A revenant stared at Freya, but it wasn’t a dream, it was only Oliver Karhu. The CTO hadn’t changed his clothes since their meeting yesterday. His eyes were hollow, and he reeked of cigarettes. Freya felt a stab of guilty sympathy. This was her fault. She knew exactly what sleep deprivation felt like.
But Freya hadn’t told Karhu to stay up all night chasing his tail. There was some piece of him that couldn’t let the mystery go. She suspected if he knew the truth, it would be even worse. She made him some coffee, and he accepted it gratefully.
Freya was of little help to him. She hadn’t heard anything from Lassa, and she didn’t know the password to their router. Karhu was polite throughout the process though, under his words, she felt the jagged edges poking through. He asked if he could take their router back to Hiidenkirnu. From his tone he wasn’t asking. Freya couldn’t think of a reason to refuse him. He asked if there were any other computers in the house, and she brought him her old MacBook.
As Karhu booted it up, he had the exact same frown Lassa had had.
This is so slow.
Freya was suddenly certain Lassa had slept with him. It clicked together. When Oliver entered their home, he hadn’t looked around the way someone did when they were in a new place for the first time. There was a bit of additional weight in his voice when he spoke about Lassa. It could be that he was only tired and worried about his colleague, but Freya was certain. There was something alike in them, a brittle and indigestible quality.
Freya couldn’t help but picture the awkward aftermath of that liaison. Lassa drunk and Karhu filled with regret. Both sling-shotting into a deeper loneliness than they could ever have reached on their own. Now, she truly felt sorry for Karhu. Beneath that fastidious mask, the man was desperately unhappy.
As his dull eyes scanned the screen, Freya felt pressure to confess building. She had the answers to all his questions. Not only what was wrong with the computers, but what was wrong with him, an escape from that all-pervading isolation. She knew the piece that was missing from everyone.
She realized it was a great crime to keep Unity to herself. How many people were walking around like Karhu and Lassa, just a frame of skin stretched around an aching emptiness? Why should she and Dan be the only ones? It was a monstrous injustice, yet as she considered it Freya grew afraid.
What if they stole the Starball, and she never felt Unity again? Or what if they joined it? Her eyes narrowed at the thought of having to be so close with someone else, to take on the weight of all their thoughts, to shoulder the burden of their existence.
In a moment of naked terror, Freya wondered what it would be like to be one with Lassa; to plunge into memories that stretched back before the moment of her own conception. All the pain Lassa had borne on Freya’s behalf, all the sacrifice, all the things no one else knew. Freya’s entire life was caught under her mother’s eyes like an amoeba on a slide.
The idea was like an earthquake. Freya felt an unsettling, panicked sense of larger forces that could rip her to pieces. Even as she recoiled from the thought, there were whispers of desire racing in its wake. A vain sense she could have it all, could know herself in a way no one ever had, see every instant of her life from birth in Lassa’s memories. Then she realized it wasn’t only her.
Inside of Lassa was the largest part of Randall that still existed on the Earth. From the instant they met until the day he died, Lassa had it all, an incredible wealth of memories. His greatest joys, his deepest despairs, she knew what it felt like to love him, to hate him, to make love with him and to bear his child. She knew what it felt like to lose him.
Freya had to sit down. Her hands trembled.
It was so wrong! These were things no one should know. Even considering Unity with Lassa felt perverse. There was a vertiginous sense she brushed up against something that could destroy her completely. The idea had a poisonous, forbidden appeal, and the more she thought about it, the more she was certain she could not resist.
Where was Lassa now? What if she was gone forever? What if she’d died? Through all her mother’s antics, there had been a definite undercurrent of I hope she never comes back. Freya had resented Lassa, hated her, hadn’t even been sad when she was gone. Even now, she was only thinking about what she could get from her, like a bank vault full of memories she hoped to plunder.
Karhu had turned to find her sobbing on the couch. His fingers were picking nervously at his tie, his lip trembled with uncertainty.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“Everything,” Freya replied. She’d become a cliché.
Karhu had the good sense to nod but not press further. He went back to Freya’s computer, giving her time to pull herself back together. After a few minutes he turned back, silently checking in with a look of concern. She held up a palm to say she was okay. His face eased in response.
Oliver Karhu seemed so cold and uncaring at the lab. At the verge of exhaustion, his shell had been worn away. All that haughty arrogance flaked off like old paint. Underneath, she suspected Karhu was a decent man.
Was everyone like that?
She felt illuminated by the thought. Unity had touched something fundamental in the way she thought about people. Before she was Dan, she had empathized with the feelings of other people, she’d identified with their struggles, she’d liked them and wanted them to be happy. But buried in her was a thread of selfish suspicion that it was all about her. Other people had seemed slightly unreal, like they were just projections orbiting the true core of everything in some Freya-centric universe.
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
Seeing through Dan’s eyes and existing in his body had shattered that illusion forever. There was a consciousness in him that was totally independent of her, as alien as the Starball. Yet, still, they had become one being.
How was she supposed to talk to other people, knowing they had the same fathomless depths in them? To try and infer all that from these tiny ripples at the surface? It seemed impossible.
