The One We Feed

by Kristina Meister

  “Need some more lemons?”

  “Can I ask your advice?”

  She frowned. “Okay, but we’re kinda not in the same...universe.”

  I looked at her in confusion until she waved a wet hand at my body. Then I remembered my transformation, how I appeared to her. Lean, perfect skin, shining dark hair: the best version of myself wearing a designer coat that I bought only because of its durability and number of its pockets.

  I brushed aside the compliment as an incidental.

  “Let’s just say, you’ve been presented with a huge opportunity to save a bunch of people from a terrible life. Not good people or bad people, just people. But to do this, you have to compromise who you are, or maybe lose it, or maybe even become someone else and forget you ever were that person. What would you do?”

  She leaned back on her heels and curled a hand around her chin. “Where’s the downside?”

  “You don’t like who you are?”

  “I work in a shit hole,” she said dryly. “I eat shitty food. I spend my shitty free time thinking about how long hepatitis lives in open air. I have a shitty life. Compromising me ain’t such a bad idea.”

  I looked around. Touché.

  “Okay, but say you did like who you are.”

  “Okay, I like who I am and for some reason care about whether these hypothetical people are miserable. Though why I should, I’m not sure.”

  “They’re people and maybe if you save them they’ll pick a side.” I said. “So would you do it?”

  “You know….” She shifted her weight to one hip. “I heard something once that seems to fit this particular day, and I’ve never had a chance to repeat it.”

  If she said “a bad day can only get better” or “if you succeed at failure, you’re still a success,” I thought I might have to scream.

  “By all means.”

  She cleared her throat and stood up tall and strong. “‘I’ve regretted the things I never did, but I’ve never regretted anything I have done.’ Good huh?”

  I chewed my lip thoughtfully. Perhaps even a negative experience could teach you something, and if a person were standing at a crossroads, they either had to pick a path or set up camp. I wasn’t sure I liked where I was just then, and, despite her charms, I wasn’t sure I wanted the waitress for a roommate.

  “An excellent point. I’m thoroughly convinced.”

  “Yeah, I was totally going to have that tattooed on my back or something, but it’s too long, you know?”

  She picked up my money.

  I swallowed my laugh. “Like I always say, it’s only worth saying if you can carve it onto your flesh. Keep the change.”

  “Sooooo true,” she murmured, meandering away as if we were still sharing a truly deep reflection.

  Jinx still hadn’t returned, and, rather than become engaged in another conversation with her, I pulled out my smart phone and used it to boogie-board through the tiny net. One hundred and seventy-eight years made it 1830-ish. Add France, a shot to the stomach, and math, and one answer presented itself.

  “Holy shit.”

  It was him, and guess what—he was someone. There was a drawing of him at fifteen. I stared at it in absolute awe and marveled. It looked just like him, minus the cranial adornments and garish color scheme. I couldn’t believe it. But the article said he’d been shot in the stomach at twenty-one, so why did he look so damn young? It had to be because of the difference in height, average being a full head shorter than me even for men. That, combined with his ability to make himself as flawless and angelic as he chose, made for an amazing youthfulness.

  He trotted toward me, a legend, and fresh as the proverbial daisy. I dropped the phone in a hurry and tucked it away.

  “Let’s blow this suck-pod.”

  “Yes, please.” I got up and followed him out.

  On the threshold, he turned and saluted the girl. “Thanks for the grub.”

  “Are you guys vampires?” she blurted.

  He looked at me. Our laughs spilled out in chorus. I was tempted to quote Lost Boys, say something about all the damn vampires in Santa Carla, but Jinx cut me off.

  “What if we were?”

  She shrugged and examined her nails a little too closely. “Whatever.”

  “It wouldn’t scare you?”

  “No,” she said, a little too idly.

  “Even if it wasn’t what the stories said?”

  “Nothing ever is.”

  He turned to me and slapped my arm. “See, I told you! Never thought I’d say this, but thank you, Stephenie Meyer!”

  “Car, now!”

