Juliet lay on her couch admiring her work. She’d given in to her urge to see if she could purposefully alter what she’d seen in her true-dream. To that end, after painting the wall black, instead of painting a view of the Jovian System with Jupiter looming large, she’d painted a campfire illuminating tall pine trees and, beyond them, the night sky, speckled with stars.
She’d worked on the artwork over the last couple of days between trips to the gym and the “learning center,” where she’d tuned out interactive vids about WBD’s corporate culture. It wasn’t so bad when she could play games, listen to music, or watch vids, knowing Angel would pass the exams for her after each lesson. “One down,” she subvocalized.
“Well, unless something forces you to change the art, I suppose it’s safe to say that your true-dreams aren’t written in stone.”
“You thought as much—glimpses into possible timelines, realities, or some such.” Before Angel could correct her likely misused terms, Juliet added, “It was different, anyway. It was the first time I saw myself in the true-dream; I felt like I was looking through Harriet’s eyes, and the Juliet I saw looked genuinely happy—lying on this couch, reading a paperback, with a lot more piled nearby. So far, Kline has gotten me two real paperbacks, one of which is a fanfic—a romance novel based on a fantasy!”
“Maybe there’s more to come—”
“Not if I can help it. We need to make something happen, Angel. We need to find out what happened to the rest of the team. For all we know, they’ve got Tanaka and Frida by now. What if they connected me to the Kowashi somehow?”
“Or worse,” Angel replied, voice hushed. “What if your friends get themselves into trouble trying to find you?”
“Exactly! So? Can we put Daisy to work yet?”
“I’m close, Juliet! She’s passing my test scenarios ninety percent of the time.”
Juliet groaned and flopped onto her side, staring at the back of the couch. “I’d bet a million Sol-bits your test scenarios are tougher than the real thing.”
“Possibly, but I don’t want to ruin everything with a misstep. You seem to be in the clear for now; no new scan scheduled yet, your upcoming appointment with Doctor Chen was canceled, and—”
“And we don’t know what else is waiting around the corner. We don’t know who else might be inches from death.”
“I know, Juliet. Just think of the setback we’d face if they discovered Daisy, though. It would make a couple more days of testing seem like the blink of an eye. We may never get another chance; if they figure out you somehow hacked your deck and created a daemon like Daisy, they’d have you on total lockdown, maybe literally locked down into a chair. That’s if they didn’t just execute you. You know Kline’s project is seen as redundant by now.”
“Yeah, thanks to Montclair taking my . . .” Juliet trailed off, choosing not to think about it. “I wonder what happened with Grossman. I mean the listener.”
“Perhaps he’s biding his time, choosing the best moment to act.”
Juliet nodded and closed her eyes, letting her mind drift momentarily. She was worried about her friends. She desperately wanted to know what happened to Dora and the others. Thinking of them brought her thoughts around to Ghoul, and she said, “You don’t suppose they did anything to Ghoul, do you?”
“I don’t see what they’d gain from it.”
“Leverage? I mean, if they knew we still cared about each other . . .” Again, Juliet trailed off, not sure what to think.
“We haven’t really spoken about that,” Angel said softly, “about how you parted. You said you weren’t sure what it meant and wanted to think about it, but then WBD took you.”
“I was emotional. She was emotional. We’d both pushed a lot of feelings down, and when I saw her—when we were hugging—it felt good, like I’d reconciled with someone I thought I’d lost. I don’t know if it means anything more than that. It was a kiss, Angel. We’re not married. Besides, what does it matter? I’m God-knows-where, and she told me she can’t leave her sister and niece. She doesn’t need this kind of trouble in her life.”
“True. I suppose it wasn’t the first time you’ve kissed anyone.” Angel’s conciliatory tone made Juliet snort; she’d completely stopped bothering Juliet about her “love life” since her little fling with Jensen. As she lay there, waiting for her next exercise outing, she thought about Jensen, wondering where he’d gone. It was funny to her that she still thought of him as Jensen, even knowing his handle and part of his real name.
