I sat back and reached for my bag. I took out the prints I'd made of photographs that Edgar had given me. “Mr. Sever, I want to show you something. Something for you, not for them. A dear friend of mine was killed last week. The man who shot him fought to the death. These are pictures of the assassin's autopsy.”
I spread the pages on the table. The first photo showed a skull seen from the top, opened up. A big chunk of the parietal lobe was gone, the tissue flowering out where the policeman's bullet had exited. “This isn't my specialty,” I said. “I'm a mathematician, like my mother before me. But some friends helped me understand what we see here. This assassin had a commissurotomy.”
“I don't understand.” Sever looked sideways again at Edgar. “Do you get this?” He was plotting his escape, keeping the conversation going, hoping to distract Edgar while looking for an opening. But Edgar was good: he didn't look at the photographs but kept his gaze fixed on Sever, right hand on the gun in his pocket, left hand holding the jammer over Sever's heart.
“New to me also,” I said. “But there's a bundle of nerves here, between the two hemispheres of the brain. The corpus callosum. It integrates the two hemispheres. On this man, it was cut. Also, there's another bundle below that, the anterior cingulate, that was also cut. Cut long before. The healing was complete; the tissue had retreated from long disuse.
“And there's another thing. Here.” I pointed at the side of the brain. “There is a fine network of nanowire mesh laid over much of the left side neocortex—only the motor, somatosensory, and some visual cortex is not covered. Now, this person had a brand name pacemaker, though he looked twenty-five. But it wasn't really a pacemaker. It had a radio in it, and it was wired up to this mesh on the left side neocortex. That mesh can generate a mild field that inhibits neural electrochemical signals. Basically, it can shut down most of the left side of his brain.”
The man stared. “You think I had something to do with this?”
“Do you have a pacemaker, Mr. Sever?”
“Yes. But not . . .” His mouth hung open as he considered it.
“Each side of a neocortex is potentially independent. But there are some asymmetries. Language, for example, is usually only in the left, for most people. The two hemispheres, if separated, can learn and do things on their own, without the other half even knowing. In a way, someone with this surgery is now two people, only partly integrated.”
I reached across the table and took his hands. I turned them over, and rubbed at the calluses at the base of the fingers of his right hand. “This assassin had the calluses of someone who was right handed, just as you have. But the weapon retrieved had only left hand fingerprints on it. The wiring in a human brain is contralateral: the right side of your brain controls the left side of your body, and sees what's to the left of your visual field. And vice versa. Do you understand?”
“No.” He looked around again, probably for his handler. He was getting more scared, perhaps a little desperate.
“I'm saying they trained the right neocortex of this guy to be an assassin. I don't think the left neocortex even knew. The right hand literally doesn't know what the left is doing. A metaphor for our civilization, don't you think?”
“I'd like to go now,” he said. He was starting to sweat.
“I suppose you believe you're a low-level security operative of some kind,” I told him. “But you're not. You're a very special product, Mr. Sever. You're an assassin who doesn't know he's an assassin, who can walk through biometric scanners without showing fear. You could even pass one of those quick-MRIs and show no aggressive brain activation.”
He stared at me. His fingertips twitched on the table. He seemed to be struggling with what I told him. Finally, he whispered, “What do you want?”
“Not to be shot, of course. But also . . . I'm a person who believes that the symbolism matters. And, well, I was made too. Or rather, my grandparents were made. For a different purpose, of course. I'm a secret, just like you're a secret. So I think it would be . . . appropriate if we both came out into the light. Don't you? You probably have a handler here somewhere. He's trying to turn half of your brain off now, while we talk. We could help you, Mr. Sever. We could get you out of here. We could have this device removed. We could help you be a free man again. Would you choose that?”
His brow furrowed. He really seemed to be considering it. I held my breath. I longed to have him, to have some link that would let us direct the police to the people who had killed David Ressar. It was so rare that we received any justice in this world. But finally Sever shook his head. “Let me go.”
