Beyond Regeneration

by Jenny Schwartz

  “A bat’s hearing. Physically it took, but my hearing didn’t adjust. Maybe it got a bit sharper.”

  Jack settled back and Charley could imagine that in some corner of his mind he’d been puzzling over the subject since Alan’s confession: why hadn’t Michael’s bio-enhancement worked? Was a bat an unsuitable source of enhancement? Had his failure to allow time and space to adjust to the bio-enhancement in peace prevented its adoption? Was it the QNA, could they really determine a bio-enhancement operation’s success?

  Charley focused on Michael and realized he didn’t like admitting failure—even one that was surely beyond his control.

  “I haven’t visited the QNA lab at New Hope in months.” Ted broke the silence. “I’d like to go there, tonight.”

  “With me as the combined conduit and guinea pig to the QNA?” Charley’s smile twisted.

  “Are you scared of the QNA?” Ted absorbed her attack and her distrust, and turned it back on her. It was a very shamanistic thing to do.

  It forced her to focus on the steps forward. If the QNA were to be understood, then she had to act. She’d accepted that conclusion this afternoon, but accepting it in theory was vastly different to putting it into practice. After the avalanche of Alan’s memories at her last visit, Charley would have preferred a night’s sleep and privacy for her next encounter with the QNA. Was she scared?

  Hell, yes. “The QNA makes me uncomfortable. However, I don’t think it’ll take over my mind or anything like that.”

  “Great.” Nicola’s chair skidded back as she stood. “Let’s get at it, then.”

  There was a general scraping of chairs.

  Jack was the last to move. He’d been watching Charley’s reluctance. When he spoke, his voice was flat. “We’ll go, but I’ll drive Charley and myself.”

  A few lights lit the path from the house to the garage, and served to make the surrounding area seem darker. While Michael and the trio crunched over gravel to their car, she walked beside Jack. They could probably hear her, even if she kept her voice low, but she had to ask. “Do you think I’m crazy?”

  “No, I believe you’ve experienced something inexplicable.” He said nothing else, though, till he opened the passenger door of his car for her. “I never wanted you mixed up in trouble.”

  Their faces were close. She realized that the anger she’d sensed in him—no, not just anger, the whole mix of emotions—weren’t directed at her, but were for her. He regretted involving her. She put her hand against his chest. “I could have run away at any time. I’ve had practice at that.” She smiled ruefully, self-deprecating. “For all my doubts and confusion, I’m intrigued. I’m glad to be, here, with you.”

  A muscle in his jaw twitched. He put his hand briefly on her shoulder, then at her waist. Then he kissed her briefly, startlingly, on the mouth. “Let’s hope neither of us ends up regretting your courage and my selfishness.” He helped her into the car and closed the door before she could question his statement.

  His selfishness? She looked at Jack’s profile as he drove down the driveway, the headlights of Michael’s car behind them lighting his face.

  “My selfishness in wanting you with me,” he answered her silent question.

  New Hope looked eerie at night. The clients’ apartments were all dark; their residents respecting the early-to-bed guidelines. Sleep played an important part in the healing process of regeneration.

  There was movement on the veranda of New Hope’s main office. A light flashed on and a security guard came forward. He met Jack at his car, evidently recognizing him. “Problems, Doctor?”

  “No, everything’s fine.”

  The guard accepted the dismissal. However, he was worth the money someone was paying him: before he retreated he cast a swift look at the four people emerging from Michael’s car. The guard would recognize them and be able to describe them later, if needed.

  They climbed the veranda steps in a group, and Charley found herself walking beside Ted.

  He was quietly enthusiastic. “It’s fascinating. If the QNA are communicating with us, how do they manage it? I was thinking about it in the car. It has to be an energetic communication. There’s no other mode of transmission since they don’t have a voice or ears or anything like that, and you’re not touching them when you receive the impression of communication, so they must broadcast. I know Alan Do cultures them in coconut water, and that contains electrolytes, but why would that matter? Can sentient communication occur at the cellular level through stimulating specific chemicals, even molecules?”

