"Aren't you in jail yet?"
Laura Fletcher looked at Lucas' image on the vid monitor, and knew he wasn't going to make it any easier on her. And, really, why should he? "I wanted," she faltered, finding this harder than she'd expected, "I wanted to say that I'm sorry."
"Good." His eyes were guarded and cold, and she wondered how on Earth she was going to get through this conversation. But it has to be done, she told herself, resolving to continue. It has to be finished.
Dr. Fletcher put on her most sincere expression, and looked straight into the small black vidcam mounted on her desk. "Please, Lucas, I wanted to find out if you're doing all right." That shouldn't sound too obvious. Besides, she realized, it was true.
His eyes shifted away; her question must have hit a nerve. "Shouldn't you know," he asked scornfully, "you're the big psychic."
"No, you're too far away." Though, really, she had no idea where the seaQuest was at this moment. He could be just off the coast, halfway around the world, or on the moon for all she knew. "At least, I think you are."
"Well, don't expect me to--" he stuttered, "to-- to enlighten you." He took a few breaths, gathering his thoughts. "What's with all the security, anyway? Took me nearly an hour."
Only an hour? She'd asked him to make this call on a triply re-routed, hard-to-trace channel, and had done the same herself. Though their conversation wasn't illegal, precisely, surely nobody on board seaQuest wanted her talking with Lucas. And she didn't want anyone listening in on her questions, either. Laura suspected that Lucas might still be able to log in to some of Mycroft's old hosts (rumor had it that Node 3 was still operational). All the security measures made everything slower, but the system had compensated by showing all the images with very low resolution. Through the fuzzy monitor, she could barely read his expression, much less his mind.
Laura resisted the temptation to play with one of her dark curls. She couldn't show any nervousness to this perceptive young man. "Are you sure you're secure?" It had scarcely been a week since Marshall's death. The fact that he could use a computer at all spoke of a very fast recovery indeed.
Lucas' chin jutted out with a fierce hacker pride. "SeaQuest comm server thinks that I'm surfing the 'Nex for pictures of girls," he said. Laura allowed the corners of her mouth to pinch up in a tiny smile, pleased that he was opening up. The way to this kid's heart was surely through computers! "Look, I shouldn't be talking to you at all. I'm probably going to annul your trial or something."
Laura frowned at the stinging comment, but didn't dignify it with a response. "You're back online sooner than I expected," she offered, hoping the open-ended comment would elicit a response.
"I slept a lot, and my brain started to sort itself out." He shook his head as if that would help the process.
"Crazy dreams?" prompted Dr. Fletcher.
"Yeah, but--" he cut himself off abruptly, obviously questioning the wisdom of saying more.
"But not as crazy as your thoughts when you're awake?"
Blue eyes grew wide and round, and Lucas nodded slightly. "Do you know what's happening to me?" he whispered. "It's been over for almost a week, but my-- head is still like-- like-- oatmeal."
Now she was getting somewhere! It sounded like typical interfusion recovery, at least so far. Something about his reactions seemed a little off, though. Laura decided to press further. "Do you do that a lot, Lucas?"
"Do what?" he said defensively.
She had to tread more carefully, or he'd shut her out again. "Do you have trouble thinking of words? Or say the wrong word? Does it feel like people talk too fast?"
He leaned closer to the camera. "Yeah! Sometimes I would think of the wrong word. Usually I would lose my train of thought. If I get too tired, it still happens sometimes. Less often now, though."
Laura nodded sympathetically. "Lucas, this all sounds really normal-"
"Normal!? You- normal!" he sputtered. "Listen to me, how I can hardly-- You did this! You!"
Damn. She touched her forehead in an effort to focus. She hadn't expected the kid to get under her skin like this. She hadn't expected to feel so guilty. "I tried to stop him," she protested, suddenly feeling like she wasn't really talking to Wolenczak. "I tried, but it was too late; he wouldn't hear me."
She wasn't sure if Lucas had really heard her. "How could you stand by and watch him?" He was shouting now. "You could have stopped him!"
"Don't you see, he wouldn't listen to me anymore! I don't think he ever listened to me!" Laura yelled over Lucas, as if volume could make him see her dilemma. "He used us all, don't you see?"
Wolenczak eyed her angrily. "You're a real- a real-- victim, Dr. Fletcher," he stuttered with sarcasm. "At least you still have a mind."
Laura felt small and evil. "You'll recover, Lucas, it'll be okay," she tried to soothe him. If he remained this upset, someone would surely hear him and end the call. And she had to keep him talking. This might be her only chance to find out what had happened, before the U.E.O. shut down her project for good. "Didn't Wendy tell you it'd be okay?"
"I don't talk to her. She doesn't make any sense. She makes me see things I don't want to see!"
The outburst instantly set Laura on alert. "What do you mean? What do you see?"
