Reach

Watching a dog play frisbee. Delete.

Milkshakes and fried chicken with friends. Delete.

Toilet breaks … fourteen incidents!? Good lord! Delete.

I lean back in my chair and rub my eyes. I’m 29 hours through the 48 hours of footage I need to sweep. At 6 times speed it only takes 8 hours to get through it all, but that is still a long time. I’d tried bumping it up to 12 times speed, but I couldn’t tell what was going on. Couldn’t spot any possible side-effects. Visible side-effects.

We work in a team of three, all looking for any irregularities or unusual events in the test subject. I sweep the visuals; Ted sweeps the audio (which means hearing those fourteen toilet incidents) but Elanor has the hardest sweep. She has to sweep our subject’s emotions. 48 hours’ worth of teenage feelings, even at a compressed 8 hours? That’s a helluva vibe check.

None of us are given the test subject’s name, nor any personal details. To us, this 48 hours belongs to subject Four/D. Respect for our subject’s anonymity is one of the reasons the sweep-and-store for side-effects work is split up. The other reason, according to the academics running this drug trial, is that if one person swept the entirety of the 48 hours alone, there would be ‘unproductive consequences’. What that meant was never explained; Elanor thinks it’s to prevent identity dissolution, Ted reckons it’s to prevent limerence. I just think you’d go insane.

Memberitol is what we call the drug, but its official name is … too long and hard to pronounce, even for us post-grad med majors. So, we just call it Memberitol. Ted came up with the name, ‘get it’ he’d said, ‘Memberitol? Remember-it-all?’. It was a terrible joke, but it stuck. The drug records the 48 hours of a person’s experience after ingestion and sends it all back to our machines for cataloguing. Don’t ask me how it works, but it does. Its purpose is to help Alzheimer’s and dementia patients. I reckon it could rewrite the brains of psychopaths, give them a little empathy.

I catch sight of Four/D in her bedroom mirror and pause the recording.

That’s unusual.

One of the stipulations of being a test subject is that all reflective surfaces be covered and avoided for anonymity. But there she is, Four/D, looking at herself in the mirror, which makes it feel like she is looking right at me. For a moment it’s as if my screen is a window.

She has straight black hair, bronze skin, dark eyes. An eyebrow piercing. And a thick stripe of scars running across her cheeks and nose. What are they? Where did they come from? They aren’t new, not fresh. But they are striking.

I lean forward in my chair. My finger bumps the control stick, resuming playback at 75% speed.

The timestamp clicks over to 3.14pm. Four/D raises her hand up and gently runs her fingertips across them. And as she does, I feel her fingers on my face. A jolt of lightning runs up my back and I hit stop. I need to stand up and stretch it out. I need space.

As I move past Ted’s pod, he’s laying back with his headphones on. No earbuds, over-the-ear only. Better sound quality.  He’s not looking at the rubik’s cube in his hand. He isn’t trying to solve it, he just needs something to do with his hands while he sweeps.

 “Hey, where are you going?” he says.

“Need a break,” I mumble.

“Coffee?”

“Hadn’t thought about it.”

Ted hits stop on his machine and takes his headphones off. “I’ll come with you. Hey Elanor?”

He throws his head over the short wall of his pod and knocks on the other side.

“What?” comes Elanor’s voice.

“We’re getting coffee. Come with.”

“Kay.”

##

“How often do you pee, Els?” Ted says as he slums down onto the grass next to Elanor. He hands out our drink orders and drops a tin full of chocolate biscuits between us.

“I don’t count,” she says.

“What about you, Ash? More than seven times a day?”

“Dunno,” I say, staring out across the quadrangle. There are students moving across the space from one lecture to another. First years, you can always spot them. Wide-eyed and terrified. A couple of arts majors huddled around a guitar on a grassy mound at the far end of the yard. I blink hard, trying to push out the images from Four/D’s catalogue. Trying to delete the feeling of her touch on my cheek.

“Reckon Four/D’s frequency could be a side effect?”

One of the stipulations for our role in the trial is that we don’t discuss the subject’s experiences. Just observe and report. But there’s no chance of that happening. Especially with Ted on the team.

“Dunno,” I say.

Ted stirs three sugars into his coffee. “Els, how was Four/D’s emotional state during her pee breaks?”

Elanor is laying back on her elbows, staring up at the blue spots between the greying clouds. “Relief,” she says. “And they weren’t all pee breaks.”

“But they sounded like—”

“It was a side effect of cheap Indian food, not Memberitol.”

Ted curls his lip in repulsed realization. “Glad I didn’t pull the smell-sweep job.”

“Memberitol doesn’t record smells,” Elanor replies.

“And for that, I thank Professor Skitter and his crack team of eggheads.”

Memberitol doesn’t record smell for a reason, smell is one of, if not the, strongest trigger for memories and emotions. Skitter and his team felt it unnecessary to record smells for that reason, it might muddy the memories. It might muddy the sweeper.

Ted swipes up a pair of biscuits from the tin. He always eats them in pairs, stacked together like a sugar sandwich. He crunches down on them. “D’you delete them?” he asks.

“Yep,” I say.

Elanor nods.

“S’pose I will too,” Ted says, biscuit crumbs spraying from his lips. “Shame. I haven’t found anything else even close to unusual.”

“Not for a teen, anyway,” Elanor replies.

“Nothing emotionally intense?” I probe.

She snorts. “Four/D is a teenage girl. They’re all intense.”

That’s what makes Elanor the best option for vibe-sweeping; she has limited capacity for empathy. I think back to Four/D’s scars, they certainly feel unusual. She must have felt something when she was looking at them in the mirror. But I can’t ask Elanor what Four/D was feeling at 3.14pm on the first day. It would draw unwanted questions, asking something so specific. Something so unusual.

Feeling Four/D’s touch on my face was definitely unusual.

Ted crams another biscuit sandwich into his mouth. Elanor sips her coffee. I hold my hand over my chai, letting the steam drift between my fingers. The conversation has tapered off. Silence fills the air, urging someone to say something before it swallows us up.

… “I did notice one thing,” I say.

Ted raises an eyebrow. “Oh, really?”

“Yeah. At 3.14pm, day one.”

Elanor’s eyes whip across to meet mine. It’s clear as day across her face.

Whatever it was, she noticed it too.