Crosstalk

by Connie Willis

  He grimaced. “Everyone knows ‘complicating factors’ is code for ‘unmitigated disaster.’ ”

  Then that sounds perfect for this situation, she thought.

  “Can’t you think of something less negative-sounding?” Trent said.

  “How about ‘interesting developments which need to be looked into further’?”

  “Oh, that’s good. Interesting developments. Tell Dr. Verrick I had to make some calls. I’ll be back in a minute.” He went out.

  C.B. was still talking to Dr. Verrick. He looked like he was on his last legs, his face drawn, his whole body slumping with fatigue.

  There was a knock on the door, and a nurse leaned in. “I’m sorry to interrupt, Doctor,” she said, “but one of your patients is on the phone. He says it’s urgent.”

  Dr. Verrick nodded. “This will just take a moment,” he said, went out, and shut the door behind him, presumably so he could speak to her in private.

  Which either means he thinks we’re all blanked out, or he still doesn’t fully grasp the concept of telepathy, Briddey thought. She might not be able to hear the person on the other end of the conversation, but she could hear Dr. Verrick’s voice. And his nurse’s.

  She went into her courtyard and located Dr. Verrick’s frequency on the radio, and then tapped the volume knob. “It’s Michael Jacobsen,” she heard his nurse say. “He says he’s lost all mental contact with his fiancée. Her voice suddenly went dead half an hour ago, and he hasn’t heard anything from her since.”

  “To be Irish is to know that in the end the world will break your heart.”

  —DANIEL PATRICK MOYNIHAN

  Dr. Verrick immediately phoned his two other telepathic patients, the Dowds, and asked them if they’d noticed any difference in their ability to communicate. They hadn’t, but half an hour later the nurse interrupted again to report that someone named Paul Northrup had just experienced a “momentary disruption.”

  At that point Trent and Lyzandra were both blanked out and had been for the last half hour, and Briddey’d just come out of a twenty-four-minute silence she’d begun to think was never going to end. Did you hear that, C.B.? she asked.

  Yeah, he said grimly. And in case you’re still thinking I’m the one behind this, I didn’t even know this Paul Northrup existed.

  Then how—?

  I don’t know. Maybe they were listening when the deluge happened, too, or…

  Or it was a cascade effect, and the disruptions were looping from telepath to telepath, triggering shutdown after shutdown. And circling back with ever-increasing strength.

  By the time they left the hospital, Briddey’s blanked-out periods far outnumbered the ones during which she could hear, and she didn’t have to worry about the fCAT scans Dr. Verrick ordered, or lie to get terrible scores on the Zener tests he made them take.

  Just like that guy in the Duke experiments, C.B. said after the second test. Remember the subject I told you about, the one Dr. Rhine was convinced was telepathic? And how he got such high scores and then, all of a sudden, they fell off sharply?

  You told me you thought he’d stopped cooperating, Briddey said.

  Yeah, but what if I was wrong? What if the same thing that’s happening to us happened to him? What if Rhine gave him a relaxant to “enhance receptivity,” and it caused a deluge that shut down the telepathy?

  Is there any way to find out? she asked, but if he answered her, she couldn’t hear him. Everything had cut out again.

  And it apparently had for C.B., too, because he said to Dr. Verrick, “Look, I just lost it again, and both of us are shot. Maybe if we go home and get some rest, we’ll be able to communicate again.”

  “No,” Trent said. “By tomorrow this could be gone, and we need to get as much data as we can before that happens.”

  “Forget data,” Lyzandra said. “You need to figure out a way to stop this,” so Dr. Verrick ordered an imCAT for each of them.

  But Trent was still blanked out, Briddey and C.B. both experienced disruptions less than a minute into the scan, and Lyzandra blanked out before the tech even got her onto the table, so Dr. Verrick ended up sending them home after all.

  “Come in at nine tomorrow,” he said, “and in the meantime I want you to keep track of the times and duration of the periods during which you can send and receive. And phone me if those periods increase.”

