Dark Mind Rising

by Julia Keller

  He chuckled. “You never bother with the small stuff, do you, Violet? No runaway dogs or cheating boyfriends for your detective agency. No, sir. You skip right on up to the fate-of-New-Earth stuff.”

  “Call me an overachiever.”

  “I think I can just call you Ogden Crowley’s daughter. Comes to the same thing.” Now he, too, became serious, letting the smile die on his face. “Okay. I know you wouldn’t have come all this way unless it was pretty damned important. Tell me what’s going on. And what—if anything—I can do.”

  She told him about the suicides. And about how someone might be persuading the victims to take their own lives so that their deaths only looked like suicides.

  “So how,” he said, “do you force people to kill themselves?”

  She paused. She knew the answer would hit him hard. “I’m guessing here, but what I think you do is put ideas in their heads. Visions. Memories. Bad ones. Ones they can’t live with. Somehow the pictures are getting into their heads. And words. Words that sap all the life force from them. According to some written notes at the death scenes, it’s like a … a screaming.” She took a deep breath. “And we both know what kind of device would be able to implant a screaming in the mind.”

  His face changed. It had had very little color to begin with, and now even that scant bit drained away. “No.” A choked whisper instead of a word.

  “Yeah. Yeah, I think so.”

  “But the Intercept was destroyed. You destroyed it—you and Kendall Mayhew. Protocol Hall, the entire computer infrastructure—you blew it up. It’s gone, Violet. It doesn’t exist anymore.”

  “Wishful thinking, as it turns out.”

  He shook his head.

  “Can it really be true?” he said. “The Intercept … is back?”

  “The evidence sure points that way.”

  Now his incredulity turned into agitation. “But how could somebody just—wait. Hold on.” He waved a bony hand in front of his eyes, like someone clearing a dirty windshield. “Never mind how it found its way back into operation. No time for that now. What can I do to help you fight it? Get rid of it again?”

  “I can’t totally dismiss the how. I’ve got to figure out who revived it. That may be the key to shutting it down for the second time. That’s why I wanted to talk to you. When you were running the Rebels of Light, I know you tried everything you could think of to get rid of the Intercept. Violence didn’t come into the picture until you had exhausted every other avenue.”

  “So you read the statement I made at my trial.”

  Violet frowned. “Of course I did, Paul. I followed the proceedings every day. The title of your manifesto is how it went from being known as the Intercept to the Dark Intercept. You renamed it. And you and your group almost cost my father his life.”

  “I never meant to—”

  “Forget it,” she said, cutting him off. “That’s over and done with. And you’re serving your time. I brought it up because in the early days, when you had just formed the Rebels, you told the court that you tried to find somebody who understood the Intercept well enough to fight it.”

  “That’s right. A genius who’d be the equal of Kendall Mayhew—someone who could, in effect, undo what he’d done.” He snapped his fingers. “I get it. You’re thinking that if somebody could unravel it, then maybe they could—well, ravel it. From scratch.”

  “Yeah. So who’d you find?”

  He shook his head. “Nobody, Violet. I’m sorry, but the answer is nobody. We got lucky when we discovered the drug that would make people immune to it for short periods of time. But that’s what it was—luck.” He moved restlessly around the small cell. Violet was tempted to call it pacing, but it really wasn’t; it was a sort of slouchy lurch, the same style of movement that everyone in a HoverUp tended to use. “Now, the truth is,” Paul added, “plenty of people might be able to build it from Kendall’s notebook. If they had the formulas, the schematics, the computer coding—yeah, okay. Sure. That’s paint-by-numbers stuff. But to rebuild the Intercept from the ground up? Without instructions? Nope. No way. Now, if your killer had Kendall’s notes, he would have a chance. But that’s impossible because you and Kendall destroyed every last particle of it. Right?”

