Double Cross [2] by Carolyn Crane Page B

sleep, but Sophia steals memory. She takes a little part of who you are. She’ll probably take the whole day from Marty. That’s as much as she can do: one waking day.
    “And afterward he gets to go home,” he adds, then looks away. “Soph,” he says. “Whatcha doing?”
    Helmut told me that when a highcap is a small child, the highcap mutation is blank possibility; like a stem cell, it can evolve into almost anything. At some point, a highcap child’s nature and personality determine what his or her highcap power will be. The child who wants things from outside his crib becomes a telekinetic. The child who yearns to know what others are thinking becomes a telepath—and telekinesis and telepathy are by far the most common powers. Then there are several oddball powers. As children, dream invaders wanted to interact with sleeping people. Helmut has speculated that Sophia had the impulse to hide the truth. Otto wanted to interact with buildings. And apparently Packard wanted to understand.
    Leave it to Packard to turn understanding into a dangerous power.

Chapter

Eight
    G ETTING THE ADDRESS , phone number, or even a nonfake name associated with the Paradigm Factory is about as easy as finding the lost Lindbergh baby. All the website has is information on how to order, and a Yahoo email address. Even the ISP turns out to have false information on the firm. We end up having to get Otto on the phone, and Otto gives the job to the tech crimes unit of the police force.
    We’re counting on the outfit being local, since Midcity is the only city with a significant highcap population. Highcaps hardly ever move away; when they do, they’re back within a year or two. Nobody knows why. I’ve heard people theorize that highcaps stay because they’re connected to the Midcity River, because the mineralogical deposits under the city give them energy, and even that they long to be near the tangle.
    I’m in the front room texting Shelby when Sophia arrives. The revisionist wears her red hair in a stiff, old-fashioned Mary Tyler Moore do—Shelby and I have decided it involves extensive hair curler usage—and her eyebrows are the most sharply groomed I’ve ever seen, just this side of evil. She wears a beige pantsuit—a hot, tight safari number—and tooled blond boots. The boots, I think grudgingly, are really wonderful.
    “Hey, Sophia,” I say. “Packard says to go right in.”
    She breezes past me without a word. Acting like I’m beneath notice is part of her campaign to suggest my unfitness as a partner for Otto. She slaps the entry panel. The door doesn’t open. She slaps it again.
    I smile. “If you ignore me and nobody’s there to see it, are you really ignoring me?” I ask.
    But just then, Packard comes through.
    She kisses him on the cheek. “We ready?”
    “Wait. We’re bringing him out.”
    “Am I taking the whole day?”
    “Most of it. We picked him up outside a coffee shop. So if you can take from the coffee shop on—”
    “But after he drank coffee?”
    “Yes.”
    “Good,” she says. “Coffee’s the ideal separation point. Got someone ready to hold him?”
    Packard nods and fills her in on the details of Marty’s abduction.
    I’ve never seen Sophia do a memory revision, but I’m told she looks deeply into people’s eyes, more or less hypnotizing them. Then she burrows into their short-term memory, finds a specific scenario, and erases back to it. Some people get creeped out by her staring into their eyes, and they need to be held. Sometimes their eyes have to be held open. Myself, I make it a point never to meet her gaze.
    After the erasure, she plants fake memories. Packard told me she imagines whole scenarios and burns them over the portions she’s erased.
Like planting movies in there
, he’d said. The images she plants “magnetize” the victims’ memories, causing them to fill things in.
Utterly seamless, always convincing—
that’s what he’d said.
Nobody ever comes back from a