Michael nodded, as if I’d admitted something. “They’ve brainwashed you, and now they’re going to brainwash me. You have to help me, Angel. Let me out of here.”
“I don’t believe you,” I said, but nausea churned inside me because I wasn’t sure.
“Prove SilverDollar is innocent. Look under the bandage.”
I didn’t want to, and Michael read that in my face. My chin went up. I tore off the bandage.
I don’t know what I expected—flashing computer lights, maybe—but all my fingers felt was a three-inch cut, neatly sewn up. No Loyalty chip.
“The incision is on the frontal lobe where Loyalty chips are installed,” Michael said.
I stopped breathing, then saw the pleased smile touching his lips. “You made that up.”
He didn’t deny it.
I was disgusted with myself. “My own note warned me not to trust you. ‘Violet eyes lie.’ ”
Michael looked puzzled for a moment, then his eyes widened.
“You know what it means,” I accused.
“You were telling yourself to lie in order to gain your freedom,” Michael said smoothly.
I didn’t believe him. I couldn’t tell if anything he’d told me was the truth. “How do I know you aren’t one of the bad guys, like Judas in the movie?”
“Who?” Michael looked confused for a moment. “Oh, right. The guy who got the blonde pregnant. That part wasn’t us, that was Vincent Cole and Erin Reinders. Never mind that. I am not Judas.”
The names Vincent Cole and Erin Reinders triggered the drowning memory again. “Who are Vincent and Erin?” I asked quickly when I resurfaced, trying to distract Michael from my pallor.
“Vincent and his sister, Leona, are two other Renaissance children we met. They were being blackmailed into helping Dr. Frankenstein. Vincent had gotten Erin Reinders pregnant, and Dr. Frankenstein was holding the baby’s fate over their heads. They escaped at the same time we did.”
I had no memory of the event, but I was inclined to believe Michael this time. Somehow the story rang true. “How did we escape?”
Michael’s expression became remote. “Dr. Frankenstein was crazy. He challenged us to a duel to the death, to prove who was smarter,sapiensorrenascentia.He lost.”
“He’s dead?”
“Yes.”
That was all Michael said, but I shivered.
“Come on, Angel,” Michael coaxed. “Say you remember me.”
I bit my lip. I didn’t. Not really.
During our conversation, I’d come dangerously close to Michael. He reached out with his cuffed hands and touched the gold chain around my throat. “You’re still wearing it. The angel pendant I gave you at Christmas. You must remember me.” Hope and exultation in his voice.
I shook my head and stepped back, but myfingers cradled the pendant protectively. “No. I’m sorry.”
The disappointment in his face pierced me, and I quickly asked him another question. “The number 1987. What does it mean?”
His lips quirked. “Ah, how romantic. Nineteen eighty-seven is the year we met.”
Today was April 19, 2099. Neither of us had been born in 1987, so the Historical Immersion towns where we’d been raised must have been set in 1987. I wasn’t learning anything new.
“This is a waste of time,” I said abruptly. “I’m leaving.”
“No!” Real panic showed on Michael Vallant’s face. He grabbed my wrist. “You can’t leave me like this! Tomorrow they’ll wipe away my memory and install a Loyalty chip in me. You have to help me.”
Frightened, I broke his grip and backed away.
“If you won’t listen to me, listen to yourself,” Michael called after me. “You left another message here in the brainwash chamber. It’s up there on the wall.” He pointed with his bound hands.
I eyed him suspiciously in case it was a trap, but in the end I couldn’t fight the compulsion to look. The bare concrete wall had scratches in it, invisible from more than half a foot away. I recognized my handwriting.
“Mike, if you find yourself here, it’s because I betrayed you. I’m so sorry. It gets harder to fight every day.”
My blood ran cold. I staggered as the drowning memory sucked at me, but when it was over the message was still there. “It can’t be true,” I whispered. “SilverDollar wouldn’t do that.”
“You only think so because your Loyalty chip is making you think so,” Mike said.
I shook my head, mute.
“Keep reading,” Mike said.
