Shattered Minds Page 7

  Dax finishes his coffee and stretches. ‘Our source has gone totally quiet. I think they’ve been compromised.’ He pauses, looks around at the faces of the Trust, decides to jump in with what’s been bothering him. ‘I can’t help but feel it might be time to pack it in, while we’re still able to.’

  He lets the words hang in the air. Raf and Charlie don’t meet his eyes. He knows they’re thinking of Dax’s sister. They’d all plugged into virtual reality, the one Raf created using the Zealscape as a template. The Wasps showed up just after they breached the firewall. Wasps are designed to sense any anomaly within their environment. Anything that looks or smells different from normal traffic is inspected further. If it’s determined to be a threat, it is eliminated. Raf was meant to have tunnelled all the Trust’s activity into things it would expect to see, but somewhere, they were sloppy.

  Everyone else disconnected fast enough. Not Tam. The Wasps severed the connection with her still inside it. It fried her implants, and they couldn’t recover her consciousness. Tam’s body is with Raf’s boyfriend, Kivon, and he looks after her. She’s still in a coma, in an illegal stasis pod in Kivon’s storage unit outside of town.

  The guilt slams into Dax five seconds after he wakes up each morning. He hasn’t told their parents. They deserve to know, but if they started asking too many questions, Sudice might realize she’s still alive, in body at least. Though it was Tam’s idea to join the Trust, his parents would be so disappointed that Dax hadn’t talked her out of it. Kept her safe. He’s failed them. He hates Sudice, what they took from him, but he’s been thinking about it constantly over the last few days. He doesn’t want to lose anyone else, either. Maybe that’s selfish. Dax can’t help it. Maybe Sudice is too big to fight.

  ‘We can’t just give up,’ Raf says, turning off the code, his tongue darting over his lips. ‘I can’t believe you’d suggest it.’

  Dax rubs his face with his hands. He forces himself not to think about Tam. ‘I can’t be the only one with doubts. I’m not, am I? You’re both worried our source is gone or compromised.’

  Charlie shrugs. ‘It is weird they’ve gone silent. Maybe there’s been some heat and they’re just waiting until the coast is clear.’

  ‘Something’s gone wrong,’ Dax tries again. ‘Maybe we shouldn’t pack it in completely, but maybe we should take a break, too.’

  ‘I’m leaning more towards Raf,’ Charlie says. ‘We’ll never get anywhere if we give up. Then they win.’

  Dax sighs. ‘I’m beginning to think they’re going to win everything, and we’re going to lose our lives. It’s David and Goliath.’

  Raf bristles. ‘David beat Goliath in the story, so that’s a shit analogy. And no one’s making you stay, you know.’

  Charlie’s mouth opens, but she snaps it shut and shakes her head. ‘Calm down, Raf. It’s too early for a fight.’ She runs her fingers through her short hair. ‘I agree this plant doesn’t seem to be giving us any real results, which is disappointing. Still, though, we’ve proved it’s a potential way in – that’s not useless. We’ll put our heads together, try and figure out what to do next. And yes, we’ll make it as safe as possible. I don’t want anyone else getting hurt, either.’

  A pause. All the words they could say float in the air, unspoken.

  Charlie pushes on. ‘Raf, any ideas you’ve been cooking?’

  Raf flicks the code on again, obscuring his features. Dax knows he uses it as a shield when he’s upset. ‘Been toying with a few things. I can run them with you this afternoon and I’m sure we can come up with something. We need to focus on people, not machines. It’s the best way. There’s no patch for human stupidity.’

  ‘So you keep saying. We’ll take a short break, as a compromise. Tensions are high, and this is our first job since Tam . . .’ Charlie’s voice chokes. She clears her throat and continues. ‘It was never going to be easy. But you believe in the Trust too, Dax. I know you do. You know just as much as any of us how much Sudice need to be taken down. And I’d personally give my life up for it. I’ve already thrown a lot of it away for this cause, and you damn well know it.’

  ‘We all have.’

