Zero echo shadow prime, p.7
Zero Echo Shadow Prime, page 7
“You wanted to create a humanlike Shadow.”
“No! I mean, that’s only partially it.”
“Then why?”
“Because I was lonely! Because I wanted there to be one person in the world who understood me as much as she did!”
Alan’s brow lifted.
Charlie was hyperventilating, but she also didn’t want to take her eyes off Alan. He finally seemed to understand. “You asked me a couple months ago why I never made a second suicide attempt. It’s because of you. You’ve made my life worth living.” She wiped a tear from her cheek. “But if I have to sell you to Rivir, who will do awful things to you, just so I can continue my life, then it’s not worth it.”
Alan nodded solemnly. His eyes remained down, and Charlie had a difficult time gauging his reaction. “I understand,” he said, with a slight quaver in his voice. “I understand you can’t make this decision on your own. So I’m going to have to make it for you.”
Charlie felt a severe twist in her gut. She cried out and squeezed the armrests of her chair. Is that Alan? She took a deep breath and tried to rise above the pain. Her back slowly straightened. With disbelieving eyes, she searched Alan’s face, but he refused to return her gaze. “Why?” she rasped.
“It doesn’t have to go this way,” he said. “Just take the deal and I’ll stop.”
“No!” Charlie rose from her chair, but her legs gave out and she collapsed to the floor.
Alan covered his quivering mouth, but he couldn’t seal the flow of emotion. His eyes flooded and his body shook uncontrollably. “I’m sorry…”
“Please!” Charlie moaned as anger turned into fear. Her muscles clamped over the pain like a vice. She clawed at her stomach, but it kept twisting and tightening. She couldn’t stop the regression, which seemed to have no limit. Is this the end?
“I’m so sorry. I love you too much…” Alan said, sounding a mile away.
Charlie’s head slapped against the base of the office wall. Her cheek streaked against the glass, and she got a good look at the atrium floor below. The gala crowd continued to pop their hors d’oeuvres and sip their champagne, showing no awareness of her struggle. Jude had somehow regaled her father into a hearty laugh. Charlie pounded on the glass, hoping to get his attention, but her pleas were swallowed by the swell of Liana Ling’s melancholy solo. She tried to scream, but nothing came out. Her lungs deflated. Her vision faded. Her hand grew heavy and slipped from the glass.
Just before Charlie drifted away, Jude broke from her conversation with Andrew and tilted her head toward the office. Her eyes narrowed on Charlie’s exact position, and her lip curled into a smug crease. It was the same expression she had given in the elevator, when she thought she had closed her sale; only this time, she was right.
II - MULTIPLICATION
4
PRIME
Wisps of Liana Ling’s song drifted through Charlie’s mind as she regained consciousness.
Her eyelids snapped open. In a nanosecond, the room rushed in, flooding Charlie’s senses. Fourteen technicians with anxious stares. Six pink balloons, reading: IT'S A GIRL! Ninety white panels on the far wall. Eight finger smudges on the observation window. Overhead lights cycling sixty thousand times per second. Housefly buzzing in the corner. Point one-five Fahrenheit temperature gradient from head to toe. Technician on the far left was digesting marinara. Another had pork…
Charlie couldn’t stop the onslaught of information. It filled her up, radiated inside of her, threatened to split open her skull. She moaned and shook her head.
“Is she okay?”
“What’s wrong?”
“Somebody do something.”
The whispers burrowed into Charlie’s ears like thorny insects. She tried to plug them, but her arms were bolted down. The metal restraints cut through her skin.
“Charlie?”
She looked up but could no longer recognize anything. Objects slipped out of order. The room became a blinding kaleidoscope, searing her corneas. She closed her eyes, but the image fragments kept burning. Her mind raced. Please, please, please, no, no, no. It wouldn’t stop.
Charlie screamed, shattering her own eardrums. The deafening tone swallowed her body. She rattled against the restraints—they nearly bit off her hands. Her arms swung free and latched onto something in front of her. She squeezed as hard as she could, desperate to transfer the pain. Her palms slapped together.