“First impressions really do matter.”
“Hmm?”
“Nothing.” Juliet glanced at the clock, saw she only had to wait five more minutes, and stood to stretch. “Do you think they listened to my request?”
“To lower the pool’s temp?”
“Yeah.” Juliet had asked Harriet if they could turn the heat off in the pool. She wanted to use the lattice while she swam. She wanted to try to reach further and see if she could pick up any new clues. Angel had been the one to suggest colder water, and Juliet thought it was the perfect idea. She was still stretching a few minutes later when the door beeped. She looked up and called out, “Come in.”
A moment later, Harriet stood in the opening, and though she smiled, it seemed a little reserved. “Ready to go, aren’t you?”
“I’m not gonna lie, Harriet; I’m feeling a little cooped up.”
“Well, thanks to the problem with the security forces assigned to our project, your schedule is pretty clear this week. That means more time in the gym if you want it.”
“Oh, I want it.” Juliet followed her out, past the four guards stationed outside. Two wore red armbands, and two wore yellow ones, and Juliet wondered if that had something to do with whatever loyalty testing they had going on. One of each type of armband walked behind them until they entered the other part of “Juliet’s suite,” as Harriet had dubbed the set of rooms—Chen’s lounge, the “classroom,” and the gym.
The guards took up positions outside the gym, and as soon as the door closed, Juliet asked, “What’s the deal with the armbands?”
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“I wish I knew. Things have been very strange the last couple of days. I heard they fired something like forty security personnel and brought in some specialists, so maybe that’s what the armbands signify. They don’t really talk to us.”
“Seriously? Forty?” She saw Harriet’s pained expression and knew exactly what it meant: She was worried that revealing that fact to Juliet would get her into trouble. The information only spurred Juliet’s interest in the pool, however. She was eager to try to fish some information from any minds she could find while swimming.
“Yes, seriously. By the way, did Kline stop to see you last night?”
“Just briefly. He came to apologize for the interruption in my therapy, but honestly, I’m not looking forward to meeting with Doctor Chen.” Juliet decided to push her boundaries just a little by adding, “She’s a little scary.” While she waited for Harriet’s response, she moved over to the pool and gingerly placed her foot on the first step.
“She—”
The water was cold, and Juliet couldn’t help but interrupt Harriet. “Oh, thank you, Harriet! I should be a lot more comfortable swimming without the heated water.”
Harriet smiled hesitantly, then nodded. “Oh, I’m glad. Anyway, don’t worry about Doctor Chen. She’s intense, but she’s very talented. I think you’ll grow to like her.”
“Not if I can help it,” Juliet subvocalized while she checked to ensure her data deck and cable were safely tucked under the skin-tight fabric of her bodysuit’s sleeve. Aloud, she said, “Talk to you in a while.”
She dove into the water, thankful for the bodysuit’s wetsuit-like ability to dull the sudden chill. Once she was submerged and the cold started to soak into the material, it lost that insulative property, but it didn’t matter. Juliet was already swimming with forceful strokes, pushing against the pool's current, humming with the rhythm of her breaths. She’d learned that with her Cybergen lungs, she could swim hard, taking a breath only every seven or nine strokes, without ever feeling winded. She liked counting to an odd number of strokes because then she’d alternate turning her head left and right for her breaths.
She got so involved in her breathing that it took a nudge from Angel to remind her to get busy: “I’m not seeing any lattice activity.”
“Right, boss. On it.” With that, Juliet lost herself in the zone and began to let her mind drift. Over the last couple of days, she’d been pushing herself as far as she could before Angel said her temp was climbing, and Juliet was beginning to think there was a vague, almost ethereal sense of direction to her probing. She swore she could tell if her mental reach was drifting down or climbing, and she thought she could tell if she veered off in different directions.
The first time she’d suspected that there was some intention to her drifting was the day before when she’d listened to a man cursing his supervisor vehemently. She’d let her mind drift away from him, and a bit later, when she’d pulled her attention back “toward” herself, she’d heard him again. Because peoples’ thoughts were her only landmarks in that strange mental landscape, she realized she could use two different minds as waypoints, and she’d just begun to test that theory when Angel had pulled her out of it.
