1
A new universe called to me, and I answered, ignorant of the harm in crossing over.
—Victor Eastmore, Apology to Resonant Earth, (transmission date unknown)
Semiautonomous California
29 February 1991
It’s one thing to die quietly with things left unsaid among family members. It’s another thing to do what the great Jefferson Eastmore did with his secrecy and architecture of conspiracy: keep essential truths from Victor and put him on a collision course with an uncanny future.
Victor gazed across City Lake toward the tessellated foothills, where the elite families of Oakland and Bayshore kept their hedges trimmed and thorny. His grandfather’s sarcophagus was up there, surrounded by marble pillars and gold-gilt fencing shaped like twisted strands of DNA. A tidy and neat brick gravemound would never have sufficed, since at the end of his life, Jefferson was as grandiose as his cancer-curing career. The stones were plucked from the canals of New Venice, and a plaque listed the man’s many accomplishments. Not listed was his failed effort to cure Victor of mirror resonance syndrome.
Victor spun around to face the city skyline. The morning was bright and windy. The timefeed on his MeshBit indicated thirty minutes until his reclassification appointment. He could go and wait in the anteroom, but his anxious vibrations might shake the building to its foundations.
He took a breath. No going back. Before the sun reached its zenith that day, his path would materialize. If he were lucky, he could stay a Class Three: free but under close supervision. Or he could become a Class Two: under guard, imprisoned, at a rancho in the hinterlands. He whispered a cherished but inconsistently effective mantra to fight off brain blankness: The wise owl listens before asking who. Each episode of blanking out was one more step toward mirror resonance syndrome’s inevitable tragic end: becoming a comatose Class One, insensate, a forgotten ward of the government. The only unknown factor was how quickly the future would crash against him.
He trudged along the shoreline, tensing and relaxing his jaw, trying to distract himself. Glittering towers rose exultantly cityside. Squally breezes swooped out of a cloudless, azure sky and assaulted bulrushes, sedges, and cattails in the shallows where a grid of waterplots penned them in.
Granfa Jefferson had been poisoned. Victor knew it. He had proof. But his family didn’t believe him, and if he said any more about it, he would be locked away. Fair? No. Surprising? Not really. After all, his life was a farcical succession of tragedies. It wasn’t time to give up, though. Not while he had unanswered questions.
The palm trees encircling the lake rustled like cheerleaders shaking their pom-poms. The water rippled, creating countless sun flashes on the lake’s surface, and afterimages glowed and pulsed when he closed his eyes. The stench of goose shit turned his stomach.
He wedged the MeshBit’s detachable sonobulb in his ear, then called Elena. She answered right away. This was not the first time her promptness was suspicious.
“See?” she said. “When a friend calls, you should answer. Right away. Not never.”
“I know. I need your help,” he said. “My appointment is here. I’m having trouble.”
“Where are you?” she asked.
“City Lake. West shore.”
“I can’t get there in time.”
You were there for Granfa Jeff’s funeral. You showed up at my apartment whenever you wanted. Why can’t you be here now?
“Then talk to me,” Victor said. “Anything to keep my mind off my theories about Granfa Jeff.”
At the time, Victor had nothing close to the truth about Jefferson’s secret messages and plans for conspiracy and counter-conspiracy. He couldn’t have guessed his role in the proliferating conflagration that would transform every person on Resonant Earth and beyond. No one could have predicted the neuro-contagion that eventually radiated beyond the American Union of Nations, or the mind-machine hybridization that became humanity’s destiny, or the fact that crossing over to another world would become a possibility rather than paranoia. If Victor had guessed any of it, he might have failed his reclassification deliberately and shown up at the gates of a rancho to check himself in. All this was a lot to have piled onto a mentally unstable young adult.
“But you found radiation on the data egg,” Elena said. “I believe you. We’re going to figure this out.”
Her confidence gave Victor warm tingles, but the timing was all wrong. Murder bird, murder bird—those aren’t the words I need right now. “Let’s talk about anything else. Please, I’m desperate. As usual.”
Elena’s recent return to Semiautonomous California had helped him, even if something felt off with her sometimes. And right now, he was feeling supercharged, like his world hinged on every movement, every word, and the right shift in thinking could set him free, if only he could figure out what that might be.
