Fast Forward

by Lou Anders

  “Try me.”

  “I can't promise,” she said, “because the aliens need me.”

  Albert chitters again. It's hot. Really hot, and Tara wants water. But there never seems to be any water here. Albert tugs her hand. He wants her to follow. She goes with him and he takes her the same way he always does. Toward the big steel doors, and then down into cool darkness, the hum of big fans, and then he'll bring her underground and there will be a thing like a microphone, only at her height, not a grown-up one. And she'll talk and sing into it, because that seems to be what Albert wants her to do, while luminescent colors roll across his armor plates in thin, transparent bands.

  She's never seen anything alive here. Except Albert.

  She talks into the microphone, though, sings it silly songs and talks about things. Her mother and father, and the divorce. The time in the hospital, and the friends she made there. Insects and arthropods, bicycles and card games. Her friends and teachers, and how happy she is to be back in a real school.

  Colors rippling across his carapace impatiently, Albert waits. They've done this before.

  I blamed the implant. Nobody likes to think her kid is experiencing symptoms of undifferentiated schizophrenia, after all. I rescheduled for the next day and took the morning off and we made an emergency appointment with Dr. al-Mansoor.

  Tara waited outside while I went in to talk to the doctor. She looked bleary-eyed under the scarf tucked over her hair, the flesh slack over her cheekbones and shadowed around the eyes. I like Dr. al-Mansoor. And it was pretty obvious she hadn't planned on being in the clinic at 7 AM to see us, but she'd managed to get there.

  I put a cup of coffee on her desk before I sat down. She took it gratefully, cupping lean fingers around the warm paper, her wedding ring flashing as she lowered her head over the steam. “You have a concern, Jill?” she asked.

  Her given name is Hadiyah, but I always have to remind myself to use it, even though we'd gotten to be good friends over the last four months or so. I think she respected the questions I asked. None of the other parents were in the medical profession.

  I looked down at my own coffee cup and cleared my throat. Best to just say it. “I think there's a problem with Tara's implant.”

  They'll catch her if she tries it here. So Tara sits and folds her hands and tries not to rock impatiently, first in the waiting room and then in the office while Mom and Dr. al-Mansoor talk, mostly over her head. There's a dollhouse on the ledge, though, along with some other toys that Tara is mostly too old for, and Tara busies herself with the dolls and the furniture until she gets bored, and starts running the red fire truck back and forth along the ledge. She stages a four-alarm fire and a rescue, complete with hook-and-ladder work on the dollhouse, though the sizes are off and the dolls have to make a death-defying leap from the second floor to be caught at the top of the ladder by a half-scale fireman.

  She's totally lost track of the grown-up conversation, and they're not talking about her now anyway but about some other girl in the trial, though Dr. al-Mansoor is very careful not to say her name. “She hasn't had any similar ideations, though….”

  The conversation stops, and Tara looks up to find Mom and Dr. al-Mansoor staring at her. “Did I do something wrong?”

  “Tara,” Dr. al-Monsoor says, smoothing her scarf over her hair, “where did you learn to play the fainting game?”

  Tara bites her lip. Her hair falls across her eyes and she pushes it back. She never promised not to tell. “At the hospital,” she says, dragging it out. She turns back to the dollhouse and saves another Ken doll from the flames.

  “Who taught you?”

  This Ken doll didn't jump hard enough. He falls short of the ladder, and the miniature fireman lunges frantically to catch him. He gets one of Ken's outreached hands, and clutches it. Firemen have gloves, big rubber ones, so it must be the gloves that are slipping in the sweat, not Ken's hand. Ken sways perilously as the fireman hooks his feet in the rungs of the ladder and hauls on his hand, Tara mimicking both Ken's cries for help and the fireman's reassurances.

  The grown-ups are silent, watching. Until Tara's mother clears her throat and says, carefully, “Tara? Did you hear the question?”

  “One of the other girls,” Tara says, letting Ken rock back and forth a little, hands slipping. She watches him carefully. Maybe if the fireman slides a little higher, ladder rungs gouging his tummy, he can keep his grip. Oh, no, gasps Ken. Don't worry, I've got you! cries the fireman.

