by Cody Sisco
“Look what that got him.”
“How do you know so much about Pearl?”
“He didn’t tell you? We brought Pearl in once before. She almost killed Samuel Miller.”
“Would that have bothered you?”
Mía didn’t answer, then straightened her shoulders. “If someone killed Jefferson—”
“He died of heart failure,” Victor lied, feeling on the verge of vertigo for twisting a truth he’d worked so hard to uncover. He had to get fresh air. The energy between him and Mía wasn’t sexual; it was twisted remorse and bitter atonement so thick it suffocated.
He said, “I wonder sometimes if he was a Broken Mirror too. Not that he would have told you. He didn’t trust anyone.”
7
The universal wave function never collapses. It never does! I found this fact on the dark grid. Hugh Everett III proved it. Which means there are infinite worlds like ours where the paths of atoms and energy, the meanderings of history, they’re all bent. They’re twisted out of joint compared to our own.
That’s the reason the primals are calling desperately. I hear them. I hear them pleading to me for help.
I think it’s possible to help the ghosts cross over. That’s why I conceived The Plan.
—Samuel Miller’s The Carmichael Journals (1971)
9 May 1991
New Venice, The Louisiana Territories
As Victor exited Mía’s building, a huddle of people on the canal promenade looked up from a device they were sharing. Some of them gave him a curious glance.
A slight aftertaste of LT bourbon lingered on his tongue. Stupid Human Life nonsense phrases repeated in his head. He walked to his favorite bar, feeling the urge to drink an ocean. Lightstrips reflecting in the canal water caused blobs of floating colors to move across Victor’s field of vision. He cursed the beautiful mirage silently. He felt penned in and trapped in his body, in this place, with a broken mind and a legacy he didn’t choose. Now, when he pictured Mía’s face, the blankness threatened to return, and he had no choice except to put all thoughts of her out of his mind.
Inside The Flock and Waddle, Victor got a beer, settled onto a padded bench, rested his beer stein on a tiny oak slab table, and watched the other patrons. The alcove Victor sat in was often empty and easily overlooked. Patrons sometimes stumbled into the table and made lengthy apologies when they recognized him as an Eastmore. The alcove was illuminated by yellow-tinged light from his Handy 1000 as he returned to the data Ozie had scraped from Karine. It was overwhelming and disturbingly intimate. Financial records, utility bills, search histories, a cache of documents that would take Victor much too long to read through. He needed to narrow his efforts somehow.
A group of young women from the local college were playing a game at one of the round tables between the entrance and the bar. They teased each other; their voices ricocheted playfully around the room. He overheard them dare each other to go up to him—he was the youngest man in the bar and apparently a sufficiently handsome target. He ignored them while sucking down his second drink, an LT vodka, through a translucent blue straw. Eventually their taunts about him withered, perhaps from his neglect, and they left.
A few minutes later, he was interrupted by a woman in her thirties wearing an ankle-length swirly fuchsia dress. She sat down at the other end of his bench, plopping a grass-green synthleather bag between them.
“Gorgeous evening,” she said. “The cold snap is finally over.” Her fingers wrapped loosely around a long-stemmed glass of bubbly. She took a long sip, appraising him. “Wait a minute, I recognize you.”
Her tone was cloying, aroused, intimate. By the way she looked at him, Victor figured he was the most interesting thing to happen to her in a while. Examining her face, he noticed high cheekbones, a thick layer of skin-smoothing cream around her eyes, and deep blue lipstick that made it look as if she’d just come in from the cold. Her dress clung tightly, showing off her trim and curvaceous figure. He rolled up the Handy 1000 and put it in his pocket. What was the point of moving to a new place if not to meet new people?
“Call me Vic.”
“I’m Lisabella. Mind if I sit here?” she asked as she scooted closer.
Her breasts stretched the fibers of her dress. Either a subtle rose pattern was woven into the fabric, or it was a trick of his perception. He tried not to stare. “Please do,” he said.
“New Venice is such a small town. I’m sure people recognize you all the time.”
