Part 76 (1/2)
CHLOE: Really?
MAUDE:.
[lowering voice]
I just wasn't interested in s.e.x anymore. I'd come home from work, and it seemed like he never helped out around the house. I got so frustrated.
CHLOE:.
But it seems like you have a great relations.h.i.+p!
MAUDE:.
We do. Now.
CHLOE:.
What did you do?
MAUDE:.
I finally realized that I couldn't change Ajit. But I could change myself.
CHLOE:.
You saw a counselor?
MAUDE:.
Oh, no. Something much more effective. I went to A Beautiful Mind. They helped me bring my expectations in line with reality,and I've never been happier. [whispering]
And our s.e.x life is fantastic!
SMASH TO: t.i.tLE CARD.
V/O:.
A Beautiful Mind Because you deserve to be happy.
The drive back to New London was exhausted and mostly happy. Brigid still fretted slightly at the edges of her inability to lead the 5.11, but she had the sense to keep it to herself-and to try to enjoy the warm post-exercise glow of all the routes she had sent. She told herself it was human to fret about one failure in the face of many successes. She told herself that telling herself that helped.
”If you're not falling off,” Val said, interpreting her silence correctly, ”you're not climbing hard enough.”
She shot him a sideways look.
He grinned. ”Eyes on the road.”
As if the car wasn't driving itself, anyway. Brigid dropped Val off and returned the ZIPcar to the charging station. The nearest tram stop was transmitting a half-hour wait, so she retrieved a community bicycle to transport her and her backpack full of gear back to her aptblock.
It was a twenty-minute ride, pedaling slowly under the weight of rope, pro, and other gear balanced across the bike's panniers. The evening was summer-soft, a breeze off the waters relieving the humidity that had made the hike up Ragged Mountain such dripping misery. Brigid cruised past the salvage sites where workers were disa.s.sembling the uninhabitable old buildings doomed to be consumed by the rising waters of Long Island Sound. Brick by brick, stone by stone, beam by beam, the ante-Peak materials would be repurposed and reused.
In the cooler evening, the streets were busy with pedestrians, cyclists, pedicabs, trams, and a few automobiles. About half of the people on the street were privacy-s.h.i.+elded, skinned tight against curious eyes. The bike, fortunately, kept track of their locations for her, limiting the potential for collisions.
Brigid pa.s.sed the waterfront Jay Street market just as the farmers were closing up shop for the evening. Her skins told her what was available. She paused and bought a melon, greens, and some farmer's cheese. With pasta, it would make supper-even after a day of climbing.
Her block was a reconstructed building, originally built in the 1800s. The old pale granite facade remained, ornate with a band of archlike engraving below the roofline-but the roof itself had been retrofitted to a modern green farm, the huge old apartments broken up into modern convertibles, and the whole building enclosed in a sunfarm sh.e.l.l. The leaves of the sunflowers were furling for the night as Brigid returned her bike to the rack across the street.
She shouldered her pack with a sigh. The straps had dug bruised spots across the tops of her shoulders. Her calves ached with tiredness as she climbed broad, dished front steps.
Brigid's apt was on the third floor. Normally, she'd run up. Today, her exhaustion and the weight of her rope made each step an exercise in concentration. But her door opened to the touch of her hand on the security pad. She dropped her climbing gear in the narrow hall closet and kicked her shoes in after.
Padding barefoot across the apt's soft gra.s.s, she carried her dinner to the corner still set as a kitchenette and placed it on the counter. She started water boiling before heading to the bathroom, kicking balled clothes towards the cleanser. Five minutes under warm mist and sonics and she was fit to live in her own skin.
Her apt was s.p.a.cious: close to seventy square meters of living s.p.a.ce, still set for sleeping since she'd left in a predawn hurry. There was no point in putting it back now. Instead, she took her dinner out to the balcony in her pajamas, plate balanced on one hand and her Omni in the other. She should pay attention to the food, but by the time she was done eating odds were she'd fall into bed almost without cleaning her teeth, and the need to research nagged at her.
This was her life now: her body completely recovered from the sailing accident in her teens that had cost her both fathers but her mind still fighting the post-traumatic urges to play it safe, to limit her futures and her horizons. Twenty years ago was not long enough; not as far as the fear was concerned.
Sometimes she could still see the black water tossing below the tilting rail, taste salt and wind and hear her Papa Kevin's voice loud and forcedcalm, saying Just swing over. If you fall, it's only into the sea. That was hardwired in, now, locked into her memory through a series of neurological adaptations that she'd spent twelve years educating herself about.
She knew how trauma response and traumatic memory formation worked. She knew how cognitive tactics worked. Using the latter to control the former should have been child's play, right?
All she had to do was keep climbing. Even though it scared her. And keep trying to trust people, even though they always went away.
Someday, maybe she'd even get on a boat again.
And of course, she thought, that has nothing to do with why you share this great big s.p.a.ce with exactly n.o.body, and all you have to do on a Sunday night is catch up on the journals.
She set the pad down on a table, tapped it on, summoned up a virtual interface-left-handed, so she could eat with the right-and began using the Omni's touchscreen to flick research windows into the air. She started in the public cloud, looking for popular overviews and opinion-working in a field could mean you lost touch with public perceptions, and public perceptions were part of what she needed to know.
She didn't stay there long. Her work permissions included deep access to ABM's research files, and she subscribed to a series of venerable research aggregators such as Science, Nature, The New England Journal of Medicine, The Technology Review, Neurology Journal, Applied Neuromechanics, and half a dozen other technical publications, the cost of each averaging a cool 327.5 revals per annum. Even with the venerable Scientific American in there-and who could miss their ”50, 100, 150, and 200 years ago:” cloudfeature?-to bring the cost-per-journal down, it was a little daunting.
She cruised through pages, skimming and flipping, indexing for keywords and metatagging for later perusal. She thought she'd get an overview tonight, sleep on it to integrate, and come back fresh in the morning. She could sleep in. While Brigid had one of the few jobs that still meant reporting to work in the morning-centrifuges and neurosurgery suites didn't grow in AR-she certainly didn't need to go into the office every day. A lot of her job was a.s.similating, synthesizing, and actualizing.
And only the actualizing took place in the lab.
She kept thinking that until her search cl.u.s.ter turned up a paper by a Dr. Ionita in the ABM proprietary database. It was fascinating, and troubling, and she didn't realize she wasn't supposed to be reading until she was a few thousand words in.
FADE IN EXT: FOREST GLADE WITH BIRDS SINGING - MORNING.
V/O.
Are you riddled by guilt because of your inability to sustain a healthy relations.h.i.+p? Do you find yourself raising your voice-or your fists- to your loved ones every week?
Every day?
Sometimes it's hard to know what's appropriate and inappropriate behavior in the home. If you find yourself unable to control your temper, striking your loved ones, or using physical or verbal coercion to control them, we can help.