False Hearts (False Hearts #1)(80)

I shake my head.

“It makes people vulnerable. People already try to hack into implants all the time—send adverts and things. Imagine hacking into your very being. Your very self.”

I lick my lips. And what would the government do with that power?

“The government are trying,” she says, echoing my thoughts. “Boy, are they trying. They fund all our research, and it isn’t cheap. If brain recording worked better, you can bet your bottom dollar that we’d all be recording, all the time. I mean, surveillance is old as time.”

She drifts off, fiddling with something, and then sets the code to process. “Anyway, it’s been abandoned for widespread use now, until they can figure out how not to fry people. Maybe at some point we’ll crack it fully. Until then, I developed a way to turn it on for anyone, at least for a little while. A back door.”

A back door into my brain. “Do you have to … use it often?” Forced brain recording. It sounds barbaric.

“Very rarely.” Her eyes go distant and blank. I swallow. I wonder what she’s had to see, had to do, but I don’t ask. Easier to think of her as a brilliant, eccentric woman with a penchant for nicknames and bobblehead figurines.

She shakes her head, coming out of it. “Not many people know about brain recording. You didn’t for sure, did you, tulip?” Kim asks Nazarin. He’s lying back in the seat, his eyes half-lidded. Whatever Kim gave him, he’s relaxed and high.

“Educated guess.”

“Smart boy,” she says fondly. His eyes flutter and he’s out cold.

Kim sighs. “Here we go.”

“Wait,” I say. “You’re really not calming me down here. Are we going to go insane or die?”

She meets my eyes. “I’m very good at this. Yes, there’s still a chance. Nazarin understands the risks, and he wants to do it. Do you? You have a choice.”

“Give … give me a minute.”

“Sure. You can see what happens with Nazarin. Then decide.” She looks down at Nazarin, runs her hand over the rough stubble of his head, and then presses a button on the Chair.

Nazarin goes rigid. Sweat beads on his skin almost immediately, leaving tracks down his temples. Kim frowns at one of the wallscreens, her fingers dancing over a projected keyboard as she studies code that means nothing to me, for all my courses in software engineering. With a flick of her wrist, a map of Nazarin’s mind appears, floating over her head like a nebula.

Kim zooms in on the occipital lobe and the auditory cortex first. I remember when people first mentioned implants to me, I thought they were just one machine, firmly glued somehow to the brain. Really, there’s a main receiver and dozens, hundreds of little implants scattered through the brain. They call it neural dust. Microscopic little computers, no thicker than a human hair, all taking the data from the brain and feeding in data from the outside world.

Nazarin has more implants than me. “What are those?” I ask, pointing at the various other parts of his brain also speckled with neural dust.

She frowns as she concentrates, changing the view to focus on the tiny machines. “They put them in when he went undercover. Extra receivers for brainloads. Implants to help memory in the hippocampus, extra occipital lobe implants to help retention and processing. There’s more in the brain stem and cerebellum to aid with coordination—you’ll notice he’s not clumsy, and very fast when he needs to be. So they’re there, and they help, but they don’t record the way you two need the brain to record. It makes this tricky, though. There’s a lot of little bits of metal in his head. Now stop talking.”

I snap my mouth shut. Kim’s barely blinking. Her fingers gesture as she imparts code to the tiny metal specks in Nazarin’s brain.

Machines beep—Nazarin’s heartbeat speeds up, warning alarms ping. Nazarin arches on his Chair, his mouth open in a silent scream. He jerks as if he’s having a seizure, spittle flying from his mouth. The veins in his neck stand out.

His heart flatlines.

“Shit, shit, shit!” Kim’s fingers fly faster.

“What’s happening?” I have my hands over my mouth. I dart forward but Kim snarls at me to stay back. Nazarin is already turning grayish. His eyes are open and bulging, their whites red with burst capillaries.

“Shut up!” Kim takes another syringe and stabs it into his heart. I watch, unable to think, unable to speak.

I don’t want him to die.

Nazarin’s heart starts again, and he gasps, his breathing hoarse.

“Oh, thank Christ.” Kim slumps against a counter. “I told them, I f*cking told them not to ask me to put in so many!”

Nazarin’s eyes are still open and staring. “Is he OK?” I ask.

The skin around Kim’s eyes and mouth is tight. She doesn’t answer. My mouth goes dry. I stay quiet, watching her work, clasping my hands together and whispering incoherently. It isn’t a prayer, not really, but maybe it’s a whisper to the universe, a hope that things will somehow work out all right.

Three minutes pass, but it feels like three hours. Kim nods, and the map of Nazarin’s brain disappears. Nazarin slumps against the seat, his eyes closed again, breathing through his mouth. He seems calmer, but he’s still dripping with sweat and twitching. Kim injects him with another syringe, this time in the shoulder, and the frantic beating of his heart slows. After another minute, his eyelids flutter.