The Awoken (New Unity Book 1)

by S. M. Lynch

“Seth’s mother?” I gasped.

  “She went to Panacea because her father was part of a group called the Collective. It was set up to advance medical science and create this island. Three men. Fleming. Childs. And another. A guy called Chichester.”

  “Merde,” cursed Camille.

  My father nodded, but though it was obvious to them why this was bad, to us it wasn’t.

  Camille had been sitting on the counter up to now, but at the mention of these men, she suddenly flung herself off and roamed the room, arms folded. “Chichester and Fleming knew my parents. They were British spies, colleagues on the other side of the water. I met Fleming once. He came to dinner. He was a foul, disgusting man. He would try to grab my mother when my father wasn’t looking. I was but five years old, but I never forget that heathen.”

  “And Childs was working on how to perfect cloning… and found lots of donors interested in funding him,” Mom explained. “Even after he was sacked as UK prime minister.”

  “Childs broke off and formed Officium, then?” I asked.

  Mom looked impressed. “He did. Beatrice despised her father with a passion. She led the exodus from Panacea in 2024. The islanders had found out about the outbreak and she got them out of there to New Zealand. Everyone had been duped about what Panacea was. It wasn’t a haven, it was a prison. Medical experiments took place there that had nothing to do with life extension but everything to do with affording Childs control over the world… the pandemic utterly confirming that. Some of the islanders had gone to escape the outside world but found life there even worse. Beatrice and her estranged husband had a pact and when she contacted him, Nate—Seth’s father—flattened the place, but Bill Fleming survived. There was an underground facility.”

  I put my hands to my cheeks and closed my eyes. “What was there?”

  Mom took an enormous deep breath. “After successfully faking my death, I took a jet, alone, and found this island. It wasn’t easy. It’s not on any maps. It’s quite scorched still, though, so when I saw it from the sky… after days of looking… I knew.”

  I held my head in my hands and tried to let it all sink in.

  “What about Chichester and Fleming?” asked Camille, who no doubt thought her father’s fellow spies might have had a hand in his killing.

  “Chichester died around the time of the outbreak. Childs killed him,” my father said, matter-of-fact. “It’s in the archives. He’d been through trials of this anti-ageing drug and it had worked, to an extent. Chichester thought he was quids in, but didn’t know his best mate was just using him as a lab rat, like everyone else.” Dad gave a disgusted look, but wasn’t surprised. “Childs knew one day Chichester might drop dead as a result of the drugs, and rather than have to answer questions about his research, he killed the man to intimidate Chichester’s son, Nate Buchanan. Buchanan is the father of the xGen. Childs forced him to create the new network and surveillance program. One night though, Beatrice Fleming sprung Buchanan from Childs’s tower and he was never seen again. He hid successfully in New Zealand for the rest of his life.”

  “And the Fleming’s?” I asked, somehow knowing their fates were intertwined with ours.

  My father seemed to know the whole story. “Beatrice Fleming’s journal ended up in that archive because they found and tortured her in 2031. She’d been helping people across Europe escape to the country but that wasn’t why they took her. They were looking for Nate Buchanan and she knew where he was. Like I said, nobody ever found him again and she only survived the torture because someone rescued her.”

  “And Bill?” asked Camille, grinding her teeth.

  “He succumbed to lymphoma in 2024, according to Beatrice’s journal, anyway. The people he’d helped out of London described him as saintly. Nobody knew he was actually the architect of the pandemic. He thought it might be a nifty way of halting any further population explosions, but he also saw this new and complex virus could inform researchers on a number of other different diseases. Unfortunately, he hadn’t banked on the virus being so deadly… hadn’t realized Childs would seek to decimate the planet as he did. Childs wasn’t dumb… he used the cloning program to attract the world’s billionaires, and don’t get me wrong, obviously he used that money to make it happen. However, the cloning program did stall now and again, because he was putting so much damn money into researching the virus. He was crazy.”

