by Jody Wallace
Noob rhymed with boob and sounded as if it had the same meaning. Plus, he wasn’t lying.
Jerk.
“I know more than you think,” I muttered.
Beau turned to John. “Tell Yuri someone else will have to do it.”
The man was blunt. I could respect that. But here’s the thing about blunt people, the ones who pride themselves on honesty, on giving it to you straight? They’re not. Honest, I mean—straight is another story. Mostly they’re just shitheads.
“That’s a good idea,” I said to John. If Beau was one of those toxic, faux-honest types, I’d pass. Wouldn’t it be better if someone who knew what I could do was my teacher? “You must have more than one person who can train me. Why can’t—”
“Beau will be training you,” John repeated.
“Won’t,” Beau said.
“You’ll have to take it up with Yuri,” John said. “Good luck, Cleo. I’ll come get you for lunch.” And the schizophrenic man who flirted with me Saturday and got miffed at me Sunday stalked out of the lab, leaving me alone with Beau the Noob Hater.
Wasn’t this awkward? John had lost major chivalry points deserting me in hostile territory.
Beau, who’d yet to gain chivalry points, leaned against a waist-high lab table and crossed his arms. “You weren’t even aware you had suprasenses before they found you, were you?”
I offered what I hoped was a clever misdirection. “I didn’t realize I was a chameleon.”
“How they find you noobs when you don’t know what you can do, I’ll never know. Well, our trackers are the best.”
I remained silent, watching him think. I guess he had to make up his mind whether to kick me out of the lab. I doubted I’d have a say in the matter unless I stormed out, but I didn’t want to storm out. My not particularly alter ego, Miss Curiosity, had reared her head, and I liked to give her what she wanted or she drove me nuts.
“Do you have any idea what a chameleon can do?” he asked me.
“Eat bugs, hang upside down on a branch, and swivel its eyeballs almost 360 degrees.”
His expression remained stoic. I sighed and gave him a serious answer. “Samantha said we blend in. Using our, um, suprasense of touch.” If we didn’t come into contact, how could my touch force someone to ignore me? Samantha had to touch me to do her thing. Her power made sense, but ‘ignore me’ vibes didn’t.
“Sort of.” He advanced on me, only to tug the clipboard out of my hands and put it on the counter. “There are various reasons why one human takes note of another. What do you see when you look at me?”
“A...man.” This had to be a trick question. When he didn’t respond, I added, “A man in a lab coat.”
“Huh.”
Was that a good huh or a bad huh? I must be failing the “powers of observation” test. Damned if I failed my first test at YuriCorp!
I gave him the works. “A man with dark skin, brown eyes, black hair. Lab coat, sandals, khaki shorts, GAP plain front with frayed hems, old black T-shirt. Really old. I mean, U2’s Zoo TV tour had to be twenty years ago. You’re about five eight, give or take your hair, and have both ears pierced, but it looks like the holes grew in. Youthful indiscretion you thought better of, some girlfriend or boyfriend didn’t like them, no offense. I never assume which way someone’s bent. Oh, maybe you were allergic to silver. You wouldn’t look right in gold. Your dreads, incidentally, resemble the scrubby thing in my sink and—”
“Okay, okay!”
“Did I see what I was supposed to see?”
He touched his head. “I disagree about the dreads.”
He didn’t answer directly. Had he tried to use his powers on me and failed—or succeeded?
“If you’re a chameleon,” I asked, “why is your appearance conspicuous? Shouldn’t you wear beige so you can blend into cubicle walls?”
“That’s not how it works.” Beau ran a hand over his nubby dreads and gave the side of his head a scritch. “I really don’t have time for this.”
“Yuri said you were top dog. No, top lizard.”
Like John, the man was incapable of smiling. I shouldn’t have to beg him to do what his boss told him to do. “If you don’t have time to train me, how can you do site visits?”
“I don’t do many, and they’re planned into my schedule. You’re not.”
