by Cody Sisco
“What are you thinking?”
“It’s a crap shoot that we’ll be able to rehabilitate Samuel. I know Jefferson thought it was possible, but I’m not so sure. But what if we could trick the data egg into opening?”
Victor looked at the machines, the most detailed brain scanners in existence. “How?”
“Just get in and let me poke around with the controls.”
“Really?”
“I learn by doing.”
“What’s the harm?” Victor said.
After several minutes of pecking at the type-pad, Ozie looked up, smiled, and gave an almost lifelike fingerburst with his jellied hand. Victor moved to climb into the machine.
“Hold it!” Ozie held up his robot arm. “I can’t believe I have to point this out to you. You know what kind of machine this is? What it does?”
“Yes, it uses magnetic fields to—oh.” Ozie’s arm had far too much metal in it. “You’ll have to wait outside.”
“I didn’t get a big hunk of magnetizable metal fused to my arm bone, but I am definitely putting off enough interference to screw with the readings.”
“What do we do?”
“I seem to recall there’s another expert on campus who can help us. Am I right?” Ozie smiled slyly and turned to the door as if he expected someone to walk through it.
No one did.
Victor waited a minute or so, sitting on the lip of the scanning bed. “Well?” he asked. “I only have an hour and then—”
Alia walked through the open door. “Victor, I don’t appreciate that kind of sexually explicit message. You do not have permission to speak to me that way. Understood?”
15
Organized Western States???? What a joke!!!! The O.W.S. should stand for Oppressive Withering Slavery. O.W.S. citizens are chips the King of Las Vegas cashes in whenever he sees a chance for profit.
—BrAiNhAcKeR Collective
13 May 1991
New Venice, The Louisiana Territories
Ozie waved at Alia with his robot arm, hidden by his windbreaker and glove. The gesture was somehow stiff and fey at the same time.
Victor wiped a hand down the front of his face. “I’m sorry, Alia. You can thank my friend Ozie for the message. What did it say?”
“Don’t ask,” she said.
“Pleasure to meet you, my ravishing lady. Victor hasn’t said a word about you, though I’m sure you’ve been in his thoughts.” Ozie smiled broadly and turned to Victor. “I didn’t expect such an exotic beauty here in New Venice.” He turned back to her. “We need your help.”
Alia folded her arms.
“Please, Alia!” Victor showed her the data egg. “Look what I got back.”
Her eyebrows rose. “Interesting. May I?” He nodded. She took the data egg and held it in two fingers, its black oblong shape featureless except for the red ring around it.
Ozie said, “We need you to bring this into the room while he gets scanned. I’ll be monitoring from outside, adjusting the scanner to compensate for interference from the data egg. We’re trying to gauge how it interacts with Victor’s brain.”
“And if we can get it to open,” Victor said, “I’ll find out who murdered my grandfather, and you’ll have access to both my neurograms and Samuel’s.”
“Murder?” Alia looked alarmed.
“Afraid so,” Ozie said. He told her about the polonium he’d been tracing.
“The neurograms would be useful,” Alia said. Victor couldn’t tell if she believed everything they’d told her. “You want me to bring it in the room and take it over to Victor?”
“That’s right,” Ozie said.
“Should I walk smoothly forward? Should I pause at certain distances? If this thing works on electromagnetic radiation, the signal should become stronger as I get closer, yes? So…”
“Yes, of course, you’re right, I—” Ozie cleared his throat. “I hadn’t actually thought about that. Other things were on my mind. Yes, move slowly. Stop every meter or so for thirty seconds, and then move forward again. Stop when you reach the scanner. Victor, don’t you move. This whole time I want you stable, immobile, thinking about puppies or something.”
“You don’t want me to try to go blank?” Victor asked.
“Not this time,” Ozie said. “We’ll do one run through totally calm, and the next we’ll get you excited. Everyone ready?”
Alia moved to the doorway. Victor lay back in the chair, eyes closed, picturing the little owl in the forest, claws gripping a branch, silently staring through the trees. From the hall, he heard Ozie say, “Here we go.”
