Retroactivity Read online

  “All right.” His voice was steadier this time. Better. “Let’s talk.”

  “Tell me a memory from when you were a pre-teen.” Mooring’s voice was calm, relaxing. He had a psychiatrist’s voice.

  Despite Mooring’s claim that there were no wrong answers, Mat hunted for a memory that would paint him in a good light. “I was ten, I think. I was teaching Sylvie, my younger sister, to ride her bike. She was five, and we’d been practicing for weeks. She was getting good.

  “She wanted to show off for me, I think. We were in our neighborhood and riding down the street, and she was speeding up to pass me. We were laughing, racing, looking at each other, and I didn’t see the car backing out of the driveway until it was almost too late.”

  “What did you do when you saw it?” Mooring’s gaze flickered from point to point on Mat’s face. He still hadn’t blinked. Mat licked his lips and continued.

  “It was going to hit her. The driver wasn’t looking back at all. Everything slowed down in that moment, and I can remember every step. I curved my bike to the side. I dropped one foot to the ground and swung the other over the bike as it fell. The car’s bumper grazed my pant leg as I leapt, and I tackled Sylvie off of her bike and knocked her to the ground, rolling us both across the asphalt. Then there was the crunch of the car running over first my bike, then hers, and then Sylvie sobbing in my arms and Mr. Odritch jumping out of his car, shouting.

  “Looking back, he must have been terrified, but at the time I just thought that we were going to get in trouble.” Mat considered adding more, but decided against it. The story really ended there. Adding more would just be rambling to hear himself talk.

  After a short pause to make sure Mat was done, Mooring asked, “Why did you pick that memory?”

  “It’s the strongest memory I have from that age,” Mat said. He wrestled internally for a moment, then added, “And a lot of the other memories I have don’t make me look that good. I was a kid, you know? I did a lot of stupid things.”

  Mooring smiled. “If you’re wondering if I can read your mind, Mathias, I can’t. Your secrets are safe unless you share them.”

  Mat grinned shamefacedly. “I had wondered, yeah. It didn’t seem polite to ask.”

  “I read powers, not thoughts. They’re unrelated, despite being lumped together in the same Augment classification.”

  “I know that, I guess. I just wasn’t sure how much bleed-over there was.”

  “In my case, none. But I’m one of the best Seekers we have.” He stated this matter-of-factly, and Mat again felt his nervousness surge. He desperately wanted to be an Augment, to have Mooring welcome him to their ranks.

  Any power, prayed Mat. Anything.

  “A few more questions, Mathias. Please tell me five numbers. No limitations.”

  “Um, okay. Five, seventeen, one hundred and nine, negative eleven, eight.”

  “Three words beginning with D.”

  “Dog. Dictionary. Dichotomy.”

  “My name.”

  “What? Um, Mr. Mooring. Aug—August?” Should I have said his first name? Did I offend him? Mat’s nervousness was bordering on panic.

  “You’re doing fine, Mathias. As I said before, this isn’t a test. I just needed a few more points. I have the answer.”

  “What,” Mat swallowed and gripped his hands tightly together, “what is it?”

  “You’re an Augment Class Zero, Mathias. A Reader, subclass Sibyl.”

  Disappointment washed over Mat like a physical wave, leaving him light-headed. “No! An Uggo?”

  “There’s nothing wrong with being an Augment-0,” Mooring said gently. “As a Sibyl, you have the ability to make accurate snap judgments about people and situations, and that is no small gift. Don’t discard it because you hoped for more.”

  Mat barely heard him. His fervent prayer of moments ago now mocked him with its ill-chosen words. Any power, yes, but Aug-0? That was worse than being normal. At least as a norm, you knew that others had advantages that you simply didn’t, and you could get on with your life. An Aug-0 had powers, but in an almost useless quantity. Mat had been given access to the world he’d always dreamed of, and then been told that he could look, but never touch.

  “I…” Mat swallowed thickly, dazed, and slowly stood up from the table. “Thank you. Mr. Mooring.”

