“I…is that a no?” I asked because I honestly had no idea what that response meant.

  “Yeah, no, you’re not being ‘decommissioned’,” she said, using air quotes around the word ‘decommissioned’. “This is more of a recruitment, actually.”

  She held her hand out, and pinched between two fingers was what appeared to be a business card. I cautiously reached over and took it.

  “Veeery interesting. Capable of resisting antimemetic properties, are you?” she said, a sly grin on her face. Her ahoge twirled impossibly into a spiral before sliding back into its previous wagging.

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I said, only lying a little bit since I had seen a little bit of Atlas’ more esoteric projects in my patient's memories. I glanced down at the card, only to throw it across the room and fall out of my chair. The card was capable of thinking, and it really didn’t like me noticing it. It was practically screaming that thought at the top of its conceptual lungs. “What the fuck was that!”

  “Hmm, you're a Whisperer then?” the girl asked as she leaned back, picked the card back up and flicked it back at me. Her chair somehow didn’t topple over despite the back nearly touching the ground as she made that maneuver.

  I caught the card as I returned to my seat and stuffed it into my sweater pocket because looking at it made the card angry, and I didn’t like how that made me feel.

  I took a moment to really look at the girl seated across from me, and realized that when I tried to examine her mental conceptualization, it was clearly there. But it was blurry, like I couldn’t quite resolve it fully in my mind.

  Until it finally popped into existence, as if it had been loading. I could see now that it was like a spider’s web that hadn’t been swept away for a few centuries, except the spider never died and just spent the whole time growing larger and larger. It patterned outwards almost limitlessly, entrapping anything that came near.

  I was pulled out of my examination by her snapping her fingers to get my attention. I blinked as I came back to reality, “Sorry, you distracted me. Were you saying something?”

  “Oh, yeah, definitely a Whisperer. Okay, here’s what we’re gonna do,” she said while examining her hand and snapping her fingers repeatedly. “Also, damn, that was cool. Why is this the first place I’ve ever seen that gesture… Never mind, that means nothing to you.” She then stuck her tongue out and clapped both hands on her face in a gesture that left me a little bit gobsmacked.

  I had to remind myself that this was a twelve-year-old… maybe.

  Who was I kidding? With what I’d seen, there was a fifty-fifty chance it was an eldritch entity inhabiting the body of a twelve-year-old for whatever purpose it had in mind.

  “Anyway, I’m gonna head out. You continue doing whatever you were doing before I got here. When I give the signal, come meet me… here one sec,” she pulled a sheet of paper out of nowhere and started drawing something with the pen that had been in my pocket a moment ago.

  A couple of minutes later, she handed me a detailed map of the facility with two locations marked in large letters, one ‘You are here’, the other ‘Come here’. There were also several other marks as well but they weren’t labelled. As I accepted the map, I folded it up and tucked it into my sweater’s internal pocket.

  “Don’t bother asking what the signal will look like, it’s one of those ‘you’ll know it when you see it’ kind of things,” she said, crossing her hands behind her head and allowing her legs to leave the table. It looked from my viewing angle that she was floating above the chair, not sitting in it, but that couldn’t be the case, could it?

  My eyes glanced at the camera in the room for just a moment. The light indicating whether it was on was turned off. I didn’t know why I expected anything else.

  “So uh, what do I do about this?” I said, tapping my collar. “If I leave my allowed area, the bomb on the back goes off, and I lose my head. In a very literal fashion.”

  A level of fury crossed the girl’s face that didn’t match her age, but it vanished as quickly as it came, leaving her previously jovial expression blank. Her spider’s web of a mental conceptualization shook like it was undergoing an earthquake.

  I instinctively reached out to calm her down, but my mental hand was swatted away.

  “I’m alright, no need for that. Anyway, Ren, it was nice meeting you, my name is Vivi, and we’ll hopefully be seeing each other again very soon,” she said, with a mock salute, then she just vanished as if she had never been there in the first place. All that remained was a note stuck to some kind of device on the table in front of me. Tapping my pocket, I noted that she had stolen my pen.

  I swiped that device into my inner pockets and left the room in a hurry. No lights indicated the path I should take, so with nothing else to do, I walked back to the rec room. I hadn’t been gone all that long after all, Aurin should still be there.

  Entering the room, I held my hand out to catch her as she barrelled into me.

  “Ren! Are you doing okay? They didn’t do anything to you, did they?!” she asked as her hands wandered over my body as if checking that I was still in one piece.

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  “Yeah, I’m fine,” I checked the camera. This one was on and working, which meant I couldn’t actually say anything aloud. I had no idea how Vivi got past security, but given the fact I wasn’t being shocked into unconsciousness right now, it was safe to say Atlas had no idea that a saboteur waltzed in and out to chat with me. “Come on, let’s just watch some of the cat videos. Maybe the red bird will show up again.”

  Aurin complied as she heard ‘red bird,’ our code word for ‘I have something to tell you.’ Curling up on the couch together, I took her hand in mine and began tapping out a message.

  “So… I don’t even know how to explain this. I doubt you’d even believe me right now,” I tapped. “Not after everything we’ve been through.”

  “You know I’d believe you no matter what you told me. But if it’s that much of an issue then just skip telling me and just do that thing you do,” she responded, and pressed her thumb pad against mine to prevent me from saying anything else.