“Anaximander came to see me today. He almost looked worried. He said people have died from resisting Loyalty Induction, their minds rebounding in on themselves. They put the chip in tomorrow.”
I looked to Mike.
“Let me go.” His eyes entreated mine.
I took a step forward. Stopped. “I can’t.”
We stared at each other for several minutes, before Mike’s expression changed into one of weary resignation. “Your Loyalty chip won’t let you release me.”
I opened my mouth but couldn’t refute his words.
“It’s okay,” Mike said, eerily calm. “Go back to your room. I forgive you.”
Thoughts in turmoil, I backed out of the chamber. In the hall, I leaned against the wall, my body bowed in anguish. I couldn’t bear the thought of Mike being cut open tomorrow and his will taken away. It was wrong.
Wrong. I clung to the word, studied it from all sides, found a chink.
Loyalty chips were wrong. I was certain SilverDollar wouldn’t do something both immoral and illegal, therefore an overzealous employee must be responsible. Since SilverDollar could get into a lot of trouble if they were discovered using Loyalty chips, it was my duty as a loyal employee to keep the company from unknowingly perpetrating an illegal act.
There was a huge flaw in my thinking somewhere, but I let it go, didn’t think about it. I turned off the video camera and went back inside.
Mike’s eyes were shut against the horrible whine coming from the speakers. When he opened them and saw me, he looked astonished.
I quickly explained my reasoning, while unlocking his cuffs with a key I’d found in the Observation Room. “SilverDollar wouldn’t do this, I know it.”
“Oh, yes, SilverDollar would,” Mike said grimly, rubbing his wrists.
“We don’t have time to argue,” I said. “Follow me.”
Mike stopped suddenly, halfway across the chamber. He stooped and picked something small off the floor.
“What is it?” I asked.
He smiled, and his whole face lit up. “A paper clip.” He opened his hands and showed me. It was, indeed, a paper clip, bent open and crooked. One end looked rusty.
“So?”
“So this is how you wrote your messages.” Mike laughed, and my breath caught in my throat. He was gorgeous when he laughed. “They didn’t search you for messages because they didn’t think you had a means of writing anything. You beat them with a paper clip and an old receipt. God, I love you, Angel. A paper clip.” He laughed again.
I stood still, overwhelmed by a memory and the drowning that immediately followed. But this time I kept the memory.Mike handing me a small, slim box at Christmastime. Opening it and seeing thenecklace glittering within. And crying. Crying,because although the angel was beautiful, it wasn’t what I’d wanted for Christmas.
I’d wanted the words. Even though I’d known how Mike felt about me, I’d wanted the words.
And now my heart shattered over finally hearing him say “I love you”—
—and not being able to say the words back.
“What is it?” Mike asked.
I shook my head, mute and angry. I didn’t have time for a trip down memory lane right now, and it didn’t matter what Mike’s feelings for me were. “Hurry,” I said.
It took us twenty minutes to reach an exit; Mike walked as if he were an old man, weakened by his ordeal. “Here.” I opened a small side door in Blue Section, revealing the starry nigh
t outside. “Go. I’ll find out who’s responsible, I swear.”
Mike halted. “Aren’t you coming?”
I blinked, astonished. The thought had not crossed my mind.
“Angel, you have to come,” Mike said urgently. “The Loyalty chip is affecting your thinking. Come with me, and we’ll dismantle it somehow.”
I was shaking my head. “I belong here.” I could see him weighing his chances of knocking me out and taking me away by force. “Don’t try it,” I warned.
“I’m not leaving without you.”
His words filled me with an odd kind of panic.He had to leave.Panic made me brutal. “Go. I may have known you once, but I don’t now. You’re a stranger to me.”
“No.” He shook his head, swaying on his feet. “I’m not going.”
“Why not?” I was near tears. It would be so much simpler if he left.
Mike favored me with a twisted smile. “Because you would never leave me. You came back for me once when you shouldn’t have, when you knew Dr. Frankenstein was setting a trap.” Softly, “I failed you once. I won’t do it again.”
