Shattered Minds Read online

  ‘Yeah, but again, this is his old backyard. I don’t think he’ll look here, especially if we get Raf to set up some false trails.’

  Raf nods. ‘I can do that.’

  Charlie turns the hovercar and they pull in front of a mansion made all of smooth white stone, as if the clouds have shaped themselves into a modern Olympus. Carina half expects an angel to emerge, large wings spread.

  Charlie pulls the hovercar in front of the wide drive. There is a second invisible force field around the house, and again, Charlie types in a code and waits. If she tries to go through it without approval, the hovercar will stall and reverse. The robotic woman soon welcomes them, and they fly through. Charlie lands in the drive and kills the engine. The place is huge – acres of floating house and grounds. There are gardens, pools, garages full of the best hovercars on the market. How many Greenview Houses would this mansion fetch? Carina guesses at least a dozen.

  Who lives here?

  The front door opens, a robotic droid flying out and standing sentry. They file out of the hovercar, cautiously. Charlie carries the unconscious Dax, his head still covered by the deprivation helmet. Just in case.

  Charlie leads the way to the grand, sweeping stairs and the front door. The butler droid bows to them all, which strikes Carina as a little over the top. One droid takes Dax in its arms and floats away. Carina watches him go, nervous to have him out of her sight. They step across the threshold, and the sense that they’ve left the real world behind only grows. The Apex is another realm entirely.

  Inside the house is as pale and pure as the outside. White marble floors and columns, like the interior of a Grecian temple crossed with a starship. There is no dust anywhere, and white vases filled with magnolias ring the round, bare walls, the only ornamentation besides the columns and the sweeping double staircase to the rest of the house. Its simplicity telegraphs wealth.

  Whoever lives here has no human servants. More droids, as white as their surroundings, flit through the white ballroom to the doorways leading to other wings of the house. One peels away to assist the butler droid in taking their coats and few belongings.

  Charlie’s face turns up, and her face breaks into a radiant smile. Carina has never seen her wear one like it before. The rest of the Trust follow her gaze to the figure at the top of the grand stairs. Carina’s mouth drops open.

  ‘We’re meant to be lying low and you take us to Isaac fucking Clavell?’ Raf asks, the words too loud, echoing in the empty ballroom.

  ‘Because Isaac fucking Clavell is the only man in Los Angeles with security to rival Sudice’s,’ he says, descending the stairs for his grand entrance. ‘And that’s exactly what you need just now.’

  Carina blinks as he comes closer. They move forward to meet him in the middle of the grand ballroom, following Charlie like nervous ducklings.

  Isaac Clavell is the prime actor of cinema. Plug into the VR at any theatre, and one of his many films will be in the selection. Action, romance, nail-biting thrillers, thoughtful character pieces, tear-jerking biopics – he’s done them all, and will do many more. He’s been headlining films for the last twenty years, and probably has another thirty or forty years in him. When people tire a little of his face and image, he goes to the best flesh parlour in Hollywood and emerges with a whole new face, takes a different role from his recent fare, and lets the audience fall in love with him all over again.

  Isaac’s been wearing his current face for a few years. Carina remembers seeing some of his films in San Francisco while she worked at Sudice, and it’s so strange to see that same face right before her. Like most people, she’d enjoyed his movies, especially after a long day of SynMaps trials and having to look into Subject B’s brain.

  Isaac Clavell is tall, but not too tall. Trim, but neither too skinny nor too muscular. His features and skin seem like they are from everywhere and nowhere, impossible to place. An aquiline nose, eyes that tilt up a little at the corners, a high forehead and cheekbones, a generous mouth and a little cleft in the chin. A dazzling smile, teeth impossibly white. He’s uncommonly beautiful, even for a world where everyone looks their best. He’s dressed in a suit that seems simple, all cream and pale blue, but she’s sure it’s worth more than she made in a year at Sudice.

  ‘Charlie,’ he says, his voice coloured by his warm smile. He holds out his arms and she gives him a firm hug. He squeezes her back just as tight, his winning celebrity smile softening into something resembling a true one.

  ‘Where have you taken Dax? Do you have a Zeal Chair and a wallscreen?’ Carina asks. ‘That’s all I need, plus Raf and Charlie to lend extra hands.’

