Something was wrong with the holo.
Since her first visit to this camp five months ago, Theresa had spent weeks, months, watching newsholos. They replayed at night behind her eyelids. This one was subtly wrong. The voice was Miranda’s and words were synchronized with Miranda’s moving lips, but not with her body. No, that wasn’t it. Her body didn’t move very much. That was it. The stiffness of Miranda’s body on certain words, plus her movements on others… the rhythm was wrong. And the rhythms in the words, too… Theresa had perfect pitch. She heard the very slight flattening in the wrong places. The holo had been created, not recorded.
Which meant that Miranda had not given this message. Or these red syringes.
Theresa glanced around. The Liver faces were rapt, almost as if they were watching a Lucid Dreamer concert. There must be subliminals in the holo. She lowered her eyes and listened to the rest of the message without watching the visuals.
If the bonding syringes weren’t from Miranda, then who were they from?
Maybe the same people who made the neuropharm these people had breathed in. The neuropharm that made people so afraid of new things. But why?
Jackson had said that nobody except SuperSleepless could create such neuropharms. Nobody but Miranda Sharifi knew enough about the Cell Cleaner to make something that wouldn’t be destroyed by the Change nanos in everybody’s body. Everybody’s but Theresa’s.
“—be together in a new way, a way that creates community, that roots that community in biology itself—”
Doubt grabbed Theresa. What did she know about “biology itself,” or community, or SuperSleepless? Who was she to decide that this recording wasn’t really Miranda? Theresa was a crazy, fearful, unChanged person who had seizures whenever anything got too unfamiliar, who had left her apartment only three times in the last year, who was afraid to go home because her ex-sister-in-law, who was also her only friend, was looking for her. Theresa didn’t know anything.
Except every recorded detail of the life of Leisha Camden.
And with that realization, Theresa knew what she was going to do.
She stood up just as the recording ended. All around her Livers gazed misty-eyed and smiling at their bonded triads. Without which they would die. Wicked, wicked. It wasn’t bonding, it was bondage.
“Give me the holo cartridge, Josh,” Theresa said as firmly as she could manage. She tried to sound like Leisha Camden when Leisha gave orders. Nobody knew Leisha’s life better than Theresa; nobody knew Leisha herself better.
A hundred misty faces stared at her.
“I’m taking it. I need it. I’ll bring it back.” Leisha, decisively telling Jennifer Sharifi that Sanctuary was wrong. Or Leisha telling Calvin Hawke that his anti-Sleepless movement was finished. Leisha: calm, firm, cool. Theresa started, knees shaky, toward the holostage.
“You leave our Miranda-time holo alone, you!” somebody said.
“I’m sorry. I can’t. I need it.” Theresa reached the terminal. But she wasn’t Theresa, she was Leisha. That was the trick. Be Leisha, feel like her. If Theresa could watch a newsgrid and feel what the mother of a dying unChanged baby felt—could feel like she was that mother—then she could be Leisha Camden. It was no different. No different…
Now people stood up, some milling fearfully in tight groups of three, some starting toward her. Mike hesitated, then he and Josh moved in, dragging Patty with them. Mike’s trowel-shaped head was lowered into his neck, his eyes were terrified. For a second, through her own trembling vision, Theresa saw them all as they must look from the outside: four wide-eyed freaks jittering around each other, smelling of fear. No, don’t think like that, don’t see yourself from the outside, see yourself as Leisha. She was Leisha Camden.
“Don’t stop me.” Theresa quavered. Mike broke stride for a moment, then continued toward her.
“I mean it!”
“Mike,” Patty whimpered, “don’t… you can’t…”
Mike whispered, “She can’t take our holo, her… she can’t have it…” He grabbed Theresa’s arm.
The vertigo started, blackness swooping over her brain. Theresa tried to push the vertigo away—Leisha had never fainted!—along with Mike’s hand. She couldn’t. She wasn’t Leisha, calm and firm and cool, she couldn’t ever be Leisha, that was more self-control than she could ever have. Even though being Leisha had seemed to work for a few minutes, Theresa wasn’t Leisha—
Then be somebody not calm and cool.
“Let go of that fucking holo or I’ll tie you in naval knots!” Theresa yelled, and the words were Cazie’s.
Mike dropped her arm and stared at her.
“Get out of my fucking way!”
Part of the crowd drew back; the rest surged timidly forward. Murmurs rose, within and among triads: “Don’t let her take it, us”… “Stop her, you”… “What right does she got”…
In a minute they would overcome their fear and grab her again. No—grab Cazie. She was Cazie. And these people’s brain chemistry now made them afraid of anything unfamiliar, anything they weren’t used to.
“I’m going to cry!” Theresa screamed at top volume. “I’m going to melt the floor! There is nanotech you’ve never seen that lets me do that, I can do that! All I have to do is sing!” She started singing, some song her nanny used to sing to her, only it was too gentle so she started jumping up and down and then spinning around, screaming the words and then changing them to the kinds of obscenities Cazie used when she was mad at Jackson for not doing what Cazie wanted. “You poor deluded son of a bitch, your vision about reality is so limited you don’t see even a fraction of it, let alone a fraction of me, you lack irony Jackson goddamn it to Liver hell can’t you even see that! You pathetic cosseted baby, you’d think you… get the fuck out of my way!”
They did. The crowd shrank back, and some children started to cry. Triads clutched at each other. Screaming, singing, jumping, cursing, whirling, Theresa moved to the door, the cartridge in her hand, while a hundred people—but there must be ninety-nine, right, or a hundred two—looked at her with the same anxious dread Theresa saw daily in the mirror.
She made it outside just before her own nerve broke.
Still, she was able to stumble to the aircar. “Lift!” she gasped at it. “Home…” and then her breath caught and the seizure started and all she could do while it lasted was try to breathe, the car flying itself away from the Liver camp where no small figures sixty feet below came out of the building to watch her leave.
Just before reaching Manhattan East, Theresa gained control of herself. She leaned back against the seat of the car and tried to think.
She couldn’t go home. Cazie might still be there. She had the car fly to the first large empty place, which turned out to be a deserted scooter-race field, and set down where she could see in all directions. She sat clutching the holo cartridge of Miranda and breathing as evenly and deeply as she could.
What had just happened?
She had been Cazie. It had only been pretending, of course, but she had been able to pretend powerfully enough to hold off her fear for a little while, and behave in a way she never could have otherwise. But how could that be? Holo actors, of course, pretended to be other people all the time, so they could be convincing in stories… but Theresa wasn’t a holo actor. And she certainly wasn’t anything like Cazie. Her brain chemistry was different, was damaged somehow so that she was always afraid and anxious and what Jackson called “severely inhibited in the face of novelty”… Had pretending to be somebody else actually changed her brain chemistry for a few minutes? But how could that be?