  He shook hands on autopilot, his mind registering the pity in the Augment’s eyes so that it could play it back to torment him later. He turned and found his way to the door, snippets of his Seeking echoing cruelly in his brain.

  Augment Class Zero

  Wrong

  Small gift

  Hoped for more

  Zero

  Zero

  ZERO

  “So man, how’d it go?” A voice in his ear, a projected image in his eye. His friend Judah was waving him. Mat sighed and thumbed the call accept on his earpiece.

  “Bad. Turns out I’m a Null.”

  “An Uggo, huh?” The projection of Judah hovering in front of him made a sympathetic face. “I mean, that’s still cool, though. At least you’ve got something! Physical or mental?”

  “Mental. Reader. Sibyl. I’m a good judge of character,” Mat said in a monotone. “So no, not really much of anything at all.”

  “Hey, come on. You’re underselling it! You’re supernaturally good at judgments. You never have to second-guess your instincts. That’s huge.”

  “Quit trying to cheer me up, would you?” asked Mat. “I want to sulk about this for a bit. I really thought—I dunno, I thought they’d find something. Like today was going to be the day I found my big hidden talent. Figured we’d end up off training together, maybe even working together if I got something complementary to you. And instead I got ‘you pick good friends.’”

  “Yeah, when you put it that way, I guess it does suck,” said Judah. “You didn’t need some augment to tell you that your friends are awesome. I mean, look at me. I exude awesomeness.”

  Despite himself, Mat laughed. “Humble, too.”

  “What’s the point in trying to hide it? I want to give of myself to the world, bless the people with my presence.”

  “Great, go out and do that,” said Mat, smiling now. “Get out of my ear.”

  “Hasta luego, mon frère,” said Judah. “And seriously man, come hang out later. Take your sulking time, then get your head together and gimme a wave. We’ll meet up, get together with some folks. It’ll be a good night.”

  Mat gave a noncommittal shrug, and Judah fixed him with a serious stare.

  “Do it,” he said, then vanished. Mat grinned slightly and shook his head.

  Well, so much for sulking, he thought. Judah had a talent for putting people in a good mood. And he was right, honestly. Aug-0 was a pretty lousy rating, but it was all in what you did with it. His power might be no more than a knack, but it still had plenty of uses. A door may have closed on his daydream of superheroism, but an entire hallway of doors had just opened to new possibilities.

  Mat walked on, new life in his step. He could work with this. Things were going to turn out all right.

  Mat’s good mood slowly slipped away as the afternoon wore on. Despite his best efforts to take this in stride and look at it as a new opportunity, he really couldn’t see much of an upside. By the time he met up with his friends at Derringer, their favorite local cafe, he was as morose as he’d been when he first left the testing center.

  “This opens new doors, sure, but they all seem to lead to rooms in varying shades of beige, you know?” Mat said to his friends. “I just…I feel like I got a power that low-level politicians would be excited about. I can tell you whether something’s a good idea or not. It’s like having the power of middle management.”

  Mat stared into his soda miserably. Next to him, Alyssa rolled her eyes, while across the table Judah tried again to lift his spirits.

  “Okay, several things, hombre. A: if you think being useful in politics is unimportant, you’ve got a weird vie
w of the world. B: if you don’t like the opportunities you’re seeing, make some new ones.”

  “Easy for you to say, Aug-1,” said Mat.

  Judah snorted. “Yeah, because the ability to change my skin color gives me a clear and direct career path.”

  “You’re a chameleon! It’s more than ‘change your skin color.’ You can look like anything you want!”

  “Yeah, so while I’m blending in with the wall, you get to know whether your life choices are going to steer you well or not.”

  “I’m just saying that—hey!” Mat jumped, banging his knees on the table, and began pulling frantically at his shirt. Alyssa had just dropped an ice cube down his collar.

  “Oops, sorry. Must have slipped,” Alyssa said as Mat wriggled the ice cube free of his shirt.

  Mat glared at her. “What was that for?”

  “Bluntly? Judah can be supportive all he wants, but I’m tired of listening to you whine. We came out here to cheer you up, and here we are, doing our part. Now you do your part. Get cheery.”

