Reset

by Sarina Dahlan

  But why would he? A delay tactic to buy time? But what would he do once Apollina finds out? She would never forgive him. There is not a compassionate bone in her body. She is like Dr. Juvenal Urbino from the book—a rational figure who values order and science. Thane feels a pinprick in his chest. What will happen to Aris?

  He touches his cheek—the spot where she hit him. The pain is still there, though the bruise is long gone. She really meant to hurt him. He is no longer angry. He had been. He acted on his anger and led the Interpreter Center and the police to them. That, he cannot take back.

  At least he is glad he had contacted Officer Scylla. If he had not, and with Apollina the only one in charge, Aris and Metis would have been erased long ago. No questioning. No due process.

  He places the books back on the shelves, being careful with each. At the end, he wishes there were more for him to put away so he would not have to go back to the Interpreter Center. To Aris. He does not know whether he can stand seeing her in misery.

  Aris gazes at Metis on the table. He is motionless—as still as a corpse. Her head hurts. There are no bracelets around her wrists anymore, but their latent effects are still in her veins.

  She asked the Interpreter to move her to be with him. She wants to see with her own eyes the moment Apollina excises her lover’s dreams. She wants the memory of it to be ingrained in her mind. She needs to remember the hatred she has for the Dreamcatcher and the Interpreter Center for all the cycles to come.

  She thinks of the helmet and the vial of Absinthe she hid in the cave. She wants to remember those too so she can go back. Metis told her Absinthe would be useless without dreams to be reawakened. But maybe there is a chance he is wrong. Maybe there is a lockbox inside her brain no one else can get to. Hope is a dangerous thing. But it’s all she has left.

  She is aware she is being studied like an organism under a microscope by whoever is on the other side of the dark mirror. She had been on that side before, watching the Dreamcatcher destroy Benja’s dreams.

  She looks at Metis. She wonders what he is thinking about. Maybe he is dreaming. Can one dream with eyes wide open? Which dreams will the Dreamcatcher take from him? Will he still be the same Metis? She imagines him like Benja—drained and demented. She knows what will follow.

  She shifts her eyes to the copper cloud above. It is empty of images. But soon the images of their lives together will appear. Then the Interpreter will erase them with a push of a button. His memories of her will be irretrievable. It will be as if they had never met. Hers will be next. She begins to implore all the Old World gods she had read about for a miracle.

  “Why is Aris in that room?” Thane asks. “Didn’t Officer Scylla say he’s coming back for her?”

  “She wants to be there. Makes it easier, since she’ll be next.”

  Thane feels his heart sinking to his stomach. “You’re going to erase her too?”

  “Metis lied to us,” Apollina says.

  “Then punish him. What did she do? It’s unfair that she be punished for his crime.”

  The Interpreter looks at Professor Jacob. “He doesn’t understand.”

  The Professor steps forward and places his hand on Thane’s shoulder.

  “It must be done, Thane. She’s a danger. She knows too much. We need to protect the Four Cities.”

  Aris? Dangerous?

  This is the same girl he has known for almost a whole cycle. The one who needed to hide from the world after every time she had to show the children from the CDL the horror of the Last War. Thane steps back, letting the professor’s hand fall in front of him.

  “What if she’s just caught up in this mess without knowing? I know her. She believes in Tabula Rasa. She doesn’t want to destroy the Four Cities.”

  “They ran. If they were innocent, why run?” Professor Jacob says. “Let’s not argue this. All that matters is that we have them now, and they won’t be able to harm anyone else anymore.”

  Thane looks at Aris. She appears more fragile than he remembers. She is absentmindedly playing with her hair just as she usually does when in deep thought. She is inside her grief. Her sunniness and warmth cast aside. He finds himself affected by her sadness.

