“Wait,” says Brock with a perplexed expression on his face. “What do you mean you think you worked for the Russian mafia?”
“I don’t really know, not for sure,” replies Dmitri, hoisting his shoulders up into a shrug. “But I know enough Russian. And when I heard the new boss’ bosses calling themselves the new security committee it just left me with a bad feeling.”
“I don’t underst-” begins Brock before Mirabelle abruptly cuts him off with, “Kah Geh Beh,” while pointing vigorously at Dmitri with her cigarette hand.
“Yes, precisely,” replies Dmitri with an acknowledging smirk.
“What?” asks Brock, thoroughly confused.
“KGB,” clarifies Dmitri, his smirk extending into a mirthless grin. “You know, old-school Commie state security. Iron curtain. Soviet agents. Assassins. Blackmailers. Extortionists. Organized crime under a state banner.”
“Oh. But aren’t they long gone?” asks Brock with pointed interest.
“Nah, they just change names. The revolution never ends, comrade. You might’ve heard the old expression about selling the capitalist the rope to hang himself with?”
Without pausing for a reply he continues, “Well, that rope could just as well be an online casino.”
Brock shrugs in a whatever-you-say gesture.
“All I can say,” continues Dmitri forthrightly, “is that with all the stories from the old country I had good reason to be a little paranoid.”
Brock raises an inquisitive eyebrow.
“Maybe I’m just too sensitive,” clarifies Dmitri with a pout. “Anyway, I bumped into Rebekah right around that time and we got to talking. Eventually I asked her who she worked for, she said she didn’t, explained how she pulled that off, and then she showed me. I was duly impressed and agreed to help build a prototype based on some of the research in that bag of hers. Once I understood what it was supposed to actually do, the pod mostly just built itself. The only real challenge was sourcing cheap and plentiful components, which wasn’t really a big challenge.”
“You also added the neural network stuff,” nods Rebekah, pointing a recently licked coffee spoon at Dmitri. “That was your baby. I would never in a million years have ever thought of that. Didn’t even know such a thing existed until I met you.”
“So, wait, what were you using before the pod?” asks Elvis eagerly, leaning in, hands clasped and elbows on the table.
“Pen and paper, mostly,” responds Rebekah, gazing upward into her memories. “I’d manually jot down repeating themes of the day, then connect them to my morning recordings. It was clumsy and slow and easy to make mistakes.”
“What did you do for entrainment?” asks Elvis, perching his head atop his arm triangle.
“Binaural beats through headphones and a strobe. I’d shut myself into the bathroom with my phone and an old voice recorder, do a session, transcribe it later. Worked great except for all of the work and the errors. The pod makes it so much easier and more reliable. Also more comfortable.”
“Yeah,” interjects Dmitri, “we gotta get Brock started on it, like, yesterday. And Elvis could probably stand to train some more.”
“What about Mira?” asks Elvis, releasing his arms and folding them on the table.
“Her net’s getting close to the ceiling on recognition already,” responds Dmitri. “If we do much more training we risk reversing the score, making it less accurate.”
Keeping her eyes on her cigarette as she taps it over a small black ashtray, Mira nods courteously in Dmitri’s direction.
“In any event,” continues Dmitri, “once I started working with the pod I noticed that I could hear, or maybe a better word is perceive, subtle sounds, like a muffled radio playing in another room. Sometimes it was conversations, sometimes music, sometimes singing, sometimes a mix. I could never pick up on what was being said or sung. The music was disjointed, not really music but more a collage of musical motifs from a specific era.”
“Sounds intrusive,” observes Brock.
“It’s not. I have to relax into it, allow it in. Like I said, it’s subtle. And it’s not really something new. When I was younger I had experiences like it, usually late at night, but I always just chalked them up to booze, drugs, tiredness. Now I just ease into it.
“I’m still exploring how it works but so far it seems to act like an early-warning system. When something is about to change around me, the signal changes. If it’s music then it’ll suddenly switch up styles, or if it’s a conversation it suddenly sounds like two different people, or more people, or fewer. You know, something noticeably different.”
“That sounds like what Mira does”, suggests Brock, leaning back in his chair and stretching his legs.
“Not exactly,” replies Dmitri. “With me it’s just a vague warning and it doesn’t always happen. Not sure what sets it off. Mira’s different, more precise. What she’s doing is more like sensing the future.”
“Communicating with the future,” corrects Dominic as he reaches for his coffee. “With herself, to be precise. Based on some of our testing anyway. My theory is that her future self sends back a signal, a feeling in her muscles telling her how to move.”
“Like magnet,” cuts in Mirabelle, once again tapping her cigarette over the ashtray. “I relax and it pull me.”
“A sort of self-actualized causal loop,” continues Dominic. “I used to think that her nihilistic front was a put-on but maybe it’s what makes it possible. Maybe that sort of emotional flatness is what’s needed to cut through the noise.”
“Flat nihilist beetch,” interjects Mirabelle slowly, head cocked sideways, cigarette held up between the fingers of a limply upraised hand.
The table goes silent.
“Zis I ‘ave not ‘eard,” she says at last with a courteous but affectless smile. “From ozer people ozer sings, but not zis.”
“I didn’t call you a bitch,” notes Dominic abruptly.
Switching to a slyly giddy smile Mirabelle replies, “But I do not care if I am beetch.”
