Chapter Six

Contraband and Cosmics

When Amira arrived on the 235th floor the next morning, the elevator doors parted to reveal a ward in crisis.

The doors to the ward flew open, followed by a flurry of movement. Staff in white scrubs swept a large bed down the hallway, ornamented with swinging tubes and drips, shouting instructions to each other. Stunned, Amira barely stepped aside in time as they advanced on the elevator. The bed passed by, revealing Rozene’s small, colorless face in the middle of the chaos, her eyes rolled back, her veiny neck arched like a rigid cat.

Naomi greeted Amira in a flood of tears. Through fits of sobbing, she explained that Rozene awoke with chest pains and heart palpitations in the early hours of the morning. The emergency team arrived as she fainted. Amira sat in a daze, numbly feeding Naomi a steady stream of tissues. Through Amira’s shock, the first sensations of failure set in, leaving her cold and hollow.

“It’s terrible,” Naomi sobbed. “This is what happened the last time to the other two, before, you know…. I don’t know if I can go through this again!”

“Can I see her?” Amira asked. Rozene’s pale face, the eggshell-whites of her rolled eyes, filled Amira’s mind. Was that the last time she would see the young woman, barely out of the compound, alive?

“Not at the moment, M. Valdez,” Tony Barlow interjected, causing both women to jump at his sudden presence. Barlow possessed an uncanny ability to materialize from thin air. “Dr. Singh is in the emergency room with her now, and she is the best equipped of all of us to handle things in their current state.”

“What a day.” Naomi sighed. “And Dr. Parrish had to come in today, of all days.”

Barlow nodded grimly but said nothing. Still reeling from the revelations of the last twenty-four hours, it took Amira a moment to recall that Alistair Parrish had arrived Earthside from the Carthage station this morning, ostensibly for a routine visit to the Soma. The endless publicity meant that Pandora, and the cloning project in particular, was likely to dominate, if not monopolize, his time.

They waited in silence. Naomi anxiously fidgeted behind the protective shell of her receptionist’s desk. Tony Barlow wordlessly scrolled through data on the wall’s three-dimensional screen. Amira sat on the edge of Rozene’s now-empty bed, hands in her lap. The days since she discovered Rozene’s altered memory had passed by in a blur, but time was now at a standstill. Had she been too late? Did the person who tampered with Rozene’s memory decide to take a more extreme course of action?

The ward’s doors flew open and Valerie Singh walked briskly into the room. Her brow was knitted into a frown. She motioned them with a quick gesture to follow her into her office.

Dr. Singh closed the door behind them.

“She’s out of immediate danger,” she said, and Naomi sighed audibly in relief. “M. Hull was approaching the point of premature delivery, but we were able to reverse the early labor process and stabilize her. No harm to the fetus that we could see. We ran the usual tests, with the usual results.” She turned to Barlow with a slightly arched brow and he nodded silently in response.

“But she’s ok?” Naomi asked.

“For now, M. Nakamura,” Dr. Singh said. “Our subject will remain with us for the near future, at any rate.”

“Do we know what happened?” Amira asked.

Singh pivoted in place to face her with an icy stare. “We know as much as we’ve known since yesterday, M. Valdez,” she responded smoothly. “We see symptoms of heart palpitations and syncope with no underlying medical condition, so we can only infer that the cause is extreme stress or ongoing psychological trauma.”

Barlow and Naomi took this as their cue to exit the room.

“Dr. Singh,” Amira said in a low voice. “I think I’ve finally figured out an effective way to treat Rozene, but I need more time.”

“She is two weeks away from her third trimester,” Singh said. “Time is a luxury we may not have.”

“More time,” Amira continued. “I’ve made some breakthroughs in the last week. The root cause is psychological. It’s not just post-traumatic stress from her childhood, although there is plenty of that. It’s her memory that’s behind this, damaged memories in her parahippocampal processing.”

Dr. Singh frowned, her mouth tightening into a thin line. Whatever she had expected to hear, she was clearly taken aback. She opened her mouth to respond when the door swung open. To Amira’s surprise, D’Arcy entered.

“Dr. Parrish is here,” D’Arcy said. “He wants cloning, interstellar Streaming and de-radiation all briefed together this afternoon.”

Dr. Singh sighed irritably. D’Arcy stole a wink at Amira.

“Our fearless leader arrives,” Singh said drily. “We’ll continue this discussion later, M. Valdez.” The statement carried a hint of an ominous note. Amira’s throat tightened, and she felt a brief nostalgia for those first few days on Pandora, when she had been dismissed as a mild irritant.

