by Sean Platt
She has to know.
“Willow, there’s something you need to—”
The door opens, and Mr. Fairchild enters the room.
He’s alone. For now.
He closes the door, hugs his daughter, then sits on one of the two chairs across from us.
He folds his hands over his lap and begins a preamble to prepare her.
“Please, Dad,” Willow interrupts. “Cut to the chase.”
He sighs, then takes out his phone and makes a call. “Yes, come in.”
Moments later, Kotke enters with Eden, wearing a blue dress and white patent leather shoes.
Then Kotke leaves the room and closes the door behind him.
Willow gasps as she stands.
“Eden?” She steps closer, her eyes wide. “How?”
“Hello, Willow. I’m sorry to disappoint you, but I’m not your sister. This is her body, perfectly preserved since her soul’s departure. I am an Artificial Intelligence. You may call me Eden.”
Tears well up in Willow’s eyes.
Her face is turning red as she steps closer, reaches out, touches the girl’s skin. Then she spins around and screams, “What did you do?”
Fairchild raises his hands, open-palmed, “I did this for you, Willow. Eden’s body will be a vessel for your soul once you pass.”
She turns back to the girl, then to her father, her face redder, her mouth twisted in agony as she shakes her head.
“You … you never told me you kept Eden’s body alive.”
“She’s not alive. She was preserved. For you. I promised that we would find a way for you to live on. And now we have. Ben can transfer your soul into her. We’re going to map your mind so we can upload a copy of your physical mind along with your soul. You won’t be a copy or a clone. You will be you.”
“You never said you were going to use Eden’s body!”
Willow’s shoulders slump. She closes her eyes, balling her fists.
I’ve never seen her so angry.
My gut and my heart ache for her.
I want to get her away.
I want to apologize for not telling her.
I want to make this all go away.
I want to hug her, to try to do something to show some support, but I’m getting a strong feeling of anger towards me, too.
If I touch her now, she might tear my head off.
Eden reaches out and touches her shoulder. “I’m sorry, Willow.”
She flinches. Recoils. “Don’t touch me!”
Then she turns her angry gaze on me. “You knew about this?”
“I only learned today, Willow. But—”
“No buts,” she says, throwing up a finger to silence me.
She spins back to her father, “I don’t want any part of this!”
Willow gives Eden an extra-wide berth as she storms out of the library and slams the door.
I look at Eden, expecting to see the girl on the verge of tears. Instead, she stares straight ahead, awaiting input or stimuli.
Like a fucking robot.
I stare at the door, then turn to a glowering Mr. Fairchild.
“You need to fix this, Ben,” he says.
* * * *
CHAPTER 12
Ben Shepherd Age 20
We’re eating at Cafe Beaujolais for Willow’s twenty-first birthday.
We’re sitting in the back, where it’s dark, quiet, and romantic. I had wanted to throw a surprise party, but Willow talked me out of it, particularly since her father already threw her one last weekend at his house.
At least they’re finally getting along again.
It took a few months for her to get used to his plan, even if she’s yet to spend much real time with Eden or do any of the mapping of her brain that we need to do if we’re going at this from both a brain and soul approach.
We don’t have much time left, and nobody’s sure how long the mind mapping will take. I feel like we should’ve started five years ago.
I wonder how many years we really have left.
I figure at least four, assuming her prophecy is correct. But what if she’s sick for a long time and only had a year or two of a quality life left?
We finish dinner, and the waiter appears, as planned, with the cake I’d brought over earlier, lit with twenty-one pink and red candles.
Willow glares at me with that fake angry look that she gives me when I pull something like this.
Several other servers appear to sing Happy Birthday.
“Thank you,” she says.
The waiter cuts and plates two pieces of cake then wishes Willow one last happy birthday before leaving us alone.
“When did you do this?”
I smile. “On my lunch break.”
“I wondered why you were working through your lunch break. And here I was pissed that you weren’t taking me to lunch on my birthday!”
I smile wider, then press my fork into the cake — decadent chocolate with vanilla frosting from Vanessa’s Baking Company. Her favorite.
My fork hits something.
What the—?
Something shiny is inside my cake.
I reach in, and my finger slides through a metal hole.
Did someone lose a ring in this cake?
I pull it out. It’s a men’s wedding band.
“Ew, I think the baker dropped a ring in the cake,” I say, unsure if I want to eat any of it.
Willow laughs.
“Or, maybe someone at this table outsmarted her boyfriend. Maybe this certain fiery redhead knew he would get a cake from Vanessa’s, then called Vanessa ahead of time and told her to put a ring in the cake, and told the waiter to cut the piece with the “H” on it and give it to you.”
“But why?”
She laughs. “Wow, for a smart guy, you are damned clueless.”
And then it hits me.
“Oh, my God. Are you saying you want to marry me?”
