by Cody Sisco
“I need help. I want to stop taking Personil.”
She looked up and studied him. Her lips twitched. Judging by her unlined face she could have been anywhere between forty and seventy years old. Lowering her head again, she continued making the strange marks.
Victor said, “I can pay you.”
“You want something, you wait,” she said, then ignored him again.
Victor explored the shop for several long minutes and then returned to the desk. The woman wasn’t moving. Her face hovered over her books; her eyes were closed, as if meditating. While he watched, she opened her eyes and stood.
“They tell me I may help you,” she said.
“They?”
The herbalist leaned forward and looked at him with wide bulging eyes. “My ancestor ghosts.”
“I don’t know—”
She doubled over, laughing. Her lungs rattled from the strength of her hooting. “You think I’m some dumb schmuck? I was consulting my conscience.” She stood up and wiped her eyes. “My name is Pearl.”
“I’m Victor.”
“Yes, I know, but Jefferson made it sound like you . . .” Pearl cleared her throat. All traces of her accent had vanished. “I didn’t expect you so soon. It’s been a bad week. The last person with MRS I tried to help was reclassified. In a single day, she went from Three to One. I think she’s in the Humboldt facility, not a nice one, I hear. I’m not sure I can help you, but I’ll try.”
“I’m looking for black cardamom,” Victor said.
“Useless!” A hint of her accent returned. “Good only for cooking. I have something else for you.”
Pearl rummaged through the wooden cubbies lining the wall behind her desk. They lacked any sort of labeling scheme.
She turned, and her hand opened to reveal a little sachet of silk. She plopped it into a shallow ceramic bowl on her desk. “Fumewort. Don’t burn it. The combustion byproducts cause cancer—not that we need to worry about that anymore. Still, don’t burn. I’ll show you how to make a tincture.”
She came out from behind the desk and moved past him in short shuffling steps, her wispy hair nearly brushing his chin. She left behind a charred, woodsy smell. He picked up the sachet and followed her. Further into the back of her domain were several tables loaded with all kinds of envelopes, pouches, and boxes.
Along one wall stood a counter piled with brown glass bottles, labeled in Chinese. From a tray Pearl plucked a pipette similar to those Victor had used in his university’s laboratory. She used it to suck a clear liquid from a jar and squirt the liquid into a small glass vial. She extended her hand and demanded the pouch from him. She pinched a few brown and flaky pieces of fumewort and dropped them into the liquid. Then she added water from the tap.
“Twenty milliliters pure alcohol and one hundred milliliters water, roughly. Add one gram of the herb. Wait at least one hour. Stable at room temperature. Drink the whole thing, though you might want to mix it with fruit juice. It’s like fire going down.”
“What does it do?”
“Calms the mind. Anytime you feel panic, drink.”
“This is all I brought.” Victor held out the black coins.
Pearl looked at the coins but didn’t take them. “I’ve already been paid.”
Victor stuffed the sachet and vials into his pocket. Could a few flaky herbs really help him?
Pearl said, “I’ll see you again soon.”
“You seem sure that I’ll come back.”
Pearl smiled. “Won’t you?”
“I know you knew Jefferson Eastmore, my grandfather.”
“Of course I did. That’s why you’re here.”
“Yes, but wait. What you said earlier: you didn’t expect to see me so soon. Does that mean . . .?”
“Jefferson told me you’d be skeptical.”
Victor crossed his arms. “How did you know him?”
She looked up at him, tilting her head. “He didn’t tell you? He said he would.”
“He didn’t tell me anything!”
Pearl looked away. “The fumewort should keep you out of trouble. You know, you’re not the only one seeking answers, my friend. There are others. Come see me again. We’ll talk more.”
“What aren’t you telling me?”
“Jefferson asked me to help you, and I will, but on my terms. Come back later,” Pearl said.
“Help me how? What did he say?”
She seemed resolved not to speak. Victor wanted to grab her blazer lapels and shake the truth out of her.
