“We live in interesting times.”
David laughed and gestured toward the second bed. “Make yourselves comfortable. We’re out of chairs.”
Gabe sat stiffly on the bed’s edge, looking like he was afraid to wrinkle the sheets. Sophie flopped onto the pillow and crossed her legs. “You summoned me, Your Highness?”
David laughed at her fake formality, then reconfigured his face in an attempt at serious. “Yeah, I got an interesting visitor this morning.”
“They said downstairs—a photographer?”
“Not that. That was just some ass who tried to take my picture while I napped. Anyway, that was nothing, but something else happened, and I wanted to tell you about it if we’re out of the secret game.” He paused. “Maybe I should talk to you alone?”
Sophie glanced at the others in the room, then shrugged. “Out of the secret game.”
“Wait—why don’t Julie and I go grab lunch?” Val stood. “Just because you’re all Team No More Secrets doesn’t mean you don’t deserve privacy.”
“If you two will promise to guard the door . . .” Julie looked reluctant to leave, but Val led her from the room.
David waited until they were gone to start talking. “Okay. You know a woman named Lana Robinson, right?”
“Yeah.” Sophie glanced at Gabe. “She works in our national office, in state priorities.”
“She said she was your coworker.”
“Yeah, close enough. Wait—are you saying she was here?” She could think of reasons for a BNL exec to show up, or a reporter, or a photographer, but not FreerMind.
“That’s what I needed to tell you about. It was the weirdest thing. She came here to ask me to be part of some anti-Pilot platform.”
“Wait, what? Are you sure you weren’t drugged or something? That makes no sense.”
Gabe leaned back on his hands. “Well, it makes a little sense, Soph. High profile, anti-Pilot . . .”
“But he’s not anti-Pilot. He’s just anti-Pilot for himself. He was like their salesman of the year!”
“I never saw numbers,” David said modestly. “And I was more of a recruiter than a salesman—”
Sophie shot him her most withering look. “You make my point either way.”
“—But I’m starting to think you’re right, at least about some of it. Even if Pilots can be useful, they have problems nobody is talking about.”
Sophie dropped back onto the bed. The hypocrisy boggled her mind. First, David had gone to work for BNL as the poster boy for the product even though he didn’t love his own Pilot. Then he got it out and kept working for them, selling unsuspecting people on Pilots. Then her own organization came to him and asked him to be a poster boy for them, too. Why? She answered that aloud: “I mean, I get why. What better spokesperson for the anti-Pilot movement than the former face of the whole Pilot program? I suppose she came here the second her keyword alerts showed her an article saying you’d gotten yours deactivated. Maybe she’s got a whole list of people she’s drooling to get into the fold. What does she want you to do?”
“Run for Congress.”
Gabe cough-choked. “Congress? Like US Congress? You?”
“Is it that ridiculous?” David looked offended. “I’m a decorated soldier, and I’m good at public speaking. I’ve seen both sides of this Pilot thing. Not too many people can say that.”
Sophie stood and paced the narrow space between beds, her hands on her head. “It’s not that you’re ridiculous. You’d probably make a good politician, all things considered. The kind that cares.”
“Thank you?”
“It’s that FreerMind shouldn’t be asking you—I mean, Lana Robinson works for ‘state priorities’ in any case, and Congress should fall under federal priorities, if they’re even allowed to do that. But also, it’s not right that they would come to you in the hospital and assume you’re on their side and—”
“That’s what I said to her. Or what I’m going to say to her. I’m a little hazy on what happened in real life and what happened in my mind.”
Sophie stopped pacing. “So you’re not going to do it?”
“No way. You’re right. She assumed I was anti-Pilot; she never even asked why I got it turned off.” He fiddled with the IV in the back of his left hand, then noticed what he was doing and stopped. “And she never asked why I was on the train track. I thought it would have been important for her to know, and she never bothered to ask. She told me how she’d spin it, but she wasn’t interested in the truth, just how she’d change public perception. I’m not interested in playing that game anymore.”
“Wow,” Gabe said. “Why didn’t you lead with that?”
Sophie almost laughed. She was relieved David had seen through the offer. Part of her felt bad about it, because if she was really the good soldier in the Pilot war that she’d always said she was, she should’ve been excited about the prospect of David running for office, not mad. Lana was right that he would be an asset to their side, and they did have a side, and they were supposed to be on it together, national and local and political and grassroots, all working toward the same goal.
“Anyway,” David said, smiling, “I’ve been thinking about it, and why not you? You’re young and energetic and passionate about helping people. You can stand on the virtuous ground of never having had a Pilot. You have a huge network of people in this area. Your brother is a sad-sack one-footed former spokesperson for BNL, whose accident you’ve vowed to avenge.”
“I’m not sure ‘avenge’ flies in polls,” Gabe said.
“Not avenge, then. Whose story you’d be running to tell. Along with your own, of course. Mine doesn’t supersede the story of people like you who got left behind by a tech fad that took over everything.”
Sophie hadn’t realized what it would mean to her to have David acknowledge that. “Thanks, Davey. Wow. I appreciate that, but—”
“But what? I’m telling you. You should do it. I’ll tell her I’ll support you. She said she’d connect me with