  “Which girl?”

  Tara shrugs. She won't remember. That's not a lie, and they can't make her remember, either. The fireman hauls Ken up once his predicament stops being interesting.

  Tara prefers a happy ending.

  “Tara,” Mom says, quietly, “she could be in a lot of danger. You have to tell us.”

  It takes a long time. But eventually, she does.

  I barely knew Jodi Carter. She was older than Tara, twelve or thirteen, and they hadn't been roommates. But they'd spent time together, in the common room or the girls’ bathroom.

  I wondered how many other girls Jodi had taught the fainting game. At least, from what Dr. al-Mansoor said, it didn't seem like she was having the hallucinations. I was guiltily glad it wasn't my job to answer either of those questions.

  Dr. al-Mansoor and I had a hasty conference while Tara banged around a little more with Barbie dolls and fire trucks. My worry that Tara was the only child to report some sort of hallucination after receiving the implant was enough to make my hands cold.

  We got Tara checked in—back in her old room, in fact—and Dr. al-Mansoor put her under observation. No restraints, but she'd be under fifteen-minute checks, though the room had a one-way window so she'd at least have the illusion of privacy.

  I argued for the right to sleep in the waiting room. Dr. al-Mansoor countered with an offer of her office couch. Tara and I went home to fetch her pajamas and get her some lunch while Dr. al-Mansoor and Mrs. Carter had a long talk with Jodi, who was already checked in for observation of her apparent hallucinations.

  Afterwards, Dr. al-Mansoor and I sat and drank more coffee—worse coffee, this, from the staff room pot, lightened with artificial creamer and too sweet because that was the only way it was drinkable—out of chipped mugs, and waited while one of the clinic staff got Tara settled in. She was furious that I'd told her she had to stay, and after she had exhausted herself on a temper tantrum and two sulks, I decided it was just as well if I gave her a little time alone to get the leftover wrath out of her system. At least Tara wasn't a kid who held grudges.

  “I didn't know about this fainting game thing,” Dr. al-Mansoor said, blowing over her coffee.

  “It's not new.” Pediatric psychiatry isn't my specialty, but you hear things, pick up around the edges in the journals. “Like inhalant abuse. Every generation figures it out, or anyway some of them do. The question is—”

  She nodded. “And then there's the whole issue of whether the implant is causing hallucinations.”

  “Only when she's on the verge of unconsciousness.”

  “And a hypnagogic state doesn't do it. Sleep's no good. It's got to be hypoxia.”

  My turn to stare into my coffee. “Apparently. What do you think of the character of the hallucinations?”

  “Some alien entity trying to communicate with her? It's a common marker for schizophrenia.”

  “But that's the only symptom she's got. No mood swings, she's obviously rational—”

  Dr. al-Mansoor smiled. “Odd, isn't it?” And then she cocked her head to one side as if she were listening, and held up one finger to silence me. “Oh,” she said. “You know, I may have something here.”

  The plastic chair creaked under me when I resettled my weight. It wasn't late, just after lunch, but it felt like six or seven o'clock at night. I was a little shocked every time I glanced at my watch. Busy day. “Well, don't keep me in suspense.”

  “The implants use a quantum computer chip.”


  “Tell me something I didn't know.”

  “Well, the chips were all manufactured at the same time, right? And the same place. Probably all from one condensate. So what if there's quantum interference? I mean”—she waved her long, elegant hand beside her face, her diamond flashing—”what if the chips can transmit electrical patterns back and forth between the girls? Feebly. And when their synapses are already misfiring from the hypoxia, those patterns get overlaid, and Tara's subconscious mind translates those signals into symbols, as they would in a dream—”

  “The symbol being some kind of alien trying to communicate. Is that possible? The transferal, I mean.” What I knew about quantum mechanics could be written on an index card, but it sounded…

  Hell, it sounded like an excuse not to pull the chip that was Tara's promise of a normal life out of her head. It might be a straw, but it wasn't a bad-looking straw.

  She made a face, pulling her jaw back and flattening her lower lip, and then wrinkled her nose. “I guess so?”

