State Machine

by Spangler, K. B.

  “I’m so sorry,” he said. “I had no idea what you went through.”

  “Is this personal or professional?” she asked as she turned to face him.

  “Personal. We don’t know each other, but if you need anything—”

  “Thank you,” she said sharply. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  The wine red began to take on the reds of irritation and hurt feelings. “Agent Peng, I’d like to help. Is there anything I can do for you, or…or any of the other Agents?”

  Lord, save me. Is this going to be my life from now on? “Thank you,” she said again, and realized she had fallen into her old habit of standing at parade rest when dealing with topics that pushed her out of her comfort zone. She shook herself, and turned back to her coffee. “The best way you can help is to treat me as though you never found out. It won’t affect my performance on the case.”

  Frustration was beginning to displace his sympathy. “Agent Peng—”

  She took a breath. “What happened is extremely personal and private. I don’t want to revisit those memories,” she said, reminding herself to be mild and polite and to not crawl straight down poor Alimoren’s throat. “Ever. Especially with someone I don’t know.”

  “Oh.” Sage green moved into his colors as he finally got it, and then this started to turn red with embarrassment. “Oh. Listen, I’m so sorry. I didn’t… I guess I didn’t think.”

  “It’s fine,” she said, and began to fix him a cup of coffee as a peace offering before remembering that serving him the motel’s brand could be categorized as aggravated assault.

  “Can I ask one question?”

  She added an extra helping of that scary, scary cream to his cup. “Sure.”

  “Didn’t you all go through it? How can it be private if it happened to five hundred of you?”

  “It’s a hivemind thing,” she said. “Some days the boundaries aren’t really there.”

  “That’s—”

  “Weird? Hell yes,” she said, handing him the cup. “But this would be just as hard—and just as personal and private—if it happened to five of us, or five hundred of us, or five hundred million of us. Big numbers don’t make what happened any more or less traumatic. They just mean I’ve always got someone to drive me to therapy.”

  “Because you don’t drive.”

  “I never drive,” she said.

  Alimoren took a polite sip. She had expected him to cough and sputter, but he seemed to be one of those people who considered all coffee to be drinkable. “You should,” he said. “What you did yesterday was amazing.”

  She grinned at him. “That was luck. If I had gotten anyone seriously hurt or killed…”

  “You didn’t,” he said. “If you had…ah…”

  “Yeah.” She nodded. “Today would be different.”

  They started walking towards the elevators. Curious yellows moved a little higher within his conversational colors, along with Hanlon’s core of water-darkened wood.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “I didn’t say anything.”

  She sighed. “Yes, Senator Hanlon knew what he was doing to us. His pet reporter put a positive spin on it before someone else could break the story.”

  Alimoren didn’t like that. His colors folded in on themselves, a defensive origami, with Hanlon’s brown pushed just outside their edges. “I know Hanlon,” he said. “He’s always played fair with me.”

  Rachel shrugged, and poked the button for the elevator. There was the light ding, ding, of floor changes, and this filled the silence better than anything she could have said.

  “I would have voted for him,” Alimoren said.

  It was her turn to wonder what he meant. “Hmm?”

  “If he ran for President,” the Secret Service agent said. “I thought he’d be a good one.”

  She shuddered. “No, he wouldn’t. He’d play the part, and in fifty years, we’d find out how hard he fucked us.”

  “Isn’t that true of most Presidents?” Alimoren said, some purple humor emerging from his colors.

  “Probably,” she said. “But I’m generally suspicious of anyone who’s over the age of eight and still wants to be President.”

  Alimoren laughed, bright purple and yellow moving through his conversational colors.

  The doors opened, and the two of them stepped inside. Alimoren reached out to press the button for their floor, and she noticed that he was no longer holding his coffee. Her scans hit on his cup, hidden behind a plastic plant on a nearby console table, and she smiled as the doors closed.

  NINETEEN

  Of course there was a hidden room.

