The One We Feed (9 page)

“Sidekick?” His
grip on the cup was vice-like. “Don’t worry about Petula. You’ll see. Check
back in a few hours, and I guarantee she’ll be gone. We compromised her, just
by being there, and it will be obvious she betrayed them.”

I let go of
the cup and crossed my arms, glaring. “Why stab me?”

“Knives don’t
generally stop cutting because you want them to.”

“So it was
unintentional?”

“I was taking
her out. All that blood….”

No matter how
incomplete an answer that was, he would never go any further into it. I had an
entire list of speculations as to why he had done it; either he needed to do
something to me, or he needed to do something to her. Both of these thoughts
unsettled me.

“What did she
mean, ‘there’s never enough time’? It seemed to bother you.”

He kept his
dark eyes glued to the dark contents of the steaming cup and created silence by
sucking at it.

“There’s
always enough time for
us
, isn’t there?” I pressed; after all, that’s
what Ananda had said. However, it did seem plausible that they meant entirely
separate things, given their entirely separate contexts.

His red spikes
gave a tiny, nonplussed shake. “You don’t know who I am, do you?”

I sat up. Was
he about to reveal something? “No.”

“She did.”

“So I
gathered.” I tipped the plate of lemons into my reclaimed water glass and
refilled it. “So who are you? Someone important?”

He smiled,
eyes focused on the space d between us. “Not anymore. And when someone
references your own personal myth...well...point is, there wasn’t enough time. I
had a name, a face, a reputation. I was a human, then, but no more. Now I’m a
ghost, waiting for humans to solve the problems I could have solved for them,
if only there had been enough time.”

Confused, I
could feel my body settling as the carefully controlled adrenalin dissolved
away. “I’m not sure I follow you.”

At that moment,
he truly seemed to look his age, all one hundred and seventy-eight years of it.
In spite of the bright hair, the piercings, the hallmarks of a very different
time, I could see the refinement of another era’s manners in his smile. I began
to wonder about him, what he’d been like before the Age of Geek. Had he been
obsessed with trends and culture even then, had he been on the vanguard, or had
he been more subdued?

“I summed
Riemann zeta two years ago.”

I blinked. I
wasn’t a mathematician, but even I knew that the Riemann sum was a big deal: a
supposedly unsolvable math problem with a million dollar price tag. I stared at
him, impressed.

“I’m stoked
but still not with you.”

“It makes me
an awesome foe to any encryption, but,” he fluffed his spikes and looked
around, “I can’t turn it in, claim the prize, because I don’t exist. I know you
think it’s all
Highlander
, that we can just move between lives like it’s
no big deal, but really, people notice. We are forced into the shadows. And
even if we somehow manage to remain free of suspicion, seeing so much
repetition, ages of man coming and going, we eventually turn
into
shadows.”

“I’m beginning
to know what that feels like.”

“There are
ways, people I can farm my ideas out to, but what’s the point in that? It slows
things down too much, and the go-betweens get greedy.”

“And you
really do want the credit.”

“There’s that.
I mean it’s the most amazing thing…,” he shook his head, blushing a little
darker, “humanity could gain a lot.”

“I thought you
math-types were unsociable, and here you want to solve humanity’s problems?”

The waitress
was returning with the sundaes. She reached through the gathering tension and
put the bowls down.

“That all?”

“Yes, thanks.”

She set the
ticket down and went about her business, not so elegantly trying to overhear
our conversation,. I couldn’t blame her. It wasn’t every day that a bloody punk
and a woman dressed like a stylish ninja walked in and demanded raw meat and
table sugar.

“I’ve been
working on a project.... It’s why I’ve been so upset.”

I watched him
shovel a few spoonfuls of sticky into his mouth before I pressed the issue. “So,
you...don’t hate me?”

“I told you,
no.”

“I know, but….”
I thought back to Eva, to the separation that began in a few unspoken plans,
evolving into one that could never be bridged. Was Arthur right? Was I filling
in gaps, trying hard to cling to the people I thought needed me, for fear of losing
them? “Eva, she….”

One of his
small hands reached for mine. It was covered in dried blood, saliva, fudge, but
I didn’t care. Strangely, it reminded me of Halloween with Eva, of corn syrup
and food coloring. Perhaps it was fake all along. Except that she should have
been the one sitting before me holding my hand, and she wasn’t. I looked at the
traces of pink around his nails, the flecks that still stuck to him.

Mental note:
keep lots of steak in freezer.

“I don’t hate
you, Lily,” he said in a gentle voice. “I’m just edgy. I’ve been running this
tech gig since the Internet sat up and begged, and finally, finally, I feel
like there’s a way. I almost had everything where I wanted it, then you
appeared, and it turned out you were exactly what I was waiting for.”

“Uh, thanks?”

“Too bad I
found that out
after
you burned my house down and had to start the
entire operation all over.”

I took a deep
breath, trying not to feel responsible. “Operation?”

“Yeah. I’m
sort of calling it the New World Order as a kind of joke. See, it’s all in how
you think about it. We have the power of anonymity. I want to turn our curse
into a blessing.”

I squeezed his
hand. “What do you mean?”

He leaned in
toward me, a wicked glint in his eye. “First the world was a huge place it was easy
to hide in so long as you could travel long distances. We could create whatever
story we wanted. Then there was this revolution, technology full-force, and the
world got smaller. I can text China. I can take a visual tour of Sri Lanka on
my friggin’ phone. The world shrank from a macrocosm to a microcosm, and our
stories are checked with facial recognition software and bar codes. The Sangha
is beginning to feel claustrophobic, but it turns out that is a good thing in
the end.”