I can’t let myself think that way.
Victor left the shop in a hurry. Why would Granfa Jeff ask an herbalist to help Victor? He’d always challenged Dr. Tammet when her treatments veered toward the experimental and holistic. Did he have a change of heart about alternative therapies?
The mystery pulled at Victor—the same pull he recognized from past slides into blankspace, a precarious feeling. He couldn’t trust himself. He needed to stay on the narrow path of sanity. He wasn’t going to see Pearl again.
He nearly bumped into a table on the sidewalk crammed full of little trinkets, pieces of jewelry, and slips of paper rolled into tiny scrolls. One jade figure caught his eye, and he picked it up and paid for it with two of his motas. A perfect present for Elena. She was right. He had pushed her away. Now it was up to him to bring them closer together again.
Victor returned without incident to the safer side of the bay, retrieved his car from the parking structure, and drove home. Back in his neighborhood, he walked to the Freshly Juice shop and bought a simple carrot-based concoction rich in beta-carotene and antioxidants, and stopped at a general store for a bottle of the strongest, purest alcohol he could find.
Thank the Laws Class Threes are allowed to buy alcohol.
At home, he made a batch of twelve tinctures and waited, sitting on his living room floor, meditating to regain his calm after a tumultuous day. The painting on the wall undulated, an impressionistic rendering of a galaxy full of colorful stars. His eyes unfocused. Whenever the vaguest hint of blankspace intruded, he pushed it out of his consciousness. A few times in his life, the run-up to a blank episode had been accompanied by a wave of euphoria, a feeling so powerful, so positive, he almost wanted to court the blankness, but he feared it meant his mind was deteriorating, and more often the blankness was just blank.
His MeshBit timer pinged. Victor got up, went to the kitchen, poured the fumewort tincture into the juice bulb aperture, and held his thumb over the opening while he sloshed the mixture.
He drank the whole thing in several gulps.
It tasted sweet and umami. Only the subtlest hints of earth and alcohol cut through the familiar taste of carrot juice.
Victor scanned his mind and body. The beating of his heart and his breath felt characteristically uneven. He paced, pushing away the suspicion that Pearl had tricked him. When his gaze fell on the file of medical records on his coffee table, he retreated to the kitchen. He heated a prepared meal and ate it quickly, burning the roof of his mouth.
It was past noon. He couldn’t stay in his apartment freaking out over nothing. Victor drove to the Gene-Us campus and hurried across the parking lot, entering through a side-door shortcut near his office. He sat at his desk, adjusting the brightness on the array of vidscreens in front of him, fully intending to spend the next few hours diving into the work that had piled up in his absence.
A jagged line traced the usage of computing resources for a large batch of proto-cancer gene screenings. He looked at reports on the gene sequencers’ performance, including error rates in the sequencing flow, idle processing capacity in the Gene-Us computer network, and bottlenecks in the transfer of data from the sequencing machines to the Bose-Drive storage rooms. He’d seen outputs like these hundreds of times before, but it felt like he was seeing the data for the first time. He pulled up another log containing thousands of lines of code and looked for anomalies. In a flash, he understood where a subunit of the algorithm was loop
ing, getting stuck on itself as it churned through millions of sequenced base pairs, filling the log with junk data interspersed with the good.
Sweat formed in his armpits, and he wiped his forehead. He made edits on the fly, breaking the department protocol of cross-checking changes with another analyst, and reran the test. The loops had disappeared. The updated algorithm resulted in a 23 percent efficiency gain.
The fair-haired, pink-skinned male analyst next to him wheeled his chair over and asked, “What are you hooting about?”
Victor pointed to the screen. “This took me less than five minutes.”
The analyst cocked his head, reading. Then his lips parted in a broad smile, showing slightly yellowed teeth. “You’re kidding me. Send me your log.”
Victor swiped the records into the analyst’s queue. A minute or so later, his colleague whistled. “That’s incredible. Can I get you to look at something I’ve been working on?”
