SOPHIE
Sophie could think of approximately ten million things more likely than what David knocked on her door to ask. He might have walked in, sat in her desk chair, and said, Let’s get a pet chinchilla, maybe, or What are the ranks aboard a gravy boat?
She absolutely did not expect him to ask her if she knew where to get a Pilot deactivated.
“Why?” She let all her suspicions drip into her voice. “Is your company going to do a sting?”
He surprised her again by bursting into tears. She had no idea what to do. She racked her brain for any time ever that he’d cried in front of her, but if he’d cried as a kid, it was before she was old enough to remember. And that would have been kid tears, the sort elicited by unfairness or pain or fear of pain or the unfairness of pain, because weren’t those the same thing in some ways? If she cried at unfairness she’d never stop.
If someone cried in the circle, which happened sometimes, someone else grabbed the tissue box from the bar and offered them. She didn’t have tissues in her room and didn’t want to walk away right at this moment, so she opened her top drawer and pulled out one of the unmatched socks that floated between the balled pairs. It had pandas on it, and she kept hoping she’d find its mate again, but in the meantime, snot wouldn’t ruin it.
At least it made David laugh when she offered it. He wiped his eyes on his sleeve, then blew his nose in the panda sock.
“Thanks,” he said. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to do that. I’m just stressed.”
She gave him a hug. He sat in her desk chair, swiveling side to side, and she was standing, so it was a shoulder hug, hard and brief. She tried to think of what to say to sound supportive instead of accusatory. “What are you stressed about?”
He smashed the snotty sock into the side of his head. “I’m done. I want it turned off, taken out, whatever they can do to make it stop.”
She hadn’t expected that, either. “You? The poster boy?”
“I wish people would stop calling me that! I’m sick of it, Soph. It was one thing when it was supposed to save my life, but now it’s making me miserable. I know there’s something wrong with it, even if they tell me there isn’t. There has to be. I need it out of my head. Please.”
The “please” convinced her. It was a broken please, a child’s please, a please she hadn’t heard from him for years and couldn’t remember when she’d ever heard it. Not the night he’d asked for his Pilot. She still remembered that one; it was an everybody’s doing it please, the whine of someone willing to do anything to keep up with his friends, slightly desperate, but not out of options. This sounded different, like he needed real help.
She hesitated, weighing what to tell him. “There’s a place. It’s not like the BNL clinics. They do body mod stuff.”
“Body mod stuff? Not the same.”
“You don’t get to be suspicious if you’re asking for off-the-books surgery. I’ve gone there with people. They’re fully licensed for all kinds of things, and they do stuff most doctors won’t, including Pilot stuff, though most doctors would say it’s proprietary and they don’t want to get near it.” She didn’t say she’d gone with someone from the group who had gotten this weird new anti-facial-recognition thing put under her skin. She’d seen Pilot disconnection on the list of things they did, and had wondered at the time who would go there instead of to BNL. Answer: her brother, maybe.
“Would you go with me?”
He kept surprising her. “Davey, are you sure you’re doing the right thing? I’m the last person to talk someone out of this, but why not do it through the BNL clinic, where they know you and know their product?”
He shook his head. “I don’t want to go back to that clinic. Will you come with me or not?”
Sophie examined her brother’s face. His gaze was steady, his expression hopeful. For all that he’d been through, his emotions still showed so clearly. She wasn’t sure she’d ever been in a position to do him any favor before, or at least no favor bigger than unloading the dishwasher on a night he wanted to go out, or grabbing him a Popsicle when she grabbed one for herself.
She nodded. “Yeah. I’ll go with you.”
“It doesn’t smell like cookies,” David said.
“Is it supposed to?” They sat in a small waiting room in a ramshackle two-story house turned body-mod parlor. They’d taken two buses to get there. It smelled like antiseptic, like hospital, scents Sophie tolerated only because her brother had asked her to do this thing with him. She hated hospitals, but at least this visit wasn’t for her, and it wasn’t a hospital, not exactly.
“The BNL clinics always smell like fresh-baked cookies. I think it’s supposed to make you relax? I always found it forced. Like, hand me a cookie if there are cookies, or don’t make me think about them.”
“Maybe it works better on people whose parents bake? Hmm . . . now I’m thinking about cookies, so thanks a lot.”
They both went back to examining the room and presumably thinking about cookies. David browsed the articles and licenses on the walls. He’d been surprised to find this wasn’t some clandestine operation. Maybe even disappointed? She couldn’t tell. If she were in his shoes, she would want to know that the person working in her head had every available certificate, diploma, license, and credential. The law that had allowed BNL to open minor brain surgery clinics outside the traditional hospital setting had paved the way for places like this to legitimize as well.
