Shattered Minds Page 9

Dread is still rising in Roz, as inevitable as the small waves on the shore of the bay. ‘Well, I can’t say I have, either. It comes with the territory. Sudice takes everything and doesn’t leave you much in return.’ Roz, by contrast, hears the bitterness in her own voice. It surprises her.

  ‘When you’re driven,’ Roz continues, ‘you see only the end goal. Everything else falls by the wayside. And good riddance to some of it.’

  Carina folds her face into the closest thing to a genuine smile Roz has seen since she returned to Sudice. ‘Another drink?’

  Roz motions for a hostess. They keep to lighter subjects for the rest of the night. The conversation flows more easily, veering from politics to favourite recipes from the replicator. Later, when Roz is back in her empty apartment, wiping off her make-up, she knows Carina was only playing the part Roz most wanted her to play.

  Worst of all is that, in Roz’s professional opinion, the code she so carefully laid down in Carina’s neurons during the first phase of SynMaps is breaking down. Before phase two can properly begin, she’ll have to find out why, and fix it.

  FOURTEEN

  DAX

  The Trust headquarters, Los Angeles, California, Pacifica

  Dax is tasked with bringing the mystery woman back to some semblance of health.

  It won’t be easy. In fact, he’s amazed she’s made it all the way to their door in her current state. Pure willpower alone must have done it. He can tell she’s not a long-term addict, but the recent downturn in her health is acute. Her vitals are poor. Her blood pressure’s a wreck, immune system shot, liver already showing early signs of cirrhosis, organs overworked and strained. Her brain is in overdrive, trying to come to terms with all the information processed through her implants over the past day. What has she been downloading, and why?

  Dax puts her on fluids and nutrition, and floods her system with antibiotics using her implants. So many Zealots have the ability to make themselves feel better hiding right in their bodies, but they grow so apathetic they can’t even be bothered, or they forget how to do it.

  This is the sort of shit that made him stop being a doctor.

  He was once a waxworker, a plastic surgeon, working in a flesh parlour for eight years. Giving people new faces all day, every day. Smoothing this, shrinking that, growing something else. He’d decided to go into medicine when he’d seen the magic his own surgeon had wrought after Dax’s hormone therapy. He’d been amazed at how the body could change to fit his interior sense of himself. He wanted to create that same magic for others.

  As a waxworker, he was jaded by the endless tucking and smoothing away of flaws that gene therapy could not eliminate. No one is ever content with who they are. More than that, Dax came to understand how the greater health industry operates. Supposedly there is free health care for all, but the government doesn’t actively go after those who fall through the cracks, like Zealots, and urge them to have regular checkups. Why bother? If they stay healthy and on the streets, they might become criminals, and that would harm the crime statistics. They’re regarded as best forgotten, until they wither away.

  He helped one or two Zealots who had managed to break free of the drug and come to see him afterwards to undo as much physical damage as possible. They went on to recover, and Dax keeps subtle tabs on a few of them even now. None of them have become criminals, as far as he can tell. So Zealots are not hopeless cases. Not all of them.

  He launched petitions, spoke to the government, participated in the ethics debates, trying to see if there was any way to change current policies relating to Zealots. It resulted in nothing but frustration – and veiled threats for challenging the status quo.

  For the Pacifica government, it’s eugenics. Dax looks down at the unconscious woman whose name, he’s sure, is not Althea Bryant. The government knows that soon she’ll die if left to her own devices on Zeal. They don’t care.

  The woman came around, very briefly, late in the night. Charlie helped her bathe, as she couldn’t stand. Her stringy, matted hair is now washed and brushed, transformed from murky brown to a pale blonde. Once this woman might have been pretty, like everyone in Pacifica, but Zeal has ravaged her beauty. Several of her teeth are missing, others rotten. He can fix that, but he’ll wait until she wakes up to give consent. Her skin has broken out in painful acne across her sunken cheeks, scarred pockmarks the remnants of past pustules. Her cheekbones are stark against her skin, temples appearing too wide in her shrunken face. She has more sores on her skin and in her mouth. Dax can’t help but feel pity.

