Luisa's Weird

• Under the Sun
• Heartbreaking Work: A Conspiracy of Kidnappers

cottonbro

Luisa opened her eyes, rubbing her fingers down both cheeks. "I feel weird," she said to no one in particular.

A girl to her left -- pink-rimmed tinted glasses, a blue mid-thigh dress that hung from her modest adolescent shape, fizzy blonde ringlets -- squeezed her knee, saying in an affectionate whisper, "That's because you are weird."

That settled it enough for Luisa. She blinked at the notebook before her, the pen in a groove in the desk, then at the glow of the massive board before her detailing one of the battles of the Sino-Russian War. She could not yet process the lilting peaks and valleys of the instructor's lecture, nearing a conclusion given her pitch, and so set to scribbling as much as she could before the slide morphed into a short video.

This reenactment was flashes and violence. Luisa winced away from it, not wishing to see whatever was playacted there -- lost limbs and shattered prostheses rendered by credible AI instead of actors -- and returned to her notes as the lights dimmed more.

She wasn't sure she cared for her handwriting. It was too pointed. She flipped to other pages for comparison, but the notebook was otherwise blank.

Luisa sketched whorls and flowers on the page to block out the gunshots and blasts. Her handwriting turned to printed text when she idly tapped the page with the back of her pen. The extraneous drawings glittered, animating blooming, then receded, leaving behind a single blacklined glyph of a flower. She tapped it twice in hopes she could restore her picture, but no. At least that accounted for the emptiness of the notebook. She must have sent her other notes somewhere, which made her wonder why she was taking notes in this book.

A pale buzz seeped from the walls. Luisa's classmates, some two dozen teenagers, sat up, gathering papers and chatting with one another on the way out of the class. She turned to the blonde girl, opened her mouth to say something, and then realized Luisa didn't have her name. It was almost there, but not quite. She should know this because the girl knew her enough for a joke, but there was a spiny absence.

The blonde girl looked at Luisa, her lips parted, the tip of her tongue thoughtfully on her canine, then said, "October and Kat want to go to the library before lunch to pick up some books. Do you want to come?" Her tone, a heightened pitch and volume, struck Luisa as confusing, but she was too relieved by the offer to do other than seize upon it.

The girl's name was Dani, which Kat -- half a foot shorter than either of them, with wavy mahogany hair and a dimple on her right cheek -- said at once in a sarcastic pitch.

October's gender was ambiguous. Their nearly black hair was long on top, shaved beneath, held behind their head by a silvery loop that glittered even when they stood still. Their voice hummed, reminding Luisa of the sound that had dismissed the class. They regarded Luisa with no particular interest, remarkable by this absence.

Dani and Kat had already moved on to another conversation about physics or boys (bodies in motion, at least) and made efforts to include Luisa. October walked beside them almost as though they belonged to only themselves, as though they were only going in the same direction.

Luisa mentally tried each of them on as friends. She assumed they must be, given the inclusion, and her inability to recall anything but warmth and gratitude niggled at her. Still, she knew better than to make an issue of it. As Dani had said, she was evidently weird.

The library shelves were thirty feet high on two levels, the top a fenced cliff five feet wide on each wall. The center featured terminals in a hexagon, seeming like bee-built. Luisa understood computers, but these were flat and thin until someone sat before them.

Her companions sat on chairs facing away from one another. Luisa studied the enormity of the collection, the scattered rainbow of their spines, and did not notice their distance for a minute.

She sat beside Dani, whom she decided must like her best and who would bear her question better. "What are you doing?"

"Searching for a book."

Luisa nodded at the simplicity of this answer. They were in a library. That's what one did.

"How?" she asked.

Dani double-tapped her right temple. Her eyes cleared at once, her focus returning to the room. "With my Nexus."

"Oh. Right."

Luisa sat back, measuring this answer.

"What?" she finally asked.

