BELIEVE AND LIVE

CODY SISCO

Resonant Earth Publishing

Believe and Live © 2016 by Cody Sisco

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval without permission in writing from the publisher.

Resonant Earth Publishing

P.O. BOX 50785

Los Angeles, CA 90050

ISBN 978-0-9970348-3-7 (Kindle)

Book cover design by Novak Illustrations

Editing by Lindsey Alexander

www.codysisco.com

Twitter: @codysisco

First Edition (newsletter freebie)

30 September 1971

Semiautonomous California

Mía pulled the soft duvet tight around her hips and stretched her legs toward Claudio, luxuriating. She’d never visited Carmichael before, where Semiautonomous California’s elites and their coterie—the “SeCa set”—vacationed, but it was exactly what she needed: country luxury. She and Claudio could walk along the river that ran next to the Carmichael Inn, relax all day at the spa, or laze in bed, completely free from obligations and far from the endless political wrangling in Oakland & Bayshore. She snuggled her feet in his direction.

But his side of the bed was empty. And cold.

Mía raised her head and opened her eyes. The clock on the bedside table blinked 03:22. The power must have gone out. It couldn’t be later than seven or eight, judging by sunlight on the white synthsilk drapes.

The duvet was neatly folded over on his side, as it usually was when he rose early. He was always careful to avoid waking her. She propped herself up on her elbows and looked at the open bathroom door and the vacant space beyond it.

The quiet room unnerved her. She shrugged it off; it must be earlier than she thought. Living in fog-blighted Oakland & Bayshore, she wasn’t used to bright sun in the morning.

Maybe he’d gone out for a jog, though last night they’d shared an entire bottle of mineral-tinged Côtes Catalanes at Enoteca Amaury. Mía felt a hint of her own hangover, a slight sluggishness that would require a hot shower to wash away.

Mía replayed the previous evening in her mind: afternoon sweets in a gelato shop where a smiling boy had made them giggle, a pre-dinner stroll along the SeCa North Fork river, amaranth-infused bourbon cocktails in the Gold and Granite Saloon, the enoteca’s savory courses of marinated onions and peppers, roast duck, and braised lamb, all of it followed by real, heritage-grown coffee and lavender panna cotta, and then, of course, lovemaking.

She smiled and pushed back the covers, remembering the passion in Claudio’s eyes, how desperately he’d pressed himself against her. Three years into their relationship, now newly wed, and still the spark between them sizzled. Thank the laws they hadn’t waited months to honeymoon on Barbados and had opted instead to spend some time in Carmichael. Claudio’s legal summit had gone well, and now that she’d joined him here, they could both relax for a few days.

Mía wished he’d stayed in bed, but maybe he’d planned all along to let her sleep in. The exhaustion she felt from the last six months campaigning for Governor-in-Chief Jerry Brown’s reelection would take more than a few days to make good. Mía needed a break before the campaign’s finale, and the honeymoon would be a good start.

A siren sounded from far away. It repeated twice, then dissolved in a jarring pop and rumble.

Mía slipped from the covers and dressed, putting on loose, flowing pants and an emerald button-up blouse. She searched around for her sandals, half expecting to come across a note in Claudio’s careful, academy-trained handwriting explaining that he’d gone for bagels, a newspaper, or a real coffee in the breakfast lounge downstairs. She found her sandals poking out from under the bed and slipped them on, just as someone outside screamed.

Her heart pounded. She rushed to the window and raised it, looking out from the second story. To the west she could see the winding road leading over the ridge into town, but there was no sign of who had screamed. She heard the sound again, a ragged, terrified shout. She ran to the opposite window, the one facing the river that ran from the foothills.

On the lawn leading down to the river she saw a couple lying next to each other and staring up at the sky. Closer, next to the dirt track that ran alongside the inn, she spotted Claudio. He was wearing his morning robe, prone and spread-eagled on his back like he was making snow angels with a man standing over him—a man wearing black military-style clothing with bulging pockets and a pair of stunstick holsters. Her breath caught in her throat.

The man standing over Claudio wore chunky black body armor and looked almost like an insect. The tip of the stunstick he was holding glowed ripe-strawberry red.

Mía yelled, “Stop!”

The man whipped his head toward the open window and met her gaze. His eyes were dark—matte and soulless. He tucked the stunstick into a holster and plucked a knife from his waistband, crouched, and held it to Claudio’s neck.

The man said, “Is she with you?” He looked up at Mía and yelled, “Step away from the window.”

Mía’s hands jumped to her throat. She screamed, “What are you doing?”

The man didn’t move. The knife remained poised as seconds cruelly ticked by. They were the only three people in the universe: the knifeman, Claudio, and Mía.

Claudio appealed to her with his eyes. What were they saying? Help? Run?

His straining neck pushed dangerously against the blade’s edge.

Mía had to get help: someone calm who could defuse the situation. She tore her gaze away and dove for the door.

She sprinted down the empty hallway to the carpeted grand staircase, careening down it, her organs vibrating with every step. The inn’s reception area was empty. No one sat in the high-backed chairs next to the fireplace. No one stood behind the black-marble reception counter.