  He ducked outside. I stood there, looking at her. She was staring at me, nails forgotten, waiting to hear what I had to say, and I found that I had only one response. Jinx’s fervor was contagious, and my path seemed so obvious.

  I crossed my lips with a finger. “Shhh.”

  At the car, I gave Jinx a dirty look. “So, New World Order, eh?”

  “Yep.”

  I sighed. “So that you can come out of your anonymity cave and start leading the wayward scientists to a greater understanding of the universe.”

  He made a noise in his throat.

  “Answer me one thing.”

  He fastened his seat belt “Shoot.”

  I flinched at his word choice. “If you’re so awesome, why do you have to eat when you get shot at, Mr. I-have-a-theory-named-after-me?”

  His eyes slid to mine, held, and then slid away. “I have to repair quickly, so I need elements. There’s probably some kind of Quantum Physics explanation for how you do it without eating. Feeding off the natural potential of the universe. You know, zero-point fields or some-such. Who cares? It works, and I have bigger fish to roast.”

  I pulled away. The waitress was sitting in a booth, watching us leave, with a cell phone stuck to her ear. The faster we made our escape, the better.

  “I can see why you changed your name, you know. Everisté is sooo lame.”

  He curled up in a tight ball, apparently sleepy after his injury. “Bite me.”

  Chapter 6

  Kali Ma

  When I looked back at the safe house, the chaos was settling. Petula was gone, just as Jinx had predicted, her room a scattered mess with two drying puddles, one red and one black. How they had gotten her out of the place, given her agoraphobia, I hadn’t a clue, but it had probably involved a lot of kicking and screaming.

  I was pleased to find the Smiths sitting around like members of the Three Hundred, nursing their slowly healing wounds, trading hypotheses on the unfortunate events that had befallen them. From what I could glean, they had barely seen me. I had dropped out of the blissful state, become visible for mere seconds, and had been moving too quickly for any of them to get a description beyond “blackish blur, vaguely female.”

  Needless to say, the man in charge was not happy. He had gone from pacing up and down the hall in front of the broken and dismantled elevator, shouting incoherently, to pacing in a room that seemed to be his office.

  I thought back to when I had heard him argue with Karl over the loudspeaker of the phone. At the time, he had seemed faultless, treating Karl as a hopeless idiot; and without a way to contradict him, I had let the impression stand. Now he shook visibly, chewed his nails to nubs, only to grow them back and chew again, toyed with the hair at his temple until tufts came out, and convulsively tapped his sternum. He walked back and forth, murmuring to himself until he was blue in the face.

  “I cannot go back to him. I cannot go back.” He tapped and tapped. “Curse you, Karl!” More hair-pulling. “Without her, I know nothing. Without her I can’t watch him to be certain.” Up and back, up and back. “I can’t call them back. They wouldn’t come. They’ve turned to him, I know they have. There aren’t any more. Even if there were, Devlin would not send them here. He won’t help. Even if he could …”—the ground was covered in fine hairs and nail ends—“even if he could, I...I have nothing left to give.”

&nbs
p; In the jhana, there was no ridicule. I watched him disintegrate into a quivering pile of worries and felt nothing but compassion. Whatever mess he’d gotten himself into, it seemed there was no way out, and by interfering I had unwittingly made it worse.

  That’s what happens when you always want what you cannot have, and have a knack for finding ways to get it.

  I opened my eyes in an incredibly introspective state of mind. To my amazement, Jinx was asleep, snoring quietly after his ordeal.

  I tapped him gently. “The National Weather Service called to let me know that Hell just froze over. Want a Redbull?”

  He looked sleepily out the window. It was almost daybreak. We were waiting out the night as far from Ananda and Arthur as we could get, hoping there would be no retaliation from the Sangha, but, really, I didn’t want to go back to them.

  I had parked across from a narrow spit of sand, somewhere in the Marin headlands. Waves crashed in a soothing rhythm, lulling the senses nicely. Moonlight danced and sparkled through mists in the dim but growing radiance of the sun. All was at peace.

