As he comes over, I say, “By the way, I’m going to want to hear all that straight from her. Sorry, dude, but hearing it from your ugly mug isn’t quite the same.”
He grunts in annoyance. “She says she’ll be happy to say it in person, too.” He looks like he would rather be almost anywhere else right now. As he helps me out, he says, “Mila wants to know how you got hurt.”
“Oh, I got hit by the train,” I say casually. Then I start laughing, because what else can I do?
“Are you going to be okay, she wants to know.”
“Yes, I’ll heal up.”
“She says the cops will only be distracted for so long, so we have to go now. She’s telling me to lead you to her. And she says to tell you my name is Michael.”
“Thanks, Michael, and thanks for not killing me,” I say wryly. “How’d she manage that?”
“No comment,” he says grimly, which makes me chuckle.
We hurry south along the river as fast as I can hop on one leg, breathlessly debating where we should cross the river. There’s a dam coming up soon, but Mila insists that it wouldn’t be safe for me to go across the top of it.
Then we see it and exclaim on it at the same time—another train has stopped on the train trestle that crosses the river before the Y bridge. “We can cross on the trestle on this side of the train and it will block line of sight from the bridge,” I say.
“Good, because there are still a dozen cops on that bridge,” Mila tells me through the man.
We cross the train trestle without incident, although by now I’ve discovered at least five more places where I hurt. The right side of my head is tender, my right hip is almost as unhappy as my left hip, and I think even my sternum is somehow bruised. But all I can do is clench my jaw and keep moving.
I ask Mila via Michael whether she’s released the data yet. “Not yet,” Michael relays. “She says she’s been distracted with staying alive and keeping you alive and keeping the cops busy with the mercs.”
A few minutes later, we’ve been guided to a tire factory. Mila dismisses Michael at the door and sends him away. I duck through the door just as the clatter of helicopters approaches overhead.
About the time I determine that I have no idea where to go and can’t possibly get there by myself even if I did, Mila comes through a stairwell door. She stops in front of me, and we grin stupidly at each other for a moment before we both reach out to each other for a hug. I teeter, and she catches my weight and steadies me.
“Sorry, my leg is pretty messed up,” I say, laughing and crying at the same time.
“I’m sorry you got hurt.”
We look at each other, and both of us tear up. I stroke her face. “I was so mad at you,” I say with a shuddering laugh.
“I know,” she says. “But I couldn’t figure out how to explain everything all at once, and at first, I couldn’t understand why I didn’t remember that second video. I got overwhelmed, and I couldn’t figure out what to say. I’m not good at emotions and explanations all at the same time.”
I wipe a tear from Mila’s cheek and can’t help but chuckle. “I would say that I’ll try to remember that the next time you seem to have utterly betrayed me, but I’m kind of hoping there won’t be a next time.”
She just nods. “Let’s get upstairs and upload the data.”
Our progress is slow, with Mila carrying half my weight and steadying me as we go. My whole body hurts more and more as the shock wears off.
As we go, Mila says, “I messaged Jerry Armstead. He says our family members are safe. They’re having dinner at a cafeteria outside Cleveland right now.”
“Thank God. Mila, thank you for sending him. Where did you even find him?”
Mila shrugs and shakes her head. “He’s a hero, that’s all. He worked security at my mother’s nursing home, and he insisted on helping. Without him, my mother would be dead.”
“Without him, I think my whole family might be dead,” I say.
Once we’re upstairs in the office, she eases me into the softest-looking office chair. Then she opens up Wikileaks.org and starts uploading the data in one large file.
As Mila writes a few paragraphs explaining the data, I notice a body on the floor. I start to get up to go check his vital signs, but then my own body reminds me that I was just hit by a train. “Mila?” I ask, pointing.
“Bad guy,” Mila says. “Tell me if you see him move.”
“Is he okay?” I ask. “And did you do that to him?”
Mila glances at me with a little shrug, and my eyebrows go up.
