by Huang, SL
“You mean you want to put these things around LA?” Pilar’s face stretched itself into a bizarre combination of incredulity and horror. “Cas, don’t take this the wrong way, but that is a terrible idea!”
“Why? I’m not going to do it unless I can get the calibration right, which I bet I can.”
“They barely did any human testing!” she protested. “I don’t even know if it’s something people could take long-term. You could make things way worse—”
“And I could make ’em way better,” I said.
She leaned away from me, shaking her head over and over. “It’s too risky. This is so dangerous. You’re talking about—”
“This could save a lot of lives.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I want to make LA safer, too, I do, I do, more than anyone. But if this went wrong—think how bad it could go. If you didn’t get it right, people would start tearing each other apart. Normal people. I saw the test results.”
I crossed my arms. “Does that mean you’re not going to give me the files?”
Pilar wavered, her facial muscles pulling in all different directions. “I know you know what you’re doing,” she said. “I do. I don’t mean to say you don’t.”
Since I wasn’t sure I knew what I was doing this time, her confidence outstripped mine, but it served my cause so I didn’t argue. “I’m very good,” I said instead, which was true. “A calibration problem is a cakewalk.”
“I know,” she said, heaving a sigh. “You do seem to do the impossible on a regular basis. Checker and I have conversations about it, you know. Did you really lasso the wing of a fighter jet a few months ago and—”
“I’m good at math,” I interrupted. “That’s all.”
“That’s what you always say! If this were anyone else asking, and I mean anyone else…” She pursed her lips and thought for a moment. “Promise you’re not going to do anything unless you’re sure it’s going to work?”
“Cross my heart,” I said.
She played with the edges of her neat stack of papers, and said softly, “I’ve got a lot of family here, you know.”
“I know,” I said, confused by the non sequitur. Pilar mentioned her family a lot.
“One of my cousins joined a gang a couple months ago,” she said. “My aunt is devastated. There was no reason, you know? He’s a good kid, good family, really nice boy—and my baby brother’s still in high school, and you know what an LA public school is like. It was a jungle when I went through and now…” She trailed off and cleared her throat. “My mom tells me he comes home with black eyes sometimes. From high school. Can you believe it? It’s not fair. My folks don’t even live in a bad part of town. That’s just how it is now. And the cities are all getting bad; my sister’s at UPenn and she and her friends are afraid to go out at night. I’m hoping my brother will apply to college in some small town in the middle of nowhere.”
As much as Pilar talked about her family, I tended to forget they actually existed as people. But hey, if they were going to help my cause, I was okay with that. “That’s why I want to do this,” I said.
“I know,” she said, the earnest trust in her voice assigning me more goodheartedness than I probably deserved. “I’ll look for those files for you. As long as you promise you won’t do anything unless you can make it work right, that this won’t hurt anybody. Promise?”
“I promise,” I said again.
“If you have any doubt it won’t work, then you’ll give it up? You won’t go ahead with it?”
“I said I wouldn’t.”
She took a deep breath. “All right. All right, I’ll send you whatever I can.”
“Good,” I said, and got up.
“Hey, Cas?”
“Yeah?”
She shifted in her chair and fiddled with her papers again. “Checker really misses you, you know,” she said very fast, not looking at me. “He didn’t tell me why you guys are fighting; he hasn’t told me anything—but he’s getting really depressed about it, I can tell. I don’t mean to be—I know it isn’t my business, but—I just, I, I thought you should know.”
“Yeah, yeah,” I said. “We’re talking again.” Guilt crept through the back of my brain, like a rash on my conscience.
“Really?” Pilar’s face lit up with one of her huge smiles. “That’s great! That’s—that’s really, really great. I’m glad. Okay, forget I said anything. Except—that’s good. That’s just really good.” She flapped her hands as if looking for something to do with them. “Okay, I’m just going to—I’m going to go work now.” Still grinning, she spun back to her computer.
I headed for the door, feeling grumpy. As I dragged it open, I ran into two kids about sixteen years old heading up the iron stairway. They were both a bit scruffy and not particularly well-dressed, and when they saw me they froze and stared like startled deer.
“You’ve got visitors,” I called.
“Is that Katrina and Justin?” Pilar’s voice came from behind me. “Cas! Stop being all menacing; they’re here to see Arthur. Come on in, guys.”
Justin was a light-skinned black kid, Katrina an unsmiling Asian girl with bangs and freckles. They squeezed past me, keeping their heads down. I pressed back to let them by. I hadn’t meant to be intimidating.
Pilar gave Justin a hug—Katrina hung back—and then gestured both kids to visitors’ chairs. Feeling distinctly like a fifth wheel, I slunk out and down the steps.
The sensation of being watched still tugged at me. I glanced back up at Arthur’s office, then around the street. The sidewalk was empty save for one pedestrian, a dark-haired man who shuffled by without taking any notice of me. This was starting to bother me—not the idea that someone might be following me, but the feeling of it. I didn’t get feelings. I saw quantifiable data that translated into probabilities.
