Broken Mirror (31 page)

“No. You’re wrong. I’ve seen the alternative. It’s what Pearl and I were working on together.”

“What alternative?” Victor asked.

“You and I aren’t broken. We are gifted.”

“I wish I believed that.”

“We are,” Ozie said. “We just need the right environment and the right tools. Pearl and I are making an alternative possible. I move her herbs to clients in the O.W.S., and she distributes my brainhacking equipment in SeCa. But we can’t let the Classification Commission off the hook. We have to end it.” Ozie massaged the back of his neck with both hands, his fingers digging under the collar of his shirt. “You did get the sequences from BioScan, right?” he asked.

“Yeah, I have them.” Victor removed the Bose-Drive from his bag and held it above the table.

Ozie reached out his arms to take it.

Victor pulled the device back. “If you want this, you have to do something for me first.”

“I saved your—”

“Look, I listened to your theories. Now you listen to mine. Granfa Jeff gave me the data egg. I have no idea what’s inside, but it might be the cure, or it might be the name of the murderer. It could explain everything.” Victor took out the oblong, black data egg and set it on the table. When it started to roll away, he put it on his dinner plate next to the remaining sandwich crusts. “I want you to open it.”

Ozie looked at the data egg, raised one eyebrow, and frowned at Victor, shaking his head.

“Impossible,” he said.

I created this register because events in both worlds seemed to fit a twisted-braid pattern. I thought by studying them I could help find a way for Victor and me to return home.

—Robbie Eastmore’s
Register of Resonant Earth Discrepancies

“You have to hack it,” Victor pleaded. “Whatever Granfa Jeff wanted me to know is on there. If you open it, I’ll give you the BioScan data.”

Ozie took the coal-black data egg into his hands. “It hasn’t hatched yet?”

Victor gritted his teeth. It was a device, nonorganic. They shouldn’t talk about it like it was alive. What mattered was getting it open. “No.”

Ozie handed back the egg. “Then I can’t help you.”

“Why?”

Ozie held up a fist and raised his fingers one by one as he said, “Piezoelectrically powered.” One finger up. “The battery
is
the data storage matrix”
—
another finger
—
“which is quantum encrypted”
—
and another
—
“and locked by your biosignatures,” Ozie said, holding up four fingers. “This is the best black box that can be made. I can’t open it. It’s too secure.”

Victor took the egg in his hand. Did it feel cold? “You seem awfully sure about that.”

“Have you not figured it out? Laws, but you can be dense sometimes.
I
gave this to Jefferson. Modded it in a dozen ways that he asked for.”

Victor flinched. Was Ozie pulling his leg? No, he looked serious with his pouty mouth and hang-dog eyes. He and Granfa Jeff had colluded to lock away the old man’s secrets, and Ozie was only now revealing this. Why?

Victor had a sudden flash of fear. “Did you cover it with polonium as well?”

Ozie reared back. “What? No! Victor, I’m a good guy. Jefferson learned about what I do through Pearl, and he came to me with a long list of things that he wanted tech-wise. The egg isn’t just a storage device. Put it near your head.”

Victor chided himself for suspecting Ozie. He held the egg to his forehead, feeling foolish. Then he thought about the hostess’s piercings and decided he could do pretty much anything in the O.W.S. and it would seem normal by comparison.

“How do you feel?” Ozie asked.

“The same.”

“Humph.”

“What should I be feeling?”

“The data egg holds a copy of your brainwave schema along with adaptive biofeedback software and a bunch of Dirac transceivers. It’s a brain hack, same as mine, and it’s been working on you for months.”

“What!?” Victor dropped the data egg on the table.

Ozie stopped it from rolling off the edge of the table. “It does three things: minimizes resonant episodes
—
you should find it harder to go blank now compared to before. Or maybe if you’re off Personil the effect cancels out. Two, the egg obscures scanners, specifically those used during the reclassification appointment. Thirdly, it’s a data repository. Jefferson had me walk him through how to record messages on it and set a trigger for it to open.”

Ozie held up the data egg, and Victor took it back. He asked, “What kind of trigger?”

“He wouldn’t say. He seemed paranoid at the time, but then . . . Look, this model could respond to brain waves, audio cues, pressure patterns. Bodily fluids too. But there’s no way of knowing what will trigger it. Keep it with you, sleep with it under your pillow. Hell, sing to it, that might work too.”

