by Julia Keller
* * *
And now, right now, right here, it was happening all over again, the massive sadness that was like a great black wall, blocking every direction in which she tried to turn her mind, to move her thoughts. She couldn’t get away from it. No matter where she went, no matter how fast she ran, it would still be with her.
It was her.
I can’t stand this feeling. Those are the words that crowded through Violet’s entire being. Right now, those were the only words she recognized. They struck her mind one by one, a heavy bell’s grim tolling:
I
Can’t
Stand
This
Feeling
And yet she had to. She had no choice. It was part of her, this anguish. A vital part. It ran in her blood. It sent its threads groping deep into her bones to find a place to root. It branched throughout her body.
There is no escape.
She couldn’t move or breathe. She couldn’t think. The emotion thickened, coarsened, swelled up, so that it was even more powerful now than it had been the first time around, when she actually experienced it. She had no more will, no more fight left in her. She couldn’t win against an enemy that was inside her. That was her. She was helpless.
Which was the point all along.
And so the Intercept had beaten her. It had beaten her without firing a shot or heaving a rock or even making a threat. It had won.
It always did.
9
Holdup
“Hey—so how was it?”
Shura was waiting for Violet outside the giant glass doors of Protocol Hall. Violet had just finished her shift. The sky was a lemony yellow, tailing off to olive green at the edges.
Just before her shift started, Violet had sent Shura a quick message from her console: Done. Shura would understand. They had discussed a long time ago how Violet would let Shura know it had happened.
And then Violet had added a brief coda to her note: Meet in plaza after work.
Shura followed up her greeting by tucking an arm around Violet’s arm and bumping against her hip. They walked in casual lockstep across the crowded plaza, turning as a twosome when they needed to turn, zigging and zagging through the crowd. “Okay,” Shura went on. “Was it, like—was it unbearable? Or sort of okay? Or what?”
“Rough.” Violet couldn’t think of what else to say right then.
But that was the beauty of a best friend. A best friend didn’t always need words to get what you were saying.
“So we guessed right,” Shura said. “It was about your mom. The Intercept picked the day your mom died.”
“Yeah.”
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah.” And she was. Well—she would be okay. Eventually. First she needed to scrape off the residue of the memory, the feeling of grief and sadness that still clung to her.
The day’s only bright spot—and it surprised her—had come when Reznik offered to finish up the last few minutes of their shift by himself. It was a slow day, and he could handle the resolution codes single-handedly. He knew Violet had gone through her intervention that morning; the Intercept activation was part of the official archive now.
“I was thinking about you all day,” Shura said. “Wondering, I mean. About how it went. Was it—was it close to the real thing? To how it felt when she—” She paused. Her curiosity was at war with her concern for her friend.
“Yeah,” Violet said. She knew she’d practically worn out that word, just in the last few minutes. “Actually, it was worse.”
“Worse?”
“It’s like it comes back even stronger. The feeling, I mean. Like it picks up speed or something on its way back—speed and force.” Violet was talking rapidly now. “You think you can handle it and you’re doing okay—and then you’re not doing okay at all. It’s too much.” She had to stop talking about it. She didn’t want to get emotional. Not here, right out in the open.
“At least it wasn’t real. It was just the Intercept.”
Violet stopped walking. She detached herself from Shura’s arm, moved a step away. “What do you mean—‘It wasn’t real’? Of course it was real. I was there. My mother died.”
“I mean the intervention. It wasn’t the real thing. It was just a simulation.”
“A simulation.” Violet shook her head. She was surprised at how little Shura seemed to understand. “No. It was the real thing. It happened all over again. It wasn’t like a play, like something based on that day. It was that day. Although, if anything, it was harder than that day. The day it happened, the first time around.”
“But how—”
“I don’t know. But it was.” Violet wasn’t mad. She was just sort of … shocked. Shocked that Shura didn’t get it.
