“Mom! Mom! No!”
She gets up and stumbles into the kitchen to turn on the coffeemaker. She curses when she finds the can empty and throws it clattering into the sink. The noise shocks her, and she cringes.
Then she struggles into the shower, sluggishly, painfully, as though the muscles that she conditions daily through hard exercise were not there. She turns on the hot water, but it brings no warmth to her shivering body.
Grief descends on her like a heavy weight. She sits down in the shower, curling her body into itself. Water streams down her face so she does not know if there are tears as her body heaves.
She fights the impulse to turn on the Regulator. It’s not time yet. She has to give her body the necessary rest.
The Regulator, a collection of chips and circuitry embedded at the top of her spine, is tied into the limbic system and the major blood vessels into the brain. Like its namesake from mechanical and electrical engineering, it maintains the levels of dopamine, noradrenaline, serotonin, and other chemicals in the brain and in her bloodstream. It filters out the chemicals when there’s an excess and releases them when there’s a deficit.
And it obeys her will.
The implant allows a person control over her basic emotions: fear, disgust, joy, excitement, love. It’s mandatory for law enforcement officers, a way to minimize the effects of emotions on life-or-death decisions, a way to eliminate prejudice and irrationality.
“You have clearance to shoot,” ?the voice in her headset tells her. It’s the voice of her husband, Scott, the head of her department. His voice is completely calm. His Regulator is on.
She sees the head of the man bobbing up and down as he retreats with Jessica. He’s heading for the van parked by the side of the road.
“He’s got other hostages in there,” her husband continues to speak in her ear. “If you don’t shoot, you put the lives of those three other girls and who knows how many other people in danger. This is our best chance.”
The sound of sirens, her backup, is still faint. Too far away.
After what seems an eternity, she manages to stand up in the shower and turn off the water. She towels herself dry and dresses slowly. She tries to think of something, anything, to take her mind off its current track. But nothing works.
She despises the raw state of her mind. Without the Regulator, she feels weak, confused, angry. Waves of despair wash over her, and everything appears in hopeless shades of gray. She wonders why she’s still alive.
It will pass, she thinks. Just a few more minutes.
Back when she had been on the force, she had adhered to the regulation requirement not to leave the Regulator on for more than two hours at a time. There are physiological and psychological risks associated with prolonged use. Some of her fellow officers had also complained about the way the Regulator made them feel robotic, deadened. No excitement from seeing a pretty woman; no thrill at the potential for a car chase; no righteous anger when faced with an act of abuse. Everything had to be deliberate: You decided when to let the adrenaline flow, and just enough to get the job done and not too much to interfere with judgment. But sometimes, they argued, you needed emotions, instinct, intuition.
Her Regulator had been off when she came home that day and recognized the man hiding from the citywide manhunt.
Have I been working too much? she thinks. I don’t know any of her friends. When did Jess meet him? Why didn’t I ask her more questions when she was coming home late every night? Why did I stop for lunch instead of coming home half an hour earlier? There are a thousand things I could have done and should have done and would have done.
Fear and anger and regret are mixed up in her until she cannot tell which is which.
“Engage your Regulator,” her husband’s voice tells her. “You can make the shot.”
Why do I care about the lives of the other girls? she thinks. All I care about is Jess. Even the smallest chance of hurting her is too much.
Can she trust a machine to save her daughter? Should she rely on a machine to steady her shaking hands, to clear her blurry vision, to make a shot without missing?
“Mom, he’s going to let me go later. He won’t hurt me. He just wants to get away from here. Put the gun down!”
Maybe Scott can make a calculus about lives saved and lives put at risk. She won’t. She will not trust a machine.
“It’s okay, baby,” she croaks out. “It’s all going to be okay.”
She does not turn on the Regulator. She does not shoot.
Later, after she had identified the body of Jess—the bodies of all four of the girls had been badly burned when the bomb went off—after she had been disciplined and discharged, after Scott and she had split up, after she had found no solace in alcohol and pills, she did finally find the help she needed: she could leave the Regulator on all the time.
The Regulator deadened the pain, stifled grief, and numbed the ache of loss. It held down the regret, made it possible to pretend to forget. She craved the calmness it brought, the blameless, serene clarity.
She had been wrong to distrust it. That distrust had cost her Jess. She would not make the same mistake again.
Sometimes she thinks of the Regulator as a dependable lover, a comforting presence to lean on. Sometimes she thinks she’s addicted. She does not probe deeply behind these thoughts.
She would have preferred to never have to turn off the Regulator, to never be in a position to repeat her mistake. But even Doctor B balked at that (“Your brain will turn into mush.”). The illegal modifications he did agree to make allow the Regulator to remain on for a maximum of twenty-three hours at a stretch. Then she must take an hour-long break during which she must remain conscious.
And so there’s always this hour in the morning, right as she wakes, when she’s naked and alone with her memories, unshielded from the rush of red-hot hatred (for the man? for herself?) and white-cold rage, and the black, bottomless abyss that she endures as her punishment.
The alarm beeps. She concentrates like a monk in meditation and feels the hum of the Regulator starting up. Relief spreads out from the center of her mind to the very tips of her fingers, the soothing, numbing serenity of a regulated, disciplined mind. To be regulated is to be a regular person.
She stands up, limber, graceful, powerful, ready to hunt.
? ? ?
The Watcher has identified more of the men in the pictures. He’s now in a new motel room, this one more expensive than usual because he feels like he deserves a treat after all he’s been through. Hunching over all day to edit video is hard work.
He pans the cropping rectangle over the video to give it a sense of dynamism and movement. There’s an artistry to this.
He’s amazed how so few people seem to know about the eye implants. There’s something about eyes—so vulnerable, so essential to the way people see the world and themselves—that makes people feel protective and reluctant to invade them. The laws regarding eye modifications are the most stringent, and after a while, people begin to mistake “not permitted” with “not possible.”
They don’t know what they don’t want to know.
All his life, he’s felt that he’s missed some key piece of information, some secret that everyone else seemed to know. He’s intelligent, diligent, but somehow things have not worked out.