As Amira left Dr. Singh’s office, she sensed an opportunity amid the morning’s crisis.

“Naomi,” she whispered. Naomi was feverishly scrolling through emails. “We need to get a resupply of Nirvatrene. Dr. Singh wants a full case ready for Rozene when she returns.”

“Oh, Amira, I’m swamped at the moment,” Naomi said as she stretched her hand across the three-dimensional monitor, zooming in on a message with Dr. Parrish’s face next to it. “I need to rearrange Dr. Singh’s calendar for tomorrow, and there’s that upcoming interview on the Stream—”

“Want me to take care of it?”

“Could you?” Naomi asked eagerly. “Can you get into the medical stores?”

“I’d be happy to, but have I been given the clearance to go to 202?”

“Here, take my ID in case you need it.”

Surprised, Amira accepted the card.

Though she had access to Floor 202, the next steps to finding Tiresia, Hadrian’s price for cooperation, would be the real challenge. Amira would need to search the Soma’s medical stores, an endeavor that could take weeks of research and scouting. The scare this morning, however, demonstrated that Rozene may not have weeks. Time to improvise.

Amira caught D’Arcy at the ward’s main door.

“This is going to sound crazy,” she began, ignoring D’Arcy’s mock-terrified smile. “But I wouldn’t ask for this favor unless a life literally depended on it. I need you to Cloud me.”

“Are you crazy?” D’Arcy whispered, dragging Amira by the arm in the hallway. She pivoted her head around like a wild owl, scanning the walls and ceilings for monitoring devices. “Amira, what are you planning?”

“Rozene went to the emergency ward this morning,” Amira said. “She’s getting worse and I don’t know how much time she has. In order to get the – the help I need, I need to get something from the medical stores that I’m not supposed to know about. If I’m caught, or someone reads my mind later, I need the next thirty minutes of my life Clouded, so they can’t see it.”

“You’re going to steal something and want me to help cover your tracks,” D’Arcy said succinctly. As a programmer, she had a knack for reducing a complicated scenario into zeroes and ones. “You know I believe you and I want to help, Amira, but this is my career on the line as well.”

“Please, D’Arcy,” Amira said. Shame burned down her neck as she met D’Arcy’s eyes. “If I’m caught, I’ll deny your name to the grave. All you have to do is switch the Clouding on and off again when I get out.”

They descended the stairwell toward Floor 202 to avoid elevator cameras. After Amira had attached the sensory patch underneath her long hair, where skull met neck, she leaned over the stair railing and raised her thumb. Several floors up the stairwell, D’Arcy lifted her hand in response and activated the Cloud code from her personal computer. A cold sensation spread from the pad through Amira’s head and down her spine. She gripped the railing, adjusting to the light-headed, buzzing sensation of the memory-blocker. Though she would remember the essentials, as the name hinted, the Cloud would dull her senses as it placed her short-term memories into a jumbled archive that would render them meaningless in a holomentic reading. At least, that was the hope. She slid an encrypted Two-Way communicator into her left ear.

“Are you ok?” D’Arcy whispered, her voice reverberating in Amira’s ear. “Can you hear me clearly?”

“I’m adjusting,” Amira said, with more confidence than she felt. She exited the stairwell.

Tentatively stepping onto the 202nd floor, Amira was greeted by a short, humanoid robot who introduced himself as Sparkes. As Naomi previously explained to Amira, he was more computer than standard robot, his processor synchronized with the Soma’s archives and medical stores, serving as a friendly interface for the complex’s daunting inventory. Despite this, he had smooth palms for retrieving files and medicine, and the retractable blades below his elbows revealed another purpose – to protect the Soma’s archives if needed.

Amira held Naomi’s badge in front of Sparkes’s swiveling, orb-like eyes, hoping his skills did not include facial recognition.

“Identifying,” he said in a soft, pleasant tone. His voice sounded fuzzy and distant under the effects of the Cloud, as though her ears were filled with water. “Welcome, Naomi Nakamura. How may I assist you today?”

Amira hesitated. Requesting the Tiresia directly was foolish, lest she create a red flag and incriminate herself and Naomi in the process.

“I’m not sure of the name, unfortunately, but it’s a new trial medication,” she said, peering over Sparkes’s shoulder. Rows upon rows of shelved inventory stretched across the length of the room, orderly and brightly sterile. “Is there a section for new medications that I could browse?”

She cringed internally at the clumsiness of the lie, though Sparkes and his ilk could only understand words, not infer the intent behind them. Not yet, anyway.