  Officer Scylla told him the dead people Thane found inside the house in Elara killed themselves. They were not murdered. He said they did it because they did not want to be taken away from their loved ones. Thane thinks of the girl with desert flowers in her brown hair. Officer Scylla said it was her wedding day. Thane cannot help but wonder whether Aris will make the same decision. He does not want to find out.

  Apollina looks at her watch and says, “The drugs should be in full effect soon. Then we can begin the procedure.”

  She pushes a button and speaks. “Date: Monday, March ninth, one thirty p.m. Subject: Metis of Lysithea. Procedure: Dreamcatcher.”

  Thane cannot stand being there any longer and walks out of the room. He needs to find Officer Scylla—any one of them—before the Interpreter can put her claws on Aris. He brings his watch up. Before he can speak, he sees the man in the brown fedora walking toward him.

  “Hello, Thane. I need to speak with you.”

  “Officer Scylla, I need your help. The Interpreter is going to use the Dreamcatcher on Aris, and she didn’t do anything to warrant it. You have to stop it.”

  “That’s why I’m here.”

  Thane notices a book in Officer Scylla’s hand. The cover is faded. Thane can barely read the title.

  Love in the Time—

  Thane’s breath catches in his throat. He thought the book did not exist. He thought Metis lied.

  The officer holds it up. “You were looking for this, weren’t you?”

  Thane does not answer. He takes a step back and wonders what is happening. He feels as if he were in a weird dream.

  The man in the brown fedora says, “One of the responsibilities my brothers and I were entrusted with is to protect this book at all cost. This old book existed long before I was born. And it will exist long after I’m dead. Do you know why?”

  Thane shakes his head.

  “Because he can’t live without her,” Officer Scylla says.

  Thane cannot understand him. Does he mean Metis? But it does not make sense. Nothing makes sense.

  “I’m afraid we both may have strayed too far from our intentions,” Officer Scylla says. “We all want to keep peace in the Four Cities, but the Interpreter Center has been erasing people’s dreams without their consent. That’s not sanctioned by the Planner. The problem is, everyone whose dreams were erased is dead. I have no proof.”

  Officer Scylla is right, Thane thinks. He is far from his intention. When he first accepted Professor Jacob’s request for help, all he wanted to do was keep peace and the Four Cities safe. He did not know the path he took would lead to Benja being dead and Aris hating him. He needs to make amends, even if Aris could never forgive him.

  “If I help you, will you make sure Aris will be unharmed?” Thane asks.

  “I’ll do everything in my power.”

  “Then you have me. I know everything.”

  The Officer smiles. “Now let’s go fix this.”

  The first image appears on the copper-colored cloud. It is of her and Metis sitting side by side at a piano. They are in Metis’s Victorian home. It’s dark except for the flickering candles that make shadows play on the walls. There is no sound, but Aris knows what song is being played.

  Aris is determined not to cry. She does not want the pain to leak out of her. She needs it inside to cement this moment in her memories.

  The door opens. She looks over her shoulder and sees Officer Scylla. Next to him is Thane, the man she once considered a friend. Loathing bubbles beneath her skin. She turns away to look back at the copper cloud.

  “What do you want?” she asks, her voice hard.

  �
�You need to come with us,” Thane says.

  She ignores him.

  “Please, Aris,” Thane says. “I know you hate me, but this is for your own safety. You need to come with Officer Scylla if you don’t want your dreams erased.”

  “No. I’m not going anywhere. I can’t leave Metis here alone,” she says.

  “I know you don’t believe me, but dreams are portals to the past.” She points to the cloud. “You know, I don’t remember that memory, but it happened. And now Metis won’t have it either. I’m going to lose him like I did Benja, and I will never let myself forget how much I hate you.”

  Suddenly the image on the cloud cuts to black. Aris wonders if it is all over. Has the Interpreter erased all of Metis’s dreams?

  The Interpreter enters the room. Her usually emotionless face is filled with rage. The skin pulls taut on her face, making her look as if she is being suffocated by a thin plastic mask. Professor Jacob appears next to her. He is staring at Thane with disappointment in his eyes. Aris regards the old professor in his fake glasses and wonders how she ever thought he was brilliant.

