Page 8 of Gifted & Talented

Meredith, Five Years Ago

A quiet conference room, gray walls, the thrum of a solemn air conditioner. An interviewer with a clipboard, a patient with an appointment.

The scrawl of notes taken in the margin of a standard introductory question. “How would you describe your moods prior to using Chirp?”

The anxious shuffle of a tepid response. “Um. Well. I’m pretty, you know, anxious. And I have panic attacks sometimes and stuff. And, like, problems with depression sometimes. Not like, you know, suicidal or anything.” Quickly, defensively: “I just get depressed and stuff.”

“Understood,” said the interviewer—reassuringly, pacifyingly. Clinical ambivalence. “And how have you been feeling since you started using Chirp?”

“Um… better, I guess?” The patient, 76A—Colette Bothe to someone looking at her confidential file, though more importantly, Patient 76A—bit her lip. “Sort of? I mean… is it supposed to work right away? I don’t totally understand. Like, to be honest, I really did this for the money.” A sheepish, humorless laugh.

The interviewer’s eyes cut briefly up from his file before he answered with a carefully rehearsed, “Chirp is a biomantic monitor, comparable to an insulin monitor for diabetics. Not to get too technical, but when your brain chemistry shifts, Chirp administers the appropriate counteracting chemicals, not unlike selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs. But pharmaceuticals of the past are no more effective than trial and error. Now, instead of taking antidepressants or antipsychotics that only serve as Band-Aids for your neurological condition, Chirp administers exactly what you need to manage your brain chemistry, as well as learning your tendencies over time and adjusting its reactivity to make you feel better.”

“Oh. Well, yeah, I do feel—” Patient 76A shifted in her chair. “Better, I guess.”

The interviewer’s eyes shot up from the clipboard again, his pen pausing above the file. “Can you explain that further?”

Patient 76A shrugged. “I was on antidepressants before, and I guess it feels the same. Ish.”

“Fuck,” announced Meredith from the small observation room behind the one-way mirror. “ Ish ? What the fuck is ish ?”

“Well, I have your chart here,” said the interviewer. “Thank you for filling it out, by the way. So, before we began your trial with Chirp, during the weeks you spent unmedicated, your average mood score was about a five, with dips here and there and some better days as well. And for the month since you began using Chirp, your mood score is an average of six.”

“Yeah, I mean, it’s… better.” Patient 76A began pulling the loose skin at her elbow. “But I thought I was supposed to be happy?”

“You’re damn right you’re supposed to be happy,” snapped Meredith.

“Relax,” said Ward, who stood beside her scrolling his Wrenfare phone. Meredith felt a surge of unspecific loathing.

“Fuck you,” she said, glancing at the clock before cutting another scowl at Ward Varela, her chief technology officer. “Why aren’t you freaking out? This is the twenty-fifth patient we’ve seen today showing no sign of significant improvement.”

Ward shrugged without looking up. “It takes time, that’s all. And anyway, it’s working, isn’t it?”

“Barely. That increase could be purely circumstantial. What if she got a better job or just bought a new vibrator? Fuck, ” was Meredith’s economical summation. “We need a wow factor. We need life-changing . We need can’t live without it . Tyche isn’t going to be impressed that they threw us ten billion dollars and we responded with ‘better- ish, ’” she concluded with venom.

“Haters gon’ hate,” said Ward louchely. He was over ten years Meredith’s senior and yet occasionally, talking to him was like ministering to the teenager in the back of the classroom, begging them fruitlessly to care about the quadratic formula or their own civil rights.

“This should have been an easy one,” said Meredith, more to herself than to him. “It’s just clinical depression, for fuck’s sake. It’s not like it’s bipolar or schizophrenia. This should be like pushing a goddamn button.”

“So should the female orgasm,” said Ward, “and yet.”

To that, Meredith spared him a glare.

“Meredith, this is just the first round of product testing.” Ward gave her a meaningful arch of his brow. “You can’t actually expect to heal the human condition overnight.”

