by Joan He
Then Celia rises out of the chair. Celia—not me. I’m still sitting as she stands, cleaving from me like an exorcised soul. I rise behind her, and watch as she walks, hair longer than mine, swishing with every stride out of the operating room, through the body shop. Even terminally ill, her brain jacked up on pills, she walks with a confidence that causes the conscious clientele to turn and look at her.
It’s the walk of someone who knows their place in the world.
And for once, she really does. I know, as Celia leaves GRAPHYC, that the last of her fear has vanished. This is her choice—to spend her final days under the open sky, breathing the air billions before her and billions after her will breathe, carried away by the amniotic blue. Living this lifetime to the fullest, even at the very end, in hopes Kay can live hers.
• • •
I sit in the tub until the water goes cold.
All this time, I thought it was about Kay. Her life versus mine. But now, with this final memory—one so clearly manufactured by my brain, nonexistent on Celia’s original Intraface—I realize Kay is not my choice.
I step out of the tub, and peer into the mirror upon the sink. I see her face. The girl I was built to look like. She stole my freedom of mind. I should hate her. But I can’t hate someone I understand. And I understand her, better than anyone. Better than even her sister.
I wish I could speak to her. I know she thinks she’s shallow, growing up with a mom like Genevie and a sibling like Kay, one a leader in the outside world, the other able to think up entire universes. Compared to them, Celia thinks of her seemingly outsized life as frivolous. I wish I could tell her she’s wrong. She’s brave. Strong. Her empathy is a well so deep it knows no bottom. Her grit is inexhaustible. Before I had a part of her name, I had her strength to crawl out of the water. I have her capacity for love, and I haven’t wasted it. I love U-me. I love Hubert. I love M.M. I’d love Hero too, given more time. I love the tang of sea wind on my face and the damp of the sand between my toes. I even love this island, believe it or not, and I love the idea someone else did too, a thousand years ago.
I’d love my sister, if I had one.
I don’t.
I may never know if Kay deserves to live more than me.
But I know this: No one enters this world by choice. If we’re lucky, we can choose how we leave.
I saw how Celia chose. I bore witness to how she used her final moments to be true to herself. A protector. She protected her sister, and now she’s not here to do it again, and it’s my turn, and I choose her. The one person who didn’t receive all of Celia’s unconditional love, who was here for me, through these last three years, before U-me and before Hero. A girl dead to the world, but she lives on in my brain and heart. She was looking for meaning. For something bigger than her. I can give that to her. I can find her. A girl lost at sea.
Not anymore.
KASEY CROUCHED AT THE END of the starting platform, waiting for the beep.
On your mark—
I STAND AT THE END of the sunken pier, watching the waves ripple into the fog. U-me rolls beside me. I smile at her. “Stay, U-me.”
BEEP.
WITH U-ME TO BEAR WITNESS, I step off the planks, into the water.
BUT KASEY DIDN’T JUMP.
As the mock swim meet went on without her, she stared at the approaching person, her face a haze like it’d been at Kasey’s party.
Yvone Yorkwell.
“Hey,” said the girl as she neared, in a swimskin like Kasey. “Bad timing, I know, but I’m pretty sure this is the only period we share and—”
“Less chitchatting, more swimming!” called their gym instructor from across the pool.
“—I just wanted to say, I watched your speech.”
Kasey felt her toes curl against the pebbled rubber of the starting platform.
“And it really resonated,” Yvone rushed to say. “So, let me know if there’s anything I can do. To contribute to the effort.”
Their gym instructor started walking over.
“There is no effort.” None Kasey was still a part of. P2C wouldn’t be expecting her return as a junior officer; she’d served her time, making a mockery of their trust on the international stage during it. Meridian and Kasey hadn’t spoken since that day in Territory 4, and as for Actinium, Kasey had deleted him as a contact while leaving GRAPHYC. She hadn’t looked back. That didn’t mean she didn’t regret her path. It’d been easy to refuse him in the moment, but harder to convince herself now—back in school, her environment mostly unchanged, surrounded by peers who didn’t understand her—that she was brave enough, human enough, simply enough to impact a world she, herself, often felt so distant from.