  If you knew where to look, there was a skull with a gold-plated front tooth. Deep in its left eye socket was a switch to activate a concealed door. Flip the switch, and a section of bones swung open.

  The Agents had found it while they were cleaning the mansion. The basement had required a great deal of attention to make it useable, as the drug kingpin who had last owned the mansion had remodeled it to look like the ossuary under Paris. Plastic bones tended to collect dust and debris. Someone had been getting the dead bugs out of the skulls, and was socket-deep with a vacuum when she thought the wall was leaping out to attack her.

  They were sure the DEA had missed the hidden room during the original raid: the two thousand kilos of cocaine attested to that. There was a fuzzy black mold over much of it, a sign that the kingpin had gotten cheap or lazy, and had cut the cocaine with something that could rot. The ones who had discovered the room donned protective suits and poked around. They learned it was one part panic room, one part climate-controlled storage unit, and guessed that the cocaine had gone bad during the years when the mansion’s power was off.

  When Patrick Mulcahy was told about the discovery, he had come downstairs, an old face mask pressed against his nose and mouth. He had stared into the hidden room for about five seconds, and then asked two questions: “What’s the best way to dispose of cocaine gone bad?” and “Is this room on the blueprints?” When he was told that cocaine disposal was hazardous and the safest thing to do was to bring in the DEA or the FBI, he sighed.

  When he was told that no, the room was not on the blueprints, he smiled.

  Mulcahy had his team of OACET engineers carefully remove the parquet floor in the solarium, and build a hidey-hole under the foundation that was just large enough for two thousand kilos of cocaine. Then he had the mansion cleared so he and Mako and eight other weightlifters could spend a full day transporting the cocaine upstairs, slow and steady so as not to damage the crumbling cellophane wrappers. Once the cocaine was secure in its new bed, he had the engineers entomb it under a cunning hidden door which blended into the parquet tiles. They cleaned the mansion again with sterilizers and chemicals and vacuums outfitted with ridiculously powerful filters, and then threw what Josh called the Ultimate Raw Meat and Ground Coffee Party.

  This time, they didn’t clean up.

  They opened the trap door in the solarium, and called the DEA.

  As predicted, the DEA ran their dogs through the mansion, searching for any additional troves secreted throughout the building. The dogs came up empty. Confused, but empty.

  They got some good press out of that one. Josh and Mulcahy, standing tall over the pile of ancient cocaine, the men from the DEA smiling and pretending their predecessors hadn’t messed up a bust three decades before.

  And then the DEA had left, and the Agents had turned the old panic room into their new insane asylum.

  Rachel leaned over a stack of boxes, and groped around in the eye socket of the skull with the gold tooth until her fingers found the switch. With an almost-unheard click, the wall began to swing open. She moved to the side so as not to bump into the boxes rolling towards her on their unseen casters, and ducked around the stacks of cardboard camouflage they used as a double layer of concealment for the hidden door.

  The panic room had been renovated into a bunkhouse. Two twin beds and an overflowing
bookshelf took up half of the room, and a couch and media center took up the other half. More books flowed off of the coffee table and across the floor, on topics ranging from financial analysis to roly-poly puppies. The selection of video games was as eclectic, as were the contents of the fridge in the corner: the permanent occupants of the room couldn’t remember what they liked.

  The two men in question were lying on the floor, immersed in a Sudoku puzzle. Green light flickered between them as they passed numbers back and forth, their conversational colors a riot of anger, joy, pain, pleasure…

  In the corner closest to the door, a third man was painting. Shawn’s core of weak-tea gold was visible, his conversational colors focused in intent blues on the canvas in front of him.

  Rachel was running emotions just to check on Shawn, and she shut them down when she saw her friend was still himself. Shawn insisted on spending time with Adrian and Sammy. Everyone else in the collective thought this was a bad idea, but Shawn couldn’t be talked out of it. The panic room made him miserable—he had spent too much time stuck inside of it to not feel miserable—but he said he wouldn’t abandon the others. Not when he knew there was a chance they could come back, too.

