Free to Fall

by Lauren Miller

  “I didn’t know at first if you were like her. Growing up you didn’t seem to be, not from a distance, anyway. When you decided to come to Theden, I had to be sure. That’s why I asked Hershey to keep an eye on you. When she told me she would go to the dean, I knew I had to send her away, however I could. In retrospect, I wish I’d never involved her to begin with. I didn’t end up needing her weekly reports. I knew you heard the Doubt on the first day of class, when you threw yourself in front of that trolley. It was something Aviana would’ve done.” Dr. Tarsus paused there, and I imagined her smiling. I heard her smile fade before she went on.

  “I didn’t see what she saw. Not then. So I took my vows that night without knowing how deep the society’s power ran. Now I know too well.” Her voice was grim. “The Few may be few, but they are everywhere. They have members in every city, in every industry, at the highest level at every major company. Gnosis and Soza are just the tip of the iceberg. Slowly and steadily, they have been creating the infrastructure for their dominance.” The infrastructure for their dominance. I shuddered. It sounded like a line from a creepy conspiracy thriller. But no, this was real life.

  “But the Few have an opponent they haven’t yet overcome,” Dr. Tarsus said then. “The Doubt. A label designed by them to make the inner voice seem untrustworthy. Irrational. It wasn’t a difficult sell. After all, people who hear it do things that don’t make sense to the world—they give up what they’ve earned, they help those who don’t deserve it, they forgo what they desire. They don’t put themselves first, and selfless people are impossible to control. So the Few began to foster the idea that this ‘Doubt’ couldn’t be trusted. They created the fiction of a psychological disorder, as if the voice could be explained away by science, when, in reality, it’s the most complicated concept of our existence. The inexplicable nudge of providence that has guided the human spirit since the beginning of time. It is, I’ve come to believe, the thing that makes us human. Whether it’s coming from God or our collective conscience or some unknown part of ourselves—the voice isn’t something we can study in a lab, or put in a box. It is so much bigger than that.

  “The Few helped people forget that. Slowly, methodically, they set out to change the story. The voice people once trusted became the enemy of happiness. Something to fear. Knowing that the voice wouldn’t scream to be heard, they made sure that the world stayed loud with music and movies and 24/7 news and incessant online chatter. If they couldn’t silence the whisper, they’d bombard people with other voices. Infinite choices.

  “It worked, but it wasn’t perfect,” she went on. “There were still some who chose the voice. Who couldn’t be distracted. Who couldn’t be misled. So Project Hyperion was born. The Few would launch a new tech company. That tech company would develop a decision-making app, and that decision-making app would become a social necessity. They knew the world well. And they had patience.

  “The summer of my senior year, the society got me an internship with Gnosis,” Dr. Tarsus continued. “That’s how I ended up as Dr. Hildebrand’s research assistant that spring. It was a fortuitous accident that someone put my name on the distribution list for that internal memo you found on my pendant. As soon as I saw it, I went straight to your mom. I wasn’t afraid for my life, not back then. Just the loss of my status. I was a girl from the Bronx who’d been given this whole new life. A life I didn’t want to lose.” Heavy with shame, her voice faltered a little. She cleared her throat and kept going.

  “Your mom didn’t waver for a moment once she knew. She wanted to expose them. And with the memo and the society roster I’d put together, she had the proof she needed. Her plan was to write an open letter to all the major newspapers in the country, enclosing the memo and the roster. Every one of them would’ve run the story. Reporters were still making their own choices back then. But she said she wanted to confront Griffin’s stepfather first. Atwater was the Divine Second then. The society’s number two. Aviana felt like she needed a confession from him, if only for Griffin.”

  Dr. Tarsus’s voice was grim now. “Neither of us knew what the Few were truly capable of. We knew they were powerful, and we knew they were ruthless, but we didn’t imagine that they were murderers. I don’t know for certain that they killed your mother, but I do know they killed your father.” Her voice broke. “I hate for you to find out this way, Rory, but Griffin is dead.” My eyes welled up with tears even though I already knew. It was the sympathy in Tarsus’s voice that got to me, the unbridled compassion. “He died the night of the party,” she said softly. “Of a blood clot in his brain. He didn’t know what he was up against when he got behind that podium. He knew that the version of Lux on the Gold used a different algorithm, designed to steer people away from the Doubt, but he had no idea that people were being chemically manipulated into trusting it, or that the flu spray he got in September was riddled with nanobots.” Her voice got hard again. “Or that his bodyguard, Jason, was taking orders from someone else.”

  I’d wondered who’d pressed the button to cause that clot. How much of our conversation had Jason overheard? Was I the reason Griffin was dead?

  “I’m sure you think I’m a coward,” Tarsus said then, her voice faltering again. “With my position, my access, I should have done something myself, long ago, before it got this far. And you’re right. But I couldn’t take them on and keep my promise to your mom. So I’ve kept you safe, hoping that the day would come when I wouldn’t need to anymore. I wish that day were today. I want nothing more than for you to leave Theden, to disappear the way your mom tried to do. But while I am not as wise as your mother was, or as you are, I am no fool. I saw the look in your eyes when you stepped up to that altar. It’s the same look I saw in hers when she pulled back that hood. So if you choose to go back into the tomb, I will do whatever I can to get you out alive.” She started to say something else but seemed to change her mind. There was a shuffling sound, and the clip cut off.

