The Duality Bridge (Singularity #2) (Singularity Series)
Page 32
Marcus scowls, something his rental body renders imperfectly. “The point is that I could barely manage to carry Lenora on my cognition—the substrate and my mind are not built for that kind of capacity.”
“Which is why she’s still scattered.” I make a mental note to visit her sooner rather than later.
“There’s nothing I could do about that.” He sounds a little defensive. Interesting. “What I’m saying is I could barely hold onto her in a scattered state. Augustus pulled her right into his mind like it was nothing at all.”
I nod, not terribly surprised. Because I already had my suspicions. “There’s something different about him.”
“Something that shouldn’t be possible.”
“You think he’s tampering with his own cognition,” I say. “Illegally, like he was with the Mind.”
Marcus scowls. “It’s more than possible—it’s the only explanation I can see. Leopold may have done us a tremendous service by disabling Augustus’s custom bodyform. There may have been something special about it.”
“Perhaps that’s why I haven’t sensed him in a resurrected bodyform yet.”
“I hope you realize it’s just a matter of time,” he warns. “Augustus will resurrect.”
“Yes, I realize that, Marcus.”
“And he’ll probably try to regrow a Mind.” His rental face scrunches up in a comical way. “You don’t seem… concerned.”
“I’m very concerned.” The image of the girl in the battle armor flashes through my mind. “About more than just Augustus. But when there’s a threat, I’ll know.” My visions of the storm—the Mind—started long before I even knew who Augustus was. And now I’m even more connected to the fugue-state world, like a spider on her threads, intimately attached to things unseen and far away. If there’s a tremor, I’ll feel it. For the moment, all is still.
Marcus peers at me. “What are you, Eli?” he asks in a hushed voice. This is the real question he’s been wanting to ask all along.
“Nobody special,” I say with a smirk.
We’ve reached the edge of the camp. In the meadow beyond, Kamali is dancing—a warm brown butterfly flitting amongst the brilliant green grasses.
I playfully bat the back of my hand at Marcus’s chest. He looks at it with horror.
I grin. “Sorry, man, gotta go. I’ve got a date.” I stride off into the meadow.
Kamali gets more beautiful the closer I get. She doesn’t see me until she pauses in her dance-of-the-butterfly, facing in my direction. A smile lights her face that lifts me straight out of the grass. I actually look down to see if I’m floating because it feels exactly like the fugue state.
She dashes off to a nearby tree—really just a twiggy thing barely struggling to make it in a meadow of field grass—and comes up with a sketchpad in her hands. My smile is going to break my face before I reach her, so I struggle mightily to tame it. She doesn’t show any kind of similar constraint, taking large, leaping dancer steps to cross the prairie between us.
She thrusts the paper pad and charcoal pencil into my hands. “Draw!” she commands, then twirls back into the grass, hardly pausing.
I fold my legs to sit in the knee-high weeds. They tickle my arms as I whip my hand across the page. The charcoal lines are crude, nowhere near capturing the beauty that is Kamali in motion. The prairie grasses agree with me, nodding their feathered heads in her wake, paying homage to the human wind that bends them to her will, making art with motion. I scowl at the drawing, flip the page and make another. And then another. I’m three pages in before I realize that the medium is simply inadequate to my purposes.
I start with a fresh page and draw a series of figures—panels in sequence, capturing her by giving strobe-light snapshots of each perfect pose. My mind fills in the gaps with color and motion. She dances in between each panel, creating one smooth line of beauty-in-movement between the images. The charcoal is just a shadowy reflection of the real Kamali dancing on the page in full color. Which in turn is just a pale echo of the vibrant girl who is now tromping through the grass to see what I’ve rendered.
I bite my lip and quickly polish the figures with more charcoal shading before she arrives. I stand to greet her, but my mind still plays the colorful version on top of the real-life layer of black lines on the page.
She peers over my shoulder, standing close, chest heaving with her exertion. The full-body charge I get from her nearness is near-impossible to disguise, and I can’t help watching her face as her eyes roam my work.
“How do you do that?” she asks.
I think she means it’s better than my previous work—which is true, due to my fugue-infused knowledge. “It’s nothing, just practice, and a little help from a few masters of art.”
Her warm brown eyes find me staring at her. “No, how do you make me move?”
“Move?” I hold up the pad, closer, so we can both look at it. “What do you mean?”
She follows the dancer on the page with her finger. “How do you get it to dance like that? I didn’t think this was a holo pad.”
It’s not. “You can see that?” My mouth hangs open, and I scan her face to see if she’s serious. When I look back to the pad, my colorful hallucination is gone. I frown, unsure now what she saw, if anything.
Kamali gives me a scrunched-up look. “You’re really a very odd person, you know that?”
I recover from my shock and smile. It’s true—even more than she knows—but she’s not running away because of it. In fact, she’s so close, we should be touching, but we’re not. A whisper of meadow wind is all that’s between our side-by-side bodies. Her face is inches from mine.
“You told me once that you had a dream about me saving the world,” I say quietly. My small grin is filled with pride, but I can’t help it. “Do you dream about me often?”
She smirks. “That, Elijah Brighton, is something you’ll never know.”
Then she kisses me.
I’m not sure what happened to the pad. I think it fell to the grass.
All I remember of the many long minutes that follow is the feel of Kamali’s lips against mine, her soft hair on my face, and my heart soaring in a way that rivals any fugue-state transcendence of this real-life plane where my boots touch earthly grass.
The world could stop rotating, and it would be a long time before I noticed.
