I barge into the waiting room of my mom’s office just as Zoey brushes past me to the exit.
I stop short, tilting my head at her. “What are you doing here?” The panic in my voice comes off harsher than I intended.
“Meeting with my mentor.” She pushes her blond hair behind her ears and flicks her head back at my mother’s door and bites her lip. Her eyes start to fill with tears.
My heart sinks and the panic bubbling through me subsides for a moment. “Is everything okay?” I reach out to touch her shoulder.
She shakes her head and tries to paste on a smile, but a tear still slips out, dripping past her thick eyeliner. “I really don’t want to trouble you with this when you have more important things going on.”
“You’re important too.” I jerk my head toward the hallway and she follows after me. “What’s wrong?”
She lets out a shuddering sigh. “I’m just feeling really useless when everyone’s putting the finishing touches on their projects, gearing up to wow the judges, and here I am, without a project of my own.” Her eyes widen. “Don’t get me wrong; I appreciate your family’s support so, so much. But your mom turned me down when I asked for co-credit on a project. Any project! I’m not even picky.”
“Zo, you’re amazing. All those people you’ve been helping out are lucky to have you.”
The corners of her lips quirk.
“I’ll talk to my mom too. See if she can—”
Zoey shakes her head. “It won’t work. Her hands are tied since I haven’t provided enough input on any one project to qualify as a co-owner. Not to mention half the things I’m working on are official Varga products already.” She wipes at her cheeks, her posture a little straighter. “She said there’s a tiny, small, infinitesimal possibility that she can persuade the board to give me co-credit for one of the projects I helped out on, but she won’t know for a few days.”
I try to inject pep into my voice. “That sounds promising.”
“It’s a long shot.” Zoey lets out a heavy sigh. “Anyway, thanks for letting me vent. This helped. A little.”
“Vent away anytime. I’m happy to arrange a dartboard if you want to take out your aggressions with the help of a pointy object.”
She laughs, and I feel like I’ve at least done something good today. I’ve cheered up my best friend.
“How’s the memory situation?” Her voice sounds a little less depressed.
“What’s the worst word you can think of in the English language? Because it’s that.” Damn, I could have used Sebastian and his extensive language knowledge right in this moment.
She frowns. “Any progress?”
“Just in trying to protect the data. Not in trying to stop the data loss.”
“You’ll stop it. I know you will.” The period bell rings and her gaze flicks to the clock. She lifts her bag higher on her shoulder. “Keep me posted on the progress. Gotta get to Molec Bio.”
Back inside the office, a copier hums, shooting paper after paper into a neat stack. The secretary gives me a three-fingered wave as she babbles into the phone. I bypass a boy stuffed into one of the uncomfortable plastic chairs, an ice pack pressed to his cheek. The dots of black liquid splashed on his skin indicate he lost a battle with a chemical compound, not another student.
I push open the door to Mom’s office. My dad used to hold the principal duties while my mom ran Varga Industries, but when he died, she took over both roles as if she couldn’t bear to replace him. They started this place together. They both left their lucrative positions at Harvard when I was a baby to open this place in a small town twenty minutes away. Every nook and cranny contains a piece of him. He picked out the flooring, got on his hands and knees and set up the first network wiring himself, and even donned a hard hat and supervised the construction process. My mom was always better at the business part, and my dad was always better at the people part, so it was a natural split for him to run the school while she ran the company.
Several former students have created huge technological advancements that changed the world. I always dreamed of being the biggest success of the school. Chalk it up to not only wanting to make my mother proud but to prove to the other students that I deserved this as much as they did. That’s why I need to win the competition.
“Mom?” I say when she doesn’t look up at me. Awards hang floor to ceiling on the walls behind her as if she fashioned a wallpaper pattern out of her success. “The reboot didn’t work and someone’s—”
My words drop off into oblivion as Mom pinches the space between her eyes and blinks at me, wearing a horrified, dazed expression. The leather chair she usually sits so straight in swallows her as she slumps. Her expression dredges up a weird feeling of déjà vu, but I can’t tie it to anything specific. A minute passes before she shakes her head, making her sleek bob jangle. “What’s that now?”
I let out an exasperated breath. Did she forget our conversation from earlier due to the breach in HiveMind? “Someone’s deleting my memories. I don’t remember my project. Or my mentor. Or—”
“Arden, sweetheart.” She uses the tone of her voice she only reserves for when she doesn’t believe a word I’m saying. “No one’s deleting your memories. It’s a glitch. We know that for sure from the Ethics Committee report.”
