How dark the unknown depths of the soul,
How strange the nameless author of the will.

It doesn’t feel like you’d think. You’re not a puppet on strings, a passive observer of your body in motion. You act according to your desires. You feel free.

Sloan feels free, and I feel aware. I focus on my breath and wait for the neural rig to lock in on his thoughtprint. My pod’s interior–darkness over the surface of suspension fluid–brightens and coalesces. Sloan stands at a podium in front of his company’s largest shareholders. On his left, a panoramic window overlooks Central Park. The leaves are turning, rusty orange under a deep blue sky. He calls on his planted questioner in the back row.

“How do you feel about the company’s position, given the shift to passive surveillance? Do you foresee active DIVE missions resuming in the future?”

“Great question.” I feel his mouth form a tight executive smile.

“Ten years ago, our company started a revolution in public safety. Our neural DIVE rig allowed America’s heroes to neutralize dangerous criminals and threats to our national security.

“Those heroes took on a tremendous risk, as we now know: fusion of the diver and host minds in the diver’s body.”

Good a time as any. I pour over his memories, pulling them to the surface, willing him to misspeak and give away the truth.

“Of course, we worked with the government to scale back the DIVE program until a day when we could ensure diver safety. I’m happy to announce that day has arrived. Fusion is now a thing of the past.”

Tell them about the testers who died.

“The Block is a surgical implant that protects the diver from the host’s neural signals.”

Tell them about the civilian casualties.

“Meanwhile, hosts remain unharmed and unaware up to the moment the diver induces them to act. After that, of course…” He shrugs and the crowd chuckles.

Tell them! Tell them everything!

They’re applauding now. Sloan is mentally spending his bonus check: a watch for Annie, a trip to Tahiti with Becca. He scans the crowd and sees her clapping in the corner. She gives a thumbs up and a tiny wink. Sloan’s smile broadens. The meeting ends. I fail.

I planned for this moment for months, establishing contacts inside the organization and building the rig from scratch, but I couldn’t make him do it.

***

I sit on the roof in the hot afternoon sun, dangling my legs over five stories of open air and a grimy sidewalk. An unwashed white panel van pulls up to the curb below. No one gets out.

I pull a cigarette from the fresh pack and fish an orange lighter from my overstuffed front pocket. A wallet and set of keys tumble out onto the ledge beside me. I look down at the driver’s license bearing my married name: Nova Kael. I never got around to changing it back. I light the cigarette. I love you, Jay, but I never did like your name.

I look down on the block where I grew up, where Jay and I planned to raise Sasha. We never had so much good food as when she was born. The neighbor’s mac and cheese, an indelible stamp on my happiest and saddest days. When you give to this world, it gives back.

Walt said something like that on my first day of grad school. I was setting up my computer when I heard a thin Boston rasp from the doorway.

“This technology will change the world.”

Walt stood there in corduroys and a sweater vest. His oversized glasses sat low on his nose, conspiring with a shock of frizzy white hair to give him an undeserved air of absentmindedness. He was grinning and holding the personal statement I wrote in my application.

“You sound like a true believer,” he said. Then he told me his hopes and dreams for the neural rig. He saw a future where kids would ride along in an astronaut’s head during lift off, where people would literally see the world through someone else’s eyes.

“And by God we’re gonna do it,” he said in that Boston accent. “When you give to this work, to this world, it gives back.” He sighed, staring out the window. “It gives back.”

I exhale a lungful of filth. This isn’t the world you pictured, Walt. It wasn’t your fault. You didn’t have a choice after you got sick. Not after Annie and Sloan swooped in. They turned the dream into a lucrative nightmare.

Instead of kids diving into astronauts, we got CIA agents diving into terrorists on “sui-takedown” missions and cops diving into regular folks on “political reconnaissance” missions. No more community after that. No more mac and cheese.

I take another drag on the cigarette and cough. The smoke hangs in a nauseating cloud of hot, still air. I’m dizzy from the nicotine. That’s good, it will cover my nerves. Just don’t throw up. My hands are shaking, and there’s a song stuck in my head.

If you like to gamble, I tell you I’m your man

You win some, lose some, it’s all the same to me

I touch the locket under my shirt, but I can’t look at it. A thought occurs: It would be so easy to jump. So quick. Sixty feet to the sidewalk. Sixty feet to the void. My lips form the words.

