Кейт Эллиот - The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2021

“You’re wrong,” Rashad said. “This is finally me.” He could feel the DBI working, like a cave tunnel widening day by day, letting through more and more water. “I can’t go back to what I was before.”

“That’s the implant telling you that,” Leo said.

And Rashad thought, What part of your subconscious is making you say that? Whether the subsystem was mechanical or biological made no difference.

“When we go in tomorrow,” Leo said, “I’m going to tell them to turn that thing off.”

“That’s not what I agreed to,” Marisa said hotly.

Rashad was surprised they weren’t on the same page. He’d thought they’d been arguing about how to confront him, not what to say.

Marisa said, “Numbness isn’t the answer.”

“Thank you,” Rashad said. “I have to—” His voice broke. How could he explain that he wanted this pain? That he believed in it. He’d turned the bedroom into a kind of arena—​Rashad Before Bullet versus Rashad After—​and he didn’t want to shrink from those blows. It would be immoral to not feel that pain. What kind of coward would he be if now, after finally regaining the ability to regret what he’d done, he refused to face it? “I have to take responsibility.”

“You did what you had to do,” Leo said.

“I’m not saying you shouldn’t take responsibility,” Marisa said. She knelt so that she and Rashad were eye to eye. “I’m saying you don’t have to keep beating yourself up about it.”

“Yeah, I do,” Rashad answered. “That’s the point.”

“You can ask God for forgiveness.”

Leo groaned. “Can we keep this on track?”

“Why would I do that?” Rashad said to her. “So I can feel better?” He shook his head. “I’m not going to shrug this off. I’m not going to move on, now that I have a second chance.” The bullet that had meant to be his punishment had robbed him of it.

“Please,” Marisa said. “It’s not so hard. You can ask Jesus to come into your heart.”

“Definitely not.” No more intercessors, strengthening some signals of forgiveness, dampening remorse. “My heart,” he said, “is crowded enough.”

“Pick a card,” Alejandra said. “Any card.”

Yellow X. Red circle. Green triangle.

“Why are we doing this?”

“Humor me. One final exam.”

“More data for your dissertation.” It was a mean thing to say. He tapped the green triangle.

She put the card away and said, “Okay, pick a card.”

“You’re not going to replace the card?”

“No.”

That annoyed him, this change in the rules. Wouldn’t this mess up her results? He looked at the red circle, then the yellow X. He suspected she wanted him to choose that second card, and he didn’t appreciate being manipulated. He tapped the red circle.

She removed the circle and dealt a new card. Blue square. He quickly tapped it. She took it away and dealt the circle again.

“Oh come on,” he said.

“Pick a card,” she said.

“You want me to pick the yellow X. Why?”

“Pick whichever you want.”

He flicked the red circle toward her and it slid off the table. Immediately he felt like a dick. She calmly retrieved the card and dealt a new one from the deck.

A yellow X. Two of them on the table now, side by side.

“Pick a card,” she said.

He couldn’t remember a time where there’d been a pair of matching cards on the table. Was this some new requirement phoned in by Dr. S? Or maybe she was going rogue, defying the doctor’s orders. There’d always been a tension between those two, a struggle for power—​the grad student chafing under the control of the mentor. In the early appointments, he didn’t have the emotional equipment to figure out their relationship. But now the DBI floodgates were open. Everything his back-brain had noticed and reacted to was available to him now. He could make any decision he wanted—​including the decision to not participate.

“I’m done,” he said.

“Please, Rashad. Pick a card.”

“There’s no choice. They’re the same.”

“Think of them as right and left. Which do you choose?”

“There’s no point. You’re leaving.”

“All right,” she said evenly. “Do you want to sit down?”

He realized that in his anger he’d stood up. He was looming over the table, his heart beating fast.

“Can you put those away?” he asked. The pair of Xs looked like the eyes of a cartoon corpse.

“Could you pass them to me?” she replied.

Fuck you. Immediately he felt childish—​but still didn’t want to give in. “They’re right in front of you.”

Suddenly she looked sad. No, sad was too broad a word—​there were more fine-grained descriptors for what he saw in her face. Resignation? Regret? Then she swept the cards toward her, and when she looked up at him again she was assessing him. She’d learned something new about him, he realized. By calling a halt to the test, he’d continued the test.

This unnerved him. He unclenched his hands. Took his seat. He couldn’t look directly at her. He could see that her hand still held the deck of cards.

“I know you’re going through a rough time,” she said. “But I want you to hold on. You can call me anytime. I’ll do anything in my power to help you.”

Except stay.

“There’s something else.” There it was again, the same hesitancy as when she told him she was leaving. He understood now that the assuredness he’d seen in her in those first appointments was a kind of uniform she put on. He’d done that himself, many times. “I need to tell you about a part of the treatment.”

“Okay . . .”

“We had to decide on some images as controls—​we hard-coded some to a set value. For example, some images always have an output of a positive value.”

“Puppies? All those pictures of dogs?”

“It wasn’t that, but yes, something like that.”

“Without telling me.” He couldn’t keep the anger out of his voice.

“I’m sorry.” Her voice had gone soft. “It wouldn’t be a control if we told you. And we also chose one to be a negative value. Something’s that’s always aversive. Something you’d avoid at all costs—​even if later you had to make up a story for why you chose what you did.”

Her hand still lay on the deck. And then he understood. His chest tightened. “Yellow X.”

“You’ve never chosen it. Not once. At first, you couldn’t choose any card. But then we turned on the DBI, and we made it difficult for you to choose that card—​and then impossible.”

“You can’t know that. I could have chosen it.”

“Yet you never did.”

“Deal the cards.”

“Are you sure you want to do this?”

“Do it.”

She shuffled through the deck, chose three, and laid them out. Green rectangle. Red circle. Yellow X.

She watched him. As soon as he chose, she’d record it in her tablet, and that would be their final interaction. Tomorrow she’d fly across the country to join Dr. Subramanian. They’d make their careers off of his injury, his handicap, his crimes.

He was tired of being data. He knew which card he’d choose, but that didn’t mean he’d have to share it with her.

“Sorry, Alejandra.” He stood up. “You don’t get to know.”

The gun sat inside the open box. He felt queasy looking at the gleaming metal, as if the weight of it bowed the floor, drawing the walls toward him.

You did what you had to do. Bullshit, of course. Yes, in the final moments he was part of an unstoppable chain reaction. Neurons fired, his fist closed, the palm switch activated, the SHEP’s gun discharged, bullets followed the path decided by physics. But that didn’t mean he could deny the series of choices he’d made to that point. He chose to enlist. He chose to go to systems operation school. He chose to send the SHEP into that home. The women and children in that house were simply the last dominoes to fall in a sequence he had initiated years ago. Maybe Alejandra was right, and ATLAS had been rigged for Yes, designed to take the burden from his shoulders—​it was right there in its name, for Christ’s sake. But none of that absolved him.