“You are not authorized to search directly,” Sparkes replied neutrally. “You must request an order that I will retrieve.”

“I see,” she said, fumbling for a response. “Well, I can go back and get my, um, supervisor to confirm the name. In the meantime, can you pick up an order for…for Oniria. And the usual supply for Subject 42: a ten-pack of Nirvatrene, thirty milligrams.”

As Sparkes turned to the far-left corner of the room, Amira darted in the opposite direction. Though the Cloud left her with a strange tingling sensation, her reflexes remained sharp. She had picked a woefully outdated medication for Sparkes to find, which she hoped would translate into a long search, but could only count on ten minutes at the most.

She charged through several rows of shelved inventory, pulsing with adrenaline. Her eye caught a glass reflection down one aisle. As she reached it, the shiny surface turned out to be a monitor, framed by a series of glass cabinets stacked with vials. Someone had marked each vial with handwritten labels. Trial medications.

She didn’t dare try to run a search for Tiresia using the monitor, if it would even be searchable. Though all drugs were supposed to be logged into the system, she suspected that something Hadrian Wolfe was so eager to get his hands on would not be found in official records. A box without labeling, he had warned her.

Amira opened the glass case with trembling fingers. Sparkes could return at any minute.

With rising frustration, she pushed aside boxes and vials, all marked with the usual clinical nomenclature. She paused. Her fingers lingered on the lowest wooden shelf, which had become transparent where her hands had touched the surface.

A glass cover.

Her heart danced. Shifting to her knees, Amira moved cases aside and felt for a hinge. She lifted the lower shelf, revealing a hidden layer of storage underneath the glass cover. In the narrow dark space, a small black box rested alone. She blinked several times, focusing her vision through the effects of the Cloud. A number ran across the container’s front – 08012216.

Tiresia. It had to be.

Wheels turned softly on the other side of the room. The box resisted her desperate attempts to unlock it or pry it from the shelf.

“D’Arcy?” Amira whispered into the Two-Way.

“I’m here,” D’Arcy said. She sounded as tense as Amira felt.

“First, I need you to create a distraction to keep Sparkes busy,” Amira said. “Quickly.”

Silence on the other end. Fighting back panic, Amira placed a finger in her ear but before she could adjust the Two-Way, a crash erupted in the bowels of the inventory aisles. A thud, followed by the rippling of shattered glass.

“I hacked into the inventory server with my shadow account, made an assistant robot knock some things over,” D’Arcy said, voice tinged with remorse. “I won’t be able to look Sparkes in the eye again. Amira, what’s going on?”

“I found what I need, but can’t get it out of the container,” Amira said. “Since you’re in the system, can you unlock it?”

D’Arcy cursed softly. Amira gave her the number.“Found it,” she said. “Oh, Amira, this is quantum encryption. The code is basically a series of probabilities. This is going to—”

“Please, can you try?” Amira whispered, standing up to peer around the aisle. Still no sign of Sparkes. “I need to get out of here now, with or without it.”

“Hang on,” D’Arcy said. “If I synch my laptop with the encoder from my Eye, I can run a script…yes, I’ve got it! No guarantees this will work, this is Aldwych-level security. Give me two minutes.”

Amira pressed her forehead against the wooden shelving, fighting back the foggy sensation in her head. Whether it was the Cloud, the Two-Way device or raw fear, Amira didn’t know. If she succeeded today without losing her job, Amira vowed to spend an evening free of technology. A drink on the Canary House’s rooftop, under the stars.

The numbers on the box spun, the combination changing to zeroes. A sharp click, and the top opened.

Shaking, Amira clutched at the thin vials inside. She stuffed them into her lab coat pockets. All contained a clear liquid, surprisingly cold despite the lack of refrigeration. She closed the hidden shelf door.

She had done it. All that remained was beating Sparkes back to the front.

Amira sprinted toward the entrance. When she reached the main hallway, she slowed her gait. Sparkes rolled around the corner.

“Your order is complete,” Sparkes said, leaning forward on a pivoted waist to present a tray, which Amira accepted, still panting from the run.

“Everything ok?” Amira gasped. “Sounded like a commotion back there.”

“Inconsequential cleanup exercise,” Sparkes said with a crispness that could have been interpreted as annoyance. “Anything else I may assist with?”

Just as she prepared to say no, another idea struck Amira.

“Actually, Sparkes,” she said, “can you provide me with a list of medications administered to the previous two Pandora subjects? The names were Jessica Alvarado and Nina Leakey.” Amira had never heard the two names spoken aloud within the Soma complex, but profiles of Jessica and Nina dominated the Stream after the news of their deaths broke last summer. Julian repeated both names on his radio station, loudly and often.

