Broken Mirror (18 page)

—Statement by Dr. Laura Tammet, the Eastmore family’s neuroscience advisor (1998)

The morning of Victor’s reclassification appointment, he trudged along the shoreline around Oakland & Bayshore City Lake, trying not to panic. Wild breezes swooped out of a cloudless, azure sky and assaulted bulrushes, sedges, and cattails in the shallows, where a grid of waterplots penned them in. He checked the timefeed on his MeshBit: twenty minutes until his appointment.

Palm trees lining the lake rustled like cheerleaders shaking their pom-poms. The water rippled, sunflashes from countless tiny waves proliferated, and their afterimages glowed and pulsed when he closed his eyes.

The scent of wafting goose shit invaded his nose, smelling like death.

Victor called Elena, wedging the MeshBit’s detachable sonobulb in his ear. She answered right away.

“I need your help,” he said. “My appointment is in a half hour, and I’m having trouble.”

“Where are you?” she asked.

“Oakland City Lake. Help me.”

“I can’t get there in time.” Elena’s voice sounded hollow. She should have been with him, to support him. She showed up at odd times without him asking. Why couldn’t she be there now?

“Then talk to me,” Victor said. “Say something to keep my mind off my theories about Granfa Jeff.”

“But you found radiation on the data egg. I believe you, Victor. We’re going to
—
”

“Please, anything else but that.”

“Okay. I think you should leave SeCa.”

“That’s exile,” Victor said. He looked at the glinting glass buildings on the far side of the lake. Although the bioconcrete path was firm beneath his feet, he felt as if he were balancing on a tightrope swaying in the wind. “They would reclassify me in absentia. If I ever tried to come back, they’d send me to a ranch
—
or worse.”

“Why would you want to come back?” Elena asked. “They treat all people with MRS like criminals. You haven’t done anything wrong.”

Victor paced toward the water plots at the lake’s edge. He said, “Remember when we talked about living on an island? I said I would stargaze all night.”

“I said I would make a pie out of real coconuts. Yeah, I remember.”

“Still think we could?”

“No.”

She was right. It was a stupid idea. He was a danger to everyone until he found a cure. “Are you still mad at me?” he asked. “For not writing you?”

Static came through the sonobulb, feeling like a cotton ball scratching the inside of his ear. The sound was just her breath scraping over the microphone. She said, “I’m glad we’re talking again. After what you told your family, I think your leaving SeCa isn’t such a bad idea.” Her voice sounded odd now, he noticed, like the hollow way she spoke when his parents were in the room.

“Where are you?” Victor asked.

“It’s a long story.”

Victor checked the screen on his MeshBit. Only a few minutes until his appointment. “I can’t leave,” Victor said, realizing he’d already made up his mind to stay. “It would feel like giving up, like running away. And there’s my granfa . . . We do need to talk about it. After.”

“I’m not saying you should run away. I’m saying you can make your own life somewhere else. Away from discrimination. Away from surveillance.”

Something was off about her voice. Her throat sounded pinched.

Victor sat down on a bench facing the lake and closed his eyes. It was probably just his resonance syndrome acting up. He could go somewhere the Carmichael laws couldn’t reach him: the sandy beaches of the Southeastern Confederacy, an island within the Dominion of Florida and Cuba, or maybe a cabin in the mountains way up north at the border between the Louisiana Territories and First Nations of Canada. But if what Ozie had said was true, soon there would be no place truly free for people like him.

“It’s really that different elsewhere?” Victor asked.

Elena said, “People in Texas think a broken mirror is seven years of bad luck.”

Victor laughed, his belly convulsing. A nearby jogger did a double take at the sound. Victor said, “I’ve never thought of myself as a bad luck charm. Let alone one with an expiration date.”

Elena laughed. “Texas is wild, though. Police can’t keep a handle on things. Dickies are fighting all the time. It’s chaos. But it’s not oppressive. I don’t know. I can’t explain it. Maybe you should see it for yourself.”

She was rambling, like old times. She was finally warming up to him again.

His MeshBit pinged, and his heart started pounding. “I have to go. My evaluation.”

