The doctor beamed. “Great. Why don’t you check back with me in two weeks and tell me how that’s going for you? I’ll put it on your schedule as a consultation so your supervisor doesn’t ask any questions.”
“Great idea, sir.” David forced a smile onto his face. If this doctor was good at reading people, he’d see right through it, but Morton looked like he’d just negotiated world peace. This was how it always went.
And what kind of bullshit was it that allowed the clinic to share his information over here? It hardly seemed legal, but if they were all the same system he guessed it made sense. He should have known he didn’t have any privacy. He was a public figure, the poster boy. They had invested in him. They wouldn’t let him go this easily.
Tash didn’t stand when David came back, but their voice carried over the half wall. “What was that about?”
“Consultation,” said David. “They have some dumb idea about the clinics.”
“Ugh. Have fun.”
David sat at his desk and listened to every finger every keystroke on every keyboard every voice on every phone work calls personal calls all the calls somebody’s headphones bleeding smooth jazz into the room every fluorescent light overhead with its own hum one bulb flickering three cubicles over Mackenzie Vogel eating her afternoon popcorn the smell of said popcorn slightly burnt someone else’s coffee someone else’s tea the microwave going with someone else’s late lunch and what jerk heated fish in an office microwave the printer in the corner and above it all his own thoughts incessant no app could fix this he had tried he had tried he had tried he had tried he had tried.
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
SOPHIE
Sophie could think of approximately ten million things more likely than what David knocked on her door to ask. He might have walked in, sat in her desk chair, and said, Let’s get a pet chinchilla, maybe, or What are the ranks aboard a gravy boat?
She absolutely did not expect him to ask her if she knew where to get a Pilot deactivated.
“Why?” She let all her suspicions drip into her voice. “Is your company going to do a sting?”
He surprised her again by bursting into tears. She had no idea what to do. She racked her brain for any time ever that he’d cried in front of her, but if he’d cried as a kid, it was before she was old enough to remember. And that would have been kid tears, the sort elicited by unfairness or pain or fear of pain or the unfairness of pain, because weren’t those the same thing in some ways? If she cried at unfairness she’d never stop.
If someone cried in the circle, which happened sometimes, someone else grabbed the tissue box from the bar and offered them. She didn’t have tissues in her room and didn’t want to walk away right at this moment, so she opened her top drawer and pulled out one of the unmatched socks that floated between the balled pairs. It had pandas on it, and she kept hoping she’d find its mate again, but in the meantime, snot wouldn’t ruin it.
At least it made David laugh when she offered it. He wiped his eyes on his sleeve, then blew his nose in the panda sock.
“Thanks,” he said. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to do that. I’m just stressed.”
She gave him a hug. He sat in her desk chair, swiveling side to side, and she was standing, so it was a shoulder hug, hard and brief. She tried to think of what to say to sound supportive instead of accusatory. “What are you stressed about?”
He smashed the snotty sock into the side of his head. “I’m done. I want it turned off, taken out, whatever they can do to make it stop.”
She hadn’t expected that, either. “You? The poster boy?”
“I wish people would stop calling me that! I’m sick of it, Soph. It was one thing when it was supposed to save my life, but now it’s making me miserable. I know there’s something wrong with it, even if they tell me there isn’t. There has to be. I need it out of my head. Please.”
The “please” convinced her. It was a broken please, a child’s please, a please she hadn’t heard from him for years and couldn’t remember when she’d ever heard it. Not the night he’d asked for his Pilot. She still remembered that one; it was an everybody’s doing it please, the whine of someone willing to do anything to keep up with his friends, slightly desperate, but not out of options. This sounded different, like he needed real help.
She hesitated, weighing what to tell him. “There’s a place. It’s not like the BNL clinics. They do body mod stuff.”
“Body mod stuff? Not the same.”
“You don’t get to be suspicious if you’re asking for off-the-books surgery. I’ve gone there with people. They’re fully licensed for all kinds of things, and they do stuff most doctors won’t, including Pilot stuff, though most doctors would say it’s proprietary and they don’t want to get near it.” She didn’t say she’d gone with someone from the group who had gotten this weird new anti-facial-recognition thing put under her skin. She’d seen Pilot disconnection on the list of things they did, and had wondered at the time who would go there instead of to BNL. Answer: her brother, maybe.
“Would you go with me?”
He kept surprising her. “Davey, are you sure you’re doing the right thing? I’m the last person to talk someone out of this, but why not do it through the BNL clinic, where they know you and know their product?”
He shook his head. “I don’t want to go back to that clinic. Will you come with me or not?”
Sophie examined her brother’s face. His gaze was steady, his expression hopeful. For all that he’d been through, his
