by Anna Gaffey
He gripped Con’s shoulder and let himself be lowered down against the curve of the shuttlepod. For a moment, the séance and its heady déjà vu flooded his mind, and he gripped at the sturdy, shiny black hull. His head throbbed in response to the tiniest movements. Con rummaged for the medkit, and swabbed primary disinfectant, then acrid-smelling iodine all over Jake’s port.
“Tell me about the side effects.”
“Hm?” Con was focused on the crook of Jake’s arm. He groped in his other pocket, and Jake looked away before he could see the glint of yellow through the low light.
“The tablet you gave me, with the vid of me, old—young me. I talked about hallucinations. Do you still have those?”
“When this works,” Con said, “I’ll show you.”
“You’ll show me? That’s just a shade too cryptic for today, all right? How will you show me?” Con looked helpless, and panic scuttled Jake. Of course—he should’ve realized it earlier. But he was so tired. “You can see what Rachel saw. What’s wrong with me?”
“It’s not just you. I thought, when you went out here, it might go away. I thought I might stop seeing it.” Con barked a harsh laugh and scratched his chin. “Temporary side effects, you said. I hoped. But it didn’t go away.”
Cold from the pod hull seeped through Jake’s sweater. “What didn’t?”
“Leech.” Con paused, and then he said in a rush, “I see it on everyone. Everyone who hasn’t had a dose of Restore. I can see it on you now. Rachel could, too. Though she didn’t want to say.”
Leech. “She was probably just worried she’d hurt my feelings.” Jake forced a laugh. The icepick twisted, hot and bright pain lancing his temples, and he recoiled against the pod. Leech blended into his panic and into his overall sense of wrongness, like a bad memory, stale blood. Shadows. Inexplicable reflections. The sleek, slippery shadows that ran up and down along every inch inside the station, staining it. He was slipping away from himself. Up, down, through: he wasn’t sure where he was going. Perhaps he was disintegrating directly into Selas, deep into the sun-stippled leaves, spread thin among the slithering velvety gloom. If he just let go…
But Con’s warm, sure fingers encircled his wrist, anchored him in the swim of pain, the ache of his knee and head. He cradled Jake’s elbow, gently but inescapably straightening his arm for injection. It’ll be just like a boost, Jake’s confused mind assured. A flurried touch at his pounding brow. The chink of glassine snapping into a sharp dispenser. Cold push in his arm port.
Then long moments passed with nothing, no sound or touch.
Jake cracked open an eye. By all the plaguing heavens, hells and limbos, Con was hesitating with his thumb on the plunger. Jake reached out and slapped his hand over Con’s, fumbled, pushed.
Rebecca—I’m sorry—
Con’s letter ran through his mind. I’m so sorry about Rebecca, and you, and everything.
The vial emptied its yellow venom into the crook of Jake’s arm.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Newscaster: “…and we’re here now with Dr. Angelica Padula Jeong, the mother of the now-convicted Dr. Jeong. Dr. Jeong, do you have any reaction to the verdict?”
Angelica Padula Jeong: “Please have the kindness to leave me in peace.”
N: “Doctor, we understand that this is painful, but surely you can see – ”
APJ: “My daughter is dead. My husband is dying, and my son will suffer for as long as the combined gods will it. I have nothing more to say.”
Excerpt: newscast coverage of verdict
09 April 2232
United Worlds Commonwealth v. Jeong
4th Circuit United Worlds International Court
Western Hemisphere Dome 0048 SP
Earth, Sol System
[Archived: United Governance Board regional justice systems, Earth]
2 November 2242 AEC
02:00
There was pain: a pinch.
Jake braced himself for the inevitable donkey punch. After all, Con had said it would come. And even if he was lying, Jake felt the threat of pain simmering around the edges of his senses, that fiery razor edge of agony ready to slide over the threshold.
But it did not come.
Instead of anguish, he tasted a musty undercurrent in the breeze. The trees vanished, and he found himself staring instead at cold, crumbling stone, a ceiling harshly lit by bluish-white portable lab lamps. Selas had disappeared. He had no idea where he was.
