Shattered Minds Read online

  If they are captured, there will be no trial. Their bodies will not be frozen and put in stasis with other Pacifica criminals. Sudice will not let them fall into the government’s hands. They’ll be killed by the company – quickly, if they’re lucky – and then incinerated, rolled back into a replicator, and churned out as plastic Tupperware for leftover dinner.

  Charlie says, terse.

  Raf pouts.

  Charlie’s tone brooks no argument.

  A second later, the code vanishes. The virtual reality simulation powers down. The Trust are merely three people standing in an abandoned warehouse in east Los Angeles. The switch back to reality is always jarring. The real world doesn’t have the hypersaturated colours or heightened emotions of the Zealscape, nor the crisp yet distant edges of virtual reality. Reality is messy. The warehouse smells of the rotten rodent corpses that are mouldering in its corners.

  ‘Did they track us?’ Charlie asks as they all take the small electrodes off their temples.

  Dax checks the VR specs on his implants. ‘No buzzing of security Wasps out there, and no one within a hundred feet of us in either direction. I think we’re good.’

  ‘Glad to hear it.’

  They take a moment to stretch out the cramps in their muscles. Charlie shows off and does a few slow flips around the warehouse, then tugs her leather jacket straight. Raf applauds, and Charlie gives him a little sardonic bow.

  They pack up their kit. It’s all custom-made by Raf, with some hardware and firmware thrown in by Charlie. Almost nine months after joining the Trust, Dax is still a little amazed Raf is walking free. If the government and Sudice had their way, Rafael Hernandez would be in custody. Then again, the man could probably hack his way out of stasis. Raf rolls his shoulders. His dark hair is as messy.

  ‘You gonna help me pack up, or are you just gonna stare at my pretty face some more?’ Raf asks Dax.

  Dax rolls his eyes and hefts a backpack. One by one, they slip out of the warehouse, through the blind alley where the surveillance drones don’t fly. Charlie leaves first, her scarlet pixie cut hidden by a hood, only her blue eyes flashing in the darkness. Raf lifts his own pack and follows her.

  Dax goes last, and can’t help but glance behind him. He wishes Tam were here, able to slink out right next to him like always. He can just picture her, with her features an echo of his own – they’d be mirror images if he hadn’t had his testosterone implant fitted and started visiting flesh parlours at puberty. He can almost see the smile she reserved only for him, and hear her teasing words: Hey asshole, I know you. We shared a womb and you hogged all the extra space.

  Tam’s not there. She’s gone, somewhere he can’t follow, and he doesn’t know if he will ever get her back.

  Dax throws a DNA scrub grenade over his shoulder as he leaves. The ball hisses as it hits the floor, the tiniest nanobots floating through the air to eat every dead skin cell and piece of hair they left behind before self-combusting. Not so much as a strand of rat hair will be left when they’re done.

  Maybe it’ll even improve the smell.

  The three of them take different routes. Dax walks alone through the abandoned streets, the dark night lit up with neon signs. Holographic advertisements dance along brick and concrete walls. A beautiful woman with lavender hair winks at him, pursing her lips to showcase her red lipstick. Athletic men and women flex their muscles, advertising the latest and greatest in nanobots that can repair – and build new – muscle faster than the human body ever could. A couple dancing, promoting a new brainloading program that enables anyone to move as gracefully as they do. The late spring humidity is stifling, the air close and scented with frying oil, ginger and onions from a nearby takeout joint for when people want a non-replicated meal. In one of the apartments above him, someone practises the saxophone, jazz music drifting down over the hush of the street.

  The Trust meet again at an unmarked hovercar. Dax is the last one to enter. It takes off and heads back to headquarters, which Raf has affectionately named the Technodrome. The others speak amongst themselves, but Dax is silent. He looks out the window at the untidy sprawl of Los Angeles, the endless sea of lights. Tall skyscrapers merge with the smaller, floating buildings between them, connected by thin, flexible bridges. They are the most recent additions to the city, and work so well with the frequent earthquakes that the city will probably make most new buildings float. It’d mean the ground could go back to being green to combat the still-lingering smog. Or that’s the plan. Dax thinks it would look beautiful.

