by Cody Sisco
They crossed the Bayshore Narrows Bridge, which arced across a channel of water that marked the northern border of the Bayshore region. Boats carried lumber, rock, and other materials west toward the bay’s wide expanse. They emerged onto a moonlit plain. He kept checking the rearview mirror to make sure they weren’t being followed.
After about sixty kilometers, Victor took a turnoff that degraded to a gravel drive and then a rutted dirt path, undoubtedly a little-used route between one field of desiccated alfalfa and another. He pulled behind a tree and turned the car around so that he could speed back to the highway if necessary. No car could approach them without being visible for at least a half mile.
They reclined their seats and shared a single thermal blanket.
Victor’s sleep was fitful. When the sun rose, he started the car, jolting along the road. Elena woke up after the first few bumps.
In a thick, sleep-slurred voice, she said, “Let’s find a town so I can get a few things. Toothpaste. Some clothes. An air freshener.”
The SeCa Long Valley stretched around them. For a brief span in the seventies, the combination of good soil and a burgeoning workforce of impoverished Asians deported from Oakland & Bayshore wrought a green miracle and enabled SeCa to feed its own and export to other nations.
Then the eight-year drought came. The snow pack vanished from the mountains. Streams slipped beneath the gravel and clay. The Long Valley baked and hardened. Many starved.
After eight years, the rains returned with a vengeance, though snow was still a rarity. On a clear day it was possible to look across the plains and see the Sierras, but today the dew in the air hid everything except monotonous scrublands and dwindling Long Valley farms. It was flat, empty, and desolate—the dried-up core of Semiautonomous California.
Elena grimaced. “Reminds me of the Republic of Texas,” she said.
“What’s it like there?” Victor asked.
“Rotten.” She didn’t elaborate.
They reached a small town where delicatessens, fruit stands, and used bric-a-brac shops lined the street.
Elena pointed. “Stop there.”
Victor parked along the main road. On either side, small shops leaned into their wood frames. Elena disappeared inside one. Victor found a bakery that sold breakfast sandwiches and faux-café. He paid, waited a few uncomfortable minutes under the smiling eyes of the gray-haired proprietress, collected his order, and took it outside.
He found a rough concrete plaza with shrubs and flowering orange poppies in planter boxes leading to a small grassy park. A few parents tried to corral their running, screaming children. An old couple, both wearing large sun hats, sat on a bench and watched the world go by. Several people squatted next to blankets on which cheap devices, books, and kitchen supplies were laid out for sale.
Egg and pork smells escaped from the bag, and his stomach rumbled, but he resolved to wait for Elena to eat. On a normal day, it would be time for his morning dose of Personil. He reminded himself to drink a tincture before they resumed driving.
Buildings painted bright pink and green surrounded the plaza, but their metal downspouts were blacked with soot. Victor realized the area was the footprint of a building that had burned to the ground.
A wave of dizziness came over him, and he closed his eyes.
Someone bumped into Victor, and he lurched forward. The bag leaped from his hands onto the ground.
Off balance, Victor teetered. He flailed and grabbed the person’s jacket to keep from falling, coming face-to-face with a middle-aged man. His weathered face pinched. Wiry black hairs ringed a large bald patch on the man’s head.
“Watch where you’re going!” the man said, pushing Victor away.
The world was spinning. Victor leaned forward, hands on his knees to steady himself. “You ran into me.”
The man grabbed Victor by the shoulder. “What did you say?”
Pressure built in Victor’s face. Blankness flowed into him. He couldn’t tell left from right. “Leave me alone!” he said.
The man sneered. “You’re a Broken Mirror, ain’t ya?”
Victor began whispering Dr. Tammet’s calming mantra. The wise owl listens—
Victor felt a shove in his chest and a sense of falling as blankness took him.
Chapter 20
My work focused on using techniques to understand and interpret others’ emotions, such as facial expression color-coding and mind-body synchrony techniques. The goal was to help Victor contain and minimize resonant episodes and achieve cognitive and emotional stability. The techniques I taught him worked, but the effort required to employ them successfully was tremendous. They required depths of willpower and endurance that most people don’t have.