Strangely, the first thought that sprang to mind was that this could be a moment from his lost memory.
—He should be scared—
Yes. Something that escaped the erasure and lay dormant for him to discover.
—He was nervous, yes—
Nervous? No, that wasn’t right at all, Jake should be excited, jubilant, berserk clutching onto this memory with both hands and feet and any robotic apparatus he could finagle into action—
—but that was mostly due to the isolated, shitty surroundings. If Dr. Jeong had fucked anything up, he’d probably just hide Con’s body and go on with life as normal—
—and the thoughts were piling up, drenching over him, crushing down on Jake’s own. What was happening? Jake looked down at himself. He was lying flat on his back on a cot, with stiff beige canvas restraints crisscrossing his legs, arms and chest. He ground his teeth, and noted with horror that he wore a rubber mouth guard, the standard Science allocation for clinical lab patients to protect their tongue and teeth during surgery and testing.
A longer look informed him that, wherever he was, he wasn’t there as himself, either. His body was long and lean, clad in blue flight pants and unbuttoned shirt. If he looked, he could see chest hair and a familiar dipsy-doodle of a scar under his right nipple. This was insane, this was impossible, this was—Con’s body. A somewhat younger, less timeworn version, but undeniably Con’s. He looked up, and into the face of young vid-Jake.
Jake tried to process that, but his mind was less than willing, and the vision of his body as Con blinked out. The dim, wafting trees of Selas flickered back in before him. The cold hull of the pod chilled through his shirt, and he tried to twitch away.
It was a mistake. Instantly he was staggered by a rush of burning heat, a red tide of fire blistering through his veins and skin and eyes. Jake opened his mouth to shriek, and the fire swallowed his throat, drowned him, too much, too much—
—Jake, you control hungry uptight impossible paranoiac—
Con’s unspoken words cut into Jake’s mind and disrupted the fire. The thoughts felt rough and forced, like a circuit into the wrong port, and Jake shook his head.
—Don’t fight me, Jake.
Just let me show you—
Con’s words were boiling with frustration, and they steered Jake’s brain back on track. Con’s voice in his head. What was happening? A dream? Something brought on by the Restore, some kind of hallucination of Con? Or was this a true literal meeting of the minds, a psychic event? It wasn’t pleasant; his thoughts felt stilted and overcrowded, as though Con’s had shouldered their way in and misappropriated more than their fair share of Jake’s skull space. A problem for anyone accustomed to enjoying their own cranial expanse, but especially when one had enough regularly scheduled mental interruptions to last two lifetimes—
—If you’re done—
I’ll never be done, Jake argued. I’m a scientist, I question everything.
—When you can be bothered to—
An unmistakable fondness softened the words.
—You can trust me—
The landscape of Selas shimmered like a mirage, and then Jake winked back into the dingy lab. He was back in Con’s body again. The pain receded completely to its simmering distance. Jake sighed in relief. His head felt less full now, though it was still peculiar breathing in a different chest. Con’s seemed much more cavernous than his own.
—Pay attention—
Con’s voice was far off and muffled but still clear and sm
all as Jake’s own thoughts.
He spat out the mouth guard. “You need to relax,” he said with Con’s mouth. If breathing with Con’s chest was weird, speaking in Con’s dry rumble to his younger self was bizarre beyond universal measure. Stranger still: the words rose to his lips inexorably. He was speaking a memory. It couldn’t be said any other way.
“I do?” the young-and-cocky Jake said. “You’re going to break the arms off the chair, and I’m the tense one?”
I’m so young, Jake-in-Con thought, in a brief rush of mental individuality.
Young and unscarred as the old me. The vid-Jake. And I’m talking to myself. Young and cocky, and what is this? Where are we? We’re in a lab. It must be the Monticello bunker. Doing a test for Restore. Con, how are you showing me this—this memory?
Why are you showing it to me?
