At her command, data swelled before Oxham in secondary and tertiary sight and hearing, blossoming into the familiar maelstrom of her personal configuration. Nameplates, color-coded by party affiliation and striped with recent votes, hovered about the other senators flowing up the steps; realtime polygraph-poll reactions of wired political junkies writhed at the edge of vision, forming hurricane whorls that shifted with every procedural vote; the latest head-counts of her party’s whip AI invoked tones at the threshold of hearing, soft and consonant chords for measures sure to pass, harsh, dissonant intervals for bills that were losing support. Nara Oxham breathed in this clamor like a seagoing passenger emerging onto deck for air. This moment—at the edge of Power, before one dived in and lost oneself—restored her confidence. The bracing rush of politics gave Nara what others were given by mountain-climbing, or incipient violence, or the pleasure of a first cigarette before dressing.

The senator smiled as she headed for her offices.

Nara Oxham often wondered how politics had been possible before second sight. Without induced synesthesia, the intrusion of sight into the other brain centers, how did a human mind absorb the necessary data? She could imagine going without synesthesia in certain activities—flying an aircraft, day trading, surgery—where one could focus on a single image, but not in politics. Noninterfering layers of sight, the ability to fill three visual and two auditory fields with data, were a perfect metaphor for politics itself. The checks and balances, the competing constituencies, the layers of power, money, and rhetoric. Even though the medical procedure that made it possible caused odd mental results in one in ten thousand recipients (Oxham’s own empathy was such a reaction), she couldn’t imagine the political world—gloriously multitrack and torrid—without it. She’d tried the old, presynesthesia eyescreens that covered up normal vision, but they’d brought on a claustrophobic panic. Who would trust the Senate to a blinkered horse?

The disquiet she had felt all morning tugged at Nara again. The feeling was familiar, but vaguely so, in the way of old smells and déjà vu. She tried to place it, comparing the sensation to her anxieties before elections, important Senate votes, or large parties thrown in her honor. Nara Oxham recalled those apprehensions easily. She lived her life fighting them, weathering them, indulging in them. She was old friends with anxiety, that poor sister of madness which the drugs never fully vanquished.

But the current feeling was too slippery. She couldn’t find the worry that had started it. She checked her wrist, where the dermal injector blinked happily green. It couldn’t be an empathy flare; the drugs made sure of that. But it certainly felt like one.