“There is no effort,” Kasey repeated when Yvone didn’t leave. Then, before their instructor could tell them again: “I have to swim.”
She jumped. The world roared, then went silent.
The water closed over Kasey’s head.
I SWIM.
KASEY DIDN’T SWIM.
She sank to the bottom and curled into the fetal position.
Actinium had claimed she was running away. The opposite: Her life had come to a standstill in the weeks since, and with no one to hide behind, or to take the reins for her, she’d been forced to face herself—her thoughts, choices, and mistakes.
She’d made so many mistakes.
But underwater, she could just be.
Thoughtless.
Formless.
When she opened her eyes, the colors were muted but still complex. She carried Celia’s heartbeat with her, yes, but also her own. It was a strong heartbeat, amplified by the pool. Efficient, like her mind. Too efficient, perhaps. A flaw, by the standards of humanity, and also evidence of it. A machine would have been perfectly designed. A creature with no self-awareness would have known no insecurity. This nagging sense of incompletion, like a puzzle piece misplaced, had to be the immeasurable quality Celia was talking about, its shape and size different for everyone but its existence—this absence—uniting them. All of them.
Even her and Yvone.
Kasey located the classified P2C file in her Intraface and stared at it, just like she’d stared at the folder containing Celia’s memories this morning before school. After a while, she’d taken the memories out of her brain. Loaded them onto an external chip. Waited for the sacrilegious feeling to settle, then placed the chip in her pocket.
Celia was dead.
Other people were still alive.
Kasey might never relate to them.
But science served the living, not the dead. It didn’t care that it was Yvone’s face at the bottom of the P2C file. Yorkwell Companies, family-owned and headquartered in Territory 3, had caused the leak while shutting down their outdated deep-sea mines as a part of their immigration deal into the eco-city. Involuntary manslaughter, you could call it. Well-intentioned, not that intentions should matter.
But consequences couldn’t be changed. Only prevented.
Kasey closed the file. Deleted it. Felt bad for a moment, for not feeling more affected. Maybe she was forgiving Yvone too easily. Maybe she was betraying Celia’s memory. Then she reminded herself of her choice—to live, as herself, for herself.
She was no lesser for feeling less.
She freed the pressure mounting in her chest. Carbon dioxide bubbled from her nose, drifting to the surface where it belonged. Where she did, too. With or without a team behind her, she’d make good on her final promise to Celia. It’d start here, with emerging into a world that needed her every bit as much as it’d needed her sister.
“I THOUGHT I MIGHT FIND you here.”
Over the waves. Over the wind. A ghostlike voice that, for a nanosecond, made Kasey forget who she was and where.
Then she remembered.
• • •
TWENTY MINUTES EARLIER
“You’re certain?”
Kasey asked from Leona’s porch, where she stood after turning down tea inside. In T-minus twenty
-nine hours, Operation Reset would go into effect en masse. Before then, she had thirty-some things to do, and double-checking that Leona didn’t want reconstruction bots installed on this island wasn’t one of them.
“I have the shield,” Leona said, and Kasey felt her face harden.
“It won’t last.” Her voice, over the years, had deepened. People didn’t listen to reason but rather authority, even if that authority was as superficial as putting on a steely persona and a white coat. “It might self-maintain for a century.” Two, maximum. “But then it’ll deteriorate.” And though the island wouldn’t disappear, like so many others during the arctic melt, it wouldn’t be spared by the elements. “Nothing will look the same,” Kasey insisted, doing her best to drive the point home for Leona.
“We’ll rebuild.”
“It’ll be difficult.” A ding from her Intraface, notifying her of an impending meeting. Kasey blinked it away. “You might not have any aid.”
“I’m not afraid,” Leona said with her own hint of steel.
Kasey’s mouth opened. And shut.
They were no longer talking about this island, but the person who haunted it.