  Charlie is the reason the Trust exists, and the main reason it’s survived as long as it has, compared to all the other would-be revolutionary groups. Charlie’s last name is Mantel: she’s part of the Mantel dynasty that owns Sudice, and is second cousin to Gregory Mantel, the president. Or she was. Charlie’s renounced all ties with her family. Changed her name. Changed her face. Cut off contact. She says she regrets that sometimes. It would have been easier to stay in the family, work from within; but while Charlie has many skills, lying is not one of them. She’d have been caught by now, and silently dealt with by the family. Better to be on the outskirts, with a new life, and use the many secrets she gleaned through the first twenty-four years she spent with them to chip at their defences from the outside. Dax has never found out what actually spurred Charlie to leave.

  Raf turns his back on Dax, going to his room. Dax watches him go. Charlie sighs and drains her coffee.

  ‘We need to stand together if we’re going to have any chance in hell of pulling this off, Dax.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘You know Raf gets upset by the thought of quitting or dissent within the group. If you have concerns, come to me first.’

  ‘We’re only three people now – does that constitute a group? Or are we just a trio?’

  ‘We are a small group.’

  ‘OK. Sorry.’ Dax has so much more to say, but why fight? He’s said his piece, and deep down, he’s afraid to continue, and he’s afraid to quit.

  There’s a knock on the door.

  Charlie and Dax startle. Raf pokes his head out of his room. No one is meant to get close enough to knock. About three alarms should have sounded by now.

  ‘Shit,’ Charlie says. They stay still, perfectly poised in a frozen tableau.

  ‘Guess we better see who it is,’ Dax says.

  ELEVEN

  CARINA

  The Golden Line, Los Angeles, California, Pacifica

  Carina runs towards the Metro stop and jumps on the first train that arrives. She wants distance between her and the chop shop. When she has a chance, she’ll wipe her new VeriChip and give herself another identity. Still won’t help much if Sudice find Chopper and access her new serial number, but it’s better than nothing. Maybe later on she can get yet another chip – somehow – and confuse the trail further.

  As Carina collapses on the train seat, her vision tunnels. The pill Chopper gave her has already worn off. Zeal withdrawal is in full, horrific effect. With fumbling fingers, she finds the bottle in her pocket, but her fingers are too weak to twist the top. It drops and rolls away down the train car. The strangers’ eyes follow the bottle, then glance at her. Some of the eyes are filled with pity. Some derision. Most slide away as soon as possible, pretending they never saw her at all.

  One man moves, picking up the bottle as it rolls past and walking up to pass it to her. He takes care that his fingers do not touch hers.

  Carina gives up on opening the bottle, shoving it back in her pocket. It won’t do much at this point, anyway. She leans back against the seat, sifting through all the information that just added itself to her brain. She can theoretically see how Mark managed it, but the pure sophistication still astounds her. The information must have scattered into the neural dust in her long-term memory, and the brainloading implant will only accept the information once the required memory was accessed. But still – how is she supposed to know which memory ties to what? She has no perfect catalogue of her life in her head. Just the normal untidy memory – half-remembered images and impressions that fit nowhere else, half-forgotten moments in time, and many that she could never remember at all.

  That was another difficulty with the trials back when she was at Sudice, both times. Humans’ filing cabinets of memory are intrinsically messy. Connections run through memories that have nothing to do with c
hronology. Smells or sounds link just as easily. Dreams are inspired by real-world events. Only fragments remain of most memories, as the brain naturally sheds excess information.

  Even if Carina and the other scientists at Sudice could have figured out how to brain record perfectly, with no negative side effects, it couldn’t have retroactively brought the memories to life as much as they’d once hoped – once they’d cracked it, new memories would have been perfect, but not older ones.

  The second phase of those SynMaps experiments went more smoothly once they had access to Verve, the Ratel’s twist on Zeal. It would have been a disaster in Pacifica if the Ratel had managed to roll it out, large-scale, as they’d planned. The drug worked like Zeal, creating dream fantasies often tied to real memories – gaps filled in, until the fantasy felt better than the true memory. For brain recording subjects, it could help jog other details, but true facts versus Verve replacements were difficult to determine.

