“Okay, so move them over to my opportunities list then.”
North started to shake his head. “Rory—”
I cut him off. “I didn’t finish what I was telling you before. About my midterm.”
“The dock,” North said.
“The goal was to evacuate as many ‘high-value’ people as possible before these huge crates of fireworks exploded. When the timer started, I just froze. There were all these little kids there, natives, and I knew they were considered low value, but I couldn’t stand the idea of leaving them to die. Then, all of a sudden, I heard a voice. Telling me to wait. Not to evacuate anyone. That’s the way I took it, at least.”
“This voice—”
“It was the Doubt,” I said firmly. I didn’t want to dance around it anymore. “It was the Doubt, and I ignored it, because that was the rational thing to do. But then I found out that the simulation was based on something that happened in Fiji last week. Except in real life, the dock didn’t explode because it was over its weight limit. It collapsed into the water just as the firework blew. So if I’d waited, no one would’ve died.”
North took a few seconds to process this. “I don’t understand what this has to do with your Lux profile,” he said finally.
“That wasn’t the first time I’d heard the voice,” I said. “It started the day I flew out here, on the plane. I was worried about Theden, and the voice promised me I wouldn’t fail. I heard it again the next day. Twice. Once in practicum, then again when I was picking my research topic for cog psych. The Doubt told me to pick akratic paracusia disorder. APD. It’s the medical term for people who listen to the Doubt. It’s sort of a long story, but if I hadn’t listened to the Doubt that day—if I’d trusted Lux instead—I never would’ve found out that my mom had it.”
“Had,” North repeated. I saw something in his eyes. Not hope, exactly, but something like it. The you, too I’d felt when he told me he’d lost his mom.
“She died when I was born,” I said. Then, because I felt my voice breaking, I barreled on. As long as I was talking, I wouldn’t cry. “She was nineteen. She was diagnosed with APD while she was here, actually. At Theden. They kicked her out because of it. And I’m thinking, Lux had to have known that, right? It was right there in her medical file. So why did it try to steer me away from picking APD as my research topic? What else has Lux decided to keep from me?”
“Lux hasn’t decided anything, Rory,” North retorted. “Lux is an app following an algorithm that some computer programmers wrote after some business people pretending to be social scientists decided they could ‘optimize’ society by making people’s lives run more smoothly.”
“Fine, but that algorithm has determined that there are six people out there who somehow have the potential to throw my life into chaos. It’s weird, North. Really freaking weird. Who are these people and what does my blood type have to do with anything? If you were me, wouldn’t you want to know?”
“Sure, but—”
I grabbed his arm. “So do it. Move them to my opportunities list. Lux is designed to move a person toward her opportunities, right? If those people are at the top of the list, then—”
He put his hand on mine. “I can’t, Rory.” He sighed. “Not won’t. Actually can’t. What you’re talking about would require access to Lux’s back-end data, behind Gnosis’s firewall. That’s impossible, even for me. Trust me, I’ve tried.”
Hot tears sprung to my eyes. I turned away from him. “So, basically, I’m powerless.”
“You’re far from powerless, Rory.” I felt his hands on my waist. “You have a guide that’s far better than Lux.”
I spun around to face him. “You’re telling me to trust the Doubt?” My voice was incredulous. Accusing.
“I do,” he said softly.
“You— You hear it too?”
He nodded, his eyes searching mine. “Not every day or anything. But sometimes.”
“Have you ever seen a doctor about it?”
North made a face. “Why, so they could numb me out on antipsychotics? No, thank you. My brain is fine the way it is.” It was the same thing Beck always said.
“But what if we’re . . . sick?” Sick was easier to say than crazy.
“Do you feel sick?” North asked.
“Well, no. But I’ve read the research, and—”
“Whose research are we talking about here?” he scoffed. “‘Science’ with a capital S? The same geniuses who said the Earth was the center of the universe?”
“Okay, so what is it then? If it’s not a hallucination, where is the voice coming from?”
“People used to think it was the voice of God.”
“But that’s crazy,” I said, then winced when I saw North’s face. “Not crazy. I just meant, why would God give us the capacity to reason and then tell us not to use it?”
“Human rationality convinced Eve it was a good idea to eat forbidden fruit,” North challenged.
“But what if the Doubt is the other voice?” I countered. “The snake.”
North just looked at me. “Do you really believe that?”
I thought of everything I knew of the voice in my head. When it had spoken, what it had said. I thought of those little children on the dock, the ones the voice had tried to help me save. “No. I guess not. But I’m still not totally convinced I should trust it. Not all the time, anyway.”
North flipped over his forearm and pointed to one of his tattoos. A double-minded man is unstable in all his ways it read, in simple block type. I touched the words with my fingertips. There was truth in them. Unstable was exactly how I felt. Not mentally, but somewhere in my chest, at the root of myself. “It’s from the Bible,” North said. “The Book of James.”
There was a medical term for double-mindedness. Dipsychos. It was part of the pathology for akratic paracusia. “Of two minds” was how my textbook defined it. Reason and the Doubt at war in your brain.
“The point is, there will always be competing voices,” I heard North say. “In your head and in the world. You can’t spend your life caught between them.”
I looked up at him. “You’re telling me to choose.”
“I know better than to tell you to do anything,” North said, reaching around me to shut down his computer. “But if you don’t decide, the world will choose for you.”
18
I CALLED MY DAD on the walk back to campus, but he and Kari were at Mulleady’s for trivia night, and with the background noise, I could barely hear him, so the conversation didn’t last long. I wasn’t sure what I was planning to say to him anyway. I wanted to ask about my blood type, to see if he had any clue how it could’ve possibly ended up at the very top of my Lux threat list, but obviously couldn’t tell him why I was asking or what North had shown me or why I felt so rattled by what I’d seen.
I tried Beck next, but he didn’t pick up.
Hershey wasn’t in our room when I got there. It was already after ten, so I buried myself in bed and tried to relax under the weight of the covers. My mind was whizzing, whirling, and my body ached with tension I couldn’t let go of. Over and over I heard North’s voice. If you don’t decide, the world will choose for you. It reminded me of something the Doubt said that night in the arena. Choose today whom you will serve. But I hadn’t. I was still wavering, hovering, between trusting the voice and wishing it’d leave me alone.