I’m tearing up. And thanks to the proposal, I was already feeling too much like a girl.
“Yes.” She gets down on one knee and holds out her hand, asking for the ring.
I wipe off the pieces of cake and place it in her palm.
She’s about to slide it on my finger and reverse tradition, but then she stops.
“Oh, wait, I almost forgot,” she says, reaching over to her purse, pulling something out, palming it, then sliding it into my hand.
“First this.”
I look down.
It’s a pregnancy test. With two lines.
“Does this say what I think it does?” I ask, tears now flowing.
She’s crying too, smiling as she nods.
I hug her. “Yes!”
Diners applaud all around us, but there’s no way they can possibly know how happy I am.
* * * *
CHAPTER 13
Ben Shepherd Age 21
“I can’t do it,” Willow cries, still pushing.
Her face is red. Sweat beads her brow. The light above her bed feels like a heat lamp.
She’s been in labor for nearly twelve hours. She’s exhausted, barely able to push.
I sit beside her bed in a chair, doing my best to be there for support without annoying her. She’s normally laid back and good-natured, quick with humor, but now she feels only pain and exhaustion. She’s already yelled at her parents to wait outside because her mom kept trying to “help out.”
Willow refused a C-section, but by the thirteenth hour, I wonder if she’s regretting her decision. I try to encourage her.
“You can do it! You’ve got this, honey.”
I give her my hand for support.
She grips it tight enough to turn my fingers all white.
I don’t pull away. If she needs to break every one of my fingers to get through childbirth, then so be it.
Willow’s doctor coaches her. “That’s it, Willow. Push.”
She screams, squeezing my hand even tighter.
“You’ve got it, baby. You’
ve got it.”
She continues to push, her entire body now trembling.
I focus on her face. I can’t stand the thought of looking anywhere else.
“I can’t do it!” Willow screams, collapsing, her hand relenting its iron grip on my fingers.
I move closer, hoping my presence doesn’t annoy her.
Willow looks up at me, a wreck.
And here I sit, helpless to make this any better.
She’s the only one who can do this.
I lean over, kiss her on the forehead, and whisper, “You’ve got this, baby.”
She begins to push again, gritting her teeth against the pain.
Suddenly, a cry.
I turn to see the doctor pulling a baby from between my wife’s legs.
Willow is looking up, tears streaming down her cheeks, smiling as she stares.
Then the doctor hands our daughter to Willow, umbilical cord still attached.
She takes the tiny pink baby against her bosom, nuzzling her cheek against its little, fuzzy head.
Willow looks up at me, and for the first time, I understand what she meant: Having a baby completes our family.
And I will do anything to keep our family together.
* * * *
CHAPTER 14
Ben Shepherd Age 22
I stare at the old man in the examination bed wondering if he ever thought he’d be part of medical history.
We’re in an operating theater in the bowels of AD.
The man is hooked up to machines monitoring his heart rate and blood pressure.
Thank God he’s asleep. I’m not sure I could do this with him awake, even if he consented in exchange for whatever ungodly sum of money Advanced Dynamic paid his family.
His name is Oliver Remington, an 87-year-old plumber who had what little life he had left cut short by an aggressive brain tumor.
He went downhill fast. One week he was vital, walking around, and the next, he was having memory problems, complaining of pain.
Then he turned angry and scared.
One of his doctors reached out to AD, who’d asked key people to keep an eye out for potential subjects for Project Willow.
Kotke is beside me, and there are three doctors with us.
Fairchild is on the other side of the two-way mirrors above us, probably with other members of Advanced Dynamics, sitting and watching, waiting for us all to make history.
One of the doctors, a thin, older black man with intense eyes whom I’ve never met, says, “Are you ready?”
I nod, even though I’m terrified that this isn’t going to work.
Terrified that we’re about to kill a man for nothing.
Yes, he was going to die anyway, and at least this way he’ll go out painlessly, with his family well-compensated after his passing, but still, we’re killing a man for something that might not fly.
I shake the doubt from my head.
I remember why I’m doing this.
Willow’s been withdrawn in recent weeks. Her depression is always worst in the aftermath of her mind mapping sessions with Eden.
She’s not sick yet, but damn if she doesn’t seem like she’s preparing for death. Sometimes I wonder if she knows something she’s not telling me. If she does know the exact date. And if so, why not tell her father or me so we can accelerate the process?
Her only happy times are spent with Ella, who is now starting to walk. They play in our yard, following our move into the Fairchild’s guest house. They go to the park. They watch shows together. Ella tries to exercise with Willow.
I wonder if Willow misses her job, or having something to do beyond staying home with Ella all day. Given how she gets cold towards me so often when I talk about work, I have to wonder if she’s jealous that I’m there and she’s not.
It’s not like she can’t go back.