  Other hovercars whoosh past the window. Dax should feel triumphant. They’ve planted the virus. It’ll lie low within Sudice’s systems for a few days as Raf tinkers with processes and creates modified backdoors. The program will amass data and split it up into small packets, exfiltrating it over time encoded as normal corporate traffic. The Viper is in part an AI, making sure all information leaving doesn’t trigger anomalies and bring in Wasps, Sudice’s security AI bots. In all likelihood, the Trust won’t find anything terribly useful. But if the Viper can stay undetected and disappear, then that’s a weapon to use for a bigger exploit.

  The rest of the Trust are smug. Even Charlie is smiling, looking out the window over the City of Angels. None of them mention Tam. His sister as good as died for them all. Her body is alive, well hidden, but they can’t reach her mind.

  Dax knows the others wonder if Tam betrayed them, though they know better than to say that to him. His hand snakes up to his neck to clutch the Shoshone bead necklace his sister made for them at their home in Timbisha, in Death Valley, back before they left home and plunged head first into danger. They should have stayed on the reservation. Tam’s injury four months ago nearly drove the Trust apart. Maybe it should have stayed broken.

  Even if everything works perfectly with the Viper, it’s highly unlikely that they’ll all come through this unscathed. Dax sighs, fingers running over the beads for comfort. The only other option is to do nothing, to let Tam’s injury be in vain. That’s not an option. For Dax, or for any of the others.

  FIVE

  CARINA

  Chesterfield Square, Los Angeles, California, Pacifica

  The next day, the Green Star Lounge is still closed.

  Carina stares at its darkened entrance and curses. The nearest Zeal lounge is about a mile away, she has no money for a hovercab, and the withdrawal is kicking in hard.

  She starts walking, wrapping her arms around herself to stop shaking so badly. Every half block she pauses, bent over, wheezing. If she was healthy, it’d take her about fifteen, twenty minutes, tops, to reach the next Zeal lounge. It takes her forty-five instead. Forty-five long, agonizing minutes. She retches onto a potted tree on the sidewalk, but all that comes up is bile.

  People’s eyes glaze and slide away from Carina. They’re embarrassed for her – a Zealot out in public, suffering from the drug that most can take with no ill effects. A physical reminder that Pacifica isn’t as perfect as it pretends to be.

  Zeal is integral to so many aspects of Pacifica. It’s a neuroware component of brainloading information directly into their implants, or it can be used to assist with therapy. For nearly all of the population, if they have a bad day, they can go to a Zeal lounge on their way home. Normal citizens frustrated by office politics, or their relationship, or a friendship gone sour, go to the slick Zeal lounges in the better parts of town, where the addicts don’t go. They take a hit, plug in and imagine killing their boss, or maybe they have really good, angry sex with someone – either another person plugged in to the same Zealscape, or an imagined figment – or they have a proper blow-out screaming fight with their friend. Then they unplug, go home. Zeal is but a temporary catharsis, more vivid than the virtual reality feeds yo
u can order off your wallscreen. Only the defective ones grow addicted. The ones with brains wired for violence, the ones in high danger of becoming criminals.

  Carina hasn’t always been like this, though she’s always dreamed of murder. At sixteen, everyone takes their first hit of Zeal. She took it along with everyone else, and killed the man in her imagination she’d dreamed of killing every day of her life since she could remember. Everything she’d ever experienced paled in comparison to that sensation of ripping into flesh, or making someone else scream in pain until they could scream no more.

  She came out to face a very unnerved orderly, but Zeal had done its job. She felt freed, sedated, but she didn’t crave another hit. She still avoided the drug, afraid of how much she’d enjoyed it. Until a few years ago, when the urges to kill grew stronger, until they threatened to consume her entirely.

