“If it makes you feel better,” Jenny replied, “you lost your eyesight before your implant was fully activated. It’s what I was telling you about when the physical changes from biofeedback started. They occurred after full activation, not before—the implant had nothing to do with your going blind.”
Rachel laughed so hard she nearly started crying. “How is that better?” she asked Jenny. “How could that possibly be better if it means I went blind because of me?”
“Because the implant can’t be removed,” Jenny said, brushing Rachel’s short hair back from her forehead. “Not without killing us, which means if it causes us any problems, we’re stuck with those forever.”
“But if the problem is… if it’s me…” Rachel started, but couldn’t find a way to end that thought. There was relief within it, but also the closing of a door she had wanted to keep open.
Jenny shut it for her, gently. “If it’s you, the problem can be diagnosed and managed. It’ll take time, and you’ll have to live with the knowledge that you screwed up your own eyesight, but this is something that is within your control.”
“Jenny, this is so far from something I can control—”
“It feels hopeless,” Jenny whispered. “I know.”
If they hadn’t been linked, it would have been a throwaway comment—I know—two words used so often, so carelessly, they could stand as a period at the end of a sentence. But in a link, they were as true a thought as Rachel had ever heard.
And then Jenny let down her walls.
They were no longer neophytes at this: Jenny didn’t allow Rachel to plunge into her own mind, nor did Rachel step into Jenny unaware. The two of them shared a long measured moment on the periphery of her being, and then they both entered the eternal sense of self that was the core of Jenny Davies.
Fear, hidden deep below Jenny’s professional whites, flooded her. She—Jenny and Rachel, one person, at least for the time being—was lost within potential. Not just people, not even the newness of energy and semi-sentience coming from machines. No, the first she could manage through her education and training, while the second would require time and experimentation. But the balance of the unknowable, that soft space that took her mind from her, like looking up at the stars, like floating weightless in an infinite ocean… That was beyond her ability to understand. It tipped in on itself and blew her away… It would be better had she been nothing, meaningless, but no, she existed. Those things that were, they weighed her worth, and found her valid.
Valid, but small. Small in the way of atoms, molecules…
Did cells deserve names?
(God help her—God, please let her escape from all of it—there’s too much of it—please)
She was standing in the medical lab. The collective was upstairs and all around her, and here, in this room, she was safe. Here, that humming that was infinity was almost silenced, and these new senses which let her feel the constant churn of things living and dying were sated by the data. Here was where she let the raw materials of her research run through her mind. Data was clean. Data could be unlocked. She could find the patterns within it, she could put those patterns to use, and then, finally, she might learn what she was—what they were—becoming.
“I barely sleep any more,” Jenny said. Rachel heard her from a distance, still lost in Jenny’s memories of the struggle to understand that which was completely familiar and unimaginably alien, all at once. “Every day, I learn more about what we might be able to do and it terrifies me, because I don’t know if we have enough capacity to go along with this much ability. I can barely talk to anyone outside of the collective, because when I’m not at the mansion, I can’t stop thinking about the size of it all…
“But I do know this,” Jenny said, her mental voice absolute. “I do know that my obsessions aren’t caused by the implant. They’re how my mind has decided to cope with what they did to us. Trauma—years of trauma—doesn’t go away overnight. And I think a good way to go crazy is to start blaming the implant for the aftereffects of abuse. It’s stuck in our heads, and it’s not coming out. We have to learn how to live with it, not use it as an excuse for problems that we’d still need to deal with if we didn’t have it.”
They pulled apart, body and mind, and Rachel scrubbed her fingertips against the carpeted floor of Jenny’s SUV to ground herself. She felt the gritty residue from feet and food buried within the rough weave, the hidden pebbles of grit which climbed up under her nails...
“I’m so sorry,” Jenny said in a hoarse voice, as she wiped away her tears with the collar of her blouse. Guilt was starting to run through her surface colors, like drops of blood in water. “My therapist told me I needed to drop most of my projects. Yours—your vision—it was one of them. I had to triage… So I dropped those that weren’t related to everybody’s health, and…”
“I know,” Rachel said. The concrete under the car was ancient and worn, lacquered over by layer after layer of thin rubber. “I know.”
Jenny’s hard sadness clung to Rachel; she kicked herself for not realizing why Jenny was always at the mansion when she dropped by. Jenny was always available—Jenny was always there. And Rachel was so self-centered she has assumed that was how things should be. It was her turn to reach out, to take Jenny into a hug, and entwine the fingers of her good hand through both of hers.
“Who’s your therapist?” she asked Jenny.
“Margaret.”
“How’d she finally get you to stop pushing yourself to exhaustion?”
Jenny sighed. “It was easy. She came down to the lab and said she wanted to monitor my work day. After sixteen hours, I started nagging her to go home and go to bed. I finally caught on when she started suffering from sleep deprivation.”
They sat, holding each other and their shared emotions. Their walls were back up, but there was no need to talk, so their link was mostly images, with scraps of thought blowing around and occasionally brushing against their shared consciousness.
“You want to know what gives me hope?” Jenny finally asked.
“Sure.”
