Y _ What about being a basketball star.
AM _ What about it.
Y _ They say you’re going to go professional. And make millions of dollars.
AM _ So.
Y _ So if you run away you don’t make millions of dollars.
AM _ Oh. Yeah. I mean we didn’t go. So I guess it doesn’t matter.
Neesha.
NEESHA LEFT HER dorm just after 6:00 a.m., every day, so she could walk the long loop around the school at the perfect moment of morning, right when the sun was rising and the fog was lifting and the eerie blue of the complex was starting to glow golden, and there were no instructors outside to tell her she couldn’t smoke a cigarette.
Neesha’d never smoked before Redemption. It was Emma’s idea to smoke cigarettes, just like it was Emma’s idea to sell Neesha’s Discovery project to their classmates, and Emma who convinced her that human trials would help her win the trophy. It all stemmed from Emma; every misbehavior and anxiety was the result of this toxic and lucrative relationship.
She waited outside, gnawing her way nervously through the pack of Marlboros until the warning bell sounded. She took the long way to class, crossing as much of the back lawn as possible, close to the forest, before cutting inward to the C-School. As she passed the bench outside Human, she saw someone had dug up two branches from the forest and planted them in the mud, sticking straight up. It looked like an absentminded art project, but for whatever reason, she was unable to look away. She stopped, alone in front of a walking path to the forest, and stared. It felt like it had been left there for her. To warn her.
By the time she got to her pharma lab, everyone was buzzing about Emma’s disappearance.
“I overheard her in church saying a prayer for something.”
“You can’t disappear from praying.”
“Unless God beams you up.”
“That’s not how God works.”
“I heard her say the other day she was super tired. Maybe that’s what happened?”
“She fell asleep?”
Neesha steered clear, sinking into the farthest possible chair to avoid looking interested.
“She told me she didn’t have a pen, when I asked her in homeroom last week, but she seemed really sad about it. Like, I remember thinking, ‘I don’t think this is about the pen.’ I think she might have been depressed or something.”
“Do you think she killed herself?”
“It’s hard to say.”
“That would explain why no one has heard from her. I feel like at least the school would have heard from her by now if she’s not dead.”
“No way, she didn’t kill herself. She was selling Apex. It probably has something to do with that.”
“Like someone from outside the school came and killed her?”
“She was on the phone a lot.”
“Maybe someone inside the school killed her.”
“Who in the school would kill somebody?”
“Aiden almost killed Eddy.”
It was embarrassing, listening to these plebes talk about her with half-informed speculation. None of them actually knew Emma.
“I don’t know. But I talked to the guy who’s looking for her, and he’s big. I don’t think they’d get somebody that big if it wasn’t serious. . . . Neesha, do you have any idea what happened?”
The last one to talk was Margaret Chun, a Year Four from Taipei who had invented some kind of device for a telephone, and then come to school and turned into Redemption’s resident speakerphone. If Margaret knew something, everyone knew it.
Neesha sat up, realizing that she was tucked into the back corner, not reading or writing, just staring angrily at them. Behind Margaret, she saw Zaza sit up, too.
“No,” she snapped. “Of course not. Why are you asking me?”
“Oh—” Margaret looked between a few other classmates. “Aren’t you her roommate?”
“Oh . . . yeah, no, she didn’t come back last night. That’s all I know.”
Margaret Chun licked her lips, checking to be sure Yangborne wasn’t listening, then leaned closer. “Did she tell you anything about Apex?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Margaret,” she said, and flipped open a textbook to a random page.
Yangborne was extra manic today. He started class with a lecture on mirror neurons that sounded like it was being assembled as it was happening, scientific basis included. They had a joint experiment with the B-School that night, and he was always on edge on test days. All he ever wanted to talk about was the experiment. Two hours into the lecture, the dam finally broke. “And—and I don’t mean to get off track here, but I think we’ve really got it this time, friends. I mean, this is not unrelated to the topic at hand, but I really think this is our moment, in open election communication. This is the breakthrough.
“And like I always say, one breakthrough in a hundred is good science. That’s a high percentage, in our work. But I really think this is our day.”
Eyes rolled back around the classroom. Yangborne said this every test day, at least a dozen times, totally unable to take his own advice and understand that if only one in a hundred experiments were supposed to work, then ninety-nine of the days weren’t “our day.”
“You may say I’m overconfident. But I’ll tell you why. . . .” He paused. “I know it’s irresponsible to talk about the Discovery this early, in October . . .”
Chairs around the room squeaked as everyone sat up, listening closer.
“But the reason for confidence tonight is in the incredibly hard work of one of our own.”
Neesha swallowed. She’d submitted a version of Apex for consideration, and even though her original rat tests hadn’t gone well, no one else in the class was even close to a product.
Yangborne’s eyes scanned the room, up to the back row, landing on her for a moment before falling back to the front-right corner. Leia beamed back at him.
“Leia, what are we going to give our subjects tonight to boost their neural activity?”