  He sighs. He’s stabilized and injected her with extra nanobots to go in and knit together broken tissue, build up the blood cell count, help her on the path back to health. It won’t happen overnight, but within a few days the worst of the physical addiction will be gone, most of the toxins flushed out.

  He’s keeping her sedated for the moment, but the next week won’t be much fun for their mystery woman. Dax can’t do anything for mental addiction.

  That will be something she’ll have to overcome all on her own.

  FIFTEEN

  CARINA

  The Trust headquarters, Los Angeles, California, Pacifica

  Carina wishes she would die already.

  She feels like she’s drowning. Her lungs have filled with liquid. The veins in her eyes have exploded, the whites stained red. Her body convulses, gasping for air.

  If there were any sort of weapon around her, she’d use it to stab herself. Shoot herself. Bleed out onto the floor.

  Anything is better than this.

  It’s not physical. By now her body has expelled most of the carnal need for the drug. Short but severe. She drooled. She spasmed. She threw up, retching into a basin as someone held her hair back. But that’s over. Her body is the healthiest it’s been in almost a year. But her mind . . . her mind is screaming. Even kicking Verve after Max’s Christmas experiment was nothing compared to this. Her system has been so saturated in Zeal for so long.

  Carina wants to kill. She wants to stalk, to capture, to murder. She’s done it over and over for most of her waking-sleeping life the last year. They weren’t real, her victims. But they felt real. Her mental pathways yearn for that same broken, beautiful release.

  She can’t have it.

  She’d kill herself to at least kill something.

  Carina misses the Zealscape Greenview House, that twisted, horrible echo of her childhood home. Hiding away from the real world and being able to control every aspect of her surroundings. Tweaking people’s faces with a mental flutter. Making buildings rise and fall in the limitless rooms of the house. She was a god, feared by those in her clasp as she exacted her judgement on them for her own pleasure.

  Now, she is irrevocably human, trapped on one plane of existence.

  How is it that everyone isn’t addicted to Zeal? Plenty spend most of their lives staring at wallscreens, in virtual reality. Plenty plug into the Zealscape for the more visceral experience for an hour or so a few times a week. Why is it only this way for those they deem will become criminals?

  Deep down, in the part of her not screaming in mental pain and confusion, she has a pretty good guess as to the answer: because the government doesn’t want law-abiding citizens to become addicts. They aren’t dangerous like she is. Not in the same way. Let them play in virtual reality, which is cheaper, less addictive. Let those people be active members of society.

  Hidden in her mind are memories that will unlock whatever else Mark put in there. Somewhere in her broken brain are the answers. If only he’d chosen someone else. Anyone else. She won’t be able to help. She’s only a drug addict wanting to hide away from her own memories. Her own twisted atonement for what she did, all those years ago and in Sudice. For what she’d do, if unleashed out there in the real world.

  She wants to keep her memories walled up and locked away. Mark will have linked information to the darkest corners of her mind.

  They must have made more breakthroughs in brain recording a
fter she left for Mark to do what he did, even though she knows that the SynMaps project closed down again. Or at least, it was meant to. Kim had sent her a message she hadn’t responded to, a month or so after she left.

  A small percentage of people, about five per cent, will die attempting brain recording, right out of the gate. For most people, it can work for a short period of time relatively safely, for undercover operations and the like. As far as Carina knows, only a few people can take the processing speed of proper brain recording. It wouldn’t be profitable enough to roll out on a large scale – too many legal pitfalls and too much red tape – so Sudice scrapped it.

  Carina doesn’t know how to unlock what Mark sent her. Should she sit here and try to run through every memory in her skull? All memories, senses and thoughts are scrambled as her brain yearns for more Zeal and more escape. Those burning leaves of her first memory again, the red veins fading to black, the spent skeleton of a leaf crumbling to ash and blowing away. Her first day at school, the way the patent-leather Mary Janes gave her blisters. Her first kiss and how she thought she would have felt . . . more. Yet when he pulled away and smiled at her, she couldn’t find it in herself to smile in return. He didn’t kiss her again. The friends she’d tried to make and then discarded once her emotions bled away, without her even realizing what was happening. Hours and hours spent in Greenview House.

