This makes me cackle with laughter. “Are you serious? Then why—blast it!—why on earth are we plugged into fifteen other minds every week? I reflect them because of you. You’ve made us all mirror minds of each other!”
The Director licks his lips before continuing. “You misunderstand me. Streaming is in place solely for the benefit of shared learning, as you know. To increase productivity, speed up the learning process, accelerate the human mind. But we want you to feel as if your minds are all equal. What you have done, Valeria, is to build up one other mind within your own. Marcus’ mind is loud in your own, and yours in his. You are sharing too much of your identities with each other.” He clasps his hands in front of him now. “Make no mistake, Valeria, your mind is becoming fogged, and it is hard to see into it. This is dangerous, and I cannot let it continue.” His shoulders rise and fall. “That’s why I cut off the paired streaming. I feared specifically for you.”
“Feared? What could possibly happen that scares you?” I roll my eyes.
“I was losing you.”
“What the—?”
“You and Marcus were streaming so much that when I sat down to read your thoughts, on more than one occasion, I thought I’d pulled up his thoughts instead.”
Shock slaps my jaw loose. No words exist to describe my hatred for this man. Fingers trembling, I gather my words. “You cannot keep us from being people. If that was your goal, sir, you should have made us robots.”
For a second, his beard quivers, and I smell victory.
“Before you lash out with another comment about cruelty or unfairness or privacy, let me remind you of one thing and inform you of another. First, as you are well aware, for the past ten years, since your sensors were implanted, your thoughts have been open for the general perusal of any interested parties, myself as well as your fellow Order members and domus staff. Without this access, we could not be where we are today scientifically, and you, Valeria, would not be perched on the precipice of a highly anticipated breakthrough in anti-aging treatments. So, do not begrudge me the simple pleasure of watching your most fascinating mind. I find little else entertains me these days.
“Secondly …” Here he shifts his weight in what looks, oddly, like an awkward attempt to muster courage. I can see the tiny wrinkles that spread outward from his eyes, a flaw that would not exist if my research ever comes to fruition. “I have somewhat of a right as well as a desire to see what is on your mind.”
Words begin sputtering from my mouth. “What the—how can you—I can’t—”
“I knew you’d react this way, but hear me.” He lifts a hand. “I have a right, you see, because I created you.”
All the protest is sucked out of me, and I stare at him, lip curled.
“I wrote you, Valeria. Don’t look so repulsed. You are what you are because of me.” He begins pacing. “I’ve been Director of this Center for nearly twenty years now. When I first took over from Dr. Abdul, she recommended I submit my own work for one of the Fifth Order, your Order, as she had once done for the First Order. At the time, that gave me a few years to edit the genetic code for one of the members of the Fifth Order. It was my dream, and one of the reasons I had worked so hard to become Director, to be able to create a person just the way I wanted! Every detail was purposeful, every detail was personal.” Suddenly, he reaches out a hand toward my cheek.
I jerk away so violently that I nearly topple over as I turn and run.
Where I think I will go, I don’t know, I just want to be rid of his face. I dart around a few trees and straddle the stream, pumping my fists and sucking the sweet air. I stop and look behind me, half expecting to see him floating across the ground toward me like some haunted apparition. But I am alone.
And then I run full speed into Marcus, who has just rounded a bend in the path.
“Ouch!” I back away, shaken from the impact, startled by my surging anger at him.
“What’s up?” He can tell something is wrong. “I came looking for you. Checked the roof first.”
“You startled me,” I say, looking back over my shoulder, ready to see the Director emerging, but he hasn’t followed me.
“Why were you sprinting?”
After a few heaved breaths, I explain what the Director just told me.
“You know what this means, right?” He looks at me with a heaviness I’ve never seen on his face.
“That I am disgusted by this place? More now than ever.” I wriggle, as if I can shake the Director off of me. But he is inside me, inside my head, inside my blood.
“That you are never going to get away with anything. He’ll know. He’ll catch any dangerous thoughts you have even if the streams somehow don’t get them. He’ll always know everything you’re thinking. I bet—I know—he knows all about what we’ve streamed to each other. He obviously didn’t like what he saw in your head …” Marcus stops talking. His blue eyes are close to my face, making me uncomfortable. An idea passes through his eyes that for some reason makes him frown. “Whatever he saw, V, he thought it was dangerous. Dangerous enough to make us stop.”
Following his reasoning, I back away. “No,” I whisper. I don’t want him to be right. I don’t want him to be right about the Director in my head, and don’t want him to be right about the Director seeing every detail of my feelings for Marcus, feelings I’ve never even had the guts to voice to Marcus aloud. I relied on our streams to say it all. “No, I’m sure he just—” But Marcus is right, and he knows it.
Bubbles breaking the surface, I reach boiling point and let out an animal scream. Marcus eyes me with a hint of fear.
“He always gets what he wants, doesn’t he?” I shout.
Marcus just stares.
“He always wins!” I jerk my fists straight down by my thighs. “He’s taken everything. The only thing he’s left me is my research.”
