by Matthew Fish
“…when I’m supposed to be,” Cherie says as she stands there dressed for travel.
“Please forgive me,” I say as I bury my face in my hands. “Give me a second chance…”
“…a second chance,” Cherie mirrors as she begins to pace back and forth frustrated.
She leaves down the hall shuts herself in her bedroom. It is probably for the best at the moment. She is upset, and although I know she wants to express it, all she can do is repeat what I am saying… I cannot even imagine how difficult that must be for her. I get up from the couch and stand just outside of the doorway of the apartment. I pick up my cell and say “Katharine, C-Shapes Field Office.”
“Ethan,” Katharine says as she answers the call. “Can I help you with something today?”
“I messed up… really badly,” I admit.
“Are you alright?” Katherine says, her voice becomes deadly serious. “What happened?”
“I forgot to make sure Cherie took her pill on Saturday—she was so excited and then she crashed… I screwed up the one thing I was supposed to do.”
“Is that all?” Katharine says as she sounds relieved. “It’s a rookie mistake, it happens. Just don’t forget—you’ll get docked. What state is she in?”
“Just very upset,” I say with a fleeting feeling of relief. I figured that such a mistake would be grounds for immediate termination. However, I was ready to take the punishment for causing Cherie so much pain
“Just make sure she eats, and… she is on a Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday dosage right?”
“Right…”
“Yeah,” Katharine says as she continues, “You will have to force her to take her pill tomorrow—she will probably fight you on it… but you have to do it. It is not going to be a fun experience. At least it will remind you in the future to not forget.”
“Understood,” I say sadly.
“How was your date by the way?”
“It was extremely informative,” I say feeling rather awkward about the whole thing. “I learned a lot—she’s really been through the whole thing for a while.”
“But… not a connection.”
“Probably a little too intimidating for my tastes…” I reply, hoping that I don’t come off as offensive.
“I’ll put you back in the pool—don’t worry she won’t know.”
“Thanks,” I say as I do not really look forward to any future dates. “Thanks for the help here as well—I was sure I really messed things up.”
“You’re fine, and that is what I am here for. Be careful and have a good day Ethan,” Katharine adds as she disconnects the call.
I step back into the room and go into the kitchen. I find of the egg salad sandwiches and put it on a plate with some potato chips. I pour another glass of water and balance it on the plate as I make my way down the hall and knock on the door.
“It’s unlocked.”
I open the door; Cherie is curled up in a ball in bed. Tears are still fresh in her deeply sad eyes.
“Eat something,” I say as I place the plate beside her on the bed.
She slowly gets up and pushes around the food with her fingertip. “Is that an order?”
“It’s a… please eat something. I’m really sorry.”
Cherie reaches into my pocket and pulls out my C-Shapes badge. She eyes it as she turns it over and over between her fingers. She tosses it across the room. “I hate your job—it makes you break promises.”
“Sometimes I do to,” I say as I look away. “I’m so sorry.”
“Stop apologizing,” Cherie says as she begins to eat slowly. “I’m sorry that I slapped you.”
“I deserved it,” I say as I place a hand to my cheek. It is rather sore. I imagine I’ll probably grow a pretty nice bruise.
“I deserved it…” Cherie repeats.
I allow her to eat in silence as I sit and watch her. I am at least glad that she is eating. As she finishes he water and places the glass upon the plate I reach for it. She stops me and pushes my hand away.
“Just leave it,” Cherie says as she looks into my eyes.
When faced with those beautiful, sad, hazel eyes I find myself helpless—like someone adrift at sea. I have to look away.
“Would you come with me to visit Noah today? He has something of an emergency; I don’t know what is going on. I know it’s not a trip to Paris, and it is okay if you say no. I just… you’re supposed to come. He said so.”
“Do you care about me?”
“Of course I do,” I say as I nod.
“Why can’t you look at me?” Cherie asks as she reaches over and gently places her hand upon my face and pulls my vision up so that our eyes meet.
“I do not like to see you sad,” I say quietly. “I know that I did this to you, and I… I do not like to see it. It makes me feel like I am a terrible person.”
“You’re not,” Cherie says as she keeps her hand against my face. “I’ll go with you.”
“Thank you…”
“I was going to ask… in front of the Eiffel Tower—because I wanted it to be special. If you still do care… If I am important to you, I think here is just as fine. Would you kiss me?”
I pause. For a moment my heart feels as though it will stop beating. I know how wrong this is. I know the implications it could have on my career… on my future. However, I have fucked things up enough with Cherie that I simply nod. As she pulls me in our lips meet. Although dry and cracked, there is softness… wetness; a gentle calm comes—like being outdoors and relaxing on a summer day. An overwhelming feeling that this is right washes over me. It threatens to steal me away like grains of sand against the oncoming ocean tide. All once I realize… I have lost the internal struggle to keep my feelings for her boxed away. I have lost the battle between what I thought was right and wrong.
“Thank you,” Cherie whispers as she releases me. “It did not need to happen there… I guess it just needed to happen.”
