Doctor Fernando Bianchi's office was small, measuring just four meters by five, and sparsely appointed. A thin carpet not quite wide enough for the room left bare a half-meter strip of linoleum along one long wall. The only items of furniture were a filing cabinet, several well-filled bookshelves, an office chair, a padded stool, a coat tree in the corner by the door, and a cluttered table against one wall, which served him as a desk. Three large cardboard boxes stuffed with binders and folders occupied part of the uncarpeted floor. The only personal touches were a few toys on the bookshelves and several framed photos on his desk and on the walls.
Mounted in the ceiling above the coat tree, a camera pointed down at the stool and whoever sat on it. There were two windows: one on the narrow wall to his right as he sat at the desk, which, when the blind was raised, gave a view of the cyborg dorm across the small courtyard; and a one-way mirror on his left, in front of which the stool was positioned. On the other side of the glass was an observation room large enough to hold a dozen people. Neither surveillance device was the doctor's idea: they had already been in place when he moved in. But he had learned to live with them, and even found them convenient from time to time.
The door snicked shut as Henrietta left, and Bianchi permitted himself a faint sigh and a glance at the observation window. Today's session with the little brown-haired girl had been especially disturbing. The girls were all smarter and more complex than you would ever guess if you saw them only in the company of their handlers; the conditioning process, and Belisario's 'editing', suppressed both their emotions and intellect when the men who stood at the center of their personal universes were nearby, presumably to make them more reliable tools. But when freed of duty –or as free as they were allowed to be – they were very much a group of troubled children, surrounded by adults who never really listened to them.
Henrietta's insecurities and suppressed traumas, and her methods of dealing with them, worried him greatly. Cyborg or not, killing people as an expression of love was an unhealthy act, especially so when counting those kills like a football score was important to self-esteem. It wasn't just repellent, it was baffling.
He couldn't relate the behavior directly to her horrible pre-conversion ordeal, traumatic as it had been. Triela had suffered no less physical trauma, and God alone knew what she had witnessed and been subjected to prior to her captors' decision to make her the star of their evil entertainment production. Yet Triela was emotionally bright and well-adjusted, and totally pragmatic about her past and present lives. Something else was at work here, some flaw in Henrietta's conditioning or her basic mindset that compelled her to prove her worth to Jose by piling corpses at his feet. The doctor had a dark suspicion that the girl's strange behavior somehow reflected a sickness in the soul of her handler.
A handler who was presently waiting on the other side of the mirror.
Angelica was due any minute, though; Bianchi decided that Jose could wait. He had Marco for company, after all. Provided the senior handler was in a mood to talk.
He picked up one of the three photos standing on his desk: a family photo of him and his three girls sitting on the living-room floor, taken by his wife before her death. Alba, who was in secondary school this year, was only five in the picture, barely chest-high as she leaned back against him. Lena, his quiet middle child, sat half-turned with her lower legs sideways in front of her, the back of her head touching his left shoulder, his hand resting on hers.
Fernando smiled and shook his head at the third girl: Sandra, who would soon be going off to university, kneeling to bring her head even with his chin and facing him with her head turned to the camera in the most grown-up pose the then-thirteen-year-old could arrange. Sandra had assumed her mother's role after Mimi had passed, seeing to her two sisters – and her father –and largely taking care of the house as well, all while holding on to her top-ten-percent class ranking – and managing her own grief. Fernando didn't know how he could have managed without her, at least not during the first year when simply getting up and going to work had been such an effort.
He replaced the picture and leaned back in his creaking office chair, stretching, and admired the picture beside it: him and Alba in her playroom in the attic of the old house in Monterotondo, the child's face alight with joy and her arms thrown around his neck as he lifted her up in his arms like a little princess.
Angelica should have arrived by now, he thought. He rose and pulled open the door. The hallway was empty. He glanced to the right and saw the door to the observation room with its 'Do Not Enter' sign hung on the doorknob.
He decided Jose had been cooped up with Marco long enough. If Ferro arrived with Ange and saw the office empty, the observation room would be the first place she'd look for him anyway. Though he wouldn't want her to leave the girl sitting on the stool while she –
Bianchi opened the door. The room, somewhat larger than his office, was illuminated only by the hall lighting falling through the door and from the rectangle of muted radiance coming through the observation window from his office. But that was enough to see that it was empty.
