Элизабет Бир - The Best of Elizabeth Bear

I imagine the flexible circuits embedded inside my brain falling into quiescence at the same time. Even smaller LEDs with even more advanced power cells go dark. The optogenetic adds shut themselves off when my brain is functioning healthily . Normally, microprocessors keep me sane and safe, monitor my brain activity, stimulate portions of the neocortex devoted to ethics, empathy, compassion. When I run, though, my brain—my dysfunctional, murderous, cured brain—does it for itself as neural pathways are stimulated by my own native neurochemicals.

Only my upper body gets cold: Though that wind chills the skin of my thighs and calves like an ice bath, the muscles beneath keep hot with exertion. And the jacket takes the edge off the wind that strikes my chest.

My shoes blur pink and yellow along the narrow path up the hill. Gravestones like smoker’s teeth protrude through swept drifts. They’re moldy black all over as if spray-painted, and glittering powdery whiteness heaps against their backs. Some of the stones date to the eighteenth century, but I run there only in the summertime or when it hasn’t snowed.

Maintenance doesn’t plow that part of the churchyard. Nobody comes to pay their respects to those dead anymore.

Sort of like the man I used to be.

The ones I killed, however—some of them still get their memorials every year. I know better than to attend, even though my old self would have loved to gloat, to relive the thrill of their deaths. The new me… feels a sense of… obligation. But their loved ones don’t know my new identity. And nobody owes me closure.

I’ll have to take what I can find for myself. I’ve sunk into that beautiful quiet place where there’s just the movement, the sky, that true, irreproducible blue, the brilliant flicker of a cardinal. Where I die as a noun and only the verb survives.

I run. I am running.

When hemet her eyes, he imagined her throat against his hands. Skin like calves’ leather; the heat and the crack of her hyoid bone as he dug his thumbs deep into her pulse. The way she’d writhe, thrash, struggle.

His waist chain rattled as his hands twitched, jerking the cuffs taut on his wrists.

She glanced up from her notes. Her eyes were a changeable hazel: blue in this light, gray green in others. Reflections across her glasses concealed the corner where text scrolled. It would have been too small to read, anyway—backward, with the table he was chained to creating distance between them.

She waited politely, seeming unaware that he was imagining those hazel eyes dotted with petechiae, that fair skin slowly mottling purple. He let the silence sway between them until it developed gravity.

“Did you wish to say something?” she asked, with mild but clinical encouragement.

Point to me , he thought.

He shook his head. “I’m listening.”

She gazed upon him benevolently for a moment. His fingers itched. He scrubbed the tips against the rough orange jumpsuit but stopped. In her silence, the whisking sound was too audible.

She continued. “The court is aware that your crimes are the result of neural damage including an improperly functioning amygdala. Technology exists that can repair this damage. It is not experimental; it has been used successfully in tens of thousands of cases to treat neurological disorders as divergent as depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, borderline personality, and the complex of disorders commonly referred to as schizophrenic syndrome.”

The delicate structure of her collarbones fascinated him. It took fourteen pounds of pressure, properly applied, to snap a human clavicle—rendering the arm useless for a time. He thought about the proper application of that pressure. He said, “Tell me more.”

“They take your own neurons—grown from your own stem cells under sterile conditions in a lab, modified with microbial opsin genes. This opsin is a light-reactive pigment similar to that found in the human retina. The neurons are then reintroduced to key areas of your brain. This is a keyhole procedure. Once the neurons are established, and have been encouraged to develop the appropriate synaptic connections, there’s a second surgery, to implant a medical device: a series of miniaturized flexible microprocessors, sensors, and light-emitting diodes. This device monitors your neurochemistry and the electrical activity in your brain and adjusts it to mimic healthy activity.” She paused again and steepled her fingers on the table.

“‘Healthy,’” he mocked.

She did not move.

“That’s discrimination against the neuro-atypical.”

“Probably,” she said. Her fingernails were appliquéd with circuit diagrams. “But you did kill thirteen people. And get caught. Your civil rights are bound to be forfeit after something like that.”

He stayed silent. Impulse control had never been his problem.

“It’s not psychopathy you’re remanded for,” she said. “It’s murder.”

“Mind control,” he said.

“Mind repair ,” she said. “You can’t be sentenced to the medical procedure. But you can volunteer. It’s usually interpreted as evidence of remorse and desire to be rehabilitated. Your sentencing judge will probably take that into account.”

“God,” he said. “I’d rather have a bullet in the head than a fucking computer.”

“They haven’t used bullets in a long time,” she said. She shrugged, as if it were nothing to her either way. “It was lethal injection or the gas chamber. Now it’s rightminding. Or it’s the rest of your life in an eight-by-twelve cell. You decide.”

“I can beat it.”

“Beat rightminding?”

Point to me.

“What if I can beat it?”

“The success rate is a hundred percent. Barring a few who never woke up from anesthesia.” She treated herself to a slow smile. “If there’s anybody whose illness is too intractable for this particular treatment, they must be smart enough to keep it to themselves. And smart enough not to get caught a second time.”

You’re being played , he told himself. You are smarter than her. Way too smart for this to work on you. She’s appealing to your vanity. Don’t let her yank your chain. She thinks she’s so fucking smart. She’s prey. You’re the hunter. More evolved. Don’t be manipulated—

His lips said, “Lady, sign me up.”

The snowcreaks under my steps. Trees might crack tonight. I compose a poem in my head.

The fashion in poetry is confessional. It wasn’t always so—but now we judge value by our own voyeurism. By the perceived rawness of what we think we are being invited to spy upon. But it’s all art: veils and lies.

If I wrote a confessional poem, it would begin: Her dress was the color of mermaids, and I killed her anyway.

A confessional poem need not be true. Not true in the way the bite of the air in my lungs in spite of the mask is true. Not true in the way the graveyard and the cardinal and the ragged stones are true.

It wasn’t just her. It was her, and a dozen others like her. Exactly like her in that they were none of them the right one, and so another one always had to die.

That I can still see them as fungible is a victory for my old self—his only victory, maybe, though he was arrogant enough to expect many more. He thought he could beat the rightminding.

That’s the only reason he agreed to it.