Amped (4 page)

Curious and alone, I mount the stage and stand behind the podium. Looking out onto the green expanse shaded by the slat-windowed cathedral tower, I try to imagine the power Vaughn must have felt standing here.

But I don’t feel powerful. I feel empty.

My enemy stood on this spot moments ago and declared war
on people like me. His vision of how the world should be seems so stark. Now that he has the momentum of the nation, I doubt Senator Vaughn and his Pure Priders will stop at words.

A piece of paper still rests on the podium. Just an extra page that must have fallen off the end of the speech. I pin it against the wood, hold it quivering in the breeze.

The letterhead is marked with an official seal: a coat of arms with the words “Pure Human Citizen’s Council” on a circular banner, wrapped around the bas-relief image of a smiling little girl with a clean temple. Beneath her face, the word “Elysium” is embossed. Faintly, I notice the first and last letters of the word are bigger. Somehow familiar.

I’ve seen those two letters before, in a tattoo:
EM.

I must have noticed the white van parked just outside my father’s office on some level, but the meaning of it doesn’t hit me until about thirty minutes later—right after the detonation.

I’m standing in the sunlight outside my dad’s medical practice, a government satellite office two blocks from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine where Neural Autofocus was invented. Vaughn’s speech is finished, but I can still hear the roar of his crowd from where it has gathered on the school steps just around the corner.

My dad answers the door. I open my mouth to tell him what happened and he doesn’t let me finish the sentence. Grabs me and folds me into a bear hug.

“It was on the news, Owen. I’m sorry,” he says.

Then, oddly, he scans the street. Pulls me into the waiting room and locks the front door. I give him a look, and my dad says something that puts a cold sweat on my forehead: “The police are looking for you. Just for questioning. But there are things you need to know.”

We march past familiar photos of my father’s happy patients: a toddler with his prosthetic carbon fiber arm clasped around his mother’s neck, preteens with their maintenance nodes coated in rainbow colors they chose from a thick binder, and an elderly man standing straight and proud with the skeletal metal of an artificial calf and foot shining below his khaki shorts.

You can’t separate the body from the mind. In the last decade, the Neural Autofocus became elective with every upgrade, from artificial limbs to medical exoskeletons to retinal implants. Autofocus makes the communication between mind and body seamless. Sharpens you up, they say. Every one of those smiling faces on the wall has that subliminal gleam of intelligence. Overclocked brains and shiny new limbs.

My dad ushers me through the empty waiting room and down an antiseptic corridor toward the back offices. Most of the lights are off. An office window is broken. Papers are strewn around the floor, marked by boot prints.

“We were raided this morning,” Dad says. “The feds seized everything.”

“Because of the ruling?”

He nods. “A research freeze. Vaughn’s rallies have them in a frenzy.”

My father cocks his head and listens to the eerily quiet hallway. Then he opens the door to his cramped office. Cheap venetian blinds chatter as the door swings. He squeezes into the squeaky chair behind his desk. A blank square marks where his computer used to be. Emptied file cabinets gape.

I sit down across from him.

As a kid, I played with toy cars on the floor under this desk. After my mom passed away, I hung out here for countless hours before and after school. I grew up under these fluorescent lights, but now the place seems strange, broken.

“What’s going to happen?” I ask.

My father just shakes his head.

“It’s too much to tell and I waited too long. I am sorry.”

“Sorry?”

He clears his throat and looks away, blinking. I realize how much older he looks today.

“Sorry for what?” I ask.

“You have to understand, Owen, when we started this research all those years ago, we were excited. The potential to do so much good. Curing diseases, making people better. But when you got hurt …” He takes a deep breath. “I’m sorry I never told you.”

“Never told me what?” I ask, my voice hollow.

The answer is already nibbling at the back of my mind. Little memories of life here at the shop: playing, working, even sleeping here when my dad worked late. And every once in a while, after the nurses left and the front door was locked, Dad called me into the operating room to check on my implant. He wanted to make sure the seizures would leave me alone, he said. I’d stare at the anatomy poster on the wall while he put on his mask and pulled his magnifier lens
over one eye. The last time he tinkered with my implant was in high school, when I was about Samantha’s age. The age she’ll always be.

Frontal lobe. Temporal lobe. Motor cortex. Sensory cortex.

“You’re an amp,” he says.

My father watches me absorb the words, desperate for forgiveness. Grasping at it. But this new reality is too shocking to digest.

“I’m not medical?” I ask, reeling.

His lip twitches involuntarily and I realize he is holding back tears. “You were hurt so bad, Owen,” he says. “My baby boy. Falling off that truck hurt you worse than you knew. Worse than I ever, ever let on.”