Actinium was gone by the time Kasey returned to GRAPHYC, six months after her last visit. The unit at the top of the stairs had been stripped bare, like his brain with regard to memories of Kasey and their solution. But he did not forget his ways. A year and a half later, he would assassinate the premier of Territory 2, coincidentally (or not) the territory that’d pledged the fewest number of delegates during their PR circuit. Since then, a string of murders—from CEOs in unsustainable industries to average citizens with below-average ranks—had all been linked to him. The Worldwide Union had assembled a task force to catch him, and when intel traced Actinium visiting the island, the whole of it and its residents had fallen under surveillance.
Through it all, Leona’s brown hair seemed to gray before Kasey’s eyes. Still, the woman refused to heed Kasey’s warnings—that Actinium wasn’t just a menace to society, but to Leona as well. If she believed she could rehabilitate him, just like this island, then she was gravely mistaken.
But what use was logic? It ended where love began.
“Any contact with him must be reported,” Kasey now reminded Leona, the words made trite by repetition.
Leona replied by taking a hold of Kasey’s hand. Kasey stiffened. She was surrounded by people at any given moment, but everyone—her lab included—was held at a respectable arm’s length.
“You’ve worked hard, Kasey.”
As a servant of science, she’d only done what it had asked of her.
“We’re all very grateful.”
She was as numb to gratitude as she was to death threats. It came with the job.
“Without you,” Leona continued, “so many wouldn’t have this second chance.”
“Too many already won’t.” After dropping out of school, it’d taken Kasey nearly a year to find an innotech company willing to sponsor her, then another year to convince the Worldwide Union and P2C to trust her once more. Three years to secure global commitment to Operation Reset, one to devise a system to enforce universal participation. Total time elapsed: six years. Disasters suffered: two more megaquakes, three tsunamis, and countless category five hurricanes. Dead: 760 million. Eco-cities had opened their doors to refugees on a rank-blind basis, but the corrective action came too late, and at a cost. Physiological illnesses, once eradicated by the Coles, spiked again with population density, and mental health declined when holo requirements exceeded the recommended maximum in an effort to reduce overcrowding.
If only consensus had been reached sooner; opportunity cost calculations performed faster. But Kasey had come to accept inefficiency as a symptom of the human condition, and the frustration in her chest was an ember of its former self, dying out as Leona squeezed her hand.
“You did the best you could do. Celia wouldn’t want you to blame yourself.”
Celia. After Operation Reset’s failure, Kasey had come to the island, alone. She and Leona had traveled past the levee to watch Francis John Jr. repair the boat. What Kasey remembered of those days: summer, sunlight green through the trees, the screams of the O’Shea twins nearby as they played in Francis’s pool. Then came fall. The boat was finished, and something in Kasey finally healed. She knew this because hearing Celia’s name no longer brought a lump to her throat.
“I have to go,” she now said to Leona. She eased her hand free. Headed down the porch. A copterbot awaited her on the beach. Ding—the meeting had begun without her. That was fine. It’d been low-priority anyway, thought Kasey, then stopped short of the copterbot.
Maybe she did have time to spare.
One minute, she told herself, allowing her feet to choose her destination. They brought her to the pier. A peaceful place to soak in the sea and wind, except it was hard to soak in anything when her Intraface chimed with constant notifications—messages from her lab, from P2C, interview requests, and more. She answered the urgent ones, flagged others, then checked the feeds out of habit. Meridian Lan’s talk show was trending. Kasey caught the tail end to a clip.
“—polluted Earth. But what about privilege?” Meridian sat on a scarlet couch, opposite her cohost. “Those who industrialized first set rules for others. Territories behind the curve were expected to adopt clean energy and advance their societies after centuries of exploitation.”
“And can you really even call yourself clean if you’re just moving manufacturing out of your own backyard and into Territory Four’s?” added the cohost.
“Took the words right out of my own mouth.”
“Now here’s a name the world knows: Kasey Mizuhara, CSO of Operation Reset. Would you say she’s an example of the privileged?”
