Shattered Minds Read online

  Carina nods. ‘Yes. My memories of that day are fuzzy from the drugs she gave me. I only remember that she wanted me to do something else with her, and I refused. The facts aren’t solid, but the emotion was. I needed to run. So I did. I left the rest of you there. I’m sorry for that.’

  ‘Don’t be. I wish I’d been as strong as you.’ He pauses, sighs. Is the same AI ghost as in the Zealscape, but it feels so much like him. Carina wants to reach out and touch him, but he’d only be air between her fingers.

  ‘After you left, she gave me the same job proposition she offered you. And, God help me, I took it. She asked me to get in Nettie, an intern I’d brought in for work experience. She’d seen her scans and thought she’d be a good candidate.’ He looks at Nettie, small and silent below him. ‘I followed Roz’s instructions, mapping Nettie’s reactions to images encrypted with proto-code Roz’d been developing. She’s grown so much more sophisticated since she first meddled with your brain. She tried to amend your coding, didn’t she?’

  ‘I think so,’ Carina says. ‘I don’t really remember. It was another thing I didn’t really think about because she didn’t want me to.’

  ‘If she’d managed to pull it off, the new code would have been ironclad. You’d have been back to being as robotic as she is.’

  ‘Did . . . she program herself?’ Carina asks, a dawning dread seeping through her.

  ‘Of course she did. To improve her concentration and focus, to dampen emotions and to become utterly ruthless. She literally made you in her image. As she tried to make Nettie, but failed.’

  ‘Why did it fail with Nettie? And why has Roz’s held up?’

  ‘Not entirely sure. I never gained access to all her notes. My guess is with Nettie, it was like brain recording. Too much stimulus at once and the brain short-circuits.’

  ‘You’re still evading something you need to tell me, aren’t you?’

  ‘Merely laying out the various steps,’ he says. ‘There’s another reason I had to have you carry on my work after I no longer could . . . it’s what Roz plans to do next.’

  Carina says nothing, waiting for him to continue.

  ‘Sudice are planning to roll out an implants software upgrade in two months’ time. It’s meant to have faster download speeds, fewer glitches, the ability to run more applications at once. So far, so normal. Those happen every few years. This time, though, there will be an optional add-in.’

  Mark’s AI ghost gestures, and Nettie’s body and the lab disappear. The drop of blood blooms brightly in Carina’s mind’s eye again, and then, with another sickening lurch, it turns into an advertisement. It’s designed for virtual reality, the colours hypersaturated. Her vision is split down the middle, with the same man on the left and the right. It’s a quick montage of two very different versions of his day. There are flashes of different decisions from the mundane – one skips breakfast, the other doesn’t – to larger – one accepting a promotion and one turning it down, or one accepting a date and the other putting it off. It flashes forward to several years later, one version of the man happy and successful, the other in the same rut as before, in a job he doesn’t like, living alone. ‘Make the right choices,’ the voiceover says, firm and confident. ‘Let Pythia™, the optional Sudice upgrade, guide you on your path.’

  It goes dark, Mark’s AI appearing again. They seem to sit in Carina’s old office at Sudice. Her skin ripples with fear. ‘She’s hidden personality programming in this Pythia upgrade?’

  ‘Right,’ he says. ‘She’s done it very cleverly. Very slow, very gradual changes to everyone’s personality. Zeal helps make people more complacent, but it’s not perfect. Zealots are proof enough of that.’

  Carina suppresses a flinch. It all fits, though. She should have seen it. They all should have seen it.

  ‘Once she had access to Verve, she realized she could roll out the personality reprogramming on a larger scale. Lower side effects, but not foolproof. There will still be a percentage of people who are significantly at risk by using Pythia. I don’t know how she finally convinced Mantel to release this,’ Mark continues. ‘It’s been brewing for a long time, before you even arrived at Sudice for the second round of SynMaps. She’s had the code prepared for ages. She tried to roll out a similar initiative after your seeming success as a teenager, but it was deemed too experimental. You were a long-term subject to be studied, and she must have hidden the fact it failed.’

  ‘I’m not stable and I’m too small of a sample.’

