by Platt, Sean
She was too evolved for this, and yet here she was. A prisoner in her costume.
The door opened.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” said the newcomer.
Melanie turned. The woman in the doorway had severe features, dark brown eyes, and moderate-length brown hair that jutted off at angles. As far as Melanie understood, it was an attractive look. But it was so hard to judge oneself against another.
“What are you doing?”
“I could ask you the same thing,” Melanie said.
“I have a report to give. You are primping like a Barbie doll.”
“I was merely inspecting my presentation.” It wasn’t true, but Melanie had already filed away the second thing her visitor said, saving it like an ace to play later. Like a Barbie doll? That was hardly essential knowledge to have plundered — just as nonessential as the carefully chosen clothes they both wore and the way they’d styled their hair to mimic an engrained media perception. None of it was necessary. And yet as much grief as Divinity gave her about acting too human, it was a case of that other popular metaphor concerning the pot and the kettle.
“I happened to check on your presentation,” Divinity told her. “For means of removing another troublesome impurity. One as bad as what happened to Meyer Dempsey’s original Titan replacement. Impurities were always meant to be purged, as we did with the Dempsey problem. And yet, here they are.”
“What does that have to do with my presentation?”
“For one, the fact that you still refer to ‘my’ presentation,” Divinity said.
“It’s a human affect meant to enhance the effectiveness of my human presentation. It’s cultivated intentionally.” Melanie shrugged — another affect meant to enhance the effectiveness of her human presentation, apparently — and brushed aside a lock of blonde hair as it fell in front of her eyes. “One you seem to have cultivated as well.”
Divinity didn’t flinch. “But for another thing, the stream seems, in some cases, to have begun identifying you by a human name.”
“Ridiculous.”
“Is it ridiculous … Melanie?”
Melanie felt something rise inside herself. For a reason she couldn’t articulate, she didn’t like hearing that word pass Divinity’s no-more-human-than-hers lips. It was a private word that deserved to be kept secret.
“Secrets are for people,” Divinity said, plucking her thoughts from the shared stream.
Melanie — Eternity, rather — stood straight. Her adopted human body was several inches taller than the other’s chosen form, even if she wasn’t wearing the high heels neither of them had any practical business wearing. It was something that shouldn’t have given her pride or a feeling of superiority, but had anyway, slowly over twenty years spent living in the same human suit.
“What is your report?”
“Can’t you read my mind?” Then there was a tiny, devilish smile, as if this was giving the other woman pleasure.
Time to go on the offensive.
“Sit down.”
“I have no need to sit.” Divinity’s eyes ticked toward the human affects Melanie had added to her quarters — the quarters themselves having only been added after five years of maintaining orbit and attempting to erase bugs from the Forgetting virus. “I’m not human.”
“Then perhaps you should revert. Discard your surrogate. Just because it doesn’t age like a human body doesn’t mean it’s not becoming uncomfortable for such an expanded consciousness as yours.”
“As ours,” Divinity corrected.
“As ours,” Melanie said.
“I need the surrogate to do my work, now that we’re required on the surface,” said Divinity.
“And you’ve needed it for twenty years without visiting the surface.”
“You know as well as I do that it wasn’t supposed to take this long. It was always a matter of days before the bug was eradicated and we’d be needed on the surface for a final sweep.” A tiny smirk visited Divinity’s pixie features. “How would it have looked, after the Forgetting took its hold, for us to visit the people below in our native forms?”
“So it was easier to keep your surrogate than discard and grow accustomed to a new one.”
“To the confinement of a new one after my — our — natural expansion,” Divinity added.
“And that’s why you maintained it.”
“Of course.”
“And groomed it. And dressed it.”
“All practical things,” Divinity said. “All within expected parameters for ideal projection. I did nothing you did not.”
“Because I, too, was merely preparing for a final visit to the surface before we were able to depart and head home.”
“Of course,” said Divinity.
“Of course.”
“This body is just a machine.”
“As is mine.”
“I didn’t do anything absurd like name it.”
They stared at each other with human eyes that weren’t their natural ones — but which, Melanie knew, both had become so used to that it was impossible to remember the trick of being as unlimited as they were all meant to be.
“I asked you to sit.”
“You definitely did,” said Divinity, putting extra emphasis on you. All of the Divinity who’d stayed in their surrogates had picked up that habit, but for some reason Melanie — who may have been the only one who’d adopted a secret name, not that she didn’t have an excuse being up here at the very top — felt the sting of Divinity’s accusation more than was probably her share.
The brown-haired woman sat on one of the long white benches near the room’s edge, carefully sweeping her stylish skirt up beneath her. Melanie took in her makeup (worn for vanity she wouldn’t admit, rather than maintenance), her clothing (impractical, though the human collective seemed to praise it), and the cut of her hair. This was the one bit of aging that surrogates did well. Hair grew, and had to be cut. It wasn’t unreasonable to make it look nice at the same time.
