Resurrection

by Sean Platt

  Well, then fuck her, too.

  Even as Melanie stalked from one end of the ship to the other, she knew she was out of control. All that she hated in Meyer and Divinity and disobedient Titans, she saw in herself. Even now, she was learning new lessons. This time around, that lesson was hypocrisy. But if the collective wanted to individualize as poison flooded through Clara’s breach, then they’d suffer the flip side of that individualization. Yes, they could make their own choices. But the same disease that gave them options also gave her authority. What was once egalitarian could become hierarchical. What should have been a collective could become a dictatorship as complete as any the humans had shown through the archive.

  Despite the press of time, Melanie refused to run. She stalked the ship, almost hoping for defiance. Her mental fists were held aloft, ready to fight. Being threatened and abducted and subjugated had raised her hackles. Meyer had made her believe she could die (though she couldn’t); Divinity had shown her she wasn’t in charge (though by new definitions, she was); Titans and Reptars were drifting about under their own direction. The archive was barely guarded while Titans took sides aboard the big ships. She couldn’t even dispatch shuttles, because none wanted to listen.

  Again, fuck them.

  No Titans entered the corridors. If they had, she’d have tackled them with feet and fingernails before simply pinching off the energy fueling their bodies from deep within. No Reptars came, even though she was sure they’d see her in the collective if they looked. They knew better, it seemed.

  A short while later Melanie came to a double-wide door at the end of a large, utilitarian hallway. She was at the edge of the ship, not even in its middle. To her surrogate sensibilities, everything about the chamber and its lack of pomp seemed boring. It looked more like a storage room than the bed of royalty.

  The door, on her subconscious command, slid open. The space beyond was larger than the door implied: at least fifty feet high, round and domed, massive in circumference. Through all her turmoil, she’d somehow kept her human shoes on. Heels clacked in the space, echoing like tiny gunshots.

  She looked up at the partition. She issued a request with a thought, and the partitions flickered away as if they’d merely been projections.

  Behind it was a thing like an enormous anemone, its skin translucent, its insides made of light.

  “It’s gone too far,” Melanie said. “Open up, and let me in.”

  CHAPTER 50

  Lights surrounded her. To Melanie they looked like fireflies she’d never witnessed through her surrogate’s eyes but had seen over and over in memories — from the archive, pulled from the air, seen through the eyes of drug users in altered states, downloaded from observers who’d lived countless lives together with their human hosts.

  A voice seemed to say, Are you sure?

  But Melanie knew the trick. The voice was her own, though it sounded like a thing from the outside, pushing in, through her skull.

  “What damage can it do at this point?”

  The space — the fireflies, the voice, all of it — didn’t respond for a while. Melanie stood in the thing’s center, in the semi-dark, watching the pattern of lights as they floated like sparks all around her. The thing’s skin was mostly transparent, but she was in the center, seeing outward through many layers. If the body had organs, she was seeing through them as well. The effect was curious and beautiful, like standing in the aftermath of an elegant explosion, watching scraps of flame descend and swirl in the air.

  Then it did respond, but again Melanie tried to see the reaction for what it was. Not that different from speaking to oneself in the mirror — something Melanie had tried, and found she liked. Humans spoke of selves within the self: multiple voices in one, ego and id. Considering where she was and what she’d seen and done, it was something Melanie could appreciate on many levels.

  She was standing inside her own body, speaking to her own mind. But whereas the anemone in the room had once truly felt like “Eternity” to all on the ship, it had started to feel like something else. Melanie was the embodiment. This huge thing in the giant room, thinking in abstract and bathed in light? It was old baggage — a body Melanie knew she’d need to return to one day, but still found repugnant.

  The voice in her head, as Melanie stood in her true body’s center, said, As you wish.

  “As we wish,” she corrected.

  But the voice did not reply.

  And then it began.

  CHAPTER 51

  In Control, with Liza Knight smugly juggling the canister of Canned Heat and still infuriatingly undecided, Divinity felt the Purge creep through her like an internal hand. Walls in front of secrets she’d tried to keep — rights of a surrogate, rights of a damaged, individual mind — crumbled to dust. Eternity gripped her. The big hand rummaged through her thoughts, tweaking, nudging things into place. Mental chests opened and spilled their contents. She knew what had happened immediately. And what would happen next.

  Liza’s eyes widened. For a moment, Divinity saw right through her. Liza’s head seemed to open like origami unfolding, and Divinity could read it all over her shoulder, from the big chamber, where Eternity had broken the collective covenant. It was Eternity committing this violation, forcing her way into both of their brains through brute force. But as long as Liza’s hybrid mind opened, Divinity would take her peek.

  Liza was bluffing. Of course she was, and had been all night while neither slept. There was no magic to the human’s virus. It would integrate with their collective same as any human technology could be made to, simply by plugging it in. Liza was only hot air. Thanks to Eternity’s intrusive Purge, her posturing — pretending she held knowledge needed for installing Canned Heat — was as obvious as the smug look that had so recently drained from her face.

