Crosstalk

by Connie Willis

  “Let me know if you find it!” Suki called after her. “Do you think I should try to get him to ask me out, or should I just ask him?”

  And as if that wasn’t bad enough, when Briddey reached her office, Charla told her, “Trent Worth just called. He wants to see you right away. It must be about your EED.”

  “M-my EED?” Briddey stammered.

  “Yes. He sounded really excited. I’ll bet he was able to get the date of your surgeries moved up.”

  Or he’s located a telepath who hasn’t been affected by the cascade, Briddey thought, and hurried up to his office. But when she got there, the first thing he asked, after sending Ethel Godwin to make copies of a report, was, “So, did Schwartz know of any other telepaths?”

  “No,” Briddey said.

  “And I’m assuming you didn’t hear anything last night after we talked, or you’d have called me?”

  “No, it’s completely gone. Did you?”

  “No. And neither did Lyzandra or Dr. Verrick’s other patients. I just talked to him. He said none of them have heard a thing since yesterday. So it looks like Schwartz’s theory was right, and the trauma of the voices caused a reaction that shut down the telepathy permanently.”

  So why aren’t you upset? Briddey wondered. Yesterday he’d been practically suicidal over the prospect of having to tell Hamilton the telepathy was gone. But now, not only wasn’t he upset, but he was excited, just like Charla’d said. Why? Had Dr. Verrick somehow gotten enough telepathy data from the scans they’d done to make the electronic circuitry after all?

  “I’m going to need your help,” Trent was saying. “I need you to get the word out that we had the EED done.”

  The word out? “But you said you wanted it kept secret—”

  “That was before it shut down. Now we need to tell people.”

  “Why?”

  “Tell them we had it done last week,” he said, ignoring her question, “but we didn’t want to tell anyone till after we’d connected. And hint that the connection is even better than you’d imagined.”

  “But I don’t understand. Why would you want anyone to know—?”

  “It’s all part of the plan I’ve come up with. We say we secretly had the EED, and we hint that the reason we had it done has something to do with the Hermes Project and we can’t say what, but it’ll revolutionize the communications industry. And then we hint that the something we found is telepathy.”

  Oh, God, they had been able to get enough data. I have to warn C.B., she thought.

  “We drop all these hints about how we can communicate telepathically and how we’ve found a way to duplicate that communication in a phone.”

  “But none of that’s true,” she said. I hope.

  “No, but they won’t know that. Or that we’ve gone to Management and told them the whole thing’s a ruse.”

  “A ruse?” Briddey said, completely lost.

  “Yes, we tell Management it was all a trick, that we came up with it because we were convinced Apple had planted a spy here at Commspan to find out what our new phone has, and that the entire thing—having the EEDs, the telepathy, the scans—was a diversion we came up with to catch the spy. And to keep Apple from finding out what we were really working on,” he finished triumphantly. “Clever, huh?”

  Yes, Briddey thought. The story would no doubt save his job. And if there was a spy, and the spy reported the telepathy back to Apple and they fell for it, Commspan would have proof of their corporate spying, and Trent would be a company hero and probably end up getting that executive suite he wanted.

  If his plan worked. But for the EEDs and the telepathy to have been a diversion, there had to be some other project it was diverting attention from. Which they didn’t have. She pointed that out.

  “Yes, we do,” Trent said. He showed her a schematic. “Behold, Commspan’s new phone, the Refuge. Designed to protect you from the daily bombardment of unwelcome phone calls and messages. It screens out people you don’t want to talk to by putting them on a permanent ‘call on hold’ list. Or, if you just don’t want to talk to them right then, by sending a ‘call cannot be completed at this time’ message. And if you’ve already connected with the person and you want out of the call, you hit a key, and it’ll automatically cause the sound of your voice to break up.”

  Those are C.B.’s ideas, Briddey thought. That’s his Sanctuary phone.

  “I got the idea when that swarm of voices hit me,” Trent was saying. “We need to be protected from unwanted intrusions. We need a refuge from all the people and information bombarding us. What do you think?”