  “Yeah, but which crazy are we dealing with now?” I asked, shaking my head, looking between my mother and father.

  My mother wetted her dry mouth and gulped. “It took a while for me to get inside. It wasn’t easy, even with my father’s box of tricks.”

  So, Mom had adopted my grandfather’s xGen, then?

  “The place appeared to be utterly abandoned. Indeed, beneath ground, it seemed as clean as a whistle, not like it’d been sat there for sixty years.”

  I saw Camille watching my mother, hopelessly intrigued, but also still a little bit wary and betrayed. Camille constantly had a hand to her mouth and was hunched, and that just wasn’t her, her posture was usually impeccable. All this was probably even more shocking for my aunt, actually.

  “I found a room and lay down. I was tired and confused. The voices had stopped by this point because I was too far out of reach, but the chip kept giving me a headache, and what I didn’t realize as I lay down… I was in a surgery suite. When I woke up, I was bandaged, a number of robots surrounding me. I’d been given the treatment I needed.”

  “How is that possible,” Camille murmured, “it was fused within your brain.”

  “The bots told me nano chips are not designed to last so long in a human body. Most clones never survive beyond forty. I’m obviously over fifty now,” she said, coughing loudly in an attempt to muffle her age. “They removed it. I’m free again.”

  She gave a wide smile and I looked at her, like how could that be? How could any of this be? None of us could believe it.

  “How could they possibly…?” Arthur asked. “A hundred thousand neurons…? How?”

  “It was an operation that took several days, but Panacea has the technology to make it possible, and even made the rehabilitation afterwards so painless, too. It was an intricate and difficult operation, of course, and some functions I can’t perform now… some memories are gone, but I’m still your mother,” she said, sounding progressively more defensive.

  My brother came closer to the table, frowning. “So… you were fixed… and you didn’t come back, huh?”

  Camille, myself and my brother were all thinking it, but Dad had a warning look in his eyes.

  “She’ll get to that,” he growled, and Arthur backed off.

  “I can’t write anymore,” said Mom, her eyes shiny. “And I don’t remember anything before I was switched. I only remember my life after the shooting that killed my original body. All those other memories were on the chip. I don’t remember much of Eve when I thought she was just my aunt… I don’t remember anything of my adoptive parents. I just remembered all of you and how much I love you all. And for that reason, I knew I just couldn’t come back. Roche was truly convinced of my death, and me and your father believed she would’ve done anything to get rid of me, so coming back wasn’t an option… at least not right away… even though I was suddenly well again.”

  Her troubles finally made me feel sad and sympathetic, but there was still so much I didn’t know. I looked to my side, at Kyle, and saw him fidgeting and looking so unlike his usual calm self.

  “You know of this Panacea too, don’t you?” I said, and he looked up, afraid.

  “I do,” he answered, trembling.

  I stood up and was of half a mind to run away screaming, but for some reason, I still wanted to know the truth.

  “I got left behind after the explosion, in 2024,” Kyle began. “I was a candidate for Panacea’s therapies. They’d lifted me out of my life because I had a brain tumor and only had months left to live.”

  “Ha!” exclaimed my brother. “Oh, god, a
ll right, then…”

  “Ignore him,” I grunted.

  “I was cured, and I didn’t age. Nobody there did. Our ageing was halted,” he said, so sure of that. “I lived on that island as a kindergarten teacher for twenty years. It was an odd existence, especially as I’d been educated in law, and then found myself relegated to diapers and teething toys.” He laughed, like he knew it was odd, but had found it entirely normal at the time. “Nate Buchanan decimated the island above ground, but not below. Nothing important was kept above ground. Everything is still there that was used to treat people. That’s why your mom could be saved.”

  “Right,” said Arthur, blowing a raspberry.

  Even Camille’s mouth was twisted and her eyebrow raised.