  ‘Of course. Please follow me.’ He makes his way across the marble floor, Italian shoes clicking compared to the duller thumps of the Trust’s practical rubber soles. He leads them down wide white corridors that remind Carina – painfully, sharply – of her old Green Star Lounge.

  Isaac opens one of the doors and motions them inside. The room is grey. A blank palette for Isaac’s own fantasies, if he ever plays with Zeal in here. What would the man who has everything dream about?

  The robot has laid Dax in the Chair already. His blindfold and earplugs have been removed. Charlie brushes the hair back from Dax’s face, her features concerned.

  ‘Don’t say anything incriminating. You,’ Raf gives a pointed look to Clavell. ‘Don’t speak, in case they recognize your voice.’

  Isaac gives them a bland smile.

  ‘Someone strap him in and prep the Zeal,’ Carina says. She leaves the rest of the words unspoken: I don’t trust myself enough to do it.

  Charlie prepares the syringe expertly. It’s a tiny dose, just enough to prep the implants to make it easier for Carina to manipulate the code. To find out what Roz has done, find the link back and sever it. After, she’ll want to flush his implants and put in new neural dust entirely. Can they trust Isaac to order that for her without detection? She wants to know why Charlie’s put their lives in Isaac Clavell’s hands, but there’s no time.

  Focus. Focus. Carina turns away as Charlie slides the needle into the crook of Dax’s arm. She wants to take his place and disappear. It would take less than three minutes once she’s back in a Zealscape to create and kill a victim. Three minutes until that sweet release.

  Focus. Focus.

  Dax’s body relaxes. Carina takes a deep breath, feeling as though she’s almost slid back in time to when she was a brain-hacker at the top of her game. She draws up Dax’s new brain map taken in the Trust headquarters and compares it with the old one again. Algorithms count the neural dust implants, highlighting the new ones. She’ll start with these, deactivating and setting them to self-destruct and flush from the system. They blip off the map, like stars going out. Within twelve hours, they’ll have dissolved. No trace left.

  The Trust and Clavell are watching her every move. She can’t think about them. She can’t think about that deep, throbbing desire she still has for Zeal. She can only concentrate on the code. The letters, the numbers, the commands. No mistakes.

  The code floats around her, transparent and multicoloured. She could have gone full VR for ease of seeing the relationships, but that would require Zeal. She has to keep her head together. Carina steps from side to side to access different parts of the code, fingers moving through the air almost as if she’s conducting a symphony. She remembers this dance. It’s both soothing and electric. Once, she knew the steps so well she could do it in her sleep.

  Now, it’s so much harder. The implant interfaces are slightly different than they were over a year ago. Sweat gathers on her temples. Her muscles shake as badly as they did during her Zeal withdrawal. One mistake, and she could fry Dax’s brain. Like what happened to his sister. Like what she did to Subject B and Subject E. Dax’s brain could be so overexposed to data that it gives him a heart attack and a stroke in front of another room of witnesses.

  At the thought of those long-ago, real-world kills, her face flushes. Isaac Clavell even reminds her sli
ghtly of Subject B, in looks if not in manner. That old-school Hollywood charm, perfectly styled and coiffed, a smile that shows too many teeth. What would Carina find in his memories, if she peeked beneath his skull?

  Focus, goddamnit. Focus.

  Carina moves through the code. It feels so slow, so clumsy. Dax’s new implants are gone, but she still hasn’t found the link back. It’s as if she’s tiptoeing through his brain, and it’s so full of trip wires that one wrong move and all alarms will sound with disastrous consequences.

  There. She’s found the threat. Carefully, so carefully, she begins to dismantle it, like untying a particularly tricky knot in a necklace chain. Pull the wrong way and it only grows tighter, until your fingernails find no purchase.

  Finally, it unravels. She snips the code. Back at Sudice headquarters, Roz will know. It’s the middle of the night, but Carina guesses she’ll likely be sleeping fitfully on the hard sofa of her office, like she did for so many nights in San Francisco. Right now, alarms are sounding, and Roz will blink sleep from her eyes and go on the hunt. She’ll be desperate to find them, and Carina has to hope that Clavell’s security is as good as he claims.

