Broken Mirror (17 page)

He thought back to what the herbalist had said about war. She was clearly an alarmist. She’d probably heard so many people with MRS complaining about persecution that she’d started to believe them.

The strip of paper she had given him crinkled in his pocket. Whoever Pearl wanted him to contact probably wouldn’t even respond to Victor’s ping, but he should at least try.

Victor took the train across the bay, retrieved his car from the parking structure, and drove to the Gene-Us campus. After dosing himself liberally with fumewort and bitter grass, he spent the day immersed in data sheets and visualizations.

The office emptied out at six p.m. He found an unoccupied conference room, activated a Mesh terminal, and began a search query for the brainhacker’s MeshID.

A profile screen swam to the surface as it usually did, but there was no information. The fields for name, location, employer
—
all were blank. The command cursor blinked, asking if he would like to initiate contact with the non-person.

He pressed the “affirm” icon on the type-pad.

The vidscreen filled with a shadowy figure, male in outline, broad-shouldered and short-haired. His face and clothes were a darker black against a hazy grayish background. Why vidchat at all if the image was going to be obscured?

“Victor Eastmore?” a tinny voice asked. The modulation of the sound made it difficult to make out the words.

“Who are you?” Victor asked.

“You got this MeshID from Ming Pearl in San Francisco. You’re self-medicating now, she tells me.”

Victor sat back in his chair, suddenly feeling exposed.

“Don’t worry, our feed is masked,” the figure said. “It won’t register on any logs.” The man’s smugness was apparent even through the filter that obscured the sono and vidfeed.

“She said you could help me.”

“Correct,” the figure said.

Victor asked, “Why would you want to?”

“To get to the bottom of Jefferson Eastmore’s assassination.”

HeAdSpAcE helps you reach your full potential.

—HeAdSpAcE Brainhacker Collective slogan

Victor blinked at the vidscreen.

“I never thought you would get in touch with me so soon,” the figure said. The sonofeed rippled electronically, masking its true voice.

“Who are you?” Victor asked.

“I like to help people who need help from people like me.”

The oblique nonanswer, a familiar style of bantering, tickled Victor’s memory. He shrugged the thought aside and asked the more important question, “Why did you say Granfa Jefferson was assassinated?”

“‘Granfa?’ SeCa’s linguistic fetishes won’t bring about autonomy.”

“Tell me!”

Gruff gurgling came through the speakers. The figure reached out of the frame and put an object on his head that resembled a crown. When he spoke again, there was an additional scratchy distortion coming through the sonofeed. “If you’re seeing the herbalist, I’m willing to bet you’ve stopped taking Personil. It’ll be some time before its effects fade. These next few weeks are going to be tough.”

Victor bristled. “You think you know so much about me, but you
—
”

“How’s Alik? Have they pulled the plug yet?”

Victor’s breath caught in his throat.

“Wait, don’t tell me.” The figure hunched over
—
Victor heard the rapid stabs of fingers on an old-fashioned keyboard
—
then straightened. “Okay, it looks like your friend Alik is conscious for at least eight hours each day. He responds when he hears familiar voices, though he’s got nothing like normal speech
—
”

“Cram it!” Victor knew all about Alik’s progress. The boy’s parents regularly apprised the Eastmores of his condition.

“Control yourself. You know as well as I do the importance of cognitive equilibrium. I’m going to help you achieve it.”

“Cognitive equilibrium?” Victor leaned forward, scrutinizing the figure’s outline. There was only one person who knew enough about Alik and about Victor’s condition to talk to him this way: Ozie, Victor’s friend and classmate during university. How was Ozie, a fellow person with MRS, wrapped up in all of this?

Victor said, “I know you! I know who you are. No more hiding, Ozie.”

The figure tore the crownish thing from its head, slammed a hand on the keyboard, and the feed went dark.

Victor stared at the blank vidscreen. Evenings in the Gene-Us office were quiet, though a few of the professional staff would still be on site. Someone could walk by the conference room any minute and ask him what he was doing.

