Shattered Minds Read online

  ‘Who are you?’ she asks.

  ‘I’m the person treating you.’

  ‘Ah. You must be Dax, then. The former physician. Should have guessed.’ Her voice is raspy, but she’s pleased at how coherent she sounds. Inside her head, it’s still a chaos of desire, memories and encrypted information, but she’s managed to hold onto a little bit of Carina Kearney. Perhaps it will be enough to see her through.

  A swift inhale of breath. He didn’t expect her to know his name. She smiles in the darkness. She can frighten him further.

  ‘Then there’s your sister, Tam. It’s a shame, what happened to her.’

  For a second, she thinks he’ll tackle her. Push her to the floor, put his hands around her neck. Neutralize the threat. Instead he stares at her, shoulder muscles wound tight.

  ‘Relax,’ she says, keeping her voice mild. ‘Obviously, if I wanted to turn you in, I would have done so.’

  ‘Maybe you will when you’re recovered. Or maybe you’re a spy. Maybe I should just kill you right here, and tell the others I couldn’t save you from your addiction.’

  She takes a moment to consider it. He probably has a poison on him. Maybe in his left pocket. Her reflexes aren’t as bad as they could be – she did surprise Roz’s guard – but unlike that man, Dax won’t underestimate her. She shrugs. ‘That’d be your mistake. Mark wanted me to find you. I have information you need.’

  He shifts, and she can finally have a good look at him. Long dark hair hangs past his shoulders. He has a thin face, full lips, high cheekbones and a small cleft in his chin. From the information that just unlocked, she knows he’s Native American, of the Timbisha Shoshone, and grew up in Death Valley. He is trans. He’s about the same height as Carina, slim but broad-shouldered, and toned in a way that suggests he either has very good muscle mods or actually works out. Good-looking. It’s been a long time since she’s been with it enough to even recognize someone as attractive.

  Carina slides the IV needle from the crook of her arm and sits up. Her neck hurts. The rest of her hurts . . . a lot less. Her arms are healed; the many bruises from countless Zeal needles gone. The scars are still there, but the veins under her skin aren’t quite so stark. Even her torn and bloody cuticles are a bit better.

  Dax passes her a mirror. She hasn’t liked looking in them these last six months. She closes her eyes and steels herself.

  It’s still bad. Her hair has thinned enough that she can see her dry scalp through the fair strands. The bags under her eyes are just as dark as before. She’s so thin.

  ‘I didn’t do anything except fix the really dangerous risks to your health. I could fix your teeth and plenty more, but I concentrated on the essentials. You came close to dying.’

  Carina probes her mouth with her tongue. How had she not realized she’d lost four teeth? Most of the others are grey with decay. She hesitates, then decides. ‘I’d like it if you could fix them. In fact, I wonder if you could do one better.’ She looks up at him. ‘Can you give me a new face entirely?’

  Dax blinks. ‘I can. But I want to know who you are, and why you’re on the run. Why you’re really here. No bullshit.’

  Carina considers him. His mouth is set in a stubborn line. A few strands of hair have escaped the loose ponytail and frame his face. The information she’s downloaded on the Trust has a personality profile for Dax, which is useful. It says he has a strong moral compass. That he’s trustworthy, if he thinks the person is worthy of that trust.

  ‘My name is Carina Kearney,’ she says, electing to tell the truth. ‘I used to work for Sudice. With Mark . . .’

  ‘Who’s Mark?’

  ‘Your source.’

  Dax swallows. ‘He hasn’t told us his name.’

  ‘He was Dr Mark Teague. I worked with him on the SynMaps memory trials, starting around three years ago.’

  He starts. ‘SynMaps? The experiments that tortured people?’

  She doesn’t blink. ‘Yes. Those. I quit and left when I didn’t agree with how they were conducting those experiments.’ It’s more complicated than that, but she doesn’t feel like going into the nuances. ‘Mark is dead.’

  Dax leans back into the darkness again. She can’t see his face, but his hands clench.

