They had spent five years hiding from themselves. Coming out of shock was always more difficult than going in, and it had taken time to relearn how to be functioning human beings again. Over time, the Agents had trained themselves to reduce connectivity, to block themselves off and selectively interact with each other. Their barriers became polished, refined; they each had a single body again, and reaching out let them speak with a person, rather than the lump sum of the link.
And, once order had been established, they realized they missed the chaos. They were part of a whole now, a collective made from many; to pretend otherwise was to deny the loss they felt when the implant was turned off. Here, in their home, the walls could come down a little. Nobody wanted to throw themselves back into that soul-shattering rush of singularity, but they could relax, just a bit, and immerse themselves in the comfort of being one, within many, within one.
Today, after the slow waiting terror of the basement, Rachel took down her walls and let herself join with the link.
When they were home, many of the Agents chose to keep themselves open. Rachel felt a hundred minds take her into them, and she allowed them to enter her in turn. There was a mingled sense of will, of emotion… They were happy to see her safe and sound, and home. She lost track of time as she and the others shared themselves within the collective.
It didn’t last long. She didn’t have the endurance to lose herself for hours on end, the way some of the others could. When physical sensations began to intrude (butt aching from cold marble floor, filth from ash caking skin, decorative rails on mahogany door jabbing into spine...), Rachel began to rebuild her walls. She began to feel the physicality of the others; she felt herself typing, talking on the phone, making a sandwich—
Oooh!
Rachel shook herself and pulled her mind back from the two Agents in the supply closet. She wished that some of the others would remember to close themselves down in the heat of the moment. The sensation of unexpected coupling—often outright in flagrante delicto—was something she had grown used to, but she didn’t enjoy it.
She stood and headed towards the back stairs. Someone had been cleaning. The last time she had come home, the stairs had been a deathtrap of cardboard boxes and furniture. Now, nearly half of the boxes were gone; Rachel reached out and asked why she was able to walk downstairs without the danger of breaking an ankle, and was told the Federal Bureau of Prisons had finally gotten around to cleaning out their stuff.
Anyone without an implant would have sworn the mansion was haunted by the ghosts of seedy flea markets. OACET was part of the federal government, true, but if there really was a family tree, the cyborgs would be dangling all the way at the end of the branch with the redheaded stepchildren and the uncle who was never allowed near the good silver. As such, OACET had been assigned temporary headquarters in a mansion seized by the DEA at the height of the cocaine boom. The mansion had turned out to be unsellable, as the interior decorating choices of a drug kingpin were somewhat... unpalatable. As the drug raid had occurred in the 1980s and flipping properties upwards of twenty thousand square feet was not yet in fashion, the government had the options of spending millions of taxpayer dollars on renovations, or using the mansion as an overflow property warehouse for federal law enforcement. They chose the route that would look better during reelection, and crammed the mansion to its rafters with the assorted crap of broken lives and illicit trade.
The nice thing about working in a rundown mansion was that it was still a mansion. The size of the place was astonishing; they needed five industrial air conditioners just to make it livable during the summer. There was a solarium, a sauna, a full chef’s kitchen, all looking like cover shots from outdated Sunset books but still more than adequate for the Agents’ needs. They had repurposed what they could into offices, and stuffed the rest with junk: until she had been granted a desk at First District Station, she had done her typing in the trophy room, surrounded by animal heads with suspicious glassy eyes.
The not-so-nice thing about working in this particular mansion was the décor. Some rooms, like the kitchen, had simply been worn down by time and hard use. Others… well.
The massive wine cellar had become their medical lab. Like most wine cellars, the room was tucked away in the basement. This wine cellar was different, however, in that someone had decided to model the room and the adjacent hallway after the Catacombs of Paris. Plastic bones lined the walls from floor to ceiling, skulls dotting the bones throughout, and all of which were meticulously hand-painted to show the bones in various stages of ripeness or decay.
Calling the whole mess “creepy as fuck” did not do it justice.