I STARED ATMIKE in frustration. “Are you crazy? You have to leave.”
“No. Not without you.”
He meant it, I realized with a shock. He wasn’t leaving. I fought the warm glow that wanted to spread through me. “If you stay, they’ll install the Loyalty chip in your head.”
His gaze remained steady. “Not if you help me.”
I wanted to, but I wasn’t sure that I could.
“All you have to do is find the Loyalty chip they plan to install tomorrow and sabotage it,” Mike said.
“Oh, is that all?” I asked sarcastically. “What if I can’t find it? Even if I do, it won’t help because I don’t know how to disable a Loyalty chip.”
“I trust you,” Mike said. “I’ll risk it.”
I stared at him, appalled. How could he trust me? I was the one who had captured him, betrayed him, and the chip in my head would make me do the same thing again.
Without another word, we headed back, Mike’s arm draped over my shoulders for support.
“I don’t know how much discrepancy on the videotape we can get away with before the technicians notice,” I said, planning ahead. “You’ll have to go back in the chamber and rechain yourself while I search for the chip. Position yourself as closely as you can to where you were when I came in.”
“No problem.” When we reached the Loyalty Induction chamber, Mike went inside without a word of advice or caution.He trusted me.The thought made me dizzy.
Determined not to let him down, I searched the Observation Room thoroughly. I found a supply of medi-patches: Knockout and TrueFalse, and others I didn’t recognize.
A second gray door opened off the Observation Room to the left. Inside, I found a stainless steel surgery. It made me queasy to think about Mike’s skull being cut open tomorrow. Would Dr. Clark perform the operation, or was it a matter for an engineer? Had I lain on that cold table? I shivered.
I found the Loyalty chip inside a locked cupboard. At least, I thought it was the Loyalty chip: a wafer-thin black object the size of my fingernail with clusters of cilia-like fibers growing out of it. Neural connectors?
I wanted to grind the hateful thing under my foot, but that would only delay Mike’s brainwashing while they got a replacement chip, not stop it.
Viciously deciding that Mike was crazy to trust me, I pried open the Loyalty chip along its hairthin seam. An even tinier circuit board winkedinside. I thought about scoring the delicate lines etched on the silicon with my fingernail, but hesitated. What if all I did was damage the chip, and when it was installed Mike’s brain got fried? I was nearing despair—Mike would just have to leave without me, that was all—when I hit upon the obvious.
The chip itself wasn’t dangerous to Mike; the connections between Mike’s brain and the chip were what allowed it to interface with him. All I had to do was disconnect the chip from the neural connectors.
Fingers clumsy with haste, I ripped the chip out of its nest inside the black casing. Once I’d satisfied myself there were no connections left, I put the chip back inside and snapped the halves of the black casing back together, taking care not to catch any of the cilia inside. It looked the same to me as it had before I’d opened it. I replaced it on its shelf and relocked the cupboard.
After turning on the video camera again, I told Mike what I’d done, trying to be positive. “As long as the chip was already programmed and all they plan to do is install it tomorrow morning, they shouldn’t notice the sabotage. If you can fake your way through whatever testing procedures they try on the chip, you should be fine.” My stomach did a slow roll at the thought.
“It’ll work,” Mike said intensely. “But if it doesn’t, promise me that you’ll do the same for me that you did for yourself with the paper clip.” His cuffed hands framed my face. “Promise me that you’ll tell me who I am. That you won’t let me forget.”
“I promise.” I turned toward the door before Mike could see my tears and the lie in my eyes. How could I help Mike when I remembered only the barest part of who he was? And if the chip’s sabotage was discovered, my part in it likely would be, too, and I’d find myself back in the Loyalty chamber with him.
I slipped out into the hall. It was close to five in the morning, and there was no one around.
I wanted quite badly to set a watch on the door to the Loyalty Induction room, to see who was going to install Mike’s chip, but I would be too obvious, loitering in the hallway. So I went back to my quarters and lay down but didn’t manage to sleep.