“I will find a way to make this work,” I say she take her hand into mine.
“I’m different though—it’s not… allowed.”
“I don’t care.” I say as I nod and squeeze her hand reassuringly. “We have to go though… I was supposed to meet with Noah early.”
“Is this work related?” Cherie asks as she nods and gets to her feet.
“I think this is just Noah related. He has something important to tell me, it’s probably nothing… but I don’t want to let anyone else down.”
“Let’s go,” Cherie says as a smile crosses her face. As we leave the room I retrieve my badge from behind the dresser and shove it in my shirt pocket.
Cherie begins to roll her suitcase along with her.
“We’re just going out of town…” I say as I stop her.
“You helped me pack it—it seems right,” Cherie says as she continues to roll the suitcase out the door.
“I’ll get that,” I say as I pick it up and rush down the stairs. I start the car and begin to head out of town.
“You’re late…” Noah says as I enter his room.
“You said that to me the first time we met,” I say with a laugh.
“Is she with you?” Noah asks just as Cherie enters behind me, rolling her small suitcase.
“Yeah,” I add, stating the obvious. “We missed our flight to Paris after all.”
“Your badge…?”
“In the glove box of my car,” I say as I pat my pocket down. “What is this all about Noah?”
“Cherie, could you wait outside in the hallway for a bit,” Noah asks as he brings me to the corner of his room. “We need to have an important discussion and some of it you can’t know about yet—it’s secret stuff.”
“Secret stuff…” Cherie says as she looks at me and nods.
Noah shuts the door behind her and begins to pull up a section of the carpeting in the far corner of the room. “Can I trust you?”
“I believe so,” I say as I shrug my shoulders. “I don’t know what you
mean, but I…”
“How do you feel about the girl? What do you think of her as—is she human enough? Are you afraid of her?”
“I kissed her…”
“That is a bit more than I expected,” Noah says as he laughs. “But, then again you were always a good guy in high school—I had hoped that you hadn’t changed. I’m sorry for the act—but it was necessary. I needed someone that I could trust.”
“Act…?” I ask as I watch as he pulls open a hatch from beneath the carpet. “What do you mean someone you could trust? You don’t remember me from high school.”
“Where to even begin,” Noah says as he beckons me to follow him down into the exposed ladder.
I peer down as he pulls a string and a light comes on. I cautiously make my way down the ladder. A large room exists beneath the floor. All around me are printed stories taped to the concrete wall, pieces of different colored threads tie them together—photos of places, people, and things I don’t recognize fill the wall, each color coded with a different colored piece of tape.
“This is the reason you are here.”
A computer sits at the far wall. It is much newer than the one upstairs. A maze of wires run from it and up into the ceiling. A large chest rests against the far wall, I spot a few boxes of bullets on a metal shelf full of computer parts and other various items—more bottles of water line another corner. “What is this?”
“The truth,” Noah says as he begins to point at a piece of printed computer paper taped to the wall. This is the day the virus hit. A number of different colored lines stretch out from that central point and fill the entire wall. “This here is where it begins, and it spreads out to the truth, and the terrible ending that C-Shapes is planning.”
“Is this more of your conspiracy theories?”
“Look here,” Noah says as he points to a picture of an older man with his wife and four adult children. “This is Thomas Manning—one of the founders of C-Shapes. This is a current photo of his family… those look like pretty good odds, how many people do you know that lost someone on V-Day? Seems a little more than luck doesn’t it?”
“The President and the First Lady lost their son…”
“I’m not saying for sure that the government is in on it—but C-Shapes definitely either knew about it, or they are hiding something relevant to how it works… that’s not the important part anyway. Maybe it is luck—or maybe they have a real cure. I don’t know.”
“Are you saying that you faked your own… becoming Unstable?”
“I had to,” Noah says as he pauses for a moment. “I know that we lost contact—so you probably don’t know that I had a wife, and a son. I lost both of them. The depression is real… the incoherency is an act. I’m sorry I deceived you, but it was a necessity. You know how they found me?”
“How…?”
“I was barbequing my neighbor’s flowers on a grill in my front yard… naked,” Noah says as he continues to point at another piece of paper, it has a list of names, next to each name is their position… chemist, tech, researcher, and evaluator… All of the names sound foreign. “These are my contacts on the inside—a lot of them aren’t happy with what is going on because they know the truth.
“You were a local paper writer, you covered new movies and local events… you don’t have contacts.”
“Just hear me out,” Noah says as he shakes his head. “I went through evaluation, I was there for a month—I figured out who I could trust and I asked the right questions. At great risk, I had to get the story.”
“So why now, why today…?”
“I was contacted by one of my chemist contacts—this new pill next month is not any better. The cure promised by the end of the year is not a cure at all, it will kill every single one of the Unstables over the course of a few months.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” I say as I shake my head. This is all too much for me—I already dislike getting involved in theories and politics… this is all way over my head.