  “What are you doing with my patients?” the Interpreter asks. She looks at Thane as if she wants to tear him to pieces.

  “They’re not your patients,” Thane says. “They don’t belong here.”

  Officer Scylla says, “You’ve been erasing dreams without consent. That’s not legal.”

  Apollina squares her shoulders. “All my patients agreed to undergo the Dreamcatcher procedure. What proof do you have?”

  “He has my words,” Thane says. “I told him everything I did for you and this place. The spying. The lying. The stealing.”

  “How dare you use those foul words to describe what we’ve entrusted you to do in the name of peace!” Apollina screams. “Our responsibility is to the Four Cities. To the vision of the Planner.”

  Officer Scylla pulls out a silver bracelet and advances toward the Interpreter. “You should not use the Planner’s name to advance your illegal activities. Your actions led to, whether you meant them to or not, the deaths of several citizens of the Four Cities. I’m not going to ask again. Stop the procedure on Metis and release him and Aris to me.”

  The Interpreter steps back. “Under whose authority?”

  “The highest.”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  On a screen that spans the dimensions of the wall is a face ravaged by time. The Planner, the world creator, presides over the large white room like a Titan from Greek mythology. The wrinkles on his skeletal face fold in on each other like stained parchment. Veins rise on his temples, resembling the gnarled limbs of an ancient oak tree. His hair and beard are as white as the mountain of salt on the edge of the Four Cities.

  His eyes are the only things that appear untouched by age. They stare at the wispy image of the Crone as if she were the only being that exists in the room. In the world.

  They have been here countless times before. It is a game of cat and mouse that ends with each cycle, only to begin again in the next.

  “Must you keep them here until Tabula Rasa?” the Crone asks.

  “It’s for their own good while the Officer Scyllas straighten out all the mess they were a part of.”

  “What will happen to them?”

  Metis’s face is smooth and expressionless. Aris is next to him, silent in forced slumber. Their bodies are in reset mode. They will not wake again until the Planner allows them to. It is his way.

  The Crone wonders what is going on inside their heads. There is no conclusive data on what happens to the human mind while it is resetting. But there are parts of the brain Tabula Rasa cannot touch. She knows. It is what she has been devoting her life to protect.

  “In six days, they will be brought to the hospitals—he in Lysithea and she in Callisto. As it has always been. They’ll wake up to new lives,” the Planner says.

  The ancient woman looks up at the owner of the voice. Emotions dance inside his clear deep-brown eyes like fireflies on a warm night. She fears she will not be able to contain her own feelings, so she shifts her gaze to the bed where Metis and Aris lie unconscious.

  “They should stay together. It’s the right thing to do,” she says.

  “You know that’s not protocol.”

  “What the Interpreter Center did was not protocol,” the Crone says. “Your Interpreter took some of Metis’s dreams. I think we should even out the score a little and make it fair. All you have to do is assign the couple to the same city, the same hospital room. The rest will be up to them.”

  “They mean a lot to you?” the Planner asks.

  She turns toward her husband on the screen. “They mean nothing to you. What are two people to the Four Cities?”

  “You should know better than most what two people can do.”

  They hold each other’s gaze for a long while. His penetrating stare makes her feel vulnerable. Once upon a time, it made her feel loved. The thought saddens her. She turns her back to him and sighs.

  “Without their memories, they’re not a threat. It was their separation that started all this.”

  “Just as Absinthe is not a threat?” he asks.

  “It’s only a tool to help remember. Like Tabula Rasa is a tool to make people forget.”

  “The mind needs to be wiped,” he says, “Like a room full of clutter. Tabula Rasa cleans it of prejudices and hate. With the mind a blank slate, everyone can be free from the burden of their past and move forward unchained.”