“Oxytocin,” she said proudly.
Neesha felt like the wind had been knocked out of her. Oxytocin was a naturally occurring hormone. Leia didn’t even know how to synthesize complex compounds.
“Oxytocin, indeed! To those of you in the back of the room who aren’t familiar, oxytocin is a naturally occurring hormone in humans that boosts neural activity, acting as a kind of mailman for some of our most important neural activity. Its presence makes us more inclined to trust, be affectionate, and understand others.
“Humans started producing it when we started having children. We’ve found recently it releases during activities like maternal care, paternal care, kissing a baby’s forehead, hugging. It really is a miracle hormone—if you’ve got people who aren’t getting along, you hit them with a puff of this, and boom. They’re understanding, they’re listening, they’re kissing, they love each other. Like MDMA without having to dance all the time.”
“What’s MDMA?” someone in the front asked.
“Doesn’t matter. Point is, it’s the most important chemical in the human body. Many would say it’s the reason humans ever evolved past the primate stage. We started caring for our children, started caring for other people’s children, started caring for our brothers and sisters, started caring for random people, and before you know it, we’ve built a whole complex architecture of emotional perception we call empathy. And that has become the only reason we do anything, beyond survival.”
The class wasn’t nearly as excited as he wanted them to be, so Yangborne drummed his fingers on the desk a few times. “It’s also the hormone your body releases during orgasm!”
“Except,” Neesha said, raising her hand and speaking without waiting to be called on, “if it’s naturally occurring, how come we’re giving Leia credit for inventing it?”
The class laughed.
“Leia,” Yangborne said with another gross little smile in her direction, “has created a booster th
at is effective with rats. It activates exactly the parts of their brain we want to be activating, and she’s proven it with research. Well done, Leia.”
A few people clapped. Leia buried her head, feigning like she was above the attention.
Neesha took few deep breaths to keep her face from flushing red. Not only was it ridiculous that Leia would get credit for something that was already actively existing in all their brains, but Apex stimulated way more neural activity, and she had the proof. The problem was, it wasn’t with rats, and she couldn’t show it yet.
“So be ready tonight. Wear a nice shirt, in case we have to take a picture.” He nodded to the wall on the right, covered by framed photos of Redemption classes of old, surrounding successful experiments and discoveries. “We’ll start at nine, come early if you want a seat—”
A loud buzz from the corner of the room interrupted him. Several students jumped. Yangborne made his way over to the radio dock on the wall and plugged it in, then flipped a switch. “Hello?”
There was a crackling, then a woman’s voice. “Carl, do you have a class in right now?”
The school had a closed-circuit radio feed, physically wired into the building by the Robo students, that allowed the heads of the schools to communicate directly. They all had docks in their offices and classrooms, so occasionally, Yangborne would leave his on and transmitting while his boom box played country radio. Once during a lab session, Dr. Richardson came flying in and ripped his boom box from the wall, because it was broadcasting “Achy Breaky Heart” to the other offices.
“Just my Year Fours, go ahead.”
“Would you mind talking to all your students about the sweep last night?” It was a high voice, either Dr. Richardson or Dr. Roux. “We decided we’d rather have it come directly from instructors, to help people with the news.”
“Sure thing.” He flipped the switch off, and the crackling stopped, then turned back to the class.
“I’m sure most of you already know this, but Emmalynn Donahue from Human hasn’t been seen since last night. If you know anything, anything at all, please go to the office in the GRC and tell them. I’m sure we’ll know what happened quickly, and it’ll be some kind of misunderstanding, but until then, if anyone needs help with it, we can do a support group. Okay? Okay, great.” He smiled. “I’ll see you tonight.”
Evan.
EVAN SAT ALONE outside Dr. Richardson’s office, his feet propped on her waiting table. Through half-open eyes, he followed the lines across the paper in front of him, thinly covered by a piece of schoolwork, tumbling through the associations of Emma’s final week and lining up details.
Zaza, Neesha, Aiden; before mass.
A violent mess in the chapel, with her boyfriend at the center of it.
Yanis immediately sent by the school to find her.
A phone call, from the booth ten feet away—to an unidentified number.
He hadn’t slept. Her testimonial journal had presented him with forty days’ worth of new data points, directly from the source itself, and he had to log them all before morning.
The writing in her journal was frustrating. There was little recounting of the particular details of her life, and almost no mention of classes or conversations. Sometimes he was able to glean details from the context of described interactions—assessments with Dr. Richardson, late nights with Neesha—but most moments were omitted or left to biblical parable. There were still inexplicable behaviors, and huge gaps and variables in her pattern.
On the other hand, it was the Emma he knew, the Emma of May fourteenth, pure and true. It was exactly what he needed to know about her, and he knew her now better than he ever had before. The depth of her sadness. The amount of her time that was spent wallowing in past nightmares. He wasn’t wrong. Emma was troubled, and she needed help. Now more than ever.