Divinity wore her little sideways smile. Melanie, who was in charge here if there was such a thing in a collective, felt a rush of inappropriate desire to wipe the expression from her face.
“Your report.”
“So you didn’t pull it from the stream,” Divinity said.
Again, Melanie eyed her. Then she steeled herself, harkening back to her manner in the days when plurality had been easier than singularity. She spoke boldly, with an almost robotic precision.
“I did not. As is most efficient for a surrogate-bound entity — something you know and practice — I have focused my attention in toward manual modes of investigation, leaving the larger collective to analyze larger matters. Do not pretend you disagree with this mode of thinking. If you did, you would not have come here to speak with my surrogate. You would not even have spoken at all. Particularly now, with the difficulties in eradicating persistent memory on the seed planet, it is important to understand the singular nature of human thought and discourse. However, if you prefer to discuss mind-to-mind within the collective as befits ‘proper representatives of our race,’ I would be happy to do so … after your individual record is reconciled, of course.”
That stopped her. Divinity’s smile melted. Melanie wasn’t the only one with secrets accumulated as a somewhat pinched-off mind, and one thing she’d learned from plumbing the stubborn human consciousness below was that no girl liked someone else reading her diary.
“That will not be necessary,” said Divinity.
“Then speak. Like a human.”
“I have entered the appropriate records into the collective for your verification and for the verification of Divinity. It will upfiltered to Eternity and ultimately the Core as normal. But the verbal, limited-perspective experience of this surrogate is as follows: Divinity Instance 314 landed at the entrance to the Mullah caves and located their Disturbance Zero, known as Clara Dempsey, believed by the collective to represent ‘The Innocent’ in the Mullah legend. She was, at t
he time, apparently emerging from her shut-down state with Logan Taylor, who recursive analysis suggests she once shared a pair bond with, and Sadeem Hajjar, similarly believed by the collective to represent ‘The Sage.’”
“An analysis made before he was released, before the Forgetting,” Melanie said, keeping her tone stone like, as befitted proper Eternity. “What was Clara’s state?”
“She appeared lucid.”
“But we’d shut her down. When she broke through and we could finally see her mind on the network, we sent a pulse to put her into hibernation.”
“Unfortunately, those ‘unexpected events’ during your attempt to recover The Warrior archetype seem to have created ripples.”
Melanie looked down at her fingernails. Breaking them off had hurt more than anything her surrogate’s body had ever felt. Blood had been significant, but even after repairs onboard the shuttle, the appearance of her shattered hands had bothered Melanie more than made practical sense. Artificial nails had solved that problem, but the need she’d felt to hide her injuries — in so cosmetic a way, no less — had bothered her more.
“What kind of ripples?”
“I would need to consult the stream’s analysis. But it definitely stalled the freeze on the containment spread, and woke Clara up.”
“Stalled the …” Melanie sighed, then admitted something she’d more or less known before talking to Carl Nairobi — then subjecting him to the scan that had not only failed to locate the others but had somehow fed right back into Melanie, forcing a stop. “So it’s over. They remember. All of them.”
“It would appear so. The bug in human recall containment has spread. I won’t pretend to understand it from my surrogate’s limited view, but it’s consistent with what we’ve been seeing all along. Somehow Clara and the others acted as a dam. Each node contained the whole in miniature. Unless all nodes were blanked, there was always the ability to regenerate everything.”
“We’ve discussed this. It’s not possible,” Melanie said. “It would mean they have a true collective.”
“It was always the intention for them to form a collective.”
“But they did not. It’s why judgment was rendered. Why the epoch was ended and the experiment reset. They were polluted. There wasn’t sufficient control for a collective.”
“Maybe it’s a different kind of collective than we anticipated.”
Melanie shook her head. She caught her reflection in the mirror, and an angry impulse made her want to shatter it. She didn’t like the impulse any more than Divinity’s words. Ever since she’d felt what she had from Carl’s session, the throb of that remembered pain had refused to dissolve.
“Where is Clara?” Melanie asked. “I will need to plug directly into her.”
“Why?”
“She is the origin. If we can match the signal, perhaps it can be disrupted.”
Divinity looked away.
“What?” Melanie asked.
“There was an incursion. We did not recover Clara.”
“You …” But she couldn’t speak.
“A tribe ambushed the cave with guns.”
“So?”
“The shuttle was grounded. We only had the party of five. One of my Titans was taken unaware. The other evolved. But it was three Reptars against dozens. With guns.”
“Guns. Human firearms.” Melanie felt her face tighten. “We surveyed each of the groups before the first Forgetting and the second. All weapons were removed.”
“It would seem we missed some.”
“Which tribe? Who had guns?”
Divinity sighed. “It would seem to be a tribe we missed.”
“How is that possible?”
“Chaos was always sewn into the experiment. You would need to query the Founders.”
“Chaos does not explain how an entire group of humans survived to the seed stage, completely unaccounted for,” Melanie said.
“Apparently it does.”
