Dark Mind Rising

by Julia Keller

  And that was one of the reasons why she hung out at Redshift, night after night, and she danced and she laughed and she flirted and she tried to jump-start other feelings in herself, feelings that would equal in intensity what she’d once felt for this guy.

  The guy standing in front of her right now, the guy whose face she couldn’t see very well anymore because of the darkness. But she didn’t need to see his features. She knew them so very, very well. She knew how he looked when he was sad, so she knew how he looked right then.

  “I don’t know what happened, Kendall,” she said. “You’re my friend, though, okay? Always.”

  It was not what he wanted to hear. But he wouldn’t push her. She knew that.

  “Okay,” he said. His tone changed. It was brusque now. All business. “I’ve got to get back to the station. And get in touch with Rez.”

  “And I’ve got a case to work on.” She had checked her messages during the drive to the park. There were a bunch of annoying ones from Jonetta, who had rattled on and on about dozens of different things, things that Violet just had to take care of right away—but the one on the top of the heap was this: Charlotte Bainbridge wanted Violet to stop by tonight. No matter how late it was.

  That was where she was headed next.

  19

  The Peanut Butter Principle

  Jeff Bainbridge never took his eyes off his plate. He didn’t eat a single thing during Violet’s visit, but he sat in his chair at the kitchen table and stared at the food. His mother had made his favorite nighttime snack—saltine crackers with lots of peanut butter—and he studied the square crackers and the tufted tan gobs as if the whole thing constituted a dense mathematical code he was solely responsible for cracking.

  Peanut butter.

  Stepping into the brightly lit Bainbridge kitchen right behind Charlotte, Violet paused when she saw Jeff’s plate. She remembered the first time her mother had introduced her to peanut butter.

  She was probably four years old. They sat on the balcony in red chairs, her mother’s big chair and Violet’s small one, and they watched the light along the horizon of New Earth. The slow withdrawal of the sun’s radiance left behind a watery trail of pink and bronze. This may be a fancy new world filled with wonders aplenty, Lucretia Crowley had said, but the most wonderful thing of all is still peanut butter. Here, sweetheart. Taste this.

  Lucretia smiled and handed her half a piece of toast on a small plate. Swirled atop the bread was some kind of brown stuff.

  Violet touched the substance with her tongue. Let some of it hang around in her mouth. Delicious. Like a kind of salty ribbon of deep flavor. She eagerly licked the rest of it off and wadded the crunchy bread and popped it in her mouth. She handed the plate back to her mother. More, please, she said. Lucretia laughed.

  Violet could still hear that gentle laugh echoing in the caverns of her mind. Her mother’s love rose up and encircled her all over again.

  * * *

  If this were two years ago, Violet realized, the Intercept would have been whirling and churning at this point, registering the intense memory—the one with peanut butter and a mother’s love. Then later, if Violet broke the law, the memory would quickly be sent back into her brain. Because this kind of moment—sweet and joyous and gone forever—could bring you to your knees.

  But the Intercept was gone.

  “Would you like something to eat?” Charlotte asked.

  Violet shook her head. She’d finally managed to stop staring at Jeff’s plate. No wonder her client had the wrong idea. “I’m good.”

  “Well, then,” Charlotte said. “Let’s sit down. I’m glad you could come by. I heard about the explosion. I’m so relieved you and your assistant weren’t hurt.” As soon as they had settled around the table, she pulled a note from her pocket. It had been crumpled at one point, as if someone had tried to throw it away and smoothed back out again.

  “Naturally, the police searched Amelia’s room,” Charlotte said. “They didn’t find anything. But this morning I was doing the laundry. I came across Amelia’s jeans in the hamper. And in the pocket, I found … this.”

  Violet was aware of a sudden sinking feeling. If this was a suicide note, then the case was over. Charlotte would dismiss her. And to her surprise, Violet realized that her disappointment wasn’t just about the loss of revenue. It was about Amelia herself; she didn’t want to believe that the young woman had been responsible for her own death.

