Pru’s eyebrows rise. “You’re going back to the Center?”
My chin drops and I watch the grass pass under my feet as we start walking back to the car. “Not exactly. They’d never just let me walk back in. There’s an opening with the HFH that I’m thinking about applying for.”
Pru offers an interested expression but no judgment.
I continue, “Now that Abel’s gone, I wish I knew him more. He hated what they did to us in there. Mr. Crowne, the box, all of it. He was trying to change the Senate’s mind on those practices. He’d been making headway. If I work with the HFH, maybe we can expose what they are doing and keep making progress where he left off. Now that Dr. Yamaguchi took over, I bet she’ll be trying to change some things. She was never a big fan of watching us suffer under those punishment streams. I think she and Abel were working together to sway the Senate. But it could take a while.”
Ty chuckles. “Sounds like you’ve got it all figured out.”
“Hardly. But all I can do is try. If I loved him”—the word is still hard for me to say, but I mean it more than I ever thought I could—“if I love Abel at all, I’ll spend the rest of my life trying to finish what he started. He was trying to make that place better, and so will I. I know we need the Center, but we can at least share all that science with the rest of the country. Eventually, I’d love to get back in a research lab. Work with genes. It’s what I love. But Abel’s right about the fact that we don’t need to genetically engineer humans to do the research in there. I mean even I …” I haven’t quite come to terms with the fact that I am as generic as every other person I’ve looked down on my entire life. “Well, I was able to do pretty good research, considering I’m … just a—”
“Genius?” Pru glances sidelong at me.
“The HFH will hire you on the spot,” Julius says, chuckling. “Their dream come true. An Order member up for hire.”
I smile at him. “I think they will. And I think it’s what Abel would have wanted. I’m sure of it. After all, he left that tablet with all his files in it, including my thoughts, in his car for me to find.”
Suddenly shaken with guilt, I look over at Ty and Pru and Julius. “Did I kill him?”
“Don’t go through that again, V,” Julius says.
Pru nods. “It’s not your fault. He jumped in front of that bullet—you didn’t force him to do that.”
“But he wouldn’t be dead if it weren’t for me.” If I’d never gotten tangled up with M’s crimes. If I’d never caused us to crash in that car. If I’d never gotten myself kicked out of the Center. If I’d never let Marcus define me.
Julius wraps an arm around my shoulder in a comforting way—I no longer cringe when someone touches me like I did when living at the Center. “You cannot be responsible for another person’s actions. You didn’t force him to do anything. Just like he didn’t force you to do anything.”
“Yeah, I guess so.” Every domino in the line, every cell division along the way, was part of a chain that brought us to this moment. I let Julius’ arm and words comfort me, for the umpteenth time, as we walk away from where my father is buried.
M’s association with China is broadcast over and over on the local news; it even appears on the national news a few times as people get stirred up over foreign countries spying on our technology.
M is never going to see the light of day again, according to the police and city lawmakers. Many demanded that M’s brain be searched for information on all his criminal activity, but I, and Pru and Julius and the first Marcus V, helped convince M’s lawyer, and thereby the judge, that the precedent of mind searching should never, ever be set, no matter how awful the crime. And so M was put behind bars to await a fair trial. I suppose M could have been a great man, like any emperor, but he’d been consumed by what he loved, just like the Director said. He’d been consumed by power.
Pru tells me she’ll come with me to the interview at the HFH. Just to see me off.
A few days after the Director’s funeral, I sent in a pretty humorous résumé that Ty helped me create that said essentially one thing: previous work experience as an Order member at America’s World Research Center. Within hours, I got a call from the HFH. They didn’t seem surprised at all that a former Order member was applying for a normal job. Even seemed to be expecting it. They set up an interview for the next day. Hired me on the spot, like Julius predicted.
