by S. L. Huang
I picked up the fractured circuit boards and crushed them in my hands until they cut my palms. Even if I destroyed them all, it wouldn’t help, wouldn’t help at all; my program was already on everyone’s phones, all around us, unstoppable … I could work with Checker, find out a way to reprogram all our boxes to remove it, maybe—but if we did that—
Los Angeles was poised on the edge of a gang war. Even if Rio walked everything back, I wasn’t sure it would be enough to salve the situation. If we pulled the brain entrainment now …
We ran through the night and the world burned along with its future.
Don’t you understand? Change the axioms, change the world.
My cheek hit the pavement. I’d fallen in the gutter. I blinked my eyes, staring at the curb.
Rio’s forty-six hours might have overestimated me.
Hang the fuck on, I ordered myself. You have to hang on until you fix what you did, or you’ll be responsible for a lot more than just what Rio’s planning—
Rio—
I groped for my phone.
I had to tell him it was off. Had to tell him he’d won, that I would take it all down, that he had to stop this.
My senses fractured, stabbing too sharply, numbers everywhere, so many, too many, spiraling into infinite exactitude like a black hole sucking me past its event horizon—
The phone was thick and clumsy in my fingers. I punched the numbers, the 5s and 8s crossing with the 3s and 9s. The wrong numbers. I tried to hit the button to clear it, to dial again.
“We knew this was an experiment,” someone said, backlit by fluorescent light. “Experiments fail.” The curtain drew across my blurry vision, shrouding everything.
I clawed at the curb, trying to get back upright, my fingers imprecise and useless. I had to call him off, and then I had to—to get somewhere. Checker’s place. We needed to plan, to figure out how to make everyone stand down, and then we had to undo everything—I had to get to everywhere I’d planted one of the boxes—it had taken a week to plant them; it would take a week to reprogram them—
“A week?” Laughter. “You really think she has a week, in this state?”
I was the only one who knew all the locations. The only one who could reverse it all.
The call finally went through.
“Rio,” I gasped. “You win, okay? You win. I’ll take it all down. Just stop this.”
Three tones interrupted me. “We’re sorry; you have reached a number that has been disconnected or is no longer in service. If you feel you have reached this recording in error…”
I tried to focus my eyes enough to see where I’d misdialed, to call him back, but the outlines of the phone fuzzed in too many duplicates, and my hand wasn’t working right.
My last thought before my own brain ravaged me was that Rio and Checker and McCabe and Yamamoto had all been right. Instead of saving the city, I had doomed it.
And that was going to be my legacy.
twenty-seven
I WOKE up in the middle of an empty rave.
At least, that was how it felt. Some sort of bass thumping through my brain, flashing patterns of light and color … and I was alone in a dark room.
I sat up. The room was Checker’s bedroom—the colored patterns of light alternately flitted over his science fiction movie posters and action figures and bookshelves and gadgets, bringing them to ghoulish prominence before eclipsing them back into shadow. I’d been lying on top of the quilts on the made bed. The blinds on the windows were open, but between the blinds and the glass a heavy black material had been snugged against the wall, blocking all light.
My eyes went to the door. More blacking covered the crack underneath and the edges all around the jamb.
Between the thumping bass, someone knocked, and the door cracked open. “Cas?”
The dim light from the hall felt very bright. Like I had a hangover. I ducked my face away. “What’s going on?”
Checker came in and shut the door behind him, the sound muffled by the blacking. “Are you okay? How are you feeling?”
“I’m feeling like I want to know what’s going on.” I’d been … at Arthur’s office. Rio had been fighting me. And—oh God. The brain entrainment. Katrina.
I jumped up, and the room yawed.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa, Cas! Sit down.”
The back of my knees hit the bed and I sat, hard. My short-term memory was patchy, confused, like images out of a dream. “What happened to me?”
“You, um—well. We’re pretty sure you were—well, you know.” He ducked his head self-consciously.
Dying. Going insane.
Come to that, why wasn’t I?
I frowned. My thoughts echoed in my own head in blessed silence.
“Checker,” I said. “What the hell did you do? What is all this?”
“Brain entrainment,” Checker said.
“What?”
“Ha! Now you know how I felt. Not so sanguine when it’s you being poked at, is it?” I must have looked murderous, because Checker scooted his chair back a smidge and then raised both hands in surrender. “Sorry, sorry! Um, we didn’t know what to do. We argued about whether to get Simon or Rio, but it ended up being a moot point because none of us knew how to find either of them—I imperiled my life by calling the number you gave me for Rio, but he hasn’t gotten back to me yet. We did call Doc Washington, though—you know, Arthur’s friend who’s patched up your bullet holes a time or two? Pilar got the idea to tell her to get her hands on some EEG equipment, because, you know, data, and by the time she got here we’d had the utterly fantastic brainstorm of calling Professor Sonya, too. Which is good, because Dr. W. took the EEG but didn’t have any idea what to do for you other than possibly a hospital. But we went and got all the brain entrainment math you worked out from that place of yours where we did all the programming, and we shoved it at Professor Sonya, and she looked at your brain waves and came up with this.” He waved a hand at the light show. “She says to tell you she basically used your own math on you and you should still consider working with her.”
