by H C Edwards
Quentin thought of the dream at the beach, of the ocean, the jellyfish…the sailboat. It had all been real then; he didn’t drown at The Bay, as he’d always been told, but in the Old World.
He thought there should be more to his feelings right now, that the shock of this revelation was more than enough to drive someone screaming from the room, even land one in the psych ward at the Pantheon Hospital, but maybe a part of him had always known the truth.
Isn’t that what the subconscious was for? Isn’t that why it made him dream the same dream over and over again all these years? Didn’t he always feel upon waking that the memory of that day at the beach had been real, more real than anything he could ever recall in his life?
And that was it right there. He had known. His subconscious had always known. Whether it was the GABA receptors or those blocked memories that wouldn’t lie dormant…somehow, the truth had been hidden deep down inside of him, revealed only in his dreams.
“How…how did you bring me back?”
“That’s a long story, Son,” his father replied solemnly. “About three hundred years long.”
“I need to know, Dad, and I need to know now.”
“I know,” Griffin agreed quietly. “I just…”
His father sighed deeply, shaking his head.
“I didn’t think it would happen like this. Truth to tell, I don’t know how I ever envisioned this conversation going. I guess that’s why I never told you.”
Quentin reached out with his hand and put it over his father’s. It seemed strange that he was the one to lend comfort at this moment, but maybe that meant he was going to be okay…maybe they both would be.
“That day you died was the worst day of our lives, and yet, it was more so for your mother. She had always felt things more than anyone else, and when she felt pain it was ten times what I could imagine. It also meant she felt joy and love and empathy more as well, but that day…that day something broke in her that never healed.
We knew your cloud profile wasn’t complete. Our uplinks had been operational for a few years by then, but it never occurred to us to put one in you. We always thought there’d be time, you see? No one ever thought the world would end so quickly.
A few months after the accident while we were still compiling the data, we realized that there were more corrupted files than complete ones, a product of the brain trauma. If we brought you back then your consciousness would have difficulty telling the difference between what was real and what were memories. You wouldn’t have life so much as a half-life, caught in limbo between this world and the one you remembered.
We couldn’t even begin to attempt that, and so we set about recreating new memories to replace the corrupted ones. That process involved a whole new science. We had to build a quantum brain to download your profile into then hack it to access what memories were corrupted, download them onto a mainframe, process the information into a visual, and then replace them with new ones.
The program we used to access your memories of Claire in my lab is a much more updated version of what your mother and I created, but back then it was a very tedious and time-consuming process.
Unfortunately, in the midst of it all, the war began starting to spread across the planet like wildfire, even creeping onto the coastal states, the first time our country had been invaded by a foreign power in over three hundred and twenty years.
That’s when the government started gathering the most brilliant minds and housing them in the sanctuaries. Because of our work on the Quantum Cloud, we were one of the first approached, but our labs were on a nearby military base and we felt safer there, so we didn’t go.
We read the reports, watched the news, saw things go from bad to worse. A terrorist faction set off a large device in Australia and just like that, forty million people were wiped off the face of the planet.
It didn’t take long before the smaller countries took their wars to the next level. Israel and Palestine were the first to use their nuclear arsenals. No one knows who fired first, but it didn’t matter. They wiped each other out in a few minutes, and while the world was looking the other way, North Korea finally made a move.
We all thought that meant the US would retaliate, but the peninsula was too hot and irradiated, and it was only a matter of days before the north was dying as well. Japan was getting a lot of the fallout; China too, and all of a sudden it seemed like cooler heads would prevail, once the destruction was seen by the whole world.
Leaders gathered, promises were made, treaties drawn up, but the summit was attacked. Our president was killed, as well as Russia’s. And that’s when it all becomes a bit confusing.
There were armies on almost every continent, war machines laying waste to cities and even some sanctuaries. Although the major countries never fired their own nukes, it didn’t matter. When cities were destroyed, there was no one to man the nuclear power facilities. They went into meltdown and caused almost as much radiation as a bomb would have, minus the physical destruction.
It all took a while, maybe even a month, but not much more than that. Your mother and I barely escaped the base alive aboard a helicopter. We watched the mushroom cloud from miles away and knew that it was gone.
Your mother was always the more level-headed of us. Up until the last moment, even as they were trying to drag her away, she was uploading the data profile for you into the Quantum Cloud via satellite. It was sent to Akropolis and stored there, waiting for us.
Our arrival at the sanctuary is a dark day that is engrained in my mind forever. We could see the thousands crowded outside the Wall, stampeding and climbing over each other like drowning ants. Their screams were a roar, almost overpowering the sounds of the rotors on our helicopter. Some were firing guns at us and some at the city. There were a few explosions I can only imagine were grenades or RPG’s, but they did more damage to themselves then the Wall. We could even see a large pocket of soldiers trying to push their way through with a couple of tanks and humvees. Maybe they had a plan. I don’t know. They were overrun by the crowd and we lost sight of them as we went over the Wall and through the opening in the field.
