NINE

 

RACHEL WAVED AT ZOCKINSKI AS he drove off down the long driveway. He had wanted to stay and make sure she had a ride home, but she told him she would work it out with one of the other Agents.

“Get a car,” he had told her, scowling at the parts of his front seat that weren’t covered by the fire blanket. Wet ash, thicker than mud, was everywhere. “Gonna have to get this detailed.”

She had promised to look into insurance and start shopping around for a reliable two-door coupe. She wouldn’t: the only place she didn’t trust her scans more than eyesight was on the open road. Besides, it wasn’t as though she had trashed Zockinski’s family minivan. She and Santino might be stuck using Santino’s personal car, but Zockinski and Hill tootled around town in their own unmarked MPD-issued sedan.

She ran up the sidewalk to the front door of the mansion. The path had become something of an obstacle course of late, as the Agents had carved pumpkins the previous weekend. As tradition demanded, they had left them to rot on the front steps until Halloween, at which time they would be set on fire and most likely burn the entire building down. The grounds would probably burn, too; there were three hundred and fifty Agents in the D.C. area, and even the front steps of a mansion couldn’t accommodate every single pumpkin. The lawn had become a sea of grinning orange.

(OACET’s first baby had arrived at the end of August, and everything had become a first. First Labor Day cookout, first apple picking, first Halloween… There was a first Thanksgiving coming up, with a first All-Purpose Exchange of Gifts Day after that—the plans for decorating the front hallway of the mansion included a Christmas tree and person-sized menorahs and kinaras on either side of the staircase. OACET was nothing if not diverse. The pumpkins had been carved in Avery’s name, but the nuanced joy of an all-out pumpkin-innards war on the lawn had most likely been lost on the seven-week-old baby. This was a year of firsts for all of them, and Avery had become a joyous excuse for them to celebrate each one.)

She stepped over the threshold and the mansion welcomed her home.

Rachel was glad Santino wasn’t with her. If he had been, she wouldn’t have let herself slide down the closed double doors and sit splay-legged on the marble floor while she lived in the link.

There were different levels of connectivity for the Agents. The default setting was access, whole and complete access to all things capable of networked communication, including the Agents themselves. A lovely concept in theory, maybe, allowing the human brain unfettered access to peers and machines, but in practice it had driven them to the edge of screaming insanity. A single person split and made into five hundred? The pressure of holding those hundreds of minds within the body that had once been yours alone was a trauma; the realization that your mind was now split between five hundred different bodies an impossibility. Oh, it wasn’t as though Phil could have possessed her and used her to prepare his mother’s famous Spaghetti alla Foriana, but she could feel his expert touch on the pasta rake as he spooned out the servings with his own two hands.

Now, multiply that confusion times five hundred.

Madness.

Little wonder they had lost so many during those first years. Privacy was as much of a basic need as food, water, shelter, warmth… Deprived of privacy, the mind would struggle and die as surely as if the body had been left adrift on a scrap of wood in the middle of the sea.

But the mind could erect walls.

After the initial excitement had worn off, their gut response to being thrown into each others’ minds was to retreat into their own. Barriers had been hastily cobbled together, like Ben nailing scrap wood and spare doors against the farmhouse walls to keep the zombies out. They had retreated within themselves, as far as they could go to avoid the chaos and confusion when they accidentally scraped against another mind, becoming catatonic souls within functioning bodies.

They had spent five years hiding from themselves. Coming out of shock was always more difficult than going in, and it had taken time to relearn how to be functioning human beings again. Over time, the Agents had trained themselves to reduce connectivity, to block themselves off and selectively interact with each other. Their barriers became polished, refined; they each had a single body again, and reaching out let them speak with a person, rather than the lump sum of the link.

And, once order had been established, they realized they missed the chaos. They were part of a whole now, a collective made from many; to pretend otherwise was to deny the loss they felt when the implant was turned off. Here, in their home, the walls could come down a little. Nobody wanted to throw themselves back into that soul-shattering rush of singularity, but they could relax, just a bit, and immerse themselves in the comfort of being one, within many, within one.

Today, after the slow waiting terror of the basement, Rachel took down her walls and let herself join with the link.

When they were home, many of the Agents chose to keep themselves open. Rachel felt a hundred minds take her into them, and she allowed them to enter her in turn. There was a mingled sense of will, of emotion… They were happy to see her safe and sound, and home. She lost track of time as she and the others shared themselves within the collective.

