The Awoken (New Unity Book 1)

by S. M. Lynch

  “Killing, you mean?” he snickered. “Nice work, huh?”

  “Her work was standing up to all the wrong in this world. For that, everyone she loved as well as her own safety was in danger.”

  He carried on putting the puzzle together and I hadn’t missed how quickly he was working, his eyes sharper than a cat’s.

  “You’re trying to put me off,” he said absently. “Trying to make me afraid. I’m not afraid of you, Ari. Or anyone you hang with. I’ve been programed to be able to fight. You saw me and Camille.”

  “I saw.”

  “I would not have this so-called mantle for you. Not when we both know I’m the stronger and more capable killer.”

  I laughed. “So, you admit it?”

  “Of course, why wouldn’t I admit it? It’s obvious.”

  I stood up from the bench seating in the window and held out my hand, “Come then, prove to me your power. I dare you.”

  He gave a small smile and carried on with his puzzle, not intimidated. “I would not touch a hair on your head, even in play. I could strike you at the wrong angle and kill you. You couldn’t entice me to fight you, I’d rather die, Ari.”

  Those words took my breath away and I swallowed, hard. I’d managed to get myself together slightly by the time he looked up again, slowly taking in my body with his soft gaze as I stood towering above him. On the other side of the small table we were working on, he was seated on a generous, oversized bean bag, and a part of me knew he couldn’t move off it fast, giving me the advantage should I choose to strike, and yet I knew, also, he was right—he could kill me easily if he struck me in just the right place.

  The way he ate, the way he could keep going and going without much sleep, the strength he demonstrated when we went out running… his body was a weapon, and we both knew it.

  I retook my seat and we continued putting the puzzle together for a while, sitting in comfortable silence. My mind was still whirring, but when was it not?

  “Tell me about your time,” I asked, “what you remember of it, anyway.”

  He took a series of deep breaths and after he’d impressed me by finishing off the bottom right-hand corner of the puzzle (which was mostly black pieces), he tried to seem nonchalant about it all.

  “People didn’t know how lucky they were. It’s odd now I think about it… not so much think… as feel. People could sit outside restaurants in the sunshine… in my America, the one I seem to have up here” – he pointed to his head – “it was all just so… there was so much…”

  “Greed,” I answered.

  He nodded slowly and sighed, then shook his head.

  “My parents, what I remember of them, were so wrapped up in it all. The society events, the big house, two cars, three dogs, impressive kid and dream careers. They were the workaholic types taking barely a week’s vacation a year, and even then, they’d have had their cell phones and laptops with them on the beach.”

  I was so surprised he was telling me all this stuff. I knew he didn’t realize this, but it seemed like whenever he was prompted for information, he would remember stuff and it would spill forth… like my prompts were just unlocking whatever was in there, masked by shadow, lurking at the back of his mind.

  “Don’t talk to me about parents who had it all. Literally, my mom and dad… especially Mom… she had everyone wrapped around her little finger. She had the whole of high society in her thrall and she knew how she could get what she wanted. They may have feared her, but they also respected, admired and adored her. She was the most terrifying beauty alive and the men, especially, often fell foul of her.”

  Kyle gave a wry smile and raised one eyebrow. “Reminds me of someone.”

  I ignored his comment. “I think the only difference is that probably your parents reveled in their high-flying careers. Mom may have loved being Queen Bee, but my father never wanted it… none of it… the responsibility, I mean. It wasn’t his choice; he just knew there was nobody else.”

  “Isn’t that the best type of leader? Someone who can remove their ego from the equation?”

  I laughed, again… that was debatable. “Even someone like my father, a notorious recluse, a shadow… a brooder… even someone like him, eventually, the celebrity aspect of it starts to rub off and they forget themselves. It’s human nature. People keep telling you you’re doing so well, and you are, until you’re not. Being human and all, we all make mistakes… yet even when you’re screwing up, because you’ve got so lofty up there, believing you’ll more than exceed everyone’s expectations, you don’t see the fall coming. Nobody does.”

  “Bill Clinton,” he said, deadpanning.

  His grossed-out expression made me throw my head back laughing. He was so funny when he wanted to be.

  “So… your mother’s killer was never captured?” he said, sadly. “I got that impression anyway when you and Camille talked about her… like your sadness is mingled with some unresolved thing.”

  “No, and it’s painful, I admit. And I don’t know who she pissed off, or why. I could write a list of suspects, though. It’d probably be as long as your arm.”

  “Is this why Camille trained you? To protect yourself.”

  “Maybe,” I whispered, even though I was sure it was because she wanted me to be ready to go up against my own brother.

  “And your father… he doesn’t know why someone came for her?”

  “He might,” I said, pulling a face, “but they were always so… conspiratorial… he wouldn’t tell me even if he did know anything. He’d say it’s to protect me, but really, there could be some dark secret he’d rather I not know.”

  “Interesting.”

  “Certainly never a dull moment among the Hardy’s.”

  “I’m seeing that already,” he said with a sniff, and carried on puzzling.