It made sense that Ozie had become a brainhacker. He’d always loved computers and excelled at computing, engineering, all of the hard sciences, even more so than Victor, who got top marks in those subjects. If there were a way to hack into the human brain that wasn’t pseudoscientific fraud, Ozie would be the one to discover it. That must be why he disappeared at the beginning of senior year. Victor thought he’d been reclassified. Apparently he’d escaped SeCa instead.

Victor knew he should get up, walk away, and forget about any talk of murder and assassination. Sure, he’d found polonium on the data egg. It was probably a defect in the manufacturing process. Quantum storage devices were notoriously difficult to make. The process probably required all sorts of dangerous materials. Victor was no engineer, and he knew next to nothing about radioactivity. He had a reclassification appointment to worry about, and he couldn’t afford to listen to Ozie’s crazy theories.

Victor drummed his fingers on the desk. Curiosity got the better of him, and he sent a feed request.

This time Ozie appeared unfiltered on the vidscreen, sitting on a high-backed, overstuffed chair. Behind thick-rimmed glasses, the whites of his eyes blazed in contrast to his skin
—
black as obsidian
—
and dark clothing, nearly invisible in the low-lit room. A metal cap that resembled an overturned colander sat on his head.

“Greetings from the Organized Western States,” Ozie said in a low, carefully controlled voice.

Victor smiled. He hadn’t realized how much he’d missed the only male friend he’d ever made. Crazy Ozie, always inventing some unbelievable bit of tech, always pushing Victor’s buttons
—
someone Victor could trust and tell anything.

Victor had to set the record straight about one thing, though. “Alik’s coma wasn’t my fault. I told you. He picked the fight.”

Ozie waved a hand. “It doesn’t matter how I see it, or you, for that matter. The Health Board cast a wide net, and with you they bagged the big fish. If an Eastmore could be diagnosed . . .”

“You’re saying my diagnosis—more than ten years ago
—
was politically motivated?” Victor and Ozie had spent many hours discussing their symptoms, trying to understand themselves better by understanding each other, but they’d never talked about anything so sinister.

“Not politically motivated, politically fortunate. Your diagnosis fits into their plans.”

“
Their
plans?”

“The Health Board.”

“That’s classic conspiracy nonsense,” Victor said. “I shouldn’t be talking to you.”

“Don’t you want to know why Jefferson was killed? It’s shameful that you haven’t puzzled it out yet.”

Victor wouldn’t let Ozie goad him. “Tell me about your hat,” he said. “Is it magnetic?”

Ozie leaned toward the vidlens and bowed his head. The device wasn’t metal after all but some kind of painted-gray ceramic bowl with protruding nodes that Victor assumed were magnetic coils. Ozie said, “I do my best thinking when I’m wearing this.”

“Maybe you should turn it down and join the real world.”

“I could make you one. In fact, Jefferson insisted on it.”

Victor slammed his hands on the desk. “What are you saying?”

“Jefferson said you’d come looking for me when the data egg opened.”

“It hasn’t opened.”

“Ah, I see. I’m not sure I can be of much help yet. Your grandfather was quite the planner. Though I guess his timeline is all messed up. Even so, the unopened data egg should be enough to subvert the new reclassification protocol.”

“How?”

“Magic.”

“You’re a dick, Ozie. Wait, there’s a new protocol?”

“Indeed. Jefferson opposed the latest revision. Unfortunately, with him out of the way, everything will go forward. More diagnoses. More ranchos. More Class One facilities. We’re talking doubling or tripling our numbers, and thousands of new jobs to go along with the expansion.”

“You really think there are that many undiagnosed Broken Mirrors?”

“I don’t use that term of oppression.” Ozie sighed. “SeCa is just the first phase. Next is the New England Commonwealth, the Southeastern Confederacy, the Northern League, Europe, and on and on. Draft bills are already circulating. SeCa incubated the system. Now it’s going to send its nasty laws around the world like a virus. You seriously didn’t suspect that’s why they got rid of him?”

“This is . . . It’s just . . . Do you have any proof?” Victor asked.

“You mean like the vidfeed showing him being poisoned?”

Victor froze.

Ozie smiled. “Got you.”

“Why do you care about all this? You ran away. It doesn’t affect you.”

