by Greg Logan
Hasani went back to his room, thinking he should probably lie down. Instead, he went to a window and pushed aside a torn, dusty curtain. This side of the building overlooked the street, and he had a good view of the sidewalk below. He watched as Jake Calder and Akila stepped out of the building. They walked along, and already she had wrapped an arm around one of his. They were talking and laughing, and she leaned her head against his shoulder briefly in mid-laugh. A subtle gesture, but with such clear meaning.
Hasani watched until they were gone from his sight. He stood for a moment, staring down at the street of this alien Earth, watching absently as first one car drove past, and then another. He felt empty. So very alone. Another car passed, going in the opposite direction.
Hasani turned away from the window, and let the curtain fall back into place.
SEVEN
Lisa sat in a chair with an aluminum frame and vinyl padded cushions. In the bed before her was her mother, her eyes shut, her face seeming thinner than she had ever seen it. Her hair was thin and wispy. She looked so fragile.
It was late. One o’clock in the morning. The nurses at the hospice had let her stay beyond visiting hours, though. Lisa had sent Emma home, because Kaylie needed her sleep and Lisa thought Kaylie should be with Emma, not at a sitter’s house. A mother and daughter should spend as much time together as possible, she thought. Especially now.
The room began to grow darker, but Lisa wasn’t frightened. In fact, she barely reacted. She knew the police were frightened of this Darkness entity, and were doing what they could to detain him, but Lisa knew he meant to harm. She had been there when he brought back Kaylie. She had seen him with her mother. Whatever this being was, it was not one of malice, but one of love.
Lisa simply said, “She’s dying.”
“Yes,” came the baritone from all around her. “I can sense it.”
Lisa found there were no tears left. She had cried them all away. She said, “She turned eighty-seven yesterday. She’s had a long life. I should count myself lucky to have had all the time I did with her. But it’s not enough. I’d trade almost anything just to have one more hour with her.”
“What can I do?”
“Unless you can hold back death, I’m afraid there’s nothing you can do. Not this time.”
He was silent.
She said, “Kaylie is home with Emma.”
“Yes. I was just there. Checking in.”
Lisa thought maybe she should find that frightening. An invasion of her home, her family. But instead she found it reassuring.
She said, “Kaylie talks about you all the time.”
They were both silent for a few moments. Then the Darkness said, “You look tired.”
She nodded. “I feel like I haven’t slept in years.”
“I will watch over her. Go get some coffee. Maybe call home.”
Lisa nodded again. “Emma asked me to keep her posted.”
She rose wearily from the chair. “I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
“There is no need to hurry.”
She looked about the darkness that was now enveloping the room, as though the lights had been shut off. “You’re very kind.”
“I am what I am.”
She didn’t know what to say to that. She raised her brows in a little shrug, the headed out the door.
“Sondra,” the Darkness said. “Awaken.”
She didn’t. She continued to sleep, breathing easily.
He reached into her mind. Not enough to cause damage, just enough to serve as a little jump start.
She opened her eyes.
“Sondra,” he said again.
“You.” Her voice was thin. Whispery.
“Yes.”
“You’ve come to say goodbye.”
He began to corporealate before her. To become a tall, dark silhouette. “I have come to offer you life.”
“Life? How? I have lived. Now I am at the end of my life. To all things there is a beginning and an end.”
“No. Energy does not end. It might changes its form. We are, after all, little more than sentient energy fields inhabiting a body.”
She managed a smile. “You’re getting metaphysical, now? In your odd way?”
“I am simply stating facts. Or, rather, observations I have made over the years.”
“All right, I have to admit. I’m intrigued. How can you offer me life?”
“I can take you with me. You and I can be as one.”
“You mean..,” she was a little perplexed, “you can make me like you?”
“I don’t know if you would be like me, as much as with me. You could ride the night winds with me, forever.”
“Forever?”
“I think I will always be, as long as there is darkness. There is no end for me. Would you make this journey with me?”
“How can you do this?”
“I don’t know. I only know that I can. One of these days, I will have to visit Scott Tempest and see if he can find some answers. But in the meantime, I invite you to join me. If you will.”
Her life spun before her eyes in a sort of rapid fast-forward, though she saw every moment in detail. Her childhood. Her teen years. Receiving the engagement ring from Dean. Their marriage. Their children. Their life together. All the years, all the moments.
She looked at the dark mysterious humanoid before her. “Yes. I’ll go with you.”
He reached out to her, placing a cold, hard hand on her head. And he reached into her. She closed her eyes and let him envelope her within himself.
She found herself gasping. And looking about. Her nightgown was lying on the bed beneath her, but was now empty. She was above the bed and beside it. And all around it.
She said, I feel like a wraith.
Not a wraith, he said.
She said, I know. The darkness.
She found herself looking into his soul. She saw herself through his eyes. She remembered this boy, from so many years ago. I know you.
He said, I don’t think you ever saw me.
I did see you. I remember you well. I am so flattered that you thought of me as you did.
He had waited so long for her to actually see him. Not to look past him or through him. He had long ago given up on this moment ever actually happening. But now it was here, and he was not sure how to feel.