And I finally made an appointment with Dr. Miriam Tan, former doctor for M, to remove my sensors. When I made the appointment, asked for the surgery, her schedule was magically open. I can’t be sure, but I think Ty may have called in a favor. In return for saving his life, perhaps. I may never know, but I will always thank him for helping me get that appointment so quickly.
Dr. Tan removed my sensors—and granted me blessed freedom—in a surgery that lasted five hours. No damage to the brain. No hard feelings from Miriam, despite her friendship with M. She knows me only as the girl who saved Ty and bravely stopped our city’s spy. She, along with so many others, had watched my live stream of the dreadful events at the warehouse. My last live stream. A stream of my thoughts that just so happened to contain a brain flash of M’s thoughts. Perfectly timed. Perfectly exposed.
The HFH paid for the operation.
At last, my mind is mine.
Thirty-Four
My first week on the job, I drive toward the Center for what the HFH calls their quarterly humanitarian tour. They visit the facility to make sure the cameras are all actually filming and to physically see the Order members engaging in their normal routines. To ensure the wellbeing of the Center’s little science experiment children. To remind the world we are human. I remember seeing the nametagged HFH employees touring the Center in years past. Today, that nametagged person is me.
From the outside, the Center is enormous. It is strange coming here, entering as an outsider. I was born here. I grew up here. And even though I’ve spent the past several months hating this place, I feel it still: I belong here. The people I grew up with are here. My lab is here. Marcus is here. And my father spent the last twenty years of his life here.
But today, I wear a wig and convincing eyebrows, like a virus decorated to look innocent as it attacks its host. My job is to pass some files to Yamaguchi, files Abel left for me with her name on them. The HFH is all in when it comes to exposing the mistreatment of Center children. They agreed I should do it, considering Yamaguchi might actually listen if it comes from one of her own. She’s the only one who can know I’m here. Well, her and one other I’m hoping to see today.
The doors slide open in front of us. It seems like only a handful of days have gone by since I was forced to walk out these doors, expelled like an unruly child. Little did I know that the Director wanted me to leave, not because he wanted me dead or brain-wiped, but because he wanted me free. From before I was born, he knew I’d walk out of this Center. He planned it. And I think he also planned, or hoped, I’d be walking right back in now.
I turn to wave to Pru, who smiles from the back seat of the car that dropped me off. She couldn’t risk being seen by anyone in the Center, but her boldness to come this far gives me strength to step forward, back into my old prison. My fingers instinctively lift to the place behind my ears where my sensors—the real prison—used to be.
I smile as I shake my head. I hated my father for kicking me out of this place. I hated him for telling me he crafted my genes. I blamed him for all my faults. When, as it turns out, he knew all along that those faults were just normal, human faults, and they would bring me my freedom.
And then, suddenly, violently, my mind shifts to Marcus.
He’s here somewhere. I search for him in every corner of the room, in every face crossing this wide-tiled space. I know he couldn’t possibly be in the atrium, which is off-limits for Order members, but I can’t help looking. Where is he? In lab, maybe? The rooftop? Does he remember that we used to go there?
“Ms. Ebner, isn’t it? From the H
FH?” asks a honey-voiced woman with skinny legs and a pencil skirt. She doesn’t recognize me in my disguise. “Our late director was an Ebner. How odd.”
“Yes,” I mutter, coming out of my daydream. “Unusual last name.”
“Come with me.” She waves me onward, toward a door that leads into a hallway, a vein of this great beast.
My heart hammers, my mind going wild, as I follow the woman in front of me.
Once again, the beast swallows me! How is it that I am here again? In this capacity? The truth surges through me, both frightening and soothing. I am the Director’s daughter, his very own creation. I belong here. I will make this place better, as he did.
This time I am not working for my own goals, I’m working for his. Abel’s tablet that he left for me contained hundreds of files of letters written to me that detailed everything he had wanted to tell me. I haven’t had time to go through it all yet, but I know I will read every word.
He’d titled the file containing these letters “The Veritas Project.”
That man knew me so well, even when I didn’t know myself.