  I let out a huff and brought my other hand around to cup her chin and raise her eyes to meet mine. Even if any sort of sight allowed me access to a mental conceptualization, eye contact just made the process far easier.

  “Your eyes are so pretty,” Aurin said, for the thousandth time.

  “Mhmm,” I hummed as I unlocked the lockbox that was wrapped around her mind one step at a time. Even if someone else had an ability like mine, they would never be able to break into Aurin, not with what I’d done for her.

  Hence why I actually trusted her at all.

  “You’re always so gentle,” she said, eliciting a smile from me. I was good at my job after all.

  Once open, I started placing pieces of the conversation I had with Vivi in, one piece at a time. It wasn’t a long conversation, but with every part, Aurin visibly had to struggle not to react, and I didn’t want to overload her. After I finished, I closed her mind back up and clicked the lock back into place. She curled up with her head on my shoulder, which probably looked ridiculous given she was a full head taller than me. Her dark locks spilled down my chest, and my hand automatically went to play with one of them.

  I could physically feel the smile radiating off her.

  We didn’t need to say anything from there. I had already seen her opinions when she reacted to the information, and with the inserted memories, I included my thoughts on the situation, so it was as if we’d already discussed Vivi in her entirety. Given Vivi’s capabilities and the kind of energy she carried herself with, we agreed there was no fucking way she was a real twelve-year-old, and I didn’t really care if I was playing into some eldritch being’s schemes, as long as it got me out of here.

  Eventually, the day ended with no new patients for me to see, a slow day apparently. Usually I had four or five realignments to perform every day. I brought a nutrient packet to chew on for the evening back to my room and curled up in bed. Underneath my cover, I pulled out the map and the device; the pink glow of my eyes provided enough light for me to make out its details in the dark. The note attached to the device was simple: ‘Tap this against your collar’. I assumed it would disable the collar, and I could only hope it worked more than once.

  I wasn’t leaving Aurin behind after all.

  The device itself was like a marble made out of ceramic. The only indication that it was electronic in any fashion was a single blinking blue light.

  As I lay there staring at the ceiling, my hand found its way to the card that did not want to be known.

  Slipping it out of my pocket, I actually took a moment to examine it. I didn’t have to worry about the cameras picking it up if it was an actual antimeme. Which seemed likely given its mental conceptualization of itself was spot on what I’d assume an antimeme’s was.

  It wasn’t anything like a business card, like I expected. It was more like a calling card. The card itself was made out of a black plastic that seemed to writhe in place when I wasn’t paying full attention. Scribbled on the front was a series of numbers that meant nothing to me.

  “Six, twenty-three, fifty-six thousand—” I started to read.

  “Shh, not yet,” the card whispered, interrupting me, or not the card but… reality itself? That was the only way I could describe what just happened. Reality itself just told me to wait until later.

  I put it away and just put it down as another oddity I’d figure out later. A few hours later, I drifted off, wondering if Vivi was actually hovering above the chair or not.

  The next day, I wasn’t woken up by an announcement over the speakers, as usual. I managed to allow them to shock me awake, having taken too long to fall asleep.

  Cursing my insomnia, I rolled out of bed. My sweater was already on, so I just fixed my hair and tried to head out the door. Only for it not to open.

  After waiting a minute, with no response, I tapped on it. They had to activate my collar to wake me up; they wouldn’t do that for no fucking reason, would they? Rubbing the front of my collar where my skin was still tender, I let out a sigh. They definitely would shock me just for the hell of it.

  The intercom crackled on, “Please wait a moment, Subject M-436, security tapes are being reviewed for discrepancies.”

  If I still sweat, I would have broken out into cold sweat. Did they find out about Vivi? If they did, what would happen to me? Was I fucked?

  I had nowhere to run and couldn’t act any differently without making them suspect something, so all I did was school my expression and pray to whatever eldritch deity was listening to my thoughts at the moment.

  A hatch on the floor opened, and an AN-7 Cicada drone crawled out of it. A buzzing filled the room, keeping up with the drone’s namesake. Its microdart injector was trained on me from the moment I was visible.

  “Subject M-436, please raise your hands above your head and face the south wall, being indicated to you right now,” the voice said as one of the walls began to blink with a yellow light. Its generated qualities belied no detectable emotion.

  Yellow, not red, I wasn’t being put down yet. Whatever they found wasn’t conclusive of anything.

  Raising my arms, I walked over to the wall and leaned my forehead against it. The Cicada crawled behind me, releasing short bursts of loud buzzing. I’m fairly certain the drone had some kind of sonic capabilities, but I wasn’t sure exactly what they were.

  “Subject M-436, slowly lower your left hand and retrieve the object in your left inner pocket and show it to the drone,” the voice spoke again. That was where I was hiding the device. They knew of it somehow. I don’t know if they knew what it was, but they were aware of its existence.

  Bringing my hand down slowly, I palmed the marble-shaped device Vivi gave me and covered it with the antimemetic card. Then brought that out, presenting the card covering the marble to the drone’s camera.

  There was silence for an uncomfortably long time after that, only interrupted when all of the lights in the room shut off, followed by an alarm screeching to life.

  I think that this might be the signal Vivi mentioned.

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