Tortured Echoes

by Cody Sisco

  They sat on the ground. The soles of their shoes pressed together, legs and torsos making L-shapes, as had been their habit since he was young and he became intrigued by her practicing yoga in the mansion. She took his hands and pulled. He felt his hamstrings grow taut, and he breathed, trying to relax. If there was ever a time to bring up a difficult topic, this was it, while his body was physically forced to unwind.

  “Auntie, I saw Samuel Miller. He’s basically a vegetable on Personil. We’re not going to get what we need from his brain while he’s like that.”

  They straightened. She said, “You’re not wrong. But we’ve got to wean him from Personil carefully. It didn’t go well for you, remember.”

  “That was a difficult time for me,” Victor said. He almost laughed at how stupid he sounded.

  She squeezed his hands, and he gently pulled. As she doubled over, her arms and torso seemed to lengthen as if she were adding space between each body part.

  They straightened again, and she pulled him forward. His body was not nearly as limber as hers. He softened his knees and rounded his back. Instead of stretching, he focused on letting go. His head lowered a fraction toward the ground.

  “That’s it,” she said. “That’s good. We should enroll you in a yoga class.”

  Blood crowded his face. He was glad she couldn’t see his expression. He was tired of people telling him what was good for him, even Auntie Circe.

  He came up, let go of her hands, and stood. “At the meeting the other day you said Granfa Jeff made the doctors prescribe Personil even though I was only Class Three.”

  She stood, balanced on one leg, and grabbed her other foot to stretch her quad. He mirrored her, holding his impatience in.

  “A sad bit of manipulation that. Father had an extraordinary ability to motivate his employees. He pushed them to accomplish great things while simultaneously eroding their confidence in themselves. Part of the trick was his temper. Hardly anyone dared disagree with him. I can’t believe Dr. Tammet lasted as long as she did, but he seemed to respect her opinion even as he overrode it in your case. I can’t blame him. He was worried about deterioration of your inhibitory neurons. Every time you have an episode, your ability to fight off the next one is weakened.”

  “But Karine shared the studies with me. They said that catatonia wasn’t inevitable.”

  “In most circumstances, that’s true. The ones who fared the best were patients in rural locations with strong family support networks. They fared well before Classification, I mean. I don’t know how to say this without sounding prejudiced.” She cleared her throat. “Some Cathar families seemed to do exceptionally well in caring for family members with mirror resonance syndrome. The times the Classification Commission stepped in and imposed treatment—the results were tragic. In your case, after what happened to you in Carmichael, there was a concern that you would slide more quickly toward Class One status. It’s a testament to your fortitude that you’ve done so well for yourself. I admit, Victor, we’re flailing. Until we find a cure, I’m afraid there are no good options.”

  “If the Classification System is making things worse, why can’t we get rid of it?”

  “It’s not that simple. Now that stims—”

  “Forget stims. I don’t know why we care about them. It was a data leak. Who cares! Why is it so hard to admit mistakes and fix what’s broken!”

  Circe stood tall, looking up at his face, hands on her hips. “We made mistakes, yes. Not this time. I reviewed the MeshNews footage, which we’re starting to share with the public, by the way.” She looked closely at Victor. “You never knew about Dario Sanchez, did you? Did anyone ever tell you what really happened the first year after Carmichael? Did Father?”

  Gooseflesh rippled on Victor’s arms. Pearl had only told him today. Why was Auntie Circe asking him about it now?

  “Not really,” he said.

  Fear hovered around Auntie’s face, as well as a kind of sentimental astonishment, and he had the feeling that she was about to say something that would change him forever.

  But Auntie Circe didn’t say anything. She walked toward a steep slope overlooking New Venice. He followed. The sun glinted off the water. The canals were a bright grid outshining the stone buildings. A breeze blew over them, and Victor smelled sulfur and also char that evoked the smoke that day in Carmichael. He pulled a tincture from his pocket and drank it. Auntie Circe seemed to have forgotten he was there, absorbed in her own memories.

