Nikki stared at the bottle. “What is it?"
"They just came up with this at Dad's lab.” Gorby's father was a chemical engineer at Quantum Biodynamics. “It's a kick. You take one, and you believe in God and leprechauns for a couple hours, just like old people and rejects.” He picked up the bottle and began twisting off the cap. “Who's first?"
No one said anything.
"Come on,” said Gorby. “It's perfectly safe. Look.” He pointed to a symbol on the label. “The seal of quality.” Still no one replied. Gorby slapped the bottle down and looked sullen.
"Here,” said Xander, putting out a hand. “I'll try anything once."
Gorby shook his head, frowning. “It's only for normals. It makes rejects sick. No telling what it'd do to a tweak."
After a space of a breath, Nikki lost interest and turned back to Quinn. “What do you do for fun?"
He shrugged slightly. “Same as anyone, I suppose. I paint, compose music, do research in quantum physics, translate ancient Sumerian tablets. That sort of thing."
Nikki laughed. She touched his knee, smiling. “Can I get you anything? A beer?"
"What did you do, anyway?” asked Gorby, his lip curling. “Kill somebody?"
I felt Skylar tense up beside me.
Quinn bared his teeth in a ferocious smile. “Oh, something much worse than that."
Everyone leaned in when he said this. He held them in suspense for a moment and then said in a low, ominous tone, “I tampered with my mobile."
Eyes were wide. That was definitely more serious than murder.
Nikki tilted her head, stared up into his eyes. “Why?"
Quinn's dark eyes gleamed back at her. “To protect the honor of a lady."
"What are you talking about?” asked Gorby, with a mixture of scorn and curiosity.
"In high school,” said Quinn. “I was a pretty good hacker. One night I got smashed at a party like this and didn't put my mobile on stand-by when I should have. If that footage had been accessed, it would have been very embarrassing for someone I cared about. So I hacked my mobile and deleted it."
"How?” asked Gorby.
Quinn fixed him with an unnerving stare. “I'll show you exactly how to do it if you'd like."
Gorby shook his head.
After another brief pause, Nikki asked, “How did you get caught?"
"Don't know. I thought I'd gotten away with it, but when I got back home, they were waiting for me, a black van with flashing red lights sitting in our driveway."
"Then what?” asked Gorby.
Quinn rubbed a thumb along his jaw line. “It's kind of a blur. I remember being strapped down and shoved into the back of that van. Next thing I know, I'm in a little blue cell with this.” He tapped the stripes above his eye. “Day after that, they took a bunch of us out to some exercise yard where this fish-eyed little instructor screamed at us, made us run laps and sprints and do pushups until we were all about to pass out. We were so terrified we kept doing whatever he told us to do, until this one red-haired kid just sat down and refused to budge. The instructor stopped yelling then and started smiling like it was all a joke. He said we misunderstood; we could do whatever we wanted to do. He had the guards open the front gate, and said, ‘If any of you want to leave, leave.’ That red-haired kid thought about it for a couple seconds, then bolted for the gate. He'd taken about two steps when he fell over like he'd been shot. He was on the ground flipping around like a fish, making noises that weren't human, vomiting over and over until he was dry. Then finally the instructor walked over to him and leaned down in his face and said, ‘You don't want to leave.’ They didn't bother to shut the gates after that."
"They say it feels like an aneurism,” Gorby said in a matter-of-fact tone, “only worse."
Quinn seemed distracted. “I suppose so."
Nikki touched his shoulder. “Have you ever...?"
"They put you in a cell,” Quinn replied, “with food and water on one side, you on the other, and a red line in between marked, ‘do not cross.’ Then they leave you there. If that doesn't work, they do something even worse. Sooner or later, you cross the line."
A ragged breath beside me brought my attention back to Skylar. I could have kicked myself right then. She was so upset she was shaking. I needed to divert the subject quickly, without being obvious. Gorby's pills were still sitting on the coffee table.
