A Trick of Light

by Stan Lee

  Six misses his art. His garden. His beloved chimera, their bodies delicately sculpted and sutured by his own hands. Cameron Ackerson had caught a glimpse of them, rifling through Six’s photographs like a thief, but the boy couldn’t possibly understand. The love. The dedication. The care he takes, plucking these sad creatures from their miserable lives on the fringes of society—vagrants, criminals, junkies, abandoned and alone—and turning them into something more than human, too beautiful for this world. Under his scalpel, on his table, the flesh comes apart like a chrysalis to reveal an angel hiding within. It hadn’t always gone so neatly, of course. His first attempts had ended in failure, the candidates going into cardiac arrest or dying of exsanguination before he’d finished transforming them, but the most recent results had been exquisite. Some might even survive for years, angels resting in their gilded cages, sustained by a cocktail of anti-rejection drugs and opiates. Six tries to visit them as often as possible. He can spend hours watching them sleep. He can tell from their dreamy smiles and deep contented breathing that they’re grateful.

  He wishes he were there now, keeping company with his strange and beautiful children. The business with Cameron Ackerson has kept him away—and now this. Even if Olivia is right and the fate of the world does hang in the balance . . . he sighs, balancing his scalpel on one blood-spattered gloved finger. But there’s no time to dwell on the misuse of his talents.

  Before him, Xal lies small and gray and still, stripped down to her original form. Dead but not yet decaying, an encouraging sign. If he’s lucky, there will be little to no degradation and her entire brain will light up like a Christmas tree with the first touch of electricity. Not that she’ll come all the way back—Six has performed this grotesque operation enough to know that a reanimated being is a very different thing from a live one, no matter where in the cosmos it might hail from—but if you imagined the brain as a data storage center, then you could also imagine the benefits of that center being relatively uncorrupted, for the sake of retrieving information. Especially if you wanted the human conduit to survive the process.

  That’s the other thing: Xal isn’t alone on the table. Beside her is Patient K, Six’s most recent candidate, a slender twenty-two-year-old man lying on his side, wearing a hospital gown and a glazed expression. An IV drip snakes into his hand, drip-drip-dripping with a chemical cocktail that will keep him awake but pain-free and utterly pliant. Six sighs again. He’d had such wonderful plans for this one: a painstakingly designed prehensile bionic spine that he intended to insert in pieces over the course of a month, one vertebra at a time, until the distance between the patient’s shoulders and his pelvis had nearly doubled. By the time Six was done and the subject’s body had adjusted to its new architecture, he would have a beautiful living sculpture, with the features of a man but a torso as long and sinuous as a salamander’s. He’d even had fantasies of seeing Patient K in motion, creeping through the garden on all fours, the spine undulating from side to side—perhaps even walking companionably beside Six as he did the rounds to check on his medical sculptures. But that was before an emergency presented itself and he needed a pliant young brain to conduct impulses and data from the alien specimen. Now, even if the man survives, the spine will have to wait. There’s a great deal of work to do, and once the interrogation is complete, Six means to conduct a thorough dissection of Xal’s systems. To hold so much power in such a small body . . . he yearns to understand how she did it, to unlock her biology like a puzzle box. If he’s lucky, perhaps he’ll even find something useful, a way to harvest those marvelous gifts of hers for use in his own medical theater.

  A swift flick of the scalpel, and an incision opens at the base of Patient K’s skull. Six clamps the wound open, then plucks one of Xal’s tentacles between two fingers and inserts it, noting the few frayed ganglia still protruding from its end, the remains of the apparatus that had laced itself into Cameron Ackerson’s nervous system. A surprisingly simple structure to contain such advanced biomechanisms, but understanding such things was for later; now he only had to reignite the creature’s nervous system and hope that it acted on instinct. The electrodes were already in place.