The mansion had tennis courts and a pool, and there was a decent-sized bathroom across from the plastic ossuary that the athletes had set aside as a locker room. Like many of the other Agents, Rachel kept an extra change of clothes in a nearby closet, just in case. She found her emergency suit and peeled off the sticky note she had painstakingly written out and stuck to the hanger (If you need to use this, please dry-clean before returning or I will shoot you. Love, R.P.), and walked her nice clean suit to the bathroom at arm’s length.
She knew she was prudish by cyborg standards. Most of the others would have no problems asking for help getting out of their clothes, but she forced her skinned and burning hands to struggle with the fasteners on her ballistic vest. Same with the shampoo and soap in the shower; the hot water across the raw cuts was agony. But when it was over, she felt more relaxed than if she had shared the shower with someone else: privacy was sometimes as important for the body as it was for the soul.
When the last of the ashes and coffee grounds were sluicing down the mansion’s drains and she was done struggling into her emergency suit, Rachel returned to the ossuary. She walked through the stacks of boxes that the Agents had piled against the walls to keep the bones at bay, then rapped on the glass door of the medical lab. “Jenny?”
The other Agent was in her office; Rachel had felt her in the link. But their mental walls were easier to maintain when everyone upheld the same myths.
“Hey, Rachel! C’mon in.”
She gave the door a little shove and it glided open.
The medical lab was stunningly well-equipped. When the Agents designated the oversized wine cellar as their on-site hospital, they moved every piece of medical equipment they could find down to the catacombs. The era of institutionalized Medicare fraud had netted them some high-end items, and these were illuminated by the light from the glass-fronted refrigerators which stored the U.S. government’s eclectic collection of top-shelf alcohol. The Agents kept the fridges padlocked shut, save for the one closest to the front entrance where Jenny Davies and the other physicians stored refrigerated medications on one bottom shelf, the crate of community vodka on the other.
A gaunt man with unkempt hair was sitting on the floor, assembling a jigsaw puzzle at a lightning-fast pace. He had been tucked into a corner and didn’t look up when Rachel arrived; Shawn rarely noticed anyone unless they forced him to communicate with them. The glow from the nearest fridge put his face in shadow; he was smiling widely, with plenty of teeth, and looked as though he belonged among the skulls.
Rachel walked over and squatted down beside Shawn. His hands darted from the upturned pile of pieces to the slowly-growing rectangle in front of him, fitting piece after piece in their proper places.
“Hey, Shawn,” she said. “How are you?”
There was no response. Shawn was immersed in his puzzle; Rachel flipped her implant to reading mode and saw he was assembling it upside down, with the unprinted cardboard backing facing up.
“Shawn?” she said through the link.
He stopped and looked up.
“Rachel!” Shawn smiled at her. “Hello!”
None of the OACET Agents had had an easy time of their transition. Rachel’s had been so bad she had literally blinded herself, but Shawn’s experience made hers seem as though she had spent those five years rai
sing a slightly naughty puppy. Shawn had gone insane, and not in a happy-go-lucky-slightly-unhinged way. No, Shawn had gone insane in the way of clinical multi-tiered DSM-IV-TR diagnoses, where the all-purpose “insane” was replaced with specifics like “psychosis” and “severe disassociation disorder”. After his implant was fully activated, Shawn had tried to kill himself, and when he had failed and been put on constant suicide watch, he had spent the next six months naked and screaming.
These days, Shawn was a different person, one who wore clothes and attempted conversation. He liked to hang out in the medical lab; he said all of the machines loved him and wanted him to get better, and the other Agents had decided not to argue since he was guaranteed continuous medical supervision. Under Jenny’s care, he had begun to fill out; she had convinced him to ease off of the implant and not go out-of-body to the point of exhaustion, and his skeletal frame was finally keeping some calories to itself.
