“If you want me to teach you something, you have to let me teach you,” he said.
“Can’t you just—”
“No. Help me out, okay?”
Jason sat, cross-legged, and gestured for her to join him on the ground. She did, facing him, her new tablet splitting the space between them. It reminded her of their unintended merging of the other night, where they had found themselves seizing the 3D-printed replica of the fragment as their lifeline.
“Here,” he said, holding her new tablet out with both hands, like a heavy plate he needed her help to carry. “Put your hands on mine. We’re going in together.”
She stared at it as if it were a flat shiny snake. “Um…”
“Come on,” Jason said aloud. “You have to feel your way through this. It’s more of an art than a science.”
“Who taught you this?”
“Nobody,” he said. “I like computers.”
She muttered something nasty, and placed her hands over his.
Nothing passed between them, or between her and her tablet.
“Walls,” he said.
“Right, right,” Rachel sighed, and let him in. Resignation, slow and grumpy, passed from Jason’s mind into her own. “Oh, come on! I’m trying!”
“Do you want to learn this or not?” he snapped.
A memory of Glazer’s cold, viperlike stare bubbled up from where it had been lurking in her subconscious. “Yes,” she said, and took down the rest of her walls.
Jason’s mind joined hers, their identities a safe, courteous distance from each other. Together, they entered the tablet.
When Rachel interacted with a machine, she did so at the most basic level, using her mind like an extension of her fingers. She’d poke and prod, and make the occasional connection like she was flipping a switch, but for the most part she kept herself to those commands that didn’t require her to have anything but the most superficial knowledge of how the machine functioned. She could find files on a phone, or turn on the siren of a police car, only because she already knew how to do these things.
Jason carefully bundled her mind within his, and took her into the code.
She had visited these depths before, but briefly. It made no sense to her at all. She had expected the code to flow past her in ruler-straight green streams, or bounce around in pictures, something her mind could grab as This! This is something that exists. This is something real. This is something you can change.
No. The closest comparison she could think of was wandering through pockets of air with different qualities. Here was a cluster of warmth, there felt thin and empty…
Rachel had always stepped out of the code as quickly as she had entered. What could she do with air?
(Other than run around in it, of course, waving her arms and generally making a mess of the place, and she dreaded the fancy lying she would have to do when she took her tablet back to the store for a refund.)
“It’s not air,” Jason, somewhere both beside and inside her, all at once, said. “But it is elemental. Not the air-fire-water kind of elements,” he added quickly, “but like carbon, gold, aluminum… The code makes up this world. Here, it’s the atomic components of what exists.
“We can’t do much with atoms,” he said. “They’re so small, their size puts them out of our reach. But when code comes together in packets, it gets bigger, like a chunk of Italian marble made up of… whatever marble’s made from. Silicon and calcium?”
“Sure,” Rachel said, as clueless as he was when it came to rocks.
“Don’t just ‘sure’ me—I’m going somewhere with this. How can you tell if a wrecking crew’s taken down a building?”
“The…uh…the big pile of rubble?”
“Yeah. Now, how can you tell if a plumber’s fixed a broken pipe?”
“The footprints on the kitchen floor.”
“Don’t be a smartass. Say he’s good and cleans up after himself. How can you tell he was there?”
“Is this a trick question? If he knew what he was doing and everything works, I don’t think you can.”
“Right!” Pride, fast and sudden, came from Jason. “So, you can either go into the code like a wrecking crew and leave a huge trail behind you, or like a craftsman who can change the code so it doesn’t seem as if anything’s happened.”
“Lemme guess—you’re the craftsman?”
“No,” he said, and this time the pride was for himself. “I’m the symphony’s conductor.”
“What?” It was such an odd comparison that she heard herself say it aloud.
“Don’t lose focus. Code’s not what you think it is. There’s a gap between what code is, and what it does. Code has meaning, but when you use a computer, you’re looking at the program…the execution of code.”