She wanted to stay home.
She wants to spend every possible second being a mother.
So why does she seem to resent me?
Doesn’t she see that the long hours I put in with her father are all designed to save her life, or at least allow her to live on in another body?
I think that’s part of it.
She’s still not pleased that her father kept Eden alive.
She insists that it’s wrong the few times we’ve discussed it. And creepy. She doesn’t want to be in a child’s body. She wants to be an adult.
Nobody seems to be sure if Eden will grow now that she’s “alive,” or if putting her body “on pause” for so long did something to prevent her from aging permanently.
“Here we go,” Kotke says, watching the doctor inject his patient.
In a few minutes, the man’s organs will shut down.
I have to capture his soul before it leaves his body, then transfer that soul into Eden. In theory, it should work, even if I understand so little about how.
I focus until I find his signal.
I grab his hand, and instantly we’re connected.
I find myself, or the astral projection of myself, standing on a giant, dark stage without any floor or walls or ceiling or lights.
Memories rush by on fast-moving shivering walls. They’re ephemeral if I watch them, but when they brush into me, the dark stage vanishes, and I’m suddenly transported into this man’s memories.
They find me like bullets, piercing me, one after another.
I’m seeing through his eyes at different points in his life. Oliver as a child, playing with his brother; the time he accidentally ran over his family's dog and had to lie to his children so they wouldn’t hate him; the time he asked his wife to marry him. Those memories, and thousands of others.
So far I’ve only done practice runs of this with two other patients.
I followed the soul’s signal in both patients, which I could sense by its tone, compared to the rest of the body’s noise.
I had to follow the sound and enter the person’s memory.
Then I tune everything out: the memories, the chatter, everything.
I listen for his soul.
I hear it, up and to my right, inside a wall of memory.
I push myself toward it like a swimmer underwater.
I splash into the wall and find myself on a porch on a hot summer day in Kansas when Oliver was nine.
He’s sitting on the porch swing of his parent’s old run-down farmhouse, petting his puppy — a beagle named Sparky.
He smiles at his puppy.
His family struggled to put food on the table, but life was simple.
And there, just behind him, I see what I’ve come to find.
His soul.
It’s an energy that science and all its machines cannot sense.
But my gifts display it with clarity.
I see the aura more than the soul, and in Oliver’s case, his is bright blue, surrounding a fist-sized orb floating behind him.
Inside the aura, that clear nothingness, is his soul.
Despite having seen several, nobody has told me how to take it.
Fairchild said to trust my instincts.
That means I have no fucking idea, son.
With computers and memories, I’ve so far been able to visualize and grab, bringing them back with me or placing them into others, my interface manufactured on the fly.
But behind the scenes is work that I can’t understand.
I reach out with my disembodied hand and touch it, unsure of what will happen. But my fingers feel nothing
They pass through the soul. It simply slips away.
His aura blinks red before it vanishes, kicking me out of the memory and back into the black stage of his mind.
Shit!
Beeps in the real world signal that Oliver is about to die.
Again I search for the signal, but the walls of memory are racing by at the speed of light, spinning into a blinding white cacophony.
I try to focus on the tone, but can’t hear it beneath the screaming river of memories crashing over
and into me.
One second I’m standing on a Miami street corner at midnight, the next I’m in bed with his wife.
Then I’m an infant crawling on the floor.
His life is racing by as his body shuts down.
I have to find his soul then figure out how to capture it!
If not, this whole thing is a failure.
How do I find something the size of a fist in all of this?
Beyond his memories, I feel emotions, everything he’s ever felt in his life: joy, fear, hate, lust, heartbreak, envy … so much sadness.
If his life was a song, it’s defining note would be sorrow.
So much heartache.
Hopelessness begins to drown me.
Memories darken in tenor and visibility.
I must find his soul.
Then I remember one of the first memories, the one where he accidentally ran over his dog.
I propel myself through the walls of memory hoping that whatever guides my powers — instinct or supernatural force — will lead me true.
And then I’m there, standing on his front lawn watching his car backing up. He is going to pick up his children from elementary school and unaware that the family dog — a big, lovable mutt named Clyde — had gotten out of the house and is lying on the driveway, baking in the sun.
THUMP!
And a yelp.
Oliver stops and leaps out of his car.
“Oh God,” he cries out, staring down at Clyde’s body beneath the Toyota. The dog is looking up at him, confused, its eyes glassy as blood spills from beneath him.
“No, no, no, no. Clyde, I’m so sorry.”
He drops to his knees, trying to pull the dog out from under the car, but realizes that it’s stuck. Even if it weren’t, nothing could save him now.
He cries.
Behind him, I see his soul, floating, surrounded by a dark black aura, pulsating, growing while the memory darkens at the edges.
Oliver’s body is shutting down.
Soon, there will be nothing.