by Laura Lam
Three-dimensional holograms appear and, unlike the solid-looking crime scene around us, these are as transparent as ghosts.
Vuk is laughing, knocking back champagne. He has a similar look to Nazarin—bulky and muscular, with short-buzzed hair. But where Nazarin’s features are strong, Vuk’s are almost delicate, the features too small for his face. He sets down the glasses, chatting with his friends. Tila perches next to him, her legs crossed, as she sips from a wine glass. It’s a re-creation from the infrared sensors at Zenith, so their expressions are only the bare minimum—a huge smile or no emotion at all. One by one, the other people leave, until Vuk and Tila are alone.
The image wavers. Ostensibly this is where Tila and Vuk speak, but the program does not know what was actually said that night. Normally, the cameras in Zenith would, but in the Zeal lounges, clients can pay extra for privacy. When the image clears again, Tila holds a knife. Vuk turns back to her with the drink and she attacks him. He manages to fend her off. She cuts him in a glancing blow to his wrist, which accounts for the blood splatters to the left of the large bloodstain. She manages to stomp on his instep and her knee flies up between his legs. He crumples, and Tila doesn’t hesitate. The knife flashes and goes beneath his ribcage and up, right to his heart. She rips the knife down, widening the wound, and Vuk bleeds out on the floor. She has no expression on her face. She bends down to the coffee table in front of her, driving the knife into the wood.
The holographic image goes dark.
I’m shivering, despite the perfect temperature of the room. It can’t be true. There must be some mistake. The infrared sensors were tampered with. It wasn’t actually my sister. It was someone else. Something. I can’t believe that Tila would do that, with no hesitation, with such precision and skill. There has to be more to it. There has to. Because if not, then I have no idea who that woman is I just watched kill someone in cold blood.
“That’s only one way it could have happened, right?” There’s a note of pleading in my voice, and Nazarin looks at me with a hint of pity. I turn away, not wanting to see it.
“Right. From infrared we know there were two people in the room, but their body movements weren’t mapped. This is their best guess as to the sequence of events, judging by the wounds, but the order could be off, and we have no context.”
I ask myself, in reality, how different could it be? Someone stabbed Vuk and ripped him open that night, and no one else was in the room but my sister. He didn’t do it to himself. I push the doubt away. It’s too much. I’ve never been more thankful for Mana-ma’s training. “What more can you tell me about Vuk?” I ask. The information I have on him from the police download is scant at best.
“Pretty sure he took out at least one person a week for the Ratel, between his other duties. With all his schmoozing, he could gain access to places many members of the Ratel couldn’t. For all that, though they trusted him, I doubt he was in their very inner circle, though he was hoping to be. He’d had a lot of mods and upgrades to his body, according to the autopsy.” He pauses to scroll through the medical chart. “Muscle implants and nanobots, almost an entirely new face, a prosthetic hand with skin grafts, new teeth. He even changed the shape of his ears. So whoever he was before, he wanted to make sure we’d never know, not even in death.”
I swallow. “Can I … go into the crime scene for a closer look?” I ask, my mouth dry.
“Yes.” His eyes go distant as he accesses the controls with his ocular implant, and the bubble pops. Carefully tiptoeing around the blood, I ignore the body, as that’s not what catches my attention. I look closer at the coffee table.
My fingertips hover over the items on the table.
“Can I move things?” I ask.
“Yeah.”
I reach out and move the glass with the lipstick print. I can’t feel it. It’s like I’m holding air. There’s a chip on the rim. It had fallen over, but Tila had put it to rights before she left. Below where the glass was is a hasty carving of five points. Next to it are a few other scratches. The glass falls from my hand and slides back to its original position on the coffee table.
“She didn’t stab the coffee table. She carved it,” I whisper.
Nazarin looks over the crime scene notes. “They noticed those. Five points. That’s the symbol for the Hearth, isn’t it?”
“Yes.” I haven’t seen that simple design in a long time. Why did she leave it here? She hates the Hearth as much as I do.