I never focused explicitly on suppressing violent tendencies. I viewed those as ephemeral fight-or-flight reactions rather than symptoms of the underlying disorder. His later actions can only be explained by how his responses to external events evolved over an extended period, the details of which I obviously have no knowledge of.
—Statement by Dr. Laura Tammet, the Eastmore family’s neuroscience advisor (1998)
Semiautonomous California
3 March 1991
Standing alone outside a grocery store in the tiny farm town of Gaobeidan, Elena held a MeshBit to her ear. “We’re in Long Valley,” she said to Bandit. She felt as if she were betraying Victor, but Bandit and his female partner, Lucky, were only trying to help.
Bandit said, “You shouldn’t have let him leave Oakland.” He sounded annoyed and gruff. He’d been all smooth talk and charm when she first met him. Something had changed. He said, “Stay where you are. We’ll meet you there.”
Elena’s back stiffened. She wasn’t going to take orders from anyone. Besides, Victor had to leave SeCa. She could see his life unraveling by the day. She had to help him save what he could of his sanity. “No. We’re heading—I mean, we won’t stop again, I don’t think.”
Bandit and Lucky had seemed normal the first time they came to her, very professional, setting up check-in times to coordinate their schedules and keep track of Victor’s movements. They claimed the Eastmores were simply putting money on the table to make sure Victor didn’t get into trouble. They spoke about his boss, Karine, and his ma, Linda, with a familiarity that would be hard to fake. She’d agreed to keep an eye on Victor because she believed everyone had his best interests at heart, and she had taken on working with Lucky and Bandit as part of the job.
A string of coincidences made Elena second-guess everything. Victor had flipped out at the funeral and found evidence of radiation exposure. He’d gone to see an herbalist who then disappeared. His reclassification got moved up. Something about the whole situation stank.
Then last night Lucky and Bandit had showed up at her room and raged at her, clearly amped on some kind of drug, so they weren’t the professionals they’d pretended to be. If they were tied to the Eastmores, as they claimed, they might have had an opportunity to poison Jeff Eastmore. Victor said two people had kidnapped his herbalist—that could have been them as well.
Elena felt paranoid. She wanted to tell Victor everything, but she knew his reaction wouldn’t be good. She didn’t want to send him completely over the edge.
“Where are you headed?” Bandit asked.
She gnawed on her lower lip, deciding how much truth to feed Bandit. “Victor wants to leave SeCa.”
“We’ll catch up before then,” Bandit said, now sounding unconcerned. “Just don’t let him go alone.”
Elena paced along the grimy sidewalk. “Tell me again exactly what your goal is here.”
“Same as yours. To keep him safe. That includes keeping him safe from himself. Which is going to be difficult until we bring him back to Oakland. You need to help us do that.”
Shouting erupted from the small plaza where she’d left Victor. “I’ve got to go,” she said and terminated the feed.
Elena pushed into a buffer of onlookers and spotted Victor
standing at the center of the commotion. Bad situations seemed to arise wherever Victor went, yet he never stopped fighting, never gave up. He was the toughest person she knew. That’s why it crushed her to see him this way.
Victor stood still while a salt-and-pepper-haired man strutted and crowed around him, poking his stomach, flicking his ear. Victor shied away each time the man prodded him but made no effort to evade the abuse. When she saw Victor’s eyes—focused but empty—she knew he’d gone blank.
Elena dropped two wax paper bags that held clothes, water bottles, and snacks for the road, and elbowed her way to the inner edges of the crowd.
The crowd jeered and laughed at something. The man asked, “Should I?” He held his hand against Victor’s crotch, saying “Anyone want to see what happens?”
Elena felt heat in her face, charged at the man, and knocked him on his butt.