It didn’t last long. She didn’t have the endurance to lose herself for hours on end, the way some of the others could. When physical sensations began to intrude (butt aching from cold marble floor, filth from ash caking skin, decorative rails on mahogany door jabbing into spine...), Rachel began to rebuild her walls. She began to feel the physicality of the others; she felt herself typing, talking on the phone, making a sandwich—

Oooh!

Rachel shook herself and pulled her mind back from the two Agents in the supply closet. She wished that some of the others would remember to close themselves down in the heat of the moment. The sensation of unexpected coupling—often outright in flagrante delicto—was something she had grown used to, but she didn’t enjoy it.

She stood and headed towards the back stairs. Someone had been cleaning. The last time she had come home, the stairs had been a deathtrap of cardboard boxes and furniture. Now, nearly half of the boxes were gone; Rachel reached out and asked why she was able to walk downstairs without the danger of breaking an ankle, and was told the Federal Bureau of Prisons had finally gotten around to cleaning out their stuff.

Anyone without an implant would have sworn the mansion was haunted by the ghosts of seedy flea markets. OACET was part of the federal government, true, but if there really was a family tree, the cyborgs would be dangling all the way at the end of the branch with the redheaded stepchildren and the uncle who was never allowed near the good silver. As such, OACET had been assigned temporary headquarters in a mansion seized by the DEA at the height of the cocaine boom. The mansion had turned out to be unsellable, as the interior decorating choices of a drug kingpin were somewhat... unpalatable. As the drug raid had occurred in the 1980s and flipping properties upwards of twenty thousand square feet was not yet in fashion, the government had the options of spending millions of taxpayer dollars on renovations, or using the mansion as an overflow property warehouse for federal law enforcement. They chose the route that would look better during reelection, and crammed the mansion to its rafters with the assorted crap of broken lives and illicit trade.

The nice thing about working in a rundown mansion was that it was still a mansion. The size of the place was astonishing; they needed five industrial air conditioners just to make it livable during the summer. There was a solarium, a sauna, a full chef’s kitchen, all looking like cover shots from outdated Sunset books but still more than adequate for the Agents’ needs. They had repurposed what they could into offices, and stuffed the rest with junk: until she had been granted a desk at First District Station, she had done her typing in the trophy room, surrounded by animal heads with suspicious glassy eyes.

The not-so-nice thing about working in this particular mansion was the décor. Some rooms, like the kitchen, had simply been worn down by time and hard use. Others… well.

The massive wine cellar had become their medical lab. Like most wine cellars, the room was tucked away in the basement. This wine cellar was different, however, in that someone had decided to model the room and the adjacent hallway after the Catacombs of Paris. Plastic bones lined the walls from floor to ceiling, skulls dotting the bones throughout, and all of which were meticulously hand-painted to show the bones in various stages of ripeness or decay.

Calling the whole mess “creepy as fuck” did not do it justice.

The mansion had tennis courts and a pool, and there was a decent-sized bathroom across from the plastic ossuary that the athletes had set aside as a locker room. Like many of the other Agents, Rachel kept an extra change of clothes in a nearby closet, just in case. She found her emergency suit and peeled off the sticky note she had painstakingly written out and stuck to the hanger (If you need to use this, please dry-clean before returning or I will shoot you. Love, R.P.), and walked her nice clean suit to the bathroom at arm’s length.

She knew she was prudish by cyborg standards. Most of the others would have no problems asking for help getting out of their clothes, but she forced her skinned and burning hands to struggle with the fasteners on her ballistic vest. Same with the shampoo and soap in the shower; the hot water across the raw cuts was agony. But when it was over, she felt more relaxed than if she had shared the shower with someone else: privacy was sometimes as important for the body as it was for the soul.

When the last of the ashes and coffee grounds were sluicing down the mansion’s drains and she was done struggling into her emergency suit, Rachel returned to the ossuary. She walked through the stacks of boxes that the Agents had piled against the walls to keep the bones at bay, then rapped on the glass door of the medical lab. “Jenny?”

The other Agent was in her office; Rachel had felt her in the link. But their mental walls were easier to maintain when everyone upheld the same myths.

“Hey, Rachel! C’mon in.”

She gave the door a little shove and it glided open.