  “Why is it only Tara?”

  “There's something wrong with her chip? Or something right with it. If that is what's going on, it's functional telepathy.”

  “That would mean there wasn't any problem, really.”

  “Other than half the clinic strangling themselves for the fun of it, you mean.”

  “Right.” I thumped back in my chair. I'd lurched forward at some point, without realizing it. “That. Tara won't promise. She thinks her alien friend needs help.”

  “If she promises, can you trust her?”

  “Tara? Yes. What about Jodi?”

  “I'll ask Mrs. Carter what she thinks. We'll have to address it with all the kids. One of the staff is making calls. Tara seems a special case, though. For her, we could edge the voltage down a little and maybe get rid of the hallucinations, if my guess is right. Which it probably isn't. But that might affect pain management.”

  “Right,” I said. I put my half-empty cup down on the edge of Dr. al-Mansoor's desk. “I'll go talk to her. If asking nicely doesn't work, there's always extortion.”

  Mom comes back before dinner, and takes Tara down to the cafeteria to eat. Tara likes the cafeteria. There's always something she doesn't get at home very often. Today it's meatloaf and apple pie, with brown gravy. The meatloaf, not the pie.

  Mom's watching her worriedly, and pushing kidney beans and cottage cheese—and other stuff Tara can't figure out why anybody would eat—around on her salad bar plate. “Dr. al-Mansoor thinks the things you're seeing are feedback from the implant,” she says, when Tara is halfway done with her meatloaf.

  “I think it's from the implant,” Tara agrees. She'd picked out a mockneck shirt to hide the bruise across her throat. Mom frowns at it. “But maybe not feedback. I've been thinking about Albert.”

  “Albert?”

  “The alien.” Tara slashes her fork sideways. “I don't think it's just him. I think it's a whole species.”

  Mom leans forward, arms folded behind her fussed-at plate. “He told you his name?”

  “No.” Tara drops her fork and jerks her hands back and forth beside her head. “He talks in colors or something. He's Albert because of Albert Einstein.” She drinks some milk and picks up the fork again. “But he keeps wanting me to talk in a microphone into a computer. I think he's trying to learn how I talk. Anyway, I think he's in trouble. He needs help.”

  “What kind of help?” Mom starts chasing the kidney beans around her plate again, pretending like she's only being polite.

  “I don't know,” Tara says. She stops herself abruptly, chews and swallows the mouthful of mashed potatoes before mom can yell at her. She reaches out and picks a hard, round red grape off her mother's plate, waiting for the nod of permission. It crunches sweetly between her teeth. She takes another one. “I just…it seems really important.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I just know.”

  Mom picks up one solitary kidney bean on the end of her fork and stares at it. She slips it into her mouth and chews slowly. “Tara,” she says. “It's more important that you don't risk your life playing the fainting game anymore. If Albert's real, and he's a grown-up scientist, even if he's an alien, he'd agree with me. Don't you think?”

  “I'm always careful. That's the problem. I think if I had just a little more time with him, we could talk.”

  “It doesn't matter how careful you are. It's dangerous.”

  “Mom—”

  “Tara.” Mom puts her fork down, and uses that voice. “Promise me.”

  Tara finishes her meal in silence, while Mom stares at her and doesn't eat another thing. They're going to make her sleep in the hospital bed tonight, with the lights that don't go off and the shadows behind the one-way mirror all the time.

  It's okay. She can sleep anywhere. And she has a plan.

  I was supposed to sleep on the couch. Predictably, I spent the entire night in the observation room. Tara seemed to be sleeping, under the pale blue light, her hair fanned out on the pillow and her knees drawn up against her chest as always. I sat and watched her with the observation room lights off, so every time Dr. al-Mansoor or the staffer came in for the check, a wedge of light fell across the floor and dazzled me for a minute.

  Each time, they paused in the doorway, glanced through the window for a moment, smiled at me, and withdrew. I think Dr. al-Mansoor was hoping I'd fall asleep on the bench. Not quite.

  At two in the morning, Tara began to thrash.

