Someone to Remember Me: The Anniversary Edition

by Brendan Mancilla

  “I can still try,” Eight insisted, ignoring the insult.

  “Try? What do you think you can do? Do you have a cure to suicidal tendencies? At one point or another each person in this station called him a liar. What would any of us do if we were subjected to that? I wouldn’t keep playing the game. I’d use my first opportunity to tell you all to go to hell and die a last death,” Twenty raged, his fury crashing over his audience.

  It bothered him that they cared now, only when the population of the human race had deflated to a meager twelve. Their desires were greedy and hypocritical: save Seven to save themselves, to save their numbers. Twenty was not a mathematician but he felt confident in saying that twelve people could not repopulate a race.

  “Those memories of his were a warning. We ignored them and everyone died,” he slowed his rant to a stop. He, Null, and Ninety-Nine awaited Eight’s calculated retaliation.

  “You’re right, Twenty. Absolutely right. I ignored his warnings and now Seven’s desires are the wishes of a depressed, unhinged, suicidal mind that is trashed beyond repair. He has reached an unreachable place where what he wants most is what nobody wants to give him: everlasting death.”

  “But what can be done about it?” Null asked once she’d swallowed the shock of Eight admitting her mistake. “When we leave, Seven will be here alone. He can tell Provence not to wake him up and kill himself. Nine says that the others are already restless and want to leave. I agree with them: staying here means a half-existence. Out in the world we have a chance at a real life.”

  “And so we leave Seven here?” Twenty challenged her.

  “If he wants to die where he was created then that’s his choice!”

  “It’s a dumb choice!” Twenty argued.

  “Seven doesn’t seem to think so! And if we force Seven to think otherwise, are we any better than the people who created us?” Null argued Twenty to a draw. From the corner of his eye he saw Eight and Ninety-Nine share a hasty glance. Obviously, this meeting was to discuss a plan of action, not debate the problem.

  “Null, we can’t let that happen to Seven. We can’t let him lay down and die,” Eight warned her.

  Null closed her eyes. “I know. I know. I was...just my thoughts...said them without thinking...”

  “It’s okay,” Eight assured her.

  “Then what do we do? Do we hit him over the head and drag him away with us? Do we put him through some homemade therapy?” Null asked.

  “We are going to give Seven what he wants: release. Ninety-Nine and I have come up with a way of doing that,” Eight gestured to Ninety-Nine. Surviving the end of the world did little to change Ninety-Nine’s pale skin or small frame. Twenty felt the twinge of desire laced with regret.

  “After what we have seen today, I think each of us knows that a life without death is meaningless. Nobody wants to stay here, being reborn endlessly until Rose Garden’s lights finally go out. We need to leave. We must give meaning to our lives.” She typed into the computer a series of commands that caused the great screen to illuminate and depict schematics of the cloning machinery. “Seven has made up his mind to die. He will not be dissuaded. Our solution is to kill him.”

  Twenty bit his tongue. He knew that they would never agree to let Seven die; yet their plan depended on it. Ninety-Nine called up a schematic of Rose Garden’s underground antenna array. She narrated her examination of it.

  “When we die, this facility uses a unique type of receiver to capture our memories as they escape into the ether. I have written a code that will hold Seven’s memories in the memory stream when he dies. A fraction of his memories will trickle into his new body, as required by the system, but in effect Seven will wake up with no significant remembrance of himself.”

  “Like water behind a dam. You’re holding his memories here but letting out enough to move his consciousness into the new body,” Null surmised.

  “Yes. When Seven wakes up, he will be as new and independent as possible. In his new life he will have the opportunities he was deprived of in this one. Free of Haven, free of the War of the Begotten. Free of his own legacy.”

  Twenty listened, keeping his opinion to himself. Horror and admiration competed to be voiced but he subdued them both. He settled on his final position: it sounded too good to be true.

  Eventually he said, “Then do it.”

  Eight stepped forward, relieving Ninety-Nine of the attention given by Null and Twenty.