“The collective. You, me… Everybody. Us. We can all share each other, and be part of each other, and we know beyond any doubt whatsoever that everyone else in the collective is completely screwed up. And I still can’t tell when I’m doing something self-destructive. Not until it’s too late.
“That,” Jenny sighed, “is such a perfectly normal human failing, I know I’ll be okay.”
Rachel roared with laughter.
Later, she stepped down from Jenny’s SUV and rejoined Santino in his tiny hybrid. She was feeling better than she had in a long, long time.
As soon as she closed the door behind her, Santino broke her good mood apart. “Good news,” he said. “They found the gun that killed McElroy and Reeves. Fished it out of a storm drain a block away from Gayle Street.”
“The hell?” Rachel was dumbfounded. Anyone with common sense and a television knew better than to toss their gun down a storm drain.
“I know, right?”
“Model?”
“M1911,” he muttered. “So... yeah.” Santino started the car and began to pull into traffic. He jammed on the brakes as he finally noticed her face, his conversational colors going wine red in sympathy as he read what had happened in the SUV.
“Do you want to talk about it?” he asked.
“No,” she said, and then remembered that she was with Santino. “Yes.”
She started at the point in the story where Knudson swung at her, and then gave an abbreviated version of what Jenny had said to her about their implants. Not about Jenny’s own situation, of course; that story wasn’t hers to tell. But Rachel did mention, in an almost off-hand way, that she had been worried about Santino finding her cold body in the garden one morning, her gun or a bottle of pills beside her and no note anywhere in the house.
“It’s not that I want to,” she said, trying to reassure him, knowing she couldn’t. “I’m not even consider
ing it, and I’m… I’m actually happy with my life right now,” she realized. “I just don’t know if I can trust myself. Not completely.”
Santino’s colors were weaving in and out of themselves as he finally turned the car into the street. She saw her turquoise core bound within the separate reds of worry and love, as he tried to find something to offer her.
“Zia has nightmares,” he said.
She looked over at him.
“Screaming nightmares,” he added. “I think it’s night terrors. Every time I stay the night, she’ll wake up and have no idea where she is, or who I am. She thinks it’s three years ago, and she’s still living in her apartment in California.
“And when she finally remembers me, she can’t stop crying. Her heart beats so fast, I don’t know why it hasn’t given out.”
“You shouldn’t be telling me this. If Zia wanted me—”
“She’s getting better,” Santino said, his words riding over Rachel’s. “She still wakes up screaming, but it’s getting easier to calm her down. After I do, she can go back to sleep. That’s new—she used to spend the rest of the night awake, pacing.”
“Santino…”
“You guys are making progress. If, deep down, you’re headed towards putting a bullet through your own brain, then why did you bother to throw yourself out of the way of Knudson’s punch?”
She slumped to the side and pressed her forehead against the window.
“I’m waiting.”
“Shut up.” She was exhausted: for once, she almost meant it.
“See, it’s that level of maturity that’s gotten you to where you are today.”
“Swear to God, Santino...”
“All I’m saying is, you should trust your instincts a little more.” He looked over at her and grinned. “You’re the only one who doesn’t.”
SEVENTEEN
“WHAT DO YOU SEE?” Santino asked in her head.
Her scans pinged on red. Angry, frothing red.
“Nothing good,” she replied.
Jonathan Dunstan’s byline was getting a lot of mileage over the past week, and this morning’s news article was his most incendiary thus far. The reporter had gone live with a story quoting a certain anonymous someone who was active in Congress, and who claimed that evidence implicating U.S. Special Forces had been recovered from the scene where the two officers had been killed. That same someone had then indicated the Department of Homeland Security had intentionally locked local and federal law enforcement out of the investigation. Dunstan’s article had concluded with a statement from a certain anonymous someone, who had suggested a large spontaneous gathering on the lawn of the National Mall would be proof of the unbreakable spirit of the American public in the face of government oppression.
Rachel hoped that a certain anonymous someone would die in a fire.
She supposed she was undercover, wearing a white windbreaker with a huge marinara sauce stain across one arm, and her rattiest pair of jeans. Fifty feet away from her, Santino was in a Caltech sweatshirt old enough to date back to the first time he had done his own laundry. Zockinski and Hill were similarly dressed, and Rachel thought that anybody watching for undercover cops would just have to look for the slobs.
When Sturtevant had heard about the demonstration, he ordered them to get down to the Mall and see what they could learn. They were each working the crowd in their own way, trying to get a read on the city’s rising tension. Rachel was looking for happy people. Not the rich purples of general happiness or those rare sun-bright bursts of pure yellow joy, but the smug pink of things going according to plan. (Her search was not going well: if she struck up one more conversation with someone who wanted her to convert her bank account to gold or bitcoins, she was going to have to find a place to dump a body.) She was keeping a firm lock on Santino’s smartphone, just in case—she did not like all of the red around her, the traces of hard black surrounding it… Rachel had been in more than her fair share of riots, but this was going to be her first as a cyborg. When she turned off the emotional spectrum, the crowd was scary but familiar; with the emotional spectrum on, it was terrifying. Red whipped from person to person, a shared aura that fed on itself, growing ever stronger.