  “I’m just saying—”

  “Yeah, what are you just saying? How being an Uggo is the worst fate imaginable, and a norm like me couldn’t possibly understand that?” Alyssa brushed her short black hair back behind her ears, her eyes sparkling dangerously.

  “You’ve never even been tested! For all you know—”

  “Haven’t been, won’t be, don’t care. I’ve got no powers and I’m fine with that. But tell me how not having a cool enough power makes you less of a person. Say it to my face.”

  Mat looked over at Judah for help, doing a double-take when he saw only Judah’s clothes sitting there, upright and hollow.

  “Don’t look at me, hombre, I’m just part of the scenery,” came Judah’s voice. “Staying way out of this.” When his lips moved, Mat could see a ripple in the air as the motion distorted the positioning of the colors on his skin. Otherwise, the illusion of invisibility was perfect.

  “Some help you are,” muttered Mat. He turned back to Alyssa, who was still staring at him challengingly. He sighed and raised his hands, admitting defeat.

  “No, fine, obviously it’s not a fate worse than death or anything. I just wanted something cooler.”

  “Boo hoo, my daddy got me a car and it’s not the right color,” mocked Alyssa.

  “I appreciate your sympathy,” Mat said dryly.

  “This is my sympathy. You’ve never seen my scorn.”

  “And I don’t think I ever want to!”

  “Good call, Matty. See? See how handy your augment is?”

  Mat made a face. “Okay, look. I’m willing to stop talking about how much my power sucks, if you two will quit referencing it every time I express an opinion tonight. Seriously, it’s kind of a sore spot right now, and maybe we should just move on.”

  “Deal,” said Judah, visible again.

  “No deal,” said Alyssa. “Look. I’m about to get real real with you here. What’s your problem with your aug? Your actual problem. Yesterday, you didn’t know you had this. So what’s actually been taken away from you?”

  Mat started to answer, and Alyssa cut him off. “Too fast. Take a second, think about the answer, give me the right one.”

  “Is this another riff on my power?” Mat asked suspiciously.

  Alyssa scowled at him. “No, it’s an assumption that you know yourself well enough to know if you’re dodging the truth or flat-out lying to yourself. Be honest with yourself here. What’s the real reason that this is bugging you so deeply?”

  Mat stared into his soda and watched the bubbles rise as he thought about his answer. “It’s a direction problem, I think,” he said eventually. “Whatever I choose next, wherever I choose to go, that pretty much ends up determining the rest of my life. You know? This is a momentous time, and I’m not prepared for it. I mean, I guess maybe no one is. But if I’d had a good augment, I wouldn’t have had to pick. I would have been courted for a program like Judah was, and I could have just gone with it.

  “But without that, I’ve got to just pick something that I’ll probably end up doing for the rest of my life, and what if I get it wrong?”

  “You can’t get it wrong, Uggo,” said Judah and Alyssa simultaneously. They glanced at each other, surprised, then started laughing hysterically.

  “Okay, that one was definitely a riff on my power. Always nice to be the butt of your jokes, guys,” Mat said, but smiled anyway. Their laughter was infectious. And honestly, in this case, they might not be wrong. The whole point of a power of making snap judgments, even a low-level one, was to ensure good results from choices, right? So really, pretty much anything he picked here would turn out to be right.

  It felt weird to put that much blind faith in his instincts, but Mat realized he’d better get used to it. If this was the augment he’d gotten, he’d learn to play the hand he’d been dealt as well as he possibly could.

  III

  “Meanwhile, elsewhere….”

  Kevin Ghulam, better known to the world as Gammalock, sat surrounded by computer screens. Although not actively paying attention to any of them, he was passively receiving input as they streamed diagnostics, ran programs and provided information about the world around him. Gammalock had found that the more data he had available, even subconsciously, the better his creations were.

