After the Winter (The Silent Earth, Book 1)

by Mark R. Healy

  A single coherent thought came to me: the inner lab substructure had been lined with fire retardant. It had been built to withstand earthquakes and extreme weather events. It could still be intact.

  Dimly, I saw the entrance to the lab behind a curtain of smoke and flame. There was no time to consider options or to reflect on the best course of action. I just had to act. I had to get in there. Gritting my teeth in determination, I started forward.

  “Brant, wait!” came Arsha’s voice behind me. She had followed, somehow keeping up with my breakneck pace. Now she stood there, her face a mixture of anxiety and desperation, her hand held out, entreating, her feet rooted to the spot as if she dared come no closer. “You can’t go in there!”

  “What are you talking about?” I spat. “We have to get in. Our whole future is in there!”

  “You won’t make it!” She gestured uselessly up at the fire. “You won’t survive that.”

  “There’s no choice, Arsha.” Resolute, I turned my back on her and began to walk, the heat on my face intense. I glared into the flames, challenging them. Daring them to stop me.

  “Brant!” Arsha cried. She was at my side, grabbing at my arm and half turning me, half trying to drag me back. “Don’t do it!”

  I resisted her, tried to pry her fingers from my arm. They were like steel.

  “Arsha, this is crazy. We’ve waited decades for this. I’m not throwing it all away!”

  “It’s too late. It’s gone. Just leave it!” she bellowed.

  “No,” I shouted back defiantly.

  “We don’t need the lab,” she said, her desperation mounting. “We don’t need the Displacer, or our human bodies. Come with me, let me show you!”

  I rammed my palm into her chest, propelling her backward. She lost her grip and gasped, shock and surprise written across her face.

  “I said no!”

  Free of her grasp, I ran forward, shielding my face from the fire. My body was built to withstand harsh conditions, but not prolonged exposure to this kind of heat. I had to do this quickly. With haste, I closed the distance between myself and the door, fumbling for the access panel. Smoke clogged my eyes, it was down my throat. Somehow my fingers found the catch and I pulled it back. Hesitating, I stared at the readout. For a horrible moment I thought I wouldn’t remember the passcode, but my fingers jabbed forward almost of their own volition. The passcode was accepted. The door swung open and I plunged inward.

  As I moved past the outer threshold the door closed softly behind me. The fire retardant had done its job. Although the exterior of the building was charred and intensely hot, the stairway that led inside was cool and dark. It was like abruptly passing through a maelstrom and into a void, another world. Within, there was no hint of the chaos going on outside. There was not a sound.

  I felt my way down in the darkness, my fingertips tracing along the smooth edge of the passageway. I’d been here many times before, and my feet instinctively found each successive step without fault. There were maybe fifteen steps in all, and with each one I was drawn further into the darkness, into this vault that had been sealed for decades.

  I’d played out this scene so many times in my head - this triumphant return to the presence of my true self, considering a hundred variations on the possibilities, but I’d never foreseen one quite like this. In my mind I had always pictured myself stepping triumphantly toward the cryotank, seeing my body lying peacefully within, the shell that awaited my spirit to once again fill it with life. Arsha was always there too, looking down serenely on her own cryotank, her face a mirror of my own emotions. We’d lift our gazes to each other and smile, primed for what was to come. The long wait over.

  This rushed, chaotic and uncertain mess that I now found myself caught up in had never been taken into calculation. It seemed absurd, but here it was, suddenly a reality.

  The automatic lights clicked on as I alighted from the bottom step. The first test had been passed: the cells still had reserves. A good sign. On the down side, there was little illumination forthcoming, an indication that they were running low. On the wall to my right, a red beacon glowed softly, almost too faint to see. It was a panel displaying a fire proximity warning, advising occupants to evacuate the building immediately. There was no accompanying audio alert, possibly a malfunction in the system. I took a couple of steps further into the lab as my eyes adjusted from the blinding light outside to the dull glow of the lab interior.

