Page 51 of Middlegame

“The Middleton boy’s minder had to be . . . removed . . . from the program due to a failure to hold his attention,” says Leigh, with a surprising degree of delicacy, at least for her. “I thought you had convinced the girl that her ‘brother’ was a fantasy.”

“Compulsions never stand up to confrontation with reality,” says Reed, dismissing the idea of his culpability with a wave of his hand. “What of the Cheswich girl’s minder?”

“Doing her best, but she’s limited. They’re inherently chaotic creatures, and she channels the opposing force. Once they came together, she was overwhelmed.”

Reed narrows his eyes. “How?”

Leigh shakes her head. “They met by accident, but Middleton tracked Cheswich down after he realized she was on campus. He seemed very invested in getting her to talk to him.”

“Are they still capable of communicating non-verbally?”

“I don’t know.” The admission clearly pains her. “After the amount of time they spent apart, the ability should have atrophied—but we didn’t expect them to be so tightly bonded that the Cheswich girl could call for help after she opened her damn wrists.” She makes no effort to hide her disappointment. A cuckoo that attempted to kill itself was weak, as far as Leigh was concerned: it had no business in the program. Had things been allowed to progress to their natural conclusion, the Cheswich girl would have bled out, the Middleton boy would have died of shock, and that entire generation of cuckoos would have been excised. She could have closed the book on a failed experiment, not been forced to devote time and resources to continuing to monitor their progress.

For Leigh, there is nothing more terrible than a waste of time. Time is the most precious commodity of all.

“Tell your remaining minder to find out. We need all the information we can acquire on how they interact . . . and tell her not to interfere.” Reed folds his hands behind his back, coin still dancing from knuckle to knuckle. “I want to see how they’ll mature without roadblocks. They should be old enough to have fully distinct senses of self; that will keep them from blending into each other to such a degree that they become useless.”

“Sir—”

“Leigh.” He looks at her. This time, there’s no mercy in his eyes. “Have I not been right up until now? Have I not fed you, clothed you, kept you, given you the materials for your own experiments, and covered up the signs of your less . . . savory interests? I could have discarded you as a failed Eve when I found you in that lab, but I took you as my own, testified to your stability before the Congress. I took responsibility for you, and all I’ve ever asked in return is that you obey me without question. Trust me. Believe in me, and I will lead you into the light.”

“I’m sorry.” She ducks her head, that old, not-quite-human motion that presses her chin to her sternum and reveals the extra vertebrae tucked into her neck. “I’ll tell my girl to watch without interfering.”

“Good. Very good. How is your generation?”

Suddenly Leigh is all smiles again. “Good,” she echoes. “Very good. Two of them have abandoned the idea of individual bodies. They treat themselves as a single thought-form entity with four hands and four feet that sometimes needs to be fed. Two more committed a ritualized form of murder-suicide without even needing to be asked. They’re all coming along nicely.”

Reed doesn’t remind her that she’s just described losing two of her subjects as “coming along nicely.” Instead, he looks at her, and says, “I thought you had three pairs. Multiples of three are ritually important.” Roger and Dodger started as one pair out of three, and have outlived their fellows by a matter of years. Of the pairs he created after them, two remain, neither showing their early promise, neither showing their early problems.

“I wish you’d been willing to sign off on twelve,” she says. She shakes her head. “My third pair is good around the lab. They pull their own weight, don’t complain about the chores they’re given. The girl is language, and she’s been translating some of my old workbooks for me—but not for fun. She has to work. She does it dutifully, without complaint, but there’s no joy in it. The boy is math, and he’s the same when I set him jobs that involve measurement or calculation. His work is always perfect. It’s not inspired. I think they didn’t bake properly.”

“You can recycle them if you like.”