“Could you try to hack it anyway?” Victor asked.

Ozie’s eyes lit up. “Well, maybe if you did something for me.”

Victor crammed the data egg back in his pocket. Ozie had once tricked Victor into creating a science project for him. It won second place, and Ozie took all the credit. He knew how to push Victor’s buttons to get what he wanted. But Victor had grown in the past few years, and he knew when someone was taking advantage of him. “I’m done running errands for you. Tosh was right.”

Ozie glanced sideways and lowered his voice, “Who’s Tosh?” he asked. “Another person you’ve told too much?”

Victor felt heat building in his face and had the urge to split his friend’s lip with his fist. “Someone who will beat you senseless if you screw us over. He wants to find out what happened to my granfa almost as much as I do.”

“You need to do better at keeping secrets. I saved your ass, Victor,” Ozie hissed. “If you hadn’t left SeCa like I told you to, you’d be in a facility by now. Or worse.”

Ozie was getting a rise out of him as usual, the manipulative bastard.

Victor said, “You didn’t do me any favors. My family could have saved me. I could have hired a bodyguard, instead of exiling myself to rendezvous with a conspiracy-obsessed data troller.”

Ozie pounded a fist on the table. “You were losing it!”

A few of the other patrons looked over. Victor’s heart thumped in his chest, ready to erupt. “We’re amping each other up,” he said, feeling his hold on consciousness slipping toward blankspace.

“I know that!” Ozie snapped. “We need to calm down. Do what you have to do. Use the egg.” He tapped on the table, and a robot came over and delivered a brainhacking cap. It looked like a ceramic bowl with raised ridges and nodules dotting the surface. Ozie grabbed the cap, looking like a stimhead desperate for a fix.

Victor dug in his bag, searching for a fumewort tincture. Same as always; whenever he and Ozie got to talking, they started yelling and pulling each other’s triggers.
Hello, Mr. Resonant Episode, can’t say I’m glad to see you again soon. Why don’t you piss off?
Victor found a vial, uncorked its forest-green cap, and swallowed. The liquid burned going down. He closed his eyes, focusing on the sensation. Warmth spread from his throat. An acid-green haze appeared behind his closed eyelids.

Victor lowered his head and brought the egg to his ear. After a few moments he felt calmer, his mind clearing. Whether it was the egg, the fumewort, both or neither, he had no idea.

When he opened his eyes, he saw Ozie wearing a ceramic cap on his head.

Victor laughed. “You look—”

“Don’t,” Ozie warned.

Victor smiled. “I was going to say, ‘calmer,’ as in, ‘You look calmer already.’”

Ozie nodded and the ceramic cap didn’t budge. They stayed quiet for a few minutes. Ozie closed his eyes, face intent as if he were listening to music only he could hear.

A question that had been worming its way through Victor’s brain broke the surface.

“Have you heard of a drug that mimics our condition? Aura? It’s a kind of stim.”

Ozie’s eyes popped open. “I’ve read dark grid rumors, but the idea is ridiculous,” Ozie said. “Who would want to take a drug like that?”

“Elena did. She said it felt like her senses were sharpened. Synesthesia. Euphoria, too, for a while.”

“Are you saying you think stims are related to mirror
—
”

“I don’t know what I’m saying!” Victor shifted in his seat. He put his hand in his bag and ran his fingers down the side of a fumewort vial. He should double up his dose, but his supplies were running low. He said, “I hate not knowing what’s going on. It makes me question everything. This time the reclassification doctor used a scanning chair. It made my symptoms worse, briefly. Almost like they were trying to destabilize me.”

“Now who’s being paranoid?” Ozie asked. “It was probably interference from the egg. Brains like ours aren’t paragons of stability anyway.” The glossy white ceramic nobs on his brainhacking cap glowed, reflecting the multicolored lights of the café. “You’ve never been in a Class One facility, right?”

“I haven’t, no,” Victor said. “They’re in the vidfeeds though.”

“Don’t trust those. I haven’t been to one either. How about a rancho?”

“Only the one my granfa set up in Carmichael, not the rest of them.”

“Jefferson courted disaster with the crazy idea that we could be rehabilitated. The rancho in Carmichael alone was enough to make him a target. And then when he moved Samuel Miller to the Class One facility there . . .” Ozie adjusted a control on the side of his cap, saying, “We don’t really know what happens to the Class Ones. Did you know that the number of times someone has been upgraded from a Class One to a Class Two is exactly zero?”

