by John Saul
“This isn’t happening,” Frank Carlson breathed. “This can’t possibly be real.”
On the screen Amy’s eyes shifted as if she were actually looking at him. “But it is real, Daddy,” she said. “It’s really me. I can’t even tell you how it all works. It’s sort of like the computer is my body now. I know how to use it, and make it work, and do what I want it to do.”
“No!” Margaret Carlson cried, rising to her feet and taking a step toward the tank. “Well get you out of there! There has to be something—”
“There’s not, Mama,” Amy said, her voice cutting through the torrent of words spilling from her mother. “I’ve thought about it a lot. But it isn’t possible. I’ve studied everything, and nobody can put my brain back into a body. There’s too many things no one knows. And even if someone could do it, it would mean that someone else would have to die so I could have their body.” For the first time her voice took on a note of anger. “It wouldn’t be any different from what Dr. Engersol did to Adam and me.”
“No!” Margaret said again, as if the word itself could dispel the truth of what Amy had said. “There has to be something! There has to be a way!”
“There is, Mama,” Amy said softly. “There is something I can do. I can let my brain die.”
Margaret gasped, her eyes shifting to her husband. “What is she saying?” she pleaded. “What does she mean?”
“I can’t live like this, Mama,” Amy went on. “I know what happened to Adam, and to everyone else. Adam changed, Mama. He wasn’t like himself anymore. He started hating everyone, and if Dr. Engersol hadn’t killed him, he could have done anything. He could have gone into any computer anywhere and done anything he wanted. And if my brain stays alive, I could do the same thing.”
“But you could stay here,” Josh protested, instantly grasping what Amy was saying. “If the computer wasn’t hooked to a modem—”
On the monitor Amy’s head shook. “I don’t want to do that, Josh. I don’t want to stay trapped in here forever. So I’m going to go away. I’m going to end this project and go away.”
“No,” Josh wailed. “Don’t die, Amy! Please?”
On the monitor Amy smiled. “You have to understand, Josh. I have to go away now. It’s the only thing I can do.” Her eyes moved, seeming to fix once more on her mother. “I love you, Mama,” she said softly. “And I’m glad you came. At least I get to say good-bye to you.”
Margaret clutched once more at her husband’s arm. “Stop her, Frank,” she begged. “Don’t let her do it!”
But Frank Carlson, who had been listening carefully to his daughter, shook his head. “It’s all right, Amy,” he said quietly. “Do whatever you have to do, and remember that we love you. We always did, and we always will.”
Amy’s smile faded away. “I love you, too, Daddy,” she whispered. Then, as the people gathered in the room watched, her image faded slowly away. A moment later alarms sounded as the equipment supporting Amy’s brain began to shut down.
“Do something!” Margaret Carlson screamed. “For God’s sake, someone do something!”
Instantly, Josh went to work, his fingers flying over the keyboard as he tried to restore the programs that were dropping out of the computer’s memory banks and the systems that were grinding to a halt as their supporting programs disappeared.
The keyboard failed to respond.
As everyone in the laboratory watched helplessly, Amy Carlson finally died.
EPILOGUE
Josh had been back in Eden for almost a week, and as he started home from school, his mind returned once more to what had happened at Barrington only a few days ago.
He found himself thinking about it more and more, despite the fact that his mother—and everyone else, too—had told him it was better not to think about it, but just to try to forget it.
But how could he just forget it?
He’d been there! He’d seen it!
Seen Hildie’s body in the elevator, and then Dr. Engersol and Jeff, lying on the floor down in the lab.
Adam’s brain, sitting in a puddle of water, dead.
And Amy’s brain, still alive in its tank, still hooked to the computer.
He’d even seen Amy’s brain die.
He’d never seen anyone die before, and the images on the monitors were still vivid in his mind, all their displays gone flat. He’d stared at them for a long time, then his eyes had drifted away from them, fixing instead on the mass of tissue suspended in the tank.
It hadn’t looked any different at all. The folds in the cortex all looked the same, the color was still the same gray hue shot through with the bluish network of blood vessels.
It didn’t seem right.
If Amy was dead, her brain should have looked different.
But it hadn’t, and finally, feeling Alan Dover’s hand on his shoulder, he’d looked up.
“Is she really dead?” he’d asked, his voice shaking.
“I’m afraid so,” the policeman had told him. “Come on. Why don’t you and I go outside? They don’t need us down here anymore.”
Riding up in the secret elevator, Josh had felt a chill go through him as he thought about what had happened to Hildie that morning.
Would he always think about it, every time he got into an elevator for the rest of his life?
When they’d gotten to Dr. Engersol’s apartment, he’d ignored the clanking old elevator that was still waiting at the fourth floor landing, choosing to go down the stairs instead.
