Analog SFF, March 2010

by Dell Magazine Authors

  Only by the reporters’ reactions did he realize he had done it again. He began stumbling anew. The journalists became eager to ask the next question. Their feeding-frenzy instincts began overcoming whatever support they had for Burleigh's actions. They didn't attack outright, but they all wanted to be the one whose question brought the next mistake.

  Phelps blundered through several more questions before falling apart. “No,” he shot back to a questioner, “the president didn't coerce me, or any other volunteers. We own—uh, our own actions are under our control. Is it s-so hard to believe we'd be acting with honest motives, that we'd believe in something and o-o-o-oh, that's it!” He stormed from the podium, a bedlam of voices chasing him.

  Lucinda convulsed with silent laughter, recovering just soon enough for Curt to kiss her. “We did it,” she gasped. “We've got a real chance—if they don't suppress this."

  "I don't think they can,” Curt said. “They promoted it too much; too many people were watching. I think we've hit a tipping point—but we'll keep nudging them."

  "Absolutely.” She kissed him again, then glanced past him toward the bed. “So, care to celebrate?"

  He craned to see his watch. “Not when I'm due somewhere in fifteen minutes. Tonight, though..."

  Lucinda grinned, but a stray thought melted it. “They're going to be suspicious now. They'll be looking for a cause."

  "No doubt. Erica Rawlins is in serious trouble.” He looked at her. “You want to lay low?"

  "I do—but I won't. It's the wrong time to hold back, no matter how scary things may get. I just hope—"

  "I know. Me too.” Curt held her close, knowing she needed some of his strength that moment. She returned the embrace, in case he needed some strength too.

  She left his quarters, got lunch at the mess, and went back to producing templates with Henry. A couple of hours into their newest one, her console flashed with an incoming call. She put on headphones and switched it on. “Hello?"

  "Lucinda, it's Nancy. We have a new subject coming in for interrogation, and I need help. Monitoring Room 3. Can you come?"

  "I'll be there.” She switched off. “Surprise break, Henry. I'm being called away. Save our progress and go relax. I'll call you when I'm free again."

  She walked over to MR3, noting the soldier guarding the door. The prisoner must be important, to guard the monitoring room on his account. She entered, finding Nancy standing in wait for her. “Okay, who's our—” Only then did she see the screen showing live feed from the scanning room. It was dark.

  The door shut behind Lucinda, and by some sense, she knew the guard was on this side of it.

  "I should have known much earlier,” LaPierre said, her face simmering with hatred. “You were the first to stumble across the effect, five years ago, before I even joined the Berkeley team. Now you're using it to sabotage our work, to subvert the only hope humankind has to finally find peace."

  "Nancy, what are you talking—"

  LaPierre slapped her face, hard. "Traitor!"

  Lucinda cradled her stinging cheek. So much for bluffing her way through.

  "I thought you had changed,” LaPierre said. “I was so stupid. You're a bloody-minded reactionary, and you were never going to change.” An icy smile cut across her face. “Until now."

  Lucinda turned to run, hoping somehow to get past the guard. He was already moving, stunner in hand.

  * * * *

  When she woke up, she was lying supine and shackled. Bright LED strip lights shone above her, partly shaded by the edge of the MEG scanner looming past her forehead. She heard indistinct voices, and the bed under her back slid her into the machine.

  A speaker scratched with brief static. LaPierre's voice came through. “When did you first sabotage an overlay procedure?"

  Lucinda thought back to the day Curt had her in the scanner. She had spoken without restraint then, because she had no one to protect. This was different. She filled her mind with miscellany: lists of nerves and cerebral structures, prime numbers, old poems. Soon, she didn't even hear what she was being asked.

  LaPierre didn't tolerate that for long. A jab in Lucinda's leg brought a cry of pain. Within seconds, she felt the sedative doing its work. She remembered that one patient's terror: it echoed in her mind, doubling and redoubling her own fears. She didn't think to pray like he did, only to fight. And she did. For a while.

