"Like what?"
"You've been under a lot of stress, and you've been overly excited the past few days. Especially earlier today -- a couple hours ago. Sometimes those readings can be a bad sign." She paused for a moment to read his face. "So what's been bothering you?"
Jeremy laughed. He tried to make it sound natural, but it felt contrived.
"I thought I'd already had my psychoanalysis for the day."
"And I noticed that you resisted it."
"People from the Community like their privacy."
"Even with their doctors? You're not doing yourself a favor if you don't let me know what I need to know to help you."
Jeremy shook his head. "Who says I need help? You're acting as if it's a foregone conclusion that I'm going to get this 'implant psychosis.' I thought it was rare."
"It is. Perhaps you don't remember, but you do have an enlargement in the occipital region of your brain."
"I do. I also remember being told it wasn't a problem." He didn't say that he'd also checked it out in the literature, and found absolutely nothing to indicate a connection with implant psychosis.
"It probably isn't," she admitted without meeting his gaze. Her face showed suppressed concern, but she shrugged and took another piece of cheese. "If you don't trust me, there's not much I can do for you."
"It sounds to me like the shoe's on the other foot. You don't believe me when I say that I'm doing fine."
"It's not out of the blue, you know. I can access your implant while you're in diagnostic mode, and the data I'm getting concerns me. And it's even more of a concern that you're developing an attitude."
Ah. The last refuge of the manipulative woman.
Jeremy knew there was no response to that charge. Any conceivable response would be cast as confirmation of his 'attitude.'
He took another sip of wine and waited for her to take the next step.
"You're playing a dangerous game here, Jeremy," she said after a minute, with clear signs of irritation. "You're beginning to show classic signs of implant psychosis, and the longer you wait, the worse it will get. If you trust me -- if you let me take you back to the office and run the tests I need to run -- then we can catch it in time, and you'll do just fine. But if you continue with this passive-aggressive attitude, things will just go from bad to worse, and then I won't be able to help you."
Jeremy smiled and took another sip of wine.
"More?" he asked, offering to refill her glass. She scowled, but then turned her gaze away and seemed to be listening to a message. She sat up straight as her eyes flickered about.
"They need me. I have to get back to the office. But don't forget what I've said. I think you ought to reconsider your course."
* * *
Once she left, he sat back in his seat and took a deep breath. A faint smile struggled for mastery with an expression of weariness. Through drooping eyelids he watched the light of the lamp sparkle through the deep red wine as he swirled it in the glass. He also noticed that his hand was shaking slightly.
His implant startled him out of morose self-reflection.
From Hanna. Hi Jeremy. Remember me? MacKenzie and I are bored. Can you meet us?
He shook his head and sat up straighter in his chair.
To Hanna. Chat mode requested, he sent.
Accepted.
Your timing couldn't be better, he sent. My schedule just freed up and I'm wondering what to do. What did you have in mind?
MacKenzie wants to go skating. I want to watch a movie. How about you?
Neither of those options had the slightest appeal to him. His mind was consumed with questions about the phantasms, and this might be his best chance, although it would require letting Hanna and MacKenzie in on his story. If he could sit down and talk with them for a while, maybe he could make sense of everything that had happened to him in the last few days.
Actually, this may sound boring, but I've got something on my mind. He remembered Hanna's offer to help him adjust to Society. It has to do with the implant. Would you and MacKenzie mind talking me through it? I'll buy you a drink, or we can get an ice cream or something.
Just a minute, she replied, and then continued a moment later. There's a great chocolate bar at 11th and Massachusetts. Can you meet us there?
A chocolate bar is a place? I thought it was a kind of candy.
It's both. It's a bar, you know, like ... a bar, but they serve chocolate in just about every way you can imagine. As long as you don't make me eat a sausage for breakfast, I can budget the calories.
Jeremy grinned. Hanna wasn't close to having a weight problem.