All it would take was one rock.
She would have pulled the men out if they hadn’t been with the MPD. The hero worship that came and went for city cops was at an all-time high; the two murdered officers had convinced the crowd that there was Homeland, and then there was everyone else. If they had known this before they had come down to the Mall, they would have been wearing uniforms like armor. As it was, Santino, Zockinski, and Hill wore their badges on thin ribbed chains around their necks like talismans, and told anyone who asked that they were off-duty and were here to show their support.
Her own badge was tucked beneath her windbreaker. OACET wasn’t part of Homeland, but she didn’t want to explain the fundamentals of federal agency alignments to strangers while they tried to stomp her skull open.
She was relatively close to the Reflecting Pool, but too far from the Lincoln Memorial to hear the speaker: Homeland had gotten news of the flash mob and had decided to turn it into a public relations event. On the steps of the Memorial, a spokesman from Homeland was sharing the podium with politicians, policymakers, and the odd and angry representative from the MPD. When Rachel rode the signals coming from the news crews, she could hear the speaker from Homeland reassuring the crowd that despite all evidence to the contrary, they were not responsible for the tragedy on Gayle Street.
Nobody was buying it.
The noise bothered her: there should have been more of it. Not that the crowd was silent, but this far back from the podium, most of them had their eyes and ears buried in their smartphones. Easier to watch the live feed from the local news stations than to elbow their way into ringside seats.
Rachel had seen many a freaky thing over the years, but she had bumped some of them down the list to make room for a mob mentality taking place on variable delays: some of the news feeds were instantaneous, others had a one-, two-, or three-second pause, and the flares of red within the crowd went up like timed explosions. It was eerie, and she was pretty sure that being hooked into a live feed couldn’t help but make a bad situation worse.
“Hey.”
The word was aimed at her, and Rachel sent a fast scan around to locate the speaker. He was a man with a core of white lilac and surface colors picked out in red (of course), but with red lust stampeding its way across the anger. Terrific, she thought. Trust me to attract the perverts.
“What?” Santino asked.
Rachel winced; she had forgotten she was maintaining an open connection to Santino’s phone. “Nothing,” she told her partner. “Some dude’s decided an impending riot is a great way to pick up chicks.”
“Well, yeah. That’s how my parents met,” Santino replied. “Call me back.”
Their connection broke as Santino hung up. Rachel ran the man’s features and came away with a man in his mid-twenties with little in the way of a chin.
“Hey,” she replied, pretending to notice him.
“Lost in thought?” he said, grinning.
“Just…” Rachel swept out her left hand, palm up, to take in the crowd. “It’s so scary, you know?”
He took the bait. “Oh man,” he said, seeing her cast. “What happened to you?”
She quickly pressed the palm of her cast against her chest and dropped her eyes to the ground.
“Gayle Street?” he asked quietly.
When she nodded, his colors turned over, the lust dipping into the wine reds of sympathy and empathy. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Are you okay?”
Fuck, she thought. It was always harder to play them when there was a nice guy under the pickup artist: her guilt got in the way.
Harder, but not impossible. “Yeah, I’m okay,” she whispered, letting her shoulders and the tilt of her head tell him she was not okay, no, she was not okay at all.
He
reached out to try to catch her in a hug. “I’m sorry,” Rachel said in a wet sniff, stepping out of reach. “I just… I can’t. Not right now.” Not when you’re sure to notice my vest and gun.
He took a step back, nodding. “Are you here alone?” he asked.
Rachel’s Texas accent was always right under her tongue. “I’m in town on business,” she said, letting her drawl run through her words. “I didn’t expect to be here this long, but the police want anyone who was on Gayle Street to stay close.”
“And you decided to come to the rally?”
She looked down, not allowing her body language to cue him in to what she was thinking: no point in reading the crowd if the crowd just regurgitated what you wanted to hear.
“Come with me,” he said. He made a path for them through the crowd, using his elbows to nudge aside those immersed in their phones. Rachel followed him to the edge of the Reflecting Pool, where he found some unoccupied space along the concrete coping. He sat, and patted the ground beside him.
Good choice, she admitted. During a stampede, sitting was only slightly better than lying down, but her new buddy had put them in a location with a variable wall. True, they might get a little wet if they had to retreat into the Pool, but she’d rather be damp than dead.
She settled herself beside him and looked around. “Is something about to happen?” she asked, as if she were slightly slow.
“They’re pissed,” he said. “Just look at them.”
Interesting. She supposed nobody liked to think of themselves as part of a mob, but he seemed to embrace the difference; his conversational colors were slowly leaking reds as he picked up traces of her turquoise core.
“They’re tired of the same shit,” he said. “This is new. This is totally new.”
“What do you mean?”
He shrugged. “I live in D.C. We’ve got a different protest or political rally every other day. My friends and I play a game, where we guess the cause based on the people. Old white guys? Republicans or Tea Partiers. Kids in a drum circle are usually Occupy Wall Street or some liberal shit like that. But…” he said, craning his neck to look up and around them. “This is different. This is everybody!
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