“Because…” She saw the rough shape of Jason manipulating code in his thoughts, and pulled his half-spoken comparison straight out of his mind. “Because the code is the sheet music, and the program is the song?”
“Exactly!” he said, pleased.
Rachel remembered Bell’s old computers, the ones that sang like a choir, and wondered if she had helped Jason come up with this analogy.
“This is how I’ve always looked at code,” he said, picking up on her thoughts as if they were his own. “Since joining OACET, at least. I haven’t told Bell about it. I think it might hurt.”
“Yeah,” she agreed. The girl’s passion was exploring the boundaries between art, technology, and humanity. Dangling this ability in front of her would be cruel. “But… I don’t see anything to shape! Am I missing something?”
She felt him nod. “You need to stop thinking of code as a thing. It doesn’t make sense to a human mind. There’s too much of it, and unless you’re a programmer, there’s no way to look at it and know what it’s supposed to do. Even a good programmer can’t make sense out of all of the code—you can pick out pieces here and there, but it’s hard to get a feeling for the big picture. That’s why you need to bring a computer into it.”
“The implant.”
“Yup,” he said. “It crunches the data for us, turns it into something we can understand. It’ll let you be the craftsman, not the wrecking crew. What do you want to try?”
“Huh?”
A new wave of exasperation, well-muffled but still there, moved between them. “Pick an app that’s on your tablet,” he said. “Fix it in your mind.”
“Uh… Weather Channel?” It had come preinstalled on the tablet.
“Good. Got it?”
“Yeah?”
“Let go,” he said.
“What?”
“Let go,” he said again, and he pushed her.
Strange, this feeling of falling without a body. For her, it wasn’t anything like flying (it was more of a controlled plunge in which she tried her hardest not to scream), but she knew that somewhere nearby, Jason kept pace as he read the currents within the code like a falcon.
And then she was there. It looked no different than the rest of the airy nothingness around them, but somehow, she knew she was where she needed to be.
“Okay,” Jason said. “I put a puppy in the code. Find it.”
“What?”
“A picture. Of. A. Puppy,” he said. “It doesn’t belong there. Find it.”
She peered around her. “I don’t see a puppy.”
“It’s code. You’re not looking for a real… Forget it. Let your implant do the work. Give it the puppy, and let it go through the data for you.”
Give it the… How do you give a computer a puppy? A brief giggle came and went as she imagined herself presenting Lulu with a wiggly beagle. She fixed an image of a puppy in her mind’s eye, and then another, and another, just in case Jason had stuck a Rottweiler in the same file where her implant was searching for a Chihuahua. This, or something like this, she said to that piece of Other. Find it.
She found herself moving, and reached out to grasp… nothing. Whatever it was slipped through her idea of
her fingertips.
“Good!”
Rachel found herself blinking at her hands. Her real hands, her flesh and blood ones still resting on her new tablet, with Jason sitting across from her in self-satisfied pinks.
“What happened?”
“You found it!” he said, pleased. “We’ll do that a few more times until you get the hang of location, and then we’ll start working on manipulation.”
“Hey, good,” she said, as she flipped visuals off and on to orient herself in her own body. “Why did you pull us out?”
“Five minute break,” he said. “For as much time as you spend in the code, you have to spend that much time out of it. You can get lost in it if you lose your focus.”
“Lost?” she said, panicking. “Like, lost-lost?”
They were still joined tightly enough for Jason to feel her terror at losing her sense of self within a computer. “No,” he said, pushing a sense of calm towards her. “That can’t happen. Machines don’t have identities. You can get some bad vertigo, though. Once, I had to disconnect completely to take myself out of Lulu. Gave myself a fucker of a headache.”
Rachel slumped in relief. She hadn’t even considered the possibility that she might disappear within the code—
She jumped up and ran to the edge of the underbrush before she dropped to her knees, retching.
“Maybe this isn’t for you,” Jason said.