Elena hesitated. No doubt the man deserved a throttling, but he could cause a lot of problems. They were already doing a terrible job of remaining inconspicuous. She pulled Victor away, sat him down, and whispered his silly owl and cuckoo mantra. He began to blink and look around.
Elena knelt down next to the man and, reaching into her pocket, quickly estimated the thickness of about $200 in bills, pulled them out, and held them in front of the man’s eyes. “You get to keep this if you stand up and quietly walk away. No harm, no alarm. Deal?” she asked.
The man grabbed the money. “He your pet freak?”
Elena pressed her lips together. It didn’t matter what he said. She and Victor were leaving.
A few onlookers gawked. Elena rose and stared them down until they turned away. The man rose to his feet.
Victor sat a few paces away, conscious again, blinking and gaping at the bills the man held. “Why’d you give him money?” he asked. “What did I do?”
Elena stepped toward Victor and lifted him up. “Nothing. Let’s go.” She hoisted her shopping bags and led Victor toward the car.
He planted his feet. “Tell me, Ellie.”
“Forget about it. Come on. We’re still in SeCa, remember? We’ve got to keep moving.”
“Where did you get that much money?” Victor asked.
Elena paused. He didn’t need to know that his family was paying for her companionship. Besides, she would have done it for much less. She wished she could explain it to Victor, but clearly this wasn’t the right time.
“I found a MeshCash machine,” she said. “We’ll need lots of bills. Some of the places we’re going to pass through aren’t exactly credit friendly.”
An itching sensation spread from her elbow to her fingers. She scratched her forearm and pushed the thought of stimsmoke out of her mind.
Victor hung his head. “You don’t have to come with me, you know.”
Elena moved closer and intercepted his gaze. “You’re not getting rid of me. I’m in this. All the way.”
“I’m not sure anyone can help.” His shoulders sloped toward the ground.
“Well, I’m sure. Come on.”
They got in the car and said nothing more. She wanted to ease his mind, but what could she say except “Perk up” and other inanities? His troubles were real and not solvable through idle talk and false positivity. Neither was her deception helping. So she kept silent.
Victor navigated through town to back roads leading to the foothills. They stopped in the middle of nowhere and ate the now cold sandwiches—bacon, eggs, and cheese on country bread. She could tell by the way he listlessly nibbled his sandwich that something was bothering him.
They drove on. Trees from an orchard flashed by. Elena’s itching returned. She rubbed her thumb down the length of her arm, not using her nail, not wanting to tear the skin, knowing she’d have to scratch again and again, and wouldn’t feel relief for days.
Victor started squirming. “Last night, Granfa Jeff . . . I didn’t cover him up. I just left him there exposed!” He banged his hands on the steering disk. “It’s going to be all over the Mesh! Everyone’s going to think—”
“Shh.” She realized he’d been stewing on this for the better part of an hour before finally erupting. That frightened her.
A vista of grassy hills—still green from winter rains—and oak trees greeted them when they rounded a bend.
“Ozie said—”
“Who’s Ozie?” she asked.
“Someone I met at university. We were friends. Until he disappeared.”
“Disappeared?” She hoped her questions were distracting him from his churn of feelings.
Victor explained, “Yeah, right in the middle of the semester. Then the herbalist gave me his—”
“Ah, the one you said was kidnapped?” She looked at him. It was unbelievable that someone with his condition would experiment with drugs. Though she wasn’t one to talk. What would he say if he knew she was recovering from stimsmoke addiction? The withdrawal was so bad it was still making her skin crawl. She ran her nails down her arm. The momentary relief was worth the next round of itching it provoked. “Herbs, huh? That explains why you lost control,” she said.
Victor sat a little taller. “They’re helping me.”
“Are you sure? It doesn’t look like it to me.”
“If I could control it completely, it wouldn’t be a disorder,” he snapped. “They are helping. I just forgot to dose this morning.”
He slowed to a stop in the middle of the empty road and dug into his bag. His hand came up with two glass vials, which he tipped into his mouth and swallowed, grimacing.