  After that, she was adrift. LaPierre's words were rocks in a stream, sending her flowing one way or another in the current. She knew they were watching her innermost reactions to names, dates, numbers, extracting the truths she would not speak. She couldn't resist it. She couldn't even think of resisting.

  She could do nothing as they drew her out of the scanner, strapped her onto a gurney, and took her by corridor, elevators, and tunnels into some deep place. When they laid her in the dark room, she sank into the cot like liquid finding its level. She couldn't even see the door as it thudded shut, and the locks snapped.

  Once her will began trickling back, she looked around the room. It was small and bare, its heavy door pierced by a small head-high grille. She accepted dully that she was in a cell.

  Half an hour later, she had enough energy to stand up, take a drink from the sink, and use the toilet. Then she dropped back onto the cot, drained.

  She heard rough voices down the corridor. She thought she recognized Curt's baritone, and a fist gripped her heart. She began thinking of what she could do, but it was too painful, for there was nothing to do. She laid herself down, hoping a forgetful sleep would take her. And it did.

  * * * *

  Soldiers roused Lucinda out of what felt like a long sleep. Her muzzy mind noted they were retracing yesterday's path into the cellblock. By the time her fear returned, her guards had brought her back to the examination room.

  She went back onto the bed, and back into restraints. A moment later, Nancy LaPierre loomed over her. “We got him, of course,” she said, with a curious edginess. “He confirmed what we assumed about Rawlins. By now, she's giving up her confederates. You've lost."

  Lucinda believed her. So why had it sounded like a lie?

  "Will you behave yourself for your base scan?” Lucinda asked.

  That was the only reason she could have been brought here: to map out her brain so they could learn how to recreate it in their image. Briefly, the rising dread receded. “Not a chance,” Lucinda said.

  A cruel smile curdled LaPierre's mouth. “I didn't think so.” The hypo went in again, but this time Lucinda didn't cry out. “Put her in."

  The session was a repeat of yesterday, only the dosage seemed not as strong. She drifted through the quiet as the MEG read her brain in repose, but she could focus on the questions when LaPierre began asking them. What actions did she want taken against the destroyers of Washington? What did she think of President Burleigh? What did she think of a dozen political issues? Of Christians? Of Muslims? Of progressives? Of right-wingers? Of God? Her mind lay still through all of it, placidly betraying her.

  By the time they dumped her back into her cell, the stupor was already fading. Someone had left a tray on the cot, with oatmeal and juice. So it was morning. She set it aside, but minutes later her appetite surfaced, and she quickly devoured breakfast.

  There was a shuttered slot at the bottom of the door, one she hadn't noticed before. She left the tray there, out of an instinct for neatness that circumstances somehow didn't suppress. She washed up, then sat on her bunk, thinking.

  Finding matches for her brain, creating a therapeutic template from them, and programming a TMS with the template would take several hours. That is, if they were careful and conscientious. They might instead slap together a crude, heavy overlay, not caring what they wiped out in imposing what they demanded of a virtuous mind.

  And now true fear came, in great drowning waves.

  Lucinda curled up tight on her cot, as though trying to hide from what was coming. She let time flow past unmarked, minutes running into
hours. If she didn't count those seconds, she could pretend they weren't drawing her toward her fate.

  She heard voices and sounds at intervals. At some point, her empty tray disappeared. At another, she thought briefly she could hear Curt. She thought of crying out to him, but an ache from yesterday's stunning dissuaded her. She listened, but did not hear him again.

  Her door snicked again, and she saw a new tray slide inside. Hours had passed—meaning her overlay would be coming that much sooner. She stayed on the cot, having no stomach for her last meal.

  There were footsteps, coming close. The door snicked and its handle jiggled. Lucinda uncurled from her fetal tuck, some deep part of her not wanting to be found that way at the end.

  Voices down the corridor called out. The door handle jerked once and fell still. Footsteps ran away.

  Lucinda let out a sobbing breath. By now, the suspense was as much torment as the horror to come. It was several minutes before she thought back, wondering whether that guard had locked the door again before leaving. Maybe, just maybe...