Unbelieving, he swept the room with his eyes: the table and chairs, speakers and monitors in the upper corners; the dated soundboard equipment under the window, presumably from a time before the Agency acquired the place when his office had been used for a studio of some sort. But there were no people. The doctor's jaw tightened. Had they left early, or not bothered to show up? He had bent his rule against compromising the cyborgs' privacy, allowing Jose to observe and requiring Marco to do so, because he believed it was in the girls' best interests. He knew that Jose was entertaining doubts about how much emotional capital to invest in his strange little partner, and that Marco, after Angelica's accidental reboot, had abandoned her emotionally. Did the girls' handlers now place so little value on their inner thoughts and feelings? Did they think conditioning was a substitute for –
Someone was sitting at his desk.
Fernando moved closer to the window. Because the desk was against the wall next to the observation window, he could see only the labcoat-clad visitor's back and left elbow, which was resting on the desk but moving as if writing. Fernando was about to tap on the glass when someone knocked softly at the office's door, the sound coming through the observation room's speakers rather than the glass.
The seated figure rolled back from the desk and turned toward the door, bringing him into view: slightly stocky, short sandy hair, a tiny chin beard…
The man in the office chair was himself.
"Come in," said the stranger with his face, and the door opened.
Alba stood in the doorway, hesitant.
"Angelica," the man said. "Take a seat."
Fernando found himself beating on the window, but the glass gave back no sound. He turned for the door, only to find that the room behind him had disappeared: nothing but featureless blackness surrounded him, even under his feet. There was only him, and the window, and what lay beyond it. He turned back to the window. "Get out of there," he said, although he was sure she couldn't hear him. "You don't belong here."
On the other side of the glass, Fernando's youngest child, now twelve years old, settled onto the stool. The imposter said, "Do you know who I am?"
She hesitated. "Dr. Bianchi."
The man offered her a little smile that Fernando was sure must look false even to a brainwashed child. "You read my name tag, didn't you? It's all right. I haven't seen you in a while. The attending doctor says you're doing really well."
"That's not Angelica, you idiot!" Fernando shouted.
From the bookshelf on Bianchi's desk, the man drew out a picture album. "How many people do you recognize in this picture?" Opening it near its halfway point, he passed it to her. Fernando couldn't see the inside, but he knew that the album was from last year's family reunion, a sprawling affair that included all her cousins, uncles, grandparents, and even family friends, including her playmates. The only two-page picture in it was a group shot, including Alba and her sisters, taken by him.
Alba studied it with a worried expression. "…number six, and nine … and thirteen. And number twenty," she finished.
Fernando felt short of breath. He had never attached numbers to the two dozen people in that photograph, all of whom were known to his youngest daughter. But that was only half the shock. Alba and her sisters were in the center of that picture, so close together they touched. But her accounting didn't include three numbers close together. Feeling sick, he remembered that the reunion had been visited by his old friend Marco and three of their coworkers - Priscilla, Hilshire, and Ferro - and that they had stood scattered in the fringes of the shot.
"How much did I forget?" Alba said worriedly. "Am I leaving out someone important?"
The man put away the album. "Not to worry," he said breezily. "It's not really a test." He picked up a photo from the desk. "Do you know who this is?"
The framed photo was of Fernando, sitting on the beach with Alba's Corgi, Benito. The imposter held the picture up to his chest, inviting recognition. The child studied it, then shook her head, unable to recognize the man in the photo and the one sitting a meter from her as one and the same.
But he isn't the same man, Fernando thought. That man isn't me.
But she hadn't recognized the man and dog in the picture. And when she'd studied the group photo and pointed out the people she recognized, she hadn't even identified her own handler by name.
Her own handler? He felt confused and afraid. This isn't Angelica.
"Doctor," Alba said, "When can I go back to work?"
"That's not up to me," the man said. "You'll have to talk to Marco."
"Hey, wake up." A woman's gentle voice, a hand on his chest. A soft light came on, its warm illumination adding to the late-afternoon sunlight leaking past the bedroom curtains. Ferro's face looked down on his from a hand's width away. "The same dream?"
Fernando took a breath. "Close enough. This time it was Angelica. But she was Alba. They'd wiped her, and she didn't remember …"
"Hush." She kissed him. A moment later she said, "Fernando, you can't bring it home with you. You have to keep work separate."