She raced to the counter, picked up the phone, and dialed 112 to connect with the police. After a moment, she realized there was no signal. The phone was dead.

When she rounded the counter to try another phone, she nearly tripped over a man lying prone on the carpet, eyes open to the ceiling, red foam coating his lips. Three bodies lay slumped beyond the doorway to the inn manager’s office. She gasped, looked around, hesitated. She didn’t know what to do. This wasn’t happening. Couldn’t be.

A wash of fury squeezed her stomach into a tight ball, and she ran for the exit. Her gaze skated across chairs, tables, looking for a weapon. There! A paperweight as big as her hand, fossilized wood in a dense translucent coating. She hefted it. Heavy. A primitive tool for a primitive situation. She tightened her grip and ran for the door and onto the back lawn.

Trees at the river’s edge swayed their limbs in the breeze. Claudio lay just as before, but the man in black armor was gone. Mía rushed forward. Claudio’s neck was intact, but there was red foam on his lips and his eyes were glassed-over. As Mía’s knees weakened and she opened her mouth to scream, a hand whipped from behind and covered her mouth. She was encircled, her arms pinned, one hand still clutching the paperweight. A cloth pressed against her lips and vapors stung her lungs. Her thoughts slowed, her muscles relaxed involuntarily, and she felt a sudden calm.

She felt as close to death as she ever had. The man could snap her neck or slit her throat.

Through blurred vision and sluggish thoughts, she noticed the man was trying to unhook something from his belt.

“You’re not supposed to be here. That’s okay. I’ll help you cross over,” he said. “You must be one of the blessed.”

Beneath drooping eyelids, she saw his right hand fumble with his stunstick. They were supposed to be non-lethal. How could he have killed Claudio and the others with it?

Claudio. She would join him—soon she would meet her husband in black eternity.

Her breath hitched. No!

Claudio would tell her to fight. He must have tried and failed. She couldn’t give up if he had sacrificed his life saving hers.

Mía held her breath against the mind-fogging drug and clung to consciousness, looking around for something to pin her to the waking world. On the ground, a small sign in hand-painted cursive letters read: Believe and live.

Mía gripped the paperweight tighter, twisted around, and jammed it into the crook of her attacker’s elbow.

His hold on her slipped. The stunstick tumbled to the ground.

She turned fully around to look him in the face. Wide mouth. A small nose. Features like slimy half-cooked chicken.

She raised the fossil again, this time ramming it into his nose. Blood sprayed, splattering across her blouse. A satisfied snarl pulled Mía’s lips back. The man crouched and grabbed the stunstick. Mía kicked his shoulder, knocking him over, but now he had his weapon. She turned and lumbered across the lawn.

Mía set her sights on a cluster of oak trees. If she could make it to the ridge, Carmichael’s houses and small downtown lay just beyond.

Her legs felt sluggish. Her arms hung limply. One hundred strides later she stole a glance behind her. The man paced, glancing between Mía and the river, seeming torn about whether to follow her, cursing to himself, something about the word “time.” He checked his watch and spoke to it, though she couldn’t make out the words. Then, cupping a hand over his broken nose, he stalked toward a hoverboat moored at the dock.

She started stumbling forward again. At the crest of the ridge she stopped, gasping at the scene below her. The skies were cloudy with smoke and an oddly bright white fog seemed to be moving through the town in clumps, forming almost as fast as the breeze thinned it. What the thinned-out fog revealed left her gaping.

Three separate conflagrations were roaring through houses and shops. Another fire was burning elm trees lining the town square, blazing like giant torches. One fire ripped through a block of bars, restaurants, and shops where she and Claudio had walked just last night. Homes on fire on the other side of the low-rise town sent black smoke billowing up, blending with haze from the other fires, rising toward one inky confluence.

Why couldn’t she hear any sirens? Why wasn’t anyone coming to put out the fires?

The answer lay at the foot of the hill. A small blaze engulfed a fire truck, split in two like a broken toy. The main cabin rested on its side fifty meters from the carriage, but there were no other vehicles on the street, no sign of what had caused the accident.

Oh laws, the parade! Today was Repartition Day. The townspeople would have gathered on Main Street. Could a bomb have gone off? But then there would be survivors, people helping the injured. There should be scores of police investigating, helping people, but she saw none. Where was everyone?

The tragedy, she realized, was bigger and more horrible than her own painful slice. It was as if someone had torn the cover off a book, revealing a different image and a tale much darker than the one that had been promised. No one was safe, she realized. After this day, how could anyone in SeCa feel safe again?

The fires seemed to be gaining strength. Smoke billowed upward.

An engine fired up behind her. The black-clad man was piloting a boat down the river toward her.

“Laws!” she cursed.

Find someone in town. There must be someone somewhere who could help her.

Mía stumbled down the hill. Safety in numbers. Shelter. Weapons. Survive. These thoughts filled her head and crowded out everything else.

She ran, passing houses like pale faces, eyes wide and shocked by the death and conflagrations on their doorsteps.

