Long Division (9 page)

James flicked some ash into the tray. ‘Think, Mark. The device works on people’s
brains.
What do you think that could do, if programmed properly?’

I felt my throat closing off. ‘The…device makes them forget?’

James didn’t answer for a long time. ‘The device, one might argue, has a greater purpose than that which they’ve advertised.’

‘B—but what about you?’ I babbled. ‘You’ve certainly been using it!’

‘Ah, yes. But I
invented
it. Rather hard to pull the wool over someone’s eyes when they’re the one knitting it!’ He recited the phrase as if he’d worked on it.

‘So you don’t forget because you already know.’

James nodded.

‘So, if I used this device, would I forget?’

James raised his shoulders indifferently. ‘I don’t know.’ His eyes glinted. ‘Would you care to find out?’

I wrinkled my nose. ‘No. I certainly would not! I don’t like to think of what that thing is doing to your head! It has to be just as bad as those bloody cigarettes!’

I hadn’t meant to explode the way I had. My fear over the project came out sounding more like worry for him. I flushed with frustrated embarrassment. This whole meeting was bizarre beyond my expectations and I had to admit, I didn’t know how to react to it. Or him. I had just come here to drop off a thumb drive, now here he was telling me all of this. Things that didn’t seem possible.

James simply chuckled again and blew another cloud of smoke through his lips. ‘Well,’ he said wistfully, ‘we all have to go some way.’

I swallowed tightly. I didn’t like to think on it. The sound of screaming brakes ripped through the back of my mind. A painful reminder.

James’s phone buzzed from the table and he swept it up. His eyes darted back and forth rapidly as he read whatever was across the screen. He grumbled irritably.

‘Something the matter?’ I asked hesitantly, not sure if I should.

James rubbed his face with a groan. ‘The duties of the mathematical genius never end.’

I was surprised. I wouldn’t have imagined that mathematical geniuses had much to do at all, besides sitting around writing out problems. I stood swiftly. ‘Guess I should leave you to it, then.’

James watched me stand. ‘Pity this had to be cut short.’

I stuffed my hands into my pockets. ‘No, no…it’s fine. It’s been…interesting.’ I didn’t know
what
it had been. Disturbing? Unbelievable? Twilight Zone-esque? Definitely.

James didn’t stir from the sofa.

I waited a tick. ‘Well, I’ll just…show myself out, then?’

He didn’t answer, simply stared into space.

I watched him a few seconds longer, indecision bubbling in me. I wasn’t sure what to do. Just leave him like this? He clearly was showing no signs of moving.

‘I’ll text you later,’ I said uncertainly.

Without another option, I opened the door and stepped out into the light and fresh air of London, glad and yet, strangely disappointed, to be leaving that odd man and his smoky den.

6:Enigma Man

For the next few days, I could focus on nothing but what James Nightgood had told me. It was almost too much to comprehend, and it sent my stomach knotting every time I found myself thinking on it, which was much too often.

James and I had not had a chance to chat much over the last three days. Whatever business that had cut our time short must have taken over his life, for at all hours he seemed to be off doing one thing or another and it left little time for me to catch up with him. I wasn’t entirely sure what there was to “catch up” on, honestly.

I pushed another book into its slot on the shelf in frustration.

Part of me wished James had never told me what he had. It ate away at my mind, constantly there. The dreaded launch date of InVizion’s Godlink was fast approaching and I didn’t know what to do. Telling my co-workers about the dangers of the device would have gotten me nothing but a queer look. And what did I have to say, anyway? I had no definitive proof that anything devious was going on. Were InVizion’s methods a little spooky? Sure. Did I like what I’d been told? No. But what more was there to do? I still couldn’t believe that InVizion had any malevolent intent. That would make no sense as a business model. It wasn’t InVizion I was worried about. It was other people.

My only consolation was that most humans were not lucky enough to have the mind that James Nightgood had. Perhaps the impressive demonstration I’d been treated to at James’s flat was beyond the expectation I should have of the majority of the population. If James was as brilliant as I’d been led to believe, then what hope did those of us with normal, boring brains have of manipulating the technology as James had? And yet…it was always the super smart ones that went bad, wasn’t it? Those evil geniuses…

Now I knew I was taking things too far. My brain was spiralling out of control with ideas. I’d clearly spent too much time thinking about it. And too much of my free time reading science fiction.

I carried my armful of books down the rows, desperate to find something to distract myself. I found it on the very next aisle. Absolute chaos. Books strewn everywhere. The same section that it always was.

I clenched my teeth in frustration, completely putting my worries about InVizion aside, then marched down through the stacks and regarded the clutter in frustration. Who the hell kept doing this? It was as if a primary school had been let loose down this row and had proceeded to tear it apart.

