Those That Wake 02: What We Become (3 page)

She looked up, waited for him to take the cellenses off, which he did after the barest moment of silence. His smile never faltered, laboring to support hers, too.

“It doesn’t hurt at all?”

“No, not at all. The implantation only took an hour. The rest of the time, they were locking the biosync and teaching me to subvocalize my calls and stuff. Didn’t hurt a bit. Isn’t even sore.”

He sounded like the web ads and infocasts that the companies ran on the process.

“They even said they’re going to have a wireless link to contact lenses in less than two years, and we can get rid of the glasses.” He was watching her expectantly.

She looked around her, at the other students coming, going, and sitting. Four, five, six, eight others that she could spot had the patches, too. They didn’t come cheap. These would be the kids without student loans, with enough money to eat off campus if they wanted; the kids like Josh. And Laura.

“Dude,” a student, someone Josh knew and Laura knew in passing, shouted out as he went by, pointing at the spot near Josh’s ear. “Sorry about the brain cancer.” He smiled and swept by.

“Nice timing,” Josh’s voice rose after him, then quieted. “Dick.” He looked back at Laura, worried. “That’s a totally false rumor,” he said. “They talked all about it. The rise in brain cancer only has to do with—”

“A higher incidence of the fallout from the ozone-layer satellites, I know. I read all the same websites you did.”

“Come on, Button”—his voice sounding strained now—“I’m back. I’m cool. We should be thinking of something better to do than this.”

She felt the tension, wanted it to vanish.

“I’m sorry,” she said, touching his face again. “The interview got me messed up. I’m so happy you’re back. Meet me in an hour at the café, and we’ll come up with something good.”

“Okay,” he said uncertainly. “What are you gonna do?”

“Just want to talk about the interview. I’m going to call my parents.”

“Honey!” Laura’s mother was delighted to hear from her as always. It didn’t matter if they hadn’t spoken in a week or ten minutes, the brightness of her mother’s exuberant smile nearly blew out the screen of Laura’s cell.

“Hi, Mom.”

“What is it, Laura, what’s wrong? Was it the interview?” Did Laura let something slip into her voice, or was it her mother’s seemingly preternatural ability to key into Laura’s mood even across an expanse of miles? For God’s sake, did the woman have anything else in her life but her daughter?

“No,” Laura said. “Yes. No. Maybe.” It would be easier to talk about the interview than what was really bothering her. “I met with a guy; he talked about the diagnostic programs. They don’t care about how people work there, Mom. They care about how machines work and how machines can fix people, and then they don’t have to worry about dirtying themselves by acting like actual human beings.” Laura was surprised to hear the anger in her own voice. She hadn’t even been this angry after the interview.

“I’m sorry, honey.”

“Is that how it is everywhere, Mom? I swear, half my teachers have the same attitude. Is everyone in the world an asshole?”

“Laura . . .” Her mother’s voice suddenly hushed in a tone of admonishment. She could bear the cursing if they were face-to-face, but somehow on cells it always troubled her, as though they were performing for an unseen audience.

“Sorry, Mom,” she said by rote. “But I’m finding it really hard to take right now.”

“I can see that, honey. Are you in your room?”

“Yeah.” It was a tiny, cramped little place, which Laura loved dearly. Her roommate, absent at the moment, left her side as neat as if a maid came through every day. But it echoed her mother’s obsessions and left Laura with a sense of home. Her own side was filled with pictures of Mookie—leaping up for a Frisbee, peeking out of his dog house—with a framed arrangement of dried flowers and her father’s proud addition to the room, a vintage poster that screamed
LET’S GO, METS GO
! to cap it off. All of Laura’s electronics were hidden away, under the bed, in drawers. They might not have even existed.

“Are you alone?”

“Yeah, Mom.” She could hear it coming.

“Well”—her voice went quiet again, as though that would do any good if someone
was
monitoring their cell conversations—“are you having those headaches again?”

“They weren’t headaches, Mom,” she corrected, already exasperated.

“Well, the episodes.”

“They weren’t episodes. It was a transient, self-limited loss of consciousness.” Always a comfort to retreat into the technical, though it turned her mother’s face sour.