  Dax’s heartbeat speeds, slows and then stops.

  Carina wastes no time. An implant is anchored to the medulla oblongata, the area of the brain controlling heart rate, blood pressure and respiration. This is new – she didn’t know Sudice were capable of doing something like this. She works at the code around the section of implants, trying to stop it, but everything seems to snap. Dimly, she can sense the others’ distress. Raf is crying, Charlie is doing CPR, Clavell stands well out of the way.

  Carina types, hoping her intuition is right, and then slams the code into the implant area, restarting the neural dust.

  Dax’s heart starts again, fitfully at first before settling back into its usual rhythm. He gasps, eyelids twitching, mouth opening and closing, but he’s still unconscious. Raf laughs and Charlie joins in. Carina doesn’t.

  Dax’s eyes are open, his mangled implants still able to project a recording onto the white ceiling for all to see.

  It’s a recording of Carina in the Zealscape. It’s an older one, Carina thinks, which is no less unnerving. Roz must have known where she was in LA and bribed an orderly to record a dream, something they weren’t meant to do in the Zealot lounges.

  How long has Roz been watching her dreams?

  Now, the rest of the Trust are witness to one of her darker, depraved fantasies. It’s a slice of Carina cutting open a middle-aged woman, mouth open in a rictus scream. Carina carefully snips the arteries of the heart and draws it from the open sternum, the ribcage spread like wings, blood slick in her bare hands.

  To clear any potential confusion, Roz chose the clip well. Carina looks up at a mirror on the ceiling of the room in her dream Greenview House. There’s her old face and blonde hair, cheeks flushed, pupils wide. The recording ends and Dax slumps against the Chair. A sting in the tail, like Mark’s first image.

  Dax groans, waking up. He missed the recording, at least. Everyone else stares at her in fear, though Clavell’s is tinged with confusion – he doesn’t recognize her older features in the recording.

  No one says anything. Carina shuts down the programs, the code disappearing in the air. Charlie unlaces Dax from the Chair and he struggles to his feet.

  Carina leaves the room. She can hear them murmuring, hesitant and hushed. Isaac is silent, but Carina knows he’s taking everything in.

  She ignores them all, walking through those stark corridors. Something stirs in her for the first time in a long while: shame. It’s keen enough to cut her. She didn’t kill that woman in real life, but what does that matter? The intent was there. It still is. They saw how close she came to losing it after Dax was shot. They’re all terrified of her. She can’t blame them.

  One of the robot assistants floats to her in the hallway.

  ‘Would you like me to show you to your room, Madame?’ The robot asks in its smooth, modulated voice.

  ‘Yes.’

  She follows it through the hallway, up the grand set of stairs, to the east wing of the house. The robot shows her a room and leaves, the door clicking shut behind her. She falls face first onto the white, clean bed, leaving her shoes on. Freshly replicated clothing is folded neatly on the dresser. She has no other possessions in the world. Once, she’d had savings, an entire wardrobe of designer clothes, a career, an apartment all her own, a life. A flawed life, perhaps, with everyone kept at a distance.

  The withdrawal pulses through her, hot and intense. She balls her hands into fists. It’s more manageable than the night of the detox, but she still feels as though ants crawl underneath her skin.

  She’d let herself grow closer to her team at Sudice than anyone else. Mark. Kim. Aliyah. Even Roz, in her own way. Look what had become of them. Mark murdered by Roz. Kim stuck working for a company she knows is evil. Aliyah is on the other side of the continent in Boston in Atlantica, hoping it’s enough distance that Roz leaves her alone. And Roz is determined to kill Carina, their once almost-friendship turned to the purest hatred.

  Closing her eyes, she tries to quiet her mind. She doesn’t want to think about Sudice, her team, the SynMaps brain trials. About all the Zeal dreams she still misses. About the look on the rest of the Trust’s faces when they saw, in high definition, exactly what she is.

  THIRTY FIVE

  DAX

  The Apex, above Hollywood, Los Angeles, California, Pacifica

  The first thing Dax sees when he wakes up is Isaac Clavell’s face, and he thinks he must surely be dreaming. He thinks it until Charlie takes the needle from his arm and it hurts like hell.