  Carina thinks of the girl and her mismatched eyes. Roz had injected the girl with Verve before operating on her.

  What else was Roz doing with the drug? Carina has stayed far away from Verve since the one and only time she tried it. It doesn’t have that convenient perk of dampening violent urges in the real world that Zeal does; it does the opposite, making people more prone to violence. The Ratel had been slowly swapping Zeal with Verve in dingy Zeal lounges, hoping to create so much chaos that they could step in and pluck power from the government. That ploy failed. Badly.

  Brain recording would happen one day, though. Then every brain would be a perfect archive of memory. Every moment kept forever, whether you wanted to remember or not.

  Carina thinks back to her first memory again. The fire. The leaves. The smell of smoke. How did Mark even know to attach it to that memory in particular? She can’t remember if Roz ever mapped that one at the lab. And how would he know Carina could find them all, and in the right order? The bastard has hidden a scavenger hunt in her brain, and she can’t trust that it will all actually work out.

  Ah. One puzzle piece falls into place. This is possibly what he searched for first, when he found the memories. To prove they were hers.

  She remembers her first Christmas party at Sudice labs. The first time she tried Verve.

  They had the party in the lab after hours. Roz elected to go home. Kim went full Christmas spirit. One of her old girlfriends had been English, and she’d sought out the paper crowns and Christmas crackers you pulled apart with a pop! and a whiff of smoke. Everyone wore their paper crowns, most of them askew. Mark had made his own gin, so everyone forwent the synth stuff and drank the moonshine out of sterilized beakers. Faux-turkey and cranberry sandwiches lay on a platter before them.

  They were sitting on the floor, shoes kicked off but lab coats on, and it was all merry and festive. Carina was not one for parties, but she remembers thinking that if she hadn’t been there, she’d have been sitting in her grand apartment all on her own, eating a Christmas dinner ordered from the replicator. It was almost as though they were friends, and that tightness wound within her chest loosened minutely.

  The party devolved into drinking games. They asked each other questions about themselves, and they had to either answer or take a drink. Or answer and take a drink. By that point, the rules had grown fuzzy.

  ‘What’s your earliest memory?’ Mark asked Aliyah.

  She paused, thinking, twirling the moonshine gin and tonic in her beaker. ‘I’m not sure if it’s my first memory. It’s a very clear view of my mother’s face. I think it is a memory – she looks so young compared to how I remember.’

  Mark nodded. ‘Good one. Think lots of people’s first memories are their mother or father’s faces. What’s yours, Kim?’

  ‘Some asshole kid throwing a rock at me when I was playing at the playground. Must have been around three or four. My mom went up and screamed at the kid and then screamed at his parents. So from the get-go I knew not to mess with my mom.’ She grinned and took a swig. ‘Afterwards she took me to Santa Monica Pier for ice cream, then we rode the Ferris wheel.’ Her smile faltered. ‘One of the few nice memories with my mom. She could be pretty cold.’

  Mark raised his glass to her. ‘I know all about cold parents, too. You, Carrie?’

  Though normally nicknames annoyed her, she had let it continue. It showed they were comfortable with her, which was good.

  Carina told them the story of her first memory, with the burning bonfire, her mother smoking, the meadow near Greenview House. Mark was very interested in the house, thinking the whole image very quaint.

  ‘Can we map it?’ he asked me, excitedly.

  Carina frowned. ‘You mean, use Verve stuff? Not sure I feel like being your human guinea pig, Mark.’ They’d only just been granted access to Verve, but weren’t yet allowed to use it for their sessions.

  Mark made puppy eyes at her. ‘I’ve been studying it a lot lately. I think we could make a really detailed view of Greenview House, and it’d be cool. C’mon, please?’ He was the oldest of their group, but still as excited as a child about his research. ‘Don’t pretend you’re not interested in seeing what Verve would do to a memoryscape.’