It would take some time to fix.

I found myself complaining, but this was exactly the distraction I needed. A good while of work, which would allow me to vent my aggravation at something else besides my worry over the future.

Throwing myself at it, I forgot myself, and I let my mind wander, sending it in other directions, as far away from James’s dark den and the strange technology as possible. And stuffing books into their proper places and glancing at the spines, I found myself thinking of Ashley, of all people.

That recurring thought made me curse my loneliness. The aching desire for company and the physical need for another human being to be near me was—at times—debilitating. Awakening in the night from vivid dreams, hard and wanting for whatever fantasies were fast disappearing, those were the nights I hated.

I could usually push it away during the day. Forget about it, ignore it, pretend it didn’t exist. Pretend I wasn’t human; that I didn’t have desires; that I didn’t need anyone else in my life. That I’d somehow managed to put those instincts behind me.

It didn’t much work.

It was times like this, alone with my own thoughts, when I wasn’t guarding myself against them, that they’d hit. Those slightly inappropriate feelings would tiptoe into my head, those ones that couldn’t be truly considered, not unless I was in the shower.

I supposed I was the only one stopping myself. I was the one who shunned relationships these days.
I
was the one who couldn’t handle social settings, or perhaps—more truthfully—didn’t want to. I couldn’t let people into my world. If they got in, old hurts might be pulled up from where I’d so carefully tacked them down out of sight.

So why had I started talking to James? Yes, it was true; we did not delve too deeply into our lives—usually. James never asked, and if I ever did speak about myself, it was always on my own accord, when I’d forget myself. And for some damned reason, James always lulled me into a sense of security. Without prompting, without seemingly, questioning, on those rare occasions, he was able to have me open up and talk about myself more deeply or personally than anyone else.

I supposed that it was, perhaps, because I didn’t truly
know
him in our little text conversations. Talking to someone through the written word, waiting for the response, it had a type of private, almost intimate feel to it. Meeting James in the flesh had had a completely different effect on me. He had spoken to me as if we were good mates, been completely candid. He’d shown me things I imagined he hadn’t shown many. He’d acted as if he’d almost…trusted me.

I felt guilty, for when I’d met James, I felt wary, unsure of him, like he was a stranger, and not a man I’d spent the majority of my free time conversing with. I wasn’t sure which of our reactions had been the proper one.

I shook myself and pushed another book onto the shelf. I was just too damn confused. My decisions confused me. My thoughts confused me. I seemed to no longer be able to focus these days. I wondered if he was to blame, or if it was just my frazzled state of mind.

From several aisles over, a voice began to shout, making me jump.

‘No! No! No! No! It can’t be; that isn’t right! No!’

I was on my feet immediately. A disturbance like that in this quiet sitting was never a good thing. Turning the direction of the sound I hurried towards the increasing shouts, wishing someone else would deal with it before me. Yet, as I made my way, I couldn’t help but feel I knew that voice from somewhere. I quickened my pace.

As I rounded the corner, I saw what the problem was: James Nightgood was shouting formulas in a panicked, high voice. His hands were clamped on either side of his head, eyes squeezed shut tight. I was surprised, to say the least. And seeing James this way was even more of a shock. He seemed completely out of control, like a toddler having a meltdown. I winced, inwardly cursing the situation and rushed forward.

‘James, James, hey, calm down.’ As gently as I could, I touched his wrists.

He yanked away from me and shouted all the louder, his hands beating, as if battling off a swarm of bees. People were beginning to stare.

‘Hey,’ I dropped down across from him. James was shaking his head, eyes closed. ‘James, hey, it’s me. Mark Hurt.’ I kept my voice as soft a whisper as I could manage.

He shook his head, eyes still shut, as if fighting with himself. His voice was a loud, booming list of numbers.

‘James?’ Without thinking, I reached out and touched his cheek lightly.

His eyes snapped open. Bright green orbs shining with a fearful light. He narrowed them at me for a moment, and then something—recognition, I thought—flashed. ‘Mark?’

I offered him a timid smile and pulled my hand away from the coolness of his skin. Inwardly I flushed at the contact. ‘Yeah.’ I glanced round at the people staring, giving some of them a sharp look, when what I really wanted to do was say ‘Bugger off!’. ‘You okay? Do you know where you are?’

He narrowed his eyes further and pushed back away from me. ‘Of course. I’m fine.’

I took a deep, confused breath. James was raking his long fingers through his reddish hair, eyes fixed on the notebook open before him, which was so full of equations I couldn’t begin to fathom how he made sense of it. ‘Look, you’re upset, maybe you should just leave this for a while, go outside, get some air.’