The medical lab was stunningly well-equipped. When the Agents designated the oversized wine cellar as their on-site hospital, they moved every piece of medical equipment they could find down to the catacombs. The era of institutionalized Medicare fraud had netted them some high-end items, and these were illuminated by the light from the glass-fronted refrigerators which stored the U.S. government’s eclectic collection of top-shelf alcohol. The Agents kept the fridges padlocked shut, save for the one closest to the front entrance where Jenny Davies and the other physicians stored refrigerated medications on one bottom shelf, the crate of community vodka on the other.

A gaunt man with unkempt hair was sitting on the floor, assembling a jigsaw puzzle at a lightning-fast pace. He had been tucked into a corner and didn’t look up when Rachel arrived; Shawn rarely noticed anyone unless they forced him to communicate with them. The glow from the nearest fridge put his face in shadow; he was smiling widely, with plenty of teeth, and looked as though he belonged among the skulls.

Rachel walked over and squatted down beside Shawn. His hands darted from the upturned pile of pieces to the slowly-growing rectangle in front of him, fitting piece after piece in their proper places.

“Hey, Shawn,” she said. “How are you?”

There was no response. Shawn was immersed in his puzzle; Rachel flipped her implant to reading mode and saw he was assembling it upside down, with the unprinted cardboard backing facing up.

“Shawn?” she said through the link.

He stopped and looked up.

“Rachel!” Shawn smiled at her. “Hello!”

None of the OACET Agents had had an easy time of their transition. Rachel’s had been so bad she had literally blinded herself, but Shawn’s experience made hers seem as though she had spent those five years raising a slightly naughty puppy. Shawn had gone insane, and not in a happy-go-lucky-slightly-unhinged way. No, Shawn had gone insane in the way of clinical multi-tiered DSM-IV-TR diagnoses, where the all-purpose “insane” was replaced with specifics like “psychosis” and “severe disassociation disorder”. After his implant was fully activated, Shawn had tried to kill himself, and when he had failed and been put on constant suicide watch, he had spent the next six months naked and screaming.

These days, Shawn was a different person, one who wore clothes and attempted conversation. He liked to hang out in the medical lab; he said all of the machines loved him and wanted him to get better, and the other Agents had decided not to argue since he was guaranteed continuous medical supervision. Under Jenny’s care, he had begun to fill out; she had convinced him to ease off of the implant and not go out-of-body to the point of exhaustion, and his skeletal frame was finally keeping some calories to itself.
    Rachel had never gotten a clear peek at Shawn’s core. The Agent’s conversational colors were deranged, a churning rainbow which ripped itself apart and rebuilt itself too quickly for her to detect patterns. Sparks of bright light swam around and through these colors, as well as passing through Shawn’s body. Today, he was happy blues and purples, with a thick streak of out-of-place red lust.

Shawn was a headache. Rachel usually shut down the emotional spectrum when she was with Shawn to preserve her own sanity, and she did this now when she caught sight of his arousal. Not her business, not her concern.

“What’s the picture on the puzzle, Shawn?” They spoke aloud to Shawn whenever they could, trying to make him talk outside of the link. He seemed more likely to retreat within himself when he forgot there were other ways to communicate.

He gave her a guileless stare. “I don’t know. It’s not done yet. Want to help?” His hands began to move back and forth between the puzzle and the stack of loose pieces again. Each new piece was fitted into position, or tossed into a separate pile; as Rachel watched, he went to the smaller pile, pulled out a certain piece, and plunked it down beside another he had just put in its proper place.

“Maybe later? Jenny said she wanted to show me something.”

“Yes!” he said aloud, leaping to his feet. He took her hand before she could pull away, and she was bludgeoned with his joy, his longing…

He dropped her hand. “You’re scared of me?”

“A little bit, Shawn,” she replied. She never lied to other Agents. Almost never. “But not as much as I used to be. You’re making a lot of progress.”

Until recently, skin-to-skin contact with Shawn had been slightly less pleasant than drinking rubbing alcohol, but Rachel knew he wasn’t the only one with baggage. She cleared her mind and held out her hand to him. He shied away, then reached out with his own, and grinned as she held an image of him wrapped in his purple joy.

“I’m… happy?”

She nodded. “You’re very happy.”

“Nice!” he shouted. He sounded like a teenager at the mall, and Rachel laughed.

They walked, hand in hand, to the open office door. Jenny Davies had been watching them.

“Rachel is here!”

“Thank you, Shawn,” Jenny said. “Could you get ready? I want you to show her your special trick.”

