by Cody Sisco
Circe perched on the arm of the love seat. Victor wondered if the effect of having the highest perch in the room, a subtle reminder of her authority, was lost on anyone else. He doubted it.
“Thank you, everyone, for coming,” Circe said. “I want to say at the outset that I know this is going to be a difficult conversation. We all have strong emotions. I encourage you to express them. We must be open and honest in our dealings, especially given how sensitive the topic is. Nothing we say here leaves this room. Do you all accept these terms?”
Circe looked to each guest to confirm, eliciting a chorus of yeses and of courses. Pearl only nodded.
“Good. I’ll get right to it. Samuel Miller arrives tomorrow. He will be our patient and our responsibility. A security detail from an approved contractor will be stationed at Building E, where he will be housed. We’ll have him under constant surveillance.
“Let me remind everyone. He is not our prisoner. He is our patient. However you feel about him or his crimes, we must respect his rights. I should note that he has consented to all of these terms.”
“What a relief,” Pearl deadpanned.
Her joke didn’t provoke any laughs, though Marilyn and Karine exchanged amused looks. Circe’s face was a stern mask.
Alia smoothed her hair and said in a clear voice, “I’m not as familiar with his history as most of you. I looked up what I could on the Mesh, but it seems the story wasn’t covered here like it was in SeCa, and I don’t have the access privileges.”
“You wouldn’t find much,” Mía said. “Pretty much everything has been classified or destroyed.” She shot a look at Circe.
Alia said, “I have to ask, based on what I do know: How competent is Samuel Miller to agree to anything? The mere fact of his transfer from a public health agency to the care of a private company raises a lot of red flags for me.”
Auntie Circe smiled, a mixture of compassion with a hint of condescension. She seemed to appreciate assertive women, which explained why Karine had done so well as her associate.
“There are many aspects of Samuel Miller’s situation that aren’t available to the public, including his competence. Karine, why don’t you review those now?”
Karine nodded, opened her briefcase, and pulled out a stack of paper. She distributed one sheet to each person. Victor took the paper and skimmed it. A summary of Samuel Miller’s psych evaluations over the past two decades since Carmichael. Karine hit the highlights.
“Samuel Miller was apprehended in Carmichael in the middle of a blank episode. We believe the incomplete implementation of his plan—”
“Mass murder is not a plan!” Pearl shouted. She sat stock still in her seat, except for the rise and fall of her chest.
“No, it’s not,” Karine agreed. “I’m sorry. I’m never sure what words to use when talking about his—”
“Atrocity?” Mía offered. “Destructive rampage? Any of those will do.”
“Please,” Circe interjected, “we’re not here to rehash the past. We’re here to make plans for the future. Karine, please continue.”
Mía rose in a huff and moved to the window.
Did Karine know that Pearl had lost relatives in the Carmichael Massacre? Victor doubted Pearl had told her. She kept secrets better than anyone he knew. He was pretty sure she knew more about Jefferson’s assassination than she’d told him. Pearl’s truth would come out when she was ready. He’d learned that lesson well enough.
Karine said, “The short version is that Samuel Miller was catatonic for months. When he came to, his conception of what he’d done was fractured. He believed that Carmichael never happened. He spoke of parallel worlds and that he was on the wrong one. Over the years, through medication and therapy, doctors worked toward reintegrating his personality. I’m telling some of you what you already know.” She smiled apologetically at Pearl, Mía, and Circe in turn. “Two years ago he took responsibility for his actions and disavowed his fantasies. In SeCa’s Classification Commission parlance, he was reclassified from a One to a Two.”
“What?” Victor said loudly, involuntarily. Everyone in the room looked at him. “I didn’t know that was possible.”
Mía answered, “It’s rare. No patient has ever received as much focused care and attention as Samuel Miller.”
Victor felt her words on his tongue as briny sour slime.
“How?” Victor asked. “What worked?”
Circe and Karine exchanged a look, concern and anxiety on their faces.
