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"You must have a child."
- Hello Mother. I am well. So are you, I hope. An excellent day for business, isn't it? The stock market is at its highest.
- I'm making sure our business is in a good place.
Reina's voice is factual, unmistakable, her silence perfect.
Your business, perhaps," thinks Nikita. But I ensure that mine is even better placed there. Her mother Reina had made the Kumamoto business inherited from her mother a success. But Nikita wanted to do better. Business is Nikita's primary interest, ever since she first listened to financial broadcasts on the PsyNet.
- It's the best time to ally with an interesting family group. You're going to seal the deal, Nikita.
"And your mother will find you a perfect candidate. Perfect for her, of course: physically flawless, highly placed in the business world, and a powerful telepath to have a cardinal in the family. The only thing she won't be able to brag about is that she laid him herself..."
Reina's voice fades into the surrounding sounds as the memory springs to the forefront of Nikita's mind. She had forgotten that voice, almost fifteen years before. The voice of a strange girl, a Psy who didn't care about Silence or Protocol. A Psy could claim to be the only person outside of her mother who could get Nikita out of her funk. All her life, Nikita has envied her mother's Silence, trying to replicate it. She almost succeeded once. Until she met...
- Nikita.
- Sorry, Mother. An urgent communication, we'll certainly discuss it at dinner.
Nikita goes as quietly as possible back to her room. Is this the date? She hadn't thought about her former classmate for so long. She hadn't wanted to think about it.
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"...and that's why the Silence Protocol was officially put in place in 1979."
- Excellent presentation Duncan, you may return to your seat.
Nikita nodded and returned to her seat quietly; no smiling like Amy the little red-haired human in the third row, and even less jumping up and down with her fist in the air like Boris, the changeling boy in the front row. No, at almost 16, Nikita's Silence is perfect and nothing can disturb it.
- Your stoicism in front of your fifth consecutive month as a major is impressive Duncan!
Correction: almost nothing, thinks Nikita. This girl from the back of the class who gets along so well with the other students is pissing her off. Worse, she smiles at her! And the teachers don't even seem to notice this blatant violation of the Protocol. As a sign of protest, Nikita had taken great care not to learn the girl's first name. Unluckily for her, the girl seemed to have remembered Nikita's name perfectly.
- You have no sense of humour, Duncan!
And on top of that, she's following her in the corridors! Pride is allowed by Protocol, and Nikita is proud to say that she has achieved a flawless Silence almost two years ahead of the students in her class. But this girl is behind her Protocol, really, and she resents it. Nikita hates people who are late or who don't follow instructions properly. That's why she knows that later on, she will concentrate on financial matters. Numbers disturb her much less than people with emotions. Although as a Psy, she should not be disturbed by this, she knows. Strange, perhaps something to discuss with her grandmother at the next session.
- Earth to Duncan, are you listening?
Nikita twists her gaze on the Psy in front of her: shorter (which should be impossible given Nikita's height, which is not her greatest asset), long braided brown hair, and a slightly wry smile.
- You're Psy. You're not supposed to smile.
- Good point Duncan, but some Psy's are freer than others. My classification needs feelings to work. Unlike you, I don't mind emotional resonance.
Only one category of Psy speaks as freely about "feeling" and "emotional resonance": the Ps, who need this to analyse ancient objects and places. This explains the laxity shown by teachers. Ps, take an extremely long time to condition because the balance between Silence and maintaining psychometric abilities is delicate.
- It frustrates you, doesn't it Duncan? But you know you shouldn't be annoyed? You're not such a good shrink, are you?
- Is that the top spot you want? Work as hard as I do, and then you'll get there.
- It's much more fun talking to you, Duncan. How's your grandmother?
Nikita is confused. What does Grandma Ai have to do with this discussion? She doesn't see her that often, her mother Reina doesn't get on well with her own mother. But Ai is the one who validates Nikita's progress in the Protocol, so a fortnightly meeting is scheduled. But Ai never mentioned anything about a Ps-Psy being completely out of control.
- I've been working at the Conservatory recently, a splendid piano score by Mika Kumamoto. You should ask her what she thinks.
The girl had turned on her heels with this enigmatic comment.
And Nikita shouldn't have mentioned this score during tea at her grandmother's, she was aware of that. Time had suddenly frozen. Her mother had turned pale and her grandmother had shaken so badly that tea had splashed onto the saucer.
- Where did you hear that name? Can you hear me, Nikita? Where did you hear that name? Are you embarrassing my mother on purpose?
"My mother" always, never "your grandmother" or "grandmother Ai", Reina never forgot that she had torn the custody and gene pool of her daughter away from Dmitri Kukovich and was left with a child who looked like her, but who had no trace of the family heritage in her name. This was an unforgivable flaw for Reina, who had worked hard to bring the Kumamoto company to the forefront.
- I should have left the Russians such a disobedient and defiant daughter.
Nikita almost runs out of the room. Breaking protocol doesn't seem so bad to her, not when she sees the tears in Grandma Ai's eyes. Why does Grandma Ai, who is so committed to Nikita's success, seem to care so little for herself?
Nikita takes refuge in her room and picks up her tablet. She doesn't want to think about her family and this strange girl who knows things about her that she doesn't know. She doesn't want to look at who this Mika is who writes music. She just wants to listen to the show she prefers...no, Psy doesn't prefer, that would be like, which is against protocol. Nikita takes a deep breath and collects herself: the show that teaches her the most about her future project: building a business under the name Duncan, which will one day eclipse her mother's.
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- I'm not saying that finance isn't interesting, darling, but you're such a good pianist.
- Music is not allowed by the Mother Protocol.
Ai answers her mother as factually as possible. Mika sometimes forgets that her daughter is not supposed to play a musical instrument. Ai forgives her, her mother after all is an Elder, from before Silence and the calm it brings on emotions.
