Then again, the same thing could be said of the entire body: why couldn’t two Agents who shared no genetic markers pull themselves apart through the familiarity of their own faces, their own hands…even their own genitals?
(Rachel, when she was Rachel and not an amalgam of RachelJasonPhil, thought that it was because belief was shaped by the mind, but emotions were shaped by the soul.)
The strange metal object was their way home. They felt it in their joined hands, still warm from the printer. They concentrated: concentration was key. Fragments of other thoughts, other concepts, those could introduce new emotions to the mix, and that would keep them rolling in this mental mess forever.
Important, one of them said.
Trivial, said another.
What? said the third.
Then it was just a matter of following those emotions back to their source.
The pieces of identity who felt the item was significant gathered itself together, pulling away from the Other. In that undefined space where identity existed, the one who felt the item was barely worth its time found itself, and it too pulled away. This left the one who was just utterly confused by the whole thing floating around, alone.
And then it was just a normal three-way link. This link was enhanced through skin contact, yes, but now they were just swimming in their own carelessness.
Jason broke contact first. “Fucking rookie mistake,” he hissed, throwing the metal object into Rachel’s lap and crawling away to put some distance between him and the others. He looked around, his conversational colors whipping in hard reds all around him, and saw Bell. The girl was staring at him, her mouth open, Santino’s arms tight around her to keep her from running to him and Phil. He leapt to his feet and stormed out of the room.
“Jason!”
“Let him go,” Phil said to Bell. “He’s got to walk it off.”
“What happened?” Santino asked.
“We got mixed up,” Rachel said. “We sorted it out.”
I hope. She slipped the metal object into her pocket as she searched her memories for something new. Nothing stood out. She still experienced some minor confusion separating her own experiences from those of other Agents (Christmases and birthdays, especially. For whatever reason, happy memories tended to stick. Better than the alternative; she’d much rather have the memories of opening a thousand different gifts than standing around in the dim childhood fog of funerals.), but nothing stood out as being a new addition from the Phil or Jason Memory Collections.
Rachel glanced over at Phil, who was a mix of embarrassed reds and anxious grays. “You okay?” she whispered, not quite ready to open a new link.
“Yeah,” he said softly. Then, stronger: “Yeah.”
He turned to Bell. The girl jumped into his arms with the enthusiasm of lovers reunited after a long tour of duty.
“Didn’t mean to worry you,” Phil said, brushing the girl’s green-streaked hair away from her face. “It happens sometimes. We’re fine.”
Santino hung back, unsure if he should give his partner a hug. Rachel reached out and pulled him close, and let his cobalt blue aura and warm woody scent wrap around her. “That was hard to watch,” he said.
She stepped away and nodded towards Phil and Bell. “So I heard.”
“I hadn’t seen that before,” he said. “Zia told me that you guys sometimes…merged?”
“Good word.”
“Yeah,” he said. His girlfriend’s violet core color was prominent in his conversational colors; he was wondering what Zia had left unsaid. “The three of you just started…” He stopped, searching for a good way to describe the wrongness of three separate bodies moving as one.
“I think Jason and Phil’ve gotten careless,” Rachel said quietly, so as not to disturb Phil and Bell on the nearby couch. “They’ve been spending a lot of time together, and they’ve probably gotten their mental defenses tuned against each other. Casual contact isn’t as big a deal to them. I jumped in the middle, and broke their balance.”
“It’s that bad?”
“It can be—it used to be,” she corrected herself. “This is the first time it’s happened in months.”
Well, first time it’s happened to me in months, she thought, and wondered how much of Jason’s happier, warmer personality might be because of his new relationship with Phil, not Bell. It was possible that some of Phil had gotten stuck in Jason’s head…and then she shook her head to ward off that line of thinking. She knew firsthand that Jason could be a real human being when he put his mind to it. Besides, links went both ways, and Phil didn’t seem to be showing any signs of Jasoning.
She shook her head again, and moved towards where Bell and Phil were holding each other on the couch, finally ready to do damage control.
“So,” Rachel said to Bell. “What have the guys told you?”
“Nothing!” Bell said, a little too quickly. The conversational colors across her shoulders dimpled with the lie.
“Good,” Rachel said. “That’s exactly how you should answer that question for anyone else. Now, what have the guys told you?”
Bell looked at Phil, who rubbed her back and assured her it was okay.
“They told me you were—”
“Brainwashed,” said Jason from behind Rachel. She jumped: she had shut down everything but her short-range scans, and he had managed to surprise her. He grinned at her to show he knew she had been caught. It was the same grin the old Jason had used, all smooth arrogance. “We told her they lied to us before they put the chips in our heads. Then, once they had their lab rats, they walked away from us for five fucking years because they wanted us to lose our goddamned minds, wanted us to become…that.”
He pointed at the spot where the three of them had gotten lost.
“Bell knows,” he said. “Everything Santino knows, we told Bell.”
“Good. She should know everything,” Rachel said. Then, to Bell, “Now, tell me what they told you.”
“What? Why?” The girl was staring at Jason as if she had never really seen him before.