Mía saw this and shook her head.
Circe stood. “We know that Personil is effective in attenuating mirror resonance episodes.”
“Because it attenuates all higher functions,” Mía said. “Personil swats a fly with a mallet. It didn’t help him.”
“Is that your medical opinion?” Karine asked.
Mía retorted, “I may not be a clinician, but I’m as close to this case as it gets. Personil is not a cure, end of story. His disavowal wasn’t genuine.”
Circe cut in smoothly as if she’d been in the middle of a speech: “Of course Personil is not a cure. However, we’ve learned that it can be helpful in extreme cases.”
“Extreme cases? I was Class Three! Why was I taking it?” Victor asked.
Mía said, “That’s what I was trying to tell you. The Classification System is not perfect.”
“We all want a cure, Victor,” Karine said. “Until we find one—”
Victor interrupted her: “We’ll just lock everyone up or sedate them!”
Circe caught Victor’s gaze. She said something in a quiet voice that didn’t rise above the argument crisscrossing the room, yet he heard her words distinctly. “You were traumatized at an early age. When you were diagnosed—how old were you? eleven? twelve?—Jefferson arranged your prescription. It was an aggressive treatment option, but he was adamant. Not even I could persuade him to change his mind.”
It felt like a slap in the face. Victor didn’t have a chance to question his auntie about it.
Alia asked, “So what worked for Samuel if not Personil?”
Mía said, “Who knows? Ask each person involved in his case, and it’s a different story. Pearl thinks it was her herbs.”
Pearl stiffened. “Perhaps they did the second time we tried them. I am not responsible for what happened before.”
Victor got up and paced in the dining area. More secrets and lies—he could read the deception on everyone’s faces. There was something huge in the past they weren’t telling him. “The second time?”
“Drop it,” Circe said.
Alia said, “If I could access the patient’s complete records—”
Mía cut her off. “We don’t have answers for you, Victor. I’m sorry.”
Karine cleared her throat. “That’s the case history. Should we move onto research, Alia?”
Alia stood and smoothed her rumpled coat. “We’re bringing Samuel Miller here to study what works in treating mirror resonance syndrome. The question is: What constitutes good treatment? What constitutes a good outcome? We know which gene is responsible for mirror resonance syndrome, and we have some idea of the neurological underpinnings of the disorder. However, based on the research I’ve reviewed, there’s hasn’t been a comprehensive study of neural activity associated with the disorder. We have a new model of the Cogitron Exelus. It will allow us to make realtime recordings of someone’s brain activity with an astounding resolution. We’ll be able to see exactly how a resonant episode in the brain starts and evolves, which should give us some ideas for how we can treat it. I’d like to get started as soon as possible taking baseline measurements of Samuel Miller and all the other patients.” She looked at Victor then blushed. “The substance abuse ones too, since stim addiction and MRS have similar cognitive impacts. I put together a schedule. We should have the baselines completed within a week.”
Pearl raised an eyebrow and asked, “Could someone explain in English what she just said?”
Victor said, “She has an expensive t
oy for looking inside people’s heads. Mine, for instance.”
Circe stood in the center of the room and said, “We need to make the most of our resources. Samuel Miller is coming here, and his brain is coming with him. We’re going to get to the bottom of his perceptions—”
“Don’t you mean delusions?” Pearl asked. She looked at Circe with open hostility and then turned and shook her head.
What was that about? Victor wondered.
Circe continued, “We’re not going to stop until we understand mirror resonance syndrome and its effects as well as we understand cancer. That is our mission.”
“Fine,” Mía said, “Let’s just skip to the point. All this effort is for naught if it’s not put into practice. You’ve asked me to work with Victor to build public support for bringing the Classification System to the Louisiana Territories. Well, I want everyone to hear me now. We’re not going to do that. We need something new.”
6
I dream about Mía finding me at home in Carmichael. Instead of leaving to go get help, she tries to open the back door. She asks me to unlock it.