He raised his eyes to me in a glower. ‘No.’

I pushed myself to my feet, hands up. ‘Fine, fine.’ 

Even though I felt we had some sort of connection, I didn’t know James well enough to be telling him what to do. A few weeks of texting? One meeting? Hardly enough basis to call myself his close friend. What right did I have to suggest anything?

James rubbed his eyes with the tips of his fingers and let out a low groan. He seemed to be coming out of whatever turn he’d taken.

I glanced round at the numerous books scattered across the table. I cast him a rueful smile.

‘So, now I know the culprit who’s been making such a mess of things in the mathematics section. I would have figured this stuff was too basic for you.’ I frowned at him. ‘What are you doing here?’

James’s eyes swivelled over to me, fixed on my face, looked at somewhere besides my eyes. ‘Always come here…helps me think. Helps me escape.’

I felt my eyebrows go up. I’d never seen him here before. Then again, I’d never known what James looked like till recently. ‘Escape from what?’

A shadow fell across James’s table and I raised my eyes to see two men in matching black sidle up. They both looked down at James with identical, slightly condescending, paternalistic expressions.

‘We’ve been looking all over for you, Jimmy.’

‘Who’s your friend?’ the other asked. All charm.

I noticed a change come over James instantly. He visibly grew more nervous. And, to my surprise, he began stammering. Not just a little, but almost uncontrollably, so a word hardly got out of him. Whatever sentence he was trying to form simply wasn’t working somewhere from his brain to his mouth. I winced in sympathy.

I held out my hand, thought it was the last thing I really wanted to do. ‘I’m Mark Hurt. Just came over to check and see if he was all right.’

By the looks the two men were giving me, I knew I should be going. Yet, I was reluctant to leave James’s side. I cast him as covert a look I could manage and didn’t like what I saw. He was gnawing on his lower lip with wolf-like viciousness; eyes wide in childlike distress. I watched his hands, the fingers were tapping together on his left, one, two, three, four. Each finger tapping his thumb nervously.

‘That was very kind of you,’ one of the men said, chilly.

The other man directed his attention down to James. ‘It’s time to go, Jim.’

James raised his eyes to the man yet he didn’t move. ‘I want to stay,’ voice finally firm.

The man laughed. I think he meant it to come off as friendly, but it just grated on my nerves, made me angry.

‘Come now, Jim, you know you can’t.’

I swallowed nervously. I felt like I’d just stepped into some domestic and it was threatening to turn nasty. I wanted to back away, but the look on James’s face ripped at my insides. He looked so miserable, so helpless. Friendless.

It was a struggle to not say that James was an adult. He was more than capable of deciding for himself what he wanted or did not want to do. He didn’t need two blokes in black telling him.

I kept my mouth shut. Scared. Of what, I wasn’t so sure.

I watched his fingers go tracing over the surface of his open notebook, over the equations he’d just scribbled there. He seemed lost in his own head, no longer aware of the two men standing over him. No longer aware of me. In my head I’d grab the two men by their collars and snap at them to stop. They were clearly distressing James. Seeing him like this was a stab in my heart, damned if I knew why! But I was much too weak and timid for any show against these two strangers and so I simply stood back like an idiot, cursing myself even as I did so.

‘James,’ one of the men said with exasperated patience.

Very, very slowly, James closed his notebook. A look of unhappy resignation on his face. Our eyes locked briefly; the first time, I realised, I’d ever made eye-contact with him. What could I say? And how could I, with these two men watching every move James made? I had to settle for a sympathetic expression, which, by the morose look on his face, he did not understand. He gathered up his things slowly, head bowed, quietly muttering what sounded like equations; once again lost in his own world.

They brushed past me without a word, without a glance. James shepherded between the two of them, his head still lowered. I felt a pang at the pit of my stomach as I watched them go; James hunched over, like he was trying to shrink into himself, away from the men.

I didn’t like it, or the strange wave of protection that washed over me. I had no right to feel that way towards James, so why was I now so resentful of those two damned suits who had appeared out of nowhere to drag him away?

There was a stab of pain in my palm and I realised I was digging my fingernails into my skin. I uncurled my hands, wincing. James and his two handlers were now out of sight. Still I stared after them, till my vision blurred and I no longer knew what I was looking at; simply cloudy neutral colours. I blinked once my eyes began to sting and the library shifted back into focus.

I wanted to text him. To call him. To find out what the hell was going on. Learn if he was all right. I couldn’t. Not at work. I’d have to wait. And that was agonisingly long hours away.

I didn’t like those two. They were different from the two who had taken him at his lecture. But they still carried that same air about them. Something was terribly wrong.

And I couldn’t help but think it all came back to InVizion.