by Micah Thomas
No matter how Cassie felt, life and death at the hospice followed the usual grind. Check charts, check meds, check comfort, make small talk. Cassie usually enjoyed that last part, but she was so very distracted by the goons, the job offer, the thoughts of a kind cop, and a troubled man in trouble. It didn't help that one of her favorite patients had passed in the preceding week. Where could she go now for that maternal insight? Who else was that concerned for her romantic wellbeing? Oh god, she thought, realizing that her patients were the closest things to friends that she had.
Today they were trying something new at the office. A patient, Gary Grossman, forty years old and dying, fairly young for their facility, had opted to try a new therapy program, one using music. Cassie had helped sponsor the program and had read up on the literature, even though she'd not seen it in action. She supposed it would be better than the limited number of iPods that were donated, frequently old and half working. Objects on their way out for people also on their way out.
The music therapist was waiting in the lobby with a suitcase and a guitar case over one shoulder. She was Cassie's own age, and strikingly beautiful. She wore a colorful floral dress, incidentally forming to her lithe body. Indeterminately ethnic. Her hair a significant tumble of rich brown curls, framing her face that held brightly energetic eyes and quirky sideways smile. What is that feeling in a woman when she sees someone like this? A spike of envy and attraction? A sudden awareness of one's self-perceived shortcomings and imperfections, and certainly, in this context, an uggh feeling about wearing unflattering, but practical scrubs.
"Hi. I'm Cassie."
"Nessa. The music therapist, obviously," she said as she shrugged and adjusted the guitar case.
"Nice to meet you. Here, let me help with that."
"I got it," Nessa said.
Great. She's nice, too. Cassie supposed that music workers would be happier than others.
"Gary isn't awake yet. We have a lounge for staff, coffee and maybe there's some danish left."
"Great. I could use a cup or five."
They sat in the small staff lounge.
"So, how did you get into music therapy? Like, is that what you always knew you'd want to do?"
She laughed and even the laugh was musical.
"No. I'm a musician, above all else. I've done all sorts of work. Literally, everything. This just, you know, organically happened, you know? How about you? Did you always want to work in this area of care?"
Cassie laughed, "Not really. I guess, like you said, it was kinda organic. Things just happened."
"Not your dream job?"
"You could say that."
Nessa sipped her coffee. Cassie glanced at the clock. They still had time to fill. Gary was waking up later and later. The side effect of the palliative medications. There was a balance, often missed in dosages. Sleep without pain at the cost of missing out a dwindling number of hours of living. A lot of people do calculations of hours spent at work, hours on the toilet, hours asleep, hours with family or experiencing joy. The calculation becomes much sharper when one is on the precipice.
"I was going to be a doctor. That's what I wanted to do out of high school."
"Then life happened?"
Cassie, the introvert, the friendless, deliberated opening up, and figured what the heck, "That's right. My dad died. We weren't rich, but we thought there'd be something for college, but there wasn't. My mom went back to work and I went into the military."
"Damn. That's pretty heavy."
Cassie equivocated a bit, "I guess. I eventually did get medical training, but it felt like nothing felt right. When I got out, this job was open and I took it. I guess it's not really a very long story."
"You know, you could always do something else."
Cassie thought it was ironic. Wasn't Nessa supposed to be a therapist for the patients? Here she was doling out career advice over coffee.
The orderly came in to let them know Gary was ready. Cassie stood as if to go in too, but Nessa stopped her.
"The sessions can be really emotionally intense. I know it's the first one you guys have done, but it's best for me to work alone with the patient," Nessa said in friendly but firm terms.
"Oh, ok. We'll see you in an hour. Just press the nurse button if you need anything."
Cassie felt funny about it, but supposed it made sense. She thought about the life of a musician, playing gigs and traveling around, chasing the dream. She could always do something else, couldn't she? What would it take to take the investigator's offer seriously? She had no pets or plants, so it's really a matter of putting her mail on hold and seeing if she could take time off work, or quit even. Was there some excitement to the danger in finding Henry? She wasn't sure about that part, but there was a tingle of a sorts. It was like something out of a movie. She didn't know the first thing about how to find someone though. Maybe they'd feed her leads and she would go door to door asking if they were sheltering a fire starter. It sounded dumb in her mind, but still, it would be a really big change, at least for a few days. How long could she rely on this lasting? They offered some unspecified amount of compensation. Maybe enough to take this seriously.
It wasn't as if the offer itself wasn't weird and movie-like. What they said about Henry, it had to be bullshit. Stuff like that doesn't exist, can't exist. She'd been in war-torn cities. If there were some super-powered heroes or villains, she hadn't seen it. Just an ordinary human mess, human violence and destruction, and human compassion. No. Henry was probably just a messed up guy that spent time with a vaguely cult-like mental institute. If she did find him, maybe she'd just help him find his family or get real help. She didn't know. It's hard to imagine that far in what was essentially just a daydream.
