Rifters 4 - Blindsight (19 page)

"I can't see anything," Szpindel said, his voice shaking.

"It's in the EM fields," James said. "
That's
how they communicate. The whole structure is full of
language
, it's—"

"I can't see
anything
," Szpindel repeated. His breath echoed loud and fast over the link. "I'm
blind
."

"
Shit.
" Bates swung on Szpindel. "How can that—the radiation—"

"I d-don't think that's it.."

Nine Tesla, and the ghosts were everywhere. I smelled asphalt and honeysuckle.

"Keeton!" Bates called. "You with us?"

"Y-yeah." Barely. I was back at the bell, my hand on the ripcord. Trying to ignore whatever kept tapping me on the shoulder.

"Leave that! Get him outside!"

"No!" Szpindel floated helplessly in the passage, his pistol bouncing against its wrist tether. "No, throw me something."

"What?"

It's all in your head. It's all in your—

"Throw something! Anything!"

Bates hesitated. "You said you were bli—"

"
Just do it!
"

Bates pulled a spare suit battery off her belt and lobbed it. Szpindel reached, fumbled. The battery slipped from his grasp and bounced off the wall.

"I'll be okay," he gasped. "Just get me into the tent."

I yanked the cord. The bell inflated like a great gunmetal marshmallow.

"Everyone inside!" Bates ran her pistol with one hand, grabbed Szpindel with the other. She handed him off to me and slapped a sensor pod onto the skin of the tent. I pulled back the shielded entrance flap as though pulling a scab from a wound. The single molecule beneath, infinitely long, endlessly folded against itself, swirled and glistened like a soap bubble.

"Get him in. James! Get down here!"

I pushed Szpindel through the membrane. It split around him with airtight intimacy, hugged each tiny crack and contour as he passed through.

"
James
! Are you—"

"
Get it off me!
" Harsh voice, raw and scared and scary, as male as female could sound. Cruncher in control. "
Get it off!
"

I looked back. Susan James' body tumbled slowly in the tunnel, grasping its right leg with both hands.

"
James!
" Bates sailed over to the other woman. "Keeton! Help out!" She took the Gang by the arm. "Cruncher? What's the problem?"

"
That!
You
blind
?" He wasn't just
grasping
at the limb, I realized as I joined them. He was
tugging
at it.
He was trying to pull it off.

Something laughed hysterically, right inside my helmet.

"Take his arm," Bates told me, taking his right one, trying to pry the fingers from their death grip on the Gang's leg. "Cruncher,
let go
.
Now.
"

"
Get it off me!
"

"It's your leg, Cruncher." We wrestled our way towards the diving bell.

"It's
not
my leg! Just
look
at it, how could it—it's
dead
. It's
stuck
to me..."

Almost there. "Cruncher,
listen
," Bates snapped. "Are you with m—"

"
Get it off!
"

We stuffed the Gang into the tent. Bates moved aside as I dove in after them. Amazing, the way she held it together. Somehow she kept the demons at bay, herded us to shelter like a border collie in a thunderstorm. She was—

She wasn't following us in. She wasn't even
there
. I turned to see her body floating outside the tent, one gloved hand grasping the edge of the flap; but even under all those layers of Kapton and Chromel and polycarbonate, even behind the distorted half-reflections on her faceplate, I could tell that something was missing. All her surfaces had just
disappeared.

This couldn't be Amanda Bates. The thing before me had no more topology than a mannequin.

"Amanda?" The Gang gibbered at my back, softly hysteric.

Szpindel: "What's happening?"

"I'll stay out here," Bates said. She had no affect whatsoever. "I'm dead anyway."

"
Wha
—" Szpindel had lots. "You
will
be, if you don't—"

"You leave me here," Bates said. "That's an order."

She sealed us in.

*

It wasn't the first time, not for me. I'd had invisible fingers poking through my brain before, stirring up the muck, ripping open the scabs. It was far more intense when
Rorschach
did it to me, but Chelsea was more—

—precise, I guess you'd say.

Macramé, she called it: glial jumpstarts, cascade effects, the splice and dice of critical ganglia. While I trafficked in the reading of Human architecture, Chelsea
changed
it—finding the critical nodes and nudging them just so, dropping a pebble into some trickle at the headwaters of memory and watching the ripples build to a great rolling cascade deep in the downstream psyche. She could hotwire happiness in the time it took to fix a sandwich, reconcile you with your whole childhood in the course of a lunch hour or three.

Like so many other domains of human invention, this one had learned to run without her. Human nature was becoming an assembly-line edit, Humanity itself increasingly relegated from Production to product. Still. For me, Chelsea's skill set recast a strange old world in an entirely new light: the cut-and-paste of minds not for the greater good of some abstract society, but for the simple selfish wants of the individual.

"Let me give you the gift of happiness," she said.

"I'm already pretty happy."

"I'll make you happier. A TAT, on me."

"Tat?"

"Transient Attitudinal Tweak. I've still got privileges at Sax."

"I've been tweaked plenty. Change one more synapse and I might turn into someone else."

"That's ridiculous and you know it. Or every experience you had would turn you into a different person."

I thought about that. "Maybe it does."

But she wouldn't let it go, and even the strongest anti-happiness argument was bound to be an uphill proposition; so one afternoon Chelsea fished around in her cupboards and dredged up a hair-net studded with greasy gray washers. The net was a superconducting spiderweb, fine as mist, that mapped the fields of merest thought. The washers were ceramic magnets that bathed the brain in fields of their own. Chelsea's inlays linked to a base station that played with the interference patterns between the two.