  “It would fail, don’t you see? Seven would wake up here surrounded by people trying to keep a secret from him. He would come back to a world filled with as many lies as the one he left behind.” Understanding dawned on Twenty as he figured out exactly what Eight wanted to do.

  She was brilliant but also insane. She was everything that a person scrambling to order a disordered world would be. He hated her for her genius but admired her for the compassion she meant to show Seven through her proposed act of madness.

  “You want us all to do it,” he guessed.

  Ninety-Nine spoke up, cutting Eight off before she could reply. “An end with no journey inherently lacks value and a journey with liars is no journey at all.” Ninety-Nine typed in another series of commands and a map of Haven appeared. “I’ve come up with a plan to deposit new bodies for each of us across Haven. Once that’s finished, we’ll apply the code I wrote for Seven to the four of us. With Rose Garden’s transmitter array reversed, our consciousnesses will be beamed to our new bodies out there minutes after we kill ourselves here.”

  “And then what?” Null asked, her tone drowned by incredulity.

  “Our new selves will reconvene and follow a predetermined trail of clues that I’ve established. Once we get back to Rose Garden, we get on a boat together and leave Haven forever with Nine and the others,” Eight concluded. Her voice met utter silence. “Our best estimates say that the journey from start to finish will take four days.”

  “Let me make sure I understand this. You want us to reset ourselves to the day we were created in an artificial attempt to redevelop our friendship and ensure Seven’s mental wellbeing?” Null laughed, the act itself a dismissal of the idea. “How did you plan to buy the time from the others? Or, because this is the one worth asking, what did you plan to do when I said no?”

  Twenty saw a dangerous expression consume Eight’s face. She answered, “I asked myself that as well. I came to the realization that I have no intention of asking a question whose answer I might not like,” Eight’s glare fixated on Null. “So I made plans of my own. Plans to vent the air from the other floors in Rose Garden. Plans to have Provence revive and store Nine and the others in stasis. Plans to make sure we return with a psychologically healthy Seven.”

  “You already did it,” Null whispered, horror distorting her face while rage filled her voice. “They’re dead already! Aren’t they?”

  “As soon as you arrived,” Eight confirmed.

  Twenty felt the last shreds of rationality being pulled from his collapsed world.

  “My husband had to die so that we could fix your damned boyfriend?” Null bellowed, slamming Eight to the ground. Twenty wondered if the right choice was to drag Null away, which was what he did, or to let her continue assaulting Eight. “Nobody here did anywhere near as much damage to Seven as you!” she roared, fighting against Twenty to reach Eight. “Where did you get the right to punish the rest of us for your mistakes? If Seven wants to die then let him die!”

  Twenty finally dragged Null a safe distance from Eight. Without a doubt in his mind Eight deserved to be torn to pieces. Null was crying violently as she rocked herself against Twenty, raging through the knowledge that Eight’s plan was already in motion. Twenty marveled at how Ninety-Nine, the veritable architect and enforcer, went unscathed by Null’s temper.

  “It had to happen this way,” Ninety-Nine chirped through watery eyes. “Don’t you understand? The others had to die first so that they could keep their memories. The code I’ve entered into the system for Seven a
nd the rest of us will become irreversible because by the time we get back here, I won’t know how to remove it.”

  “Eight, you’re destroying another relationship so that you can have your own?” Twenty snarled, ignoring Ninety-Nine.

  Eight shook her head. “Everyone here possesses certain attributes that will dramatically increase this plan’s chances at success,” she explained as she wiped blood away from her cut lip. “Null’s expert architectural knowledge, my scientific background, Ninety-Nine’s computational prowess, and your abundant practicality imbue the plan with a level of insurance that it sorely needs.”

  “I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die,” Null groaned. “I want to keep my memories...”

  “The cloning technology must not be allowed to leave Haven. Between the three of us we could build another cloning station in the future, when old age and mortality are much scarier than they are now,” Eight reasoned. “If for no other reason, we must go on this last journey to destroy cloning forever. To wipe out immortality and to finally condemn us all to real, permanent, everlasting death.”