She took a breath. “I think you should leave SeCa.”
Although the bioconcrete path beneath his feet was firm, he was unsteady, as if balancing on a tightrope swaying in the wind.
“If I don’t show up, they’ll reclassify me in absentia. I could never come back.”
“Why would you want to come back?” Elena asked. “They treat people with mirror resonance syndrome like criminals. You haven’t done anything wrong.”
Victor paced toward the lake’s edge. Crowds of lotus leaves floated, looking sad without their blossoms. “Remember when we talked about moving to an island? I said we could stargaze all night.”
“And I would make a pie out of real coconut flesh. Yeah, I remember. A wish is a lie, Victor.”
Elena was right. He couldn’t afford to dream. Until he found a cure, his blanking episodes made him a danger to everyone.
She went on, “Without mentioning the thing you don’t want me to talk about”—he had no doubt she was rolling her eyes as she said this—“I will say that after what you told your family, I think you leaving SeCa isn’t such a bad idea.”
Static came through the sonobulb, like a cotton ball pressed too deeply into his ear. His parents, granma, aunt, and cousin all thought he was losing his mind. They might be right, but why couldn’t they just listenfor once? His stomach ached as he remembered the disbelief, disappointment, impatience, and the hint of fear on their faces—ugh, the memory was a knife twisting in his guts. It was good that the Personil was dulling his emotions; without it, he’d be lost in a storm.
He checked the screen on his MeshBit and tensed—only a few minutes until his appointment.
Leaving wasn’t a solution. It wasn’t. He cleared his throat and said thickly, “No matter where I go, I’m still, you know, me. If I go blank here, people know what to do. Out there … I don’t know what would happen.”
“No. The good people of Semiautonomous California aren’t lining up to save you. SeCa is the problem. It’s the good versus evil Cathar mindset. Other places are different. You can get away from discrimination. Away from surveillance. There’s no future here for you.”
Victor sat on a bench facing the lake, closed his eyes, and smashed his fists together. She was saying he could go somewhere the Carmichael laws couldn’t reach him: the sandy beaches of the Southeastern Confederacy, an island within the Dominion of Florida and Cuba, or maybe a cabin in the mountains up north at the border between the Louisiana Territories and First Nations of Canada. But if what Ozie had said was true, that other nations were passing laws based on SeCa’s, soon there would be no place truly free for people like him. Maybe leaving would buy him some time. Maybe that would be enough.
“It’s that different elsewhere?” Victor asked.
Elena said, “People in Texas think a broken mirror is seven years’ bad luck.”
He barked a laugh. A nearby jogger did a double take at the sound. “I’ve never thought of myself as a bad-luck charm. At least seven years is better than a lifetime.”
She sighed. “Texas is wild. Everyone is fighting all the time. The government is barely functional. It’s chaos, but it’s not oppressive. I don’t know. I can’t explain it. Maybe you should see it for yourself.”
She was rambling, like old times. She was finally warming up to him again.
She wouldn’t have killed Granfa Jeff. She had no reason to. She wasn’t a killer. Oh yes, she’d returned carrying secrets, but an Eastmore murder wasn’t one of them.
His MeshBit pinged, and his heart suddenly pounded. “I have to go.”
Elena spoke rapidly. “Don’t let them trick you. Not all the questions are going to be fair.”
“How do you know?”
“I’ve been asking around. Try to keep calm and rational.”
“As opposed to psychotic and homicidal? I’ll do my best.”
Victor discontinued the feed, took the sonobulb out of his ear, reconnected it to the MeshBit, and tucked it inside his pocket, where it bumped against the slightly radioactive data egg that was somehow supposed to save him from being locked up. He exhaled loudly, then walked toward his reclassification appointment.
2
Semiautonomous California
29 February 1991
The workers Victor passed on his way through the business district were the lucky ones. Employment came easy for SeCa union members, whereas he was reliant on the Classification Commission’s Safe Places program and his family’s influence. That hadn’t stopped him from trying to join, of course, but the union recruiters hadn’t even acknowledged receipt of his application. “It must have been lost,” they told him when he confronted them about his third submission. It probably hadn’t helped that his granfa and the unions had feuded for decades. And no one wanted to work with someone like him—unreliable, possibly dangerous, at risk of going blank on the job.
