State Machine

by Spangler, K. B.

  They’d never do any of those things: Mulcahy wouldn’t let them. Allowing the Hippos to go on the hunt was as close as he would ever come to letting an Agent break the law. OACET needed to be trusted if it was to survive.

  (Rachel knew this—she tried her best to live this! And yet she still always felt better after those meetings where they allowed themselves to take that mental deviation from the straight and narrow. Like revenge, catharsis was a dish best served cold, but for different reasons.)

  “We give him choices,” she agreed. “Tempt him with possible solutions to his problems. Did you set this one up? Is the fragment of the Mechanism a solution to his problems?”

  “It might be a possible solution, but it’s not a trap that we set for him,” Mulcahy said. “He found the fragment on his own. I only learned about his involvement when the Hippos found his connection to Jenna Noura’s broker.”

  “You think he killed Noura,” she said.

  “I think he had her killed, yes,” he said. “Another large sum of cash was withdrawn from a different account right after Noura was arrested. Except the Hippos can’t find evidence Hanlon hired the hit.”

  Rachel tilted her head up towards the stars again. There was a breeze, and now that she had shed the heat of their race through the woods, she was starting to feel the chill. “We won’t be able to prove any of this,” she said.

  “No,” he admitted. “But it’s information. It might lead somewhere useful.”

  “For OACET, maybe,” she said with a shrug. “It’s fruit of the poisonous tree for me.”

  “Yeah. I don’t know what tipped him off to the fragment’s location in the White House’s basement. I’ve asked Hope to go to Greece and see what she can find over there. She’s not an Agent, or law enforcement, so she’s got more flexibility than we do.”

  Rachel tossed her scans over to Mulcahy’s wife, still asleep within the pile of clothing. “Um…”

  “She’ll be fine,” he said, a strong streak of red pride moving into his conversational colors. “And she can go a lot of places that we can’t. Until we’re cleared to travel outside of the country, she’s the best investigator we have.”

  “Why were the Hippos following me?”

  “They weren’t,” he said. “Why do you think they were?”

  “Hell of a coincidence, Ami and Ken in the same part of town when I needed them…”

  “Oh, that.” He grinned. “I don’t think it was a coincidence at all. Hanlon’s known the Hippos have been snooping around, but they’re almost impossible to spot. He saw a way to take out Noura and get the Hippos to break cover at the same time.”

  “Hmm.” Rachel mused. It would explain why the gunmen hadn’t targeted her. If the gunmen kept Rachel in danger, that’d be more likely to draw out her hidden allies than if they had simply killed her. Dead was dead, but if her death could be prevented…

  “Yes. Hanlon used you as bait,” Mulcahy agreed. “There’s nothing you could have done about that.”

  Pale green guilt came up within his colors. It was fresh, unprocessed: something was on his mind, and it had happened during the car chase. She peered up at him, picking stray thoughts out of the night air—What if…? Who might…?—as he pushed the events of the day around in his head.

  “What did you do?” she asked.

  Mulcahy’s colors moved back and forth in a loose weave of browns, turquoise, and vivid greens and blues. “I used the car chase as an opportunity to set another trap for Hanlon,” he finally said. “I set up something for him, something irresistible, and he took the bait.”

  “You do that all of the time,” Rachel said. “Why’s this one gnawing on you?”

  “I know there’s always a cost,” he said. “Some of the traps I set will result in collateral damage. Not might—will. If Hanlon follows through with this particular trap, someone will be killed. I don’t know who, I don’t know when, but the scenario requires it to happen.”

  “Do you want to get into specifics?”

  “No,” he said, almost sadly. Mulcahy’s emotions searched around the edges of a bright blue light which kept his cerulean blue core away from her Southwestern turquoise. She associated this hunt-and-peck motion with the conflicting needs of wanting to give someone information while also keeping a confidence.

  Too many secrets, she thought.

