Crosstalk

by Connie Willis

  And then what?

  Then I yelled at you and C.B. that I couldn’t believe you guys did that. It’s so not fair!

  What did you do after you couldn’t hear anything? Briddey asked.

  I tried to reboot it, but I couldn’t. I hit every key I could think of—

  Every key?

  Yeah, you know, like on a keyboard. They’re not really keys, it’s just visualizing, like the safe rooms and your radio. Anyway, I visualized my laptop, and did everything you’re supposed to do when it crashes, like turn it off and back on again, and I reset the default codes, in case it was a V-chip or something. But nothing worked. And then the sound came back on, just like that.

  How long did it last? The not being able to hear?

  A really long time. Like fifteen minutes. You guys didn’t have to do that. I did just what C.B. said to. I pulled up the drawbridge and lowered the portcullis and then went in my tower and stayed there. All I wanted to do was find out what was going on.

  And you didn’t do anything but listen?

  No! Maeve said vehemently. I told you, I— Her voice bit off in mid-syllable.

  Oh, no, now I’ve been cut off, Briddey thought, which would make Maeve furious—she’d think they were blocking her again—and then heard Lyzandra saying, It happened again. Why does it keep happening? and realized Maeve was the one who’d been cut off.

  That’ll make her even more furious, Briddey thought, and then, I’ve got to tell C.B.

  But how? She couldn’t risk them being overheard, which meant she needed to wait till both Lyzandra and Trent were blanked out, and from the sound of things, neither one was. They were both clamoring to know why the disruptions were happening.

  “I don’t know,” C.B. told them.

  “A likely story,” Trent said. “How do we know you’re not doing it?” He turned to Dr. Verrick. “He could be disrupting the telepathy to keep us from getting the data we need. This whole ‘helping’ thing could have just been a ruse so he could sabotage—there, you see? He just cut me off again.”

  Good, that’s one down, Briddey thought.

  “If you’re interfering with my patients’ telepathy, Mr. Schwartz—” Dr. Verrick said, moving forward menacingly.

  “He isn’t,” Briddey said, inserting herself between them. “It’s happening to us, too. We don’t know what’s causing it.”

  “Is that true?” Dr. Verrick demanded.

  “Yes,” C.B. said, “although…I’ve been thinking, Lyzandra was the first to experience it. Right, Briddey?”

  “Yes,” she said, hoping that was what he wanted her to say.

  “Okay, it happened to Lyzandra first and then to Briddey,” C.B. said, pointing at them in turn, “and then to Lyzandra again, and then to Trent—”

  “What difference does it make what order it happened in?” Dr. Verrick asked impatiently.

  “Because I think Lyzandra may have caused it.”

  “Me?” Lyzandra said, outraged. “My psychic spirit gift is everything to me. Why would I—?”

  “Not intentionally,” C.B. said. “Dr. Verrick, when you were attempting to get information from Ms. Flannigan, you gave Lyzandra a relaxant. It diminished her ability to limit the number of voices she heard, and she began to hear more of them, hundreds—”

  “Thousands,” Lyzandra said. “Millions.”

  “Exactly,” C.B. said. “She suddenly heard many more voices than her mind could handle, and her mind shut down, like when an electrical system becomes overloaded and blows a fuse.”

  So Maeve was right, Briddey thought. The system did crash.

  “But I wasn’t given a relaxant, and neither were they,” Trent said, pointing at her and C.B., “so why did the shutdown happen to us?”

  “Because all three of us were telepathically linked to Lyzandra,” C.B. said, “so both the voices and her reaction to them would have cascaded from her to us in turn. And when her mind shut down, ours did, too, like when a breaker trips, and that trips the next, and the next.”

  I thought it was a fuse, not a breaker, Briddey said to herself. And if it was a response to the deluge, why didn’t it happen right then, instead of half an hour later?

  But Dr. Verrick didn’t seem to have a problem with that—or with the rest of C.B.’s explanation. “So as the effect of the relaxant wears off, these shutdowns should get shorter in duration and then stop,” he said.

  C.B. nodded.