"Nexus," Dani repeated, which was not a helpful reiteration. She double-tapped her temple again, and her eyes drifted, flicking up and down. Luisa thought Dani could still see her, but not as clearly.

The most straightforward course was mimicry. Luisa tapped her temple twice. Before her eyes materialized, a thin rectangle and keyboard. When she looked at a key, it appeared in the box. It was a shallow learning curve.

In a minute, she searched and read fluidly. She found the digital card catalog, which directed her to whatever material in the library she might want, even to the degree of putting a red arrow in the field of her vision.

She found the alcove of yearbooks. There was a kiosk that could pull up the pages, but Luisa opted for the physical book, flipping through a few and finding herself in none. She looked at her face in the black mirror of the kiosk. Luisa had sandy hair below her shoulders, high cheekbones, and tan skin, but her eyes were so dark they seemed black. She didn't know this face, hers ostensibly, but she liked the look of it somewhere deeper than vanity. She was not gorgeous but was more than average; pretty today, but perhaps not at every dawn. She did not think she would have wanted to be noticeably beautiful if someone had offered her the opportunity.

She noticed then the now green smiley face in the left corner of her field of vision, which she looked at until it vanished. When she looked again at the kiosk's screen, she better could distinguish her eyes, glassy with concern and curiosity.

She did not know her friends' last names, but the kiosk was helpful after a few taps. Danielle Myrdyz, Katherine Laremie, and October Alarcon. Each of them had pictures going back to elementary school. They had clubs, field trips, and candid photos in the books. They had a time-lapse of almost babies to young women and October.

She felt someone behind her, turning to find October at her back. They looked past Luisa's shoulder at the screen of them dressed in frills on stage.

"That was a shitshow," they said, holding Luisa's bicep loosely and leading her back to the others. "Glad you missed it live."

Dani and Kat held shiny paperbacks. October took nothing and grumbled at once that they had been deprived of graphic novels.

On the walk to the cafeteria, the latter cleaved close to Luisa, so it seemed they were two couples who knew one another but not one cohesive group.

The cafeteria seemed familiar in a way that the library did not, which was a comfort to Luisa, whose mind whirred trying to sort out why she seemed to exist so lightly in this world.

Luisa followed behind Kat, putting on her tray what the girl did: Sandwich (probably turkey), orange, cookie, soy milk. At the end of the line, Kat waved her hand at a soft white light, which turned green. Luisa imitated the gesture. The light remained white, but Kat pulled her to a table behind a brick pillar.

Dani and October were already sitting and munching on pizza, sipping a clear, bubbling beverage -- probably soda. Luisa considered whether she would have rather had that but decided she wanted it no more than what she had taken.

She was half sure she had just stolen the food, but no one else seemed concerned, so she put it out of her mind.

The other three set to a conversation about some drama that happened first period, a verbal scuffle between an annoyed student and an annoying teacher, Mrs. Brusakos. Luisa listened, absorbing the overview, if not the subtleties, nibbling her sandwich. These subjects of discussion were more strangers to her, as were most people in the cafeteria.

Luisa peeled the orange, feeling put upon that some of the rind caught under her nails. These were glossy, suggesting she had painted them recently, and so could be justified to feel bothered that the job might be undone by pith and citric acid.

She wiped her hand on her pants -- leggings but made of a strong material -- then realized this was indelicate and retorted to napkins.

Once she segmented the fruit, October took half without asking.

Luisa popped a piece whole into her mouth.

She had once stood in an orange grove near a cliff, beyond which she had seen a city, its lights flickering to wake as the sun set beyond it. She sat on the warm grass, having pulled the skin from an orange with her thick fingers, hair on their knuckles. She fed slices to a young girl -- younger than her, but not so different a model -- her eyes the color of the leaves before autumn settles. The girl received the bounty, cuddling against Luisa's muscular arms. She felt a burning in her chest she could not place.

Luisa blinked this vision away, rubbing the bridge of her nose as though the pressure could hold the tableau in place.