  I think you stole it from C.B. and you don’t even intend to give him credit, you snake. “But if you just thought of it, how will it be ready in time to beat Apple’s rollout?” she asked.

  “We don’t have to have it ready. Don’t you see? We want Apple’s phone to come out first. That way they announce that their phone offers enhanced communication, and we say, ‘But don’t worry. We’re going to protect you from it.’ ”

  And who’s here to protect us from you? she thought bitterly. It was bad enough that she’d destroyed C.B.’s telepathic ability. Now Trent intended to steal his phone design and, worse, possibly put Apple on the trail of the telepathy. And even though the deluge had destroyed it, they might be able to find someone somewhere who hadn’t been affected—or there might be enough data on the scans Dr. Verrick had done to re-create it electronically. And Apple had unlimited resources…

  I have to warn C.B., she thought. Now.

  But Trent had no intention of letting her go till he’d told her all the details. “My phone can also fake an incoming call, so you can say, ‘I’ve got to take this.’ I call the function ‘TrapDoor.’ What do you think?”

  I think it’s C.B.’s SOS app, and you stole that, too. “It’s an intriguing idea. Look, Trent, I need to go—”

  “No, you can’t go yet,” he said. “I haven’t told you the rest.” He caught up her hands. “To make all this work, we’re going to need to tell Management our seeing each other was part of the plan. That because the EED only works with emotionally bonded couples, you volunteered to date me to lend credibility to the ruse.”

  “Credibility?” she asked absently, trying to think of an excuse that could get her out of here so she could go tell C.B. what Trent was up to. A TrapDoor app would be nice. Or an actual trapdoor to drop Trent down.

  “Of course we know the emotional-bonding thing has nothing to do with it, or you’d never have connected with Schwartz,” Trent said, “but they don’t know that. And if people think we were involved, they may not believe the EED was just a cover story.”

  He’s dumping me, she realized belatedly, and supposed she should try to act a little upset. “Does this mean we have to stop seeing each other?” she asked.

  “I’m afraid so, honey. They’ve got to believe it was nothing but a setup, or they might start checking hospital records and asking Dr. Verrick questions, and our whole plan could fall apart. So you can see why it’s vital that everyone believe—”

  “That it was all for the sake of the project, and you weren’t really in love with me. Yes, I see that very clearly.”

  “Oh, good,” Trent said. “It kills me that we have to do this, sweetheart, but there’s too much at stake here for us to be worried about our personal feelings.”

  You’re right, there is, Briddey thought. Which is why I’ve got to get out of here and go find C.B.

  “Of course, for the next couple of days it’ll still have to look like we’re a couple,” Trent said. “You need to start dropping a few subtle hints about the EED, maybe some comment about ‘when I was in the hospital,’ or something, and tomorrow morning I’ll send you flowers and call your office. Will Charla be there?”

  “Yes,” Briddey said, thinking, If the telepathy still existed, I could tell Maeve to call me right now and give me an excuse to leave.

  “I’ll text you asking you if you’ve felt any connecti
on yet, and—”

  Her phone rang. Thank goodness, Briddey thought, pulling it out of her pocket.

  “—you can make sure your assistant sees it, and—”

  “Sorry, I need to take this. It’s Art Sampson,” Briddey said at random, and put the phone up to her ear.

  Trent nodded. “Drop some hints to him, too,” he said. “The sooner the news gets around Commspan, the better.”

  “I will,” Briddey said, walking rapidly out of his office and down the hall, ending the call as she walked. She hurried to the elevator and was halfway down to the sub-basement before it occurred to her that C.B. might not be there. He could be anywhere—in the copy room photocopying his résumé or off flirting with Suki.

  But thankfully he was in the lab, squatting next to the portable heater, which was apparently still broken, if the temperature in the lab was any indication, though C.B. wasn’t wearing a parka, just a flannel shirt over his Doctor Who T-shirt. He had the back of the heater off again and was doing something to the wiring. “What are you doing here?” he asked, looking up briefly.

  “I have to talk to you.”

  “Can you hand me those pliers?” He pointed over at the littered lab table.

  “Yes. No. This is important.”