  “I think Amelia intended to throw it away,” Charlotte continued, “but she couldn’t. She knew it might be important. But she also wanted it out of her sight.” The woman took a deep breath. “It’s a page from her journal. She had ripped it out. It’s from last week.” She handed it to Violet.

  It’s not my fault. I’ve tried and tried to explain that. But I just can’t make any progress. It’s not about me at all. I had nothing to do with it.

  “And this is definitely Amelia’s handwriting?” Violet asked.

  “Oh, yes. She didn’t want to keep a digital journal. She liked the old-fashioned kind. This page is from the one I bought for her right after her father died. She needed to write down her feelings. Losing her dad was very, very hard.” Charlotte reached over and tucked a cloud of Jeff’s frizzy hair behind his ear. He didn’t react at all. “It was hard for all of us, of course. Right, Jeff?”

  The boy nodded slowly. Eyes still on the peanut butter.

  Violet said, “Any idea what she’s talking about in this note? When she says, ‘It’s not my fault’? And who is she trying to explain it to?”

  “No clue.” Charlotte was still watching Jeff. She nudged the plate closer to him. “Sweetie? Aren’t you hungry? You hardly ate any dinner.”

  He shook his head.

  “Clearly,” Violet said, “someone was bothering your daughter. I wonder why she didn’t want to share it. You two were close, right?”

  “We talked all the time,” Charlotte said. “Amelia knew she could tell me anything.”

  Jeff had made a small noise. Violet thought it was a hiccough, or a burp, but then he repeated it.

  “What?” Charlotte said.

  He murmured the word again: Scared.

  His mother leaned closer to him. “Jeff, what are you saying? If you know something about what your sister was going through, I hope you will—”

  He jumped up from his chair, knocking it over behind him. His voice was husky. “She was scared, okay? She was really, really scared.” He was breathing hard and fast, and when Charlotte tried to reach out and pull him closer, he squirmed away. “She didn’t want anybody to know. But I caught her crying one day. I asked her what was wrong. She said, ‘You wouldn’t understand.’ I’d never seen her scared before. She was brave, okay? Really brave. Like Amelia Earhart.”

  Charlotte reached out and took Jeff’s hand. She held it, and with her eyes she coaxed him to sit down again. Finally, he did.

  “Yes,” Charlotte said in a low, soothing voice. “She really was brave. Just like Amelia Earhart.” She turned to Violet. “It was my husband’s idea to name her Amelia. He wanted her to have a bond with all the strong women who had lived before her, back on Old Earth.”

  Jeff had settled down. Violet wanted to get more information from him and figured it was okay to do so.

  “Any idea who she was scared of? Even a guess?”

  He shook his head.

  “Okay,” Violet said. “Were there any changes in her behavior? In her daily routine?”

  Another negative head shake.

  Violet was running out of ideas. “Jonetta checked her console,” she said, turning back to Charlotte. “The only calls Amelia made or received for the past few months were from the list you gave us—her friends and teachers. And you and Jeff. No unknown callers.”

  “So whoever was frightening her must have been someone she already knew and saw in person,” Charlotte said. “But who?”

  Restless, Charlotte abruptly rose from her chair. She paced back and fo
rth. “New Earth wasn’t supposed to be like this. It was supposed to be a safe place. But if something like this could happen…”

  The unfinished sentence hung in the air, menacing and mournful.

  20

  Olde Earth World

  Violet was astonished. Totally, utterly astonished.

  She knew Rez was good with computers, but this was … this was way beyond talent. And way beyond computers.

  This was art.

  Rez had sent the sketches to her console very early the next morning, when it was still dark outside. Violet knew the exact moment when the message arrived, even though her console was on vibrate, because she was already awake.

  An hour ago, she’d finally given up on sleep. All night long, she had thrashed and flailed, her dreams infused with the terrible image of children plunging into bottomless chasms, their screams bouncing against the sides. After one last appalling dream, Violet stopped chasing after sleep; she lay in bed, staring at a ceiling she couldn’t see. Part of the sheet was wound around her torso, and another part was bunched behind her knees. A third part was looped around her right foot.

