“I’m not sure ‘avenge’ flies in polls,” Gabe said.
“Not avenge, then. Whose story you’d be running to tell. Along with your own, of course. Mine doesn’t supersede the story of people like you who got left behind by a tech fad that took over everything.”
Sophie hadn’t realized what it would mean to her to have David acknowledge that. “Thanks, Davey. Wow. I appreciate that, but—”
“But what? I’m telling you. You should do it. I’ll tell her I’ll support you. She said she’d connect me with state party mucky-mucks. Maybe if I pretend I’m interested I can find out who they are and then bait-and-switch them.”
“Wait one sec before you go bait-and-switching,” Sophie interrupted. “Thank you for your vote, but I’m not old enough. You have to be twenty-five.”
David frowned. “How was I supposed to know that?”
“Civics?”
“For what it’s worth,” Gabe interjected, “I think you’d be great at it someday, Soph. You’d have my vote. I could keep things running back at the meeting space. Maybe look at ways to break us off from National, since their priorities are so backward . . .”
“That’s a good idea regardless,” Sophie agreed. “But, David?”
“Yeah?”
“You still haven’t said what you were doing on a train track.”
He shrugged. “It really was an accident. I’ve been taking something I probably shouldn’t have been, to try to stop the noise, and it got out of hand. When I get out of here I’m going to have to find a healthier way to deal with that, starting with figuring out what those pills were.”
“Wait—you were taking mystery pills? Who does that? How do you get them? Do you walk up to a drug dealer and say Surprise me? I take three different antiseizure meds and two meds to counteract side effects, and I know what every single one of them does alone and in combination.”
“Hey, Soph, go easy on your brother. Anyone taking mystery pills is in a pretty fucked-up place. I think he’s probably learned that lesson.” Gabe pointed to the shapes under David’s blanket.
CHAPTER SIXTY-SEVEN
JULIE
“We should rename them ‘office hours’ instead of ‘visiting hours,’” grumbled the reception desk when Julie answered the phone. “The reporter whose name you left is here. Eduardo Toledo. Still okay?”
“Yes, send him up.” The receptionist wasn’t wrong; they’d kept the paparazzi out, but taken visits from Milo and Karina and Karina’s sister, who Julie thought was kind of cute and might possibly like David, as well as a couple of political activists who’d talked to both Sophie and David with keen interest.
Julie turned to Sophie. “You’re sure about this guy?”
“I’m sure. His work is always well researched and fair. He still hasn’t run the story I gave him, but I think that’s because he’s trying to build a bigger story.”
Toledo, carrying a box of doughnuts, rounded the corner. David gestured to the table beside him, pushing aside the flowers Congressman Griffith had sent. “Food of the gods.”
“I figured you’d be getting sick of hospital food.”
“You figured right!”
“Hey!” Julie protested. “I brought ice cream.”
“That was days ago, Mom. What have you done for me today?” David smiled his most charming kidding or am I? smile, and she melted.
David selected a chocolate-on-chocolate doughnut, then let the others pick as well. “Sophie, I like your friend already.”
“That’s good,” said Sophie. “Because we’re about to get very, very personal with him.”
Toledo settled into the corner chair and pulled a laptop from his messenger bag. They’d dragged another chair in from the nurses’ station, so there were seats for both Julie and Val if Sophie sat on the other bed, which she preferred in any case.
“Okay,” he said. “Tell me everything.”
Sophie started at the beginning, explaining the relationship of each member of their family to the Pilot, as background, then moving on to her work at FreerMind. Then David told David’s story. Val walked out for part of that, ostensibly to get a drink, though she didn’t return until he was finished; Julie forced herself to listen to all of it.
Then Sophie started into the stuff she’d figured out about BNL, again with David’s help. Pride overwhelmed Julie as Sophie connected the corporate spy and the executives with fake Pilots to show confidence in a product they didn’t trust in their own heads. The kid was savvy; no, not a kid, she reminded herself.
“So . . . what do you think?” Sophie asked when she got to the end.
Toledo leaned back, took his glasses off, and rested one stem against his lip. “I think this is a hell of a story, but there are still some gaps to fill in. That thing about the execs is explosive—that’s probably the most damning part—but you don’t have actual proof.”
“I’m sure it’s out there,” said Sophie. “Are there serial numbers or warranties registered in their names? Can we run a metal detector over their heads?”
“Serial numbers maybe, though they could be faked, and I don’t think medical devices are currently required to have them; it’s going to be tougher to prove someone doesn’t have one than that someone does. And they’d have to agree to whatever scan that would be, and we’d have to make sure they couldn’t fake that, too. We need the public to doubt them, so they have to prove it to win back trust. That might fly, but I can’t run your accusation without proof.”
“What about the other stuff?” David reached for another doughnut. “The e-mail I took from BNL?”
“That and the study it referred to are great. I can use that, and it’s even better if you’re on record as a source.”