  “So’s this,” he said. “We could both freeze to death if I don’t get this fixed.”

  He was right. It was even colder down here than usual. “Which ones?” she asked, looking through the mess of tools, circuit boards, meters, and wires on the lab table.

  “The needle-nose pliers on the end there.”

  She handed them to him, and he gave something inside the heater a twist and then stood up, wiping his hands on the tail of his shirt. “So what’s so urgent? What’s this all about?”

  Before, when you could read my mind, you wouldn’t have had to ask, she thought. “Trent’s planning to co-opt your Deadzone and SOS ideas and tell Management they’re his.”

  “Well, technically they are his ideas,” C.B. said calmly. He knelt and began fitting the plate back onto the heater. “Or at least Commspan’s. Everybody who works for the company has to sign an intellectual-property assignment agreement for ideas they come up with while they’re working here.”

  “But you should at least get credit for them! And that’s not the worst of it. He’s going to tell everyone at Commspan we had the EED and about the telepathy and the scans.”

  “I know,” C.B. said without looking up. “It was my idea.”

  “Your idea? But…I don’t understand. If there is a corporate spy—”

  “There is,” he said, fitting the back on the heater.

  “There is? Who?”

  He didn’t answer. He was busy trying to make the back panel fit.

  “The spy will tell Apple,” Briddey said, “and if Apple starts researching it and word gets out that they’re working on something to do with telepathy, then it won’t matter that it doesn’t exist. Everyone will—”

  “No, they won’t,” C.B. said, finally succeeding in getting the panel on. “Because we’re only going to give Apple a week or so to take the bait, and then we’re going to put the story out on Twitter that it was all a Commspan ruse, and that Apple fell for it and actually believed that telepathy—and who knows what other nonsense? ghosts? channeling? alien abduction?—was real.”

  Which will humiliate Apple and cause them—and every smartphone company—to avoid telepathy research like the plague, Briddey thought, just like the scientists did after the Bridey Murphy and Dr. Rhine debacles, and send telepathy back to the status of pseudoscience for another fifty years.

  “We tell them,” C.B. was saying, “that it was all—”

  “A diversion to keep Apple from finding out what they were really working on,” Briddey said. “I know. And what they’re working on is your Sanctuary phone.”

  “Yep,” he said, threading screws into the back of the heater. “I figured after his attack of the creepy-crawlies at the hospital, Trent would think shutting out anything, even unwanted calls, was a good idea, and he did.”

  “But to give him your ideas—”

  “I had to give him something he could put up against Apple’s new phone. Apple’s rollout is less than two months away, and all he’s got is some ridiculous story about hearing voices, only he can’t hear them anymore. Which meant he was going to lose his job, and if he did, his only hope for vindication would be proving telepathy was real. Which meant he’d keep digging, and I didn’t want him to find out about Maeve. Can you hand me that screwdriver?” he asked, pointing.

  She gave it to him. “Thanks,” he said. “Giving him the Sanctuary stuff means he keeps his job and is too busy for the next few months to worry about anything but the phone, and after that he’ll be too busy giving interviews to Wired and The Wall Street Journal about ‘How Commspan Changed the Communications Conversation from More, More, More to Protecting the Consumer’ and fielding offers to work for Samsung and Motorola. He won’t have a moment to think about telepathy. Believe me, giving him the Sanctuary was a small price to pay for getting the spotlight off us.”

  “But if that’s what you’re trying to accomplish, then leaking the EED story’s the last thing you should do. So why did—?”

  “I had to. Trent had already told Hamilton, and I wasn’t sure Hamilton would be willing to give up on the telepathy otherwise. He thought he had a game changer in his grasp. The only thing that would convince him to settle for the Sanctuary phone instead was the threat of looking like an idiot.”

  He was right. If Trent told them he’d experienced telepathy firsthand and then it had disappeared, Hamilton would refuse to accept it. He’d insist on pursuing the research. But if he was told it had never existed, that it was part of a trick to fool the competition, he wouldn’t dare admit he’d been gullible enough to fall for it, too.

  “But what if Apple has something really big that the Sanctuary phone isn’t revolutionary enough to counter?”