The robot’s eyes blinked at her, depthless but unreadable swirls of black. There was no reason, of course, for robots to blink, or for an archival machine such as Sparkes to even appear human, but that was how they were made.

Seconds later, she held the dead women’s records in hand, both marked in red as ‘highly classified’.

She returned to the stairwell, tapped on the door twice and entered. Almost immediately, the effects of the Cloud dissipated, sensation returning to her fingers. She sighed with relief, her hearing sharp and clear again. As she pulled the pad from her neck and the Two-Way from her ear, she looked up to see D’Arcy give her a final wave before she exited the stairwell.

Taking the stairs back up to the ward, Amira flipped through the files. She received profiles of the previous two subjects on her first day at the Soma, but the details were suspiciously scanty, abbreviated footnotes on two lives cut short. Assuming they had not been edited, the records in her hand might fill that gap.

Both of the files contained a list of medications, including known treatments before and during their terms as Pandora subjects. Neither young woman had received the now common embryonic pre-treatments for cancer and other genetics-based diseases. In addition, neither was given the generous dosages of health supplements that most city-based residents grew up with. They, like Amira and all compound residents, were genetically unaltered from birth, a biological relic of a more primitive time.

They became Pandora subjects around the same time frame and died within days of each other, just shy of their third trimesters. A final photograph in Nina’s file revealed a wide face drained of color, unambiguously dead. Amira slid the photograph to the end of the file with shaky fingers. A note in scrawling handwriting recommended that the project avoid recruiting a replacement subject. One less potential death all over the Stream, Amira thought as she flipped through the pages.

Amira scanned the last page on Jessica Alvarado’s file, frowning slightly as she reached the end of the list. She read it again, then turned to the end of Nina Leakey’s record. The same drug appeared in both women’s files, administered during their time as subjects.

“Txxxxxa. Approved experimental therapy – confidential.”

It had to be Tiresia.

* * *

She returned to the ward as quietly as she had left it. Rozene remained in the emergency room. The thin vials chimed softly together in Amira’s coat pocket, nestled between the folded medical files. Keeping them was dangerous, but she was not ready to part with the information they contained.

Amira pulled out the Oniria, cradling the fragile vial between her fingers. She smiled at her own quick thinking – she’d requested the archaic medication to keep Sparkes busy, but it also offered a potential treatment for Rozene. Amira witnessed it being administered to volunteers in her early days at the Academy. Oniria was once used to treat patients with extreme stress or trauma by inducing vivid, waking dreams that a therapist and patient could witness and discuss together – ideal for exploring suppressed memories, provided that Rozene would cooperate.

The Tiresia was her more intriguing possession. Why had an unofficial trial drug been administered to two cloning subjects in precarious health, and why did that very same drug interest Hadrian? Was it some pioneering medication meant to aid the cloning process or something more sinister? If its purpose was sinister, why did someone include it on the file? Amira could not ask these questions of Valerie Singh without revealing how she discovered the information. Instead, she would hold on to the Tiresia as collateral until she made headway with Rozene’s memory.

After dropping the approved medications at Naomi’s desk, Amira stopped in front of Singh’s office. The sounds of a heated argument drifted beyond the barrier of the door.

“From what I can see, there is no progress to speak of,” Alistair Parrish said. “I’m only here for an hour before I hear about a new medical crisis this morning, the same pattern as we had before—”

“There is no crisis,” Singh interjected. “We had her stabilized within an hour. I am not worried.”

“Well, you might want to start worrying!” Dr. Parrish snapped. “If this got out to the Stream, after everything that’s already happened…don’t forget, the interview with Harrison Harvey is two weeks away.”

“Yes, of course,” Dr. Singh responded. “Press briefings are naturally at the top of my agenda.”

“Don’t be flippant, Valerie!”

“I am far from flippant.”

“If I may interject—” a third voice intoned.

“And what’s he doing here?” Parrish asked, his voice rising in outrage.

“Dr. Barlow is here at my request, as a consultant,” Singh replied with a hint of impatience. “This is, after all, still my project.”

“For now.”

“On to more important things,” Barlow said. “What is most urgent is monitoring the cell growth rate as we move into the third trimester. So far, fetal development is occurring as we’d expect, but we have to monitor the impact that M. Hull’s stress may have on the child.”

“How’s your student working out?” Parrish asked abruptly. “Should we cut her loose? Or keep her until the press dies down?”

