by Bob Proehl
“Not so little anymore,” he says.
“Oh, fuck,” says Carrie. She falls against him, sobbing. “Clay, it got so bad. It was so bad for so long. I could shut it out, but it was like this bad voice in my head all the time. All the time.”
“Is it still in there?”
Carrie shakes her head. “There’s a girl I was traveling with,” she says. “She did something and knocked it dead. In me and a couple other Faction people.”
“Emmeline Hirsch,” Clay says.
“You know her?” Hayden asks.
“Where I used to work, she’s sort of a legend,” Clay says. “I heard her call out the other night.”
“We all did,” says Hayden.
“Any chance she’s on her way down here?” Clay asks.
“I left her with somebody else,” Carrie says. “The name she said in the Hive—she was only supposed to do that in an emergency.”
“I don’t mean to interrupt,” Waylon says, “but can we focus on this emergency?”
“What’s the situation?” Carrie asks after taking a deep sniff to regain her composure.
“Don’t you army types say sitrep or whatever?” Hayden asks. They fold their arms and glare at Carrie.
“I wanted to speak civilian so you could follow,” Carrie says.
Hayden smiles, but it isn’t particularly warm. Clay offers them his hand. “Clay Weaver,” he says. “My kid’s a big fan.”
“Your kid?” Hayden says.
“I love the first album,” he says sheepishly. “Carrie used to play it when we were—”
“What were you two exactly?” Hayden asks.
“Here, let me link us all in,” Waylon says, playing peacemaker. Carrie staggers and finds a seat as her head floods with voices: Clay, Hayden, Waylon, and Bryce, word-salad monologues of thoughts and emotions. Like the levels being adjusted on a stereo, they drop and Waylon’s voice, clear and considered, emerges.
Baby, I’ve got some people here, he says. You want to fill everyone in on where things are at?
Carrie feels like her entire personality is being surveyed. It’s Bryce, checking to see who’s sharing his headspace. Hey, he says, addressed to everyone but individuated so that Carrie hears something closer to Hey, kid.
You okay? she asks.
Had better days, says Bryce.
“Walk us through what happened,” Clay says, his voice booming in the bar and through the psychic link.
They showed up this morning, Bryce says. Walked right in the front door. One Bloom.
Fuck, Hayden says.
That’s not so bad, says Carrie.
Depends on who it is, Clay says. Carrie chuckles and feels Hayden’s attention focus on her, trying to prize out some secret. You ought to know better, Carrie thinks at Hayden. My mind is a cool white flame.
They’ve got us locked down, Bryce says. Resonants in the cafeteria, baseliners in the gym. They say they’re going to load up the baseline kids and take them to a secure facility out west. They say they’ll be reunited with their parents once the full evacuation’s finished.
You don’t believe them? Waylon asks.
There’s no vehicles out front, Bryce says. I think they’re waiting for the green light to kill the kids.
Can you find Rai and Dom? Clay asks. Carrie hasn’t spent much time on these kinds of psychic conference calls: Waylon tried to hold team meetings this way back in his drug-dealing days, but everyone hated it. Words come through bearing not their literal meanings but their emotional connotations. It’s how she knows without being told that Dom is Clay’s husband, the person he talked about in guarded terms when they were in the Faction.
There’s a long pause, and it’s not because Bryce is looking for them—he would have located them immediately, obeying a gut instinct to prioritize family.
They have them in the other room.
As much as she hates it, Fahima gets a thrill seeing one of her machines fully realized in the world. It’s shot through with a vein of disappointment: the machines in her dreams are impossibly beautiful but end up bent and twisted when they descend into dull matter. At the implementation stage, she opts for a steampunk aesthetic, leaning hard into the clunky but necessary mechanics. If nothing will have the sleek, otherworldly beauty of her dreams, let them find a strangeness that speaks to the constraints of being a thing in the world.