  She came up behind him and ran a scan across the painting. It was a seascape; Shawn was painting the ocean. “Hey,” she said softly.

  “Give me a minute,” he said in the same quiet tone. “The light’s just right.”

  Rachel reached out to him through a gentle link. She had been wrong: Shawn wasn’t entirely there. She traced his connection, and found part of his consciousness standing on the rocky cliffs of Maine.

  Rachel sat down beside him, her back against the wall, and sent her mind north. Her bright green avatar appeared beside Shawn’s, who was staring out across the sea. Beneath them, the surf pounded against black rocks.

  “I swear I can smell the water,” Shawn’s avatar said to hers. “It’s disorienting.”

  Great. Now he wants to talk. Back in the mansion, Rachel clasped her hands across her ears and shut down all but the most basic visual scans. She hated going out-of-body.

  “How do you do it?” she asked him. “Split yourself so you can focus on multiple things at once?”

  His avatar shrugged. “I spent so much time out of my own mind, going out of my body is easy.”

  “Ouch.”

  Shawn gave her a wide green grin. “It’s either we laugh at ourselves, or go crazy, right?”

  She gave Shawn’s avatar a fast once-over. His hair and clothes were tidy, and he looked as if he was finally getting some muscle tone back. Rachel reminded herself to check on Shawn’s physical appearance when they stepped out of their avatars to see if his body was as healthy as his mental image of himself.

  “How’d you find this place?” she asked him.

  “Somebody’s Flickr account,” he said. “They posted a photo I liked, so I came here to check out the location.”

  “I love it,” she said, as she watched the waves smash against the shore. She adored water. When she was in her own body, it was as good as poetry to her expanded senses. “It’s wild.”

  “Yeah, I was getting tired of painting meadows and haystacks,” he said. “I’m trying to come out here on sunny days. Harder to do than it sounds. This time of year, this place is always overcast… Okay, I’m done.”

  His avatar vanished, and Rachel heard, as if from a very far distance, Shawn call her name.

  “Yeah, yeah,” she muttered, giving the shoreline a last look. It was beautiful, complex… Definitely a step up from haystacks.

  She stepped off of the cliff and hovered in midair for a moment, then let her avatar drop. Her blurry visuals gave her an image of a set of eyes, just inches from her own face, and she instinctively threw up a hand. There was a faint papf! as she accidentally smacked someone on the chest, followed by grunting and scrambling noises as that someone scurried away. Rachel stumbled through her visual settings as quickly as she could until Shawn appeared in front of her.

  “Shit,” she said. “Did I hit you?”

  Shawn shook his head, and pointed. Adrian and Sammy were peering around the side of the couch, like wild dogs unsure if they were about to receive food or a thrown rock.

  Cold fear shot up her spine as she realized she could have touched their bare skin. It had been pure luck that they were both wearing clothes today. “Who did I hit?”

  “Sammy,” Shawn said, holding out his empty hands to the insane cyborgs. The two men glared at him before disappearing behind the couch. Shawn watched as they hid like wild animals in men’s bodies, and his shoulders folded in on themselves in despair.

  She turned emotions back on, and deep gray appeared over Shawn, rolling thick and fast like the worst of storms. She realized his avatar was a clean copy of his body. Shawn was nearly a year removed from the days when he had been a full-time resident of the panic room, and he had recovered much of his mental and physical strength. Now, though, he seemed the same gaunt savage who had attacked Santino with a straight-edge razor. He was staring at his hands as if he didn’t recognize them, the beginnings of a panic attack moving across him as he began to tremble.

  “Come on,” she said, as she stood and tugged on Shawn’s shirtsleeve. She took him over to the couch and settled him within a nest of throw pillows.

  “I don’t like it here,” he said.

  “Out loud, Shawn,” she reminded him. “You start to withdraw when you speak in the link, remember?”