“She stays for now,” Singh said firmly. “As I have said countless times, the problem with our subject is psychological, an area that none of us, perhaps forgiving Barlow somewhat, are qualified to speak about. We will wait and see if our addition from the Academy can tell us something new.”

Amira sighed in relief, surprised and moved to hear Singh defend her after their earlier exchange.

The door flung open and Amira found herself face to face with Alistair Parrish. He was tall with copper-toned hair. A neatly trimmed beard framed his open, animated face. Access to the best anti-aging treatments in Westport kept his appearance youthful for a man in his fifties, his true age betrayed only by his eyes, which carried that sunken, haunted quality earned through life’s trials. Like Valerie Singh, he wore the black lab coat of a senior researcher, and a red badge with the Atomic symbol across the lapel, signifying his membership of the powerful Aldwych Council. His stern expression quickly morphed into a broad, warm smile.

“Ah! You must be M. Valdez.”

“Just letting Dr. Singh know that I ordered the Nirvatrene,” Amira said swiftly. Singh nodded indifferently and then closed the door behind her.

“So, M. Valdez,” Parrish continued. “I hear that our patient is out of immediate danger.” He gestured toward Rozene’s room.

Amira found herself walking in step with the legendary genetics pioneer.

“Yes, she sh-should be,” Amira stammered. “She’s resting now, but I’ll be evaluating her later today.”

“Excellent.” His tone carried no lingering traces of his outburst moments ago.

Through the window into the main ward, Rozene was in deep sleep, her brow tightly furrowed as it often did when she dreamed. Her face was paler than usual and her arms bruised in several places from IVs, but she otherwise appeared the same as she had the day before. One arm lay draped across her ever-increasing belly as her chest rose and fell.

“Very young,” Parrish said sadly. “She looks like a child. Reminds me of Maya, in a way.”

Everyone in Westport knew the story of Alistair Parrish and Valerie Singh’s only child. When she was twenty-two, a car struck Maya Parrish off her bicycle in the Rails, the thoroughfare where Aldwych’s elite lived. The story shocked Westport, a city unaccustomed to many accidents after the adoption of the Auto-Navigated Vehicle Promotion Act. When it emerged that a motorist had disabled the self-driving mechanism in his car, it prompted a citywide ban of all human-operated vehicles.

Maya remained in a coma, living through her twenties as a lifeless vegetable. While undoubtedly a tragedy for both geneticists, Alistair Parrish disappeared from public life for three years before resuming his career as the Carthage station’s head researcher. “I am happiest in the tranquil dark of space,” he famously said at his returning press conference. “Westport carries too many painful memories for me.”

“That was going to be the original name for this project,” Parrish continued. “The Maya project. I wanted to name it after her. Had you heard that?”

“No,” she said carefully.

“But Valerie opposed it, and she had a point. Too sentimental and loaded for an already controversial effort. In addition, Maya in Hindu mythology means illusion, mirrors of deceit. It would play into the public’s anxieties, that we are creating an illusionary human, something artificial. Ridiculous, but there you have it.

“Instead, it became the Pandora project, a nod to the fact that we want to open boxes of knowledge that could never be closed again. A name especially fitting for the cloning effort. A human woman created by the gods out of clay. A clone. Although in hindsight, Amira, was it really the better choice? Do we think ourselves to be gods? We all know how Pandora’s story ended. Ills unleashed on the world, with only a sliver of hope remaining.”

They stood in silence, watching Rozene through the ward’s window. Amira saw a kindness in Parrish that was noticeably lacking in Singh and for a moment, considered opening her own box of secrets – the tampered memories, the mysterious men with blurred faces, the unexplained and ubiquitous presence of Tony Barlow. In the end, Dr. Mercer’s warnings restrained her. Watch yourself.

* * *

Infinity Park was one of the few open spaces in Westport that remained defiantly urban, without the sound-canceling perimeters and dense ceilings of vegetation within the newly designated ‘Green Zones’. Amira would jog through the Green Zones when she wanted to escape the cacophony of the city, but those occasions were rare. Infinity Park, on the other hand, was an open mixture of grass and concrete from which one could watch trains scream overhead against a backdrop of towering buildings that caught the waning sunlight.

It was the start of April, meaning that spring should have arrived, but seasons became less predictable each year. Random blizzards struck into late July and after heat waves during spring, when the park would become overrun by excited residents drawn like shivering plants to the sunlight. Soon enough, many predicted, there would be no seasons at all, only days subject to nature’s whims.