“John says I’ll be powerful once I’m trained.” Powerful at being so insignificant nobody noticed me. Wasn’t that anti-powerful? “If you do a good job with me, that’s one more chameleon to make site visits so you can stay here and work on math and chemistry.”
“Oh, I’ll do a good job.” Beau sighed. “I know I’m going to regret this.”
My new teacher, instead of being merely mean, was a freak of human nature who didn’t tell lies. What kind of person was like that? He really thought he’d regret spending the time to train me.
“That’s not very polite,” I observed.
“I’m not very polite.”
No kidding. I was so shocked to see no mask around him when he said that, I had to lean on the counter.
“Are you sure you aren’t the lab assistant I keep asking for?”
“Positive.” I wanted to ask if I looked like a lab assistant, but hey, I had on a white coat. I looked like a lab assistant as much as he looked like a scientist.
“We’ll start by logging your DNA. Basics first. That’s all our DNA equipment can handle without serious adjustments.” He led me to a sink and had me wash my mouth with some horrible antiseptic. Then he swabbed the inside of my cheek and popped the swab into a test tube.
“I don’t know who my father was,” I volunteered. “I’m pretty sure my mom didn’t have any special abilities.” Except the ability to get drunk and stay that way on a limited income.
“A lot of suprasenses are inherited.” Beau took the test tube to another counter and started futzing around with it. “But a lot of sensors are made.”
“I can understand going blind or deaf, but how could somebody get X-ray vision? The bite of a radioactive spider?”
He didn’t so much as smirk. I guess comic book jokes were old hat.
“It doesn’t have anything to do with the organ doing the sensing, it has to do with connections in the brain. If a person suffers a stroke, for example, the neural network is forced to reconfigure. Sometimes a suprasense is the result.”
I thought about the recruiters from Baumhauser. “Are there a lot of senior citizen supras?”
“Yes,” he said, but he didn’t elaborate.
“Can you go blind if you have suprasenses of the eyeball?”
“Yep.”
“Does it mean you lose your suprasenses?”
“Pretty much.”
“Double whammy. What if you had supra thigh muscles and lost a leg?”
“Motor skills don’t involve—”
“The neural network. Got it. So a chameleon’s ability, like yours and mine, is based on the sense of touch.”
“As far as we can determine.”
I didn’t mention my suprasenses of vision and hearing, neither of which were doing me any good with Beau. Maybe I should ask, “Hey, are you a corporate mole?” so I could mark him off my list and move on.
Instead I asked, “If a chameleon’s skin was burned to an unrecognizable state in a fire but not bad enough to die, would he lose his ability?”
“That’s sick.” Beau stopped what he was doing to stare at me. “Where do you come up with these things?”
“I just want to know how I work.”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know how I work?”
“I don’t know if a chameleon’s suprasense would survive disfiguring burns.”
We continued that way for some time as he processed the DNA. I asked questions about being a chameleon, suprasenses in general, and whether he could morph his skin into camouflage if he wore army pants (no). He didn’t lie much, nothing distinct enough for me to read lips.
&n
bsp; It was an exercise of mutual pointlessness. I was wasting his time when he’d rather be scrawling crazed mathematics on a clipboard. He was wasting my time when I’d rather be doing just about anything else. Like shopping at the dollar store, a move of sheer desperation. But I was on the clock now.
My fear was that I couldn’t learn how to handle the jobs I’d been hired to do. First off, could I train to be a management consultant in a matter of months? I had no business degree and minimal grasp of economics. I was genius at office politics, for obvious reasons, but it might not be enough.
This chameleon stuff—the stuff my new peers expected me to master—I had no idea how to take advantage of it.
I only had their word I could do it.
Then there was my secret whack-a-mole assignment. Might as well get started. On Beau.
“I met one of Psytech’s employees when Samantha and John took me to dinner. Then I met four Baumhausers when they chased our car down and offered me a job. Do you know many supras in other firms?” I asked him.