“I don’t know,” he said, “I’ve only been here a few weeks. Work keeps me busy.”
“You work for BioScan?”
The hairs rose on his arms. She’d inflected her voice like a question. Steel blue certainty on her face told a different story. Victor took a sip of his beer.
“Sorry,” she said, “I didn’t mean to put you off. What do you think of all the construction?” She nodded toward the door.
The Flock and Waddle sat at the corner of the Petit Canal and a “C-grade” canal, one of the wider watery thoroughfares. The BioScan construction on the east side of the Petit Canal could be heard in half of town. People spoke with awe and pride about the millions of AUD flowing in, thanks to the Eastmore family’s roots in the area, which extended deeper and further back in time than New Venice’s famous canals. Surely the family knew what was best, and if they didn’t, too bad. The town was stuck with them.
In the few weeks since Victor had arrived, hundreds of employees and contract workers had moved in, snapping up apartments along the canals and filling all the tables at local restaurants long before the start of the summer tourist season, which would swell the population even further.
“It’s loud,” Victor said.
“Ha!” Her laugh sounded like the high-pitched cry of a mockingbird. “Isn’t it, though?” She smiled again. Victor felt his lips stretch in response, though he was starting to feel that she was forcing her emotions on him, trying to get him to warm to her.
Lisabella ran her fingers through her hair. “It seems like there’s a layer of dust on everything in town.” She looked at him with a raised eyebrow. It reminded him of the way Dr. Tammet would silently encourage him to answer her questions on days when he was feeling mute. Usually the expression preceded more insistent pressure. He gripped his beer thinking of what he could say to excuse himself without seeming odd or rude. It was a small town. He was sure to run into Lisabella again.
“What it’s like to come back to your family’s town? Is it much different than SeCa?”
Different? She couldn’t be that naive, could she? “Sure, it’s different. I can’t be locked up here for being what I am.” Hardness had crept into his voice. He took a deep breath.
Lisabella smiled, a deep purple overlay of satisfaction that sparkled with a specific shade of red. It was familiar, but he couldn’t quite place it on the emotional spectrum. Confidence? A hunter’s thrill?
“It’s interesting you mention SeCa’s Classification System,” she said, her voice crackling with charged urgency. “People have been wondering about Samuel Miller’s legal status when he comes to the Louisiana Territories.”
Victor sat back. Her gaze flicked down to a brooch on her jacket and quickly returned to his face. She smiled to reassure him. He glanced at her brooch, a blue butterfly. Its black marble head reflected his face. A vidcapper.
“I do not consent to this recording,” Victor said.
She smiled sadly and also with a bit of pride. She reached into her green bag and flashed a MeshNews badge. His objection was powerless. MeshNews agents could record anything they wanted if they deemed it newsworthy. They had only their senior editors in Europe to answer to. “What’s the first thing you’ll say to Samuel Miller when you see him again?”
Victor crossed his arms and watched the bartender pour a flight of beer shots for a group of guys at the bar.
“Have you seen him since the Carmichael incident?” Lisabella asked. Her voice was a chisel trying to chip away th
e truth.
Victor picked up his beer stein and raised it as if he were toasting her. “You want me to make a statement?”
Lisabella leaned forward eagerly.
Victor got up, chugged the remainder of his beer, slammed it on the table, and walked out of the bar without a word.
***
More alcohol seemed like the best thing. It would lead to a different kind of blankness that would be comfortingly obliterating and render him safely unconscious and reliably immobile. The next bar he entered, The Diligent Badger, resembled any other in New Venice: it sagged under the weight of its age and smelled of canal muck and spilled spirits. A few townie-looking middle-aged men sagged on barstools and alternated between insights on the nature of life, sips of their drinks, and demands for another.
Victor sat at one end of the bar and pointed to a dark liquid in a clear bottle. The young bartender, an attractive man with black skin and a sexy sweat-sheen that reflected the lightstrips, served him a double with a wink, and Victor took the shot in one gulp. It burned down his throat and hit his stomach, a hot surge of calm spreading.