Drapes twitched in the ground floor window of one of the houses. Mía moved closer, hobbling. A boy maybe seven years old watched her approach from behind the glass. It was the same boy she and Claudio had smiled at in the gelato shop. He disappeared and the front door opened. A refuge. Mía started to cross the street.

Something beeped three times, a sound similar to a Mesh feed notification but not quite the same. The boy’s mouth opened to call to her.

The façade of the building bulged, then shattered. An explosion blossomed into flame, knocking Mía ten meters back onto the grass. Alive.

But the boy was gone.

The house blazed, adding its smoke to the crowded sky.

Mía closed her eyes to blot out the image of the burning rubble in front of her.

A middle-aged woman ran out from a neighboring yard, panicked. Her dress was on fire. She tried batting it out, but the wind whipped it away from her grasp. Flames climbed up the fabric as she struggled in the middle of the street.

A car rumbled to life. It accelerated, aiming straight for the woman.

“Run!” Mía yelled.

The woman stopped and turned.

Mía didn’t have time to look away. The car slammed into the woman, knocking her back. The tires rolled over her, and the car continued down the street before slowing again, returning to its slumber.

The woman’s body seemed to still be moving. An illusion, just the wind snapping at her dress, Mía realized, trying to make sense of was going on. The town itself had been turned into a weapon, houses transformed into explosives, self-driving cars into killing machines.

Fear pushed Mía to move. She took a step forward and a car’s engine started. She sprinted toward the burning house as best a hobbling person could. The death-car rumbled and started to gun for her in reverse, but she was already pushing past a leaning fence into the burnt woman’s yard. The car didn’t follow—though it could kill, it couldn’t betray its programming and leave the street.

In the backyard, Mía found a man’s body lying facedown at the foot of a screened-in porch. She knew the same red foam would be on his lips if she turned him over.

A black box lay on the ground next to him. She’d seen one like it before, attached to the murderous man’s stunstick. A shiny silver connector protruded from one side, and on the opposite face, in platinum-embossed characters, were the words “Quantum Trigger-X0376.”

Gadgets. That was his thing. The cars. Explosives. Dirac stunsticks. These black cube things. He was killing everyone with tech. The knife on Claudio’s neck had just been for show, a trick to coax her out of the inn. Could one man have done this on his own? Or were madmen patrolling the streets with stunsticks, rounding up survivors for slaughter?

Mía’s breath hitched and she dropped to a crouch, hugging her legs with her arms.

Next to the dead man, on another scrap of cardboard, were the same hand-painted letters that she’d seen near Claudio: Believe and live. What kind of monster forced such an absurd message on his victims as he killed them? What kind of madness was this?

Could this day be real? Could it be a dream? What if, instead, she had lost her mind? Could insanity feel this tangible, this awful?

A searing ember landed on the back of her hand and she snapped back to reality. The fire at the house next door was growing louder, hotter, throwing parts of itself to the wind like deadly spores. She wasn’t safe here, but where would she be? Who knew what other surprises were hidden throughout Carmichael?

The veteran campaign planner in her switched on. She took in her surroundings, seeing only obstacles, threats, and her path forward.

Mía pushed on her thighs to raise herself up, tottering toward a woodpile stacked against a two-meter-high wooden fence. Finding depths of strength she would have thought superhuman just an hour ago, she clambered up the pile, hoisted herself over the top of the fence, and dropped to her feet on the other side. Leaning against the fence, she wished for a few moments of rest. She staggered forward instead.

There were no bodies in this yard. Good.

Believe and live. What did that mean? It was useless to wonder. Ask a viper why it hunts, and you’ll receive an answer of fangs.

“You’re not supposed to be here,” he’d said. Well, she was here, and damned if she wasn’t going to stop wondering and start fixing.

Mía, the anomaly, the woman who would stop him. Somehow.

She stepped around a kiddie pool and a child’s swing set in the yard. Movement from inside the house caught her gaze. A little boy with curly black hair, perhaps four years old, pounded on a sliding glass door. His eyes were wide with fear.

Mía held up her palms and shouted through the glass, “Don’t touch anything. It’s not safe.”

The boy nodded. “I know.”

“What’s your name?”

“Victor Eastmore.”

***

Victor stared at the woman. Her clothing was spattered with red and blackened at the edges.

She had told him not to touch anything, but he’d already been warned by his dreams.

His head felt like a balloon about to pop. The feeling was frightening, too much. He wanted to make it stop. He began to slap the glass again.

“Calm down. Please! Stop banging,” the woman yelled through the door. “You’ll get hurt.”

He stopped slapping and pressed his face into the glass. Its coolness felt soothing.

Outside, the woman knelt and inspected the underside of the wooden steps. Victor knew what she would find: a rope of shiny gray material attached to a small black box. He’d tried to point out the object to his parents, but his words got mixed up and they said they wouldn’t listen to more nonsense about his dreams. Even when he told them they were coming true.

The woman looked up. “You need to stay inside. Don’t try to open this door. Can you do that?”

Victor nodded, feeling tears spill onto his cheeks. He wanted his ma. He wanted her to hug him, to stroke his hair, and most of all to believe him.

