Read Online Shoggoths in Bloom by Elizabeth Bear - Free Book Online

listening, and held up one finger to silence me. “Oh,” she said. “You know, I may have something here.”
    The plastic chair creaked under me when I resettled my weight. It wasn’t late, just after lunch, but it felt like six or seven o’clock at night. I was a little shocked every time I glanced at my watch. Busy day. “Well, don’t keep me in suspense.”
    “The implants use a quantum computer chip.”
    “Tell me something I didn’t know.”
    “Well, the chips were all manufactured at the same time, right? And the same place. Probably all from one condensate. So what if there’s quantum interference? I mean”—she waved her long, elegant hand beside her face, her diamond flashing—“what if the chips can transmit electrical patterns back and forth between the girls? Feebly. And when their synapses are already misfiring from the hypoxia, those patterns get overlaid, and Tara’s subconscious mind translates those signals into symbols, as they would in a dream—”
    “The symbol being some kind of alien trying to communicate. Is that possible? The transferal, I mean.” What I knew about quantum mechanics could be written on an index card, but it sounded . . .
    Hell, it sounded like an excuse not to pull the chip that was Tara’s promise of a normal life out of her head. It might be a straw, but it wasn’t a bad-looking straw.
    She made a face, pulling her jaw back and flattening her lower lip, and then wrinkled her nose. “I guess so?”
    “Why is it only Tara?”
    “There’s something wrong with her chip? Or something right with it. If that is what’s going on, it’s functional telepathy.”
    “That would mean there wasn’t any problem, really.”
    “Other than half the clinic strangling themselves for the fun of it, you mean.”
    “Right.” I thumped back in my chair. I’d lurched forward at some point, without realizing it. “That. Tara won’t promise. She thinks her alien friend needs help.”
    “If she promises, can you trust her?”
    “Tara? Yes. What about Jodi?”
    “I’ll ask Mrs. Carter what she thinks. We’ll have to address it with all the kids. One of the staff is making calls. Tara seems a special case, though. For her, we could edge the voltage down a little and maybe get rid of the hallucinations, if my guess is right. Which it probably isn’t. But that might affect pain management.”
    “Right,” I said. I put my half-empty cup down on the edge of Dr. alMansoor’s desk. “I’ll go talk to her. If asking nicely doesn’t work, there’s always extortion.”
    Mom comes back before dinner, and takes Tara down to the cafeteria to eat. Tara likes the cafeteria. There’s always something she doesn’t get at home very often. Today it’s meatloaf and apple pie, with brown gravy. The meatloaf, not the pie.
    Mom’s watching her worriedly, and pushing kidney beans and cottage cheese—and other stuff Tara can’t figure out why anybody would eat— around on her salad bar plate. “Dr al-Mansoor thinks the things you’re seeing are feedback from the implant,” she says, when Tara is halfway done with her meatloaf.
    “I think it’s from the implant,” Tara agrees. She picked out a mockneck shirt to hide the bruise across her throat. Mom frowns at it. “But maybe not feedback. I’ve been thinking about Albert.”
    “Albert?”
    “The alien.” Tara slashes her fork sideways. “I don’t think it’s just him. I think it’s a whole species.”
    Mom leans forward, arms folded behind her fussed-at plate. “He told you his name?”
    “No.” Tara drops her fork and jerks her hands back and forth beside her head. “He talks in colors or something. He’s Albert because of Albert Einstein.” She drinks some milk and picks up the fork again. “But he keeps wanting me to talk in a microphone into a computer. I think he’s trying to learn how I talk. Anyway, I think he’s in trouble. He needs help.”
    “What kind of help?” Mom starts chasing the kidney beans