I stood. Sever flinched, as if he'd started a movement but immediately stopped it. Edgar's hand under the table pressed his gun hard into the man's side. Sever's hands stayed on the table.
“All right,” I said. “We'll play it out. I'm going to leave now. My friends here are going to hold you until my train leaves. Then they're going to let you go. We two will talk again—if your handler doesn't kill you because of what you now know.”
Juno growled once, the barest murmur. I locked eyes with Edgar and he nodded. I picked up the briefcase that he had set on the floor next to his seat, and then I headed for our train, Juno padding quietly beside me.
We took the Metro-North train to Stamford, Connecticut. A little girl sat across from us in the aisle, chocolate smeared on her face, and kept offering the wet gnawed end of a candy bar to Juno. Her mother stared glassy-eyed off in space, indifferent, either teeping someone far away, or maybe having a television program cast right into her occipital lobe. Either way, she sat oblivious.
TAKE CANDY GOOD CANDY PLEASE TAKE, Juno asked.
“No, Juno,” I said softly, “chocolate is not good for a dog.” I don't know where that old saw came from—that chocolate causes dogs to keel over with an exploded heart. But I did know Juno would likely puke in an hour if he ate the thing. I smiled at the little girl.
“I'm sorry, honey, but my dog Juno can't eat chocolate. Chocolate is bad for his tummy.”
The girl frowned. She puzzled through my words, clearly unaccustomed to speech. Then she nodded and smiled. She set the candy bar on the filthy seat next to her mother, to free both hands so she could boost herself up. She managed to get onto the seat, but then had to figure out how to get the candy out from under her skirt without getting back down. She twisted, smearing chocolate on her clothes.
Juno looked at me dolefully.
“I just gave you three sausages,” I reminded him. “It'll be a wonder if that alone doesn't make you sick.”
The train car was silent, though crowded. It would have been eerie, in my youth. The Metro-North trains were never silent then. People talked to each other, people shouted into phones, people listened to music and the tinny beats leaked from their headphones, some people sang or shouted. But now it was always quiet. Everyone had a teep chip. They talked, or called, or listened to music inside their skulls. Every person carried his own world everywhere with him.
The teep chips had completely transformed the global economy. There was no going back now. They were a permanent fixture of human life, of the human future. People like me, without a chip, were becoming like people living off the grid: oddball fringe types. Few would choose a life without the chips, because few could afford to do so. And no one, no tyrant, no religion, no employer, would have the power to demand that servants or subjects or workers not have the chips—a modern economy required them.
In Stamford we got off and changed platforms, and waited until a sleek high-speed Amtrak pulled up. I had two first class tickets, so this time Juno and I sat in plush seats in the back of a nearly empty car. A steward approached us, an old man. I spoke quickly, before he tried to teep me, and he smiled in relief and gladly took my spoken order for white wine. After he brought the glass he promised to let me know when we reached Providence. He petted Juno, who dropped his ears contentedly while being scratched. Then the steward left us to doze.
SEE SISTER YOUR SISTER
? Juno sent.
“Yes.”
He looked at me, thinking. NICE SISTER SMELL GOOD PLAY GOOD.
I shrugged. “I haven't seen her in years. Since our mother's funeral. We are not friends.” I feared, as soon as I said this, that Juno would not understand.
But in reply he just sent, SISTER BROTHER ALWAYS FRIEND GOOD FRIEND SMELL GOOD FRIEND.
He curled up and went to sleep, long chin on his heels. I took off my heavy computer glasses, glad to be free of them, put a hand on Juno's hot flank, and closed my eyes.
* * * *
Our mother had died in July, ten years before. The same cancer that had killed her mother before her. For the burial, we stood in a hot field near our grandfather's farm, and people from the Marrion School, people like us, said things about her contributions and the sacrifices she had made while bees drifted indifferently through the wildflowers. Afterward, I never could remember what they said, only the dirt falling down on the plain pine box she'd requested for a casket, and the ringing of blue jays at the field's edge. No one cried as much as our father, Allen Reed, who had never married her—"I wanted to have his babies,” our mother had told us, when we asked as children why our father didn't live with us, “not to have his life.”