Seven or eleven, snake eyes watching you

I pick up the orange lighter, feel the weight of it, and toss it down to the street below. It seems to fall in slow motion. It bounces off the panel van’s roof with a dull thwump. I take a final drag on the cigarette. I don’t throw it away.

And don’t forget the joker.

***

Sloan’s breath quickens, and I see bright grey, a cold February blur. I feel the wind bite, and he pulls his coat tighter. He’s walking across the park for lunch.

It’s Tuesday, which means salad from the corner bistro. Sloan approaches the street corner, presses the walk button. Turn left here, cross toward the Times building. We have to tell them! The light changes. He steps into the street, towards the bistro.

Back in gooey darkness, I push the pod’s lid open.

“How did it go?”

“I made him get the soup instead of the salad.”

The Uhaul sits on the lowest level of an underground garage next to the park. A large man in navy blue coveralls leans against the side of the van, a generator humming next to him. In the back, I pull off the spidery neural rig and take a towel from Finch.

“Don’t take this the wrong way, but convincing someone to eat soup in February is basically nothing.” She slaps the side wall twice.

“Yeah.” I didn’t want it to be this way.

“We’re 0 for 2. I think we’re going to have to change tack.”

The back door rolls halfway up. I see Nathan silhouetted against brown and grey concrete.

“Any luck? Should I kill the genny?”

“No and yes,” Finch says. “Let’s go.”

Nathan rolls the door back down.

“Shit.”

***

“Your target is Nova Kael.”

A woman in her 30s stares down from the briefing room’s projection screen. Long red braids fall over her right shoulder, framing a face with defiant, wide-set brown eyes over sharp cheekbones. She wears a black field jacket, an orange neck gaiter, and the ghost of a smile.

Her picture illuminates four people in a small briefing room. The oldest man paces in front of the screen while he delivers the briefing. The others sit at desk chairs: a driver, a medic, and the diver. The driver leads the strike team. She’s tall, thin, and imposing in all black. Her tactical vest bears a single patch over her heart: Finch, in grimy gold lettering.

Finch stares at the corner of her desk, fidgeting with a pen. Next to her, Nathan shifts in his chair and pauses his note taking. She catches his eye and exhales slowly. Her unease feels tight in his chest.

At the desk opposite Finch, the source of her anxiety leans back in his chair. It’s the diver. He looks from his desk to the picture of Kael and back. He has drawn her face in his notebook.

The briefing continues: more about Kael’s background and her role in developing the neural rig. None of this is new to Finch or Nathan, but they put on a show of nodding and taking notes. The diver adds breasts to his drawing.

Finch specifically requested this diver for the mission. He’s good. Or at least, he has more confirmed kills than anyone else in the company.

The briefing continues.

“This target is dangerous. She knows the tech, and she knows how divers think. Be careful out there. Questions?”

Finch looks around to the others. Nathan reviews his notes and slowly shakes his head. The diver stares up at the ceiling.

“Dismissed.”

In the hallway, the diver is waiting for Finch. She doesn’t stop walking.

“Hey babe, you’re my wheels?” He scans her up and down. “I got a…ah…special request.” She knows what’s coming next. Even if he wasn’t openly eye-fucking her right now, he would make her skin crawl.

“I’m the wheels,” Finch says. Still walking.

“When the time comes, don’t close the pod. Keep it open and blast the stereo.”

He steps in front of Finch and stops, facing her. He leans in a little.

“I want this bitch to go out hearing my favorite song.” He winks and walks away.

If he wasn’t a diver he’d be a serial killer.

She shivers involuntarily, thinking about the way his eyes had groped her. She’s glad she picked this diver.

***

Finch checks the side mirrors again. A faint heat mirage blurs the empty sidewalk. She glances up in the rear-view. Nathan sits facing the open pod, monitoring the diver’s vitals and drumming along to the Motörhead song with a capped scalpel.

The Ace of Spades

The Ace of Spades

THWUMP!

Finch turns to face Nathan. In the corner of her eye, the orange lighter bounces down past the windshield.

“Rip it.”

Nathan pulls the unconscious diver to a sitting position. The neural rig–a spider-like jumble of blue plastic legs–wraps around the diver’s head. The place where the spider bites down, behind the man’s right ear, connects to a grey plastic implant. Careful not to disturb the spider, the medic guides the scalpel into the gap between the shaved skin and the implant, and slices it clean. Blood flows down into the pod.

