The doctors’ lounge was otherwise empty when she reached it. It was a warm room with indirect lighting and real plants—ferns and ivies—hanging from planters along the walls. Two sofas long enough to sleep on and an automated galley as sophisticated as some she’d seen serve a whole ship.
She didn’t know if the other physicians had been warned away or if Ahmadi had been alone there all along, but when she sat down across from her, Ahmadi’s tea had a little skin of oil across its top where it had cooled, undrunk. The doctor’s gaze swam a little bit as it found its way to Tanaka.
“You’re here,” Ahmadi said.
“I am,” Tanaka agreed, and pushed the little packet with its two pills across the table. “How does this work? Why does it take the edge off the effect?”
Ahmadi nodded. “It reduces activity in the temporoparietal lobes with some antipsychotic effects. It diminishes spontaneous neural firings globally. Whatever is reaching into your mind, I thought it might help you to not respond to it.”
“What else does that? What other drugs? I need a list.”
Ahmadi put out her hand. For a moment, Tanaka didn’t know what she meant by it, then she gave the doctor her terminal. As Ahmadi wrote in it, she spoke. Her voice was soft and hazy.
“When I was an intern, I had a patient with left neglect.”
“I don’t know what that is.”
“He had a lesion on his brain that meant he didn’t experience the concept of left. If I asked him to draw a circle, he’d draw the right half. If you had him draw an analog clock face, all the numbers would be crowded onto the right. Left was a thought he just couldn’t have. Like he was colorblind, but for half his perceptual field.”
Tanaka leaned back in her chair. “Are you all right?”
“I always thought about how strange it would be to have that loss. I never thought about how odd we must have been to him. These weird people with twice as much world that he couldn’t conceive of. And he couldn’t. The thoughts you have depend on the brain you have. Change the brain and you change the kinds of thoughts that are possible to think.”
She put the terminal onto the table beside her abandoned tea. It made a scraping sound like a fingernail over skin as she pushed it across. Tanaka didn’t pick it up.
“It happened to you.”
“It did,” Ahmadi said. “I was remembering a tunnel. You were there. Something bad was happening.”
“To Nobuyuki,” Tanaka said. “Whoever the fuck that is.”
“It’s connecting us,” Ahmadi said. “It’s making cross connections between our neurons. Making it so that the electrical impulse of a neuron in one brain can trigger the neuron in another brain to fire. We used to do that with rats, you know? Put an electrode in one rat brain that’s hooked to a radio transmitter. A receiver hooked to another rat in another room. We’d show one the color red, and shock the other. After a while, when the one saw red, the other would flinch even without a shock. ‘Poor man’s telepathy’ we called it.”
“Nothing personal, but your work sounds kind of fucked up.”
“I thought it would be like… being with people. Like a dream, but it’s not. It’s being part of an idea that is too big to think. Being one part of a brain that’s so vast and interconnected, it’s not human. It’s made of humans, but that’s not what it is. Not any more than we’re neurons and cells.”
“You still think this is intimate assault?”
“Oh yes,” Ahmadi said. Her voice was low and rich with her conviction. “Yes.”
Tanaka picked up the handheld from the table. A dozen different pharmaceuticals were listed there, with dosage formulas and warnings. Do Not Take on an Empty Stomach. Discontinue if Rash Presents. Avoid if Pregnant. She slapped the handheld onto her wrist and put the two remaining pills into her pocket.
“It’s spreading,” Ahmadi said. “It’s not just the people who were in the ring space with you. It’s spreading out everywhere. Like a contagion.”
“I know.”
“How can it do that?”
Tanaka stood. Ahmadi seemed smaller than she had in their session. Her face was softer than it had been. The voice that had admired her, that had been reminded of his wife, was silent. Or elsewhere. Or blocked by the drugs.
“I don’t know how it’s being done,” Tanaka said. “But I intend to find out.”
“How do you stop it?”
“I’ll find that out too,” she said, and walked away. In the corridor, she copied the list to the two Marines as she led the way toward the pharmacy. “Any of these that are already compounded, we take. Anything we’d need to synthesize more on the Derecho, we take that too.”
“How do we know what those are?”
“Shake a pharmacist,” Tanaka said.
It took longer than Tanaka had wanted to spend, but the supply was also larger. By the end, they had to take wide, blue plastic bags that were meant for the personal effects of patients. By the time they were ready to go, it looked like they’d been shopping at a high-fashion market district. One of the doctors—a small, round-faced man with an unfortunate beard—followed them out toward the hub to the main station flapping his hands in distress. Tanaka did him the favor of ignoring him.
It took the lift a few seconds to arrive. As Tanaka stood there, waiting, one of her guards cleared his throat. “Straight to the dock, sir?”
“Yes,” Tanaka said. And then, “No. Wait.” As the lift chimed, she pulled open one of the bags and grabbed out a familiar glassine packet, filled with pills. “Go ahead. I’ll meet you at the ship.”
“Are you sure, sir?”
“Go.”
She didn’t wait to watch. Anyone on the Derecho stupid enough to disobey her at this point was beyond saving. She stalked to the doctor’s lounge again. This time, more people were there. They turned to look at her like she was a threat. Fair enough.
Ahmadi was exactly where Tanaka had left her, though somehow she’d gotten a fresh cup of tea to ignore. Tanaka touched her shoulder, and she was slow to turn. Tanaka put the packet on the table beside the teacup. Ahmadi’s hand covered it.
“I’ll do what I can,” Tanaka said.
Chapter Thirty-Five: Alex
At first, Alex didn’t notice the sounds of violence. There were several reasons for that: He was on the flight deck at the top of the Rocinante, and the fighting was down by the crew airlock; he was at the end of a long, busy shift, and the fatigue left him a little slower on the uptake than usual; he was watching one of his favorite old neo-noir entertainment feeds, and the detective—played by Shin Jung Park—had just followed the mysterious woman—Anna Reál—into a nightclub on Titan. It was only a few minutes before he’d find the policeman’s body, and maybe an hour before he realized that the mysterious woman was his daughter. Alex had seen this one many times over the years. He knew it well. Rewatching old feeds was a comfort for him. There was a calm that came with knowing what was going to happen.
He couldn’t tell what caught his attention, only that something in the club sounded wrong. He paused the feed, Shin Jung Park with his eyes half closed and his mouth open awkwardly in the middle of ordering a drink. The Roci was just the hum of recyclers and his own heartbeat. When the next shout came, Alex started. It was a girl’s voice lifted in rage. He couldn’t make out individual words, but it was only trouble.
He unstrapped and hauled himself down through ops to the lift. The girl’s voice came again, louder and fast. The only thing he could make out was the word fucking in the middle of a sentence. Then a sound of impact loud enough that the hull rang with it for a few seconds.