  “Or else this will just keep happening,” Twenty echoed Seven. “Again and again and again.” Null met Twenty’s gaze. There was a question in her bleary eyes, seeking his opinion, and he nodded to her in an vain attempt to reassure her that this was necessary. That they would be trapping themselves in the same cycle if they left with their knowledge of the cloning technology, of how to grant immortality. Whether or not she understood him was inconsequential, since they would be submitting to Eight regardless.

  Null, forcing herself to be calm, gave Eight a murderous glare. In a way, Eight was right. By allowing the technology to exist, by failing to completely destroy the Sphere of the Builders, the Founders had left open a narrow avenue to bring the means of their enslavement back into the world. Tobias Clay had gone down that road. He had created more clones many generations later and triggered the War of the Begotten, unwittingly sentencing Haven to death at the AdvISOR’s hand.

  The plan devised by Eight and Ninety-Nine was already in motion. Twenty and Null could not oppose it, could not hope to prevent it, not with the two smartest people in Rose Garden aligned against them. Any objection or challenge they raised would be countered and eliminated. Or they’d just be killed first.

  Even then, knowing that he was being coerced, Twenty wasn’t sure that he would object even if he could. He had failed Seven once before. He hadn’t helped Seven to save Haven. This was Twenty’s last chance to do something for his friend. This was his last chance to prove, even if Seven never knew it, that someone believed him.

  Renewed hopelessness and futility, coupled with the iron will of her own restraint, kept Null from ending Eight’s current life.

  “You’ve become a bigger monster than Tobias was,” Null spat. She climbed to her feet and purposefully shoved past Eight on the way to the elevator. “Excuse me while I dispose of my husband’s body.”

  “Haven and Earth in ashes burning…” Twenty’s voice drifted away from him with the music, its melody releasing him from the past. The boat sped along on its journey towards the Second Core, which was nearly complete, because he could see the massive hydro-electric power station dominating the Long Reach. Faded afternoon light shone a demure gleam across the sprawling compound, illuminating the mass of silver towers adorned with coils, bolts, and cables.

  Enormous generators dotted the coastline and some were as tall as the residential towers further east. Turbines lined the waterfront with their immense blades languishing in the water. The Second Core’s immensity dwarfed Twenty and his small boat but he turned towards a row of empty docks, identifying them as his point of entry into the industrial complex. A sharp golden flash caught his attention and drew his gaze to the seawall lining the turbines.

  Dotting the top of the wall were metallic golden statues that were vaguely designed in the likeness of men. Twenty, who fancied himself privy to the artistic escapades of Haven prior to the fall, did not recall any live art exhibit occurring at the Second Core. Neither did he recognize the style or sculptor of the statues. Twenty searched his memories, hoping to find some clue or reference to the mysterious adornments atop the Second Core’s seawall when the music returned, uninvited.

  His lips mouthed, “When from skyward we descend…”

  “Are you sure you want to watch this?”

  “If you watched your husband go through this thing, then I think that I can survive watching my friend go through it,” Twenty answered Null.

  “Okay,” she leaned over the controls, entering in the commands required to activate the machinery in the adjacent room. Twenty and his companion were in a featureless room whose walls and roof were as dark as the night outside, high above Rose Garden. On the walls to his left and right, emblazoned in thick yellow script, was the room’s name: RECLAMATION.

  “I don’t think I’ve ever been to Reclamation before,” Twenty muttered.

  “I don’t blame you. The whole Production floor is one stomach-turning room after another,” Null answered, distracted by her work at the computers. Her workstation sat against the far wall ahead of Twenty, opposite from the exit behind him. A broad window above the translucent screens and keyboards allowed the computer’s operator, and any other spectators, to see into Reclamation’s adjoining chamber.