“Why?” I
thought of all the possibilities that were slowly drying up. Where did I fit in
this micro-macrocosm? I still had a name and a history to occupy. Did that mean
anything anymore, or should I give it up?

“I’ve finally
figured out how to do it,” he continued. “I mean, open-source always was the
way of the future, but what about open-source reality? Me and the Wikipedia guy
had the exact same idea; unfortunately he’s not an immortal with my resources. I’m
setting up a web page.”

“A math blog.”

“More than
that, but yes.” He grinned. “Every problem I find, every complicated issue that
gets published, I post my research,
my
math.” He let go of me and braved
a headache for another several spoonfuls of ice cream. “Basically, I solve
problems, and no one knows who it is. You want a more efficient solar panel, no
prob. You want a better program to model protein folding in DNA, sure thing. You
want the next metamaterial, I’m your guy. Soon, all tech advancement gets
funneled through me and whoever I choose to be on my team, because no one is
willing to pay for it when it’s free. I will control everything, and everything
will move at
my
pace instead of industry’s pace, because no one will
invest in corporate technology when they know mine is always cutting edge. No
one buys a new computer when they know that their neighbor builds something in
his garage that’s twice as sexy and twice as smart, or better yet, when they
have the schematics and can do it themselves.”

“Nice,” I
tilted my head. “Pretty soon you’ll be just like that kid from
Ender’s Game,
and I’ll like, be able to say I knew you when.”

“Epic, right?”
he nodded happily. “Think of it like the technological equivalent of the app
store. Third-world countries could get assistance with building green power
plants, thereby shifting the economy; the CDC could develop vaccines like the
wind; material scientists would communicate in a way that circumnavigates
intellectual property law and federal regulation, thereby changing the physical
substrate of our lives. Next comes open-source history, as written by the
people who lived it: us. We can keep our records there for people to see; we
could control
history
! Imagine what it would be like if Arthur were to
write out all he had seen, imagine the perspectives that could be gained!”

“Assuming he’d
write them,” I murmured. Something like his blog could be a powerhouse, an
international revolution if people who understood could openly discuss the
equations and facts in a forum, with Jinx as moderator. It would also get him
sued, but only if they could catch him. Only if they’d want to.

“Do you know
what this means?”

I stirred my
sundae. It looked so good, the way they’d always looked, but I felt no hunger,
no need for it, no desire. It was just pretty. I was wholly discouraged. All my
simple pleasures, gone.

“No.”

“It’s leveling
the playing field yet again. We had them for a long time, then they had us, now
no one owns anyone. We, us, the immortal race, could change the world, sculpt
it as we like. It means we can eventually come out! We won’t be forced out, but
can step out on our own terms!”

I dropped my
spoon, but, really, it just sort of gained a mind of its own and leaped away. The
hovering waitress seemed at the ready and appeared like Lurch to hand a fresh
one off before she sulked away to the end of the bar.

I dropped my
voice. “What are you talking about? Come out? Half of the immortals are
batshit! You can’t really think that’s a good idea?”

He picked a
cherry and began tying its stem with his tongue.

“Jinx,
seriously. What are you talking about?”

“You.”

I dropped the
new spoon in the bowl. “What about me?” For a moment, I was almost overwhelmed
by tiny things that had, in the moment, seemed out of place. They ganged up on
me now, when I was vulnerable, recovering from the near loss of one of my
dearest friends.

And in the
silence, I heard his words before he said them.

“I was wrong, Lily,”
he whispered, “about you. You
are
the cure.”

I was already
shaking my head, “I don’t know how I changed you, Jinx! Who’s to say it wasn’t
you? Maybe you did it to yourself.”

He shook his
head adamantly. “I’m not talking about me. I mean I am, but remember I’m the
one who sees patterns, and I’m seeing one now.”

I crossed my
arms in a final defense against his reckless sincerity. If there was one thing
I didn’t feel capable of taking responsibility for, it was the entire fucking
race. “What pattern, what are you talking about?”

He greeted my
standoffishness with a long-suffering sigh. “Never mind; I’ll point it out when
it’s important, I guess. I have a lot of stuff to check on anyway.”

All of a
sudden, I couldn’t breathe. I felt like I was strangling. I swallowed…hard. “Does
this have something to do with my talent for acquiring abilities?”

“Partly.” He
looked around at the dingy restaurant. “But don’t think about it. Just keep
doing what you’ve been doing, but can I rely on you to help me make this
happen? We are the new race, Lily. We’re the ones who will take humanity
forward! So...will you help me figure out where
forward
is?”

I let out a dubious
sigh. “You’re serious.”

“I know it’s a
lot of pressure, but Lily, you’re a new thing! We have to incorporate your
originality into the collective consciousness.”

I pushed the
sundae away, disgusted. “Now you sound like the Borg.”

He slid out of
the booth and leaned over me. “Lily, you know I love you.”

It was the
first time he’d ever said anything like that to me. I looked up into his eyes,
happily surprised. He smiled back at me crookedly.

“I was wrong
before when I said you should try to fight your transformation. I don’t think
you’re like them at all, or ever will be. I think you should own it.” He
pointed toward a dark hallway; the waitress nodded. “I’m going to clean up. You
think about it.”

I swept hands
over my face and stared around, wondering what the hell that meant. I was a
grown woman, or had been. I had a family, a home, a history, and, now that all
those things were gone, I found that I still existed, and existing wasn’t all
it was cracked up to be.

Get a
new
life.

But what life?
It was a crazy thing, to chase a random dream.

The first time it had happened,
I sleep-walked through it; but this time, I was fully aware and apparently as
big a failure as before. If not for Jinx, the strange girl from my vision would
surely already have pitched herself off a building.