They started walking again. Neither of them said, “Let’s start walking again, okay?” They just did it, both at the same time. And somehow they knew they were going to Perey Park.
Which was another quality shared by best friends, even best friends you were currently disappointed with. Little synchronicities like that happened all on their own. Violet instantly forgave her. You couldn’t expect someone to comprehend an intervention unless she’d been through it.
“Have you talked to Danny about it yet?” Shura asked.
“No.”
“I just thought that—because of Kendall Mayhew and all—you’d, like, maybe want to discuss it with him, and tell him about how his brother’s machine had—”
“No.” It came out sharper than Violet had intended it to.
“What’s going on, Violet?” Now it was Shura’s turn to stop.
With all these stops, Violet thought ruefully, we’ll never make it home.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that you’re acting weird,” Shura declared. “I know the intervention was difficult. And I know how much you loved your mother. But this is something else. Is it about Danny? Promise me you’re not still following him.”
“I’m not.”
“But it is about him, right?”
The area around the park had grown even darker now. They had not passed anyone in several minutes. They were deep into their conversation and so neither of them saw the wiry figure until it had leaped out of the shrubbery lining the path and lunged at them.
Shura screamed.
And Violet realized—initially with more surprise than fear, although the fear wasn’t far behind—that the object being thrust repeatedly at her face was the ugly snout of a slab gun.
* * *
Writhing black hair.
Thin, haggard face.
A snarled rat’s nest of curses, uttered in a low continuous mumble.
Those were Violet’s impressions of their assailant. She felt a quick crease of fear in her belly, but then that feeling, like the surprise, vanished.
The man didn’t have a chance.
He made a wild grab for Shura’s bag. Before his hand could close around the strap, his head snapped back. He looked as if he’d been zapped with an electrical charge, although nothing and no one had touched him. He staggered backward, flailing wildly as he flopped onto the ground.
The slab gun flew out of his hand. His body stretched and folded and stretched and folded again like an amped-up accordion. He bucked and he shook. His words came out in bitten-off shrieks of panic:
“No, Buster, no! Bad dog! Bad dog! NO! DON’T! Don’t run out in front of the car! Buster—No!—You can’t—”
He exploded into sobs, sobs that seemed to be clawing their way out of his throat in a frenzy of grief. He pulled at his hair, yanking it out in greasy black hunks. Spittle foamed over his lower lip. He pounded the ground with his fists.
Violet had seen the Intercept in action multiple times—she’d lost count, frankly, given her job—but each time, she was surprised all over again by its speed and power and efficiency. Emotions were more dangerous, more self-destructive, than guns or knives, than bombs or poison, than sticks or rocks or ropes. They were k
illers.
She touched her wrist console. Reznik’s face popped up on her screen.
“You guys okay?” he said.
“We’re fine. Right?” Violet looked over at Shura. Shura was breathing heavily, and she was obviously shaken up, but she gave Violet a thumbs-up, all the same. Violet’s eyes came back to her console. “Good work, Rez,” she said.
“Not a problem. I’m just glad I stayed late tonight. They asked me to help out with park surveillance. Everything’s under control.” Rez tucked his bottom lip under the upper one. He gave Violet a small, honest smile. “It was hard to see you in that kind of situation,” he went on. “Vulnerable, I mean. Even though I knew there was no real danger—not with Steve Reznik on the job.” Then he blushed. Violet saw it clearly on her console.
When someone liked you a lot more than you liked him, it wasn’t a good situation. It didn’t make you feel at all superior. Violet was uncomfortably aware of the imbalance in her relationship with Rez.
And yet—she couldn’t stop the thought from coming—she fully intended to exploit it in the near future. To take advantage of his technical skills for her own purposes. Did that make her a terrible person?
Okay, maybe it sort of does. Whatever.
Rez was still talking. “Hey—do you guys want to see the guy’s Intercept feed?”
“Yeah,” Violet said. “Actually, I do.” She was always interested in what lay waiting in the dank basements of people’s memories, ready to reach up and strike them. She wanted to see what had taken down their assailant.
