Broken Wide

by Susan Kaye Quinn

“Okay,” I say, finally breaking the silence. “I’m listening.”

  He takes a deep breath and starts. “Wright came for us in the middle of the night. She must have drugged us because I woke up with no knowledge of how I got to the base. She had your mother and sister, that’s all I knew. I thought…” He swallows. “At the time, I thought at least you were safe, given you’d run away. I should have known better. Anyway, Wright gave me a choice—help with their latest weapons development or see your mother go back into the program. And Olivia…” His voice cracks.

  I can’t help it—my anger dissipates. Because I’d do anything for my kid sister, too. “You were trying to keep them safe.”

  He ducks his head and wipes at his face. Then he looks up and clears his throat. “I knew Wright would continue her weapons programs whether I helped or not. Each day I worked in the lab was a day your mom and sister were staying out of it. If I had to make that choice again, I would. Especially knowing they’re free now.”

  “They are.” I don’t tell him they experimented on Olivia anyway. That her mutant powers are likely due to Wright’s serums. There’s no point, and I can all too easily see myself making the same choice.

  My dad nods. “So I did what they asked. But I dragged my feet, Zeph. And I sabotaged whenever I could.”

  My eyebrows lift. “The production problems Tiller was battling with the orbs…”

  “You know about that?” He seems surprised.

  “A lot’s happened since I saw you last.” An unexpected closing of my throat cuts me off.

  He frowns but nods. “The attack on Jackertown—that was unexpected. I don’t know who authorized it, but Wright was taken by surprise, too.”

  “She didn’t order that?” Now I’m surprised.

  “I don’t think so. Something larger is in play here—that’s why the president’s call to you freaked her out. Me, too, honestly. You can’t trust that man, son.”

  “I know.” But my heart feels like it’s suddenly light. Like the world makes sense again. Because my dad, even if we don’t share DNA, is looking out for me. And never stopped.

  I've choked up again, so it’s good my dad keeps talking.

  “This is why I needed to come see you. To warn you about the president, and Wright, and really… you can’t trust anyone, Zeph. But even more important, you need to know… I’ve built a backdoor into the design of the orbs.”

  “Wait, what?”

  “A back door. A way to disable them.” He glances around the apartment as if he’s afraid we’ll be overheard. “No one knows about it but me. I designed it. I don’t know what your abilities are, but if you can jack past the shielding, there’s a kill switch in the code.”

  My eyes go wide. “Actually, I can’t. But I know someone who can.” Sammi—this kind of work is her specialty. If only we’d know when we were battling the orbs at Jackertown.

  “Okay. Good.” He looks nervous. “I’m just a reader, but I’ve learned a thing or two about keeping secrets, being around jackers my whole life.” He gives a small smile, and I know he means my mom. An image of the two of them pops up in my head—him a reader, her a damaged jacker who can no longer jack, teaching each other mind tricks. It swells an unexpected lump in my throat. And I can’t help imagining what life would be like if Tessa and I had any time like that—just normal life. A family. Kids.

  I have to physically shake that thought from my head. I can’t afford to go there. “So you’ve kept this a secret from Wright,” I say to my dad. “All this time.”

  “Yes. I think so. There’s no way she’d let me live if she knew.”

  I nod my agreement to that. “So how do I access it?”

  “There’s a special sequence,” he says. “I’ve locked it away in a memory that seems… innocent.” He steps forward and takes me by the shoulders, peering into my eyes. “Son, I want you to link into my head. I’ll play the memory. Then I want you to erase it.”

  “What? Why?” I grimace. The last thing I want is to tamper with my dad’s head.

  He squeezes my shoulders and releases me. “Because I won’t be able to suppress it after that—not after playing it for you. If Wright has one of her monsters scour my memories, she’ll find it… and you.”

  I nod even though I don’t like this one bit.

  He steps back and closes his eyes. I link in and see a memory bloom in his thoughts—it’s the four of us at Olivia’s birthday party, standing around the cake and singing Happy Birthday. When the song finishes, we all sing a nonsensical string of words… then laugh. Only that never happened, not in real life.

