Broken Mirror (14 page)

“Victor, calm down.”

Victor slammed a hand on the table. “It’s not
right
.”

Elena pointed at his face. “I’ve seen that look on you before, and from here it’s a short walk to crazy town. You know it, Victor. Drop this nonsense.”

He shook his head violently. “I’m not imagining it.” He ran his fingers through his hair, and his hand came away feeling oily, smelling foul, and with a few strands. He wiped his hand on his pants.

Elena stood up and folded her arms across her chest. “I can’t. Victor, I’m sorry. I can’t do this with you. It’s like you’re not even trying to see reason. You need to up your dosage or talk to a therapist or something. They’re going to lock you up if you keep going down this path, and I’m starting to think that might be best.”

She stomped away.

Victor watched her go, then turned back to the vidscreen. Why would Granfa Jeff cover up the true cause of his own death?

I always knew I was different. Before “mirror resonance syndrome” and “Broken Mirrors” became household words in SeCa, I didn’t know how to express what I was feeling or how I experienced the world. My family noticed my strange behavior, but they just called it “Eastmore eccentricity.”

Then Carmichael happened, and the Classification Commission began its work, and I had my fateful encounter with Alik.

When I was diagnosed, no one was surprised, except maybe me. I became aware of just how different I was, and then I became skilled at hiding it. No one ever knew about my dreams, except Elena.

To my grandfather’s credit, he tried very hard to help me, which made the reversal at the end of his life so puzzling. It would be a long time before I understood his reasons.

—Victor Eastmore’s
Apology

Dr. Tammet’s voice boomed over the intercom, temporarily drowning out the others. “Listen to the voices, Victor. One of them belongs to your grandfather.”

On Victor’s fifteenth birthday, he stood alone in a room with a one-way mirror, through which Dr. Tammet and Granfa Jeff could watch him. Glowpaper stencils covered the floor, walls, and ceiling and depicted a forest scene in dirt-brown, grass-green, and sky-blue tones. The recorded voices of a dozen people created a cacophony that felt to Victor like a cheese grater shredding his skin.

Victor clenched his fists. “I don’t want to do this anymore.”

The voices shouted at him, crowding out other sensations. He tried to find refuge, to surround himself with a protective bubble of images: a hill, a forest, birdsong. In his imagination, tree trunks rose high above him, casting shadows. A woodpecker tested its beak somewhere nearby. Dr. Tammet’s voice pursued him. He ran from it, stumbling on uneven ground, slamming into tree branches and rocks, falling down a slope. Even as he stood motionless in the center of the room, aware that he had slipped into a fantasy world, he fled between trees flaming like torches as crackling-hot winds chased him and trunks exploded, booming through the forest. His lungs pulled in choking, bitter char.

A part of Victor’s brain knew he was trapped in the memory of a dream, yet the forest enveloped him. He tried pinching himself to be sure he was actually awake, but he barely felt the sensations of his fingers tweaking his skin. A maelstrom of voices. Choking smoke. His stomach felt weightless, and then a boiling flash of pain coursed through his skin.

He went blank.

Some time later, he lurched forward, knocking over a small table that had been piled with books, papers, and wooden animals. The therapy room in Oak Knoll. Dr. Tammet and Granfa Jeff behind the glass. He was safe, but failing miserably.

He tried to recall the purpose of today’s exercise. Was he supposed to find something? In the books? He looked around and grabbed the nearest one, opening it at random. The words and pictures confronting him carried no meaning. Trees and smoke and water floated like a hologram above lines of dull text. He shook his head to clear the visions, but it was no use. He couldn’t prove that he wasn’t broken.

To add to his humiliation, Granfa Jeff and Dr. Tammet were watching him through a one-way mirror and doing nothing to help him.

Victor looked up at the mirror as his legs galloped forward. His reflection, a broken boy, rushed at him, his fist met his reflection’s fist, and Victor yelled into his own face. Shamed by the crazed look in the broken boy’s eyes, Victor slumped against the wall, now hidden from his granfa and the doctor. All their time and attention couldn’t correct his deficiencies. He’d failed the test again
.