  “They don’t.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I can—that is, I could—read minds. And all the new iPhone’s got is a set of defenses to protect the Cloud from hackers. Ironic, huh? Plus it’s got a longer-lasting battery, and a slightly bigger screen.”

  “But then Apple will need to find something to counter the Sanctuary phone. And to get back at Commspan for making them look like idiots. What if they start digging and find out Trent and I really did have the EED? Lyzandra’s threatening to sue Dr. Verrick. If she—”

  “She won’t,” C.B. said confidently. “A lawsuit would mean publicly admitting she’d lost her ‘psychic spirit gift.’ She can’t afford to let her clients know that. They’d desert her in droves.”

  “But won’t they desert her anyway when they realize she can’t read their minds?”

  “They won’t find out. She did almost all her stuff by cold reading anyway—and telling people what they wanted to hear. And as for Dr. Verrick, I was just about to take care of that problem,” he said, flipping a switch on the front of the heater.

  His repairs must not have worked. No operating hum came on, and the coils didn’t turn orange, but C.B. didn’t seem to notice. He was too busy pulling a smartphone from his back pocket and typing in a number. He put it to his ear. “Hello, this is C.B. Schwartz calling Dr. Verrick. You can reach me at this number.” He rattled it off, hung up, and began typing a message, his head bent over the screen.

  Briddey frowned at him. “Are you sending a text?”

  “Nope, a tweet,” he said, continuing to type. “And I’ll bet you were going to ask, since when am I on Twitter?”

  “No, I was going to ask, since when do you carry a smartphone?”

  “I don’t. I borrowed this from Suki. Stole it, actually.”

  Or Suki left it down here on purpose so she’d have an excuse to talk to him again, Briddey thought. And she knew when she called that there wouldn’t be an answer because it didn’t work down here, so she’d have to co
me down here to get it. But then, how—?

  “How are you going to send a tweet?” Briddey asked. “There’s no coverage down here.”

  C.B. hit SEND and then looked up at her. “Oh, yeah, about that,” he said. “That lack of coverage isn’t entirely a natural phenomenon.”

  She looked over at the heater. “You’ve been interfering with the reception,” she said. No wonder it had never given out any heat.

  “Yeah, I have been,” C.B. admitted, “and I just switched it off, so if you were counting on not being able to get calls down here, you might want to turn your phone off,” and Suki’s phone rang. “Sorry, I need to take this,” he said.

  Briddey nodded, turning off her phone before it rang, too.

  “Dr. Verrick,” C.B. said. “What?…Slow down, I can’t…Slow down…Sorry, I didn’t get that last part. Can you say that again?” He took the phone from his ear, hit the speakerphone icon, and set the phone on the lab table.

  “I said,” Dr. Verrick’s agitated voice said, “it’s gotten out!”

  Gotten out?

  Briddey glanced up at C.B. in alarm, but he was looking calmly down at the phone. “How do you know?” he asked.

  “I just got a tweet. It says, ‘Breaking: EEDs make patients able to read minds,’ and there’s a link to my website.”

  Oh, no, Briddey thought. Is this Trent’s idea of “a few subtle hints”?

  “Do you know the damage this could do to my practice?” Dr. Verrick shouted. “Mind reading? I have clients who are members of the royal family. If word of this gets out—”

  “Do you know who sent the tweet?” C.B. asked.

  “It says it’s from Gossip Gal, but I know it’s from Lyzandra. This is her way of getting revenge for losing her psychic powers.”

  “What’s the hashtag?” C.B. asked.

  “EED equals ESP question mark.”

  “When did you—?”

  “Wait, I’m putting you on hold,” Dr. Verrick said. There was a brief silence, and he came back on, even more agitated. “I just got two more tweets. Same sender, same hashtag. The first one says, ‘Rumor going around a certain celeb EED doc is doing ESP experiments on his patients à la Duke University,’ and it has a link to Dr. Rhine’s Wikipedia page.” Dr. Verrick sounded completely beside himself. “And the second one says, ‘Could Briddey Flannigan be the new Bridey Murphy?’ ”