The reception sprawled around Allen's house. People talked in loud voices and crowded into every room, but Allen looked fretfully out the back windows at where Virginia stood in the grass of his back yard, getting drunk alone.
“I'll check on her,” I told him.
“I hate these things,” she said, by way of explanation as I approached, swinging a bottle of white wine in her hand, not even maintaining the pretense of holding a glass in the other. She was barefoot. She lifted the bottle and took a swig, aiming to shock me. She looked good, like a professional woman from the city: thick hair cut expertly, clear shine on her short nails, a slightly severe suit but with a provocatively short skirt. Only the sore red of her eyes gave away some hint of vulnerability. “I swore I'd never come to another.”
“You were thinking of avoiding your mother's funeral?” I asked.
“Starting right in, Jan? You know I meant these gatherings of people from the Marrion School. These cabals of conspirators.”
“This is our father's home,” I said softly.
“God, I'd almost forgotten the self-righteous way you could talk. As if all this were reasonable.”
“It's a funeral, Ginny. It's not reasonable or unreasonable.”
“It's not a funeral. It's a business meeting.” She turned to face the house. “They're all in there, scheming. I saw that creepy David Ressar in the living room, brooding over his little army. He was on the news last week. That ‘non-partisan, non-party political party’ of his has fifty million members, they said. He's trying to rule the world, that mean old bastard. And what do you do for them? What's your big role in this criminal enterprise?”
I answered her calmly. “I'm good at cryptography.”
“You don't even see how sick this is.”
“You think it's better to dedicate your life to selling junk food and shoes made in sweat shops?” I had meant to just let her vent, but suddenly I found myself reverting to my role as ridiculously earnest critic. Virginia worked for an advertising agency, jealously proud of its big clients in the restaurant and sportswear industries.
She laughed at me. “See? You think my job is worse. You can't even tell how perverse this little cult of yours is, like that school.”
I frowned. “What's wrong with the Marrion School? I loved that school. All of us did.”
“Not all of us, Jan. Not all of us.”
“Mom thought it was good.”
“Mom hated all this,” Virginia said, again waving the bottle at the house, so that it splashed wine over her hand. “She thought maybe the Marrion School was a good school, that's all. For the education. She didn't even know about the sick psych tests.”
“There were no sick tests. What are you talking about?”
“The goddamn chocolate bars.”
I strained my memory, and then recalled the kindergarten exercises we did sometimes. In a conference with a teacher, a few at a time, they gave each of us a candy bar, set on a clean white plate, unwrapped, the naked chocolate easy to smell. “You can have this now,” the teacher explained, “or you can wait and not eat it until I come back, and then I'll give you another chocolate bar and you can have two.”
I waited for the second bar. All the children in our school did. Except Ginny. She nibbled on the edges of her chocolate bar, hoping to cheat the test by eating too little for any adult to notice, but she kept eating around the edge until nothing was left but some smears on the plate. She'd cried when she didn't get a second bar.
“That?” I almost laughed at her. “You remember that? That's an old test that didn't come from the Marrion School. It's a standard psychological test.”
“Yeah, well, I flunked,” Virginia spat. “But they kept making me take it. Over and over. I kept flunking but they wouldn't stop making me take it.”
I shrugged. “They were hoping you could learn.”
“Learn what?”
I didn't reply. She knew the answer.
Virginia turned and walked farther down the lawn, swinging the bottle. I followed only a few steps. “All of you are going to pay for the things you've done,” she said. “Someday. I look forward to seeing it.”
Then I said to her the cruelest thing that I had ever said. “Well, you flunked again, Virginia. You just proved that even at your own mother's funeral, you can only think of yourself.”