  Divinity didn’t need Liza Knight — or her maddening indecision.

  “Oh God,” Liza said.

  “If that’s what you believe.”

  Divinity crossed to Liza, lighting fast.

  Took her head in the crook of her arm.

  And broke her neck.

  Meyer’s eyes opened in his barred cell, the haze departing as if someone had set an industrial fan beside him to waft it away. Suddenly there was no connection. He couldn’t reach Piper, to give her Trevor or any of the others as a guide. He couldn’t reach Clara, to explain what needed doing or what he had in mind — what had finally dawned on him, after Eternity ordered him dragged from the Nexus to this place, where it turned out he could still reach the Ark’s memories just fine. He couldn’t reach Stranger or Kindred; it was as if his other halves had been severed clean, snipped from existence.

  He was in a white room, restrained by the arms, beaten a bit more than seemed necessary, especially by usually-stoic Titans. He’d been keeping the pain at bay, but now everything hurt. His head throbbed. He felt tiny, all that expansion he’d so recently realized gone in a blink.

  A raw, red force remained in its place. Eternity, pushing through him like a battering ram.

  He scrambled for the connection. The force would have to leave again eventually, withdraw the suffocating presence like a weight on his chest. The timing couldn’t have been worse. Meyer could see through their eyes now, but with the connection cut that felt like a curse. He could still see the freighter from Piper’s point of view, with Clara, Logan, Kindred, Stranger, and a Middle-Easterner who seemed vaguely familiar all around her.

  Meyer strained, trying to fight the force of Eternity scraping the inside of his mind, cutting him off from Piper and the others.

  They’d be at the wreck in minutes — but would now arrive without his help, without the ability to tell the real Reptars from their echoes.

  On the planet below, Stranger gripped his head and fell to the sand. His knees wouldn’t hold him upright anymore — and curiously, neither could Kindred’s, just down the dune. The pain was blinding.

  Piper moved in front of him, speaking, but he couldn’t hear her
, or concentrate on anything at all. Someone was inside his head, pushing all the buttons that he alone should have been able to press. There was no forcing it back. He could only close his eyes and wait.

  “Stranger!” Somewhere down the dune, other voices shouted Kindred’s name, somehow echoed not from outside his head but inside Stranger’s mind.

  He saw a long tunnel in the darkness behind his eyelids, he at one end and Kindred at the other. When he opened his eyes, Stranger could still see Piper — except that her face had become that of a blonde woman.

  “Now I understand,” said Piper/the blonde woman, a smile crawling across her features.

  Inside that mental tunnel, Kindred and Stranger moved toward each other. Force built. Lightning crackled through the air with deadly potential.

  It wasn’t until hands grabbed him and tried in vain to hold him back that Stranger realized his body, in the real world, had risen to walk forward as well.

  Clara stood without moving, watching the two men stand and walk with their entourage, meeting an internal face eye to eye. She turned to meet its gaze without flinching, her mental body squaring mental shoulders.

  You can’t stop us, Clara thought. We’re already at your Ark.

  I am in control now. You cannot harm us.

  But Clara knew it was a lie. Staring in those mental eyes, directly through the break she herself had made between the species, she knew that poisoning the Ark would work just fine, if they could reach it.

  There are Reptars, said the other.

  They will not stop us either. We can open the top. Piper knows how. She is the key. You did that to her, all those years ago.

  The face inside seemed to laugh. Then it said, Piper also knows how she plans to poison it.

  And then it showed Clara what Piper meant to do.

  Inside the monolith, two Reptars woke. They’d moved as one, nesting together as if seeking comfort. The wounds were superficial. But now the odd thoughts each had about earning more — normally out of mind in this form but present of late — were gone.

  A ghost of a handler materialized before them.

  “There are five on the sand, split into two groups,” the handler said. “One group for each of you. Center on the two older white men and the young woman. They are the last of the Archetypes. The others will go quickly once they are handled.”

  One of the Reptars rose to its clawed feet and chattered. The other joined it, two black voices forming a chorus like swarming insects.

  The handler seemed to take the chatter as language. She plucked the Reptars’ key thought — concern was too strong a word — as if spoken in the words of the higher class.

  “It will be like last time,” the handler said. “Double and redouble. They are blind, and will not see the true targets until it is too late.”

  The lead Titan, walking without hurry in the direction Eternity had departed, stopped as if he were an automaton with its power cut. His companion paused as well, and the two met each other’s placid eyes.

  Where is she?

  It does not matter.

  We were pursuing, said/thought one of the Titans.

  But it does not matter.

  The head Titan stopped, waiting for a thought. Moments ago, his directive had been clear. He’d been going to retrieve … something. Someone. Now all he could sense from the collective was the collective itself. It felt different somehow — damaged, as if there had been discord or death. But he paid it no mind. Because Eternity’s hand was inside, holding him, ordering him to ignore it.

  Where? thought the first.

