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  The elevator whirred quietly to the fourth floor, and she stepped out on the top of the garage. The night air was brisk, and she pulled her jacket tight around her as she walked through the dark lot, passing student cars. The sky was dark, moonless, and the dim yellow light of the garage lights only just barely illuminated her rental car parked on the other side of the lot.

  There was a movement in the corner of her eye, and she turned her head toward it instinctively.

  “Hello?” she said. “Who’s there?”

  There was no answer, but Chal had the unnerving sensation that somebody was watching her. She heard a whispering sound and spun around, but it was just a piece of crumpled paper being blown softly across the garage floor.

  She fished her keys out of her purse and clutched them in one hand, moving quickly toward her rental car and cursing herself for not having remembered to put the pepper spray back in her purse. She had had to take it out for the flight to California and it sat now uselessly in a pocket of her suitcase on the hotel room floor. Her past self was always causing problems for her future self.

  “Wait!”

  The voice made her spin, her pulse immediately speeding up. A man in a suit had stepped out from behind the line of cars twenty feet away in the dim shadows. She heard an engine roar to life on the second floor of the parking structure, and tires squealed. She continued walking to her car. There was something in the way he stood that made her heart pound.

  “I’m sorry, can’t talk,” she said. “I’m late.” Her voice had a panicked edge to it but she didn’t care. What kind of person would accost her late at night after a lecture, in an empty parking lot? Either a creep or a nut, and she didn’t want to talk to either.

  “Stop,” the man said, and took a step toward her.

  Chal did not hesitate. She turned and ran, kicking her heels off as she allowed her fear to fuel her muscles. Behind her she heard the man yelling at her, and then his steps as he began to chase her.

  She aimed for the elevator but then cut right, slipping sideways through the rows of tightly parked cars. The man chasing her had to cut through as well, but his large size slowed him down in between the cars. Chal felt herself gaining distance and broke out from between the rows, heading straight for the car exit.

  There was a black van driving alongside the exit ramp, and she waved her arms through the metal grating as it sped forward.

  “Help!” she cried out. “Stop! Help me!”

  The black van pulled around to the exit ramp, stopping twenty feet in front of her. The side door opened, and Chal’s heart dropped.

  Two more men stepped out of the van. Both were in suits.

  She opened her mouth to scream, but an arm came around from behind her and muffled the sound. She felt a hot pinprick on her neck, and then the warm numbness of the sedative took her over, paralyzing her muscles. The last thing she saw before the darkness swept over her vision was a man in a suit standing above her, looking down with an expression that bore no emotion. His eyes were a piercing blue.

  “I’m sorry, Dr. Davidson,” he said. “We need you to come with us.”

  ***

  CHAPTER TWO

  Chal awoke to the hum of an engine, her neck cricked badly at an angle. She peered under her slitted eyelids, her vision still blurred, and realized she was buckled into something. She opened her eyes. It was a bench seat on one side of the van.

  The lecture.

  Chal’s head snapped up with the sudden memory of her abduction. There was only one overhead light illuminating the back of the van, two long black leather seats running alongside both sides. The man with blue eyes was sitting on the long seat on the opposite side of the van. He was alone in his seat, but two large men in suits sat on opposite sides of her. She was trapped.

  “Hello,” he said. “I’m sorry to meet again under these circumstances.” He reached forward and offered his hand. She stared at it as though it could bite.

  “Where are you taking me?” Chal asked. Her throat rasped with the dryness caused by the sedative, and she tried to figure out if she could reach over to the driver of the van, maybe cause an accident –

  “Phoenix,” the man said. “Or rather, just outside of Phoenix.” His voice was pleasant but firm. Chal had no idea if he was telling the truth or not, and his face told just as little to her as his tone.

  “Who are you?” Chal asked. Her eyes darted between the men sitting on either side of her. They were both staring straight ahead. She slid her left hand slowly down her hip, inching it closer to the seatbelt release.

  “Lieutenant Johnner,” the man said. “Gray Johnner. I’m with the M.I.D.” He pulled out a badge from his suit and held it in front of her face. The letters were wavy, and she frowned, trying to steady her vision.

  “The M.I.D.?” Chal asked. She couldn’t believe it.

  “Military Intelligence Department,” the man said, putting his badge back into his pocket.

  “I know what it stands for,” Chal said. Her voice began to rise in anger. “Why have you kidnapped me?”

  “I assure you, Miss Davidson – ”

  “Dr. Davidson.” Chal’s hand rested on top of the seatbelt release. She could lash out with her feet, push herself toward the front of the van. She could do it. Maybe. Her heart was pounding.

  “I’m sorry. Dr. Davidson, don’t you remember me?”

  Chal blinked, her hand tense on the buckle. Remember him?

  “From the M.I.D. research discussion panel. The digital intelligence convention in Atlanta, four years ago?”

  Now Chal was thoroughly confused. She vaguely remembered the panel, something about practical applications of digital intelligence. It had been the M.I.D. that had hosted the panel discussion.

  “Yes,” she murmured, trying to remember.

  “You signed up as a potential consultant for our project.”