“Of course that’s what he wants. Much is expected, remember? He’ll strip everything away to keep us efficient in the lab. You’ll never be just yourself, V. It doesn’t work that way here.”
“Just myself?” I laugh. “I don’t even know who that is.” I raise my hands out at my sides.
Marcus must see fire in my eyes. “V,” he whispers. “Listen to me.” His face is near, his brow rigid. “You know what they can do to you. You remember, and so do I, what they did to the first Marcus, the one I replaced.”
Quivering under his closeness, I back away. “Yes, I remember. If we get too messed up, too faulty, they just click delete.”
“Don’t let them.” Urgency slips into his tone as I keep edging further from him. “Don’t let them replace you.”
Afraid of what he’s saying, afraid of my own capacity—maybe even desire—to break so many rules that I would get deleted, I turn and run.
The only place I feel like going is my lab. At least they can’t take my lab from me.
Cold air washes over me as I enter the laboratory, heart pounding. The thought of finding out what is in my head, only my head, swarms in my mind like angry bees. What if …
I step into my lab station and watch as the blank t-screen leaps up around me, flashing the words Scientia et Veritas as it awaits my command. The hologram of my face swims into view and I think of what Marcus said. They could delete this person, this face that is looking at me now, and replace me just like they did with the first Marcus V.
I’d be some shell, emptied like a wiped file, and stuffed with a consciousness not my own at all. Shivers shimmy up my arms.
My mind is like a mirror, the Director said. I reflect what is before me because I do not exist. And no wonder. Valeria is not one person, she is one-sixteenth of a person. I need Marcus to be my mirror because I can’t see myself.
My research springs into the air around me. Years’ worth of work. In these moments, when my life’s work is before me, I feel the pull toward publication. My personality was written so that I will crave this. It is, after all, how the Director—I can’t call him Daddy anymore, funny
thought—made me.
I can’t do it. Breaking the rules—severing my mind from the whole, the unit that is the Fifth Order—is madness. I’ve worked so hard for this research. But all I want to do right now is ram a spike into the Director’s perfect little plan. There must be some way …
Four
The next day inches by like a growing fungus. Every time Marcus pops up, I look away, still not ready to face the truth of what he told me in the garden yesterday.
Fifth Order report to the platform. Fifth Order report to the platform.
“The platform!” I shout the words as I’m walking down the hall from the Caf. I’m not in the mood to be called names today by a bunch of generics.
Generics who get to do whatever the heck they want in life.
“First Tuesday of the month, Val!” Marinus says, as if I need his useless commentary.
Today is our scheduled trip into the city. We have them every month. For exposure, for socialization, for fun. Exposure so the donors and rights activits and generics think of us as actual humans. Socialization so the Center staff can sleep at night. Fun so we can sleep at night. But the exposure is somewhat like polonium’s, the socialization somewhat like an eel’s, and the fun somewhat like a kick in the shin.
“And today you may choose from a selection of condescending slurs,” whispers Julius from behind me in his chipper, sarcastic tone. “Chain brain, freak, or motherless wretch!” His bright orange buzzed hair bobs beside me as we make our way down the tiled hallway toward the elevators to take them down to the train platform.
“I prefer nerd,” I grumble, remembering that of all the names we are called by the generics, nerd is the most complimentary.
“Somebody’s a grump!” Julius tilts his head, pushing out his lower lip.
I roll my eyes at his puppy-like expression. “I think whoever wrote you forgot to put in the normal range of human emotions. They only programmed you for happy.”
All sixteen of us filter onto the platform and trickle onto the waiting tram. The smell of cleaning fluid burns my nose. I weave to the back, away from Marcus, away from Pru’s narrowed eyes. She hates these trips into the city even more than I do; I’ve seen it in her mind. If it were up to her, she’d sit comfortably in the Center every day of her life and never leave.
The tram car slings us toward the rising buildings. The city is vibrant, full of lights and color and sound and people. Ads promising perfection pour down the walls of high rises. For a moment, I consider what the ad for my skin engineering will look like. Some before and after shots of an old woman? All these models already have perfect skin, blown to monstrous proportions as the faces cascade toward the bustling streets. An ad for our wound repair serum—Miraclen—shows a gash the size of one building’s penthouse shrink and heal before it reaches the pavement. I smile to myself. That is Center science. And that is why much is expected of us.
We reach our stop in minutes. The tram will wait for us until we return, on schedule, in three hours. Three hours to roam, to purchase, to experience. But not to run. These little outings are not an escape hatch. A boy from the Third Order, Octavius III, tried to run once. They just pulled up the live feed from his sensors and tracked down where he was in less than fifteen minutes. Then they stuffed him in some basement room for a week, and we never learned what happened in there. He didn’t take a single memory from that room into his next full-Order stream. Valeria III, my elder in the Third Order, told me that once.
Here, we are like dogs out for a walk. Sniff after a squirrel and we’re yanked right back.
The tram deposits us near the edge of the city, right in the heart of the newest commercial district. A broad and deep mall descends beneath us, open in the middle as if a surgeon wants us to see all the veins and ventricles of this teeming place. Ads race around the balconies like rats in a run, advertising the goods for sale on each level. The further down you go, the darker the colors, the more exaggerated the airbrushing, the more suggestive the content of the ads becomes.