  “I want to know exactly when each one begins.” And while C.B. and Briddey worked with Trent and Lyzandra on getting into their safe rooms the second they heard the voices, Dr. Verrick charted the pattern and duration of the disruptions.

  They didn’t grow appreciably longer, but they didn’t grow shorter either, and Trent’s and Lyzandra’s didn’t overlap, so Briddey had no chance to tell C.B. that Maeve was having them, too.

  If she was. Just because she told you that, it doesn’t mean it’s true, Briddey thought. Maeve was perfectly capable of lying. And very good at it. She had to be, with Mary Clare for a mother. Her entire story could have been concocted to keep Briddey from suspecting her.

  Because she knows I’d tell her to stop, that it’s too risky. And impossible, no matter how much of a whiz she was. To do any good, she’d have to block both Trent and Lyzandra for long enough to convince Dr. Verrick and Trent that the telepathy had permanently vanished, which might take days or even weeks, and she could only keep it going for as long as she could stay awake.

  And even if she could somehow manage that, it wouldn’t convince Dr. Verrick. He had other patients who were telepathic, and Maeve couldn’t block them. She didn’t know they existed. And even if she’d been listening when Briddey and C.B. had discussed them, she hadn’t heard their voices, so she’d have no way of finding them in amongst the thousands of clamoring voices. And she was already having trouble just blocking Trent and Lyzandra for more than a couple of minutes at a time.

  Or not. When Briddey came out of the disruption, Dr. Verrick told her it had lasted nearly six minutes, and that the frequency of the breaks was steadily increasing. “I want to run an fCAT on all of you to see exactly what’s happening.”

  Briddey automatically looked at C.B., expecting him to tell Dr. Verrick that wasn’t a good idea, but he said, “Okay. Maybe it’ll tell us something.”

  Now see what you’ve done, Maeve, Briddey thought, and tried to think of some way to signal C.B. that he shouldn’t agree to it, but Dr. Verrick was already saying, “Mr. Schwartz, I’ll take you and Lyzandra first. This way,” and leading them down the hall.

  Please, please go into your safe room, C.B., Briddey thought.

  Okay, I’m in it, he said.

  You can’t do this.

  I’ve got to. I need to find out what’s going on.

  You don’t understand, Briddey said. I think— And the voices vanished again.

  Maeve, she thought furiously, if you did this…But Maeve couldn’t hear her. Nobody could. She was locked in a dome of silence.

  She did this to keep me from telling C.B., Briddey thought, and hopefully that meant she would see to it that nothing would show up on his scan. But what if the signs of her interference could somehow be seen? Briddey had to talk to her. But she couldn’t, not trapped in here.

  You can call her on the phone, she thought. If she could get out of here and away from Trent without him getting suspicious.

  He had picked up his phone the moment the others left the room. Briddey waited till he started texting someone and then said, “Tell Dr. Verrick I need to use the ladies’ room.”

  Trent nodded vaguely, and she slipped out of the testing room, along the inner hall, through Dr. Verrick’s office, and out into the hallway. She darted along the hall to a stairwell like the one she’d fled to that first night here in the hospital, and ducked into it. She took out her phone, listened a moment to make sure she was still blanked out, and called Maeve.

  Mary Clare answered. “I’m sorry, Briddey,” she said
briskly, “but you can’t talk to Maeve. She’s lost her telephone privileges. She’s grounded.”

  “Grounded?”

  “Yes. I caught her watching Brains, Brains, Brains! She knows she’s not allowed to watch zombie movies, and she expressly disobeyed me. Did you know she was watching them?”

  “No,” Briddey lied. “How did you catch her?”

  “I went in to ask her to take some soup over to Aunt Oona. I’m worried her rheumatism’s acting up again. She didn’t want to talk when I called her this morning, and now she isn’t answering her phone, so I thought somebody’d better check on her, but Kathleen’s not answering her phone either. So anyway, when I went into Maeve’s room to ask her to run over, there she was, watching this awful zombie movie on her laptop. She tried to blank the screen, but she wasn’t quick enough. Thank goodness she’d only watched the first few minutes. If she’d watched the whole movie, she’d have nightmares for weeks. Why did you need to talk to her?”