  Greenview House. She feels herself being drawn to a memory. Her thoughts slow and snag. Is this Mark’s work? She falls into it, as inevitable as a Zeal trip.

  Carina was fifteen when it all changed.

  For years, she had woken to the smell of toast. The warm, nutty scent stil reminds her of the few good parts of Greenview House. Her mother didn’t go in for full, bacon-and-egg-laden breakfasts. Every morning, she and her mother would sit at the table and eat toast. Her father never ate breakfast at all in the house, usually going to work as soon as the sun crested the hills.

  That morning, there was no smell of toast.

  Carina got up at her usual time. Put on clothes. Brushed her teeth. Then she couldn’t take it any more. That absence of smell.

  Had her mother slept in? She went down the hallway to her mother’s room. Her parents had had different bedrooms on opposite sides of the house for as long as she could remember.

  It was empty. The bed was not made. That was strange. Her mother always made the bed. Not with military precision, but she pulled the covers up. Her mother liked things to be pretty but not perfect.

  The room had the strange sense of being unoccupied. Carina felt cold, her fingertips numb.

  It wasn’t like her mother to just leave her. Had her mother gone out on an early morning errand? Out for a jog? No one in her family had nano muscle inserts. Her father didn’t allow it. Some technology in their life was fine, but anything directly in their body was still considered the ultimate taboo.

  But would her mother go before toast?

  The kitchen was also empty. Her father had left for work.

  Carina spent the whole day alone. She didn’t go to school. She kept pinging her mother and getting no answer. She tried to find her mother’s location on the wallscreen, but it was blocked. Her father was at his desk, but he was closed to all calls while he worked, raking in accolades for his environmental work. He’d won awards, the fancy ones where she’d had to tag along to elaborate dinners while wearing uncomfortable frilly dresses.

  Her father returned at half past seven that evening, his mood a stormcloud. He asked her why she hadn’t gone to school. She said, as calmly as she could manage, that it was because her mother was missing.

  He paused as he accessed his implants, trying to ping her mother. Like her, he received no answer.

  ‘You’re sure she’s not here?’

  ‘I’m sure.’ She was on the verge of tears, but tried to keep them back. Her father couldn’t stand crying. A tear fell down her cheek anyway.

  Her father slapped her. Carina didn’t bother bringing a hand to her face. She was no longer surprised by the violence.

  Her father dithered for an hour before finally calling the police.

  They arrived in their hovercar and asked their perfunctory questions:

  ‘Would she have any reason to leave?’

  No hesitation. He plays the part of Concerned Husband, even though he never spoke to his wife except to scream at her, never touched her except to hit her, too.

  ‘No, I don’t think so. We have a pretty good life out here.’ A rueful smile. The police ate it up, offered sympathetic smiles in return. ‘Don’t we, honey?’ he asked, looking at his daughter. The warning in his eyes.

  ‘Pretty boring and uneventful,’ she said, choking on the words.

  A flash of a petal in her mind’s eye, a twist of information, and then Carina tumbles into another memory.

  The police never found the body.

  After a few months, her father threw a memorial in San Francisco. Everyone came. Carina stayed stiff and silent. She’d cried so many tears behind closed doors, it was a wonder she hadn’t drowned in them. Dr Roz Elliot was at the funeral. She offered Carina a piece of candy, as though she were a child, and Carina sucked on it quietly during the ceremony. Sour, sour apple.

  She wanted to run away, into those twining streets of San Francisco. Hide where her father could never find her.

  Yet she climbed into the hovercar after the funeral with no protest, staring silently out the window as they flew back to Woodside and Greenview House.

  Another petal falls, draws her to a few years later.

  After four months of therapy, her father pulled the plug.