He was crossing the street when a horn blared and brakes screeched. The sounds hit him with the force of an explosion. He dropped to his hands and knees, heart thudding, his vision splotched by yellow haze. He covered his ears. The resonant effect faded marginally. He looked back and saw a woman clutching a small child. One meter away was a silver car, a new Erbeschlitten. Smoke billowed from its wheel wells.
A near miss. Nothing to do with Victor. No reason for his pulse to be thumping behind his eyes. Sensitivity was the most aggravating consequence of MRS; anything could set him off. He was a harp, his strings so tightly wound a breeze could play a chord and make him resonate.
The woman didn’t dare cross in front of the car, whose driver was rocking in his seat like a jockey on a horse. He raged incoherently at her, and then the car sped away. Probably a stim addict—the only group vying with Broken Mirrors for the bottom level of the social hierarchy.
Victor took a few breaths to calm down. It would do no good to show up for his appointment ready to explode.
He entered a ten-story modern ziggurat that filled the entire block. An elevator took him to the sixth floor. Brass plaques lined an endless hallway of doors. He followed signs to Dr. Santos’s office.
Victor wished this evaluation could be performed like all the previous ones: by Dr. Tammet at Oak Knoll Hospital, with Granfa Jeff nearby to encourage and calm him. But with Oak Knoll closed, Granfa dead, Dr. Tammet gone, and the Health Board calling the shots, there was no going back. No choice but to see this new doctor.
Victor stepped into the small reception room. Two faces turned toward him then snapped back to their reading material: other MRS patients, maybe. They shifted in their chairs and avoided eye contact. Victor was glad; there was enough anxiety bubbling inside him without adding their fear to the mix.
On the far side of the room, a young receptionist sat in a cabinet-sized alcove, separated from the room by a thick-glass window. She scrutinized Victor as he approached. A sonocircuit embedded in the glass allowed him to speak his name to her. In a flat, uncaring tone, she told him to take a seat and wait his turn.
The chairs and tables were made of hard plastic. A steel door with no handle led, presumably, to the doctors’ offices. This setup was nothing like the cozy, familial atmosphere of Oak Knoll. He felt pinned down by all the precautions and suspicions. The men pretended not to notice him. Resonance, barely perceptible, like a low hum, tinged the air with anxiety and fear.
Victor sat and flipped through a magazine, stopping at a feature article about a dispute between Semiautonomous California and the New England Commonwealth. NEC-Automation, the biggest robotics company in the AU, wanted to build a factory in SeCa. Opponents accused them of establishing a beachhead to repeal SeCa’s Carmichael-induced ban on autonomous vehicles. Members of the SeCa legislature called it an example of a “resurgent imperial mentality.” They trotted out the Carmichael deaths as well. He wanted to care about these things, patterns in the world, the ebb and flow of history. But he felt insulated, maybe due to the Personil again. Or maybe he couldn’t care about anything except the next hour of his life and the many dangerous mental pitfalls he had to carefully avoid if he wanted to pass the examination. It was sad how limited his emotional range was—sad but necessary.
The man with the crew cut coughed and wheezed, and the other man was still, his eyes closed in strained meditation, even when the sound of the Erbeschlitten’s horn filled the room. Neither of the men flinched, though the horn sounded again and again. Of course, the resonant echo was only in his own messed-up brain.
Not now, please!
A low rumble reverberated in his chest. His vision started to blur and double as his heartbeat skipped and fluttered along with a rush of adrenaline. It’s starting. Oh, shocks, oh no …
Two worlds resonating; lines going fuzzy, colors blending. Blankness scrambled his perceptions and put a lick of euphoria on the tip of his tongue. He tried to keep some perspective. I’m lucky; if my brain was wired differently, going blank could feel like drowning or being lit on fire, like in my dreams.