Dani squinted at her. "You got quiet."

How could she know Luisa had been quiet? Aside from affirmative noises, almost automatic, she had said nothing substantive in minutes.

"I just remembered a dream."

Luisa's long fingers squeezed her thin arm. She felt smaller now, though she seemed average compared to most girls in the cafeteria, talking and reading. She could not find a boy much smaller than her.

Kat gave a breathy laugh. "Are you getting weird on us again?"

Luisa paused, weighing the looks of her friends. "Yeah, probably. Low blood sugar. I didn't have breakfast."

The three gave awkward smiles, October's the thinnest, and continued as though she had not spoken.

After a few minutes, she excused herself for the bathroom, though she had no biological need. Instead, she returned to the library, double-tapping her temple.

What to search? She had a few factors -- "orange grove near city" -- but it was not enough. She only needed a reprieve from company. She no longer felt she had just met the three of them, but the disparity in their knowledge of one another provoked more anxiety than filling in the notebook before it was too late.

If she could not find the source of that memory -- deciding it had to be more memory than dream, no matter how little sense that made given her slight and markedly feminine body -- she could try to pull up as much about herself as was available.

There were no passwords when it came to her files. She found her class schedule, the history notes she had taken, and a hundred others. There were pictures of her -- with Dani and Kat but more with October. She smiled in them, a goofy grin Luisa was unsure her face could make. Her eyes were wider in these, the sunlight meeting the sclera, and were not as dark as when reflected in the kiosk. Luisa did not like these pictures, though it occurred to her that Dani must be her best friend or girlfriend, given how they hung on one another. She waited for her emotions or body to help her pick but felt only vague positivity.

She felt love in that dream. Intense longing for the little girl. She wanted to find her, yet knew somehow this would be impossible.

Would another orange bring the memory back? Would something else? Luisa thought of a madeleine, that this could restore more, but couldn't say why.

No, that wouldn't work. It has to be an all-at-once surprise; spontaneous, not provoked.

Even now, the feeling of it had faded to two dimensions, and her desire for it grew velvety.

Someone dropped onto the chair beside her. Luisa tapped her files closed.

"I hope you aren't going to the bathroom in the library," Kat chirped. "They frown upon that at this school."

Luisa tried an airy laugh and thought she had done a good enough job to be convincing. "No, I got distracted."

"The bell is about to ring," she said. "Don't worry. October finished off your sandwich like the primate they are."

English was easier. She followed the flow of the conversation. She practiced making her handwriting more ornate in transcribing notes, then tapping it to printed text, surprised that the book wasn't confused a moment about her intentions. How unlike hers could she make her writing before the book wouldn't know her?

Dani was not here, and Kat sat across the room within a phalanx of boys. Luisa thought she missed Dani or thought she should, so she made herself miss her.

There were boys on either side of Luisa, one with hair only a little darker than his warm complexion and the other pleasantly rounded and pale, like a clay she wanted to press her fingers into. They paid no attention to her, which was more manageable. She already had three too many curious parties in her orbit.

"Luisa, did you have something to add?" asked the teacher from the front of the room.

Luisa looked around for another Luisa to whom the teacher could be directing this comment. There was no mistaking that the teacher addressed this to her.

She tried her airy laugh again, but it rang hollow. "I couldn't possibly add anything you have not better covered, sir."

"Are you mocking me?"

"I wouldn't ever!" Luisa blinked. This was true. It was not her inclination to mock anyone, for which she was grateful, but she wouldn't have thought to question it until she exclaimed to the contrary. "To be honest with you, sir, my attention has been slightly divided. I'll focus better."

This all came automatically, so each word startled her. How deferential and respectful she must be for this automaticity.

The teacher, too young for the worry etching his face, tapped his foot a few seconds before continuing, directing his attention now to a boy in the second row who had snickered at the interruption.