“Have you seen my ma?” he asked.

The woman frowned. He saw that she was crying too.

Victor put his palm on the glass. “My doctor says it’s okay to be sad sometimes. But what if I’m sad all the time? What if the man from Nightmareland got my ma?”

The woman gently placed her palm on the opposite side of the glass from his. It was bigger and needed soapy washy time. “Can you go hide in your room?” she asked.

He said, “I know how to open the doors that Ma and Fa think are too big for me.”

“That’s very clever. Go to your room, Victor. Don’t leave for anything. No matter what you hear. Stay there until someone comes to get you.”

“Is the man from Nightmareland coming back?” Victor asked.

The woman blinked at him. “Only if he sees you.”

Victor whispered, “I’ll tell you a secret.”

“What?” she asked. “I can’t hear you.” She tapped lightly on the glass.

Victor spoke louder. “His name is Samuel Miller.”

Her eyes went wide. “You’re sure?”

Victor nodded. “He works at my school.”

“Stay inside. I’ll bring help.”

Victor nodded again, sadly. He knew she would bring help, but it was the kind of help that was good and bad at the same time, and it was already too late. He hadn’t done enough to warn his ma and fa. He ran to the stairs, bounded up them like a monkey on all fours, and hid in his room, listening to the sounds of Carmichael falling to pieces, knowing he shared some of the blame.

***

Mía watched the Eastmore boy climb the stairs in what must be his family’s summer house though even for a second home it seemed too plain and modest for one of the richest families in Semiautonomous California if not the entire American Union. She wondered why his parents had left him alone. He acted eerily older than he appeared to be and seemed to know far more than a child should.

Like the attacker’s name.

Mía repeated it silently. Samuel Miller. Samuel Miller, I’m going to stop you.

Then she left the boy to his hiding spot and went back out into the street.

Of the many people she saw lying on the pavement, most were still breathing. She had to do something, tell someone, get help. If the man didn’t find them first, the cars would run them down when they moved.

The Mesh tied all of Semiautonomous California together. Carmichael was only a two-hour train ride from the capital. How could the town’s citizens be left to fend for themselves? Why weren’t people coming to help them? Surely, they’d seen the smoke.

Maybe help had come and they’d succumbed to the same traps as the firemen. Or maybe the man in black armor—Samuel—had sent authorities on a wild goose chase in the opposite direction. Whatever the case, she had to sound the alarm.

As she darted across the street, the whir of a car’s engine sounded, coming to life when it sensed her movement. Mía hurried on, making it to the safety of a hedged-in yard. She traversed another set of fences and backyards and found a narrow gravel lane. Beyond it she saw a park with a bandstand and play areas for children. It should have been filled with life and laughter. But it was empty. What could possibly motivate someone to—

Voices.

Mía ducked behind a hedge. On the far side of the park the black-clad man was pulling a woman across the green. Her hands were tied, her mouth gagged. He led her to the bandstand. His head swiveled, scanning his surroundings. Mía didn’t dare move. Through the dry, unhealthy-looking foliage and twigs, she could see the scene unfolding, and her stomach sank. She was about to witness another murder.

The man forced the young woman to her knees. “Believe and you’ll live. I’ll help you cross over.” His voice sounded earnest, frantic, like he wanted to convert this young woman to some religion of his own creation. If it was a religion, it was one that confused life and death, faith and fear, this world with somewhere else.

Tears streamed down the young woman’s face. Her white blouse, almost the same cut as Mía’s emerald one, ruffled in the breeze. Her hair lifted, as if its reddish blond strands were appealing to him for mercy.

“Believe in the other world and you’ll live on there.” He lifted a stunstick and pressed it to her head. The black cube capping the stunstick emitted a click.

Mía screamed, “Samuel, stop!” She rushed into the open.

He jumped and spun around. The stunstick stopped clicking.

“Go away!” he yelled. “She can’t cross over while you watch. You’ll kill her.”

“Please,” Mía pleaded. “Let her go.”

“Stop interfering,” Samuel said. “It’s not my choice! This world is hell. The dream people won’t stay quiet. I’m helping half souls cross over to the better world.” He pulled a silver sphere from his pocket and threw it at Mia’s feet. Thick smoke billowed around her knees, rising, jetting into the air. Sleeping gas, the kind riot police in San Francisco used to derail protests.

Mía ran, trying to outpace the smoke.

Click. Click. She glanced back and saw the stunstick fire. Dirac waves pulsed from its tip, momentary shimmers in the air that looked like water moving across a pane of glass. The young woman collapsed, red foam leaking from her mouth.

“Live free,” Samuel said softly. Then he looked at the box on his stunstick. His face scrunched and he howled. “You did this!” he shouted. “You killed her!”

Mía fled through the haze of gas and stumbled into a car, a SeCa SeaBreeze. She ducked inside and slammed the door shut just as the gas cloud overtook the vehicle. Frantically, she searched the dash for air vents to close them, when, with a violent lurch, the car accelerated down the street.

She hadn’t touched anything.

