Rupture (7 page)

Another question appeared:
Why?

“Why what?” Kimberlee asked.

“Why two plus two equals five,” Simone replied. She smelled Rogue games. They loved unsettling human minds. And there was nothing more irrational than twisting the logic of basic arithmetic. Making the impossible, possible.

Simone remembered reading George Orwell’s
Nineteen Eighty-Four
last year in her AP class at Ellington. She had seen this idea that two plus two equals five more than once in the story. Her English teacher stressed that a big part in understanding the novel is teasing out why the authoritarian Party wants to make the main character Winston think that two plus two equals five. It’s central to understanding the novel, her teacher had said. “The Party wants to break his spirit and his sense of rationality in the its quest to make Winston love it. Only by making him deny rational truth can they do it. Remember class, two plus two can never equal five, no matter what anyone tells you. It’s a logical impossibility, even if someone—or something—like Big Brother demands it.”

“Type: Because Big Brother says so,” Simone said.

“Hey. That’s in the book Joss likes.”

“Just do it.”

Kimberlee did.

Correct answer.

This time a hundred dollars in twenties popped into the tray.

“Look at that!” Kimberlee grabbed the money and fanned out the bills. “I rarely use cash anymore, but—”

“This is bad,” Simone said.

“No,” Kimberlee corrected her like she was missing the entire point. “This is awesome. Free money if you get the question right.”

“The first sign of a Rogue is irrationality. Second sign is tyranny of the mind. Third sign is ... slavery of the body.”

“Tyranny? Slavery? What does that even mean?” Kimberlee looked away when she saw a few art students walk in. She hid the money. “This is our secret.”

“Hey, you know what? I remember him talking about some book last year he liked. We read it in Advanced Placement English. He has a poster of some leering guy with a mustache in his office. Underneath is the same illogical equation …”

“Where is that?”

“Compsys room.”

“Let’s go.”

Kimberlee followed with a skip in her step. “It can’t last forever. Someone else will figure this out soon.”

“Not if it doesn’t want to be figured out,” Simone said, thinking that machine had been helpful to them for its own twisted reason.

After returning to the main campus building, going into the basement, and finding the Compsys room, they wound their way through an aisle of workstations and mainframes. They stopped before an empty desk shorn of its equipment. Behind Joss’s chair was a picture of a mean-looking man staring right at you. Underneath it read the caption:
Big Brother is Watching
.
2 + 2 = 5.

“A disembodied double of Joss Beckwith is in that ATM,” Simone said, not surprised at all. “It’s in Sterling’s system.”

“What?”

“There’s a cyber-double of Joss out there and it used my tablet and that machine to communicate with us. I hope the real Joss is all right.”

“Now you’re talking crazy, and scary. Stop it.”

“You should spend more time in the library and less time flirting. This is serious.”

Kimberlee frowned. “Jerk.”

“Sorry. Wait.” Simone gently grabbed her arm. “I’m no expert. Sorry if I sound like it. I know what I’m talking about, though, because I had to do some research when I got in trouble at Ellington. It was part of the deal.”

“Trouble?”

Simone moved in close. “I have this problem ... when I get excited, things happen.”

“Things?”

“I’ll tell you about it some time. Let’s just say my last school had to rebuild a portion of their gymnasium.”

Kimberlee’s eyes widened as she realized Simone was a real telekine. But she said nothing.

Simone continued. “The Consortium shrinks told me my ability ... to knock down walls is the result of a Rogue AI entity, even if I wouldn’t admit it. They said everything I can do is explainable. But they couldn’t prove anything. They made me study this stuff about, what did they call it? ... yeah, ‘the tyranny of the mind.’ The standard line by the Consortium is bullshit. Well, most of it. The Rogue AIs are real, but they’re tools of greater powers.”

Down with Big Brother, she thought, one way or another.

Simone looked one more time at the poster and guessed Joss was an idealist who’d challenged the wrong RAI. Challenged or courted? She had no idea. But she intended to find out.