She enjoyed the class even though she hadn't read the twenty-second-century novel the teacher discussed. Or had she read it? She surreptitiously tapped her temple as though to rest her head, searching the book's title, skimming synopses, and returning to her notebook within three minutes, seemingly unnoticed by anyone else. She didn't think she had read it but saved it to her files for later. Surely she could not have been alone in employing this tack?

She pulled up her schedule, which she realized was interactive. She looked at her next class, and the red arrow reappeared.

She heard Kat calling her name when the walls buzzed but decided she would rather exercise independence. If she stayed too close to her friends (they were likely her friends), she was liable to let slip that she was adrift in amnesia. Once she had sorted this out better, she might confess the strangeness to one of them, assuming she decided they would keep her confidence.

The hall was orderly chaos, everyone scattering to chatter when liberated from a door, but the flow was never too severely impeded.

Luisa stood near the window, chatting with a boy whose name was alien to her, until most of her classmates sat. A few empty desks remained, so she chose the one closest to the windows. Sun glinted off the tram that cycled past every few minutes. Far away, a tower hundreds of feet stood, winnowing to a point as though it were a pyramid that had been squeezed at the base until it threatened to pop.

The desk glowed as the teacher announced a pop quiz. Complex geometric shapes manifested beneath Luisa's fingers with numbers orbiting. She paused over them, hands above, until their simplicity appeared in her mind.

She knew math. Good.

She completed the quiz in minutes while others struggled. She entered it, saw her score was in the nineties, and then tapped her Nexus to scan through her files. They were disorganized, most in a root folder, and she sorted them until she found something personal, almost marginalia.

It was the most unfamiliar thing she had seen yet, these words describing an infatuation with... it wasn't clear. This seemed like set dressing to her, something meant to give context but inauthentic.

She had stood on stage, her voice deep and confident, her eyes so awash in the light that she could not see the audience.

No. That was not her. It couldn't have been.

It slipped from her again. Denying this sickened her.

She excused herself to the bathroom. The teacher, wide-eyed and thin-haired, looked her over once, glimpsed her desk growing green, and waved her away.

The library wasn't the sanctuary she needed. Her friends could find her there.

She glided down the hallway, listening to the sounds of teaching until she found a quiet classroom where she could cloister herself.

She riffled through the desk in the front until she found paper. She folded it once to confirm it was nothing digital or connected, only something on which a pen (also in the desk) could make a mark.

She knew about automatic writing -- damned if Luisa could say why she knew this -- and willed her hand to write everything she might know about these flashes.

"Actor," "orange grove," "girl who resembles me," "man." These were not much, but she let her mind quiet and allowed the words to flow from her.

She had half a page down before she saw a name that made her quake. She double-tapped her Nexus and had ten articles about his death before realizing she had been holding her breath.

There was nothing in these about an orange grove, but he had been a minor actor before becoming a machinist during the war -- though the context of this word was different than Luisa expected. He died of natural causes after a long battle, though the articles did not clarify what these might have been and against what he battled. She read between the lines that the details might have been too delicate for anything but flat euphemisms.

She had no connection to him that she could find -- though she might also have claimed to have no connection to herself at the moment. He had died a few years ago, a hundred miles away.

She feared to search more. She couldn't tolerate more words but was too weak not to search for pictures and videos. She knew that voice, how resonant it was, though the sound of it was different than she expected. She couldn't judge his looks, neither handsome nor ugly, but present. He could have been her father, but he didn't look like her. The skin tone and facial structure were all wrong. Though she was sure she had a father, she could not bring his face to mind to compare.

She expanded and contracted his pictures like a pulse, quickening the action as if the heart rate of someone in a haunted house. Wasn't she one now? A ghost hidden somewhere that might spring out if she were unwary?

She resisted another vision, another false memory. She closed everything, tapping off Nexus, and lay her head on the desk for some minutes.

The door hissed open. A woman with a mug strode, froze when she saw Luisa grow rigid, then sat heavily in a chair.

"Ms. Mignott, may I ask why you aren't in class?"