  “Are you forcing him to act?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “Then it’s not your fault.” Rachel didn’t even have to think about it. “It doesn’t matter how the gun got in his hands. The man who pulls the trigger is sometimes responsible, but the one who gives the order is always responsible. The burden isn’t yours.”

  “That’s what I keep telling myself,” he said. “But I was the one who gave Hanlon a loaded gun. I won’t pretend I don’t bear some responsibility for how he’ll use it. And where he’ll point it… I don’t know.”

  “Is he going to come after us?”

  Mulcahy chuckled. “Of all of the possibilities, that’s the one that won’t happen. In this instance, killing one of us would be counterproductive.”

  “Is there any way this’ll backfire on us? Is what you did illegal?”

  “No. It’s…” he paused, unable to put what he wanted to tell her into words. Finally, he reached out a hand. “Here.”

  Rachel hesitated. She had never been invited into her boss’s mind before. Even with the invitation, it seemed an invasion of privacy.

  When she moved into his link, there was the usual blurring of boundaries, but...

  She looked down and saw her hands. Below those, her shirt and slacks, and a familiar pair of shoes. A body? That’s new.

  She glanced around, taking in the landscape of his mind. Mulcahy didn’t have walls, not in the way she usually experienced them. Stepping into his sense of self was akin to stepping into an iron channel. Rachel knew there was more to see and feel than what he showed her, but he was allowing her to access one path, to know a single thought: OACET above all.

  A stray thought—wonder how his wife feels about that?—drifted away from her.

  Humor rolled across the part of Rachel that existed in Mulcahy’s mind, and she turned to see Hope Blackwell’s wild blue-black core at the other end of the channel, holding the same weight and mass as Mulcahy’s commitment to his people.

  Ah, she thought. A balancing act.

  Exactly so, came a thought that she didn’t think was hers.

  She turned away from his devotion to his wife, and examined the channel. Scans didn’t work, not here, not unless Mulcahy let them, and she got the impression that Mulcahy didn’t approve of others snooping around in his head.

  She moved towards the space he reserved for OACET.

  A will-o-the-wisp of green with streaks of red bobbed across the iron channel; guilt, wreathed in shame. Deep within was that same vivid blue.

  This? She held out a hand to the ball of colors, offering contact, and the sprite floated towards her.

  Before she could touch it, she was back in her physical body.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I can’t.”

  The shock of being thrown from his mind was minimal, but Rachel kept shaking her head to clear it.

  Mulcahy didn’t have any conversational colors.

  (Everyone had a conversational layer, she reminded herself, flipping her implant off and on in a furious rush. You just can’t see it… Look over there, you can still see Hope’s, so this is just an error left over from being in Mulcahy’s head…)

  He stood, the stray thoughts whispering around him devoid of any emotion. “You’re babysitting today,” he told her. “Be at the mansion by seven tonight.”

  The request—the command—took her by surprise. “I’m not scheduled for another—”

  “Public scrutiny is going to be high,” he said. “Maybe higher than when we first came out. I’m pulling anyone off of the duty roster who’s not capable of managing any problem that might come up.”
/>   “I…” She rolled onto her feet, uncertain whether she should fight his sudden change in attitude, or salute.

  “It’ll be a three-hour shift,” he told her, and then walked into the shallow water to rejoin his wife.

  A few steps into the pool, and he stopped. The slightest flickers of red stress and mournful gray moved across his body as his emotions returned. “Thank you for the run, Penguin.”

  She watched him walk away. She knew she should be pissed.

  More than anything else, she wanted to give him a hug and tell him everything would be okay.

  Mulcahy had been the first to break free, and he had been there to guide them when the rest of OACET came out of their five-year fog. Until she had seen the near-alien landscape of his mind, Rachel had never stopped to appreciate how that meant he had gone through the transition alone.

  Going through the motions as a brainwashed husk one day; the next, learning you had been turned into a living weapon for the digital age. And maybe the day after that was when you realized you were responsible for the welfare of the four hundred other survivors who had been sold the same bill of goods.