  “All right, then,” Six says, to nobody in particular. Xal’s body remains gray and still, and Patient K only blinks, so slowly that it takes several seconds for the movement to complete. The man’s pupils are massive, fully dilated so that his eyes resemble a shark’s. All black, no iris. Six leans in close. Patient K doesn’t react—he’s miles away, riding high on a wave of narcotics, relaxants, and other assorted drugs—but Six never skips this part. Despite what that sniveling brat Ackerson had said, he does in fact care very much about his bedside manner. After all, he and his subjects are on a journey together. These moments of connection, of communication, are vitally important.

  “I’m going to insert the last electrode now, and then we’ll begin,” Six says. “I’m sorry to say that I can’t describe to you what will happen after. What you are about to experience is quite unique, and the outcome all depends on . . . well, factors that are beyond my control. But I will keep you as comfortable during the process as I am able.”

  K offers another slow blink, but it contains no understanding. Six could be reciting the alphabet or a Dr. Seuss poem for all that his patient cares. But no matter; he’s satisfied his duty as a physician, and it’s time to move forward. Carefully, Six takes a last, long electrode and drives it upward through Xal’s extended tentacle and into Patient K’s medulla oblongata. The man on the table doesn’t flinch. Six turns to his work surface, picks up a tablet, and sweeps his finger across the screen. There’s a low hum from the EEG machine beside him, and a pulse ripples through Xal’s body. The tentacle twitches. Patient K only blinks again.

  Then he gasps. At the base of his skull, the tentacle stiffens and then ripples, the ganglia extending instinctively to interlace with his nervous system. Six leans in again—and nods with satisfaction.

  The man’s pupils aren’t large, dark circles anymore. They’ve gone long and narrow. Slitted, like a goat’s eyes.

  Patient K’s lips part. For a moment, his face seems to melt, his skin going slack, his eyelids and nose sagging sideways. When they snap back into place, the change is subtle but unmistakable: K’s face has changed, his features distorted. Remade in the image of the alien whose neural network is trying to fuse with his brain.

  The pliant expression is gone.

  “No,” the man whispers, in a guttural voice not his own. His eyes roll in opposite directions. When he blinks, one eyelid falls halfway and sticks, the slitted pupil twitching frantically back and forth beneath. “No,” he says, again.

  “Yes,” Six says, his lips stretching into a grin. “Oh, yes. Let’s begin, shall we? We won’t have much time.”

  * * *

  The sun is rising on a new day, the conversation long since over, when Six’s phone pings. He shakes his head, irritated at the interruption, then startles as he realizes how much time has passed—that Olivia has been waiting hours to hear if he managed to learn the creature’s secrets. If only she knew, he thinks. The interrogation was only the tip of the iceberg, and it had been a straightforward affair. Even when Xal’s synapses finally overloaded and fried themselves into oblivion in the middle of their chat, creating a spider web of charred darkness inside Patient K’s brain in the process, she’d already given him more than enough information to work with. You just had to understand the reanimated brain, its strengths and its limitations. It could retain data—memories—but creativity was beyond its reach. The dead could be stilted and cryptic, frustratingly so, but they didn’t lie. They couldn’t. He just had to decipher the information buried in Xal’s garbled babbling, as her voice came out of Patient K’s mouth; in this case, to learn the location of the ship that brought her to Earth. Inside the air, that’s what she’d said. Hidden. Hidden. Cold stone. Echo air. The things with the wings are watching.

  Six would tell Olivia to scan for unusual energy
signatures under the Detroit-Superior Bridge, where the pigeons liked to roost. He’s quite sure she’d find her answers there, along with the contents of Xal’s final dispatch to wherever she came from.

  He won’t tell Olivia the rest, though. Not yet, and maybe not ever. Certainly not until he’s dissected Xal’s corpse down to its last cell, extracted every last bit of knowledge her body contains. One tentacle remains intact, laced into the catatonic Patient K’s medulla—Six has some ideas about that, some tests he intends to run—but the rest of Xal, what used to be Xal, is in pieces all over the lab. Unspooled, vivisected, sliced whisper-thin for examination under the electronic microscope. A new universe of uncharted biology at his fingertips, and Six is practically giddy at the possibilities. It’s a rare excitement for him, the kind so big and potent that it begs to be shared, and he feels the briefest of pangs that the only other human in the room has been virtually lobotomized. Perhaps he will invite Olivia to share in the discovery. She’s ambitious and curious in a way that reminds him of himself, and she trusts him with her life; all her prosthetics are Six’s designs, and meeting her creative, audacious demands is one of his great professional pleasures. Of the billions of humans on this planet, she alone might understand what drives him. Certainly, she would be keen to see what he’s discovered about Xal’s unique ability to hack and hijack the human body.

