Dark Mind Rising

by Julia Keller

  “Okay, great,” she said.

  “But.”

  “But?”

  “But if somebody was trying to fire up the Intercept again, it would be hard to tell. Once they cracked the outer shell of the code, the rest of the operation wouldn’t leave any traces. It was the initial breach that caught my attention.”

  Her mood slumped once again. Violet wasn’t sure how much more emotional ping-ponging she could take.

  “Okay,” she said.

  Time for truth. She had to ask him a serious, important question—the second-most serious, important question she had ever asked him. The first was two years ago, when she’d had to ask him if he had hacked her father’s Intercept file. The answer was yes.

  Now she had to do it again—ask a question that she really didn’t want the answer to. But she had to do it. She needed to put all of her energy into investigating Amelia Bainbridge’s death, and the deaths of the other three, and as long as this Intercept business was hanging out there, she was distracted. She couldn’t do her job.

  She had to know.

  “Rez,” she said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Is it you?”

  “Is it me what?”

  “Are you the one who’s trying to get the Intercept up and running again?”

  His image on the screen changed. Now he was peering at her the way he might look at a peculiar insect that had survived Old Earth radiation but grown an extra head and four hundred new legs in the process. At first, he seemed incredulous, then half-amused, then upset. “Why would you think that—”

  “Because you told me about it in the first place. Which would be a perfect way to deflect suspicion from yourself. And because you’re a genius with computers. You’d be capable of doing this, unlike just about everybody else on New or Old Earth. And because—”

  “Because why?”

  Because you were in love with me once, and I didn’t love you back, and so you did something sneaky and mean to retaliate—and maybe you’re still in love with me. Maybe this is just another way to get back at me.

  Bringing the Intercept back to life.

  Another voice in her head pushed back.

  So if Rez did it, then how did he get the pages? The ones that Kendall has been keeping under lock and key? The ones he’d need to get a new Intercept off the ground? How? Rez can’t leave Old Earth. It’s a condition of his parole.

  All she said out loud was this: “I don’t know. That’s why I’m asking. And I’m hoping you’ll be straight up with me. Because we’re friends.”

  The face on Violet’s console screen was deadly serious.

  “The truth,” Rez said in a slow, measured voice, as if he wanted to make damned sure she understood him, “is that I wouldn’t bring it back even if I did know how to do it. But I don’t. I swear, Violet. It’s not me.”

  She believed him.

  “Okay,” she said. “Just so you know, though, Kendall’s going to be asking you about it, too.”

  “Why? Wait—it’s obvious.” In a bitter voice, Rez went on. “He’s trying to get me into trouble again, right? It’s like he thinks there’s only room for one genius at a time.”

  “That’s not fair, Rez. He got you the approval to do quantum computing.”

  “Yeah, whatever.” He signed off.

  Violet jumped out of bed and started getting dressed. All at once, she was feeling pretty good. Better, at least, than she’d felt for days. Now that she knew who wasn’t trying to revive the Intercept, she could start to figure out who was. Or maybe she wouldn’t have to. Maybe the culprit had backed off. Gone back into hiding. And now she was free to focus on her case—the one she was actually being paid to work on. Jonetta was making some real headway. And Violet was thrilled that Rez’s ideas for Old Earth were soaring. Olde Earth World was going to be a real thing. Not even the petty feud between the two men in her life could dent her good mood.

  She was marginally hopeful again. Faintly optimistic.

  Which was why, when the terrible thing happened the very next day, it hit Violet so hard. Hope had softened her up, encouraged her to lower her natural defenses. She had made herself utterly vulnerable.

  And so her heartbreak was even greater.

  21

  A Last Glimpse

  It felt like a … well, it felt like a twitch.

  The briefest flicker, located behind her right eyeball.

  Twitch.

  Just plain weird.

  Delia opened her front door. Maybe some fresh air would help. She waved at a young woman walking by on the other side of the street. The woman didn’t wave back, but the snub couldn’t affect Delia’s good mood. Because the morning felt freshly rinsed and clean, just as most mornings on New Earth did.