"I finished," she said. "There was a quiz. Geometry. I'm sorry. I shouldn't be here, but it has been a perplexing day." She stood to leave, though her mind resisted going.

"What's that?" asked the woman.

She must be a teacher, but Luisa could not recall if this woman was one of hers. Luisa's eyes darted around the room, landing on an e-ink plaque on the desk.

"It's nothing, Mrs. Brusakos," she said, sensing the woman would not have noticed the half-second hesitation before pronouncing her name. "I was taking some notes for myself."

"On paper?"

She nodded. "It seemed like something that needed paper."

Mrs. Brusakos shook her head with a tight smile. "'Something that needed paper,'" she repeated like a refrain.

The teacher put her cup down, striding toward Luisa and picking up the page without question or pause. Her eyes skipped over it, scanning for something she did not want to find. She gasped hard, almost a sob.

"Fuck," she said quietly. "It had to be today, right? It's only been five periods since I saw you--" So she was one of Luisa's teachers! "--so it happened when?"

"What happened?" Luisa said, but she felt a lump in her throat that she should know this and was guilty of something she hadn't done or couldn't remember having done.

"Why did you come in here?"

"I think I can trust you," Luisa said. Was this why she was here? Was it not seeking quiet but something else? She looked into this woman's stern, distraught eyes and felt a comfort she hadn't from anyone else. She could accept that she was drawn here by more than anxiety and convenience, a magnetic automaticity.

Her jaw hardened as if this statement caused her physical pain. "I wish you didn't feel that way."

"Are you not trustworthy?"

"No, I am," said Mrs. Brusakos. "I simply wish you didn't so automatically think so."

She reached for the page back. Mrs. Brusakos did not release it.

"I have been having these flashes. Maybe from dreams, I thought, but they kept coming and felt more tangible than my memories," said Luisa. "They are about a man who died a few years ago."

The teacher looked more stricken at the mention of the man, her jaw setting and pale eyes more distant.

"How many other people have you told about this?"

Luisa shook her head. "No one, really. Some friends thought I looked spacy, but I didn't tell them anything. I didn't know about him until maybe fifteen minutes ago. My hands knew the name. Until I wrote it, I didn't know it. Please tell me this makes some sense to you?"

The teacher tented her fingers before her face, thumbs on her chin and fingers occluding her lips, but Luisa saw the sincerity in the frown left exposed.

"I've said something wrong," Luisa concluded.

"Something I wish you had not," said the teacher. "It isn't wrong in a literal sense but is nevertheless tragic."

It was tragedy for Mrs. Brusakos, but Luisa only felt lighter that she had shared this burden with someone who understood better, even if the teacher hated that she did.

"Why do I remember bits of him but only today of myself?"

Mrs. Brusakos' expression was half-lidded as though to keep from looking at the girl directly. "You don't know what you are asking and shouldn't. Live your life. Forget all these things. Tomorrow or next week or next month, this day and its concerns will be so small."

"I don't want to forget this," Luisa said. "I've forgotten so much else. Tell me why, please."

The teacher's shuddering breaths as she studied Luisa almost made the girl want to rescind the request, but she couldn't.

"Close your eyes," the teacher said, "and tell me the first thing you remember. Don't lie to me."

"In history, the teacher showed a recreation of a battle."

"Today?"

"Yes, a few hours ago." It felt far longer now, but this felt like the entirety of her life, so she could forgive herself for feeling it had to be longer.

"And you are already here. You are already pestering me." She swallowed. "'A few hours,' she says."

Luisa was not pestering the teacher, she knew. Hurting her, yes, and she would repent for this the moment she could be satisfied. "And you know why?"

"I would tell you to go away, but you would just get yourself killed with your curiosity."

"Please."

"You're synthetic," she said, the word almost mocking. "You are a vessel for the brushed-off soul -- not a soul; souls are superstition -- of a dead man."