I ignored the last part. So they’d used my own calculations to knock me back into a normal brain state.
Holy shit.
“So, uh—how are you feeling?” asked Checker.
“Fine.” I tried to push myself up again and stopped when the wall swayed. “A little dizzy,” I amended. “And … confused.” I remembered Justin dashing into Arthur’s office, but not why I’d been there. The brain entrainment—I had to disable it, had to … why did I have to?
“Confused how?”
“Not telepathy confused. Head injury confused.” It felt like I’d had a raging concussion: my brain didn’t want to put together the events leading up to it. There was only a sense of urgency, and guilt … I had to do something … something important.…
But at least I could string together thoughts linearly again, without interference from past lives. I hadn’t realized how hard it was to think until I was alone again in my head.
How long would it last? How long would I have? This wasn’t a cure—I knew that before I even asked the question. The foundational research on the Signet Devices I’d spent so long immersed in had been clear and mathematically specific: the entrainment could knock me out of an altered brain state, but there would be no way for it to solve the problem that had drop-kicked me there in the first place.
The stupid screwed-up psychology that would mow me down again. And again.
Shit.
I pushed away the inevitability of it, forcing myself to take advantage of my temporary clear-headedness. Trying to get my bearings. The chunks of events fit together like a puzzle missing two-thirds of its pieces.
My tangled sense of urgency deepened.
“What happened?” I asked Checker again.
He frowned slightly. “We used your brain entrainment math to—”
“I heard you the first time. I’m not that confused. I meant before this, when you found m
e.”
“Uh. We didn’t, for a while. Arthur was caught up in something else—”
Katrina. Right. Guilt pulsed in me, hard.
“—and for the first few hours we assumed you’d taken off to do your own thing, but then I tracked your phone, and after I picked up Pilar we, um, we found you.…” He trailed off.
Pilar, I thought. The last time I’d seen Pilar …
She’d been pointing a gun at Rio.
The guilt clawed up my trachea, and I shied away from the memory.
“I’m going to ask Professor Sonya to dial it back a bit, okay?” Checker said, and I wondered if he was deliberately changing the subject. “Keep talking to me, and try to tell me if things start going wonky for you. Okay? You promise?”
“What am I, five?”
“No, you’re a stupid and stubborn person who doesn’t like telling people when something’s wrong. But consider this for science. Tell me if you start feeling anything, okay?”
“Yeah, whatever.” Now that the brain entrainment had done its work, it wouldn’t be affecting me anymore. Checker’s concern would be better placed looking ahead to the next time I face-planted in a gutter.
That didn’t stop me from feeling a twinge of anxiety as he tapped at his phone’s touchscreen and the light and sound both dimmed a little. Checker did something else on his phone, and the room lights came to life in a soft glow behind the color.
My brain stayed silent.
I tried to stop double-checking and dwelling on how long it would last. After all, hadn’t Simon said something about how picking at the memories made them worse? Of course, trying not to think about something only made my brain try to think about it more. I concentrated on reading the titles of the books on Checker’s shelves, making patterns out of the numbers of letters in the titles, solving for regression equations that gave his paperback collection another dimension.
“Still okay?” asked Checker.
“Yeah.”
He tapped at his phone more, and the noise and light dimmed out completely, leaving us in an ordinary room with the windows and door blacked out.
Checker studied me with concern. “How about now?”
“Fine. No voices. I appear to be sane again.”
“You were hearing voices?”
“What did you think ‘going insane and dying’ meant?” I said.
“I don’t know! You weren’t exactly talking a lot about it, you know!”
A startled laugh almost choked me.
“What’s going on?” Checker demanded immediately. “Are you all right? Cas?”
“Yeah. Yeah,” I hiccupped. “It just, it feels really good to argue with you again.”
“Oh, fuck you, Cas Russell,” Checker said, but there was no bite in it.
My good humor slipped away as soon as it had bubbled up. Something was wrong. Maybe everything. Why couldn’t I think …
I pushed myself up off the bed. The floor wobbled, but I kept my balance this time. I did keep a hand against the wall, just in case. “How long was I out?”
“A day and a half, I guess? Well, I don’t know how long it was before we found you, so maybe more like a couple days. By the way, Arthur wants to talk to you—he’s switched sides now on the brain entrainment, because one of the kids he mentors—”
“Days?” The wall was suddenly holding me up. “A couple days?” That was bad, that was very, very bad—why—why was that so bad—
Forty-six hours, Rio had said.
Rio—Rio—
“Give me your phone; I need a phone right now!” I snatched Checker’s mobile out of his hands before he’d fully extended it. My fingers zipped across the touchscreen.
The line on the other end rang. And rang.
Voice mail.
Cold seeped up and clenched my heart. No. This couldn’t be happening.
The generic message played out and beeped. “It’s Cas,” I said. “Call it off, okay? I’m taking it down. LA will go back to normal. So whatever you’re doing, call it off. Call me as soon as you get this.”