  Charlie fills them in. He grew worse. They came to Clavell’s. Carina helped him.

  ‘Where is she?’ he asks.

  ‘In her room.’ A pause, a sidelong glance.

  ‘What aren’t you telling me?’

  ‘Roz Elliot put in a booby trap. Once Carina severed the link, we all got a front-row seat to one of Carina’s Zeal dreams.’

  ‘Oh.’ Dax’s stomach clenches.

  ‘Oh,’ Charlie agrees, grim.

  ‘Where is she?’ he asks again.

  ‘One of my bots will show you,’ Isaac Clavell says, all smooth charm. ‘She’s in the east wing.’

  ‘Um. Thank you.’ He’s never really met anyone famous before. He’s not starstruck, but he doesn’t know how to act around someone who holds their lives in his well-manicured hands.

  Dax follows the bot through Clavell’s lavish home. He’s too tired, his head too tender, to be amazed at the luxury surrounding him. He focuses instead on trying not to think about what has just happened. When he reaches Carina’s door, he gives a tentative knock.

  ‘Not now,’ he hears faintly, as if her face is pressed into the pillow.

  ‘Carina,’ he says.

  A pause. Then: ‘Fine. Come in.’

  The door slides open, and Dax slips inside. The room looks like the rest of the house: pristinely pure. There are no sharp edges; all is oblong and smoothed. Bookshelves are built into recesses in the walls, a low bench topped with satin pillows emerging from another. Carina draws herself up from the oval bed with effort. Her face is smooth; he has no idea what she’s thinking or feeling. He finds the stillness unnerving.

  ‘I’m a bad neuroprogrammer,’ she says, voice flat. ‘Running off without doing tests. I’ll check you over now.’

  Dax’s nerves spike. ‘Did you get everything? What if this is still recording? They’ll know exactly where we are.’

  ‘Shh, don’t worry. I got it all. I’m checking your basic physical responses. You’re up and moving and speaking, so that’s good.’ She holds up a finger. ‘Follow this.’

  His eyes dutifully move side to side.

  ‘Your pupils are normal. Good. Any headache? Auras, warbling vision?’

  ‘No. That all seems fine.’

  ‘Can you access your implants?’

  He tr
ies. ‘No.’

  ‘Good. I blocked them. You won’t be able to access them until we flush your neural dust and put in new ones. I need to figure out where to get it. Clavell might be able to help, but . . .’

  ‘But you don’t exactly trust him.’

  ‘No. Do you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Good call.’ She pauses. ‘Well, most things seem fine from my end. What’re your doctor senses saying?’

  Dax pauses, closing his eyes and focusing inward. He checks his heartbeat. Goes to the bathroom and looks in the mirror at the whites of his eyes (a little bloodshot, but not too bad), and his skin (a little paler than usual, but nothing to worry about). He comes back. ‘I’m OK. Physically and mentally sound, at least until the next catastrophe comes along.’ Dax leans against the smooth, white wall of the room. He feels his face crumple. ‘They went into my mind, Carina. They let the doctors heal my body and they ravaged my brain.’ It is a violation of the worst kind. They had brain recorded his thoughts, his memories, his feelings.

  ‘Looks like Roz managed to finally finesse brain recording. I guess she’d have had to, to have Pythia up and running smoothly. Similar amount of processing required by the brain. If they manage not to overload most people, then it’s an acceptable level of risk.’

  Dax shudders.

  ‘Sorry. Old habits. But I am sorry. That it happened to you.’ The words sound stilted, empty. She’s trying.

  ‘I don’t know if you can fully understand how horrible this is for me. My body . . . has always been important to me. I mean, it is to everyone, but especially to me. I fit it to match my identity. I made it mine, in a way most people don’t. I treat it well. It took time for me to be comfortable in it, but now I am.’

  ‘I understand, though I can’t pretend I treated my body well.’

  The side of his mouth quirks. ‘No. Not particularly. But to learn someone’s been in my head, done whatever they wanted . . .’ He trails off, unable to find the words.

  ‘You’ve never doubted your mind. Your mind always knew you were Dax. Your mind is a doctor’s. Strong, smart, capable. Your mind has shaped everything.’