I alternate between letting it flow naturally and controlling it. The game allows my mind to wander. Do I choose light or darkness, faith or doubt, life or death? How many breaths do I have left in this lifetime?
I am near sleep when I hear Kamal and Phoebe coming down the path. I crawl to the door of the tent and climb out.
They freeze when they see me.
“Hey,” I say.
“Oh shit,” whispers Phoebe. Kamal drops down to the ground where I sit.
“Stay back,” I warn him. “I’m not feeling well.”
He looks at me so completely, so deeply, I imagine he can see all the way through to whatever microscopic spark of light inside me makes me who I am.
“I’m really glad to see you,” I say.
“I don’t think I’ve ever been more glad of anything.” His voice is quiet and direct like we are the last two humans left on earth. “Where did you go?” he asks.
I swallow, holding his gaze. “I went to call my mom.” I pause. A heavy cough erupts from my chest, then calms. “My dad is gone,” I say. Tears pool along my lashes, a sepia filter over everything. “Then I started walking. I didn’t know where. I just wanted to be alone. That piece of paper Ron gave me.” I glance at Phoebe, about to admit I lied to her. “It was an address. So I started walking there. And I started feeling sick. But I was afraid to come back, so I kept going and—Ron and Freddie were there. And that woman from the video, Evans B. They were having, like, a funeral for Jordana.”
“Sounds like a dream,” Phoebe says.
“It was like a dream. They were all so weird. I thought Evans was going to help me, but they said something about how I wasn’t ready.”
“What does that mean?” Phoebe asks.
“I don’t know.”
Kamal pulls off his mask.
“What are you doing?” Phoebe snaps.
“I can’t breathe with that thing on. And right now I need to breathe,” he says.
I look at Kamal. Silver flashes across my eyes. Heat rises inside me and his smell is everywhere. I feel like the physical shell that contains me might suddenly pop like a balloon. I feel like the rest of me might rush forward like a river, drowning me, Kamal, and everything that surrounds us. This is love, I think. This is actual love.
“We need to take care of you,” he says. “What do you need?”
I look at Phoebe and back at him. “I need to do what I came here to do, which is figure out how to stop this thing. Nam says I know how, so I need to figure out how.”
“They released the video,” Phoebe blurts out. “I fought them on it, but they didn’t listen.”
“People will be freaking out about it, no doubt,” Kamal says.
I feel a glimmer of strength. “Let’s see,” I say. I pull my laptop out of my pack and log into my server. I put the link to the video into the search bar of LightYears. I watch as the opinions and emotions of the world crystallize in the form of curves rising and falling along a grid. Feelings of outrage flare up. Disbelief.
The word Horror shoots to the top of the comment keyword ranking function, along with Inhumane, Monsters, and Blasphemy.
Then the sentiment turns against the president for sanctioning the indiscriminate burning of bodies. The hashtag impeachher spikes.
The number of comments and posts explodes into the millions. They are loaded with expressions of grief, sadness, and shared pain.
“What’s happening?” Kamal asks.
“It’s going viral,” I answer. These three words stick in my mouth like a car lurching over an unseen speed bump. I look at Kamal. “That’s it.”
I click on Pervasive Sentiment. Empathy is again charting as the dominant emotion. Just like with Hugo.
I think for a minute, just watching the data amass. I imagine the video spreading, just like ARNS is spreading. Clicks and shares, clicks and shares.
I do a search for the geographic trajectory of the virus’s outbreak. I’m looking for a map showing where specifically across the globe the disease has spread from one day to the next. It’s easy to find.
I convert the data from the map into a graph covering the three days that followed the release of the Hugo video. Six percent of new cases were in New York City. Nine percent occurred in New Delhi, and on and on around the world.
Then I look at the geographical data from my LightYears analysis of the Hugo video. I convert that into the same type of graph, showing me percentages of Empathy responses based on location.
I lay one graph on top of the other and like a lock’s tumbler falling into place, they line up exactly.
A calm settles over me.