"You know,” I said, grabbing the bottle, “I think I'll take one of these.” That did it.
I made a show of popping one of the gelatin capsules into my mouth and swallowing it with a swig of soda. Then I raised my hands and shouted, “Hallelujah!” and declared myself the new pope, spending the next five minutes laying hands on people and blessing them. The act was quite a hit.
I was a little worried that Nikki was going to be offended, but she only laughed. Even Gorby seemed to think it was hilarious, and I guess I should have wondered about that. But all I cared about was how Skylar was doing, and she looked relieved. After I wound the skit down, I leaned over her shoulder and asked quietly if she wanted to take off. She nodded.
In the car, Quinn drove and I sat in the back with Skylar, who leaned forward and held her face in her hands once we were out of sight of Nikki's.
"You okay?” I asked.
"Fine.” She looked up at her brother. “I want to go home, Quinn. Let me off first."
After we parked the Lexus at the Dennison's, I watched Skylar disappear into the house.
"She'll be okay,” said Quinn. We walked to his Civic parked on the street. “My fault. Stupid of me to give my ‘scared straight’ speech with her there."
As we were pulling away, Skylar called, voice only.
"Sorry I'm such a baby, Parker,” she said. Her voice was a little raspy.
"No, I'm sorry. Those people are all jerks. We'll go someplace better next weekend, okay?” I waited.
"Okay. Good night."
"Night.” I tapped the mobile to end the call then turned to Quinn. “Thanks for the lift."
He nodded. “You saved my life, I'm giving you a ride home. We'll call it even.” He never took his eyes off the road as he spoke. “You feel okay?"
"Sure. Why wouldn't I?"
"You took a pill."
"The ‘Faith Formula?'” I laughed. “That's just a load of crap, right?” Now that I thought about it, though, I was feeling a little queasy. Outside, the lights of passing cars seemed to leave a smeary afterimage in my vision. “Okay, it's doing something."
A few minutes later, I thought I was going to be sick, and Quinn pulled over. I opened the door and leaned my head out, but nothing came up and after a while I felt better.
"It's messing with your neurotransmitters,” Quinn remarked. “You'll be okay in a bit."
"I'm okay now.” I settled back in my seat.
When we turned onto my street, I saw a pulsing pink glow in the distance.
"You see that?” I asked Quinn. “That light?"
He nodded. “Uh huh."
"What is it?"
Quinn didn't reply. His brow furrowed a little as he peered at the glow ahead of us. As we got closer, I could see that it was my house that was glowing, illuminated by a red strobe light on the top of a black van sitting in our driveway. Two men in black uniforms walked over to meet me as I got out.
"Parker Evans?” said one of the men.
"What is this?” I asked. The lights seemed too bright, the images distorted.
"We've had a report of controlled substance use. Please give me your hand, Mr. Evans."
I held out my right hand, and the officer slipped a spongy tube over my index finger. A little display on the tube read, “positive."
I really did throw up then. After that, the rear doors of the van opened and a third man wearing hospital scrubs and pushing a collapsible gurney emerged. I was ordered to lie on the gurney, and after a moment of stunned immobility, I did. Rough hands tightened straps over my arms and legs and torso.
Time seemed to be all messed up; people were moving too fast and then too slow, and I kept saying to myself, “Somebody set me up.” Gorby set me up to get even for the debate. Or Nikki, to keep Dad from winning the primary on Tuesday. Or both of them together. What about Quinn? I could see him leaning against his car, watching my arrest impassively. Was Skylar in on it too?
"Could I please speak to my father?” I asked, trying to keep my voice level.
"Keep quiet, Mr. Evans."
"But I only want to speak..."
The officer pulled something from his belt and touched it to my temple. There was a lightning flash of pain, then blackness.
Now, I'm pretty sure the next part didn't really happen. I'm pretty sure it was just the drug, but I saw a huge light in the sky, almost too bright to look at, and a double-spiraled golden staircase, enormous, millions of miles high, leading up to the light. There were people, billions of them, talking and laughing together as they slowly ascended the stairs.
