by Cody Sisco
Elena pulled out a wad of cash and placed it next to Bandit.
“What’s that for?” Victor asked.
“He needs to get his foot sewn up.”
“Keep the cash. It’s not enough.” Victor transferred ten thousand AUD to Bandit’s paystick with a note: “For your troubles. Let’s hope this is the last time we meet.” He did the same for Lucky.
“Now for Tosh.” Victor started the Handy 1000’s sonorecorder. “Tosh, no hard feelings, I hope. When the data egg opens, I’m willing to make a trade. Information for Jeff’s tongue. That seems fair to me.”
He sent the message to Tosh’s feed queue.
“What about her?” Elena nodded to Karine.
“Now I make a devil’s bargain. Any more wake-up juice in Tosh’s bag?” Victor asked.
Chapter 43
Republic of Texas
10 March 1991
Victor paced along a paved riverside promenade, aware that he was dreaming and expecting to wake at any moment. Usually his dreams could not continue for long once he became aware of them—especially without a bitter grass supplement—but somehow this dream went on.
A fog rose, encasing him in a cool, gray void. The suspicion that he had forgotten a vital clue to his grandfather’s murder crept over him. He needed to act, but he couldn’t remember what he was supposed to do.
Waves lapped nearby, invisible in the mist, lulling him into a trance. This was a peaceful place. Victor sank to his knees, sitting on his heels, content. He pressed his hands on the promenade’s smooth, cool stones, and a little joy sparked in his chest.
Wind played in his hair, and the mist receded, its tatters blown into thin filaments. The sky cleared. The waterfront was bright as day, though the sun still hid behind a rocky hill covered in elm trees.
On the other side of the water, marshes and low hills extended to the horizon, and an earthen levee upstream walled off his view. The locale seemed familiar but altered. He couldn’t place it at first, but then he knew. This is New Venice. In the distance, he spotted the town’s tightly clustered buildings, aligned to the stone-lined canals.
A figure scrambled onto a boulder at the promenade’s edge. Shadows cloaked its form, light draining from its surroundings.
The figure bounded toward him like an enraged bear, moving impossibly fast and flickering.
Closer now, the figure resolved into a naked man-monster with bloodshot eyes. He leapt on top of Victor, pressing him against the promenade. Jagged teeth descended and pierced Victor’s neck, tearing flesh and tendons. The creature’s fists slammed down, caving Victor’s chest. He opened his mouth to scream, but his lungs no longer worked—they oozed through the beast’s upheld fingers.
The monster-man’s fists smashed down again, crushing Victor’s nose and blinding him. Wet warmth flowed across his face. A final slam shattered his skull, the pieces rammed into his brain, and he died, his spirit propelled out of the world into the void.
Victor jerked awake. His heart thumped in his chest, yet his limbs were cold and almost numb. The world was bathed in violet predawn light.
He must have fallen asleep in his car outside the kennel.
Negotiations with Karine had taken a few hours. Eventually, she’d agreed to his terms. She ordered the Corps guarding the kennel to allow him inside. She provided him with classified research on MRS, which he’d been reading when he fell asleep. And she’d agreed to intercede on his behalf with the Health Board and try to keep him a Class Three. In exchange, he’d untied her and agreed to her demands: to give up his “fantasy” that Jefferson Eastmore had been murdered and to tell her who was supplying him with tech. He planned to double-cross her, of course. For now, though, his path was fixed. Nothing save a meteor strike could keep him from searching the kennel.
A tap on the window made Victor jump. Hector rapped on the glass again.
Victor opened the car door, swung his legs around, and hoisted himself out.
Hector held out a steaming mug. Victor accepted it silently, trying not to shake. His neck ached where the dream monster had torn into it.
Hector took another cup from its temporary perch on the car’s roof. They stood a few steps apart, taking tentative sips. Faux-café, and not a very convincing brand. A few Corps stood guard in front of the kennel.
“I could have convinced Mamá to let you sleep at our house,” Hector said.