  Reclamation’s purpose was to strategically decompose the bodies of dead clones, vessels without souls, and to return the biological materials to Rose Garden’s cloning machinery. Beyond that, Twenty could not say how the process worked. His wasn’t a mind that was best equipped for the nuances of immortality, for the number-crunching allocation of resources that cloning required, but he trusted Null’s expertise.

  In the second room, the one on the other side of the glass wall, was a table that Seven’s lifeless body lay atop. That room’s walls were stainless steel, shined and lighted to perfection, in stark contrast to the control room’s blackened surfaces and conservative lighting.

  “It couldn’t have been easy to put Nine through this,” Twenty said.

  “I didn’t have much of a choice. I wasn’t going to let Eight or Ninety-Nine touch him.”

  “Thanks for the vote of confidence,” Twenty grunted, noting that her omission of his name was still an implication of guilt.

  “Don’t act so injured. I didn’t ask you for help because I know you’ve been sitting outside Seven’s room for the past two hours.”

  “Ninety-Nine had trouble overriding the lock on his door.”

  “Sure she did.”

  Twenty thought about arguing and decided against it.

  “It’s a good thing I won’t remember any of this or else I’d never forgive Eight,” Null pressed onwards, changing the subject after the silence dragged on for long enough.

  “Forgetting isn’t forgiveness.”

  “No, but if this plan of hers works out then it might as well be.”

  “I wonder if Seven would’ve forgiven me eventually? Forgiven any of us?”

  Null thought about the question before answering. “I doubt it.”

  Twenty nodded.

  “Listen…I want Seven to be okay. I don’t want him to be left behind.” Null confessed, abrupt but honest. “I can’t say that to Eight, not after what she’s done, but at least I can say it to you.” With a final series of keystrokes, Null stepped back from the computer as the Reclamation room came to life. Null’s voice rose over the sounds of machinery when she declared, “I get why she did it. The technology has to die. I only wish that part of me didn’t need to die with it.”

  Twenty heard the confession but his eyes were fixed on the room beyond the glass. Its steel walls, roof, and floor folded away and heavy machinery inched out of the exposed darkness and lumbered towards Seven’s body. Enormous coils, perfectly spiraled, encircled the table holding Seven’s corpse.

  Humming at first, the coils warmed to their purpose, until floor beneath Twenty’s feet shook with the strength of th
eir vibrations. Null did not speak, she did not narrate the dissolution of the body, or how any of the components worked. Twenty was grateful for that but knew that her kindness came from her pragmatism, since any knowledge of the process might be dangerous in the future.

  Seven’s body transformed as everything it was released into the air of the Reclamation room. It was as if the strife and misery of his existence found the relief they needed, finally unbound from the restraints of the soulless body. Clouds of red, blue, brown, and white tugged themselves away from the vaporized body in gentle, but lethal movements. In a second’s time the table was empty and Twenty did not see bone, or blood, or tissue of any kind. Instead, Seven became as light and free as the morning’s mist and the man, broken by the past’s lingering memories and haunted by his shattered hope, ceased to be.

  Once the coils finished collecting the salvaged materials they retracted into the darkness and the empty silver walls returned. No sign of Seven survived the process and it was if he had never been in the room. It was as if, Twenty realized uncomfortably, Seven had never existed at all.

  “It’s almost beautiful,” a morose Null observed.

  “Almost,” Twenty agreed.

  Null sighed and led Twenty out of Reclamation. In the hallway, he asked her, “What’re you going to do now?”

  “There isn’t much left to do. I’ll move Nine and the others aboard the yacht. They’ll be safe there until they wake up.” Null paused, her voice drifting away with her thoughts, at the mention of her temporarily deceased husband. Technically, Twenty reminded himself, Nine was dead anymore but in stasis. When Twenty and the others returned, reborn but amnesia-stricken, none of them would recognize Nine or the others. “Ninety-Nine says reversing the transmitter array might cause a system failure. She says Provence could go offline.”

  “What?” Twenty demanded, alarmed. Rose Garden was supposed to be their safety net; the place they would return to if they died out in the city. “But that means that we might actually be mortal before we leave Haven.”