  Eventually she turned and said, “Father called it a mass hallucination. The stress, he said, played tricks on people, on their ability to reason. This was before Personil, when we had in our hospital a man who had killed hundreds of people and who spoke of other worlds and crossing over and patently impossible things.”

  The derision in her voice made Victor gulp. He was curious: Was she mocking Samuel Miller or someone else?

  Circe kept going without a glance at Victor. “The problem was he was convincing. One of the nurses, Dario Sanchez, killed himself by following Samuel’s instructions for ‘quantum suicide.’ And then everyone was talking about another world that was almost like this one, about primals and ghosts, all the imaginings that Mía found in Samuel’s journal. She exposed them to show how absurd they were. But people started to believe them instead. People started to think MRS was infectious. A psychic infection, if you will.”

  Victor stood, sun relentlessly bombarding him with heat and radiation. He felt pressurized, a shell filled with gas growing hotter until one day he would catch fire. Memories of the burning dreams returned.

  “That’s insane. Isn’t it?”

  “The classification system, the tests, the treatments, the classes—all of it was informed by that experience. Even Father believed that we needed protection, if only from our willingness to believe in delusions.” She said the word with exactly the cadence and emphasis Jefferson had used.

  Victor knew how easy it was for him to slip into delusion. But he was different from normal people. The staff working at Oak Knoll shouldn’t have been as susceptible. Yet Auntie Circe was saying that they had been. He took out the data egg and held it to his forehead.

  Circe looked at it curiously. He remembered the last time he’d shown it to her, right after the funeral, before his life had gone further off the rails.

  She began, “Is that—”

  “It opened. Not all the way, but a little bit. I know what’s in it now. Jefferson’s messages. And some clever brainhackery that helps keep blankness at bay. Granfa spoke to me. He wants me to reform the Classification Commission, thinks that I should be in Carmichael. But he never told me any of this.” Victor shook his head, lowered the egg.

  A sensation like being watched settled over him. Like a mouse at night when an owl stops hooting. He looked up. There was no one else there, just him and Circe, but the air felt full. Maybe he was going to go blank. He hoped it would be one of those pleasurable orgasmic times. Maybe he should just let it happen.

  Circe was looking at him. Her shining eyes reflected sunlight, swollen with tears that hadn’t yet fallen. Sadness painted her face like the sky when dusk turns to night, and perhaps—unless his mind was playing tricks on him—a green shade of guilt.

  She said, “I’m so sorry. Forgive me.”

  Victor felt the crushing ache of her regret, more than he could bear. In his mind, he was flattened by it, like a huge stone rolling over him. Floating, he existed somewhere in the circuit of emotion between Circe and himself, less himself and more like his reflection in her sad eyes. An inner voice screamed something wordlessly, but he smothered it quickly.

  “Why?” he asked, feeling tears trace cool tracks down his cheeks.

  Her face hardened, her features like obsidian. She stared at him. Strong Circe again. She wasn’t one to dwell in her emotion. She was always moving forward.

  “I—I’m envious,” she said in a quivering voice that grew steadier with each word. “You got to hear Jefferson’s final wo
rds. I hope they were comforting.”

  A cool dark certainty began to solidify in Victor’s belly. The data egg wasn’t ever going to be comforting. He couldn’t ever be sure it held the truth. It was one distorted shard of it, a sliver of understanding that was filtered through Jefferson’s mind, skewed by his lifetime of experience and passed on to Victor through tortuous detective work. It wouldn’t answer all his questions. It would only poke him in the eye.

  “I’d like to listen sometime,” she said. “I’d like to hear his voice again.”

  “I talked to Pearl,” Victor said. “With her herbs and this data egg, I think we can help Samuel. There won’t be any hysteria. We’re prepared this time.”

  She grabbed his shoulder and squeezed hard. “You inspire me, Victor. You never stop trying. All right. I’ll let Karine know. I want the truth as much as you do. I hope we find it together.”

  20

  I suppose we must ask ourselves, “When a large institution crumbles, what replaces it?”

