Doctor White nodded. “Okay. You’re right, and I will explain. But first, I need to ask you something about Kyle. How familiar are you with his condition?”
Jessie clenched her fists. Her patience was frayed. “I know he was born with some kind of wasting disease.”
“Idiopathic degenerative syndrome,” White replied, nodding. “The term idiopathic is a convenient way of saying we haven’t found a cause. Except . . . .”
“Except what? Are you saying you do know what’s wrong with Kyle?”
Another nod. White checked her Link. “I think Kelly should fill you in on the specifics. I just needed to know the level of your understanding. And there isn’t time for everything.”
She scratched her cheek and leaned forward. “I want you to know something, Jessica. What Kelly has done — what I’ve asked him to do — he had no choice. I made him do it. So whatever doubts you might be having about him, whatever suspicions and anger you’re harboring, they should be directed at me, not him.”
“Why should I believe you?”
“Because deep down, with every fiber of your being, you know that Kelly loves you. He has always loved you. Even I can see that. He is a good man and he would never hurt you, not if he had a choice.”
“If he loves me so much, then why would he let anyone come between us?”
“Because he wants to protect you.”
Jessie hated this woman. She hated that White presumed to know Kelly better than she did. She hated that she assumed to guess what was in her own mind. And she hated that she was at least partially right. But most of all, Jessie hated her because she found herself badly wanting to believe her.
She studied the doctor’s face, hoping to see if she was lying. From living with her grandfather, Jessie had learned a lot about reading people. She knew that certain nervous tics could betray deceit. The doctor held her gaze. There was no blush to her cheeks, no telltale constriction of the pupils or turning away. She leaned toward Jessie, her arms outstretched in a posture of earnestness, exposed and vulnerable. She certainly wasn’t acting like she was lying.
You can’t be sure about anything anymore. You’ve been wrong about people in the past.
“You’ve seen how protective Kelly is with his brother.”
“We’re not talking about his brother.”
“He cares just as much for you as he does for Kyle. He’d rather die than to see either of you hurt.”
“And yet, strangely, the things he’s done have hurt me. Terribly.”
“No, Jessica, it’s your own actions which have brought you pain.”
“Bullshit! Don’t you fucking insult me by saying this is all my fault!”
“You have the luxury to make your own decisions. Kelly hasn’t had that choice.”
“You keep saying that! How could he not have a choice?” Jessie spat. “We always have a choice.”
“Not this time. Not when the alternative is allowing his brother to die.”
And then Jessie understood. White was blackmailing Kelly.
Remember, you were prepared to do the same.
Her hatred for the woman ballooned.
“Why?” she asked.
“The file on your Link. The photo.”
Now it was Jessie’s turn to be surprised. “How did you— What the hell is it?”
“It’s information.”
Jessie launched herself out of the chair and leaned over the desk. She thrust an accusing finger at White’s face. “Who do you work for? Is it Arc? The Southern States Coalition?”
The doctor flinched. “Heavens! You do go straight for the jugular, don’t you.”
“Tell me!”
White took in a deep breath. “You are right to ask about them, as they’re the two biggest players in this game. But, no, I don’t work for them.”
“The government then.”
She shook her head. “They’ve been a puppet of Arc’s for a long time. But Arc and the government are engaged in a fight that’s only tearing our country apart.”
Jessie shook her head in anger. “You’ve told me nothing! What is this thing on my Link? Why is it there? Why did you make Kelly put it there?”
“The files on your Link contain the results of years of scientific research, the collective knowledge of everything we know about Reanimates. And even a little about ourselves, the living. It’s information that certain groups would kill to get access to.”
“If you’re not with the government or Arc or the Coalition, then who? Tell me now, damn it! Who are you working for!” She pulled out her Link. “Or I’m pinging my brother!”
“Wait! Okay, but you have to calm down, Jessica.”
“I don’t have to do anything! You say you’re Kyle’s doctor and that you know what’s wrong with him, but you won’t tell me what. On the other hand, you’re using Kyle to blackmail Kelly, threatening to kill him if he doesn’t do what you want.”
The doctor flinched. “I never threatened to kill Kyle, Jessica.”
“You’ve got exactly ten seconds to make me understand, or, swear to God, I will ping my brother.” She held the Link up so the woman could see she was serious. Her thumb hovered over the connect button.
The lump in Doctor White’s throat bobbed and she nodded.
“First, tell me who you’re working for,” Jessie slowly said. “Give me a name.”
“I think—”
“I don’t give a rat’s ass what you think!” Jessie screamed. “WHO?”
“Your father.”
‡ ‡ ‡
Chapter 28
She’s lying.
Jessie stared in stunned silence at Doctor White’s upturned face, eyes flicking over the blush on the woman’s cheeks, the furrows between her eyebrows, the redness of her lips.
The hospital intercom chimed over their heads. Muffled words filtered through her shock, but her mind couldn’t process them. In that moment, there was only rage. She knew White was lying because her father had been dead for years.