“A perfect match,” I say quietly, looking up at Phoebe and Kamal.
They stare back blankly.
“It’s the videos. The videos are making people sick, specifically people who are the most empathic.”
Kamal’s mouth gapes open. “Um, what?”
“Where are you getting that?” Phoebe snaps.
“The places where the dominant feeling about Hugo was empathy are the places where the infection spiked. The patterns are identical. I don’t know exactly how, but ARNS must somehow be triggered in the brain by certain neurons firing in response to the videos.”
A flash of white. My mother. I think of her research again, of what she told me about why we love watching sports.
Maybe that is how it works.
“It could be like an autoimmune thing,” I say. “Where there’s a virus that’s only activated by a specific neurological response. Something to do with mirror neurons maybe.”
“I am suddenly feeling fairly stupid here,” Kamal says. “Pretty freaked out, vaguely hopeful, and fairly stupid. What’s a mirror neuron?”
“They’re what my mom studies for a living. They’re the part of our brains that makes us more or less empathic and emotional. People with high concentrations of mirror neurons—their feelings, especially their feelings of empathy, are stronger. I’m thinking the videos somehow activate the virus in those people.”
“That’s insane,” Kamal says.
“It’s fairly insane. But you can see it in the data. The places where people were most empathic about Hugo are the places where the infection rate went up. No way that’s a coincidence.”
Kamal glances at Phoebe, then back at me.
“The new video should have the same effect,” I say.
I close my eyes and travel back to the sanctuary at Lux. The boom of the voices in the room. Everyone unmasked, shoulder to shoulder. No one ill or worried about getting sick.
Light or darkness, faith or doubt, life or death? A choice.
Maybe it’s just a choice.
I’m hit with a torrent of warm, rich colors, strange tingling sensations, and that heat still rising up from my belly.
Choose the light. I think.
I bring to mind a vision of the ARNS virus, a multisided little ball. To me, it’s red. I picture millions of these poppy-colored orbs coursing in waves through the lymphatic vessels connecting my brain to my immune system.
The sound is suddenly deafening. It’s like a thousand screaming baby pigs. I put myself in the path of this blood-red squealing surge. It’s coming at me so fast, it’s going to consume me completely.
Part of me knows that I can just open my eyes and stop it. But if I do, I will be right where I started. I will be sick. I will be scared. I will be nowhere.
I imagine my arms raised to defend myself. Bolts of yellow and that hissing sound meld with the red and I begin to experience the sensation of drowning.
I am gasping for air as a red swell crests above me, about to drop. I feel my lungs shrink and my eyes go wide. This is it. I feel the same disbelief I saw on the man’s face behind the gas station, my knife wedged deep in his back.
I brace for the ultimate moment of destruction, of dissolution.
And then, my own voice: “It’s just waves.”
Again, louder. “It’s just waves.” I look up, expecti
ng to be swallowed in red. But the squealing spheres have stopped in midair.
Everything goes quiet.
“It’s just waves,” I hear myself yelling as I float inside the otherwise soundless suspension of my own body.
I am like a deep-sea diver, weightless in the silent abyss.
The wave above breaks apart. The red balls come to hover all around me. Then, one by one, they rise back up and disappear.
Soon, they are all gone.
I breathe in, then out, then in again. I feel a sense of being lifted. It’s like the first sip of morning coffee or the calm high after a long swim. It’s like the way a bad mood can turn around with a good laugh. Relief spreads through me. I sit motionless and time seems to stop. Is it a minute, or an hour that passes?
Eventually I open my eyes. Kamal and Phoebe are sitting there. The night sky hangs above us. The air is clear and fresh like after a storm.
As clearly as I’ve ever known anything, I know in this moment: I am going to be fine.
“What just happened?” Kamal asks. “Where’d you go?”
I smile. “I’m not sure I can answer that, exactly. But I feel better. I feel kind of … amazing, actually.”
“You look different,” Phoebe says. She’s been quiet for so long I had almost forgotten she was standing there. “You look not sick.”