“Yes!” Shawn said again. He dropped Rachel’s hand and scurried away.

Jenny leaned back against the skulls. “What scans are you running now?” she asked Rachel.

Rachel had no clue where this conversation was going. “Full range, mostly,” she said. “I don’t have emotions up, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“It is. Can you run them? I want you to monitor Shawn,” Jenny said, then nodded to the gaunt man. “Go ahead, show her.”
    Shawn gave a tiny snort and hoisted himself up on the nearest examination table. He lay down, closed his eyes, and folded his arms across his chest as if responsible for preparing his own funeral. His colors flashed in purples and blues, sparks like liquid silver on the edge of a pinwheel within them.

Rachel waited, a finger tapping against her own forearm. “Guys...” she finally said.

“It’s already happening. Give him a chance,” Jenny whispered.

Rachel squashed a sigh and watched the little lights dart through Shawn’s conversational colors, silver minnows within a rainbow lake. It was oddly soothing; when Shawn was calm, the little lights slowed and flowed close to his center.

She lost track of time. Shawn’s little lights had started swimming in patterns, miniature glowing arcs which swept across the center of his body and then across his limbs. Then, gradually, the cacophony of his conversational colors began to thin and part, revealing Shawn’s weak tea core.

Rachel realized he was asleep. Or, maybe not quite asleep... “Shawn?” Rachel asked aloud.

“Don’t ping him,” Jenny said. “It’ll break him out of it. But go ahead and check his vitals.”

Rachel took a couple of hesitant steps towards Shawn, then paused, her own hand hovering over Shawn’s. She steeled herself, then slid two fingers beneath his collar and pressed them against his neck.

Nothing. No emotions, no pulse.

“Shawn!” Rachel shouted. She pulled back to slap him and Jenny grabbed her wrist; the physician was laughing silently, her good humor crossing over to Rachel.

“What’s happening to him?”

“It’s a deep meditative state,” Jenny replied. “He’s still breathing, he’s still got a pulse. They’re just suppressed.  Here.”

Jenny guided Rachel’s hand back to Shawn’s neck, where the two of them felt his shallow breathing and, every few slow seconds, a single heavy heartbeat.

“What the hell, Jenny?”

“You’re still running emotions, right? What does he look like to you?”

Rachel removed her hand and stepped away from the exam table. “Like...” she started to say, then dropped down on her knees as though she needed a vantage point to peer inside his body. Shawn’s conversational colors were almost non-existent; he was almost nothing but his weak tea core wrapped in slow translucent blues. He reminded her of those too-quiet rooms at the hospital, the silent minds within…

“...like he’s in a coma,” she finished.

Jenny shook her head. “It’s not a coma. It’s slow-wave non-REM sleep, or something very like it. He’s let me measure his brain activity when he’s like this. The EEG shows high delta wave activity, with little awareness of environmental stimuli. Those are hallmarks of this state of sleep.

“But,” she added, “There’s a huge difference between what Shawn’s doing and normal deep sleep cycles.”

Rachel felt Jenny reach out through the link to lightly ping him.

His eyes fluttered, then opened. Shawn sat up, a huge grin stretching across his face.

“Did it work?” he asked Jenny.

“Yes,” the physician nodded. “Thank you, Shawn.”

He dropped his legs over the side and began to swing them back and forth like a happy child. The table rocked furiously; Shawn used to be a large man.

“Shawn, honey, you’re going to flip the table,” Rachel said.

He stopped kicking and looked up at her with liquid brown eyes. “Would you like to have sex?”

She blinked at Jenny, whose surface colors were fluttering in amusement.

“No thank you, Shawn.”

“Are you sure? Jenny says I’m very good,” he said, smiling sweetly as he swung off of the table and dropped lightly to the ground. Rachel caught a brief glimpse of the man he had once been, and mourned anew.

Jenny flushed. “Shawn?” she said. “I don’t mind if you say that to the others, but I’d be very embarrassed if you bragged about you and me to anyone outside of OACET.”

“Oh. Yes. Right.” The little colored lights started churning around him again, and he backed away from the women and retreated to a corner of the lab. He sat on the floor and wrapped his arms around the base of the largest surgical microscope, then started humming in a tuneless monotone.

“Come on,” Jenny said to Rachel. “He’ll stay like that for hours. Let me look at your hands.”