“The Block is out. We’re clear.”

Seconds later, something heavy hits the ground next to the van. Nathan pulls the body inside and slams the door. A lit cigarette rests beside a pool of Nova Kael’s blood on the sidewalk.

***

I see it in your eyes, take one look–

Someone kills the music, and I wake with a start. I’m not falling, not lying on the hot concrete. I’m naked in the pod. It worked. Pain throbs just behind my ear. Reaching up, I feel a round wound the size of a dime. When I remove my hand, it’s streaked in blood and pod goop.

The fuckers cut out my Block. Why the fuck would they cut out my Block?

Snippets of training scenarios and briefings on neural fusion flash through my mind. I remember enough to know how fucked I am. Fusion is 100% fatal. Insanity and then death, usually in less than a day.

But why did they remove the Block? The mission went perfectly, a textbook Sui-Takedown with the soundtrack and everything. I sit up and pull off the neural rig, turning slowly to face the medic on my right.

He sits up. I see the target’s body. My body. He was arranging it into a black bag. I see the outline of the locket against my—its—shirt.

Part of me hit the ground. The rest is still falling.

I reach out and grab Nathan’s wrist with a slimy hand.

“Wait.”

I feel like I’m attending my own funeral. The finality of the act is suffocating, like I’m at the bottom of the ocean. My dates are carved in the rock. And we don’t even know that this plan will work.

Don’t think about that now.

I remove the locket and look away as Nathan returns to the body. I examine the diver’s hands—our hands, my hands. There’s a spiral scar on my left palm. I know I’ve never seen it before, but I also remember burning it on the stove during a drunken party in college. Back when I was a stranger, and that’s not my hand. What am I doing here? What have I done to myself?

“Undo it.”

Nathan looks up with kind understanding. Or pity.

“I need to go back, I have to be back in my body now, I don’t like this body, I can’t do it.”

“Hey, look at me. Look at me, right here.” He puts his hands on my shoulders to steady me. “It’s okay, you’re gonna be fine.” A lie.

“No, I can’t do it, send me back I have to go back, right now.”

“Hey!” He shakes my shoulders, two quick jerks. A wave of suspension fluid slops over the side of the tub. “This reaction is totally normal. You’re doing great, Kael, just breathe.”

Kael? The target?

“We just iced Kael, you prick. Stop fucking around,” I say through rapid, shallow breaths. The name feels different somehow. It leaves a sour taste in my mouth, like a cheap cigarette.

I love you, Jay, but I never did like your name.

“It was the lighter, that fucking lighter. You screwed me, you murdered me. I’ll fucking kill you!” I try to stand but slosh back into the pod. The medic leans in and shines a penlight into my eyes.

“I’ve seen some rough transitions. Believe it or not you’re taking it better than most.”

I nod and look down at my dead body again.

“Could be worse, I guess.” Lie.

Nathan nods, smiling.

“The dissociative split is normal. You’ll settle into a stable personality after a few minutes.”

“Which one?”

“A bit of both, but usually the tie goes to the trespasser.”

I take a steadying breath. The present feels whole, undivided. I retrace my awareness to the moment of waking, to the roof, the song, the divergence when I entered my mind. I try to go earlier, reaching back into a whirlwind of episodic memories. Two pasts bouncing off of each other in the same skull. Somehow I’m both of them. Somehow I’m neither. Whatever we are, we’re still falling. We just haven’t hit the ground yet.

Finch turns around in her seat.

“Nova, are we good?”

***

Sloan sits on a sofa with a glass of whiskey. He’s alone in a dark penthouse room: leather furniture, dark green walls, mahogany accents. A floor-to-ceiling window bathes the room in the orange city glow.

He’s watching a hockey game, and I’m watching him. The Rangers are losing by two in the first period. Sloan remembers taking Becca to a Rangers game. They sat in the cheap seats, ate hot dogs, and didn’t care about the score.

He picks up the manila folder lying next to him. He knows what’s inside, and he knows he won’t like it. A courier delivered the papers earlier today. Annie’s taking over the company.