Her excitement at seeing one of her ideas come to life maps directly onto its size. Smaller devices can be marvels of intricacy, but nothing matches the exhilaration of a building-size project come to life: human-scaled so she can take it in all at once but big enough that she has to step back to do so. The MTA revisions are her biggest project, but she can’t behold it, so it returns to the realm of abstraction.
Although it’s her most unwanted child—she’s in Berlin solely for the purpose of its destruction—Fahima’s heart flutters when she sees the Beta Chair fully constructed on the Alexanderplatz. It’s a massive crèche with thick cables snaking around the television tower, awaiting its user. It’s not the way she would have done it—Cedric has encased it in sleek black surfaces like something designed by Apple. It’s hers even if Cedric’s grubby prints are all over it.
There’s a crowd on the Platz, and the translation nanites she injected herself with—not designed for text—struggle to render their picket signs into English. She tries reading the signs out loud under her breath, hoping the nanites will translate her own speech, but her pronunciation is choppy and it doesn’t work. From what she can hear of the chants coming off the Platz, the crowd is split. Half is the crowd Fahima’s used to: they shout abomination and monster, like a song she hasn’t heard in years.
The other half clamors for change. Turn it over now, they say. Resonance today. Make us like you.
Five Blooms patrol the fence around the machine, assuming there aren’t others Fahima doesn’t see. If Fahima needs evidence that this is the highest priority, she gets it when she sees Ji Yeon Kim, the top cog in the Faction machinery, calling out orders from atop a chair sculpted out of bronze, the unoccupied one of a quartet on which the likenesses of Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, and Chelsea Manning stand. The thing that breaks Fahima’s heart about what Ji Yeon became was that she used to speak truth to power and hold people to account. The Ji Yeon she met behind the barricades in Revere should have helped them shape the America that came after the war into something good. Patrick or Raymond Glover or whatever got put into her head took that away from her, and it makes Fahima that much more determined to stop him.
Fahima blinks her eyes rapidly. The contacts she designed show her a web of sonic shielding forming a dome over the device.
“So is there a plug I can pull?” Omar Six asks. “Or do I stick a wrench in it somewhere?”
“He blackboxed it,” Fahima says. “It’ll be tough to get into its guts.”
“Have we considered throwing a very large Molotov cocktail at it?”
“I have considered that,” Fahima says. “But I need a better sense of their security. Keep at a wide spread and don’t get caught.”
“Do I get extra points if I blow it up?” he asks.
“Only if you can do it without blowing yourself up, too.” As soon as she says it, she thinks of Omar Eighteen shooting himself in the head to avoid capture. Omar Six is thinking of him, too, and Fahima wonders how the loss of a duplicate registers for the Omars.
“What are you going to do?” he asks
“I’m going to lob some charm bombs at it.”
“So we’re fucked, then,” says Omar Six. He flips up his collar and walks onto the Platz. With a shimmer of air, he doubles, then doubles again. The four Omars disperse, blending into the crowd. Fahima watches until she can’t track any of them, then turns to go.
She’s never been happy with the image inducers she i
nvented: the low-res results don’t hold up to close scrutiny. She wants sci-fi-movie perfection in which the mask isn’t apparent until it’s taken off for the big reveal. In the movies, when they switch out the actress and the computer-generated imagery it is in play for only a heartbeat. Fahima’s best efforts make the wearer look like an early Pixar animation of a human being, a walking uncanny valley.
Luckily for Fahima, she has access to one of the most compelling disguises in existence. To become someone else, she need only remove her hijab. Any official working with Project Tuning Fork would recognize Fahima Deeb and hand her to Cedric. But Leisl Hoffstrader, an undersecretary from the Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation, Building, and Nuclear Safety with pristinely forged identification and dark hair carefully styled into an asymmetrical bob by Ruth before they flew out, can sit in the waiting room outside of Niklas Babisch’s office in the Bundestag looking at the pictures in Der Spiegel with no one the wiser.