Elena had told him he had nothing to worry about, but the fumewort was wearing off, and he hadn’t dared bring any vials of tincture with him. He ran his hands over his thighs, counting long breaths despite the galloping panic in his chest, but Dr. Tammet’s motion and breath exercises weren’t up to this challenge. This would be a routine exam, required by law, with the power to decide if he should be locked up forever. Victor gripped the data egg in his pocket. Before he died, Granfa Jeff insisted that Victor took the data egg to his next reclassification appointment and that it would help. How? Ozie had told him the same thing—that the data egg would help—and that Granfa Jeff had been assassinated, no question about it.
No—he couldn’t think that. Not until the appointment was over.
Victor held up the magazine, trying to redirect his unsteady mind. It was futile. He doubled over and rested his chin on his fists, unable to hold back a tide of worries. He shouldn’t have to contemplate exile. The American Union had rooted out racism through Reconstruction and the Permanent Enlightenment. A majority of people in SeCa and the other nations of the AU could trace their ancestry back through lineages that a century ago would have been called white, black, and red. Victor sometimes imagined having darker or lighter skin rather than his mid-tone brown, but there wouldn’t be any real-world consequences to such a change. Skin is skin, everyone said, and racist institutions and systems had been overturned throughout the AU. Why couldn’t they do the same with the stigma around mental illness? No one is captaining the boat, that’s why. Reconstruction had led to Repartition, from USA to AU, and now the nations of the American Union were only a flotilla of loosely connected vessels, adrift in the doldrums. One day, they’d break free of each other and head in different directions.
It was a useless game imagining different histories, yet he couldn’t stop himself. His dilemma was a historical peculiarity resulting from cascading bad decisions that landed on the backs of a small percentage of Semiautonomous California’s citizens. Someone could have stopped Samuel Miller, the Man from Nightmareland, as four-year-old Victor had called him, and prevented him from destroying Carmichael. Or Mía Barrias might not have survived to demand that SeCa lock up as many people with MRS as could be diagnosed. What if the response to the syndrome had been entirely different? Maybe Alik wouldn’t have picked the fight with Victor that ruined both their lives. Jefferson Eastmore might have cured MRS, instead of shutting down the project. He could have lived, instead of leaving this mystery at Victor’s feet. The world didn’t have to be the way it was. That was what was so frustrating—things could have turned out differently. Why, Victor often wondered, was he stuck in a world that hated and feared him?
He stared at the magazine, blinking back wetness in his eyes. He gave up trying to read it. Leaning forward, he asked the other patients, “How long have you been Class Threes?”
The man with a crew cut, who looked to be in his late twenties, looked up sharply. He glanced at the receptionist and said in a low, wavering voice, “One year.”
They could have sampled him for an employment application, driver’s license renewal, or child custody battle. More and more interactions with the SeCa bureaucracy included a DNA swab and screening for the MRS gene.
The other man, older and pudgy, eyes still closed, shook his head.
“How about you?” Crew Cut asked quietly.
“Eleven,” Victor whispered.
The older man’s eyelids flew open. Crew Cut’s gaze was piercing. Their scrutiny and awe were unwelcome. Victor felt no pride in his longevity as Class Three. It was out of his control.
Crew Cut cleared his throat. “I recognize you now. The Eastmore.”
“What about you?” Victor asked the older man.
The older man blinked and licked his lips, listening to their discussion. He’d said nothing. His meaty limbs and neck seemed to belong on a different torso, as if specific dimensions had been compressed and other parts inflated—a balloon made of flesh accustomed to being squeezed. They all were, in a way.
“Come on,” Victor said encouragingly. “They can’t stop us from talking.”
The man returned a puzzled expression. “But I’m not. I’m not a Broken Mirror. They called me yesterday. Said I had to come here for an evaluation. It’s all a misunderstanding.”
Red wine-colored splotches formed on Crew Cut’s face. “How do you think it works?” he asked. “You think they politely ask when you might check into the asylum? It starts as an appointment, and your life is never the same.” He sat back, crossed his arms, and stared up at the light strips.
Victor’s cheeks flared hot. The danger people with MRS posed couldn’t possibly account for the indignities they were subjected to. Ozie could be right. Something else might be going on—something his granfa had been killed for.