  “Fleming and the other survivors beneath ground left shortly after everything above stopped burning. They were heading off to help people escape Childs’ regime and get into the countryside. I could’ve gone with them. I wasn’t scared of the virus, in fact, we’d all been told that as Panaceans, we would have a really good chance of not getting it. However, my past condition required that I received regular top-ups of therapy, and I knew if I returned to the real world, the only way I could survive would be to join Officium… and I didn’t fancy it. So, someone put me in a hibernation pod and then I was asleep for decades, I presume. All I know is that my friend who’d promised to come back for me can’t have… the next thing I knew, I was teleported down to Ari… and everything between is a total blank. I can’t account for how I went from there to here. It’s gone from my mind. I don’t know what happened to me.”

  “And your brain tumors?” I asked, struggling to wrap my head around it all.

  “I don’t know, Ari. I’ve been with you for months now and I feel well. Maybe the deep sleep, I don’t know.”

  Arthur had folded his arms and his nostrils flared; he wasn’t impressed or taken in. His eyes told me he didn’t believe a word of what Kyle was saying. I’d started to believe, though I knew there was much more to know—to fill in the gaps.

  “You didn’t spot Kyle while you were there, then?” I asked her.

  “It was completely abandoned. And everything was so clean, which told me the bots had had nothing else to do all those years… but clean.”

  “And you left the island… somehow?” asked Arthur, sighing.

  “After the surgery, I survived a couple of weeks on Panacea before I got bored. There was nothing there but the medical facility. No archives or anything like that. Anyway, I wanted to know more about Panacea’s beginnings, the real story, and I knew from what your father had told me that Seth Buchanan had been there… when he was a kid. And your father and I had heard rumors of the family still hiding in New Zealand. So, I flew to the South Island… and hiked around, everywhere… for months and months, until he finally showed himself.”

  I covered my mouth. “Oh, god.”

  “Seth took me in. He lives alone now. The family scattered years ago.”

  Now something really wasn’t adding up.

  Why had Seth called to warn me about Kyle?

  Why had he said I couldn’t trust him?

  Arthur and me both knew there was something wrong. Something hugely wrong. He stood near Mom with folded arms.

  “You’re saying you holed up for five years with that weird genius bloke? I don’t buy it,” said my brother.

  Arthur looked at me to find out whether I agreed, and I shrugged… I was beginning to.

  I looked at Dad then to see if he truly bought into this, but ever the poker player, he was giving nothing away.

  Then I caught Camille’s eye. She wasn’t convinced, at all. That’s why she kept her eyes narrowed and was tilting her head, unsure it was even Seraph Maddon sat before us.

  “Seth Buchanan is no ordinary man,” my mother began. “His father before him invented the xGen. Pascal completed the work, helped realize the idea, but it was Nate Buchanan’s invention. Nate also invented invisibility suits, wrote programs that are still used today by governments all over the world, and died in his nineties from old age… never having ever suffered ill-health. Before Nate, there was Horace Chichester, who basically invented hacking. He also invented surveillance techniques that Officium would later adopt, under Nate’s instruction. Horace wasn’t just the man who taught Nate how to write programs, he also taught Nate how to make computers. Some of the military-grade laptops still in use today were engineered by Horace Chichester almost a hundred years ago. And Seth… he’s from this same line. Like I said, he’s no ordinary man.”

  “So, what did he do, then? Spend five years telling you his life story?” Camille snapped, frustrated. Her speech got more clipped and French sounding when she was pissed off.

  “He and I had been working on a plan to oust Roche. We nearly had a strategy, thought we had it cracked. But then those things started falling from the sky.”

  I leaned across the table, staring into Mom’s eyes. “They are clones?”

  “They’re clones,” Mom cautioned. “All except Kyle, it seems. And that’s why I’m here now, to help you figure it out. Something is going on… something big. Has to be.”

  I felt sick to my stomach and looked at Camille. “More have arrived since Kyle?”

  Camille shrugged. “What were we meant to do? Her hunters found them first.”

  I felt sick, but then, I didn’t know what was worse: my father’s freezer, or death by firing squad?