“She’s right,” Kamal echoes. A flash of silver. I can see him wanting to believe. “You look … better.”
“If ARNS is triggered by a person’s emotions being out of control,” I say, “then it can be stopped by their rational mind bringing them back into balance. That’s what Nam meant. And Evans said it too. I can stop it. Anyone can stop it. If they know how it works, if they use their rational mind to create a new belief, a new truth.”
Silence as we all take it in.
I pick up my phone and open x.chat. I write to Nam: I know what you meant. I know how to stop it. Send.
“What are you doing?” Phoebe asks.
“Writing to Nam. Telling him I’ve figured out what he was saying.”
“If he made the videos and the videos are the cause, then he’s behind it all,” Kamal says. “Nam created ARNS.”
Before I can say another word, Nam responds. “He sent me another poem.” I read it once to myself, and a second time out loud.
“Like brothers, they set out to reach the edges of the earth
To topple cedars, slay a beast, live an eternity past birth
One, he died a tragic death, his friend was left alone
The serpent smiled and shed her skin, taking his fortune for her own.”
“It’s—” Phoebe stops herself. Her shoulders are drawn down. Her brow is tense. She looks like she is trying to make herself invisible.
“Do you know what it means?” I ask.
She half nods. “It’s Gilgamesh,” she says. Her voice sounds as heavy as her face looks. Kamal and I stare at her. “It’s The Epic of Gilgamesh. Gilgamesh and his friend go looking for an eternal-life potion and the friend dies, but Gilgamesh finds it. He stops on his way home to bathe in a river and a snake slithers by and takes it. The poem is about The Epic of Gilgamesh.”
My mind starts weaving the threads. “The resurrection of Lazarus. The Indian gods looking for eternal life. Gilgamesh looking for eternal life. The poems aren’t about stopping ARNS. They’re about stopping death. All death.”
Another jolt of revelation hits me.
The man at Lux with the long dreads, his words as I rushed down the aisle: “Death no more.” I look at my phone, at Theodore Nam’s name on my x.chat interface. The letters seem to leap from the screen and float in front of me. My eyes begin to rearrange them in my head. The d comes forward, then the e, a, t, and h, and on like that until the meaning of the cipher’s name is clear. Like the poems, Nam’s name is a puzzle.
“It’s an anagram,” I say. “Theodore Nam. It’s an anagram for ‘death no more.’ ” I flash back to the story in the Montana paper about Nam and his death. “He was a man who supposedly killed himself because all his friends died before him. He’s a cautionary tale. He’s fiction. The message is that when people die, our lives are destroyed and our loneliness becomes unbearable.”
Phoebe’s eyes appear to shrink into their sockets, which makes the rest of her seem to get smaller and smaller and smaller. A flash of blue and before she even speaks, I know.
“Yes,” she says after a long pause.
She is a part of this plot.
“Yes?” Kamal snaps. “Yes, as in you know that, you’ve known that this whole time?”
Phoebe looks away.
Anger rises in my chest like a hawk spreading its wings. My heart pounds. I spin, dizzy with purple light. I pull off my mask. “You could’ve saved him.” I can barely breathe. “You could’ve saved everyone.”
“You have to know that I was young when I met him,” Phoebe pleads. “Practically a child. It was right after Blackout. I had lost everything. When I came out here for the protests, he offered me solutions. He understood what I had gone through. He had lost his own parents at a young age. And he had a vision for the world that made sense to me. I believed we could change the course of civilization and that the consequences of that were worth it.” She pauses. Tears paint lines down her cheeks.
“How could you lie to me, to us, every single day? You could’ve saved my father,” I say again.
“I know, and I’m sorry. But I don’t believe it anymore. I know it’s wrong now. The part of me that died with my parents, I don’t know, it’s like it’s been brought back to life. I can feel pain again, but it’s like I can handle it now. I look at you, Lu. I see how strong you are, how you just keep moving forward. You keep searching, eyes and heart wide open. And I want to be like that. I am like that, or I was. And I want to be again.”
