Senna laughed softly. “Okay, I think I follow.”
“Then you’re exposed to pleasant imagery and nice music, all that junk, and if LENG does it to the right memory junctures in the right order enough times, we’ll have a success story on our hands.”
Nodding, she wandered back toward the chair, passing her hand over the flat, expected back of it. No surprises. Nothing strange. “I thought there would be wires and electrodes and . . . I don’t know, more.”
“You’ll see,” Paxton replied, grinning. “There’s more.”
After she sat in the chair, Dr. Colbie, the blond woman with the soft blue eyes, joined them and put in her IV. She told Senna to close her eyes, take a deep breath and count back from ten, and with a light touch, she slid the needle into Senna’s right arm near her elbow and then taped down the apparatus.
“A little saline to test,” Dr. Colbie said with a wince. “I know it tastes bad.”
Senna smacked her lip. “Ugh.”
“You won’t feel much until the process is complete and we’re ready to administer the HDAC. It won’t feel too scary, but you might get a sensation like you’re really warm, like you’re suddenly flushed, okay? Just relax, it only lasts a second.”
“How long will the session last?” Senna asked, the funny taste in her mouth diminishing. The star field in front of her began to dim as Dr. Colbie stood up, turning her head toward Paxton in inquiry. He had been waiting and observing by the projection wall, pinpricks of light rolling over him in a dazzling spray.
“Simple stuff today, just testing some connections to see if LENG has success. Lots of connections to shake and see what happens. Erasing the trauma of the crash might mean going way, way back.” Paxton rubbed his chin thoughtfully, sucking on his lower lip. “We maaay end up giving you a generally quaint memory of the compound. Not good but hazy, you know? Like a dream half-remembered.”
Senna shrugged. In many ways, it already felt like that. She couldn’t think badly of Mina, or Alex, or Somchai, or any of the innocent foster kids that had been pulled into that place and made to think it was safe and perfect and good. “Just . . . just don’t give me any fond feelings for Preece Ives, okay? I don’t want that, and he doesn’t deserve that. Erase him if you have to, but never make me like him.”
Pushing off from the wall, Paxton gave a curt nod. Dr. Colbie checked the IV line one last time and then left the room.
“Heard,” Paxton said with a salute. “Now I think it’s time you met LENG.”
* * *
—
“Genie!”
“Yes, Zurri, how can I assist you?”
She was on her third cup of green tea, feet propped on the cubist coffee table while a muted vid of last year’s fall runway in Paris played. A stunner with glowing LED leg prosthetics stomped toward the camera with a navy mesh hood pulled low over her face. The clothes were dreadful but Zurri could hand out a tap on the wrist of applause for the girl.
“What the hell is going on with my texts?” she asked. As requested, her apartment was furbished in the latest style—ultra-minimalist pastels, with the rare absurdist touch. An oversized teddy bear with shellacked yellow beetles for eyes was propped up in the corner under the vid screen. “I sent Bev my updated schedule three hours ago and it keeps bouncing back.”
“Storm activity—”
“Shut up.”
“Yes, Zurri.”
“I want to speak to Paxton,” she hissed. “Now.”
She could all but hear the AI thinking through the strained silence. The next model down the runway couldn’t walk to save her life, teetering on the treacherous heels with an obviously pained expression on her face.
“Paxton is currently with a patient, and is not available until—”
“Get. Him. Now.”
“One moment, please.”
Sighing, Zurri tapped her nails along the edge of the teacup. She loved the way that ordinarily made people shit their pants. Her nails, if long enough, could be an entire drum corps along the rim of any obliging cup.
“Jeeeeeesus,” she moaned, plucking a cashew from the plate next to her feet and chucking it at the vid screen. “Learn to walk, you fucking moose. They should run you out of Paris, they should try you in the Hague—”
“Zurri?” Paxton’s voice interrupted mid-rant, as crystal clear as the robot’s. “What’s going on?”
“Do you know Camden Zed?”
