And just in time. Nabiki came running back, and I picked up both screens to cover my prying. “You forgot these,” I told her, holding them out to her.
Nabiki looked a little annoyed. “Thanks,” she said.
She was always polite, Nabiki, but I could tell she didn’t really like me.
I felt strange as I linked up with Otto’s screen later that evening. It was an antiquated technology, on its way out even when I was a kid. The technology had been replaced by the cells, which responded to voice cues and used their little holo recorders to make it seem as if you were really there with the person.
It felt as outdated to me as a quill pen would have felt to someone in the Gates era.
I pulled up the keypad on the touch screen, took a deep breath, and began writing. Otto, sorry to bother you. This is Rose.
I waited.
When the reply chimed on my screen, I was almost too nervous to read it. No bother. Wow. Hey. Nice to talk to you.
Yeah, hi. Now that I’d started, I didn’t know how to continue. I thought I’d just say hi. I was glad he couldn’t see the face I made as I realized what an ass I sounded. Sorry. It’s just awkward talking through Nabiki all the time.
It is. I’m glad you thought to write me. This is really . . . wow. This is so sky! Hi!
I really wasn’t expecting this.
I hadn’t been expecting this, either. Otto sounded so friendly compared to his cold stare and Nabiki’s quiet coolness. Sorry.
What for?
Interrupting you, whatever you’re doing.
You aren’t interrupting anything. I really wanted to talk to you, too. It’s just . . .
this would have been the only way, and I couldn’t figure out how to ask. It’s kind of a weird thing to send through someone else. That and most people find this kind of thing too antiquated.
Actually, I do, too.
Really? I’d have thought you of all people had done it before.
Well, I have. But only when I was a kid.
I thought so.
There was a long pause. I didn’t really know what to say next.
Was there a specific reason you wanted to talk to me?
Sort of, I wrote. Dr. Bija was the one who suggested I write to you.
Mina? Isn’t she nice?
I like her. Do you go to see her?
Weekly.
Me too.
I know.
She wouldn’t tell me if you went.
She didn’t tell me. You did. She was in your mind.
Oh. I’m not sure how I feel about that.
Don’t worry. I show no one what I see in other people’s minds. I have a code of ethics about it. As strong as Mina’s. As any doctor’s.
Really?
You have my word. In writing.
I wasn’t sure why I could hear humor in that little written sentence, but I could.
Thanks, I wrote. I wanted to ask you something a little personal, and I didn’t want to go through Nabiki.
Hm. Why not?
I tried to think of something that wouldn’t sound offensive, since I really had no reason to dislike Nabiki. In fact, I thought she was probably very — what was that word they were using now? — very sky, considering her taste in friends. She doesn’t seem to like me very much.
Ah. I’ll have to tell her. She’s not hiding her hostility very well.
Is she trying to?
Desperately.
So she really doesn’t like me?
There was a bit of a pause before he replied. She doesn’t blame you for it. She knows full well it isn’t your fault.
What isn’t my fault?
There was another long pause. She’s jealous, he wrote finally. I was indignant.
Jealous? What on earth for?
Just who you are, I think.
Oi! Tell her for me, she can have it. My whole life. She can have the whole bloody company, the blasted reporters, the stass fatigue, another two years of physical therapy — not to mention all the nightmares! I’d change places with her in a heartbeat.
The moment I sent that message, I regretted it. Sorry, I wrote immediately.
She knows all that. It isn’t that.
Now I was confused. Then what is she jealous of?
I find you interesting, and she finds that unnerving.
I swallowed. Oh.
Yes. It doesn’t happen very often, you see. Most people bore me. Most minds are very simple.
I’m not very smart, I wrote.
It has little to do with intelligence, though I did not see stupidity in your thoughts. No, it’s being willing to think and consider that I find interesting.
Everyone has the ability to broaden their mind, but few people use it.
I didn’t know what to say to that, so I asked another question. Is Nabiki interesting?
Very. She has many layers of thought. Which is why she can feel hostility and sympathy for you at the same time.