  “It wasn’t important,” Briddey said, thinking, It’s not her. Because if Maeve had been blocking the voices and just pretending to be blocked herself, she’d never have let her mother catch her watching Brains, Brains, Brains.

  Which meant it was some sort of blown fuse or tripped breaker, like C.B. had said.

  But he’d also agreed with Dr. Verrick that the disruptions would grow shorter as the drug wore off, and that wasn’t happening. Briddey was still blanked out when she got back to the testing room, and Trent, who was now on the phone with Ethel Godwin, stopped talking long enough to tell her he’d blanked out again, too. And when Dr. Verrick returned with C.B. and Lyzandra, she learned that disruptions, first in C.B. and then Lyzandra, had kept him from getting conclusive results.

  Worse, C.B.’s blackout had lasted twelve minutes, and Lyzandra had been blanked out for nearly eighteen and still showed no signs of coming out of it. “They’re not diminishing,” Dr. Verrick said. “They’re lengthening! What’s your explanation for that, Mr. Schwartz?”

  “I don’t have one,” C.B. said, “except”—he grabbed a sheet of paper and began drawing a diagram. “Look, it happened to Lyzandra and then to Ms. Flannigan and then Lyzandra again—”

  “We’ve been through all that,” Dr. Verrick said.

  “And then Mr. Worth and me,” C.B. went on, adding connecting lines to the diagram, “and Ms. Flannigan again and then Lyzandra.”

  “Yes, yes, we know,” Dr. Verrick said impatiently.

  “Right, but look at this pattern.” C.B. showed them the diagram. “It starts with Lyzandra and keeps bouncing back to her. That could mean it wasn’t just a cascade, that it’s a feedback loop—”

  A feedback loop? Briddey thought.

  “—which would mean that each time it travels from one person to another, it intensifies the effect.”

  “The effect of what? The overload?”

  “Or Lyzandra’s reaction to it,” C.B. said. “What if the incoming flow of telepathic signals didn’t trip a breaker but triggered a signal inhibitor of some kind? Because everyone is linked, that action would be communicated to all the others, triggering their signal inhibitors, too.”

  “But if it were a signal inhibitor, it would inhibit the voices completely. It wouldn’t cause intermittent disruptions.”

  “It would if it takes more than one inhibitor to cancel out the signals,” C.B. said, “or if the inhibitor mechanism was too weak to sustain that cancellation. With a feedback loop”—he drew a continuous loop on the diagram, circling to each of their names in turn and back again to Lyzandra—“not only does Lyzandra’s information cascade to the three of us, but our reactions to it do, too. So with each circuit, the cascade’s amplified, and the number of inhibitors increases, or the inhibitor response is strengthened, or both.”

  And the disruptions would grow longer and more frequent. Which was exactly what was happening.

  “But it wouldn’t affect anyone else?” Dr. Verrick asked.

  He’s worrying about his other patients, Briddey thought.

  “They’d have to have been telepathically linked to you for it to affect them, wouldn’t they?” Dr. Verrick persisted.

  “Or listening in,” C.B. said. That was why Maeve had been affected. She’d been listening in, so she’d become part of the feedback loop.

  Maeve experienced a blackout, too? C.B. said, and when Briddey automatically shushed him, he told her, It’s okay. Lyzandra and Trent are both blanked out right now. How long was this disruption, and how long ago did Maeve have it?

  Briddey told him and informed him of Mary Clare’s catching Maeve watching Brains, Brains, Brains.

  Then she must be telling the truth, he said, and she realized he’d suspected Maeve of being behind the blocking, too.

  Yeah, it did cross my mind, he said, though I didn’t really think she was capable of it, her moats and brambles and firewalls notwithstanding.

  But you’re capable of it, Briddey said.

  Not this, I’m not. I don’t know anybody who is.

  What about Lyzandra? We don’t know anything about her. Maybe she’s more telepathic than you thought, and she doesn’t want any competition, so she’s shutting us down—

  No, I can read her mind, remember? She’s completely bewildered by all this, and terrified at the prospect of losing her “psychic spirit gift,” as she calls it. And if she had even rudimentary skill at blocking the voices, she’d never have let herself be hit that hard by them. Trust me, it’s not her.