They left Shawn to croon to the machine, and walked into an offshoot of the catacombs adjacent to the lab. They had set this area up as a secret ICU, just in case. They had enough equipment for five patients, which was a concern: if they needed to hospitalize more than five, they’d have to go through normal medical channels, and nobody wanted that.

“You and Shawn?” Rachel whispered. “Jenny, please.”

Jenny raised an eyebrow. “He’s mentally ill, not dead, and I’m neither his primary physician nor his therapist. Besides, he really is a good lover.” She dragged a folding chair over to a stainless steel table, and gestured for Rachel to sit. “And he’s getting better. He was scared at first, but he’s started to get his confidence back. Over the last few days, he’s been propositioning every woman who comes in here.”

“I hope he didn’t take my rejection too hard,” Rachel said. “I don’t want to be another setback.”

“Nope.” Jenny grinned over her shoulder as she rummaged through a cabinet full of small white plastic cases. “He’s used to it; he gets shot down a lot. This is the first time he’s used me as a reference, though, so he must like you.”

“I told him he was happy.”

“That would do it,” Jenny said, nodding. “He’s relearning emotions. It’s a huge effort for him, to know the names of things but not how they relate to how he feels.”

“Want me to work with him?”

“No. Well, maybe if you’d check in on him every so often and give him feedback, like you just did. Everybody wants to help him,” Jenny sighed. She pulled one of the cases down from the cabinet and came over to the table. “But I can’t tell if four hundred people in his head is beneficial or not.”

“Is that why you asked me to come home?” Rachel said, glancing through the wall at Shawn. He hadn’t moved, still clinging to the microscope.

“No, I wanted your opinion of his mental status when he was under. Was he conscious?”

“Definitely not.” Rachel shook her head. “I was at the hospital a few days ago, and I passed a few coma patients while I was there. What Shawn was doing? His mind was almost identical to theirs.”

“Identical, or almost identical?” Jenny asked, as she washed her hands and shook them dry.

“If I had known you needed this, I would have paid attention…” Rachel growled, thinking back to that hurried walk down the hallway. “Almost identical… Shawn had some blue to him.”

“Blue meaning…”

“Calm. Rest. Um…” Rachel mulled it over: she rarely saw the emotion she was thinking of in anyone from OACET. Still… “Peace. He was at peace.”

“Good,” Jenny said. “That’s what I hoped you’d say.”

She took Rachel’s left hand and removed the light bandages the EMTs had used to cover the injuries, and then inspected the deep cuts across the palm. There was no exchange of emotions or sensations at the contact; Jenny was a professional. Rachel had once asked her how she blocked out emotional transfer to her patients when she was working, and Jenny honestly couldn’t answer: emotions didn’t—couldn’t—become part of the medical process.

“I see you did some bathroom surgery,” Jenny said. She never spoke aloud around open wounds if she could help it.

“Bathroom surgery?” Rachel fought down her nausea as Jenny rolled her hand around in her own and applied a local anesthetic.

“Digging around on your own and making things worse,” Jenny said. “Did you use a nail file?”

“Uh, no. My teeth.”

“Oh, for…” Rachel felt the slightest shiver of annoyance from Jenny. “Rachel, these cuts will most likely become infected. I hope you know this.”

Rachel laughed. “If you’d seen the state of that basement, you’d have used your teeth, too.”

“Mhmm,” Jenny said, nonplussed. She opened a suture packet and prepared a needle. “This’ll be hard to watch. You might want to turn away.”

Rachel grinned up at her, and Jenny squeezed her eyes shut. Embarrassment flooded Jenny’s conversational colors and broke through her composure to run across Rachel’s skin. “Oh! Rachel, I’m so sorry!”

“It’s okay,” Rachel assured her. “I’m happy you can forget. I’d hate it if it’s the first thing that comes to mind when you think of me.”

“Nobody thinks of you as blind.”

“So this trick that Shawn does,” Rachel said, changing the topic. “Why did you want to show it to me?”

Jenny looked up at Rachel, the slightest hue of orange-red frustration seeping into her colors before she clamped down on her emotions and started to stitch up Rachel’s hand.

“Fine,” Jenny said aloud. Rachel flipped off visuals and concentrated on Jenny’s mental voice as the physician worked.

“Well, the first time I saw it, he did it in bed. To surprise me, I guess. It scared the complete shit out of me. I came out of the shower and found him all but dead. I never thought to ping him—I just went straight into doctor mode. I did all of the same vital checks you just did, plus a few more. By the time he woke himself up, I was standing over him with a primed crash cart, ready to hit him with the pads.”

