A new universe called to me, and I answered, ignorant of the harm in crossing over.

—Victor Eastmore, Apology to Resonant Earth, (transmission date unknown)

Semiautonomous California, 29 February 1991

It’s one thing to die quietly with things left unsaid among family members. It’s another thing to do what the great Jefferson Eastmore did with his secrecy and architecture of conspiracy: keep essential truths from Victor and put him on a collision course with an uncanny future. 

Victor gazed across City Lake toward the tessellated foothills, where the elite families of Oakland and Bayshore kept their hedges trimmed and thorny. His grandfather’s sarcophagus was up there, surrounded by marble pillars and gold-gilt fencing shaped like twisted strands of DNA. A tidy and neat brick gravemound would never have sufficed, since at the end of his life, Jefferson was as grandiose as his cancer-curing career. The stones were plucked from the canals of New Venice, and a plaque listed the man’s many accomplishments. Not listed was his failed effort to cure Victor of mirror resonance syndrome.

Victor spun around to face the city skyline. The morning was bright and windy. The timefeed on his MeshBit indicated thirty minutes until his reclassification appointment. He could go and wait in the anteroom, but his anxious vibrations might shake the building to its foundations. 

He took a breath. No going back. Before the sun reached its zenith that day, his path would materialize. If he were lucky, he could stay a Class Three: free but under close supervision. Or he could become a Class Two: under guard, imprisoned, at a rancho in the hinterlands. He whispered a cherished but inconsistently effective mantra to fight off brain blankness: The wise owl listens before asking who. Each episode of blanking out was one more step toward mirror resonance syndrome’s inevitable tragic end: becoming a comatose Class One, insensate, a forgotten ward of the government. The only unknown factor was how quickly the future would crash against him.

He trudged along the shoreline, tensing and relaxing his jaw, trying to distract himself. Glittering towers rose exultantly cityside. Squally breezes swooped out of a cloudless, azure sky and assaulted bulrushes, sedges, and cattails in the shallows where a grid of waterplots penned them in. 

Granfa Jefferson had been poisoned. Victor knew it. He had proof. But his family didn’t believe him, and if he said any more about it, he would be locked away. Fair? No. Surprising? Not really. After all, his life was a farcical succession of tragedies. It wasn’t time to give up, though. Not while he had unanswered questions.

The palm trees encircling the lake rustled like cheerleaders shaking their pom-poms. The water rippled, creating countless sun flashes on the lake’s surface, and afterimages glowed and pulsed when he closed his eyes. The stench of goose shit turned his stomach.

He wedged the MeshBit’s detachable sonobulb in his ear, then called Elena. She answered right away. This was not the first time her promptness was suspicious.

“See?” she said. “When a friend calls, you should answer. Right away. Not never.”

“I know. I need your help,” he said. “My appointment is here. I’m having trouble.”

“Where are you?” she asked.

“City Lake. West shore.”

“I can’t get there in time.” 

You were there for Granfa Jeff’s funeral. You showed up at my apartment whenever you wanted. Why can’t you be here now?

“Then talk to me,” Victor said. “Anything to keep my mind off my theories about Granfa Jeff.” 

At the time, Victor had nothing close to the truth about Jefferson’s secret messages and plans for conspiracy and counter-conspiracy. He couldn’t have guessed his role in the proliferating conflagration that would transform every person on Resonant Earth and beyond. No one could have predicted the neuro-contagion that eventually radiated beyond the American Union of Nations, or the mind-machine hybridization that became humanity’s destiny, or the fact that crossing over to another world would become a possibility rather than paranoia. If Victor had guessed any of it, he might have failed his reclassification deliberately and shown up at the gates of a rancho to check himself in. All this was a lot to have piled onto a mentally unstable young adult. 

“But you found radiation on the data egg,” Elena said. “I believe you. We’re going to figure this out.”

Her confidence gave Victor warm tingles, but the timing was all wrong. Murder bird, murder bird—those aren’t the words I need right now. “Let’s talk about anything else. Please, I’m desperate. As usual.” 