“That is literally what Foster expects me to do,” Meredith hissed. “Our whole valuation is riding on this.” She started to pace the small room, feeling the walls gaining ground on the breadth of her panic. “If Tyche doesn’t get the numbers they want, they’ll bail. They’ll bail .”

“Sure, and that sucks,” acknowledged Ward with the air of an incoming lecture. “If Tyche bails, then your dad leaves another annoying I-told-you-so voicemail, some tech bloggers nobody’s ever heard of do some think pieces ravaging your reputation, and in a few years, you try again with a better product, something that actually works—”

“ This product works!” snapped Meredith. “This is my fucking life’s work, Ward—”

“Mer, come on. Those are two different things—”

“I dropped out of Harvard for this. I signed with Kip Hughes for this.” She shuddered and rounded on him. “Don’t you get it? I gambled everything on this—”

“Harvard is a dinosaur,” Ward interjected with a shrug. “Their biomancy program is nothing compared to the one at Xiamen.”

Briefly, the image of Ward choking to death in a pool of his own blood floated uncharitably across the forefront of Meredith’s mind. Followed by the possibility of strangling him.

Then, finally, something useful appeared. An idea, half-formed. The holy glow of revelation. Epiphany! Something no less criminal than killing her business partner, but certainly more useful. Something that wouldn’t cost her a billion— ten billion—dollars. Something that would make all of this worthwhile.

Empowered, desperate, and doomed from the moment the light turned on, Meredith turned to the observation room’s door.

“Mer,” said Ward, leaping to block her first step the moment he caught the glint of mania on her face. “No. Mer.”

“Move,” said Meredith.

“Meredith, listen to me, look me in the eyes . Whatever you’re thinking of doing—”

“Edward,” Meredith coolly replied, “if you don’t get out of the way, I’m going through you.”

“Meredith. Please.” Ward’s voice reached a rare edge of panic. “What are you going to do? You can’t interfere with the clinical process. It’s unethical. It’s… it’s fucking illegal, ” he spluttered, “and it’s the first step to felony fraud.”

“I can fix it,” she said simply. He wouldn’t understand, but why should he? For better or worse, she was the one branded for life by the letters CEO.

“How?” demanded Ward. “What are you going to do, falsify the results? Threaten the patient? Either way, you’d go to prison, we’d lose everything—”

“Why? Are you planning to turn me in?” she asked him.

“I—” He balked at her, then seemed to switch tack, appealing desperately to her logic. “Meredith. You know you can’t interfere.”

“The whole point was always to interfere, Ward. It was always the plan to intervene, specifically to make things better . Which I can’t do,” she gritted out, “if these tests aren’t meaningfully conclusive.”

“Meredith—”

“Do you want to move out of your parents’ basement, Ward?”

“Just think about what you’re doing—”

“My father founded Wrenfare on a hunch, with no concrete proof that he could bring any of it to market, with everyone in the industry claiming that kind of deep learning was impossible. You really think he was worried about ethics?”

“A human being is not an operational system —”

“They sure aren’t, Ward, and that’s the goddamn point. The whole world changed because some guy said ‘Fuck the rules, I have faith in this,’ and now I’m saying it. I’m saying it because I know I can make this woman’s life better. I know it.” She felt her expression sour. “Do you not have faith in me? In what we built?”

“Of course I do, obviously I do—”

“Then get out of the way, Ward.”

He gave her a pained look. But there was a reason she’d plucked him from obscurity. There was a reason he’d failed and failed and failed before, and only Meredith had gotten him here. He knew his role, and he knew hers.

“Don’t be stupid, that’s all I’m saying,” Ward managed eventually, proving her right.

“Move,” replied Meredith.

Ward stared at her a moment.

Then he let out a breath and took one step to his left.

By then, Meredith’s heart was pounding in her chest. She took a step, then another, heading straight for the door.

“Cut the camera,” she said as she passed, leaving Ward to suppress a grimace.

“Meredith, I am not your fucking henchman —”

“No, but you’re an accomplice now, Edward, so wise up,” she called over her shoulder, just before the door slammed shut. Her heels clipped into the linoleum hallway, echoing down the corridor until she reached the conference room.