  I began to discern the outline of several objects. They were fuzzy, indistinct, but becoming clearer. A bench. A wall. The expanse of the floor. I tried to orientate myself with the layout in my memory, but they weren’t fitting in the right places. Nothing was where it should be. It was all disjointed.

  Had I forgotten so much?

  I swung my head from side to side, taking it all in and attempting to make sense of what I saw, but the more I looked, the more I began to realise that this was not the lab I remembered. As I paced forward I could see that there were no cryotanks lining the wall, no terminal screens where I remembered running countless repetitions of analysis. No instruments. No gauges. Instead, there were just a few dusty cardboard boxes and a large cone shaped object in the middle of the room, covered with a black sheet.

  My heart leapt. The Displacer machine.

  I stepped forward hurriedly, my boots echoing in the close confines of the lab. I tugged at the sheet, and it slipped to the ground with a soft whisper and began to pool around my ankles. Such a soft and gentle thing to hide such secrets.

  As the last folds of the sheet drifted down I saw what lay beneath. Saw, but couldn’t quite believe. A stack of broken furniture. Books. Old terminal screens. Other bits and pieces I couldn’t make out in the gloom. They were all piled together, reaching up almost as high as the ceiling. A jumble of useless objects. Garbage.

  The Displacer wasn’t here.

  “I didn’t want you to find out this way,” came Arsha’s voice from behind me.

  I spun on my heel at the sudden sound. I hadn’t heard the door open and had no idea how she’d gotten there. Perhaps I’d just been so intent on finding the Displacer that I hadn’t noticed her making her way inside. I stared at her stupidly, a paralysing kind of numbness spreading over me.

  “Find out what?” I said. My own voice sounded disconnected, like it was someone else talking.

  “The truth,” she replied quietly. There was sadness in her voice and her eyes couldn’t seem to lift above my feet.

  I ran my fingers through my hair, tried to get a hold of myself. “Arsha, where’s the Displacer?” I demanded. I was fighting through that numbness but it clung to me, thick as molasses. I turned back and gestured at the empty lab. “Where are the cryotanks? Where are our bodies?”

  She sighed, and her eyes crept up to meet mine. “There is no Displacer. There never was.”

  I stared at her blankly. “You’re not making sense.” I shook my head. “What’s going on here?”

  She held out her hand again. “Come back outside with me. Please.”

  I pressed my lips together and pointed a shaking finger at her. “Arsha, I don’t know what you’re talking about, but we need to find our bodies-”

  “You were never human,” she shouted suddenly. The sound echoed about the room for what seemed like minutes, those final two words assaulting me again and again from every direction, like a hundred people shouting it in turn. Something pressed against my back and I lurched forward. The stack of debris crumpled and sagged to the floor, scattering everywhere. Somehow I’d taken a few steps back without realising it.

  Now my mind was reeling. I fought to regain control of myself. “No... Arsha, that’s... that’s not true.”

  “I’m sorry, Brant,” she said softly. “I’m so sorry.”

  I felt like I was going to black out, fall to the floor. The world was imploding.

  “I....” The words wouldn’t come out.

  Arsha took a cautious step toward me. “I tried to stall you f
rom coming here. To the lab. I wanted more time. I figured if I had a few more weeks, I’d be able to tell you this in a gentler way, or that somehow you might remember again.”

  “What are talking about, Arsha? Remember what?”

  “They never did find a way for people to survive the Winter. Did you know that? Everything they tried failed. All of it. There was no way for them to live through it, but... they did the next best thing. They created machines that mimicked all of their traits. They created us. We are their successors. They built you and me, and others like us to carry their spirit forward, and then to one day bring them back into the world. They gave us their embryos, and everything we’d ever need to pass on to their children: all their emotions, their intelligence, their empathy, and their ability to see beauty in the world around us. To dream and see beyond the sand and the ruin. To imagine a future. But they made us so human that we began to believe we were human.”