He and I had, at some point, seated ourselves on tall stools next to a lab table, and I spun gently from side to side. My seat squeaked like an old ceiling fan.
“I know a lot of people,” he said. “The initial DNA analysis will be ready soon.”
Was he avoiding an answer or stating a fact? “Did you guys steal the database of the human genome project to find new supras?”
He looked at me as if I were the crazy one. “No.”
“So how can you find people if they don’t make themselves obvious?” Like I, apparently, had done, though how they’d pinpointed my blog among all the cranky weirdoes on the Internet, I couldn’t imagine. People in cyberspace were nuts.
“You’re going to have to quit talking so much,” he commented, “if you want to be effective as a chameleon.”
I realized the man was a grinch, but did he have to be bitchy too? “What does an effective chameleon do besides bore people with a sad lack of conversational skills?”
“You can’t learn everything in one day.” Beau returned to the machine where the DNA had been doing whatever DNA has to do before people can make heads or tails of it.
“I’d like to come out of today having learned at least a little something.”
“Why don’t you tell me about yourself?” he suggested as he fiddled with the DNA machine. “How much do you weigh?”
I couldn’t think of any reason why I’d care to hide the truth from someone like Beau, so I didn’t expend the effort. “One hundred thirty pounds, last time I checked. Why?”
“I need the information for the tests. What’s your natural hair color?”
“Dirt brown. What you see is what you get.” I hadn’t scheduled a salon color and highlighting session in a while.
“Do you fake orgasms?”
That was a highly unusual question. Wasn’t it against corporate sexual harassment code? “Why do you need to know that?”
“Just do.” He didn’t appear to be concerned about my answer, though he scribbled on his clipboard after many of the things I said. You’d think he’d have a laptop or a PDA.
“I don’t fake it. Why bother?”
He twisted some dials on the DNA machine, and it whirred. “To make your partner feel successful.”
“Like they care,” I said with a snicker, thinking about how so many men professed their desire to see you satiated but their mask told a different story. “I could tell you stories.”
“I’m sure you could.”
“There was this one time,” I began, intending to mock the last guy I’d slept with, but Beau waved me off.
“Let’s not go there.”
What a prude. Probably insulted his masculine ego, not that he seemed the type to have an ego. Or sex. He’d have to find a willing partner, and he was so drab, I couldn’t imagine that happening.
A printer to the right of the DNA machine spat out a long sheet with a bunch of lines and dots on it. “Here we go,” he said. “This is your rough DNA chart. Here’s the section that indicates you have suprasensor abilities. Well, I guess you really do have them. Hm.”
I looked at the white paper with its ladder of lines, my personal UPC code. “Hm, what?”
“It’s not what I expected. Have you ever had a stroke?”
“No.” I’d been really pissed, but no stroke. “Would a stroke show up in DNA?”
“It wouldn’t. Head injury?”
“That wouldn’t show up on DNA either.” I pointed at a section of the print out where the black markings were erratic. “That part looks sketchy. Maybe that’s what my biological dad contributed.”
“We’ll have to run it through our version of CODIS to see if any matches come up. For now, this verifies you’re a chameleon, with added traits. Not sure what.” He squinted at the paper, then pulled his glasses out of his pocket and put them on.
If he blew my cover my first day on the job, I hoped I wouldn’t get a pay cut. “Does it say whether or not I’m going to go grey early?”
“Do you need glasses? Contact lenses?”
“I have better than 20/20 vision.” He had no idea how much better. Unless he did know, by reading my DNA.
“Right. See here—“ He pointed at part of the pattern “—we see these markings in someone who has a suprasense in vision. But it’s different. We’ll know more after the computer at the Registry has a chance to fully analyze you.”
Would the Registry computer identify the fact I could see lies? Would Beau? Surely Yuri knew Beau would run my DNA and send my tests to the Registry lab.