  Tears were streaming down my face now, dripping onto the desk. She hadn’t told me anything I didn’t already know, or at least suspect. But her words had solidified things for me. I wouldn’t run. I couldn’t run. Not after what these people had done to my parents. To Beck. To millions of other people.

  “Rory?” North’s voice was muffled through the headphones. I pulled them from my ears, letting them drop onto the desk. “What did she say?”

  I just shook my head.

  “Is she really on our side?”

  “More than that,” I said, hoarse from the tears. “Everything she’s done, she’s done for me. She promised my mom she’d keep me safe.” I pulled the pendant from the laptop and handed it to North. “Can you put the recording on your phone? I want to listen to it again later.”

  He nodded. “Of course.” He sat on the edge of Ivan’s desk. “Do you want to talk about it?”

  I wiped away my tears. “I want to talk about how we can take those bastards down.”

  “Okay, you said you saw a Gnosis server room in your simulation,” North said. “What’d it look like?

  I described it in as much detail as I could.

  “And what about security?”

  “Numerical password and a voice recognition mic.”

  “Voice recognition. Yikes. How’d you get through in the simulation?”

  “I was her. Tarsus. I couldn’t hear what she was saying, but her voice got me through the door.”

  North chewed on his lip. “You said she’d be at your initiation, right? If we could get to the room undetected, would she let us in?”

  The hope that had all but vanished came surging back. “You have a plan,” I said, leaping to my feet and slamming my knees against the underside of the desk in the process.

  “Well, technically it’s your plan,” North replied, the corners of his mouth turning up just a little. “I’m just a sucker for a challenge. Plus, the timing is just too perfect. It feels like a gift.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Th
e utility companies are shutting off the power grid tomorrow afternoon to protect the transformers from the solar storm. Gnosis claims its systems are grid-independent, so its taking its servers off the grid at midnight tonight.”

  “Why?”

  “So they’ll keep running during the blackout, I guess. The utilities are saying that power could be out for twenty-four hours.”

  “God forbid that people be without Lux for that long,” I said sarcastically.

  “The good news for us is that the entire Gnosis system will be offline tonight from midnight to two a.m. eastern for maintenance.”

  “Including Lux,” I said. I felt my pulse pick up.

  North nodded. “Which means if we can get this done while the servers are down, we might be able to do it undetected.”

  “But won’t people be in the server room during that time? Like, working or whatever?”

  “I doubt it,” North replied. “It’s freezing in server rooms, and super loud. And it’s not like Gnosis employees need to be in the room to access the servers anyway—they can get in through the company’s internal network.”

  My heart was racing now. “Oh my gosh. We could really pull this off.”

  “There’s still a lot to figure out,” North cautioned. “Assuming Tarsus can get us past security, we’d still have to find the terminal, and then I’d have to—”

  “The terminal. What is that?”

  “The entry point for the system. A machine with a keyboard and a screen. It’s how you—”

  I cut him off again. “I saw it. Three screens, a glass desk that looked like a giant touchpad. It was surrounded in copper mesh.”

  “Okay, so we found the terminal,” North said. “But we still don’t know how tight the security is on the machine itself. And we won’t know until we get in there.”

  “Not we,” I corrected. “I. I’m doing this alone.”

  “Like hell you are,” North scoffed. “First of all, there’s no way you could pull this off without me. What we’re talking about is a figure-it-out-once-I’m-in-there kind of thing. I couldn’t tell you how to do this even if I wanted to. Not until I see it. Second, I love you way too much to let you walk into that place alone.”

  With a sharp pang, I realized this might be my last chance to say it back. Though I was forcing myself to ignore it, I couldn’t shake the awareness of just how dangerous this plan of ours really was. “I love you too,” I said softly. “But how will we possibly get you in there?”

  “Liam always brings you in, right? In a hooded robe?” North shrugged. “I’ll be Liam.”

  “If they catch you—”

  “They won’t catch me. And so what if they do? You said there’s the serpent, an owl, and a fox, right? With Tarsus on our side, it’s three against two.”

  The knot in my stomach loosened a little. North’s confidence was contagious.

  “The only question is, how do we take Liam out of commission for a couple of hours?” North asked.

  “We roofie him,” I said without hesitation. “It’ll incapacitate him without killing him, and it’ll screw with his memories.”

  “Oh, okay. I’ll just grab the bottle of date-rape pills I have in my medicine cabinet.”

  “Not pills,” I corrected. “Has to be injectable. There’s no way we can guarantee that he’ll drink whatever we put it in.”

  North gave me an incredulous look. “You’re actually serious?”

  “What? It’s what the society uses. And it’ll do exactly what we need it to do.”

  North tugged at his Mohawk. “I know we don’t have time to get into this right now, but, holy crap, Rory, this shit is seriously messed up.”

  “You’re right. Not the time. We have to go buy roofies.”

  “Where, at Walgreens? I’m sure we’ll find them right next to the Advil.”