"They used to need a machine the size of a bathroom just to house the magnets." She laid me back on the couch and stretched the mesh across my skull. "That's the only outright miracle you get with a portable setup like this. We can find hot spots, and we can even zap 'em if they need zapping, but TMS effects fade after a while. We'll have to go to a clinic for anything permanent."

"So we're fishing for what, exactly? Repressed memories?"

"No such thing." She grinned in toothy reassurance. "There are only memories we choose to ignore, or kinda think
around
, if you know what I mean."

"I thought this was the gift of happiness. Why—"

She laid a fingertip across my lips. "Believe it or not, Cyggers, people sometimes choose to ignore even
good
memories. Like, say, if they enjoyed something they didn't think they should. Or—" she kissed my forehead— "if they don't think they
deserve
to be happy."

"So we're going for—"

"Potluck. You can never tell 'til you get a bite. Close your eyes."

A soft hum started up somewhere between my ears. Chelsea's voice led me on through the darkness. "Now keep in mind, memories aren't historical archives. They're—improvisations, really. A lot of the stuff you associate with a particular event might be factually wrong, no matter how clearly you remember it. The brain has a funny habit of building composites. Inserting details after the fact. But that's not to say your memories aren't
true
, okay? They're an honest reflection of how you saw the world, and every one of them went into shaping how you
see
it. But they're not photographs. More like impressionist paintings. Okay?"

"Okay."

"Ah," she said. "There's something."

"What?"

"Functional cluster. Getting a lot of low-level use but not enough to intrude into conscious awareness. Let's just see what happens when we—"

And I was ten years old, and I was home early and I'd just let myself into the kitchen and the smell of burned butter and garlic hung in the air. Dad and Helen were fighting in the next room. The flip-top on our kitchen-catcher had been left up, which was sometimes enough to get Helen going all by itself. But they were fighting about something else; Helen
only wanted what was best for all of us
but Dad said
there were limits
and
this was not the way to go about it
. And Helen said
you don't know what it's like you hardly ever even
see
him
and then I knew they were fighting about me. Which in and of itself was nothing unusual.

What really scared me was that for the first time ever, Dad was fighting
back
.

"You do not
force
something like that onto someone. Especially without their knowledge." My father never shouted—his voice was as low and level as ever—but it was colder than I'd ever heard, and hard as iron.

"That's just
garbage
," Helen said. "Parents
always
make decisions for their children, in their best interests, especially when it comes to medical iss—"

"
This is not a medical issue
." This time my father's voice
did
rise. "It's—"

"Not a medical issue! That's a new height of denial even for you! They cut out half his
brain
in case you missed it! Do you think he can recover from that without help? Is that more of your father's
tough love
shining through? Why not just deny him food and water while you're at it!"

"If mu-ops were called for they'd have been prescribed."

I felt my face scrunching at the unfamiliar word. Something small and white beckoned from the open garbage pail.

"Jim, be
reasonable.
He's so
distant
, he barely even
talks
to me."

"They said it would take time."

"But two years! There's nothing wrong with helping nature along a little, we're not even talking black market. It's over-the-counter, for God's sake!"

"That's not the point."

An empty pill bottle. That's what one of them had thrown out, before forgetting to close the lid. I salvaged it from the kitchen discards and sounded out the label in my head.

"Maybe the
point
should be that someone who's barely home three months of the year has got his bloody nerve passing judgment on
my
parenting skills. If you want a say in how he's raised, then you can damn well pay some dues first. Until then, just fuck right off."

"You will not put that shit into my son
ever again
," my father said.

Bondfast™ Formula IV

-Opioid Receptor Promoters / Maternal Response Stimulant

"Strengthening ties between Mother and Child since 2042"

"Yeah? And how are you going to stop me, you little geek? You can't even make the time to find out what's going on in your own family; you think you can control me all the way from fucking orbit? You think—"

Suddenly, nothing came from the living room but soft choking sounds. I peeked around the corner.

My father had Helen by the throat.

"I think," he growled, "that I can stop you from doing anything to Siri ever again, if I have to. And I think you know that."

And then she saw me. And then he did. And my father took his hand from around my mother's neck, and his face was utterly unreadable.

But there was no mistaking the triumph on hers.

*

I was up off the couch, the skullcap clenched in one hand. Chelsea stood wide-eyed before me, the butterfly still as death on her cheekbone.

She took my hand. "Oh, God. I'm so sorry."

"You—you saw that?"

"No, of course not. It can't read minds. But that obviously— wasn't a happy memory."

"It wasn't all that bad."

I felt sharp, disembodied pain from somewhere nearby, like an ink spot on a white tablecloth. After a moment I fixed it: teeth in my lip.

She ran her hand up my arm. "It really stressed you out. Your vitals were—are you okay?"

"Yeah, of course. No big deal." Tasting salt. "I am curious about something, though."

"Ask me."

"Why would you do this to me?"

"Because we can make it go
away
, Cygnus. That's the whole point. Whatever that was, whatever you didn't like about it, we know where it is now. We can go back in and damp it out just like
that
. And then we've got
days
to get it removed permanently, if that's what you want. Just put the cap back on and—"

She put her arms around me, drew me close. She smelled like sand, and sweat. I loved the way she smelled. For a while, I could feel a little bit safe. For a while I could feel like the bottom wasn't going to drop out at any moment. Somehow, when I was with Chelsea, I
mattered
.

I wanted her to hold me forever.

"I don't think so," I said
.

"No?" She blinked, looked up at me. "Why ever
not
?"

I shrugged. "You know what they say about people who don't remember the past."

"Predators run for their dinner. Prey run for their lives."

—
Old Ecologist's Proverb