“Did you scream?” Rachel asked.

“Like I was in a horror movie. I scared him worse than he scared me. It took him a few weeks before he felt secure enough to show it to me again.”

“So what is it? What’s he doing when he plays dead?”

“It’s what I said. It’s a deep meditative state, similar to slow-wave non-REM sleep. So far, it’s also the best example of how the implant may be able to change us physically as well as mentally.”

Rachel had to keep herself from yanking her hand away.

Jenny must have felt her sudden surge of anxiety, but her mental tone stayed calm and level. “Keep in mind this is all pure theory at this point,” she said. “You’ve heard of biofeedback?”

“Yeah,” Rachel replied. “Enhancing mind-body relationships through machines. Plug a person into something that dings when his blood pressure goes up, and he can train himself to stay out of the danger zone.”

“Right. Except for us, the machines are in our heads. Quantum organic computers, each one becoming more individualized through use. I’m working on the theory that our implants learn how we use our bodies, and then help us to use them more efficiently. Like how you trained yourself to make those insane trick shots of yours.”

Rachel nodded. One of the first things she had done with her new senses was relearn how to use her gun. Compared to her, the best sharpshooter in the world looked like a kid with a leaky water pistol. “You’re saying Shawn wrote an autoscript.”

“Yes. He taught himself how to do this by accident. He was watching videos on meditation, how to keep calm under stress. He learned how to put himself into a... I guess you’d call it a trance? He kept finding a state of relaxation, then pushed himself deeper. His implant learned to mimic the process. He can drop himself into it, any time he wants.”

“Isn’t that dangerous?”

“No. If someone doesn’t ping him, he wakes up on his own. It’s very close to a natural sleep state. He just uses a shortcut to reach it.”

“Do you want him to stop?”

“No!” Jenny must have shaken her head, hard: Rachel winced slightly as the almost-unfelt thread tugged at her palm. “Current thinking is the body does most of its repair work during slow-wave non-REM sleep, but we only experience it for thirty minutes at a time. Maybe forty, if we’re lucky. Do you realize what it might mean from a medical perspective, if we could figure out how to trigger this at will?”

“We could heal ourselves…” Rachel breathed. She flipped on visuals, then emotions, and looked through the wall towards Shawn. He hadn’t moved from his spot on the floor, but his colors were blue and there wasn’t a hint of gray in them. He still wasn’t whole, but he was so much better... He was pushing himself to get better. “Jenny…”

“It’s not just Shawn,” Jenny said. Rachel turned her scans back to her; the other woman was burning yellow-white with excitement. “You know how I’ve asked you and a couple of other Agents to keep track of your workouts? I need to run a few more tests—a shitload more tests, actually—but I think you’re all writing autoscripts which improve your physical performance.”

“What?” Rachel arched an eyebrow to make sure the sarcasm landed.

Now that the wounds were closed, Jenny began to speak out loud. “Athletes injure themselves,” she replied. “It’s a fact of life. Athletes pull things, sprain things... But we have atypically low rates of injury. Like, practically non-existent. We’ve got martial artists, weight lifters, triathletes... I should be treating soft-tissue injuries or putting on a cast at least once a week. And I used to! I used to treat you guys all of the time! When we moved out here, I saw the usual number of exercise-induced injuries. Less than a year later, if I’m asked to treat anything, it’s a pre-existing condition.

“Physical training is a form of biofeedback, where you continue to improve your performance through repetition, by teaching your body how to work more efficiently. My working hypothesis is the implant facilitates all biofeedback, including athleticism.”

“Or we spent five years out of practice, and we’re just getting back into the groove.”

“Except not everybody was out of practice. Take Mulcahy, for example. He started lifting weights during the worst of it, and he still suffered sprains, muscle tears… After his implant was fully activated, these gradually stopped. And you’ve always jogged, right? When was the last time you twisted an ankle?”

The rhythm of feet on bright metal… Rachel shook her head. “Not that long,” she said. “Couple of months?”

“You’re going to lie to your doctor? I treated that ankle back in March. The only injuries you’ve had since then have been sustained in the line of duty.”

“Jenny, I just fell through a floor. I’m not exactly a bionic commando.”

