The Answer in the Shadow
Chapter One: The Answer in the Shadow
Her existence is a quiet one.
She rarely speaks, for she has few people to talk to.
She avoids the city like a plague, but she feels most alive when she walks through a crowd, music streaming through her ears, the rest of the world moving like a blur around her. Occasionally, a gust pushes through the trees of the city and scatters leaves like water, or a gull catches a high breeze and floats in the reflection of a skyscraper, and she smiles.
Other times, she studies.
She is a student of philosophy, and of poetry, and of other things that bear little meaning in this new earth, so unlike the old methodologies and ways of life she steeps her brain in.
She defended her thesis one week ago. The reviewing board could have been cut-outs, for all they responded, but she left her painstaking work to be judged in the big room in the city and went back to her quiet little house, a dead woman’s house, on the outskirts of town.
She spends her days and nights almost exclusively in this house, unless the city calls her in for educational purposes, or medical ones, and while she is home she avoids the dead woman’s things; her old leather books, dusted and studded with crystals and braids, that strange collection of trinkets, and three long wooden sticks, exquisite in their simplicity. Lets them gather dust in the low attic.
Her existence is a quiet one.
Her greatest pleasure is a good book, or attending a fantasy that plays through her mind so vividly, a waking dream of heroics and riddles and desire. Her mind, unchecked, spins with some common aspect of being chosen, of being special. She resents these thoughts when she has them. Understands them as a symptom of loneliness, loathes herself for even subconsciously needing validation from the world.
She had validation once, in spades, in — but no, she will not think of that, not anymore, not when life is so simple.
Alas, the daydreams surge upwards, inevitable as the tide, and soon she is treading water in them.
She goes by the name of Persephone now, because the old name she had is as dead as the woman who owns this house, and she is lost in a daydream, barefoot in the kitchen, kneading bread with floured fingers when the phone rings.
“Accept call,” she says to her home-control device.
The small, silver machine beeps an affirmative. She hasn’t heard herself speak in days, and she doesn’t like the way her voice sounds.
Thin, breathy, crackly.
“Hello,” she says, after the ambient noise of the city bursts to life in her wood-and-stone kitchen.
“Hello. Is this Ms. Valins?” A woman’s voice asks. She sounds rushed, harried, and a car horn honks loud and long, floats away like a draining balloon.
She makes a sound in the affirmative.
“My name is Rebecca Noth, Ms. Valins. I was one of them, one of the ones to which you defended your thesis.”
“I see,” she answers, heart stuttering as her hands still. “What can I help you with?”
The woman laughs through the city sounds, and Persephone suddenly remembers her, the woman with a hundred fine braids and a kind face, the one who asked a particularly piercing question.
“I think it may be you who can help me,” Rebecca explains, “I’m conducting a study here at the University, and I think you could fit what we’re looking for. I think you could fit very well.”
Persephone pauses, the dough forgotten, her toes scrunched up against the warm slate floor. She forgets the professional’s specialty, now that she needs to remember it.
“A study?” She echoes, unsure.
“Yes, it’s a brain study. It’s non-invasive, if you’re interested. I’d really love to talk to you about it. Are you free this afternoon?” Her voice fights against the sounds of the city, echoing in the kitchen.
“No,” Persephone answers, too quickly. The sounds of the city unsettle her. Her brow knits together and her fingers slide back into the dough like a diver slips into a pool.
“Tomorrow, perhaps? You could come by our lab, our facilities on the East Campus?”
Persephone considers how to politely decline.
But the woman adds, “And I’d like to talk to you about your thesis, as well.”
And she can’t deny herself that. “Tomorrow. Alright.”
“Two in the afternoon? I’ll send the address to this number.”
“I…” She clears her throat. “I, yes. I’ll be there. Do I need to bring anything?”
A siren passes, a child is laughing in the background. The woman chuckles. “Just yourself, Ms. Valins. I’ll see you tomorrow, then.”
“Alright,” she answers, and the kitchen is quiet once more. She tries to remember what she was daydreaming about, but it slipped through her fingers. So she starts a new one, working the dough, pushing the call from her mind, trying to knead the silence back into her home.
Her name wasn’t always Persephone.
She once had a different name, a louder life, a big existence.
It is… startling, sometimes, to think of how easy it was to let the past float away, when she allowed herself to think of that past life.
Which she never does, never. Not as she us falling asleep, not when she wakes, nor when she goes on long walks or shops at the grocer’s or showers or breaths or, or, or… No. She never thinks about it.
