How could I say no?
He had me by the curiosity, and that's a dangerous place to be with Jas.
I walked slowly down the old drive that led north away from the house. Back when the Silvas' property had been serviced by groundcars -- long before any of us had been born -- a crushed-rock road had led from the region's ring road to the estate. Now it was a weedy trail. It led to an outbuilding that Jasha had taken over a handful of years ago, to house the experiments that needed more space. When the supply train came around, it was convenient for him to not have to haul his many packages back to the house. I was carrying a small crate of cleaning chemicals he's asked me to retrieve.
The old black gravel crunched under my feet as I walked, punctuating the low hum of insects in the forest to either side. Thin trickles of sweat ran down my back under the loose shirt, but I didn't mind. As soon as I was at the ring road, the breeze that blew down it would cool me off. I began to sing a song I'd heard on the entertainment screen that morning. And just for a moment, I was perfectly calm.
The trees on my left thinned and spread out into a small clearing. At the edge of it was Jasha's barn, as he called it. Half of it was the requisite storage that every estate was still required to own -- survival supplies, backup generators, spare seed, that kind of thing. Arind was careful to keep the stock updated, as we rotated out what we were growing. Not that we'd ever really need any of it. But the law was the law.
The rest of the space was a large divided-off room where Jasha tended to perform his larger, messier, or more questionable experiments. The technical service on which he ran his chemical models had a tendency to get hot, which was another reason why he handled them out here.
I pushed the door open with my hip. Jas looked up. "Hey, I appreciate it."
"Want these anywhere specific?" I asked him.
"Just set them down on the floor. Come help me with this box, would you?"
I turned and went over towards the table under the front windows, where Jas was opening the first of two medium-sized crates. I pulled the other one towards me, and dug my fingers under the already-loosened seal. Inside I saw the caps of a bunch of little tubes in a rack. I pulled it out, and found an identical rack beneath. "What's this?" I asked.
He looked at me consideringly, then back down at what he was doing. "The beginning."
Well, that told me nothing. I took the racks out and placed them side-by-side, under the sill, next to the ones Jas had unloaded. The bottom rack in my box contained not tubes, but a number of small black containers, each sealed and blinking with a tiny red security light.
I carried all the empty crates through the door connecting the outbuilding's rooms and set them down, for pickup by then next train. Back in the cooler side, Jas was organising the mysterious racks, deciding that the placement of a couple of bottles should be switched. A series of vials stood open in metal stands, with several pipettes discarded in an enamel dish of water nearby. I leaned on the table beside him, just steadily watched what he was doing until he started looking antsy.
He folded a coolant lid over the entire array, and turned to me.
"What is that stuff, anyway?" I asked. " Don't fuck around, I want to know."
"Do you?"
"Yeah."
A mischievous glint entered Jasha's eye. "Enough to try it?"
"If that's what it takes. I did walk all the way out here." At the very least, I could match his bravado.
He sat down on a metal stool, flipped the lid back open, and took out one vial. Studied it for a moment. It looked like a perfectly normal test tube with clear liquid to me. "I'm not technically supposed to have it," he admitted.
I waited. To be fair, with Jasha's hobbies, it wasn't the first time he'd said this.
He looked at me speculatively, once again. "If I asked you to," he murmured, "would you destroy it?"
That took me aback. I thought about it. "Yes," I replied.
"Without telling my father?"
Instinctively I knew this was crucial. If I even stopped to ask again what it was, something would be lost. My father, he'd said. Not dad, not Ari. "Yes," I whispered.
Slowly he relaxed, and when he met my eyes again, there was something I hadn't seen in a long time. A a shared purpose we'd had before, blocking out the whole world.
After some digging, we found an old reclining chair in the storage side of the outbuilding, and I helped him pull it over towards a panel of screens. With a few words from Jasha, the screens filled with data, in charts and tables that I recognised as test results. I settled back on the chair, happy to see at least some evidence that he'd tried this out before.
The electrodes on my head and arms were a bit of an unwelcome reminder of what we were doing. He hooked the ends of the wires to an apparatus that I couldn't see, as it was under the console table. But he explained to me what he was doing as he went.
"This last one is to measure your blood pressure," he said. "I want to make the machine as unobtrusive as possible, so that your cortisol levels won't be altered too much by the sight of all this junk." He flipped a hand towards the screens behind him.
I appreciated it, but I was already getting nervous.
Jasha continued doing the wires up, and I tried to breathe deeply. The point of this test, apparently, was to see what my brain scan would be doing under the influence of the chemical. He told me that it was supposed to cause an increase in the efficiency of my communicator module. That seemed straightforward enough.
He switched on the power, and I told myself that the low hum was reassuring. "And you've done models of this?" I asked.
"Seven hundred and forty-four of them," he said placidly. "On all available DNA types and common mindpatterns. I've taken it myself six times. But I've reached the limit on what I can self-observe."
I rubbed my face with my hands. Seven, I reminded myself. My own brother created seven, one of the most-loved substances on Daltia. He knows what he's doing.
"Let me smell it," I said suddenly.
