by Julia Keller
Stark lurched forward. He was gripping the tabletop, trying to stop himself from vibrating right out of his chair from his shaking.
Violet tuned her console to the Intercept feed—the record of what was being inflicted on him. Surely it was resurrecting the day he was shot, the moment he realized he would never walk again. Surely it was slamming those images back into his brain. Surely he was being forced to relive the horrific moment when his body melted and congealed from the pulse of a slab gun.
Callahan leaned over to watch, too.
And that was not what they saw.
* * *
A long narrow room.
A room lined with gray lockers. This is Old Earth.
A woman in a crisp blue tunic walks smartly up that corridor.
Wait, Violet thought. That’s—Callahan. Yes. It’s Michelle Callahan.
A man is looking in a mirror. He’s handsome, but in a rugged, offhand way. His body is muscular, his arms strong. His hands look as if they could rip out every one of these lockers, just for sport.
He grins.
It’s Paul Stark. He’s in the locker room of Precinct 12, and the mirror is on the inside of his locker door. He slams it shut.
“So,” he says. “Want to, like, get a cup of coffee sometime?”
They’ve been flirting with each other for months, ever since they joined the force. Talking, laughing, making sure to linger just a little bit longer than necessary when they happen to brush past each other in the corridor after roll call.
“Sure,” she replies.
And then he takes her in his arms and he kisses her. It’s not a casual kiss. It’s a serious kiss. A kiss that makes a promise. A kiss that she looks as if she’s feeling all the way down to her toes and then right back up again.
“Tell me,” she murmurs, when he finally lets her go, although she doesn’t want him to, “that it will always feel exactly like this.”
“Yes,” he says. “Always.”
* * *
Paul Stark was facedown on the floor, quivering and sobbing. He tried to rise but he couldn’t. He didn’t have the strength to direct the HoverUp to lift him.
It’s tearing him apart, Violet thought. This memory of a time that can’t return. A memory that pierces and sears not because it’s horrendous and ugly—but because it’s beautiful.
And gone forever.
It seemed more like torture than interrogation. She looked up from her console to see how Callahan was enduring the scene.
No Callahan.
What the—
Violet’s eyes dropped to the interrogation room below. There was the chief, standing face-to-face with a startled-looking Garrison. She had slipped out while Violet watched the feed.
“Stop this,” Callahan declared. “Shut it down. Stop this now.”
Garrison might have been shocked, but she stood her ground. “I can’t do that, Chief,” she said. “I think he’s just about ready to talk.”
“I told you to shut it down. That’s a direct order.”
Garrison stared at her. Her expression was puzzled, but it was also defiant.
“This isn’t your case, Chief,” she said calmly. “You had to step down on this one, remember? You have no authority here.”
Callahan ripped her slab gun from its holster. She aimed it at Garrison, who backed away from her, hands raised.
“Chief,” Garrison said, her voice rising in agitation. “What are you doing?”
“Turn it off.” Callahan tightened her grip on the weapon. “Don’t test me, Allison. Please. You’ll regret it. I don’t want you to end up like—” She inclined her head toward the suffering man on the floor. “—like Paul.” Now she looked up at the terrace. “Don’t get involved in this, Violet. I don’t want to hurt you, either.”
Garrison had made her decision. She tapped her console. “Shut down the feed. Now.”
In a few seconds, Stark’s breathing returned to normal.
“Paul,” Callahan said. “Can you stand up?”
“I can stand up,” he declared.
“Then let’s go.” She handed him his backpack, which Garrison had confiscated when the questioning began.
He glided forward, talking as he maneuvered the HoverUp. “Make sure you get a drink of water, Michelle. We may be on the road awhile.” He pulled a water container from his backpack. “Here.”
They were halfway out the door—Callahan had to back out, in order to keep the gun aimed at Garrison—when her lieutenant spoke.
“Why, Chief? Why are you doing this?”
Callahan let a few seconds pass before she answered. “They’re right. The Intercept is torture. Our emotions are nobody’s business but our own, Allison. Nobody should be able to use them to control us.”
Garrison’s expression didn’t soften. “This—what you just saw—is what the Intercept is supposed to do. You know that. You’re just confused. You’re distraught. This is the price we pay for New Earth. For an orderly, well-run world. We don’t want New Earth to turn into Old Earth.”
Stark touched Callahan’s arm. “We have to leave. Now.”
Garrison’s voice was brusque with certainty. “We’ll find you, Chief. You’ll never get away with this. There’s nowhere for you to go. You can’t hide from the Intercept. You know that.” She tried one more tack. “If you haven’t done anything wrong, you have nothing to fear.”
“It’s not about fear,” Callahan said, as she and Stark hurried through the automatic door side by side. “It’s about love.”
32
The Revelation
Reznik was always happiest when he was working at his computer. His computer was like a broken-off puzzle piece of himself with which he was being constantly and joyfully reunited, making the picture whole again.
Coming up behind his seat in the workstation they shared, Violet realized that anew. She’d known it for a long time—as long as she’d known him, in fact—but each time she approached him in Protocol Hall from his blind side, it came back to her: the solid certainty that no human being would ever satisfy Steve Reznik’s soul in quite the same way his computer did.