"Like you do?"
She rose abruptly and reached for a thin robe hanging on the headboard.
"I'm sorry."
"Don't be. You're a part of my job that I'm glad to bring home." Ferro bent to kiss him again, briefly. "I just want to send you home with a meal in you, and it's getting late."
Fernando lay staring at the ceiling, listening to the sounds of cabinet doors and cooking gear while he collected himself. Then he got up, dressed, and went into the bathroom to splash some cold water on his face.
Ferro called, "Dinner's ready."
The combined kitchen and dining area was warm and fragrant with cooking, and just large enough for a four-place table. As usual, Ferro's calico fled the room as he entered; it gave Fernando a small measure of guilty reassurance to know the creature wasn't used to houseguests. Ferro untied the checkered apron she wore around her robe and sat across from him. As they ate, he said, "I should tell the girls about us."
She shook her head as she lifted her wine glass. "I don't think they're ready for another woman in your life yet. I wouldn't be." She sipped, eyes on her drink. "You're the only one of us with a life outside that place who's managed to keep it. Don't put it at risk."
At home, Benito and Russo, their spotted mutt, yapped excitedly through the front window as he marched up the walk, and Sandra opened the door when he reached it. The appraisal she gave him as she stepped back from the doorway was a woman's, and he was sure she suspected he was seeing someone. But she smiled and said, "Welcome home," just before Alba launched herself at him and wrapped arms around his waist.
With his arms around his youngest's shoulders he asked, "Where's Lena?"
Sandra closed the door behind him. "Up in her room, doing her moody-teenager impression. She's not very good at it, but she wants you to know she's missed you."
With the dogs circling his feet, Fernando hoisted Alba up in his arms. For a moment the dream from this afternoon returned, and his grip tightened, but he pushed it away. "Sorry I'm late." It didn't occur to him to cover his absence with a lie: he often worked late, and the kids understood that he couldn't talk about his work.
"I'm just glad you're back before I had to leave," she said. "Class tonight. Dinner's on the stove, everyone else has eaten."
He suppressed a groan – his eldest daughter would know if he didn't eat her meal, unless he threw it away, and that he would not do.
The next morning, Bianchi woke late. He hurried to his car, hoping the traffic on A1 would be lighter than usual. It wasn't. The doctor made it to his office barely in time for his first appointment.
Who was his first appointment? Bianchi didn't usually have trouble remembering, but today's list of visitors was a blank in his mind. As he threw on his coat, he consulted his calendar, and smiled as he read the entry: Petrushka. Second-generation girls like Petra and Soni were so much easier to talk to than the Firsts. Their lighter conditioning meant that they usually had issues on their minds other than their work and their handlers. Petra was especially entertaining, with her reflections on the purpose and morality of the Agency and her insights into other people who worked here. It was easy to think of her as a bright teenager and not a killing tool or a brainwashed child.
There was a polite knock on the door, five quick taps. Fernando turned that way and said, "Come in."
The door swung open, revealing the smiling redhead. He started to smile in return, but something at the corner of his eye caught his attention. He glanced at the observation window, and stared at a fist emerging from the silent blackness beyond, as if from deep water, to flatten itself repeatedly against the clear panel. Irritated at the intrusion, he scowled at the window. "Excuse me a moment, Petra. I have to see-"
A face drew close to the window: a young man, eyes round with alarm or horror, mouth open in a shout that somehow was stopped by the glass. Strangely, though he looked familiar, Fernando didn't recognize him. What was he doing in there, and what did he-
With a shock, he recognized the boy, not by name but from a video that Duvalier had loaned him, a documentary on the Bolshoi Ballet Academy. One of its most promising students, and one the documentary had showcased, had been a lovely little sixth-year student named Elizaveta Baranovskaya, a girl doomed to fall or jump off a three-story building and become Petrushka, the cyborg at his door. In one scene, she had practiced lifts with a male partner in a mirror-walled room. The boy lifting the petite blonde over his head, and smiling into her eyes as he set her down, was the one whose haunted face was now pressed against the window.
What is he doing here? And how is it possible that he recognizes her now? She doesn't look the same at all-
He turned back to the doorway, where his daughter Lena stood smiling uncertainly. "Doctor? Are you all right?"