Such warnings meant little, however, when the sun warmed the sidewalk and the scent of newly planted grass permeated the air. Amira sat cross-legged on the mossy turf opposite D’Arcy and Julian, digging her toes into the cool grass. They drank cheap wine out of plastic cups. Like most of the sunbathers in the park, D’Arcy was topless, displaying a new three-dimensional tattoo of dancing flames (temporary, she assured the group) along her left side. Though Amira had moved well beyond the laced veils and long dresses of the compound, she refused to join the casual public nudity that was commonplace on warm days in Westport. Her compromise was a sheer white top draped loosely over her shoulders. Julian’s left eye flashed when his Third Eye took pictures of the cloudless sky.

Julian and D’Arcy were heatedly discussing rumors of a Westport resident who had designed an Eye that could be used not only in Aldwych, where the devices were disabled, but in the space stations as well.

“It’s impossible,” D’Arcy said flatly.

“But the guys on the second floor swear it’s true!” Julian said. “It’s supposed to be quantum-level encryption, which is how it can bypass all of the security the labcoats made.”

“The technology isn’t there yet,” D’Arcy said. “Believe me, this is my area. There are true quantum computers in places like Aldwych and the stations. The Stream is obviously quantum as well, but to design an Eye at the quantum level…no way.”

Amira sat upright, struggling with images spinning past her line of vision.

“How’s that Eye working for you, Amira?” D’Arcy called playfully.

“It’s….” Amira’s voice trailed away as she struggled for the right obscenity. In her left eye, she could see her friends sitting on the grass, while the right eye was a dizzying tornado of images and words – calendars, articles, search results – changing faster than she could process them.

“You have to focus your thoughts into one, single command,” D’Arcy said kindly, with subtle amusement in her voice. “Think the words ‘send message’, for example. Think those words and nothing else.”

Amira followed D’Arcy’s advice, her heart leaping with excitement as the screen simplified into a list of contacts, all familiar names of Academy students. As she tried to scroll down the list, however, the screen changed to display a series of Stream articles about Iceland.

“Why is it showing me pictures of glaciers, D’Arcy?” Amira asked in a low voice as Julian burst out laughing.

“Oh, it must have been your background thoughts again. The trick is not to make them forefront thoughts and—”

“And I’m done.” Amira pulled the lens from her eye with a little more force than necessary and handed it back to D’Arcy, who smiled sheepishly as Julian continued to howl. “I’ll stick to regular computers where I can switch off the mind-reading, thanks.”

“I still think you could master it if you try.”

Julian stood up.

“As much as I’d love to stay, I need to get ready for the radio show,” he said, leaning down to give Amira a hug and kiss D’Arcy. “And I thought you were both going to get some classwork done.”

Amira cast a dark glance at the textbook nestled in the folds of the blanket, beside the hummus plate – Crossing the Void: A Theory of the Psychosocial Effects of Interstellar Space Travel.

“Isn’t that what the Carthage does?” Julian asked. “Study the effects of space on the human body and mind?”

D’Arcy raised a hand, counting off with her fingers.

“The Carthage is Parrish’s station, and that’s what they do using ‘voluntary’ prisoners,” she said, unreadable under her wide sunglasses. “The Volta is Victor Zhang’s, although who knows who’s running it after he disappeared – they research radiation in deep space and energy sources for long-term space travel. The Hypatia – dark matter and energy. The Nineveh – tied to that super-telescope, looking for habitable planets. And Amira, tell him about the Osiris.”

“What’s there to tell? No one knows.”

“Exactly,” D’Arcy said with a gleeful clap. “Well, whoever runs it knows, but we don’t even know who they are. It’s like the Area 51 of space. They might be partying with aliens for all we know.”

Julian laughed. “I get it. And no room for the arts up there – unless that’s the deviant stuff the Osiris is studying. I’ll leave you both to it.”

D’Arcy rounded on Amira the second Julian was out of earshot. “What the hell is going on, Amira? We’re in Aldwych less than a month and I’m Clouding you. Do I even want to know?”

Amira cradled the textbook in her lap, the answer stuck in her throat. Her ears buzzed, as they had in the Soma when she stole the Tiresia. As a fellow Pandora team member, Amira could tell D’Arcy certain things. But explaining that she stole a mystery drug for a rogue space cop who ran an abandoned ship of compound refugees? Even D’Arcy had her limits.

“What I’m about to tell you has to stay between you and me,” Amira said. “No one else on Pandora can know, because I can’t trust anyone except you. That also includes Julian, your data, even that diary you keep in your Eye.”

“As long as you don’t have to Cloud me every time we talk,” D’Arcy said, raising her wine-filled cup with sufficient gravitas.