Victor wheeled over and watched a coding matrix rise on the vidscreen.
The analyst said, “I know there’s a mismatch in here, but I—”
“There,” Victor said, gently moving the analyst’s hand off the touchpad and zooming in with his fingers. “I’ll bet it’s keyed off the wrong reference sequence. Check the library files from the Human Genome Initiative’s feed. They might have updated them without telling us.”
The analyst grabbed Victor’s arm as if to verify he was really there. “What’s got into you?”
Victor shrugged and smiled. “I just see it.”
“You got laid or something, didn’t you?”
Victor blushed. “That’s my secret,” he said, glancing at his desk drawer where he’d hidden a handful of fumewort vials. He didn’t credit the herb for his new efficiency, not entirely. The Personil was also clearing from his system, allowing his thoughts to speed up to their natural potential.
That night at home, Victor looked over Granfa Jeff’s medical records again.
He noticed something odd right away, something he’d missed before. The papers from the first three months listed symptoms in detail and included multiple results from over a dozen tests. But after that, the paper trail thinned out. From September onward, there were no new prescriptions, only a few neatly typed notes, and barely any tests—all at a time when his granfa’s condition must have been progressively worsening. It was as if both his grandfather and the doctor had given up.
Victor sat back in his sofa and tried to imagine a scenario to explain the records. The only treatment Jefferson had received during his final months was a prescription for Vasistatin. Surely there were more invasive treatments available as well. Why hadn’t he turned to those?
Maybe his granfa had stopped fighting the disease. That wasn’t like him—Granfa Jeff was the definition of take-charge-and-do-it tenacity—but maybe his illness had taken such a toll on him that he’d welcomed the end. Or maybe dementia had taken hold, and he wasn’t able to plan his own treatment. But if either of those was the case, the doctors would have pushed treatment on him.
Victor rifled through each of the papers again. Prior to Oak Knoll Hospital closing, a broad battery of tests for Jefferson had been ordered, and the results were thoroughly documented, some coming back with values well outside normal ranges, including hair loss, mouth ulceration, and kidney ailments.
After Oak Knoll closed, the number of tests diminished, and all came back within normal ranges, except those related to heart failure: blood tests for electrolytes and creatinine, and electrocardiogram and angiogram measurements. Pre- and post-closure of the hospital, the results were staggeringly different. If not for the patient’s name, Victor would have said the records were for different patients.
He looked again at the post-closure results. They looked too perfect, too spot-on.
The records made after Oak Knoll closed were lies.
Chapter 11
Another bad dream. I walked through a hospital full of comatose patients. I followed a nurse as she stepped up to a bed, checked on the patient’s vital signs, shook her head, and moved to the next. Her sighs echoed through the rooms and corridors until the sounds seemed alive, malignant, taunting the injured sleeping who were calling out for help in their dreams.
Somehow it dawned on me that I was responsible. Each patient was half-dead because of something I’d done.
Then they started waking up, their vengeful and hungry eyes popping open. They were illogically frenzied. They knew me, their eyes found me, and all they wanted was revenge.
—Victor Eastmore’s dreambook
Semiautonomous California
26 February 1991
Around ten a.m. Victor hurried through the open plaza of the Semiautonomous California National University. Lining the plaza were eight pillars, each five meters tall and topped with a huge bust of one of the architects of the Repartition process that created SeCa and the other eight nations of the American Union.
Victor found Elena leaning against the base of Jefferson Eastmore’s pillar. “Thanks for meeting me,” he said. “This is important.”
She scowled at him and didn’t say anything.
Victor looked up at Granfa Jeff’s stone face. Two gray slugs for eyebrows, his nose a blunt nubbin, and eyes painted to stare at the Golden Gate Strait. Victor wondered if Elena had purposefully chosen to stand there to unnerve him.
She took a wary step forward and wrinkled her nose. “When was the last time you showered?”