“David?” A pink-wigged, blue-scrubbed woman with a Star Trek–style series of bumps embedded in her forehead stood in the doorway to the back room. “You missed a question on the intake form. Do you want the light deactivated as well as the implant?”
Sophie shot the nurse a narrow look; she wished the woman didn’t have a Pilot. “Wait—you can turn off a Pilot without turning off the light?”
The nurse nodded. “A lot of people like that option. The light is superfluous. Branding. Leaving it on gives the impression they still have Pilots, so they don’t face the pressure and questions. We don’t take them out here in either case—that’s a far more invasive surgery than just snipping the leads, with way higher risks.”
A strangled noise died in Sophie’s throat. She looked at David, daring him to keep it. He had already taken advantage of every benefit the stupid implants had to offer; it would be just like him to keep the social cachet that came with the Pilot while deactivating the Pilot itself.
He sat silent for a long minute. Sophie could tell he’d made his decision when his chin lifted right before he spoke. “Turn it off. I don’t need it anymore.”
The nurse made a notation on the form, then held it out to David to initial. “Do you want your friend to come with you?”
“My sister.” He stood, looked at Sophie, gave a shaky smile. “Nah. I’m okay knowing she’s out here. Let’s do this.”
Sophie gave him a thumbs-up, but he’d already turned to follow the nurse, so she grabbed a scrapbook off a corner table and started paging through different mods Dr. Pessoa and her staff had performed, ranging from the subtle to the freaky. She wondered what her moms would think if she came home with a septum piercing or a unicorn horn. She was old enough that it was her choice, and she’d always had a high tolerance for pain, but none of that felt like her thing. Maybe a tattoo someday; that reminded her of the art she used to hide under her bed. She went through the book categorizing mods into “maybe,” “no,” “hell no,” and “whoa.” Some categories overlapped.
She’d never have imagined she would be in a place like this with David. David was the most by-the-book person she knew: a follower of orders, a follower of order in general. She didn’t know if he’d changed and she hadn’t noticed, or if this circumstance was extreme. It felt like the latter.
David returned in less time than she’d expected, a baseball cap pulled low over his eyes. She studied his face. “How do you feel?”
He shrugged. “Massive headache. It was just a local anesthetic, so I’m not too out of it.”
She didn’t push him to say more. He was quiet on the ride home, too, and followed her as they switched buses, like he was trusting her rather than paying attention for himself. He took out his phone and stared at his Pilot app a couple of times. At one point, he reached out and squeezed her hand, and she squeezed back. She tried to imagine what it would be like to have a brother who wasn’t the poster boy for the company she spent her life fighting. Would they be friends? Neither of her moms had siblings, and neither did Gabe, so she didn’t have any models for it other than books and television and movies.
On the second bus, she looked up to see a picture of him in his uniform staring back at them. Real David had his cap pulled low, but at least one person was pretty sure it was him, was poking her friend and whispering. How fast would BNL pick a new spokes-shill? Sophie tried to catch David’s eye, but he had his shut tight.
David sagged into the couch the second they walked in the door. No military bearing; a heap on the couch, hands over his face. His cap fell off his head, and he didn’t bother to retrieve it. He had an adhesive bandage over his shaved temple, but a blue light still shone through it.
Sophie yelped. “You didn’t do it. Why did you make me think you did?”
He dropped his hands to his cheeks and opened one eye. “I did it. This headache tells me so. Look, if you don’t believe me, I can show you the app.” He unlocked his phone and showed her a screen reading: error—make an appointment at your local installation center immediately.
“You told the nurse to turn the light off. I heard you.”
“I changed my mind when I got inside. It makes sense for my job to leave it on. I like my job.”
Rage coursed through her. “What kind of chicken human being hides something like this? If you don’t need it, stand behind that decision. And you’re keeping that job? You got it taken out because you hate it, because it breaks something in your head, but you’re still going to sell it to other people? Do I have that right?”
“I’ve told you before. I don’t hate it. I think it’s good for other people, but it’s not good for me. If turning it off makes my head better, it’s a health thing, right? Why should I lose a good job over that?”
“Never mind. If you don’t get it, I don’t think I can explain it to you.”
She didn’t bother to pull her boots off. She tried not to stomp back to her room. People always accused her of walking off in a huff when all she wanted was to get away from whatever or whoever was frustrating her. Put stairs and a door in between and she could exorcise it without losing her cool completely.
Maybe she’d been hasty in envisioning him joining her cause, coming to meetings, making them a family affair, or near enough, but it truly baffled her how he was still willing to work for them. Even if she accepted his premise that his implant was bad, that the experience was worse for him than for other people, she still didn’t understand how he could make the distinction. He was a mystery to her. Not an enemy, still not a friend. She’d been silly to think otherwise.
Also, she really, really wanted a chocolate chip cookie, but she was not going back downstairs to forage in the kitchen if it meant passing the traitor on the couch.