  “But the Displacers....”

  “You and I made a pact, Brant. We would hook into each other’s neural core and change our memories, the only things that stood in the way of our fantasies being complete. The Displacers were a part of that fantasy. I hooked into you first and... something went wrong. Horribly wrong. After, you couldn’t face reality at all any more. There was a schism in your mind that you couldn’t reconcile. You fled into the desert to escape.”

  “No. That’s not right. It was the Marauders-”

  “The Marauders never came here. They never found us. Maybe that’s a reason you invented to justify why you were out there, but it’s not the truth.” She lifted a hand to her cheek and closed her eyes. When she opened them again I could see the pain within. “You left me here alone, and that’s how I’ve been ever since. Making my own way, trying to put the pieces back together. Trying to cope with this broken world. Over time I came to accept who and what I was, and started making the most of this life I’d been given.”

  She fell silent and watched me, waiting for me to respond.

  “It doesn’t make sense,” was all I could say. “I remember this lab. Why else would I remember it? I knew the passcode....”

  “We were created by M-Corp, and this was just another of their labs. They stored some important data here in the past, but all of that is gone. I removed everything of value years ago and stored it in my safe houses, where it was easier to reach. I just never bothered to switch off the monitoring in here when I left.”

  She took another step closer to me, but I couldn’t look her in the eye. “Brant, listen. I fixed the solar conduit. We have power back at the workshop. We have a future there. If you’ll-”

  “This is all bullshit,” I said vehemently, shaking my head and backing away from her. “Complete bullshit. If none of this is real, then how do you explain this?” I pulled the photograph of Zade from my pocket and held it up, my hand trembling.

  She looked at the photograph, forlorn. “It’s something you found in the ruins to incorporate into your fantasy. You were always out there, digging around, searching. That’s all it is... just another prop to help you believe. Nothing more.”

  “But I remember, Arsha,” I insisted. “It has to be real.”

  “I know it seems real to you, but it’s not. We spent months planning and programming the details, down to every last aspect. To make it all seem real. Do you remember that part?” She watched me, her eyes beseeching.

  “No.” I shook my head desperately. I didn’t want to hear what was coming.

  “We created memories for everything. Memories of places in this city, of things we did, of people we met.”

  “No....”

  “We created jobs, and backgrounds, and friends. Do you remember telling me all those things? You said you wanted a family. You said you wanted a little boy....”

  “No, stop....” I screamed, falling to my knees. It couldn’t be true. “Please stop....”

  “Brant?” Her voice seemed a long way away. I could barely hear it. “Brant?”

  The floor had somehow reversed and now I was staring up at it. It was cold and grey and unyielding. It had become the sky in this bleak little universe I now found myself trapped within, a tiny box that held me prisoner, crushing my spirit as it pressed in tighter around me. I was sinking toward it, hoping that it would close in so far that it blotted out all the hurt and confusion and pain that was hammering mercilessly away at me. The coldness of it brushed against my forehead. I wanted to pass through it, to be swallowed up by it and never return.

  But it wouldn’t even allow me that.

  I lost touch with reality. Time seemed to have stopped. I didn’t know if I’d lost my mind, blacked out, or something in between. Nothing made sense. I pushed myself back to my haunches and became dimly aware of noise filtering down and permeating the silence. I listened. It was like the sound of locusts, millions of them, hungrily gnawing away at whatever lay in their path. It was the rush of a river through my head, a torrent of white noise.

  Awareness finally came to me. The fire was eating its way inside the lab.

  “Arsha?” I said finally, my voice broken and hoarse. I looked up, but there was no one else in the room. She had gone, given up on me. Left me to face my demons alone.

  I got to my feet, looking around the room one last time in despair, at this place of stolen dreams. There was nothing here worth staying for and nothing to take away. Slowly, as if in a dream, I walked toward the stairway that led outside.