All too soon it was time to get up again. I stumbled through a five-mile run with Anaximander in a haze, suspense sawing at my nerves. I lived through terrible scenarios of something going wrong with the Loyalty chip because of my oh-so-clever fiddling, and Mike turning into a vegetable.
Whoever Mike was to me, I didn’t want him dead.
“No computer lessons this morning,” Anaximander said when we’d finished. “You’re to write a fifteen-hundred-word essay instead. The topic is: ‘The Future of Mars.’ Be finished by noon.”
Essay writing had nothing to do with my job description, but my wits were too dulled to protest. As soon as Anaximander left, I returned to my bedroom and napped. At 10:30A.M,I woke and wrote the essay in furious haste, churning out fourteen hundred words by 12:15P.M.Mars turned out to be an interesting topic. In my essay, I advocated“terraforming” Mars—making its atmosphere and ecology more Earthlike so humans could live on it without domes—since I found the most information on that subject.
I added another hundred words during lunch hour and was revising the last sentence when Anaximander found me at 1:00P.M.
Eddy came with him. “Hello, Angel. Have you been angelic?” He laughed at his little joke.
My boss, the comedian. I lacked the energy to dredge up a smile, so I just handed Anaximander a disk with my essay on it. “Why did you want me to write an essay on Mars?”
Eddy answered. “You’re entering a contest.”
Obviously, I hadn’t had enough sleep, because I didn’t understand. “What?”
“Once your training is finished, I’m thinking of sending you to Mars on assignment. So I want you to attend a student symposium on the future of Mars to give you some background. My nephew, Timothy, is running the show. SilverDollar is sponsoring it. There will be a bunch of lectures about Mars, and there’s a contest.”
“What’s the prize?” I asked, curious.
“A trip to Mars or seventy-five thousand dollars’ cash. Timothy’s idea. He’s crazy about Mars, a real Martian! So how does attending the symposium strike you?”
“Sounds like fun. When does it start?” My tiredness began to leave me. The symposium would give me a chance to get out of dull SilverDollar and meet people my age.
“You fly out this afternoon,” Eddy said, his words like a splash of cold water.
This afternoon.If I left this aft
ernoon, I wouldn’t have a chance to check on Mike. I wouldn’t know if I’d succeeded in breaking his Loyalty chip or if I’d killed him.
I hung onto my smile by the skin of my teeth. “Great!”
Eddy didn’t notice the falseness in my voice. “Anaximander’s running security for the event, and I’m one of the contest judges. Perhaps the next time I see you, I’ll be presenting the award to you!”
My smile began to feel as if it were fixed in cement.
“Anaximander, why don’t you wait outside while I speak to Angel alone for a moment?” Eddy flashed a predatory smile.
Anaximander didn’t move. “What do you want to discuss?”
Eddy opened his suit jacket and began to play with the black butterfly token. Anaximander’s gaze was drawn to it as if to a lodestone. “I said, leave us.”
Anaximander shook his head as if to clear away cobwebs. “Yes, sir.” He walked slowly toward the door, his body language reluctant. I had the odd impression that Anaximander wanted to protect me.
I gave a slight nod when Anaximander stopped and looked at me. I would be fine. Eddy was a creep, but I could handle him.
And then a very odd thing happened. Anaximander, whose Augments gave him better than 20/20 vision, missed the door and walked into a wall.
He didn’t just graze the wall; he walked full intoit. It must have hurt, but he just tried again and walked out the door.
Eddy slapped his knee, laughing. “Did you see that? Did you see what the big robot did?”
Robotwas the worst insult one could make to the Augmented. I stiffened on Anaximander’s behalf.
“Oh, don’t look so mad. Loosen up. It was just a little joke.” Eddy punched my shoulder.
“It wasn’t funny.” I resisted the urge to punch him back.
Eddy’s expression turned mean. “I thought it was.”
A hard silence fell, and then I blinked, and when I next looked, Eddy had relaxed. He smiled slyly, as if he knew a secret I did not. “I want to talk to you about Timothy.”
I waited.
Silver Eyes Page 5