Leaning into the conversation Elvis asks, “So how far forward can you actually see? Erm, feel?”
“Maybe four second,” replies Mirabelle with a gentle shrug, her smile dissolving back into her customarily detached expression.
“That’s a long time,” muses Elvis. “But what happens if you don’t follow through? Or what if something interrupts you before you can send yourself a signal?”
“What ‘appen when somesing never ‘appen?” she replies nonchalantly. “I do not know. Zere is still much mystery for me.”
“And this is all still a working theory,” adds Dominic. “But we’re starting to see overlap in what we can do. Our abilities, I mean. Not just that we can all do these things, more or less, but that they might actually just be one thing or, at least, somehow related.”
Brock considers the statement for a moment. “Not sure I follow you,” he says at last.
“Well, Dmitri needs to relax and open up while listening for the signal. Mira needs to soften up while paying attention to the pull. Elvis needs some time to ease into his state but he also needs to control the flow of his energy while he’s in it.
“Correct?” asks Dominic as he gazes over at Elvis.
Elvis nods back affirmatively.
“I need to be calm and simultaneously focus my mind in order to get into my body,” continues Dominic.
“The pods are built around the same idea. Isn’t that correct?” he asks again, this time swiveling his head toward Dmitri.
“More or less,” responds Dmitri with a sideways nod.
“As for you and Rebekah,” continues Dominic, turning to face Brock, “I don’t think we fully know what you’re good at yet and we know that Rebekah does that staring trick, which I’m sure requires focused quietude.”
With this Dominic looks expectantly over at Rebekah.
“Confidence,” she replies with a cocky head nod. “Confidence is probably better. And shorter.”
“Sure,” confirms Dominic assertively. “As long as we all understand it the same way, we don’t need to argue the nomenclature.”
“And as Becks points out,” adds Dmitri, “there are more aspects to it, more variables to consider.”
Rebekah casts a long and intense side-eye at him just as he turns toward her.
“Confidence, Becky! Confidence!” announces Dmitri cheerfully in response.
She recedes slightly. The daggers shoot out of her eyes at a slower rate. The slits through which they emerge are a little less sharp.
“Okay, seriously, is there something going on between you two?” asks Brock, waving a butter knife between Rebekah and Dmitri.
Dmitri turns his beaming face toward Brock and, relaxing it, he explains, “A long time ago Rebekah told me some things in confidence, huh, and swore me to never reveal them unless I thought she was overstepping certain bounds.”
“Kinky,” notes Brock with an overly stern face.
“There was alcohol involved,” includes Rebekah with a weak sneer.
“Self-administered,” counters Dmitri with an upraised eyebrow. “And as I recall, I wasn’t the one pushing it.”
“Sounds familiar,” adds Dominic.
Shooing the conversation away with her hand Rebekah responds, “Yeah, well, whatever.”
A warm ocean breeze enters from behind her and winds itself through the group before exiting back out to sea. After some time Brock turns to Dmitri and asks, “So I take it you’re Russian?”
“Originally, yeah,” replies Dmitri, nodding in confirmation. “We took a permanent family vacation after my father had an unpleasant run-in with state security. Me and my brothers didn’t know the real reason for the trip. Probably for the best, in hindsight.”
Continuing his questioning Brock asks, “How many brothers do you have?”
“Two,” notes Dmitri. “One older, one younger. Maybe one day you’ll get to meet them.”
“And your dad, what did he do to attract the attention of the KGB?”
“He was a merchant marine, meaning he traveled internationally, and he had opinions about the state. One day he didn’t come home as expected and my mom nearly lost her mind looking for him. Eventually she found out he’d been detained for interrogation. Nearly a month later they released him. No charge but plenty of threats. That’s when they both made secret plans to escape.”
“Huh,” exhales Brock with slight bewilderment. “Did they think he was working for the other side or something?”
“A dissident working for western powers, yeah,” confirms Dmitri. “Of course he wasn’t but they didn’t need any evidence to disappear people, just suspicion. Family members were automatically scrutinized too, in case his weird ideas rubbed off on us. For all I know we all might’ve ended up behind bars or in some work camp at some point. I’m sure there’s still a file on us out there somewhere.”
“And now you’re a secret agent with a super-secret agency,” states Brock directly. “Ironic.”
Dmitri pushes out a singular laugh and follows it with a gently amused, “Yeah.”
“Except I don’t get any totalitarian vibes from the agency,” he continues after a brief pause. “Or from any of you. Well, maybe Rebekah a bit.”
He turns to her, a shit-eating grin spread across his face.
“Har har,” she replies sarcastically. “But knee-slappers aside, I still don’t really know much about my new friends Mira and Elvis here. Yeah, okay, we’ve had some adventures together but how do I know they’re not somehow connected to the assassination attempts? Or to Shindan? I’m not saying it would be on purpose, like consciously, but still…”
Elvis responds to her statement with a wounded expression. Mirabelle’s face stays exactly the same.
“I’m not accusing anyone of anything,” explains Rebekah, “I’m just saying–“
She’s silenced by Mirabelle who asserts, “I can say my story. I do not care.”
Stubbing out her cigarette into the crowded black ashtray she leans in slowly.
“Mirabelle Saint-Juste,” she announces lazily, lolling her head from side to side as she examines the dying tobacco embers. Lifting her head up to look at no one in particular she says, “I sink maybe my family ‘ave kill many many people.”