  Carina finally reaches the Zealot lounge called Vellocet. It’s flashier than her old haunt, which looked like a hospital ward. That had actually been comforting. This one, with its purple lights and 1960s-inspired furniture, makes her lip curl.

  She trudges in. Beggars can’t be choosers.

  Thrusting her credits at the receptionist, who looks at her as though she’s trash, Carina writes down her identification number for them to call out. In the nicer lounges, people scan their VeriChips, but here in the Zealot shitholes, no one wants the government to know. There’s the fear that the government will watch, see how deranged their dreams are, and they’ll disappear, frozen into stasis without a trace. These lounges aren’t meant to record trips. Carina’s fairly sure the government watches them anyway. They could crack down on Zealot lounges, but they choose to let the addicts take care of themselves, one failed body at a time.

  The paradise of Pacifica.

  Carina shuffles, her legs giving out just in time to collapse into an empty chair. She’s thirsty, but there’s no water. Her lips are dry and cracked, her breath stinks and her hair is stringy with sweat.

  The lobby is busy, and she recognizes a few faces from the Green Star Lounge. Lucky souls who weren’t there yesterday. She waits, the shakes growing worse, her patience wearing thin.

  Finally: ‘700628.’

  The orderly barely gives her a second glance as she leads her down the hall. Old music plays. Carina knows this band: The Beatles. Her father played a lot of their songs, their voices echoing through Greenview House those few times he was in his good moods. The Beatles sing about an octopus.

  The orderly plugs Carina into a Chair while whistling along with the music. It puts her on edge, but she resists the urge to lash out, not wanting to risk being thrown out. She wouldn’t last long enough to make it to the next Zealot lounge a mile away.

  ‘Sweet dreams,’ the orderly says, as monotone as all the others who have said it to Carina over the last few months.

  As the drug takes hold, she can’t help but feel a thrill of fear. What if whatever happened to her before comes again? What if she joins all those souls who died yesterday? What if she finally disappears?

  Carina smiles as she falls back into dreamland.

  At first, nothing seems to have changed. Carina is back in Greenview House. She appears in the dining room, and makes the dining table, chairs and china cabinet disappear with a blink. She burns with the desire to kill someone; it itches like anxiety.

  The same muscled criminal she created yesterday appears. She cuts corners – the figure’s vague and barely sketched. Wrapping her fingers around his throat, she squeezes, feeling the pulse jump beneath her fingers. She’s about to break his neck when his features shift, becoming the teenager with the mismatched eyes.

  Carina lets go. The girl staggers back, staring at her. One green eye. One blue. Even as Carina watches, the simulacrum becomes more detailed, until she’s a perfect replica of the murdered girl from the earlier vision. The girl falls to the ground, pale as though she’s been dead for over a day, even though scant seconds ago Carina could feel the pulse in her neck.

  After the first rush of adrenalin, Carina feels strangely calm. It’s happening again. Whatever virus was in the Green Star Lounge has come here. She won’t be able to escape her fate a second time. It’s almost a relief.

  ‘Find out who killed me,’ the girl says. Black blood dribbles from the corner of her chapped lips. The cut on the side of her head is almost a terrible smile, the metal sutures like ragged teeth.

  ‘No,’ Carina says. ‘I don’t care who killed you.’

  ‘You should. You will.’ The girl disappears.

  Carina presses the heels of her palms against her eyes, steadying her breath. When she takes her hands away, Dr Mark Teague stands before her. Boyish good looks, light-brown skin, a shock of incongruous grey hair. He gives her that signature crooked half-smile. One that melted most peoples’ hearts like butter, but only softened hers ever so slightly.

  Carina’s old colleague has never appeared in her Zealscapes. Before she left it all, he, Kim and Aliyah were among the few people she trusted. Her three fellow scientists, pitted against their boss, against Sudice’s true plans for their research – against the world, it seemed sometimes. Despite all the people she’s harmed in her dreams, she’s never created those three.