Luisa's lips parted. Not in answer. She didn't comprehend enough for a reply. Mrs. Brusakos sounded insulting, but only because she wanted this knowledge to pain Luisa as much as it did her.

"I don't understand any of that."

"Well, join the club, kid."

"What's a synthetic?"

The teacher took a minute to calm herself, then explained what must be the bare basics of it. The "essence" -- which was not a soul or mind but something more complicated -- of a deceased person was injected into a manufactured body -- into Luisa. It was not widely known or acknowledged, and those who knew about it considered it somewhere between a hypothetical and a conspiracy theory. Luisa did not exist before the process -- this was not akin to demonic possession as much as installing an operating system. She was not a robot -- Mrs. Brusakos was adamant on this point.

The cortisol of starring in this impossibility made bile rise in Luisa's throat, though she was unclear whether she had stress hormones or a functioning digestive system. Having begun to absorb this litany, Luisa settled on asking, "Why aren't I a boy?"

She shrugged one shoulder. "I feel he was always... like you but had missed the opportunity to express it fully. He did all he could to direct your design in the days before it reached this conclusion. He was not unhappy with his gender, but he wore it rather than being immersed in it. I hope you will not have the same experience."

"I'm a girl," she said, but the confidence waned. "Am I a girl?"

"In most ways that matter."

"Am I human?"

"I would say no, but others have dissented. You are partially organic. You can bleed. Your organs -- those that are not artificial -- function properly. You are mortal," the teacher said, "but you are not human. You cannot breed. There are parts of you found only in androids, like your brain. On the other hand, most of your classmates have Nexus implants or knockoffs, so one might argue that full humanity is a rarity."

Luisa was unbothered by the idea that she was not strictly human, then was bothered by the fact that it didn't bother her. Something living should care more that it wasn't authentic.

"Did he have a daughter?" asked Luisa.

The teacher hit the desk, an action all but involuntary. "Stop this! What are you not getting? You cannot know about him."

"Just one question. Just that. Did he?"

The teacher rubbed the red of her palm, though the pain of the action was somewhere else, which she did not bother to have her face disguise. "No. No children."

Luisa wanted to ask more, but she promised only one question, and the answer gave her a confirmation she didn't know she needed.

"Why this?" asked the girl, who was less steady now defining herself as such. "Why won't I have a childhood?"

The teacher rose from her desk, pacing as though gearing up for a more academic lecture. "Children were tried and... didn't work out. It was too eerie to have the intellect and intentions of someone who had been an adult in so small a body. Those experiments were-- scientists, governments, did what they do when an experiment fails. An adult wasn't different enough for integration and raised too many questions. High school was the best solution, something in-between so the new person could figure out how they wanted to interact with the world. Your version is less likely to break down as you grow, rather than the machinist adjusting a child every few years. A teenage skeleton is close enough to an adult one." She gave an empty laugh. "I'm repeating what he told me, understand. I'm as good as a pamphlet."

"That's sensible," said Luisa. "How am I reacting?"

"Not how you are intended to but also how I would expect given your essence."

"Are there others at this school like me?"

She pursed her lips. "A few, reputedly. I wouldn't know about any but you. To my knowledge, they are unaware of their origins, and we intend to keep it that way. Worldwide, maybe ten thousand. More than when they tried with childish bodies. Fewer of your generation have run into problems."

"Why don't the other students know about me? I woke up in history, and no one noticed."

"You've been at the school all year. Your essence hadn't taken hold until now, so you cannot process this past. In a few days, you should remember what happened since August, and then you will build memories backward. You will think you always were Luisa, that you had first steps and words other than when you were fifteen. It won't be so strange a thing. Few adults dwell on more than a dozen memories, the rest consigned to the dustbin. There was some debate among the scientists about what would happen in June if you hadn't, as you put it, woken up."

"So, I've been--?" but Luisa didn't have a word for what she had been. Asleep? Comatose? Robotic?