“Because information is our first line of defense, and I need to know you have the facts right.”
Jason started to complain. Rachel thought about opening a link between her and the other Agent to tell him to back off, then decided she still wasn’t up for it. “Jason?” she said. “Not now.”
He stepped away, furious.
Bell’s attention moved from Jason to Rachel, her conversational colors dropping Jason’s and Phil’s cores, and replacing these with Rachel’s strong Southwestern turquoise. She began to talk, slow and halting, as if telling one close friend about another’s murder.
The girl knew.
She knew that five hundred young employees in the federal government had been recruited to become part of an experimental top-secret program. How they were told that this Program was critical to promote interagency cooperation.
And how that story was a lie.
That cooperation was never the goal. How the true purpose of the Program was to allow a select few businessmen and politicians to gain access to the abilities of the implant, without incurring the risks of brain surgery and criminal liability.
That to achieve this, the minds and personalities of each Agent needed to be eliminated.
That a piece of software, a personal digital assistant, had been introduced, and how this could not be controlled or turned off. How this software had been designed to hammer at the Agents’ psyches for five years, day and night, until their personalities had retreated so far behind their walls they might not have ever come out again.
That Patrick Mulcahy—then, just another Agent; now, head of OACET and their champion and protector on Capitol Hill—had somehow tripped over a way to free them.
That Mulcahy had led them from behind their walls, and out of those five years of hell.
Had united them into a single Agency.
Had encouraged them to wait until the time was right to spring their exist
ence on an unsuspecting world.
And, finally, to accept that while the world might tolerate cyborgs with the power to control machines with their minds, it was unlikely they would think of technologically-omniscient cyborgs recovering from serious emotional and mental abuse as anything other than a disaster waiting to happen.
And so, in a way, the Agents were still waiting.
By the time she finished, Bell was sobbing. The girl buried her face against Phil’s chest and wept. Rachel waited until Bell could get a handle on herself (a hundred and sixty-two Mississippi, a hundred and sixty-three Mississippi, a hundred and… Jesus, kid, pull it together), and then reached out to place a hand on the girl’s shoulder.
“Thank you,” Rachel said.
Bell sniffed, and wiped her eyes with Phil’s shirt. Phil took a deep breath, resigned.
“For what?” Bell asked.
“For keeping our secret. I know it’s tough. But it shouldn’t be for too much longer.”
“Are you really going public with the brainwashing story?”
“Yeah,” Rachel said. She knelt down, making sure that Bell was seated higher than she was: illusions of power went a long way towards maintaining relationships with those outside of the collective. Rachel didn’t think she needed this extra step with Bell, but she didn’t take chances. “Not us,” she said, tapping her chest, and then gesturing at Phil and Jason. “And not our Administration, either. We’re going to let the media do it for us.”
Rachel was part of OACET’s Administration herself, and knew the story would break soon. They kept a close watch on certain pieces of information in certain databases, and certain reporters were getting close to these. Once they did, it was only a matter of time before they would be able to trace that information back to its source and verify the story.
If the Agents were lucky, the story would finally give Congress the kick in the ass it needed to turn against Senator Richard Hanlon.
(Rachel wasn’t optimistic. Congress didn’t change, not really. Government thrived on predictability. After OACET had presented evidence that members of Congress had been directly involved in eliminating uncooperative Agents, the ranking politicians had offered a few of their less popular members up for public sacrifice. Hanlon hadn’t been among them. The man had serious money, and was incredibly popular with voters. Every time OACET brought evidence against Hanlon, it was met with a Yes, but did you consider… They had. Everybody had—everybody knew he was rotten. And nobody seemed to care as long as the political system kept churning along.)
Bell hauled herself off of the couch, and dropped to the floor next to Rachel. So much for body language, Rachel thought. The girl’s grays were turning on themselves, changing from the sorrow of a cloudy sky to a determined steel.
“What are you going to do about Hanlon?” the girl asked.
Rachel glanced towards Phil, who nodded.
Risky, Rachel thought to herself. Telling Bell who was responsible for developing the implant and the mental conditioning branded the girl an ally of OACET, and Hanlon didn’t especially approve of those.
“We can’t—we will not—go after Hanlon,” Rachel said. “He’s the living symbol of why OACET can be trusted. Once the story gets out, it’ll prove that he was behind the software used in our…conditioning. By letting him live, we’ve shown that we obey the rule of law. Even when killing him is something we really, really want to do.”
Phil and Jason were both nodding now, their conversational colors holding her turquoise; they agreed with her. Bell, on the other hand, was reading Objection! in a mix of hard reds and grays.
“Why do you let him walk around, knowing what he’s capable of?!” she asked. “He’s evil. He’s a murderer! He killed over a hundred and fifty Agents before you went public!”
“We don’t have proof he was directly responsible for the murders,” Phil said, reaching down to touch Bell’s shoulder. “We do have proof that he knowingly set out to brainwash us. And we can’t alienate Congress by forcing them to turn on one of their own. We need Congress to think we’re worth keeping around, or they’ll find a way to get rid of us.”