She said, If I had only known how you felt then. That there was a boy who had such deep feelings for me.
Would you have looked back at me? He said.
She gave a sort of mental shrug. I don’t know. I was so young then. I don’t know if I was ready for a love so deep.
He was silent.
She said, But we’re here, now. Together.
Yes.
She said, Show me what it’s like. To ride the night winds.
Lisa returned with a styrofoam cup of horrible tasting coffee in one hand. She had gotten it from a dispenser in the lobby. She had called Emma and given her a progress report. The doctors didn’t think it would be long. Maybe tonight, or maybe tomorrow.
“I should be there with you,” Emma had said.
“No, sweetie. You should be right where you are. With your sweet daughter.”
“I just hate for you to be alone at a time like this.”
“I’m not alone. Uncle D.J.’s flight is due in tomorrow morning. And, he stopped by. That darkness being. I’ll be all right.”
“Keep me posted.”
Lisa had returned the phone to her purse, then invested $1.25 in the worst tasting coffee on the planet, and headed back to her mother’s room.
She found the Darkness was no longer there, which struck her as a little odd because he had said he would watch over her mother. But then she realized her mother was no longer there, either. Her nightgown was lying on the bed, empty. Almost like her mother’s body had simply disappeared and the nightgown had collapsed to the mattress.
Then she realized what must have happened. Where her mother must have gone. The only re
ason the Darkness would have left her side, she somehow knew, was if he could take her with him.
She went to the window and looked out into the night. A three-quarter moon hovered above, casting a silvery light onto rooftops. A cloud drifted lazily.
She expected tears, and yet what came was a smile.
GENESIX: DYSTOPIA
ONE
2034
He stood in the shadow of an old, derelict jetliner. His hair was long and white, and caught the breeze coming in from Boston Harbor. He had a beard which had also long ago turned white. He wore a long coat and he pulled it tight against the chill on the wind.
His name was Quentin Jeffries. He had been a citizen of England, back when there was an England. Back in the time they all thought of as Before. Now he wasn’t a citizen of anything. A citizen of the Earth, maybe. But there were no more countries. No more political states. There wasn’t really much of anything, anymore.
He looked off toward the remains of Boston, his eyes distant. He was seeing not the war-torn remains of the city. Its burned out buildings, some with their roofs caved in. Deserted streets, some with pavement torn up from the impact of bombs. What Quentin saw was the city that was. From the time before the invasion.
Beside him stood Jeff Calder. Jeff was thirty-four years old, but could have passed for ten years younger. Despite the harsh living of the past twenty years, he bore none of the lines near his eyes or around his mouth that usually began to dig into a person when they hit their thirties. Zeta energy had a way of keeping you looking young and fit. Jeff’s hair was also long, as barbering and hairstyling had become things of luxury. His jaw was scruffy with a few days’ worth of whiskers. He wore a jean jacket and tattered olive khakis.
With them was Sammy, the android with a photon computer for a brain. Sammy looked as he always did. Androids tended not to age. Young, smooth skin. A square jaw. A toothy smile. He was in an olive t-shirt and pants of desert camouflage. In a holster clipped to one side was an ion pistol.
The gutted, war torn remains of Logan Airport stood about them like a monument to days gone by. A couple jetliners held silent vigil on the tarmac, their tires long since gone flat. The skin of their fuselages was streaked with grime. The tarmac itself was a faded gray and was cracked in places, with weeds growing tall through the cracks.
Across the water, the wind caused dust to rise from the remains of the city. This happened often, and sometimes the dust reminded Jeff of smoke clouds.
The city of Boston was now officially deserted. It had been for years. The few humans who had survived the invasion and the war that followed had been long ago rounded up and interred in agricultural camps. These camps were sprinkled throughout the midwest and other places like Siberia, the Australian outback, and northern China.
However, Boston was not in reality fully abandoned. Sporadic renegade groups sometimes entered the city, looking for resources that might help them make one more stand against the Machine.
That’s what they called it. The Machine. The super computer running everything. It had outlawed religious and political organizations, and had rounded up dissenters and eliminated them. And it had outlawed the existence of meta-humans.
“The city,” Quentin said, in his gentle British accent. “Sometimes, I find myself simply looking across the water and remembering.”
“Sentimental, Quentin?” Jeff said. “We don’t have much time for luxuries like that.”
Quentin sighed. “Too true. And yet, if we allow ourselves to forget, then we will have nothing to rebuild, once we win this fight.”
“You still think we can win?”
Quentin nodded. “One cannot give up optimism. Just as one cannot give up memories of the past.”
Sammy said, “That’s commendable. And yet, the odds of us winning, of driving the alien force from this planet, are – “
Jeff interrupted him, rolling his eyes. “Please don’t.”
Quentin chuckled. “You two remind me sometimes of your father and Scott. God, how I miss them.”
Sammy nodded. “As do I. It’s been seventeen years, and yet I find I miss them no less than the day they were killed.”
“My dad,” Jeff said. “I knew him only a few short years.”
“And Mandy,” Quentin said, his gaze scanning what was left of the Boston skyline and the dust cloud rising from it. “I fear I never really knew her at all. And yet, I miss her as though it were only yesterday.”