  Rubbing his eyes, he sat up. “Wow. No shit. Can’t remember the last time I napped.”

  “I checked in. You were right. Petula’s not there anymore.”

  He smiled weakly. “And our friend, the overseer? He still walking around with his tail in the air?”

  I pulled my legs into a cross-legged position and leaned into the headrest. “That’s where it gets weird. I think we may have actually made the situation worse.”

  He turned and rummaged around in the back seat. “Uh huh. My movements are no longer being tracked by an immortal low-jack, and we’ve tossed a cog into their wheels. What could be bad about that? Last time I checked, that pattern worked out for us.”

  I sighed. Petula’s disconnected whispers came back to me, talking of the dark spot in her visions she hated to look at. “The overseer is shitting himself right now, all sack cloth, ashes, and gnashing of teeth. I’m beginning to think the man behind the curtain is way scarier.”

  Jinx opened a can and brooded over it. It was a long time before he bothered to sip or answer. “Well, I agree the dude cutting out tongues is probably not someone we want running around unchecked. And if we happened to make friends with Mr. Overseer in the process, so much the better, I guess. Anything specific we can look in on?”

  I wasn’t so sure I liked the idea of having him for a friend. “He mentioned a name. I don’t recognize it. Maybe you do.”

  He waved his hand.

  “Devlin ring any bells?”

  There was a sudden spray of sticky, bubble-gum scented juice. “Did you say Devlin? D-E-V-L-I-N. Devlin?”

  “Yeah.” I pointed at the glove compartment where all napkins and an odd coagulant pack ended up. “He said he couldn’t go back to Devlin, that Devlin wouldn’t send him anymore...whatevers, because….”

  “He’d want something in return?” the boy interrupted with a knowing grimace.

  “Yeeeaah.” I wiped off the dash and windshield, a bit bothered that there were still things I was learning that other people in the gang obviously knew. “I thought friendship had this whole clause about The Loop. Why is it I don’t know this Devlin person?”

  “Trust me when I say that you don’t want to know Devlin. He’s a bad dude.”

  “Well, if he’s bad, then maybe the overseer is a compatriot, not an enemy. After all, he did say he didn’t want to have to deal with the guy.”

  Jinx put his can into the cup holder and got out the netbook I had stashed behind his seat. “That isn’t saying much. Nobody wants to deal with Devlin. Problem is, you almost always have to. Asshole’s like the goddamned wind, he’s everywhere but invisible, and no one can live without him. Hang on a minute.”

  He opened a window on a program I didn’t know and began typing in code-speak, outlining parameters for what seemed like a search algorithm.

  “What is that?”

  “A way to see the wind.”

  “Um….”

  “A spider.”

  I leaned closer. “A what?”

  “It’s a code bot. It crawls through whatever I tell it to, looking for whatever I tell it to. People have been writing these things for years. Usually they’re used to gather market data, you know, scan social networking pages for likes and dislikes, cruise Tumblr for the top-mentioned movie or song, you know? Of course, my spiders are like Shelob or Aragog. They put others to shame. I use them to research memetic patterns, ideological trends in cyberspace.”

  “It can do that?” I gasped, wondering how much of my former life was visible to such automated think-tank bots.

  “It’s an artificial intelligence, learning as it goes.” He looked at me slyly. “Right now, I’m scanning a select group of back alleys, looking for....” He pointed. “The bastard’s footprints.”

  Hand to my forehead, I leaned into my seat. “Okay. Why are we looking for him?”

  To my surprise, he seemed a bit nervous. He set the tiny computer on the dash and turned sideways in his seat. “Petula and William are a rare breed. People like them break down very quickly. I can’t imagine what it would be like to know exactly what man is capable of doing. It would certainly taint my naive idealism.”

  “No shit,” I said, knowing exactly what he meant. Since I’d met William and incorporated his gift, it was difficult to keep focused and not interrupt the screaming match two rooms down or walk down the road to the Meth house and set it on fire. Since I’d met William, the only response I had was to go into the jhana, where all actions seemed perfectly normal expressions of human nature and judgment seemed arrogant. The jhana was like Novocain, and I was becoming an addict. The problem was, the longer I tried to stay away, the more I yearned to go back. The withdrawal got worse each time. Reality was turning into an endless pabor noctumus.