Kamal is seething. “You get that you are partially responsible for the deaths of, what, hundreds of thousands of people as of this moment? Ultimately millions? Including Lu’s dad, probably my parents, our friends. So that’s great that you’ve changed your mind now, but it actually doesn’t matter, like, at all.”
“You’re right,” Phoebe replies. “I can’t undo what I’ve done. All I can do is try to help now. That’s why I told you what the last poem means. That’s why I’m telling you the truth now.”
I bury my gaze in her. I want to understand, but I don’t.
“You do realize he wants you, Lu. He sent you the poems and the messages as tests. He wanted to see if you could uncover the truth that has eluded the entire world. And if you passed the test, whether you’d be part of what comes next.”
It’s like swimming in head-high breakers. As soon as you make it through one, another hits you with full force.
“What you said on the train was right. ARNS is the groundwork. He’s brought the world to its knees through grief. That’s the terror. Next he will bring relief from the terror—immediate relief but also lasting relief.” She looks up at the cloudless sky and clarity slams down like lightning as my whole body trembles with the smell of fresh-cut roses.
“He becomes a hero with the cure and then—” I begin.
“And then when everyone is still reeling from their loss, he offers them the thing they will want most.”
“Eternal life,” I mutter.
“Eternal life.”
“Who is he?” Kamal asks.
Phoebe and I ignore the question.
“He’s figured out the basics of how.”
“But it’s also a certain kind of future for humanity,” I add, filling in the blanks as shards of colored light swirl around me like I’m under a disco ball. “That’s why the virus works the way it does? Empathic, deeply feeling people must be gotten rid of?”
“That’s right,” Phoebe says. “He thinks they’re unpredictable; they make poor decisions. They cause damage and erode order. He’d actually be surprised you got sick. He pegged you as a pure intellectual. I guess he was wrong.”
&nbs
p; “Yeah, guess so,” I say quietly.
“Who is he?” Kamal asks again.
“Thomas Bell,” I say evenly.
On some level, I realize, I have known it all along.
CHAPTER 16
“We need to get the fuck out of here,” Kamal says. His focus is on me as though Phoebe no longer exists. “They said at the meeting tonight that planes are being grounded as of tomorrow.”
“I can probably get a car,” Phoebe offers.
“We aren’t going anywhere with you.” Kamal’s voice is like ice. “You’re a terrorist.”
I turn to Phoebe. “Where is he?” I ask.
“He could be anywhere,” she says.
Kamal puts his hand on my shoulder. “Are you well enough to walk?” I stand up slowly. My head rushes with heat. It’s just waves, I think.
“Yes,” I tell him, still looking at Phoebe. Pain and guilt hang off her like a suit of heavy chains. But underneath that, as if through the openings of the links, a bright light shines through—a glimpse of her unbroken soul.
I have every right to hate her. I want to hate her, but in that moment I realize, she is also a victim of Thomas Bell’s madness. He preyed on her hurt and weakness, on the same desire for peace and purpose we all have. If I think about what my father would say to her, it’s that we all deserve the opportunity for redemption. “I can’t forgive you right now,” I tell her. “But I believe that you see it differently now.”
“Don’t go,” she says.
“We have to.” I grab my pack, turn, and head down the path.
Kamal and I wind our way from alley to alley toward the gates. “To be clear,” he whispers as we pass the vegetable garden, “you just cured yourself of the deadliest virus on the planet.”
“The virus isn’t deadly,” I whisper back. “It’s our belief about the virus. I cured myself of that belief, yes. And now my body has no reason to destroy itself.”
Kamal tugs at his mask around his neck. “We should put these back on. Just in case.”
I stop walking. “You don’t trust me?”
“I don’t trust Thomas Bell.” We put on the masks and continue. I want to yell to everyone that they can stop ARNS with the power of their thinking and a leap of faith, but then I freeze. How crazy would that sound? I need a way to show people, not just tell them.
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