She took a deep breath, then shoved open the door.

“Hi,” she said to the interviewer, who looked up with a startled glance. “Sorry, there’s just been a call for you from the front desk. Something about a family emergency.”

“Oh god, is my wife in labor?” asked the interviewer.

“Yes,” said Meredith Wren, without hesitation.

“Oh Jesus, okay, I just have t—” He glanced apologetically at Patient 76A, who looked confused. “We’ll have to reschedule and continue this later, I’m so sorry—”

“I’ll take over,” said Meredith, placing a reassuring hand on the interviewer’s shoulder. “They sent me in to finish your interview.”

“Right, okay, great—sorry, your name?” asked the interviewer. “Just, you know, in case they ask—”

“It’s Eilidh,” said Meredith.

“Haley?”

“Just get going, would you?” suggested Meredith, forcing a casual colleague’s unbothered laugh. “I doubt your wife intends to hold it in until you arrive.”

“Right, right, sorry—”

“Just leave the files, it’s fine—”

“Right, yes, thank you!” The interviewer hurried out the door.

Meredith took a seat in his place, looking up to scrutinize the face of Patient 76A. Colette Bothe. She had lovely, dead eyes.

“Listen to me,” said Meredith, in her most quiet, calming voice. The one she had once used to soothe her mother, and occasionally her brother, and in times of real fuckery, herself. “Everything is about to change, okay? All that emptiness you feel, all the worthlessness… it’s a lie,” said Meredith softly. “It’s a lie your brain is telling you. You don’t have to take it anymore. You don’t have to feel this way anymore.”

Patient 76A looked at her with skittish uncertainty. She didn’t believe Meredith, but she didn’t have to, not yet. All she had to do was sustain eye contact for several seconds. Five more, maybe. Maybe ten, just to be sure.

All the training. Boarding school from the age of twelve so Meredith could compete with the very best. The exclusive summer camps, the private tutoring, the people she’d been forced to gut from her life, the perfection she was made to chase. All those years of fucking tennis, day in and day out, just so that she could hold it longer, endure it worse, survive it more. She hadn’t suffered just for fear of obsolescence or the goddamn economy.

It was always, always for this.

Meredith reached for Patient 76A’s hands, grasping them tightly. The patient was too startled to pull away. Overhead, the red light blinked out. Somewhere on the other side of the glass, Ward had figured out the security monitor.

All those years of being a prodigy. A baby genius. The future of magitech personified had spent most of her twenties proverbially on her knees. If this didn’t work, she wouldn’t be anything anymore, nothing worth looking at. She’d just be another girl who grew up, who got old. A college dropout. She’d been working on the same project so long her hair had started turning gray, lines were starting to show on her face, she was constantly aware of a knot in her back. Her father had let her down and she had betrayed him. Her best friend was gone, excised for life. When Meredith fell in love it had to be forever, so now what? Where did it end?

A drop of sweat snaked down Meredith’s spine.

“You’re going to be happy,” whispered Meredith, locking eyes with Patient 76A and speaking as deliberately, as persuasively, as unbendingly as she knew how. “I promise.”

A vision of Jamie standing in the doorway swam briefly before her eyes. She was out of practice. Normally she could keep him at bay for longer.

A little longer. Just a little longer. All you have to do, the young, eternal version of Lou whispered in Meredith’s mind, is really, actually want it.

There. There it was, just a little fix, like flipping a switch. Like pushing a button.

When Patient 76A finally blinked, there were tears in her eyes.

“Is this what I’ve been waiting for?” she whispered.

Ten minutes later, Patient 76A had gathered her things, broken up with her boyfriend, enrolled in a calligraphy class, ordered Chipotle from her phone, and decided to finally paint her bedroom yellow. Colette Bothe was happy.

And Meredith Wren sat back in her chair, the drop of sweat on her spine seeping into the silk of her shirt.

“Send in the next one,” she said to the empty room.

And from somewhere on the other side of the glass, Ward did.