* * *
Knock-knock.
The sound was faint, compared to the drumming of water on my head, although it was enough to interrupt my re-living the events of the afternoon. I expected it would be Mother, as Father had been essentially non-existent over the last few weeks.
A disgruntled huff escaped my lungs, as I turned off the water. It was not a welcome intrusion. Pulling a dry towel from the rack I ruffled it over my hair to take care of the biggest drips, before dragging it across my face and shoulders to secure it around my waist. When I reached out to open the door, I noticed two long bruises running across my chest, a nice yellow-green colour. They were from when I’d hit the ground when Cassie fell, not painful, but Mother would not miss them. I rolled a second towel around my shoulders and let it hang down, covering the worst of the marks.
Perfect.
Releasing the lock on the bathroom door, it swooshed open, to reveal Mother – as expected – standing on the other side.
“Hi,” I said, stepping out of the steamy room, avoiding eye contact with her. I had hoped for a quick exit to my room, but that was obviously not going to happen.
“Hello, Balik. Have you been here long?”
I shrugged. “Maybe twenty minutes.”
“I just ran into Cassie outside the apartment. She was looking for you.”
“Cassie?” I repeated, managing to sound like I didn’t actually know who Mother was talking about.
“She seemed a bit upset, maybe, flustered…”
I looked up to find curious eyes trained on my face. As if she expected this information might mean something to me. Unfortunately, it didn’t – although it did worry me, and I wondered if it might be connected to Cassie’s abrupt disappearance from the park. “Oh,” I said finally, hoping it would be an adequate response.
Mother narrowed her eyes, ever so slightly. She looked like she was straining to hear someone whispering. A moment later, her facial muscles relaxed into her normal, bland expression.
I began walking towards my bedroom. I wouldn’t have thought it possible, but Mother’s behaviour was even stranger than usual. An eerie sense of de ja vu washed through me, as if I should understand more about her reaction, but couldn’t quite put it in context.
“Did you go to the engineering sector to look at the placement details today?” she asked.
I didn’t turn back when I replied. “No, I forgot that was today. I’ll go to the next one.”
Taking a step towards me, Mother appeared at my arm, half blocking my path. She never normally came that close – seeming keen to keep a physical distance between us, as far as possible. But now, her full attention was turned on me like a spotlight.
“You seem to be forgetting a lot of things lately. Yesterday you left your bag at The Clinic, and had to go back. Now this as well, are you feeling OK?”
As she spoke, it was not in her normal, subdued tone; instead it ratcheted higher with each word.
Was it concern…?
It had to be, I told myself. Then, I remembered another time I’d heard someone’s voice get similarly shrill. That hadn’t been concern…it had been fear. Cassie’s voice took on a similar higher cadence when she was scared.
I watched Mother for a few seconds. Her eyes were staring right back at me, as she waited for an answer. “Yes, I’m fine, thank you.” I nodded firmly, reinforcing my words. “I went to the park with Cassie when we finished – I just didn’t think about the placement visit. It gets busy learning all these new things at The Clinic each day – it’s quite different to school.”
Mother smiled slightly, the focus of her eyes changing as she looked at me, as though my words meant something more than they did. The expression sent a shiver rippling down my spine.
Had Mother ever looked at me that way before?
At that, Mother turned away and began walking in the direction of the main living area, although, she did offer some further words as she went. I wasn’t sure if they were supposed to be encouraging, because she sounded dismissive.
“You do not need to worry too much about what you learn at The Clinic, you probably won’t use most of it anyway.”
“Won’t use it?” I repeated. My face compressed around the question in a confused frown.
Mother’s head swung up, her eyes drawing back to me. She looked surprised, as though she hadn’t meant to say what she had, or perhaps that she hadn’t meant it…
“I – er – just – obviously you will use it – I just meant, you will not need it all at once. There will be time for you to keep training after the placement.” Mother’s head twitched minutely as she stammered out a response. The twitch was something I had never seen her do before, and I had certainly never, ever heard her stammer. This was not right.
“Oh,” was all I could say, because my mind was already racing.
What was wrong with Mother, her behaviour was so different?
Or was I changing? Heightened sensory function was a likely side-effect from the gene therapy I had administered…could it be making me more aware than normal?
Yesterday I had guessed that the therapy might have sped up my reaction time when Cassie fell. From hearing a small cracking noise and feeling a slight movement beneath my feet I had already been responding: working out what connected the two things and reaching for Cassie before I was truly conscious of what was happening. Was it just adrenaline heightening my senses, or was it something more permanent…?
“Are you going to speak to Cassie?” Mother asked.
Her question startled me from the confused jumble of thoughts that had invaded my brain.
“Speak to her?”
“Yes. Cassie asked me to tell you to call her, she should be home by now – and she seemed keen to talk to you, she called on the viewing screen a few minutes after I had seen her here.”
I could have kicked myself. Cassie must have called at the apartment whilst I was in the shower. Piecing together Cassie’s strange disappearance from the park, with Mother describing her as upset, and her apparent desire to speak with me… A nervous tremor ran through my stomach. None of that sounded good.
“Yes,” I replied. “Yes I am. I’ll call her now.” I was already heading to my bedroom.
I pulled on a clean day-suit, whilst trying not to panic about what might cause Cassie to behave so oddly. As I rolled the sleeves down over my arms, I realised that if there was something seriously wrong with Cassie, it might begin to flag up on the monitoring systems. Maybe it was connected with the adjustments I’d made to her supplement…?
No. I shook my head, convincing myself it wouldn’t work that quickly…
Dragging my portable screen from my bag, I ran my fingers across the keys and began logging in to the, now familiar, database. Within seconds I was looking at Cassie’s profile for that afternoon. It didn’t look good.