Detailed in those letters was his ambition to see to the end of mind control among the Order members. He had started in the corrective treatments department when he thwarted the efforts of the staff to erase my memories of the first Marcus V, or Pru’s memories of her life outside the Center, or Marcus’ memories. All of that, all the Director’s doing. I can only hope to continue that work.
The woman leads me into a luxurious waiting room, so much cleaner and slicker than anything in the city. Long, low couches touch two walls above more of the same shiny, black tile. Thin vases holding dahlias stand here and there, filling the room with a soft scent. A man waiting behind a solid block of wood—a chunk from a huge tree, no doubt—that serves as a bar pours a glass of water, plunks a few slivered limes in it, and hands it out to the woman in front of me, who passes it back to me.
“Anything else?” she asks politely.
I decline and she instructs me to wait here. I perch on the end of one of the couches and notice, embedded in the table before me, a screen flashing newsworthy comments about the Center and its latest anti-aging research that restores collagen indefinitely. My research. I look away.
When my name is called again, I can’t help but blink at the person who will be conducting my tour. The blue hair is all too familiar.
She introduces herself as if to a stranger. The disguise is effective.
“Hello, Wynn.” I smile and stand, feeling almost like I’m greeting a friend.
“Shall we?” Wynn asks, a comfortable smile pressing her lips together. She is not at all the grouchy woman with the syringe anymore. She is here to placate this HFH member. Today, I have the upper hand. The reversal feels strange, foreign, but not unwelcome.
I just nod, not sure what words would come out right now were I to give myself permission to speak.
We start in hallways I’ve never seen before, but soon we are in an elevator, which is much more familiar, even though this is one I’ve never used—the employee elevator.
The numbers flash by on the screen indicating the floors we’re passing. We pass my lab. We pass the Caf. We pass Marcus’ lab. The number five flashes on the screen, and my heart staccatos till the five is replaced by a six, a seven. We stop at seven. The Senate level and the level for the Seventh Order. It’s a Wednesday. That means the Sevens are probably in class right now.
“Follow me.” Wynn steps out of the elevator onto the sanitized white tile. I hesitate before lifting my foot, nearly worried the floor will recognize my shoe as I will recognize the sound it makes when it strikes. Wynn does not turn back to see my automatic flinch at the click of my footfall on this tile. But I’m wearing different shoes than the ones we were issued here, and they make a slightly different sound. I am not Valeria V, marching to a Senate meeting. A pent-up breath eases out of my lungs as silently as I can manage.
“In here, you will observe the learning process of some of our younger Order members. Then I will take you to see one of the labs, and, as requested, the Director.”
We reach the heart of the star and turn left. Library pods line this hallway. She stops before one. The door is illuminated to reveal someone is inside.
“Julius VII is studying photosynthesis in here. When he finishes learning about this topic, he will share all he knows with his fellow Order members via their weekly stream. Presently, all the learning taking place in his brain is being stored by his thought sensors.”
She lifts her hand toward the palm panel, presses it. The door slides away, and a startled young boy turns around, his dark arm raised to the wall of his little classroom as he draws the cycle of photosynthesis. I remember this little face. So different from his older brother’s. His familiar face makes me smile, but my smile is quickly replaced by a frown when I consider he is no more than a prisoner of the chain brain.
“Julius, this is a visitor from the HFH. Would you please explain to our guest what you have been learning today?”
The boy stands straighter, a soldier obeying orders, and begins to recite the mesmerizing complexity of how a leaf turns light into food. I find myself drifting away in his description of the photons exciting electrons within the chlorophyll of plants but start to glance around in apparent boredom when I realize Wynn is watching me. Play the part. Don’t get caught.