Mandy, Jeff thought. Jeff’s own mother. He had met her only once, when she attacked the old complex in Colorado twenty-two years ago. She hadn’t even recognized him, and had tried to kill him. The woman had been completely out of her mind. And yet Quentin had been in love with her. Hopelessly. And he still was, even though she hadn’t been heard from since long before the invasion.
“We should get inside,” Sammy said. “We have eight minutes, thirty-seven seconds before the next reconnaissance fly-over.”
Jeff nodded. He and Sammy turned toward the building at the end of the tarmac. But Quentin simply stood, staring off toward the city.
Jeff touched his arm. “Come on, Quentin. Staring at the remains of the city won’t help anything. If we’re going to rebuild someday, first we have to stay alive.”
Quentin reluctantly nodded, and turned to follow them. He wiped a tear from his eye.
TWO
Sammy led the way across the tarmac, toward the central building ahead of them. Logan had been a small airport, as such things had gone. It held only a few gates. Above them was the small air traffic control tower that reminded Jeff a little of the Walkers used by the Empire, in the old Star Wars movies. The tower was now empty, with broken windows.
The air was clean and cold. There hadn’t been a carbon-emission engine fired up in Boston for seventeen years. Air pollution, which had been a problem of the old, pre-invasion days, was now long gone. Thank God for small favors, Jeff thought.
They stepped through a doorway. A guard was standing there, in military garb and holding an ion blaster.
“All clear, Henry?” Jeff said.
Henry nodded. He wore a desert camouflage helmet, and black stubble was decorating the jaw of his dark face.
“Fly-over due in just a few minutes,” Jeff said. “Don’t let them see you.”
“They won’t.”
Henry Johnson was like Jeff and Quentin, and like pretty much everyone at this complex. A meta-human. In his case, he was a runner. He could run all day without a trace of exhaustion.
He stood at the open doorway, which led to what had been the Delta gate. He was to blast anything that moved out on the tarmac.
They had no communication devices. No ear buds like the Secret Service and SWAT teams had used, in the old days. As such, one of Quentin’s functions was to remain in telepathic contact with Henry. Not so much in direct contact, but sort of listening so if Henry called to him, Quentin would hear it.
The interior of the former airport was dark, as there was no longer any electrical power. The grid had been shut down years ago. No need to waste resources powering a city that was no longer inhabited.
Jeff wore no weapon, as he didn’t really need one. Essentially, he was a weapon. But he did have a small mag light tucked into his pocket, and he pulled it out and flicked it on. Sammy had one, too, and so did Quentin.
The place was dusty. Their flashlight beams looked like they were cutting through fog. What Jeff wouldn’t have given to have Pete Sanborn around. A meta-human who had lived with the Boston crowd in the time they thought of as Before. Pete had never felt his meta ability was all that glamorous, compared to what some of them could do. His ability was simply to generate an energy field that could kill microbes and bacteria within a radius of a few hundred feet. An ability Pete had thought nearly useless, and yet Jeff would have considered it a treasure these days, as they made their way along the dusty, dingy interior of the airport. But Pete had been killed back in the invasion, along with so many others.
They made their way along dusty and torn carpets. Deep, intricate spider webs laced themselves along the ceiling. A rat skittered away ahead, just beyond the beam of their flashlights. Jeff couldn’t really see it, but he caught a glimpse of the motion.
They followed the corridor along to the central concourse.
Twelve people milled about. Chatting. Bored. There was a lot of downtime when you were on the run, hiding from hover craft making reconnaissance fly-overs. This group of survivors totaled thirty-one, in all.
At the center of the room was a bluish cube, maybe a foot high and a foot wide. It was a lighting cube—a piece of alien technology Rick had pilfered. A gentle bluish light glowed from it and filled the concourse. No one was quite sure how it worked or how long it would last before its power source was exhausted. But for the moment it and the mag lights were the only source of lighting the group had.
Rick Wilson had long since given up going by the name The Comet, the old code name April Hollister had come up with for him, in lighter times. But he could still move damned fast. He had taken this lighting cube from a small group of soldiers a few months earlier. He simply ran into their camp, grabbed their lighting cube, and then was away, stirring up a cloud of dust that left them choking and blinking their eyes. By the time they realized what was happening and had drawn their ion blasters, he was a half mile away.
Of course, the enemy forces had detection devices that could have alerted them to Rick’s presence long before he reached them, and energy fields that could have neutralized his ability. But it was a peripheral scouting detail, and they had been caught unprepared. A risky maneuver on the part of Rick, but now at least their little hideout had a lighting source.
He had said, “Sometimes you just gotta take a chance.”
The technology of the aliens was in many ways superior to anything Jeff had ever seen, and he would have loved to be able to learn how it worked. But with Scott Tempest long dead, there was no one among them who would have a chance of figuring it out. Not even Sammy. Despite his millions of gigs of memory, the poor guy couldn’t match what Scott could do. Sammy could tell it was some sort of bio-electrical engineering and ran on a power source he couldn’t identify, but that was about it.