Minders (4 page)

“It’s like the difference between ducking your head under water in a bathtub and submerging yourself in the middle of a lake,” Curtis explained. “We’ve found that the initial jump into Syncopy can be overwhelming, so to minimize that disorientation and maximize your ability to work productively from day one, we suppress certain sensory inputs, such as taste and temperature. In shallow stasis you also have access to a panic button that makes it possible for you to exit Syncopy easily and safely if necessary.”

A guy with hair that appeared to have been parted by a ruler asked, “Why would we panic?”

Curtis chuckled. “Right. You’re not a group prone to panic.” Sadie felt herself nodding instinctively and, glancing around, saw that everyone else was too. “That’s exactly why. Syncopy is unidirectional. That means all you can do is witness. You won’t be able to talk or move or advise or offer suggestions. To say that your hands will be tied is an understatement. You will not have the ability to communicate or influence events in any way. Hours can feel like days, days like years, when you are in someone else’s control.”

The group went completely still.

“Everyone will be brought out of stasis at the end of the first week and interviewed,” Curtis went on. “If the Committee is satisfied with your performance, you will move from shallow to deep stasis for the remainder of the six weeks. At that point—”

A girl with her hair pulled into a tight bun shot up a hand. “Excuse me?”

Curtis paused. “Yes?”

“What happens if the Committee isn’t satisfied?”

“You will return home.”

The girl said, “You mean we’re kicked out of the program.” Her tone was challenging.

Curtis shook his head. “Your Syncopy session ends. You still remain a Mind Corps Fellow with all the privileges and responsibilities that entails.”

Another voice, this time a guy with a southern accent standing next to the table, asked, “How often does that happen? Not making it past the first week?”

Curtis gave a weary smile, as though he’d answered all these questions before and they weren’t the important ones. “About half the time.”

Southern accent said, “Do you mean every other year someone doesn’t make it—”

“I mean half of you will be allowed to enter profound stasis. In other words, either you or the person standing next to you won’t make it for the full six weeks.”

Saying it like that was like waving a scent in front of a pack of hunting dogs, Sadie thought. Every one seemed to sit straighter. Any cordiality between the Fellows vanished as they all galvanized their determination to be one of the fifteen who made it.

A guy in a brown checked oxford shirt asked, “What will the Committee be looking for to assess our performance?”

The air seemed to have thickened and become more dense. “We’ll be reviewing the quality of your observations and your bond with your subject, looking for a balance between empathy and objectivity.” Complete silence as everyone committed that to memory. “We need to know that the relationship is functional and appropriate. Once you enter deep stasis, you will not be able to leave for the next five weeks.”

A boy to Sadie’s left: “What about the panic button?”

Curtis shook his head. “While you are in deep stasis it functions only as an emergency beacon. If you push it, police will be immediately dispatched to your Subject’s location. It is intended to be used only if your Subject is in the process of committing a crime. You will remain in stasis until it is possible for us to remove you safely. Coming out of deep stasis is a more complicated process than coming out of shallow stasis.”

A short boy near the front asked, “More complicated how? What can go wrong?”

“There have been incidences of temporary memory loss.” Curtis’s eyes swept over the group. “Any other questions?”

The girl standing directly in front of Sadie swung her thick charcoal-black hair to one side as she put her hand up. Her voice was husky, and she had the confident and entitled posture of a pretty, popular girl. “You mentioned Picasso and Shakespeare and Mozart at the beginning. Why send us into the minds of poor kids? Why not into the minds of geniuses?”

How do you know they’re not geniuses?
Sadie asked herself.

She didn’t know she’d said it out loud until a voice that seemed to come from the coffee urns said, “Indeed. How do you?” It was a woman’s voice, and Sadie was surprised to realize it was one of the servers who had spoken.

The girl with the dark hair turned to lock a false smile on Sadie, ignoring the interruption from the server. Sadie saw she’d been right; the girl—her name tag read “Flora”—was pretty. And entitled. “What I meant was, if we can go into anyone’s minds, why this population? What can we learn from
them
?”