“We couldn’t make any sense of these, though,” Nazarin says, nodding toward the dashes and dots, almost like Morse code. “No language or code we could figure out.”
I shrug, not wanting to tell him, looking at other things.
“You understand those markings,” he says. “I can tell.”
I debate lying, and then decide it’s pointless. “It’s an alphabet Tila and I made up when we were children, so we could write notes to each other nobody else would understand.”
“She knew you’d see it.” Detective Nazarin scratches the stubble at his chin. The muscles of his bicep flex under his shirt, and I’m reminded of how much larger and stronger than me he is. He’s suspicious. And why shouldn’t he be?
The fact is, I’m just as flummoxed. Why would Tila leave me a sign? And why that as a sign? She had no way to anticipate how all this would play out … did she?
I feel sick. I back away from the blood and the scratched coffee table, breathing loudly, and move to the bay window, looking out over the cloudy San Francisco day. The sailboats are coming into port, the hovercars leaving and arriving the Embarcadero to and from their sundry destinations. The sun is setting, and everything glows that soft pink and purple of approaching dusk.
Detective Nazarin glides to my side, silent. I press my forehead against the cool glass of the window. Throughout it all, my mechanical heartbeat has barely quickened. Somewhere out there, Tila is in her cell, and her heartbeat is more or less in time with mine.
“What does it say?” Nazarin asks. He’s close to me now, but his voice is gentle, and his breath puffs on the back of my neck, smelling of spearmint. But the gentleness is a ruse—underneath he’s all steel.
I could lie. Tell him it means something else, and they’d never be able to follow the path any further. Then I could try and do it on my own. But I wouldn’t be able to, would I? If Tila is involved with the Ratel, then I don’t know the first thing about how to deal with them.
Nazarin does.
“‘MIA,’” I say, still turned to the window. My breath mists the glass. With a fingertip, I write the letters in our secret alphabet.
“And what’s that? Missing in Action?”
“It’s not a what. It’s a who. Mia. The woman who took us in after we left the Hearth.”
“Why do you think she wrote that name? Where can we find her?”
I shrug, wrapping my arms around myself. I want to go home and close my eyes and wake up and have everything fixed.
“She’s an apostate of the Hearth. Like us. She got Tila into hostessing. Used to be one of the best in the city. But now she’s a Zealot. We can find her at the Mirage in the Mission district.”
“That’s a shithole.”
“Yeah. But the Ratel haven’t tampered with the Zeal there and replaced it with Verve?” I ask.
“Not that I know. Fuck.” He rubs his hand over his shaved head. “If they have, it’s dangerous to go there. Someone could be watching.”
I say nothing.
“She’ll be there now?”
“She’s always there.”
“Then let’s go.”
Nazarin accesses his implant, and the crime scene hologram disintegrates into nothing.
* * *
When people think of Zeal, they don’t think of the dark, dingy Zealot lounges. They think of brainloading. They think of the bright, shiny lounges in the nice parts of the city, a place for people to go to let out a little steam and return to the real world, refreshed. They think of the drug that
keeps the city largely crime-free, and provides a little fun along the way; all thanks to Sudice, Incorporated. The company I used to work for, along with so many other people in San Francisco. I’ve never thought before about how many tendrils the company has within the city, and how much the government owes it for its many inventions.
Those dark Zealot lounges, though; those, most of the city tries not to think about, and they do a very good job of forgetting. They don’t sit and imagine those who might be the worst criminals, serial killers or rapists or abusers, locked in the Zealscapes, too out of it when they come out to think about anything except plugging in again. The people who go there have dreams so dark they don’t dare go to the beautiful lounges. They say the government can’t properly eavesdrop on dreams, not in great detail—but not everyone believes that. So they go underground.
Mirage is one of the worst Zealot lounges, and that’s where we head in the hope of finding Mia.
Mia. I haven’t seen her in a year and a half. She took us in when we left the Hearth. She was like a second mother, or an aunt. We lived with her for years—the only other Hearth apostate, or at least the only one we met. We loved her, and she loved us, but she was always troubled. In and out of the nicer Zealot lounges, but when her Zealscapes became darker, police showed up at our door. She cleaned up her act until she almost seemed like the Mia we knew when we first came to her.