  Maybe I’ll never get out of bed again. Yeah, I’ll just stay right here until I starve to death, and they’ll find my rotting corpse and the smell will be so gross that—

  Her console made no sound, but a muted orange jewel rose an inch from the screen. She retrieved it from her bedside table. An auxiliary jewel—it was a sort of azure—was attached to the main one. She touched it.

  And there it was.

  Violet felt a tingling in her fingertips—the same tingling she had felt, two long years ago, when she was first falling in love. The same tingling she still felt when she looked at one of Shura’s paintings.

  The tingling made her feel life—her own life, and the life of the world around her, the earnest flow and the constant turnings—lifting up inside her like a private sunrise.

  For the moment, she didn’t mind all the crap that was going on. She didn’t mind the weirdness with Kendall. She didn’t mind the fact that she couldn’t figure out the meaning of the page from Amelia Bainbridge’s journal. She didn’t mind the fact that she still didn’t know what linked the suicides. Or the fact that she’d just spent two sleepless hours obsessing over who might be trying to bring back the Intercept.

  All she cared about was the sketch that shimmered just above her console screen, a three-dimensional holographic image so gorgeous that it gave her goose bumps.

  It was a rendering of the roller coaster Rez dreamed of building. But it wasn’t like any roller coaster Violet had ever seen before. Even though it was not a video, the picture seemed to move. The sides were made of crisscrossing steel beams that made the track undulate like a dark sinuous eel, curving up to a bucking crescendo and then suddenly breaking off, leaving only a steep drop and a fierce sweep of pure mystery. The coaster track dissolved into the horizon …

  … and then—whoosh!—it abruptly split from that same horizon, diving and turning in an elegant tangle of angled steel and twisted iron, swimming in and out of the horizon’s powdery smudge of light and diminishing landscape.

  There were no cars on this coaster track. Those would come later. For now, it was a track, a pathway, a direction, an idea; it was a swooping staircase that steadily escalated toward the unfolding promise of tomorrow.

  By now, she was sitting up in bed. She couldn’t take her eyes off the screen.

  Her console chirped. Rez was phoning. He had to know if she’d seen the coaster.

  “I didn’t wake you up, did I?” he said. The sketch whisked away, replaced by an image of his somber face and dark glittering eyes. He looked tired but happy. He’d clearly been working long and hard on his plans for Olde Earth World. “I set it to go into your Storage Jewel if you didn’t acknowledge the signal. So you’d get it later.”

  “I’m awake.”

  “Good. So what do you think?”

  “I think … I think it’s the best thing ever,” Violet said. Not very specific, but she couldn’t come up with anything else. She had to let him know how much she loved the coaster, but the right words seemed just out of reach. “I guess I thought it would be more like a regular sketch. Just pencil lines. Without all the color and light and … and imagination.” Her breathing was returning to normal. “It’s absolutely great, Rez. How did you—”

  “Hang on.” The screen went gray for a second, and when the image resolved itself, Rez wasn’t alone anymore. Shura stood beside him. “She helped,” he said, pointing at Shura.

  Violet was surprised, but this time, the surprise included a crease of annoyance. Shura hadn’t said a word about going to Old Earth. They didn’t send console messages back and forth every hour or so like they used to do, but if her best friend was working on a project with Rez, well, naturally she’d expect to get a heads-up about it.

  “Hey, girl,” Shura said.

  “Hey. So—you and Rez.”

  Truth was, Violet realized, she should have known Shura was involved, from the moment she saw the picture. Those colors, the way they zipped and blended—that was pure Shura. Choosing between art and medicine had been the most important decision of Shura’s life. Violet understood why her friend had decided to become a doctor, but she still mourned the loss of the paintings that would never be. Shura was that good.