Flora had addressed Sadie, but it was the server who answered. The woman stepped away from the wall and began making her way through the group toward the front. She was tall and thin, but she moved as though she was accustomed to cutting a wide swath through a crowd. As she passed, Sadie smelled leather and roses and wood smoke.

“You might as well ask why we send snobby, self-centered teenagers instead of adults,” she said. “The answer to both questions is the same. I wanted to get things done, fix things in communities that needed fixing, and I knew the old men already in office were too entrenched. Too many people sticking bills in their G-strings.” The woman had reached the front of the room and turned to face the Fellows.

Sadie gasped, and a low murmur came from the group as everyone else let out a surprised breath at the same time. This was Miranda Roque, who had built her father’s chemical company into a global multinational worth billions and then withdrawn from public life, dedicating all her money to aggressive philanthropic missions no one else would even consider. Miranda Roque, famously reclusive, was standing
there
, right in front of them.

Talking about G-strings.

Her hair was a silver helmet, and her eyes were cool sapphires, but there was a glint in them, and she paced restlessly, as though the contained exterior were a false front over a blazing furnace.

She talked as she moved, in a precise, clipped way, as though every sentence was an order. “I decided to empower a group of young leaders and give them a tool their elders never had. When their minds were still pliant, I’d send them into the trenches to observe their counterparts at the riskiest moments of their lives.” Miranda had to be at least eighty, but she seemed to buzz with restless energy. “You, all of you, will finish high school next year, go on to college, get jobs. For you, a risk will be getting drunk the night before midterms. But these kids, a year or two out of high school, most of them are adrift. No school; boring, dead-end jobs. There are other options, of course: scholarships, gangs, everything in between. Through Syncopy you will know everything they think, everything they feel, every wish and desire and superstition. I want that information. I want to
know
them.”

Her eyes moved to Flora, and she glared. “Not every one of my initiatives works. And not every one of your Subjects will live to be notable—or even live. But I can assure you, young woman, there’s not a single Mind Corps Fellow who would say that his or her Subject was anything short of exceptional.”

Miranda pointed toward the bouquet of flowers in the center of the table. “Every one of those flowers is a species I developed myself. Three of them shouldn’t grow here, two shouldn’t be that color, and four of them, like this one”—she reached through the group to pluck a white flower with a single red spot on one petal from the arrangement—“started off as weeds. Despite what my enemies say, with the right care and vision, civilization can be cultivated anywhere.” The eyes beneath her high brow shone, and Sadie felt ignited by their fierce challenge. “In case you haven’t figured it out, I’m Miranda Roque. This is my house. Make me proud.”

She tucked the flower into Curtis’s buttonhole, then made her way toward the door behind Sadie. It slid apart as Miranda approached, only now there was no sign of the thick green carpet, no scent of wood polish and flowers that had been there when Sadie entered. Instead it opened onto a sterile, cream-colored hallway with a sign that read FLOOR −14. BADGE RULES IN EFFECT.

“Where are we?” someone behind Sadie asked.

“Home sweet home. Subbasement fourteen,” Curtis said. “Welcome to Mind Corps.”

CHAPTER 3

A
decade earlier Miranda Roque had built the finest research facility in the country, staffed it with the top scientists and academics in the world, and buried it beneath the ground. Each of the twenty subbasement floors was headed by a different researcher and dedicated to cutting-edge specialties like geocorporation, cipherlogistics, and infodemiology.

Syncopy, which grew out of late-night coffees on several different floors, now took up all of subbasement fourteen with fifty-three staff members, four state-of-the-art laboratories, and the most advanced nanochip research facility in the world.

The Fellows’ tour guide, Catrina Devi, told them this as they walked from one cream-on-cream corridor into another. Catrina had dark hair styled in a pixie cut, high cheekbones, luminous brown eyes, and almond skin. She was what Decca would have called “one of those,” meaning one of those women who are so naturally beautiful they could wear a piñata—or in this case an ankle-skimming lab coat and no jewelry except a single gold bracelet—and make it look like they were dressed for a chic party.

