Edge

by Blackthorne, Thomas

  Josh rubbed his face, and breathed out tension.

  "Well, good for her."

  Suzanne touched his arm.

  "Yes, she knew how to accept what you can't change, as the old saying goes."

  "Right." Josh gestured towards the pub. "You want another drink, or something to eat?"

  "Maybe at the motorway services."

  It was quite a drive to the Reading service area, but he assumed she knew that.

  "You want to start heading back?"

  "Let's do that. You're OK to drive, clearly."

  He held open the passenger door for her, then got in behind the steering wheel, inserted the key, slid his phone into its console slot, reached for the ignition button – then stopped.

  "I was pissed off," he said, "when I entered the car park. Now I'm not."

  "You look more relaxed."

  "Yeah… You're quite the witch, aren't you?"

  Suzanne's smile was enchanting. "Possibly my ancestors practiced voodoo."

  "Mine painted themselves with blue dye and mud, but you don't see me doing it."

  "Hmm… You know I can make you laugh, right?"

  Josh looked at her.

  "I'm feeling better, but not that m–"

  She touched his arm and he tipped his head back, laughter bubbling up inside him.

  "Jesus," he was able to say finally. "How did you do that?"

  "Like this."

  Another touch, and a paroxysm took hold, matched by Suzanne's laughter. Soon he was laughing so hard that the tears were coming. At last, she settled back in her seat, giving a final giggle.

  "That," said Josh, "was the weirdest thing I've ever experienced."

  "Voodoo."

  "With the greatest respect, bullshit. How did you do it?"

  "That spot I touched on your arm. That exact spot?"

  "I don't see–"

  But she merely stared at the spot, and he laughed. Her gaze went back to his face, releasing him.

  "Hypnotism?" he asked.

  "Simpler than that. In Petra and Yukiko's flat, I created an association between pressure on your arm exactly there and laughter, between the gesture and the mood. All I did was press that point when you were laughing at their jokes. You never noticed."

  "You're kidding me."

  "Maybe I'm joshing you."

  "Oh, please…"

  "Honestly, it's that easy." Her chestnut eyes seemed to deepen to chocolate. "But the timing has to be perfect, at the height of the mood. It's one-shot learning, and it's a physical skill to create the associative link."

  It seemed impossible; but his own reaction was compelling proof.

  "This stuff happens unconsciously?"

  "Very much so. Most of what happens inside our heads is below conscious awareness. There are sixty muscles in your arm, and you're not aware of orchestrating their movements when you put the car key in the slot."

  "Yes, but–"

  "What's three times three?" she asked.

  "Nine."

  "How do you know?"

  "Er…"

  Suzanne smiled. "Right then, you could have gone into trance – with a little encouragement – during that search for internal meaning we call a duh moment."

  "Bloody hell."

  "You can know an answer without knowing how you retrieve it. Every conscious decision you think you make, your brain started to create that thought three hundred milliseconds earlier. At least. End of lecture."

  "Jesus Christ."

  He went quiet, contemplating this. Then he sniffed in a breath.

  "Will you teach me how you do it?"

  "Maybe." Her smile looked surprised. "Maybe I will."

  At the roundabout where he should have exited to join the motorway, he continued turning, into a second rotation.

  "I need to do something," he said.

  "Visiting hours must be over."

  It was scary how she understood what he intended.

  "I'll manage to get in."

  "Then let's do it."

  He took the Swindon road, and continued on to the hospital. Suzanne said nothing until he pulled in and parked the car. Outside, the night was darkening.

  "Do you want me to come in with you?"

  "No. Thanks."

  Reaching over to the glove compartment, he became sensitive to her warm proximity, and the fragrance she was wearing: airborne molecules propelled by the heat of her flawless creamy chocolatte skin. Swallowing, he extracted a dull silver ring from the compartment.

  "Fake ID?" asked Suzanne.

  "A dummy, to make me look genuine." Josh extracted his phone from the console. "This is what will get me past the scanners."

  He walked to the main entrance, nodding to the security guard beyond the glass doors, then held his ring close to the door, and faced the cameras. What should happen was a three-way check among data stored on the ring (including fractally compressed facial images), the camera scan, and the staff database; what actually occurred was fast intrusion from his malware, a false recognition code, and the clicking open of magnetic locks.

  "Hi," he said to the guard.

  "Evening, doctor."

