Broken Mirror (9 page)

On the reception desk he saw a printed MeshNews article. His family’s company, Holistic Healing Network, had bought Gene-Us, and the newly merged company would be named BioScan. He felt a stab of resentment. The family company was buying his current employer, and no one had said a word to him.

He headed to Karine’s office to demand to know what the merger meant for him.

But her office was deserted. Empty drawers poked from their enclosures. Her framed certificates no longer hung on the wall. On her desk, exotic paperweights from far-off places that she liked to show off
—
volcanic glass from the Kingdom of Hawaii, wooden idols carved by African tribes, beaded animals from South America
—
were gone.

Victor called Karine on his MeshBit, and to his surprise, she answered.

“Why are you here?” Karine asked.

“Where are you?” Victor spun around, expecting to see her standing behind him wearing her usual mocking smile. But she wasn’t there.

Her sigh buzzed in his ear. “I’m moving offices. I thought you would take a few more days off after the funeral, but since you’re here, we need to meet. I have an opening at three o’clock. Hang on.” There was the sound of muted conversation, and then Karine said, “Don’t bother with your analytics today. The sample preparation staff are at a retraining, and we need you to cover for them. You should be able to handle it.”

A few seconds later, his MeshBit buzzed. The message from BioScan Operations ordered him to report to the sample preparation room on the second floor for a temporary work assignment.

Victor trudged to a room crowded with bins holding packages mailed in from all over the American Union. The procedures for preparing mailed cheek-swab DNA samples for replication were straightforward, basic manual labor that anyone who could follow a checklist could do.

Sometime later Sarita, one of the office administrators, walked into the sample preparation room and approached Victor. She flitted in several directions at once
—
her frizzed hair, nervous hands, luminous eyes, and lips painted the deep red of poison berries all vibrated at asynchronous frequencies.

Sarita eyed him gleefully. “Is this your new role? Filling the machines with spit?”

Victor refused to meet her gaze. “It’s temporary.”

“Sure it is.” She sidled closer. “Did you hear? Karine got a promotion. Second chief!” Sarita smirked. “You know what that means?”

Victor pulled on a set of synthsilk gloves to avoid contaminating the DNA sequencing machine. “She reports to my auntie Circe now,” he said, stating the obvious.

“
And
she’ll pass you off like a hot potato. She’s meeting with each of her reports this afternoon.” Her breathiness implied something sinister.

“Okay,” he said, shaking his head to himself. Sarita could have been sucking up to curry favor with the nephew of the new chief, but scorn for a Broken Mirror prevented her.

She clucked at him. “Did you know about this? The acquisition?”

Apart from Oak Knoll Hospital, the Holistic Healing Network had always been a vague, nebulous entity that he heard about in pieces and never really understood. No one could see the shape of the whole elephant from just one of its parts. But someone in the family could have
—
should have
—
kept him more informed. He would have to ask Circe about it.

“Of course,” he lied.

“Yeah, right, like your family would bother telling
you
. I bet she fires you today.” Sarita flounced away to infect someone else with her gossip.

Victor told himself not to be concerned with her insinuations. He worked through the day’s batch of samples.

In the early afternoon, while he waited in line for a buffet lunch, merger speculation and gossip found Victor again. A dark-haired young man wearing a sky-blue Facilities jumpsuit grabbed him by the shoulder and said, “Can you believe it? They might move the headquarters here.”

The proposition was unlikely, and obviously so, to anyone with a working brain. Because of marketing and government relations, the Holistic Healing Network had always been headquartered in Europe, and Jefferson had traveled back and forth frequently. Why would BioScan under Circe do it differently?

“You really think so?” Victor asked. Pretending to ask stupid questions always helped him avoid trouble.

The Facilities guy said, “I don’t know. We’ve got the room to expand
—
we’d just have to rip out that dead orchard next door. I bet we’ll all get raises too.”

“I’m sure.”

“Come on, this is exciting. Don’t give me that Broken Mirror face.”