Now, she was trying again. When she listened, Juliet lost track of everything, even her AUI, so she had no idea how long she worked at it, but after a while, she was certain her hypothesis was correct. She could drift, with intention, between three different, nearby voices—Harriet’s, a corpo-sec officer daydreaming about his best friend’s wife, and a woman a little further away, concentrating on installing a new air scrubber while worrying about her son, who’d gotten a second red frowny-face, from his corpo-daycare instructor, in a row.
What Juliet found strange about her newfound ability to “drift” from mind to mind was that she had no idea how she did it. It wasn’t like flexing a muscle or stretching an invisible limb out through the air. It was more like floating and gliding in the direction she “looked.” It struck Juliet that today, she’d been “moving,” and before that, she’d been “listening.” Her first “sense” in the strange thought-space had been her hearing. She’d heard voices, and, at first, she’d had trouble not hearing them. As she’d gained more and more control of that, she’d learned to direct her listening by imagining a portal through a person’s eyes. Was that her mind trying to make sense of this ability?
If her mind was subconsciously trying to learn to control what she could do, first with sound, then direction, and now, this new ability to float where she wanted, could she learn even more control? Juliet was currently near Harriet’s thought-space. She’d just been listening to her, but she could feel the direction she’d need to “float” to return to the corpo-sec officer’s thought-space. If she knew what direction it was in, shouldn’t she be able to look that way? As suddenly as she had the thought, Juliet’s mental image of a black void burst with light—the birth of a galaxy of glowing, tangled thought threads that were the corpo-sec officer’s mind.
Juliet “looked” back toward Harriet, and there was her shimmering, glowing mind, bursting with energetic tangles—memories, dreams, conscious and subconscious thoughts. Juliet turned toward the woman, the one worrying about her child, and another galaxy of thoughts burst into being. Juliet felt like weeping, and she knew if she weren’t struggling to swim against a stiff current, she would be sobbing at the beauty of it. She turned back to Harriet’s mind, then the guard’s, and each time, she noticed more differences between each tangle of thought. They all had a particular character, like a person’s iris—utterly, fabulously unique.
The more she embraced her newfound visualization, the more real it seemed, and the more Juliet believed it was real, that she could drift through the void of “mental space” and look around, seeing the knots of glowing thoughts that represented other people’s minds. As she gained that spatial awareness and looked between the minds of Harriet, the corpo-sec guard, and the other woman, Juliet felt like she’d been blind and someone had just installed her first ocular implants.
Juliet used her “ears” to find more nearby thoughts, and then she “looked” that way, and more and more tangles of glowing thread began to populate the void. Each discovery felt easier than the last, and she lost count as first a dozen, then a hundred, and then thousands began to fill the space around her. She was stunned by the visualization. She felt like she was drifting through intergalactic space, and all around her were brilliant, busy galaxies floating in the vast, endless void. “Angel . . .” she grunted into the water, her arms falling limp as she drifted, allowing the pool to push her toward the shallow end.
At the same time, Angel said, “Juliet . . .” She didn’t say anything more, and Juliet could feel her sharing her wonder. What must she be thinking? Could Angel see what she was witnessing? If not, she could surely feel it.
“I-I, um . . .” Some part of Juliet was aware that she was still face-down in the pool, floating, but most of her was utterly flabbergasted by what she was witnessing. She couldn’t help herself from picking a random, distant mind, floating toward it, and then listening to the thoughts just to confirm she hadn’t gone mad. A man’s voice came to her, deep and jolly. Two more hours ‘til quitting time. Three more days, then off this bucket and back to Ursula! An image floated through Juliet’s mind—a sturdy, middle-aged woman with silky black hair, bright red lips, and cheeks that scrunched into rosy apples when she laughed.