  ‘You weren’t the only one, back then. Neither was Nettie this time around.’

  In this strange dream-memory, her mouth does not go dry, as it would in the real world. ‘What?’

  ‘That journalist, Nemec, nearly stumbled across it. There have been many people who have disappeared into the depths of Sudice, but the path is well hidden. I couldn’t find any other proof save you and Nettie, and only because I knew to look for it.’ Another pause. ‘Have you accessed the information I just sent you before coming back in here?’

  ‘No. I came straight here. I would have been too exhausted if I let it all unravel.’

  ‘When you’re out, take a look through it. I think it’ll be enough if you can manage to send it out wide scale.’

  ‘We’re still trying to figure out how to do that. How to gain access to the servers.’

  ‘The Trust will figure it out. Send it far and wide. This should be enough, just. The last image will have that bit more. Once these brain recordings of mine go public, my memory will be tarnished. My family will be shamed to know what I did with my life.’ His head bows.

  ‘It’s worth it, yes?’ Carina says. ‘Doing the right thing, even if it’s too late.’

  ‘My previous self would hope so.’

  Carina wonders where Mark is now, in whatever afterlife waits for them, if any.

  ‘Thank you, Mark,’ she says.

  Mark reaches out to Nettie’s still face. ‘Don’t thank me for doing the bare minimum of common human decency. Just finish them.’

  ‘I’ll try, Mark. I really will.’

  He stares at her, unblinking, until the dream fizzles and burns away.

  THIRTY THREE

  CARINA

  The Trust headquarters, Los Angeles, California, Pacifica

  Carina gasps as she comes out of the Zealscape, looking up into the face of a very irate Dax.

  Her head feels full. She transfers the information to the Trust’s servers, wanting it out of her head. Dax’s lips tighten and he narrows his eyes in disappointment.

  If she wasn’t dosed up with Zeal, she’d feed off his anger and lunge for him. Instead, she feels the dopey, soporific effect she’s been craving for so long. He’s safe around her, at least until the drug leaves her system. Then no one will be safe. She doesn’t let herself think about that.

  ‘I missed this,’ she says. ‘Sometimes I think this is what it must be like to be normal. I still feel, but it’s not so . . . big. And I’m not numb. I’m just . . . warm. I wish you hadn’t hidden this from me. Even taking tiny doses might have been better. At least until this is over, I could have had these little respites.’ She blinks, dreamily, reaches up and touches his cheek. His colour is good, though the dressing peeks over the collar of his shoulder. The gunshot wound is probably already nearly healed. ‘I’m glad to see you looking better. And see, I’m not afraid of touching you,’ she says, half-wonderingly.

  Dax’s face stills. He doesn’t pull away, but he doesn’t lean into the touch, either. Carina lifts herself off the Chair, moves closer to him.

  She presses her lips against his. They are soft, and warm. Normally she’d be afraid that she’d lose herself, that she’d dig her fingernails into his skin until drawing blood, but for the moment her mind is blissfully silent.

  Dax returns the kiss, but doesn’t move it forward. He doesn’t draw her close, doesn’t run his fingers through her hair. Instead, gently, he pulls away. His eyes are sad.

  ‘I’m sorry
we lied to you about this. I wasn’t lying about Zeal breaking down your emotional connections further. This dose, even though it’s small, will do damage. You’re not yourself at the moment,’ he says. ‘When you’re sober, you may not feel as you do right now.’

  She wants to tell him that this is how she’s felt for days, beneath her fear. That desire for closeness, for connection. That she’s attracted to him physically, and also drawn to his kindness, so different from all her sharp edges. And now she’s dulled enough from cutting them both, she wants him.

  She says none of that. She shuts down, clams up.

  ‘Why did you take Zeal? How did you get in here?’ he asks, neck stiff. Carina has grown to know him well enough that she can guess at his thoughts, his emotions, but he’s completely closed to her.

  ‘Mark told me to.’

  ‘I thought Mark was dead.’

  ‘He is.’

  They stare at each other. Carina resists the urge to bring her fingers to her lips.