Victor shoved the thought away. “It hasn’t always been like this,” he said, hating the whine that crept into his voice. He’d been protected and coddled, but now that he was alone, he shouldn’t be surprised everything was more brutal. “It’s like an ever-tightening snare.”
“You’re right,” Crew Cut said with bitterness. “We’ll all be taken to the ranches eventually. Even you.”
Elena’s warning echoed in his ears. Not all the questions are going to be fair. “You must have had a couple of appointments so far. Have they ever asked you about Carmichael?” Victor asked.
Crew Cut’s mouth dropped open. He looked away.
The woman called the older man to the door. He rose jerkily and, with a hasty glance at the others, staggered forward. The door slid aside to allow him to pass and closed behind him. Victor saw nothing of the other side.
“I heard that they started asking us about Carmichael. Is it true? Do you know?”
Crew Cut folded his arms again, a pathetic gesture of self-protection. In another world, Victor would want to reassure him, get him to open up, gently take his hands, wrap him in his arms, and find better ways to spend an hour together. Choices like that were for people with less pressing problems. Perhaps the Carmichael questions were baseless dark-grid conjecture. There was no point in dragging anyone, even people with MRS, through that hell. Ozie may have got it wrong.
The woman called out Victor’s name, and the door opened. He stood and stepped forward.
The young man asked, “How do you manage it?”
Victor paused and tried a reassuring smile that felt more like a grimace. How could he explain years of therapy and hanging on by a thread? “Never surrender,” he said. The door slid shut behind him.
3
Semiautonomous California
29 February 1991
At the threshold of a door with a blue, blinking light above it, Victor braced himself for a barrage of questions. He had completed years of coaching and therapy. He would pass. Be polite. Be brief. Be normal. He repeated the mantra under his breath as the door sprang open.
Dr. Santos sat in a high-backed synthleather chair behind an enormous wooden desk. His baby face was smooth, round, gleaming in the lightstrips’ glow, and topped by hairs as wispy as spiderwebs. A typepad and flatscreen monitor were positioned within reach. Victor’s records, he presumed. Now that Oak Knoll’s records were gone, erased in Granfa Jeff’s annihilating data purge, the files possessed by Dr. Santos would be the most comprehensive documentation of Victor’s physical and mental condition.
“Empty your pockets and sit down, please,” Dr. Santos said in a high voice. He gestured toward a bowl on a small table by the door. His vowels sounded slightly twisted, as singers sometimes contorted their words to make an odd rhyme work.
Victor swallowed hard as he moved to the table, thinking about the data egg. With a shaky, desperate sleight-of-hand, he transferred the data egg from his pocket to his underwear while appearing to fish out his MeshBit and place it in the bowl. Hoping his pants didn’t bulge at the crotch too much, he approached and sat. The chair was deep and tilting, forcing him into a semi-reclined position, and the synthleather gripped his body. He felt he was about to be swallowed whole, like an insect caught in the flower of a pitcher plant. A tall cone-shaped lamp threw a bright circle onto the ceiling.
After a full minute of silence, the doctor said, “Victor Eastmore.”
It didn’t sound like a question. Though maybe it was a test. “That’s correct, sir.”
Dr. Santos looked up. “You should call me ‘Doctor.’”
“Yes, Doctor.” Already, this was off to a bad start.
Dr. Santos opened a desk drawer and placed a pyramid-shaped device on the table, twisting its top until the apex lit up green.
He began speaking. “This is a formal psychiatric evaluation under the Carmichael edicts of Semiautonomous California. This recording will be shared with the Classification Commission of the SeCa Health Board, to be used as evidence in the event of any legal challenge. Victor Eastmore, you hereby waive any potential claims against me, including damages and harm that may result from my determination of your status. Say, ‘I agree.’”
Polite. Brief. Normal. Don’t forget to breathe.
Dr. Santos leaned forward and waved a hand at Victor.
“Uh, yes, I agree.”
Dr. Santos rose from his chair and walked behind Victor. Suddenly, a low hum surrounded him, tingling his skin and blurring his vision. The chair was generating an electromagnetic field—another set of data to feed to the authorities.
“What is that?” Victor asked. “That feeling?”
“Hmm? Oh. This chair uses an array of Dirac-monopole active-resonance sensing units to sample your neurological activity.”