On entering Park 42, she had shown slightly elevated pulse rate and some low-level agitation – not enough to hit the escalation point. Just. But, as she left the park, the scanner showed a huge increase in heart rate and tension. She was also moving at high speed, which had earned a mark in the review column. I tapped in some new instructions and her data returned to the normal level. I was about to scroll forwards, to see if she had passed any other markers between the park and the Green Zone, when something caught my eye.
At the bottom of the screen, Cassie’s scan results from her walk to the park showed a red mark in a column that was normally empty. Swiping the pointer to it, I tapped once to open the link. It took me to a new page – one filled with a large, single rotating image. I stared for a moment, watching the blue curved lines moving on the black screen, before realising what it was: a brain scan.
The first set of scan images was completely normal. Green, red and yellow spots showed specific areas of activity in the brain at the time of the scan. I guessed that some would have been managing physical activity, such as controlling Cassie’s legs and
body as she walked. Another area, which looked like it might be the amygdala, was active at the time. I struggled to recall what that was connected with, but I thought it might be emotional memory.
When the image rotated further to show the frontal lobes, everything went from normal to extraordinary. Two bright points, shone white on the screen, emanating from the frontal lobes. Thin, white threads beneath them showed a neural pathway connecting the two points with the temporal lobe, which also glowed white. This in itself was unique, but the thing that really caught my attention were the wispy, shimmering trails of light, which connected to the frontal lobes, but were stretching outside the scan area…they were linking to something outside the brain.
Whatever was happening to Cassie – giving her these new powers – this was the evidence. The fact that the scan appeared in a column, which directed immediate investigation, suggested that there was something seriously amiss. And that someone, somewhere, was monitoring us for this very thing.
I closed that screen and moved through Cassie’s data, looking for something more. Two pages back, I found it. Another red dot – which I clicked – and a near duplicate scan image, although the white areas were considerably less bright on this one.
The time stamp was today. My blood froze. It was when we had been in the records suite, and Cassie had heard my thoughts. I raced back to the day before, when we had been in Park 42, but found nothing.
Perhaps we had been too far from the scanner to register?
I scrolled forwards now, finding the first scan I’d looked at. The time stamp for the scan this afternoon, was about ten minutes before Cassie had met me in the park.
Could it have been when she saw the woman she had told me about?
I was nodding to myself, agreeing with the likelihood of that guess, when I saw that new data was available on Cassie’s profile. It must have downloaded in the last minute or so, as I looked at the scans. It was the last hour of scans reported across the Family Quarter.
Click.
The new page opened. Nearly every scanner report for Cassie in the last hour had warning flags: heightened adrenaline, erratic pulse rate and red marks, showing abnormal brain activity.
What had happened to her?
Even as I tried to pull together a connection between the scan results and what Cassie might have experienced since she left me, I was removing the abnormal files from Cassie’s data feed. I dropped all the information into a hidden folder on my portable screen, for further investigation, and then cleared off the warning notes from her profile. When I closed down the screen, everything looked normal. Now I needed to speak to Cassie, to find out why it wasn’t.
Activating the viewing screen in my bedroom, I entered Cassie’s details and waited for the call to connect. The screen changed from black to Cassie’s face – in close up – a few seconds later.
“Hi!” She gushed, as soon as she answered the call.
“Err. Hello?”
It sounded like a question. This was not what I was expecting. Cassie sounded giddy and was fidgeting around like an impatient child.
“Did you get the results we wanted from the research streams?”
Search stream…what was she talking about? I must have shown my confusion, because Cassie began explaining.
“I had an idea about that I wanted to talk to you about.”
Cassie’s eyes met mine, through the screen, and I saw then. She was terrified. Looking beyond her face now, I saw that she was in her living room, and that her parents were stood close by. We couldn’t talk with an audience, and Cassie looked desperate to get away.
“You know what – I forgot to get dinner on my way home – can you meet me and we’ll get something together? We can talk about the research then if you like.” I hoped I sounded natural and bright. Something in my stomach felt like a weight, and in that instant I wanted nothing more than to charge into Cassie’s home and rescue her.
Cassie’s eyes closed briefly and I recognised her relief, before she exclaimed “Me too!” with fake excitement. “Let me check if that’s OK.”
She didn’t even have to ask her parents, her father was already answering before she spoke. It sounded like: “No problem – you should go – you have to eat after all.”
Hearing this, I pulled shoes onto my feet. “Shall I meet you at the Green Zone junction?”
“Sure,” Cassie replied cheerfully. “I’ll see you in a couple of minutes.”
Those couple of minutes felt like forever as I paced in tight circles around the junction. The mirrors were beginning to tilt, and shadows between the apartment buildings were growing gradually longer.
Why was it taking so long for her to get here?
I turned in the direction of a soft flapping sound, and saw Cassie racing towards me, suddenly appearing from the shadows. Without a word, she slammed into me – nearly knocking me over – and threw her arms around me.
“What’s wrong?” I demanded, catching her arms and pulling her back. My eyes scoured every inch of her face for some explanation as to what was happening.
I was about to repeat my question – finding no answers in her face – when Cassie shook her head at me. With a gentle nod of her head, she pointed at the freestanding viewing screen, a couple of metres away from us, in the middle of the junction.
I pulled her close, putting my lips to her ear. “We need to go somewhere?”
Cassie bobbed her head in confirmation. I let her go, but took her hand securely in mine and we walked away from the junction.
Leaving the Green Zone behind us we approached the central plaza and passed The Clinic. At the café we had eaten in the night before, Cassie steered me inside and we took two meals out with us. Questions burned my insides, fighting to get out – but I couldn’t say anything until I knew we were safe.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“You know,” she said “We can talk there.”
I nodded and slipped her hand into mine again. We would go back to the park.