“But you said I had a simple brain stimulator. That I’m not like the elective kids. Not an amp.” I mumble the words like an incantation. Like a prayer. “You told me I was
normal
.”

“Understand that I used every possible means at my disposal to repair the trauma. You didn’t need to know. Stigma does terrible things to children. You’ve heard those demonstrators outside. I needed to give you a normal childhood.”

“So you lied.”

“Until you have a child of your own, you cannot comprehend how much I love you,” he says flatly.

“Do I even have epilepsy?”

“You do. But the hardware you’ve got is special. It does much more than prevent seizures. The insult you suffered to your brain was … devastating. The implant had to shoulder the burden while you healed. It became a part of you, Owen.”

There is something else. Something worse. Some shiver of guilt in my father’s shoulders gives it away. “Neural Autofocus can’t do that,” I say.

He fixes his eyes on mine and replies instantly. “I gave you something extra.”

I press my palms against my eyes until dark pinwheels lace my vision. I’ve had a head full of lies all of my life. This thing my father put in my brain does more than stave off epilepsy. It must accelerate my mind, sharpen my intellect, insinuate itself into every thought I have.

Every thought I’ve ever had.

For an instant, I envy Samantha Blex. At least she saw herself for who she was. It occurs to me that my own father killed whoever I am, or might have been, with the implant he chose to put in my adolescent skull.

“Things got out of control so fast,” says my father. “Joe Vaughn and his Pure Human Citizen’s Council—they came out of nowhere. You can never underestimate the fear that drives humankind.”

“I need to think,” I say.

“You don’t have
time
to think,” he says. “The federal government already has my research. There were things in there I couldn’t erase. Parts requisitions. Lab time. Once they figure out what I did, I’ll be arrested. Then they’re going to come for you. For what’s inside your head. They are likely already on their way.”

I’m touching the nub on my temple, prodding it compulsively with my fingertip. “What did you do to me?”

“The hardware I gave you was stolen,” he says. “At the time, there was no other choice. Nothing off the shelf was powerful enough to compensate for the damage.”

“This is crazy—”

“You need to go right now. Through the side office. The police are looking for you about your student’s death. Do not speak to them under any circumstances. Try to close your bank account.”

He starts scribbling notes on a piece of paper, frantic. “Listen to me, Owen. Get your things and go west, to a place called Eden. It’s a trailer park in Eastern Oklahoma,” he says, handing me the paper.

I stand up and open the office door. “A
trailer
park
?” I ask.

“Eden is where all of this began—the original Uplift site. We chose to test Autofocus there because it was isolated and rural. The population was in need. A perfect setting for our experiment. Only now, it’s become an enclave. Full of other people who are like you. Your own kind, Owen.”

He reacts to the look on my face.
My
own
kind?

“You’ve got to find a man named Jim Howard, an old colleague of mine. He’ll guide you through this. There’s a lot you need to learn about yourself.”

“Dad?” I ask. “Dad, come with me. I can’t—”

“Go!” he barks. The force of his exclamation jolts me into the hallway. “Find Jim Howard. Don’t tell me how you’re getting there. They’re coming for me
right
now
. When they take me in, I will have the opportunity to obfuscate the situation. At the very least, I may cause a delay. It is the best chance you’ve got.”

My father is suddenly small and old and feeble behind his desk. Like someone I’ve never met. Never would want to meet.

“I risked everything to give you a life,” he says. “Don’t throw it away.”

I know the thing I’m about to say isn’t fair and that I can never take it back, but I say it anyway. That’s just how it goes, sometimes. “You didn’t give me a life,” I say. “You stole it.”

My father is quiet for a long second. When he speaks, his voice is without emotion. “You’ve got to realize, Owen, that without the amp you would have died. It is a part of you, but you have to give it permission. I gave you something
extra
. When the time comes, you have to activate the amp willingly.”

“When the time comes for what?”

“To do good, Owen,” he says, standing. He softly pushes the door, eyes never leaving mine. “I’m sorry that I waited until it was too late. Find Jim. The old man is the only one who can help you now.”

Click.

The door shuts and the hallway is silent save the far-off roar of demonstrators. I follow my dad’s advice and walk on dull legs out the side door. Through the adjoining offices. Out into the alley that runs alongside the building. Run my fingers over rough brick. Look at the world without seeing it. After a half minute walking through the familiar backstreet, I get a funny feeling. For some reason, I stop and look at the sky.

A block away, a bomb detonates.

The guttural roar engulfs me and a shock wave brings my knees to the pavement. Dark smoke pours into the street behind me. The concussion has erased half my father’s building. Pieces of brick and concrete are still spinning away.