“Doesn’t affect me? If they export this madness to the rest of the world, what do you think will happen? I’m pretty sure they would peg me as a Class Two right away, and I’m not much for farm animals. You and I are going to get to the bottom of this together.”

“Can’t. I have a reclassification in a few days.”

“Then we have to hurry. Jefferson kept me in the dark about his plans, but I can tell you every move he made in the last six months of his life. The problem is that I don’t know what to look for. I have a haystack. I’m still searching for the needle. You can help me. Start by going to Oak Knoll. There must be something left.”

Victor shook his head. “Not until after my reclassification.”

“Well, then, make yourself useful somehow. Go talk to one of the Health Board members. You can start with your boss, Karine LaTour.”

Victor sat up again. “She’s on the Health Board?”

“Do you not pay attention to anything?” Ozie asked. “They replaced Jefferson with her.”

“When?”

“September.”

Victor frowned. Around the same time Oak Knoll was closed. What was the connection?

“Hello, Victor? Stay with me buddy. After you speak with Ms. LaTour, you might want to get a second opinion. You know Mía Barrias, don’t you?” Ozie’s eye-pixels twinkled.

Victor’s old friend was abusing every opportunity to tweak his nose. “You’re a real fuckface, Ozie,” he said.

Mía had saved Victor’s life in Carmichael and then ruined it by demanding that SeCa’s governor-general create the Classification System. He didn’t want to see her again. But Karine
—
he had no choice but to see her. “What do you think I should do? Accuse them of murder?”

Ozie shrugged. “Say anything you want. Just try to provoke a reaction, and use your gift. See which one of them seems capable of killing in cold blood.” Ozie pressed a few buttons on a keypad next to him. Victor’s MeshBit chimed. “The next time you want to reach me, use the MeshID I just sent to you. Another untraceable. We need to be careful.”

Ozie’s expression grew serious. “Bring the data egg to your appointment. And watch what you say. The dark grid says the doctors started asking about Carmichael.”

“Why would they do that?” Victor asked.

Ozie terminated the feed and vanished from the vidscreen.

Victor rose from his chair and paced in front of the windows. Ozie had explained the dark grid to Victor once, something about a parallel hidden computing system that lived within the Mesh, but he hadn’t understood the tech speak. To Victor, the dark grid was a source of the rumors and untrustworthy conspiracy theories that Ozie was always a sucker for. But what if this time he was right?

Outside, on the other side of the glass, wetlands stretched toward the bay. Grasses rippled in the wind, lit by a nearly full moon. It was a clear night.

Victor had lived most of his life with the knowledge that he was different, dangerous, that he was a problem to be solved, or at least managed. But if the diagnostic protocols were being manipulated now, couldn’t they have been manipulated back then too?

Victor had always believed there was a small spark of goodness, of rightness, deep inside him, even when it couldn’t be seen or felt. An infinitesimal mote, his true self, a fact of nature, existing neutrally, as real and inevitable as the entire universe, which couldn’t be denigrated by such small things as diagnostic protocols and human folly.

Pearl and Ozie had both urged caution, that he should move carefully and keep information to himself. Yet he’d already shared his suspicions with his family and Elena. Perhaps it was too late to sneak around.

The problem, as it had been all along, hidden in plain view, was that he lacked proof. He knew what his next step would have to be: he would need to get a sample from his granfa’s body, and the thought made him sick to his stomach. Victor stared at the dark Bayshore wetlands. With his reclassification coming up, he couldn’t afford to break into an abandoned hospital or exhume his granfa’s body. But if he didn’t pass it, he would never get the chance. He stared at the wetlands, undecided, stuck at a crossroads where the only road he wanted to take was the impossible one: he wished he’d never been born.

Jefferson Eastmore and I argued many times about Victor’s treatment program and its connection to the Holistic Healing Network’s research projects. I never questioned Jefferson’s faith that his researchers would find a cure for mirror resonance syndrome
—
I believed they would, in time
—
but I did question Victor’s involvement.

Victor’s participation contributed to an unrealistic expectation that a cure would solve all his problems. Day by day he became more and more obsessed with being normal, rather than focusing on how to make the most of his circumstances.