If his Pilot had trained his brain into the noise, had done it so successfully that even deactivating the Pilot couldn’t stop it, then he needed to try to train his brain back into its natural state. He approached it with the same dedication that had allowed him to get past the noise and finish high school and survive his deployments. Retraining his brain was his job now. Put on your oxygen mask before you help others. He didn’t research whether retraining was possible; it had to be.
Sometimes he ate dinner with Milo and Karina, but he was conscious of the intrusion on their lives. More rarely, with them and Alyssa, though he’d been careful to tell her he was working on himself and needed to take things slow. Sometimes he hung at the club where Milo worked, until Milo said his boss had called David a distraction, so if he went out at all he just drank until Milo got off work. He still hadn’t told Milo about the Quiet.
Mostly he sat in the park and watched the ducks and then the dusk and then the darkness, and let the one move through the other gradually, a progression, a natural linearity his brain had never allowed him to witness before. Quiet.
Sometimes he sat there all night, slept on the bench until a cop roused him, and then he apologized and said he must have dozed off, and yes he had a car in the lot and a place to go home to, and he allowed his ironed shirt and his famous face to grant him the privilege of a dignified exit. He drove home, slipped upstairs and into his bed to get enough sleep to repeat it all the next day. It was a strange routine, but he was learning, he was growing, he was forcing his brain to change, maybe, hopefully.
After a while, David had to admit to himself that his attempts at brain training were making no difference. If anything, it had gotten worse. Quiet worked, but now there was a comedown he hadn’t remembered before, the ocean of noise ebbing then returning in a tidal wave, so that the gaps between the pills felt worse than anything he’d previously experienced.
He called the BNL clinic. Since he didn’t work for them anymore, he didn’t care what they knew.
“I need my Pilot looked at,” he said when he reached an actual human.
“Is there a problem?”
“Yes. I had the implant deactivated, but I haven’t noticed any difference. My head is still full of noise.”
He heard the frown through the phone. “What was your name again?”
He repeated his name and implant ID, as he had to the machine at the beginning of the call, which had promised to route him to the right department.
“Mr. Geller-Bradley, our records don’t show that you had your implant deactivated.”
“I had it done elsewhere. Your doctors wouldn’t do it for me.” You kicked me out, he didn’t say. If he was lucky, that note wasn’t in his file, but he couldn’t imagine it wasn’t.
“I’m afraid if you had your implant deactivated at a non-BNL facility, unless it was a documented emergency procedure at an accredited hospital, you voided the warranty on your implant.”
“I’ll pay for the appointment. I don’t care about the warranty.”
“No, I’m afraid it’s not a matter of payment. If someone else altered your Pilot, we can’t do any further work on it. It’s not an insurance matter; it’s about liability.”
This time he said it. “I went to you to do it, but you kicked me out.”
He could have waited for whatever the operator said next, but instead he channeled his inner Sophie and hung up without niceties. He had missed this fine print, but it wasn’t like he hadn’t tried to go to them first. It made him feel lousy about ever having worked for them, that they would leave him high and dry like this. Maybe his sister was right.
She couldn’t be right. For her to be right meant he had to be wrong, that he’d bought into a bad system and worked to propagate it. He’d let them use his face on billboards in service of a bad system. That was too much to acknowledge.
He closed his eyes, searching for a solution beneath his eyelids. He dialed the doctor who had deactivated his Pilot and made an appointment to get the light turned off, too. Dr. Pessoa’s schedule had gotten busy, so he scheduled a month out. Still time to change his mind.
He imagined Julie giving him a hard time about how limited his job options would be once the light was off. Val would be supportive, and that might be even worse; he’d pushed so hard for his Pilot, and he couldn’t shake his concern that the problem lay with him, not the Pilot. Even now he wasn’t ready to disavow the utility of the Pilot—it had still saved his life—but he didn’t need to be a walking advertisement anymore.
CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN
JULIE
Julie led the noon staff meeting, suddenly conscious of the blue lights on every head in the room. She wondered if anyone was faking it, like David. If anyone else had gotten theirs taken out but still pretended to have it so that nobody could question their focus and commitment.
She checked off everything on her day’s to-do list and started on the next day’s list. On her way home she drove past the park: David’s car was there again.
Neither kid came home for dinner. Julie and Val watched two episodes of Co-Pilots, the mystery series where a young Piloted priest and a skeptical old-guard reporter investigated their town’s stratospheric body count. When Val announced