Mika doesn't know what to do with his beloved daughter. Ai "Love", she loved her daughter's father so much. She no longer recognises her. The Protocol has taken away everything that made her a noisy little girl who loved to come and listen to her play the piano. They called her "not specialized" in her psychic skills. They erased even her identity as a shrink. And sometimes Mika prefers to forget.
And more than fifty years later, it is Ai who would like to forget. Nikita's innocent question brought it all to the surface. She has lost control of her hard-won Silence, and now she feels like a big cat is purring against her. She remembers having this feeling when she was a very young child. Before. Before the quiet of Silence and the people in black who sometimes came to threaten her mother to be quiet, or else... Their boss didn't want them to talk in front of Ai though, he always sent her to her room. But Ai remembers how scared Mika was when they knocked on the door. And now that Reina has seen him cry, she is afraid too. Because her daughter is not like her. Ai tolerated her mother's flaws; Reina hates them. She sees the contempt in her eyes, in front of her mother who is no longer in control. Ai knows that soon she will be summoned by the Council. They know what Reina and Nikita do not. Ai is not 'unspecialised', she is Silence's worst nightmare.
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Grandma Ai had died within a week, Nikita recalls. An accident, her mother had told her. Nikita had found it hard to believe, and when she had returned to school after the memorial service, she had seen in the Ps-Psy's eyes that the latter did not believe it either. But Nikita had never dared to ask her about what she knew, and now she regrets it because since the beginning of her pregnancy she feels like she is becoming just like her grandmother. She even feels that the "big cat" that Ai sometimes referred to when describing the PsyNet comes to see her from time to time, which makes no sense. If any animal should be attributed to Nikita, it is the snake.
Because Nikita went against Reina's instructions. She did not select one of the candidates that Reina selected. Her mother wants her to have a child, fine. But on her own terms: a telepath is a suicidal idea. With Nikita's ability to create a virus, she would risk having a psychically uncontrollable child; or else see her disappear into the 'Council Gulag'. Nikita stops dead in her tracks, that expression is not hers. She rubs her belly, she has chosen a Ps-Psy as her father, perhaps a little in memory of her friend from before. But this baby is turning her Silence completely upside down.
- You are the worst fan ever, you know that!
- Being a fan means having emotions. I'm a Psy and so are you. I have a purely professional interest in this man. These presentations for the business prediction mode are the most interesting.
- And you think he's cute!
Nikita suppresses a sigh, totally at odds with Silence. She is 17 years old, Silence is perfectly imbued in her. Except in the presence of her exasperating classmate who seems to have taken up residence on her bed between classes. At the moment she is lying on her stomach watching the programme that Nikita interrupted when she arrived. It's a programme about predicting stock market fluctuations and how to anticipate them. And yes, the presenter is physically adequate, but like any well-chosen genetic Psy, Nikita is reassured. It is for the scientific content of the video that she has watched for so many years, not for the presenter.
- Will you remember me when I'm gone?
Nikita looks at the woman who, in one year, has become her closest friend, as humans would call it. She has been diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumour, which is why she seems to have given up any idea of applying her Protocol: if she is going to die soon, she might as well experience everything first, including human emotions and Changeling. Nikita doesn't mention it, but she suspects that her friend had a close encounter with a human. She saw the picture on her friend's phone: a boy with red hair and green eyes smiling. Nikita quickly suppressed the feeling of jealousy, not at all in keeping with her conditioning. And no, she won't be thinking of another red-haired, green-eyed boy even though her friend isn't so confused.
- Even if his video is very good, you are aware that you are devouring him with your eyes more than anything else, right?
Nikita does her best not to blush. Her friend stopped by to see her before she went to the hospital. With the chemotherapy, her long brown hair has disappeared and her energy seems to be gone, but she still has her unbearable smirk.
- Don't worry. Even for the most beautiful telepath on earth, I won't forget you...
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- Sascha
Nikita almost smirks when her mother gets up so abruptly from her chair that it falls to the floor. The nurse who passes her as she storms out gives Nikita a puzzled look: this is not Psy's behaviour at all. Nikita reassures her with her eyes. She wanted to pay tribute to her friend whose memory had become more and more present during her pregnancy, but she had not anticipated that this would have an even more positive effect: to keep Reina at a distance. The latter would have no desire to be associated more than necessary with the lookalike of one of her least favourite people: the infamous Ps-Psy who occupied her daughter's room every Saturday afternoon.
Nikita tilts her head towards her baby. Like Sascha, her daughter has dark hair. But she is a Cardinale who looks nothing like Nikita, and she is an E-Psy. The M-Psy who told Nikita this seemed to imply that it runs in the family. This does not surprise her. As Nikita worked her way up through the ranks of the Council (courtesy of her peculiar telepathic abilities), she learned many strange things about the establishment of Silence and its main detractors, the most famous of whom was Mika Kumamoto. This reinforced her original conviction: to put her mother away, become the perfect Psy, and become a Counsellor. No one would touch her daughter, and she would find a way to make her escape. Some say that's what Mika did when Ai became an adult and Nikita will make it happen. Even if her daughter has to hate her for it.
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Thirty years later, Reina is dead, Nikita has become a Councillor, Silence has fallen and her daughter is mated with a leopard. In her mind, as she is about to open the door to her visitor, Nikita hears another Sascha burst out laughing. "You think he's so handsome, Nikita." Why not after all? She's safe now. Nikita Duncan is descended from a rebel and has given birth to another, so she might as well become one herself. So she opens the door to the man who once presented the videos she loved so much. She can admit to herself now: there were much better presentations on this subject, but no presenter was as charismatic.
- Good evening Nikita
- Good evening Anthony