Holy crap. They were friends.
I shoved the headphones plug into the jack and clicked the other file.
“You no doubt have questions,” came Dr. Tarsus’s voice through the speakers. “I have some answers, but not all. I don’t know why your mom left Theden when she did, or whether her death was an accident, although I suspect it wasn’t. I do know that Griffin Payne is your real father, and that he and Aviana were deeply in love, and she was certain you were conceived on their wedding night.” Dr. Tarsus took a steady breath. I felt my body stiffen, bracing for whatever she was about to say.
“The last time I heard from your mother was the day you were born,” she began. “She’d been gone since the previous June. She called from a nurse’s phone to tell me she was in labor, and that she thought the Few had found her. She didn’t say what had happened to make her run, only that something terrible had, and that, because of it, you could not grow up as Griffin’s child. She said she’d made sure that Griffin didn’t suspect that you were his, and that you would grow up believing that a man named Duke Vaughn was your father.” My eyes watered at the mention of my dad’s name. How far away my life with him seemed. “She said she was calling to say good-bye,” Dr. Tarsus continued. “And to ask me to keep you safe. I promised her that I would.
“By now you know that the upsilon necklace is mine. Your mom was never a member of the Few. Neither was your father. Your father was never even considered, despite his stepfather’s pleas on his behalf—his IQ didn’t meet the threshold. Your mother was invited and went through the evaluation process, but when the time came for her vows, she refused to make them. I’ll never forget her words. She pulled back her hood and said, ‘Only the powerless hide behind masks and robes.’ The rest of us were caught up in the prestige and exclusivity, the flattery of being told that we were destined for greatness. It was so easy to rationalize it, to call this greatness our duty, to make it sound important and even good. It’s how we’re made I suppose. How did Milton put it? ‘Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall.’ The choice was ours, and we chose ourselves. Not Aviana. She was wiser than that.
“I didn’t know at first if you were like her. Growing up you didn’t seem to be, not from a distance, anyway. When you decided to come to Theden, I had to be sure. That’s why I asked Hershey to keep an eye on you. When she told me she would go to the dean, I knew I had to send her away, however I could. In retrospect, I wish I’d never involved her to begin with. I didn’t end up needing her weekly reports. I knew you heard the Doubt on the first day of class, when you threw yourself in front of that trolley. It was something Aviana would’ve done.” Dr. Tarsus paused there, and I imagined her smiling. I heard her smile fade before she went on.
“I didn’t see what she saw. Not then. So I took my vows that night without knowing how deep the society’s power ran. Now I know too well.” Her voice was grim. “The Few may be few, but they are everywhere. They have members in every city, in every industry, at the highest level at every major company. Gnosis and Soza are just the tip of the iceberg. Slowly and steadily, they have been creating the infrastructure for their dominance.” The infrastructure for their dominance. I shuddered. It sounded like a line from a creepy conspiracy thriller. But no, this was real life.
“But the Few have an opponent they haven’t yet overcome,” Dr. Tarsus said then. “The Doubt. A label designed by them to make the inner voice seem untrustworthy. Irrational. It wasn’t a difficult sell. After all, people who hear it do things that don’t make sense to the world—they give up what they’ve earned, they help those who don’t deserve it, they forgo what they desire. They don’t put themselves first, and selfless people are impossible to control. So the Few began to foster the idea that this ‘Doubt’ couldn’t be trusted. They created the fiction of a psychological disorder, as if the voice could be explained away by science, when, in reality, it’s the most complicated concept of our existence. The inexplicable nudge of providence that has guided the human spirit since the beginning of time. It is, I’ve come to believe, the thing that makes us human. Whether it’s coming from God or our collective conscience or some unknown part of ourselves—the voice isn’t something we can study in a lab, or put in a box. It is so much bigger than that.
“The Few helped people forget that. Slowly, methodically, they set out to change the story. The voice people once trusted became the enemy of happiness. Something to fear. Knowing that the voice wouldn’t scream to be heard, they made sure that the world stayed loud with music and movies and 24/7 news and incessant online chatter. If they couldn’t silence the whisper, they’d bombard people with other voices. Infinite choices.
“It worked, but it wasn’t perfect,” she went on. “There were still some who chose the voice. Who couldn’t be distracted. Who couldn’t be misled. So Project Hyperion was born. The Few would launch a new tech company. That tech company would develop a decision-making app, and that decision-making app would become a social necessity. They knew the world well. And they had patience.
“The summer of my senior year, the society got me an internship with Gnosis,” Dr. Tarsus continued. “That’s how I ended up as Dr. Hildebrand’s research assistant that spring. It was a fortuitous accident that someone put my name on the distribution list for that internal memo you found on my pendant. As soon as I saw it, I went straight to your mom. I wasn’t afraid for my life, not back then. Just the loss of my status. I was a girl from the Bronx who’d been given this whole new life. A life I didn’t want to lose.” Heavy with shame, her voice faltered a little. She cleared her throat and kept going.
“Your mom didn’t waver for a moment once she knew. She wanted to expose them. And with the memo and the society roster I’d put together, she had the proof she needed. Her plan was to write an open letter to all the major newspapers in the country, enclosing the memo and the roster. Every one of them would’ve run the story. Reporters were still making their own choices back then. But she said she wanted to confront Griffin’s stepfather first. Atwater was the Divine Second then. The society’s number two. Aviana felt like she needed a confession from him, if only for Griffin.”
Dr. Tarsus’s voice was grim now. “Neither of us knew what the Few were truly capable of. We knew they were powerful, and we knew they were ruthless, but we didn’t imagine that they were murderers. I don’t know for certain that they killed your mother, but I do know they killed your father.” Her voice broke. “I hate for you to find out this way, Rory, but Griffin is dead.” My eyes welled up with tears even though I already knew. It was the sympathy in Tarsus’s voice that got to me, the unbridled compassion. “He died the night of the party,” she said softly. “Of a blood clot in his brain. He didn’t know what he was up against when he got behind that podium. He knew that the version of Lux on the Gold used a different algorithm, designed to steer people away from the Doubt, but he had no idea that people were being chemically manipulated into trusting it, or that the flu spray he got in September was riddled with nanobots.” Her voice got hard again. “Or that his bodyguard, Jason, was taking orders from someone else.”
I’d wondered who’d pressed the button to cause that clot. How much of our conversation had Jason overheard? Was I the reason Griffin was dead?
“I’m sure you think I’m a coward,” Tarsus said then, her voice faltering again. “With my position, my access, I should have done something myself, long ago, before it got this far. And you’re right. But I couldn’t take them on and keep my promise to your mom. So I’ve kept you safe, hoping that the day would come when I wouldn’t need to anymore. I wish that day were today. I want nothing more than for you to leave Theden, to disappear the way your mom tried to do. But while I am not as wise as your mother was, or as you are, I am no fool. I saw the look in your eyes when you stepped up to that altar. It’s the same look I saw in hers when she pulled back that hood. So if you choose to go back into the tomb, I will do whatever I can to get you out alive.” She started to say something else but seemed to change her mind. There was a shuffling sound, and the clip cut off.