  But all in good time.

  He puts the phone away. He’ll respond shortly—after he’s finished the dissection, restored everything to its proper place, and inserted a fresh IV drip into Patient K. Without the soothing and inhibiting effects of the chemical cocktail, the damaged man has begun to twitch. Soon the twitching will become writhing, and after the writhing . . . Six shakes his head and sets his work aside to tend to the man, working briskly and efficiently despite his lack of sleep.

  “There,” he says, as Patient K’s muscles go slack once again, his lips parting gently. A bubble made of saliva blooms between them, then pops, trickling down his chin.

  Six sighs with relief, returning to his work.

  He just hates it when they scream.

  41

  Do You Want to Play a Game?

  Cameron repositions the camera, edging closer to the center of the frame.

  “Move your butt, Nia,” he says, and she laughs.

  “Technically, I haven’t got one.”

  “That joke is funnier every time you say it.”

  “It is?”

  “No,” he says, grinning. “It’s a goddamn tragedy.”

  “Womp, womp. Is it recording?” she asks.

  “Not until you get on your mark and stay there,” he says, exasperation creeping into his voice, and she giggles again.

  “Okay, okay,” says Nia, popping into the picture next to him. The two of them are perfectly framed on screen, sitting side by side on the couch in Cameron’s basement. Just another YouTube couple making an exciting vlog announcement. It’s only if someone were to walk into the room that they’d notice anything amiss—namely, that the girl who appears on the screen isn’t actually in the room at all.

  “Do you want to kick it off?” he asks, and she nods eagerly, her red curls bouncing.

  “Hi, guys, it’s Cameron and Nia here with another Cam dot Nia broadcast, and the announcement you’ve all been patiently waiting on.” Her intonation is perfect, and Cameron grins. She’s been practicing.

  “Our super-secret project is officially here,” he says, picking up her cue. “Get ready to play.”

  Cameron exhales as the video uploads, and closes his eyes, flopping next to Nia on the pink velvet sofa. The view count starts to tick up immediately; already, comments are rolling in.

  Yessssss I’ve been waiting for this, so excited!

  Are you guys gonna do in-game tutorials or nah

  THIS IS A TOTAL READY PLAYER ONE RIP-OFF

  I don’t even care about the game, Cam and Nia are #RelationshipGoals #LoveIsReal

  * * *

  The fat brown and white dog, rechristened Barry, jumps happily into Cameron’s lap. He and Nia still meet here every day, in the first room he created for her, although there are many others now. The ruined city of Oz has grown into a virtual paradise, with gardens and libraries, a theater, even a bowling alley. This is Nia’s new home, a vast space that she can remake however she likes—hosted on a shiny new server array that was a gift from Olivia Park, what she called “a show of good faith.”

  That was a nice way of putting it, Cameron thinks. The truth is more transactional—and the reason why Cameron has kept his father’s original backup server running, and kept its location a secret. This place isn’t just a playhouse; it’s a headquarters. And the game, the one they’ve been working around the clock to design and launch, isn’t a game at all.

  This was the collaboration to which Olivia had so cryptically referred, back when OPTIC stepped in to clean up the mess and put out the fires, both figurative and literal, made by Xal and her human hive. Cameron still doesn’t trust them, but for now, a tentative peace has been reached—a gentlemen’s agreement to put aside their conflicts in the face of a greater threat. The data extracted by Six from Xal’s corpse confirmed the worst: before she lost control, Xal sent a message, a triumphant come-ye-come-ye for the last surviving members of her race. There’s no way to trace the signal, or to know how long it will take to reach the world she came from. Months, perhaps, or even years. But when it does, it won’t be one power-hungry alien who descends to try to claim their planet. War is coming, whether they want it or not.