Curtis had introduced her as soon as they got off the elevator. “Catrina was one of our first Mind Corps Fellows five years ago,” he told them. “Now she oversees our Stasis Center. She’ll be doing this next part of the tour. For the six weeks you’re in stasis, your life is in her hands.”

A smattering of nervous laughter. Sadie watched Curtis give Catrina a warm smile and wondered if their relationship was more than just professional. If she’d been a Mind Corps Fellow five years earlier, she would have to be twenty-one or -two, Sadie calculated.

A tight cluster of Fellows peppered Catrina with questions as she led them down the long hallway, most of which Sadie thought were designed more to get attention than answers.

The guy with the southern accent asked, “Could stasis be used to perform surgeries without anesthesia?”

“That isn’t something we’ve explored yet,” Catrina told him.

A girl with dark hair to her waist: “How old will our subjects be?”

“They’ve all been out of high school for at least a year, so usually between nineteen and twenty-two. Never older than twenty-five.”

The walls of the corridor curved gently, the floors absorbed the sound of their footsteps, and the light was buttery, shadowless. Everyone’s voice sounded slightly more pleasant, their movements more graceful, and Sadie was struck by the tranquility of the place. It reminded her of her home, but even more calm and orderly. It was, she felt, a place where nothing bad could happen.

They passed departments of bioethics, sociology, anthropology, psychology, and chemical engineering, things she’d expect, but there were also unfamiliar specialties like neuronutrition, chronogeography, and bricolage.

As far as Sadie could tell, almost no one involved with Syncopy or Mind Corps was even close to thirty. Which made more sense when the boy with the perfect part asked, “How do you get a job here?” and Catrina answered, “By being the best in your field or by being a former Fellow. Usually, of course, those are the same thing.”

A few Fellows laughed, but Catrina’s tone made it clear she wasn’t joking.

Sadie wondered if she ever laughed.

They turned into another corridor, and Sadie was surprised to see an old-fashioned painting hanging on one wall. It was a portrait of a striking man dressed in nineteenth-century attire. Pausing, Sadie saw that a little metal plaque screwed into the frame identified the man as Judge Montgomery Prester Roque. It would have fit in perfectly upstairs, but down here it seemed strange, almost jarring.

When she looked at it more closely, she saw there were four round holes in it, right over the figure’s heart.

“They’re bullet holes,” Curtis Pinter’s voice said from just behind her. “Most people don’t notice.” He came and stood next to her. “It’s nice to see you again, Sadie.”

“You too, Mr. Pinter.”

“Call me Curtis,” he suggested. “I want you to feel relaxed around me.”

There’s little chance of that,
Sadie thought as her cheeks flushed. “Curtis, then.” He was looking at her as if he was genuinely interested in what she had to say, but she found her mind had gone completely blank. Finally, unable to think of anything smart to say, she stammered, “How did the bullet holes get there?”

“It happened almost twenty years ago. After Miranda’s first major philanthropic project—”

“The Perfect Garden,” Sadie broke in, trying to look like less of a moron.

“I see someone overprepared for their interview.”

Sadie’s cheeks flamed. “I—I just didn’t want to miss anything.” She found herself strangely aware of his proximity. Forcing her attention away from the spicy citrus scent of his cologne, she recalled details from the articles she’d read. “The Perfect Garden was a home for underprivileged orphans, wasn’t it? But there was some controversy around it.”

“Gold star to Miss Ames.” Curtis nodded. “Miranda swore she could take children no one wanted and educate them in such a way that each of them would become a success. The curriculum was basically an intensive study of Shakespeare and weapons training. And it worked. They were creative, aggressive, and disciplined. Every student in the first class—the only class to graduate—had made at least a million dollars by the time they were twenty-four.”

“That’s amazing,” Sadie said reverently.

“Yes. Unfortunately, a few of them turned the same traits toward less-than-legal pursuits—and excelled at those as well. A state commission was convened and ruled that Miranda had perverted the natures of those in her care by pumping up their drive to succeed and giving them the skills to be excellent criminals.”