Jenny.
Much as he believed in what he was now doing, he had to concede that she would not have approved.
But she wasn’t here.
Finney swiped his tablet screen with two fingers. A red circle appeared in the middle of it. He tapped it. A large “5” replaced the red circle and proceeded into a countdown. At “0” the screen burst into a pixelated riot of multicolored sine waves.
The die was cast.
He couldn’t see it, or hear it, or touch it; but Finney knew that at that moment a pulse of electromagnetic energy was reaching out from his tablet, seeking its brother embedded in the substance of Dr. Wu’s brain—an electronic umbilical cord that would link her thoughts with the tablet, and, by way of the tablet, with him.
A single word flashed on the screen: NOMINAL.
The connection was established.
RITA
Rita perceived a slight tickling sensation inside her skull, as if someone had removed part of the bone and passed the tip of a feather along the surface of her brain.
She pulled her fists away from her eyes. The impulse to cry had disappeared, erased by the tickling feeling, which felt so odd. She touched her left ear and shook her head, as if to clear it away.
But the sensation was gone.
“What was that?” she said.
“Dr. Wu,” Finney said. “You need to operate on Mrs. Sanchez this morning. You can’t cancel the operation. You’re a surgeon.”
And a strange but compelling thought rang through Rita’s head, as if a part of her mind had grabbed a bullhorn and was shouting:
I’ve got to operate on Mrs. Sanchez this morning! Because I’m a surgeon!
Without thinking, she stood up—
(Because I’ve got to operate on Mrs. Sanchez this morning)
—intending to hurry to pre-op to tell Mrs. Sanchez it was time for the operation.
She went ten paces before she stopped.
But.
No.
She shook her head fiercely from side to side.
Where the hell had that stupid idea come from? Operate this morning on Mrs. Sanchez? That didn’t make sense. Any sense at all. She’d already decided to cancel. Operating wouldn’t be safe.
“But … that doesn’t make sense,” she said aloud. “There’s no reason for me to do that.”
It was so hard to push those words out of her mouth, an effort as intense as any of the biggest running races of her life. Which was so strange. She felt like she was trying to move concrete blocks with her tongue. Why was that?
“There’s no reason for me to operate this morning,” she said.
FINNEY
Finney raised his eyebrows and studied the colored displays on his tablet.
Interesting.
And annoying.
She was blocking him.
Her resistance was impressive. He hadn’t expected her to shrug off the embedding so quickly, or with so little effort. Her intellectual discipline—or willpower, whatever you wanted to call it—was formidable. And, he conceded, admirable. In its own way.
The signal strength, the amount of power he was transmitting to her brain, was set to fifty percent, the level that had worked for most of the experimental subjects. He swiped the tablet with his index finger and increased the power level.
He increased it a lot. Not to its maximum, but close.
Admirable or not, he was in control here.
Not she.
RITA
She winced as the tickling sensation reappeared in her brain.
Except now it wasn’t tickling.
It was much more intense—like a buzzing, or a humming, that rattled her head like the wheels of an approaching train shaking its tracks, then vanishing with the same abruptness that had accompanied its arrival.
She felt—
(what the hell had that buzzing been?)
—really, really strange.
She raised her left hand to her left ear, and …
… and in that moment somehow stepped outside herself.
Literally outside myself was her very first, very vivid impression.
But that can’t be, she thought. I can’t literally step outside myself.
Still, there she was, standing in the locker room, staring at herself: Because she now saw another Rita there, as if she’d become a pair of twins. The other Rita was standing about a foot away, holding her gaze.
She raised her hand, thinking that the other Rita would raise hers at the same time, too, like a mirror image; but the other Rita stood there with her arms at her sides, staring back, acting like she was waiting for something.
With the peculiar logic of a dream, all this somehow made perfect sense to Rita.
“What’s happening to me?” Rita asked the other Rita.
The other Rita, her twin, blinked but didn’t answer.
“Am I speaking these words out loud?”
The other Rita said nothing.
She didn’t want to just stand there gawking at herself. So Rita began to pace a slow circle around the other Rita. This also made sense, for no reason other than it just did.
“Is this happening inside my head?”
“Does it matter?” the other Rita replied.
Except the other Rita wasn’t using Rita’s voice.
She was using Finney’s.