“Hold on. I’ll send it to your console. Turns out it was a childhood memory.”
Childhood memories were always the most pungent, Violet knew. They slipped between the neuronal cracks, finding nooks and niches to use as hiding places. And there the memories waited. They waited until they were reawakened, freshly harrowing, by the Intercept.
“Thanks, Rez. See you around.”
“Yeah.” He nodded. “Sending the feed right now.”
While Violet was speaking with Rez, two cops had arrived to perform the post-incident maneuvers. Their blue tunics were smooth and clean. Each took an arm, carrying off the trembling, babbling attacker and hoisting him into the back of the police van. He would be processed into a secure facility. Eventually he would regain his emotional poise. He’d stop sobbing. Stop ripping out his hair. But the newly revived memory, like burned flesh, would go on hurting him for a very long time, scalding its way down through all the layers.
Violet switched her console to reception mode. The man’s Intercept feed flared to life on the screen.
At the moment he jumped at them, a surveillance drone had picked up the disruption. Reznik, watching from Protocol Hall, initiated the intervention. The assailant’s brain was marinated in a memory. Violet watched his emotions as they swept over him:
The feel of Buster’s square brown head as the dog rests it on his knee.
The warmth of the dog’s heavy, steady breathing.
The tender devotion in the animal’s soft brown eyes.
And then come the sounds of fast-moving traffic on a nearby road, the raucous rumbles and metallic screeches that catch Buster’s attention. The dog wants to investigate, he has to check it out, and so he hoists himself up on all fours and he runs at full stride and he—
“No, Buster, no! Don’t—please—Buster, no!”
A startled, helpless medley of car horns.
Every nuance—the dog’s big body flipping into the air when he is struck, the yelp of surprise, the nasty thump when the body hits the pavement and splits open, a mess of meat and fur and bone—is present in the man’s mind.
Violet can see it on her console just as the man had seen it, blooming in his brain over and over and over again.
And over and over and over and OVER AND OVER AND
It is his only reality. He cannot turn away from it. The memory singes him. Engulfs him. He cannot not see it, cannot not know it. He cannot not feel it.
It is tearing him to shreds.
“Wow,” Shura murmured. She’d moved closer to Violet so that she could see the feed, too, on the bright screen of her friend’s console. “Kind of hard to watch. All that he’s feeling. All that pain.”
Violet was struck by the same realization that was troubling Shura: The man’s suffering seemed out of proportion to his potential crime. But she couldn’t reveal that to anyone. Not even Shura.
“Yeah, I guess so,” Violet said. She hoped her brusqueness would cover up her uncertainty. “But he broke the law, right? He’s a criminal. And if the police had done it the way they used to do it on Old Earth—rushing in and shooting and trying to take him down, going after his slab gun—we might’ve been injured. Other people, too.”
Reznik wasn’t a mean person, or an insensitive one. And neither was she. They protected people. They kept the world peaceful and safe. If Violet had been working tonight and this same incident had occurred, involving two other innocent people walking home in the park, she would’ve done precisely what Reznik had done: Initiate the Intercept. Disable the attacker.
They did their jobs. There was nothing more to it than that.
Right?
10
A Memory of Christmas Morning
From its place on her bedside table, Violet’s console played a soft, three-note chime. She knew the ringtone well: Danny.
She wasn’t sure what time it was, but her room was entirely dark. She had been lying in the darkness, thinking about him and the Intercept, and about a lot of other things, too. Sometimes insomnia was terrible; sometimes, though, it wasn’t so bad. Darkness was a good background for deep thinking.
Violet waited for her heart rate to resume its normal rhythm and then she touched the screen to accept the call—but only on audio. She was wearing her usual T-shirt and sweats in bed, with the lights off. She didn’t want him to know that.
“Hey,” she said.