  In a flash, Chal recalled the discussion panel and the blue-eyed man who was sitting opposite her. The last time she had seen him, he had worn that same dark suit.

  The panel discussion had been forward-thinking, an intriguing project. Modules that doctors could use to help the mentally disabled increase their rate of learning, a focus on autistic patients. When the project developers approached her at the end, she felt honored to sign up as a possible consultant.

  In the months to come, she had filled out a series of surveys by email. Some of the surveys were simple experimental design questions, but many of them concerned hypothetical scenarios that were...strange, to say the least. End-of-the-world scenarios, wartime ethical concerns, nothing that related to the mentally disabled. There was a quiz that had asked about her different emotional responses to a number of living and non-living things: Venus flytraps and automated vacuum cleaners. It was ridiculous.

  “It’s how the government works,” one colleague had said when she had raised concerns. “Start with one project, end up with something completely different. And useless.”

  “You work for a state university,” she reminded the colleague. He just shrugged.

  “It’s a joke,” he had told her. “Those kinds of projects are nonsense, they never go anywhere.”

  Except now the man with the blue eyes was sitting across from her, telling her that it wasn’t a joke.

  “I’m sure this comes as somewhat of a surprise,” Lieutenant Johnner said.

  “Surprise? Surprise?” Chal hissed the words, her fear turning into anger. “What right do you have – ”

  “You signed up as a consultant,” Lieutenant Johnner said. “And we need your help.”

  “Now wait,” Chal said. “You can’t just take me, KIDNAP me and take me away– ”

  “Your presence is required by military law under the project protocol I’m currently following. We have been ordered to use force if necessary to bring you to Phoenix.” He had the decency to look ashamed when he talked about the use of force.

  “Project?” Chal racked her brain, trying to remember what e
xactly the project had entailed. Something special about biological substrates, using both neuronal implants and a digital neuronal core to guide development. A hint of curiosity clawed its way into her thoughts. Implant development was an essential part of the growing field of digital intelligence, and she had never been able to crack it. She shook her head, as much toward herself as toward Johnner.

  “The project you agreed to help with,” Lieutenant Johnner nodded. “You’ll be the first to know the results of the trials we’re now conducting. You will be the one guiding the trials.”

  He no longer seemed abashed at having abducted her, thrown her into a van, and driven her God knows where. Phoenix, if she could believe him. Despite the circumstances, she felt drawn into the mystery. What strides had they made in the field? What trials were they running?

  She shook her head, trying to restore reality. “I–I can’t do it,” she stammered. “I have a lecture in New York tomorrow evening–”

  “That lecture has been cancelled, as have all of your engagements for the next two weeks.”

  She gaped at him. “What? Cancelled? You can’t just DO that–”

  “I’m afraid we can,” he said. “I’m not authorized to explain to you the details until we reach Phoenix.”

  “I signed on as a volunteer,” she protested.

  “You signed,” he said. His voice was flatly insistent.

  “And if I refuse?” She crossed her arms, leaning back in her seat.

  He coughed lightly, embarrassed, and she noticed for the first time the streaks of white hair at his temples. “If you refuse, I’m ordered to escort you to Phoenix under compulsion.”

  “By compulsion. Which you’ve already done.” Her voice was low, quivering on the edges with a mixture of curiosity and fright.

  He straightened up across from her. “I’m sorry, but yes. This matter requires your urgent assistance.”

  “And if I refuse to help when we arrive?” she said.

  “We have other consultants on our list. The next is Dr. Corey Abboud, I believe,” he said.

  Dr. Abboud. He was at Olin LabCorps, working on chimpanzees to develop new digital intelligence chips that could be implanted without having to rely on an external source of energy. His work was phenomenal.

  So they were combing through digital intelligence researchers. She immediately felt herself reach toward the unknown, jealous of anyone who was able to work on such groundbreaking research. Was it a bluff? She stared at Lieutenant Johnner and he stared back dispassionately.

  Despite her misgivings, it seemed as though Lieutenant Johnner actually had a project underway, and it sounded intriguing. If they were working on the biological substrate problem, she wanted to know about it. She wanted to be the first to know.

  She thought about the next two weeks. Her lecture and charity dinners in New York. The Boston book signing. All cancelled. For what?

  “Fuck.” Chal leaned her head back on the seat. Her hand dropped away from the seat belt buckle. “FUCK.”

  Lieutenant Johnner sat silently in front of her, waiting. Finally she shrugged in reluctant assent. If there was no way out of this for the time being, she was at least going to make the most of it. She sighed, turning away from the military man to look out the van’s windshield. The road in front was empty, the headlights shining onto an endless highway. To Phoenix.

  “This had better be interesting.”

  ***

  Interesting was Chal Davidson’s primary criterion for anything. Men, food, work: if it wasn’t interesting, it wasn’t for her. This was not, despite one ex-lover’s words to the contrary, how she explained away her commitment issues. It was simply that she enjoyed being around people that made her think. Most men didn’t do that, or at least not for very long, and when she got bored she moved onto the next one. Her relationships came and went like the seasons, and she didn’t seem to care.