I'll meet you there in ten minutes, but I've got one or two things to do, so do you mind if I turn off the chat mode?
No. See you soon. Chat mode discarded by remote host.
* * *
Looking at the evening sky brought Jeremy a sense of calm. The fading light promised to hide him in a blanket of darkness. Childhood ghosts grew more fearsome at night, but he had a feeling that the ghosts that had been following him needed the light to see. He might not have believed that if he had thought it through, but he wasn't thinking now, he was just walking and allowing his mind to wander in nothingness as his body enjoyed the cool breezes of a Spring evening.
He pulled his thoughts back to the present when he turned the corner onto Massachusetts Avenue and saw a row of retail establishments. They were all one- and two-story enterprises that comprised the bottom floors of the traditional 13-floor, D.C. office building. A series of old-fashioned wooden signs hung from the eaves. The one he wanted stood out by its plainness. Amidst oranges and purples and bright greens, the sign for the chocolate bar was chocolate brown, and bore in white letters the name of the place. It was, literally, The Chocolate Bar.
The restaurant was divided into a self-service facility for carry-out and an eat-in area with waiters. Everything sparkled clean and bright, reminding him of pictures he had seen of old-fashioned soda fountains. The tiled floor, the metal hand railings, the white tables and red chairs all gleamed to a polished perfection. A quick scan uncovered no robots, but it had to be their work. Jeremy couldn't imagine that human hands could make a place look so immaculate.
"Hi Jeremy," Hanna called from a table near the center of the eating area. She and MacKenzie rose to greet him, although MacKenzie timidly hung back a little, somewhat unlike her manner in class, or at lunch.
Does she think she's on Hanna's turf?
Jeremy greeted them both warmly and took a seat on a three-legged stool.
"So what's good?" he asked, speaking to the ceiling as he called up the bar's hole address and accessed the menu.
When all the orders were placed they fell into an easy chit-chat. Jeremy felt suddenly light-hearted. The cheery surroundings, the company -- they recalled his school days. His dad always told him it was important to be a fun date, and he began to realize how much he craved simple, friendly time with people about his own age.
The orders arrived remarkably quickly and they started right in. Hanna ordered a chocolate fudge cake, MacKenzie a thick bar of slightly warmed dark chocolate, which she ate with a fork, and Jeremy tried out the thick malted milkshake, complete with a motor-driven straw. After the novelty of the straw wore off, he began to notice the flavor of the shake. It was the best thing he'd tasted in his life.
Hanna and MacKenzie both offered him a bite of their desserts, but although sharing a dish with one woman might be romantic, just swapping food around the table didn't appeal to him.
"So what's on your mind, Jeremy?" Hanna asked as a bus boy took their empty dishes and a waiter poured steaming coffee into gleaming white, porcelain cups.
Jeremy looked down at the table to gather his thoughts. His suddenly serious expression took Hanna and MacKenzie by surprise. "Actually," he said, "I have some important things to ask you both about, but first I need to ask some computer-related questions. Do you mind?" He looked back and forth at both of them, but they all knew Ma
cKenzie was the computer expert. Hanna pointed to MacKenzie with her open hand, as if to say, "ask her."
Jeremy rubbed his eyes as if the afternoon's headache was returning just by thinking about it again.
"Okay, as I understand it," he began, "everybody's implant is connected to a network of millions of computers, and all the implants and computers are tied together by a zillion communications links."
"I won't vouch for the numbers, but go on," MacKenzie said.
Jeremy shrugged and grinned. "Okay. So when I send something over the net, my message goes to some computer somewhere, the computer gives a reply, and that information is sent back to my specific address, to my implant, which formats the information in whatever mode I've selected, ... visual, or whatever."
"Keep going," MacKenzie said approvingly.
"Question number one. Everything I see in my implant is on my desktop. Is it possible to see things from off the hole that appear in your normal field of view -- not on the desktop at all?"