  ‘No!’ Carina protested when he told her. ‘It hasn’t been long enough.’

  ‘You’re too dependent on her. You tell her too much.’

  ‘I don’t!’ She’d never told her therapist her father hit her. The therapist was a woman nearing retirement, with beetle-black eyes and a harsh slash of a mouth that never said unkind words. Her father didn’t strike her often, maybe once every other month, and he made apologetic noises each time, bought her something she didn’t need. She’d been working her way up to telling the therapist, and perhaps he knew this. Carina did tell her about the manipulation, about how she walked around her house as though she were on eggshells. About how he never let her wear make-up because of his upbringing and beliefs, and she rarely saw friends outside of school. She’d scattered the details into their conversations. Her therapist was smart. She was piecing it together.

  ‘I’m tired of your weakness,’ her father said.

  Grief isn’t weakness, she wanted to say. Existing despite you is strength. It was something she’d learned in therapy. She kept the words locked behind her lips, but she said them in her head as loud as she could.

  ‘I’ve found a better course of action for you,’ he said.

  Her stomach knotted with dread. ‘What?’

  ‘Grab your coat. Let’s go.’

  He took her to Dr Roz Elliot. She shook Carina’s hand, which was freezing cold. Dr Elliot said they’d do great work together.

  ‘What are you planning to do, exactly?’ Carina asked. ‘My father didn’t say.’

  ‘Nothing drastic, I promise.’ Dr Elliot gave a small laugh that did nothing to reassure Carina. ‘It’s a new procedure to help people with trauma and PTSD. Helps them cope better. Your father says you’re still having trouble with the loss of your mother.’

  Carina couldn’t help but be a little curious. There’d been a hole in her since her mother left. She wouldn’t mind waking up without that heaviness of absence in her chest. It weighed her down so much she couldn’t do anything most days, not even work towards what she wanted the most: answers.

  They thought her mother had jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge, her body washed out to sea.

  Carina doesn’t believe that. Her mother wouldn’t simply disappear.

  They showed her a still from a camera drone: a woman in a pink coat like her mother’s on the Golden Gate
Bridge. Evidently her VeriChip signal went dark within the city. She didn’t believe it was her mother, and she couldn’t see her face.

  ‘I’m pretty sure this is too experimental to roll out on a traumatized teen,’ Carina said. ‘I should probably stick with therapy and antidepressants.’

  ‘Let me perform one treatment, and see how you feel afterwards. If you don’t feel it’s helping, we can stop. I promise.’

  Carina paused, sizing up the scientist. She seemed so collected and assured. So confident. Carina wanted to trust her.

  She agreed to one treatment. Dr Elliot hooked her up to a Chair, walked her through a few images. Her own brain scan hovered in the middle of the lab, dark as a thundercloud. Nothing much seemed to happen, though at one point, Dr Elliot gave her a small dose of something. She claimed it was only Zeal, to make the brain scan clearer.

  Though Carina was entirely sure she’d stop after one treatment, at the end of the session, she found herself agreeing to a second session. As if all her opinions about receiving the treatment had been erased. She returned home.

  There were roses in the front garden at Greenview House.

  They were separate memories, not just one, but all linked together through associations in her mind. A rose unfurls before Carina in her mind’s eye, the petals wet with dew. The heady perfume reaches her. Carina bends forward, until she’s close enough to kiss the velvet petals. The bloom shakes, as if battered by the wind, and then breaks apart into pixels and long strings of code. They settle into her brain.

  Like the Bee, it’s too much information to process at once. Carina lets her exhausted, wrung-out mind take it all in. She knows she has struck gold.

  When the last of the Rose information has downloaded, her brain feels calmer. It still wants Zeal, but she no longer feels as though she’s drowning with that need.

  Someone comes into the room. The light is dimmed to spare her sore eyes. She’s not sure who it is; she didn’t have a chance to see any of their faces before she lost consciousness. She has to have come to the right place. So who’s standing before her in the dark? Is it Charlie? Raf or Dax? What are they like?