  Violet didn’t answer. She was remembering the day two years ago when she and Kendall set the detonator, dumped Kendall’s notes on the floor of Protocol Hall, and then raced down the steps of the immense glass-walled tower, searching for a safe place to ride out the blast, the one that would destroy the Intercept forever—and along with it, any possibility of ever rebuilding it.

  And then, at the last minute, she had whirled around, run back inside, grabbed some pages scattered across the floor, and …

  “Right, Violet?” Paul said.

  “What? Oh, right. Absolutely.”

  “Okay, then. Nobody on New Earth—or Old Earth, for that matter—could re-create the Intercept without a template,” Paul concluded. “Not your buddy Steve Reznik, as smart as he is. Not even Kendall Mayhew could reproduce all of his work, most likely, without the original diagrams to go by. The Intercept is a once-in-a-lifetime creation.” He frowned. “So how is somebody doing it? The schematics were destroyed. And just as puzzling—why is somebody doing it? Why harm those particular people?”

  “That’s what I’ve got to find out.”

  “You’re looking for a deranged killer who also has the technical ability to rig up a new Intercept. With nothing to go on.”

  She nodded, but that wasn’t quite accurate. The killer might very well have something to go on.

  The thought dug at Violet’s conscience.

  “Hey,” Paul said. “Can I change the subject for a minute?”

  “Sure.”

  He looked around, embarrassed. “I don’t know how to ask this, but … do you ever hear anything about Michelle? I’ve never even seen her. Not once. I’ve sent her messages over the years, whenever the warden lets me, but Michelle … won’t answer.”

  Michelle Callahan was his wife. She had also been the police chief on New Earth, back when the Rebels were trying to take down the Intercept. In the midst of an epic battle, she, too, had disobeyed the authorities of New Earth. She was serving her sentence in this very same prison.

  “No,” Violet said. “I’m sorry. I don’t know anything about her.”

  He didn’t speak for a time. The jets of his HoverUp made a whish-whoosh, whish-whoosh sound.

  “I miss her,” he said. “In spite of everything she did to me, I miss her. I always will.”

  Violet nodded as if she were thinking about Paul and Michelle, but she really wasn’t. She was thinking about secrets. Right now, the weight of her worst secret—the one she shared with Kendall—was pressing down on her with a force that rivaled all the stones in this mountain prison combined.

  * * *

  Rez stood in the waiting room. He was reading a long article on his console about the harvesting and repurposing of neutrinos. Violet knew the topic because he launched into the technical details the moment she appeared—and he didn’t take a breath until she held up her hand like a stop sign.

  “How’d it go with your parole officer?” she asked.

  “He’s pretty bored by Olde Earth World. But I don’t care. I’m just supposed to keep him in the loop. And that’s done. Now we can go look at the progress I’ve made on the Riptide Ride.”

  “The what?”

  He grinned. Violet couldn’t ever recall seeing Reznik grin before. Smile, yes; smirk, absolutely. But grin? A grin was a sign of an easygoing joy. There was nothing easygoing about Steve Reznik.

  “The Riptide Ride,” he repeated. He didn’t repeat it in an irritated, why-didn’t-you-listen-in-the-first-place way. He repeated it with a little sprig of delight in his voice, as if he couldn’t say it enough times. “That’s the tentative name. I may change my mind later. But for now, that’s it. The coaster’s going to dip in and out of the ocean. It’ll be under the surface at least 60 perce
nt of the time.”

  “Um … won’t the riders get a little wet?”

  “The cars’ll be covered. Bubble-tops,” he replied patiently. “The coaster will go from land to water to land and then back to water again. A lot of swooping. A lot of climbing and diving. It’s going to go on for hundreds of miles. I’ve already put in the first sections of track—well, the scaffolding for the track sections, at least. Now that I can crank out the specs on the quantum computer, the progress has been amazing.”

  Violet started to ask him more about it, but then she realized that, right at the moment, she didn’t care about the Rip-Roaring Whatever-the-Hell-It-Was. She didn’t care about any of the other rides, either, that Rez was so eager to tell her about. She just didn’t.