“I was fine,” he said. The words sounded hoarse in his mouth.
Hector took another sip. “I won’t have time to show you around today.”
“That’s okay. I just need to speak with the logistics manager. If you introduce me—”
“We don’t have one of those.”
Victor’s gaze followed Hector’s as it shifted to the stubby bushes fronting the kennel. They looked dead, but then, so did most of the vegetation Texans had imported to the semi-arid desert. In parts of SeCa, people adapted to the changing climate with succulents and other drought-resistant plants. Here they tried and failed to nurture the iconic garden varieties of the East.
Victor waved his cup toward Hector to get his attention. “Someone in charge of the records then.”
Hector rubbed his nose and sniffled. “Maybe Leroy, our sort-of accountant. Usually he’s the one who unloads the trucks and oversees the warehouse. But what are you looking for?”
Victor said, “It’s something my grandfather asked me to take care of a while ago.” He felt Hector’s scrutiny as a tingling on his face. He had to get more fumewort. It had been about eighteen hours since his last dose. Hopefully, Pearl could send some soon.
“Do you know why he came here in September?”
Hector flinched and took another sip from his chipped cup.
“What’s wrong?” Victor asked.
“Nothing. Hot coffee,” Hector said, but it was a lie, an obvious one. His look askance, quavering voice, and a false boldness in his stature gave him away. “I didn’t work that day.”
“Please, Hector, it’s important to me.”
Hector looked at him for a long moment. Then he shrugged. “Better get going.”
As they walked to the entrance, Hector summarized the layout of the kennel complex for Victor: cotton fields on one side and a golf course on the other. An administrative building welcomed new arrivals. Nearby, another large building housed the animals. A service road led beyond an automated gate around the back of the complex to a set of smaller buildings, where supplies were stored and the on-staff veterinarian worked.
“Is the vet here today?” Victor asked.
“No, she isn’t.”
Hector led Victor past the guards and inside the administrative building, a low-ceilinged, flimsy, unimpressive aluminum shell not much more solid than a trailer. A conference room was tucked into one corner. A polished wooden bar ran at waist level below the front windows. A sign said, “Hitch Your Puppies Here,” in loopy, hand-painted letters.
Drab brown curtains separated the entrance area from the remainder of the building. A female receptionist greeted them with a thick and happy drawl. Hector made introductions. The minutes stretched. She apparently didn’t know the complicated legal history of the kennel’s ownership—“I was wondering why those rough guys were hanging around,” she said—requiring Hector to provide explanation about Jefferson Eastmore, Mason Charter, and the Eastmore family foundation.
Victor’s feet itched, but he forced himself to stand still.
Hector excused himself to clock into his shift.
“It might be a minute,” the receptionist said, happily oblivious to Victor’s stomach flipping and twisting.
A smile remained frozen on his face. He would say nothing to jeopardize his search.
“You can wait in the conference room. We have a MeshLine.” Her eyes lit up with pride.
Victor went into the conference room and sat down, running his hands along the surface of a table to calm himself. The vidscreen on the wall pinged that it had a live MeshLink. Victor ente
red his MeshID to access his message queue and entered his parents’ IDs into the recipients field.
“Arrived in Amarillo day before yesterday,” he said—had it really only been that long? “I’m safe. I’ll be in touch soon.” The words displayed on the vidscreen as he spoke them. His parents would want to speak with him directly, and he wanted to hear their voices, but that could wait until later. He paused for a moment to appreciate the deep well of patience that had filled him recently.
Victor found a new message from Karine. You’ve been reclassified in absentia. Class Two. We’ll work on the appeal.
She was backing out on that part of their agreement. Fine. He’d never really expected her to follow through, and he wasn’t going back to SeCa anyway.
He looked at the previous message, which she’d sent him last night. The studies are not part of the official record. DON’T SHARE THEM!