  Carina sighed and drained her glass. This was a terrible idea. But she was just drunk enough to decide to throw all caution to the wind. It wouldn’t be the first time that memory had been mapped. ‘Fine.’

  Mark administered the drug and plugged her into the Chair. Kim and Aliyah clustered around her.

  It worked. Mark entered the dream with her, and between them they were able to make a pretty good rendering of Greenview House and the burning leaves. Memories are fuzzy things. But Verve managed to fill in details and bring it to life. The sky was brighter than it might have been that day, the forest denser. Yet it felt . . . complete. Real enough to touch.

  Carina stood and gazed at the house. In this memory, that house was brand new. All the horrible events hadn’t happened yet in it. Some had, though. Enough. She turned to look at the burning leaves. Bile burned her throat. She made the signal, and Mark took her out.

  He was looking at the map of her brain on another screen, his body blocking her view. ‘Hmm,’ he said.

  ‘What?’ she asked.

  ‘Nothing. It’s just a complicated memory, that’s all. More gin?’

  Carina comes out of the memory of the Christmas party. Had that been what gave Mark the initial idea for this? He couldn’t have known that memory had been recorded before by Roz, years before he’d ever seen it.

  She found the Verve experience terrifying. When she woke up in that lab with Mark leaning over her, she wanted to hurt him. He might have seen that – he backed away from her. She held back, just, but she went to a Zeal lounge first thing the next morning, before work. She stayed as far away from Verve after that as she could.

  The train is quieter now. There are empty seats to either side of her. Something about the Christmas party niggles at her. She’d forgotten all about it. What did Mark see?

  Oh.

  A few months later, Mark moved a conversation around to repressed memories. When he discovered Carina’s memories, he would obviously have discovered the block Roz installed. Did he find other curbed memories, too?

  ‘Oh, Mark, you clever, sneaky little bastard,’ she says out loud, and the other people on the train give her nervous sideways looks.

  The rest of her memory unlocks. She doesn’t remember this, can’t be sure if she ever really remembered it before, but she knows it’s real.

  She was small again, wearing her parka against the cold. The leaves were burning, limned in red and orange. Some swirled away in the wind, revealing the half-burned corpse of her childhood cat.

  ‘Amoy,’ she wailed, moving closer to her mother.

  Carina’s father touched her arm, and Carina’s mother set her down. He urged her closer to the dead cat. She struggled, trying to get away, but he only gripped her tighter, not quite hard enough to hurt.

  ‘Listen to me. Ev
erything dies, Carina,’ he said. His voice was deep and pensive. ‘And everything goes away. Nothing is permanent. The sooner you know this, the better. You do not have to fear what is natural.’

  She wants to listen to him. At that age, her father was her whole world. She worshipped him. Part of the cat’s skin had disappeared from her face, showing her blackened skull. Carina remembered petting that skull, when it had been alive and covered with soft fur and warm ears. She sniffled, but she didn’t cry.

  Her mother inched closer, wanting to take Carina away from the flames. He held out his hand and, with a look, stopped her in her tracks. She stumbled, too close, and the edge of her coat caught fire. Her mother swatted at it, frantic, and the smell of burned goose feathers joined the smoke.

  Carina looked up at her father, holding his hand tighter.

  There’s more, she’s sure there’s more. Why has she forgotten it? Her first view of death was too much for her. Little did she know what would come after.

  It’s enough.

  The Bee rises in her vision again. The sting in the tail.

  At the next stop, she leaves the train, staggering out as the information takes hold. She finds an unoccupied corner in the station and falls down against the walls. All the intel she needed before streams into her: who the Trust are, where they’re located. This is what Sudice never had. They had only those blank monikers and scattered rumours.

  Mark has everything. Or he did, before he sent it to her.

  He was their source on the inside for over a year, giving them what information he could. He knew that he wouldn’t be able to do that much longer. And he knew this information had to be even better hidden. If Carina had been caught right away, someone might have gotten the first level of encryption, but not the second, unless they knew to look for it. And how would they know to search for a repressed section of her first memory, when even Carina herself hadn’t remembered it?