“I think he’ll be okay,” she answers. “I just hit him on the head with that chair over there… um… a few times.”
I shake my head. “Head injuries are bad. Help me up so I can make sure he’s not dying.”
“He’s a bad guy,” Mila says. “And this one deserves a little brain damage if anyone does.”
“I’m a nurse,” I retort.
“You’re injured,” Mila says, “and he could be faking it, waiting for one of us to get close enough to grab. Help will be here very soon, I promise. Let me finish this. I’m almost done.”
I’m too exhausted and overwhelmed to argue. I space out while I keep an eye on the guy’s breathing.
In another few moments, Mila finishes her post of the explanation and the data. “With what I’ve explained here, they’ll unpack the data, analyze it, and explain it in laymen’s terms in short order. Then it will hit the media, and then they’ll finally be able to fix Eve.”
“So that’s it?” I ask. “We’re home free?”
“No,” she says with characteristic bluntness. “We’re going to go to jail again first. How soon we get out depends on the judge, Mr. Pataky, and luck.”
We hear sirens outside. “There they are,” she says. “I told you help would be here in a minute. I’ll tell Tom what room we’re in.” In response to my questioning look, she says, “Tom Lyons, the US deputy marshal. I’ve been keeping him busy taking out the remaining mercenaries with the promise that we’d turn ourselves in afterward.”
I catch her hand as she turns back toward the computer. “I’m not ready,” I protest with a laugh. “There’s so much we need to talk about.”
“We’ll have time,” she promises, squeezing my hand. “We’ll have all the time in the world.”
It sounds like a promise that she’ll be there with me. I like the sound of that.
She finishes typing a message to Tom, and then she turns back to me. “I understand you being mad,” she says gently. “I didn’t like the Mila I saw in those videos, either.”
“I’ve never understood you—not at all,” I say with a wry laugh. “But I did think that you didn’t care about people much, and it frustrated me. Do you really think you’ve changed because of me? You meant that about ‘before Phoebe’?”
“I meant it,” she says. She rolls her chair right next to mine, takes my face in her hands, and kisses me warmly.
I was important enough to her to change how she sees the world. I’m thrilled. I kiss her back, and we don’t even stop when Tom and the rest of the marshals open the door and tell us to put up our hands. As if by silent agreement, we raise our hands and keep right on kissing.
Jail is, in fact, where we go next, although we get a trip to the hospital on the way. We’re put in separate ambulances and don’t see each other at the hospital.
Exhausted beyond endurance, I wait through X-rays and examinations with my hands cuffed to the bed rail and an army of cops nearby. A doctor eventually confirms what I had expected—damaged ligaments, strained muscles, and a broken tibia. To be specific, it’s a nondisplaced partial oblique fracture, which is very lucky. A simple cast takes care of it. Then I hobble to jail on crutches.
There, weeks pass with Mila and I still cut off from the world and from each other, waiting for our fates to be decided by forces outside of our control.
Other than my twice-weekly physical therapy, I spend much of my time listening to medita
tion recordings or music from the prison library. I have no desire to watch movies, even though I thought I would. I expected to want to lose myself for a while and forget everything, but instead, my brushes with death have made me want to immerse myself and remember everything.
What I want is to stay in reality even when it’s nothing special—to watch the beams of sunlight lengthen on the wall across from my cell as the day draws to a close, taste the cold, metallic water from the fountain, and track the way my cellmates gradually relax in my presence as the time goes by until we’re sharing stories from our lives. Talking to people who share the same physical space with me for days at a time—all of us free of distracting Navi messages—is like rediscovering a foreign country where I once lived and didn’t know I missed.
Real life is steady and reassuring, I find, not like the ephemera of Navi communications.
I also relearn how my body feels when I stretch and the way my brain gradually wakes up in the morning—how pre-sleep thoughts pop back into my mind while my dream images diminish—and what it’s like to follow the same train of thought for twenty or thirty minutes at a time.
