As I’m changing into my pajamas for bed, I catch a glimpse of a few words scrawled across my left forearm.
Today’s events: Simon begging me for Veronica’s memory of her cheating then asking me to delete it. Slipping an SSD drive into an IT monitoring computer. Having a discussion with Sebastian directly after Kimmel’s class in the hallway about how he doesn’t remember our project either. Making plans with Sebastian tonight after dinner. Watching a memory disappear from my account. Backed up recent memories to external hard drive. Discovered 56,320 lines of code have been altered in HiveMind.
Most of this is familiar, but the middle one makes my pulse race. Plans with Sebastian? What plans? My eyes zoom to the clock. It’s nearly eleven p.m. Dinner was almost four hours ago. My stomach gives an uncomfortable lurch. I’ve just been sitting here for hours trying to figure out what the hell those 56,320 lines of code changes in HiveMind meant to no avail while he’s been sitting at home, waiting for me.
I yank off my shirt and skim over every word written on my arm, but this is the only piece of information I don’t remember.
There’s a horrible weight in my gut. I just abandoned him. Left him without a word or a text.
I’m about to scramble back into my shirt from this morning, but on second thought, I grab a fresh one from my drawer. This one has the added bonus of just a little extra cleavage. I shrug on a cardigan as well in case it gets cold. My fingers bang out a text as I stuff my feet into my shoes.
Arden: Sorry! On my way.
After grabbing my laptop and all my supplies, I rush downstairs and cringe at the creaking third step. Voices echo from the nearby kitchen. With an open floor plan and hardwood floors that amplify footsteps even in socked feet, my house offers no place to hide. I call it a first world problem house: too big for the property, too small for epic parties.
“—don’t understand. He said he loved me.” Leo’s voice makes me pause on the landing. “And after yesterday’s success—” A foghorn sounds from the kitchen. Or maybe he blew his nose.
“I know you’re upset,” Mom says in her soothing voice, the one she uses on potential investors. “But it’s good this happened now, before the press conference. It’ll make customers feel more secure if the creator isn’t romantically involved with the head of IT.”
“I just wish we could talk about this. He won’t even listen to me.” Leo’s sobs make something painful shoot inside me.
“I know, honey. I say be upset today and then tomorrow you show him how much better off you are without him.” She pauses for a moment. “For now, what I think you need are the two best medicines: ice cream and distraction.” The sticky squish of the freezer opening sends a wrench through my gut. I think back to swallowing spoonfuls of that same icy cure next to her on the couch after my dad died. Ice cream didn’t cure my heartbreak then or bring Dad back from the dead. Neither did distraction.
Mom wouldn’t remember that though. She carved out everything from her mind that reminded her of Dad being sick. “To stay strong,” she once told me. “Sadness is a liability.” It’s one thing to accept his death, it’s another thing entirely to erase all evidence of it.
A lump forms in my throat. I used to think the only way to lose someone was to have him or her leave you, whether by force or choice. Brandon chose to leave Leo. Cancer stole Dad from us. But I’ve lost pieces of myself even though I’m still here.
“Speaking of distraction, we need to discuss the press conference,” Mom says.
“I’m not going. Not if Brandon’s going to be there.”
“Well, he has to be there, honey. He’s in charge of the technical setup.” She pauses for a moment. “Though I guess I can outsource the technical aspects if it means that much to you.”
I had planned on sneaking out, but I can’t just walk out of here when my brother’s so upset. She’s right. Leo needs to show Brandon exactly what he’s missing. I plod into the spotless kitchen over to where my brother sits at the reclaimed wooden table. He buries his face in his hands, his mop of dark curls spilling over his fingers.
I place a palm on his shoulder. “You okay?”
Leo shudders. “Not really.”
“Don’t wimp out on the PC.” I scrub his hair, messing up his neat part. “Make him jealous. Look better than him. Act better than him. Be better than him.” Ever since sophomore year, when late nights in the lab turned into date nights in the lab, my brother and his boyfriend have been inseparable. After Leo graduated, Brandon got a job as the IT manager because even one nanosecond apart proved unbearable.
Mom sets the spoons on the table with a clatter. She pinches the bridge of her nose. Slouchy gray pajamas hang from her thin frame, and strands of hair escape from her low ponytail. Even though she stands with perfect posture, this is her definition of relaxed. I’ve always suspected she strategically hides crisp ironed suits around the house in case she needs to slip into one at a moment’s notice, Batman-style.