  ‘His AI ghost. He wanted to explain what was in this image himself. He was ashamed.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘See for yourself when it transfers. We’ve got bigger problems than we thought.’

  Carina forces herself out of the Chair and the world tilts and blurs. Blood rushes to her head and her vision darkens. She holds onto the side of the Chair until the worst of it passes.

  ‘Are you all right?’ he asks. He takes her hand, and her hopes rise, but he’s only given her a pill. A beta blocker, like Chopper gave her the night she became Althea Bryant so briefly. ‘Take this when the withdrawal starts to kick in again. It’ll help.’

  ‘Fine,’ she says, curtly. Talk about harshing her buzz. She leaves the room with the Chair behind, making her way back to her bedroom. Dax does not follow her.

  Carina hobbles to the shower, thinking of all she’s learned. Roz is no longer content to change one person here, another person there. Her ego is such that she wants to change the whole of Pacifica.

  Carina can understand the reasoning. Hell, if Roz’s programming hadn’t broken down, she’d probably be right at her side still, and it’s a sobering thought. Would she have thought of this grander scale? If the population could just be guided that little bit more to avoid violence, or bigotry, or jealousy, could Pacifica move closer to that utopia it pretended to be?

  Mark was right, though. Seeing that he knew about Nettie, that he was in a way complicit in her downfall, makes her see him in a different light. She had looked up to Dr Mark Teague. Thought he was one of the good guys. A little selfish, a little childish, but ultimately someone she could count on. Instead, he’d been a coward and let a teenager die right in front of him. He’d ended up collecting this information and sending it to Carina, but more to assuage his own guilty conscience than because he felt it was the right thing to do. She’s not exactly doing the right thing for altruistic reasons, either. Her own sins haunt her.

  After stepping out of the shower, she towels herself off. The reflection in the mirror still looks like a stranger’s. Will she ever grow used to this new face? Her old face bore bruises from her father. That’s the face she wore when she experimented on humans at Sudice. That’s the face that she wore in the Zealscape, enacting countless horrors.

  Snarling at her new features in the mirror, she pulls her lips back from her teeth like a wolf. Then she turns away from the mirror, drying her hair and slipping into more replicator-ordered clothes. She looks at the face long enough to carefully apply make-up.

  She finally forces herself to leave her room. The Trust are awake and gathered in the lounge, and they look at her as if they know exactly what she’s done. The last time they saw her was in the hovercar, when she was a wreck in withdrawal from a small dose of Zeal. It’s going to be worse this time. It already claws at the edges of her awareness. Time to get it over with before she locks herself in her room and muffles her screams into a pillow. She doesn’t remember what she did, just the confused thrum of want and need. Did she hurt any of them? She can’t meet their eyes, instead perching in an armchair a little out of the way.

  Raf and Charlie are tinkering with new kit they ordered after losing everything at the silo, making sure it’s all in working order. Dax is resting on the sofa, eyes closed as he reads something on his tablet. It’d be a cosy scene, except for how keyed up everyone is. Carina, as usual, feels like an interloper. The black sheep of this family. Someone they’re only tolerating until they’ve received everything they need from her. One image left. If she unlocks the information from Nettie’s mismatched eyes, will they kick her out, and will she still want to leave? She could finally try her code and see if it helps or fries her neurons into dust.

  ‘I take it the fourth image has finished downloading,’ Carina says.

  Charlie nods. ‘Me and Raf went through a bit of it. Decided to wait for you and Dax. He just woke up. We need to accelerate our time plan. They’ll start testing early versions of those new implants for reviews any day now, if they haven’t already. We can’t let them roll out Pythia large-scale.’

  ‘Those memories Mark sent are going to give me nightmares for weeks. That poor girl.’ Raf bends his head, turning a piece of metal over in his hands.

  Charlie projects the information onto the wallscreen. Carina is still tired, and the beautiful afterglow of Zeal is starting to recede. She’s taken the pill Dax gave her, but it’ll only buy her so much time. Her fingertips are already shaking. She stumbles into an armchair, massaging her temples. She has the beginnings of a migraine, a warbling aura wisping through her vision. She wants to go back to sleep even though it’s only mid-morning.