Dr. Richardson leaned out of her office. “Thanks for waiting, Evan. Come on in.” He watched over her shoulder as she typed four numbers into the keypad.
Her office was plain and warm, with soft light coming from lamps in all four corners, a large desk in the center, and neutral-tone bookshelves along the walls. It was intentionally welcoming, obvious S2—Subtext suggesting this was a place where students could feel safe. There were photos everywhere of Dr. Richardson, shaking hands or holding microphones next to political and academic types, waving to cameras and accepting awards. He wasn’t sure exactly what she’d done to earn her all this praise, but all the instructors at Redemption seemed overqualified.
She stared at him for sixty seconds, smiling as if she had learned everything she needed to know in one silent moment. Finally, she plopped open a thick folder on the desk.
“You wrote in a paper for Dr. Edwards that a creature whose purpose has been voided is living a nonexistence worse than death. ‘Only those with a mission, with a reason to have lived, will know true salvation.’” She smiled. “That’s very literal, Evan, and very biblical. Also, it’s a very serious standard to apply to life. Do you really believe that’s true?”
He nodded.
“Then what is your purpose?”
Evan’s eyes flittered around the room before returning to her. He didn’t look away or stutter. “This. Redemption is my purpose.”
He could tell in the creases of her eyebrows that she wasn’t satisfied by the answer, or she didn’t believe him. “Most students say that. And if you don’t succeed here? If you were, for some reason, to fail? What are we supposed to do with you then?”
“I . . . I won’t fail.”
She flipped over pages in the folder. He tried to make out what was written upside down, but she moved so fast through them, he only caught glimpses. A photo that looked like his family’s living room. A photo of the chess computer. A newspaper article about his victory.
Whatever she was looking for, Dr. Richardson didn’t find it. She readjusted in her chair. “Do you ever get sad here?”
It caught him off-balance. It was completely outside the pattern. There was no place in the conversation for a question like that. It had no visible S2—Subtext, no apparent S3—Intention, but it asked him to respond with S4—Emotion.
“Everyone gets sad,” he said with no inflection. “But I don’t, very often.”
“About what?”
“School. Friends. Sad movies.”
“Interesting,” she said. “You don’t seem to be a fan of these kinds of conversations. Is that fair to say?”
“I don’t know.”
“I understand. That’s common, particularly for exceptional students. We have a lot of those here. That’s on purpose, of course; we recruit the students we think are the most gifted, yourself included, so we can develop those gifts. That’s the way we’ve operated for twenty years; it’s the reason we have the results we do.
“But one of the unintended consequences of orienting students like that, toward the pursuit of being the best at what they do, is that they tend to underestimate the value of the way they feel. To be the best basketball player, the best debater, to win at chess—these goals are so urgent and defined, everything else feels like it just gets in the way. Feelings of stress or loneliness can seem like an obstacle to the more important thing we know we’re destined for. So students ignore those feelings, over and over again, until eventually they’ve built mechanisms to shield themselves. And one of those mechanisms”—she flipped the folder shut—“is not talking about it.”
She looked into his eyes. “Feeling alone, or scared, or empathetic—those feelings are who we are. They’re the engine that makes the rest of it go. If we weren’t constantly in pursuit of love, or afraid of the loss of it, we wouldn’t have any reason for doing anything.
“And talking about them is how we make sense of them. The practice of trading empathies is what creates our moral baseline. After all, how am I, as one of the heads of this school, to understand the pain of stress on students, unless you express that pain? How am I supposed to know what’s blocking your progress,
if I don’t know what’s going on inside you?”
It was a rhetorical question. Evan let it hang in space for a moment.
“The lesson is this,” she continued. “Don’t disconnect from the forces that drive you from the inside. Listen to them. Experience them. Because if you don’t control them, they will come back to control you, in terrible ways. Like a stutter.”
She let it sit with him for a long moment. But he didn’t flinch.
“Okay.”
“Good.” She sat up. “The first step, of course, is you and I working together to understand what has shaped you into the person who sits before me. In order for that to happen, I need you to make me a promise. You have to be completely open. You have to tell me everything. No secrets, no rules, no punishment. Can you promise me that?”
Her lips curled upward. She could already see through his skin.
Evan nodded.
“Wonderful.” She nodded. “Then I’ll see you tomorrow.”
He stalled in the lobby after the assessment, watching as the next student, a Year Four named Archie, disappeared behind the thick wooden door. She was right. He didn’t like talking about sadness. But not because it was uncomfortable. And not because it wasn’t important.
He didn’t want to talk to her because as soon as you told someone something about yourself, it was no longer yours. In chess, signaling information was the quickest way to lose an advantage. Some argued information sharing was evolved, that the most advanced forms of civilization, reserved exclusively for ants and science fiction, used hive minds to share information simultaneously between all members of their species. In the human world, however, where there was no such thing as a parity of power, there was no such thing as a parity of information, either. Advantage could only be gained by keeping information in your own head, for yourself alone.
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