Plastic Smile (Russell's Attic Book 4)

by Huang, SL

  Checker digested that. “We could take it slow,” he suggested.

  “I told myself not to,” I argued. The note had been in my writing, with my signature, the precise math of the handwriting analysis leaving no doubt I had penned it. Do not try to remember under any circumstances, it had said. “I still don’t think I should.”

  “She been getting flashes,” Arthur said. “Since Dawna.”

  Checker’s eyes got wide. “Oh. Crap.”

  “She knew,” I whispered. “I didn’t even know, but she must have seen it somehow, and she—I think she broke something. And now that I’ve been thinking about it, thank you very much—” I couldn’t keep an edge of accusation out of my tone.

  “I’m sorry,” blurted Checker.

  “Yeah, well, you should be.”

  Arthur made a small sound beside me.

  “I’m going to make some coffee,” Checker said abruptly. “I can’t think this early without coffee. Who else wants some?”

  “Cas gonna have some,” said Arthur.

  “I didn’t drink that much,” I objected, though coffee did sound great.

  Arthur stood to follow him. “Let me help.”

  I’m not terrific at reading body language, but since there was no way Checker needed help making coffee, Arthur clearly wanted to talk about me. I got up and crossed the living room to lean next to the kitchen entryway.

  “Ain’t you should be apologizing,” Arthur was saying. “Should be her.”

  “Maybe we both should,” said Checker, an irritated shrug in his voice. He inhaled sharply. “I’m not sure I pieced all that together, but—do you think I triggered her?” He sounded horribly guilty.

  “This ain’t your fault, son,” said Arthur.

  “Except that maybe it is, at least partly. Is she…how bad is it?”

  “Ain’t know. Think she’d kill me if I told her to see someone?”

  “What, like a psychotherapist?” Checker’s tone was hooded. “I’m not the best person to ask that question, you know.”

  “Good help to be had out there,” Arthur said mildly. “System screwed you; don’t mean it ain’t a good idea.”

  “Do you honestly think a psychologist would be able to figure this out anyway? We’re talking psychics, remember. Not to mention Cas’s math stuff. If she tried to be honest with them on any level, they’d call her delusional and accuse her of having read too many comic books.” Ceramic clanked, louder than necessary, and there was a beat of silence.

  “Go ahead,” said Arthur. “I can bring it out.”

  I retreated and threw myself back on the couch just in time for Checker to come back.

  We sat in silence for a minute. The rich aroma of brewing coffee wafted out from the kitchen.

  “What would you like to do?” asked Checker.

  The question surprised me. “What, you’re not going to keep bullying me into trying to figure out who I was?”

  He took a breath. “I shouldn’t have done that.”

  And I probably shouldn’t have held a months-long grudge just because he insisted on worrying about me, but I was feeling too snippy to admit it. “Yeah,” I said instead. “I agree.”

  He swallowed. “I’m…I’m asking you, then. What would you like to do?”

  “I want to stomp out this crime wave,” I said.

  His brow furrowed. “What?”

  “Dawna’s not the only one with a superpower. If she could do it, I should be able to, too.”

  He snorted a laugh. “Only you would decide to fight crime because you don’t want to be shown up.” Then he looked uncertain, as if he wasn’t sure if it was okay to take the mickey with me yet.

  I pretended not to notice. “Wasn’t that the whole MO of the guy in the red robot suit? Not being shown up?”

  “The guy in the red—you mean Iron Man?” he squawked.

  “Yeah,” I said. Checker had been indoctrinating me in science fiction for the better part of three years now, partially successfully. “Him. I liked him.”

  “You would.”

  “His math was all wrong, of course—”

  Checker slapped his palms against his ears. “I’m not listening!”

  “—talk about a complete failure in understanding how physics works—”

  Arthur chose that moment to reappear with the coffee. Black and unsweetened for me; Checker’s looked like it was sugared cream with coffee flavoring.

  “Figure anything out?” asked Arthur, demonstrating his keen ability to put a damper on any conversation.