  The etherwaves had helped with that immensely. Part internet, part phone service, all streamed wirelessly to a neural-interfacing device that even he only mostly understood. It talked directly to the brain, providing sound and images for the user without the need for cumbersome equipment. Scientists were still puzzling out exactly how the earpieces functioned, and Gammalock didn’t have the words to explain it to them. He built the first pair knowing that they would work, then provided his diagrams to a company to have them mass-produced once the demonstration had been effective. Although dozens of men and women had, with Gammalock’s blessing, attempted to reverse-engineer the process, so far the precise mechanics remained a mystery.

  The near-magic quality of the waves was well-known. What was a better-guarded secret was that outside of the earpieces, there was very little else to the waves. All of the data stored and streamed, the phone calls placed, the information exchanged—it didn’t seem to exist anywhere, or run on anything. As far as Gammalock could tell, the waves borrowed processing power from the brains to which they were connected.

  This gave the US government fits. Probably other governments, too, but since Gammalock lived in Rhode Island, it was the US government that he had to deal with. There had been a very unpleasant conversation when he first released the etherwaves and the government discovered that there were no servers to subpoena, no lines to tap.

  “Are you telling me that if some terrorist wants to conduct a plot over your waves, I’ve got no way of getting evidence of this?” an agent named Clements demanded of him.

  Ghulam, not yet going solely by Gammalock, shrugged. “You could still infiltrate, I think. Any method that would work without seizing records that were never yours. I am not overly concerned that people might talk without you hearing.”

  “And that’s the other part! Where is this all being stored?”

  “In the brains. Like cloud computing.”

  “So everything I send is just in everyone’s mind? Even that terrorist’s? What about national security?”

  “A minute ago, you worried that you could not see what he writes. Now you worry that he can see what you write. Perhaps this will solve your problem? Train a Reader to find where in the brain the waves are stored.”

  Ghulam meant it as a joke, but Clements had looked thoughtful. Probably the government had started a secret program doing exactly that shortly thereafter. It was the sort of thing they did.

  Gammalock occupied a weird space in the governmental hierarchy, almost a nation unto himself. As an Augment-5, they found him far too dangerous to be allowed to work without supervision. But equally, they had come to depend on the steady stream of
world-changing discoveries and inventions he was creating. So they funded him, allowed him to keep working, and kept a close eye on him.

  Not, Gammalock reflected, that they could really have stopped him if they wanted to. As long as he was in his suit, being constantly bombarded with ionizing radiation, he was deity-level smart. The suit was his castle and his prison, his death and his life. Its medical capabilities counteracted the cellular destruction wrought by the constant radioactive bombardment which boosted Gammalock’s intellect. It served as both war machine and iron lung.

  In the end, it would be his coffin. Gammalock knew this, too. Not through any powers of seeing the future, but simply through acceptance of reality. Without the suit, he was simply Kevin Ghulam again, and he would never go back to that. He would die before he would let that happen.

  IV

  “Heavy stuff. But back to our hero!”

  Once Mat accepted that he was going to have to self-direct the rest of his life, it turned out not to be that bad at all. He couldn’t quite bring himself to just pick something on a whim and count on his augment to have steered him to the right choice. There were too many possibilities out there to count on the right one having been in front of him by chance. So instead, he spent the evenings after school for a week looking into various possibilities and taking notes.

  At the end of the week Mat made a vision board, feeling a bit stupid as he did so. It seemed like a very self-help sort of thing to do. On the other hand, he couldn’t really think of a better way to get all of the options in front of him at once, so he compiled the possibilities in his wave and displayed them all in neat holographic rectangles in front of him. He labeled it “THE FUTURES” just to up the melodrama a little bit more, and made a mental note to delete this before anyone else saw it.

  Six options were arrayed in front of him, broad categories with further suboptions beneath each. The main ones were: further schooling, augment training, trade school, research, government work, private sector. Many of these had overlap, but they were the end-state he’d be aiming for. Each option had various pros and cons, and Mat had constructed logical argument for and against each over the previous week. He expected, therefore, to feel indecisive when faced with the final choice, and was surprised to find that he did not. With the six options all side-by-side, there was no question in his mind: the government was the way to go.