“So they didn’t want to tell me what the real crisis was,” I said. “The rogue bacteria or virus that Panos spliced, whatever it is.”
“That is for you to consider,” Arnaud said. “We are scientists. All we are saying is that there are layers here beyond what we are being told.”
“Thank you,” I said. “I suspected, but this confirmation is helpful. Is that everything?”
“One more item,” Kalyani said, taking back the phone and turning it around toward her smiling face. “I wanted to introduce to you my husband, Rahul.” An Indian man with a round, mustached face stepped into view beside her, then waved at me.
I felt a chill.
“I told you that he is a good photographer,” Kalyani said, “but you do not need to use him that way. He is a very clever man. He can do all sorts of things! He knows computers well.”
“I can see him,” I said. “Why can I see him?”
“He’s joined us!” Kalyani said, excited. “Isn’t it wonderful!”
“Very pleased to meet you, Mister Stephen,” Rahul said with a melodic Indian accent. “I will be very helpful, I can promise you.”
“I . . .” I swallowed. “How . . . did you . . .”
“This is bad,” Ivy said from the back seat. “Have you ever manifested an aspect unintentionally?”
“Not since the early days,” I whispered. “And never without researching a new topic first.”
“Man,” Audrey said. “Kalyani gets a husband and I can’t even have a gerbil? Totally unfair.”
I pulled over immediately, not caring about the car that honked beside me as I swerved. As we lurched to a stop I yanked the phone from J.C.’s hand and stared at the new aspect. This was the first time any family member of one of my delusions had appeared to me. It seemed a very dangerous precedent. Another sign that I was losing control.
I hung up, making their smiling faces wink out, then tossed the phone over my shoulder to J.C. Sweating, I pulled the car forward, earning a honk from another car. I took the first off-ramp I saw, veering down into the city.
“You okay?” Dion asked.
“Fine,” I snapped.
I needed a place to go, a place to think. A place that would look natural, but where I could stall and wait for my plan to proceed without Zen getting suspicious. I pulled into a Denny’s. “Just need some food,” I lied. This would work, right? Even a man trying to save the world had to eat.
Dion glanced at me. “You sure you’re—”
“Yes. I just need an omelet.”
17
I held the restaurant door for my aspects, then walked in after them. The place smelled of coffee, and was occupied by the late-morning breakfast crowd, which was perfect. Zen was less likely to try something with so many witnesses. It took some work to get the waitress to give us a table for six; I had to lie and say we were expecting more people. Eventually, we settled down, Dion opposite me and two aspects on either side.
I held up a menu, fingers sticking to syrup on one side, but didn’t read. Instead, I tried to calm my breathing. Sandra hadn’t prepared me for this. The family members of aspects appearing suddenly, without research being done?
“You’re crazy,” a voice whispered across from me. “Like . . . actually crazy.”
I lowered my menu which—I only now realized—I’d been holding upside down. The kid hadn’t touched his.
“No I’m not,” I said. “I’ll give you, I might be a touch insane. But I’m not crazy.”
“They’re the same thing.”
“From your perspective, perhaps,” I said. “I see it differently—but even if we admit that the word applies to me, it applies to you too. The longer I’ve lived, the more I’ve realized everyone is neurotic in their own individual way. I have control of my psychoses. How about you?”
Beside me, Ivy sniffed at my use of the word “control.”
Dion chewed on this, leaning back in his chair. “What do they say my brother did?”
“He claims to have released something. A virus or bacteria of some sort.”
“He wouldn’t have done that,” Dion said immediately. “He wanted to help people. It was the others that were dangerous. They wanted to make weapons.”
“He told you this?”
“Well, no,” Dion admitted. “But, I mean, why else would they try to force him to give up his projects? Why would they watch him so closely? You should be investigating them, not my brother. Their secrets are the dangerous ones.”
“Typical pseudo-intellectual teen liberal prattle,” J.C. said from my right, looking over his menu. “I’ll have the steak and eggs. Rare and runny.”
I nodded absently as the others spoke up. At the very least, the server wouldn’t have reason to complain about us taking up so many seats—seeing as how I’d be ordering five meals. Part of me wished I could have them give the meals to others after I was done imagining my aspects cleaning their plates.
I turned my attention to the menu, and found I wasn’t that hungry. I ordered an omelet anyway, talking to the waitress as the kid dug in his pocket, obviously determined not to let me pay for him. He came out with a few wadded-up bills and ordered a breakfast burrito.
I kept waiting for a beep from my phone, telling me that Wilson had followed my instructions. Nothing came, and I felt myself growing increasingly anxious; I wiped the sweat from my temples with my napkin. My aspects tried to relax me, Tobias chatting about the origin of the pancake as a food, Ivy engaging him and acting very interested.
“What’s that?” I asked, nodding at Dion, who was staring at a little slip of paper he’d found among the wadded-up bills.
He blushed immediately, moving to tuck it away.
I snatched his hand, moving with reflexes I didn’t know I had. Beside me, J.C. nodded appreciatively.
“It’s nothing,” Dion snapped, opening his hand. “Fine. Take it. Idiot.”
I suddenly felt foolish. Panos’s data key wouldn’t be a slip of paper; it would have to be on a flash drive or some other electronic storage medium. I pulled my hand back, reading the piece of paper. 1 Esd 4:41, it read.
“Mom slips them into my pockets when she’s folding laundry,” Dion explained. “Reminders to give up my heathen ways.”
I showed it to the others, frowning. “I don’t recognize that scripture.”
“First Esdras,” Ivy said. “From the Orthodox Bible—it’s a book of Apocrypha that most other sects don’t use. I don’t know that particular verse offhand.”
I looked it up on my phone. “Great is truth,” I read, “and strongest of all.”
Dion shrugged. “I suppose I can agree with that. Even if Mom won’t accept what the truth really is . . .”
I tapped my finger on the table. I felt as if I was close to something. An answer? Or maybe just the right questions to be asking? “Your brother had a data key,” I said, “which would unlock the information stored in his body. Would he have given it to your mother, do you think?”
Ivy watched Dion carefully to see if he reacted to mention of the key. He didn’t have any reaction I could see, and Ivy shook her head. If he was surprised we knew about the key, he was hiding it very well.
“A data key?” Dion asked. “Like what?”
“A thumb drive or something similar.”
“I doubt he’d give anything like that to Mom,” Dion said as our food arrived. “She hates technology and everything to do with it, particularly if she thinks it came from I3. If he’d handed her something like that, she’d have just destroyed it.”
“She gave me quite the cold reception.”
“Well, what did you expect? You’re employed by the company that turned her son away from God.” Dion shook his head. “Mom’s a good person—solid, salt-of-the-earth, Old World stock. But she doesn’t trust technology. To her, work is something you do with your hands. Not this idle staring at computer screens.” He looked away. “I think Panos did what he did to prove something to her, you know?”
“Turning people into mass storage devices?” I asked.
Dion blushed. “That’s just the setup, the work he had to do in order to do the work he wanted.”
“Which was?”
“I . . .”
“Yeah,” Ivy said. “He knows something here. Man, this kid is not good at lying. Take a dominant position, Steve. Push him.”
“Might as well tell me,” I said. “Someone needs to know, Dion. You don’t know that you can trust me, but you have to tell someone. What was your brother trying to do?”
“Disease,” Dion said, looking at his burrito. “He wanted to cure it.”
“Which one?”
“All of it.”
“Lofty goal.”
“Yeah, Panos admitted as much to me. The actual curing wasn’t his job; he saw the delivery method as his part.”