  I crossed my arms, irritated by the sarcasm. “You’re a guy with a Mohawk and tattoos. Don’t you know people?”

  “People with Rohypnol?”

  “So you don’t know anyone who can get it?”

  He started to shake his head but seemed to think of something. “One of my clients is a pharmacist in Greenfield. I could probably get a prescription sleeping serum from him. Something potent but legal. I can message him from my apartment.”

  “We need to fill Hershey in anyway,” I said, grabbing the laptop and headphones.

  We thanked Ivan and hurried out. After a quick stop at Paradiso to tell Kate that North wouldn’t be coming back to work, we headed up to North’s apartment with coffee and one of every pastry in the café’s glass case.

  “Hershey?” I called out when we stepped inside. But the living room was quiet.

  “She’s with mystery boy,” North said. “She came by this morning for her bag. She said she was gonna stay at his place for a few days.” His place. So he definitely didn’t live on campus. Or with his parents.

  I gnawed on the inside of my bottom lip. My boyfriend didn’t go to Theden or live with his parents. That didn’t make him a psycho killer. Hershey had been hooking up with this guy, whoever he was, for a while. He wasn’t a stranger. And she was Hershey. She could take care of herself.

  North had disappeared into his closet. When I joined him, he’d already launched what looked like a chat box on his screen. “This is how I communicate with my clients,” he explained. “It’s a private chat program. It’ll call his handheld and beep three times, signaling that he should log in.”

  A few minutes later the guy did, and North started typing.

  “He’ll do it,” North said, and grinned. “He’s at the pharmacy now. It’ll be ready in fifteen minutes.” He spun around in his chair and looked at me.

  “We’re really doing this,” I said.

  North’s brow furrowed. “It’s what you want, right?”

  “Absolutely. It’s just—” My voice caught. “I don’t want anything to happen to you.”

  “I don’t want anything to happen to you.”

  “But I got myself into this. You didn’t. You got dragged in by me.”

  “You clearly don’t know me as well as I thought you did,” North said. “I don’t get dragged into things, Rory. I’m doing this because I want to. Because what these people are doing is wrong. And because the voice in my head is saying the same thing that yours is.”

  “Fear not,” I whispered. North met my gaze and nodded.

  “Fear not.”

  32

  WHILE NORTH TOOK HIS MOTORBIKE to the pharmacy in Greenfield, I stayed behind to wait for Hershey. We’d decided to leave for North’s apartment in Manhattan as soon as we got out of the tomb, so this might be my last chance to say good-bye. If we pulled this off, we’d have to disappear.

  Our plan was actually pretty simple. We’d decided to manufacture chaos by reprogramming Lux to direct Gold users into their threats and weaknesses instead of away from them, enabling people to experience the moments the Few were so intent on keeping them from— and throwing a massive wrench into their daily schedules in the process. It wasn’t breaking the shackles, exactly, but if people’s lives were thrown off kilter, maybe they’d look up from their screens. Maybe they’d seek guidance from somewhere other than the shiny gold box on their wrists. It was all we could do, really. Lay the groundwork. In the end, people had to choose.

  I formed them free and free they must remain. I saw the quote from Paradise Lost differently now. The Few hadn’t changed human nature. They hadn’t taken away free will—they didn’t have the power to do that. Yes, the nanobots in people’s brains were manufacturing a sense of trust, leading them to blindly put their faith in Lux, but those tiny machines weren’t dictating their choices. Nobody was. Nobody could, not even God. It was the message on Griffin’s ring. Steinbeck’s timshel. Thou mayest. With Lux, people were simply choosing not to choose. We had to remind them that they still could.

  We were optimistic. After seeing Beck’s Lux profile and my reaction to it, North had started clickin
g through Lux profiles randomly, looking at the users’ threats and weaknesses. As it turned out, there were some that appeared on nearly every profile, so he’d started cataloging the repeats. Synchronicity, serendipity, and sunsets, for example, were common threats. As were unfulfilled expectations and unanticipated delays. Meanwhile, the same five traits appeared almost universally as user weaknesses. Patience, compassion, humility, gratitude, and mercy. Their antitheses—instant gratification, smugness, confidence, entitlement, and indifference—were at the top of nearly every strengths list. Our plan was to keep the app’s existing algorithm but change the variables. If North got the code right, our modified version of Lux would manufacture the scenarios it had previously been programmed to avoid. I didn’t know exactly what to expect if we succeeded, but I knew that if the Few were keeping people from having them, then these types of experiences—moments of compassion, of mercy, of gratitude, of humility—must be powerful. I kept thinking of the way Hershey acted after I helped her study for her midterms. She was a recipient of my grace that night, and it changed her.

  I put my earbuds in and pressed play on Tarsus’s recording. North had put it on his iPhone like I’d asked, and since he’d been gone, I’d listened to it three more times. As Tarsus spoke, I pulled my legs up under me and closed my eyes. Focusing on my breath, I tried to clear my brain of its whirling, fruitless worry. In . . . Out . . . In. My breath sounded like the ocean, or like the wind.

  The wind blows wherever it pleases, I heard the voice say. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going.