“But how can I be better than him if I’m not ready yet? I just started the trials and I don’t get the full results for a few more days.” For his thesis project two years ago, he developed some way to cure diseases on a cellular level. Beta testing didn’t go as planned last year—they could only test it on mice, not humans, and the mice kept dying shortly after being cured—but it’s still being presented to the public this year. He and Mom are both confident the new trial will be successful and they want to get ahead of the market.
I circle around my brother and pick up the abandoned tub of cookie dough waiting in the center of the table. “He’ll regret his decision when he sees the world swooning over your product.”
“Yeah, you’re right.” Leo eyes my cleavage for the first time. “Whoa, where are you going dressed like that? Because wherever it is, it can’t be good.”
I readjust my lace shirt, pulling it a little higher on my chest. “Thanks a lot, jerkface.”
He holds up his hands in surrender. “Hey, I’m not the one parading that way-too-revealing outfit.”
“I’m wearing a cardigan!” I tug at my sleeve as if nothing can be risqué when covered up with the article of clothing most worn by librarians. The fabric slides higher on my wrist, revealing the ink written across there. I quickly yank it down.
Mom smooths a rogue wrinkle in her pajamas. “You better have a good reason for going somewhere this late on a school night.”
My project provides me with the perfect alibi. “Sebastian’s house. We need to try to figure out what our project is before the review.”
Leo snickers under his breath. “Bash’s house doesn’t exactly qualify as a good reason.”
“No. Absolutely not. You cannot go to a boy’s house on a school night.” Mom crosses her arms. “Besides, it’s not even necessary to work on your project. The Committee granted you the extension. Your final grade won’t be impacted in any way.”
I rush to change the subject. “I noticed a few key teacher accounts are no longer accessible in HiveMind. Does that mean whatever the Ethics Committee did to lock them down worked?”
Mom’s eyes widen. “I hope you’re not implying you tried to access one.”
I present her with my best halo smile. “Of course not. I would never do something like that. So … does it?”
Thin lines cup Mom’s mouth when she frowns. “No, memories are still being tampered with, even in the accounts we tested the fix on.”
Crap. All that means is the hacker was able to bypass the new security measures but I still can’t. It’s not often I feel inferior and that thought makes me want to punch something.
“Memories are being tampered with?” Leo’s face turns as gray as the steel appliances.
“Someone’s deleting all the juicy stuff from people’s minds.” I place a hand on one hip. “Know anyone at Varga Industries who has a vendetta against me?”
Mom thrusts her arm out into the center of the table like a referee stopping an illegal play. “Arden, don’t spread rumors. It’s a system glitch, not targeted malice. We’ve got it under control. It’s actually a lot less activity than it initially seemed, mostly just concentrated on two users with a few other outliers.”
“I’m well aware,” User One says. User Two’s currently waiting in his room for User One to rescue him.
“Rest assured,” Mom continues, “I’ve got people working round the clock to fix it. We’re going to get your memories back, I promise, sweetie.”
“Don’t take this the wrong way, but I don’t trust the Ethics Committee to do it right. I’m going to try to fix this myself.” I pivot on my heels. It seems to me that my mom’s trying to solve the wrong issue: She’s fixing the software instead of finding the culprit.
I storm out the door before she can try to stop me. I can hear her faint shouted threat: “If you walk out that door, you’re going to be grounded for a month!”
Maybe there’s a bright side to all these memory deletions. Perhaps she won’t remember grounding me by tomorrow.
LIGHT RAIN COLLIDES with the nearby tree branches and plunks onto the walkway of Sebastian’s townhouse. I huddle under the vaulted porch awning and shake out my umbrella. Wind whips my hair around my shoulders as I press the doorbell. The knob twists, and a woman with dusty blond hair pokes her nose out. “Arden.” She spits my name like a curse word. “It’s a school night. He’s in bed.”
“Please, it’s important.”
To my surprise, she opens the door and crosses her arms over a TGI Fridays uniform. She smells like greasy fries and blue cheese. Several nursing scrubs are folded neatly on top of a laundry basket at the foot of the stairs. Two jobs? The kids who live off campus are usually so rich their parents can afford nannies for their child. “Honey, he needs his rest. I know you want to see him, but can’t this wait until tomorrow?”
“I’m afraid not.” I brush past her and trudge up the stairs, my feet leaving wet imprints on the mauve carpet.
“Arden! You can’t keep coming over like this!”