How did you two get together? If that isn’t too personal a question.
It’s not. When I first got to Uni, I was in a bad space. I was about as alone as you are, and even more strange. There was a lot of harassment. Nabiki has always been fiercely protective of me, ever since we first knew each other.
Something about that reminded me of a mother lioness. She was so flattered by the thought that she fell in love almost instantly.
Wait, after one compliment?
Well. It’s sort of hard to explain. First, a compliment from me is usually pretty, well, intense. God, that sounds arrogant. But it’s true. I’m weird, and that’s one of the weirdest things about me. And second, Nabiki’s just like that. Everything she feels, she feels wholeheartedly, nothing held back. It was very strange absorbing the thoughts of someone falling in love with me. It was as if a colored rainbow of light came through her mind.
I liked that description of love.
I hadn’t planned on a girlfriend, but it was such a beautiful thought that I found myself warming to it. We’ve been together more than a year now.
That’s a nice story.
Nicer than most of yours, I suspect.
I shrugged, even though he couldn’t see it. True.
Don’t worry. I have plenty more nasty stories than nice ones.
I’m sorry.
I’m not. I can live no one’s life but my own. What was that personal question you wanted to ask me?
Oh. Just the one. What so scared you about my mind?
You don’t want the answer to that question.
I do.
If I could answer it properly, you wouldn’t have to ask it in the first place. I’m not used to having to find words for that sort of thing.
I sagged in disappointment. I’m still asking. Answer any way you can.
It’s your mind, Otto wrote. What do you think I saw?
When you touched me, I just felt confused.
And lonely. And frightened. And lost. And a little resentful.
I’m not resentful toward you.
Not toward me. To some golden statue.
Oh. That’s how I think of Reginald Guillory.
Oh, that’s funny!
A thought struck me. Do you laugh?
Not very well. I sound . . . odd. I tend not to in public.
Why don’t you talk?
I can’t. I’ve tried. There’s a resonance chamber in adult humans that enables speech. Mine is still the same shape as an infant child’s. I can whisper sometimes, if I’m desperate, but it still sounds odd, and people have a hard time understanding it. I know sign language, but it’s useless if others don’t know it, too. It can be really frustrating.
And your expressions? Your skin?
I think, as the heir to UniCorp, you have access to my medical records, if you’d like.
No, that’s okay, I wrote as quickly as I could. Sorry.
I don’t mean to sound rude, Otto wrote. I don’t think much of UniCorp.
I don’t blame you.
I don’t blame you, either.
That was nice to hear. I’m glad. I still want to understand. I wish I knew why I scared you, so this wouldn’t be the only way we could talk.
Fine. Let me think. There was a long pause before the words began again. This is annoying, he finally wrote. It would be so much easier to SHOW you, but if I could show it to you, I wouldn’t have to in the first place, because I’d be in your mind, and the problem wouldn’t have arisen.
That’s ironic, I wrote.
Quite. All right. There is an . . . emptiness in your mind. It’s not lack of intellect, and it isn’t blocks or gaps in memory. Your memory seems solid.
Stronger, in some places, than most people’s. So strong it feels a little like running into speed bumps. I didn’t see much, so bear with me if I say something that offends you.
I doubt there’s anything you could say that would offend me, I told him truthfully.
There’s something about the areas around those speed bumps of strong memory. Either before or after them are vast holes, and I’m afraid to look into them. I feel that what is inside them is dangerous. Some kind of terrible briar might drag me inside, and I’d be trapped forever. But I don’t know why I feel that.
I swallowed. Otto? I wrote. Have you ever gone into stasis?
No, but I plan to, one day. My sisters and brother and I would like to go to Europa after we reach the age of ascension and have the right to do anything we coiting well please.
I smiled at that.
Why do you ask?
Just wondering if that’s what you were seeing.
I doubt it. There’s more than just the one gap.
Well, there was more than just the one stass.
Really? Why more than one stass?
I had to change the subject. You think you’ll get to Europa?