The scanner began to hum. Other than that, he didn’t feel anything strange.
Alia said, “I want you to picture a smiling baby. Now think of the sound of the ocean. Visualize making a fist. What’s eight times six? Where is the northernmost point of the American Union?” She continued with questions and instructions. Her voice grew louder. He could smell her, faintly soapy with a subtle floral perfume and some spice. A pressure began to build in his pants.
He called out, more loudly than he intended, “Should I be feeling anything weird? I mean, when I was in Dr. Santos’s chair, it was like there were bees and smoke in the room. Right now I feel fine.”
Ozie said from the doorway, “That’s because I’m making adjustments. Do you want to feel what’s it’s like if I don’t mess with the settings?”
“No, thank you,” Victor said.
The scanner’s hum diminished and went silent.
“Is that it?” Victor was eager to leave the scanning bay.
Ozie came back into the room. “We should do it at least once more. With the egg in there with him. Can you run him through the same questions?” he asked Alia.
“I can,” Alia said, “but they’re not novel anymore.”
“Hmm, that means they’ll trigger the memory part of his brain. MRS isn’t known to affect memory necessarily.”
“This is all pretty much a stab in the dark,” Alia said, “isn’t it? I’ll ask the same questions. Let me prepare.” She reviewed the data they’d collected and made some notes on a piece of paper. “Ready,” she said.
“From the top!” Ozie said.
They ran through the experiment again. Victor felt calm and grateful. It was good to have friends to help. During a final repetition of the experiment, Victor brought the blankness close, like wrapping himself in a blanket, then pushed it away when it was over.
After Alia had run through the questions and prompts, she asked, “I can see you in there. What are you smiling about?”
He opened his eyes and raised his head. Her face, a beautiful composition of delicate features and kindness, just outside of the scanning bay, made him smile even more broadly. “I appreciate your help,” he said. “Sorry Ozie tricked you.”
She touched the type-pad, and the scanning bed rolled along its track, freeing Victor from the bay.
“It’s a worthy cause,” Alia said. “I’m as curious as you are about what’s inside.” At first he thought she meant the data egg, but then she pointed to his head.
“Don’t think I’m awful just because he is,” Victor said.
Her smile dipped at one corner, becoming more sardonic. “You boys will have to take it from here. I need to get back. Tell your friend if he needs my help, he should ask nicely next time.”
She left, and Victor caught a glimpse of Ozie bowing dramatically in the hallway as he watched her leave.
Ozie laughed as he stepped into the room. “A hot doctor who knows all about MRS. I have a major hard-on for her.”
“She’s engaged.”
Ozie mimed choking himself with his robot hand and for a second Victor was worried he might actually hurt himself, but it was just a face. Ozie had always been good at clowning.
“How about a beer?” Ozie said.
“Sure, there’s a bar called the Flock and Waddle. A MeshNews agent has been hanging around. She’ll want to talk. Maybe you can hack her feeds
.”
Ozie smiled, the excitement of a hunter flashing in his eyes. “Let’s go.”
Victor glanced at the scanning bay and frowned, feeling as if he’d seen movement out of the corner of his eyes.
“What’s wrong?” Ozie asked.
“Nothing. I just realized that if this doesn’t work, I won’t have any choice but to see Samuel.”
16
Progress is made of innumerable and individually insignificant moments of transformation, from this to that, from a to b, from hypothesis to result. Revolution occurs, not spontaneously, but because the accumulating weight of incipient change overcomes the inertia of the status quo.
I don’t believe in the spark of invention. The creative gestalt is a myth. Without steady advancement, without a carefully cultivated field, the future cannot grow. We can believe that something emerges from nothing only by closing our eyes to what the past has wrought.