  My dad opens his eyes. “That’s the code.”

  “Got it.” I frown, then jack fast into his mind because this part makes my stomach squirm. I erase the last part of that memory, along with his entire explanation about the tampering and the code’s existence. Then a chill runs through me as I realize this memory is linked to so many things—the work itself, the many times he’s dug in to resurrect the memory, to make sure it’s still there, his determination to come see me and tell me about it. I plow deeper into his memories, erasing as I go.

  My dad’s eyes squeeze shut, and he groans.

  I keep going.

  It’s like a spider’s web, these memories, all connected, all tangled with one another. I keep erasing. My dad cries out and drops to his knees, his fists bunched in his hair as if he could stop the pain of the memory scouring that way. I feel the tears leak out even as I keep tunneling deeper and deeper. By the time I’m done, it feels like I’ve erased half of the last two years.

  I pull out of his head, and he gasps with relief.

  He doesn’t get up right away, so I bend to help him. My hands grip his arms—he’s shaking.

  “You okay?” I feel sick inside.

  “Yeah, I don’t know what that was,” he says, shaking his head to clear it. Half his memories of why he came to see me are gone. “Just felt woozy there for a second.”

  “Do you need some water?” I can’t say anything else. Can’t even hint—the mind is too good at putting itself back together. Filling in the blanks.

  “No, no. I’m fine.” He waves me off but still has a hand rubbing his temples. Then he peers at me. “Anyway, son. I know all of this is hard. And upsetting. And if you can’t forgive me for, well, everything I’ve done, I’ll understand. But it’s really for the best.”

  My throat’s closed up. He doesn’t remember. He thinks he’s been working for Wright all this time, albeit to keep Mom and Olivia safe. “It’s okay, Dad. I get it.”

  He nods, vaguely. “Wow, this headache… I’m going to go. I hope that meeting with the president goes well. Just be careful, do what they say, and it’ll all work out.” He leans in to give me a one-armed hug while his other hand still massages his temple.

  I hug him back with both arms. Hard. “I love you, Dad.”

  “I love you, too, son.”

  I just watch as he stumbles to the door, opens it, and slowly closes it as he leaves.

  Then I don’t even try to stop the tears from falling.

  The last 24 hours have been bad for me.

  But they’ve been hell on Renell.

  I don’t know exactly what’s happened in the isolation tank, but he’s standing before me now, dripping oily liquid on the floor, and he looks far worse than when he went in.

  “The full programming usually takes three days,” Wright grumbles.

  She’s complaining because I insisted on checking him before I made any more Obedients, most notably Anna. “What kind of science are you guys doing if you don’t check on progress?” I snap back.

  She sniffs at me, which is a lot less pushback than I expect. Then she focuses on Renell, but he just continues to stare blankly ahead. “He’s not responding to anything more than basic commands.” The whining in her voice is getting on my nerves.

  I tamp that down. “How does this work exactly?”

  “The details are classified!” she barks at me.
Going from whiner to bite my head off in two seconds is uncharacteristically volatile for Wright. She’s under some kind of pressure like my dad said, and it’s getting to her.

  “All right, look.” I turn away from Renell’s vacant expression. “You want me to make more? You need to work with me. I need to know what’s going on inside.” I jab a finger at his head.

  “I thought unlocking minds was your specialty.” She presses her lips together in a perturbed expression that’s almost comical.

  “This crazy mindfield you’ve designed is impenetrable to ordinary jacking.” I explain it slowly like she’s an idiot.

  The flash in her eyes is more like the normal Wright. Terrifying and cold. Somehow that’s more reassuring than this slightly-unhinged state she’s been in lately.

  “I can spin his mindfield to try to take a look inside,” I elaborate, “but the last time I did that, I killed a guy. So I’m trying to make sure I don’t break your toy.”