  There were more shouts. Someone ran past, and now she could make him out. “Have them report here. Everyone who will respond! We need to hold the building...” He turned a corner, and his voice faded. She tried to puzzle out what was happening.

  Then she heard the dull, distant thud. Then another. Then a long rattle of gunfire.

  The yawning pit already in her stomach turned into a canyon. A fight was breaking out. No, a battle. She pulled her legs back up to her chest.

  She detested violence, for itself and for the fear it created. This is what she had striven to fight with neural overlays. This is what President Burleigh told the world he was fighting. Now their mirror-image ambitions had brought it into being, here.

  She closed her ears—tried not to hear the shouts down the hall, demanding to know what was happening—tried not to hear the spasms of gunfire, the concussive booms, and the screams that came not from fear, but from agony. She sank into a fugue of trauma, hoping the bloodshed would pass by her door like the last plague of Egypt.

  The gunfire sputtered out. Sharp voices rose above thumping bootsteps. The cell door clanged and crashed open, sending the tray's contents flying. A soldier in heavy pack and with a big rifle filled the doorway. Lucinda screamed with all her built-up terror, but only a squeak came out.

  "It's okay,” the big soldier said. “The cavalry's here."

  * * * *

  A semblance of order began to emerge over several hours. It took Lucinda that long to feel like her life was her own again.

  First she was in a makeshift triage, helping army medics and some colleagues tend to the wounded from the battle. The numbers were not overwhelming, and thankfully she didn't recognize any of the casualties. Lucinda found it incongruously calming. She was helping to heal again.

  Then she was being led back to her dorm for temporary safekeeping. Soldiers walked most of the hallways. A few of them, she knew as guards. They must have changed sides when there was finally another side to change to. She kept her eyes away from the bullet holes and smashed glass and the few smears of dark red.

  Then she cooled her heels in a dorm about half full, listening and sometimes talking to colleagues. Some of them were relieved, some frightened. A good number of them weren't there at all. True believers, Lucinda guessed, now filling the cells in the deep basements. At least she hoped they had been captured, not cut down.

  She felt a tiny pang of regret for Nancy, incarcerated, perhaps even in the cell Lucinda had occupied. Then she pinched it out like a candle flame.

  A few hours later, two soldiers arrived to distribute rations, while another worked at the information booth. After ten minutes, he whistled for attention. “The censorship blocks are disabled at this terminal. You can now e-mail out freely—but one at a time!” His final shout barely slowed the rush to the booth.

  Lucinda hung back, taking out her pocket-comp. By the time the line brought her to the front, she had a rambling letter to her parents ready to send. She didn't try to impose order on the jumbled mess of things she had kept bottled up for months, save to write that she loved them and hoped to see them soon.

  Writing a shorter letter to Josh took longer. She had to explain her long sojourn in Burleigh's orbit, her inability to say what was happening, her recent alienation. Keeping things out of the letter took even more time. Maybe it was cowardice, but she hoped something would make it unnecessary.

  A while later, as she sat on her bunk picking at rations, an officer arrived. “The buildings are now secure,” she announced. “We can't let you leave the base yet, but you're free to move around inside. We'll tell you more when we can."

  She left and some of the women trickled after her. Lucinda joined them, eyes peeled. It didn't take very long to spy him, heading toward her dorm. “Curt!"

  She had seen him twice briefly after they were freed, but got separated each time. Not now. She dashed over and threw her arms around him. In his arms, she felt the last tremor of fear from the last two days shiver her and depart.

  "So what's happening here?” she asked him.

  "Well, I e-mailed the kids, tried to explain what's going on. Hopefully later I—"

  "No, about everything. Has Burleigh been deposed? Is it civil war? When can we leave?"

  "To the last, not yet,” Curt said. “To the others, who knows? Looks like we'll be doing nothing for a while—except celebrating our success.” He moved closer for a kiss, but her expression stopped him. “Okay, that came out wrong."

  "You're right, it did. So what? Let's go."