They won’t be able to stop us once we’re twenty- one.
I’m glad you’re human enough that UniCorp can’t own you completely.
They can still make more of us, Otto wrote. We do not even own our own blood.
Prick us, do we not bleed? Not without written permission. UniCorp owns our reproductive rights, too. If we could ever have children, they’d own them as well.
That’s awful!
Yes. But you’re almost as bad off as I am, at the moment. UniCorp owns everything about you as well.
Until I supposedly come to own UniCorp.
If your golden statue will let you.
A terrible sense of foreboding engulfed me. You think he wouldn’t?
I know he likes power. He was extremely affronted when I won the scholarship to Uni. He’s made us all nervous ever since.
When I read that, I felt ill. I tried not to think of my long-lost Young Masters Award.
Of course, I am not truly free, Otto continued. Uni is still run by UniCorp. That was the only reason why I won the lawsuit. The judge decided that any school run by my guardians was the same as any other run by the same, and that if I had the ability to earn the tuition, I should therefore have a choice. Direct legalese quote. There was a pause in his steady stream of letters and then they started again. I have to go. They turn lights out at eleven for the boarders, and Jamal’s my roommate. He complains if I leave my screen running.
Good night, Otto.
Good night, Briar Rose. Write to me again. I still find you interesting.
It was nice talking to Otto. For one thing, writing to him just before I went to bed helped me feel less alone at night. That was the first night in weeks I didn’t have a nightmare. I was perfectly willing to repeat any performance that might keep the horrors at bay.
So I was glad the next day at lunch when Otto threw his deliberate smile at me while Nabiki wasn’t looking. He tapped his notescreen twice and then held up both hands. Ten. I nodded silently.
At ten o’clock that evening, with Zavier keeping my feet warm, I sat down and turned on my notescreen. I hadn’t even had time to open a file before a page linked through. Hello again.
Hello, I wrote. And to what do I owe the pleasure?
I just wanted to talk to you.
What about?
Anything. Everything. I want to ask all the banal questions you never answered for the reporters.
What are you talking about? I did nothing but talk to reporters for days!
Telling them exactly what they wanted to hear. Am I right?
I hesitated. Um, I finally wrote, almost as a joke.
You’re funny. Tell me the truth. What did it feel like to wake up sixty years after you went to sleep?
Stass isn’t exactly sleep, I wrote, avoiding the question. Though it does leave you rested. And there are . . . dreams, for lack of a better term.
They aren’t really dreams?
No, I wrote. It’s more like seeing inside my own head. I frowned. I think it’s a little like what you did when you touched me, only it’s just in my own head.
And most of it takes the form of images — storms, and seas, and lots of colors.
Oh! There was a long pause. Must be pretty spooky, then.
No. Stass chemicals eliminate the fear centers of your nervous system. You can’t feel any fear in stasis. Worry and sadness are partially eliminated, too, since they’re mostly based on fear.
That’s odd.
It was necessary. Before the fear suppressors, people would instinctively panic as their bodies stopped working. It’s a weird process. I mean, your cells stop aging or dividing, and you feel yourself — well — dying. You aren’t, really, but that’s the only comparison your body has. You can only feel it for a second, but before the suppressors, it made getting out of stass extremely unpleasant.
People were frozen in a state of terror for . . . however long they were stassed for. There’s also the claustrophobics, who’d panic even before the stass started, and . . . My knowledge failed me. There’s other reasons. Before they introduced the second load
of chemicals, stass was much too unpleasant to use.
You know a lot about this.
I’ve done a lot of stass.
You make it sound like a drug.
I blinked when I read that. I didn’t reply for so long that Otto wrote, Rose? Still there?
Still here, I wrote. You took me by surprise is all. You’re right. In some ways, I guess it is a little like a drug.
I’m sorry. I just realized that was a bit insensitive of me. I didn’t mean to say I thought you’d been high for sixty years.
Sixty- two, so they tell me, I said. No, it wasn’t a sixty- two year high. More like meditating on my artwork for a really long time.
