Crosstalk (3 page)

“Sorry, but my nine forty-five just got here,” Briddey said, and hung up, thinking,
Maybe going down to see C.B. would be a good idea.
Staying here, she wasn't going to get a moment's peace, and the fact that there was no reception in the sub-basement meant she wouldn't be able to get calls
or
texts there. And since Charla thought C.B. was some sort of horror-movie monster, she was unlikely to venture down there after her to deliver a message.

Best of all, since C.B. didn't carry a phone and never checked his email, he wouldn't know anything about the EED, and she wouldn't have to engage in another time-consuming conversation about it. She could find out what he wanted and then go into one of the storerooms and figure out exactly what to tell her family without fear of being interrupted.

She started out the door, nearly colliding with Charla, who said, “Suki Parker called again. And your Aunt Oona. She said she needs to talk to you about the poetry reading. And your sister Mary Clare is on line one.”

“Tell them all I'm in a meeting,” Briddey said. “I'm going down to C.B. Schwartz's lab.”

“But how will I get in touch with you?”

You won't,
Briddey thought. “I'll be back by ten thirty,” she said.

“Okay,” Charla said doubtfully. “Do you really think you should go down there by yourself?”

“If he tries to kill me, I'll hit him with an icicle,” Briddey said, and to make sure Charla didn't follow her, she added, “I've been thinking about what you said, and you're right. He does look a little like the Hunchback of Notre Dame. Or the guy in those
Saw
movies.”

“I
know
. You're sure you'll be all right?”

Absolutely. If I can just get down there without being waylaid by anyone else.
She opened the office door and looked cautiously out, convinced Suki would be lying in wait, but for once the “luck of the Irish” Aunt Oona constantly invoked was with her. There was no one in the corridor
or
the elevators, and she made it safely down to the sub-basement without any more encounters.

The elevator opened onto cement emptiness and the sharp, cold smell of a walk-in freezer. No wonder no one came down here. It was absolutely glacial. Ice crystals had formed on the metal door of C.B.'s lab, which had a printed sign on it saying
DANGER—NO ADMITTANCE—EXPERIMENT IN PROGRESS
and a handwritten one that said,
KEEP OUT—THIS MEANS YOU.
And when she looked through the door's glass-and-wire mesh window into the lab, C.B. was wearing a pea coat, a wool muffler, and fingerless gloves. And cargo shorts and flip-flops. He was hunched over a lab table, doing something with a circuit board and a soldering iron.

Briddey was glad Charla wasn't here because he looked appalling even for him. He had a two-day stubble, and his hair was even messier than usual.
Maeve would probably like
him
,
Briddey thought.

He looked like he'd spent all night here again.
Which is good,
she thought, knocking on the metal door.
He won't have overheard anyone talking about the EED on his way down here this morning
. Though he wouldn't necessarily have heard it even so, since he was wearing the earbuds Charla had mentioned.

He didn't look up. She knocked again, and when that didn't have any effect, she opened the door, went in, walked over to where he was working, and waved both hands in front of him. “C.B.? Hello? Are you in there?”

He looked up, saw her, and yanked the earbuds out. “What did you say?”

“I'm sorry to bother you when you're working,” she said, smiling. “But you said you wanted to talk to me?”

“Yeah,” he said. “You're not seriously thinking of getting an EED, are you?”

“If everybody minded their own business,” the Duchess said in a hoarse growl, “the world would go round a deal faster than it does.”

—
L
EWIS
C
ARROLL
,
Alice in Wonderland

“Wh-what…how?” Briddey said, stammering in her surprise. “Who told you I was getting an EED?”

“You're kidding, right?” C.B. said, putting down the soldering iron. “It's all over Commspan. And if you want my opinion, I think you've lost your mind. Don't you already have enough information bombarding you, what with emails and texting and Twitter and Snapchat and Instagram? And now you're going to have brain surgery so you can hear
more
?”

“The EED's not brain surgery. It's a minor enhancement procedure—”

“Where they drill a hole in your head so all your sense can leak out. Only you don't need to have that done because it's obvious yours already has! Do you have any idea how dangerous an IED is?”

“EED,” she corrected him. “An IED is a kind of bomb.”

“Yes, well, wait till it blows up in your face,” he said. “What if the scalpel slips and the doctor cuts the wrong nerve? You could end up paralyzed. Or a vegeta—”

“It's a completely safe procedure. Dr. Verrick's performed hundreds of EEDs without anything bad happening.”