After the last time she relapsed, and disappeared to an off-grid Zealot lounge, both Tila and I washed our hands of her—at least, I thought we both did. It wasn’t easy, but I couldn’t watch her self-destruct. She turned down all my efforts of help, of therapy, of rehab. There was no going back for her. Not this time.
I still felt guilty about that, but I couldn’t help her if she wasn’t willing to help herself.
Nazarin thankfully has the night off with the Ratel, though he’ll be there all day tomorrow. There’s still a chance we could be recognized if the Ratel have visited Mirage before. We’re both wearing masks, like a temporary visit to a flesh parlor. They fit perfectly over our features, light enough not to be noticed but enough to trick the camera drones, and we can peel them off when we wish. There’s a small chance the orderlies might notice, if they look too close, but so many there are overworked and underpaid, I think we’ll be all right. My mask itches.
We take the MUNI down to the Mission district. By the time we arrive, night has fallen. The streets here are full of wavering holographic ads. They assault the senses as we walk down the street: men and women wearing next to nothing, displaying their wares, licking their lips suggestively and calling out to us what they’re offering. Loud, tinny music blares from each of them in a cacophony. If anyone still had epilepsy these days, they’d have to avoid this whole neighborhood. I feel the beginnings of a headache flaring at my temples. Shielding my eyes with my hand, I make my way through the glare, Detective Nazarin at my side.
The ads grow darker, more reds and blacks and deep blues. They flicker, leaving the streets in darkness but for the street lights. There’s no sense of welcome. The people who come here want only the dreams they’re too afraid to dream in a proper Zeal lounge.
Mirage is at the end of the street. An ad of a palm tree in a desert ripples over the front of the building. A stone sphinx wavers in the distance, and as we watch, it opens its mouth and yawns before gazing at us mysteriously. The windows are shuttered. I don’t want to enter.
In that building I know there are dozens of people strapped into Chairs, wires poking from their veins, their eyelids twitching as they live out their dreams.
I wonder what causes some people to favor more violent dreams than others. Some say that people who are predisposed to crime have different brains, like damage to the prefrontal cortex. That means that the two hemispheres of the brain can’t communicate properly, and aggressive impulses are in overdrive. Ticking time bombs.
I never bought that, but it’s the endless question of nature versus nurture. Free will versus predestination.
Sudice developed Zeal at first as a virtual reality game in which to act out fantasies. They discovered the extra benefit by accident, that if people acted out violent urges, when they came out, vicious tendencies were dampened. The neural pathways are reworked, suppressing the amygdala, or the prehistoric “lizard” brain we’ve had since we crawled out of the ocean. It worked on those with so-called violent brains, and those without. Overall, people were calmer, happier. Perfect citizens. Zeal lounges became all the rage.
Sometimes I wondered what Mana-ma would have to say about all that.
The first time doing Zeal is a rite of passage, one my sister and I missed. When we tried it later, it was anticlimactic. All the dreams seemed but pale echoes of what we saw during Meditation back at the Hearth, or when we closed our eyes each night.
“The government and Sudice are both terrified of Verve, aren’t they?” I ask.
“Yes.”
“The same drug, but stronger, more powerful, a better high and people wake up not calmer, but angrier. More prone to lash out. San Francisco has peace now, but how peaceful would it be if people weren’t kept dampened by Zeal?”
I wonder if I’m pushing too far, saying that. It sounds critical of the government, his employers. Nazarin only smiles sadly. “I don’t want to find out, do you?”
I don’t say the other thing I’ve wondered, from all the information I’ve brainloaded: what happens if the government gets hold of Verve? Dangerous as it is, it lets people see into others’ dreams remotely. And what if there’s more it can do?
“How did the Ratel develop Verve?” I ask.
“We think it’s Ensi himself who designed it. The genesis is from Zeal. He took it and twisted it somehow. The man is a genius.”
“And where did he come from?”
“That’s the question, isn’t it?”