But on the very rare occasion, when she catches herself hunting constellations, or she wants to fix a tear in her sleeve but her sewing kit is at home, or when she sees gruesome tales of assault on the news, she remembers that little thing that used to define her.
That little thing called magic.
She pushes it from her mind as she walks to the bus at the end of her quiet country lane, and pushes it further from her mind still as she rides the bus and listens to music. A dozen people get on and off before the bus connects to the tube, and down into the metro she goes.
She owns headphones that block out all other sounds and she loves them. She listens to classical music, gentle and balanced, or sometimes just the haunting, soothing sounds of Tibetan singing bowls.
Persephone stands in the tube for seventeen stops, head down, one arm firmly holding a canvas tote from an American museum against her side. She wears loafers and short-hemmed black pants, a linen shirt and a black denim jacket. Her hair is a bun of chaos, stabbed with a wooden pin, and she wears green-wired glasses that became a part of her disguise two years ago, but actually help her see.
Isn’t that a funny thing, she thinks, that they had never thought to check anyone’s eyes at Hog-.
She shuts down, shuffles closer to her pole, and rides the last three stops to the sound of a jungle rainstorm on full blast. She makes up riddles, all the way to the front door of the University, and sharpens the edges of them as she climbs the stairs to Noth’s office.
It is a clean, crisp space. The opposite of her home of warm wood and stone. This is sterile, glass and aluminum, stainless steel and white lab coats. It reminds her of her parents, and their dental practice. It is oddly comforting.
A tap on a shoulder draws Persephone from her revery. “Ms. Valins?” She hears a young man say, once she pulls the noise-blocking headphones from her ears.
“Yes,” she answers. He wears a lab coat and seems her age, mid-twenties, or perhaps younger. There is a shininess about him, an eagerness, that reminds her of her old self.
She forces a rusty smile to her lips, and he responds in three-fold, incisors and all. Her parents would love him, and all those straight white teeth.
“I’m Nick, or Dr. Bagby, I suppose, but I’m still getting used to that,” he chuckles, and she sees a warmth come to his dark skin.
“Congratulations.”
“Yes, well. Thank you. Dr. Noth is waiting just through here, if I may?”
She nods and he guides her through the sterile halls, past a few quiet scientists that tinker at their tables, through a series of doors and down a set of stairs to enter a low, dark laboratory that lacks ambient sound. It is unlike the other spaces she had passed - no windows, only walls. Most of the light comes from a screen against the far wall showing a projection of a brain, rotating slowly. Darkness gathers at the corners of the rooms.
Persephone has nothing but questions.
For that reason, she finds it beautiful.
“Ms. Valins!” Dr. Noth’s voice cuts through the still silence of the laboratory, and she bustles out of the darkness and around the steel tables to greet Persephone up close. She grabs both of her hands and shakes them emphatically, smiling warmly all the while. Persephone’s returning smile feels slightly less forced, now.
“Thank you so much, thank you, for coming,” Dr. Noth says, with feeling.
“I’ll admit you’ve peaked my curiosity,” Persephone says with a lilt, studying the room past Dr. Noth’s warm face. She notices another body in the room, sitting in the back, near the projector, in the dark. He keeps his face turned away.
A feeling stirs in her belly.
“Tip of the iceberg, tip of the top,” Dr. Noth practically beams. “The more you find out, the more you’ll want to know. It’s practically magic.”
Persephone’s smile drops absolutely, a numbness starting in her fingertips. But it is only a coincidence, so she perseveres, reaching into her bag. “I made too much bread yesterday,” she explains, knowing that strangers find this strange, but refusing to allow food to go to waste in her home as she pulls out a wax-wrapped loaf of olive and rosemary ciabatta to hand to Dr. Noth.
Dr. Noth’s appreciation is perplexingly high. She flaps her hands and grabs the bread and smells it through the wrapper, her eyes lighting up as she stares back at Persephone. “You’re far too kind, Ms. Valins, although your thesis would’ve led me to believe that, anyways.”
She places the bread in a giant leather bag that matches her purple leather shoes, shooting a possessive glance at Dr. Bagby as though daring him to take it, and ushers Persephone towards the projector, and the stranger in the darkness.
“How would my thesis have suggested that?” Persephone asks, perplexed and a touch defensive. She doesn’t think of herself as a particularly nice person - ciabatta won’t freeze well, that’s all - and her thesis was intentionally clinical, benign, almost redundant despite its importance.