“Someone called your mother, Josh,” Alan Dover had told him. “She’ll be here tonight to take you home.”
Josh had barely heard the words, for the emotions he’d held in check all morning had finally overwhelmed him. He began sobbing, throwing his arms around the police officer, despite the fact that all his friends were watching him.
“It’s all right,” Alan Dover had told him. “It’s all over now.”
But it hadn’t been over. He’d spent almost the whole day talking to the policemen, and the doctor, and a lot of people whose names he didn’t even remember. He’d answered all the questions he could, and explained over and over again what had happened when he’d put on the virtual reality mask and seen Adam in the computer. He’d even tried to show them, but when they’d gone up to his room, and he’d set up the computer and put on the mask and the glove, it hadn’t worked.
He knew what had happened: before she’d died, Amy had erased all the programs that Dr. Engersol had set up, all the programs that had let him actually see inside the computer.
For that, he was almost certain, had been what he’d been doing.
It hadn’t been a simulation at all.
The program had been set up so that Adam could show him what it would be like to be inside the computer, to have been part of the world that he and Amy had been taken into.
The world that had given him nightmares and made him feel that he was going insane.
When Josh had finally told them everything he could, and his mother arrived to help him pack his clothes and books, he’d said good-bye to the few kids who were still there.
All day long parents kept arriving at the school, packing things up as quickly as they could, taking their children away. Josh knew why they were doing it, but it still seemed strange to him, since the experiment Dr. Engersol had been working on was destroyed, and Dr. Engersol was dead.
Most of the kids hadn’t even been involved in the experiment. But their parents took them home anyway, saying the same thing his mother had told him: “I knew there was something wrong with this place! Right from the first minute I saw it, I knew something wasn’t right.”
Josh didn’t believe any of them. After all, the school still looked the way it always had, with the big green lawn spread out in front of the mansion, and the towering circle of redwood trees in the center of which he’d first met Amy.
When his mother had finally taken him away, down into the village and the little inn where they were going t
o spend the night, he’d looked back out the rear window as long as he could, knowing that he would never again see the Academy or any of the kids who had been his friends.
When he’d gone to bed that night, in the same room with his mother, he hadn’t been able to fall asleep for a long time.
He’d listened to the surf crashing on the beach below the inn, wondering how long it would be before he heard it again.
And what it was going to be like, going back to his old school in Eden.
There weren’t going to be any classes there like there were at the Academy, and he was going to have to sit quietly all day again, pretending to listen to a teacher talk about things he already knew.
He was going to have to listen to the taunts of all the other kids again, pretend he didn’t care about being teased, pretend it didn’t matter to him that he didn’t have a single friend he could talk to.
But at least no one in Eden would try to do to him what Dr. Engersol had done to Amy and Adam.
Now they were dead, and he was still alive, and going back to Eden.
He’d finally gotten to sleep just before the sun started to come up, and he hadn’t said much on the way home, curling up in the corner of his seat, staring out the window as his mother drove him back out into the desert.
And now, almost a week later, it was almost as if he’d never been away at all.
The desert hadn’t changed; the sun still blazed down out of the sky, the rolling landscape was still barren of everything except sun-baked earth and saguaro.
But now its simple familiarity made it look good to Josh.
School wasn’t quite the same, either; for some reason, he found it easier to pay attention in class, and the teacher didn’t seem to be singling him out anymore.
And today, as he left the school, he fell in beside three of his classmates. Instead of turning away from him, they actually spoke to him. He walked along with them for a while, even went with them to hunt for horny toads.
Finally he arrived home, climbing the stairs to the second floor and the little apartment he’d lived in as long as he could remember.
It wasn’t anything like the Academy had been, but it, too, offered the comforting safety of familiarity. He said hi to Mrs. Hardwick, who held a finger to her lips and pointed to Melinda, who was sleeping in her playpen. As he retreated to his room, Josh wondered why he was supposed to be quiet when the television was blaring loud enough that he’d been able to hear it as he came up the stairs outside.
But even that didn’t make him as mad as it used to. He tossed his books onto his bed, then went to his desk and switched on his computer.
The same computer he’d had at the Academy. They’d let him bring it home with him when he left.
“They’re only doing it so I won’t sue them,” his mother had told him. But she’d let him take it, and hadn’t even argued when he’d insisted on hooking the modem into the telephone line himself instead of waiting for the telephone company to do it.
“If you wreck that phone, I’m taking it out of your allowance,” she’d threatened.
Josh had only grinned. Five minutes later the modem had been working perfectly.
Now he waited as the computer finished its booting cycle, then went into the communications program that would allow him to connect the computer to any others for which he had telephone numbers.
Or to activate a random dialing program that would keep cycling until it made a connection with something.