  She sighs and purses her lips, but she seems reassured that I’m not trying to pry top-secret technology out of her. “The mental conditioning of the isolation unit is very standard. Suggestibility drugs, light and sound conditioning, and a control phrase that’s implanted deep in order to trigger total compliance.”

  In other words, torture and brainwashing. I keep that thought to myself.

  “So it’s not that they’re keyed to your brainwaves or something?”

  “I’m the only one who knows the control phrases,” she says stiffly. “Obedients are able to receive mindwaves like a reader and will obey simple commands, but anything complicated or... troubling... requires the control phrase. I’m very careful to only activate it when I’m alone.”

  I squint. “Yet, someone else sent Obedients to Jackertown.” It’s a guess—based on her argument with my dad yesterday—but the way her eyes flash, I’m hitting it dead on.

  “Those units were commandeered without my permission.”

  Units. My teeth grind. “Okay, so someone hacked your protocol.” I glance at the box with its blinking screen. “I assume you checked that out?”

  “There was no breach in our security.” She’s strung tight about this. And I can see why—if you’re hard-coding a control phrase into people’s brains, that’s not something that’s easy to change… but if the control phrases were leaked somehow…

  “So how did they get the codes? And who sent the orbs to Jackertown?” Seems like those must be the same person.

  Her normal frosty with a side of killer expression makes an appearance. “I suspect Mr. Tiller is running his own parallel research program. Or I have a mole.”

  I’d hate to be the DARPA flunky who stole from Wright. “I thought you and Tiller were working together.” It certainly looked that way when he brought in Wright to threaten me with her Obedient.

  “Only when necessary.” She harrumphs again and gestures to Renell, who’s staring at nothing. “In any event, this unit needs more time in the tank. I’ve been commanding him to attack you for the last five minutes, and he hasn’t moved.”

  I give her a look of disgust. “There’s seriously something wrong with you, Wright.”

  She ignores that. “Perhaps you’ve simply failed in your job.”

  “What? For the love of—” I squeeze my eyes shut and rub both hands against my temples, willing myself to patience. When I open them again, I look over Renell. I really don’t like the idea of putting him back in the tank. “So, you’re telling me you just implant this control phrase deep in his subconscious? That’s not much more than a standard jack.” It’s more complicated to make it stick, but still possible with the right kind of jack.

  “Only it must be done after they’ve been made Obedient. If standard jacking worked, I wouldn’t need you.”

  I study Renell’s slack features. “Maybe I can plant the control phrase while I’m spinning the field. Locking it in, so to speak. I’m essentially reshaping his mind—anything I implant at that point will become part of the fabric of the new configuration.” I look to her. “It could work. Then you wouldn’t have to mess with the tank.”

  Her eyes light up, and a smile tugs at her lips. “Do it.”

  “You’re forgetting… I’m not sure if I can undo it.”

  “There’s no need to—”

  “I don’t want to break him, Wright.” I blow out a breath—I really don’t want to try this, but I need to know if I can restore Renell before I create any more Obedients. I don’t know what Wright’s endgame is, but I know mine—to undo all the damage I’ve been forced to create while trying to bring down this whole operation. With my dad’s back-door code for the orbs, suddenly there’s a real chance at that. I just haven’t figured out the details.

  “If it breaks,” Wright says, “we have more to experiment with.”

  She really has no soul. “How about you give me a little space to do this? I don’t need you hovering over me.”

  “Fine.” She seems frustrated with me as well.

  “And I’ll need one of your control phrases.”

  “Absolutely not!”

  I throw up my hands. “I don’t know what you expect me to implant then.”

  The warring expressions on her face would make me laugh if I didn’t think she’d shoot me for it. I keep my schadenfreude amusement under wraps.

  “Very well,” she says stiffly. “You select the phrase. We’ll test the unit again when you’ve successfully implanted it.”

  “Okay then.” I guess they don’t have some rigorous protocol for designating control phrases for their mind-bots. I’m not sure why this strikes me as funny.