  She missed sitting outside. She had done that frequently on Old Earth, even if it meant plopping down in the dirt. The air back there might smell foul and the horizon might be awash in smoke and flame, but Delia didn’t care about any of that. She liked the outdoors. She liked the feel of the sun on her skin.

  Here on New Earth, however, sitting in the dirt was not an option. For one thing, all she had was this tiny, sparkling-green lawn. No dirt in sight.

  She closed the door.

  Tin Man was still asleep. She had passed his room when she walked toward the kitchen, pulling his door shut so that he could get his rest. He never came home before three or four A.M. and often slept until just before dinnertime, when he would rise and start the ritual over again: leave for work in the evening, work until the wee hours, and then return home to sling his tired body into bed for a long, restorative slug of sleep.

  Her son was eighteen now. A grown man. Living with his mom wasn’t the ideal situation—Delia had no illusions about that—but for now, he had no choice. He didn’t have enough money to live on his own. Frankly, she loved having her son around.

  Twitch.

  She frowned. She’d had a good night’s sleep, so this weird squirmy thing in her head didn’t make any sense. Maybe she needed more coffee. In the kitchen, she stood by the small window while she drank another cup. She loved looking at the distant hills from this window.

  Twitch.

  Molly had loved hills.

  Delia’s hand flew to her forehead. Whoa, she thought. Where did that come from?

  It was true, though. Nobody loved running up and down hills more than her daughter, Molly. Hills were her favorite, but mostly she’d had to run through ugly alleys stacked with garbage and stewing with rats that were almost as big as she was. Hills were a special treat. And yet Molly loved to run, no matter where she was.

  But why was Delia thinking about Molly now? She took great pains not to think about her, except under carefully controlled circumstances. Otherwise, she simply got too sad. Mind-numbingly sad. Darkly, deeply depressed. Sometimes, as a precaution, Delia temporarily took down Molly’s portrait in the living room. There were days when the picture was too much. It made the loss too real. So she had to be careful. She had to ration the amount of Molly-memory she released into her thoughts.

  Twitch.

  Twitch.

  With every twitch—and by now Delia believed that twitch was the perfect word for what she was feeling, for that funny crinkly thing that kept happening behind her eyes—the picture of Molly in her brain became clearer, more detailed, than even Shura’s wonderful portrait. The colors popped: Molly’s yellow hair, blue eyes, raspberry-pink cheeks.

  Twitch.

  Her little girl was gone. She’d never see her again. No matter what else happened in Delia’s life, the one thing that would not happen, that could not happen, was seeing her daughter even one more time.

  Not even once.

  She wanted to … to scream. Yes. That was it. Delia wanted to throw back her head and let out a long animal howl, because she missed her little girl so much.

  She wanted to let it out.

  But she was already screaming. The screaming had started inside her head—inside t
he twitch, really—and by now it was a giant vortex of accelerating sound, rising, climbing, widening out.

  Delia dropped her coffee cup. It shattered against the tile floor. She swayed back and forth, grabbing the edge of the counter to try to steady herself.

  The scream was louder now.

  Molly was gone, gone forever, and there was a hollowness at the heart of the world, a great empty cave through which ancient winds rushed and sighed with nothing to get in their way.

  I’ll never see her again. My Molly. My child.

  Frantic, feeling her soul fill up with grief and pain, Delia yanked open the drawer in which she kept the utensils. She pawed madly through the contents: spatula, slotted spoon, ice cream scoop—there. Yes. There it was.

  The knife.

  She pulled it out by its hard black handle. The screaming was so loud now that it was drowning out everything, destroying it all—not only the thoughts in her head but the pictures, too. The screaming was shattering the pictures, raking them off the walls of her mind, ripping them apart. And that was exactly what Delia wanted, what Delia needed; those pictures must be eliminated. Molly running, Molly laughing—she had to cut those pictures out of her memory, out of her body itself. Or else she would die from sadness.