A beautiful picture formed in his mind: a DNA double-spiral, the sequence of genes responsible for mirror resonance syndrome. His program had deciphered it with a bit of help from Ozie. Now Victor needed to get the sequence from Ozie and start synthesizing proteins, growing neural tissue, and looking at how it all worked.
The MRS mutation in his DNA tweaked the way a protein in his neurons folded, which weakened the cells responsible for dampening neural activity and made his brain hyperactive. He took out the data egg and held it to his forehead. He wondered how alcohol affected the way the data egg worked. His granfa never had access to Victor’s inebriated brain. Maybe the egg could sober him up? He returned it to his pocket and made a fingerburst at the bartender to order another. As his fingers spread out, his perspective warped—the room appeared to bulge and rebound, as if instead of air the room were filled with clear gelatin shaking in an earthquake. Not his favorite synesthetic effect. Victor brushed his hair back from his face and tried to picture his DNA again. Instead, he could only picture Karine’s face smugly announcing her plans to make BioScan a great company, which were in fact Circe’s plans. Karine liked to take credit everywhere she could.
Victor, she’d said, you’ll be an advocate for the expansion of the Broken Mirror Classification System.
Oh, really? Not me. No, ma’am. That’s as likely as me drinking a bucket of horse piss. You’re the insane one to think I would help you.
The offer from Mía, however, was tempting. Evolve the Classification System in SeCa, in the LTs, and across the A.U. into something new, something more humane. Maybe it was possible.
On Victor’s sixth or seventh drink, the bartender suggested that he pay up and move on. Victor refused. But somehow his thumb found the type-pad, almost on its own, and authorized the deduction to pay his bill. He lurched from the bar. Good riddance to liquor. He banged into an empty table. What good are empty tables? Good luck staying in business if you kick out your paying customers. He flung himself outside, where neon lights hummed their disapproval. He hissed back.
Lisabella’s questions rang in Victor’s ears and left a foul taste in his mouth as he walked south past storefronts selling shirts, belts, and hats with colorful beaded Caddo patterns sewn into them. A fumewort tincture would go down well right about now. He had to get more from Pearl soon.
He was halfway home when his Handy 1000 buzzed. He stopped, took it out, and unfurled it. Ozie’s face stared up at him, looking flushed and nervous, eyes swimming fearfully behind his thick-rimmed glasses.
“Where have you been?” Victor’s shout echoed down a canyon of stone masonry houses.
“Long story,” Ozie said. Sweat pebbled on his forehead. His black skin glowed yellow from his own Mesh device. “I don’t have much time. The King of Las Vegas has agreed to meet with me.”
The King? Victor blinked. Ozie had stolen from the King. He should be hiding, not seeking him out.
Ozie said, “I’m going to see him now. You need to—”
The feed cut off. Victor tried calling Ozie back, fumbling with the type-pad. No response. The feed was blocked. Victor used the Handy’s ping function to try to locate his friend. No luck. Ozie must have gone off grid again. Wherever he was, he’d have to fend for himself.
The stones flowed unsteadily beneath Victor’s feet. Trying and failing to walk a straight line, he tried instead to walk a narrowly meandering path, rather than the wildly disjointed vectors by which his feet wanted to carry him forward, toward his room, toward the blissful feel of a pillow and darkness. First he had to turn left before the Grand Canal, a couple hundred more yards down a quiet canal-side street in a stupid town, to sleep soon—
Footsteps clacked behind him.
Victor turned to look.
Pain greeted him, an explosion of light and aching on the side of his head. He reeled toward the railing. Blam! Something hit him again. Agony in his skull. His vision went black, something slammed into his chest, and he felt weightless, spinning—uh oh, I’ve got the spins—then water surrounded him, burbling, cold wetting his clothes, dirty canal water soaking in. He gasped for breath, his lungs filling with water, and everything went dark.
PART TWO
8
Swirling white. Falling—that feeling in your gut the moment before you hit the ground. Glowing blurs, a flare across your field of vision that fades. Insubstantial, this place, perhaps a memory of blankness. Pain moving to different parts of the body, especially the back and left side of the head. The light beyond eyelids becoming less bright, less hot.