  He seemed content to be doing something like this, and when he next spoke after a while of quietude, he said absently, “The big difference between your world and mine, from what I’ve seen so far, isn’t that more people are poorer now. People at the bottom have always been poor. Poverty is what it is, indiscriminate really. There will always be those who scramble to get ahead, often at the detriment of others. The difference here is that all people—even the rich—lost hope, so long ago. And yes, in my time, people were greedy in so many ways. But the main way? They just flaunted their freedom. They took it for granted. Every day, people ought to have been kissing the ground they lived on, but they weren’t. Do you know what they were doing?”

  I pondered at his passion when he could seem so calm about it, but obviously full of an opinion, too.

  “Tell me,” I asked.

  “They were ruining the ground they lived on. Digging it up, burning it, filling it with trash. And in all their clamor for prestige, wealth, Western ideals, all that… they never stopped to think, ‘Should we be doing this?’ And moreover,” he said, looking up to stare right into my eyes, searing his message into my soul, “they never saw that their freedoms were being robbed, slowly but surely, right from underneath them. Cell phones, smartphones, these xGen things… how crazy they thought it would be the rise of machines that would kill all hope. Machines don’t force people to become addicted to gaming. I looked it up, you know? Gaming is now worth a trillion earth dollars, more than the film industry, music and streaming giants combined. People have forgotten how to goddamn live in the world they’re in, Ari. Your contemporaries prefer the fake. Isn’t that true?”

  “Yes, very much so,” I had to agree, shrugging.

  “People make their choices. Like in 2023, so many made the choice to either stay or go. To have this device or not” – he picked up his xGen and flapped it about – “and AI was like something people said would never catch on, like it was all so implausible. What do they think social media is, if not that, Ari, huh? It pre-empts what you wanna see and hear. And it has now been embedded in culture for over seventy years. People make their choice whether they wanna be involved in all that
crap, you know? People make the choice to give themselves up to what other people are saying instead of learning for themselves.”

  “But what about if you’re judged a pariah for not being part of it all?” I said, finding myself defending it, for some reason.

  Kyle sat up taller and leaned his elbows on the table, hands folded, and really looked at me, seriously for a change. I knew he was going to say something profound, but I couldn’t have braced myself for it.

  “We never stopped to ask if any of it was right. We never stopped to think a moment. We got all wrapped up in this bubble of being so interconnected, or so it seemed.” He didn’t seem convinced any of us were really connected anymore. “Since I arrived here, I’ve been reading up on the past few decades’ history. Nothing I’ve read so far surprises me. Shocks me, yeah, but surprises? No! The mental health epidemic among young people because of social media. The complete lack of culpability from the owners of those platforms. Because at the end of the day, this artificial intelligence sunk its way in so deep, so long ago, and bit, by bit, people were owned, and couldn’t be disowned from it. They were owned by their phones and tablets telling them what to buy, what to think, what to be, who to love, where to go. They stopped thinking for themselves. And purely, and very simply, this epidemic of apathy… that’s what broke the world. If the director got away with it, for so long, it wasn’t because people had suddenly given up. They’d been giving up for years already.”

  I felt uncomfortable about it all, so much so, I frowned deeply and folded my arms, staring him down.

  “Think about it, Ari,” he said, defending his theory. “I’ll use this analogy. With the advent of the Sat Nav, you no longer had to use your brain to recall street names, the quickest routes, which streets were one-way, none of that. The burden… it’s all taken from you. But is it too easy? You’ll never have to queue in traffic again if you know what time to hit the road and which routes take you around the jams. But in losing this skill, of being able to navigate yourself, do we lose those tracking skills we’ve relied on since the dawn of man? Do we become lazy, entitled, impatient, and ultimately, does this spread to every other area of life… where everything becomes too easy, and we don’t stop to think, should we? Tech makes it all so much easier, or so you would believe. You think the First Amendment is still upheld in America? When everything is redacted and censored and filtered through the social media channels. Freedom of speech, so far as I can tell, has been dead since 2023.”

  I couldn’t disagree, but… “You’re saying technology has basically damaged the planet? That it wasn’t the director, or the pandemic, or anything remotely like that… you’re saying… basically… Bill Gates and Steve Jobs and friends… they initiated a wave of tech that broke the world.”

  “That’s what I’m saying. I even read that towards the end, Jobs warned of this unhealthy need to have it all. He’d seen what was to come, as all great thinkers do. Your grandmother, too… she must have known bringing down Officium wouldn’t fix everything… that’s why she went to such great lengths to conceal your father for so long after that explosion at the tower. She knew his leadership would be paramount. That there were hurts to heal that may never be cured.”

  “And she was right,” I concluded.

  “People began looking down at their oracle” – again, he picked up the xGen – “and whatever it told them, they believed. And the director knew he could manipulate people’s weakness, like a dealer does a junkie, and at no stage did people stop to think, ‘What the fuck good is this really gonna achieve?’ And that’s a perspective that perhaps only I have. I might be the only person on earth who sees the truth for what it really is. Because I knew the world before this one… when kids ran around the neighborhood instead of being locked away until adulthood. Instead of forming suicide pacts through forums. Where I come from, families extended to grandmas and great-grandmas and cousins and aunts and uncles, all living so closely, so involved. With your family an exception Ari, most people today are alone. They leave the city they grew up in to get a different perspective, and they end up trapped somewhere else, unable to return to see family. And the loneliness goes on, and the isolation, and that’s what the director really achieved through the pandemic… this isolation… so this xGen is all you’ve to turn to… all you can trust.”