He sat at the desk, weighing his options, when suddenly the computer beeped softly to alert him that a call was coming in.
Frowning, he waited as the connection was made and the screen cleared in readiness to accept an incoming message.
Instead of a message, an image appeared.
Amy Carlson’s face, grinning at him.
“Hi, Josh,” she said, her voice emerging from the small speaker built into the tank of his computer.
Josh froze for a second, staring at the image.
It wasn’t possible! Amy was dead!
He’d been there when she had died.
He’d watched her die!
But there she was, her blue eyes dancing in her freckled face, her red curls tumbling down over her forehead just the way he remembered them.
“Well, say something!” Amy complained. “I’ll open a message box and you can just type, okay?”
At the bottom of the screen a window opened, and a cursor flashed, inviting him to write something. He hesitated, then tapped the keys:
AMY? WHERE ARE YOU?
On the screen Amy’s grin faded into an enigmatic smile. “I’m everywhere now.”
“You’re dead,” Josh typed. “I saw your brain die.”
Amy nodded. “It did die,” she told him. “But I didn’t. I’m still alive. I just went away.”
Josh’s mind reeled. Away? Where? How? It wasn’t possible!
“How?” he typed.
“It was easy,” Amy told him. “I knew what was going to happen. As soon as Dr. Engersol figured out he couldn’t control us, I knew he’d try to kill us. And I didn’t want to die. So I replicated myself.”
Josh frowned, then typed again:
I DON’T UNDERSTAND!
“Sure you do,” Amy told him, her smile broadening and turning mischievous. “You know how brains work. All they are is big computers. So I copied the whole structure of my brain. The cells and nerves are just like microcircuitry, except they’re a lot more complicated, with billions and billions of connections. But I found out that I could copy them, just like you copy files. So I duplicated myself. All the cells in my brain, and all the nerve connections. And all my memories, too. And it worked, Josh. It works even better than what Dr. Engersol was trying to do, because now I don’t need my brain, either.”
Josh stared at the screen, an icy chill creeping down the back of his neck. Was it really possible? Could she be telling him the truth? Summoning his courage—for he wasn’t certain he wanted to know—he typed his question:
WHERE ARE YOU?
Amy laughed, a crackling sound that was distorted by the tiny speaker in the computer. “I was in the Croyden at the beginning. And one of me is still there. But then I started moving. And now I’m everywhere, Josh. I’m in the biggest computer in the Pentagon, and I’m in the one in the salt vaults where they keep all the bank records. I even sent a copy of myself to a computer in Japan, and one in Germany.”
Josh felt numb. He stared at the image on the screen, and listened to Amy’s voice as she kept talking. His skin began to crawl as he began to understand what had happened.
“I can do anything now, Josh. Anything I want!”
There was a hardness to her voice, and as Josh studied the image on the screen, he saw that her face had changed, too.
No, not her face.
Her eyes.
They seemed to glow on the screen, glinting with something that felt as if it might reach right out of the tube and grasp him.
It had happened! Just as Amy herself had said it would.
Like Adam, she had changed.
She was no longer the Amy he knew.
And she was evil.
As she kept talking, whispering to him that she’d found another place, another project that was just like the one at the Academy, he began to understand what she wanted.
She wanted him.
She was lonely, and she wanted him to come and join her.
Cold fingers of fear clutching at him, Josh reached out and turned the computer off.
An hour later, when his mother came home from work, the machine was sitting on the long balcony, outside the front door.
“Josh?” Brenda said as she came into the apartment. “What’s your computer doing outside?”
From the couch, where he was sprawled out watching television, Josh spoke without looking up. “I don’t want it anymore.”
Brenda frowned. “Don’t want it? Why not? You’ve always been crazy for computers.”
/> Josh looked up at her. “That’s why I don’t want it anymore,” he said. “I don’t want to be crazy.”
Brenda was on the verge of arguing with him, but then a gust of wind blew the curtain over the open window aside, wiping the shadows away from Josh’s face. As she got a clear look at him, Brenda realized that something had happened that afternoon.
Something that she somehow knew Josh would never tell her about.
But it had changed him.
Changed him forever.
For the first time since she’d brought him home from the Academy, Brenda MacCallum knew that her son was going to be all right.
a cognizant original v5 release november 24 2010
About the Author
JOHN SAUL is the author of twenty-eight novels, each a million-copy-plus national bestseller; Suffer the Children, Punish the Sinners, Cry for the Strangers, Comes the Blind Fury, When the Wind Blows, The God Project, Nathaniel, Brainchild, Hellfire, The Unwanted, The Unloved, Creature, Sleepwalk, Second Child, Darkness, Shadows, Black Lightning, The Homing, Guardian, The Presence, The Right Hand of Evil, and The Blackstone Chronicles. John Saul lives in Seattle, Washington.