Two minutes before her appointment, a crew-cut young man right off a Nazi propaganda poster steps out of Babisch’s office and, nodding briskly at Fahima and muttering “Guten tag,” strides out of the room. The door closes softly behind him. As the minute hand clicks up to twelve, the door opens again and Niklas Babisch’s head pops out. “Miss Hoffstrader,” he says. “Please.” Fahima stands, gathers up the manila folder full of blank papers that completes her costume, and steps into his office. Babisch has already landed comfortably in his desk chair, fingers tented, as if he’s been waiting for her. He smiles patiently as the door shuts, then reaches under the edge of his desk. There’s a click and then a hiss of white noise that registers in Fahima’s mind rather than her ears.
“Our people call it psychic chaff,” he says. “It is to mind readers what the old running water trick was to Stasi bugs. I assume you want privacy, Dr. Deeb.”
“You knew it was me?” Fahima asks, sitting down.
“There is no overlap between my ministry and whatever long list of fiefdoms ‘Leisl Hoffstrader’ oversees,” he says. “I’ve been following what Cedric tells us is going on with you. Mysterious disappearances make old Germans uneasy. When I saw an obviously fake appointment on my schedule, I assumed it was either you or someone coming to kill me.” He pauses. “I’m happy it’s you.”
“The Chair isn’t safe,” Fahima says.
Babisch smiles. “I’ve missed your straightforwardness,” he says. “Will you tell me what about it is unsafe?”
“The original Pulse actualized two-thirds of the people within range and left the rest unchanged,” Fahima says. She wishes she’d brought charts. Babisch seems like a man who enjoys a good chart. “This Pulse will actualize or kill. I don’t know the casualty rate, but anyone who doesn’t resonate will die.”
“Your Mr. Joyner has assured me—”
“He’s lying,” Fahima says. “There’s a mandate to get this done regardless of collateral damage. Joyner was brought in to replace me because he has no qualms about following orders.”
Babisch smirks. “Americans assume they say ‘following orders’ to a German and Hannah Arendt sings arias in our heads. Do you have any proof that Joyner is lying to me other than he has the weak will and mild malignancy of an Eichmann?”
“I know what the numbers looked like before I left,” she says. “Joyner isn’t smarter than me, and if he’s made improvements, they’re minor. And I’d have to be either very stupid or very sincere to walk into your office given the number of Faction agents in Berlin. I’m asking for your trust.”
Babisch nods, taking all this in. She’s read him wrong: he’s not a man of charts. He trusts people and his ability to read them. It’s why she’s here rather than in Mumbai or Tokyo. He’s the only one who might trust her enough to do something.
“I could not stop what will happen tomorrow,” he says. “It has passed above my station and out of my hands. If I did believe you, and I am not saying I don’t, I’m not certain I’d stop the test.”
“We’re talking about millions dead,” says Fahima. Hannah Arendt might not mean shit, but millions dead has got to hit him somewhere, she thinks.
“You told me when I was in New York the master-slave politics that came after your war would not happen here once we accepted your gift,” he says. “I think your optimism was misguided. We’ve had increases in every form of racial and sectarian violence in the weeks since construction on the device began. In some cases, it’s last punches in before the tables turn. But I see a prelude. We are handing shiny new boots to people who will put them on their brothers’ necks. You tell me those who don’t become gods will die, and I wonder if they will not be better off. Give me superpowers or give me death.”
“We don’t say superpowers.”
The phone on Babisch’s desk buzzes, and he raises his finger, putting millions of deaths on hold while he takes the call.
The tiny genius machines in Fahima’s blood are wearing down. She should have taken a booster shot before the meeting. Their translation is crackly. “That is unacceptable. They have no right to take a prisoner on our…Of course you brought that up. Did they explicitly say— Yes, that is unambiguous. If he were German, I would push, but no. I’m afraid they keep their man. Thank you for informing me.”