—Jefferson Eastmore’s The Wheel of Progress (1989)
13 May 1991
New Venice, The Louisiana Territories
Freedom, release, graduation—Elena’s big day. She was officially freed from her stim addiction, and she could leave BioScan feeling whole. She could enjoy the sunshine, budding flowers, fresh green shoots in the garden, and a gentle afternoon breeze caressing her hair. She could almost ignore all the construction equipment buzzing on the hillside. Victor would meet her soon, they’d have a nice meal somewhere in town overlooking a canal, and she wouldn’t worry too much about what she was going to do next. No need to rush things. Time would pass the same no matter what.
Alia walked next to Elena, a final send-off from the treatment program. It was a nice touch to have one of her doctors there. Elena liked Alia much more than her therapist.
Alia asked, “Are you nervous?”
“No,” Elena replied, “I’m…”
What was she? Free? Whole? Nah. She was a person with enough scar tissue inside her to soak up a vat of scartoo ink.
“I’m good,” she said. “You don’t have to see me out.”
“I want to. I try to meet with everyone when they’re—”
“Released into the wild?”
Alia smiled and gestured to the bridge over the Petit Canal. “I think you’re crossing over to a new adventure.”
Elena’s mouth soured. Crossing over. Words made famous in SeCa by Samuel Miller. The man had tainted all their lives, so that even an innocent-sounding phrase carried bitter echoes now.
Elena checked her watch. Victor was already ten minutes late. He’d promised to be here and to be on time, but things were a bit slower paced in the Louisiana Territories. She wouldn’t begrudge him a few minutes. She looked out at the city, poised above the water, windows opened for air.
Alia said, “All of New Venice shrank back under the scrutinizing gaze of the lioness.”
A grin tugged at Elena’s mouth. “Lioness, eh?”
“You’re strong,” Alia said. “The things you’ve been through would have broken most people.”
Elena said, “I think most people are broken. It’s the strong ones who figure out how to heal. Like Victor.”
Alia nodded, then bit her lip.
“What’s wrong?” Elena asked.
Alia shook her head and put her arm in Elena’s. Elena stopped, feet rooted to the ground, and slipped her arm free. “You don’t have to wait with me. I’m meeting Victor here.”
“I don’t think he’s coming,” Alia said.
Elena held her breath, hurt. He’d promised. “Why not?” she asked.
“He and Ozie—”
“Ozie’s here? The two of them together are like…like…” Elena struggled for words. “Two heads that are worse than one.”
“They’re trying to get the data egg open.”
A wave of pessimism crashed down on her. Same old Victor. Desperately seeking. Willing to sacrifice his peace of mind for a destabilizing truth. His quest for answers would send him over the edge again if he wasn’t careful.
Elena let out a long sigh. So Victor had found a way to ruin her big day. She was finally kicking stims, and not only was he not there to congratulate her as he’d promised, he was scratching an old itch that had scarred him time and time again.
Alia said, “I know he cares a great deal for you.”
Elena looked out at Caddo Lake. Haze hid its distant stretches. Victor’s business wasn’t Elena’s business anymore.
During therapy, Elena had come to understand that her addictions stemmed from a hole inside her, which finally felt, if not full, then at least only half empty. She’d latched onto Victor in high school because his attention and his problems felt bigger than hers. When she was with him, she didn’t think as much about herself and her feelings.
That was then. Today, she was determined she wouldn’t let him take center stage in her life anymore. She wouldn’t let his moods and his issues control her feelings anymore. There was no room anymore for a Victor-sized, attention-seeking, problem-addled plug in her heart.
Elena stared out at New Venice. Memories that were still painful now lacked the power to make her run from them. The shunning after her parents were kicked out of the SeCa trade union, the move to the Republic of Texas, the pain of Victor abandoning their friendship, stim addiction, the Puros. She might have made mistakes, but she could no longer hold onto shame. She had to move forward.
And, in truth, the Puros weren’t on the list of problems in her life. They were good people with a good cause. They’d helped her. They’d done their best. They’d always had her back.
Shocks to you, Victor. Enough is enough.
Alia seemed to sense Elena’s thoughts, her resolve. She gave Elena’s shoulder a squeeze, then turned and walked back into the construction chaos of the BioScan campus.