This is a rare treat, the opportunity to dismantle something living without needing to justify herself. To his surprise, Leigh says, “Not yet, unless that’s an order. As long as my first pair is around, you won’t authorize a new batch, and they make an interesting control group. One set has become so entangled as to be ritually useless, even if they’re a fascinating puzzle, and a second set has managed to avoid the Doctrine almost entirely. I want to understand why. I’m going to give them another six months, and if they haven’t produced useful results by then, I’m going to set them against each other and see who survives. It will be interesting to see what happens to either set if one of them is killed. I have theories.”

“You always do,” Reed says. “Middleton and Cheswich are the closest we’ve come to the controllable manifest Doctrine. Even her attempts at self-harm have served us; they’ll make him protective, which makes her a lever that can be used. Keep them under watch. If they show signs of entangling further, we may have to intervene. For the time being, we can let them alone. See what they’ll do, given the chance to exist together without external conflicts.”

Leigh frowns. Just a little. More than she usually allows in the presence of her owner and employer. Like all failed experiments, she’s far too aware of what it could mean if she incurs her keeper’s wrath. “All right.” She doesn’t sound pleased. Reed will not punish her for that; flashes of empathy are rare enough from her that he feels inclined to encourage them. Perhaps a bit more empathy would make her a bit less vicious. No less gifted, but . . . less inclined to “accidents” in the lab. “I’ll call Erin with her updated instructions.”

“Very good,” he says. They walk together through the halls of the Congress, away from the old fools who dream of an Impossible City they will never see, and the improbable road has never been more achievable, or closer to hand.

BUCOLIC

Timeline: 17:20 PST, November 16, 2008 (two months at peace).

“When are your parents expecting you?” Dodger is at the far wall, a dry-erase marker in her hand, adding numbers to the columns already there. Her handwriting is surprisingly precise, more like a font processed through a human hand than anything natural; every digit fits into the same amount of space, perfectly matched to its neighbors on either side.

Roger wouldn’t expect anything less. He’s cross-legged on her bed, elbows on his knees. The way she has the room arranged offers no back support; the mystery of her morning yoga classes has been answered. Without them, he’s fairly sure she’d pull a muscle trying to deal with her homework every morning, much less handle the rest of her day. The air smells of marker fumes and cleaning fluid; the single open window can’t clear it all out. Old Bill is on the sill outside, showing with his presence that he could come in if he wanted to, he’s just choosing not to. The sky is gray, and the air tastes of rain, and the world has never been so perfect.

“My flight leaves Sunday morning,” he says patiently. She already has this information: she helped him find the tickets, working some sort of mathematical wizardry to find the best deal for a holiday flight between Berkeley and Cambridge. (Well, San Francisco and Boston: she may be a math wizard, but conjuring airports out of nothing is outside both her skill set and her overall interests. Where would they put it?) “I’ll be gone six days, returning the Saturday after Thanksgiving. You’re still welcome to come, if you want to.”

“And get murdered by my own parents for being an ungrateful child? No, thank you.” She adds another row of figures. “I’ll go home to Palo Alto, and have my father’s deep-fried turkey, and like it. Really. He’s good at things that involve borderline ridiculous amounts of fire. Remember the time zone: I don’t get out of bed before nine, which’ll be noon for you.”

“I remember when you habitually got up at five.”

“Yeah, because you were up and active and eager at eight, and because I had people enforcing a tyrannical and unreasonable bedtime on my growing mind.” She smiles over her shoulder. “I keep different hours now.”

He lifts his head and smiles back. They’re falling more and more into sync lately; not enough that she’s worried the quantum entanglement is getting worse, but enough that she once again truly believes he’d be there to catch her if she fell. (Quantum entanglement is still their best way to describe the situation, despite carefully asked questions directed at the physicists they know. What they’re experiencing is, if not unique in the annals of human history, at the least unusual and bizarre. This has also made them cautious when it comes to looking for additional information. Exploring a strange phenomenon from the comfort of their respective apartments is one thing. Doing it from someone else’s lab is something else altogether.)