Chapter 174 Hundred and seventy four

Chapter 174 Hundred and seventy four
Dorian Walsh was in a room on the facility's second level that had been arranged with the comfortable practicality of a man who had been occupying it long enough to have opinions about furniture placement. There was a workbench along one wall covered in physical books and printed technical documents, a map of the North Atlantic tacked above it with annotations in handwriting that was either architectural notation or the personal shorthand of someone who thought in diagrams. A kettle. An actual kettle, electric, running off the geothermal power system, and beside it two cups and a small collection of tea that suggested a man who had made certain decisions about the minimum requirements for civilised existence regardless of circumstances.
He was reading when they brought Mia to him. He set the book down with the easy lack of ceremony of someone who had been interrupted regularly and had decided this was simply a feature of his current situation rather than an imposition.
"Ghost Rider," he said.
"Just Mia," she said.
He gestured to the second chair with the hospitality of a man who had grown up in a house where visitors were offered a seat before anything else, and she sat.
"She asked you to stand in the machine," he said. Not a question.
"Yes."
"And you wanted to talk to someone who had."
"Have you?"
"Three times," he said. He said it without drama, simply accurately. He was a large man, fifty-three, with the kind of physical presence that comes from decades of outdoor work, wind-weathered skin and hands that showed forty years of manual labour in the way that hands always showed the things they had done. His reading glasses were pushed up on his forehead. They had been there for some time, she thought. "The first time was terrifying because I didn't know what to expect. The second time was interesting because I did. The third time," he paused, pouring water from the kettle with a focus that was partly hospitality and partly the space needed to find the right words, "felt like understanding something I had been failing to understand my whole life."
"And the convergence?" she asked. "Do you believe in it the way she does?"
He was quiet for a moment, looking at the cup he had placed in front of her.
"I believe in the facts," he said. "The seeding event was real. The restructuring is real. The convergence timeline is real." He wrapped both hands around his own cup. "Where Dorian Walsh and Elias Vorn disagree is not about the facts. It is about the character of the thing at the other end of the signal. Vorn assumes it is a threat because it arrived without our consent and has been working without our knowledge. Li Mei assumes it is an opportunity because the restructuring it produces has not, in any of the cases she has studied, produced harm in the people it has restructured. Changed people. Not harmed ones."
"Changed toward something specific," Mia said. "Something that serves whatever sent the signal."
"Changed toward connection," Dorian said. "Toward a shared resonance that the people experiencing it describe as," he searched for the word, "recognition. Not control. Not compulsion. A broadening of what the self includes."
"That sounds like what people say before the dissolution of self becomes total," Mia said.
He looked at her with an expression that was both sharp and appreciative.
"Yes," he said. "It does sound like that. That is the correct thing to be suspicious of. I am suspicious of it." He paused. "And I am also a man who has stood in that machine three times and come out each time with my opinions fully intact, my history fully intact, my awareness of Dorian Walsh from Dublin fully intact. Which is either evidence that Li Mei is right and the convergence is not consumption, or evidence that I have not yet been in the machine enough times to know the difference."
Mia looked at the window. Through the basalt wall, there was no view, only the island's geological patience.
"The amplifier," she said. "If I stand in it, what does it do to the seeding timeline?"
"Li Mei's models suggest full convergence within seventy-two hours of a fully expressed carrier engaging the amplifier at maximum resonance output," Dorian said. He said it without softening it. She respected him for this. "Global propagation. Everyone carrying Code-Born expression reaches the convergence simultaneously."
"And everyone who doesn't carry it?"
He was quiet.
"Dorian."
"Li Mei's position is that the convergence will naturally incorporate the non-Code-Born population through the resonance network of the converted carriers," he said. "That the signal, once strong enough, will complete the seeding in individuals who were exposed but did not express."
"Her position," Mia said.
"Her position," he confirmed.
She looked at the tea she had not drunk.
She thought about Dax upstairs at the railing, his Code-Born expression restructuring him at an rate that was slower than average but was not nothing. She thought about Jax and Tank and Reyes, fighting on the eastern flank of a facility in Iceland for a cause they had followed her into without knowing its full dimension. She thought about the non-Code-Born population of a planet that had been carrying a frequency in its sub-ether layer for forty-one years without being consulted.
"What's your read on her?" Mia asked. "After two years. What kind of person is Li Mei Chen?"
Dorian Walsh set his cup down. He looked at it for a moment and then looked at Mia with the direct, calibrated honesty of a man who had spent his life reading weather and knew the difference between what the sky looked like and what it was about to do.
"She is the most genuinely believing person I have ever met," he said. "She is not cynical. She is not calculating in the way of people who want things for personal reasons. She believes, with complete sincerity, that she is working toward humanity's benefit." He paused. "That is the most important thing I can tell you, and also, depending on what she is wrong about, the most dangerous thing I can tell you."
Mia stood.
She picked up the cup of tea she hadn't drunk and drank it in three swallows, because it was there and it was warm and some part of her brain that was still nineteen years old and alone in a Coldwater garage had decided that tea was currently the priority.
"Thank you," she said.
"What will you do?" he asked.
She moved toward the door.
"I'm going to talk to my aunt," she said.