  Charley let the spate of words wash over her.

  Ted was struggling to make sense of a potentially sentient intelligence which by human laws, couldn’t exist. If he managed to conceptualize the experience, maybe he could explain it to her, but his musings made less and less impact on her. In fact, they faded to no more than a background hum to her worries.

  Jack flicked switches, blazing with light their trail through the empty building. There was an awful symbolic rightness in darkness ahead and light behind them, marking their progress. They were moving from the known world to the unimaginable.

  As they approached the QNA lab Charley braced herself for the weirdness of the QNA’s communication.

  Beside her, Ted fell silent.

  “Are you ready, Charley?” At her nod, Jack opened the lab door.

  Perhaps it was the group intrusion, but initially she didn’t sense anything odd. Relief and anticlimax mixed with a wary waiting-for-ambush feeling.

  The others looked around the lab while shooting sly assessing looks at her.

  Actually, she corrected herself, they weren’t just looking.

  Ted was, but Nicola and Aaron were using other senses. That was evident in the way Nicola closed her eyes and concentrated.

  Nicola’s eyes remained closed when she asked Charley. “Can the QNA show you someone else’s memory?”

  “Did you get something?” Michael pounced.

  Nicola opened her eyes, blinking innocently as she stared down at the culture dishes of QNA. “No, just curious.” She reached out to touch the QNA dishes, then withdrew, perhaps remembering their sterile cultivation condition.

  Michael looked unconvinced, but Aaron spoke before he could question her further.

  “They smell blue like the ocean…clean, renewing.” He and Nicola stared at each other, communicating some shared understanding.

  “Can the QNA show you someone else’s memories, Charley?” Nicola prompted.

  Strangely, it was the absence of the QNA’s communication that enabled Charley to consider the consequences of her answer before she gave it. While Aaron and Nicola distracted Michael, she’d had a moment to think.

  The answer she gave to Nicola’s question had implications in the QNA’s future use. In how they…or it…would be used. And they would be used, Charley didn’t doubt that for an instant. Michael was looking for an edge, and he wouldn’t be the only one. He was hungry for power, and what greater power was there than controlling a sentient species?

  The QNA could be the most devastating of eavesdropping devices. From a security force’s point of view, prisoners could be shut in with the QNA and their secrets stripped—if the QNA cooperated.

  It came back to the question of whether ethics and policing could keep pace with the changes the QNA’s sentience introduced?

  Yet, if she withheld information, would she be the one limiting the QNA’s future?

  She looked at Jack, who looked back expressionlessly.

  The bottom-line was that she had no right to withhold information from him about his QNA. At least in legal terms, it was his both in terms of owning it and being responsible for its actions.

  She sighed, a little concerned that the QNA still hadn’t spoken to her.

  Wouldn’t it be wonderfully ironic if, after everything, she and Alan had simply hallucinated their sense of emotional interaction with an alien sentience? Perhaps there’d been some chemical released into
the air from the culture medium—although coconut water wasn’t a known hallucinogenic.

  She decided to stick with the unembellished facts. “When I was looking for Alan, yesterday, I was worried about him. I think the QNA was, too. It picked up on my worry and showed me Alan’s memory of identifying Lillian’s body on the rocks. I was repelled at the invasion of his private emotions and I kind of broadcast, blasted, that emotion—my total disapproval. I think the QNA took my negative emotions as a lesson learned. It won’t be showing other people’s memories anymore.” Okay, so that last bit was purely a product of fiction and hope. Basically, she had her fingers crossed.

  “Even if you asked it to?” Michael prodded.

  She scowled at him. “I wouldn’t. Besides it doesn’t work like that. The communication is more amorphous.” She stopped as memories hit her.

  The QNA had been holding fire—perhaps learning the people who'd intruded on its space—but now they had something urgent they wanted to communicate.