  After the United States of America devolved, Europe decided to take an active interest in the nine new nations of the American Union.

  What filled the spiritual void created by the Catholic Church’s implosion? Have we yet glimpsed the next development, or is it still beneath the horizon and we must venture beyond the rim of our world to see the future?

  —Robbie Eastmore’s A Study of Alternate Histories

  16 May 1991

  New Venice, The Louisiana Territories

  Victor descended Cemetery Hill, grateful that Circe had chosen a more circuitous route down while he retraced their steps. He tried to go over their conversation again, but he couldn’t concentrate. Instead, he felt surrounded by flames, burning from the bottom of his feet to his head, living the fire dream while he was awake. He worried it was a new side effect of the bitter grass that somehow allowed his brain to put a lucid dream overlay on his waking-state consciousness. Why the fire dream now? Because he was overheating in the humid air? He stripped off his shirt, used it to mop up his sweat and careened down the hill clumsily, on the verge of falling, or maybe on the precipice of blankness.

  When he reached Pond Park, he rushed to the water, waded thigh deep and splashed himself, wetting his hair, his torso, clapping the water to his face, knowing that it was polluted by duck shit but failing to care. The fire dream faded. He pictured Circe’s face, tears wetting her cheeks, and wondered why she’d been so affected. A cold spike chilled his spine. The blankness, hovering close, promised deliciously frigid catatonia.

  That’s when he noticed he had an audience. Wonda, Del, Tosh, and a group of Human Lifers, standing in a circle as if they’d just risen from a squat talk, were watching him. Wonda approached with the others following closely behind. They stopped at the water’s edge. She looked at him. Awe filled her eyes to the brim and flooded him. Her hands clasped together to keep from shaking.

  “We saw you on the Mesh with Lisabella,” she said. She smiled exultingly and stepped forward into the water, gingerly at first, then splashing and laughing, her voice tinkling like chimes. “Let’s celebrate!”

  He took a step back. “My skin feels like it’s on fire.”

  She cocked her head. “Let me help.” Bending down, she ran her hands through the water, stepped close, and placed them on his cheeks. A flash of irritation at being touched coursed through his body but then immediately transformed into an icy hot sexual heat. Drops of water traced luxurious tracks down Victor’s back. Waves of tingling warmth pulsed with each heartbeat. Every cell cried out for contact. He pulled Wonda close, couldn’t let her go. The air surrounding him vibrated, felt as if it were part of him. There was no such thing as stillness, as boundaries—the world and his body, his mind, were intertwined, one. Her body pressed into his, heat rebounding between them. He tilted his face down and kissed her deeply. She grasped his shoulders and held him close. Someone’s arms embraced him from the side, curling around them both. Tosh’s scent, a deep musk, and Del’s now too, a soapy gentle odor. Victor removed his lips from Wonda’s. Feeling tightly held, loved by three people he’d never felt close with, he nearly choked, his throat swollen by unfamiliar feelings.

  After several long moments, their grip on him loosened, and he stood, staring back at the three of them.

  “What just happened?” Victor asked.

  “You amaze me,” Wonda said. If a lower lip could be proud, hers stood at attention.

  “I don’t understand.”

  She said, “I believe when you feel something strongly, and you can’t explain it, that’s the universe talking to you.”

  Tosh looked at Victor with an odd expression, part respect, part hunger, and part shame. A sliver of confusion shadowed his face.

  “We heard about the Classification Act, and we want you to speak to our potentiate,” Del said. “I don’t care if you denounce us all as loonies. They need to hear what a struggle you’ve had with medication. To see how you’re standing up now. It will inspire them.”

  Looking into Tosh’s brown eyes, the way his irises seemed to whirl, it was as if Victor understood him for the first time. Tosh didn’t really know what he was doing or what he was looking for. He was making it up as he went along, like the rest of them. “You didn’t hurt Ozie,” Victor said.

  “No, I didn’t,” Tosh replied. His fists curled and relaxed then curled again.

  “Why do you think you’re here?” Victor asked.