—Pay attention. This is what happened. Stop interrupting—
Jake felt an overwhelming rush, and then Con dunked him back under, their senses entwined, indistinguishable. In the last gasp before he lost himself again, he heard Con finish:
—and ease—
Con supposed he should be scared. But he wasn’t. He was cold and calm, his brain ticking away like it did before a shuttle launch, noting the proper place of each and every detail in his surroundings.
He could smell astringents, disinfectants, hear the chink of glass and the duller clunk of polymerine as Dr. Jeong rearranged the tray for the fourth time. He gripped the edges of the cot, closed his eyes, and waited. The restraints numbed his wrists. He needed to remember everything for later.
He heard Dr. Jeong—Jake—exhale. He was all quick motion and dark eyes above Con, above the tray, his anxiety radiating around the room.
“I just want you to get it over with,” Con confessed.
Jake reached out and took Con’s wrist, tapped his fingers against the skin. He was bristling with nerves, something Con had never seen before in top-of-the-mountain Jake. Always he blazed with confidence, a second sun for the insecure, the less brilliant. To see him rattled was disconcerting. At another stage in his career, Con would’ve exulted at his success in connecting with a difficult subject (inwardly, of course, Con didn’t boast). Instead, he felt…hollow. Numb all the way through. Apart from the brief press of Jake’s fingertips at his pulse; that he sensed like a brand.
“That’s a terrible reason to proceed,” Jake burst out, his gaze darting from the tray to the dripping walls to the thick canvas straps, anywhere but at him. “You don’t need to do this. I mean, I know you’re willing, obviously, and if I didn’t have signed releases in triplicate, we wouldn’t be here, but I’m not sure. I should do another range of B18 tests. Just to be certain.”
“You already did two,” Con pointed out.
Jake paced away from the cot. “Then I’ll redo them again. Or—” He turned and snapped his fingers at Con, the sound harsh in the dark space. “I’ll take the injection myself. I’ll show you how to do the prep, and you can inject me. It’s incredibly easy, a monkey could do it, if we had a monkey—”
“Is that another space ape crack?”
“You could do it.” Jake stalked back to the tray and began to rearrange the vials. “I can show you, and I trust me and I trust you. There, solved.”
“Or you could get Rebecca involved.”
Jake scowled at him. “You say that like it’s a deterrent, when in fact it’s a great idea. Why shouldn’t I get Rebecca involved?”
Con shrugged. “Why aren’t we doing this back at Icebreaker? A month ago?”
Something clanged on the tray. Jake took several deep breaths.
“So you should just get it over with it,” Con said placidly. He didn’t feel placid. He felt excited and jittery and why the fuck won’t you just do it? He was ready. “Unless you’d like to lose sole credit.”
Jake’s eyes glittered. He put on gloves. He slap-loaded a glassine vial full of yellow liquid into an injector, pushed the tray aside, and picked up Con’s mouth guard. “Open, please.”
Con obediently opened and bit down.
“Ready?”
“Been ready, still ready,” Con tried to say, but the guard got in the way. It didn’t matter, because Jake had already stuck the injector sharp in Con’s port. A short, shivery pressure. Then the stuff was speeding up his arm, like a hot needle dragging over his flesh, and then the needle widened, swelled, and Con leaned away from it—
With a wrench, Jake was out of the memory and his own man again. A touch of the burning pain edged into him. Not much, just enough to warn him it was still there, lurking under this onslaught of memory. He looked down at his—Con’s arm, and noted with detached interest how the median cubital vein stood out in a distinct cord, how the flesh around it turned livid.
You said this would hurt. All of it.
—It did—
So show me already.
—No—
Con’s arms convulsed, but they were phantoms, caught in agonized horror Jake couldn’t reach. He pressed a hand to his—no, it was Con’s. The lines were blurring, and once again Jake was going completely under. Fucking psychic improbability. He made a last, desperate effort to sense Selas around him, somewhere beneath the memory’s mask, to feel the cold pod against his back. Impossibly, he seemed suspended between the two…
Then the serum ripped into him like a blade, and he screamed along with the Con on the cot, and felt Con’s hand hard on his arm.