  She kicked the covers off and rolled out of bed, rolled under the bed in the space of time it took me to hit the call button and dive for the connecting door, shouting her name. I crawled after her, scrabbling on hands and knees. The metal railing caught my shoulders, knocking me off my knees and onto my belly, and I squirmed after her. She jammed herself into the space by the head of the bed and curled on her side, knees drawn up, hands pressing me back, pressing me away. Battling, until her arms went soft and her feet kicked, or I should say shivered.

  I couldn't hear her breathing.

  I got my hand around the slender flexible bones of her ankle and pulled. She went limp as I dragged her out, and first I thought she was making herself dead weight, but when I got her into the light I saw how limp she was. I thought it was the light turning her blue, but then the door thumped open and the light came on and I could see it was her skin, as well.

  You're supposed to check the airway. Her mouth fell open, slack, and I ran my fingers into it. Her tongue hadn't fallen back, but I thought my fingers brushed something smooth and resilient, hard, at the back of her throat.

  “Jillian,” Dr. al-Mansoor said, her hand on my shoulder.

  “She's choking,” I said, and let her pull me out of the way. “I think she palmed a grape at dinner. I didn't think—” Stupid. Stupid. No, I didn't think at all.

  Dr. al-Mansoor yanked off her rings. They rattled on the floor, disregarded, gold and diamonds knocked aside as she straddled my daughter's hips, straightened her neck. She placed the heel of her interlocked hands under Tara's breastbone, and I loved her with all my heart.

  I remembered Tara crowding away from me under the bed, her eyes wide and wild, her desperation. Tara was the smartest kid I've ever known. She'd had swimming courses, first aid courses. She was ten. Not a baby, just ask her. She knows more about entomology and dinosaurs and stellar astronomy than I ever will.

  She'd known I'd come after her. She'd known I could save her. She'd jumped out of the bed so I would see that she was in distress. And she'd crawled away from me, buying time.

  They talk about possession. After a crisis, you hear people say they have no idea what they were doing.

  I knew exactly what I was doing. I reached down and grabbed Dr. al-Mansoor's wrists and held on tight. “Jillian, let go,” she said. “It's just the Heimlich maneuver.”

  Her face was inches from mine, her eyes red with sleeplessness rather than asphyxiation. Her scarf had fallen back, and her hair was all tangled ov
er her shoulders. It didn't matter. We were all women here.

  “Thirty seconds,” I said.

  She stared at me. She leaned against my hands, but I held on to her wrists. Tight.

  “Brain damage,” she said.

  Dreams can happen fast. The length of the REM cycle affects it, of course, but sometimes even when they seem to take hours, days, they're over in seconds. Just the forebrain trying to make symbolic sense of electrical noise kicked up by the random signals firing up the brainstem. “Hadiyah. Thirty seconds. Twenty seconds. Let her talk to Albert.”

  She licked her lips. And then she jerked her chin sharply, and I saw her mouth move, counting. Fifteen, fourteen, thirteen—

  Albert is waiting. He's in a hurry, too. This time, he grabs Tara's hand in his manipulator without preamble and almost drags her into the tunnel, his many legs rippling indigo-azure-gold as they race underground. But this time it's different, dream-different, the microphone gone and a kind of control panel in its place, not made for Tara's hands. She stops, confused, just inside the arched doorway and waits for Albert to show her what to do. And isn't it funny, now that she thinks about it, that the doorway is tall enough for her, when Albert's only two feet high?

  He takes the controls in his manipulators. They move over the keypad with arachnid grace. “Tara,” the air says.

  “Albert?” At her voice, colors ripple across the panels before him. He turns, regarding them with every evidence of thought in the tilt of his expressionless face on the ball-jointed neck. She shouldn't try to guess what he feels. She knows that.

  She does it anyway. “You figured out how to talk to me.”

  “I did,” he says. “Come here. Put your hands on the plate. We don't have much time.”

  “Before my mother stops us?”

  He chitters at her, his antennae bristling. “Before the program ends. This is a simulation. I am the last remaining, and we used the last of the power to reach you. We looked and looked, and you were the first we found.”