“Why, David?”
He shrugged, still looking anywhere but at her. “It’s not working. I mean, it’s still working. It doesn’t feel like it was turned off.”
“Did Dr. Pessoa tell you how long it would take?”
“She didn’t know exactly, but I got the impression this isn’t normal. If it’s not on anymore, it shouldn’t act like it is, right?”
“Hmm.”
“And I can’t tell anyone. Like, I can’t tell BNL I got it turned off, and I feel funny going back to a doctor who made me sign a form saying I understood she hadn’t done many of these procedures. I thought maybe she lied and didn’t turn it off, but she came across as ethical. I don’t think she lied. I don’t know what to do.”
“Wow,” his sister said. “It’s still exactly the same?”
“Exactly.”
Sophie tossed her tablet facedown on her bed and studied his face. He looked back at her, daring her to make fun of him. When had she gotten old enough that her opinion mattered to him? He hadn’t caught up with the times; in his absence, she’d become a whole person instead of an annoying kid sister. He remembered occasionally treating her like an adult, but mostly at times when he’d been dispensing the wisdom of his years, not listening to her. Now he found himself wanting her advice more than anyone else’s.
“I don’t know if this is relevant, but a woman came to our meeting recently who’d been in the original trial—she had her Pilot even longer than you’ve had yours. And they’re—BNL—they’re contacting some of the original people with some new questions. They paid her a bunch of money to get hers out entirely, not just off like yours, but, um, when she had it out, she said her brain still thought she had it. She said—what was the word she used?—neuroplasticity. She said her brain had learned to fire like that on its own. That the younger you were when you got it, apparently, the more likely it was to teach your brain to do the work itself.”
He slid down the door to the floor. Sophie didn’t tell him to stand. “Did she say anything about noise?”
“No. She said she’d liked hers, but they gave her enough money to consider it.”
“And nothing changed when she got it out?”
Sophie shook her head, and David groaned and covered his face in his hands.
He thought of something else. “You said this was a few weeks ago? Before I had mine turned off?”
“Yeah.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“It was a few weeks before that, and I forgot until you said that just now.” She cocked her head, thinking. “She got hers out entirely, not turned off, and it was your company that did it, and hers wasn’t a problem for her like yours, so I guess it slipped my mind. I’m sorry.”
He sighed. “Not your fault. Like you said, it didn’t seem related.”
They sat in silence. David’s noisy brain spun up all the hits at once. He’d trapped himself. If he’d gone through with having BNL deactivate his Pilot, they’d be on the hook for whatever was happening to him. Now if he went to them, it wouldn’t look like coincidence that it was off, if it even was. On top of that, he had no idea if there was any sign marking Dr. Pessoa’s intrusion, or if the reversal was reversible. He’d probably voided his own warranty.
He had so many questions. Why was BNL asking people to remove their Pilots, and what was wrong with his head, and did anybody else feel like him or was he a weak link, and he had nobody to blame but himself, he had chosen this, what if this was as turned off as it would ever be, and this was him forever, his ongoing status, a permanent deployment, noise forever and ever amen.
He struggled to convince himself to stand, but couldn’t do it. Sophie didn’t make him go anywhere, just lifted her tablet and refocused on whatever she’d been working on when he interrupted, and the room got dark around them until the only light was the tablet bathing her face in a glow, and, in the closet door mirror, the blue pinprick meant to mark him as part of the Piloted masses.
He extricated his phone from his pocket and scrolled back through his message history with Milo until he found Alyssa’s number. Hi, this is Milo’s friend David from Karina’s birthday party. Sorry if I asked weird questions. I wasn’t in a great space that night, but it doesn’t excuse being rude. Hopefully that struck the right note of genuine apology and urgency. He hadn’t meant to be so intense with his questions. Sometimes he forgot the body he inhabited, the space he inhabited, the way he came across. He’d say that, too, given the chance. He left the actual question he wanted to ask for a follow-up conversation.
• • •
Alyssa didn’t write him back for two days, two days in which David had jumped every time his phone buzzed. Her message was cautious. She remembered him, thank you for the apology. He tried to calibrate the tone of his response, continued to hold back his ask. He wanted it to come up naturally.
At work, he tried to hold himself together. Worked on his trainings, tried to avoid anything that would get him sent back to Dr. Morton’s office, like a teenager trying to avoid the principal. Since he was on an apology kick, he apologized to Tash for snapping at them, and they accepted the apology, at least superficially, though he got fewer visits over their shared wall than he had previously.
He tried to get information on the early-adopter trials Sophie had mentioned, but either he wasn’t a good investigator or there was no information to be found. BNL was a huge corporation. The Research and Development Department was siloed from his department and was siloed from the subsidiary that ran the clinics, though they apparently had the right to