Victor flinched. He tried so hard to blend in, but he didn’t fit anywhere. Maybe the Safe Places program had plastered his picture in the facilities’ workspaces with a warning: “Watch out for the freak show with broken mirror neurons in his brain.” The lunch tray seemed to weigh a ton.

Wait, Victor thought. The guy had smiled, but not in a cruel way. “Broken Mirror face” was just something people said, wasn’t it?

Victor lowered his head, letting his hair fall forward, smiling even though he felt like knocking the guy’s jaw loose. He laughed loudly and said in a false baritone, “Good one!”

“That’s better.” The guy patted Victor’s rear end.

Victor got his food and found a seat by himself in a seldom-frequented corner of the canteen. He picked through his food, a bland composition of farro, salmon, and avocado. Thinking about his granfa’s death, he knew he should let the matter drop. His suspicions were a manifestation of his condition, everyone said so, and probably the result of going off his medication. He’d take one more look at Jefferson’s medical records this evening, and then he would stop. He’d take his dose, and everything would go back to normal.

An hour later, when he was between two batches of samples, his MeshBit chimed. It was time for his meeting with Karine.

The tang of facial cream and floral perfume greeted him at the threshold to Karine’s office. She stood and waved him in. Taller than Victor by several centimeters, Karine had a moon face and a stiff and wispy corona of auburn hair. She lined her eyes with black pencil. The image of a frill-necked lizard popped into Victor’s mind.

They sat down. “You probably heard that, as of today, I am second chief for the company,” Karine said. “We need to talk about your role.”

Victor exhaled slowly, sure that she was about to fire him.

“As BioScan, we’ve started thinking bigger and bolder. You’re going to work on a special project for me.”

Victor sat up. She appeared to be serious. “What kind of project?”

“A gene-to-pathology mapping program.” She threw the words at him, like tossing a treat to a dog
—
perhaps expecting some sort of excited response. Victor waited for her to explain in more detail.

She rested her forearms on her farmed-crystal desk blotter. “We’re building a database that correlates clinical data with the genomes of our patients. That means we need new clinical procedures; better sequencers; enhanced data-management, storage, and analytical capabilities; and a new operations and marketing organization to sell the data to research groups. I’m putting a team in place to build this new business. You’d lead part of the team, and you’d report directly to me.”

A promotion? That was the last thing he’d expected.

Karine tilted her head in confusion. “Well, what do you say?”

“I’m not qualified for it.” Why would she offer him such a significant position? More importantly, how did Karine already know so much about the future direction of the company?

“I’ve known you a long time, Victor. I’ve seen your capabilities. We’re underutilizing your talents. And you are singularly suited for this role.”

Victor didn’t like the sound of that. “How?” he asked.

“The new initiative will have several focus clusters. The most important will be neurological disorders, including mirror resonance syndrome and addiction.”

Victor’s mouth dropped open. “The two of those together? That’s ridiculous.”

“Do you think so? Your first priority should be to get up to speed with our research.” Karine leaned forward with her palms up as if she were holding something in each one. “Both addiction and your condition have related neurological mechanisms: a heightened susceptibility to positive feedback loops and above-average cognitive inertia. Yours happens to have a genetic origin. What we’re finding is that addiction to certain types of drugs can change how genes are expressed in the brain, possibly due to prions that act like a cellular contagion and alter the shape of proteins throughout addicts’ neural networks. The resonance in addicts’ brains is similar to mirror resonance in yours.”

Victor understood what she was saying. Granfa Jeff had referred to the plasticity of his brain too. But drugs that could rewire brain chemistry? He felt bile rise in his throat. She was lumping together drug addicts and people with MRS in a dregs-of-society research program. It was worse than being ignored.

“I need you to work on the sequencing plan in support of the lab and clinic research teams,” she continued. “Figure out what data they will want from us and how we can deliver it. There will also be a ceremonial role. You’ll need to hone your public speaking skills and work with some pretty senior people in the organization and in government, so that will be a challenge. That’s what coaching is for. But you have the face for it
—
remember, dissonant micro-expressions aren’t a problem when you’re speaking to a crowd of people.”