With a jerk, he woke. He was in bed, in his own house, the only illumination a soft glow from the streetlight filtering through the bedroom curtains. Bianchi looked at the clock by the nightstand: three-fifteen AM. He got up, left his room, and padded down the upstairs hall, quietly opening and closing bedroom doors until he was sure his girls were home and asleep.
At five, Sandra came down in her robe to start coffee and found her father at the kitchen table with a cup of tea. She said, "How long have you been awake?"
"It's getting hard to tell." He stared down into his mug. "I don't put much faith in the detailed analysis of dreams, but my subconscious is most emphatically sending me a message."
She sat across from him, concern creasing her brow. "You've been losing weight. I thought at first you were doing it for your girlfriend. But you don't look well. Papa, maybe you should see someone."
"I can prescribe my own sleeping pills."
"You know what I'm talking about." She reached across the table and laid a hand on his wrist. "Even the Pope has a confessor."
If I told another psychiatrist about my 'problem,' he'd end up inducted into the Agency. Patient-doctor privilege wouldn't be enough to keep him quiet … at least, Jean and Lorenzo wouldn't think so. Or would he just become a traffic statistic? He lifted his mug to his lips, and her hand slipped off. He said, "Finding someone wouldn't be as easy as looking a name up in the phone book. There aren't many practicing psychiatrists with that sort of security clearance."
"That's a poor excuse. We both know it." She stood up. "The woman you've been seeing. Someone from work?"
He shrugged an acknowledgment.
Sandra eyed him keenly. "One of the ones Signore Toni brought to the reunion? Who smiled and changed the subject every time I tried to talk about what you do together?" She placed a hand at the back of his neck. "I hope you're sharing your troubles with her, at least."
"Women don't like men who always talk about themselves." Fernando reached back and covered her hand. "I don't know what I'd do without you."
She gave his neck a little squeeze. "Well, you'll never find out, will you? I have to get dressed."
"Doctor?" A girl's voice in his ear. "Doctor Bianchi."
Fernando lifted his face off his forearm and stared blurrily at the desk photo of himself sitting on the floor with his three girls – and blinked, because there was a fifth person in the photo: looking over his photo-self's shoulder at him was the ghostly image of another young girl, with long blonde hair tied in a pair of tails on either side of her head. The image's lips moved, and he heard the voice again: "Are you okay?"
It took him a moment to realize that the voice was coming from behind him. The doctor gripped the picture by its frame and turned it slightly, and the ghost-image slid sideways and out of sight. He turned his head and looked over his shoulder to see Triela standing behind him, concern creasing the space between her brows. "Hello, Triela," he said, brushing at his eyes and trying to push the weariness from his voice. "Sorry, I didn't hear you come in. I was thinking."
"You were snoring."
He turned around in his chair, turning his back to the picture. "Really? Are you sure?"
"You sounded like a truck pulling a load up a steep grade."
He scoffed, slumping into the chair. "Sorry. I haven't been sleeping at night just lately."
"Well. Maybe some fresh air would do you some good. The weather's nice."
"I have an appointment," he said, smiling. The doctor sometimes held informal outdoors counseling sessions with a few handlers, who ostensibly came to him to talk about their cyborgs but usually ended up discussing their own problems adjusting to their lives and duties at the Agency. But he had never stepped outside his office with one of the girls.
"Oh, come on," she said lightly. "We can talk on the bench, the one you like. You don't need to record everything I tell you, do you?"
Bianchi was about to decline – but then he saw the entreaty in the girl's eyes. "Maybe you're right." He stood and headed for the door, lifting his light jacket off the coat tree on the way.
At the start of his tenure here, Fernando had requested an office on the side of the ravine opposite the clinic and the Agency's public face, among the older buildings that had been converted to cyborg dorms, Section Two offices and classrooms, and chambers of darker purpose. The broom closet they'd shoehorned him into was a small price to pay for the quick and easy access to his patients the location afforded. And the separation suited his attitude about his spiritual place here as well: he had always felt somewhat apart from the other doctors - the men and women in the clinic who converted the cyborgs and experimented upon them and regarded them as machines, products of their own cleverness, rather than people.
