May 29 2008
DarkPages – Sage: Introduction
As the two men reached the top of the stairs one of them paused and reached into his coat. He was a head taller than his companion, who stepped forward, first knocking and then balling a fist to thump noisily against the door.
“Sage? It’s William. I know you’re in there. Look, we need your help–”
The taller man cut the shorter one off, pushing past him and stooping to apply picks to the door lock. The shorter man stood dumb as the tall one easily opened the lock and slipped into the apartment. A moment later he too crossed the threshold, stepping uninvited into the apartment at the top of the stairs.
He discovered his companion along with their quarry, a young woman no more than nineteen years old, in a cramped and cluttered office. The taller man stood with his hands in his pockets, grimly watching the woman. The woman sat slack-jawed in a reclining chair, her eyes unfocused, staring in the direction of a half dozen computer monitors. The screens flickered, casting different colors of light across the back wall of the room. Each seemed to be displaying information at random, and changing every few seconds: a photograph would blink out of existence to be replaced by an encyclopedia article, then a news clipping, then a photograph again, and so on ad infinitum.
“Sage?” the shorter man repeated, stepping forward to stand beside her. When she didn’t respond he passed his hand in front of her face, but her expression remained blank, unaware of his presence. Her breathing did not change, she did not even blink.
“She can’t hear you,” the taller man grunted, once again reaching into the inner pocket of his coat. The shorter man frowned.
“You said she could help us,” he said, the earnest tone in his voice giving way desperation. “You said you could make her help us!”
The taller man held up his hand, silencing his companion. His other hand reached into his coat and withdrew an aged paperback book, no more than 200 pages, tossing it so that it arced and fell into the lap of the catatonic woman. The Adventures of Tuxedo Cat, the shorter man read on the cover. He blinked and glanced hesitantly to his companion. The woman stirred, and for the first time since either man had entered her presence, she blinked. She blinked slowly, and so deliberately that the way her eyelids slid down to momentarily cover her eyeballs was practically audible. All at once she stood, plucking the book off her lap and stretching her back, rubbing at the weary circles under her eyes.
Five years ago the woman had been diagnosed with high grade astrocytoma and given a grim prognosis. An immediate surgery was scheduled, and purely by chance it happened to coincide with a celestial event: a meteor shower and a resulting power failure which brought her surgery to a premature halt. And after that she had never been quite the same. The tumor sat on her brain, like some bloated spider beneath the crown of her skull, legs wrapped tight around her gray matter.
They called her Sage now. This was not some fiction about human beings only using ten percent of their brains; she had merely become a statistical outlier. Her capacity for recall and her ability to collate information had both been increased beyond previously observed limits. It was not merely that she could recall in exquisite detail everything she had ever seen, read, heard, smelt, tasted or felt. It was her ability to cross-reference this knowledge, to draw connections between disparate pieces of information, that made her miraculous. Sage made the invisible plain, like a conjurer plucking scarves from thin air.
A brief while later the two men walked back down the stairs. Again it was the shorter man who spoke first.
“She’s getting worse, isn’t she?”
The taller man stopped and turned to look at the shorter man over his shoulder, his expression unreadable.
“It’s a cancer, Liam. She goes on living with it, but…” He shook his head and turned to resume descending the stairs. “There is no worse. There’s just dead.”