Photos line the walls. As I ascend the steps, Sebastian grows up before my eyes, starting as a squealing baby with a dollop of hair. His body elongates, his glasses change but remain a constant, he gets acne, he covers it up, and he grows gawky, then fills out, then loses some weight. And at the very top, I startle at one image. He’s smoldering at the camera, the glare reflecting off one of his plastic-rim lenses, his arm propped around me.
I look so … happy.
A nervous flutter warms my belly at the image.
On the second floor, several closed doors face me. I feel like a contestant on a game show being asked to choose behind Door Number One or trade the prize for the mystery behind Door Number Two. But with Mrs. Cuomo hot on my heels, it’s Door Number Three—second to the left—that calls to me based on what I hope is latent empirical knowledge.
Sebastian sits cross-legged on his bed, flipping through a composition notebook. “Arden?” He sets the notebook on top of a heaping pile teetering on his bed. “What are you doing here?”
The hair on the back of my neck rises. “We had plans tonight. Check your phone.” I slam the door shut, flip the lock, and lean against it while ragged breaths escape. This isn’t me. I sneak into the school late at night to do extra homework, not into guys’ rooms.
He leans over his bed to grab his schoolbag from the floor. He rummages through it and then unearths his cell phone, which must have been in there since he got home from hanging out with Teddy. He must be the first teenage boy in history to not have his phone surgically attached to his palm.
I wipe sticky hair out of my eyes, but it clings to my forehead as though it’s mocking me with its rebellion. I jerk my chin toward the notebooks. “Anything about our project in those?”
“Possibly, but it’s hard to tell because it’s just pages of quantum physics equations. I must have been really fun at parties.” He stands and stretches. His white T-shirt rises an inch above the waistband of his baggy pajama bottoms, revealing creamy skin and the elastic of his blue boxers. I force myself to swallow.
He stares at me back, as if waiting for something. “Uh…”
Several hard bangs on his door snap us out of our trance. I give him a dismissive shake of my wrist. “Don’t worry about her. I’ll take care of it.”
“No, I meant, I need to get dressed.…”
“Oh. Right. I’ll just … turn around.” It takes way too much effort to drag my feet into a pivot. I face the opposite wall, where a desk resides, covered in more composition notebooks. A periodic table hangs alongside a few posters of emo bands. Dirty clothes drape over the back of the desk chair, which sags in the center, a permanent butt print. The room is lived in, not the room of a boy with no memories. I was expecting blank walls to match his blank mind.
While he slips on a T-shirt, I flip open a notebook on his desk. Experimental data litter the pages, all scrawled in nearly illegible chicken scratch.
“Sebastian!” His mother pounds even louder. “Open up immediately! What did we talk about yesterday? When she’s here, you leave the door open.”
I close the notebook. “Does your mom know you lost your memories?”
“Yeah, but I don’t think she understands. I get the feeling she’s not all that technologically savvy.” Clothes rustle. After a minute, he says, “You can turn around.”
I spin to find him looking way too good in dark jeans and a crisp blue polo. He dressed up for me, and for some reason, that fact makes my heart skip faster. He looks way better without glasses.
“What did she say?” I raise my brow, the universal signal for I need more info than that, buddy.
The door jiggles harder.
“It was all so weird. This morning she burst into my room yelling we had to leave for school. I was so confused, but I got ready in a hurry because she was freaking out. When I came downstairs, I walked in on her crying. She pulled me into a hug and apologized for yelling at me. Then I told her I didn’t remember who she was, who I am, anything. She stared at me as if she’d never seen me before and I thought maybe she was experiencing the same thing.” He sighs. “But she went to a drawer and got out the HiveMind instruction manual. She studied that thing for like fifteen minutes before pointing at a line and saying, ‘Oh, you need to restore the backup from the online archive.’”
“And did you?”
“We were already late for school, so not until I got home. I followed the instructions, expecting there to be nothing in the online archive. But there was.” His face turns gravely serious. “It’s just me lying on a hard metal slab, staring at overhead lights. No inner monologue. Just lights.” He swallows audibly. “Arden, the memory was endless.”
A high-pitched sound buzzes from outside the door. “Maybe it just felt like forever. HiveMind has a way of distorting the perception of time.”
He strides to his computer and flips it on with a touch of his finger. “No, I looked at the file size. It’s huge.”
I stand close enough to inhale a whiff of his cedar wood scent. “Whoa.” The file is over two hundred gigs, twenty times longer than my longest memory. It could cover several days, maybe even weeks.
The knocking gets even louder. With a sigh, Sebastian unlocks the door. His mother stands there with arms crossed. “Out. Now.”
Sebastian sways back and forth. “Mom, this is Arden. My—uh—lab partner. We have to work on our experiment.”