  Charley saw Eric, young, tired, his half-smile lurking. It was the memory of just one of a thousand small goodbyes. In memory, they stood at the door to the hospital where Eric had interned. Back then, she’d looked up from their kiss and seen Jack watching, waiting to step past them and through the door.

  “Sorry.” She’d pushed at Eric’s shoulders, and scolded. “We’re blocking the door.”

  Only now, seeing the memory, did she identify Jack’s expression. Not impatience or disapproval: envy.

  “Enough,” she said aloud. The memory vanished, fading at the edges, losing its precision. She focused on the lab and the people in it. They were staring at her.

  “Enough what?” Michael asked, softly.

  “My memories.” She refused him an answer. She felt fragile, as if the simple act of breathing hurt. She couldn’t look at Jack. “I’d like to leave now.”

  “Of course.” Jack opened the door.

  She bolted out, her body scorching as she passed him. She heard his breath check as he noticed her awkward avoidance.

  Of course, neither Michael nor Nicola wanted to leave it at that, but Aaron silenced Nicola’s protest with a hand on her shoulder and a warning look.

  Jack simply ignored Michael and led the way back to their cars. “Tomorrow is soon enough.” He shut the car door, shutting Charley into the Jag and away from Michael.

  “Jack, there isn’t time.”

  “Too bad.”

  Only Ted hadn’t reacted to Charley’s flight. Whatever he’d seen in the lab—something or nothing—had shut him in on himself.

  Charley trembled as she sat limply in the passenger seat of Jack’s car. There was an intimacy in being enclosed in that dimly lit bubble. For her, scientific interest in the QNA was completely submerged by their revelation: Nicola, Aaron and Ted had been right. Jack’s interest in her was personal.

  His words were a weird almost-echo of her thoughts. “Memories are personal,” he said, staring ahead at the road.

  “Yeah.” Her whispered agreement was rough. She stared at his shadowed profile. And sometimes memories give away too much. Maybe that’s why, left to itself, the human mind blurs and buries memories.

  She leaned her head back against the seat. Her heartbeat was too fast. “I came here to write an article about a medical breakthrough. But I got it wrong. The story was, and is, a story about what it means to be human.”

  “Maybe.” He extended his claws, tapping them against the steering wheel. “Does it bother you, this non-human part of me?”

  “It did in the beginning.”

  He retracted his claws, curling his fingers out of sight over the steering wheel.

  “No, I didn’t mean…I never saw you as a monster. It bothered me morally that there would be a further divide between rich and poor according to those few who could afford your bio-enhancements—and that was before I learned of Jabberwocky and sensory enhancements.”

  “Most technologies are initially too expensive for everyone,” he began defensively.

  “I know. I’m explaining how I felt, and feelings aren’t logical.”

  He made a sound beneath his breath, nearly a growl.

  She hurried on. “I realize my response was irrational. Refusing to develop something because it will be expensive would be ridiculous. It was an adolescent response.” She dismissed it, her voice tightening. “What bothers me now, Jack, is the challenge of integrating these new capabilities into what it means to be human.”

  “That’s a question for the philosophers.” He turned the car into his home street.

  “And for those of you who have to live with it.” She wanted to crawl into bed and pull the covers over her head and not be bombarded with anything more, but they couldn’t leave the issue unaired. It was out there. She knew it. He suspected it.

  He had feelings for her.

  She waited till he’d parked the Jag. “Let’s walk down to the creek. I want to talk without eavesdroppers.”

  He froze a moment, before clicking the car locked. “Okay.”

  Moon and stars gave enough light to make it safely to the creek. Skitters and rustles in the grass and trees marked the flight of the nocturnal inhabitants of Jack’s home.

  “Bats?” she asked, only peripherally disturbed by an old phobia.

  “I’ve not seen any, here.”

  They stopped near the rough wooden benches where they’d eaten lunch, but neither sat down.

  “Nicola, Aaron and Ted haven’t been completely honest with you,” she began.

  “You mean, beyond bugging my life?”