Elena’s recent return to Semiautonomous California had helped him, even if something felt off with her sometimes. And right now, he was feeling supercharged, like his world hinged on every movement, every word, and the right shift in thinking could set him free, if only he could figure out what that might be. 

She took a breath. “I think you should leave SeCa.”

Although the bioconcrete path beneath his feet was firm, he was unsteady, as if balancing on a tightrope swaying in the wind. 

“If I don’t show up, they’ll reclassify me in absentia. I could never come back.”

“Why would you want to come back?” Elena asked. “They treat people with mirror resonance syndrome like criminals. You haven’t done anything wrong.”

Victor paced toward the lake’s edge. Crowds of lotus leaves floated, looking sad without their blossoms. “Remember when we talked about moving to an island? I said we could stargaze all night.”

“And I would make a pie out of real coconut flesh. Yeah, I remember. A wish is a lie, Victor.”

Elena was right. He couldn’t afford to dream. Until he found a cure, his blanking episodes made him a danger to everyone. 

She went on, “Without mentioning the thing you don’t want me to talk about”—he had no doubt she was rolling her eyes as she said this—“I will say that after what you told your family, I think you leaving SeCa isn’t such a bad idea.”

Static came through the sonobulb, like a cotton ball pressed too deeply into his ear. His parents, granma, aunt, and cousin all thought he was losing his mind. They might be right, but why couldn’t they just listen for once? His stomach ached as he remembered the disbelief, disappointment, impatience, and the hint of fear on their faces—ugh, the memory was a knife twisting in his guts. It was good that the Personil was dulling his emotions; without it, he’d be lost in a storm.

He checked the screen on his MeshBit and tensed—only a few minutes until his appointment. 

Leaving wasn’t a solution. It wasn’t. He cleared his throat and said thickly, “No matter where I go, I’m still, you know, me. If I go blank here, people know what to do. Out there … I don’t know what would happen.”

“No. The good people of Semiautonomous California aren’t lining up to save you. SeCa is the problem. It’s the good versus evil Cathar mindset. Other places are different. You can get away from discrimination. Away from surveillance. There’s no future here for you.”

Victor sat on a bench facing the lake, closed his eyes, and smashed his fists together. She was saying he could go somewhere the Carmichael laws couldn’t reach him: the sandy beaches of the Southeastern Confederacy, an island within the Dominion of Florida and Cuba, or maybe a cabin in the mountains up north at the border between the Louisiana Territories and First Nations of Canada. But if what Ozie had said was true, that other nations were passing laws based on SeCa’s, soon there would be no place truly free for people like him. Maybe leaving would buy him some time. Maybe that would be enough.

“It’s that different elsewhere?” Victor asked.

Elena said, “People in Texas think a broken mirror is seven years’ bad luck.”

He barked a laugh. A nearby jogger did a double take at the sound. “I’ve never thought of myself as a bad-luck charm. At least seven years is better than a lifetime.”

She sighed. “Texas is wild. Everyone is fighting all the time. The government is barely functional. It’s chaos, but it’s not oppressive. I don’t know. I can’t explain it. Maybe you should see it for yourself.”

She was rambling, like old times. She was finally warming up to him again.

She wouldn’t have killed Granfa Jeff. She had no reason to. She wasn’t a killer. Oh yes, she’d returned carrying secrets, but an Eastmore murder wasn’t one of them.

His MeshBit pinged, and his heart suddenly pounded. “I have to go.”

Elena spoke rapidly. “Don’t let them trick you. Not all the questions are going to be fair.”

“How do you know?”

“I’ve been asking around. Try to keep calm and rational.”

“As opposed to psychotic and homicidal? I’ll do my best.”

Victor discontinued the feed, took the sonobulb out of his ear, reconnected it to the MeshBit, and tucked it inside his pocket, where it bumped against the slightly radioactive data egg that was somehow supposed to save him from being locked up. He exhaled loudly, then walked toward his reclassification appointment.