The voices quieted. Silence met his skin like a cool breeze. The test was over, and the next would start again when he was ready.

Victor breathed, calming down. The forest scene in his mind faded. He was in the observation room at Oak Knoll
—
and nowhere else.

The exercises were supposed to help him cope with his synesthesia and emotional stability, but everything was getting worse following his diagnosis. Over a few years, he’d slipped from nearly normal to barely functional. People didn’t understand how much they relied on their mind’s abilities to sort through perceptions, to make sense of the sensations flooding the brain, and to form a coherent world of sense and response, action and reaction, cause and effect. To lose control of your mind
—
there wasn’t a worse fate.

Today’s exercise tested his abilities to sort through stimuli and bring order to chaotic perception. After three failed attempts, he was beginning to think his endurance was being evaluated as well, along with Dr. Tammet and Granfa Jeff’s patience.

But they hadn’t given up. He couldn’t either.
Never surrender
, the old Eastmore motto went. He would try again.

Victor got up, walked to the center of the room, and stared at himself in the mirror, seeing past his reflection, picturing his granfa and his coach watching him. He nodded. A moment later, the sonofeed started up again.

He closed his eyes and listened.

Voices floated in front of him like glowdust skywriting scattered by strong winds. Snippets of words took shape and clarified in his mind. A woman intoned, “The lazy bear rolls on its back.” He saw each word as a shape made of muscle and fur and claws, flexing and twisting on the ground. Once he’d seen the words, he could ignore them. The fur and claws faded away.

His own recorded voice rose above the din, repeating the new watch-and-wait words Dr. Tammet had coined for him. “The wise owl listens before he asks, ‘Who?’” These appeared as a set of eyes surrounded by feathers, hovering in the air, calmly watching. Victor waved a hand, and the image faded.

Another voice, a melodic girl’s, said, “Jason gazed upon the stream. The men sieved water using lambs’ fleece.” The words became a gurgling stream, each letter running into the next. Responding to a wave of his hand, they ran into nothingness.

One by one, Victor concentrated on the rhythm and tone of the remaining speakers, teasing their words into discrete sentences, learning their patterns, and using his knowledge to tune them out.

After several minutes, only Granfa Jeff’s voice remained. His mind grasped at each word and held it, seeing the curves of the letters in his mind’s eye like sharply etched silver. With each repetition the meaning solidified, the grooves became deeper, and he finally understood what it was saying.

“Never surrender. Look for a red book with an embossed cover.”

Victor listened to the sentence repeat twice to make sure he heard it correctly. Then he opened his eyes. At least twenty books lay on the floor mixed in with many more magazines and papers. His granfa’s command hovered in the air, a physical presence sharing the room with Victor.

He sat down with his legs splayed in front of him and began to sort two piles, books to his left and magazines and other texts to his right. He found three red books and pulled them close, running his hands across their covers to select the embossed one and discard the others.

A loud chime momentarily rose above the din. Then the voices continued to ooze through the speakers, louder and more varied. Victor latched onto his granfa’s gravely deep voice, which told Victor to turn to page 339
—a good number, almost as good as two
.

“Take the fourth word of each of the first ten complete sentences on the page,” Granfa Jeff said. “Write them down, and bring them to us.”

He picked up one of the pens he had scattered on the ground, found each word, and wrote them on a blank piece of paper. He carried the final message to the mirror and held it up. A thrilling nugget of pride solidified in his stomach. He had never done this well before.

The voices stopped.

A new voice came over the intercom, a live voice, smooth and clear. It was Dr. Tammet’s. “Well done, Victor,” she said. Victor pictured Dr. Tammet smiling, her bangs shaking like grass in a breeze.

The door opened, and both she and Granfa Jeff entered the room. They patted his shoulders. Dr. Tammet dragged two chairs into the center of the room and sat down facing Victor.

“How do you feel?” she asked.