Residual sleepiness and the lack of juices and tinctures clouded his thoughts. How much had he read before he fell asleep? The prospect of digging into the research was like hitting a mother lode of endorphins and oxytocin at the same time. His brain revved up. The memory of the man-beast chewing his neck bones sent a shiver up his spine. He ignored the sensation and focused on the Health Board’s research.
He skimmed the first paper’s abstract. Two years after Carmichael, a genetic study had identified a mutation in the Lee-Lambda chromosome pair. The mutation was a single nucleotide polymorphism, meaning it was one small difference in the sequence of nucleic acids that coded for a neurologically important protein. Complex conditions were usually the result of many genes’ interactions with the environment, but mirror resonance syndrome didn’t appear to follow that pattern, even though the symptoms were extremely varied.
Fine. They’d found a genetic fingerprint for mirror resonance syndrome. But how they found it was odd. They had made brain scans of study participants and compared them to a single unnamed reference case. The study’s subjects were “volunteers” from the unions in SeCa, some of whom were subsequently found to have MRS. This had been a sore point between Jefferson Eastmore and the unions for years. Why focus on that specific pattern of brain waves? What was the reference case?
It must have been a neural excitation wave from someone unequivocally diagnosed with mirror resonance syndrome.
Who?
Oh, of course!
Samuel Miller. It had to be.
The Health Board had studied Samuel: his genes, his brain. Through him, they’d found the first clues into mirror resonance syndrome.
Victor cursed. Everything seemed to trace back to Samuel Miller. He’d ruined so many people’s lives! It wasn’t just the Carmichael dead and their surviving loved ones. His crimes had also led to a draconian response: the Classification Commission. Samuel Miller was responsible for every misery suffered by every person with MRS. If Victor ever met the man, somehow he would avenge the life he should have been living.
Victor turned to the next document. Researchers had studied neural networks grown from stem cell cultures. The mirror resonance gene changed the way electrical impulses traveled through the brain, making the neurons easier to excite and harder to suppress—in effect, relaxing the brain’s natural brakes.
Okay, fine, so in the second study researchers found a link between genetics and MRS people’s neurological function. Good for them. As Victor had always thought, and as the SeCa Health Board maintained, mirror resonance syndrome was a real, serious condition, with a genetic basis.
There was one more study to review, but a visual hallucination of sparks erupting in time with dogs barking blocked Victor’s view of the vidscreen. He repeated the owl mantra ten times, which caused the tiny fireworks to fade.
He pulled up the third document, a longitudinal study of the disease’s progression. The conclusions in the abstract were all he needed to read. The mirror resonance gene created an unmodulated cognitive resonance, which manifested as symptoms of blankness, susceptibility to suggestion and heightened flight or fight response, among others. However, the syndrome’s effects were not deterministic vis-à-vis mania, aggression, and delusional thinking, and deterioration wasn’t assured. In other words, the paper explained, not everyone with mirror resonance syndrome was doomed to psychosis, violence, and catatonia.
People with MRS weren’t inherently dangerous.
Breath caught in Victor’s throat, choking him. The SeCa Health Board had exaggerated the threat. Perhaps they’d even increased the likelihood of MRS people becoming violent by treating them as dangerous.
It was a monstrous injustice. Thousands of people had their lives cut short, sequestered, diminished. Of course people with MRS ended up catatonic. When everything is taken away, what does a person have left?
Sparks flared all around Victor. The world turned white, burning. His entire life had veered off track long ago, and he was just now realizing how bad it had become.
The receptionist knocked on the glass conference room wall. Victor jumped in his chair.
“Sorry to spook you, hon!”
The blankness ebbed and left Victor numb. He terminated his connection to the Mesh and followed the receptionist to an area cluttered with desks. They navigated through the disarray and arrived at a desk where a young man sat.
He had slick hair, polished to a midnight black and pasted to his skull. All his clothes were black or near-black: jeans, a collared shirt, and a slim-fit jacket. He even wore a black pair of thick, square-rimmed glasses. Only his face, hands, and glinting silver jewelry hanging from his wrists, neck, and ears offset his dark clothing. The young man continued tapping, swiping, and clicking on various input devices while Victor and the receptionist hovered nearby.