  ‘I didn’t know anything about what Mark was up to,’ she continues. ‘I didn’t even know he’d left the company. Then, yesterday, I was . . . plugged in as usual –’ Carina hates how her voice flickers – ‘and he sent me all this information. It’s hidden in my head. I have information on your group. A lot of it. But I have the potential for more. I managed to unlock a second lot of information on Sudice. I can guarantee you, it’ll have things you can use to hurt them.’

  ‘Like what?’

  She mentally rifles through it. ‘Accurate, up-to-date personality profiles on every employee. Meaning you can sift through and pinpoint which employees are susceptible to bribery through money, sex or patriotism. There are a lot of people in there who aren’t happy. They just need to be pushed in the right direction, with the right amount of pressure.’

  She pings three profiles to his implants as an example.

  Dax stays silent, turning around the information she’s given him. ‘Interesting.’

  ‘And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. So: you need me. I need protection until I get the rest of the information out of my head. I’ll give it all to you. Then I can walk away and not have to deal with this.’

  ‘This is still weird. Why didn’t he just send it to us? Why you, especially in your physical state?’

  Harsh, but fair. ‘He was afraid it’d be traced, I think. He said I was the only person he trusted, and he clearly wanted me to bring this to you. He knew my brain well enough from when we worked together to be able to pull this off.’ Again, she’s skipping over a lot of details, but this Dax doesn’t need to know everything. ‘I have my reasons for hating Sudice, too.’

  Dax considers this. Carina knows he takes care of logistics along with Charlie, and already he’s trying to formulate a plan with the limited knowledge she has given him. He sighs, meets her eyes.

  ‘OK. What do you want to look like, Carina?’

  Carina wakes up from the medical coma and the first thing she does is run her tongue along her new, whole teeth.

  Dax hovers above her, lit from behind. He helps her sit up.

  Carina feels vulnerable. This man she barely knows has put her unconscious and changed her body and face into something else. It’s a different, strange sort of intimacy. This total stranger has now seen underneath her very skin.

  She’s not new to flesh parlours, though she hasn’t gone as often as a few people she knew in San Francisco. Mark, for instance, seemed to go every week. She hasn’t been to one since quitting Sudice, and when she worked at the lab she was still in her early twenties; so what with a combination of decent genetics, even better gene therapy, and the elasticity of youth, she’d only made minor changes to her body.

  After she’d left Woodside, she had wanted to change herself entirely. Rewrite her face into a new start. In the end, she’d held onto her face, to have something familiar when everything else had changed so completely.

  She can’t look in the mirror just yet and acknowledge the fact that yes, after twenty-four years, she’s changed her features into a stranger’s. The blonde locks, the once-full cheeks and pointed chin had worked well for her. People never expected the true devil hidden behind the sweet face. In recent months, the Zeal had burned away any softness, left her forged yet fragile.

  Dax had left her alone with the implant program to design herself before the surgery. It was strange. She had scanned her body, wincing at the ruined echo staring back at her. The app was encrypted, and everything within the Trust’s headquarters was triple-encrypted on top of that.

  So for a few hours, she tweaked everything about herself. She narrowed and widened her nose, eyes, lips, chin and cheekbones. Carina strayed from anything that would require changing the actual shape of
her skull. Longer recovery time, and the thought of it made her squirm.

  People don’t often change as much about themselves as one might think. In general, everyone tries to look like the best possible versions of themselves. They want to look younger, slimmer, healthier, happier. It means that everyone looks like real-life models, airbrushed to perfection. Yet so much perfection lends everyone a certain sameness, and so people love to peacock themselves. There are also plenty like Chopper, who change themselves until they are completely unrecognizable.

  Eventually, Carina decided on a face.

  In the bed, still groggy with the medicine, she prepares herself and opens her eyes.

  The new face stares back at her.

