Fear the Water
Dr. Mercer’s living room made for a cozier spot than the Soma ward, enough to induce Rozene to sink into the armchair by the fireplace without ceremony. Nova rested on a blanket next to her feet. The enclosed, windowless room in the basement belonged more to the Pacific Northwest than the Californian peninsula – with its wood-paneled walls and fuzzy carpet, it almost seemed to be fighting back the outside world. Synthetic fire crackled across logs within a brick fireplace, releasing the rich scent of pine needles and smoke. Low lamps cast a soft orange light across the room.
Henry the robot rolled into the room with a tray, and handed Tony Barlow a scotch and Lee a cup of chai. Both men stood on the room’s periphery, unnaturally still, while Dr. Mercer helped attach the sensors to Rozene and Nova’s temples.
“Is this room too crowded, Rozene?” Lee asked with a dark sidelong glance at Barlow. “Do you want us to clear out?”
“Doesn’t really matter,” she murmured. She had not been placed under Oniria or even a basic sedative, but the excitement of the new arrivals and a heavy dinner seemed to have drained her energy. That worked to Amira’s advantage, at least for this particular reading. A tired mind was a more open mind, less able to resist her probing into the brain’s dark corners.
“Perhaps, in the interest of patient confidentiality, we should limit those present,” Barlow said with his own glance at Lee. “This remains a highly sensitive project, after all.”
“Rozene and Nova aren’t a project,” Lee said heatedly.
“The patient’s wishes override any confidentiality concerns, at least within my house,” Dr. Mercer said. He gave Nova a gentle, protective pat on the stomach.
“All of you stay,” Amira said. “It may prove useful for the reading.” A faint smile curled her lips and the room fell silent. She extended her hand, curling her fingers as she thought a silent command. Sensor to me. The wand-like sensor flew across the room into her outstretched palm, where it belonged.
Her blood warmed with excitement, heating her chest and fingers. This was what she knew. Though the past few months had left her adrift and frightened, the holomentic reading machine was her anchor. No one else had her deadly combination of skill, creativity and confidence. And unlike the reading of Hannah Slaughter, this would be a proper application of her talents. If anyone could unravel the situation of Rozene and Nova’s connection, it was Amira.
“Do you remember my introductory class on child psychology?” Dr. Mercer said with a knowing smile at Amira.
She nodded, before letting out an involuntary laugh. “I remember wishing I had brought ear plugs to your holomentic demonstration,” she said. Most of the class had focused on theory and the art of waking therapy for troubled children, rather than holomentic readings. Children were difficult to read, infants even more so. They couldn’t answer probing questions, their conscious minds were unfocused, and their subconsciouses were undeveloped, untainted by layers of memory and feeling. The main interest in holomentic readings of infants lay in searching for evidence of past lives and reincarnation. Despite some rare and compelling case studies, the jury remained out on the subject of past lives.
“How are you going to do this?” Lee asked. “Can you read two minds at once?”
“In a way,” Amira said. “It’s a tricky business, but the machine is capable of probing two neural patterns at once, on different displays. But I can only probe directly into one mind at once.”
The holomentic machine whirred to life from a corner near the fireplace. The unassuming machine was tall and box-shaped, save for a disk rotating at the top like a record player. At Amira’s mental command, the disk separated into two, each rotating in a different direction. One would display Rozene’s neural firings on one side of the room, Nova’s on the other. The padding on both of their temples lit up in a warm, greenish glow.
The sensor warmed in Amira’s hand and she gripped it until her knuckles whitened. While confident in her abilities, she couldn’t suppress the fear at what she would unravel in the coming minutes.
“Tell me what motherhood has been like the last few months, Rozene,” Amira said. “There’s no wrong answer, and there’s no simple answer. It can be many things.”
A twitching smile broke through Rozene’s pensive frown. She kept her eyes closed.
“It is many things,” Rozene said. “I always dreamed of being a mother, and it definitely feels right. Like coming home after a long trip. Where I was raised, no one talked about how tiring it is, how much work it is to keep a new life alive – you just did what you had to do. So I wasn’t afraid of not getting sleep, of spending every waking minute with her. It’s hard, but it’s right.”
On Rozene’s mental display, a swirling medley of images materialized and dissolved, little vignettes of early motherhood combined with childhood memories. Rozene in Dr. Mercer’s kitchen, wrestling with bottles of formula. Late nights in a dark room, a baby’s piercing cries spiraling into the air. Children with bonnets, running through the glowing walkways of the Trinity Compound. Past and present, bound by the cycle of new life.
But while the memories were tinted in soft blue, the color of tranquility, some of the images displaying in the room’s center took sharper edges, framed with flashes of red. Memories tinted with anxiety and sadness.
Amira seized one. “Talk to me about the time you took Nova out to the ocean on an early morning. Did something happen?”
Rozene’s brows tightened. She squeezed her eyes shut and the holographic image took sharper form in the room, the fuzzy beige carpet drowned by the deep blue of lapping waves. Rozene stood on the shore, in a sundress, holding Nova in a firm grip. She lowered the infant until her feet dangled inches from the water. The waves lapped at her small, smooth feet.