Victor opened his eyes, and the world took on shape, weight, and color. A sharp ache cascaded through his skull. When he moved, the pain was too great. He lay still, asking himself, What the laws is going on?
He wore a yellow synthsilk patient’s gown, and he was lying in a hospital bed surrounded by palm plants and a gentle artificial light reflecting off the walls. A large window faced a construction site. After a moment, Victor recognized the dirt pits that would be replaced by BioScan towers.
He searched for a mechanism to call for help, trying not to move his head too much but failing, setting off waves of pain and nausea.
There was something he was supposed to remember, something vital he’d forgotten. What? He couldn’t think through the pain.
Victor reached out for a type-pad on one of the biometric monitors, pressed it, and fell back, waiting, willing the pain to pass through him like neutrino particles passing unhindered through the Earth. He watched the door.
After a knock, the door opened, and Alia entered, wearing a sand-colored uniform that fit as loosely as men’s pajamas. “How are you feeling?” she asked with a voice that burbled like a mountain spring.
“Are you my doctor?”
“No. Circe asked me to be here when you woke up.”
Victor would have been uncomfortable in the presence of such a beautiful woman if he felt halfway human. “My head is pounding. I can barely think.”
“You have a head wound and a concussion,” she explained.
“Concussion?” Victor had fallen and knocked his head while blank before, and a doctor at Oak Knoll Hospital had explained how they determined the severity. He asked, “What grade?”
She was silent for a moment and looked at him quizzically. “Are you familiar with the Hamburg scale for mild traumatic brain injury?” she asked.
Victor put a hand gently on his forehead and pressed, slightly relieving the pain. “If I can remember, it’s not as accurate as it purports to be.”
She smiled. Perhaps his knowledge impressed her. “We still use it as a benchmark. My conclusion is that you experienced a Grade D2 concussion: loss of consciousness and bruising of the skull with some residual compression. I haven’t observed any transcranial hematoma or anomalous vital signs, aside from the fact that you’ve been unconscious for sixteen hours. As soon as you feel
up for it, we’ll peek inside your head.”
A D2 concussion and being knocked unconscious. This was serious. There could be lasting effects. Now his brain was more screwed up than ever.
Victor closed his eyes. What was he forgetting? He said, “Have you brain scanned someone with MRS before?”
“I don’t expect any surprises.” Her voice soothed the pain in his head, and he wished she would keep talking until he fell asleep. “Then again, you’re no ordinary patient. Victor Eastmore, twenty-five. A risk taker. An advocate for the disenfranchised. Not scared of taking on Corps thugs or corporate fascists.”
His eyes popped open. She wore a wry smirk. For a moment, Victor thought he had hallucinated what she said. He ran his palms over the bedsheets and gripped them. Was he going blank? She continued to look at him. Blankness felt far away, and the room felt real. He asked, “You got all that while I was unconscious?”
“I’ve been brainscanning our addiction patients, including your friend Elena. She can’t stop telling everyone how brave you are. It made the procedure quite a chore.”
He groaned. Elena needed a muzzle for her big mouth. She shouldn’t be telling people about their past. There was still a murderer on the loose. But it didn’t feel bad to have someone say something nice about him for a change, and coming from her it meant the world.
Alia approached the bed and spoke softly. “The blow to your head might cause dizziness, sensitivity to light, or more subtle changes to your emotional and cognitive functions. We’ll run some tests to see what we’re up against.” Alia gestured to his head. “Do you feel up for a trip to the Cogitron Exelus now, or should we wait?”
Victor began to pull himself forward. Pain rose again and crashed against him like a storm surge breaking through a levee. He fell back on the mattress. “Wait.”
“That bad? I’ll get something for you. Don’t go anywhere.” She walked into the hall.
Victor lay still and tried to recall what happened after he left Mía’s apartment. He didn’t remember feeling on the verge of blankness. Drunk, yes, and sloppy from it, but not blank.