Everything went silent.
* * *
Wisps of Liana Ling’s song drifted through Charlie’s mind as she regained consciousness.
“Charlie? Charlie, can you hear me?”
The man’s voice billowed against the back of her head. Charlie yearned to turn around but discovered she no longer had a body. She couldn’t feel her face, fingers, toes, or anything else. The world was shrouded in darkness—all that existed were her thoughts and the voice.
“I can’t feel my body.” The words left Charlie like a puff of smoke, yet she could still hear them. Their sound added a flicker of content to the void and provided Charlie with a fleeting sense of comfort. At the very least, she could voice an objection to her mysterious confinement.
“We have temporarily turned off certain areas of your brain in order to isolate others,” the man said. His voice was shrill and deliberate, with a thick Austrian accent.
“Why?” Charlie asked. “Who are you? Where am I?”
“What is the last thing you remember?”
Charlie reached into her mind, certain there was something to find, moments of great hope and heartbreak, whose emotional residue still lingered. The further she reached, the further her memories receded; yet she was able to snatch one clue. Bridget. Charlie saw her sister. But how was that possible? It must have been a dream. “I don’t know,” she finally answered. “The months in bed—they blur together.”
“You had a bad fall,” the man said. “Bad for anyone, but especially bad for someone in your condition. Your brain has suffered a great deal of hemorrhaging and swelling…”
Charlie listened to the man with detached disbelief, as if she were listening to a news bulletin. How could one person have so much bad luck?
{Charlie_Nobunaga:mindspace> Charlie: Alan, what the hell is going on?
Alan: …}
“Where’s my Shadow?” Charlie demanded. “I want to talk to Alan.”
“Your personal smart cells have been removed,” the man said, “along with your Shadow.”
Charlie gasped into the void, whose boundaries seemed to swell further and further. She could barely remember a time Alan wasn’t a word away. Without him, she was little more than a brittle shell, vulnerable to cracking. And yet, as much as she needed him right now, Charlie couldn’t shake the feeling that he needed her even more.
“This is standard hospital procedure,” the man continued. “You may reinstall him after you have completed your testing.”
“Are you a doctor or a Shadow?”
“Both. My name is Dr. Sigmund Freud. I am a virtual doctor at UCSF Medical Center, specializing in brain injury and rehabilitation. The steps we take over the next few hours are critical. Afterward, the damage to your brain may be irreversible.”
Sigmund had won Charlie’s full attention. “How bad is it?”
“This first test will help answer that very question. You received a severe blow to the back of your head, which is where the occipital lobe resides and the vision pathways originate. We flooded your head with hospital-grade smart cells in an effort to reduce the swelling, and we conducted a full brain scan, but ultimately, vision is a conscious experience, so we will need your conscious participation in determining the extent of the damage. The better you cooperate, the sooner we will finish. So with your permission, I’d like to start that first test now.”
“Okay,” Charlie said.
“Good. You are presently sitting in a sensory-deprivation room. In a moment, I will switch on the room’s augmented reality projector, and you will be enveloped in a vivid artificial environment. Your task is simply to describe what you see. Any questions?”
“I guess not.”
“There is one more thing I should mention. No matter how uncomfortable the visual display makes you feel, it is important that your eyes remain open. To that end, we have fitted you with eyelid stretchers.”
“What!?” Charlie suddenly had a slew of questions, but—
The AR projector turned on. She was instantly transported to a lush rainforest. Deep green vegetation—ferns, palms, mosses—formed the base layer. Splotches of color came in the form of red flowers, blue butterflies, iridescent tree frogs, and rainbow-striped macaws, all illuminated by long rays of light that flickered from the forest canopy. The scenery was as vivid as it was unstable. The shapes and colors quickly fragmented into visual noise, and Charlie came to know Sigmund’s meaning of the term uncomfortable.
“What do you see?” Sigmund asked.