  Some said that Chal Davidson had become obsessed with discovering interesting things at the expense of friends, family, and just about everything else. Others simply called her a genius.

  Her background in undergraduate school had been in theoretical physics, which she had abandoned for a doctorate in philosophy at Johns Hopkins that never reached fruition, her advisor having kicked her out once she made clear her disagreement with him on the practical applications of metaphysical philosophy. She ended up switching over to computer science at the same school and wrapped up her thesis on digital intelligence within a year, impressing everyone except those in the philosophy department, who squarely turned their backs on her.

  Her career in academia was imbalanced, to say the least. Whereas most intelligence scholars focused on theoretical models, Davidson only published papers under pressure when she had to extend her grants, preferring to focus on practical applications. She would seem to have been tailor-made for corporate work, but she despised the suits and the suckups. The one corporate job she worked at a large software company lasted only a week before she yelled at the head boss during a division meeting and was fired for insubordination.

  Still, she had done well for herself after a venture capital fund sniffed out her work on biological substrates and granted her a cool three million dollars to continue studying the applications. She hated biology and hired two young brilliant students out of MIT to wrangle with the substrate problems, turning her attention fully to the nascent field of digital intelligence. Her work quickly took off and soon there was no lack of capital to support her research.

  Most digital intelligence researchers focused on non-biological substrates, developing software that could only be used in computers. In this, they were continuing the artificial intelligence work that had begun two centuries ago. Davidson thought that bio-substrates, though annoying to deal with, had certain properties that lent themselves well to high performance once the digital intelligence transferred across platforms, so to speak. As everyone else moved toward silicon, she shifted to organic media.

  Eventually the Fortune 500 companies grew interested in the long-term potential of digital intelligence and it became trendy to have dig-int teams installed in branches of both marketing and research departments. Many universities had started offering digital intelligence programs alongside the more traditional cognitive science degrees. The CEO who had fired her seven years before invited her to dinner at a chic French bistro and offered her a seven-figure signing bonus, but she refused, in a manner she herself later described as “petulant and short-sighted.”

  At an interview for one popular science magazine, she was asked to pose for a photo shoot. The photographer came into the studio with a skin-tight red dress. Chal initially balked, but the magazine interviewer talked her into the dress. It turned out to be the right decision.

  In what seemed to her like the blink of an eye, she had amassed dozens of offers for book deals, interviews, cover shoots, corporate advertising for any digital product under the sun. She accepted them all, ignoring the advice of her fellow researchers.

  “People see you as a sellout,” a senior colleague had said. Chal merely shrugged. Maybe I am.

  In private, she took all of the money from the promotional offers and gave it to charity. She never told anybody that she felt guilty, or why. They wouldn’t have understood. Only her tax accountant knew that Chal Davidson, despite having the brains to match her beauty, was as penniless as a grad student.

  Her mom sent her clippings from the local newspaper whenever it mentioned Chal’s work. Paper clippings, still–Mrs. Davidson lived in Catalonia, a non-digital post-Divide country. These Chal kept in her desk drawer, even after the slips of paper turned yellow, thin, and finally began to crumble, as all mortal things do.

  ***

  Paper? That was what she thought, before anything else, when the military man, Gray Thomas, leaned forward in the van and handed her a binder full of the stuff. “This is what we need you to review before Phoenix.”

  “You needed to print this all out?” Chal asked.
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  “It’s for security’s sake,” Lieutenant Johnner said. “No digital copies are allowed outside of the lab.”

  Chal rolled her eyes sleepily. The binder was three inches thick; she had already been awake for twenty-seven hours, not counting the brief period of sedation. And the sedative must have been an etorphine blend, the way it knocked her out so quickly. She could already feel the hydrochloride-induced headache coming over her as she turned to the first page. There were so many pages.

  And it was all paper. Overly paranoid, that’s what the military was. As Chal perused the binder, she felt as though she was back home, visiting her mom who, despite Chal’s bribes, threats, and plain old begging had refused to leave West Catalonia.

  Turning quickly to the second section, she was surprised to see copies of all of her research on bio-substrate digital intelligence, including her thesis. She skimmed over them now. Pieces of the text had been underlined, and certain passages were copied over onto separate pages with dense technical notes scribbled under them. Chal recognized the notes as part of the lab processes that were required to apply digital intelligence into a biological matrix, the results of which had never been successful in Chal’s lab. At the bottom of one page someone had signed his name to the scribbles. Dr. Fielding. Chal would have to ask about him.

  Continuing through, she began to be acutely aware of the feel of the paper rasping under her fingertips. In the middle of a paragraph on rat intelligence she lost track of the words, her fingers underlining the sentence but not understanding it. A noise grew in her ears, an insistent buzz, and her mind wandered far, far away from the present.

  Paper.

  Paper dolls.

  Paper dolls blowing across the floor and under the bed –

  “Dr. Davidson?”

  Chal was pulled back into the present, where Lieutenant Johnner looked at her with concern.

  “Yes?”

  “Thought we had lost you for a moment there,” Johnner said. He smiled impassively, and Chal gave him a terse nod.