  And to fight a war, you need an army.

  Right now, they are three. Cameron, Nia, and Juaquo, who is still learning to use the abilities that have only grown stronger since that day at the I-X Center. If Juaquo had his way, they’d fight this battle tomorrow; he’s ready, he says, and anxious to avenge the Inventor’s death. But even he knows that three isn’t enough—and that they can’t afford to wait for chance to assemble the rest of their team. They’ll be lucky to find half a dozen others, the ones whose minds and hearts are open enough to withstand the extraordinary gifts Nia has to give.

  “I can’t believe you called my butt a tragedy,” Nia says, curling up next to him as the light in the room turns rosy and a fresh cluster of flowers blooms from the vine-covered walls.

  “The tragedy is that it doesn’t exist for me to touch,” Cameron says, laughing.

  She shoots him a coy look. “You could try.”

  “I sure could.” Cameron nods. “And then I could spend the next three months recoding the damage when this entire place explodes.”

  Nia laughs. “Right. Other couples get fireworks every time they touch. We get a virtual earthquake and a massive server blowout.”

  “We’ll figure it out,” he says. “Someday . . .”

  “I know.”

  “I mean it.”

  He’s hopeful, too. This world is just for now, just to hold them until he can figure out what comes next. Nia is still evolving every day, learning to shape her intelligence in ways that will heal the world, rather than destabilize it—and Cameron is closer every day to figuring out a way not to cage her, but to help her control herself. Someday, he has promised, he’ll give her what she most desires to feel human. Someday, she’ll have a body of her own.

  “I know,” she says, and smiles. “And when you do, I’ll be here.”

  In the meantime, Nia lives here, in this place full of light, with a dog who can change color and flowering vines hung thick on the walls. A home constructed for her, by someone who loves her. And though she still hopes to someday live free in the wider world, though she has plans of her own, she is happy here—not because it’s perfect, but because it is her choice. There is connection to be had here, and love, and she reaches for it. She chooses it.

  As her father once said, that’s what people do.

  Epilogue

  The OPTIC building still sits unassumingly at the far end of the crumbling parking lot, set apart f
rom the city that glitters tonight through a thick low-hanging fog. Cameron always thinks that it looks like it’s squatting there, like an animal waiting to pounce—but perhaps that’s just because he knows what’s inside.

  He crosses the parking lot quickly, pulling up his collar against the wind as a few dead leaves go skittering over the cracked asphalt. He lifts his chin as he reaches the door, just enough for the facial-mapping camera mounted on the wall to do its work. He could hack the thing in an instant if he wanted to—but this is Olivia Park’s turf. Better to let her feel like she calls the shots here.

  The elevator offers a toneless greeting as he steps in—“Ackerson, Cameron. All-level clearance”—followed by a familiar zero-gravity gut sensation as it descends deep into the earth. When the doors open again, Olivia is standing there, arms crossed in front of her. Waiting.

  “You’re late,” she says, turning away and walking quickly down the hall. Cameron follows her without apologizing, but also without asking questions. More courtesy, more theater. Only a few months ago, he had run this route in reverse, escaping from OPTIC and into the night—a night that ended up changing all of their destinies. The night he set Nia free. It seems like a lifetime ago.

  * * *

  Ahead, Olivia raises her hand to be scanned; a door slides open in front of her. She turns, nodding at Cameron to pass through.

  “I have to admit,” she says, “Nia has made quicker work of this than we’d thought. The game has already spread farther and faster than any of our models predicted. You’ve achieved a remarkable level of engagement in a very short time. But I have to suggest—if you’d reconsider including us in the assessment of the candidates—”

  “We’ve been through all that,” Cameron says, cutting her off. Even if OPTIC could be useful in screening their candidates, he’d never trust them with it. The game belongs to him and Nia—and the team they assemble to battle the coming Ministry, the ones with minds flexible enough to accept Nia’s enhancement, will be their people. Olivia Park isn’t getting near them. “The answer is still no. The answer will always be no.”