* * *

Not long after Simone and Kimberlee finished their walk on the track, and just after they encountered the smart ATM. A Sterling student named Carol West decided to practice early today. She was a skilled long jumper, and if not for a very minor problem, she would be attending a good school for the enhanced, like Ellington. Instead, because she tended to talk loudly (the kind of loud that sounds like a yell) her parents enrolled her in Sterling.

She finished her half-mile warm-up around the track and was stretching on the field when she saw someone emerge from under the bleachers. At first she thought one of the field hands was drunk on the moonshine they liked to make. The figure stumbled forward, almost tripped, then crossed the track onto the field, arms out and stiff-legged like an old Hollywood Frankenstein monster. She was on the other side and took a few steps forward to help when she noticed something wrong.

The person wasn’t a field hand. It was Joss Beckwith, and he was terrified. Worse, and Carol West would later explain this to her concerned parents over and over again, he was walking backward, except his head had twisted all the way around so that he faced her. When she realized the arms reaching to her for help were on backwards as well, Carol screamed like she never had before and bolted. Carol’s parents lived in a fashionable legal villa in a fashionable gated community outside the arcology hives of Atlanta, and she owned a very fast Porsche, which she started right up and programmed to drive away before the school went into lockdown.

* * *

Joss hated to see her go, really hated to. In fact, he cried all the way back to the bleachers, but only tripped once.

He’d wanted to ask her to get him some ice cream.

It would help sooth his throat.

He sat in a lawn chair under the bleachers he’d been in since last night, when he’d escaped the clinic. His arms hung down his back, and his head hung low between his shoulder blades. He wept because of what had happened to him, but not from pain. Somehow the metamorphosis of his body had stopped hurting. When he’d awoken in the clinic bed, though, he’d thought fire ants were eating through his skin. If Nurse Betty hadn’t been such a TV addict, he never would have escaped.

He’d yanked out the dendrites connecting him to the wall and the school’s cyber-system. He cried tears of anguish as he ran away because he knew the Rogues had stolen something from him before they had sucked their long tendrils back inside the system. The Rogues had stolen part of his self, the good part, the part that would have stopped him from wanting to embrace them. He looked at the brands on his palms and back and knew he needed help. Otherwise, how much longer could he resist? He had an urge to brand the entire world ... and everyone in it.

I’m becoming a Rogueslave.

When grounds-keeper Ralph, Coach Buzz, and Principal Smalls approached in one of the school’s golf carts, Joss stood so they could see him. They pulled up behind the bleachers and all cursed at the same time. Joss was happy to see Coach Buzz up and about. Since getting killed in a glad match and being rejuved, he’d only been back on campus a week or so. He was dressed in a black woolen robe that hid his hands and feet and made him look like some mendicant friar in need of a bath. His long hair hung in strands from his head, nearly covering his face. His skin was sallow, as if he’d never been in the sun a day in his life.

“I know,” Joss said. “Look at me.”

Principal Smalls stumbled out like he might faint. “What in heaven’s name ...?”

“What did that?” Coach Buzz asked, his voice barely above a whisper.

Ralph chewed on his bottom lip. “Don’t matter to me. I’m not staying ‘round for this.” He spun on his heel and took off for the other side of campus where he could hide in peace, maybe sip some of that moonshine that was always passed around.

Principal Smalls grabbed hold of a load-bearing post to steady himself. He had probably never seen the result of an RAI branding, or even thought that really happened. Joss’s deformity was uncommon, even for high-functioning intellects like him with a penchant for cysystems. That was why everyone was looking at him as if he were …

A group of students approached, enough of them that there was no way now to keep this a secret.

Principal Smalls swatted at his sweaty face, as if that might help.

“You all right?” Coach Buzz asked Joss.

Joss groaned.

The students crowded around the far end of the track, unsure what they were looking at.

“Oh, no,” Joss said. He accidentally bent forward, as if to put his head in his hands, except his face now looked upward and his hands reached out behind him. “Damn! I keep doing that!”

Coach Buzz turned away, as if he were looking at someone being brutalized.

“Get in, Joss,” Coach Buzz said, pointing to the cart. “Let’s go before they all arrive.”

Joss stood, took a lumbering step toward them, and paused.