Melanie vented a frustrated exhale. “We have Dempsey and Nairobi. The King and the Warrior. You lost the Innocent.”
“And the Sage,” said Divinity.
“And the Sage,” Melanie repeated. “Where are the others?”
“We can only guess based on a glimpse of the human mental network received when Clara breached the wall. There are three others: The Magician, The Fool, and The Villain.”
“Can they accomplish what they must with only five on the planet?”
“Impossible to say. This is the first epoch in which the Archetypes have had the potential to recover knowledge of who they are and what they might be able to do.”
“Which is what?”
“Chaos,” said Divinity with a flip of her hand. “It means we cannot know. But to do it, they’d need to assemble in a single group. And they’d need to have those realizations — which, remember, they did not have before the Forgetting. It can’t simply be remembered. It must be discovered.”
“Did you follow them? After you boarded your shuttle to come here? Do you at least know where Clara has gone?”
“The Lightborn have always been invisible to us. It’s worse now that there are no repeater stones, and with Clara’s guard back up. I doubt we could even find Sadeem.”
“Then she’s lost,” said Melanie.
“Not entirely. They could only travel the radius available on horseback.”
Melanie felt the pressure building. It was new, stacking atop what had happened in that mind-delving session with Carl. She didn’t like it one tiny bit.
“There is at least some good news,” Divinity said. “According to what I see in the stream, the breach allowed us to reacquire the rogue agent. The one of our own who was left behind.”
“Where is it?”
“Infiltrating.”
“To what end? What were the instructions?”
“It was not so simple. A member of the collective, if it spends enough time in human spaces, seems to adapt and is not so easy to reintegrate.” Divinity looked up, and Melanie knew what she’d say before it left her mouth, knowing its truth as much as she feared it. “Something you and I know from experience.”
“This is different.”
“Of course. But the connection was at least reestablished. We are able to monitor. With luck, it will lead us to the others.”
“And if not? What are the recommendations if the Forgetting cannot be reestablished?”
“You know the answer to that,” Divinity said.
Melanie looked away. The floor’s stark lack of color was nearly blinding, far too bright.
“With luck, you say.”
“With luck,” Divinity repeated.
After a moment, Melanie nodded, then said, “Dismissed.”
Once the door was closed, Melanie returned to the mirror. Palms on the counter, turned back to let her fingers dangle over the edge. Torso forward, eye to eye with her double.
“I don’t believe in luck,” she said aloud.
Her reflection said nothing.
Chapter Nineteen
Long hours passed. Night came.
Piper found herself lost in a vortex, her old life intruding on the new like a long-lost parent entering an adopted child’s life. Everything changed the moment she remembered her identity. Everything. It was strange how recollection could take more than give.
Piper lost the daughter she’d had for twenty years — gone in a blink, the minute she remembered Heather Hawthorne.
She’d lost her granddaughter. Clara would always be special to her, but they’d stopped being blood the instant Piper remembered that they’d never been. There was a silver lining to that one — with memory came details of Clara’s unique breed of strangeness. The girl wasn’t just odd; she was special. Lila had grown Clara under the gaze of an Astral mothership, and she’d been born precocious. Practically from birth, Clara had been ahead of other children. An old soul adjusting to an uncooperative infant body — but the second she figured out the controls, she’d tho
ught like an adult.
Because of the Astrals.
Because she was Lightborn.
And Piper remembered that as the world ended, the Lightborn were different. They hadn’t forgotten. They’d told the villagers how to smith metals and make glass and the best methods for reinforcing their homes. So as much as it hurt Piper to realize what she’d already known, at least Clara wouldn’t feel the same. She must know who her mother was, and who exactly Piper was to her: technically, nothing.
Piper wondered, as she lay awake by the fire behind the rocks, watching Lila and Kindred fitfully sleep, if Clara was okay.
They’d taken Meyer.
They hadn’t looked twice at Piper or Lila.
But conveniently, there had been Kindred. They hadn’t known he was following because (so Kindred claimed) he hadn’t been. And he hadn’t called out to them earlier — say, before the Astrals had already sealed the deal on Meyer’s second abduction — because he hadn’t seen them until that final moment. Then he’d come running. But what was he supposed to do against Reptars, once he’d arrived?
Piper sighed and looked up at the stars, feeling a queer sense of doubling. She was two separate women, sharing her skin like two kids in a sleeping bag. Even the simplest things had grown confused as memories clashed. She was sleeping in the open. As a primitive pioneer, Piper was used to the elements and didn’t fear them more than a wise person should. But the Piper she’d been before forgetting couldn’t help thinking of snakes. Of sand fleas. Of scorpions in the night.
Kindred said he knew where they should go. How, in the absence of other ideas, they might best find Meyer.
But Piper had remembered more things about Kindred, same as he must have recently realized them about himself.
Kindred wasn’t human. Once upon a time, he’d been a Titan implanted with Meyer Dempsey’s memories. So what was forgetting to Kindred? Wasn’t it just returning him to the blank tape he’d once been?