Elena spoke rapidly. “Don’t let them trick you. Not all the questions are going to be fair.”

“How do you know?”

“I’ve been asking around. Try to keep calm and rational.”

“As opposed to psychotic and homicidal? I’ll do my best.”

“You’ve got nothing to worry about.”

Victor discontinued the feed, reconnected the sonobulb to the MeshBit, and tucked it in his pocket. He walked away from the lake and entered the business district. The workers he passed were the lucky ones. Employment came easy for SeCa union members, whereas he was shunned, reliant on the Commission’s Safe Places program and his family’s influence. That hadn’t stopped him from trying to join. The union recruiters, however, hadn’t even acknowledged receipt of Victor’s application. “It must have been lost,” they told him when he confronted them about his third submission failing to garner a response. It probably hadn’t helped that his granfa and the unions had feuded for decades.

Moments after he crossed the street, a horn blared behind him. Brakes screeched.

The sounds hit him with the force of an explosion, and he dropped to his hands and knees, heart thudding. The horn blotted out his vision with a yellow haze. He covered his ears, the resonant effect faded, and he looked back. Across the street, a ma clutched her child to her skirt. Just one meter away from them, a silver car, a new Erbeschlitten, sat motionless. Brake smoke billowed from its wheel wells. The driver stopped the horn’s shrieking.

A near miss. Nothing to do with Victor. No reason to get involved. His heartbeat thumped behind his eyes.

The woman didn’t dare cross in front of the peevishly waving driver, who seemed to be rocking in his seat like a jockey on a horse. The driver raged incoherently at her, and then the car sped away. Victor shook his head. The man was probably a stim head, the only group who competed with Broken Mirrors for the bottom level of the social hierarchy. If only SeCa could get over its fear of automation and allow self-driving vehicles, accidents and near misses like these could be avoided, no matter who was driving.

Victor took a few breaths to calm down. It would do no good to show up for his appointment ready to explode.

He entered a ten-story modern ziggurat that filled the entire block. An elevator took him to the sixth floor. Brass plaques lined a hallway of endless doors. He followed the signs for Dr. Santos.

Victor wished this evaluation could be performed like all the previous ones: at Oak Knoll Hospital, by Dr. Tammet, with his granfa nearby, encouraging him and helping keep him calm. But with Oak Knoll closed, his granfa dead, Dr. Tammet on an international sabbatical, and the Health Board calling the shots, there was no going back. No choice but to see this new Dr. Santos.

Victor stepped into the small reception room. Two heads swung toward him—
always two
—then snapped back to their reading material, men waiting to be evaluated. Apparently other Class Threes, they shifted in their chairs and avoided eye contact.

On the far side of the room, a young receptionist sat in a cabinet-sized alcove, separated from the room by a thick glass window. She scrutinized Victor as he walked in and approached her.

A porous patch of glass allowed him to speak his name to her. She told him to take a seat and wait his turn. The chairs were made of hard plastic. The tables seemed to be made of the same material. A steel door with no handle presumably led to the doctors’ offices. This setup was nothing like the cozy couches and familial atmosphere of Oak Knoll. He felt weighed down by all the precautions and suspicions.

Victor sat and began flipping through a magazine with a feature article about a dispute between Semiautonomous California and the New England Commonwealth. NEC-Automation, the biggest robotics company in the A.U., wanted to build a factory in SeCa to take advantage of cheap labor, they said, while opponents accused them of establishing a beachhead for the repeal of SeCa’s ban on autonomous vehicles. Members of the SeCa legislature called it a “culture war” and an example of a resurgent imperial mentality. There was no mention of Europe in the article, which Victor found strange. As the world’s only superpower, surely it had a stake in resolving the conflict.

Victor noticed his vision start to blur.

Elena had told him he had nothing to worry about, but the fumewort was wearing off, and he hadn’t dared bring any vials of tincture with him. He ran his hands over his thighs, counting long breaths despite the galloping panic he felt in his chest. This would be a routine exam, required by law, with the power to decide if he should be locked up forever. Dr. Tammet’s motion and breath exercises weren’t up to this challenge. Victor gripped the data egg in his pocket, a poor substitute, though Granfa Jeff had insisted he bring it to his reevaluation.