“I met him a long time ago,” the doctor explained. “Just once, and very briefly. He saved my life.”
Jessie barked out a laugh of disbelief. “You’ve obviously got him confused with someone else. My father was a monster.”
“Interesting choice of words.”
“If you knew what my father did, you wouldn’t think so.”
“You’re probably too young to remember much about the Long Island outbreak.” Doctor White’s eyes unfocused as she recalled the distant memory.
“I was five,” Jessie spat. “I remember enough. I’ve read the reports.”
“Lies, mostly, if you’re referring to the official record.” White flicked her fingers dismissively to the side. “I was there, Jessica, on the island. My family was there. Such horror, death everywhere, the infection spreading like wildfire. The Army was— They were shooting anything that moved. It didn’t matter if you were healthy or not. We were caught, my family and I, trapped. That’s when your father helped me escape.”
Jessie plucked the name block off the desk and raised it over her head, ready to bash it into Doctor White’s skull. The woman watched impassively. She didn’t make a move to defend herself.
“You’re lying,” Jessie said. “My father died three years before the outbreak. There’s no way he could’ve saved you.”
“Your father didn’t die then, Jessica. He died two weeks ago.”
Jessie froze, her arm still over her head.
“I know about Professor Halliwell— the man you know as Father Heall. I know he was your real father. That’s who I was working with.”
Jessie pulled her arm down, and that’s when she saw it, the word Sister on the wooden block.
“You were bitten?”
Doctor White shook her head. “I was never infected. My husband—”
“This says you were! Father Heall called the ones who’d been infected Brother or Sister. Where were you bitten?”
The woman just stared, o
ne eyebrow raised, as if to say things weren’t as simple as that.
“Then you’re lying,” Jessie said. “How could you be working with him? He was completely cut off from the rest of the world.”
“No, he wasn’t.”
“Arc put him on that island. They walled him in, controlled him. They monitored his activities.”
“To control him, yes. To exploit any useful knowledge he created and prevent the release of any that might damage their interests. That was what they tried to do, anyway.”
“Excuse me for being skeptical, but how did you communicate, using smoke signals?” Jessie’s eyes drifted to the old telephone on the desk, but Doctor White shook her head.
“At first, yes, we used telephones, but once Arc tore down the existing towers and disabled the telecommunication satellites shortly after the outbreak, both landline and cellular infrastructure became essentially useless. They were already in the process of switching us all over to stream technology, which was supposed to be more secure, more efficient, cheaper, but then they put up the barrier, isolating the island. The dirty little secret about stream technology was that it gave Arc complete access and control to every single byte of information created and transmitted through the streams. And the government was a party to the deception because they were promised unfettered access to monitor it all, which was, of course, a lie.”
“So, how did you two communicate, then?”
“The old fashioned way, using hand carried messages. Letters. We had a person inside Arc, someone who had access to one of the entry points to Long Island. His job was to transport new Players from the processing facility in New Jersey to a portal on the south coast of the island. For years, we relied on him to ferry messages back and forth, hidden on the bodies of Players.”
Jessie distinctly remembered thinking how pitiful it all seemed, this ragtag band of people, nothing in common except their involuntary exile, most of them dependent upon Heall’s blood to stay alive. It was pitiful, actually, because they believed they could fight the all-powerful Arc, outsmart it. But Arc controlled everything, even information.
We may be isolated, Brother Matthew had told her, but it doesn’t mean we’re out of touch.
“A couple years ago,” White said, “we discovered that Arc’s streaming network could be used to transfer encrypted data. We were able to obtain and modify a gaming system to embed packets of information directly within the game’s data stream without affecting the system’s performance. It was a very effective means of communication.”
“And Arc wasn’t aware?”
“The communiqués were miniscule in comparison with the terabytes of data that stream across their towers every millisecond. Even so, if Arc somehow managed to detect the extra code, they still wouldn’t have been able to extract the information. We had developed a proprietary algorithm which would dynamically encrypt data. It’s impossible to crack without the right key.”
Nothing’s impossible, Jessie very nearly said.
“We were content to communicate this way for years,” the woman continued. “But then, about a year ago, everything changed— our timeline, everything we’d been working toward.”
“Which was?”
“A cure, of course.”
“And is there one?”
Doctor White shook her head. “We’re close, though.”
“What changed?”
“Two things. First, Professor Halliwell discovered something that shattered all of our understanding about reanimation: our consciousness remains largely intact.”
Jessie gasped in surprise.
White nodded. “We’d always considered Reanimates as dead, and therefore there was no self-awareness. It turns out that may not be true. The connection between awareness and the physical body has only been severed.”
Jessie remembered the feeling she’d had of being trapped inside the Player’s body, aware of another presence there with her — not the Deceiver, but another, older presence. It had to have been the man who had become the Player.
“All of a sudden,” White continued, “a cure seemed like a stepping stone to something much greater: a way to reconnect the mind and body in Reanimates. Someday, we’ll be able to bring them all back.”
“And the second thing?” Jessie asked, her mind buzzing.