“Cas?” Checker said.
I hung up the phone and checked the date and time on the brightly lit screen. Calculated. I hadn’t been in the best mental state when I’d talked to Rio, but when he’d given his deadline I’d checked the time—
Forty-nine hours and three minutes. I was three hours late.
twenty-eight
CHECKER AND Arthur and I gathered in the Hole as our war room.
Professor Halliday had wished me well and gone home, declining to become involved in whatever situation we’d embroiled ourselves in—her words. Pilar was noticeably absent. Other than assuring me she was all right, Checker and Arthur avoided my questions about her.
Rio assaulting Pilar. Yet another thing I’d let get out of control. My fault.
I had Checker set up an automated dialer for Rio, with Rio’s current phone number rather than with the permanent voice-mail box Checker had originally tried. We still hadn’t gotten through to him. I’d tried texting, too, but there had been no response.
Irreversible in forty-six hours, he’d called his plan. Rio didn’t bluff.
“Keep checking the news,” I said. “The minute we find out anything…”
“I said I’m on it, Cas,” Checker answered.
“Meantime, we gotta talk about our game plan,” Arthur said. He hadn’t said much, and he was avoiding my eyes. I’d been too afraid to ask about Katrina.
I didn’t want to hear what else I had done.
“Well, we have to abort, clearly.” I tried to assuage my guilt by making the declaration as firm as possible, regardless of the fact that it was weeks too late. “We have to. But the minute we do…”
The changing variables that had come with the brain entrainment might have thrown all of Checker’s statistical programs askew, but every iteration he ran now was telling us the same thing: with the mess of other tensions I had created in Los Angeles—even without whatever hammer Rio was dropping—the brain entrainment was the only thing keeping the city from boomeranging into an exponentially worse state than we’d brought it out of. Ironically, a lot of that would probably come from people’s anger over being affected by something they hadn’t understood, but they’d only be able to act on it fully once it was gone.
And with Rio’s provocation, the city would be needing the check more than ever. The same check that was making vulnerable kids lose their support networks and destroy themselves.
Checker coughed. I had the intense impression he was avoiding saying “I told you so.” Usually he just would have said it—almost dying must have earned me a small jot of grace.
But instead, he cleared his throat and then spoke quietly, to his keyboard. “You know, if it weren’t for … uh, practical concerns, I’d sort of like a world where peer pressure and hive minds didn’t work.”
I jerked to look at him, shocked.
He half shrugged. “Obviously we have to abort. But you were also right about there being a certain—that it gave people back their individual freedom, in a way. I … there’s something that appeals to me about that world. I don’t think it’s inherently a wrong one, just a—a different one.”
“It is wrong,” Arthur said.
I glanced between them.
“You don’t have to say that,” I said to Checker.
“I know,” he answered. “Let’s figure out how to undo it.”
Right.
Now that I had room in my brain to think, an idea had been pushing in from the sides. I absolutely, one hundred percent, and on no uncertain terms did not want to do it.
But it was an idea. And we had less than zero time to start walking this back.
“Arthur,” I said.
He looked up.
I swallowed. The echo of Valarmathi’s voice flickered, just below the surface. Waiting.
“You suggested something,” I said. “That I might be able to … give myself up. To save the city.”
&nb
sp; Arthur glanced at Checker with a frown. “Thought you gave that a go already.” The slightest thread of accusation bled through his words.
“I did,” I said. “With Rio. He said no. But we all know someone else who can get everyone in the city to step back from shooting each other. Someone who has the power.”
Checker got it before Arthur did. His face galvanized into shocked understanding. “What? No. No no no no no no no. That is a terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad idea, Cas Russell. In fact, it’s almost exactly what Pithica was doing, which is—”
“We’re on the verge of a mob war that will take out large chunks of Los Angeles the instant we start removing the brain entrainment,” I said. “You really think we should do nothing?”
“I think we should look for a third option!”
“Sometimes there is no third option,” I said. “Sometimes there’s only one shitty solution and a shittier one.”
“Arthur,” Checker said. “Help me out here. Using a telepath to solve this—a telepath you most emphatically do not trust, I might add—is not a solution!”
Arthur was looking at the floor again. “You planning on using him to kill people, Russell?”
“No,” I said.
“Then we’re not Pithica,” Arthur said, still to the floor.
I couldn’t imagine what he must be feeling. He’d supported this effort, and he held himself to a much higher standard than he did me.
I was still too much of a coward to ask about Katrina.
“Cas,” Checker tried again, “assuming you can do this in a way that isn’t completely and blatantly immoral, and assuming Simon agrees to help at all, what can one psychic do against a tide like we’re dealing with? What, are you going to march him around to every one of the bad guys and talk to them? Let me remind you that we haven’t even been able to find where the militia people are camped out, and considering how badly you’ve pissed most of the crime lords off, what are the chances they’re on the lookout to snipe you before you even get close—”
“There’s a much easier way,” I said. “You’re forgetting there’s a radio show that’s a poster child for every single person who’s mad about this.”