“I don’t know,” he said, unsure of what to make of her newfound confidence in him.

“Victor, this project is going to revolutionize biomedical research. We are talking about the sequencing of millions of patients’ genetic codes and tying that to detailed information about their medical histories. Researchers will use this data for decades to understand why some people get sick and others don’t, how genetic defects arise and get passed on, how to create targeted medical treatments. This is the future of health care, and you’ll get to be a part of it.”

Karine looked at him with focused intensity. Could she really have that much faith in his abilities?

Victor sat up and puffed out his chest, though he didn’t feel he deserved her confidence in him. “Why me?”

“Isn’t it obvious?” she asked. “You’re talented. Our best data jockey by far. More than that, you are the nephew of our chief, heir to a fortune that owns a controlling interest in this company,
and
a high-profile mirror resonance patient. In other words, a unique asset, and I would be a terrible manager if I didn’t take advantage of it.”

Victor imagined her jaw unhinging to swallow him, like a giant python devouring a flightless bird. He remained silent. The scope of the project impressed him. A large-scale comparison of genomics and pathology could change medicine as completely as had the sequencing of the human genome and the cure for cancer.

He stared at a metal vent on the ceiling and considered his options. Karine was describing a great opportunity, but he didn’t like the feeling of being manipulated.

She cleared her throat. “You’ll need to decide quickly. I suppose an immediate answer isn’t necessary, but I can’t really see there’s much of a choice for you. Things are changing, Victor. You need to keep up.”

She rose and brushed her hands over the arms of her aquamarine synthsilk suit as if some odious substance had settled on her in the past few minutes. “Now, I’ve spoken to Circe and we agree on several points. You need to take your medication, drop this silly fantasy about Jefferson’s death, and start seeing a therapist again. Agreed? We can’t afford to take any chances with your mental health.”

A lump formed in Victor’s throat. She’d been discussing him with his family. Losing his grip on reality, they must have said, poor thing, needs to get back on his pills. How disappointed Dr. Tammet would be if she knew how foolishly he’d been acting, indulging in dark fantasies and scandalizing his family.

Karine was right. This was his opportunity to put the past behind him, and he had to take it. But that would mean going back on Personil, losing his newfound clarity of mind.

Karine was waiting for him to answer.

“Agreed,” he said. He could take a half-dose, intermittently, and probably get away with it. Still, it felt like a loss to agree to her terms. Victor closed his eyes and visualized Granfa Jeff’s casket, imagining the click the lid made as he shut it tight.

“Good.” Karine’s real leather boots clicked on the floor as she walked to the door. “There’s one more thing.” He opened his eyes. She said, “Circe wants to speak with you. Now. She’s expecting a vidfeed. You can use mine.”

When she left, the air in the room smelled less sickly sweet and he breathed easier.

Victor put his MeshBit on Karine’s ident-pad. His aunt’s face appeared on the vidscreen.

“About the merger,” Circe said, and then paused. She laid a hand on her neck. “I am sorry we couldn’t chat about it before.”

“Karine told me about the promotion.”

“Yes. She’s got everything well in hand.” Circe pushed a stray curling rope of dark hair further up her mound of ringlets. “Your leadership . . . Victor, patients around the world will thank you. We may even be able to find a cure.”

Victor uttered a silent prayer that he’d be able to live up to her expectations and put his fantasies to rest.

Friends, family, and even colleagues laughed at me when I told them I was planning to locate the Holistic Healing Network’s headquarters in Oakland & Bayshore. At the time the West was synonymous with doom, grand ambitions half-realized, and fools’ follies. Historical examples of this myth abounded: the mysterious abandonment of the Spanish missions, Powell’s failed expedition to map the West, the disappearance of the Donner party, the collapse of the St. Francis Dam, and on and on.

I wanted to create a countertruth. To show that science, technology, and a little bit of luck could open a new age of development. The simultaneous rise of Oakland & Bayshore and the fortunes of my firm marked a turning point in Semiautonomous California’s history. The nation slowly grew from a fertile testing ground to a real participant on the A.U. stage.