  “Seth Buchanan has a supercomputer he calls Robert. It’s exceptional,” my mother continued to explain, battling on. “He knows everything, can find out anything you want to know. This was also something started by the elder Buchanan, Nate but later finished by Seth. The planet has about twenty years left until it becomes uninhabitable to all life on earth. It’s predicted the winter we’re in at the moment will last for the rest of the year. And potentially next year, we will endure temperatures forty or above… seasons will die out and it will be one extreme weather pattern after another… until everyone begins congregating in the same place. And there won’t be enough room.”

  “There has to be some mistake,” Arthur growled, only saying what the rest of us were thinking.

  My mother seemed pretty pragmatic about it all, considering. “Seth Buchanan believes the balance of the universe is under threat. He says the clones are being sent down to report on just how bad it is on Earth. He says that for millennia, other races have been coming here and quietly siphoning off rare earth minerals… because they cannot be found elsewhere in the cosmos, and have become for other races essential, sometimes. If this torrent that Robert expects will cover the earth occurs, another great flood so to speak, not only will it wipe out human life and starve every other creature, it would also prevent extraterrestrial advancement, then their lives would diminish, too. They rely on us. The balance is delicate.”

  “Twenty years,” Camille whispered absently, like she couldn’t believe that’s all any of us had left.

  Meanwhile Dad and I shared a look. When we’d spoken to “Seth Buchanan” just before Christmas, he’d told us it wasn’t extraterrestrial activity in the sky above, but Officium. So, someone was lying. Or was my mother confused? Or keeping the truth hidden from a certain person in the room… perhaps even trying to tease a confession of a contrary version to hers?

  “This is bullshit,” Arthur barked, shaking his head. “Seriously, are you even my mother? Seraph Maddon, the one I knew anyway, wouldn’t have been taken in by all this horseshit. Surely, if this is what we’re even contemplating here, aliens would have realized this planet was going to suffer, so why didn’t they step in ages ago? Why didn’t they do something for us ages ago? If they’ve got the technology to cross galaxies to get here, then surely, they also have the technology to help us reverse the damage quicker than planting more trees ever would.”

  My mother swallowed hard and scowled at my brother. “They’ve got cloning technology obviously, and I agree, it probably took them far less time to
develop cloning tech than it did us. Why do you think they’ve been sending clones down? Why do you think that is?”

  My mom sat staring at my brother, her sharp eyes glaring, her arms folded so her elbows looked like blades.

  “They’re sending them down to investigate,” I answered her. “They’re sending them to… decide if we’re worthy of being saved. Otherwise, they will dredge all our resources… and the world will no doubt end much quicker.”

  “They’re frightened to appear, no?” my mother said, but it was a rhetorical question. “Sending these clones, hoping they will ingratiate themselves… tell them what they need to know.”

  “Why London?” Camille asked. “They were sending them to London. Nowhere else.”

  “Seth thinks that because so many maps have the UK in the center, and because much of the world now speaks English, the aliens believed it was the best place to start. Plus, it was where the pandemic attacked hardest. They wanted to understand why.”

  “This is conjecture, though,” I exclaimed, and my father rubbed his chin, finally admitting he had some doubt about all of this, too.

  Everyone in the room, including Kyle, started looking to my mother, waiting for her to say how he came into it, but for some reason, she kept staring at him, hard. It was like he was meant to keep his mouth shut.

  “What did you and Seth decide, then?” I asked, shaking my head.

  “Roche is now secondary to everything else going on. The fact that they’re sending clones down now, well, that says they’re aware how close to midnight we are… and we were preparing to make contact… see if we couldn’t negotiate.” She looked deadly serious about it all. “But, then a spanner was thrown in the works. We’d seen you were picking them up. Having to bring them to your father to be destroyed. Your father called me—and believe me, we only ever spoke if it was entirely necessary—and we discussed what was going on, and he was frightened you were going to get yourself killed… but you wouldn’t listen.”

  It felt odd… that every step of my life had been watched. I’d never truly been free, had I?