Juliet heard herself laugh into the water as she pulled away from the cluster of yellow, golden thoughts and scanned the thousands of mind clusters, wondering where to go next. Paralyzed by the myriad choices, she stared, taking more and more in. Something odd caught her eye, a lopsided cluster, oblong and bright on one end, dim on the other. It was strange because while every other cluster she’d seen was unique, they were all roughly spherical. Juliet stared at the oddly shaped bundle of thoughts and drifted toward it, intent on seeing what made it so different.
“. . .Juliet!” Harriet’s voice broke through her concentration, and Juliet opened her eyes, blinking into the water. She lifted her head and blew out her breath, instantly heaving for a new one—her lungs had plenty of stored-up oxygen, but they still made her gasp reflexively, restocking their reserves. “Are you okay?” Harriet stood in the shallow water, a hand on her shoulder.
“Oh man, I’m so sorry, Harriet!” Juliet tried to think fast, but her mind was still reeling from the breakthrough she’d just had. Had she been outside of her body? Was “she” not bound by her mind and flesh? Or was she just pushing her senses around, outside of herself? It was such a strange, magical thing, and she knew Angel was flummoxed also; she could feel her trying to make sense of all the feelings she’d just gone through.
“What happened?” Harriet asked when Juliet didn’t speak further.
“Oh, um, I just realized I must have done something to my lungs! How can I hold my breath for so long? Sorry if I scared you; I should have said something before trying to test it.”
“Yeah, well, they can’t get mad at me for confirming the obvious, can they?” Harriet smiled and nodded, shrugging helplessly. “You have some nice lung upgrades. They’re not synthetic; they’re full-on cybernetic.” She backed up the steps and sat on the edge. “Too cold for me!”
Juliet smiled and stood, not at all surprised to see steam drift away from her bodysuit; she was hot. “Well, I sure warmed up swimming like that! This temp is great for a hard workout.” She glanced at her clock, saw her exercise hour was almost up, and subvocalized, “Angel, are you okay?”
“I’m fine, Juliet, just savoring those feelings we had a minute ago. Will you tell me about what happened?”
“Of course! As soon as we’re back.” Juliet started climbing out of the pool, then looked at Harriet and asked, “Hey, think I could swim again this afternoon? I was just wondering since most of my other stuff was canceled.”
“I’ll message Kline. I’m sure it'll be fine after we check in for lunch and I do my reports. You’re not tired?”
“Not really. I don’t know, Harriet, I just love swimming! I never used to like it this much, but I feel like I can just totally zone out and float away, you know?”
“Like all your troubles just melt away?” Harriet looked down, her pursed lips lifting at the corners.
“Does that mean something to you?” Juliet asked, nudging her with an elbow as they stepped into the hallway and past their waiting escort.
“Yeah, it does. I get that way when I game. Sometimes I lose out on sleep ‘cause I’m busy escaping reality, you know? Oof! Juliet! I keep forgetting to remain professional with you! Now Kline’s AI will tell him about my poor sleeping habits.” At first, Juliet thought she was really upset, but when she looked at Harriet with alarm, she saw that her smile had grown, and there was a spark in her eyes. Was she teasing her? Making fun of Kline?
“Well,” Juliet said, trying to sound chagrined, “I appreciate your efforts to make me feel better, Harriet. I recognize you’re trying to relate to me, and I hope you don’t get into any trouble for being a talented caretaker.”
“Caretaker?” Harriet narrowed her eyes as though trying the word on for size. “I guess that fits.”
They were already approaching the door to Harriet’s lab, where the other two guards waited, and Juliet immediately noticed it was already open. She felt dread when she saw that open door, and something inside her screamed, “DANGER.” She slowed her pace, coming to a stop, and Harriet noticed, also slowing.
“Something wrong?”
“I think someone’s there,” Juliet nodded toward the open door just as it began to snick closed.
Harriet looked at the guard with the red armband. “Who’s here?”
In a voice that reminded Juliet of Athena’s mechs, utterly devoid of human inflection, he said, “Vice President Montclair is waiting.”