Karhu turned to her again, and color rose to her cheeks. She stared too intensely, feeling too much. She gripped the Starball and took a deep breath through her nose, trying to make it through this.
“Well, your computer is slow, but it’s not because of the Ø process. That doesn’t mean much anymore. The infection has changed. Devices aren’t showing the process, but they’re still spitting out traffic I can’t explain.”
Freya was glad he’d given her something technical to think about.
“Where’s it all going?”
“Proxies and addresses belonging to mobile carriers. As near as I can tell, it’s being distributed to a few hundred local cell phones. It’s clearly someone very clever, but what they’re taking makes no sense. None of the data is even classified. We freely share it with research partners.”
“Can you tell me what data it’s stealing?”
Karhu paused. It was likely something he shouldn’t tell her, but he was past the point of caring.
“Most of the files were from our research on Human Serum Albumin. It’s a compound used to deliver nanoparticles past the blood-brain barrier. That’s a big deal because it can eliminate a lot of the side effects from antidepressants. There’s more to it, but I’m only IT. Our scientists can’t understand why someone would bother stealing this particular set of data. It’s mostly preliminary research. The attacker had access to a lot. They ignored some things that are enormously valuable."
Freya reached a cold understanding. The Starball looked for a better way to control them. It had been ineffective during Dan’s panic attack and hadn’t been able to prevent her from sealing it in her locker. She saw Karhu’s eyes settling on her. He’d seen something in her face. She needed to come up with a lie fast.
“Soma,” Freya said.
Karhu blinked.
“In Brave New World, it’s this miracle antidepressant everyone takes. The government sprays it on people when they’re rioting to disperse them. Maybe that’s the idea.”
Karhu nodded his head. It seemed he’d bought it.
“Ah, I don’t read fiction,” he said. Karhu obviously thought her idea was stupid. He closed the lid on her computer. She felt a brief thrill that he hadn’t found her hidden partition. He was probably just too tired, but it felt like she was getting away with something.
When he was through with her laptop, Karhu asked if there were any other computers, and Freya shook her head. Randall’s old laptop was in the garage, but she didn’t like the idea of Karhu touching it, those too-feminine hands on the keys that had been worn glossy by Randall’s big, callused fingers. She wondered why she was having such ugly thoughts. That was the old way, the wrong way. Still, the idea had a resilience to it, and it refused to leave her.
“Will you be all right on your own?” Karhu asked, unaware of her struggle. Freya nodded.
“I’m fine. Are you okay to drive? You look terrible.”
“I hope so,” he said, and he blinked. She’d caught him off guard. “Really, I’ll be fine,” Karhu revised, fingers plucking at his tie. “I’m headed home after this.”
There was an awkward moment where she nearly asked him if he was sleeping with Lassa, but he was just too haggard. To break it, Karhu reached into his computer case and returned her phone to her. She noticed it wasn’t in the signal-blocking sleeve anymore.
“Whatever was on your phone doesn’t seem to be active anymore. Maybe it’s a self-destroying program. I would like to give this back to you in case Lassa tries to get in touch. Can you unlock it and tell me if she’s tried to call you?
“She wouldn’t,” Freya asserted. “But I can check.”
Freya expected the battery to be dead, but Karhu had charged the phone to full. Lassa hadn’t called her, and no one else had either. It was a little embarrassing.
Miss popularity.
There were two new texts. She thumbed to them, hoping they were from Dan, even though he knew her phone was gone. But it wasn’t one of her contacts.
The first text was a picture of a snub-nosed revolver clutched in a man’s hand. In the background was a steering wheel and center console. The phone had been angled down so she couldn’t see out the windshield. The second text read:
<207-431-1033> PAYBACK’S A BITCH
Freya stared at the picture in shock, thinking it couldn’t possibly be real. It must just be Malcolm trying to scare her with a generic photo from the internet. But as she examined it, it seemed like it could be real. She wanted to throw up.
“Mitä helvettiä?” Karhu glanced at her screen. “Is that a joke?”
“No. This guy is stalking me,” Freya said, fighting to keep her voice even. She took a screenshot of the text and sent it to Lynn. She waited a few beats, hoping for an immediate response, but none came.
“The police already know,” Freya said.
“He’s an idiot. They can get a warrant for the location data from that phone and find him very quickly.”
“That’d be nice,” Freya said without any faith that would happen. All she could picture was Officer Martin’s bad eyeliner. “They’re already looking for him. He put Radomir Stich in the hospital.”
“This is the same one? That was days ago. Mother of Christ, what’s wrong with the police? Be very careful. What a terrible time for you to be on your own.”
“I will be. Actually, are you going back through town? Could I ask you for a ride?”
“Of course,” Karhu replied. He looked distraught.
“Thank you, Oliver,” Freya said, and a flicker of surprise crossed his face at her sudden familiarity.
It got awkward, and Freya glanced away, her eyes landing on the ottoman. Freya thought about bringing Randall’s gun with her. But the idea seemed insane. What was she going to do, carry it in her coat pocket? Get into a shootout at the China House Buffet?
She reached into her pocket for the Starball and held tight.