“No! Stop!” she screamed.

The car ignored her command. The steering disk accepted no input.

She tried to open the doors. Locked.

Behind her, another car followed with the black-clad man inside, watching her and fiddling with a device, no doubt controlling her car remotely.

Painful heat rose in Mía’s throat. Panic trembled in her hands as a parade of houses whisked by. Her car whizzed away from the center of town to a stretch of road that hewed to the riverbank. The Carmichael Inn squatted one hundred meters ahead on the left. The river arced around the inn, revealing the broad lawn between it and the river. Mía saw a dark spot and realized with a sob that it was Claudio’s body, still where she’d left it on the lawn.

A message flashed on the dashboard: Warning: safe mode disengaged.

The road turned. The car did not.

Mía slipped instinctively into the footwell. The car fell, slammed into earth on one side, and flipped.

Steel crunched and windows shattered. Water rushed in, soaking her skin and clothes. The vehicle lurched, scraped along the bottom of the river, came to rest, then broke free again.

Floating in a jostling, blind murk, she flailed until she found her footing. She found a pocket of air and coughed up water. She was beyond thought. Every corner of her mind screamed, “Breathe, find air, and keep it.”

The submerged car bumped into a sandbar and stopped. Mía slipped under the water line. Jagged glass slashed her hands and snagged her clothing as she pulled herself out of the car through a broken window. Tensing her limbs, she pushed off the car’s side like a frog as it suddenly moved on, scraping downstream.

At the surface Mía gasped and wiped her eyes. She spotted a tree. Its roots played in the water at the river’s edge like fingers. She pulled with one arm and then another, drifting farther downstream, but not making much progress toward the bank. She’d never been a good swimmer. The river had widened and the current was steady. She swept by the tree, missing her target. She floated on, uncertain if she would have the strength to pull herself from the water.

A bend in the river approached, and she swam toward it. She found herself on a shallow rocky stretch half a meter deep. She trudged forward and collapsed onto land, sobbing. Her entire body shook. She’d never imagined it was possible to feel this afraid and in pain.

The sound of a motor jerked her head up. The man was driving down the road toward her, one hundred meters upstream.

Mía jumped in the water and let the river carry her away, kicking and paddling to stay afloat.

The black-clad man’s words echoed in her mind: Believe and live. She would bring rescue. The police would lock him up, study his defects, and guard themselves against broken people like him.

She would marshal all the resources in SeCa to put the man under a microscope and pry him apart, to find out exactly what part of his heart had turned black, what piece of his brain corrupted him. She would uncover what could turn a man into such a monster.

Some ways downstream, Mía spotted a fisherman. She swam to him, and he pulled her onto his boat. She told him, croaking in the sudden calm and quiet on deck, with a bloody noonday sun overhead, what was happening in Carmichael, and when they docked, she told a SeCa militia unit. That evening, they took back the town, but even when the horror ended, Mía told anyone who would listen what had happened—and they always listened like spellbound children. She'd fought evil as black as night. They couldn’t choose but to hear her speak.

Mía’s prior life was gone, erased. She existed only for the purpose of telling her story and making sure the monstrosities that happened in Carmichael never happened again. And so, months later, she made her case publicly for the Classification Commission and then became its leader.

***

A few hours after the fisherman pulled Mía from the water, Victor finally left his hiding spot and peeked out the window. Masses of people in uniforms were going door to door. He waved when one of them looked up at him.

A woman in a light-blue uniform spent a half hour under Victor’s watchful gaze fiddling with the object under the porch. When she finally removed it, Victor was reunited with his ma on the front lawn. The look on her face was dazed; she said the smoke had made her sleepy, so sleepy that she had had to take a nap on the bicycle trail. He said that was silly, but he didn’t laugh. Fa was on his way home from New Venice, she told him, then she called Granfa Jeff. Victor could hear his voice on the sonofeed. He said it would be all right, he would take care of everything, and they should go to Oakland & Bayshore and live in his mansion.

As they sat together on the lawn, Victor smelled smoke and soot in his mother’s hair and listened to his granfa’s voice on the feed, feeling like one of the paper boats his class had sailed on the lake, so wobbly that they eventually filled with water and disappeared. What if one day he himself sank, pushed under by the same dark force that had found him in Carmichael today? What if he never bobbed back up?

***

I couldn’t help myself. I kept returning to Carmichael. First to contribute to the timeline reconstruction for the trial and then for the first anniversary. And then for the rebuilding. And then again by myself, and again.

I retraced my footsteps. I can’t explain why. I think about how differently that day could have gone. If the boy hadn’t blown up. If I’d managed to save Claudio. If I had been the one who helped people in the town cross over. For years afterward, pieces of me kept coming loose, and I replaced them with pieces of Carmichael. It wasn’t just to connect to the other victims and their lives. I know that’s what I said at the time. But I have pieces of the monster inside me, too.

Maybe it was monstrous of me to break into the evidence locker at the courthouse, but reading Samuel’s carefully worded thesis opened my eyes to what we needed to do. The Classification Commission’s work is vital, and we must support it. After all, anyone could be the next monster.