  So it wasn’t Lyzandra, and it obviously wasn’t Trent. He didn’t even have the ability to hear C.B. and Lyzandra, let alone block them. And besides, this was the last thing he wanted to see happen. Which only left C.B.’s feedback-loop theory.

  But C.B. and I don’t have— she thought, and hastily shoved the rest of the thought away till C.B. blanked out again.

  As soon as he did, she checked on Lyzandra’s and Trent’s status—she was blanked out, and Trent was worrying about how he was going to break the bad news to Hamilton—and then went into her safe room and barred the door. Only then did she allow herself to finish the thought and consider its implications.

  C.B. had said the cascade had triggered the inhibitors, but she and C.B. didn’t have inhibitors. They lacked the genes. Plus, he had asked her all those questions in the testing room about what Dr. Verrick had said regarding the neural pathway being a feedback loop. Those questions and now this explanation couldn’t be a coincidence, and there was only one reason for him to have lied about their inhibitors being the cause of the disruptions: He was causing them.

  And the reason the disruptions were intermittent was because that was all he could manage for now. He was too exhausted to do all three of them continuously, so he’d come up with this intensifying-feedback-loop story, and tomorrow, after he’d had some sleep, he’d block everyone. Except Dr. Verrick’s other patients. He hadn’t heard their voices either.

  And just shutting down Trent and Lyzandra wouldn’t solve anything. And if he could block people, why hadn’t he blocked Trent yesterday morning before Trent ever heard her? Then they wouldn’t be in this mess.

  And if he was doing it, why had he looked the way he did the first time he’d been blanked out? He couldn’t have faked that expression, she thought, remembering how bewildered—and frightened—he had looked. I don’t care how expert a liar he is.

  But if he wasn’t doing it, why had he lied about the inhibitors? And why did the timing of their disruptions correspond so perfectly with the scans? When Dr. Verrick took her and Trent for their fCATs, she blanked out before they even got her into the room, and Dr. Verrick wasn’t able to get anything.

  C.B. has to be doing it, she thought. Maybe he has some plan for getting Dr. Verrick to bring the other telepaths here to the hospital so he can hear their voices, and hoped he had enough energy to carry it off. When he came back from a second unsuccessful fCAT, he looked utterly worn out, and she half expected the disruptions to grow shorter in duration
because he lacked the energy to sustain them.

  But they didn’t. As the day progressed, they became longer and closer together, and by late afternoon they’d begun happening to all four of them at once.

  “This is terrible,” Trent said. “Can’t Schwartz do something to stop this? Start a second feedback loop to inhibit the inhibitors or something?”

  Briddey stared at him in disbelief. “You honestly want the voices back?”

  “No, of course not, but what about the project? What am I going to tell Hamilton?” He waved his phone at her. “He just texted me asking how today went.”

  Briddey looked at C.B., who was going over his scan with Dr. Verrick, looking strained and exhausted. “Tell him it didn’t go very well,” she said.

  “Wonderful,” Trent said sarcastically. “We have barely two months till Apple rolls out their new phone, I’ve already told Hamilton we were on the verge of a breakthrough that would blow them out of the water, and now I have nothing to show for it. Everything—my future, my career, my job—is riding on this, and you think I should tell Hamilton it didn’t go very well? How do you suppose he’ll respond?”

  “Better than he would if you’d gone ahead with your phone and then this had happened,” Briddey said. “Just think of the ads Apple and Samsung would air: ‘At least our smartphones won’t drive you mad. Or kill you.’ ”

  “Oh, my God, you’re right! I hadn’t thought of that.” He looked down at his phone again. “But that still doesn’t help me with Hamilton. I’ve got to tell him something.”

  “Tell him the truth, that the telepathy turned out to be too dangerous to use, that there were unintended consequences that made putting it in a phone non-viable.”

  “I can’t tell him that! I assured him it was viable—and perfectly safe. And ‘unintended consequences’ makes it sound like I didn’t think it through.”

  Which you didn’t, Briddey thought. “Then tell him there have been complicating factors.”