I blink, a glimmer of hope welling in my chest. “What does the report say?”
She puckers her candy-red lips, flicks her mouse, and studies something on her screen. The mahogany table in front of her holds several computers and tablets so she can monitor both the school and the company without leaving this room. She jabs her hand at an Excel document on her screen filled with tiny type and lots of analytics data. “This shows a number of people with archiving activity in the last day. If you look at the graph, it’s clear all this activity started around the same time, right around when we last deployed a patch to the software. The Committee’s performing a root-cause analysis as we speak, but all evidence so far indicates a regression issue introduced by the patch.”
I’m still stuck on the first sentence she said. “A number as in two?” Sebastian and me, for instance. “Or a number as in hundreds?”
Mom drums her fingers against a table as though she’s considering how much to reveal. “More than two is all I’ll say.”
“Can we roll back the patch?”
“We’re looking into that too, but a rollback is quite severe. It requires taking the entire system down for days and reprovisioning every single account. If that’s what we need to do to fix this, we will, but trust me when I say it’s the absolute last resort.”
My face pales. I remember working with my dad to process the initial round of provisioning on the first few accounts. Each one took hours. To reprovision every account would take weeks, maybe even months.
Mom gives me a warm smile. “Arden, I promise. We’re going to fix this. The Ethics Committee is doing a full investigation; they told me a few minutes ago that they’re testing out a new security measure on a few key faculty accounts. If it works, I promise you’ll be the first one we roll this out to. I want to ensure all my students are safe, but especially you.” She circles the desk until she rests next to me. Her expensive perfume overwhelms the fresh scent of the plants that line her walls like an exotic greenhouse. She strokes my hair the way she used to do when I was a baby to comfort me to sleep.
“How long will it take to test?”
My mom shrugs. “I don’t know. A day or two?”
I squeeze my eyes shut. I don’t have a day or two. I could lose my entire mind within the next few minutes. “Test it on my account now. Please.”
Mom flicks her wrist dismissively, her glittering diamond bracelet sliding down to her elbow. “The Committee would never approve an initial test on a student account.”
The longer I stay connected to HiveMind, the more pieces of myself I might lose. “Then I’d like to disconnect my account entirely.”
Mom clucks her tongue. “I’m afraid that’s not possible. The Committee also put a temporary freeze on disconnect requests.” HiveMind works by syncing directly to my brain waves, so the only way to remove my account is through a lot of signatures—my mom and the Committee members—and then to have one of the admins delete my brain wave data from the host server. It’s a system of checks and balances. “Don’t worry,” Mom continues. “I have every faith we’ll figure out what happened and find a way to restore your memories.”
But the problem is, as a scientist, I don’t believe in faith.
“Mom, you don’t understand. This is dire. I don’t remember my project!” My voice screeches. “I can’t present to the Committee if I don’t have a clue what my project is!” I grip my silver pendant, the one Dad gave me on the first day of school, and run my fingers over the engraving.
“Wait.” She clamps a palm over her mouth. “I don’t remember what it is either.” Her face morphs into a mask of horror, and I hold my breath, waiting for the severity of this to sink in. But then just as quickly as she seemed terrified, her cool, calm composure takes over. “Don’t worry about the presentation to the board. I’ll talk to the Committee. Get you an extension on your presentation until they can fix this unfortunate glitch.” She tugs at one of my wavy locks, defying nature by pulling it straight. “Your work has always been exemplary and I’m sure the Ethics Committee will understand that this isn’t your fault.”
It feels as if the rug was just pulled out from under me. I rock in place, my head foggy and dizzy. “But, Mom—I need to present at the review competition. I can’t win if I don’t present. It’s the only way I’ll have a shot of getting my project announced to the world during the press conference.”
She starts stroking my hair again. “It doesn’t matter. The world will know how amazing you are soon enough.”
Her words make me sink farther into my seat. It matters to me.
She places both hands on my shoulders, forcing me to look at her smiling face and the webbed lines cascading from her eyes beneath a smooth layer of foundation. “I’m really proud of you, honey. Don’t get upset. This isn’t your fault.” She taps the edge of my nose, just as she always did when I was a kid. Her signature show of affection.
As quickly as she came to stand beside me, she disappears behind her desk. She hands me a hall pass and gives me another tight smile as she cups the phone with her palm. “I’ll escalate this right now for you and get you that project extension. You go to Gym and try to forget all about this until we get it sorted out.”
I swallow, a bad taste lingering in my mouth.
Forgetting about this is entirely the problem.