  That had to mess you up.

  She stood and began her long jog home.

  SEVENTEEN

  First District Station had begun its career in public service as an elementary school. When it was converted to a police station, the building had been retrofitted and resized for adults, but the front entrance would always belong to children. The original design of the schoolhouse hadn’t included a grand entrance, and that hadn’t changed during the remodel. There was a tiny alcove and a set of double doors, all of it painted a bright primary blue.

  No matter how many times she faced those doors, Rachel knew she’d always feel like the young, tender outsider she had been in suburban Texas. The difference between her and her younger self was that she finally understood why she shouldn’t solve her problems with her fists.

  Shame, that.

  “How bad is it?” Santino asked her.

  She continued to move her scans around. “Bad.”

  There wasn’t a person within her range who didn’t hold OACET’s neon green within their conversational colors. As she and Santino walked towards First District Station, pops of Southwestern turquoise started to catch and run within the green.

  Front and center on everyone’s mind, she thought. What a day this’ll be.

  Santino turned towards the side door, and she grabbed his elbow and yanked him back onto the main path. “If we’re going to do this,” she told him, “we’re going to do it right.”

  Two stairs up, a short walk down a freshly poured sidewalk, and they were at the front doors.

  Rachel took a breath, and yanked both of them open at once.

  Today, she was glad she had worn those boots with the heels. The moment she passed through the front doors, her own unique turquoise had exploded throughout the conversational colors of every person on the first floor of the building. She pounded down the hallway while Santino’s feet made small shuffs behind her. Other than the noise of their shoes on the linoleum, the precinct was as silent as a public space could ever get: the white noise of machines and people unseen filtered through the air, but no one near enough to know that Rachel had entered the building was talking.

  She had planned to keep her chin up and push through, but there was a tug in the aether as first one smartphone started recording, then another.

  Smile, she thought. You’re on Candid Camera. Always and goddamned forever.

  Might as well go ahead and shoot the elephant in the room. If there absolutely had to be a giant animal stinking up the place, it was simply common sense to make sure it wouldn’t also gore you to death.

  She tapped Santino on his arm, and the two of them stopped in the middle of the hall. “Public announcement, guys,” she said. She barely had to raise her voice; every person in earshot was listening. “It’s true,” she said. “We were brainwashed for five years.

  “We didn’t talk about it. Not because we were hiding, but because we didn’t want to talk about it. It’s been an open secret for months. Chief Sturtevant knows. At OACET’s request, he had me vetted by multiple psychiatrists to make sure that I’m sane enough to work as a cop.”

  She paused to see if anybody would laugh. Nope. Nobody had a sense of humor any more.

  “Since I’m part of a federal agency, my personal options for what I could do, and who I could tell, were limited. It was a need-to-know situation, and the press, apparently, has decided everybody needs to know.

  “Keep your opinions of what I should have done to yourselves. Those were the worst years of my life. I won’t talk about them.”

  With that, she turned and resumed her long stomp down the hallway, Santino covering her back.

  Her little speech seemed to help. The two of them walked away in a cloud of wine-red sympathy.

  Rachel hesitated a second time at the door to their office. The gauntlet downstairs had been bad. This part, she was dreading.

  She pushed open the metal classroom door, and entered the jungle.

  The office she shared with Santino had spent the last year in a near-constant state of change, the single defining feature being that it was always stuffed full of enough houseplants to qualify as a pocket rainforest. When Rachel had first been tapped as OACET’s liaison to the MPD, she and Santino had been given an overly large south-facing office on a middle floor, a near-perfect location for a greenhouse. His desk had been secondhand but huge, and stationed in the center of the room. Hers had been a lap desk with a beanbag bottom, shoved beneath a rickety wooden chair off to the side. After they had started solving cases and the MPD’s opinion of Rachel had changed, a second desk identical to Santino’s had appeared, and they spent their workdays facing each other across a wide expanse of pockmarked metal.