  “What about me?” Lyzandra said. “Am I supposed to go home, too? You brought me here, you destroyed my psychic spirit gift, and now you expect me to just go back to Sedona? What if it doesn’t come back? What am I supposed to do? I’ll be ruined!”

  Dr. Verrick turned to deal with her, and Trent said, already putting his phone to his ear, “I’ve got to get back to Commspan. Hamilton wants to see me,” and left.

  Good, Briddey thought. This’ll give me a chance to talk to C.B. alone. But when the two of them had successfully escaped Dr. Verrick’s office, C.B. said, “I really need to get back to the lab and see if I can figure out what’s going on. Would you mind—?”

  “Getting home on my own?” she said. “Of course not. Do you think it is a feedback loop, like you told Dr. Verrick?”

  “Maybe. I guess. I don’t know.”

  “But you said neural pathways didn’t work like that.”

  “Ordinarily, they don’t, but…”

  “But even with a deluge and a cascade or a feedback loop or whatever it is, how could it trigger inhibitors we don’t have?”

  “I don’t know,” he said testily. “Maybe I was wrong, and we do have them, and they just hadn’t been activated before. Or maybe the cascade’s transmitting not only the order to trigger the inhibitors but the instructions for constructing them.” He rubbed his hand tiredly across his forehead. “Or maybe it’s something else entirely,” and left her standing there in the hospital lobby.

  She called Kathleen for a ride—it no longer seemed to matter whether her family found out about the EED or not—but Kathleen didn’t answer. She debated calling Aunt Oona, but if she was laid up with rheumatism, Briddey shouldn’t bother her, and she was in no shape to deal with Mary Clare, especially after a look at her messages, which demanded to know whether Briddey had let Maeve watch Brains, Brains, Brains on her phone when they’d gone to the park.

  She called a taxi and tried not to think about the last time she’d left the hospital, with C.B. waiting for her, smiling and saying, “My lady, your chariot awaits.”

  She was half afraid Mary Clare might be waiting at her apartment when she got home, but she wasn’t, and there were no new messages from her. Or from Maeve. Not even mental ones. The disruptions are getting longer for her, too, Briddey thought, staring blindly at the phone.

  She checked the rest of her messages, almost hoping there was one from Kathleen so she could call her back and hear a friendly voice, but all Briddey had was a text from Trent, telling her not to say anything about what had happened to anyone at work, and when she decided to try Kathleen anyway, she still didn’t answer.

  Briddey supposed she should try and get some rest, but she doubted if she could—she felt too wrung out. And too empty. She hadn’t eaten anything all day.

  Maybe that’s part of the problem, she thought. C.B. said heightened emotional states could affect the telepathy. Maybe hunger can, too, and went into the kitchen to see what was in the refrigerator.

  Nothing edible, and the cupboard wasn’t much better. All that was left after Maeve’s raid for the ducks was a can of beets and a nearly empty box of organic MultiGrain Squares.

  At least it isn’t Lucky Charms, Briddey thought, pouring a bowlful and taking it to the couch to eat, but the squares were just as tasteless as the marshmallows had been, and their shapes just as indeterminate. She thought of C.B. sitting across the table from her in the Carnegie Room, trying to guess what the marshmallows were: green hats, yellow dog bones, albino octopi.

  Are you there? she called to him, but either he was experiencing a disruption or he was too
absorbed in trying to find out what was causing them to hear her.

  Or he doesn’t want to talk to me, she thought, no longer hungry, because I’m the one responsible for this. Lyzandra and her inhibitors may have triggered the cascade, but I opened the floodgates. I let the voices in.

  She took the uneaten cereal back to the kitchen, dumped it down the sink, and went back into the living room.

  You need to go to bed, she told herself, but she went on sitting there, hoping that C.B.—or Maeve—would break in to tell her that the blanked-out intervals were lessening. But the only voice she heard was Trent’s. What in the hell am I going to tell Hamilton? she heard him say, an edge of desperation in his voice. Maybe I won’t have to tell him anything. Maybe this is just temporary, and I can stall him until—

  His voice cut out, but Briddey didn’t notice. When everyone had been trying to talk her out of having the EED, Kathleen had sent her something about its effects being temporary. Could that be it? Could her EED have worn off, and since they were all linked together, it had affected the others? If that were the case, it might be possible to redo the EED…

  “I thought of that,” C.B. said when she saw him the next morning at the hospital, “but that would have taken months, not days. And you would have had the first disruption, not Lyzandra.” He dragged his fingers wearily through his hair.