Rachel had never gotten a clear peek at Shawn’s core. The Agent’s conversational colors were deranged, a churning rainbow which ripped itself apart and rebuilt itself too quickly for her to detect patterns. Sparks of bright light swam around and through these colors, as well as passing through Shawn’s body. Today, he was happy blues and purples, with a thick streak of out-of-place red lust.
Shawn was a headache. Rachel usually shut down the emotional spectrum when she was with Shawn to preserve her own sanity, and she did this now when she caught sight of his arousal. Not her business, not her concern.
“What’s the picture on the puzzle, Shawn?” They spoke aloud to Shawn whenever they could, trying to make him talk outside of the link. He seemed more likely to retreat within himself when he forgot there were other ways to communicate.
He gave her a guileless stare. “I don’t know. It’s not done yet. Want to help?” His hands began to move back and forth between the puzzle and the stack of loose pieces again. Each new piece was fitted into position, or tossed into a separate pile; as Rachel watched, he went to the smaller pile, pulled out a certain piece, and plunked it down beside another he had just put in its proper place.
“Maybe later? Jenny said she wanted to show me something.”
“Yes!” he said aloud, leaping to his feet. He took her hand before she could pull away, and she was bludgeoned with his joy, his longing…
He dropped her hand. “You’re scared of me?”
“A little bit, Shawn,” she replied. She never lied to other Agents. Almost never. “But not as much as I used to be. You’re making a lot of progress.”
Until recently, skin-to-skin contact with Shawn had been slightly less pleasant than drinking rubbing alcohol, but Rachel knew he wasn’t the only one with baggage. She cleared her mind and held out her hand to him. He shied away, then reached out with his own, and grinned as she held an image of him wrapped in his purple joy.
“I’m… happy?”
She nodded. “You’re very happy.”
“Nice!” he shouted. He sounded like a teenager at the mall, and Rachel laughed.
They walked, hand in hand, to the open office door. Jenny Davies had been watching them.
“Rachel is here!”
“Thank you, Shawn,” Jenny said. “Could you get ready? I want you to show her your special trick.”
“Yes!” Shawn said again. He dropped Rachel’s hand and scurried away.
Jenny leaned back against the skulls. “What scans are you running now?” she asked Rachel.
Rachel had no clue where this conversation was going. “Full range, mostly,” she said. “I don’t have emotions up, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“It is. Can you run them? I want you to monitor Shawn,” Jenny said, then nodded to the gaunt man. “Go ahead, show her.”
Shawn gave a tiny snort and hoisted himself up on the nearest examination table. He lay down, closed his eyes, and folded his arms across his chest as if responsible for preparing his own funeral. His colors flashed in purples and blues, sparks like liquid silver on the edge of a pinwheel within them.
Rachel waited, a finger tapping against her own forearm. “Guys...” she finally said.
“It’s already happening. Give him a chance,” Jenny whispered.
Rachel squashed a sigh and watched the little lights dart through Shawn’s conversational colors, silver minnows within a rainbow lake. It was oddly soothing; when Shawn was calm, the little lights slowed and flowed close to his center.
She lost track of time. Shawn’s little lights had started swimming in patterns, miniature glowing arcs which swept across the center of his body and then across his limbs. Then, gradually, the cacophony of his conversational colors began to thin and part, revealing Shawn’s weak tea core.
Rachel realized he was asleep. Or, maybe not quite asleep... “Shawn?” Rachel asked aloud.
“Don’t ping him,” Jenny said. “It’ll break him out of it. But go ahead and check his vitals.”
Rachel took a couple of hesitant steps towards Shawn, then paused, her own hand hovering over Shawn’s. She steeled herself, then slid two fingers beneath his collar and pressed them against his neck.
Nothing. No emotions, no pulse.
“Shawn!” Rachel shouted. She pulled back to slap him and Jenny grabbed her wrist; the physician was laughing silently, her good humor crossing over to Rachel.
“What’s happening to him?”
“It’s a deep meditative state,” Jenny replied. “He’s still breathing, he’s still got a pulse. They’re just suppressed. Here.”