  “They’re concerned about you.” Whatever their feelings toward him, they were concerned about Jack because he was the gateway to the three of them. A threat to him, threatened them. “Forget that.” Briefly, she outlined the trio’s experience of their sensory bio-enhancements.

  “Why didn’t they tell me?”

  “I think they feel protective of their world. And maybe despite their impression of confidence, they doubted they’d be believed.” Given her experience with the QNA, she had some sympathy for that fear. However, she thought there was another reason, too. A more ambitious one. “Sensory bio-e opens up a whole new world and they’re its colonists.”

  “Colonists?” He queried the notion. “Explorers maybe, mapping a new territory. Insisting on rugged independence.” Bitterness marred his voice.

  “No.” He hadn’t understood. “The trio’s understanding of what their enhanced senses perceive is creating a new world. Human perception is our world. As their perception changes and deepens, Nicola, Aaron and Ted are creating a new world.”

  “So are you,” Jack said, surprising her. “With the QNA. People have searched outer space for years looking for intelligent life, another sentient species to share our experience. But the QNA are here. They share Earth. In a sense we created them—and maybe they won’t be the only intelligence created, inadvertently or not, by human activity.”

  She leaned back against a tree, needing its rough, physical support. “But I didn’t create this new world—it found me.” She was tired, soul deep exhausted. “It’s weird to think that the QNA’s existence means humanity is no longer alone.”

  “And that cross-species communication can start without language. No wonder Michael was interested enough to announce his eavesdropping.”

  “You can’t give him the QNA.” She straightened, suddenly urgent.

  “Ah.” It was no more than an indrawn breath, an “I thought so” without words.

  She cut off her protest to frown at him. “What?”

  “Have you noticed your attitude towards the QNA?” He paused, then answered his own question. “You’re protective, Charley. Unsure, a bit scared, but determined to protect what you see as a vulnerable new being.”

  A frog stopped its ribbiting chorus and entered the creek with a tiny “plop”. Charley glanced in the direction of the noise, unwillingly grappling with the implications of his observation.

  W
as she protective of the QNA? She didn’t want it hurt through ignorance, or exploited. She felt responsible for it since she could receive its communication. Responsible. Since Eric’s death she hadn’t let anyone close enough to owe them any responsibility. She hadn’t even watered neighbors’ pot plants or collected their mail during annual vacations. Now Jack had picked up that the QNA had breached that defensive wall between her and the world. Was that what had brought back the professional buzz her work held for her?

  His phone rang, an alien sound in the quiet night. The entire frog chorus, that had accepted Charley and Jack’s still figures, silenced.

  “Excuse me.” He walked away from her, phone to his ear.

  Who would call him at this time of night?

  A calming note entered his voice.

  His professional bedside manner? She strained her ears. Yes. Some soon-to-be client, judging from his answers. Possibly a person in pain, and worried and forgetful of time differences from wherever it was they lived.

  He handled them carefully, despite his preoccupation. They clearly had questions and he answered without impatience. “I have to go inside and look that up. Yes. All right.” His voice faded.

  She heard the sound of the back door closing.

  The night was once more given up to the sounds of the bush and the gentle gurgle of the creek.

  From a couple of trees away, a mopoke gave a mournful cry. “You and me both,” she said. She stared at the clear running water, the sparkle of moonlight lost to darkness beneath the trees. Would the cold creek water clear her thinking? It had been a long time since she’d gone paddling, squealing as tadpoles darted around her toes. The temptation was irresistible; far more appealing than being shut inside with her thoughts.

  She sat down and stripped off shoes and socks, but her thoughts weren’t as easily stripped away. She was naggingly aware that there existed a world beyond this world that the trio at Jabberwocky experienced. Then there was the QNA with its introduction of a species to share sentience with humans. Finally, there was the Jack; his emotions revealed first by the trio, and then, like a searchlight, by the QNA.

  He can’t love me. It was part panic, part commonsense. Eric had loved her, deeply, but she was under no illusions that she was some femme fatale. Why would Jack want her?