“Well, you know what I’m talking about, anyway. Is that happening again?”

Laura took a deep breath in and let it out in a not-quite sigh.

“No,” she said, but had paused too long.

“Laura, please tell me the truth. Are you having those flashbacks to high school again?”

“They weren’t flashbacks, Mom. I never had any flashbacks. I was—there was confusion about some things in senior year.”

“It was more serious than that, Laura. You went to the hospital.”

“For
observation,
Mom. And they didn’t find anything.”

“That’s serious. The hospital is serious. You know how your dad and I worry about that.”

“You
and
Dad, huh? I have the feeling Dad’s managing okay.”

“You’re changing the subject.”

“You noticed.”

Her mother stared back at her, silent, through the miniature screen.

“No, Mom, that’s not happening again. I’m just, I don’t know . . . feeling uneasy about things.”

“Like with those episodes.”

“They
weren’t
episodes. Christ, Mom.”

“But like with those things.”

“Yes, a little bit. The uneasiness, but without the panic attacks or syncope.”

“You speak just like a professional, Laura,” her mother said with equal amounts of frustration and pride. “You should come home until it lets up.”

“I’m not going to do that.”

“Laura, what could it hurt? You could get home by dinner. I’ll fix mac and cheese with franks and—”

“That doesn’t actually have an effect on brain chemistry, Mom.”

Her mother’s face fell.

“I’m sorry, Mom. Thank you. I don’t . . .” Because no part of the small dorm room was not visible from any other part, Laura saw a small white fold of paper being slipped beneath her door. “It’s not that serious.” She sat, transfixed by the tiny arrival.

“You should still think about—”

“I’m not coming home, Mom. I’m seeing Josh in twenty minutes, and I’ve got a paper due in two days.” Laura rose from her bed but stood in place, looking at the note. Why not a text? It would have scrolled right beneath her mother’s face, assured instant receipt. Who left actual notes anymore?

“Laura, what’s going on?”

Laura’s attention snapped back to the cell.

“Nothing. I’m fine.”

“Laura. Go see the counselor. Okay?”

“I don’t need to see the counselor.”

“It helped last time, honey, and if you’re not coming home, then at least do that. I know you don’t want my help, Laura. That’s a way you can help yourself. Please.”

Laura was suddenly overwhelmed with a sense of how far away and helpless her mother must feel.

“I love you, Mom,” she said softly.

“I love you, too, Laura. So much. Go see the counselor.”

“I will.”

“Promise.”

“I do.”

“Okay. Tell Josh I said hello.”

“I will. Bye, Mom.”

The screen flickered out on her mother’s smiling face, leaving behind a scrolling advertisement for soothing, comforting hot chocolate mix.

Without her mother’s presence, the room was filled with Laura’s growing unease. And that note wasn’t helping. She wished Kari, her roommate, were here, just so someone would be around when she read it.

She walked over and picked up the note and held it, still folded, before her. What the hell was going on with her? It was just a goddamned piece of paper
. Open it
.

She did. A silly, innocuous message; probably slipped under the wrong door for all it meant to Laura. It contained only one sentence:

Where is the Librarian?

MAL WOKE FROM A TWITCHING
nightmare, his face crusted to the concrete ground with his own vomit, the glints of grim gray light pricking his brain like long needles. He was, by some way of thinking, fortunate to be waking up at all, though fortune felt as foreign to him right now as a smiling face and a warm embrace.

He pulled himself to a sitting position, his stomach somersaulting and the dry matter on his face crumbling into flakes as he winced. The space around him reflected the tone of his thoughts just now: a large room filled with toppled wooden chairs and tables, a forlorn kitchen filled with rusting pots and pans seen through a long galley window. Once it had been a soup kitchen, when such things were allowed in the city. The homeless, though, had been shipped out of the city by ranks of MCT officers in riot gear, shuffled off, and dropped into neighboring cities, into hastily constructed and just as hastily disintegrating camps. City government had mandated a shiny, flawless façade that would present an inviting picture of a hopeful future to its inhabitants. Problems like poverty were more easily denied and coated over with gleaming new surfaces than actually addressed. So, what use were homeless shelters? This one, far past simple abandonment, had been forgotten. Like the forest Mal had once woken in to find himself trapped by a power beyond his understanding, this homeless shelter had been torn out of the memory of Man, interred in the graveyard of the past, lost to everyone. Except Mal.