"When I look at her, I see through two sets of eyes," he tried explain, knowing how strange it sounded. His hands twisted in frustration. "I see what he saw!"
The realization hit her. "You see Clay's memories of her?"
He nodded miserably. "I see what he saw, his love and his hate. So cold! I see you, and I feel it... how could you stand it? How couldn't you see what he was?" The boy was making less sense now, but as he fell apart, his story was coming together.
"Lucas, listen to me. Listen!" Through the vidscreen, her dark eyes bored into his. "You are recovering from interfusion. It's what happens when someone takes over your mind without your permission. Do you understand me?"
"No! When- when-" he was stammering again. This conversation couldn't go on much longer. Now that she realized the extent of his injury, she was amazed he'd been able to talk to her at all.
"It will go away soon." How could she explain without getting into all the parapsychological jargon? How could she reduce it to terms he understood? "You're a programmer, right, Lucas?" She waited for him to nod. "When you write a program, you make structures and pointers-shortcuts to data, right?"
"Well, yeah, but hardly anybody uses actual pointers anymore; it's all at a higher level; by- by- reference."
Like that was supposed to mean something to her. She hadn't taken a programming class since her undergrad days. "Right, but you get the idea. When Clay interfused, er, took over, your thoughts, he scrambled the shortcuts. And he left some of his own thoughts."
Understanding began to dawn in Lucas' eyes. "Corruption."
Finally! "Right! So sometimes when you try to remember something, it takes a long time to find it. Or other times you follow a scrambled shortcut, and it takes you to the wrong thought, or something that Clay left behind." He looked horrified, and she realized what he must be thinking. "But you're more than a computer. Your brain is reorganizing itself again."
"The crazy dreams?"
"Yes, that's why your brain has the crazy dreams. That's why you find yourself thinking about stuff you thought you'd forgotten. That's why it takes a while to remember simple things."
"Re-indexing... self-repairing system..." he mused aloud. Oh, what Laura would give to have had his insight on her psychic research! But then again, that's what he was doing right now, only he didn't realize it. Once again, she surprised herself by feeling guilty for manipulating him like this.
"I don't mind the muddled thoughts so much, then," he said, looking visibly relieved. "But when will I remember?"
She frowned. "You don't remember what happened while Clay was controlling you?" That was unusual, though not unheard-of. Most interfusion patients remembered everything; they just had a tough time piecing it together at first.
This wasn't good news; it refuted the hypothesis that she'd hoped Lucas' experience would support. Whatever Clay had become, his results of his work with blue moon were still valid. Before she lost her job to those U.E.O. flunkies and their charges, Laura was consumed with the desire to finish the synthium document. Though she wasn't sure if it was for Clay's sake or her own.
"No, I remember all-- all of that. Dagwood and the missile code, four six oh--" The young man's eye had a faraway look to them as his mind returned to that Hell for a short moment. "No," he blurted, snapping out if the memory. "I want to remember the three days when I escaped."
Dr. Fletcher was confused. "Escaped from where?"
"From medbay. Dr. Smith said I was incoherent, violent, and I-- I-- ran."
"You don't remember what happened?"
"No. I remember waking up once. Two days later? I was in the vent shafts, and all I could think of was Clay and... Then it was all gone again."
It couldn't be! Unless- no. Laura couldn't believe it. But it the only way possible. "Lucas, when you see Dr. Smith, not with Clay's ghost memories, but with your own eyes, what do you remember?"
Lucas, who had ceased to look coherent at all, furrowed his brow in thought. "Synthium," he muttered. "I just see blue moon."
It was as she'd feared, and an ethics nightmare. She bit her lip nervously. Maybe there was a way to work this to her advantage, after all.
"Lucas, you may never get those memories back," she said slowly. Every word mattered here. Think carefully. "But that's normal after an attack like this," she lied, "It's your mind's way of protecting you." Marginally true. Then she returned to the whole truth. "When you can sleep through the night without dreaming those crazy dreams, that will mean you've mostly recovered. After that happens, go see Wendy, and she will be able to help you."
"Okay," whispered Lucas. "Will I be able to..." He would have said more, but a someone knocked loudly on the hatch behind him. Tony's voice echoed into the room, muffled. "You still on the phone, Genius? Hurry up and lemme in there!"
"Just a second!" Lucas shouted at his insistent roommate. He turned his attention back to Dr. Fletcher. "I have to go." He reached for the disconnect button, but paused. "I'm glad we talked."
Then she found herself staring at the U.E.O. logo, subtitled with the words END TRANSMISSION. "Me, too."
Nobody alive knew blue moon better than Laura Fletcher. It had ripped away her career, and Clay's soul, and this boy's mind. Now she had to talk to Wendy. She prayed that Wendy would listen, for both their sakes.