  ‘If you’re seeing this, Carina, then I’m dead,’ Mark says.

  Carina says nothing. It doesn’t feel true; he can’t be real. Mark flickers – some feedback – and Carina immediately recognizes it as a glitch, not part of the Zeal dreamscape.

  It’s foreign.

  She suspected this when her Zealscapes shifted so strangely, but it’s supposed to be impossible. Shared visions, sure, if people are plugged into the same room and network. But not this.

  ‘What happened?’ she asks.

  ‘I do not know. This is pre-recorded, set to send once my life vitals end.’ He does not look particularly sad, but then she supposes when he created this, however long ago, it was only a precaution. He looks the same as ever, but Carina knows he was close to seventy when they worked together, even though he looked like a prematurely greying twenty-five-year-old. Good flesh parlours and gene therapy.

  ‘I recently changed this recording to be sent only to Carina Kearney upon my death. You will already have received other messages from me.’

  Carina swallows. ‘The images? The murdered girl?’

  A pause as the program takes in her response. ‘Those images have been specially chosen. The bee. The rose. The thorn. The drop of blood. The mismatched eyes. They’re more than images. They each contain encrypted information, which has now been downloaded deep into the frontal lobe of your cerebral cortex. I’ve tried to make this as secure as possible because I feared this message could be intercepted during transmission to you; or I could still be caught, and then the information could be used against you.’

  ‘What have you done? Why?’ Her voice rises. This is the most emotional she’s felt outside of a kill for months.

  Another delay as Mark’s AI program processes her words. ‘I’m sorry to do this to you. The images are inconvenient, but it was the only way I could move it off their servers without detection. You can help finish this. You are the natural choice.’

  ‘I’m not. I left Sudice. I want nothing to do with this. You know where I am, and what I’ve become.’

  His face creases in sadness. ‘I do know. You should have come to me, when you found out what Roz was really doing. We could have worked together.’ His eyes grow haunted. ‘Maybe we could have prevented what happened next.’

  ‘Maybe I should have,’ she concedes. She’d run away from everything, from everyone, without even a look over her shoulder. ‘Who’s the girl, Mark?’

  ‘You’ll find out. It’s all in your head now. Will you help me?’

  ‘Help you do what?’

  ‘Destroy Sudice.’

  Carina can’t help but laugh. ‘Destroy Sudice. Are you absolutely cracked, Mark? I’m not even doing a very good job of helping myself. I don’t know how the hell yo
u expect me to be able to help you.’

  Another pause. Carina isn’t sure how the AI will respond to her outburst, but she knows whatever AI program he’s installed over the messages is good. He must have spent months on it, making sure the AI could have some sort of response, no matter the question.

  ‘You can help me. And you have more reason than most to hate Sudice and want to take them down. Such a brilliant mind. What they did to you was just as much of a crime.’

  Carina feels trapped, as though she’s being backed into a corner. ‘What are you talking about, Mark?’

  Mark smiles sadly at her. No. This isn’t him. Dr Teague is dead. She is speaking to a clever echo of him. A ghost is asking her for help, and she wants nothing more than to turn him down.

  ‘You were the only one I could send the images to,’ he says, voice still blandly pleasant, ‘because your memories are in the Sudice database. The bee, the rose – all the images are tied to specific memories from your past.’

  It takes her a few moments. ‘From phase one of the SynMaps project? Those would be old memories, from when I was sixteen.’

  ‘Roz kept all of them.’

  Carina suppresses a shiver. ‘Why? That experiment didn’t work properly.’

  The AI’s face falls. ‘I feared this.’

  ‘Mark?’ She’s finally feeling afraid. It spreads through her stomach, the sensation enhanced in the Zealscape. She wants to run.

  Mark’s ghost reaches out and touches Carina on the forehead. ‘I’m sorry.’

  Something deep within her shifts, clicks back into place. Something she never even knew was out of alignment.