Then the laughter turned to screaming as the staircase broke apart, huge sections of it collapsing away. The people were thrown off, and they fell, still screaming, into the deepest darkness.
I woke up in a little blue cell.
There was a toilet and a sink without a mirror against one wall, a desk on the other, with the hard bed I was lying on between them. In front of me was a steel door, painted blue like the rest of the room, with a mesh-reinforced window. Running along the floor in front of the door was a red stripe that was marked “do not cross."
I sat up very slowly, afraid to move. I felt my scalp, but it hadn't been shaved. I didn't feel anything over my eye, but I didn't think you could feel stripes anyway. There was a faint antiseptic smell in the air. I sat there on the bed, not moving, for what seemed like an eternity, waiting for some sort of instructions. Nothing came.
Eventually I put my feet on the floor, on the side of the bed toward the desk. There was stuff on the desk. My stuff. My papers were there, my handwritten notes, and my standalone computer with all of my archives, everything I needed for my number theory research. There was a note on the desk, a large red placard with the words, “Finish this.” It took me a few minutes to believe what I was seeing, and I wondered if this was just the first stage of some twisted torment. But I didn't have a lot of choice. If they wanted me to do math, I'd do math.
I sat down at the desk, took a fresh sheet of paper and wrote out the general equation of the conjecture I was supposed to be proving. I stared at it. Images kept popping into my head. My father. He wouldn't win the primary now. My mom. I'll never be the scientist she wanted me to be. Xander. Who's going to watch out for him? And Skylar. She was too good to be true anyway. Everything's gone. It's all gone.
I gritted my teeth and cleared my head of everything besides the math, working on paper at first, but soon in that mode where I could see everything written out in my mind at once, page after envisioned page of equations constantly revising themselves with each new insight.
I made more progress in the first day than I had in the last two years. I was afraid to stop. Food arrived on a cafeteria tray through a narrow pass-through hatch. I never saw who was putting it in; my side would only open when the far side was closed. There was generic toothpaste and deodorant on a shelf above the sink, a drawer under the bed with a week's worth of loose-fitting orange pants and shirts like the one I woke up in, and a hamper.
That first night, I intended to work straight through until morning, but the lights shut off at ten o'clock and didn't come on again until six. The next day passed in almost exactly the same way. On the third day, I was done.
I made some typesetting corrections in the final paper and saved it on the standalone. Then I looked around, waited.
"I'm done,” I shouted. “It's done."
I stared at my terminal, wondering what I should do.
"They didn't say I couldn't,” I said softly as I accessed the last coded message that my mother had left me. The machine quickly verified my solution and the message was unlocked.
"Hi, Parker,” said my mom. She was sitting at her desk in the little workshop she had kept in our basement. “How old are you now? Have you met a nice girl?"
I nodded.
"I hope so. For your prize this time, I'm going to tell you a dark and terrible secret. Or a funny story. Depends on how you look at it. Come here.” She leaned forward toward the screen, and I involuntarily did the same.
"When your father and I were on our first date, we were talking about biomedicine, and he mentioned that he had never taken the standard filter. He's always hated pills, and he just dropped his in the trash every year when they handed them out on campus. It was funny, because I had never taken it either. When we got married, I formulated a custom filter—I had access to just about anything through my lab—and we both took it. I didn't tell your father about the change I'd made.” Her face twitched with amusement at the recollection. “The point is, Parker, you don't have Correction 13. You have everything else, but I just had a bad feeling, you know, one of my little flashes of intuition, about that one.” She laughed. “I've probably told you all this years ago, so I also taped a five-dollar bill with your initials on it under the drawer of your nightstand. If it's still there, why don't you bring it to me and see if I remember what it is? See you later, kid.” Her image faded.
