Free Afterparty by Daryl Gregory Page A

Then Ms. Frank said, “How long have you been awake, Ms. Skarsten?”
    Olivia wasn’t quite sure. Three days, more or less.
    Ms. Frank said, “I’ll take care of this.”
    It was now an hour until the plane landed. Olivia was alone in the building, sitting at her desk with all four computer monitors on. One window showed the Virgin-Atlantic website, a dozen others were open to every TV and web news channel Olivia could think of. She was sick to her stomach. Sweat painted her back. She counted down the minutes to 4:52 a.m. And then, at 4:40, the Virgin-Atlantic website updated. The plane had landed early.
    Olivia was shocked, but also relieved. No crash. No bomb. She could not understand what had happened. And then, because she was one of the company’s best analysts, she came upon the solution.
    Olivia’s superior returned early from vacation and found her at her desk, staring at the monitors. Three security officers stood behind him. The boss said, “Ollie, did you call Willa Frank this morning?”
    Olivia said, “Nobody else would listen.”
    He told her to gather her personal belongings, but she had already packed the box. She’d been doing fifty milligrams of Clarity a day, plus another fifty of Adderall, and usually a twelve-pack of Red Bull. She could see, almost literally, what was coming. The writing was on the wall, the floors, and the furniture. Each face like an arrow pointing her toward the exit.
    A few years later, when she told the story to Lyda Rose, a fellow resident of the neuro-atypical ward of Guelph Western Hospital, Lyda asked, “What happened to the Pakistani guy in New York?”
    Ollie shrugged. “He probably got a new watch.”
    —G.I.E.D.

 
    CHAPTER SIX
    We waited for Ollie at the agreed-upon place, the parking lot of a Tim Hortons three blocks from the hospital. Bobby drumming his fingers on the wheel, Dr. Gloria in the backseat humming Mozart, both of them driving me crazy.
    Bobby said, “Are you sure this is a good idea?”
    “Is what a good idea?” I asked.
    “Helping her … escape.”
    “You think she’s dangerous?”
    “No, no! I mean, maybe. Didn’t she kill a guy?”
    “She shot someone. Wounded him. It was a robber who was breaking into her apartment.”
    “I thought it was her landlord.”
    “Who told you that?”
    Bobby touched the treasure chest at his neck. “Todd.”
    Fucking Counselor Todd. “Yes,” I said, “but she thought it was a robber.” Actually, she had thought it was an agent sent by her former employers to take her back across the border. Ollie on meds was brain-damaged—couldn’t organize her visual field, couldn’t separate figure from ground, couldn’t recognize her own face in a mirror—but Ollie off meds …
    “She can be a little paranoid,” I said.
    “She told me that the US has drones the size of house flies, and that they can come in your house and take pictures of you.”
    “The US government does not want to see you naked, Bobby.”
    “So it’s not true?”
    “I didn’t say that.”
    Ollie had worked for six years doing signals intelligence for the US Army, then moved to the private sector to do the same job for three times the money. A contractor, with access to all kinds of classified info, not to mention the government’s mil-spec smart drugs. The one Ollie used was a wicked thing, a custom-built enzyme that generated its own battery of agonists for the alpha-2A receptor. They called it Clarity. The drug—or rather, the proteins that the enzyme manufactured—set fire to the forest that was the prefrontal cortex, burned down the trees and encouraged massively interconnected bushes of white matter to grow up in its place. Repeated use at high doses made the new structure permanent.
    Nobody used Clarity anymore.
    “Besides,” I said to Bobby. “You’re Canadian. You’re perfectly safe.”
    Dr. G spotted Ollie crouched down between cars, wearing a baseball cap and blue scrubs, not enough clothes for the weather. I