“To
him.
He's making a pile of money convincing couples they'll be able to read each other's minds. Just because some quack in an Armani suit and Italian loafers tells you he can—”

“Dr. Verrick happens to be a well-respected surgeon with an international reputation in neurological enhancement. And you're not able to read each other's minds. The EED increases your ability to connect emotionally with your partner.”

“Connect
emotionally
? What ever happened to kissing? What ever happened to
hooking up
?”

“I am not going to discuss this with you,” Briddey said stiffly. “It's none of your business.”

“Yes, it is. You're the only person I can talk to around here, and if you're a vegetable—”

“Shouldn't you be working on your proposals for the new phone? The interdepartmental meeting's in an hour—”

“I
am
working on it.”

“Oh, is that it?” she asked, pointing at the circuit board he'd been soldering.

“Nope,” he said. “That's the control panel for my space heater.” He pointed toward a large metal box with a bunch of wires hanging out of the back. “As you can see from the Antarctic atmosphere in here, it's on the fritz again. I've been trying to fix it, but no luck. Speaking of which, do you need a jacket?” He went over to the couch, which had clothes and blankets heaped in the middle of it, and began rummaging through them.

“No, I'm fine,” she said, though actually she was starting to shiver.

She looked around at the lab. The walls were covered with pinned-up schematics and lists, assorted
KEEP OUT
signs, a movie poster for
Scanners Live in Vain,
and a pinup of some 1940s movie star. The lab tables were as cluttered as the walls, piled with laptops, hard drives, and disemboweled smartphones. A pink plastic radio with an old-fashioned tuning dial stood on an even more ancient television set, and the floor was a maze of snaking wires and power cords. She didn't see any bodies, but then again, there was no telling what was in all those file cabinets.

C.B. held up a faded and filthy khaki army jacket. “How about this?”

“No, thank you,” she said. “So, about the phone. Are your proposals going to be ready by the meeting, because if they're not, you need to tell Trent—”

“Forget Trent. Do you
know
how many people die on the operating table during brain surgery every year?”

“I told you, it's
not
brain surgery. It's a minor en—”

“Fine. Do you know how many people die from”—he made air quotes with his fingers—“‘minor enhancements'? Haven't you ever seen those pictures on TMZ where the starlet's nose has slid halfway down her face, under the headline
COSMETIC SURGERY GONE WRONG
?”

“An EED is
not
cosmetic surgery.”

“Then why has everyone in Hollywood had one? Or you could get a secondary infection like staph or flesh-eating bacteria. Hospitals are breeding grounds for those things. They're horrible places—bedpans, catheters, gowns that open in the back. I avoid them like the plague, and you should, too.”

“I—”

“Or they could give you too much anesthetic. Or, even worse, your surgery could go great and work exactly like it's supposed to, because telepathy's a terrible idea—”

“It's not telepathy—” she attempted to interject, but he went right on.

“You don't
want
to know. Trust me. Especially what guys think. It's like a cesspool in there. I mean, it's even worse than the stuff they say on the internet, and you know how bad
that
is.”

“We are supposed to be talking about whether your proposals are ready—”

“I
am,
” he said. “Commspan promises the same thing—more communication. But that isn't what people want. They've got way too much already—laptops, smartphones, tablets, social media. They've got connectivity coming out their ears. There's such a thing as being
too
connected, you know, especially when it comes to relationships. Relationships need less communication, not more.”

“That's nonsense.”

“Wanna bet? Then why does every sentence beginning ‘We need to talk' end in disaster? Our whole evolutionary history has been about trying to stop information from getting communicated—camouflage, protective coloration, that ink that squids squirt, encrypted passwords, corporate secrets, lying. Especially lying. If people really wanted to communicate, they'd tell the truth, but they don't.”

“That's not true,” she said and then remembered texting her family that she was in a meeting and telling Rahul Deshnev's assistant her nine forty-five appointment was there.

“They lie constantly,” C.B. was saying, “on Facebook, on eHarmony, in person. ‘Yes, the report's done. I'm just putting the finishing touches on it.' ‘No, I don't think that dress makes you look fat.' ‘Of course I want to go.' ‘Of course' is a dead giveaway that you're lying. ‘Of course I didn't sleep with her.' ‘Of course I like your family.' ‘Of course you can trust me.' ”

“C.B.—”

“And you know who people lie to the most? Themselves. They're absolute masters of self-deception. So even if you have this IED and can hear Trent's thoughts, what good will it do?”