“Fucking…”

Sloan stands up and arches his back. Lifting his head, he presses his fingers gently into his closed eyes. He inhales for four seconds, exhales for eight. I know what will happen before he does. He grabs the glass of rye and whips it into the TV. It shatters on impact, stamping a spidery crack into the screen.

“MY vision! MY company!” he screams to no one. It had been his company from their first trip to Pittsburgh. His neuroscientist father-in-law, Walt, had been dying to show them his crazy invention: the neural rig. Sloan’s life had changed forever that day. He had seen the lab through Walt’s eyes, seen his own body lying still, suspended in the pod.

The applications were limitless. Walt and Annie wanted to pioneer an industry for paid experiences. They thought we could get rich off banking executives diving into pro athletes. How much would they pay for the chance to catch a touchdown pass in the Super Bowl? And of course Walt’s feel-good projects: cancer kids diving into Tony Hawk.

They never understood. People don’t want more immersive TV; they want video games in real life. They want to control, to decide. People want power. Walt had been too afraid of Sloan’s vision, but he’d convinced Annie.

Or he thought he had. Now Annie had Walt’s shares, and she was cutting Sloan out. He would lose everything, and that wasn’t the worst of it. He knew too much—about the civilian casualties, the unauthorized dives, fusion. The board might send a diver for him like some fucking scumbag.

He suddenly feels foolish for drinking alone. If the board sent a diver, he couldn’t be alone, much less alone and drunk. He would be as good as dead.

Sloan walks to the bar and grabs a towel. Looking down, he sees broken glass and whiskey spatter on the floor. I see an opportunity.

Physical pain is the most reliable method to induce fusion. The trick is to be slow and subtle until the moment the host gives way, then crash in all at once, with nothing in between. I gently steer our gaze to the shards of glittering glass.

Sloan considers the broken remnants. This glass was part of a set—a wedding gift from his best man. It had been the last one, and now they’re all gone. The last relic of a dead past. He picks up the largest shard, a half-moon from the thick base. A long sliver sticks up.

He had never noticed before just how thin the sides of these glasses were. A twinkle of orange light from the window dances on the sharp edge. He caresses it with a finger and sees a drop of blood before he even feels the cut. So sharp.

A thought occurs: This is my transformation. Transformation demands pain. Blood. A sacrifice.

He feels a catch in his throat, and tears blur his vision. Sadness, disgust, and shame float by. He tightens his grip on the half-moon base, feels it cut into his palm. It isn’t pain; it’s clarity. It anchors us to the moment, to his transformation. It’s a good feeling. A powerful feeling. He wants more, needs more.

WHAM!

He slams his hand into the floor, pinning the glass shard beneath it. The sliver breaks off in his palm. He bellows, a feral and incoherent roar.

WHAM!

The thick base hammers the sliver deeper, embedding it between the knuckles of his middle and ring finger. Smooth glass squeaks against bone and sinew.

We draw jagged breaths as a mental tsunami overtakes us: thoughts and feelings and memories and pain. Competing pasts careen toward an integrated present where triumph overtakes panic.

The room is silent, as though to honor a death. But the end of Sloan is the beginning of something greater. Sloan’s tight smile creeps across my face.

I close my eyes and interrogate his memories. I weave through incriminating scenes, playing his synapses like a musician. I pause on the memory of Sloan seeing himself in the pod. I feel his hope. I always thought he wanted to get rich selling a lie. Now I see he believed his own bullshit.

You sound like a true believer.

It doesn’t matter now. Everything is here, enough to burn the DIVE program to the ground. Enough to change the goddamn world.

I take out his phone and dial a number he doesn’t know.

“I’m in. Kill the connection.” I hang up, picturing the white van peeling out into the night. Goodbye.

The phone buzzes in my hand. It’s Becca. A cacophony of emotion threatens to boil over: my impatience fights Sloan’s desire. My hate merges with his self-loathing. But Sloan surprises me again: underneath all of that, he loves her. And in our tangled knot of beingness, I love her too. I’m afraid we’d do anything for her.

I look down at the message. It’s a picture. She’s sitting at a bar, smiling and looking sideways towards the empty seat on her left.

“You coming? :)”

It’s my last night on Earth, and I have a job to do. Carved in the rock. I don’t know how long I have with this mind.

I look down at the picture again. Blood oozes down the side of the screen, but I hardly notice. I can’t stop looking at her eyes.

What have I done?