Rozene took a step deeper into the ocean, the saltwater pooling around her ankles. A memory flashed of another time she had been in water while heavily pregnant – in a murky, half-drained pool, imprisoned by chicken coop wiring. The real Rozene on the armrest twitched, her hand shooting protectively to her stomach, perhaps in memory of the labor contractions that her imprisonment had triggered. The flashback had been quick, but in the hologram, the infant hovering over the water let out a piercing scream.
On the floor, Nova screamed as well. Her fists formed angry balls, jerking in front of her midsection. Rozene’s eyes flew open and she cast an anxious glance at her bawling child. She made a motion to rise, but Amira gestured her to lie back. She cast Rozene a gentle, reassuring smile, one at odds with her thundering heartbeat.
Kill auditory senses on platform one, Amira thought, and sound cut out from the memory by the ocean. But Nova kept crying on the floor, threatening to dislodge the sensors attached to her temples.
Amira shifted the sensor toward Nova, triggering the child’s memories and thoughts to display on the second holographic platform. The first images were what Amira would expect from an infant. Undefined, blurry shapes in a swirl of muted colors, the neural firings of a developing brain. Hazy memories fought through the red-tinted mental clutter – Rozene holding Nova in the kitchen, water pouring from the sink. The Pacific Ocean’s waves visible behind tall blades of grass. Every scene was from Nova’s perspective, which Amira also expected – she had not lived long enough to have memories she could distance from, to see beyond her direct vantage point.
Amira’s skin prickled, tightening across her arms. There was something else the memories all had in common.
Water.
The water took form in every vignette in Nova’s mind, the ocean’s blue and the dripping faucet the sharpest element in each image across the platform’s display. What Dr. Mercer used to call—
“An object of significance,” Dr. Mercer murmured from across the room. Amira met his dark eyes, noting the alarm that pooled in his pupils, the way his dark skin had turned a shade lighter.
Water held a psychological significance for Nova. Perhaps this was a lingering memory of the watery safety of the womb. But if that were the case, why did Nova react with such alarm? Wordlessly, Amira grabbed a glass of water from Henry’s tray and knelt before Nova. Rozene opened her eyes and frowned at the scene, but said nothing.
“Think back to the memory in the pool, Rozene,” Amira said. “When you were imprisoned in Victor Zhang’s house, before I came.”
A faint groan escaped Rozene’s throat, but she closed her eyes and obeyed. On her holographic platform, the grim image of the muddy, fluorescent pool returned to focus, a small red head bobbing behind a cage. Nova let out a gusty wail.
Amira bent over her, dipping her fingers in the glass of water. She let several drops fall onto Nova’s skin. The baby’s eyes opened, meeting Amira’s.
Dr. Mercer yelped. Lee shot to his feet. Amira turned to Nova’s holomentic platform, where her conscious mind glowed bright within the dim room. The same pool scene unfolded, but from Rozene’s vantage point. The image bobbed up and down, in time with her swaying in the water, the outer pool area visible through a mesh of chicken wire. Barlow seated at the pool’s edge with hands bound behind a plastic chair. The scent of stale chlorine filled Dr. Mercer’s living room, emitting from the base of the holomentic platform, in the machine’s best mimicry of the sensory memory.
“Help!” Rozene’s voice burst through the machine, frantic.
Amira’s throat knotted. She remembered that moment too well, how she had discovered Victor Zhang’s corpse before hearing Rozene’s muted cries through the wall.
And sure enough, in the memory, the door on the other end of the room burst open, and Amira saw herself running into the pool room. She paused at the sight of Rozene, before Rozene yelled for her to help, and Amira leapt into the pool.
Nova, though still in the womb in that moment, still hours away from entering the world, carried a memory of that moment of rescue, through her mother’s eyes.
The hologram flickered and the image vanished. A heavy silence followed. Rozene’s eyes were open, apprehensively scanning Amira for a reaction. She seemed to be seeking something – confirmation, or even validation, of what some part of her knew to be true. An explanation. But Amira had none to give. None that she could give openly, anyway. Lee and Dr. Mercer hovered in the corner of the room, their faces stretched in alarm.
A fetus and a pregnant mother had an undeniable connection in the later stages of pregnancy, physical and even emotional. But not this – not a shared memory, one triggered by the immediate reaction of another. Rozene had recalled, for a fleeting second, the scene in the pool, and Nova had reacted with a memory of her own – as though reading her mind. Something only Amira’s holomentic machines were supposed to be able to do.
While everyone in the room stared at Amira, she turned to the figure who had remained silent – Tony Barlow. He sat in a plush armchair, white knuckles wrapped around a glass of scotch. His usual placid expression had been replaced by something Amira had never seen before, even when they were on a fiery shuttle crashing toward the Earth – fear.
Barlow was afraid. His clear blue, saucer eyes stared at Nova as he took in the reality of his own experiment. The color drained from his face, his limbs unnaturally still. Finally, he turned to Amira. Without a word, they exchanged a silent understanding.
His Tiresia experiment had succeeded – at something. Now they had to work together, for Rozene’s sake and the world’s sake, to understand what he had done.
Flashing lights interrupted the dim gloom of the room. Amira spun around. A siren wailed.