  Shura shrugged. “Sort of. I had to be down here for a few days, anyway, for my research on viruses. I ran into Rez. He told me his idea. I think it’s pretty cool. Oh, and I heard about the trigger-trap. Glad you’re okay.”

  “Yeah,” Violet said. “I’m totally fine.”

  Some other feeling was pulling at her. She couldn’t name it. Well, maybe she could, but it didn’t make any sense.

  Was it possible that she was—and here Violet wanted to scoff at the very thought—jealous of Shura? Because Shura was spending time with Rez?

  Oh, come on. Get a grip.

  Rez leaned his head into the console picture again. “I’ve got tons more sketches to show you, Violet. The Ferris wheel is going to be amazing. And there’s a hoverboard ride around the melting ice caps and a ride that goes through areas made uninhabitable by radioactive wastes—I’m inventing a sealed-off car, so it’s perfectly safe—and there’s a—”

  “Okay, Rez. Okay.”

  “Just wanted you to understand the scope of this,” he said. “Now that I can do quantum computing, it’s all going to come together very fast.”

  “Speaking of fast,” Shura said, “I have to get going. I left some experiments running in my lab.”

  “Okay,” Violet said. “See you around.” Neutral voice.

  “Yeah. See you around.” Shura’s image vanished from Violet’s console.

  Rez had moved over so that his face would occupy more of the screen. “You really like it?” he asked.

  Violet had never seen him so curious about anybody’s reaction to what he created. Usually Rez didn’t care what you thought. He did what he did.

  “It looks fantastic,” Violet said.

  He beamed with pleasure. She’d never seen Rez beam before. Another change.

  “As long as I have something to work on,” he said, “I think I’ll be able to stand it. My parole. At first, I wasn’t sure. When I thought about how much time I had left, I got so upset that I—”

  He didn’t finish his sentence. Violet was sort of glad he didn’t; it was hard to see her friend in emotional distress.

  “Anyway,” Rez said, moving on, “it’s easier now. I have Olde Earth World to design.”

  “One question.”

  “Okay.”

  “I know these rides are cool, Rez, but it’s still Old Earth. I mean, it’s still a pretty gross place, right? Depressing? And violent? Are people really going to enjoy rides that take them through polluted oceans and across melting ice caps? Won’t they be too freaked out to have fun?”

  He didn’t look upset by the question, as Violet feared he might. He nodded tboughtfully.
He even gave her a hint of a smile—again, a very un-Rez-like thing to do.

  “I worried about that, too,” he said. “And then I found this quotation from an Old Earth writer. His name was Oscar Wilde. He said, ‘It was like feasting with panthers; the danger was half the excitement.’ That’s what I think about Olde Earth World—the danger is half the excitement.”

  It made sense in a funny, twisted, Rez-like way. “Maybe it’ll work,” she said. “And no matter what, that coaster’s going to be gorgeous.”

  She had another question for him. If he hadn’t called her today, she was going to call him; she had to know the answer. Kendall hadn’t asked him yet about the Intercept; if he had, Rez would have already told her about it.

  “Hey,” she said, using her best fake-casual voice. “Remember when you told me it looked like somebody might be trying to get the Intercept up and running again?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Any more signs of that?”

  “Nope.”

  Relief. Violet started to sign off. Maybe she’d get a few hours of sleep after all.

  “But,” Rez added, “I haven’t checked in a day or so. Now that I can do quantum computing, I don’t have to use a back channel anymore. The old one where nobody goes unless they have to. It’s like a dirt road. After somebody puts down a nice, shiny, new one, you don’t use the crummy one.”

  So he hadn’t kept tabs. It might still be happening. Violet’s relief was replaced by anxiety. Or rather re-replaced.

  “If somebody was trying to restore the Intercept,” Violet said, “how technologically savvy would they have to be?”

  “Very.”

  “Meaning…?”

  “Meaning that anybody below the genius level would be out of luck.”

  The relief came back again. Her dad once showed her a video of him playing a game called Ping-Pong. Her sudden mood swings felt like the little white ball, zinging back and forth over a net.