Not my problem. Exactly.
“Who’s going to teach me to be a management consultant? I don’t have a business background.” Most of the consultants did, but Yuri had explained they made exceptions for talents such as myself. They were also going to pay my tuition for standard online business classes if I was willing to take them.
“I don’t know who they’ll assign. It won’t be me.”
“I can see why your skills as a teacher wouldn’t be in great demand.” In fact, I had no idea why Yuri thought Beau could teach me anything. I’d been forced to pry everything out of him while he tinkered around his lab and tried to pretend I wasn’t there.
All in all, he was one of the least interesting men I’d ever met, which is saying something. When so many people lie about so many of the same things, it gets old. Beau hadn’t lied much, but he was still dull. He seemed to have nothing to hide, not even dirty thoughts.
“There are a lot of things I’d rather do than keep teaching you,” he said.
“Keep teaching me? When did you start?” I didn’t feel different now that I knew I had camouflage power. I didn’t know how to activate it. I sure as hell didn’t know how to pass myself off as a chameleon to my coworkers while I sorted through their secrets and found the villain amongst them.
Beau took his glasses off and looked at me. “This whole day has been educational.”
For whom? I had a sudden urge, born of frustration, to tell Beau the truth. If he realized how crucial I was, he’d take my training seriously.
The more I considered it, the smarter it sounded. Beau was a lab geek, not the type who’d be a double agent. I’d asked whether or not he was a spy and he’d said no without a mask, hadn’t I? Pretty sure I had. He’d have to be privy to corporate secrets to steal them. No way was he important enough at YuriCorp to know what was going on at the top.
Beau seemed to read the myriad thoughts in my head. “I’m a better teacher than you think.”
Something in his voice snapped my spine straight and I studied him with new eyes. Or was it old eyes?
“How would I know? You refuse to train me.”
“We’ve been training all morning, Cleo. Tell me how you see me now. Tell me what you’re thinking of me.”
I couldn’t tell the man I thought he was so unimportant there was no way he could be a secret agent. “No.”
“You had no problem describing
me earlier today.”
Those had been physical comments, not character judgments. “I didn’t know you then.”
“And now? What stands out?”
There was nothing remarkable about him. I couldn’t even trick the guy into lying about anything except how old he was when he’d first had sex—an out of the blue question I’d thrown at him as a test, and nearly everybody lies about it, anyway.
Beau slid off his stool and spread his arms. “Come on, Cleo. Give it your best shot.”
I tried to concentrate on his physical details. I squinted, but he was just...this guy in a white coat. Oh, and he wasn’t very tall.
“You’re short and you’re wearing a white coat.”
Beau laughed. “Look closer.”
I was two breaths away from telling Beau there was nothing to look at, and I should know because I could see lies and he was so boring he didn’t even tell them, when the air around him shimmered.
It wasn’t like a lie. It was more like a giant soap bubble. When it popped, Beau stood before me in all his scruffy glory. That scouring pad hair, the sandals, the gnarly old clothes, all the details I’d noticed this morning and couldn’t recall later when he asked me to.
“You’ve got to admire a woman who’ll admit what she weighs without blinking,” he said, followed by a mean smirk. “You must be really self-confident.”
What the hell?
Weight, hair color, sex life. Why would I share such things with this troll? Why would I want to tell him I could see lies? I’d almost dropped my guard and spilled my fifteen bean soup.
Beau chuckled at the expression on my face.
“I’m a chameleon. And that’s what we can do, Cleo.”
Chapter 7
Cleopatra Giancarlo, Management Consultant to the Stars
My training kicked it up more than a notch after I learned to respect Beau’s skill. He promised not to use his chameleonocity to incite my verbal diarrhea again. When I promised to do the same, he laughed and said I couldn’t influence him.
He must not have been sure about that, because a mask shimmered around him. He wasn’t much of a liar, all things considered, so when he shimmered, I noticed.