  38

  The heat of the fire barely registered as I left the lab. It was just an orange haze through which I stumbled, roaring at me like a toothless monster, unable to inspire fear or to do me harm. I was beyond that. The damage had already been done, not by searing heat or the bite of ravenous flames, but by words. Just a few simple words.

  In moments I was clear, absently swatting at little clumps of flame that clung to my clothes. Wisps of smoke drifted off me like steam from a cup of hot coffee in the cold morning air. I looked back. The fire was only getting stronger. By the time day broke there would be nothing left but charred skeletons of wood and steel.

  Arsha was nowhere to be seen. In the back of my mind I wondered where she had gone, why she had departed. Was there a reason she’d left me in there? Maybe she’d finally decided I was no longer worth saving. Who could blame her? Even I had to admit that, now, all was lost. There was no way back.

  I turned up the street and began to walk away. With the scorching heat of the fire behind me, the cool night air on my face felt like the touch of ice in comparison. What was my destination now? Where was I to go? I couldn’t return to the workshop. Couldn’t face her again and those cruel, vicious words that had tumbled from her mouth. I couldn’t go on with that life, because now it had no meaning.

  I needed to walk. I just didn’t know where.

  Looking back at the blaze I saw a small dark shape amidst the turmoil. It was the silhouette of a man in the street - a vision of myself as a human, drawn and pale and draped in a blanket, standing motionless amidst the smoke, watching me. It was like a reflection of everything I’d wanted, my hopes and dreams encapsulated and made whole. Another mirage in the desert, the embodiment of all I’d lost. It was no more real than those shapes I’d seen on the horizon out in the wasteland, no more real than the memories in my head I thought I’d owned. That I thought I’d made. As I watched it was enveloped by smoke and slowly faded from view.

  I didn’t look back again. The fire roared into the night sky, and somewhere up ahead, out by the river, the first blaze lit up the gloomy city in soft hues of yellow and red. Two candles in a dark world.

  I walked for maybe an hour, drifting, not looking further ahead than the road at my feet. I followed no particular path. When confronted by debris, I walked around it, or headed in another direction. I let the road be my guide. Wherever it allowed passage, I went. The shapes of buildings passed me by, but I paid them no heed. At one point I felt the breeze coming off the river, coiling around me, cool on my skin,
and I knew that I was on the bridge, but still I refrained from lifting my eyes to plot out a path. I was carried along much like the water below my feet was borne along by the current of the river.

  At some subconscious level I must have been aware of what I was doing, my mind working in ways I didn’t understand, because I found myself at the park without really knowing how I got there. It appeared before me as if by magic, the twists and turns of the road suddenly ending here at the ring of dirt that marked its boundaries. I stepped quietly off the street and began tracing a path between the dim shapes of the swings and the climbing wall, stumbling over the pronounced ridges of a garden edge as I shuffled across the ground. I arrived at the centre of the park, the place where children had once played their games of chase and laughed and shouted, now empty and dull in the faint light of the fires across the river. I sagged to the ground and sat, the weight that pressed down on my shoulders, on my spirit, now too heavy to bear.

  Across the way, the vague outline of old dead trees were like the silent, cowled forms of mourners, watching me sadly, somehow understanding my pain but unable to utter words of comfort. They knew what it was like to lose everything, to be left empty and alone. My tragic plight, however lamentable, was all too familiar. To them I was just another of the multitudes who had been lost and left to rot, another derelict to be taken into the fold.

  Fumbling behind me, I found that, somehow, the photograph had found its way back inside my pocket. Instinct. Even when I’d lain broken and incoherent on the floor of the lab, some part of me had still wanted to protect this treasure, had found a way to return it to safety. I pulled it out and held it up to catch what little light it could. Only the outlines, the contours, were visible: the curves of his cheek, the whites of his eyes, the wayward tufts of his hair. But that was all I needed. Every little detail was as clear in my mind as if I was holding it under the midday sun.