The Veritas Project

by C. F. E. Black

  Not wanting to face the guilt I’ll feel if I look at him, I watch Maxima as she walks ahead of me. I broke Codex despite Marcus’ warnings, yes. To him, I’m sure it looks like I chose recklessness over him. Over my shoulder, I whisper, “Freedom shouldn’t have to be a choice.”

  Sitting in our pale domus living room waiting for the inevitable, I hear a door click. My heart stutters.

  “V?”

  Just Marcus. I swallow a gulp of air. I’ve been waiting for someone in navy scrubs to come and stick me with a tranquilizer, wheel me away to some torture lab.

  “Yeah?” I clear my tablet, which had been the only light in the room, and activate the lamp feature. I set the glowing square on the couch beside me.

  Marcus’ contoured face slides into the bluish light. “You’re still here.”

  He slumps onto the couch, which tips the light toward him, carving his cheeks into jagged mountains just touched by sunrise. It’s two a.m. and we shouldn’t be awake. In three hours our wristbands will wake us up, time for labs. But I won’t be here in three hours.

  “Congratulations, by the way,” he says. “On your sequence. I saw that part loud and clear in the stream.”

  “Thanks,” I whisper, not wanting to wake up our sleeping Order. “I haven’t heard a word. Not about my sequence, not about what Julius and I did, not about anything.” Pulling my knees up to my chest helps me feel safer … from the navy scrubs that are surely coming and from Marcus; he’s so close and we’re so alone. “Think they’ve figured it out yet?”

  “I think …” He presses his forehead into his palms. From between his hands, he says, “V, I don’t know what they’re going to do to you, and to Julius, but it won’t be good.”

  “Well, he helped me have a minute of free thought. That’s worth whatever they do.”

  “Is it?” He snaps his head up. “The Director will know—probably already does know. It’s almost like you’re testing him.” He narrows his gaze. “Like you’re daring him, just to see what he’ll do to you.”

  I scoff. “Our minds are trapped, Marcus! They are controlled!”

  “But he could take you away from me. Forever.”

  Blinking, I try to process what he just said. A few times, I open my mouth, then close it again without a word. What is he doing? He’ll get fried for saying that. My eyes remain fixed on my ankles for several minutes of thick silence.

  “I miss streaming with you,” I say finally. The words feel like ants crawling out of my mouth and my body twitches. You’re fried anyway. Relax.

  His face inches forward, his eyes deep in shadow above his cheekbones. “I know.” His left hand leaves his knee and travels to the space beside my neck on the back of the couch. I stiffen, aware of his hand like it is a poisonous spider. “But we’ll be all right. I’ll never forget streaming with you.” His hand moves—the spider leaps!—and lands on my cheek.

  A marching band strikes up within me. Oh, please take it away! This kind of physical touch is more than I can bear, more than I have ever had in a single day, save when they give us our examinations—but those are so cold and gloved and impersonal. This is personal. This is electrifying.

  I can’t speak; my words have galloped away somewhere. All I know is his warm hand on my face. Automatically, I push back a little, drawing his hand off my skin, though as soon as it’s gone, I miss it.

  His eyes are so loud, or is it his chin, his mouth—what is it about his face right now that I’ve never seen before?

  Stop it. It’s Marcus, for crying out loud.

  “Marcus.” I’d managed to lasso his name. Just his name.

  “I’m sorry, I—” He scratches his head with the offending hand. “Didn’t mean to—”

  “Oh no, it’s fine!” I yelp, a little too loudly. You sound like a ridiculous idiot. I breathe in, collecting myself. “No, I’m sorry. I’m acting so …” Eye contact, there you go. “It’s all right. I’m just … scared.”

  He smiles; the marching band picks up tempo. “It’s going to be okay. I’m scared too of what they are going to do to you, but I hope you’ll come back to me soon.”

  He’s breaking all kinds of Codex now. “Stop. There’s no need for you to get fried, too.” But inside me, the marching band has just reached a crescendo.