There’s a time when we’ll talk about that, she thought, but not now, not while he’s on edge.
He resumed driving. His actions were stiff, like an automaton running a program. She’d always admired him for doing his best despite being a second-class citizen—she would’ve eaten a bucket of pills long ago—but maybe SeCa society’s restraints were finally wearing him down.
Victor said, “I wish I knew how people know that I have MRS. And why they react the way they do.”
“It’s not you. Not entirely. People are wound tight here. Any little thing sets them off. It’s funny, in Texas, even when their farms are being burned and their families ransomed off, people are more laid-back. I mean, they’re mad and scared, but they don’t let it get to them.”
“But what is it about me?”
“I don’t know, Victor,” Elena admitted. “It’s something in the way you look at people. It feels—I don’t know—charged somehow.”
“Charged?”
“Forget I said anything.”
She ran a nail down her arm and felt a tingling shiver in its wake. Being near Victor again felt like quenching a thirst and having hot air blasted over her at the same time: a bittersweet unpleasantness that she had missed desperately because watching him struggle made her feel more alive.
“So what’s the plan to get us across the border?” she asked.
“I don’t know.” Victor’s voice sounded flat and distant. She knew there was a battle being waged inside him to maintain equilibrium, even though there was no sign of it on his face. His mind was a minefield that never got swept. She had to tread more carefully if they were going to get through this.
Victor continued, “Ozie told me he’d figure out a way. In the meantime, we’re supposed to wait somewhere outside Truckee.”
“For how long?” she asked.
Victor shrugged. “A couple days?”
“It’s a house, right? I didn’t buy any camping gear.” She waved toward the bags at the rear of the car.
“I don’t actually know. Ozie’s tight-lipped.”
Elena rubbed the numb spot on her upper ear. The stimsmoke damage was probably permanent. She should have asked the clinic staff in New Venice whether there was a treatment for missing sensation.
Morning sunlight had chased away the ground fog. Its beams streamed through the windows of the car. Heat rose from the dark plastic dashboard and the clipped velour fabric covering the car seats. She cracke
d the window. Dewy, cool, and grimy air rushed in.
Elena wedged her thumbnail between two teeth. A sliver of pork fat, the last remains of her breakfast sandwich, burrowed deeper, hiding from her probing nail. “Who do you think those thugs were that came looking for you?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t get a good look at them. It was dark. I think maybe they’ve been following me since my reclassification appointment.” His voice had regained its vibrancy. “I thought they might be the ones who are supposed to take me to the ranch, but—”
“Maybe you’re right.” Elena said, relaxing into her seat. He didn’t know about them. That was good. He wouldn’t be happy to know she was keeping secrets.
Her fingernail freed the sliver of fat. It slipped behind her teeth and down her throat. She watched Victor closely. His gaze moved in a cycle between the road and his mirrors.
Elena scratched her arm again, this time digging her nails in, feeling a tingle throughout her body, an aftereffect that still hadn’t faded weeks after her last high. “You know what? We need a word for what we’re doing. What is it? An excursion? An exodus? An expulsion?”
“An exorcism. I’m leading the bad spirits out of SeCa.”
Elena wrinkled her nose. “That doesn’t sound like you.”
“People can change,” he said.
The look he gave her was impossible to read. She felt as if he were studying her, and a shiver ran across her arms. She shifted toward the window. The wind buffeted her hair. She scooped the strands into a ponytail.
Victor said, “In a normal life, we could have worked together, maybe at BioScan.”
The image of a gleaming laboratory at the SeCa National University came to mind—a proper research facility with the latest instruments, a functioning MeshLine, and experts in the most advanced biological and medical techniques. Who wouldn’t want to work in that kind of environment? Of course, it wouldn’t be that simple: she had five years of going down the wrong track to make up for. And some mistakes couldn’t be undone. Although, now that she was clean, she had more options.
“You always said you wanted to be an astronomer,” she said. “Do you like computational biology more now?”