  She’s gone for dark purple hair, as it’s especially in fashion in Los Angeles this season (so ubiquitous that even she has noticed it’s a fad) and means she won’t stand out. She doesn’t have to worry about roots; her hair will grow from her head that dark violet, the pigment written into her very DNA. It’s thicker and lusher already, though some strands are shorter than others. Her skin is as pale as before, but the scars and acne have disappeared, and against the dark purple her skin seems to glow, looking better than before she ever touched Zeal. The circles around her eyes are gone, and her irises have darkened from light blue to a deep indigo. Her eyelashes are longer, her eyebrows the same shade as her hair. Her lips are not fuller exactly, but a different shape. Her sunken cheeks have filled out, her chin stronger, less pointed.

  It’s a beautiful face. It doesn’t feel like hers.

  Dax understands her stunned silence and leaves so she may investigate her body on her own. She appreciates the gesture, though it’s not as if he hasn’t seen what’s under her nightgown. He created it.

  Carina has been asleep for a few days to speed up healing. She’s no longer emaciated, is even a little plumper than she was before she threw herself into Zeal lounges, so that the new nanobots have energy to rebuild her wasted muscles. She didn’t want to change her body too much. She didn’t wish to grow taller and change her centre of gravity. Her breasts look like they used to before she’d lost so much weight they’d deflated. Identifying moles have been removed or moved somewhere else. She raises her arms above her head and turns around in front of the mirror. It’s remarkable.

  ‘You’re good,’ Carina says when Dax returns. ‘Surprising, really, that you gave up your career for a life of crime. You worked in one of the top parlours. Right?’ She knows he did. It’s in his file.

  The muscles in his jaw tighten. ‘It wasn’t the life for me.’

  Carina shrugs. ‘Just seems a shame to waste this talent, is all I’m saying.’

  Carina can’t stop looking at herself in the mirror. Her old face is gone forever. Even if she ever goes back to a flesh parlour and has them change it back from the biometric snapshot Dax took before he put her under, it won’t be quite the same.

  Humans change all the time, she reminds herself. Every seven years, all cells are replaced. Is this so very different?

  ‘I took the liberty of swapping out your VeriChip and destroying the old one.’

  ‘I’d only put that in yesterday,’ she admits.

  ‘Four days ago. You’ve been asleep, remember. You went to a chop shop?’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘Sudice are good. At some point, they’ll figure out where you went and whoever swapped it for you will give up the serial number to save their own skin. So that breaks the trail.’

  She hopes Chopper will be smart enough to evade Sudice. ‘So I’m no longer Althea Bryant?’

  ‘No. I haven’t turned it on yet, so you can come up with your own identity.’

  Althea Bryant was a mayfly. Lived and died over the course of a few days.

  How did he have a spare VeriChip? They’re carefully sanctioned by the government. She still doesn’t know who to be next. He leaves her with the programs again. At the door, he turns back.

  ‘Charlie and Raf are going to want to meet you soon.’

  He closes the door. Carina’s pulse spikes with the slightest hint of nerves. A few years ago, she wouldn’t have felt that. Charlie and Raf are dangerous. Their goals should align, in theory, but she can guarantee they won’t like her.

  No one ever truly likes her. They all sense that, deep down, she’s broken.

  SIXTEEN

  ROZ

  THREE YEARS AGO

  Sudice headquarters, San Francisco, California, Pacifica

  Roz should have known SynMaps was going too smoothly.

  The day starts out well enough. The subjects arrive on schedule, as usual. The fourth week of the trials has begun. The team has finished mapping their subjects’ brains in detail and are starting to integrate Verve into their initial experiments, chronicling important memories and filling in the blanks. It doesn’t require as much brainpower as full brain recording, and has fewer side effects. All the subjects are strapped into Chairs, their fingertips and eyelids twitching as they experience their dreamscapes.

  All morning Carina has been frowning, a line forming between her eyes. It’s so unlike her usual blank mask, Roz is curious. She leaves her own subject, a woman locked in the memory of when she lost her virginity. Roz is all too grateful to have an excuse not to watch that awkward, saccharine-sweet moment. Her own first time was not so shy and exploring. Not unpleasant or cruel by any stretch; but seeing her subject’s memory reminds Roz that she didn’t lose her virginity with someone she loved, or even particularly liked.