  One considered. As did the other. Then they seemed to realize the same answer at the same time, as it had always been within the collective.

  Control. There is a threat.

  Weapons up, the Titans changed direction and marched toward Control.

  Divinity bore down, finding her surrogate’s head throbbing.

  If she waited and kept the pressure on, she could push Eternity out of her. And as she pushed, Divinity fought a curious indignity. Eternity had initiated a Purge. It was a violation but also bad news. In a stable collective, a Purge was dicey, and the collective was far from stable now. The group mind wasn’t meant to be hijacked, but sometimes even the best-functioning group needed an administrator to force order. The ability was there as almost a janitorial concern, simple to implement and align diverging minds, but short-lived and intended to fold after a hard moment of systemwide force. She’d be able to puppet Titans and Reptars if she wanted. But Divinity had a mind of her own.

  A terrible scratching preceded a banging at the door: someone trying to break in.

  Divinity looked down at Liza Knight’s body. She’d meant to watch her death, to find out if she could see the observer energy leave Liza to find itself a new host. But she’d seen nothing.

  She reached down, grabbed the silver cylinder. The banging continued.

  In seconds they’d be inside.

  But what Divinity meant to do would take less than that.

  On the sand, feeling the hand retreat, Stranger and Kindred looked at one another, each feeling the intensity of the attraction drawing them together. The air felt charged by powerful electromagnets. Kindred blinked up, realizing what he’d almost done, seeing the other members of their party slowly let go of their arms, apparently deciding they might not walk any closer after all.

  Another ten feet might have done it. Ten feet closer, and there’d have been no more Stranger. No more Kindred. Only the end.

  The presence animating their bodies slipped away, its power lost. Kindred and Stranger, each with intense effort of denial, began walking backward, away from one another.

  The force in the air lessened, crisis averted.

  But across the open area ahead, a sea of Reptars was already swarming.

  CHAPTER 52

  Melanie awoke in the dark. There were no more fireflies. As had happened when she’d woken in front of Meyer, at first she wondered if she was dead — if her surrogate’s end had meant her own. But no, she was simply integrating. Her little push had realigned the collective’s key pieces, showing her so much that she’d needed to know, that had been kept from her. A side effect was that her true self was pulling her back in. Inviting her to rejoin, to stop being Melanie and become Eternity again.

  No.

  This is what you requested.

  It’s not what I want.

  But the Purge. You have forced reintegration, through the fist.

  Even that didn’t make sense. Her true body didn’t have a fist, or understand the allusion.

  She’d only managed to delay the inevitable. Cured nothing. As she’d feared, the collective was fatally infected. If they stayed here any longer, it would all come crashing down, no matter how many realigning Purges she tried. Even her true mind carried the pollution. Divinity had pushed her away, and she, herself, didn’t want to accept her body’s call. What did it say about the collective if its Eternity didn’t want to be itself?

  But some good had been done. She’d almost annihilated two of the remaining Archetypes. All three were in grave danger now — a bit of theater she could still see through the stream, if she looked inward. Melanie still had her hooks in Meyer, and that meant none of the six people on the sand would be able to tell the true Reptars from the counterfeits.

  But if Clara was right? If they really could get past the Reptars? It seemed unlikely, but humanity had surprised them so many times already.

  If they poisoned the Ark again, the damage would be too intense to purge. There would be no choice but to sever the connection. Not by killing the species; they were far to entangled now for that not to end the collective as well. But they could leave, declare Earth a loss, and go, accepting their failure to clean the lab after the experiment had ended.

  I might be Melanie forever.

  Unacceptable.

  This could still be saved, the situation salvaged.

  Meyer was still repressed.

&
nbsp; The Archetypes would be unable to fight without his help, and the remaining three would die.

  Then they could complete the erasure.

  And accepting a two-decade delay, the new epoch could finally begin.

  Melanie exited the larger body, resisting its intense pull. She thought again: Hypocrite. But leaders always made exceptions for themselves.

  As the body closed, she saw the fireflies come back to life inside it.

  She didn’t leave the chamber for what came next.

  Melanie sat. Cleared her mind. And watched the scene unfold on the planet below.

  CHAPTER 53

  They came like a black tide.

  If there really were only two Reptars on the freighter — something Clara found herself doubting as she watched them boil over the railing and run down the ship’s sides like drops of noxious water — they must have done something since the group’s departure. They must have taken their false faces and doubled them, then doubled them again. This was something exponential. Clara was frozen. The Reptars would come and come until their tiny group was drowning.

  “Run.”

  Clara’s mind wanted to identify the speaker, and was shocked to discover she’d said the word herself — in a hush, like a secret.

  “Clara …” Piper said, drawing the end of her name past its usual length: a question without a mark. Logan and Kamal were looking at her the same way. Clara wasn’t in charge, but still somehow it seemed that she was. Piper had told them they needed to return, but Clara sat at the middle of some sort of vital crossroads: in agreement with Piper on one axis but most informed on the other.