“Professor Halliwell discovered that he was—” She frowned and looked away.
“Dying?” Jessie guessed. “Was he dying?”
“Not exactly,” the woman replied. “But close. The discovery of the mind-body connection came about as a consequence of his own deteriorating condition. He was losing himself, losing control of himself. His connection was slipping away.”
“I don’t understand.”
“He was becoming Undead. Again.”
“Again? But he was immune! How—?”
“Fifteen years ago, when he tried to cure Reanimation, he died. When he revived, it was in some in-between state, neither fully alive, yet also not Undead. He still breathed, his heart still pumped. His body still aged, albeit in a much different way than our bodies age. For all intents and purposes, he was alive. But over time, he began to be consumed by hunger, the same maddening hunger that drives Reanimates.”
“The tea,” Jessie said. “He said it dulled his appetite.”
“In his earlier work, he had discovered that an herbal preparation could partially suppress the urge in true Reanimates. He started drinking it himself. But it began to lose efficacy. The urges returned, so he was forced to make it stronger. But he was deteriorating. He knew he’d have less than a year before his mind would be completely severed from his body, and he’d no longer have control over himself. That’s when he decided that it was time to assemble his results.”
“We looked for it,” Jessie said. “When we were on the island. We couldn’t find any records.”
“They were all destroyed. All except the one copy, which he sent to me.”
“Using my Link.”
The object itself pinged in Jessie’s hands, but she could only blink stupidly at it, as if it were completely foreign to her. This new information was almost too much to take in all at once. The questions it raised piled up in her mind:
How did he know I was coming?
Why did he want me to have the file?
How far can I trust what she’s telling me?
Another ping. This time she managed to bring it to her eyes and squint at the screen. She half expected to see Father Heall’s face there, as if the mention of his name out loud had somehow conjured the man back from the dead. But it wasn’t Heall. It was her brother. And two new questions were added to the list: Does Eric know about White? Does Mom?
Back when Jessie first met Heall, she hadn’t cared about the war he said he was fighting. She just wanted to get the treatment he had supposedly developed so she could save Jake’s life. So they could all go home. So they could put the nightmare behind them.
The war wasn’t between him and Arc and the government. It wasn’t with the Coalition. The war had been with himself.
A third ping. The insistent buzz of the device this time almost felt angry to her. She fumbled to connect. “Eric?”
“Where are you?” he asked. “The nurses up here have been looking everywhere for you.”
“T-talking to one of the doctors.” Jessie felt terribly confused at the moment, frightened and yet—
optimistic
—unsure. It was hard for her to think straight.
“Jess? Everything alright?”
She blinked at the miniature image of her brother. “Is Kelly there?”
Eric turned his head to the side, then back again, nodding. “Yeah, he’s right here next to me.”
She glanced up at Doctor White, but the woman only pursed her lips and waited to see what Jessie would do.
“Eric—” She squeezed her eyes shut and hoped she wasn’t making another mistake. “What I said in the car. I want you to sit on that for now. You two go on
home. Be civil. I’m going to stick around here for awhile. And don’t— Just wait till I get home. We’ll talk when I get there.”
Eric tilted his head, frowning. “Any news on Reg?”
Jessie sucked in a deep breath and let it out. She knew no more about Reggie’s condition than when she’d first arrived, and yet . . . .
“I I’m not sure. It’s too early to tell. But go on home. I’ll see you in a little while.”
She disconnected before she could change her mind, or he could question her more about Reggie.
When she turned back, there was an expectant look on Doctor White’s face. And concern.
“My friend is going to be okay, right?” Jessie asked her. “You know what happened to him, don’t you?”
But the woman’s eyes betrayed her. The lines around her mouth shrunk as her lips pressed tightly, as if she would rather not let the truth spill out. And Jessie’s heart sank before she could utter a single word. “I honestly can’t say, Jessica.”
“Jessie. Please. It’s Jessie.”
The doctor sighed, nodded. “Jessie. I’m just being honest with you. I won’t know anything about his condition until his doctors can run a full set of neurological and cybernetic tests tomorrow morning. He might be awake before then.” She shrugged.
Reggie has to get better. He has to!
Jessie stared back down at her Link still in her hands, stared at the photo Kelly had sent her: Will you marry me, Jessica Daniels? spray painted on the side of an abandoned building. She shook her head. Why would anyone think giving her something this sensitive was a good idea? It wasn’t like she had any use for it. She wasn’t a scientist. She had no specialized training and couldn’t possibly know how to use the information. If anything, her understanding about Reanimate physiology and behavior was terribly misinformed by what she’d been taught in school.
“I tried to open it,” she mumbled. She looked back up, suddenly numb, suddenly very tired. “The file on here. I tried to figure out what it was, but I couldn’t open it. I couldn’t copy it or download it or delete it, either.” She tossed her Link onto the desk. “Take it.”
“I wish I could.”
S.W. Tanpepper's GAMELAND: Season Two Omnibus (Episodes 9-11) Page 19