“Absolutely,” said Meridian. “And I think she’s playing at savior.”
It wasn’t untrue. Example of a “savior” thing Kasey had done: Before moving out of the Mizuhara unit and severing contact with David, she’d forwarded him the Lans’ relocation application, reminding him that she could reveal P2C’s cover-up of Yorkwell Companies at will. She had no intentions of actually following through—couldn’t, seeing as she no longer had the file—and she also had no intentions of telling Meridian. They’d never restored their friendship. Correspondence. Relationship. Whatever you called it. In retrospect, Kasey saw its one-sidedness—saw it even back then, but hadn’t spoken up. Like so many areas of her life, she’d been content to let others set the terms. Was she at fault? Was Meridian? Kasey didn’t think so. In that lunchroom eleven years ago, they’d been children still. They’d grown out of each other and into themselves. Into science, for Kasey, and punditry for Meridian. Kasey felt no ill will toward her. Not all molecules were meant to bond.
She closed the feed and took one last look at the scenery around her. The minute was up. If Leona didn’t agree to reconstruction bots, then the pier would surely sink. So be it. It served no practical purpose, and besides, it was here that Kasey was reminded most of the foolish girl she’d been, so unsure of herself, she’d borrowed the emotions of someone else. Here, that she could still hear his voice, over the waves—
A voice. Right now.
It came over the waves.
What were the chances? High enough for Kasey to turn, but low enough for her to wonder if she was hallucinating. Or if she’d been hacked.
The probabilities of either, unfortunately, were even lower. As a public figure, her biomonitor filled her bloodstream at any given moment with nanobots to fight off bio-terrors. Her retina, brain, and DNA down to her skin cells were protected by anti-hack technology. She was a fortress. Opaque, in every sense of the word.
Unlike Actinium. Standing at the end of the pier, his holograph half transparent. Kasey tried tracing a lead to his physical body. No luck. Her teeth gritted, temples tensing, the words he’d said echoing through her head.
I thought I might find you here.
“It was a good trick,” he sai
d, approaching. In addition to growing more secure over the years, holographs had advanced visually. Actinium’s managed to capture the way the wind moved through his hair—longer now, grown out of its part, bangs in disarray. He was thinner, his features gaunt. His black trench coat hung off him, the front open to a white T-shirt that clung to his ribs. A five o’clock shadow darkened his jaw, but his eyes hadn’t changed. When they hit Kasey, she felt like she was looking into a mirror, and even though he wasn’t real, she found herself taking a step back right as he said, “But everyone knows to back up their files.”
What files? But Kasey didn’t need to ask.
For six years, she’d operated under the assumption that whatever Actinium did, it was without his memories of her. Of them. Now, to know he hadn’t forgotten—he’d only let her think so—
“What a waste of space,” Kasey deadpanned. So she’d failed. Actinium? He’d just given up his advantage by revealing that fact. She still had the edge. Operation Reset would still go into effect. This turmoil inside of her—these feelings of resentment, joy, humiliation, relief—were perverse and overblown, like all emotions.
He was one soul, compared to the billions relying on her.
“Still playing down your self-worth,” said Actinium, walking ever closer.
“I know my worth without you saying so.”
“Then you’ve changed.”
And he hadn’t. Mentally, certainly, and physically when compared to the latest Wanted ad—not that Kasey would ever admit to looking at them. “What are you here for? To gloat over my oversight?” she asked, taking a step back.
“Partly.” He stopped exactly 3.128 meters away, according to her Intraface. “Mostly to tell you that you’ll fail.”
Impossible. Kasey’s mind ran through the scenarios. The stasis pods were guarded around the clock; their original plan of engineering them with a permanent lock, triggered by rank, was no longer feasible. There was the barometer technology, but even if Actinium could replicate it, manipulate it to wake him before everyone else, then what? The population’s pods were unbreachable without Kasey, as re-habitator zero, and Kasey’s pod would only open upon being found by her bot, programmed to take her out of stasis regardless of Act—