“The nice thing about my current situation is they can’t penalize me anymore,” said David. “I’m happy to spill the beans. Not that I know much; I didn’t even merit an NDA when I left, just a form saying I wouldn’t use their information in a new job.”
“Um,” Val interrupted. “Maybe don’t connect your name with the e-mail and the study? That’s still probably corporate theft, even if you didn’t sign an NDA. How about all the people online in the same boat as David? There’s a whole Pilot Survivor thing going on separate from the anti-Pilot activists.”
Sophie looked surprised, and Toledo made a note. “I’ll check that out.”
“Me, too,” said David. “I gave up looking for other people since nobody I asked ever sounded like they knew what I was talking about.”
“There’s got to be something more.” Sophie’s frustration was rising. She’d clearly expected the journalist to run with everything she’d given him. Julie wanted to point out that he obviously knew his job well and Sophie should have faith, but it felt patronizing; she kept her mouth shut.
“I mean, there’s lots,” said Toledo. “This isn’t nothing. We need to keep adding concrete evidence until we can prove it.”
“Maybe there’s something we left out.” Sophie looked at each person in the room like she was begging for someone to say the thing that would change the journalist’s tune from keep adding to I’m taking this to my editor.
David frowned. “I can’t remember. Did I talk about Quiet?”
“You talked about noise,” Julie said.
Toledo put his glasses back on and paged through his notes. “Is there something else, David? You talked about noise, and you talked about getting the Pilot turned off but not the light, and the noise continuing, and taking a drug that counteracted the noise, and then overdosing by accident.”
Val stood as if to walk out, then sat again. Julie knew she couldn’t stand the parts of his story in which his parents had failed to help him.
“It’s not your fault, Ma,” said David, who also must have noticed. “I hid it from you. But have we talked about the pills themselves?”
; Toledo shook his head.
David reached for a third doughnut, but gestured with it instead of taking a bite. “I’d forgotten this for a while, because I learned it just before the, uh, accident. When Alyssa first gave me the pills”—Julie decided Alyssa wasn’t such a catch after all—“she called them Fortress of Solitude, but they had a lowercase q on them, and I started thinking of them as Quiet, since they were so good at cutting out noise. Whatever they have me on here is okay at it, but makes me loopy, too, and a little queasy. Quiet didn’t have any side effects.”
“It did, honey.” Julie remembered the blank David she’d encountered in the park.
“Okay, well, from my end, it took away the noise without adding nausea or anything. Except just before the accident, someone told me that what I thought was a lowercase q was actually a lowercase b, for Balkenhol.”
Toledo looked up sharply. “Are you sure?”
“No, but that would be easier to check than that other stuff, right? Whether Balkenhol makes a round teal pill with a lowercase b on it?”
“It would. Also, I’ve done a fair bit of research on this for another story, and I can tell you drugs are way more regulated than medical devices. There are strict protocols for every step, from research to trials to FDA approval and scheduling. If this is really theirs, even if it’s still in a testing phase, there’ll be a trail saying what they think it’ll be good for, and how they think it works. That means in theory they’ve been aware for years of some issue they were trying to counteract. If they knew they would need an antidote to noise, that means they think noise is a problem for more people than David. And it means that rather than pull the Pilot implant from the market while they figured out if it caused problems, they decided to go ahead and cause the problem, then monetize the solution.”
Julie was stunned. She thought of herself as a careful person, even if she wasn’t in Val’s league on that front. How had she bought into this product so easily? It was horrifying, but more than that, embarrassing. She looked over at Val, who graciously avoided the I told you so, but instead watched her with something like pity, which was worse. David’s expression was placid with an undertone of guilt. She’d chosen to get a Pilot, and let him get one; he had talked who knew how many people into getting them.
Val asked, “Is it possible these pills are already on the market for something else? Maybe they found a second use for a prescription pill they already had.”
Everyone turned to Toledo, who had gone silent, images of pills scrolling on his laptop screen and reflecting in his glasses.
“You’re right,” he said after a long moment. “Baranor, by Balkenhol. It’s only approved for one rare form of ADD. I’ll research whether they’ve done trials for any other usages.”
“They’re still assholes,” said Sophie.
“Assholes,” David echoed.
“That isn’t harsh enough,” said Val, which Julie agreed with. She could think of other words, none of which were harsh enough, either.
The journalist tapped his chin. “All right, okay, this is a big piece to the puzzle. This is something I can work with.”
“God, I want to find proof of the other stuff, too,” said Julie. “I want to nail them. Let me in your organization, Soph. I’m with you.”
“I can’t, Mom. You have a Pilot.”
“I’ll have it turned off tomorrow. This company can’t have my brain any longer.” She hadn’t known she was making that decision until she made it, but it felt good.
Sophie’s eyes opened wide. “No, I need you to do some stuff first, starting with recording yourself going to the BNL clinic to see if they try to talk you out of deactivating it, and if they’d let you deactivate but leave the light on.”
“That would definitely be interesting,” said Toledo.