“Sounds like shockstick tech,” Victor said, suppressing the urge to jump from the chair.
“Nothing of the sort! Let’s get started,” the doctor said, returning to his seat. “I’ve reviewed your records. You were diagnosed in 1979. You have a history of violent behavior, lapses of judgment, and fugue states, the most notable being two years ago on the National University campus in the spring of 1989. To be honest, you’re fortunate to be a Class Three. I probably wouldn’t have made that call, but—let’s see.” He paused for a moment to read the file. “Dr. Tammet documents your progress in mood stability, impulse control, and interpersonal communication. However, her license to practice medicine in SeCa has lapsed. Her entries in your record are no longer valid.”
Victor tensed. Could evidence supporting his continued Class Three status be swept aside so easily?
Dr. Santos said, “In any case, I’m not sure any progress in your outward behavior will impress me sufficiently if the underlying neurobiological condition has deteriorated. We’ll see.”
The hum of the chair surrounded Victor, oscillating and thrumming. It felt like bees swarming around him.
“Well?” Santos asked.
“Um, I’m not sure what the question is.”
“Should you be a Class Three—”
“Yes,” Victor answered. “I’m making progress—”
“Excuse me. I don’t like being interrupted.”
“But—”
“The question”—Dr. Santos paused, glaring—“is whether you should remain Class Three, meaning you are safe to be out among the public. Tell me about your medication.”
“Personil,” Victor said. He closed his eyes. When he opened them, bees were swirling around his head, humming loudly in his ears. The air started to fill with gray smoke, ebbing and flowing in concert with the scanning chair’s fluctuations. The sensations were far more substantial than his usual synesthesia; they seemed tangible, palpable, real things in the real world rather than artifacts of his brain’s processes.
“And? It says here Dr. Rularian prescribed one fifty-milligram pill twice per day.”
Victor focused on Dr. Santos’s words. Personil every day: that was the official story. “Personil was supposed to help me maintain emotional equilibrium.”
“Was?”
Victor thought better of saying, You know, before I threw the pills down the toilet. He scratched his arm; the buzzing and smoke irritated his skin. He pictured scales forming in the cells of his epidermis, a noxious puss oozing from between them.
“That’s what Dr. Rularian told me. That Personil would make me feel stable,” Victor said, but he suspected that Dr. Rularian must have known it was a lie. Personil provided numbness, not stability. Was a lie told to counter another lie equal to the truth?
“Have you had any episodes or outbursts in the past ninety days?”
“No.” He scratched his arm again, trying to relieve the itching. Could Dr. Santos have seen footage of the scene at the funeral? He could tell the doc that it wasn’t an outburst; it was a vision, but that would get him locked up immediately. A trickle of laughter tickled his throat. He coughed it out.
“Loss of memory?”
“No.”
Dr. Santos steepled his fingers and pressed them into his fleshy neck, creating dimples like the buttons constraining the fabric on the synthleather chair. “Irritability? Mania?” he asked.
Victor tried to determine whether his throat was as swollen as he perceived it to be. Swallowing with difficulty, he said, “No. To both questions.”
“How does the medication make you feel?”
Victor blinked and breathed. “Calm.” His voice hummed discordantly with the chair’s buzzing. He interlaced his fingers and let his hands sit heavy on his crotch, pressing where the data egg was hidden. Physical sensations kept anxiety and delusions at bay—so Dr. Tammet had always said. She also noted that imagining being calm was the same as being calm, but her words seemed irrelevant in moments like this. He focused his gaze on the midpoint between his knees rather than the eyes peering at him from behind round lenses, still visible through thick gray smoke.
Dr. Santos picked up some papers and examined them. “Are you taking any other medication?”
All the saliva in Victor’s mouth dried to paste. Did he forget to fill a prescription? Or—Shocks!—did Dr. Santos suspect about the tinctures?
“Does my file say I am?” Victor asked.
Dr. Santos dropped the papers onto the desk. “I asked you a question.”
“No, Doctor. I’m not taking any other medication.” I am your polite patient, your faultless apprentice, your very normal minion. Let me dance for you, Doctor!
