“I don’t think you understand,” Burnham says. “My whole life’s different since the accident. I can’t dive anymore. I can’t meet people without them staring at me, and then when they figure out I’m that guy from Forge, it only gets worse. My old friends, they’re great, but they’re going on with their lives. They have no idea what it’s really like for me now.” He clears his throat. “But this? This fight against Berg. I’m part of this. I belong here. I’m going in with you.”
I glance at Linus, who isn’t saying anything. It’s up to me to explain, I see.
“It’s worse than you know,” I say, and I push my hands into my pockets. “Once I save my parents, I’m going to find a way to stop Berg once and for all.”
“You mean kill him?” Burnham says.
I don’t want to do it, but I don’t see any other answer. I’m not sure exactly when I decided what I had to do, but now I’m filled with quiet certainty.
“You can’t do it,” Burnham says. “Rosie, even if you could, physically, it would eat at you forever.”
“He’s never going to let my parents go,” I say. “There’s no other way. Now you see why you can’t come.”
“But you’re not a killer!” Burnham says. “You’re not that kind of person. What do you think you’re going to do? Knock him over the head? Do you have a gun?” He turns to Linus. “You can’t seriously mean to let her go through with this.”
“I thought I’d do it for her, when the time comes,” Linus says.
I turn to stare at him. I hardly know what to say. It’s the most amazing thing anyone has ever said to me. I can’t let him do it, of course, but I appreciate his willingness.
“Holy crap,” Burnham says. “And the other doctors down there? Do you plan to kill them, too?”
I hadn’t carefully considered them. “No,” I say reluctantly. “I can’t do that.”
“So then, what? They just go on with their research?” Burnham asks. “And what about the dreamers? Are you going to disconnect all of them? Or don’t they matter, either way?”
“Of course they matter,” I say.
“Why? They’re dead already, aren’t they?” Burnham says.
I balk at his bluntness. Arself’s alive, and she comes from the dreamers, so they can’t be truly and completely dead. She’s privy to my thoughts, too, so I need to be careful. Honestly, it hurts me to think of leaving all the dreamers behind, trapped forever in the vault, or until they finally die enough for Whistler to bring them to the incinerator. But what else can I do? I can’t save them all. I can’t save even one of them. The most I can do is save Arself now that she’s in me. I listen in case she wants to surface and say something, but she’s silent still. It seems she decides for herself when she wants to come forward, and this moment doesn’t merit her input.
“The dreamers may be dead individually, but together, they’re something alive,” I say to Burnham. “I’m going to leave them as they are. I’ll report the doctors to the police, or maybe the media, okay? Unless you have a better idea.”
Another salty breeze comes up from the ocean while I wait to see what Burnham can come up with.
“I don’t,” he says finally.
I glance up toward the stars again. “How late is it?”
“It’s nearly four,” Linus says.
“You can’t say anything to Lavinia or Dubbs about killing Berg,” I say to both of them. “As far as they’re concerned, we’re only going back to get Ma and Larry.”
“You could still change your mind,” Burnham says.
Burnham can think that, if he wants. I know otherwise.
“You still want to come?” I ask him.
“I’m coming.”
“Then let’s get some sleep,” I say. “Or at least try.”
Linus opens the door, and we slip back into the quiet of the living room. Without turning on the light, I find my blankets and my pillow near the couch where Dubbs is still sleeping, and I settle in for the rest of the restless night.
24
SEVEN RED POSSIBILITIES
I WAKE THE NEXT DAY feeling slow and stiff, and as I hear voices from the other room and realize I’m the last one up, I feel the chagrin of laziness and missing out. Blankets and pillows are strewn about the living room floor as if no one wanted to disturb me by cleaning up. I step over to Lavinia’s bedroom and peek in the doorway.
On the bed with his back to the headboard, Burnham is typing away on Lavinia’s laptop. Lavinia sits beside him, looking on and holding a bag of lemon drops. The screen reflects on their two pairs of glasses. Linus, in one of the beach chairs, is poking at his phone. Dubbs lounges on the blue rug in a patch of sunshine, stroking Tiny and experimenting with what makes the cat flick her ears.
“Why has Arself come to life now?” Lavinia says. She’s in a periwinkle outfit today, with golden ballet flats. “That’s what I don’t understand. If she can get into Rosie, can she get into other people, too? Maybe she already has, and we just don’t know about it.”
“That’s unlikely. Rosie said Arself essentially infected her while she was being mined,” Linus says without looking up.
“I don’t understand what Arself is,” Dubbs says from the floor. “How can a computer infect someone?”
“She’s a different kind of computer,” Burnham says. “Quantum computers are incredibly fast, and Arself has a biomedical interface that connects her circuits to living tissue in the dreamers. She’s a hybrid organism.” He smiles toward Dubbs, whose doubtful expression makes it clear she isn’t following him. “Think of people who have fake arms that are controlled by their minds. Arself’s a little like that, only backward, like an arm that can think.”
Dubbs looks at her own hand, turning it in the sunlight over the cat. “I wouldn’t like that,” she says.
I smile at her. “No, you wouldn’t.”
Linus lifts his head to meet my gaze. Wordlessly, he smiles at me, and my heart tumbles over.
“Rosie!” Dubbs says. “Come sit here. By me.”
I ease down onto the rug beside her. “Did you eat breakfast?”
“Yes. Bagels.”
I pull my ankles in, sitting pretzel style, and feel the warmth of the sunlight coming in the window.
“Are you calling somebody?” I ask Linus.
“No. Just answering a text from my boss,” he says.
I hadn’t even thought about his job. “Are you missing work?” I ask.
“No. We’re good. We wrapped up our last story earlier this week. Now we’re negotiating for next season. I can check in later.” He puts his phone away.
It sounds important to me, and I feel a bit guilty about keeping him away from Found Missing.
He smiles, shaking his head at me. “Don’t worry about it.”
“Speaking of smart arms,” Lavinia says. “When I was a kid, I remember when researchers connected one rat to another, brain to brain, and the rats could share information on how to get through a maze. That was a big breakthrough. Back then, the most common A.I. was Siri on our phones. Then the Google brain folks had a translator that taught itself how to translate better. Things really took off after that.”
“It’s the biomedical interface that makes the difference,” Burnham says. “The dreamers have a lot of computational power down there. Converted to data storage or digital processing, it has to be massive.”
“What data would they store?” I ask.
“Could be anything,” Burnham says. “Dreams themselves take up loads of computer memory. Remember those strange files we found when we hacked into Berg’s computer system at Forge?”