“Yeah,” said David. “I’d be curious, since they wouldn’t do it for me.”
It felt good to be of use to her kids for once. “Makes sense, but someone should do the opposite, too, right? Ask if they’ll install a Pilot with no light?”
Everyone looked at Val, who frowned. “I’m not getting a Pilot.”
“You only have to ask, not actually get one,” said David. “Somebody take these doughnuts away from me?”
Julie took the box to the nurses’ station, then returned.
“They’ll never say yes to that one,” Toledo was saying. She hadn’t missed much. “That’s got to be top secret, or it would’ve gotten out by now.”
Sophie put her hand over her mouth. “There’s one more permutation. It doesn’t need to be you, Ma. I can do it myself.”
“There’s no way you’re getting a Pilot,” said Val. “I mean, I’m not stopping you, but even if your seizures didn’t preclude it, there’s no way you’d do it.”
“I have something else in mind,” Sophie said. “I’ve just got to talk to the group. And I’ve got something else I need you to do, too, Mom.”
Julie nodded, not saying that in this moment, she would do absolutely anything any of them asked.
CHAPTER SIXTY-EIGHT
JULIE
Julie didn’t think she was back in Sophie’s confidence yet, nor did she deserve to be. She accepted her orders hoping that maybe this thing, this huge thing, might earn back her daughter’s trust. Sophie played the general, her family willing soldiers.
The first instruction wasn’t to test the BNL clinic on their removal policies, which was a relief. While her instinct in the hospital room had been knee-jerk—“I’ll have it turned off tomorrow”— that reaction had cooled. She’d been an adult when she got hers, and there was no telling if her brain had adapted or not. Her Pilot had only ever helped her; she had to work up to deactivating it.
Instead, she texted Representative Griffith and asked if he’d meet with her the next time he was in the district office. They conducted most business over e-mail—their last texts to each other had been three months before—so the request had its desired effect. He responded immediately, saying he’d visit on his way home for the weekend.
Which was why, the following Friday, he threw himself in a chair in her office and said, “If you’re quitting, break it to me quick.”
“I’m not quitting.” Though he might fire her by the conversation’s end. She closed the door.
He made a show of relief, wiping his forehead with a manicured hand. “And how’s your son?”
“Doing okay. Thank you for the flowers.” He was a good guy, for a politician. She’d never lost any sleep over working for him; time to find out if her trust had been misplaced. “I need to know what you know about BNL.”
He frowned. “Evan is the main contact with them. Do you want to call him?”
“No, I want to know your relationship with them first, not his.”
“Well, as I’m sure you know, they’ve been great for our district. Three thousand jobs, infrastructure, schools . . . They helped us fund a transit expansion out to their headquarters, which spurred housing growth, too—but you must know all that. Is that what you’re asking?”
“I’m looking beyond what they’ve done for us or we’ve done for them.” She took a deep breath. “What I want to know is: Is your Pilot real?”
“What do you mean?” He touched the light on his head.
He looked sincere. If he was sincere, maybe it wasn’t a government-wide conspiracy, as Sophie thought. Maybe it was just BNL, or BNL and the military. She wasn’t sure which questions were the right ones to get the information.
“When did you get your Pilot? Before or after they started supporting district projects?”
“Let’s see. I got my Pilot three months after my daughter got hers, maybe six months after Evan. Mine was the first on Capitol Hill, but Janelle’s always been an early adopter and she kept talking about how it helped her focus, and it would give me an edge in debates and hearings. It didn’
t hurt that they’d just set up shop here, so I felt like I was supporting the home team.”
“So they were already here?”
“Yes. I remember chatting with Sylvia Keating at a charity dinner about how I was going to get one. She was so attentive. She was concerned about it being too early to stand out like that, and that they might get banned from Congress, but I said we hadn’t banned pacemakers or hearing aids or medications, so why would we ban her devices? I thought she was worrying over nothing. I guess after I said that she saw me getting one as a positive rather than a negative. She made sure my appointment was private, so the press wouldn’t run with it until I was ready for them, and she hooked me up with the doctor who had personally installed hers.”
“Leroy, what does your Pilot feel like?” She flashed on the first time Val had asked her that after she got hers; no, Val’s question had been “Do you feel different?” She had, but it was hard to put into words.
He had the same struggle. “You know. Confident, capable, on it.”
“I’ve worked for you for a long time. You’ve always been confident and capable and on it. So you’re saying it intensifies strengths you already had?”
“Yes,” he said, with less boundless confidence. “Why ask that? You have one. You know.”
She knew. How many times had she dismissed David’s noise, thinking he was referring to the same thing she felt, but describing it differently? It would be easy to chalk the congressman’s description up to a communication failure, too. She had a new theory of her own now; maybe she was wrong, but she didn’t think so. “I’m going to tell you something, and I want you to listen to all of it before you say anything.”
He stood, removed his coat, and draped it over the chair’s back. “Sounds like I should get comfortable.”
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