  He leans forward again; I try to breathe evenly. “V, before you go … before they take you …”

  He swallows, reaches for my hand, a much safer thing to touch than my face, but no less exhilarating. I feel more right now than I think I ever have. More than when they told me I’d been picked for the genetics lab. More than my first day with the toys in the gen lab. More than the day I met Marcus. And more than I did yesterday when my thoughts were my own.

  “I want to tell you something.” His voice is near and very low.

  “Don’t say anything!” I warn. I don’t want him to get in more trouble than he has to.

  “It’s about what I remember … from before.”

  My eyelids flutter.

  “You asked if I remembered anything. Well, there’s just one thing that reminds me I didn’t grow up here. You’re not going to like it. I remember—”

  The door to our domus slides open.

  “You remember what?” A voice, a woman in the doorway. Navy scrubs. Not now!

  My first instinct is to stand up, face my enemy. I nearly bump full body into Marcus as I scramble off the couch. The marching band is dead, bombed by an unforeseen jet. Even as his hand slides around mine again in the dim light, I don’t think of it. I think only of the woman approaching me, the small item in her hand that will wipe me out.

  “This will be easier if you sit back down,” she says coolly.

  “What if I go willingly?” It’s worth a shot.

  “That will not be necessary.” The woman is my height, with less distinct features, less perfect genes, of course. But she’s the one holding the syringe, not me. I’ve never seen her before, so she is not part of our domus staff. “Sit down, please.” She glances between us. “Both of you.”

  There are two syringes. They knew! Of course they knew! Rage fueled with panic bubbles into my bloodstream, and I crush Marcus’ hand with all my might. Fight takes over and I start screaming, hoping to wake every last person asleep in domus number five.

  “You knew he’d be here! You read it straight out of our heads! You were waiting for this!” I direct my screams at the woman now pushing against my shoulders. I direct my screams through her, to the earpiece she is wearing, to the Director himself. To Daddy. “You can’t do this! You can’t program a person to be a certain way and then try to boil out all the imperfections!” I’m fighting the woman, shoving against her with my hands as I fall back, punishing her thighs, stomach, groin with my heels. Faces have appeared at bedroom doors.

  And then a syringe pricks as she connects the needle with my flailing arm. Quick as a synapse, the fight is sucked out of me, and I sink to my knees, watching as she stabs a shocked Marcus in the arm with another needle. She wanted me to see this. Daddy wanted me to see this.

  A tunnel consumes the room, then my brain. Gone.

  Eleven

  Flashes, pain, light! Then the memories come flying. My body convulses in the chair, head and limbs pinned down. This time instead of pouring new things in, the streams pour my soul out. I feel it, I taste it, and yet I cannot stop it.

  Marcus’ arrival—a transfer! His blue eyes, his deep voice, his seat beside mine in Microtech class. The first day he walked with me to lunch. The time he saw me in the Rat and asked me, out of the blue, to stream with him. Our workouts together while we were on the same Rat schedule. His voice when he says my name.

  All of it slithering through the cable and out of my head. All of Marcus, all of it leaving, and in the wake of those memories, haze.

  The process stops, the cable retracts out of my head. The light above me shifts from green to harsh white. My body jerks, pulling up bile from the depths of my stomach. I retch into the tr
ash tube beside the chair. There, that too. Take it all, everything inside of me.

  I’m not sure how long they repeat the streaming. Every time, they pull out the same memories: Marcus, from the day I met him eight months ago; my code breaking with Julius; and my anger. All the times I can remember getting angry, they try to take those. And they begin to replace the memories with altered versions of those events. They try to make me see Marcus from the point of view of our other Order members—from their point of view, he is nothing but another Five.

  But for some reason, this fails.

  My mind holds on to these memories the way hydrogen holds on to oxygen. Something in my mind, some part of me, keeps regurgitating the memories. They are woven into my neurons, my cells, my blood. I think it’s starting to annoy them.

  “Valeria V, can you tell me the last thing you remember?” An aging, cyan-haired woman wearing navy scrubs and magenta lipstick sits in a rolling chair beside me, sliding her fingers across the t-screen displayed in between us.