I slip my hand into my pants’ pocket and feel the small coin there. M’s coin. I’m returning it to the Director’s office today, where it belongs. Now, however, it contains all the files Abel left for Yamaguchi. He knew I’d find a way to get them to her securely. Files that explain his personal research on the mental repercussions of thought streaming. I’m exhibit A. Turns out there was a purpose for reading my thoughts like a book. Just one I could never have understood until now. It may have been unfair, uncomfortable even, but he had his reasons. The HFH will be delighted to get their hands on this info, but I want to make sure Yamaguchi gets a copy first.
By the time the boy is finished reciting, I’m nearly so lost in my own memories that a second passes before I notice the silence.
“Impressive,” I say, feigning ignorance of what he just explained.
Casually, as if his brilliance is an afterthought, a given, he adds, “Much is expected of us.”
I nearly choke. To him, I am just a generic. An outsider. He’s still drinking in the brainwashing like those thylakoids suck in sunlight. Wynn lifts a brow at me but doesn’t say anything. I want to scream at this boy, to tell him he is his own person, that however high the expectations, however much they require of him, it isn’t worth what they take from him. It isn’t worth the sanitizing of the individual, the slow erasure of the self.
Then I remember that I work for the HFH, the group that would hold these very same beliefs if they knew more about what goes on here. I clamp my mouth shut, knowing that one day soon, this boy will hear what I have to tell him. But not today. Not right here. “No matter what they expect of you, Julius, don’t forget that you matter.”
I say these words before I can convince myself not to.
Wynn narrows her eyes at me, presses her palm to the panel, and the boy disappears. But I did it. I said something, and the boy heard me. His face, before it disappeared, looked hungry. Hungry for this sort of affirmation. My heart breaks inside my chest like the shattering of sunlight in a prism. I cannot save this boy today. But I can sleep tonight knowing I did not let my fear of Wynn or the Senate or Mr. Crowne keep me from telling this boy what he needed to hear.
The next stop on the tour is supposed to be the gardens, but as we enter the employee elevator, Wynn checks a notification on her tablet.
“The Director will see you now. If you don’t mind, we will go there first.”
“Not at all.”
The wooden door outside the Director’s office now boasts a new name plate. This part of the Center is the only part that looks old-fashioned. The first time I saw it, I lifted
my lip in disgust. Who would want to celebrate the past in an age of rocket-propelled progress? But now it isn’t so much the past that the plain wooden door—installed at Abel’s request—represents, but an identity. The identity of a man I call my father.
Entering today, even in disguise, I enter as more myself than I ever was before.
The waiting room has new lamps, but nothing else has changed. Yamaguchi’s smiling face appears as we step into Abel’s—now her—large office. The window screen is projecting midday, a bright blue sky that lights up this underground room. Instead of the dread I was feeling earlier at attempting this exchange, at the sight of my old domus nurse’s face, the tension eases out of my shoulders.
“Dr. Yamaguchi, it’s nice to meet you.” I take the proffered chair—the same one I sat in across from Abel. The coin I stole here now burns in my pocket to be returned.
Yamaguchi lifts a hand toward Wynn. “I’ll finish the tour, Wynn. I know you have an appointment in corrective.”
My shock passes unnoticed as Wynn, also surprised, nods and sees herself out. I wonder who she’s about to torture. I swallow.
Yamaguchi circles her desk and sits, her curtained black hair reflecting the light from the window screen. “You are the first HFH visitor we’ve had since I took over as Director.” She looks down at her hands. “Our former Director, as you may know, died recently. Perhaps you, too, saw the feed?” She shakes her head, remembering the video feed of the night that so many people witnessed from my eyes. “Terrible, terrible.”
I nod, unsure what to say. That the bullet he took was aimed at me?
She looks back up. “One of my goals as Director is to establish a better relationship with the Humans for Humans. I believe in what you do, in your mission to help the world see our children as valuable. I have many goals for this Center, but this is merely one.” She lifts her hands off her lap. “Might as well begin checking things off my list!” Her hands fall. “So, tell me. What are your greatest concerns? We have many areas to improve here, but they cannot happen all at once. Where would you like us to start?”
The Veritas Project Page 27
