by H C Edwards
Misao knew as she fell that his was it. She wouldn’t be able to get up again, not this time. Her body and mind were spent. She was sorry…she was so damn sorry, but she just couldn’t do it anymore.
And that was when she felt his arms catch her, easing her to the ground. She squinted, her vision coming into focus.
“Major,” she said, smiling. “I’m really glad to see you.”
“Same here,” he replied softly, and his words were clear even over the blaring of the alarms.
Misao turned her head.
“I need to get into the chamber. I have to upload the calculations.”
“How long will it take?” Trey asked.
“It’s done,” she said weakly, fighting off unconsciousness. “I just have to send them off, but you can’t be here when I do.”
“I’m not leaving you.”
“You have to,” Misao replied. “The explosion…you won’t…you won’t be able to escape it.”
The Major seemed to think about it for a second.
“You’re right.”
But instead of helping her to her feet, Trey lifted Misao up, cradling her tight to his chest in his arms. Then he was running.
She felt a brief weightlessness as they sailed the gap in the tunnel, and then a jarring thump that sent tendrils of pain racing across her entire body when they landed. It took a few seconds for her to catch her breath, but by then, they were already in the monitoring station, where four guards were waiting for them, rifles up.
Trey came to a halt in front of the four men. There were two other people lying on the floor in front of him. One was an unconscious tech, which he’d already seen on his way in, but the second body was recent, a guard.
“What’s it going to be fellas?” Trey addressed the men in front of him.
Gonzalez lowered his rifle, the rest following suit. He stepped forward, separating from Raleigh and Sern.
“I’m sorry, Sir,” he said. “But we couldn’t wait for Jenkins and Schmidt. They’re just too slow.”
“I guess they’ll miss out on all the fun,” Trey smirked, looking around at the men, feeling grateful and proud.
He glanced down at the councilwoman in his arms. “Take her, but be careful. She’s banged up pretty
good,” he said, handing Misao over gently.
“And you, Sir?” Gonzalez asked, looking down at the blood that had soaked through Trey’s clothes.
“I’ve still got more work to do here,” he replied.
“We can help, Sir,” Sern spoke up.
Trey gave them an appreciative smile.
“You already have.”
He gave them one long last look, his men, his people.
“Get topside fast, boys,” he directed. “Because this place is going straight to hell.”
Claire spotted the doctor’s office as she ran around the corner. Talbot and a guard were framed in the doorway, and from between their shoulders she caught a glimpse of Quentin, her Quentin, and it was at that moment when she felt something again, an explosion of panic that bordered on near terror.
It was also the moment that the lights went out.
There was a flash and the sound of a shot, and then Claire was through the doorway, slamming into the two men and sending them flying in either direction.
When the lights came back on a few seconds later, she stood panting in the middle of the room, Talbot slumped against the wall on one side and the guard on the other. In front of her, Quentin stood in shock, his hands empty, a blossom of blood starting to spread in the middle of his abdomen.
“No,” Claire uttered breathlessly, rushing forward and around the desk, catching Quentin as he half-collapsed to the floor.
“Claire?” he asked, his expression a mixture of doubt and confusion.
She nodded her head.
“It’s me, it’s me. I promise,” she assured him, and just so that he didn’t doubt for a second longer, she kissed him.
When their lips separated, he no longer looked confused.
“I think,” Quentin said, his soft smile starting to disappear as the realization set in. “I think I’ve been shot.”
Claire looked down at the bloom of blood on his shirt. She reached down and gently undid the buttons, pulling each side back.
What she saw made her moan deep in her throat.
“Oh, Quentin,” she whispered, the tears welling up in her eyes.
“Dad!” Quentin said suddenly, attempting to get to his feet, but falling back weakly a second later.
“Don’t move,” Claire begged him, the words struggling to get out. “Please, Quentin, don’t move.”
From behind her, Claire heard a sound. She whipped her head around, expecting the guard or Talbot to be standing there, gun in hand, and was relieved to see it was Quentin’s father getting to his feet. His right shoulder was soaked in blood and there was a piece of synthetic collarbone peeking out, but he was alive.
“I’m here, Quentin,” he said, stumbling towards the two of them and falling to his knees in front of his son. “We both are.”
Trey put the gloves on and then the glasses, staring at the screen in front of him, or rather, staring through it.
He was thinking of Shay and Hannah, but not the last time he saw them. Rather, he was remembering a birthday party from a few years before, his birthday party, the big four zero.
It was a simple occasion, just the three of them, but when Hannah brought out the cake, a lopsided leaning tower of frosting and sprinkles that she had baked herself, the balance of it proved to be too tricky for her. When it fell to the floor she had burst out in tears, covering her face with her little hands.
Trey had laughed, which was the wrong thing to do, because it only made her angry and cry harder. Shay cuffed him on the shoulder and pointed at their daughter. Pantomiming shame, he got to his knees to gather her in his arms, but she wouldn’t be consoled. She pushed him away, shouting to be left alone. Even when Shay tried, she was given the same treatment.