  He tossed his device between his two hands, like it was nothing really, just a thing that had been used to manipulate what was already prevalent.

  It had been people’s gullibility, believing whatever their gadgets told them. And no questioning the inflated hype, the trending stories…

  “You believe we’ve gone backwards? Evolution stunted. Regressed, even.”

  “I don’t know, Ari.”

  “If my mother were here, she’d fight you on all you just said. She’d say technology can bring people together. Like she did. She used it to try to instigate positive change.”

  “I could see how it could be used for good, but also—”

  “It ultimately got used to perpetuate evil… because when they’re afraid, people are vulnerable, want to believe in something if it appears to be a solution. Even before 2023, they’d be looking at their phones on the toilet, they’d check in with their device before they ever bade their partner good morning… would stare at some fucking stupid screen rather than talk to their kid while they were out at the park.”

  He folded his arms, sat back, and said nothing… like he was right… like I knew it, he knew it, it was obvious. It was just… inevitable. Since the dawn of industrialization, we’d been doomed to keep progressing, until one day, that progress would outdo us… rendering humanity secondary to the technology in our hands.

  The modern man’s illness: preferring detachment, rather than a genuine connection to anyone else. It was clinical and like man had become completely anti-social.

  I thought about Pascal and Eve, who’d both suffered, separated for decades because it was dangerous to be together and she couldn’t deviate from her path. Yet even from a distance their love had sustained them, kept them alive through the worst times, and it was that which was worth fighting for, living for… dying for.

  Real, genuine relationships… give purpose, like nothing else. Lift the soul.

  “I hate that you’re right,” I groaned.

  “So do I really, more than you could ever know.”

  THAT FEELING IN the gut like anxiety or impending doom, when something doesn’t feel quite right, plagued me for the rest of that day, and even when we ate vegetarian Mexican wraps for dinner, I wasn’t that hungry and let Kyle have the lion’s share—though it was my favorite meal in the world.

  I’d allowed him to hold me through the night for two nights in a row up to then, but when it came to bedtime that night, I tried to push him away and have the bedroom to myself again.

  However, he wouldn’t leave my side. He said he’d stay on the floor or sleep in the chair by my bed. Eventually, I let him in beside me, and I had a little cry into his chest.

  It felt like there was no saving the world. Like we were all doomed. There was no getting back to this world he spoke of, a place that had existed for him and still did, deep inside his mind, before everything went to shit, when kids were kids and didn’t have so much to worry about. There was no salvation in my time whatsoever, and I couldn’t make things beautiful for him… because he’d already known something better, and nothing I could ever give him, would ever measure up. We were living in dark times, desperate times, and it was going to get bleak. There was no “it’ll get worse before it gets better”. It was only going to keep getting worse.

  “Ari, please don’t cry,” he asked.

  “Why? Because you have some sort of fix?”

  “No, but… don’t cry. Please.”

  He cuddled me hard and I was so thankful for him, but at the same time, I really felt wretched.

  “Ari, come on,” he said, “let me kiss you.”

  I didn’t want to be kissed a
nd buried myself against his chest, hiding my face in his t-shirt, the smell of his body comforting and wonderful.

  He gave up and stroked my hair, sighed like he was annoyed he’d ever said anything… annoyed he couldn’t fix everything for me. I was annoyed about the same things.

  “Mom used to say that if they hadn’t been thrown together, she and Dad probably would never have got together,” I chuckled, suddenly feeling talkative. “He was too standoffish and reticent, she believed, when they first met, while for him, she was too powerful, too much of a force to be reckoned with… and he resisted, too.”

  “And what happened?” he asked softly.

  “He stopped being a prick and realized he could never control her, only embrace her. Worship at her altar, and make her his purpose.”

  I nearly choked on the words. My mother had loved my father so goddamned much.

  “Wise words.”

  “And she realized there were things a man could do for a lady. Not just that though, you know?”

  He sniggered into my hair. “Oh, yeah?”

  “He can pick up the slack, when she’s lost a bit of that power, temporarily. He can stand firm, the rock that everyone else clings to during a storm. And I used to think these were such stupid fantasies, these were dumb adult things, like… I’d never need anyone, I’d be so strong, I’d never need another person my whole life long… I’d be fine. And do you know what?”

  “You’re not fine,” he murmured, cupping my chin and lifting my face, then planting a superbly soft kiss against my lips.

  “I’m not fine, Kyle. I’ve been carrying the weight of the world without even knowing it.”

  “I know, Ari.”

  He hugged me tighter and I buried my face in his neck, inhaling his natural, musky scent. It was heavenly.

  “There has to be a way to save… something,” I said, my teeth chattering.

  “If there is, we’ll find it… we’ll do whatever it takes, I swear. I want the same thing. I want to save the things that count, the same as you do.”