  Beyond reception, he walked corridors now half in shadow, conserving energy and helping patients sleep. The wall signs glowed, but he did not need them to find his way. At the nurses' station outside the coma unit, he stopped, opening up his senses while remaining still inside. From the sounds and other subliminal cues, he understood there were two nurses inside the open office, drinking lemon tea – he could smell it. Their chairs creaked as they rotated them, one leaning close to murmur something to the other; and as they naturally faced away from the doorway for a moment, Josh slipped past.

  Inside Sophie's room, machines sucked and hissed, susurrating as they worked her small lungs. Medicinal smells were strong. Monitors glowed and beeped, tracking her physiology and rendering a clear message in steady coloured graphs: no change.

  Sophie's face was delicate, luminescent grey in the half light. He brushed a curl, fine and wispy, away from her forehead. Then he took her fingers in his, remembering her as a baby, grasping a single finger, smiling her heart-splitting smile.

  My little girl.

  For a long time he held still; then he leaned over, kissed her forehead, and stepped away.

  "Good–"

  I can't say it.

  A complete farewell was impossible.

  His exit route was irrational, perhaps from the need for physical action. He raised the window of Sophie's room – he was three floors up – went through, pulled the window shut – the automatic lock clicked home – then spidered his way down in the dark. Brickwork was hard and gritty against his palms. His shoe soles made scraping noises as he descended. Then there was ground beneath his feet: an anticlimax that came too soon.

  Everything people do is for unconscious reasons. Wasn't that what Suzanne had been trying to tell him? He knew symbolic logic, could design software in Evolutionary Z, but it seemed to have little to do with the way his mind worked, or the way Sophie's image remained in his mind no matter what he was doing.

  When he opened the car door, Suzanne flinched.

  "Where did you come from? I was watching the entranceway."

  "Sorry."

  He slid in and closed the door. And sat there.

  "What happened, Josh?"

  "I… I tried to say goodbye."

  "What stopped you?"

  He closed his stinging eyes as his mouth turned down. Then he blinked a few times.

  "It's too late, because she's gone. It was too late the moment the car hit her."

  Suzanne's hand was on his forearm. No psych trick, just a human gesture.

  "That's not Sophie," he went on. "It's a remnant, like a fingernail or a – a lock of hair."

  "I'm so sorry."

  He nodded.

  Time passed. Epochs or minutes, he could no longer tell the difference. Then he slid his phone back into the console, and turned on the engine
.

  "Let's get you home."

  Once they were on the motorway and cruising, Suzanne told him how things had gone with the Brezhinski family.

  "The parents are less stressed, and young Marek will be practicing healing visualisation."

  On the battlefield, Josh had seen men who gave up and died from survivable wounds, while others fought, living against horrific odds. The worse the physical injury, the more vital was the mind controlling the immune system. Many soldiers developed a form of autohypnosis to cope with small combat wounds.

  "Good." He forced his attention outward, onto the dark motorway, for the sake of Suzanne's safety as he drove. "You calmed them down."

  "Actually, I got one of them sputtering with confusion as I tied them up in verbal knots, showing the contradictions in their behaviour. Sometimes you need to be outrageous and almost aggressive." She smiled. "Rapport can be overrated."

  "So no hypnosis."

  "Well, maybe a little."

  "But you can't hypnotise someone against their will."

  "Uh-uh. Look, pay attention to the road right now, but in the past, have you ever drifted off while driving… then come to your senses, and wondered who the hell was in charge for the past fifty miles?"

  "Oh. So it's not just me."

  "Everyone who's been lost in a good movie was in a trance, because that's all it is, an altered state. We drift through dozens of different mental states every day."

  "Mind control," he said. "Tell me about the mind control."

  "Bad metaphor. People want to learn how to hypnotise others but not go into trance themselves. Wrong, wrong, wrong. It's more like a dance, leading someone into a state where they're more resourceful than usual. The fastest way to induce a trance is to go there first."

  "You're joking."

  "I go into a different state from theirs, because my eyes are open, my attention on the client while they go inside themselves. But I'm still in a kind of trance. The fMRI proves it."

  Josh was not sure whether he was impressed or disappointed.

  "You say it's like a dance. There are links between martial arts and dance, you know."

  "What I use is not a weapon."

  "Oh."

  Clearly she could read his mind.

  Later, still driving, he tapped the phone, then told it the URI to connect to. Ghostly outlines in blue, red, and green popped up on the windscreen: a translucent heads-up display. Via proxies, he had the postings list from his querybot, with two hits registered, both recent.

  "What's that?" asked Suzanne.

  "High-probability sightings of Richard Broomhall." He tapped for a map-pane, which he dimmed. "London, south of the river. We can check the video footage when we stop."

  "How far to the services?"

  "Ten minutes. Perhaps we should go on. I've had to control my bladder before."