Marcus hops off the train and waits for me, his tall profile above the rest. I shake my head. Not today. Not ever. The Director has stripped him out of my life—out of my mind anyway.
“Julius!” I shout, hoping he hears me over the blaring ads and incessant electronic beats pumping from the nearest store. He looks around, finds me, waves, and waits. Marcus sees this and, though I force myself to look away, I know I saw a look of betrayal.
Pru slithers nearby, her lanky arms and legs like ribbons. Something about her forward gaze, the tense muscles in her neck, make me think she’s gloating. She knows I’d be walking with Marcus right now if it weren’t for Daddy’s little lecture yesterday. Can’t call him Daddy, remember?
“Pru, where are you headed?”
She pretends she cannot hear me, but her chin tilts just enough to indicate that she did. I angle my path, walk directly beside her.
“Happy?” I ask, watching Marcus split off with Flavius up ahead, toward the arcade where quasi-effective escape is possible through virtual trips to Paris, Tokyo, or wherever. Cities we can only see in VR, never touch, never experience. Pru says nothing, an affirmation. “Why is it, exactly, that you hate me so much?”
This gets her attention. She turns to me, round brown eyes glistening with what looks oddly like pain. “The Codex, Valeria. I love the Codex.” She blinks with purpose, as if erasing some image from her mind. “And to do what is expected of us requires obedience.”
A small cough lurches out of my open mouth.
She jerks her head around and starts walking again. “What was so important about streaming with Marcus anyway? Don’t you get enough every week from all of us?”
I shuffle after her. Dropping my voice to a hiss so no one passing can hear, I say, “My own mind can’t tell me who I am anymore—there’s so much clutter in there from all of us.” She eyes me over her shoulder. “When I wake up from a full-Order stream, I can’t remember what my own face looks like. When I see myself from his eyes, I know.” She’s stopped walking but is facing forward, gaze toward the bustling crowd of strangers. “When I see myself from his point of view, I know I’m not the same as everyone else.” Saying all of this out loud leaves an odd twisting in my gut. Confession, I realize, is both taxing and freeing.
We’ve caught up to Julius, who merges in beside Pru, his goofy smile shrinking as he sees our faces.
“As touching as that sounds, Valeria, you know as well as I do that we are not supposed to seek our value from our differences. The Codex says we are strong because of what we share. Our research would not be possible without some sacrifices.”
Julius glances between us. “Much is expected, eh?” His upbeat words fall flat as we both turn hard eyes at him. “Never mind!” He raises his hands and turns aside.
“Just remember your purpose, Valeria. It’s not you,” Pru hisses at me. “It’s all this.” She nods her head in the direction of the walkway buzzing with pedestrians and gliders swallowed in their own worlds. For a moment, it seems like she is looking for someone, her eyes flickering between the faces in a mad search. “What we do is for them.”
I roll my eyes. “How can you care so much about them? They hate us.”
“I don’t care about them!” she snaps, and I take a step back. Then just as quick as her outburst, she is stone-faced again. “And they hate us because they’re afraid of us. They fear what they don’t understand.” She crosses her antenna-thin arms. “We are supposed to be better than that.” She curses me with a quick glance.
Julius sees this and stuffs his hands in his pockets, starts slowly walking away.
“Hold on,” I say to Julius, stepping after him. “We’re coming.” I want this conversation to be over.
But Pru wants the last word. With one long step, she is beside me. “You know they’re watching everything you think. I’d suggest giving up your selfish little rebellion.” We reach the end of the balcony that overlooks the gaping maw of the mall.
Turning in tandem, Pru and Julius and I see three boys approaching. Men, actually. They are old enough to have intricately sculpted beards and wedding rings on but not yet old enough to act like men. I adopt Pru’s scowl and fold my arms just as she does. This is a mistake.
“See, they even act the same!” The first man shudders. His friends laugh but the angle of their brows tells me they are afraid. Of us. “Three little baldies. Looks like one of them’s a ginger, boys! A gen-eng ging!”
The laughter at his pathetic rhyme makes my blood boil. Humanists. They think because science helped create us that we are some insult to the universe and therefore should be persecuted without mercy. And Pru was just defending them.
I clear my throat. “I’m sorry you are limited to just one brain. Maybe that’s why your beards look the way they do.”
The fury in his eyes tells me I struck a nerve.
He has the gall to reach out toward Pru. In a flash, Pru has his wrist twisted upside down in a painful hold. He bends to avoid the pain, disgust taking over his fear. I fight the urge to cheer.
“It’s touching me! Get it off!”
Another of the trio slaps at Pru’s hand, which doesn’t budge. For now, I’m enjoying her stoicism.
Not because I like Pru, but because I hate these humanists, I say, “Go find some other generics to bully. You know we are emotionless. Your taunts do not work on us.” I play off their fears, forcing my voice to sound clunky, computerized.
The Veritas Project Page 3