– Interview with Mía Barrias, Five Years After Carmichael (1983)

About the Author

Cody Sisco is the author of speculative fiction that straddles the divide between plausible and extraordinary. Tortured Echoes is his second novel and continues the series that began in Broken Mirror, which focuses on Victor Eastmore’s journeys on Resonant Earth and beyond. An avid reader of Frank Herbert, Haruki Murakami, and Kim Stanley Robinson, Sisco strives to create worlds that sit in the “uncanny valley”—discomfortingly odd yet familiar, where morality is not clear-cut, technology bestows blessings and curses, and outsiders struggle to find their niche. He is a co-organizer of the Northeast Los Angeles Writers critique group and the founder of the Made in L.A. indie author co-op. Find out more on the author's blog or sign up to the newsletter.

Afterword

Thank you for reading Believe and Live. I'd love to hear what you think of it. Write a review for the story and post it to Goodreads. Please go do that now, and then continue reading below as the story continues with the first chapter of Broken Mirror.

Chapter 1

Yours is not the only universe. There is another, where I was born. Your universe called to me, and I answered, ignorant of the harm crossing the bridge would cause.

—Victor Eastmore’s Apology

Oakland & Bayshore, Semiautonomous California

14 September 1990 (20 years after the Carmichael Massacre)

Victor Eastmore waited in the Freshly Juice Shop’s customer queue, whispering a mantra to fight off brain blankness. Only three people waited in the queue ahead of him, a young woman with copper-colored hair and an elderly couple at the counter. Soon he would have his enhanced juice.

He dry-swallowed a dose of Personil. The timing of the juice and the pill had to be just right for him to arrive at his appointment in a calm but lucid state of mind.

Behind a counter that ran the length of the juice shop, stone fruits, berries, and citrus bathed in a chiller cabinet’s cool mists. Vegetables, still actively photosynthesizing, stewed in irrigation racks on the back wall.

Victor felt radiative pressure from the overhead lightstrips as a pleasurable tingling on his face. He tilted his head back. The side benefits of having a synesthetic brain that perceives one stimulus and translates it into another were few and far between, and he took what he could get.

The queue didn’t move. The friendliest Freshly worker, Ric, liked to chat with each customer. Victor usually took the extra time to study the more “normal” behavior of others—his condition enabled him to visualize people’s emotions as patterns of colors. When he observed Ric’s face, he saw electric blue filaments dancing on a rosy background, an indication of good humor overlaid by excitement. But today Victor’s attention wandered. Dr. Tammet had promised to run him through an extra challenging perception-focusing test today to prepare for his reclassification appointment in a couple months.

Victor appreciated the doctor’s help, but she’d been so ambitious lately and he felt that he wasn’t meeting her expectations. Today was likely to be frustrating. His stomach roiled. He silently formulated a mixture of juice and additives that could quiet a volcano. Adding to his unease, he’d had little sleep last night on account of his nightmares, though that was nothing new.

Victor searched through dozens of Freshly bioenhancer additives listed in the wall-mounted menu. If he factored in the benefits of freshness and the nutrient base of the ingredients, the optimum recipe combined leeks, cabbage, and celery, along with smaller portions of mandarin, apple, and persimmon and two doses of languor and equilibrium.

Victor rehearsed the ingredients’ names to himself while tapping each finger with his thumb two times—two is the best. He also tried to relax by humming, keeping the vibrations low, intermittent, and inaudible to anyone else.

The young woman waiting in front of Victor turned and looked him up and down. Her reddish-brown hair was gathered in a black synthleather band at her neckline. She crossed her arms and said, “Did you say something?”

Victor’s stomach tightened. He looked up at the menu. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see anxiety glistening around her eyes. Her hands moved to her sides and clenched, whiter than her pale skin. She might be readying an attack. All he wanted was his juice bulb and to be on time to see Dr. Tammet.

“You seem . . .” Her voice trailed off. Then she asked in a quiet hiss, “Are you a Broken Mirror?”

Victor kept his gaze on the menu and pretended not to hear her. Broken Mirror was a commonplace slur for people with mirror resonance syndrome. He’d been called it a thousand times since his diagnosis. Next to his nightmares, which left his sheets sweat-soaked every night, name-calling was nothing.

“Hello? I’m talking to you,” the young woman said.

Victor looked down at the woman’s red polo shirt. Faint stains marred the shirt’s coarse-grained fibers, and the collar splayed wide, revealing her freckled, sunburned neck.

“Are you snubbing me?” she asked.

He glanced into her narrowed hazel eyes.

A mistake.

Her anger arced into his brain, locking the breath in his lungs. Sounds from the shop faded, replaced by waves of hostile pressure. Her emotions had infected him. Victor wrenched his gaze back to the menu board. In a quiet, strained voice, he said, “I’m sorry. I’d rather not converse with you.”

Her face drew closer, reddening. “I won’t be shamed by you.”

People turned and stared. Everything in his field of vision undulated. The Personil wasn’t working.