A track student appeared from the other side of the bleachers near Joss’s corner, a freshman or sophomore he didn’t know. The young man stopped as if he’d hit a wall when he saw Joss, backed up, tripped, and fell on his ass. He began crawling away as if a sea of man-eating turtles were about to get him.

“Hold on there, son,” Coach Buzz said. “It’s all right.”

Joss began walking over. “I’m okay, look, I ... just have this problem with my arms ... and head. But, I’m me. I am, really.”

“Wait,” Coach Buzz said to Joss. “Let him go.”

By the time Joss moved away from the frightened student, enough people had arrived that they were pushing under the bleachers. Joss walked to his folding chair. He extended his back so that he hid his face. He looked as if he were relaxing in the most awkwardly slouched position possible.

Joss began weeping, but he refused to leave his chair and face everyone.

He heard someone who Coach Buzz was trying to hold back approach out of the crowd.

“Get away,” Joss said, without looking to see who it was.

“It’s Simone. We met yesterday.”

He glanced over his shoulder at her and tried to wave. But it didn’t work, and he groaned. “Look at me! I can’t move my arms right!”

She walked around him, ducking under one of the bleacher rows.

Simone had mumbled her most basic mantra of calming until she realized that wouldn’t be enough. Her mother had taught her how to move through the different psy-katas and mantras to channel her entities, but she could only go so far. By the time she spoke to him, hearing the words as if someone else spoke them, she was as centered as she could be. When she saw what the Enemies had done to him, it didn’t phase her. She knew she would have been sick had she not protected herself.

He was branded, every bit of him blemished.

“They messed you up,” she heard herself say, hoping a joke would alleviate his suffering.

“My own damn fault. I got cocky. I knew they were probing Sterling. I just didn’t know why.”

His shoulders and arms were on backward, but not as if twisted by some horrible device. They looked like they had grown that way. And his neck, his spine, and his Adam’s apple had switched places. His head was truly facing the wrong way. She tried not to stare.
 

“Hard to walk?” she asked.

That earned a laugh.

She reached forward and placed her hands on his, feeling the circular brands on his skin. The tension that wracked him disappeared. He even sighed, and seemed to deflate into his chair. She felt a sickness that wanted to reach into her. But her lords were deflecting it. She was safe.

“There we go,” she said and pulled away.

Joss relaxed, as if he’d just dipped into a cool pool of water on a scorching day.

“I’m messed up,” he whimpered.

“I know. But there’s hope.”

“I’m getting ... worse. I want to do ... bad things.
Inhuman
things.”

She looked at him as if she’d known him for a lifetime and would do anything in the world for him. Something about the way he stared back at her made her wary, though. She stepped away. The anxiety returned and caused him to grimace. He said, “The Consortium’s going to tank me.”

“Maybe.”

“I’ll be a specimen for the rest of my life. That sucks balls. Oh, that sucks.”

He began weeping again. “Don’t stare at me like that. I’m one of the smart people, really smart, and I know what the Consortium does with problems to the order of things like me. If they don’t outright liquidate you, they file you away in a laboratory somewhere, telling the world everything has been taken care of. But it’s a big lie, the
Big Lie
, that the Consortium tells the world to calm the superstitious.”

“What happened?”

“After you left the clinic, I fell asleep. I woke up with bio-dendrites extending from my skull, into the wall.” She saw a wild look in his eyes, the kind you might imagine seeing on someone at the edge of a cliff, hanging on for dear life. “The Rogues were stealing my soul, bit by bit. I had to escape. I used to think I’d mess up big because of the reason I was at Sterling in the first place: I tend to interface deep into the cyber world. When I return from those trips, I sometimes retain qualities of the avatars I used. It freaks people out. I always thought that would be what messed me up, maybe cost me the right girl, or the right job. But not this ... not being turned into an infected and deformed Rogueslave
.”

She stepped away a bit more, as if she needed a break from him. “How did you escape the clinic?”

“First, I got the brands. Then I woke up with those digital feeds growing out of my head ... and my body was different. My whole body hurt. I was
deformed
. I yanked the suckers off and ran. That’s how. Ran into a wall, actually.”