  He looked even more exhausted than he had the night before. “Did you get any sleep at all?” Briddey asked.

  “Not much,” he admitted, “but enough to know I’m not blocking the voices subconsciously, which I was secretly hoping might be the case. How about you? Did you get any sleep?”

  “Some.”

  “Are you still blanked out?”

  “No, but the disruptions are getting steadily longer.” She showed him the time chart she’d made. “They’re sixty percent longer now than the intervals when I can hear.”

  “Yeah, mine, too.”

  “C.B., I am so sorry. When I opened that door, I didn’t realize—”

  “I know. Don’t blame yourself. That may not even be what did it. We won’t know for sure what the underlying cause is till Dr. Verrick runs more tests. He wants to try to do another pair of imCAT scans while both subjects are still able to send and receive, though I don’t know if he can find a window.”

  He couldn’t. Trent and Lyzandra were blanked out almost continuously now, and although Dr. Verrick waited till Briddey had just come out of a disruption to start their scan, she blanked out again almost immediately, and C.B. followed three minutes later. Dr. Verrick told them he’d wait to do further tests “until the situation improves,” and told them they could go.

  C.B. stayed behind to go over the scan results with Dr. Verrick. “I’ll call you as soon as I find out what they showed,” he told Briddey, “but it’s looking more and more like the deluge is the culprit. I did some research on the saints and found a couple who heard voices several times and then had some kind of overpowering religious experience, after which they ‘fell down as one dead’—and after that didn’t hear the voices anymore. Which sounds a lot like a deluge followed by shutting down.”

  “What about Joan of Arc?” Briddey asked. “Did that happen to her?”

  “I don’t know. Look, I’ll talk to you later,” he said, and went back into the testing room.

  As soon as Briddey got out to her car, she looked up Joan of Arc on her phone and found to her relief that Joan had continued to hear her voices till the very end. But she was the exception. C.B. had played down the number of saints who’d abruptly lost their voices after a “vision” and never gotten them back. There were at least a dozen of them. Saint Brigid had “heard nothing more from that time hence,” and neither had Saint Bega of Turann, though she’d “begged most fervently for its return with penance, prayers, and much weeping,” convinced she had lost the ability to hear the voice because of a sin she’d committed.

  Like me, Briddey thought.

  She drove back to Commspan, shut herself in her office, and tried to work on the still-unfinished interdepartmental communications report and not think about the fact that Maeve still hadn’t contacted her.

  Maybe she’s continuously blanked out, like Trent and Lyzandra, Briddey thought. But Maeve could still call her on the phone. Mary Clare’s taking away her phone privileges wouldn’t stop her, and at school she could easily borrow Danika’s.

  Briddey called Mary Clare. “Oh, good, I was just going to call you,” Mary Clare said. “Have you heard from Kathleen today?”

  “No.”

  “I haven’t either, and I’ve been trying to reach her since Sunday night. She doesn’t answer.”

  Because she knows you want to interrogate her about letting Maeve watch zombie movies, Briddey thought. “She probably forgot to turn her phone on,” she said. “How’s Maeve?”

  “Sulking because I called Danika’s mother and told her Maeve was not to use Danika’s phone or computer,” Mary Clare said.

  Which explains why she hasn’t called. Maybe.

  “Have you heard from Aunt Oona?” Mary Clare was saying. “I can’t get her to answer either.”

  “Are you still worried about her rheumatism?”

  “No, she said on Facebook she had some Daughters of Ireland thing, but that doesn’t explain why she won’t answer her phone.”

  Maybe she doesn’t want to talk to you either.

  “You don’t think Kathleen would do something stupid like elope with that Starbucks guy, do you?” Mary Clare asked.

  “Where did you get that idea?”