“You can't hear other people's—” she said, frustrated. “I
told
you, the EED doesn't make you telepathic! All it does is enhance your ability to sense your partner's feelings.”

“Which are even less reliable than thoughts! People have all kinds of crazy feelings—revenge, jealousy, hatred, rage. Haven't you ever felt like murdering someone?”

Yes,
Briddey thought.
I feel like it right now.

“But your having murderous feelings doesn't make you a murderer. And having nice ones doesn't make you a saint. I'll bet even Hitler had warm, fuzzy feelings when he thought about his dog, and if you happened to pick up his emotions right then, you'd think,
What a nice guy!
Plus, people have no idea what they feel. They convince themselves they're in love when they're not, they—”

“I did not come down here to hear your theories on love,” she said. “Or Hitler. I came down here because I
assumed
you wanted to tell me something about your proposals for the new phone.”

“That's what I've been
talking
about, my proposals for the phone. What people really need is less communication, not more.” He walked over to the pinup of the 1940s movie star. “Isn't that so, Hedy?”

Trent's right,
Briddey thought.
He
is
mentally unstable.

“Hedy Lamarr,” C.B. said, tapping the photo with his knuckle. “Big Hollywood star during World War Two. She spent her spare time between making movies trying to come up with a frequency-hopping device to hide our radio signals from the Germans so they couldn't find our torpedoes.”

He walked back over to the lab table. “She succeeded, too. Patented the device and everything. Unfortunately, they hadn't invented the technology for it to work yet. She had to wait fifty years, and then they used her device to design the cellphone—unfortunately. But she had the right idea.”

“Which was?”

“Trying to hide messages, not transmit them. If you
really
want to have a good relationship with your boyfriend, you should be having an
anti
-EED, not—”

“We are
not
discussing the EED,” Briddey said. “Do you or do you not have something to show me?”

“I do.” He dashed over to his laptop and began typing. A screen full of code came up. “Let's say there's someone you don't want to talk to, or you really need to work on something and don't want to be interrupted.”

Like this morning,
Briddey thought involuntarily.

“You used to be able to say you couldn't get to the phone in time or didn't get their message,” C.B. said, “but thanks to advances in communications technology, those excuses won't work anymore. So this phone warns you in advance when your ex-boyfriend or your boss is calling—”

Or my family,
she thought.

“—and gives you a variety of options. You can block the call and have it show up as ‘Call cannot be completed'—I call that the Deadzone function—or you can have it cut off two sentences in. Or if you really hate the person, you can use the Blackball function and automatically reroute the call to the Department of Motor Vehicles—or Commspan's call menu. ‘Press one if you wish to speak with someone who has no idea what's going on. Press two if you want to stand here all day trying to figure out which button to push.' ”

He clicked to another screen. “And
this
feature—I call it the SOS app—lets you surreptitiously touch the side of your phone so it'll ring and you can say you have an incoming call you have to take.”

I wish I'd had that this morning when I was talking to Jill Quincy,
Briddey thought.
And Phillip.

“I call it the Sanctuary phone,” C.B. said. “Me being the Hunchback of Notre Dame and all.”

Briddey blushed. “How did you know about—?”

“See what I mean? There's such a thing as too much communication.” He tapped the computer screen. “So what do you think? Of the phone, I mean, not whether I'm the Hunchback of Notre Dame.”

I think it's a wonderful idea,
she thought, imagining how much easier it would make her relations with her family. But it wasn't what Commspan needed. “Trent wants a phone that will enhance communication, not inhibit it.”

“That's exactly what I'm afraid of,” he muttered, and bent over the circuit board again.

“So you don't have anything like that?”

“No, I've got just the thing. An app that translates what you say into what people want to hear. I text you, ‘You're an idiot to be having brain surgery for any reason, let alone for some infantile notion that it'll bring you true love,' and the phone sends it as, ‘Wow! Trent asked you to get an EED! How romantic!' I call it the Hook, Line, and Sinker app.”

“That's
it.
This conversation is over,” Briddey said, and headed for the door. “If you have any other proposals—any
serious
proposals—they need to be in to Trent before the meeting. If you don't, you need to tell him before that. The meeting's at eleven. You've got an hour.”