  * * * *

  In the time she didn't spend with Curt, Lucinda began pulling together the base scans of patients who had passed through the facility. No one had ever had an overlay reversed, and she could only speculate how successful any attempt would be. But it would have to do some good for those poor souls whose minds they—she—had altered against their will. Ethics compelled her to try.

  She had most of the data organized within a couple days, ready to go. But there was nowhere to go yet.

  News came in through the computers, their filters now removed. The Phelps fiasco had apparently triggered much of the armed forces to rise up against Burleigh. Mount Weather was under siege, its landlines cut and its transmissions jammed. In the rest of the country, Burleigh's subordinates were being rounded up or fleeing on their own.

  Standard news sites were in a state of shock. Much of their news was coming from local reports, the many individual voices that had fallen silent the last eight months. Many of them were jubilant. Many of them sounded ugly. None of them said when anyone could leave this place.

  Curt could get no good answers, either. “They keep stonewalling me,” he told Lucinda. “I wonder if they still think I'm Lew's close personal friend?"

  "No, they can't. Things are just in flux. Half the soldiers here are filling space, with no idea what to do. Two days just isn't long enough to put a whole country back together."

  "I guess not.” He smirked. “We'll have to give them three."

  Near noon on that third day, Curt found Lucinda in the library room, collating brain scans. “We've got a visitor coming, and he wants to see us. Both of us."

  "Who?"

  "Governor Kendall. He's—I guess he's the president now."

  Rance Kendall of Kentucky had lost the Republican nomination, but gotten the VP slot. He had disappeared when Burleigh's crackdown came and apparently hadn't been worth hunting down. It was an unusual failure of Burleigh's exhaustiveness.

  "He'll be here at one,” Curt said. “You'll be—?"

  "Yes, I'll be ready."

  She closed up her work, got a shower in the dorm, and changed into her last remaining clean outfit. Curt joined her outside the dorm just before one. A few minutes later, a sergeant came and asked them to follow him.

  They went to the main meeting room, the one with the sole crepe-edged picture of the White House in pale imitation of Mount Weather's
Memorial Room. There was no extra guard outside, and the only person waiting inside was a tall, lanky civilian with gray hair and a gray suit. Curt began stammering out a greeting, but Kendall cut him short.

  "You must be Dr. Garritty. I'm Rance Kendall. It's an honor to meet you, sir.” He stopped pumping Curt's hand and switched to Lucinda. “And you, Dr. Peale. You've both done your country a great service, a historic service. Please, sit down."

  Kendall took the head of the table. Curt and Lucinda sat in the first chairs down the right side. Curt said, “This is an unexpected honor, Mist—um, how should I address you, sir?"

  "That's a fair question. The rump Republican convention named me the replacement nominee yesterday, and the full convention will confirm that whenever they can meet. That pretty much guarantees my election, even if the Democrats hadn't forfeited their moral right to run after their assaults on us. As for the succession now—” He gave a disarming shrug. “The guilty parties cannot be allowed to hold power through legalisms, and as I'm now the head of the opposition, it falls to me. For now, though, ‘sir’ is fine."

  Lucinda accepted the arguments, disturbed as she was that they needed to be made. She still had a qualm. “What about the army, sir? Seems to me they've been in control for a couple days, here at least."

  "They did what was necessary,” Kendall said. “They bore having members of their ranks being given the treatment as long as they could, and then they defended the country and the Constitution, as best they could. That done, now they will stand aside. America cannot be perceived as being under military control, must less actually being so. You have my word, doctor."

  Lucinda nodded. Kendall had a superb speaking voice, well modulated for this intimate talk. He exuded an air of sincerity.

  "Now, I've been briefed on the efforts you made to expose Burleigh's infamies, the risks you took, the price you nearly paid. I must say, words cannot contain the gratitude our country owes you. You will receive the appropriate rewards, in time."

  "That's very kind, sir,” Lucinda said past the rush of pride in her chest, “but if you could see clear to let us go home, that would go very far in satisfying us."