  I reach for the back of my neck, rub around the small, itching spot. My fuzzy hair feels a whole week softer. In my head, words form, but I can’t make them surface. The room looks clear but distant. The woman repeats the question.

  Her skin hangs ever so slightly looser under her chin. She’d benefit from my skin research. Ah, here come the words.

  “Your name is Wynn. You have been streaming me over and over again. The last thing I remember is getting streamed.” My stomach roars.

  “Phillip, yes, bring her dinner.” The woman brings her finger down from her ear and looks at me with dead eyes. “We didn’t want any more vomit decorating this room.” Was that humor? “But your dinner is on its way. Now, tell me the last thing you remember before you were brought in here. Think back to before—”

  “Marcus was sitting beside me, holding my hand. That’s what I remember. And you—or whatever her name was—stepped in and fried us both.”

  The frown that ensues shows me just how old this woman really is—and just how tired. “I see.” A heavy sigh. More swiping around on the t-screen.

  “You know we have all kinds of topical things and treatments to prevent skin aging? Surely they provide you with this as part of your benefits?” I’m sitting up now, head no longer reeling, stomach still calling for Phillip. “You really are an attractive woman, considering you must be in your fifties, at least.”

  Wynn stops, fingers poised above the screen, mouth ajar. A tiny scoff escapes her lips. “Motherless beast!” she hisses, then goes back to typing.

  My eyes bulge; it’s my turn to look shocked. “What did you call me?” You are nothing but a generic human; how dare you insult me! I think about saying this out loud, but then I recall that I am in the detention ward of the Center, and she is my captor. I am under her authority now, no matter how much better I may be on the genetic level.

  “All you gen-eng brats think you’re better than the rest of us. Oh, the trash they feed your brain in infancy!” She shakes her head. “And it works! You’re born out of a sickening bodyless organ and raised by science and you think you own this place.” Her dark eyes dart at me. “But what do you know of the real world? You know nothing.” She laughs a single, jarring note. “You think you’re so smart, but you don’t know anything about life out there.” Now a look of pity enters her eyes, and she shakes her head once again, a gentler motion.

  I know plenty about the world, you fool.

  “And I suppose you are the expert on genetic code, on vaccinations that are saving our planet, on microtechnology that makes prosthetics move and feel and bleed?” I’m standing now. “Or perhaps you understand the way nuclear fission or programmable photosynthesis powers much of what you used to fix your chemically-altered hair this morning? No, Wynn, you are the one who understands little about this world. Science may have raised me, but science is what runs this planet, including your tiny, insignificant piece of it.”

  The door beeps then slides open. Phillip with my dinner.

  “What is going on here?” he asks, tray in hand, confused. He is a small man, bearded.

  I wait, eyes back on the woman in front of me.

  “Just working some things out, Phil. Leave the food.”

  So, she wants to keep this between us, at least for now. Interesting.

  The soup is hot, but I let it scald my tongue on the way down.

  They move on from trying to erase Marcus to trying to punish me for my moment of freedom. They try the box treatment again, hour after hour of full-on, brain bursting, self-erasing streams. My scream erupts every time the cable retracts, no matter how diligently I will myself to be silent.

  “Time?” Wynn yells as the needle pulls out of my neck.

  “Fifty minutes.” Jergen is standing by the t-screen looking scared out of his mind. His blond, close-cropped hair is slick with sweat.

  My eyes leak from the corners, but I am not crying. My whole body aches. Above me Wynn’s face appears.

  “State your name.”

  My mouth opens, and for a moment only air escapes. Who am I?

  Her blue-tipped hair is familiar. I remember her. I remember that I have been boxed. I remember that I am an Order member, but which one?

  A frown starts on her aging face. “What is your name?”

  A glance at the blond boy tells me he is just as eager for me to answer as I am.

  “I am Five.” It’s all I know. Right now, I’m all sixteen of us.

  Wynn straightens with a sigh and a tug at her shirt. “I think we’re done here, Jergen.”