“How deep do the Ratel run?” I ask out loud, more to myself than to Nazarin, but he answers.
“Deep. They’ve got their little tendrils everywhere. Right now, in a way we’re fighting a losing battle. Getting rid of the Ratel completely will likely never happen. What we have to do is have the upper hand, choke off their stronghold before Verve becomes too widespread.”
I understand. “And the easiest way to do that is to get to Ensi. Cut off the head.”
He gives me a sidelong glance. “Exactly. This is the best chance we have.”
A sentence from one of the captured men in my brainloads comes back to me: There are some who don’t agree with Ensi. Some who want him dead. It had seemed obvious to me—of course every organization has those who resent their leaders. The Hearth taught me that. But now I wonder if there’s more. “Unrest?”
“Yeah. That’s my primary goal. I’m seeing who might be thinking of causing trouble and gently encouraging them, but in a way they don’t suspect me as the cause. Division will make it easier to find a chink in their organization. Not easy, let me tell you.”
I rub my temples, the flashing lights of Mirage getting to me. “This keeps getting more and more complicated.”
“That’s how I’ve felt ever since I went undercover. The deeper you go, the crazier everything seems to be.”
“But you’ve still never met Ensi.”
“No. I’m too much of a Knight. There’s an upcoming party they’ve invited me to, though, this weekend. He’s meant to be there. After two years, I might finally meet him.”
“I’m not sure how much I’ll be able to help with all of this.”
“To be honest, a lot of it depends on how far Tila has delved into the inner circle. The fact she rose to working in the Verve lounge so quickly is impressive, but it’s difficult to see the bigger picture. Sometimes she seems to be a relatively little fish, despite being a dreamsifter, but other times I suspect she’s almost reached upper management.”
A shiver runs down my spine, and my flesh breaks out into goosebumps. Tila not only involved with the Ratel, but in deep? Without telling me, wit
hout asking for my help. Why has she done this in the first place? What does she hope to gain? Money? Tila’s never struck me as greedy, not in that way. What, though, do I really know about her? She’s been living a whole different life. I bite back a sob.
“Let’s go see what this Mia can tell us, if anything,” he says.
“And if she’s plugged in, we have to go in? Instead of waiting for her to come out?” That’s the part that gives me the biggest pause. I don’t want to go into her dreams and see what her deepest, darkest desires are. I had a secondhand view, watching her relapse, and that was awful enough. Zealscapes can be unpredictable—especially, I hear, in these off-grid lounges. For some, they’re almost like the real world. For others, they’re twisted nightmares. I fear Mia’s will be more like the latter.
“Depends on how long she has left. If she has more than twelve hours, we can’t wait that long.”
“And if we do go into the Zealscape, you think I’ll be able to lucid dream,” I say, looking nervously at the entrance to Mirage. Most of the time, when people plug into other people’s dreams, they’re carried along helplessly by the other person’s fantasy. They can’t really change much. It’s why most people do it alone. Nazarin hopes if I can lucid dream I might be able to affect things, at least a little. The problem is, lucid dreaming might not always change the reality in a way you’d like.
“Yes. This serves two purposes. Question Mia in the Zealscape, if we must, and see how you fare within the dreams. I’m certain you’ll be able to manipulate things, judging by how you’ve integrated the brainload.”
“Maybe.” I’m noncommittal. And frightened. Years of training at the Hearth—it should be easy. I have flashbacks to those shared dreams. I can almost taste the bitterness of the drug as Mana-ma gently placed it on my outstretched tongue.
“Will it hurt?” I ask. I remember so much pain. And mental pain is so much more painful than the physical.
“It hasn’t hurt me.”
“And you haven’t become addicted?” That’s another fear. I only tried Zeal once or twice, but it was years ago. What if I’ve changed since? What if I go into the Zealscape and come out of it to discover my brain is flawed and that I’ll want nothing more than to go back in? It’s a stupid fear, perhaps. I’ve seen scans of my own brain. I know all synapses fire normally. That doesn’t mean I couldn’t still love the violence. That doesn’t mean I couldn’t grow to need it.