They settled in side-by-side on the park-style bench, facing a flat expanse of lawn and the cyborg dorm thirty meters distant. A gravel path, presently vacant, ran alongside the building in front of them, bisecting the grass into two long strips. They might be under observation from any of the windows on this side of the three-story building, he supposed, but the area was quiet and conveyed a feeling of privacy. He rested an elbow on the back of the bench, trying to strike a casual pose, and said, "What would you like to talk about?"
The little blonde's posture was anything but casual: back straight and stiff and not touching the seat back, knees together, feet flat on the ground. Her hands were in her lap, and her fingers stirred as if missing her shotgun. She scanned the empty space around them as if looking for an ambush. "Dreams."
Fernando found his voice and said, "Dreams?"
The girl glanced down the side of the dorm building and fell silent. Two figures stepped out of a doorway and took to the path: anywhere else, they might have been a teenage girl and her younger sister, with their similarly slender physiques and long blonde hair, but here the two figures were Kristal, Doctor Mayfair's cyborg, and Valentina, her roommate. The girls glanced their way as they approached along the path; Kristal raised a hand in greeting, and Valentina, observing, mimicked the gesture. Fernando lifted his hand off his thigh for a moment, not really waving back, just acknowledging. Valentina took a step off the path towards them, but Kristal, regarding the two on the bench keenly, stopped her with a hand on her forearm. She spoke a few words Bianchi couldn't hear, and the pair passed on, headed for the classroom building. Triela watched them until they were out of sight.
"I know," Triela said, "I'm not supposed to remember my dreams. And I don't really, just … Sometimes when I wake up, I seem to remember dreaming about my mother. It's not really anything clear, just a few vague impressions. She's holding me, and speaking, but I don't understand the words. I smell her perfume, and I see a bright light reflecting off her glasses." She shrugged. "That's it, really."
"What is it about them that upsets you?"
"Well…" She struggled to formulate her answer. "They're not really mine, are they? The person I started out as, she had a mother, but I didn't. When I dream, whatever I'm seeing and hearing and smelling …" she stared at her knees. "And feeling. That all belongs to someone else, like when somebody moves and leaves a bunch of junk in the attic for the next owners to find." Her hands stirred again. "I don't have a soul. But she did. Is she… trapped, inside me somehow, till I die?"
They sat in silence for a minute, while a gentle breeze stirred the grass and made the air fragrant with its scent, and while Fernando gathered his thoughts. Finally, he said, "Triela. Why don't you think you have a soul?"
She ran her fingers through her scalp, "Doctor Bianchi, I'm a cyborg. I was made, not born." She looked away. "I was made to fight. Someday if I'm lucky, I'll die fighting. And that will be it. There are worse lives, and worse ways for them to end. It's all right. I just…"
Fernando shook his head. "Mr. Hilshire doesn't think of you that way."
"I know. But he isn't right all the time." She sighed. "I don't understand what he thinks I am, I really don't."
"I do." He stared at her until she met his eyes. "Triela, have you ever heard of reincarnation?"
"I think so. Is that where, when you die, you sort of come back as something else?" She scoffed. "A bird, or an ant, or-"
"Or a cyborg."
The girl turned, wide-eyed, to face him. Bianchi wondered, not for the first time, what ethnic heritage had produced her combination of café-au-lait skin and fine blonde hair, and the startlingly blue irises of her oval East Asian eyes. He said, "I don't know if reincarnation is real. I don't know if anybody has a soul, really. But if those things exist, then each of us carries a tiny spark, something apart from the body it's housed in. And maybe that spark doesn't just wink out, or go off somewhere beyond reach, when the body it's riding in dies. It transfers to another. The person you are may be very like the person who last carried that spark, or very different. But the spark is the same, and it belongs to you as much as anyone it ever resided in."
He shifted, thinking of the other girls, and his dreams. "That's what he sees when he looks at you. A continuation. And someday, when you're gone, that spark will pass on to someone else, maybe another girl with a different life, a different fate. To him, you're the custodian of a better future. Do you understand?"
"I don't know if I do." She stood. "But you've made me feel better. Thank you." She bent and touched her lips to his forehead. "When you kiss your girls again, think of me."
He smiled. "I will." But hopefully not in my dreams. He watched her stride away, then stretched his arms across the back of the bench, let the soft air and sunshine soak into him, and fell asleep.