  She was tired. She was discouraged. She was right back where she’d started from. Paul Stark hadn’t offered any useful information. And her grief for Delia had suddenly emerged again with a fresh fierceness. She’d managed to put it aside long enough to conduct the interview, but now it was back.

  “Hey, Rez. Can I take a rain check on the … um … the…” She was blanking on the name again.

  “The Riptide Ride.”

  “Yeah. That.”

  He shrugged. “Sure.”

  She could see how disappointed he was, but so be it. She’d look at the sites for his rides later.

  She had to hurry back to New Earth. And go to work.

  25

  Dance Fever

  But she didn’t go to work.

  By the time she alighted on New Earth, it was already dark. Violet found herself heading instinctively toward Redshift. She was still in a sort of mild shock over Delia’s death and over her certainty that somebody had revived the Intercept. She still hadn’t found any answers for Charlotte and Jeff Bainbridge. She didn’t know what linked the victims. But instead of going back to the office and devising a strategy, she went out to do the only thing she seemed to do well these days: dance.

  Another bouncer guarded the entrance to Redshift. She was a lithe, muscular woman with black skin, peroxide-blond dreads, a bright purple tank top, and crinkly black yoga pants.

  “Name?” The bouncer kept a protective hand on the golden double doors in case she didn’t like the answer.

  “Violet Crowley.”

  The woman’s eyes widened. She dropped her hand and stepped to the side.

  “Go on.”

  Violet usually hated that—hated the automatic deference that came from being the daughter of New Earth’s first president. Tonight, it was kind of nice. Saved her from a few seconds of arguing.

  The moment she pushed opened the double doors, she was engulfed by colors and sounds and the complicated smell of overheated bodies and a hundred different perfumes. And once those doors closed behind her, she was captured by the music and the flashing lights and the thick crush of people. She felt her troubles dissolve in the heat and the noise, just melting away. She didn’t have a specific dance partner; she didn’t need one. It was the kind of night when being young and being on New Earth—and being in motion—were the only things that mattered.

  And that feeling, in turn, reminded her of a line from a poem her father had read to her once. Ogden Crowley loved to take a big book down from the long shelf in his library and move slowly to his reading chair and then share a favorite poem with her. It was always a poem from long ago:

  Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven!

  “Violet! Hey, Violet! Over here!”

  Without stopping the wild, made-up dance she was doing, she looked around for the source of the greeting. The bearded face was semi-familiar. Some guy she’d gone to school with. And his name was … Don? Doug? Dante? Dominic? Dimitri? She vaguely remembered that he’d asked her out a few times. She had turned him down, but in a nice way. Now he was next to her, dancing even faster than she was, his long blondish-white hair flying out behind him.

  “Hey!” she shouted even though she knew he’d never be able to hear her over the music.

  “Wanna dance?” he said. Or at least that’s what she assumed he said. It reminded her of communicating with somebody on Old Earth. You had to do a lot of guesswork. And filling in the blanks.

  She nodded. He nodded. Before she knew it, they were together, jumping and crashing happily against other people, people who laughed and pushed them back toward each other. Violet spun around until she felt terrifically dizzy. She almost lost her balance a few times, but there was always somebody to grab her before she hit the floor.

  And that was how she spent the next several hours, shaking off the worries that had been following her around for days. She drank more than she should have—Don or Doug or whatever the hell he called himself kept bringing her fresh Neptunia Nodes before she’d finished with the one she already had—and she danced and she danced. If an emotion started to rise in her, she countered it with another drink, another mad flurry of dancing. She fought back against the feeling, so that it couldn’t bother her anymore.

  I finally know what to do about emotions, she thought. Never stand still long enough to let them catch up to you.

  26

  Oliver’s Final Ride

  Oliver Crosby sat in his car.

  The darkness was absolute. It felt like the last word in an argument. Oliver didn’t mind that; he found it rather comforting to be held in the night’s tight grip. He couldn’t move. He couldn’t drive away. He couldn’t drive away even if he wanted to, which he didn’t, but the decision was now officially out of his hands.