Finally, after five minutes and with no end in sight, Trey plopped himself down on the floor and started to eat the cake in handfuls, making exaggerated moaning sounds of pleasure. Shay, taking his cue, sat down next to him and did the same.
Hannah heard the sounds and stopped crying long enough to peak through her fingers. When she saw their faces covered in chocolate, she burst out into peals of laughter, and then joined them.
After a bit they started shoving pieces of cake into each other’s faces, and it wasn’t long before they were throwing the globs around in a full-fledged food fight.
Later, long after they had cleaned up, Hannah and Shay brought him a chunk of cake with a candle sticking out of it and asked him to make a wish. He thought about it for a second then asked Hannah what her wish would be.
“That I drop the cake next year,” was her reply.
Trey lifted his gloved hand and clicked on the upload icon. The screen showed a black background for a couple of seconds, streams of coding and data flowing across it, and then stopped.
From behind him he heard the first pop, the whoosh of fire breathing into life. There were other sounds too, and at one point the floor started to shake, but Trey wasn’t paying attention to that anymore. He was lost in memory…lost in the dream of his life.
Make your wish, Daddy.
He closed his eyes…and blew out the candle.
They felt the rumbling in the floor. Like a peal of thunder it rolled and rolled, going up the walls, the ceiling, until it was all around them. It lasted about ten seconds, and when it was done and the alarms stopped their blaring, Griffin looked down at his son, smiling through the sheen of tears.
“We did it,” he said.
“I know,” Quentin replied, his voice weak and raspy, but he was wearing a smile as well. “Thanks for waiting.”
He shifted his gaze to Claire.
“You found me.”
Her voice shook as she spoke.
“We found each
other.”
It was a moment before she realized that he wasn’t going to say anything else, that he couldn’t.
Gently, ever so gently, Claire handed Quentin over to his father, who cradled him in his arms and started to cry. She stood up, looking around the room. From across the desk she saw movement near the wall. She walked over, kneeling down by her grandfather. He had turned over onto his side. There was blood leaking from the corner of his mouth and the lower half of his body was at a funny angle, but his eyes were open and staring at her.
“Y-you…” he mumbled past trembling lips. “Didn’t change anything…the work will go forward…for the greater good…”
“Maybe,” Claire replied numbly. “But you won’t be around to see it. That, I can promise you.”
Talbot struggled to say more, except there was no breath left in his body to expel the words. At the end, as his eyes glazed over, he looked afraid…and Claire was glad for it.
Epilogue
Claire sat on the edge of the pier, head down, the sun and wind at her back. It was mid-morning, five weeks after the destruction of the quantum computer, what the citizens were stating to call ‘In Fine Somnia”, or the end of dreams. A bit pretentious for her taste, but she understood the need for the label. It was, after all, the day they lost the Cloud, and the eternal existence they had all been promised. Such a thing needed to be named.
She had expected chaos in the city when the news spread, but the citizens of Akropolis surprised her. There were no riots, no protests, no demands that another computer be built, the promise of an afterlife restored. They let it go quietly, or as quietly as they could.
Misao had made a speech, broadcast across every screen in the city, in which she exposed the truth of the quantum computer and the efforts of the council to keep it secret. She talked about unity in trying times, the tenacity of the human race to survive and rise above each new challenge.
It was a damn fine speech, and Claire had been there, shoulder to shoulder with the crowd in front of the Pantheon.
When it was over, the people cheered, because they believed in Misao, believed in their city, and even though the Cloud was gone, they were alive and they had hope. It would have to do.
There was another bit of sad news to go along with losing Quentin. The woman, Mia, who helped Claire in the trade hub and went to The Mountain with a handful of others to free the people of Charlottesville, had been killed. There was only one survivor in her group, a woman named Chase. She had come back to Akropolis with an astonishing tale of a synthetic uprising, the council there usurped and replaced, the last refugees of Charlottesville spared some horrible fate.
She had gone back to the Mountain a few days later to oversee the transition of the new council, her being one of them. They had adopted a popular vote, and Chase being a hero of sorts, was one of the first nominated, despite not being a citizen of the sanctuary. Her first act as councilwoman was going to be the dismantling of The Mountain’s quantum computer.
And then there was the ship, the ark named Genesis. It was on the verge of completion. The project managers and former council members had turned over the schematics and blueprints, hoping that the vessel might be a gateway to a less harsh sentencing when it came. Chase brought a copy of them to Akropolis with her when she came, and Griffin had been the one to find several structural problems, as well as systems errors in many of the ship’s programs, just in the first day. It had been unanimously decided that he would spearhead the rest of the project. There would be months of familiarizing himself with the designs, but he was confident that within a year, the ship would be ready. Whether they went for the stars after that was a decision that would be made later.