I went inside. I did not see her again.
* * * *
In Providence the old steward woke me. I thanked him and Juno and I jumped down to the terminal. We took a taxi to the waterfront, and boarded the seabus, a big electric ferry that would slip up the side of what remained of Cape Cod, making a few stops on the way to Provincetown.
Juno liked the sea. He paced the railing, nails clicking on the steel deck, his mouth open in a smile of contentment for the wind. I turned my glasses back onto wide network—I'd allowed them only local network transmissions before this—and then made some calls. I called the house and felt relief when I got Steven and learned he was fine. I called Edgar and told him where I was. And then I left my tags in the ether, open for calls. I was announcing, to anyone astute enough to know how to track me, where I was, and where I was going.
When we came to the huge floating dock in Chatham, the bus slowed, bounced off the dock, and then finally stopped, pressed up against it. Juno and I got off alone, though a few people got onto the ship. I waited a while, feet sinking into the soft plastic cubes that made up the dock, listening to the lapping water and wondering if a water taxi would come. Finally I used my glasses to locate a service and then ordered a taxi. After a while a small electric boat driven by a sullen boy with red hair circled the dock, as if deciding whether we were worth the stop, and then pulled up.
Extra for the dog, his teep chip sent, using protocols that my glasses could translate.
“That's fine,” I said aloud. Juno leapt into the boat, making it rock, and I climbed in uneasily. I told the boy the address, and he seemed to puzzle over the sound a minute, but finally pulled away.
Chatham had become the Venice of a sunken Cape Cod. White houses tottered on fat pilings over sand bars that, a generation ago, had been far inshore but that now were drowned at high tide. Boats rose and fell with floating docks, providing the only reliable transportation. A strange mix of people lived out here. Many old timers, from fishing families or families that had otherwise spent a generation or two on the Cape before it mostly disappeared, and considered the sea here their birthright. A few obscenely wealthy types who saw some kind of cachet in the authenticity of what remained of the Cape. And a few like Virginia, who loved the sea and managed to buy a little house in amongst the other folks.
I'd never been to Virginia's new home, of course, but we had managed to find the a
ddress. The boy steered the taxi through a system of buoys colored red and blue and other primary colors, floating in what seemed to be a grid pattern in the high tide. They marked out something like water avenues. Juno went and stood at the boy's side, almost pressing his head to the boy's hip, and I stiffened, expecting a complaint. But the young man only petted Juno a little, before returning both hands to the wheel.
We fishtailed around corners, dragging a wake and plowing close to many of the buoys. Juno closed his eyes against the wind, tongue hanging out, loving all of it.
Finally we turned into what I considered a narrow water alley, behind a long row of small houses standing on quads of steel-banded concrete pilings. The boy slowed and turned, expertly tapping the boat against the dock. Juno bounded onto the platform. I paid the boy, tightened my grip on the briefcase that Edgar had given me, and then carefully stepped onto the squishy plastic cubes. Without a word, the water taxi backed up, churning white foam, and then drove away.
When I looked up, Virginia stood there, at the top of a white ladder that led up to the balcony of her home. She held a glass of wine. Her hair had gone gray, and she'd gained a lot of weight. Juno eyed her curiously, uncertain about the obvious aggression in her stance.
“Hello, Virginia,” I said.
She stared a while longer, and then threw up her hands. “You don't have a teep chip. You were engineered specifically to care only about the future and instead you're a backwards luddite. We have to actually speak now. What a pain. You know, I've really come to like it that with the chip I can drink and talk at the same time.”
I shrugged.
“I already know,” Virginia added.
The tide was high, and only two rungs of the ladder showed. I climbed up, and Juno jumped the distance after me. My shoes clacked on the hard composite boards of the deck.
Virginia sized me up. She did not seemed pleased by what she saw.
“I said I already know that Ressar is dead. You didn't have to come out here.”
Analog SFF, April 2012 Page 9