“What? Doesn’t matter. Come on.” He started off toward the Medical Sciences Building. “The lab isn’t as busy during lunch hour,” he called over his shoulder.
“Wait,” Elena said.
Victor turned. She hadn’t moved.
“I’ll help you with whatever you have planned,” she said, “but we need to talk first.”
He walked back to her. “I know you think I’m obsessing. But the whole thing stinks. The hospital closing. How his face looked. You saw: he’d aged years. Heart failure doesn’t act that fast. And the records don’t add up. It’s like they’re for two different people.”
Elena shook her head and held up a hand. “We can talk about that later. I’ll help you. I promise. First, we need to talk about what happened with us.”
Victor felt the blood drain from his face.
Elena seemed to read his mind. “I know this is uncomfortable for you. Believe me, I feel the same way. But until I get this off my chest . . . Do you remember what you said? The day I left for Texas?”
Victor hung his head. He studied the square of burgundy paving stone on which they stood. Flecks of mica in the stone sparkled.
“I’ve been thinking about it . . .” Elena’s voice trailed off, weakening. Her gaze shifted toward the port and train terminals to the west. “What you said . . .”
His memories of the day she told him she was leaving came rushing back.
***
During their final year of high school, Victor, Elena, and Scott—another intern—had worked at Oak Knoll Hospital feeding mountains of health records into an optical scanner and double-checking the encoded bit-runs for errors.
Elena waved one hand toward the pile of papers on Victor’s desk and said, “How can you possibly get useful information from reading those?”
Victor shrugged. “I’m learning a lot.”
“You’re slowing us down,” she said. “Don’t read; just proof.”
Victor pinched the corner of the nearest document, brought it up to his face, and began reading. Elena was always rushing to get stuff done, never thinking about the big picture and how she fit in. His approach was much more careful. He read every document to fully understand diagnoses, surgery reports, notes from checkups, and prescriptions. He trusted his method, not her lack of one.
Sometime later, Scott asked Victor, “What’s wrong with Elena?”
“What do you mean?” Victor looked around, but she had left the room.
“She went to the bathroom about twenty minutes ago,
and she’s still not back.”
“So?”
“So she seemed upset. Maybe you should check on her.”
“Upset how?” Victor asked.
Scott scratched one of his bushy sideburns. “I don’t know! She got up and didn’t say anything.”
Victor looked down at the paper in his hands. “That’s not strange, is it?”
“I think she was crying.”
Victor jerked his head up. “How do you know?”
Scott slammed his palm on the desk. “Because I know what crying looks like! She’s your girlfriend. Don’t you think you should check on her?”
Victor hesitated.
“Fine! I’ll go.” Scott stalked out of the room.
Victor looked at Elena’s empty chair. She would have said something, or made a sound, if she were sad. When something bothered her, she would curse, “Shocks!” or “Laws!” or make a growling sound; she wouldn’t slip away quietly and cry.
He turned to his terminal. He had been working on something but couldn’t remember what. A normal person would know what to do about Elena, automatically, without thinking. He was stupid for thinking he could manage a relationship with anyone, even one as atypical as theirs was.
The white type-globe on his vidscreen blinked on and off, marking the passage of each second. It might as well have said, “You are inadequate and unworthy of any woman’s affections.” Elena needed someone with wisdom and empathy, not a freak with deficient mental and emotional capabilities.
Scott returned and stood next to Victor’s chair. “Confirmed. She’s crying in the bathroom. Go check on her.”
Victor looked down at the floor. He was a lousy boyfriend and he didn’t deserve her.
“Just go.” Scott spun Victor’s chair around and tipped him forward onto the carpet. “Thank me later,” Scott said.
Victor picked himself up and plodded down the hall. He reached the door to the bathroom and knocked.
“Elena, what’s going on?” He sounded so meek. He tried again, this time making his voice boom in the small hallway. “Elena? Are you okay?”