I find memories. Real ones, not the videos preserved by my Navi, which I can’t access while I’m in jail. These recollections are unsteady and fleeting, and I’m not sure I can trust their accuracy, yet I find unexpected depth and meaning in them. Maybe it’s simply that I have time to reflect on them.
My own mind is like an old friend I’m getting to know again, and I find myself to be much better company than I remembered. When I first got my implant as a teenager and first heard that slightly mechanical voice in my head, I felt an overwhelming sense of relief: never again would I be alone, trapped with my own thoughts. But now it seems to me that my Navi was its own sort of trap.
And yet, the novelty of such insights can only last so long. After I’m firmly grounded in reality, and then that reality remains the same week after week, I become restless. Bored and agitated, I find myself watching movies in my Navi again, but only one or two a day, just to break up the monotony.
Above all, I miss Mila. I have so much time to think about our tumultuous few weeks together. I couldn’t have predicted anything about it, from our unlikely meeting through a car accident to kissing passionately in my old room at my parents’ house. Yet I have a sense that I can predict what will come next. I think that Mila and I are going to last well beyond all this drama. There’s just something in my heart that tells me so. But I can’t wait to see her again and make sure of it.
The only visits I get are from Mr. Pataky, who, despite being cantankerous about our disappearance, remains willing to represent us.
On the first visit, he tells me that Eve has been patched and that no new cases of HAD have occurred, thanks to the information Mila released on the internet.
On the second visit, he tells me that they’ve devised a new treatment for those already afflicted by Eve: putting the patients in a coma and lowering the temperature of their brains until there is virtually no brain activity—a profound state of rest. It turns out that the brain is adaptable enough to heal from nearly any injury given enough time, and the freezing method shortens the time needed from months or even years down to a couple of weeks. It’s mostly working with the younger patients. The elderly don’t seem to have the resilience necessary.
They’re trying it with my brother, whose condition has remained unchanged up until now. I cross my fingers till they hurt.
Mr. Pataky also tells me that the government is beginning to dismantle the detention centers and has initiated three separate investigations into the abuses of human rights that happened there. But as Mila said, what else could they have done with those patients? Nevertheless, high-profile officials will pay with their jobs and possibly their freedom for the crime of not predicting and preparing for something no one saw except in hindsight.
Other new information has confirmed what I later learn Mila already knew: Eve was merely a visible symptom of an underlying disease, because the original purpose of Eve was to modify people’s behavior and make it more profitable. Then they got greedy and tried to increase the effects, and they accidentally introduced a bug that made the stimulation far too strong. That was the first wave. When they tried to fix it, they failed and only spread it further. That was the second wave.
And the third wave… that was for us. For me and Mila. By then, we’d learned too much and exposed too much, so they decided to make it look like terrorism and then blame the whole thing on us.
It turns out that I’d had Eve for months. Most people did. We just didn’t know it.
“They were watching everything we did, deciding when to reward us and when to punish us?” I ask Mr. Pataky at one point, aghast.
“No,” he says, looking forlorn. “They didn’t need to. Our Navis did it for them.”
“Are you giving up your Navi?” I ask him.
He snorts, his usual, brash personality reasserting itself. “Of course not. Too useful.”
In fact, according to Mr. Pataky, Navi usage is down a whopping three percent. I’m reminded of Mila’s comment about nuclear weapons and human nature. Perhaps those who didn’t get HAD feel immune or just think it won’t happen again. But what can I say? I’m among those who isn’t giving up her Navi.
On his third visit, Mr. Pataky tells me that the conspiracy has been fully mapped. Slava Knyazev, Director of Sales and Marketing for Peake International—the body on the floor in the tire warehouse—conceived of and oversaw Eve all along. He was the only one in the executive suites of any of the involved companies who knew what the program did. The rest only knew that it was a program that “incentivized” folks to buy their products. Mr. Knyazev thought it best not to reveal anything else, for the purposes of plausible deniability. The other companies loaned their resources to the “incentive program,” knowing that there was something a bit unusual and very profitable going on and willing to leave it at that.