  And that was why Delia had to do it.

  She had to get rid of the pictures. And if she got rid of the pictures, she could get rid of the screaming.

  So much pain. Molly died in pain. I couldn’t help her. She looked at me—asking me with her eyes to relieve her pain—and I couldn’t.

  Delia was small, but she was strong. Old Earth had made her strong.

  My little girl—suffering. Suffering like no one has ever suffered before.

  Delia jammed the knife at the point on her left wrist where the vessels seemed plump and ready, fat with blood, and then she pulled the knife out again with a fierce jerk and she plunged it right back in again. This time, she dragged it back all the way to her elbow.

  The pain was vast and tremendous. She smiled.

  The screaming subsided, and one word emerged, like the lone survivor of a shipwreck.

  Molly.

  22

  Epiphany

  Violet could not understand a word Tin Man was saying. She tried adjusting the clarity enhancer on her console—he had called her on an audio channel, with no video feed—but it didn’t work. His agitation caused the words to come across as one long, anguished sentence in which sounds slid and bobbed and stretched and banged against each other, making no sense.

  FoundherbloodydeadOhGodOhGodOh

  “Slow down,” she urged him. “Please. I can’t—”

  Someone else’s voice took over. Tin Man must have handed off his console. The woman’s voice was crisp.

  “This is Captain Marlene Bowers of New Earth Security Service. Mr. Tolliver is being taken care of. He is experiencing considerable emotional distress. Would you be able to come over to the Tolliver home?”

  “What’s going on?” Violet said. She’d been having lunch at her desk while she reviewed the Bainbridge case, double-checking what she’d learned from Charlotte Bainbridge. She jumped to her feet. “What’s happening? Where’s Delia?”

  “As I said, ma’am, Mr. Tolliver is—”

  “Ma’am?” Violet shot back in an incredulous voice. No one called her ma’am. She was eighteen years old, for God’s sake.

  And then Violet realized that what some cop called her during a brief console call could be safely filed under Things That Don’t Matter Right Now Because My Friend Is In Trouble.

  “Sorry,” Violet said. “Just tell him I’m on my way. I’ll get there as fast as I can.”

  But it didn’t matter.

  It didn’t matter how fast she traveled. As she was to discover, it wouldn’t have mattered if she had gotten there in ten seconds or ten minutes or ten years. By the time Violet arrived at the little cottage, it had been over for some time.

  Two ReadyRobs were carrying Delia’s sheet-covered body out on a stretcher. Tin Man followed behind, stumbling and shaking, reaching out his hands, and sobbing so hard that his breathing had become a harsh rattle.

  “Violet!” he cried out when he saw her. “Violet! I found her in the kitchen … she … she had … How could she…”

  He staggered, nearly falling to the ground. Violet helped prop him up. Tin Man was much heavier than she was, but somehow she was able to keep him standing, staving off total collapse. Then she embraced him. Violet forgot about being a bad hugger and she held him, letting him weep, feeling his big body shudder.

  The ReadyRobs finished loading the stretcher in the van. When they closed and latched the doors and signaled to the driver that it was time to pull away, Tin Man let out a howl so immense that Violet was afraid he was losing his mind. He let her lead him back inside the house. She guided him to a seat on the couch.

  “What happened?” she asked quietly. She sat down beside him, keeping a hand on his arm. It was the only thing she could think of to do.

  “I was sleeping. I can’t believe I was … I was sleeping, Violet! My mother was in such emotional agony, and I was asleep. I’m so mad at myself. I’ll never—” Tin Man pulled his wrist across his mouth to clear away the spit. “I’ll never forgive myself. She’d used a knife to … to cut herself. Over and over again. Her wrist, her arm. By the time I found her, she was bleeding to death. No—she’d already bled to death. She was—” A storm of weeping forced Tin Man to stop his story.

