“Well, someone had to. I realized that you were going to get at the truth sooner or later. Since you wouldn’t have listened to me at the time, I had to get your attention in some way or another.”
“I’m not sure I’ve gotten to the truth yet.”
“I knew you’d say something like that.”
“How did you know I was here?”
“You talked to Daddy’s AI, and then when you didn’t leave campus I made the clever deduction.”
“You didn’t answer the question.”
A buzzer went off.
“Time for me to change solutions,” said Barbara, stepping to a long lab bench that ran the length of the eighty-foot room.
I watched her weigh some chemicals on a microscale and mix some solutions in a couple of beakers. The way she handled the equipment I could tell that she was no novice in the lab.
“You didn’t answer my question,” I prompted.
“I monitor the institute’s security system from here. I spotted your car. Nice one, by the way. You have a carbon signature even a blind Yoobie scientist could detect. And this morning I saw the Yoobie agent. Yoobie agents always trigger the alarms.”
“You knew the AI called me?”
“I told it to.”
I watched as Barbara used a micropipette to pour drops of solution into a matrix of tiny wells in a large plate.
An idea suddenly struck me. “It was you, not Kirst. You’re the one who made the discovery,” I said. She’d probably spent her entire childhood in a laboratory. What else was there to do for a smart young person who couldn’t mingle in society because she didn’t officially exist? “You came up with the link between genes and emotions and intelligence, didn’t you? Arden took credit, but you’re responsible for it. Right?”
“You can hardly blame him for taking credit. He couldn’t tell them about me, could he?”
“Who killed Arden Kirst?”
Barbara frowned. “He did.” She peeled latex gloves from her hands. “I need to let these experiments cook for a while. In the meantime, how about we go somewhere and talk?”
“What happened to your father?”
“The drug has a few side effects,” said Barbara, with little emotion. “My father became addicted to a psychological state called dysphoria.”
I was astounded when she lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply.
We were sitting in a small room with Spartan furnishings. Three chairs—two with cushions—a ratty sofa, and a folding table. She’d offered me the sofa but I sat down in one of the cushioned chairs, and she took the other.
She saw me staring at the cigarette. “I know it’s a vice. But tobacco relaxes me like nothing else.”
“Where did you get it? I thought Yoobie sprayed tobacco plants into extinction.”
“There’s probably a lot you don’t know about Yoobie. But everybody knows how incompetent they are. Idiots! Their response to any problem is to banish the symptom—they attack the result of the problem, not the cause. They ban tobacco, guns, junk food, red meat, drugs, nukes, carbon dioxide, and they’d ban alcohol too if they didn’t make a fortune in tax revenue on Yoobie beer. Not only have they failed to solve problems, they’ve managed to make almost everyone in the country a criminal.”
The air in the room began to smell acrid. I made a face.
Barbara waved the smoke away. “Don’t worry, the air scrubbers will kick in and save your virgin lungs.”
“Tell me what I don’t know about Yoobie.”
She took another puff. “I thought you wanted to hear about Daddy. And the drug.”
“Let’s start there, then. What exactly is dysphoria?”
“The opposite of euphoria. Dysphoria is unhappiness.”
“I know what the word means. But I thought you said Arden was addicted to it.”
“He was.”
I waited for her to continue, but she sat silently and smoked.
“How could someone get addicted to dysphoria?” I asked. “Euphoria addiction I can understand, but no one likes dysphoria.”
“Are you sure about that? Haven’t you heard people say that they felt better after a ‘good’ cry? Don’t a lot of people like sad movies? Aren’t there people who don’t seem to be happy unless they have something to complain about?”
“I guess, but that’s not the same as being addicted to it.”
“It’s the drug. It creates emotional links in order to enhance intelligence. Sometimes the connections lead to new insights—you get smarter, more creative. But at other times the connections establish or amplify something you don’t want. Like bad feelings. I suppose it’s natural to feel bad after you’ve made a mistake or a tragedy occurs. Maybe it’s the brain’s way of learning something from it. I don’t know. But anyway, if that sort of thing gets amplified, you’re in trouble. And nobody’s found a way of controlling the drug once it gets into your system. You can get a lot of smarter, but you can also get a lot sadder too. Or unnaturally elated, which is less of a problem although it makes you sound like a giddy fool.”
“Who made this drug? You?”
“I helped develop it. I’m not really into it that much, but yes, I helped. Through Daddy, I mean. He interacted with the developers.”
“Yoobie?”
Barbara nodded. “And also that silly organization you people call Opposition.”
I shook my head. “Make up your mind. It can’t be both.”
Barbara smirked. “I thought you were smart, but you’re starting to convince me otherwise.”
“Barbara, I’m an Op. So was your father. Or at least I thought he was. Ops don’t have anything to do with Yoobie.”
“Except when there’s a ton of money to be made. Oh, and you also get smarter, too. Who doesn’t want to become a genius? So they cooperated. Yoobie has a lot of resources, which they obtain by taxing everyone to death. Many of the best scientists are Ops. They needed each other. So they were like a couple of little boys slugging each other in the belly until they got distracted by an old shoe or toy or something stuck in the dirt, and they stopped fighting for a while in order to dig it up.” She shrugged. “It’s as simple as that. A joint venture, you might say.”
Maybe not so simple, I thought, but it would explain why the suicide rate for both Yoobie and Ops people had increased. I had wondered why it wasn’t one or the other, but both.
I looked up to see Barbara studying my face.
“Daddy didn’t tell you very much, did he?”
“Not about this.” I paused. “Arden’s AI said you killed him. There’s no way it could have known that for sure because it only shared Arden’s memories up until the last update, which of course occurred prior to death. I’d been thinking it might be right, though, because it might have had access to information I didn’t know about. But now I think it was wrong. I think it only wants to believe that you had something to do with his death. The AI has the same psychological profile as Arden, so it would also have his dysphoria addiction, as you call it. It prefers sad thoughts, and the thought of a daughter killing her father is one of the saddest things anyone can think of.”
“You’re restoring my faith in your intelligence, Ellam.”
So Arden really did commit suicide. But it wasn’t entirely his idea because of the drug’s influence. I watched Barbara calmly exhale acrid smoke. “Did you love your father?”
She crushed her cigarette in a little cup she used to hold the ashes. “What extraordinary questions you ask. I tell you about a potential wonder drug and you ask about my psychology.”
“He was about the only person you knew while you were growing up, wasn’t he? You couldn’t get outside much until you got Jennifer Yates’s old number, and that was only a few years ago.”