“Absolute power is a rare topic for academia to broach, as many consider it too fanciful,” Dr. Noth near-titters as she settles Persephone onto a cold metal stool an armslength from the projector, blanketing her in darkness. She still can not see the stranger’s face.
“But the way in which you discussed it, and the compelling points you made, suggested to me that perhaps someone with control, someone with a fair mind and an optimistic outlook, a willingness to surrender said power when needed, that it could be possible, I…” Dr. Noth’s trail of speech rambles to a stop as she takes a stool between Persephone and Dr. Bagby, who stands at attention, all but wringing his hands in supplication.
The stranger moves forward, and his hand catches the light. Persephone spies a heart-stopping glance of pale skin as an aristocratic hand reaches gracefully for a sheet of paper laying in front of the projector’s table. She is forced to turn away from the stranger, forced to face Dr. Noth and Dr. Bagby and listen to more kind words about her thesis.
But no, Persephone clears her throat as she winds her hands together in her lap and listens, pushing the image of that hand from her mind. It couldn’t be his hand.
She sees ghosts of people all the time, in the actions of strangers, in a shadow or a smell. But never of him, never of him, just of Ron, or Harry, or the Professors. She doesn’t even think about him.
“Ms. Valins,” Dr. Noth continues, handing over a few pages of paperwork, “My professional experience is in the ethics of brain study. The ethics of brain examination, of using technology to read into the thoughts and feelings we associate with certain chemical releases and expressions of the brain. There have been great steps made forward in scientific and medical development, and soon, I believe, we will see a new form of communication take place.”
Persephone forces her brain to focus. She shakes the echoes of the past, and recalls what research she has done of Dr. Noth. The woman is indeed an expert in her field. Dr. Noth had made remarkable steps in advancing trials that expanded the scientific landscape, specifically those that pushed for a greater understanding of the human brain. She also spoke out against trials that posed an ethical threat, or utilized inhumane procedures.
It was remarkable what mug- what humans like herself were capable of. She had seen the most exciting news herself last month along with the rest of the world. The BBC aired a special on monkeys implanted with little chips of technology, sharing ideas from their cerebral cortex.
Practically magic, indeed.
Legilimency, almost.
The stranger in the darkness shifts sharply, and his face swings up in her direction. Persephone can’t see him in the dark, but she feels his stare. She raises her chin slightly.
“Are you hoping to use me as some sort of test subject?” She asks.
Dr. Noth nods.
“How invasive is this procedure?”
“Not invasive at all, Ms. Valins,” Dr. Noth says happily, “It’s as simple as attaching a few nodes to your temples, and seeing what you’re able to receive.”
“To receive?” Persephone asks.
“Ah, yes, I’m getting ahead of myself. Maybe - Dr. Bagby, would you break it down for us? It’s really his project, Ms. Valins. I am his mentor, and I think he is brilliant, but it is he who brought this subject forward, and who devised the technology, and insisted on finding a suitable participant - yourself - and, well, would you just get over here, Bagby?” She snaps her fingers until he trudges into the light of the projector, looking as though he’d rather be anywhere but a spotlight.
He really is very shy, Persephone confirms, and the assessment warms her to him.
“Ms. Valins,” he says, clearing his throat in an attempt at an officious manner, but his body language just doesn’t match, “A few months ago, I met Mr. Gray, over there. He’s a highly capable and educated man who underwent a traumatic experience which left him unable to speak. His understanding of brain chemistry, and of the way trauma effects it, led him to me. He is able to communicate through an implant we designed and inserted—.”
“Hold on, he’s got an implant? I thought that hadn’t gone past medical testing—.”
“Yes, well, this is a different study. These things go at different paces, and ours was luckily fast-tracked by some willing investors. Now, to continue —.”
“Investors? Has this been in the press at all? This seems like a remarkable medical achievement, Dr. Bagby, and is it really ethical to be withholding it from the public, if it is effective?”
“Ms. Valins, please —.” “I apologize for my interruptions, but I’m in the dark here, literally and figuratively, and there are absolutely huge ethical issues involved with these kinds of studies —.”
“And this is why I’m here, Ms. Valins,” Dr. Noth interjects smoothly and with authority. Persephone checks herself, and suddenly feels churlish for having gone off on them. So much like her old self, asking questions without giving anyone the time to formulate an answer.