Mrs. Cuomo cocks her head to the side, looking entirely unamused. And a little badass. “What she is, is a bad influence on you.”
“I like to live up to expectations. Come on.” I storm past her and charge downstairs. The carpet muffles Sebastian’s footsteps as he follows.
His mom races after us. “Sebastian, you need to rest! Remember—you have an appointment with Dr. Sadler in the afternoon.”
I pick up the sneakers he abandoned beside the front door. He snatches my umbrella just outside the door but refrains from popping it open. Rain pelts the exposed flesh of our faces. It’s not until we slip inside my car that we dissolve into laughter.
“Sorry in advance for getting you grounded for life.” I back out of the driveway onto the main road.
“Grounded?” He squints at me. “You’re calling me well balanced and sensible?”
“I guess slang wasn’t one of the many languages you recently acquired. Grounded means to be in so much trouble your mom won’t allow you to leave the house.”
He shrugs. “Didn’t stop me just now, did it?”
A wide grin pops onto my face. I like the way he thinks. “Too bad the first rule of sneaking out is not to get caught.” Though my usual form of sneaking out involved leaving my house to sneak into school to have unlimited access to the equipment.
“So what now?”
I debate how much to tell him before deciding to tell it all. We’re in this together, which means I need to trust him. “I got a memory back.”
He scrambles to sit up straighter. “You have my attention.”
“Hold on. Let me pull over somewhere and I’ll show it to you.” After parking in a deserted parking lot, I drop a copy of the reverse memory I received from the encrypted folder, when he was wearing the SCHRÖDINGER’S ABS T-shirt and we decided to work together on our thesis. He’ll have to watch it the HiveMind way: as an overlay on the current scene with sounds and colors muted, and with my inner monologue from today in his ear. When I retrieved this memory, I had a front-row seat to this moment, while he’s stuck watching from the nosebleed section. I practically felt the plastic rim of the glasses he no longer wears. I try to decide which way he looks better, with glasses or without. It’s like the glasses transform him into a different person.
“Bash.” Sebastian wrinkles his nose to himself. “Nope, don’t like it.”
As he experiences the memory, his expression grows grave. When it’s over, his brow furrows. “How did you get this? And why is it backward?”
“No idea on the latter.” I shift in my seat. “It’s mine. From my point of view. I found it hidden on the server.”
The streetlamps splash pools of light onto the dark road, speckles of rain bathing in the glow. The sharp intake of breath he allows carries over the pitter-patter hitting the windows. “So you’re getting your memories back?”
“Not exactly. I still lost whatever happened in Kimmel’s class today plus at least one more involving us making plans. And I can’t get back to the encrypted folder.” I tell him about the retina scanner currently blocking me from accessing the IT room.
He squints at me. “Does this mean if a memory’s deleted from HiveMind, it’s not lost permanently?”
I nibble on my lip. “Technically, once it’s deleted, sayonara forever, baby. HiveMind is so integrated with our brains, it’s like cutting a slice of cake and trying to point out where the eggs mixed into the batter.” His face falls, so I add, “You can archive them though, which is like moving them to a new computer your current one has no connection to. That’s what happened here. Theoretically, you can restore the archived memories later, but only if you can connect the two sources, and currently I can’t.”
Sebastian’s frown drags all his features downward in a landslide. “So it’s not a glitch in the software.”
I shake my head. “The Ethics Committee flagged a number of deletions, but as far as I can tell, all deletions are memories involving, well, us.” I suck in a breath of false courage. “I think—from my quick analysis of the situation—this all boils down to our project.”
Because it offers both a motive and an explanation. Someone went through the trouble of removing all mentions of it from every student’s mind. There’s a strong chance I was the most likely candidate to win the competition, after all; I can’t imagine a scenario in which I wouldn’t be. Which makes it in another student’s best interest to erase all evidence of our project. And commandeer the spotlight for themselves.
Sebastian’s mouth parts. “That’s not random. That’s deliberate. Whoever did the initial purge of memories must be monitoring us via HiveMind and getting rid of anything that brings us too close to the truth.” He snaps his fingers. “So what we need is a way to uncover our missing memories without using HiveMind in case it’s been compromised.”
“Oh my God.” My eyes light up with excitement and I practically bounce in my seat in a rush to put the car in drive. “Yes! That’s it. We have to do things old school. Before technology. The way a normal person would retrieve a repressed memory.” I paste a grin on my face to make the next part seem logical—not insane. “We’re going to a hypnotist.”