Jenny guided Rachel’s hand back to Shawn’s neck, where the two of them felt his shallow breathing and, every few slow seconds, a single heavy heartbeat.
“What the hell, Jenny?”
“You’re still running emotions, right? What does he look like to you?”
Rachel removed her hand and stepped away from the exam table. “Like...” she started to say, then dropped down on her knees as though she needed a vantage point to peer inside his body. Shawn’s conversational colors were almost non-existent; he was almost nothing but his weak tea core wrapped in slow translucent blues. He reminded her of those too-quiet rooms at the hospital, the silent minds within…
“...like he’s in a coma,” she finished.
Jenny shook her head. “It’s not a coma. It’s slow-wave non-REM sleep, or something very like it. He’s let me measure his brain activity when he’s like this. The EEG shows high delta wave activity, with little awareness of environmental stimuli. Those are hallmarks of this state of sleep.
“But,” she added, “There’s a huge difference between what Shawn’s doing and normal deep sleep cycles.”
Rachel felt Jenny reach out through the link to lightly ping him.
His eyes fluttered, then opened. Shawn sat up, a huge grin stretching across his face.
“Did it work?” he asked Jenny.
“Yes,” the physician nodded. “Thank you, Shawn.”
He dropped his legs over the side and began to swing them back and forth like a happy child. The table rocked furiously; Shawn used to be a large man.
“Shawn, honey, you’re going to flip the table,” Rachel said.
He stopped kicking and looked up at her with liquid brown eyes. “Would you like to have sex?”
She blinked at Jenny, whose surface colors were fluttering in amusement.
“No thank you, Shawn.”
“Are you sure? Jenny says I’m very good,” he said, smiling sweetly as he swung off of the table and dropped lightly to the ground. Rachel caught a brief glimpse of the man he had once been, and mourned anew.
Jenny flushed. “Shawn?” she said. “I don’t mind if you say that to the others, but I’d be very embarrassed if you bragged about you and me to anyone outside of OACET.”
“Oh. Yes. Right.” The little colored lights started churning around him again, and he backed away from the women and retreated to a corner of the lab. He sat on the floor and wrapped his arms around the base of the largest surgic
al microscope, then started humming in a tuneless monotone.
“Come on,” Jenny said to Rachel. “He’ll stay like that for hours. Let me look at your hands.”
They left Shawn to croon to the machine, and walked into an offshoot of the catacombs adjacent to the lab. They had set this area up as a secret ICU, just in case. They had enough equipment for five patients, which was a concern: if they needed to hospitalize more than five, they’d have to go through normal medical channels, and nobody wanted that.
“You and Shawn?” Rachel whispered. “Jenny, please.”
Jenny raised an eyebrow. “He’s mentally ill, not dead, and I’m neither his primary physician nor his therapist. Besides, he really is a good lover.” She dragged a folding chair over to a stainless steel table, and gestured for Rachel to sit. “And he’s getting better. He was scared at first, but he’s started to get his confidence back. Over the last few days, he’s been propositioning every woman who comes in here.”
“I hope he didn’t take my rejection too hard,” Rachel said. “I don’t want to be another setback.”
“Nope.” Jenny grinned over her shoulder as she rummaged through a cabinet full of small white plastic cases. “He’s used to it; he gets shot down a lot. This is the first time he’s used me as a reference, though, so he must like you.”
“I told him he was happy.”
“That would do it,” Jenny said, nodding. “He’s relearning emotions. It’s a huge effort for him, to know the names of things but not how they relate to how he feels.”
“Want me to work with him?”
“No. Well, maybe if you’d check in on him every so often and give him feedback, like you just did. Everybody wants to help him,” Jenny sighed. She pulled one of the cases down from the cabinet and came over to the table. “But I can’t tell if four hundred people in his head is beneficial or not.”
“Is that why you asked me to come home?” Rachel said, glancing through the wall at Shawn. He hadn’t moved, still clinging to the microscope.
“No, I wanted your opinion of his mental status when he was under. Was he conscious?”
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