Eventually, the woman interrupted gently. “Leroy, this is Victor Eastmore. He’s the grandson—”
“I know. Give me a minute, okay? I’m lost in something,” he said, continuing his frantic movements. “Victor, sit down. Chair’s back there. Thanks. One second. Okay. Done!” Leroy wiped a hand down his cheek and shivered. “What brings you here, Victor? Do you want a coffee? I’ve got a stash of the real stuff.”
Without waiting for an answer, he got up and headed deeper into the building. Victor followed a few steps behind and watched as Leroy pulled cups and an unlabeled canister from a cabinet in the kitchen, placing them in the maw of an autobrew machine. While Leroy waited for the cups to fill, his fist hammered a rhythm on the top of the machine. Victor watched him, unamused. Caffeine was a mild drug compared to whatever else Leroy was taking, judging by his motions. Stims probably.
“Sorry to hear about your grandfather,” Leroy said. “What brings you here?”
“I’m looking after a few of his investments.” Victor struggled to keep any sense of urgency out of his voice. If he showed too much interest, Leroy might get defensive.
Leroy nodded and then led Victor toward the back door, holding both cups in his hands, maneuvering the door open, and continuing into the yard.
Outside, a large fenced area with lush grass, trees, and manicured bushes extended to fill most of the property. A group of dogs were running and nipping at each other. Leroy chose a bench outside the fence and sat down with Victor. Only then did he relinquish Victor’s cup.
“Do you like dogs?” Leroy asked.
The thought of chitchat wore through Victor’s last nerve, but he tried to sound nonchalant. “Yes, of course.”
“Hey, no need for the heavy sarcasm. I’m not much of a fan either.”
Victor gulped the too-hot coffee and choked it down.
Leroy raised an eyebrow and then turned his attention to the three dogs running around the yard. “I used to like them. But now I hear them all the time—yapping, hysterical monsters. My tolerance for them is gone, gone, gone.”
After Victor coughed and got his voice back, he said, “Jefferson arranged a shipment in September last year. Supplies in cold storage from a hospital in Oakland & Bayshore. Can you help me find them?”
> Leroy sipped his coffee. His gaze bounced quickly between the snarling animals. He hiccupped and then tapped his chest the same way he had tapped the coffee machine. “Excuse me.”
“Can you help me track down what happened to them?”
“We can look through the records, but if you know the category or a shipment date or the name of the sender, it will help.”
“I know the name of the compound. XSCT-19900032.”
“Let’s give it a shot.”
Leroy led Victor back to his desk and pulled up the warehouse records, quickly finding a log noting the supplies in question. He showed it to Victor. “See? Easy. The shipment arrived on the twenty-fifth of September last year. Nothing here to indicate what was done with it.” He tapped a few commands, and pages rose and sank in response. “Huh, that’s strange. It’s not tied to any other records. Usually we would have a receiving bill or something like that. No reference in the Mesh either. Chances are we put whatever it was in our chiller. Do you want to go see if it’s still there?”
Victor wanted to scream, “Of course!” Instead, he merely choked out a quiet, “Yes.”
Leroy took Victor past the kennel cells. Clouds of aerosolized dog dander, urine, and feces wafted through the space, despite the loud rumbling and churning of an air chiller and filtration system hanging from the ceiling. Shiny ductwork snaked out the windows. Vibrations in the room were visible to Victor as a shimmer in the air.
The dogs ate and slept on two floors of rooms lining the sides of the long and narrow building. Their barks and whines followed Victor and jangled his nerves so much that his legs grew wobbly. Even Leroy picked up his pace. The dogs sounded murderous.
“I hate when they get like that,” Leroy yelled over the noise. “It’s like they want to rip us apart. ‘Man’s best friend,’ right?”