Jenny glared at her, then tied off the suture with a deft twist of her fingers. “Biofeedback results in small changes,” she said. “If the implant does facilitate biofeedback, you’re never going to see yourself sprint at cheetah speed or jump entire buildings in a single bound. Your response time might be slightly faster and you may have increased stamina, but the implant is not going to magically morph your body into something other than basic human physiology.”

“Aw,” Rachel feigned a groan as Jenny clipped the thread. “And here I was all excited that I was about to turn into Wolverine.”

“Sorry,” Jenny said. “On that note, I’m using liquid bandages on you—which I hate—but I know you won’t keep a proper wrapping on your hand. You’ll show up every twenty-four hours so I can change it out and check for infection.”

“Yes, mother.”

“Don’t you ‘yes, mother’ me,” Jenny said, as she snipped the line and set Rachel free. “If I were your mother, I’d handcuff you to the wall until the risk of infection passed. We’re entering the post-antibiotic era. Like it or not, we’ve each had brain surgery and a foreign object grafted inside of us, so we’re at increased risk. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to rely on biofeedback to keep myself healthy.”

“I hear you,” Rachel sighed. “I’ll try to stay out of dank basements and septic tanks.”

“That’s all I ask,” Jenny said.

“By the way,” Rachel said, remembering. “I used your autoscript the other day. I found a victim at the bombing, and it gave me a diagnosis right at the scene.”

“Really?” Jenny’s colors brightened. “How did it work?”

“It was pretty accurate. I visited the same guy in the hospital, and the only thing the autoscript missed was part of his burn damage.”

“Okay,” Jenny said, nodding. “Improve the accuracy of the topical injury section. Thanks.”

“Could you also add an English translation for those of us who aren’t fluent in Medicalese?”

“Uh-oh,” Jenny laughed. “Santino giving you shit again?”

Rachel sighed. “Nerds. Hand to God, there is nothing that man doesn’t know.”

“I’ll work on it. It might take some time to get layman’s terms in there. I don’t think that way, so I’ll have to figure out how to add a different language. Do you want to try a second one?”

For a moment, Rachel wasn’t sure what Jenny was asking. Then she felt the back of her chair slam against the wall and realized her lizard brain had tried to escape, and had taken her body along with it. She took a slow breath before asking, “Shawn’s autoscript?”

The other woman nodded. “It’s safe,” she said. “I’d like you to test it.”

“More data?”

“Always,” Jenny sighed. “It is safe, I promise.”

Rachel slipped out of her suit coat and rolled up one of her shirt sleeves. “If I go stark raving mad, I’m taking you with me.”

Jenny laughed and gently wrapped her hand around Rachel’s wrist.

Autoscripts were passed from Agent to Agent via skin contact, and receiving a new script was far, far down at the bottom of Rachel’s list of enjoyable afternoon activities. Her hard resolution to get through the next five seconds netted Rachel a smile and Jenny’s best bedside manner. “Shawn found the way,” Jenny said gently. “I’ve tamed it down. This script will feel like me, not him.”

The autoscript moved from Jenny to Rachel in a hot, slippery push of energy. Rachel’s skin broke out in goosebumps, and she shut her eyes against the sudden pressure in her mind. The new autoscript held its form for a moment, then dissolved and blended into her in a rush of Jenny.

“How do I activate this?” Rachel asked, a little too loudly, as Jenny released her wrist. She scratched at her own arm until red welts appeared under her nails.

“It’s just meditation,” Jenny said, taking Rachel’s hands in her own to keep Rachel from ripping herself apart. There was no autoscript this time: Jenny’s warmth and confidence passed into her, and Rachel forced herself to relax. “Lie down somewhere quiet, then activate it. It’ll be like you’re falling asleep. You can set a timer or let yourself wake up naturally.”

“You sure this isn’t sleeping?” Rachel asked. The collective had strict rules against falling asleep with an active implant.

“Very sure,” Jenny nodded. “In normal slow-wave non-REM sleep, the conscious mind isn’t involved. You saw Shawn wake up when I pinged him. We’re still alert when we do this. It’s very, very deep meditation, but that’s all.”

“Okay,” Rachel said. “I’ll let you know how it works.”

“Oh,” the other woman added. “Don’t forget to have someone there with you to monitor your vitals the first time you use it. Not Santino—it’s got to be one of us, in case you need someone to ping you.”

“Damn it, Jenny,” Rachel sighed. “You said this was safe!”

“As your physician,” Jenny said, “did you really expect me to let you leave without telling you the fine print?”

“Woman, I have a gun!”