Amira relaxed. They inched closer together on the picnic blanket.

“I think – I know – that Rozene’s memory has been tampered with,” Amira began. “Probably to hide something she knows. A secret. I don’t know what or why, but let’s just say that I learned of a drug called Tiresia that might be connected to it somehow. That’s what I took from the Soma medical stores. And sure enough, it was on the classified records of the two previous subjects, the ones who died over the summer.”

D’Arcy gasped. “Could it be some kind of miscarriage drug? Something to make them lose the clones?”

“I don’t think so,” Amira said. “Plenty of those exist already. But if you’re trying to stop a clone from being born, that’s an obvious, incriminating way to do it. It’s something else. And Nina and Jessica – the two former subjects – didn’t have any of those medications in their records. Their death records show sudden, unexplained heart failure and cessation of neural activity, which is incredibly strange for two women in their early twenties. When the cause of death can’t be explained through charts and readings, it looks more likely that their conditions were psychologically induced.”

“Or by this Tiresia,” D’Arcy said.

“I don’t think so,” Amira said. “I don’t know, but it must be more than a poison. It’s something classified – it was marked on the women’s medical charts, but isn’t on Rozene’s record. It’s doing something, but maybe indirectly. Causing stress, and that’s what’s actually killing the Pandora subjects.”

“It doesn’t seem right,” D’Arcy said. “Lots of people suffer in all kinds of ways, and they don’t just drop dead. That can’t really happen, can it?”

“Have you heard of the Nocebo effect?” Amira asked.

“Nocebo,” D’Arcy said slowly. “Is that like the placebo effect? Where you think the meds are curing you, when it’s just a dose of sugar or something?”

Amira nodded. “I will harm. One of my first classes with Dr. Mercer, he told us this story. Back in eighteenth century Vienna, these medical students decided to play this prank on a teacher’s assistant they hated. They ambushed him after class, held him down and told him he was going to be decapitated. They pushed his head on a block and blindfolded him. One of them then wrung a wet cloth so that a drop of water fell on his neck. He felt it, thinking it was the cold of a blade, and died. Right there, on the spot.”

D’Arcy raised her eyebrows behind her thick sunglasses. “He believed it enough that it happened.”

“Exactly. The mind-body connection – doctors have known about it to some degree for centuries, and we’re only now really understanding how powerful it can be. There are other examples, too – that Dancing Plague in the sixteenth century, when people in this village literally danced themselves to death for no reason. Even when I grew up in the compound, I remember this one summer, the Elders held a sermon where they accused the entire congregation of violating the natural order – you know, immodest dress, sinful thoughts, the usual. At least ten women had to be carried out of the auditorium for seizures. And it wasn’t for show – these were real seizures. Now that I’ve been at the Academy, I know the difference. The Elders said it was possessed spirits from other dimensions leaving their bodies.”

“Guess I learned something new,” D’Arcy said with a sigh. “Our thoughts can kill us.”

“Not just anyone,” Amira said. “It’s not common, and we have a better idea now of why that is. Certain types of people are more susceptible to the Nocebo effect. The first are those who have strong belief-based cognitive wiring – religious people, in other words, or those who were raised and conditioned to operate heavily on belief over rational judgment. The second type involves people with suppressed or damaged memories. In addition, there is usually an injury or inherent imbalance to the hypothalamus that’s needed to trigger an aggravated stress response – meaning, stress that doesn’t just wear you down over time like it does for most people, but literally attacks your body in the here and now.”

“Compound girls would be the poster candidates,” D’Arcy said. She leaned forward, tearing some blades of grass and rolling them between her fingers. Lines stretched across her forehead as she sat still, lost in thought. “So,” she said in a low voice. “You’re thinking someone used this Tiresia to tamper with the women’s memories to hide something, and maybe kill them with the stress caused by the distorted memory. But why tamper with a memory? Why not just take it out completely, if you want to keep someone quiet?”

Amira drew a deep breath. “It’s very difficult to erase an entire memory,” she said. “Especially a vivid one like Rozene’s. You would have to not only extract the memory itself from a complex neural maze, but also remove anything that could trigger the memory. Think of it like pulling out a tree, along with all the roots deep in the ground. It’s almost always more effective to change the memory or remove certain details.”

“So someone took the easier way—” D’Arcy began, but Amira shook her head.

“Not just anyone can do it,” she said. “You need to really understand neuroscience and holomentics to do it properly. And even then…. It can cause serious trauma for the person whose memory has been removed. Serious emotional trauma, especially if it’s a strong memory or a significant one in their development.”