  The glow around the Crone intensifies, brightening the white room with the power of a hundred stars.

  “Spare me your propaganda. It’s a concoction of your belief. What you think people should be. It’s not who we are. We need our memories. They’re a part of us.”

  “We’re still humans—just the best parts distilled in four-year increments. Our ideal selves,” the Planner says.

  “Our ideal selves,” repeats the Crone in disbelief, “A people without the ability to learn from mistakes, without the love of another to smooth out our edges. A civilization of sleepwalkers.”

  “We’ve had hundreds of years of peace. Isn’t that proof enough?”

  “A hollow peace. This is your vision of paradise. Not mine. You’ve made this place into a prison with death the only way out.”

  A pained expression crosses the Planner’s face. How can his wife not see it? He is the wall that stands between the Four Cities and its demise. The Last War destroyed the Old World—a fearful world. A civilization of people so afraid of losing what they had that they saw one another as enemies. A world where people had their whole life to accumulate prejudices and harbor hatreds. A lifetime to develop a taste for power and build empires.

  He fears that side of human nature. He created Tabula Rasa so another atrocity would never happen. No memories. No attachment. No possession. No one needs to fight, because no one owns anything or remembers owning them. A utopia of amnesiacs. One of life’s greatest paradoxes. But it is his to protect.

  The Crone looks at her husband from the corner of her eye. She loves him still. For his idealism. For his faults. He is still her Eli. The guardian of those precious few who are left. But the only way he knows how to love something is to control it.

  She wants to tell him control is an illusion. Even in the precisely designed perfection the Four Cities created, based on an ideology so beautiful it was a song, it will all come tumbling down. Maybe not soon, but one day.

  It has happened throughout history—ancient Egypt, ancient Greece, ancient Rome; the Mongol Empire, the Ottoman Empire; Russia, the United States, China. Powerful kingdoms, dynasties that spanned millennia, wealthy countries with military might—they all collapsed under the weight of time and at the destructive hands of humans. She knows this, but she lets him dream. With luck, they both will be gone long before the walls of the Four Cities collapse.


  She looks at the two lovers. There is something in Aris and Metis that inspires hope in her. They did not want to light the world on fire with change. They simply wanted each other. If each human chooses one another, humanity may endure.

  They remind her of herself and Eli when they were younger. It is too late for her and him to be together. But not for them.

  “It was being apart that led them here,” she says. “That led us here. Haven’t we been doing this long enough?”

  The lines between Eli’s eyes fold like a curtain. When he decided to leave Earth and his wife, he severed a part of himself. A part that was weak and possessive. And he is better for it. He can see the true meaning of life. There is no life in death. To live is to survive. And he will live.

  He is no longer hindered by a physical body. Without it, he is free. Just as she is. Both are digital essences of themselves because he could not bear the thought of life without her. Though he knows she may never forgive him for it.

  Now they are on opposing sides. He as the enforcer of order. She as the catalyst for change. She speaks of the “right thing to do.” For him, that has always been to protect the Four Cities at all costs. Except one. He can never hurt her. Even if she will be his undoing.

  “Are you tired of this life?” he asks, his voice gentle.

  “Just as you have your vision, I have mine.”

  “It’s futile. Tabula Rasa can never be stopped. It’s life. Like breathing, eating, making love. It will continue to happen until the world perishes.”

  There is no escaping Tabula Rasa. She knows. A long time ago Eli won. She and the Resistance watched helplessly as he succeeded in genetically engineering the next generation of humans to forget. The stealer of memories is embedded inside every citizen of the Four Cities. It is his fail-safe against the wicked side of humanity. But they can still dream.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  The sound of birds chirping comes from somewhere outside the warmth of the Victorian house on the hill. Spring is here. Through the windows, a woman sees tiny green buds peeking out from the tips of the otherwise barren branches, readying to unfurl from their long restful hibernation. Right on time. Just as the Planner intended.