Did it help your art?
Seems to have. Not that I would have chosen that way of studying. Kind of hard on my relationships. And stass fatigue isn’t much fun.
I can imagine it’s not. How long were you in the hospital?
It should have been three weeks, but they shoved me out after one. The reporters were coming. It was four weeks before they put me in school. I still can’t run the mile.
Now, that I can do. All of us are fine runners. They chose very fit embryos for us. Tristan’s the fastest, though.
I realized he was changing the subject for me, and I took it gratefully. Tristan?
Tristan Twice. My sister.
That’s an unusual name.
32. We all figured out names based on our embryonic numbers.
How did you end up with Otto, then?
It’s technically Octavius on my court records. It kind of degenerated. Octavius Sextus. Better than 86, I think.
Court records?
Yeah. We fought for real names.
When did you do that?
There was a longer pause than I would have thought he needed for such an innocuous question. When we were thirteen, Otto wrote.
Why not before?
That was — then he didn’t write anything for a long time — when we started to die, he finished.
I’m so sorry. You don’t have to go on.
There was another pause. No, it’s fine, Otto wrote. I thought it would be hard for me, but actually this form of communication seems to be coming in handy.
I forget how intense thinking everything at people is. I can’t tell people about it the way I normally talk to people. I choke up. Even with Nabiki. But this isn’t bothering me much. Oddly.
Well, that’s good. I guess.
Yeah. Weird. Okay. There were thirty- four of us at first. We lost half a dozen from unexpected complications during childhood, mostly early, before five. But when we reached puberty, we started dropping like flies. Sixteen of us died within eight months, seven who weren’t simple. Including my best friend. She was called 42.
So what happened? What made you choose names?
It was Una. Una Prime. 11. She was pretty sure she was going to die. Of course, I was pretty sure I was, too. It was the ones who can do what I do who died the fastest.
You mean with the mind reading?
Yeah. There were more of us who could than not, when we were all kids. Then things started to fall apart inside. Some of them went mad before they died.
Some got massive brain hemorrhages, bled out. That’s what happened to 42.
We were all scared. Particularly Una. She did die, as it turned out. There’s only me and Tristan now. We’re the only ones who aren’t simple and who can share thoughts who made it. There was a pause. Well, made it so far. No one’s really sure of our life span.
Oh, God. You’re scaring me.
Me too. I’m used to it by now. But Una Prime was afraid to die and have only Eleven on her tomb. So those of us who were left chose names. Apart from me, only Tristan, Penny, and Quin made it this far. The simple ones still go by numbers.
Who are Penny and Quin?
Pen Ultima is my other sister. She was 99. And Quint Essential is my brother.
He was 50. Quin can talk. You should meet him. He’s funny.
I’d like to meet your family. Did you always think of yourselves as family?
Yes. But we weren’t of ficially brothers and sisters until we took names. Una wanted family to preside at her funeral, so we actually sent it through a judge and adopted one another. Now we’re siblings with inheritance rights and everything, so if we die (presuming we’re free by then), UniCorp won’t get our property. Anything we own will go to one another. It always bothered me that 42 died before we did that. Feels like she died alone.
Aren’t you, like, really related?
Not really. We all have different mothers and different DNA inserted from different microbes. Well, the same microbe, as in genus, but different individual ones. I think they were hoping we’d try to breed among ourselves.
Too weird, though. We just don’t see one another that way. We’ve always been together. Well, until I went to school.
Something about that struck a chord in me. The memory of the Young Masters Scholarship still haunted me. It would have been hard to accept it and leave Mom and Daddy. I wasn’t sure I could have accepted. Rather than open that can of worms, I asked Otto, Does your family resent you for going to Uni?
No. All four of us tried. We knew only one of us had a chance at getting in.
Quin found out about the scholarship program from his tutor. He had a different tutor from us because he can talk. Tristan and I used to share one.
We needed someone trained in psychology, because our communication is so
— here he paused for a moment before continuing to write — different. Penny’s tutor is deaf, because Penny can only communicate though sign. And writing, like this. Unless I’m with her, of course. Then I can translate.