I reach up and notice that my hand is small, a toddler’s, and I realize I’m in a dream.
I don’t want to unlock the door because I know what will happen. I know that Samuel visited our house weeks before and planted an explosive below the back steps along with a quantum trigger.
Mía begs me to open the door, and when I do, Samuel’s quantum trigger activates. Each second counts another superposition collapsing, from both/and to either/or. He believed we would cross over, we would live on in some other world, and our ghost bodies would be reunited with our primal essences. But in this one, in the real world—the “real world” of my dream(!?!)—we are consumed by flames.
—Victor Eastmore’s dreambook
9 May 1991
New Venice, The Louisiana Territories
Mía said she wanted to talk to Victor before making a proposal for amendments to the Classification Act. Soon after her announcement, the task force adjourned.
After a brief walk, Mía led Victor to a Repartition-Era building overlooking the Grand Canal, and they took the elevator to her furnished corporate apartment on the top. He should have stopped by his apartment to get food and more tinctures now that Pearl was in town and he didn’t need to ration them so strictly. For someone who thrived on routine—who needed it to stay sane—he had gotten far too lax about his schedule.
While Victor waited in the sitting room, Mía changed into a two-piece synthsilk leisure suit—a gray unfitted sack, essentially. She was attractive for a fifty-something woman, with severe eyebrows and deep lines on her face that somehow added to her allure. He hadn’t seriously contemplated sex with anyone since the incident with the prostitute in Las Vegas, and he was once again surprised by how appealing she was to him. Why her?
Why couldn’t they have talked at BioScan, during the day, without the claustrophobic privacy of her rooms? Victor swallowed when Mía invited him to sit with her on a synthleather sofa. His heartbeat thundered in his chest. He should be interrogating her about his granfa, not getting butterflies in his stomach. There was no reason to think she’d invited him for sex, and yet somehow his mind wouldn’t let go of the idea.
“It’s awkward between us,” Mía said. “I know our history is complicated.”
“Complicated,” he echoed. “You saved my life in Carmichael, and then you ruined it. Yes, awkward and complicated sums it up.”
“I meant what I said about reforms… Well, I’ll get to that. First, I want to explain myself.” She retrieved two glasses from a niche in the coffee table and reached down again to pull out a bottle of LT brand bourbon. “Drink?”
Victor nodded. Not as good as a tincture, but it would do.
She poured them two belts each. He picked up his glass and held it up, expecting the customary gesture of clinking to good health.
She ignored him, staring out the window. She took a drink, draining half her glass, exhaled, and began speaking.
“I changed that day in Carmichael. I became someone I didn’t recognize when I looked in the mirror. Every vital part of me was burned away, except for my desire for revenge. I thought I was doing the right thing, preventing another Samuel Miller from coming along and wiping another town off the map. We were doing what was best for SeCa: the Classification Commission was a necessary step to protect our citizens, and the cost was worth the pain. But deep down, I wanted more than revenge. I wanted restitution.”
Mía drained her glass and refilled it.
She said, “An impossible desire has a way of corrupting everything it touches.”
Victor realized he’d been holding his glass out, hand shaking, the liquid churning and splashing over the side—a tempest in a tumbler, Granma Cynthia would have said. Mía didn’t seem to notice. He put the glass down.
“I built the Classification System,” Mía continued. “I’m responsible. At every step, I was there pushing it forward: the diagnostic tests, the treatment protocols, the budgeting, the legislative battles, the constant drip of propaganda fed to the SeCa masses to maintain support.
“I might not ever have seen the truth if not for Jefferson. He was patient. He was kind. He was brilliant. And he changed me. I became a person again, instead of some soulless, hungry ghost. My biggest regret is that I couldn’t help him when he needed it. I wasn’t seeing clearly. Not yet. And now…”
Mía fixed her gaze on Victor, and he saw so much hurt that it felt like hands around his neck, squeezing. It hurt to hear her confess what she’d done—she ruined Victor’s life and the lives of everyone like him in SeCa.