“Hey,” Violet said.
“Hey.” He didn’t turn around. She didn’t expect him to. That was pure Rez.
“So you heard about Chief Callahan joining the Rebels.”
“Another workstation’s handling that. They’ll find them in a flash. Guaranteed. No matter what’s happened, we’ve still got to trust the Intercept.” He still hadn’t taken his eyes off the screen.
Violet wondered how much sleep he’d gotten over the past twenty-four hours. She knew how much she’d had—roughly zero. Reznik usually averaged far less than she did. She halfway wondered if there was such a thing as negative sleep: if, after a while, the sleep you lost doubled back around and was recycled as actual sleep.
If anybody could make that scheme work, Violet thought, Rez could.
“What’s up?” she said. “And can we do this, like, fast? I’ve got to get back home to my dad. He’s pretty upset about Chief Callahan. He trusted her.”
At the sound of the word trusted, Reznik frowned.
“I have something to tell you, Violet.”
“What’s going on?”
He punched a flurry of numbers on his keyboard. Turned a dial. Instantly his screen was alive with bright green figures that wiggled at different speeds.
“Look,” he said solemnly, pointing to the wild dance of symbols.
She looked.
“I’m sorry, but I don’t know what I’m supposed to be seeing.”
“Look.” His voice was more emphatic now. He swept a hand toward the screen. “These are the calculations. They’re not refutable, Violet. It’s math. The numbers have to be correct, do you understand? There is no other plausible interpretation.”
Now he was making her mad. She wasn’t scared anymore. She was annoyed. This was a busy time for her, for everyone. She had to take care of her father. There were Rebels sti
ll loose on New Earth. She hadn’t seen Danny in hours. She needed to—
“Violet, I don’t know how to tell you this, but—” He faltered.
“We’re friends, Steve. You know that. You can say anything to me and it’ll be okay.”
He swallowed. She watched his Adam’s apple rise and settle.
“Not this,” he said.
“Try me.”
He pulled his hands away from the keyboard. When Violet recalled this moment later, she would speculate that he didn’t want to be touching his computer when he told her what he had to tell her. It was as if he wanted to be fully human for this moment. Not half-man, half-computer. He wanted to be human—for her.
“Violet,” he said. “I’ll explain in a minute how I know—it was an accident, I swear, I wasn’t looking, I wasn’t out to get him—but I know for sure now.”
“Know what?”
Reznik’s next words changed Violet’s life forever.
“The guy we think is Danny isn’t Danny. The real Danny Mayhew died on Old Earth a year and a half ago.”
PART THREE
33
Flicker
If only, Violet thought.
If only there was a way to see the Intercept in action. If only she could watch as it snatched up her emotion and flung it into her file.
That way, she would know what she was feeling. She could just read the label. Because otherwise, she had no idea.
Would the Intercept call it shock? Or anger? Or betrayal so sharp and awful that it felt like another punch in the stomach with a rusty pole?
Or all of the above?
And how about disbelief—that was there, too, wasn’t it, in the array of her emotional responses to Reznik’s news?
Violet sat in the workstation and tried to figure out what she was feeling. There were thousands of other people in Protocol Hall. The soft drifting buzz of conversation lapped all around them, a steady, constant wash of noise, noise that joined up with the muted vibration of the Intercept spreading out beneath the floor.
She felt sick. Hey, that was a feeling—nausea. Maybe she did know what she was feeling, after all. She was feeling like she wanted to throw up.
“Violet?” Reznik said. “Are you okay?”
Of COURSE I’m not okay—you just told me that the guy I’m in love with is some kind of fraud or imposter or whatever. How “okay” do you think it’s possible to be, under the circumstances?
“Yeah.” She kept her voice steady. Or tried to. “So your theory is based on what?”
“The numbers. And it’s not a theory. It’s fact.”
“Just tell me how you got there, Rez.”
“Okay, okay. Here goes.” He scooted his chair closer to the screen. “You know about biometric records, right? And how meticulously they have to be kept on New Earth?”
“Yeah.” In a lifeless, mechanical voice, Violet recited what every kid learned in New Earth schools: “The weight of New Earth has to be constantly and minutely calibrated in order to leverage the stress on the hybrid materials. Each individual has a unique body mass signature. That signature and its accompanying DNA are recorded in the Living Tissue Database. Fluctuations are noted and instantaneously accounted for.”
“Right. Right. So when somebody’s born, or somebody dies, or somebody so much as eats a piece of pie, the total weight of New Earth is recalculated instantly and recorded. If need be, weight is added or subtracted. These recalibrations take place at least a hundred million times a second.” Reznik took a breath. Then he plunged forward. “I was tooling around the databases last night, because I had to hang out and see if the cops needed me—well, needed my computer. I was bored, and so I went over all the weight differentials for the past few years. It’s like watching the world happen—birth and death and growth and surgeries and everything—from a long way off. Sometimes there’s a significant change from second to second, but usually it’s tiny. Just a flicker.”
“A flicker.”