Maybe I was jumpy. I wasn’t one to get jumpy without numerical reason—but then, everything had gone sideways and fucked lately. I sighed, headed back to my car, and drove to Van Nuys.
I found Checker in the Hole this time. The converted garage behind his house gave the impression of being modeled after a hacker cave in a comic book; monitors tiled the walls and a city of computer towers surrounded his nest of keyboards in the middle. Usually he didn’t stop typing as I walked in, but today when I opened the door his fingers stuttered to a halt and he turned to face me. “Hi,” he said.
“Hi.”
The awkwardness of the morning crept over us again.
He coughed. “I, uh, I’ve started the statistical analyses you asked for. You didn’t give me much to go on as to what you wanted, so I’m crunching a lot of different data a lot of different ways. I’ll keep sending you more as I finish.”
“Uh. No rush,” I said. I hitched myself up to perch on a piece of desktop between computer towers. “I have some stuff to figure out before I can use them anyway.”
“What’s your plan?” asked Checker curiously. “Do you need any other help with it?”
“Come to think of it, population data,” I said. “As fine-grained as possible over LA.”
“Oh, sure, that’s easy.” He spun to one of his keyboards and started clacking away at it. “No problem. I’ll send it with the first batch of data. What are you using it for?”
“Arkacite was developing some sort of frequency generator that would disrupt people’s brains so they wouldn’t succumb to peer pressure or go all mob-like,” I said. “I want to finish it and then distribute them around LA.” Hopefully their problem had only been the math. “It won’t solve everything, but I’m hoping to leach out at least some of the mindless violence.”
Checker froze. “That’s how you’re planning to fight crime?”
“Smart, huh?”
Checker spoke like he was choosing his words very carefully. “You want to mess with people’s heads?”
“Only when they’re getting sucked into groupthink,” I said. “Think how much violence goes on because of gangs, or bec
ause of people following along and getting their pleasure centers activated by joining the herd. I’m hoping to counter that.” Checker didn’t look as excited as I expected. “What?”
“It’s just—you’re mucking around with people’s brains, you know?”
“To make them less dangerous.”
“Except you can’t—changing people’s brain chemistry to make them more peaceful—it’s, it’s not right. Please don’t get mad at me for saying this, okay? But let’s think of something else.”
“Come on,” I said. “If I can get it to work, this will be perfect. How else can we make a difference everywhere at once?”
“It’s wrong,” he argued quietly, shaking his head. “Come on, isn’t this exactly what Dawna Polk was doing? And we decided she didn’t have the right.”
I struggled with his logic for a moment. “Except she was killing or brainwashing innocent people. The whole chaos effect thing. She didn’t care if they were being violent, as long as their deaths flapped enough butterfly wings to cause the hurricane she wanted. I only want to affect people when they are becoming aggressive.”
“But it’s still not—”
“We caused this situation!” I cried. “We have to do something about it!”
“I hear you,” he said. “But this isn’t a solution.”
“I don’t need your approval,” I snapped.
“Don’t do it.”
“Let’s talk about something else.” I didn’t want to fight so soon after we’d started talking again. “I haven’t even looked over the testing data yet, and after that I’ll still have to get my hands on the specs somehow. For all we know the damn things might not even be workable.”
He muttered something under his breath that I chose to ignore, then said exactly what I was hoping he wouldn’t. “Okay. Let’s talk some more about you, then. Will you tell me about the note you found?”
“What do you want to know?” I didn’t try to keep the belligerence out of my tone.
He didn’t say anything, just looked at me patiently.
“You saw it,” I said. “I don’t even know what I did with it after that.”
He reached down below his desktop and unlocked a drawer to pull out a plastic-sheathed piece of paper. “You left it here.”
I stared down at the wrinkled sheet, the staccato, slashing handwriting undoubtedly and mathematically my own.
Do not try to remember under any circumstances.
My signature was underneath. Cassandra Russell.
My senses dulled. I stumbled up and groped for the door.
I vaguely heard Checker calling behind me, but the sound was muted, as if it were smothered by layers of space and time.
I staggered out into the sunlight, the brightness stabbing into my retinas. I squeezed my eyes shut and leaned over, hands on my knees, panting.
I saw my own hands folding the note, the paper crisp and white—
“Just in case,” a male voice said. “We won’t need it.”
I turned to hand it to him—
“Cas?” Checker touched my arm very gently, the barest pressure on my sleeve. “Forget it for now, okay? Let’s go in the house.”
I let him lead me through the back door and into the kitchen, where he pushed me gently in the direction of the living room. “Go sit down. I’ll get you some water.”
I leaned against the wall instead, shifting irritably, uncomfortable in my own skin—as if I were zipped into someone else’s body being forced to look out at her world. Checker pressed a glass of water into my hands, condensation already beading on it even with the air conditioning.
“It was in a cemetery,” I said.
My eyes weren’t focusing properly; I felt more than saw Checker’s attention turn toward me. “Sorry?”
“The note. It was in a cemetery. Creepy, right?” The last two words came out with the smallest burnt edge of hysteria.