D’Arcy nodded sadly. “So that could be the problem with this poor girl?”

“It could,” Amira said. “There could also be problems in the cloning process, I don’t know. But this fits with what I’ve seen of Rozene. She became really confused when I pushed her to recall these three men. When your memory is altered the way hers was, you don’t know what’s real and what isn’t, but you know something isn’t right – with your thoughts, your past, your sense of, well, your own being. And that kind of stress corrodes the mind, and then the body.”

“Why would someone go to all of this trouble?” D’Arcy asked. “Especially if they’re a scientist. If they’re caught, that’s attempted murder. Why throw it all away?”

Amira had been considering the same question.

“If Julian were here, I’d know what he’d say,” D’Arcy said with a faint smile. “Money. Maybe a Soma rival in Aldwych who’s not part of Pandora – the Galileo, for example – wants to learn the technology but get credit for the first successful cloning. Maybe they’re hoping to kill Pandora with bad publicity. Or maybe this man – or woman – is just opposed to human cloning and is willing to pay any price to keep it from succeeding.”

The sun was beginning to set when they packed to leave, and the world around them embraced the haziness of dusk, the lemon glow of sunlight giving way to long shadows and the rising chorus of invisible crickets. Slightly drowsy from the wine and heat, Amira and D’Arcy walked together along the pathway to the train station, arms linked. D’Arcy had thrown on a shirt for the return home.

Something caught Amira’s eye and she pulled D’Arcy to their left, toward the center of Infinity Park. An outdoor theater had been built at the hill’s base for plays in the summer. On its main stage, a woman in an elegant dress, too formal for a hot day, addressed a large crowd. Although it was too distant for Amira to hear, the crowd appeared to be hanging on to the woman’s every word.

“Have you learned about the teachings of the Cosmics?” An older man materialized next to them, dressed in a poorly made suit but wearing an eager, open smile. He handed Amira a pamphlet and walked away.

“What is this shit?” D’Arcy murmured, as Amira flipped through the pamphlet.

“Sentient Cosmology,” Amira read aloud. “A science-based approach to understanding the universe and our purpose in it. Our understanding of the quantum world and dark matter has confirmed what humans have known for centuries. The world is more than the sum of what we know and see, and our consciousness plays a vital role, the driving role, in the fabric of the cosmos.”

“I’ve heard of them,” D’Arcy said thoughtfully. “I’ve seen them recruiting at the Academy, putting up posters and such.”

Amira nodded.

“Dr. Mercer told me about them,” she said. “The Cosmics. Ex-compound people and those who want a lighter version of compound teachings.”

Amira observed elements of the compound in the lecture – though the spectators were sharply dressed, some even in Aldwych lab coats, they bore the blank, hungry stares of the congregants at the Passage ceremonies. Unlike at the compound, posters behind the speaker displayed quantum equations and satellite images of deep space, as well as detailed diagrams showing the fabric of matter and antimatter between the stars.

Amira gripped D’Arcy’s arm and pointed to the front row. Alistair Parrish sat near the center of the crowd, his face wet with tears.

“That’s Alistair Parrish!” D’Arcy whispered excitedly.

“It is.” Amira had never heard of Parrish’s involvement with any religion, New Age or otherwise. The geneticist, though one of the most famed scientists in all of Aldwych, and esteemed almost to the point of worship by his colleagues, was not a religious figure.

“You’d think he’d be smarter than this,” D’Arcy whispered, smirking slightly.

“Even the smartest people will look for answers anywhere they can find them,” Amira said. She felt defensive on Parrish’s behalf, but couldn’t say exactly why. “Anyway, it’s none of our business what he chooses to believe.”

The crowd burst into applause, Parrish included. The spectators rose at the speech’s conclusion and exited the park. Parrish wiped his eyes and made his way up the steps, disappearing into the crowd.

“Time to go?” D’Arcy asked, nodding in the direction of the sun, which was dipping lower toward the crystalline horizon of the ocean.

Amira cast a final glance at the crowd and gasped. Alistair Parrish had appeared again at the top of the theater steps, now joined by Tony Barlow. Though distant, their body language and gestures suggested that their exchange was not an amicable one.

“Barlow,” Amira said. “He’s on the Pandora cloning project as well. He’s the one who knew I was from the compound.”

“They don’t look friendly,” D’Arcy noted. “What does any of this mean?”

Amira shook her head. Something, perhaps. Or nothing. Every new discovery unraveled a new thread of questions.

All of this ties back to Rozene, she thought. Rozene’s mind is where the answers lie, deep in the shapeless fog of memory.