  The lot was empty now except for his car and one other, in the far corner. He knew this lot so well. He’d parked here every weekday for a year and a half. The New Earth authorities—busybodies, know-it-alls—were always harping at you to take a tram to work, to save wear and tear on the roads, to be mindful of the crucial ecological balance. But Oliver liked to drive. In fact, he loved it. What nineteen-year-old didn’t? And so he’d said to hell with them. He’d drive whenever he damned well pleased.

  Inside the block-long, four-story brick box next to the lot, its windows lightless because the workday was long over, was his former office. He could still see the inside of that office in his mind’s eye, just the way he had arranged it, just the way it looked on his last day at work: desk, chair, computer.

  He had designed guidance systems for self-propelled transport pods. He was very good at his job. And proud of what he produced. Pods were a challenge; you had to factor in the tremendous heat created by a controlled plummet down to Old Earth and, on the return trip, the equally ferocious heat generated by the propulsion system that lifted the pod from the gritty surface of that dying relic of a planet.

  Yet as orders for pods had begun to drop dramatically, the company shifted to making decorative keyboard covers for desktop consoles. Pretty flowers and dancing unicorns and happy dolphins. In assorted colors.

  Oliver Crosby was laid off, along with about four-fifths of his department. After a long search, he’d found a job with a company that made guidance systems for self-propelled vacuum cleaners.

  It wasn’t great, but it would do. At least he wouldn’t have to move back in with his parents. Or download dolphin images all day long. He was fairly happy. Moderately satisfied.

  Until.

  Until today, when he’d felt a funny twitch in his head, just after lunchtime. It wasn’t a big deal.

  Then it intensified.

  Twitch. Twitch. Twitch.

  He shook his head. Shook it again. The twitches had started coming faster. He didn’t see how it could get any worse.

  And then it did.

  At that point, Oliver did what he always did when he was nervous, jittery, or unsettled for any reason: He drove. He walked out of his new office in the new building and he got in his car and he drove the streets of New Earth, moving from Franklinton to L’Engletown to Farraday to Mendeleev Crossing and back to Franklinton. Then he drove that route all over again.

  The after
noon slanted into dusky twilight. The twilight collapsed into night.

  By now, the twitches had taken over his brain, and it was all he could do to keep hanging on to the steering wheel. He was like a man clutching a bobbing buoy in the midst of a frantic, roiling, deadly ocean.

  A picture moved into his line of sight. It wasn’t real; it was happening in his brain, which somehow made it more real than the images right in front of him, images of roads and trees and other cars—and it clung to his thoughts like the wrapper on a piece of candy.

  He was back in his office, in the job he loved. Designing guidance systems. Busy and fulfilled.

  You’ll never be that happy again. Ever.

  The words hit hard. A deep sadness moved unstoppably through his body.

  That was the peak. And you’re only nineteen. So think of all the years you have left—all those long, empty years, working at a job you don’t really like. A job anybody could do.

  He had stopped at a drugstore along the way. He thought the PharmRob who waited on him might ask if he was okay—by now Oliver was flinching with every twitch, wasn’t he?—but it didn’t, which made him realize his body wasn’t jerking or flailing or flinching or anything. It was all happening inside his head.

  He pulled into this parking lot. The one he knew so well. The lot made him remember everything.

  Never.

  Never, never, never.

  Never again will you be as happy as you were back then. Your joy is all behind you now.

  Oliver felt a rush of oncoming bleakness. He had a vision of trudging through the days ahead, counting the hours, counting the minutes, until he would be old and gray, and death would rescue him.

  You don’t have to wait. You can do it yourself. And avoid all of the pain between now and then.

  Oliver opened the bottle of sleeping pills.

  Something inside him, a last vestige of the carefree guy he’d been, the one who loved the open road and who had friends and plans and a future, put up a brief, brave fight. But the screaming in his head won.