He tried to say, “Of course not,” but his mouth wouldn’t move. His heart thundered in his ears.

“Why won’t you talk to me?” she demanded.

Ice formed in Victor’s throat. Why did she have to be so aggressive?

The woman pointed at him and looked around. “Where is the manager? I won’t be insulted!”

He wanted to gouge out her blue marble eyes. His fingers curled into claws. Victor mouthed Dr. Tammet’s calming refrain. The wise owl listens before he asks, “Who?” The dark forest hides the loudest cuckoo. He tried picturing the doctor’s bird sketches, but in his mind’s eye, the owl clutched the cuckoo and flapped away.

The young woman loomed closer, eyes wide. “What are you saying?”

One of the workers ducked underneath the counter, stood, and asked her what was wrong.

She proclaimed, “I deserve fair treatment—”

Blood pulsed in Victor’s ears, blotting out her voice. His consciousness slipped toward blankspace. Shocks—not now, not here, not like this.

Someone hissed Victor’s name. He looked around and saw Ric at the paybox, jerking his head toward the exit and mouthing, “Go!”

Victor turned toward the door reluctantly and ran.

“You need help!” the woman yelled at his back.

Outside, the sound of sirens filled Victor’s ears. People strolled along the sidewalks, some smiling, some preoccupied, none of them glanced around looking for fire engines or police vans. The sirens were only in his head.

Ric burst out of the juice shop, carrying a bulb of pink liquid.

“Sorry about that,” Ric said as he handed the drink to Victor.

Victor sucked the straw and drained half the juice bulb in panicked gulps. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Why—why was she so upset?”

“Who knows? Maybe she’s on stims. Or off her meds.”

Victor gritted his teeth. He squeezed the bulb, and pink juice spurted from the straw onto the ground.

“Or maybe she’s just wants free stuff,” Victor said.

“Maybe,” Ric agreed. He held up his hands. “Look, I’ve seen her come in before,” he said. “Most times she’s no problem. Other times she complains to get a free drink. Sucks you had to be her scapegoat today. Try to shake it off.”

Maybe she was off her medication. Victor had lost control of himself many times: at dinner with his parents, at work, and even by himself. Maybe the copper-haired woman had mirror resonance syndrome, too. Victor sucked the bulb until the last pulse of sweet, tangy liquid was gone. He needed every drop of calm it could provide.

“Thank you,” he said to Ric. “What did you put in it?”

“I doubled up the languor. I wasn’t sure what else you needed.” Ric wiped his hands down his silver synthsilk apron. “Vic, you’ve been a Class Three for a while, right?”

Victor nodded. Longer than most. Hopefully for a long time to come.

“I thought so,” Ric said. “My brother’s a Class Two. He’s not doing great. I’m afraid they’re going to put him in a Class One facility soon.”

Victor wanted to hear more, but he kept his mouth shut. He didn’t want to be late.

Ric said, “Do you think someone you know could check on him? Your granfa, maybe.”

“Maybe he could,” Victor said.

The Eastmore family’s legacy had always overshadowed his own life. As descendants of both former slaves and slave-owning families, the Eastmores demonstrated the success of Reconstruction. Widespread intermarriage without regard for skin color led the masses to embrace nondiscrimination and equality at the end of the nineteenth century. Over several decades, the Eastmores amassed business interests as varied as energy and healthcare and brokered political favors to speed the Repartition of the United States into the nine nations of the American Union. Then Victor’s granfa, Jefferson Eastmore, cured cancer. After that, people routinely assumed the Eastmores could make miracles happen. Ric must believe that Victor enjoyed all the privileges that came with wealth and power, rather than being an embarrassment and a disappointment to his family.

Ric eyed Victor, looking him up and down. His lips were parted, moist.

Victor could tell when people thought he was attractive, as Ric obviously did. His toes gripped the insides of his shoes. The attention made him uncomfortable. He wondered what it was exactly that others saw when they looked at him, how some could fear him, some could crave him, and some could do both at the same time.

“I’ve got to go,” Victor said. “Thanks again.” He turned to leave, but Ric grabbed his arm.

“You think he’s okay out there on the ranchos? They’re real farms, right? Like summer camp?”

Victor pictured the new Class Two facility in Carmichael, a pleasant few acres of farmland on the outskirts of town. Surrounded by electrified fences and overshadowed by a concrete fortress on a nearby hill that held the catatonic Class Ones, the Class Two facility was most definitely not like summer camp.

Victor said, “It’s not so bad for Twos. He might not be reclassified for years.”

When Victor had visited the Class Two rancho in Carmichael, Granfa Jeff had pointed out all the innovations that had made it a kinder, gentler prison. The Class Twos held elections for a chief who advocated for better food and recreational opportunities. The library had been fully stocked. If someone could resign themselves to a slow, sad decline into catatonia, it wouldn’t be a bad place.

“Ten years he’s been locked up,” Ric said. “They caught him protesting the first Carmichael Law. One cheek swab later . . . He hasn’t been home since. I send him packages of black cardamom seeds every month.”

“Why those?” Victor asked.