  “How about this,” said Checker, apparently emboldened by my willingness to talk to him again. “How about I look into things for you? I’ll ask you questions, and see what I figure out, and if I find a good reason not to tell you what I find, I won’t.”

  Despite having been the one to come here, I still felt inclined to snap at his suggestion. But then I’d have to answer his question about what I did want.

  “Sounds like a good compromise,” said Arthur, in a soothing voice that made me want to punch him.

  “I thought you insisted on looking into my past already, without asking,” I said to Checker, only a little snidely. “I take it you already failed. What makes you think you’ll get anywhere now?”

  “Because you missed the part about how I’m going to be asking you questions, genius. Are you in or not?”

  “I won’t be able to tell you anything,” I reminded him. “I have no memory, remember?”

  “Russell,” murmured Arthur. I was pretty sure he practiced saying my name that way.

  “What!”

  “Let us help you, girl.”

  Putting my history in Checker’s hands…it felt vulnerable, too trusting, even for someone I knew reasonably well. Even though I’d been trying to make a conscious choice to trust more, to force myself to believe in the people I called friends…this was a hell of a lot to ask.

  But I felt horribly hemmed in: Checker on one side, Arthur on the other, and my own damn brain on the third. I hunched into the couch, curling around my coffee mug. “I reserve the right to put a stop to this at any time,” I said.

  “Unless—” started Checker.

  “No. I say stop, you stop.”

  He waited until I looked up, and then met my gaze seriously. “Okay. It’s a deal.”

  I was tempted to throw it all out right then, tell them we weren’t going anywhere with this. In fact, something in me was already screaming about what a bad decision this was, some intuition lambasting me that this was wrong, wrong, wrong—

  Checker put down his coffee mug on a coaster and picked up a tablet from an end table. “We’ll start off slow. What’s the earliest thing you remember?”

  “You want to do this now?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Well, I can’t answer that. My memories aren’t a well-ordered set.”

  “You mean you don’t have a definite earliest memory?”

  “No.” I stared into my coffee, letting the steam scald my skin.

  “Can you remember anything from before you lived in Los Angeles?”

  “No.” That wasn’t strictly true. “I only have—when I think of being a kid, I see—all people who look like me,” I admitted grudgingly. “Brown skin, black hair. Lights. Bright colors. And then some other image—a classroom, I think. That’s it.”

  “Ain’t think it was likely you’re from the U.S.,” said Arthur. “Way you talk. You mix your dialect.”

  “I don’t have an accent,” I objected.

  “Well, you do—you’re General American, or close to it. But I ain’t talking no accent. Your vocabulary’s a mix.”

  Checker frowned. “Yeah, I think I noticed that, too; I just didn’t think anything of it because I watch so much British television—but you’re right, Arthur. You use words like ‘mobile’ and ‘lift,’” he added to me.

  “Flat,” said Arthur. “Washroom. Ground floor—”

  “Okay!” I cut in, feeling uncomfortably
scrutinized.

  “But the American versions, too,” continued Arthur. “Like you got extra synonyms or something. Wonder if you know any other languages.”

  “I don’t.”

  “How do you know?” asked Checker. Without waiting for me to answer, he made a note on his tablet. “Never mind, we’ll figure it out.”

  “The woman today.” Arthur sounded deliberately casual. “She said something about someone called the Fox. Someone you know?”

  “No,” I said. “I have no idea what she was talking about.”

  Arthur looked meaningfully at Checker, who scribbled more with his stylus. “Do we know who this guy is?” he asked as he wrote.

  “Probably a criminal of some sort,” said Arthur. “Hear tell Cas might’ve…taught him a lesson.”

  “Wait, you think this is someone I don’t remember?” I said.

  “Could be,” said Arthur.

  “I thought you said I must’ve had a different name before,” I pointed out. “She knew me as Cas Russell.”

  “Cassandra,” Arthur corrected.

  “Well, that is the full version of ‘Cas,’” I said, with a large helping of sarcasm. “I just happen not to like it much.”