“Of course. It’s a degenerative disease.”

Ozie perched on the edge of the booth seat. “Is it? Does it happen to everyone? How bad does it get? How quickly?”

“I don’t know about any of that,” Victor admitted.

“Exactly my point,” Ozie said. “After Carmichael, everything happened so fast. Suddenly there’s a new neurological condition and a genetic test for it, but no one can access the data. Something’s going on with the Commission and the SeCa Health Board, and your family’s company is involved. They were the only ones doing any research. Why did Jefferson stop it? We need to find out, and to do that we need to understand the gene. That’s why I asked you to steal from BioScan.”

“How will understanding the gene help?” Victor asked.

“It’ll help me dig through the Health Board’s files, the research they conducted on Samuel Miller, whatever they’ve got. And I want to publish the gene sequence.”

“What good will that do?”

“So people can study it. Victor, this is what Jefferson wanted. We’ll figure out who killed him, I swear. But that’s not enough. He’s gone, and we’re still here. We have to live in this world, as bad as it gets, as much as we wish it were different, and we have a responsibility to honor his wishes.”

Victor leaned forward. “If I help you, promise me you’ll crack open the data egg.”

Ozie nodded.

“Okay,” Victor said.

Ozie touched one of the knobs on his cap, breathed deep, and smiled at Victor. “Excellent. We can get started tomorrow. Be patient. You realize once we start down this path, we’re painting targets on our backs.”

Victor snorted. “Too late for that.”

“Stick with me, Vic, and I guarantee we’ll find the answer.” Ozie pointed to the Bose-Drive. “Keep that safe. And don’t tell your friend about any of this. She’s hiding something from you. I can tell.” Ozie stood and walked into the bustle of Springboard Café.

If Elena was hiding something, Victor was pretty sure he knew what it was. She hadn’t given up stims after all. He crammed the Bose-Drive in his bag and stood to find her.

Economic progress depends upon the cooperation of labor and capital, according to rules set by rational and inclusive government. And, of course, the ingenuity and passion of individuals must be harnessed to feed the economy’s growth.

Where in this delicate symbiosis is there room for mechanical automatons?

We say no to the replacement of labor by unfeeling machines. We say no to the disruption of markets by unthinking intelligence. We say no to the candidates who would put the interests of robotic corporations ahead of people.

We say yes to humanity.

—United Californians Against Automation (1971)

After Ozie left, Victor stood up and, immediately, the robot wearing a top hat returned and extended a towel for Victor to wipe his hands.

“Would you like your cake to go, sir?”

Clever thing—it asked because he was standing. SeCa was missing out on these.

“Yes,” Victor said.

“You shall find it at the host stand momentarily. Please authorize payment.”

The amount appeared on a vidscreen on one of the robot’s forearms. Victor took out his MeshBit, pointed, and squeezed. The receipt was sent to his feed.

“It has been a pleasure to serve you. Have a pleasant evening, Mr. Eastmore,” it said, then rolled away.

Victor realized he’d just left a trace for his pursuers to follow, if they were any good at hacking.

He raised the MeshBit to his mouth. “Call Ozie,” he said.

A moment later, Ozie’s voice spoke from the device’s tinny sonofeed, “I just left. What do you want?”

“I paid for the meal under my own name. Is there any way you can wipe the record?”

“Don’t worry about it. Springboard Café is totally secure. I do their systems. That’s why I’m a VIP. Relax. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Victor wondered what other privileges a VIP at the Springboard Café was entitled to. A free sandwich? Unlimited beer? Whatever the perks were, they couldn’t make up for living at the Springboard Café, such an ephemeral and artificial place. A strong gust of wind could blow it away. But at least they had robots here and no damn Classification Commission
—
not yet anyway.

He searched for Elena in the lounge, hunting through dim candle-lit recesses, ignoring curious glowing eyes staring back at him. Velvet cushions lined a bench along the wall, and alcoves held poster beds draped in gauze where couples and throuples reclined. Cocktails ornamented the tables, held in every shape of glass imaginable: tumblers, flutes, mason jars, and cubes. Hip, social, and at ease
—
it was the type of scene he’d never feel at home in.