Dr. Santos rose, walked around his desk, and tried to perch on its edge, but it was too high. He settled for leaning against it. “You are working at a biotech firm. Part of the ‘Safe Places’ program. Tell me about your job.”
“I manage computing resources to run DNA analysis for Gene-Us, Ent—I mean, BioScan, Inc. There was a merger. Recently.”
“That sounds like a highly technical position.”
I am an information wizard! Victor took a deep breath and tried to relax into the padded material of the chair. “I graduated university with high marks.”
Dr. Santos cocked his head. “I’m asking about your work, not your education.”
“What is the question?” Victor exerted pressure on his jaw to keep his teeth from grinding together.
Dr. Santos scowled. “Young man, it’s in your interest to cooperate. Your future depends on it. I’m trying to help you. Tell me about your job. How is it working out?”
“I like it.” What else could he say? Think! “I like the challenge. It’s my job to make the computations as efficient as possible. I’m good at it.”
“With whom do you interact? How many people are in your group? Do you get along with your coworkers?”
Victor tensed, trying to keep the questions ordered in his mind. It helped to physically imagine them floating in space, to his left, straight in front, and to the right. Unfortunately, smoke wafted distractingly past them. Left first: with whom did he interact? “My supervisor runs the sequencing operations. Her name is Karine. She’s—”
But the doctor hadn’t asked about his supervisor per se. “I interact with her most often.” He cleared his throat and moved on to the next question at the center. “There are eight sequencing data engineers, including me.”
Finally, the question of how Victor got along with his coworkers hovered—he had to tell a delicate lie.
“I get along with most of them.”
“Most?”
He couldn’t tell the doctor that he’d almost gotten into a fight several times and that Sarita, in particular, had been the subject of numerous murderous fantasies—harmless stuff, if he wasn’t suspected of harboring psychotic tendencies. “They tease me sometimes. They call me names. A few of them do.”
“I don’t care about their behavior. I care about yours. How do you respond?”
Dr. Santos should care about them. They were the ones who caused problems; he would do just fine if they left him alone.
“I ignore them. I try not to hear what they say.”
“That’s not a good response. Someone with your condition must always consider your surroundings, social cues, and speech. You can’t hide from your problems; you must confront them.”
That didn’t make any sense. Victor’s entire strategy for dealing with his condition was to cut himself off from the world and keep it from affecting him and, as importantly, to keep his confused inner life from seeping out. “You want me to tell them to stop calling me names?”
“I didn’t say that! You need to confront your problems. Your coworkers can do whatever they like. But your entire brain has short circuited; it moves too quickly to anger and violence. You have to be honest with yourself. Notice how you react emotionally. Experience the emotion, and then let it go. It’s a matter of self-control.”
That made a little more sense, but Victor still thought Dr. Santos didn’t really understand him or his condition. “Dr. Tammet taught me to manage my emotions.”
Dr. Santos laughed. “Advice from a discredited therapist is not going to help you.” He moved behind the desk, sat, and took up Victor’s file again. “Tell me about your dreams.”
“What?” Victor gulped. They had never asked about his dreams before. He hadn’t told any medical person about them. Not the doctors at Oak Knoll. Not Dr. Tammet. Not even Granfa Jeff. He’d only ever told Elena. Dr. Santos couldn’t have known about them.
“Your dreams,” the doctor repeated.
Was this a standard question now? He couldn’t describe his dreams to Dr. Santos. He would be locked up for life.
The doctor continued, “Your sleep patterns. Any nightmares? Narcolepsy? Insomnia?”
“I used to have trouble falling asleep, but the Personil helps.” This was somewhat true. The medication helped him fall asleep, usually during meals. He’d had nightmares of drowning in a bowl of soup more than once.
“So, nothing else about your sleep to report?”
Victor shook his head.
“Hmm.” Clearly skeptical, the doctor pressed his lips together. “There’s a new part of the procedure. Bear with me—it’s not typical of most psychiatric evaluations. Listen to this statement, and then tell me how it makes you feel.”
