Sanctuary

by H C Edwards

  “Come with me,” he said. “I want to show you something.”

  He stood and helped Claire to her feet. They began to walk slowly along the pier, back to the beach.

  “All those years that I worked on Quentin,” Griffin went on. “I had to do it in secret. The council didn’t want to risk a synthetic boy being seen near the Pantheon. But working at home also meant I needed all the tools at hand. I had to have Quentin’s current profile updated and readily available in order to make certain that I could revive him should neural degradation start to occur again.”

  He stopped and turned to her.

  “His profile in the Cloud is gone. All of them are lost to the Ether, but I always kept a backup.”

  “I…I don’t understand,” Claire said.

  “The reason I haven’t been around is because I have been working, but not on the ship. You see, I’ve been working with old software, slow software. Without the quantum computer as a springboard, the processing speed of my equipment has been severely dampened. What took seconds before now takes hours. Even something as simple as rendering a zettabyte of memory takes most of the morning. And then there was the modifications I had to make on the synthetic blank I pulled from the Pantheon.”

  “What are you saying?” Claire asked, her breath catching in her throat.

  “I didn’t know if it would work, so I didn’t want to get your hopes up, but now…well, now…”

  Something in Chase’s peripheral caught her attention. She turned, the light from the artificial sun causing her to squint.

  Holding up a hand to shade her eyes, she saw a figure standing on the beach at the other end of the pier…and felt a slight flutter in her heart.

  H.C. Edwards lives in Colorado with his daughter.