Free Hyperthought by M. M. Buckner

what Luc used to say to calm people down. I made jokes. I helped people put on their surfsuits. The littlest kids we wrapped in cargo bubbles, and I tried to turn that into a game. I led people up top, forty to a load, tethered on a safety line. I remember this one kid, she was so amazed to be walking on the surface, she did a cartwheel, even in her gawky oversized surfsuit. Man, that was bliss to see.
    We airlifted almost 30,000 Euro protes that first month. Thank the Laws my friends stepped in. Luc, Adrienne, Jonas and the others, they made it happen. Without them, the rescue project never would have come together. Mes dieux, but they teased me, too. Luc and Jonas called me “Chief.” Adrienne called me “the rescuing angel.” They asked me about every little thing as if my opinion carried real weight. Plenty soon, all the volunteers in our midtown cube were following their lead, calling me “Chief” and asking me stuff. I made up answers left and right.
    Jin sent three more text messages during that time. I saved them, but they didn’t make any sense. “Imagine experiencing the world without language,” he wrote. “Could we distinguish boundaries if we had no names for foreground and background?” Another time, he wrote, “We label each experience by referencing what we’ve seen before. A large room, a white person, a sharp stick. Imagine seeing something entirely new. It must be like birth.” In his last text message, he wrote, “I will perceive undifferentiated experience, without the intervening metaphor of number. I will see and hear everything at once.”
    Frankly, that didn’t sound like fun to me. I kept sending back vidmail telling him to get the heck out of there. Even as I flew low under the Paris security scans and met those frightened refugees and led them up to the Earth’s surface for the first time in their lives, I was thinking about Jin. When I wasn’t flying, I was watching his movies. I memorized his every line and gesture. It shames me to admit I even downloaded a sexy photo of Jin from one of those sleazy fan-club sites, and I carried it folded up in my belt. I didn’t even tell Adrienne about that.
    Have you ever been so obsessed with someone that you feel wired on speed twenty-four hours a day? You’re distracted and edgy. It’s not exactly a pleasant feeling. All the time I was flying, that old Van Gogh copter-jet back and forth to Paris, I imagined Jin was there beside me, watching everything I did. I imagined I was earning his approval.
    His first videomail came in April. I was working in the office in Palmertown when the Net node on my arm vibrated. I took the call just like that, thinking it was Luc or Adrienne or Jonas. But it was Jin.
    He looked pale, and his eyes were too bright. I bent close to the small screen and adjusted the contrast. His hair seemed wet He was grinning like a fool. To my surprise, a text box opened onscreen, covering half his face. “Hello, pet.” The words appeared letter by letter in the text box, as if he were typing slowly.
    “Jin,” I whispered, “can you speak?” That text box scared me.
    He shook his head, still wearing the inane grin. He really didn’t look like himself. Haltingly, he typed, “I have developed an aversion to the sound of my voice.”
    I braced my arm on the desk to keep my Net node from shaking. Finally, I remembered to activate the holo. Jin’s face projected above the screen in a fist-sized, three-dimensional shimmer. I also enlarged the text box and tilted it toward me so it was easier to read. The projection floated like a sheet of white film just above my arm.
    “Nonlinear phonemes,” he typed with apparent effort. “Nanobots in my astrocytes. Wish you were here.”
    Just then a shadow fell across his image, and Jin turned his head. A second later, the holograph vanished, and my screen went gray. That last part of Jin’s message haunted me. “Wish you were here.” He’d said that before. What did he mean