The girl shrugged him off. “That doesn’t matter! He could still come after you, but…you’re just…you just let him go!”
“What’s the alternative?” Rachel asked her. She had a brief memory of Josh practicing the ‘But Murder is Bad’ speech he planned to give to the press when they started asking the same questions. “Congress has already investigated Hanlon’s company, and we can’t prove he entered politics to get his hands on us. To them, and to the rest of America, he’s just a rich guy whose company developed a product that was turned into cyborgs. He’s not legally responsible for anything.”
“But you know.” Bell was kneeling in front of her, her steely grays and red anger shading deeper.
Rachel met her eyes. Bell was able to hold her gaze for a few moments, but finally shied away.
“And there’s nothing we can do,” Rachel said. Bell’s colors started to fade, with a sickly green coming up to replace the grays and reds; Rachel felt as if she was watching the girl grow up before her eyes. “Not legally. Which means until Congress turns against Hanlon, there is nothing we can do about him at all.”
FIVE
“Three more, and we’re headed back to First,” Zockinski said in her head.
Rachel nodded, then remembered that Zockinski couldn’t feel it, and was on the other side of the city besides. “We’re going to keep going,” she replied. “We’ve found a few more stores that deal in boutique collectables. We’re having better luck there than in the pawn shops.”
“Right,” Zockinski said. “Meet at the station for dinner?”
Her stomach grumbled in agreement. “Maybe,” she said, overruling it. “Call you in an hour.”
He hung up, leaving an echo of his voice behind. She pretended to scratch her temples to rid herself of the pressure; her persistent headache was back.
We should probably quit for the day, too, she thought. She and Santino had plenty of practice questioning pawn shop owners from their early days as partners, but the fine arts dealers had not been as willing to talk to them.
Well, they weren’t willing to talk to her. Santino knew enough about everything from the ancient Etruscans to modern numismatic principles to at least fake his way through a conversation. Once they realized he was making better progress without her, they had split the list of remaining stores in half, with her taking those on the cheap streets with lower rent.
She had ended up on the far west side of the Potomac Parkway, taking taxis between art galleries and asking dealers if they had recently encountered anyone with interest in these. If she was in a good mood, she’d carefully place each of Jason’s 3D-printed objects on a convenient display case or countertop. If she wasn’t in a good mood, she’d dump them out of her handbag, and if she was in an absolutely venomous mood—say, after a cabdriver had intentionally jacked up her fare and then a gallery owner had spent a few tense minutes pretending she didn’t exist—she’d make sure that the leather folio with her OACET badge landed on top.
The next store on her list was in walking distance. Rachel tugged her coat collar up and hoped that the weather forecast for tomorrow would be as promised, bright and sunny, the first real warm day of the year. Today was a dismal waste of a Saturday.
Left on P Street, came the reminder at the intersection. The thought had come up without prompting, like it used to before she had an implant, back when a name or a street sign led her to recall a barely remembered set of directions. Rachel probably wouldn’t have even noticed if she still had to read a map to learn where she was going. Now, she’d look at an address and start walking, and she’d end up at the front door of her destination as if she had made that trip a hundred times before.
It’d weird her the hell out if it weren’t so convenient.
The rain had started by the time she reached her destination. She glanced up and flipped settings
to read the signage. An old-fashioned hanging plaque dangled from an iron hook above her head, with a badger and a fish chasing each other in a clumsy yin and yang.
Okay, then, she thought, and pulled the door open.
The smell of the place hit her like a punch to the face. Rachel had to take a few deep breaths before her nose numbed itself in self-defense.
“Raccoons,” came a voice from the rear of the store.
“What?” Rachel gasped.
“My neighbors had a problem with raccoons. They poisoned them, and they came to my walls to die, the bloody things.”
She tried to unearth some modicum of sense from under the man’s thick Australian accent, but kept coming back to raccoons in the walls. “Can’t you…um…?”
“Get ‘em out?” A heavyset man in his late fifties rolled around a stack of newspapers and into the clearing where Rachel was standing. “I didn’t know they were in there until they started to rot. Now? The lawyers are involved, and I can’t touch my own building until liability gets settled. Here,” he said, holding out a small tin full of cream. “Eucalyptus oil. Rub it under your nose.”
She did, and her sinuses opened with a rush.
The man was ready with a box of tissues. “Happens to everyone,” he said kindly.
“Thanks?”
“Don’t mention it. If you’re bold enough to brave the stench, the least I can offer is good customer service.” He started towards the rear of the store. “Smell’s thinner in the back. I think they died up here in the front room.”
He gestured towards a table against the far wall. It had been pushed under an open window, and a fan and a large space heater were competing over the same electrical outlet. “Coffee?” the man asked her.
She gagged. The idea of anything in that place going into her mouth…
“Had to ask,” he said. “Oscar McCrindle, Trout and Badger Antiques.”
“Rachel Peng.” She waved the sopping tissue at the man. “I’d offer to shake, but I’m a mess.”
State Machine Page 6