  They all give an involuntary intake of breath as Nettie’s corpse flashes onto the screen again. It’s a difficult image for those who aren’t used to the sight of blood – and for those who are. Even Dax glances away from the unhealed sutures.

  ‘Were you involved in this?’ Charlie asks, gesturing to the frozen image of Nettie.

  ‘No,’ Carina manages to say. ‘Mark found her after I left. She was supposed to be an intern. She was interested in the project. I think Mark let her try a brain map. Roz must have seen it, or I think Mark showed her. Roz realized Nettie would work for her next step. I think it’s in those memories somewhere.’ Her head throbs, but she forces herself to rifle through the information. ‘There.’

  She wonders if Nettie’s brain map was similar to Carina’s teenage brain. Is that what drew Roz to her? Nettie looked like an echo of a younger Carina, except for those mismatched eyes. She can’t help but feel guilty.

  ‘So Mark was confessing his sins to you,’ Charlie muses, tapping a finger against her lip. ‘It was calculated, though. He’s also, very deliberately, given us a human angle.’ Charlie brings up Nettie’s school photo. Cute, smiling, heart-breakingly innocent. She’d never smile again.

  The light from the wallscreen falls on Charlie, highlighting her red hair and the column of her neck. ‘We have plenty of intel and ammo from the images he’s put in your head.’ Charlie moves closer to the wallscreen. ‘Humans need something concrete to focus their horror. Like Anne Frank’s diary and the Holocaust. Like Lucas Hollander, a five-year-old boy who died of radiation poisoning and became the poster child of the Great Upheaval. Humans can’t picture thousands of horrors; they can be very good at sticking their heads in the sand. Even if it’s going to happen to them. Pythia would be so gradual, they wouldn’t notice. Give it a personal angle, one person they connect to, and it’s harder to ignore and push away.’

  ‘Hmm,’ Raf says. ‘You definitely have a point. We have evidence of Sudice tampering with stocks, of driving other businesses to bankruptcy and tightening its monopoly. Patenting everything. Umpteen white-collar crimes. They experimented on people in Carina’s old project, but since they were criminals due to go into stasis, it won’t have the same impact. Nettie, though – she had her whole life ahead of her, snuffed out for corporate greed. It’s an angle the media can’t ignore. Sic
kening, isn’t it? She’s already been killed and we’ll have to hold up her image to help the world do the right thing? Add the threat of personality changing before it begins to happen. A combination of guilt and self-preservation is just the recipe for action.’

  Charlie nods. ‘It is. Poor Nettie. We send this out, with everything else, though, and I think we’ve got a shot.’

  ‘The other stuff is useful, too?’ Carina asks. Dax gets up and goes to the kitchen, asking if anyone wants a drink. Everyone dutifully gives him their orders. Carina can tell by his slow steps that Dax is still feeling weak. She tries not to think about the kiss. Fails. The Zeal withdrawal is kicking in more strongly now. Her hands ball into fists.

  Raf doesn’t answer her right away. He’s still flicking through the Blood information. ‘You’ve given me a golden ticket, Carina. Lots of information on servers. I think I can get us in, and we can blast it all across the world before Sudice can blink.’

  ‘Go in . . . ?’ Carina asks. Mark had perhaps hinted at that.

  ‘This has been Raf’s plan for a while. We have access to a lot of information thanks to that earlier Viper and your images, but any moment now, Sudice could discover Mitford’s been compromised. It’s better to delete it now so there’s no chance of them tracing it back to us. We’ve copied as much info on the infrastructure of the Los Angeles headquarters, but their server’s so cut off, the only way we can access it is to physically go in and blast it ourselves. If we connect to that server, there’s no government or Sudice firewalls. Our information will go everywhere.’

  ‘Then we have to hope we can find a way out again,’ Carina says, voice quiet. With Nettie’s image projected above them, none of the Trust can avoid wondering if they will make it out alive. Carina hopes they do. If she dies, though, life will go on. The world will not stop turning on its axis; barely anyone will miss her. She’ll have done something worthwhile with her last few months. There are worse ways to go.