“Oh, God.” She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “No shit.”
“How about a compromise?” he said, as he moved a safe distance upwind. “I teach you how to find and erase the puppies, and you call me if you need to handle something more complex?”
“Deal,” she said. It’d be nice to master data diving, or whatever the cool cyborgs were calling it, but that was just her ego talking. She’d start small, and see where she could go from there. Puppies were friendly and safe and…
Glazer says hello.
Jason moved a little closer. “Why do you always think of this—” he said in a low voice, as he showed her a warm sandalwood hue. “—when you think of him?”
“Oh.” Rachel hadn’t realized she was moving colors through their link. “That’s how I think of him. That’s how he appears to me.”
“Really? You think he’s…uh…” Jason wasn’t used to thinking in colors. “…brown?”
“No, it’s just how I see him. There’re no correlations between personality and core colors,” she said, and quickly added, “that I’ve noticed. I might be wrong.”
“I would have thought that he’d be blood red.”
“I wish,” she sighed. “Wouldn’t life be easier if the psychopaths didn’t blend in?”
SIXTEEN
She was back in the dream of the sea when her owl woke her.
Rachel came awake at the loud pop! as the owl appeared in empty air, its green wings flapping to get her attention. “Damn,” she grumbled. Nobody pinged you when you had a privacy alert up, not unless it was an emergency. She wasn’t too worried: she was OACET administration, and she worked with the police. For her, nighttime emergencies were routine occurrences.
She flipped her implant from passive to active, and visuals emerged. The owl had landed on the headboard, and seemed to be watching her with its wide wooden eyes. On the other side of the king-sized bed, Becca snorted in her sleep and rolled over. The owl shied at this, a quick flutter moving across its wings, as if surprised to find someone other than Rachel in the room.
“Knock it off,” Rachel muttered as she slid out of bed. “I didn’t program you to do that.”
The owl gave her a slow blink, and vanished.
Rachel found her robe, a ratty terrycloth mess of a thing, and shuffled into it as she made her way down the stairs. Halfway down, her owl popped in again, hooting softly.
“I’m coming, I’m coming,” she said. “Let me put on some coffee.”
She had barely made it to the kitchen when her owl appeared for a third time. It stayed airborne, wings flapping furiously as if it were trying to slap her.
“All right, all right, all right!” she hissed, waving both hands to shoo it away. It refused to leave, disappearing only when she took her privacy message down.
The collective flooded in.
Holy Jesus! was her own singular thought. It was an honest prayer. She had never felt this much raw anxiety from the collective, and fewer than half of them were awake. The anxiety grew as more Agents came online, each newcomer adding their emotions to the link.
Then, a strong sense of control from a single source: the chatter and anxiety subsided as Mulcahy began to talk.
“I apologize for waking you,” he said. “We’ve gotten word that this is the day when the full story breaks.”
Rachel felt a sharp twinge from her knees, and realized she had dropped to the kitchen floor.
“In six hours, the Washington Metro will run a front-page story,” Mulcahy said, and then waited three long heartbeats before he added, “It was written by Jonathan Dunstan.”
The cloying panic that was already within the link thickened: Dunstan was Hanlon’s pet reporter.
“Stop,” Mulcahy said. Calm flowed from him into the collective. When they had pulled themselves back from the edge, he continued. “I’ve read the copy. It’s fair to us. Not kind, but fair. It’s not what any of us would have expected from Dunstan. We’re assuming that Kathleen Patterson at the Post is due to go live with her story in the next few days, and Hanlon and Dunstan decided to move first. Since Patterson has been fact-checking this story for the last few months, a propaganda piece would backfire on Hanlon. Dunstan’s version might not be the version we wanted, but it is strong and credible.
“Fortunately for Dunstan,” Mulcahy added, putting a little humor into his words, “he’s close to a good primary source.”