At the crosswalk, Elena hailed an autocab. It arrived within a minute, wound through tiny streets to the main road that bent through town, and whisked her to the train station. Amarillo was her next step, and she was better off to go it alone without a messy good-bye dump of Victor’s feelings onto hers. It was time to live without him, and good riddance.
17
The primals are beautiful, like colorful, vibrating clouds of particles shaped like humans walking, moving, gesticulating, and then disappearing again. They are the essence of spirit yet they are incomplete. Their corporeal forms—what I call ghosts, the people I grew up with, all the forsaken of Carmichael—are trapped in this reality. I hear the primals pleading to be reunited, for me to help their ghosts cross over. It is my calling to help them.
—Samuel Miller’s The Carmichael Journals (1971)
14 May 1991
New Venice, The Louisiana Territories
Victor hiked up the slope to the drug huts, watching his feet take measured steps on the asphalt path, knowing each one took him closer to his nemesis. He wasn’t afraid, wasn’t anxious. The last few weeks had been filled with dread, and now that the day had arrived when he would see Samuel Miller, Victor felt he was made of stone.
He did regret one thing: he’d failed Elena yesterday, maybe for the last time. She’d asked him repeatedly to be there when she finished the program. He knew it was important to her. Yet he’d been too preoccupied with his own problems, too obsessed with the data egg, too narcissistically focused on what was special about his brain, too pleased to see Ozie again and grateful for his company. Now that she was gone, he realized how much he wanted to speak to her, how she was the only person who made him feel normal.
The wooden deck of one of the drug huts loomed over him. Spindly stilts held it aloft. How much force would it take to snap them and send the building careening down the hillside?
When Victor reached the path to the front door, a pair of iridescent green hummingbirds darted past, vibrating and tweeting in high-pitched bursts. They dodged and weaved, fought over a bright yellow flower with narrow curling petals, and sped away like sentient missiles.
Victor knocked on the front d
oor, his heart thumping and palms sweaty. It swung open, and a tall man in a navy jumpsuit greeted him, demanded his MeshID. The name Perry was in white thread woven into the garment at chest level. Victor showed Perry the ID screen on his Handy 1000 and was ushered inside. Another man, Velasquez, according to his embroidered name, was shorter and stockier than Perry and stood outside the door to a sitting room. When Velasquez saw Victor, he motioned for him to head inside.
The sitting room was a square box. Its cream-colored walls bore countless dark marks and scuffs and few decorations. A drawing in black pencil of three trees covered the entirety of one wall. Opposite the drawings, Samuel Miller sat on a sagging green-and-blue-striped couch, staring forward. The face was the same as Victor remembered, a long rectangular shape, sunken cheekbones, wide-spaced eyes, and thin lips. Time had worn grooves into his skin. Bags under his eyes looked pregnant with purple fluid. His salt-and-pepper hair was slicked back, nothing like the wild rat’s nest Victor remembered him having in Carmichael.
He didn’t seem to notice Victor at first. Karine sat primly on a folding chair next to the couch. She had been speaking quietly to Samuel. She stopped and looked up at Victor. Her expression was calm and controlled as she gestured to a line of folded chairs leaning against the wall.
Victor felt the weight of the data egg in his pocket, breathed deep, retrieved a chair, and sat, all without looking too closely at Samuel. He stared into Karine’s eyes, hoping without reason that the data egg would begin to vibrate and divulge Jefferson’s next message and implicate her in his death.
“Samuel and I are discussing what will be expected of him when speaking with MeshNews agents,” Karine said. She turned to Samuel. “Victor was interviewed already, and I think he did quite well.”
Victor peered into Samuel’s eyes. They were dead calm. It was as if there were no one there.
“When both of you are ready,” Karine said, “we’ll start hosting small events on campus with cherry-picked attendees. City council members. Law enforcement. Our goal is to introduce you gradually to dispel any myths and prejudices about mirror resonance syndrome and to win allies to help us advocate for change.”