But wouldn’t he have done the same in her place? She hadn’t mentioned her husband, killed the night of her honeymoon by a stunstick to the head, one of Samuel Miller’s many victims that day. Wouldn’t Victor have been as twisted, as aggrieved, if he’d lived her life? He blamed her, and yet she was blameless, cast in a role she couldn’t step out of and playing it through to the bitter end, same as he was. Except now she was saying she’d changed.
Victor put a hand on her knee, though he couldn’t meet her eyes again, the pain was too raw, too cutting. He said, “I—” His voice caught in his throat, and he coughed. “Mía, do you want me to forgive you?”
She jumped to her feet, her arm moving in an arc toward the window. Her bourbon glass shattered and fell to the floor. Liquid streaked the window below a starburst crack.
Victor sat on the couch—still, mute, and confused.
Mía strode to the dining room table and leaned on it with both hands. She appeared to be searching for words. Then Victor realized she was crying. He got up and approached.
She held out a warding finger. “Don’t. I’m sorry. I need a minute.”
Victor needed to leave. The sight of her in pain twisted his stomach in knots.
“I don’t want your forgiveness,” Mía said, squeezing each bitter word from her heaving chest. “I want your help.” She straightened. Her voice took on a strident quality that Victor had heard many times on MeshNews feeds. “The system needs reform. The LTs can’t just replicate SeCa’s Classification Act and expect better results here. You need to help me shape the amendments.”
Victor searched in the kitchen, found some disposable synthsilk towels, a dustpan, and a brush, and began to clean the mess. Mía stared out the window, or maybe she was watching her reflection.
She wanted reform? The Classification System ought to be dismantled. At the very least, it had to stop at SeCa.
He said, “I’m going to find a cure. When that happens, we won’t need a Classification System. And in the meantime people like me don’t deserve to be locked up. You understand that, right? You said yourself it’s wrong.”
“There are bigger forces at work, Victor. It’s not just Broken Mirrors anymore. We have to consider the impact of stims too. The patient population is growing. That in itself is a huge incentive we’re fighting against. The number of new heal
th care jobs alone could end thirty years of stagnant economic development in the American Union.”
“I’m not interested in economic development,” he said. “It’s the patients, people like me—they’re what matters. I’m going to find a cure.”
Victor wiped his forehead and felt a stinging scratch. A sliver of glass must have cut him. He went to the sink and washed his hands, gently wiping his forehead. Mía hadn’t changed, not really. It was an illusion she needed to believe because the truth was unbearable. The good in her had died in Carmichael—just as she said—and this was an angry ghost inflicting its hurt on the world again and again, finding different ways to torment the living.
She said, “We need reform first. Jefferson thought so too, and that’s why…”
Victor turned toward the door, then hesitated. Something in her voice caught his attention. “What? What were you going to say?”
“Never mind. Now that he’s gone, there’s no stopping the expansion. The best thing we can do is direct its evolution. Listen, Victor, if you help me, I can do something for you.”
“What?” he asked.
Mía said, “You need someone to look out for you.”
Flickering light out the window caught Victor’s attention. It looked like a fire across the Grand Canal in the direction of Pond Park. The taste of soot filled his mouth.
Mía glanced to the window, following Victor’s gaze, and then turned back. “I wonder about Jefferson’s death too, you know.”
Victor gripped the door handle. She’d known his granfa well. So why did Victor feel a hollow chill in his chest and an urge to plug his ears? There was a time not long ago when anyone who acknowledged Victor’s suspicions had earned an instant loyalty. Toward Mía he could only muster sad disdain.
“What about it?” Victor asked in a tired voice.
“Jefferson was stubborn, autocratic. He didn’t like his decisions being challenged. He made a lot of enemies. You need to be careful about who you trust. Take Pearl, for instance. I saw the way you looked at her during the meeting.”
“Granfa Jeff trusted her.”