“Hey. I heard about what happened tonight in the park. It was in the end-of-shift report on the day’s criminal activity.” His voice was more agitated than she’d ever heard it. “Are you okay? Did he hurt you? How’s Shura?”
“We’re fine,” Violet said. “She’s probably asleep by now. It was no big deal.”
Danny let out a long breath.
“I know the Intercept is everywhere,” he said, “and I know it works and all, but when it’s somebody you know—somebody you—” He stopped. “Look, Violet. I’m sorry I got so mad at you. And just walked away like that.”
“You were right. I shouldn’t have tried to trick you.”
“I know it’s frustrating. I mean, I know I’m frustrating. But I just can’t—” Danny took another deep breath. “Someday. Someday, okay? I promise—someday I’ll tell you everything. Until then, you’ve just got to—”
“I’ve just got to trust you,” Violet said, interrupting him. “Right. Got it.” She was massively disappointed. She had really thought that, in the aftermath of the attack on her and Shura, in the midst of his concern for her, he might relent. Let her inside his mind.
But—no.
Still no answers.
“Yeah,” he said.
“Okay.” Fine, Violet thought. The third and final option she’d come up with to figure out Danny—the one for which she needed Rez’s help—was looking better and better.
“Okay,” Danny said. Even though they were sort of quarreling, he didn’t want the conversation to end. Violet could tell. Because she didn’t want it to end, either. “Sorry to call so late,” he added. “I just had to check.”
“It’s fine. I wasn’t asleep yet. It was a rough day even before the guy jumped out at us. I had my intervention.”
“Wow. How was it?”
“Rough. Like I said.” She was still miffed. She didn’t want to talk about it with him right now.
He didn’t push her to say more than she wanted to. He never did. “Well, I guess I’d better go,” Danny said. “I’m still at
the station. Had another little session with Callahan.”
Violet didn’t need to ask why. It could be about only one thing: Danny’s defiance of the rules about trips to Old Earth.
“How’d it go?”
“Not too bad.” That was his standard nonanswer answer. “She’s pissed, but that’s always the case.”
“I’ll put in a good word for you.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m supposed to have dinner with the chief and her husband. As a substitute for my dad. He’s way too busy. Tell you the truth, though, I think they’re going to be a little disappointed. They think they’re getting the chief executive—and they get me instead.”
“I wouldn’t be disappointed.”
Before Violet had a chance to respond, Danny was speaking again. Hurriedly. “You’re sure you’re okay,” he said.
“Totally sure. You know how it works. That guy never touched us. The Intercept won’t allow it. But you know what? Even with the work I do every day at Protocol Hall, it’s still hard to watch an intervention in person. Seeing those emotions on the attack—it’s pretty awful. Emotions can be so—so brutal, you know? So overwhelming.”
He didn’t answer right away. When he did, his voice was filled with quiet awe.
“I saw them once,” he said.
“Saw what?”
“Emotions.”
“Oh. Okay, yeah,” Violet said. “On the screen, you mean. During an Intercept. You saw a feed.”
“No. Not then. Before.”
“Before,” she repeated. She didn’t know what he was talking about.
“Yeah. In the lab. Back on Old Earth. When Kendall was first laying the groundwork for the Intercept. Your father hadn’t come down there yet. Nobody had any idea what Kendall was up to. There wasn’t any Intercept. It was all just an idea in my brother’s head. A crazy theory of his.”
She didn’t say anything, because she wanted Danny to go on. After a moment, he did.
“So Kendall called me into the lab one night. He was pretty excited. I didn’t know what he was working on. I only knew that whatever it was, he’d been working on it for years—year after year. He barely slept anymore. He just worked. And that night, he asked me to stand in front of this big, funny-looking machine he’d mashed together from a bunch of old parts he’d swiped from other machines, things people had thrown away or forgotten about. It was connected to his computers and to the test tubes he’d lined up on dozens and dozens of shelves. They were filled with this bubbling purple stuff. Smelled awful.