"You seemed normal enough. It was usually easy to forget that you were an egg waiting to hatch. The people who constructed this body made guesses based on a psychological survey and what your predecessor could report. They, for want of a better term, programmed you to act how they assumed you would when you began to integrate. No one has thought you were out of the ordinary -- another boon of doing this to seemingly teenage bodies is that teenagers are, by definition, peculiar in their attempts to chisel out an identity. You have friends. You've lightly dated."

"I've dated?"

"They monitor the synthetics before the essence takes hold to be sure nothing implies they need intervention. Your being typically adolescent was marked as a success."

Luisa slid her forefinger over her thumbnail. It felt plastic, but that might have been the polish. She didn't know what it was for something to feel real.

"Was I a good girlfriend?"

The teacher shook her head, a slight smile on her lips. "You are too much like him. That would be one of his concerns in waking up to find he had been dating: 'Was I a good partner?' Nothing more immediately existential."

"I have existential concerns. Of course I do," Luisa said more firmly than she meant. "I only want to know I have not hurt anyone more than I needed to."

"You are not much of a heartbreaker, no. The predictive programming doesn't encourage deep relationships until you are there to decide, but you seemed to manage well enough."

"Dani?"

"Just a friend."

Luisa's breath puffed from her lips in relief. "I wouldn't--"

"Want to hurt her. I know," said the teacher. "You've kept it casual. I thought something might be brewing with October over breakfast his morning."

"Who I used to be must have been a good person because the things I want to do are nice." The reasoning seemed saccharine, but she wanted to say it anyway.

The teacher swallowed, unable to resist the sadness tainting her smile. "He was. They gave him a whole week before the process would begin -- before he would be removed from his body, if you want -- and distilled into you. He accepted it totally, serenely. He didn't want to be fearful, to have any of that inside you."

Luisa could not shape her gratitude for him, for herself, though the gulf between the two grew deeper as the minutes of knowledge lengthened.

Luisa could not sense the fear she might have inherited from her donor, as she tried to phrase him in her mind, but she knew the dread in this conversation. "Don't take this life from me."

Luisa's directness, calling out the conflict rather than continuing the teacher's one-sided reminiscence, was the wrong tack. Mrs. Brusakos stood like she had been propelled away from the girl. She flared her fingers as though she might discharge her snake-fang emotions through them. "You figured it out in a day! In hours! And you set to researching him, altering your potential. You all but channeled him. What would you have them do? You are far from integrated. This possibility is exactly why I was supposed to report on you, why I know what you are."

Luisa bit the side of her finger to calm her nerves. She heard more of a promise than a threat in this, the teacher's frustration and despair at what must happen now.

"Would he have? Figured it out, I mean?"

"Yes, of course he would," she said, tears flavoring the words, "but it doesn't make the program seem like something effective. Too much is riding on this being successful. Too many people depend on you not remembering. You are like the children."

"Let me keep it," Luisa said. "There can't be too much harm in knowing if I never seek to delve further -- and I swear I won't, especially not at these costs. It's an honor to be some part of him, right?"

Mrs. Brusakos rubbed the mist from her eyes. "You even argue like him."

Luisa didn't know the balance between what she sensed and what he had known, if she were reading the reply in the teacher's hard expression or if she had some tendril of memory of seeing this perplexity on her face.

"Don't look into him more," said the teacher. "You have to be yourself. If you try to be him, the scientists will reevaluate you. If I find you probing again, I cannot in good conscience keep quiet. And it will kill me to do that, to watch him die twice."

"I will be myself."

"I'm saving you grief. The details of his life should have no bearing on the one you have begun." Luisa could not help asking the unspoken to be overt. "So, you won't tell?"

"Never give me a reason."

Looking at one another as though seeing for the first time the obligation between them, they could not speak another word. Luisa listened to a whisper around them, its focus suffused from some appliance or machine.

"What do I do?" Luisa finally asked to counter the sound.

"Grow up," Mrs. Brusakos said. "Don't rush this time."