—I told you.
It’s better if you relax—
Airless darkness. Then sharp pains striking his face, his cheeks. Con blinked back into the blurry sight of Jake leaning close, his eyes wild, yelling something unintelligible. The lab lamps hurt his eyes, sent headachy, magnified ripples over everything he could see. Jake said, “Con, oh dear departed gods and goddesses, Con.”
He held a tablet close over Con’s face, his dark eyes flickering between the display and Con, and…
There was something wrong, something different, something fuzzy about his vision. Con blinked, but the wrongness didn’t dissipate. He squinted at the drifting aura of grey smoke pulsating around Jake’s temples.
“Con? I need you to say something, buddy, let me know you’re okay.”
The aura quivered in time with Jake’s voice. It looked weak and filthy, a film of energy wrapping around his head and neck. And Jake did not seem to notice it at all. Con felt a slight pressure at his wrists and chest, and then a release: Jake had loosened the restraints. A gentle touch to his mouth as Jake removed the guard. The grey aura throbbed off his fingers against Con’s chin, and Con gagged and croaked.
“I’m here. I’m okay.” He shook free of the straps and rubbed at his eyes. But the greyness didn’t go away; it hung around Jake like a veil, like invisible aging. It was…awful. Foul in a weird way Con couldn’t name. He could almost taste the scum of it as it reached for him.
“It’s on you,” he said. Babbled, really. “It won’t go away. Even when I blink. What the hell is that, Jake? It’s all over you.”
A frown puckered Jake’s brow. The aura writhed and followed the lines. Con descended into darkness.
—You let me babble, get it out of my system. We did some tests and I was healthy, fine, better than. But you didn’t want me to exert myself, you said. So we stayed overnight. Talked—
A flash again to that slivered memory of sitting alongside Con in a corridor outside the bunker, cards in a jumble on the ground, two red Kings and a true-blue Queen lying face up. Con’s dark head in his hands.
Now Jake could see the memory from both angles, and it was bewildering, like doubled vision. He mouthed the conversation along with both of them, in both their heads.
—You monitored me the whole time—
Jake trailed after the speech of his younger self. “…but to be honest, the pain worries me. You’re stronger than most people, Con. I don’t know what it would do to an everyday civilian. You’re sure you don’t feel anything right now, any mo
re pain?”
—I watched you, too. Even after you went to sleep—
The bunker corridor dropped out, blended into the lab. The lamps had been dimmed, but there was still light enough for Con to observe Jake snoring away on a clumsily assembled cot, a thin thermal blanket drawn over his shoulders. The thick grey veil clung to him still, rising and falling with each breath Jake took.
Con poked around the lab materials, found some glass, and looked at himself. There he was: scrawny, scarred, his face creased with exhaustion and apprehension…but clean of any silvery haze. He shook his head and looked at his neck, his arms, his hands. No greyness. No grime. He was clean. That was good. It felt good. He trotted back to sleeping Jake.
The grey continued to swim around Jake’s body with tireless rhythm. Con’s hand reached out to touch, and his fingers passed through the pulsing energy as if it wasn’t there. It didn’t even react to his hand’s invasion.
—I didn’t know what to do. You thought I was hallucinating—
“There are some side effects,” vid-Jake repeated earnestly, a nauseating memory within a memory. “Mostly hallucinatory in nature. Possibly related to the pain, the, ah, nearness of death. I think they’ve passed. Or he’s being quiet about it.”
—In the morning I was still stable. Scratch that. I felt amazing. Better than I’d ever felt. Apart from the thing I was seeing, I was in miraculous shape. A little pain, a little visual futz was small change compared to that. I could see that. So we packed, suited up, and made our way back to Saint Paul Dome. You were bursting, finally ready to grab Rebecca and show her your results, so the two of you could work out a schedule to start your human trials—