“Who? I don’t have time for—”
“Camden Zed. Model. Dreadful shit. Anyway, why are my messages bouncing? I can’t raise Bev and, God help me, I need her.” She ate the next cashew and washed it down with cooling tea.
Zurri heard him try to suppress a sigh, but his annoyance was clear in his tone. “Well, we’re a bit isolated here, as you may have noticed. Even communications are a pain in the ass. Have to send them out in batches when the weather cooperates. But that’s how I like it. You think a shareholder is gonna come bother me all the way out here? Forget it. You just have to deal for a few days, Zurri, Bev will still be there, I promise.”
“I don’t deal.”
“Jesus. You just have to, I’ll batch out all communications when there’s less noise, if I unshield our magnetic field disruptors right now, they’ll be torn to shreds by the storm. Listen, I’m with a patient right now, we can discuss this later.”
He went quiet, and she wasn’t sure if he was still around to hear her mutter, “Oh, we will most definitely discuss this later. Prick.”
“Is there anything else I can help you with today, Zurri?” Genie asked, obliviously and almost adorably cheerful in the face of their bickering. The cozy morning light permeating her room cut out, making her jump on the sofa as she was suddenly left in darkness. The vid played on, silent models walking in silent streams down a glossy silver ribbon of a stage. Through the door, out in the corridor, she heard the sirens begin.
“Another storm?” she asked.
“Rather, a flare-up of one continuous weather disruption,” Genie informed her. “Paxton lowered the Dome shutters this morning, but it appears they will need to be raised again.”
The lights flickered. She glanced toward the hallway that led past the kitchen and toward the front door. Flash-flicker-flash. A shape? A person? She blinked, squinted. No, it was gone. A cascade of frigid electricity danced across her arms. If there had been hairs there, they would have stood on end. The lights came back on full, and she shook her head, reaching for another cashew.
“Scheduled alert: Your LENG session begins in approximately two hours,” Genie said.
“And what am I supposed to do until then?” Zurri sighed, her focus wandering to the cashew on the floor under the vid screen.
“In addition to Paxton’s extensive art collection and library—”
“That was a rhetorical question, Genie.” Two hours was a lifetime when you wanted to be anywhere but your mind. She couldn’t stomach another runway vid. Sometimes she caught herself combing the videos for her competition. Her replacement. It was inevitable, really. One day it would be her in the background of another woman’s photo, and when that day came she didn’t know if she would have the strength to pose through it. Maybe it was wiser to quit before anyone saw the cracks in her smile.
She rubbed her eyes, exhausted. The same bad dreams had come, the same burst of light around her eyelids as she heard Tony explode into flames. Each morning, she woke tasting human ash. Waking hours required distraction, or chemical soothing.
Anju. Anju, Anju, Anju . . . She shouldn’t have let slip the morsel about medical sedatives. Those would certainly do the trick. What vodka couldn’t solve, a medical-grade sedative certainly could. She didn’t want to taste ash, she wanted to bliss out and sleep, and wake to her appointment, ready for the ultimate reset, the ultimate high. What would it feel like to have her memories of Tony taken away? Good, she co
ncluded, warm, like sliding into a perfectly heated bath, blindfold blotting out the world, the water just shy of scalding, superbly cleansing.
How to get the bliss before the bliss became the question. Not one for Genie, she thought with a sly smirk. Could that AI thing see her? Watch her? Did it wonder what her coy little expression meant? They probably kept the heavy stuff locked down somewhere, the labs most logically. Zurri consulted her chrome VIT and brought up the map, locating the labs in Zone 3, just south of the LENG facility. Clinical Offices, they were labeled.
The Han kid had droned on and on about being the first civilian to test the LENG tech, that it was bragging rights for the rest of his life. Whatever buffers your feed, kid, she had thought, rolling her eyes behind her glass of wine. After the drama of Cult Girl storming off, the dinner had turned terminally dull. Han and Paxton started talking tech and her eyes glazed over, and she yearned for them to refill her glass and leave the bottle.