  Arthur and Checker exchanged meaningful looks again, and Checker wrote something else down.

  “Enough.” I was heartily sick of this. “I’m done for the day.” I stood up and stuck my undrunk coffee on Checker’s coffee table; he moved it onto a coaster without comment. “I’m going to go get drunk and pass out,” I announced. I pointed at Checker. “You—when I wake up I want a statistical analysis of the recent increase in crime.”

  “Way to be specific. What kind of statistical analysis, pray tell?”

  “Any numbers you can get your hands on. Get me the data, and run your stochastic programs.”

  “You realize that it’s not as easy as—”

  “I have every faith in you,” I said, and stalked out the door without looking back.

  I didn’t wait for Arthur to drive me home. I stole a car off the next street over instead. The shadows yawed and writhed at me as if a million eyes drilled into my back, but I paid no attention.

  Chapter 3

  I didn’t sleep well.

  As usual lately, my dreams were a confusing mass of colors and images, realities I thought I might be able to understand if I only had a second to look closer. I saw a dark boy with curly hair and a thin black girl. I saw mountains, and some type of aircraft, and a desert, and a jungle, and I screamed and I died.

  When I woke up, tangled in blankets and empty liquor bottles, I didn’t feel rested. Unfortunately, I did feel sober, and I couldn’t indulge myself in more alcohol because I’d assigned myself this stupid crime-fighting job.

  At least I knew exactly where my first stop would be. I fought traffic down to Arthur’s private investigations office, a clean and respectable hole-in-the-wall in a terrible part of town. I knew for a fact that Arthur and Checker could afford a better location for the business; Checker had let slip one night that he wished Arthur would move to Beverly Hills but the idiot insisted he preferred “fighting for people who needed it”—whatever that meant. Checker never came into the office himself, doing his information-gathering via telecommute, so Arthur had veto power on the location.

  Today, however, something itched at my awareness the whole drive. I stood on the street for a minute after I got out of the car and let my surroundings seep into my senses, the inputs dropping through functions into outputs, cause and effect. Everything fell within error margins, mundane and safe.

  I took one last look around before dismissing whatever vibe I’d had as a subliminal outlier and climbing the outside stairs to the heavy door stenciled with “Arthur Tresting, Private Investigations.” I pushed it open into a pleasant, professional office. At the front desk, a young woman in a bright ruffled blouse looked up and gave me a huge smile—a genuine one, as far as I could tell.

  “Cas! Good to see you! Arthur’s not in yet; d’you want to hang out and wait?”

  Pilar Velasquez was Arthur and Checker’s office manager. Almost as short as I was but quite a bit heavier, she was charming and cheerful and one of those people who basically personified the word “cute.” She’d cut her shiny dark hair into a sharp bob recently; it suited her.

  “Actually, I came to see you,” I said, pulling up a chair across from her desk and dropping into it.

  “Oh!” She placed the papers she’d been reading in a neat pile on her desk so she could give me her full attention. “What’s up?”

  “You still have all the hacked Arkacite files, don’t you?”

  “Yup. Arthur and Checker never believe in throwing anything out, you know. Thank goodness for computers! Do you know how many file cabinets I’d need if—”

  “You mentioned something,” I said. “A couple years ago. That Arkacite was working on technology to help law enforcement.”

  Pilar’s eyebrows turned to squiggles; I could practically see her rewinding her memory. Pilar had been an administrative assistant at Arkacite Technologies before I’d accidentally gotten her fired in the midst of a huge battle with the company over their AI. Since Arkacite had been an evil tech conglomerate out to eat the world, and since Arthur and Checker paid her better and didn’t sexually harass her, I was pretty sure she didn’t hold it against me.

  “It was something about frequency generation that would break up mob violence,” I said. “You mentioned it when—”

  “Oh! Right. I know what you’re talking about. The Signet Devices.”

  “The what?”

  “Signet. That was the project name—code name, maybe; I don’t know what they would’ve called it if it’d ever gone into development.”

  “Can you give me all the records on it?”