The walls of concrete and wood were seamed and cracked, long fissures running up to end somewhere Mal couldn’t track, and they made him think of the face in the shadows of the monster’s lair, its seams and cracks deep and old. The color here was old, too, old and washed out, eve-rything merely suggesting a color; its pigment worn away and inexorably moving toward a disintegrating gray, including the scraps of produce still lying on the kitchen counter, dried and withering like dead plants. Even the light here— pouring through a crumbling window that no longer contained curtains, pane, or glass—was dim and muffled, a dirty light that fell from muted clouds and felt like old dust on your skin.

Mal wouldn’t look up at that sky now. Dim though it may be, its illumination was more than he wished to inflict on his aching brain at the moment. He knew it well, though; knew the muted colors and worn-out texture of this place as well as he knew his own scarred face. This place, places of its kind, had been a second home for nearly a year now. He was used to the sound, too, the way the thrum of traffic and quick
rat-a-tat
of thousands of walking feet blended together and Dopplered into this place in warped waves, one second far away, almost silent, the next second roaring like an angry ocean, louder than it would have been right next to him.

The nightmare he woke from still lingered, the same one he always had. It was his only constant companion in life now, this low-ceilinged dream of a man in a suit trying to drill into his brain.

He pressed his fingers into his temples—slowly, everything felt like it was moving through thick, unyielding syrup—and tried to gouge out the nightmare and the pain along with it, to absolutely no effect whatsoever. He swallowed and blinked and grunted and ran his tongue over the jagged shrapnel of tooth lodged in his soft, bloody gums, and did little things with his body, just to steady himself. It was difficult to focus, particularly on things that happened right before he went out, but he knew they had put something in him, something that would let them keep track of him. That, at least, he could counter. No technology they had could possibly penetrate into here, into a forgotten place. But, he suddenly wondered, was that to his advantage? How would they take it if their means of keeping him under tabs proved worthless as soon as they had let him go? He needed to keep this advantage in reserve, because while he was immediately safe in here, he couldn’t stay in here forever. That would mean death, not only for his body, but long before that, death for his spirit, which was slowly worn away every moment he spent in one of these places, just as the surfaces of the building and ground were slowly worn away.

He gave himself another moment before he tried to stand and then, nearly toppling over, sat down again. He did this twice before he overcame the unsteadiness by a sheer refusal to fall, turned the spinning alley and tilting floor into an enemy, and then simply refused to back down from it. He shuffled to the ragged and splintered doorway, and—bracing himself for the more intense light, the more intense world of input—he stepped out.

The world roared into life around him and, again, al-most knocked him backwards. He held himself with a powerful but trembling arm against a wall. People streamed by, not a single one sparing him a glance away from their cells or the images their cellenses were transmitting into their eyes. The flawlessly polished window of a gourmet coffee superstore incongruously reflected his ruin of a face back at him.

There was only one place for him, one person for him to go to. Putting her in danger made his blood boil hot, knowing they were tracking him wherever he went now. But the woman, Kliest, knew about her already. So going to her would not be putting her in any more jeopardy.

How to get there, though? With about five bucks in his pocket, he couldn’t get a cab, and he stayed clear of the shiny silver subway stations patrolled by the MCT. It was moot, since barely anyone took cash anymore, anyway. He steadied himself to begin what promised to be a grueling walk across town, when a shadow fell across his path and halted there.

“Mal, are you all right?” asked a person he’d never seen before, a plump woman with frizzy hair, pushing a baby carriage. He squinted into her eyes briefly, collecting himself.

“Yes.”

“What did they do to you?”

“Gave me a job.”

“What? What do you mean?” the woman asked as the baby in the carriage studied Mal upside down and kicked its legs energetically.