“Yeah. And so I noticed this flicker that occurred on a day about eighteen months ago. The total weight on New Earth was reduced by the tiniest bit. So I thought, ‘Hmmm. Wonder what that’s about?’ And just to pass the time, I cross-checked the percentage of the change against the weight tables. Turned out that the unique weight and DNA signature of Danny Mayhew—the real Danny Mayhew, because you can’t fool those sensors—left New Earth at 3:03:01 on June 14, 2293, bound for Old Earth. The signature disappeared from the Living Tissue Database at 3:23.07. And never reappeared.”
“Meaning that Danny died.” Violet said the words with no emotion, as if she was verifying the time and temperature.
“Yeah. Meaning that Danny died.”
They were silent for a moment. The noise level in Protocol Hall had risen as the afternoon shift change approached. Violet was glad about that. She wanted noise all around her. The noise was helping to cushion her shock. It was as if somebody had wrapped her in a thick blanket.
She touched Reznik’s arm. She was pretty sure she had never touched him before.
“There’s no chance of a mistake,” she said. “It couldn’t just be that Danny left New Earth and didn’t show up on the monitors anymore.”
“No.” Reznik didn’t bristle at the fact that she was challenging him on his computer skills—the heart and soul of how he saw himself. Normally, he would have snapped the “No.” Not now. “The Living Tissue Database records all unique cellular activity on Old and New Earth. If Danny was alive—anywhere—the Database would tell us.” He wanted her to know that he had considered all the possibilities, too. All the angles. “Somebody might be able to fool the cops,” he added. “And somebody might be able to fool the immigration service. But you can’t fool the DNA sensors. You can’t fool the Living Tissue Database.” A pause. “He’s dead, Violet. He doesn’t exist anymore.”
“So why didn’t anybody find this out before?”
“Because nobody was looking. Why would they?”
Why would they? He was right, as usual. You generally only look for what you already think you might find. And you generally only find what you are already looking for.
“Are you okay?” Reznik said. “I know it’s got to be pretty awful to find out that—”
“I’m fine.”
She wasn’t fine. She was devastated. She thought her head might explode. But she had to hold it together for a little while longer. She couldn’t let go. She couldn’t give in.
“Listen, Violet—I’m here for you,” he said. “If you want to talk, I mean. Or process. Or whatever.”
“What?” she said. She’d forgotten Reznik was even present. Her mind felt as if somebody had lit a fire in the center of it, and the flame was swiftly destroying everything she thought she understood about the world.
Violet had been so relieved when they found her father, and when she saw he was unharmed. It’s just about over, she had thought. Everything is going to be okay again. We’re safe.
Yes, some of the Rebels were still out there, but Callahan would come to her senses and then she and Danny would track them down. The cops would force Stark to reveal the Rebels’ secret—the method they had devised for thwarting the Intercept. Everything would get back to normal on New Earth, with the Intercept keeping the peace.
That’s what she thought.
And now, she had just found out that somebody she loved was … somebody else.
So who was he? And why had he lied to her all this time? What was he hiding?
34
Confrontation
She found him at home in his apartment. She didn’t call first, so there was no guarantee that he’d be there—but somehow she knew he would.
He’s been waiting for this, she thought with fierce certainty, the moment the door opened and she saw his face. Dreading it. He’s been waiting for weeks. Months. He’s been waiting for this moment since we first met. Waiting for the day I discover the truth about him.
It was just a hunch, but it felt rig
ht to her.
He seemed to understand instantly what had happened, without her having to say it out loud. He looked at her face and he said: “So you know. I’m not me.”
He stood to one side and she swept past him into his living room. There was fury in her steps, but it was a well-controlled fury. She had gone from confusion to disbelief to sorrow to anger and back again to confusion—and she wasn’t finished yet. She wasn’t even close to being finished yet. There were too many emotions still out there, waiting to descend on her.
The Intercept has quite a job on its hands right now, Violet thought. Labeling her current feelings, cataloging them, would be a challenge. They were flying by much too fast. Her emotions were crazy, spinning things.
She stopped in the middle of the small room. She whirled around to face him.
“Who are you?” she demanded. “Who are you? And do not say that you can’t tell me. Do not say that.”
“Want to sit down?”
“No. I don’t want to sit down. I want to know who the hell you are. And what happened to the real Danny.”
“He died.”
She already knew the real Danny was dead—that was what had tipped off Reznik that something was not as it seemed to be—but hearing the words spoken that way, bluntly, forthrightly, was unbelievably painful to Violet.
Two words. He died. Two simple words, expressing a reality of which she was already aware—but Violet was staggered by them, all the same. She couldn’t show it, but she was. She felt a little lightheaded.
He died. Danny. Her Danny.
No. Not “her Danny.” It was more complicated than that. This man, the one standing in front of her, looking earnest and concerned—he was the man she knew by the name “Danny Mayhew.” So whoever had died was … who?
What was she grieving? A name? This man looked like Danny—but he wasn’t, according to what Rez had discovered.
Now she felt even more light-headed. Her arms and her legs seemed to be weightless. Her anger had backed off, and its retreat made her realize how much she’d been relying on its heaviness to anchor her, to keep her feet on the ground. Now that it was gone—well, she might begin drifting up and up and up, tethered to nothing.