  Heavy breathing brings a little strength back into my limbs. I start to sit up, head spinning.

  “Hold her, Jergen!”

  Hands grip my shoulders. Jergen’s angular face is close to mine, sweat shining off his temples.

  Her. So I am a girl. That narrows it down. “Thanks,” I hiss.

  Wynn snorts, realizing her mistake. “Get her out of here. Don’t leave her until she’s in bed.”

  As we climb the stairs—elevators were not an option because of their mirror-like doors—I look down at my hands repeatedly, hoping they hold the answer to my identity, but in my mind are memories of sixteen pairs of hands, all attached to my body, all mine. I can see the hands in front of me, but, mixed in with reality, I also see bigger hands and browner hands and freckled hands. I see the knobby knuckles on these hands here, but I still can’t figure out whose they are. Nothing I see has any meaning at all.

  “I don’t think I can make it,” I admit as I branch off toward the door. “Elevator …”

  “Miss, I was instructed to bring you up the stairs.”

  “Blasted mirrors.” I take a deep breath and begin again the endless ascent.

  After two more floors, I stop for a rest every half flight. As I’m leaning against the cold wall, I look at my captor. “You were terrified in that room down there.”

  Jergen looks at me with wide eyes. He can’t be much older than I am, whoever I am.

  “I’m new to correctional treatments,” he admits. “You were convulsing. Every time we’d open up the streams, your body would shake and twitch and often you’d retch all over the place.”

  “Try experiencing it.” I snap as I start to move again.

  Finally, we reach our domus level, Level Five.

  “I must see you to your bed. No mirrors.”

  He follows me down the long hallway and into our domus living room. I feel a strange desire to look at the couch, as if some memory that I can’t place ties me to it. I remember sitting on it, but I remember sitting on it as sixteen different people.

  Jergen opens the door to the only unoccupied bedroom. The one he opens for me is one I’ve slept in just as often as the others. Nothing in here and nothing in my head identifies me.

  Wait.

  I grasp the doorframe. A memory arises in my mind, sharp and full of substance. Standing in the bin lab, a red-haired boy faces me. Julius. And I know that my thoughts are not being colle
cted by the computers. I see Marcus in my mind, I see the gen lab. It’s coming back to me—but still I do not know who I am.

  “Miss!”

  Jergen jerks me out of this memory before my identity becomes clear.

  Suddenly, I dart toward the bathrooms as fast as my depleted muscles will carry me. Jergen’s fingers brush my arm but close around air. He’s after me again.

  In the bathroom, I skid to a halt in front of the mirror. Buzzed black hair. A pointed face the color of crisp toast. Full lips above a rounded chin. None of it is familiar.

  Then the image shifts, and I’m looking at nine or ten faces, all me, all my reflection, all memories from the stream, save for one. But which one! It was there a second ago!

  A scream cracks out of my dry throat, and I rush at the mirror. A voice behind me barks an order. The faces in the mirror before me merge with reality and then slip again into memory. Green eyes, blue eyes, brown eyes. All of them mine at once and terrifying! I bang my fists into the glass, trying to demand the real me to please step forward. A brown girl, a black girl, a pale girl, a ruddy boy. All me!

  From deep in my memories, a phrase surfaces: Your mind is that mirror.

  Banging and banging and banging and crash. Cracks spider in all directions, my reflection—all those reflections—splinter and fall.

  Someone grasps me around the waist, pulling my body and my bleeding hand away from the glass.

  I struggle for a moment, then relax. A few lookers have arrived in the bathroom.

  “Val!”

  A red-haired boy steps around from behind me.

  Val? “That’s my name?”

  He nods but cringes with his movement. “Yes, that’s you, Val.” He repeats my name, knowing it will help. “I’m Julius. You’re Valeria. Do you remember it?”

  “I remember my name now, yes. Still working on what I look like.”

  “The mirror thing didn’t go so well, I take it?” He tries to smile, but it’s held back by obvious pain.

  “What’s wrong? You look … bad.”