Mulcahy took a mental breath. During his moment of quiet, Rachel felt the tension began to drain out of the collective. Safe behind her mental walls, the private part of Rachel began laughing like a lunatic. He says red is blue, and we all say, right, okay, that must be blue if you say so, and suddenly it is blue—
The head of OACET waited until the collective digested this last bit of information, and then pushed on. “The major issue we’ll have to address in interviews is that we claim to be in favor of transparency, but we chose to hide how we had received five years of emotional and mental conditioning.”
That private part of Rachel couldn’t stop laughing. Conditioning! Received! Mulcahy was using the nicest words.
“Remember: we’re victims. We were never under any obligation to disclose how we were affected by the conditioning, not unless we were a danger to ourselves or to others. Over the past year, our actions have shown that whatever trauma occurred, we are able to manage it. As we pose no threat, we chose not to parade around our past in the public eye.
“Nobody has the right to tell us otherwise. Please be sure to remind them of that at every opportunity.”
Rachel found that the manic hyena hiding in her brain had finally gone silent. She pulled herself off of the floor and moved towards the nearest chair, bare feet padding on the cold tile.
When Mulcahy resumed speaking, the steel edge in his tone had softened. “Today will be hard. There’s no escaping that. But most of our close friends and family members have been told, and we’ve done our professional due diligence when needed.”
Rachel knew he was talking about her. Not just her—all of those Agents who, like her, played their roles in the public eye. Over the past six months, Agents employed in law enforcement or politically sensitive positions had disclosed the details of what had been done to them to their supervisors, and requested an assessment by an independent mental health professional. Rachel had personally sat through eleven different screenings conducted by three different psychiatrists and one social worker. The social worker was the only one who had guessed she was skirting around certain truths, his conversational colors flickering in and out of susp
icion and pity, but Rachel had yet to meet an assessment test she couldn’t beat.
“This isn’t the first time our lives have been turned upside down. We’re too familiar with how this will play out. Be sure to maintain your normal schedules. You can give interviews when you see the need, but Josh will be responsible for the official statement, and you can decline requests for media content in lieu of that.
“Also, consider enhancing your personal security, and be alert for possible threats. The general public has gotten used to us. This will remind them that we’re still here.”
“Rachel?” Becca’s voice was muzzy from sleep. She stopped in the doorway as Rachel held up a hand, asking for silence.
Mulcahy was nearly done. “I’ve left a copy of the article in the OACET community server. I suggest reading it…” He paused. “They don’t know about the missing fifty. Everything else, we can survive.”
Rachel exhaled, relieved, and pulled the larger part of her consciousness out of the link. “Sorry,” she told her girlfriend. “Office politics.”
Becca hit the kitchen lights, flinching before her eyes adjusted and she could take in Rachel’s mood. “Uh-huh,” she said.
“Really!”
“Liar,” Becca said, as she moved towards the coffee machine. “Is it serious?”
“Yes.” The link was all chatter. From a distance, Rachel heard Mulcahy field questions. “Give me a minute?”
“Sure,” Becca said. She stared at the coffee machine, a contraption of siphons and glass of Santino’s making. “Um...”
“Just heat up some water in a pan,” Rachel said. “I hid some filters in the flour canister.”
“Oh, thank God,” Becca muttered, and fished around in a cupboard for a couple of mugs.
Agents were beginning to drop out of the link, leaving to warn their friends and family. Rachel called up the copy of Dunstan’s article and skimmed through it. She hated reading in her mind: the words seemed too close to the backs of her eyes, and her motion sickness usually kicked in.
In spite of Mulcahy’s assurances, she was astonished by the level of detail in Dunstan’s article. Yes, it focused mainly on the Agents’…conditioning…and tended to gloss over Hanlon’s role as its architect, but there were facts within the article that were new to Rachel. One quote from a former U.S. Air Force General, taken from his written recommendation to Congress before the final vote on whether to pursue the OACET program, stood out:
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