They didn’t last long, those people. We begged the newly appointed council to let in some of the refugees at least, but it was no use. They were probably right to refuse. We didn’t have enough medicine or food to handle the tens of thousands that were outside, not on top of the population already in the city.
Let some die quickly or we all die slow…
It was quick, thank God for that, but not so quick that we didn’t hear the screams and the cries, the explosions and the gunfire for the rest of that night. Those that didn’t die by each other’s hands succumbed to the radiation by morning…and then it was finally silent…so very silent.
The helos went out and dropped some sort of caustic acid that burned like fire and after a few hours there was nothing but ashes. When the winds blew we could see the dark cloud float away to the horizon like a tide of locusts. I swear I can taste the ash in my mouth to this day…
We were all human then, in the beginning, but our utopia was as fragile as an egg shell. It would only take a single crack in the system and we would all fall apart. Or even worse, what if there was someone still out there with their finger hovering over a button, ready to target the last remnants of civilization?
Those first few years we lived in constant fear, and because of that, the council made the Quantum Cloud the top priority next to resources. The QUBIT factories had churned out thousands of synthetics, but we needed to perfect the system. There were enough cloud profiles to match the number of QUBITs but many of those profiles were corrupted. The data we downloaded from the satellites was not complete.
Your mother figured that the process we were using to restore your profile would work on others, and so we set about doing just that. It wasn’t that we had forgotten about you. Rather our reason for postponing your revival was a selfish one. We thought that if we could perfect the system for the thou
sands that had similar issues to your profile, then the risk of restoring yours was minimal.
The council suggested we use the marines who had stored profiles first, because a great many of them who were the initial subjects of the Quantum Cloud program had already died.
There was some trial and error to say the least. I’m ashamed to admit that we felt rushed in trying to produce results and so took risks we normally would never have considered. A great deal of them went mad at first, killed themselves or others before they were subdued, then later others were revived and were little better than children intellectually. Sometimes we would revive one and they would be just fine, and then an hour later they would fall over dead for no apparent reason. Maybe one out of twenty turned out okay, but those were not good odds at all.
Finally, we put a halt to the revivals, despite the objections of the council. Your mother and I delved deep into the matrix of the quantum brains, and we found a startling similarity between all the revivals.
Every single one that had a problem with the revival saw a spike in their brainwave patterns whenever their subconscious was accessed. We realized that the GABA receptors were creating new traumatic memories, and those memories were their actual revivals. The realization that they were dead, their corporal bodies long gone, and their consciousness just a construct of data stored in a computer brain was too much for their minds to handle. The new trauma caused by the GABA receptors was causing an unraveling in the matrix, shutting down synapses and killing off an abundance of neurons that eventually caused brain death.
We asked a colleague of mine, a good friend I had known professionally and personally, about possible solutions to our problem. He was a pretty damn good psychiatrist in the Old World, and specialized in trauma, both physical and mental.
He said that the brain protects itself from trauma and fear by reprogramming receptors to ‘shut off’ or stop producing the emotion of fear, those very same receptors that we were re-routing. Of course we already knew this, but he suggested that what we needed was an outlet for this fear. If the trauma was caused by the knowledge of their deaths, we simply remove that fear by instilling a memory of death then reprogramming those receptors to shut off when the memory is accessed.
He also suggested providing dreams, waking dreams like our daydreams, as well as implanting one or two very poignant dreams that provided a sense of happiness or wonder to offset the trauma.
And do you know what?
He was right.
After that, we didn’t have a problem with the revivals anymore. At least, not in the sense I explained before. That first generation, the marines whose profiles had to be rebuilt, lived and performed their duties for a number of years, and when they realized that the city didn’t really need soldiers anymore, they willingly and peacefully opted out of their revival clauses and went to the Ether.
By then we had also stabilized the Cloud. All profiles from that point forward were complete and without fault. All revivals were given the memory of their deaths, or at least an abridged version if the death was deemed overly traumatic, and besides an occasional hiccup here and there, we haven’t had a real problem since.
I tell you all of this because it will help you to understand what comes next…that we failed each and every time it came to children. You know why we don’t revive children. Everyone in Akropolis does. Their consciousness is too erratic, their memories not as clear or as real as adults, and so whenever we tried to revive one from their profile there were…disastrous consequences, to say the least. After a number of tries with the same results, the council banned the revival of children up until after the stage of puberty is complete.
There was an exception though…
“I was the exception,” Quentin said, staring down at the kitchen table.
They had moved from the basement to the upstairs before his father had started, Quentin wanting to hear whatever needed to be said in the light of day that filtered in through the windows, as if it could chase away the shadows that plagued the both of them.