  Tosh seemed to struggle for words. “Like I said, sometimes you have to go after what you want with everything you have.”

  “You want to help me?”

  Tosh returned a curt nod that seemed to say there was more to talk about but now wasn’t the time.

  Victor turned to Wonda and Del. “I need a minute with Tosh.”

  They left him and returned to the other Human Lifers, who had been keeping their distance while watching Victor.

  His skin was nearly dry, though his hair still dripped onto his shoulders. “Tell me what the King really wants,” Victor demanded. There was a force to his words that sounded unfamiliar to his ears.

  Tosh avoided Victor’s gaze, a puzzled expression on his face as he spoke haltingly. “He wants to stop the Classification Act. He’s the one selling stims throughout the American Union. I don’t know why I’m telling you this. I can’t—I can’t seem to stop. What are you doing to me?” He sounded puzzled and fearful.

  “Did he have Jefferson killed?”

  “I don’t think so. Are you making me talk like this? Please stop.”

  “Why not?” Victor said. He felt woozy, drained.

  Tosh said, “Because I think he wants the truth as much as you do. I’m sure of that. And…”

  “What?”

  “I think he feels guilty about the polonium. He had the tongue tested. It’s the same radiological signature as what he provided to Oak Knoll.”

  Knowledge like a dark raven snapped at Victor’s consciousness, but he pushed it away. How could he have doubted the importance of the data egg? Minutes before he’d been telling himself it was a skewed truth, Jefferson’s slanted version. That type of thinking was madness.

  “We’re going to get it open,” Victor said, his voice hoarse. “We’re going to do this. If you want to help, you keep us safe. Let’s hope the truth doesn’t get us killed.”

  21

  People say they can’t see the primals. They’re either lying or someone has figured out a way to block the signals. Maybe the Mesh Towers are interfering. I can see the primals. I can hear them. I would never ignore them.

  —Samuel Miller’s The Carmichael Journals (1971)

  23 May 1991

  New Venice, The Louisiana Territories

  Victor stood with Pearl on the drug hut’s deck, fighting the urge to jump at every creak and groan of the boards beneath his feet. A transparent, flexible sheath sealed the deck. It looked like a giant soap bubble had come to rest.

  Towering thunderclouds moved east, their
shadows preceding them as they darkened the muddy Passage waters, gray stones of New Venetian townhouses, and rustling greenery on Cemetery Hill. Sunlight broke out on the slope, heating Victor like an oven element. A cloud moved overhead, dropped pellets of rain, and moved on.

  Change had come to New Venice, but he couldn’t tell whether the world had transformed or if it was all in his head. It seemed that he was finally getting answers to his questions and people were being truthful when they never had been before. The flowering of truth felt like something more than coincidence.

  “You think the Personil is gone from his system?” Victor asked.

  Pearl stood at the railing. She looked out of place. Her pale blue business suit rustled as she folded her arms. “It’s been a week. He’s taking fumewort, bitter grass, and a few other herbs for good measure. Ozie’s been fussing with his braincap every other hour. This is exactly the type of aggressive treatment we had planned for you.”

  Victor knew exactly what she was implying—if he hadn’t intuited Jefferson’s murder and started investigating on his own, the plan wouldn’t have gone so far off the rails. Then again, they’d all planned to take their sweet time in contacting clueless Victor.

  “If you had told me when I first came to your shop…” He didn’t finish his thought. This wasn’t a fight that mattered. She herself had said he should let the past go. “Never mind.”

  Victor brushed past Pearl and entered the hut, noticing how there was no glass in the building, nothing sharp or breakable, all plastic edges, cloth, and stuffing, which was fine, better that Samuel Miller didn’t have easy access to anything that could be used as a weapon. But it made Victor think of all the other ways to kill someone. To suffocate with a pillow. To rip fabric from the couch and wrap it around someone’s neck. To bludgeon with fists unceasingly.

  To the guard outside the sitting room, Victor said, “Don’t let anyone interrupt us. Not even Karine. Especially her.”

  The guard, Velasquez, shifted on his feet. “She’s the second chief.”