Dr. Santos read a detailed account of the events in Carmichael from when Victor was four. It started with the months Samuel Miller spent secretly setting fire traps and explosives throughout town, each one equipped with a quantum trigger. The account included Mía Barrias’s testimony to the Classification Commission about what she saw the day he triggered them all, the day of her honeymoon: the fires, the autonomous vehicles programmed for murder, the bodies, including her husband Claudio’s, who were victims of Samuel’s modified shockstick. The sleeping smoke drifted through town so that Samuel could round up the stragglers and execute them. Victor listened with a sinking feeling in his gut. He’d lived through the carnage, surviving the day by being locked inside his house, alone and afraid: afraid the fires would burn him up, afraid his missing parents were already dead, afraid that the man he’d seen in his nightmares would find him and kill him. The account Dr. Santos read aloud wasn’t merely words; they were tortured echoes, gateways to the past. Even the vidfeeds they played in school weren’t this graphic.
Then Dr. Santos began to read the transcript of the semi-incoherent statement recorded by Samuel Miller explaining how his actions were meant to create a bridge between two universes.
Two! Victor shivered. The number occupied a strange territory in his brain. Sometimes the number seemed like a gateway to deeper meaning, a flavor of a strange mystery that begged to be tasted, savored, and investigated. Dr. Tammet said his feelings about the number two were another example of counterproductive pattern-seeking, a mirage to be ignored.
What was Dr. Santos saying about Samuel Miller and crossing over? Why tell him this? The bridge-between-worlds theory was as fanciful and speculative as trolls under bridges demanding tolls. No rational person would believe it.
Dr. Santos completed the Carmichael account. “What is your response to that?”
Victor said, “I don’t have one.” It had nothing to do with him. A memory best forgotten.
Dr. Santos frowned. “You feel nothing?”
His heart pounded. Blanking out right now would be sweet oblivion. “No. I mean that I’m not responsible. I’m not him.”
“Victor, listen carefully. The Carmichael edicts ensure what happened there will never happen again. You—like Samuel Miller—have been diagnosed with mirror resonance syndrome. Unless you can prove that you are not a danger, it’s in the public’s best interest for you to be sequestered for a very long time, maybe forever.”
Dr. Santos leaned back in his chair, breathed in, and let the air out slowly. “Now that you understand the question, please state your response.”
Victor sensed the field surrounding him as a vibration, a little beyond the limits of his perception. All his words, expressions, gestures, and brain activity fed a data storage matrix somewhere, encoding him for classification. And the data egg—what was it doing?
The doctor was waiting for a response. What if he answered incorrectly? What if his brain had already answered for him?
He looked at the recording device. There had to be a reason to record his answer. The stupid question must mean more than he’d realized. And Dr. Santos was giving him a second chance to answer it.
Victor spoke each word carefully. “He should not have done what he did. It was wrong. He was … he was wrong. I hate him.”
Dr. Santos nodded. “I have to say, for someone with your pathology, I’m impressed you’ve been living unassisted this long. However, given your past behavior, I’m not inclined to agree with your present classification. Unless the statements from your employer or the brain scans convince me otherwise, I’m afraid you’ll be downgraded to Class Two and moved to a ranch in Long Valley, where you’ll receive proper care. My office will be in touch with our determination within the week. If it were up to me, my conclusion would be immediate, but the law requires us to be thorough. In any case, you may as well pack up your things. The enrollment process, once underway, can be quite … brisk.”
As Victor drew in a breath to object, the humming of bees returned and reached a crescendo. The world was blotted out by swirling gray dust that solidified in the air like quick-setting cement. Dr. Santos rose from his seat and turned off the brain scanner. A buzzing became silence. Victor got up stiffly, collected his items from the basket, and moved to the exit, his surroundings twisting back into normalcy.
Dr. Santos waited for Victor to pass through the door and directed him down the hall. Victor took swift steps toward the exit and into the elevator, where he transferred the data egg from his underwear to his pocket stealthily. Seconds passed like hours and vibrated in his chest. Finally, he passed into the sunshine and fresh air, but despite the warmth of the sun, he shook while he waited for the shuttle bus. Throughout the journey, people on the bus stared, but he couldn’t stop the shaking, which continued long after he arrived home, rushed into the kitchen, and poured ten vials of fumewort tincture down his throat.