That must be weird.
You should see it when Guillory comes to check on our progress! Tristan and I refuse to touch him, and he won’t learn sign, so Quin does all the talking. And as I said, Quin has a sense of humor. You should see the look on Guillory’s face! Quin has been known to strut up and down making beep, beep noises, just to freak him out.
You’ve got me laughing, I wrote. Thanks. I don’t laugh much.
I’ve noticed that about you, Otto wrote.
I’m glad I’m not the only one you refuse to touch, I wrote. Though I’m a little chagrined that my companion is Guillory.
There are thousands I refuse to touch, Otto told me. You are far from alone.
Does everyone else scare you?
Most people bore me, or disturb me. Most people’s minds aren’t pleasant places to be in.
I sighed. Not surprised you don’t want to touch me, then.
I do, actually, he wrote. Only I fear it. It’s annoying. I’ve never been faced with this problem before. After living most of my life on a biological death row, there isn’t much that scares me. There was a bit of a pause before he said, So I’m glad you keep linking me. This is nice.
It is, I wrote. It was. Did you tell Dr. Bija you wanted to talk with me?
Of course. I can’t lie very well, and if I’m feeling open, I don’t hide things very well, either.
What does Dr. Bija think about me?
Here we go again. She doesn’t think about you or any of her other clients when I’m with her, and if she does accidentally, I avoid the thought and don’t read it.
It takes a lot of trust on her part, but she’s sincere. It’s kind of like being in a room with classified documents, and you’ve sworn you won’t read any of the ones that aren’t thrust under your nose. Keep your eyes straight ahead, and don’t pay attention to the rest of the room.
Oh. I didn’t mean to try to breach your code of ethics. I was only kind of hoping I could see how other people see me.
I can say how I see you, Otto wrote.
I was a little afraid to hear it, but I wrote, Okay.
You’re very quiet. You talk more with me than I ever see you do in school. He was right. I think I wrote more with him than I even spoke to Bren or Dr. Bija.
You seem sad to me, he went on. Your eyes are dark, and I’m not just talking about the deep tea of their tone. Hm. Otto had an eye for color. You’re diligent in your art; you’re always drawing. It seems to be very important to you. A kind of outlet. More than a hobby, I think.
You’re right, I wrote, volunteering information, since he’d said so much about himself. I use it to understand things.
You have trouble understanding things?
Yes. I’ve always felt like a bit of an outsider, even before all this. Drawing helps.
That’s good. Let me think. What else? Well, personally, I worry about you. You don’t complain, even though I can tell you hate just about everything about school. It makes me wonder if something’s happened to you. Of course, everyone agrees skipping some sixty years is bound to mess you up a bit.
So everyone sees me as messed up? Great.
Of course they do. Most of them are wrong about how, though, I think.
According to gossip (which I do not hold as sacred as I do people’s thoughts), most people think you wanted to be stassed and that you just wanted to be the center of attention and the dowager to UniCorp. Most people think you have an eating disorder because you’re keen on staying beautiful.
I look like a skeleton.
I think so, too, and I keep watching you try to eat.
It’s stass fatigue.
Ooh. I’m sorry.
Lots of things don’t work in me right. All my organs are protesting being dormant so long. They tell me they put little nanobots inside me, to keep my kidneys functioning and my heart happy.
Quin’s got some of those, Otto said. They hope to take them out when he’s old enough. Probably around our emancipation.
When will that be?
Twenty- one.
Why does he need maintenance nanos?
We were dying. They did try to keep us alive. Half the simple ones needed maintenance, too. Especially since they can’t really tell anyone when they’re hurting.
Is their life very hard?
They try to keep them happy. We visit for an hour or so on the weekends. They like us, particularly me and Tristan, because we can show them pretty mind pictures and stuff. A pause. Lights out. Jamal’s being a sped.
Okay. Good night.
Good night, Briar Rose.
I smiled. I was starting to like being called Briar Rose.