She forced herself to recall the mind-numbing contents of their conversation. The words hacking project stood out. Han was super proud of reprogramming the in-home assistant in their station apartment, apparently. That—her smile deepened—could be useful.
Standing, she dropped her silk robe and strode toward the restroom. “Genie? Start the shower. I’m going out earlier than planned.”
14
Han sat extremely still in the bright daylight of his living room, groping in the gray mists of his mind.
“This might happen.” He replayed Paxton’s words. “Little breaks here and there, disconnections from reality. Go easy on yourself. Your mind is making new connections, repairing itself. There would be headaches, spasms . . .”
There had been both, headaches and spasms. Han hadn’t woken up with the same usual impulses to check his messages, get on the forums and lose hours, sometimes days, to online spats or fall down a rabbit hole of someone else’s programming, dissecting the elegance of their work, marveling at their process. He didn’t want to load up his favorite VIT game and defend his high score. He wanted to sit in the artificial sunlight beamed out of the portal window, and pull on what felt like a hundred loose threads dangling from the domed ceiling of his skull.
He tugged on one thread, and an annoying question tumbled into his lap: What did I ask Paxton to take away from me?
Of course he couldn’t remember, it would be stupid if he could. But like a loose, wiggly tooth, he couldn’t help but prod at it repeatedly. Am I hungry? Am I just tired?
This might happen . . .
Han walked barefoot into the kitchen and went to the refrigerated drawer as if he had already done it a thousand times, as if this were all a studied routine. After finding a snack cake, he shucked the packaging, tossed the wrapper into the bin and ate the sweet, spongy disc as he navigated to the front door. Dusting crumbs off his shirt, he realized at the door that he had changed into simple black pants and a blue tee. He couldn’t remember getting dressed that morning. Or had he slept in his clothes?
The door swished open, prompted by his proximity. He hadn’t asked Genie for directions because he didn’t want to be told Paxton was busy. Instead, Han consulted his VIT map and decided to check Paxton’s office in Zone 5, nested just above and behind the big corridor with the chandelier where they had eaten dinner the night before. Han knew the way, even if it felt like his feet and legs were operating for him, without his directing them to. The hall leading through the dormitories was cold and bitterly silent.
Sometimes after an online game with his internet friends scattered across the station, he would wait in the lobby afterward, just watching his avatar idle out, swinging its arms side to side and shuffling impatiently. He would wait until he was the only one there and revel in the eventual quiet and solitude. It was the reverent kind of silence, like a gladiator standing all alone in the aftermath of the arena, or a runner taking a lonely walking lap of the track after the race. The corridor didn’t feel like that. This was the emptiness that herded one away from it, so thickly hushed even a single footstep seemed like a trespass.
Han walked briskly because it felt good. The exercise pulled focus from the other thickly hushed silence, the one lingering in his head. He took a left out of the dormitory hall, around the short corner that dumped him out onto the balcony that overlooked the Dome courtyard from the east side. It must have been early still, though he hadn’t checked the “time” lately. The thin, pale quality of the light filtering down from the shuttered ceiling said morning, and so did the tentative calls of the holographic birds. Down below, he spotted Brea’s dark curls among the broad leaves and curved paths and statue pedestals. She was sitting on a bench between two statues, as frozen as they were, her hands flat on the bench beside her thighs, her back ramrod straight.
Avoiding her, Han slowed and quietly tiptoed down the ramp that curved into the courtyard, following its trajectory and traveling north toward what he was now thinking of as a dining hall. All the chairs and tables had been put away, leaving just the solid white rectangle plinths with various artifacts and busts. The less he thought and the more he walked, the more he felt like himself. These were just side effects, he told himself, nothing to worry about. Paxton had warned him he would feel a bit off, and he should know, it was technology he developed.
