S Huang - Zero Sum Game

He kept his hands out of his pockets and slightly away from his body as he approached. Smart man. Tresting stood up as he reached the table.

“Mr. Tresting,” the man said in greeting.

I glanced sharply at Tresting, but he was already nodding to concede the name. “Thought you wouldn’t have trouble with that.”

“Your identity was easy enough to deduce. Your associate, however…” He extended a hand to me. “May I ask whom I have the pleasure of addressing?”

I snorted. “You can ask. And who are you?”

“Call me Steve.”

At least he was obvious about it being an alias. I jerked my head toward Tresting. “So, Steve. Now that you know who he is, are you going to make trouble for Arthur here?”

“Well, I suppose that depends.”

“On what?”

“On whether the two of you are determined to make trouble for me.” He sat, laying his hands against the top of the picnic table deliberately—and over-dramatically, in my opinion. “Let me be frank. I could not care less about any police trouble in which you two have ensnared yourselves. It would frankly be a waste of my time to become bogged down with aiding local law enforcement in their Gordian investigative practices; that is quite beneath my interest. I do, however, very much care about any involvement you may have with the organization known as Pithica.”

“Why?” said Tresting.

“Before I can answer that question, I must know how deeply you are involved with their agents.”

Tresting narrowed his eyes. “All right,” he said, after a moment’s hesitation. “I got a niggly feeling you’re going to know all of this within the hour anyway, so I might as well tell you. I got hired by Dr. Leena Kingsley to look into her husband’s death. Fell down the rabbit hole, and here I am.”

Steve turned to me. “And you?”

“I’m helping him,” I said.

“I’m afraid that’s not good enough.”

“She’s the one who said she would call Dawna Polk,” said Finch; through his bloody nose her name sounded more like “dodda po.” “She used her to threaten me, Boss. She knows.”

Knows what?

“I did glean something of the sort from your message,” Steve said to Finch. He turned to fix his attention on me in a way that made me want to turn and run. After shooting him first. “So. Either you are one of Pithica’s agents, or you truly have no idea what you are dealing with.”

I felt Tresting’s eyes shift to me. “I’m not working for Pithica,” I said, more for Tresting’s benefit than for our agency friends. “As a matter of fact, they tried to kill me.”

“Yet you somehow not only know the woman calling herself Dawna Polk, but know that she is dangerous—a combination of knowledge that makes you very, very…special.”

“Why?”

The man calling himself Steve hesitated very deliberately. I was starting to think that he practiced being deliberate in front of a mirror. “Because people who speak with Dawna Polk see only what she wishes them to.”

“Yeah, well, clearly I’m not the only one who figured it out. You and your little band seem to know exactly what her deal is.”

“Because I have not spoken to her.”

The light breeze in the park suddenly felt very cold.

“Neither has Mr. Finch,” Steve continued. “Neither, I pray to God, has anyone else who works with us, because if they have, we are already lost.”

“You don’t trust your own people?” I asked, my mouth dry.

“It is not a matter of trust,” he said. “Dawna Polk is…for lack of a better word, she is what one might call a telepath.”

There was a moment of silence. Then I snorted out a laugh. “You’re putting me on.”

“I assure you I am not.”

“That’s ridiculous. Telepathy doesn’t exist,” I informed him.

“Please explain,” said Tresting.

Steve opened his mouth, and the pounding in my head resurged—this time along with a visceral, shriveling dread. More than anything else in the world, I wanted him not to explain. I wanted to mock him and call him an idiot, because what he was saying didn’t make sense; it couldn’t make sense—my body tensed. I had to keep myself from launching over the table and knocking him flat before he could speak, or, failing that, putting my hands over my ears and humming very loudly, because I didn’t want to know —

“Some people are born into this world with certain talents,” said Steve, his baritone as calm and deliberate as ever. “People who are…one might call them emotional geniuses. Charismatic brilliance on the furthest edge of the bell curve. Under normal circumstances, some of them become the most successful of businessmen. Others are con artists. Others movie stars or cult leaders or the greatest politicians of their time. Believe me when I say that only a handful of people in a generation have this capacity on the level of which I am speaking.”

No. I wasn’t going to take this seriously. I didn’t care how emotionally adept someone was; she was still human. To assign her supernatural mental powers was an impossible fancy—

“Enter the wonders of technology,” Steve continued. “Someone, somewhere, found a way of refining this ability and sharpening it. We don’t know how. Before, a person like Dawna Polk might have had the potential to lead nations and inspire millions. Instead, she has been altered. Enhanced. She can observe the slightest movement of your face, take in the smallest quickening of your breath, phrase a question in exactly the right way, and whether she reads it from the twitch of your eyebrow or you voluntarily tell her yourself, she will know exactly what you are thinking. More than that, whatever ideas she plants in your brain, you will walk confidently into the world determined that they are your own. She is, for all intents and purposes, a telepath, capable of taking any information you know and molding you to her will in whatever ways she desires, and as far as we know, her abilities are absolute and have no defense.”

Absurd, I told myself, trying to ignore the cold trickle of sweat on the back of my neck. This was absurd. I took in a breath to deny his story categorically, to announce my complete disbelief in anything so fantastical—but then something in the back of my brain clicked, so suddenly it jarred me, and the world shifted, maybe flipping upside down or maybe clarifying instantly to an impossible sharpness…

I had no idea what I knew or why, but some spark deep in my memory, perhaps in the subconscious web of interrelated knowledge we call instinct, had connected and fit together and God help me but I believed him. More than believed him: I knew with freezing certainty that he was right.

Dawna Polk was a fucking psychic.

Fuck.

“That is Pithica,” our narrator concluded. “They employ other agents as well, of course, who have been so indoctrinated by those with these mental powers that they are the most fanatical of followers, but people like Dawna Polk are at the heart of what they do. Our organization opposes them. I tell you this because you need some basic understanding of our dilemma here.”

“What dilemma?” said Tresting.

Steve spread his fingers, pressing against the stone table top. “The only reason we are able to exist is that Pithica does not know that we do. They cannot know. We have only managed as much as we have against them by taking swift and thorough measures against anyone who might reveal us to them.”

Oh, shit. I straightened where I sat, every nerve ending firing to alert status.

“You, either as targets of Pithica or as people who have…interacted…with them—” Steve’s mouth twisted on that word—“are an obvious liability to us, now that you know of our existence.”