“Will they really escape liability because they didn’t know?” I ask.
“Not by a long shot,” Mr. Pataky says. “They were responsible for doing their due diligence, and they didn’t do it. They’re not going to get away with that.”
I ask how the bad guys knew about our work at Browning Charity Hospital in order to turn us in to the FBI. According to Mr. Pataky, Mila says it was Nurse Honor Thompson, planted there by Dr. Green, who was in the pocket of Peake International.
It creeps me out to know that all these people were watching us and plotting against us while I was obliviously popping Tylenol and Dramamine, lost in my Navi and worrying about my brother. What an idiot I must have seemed. At least they’re both being charged for their collusion.
I’m profoundly disappointed when I learn on that third—and final—visit that the attorney general isn’t dropping the charges against myself and Mila. Mr. Pataky cuts me off when I try to argue. He points out that we did, in fact, commit multiple crimes. “You’ll get a chance to talk to the judge,” he says, “so save it for him.” The important thing, Mr. Pataky tells me, is to plead guilty and hope for a good plea bargain. Even then, he says, we’ll probably still face several years in prison, but that’ll be better than the alternative.
I spend my remaining jail time in a self-blaming funk. Somehow, I’d dreamed that we might walk away from this heroes. By the time they come to take me to court, I’ve convinced myself that I was a naïve fool to break the law and even more of an idiot to involve Mila. I can never make this up to her.
Once again, Mila and I are connected to the same length of chain. She looks much better this time than the previous time. She even smiles at me, and I return her smile weakly.
Once again, we’re called first to appear before the curmudgeonly Judge Elliot Keith. The same man—Mr. Harren—stands to our left, with Mr. Pataky at the lectern.
The judge surprises me by speaking to us directly, his tone irascible. “Ms. Bernhart, Ms. Bremer, you made us assurances that you would reappear
in court on your scheduled date. Instead, you chose to leave town and cost multiple states many thousands of dollars for a manhunt across state lines. You kidnapped James Bernhart from where he was receiving appropriate treatment, exposing him to needless risk of harm, and you committed multiple counts of cybercrimes in an attempt to do what should have been left to the authorities. I understand that you’re both pleading guilty to all charges. Is that correct?”
“Yes, Your Honor,” we both mumble. I don’t know about Mila, but my heart has sunk to my toes. This sounds really bad.
He turns to the prosecutor. “Mr. Harren, do you have sufficient evidence to substantiate these charges?”
Mr. Harren clears his throat. “Yes, Your Honor. We recaptured the defendants in Zanesville, Ohio. Ms. Bremer has turned over her laptop and shown us all evidence of her hacking during their absence and of how she hacked into the central Navi ID database prior to leaving town. It is undisputed by numerous eyewitnesses that Ms. Bremer accessed the Navis of multiple people without legal authorization to do so. Video cameras at Browning Hospital clearly show their kidnapping of James Bernhart, and he was also recovered in Zanesville, Ohio.”
The judge turns back to us. “Do you understand that by pleading guilty, you lose your right to a trial, and you lose your right to appeal certain decisions of this court?”
“Yes, Your Honor.”
“I understand that the attorney general is prepared to suggest certain punishments for these crimes. I am not obligated to follow his recommendations. Should I so choose, I may sentence you, Ms. Bernhart, to anywhere from…” He checks the papers in front of him. “Anywhere from thirty-six months to… all told, one hundred and sixty months, which works out to just over thirteen years. And you, Ms. Bremer, could receive anywhere from six to forty years. However, if I do not follow the recommendations of the attorney general in your sentencing, you will have the option of withdrawing your guilty plea and going to trial and preserving your right to appeal. Do you understand all of this?”
We mutter our agreement. My heart is hammering so hard, I feel dizzy.
Absence of Mind Page 29
