“I mean, there’s lots,” said Toledo. “This isn’t nothing. We need to keep adding concrete evidence until we can prove it.”
“Maybe there’s something we left out.” Sophie looked at each person in the room like she was begging for someone to say the thing that would change the journalist’s tune from keep adding to I’m taking this to my editor.
David frowned. “I can’t remember. Did I talk about Quiet?”
“You talked about noise,” Julie said.
Toledo put his glasses back on and paged through his notes. “Is there something else, David? You talked about noise, and you talked about getting the Pilot turned off but not the light, and the noise continuing, and taking a drug that counteracted the noise, and then overdosing by accident.”
Val stood as if to walk out, then sat again. Julie knew she couldn’t stand the parts of his story in which his parents had failed to help him.
“It’s not your fault, Ma,” said David, who also must have noticed. “I hid it from you. But have we talked about the pills themselves?”
Toledo shook his head.
David reached for a third doughnut, but gestured with it instead of taking a bite. “I’d forgotten this for a while, because I learned it just before the, uh, accident. When Alyssa first gave me the pills”—Julie decided Alyssa wasn’t such a catch after all—“she called them Fortress of Solitude, but they had a lowercase q on them, and I started thinking of them as Quiet, since they were so good at cutting out noise. Whatever they have me on here is okay at it, but makes me loopy, too, and a little queasy. Quiet didn’t have any side effects.”
“It did, honey.” Julie remembered the blank David she’d encountered in the park.
“Okay, well, from my end, it took away the noise without adding nausea or anything. Except just before the accident, someone told me that what I thought was a lowercase q was actually a lowercase b, for Balkenhol.”
Toledo looked up sharply. “Are you sure?”
“No, but that would be easier to check than that other stuff, right? Whether Balkenhol makes a round teal pill with a lowercase b on it?”
“It would. Also, I’ve done a fair bit of research on this for another story, and I can tell you drugs are way more regulated than medical devices. There are strict protocols for every step, from research to trials to FDA approval and scheduling. If this is really theirs, even if it’s still in a testing phase, there’ll be a trail saying what they think it’ll be good for, and how they think it works. That means in theory they’ve been aware for years of some issue they were trying to counteract. If they knew they would need an antidote to noise, that means they think noise is a problem for more people than David. And it means that rather than pull the Pilot implant from the market while they figured out if it caused problems, they decided to go ahead and cause the problem, then monetize the solution.”
Julie was stunned. She thought of herself as a careful person, even if she wasn’t in Val’s league on that front. How had she bought into this product so easily? It was horrifying, but more than that, embarrassing. She looked over at Val, who graciously avoided the I told you so, but instead watched her with something like pity, which was worse. David’s expression was placid with an undertone of guilt. She’d chosen to get a Pilot, and let him get one; he had talked who knew how many people into getting them.
Val asked, “Is it possible these pills are already on the market for something else? Maybe they found a second use for a prescription pill they already had.”
Everyone turned to Toledo, who had gone silent, images of pills scrolling on his laptop screen and reflecting in his glasses.
“You’re right,” he said after a long moment. “Baranor, by Balkenhol. It’s only approved for one rare form of ADD. I’ll research whether they’ve done trials for any other usages.”
“They’re still assholes,” said Sophie.
“Assholes,” David echoed.
“That isn’t harsh enough,” said Val, which Julie agreed with. She could think of other words, none of which were harsh enough, either.
The journalist tapped his chin. “All right, okay, this is a big piece to the puzzle. This is something I can work with.”
“God, I want to find proof of the other stuff, too,” said Julie. “I want to nail them. Let me in your organization, Soph. I’m with you.”
“I can’t, Mom. You have a Pilot.”
“I’ll have it turned off tomorrow. This company can’t have my brain any longer.” She hadn’t known she was making that decision until she made it, but it felt good.
Sophie’s eyes opened wide. “No, I need you to do some stuff first, starting with recording yourself going to the BNL clinic to see if they try to talk you out of deactivating it, and if they’d let you deactivate but leave the light on.”
“That would definitely be interesting,” said Toledo.
“Yeah,” said David. “I’d be curious, since they wouldn’t do it for me.”
It felt good to be of use to her kids for once. “Makes sense, but someone should do the opposite, too, right? Ask if they’ll install a Pilot with no light?”
Everyone looked at Val, who frowned. “I’m not getting a Pilot.”
“You only have to ask, not actually get one,” said David. “Somebody take these doughnuts away from me?”
Julie took the box to the nurses’ station, then returned.
“They’ll never say yes to that one,” Toledo was saying. She hadn’t missed much. “That’s got to be top secret, or it would’ve gotten out by now.”
Sophie put her hand over her mouth. “There’s one more permutation. It doesn’t need to be you, Ma. I can do it myself.”
“There’s no way you’re getting a Pilot,” said Val. “I mean, I’m not stopping you, but