In Akropolis, the Wall still stood, but the council was no more. It had been disbanded immediately, and Misao had taken up the mantle of temporary leadership. There was talk of a similar vote like the one they had in The Mountain, to elect a single leader for a short duration of time, much like the presidents of the Old World, but there was no doubt in anyone’s mind who would be the first one.
The old council members had not fared well. Three of them had committed suicide, one being Misao’s mother. It had not been kind news to her, but she was made of stronger steel than any person Claire had ever met, and she was dealing with the loss with grace and a renewed sense of purpose. The rest of the council members were incarcerated, their fates still to be decided.
Claire’s vaccine was given out en masse, and within a couple of weeks, they found that the genetic unraveling had ceased. There was even hope that they could build new strands of DNA that would one day produce fertility genes, using Griffin’s knowledge of synthetic anatomy as a model, but that was a couple of years away. For now, they were grateful for each day.
The destruction of the quantum computer had thankfully been contained. Though it was quite the explosion, and felt throughout the whole center of the city, it didn’t crack the bedrock of the growing fields. Misao had even found through some models that the cause of the tremors that she had first investigated might have been caused by the electromagnetic field surrounding the computer. Apparently, it was possible that the field reversed the polarity of the iron in the upper crust of the Earth below the city, causing the plate tectonics to start shifting. With the field gone, the polarity had returned and the tremors had ceased. The growing farms beneath the city, and the city itself, were no longer in danger of collapsing.
Claire and Misao had spent long lunches in the Gardens pouring over the models and discussing the data. They had become fast friends, and while the friendship and the work kept Claire busy, not a day passed that she didn’t find herself sitting on the edge of the pier on the Bay, staring out at the water and thinking of Quentin.
The sound of footsteps stirred her from the reverie. She turned her head slightly to look back, affirming the approach of her visitor.
For those first couple of weeks after the field came down, Griffin had joined her at the pier. They didn’t talk much during those times, but they didn’t need to. They had been forever bonded in their grief, and such a thing as that didn’t require many words to share.
When he sat down next to her, she gave him a brief nod to acknowledge his presence. He didn’t return it, however, just stared out at the water.
“I haven’t seen you in awhile,” she said, looking back out across the Bay.
“I’m sorry,” he replied. “I’ve been busy.”
She shrugged.
“Me too.”
He cleared his throat, and seemed as if he wanted to say something, but couldn’t find the right way to start.
“What is it?” she prompted him.
His smile gave her hope that maybe someday soon she could find hers again.
“Did you know,” Griffin said. “That when I was a kid, my father had a sailboat?”
She stared at him, curious now. There was a strange expression on his face, wistful perhaps.
“It was the greatest thing in the world for a boy my age. On the weekends, my parents and I would cast off and sail along the coast. Maybe we’d make it back that night, maybe we wouldn’t, but it was always an adventure. And if I was lucky, my father would let me take the reins every once in a while. Even now, after all this time, when I close my eyes, I can still remember the smell of the sea and the spray of the water on my face.”
He pointed out at the Bay.
“When I come here, I keep expecting to see one go across the water. I think that’s why I used that memory the most.”
Griffin saw the confused look on her face.
“A few times, not a lot, I was called into the revival wing to assist with damaged profiles,” he explained. “The memories were fragmented due to improper uploading or just degraded from the data transfer. It didn’t happen often, but when it did, I went in and took out the corrupted memory files and replaced them as best as I could, otherwise there would eventually be a complete neural failure.”
Claire frowned.
“Wouldn’t they have known that those memories weren’t real?”
“I made them as real as I could, pieced together from the memories of their loved ones. But those memories could also be dangerous. If they figured it out, there was a possibility that they could go mad from the realization, not knowing what was real and what wasn’t.”
“Why are you telling me this?” Claire asked.
Griffin, seeming to ignore the question, continued.
“I figured out that I had to implant memories that weren’t really memories, dream like snippets of waking moments. These memories, mixed with the others that I had pieced together, provided a subconscious partition in their brain, allowing them to remember those memories as real, but not to study them too closely. The sailboat was great that way. If they found themselves thinking too hard about a certain memory, it triggered the sailboat, and they would be left with a sense of wonder and forget about the other memory.”
“So you fooled them into believing in something that didn’t happen?”
“In a way,” he admitted. “But I did it to help them, just as I did with Quentin.”
The mention of his name stung. She turned her head away from Griffin so that he wouldn’t see the tears welling up.
“I made a lot of mistakes,” he said, sighing heavily. “I know my son is dead. He died a long time ago. The boy I brought back was not him, no matter how many memories I manipulated or reconstructed.”
Claire wiped away the tears. When she turned to look at him again, Griffin reached out and took her hand in both of his.
She didn’t protest.
“But the boy I brought back is also my son. He laughed and he lived and he sacrificed…and he loved. He may have been more a product of my imagination and my memories than he was of his own, but the life he led and the choices he made are the reason why we are all still here.”
She nodded, not holding back the tears anymore. They flowed freely down her face.