Victor looked at the mess of books. “I’m sorry I went blank.” But he felt a grin spread across his face.

Dr. Tammet said, “We’ll work on your resiliency and impulse control. But Victor, think about what you’ve accomplished. This is the first time you’ve been able to filter and focus. We’ve talked about how important that is. You are processing your perceptions in a much more sophisticated way. Currently, when you go blank, external sensory stimuli overwhelm your conscious self. We’re working toward a time when you’ll be able to keep hold of consciousness and self-awareness during resonant episodes.”

“Your trick helped. Visualization.” He said it carefully, making sure not to stumble over the syllables. “I pictured the voices, then ignored the ones that weren’t Granfa’s.”

She nodded. “Good. That’s very good. Go get yourself a snack. I want to do the exercise again. We’ll see how calmly you can finish next time.” She smiled at him and squeezed his shoulder again. “Well done, little owl.”

The Health Board’s Classification Commission will ensure adequate supervision and treatment of people with dangerous disorders like the one we learned about too late in Carmichael. Parents and children, families and citizens, and all Semiautonomous Californians should feel safer knowing that people with mirror resonance syndrome will be diagnosed and monitored or, if necessary, placed into custody where they can do no harm.

—
Statement by William Brown, governor-general of Semiautonomous California (4 October 1977)

It was a good thing the laboratory’s work table supported Victor’s weight
—
otherwise he might have collapsed. Alone and naked in the lab room he’d reserved and locked, after having blacked out the window with metal foil and tested himself for radiation poisoning, Victor pressed his palms on the nano-silver laminate surface, blinked rapidly, and tried not to go blank. The sight of the data egg on the table seemed to help.

He couldn’t believe the test results: positive for alpha particle exposure.

The data egg rested next to a finger-sized radiation detector he’d scavenged from the university storeroom. His skin still tingled, an entirely imaginary sensation, he was sure, created by passing the probe along his naked body, starting at his feet and working his way up.

The contamination was the worst on his hands and face, though not enough to cause more than very mild symptoms of radiation poisoning: a loosening of hair roots in their follicles and a rash that was barely visible on patches of his skin, signs he wouldn’t have seen
—
that he
hadn’t
seen
—
until he knew what to look for. The dose was so minuscule that he didn’t have to worry about death or even moderate illness. So that was something.

What didn’t come as much of a relief was the source of the radiation
—
particles on the data egg
—
nor that the compound responsible for the contamination, an isotope of polonium, was extremely rare and definitely human-made.

Victor tried to raise Elena on his MeshBit, but she didn’t answer. He didn’t leave a message. He wanted to see her face when he told her. What would she say? She couldn’t argue with evidence. She’d have to believe him and acknowledge that he was doing fine without the Personil
—
better, in fact, since stopping the medication had allowed him to see the truth.

He got dressed, trying not think about how his shirts, slacks, and underwear were probably all contaminated too. Where did the polonium come from? What was it doing on the data egg? And what did any of it have to do with his granfa’s death?

Asking these questions was too much responsibility for him alone. His family needed to help him answer them.

He dictated a message to his MeshBit, saying he had an important announcement, and sent it to his family. He would make them listen and understand, and then
they
would have to decide what to do about it.

***

The Eastmores owned two hundred metric hectares of land along a ridgeline of the Oakland Hills. A three-meter-high granite wall surrounded the property. Victor drove to the main gate and parked. It didn’t open.

Victor got out of the car, approached the sonofeed panel mounted on the wall, and activated it.

Lê Quang Hieu answered: “Eastmore residence.”

“It’s me, Hieu. Victor.”

“I see, uh, that you’re parked outside the gate. As you may be aware
—
”

“I get it, Hieu. Granma doesn’t want me inside. But you have to let me in.”

The sonofeed was silent. Victor imagined Hieu wavering, trying to determine the correct distance to hold the handset from his ear and mouth as he debated with himself how to respond to Victor’s request.

“I have something to announce. It’s about Granfa Jeff’s death.”

“Victor!”