He hangs up the phone and tucks it into his pocket. He tents his fingers again, and Fahima can’t help feeling she’s in Bishop’s office, being reprimanded for reducing a teacher to tears with her incessant questions. “I should have liked it if you had come to me before pursuing other avenues,” Babisch says. “The Faction have your doubling man.” Fahima’s mind races. She curses Omar Six for letting himself get captured and thinks of all the things she should have done. A cyanide capsule in the tooth. Basic spy tricks she forgot.
Except she didn’t forget. She refused to allow the possibility of another Omar dying on her watch, and that refusal has netted her something worse. “Our authorities have made the appropriate noises about lawful extradition, but the response was a threat to take their ball and go home. You understand I cannot take risks at this time.”
“I understand,” Fahima says. She gets up to go, leaving the dummy folder on his desk. “You have family here, right?”
“Two sons and my wife,” Babisch says.
“Get them out,” Fahima says. “Fly them to South America tonight. Get them away from that thing.”
“And then what?” he asks. “Bring them back to Berlin with no magical powers? Move them around the board, avoiding each activation until they are the only humans left? No. Tomorrow we will eat breakfast together. Our flat is on the Platz; we have watched this thing being built since it started. My boys speculate on what their abilities will be.” He smiles. “Friedrich is sure he will be able to fly.” He nods his head, affirming something Fahima doesn’t understand. “We will go to the window and hold hands, and we will see together what fate has in store for us.”
“I’m sorry,” Fahima says.
“That is the first thing you have said to me that I have entirely believed.”
Before she’s out the door, he calls for her to stop. “Will it hurt?” he asks. “For the ones who don’t change?”
She remembers the one live test: the abattoir in the Bronx they dragged Cedric Joyner out of years ago. The bodies were twisted and broken as if the people had tried to crawl out of their skins. Some gouged out their eyes to claw away the pain at the center of their skulls as the parahippocampal gyrus thrashed and grew, destroying the precious gray matter around it.
“No,” she says. “It’ll be as if they’ve been shut off.”
“That is good,” Babisch says. “That is a good death in the face of all this. Thank you, Dr. Deeb, for your work and your warning. I hope to meet you again one day as an equal.”
It’s terrifying to feel those muscles flex again. It’s a relapse; the cigarette in his hand he doesn’t re
call lighting. Clay is glad he remembers what it’s like to fight a war. Other than he and Carrie, there aren’t veterans to take up arms against the Faction. The little worm Patrick Davenport put in their heads as a signing bonus meant that those who fought for the Faction were permanently “on call.” After the Armistice, veteran support groups sprang up in New York, and at Dom’s insistence, Clay went to meetings. Everyone had a blankness that wasn’t attributable to PTSD. Clay knew the thing they put in his head didn’t work. He’d felt it squirming around as it went in, heard the voice like a shadow under his own thoughts, but every time he used his ability, it got quieter like a radio signal fading as you turn the dial. He didn’t talk about it with the others in his Bloom—trust was important, but paranoia was a survival skill—but by the time they got to the Houston school, Clay wasn’t hearing orders anymore.
Having Waylon psychically network him with the others feels like what he wanted the Hive to be and what he wished being in the Faction had been. The little voice in his head never made him feel connected. It told him he was valued and loved, but Clay knew praise was a carrot delivered by someone who preferred to use the stick. As for the Hive, there was something performative about it, like social media sites where you covered up depression and boredom with shiny manufactured representations of yourself. After an initial shyness, the sense of his thoughts standing naked in a crowded room, Clay feels comfortable being mutually exposed.
From the inside, Bryce gives them a list of assets among the students. It doesn’t amount to much. The Unity School attracted oddballs and outcasts. Kids with more practical abilities gravitated toward schools more in line with the Bishop model or the training academies of the Black Rose Faction. Among the kids held in the auditorium, one can mimic and project any sound or voice and another has an extraneous arm. There’s a kid with “hot fingers,” three untrained psychics, and an energy projector whose accuracy Bryce rates as “buckshot.” Even the teachers are less than awe-inspiring: a healer, a universal translator, a math teacher with infrared perception, and an empath the kids call Mama Bear.