  “Seers usually find a way to end it,” Jinx said, “unless they come to think of their gifts as central to some greater cause. It gives them a memetic reason to keep suffering, a psychological failsafe, and because the human nervous system is largely subject to the values we ascribe to our surroundings and situations, they thrive. It’s a perfect example of how humanity is sculpting its own biology by thought alone.”

  I thought back on Will and his bottle of pills. He popped more in a day than Dr. Gregory House and was constantly bobbing on the surface of reality like a buoy. He had begged for my help, but, like Petula, I had had no concept of how to help. My only advice was to channel his gift to a greater good and to introduce him to people who could really put him to such a use. I had kept him alive, but was he really better off?

  “Okay. And?”

  “Well,” Jinx fluffed his spikes and sighed, “I just had a terrible thought. What if Devlin has one of them too? What if his supremely sadistic felicity with a bartering economy has aided him in convincing a Seer that their fate is so much worse without him that they’ll supply him with any information he wants? What if he sent Petula to the overseer out of his enormous stash of trackers? What if he’s tracking us too?”

  “Don’t you mean you?” I blinked. “And so what if he is?”

  “That’s not something we want. Certainly not something I want.”

  I frowned at the ocean. “Because he’s a bad dude.”

  “Yes.”

  “And the spider….”

  “Is going to help me find out what he’s been doing,” Jinx said in exasperation.

  “How will it do that?”

  He smacked his forehead and turned away. “Sometimes I forget you’re a Geek In Training.”

  I chuckled. “Actually, I’m an alumnus of F.U. It’s a vocational school.”

  He shook his head. “Look, it’s going through our communications network, which, incidentally, I designed, and is scanning for Devlin’s unique interactions.” He rolled down the window and let in some fresh, sea air. Inhaling deeply, with a renewed respect for life, he stuck his head out like a retriever and closed his eyes. “He�
�s a parasite, always looking for someone who needs something. If he’s looking, we want to know.”

  “What is it you think that will accomplish?”

  “Sometimes if you watch him closely, you can tell if you’re in his crosshairs.”

  “Based on what he’s not doing or who he chooses to help in exchange for whatever specialty they might have,” I murmured, finally understanding. If, say, an immortal assassin with a specialization in seeing the invisible really needed help with his gambling debt and Devlin answered the call, it could be very bad for us. “Point taken. Way to be safe.”

  “Have you checked in with Art?”

  I changed the subject. “How’s the Redbull? I much prefer Monster. I mean if you’re going to take in enough caffeine to vibrate out of the space-time continuum, you should at least get some amino acids, right?”

  He leaned back into the car and shook his head. “You can’t stay mad at him forever. Remember, this is how it works with him. You’ve known that all along.”

  I remained stoic. “Well, it would be nice to know his plan.”

  “There is no plan. We’re the plan. We have the plans. He has no plans!” Jinx shouted. “I’m not even sure if he knows how to plan. All exercises in strategy aside.” He mashed his face with his palms. “Come to think of it, he’s probably always playing Go because he needs to practice strategizing.”

  I rolled my window down and waited for a pleasant cross-breeze. “What exactly does that mean?”

  “Okay, okay, let me see if I can explain this to you in a way that makes sense. Try to see it from an objective position.”

  Unconvinced, I lay my head on the window sill and closed my eyes. I, too, had a renewed respect for life. “Fine.”

  “In a linear, consecutive universe, there can be only two types of inferences. You can either assume you know what is going to take place based on previous experiences, inferring C from A, or you can rely upon the idea that something unexpected could happen, like a Zed, or something. But this is not a linear universe. At least, I’m not sure Arthur is a linear creature. He has a kind of reasoning we cannot comprehend because we aren’t seeing it from his perspective. He isn’t planning or waiting; he’s doing something else.”