Ric shrugged. “It’s the only thing he asks for. He doesn’t want me to visit. You’ve been to one?”

Victor nodded. “Once. When I went back to Carmichael after—after we moved away. My granfa helped set up the visit. They have a patient council with elections, but it still feels like a prison. And Mesh BioLoc transmitters are fused to their bones.”

Ric winced.

“Sorry I said that. I’m sure it doesn’t hurt.”

Ric’s shoulders slumped. “I hope you’re right. See you next time.” He trotted back into the shop.

Victor reached into his pocket, pulled out his cigar-shaped MeshBit, and checked the timefeed—five minutes until his appointment.

***

Victor tried to jog on his walk home, but the Personil slowed him down. When he arrived, he climbed carefully in his car and drove along the east side of City Lake, turning onto a sinuous road that led up to Oak Knoll Hospital. He imagined Dr. Tammet’s sad eyes when he failed her tests. He didn’t care what the world thought of him, but he couldn’t stand a second of her disappointment.

On campus, Victor parked and hiked up the paved path to the hospital entrance, a glass facade between two towering, white concrete wings. The Personil blotted out everything except the doors in front of him.

When he approached, the two glass doors failed to slide open automatically.

He checked his MeshBit again. The timefeed read 11:07 a.m. He looked around. His car sat by itself, the parking lot otherwise empty. In his rush and his mind haze, he hadn’t noticed.

Heat suffused his cheeks. He should have realized something was wrong the second he pulled off the main road. At least a hundred cars should be in those spaces.

Victor paced in front of the entrance. His face smoldered like a piece of charcoal about to catch fire. He tried to pry the doors open, but they wouldn’t budge. The precision-cut edges held together seamlessly. There wasn’t even room to slide a slip of paper between them.

Victor felt the urge to vomit. If he couldn’t see Dr. Tammet, he would have to go without his therapy. Panic sliced through the Personil fog. A resonant episode grew more likely every second.

The world blazed sun-white as a shiver ran up his spine. He’d felt panic like this in Carmichael when he was four years old, locked in his house, crying at the sounds of explosions and screams outside, wondering if his parents would ever come home.

Victor also remembered Samuel Miller, whom he’d called the Man from Nightmareland, because his wide, shell-shocked eyes had appeared in Victor’s dreams many times during the weeks prior to the massacre. Samuel Miller had rampaged through Carmichael, stalking the town’s citizens and killing with a stunstick and explosive traps. Thanks to him and his preferred method of murder, “shocks” became a curse word in SeCa.

Victor had seen Samuel from his second-story window and froze with the curtain clutched in his hand as Samuel looked up. He’d held his breath until it felt like his ribs would break. Then Samuel had moved on to help more people “cross over.”

The resonance filled Victor like water gushing into a clogged bathtub. He pounded on the hospital doors and, straining to see inside, shielded his eyes with his hands. He could tell that the large atrium was bereft of people, an unlit gloom. Vidscreens above the information counter were dark.

When he stepped back, his reflection stared back at him.

A mess of hair. A mess of a day. A messed-up life.

Victor stumbled forward, dropped to his knees, and pressed his forehead against the glass, feeling blankness nearby. Was his own rampage about to begin?

As a Class Three, Victor could live a relatively normal life (if one considered taking daily medication and going to multiple therapy sessions every week to be relatively normal). But some day he would become a drooling, insentient bed wetter, and every resonant episode brought him closer to that fate. At some point, the blankness would take over, and he would be gone.

Victor rubbed his palms together, changing the rhythm of the movement every few breaths. That was one of Dr. Tammet’s techniques, and a useful one, especially when there was no one around to see him acting like a frenzied faith healer.

Something in the darkened hospital atrium caught Victor’s gaze. A figure moved closer. It was Granfa Jeff. His white and gray hair floated in wisps. His face, all dark freckles on brown skin, drooped as if he hadn’t slept well.

The doors opened. Granfa Jeff stepped out and secured the doors behind him. He rested his palms heavily on Victor’s shoulders. “I have some news that may upset you, Victor.”

Victor used Dr. Tammet’s techniques to read his granfa’s facial expression. Deep blue sadness dimpled the skin around his eyes and mouth, but Victor noticed something else. He couldn’t tie his intuition to a specific observation, but he noticed a shadow—a different emotion struggling to the surface.

In a low voice, Granfa Jeff said, “We have to scuttle the research into your cure.”

Victor’s mouth felt dry. He blinked, not believing what he’d heard, waiting for Granfa Jeff to correct himself. They couldn’t do that, could they? Victor peered into the hospital’s gloomy atrium. “Where’s Dr. Tammet?”

“I’m closing Oak Knoll, Victor. I let the staff go, you see. Another doctor will see you privately from now on. We’ll make arrangements.”

After years of therapy, hundreds of appointments, and who knew how many ounces of Victor’s blood drawn for tests, Granfa Jeff was going to shut down the research program? A cure was his only hope to prevent permanent catatonia.

“What’s going to happen to me?” Victor asked.

Granfa Jeff’s expression darkened, and Victor felt the blankness rise up again.

***

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