“We don’t have to…” He trailed off, clearly caught between being eager to hear what I had to say and letting me off the hook.
“You’re the one who asked. What, you don’t want to listen to the answers?” The words wobbled, sarcastic and mocking. Part of me wanted more than anything to stick it to him, my resentment turning sadistic.
“Cas…”
Checker managed to pack enough worry into my name that a good helping of guilt smacked into me. Bastard. It made me even more irritated, the knot of my emotions a contradictory imbroglio.
“You made me promise, so I’m going to answer your questions,” I said too loudly, to cover it.
He stayed quiet.
I put the glass of water down on his table, undrunk. “I had my own grave, did you know?”
“No,” he said after a moment.
“Not a grave, really. One of those shelves in the wall behind a plaque. Where they put ashes.”
“A wall niche,” he said. Know-it-all.
“I don’t know why I knew to go there,” I said. “I have no idea. I just went. And then I was standing there, in front of this wall with names all across it…”
I’d subconsciously expected something mathematical to jump out at me. Some confluence of vectors, some fascinating numerical cluster that would tell me why the fuck I’d come.
Instead, I’d seen my name.
“It’s not every day you see your own grave, right? Fuck if I’m going to leave that alone. I smashed it all open. Nice metal urn inside, but instead of my ashes, there was a note, because apparently I am an excessively morbid person. That’s what I got out of this whole thing, anyway.”
“Sounds more practical than morbid,” said Checker.
“I left myself a note in a cemetery,” I said, managing to roll my eyes around and focus on him condescendingly.
“Where else could you leave something for years or decades, undisturbed?” pointed out Checker. “Most storage spaces require some sort of regular payment. Any other place would run the risk of being rebuilt or plowed over. And a safety deposit box would require ID, and for you to know what name you’d used. If you really wanted to leave something somewhere it wouldn’t be disturbed, and you knew it might be a really long time and all manner of things might happen before you came back for it, a columbarium is actually a really smart place.”
“Morbid,” I insisted. I wasn’t going to concede that he’d made a creepy amount of sense.
“What name did the cover stone say?” he asked.
“I told you,” I said. “My name.”
“Cas Russell?” he probed.
“Cassandra.”
“Did it say anything else?”
“A date of death. See, morbid.”
“When was the date?”
“My fake death date? Why the hell would you want to know that?”
“Because,” he said in a very patient voice, “it’ll give us some idea of when that note was put in the wall. It would raise too many eyebrows for the death date to have been in the future, right? I’m guessing it would have been a random date recently before the note was walled up there, to avoid questions.”
“Oh,” I said. “I don’t remember. It was years ago; I noticed that.”
“It’s okay; I’ll go look at it. Just tell me what cemetery.”
“I told you, I broke it.” The surrealism of my surroundings was fading, snapping back into reality and leaving me with a dull ache in the back of my skull. My vision still wouldn’t focus quite right, splotching, as if a flash had gone off in front of me. “The stone,” I clarified impatiently. “The cover. Whatever you call it. The thing with my name on it. I broke it to get in.”
“Well, they probably repaired it,” said Checker.
Right.
“That could be helpful, actually,” he added. “We can ask them about vandalism and insist Arthur be allowed to crime scene it. See if there are any fingerprints inside, other than your own.”
“That seems like a stupid amount of trouble.”
“Cas. This is important to us.”
“I still don’t know why.”
He poked me gently in the arm. “If you think about it really, really hard, maybe you’ll figure it out.”
Chapter 4
I checked my email as soon as I reached my current apartment, but neither Pilar nor Checker had sent anything my way yet. I spun aimlessly on a stool for a few minutes, then brought up a new modern algebra proof that had been making a splash. I’d hit the twenty-third page, and was torn between schadenfreude and exasperation, when my phone rang.
“What!”
“Miss Russell, it’s Sonya.”
I groaned internally. Professor Sonya Halliday was a friend of Arthur’s I’d helped out the year before. Unfortunately, being a computational theorist, she’d cottoned on to how good at math I was and had insisted on keeping in touch, which had evolved into the form of irregular card games during which she picked my brain about the latest research.
Of course, she wanted me to do a lot more with her. Explore new research. Write papers. Collaborate. She didn’t know my higher mathematical intuition had been burned out of my brain—that somehow, at some point, it had been taken from me. The emptiness festered, a blistering hole I’d never be able to bridge.
Sometimes the conversations with Halliday made the ache exponentially worse. Sometimes they felt like the only thing left to me.
I didn’t tell her either of those things.
Ostensibly, I’d agreed to keep seeing her on the condition that she put equal time into repairing her fractured relationship with Arthur. After the help we had given her the year before, she probably would have been doing that anyway, but pretending I had someone to blame for saying yes to her was a pleasant fiction.
“You don’t give up, do you?” I grumped.
“Not when it comes to mathematics, no. Is your job with Arthur over?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m on another one, though.”
“I see. You wouldn’t be putting me off, would you?”