If I weren't such a basket case already, this probably would have made me one. A thought pounded through my head. I'm a reject. I look like a normal, but inside where it counts, I'm a reject.
But then a bit of color and light seemed to trickle back into my gray world as I allowed myself a small sliver of hope. Something occurred to me, something about the Samaritan implants. They could only be used on normals. Old people and rejects who committed crimes still went to prison; their brain chemistry was too varied for the Samaritan method to be safe.
I stood up and walked to the door. Twisting the cold steel knob, I found that it wasn't locked. The door swung open easily.
For a moment, I stared at the red line and the words “Do not cross.” What if they hadn't checked? I've always listed myself as a normal on all my school records. If they had taken my word for it and put in an implant, I'd probably drop dead when it activated. I took a deep breath and stepped over the line.
Nothing happened. I let the door swing shut behind me.
The hallway outside was long and sterile; humming florescent lights illuminated many yards of hard institutional floor tile. Passing one locked, unmarked door after another, I made my way to a bend in the corridor and stopped. I took a step back.
Here the hallway opened up into a lobby full of young men in their late teens or early twenties, at least a hundred of them, moving meekly and noiselessly through three sets of double doors into some kind of lecture hall. Those whose faces I could see all had iridescent stripes over their left eyes. After a moment's hesitation, I walked over to join them.
A kid with flattened blond spikes turned to stare at me, his eyes as lifeless as a ghost's. No one said anything as I followed the crowd through the doors and slipped into a seat. Inside, the hall was more than half filled with young convicts; I did a quick estimate of about four hundred.
A bell rang as the last of the convicts settled into his seat. There had been no conversation, no noise of any kind except faint shuffling sounds of movement, and even that stopped as a middle-aged man stepped up to the lectern. He began to give a speech, an orientation lecture. I listened.
A few thousand years ago, we were told, every single person in the world was normal. They all had a gene that kept them focused on the no-nonsense business of self-preservation.
"Grab stuff,” the gene told them. “Grab everything you can, right now. You're the most important thing in the world."
This was actually the best way to be back then. It allowed humanity to survive at time when life was, in the words of Hobbes, “nasty, brutish and short."
Then came something new. People were born who co
uld imagine things beyond what they could see or touch, people willing to sacrifice for a higher purpose. With these new people came civilization, science, art, and hope. The selfish, cynical gene had served its purpose and was withering away. It was dying, the man at the lectern explained, because it was supposed to die. But Correction 13 had restored the gene to full vigor.
At this point, the speaker began to give an overview of the connections between the development of religious thought and science, like ancient Hindu abstract mathematics, the Daoist influence on medicine, Augustine's contemplation of space-time theory. I wasn't sure how much of this I was buying, so I got up and headed for the door. I saw the eyes of the lecturer flick toward me as I left, but he gave no sign of surprise.
I began to wander through the prison or school or whatever it was, carefully constructing a visualized map as I went. Farther on, the place seemed less like an institution and more like a grand old manor, with comfortable furnished rooms.
Up one floor and around a corner, I came to a high-ceilinged room that I took to be a museum of sculpture, with an impressive display of works in wood and metal and stone. There was an embattled bronze centaur that I particularly liked. In an adjoining studio, the oldest convict I had ever seen, thirty maybe and dressed in a spattered smock, was molding plaster. He looked up at me and smiled, his convict stripes glistening under thin streaks of white paste.
Farther on, there were more galleries, more studios with artists chiseling and molding, painting, dancing and composing, taking photos; one was even blowing glass. There was old art too, statues and portraits and elegant machines, historical furniture and artifacts. I was reminded of the time my dad took me to see the Smithsonian, before it closed due to lack of interest.
Beyond the galleries were chemistry and biology labs, doors marked “biohazard” or “radiation,” then a physics section, lots of offices with whiteboards covered with arcane equations, stuff I recognized as quantum gravity and m-brane theory. The wall of one conference room was covered with a detailed star chart of near-Earth solar systems.
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