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Shortly after the first story spark of the Singularity series, I realized the possibilities inherent in the Singularity universe were vast. There would be dark corners and alternate perspectives that would need more than just Eli's point-of-view. So, while the five books that will eventually comprise Eli's story are the backbone of the series, there will also be a series of short stories and a prequel (Day Zero) to round out the interesting ideas this concept is generating in my head. While Day Zero is already written as a screenplay, it will come out as a novel near the end of the series. But the short stories are already well underway!
The first is Restore, written from the perspective of a med bot. I bill it as a story about "artificial intelligence and love," but it's the first glimmer you'll get of the way that ascenders limit the sentience levels of the bots that populate their world and serve their whims. This is the first stepping stone that we, in real life, will soon be encountering—what exactly comprises "intelligence" and what does it say about us, as humans, that we would limit the intelligence of another creature? Reviewers call it "heartwarming" and "thought-provoking," which is precisely what I had hoped for. Restore was originally released in the AI Chronicles anthology, and is now available as a stand-alone story as well.
The second Story of Singularity is Containment. Also written from a machine intelligence's point of view, this story takes Restore to the next natural step—what happens when a machine on the level of human intelligence is required for a certain task (say, the mining operations on a moon of Jupiter), but we don't want to bother ourselves with allowing that machine freedom of self-expression... or self-actualization? Can Maslow's hierarchy of needs be truncated, such that the pinnacle of what we consider human achievement is limited for those we wish to remain constrained to certain duties? Does the word slave apply to this? Or are we still talking about machines? I'm especially proud of Containment for a number of reasons: 1) it's my first space-based story, 2) it's my first hard-SF story, and most of all, 3) it's part of the Dark Beyond the Stars anthology, an amazing collection of space opera stories from some of today's most compelling voices in science fiction. (It's a bonus that they're all female as well.) The Dark Beyond the Stars anthology releases 8.24.15, and Containment will be available as a stand alone story in December 2015.
The third short story, Defiance, returns to Eli's more immediate world with an origin story written from Cyrus's point-of-view. It's a brief glimpse at Cyrus's black-market dealings and romantic liaisons before Basha came along and rocked his world. Secondary characters are often my favorites in a series, so writing their own stories is a labor of pure love for me. This particular story also serves as a great intro to the series before diving into the novels—it will be published in the upcoming Future Chronicles anthology in September 2015, and as a standalone in December 2015.
The fourth and final (for now) Story of Singularity, Augment, is really a sneak peek at what's coming in the third book of the novel series. Augment explores the idea that humanity has more than one plan to deal with this business of ascenders dominating the planet. Written from the point-of-view of a legacy girl born without legs who then sought out a group of dissenters to become an augment... and became one of their most fervent warrior crusaders in the process... let's just say I can't wait to get busy writing more of Miriam's character in Singularity #3. She's my cyborg Joan of Arc—and if that doesn't intrigue you, I'm not sure what will. Augment will release in the Cyborg Chronicles anthology later in 2015, and as a stand alone in December 2015.
In short, Singularity is just getting started. I hope you will join me for the full ride, diving into the short stories as well as the novels. They were always intended to be part of the larger story experience.
And there is much more to come!
This series has a special place in my heart, and I have much gratitude for those taking the journey with me—there are complex and hot-button issues inherent in the Singularity Series, and the work is so much better due to the editors, critique partners, and beta readers who've tackled them with me.
Thanks to my editor, Bryon Quertermous, for helping me bring out the best in yet another novel together—and for being "strangely attached" to the novel! It's a sublime pleasure to be able to hook your editor. Special thanks go to Daniel A. Smith for all the discussions of Kalachakra and the B-theory of time (I had to look them up, too). Our talks are a complete mental geek-out for me... oh, and they help the story, too. Much appreciation to my beta readers and critique partners—Tim Sussman, Zachary Mueller, Adam Heine, Rebecca Carlson, and Adam Quinn (that last one belongs to me—there are many benefits to having an in-house critique partner, including that they let you borrow their tablet when they're finished making notes). Hugs to Liz Masterson Searle for always asking when the next pages are coming. I appreciate you all for sticking through the series with me!
Final thanks go to Dale Robert Pease for the gorgeous cover and my awesome readers for taking a chance on Eli’s story (especially those who have left such inspiring reviews!)
I promise to get busy on Singularity #3 right away.
Susan Kaye Quinn is the author of the Singularity Series, bestselling Mindjack Trilogy and the Debt Collector serial, as well as other speculative fiction novels and short stories. Her work has appeared in the Synchronic, Telepath Chronicles, and AI Chronicles anthologies and has been optioned for Virtual Reality by Immersive Entertainment. Her business card says "Author and Rocket Scientist" but she mostly sits around in her PJs in awe that she gets to write full time.
Susan grew up in California, got a bunch of engineering degrees (B.S. Aerospace Engineering, M.S. Mechanical Engineering, Ph.D. in Environmental Engineering) and worked everywhere from NASA to NCAR (National Center for Atmospheric Research). She designed aircraft engines, studied global warming, and held elected office (as a school board member). All her engineering skills come in handy when dreaming up dangerous mind powers, future dystopian worlds, and slightly plausible steampunk inventions. For her storie
s, of course. Just ignore that stuff in the basement.
Susan writes from the Chicago suburbs with her three boys, two cats, and one husband. Which, it turns out, is exactly as much as she can handle.
Susan loves to connect with readers online! Stop by her SKQ Facebook Group or check out her website to learn about all her books. She also has a For Writers page for her fellow scribes on the journey. Subscribe to her newsletter to be notified about her next release in the Singularity series.
Table of Contents
The Duality Bridge (Singularity #2) One
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Thirteen
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Seventeen
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Twenty-One
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Twenty-Four