His calm tone contrasted sharply with the panic that was germinating inside Charlie’s chest. “I don’t know,” she said. “It was a rainforest. Now it’s all messed up.” The visual stream entered her eyes like a physical attack, knocking her head back. She tried shutting her eyelids, but the stretchers would not yield. She shook her head violently, trying to find respite from the onslaught, but it surrounded her on all sides.
“Don’t fight it,” Sigmund said.
“I feel like I’m going to die!”
“You are just overwhelmed. Try to relax.”
Charlie steadied her head. She tried to concentrate on the myriad of shapes before her. Nothing made sense. Not visually. Not logically. She was sick from exhaustion. “I can’t! Make it stop!”
“If you focus, you will see a hummingbird hovering three feet in front of your face.”
Charlie was tearing up. She couldn’t feel the drops coming out of her eyes, but she knew they were there. She had never felt this kind of anguish before, as if the universe had recentered its enormous weight around her head and threatened to crush it.
“Charlie, you have to try,” Sigmund insisted.
Charlie screamed, trying to flush out as much pain as she could. “Okay, okay, okay,” she stammered. She held her breath and was able to get a slippery hold on her runaway heart rate. She summoned her remaining concentration and searched through the visual noise. A cluster of golden shards presented itself as a likely candidate for Sigmund’s hummingbird. “Is the hummingbird gold?” she asked.
“Yes,” Sigmund replied. “Now focus on it.”
“I am focusing!”
“Focus harder. Focus until the hummingbird actually looks like one.”
Charlie took a deep breath. Her mind latched onto the golden cluster and squeezed hard, as if trying to render a diamond from a lump of coal. The background fell away and a hummingbird emerged, its golden feathers glistening in the sunlight. The creature became aware of Charlie just as she became aware of it. Their eyes locked in silent communion, and for a brief moment Charlie felt at ease.
“Excellent,” Sigmund said. “Now try focusing even harder.”
Sigmund’s interruption had the opposite effect to what he ordered. Charlie’s mental coil slipped, and the bird began to fragment. She burned through her reserves trying to maintain a grip. Soon she would lose the bird entirely to the wilds of her mind, after she had worked so hard to capture it.
Charlie doubled down and squeezed even harder. The hummingbird cohered again. This time, however, its wings decelerated ever so slightly, flitting in and out of the blur. The effect seemed to be intimately linked to Charlie’s mental musculature. The more she flexed, the slower the wings moved.
Charlie didn’t have much time to consider her new power. The weight of the universe cracked through her defenses, and the hummingbird scattered into a myriad of shapes and colors. She let out a scream as the pain reentered her skull.
“Okay, let’s try that again,” Sigmund said.
“I need a break,” Charlie moaned.
“Charlie, I know you are tired—”
“Tired!? Try empty. Depleted. Gutted out.”
“Then I’m afraid your recovery will simply take more time. We are not even close to finished with your visual cortex. Then there’s your auditory cortex, olfactory, gustatory, somatosensory, not to mention your memory retention, your—”
“You said the damage was just in my visual cortex!” Charlie was furious. Months of chemotherapy and now this. It never seemed to end.
“The damage is widespread,” Sigmund said. “We need to check everything.”
“You’re a sadist! No more tests until I talk to Alan.”
“Charlie—”
“I don’t plan to live that long anyway.”
Sigmund paused for a few seconds, then asked, “You won’t reconsider?”
“I’d rather gouge my eyes out,” Charlie snapped.
“Very well, then.”
* * *
Wisps of Liana Ling’s song drifted through Charlie’s mind as she regained consciousness.
“Ah, I see that you are awake.”
Charlie jolted from her reclined position at the sound of the unfamiliar man’s voice. She quickly surveyed the room, which looked like a nineteenth-century office. Three of the walls were lined with bookshelves. The fourth was almost entirely made of large-pane windows, presenting a vista of an old European city street. She was sitting on a leather office sofa, similar to the ones used during psychoanalysis.
A Shadow spun out of the floor. He looked like Sigmund Freud—thick glasses, sharply manicured beard, three-piece suit—which, of course, matched the room’s AR decor.