No
—he couldn’t think about his granfa. Not until the appointment was over.

Although Ozie had told him the same thing.

Victor held up the magazine but couldn’t focus on the words, staring instead at an infographic showing trade in goods across the Atlantic.

Wielding as much influence as it did, Europe could demand the end of the Classification System overnight. It was as peculiar an institution as slavery had been, a historical accident and a stain on humanity. And yet Europe allowed it to continue, remaining strangely silent about it. Why rely on Europe, though? If the American Union could root out racism through Reconstruction, why couldn’t it do the same with the stigma around mental illness?

Victor cradled his chin on his fist, unable to stem a tide of questions. What if someone had caught Samuel Miller before he destroyed Carmichael? Or Mía Barrias didn’t survive to demand that SeCa lock up as many people with MRS as could be diagnosed? What if the response to mirror resonance syndrome had been entirely different? Maybe Alik wouldn’t have picked the fight that ruined both their lives. Jefferson Eastmore might have cured Victor instead of shutting down the project.

The world didn’t have to be the way it was. That’s what was so frustrating
—
there were so many ways that things could have turned out differently. Why did Victor have to be stuck in a world that hated and feared him?

He stared at the magazine, blinking back wetness in his eyes, and tried to concentrate on reading, but it was futile.

Victor leaned forward and asked the other two men in the room, “How long have you been Class Threes?”

The young man in his late twenties with a brown crew cut looked up sharply.

“Tell me,” Victor said. “Please.”

The young man glanced at the receptionist and said in a quiet, wavering voice, “One year.”

In that case, they could have sampled him in connection with anything. Employment application. Driver’s license renewal. Child custody battle. Car accident. Filing a police report for a theft. More and more, interactions with the SeCa bureaucracy included a DNA swab and screening for the MRS gene.

The young man asked, “How about you?”

“Eleven,” Victor whispered.

Both of the men looked at him in awe.

The young man cleared his throat. “I recognize you now. The Eastmore.”

The other man, older and pudgy, blinked and licked his lips, listening to their discussion, but said nothing. His fat limbs and neck seemed to belong on a different torso, as if certain dimensions had been compressed and other parts inflated
—
a balloon man made of flesh.

“What about you?” Victor asked the older man. “How long have you been Class Three?”

The man looked at him with a puzzled expression. “I’m not. They called me yesterday. Said I had to come here for an evaluation. It’s all a misunderstanding.”

Wine-colored splotches formed on the younger man’s face. “How do you think it works?” he asked. “You think they politely ask when you might be troubled to check yourself into the asylum? It starts as an appointment, and your life is never the same.”

Victor’s cheeks flared. The danger people with MRS posed couldn’t possibly account for the indignities they were subjected to. Ozie could be right. Something else might be going on. Something his granfa had been killed for.

Victor shoved the thought away. It was the last thing he should be thinking about before his appointment.

“It hasn’t always been like this,” Victor said.

“It gets worse all the time,” the younger man replied. “We’ll all be taken to the ranches eventually. Even you.”

Victor grimaced. He’d been protected and coddled. Now that he was on his own, he shouldn’t be surprised that everything was tougher.

“Have they ever asked you about Carmichael?” Victor asked.

The young man’s mouth dropped open. He looked away quickly.

The pudgy man remained motionless, his chin lifted to the ceiling.

The woman called the pudgy man to the door. He rose jerkily, his arms wiggling in front of him, like a beetle that can’t manage to turn itself over. With a hasty glance at the others, he staggered forward. The door retracted to allow him to pass and closed behind him. Victor saw nothing of the other side.

Victor whispered to the young man, “I heard that they starting asking us about Carmichael. Is it true? Do you know?”

The young man folded his arms, sat back, and looked away.

Perhaps it was a baseless dark-grid rumor. There was no point in dragging anyone, even people with MRS, through that hell. Ozie may have got it wrong.

The woman called Victor’s name, and the door opened.

“Eleven years,” the young man said. “How did you manage it?”