  “I have some business to attend to,” she says. “When I’m done, I’ll return to check on your progress.”

  I nod, but she’s already turned her back on me, her heels clacking on the way out.

  I face Renell. “Man, I’m so sorry about this.” Not that he can hear me, but it feels right to say it. I reach out and envelope his mindfield with mine. His crazy, multicolor eyes seem like they’re staring straight into mine, which is unnerving, so I move a little to the left. He doesn’t track with me. I focus on the slippery feel of his mindfield. It’s almost featureless, perfectly smooth.

  I’ve never had to figure out how I grasp hold of someone’s mindfield—but that seems the relevant point here. Normally, a mindmap has a million features to it, like an infinitely rough climbing wall with countless places to catch hold. My mindfield surrounds it, sensing all the features—taking a read is basically mapping every contour. From there, it’s not hard to spin. It’s like friction—my mindfield conforms to theirs, there’s interference between the two, and that interference acts like friction.

  But what does that even mean?

  I wrack my brain for the definition of friction from my physics class. I only made it part way through Junior year before I ran off to escape some very pissed off Clan members, and it’s not like I was super paying attention while I was there. But from what I remember, friction is just the force between two surfaces when all their micro-features rub up against one another. But it’s not just the bumps jostling other bumps—more like when the surfaces get close to one another, a different force takes over, some electron/field interference. And mindfields are already fields—the whole idea of a mindbarrier is that when mindfields collide, the interference inhibits one from penetrating the other. Harder mindbarriers are just a shift in the amplitude of the mindwaves—I know that much; I’ve designed them. So when I grab hold of a mindfield to spin it, I’m using the friction/interference between the fields.

  Seems logical. Should work for Obedients—except they break. Then again, I wasn’t trying to be gentle when Wright’s Obedients were trying to kill me.

  I wrap my mindfield around Renell’s slippery one, slowly and gently, but no matter how softly I go, it’s the same—either it slips out of my grasp, or it catches too hard, and I have to back off.

  Then an image from my physics class jumps into my head. Mr. Zimo
lzak did a demo with some metal cubes—the smooth, micro-shaved cubes actually had more friction than the rougher ones. Smooth surfaces, if they’re smooth enough, can have more friction—something about it being flat enough to have more contact between the two. So maybe the problem isn’t that Renell’s mindfield is too slippery—it’s that there’s too much friction between our fields due to the insane flatness of his.

  I try backing off and warping my mindfield, so I have contact with only half of his. The resistance is still too great—feels like I’m tugging on an eggshell that will shatter if I try too hard. I back off further to gripping just a quarter. Still too much. I keep at it, slowly working down to where there’s hardly any contact, just a finger’s breadth if you can measure mindfields that way.

  It gives slightly… then snaps back in place.

  I let out the breath I’ve been holding while I focus. But this is good. This can work.

  A buzzing in my pocket makes me jump.

  I pull out my phone. ZEPH? says the notification.

  Holy crap, I have a scrit from Major John Scott.

  I jack in and scrit a reply. DUDE WHAT? WHERE ARE YOU?

  QUESTION IS WHERE ARE YOU, the reply comes back. TRACING YOUR PHONE NOW.

  Well, I can save him the trouble. DARPA. Then I glance at the door—Wright shut it behind her. I quickly tap in Scott’s number to call him.

  He picks up right away. “How are you even calling me?”

  “I’ve got like five minutes before Wright gets back. Maybe less.”

  “Okay, we’re pinning down your location. We can be there inside the hour. What’s your status?”

  “Um… not needing to be rescued?” I’m not even sure where to start.

  “Don’t get yourself killed being a hero, kid. Busting out of a place like that—”

  “Scott,” I cut him off. “Just listen.”

  “Okay, but if you do something stupid, Tessa will have my head.”

  Her name pulls me to a full stop. “Is she okay?”

  “Okay? She’s been riding my ass to get you rescued! And why the hell aren’t you at the DC? Do you know what I went through—”