"What have you been reading?" she asked with some surprise. "Just today I read about some really advanced work on that very subject. You see, the early implants had a tendency to get mixed up with people's regular vision. In the left eye anyway. But it was all cloudy and hazy and confusing, and gave people horrible headaches, so they had to move everything into a very limited frame -- what we know now as a desktop. But somebody's been re-evaluating that question, and there have been some breakthroughs."
"Frankly, I think it would be an irritation," Hanna chimed in. "I like keeping things on the desktop."
"You wouldn't say that if you'd seen some of the simulations. It's really amazing what they might be able to do with this. Just ...."
Hanna reached over and took her hand to cut her off.
"I think Jeremy has a couple more questions for you. You can tell us the geek stuff later, okay?"
MacKenzie tried to scowl, but a smiled peeked through at the corners. She looked back at Jeremy.
"Question number two," he said. "Could one of those computers send me some visual information that I didn't request?"
"No."
Her abrupt answer surprised him. "Just flat-out 'no'? No maybe's, or possibilities, or anything?"
MacKenzie shook her head. "Sorry, just, ... 'flat-out no.'" She looked at Hanna and they both giggled. Apparently it wasn't a Society expression.
"Privacy is sacrosanct on the hole," she continued. "Nobody can send you anything, except mail, unless you want it. And you can even filter mail."
"But isn't there some information that goes to everybody? Like the clock, or, ... I don't know, emergency stuff. Civil defense. Warnings about invading dragons. That kind of thing." Hanna laughed.
"Yeah, there's lots of stuff that comes off the hole to everybody's implant, but it's not visual information. It's kind of background noise." Jeremy took note of that. "You don't see the embedded messages unless you want to. What I mean is, your implant gets notice that there's an emergency message. You get that notice however you have your implant set, and then you have to access the file. Nothing comes to you automatically."
Jeremy asked about the black floaters he saw the first couple days he had the implant.
"Well, okay," MacKenzie conceded, "some of the noise is 'visual,' in one sense. But that's an accident, first of all, and it's just noise, not information. Most people don't see it, and if they did, it wouldn't be anything recognizable. Maybe our brains learn to ignore it."
He remembered Dr. Berry's comments about his enlarged occipital region -- a region that does visual processing. Could there be some connection?
"Is that noise at a special frequency, or something like that?" he asked.
MacKenzie shook her head. "'Frequency' is the wrong word, but it has a characteristic signature to it. We just automatically filter it out, ..." She paused for a minute and looked hard at Jeremy. "But you might not, since you're a newbie. It's possible, I guess, that some visual information could be coming through, like the noise that makes the floaters."
She looked down at the table, hard in thought. Jeremy looked over at Hanna to make sure she was doing okay while he and MacKenzie monopolized the conversation. She reached over and grabbed his hand, which was resting on the table-top, and gave it a friendly squeeze. She nodded her head at MacKenzie, as if to say, "She's the one to figure this stuff out."
"Jeremy, I have an idea," MacKenzie said after a minute. "I just wrote a little program that can test what we were talking about."
Jeremy looked at her in surprise. "You just wrote it?"
"She's amazing," Hanna said.
MacKenzie rolled her eyes. "It's no big deal, guys, but listen -- I'm going to send a message to you and Hanna, and I'm going to put some noise in it. I want to know if you can see anything when you get it."
They both nodded, and a second later Jeremy heard MacKenzie's voice through his implant. At the same time he saw a small dark patch, like a storm cloud, hover over his chocolate malt. He looked quickly at Hanna, whose expression told him all he needed to know. He looked up at MacKenzie and smiled. She mouthed 'wow' and stared off into space, deep in thought again.
Chapter 7
"This is amazing," MacKenzie said after another minute of stunned silence. "Jeremy, this is ...." She shook her head at a loss for words. "I just have to show this to my professors. Nobody has ever been able to make this kind of communication work. I don't think you realize the implications of this. I could do my doctoral thesis on the message I just sent you. I need to ...."