“Yes,” his father agreed. “It was the one stipulation we had. They needed us, you see. No one knew the quantum brain or the Cloud better than your mother and I.”
“The council allowed it?”
Griffin nodded.
“For a time…but they had their own stipulations.”
“Which were?”
“Complete isolation,” his father explained. “Our work could continue but only in the privacy of our own home. We had whatever equipment we needed brought over and we could sync with the Cloud. If and when we needed extra help, we were given support, but never the same person twice. It was necessary that we keep a low profile; no one could ever find out about you.”
Quentin studied his father’s face. There was gray at his temples, wrinkles like roadmaps across the skin. Even his eyelids dropped slightly, as if time had sat its weight upon them. It was hard to believe it was all synthetic, purposeful rather than the natural aging process.
“It sounds lonely,” Quentin said.
“It was,” his father replied. “But your mother and I, we had each other, and we had hope.”
“You said you both were in complete isolation?”
Griffin nodded.
“A self-imposed exile for the most part. We could, and sometimes, did make trips to the labs for necessary items or to discuss new tech and updates with teams at the Pantheon, but we kept it low key. Most of our work was done at home, and whatever spare time we had was focused on you.”
“But,” Quentin said, closing his eyes and recalling certain memories; it was easy now, as if they were lined up in a row like dominoes. “I remember not being able to move, being blind…trips to the clinic and the lab in the Pantheon. Are those memories real?”
“They are. The first few revivals were very difficult on us. We thought we had solved all the problems, and so when you started to suffer significant neural degeneration, we panicked and brought you immediately to the Pantheon.”
“I can still only remember bits and pieces of everything.”
Griffin frowned.
“I know, Son…those gaps are from extensive wipes. We had to; otherwise the trauma of those memories would have driven you mad.”
The timeline was almost too daunting for Quentin to consider.
“How many times?” he asked. “How many times did you bring me back?”
His father’s face was pale, ashen almost. He had never looked as old as he did at that moment, nor so weary.
“Too many times…so many years. After awhile we both passed on and were revived, but it did little to change our state of mind or deter us from finding a solution. Even so, there were decades at a time when we knew there was no point in reviving you again until we could advance the tech. We thought we finally had it, but then…”
“I started to show signs of neural degeneration again,” Quentin finished.
“Your mother…she…”
“Mom…” Quentin trailed off, recalling another memory, one where he is in bed late at night, listening…
There are voices; they are familiar. He thinks they are talking about him but he is unsure.
“…take it anymore…”
A woman’s voice.
He doesn’t hear it all, or maybe he does and just doesn’t understand it.
“…so close…just…more time…”
A man’s voice this time.
“NO!” she screams and then begins to cry again. “No more…no more…”
Quentin blinked and the memory was gone, but there was a growing knowledge inside of him that hurt so badly he wanted to curl up into a ball and weep.
“Mom,” he mumbled. “She couldn’t take it anymore.”
“I’m sorry,” his father replied, his voice thick with the same emotions that Quentin felt. “I didn’t know…I thought we’d stop for awhile, like we’d done before…but…but…”
The tears rolled down his cheeks, his face twitching betwe
en grief and a look of pleading, as if he were begging for the forgiveness he couldn’t give himself.
Quentin didn’t need to be told the rest. He remembered her sad smiles, the dark shadows in the corners of the house that seemed alive, shadows that followed her around wherever she went.
“It wasn’t your f-fault,” Griffin stuttered, his face breaking.
He shoved his knuckles into his mouth and bit down hard. Eyes clenched, a tremor seemed to grip his body, a wave that flowed from head to toe and back up again.
Quentin reached over and grasped his father’s other hand, squeezing hard, tears flowing from his cheeks as well, only his came from empathy rather than guilt.
It was strange, that at the zenith of his own revelation, when his entire existence had been turned upside down, he should be the one to feel the need to provide comfort. What was his pain after all, measured up against the centuries that his parents endured? It was inconceivable that they could have been driven all this time with one singular goal in mind, and yet it could not be denied. How many failures had there been? How many times had his mother or father held his body as his consciousness faded away? What would that do to a person after all those years?
His father composed himself after a few more moments, wiping the tears from his face with his forearm and straightening up. He gave a wan smile, as if to say he was okay now, but he didn’t try to remove his hand from Quentin’s grip.
“It was my fault, Son. It was always mine. She wanted to stop so many times. I just…I couldn’t…I knew the answer was there somewhere.”
“How did you find it?” Quentin asked.
“I didn’t…not really. When your mother...”
Griffin paused, took a deep breath before continuing.
“When she died, it happened…the answer. What you needed was a stabilizing memory, one so traumatic, so powerful, that it didn’t matter if there were gaps or implants, because that one memory would solidify your childhood reality. In essence, your mother’s death made the world ‘concrete’ to you from that point on. There was no more need for your subconscious to debate it. You…you fixed yourself.”