Jasha glanced at me, but didn't judge. He uncapped the vial and handed it to me.
On closer inspection, the chemical had a slightly aqua tint, almost unnoticeable. I held it to my nose. If it was going inside me, I wanted to get to know it better. It smelled very subtly of astringent and peaches. I handed it back to him, and he took it without a word.
"Thanks," I said. Just to fill the waiting silence.
After a moment, Jas replied, "No. I should be thanking you."
I looked back at him. He was barely visible from this angle, just a broad back and slightly-mussed auburn hair. "Well, why don't you, then?" I asked.
He looked over at me and grinned. Then turned slowly, and I caught sight of the needle he was filling from the vial.
"Shit," I muttered.
"Last chance," he said quietly, wiping a bit of my arm with the antiseptic. "I am absolutely not going to do this unless you really want to."
"Does it --" I had to clear my suddenly-tightening throat. "Is it...?"
"Upsetting? Not at all. But I don't want to tell you too much. Try to clear your mind. I need to not have your head full of preconceived ideas." He stood next to the chair, holding the needle out of my line of sight.
I closed my eyes. I called up memories of the beach, the endless waves, Arind in his study. Anything soothing.
My mother's dark hands. Flying. Ah, there. I felt the stress leave my mind.
"Do it," I said.
The needle hurt going in, although he was gentle. I imagined I felt the drug entering my vein, though it was doubtful that was real. Then the needle slid out with a sting, and he pressed a small pad to it. "Hold this," he whispered. I did.
I listened inside myself for nothing, my heart going a kilometer a second.
(Breathe,) Jas said, on the mindlink we used. And somehow...
The sound of his voice, familiar to me as my own thoughts, resonated strangely, down my neck and into my throat.
Say, I thought clumsily, missing the interior speech-point -- (Say something else.)
My own voice! --
(Listen,) he said, (listen to me and to yourself. What can you hear?)
More brain cells lifted out of my head like tiny balloons, rose and popped like bubbles amidst the plasteel rafters. My ability to answer him split into four separate pieces and kind of did their own thing in the corners. It was pleasant.
(It echoes,) I said, struggling to find the right words. (Not like speech. It isn't inflection, not quite...It's...)
Jasha began to tell me, voicelessly, the chemical and molecular makeup of the drug, the steps he'd taken in synthesising this latest iteration of it. Most of the words made no objective sense to me, which was the point. I interrupted him a few times to report the increasingly odd sensations.
(That part right there,) I said. He repeated the bizarre scientific term. (That. It was a zinging under my tongue, went back towards that original neck feeling.) Though my eyes were tightly shut, I sensed him turning back towards the table to enter some notes on his screen. This was all recorded. But the subjection I felt, the pool of awareness that alternating parts of my body were dissolving within, and the sense of language contributing to the dissolution and recrystallization of -- (Wait,) I said to him.
He was still. Felt him leaning over the chair I was in.
(You...you asked me particularly. to do it. didn't you?) I was trying to hold onto a thought. Me, an image of myself, lying in this chair as though I were above it and spun 180 degrees...
(yes why wouldn't i,) he whispered back.
(because of the colorword picturefeelings?) I was a kid again, trying to describe it to adults for the first time.
(yes.)
(did you know? that i'd feel like this?)
(i'd hoped you would. tell me about it.)
I tried.
(words if you can,) he prompted.
It was hard (to say things,) I told him. (when no words) it's (too thick.)
(thick?) he asked.
(when quiet,) I struggled, (hard to remember words.)
(ah,) he replied. (when nobody is speaking, and you're receiving nothing, it becomes too dense?)
I didn't answer. He was accurate, but I was stuck on "too dense". Too dense for what? The longer this went on, the more I wanted to bathe in the warm, almost viscous sense of muddled thought-feel.
Like being beneath the waves, in warmth,
headed towards the bottom where a strong sediment of old life and desiccated memory
lay long undisturbed--
Comedown, interminably later, felt exactly like finally hitting the water again on a particularly steep aquaslide. Skimming down, almost pain but pleasure. Sizzling across the water into slow burning brine.
(Jessyn.) His voice brought me back, a little way. I hung, suspended inside something, not unfamiliar, but it had been such a long time -- (According to the readouts, this should be starting to end. Tell me if you feel any changes.)
Perhaps by his prompting, awareness seemed to return to my fingers, then to my lips and face. The rest of me still felt like it was in a warm bath of nothingness, but I could conceive of my own shape. I could turn my head. "Feeling okay?" Jas asked quietly.
"Alright," I whispered, my eyes still closed. "Not bad." The words seemed loud.
"Good," he said. A long while of screen-tapping followed, as I traced the reemergence of the rest of me from whatever that was.
At long last I was a man in a chair again. Something had receded. I tried to make some connection between my steady breathing and the hum of the bugs outside, but it was a decision, not a sensation. It was over.
I opened my eyes. The first thing I saw was the shadows, the shadows of everything. All around us. Alarmed, I gripped the arms of the chair. "What is it?" Jas asked hurriedly.
If I looked at his face, I'd see shadows there, too.
So I didn't.