  Scientists, subjects and robots are all in the same room, but each scientist has a force field around them and their subject, like bubbles, so that conversation will not leak through. It gives a semblance of privacy but also a sense of camaraderie. Roz doesn’t want everyone separated, in little solo cells. It’s too remote, removed, and there’s too much scope for secrets.

  Mark and Aliyah are both hyper-focused on their own trials. Aliyah has made great strides. She’s already mapped over a dozen memories enhanced by Verve and is extrapolating what types of details are most remembered, and which have to be artificially recreated, and whether any of the memories are becoming clearer thanks to the drug.

  Thank you, Ratel, Roz thinks. Your new drug might just help us crack this.

  Carina, surprisingly, is the furthest behind. Roz does not want the scientists growing close to their subjects, but Carina has formed no relationship with Subject B at all. He is actively nervous around her. There has to be at least some modicum of trust between them for this to work. Especially when things don’t go smoothly.

  ‘Carina,’ Roz says. ‘May I speak to you for a moment?’

  Carina looks up from the code circling her head that she’s been amending before she sends Subject B back into dreamland. She nods, curtly, powering the halo down.

  ‘Take a break, Subject B,’ Roz says. The subject looks grateful as Carina unplugs the needles from his arms, though he shies away from her touch. He leaves the room, saying he’s making for the cafeteria for some coffee. There’s a replicator in the next room – why go all the way down there, wonders Roz? Then she realizes it’s because he wants to be further away from Carina.

  He’s not just uncomfortable around her. He’s afraid.

  Roz takes Carina into her own office, a sumptuous corner room overlooking the bay. Carina doesn’t seem nervous, but then again, it’s hard to tell with her. It shouldn’t be. It didn’t used to be.

  ‘You and Subject B don’t seem to be getting along as well as the other pairs, it pains me to see.’

  ‘I am finding him moderately difficult to work with, yes,’ she agrees easily enough.

  ‘Would you like me to terminate him and find a new subject?’

  ‘No!’ Roz is startled by the force of Carina’s outburst. ‘I don’t particularly care for him, but if an entirely new subject is brought in, I’ll have to start mapping the brain and testing memories with Verve all over again. I’ll fall too far behind. The SynMaps trials are meant to go in
tandem, correct?’

  ‘They are. Why don’t you tell me about the trouble you’ve been having with Subject B, and we can work through it?’

  Carina pauses, as if weighing up whether to speak.

  ‘Go on,’ Roz urges.

  ‘When were you going to tell us that all of the subjects were criminals meant to be in stasis?’

  Roz blinks. She chooses her own words carefully. ‘I was going to, but I wanted you to become acclimated to them first.’ The truth is, she didn’t know how to tell them. Criminals were the easiest human subjects to procure. They were grateful for a stay of execution, as it were. All their brains were more or less fully functional.

  Carina has the gall to scoff. ‘That’s a terrible scientific approach. We should be fully informed. Some of them may have subtly different brain structures. Some serial killers have smaller prefrontal cortexes, reduced empathy, varying responses in the amygdala.’ She sighs, pursing her lips. ‘The main thing that’s bothering me is, they’ve signed disclosures, haven’t they? If we find any evidence of wrongdoing in their brains, we can’t hold them accountable for it.’

  ‘Ye-es.’ Roz had convinced Mantel to put it in. A little extra incentive for stasis candidates to sign up.

  ‘Well. I’ve tried not to let it colour my interactions with him, but my subject is a criminal, and I think he came forward for these trials specifically to be able to share his crimes with his scientist and know he can’t be brought down for them.’

  Roz knows what crimes Subject B has committed.

  ‘You gave me a serial rapist for a subject, Dr Elliot.’

  Roz knows she should feel guilty. She can’t, though, because she did it deliberately. Ever since she saw that flicker. There are other hints. The way Carina acted that night at Zenith, and the way she is actually bonding with the other scientists when she should be keeping herself separated, focused on the work. Roz created Carina to work hard, to be unbothered by ethics: how would she react when faced with an ethical dilemma in her work like this?