She walked by Gary's room and heard strumming of guitar, a Beatles song, not a cheerful one, but she couldn't make it out. She made her rounds and came back around to the front desk. Aaron was sitting in the lobby. Her ex-boyfriend. What on Earth did he want?
"Hey!" he said nearly jumping out of his seat to greet her.
"Aaron, what are you doing here?" Cassie took him by the arm, leading him to the entrance and out the door.
They stood in the in-between of the exterior door and interior doors. A foyer where the AC-cooled air mixed with the heat from outside. It made the air humid and practically an interior storm front.
"Hey, hey, I saw you on YouTube. I was worried. Why didn't you call?"
"I don't know, maybe because when you're in an accident you call your family and friends, and last I checked, you weren't either."
"Come on, it doesn't mean I wasn't worried. That shit was nuts. I wanted to know if you were ok. Are you ok?"
What did she ever see in him? He'd never come to see her at work, not even sent flowers on her birthday.
"I'm fine. Everything is fine. What do you really want?"
"Like I said, I saw you and thought, my god, how does someone survive that? And then, I was like, who's that dude? Is he your new guy or something?"
"God. No. He was just another person at the store when it happened. You have no room to be jealous, Aaron. Are you still sleeping with that girl?"
"Cassie, I come here to see if you are ok and that's what you bring up?"
"Last time I saw you, we broke up and you asked me to keep paying for your cell phone. Remember that? Remember why we broke up? Should I just forget you are a cheater just because you are suddenly concerned about my wellbeing?"
Aaron shrugged and did his 'whatever man' expression of annoyance. The inner door opened and Nessa came through, wheeling her box of instruments.
"Oh, hi. I wanted to say goodbye and, I guess, see you next time."
Cassie, switching gears from Aaron, asked, "So soon? It hasn't been an hour, has it?"
"No. He didn't have the energy for it, but it was good."
Aaron coughed, a not subtle move to get attention, as he practically ogled at Nessa.
"Hi, I'm Aaron. I'm a friend of Cassie's."
Nessa looked at him with a squint, "You know, we all heard you through the lobby. You're a piece of shit and if you were a friend, you'd have made a nice gesture, flowers or something, and not made this about you. So you can fuck right off."
Aaron's face reddened. He was as shocked as if he'd been slapped in the goddamn face. Cassie loved it. He mustered another 'whatever man' look and left, ineffectually trying to slam the door, which had safety hinges, forcing a slow, very slow and safe, close.
"Thanks," Cassie said, "That was actually awesome."
"Fuck that guy. Look, I have to go, I have another appointment to get to, but we should hang out."
"Sure. That'd be great. I owe you a drink at least for fucking up Aaron's day."
"I know it's a cliché, but life is too short. Whether its men or jobs, you don't have to stay anywhere you don't want to be. You always have a choice."
Nessa left and Cassie went back to work, thinking, maybe she would make choice. Things could change and that might not be so bad.
CHAPTER FOUR
Black Star employees were among the brightest in the talent pool, but that distinction was meaningless when even the brightest are organized in hierarchies of skill and delegation. There's the engagement teams, admins and friendly externally-facing fronts. They thought the Institute was a neat place to work, where they get to meet people and present marketing materials describing how one could learn more about themselves and wouldn't it be great fun for corporate learning? Personality tests, that's their business. But once intake was done, materials passed to other hands and the front end lost sight of it. The next tiers analyzed materials and created an assessment. If the candidate met some secret combination of criteria, they went deeper into the maze. A candidate was then channeled into a dataset pool matching their assessment and predilection. 99% of candidates washed out at this stage. The tech leads followed the triage protocols measuring the candidate's ability to find the path, a spooky guided meditation process, with almost no real way to verify results, unless something happens. They knew what to look for, but not what it meant. For those very few that advance further, in patient accommodations are provided, and subjected to constant surveillance by the analysts.
Bernice was an analyst. Sure, she knew protocols as well as any tech lead, but they had enough tech leads. Opportunities to rise were outnumbered by a tendency to flip staff. This was a mechanism to protect secrets, but the outcome was staff that were always uncertain about their standing. Among the lightly disgruntled underlings, small transgressive chat windows abounded. Some had more sophistication to avoid detection, others were in blatant disregard of the official policy of not talking about personal life. Bernice walked the line. As she sat at her computer terminal, a small popup announced a private message on her contraband messaging service. Telly, another analyst on another project, was apparently equally chatty this evening.
"I always thought that I might have an undiscovered genius."
"What do you mean?"
"Like, that one day, I'd pick up the guitar, or piano, or paint brush and just be brilliant at it."
"Without training?"
"Yeah. Just a natural... maybe a sport, or even sciences."
"No luck so far, I imagine?"
"I keep trying new things, but no. Nothing yet."
"You're a pretty good friend. Maybe not brilliant though."
"Yeah. Not brilliant. Certainly not. I didn't help you move last year."
"No. You did not! Are you secretly the world's greatest lover? I know you aren't the best employee, or else maybe you wouldn't be slacking in slacker chat."