Still. Han knew he wouldn’t feel better until he talked to Paxton about it. The reassurances would come easily, and soon they would be laughing about it and chatting about more interesting subjects, like hard storage resurgence or the Bitcoin retrospective playing at the university vid theater. He drifted toward the right of the gallery. Two shallow ramps on either side of broad white doors led the way to a walkway above that wrapped around the entire gallery. Immediately up those ramps lay the entrance to Paxton’s personal office. The night before, the doors had been opaque black, but now they were clear, the situational frosting giving him privacy or a bird’s-eye view of the dining hall and even out to the Dome courtyard.
He was passing by the last statue pedestal in the right row, nearly to one of the ramps, when a voice called out to him across the echoing vastness of the hall.
“Hey! Hey, kid!”
The most famous model in the universe was actually trying to get his attention. Zurri. He stopped up short, realizing he was still barefoot. His stubbed his right toe on the statue base, crumpling against it. Gasping, he flailed, trying to catch whatever priceless art he had just bumped, but the vase displayed there never tipped over, only flickered. It was a seamless holograph projected from the top of the pedestal.
“Whoa,” he murmured, taking a step back. His toe throbbed but at least he hadn’t smashed something irreplaceable. “Cool.”
“Of course he’s that cheap.” Zurri joined him near the vase. She stood nearly a head taller than him even in flat sandals. Her boxy dress fell to just above her knees, a swirling orange pattern across it reminding him of orange dreamsicle ice cream. “All rich guys are. How are you feeling this morning after your, you know . . .”
Han blinked. Oh, right. The threads dangling in his mind tangled up for a moment. I must look dumb as hell, licking my lips and trying to put a smart thought together.
He didn’t want to look stupid or weak in front of a . . . a . . .
Crap. It took a moment for him to remember just what and who she was. Mind wasn’t quite right, he thought, fuzzy, everything coming to him through a thick gauze. Supermodel. That was her. Zurri the supermodel. He expected her to look worse in person, but unless she was somehow using an AR filter over her face, the reality looked as perfect as the advertisement. “I feel great, yeah. Maybe one headache but it’s already going away. D-Do you have a session today?”
“I do,” she replied, towering over him as she approached the vase and slashed her hand right through it. “Trying to kill time until then. Really kill time. Which is why I was hoping to find you.”
Han’s brows shot up. He swallowed
and swore they could both hear the nervous gurgle. Hoping to find you. If for no other reason, the trip to Ganymede had now been worth it. She had seemed like, well, sort of a bitch at dinner, but maybe he had misjudged her. Zurri, the Zurri, needed him for something. Had Paxton Dunn erased reality itself and replaced it with something else?
“Sure.” Han tried to play it casual. He cocked his hip to the side but ended up bumping the statue pedestal again. “What’s up?”
Tall, imposing, now smirking, Zurri looked like a cat craning over an aquarium, ten seconds away from swiping a claw and skewering an unsuspecting shrimp. I am the shrimp. “You’re smart with computers and stuff, right?”
Computers and stuff. Computers! And stuff! If this were one of his online friends’ girlfriends, he would have been laughing his ass off, then devising a way to tell him no amount of friend circle clout was worth dating such an embarrassing noob. It began to occur to him that Zurri, someone with endless money and fame, didn’t exactly need extensive knowledge of modern programming or computing to get through her day, when she cleared her throat impatiently at him.
“Yeah,” he said with a shrug, again casual. “It’s kind of my thing.”
Very briefly, she studied his bare feet and bedheaded hair. “Of course it is.” Then she smiled, hard, and nodded to her right, somewhat over her shoulder. “Those are the labs back there. I need something inside.”
Han frowned. “Like what exactly? I’m not trying to get in trouble here.”
“Do you want to know or do you want to help?” Zurri tilted her head to the side, and he could feel the claw extending, preparing to spear the shrimp. “I can get autographs for you and all your friends.”
“Why can’t you just ask Paxton for whatever you need?” he asked. Her smile wavered, the claw retracting ever so slowly.
“I want something to take the edge off while I wait for my appointment,” Zurri sighed, glancing back toward the black lab offices door. “Drugs, okay? I want drugs. They have to be stored somewhere in there, and I want you to find out where, and get me inside.”
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