  Later, after Zockinski and Hill joined their team, the secondhand desks were removed and a set of new library cubicles were installed in their place. The four of them had arrived back at work after a long weekend to find their office had been turned into a miniature cubicle farm, and had immediately disassembled it. Santino had rebuilt the pieces as a set of standing desks by the windows, Rachel and Hill had chucked a couple of easy chairs into the empty space, and Zockinski had hung a whiteboard and wide-screen television on the far wall. There were the ubiquitous bookcases and filing cabinets found in all government offices, and these were rearranged along with the rest of the furniture, but the rest of it was a deep living green.

  (Each time a new plant appeared, Rachel and Hill would wonder aloud about the likelihood of jaguars. Santino laughed them off, but they had something planned for April Fool’s Day that involved a motion detector, a hidden sound system, and a giant stuffed cat that Hill had picked up at a yard sale.)

  This morning, Zockinski and Hill had arrived before them and had staked claim to the two easy chairs. The men were layered in uncertain yellows and oranges, her Southwestern turquoise wrapped tight within these. Beneath this lay a sympathetic wine red, and at the base of this tangle of colors she spotted the harder reds of rage. Neither of them said a word as she entered.

  “Three questions,” Rachel said as she walked into the office.

  Hill’s eyebrows arched up.

  “Any three questions you ask, I’ll answer,” she said. “Doesn’t matter what they are. No tricks, no wordplay.”

  Zockinski kept his eyes on his laptop as he pretended to type up a report. “Are you okay?”

  “A year ago, no. I wasn’t. I don’t know about now—some days are worse than others. But there are more good days than bad.”

  “PTSD?” Hill’s voice was strangely light, as if a third party were using him to introduce a topic he’d rather not discuss.

  “That your second question?”

  Hill nodded.

  “Maybe? I don’t think so.”

  “Follow-up to the second question,” Santino said, as he entered the room behind her. “Would
you know if you had PTSD?”

  Hill’s colors flashed and shifted from Rachel’s turquoise to Santino’s cobalt blue, as if to tell him, Good one.

  “I honestly don’t know,” she replied. “I’ve gotten pretty good at beating psych tests. After the first couple dozen, you give them what they want to hear.”

  Zockinski and Hill fell silent, searching for a third question. Rachel took it as an opportunity to toss her new purse on her desk. A carved wooden owl, solid and all too real, glared at her from its permanent spot behind her computer screen.

  “At least it’s finally out in the open,” Hill said.

  “What?” Zockinski jumped, yellow surprise rushing into his conversational colors. “You knew? You didn’t tell me?”

  Hill reached over with his good arm and rapped his partner on his shoulder. “Today’s not about you,” he said.

  Yellows and reds clashed against each other as Zockinski wrestled his emotions back into place. “Who told you?” he muttered at Hill.

  “Mako?” Rachel guessed.

  Hill nodded. “Few months ago. Said it was a secret. Sorry,” he said, his last word aimed at Zockinski.

  Zockinski ignored him. “I’ll bet you knew, too,” he said to Santino. “Did Zia tell you? Did I have to fuck an Agent to get an invite?”

  “Christ! Zockinski, if I knew you were going to be a weeping child about this, I would have told you myself,” Rachel snapped. “You weren’t intentionally excluded, okay? I didn’t tell you because it’s not something I talk about. Ever. I told Santino—he needed to know because we spend every single waking moment together—”

  “—hey!”

  “—but the rest of the world found out at the same time you did.”

  She turned her back on Zockinski, secretly relieved. A snit fit over not being allowed in the clubhouse was better than pity, maybe even scorn…

  Yeah. She’d take the snit fit.

  “Third question,” she said. “Or are we done here?”

  Zockinski’s colors twisted into spiteful reds, and she suddenly felt cold as she knew what would come next. He had been hinting at it for months, he had never let the rumors go, she had stared him down with her broken eyes—