  “Late Sunday night she posted something about finding happiness where you’d least expect it, and you know how she’s always falling in love with someone she just met, even though I’ve told her it’s ridiculous, that she couldn’t possibly get to know someone well enough in only a few days to be in love with him. Right?”

  “I have to go,” Briddey said. “I’ve got a call on the other line.”

  She hung up and checked to see if C.B. had called while she was talking to Mary Clare. But he hadn’t, and even though Dr. Verrick said C.B. had left the hospital at one, she didn’t hear from him all afternoon.

  By four thirty she couldn’t stand it any longer. She gathered up her things, told Charla she had a headache and was going home, and started down to C.B.’s lab.

  But he was standing in the corridor talking to Suki, who hurried toward Briddey as soon as she saw her. “What’s gotten into C.B.?” Suki whispered, looking back at him. “He looks almost presentable.”

  He did. He was wearing a buttoned-down collared shirt and no earbuds. He’d also shaved, and he looked more rested and less despairing than he had that morning. He found out what’s causing the disruptions, Briddey thought, hope springing up.

  “He was positively friendly,” Suki was saying. “Did he have a brain transplant or something?” She looked speculatively at him. “He’s actually kind of cute, in a geeky sort of way, don’t you think? Or he would be if he’d comb his hair. Not as cute as Trent, of course. Speaking of which, what’s up with him? I saw him earlier and he looked awful! Has something gone wrong with the Hermes Project?”

  Careful, Briddey thought. Remember this is Gossip Central you’re talking to. “No, everything’s going great. Trent says they’re making real progress. He’s probably just stressed because there’s so much to do. Speaking of which, I need to catch C.B. I have to talk to him about an app,” she said, and hurried after him.

  “C.B.!” she called, C.B.! But he didn’t even slacken his pace.

  She caught up to him outside the copy room and pulled him inside. She shut the door. “Did you find out what’s causing this?” she asked.

  “Yes and no,” he said.

  Which means no, she thought, and looking at him, she realized she’d been wrong about his looking better. What she’d mistaken for rested was merely resignation.

  “I found a study on tinnitus patients who’d spontaneously recovered,” he told her. �
�And the pattern’s the same—emotional shock followed by the tinnitus disappearing for progressively longer periods, and, after a certain period, total silence.”

  “And the ringing sound never comes back?”

  “No. Also, Verrick called a few minutes ago to say the Dowds have both been blanked out since last night. And when I graphed the durations of everybody’s disruptions, they were consistent with the multiplying intensity of a feedback loop, so it’s definitely the cascade that caused it.”

  “And it somehow transmitted the directions for constructing inhibitors?”

  “Yeah, or else our brains came up with a work-around on their own.”

  “A work-around?”

  He nodded. “Damaged brains come up with work-arounds all the time—new pathways and connections to replace the ones that were destroyed. Maybe to survive, our brains rigged up something to double for the missing inhibitors.”

  “You said the tinnitus stopped ‘after a certain period.’ How long?”

  “A few days.”

  A few days. “C.B., I am so sorry I—”

  “Sorry? Are you kidding? You did me a favor. With the voices gone, I’ll be able to go to baseball games and movies and restaurants. And interdepartmental meetings,” he said, and smiled at her.

  “I didn’t mean I was sorry the voices are gone. I meant I was sorry I made you lose your telepathic ability.”

  “The important thing is that you kept Verrick and your boyfriend from getting their filthy paws on it—and on Maeve. And being telepathy-less isn’t all bad. It’s let me out of that dungeon.” He spread his arms to indicate the copy room. “I can eat in the cafeteria and everything. I may even get a haircut now that I can go out in public like a normal person.”

  No, don’t, she thought. I like your hair.

  But he couldn’t hear her. “And I’ll finally be able to buy some decent clothes,” he said. “I’ll need them if I’m going to go on job interviews.”

  Her heart caught painfully. “You’re leaving Commspan?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know yet. But I’ve been thinking it’d be nice to work someplace where I could concentrate on limiting communication, not trying to drown people in it—sorry, unfortunate metaphor. I’ve also been thinking it’d be nice to work someplace warm. Right?”