  "Do you like watching waterfalls? All the water splashing down, splish-splash."

  "Jesus, you are a witch."

  "No, I'm not telling you to think about a flowing tap, the ripples of running water down a channel that–"

  "All right, I'll stop."

  "I promise to use my powers only for evil," said Suzanne. "Er, I mean good."

  "Witch, witch, witch."

  At the service area they pulled in, plugged the car in to recharge, used the facilities then carried cappuccinos back to the vehicle. Inside, he put music on. After ten seconds, it was replaced with a shushing sound.

  "That's odd," said Suzanne. "Has the channel gone offline?"

  "No, it's anti-sound in the chassis and windows. There's one-way silvering on the glass as well, now that I've changed the polarisation."

  "Er… Are there onboard missiles? Machine guns?"

  "I think that's next year's model. And your phone's blocked, by the way."

  "Oh." Suzanne had velcroed her phone around her wrist. "Right, it's dead."

  "Standard anti-surveillance. I don't want you flagged as of interest, or no more than you already are, by associating with Broomhall."

  "Associating?"

  "Or whatever. Anyway, let's see the footage."

  Both segments were short, and he set them up to loop simultaneously in two panes. In one, the pinpointed youth walked along a street past piled-up bin bags – a moving shadow might have been a rat – while in the other segment, a youth in a green sweatshirt – maybe the same person – crossed a road to avoid a group of larger teenagers.

  "That's him." Suzanne kept watching. "In both loops, that's Richard."

  "Right." Josh blanked the display, then called up the map. "Depending on how far he tends to move at night… if he's settled in somewhere, he's in Wandsworth, maybe Brixton."

  "Settled in. Asleep in a doorway. Poor Richard."

  "Maybe not asleep." Josh did not want to mention nocturnal predators. "But trying to keep out of sight and warm."

  "So you're not likely to find him if you start looking now."

  "But if we–"

  "We both need sleep."

  "OK, but we make an early start," said Josh. "Or at least I do. Richard might sleep until noon, but he might have to clear out from where he's hiding before people start work."

  "Is the car charged yet?"

  "Not quite."

  "Take me home, so I can sleep in my own bed. Since I haven't been home for two nights."

  "You're wearing different clothes," he said.

  "Very observant, for a man. Pardon the stereotyping. My clothes are different because I went shopping."

  "Speaking of gender stereotyping…"

  "Uh-uh. I own four pairs of shoes and two handbags, no more."

  "Whereas I made a whole career of firing big guns. I mean really massive."

  "In order to make up for…?"

  "Oh, that. Well" – Josh held thumb and forefinger a centimetre apart – "we are talking tiny in other departments. Minuscule."

  Suzanne was laughing.

  "You are a bad man, Josh Cumberland. Take me home."

  [ NINETEEN ]

  At 5.30 am Josh was out running, past Earl's Court and through the Gothic cemetery, making a long loop back to his hotel, a white-painted cheapish place he had used before. There was parking for guests, and he thought he might leave his car here today. Back in his room, he showered fast, drank protein shake, and left ten minutes later. Soon he was riding a bus to Vauxhall, sipping from a take-away cappuccino. A few minutes before eight, he walked past the first place where Richard Broomhall had passed through surveillance. Which way would the lad have gone?

  Up ahead, a group of grimy-looking individuals stood with cardboard cups and rough-cut sandwiches in hand. They were on a gravel lot in front of a dilapidated concrete cabin, some small business long gone to ruin. Several volunteers were setting out plastic chairs. One was a thickset, square-jawed woman with short grey hair. She looked capable.

  Josh called up his clearest image of Richard Broomhall, and held out his phone as he advanced.

  "My name's Josh. And this is Richard, in the picture."

  "We don't talk to the authorities, didn't they tell you?" The grey-haired woman continued unstacking chairs. "Not about individuals."

  "Sure." Josh picked up a chair one-handed and set it down. "I'm not exactly official, just helping the family. The kid could be in trouble."

  "They all are. So what kind was he in before? What did he run away from?"

  "I… don't know. Not completely."

  "So why would you drag him back there?"

  "Look, the streets are hardly safe. He comes from a well-off home, good school."

  "And your point is?"

  "Shit." Josh looked at his phone. The kid was four years older than Sophie. "If it was my daughter, I'd tear the city apart to find her."

  "So what's the boy's father doing right now?"

  Josh blinked. This was his week for being off-balanced by strong, knowledgeable women. "Counting his money, I should think."

  At this, the woman gave a s
nort and a half-laugh. "Show me the picture again."