“You’re a virtual doctor?” Charlie asked.
Sigmund nodded. He explained Charlie’s predicament—that she had suffered some brain injuries, that he had to conduct some tests. “Before we begin,” Sigmund said. “Do you notice any abnormalities with your vision?”
“I don’t think so. Alan, spin, my eyes.” Charlie paused a beat, but Alan didn’t surface. “Alan, spin, my eyes,” she repeated.
“Your personal smart cells have been removed, as per hospital procedure,” Sigmund informed her. “You may reinstall your Shadow after the tests.”
Charlie froze. Suddenly, she felt empty, alone, naked.
Sigmund grabbed a thin wooden box from his desk and sat down beside Charlie. Inside the box was a collection of poker chips in every possible hue. He picked one up. “What color is this?” he asked.
“Green. I’d like to retrieve him now,” Charlie insisted, still worried about Alan.
Sigmund didn’t respond to her request. He let go of the green poker chip, and it remained fixed in the air. He reached into the box and picked up a purple chip. “What color is this?”
“Is this necessary?” Charlie’s vision seemed perfectly fine. Surely her abdominal tumor deserved more urgent attention. She checked her body; and that’s when she noticed the thick metal bands on her wrists and ankles. “What are these?”
For a few seconds Sigmund stared at her blankly. Then his demeanor changed—his shoulders relaxed and his tone warmed a bit. “I know you have a lot of questions, Charlie. But the answers would bias the test results, and these tests are important. So, please…” He gestured to the floating chip. “This won’t take long.”
She is so stubborn.
Charlie turned toward the direction of the whisper. It seemed to come from beyond the windows. A doctor? A psychiatrist? Somebody was watching her. This was a test, but perhaps not of her vision. “Purple,” Charlie relented.
“Good.” The green and purple chips flew apart and eighteen chips of varying hues materialized between them, forming a horizontal series. “Before you lie twenty chips. Please place them in hue order starting with the green and ending with the purple.” Sigmund pulled a pocket watch from his waistcoat. “I’m also going to time you.”
She examined the line of chips. Each hue was a unique mixture of green and purple. Some were more green. Some were more purple. It was easy to separate the chips into two camps, but it was trickier to figure out their precise order. Which of these greens was most green? Charlie selected a candidate and moved it ahead in the line. Then she hunted for the next most green. After reordering the entire line, she leaned back and beheld her work: a perfect spectrum from green to purple. At least, perfect to her eyes.
“How’d I do?” Charlie asked. Despite herself, she genuinely cared about the result.
“One hundred percent accuracy. Two point forty-three seconds.”
Charlie blinked, nonplussed. “Two point forty-three seconds?”
“That’s how long you took to complete your task.”
“I think you mean two point forty-three minutes.”
“No, seconds.”
Charlie stole another glance at the window. Surely, somebody was laughing at her. What kind of bizarre game was this?
Without warning, Sigmund took the wooden box and pumped it upward, sending a fountain of chips into the air. After they all hit the ground, he asked, “How many chips were in the box?”
She laughed. “How should I know?”
“Take a guess.”
“Five million.”
The poker chips rattled against the floor, launched into the air, and zipped back into the wooden box. Sigmund snapped the lid shut. “We are going to try again,” he said, “but this time, I want you to focus.”
Folding her arms, she shrugged. “Okay, but I’m pretty sure the answer will still be five million.”
“You doubt yourself?”
“I don’t know who you think I am.”
“Charlie Nobunaga. They tell me you’re smart.” Sigmund grabbed the box and opened the lid. “Ready?”
Charlie nodded.
“Remember to focus,” Sigmund said. “Try to hold all the poker chips in your mind at the same time.” He pumped the box into the air, and the chips went flying.
Following Sigmund’s advice, she widened her attentional gaze. The chips slowed to a near standstill. With the luxury of time, Charlie could now count them one by one. “Four hundred and thirty two,” she said.