"'Nope. Merely mediocre. Even at masturbation."
"Shit! Maybe you'll be the best dad? Or the best cranky old person? Have you thought about that?"
"Hey, did you see that video from India?"
"Yeah. Any credible news sources picking it up yet?"
"Yeah. No. I thought it was gonna be some film student's demo reel. You know, a high quality, computer generated hoax."
"Think it's related to that call yesterday?"
"Project BT? Maybe. They've gone dark. I couldn't reach Prabithra or Kothai all week."
"C seemed really pissed. Thought she was blowing a gasket."
"The management really seems to forget that there's real people working here."
"It's all about control for her. Should've retired years ago, if this were a real company."
"Fat chance. Queen bitch of BSI."
"Hey hey easy. They read these. Not all of them, but there's trigger words. You know that."
"No way. I know for a fact that half the team just sits around watching porn and YouTube all day."
"Lol. I forgot you were transferred from IT. Oh shit. I've got a red light. My girl is waking up. Gotta go."
"Ok. Be nice to her. She's not a mutant experiment. Remember. We are people and they are people, too."
Working for any technology giant inherently meant giant bureaucracy and also giant secrets. Black Star took enormous precautions to safeguard confidentiality, some through usual channels of non-disclosure agreements and others, less talked about, but the threat or promise of action had a near total silencing effect, at least externally. Despite decades of operation, there'd been no leaks that could not be discredited or made to disappear. Knowledge of this reality was tiered, and reached the level of rumor down at the lowest analyst level. Bernice wasn't at the bottom, but certainly wasn't at the top, nor did she want to be. The hourly commitment was only part of it. There was a culture thing. Double talk and belief. On one hand, the guise of project management language kept conversations limited to status and code names, data outputs, processes; but underneath, the discussion was about the projects.
Bernice was sitting in an observation room. Her subject was starting her morning routine, despite it being in the middle of the night. A few days inside, away from windows and anyone's biological clock might fall out of standard circadian rhythm. The effect was very strong with Project Lilith, but that was barely even a consideration in the observation.
Beyond the looking glass of hidden webcams and double sided mirrors, a young woman, a teen really, brushed her teeth and studied her reflection. Telly's parting words echoed in Bernice's mind. She's not just an experiment. She's a person, sure, but more than that now. The lights in the bathroom flickered and Bernice saw, or imagined she saw, a light behind the teen's eyes, something or someone else behind them. The moment passed and the teen finished washing her face. Bernice sighed and went back to playing solitaire. The girl might not be a mutant, but she creeped Bernice out. Between flickering lights and some awful sense that she could see Bernice beyond the glass, there was something not right about the kid.
After a decided loss at solitaire, Bernice clicked to see if she had access to the project session data. Analysts usually had access by necessity. How could they report data of any significance if they didn't know the manifestation vectors of the subject? Just like last time, the system beeped an error indicating insufficient credentials. The teen was now reading comic books, curled up on the couch in her fake apartment. What kind of monster are you, little girl? Bernice thought the worst about her charge, and did the girl look up at her? God, this job sucked.
***
Henry wasn't Henry, not in these dreams where dissociative identity, madness, and ego death were becoming real possibilities. It was like trying to sleep while coming down from an acid trip. He knew he was dreaming. Yet he knew he was traveling both inward, ever inward, and also moving through the sky, a mote of perception caught in the breeze. The duality of presence, or awareness, really fucked him up. Just like being on acid, it is not the visuals that did you in, but the mental confusion.
He was the hot air rising. The wind buoyed him, or what remained of him, to great heights and slammed his mind into thunderheads of condensation, friction and lightning. Storm fronts and sledge hammer cold fronts and towers of hot columns. He was really cruising, the sense of accelera
tion, ascent, descent across the desert sky and some remote part of his awareness was running dream narratives and fictions through his thinking parts. Memories and memories of dreams broke out into words unsolicited, a mushroom trip of mental chatter playing against a black wall of nothingness inside. Self talked to self, unbidden as the physical burned in the ether.
"Where's Henry? Did he get into the basement again?" he heard a voice from the past ask.
Great question. Where was his body? Henry was caught in the double perception, one comprised of passing landscapes, impressions of sky and land, and the other, a disturbing introspective trip as his consciousness flipped through memories and made up things, perhaps in an attempt to reconcile the horrors of sharing a mind with an alien entity, or to make peace with what he had seen. He heard voices, their echoes and fragments rolling in that internal blank landscape, when suddenly, he was dropped into a scene, watching that movie of his life. It was impossible for him to keep up.
He was in Seattle, again. An important day. It was the day after Chloe died. He knew the police would be looking for him. He hadn't been there with her, but they probably knew he'd provided the drugs that ended her life. They wouldn't care that he had warned her, that he didn't mess with the hard stuff, and that she had broken up with him about it. Broken hearts aren't mitigating factors to culpability. And he did feel bad. The memory dream, so tactile and lucid, brought up his heartache fresh and bloody. What had he felt? Fear, pain, and the need to escape.