  He nodded. His conversational colors had started churning, showing emotions that weren’t drawn from his own thoughts and personality. “I know. I know. Please don’t make me mad.”

  “Okay,” she said, as she curled up at the other end of the couch. She tried to ignore how the leather was sticky and filmed over, as if toddlers had painted it with a thousand different meals.

  It took Shawn almost an hour to get himself under control. Rachel read a magazine until her head throbbed, and then turned off reading mode to let her mind drift around the room. She didn’t trust herself to turn off visuals, not after hitting poor Sammy in the chest, so she sent her senses crawling through the hidden spaces of the panic room.

  She had done this many times before. Babysitting duty wasn’t fun. Sometimes, those on duty left things behind for the next shift, notes or books or…

  Rachel’s scans tripped over a new addition in the room. Hidden under one of the beds was a long box, bolted to the floor and padlocked in three places.

  A disassembled sniper rifle waited within its metal shell.

  Damn, Mulcahy’s gotten fanatical about security, Rachel thought, before she remembered that if the rifle had anything to do with babysitting duty, he’d have told her about it. No, that gun had been left in the most secure site in OACET’s headquarters for a different reason.

  She flipped frequencies as she explored the gun, coming to rest on one frequency in particular which showed the rifle resonated with a vivid blue aura. Her scans flinched away from the rifle at that, at learning the weapon had taken so many lives that it held traces of that unmistakable deathly blue, and decided Mulcahy probably had very good reasons for locking such a gun away.

  If Adrian and Sammy knew the lockbox was there, it didn’t bother them. The men had come out from hiding, Rachel and Shawn forgotten, and had turned on the latest iteration of Call of Duty. They were exceptional at it, and like all men in their late twenties, their mastery of trash talk could put sailors to shame. The two crazy cyborgs verbally smacked each other around, the insults ranging from genitalia to scores on intelligence tests. As they played, their kaleidoscopes of conversational colors slowed and faded, with blues starting to show beneath the swarms of reds, blacks, and oranges.

  “This is good,” Shawn whispered in a hushed mental voice.

  Rachel was about to tell him again to speak out loud, when she realized that while Shawn was curled in on himself, hugging his own legs to his chest as he rocked back and forth, he was also intent on the two
men playing their game.

  “It helps to focus on something outside of your head,” he said. “They need to remember who they are.

  “It’s the memories,” he continued. “They’ve got so many other peoples’ memories in their heads, and those memories are all so real. They don’t know what to do with them. They don’t know if their thoughts are their own. But you don’t need memories to play a video game.”

  The two of them watched as Adrian shot Sammy in the head repeatedly, and was in turn blown to smithereens by a fortunate respawn. Adrian hurled a particularly poignant comment about Sammy’s sister, and as Rachel watched, Sammy’s small blues disappeared under a growing tempest of reds. He put down the controller and wandered away.

  “Sammy’s an only child. He doesn’t have a sister,” Shawn told her. “Deep down, he knows he doesn’t have a sister. But he remembers having one—he remembers having hundreds of sisters!—and he doesn’t know what to do with that information.”

  “Yeah,” Rachel whispered back across their link. If it had been any other Agent, she would have sent them the memories of her childhood Christmases, which had taken place in more houses and in more bodies than she could identify. But it was Shawn, and she didn’t want to pretend she had had it worse than him, and she definitely didn’t want to say the wrong thing to tip him back down that dark hole he was trying so hard to climb out of.

  “Rachel? I want…” Shawn’s mental voice trailed off. Rachel saw his emotions swirl around an unmistakable cerulean blue. Then, his voice hardened as he blurted: “You need to tell Mulcahy to take them home.”

  “They are home—”

  “No!” Shawn’s head came up. “Where they grew up! Their parents, their families… They should be somewhere they recognize, with people who can remind them who they used to be.

  “That’s how I came back,” he said. “I was trying to kill Santino. It was… It wasn’t me. I knew my mother wouldn’t have raised someone who would do that, and then I remembered her, and then…