Jeremy cut her off, shaking his head and holding his finger to his mouth, asking her to be quiet. "I'm sure I don't understand the technical aspects of it, MacKenzie, but there's something else we need to talk about, before you tell the world. And this isn't the place. Can we get out of here?"
Hanna and MacKenzie looked at each other as if they didn't quite understand why he was being so mysterious, but they were willing to play along. They shrugged and got up to leave. Jeremy didn't speak until they were a block away from the Chocolate Bar and on a somewhat lonely stretch of pavement.
"I've got a story to tell you both, but I need your word that you won't repeat any of it to anybody." Jeremy looked seriously at Hanna and MacKenzie, who almost laughed at him. MacKenzie was still thinking of all she could do with what she had just learned, and how it would impact her academic schedule.
"What? You want me to keep this secret?" MacKenzie protested. "This is the biggest discovery in hole communications in a decade."
Jeremy hung his head and thought for a minute. He spoke without looking up. "I couldn't ask you to keep what we've just talked about secret. That wouldn't be fair." He looked up and stared MacKenzie in the eye. "But I want you to swear to me that you won't tell anybody what I'm about to tell you. Both of you," he added, looking at Hanna. "And I think that after you've heard my story, you'll want to keep quiet about the other stuff as well. At least until we can figure it all out."
Hanna and MacKenzie shared a meaningful look. They whispered something to one another, and then Hanna looked back at Jeremy.
"Well, it turns out that your luck is better than you know," she said. "We're both Covenanters."
She might as well have said they were newspapers for all the good it did Jeremy. He looked at her with a blank expression.
As they turned aside to sit on a park bench, Hanna briefly explained what she meant. Covenanters were a religious group whose devotional practices centered around a series of covenants, or oaths, made with God, and in some cases, with others. Putting it in terms Jeremy would understand, they were a modern form of Puritanism.
Hanna didn't explain the details, but both Hanna and MacKenzie were sworn to keep confidences sacred at all costs. It had something to do with the initiation rites they started back during the riots. The survival of the fledgling Covenanter movement depended on secrecy.
Jeremy didn't understand it all, but he got the idea that they would rather die than reveal something they ha
d promised to keep secret, and they both promised to keep his story to themselves.
Religion didn't have much of a hold on Jeremy, and he was not a little disappointed that Hanna had caught it -- he was sure it would put a damper on future dates -- but a sacred promise of silence sounded just perfect for his present situation. He told them everything.
* * *
They were still on the park bench well after dark. It was a warm, late-Spring night, and it would have been much more enjoyable if they didn't have such serious things to discuss. Jeremy finished his story about his experiences with the images, and Hanna and MacKenzie were still trying to take it all in. Hanna was the first to speak.
"It seems to be more than a coincidence that Dr. Berry had you under surveillance, and then there was one of those things at the public terminal, watching you."
MacKenzie nodded. "Yeah, that seemed just a little too coincidental to me, too. And you said that she went off suddenly after your meeting tonight?"
"She said she received an emergency call. She is a doctor, after all."
Hanna and MacKenzie were silent for another minute, thinking things over, but then Jeremy got a message through his implant.
From Dr. Berry. I need to see you right away.
Another coincidence? he wondered. This was getting uncanny.
To Dr. Berry. I'm a little busy right now. I'll make an appointment with your office. He didn't know what else to say.
From Dr. Berry. This is urgent. I've just received a new batch of analysis of the data from your implant. I need to see you right away.
Hanna and MacKenzie realized something was going on and they looked at him, curious. "Are you seeing something?" Hanna asked. Jeremy ignored her and began searching around for something on the ground. They looked at him like he had gone mad. He grabbed a stick and started writing in the dirt.
"It's Dr. Berry," he wrote, and then realized how silly he was being. "Why am I doing this? She can't hear what I'm saying."
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