“No apologies necessary, Ms. Valins,” Dr. Bagby continues. “Essentially, we are at the beginning of something great, but we have been waiting for someone who would be a good fit for the next element. There were a number of variables… It is important that we found someone who did not seek us out, someone who has no expectations of this experiment. Also, we required someone who has a solid moral and ethical compass. Your philosophy professor, Dr. Treehorn, suggested you when I discussed what I was looking for. Dr. Noth was coincidentally selected to be on your thesis-review committee, and wholly supported the suggestion.”
Persephone glowers a bit at the idea of these things transpiring behind her back, but she forces her mouth to stay closed as she draws up the courage to politely disinvite herself from this entire venture.
“If you are willing, we will hook you up to our computer. Once you are able to complete the circuit, we will invite Mr. Gray to communicate through the computer and see if his thoughts, and perhaps even images or feelings, are able to follow the circuit from his implant to the computer, and finally into your brain.”
Persephone does not speak.
She has had those strange fantasies, of being chosen for something. Saving the world, perhaps. (Again). But this is… unusual. This feels like being a pawn on a chessboard designed by someone’s whim, and that is a feeling she knows all too well.
But beyond that, the costs associated with something like this are in the millions, surely, and how could this not have more press?
“Are they any potential side effects from my involvement?” She manages to say.
Dr. Bagby perks up considerably. This is not a rejection. Damn her curiousity.
“None. It is a sticker on each temple, and if at any point you are uncomfortable, you can remove them yourself.”
Persephone nods, frowns, folds her arms across her chest.
“And this man - this Mr. Gray - he wants to be able to communicate with someone non-verbally, I suppose? He’s the investor, I suppose, or the reason for the investment?”
Dr. Noth and Dr. Bagby look at each other with some amount of guilt. Dr. Noth opens her mouth to speak, seemingly searching for the right words to say.
A loud beep cuts through the pregnant pause.
The monitor lifts from sleep, illuminating both doctors with clean light. Their faces suggest this is not a common occurrence, and Persephone finds herself both suddenly and deeply curious.
“Mr. Gray would like to add something,” Dr. Bagby explains breathlessly as he pushes his glasses up the bridge of his nose and leans towards the monitor. He clears his throat auspiciously.
“Mr. Gray says: Good afternoon, Ms. Valins.. I apologize for not introducing myself earlier. I do not often communicate. First of all, thank you for your willingness in meeting with us today. I understand that you have walked in blind. Ms. Valins, we three are at the cusp of great scientific discovery. We do not take the responsibility of these steps lightly. You have shown yourself to be an ethical person, and I respect the judgement of Rebecca and Nick.”
Dr. Bagby takes a fortifying breath, daring a swift glance towards the shadowed figure of Mr. Gray, and continues, “I have not spoken aloud in six years. My Mother is dying. She can not come to this laboratory, due to her illness. If this attempt with you is successful, I will devise a similar, portable device over the coming months to use with my Mother, so that we can communicate, one last time, before she leaves this life. I can assure you we mean no harm, and I thank you once more for taking the time to listen and consider. End transmission.”
Dr. Bagby clears his throat, looking entirely choked, and Dr. Noth goes so far as to brush a tear from one shining eye. Persephone’s brow furrows in confusion, and perhaps in sympathy (she does have a heart, after all), but also in suspicion. Who is this polite shadow? How much money does he have, really, to bring these scientists to tears?
“You’re… quite articulate,” she dares to say as she peers into the darkness, hoping to see this Dr. Gray. His broad shoulders twitch, once, under their collective scrutiny. But he is still firmly turned away, looking at the wall with his fingers laced together.
Even his silhouette, in her opinion, is the definition of tightly wound.
She would like to see his face, but… Perhaps there was some accident, some terribly gruesome accident, that has left him less-than-normal in the face department. Poor guy, she thinks, this poor, poor man.
His shoulders twitch once more and she forces herself to look away.
A sigh at her boredom and her bleeding heart, then:
“Fine. Let’s do it now,” she settles herself on the stool a bit more firmly, “I’m only receiving information, right? Not sharing anything?”
There is a pause as the doctors absorb her shift in direction, then a flood of movement.
“No, Ms. Valins,” Dr. Noth says as she unspools wires from the back of the computer, “You will only receive. You can speak aloud, and he can hear. But you will not be able to share your own thoughts. It’s a one-way path.”
Persephone twitches reflexively as Dr. Bagby brushes her temple with some anti-septic-smelling solution.