  “I’m not sure we have them all?” she said. “That project was pretty secret, and we didn’t grab the stuff behind the military firewalls, because it wasn’t, you know, necessary at the time. But it might be easier for me just to tell you anyway—I was in on that one. I mean, not in on in on, but they needed someone to keep records through the whole fiasco so they had me sign a bunch of NDAs and take minutes at all the meetings. What do you want to know?” She gave me another big smile, as if she lived to violate Arkacite nondisclosure agreements.

  “Okay,” I said. I’d still have to get the specs somehow, but at least Pilar could give me a rundown. “So what did it do? Calm people down or something? Make them less aggressive?”

  She cocked her head to the side and thought for a minute. “Not quite. I mean, that’s the result, sure—that’s what they were going for as an end, I think. But what it really did was break down the, the—I’m not remembering all the names now; they had a lot of social psychologists come in who used a lot of academic language about it; I’ll send you the files we’ve got, but—oh! ‘Deindividuation,’ that was the term. It breaks people out of deindividuation. Which in practice meant—”

  “They were looking to disrupt mob mentalities,” I guessed.

  “Yes! Or at least, that was a big part of it. The frequency that gets emitted—or something—it stops the brain feeling, well, you know how people can get in crowds? They lose control, they get all overwhelmed and sucked into the group, they get some kind of feedback loop from it…uh, ‘crowd psychology,’ that’s another thing they kept saying; I remember now. But it wasn’t just about angry mobs—anything where people feel swallowed into the masses and lose any sense of personal responsibility or, um, personhood, I guess. They found a frequency or something that stops that from happening. The idea was that when they get swept up in those situations, people do all sorts of awful things they wouldn’t ordinarily if they’d just been able to think about it.”

  I thought about the riots LA had suffered. A lot of people who weren’t ordinarily violent, escalating into layer upon layer of savage destruction. From what Pilar was saying, the Signet Devices could stop such chaos before it ever sparked.
<
br />   They might be able to calm war zones. Or take down cults. Or, heck, even undercut the power of schoolyard bullies.

  “The police and military were all sorts of interested in it,” Pilar continued. “Really interested. Like, Arkacite had a bajillion meetings with important government people; those guys were throwing money at them.”

  “So why isn’t it out there?” This sounded like exactly what I wanted. But she’d called the project a fiasco…“What went wrong?”

  “They couldn’t calibrate it right,” explained Pilar. “No matter how much money the Defense Department piled in. It turns out people’s brains are real sensitive to it. Real sensitive. Either it was too low to work, or too high and—well, apparently it made the test subjects too individual, if that makes sense. Made ’em distrust each other and start fighting because of that, instead of mobbing together. So the point was to stamp out aggression, and it ended up causing aggression for a different reason. And there was a sweet spot where it worked, but they could never maintain it reliably, and they especially couldn’t do it evenly over a large area.”

  Hmm. “Do we at least have any of their testing data?”

  “You know, I think we might,” Pilar said. “Or, well, we should? When I was keeping records for them, I didn’t have clearance for the technical details or anything, but I could see all the data and reports, so that probably is buried in the stuff we have. Checker copied over the whole Arkacite mainframe; he’s a ridiculous packrat that way.” She smiled fondly. “It’ll take me a while to look through, but if we’ve got it I’ll send it your way. What do you want it for?”

  “Calibration’s just math,” I said. “I bet I can figure it out.”

  “Wait, you want to build one?” she squeaked.

  “No,” I said. “I want to build a lot of them. Why do you think I was asking you all this?”

  “What for?”

  “The crime in the city lately,” I said. “I’m looking for a way to axe it, and this sounds like more than a good start.” The possibilities kept expanding in my head. Combating deindividuation would potentially be a sweeping blow against gangs and organized crime, at the very least. I thought of Pourdry’s goons and their blind loyalty and was angry all over again. Devices like these might not be able to stop someone like Pourdry himself, but if they gutted his organization, how powerful would he be then? “Let’s see how brave these assholes are without their armies to hide behind.”