“C-Alysium does not cure Aggro, or even put it off… early C-Shapes researchers found out that all of the Unstables are linked—through the virus or something. They found a way to trigger them to go Aggro on purpose.”
“Why?”
“Fear… of course,” Noah says as he points to a few articles he has printed off from the internet. “Some of the cases go Aggro on their own… it is just a sad fact of the virus—however, look at where most of the newer Aggro cases take place—it is never in high end places, where the rich live. It is never close to the C-Shapes area or the Capital a few miles away. They trigger attacks at certain times to keep people afraid, they do it all over the country so that the states and the governments continue to pay up out of fear of a full on attack. Those first few years where people in specific areas would all go Aggro at once, that was all orchestrated so that when C-Alysium was introduced it would be embraced. For over six years C-Shapes has milked the entire world, letting itself become the richest company in the world. It’s no longer about oil, or gold, it’s about C-Alysium… which does basically nothing but make them worse off, it effects their memory, worsens their symptoms, and causes them to sleep all day on Sundays.”
“If it is all about money then why are they planning on killing them?”
“Because countries are getting tired of paying—tired of caring for their Unstables. C-Shapes thought they could get at least ten more years out of it—however, with states seceding and countries starting to kill them on their own… C-Shapes is beginning to realize that it is losing its grip. It is losing power. The C-Alysium next month is the same pill as always. Just they are going to lower the instances that they trigger Aggro events. Then in less than a year they will release this cure and everyone will buy in one last time… all the Unstables will die, and it will just called a bad reaction—governments aren’t going to care, their problems will be solved. From there C-Shapes can start to rebuild America the way it wants to. They may not have started the virus—but they are profiting from discovering a way to control it.”
“This is too much for me, Noah,” I say as I place my hand upon my forehead and let out a heavy sigh. “I know you think that this is all real, but you… this could all be in your head.”
“You know they are the ones that destroyed the Kawasaki Kisen Kaisha…”
“If there are so many people on the inside from countries that are being affected then why haven’t they stopped this?” I ask, growing more frustrated.
“I had to gather all the info—all my contacts know now. That was what I was working on Friday… that is why I made you leave.”
“What if they use this info for the wrong reason?”
“Wrong reason…?”
“If they can hit a switch and make people go Aggro, then why hasn’t a South Korean scientist triggered a North Korean mass Aggro event around Pyongyang…?”
“Because that would be inhumane,” Noah says as though the thought never even crossed his mind. “These are just scientists and chemists… they didn’t realize the terrible things they were working on—until now, they thought they were working for the greater good.”
“I’m just trying to get you to see that you might be wrong,” I say as I collapse against a wall and shake my head. “I know you think you’re lucid…”
“I got you into the program,” Noah interrupts. “I know that you lied to attempt to get in… hell, they even know that you lied on your application—I got you paired up with Cherie, and myself. Think about it Ethan, a wait list? When they need and take pretty much anyone that applies.
“Why Cherie…?” I ask. I feel suddenly ill. How could he possibly know that I lied in order to get into the C-Shapes program? Maybe… somehow, he knows something. I just can’t bring myself to believe that all this pain and suffering is over money.
“When I was going through possible matches for you, I noticed she was a mirror—I thought you’d feel most sympathetic when you realized that they aren’t much dif
ferent than we are. Plus, she is important—or rather her father used to be.”
“Who was her father?”
Noah points to another picture of a man and woman, I recognize a younger Cherie standing between the couple. This man used to be the head of Pfizer… he was the only one in his family spared—his company was working on a cure at the same time that C-Shapes was formed. He refused to join, stating that more progress could be made if they worked separately, different perspectives and all that. Well, one week after he rejects his wife suddenly goes Aggro and kills him. Cherie escapes—but they set her up in a new city, new place, leaving only her paintings… kind of like a cruel reminder. Remember, C-Shapes is a corporation, they do not want competition—they want power and money. They label Unstables as monsters when they are the ones doing unspeakable evil.”
“So there is no cure?”
“There is no need for a cure—not everyone who is Unstable is going to go Aggro. The best way to have solved this problem from the beginning was to do nothing at all.”
“So how do I help her?”
“Have her stop taking the C-Alysium. I’ve been taking common aspirin for six years… Also, your badge is a microphone and C Shape Sniffers sit at computers and monitor things—I don’t know if you’ll already be in trouble for kissing her…”
“She threw my badge and it landed behind a dresser.”
“That is a stroke of luck then…”
“So she will get better? She won’t go Aggro…”
“There’s never a hundred percent certainty that she will never go Aggro in her lifetime, but if you keep her on C-Alysium, she will for certain.”
“And her condition…?”
“Some things will improve. This thing about Paris will get sorted out—in time without her pill, she’ll become more aware, her memories will return… but she’ll always be a mirror, she’ll always be prone to anxiety… she will always be an Unstable. But then again, if you like her for who she is now, it is something you have to deal with.”
“I understand…” I say as I take another heavy breath of the air in.