  “Was she upset about something?” Violet said. “Extra-upset, I mean?” She added the qualifier because Delia had once told her that anybody who hailed from Old Earth was always sad. Sadness was the baseline. Sadness was a given in that broken, harrowing place, and even coming to New Earth couldn’t ever quite displace it. Delia had prided herself on keeping her own sadness at a manageable level, deflecting it with smart-ass jokes and a jaunty attitude. She didn’t want her sadness to get out of hand. Part of that, she said, was sheer angry defiance; she never wanted to give the Intercept the satisfaction of an intense feeling.

  “No,” Tin Man replied, roaring the word. “No, no, no. She seemed … she was fine, Violet. She was looking forward to so much. She was happier than she’d been in a long time. She was just starting to enjoy life on New Earth.” He put his face in his hands. Then he raised it again. “I know she was happy,” he went on. “I know it for a fact. Because I called her just after midnight. From work. If I’d only known that it was the last time I would ever—” He shook his head. He had to go on. “I needed to tell her I was going to be late. There was a private party at Redshift and they wanted extra security. We only talked for a few minutes, but I told her something else, too.

  “I told her I’d made up my mind. I was leaving the club. Coming to work for you. And she was thrilled, Violet. Totally thrilled.” He uttered a low, puzzled moan. “So when did she decide she didn’t want to live anymore? How would such an idea even occur to her?”

  Violet listened. As she listened, a dark suspicion stirred in her mind.

  She didn’t want to think it. She was afraid to think it.

  But it made sense. It was the only thing that did make sense.

  She swallowed hard. She let a few seconds go by.

  Was she sure? She shouldn’t say it if she wasn’t sure.

  First, she needed to ask him a question. “Did Delia ever remove her Intercept chip?”

  “What? No, she tried once—we all tried—but it didn’t work. You saw the scar. The infection almost killed her.”

  Okay, then. Yes, Violet thought. I’m sure.

  “The idea didn’t just pop up in her mind,” Violet said, choosing her words carefully. “The idea was inserted there. Deliberately.” The same way a terrible idea had been slotted in the minds of Amelia Bainbridge and Wendell Prokop and the Wilton twins.

  Violet had been working under the assumption that these were two separate investigations: the suicides that might not be suicides at all—and the po
ssible revival of the Intercept.

  But now she knew. They were linked. They had to be linked.

  Someone had found the perfect way to make despondency blossom in someone’s mind. To make death desirable. To make it seem like sweet relief.

  Only one device ever created could force its way into people’s brains that way, jamming their synapses with vivid memories, lurid visions, devastating emotions.

  Only one device could commandeer thoughts so that they would attack the thinker herself.

  Only one device could turn your own feelings into a weapon and then use that weapon against you.

  Only one.

  It was terrifyingly clear.

  The Intercept was back.

  But how?

  PART TWO

  23

  Gray Area

  The color was astonishing. Each time Violet came down here, it was like she was seeing Old Earth for the first time. It was a gray beyond the outermost concept of gray; it was the gray of ash and dusk and dirt and old metal and abandonment. The gray of lost hope and disenchantment. Of regret and despair.

  She stood at the edge of a great, ruined city.

  Into the pilot drive of the self-service ferry from Thirlsome she had punched the coordinates that Rez had given her, and the craft had deposited her here, after a quick but scary ride across a sludge-crusted bay that glowered with a sullen radioactive orange.

  Stepping out of the ferry, she reset her console to OET: Old Earth Time. Her console would do it automatically, of course, but Violet liked to do it manually. Somehow that small gesture helped her to reorient herself to this place, to adjust to the grim new reality. Things were still done by hand on Old Earth. The primitive ruled. Resetting her console lessened the sensory whiplash that came when she traveled from New Earth to Old Earth, from a world of golden promise to … what festered in front of her right now.

  A world of endless gray.

  This was how Violet had decided to handle her grief over Delia’s death: By getting busy. By going down to Old Earth. By doing her job.