“Apologies, Ms. Valins,” he chuckles nervously, looking for permission before swiping the other brow, “It helps the nodules stick.”
Dr. Noth approaches eagerly with two wires, each looking like they have a little saucer at the end. Dr. Bagby swoops in with adhesive stickers for each of them, and carefully, reverently, places them on each of her temples.
“Just once more, for clarity,” Persephone rushes to ask as Dr. Noth starts flicking switches, “There’s no way for this man, er, that is, Mr. Gray, there’s no way for him to be able to know what I’m thinking, right?”
She’s being reckless, going along with this. The least she can do is protect the statute of secrecy.
“Not at all, Ms. Valins,” Dr. Bagby reassures. He moves a few strands of her voluminous hair back from the stickers, presses them down firmly, and steps back. The man is absolutely beaming and Persephone feels a sharp frisson of anxiety, a stomach-drop of doubt.
There had been a seed of that same feeling, when she walked into this laboratory.
A certain energy, a flare of rare excitement - feelings associated with an entirely unknown variable. It was a rare thing for Persephone, in this new and orderly life, to enter into a room without knowing exactly what was inside. The laboratory door had been a question mark and the answer was somewhere in the shadow of the room, in that corner where the darkness gathers.
The scientists flutter and putter around her, rushing over to Mr. Gray with more wires, fussing at the computer, triple-checking the nodules against her own skin. They speak to each other in low voices, something PHd’s beyond her, and she abandons all hope of eavesdropping.
She thinks desperately of the morning light in her kitchen, of her warm stone floors, the lavender beneath the sink window.
Dr. Bagby moves to a large the computer, behaving as though he’s just been handed a ticket to the moon as he presses a series of buttons and flicks countless switches. “Mr. Gray, are you prepared? Remember to only push base statements, as discussed.”
The shadowed figure offers a sharp nod.
“Ms. Valins. From what we understand, or hope to understand, you will hear Mr. Gray’s thoughts as a voice in your mind. It will only be audible to you. Based off of previous studies, at least, we think that—.”
“Practical studies? With animals?” Persephone inquires sharply.
“Er, well. Yes. With one animal. Mr. Gray’s pet.”
“And is that entirely ethical?”
“It was fine, Ms. Valins,” Dr. Noth interjects, but she isn’t quite as soothing as she was before. Excitement taints her voice, too.
“Is the pet alive?” Persephone all but wheezes.
Dr. Bagby seemingly elects to skip to the end of his instructional diatribe, and clears his throat once more, finger hovering over the enter key of the keyboard.
“Ms. Valins, Mr. Gray, I will execute the test in three…”
Persephone grips the sides of her cold metal chair.
“Two.”
Her heart is pounding. Her palms are sweating.
“One.”
Nothing.
She could laugh with relief.
These poor, brilliant scientists.
It isn’t working. She is blissfully alone in her brain. Insane, really, that she’d even consider doing this in the first place. They’ll probably go and try and fix it, and tell her to come back next week. But no.
She wants to laugh, loud and wild with relief. She won’t come back. No way, no how. She’ll bake more bread and maybe finally finish a poem, and leave these geniuses to play God on their own.
She thinks she must be mad with relief, because there’s a ringing in her ears, a buzzing. She feels like she’s been shoved into a printer, with clicks and whirrs and grinding all around her.
She reaches for the nodule at her right temple, but her hand can’t quite reach it, and the room is spinning. There are hands at her back, Bagby's or Noth’s, supporting her so she doesn’t fall backwards off the stool.
“Breathe,” Noth urges from behind her.
Persephone struggles to remember how, then inhales like she is drowning.
Your name is not Persephone.
She chokes on the exhale.
“You.” She grinds the word out through her teeth.
He draws out the syllables, caressing them on his not-a-tongue.
Persephone.
Oh, Merlin, she knows that voice. She has been a fool.
Of all the laboratories, in all the world…
Dimly she is aware of the scientists chattering behind her, exchanging phrases of joy, of success. She feels like a lab rat, like he’s calling her mudblood all over again, and how dare they how dare they.
Rage burns up her throat. Her fingertips are pins and needles.
The last things she remembers are the sparks that fly from the computer, the cries of dismay from Bagby.
There’s the smell of smoke, and bursts of light, all set to the soundtrack of his infuriating laugh, velvety and smooth and disgustingly entertained, stretching like poison into the corners of her mind.