“Look, I’ll go first.” And before I can do anything Levi has his pack off and is sliding onto the chair. He unclips his rifle and holds his hand out. “Here. Take it,” he tells me.
“Well, they aren’t clones or zombies. So, this means that this must be some sort of Westworld Earth, and how shocking that you would be so down with that.”
“We don’t know anything yet except for the fact that we’ve been exposed to radiation, which I believe because I don’t feel all that great. Do you?”
I swallow hard and push my thumbnail into the pad of my index finger. I don’t have a clue how I feel. There’s my eye. And Tilda Swinton. And the rocket boots. I guess now that I’m thinking about it, I suppose I do feel a bit hot and disoriented, but isn’t that more likely an indicator of our present circumstance than radiation? To Levi’s point, though, I can’t be sure.
“Fine,” I say, grabbing hold of his gun and stepping back.
“Thank you. Your name is Levi, I believe? Now, in order to neutralize the radiation, I am going to have to take a sample of your blood. My colleague Shrine will create an effective treatment once we know the precise levels of toxicity in your body.”
“That’s fine, but only you are allowed to have any contact with me. She can’t touch me.” Whoa, I’m surprised and impressed. Levi must think Tilda’s a bit sexy (quite frankly so do I, and I’m not even into women). He’s ensuring the Blood Lust won’t kick in.
“It is only me. Shrine is the head of our chemistry division. She is here only to create a compound agent,” Feather assures him.
“Okay, go ahead.” Feather gracefully picks up a metal tube with the tiniest of needles on the end. He sticks it quickly inside the crease of Levi’s arm, into his vein. I can see there is a clear window in the tube and in maybe two or three seconds a large portion of blood has been taken, almost like a vacuum.
“That is the first part done. Normally I would not activate the holo-sets, but in the spirit of transparency you should see exactly what I am seeing.” Feather plugs the metal tube into what looks almost like an electronic tablet but thinner. We don’t have to wait long. It takes less than a minute for the images to pop up, seemingly out of nowhere. The first thing we see is something that looks like different lines of tape with varying thicknesses, hovering in midair. Then behind Levi, and slightly above his head, another Levi appears . . . naked.
Feather examines the image. I don’t know where to look. I’m a soldier. Nudity isn’t an issue for me, but it’s kind of like I’m staring at a naked photo of Levi, which feels weird and icky. Feather notices the wound from the beach right away. “I see there is tissue damage here. Would you allow me to repair it with one of our biopatches?”
“Sure,” Levi says indifferently. He had glanced at the image when it first went up. He’s well aware that his naked bod is floating right before my eyes. If he’s embarrassed, he sure isn’t letting me know. I look down at my boots. I hear paper ripping. I don’t need to see exactly what’s going on. It’s not like Levi can’t handle himself if things suddenly go sideways.
I look up when I notice Feather’s hands rapidly touch the projection. With two fingers he plucks at the naked holographic form. Levi’s skin is removed so that now the image displays his musculature only. Again, Feather picks at the body and the muscles are taken away, leaving only bones and organs. After a cursory examination of those, Feather dismisses them with a short flick and a turn of his wrist until all that remains is Levi’s skeleton and circulatory system. Feather sticks one hand in and opens his palm until we are actually inside Levi’s blood stream. And then, with two flat hands, Feather enhances the image so that we can see the cells themselves. I suppose with who I am and everything I’ve experienced I should be past surprise.
I am not past this.
Air gets trapped in my throat as I bring my hand to my mouth. Levi is staring at the display, but then he looks at me and I know we are thinking the same thing. How did we even get here? There is a sudden weight to this room. It is thick and heavy with all the things we should be doing. Parties and part-time jobs, football games and essays. We can’t unsee this. We can’t have normal. I accepted that long ago. We weren’t like other kids before, but now, after this trip, we won’t even be like the other Citadels.
“Display toxins,” Feather says with quiet authority. And there again, hovering in the air, a list of words comes online. Ammonia, sulfur dioxide, lead, mercury—the list keeps scrolling. I think a lot of this stuff we were exposed to on our Earth. And some words I just don’t know. I look past the words, to the strange strips running almost around the room like a news ticker. Oh shit. Of course I know what this is.
“You’ve sequenced our DNA.” It’s not really a question, more of a statement. Check our blood, okay, but this veers dangerously close to crossing a line.
“It was necessary, for an accurate holo-projection.” I stare at the black marks as certain lines begin to ping and flash in different colors. Feather stares at them. I stare at Feather. These angry, perfect lines. These unnatural stretches of biology, pocked and darkened like craters on the moon. I don’t want to see it. I fight the urge to look away, but I stand firm.
This is who we are.
“Your DNA has been altered,” Feather says to Levi. There is a melancholic tone to his voice. It’s almost as if seeing this hurts him. But we knew our genes had been messed with, so it’s not really news to us. “You are not even entirely human.”
That, however, is news.
“What?” Levi and I both say at once.
“Your DNA has been spliced with other species. Not all of it, obviously, but here,” he says, pointing to one of the red flashing parts. “And again here.” His long finger gestures to another line, this one a bluish purple, like a bruise. “I cannot even say what species resides in your genome. It does not exist here on this Earth.”
Not entirely human. What have they done to us? What does that even mean? There is too much information buzzing around in my head. I need to process this, alone, with Levi. I don’t like the idea that these people have figured something out about us that we ourselves didn’t know, and I certainly don’t want to let on that I was in the dark about my genetic alterations, at least right now. It will make me appear ignorant, weak.
“You can still fix the damage done by the radiation, though?” I ask deliberately. If Feather isn’t going to answer any of our questions, then I am not going to answer for this.
“Yes. Ryn, would you please change places with Levi?” Levi hops off the reclined chair and I slip onto it. It isn’t leather, because it doesn’t smell like leather, but it is certainly one of the best imitations of it that I’ve ever seen. “You will allow me to fix your eye, please?” I just nod my head and Feather opens a paper package and holds up a tissue-thin piece of material. It is cool to the touch and slightly wet when he puts it on my bruise. After a few seconds he removes it, and sure enough, even without touching it, I can tell that whatever swelling was there has gone because my vision is better.
“You can go ahead and take my blood, too,” I offer, knowing that I will need a neutralizing agent that differs from Levi’s because we’re bound to have different levels of toxins in our cells. I push up the sleeve of my uniform and watch diligently as he takes the blood painlessly. Again, he plugs the silver tube into the tablet and in a matter of seconds the holo-projectors begin to work.
I am well aware that Levi can see a naked version of me, but I notice that he doesn’t stare. He finds another place for his eyes to focus on, which is a relief. I already feel too exposed. It took me years to accept and adapt to what my body could do. And now there’s this.
Not entirely human . . .
Keeping my face deliberately passive, I think about Edo. She’s a liar. She might be under ARC’s control, but she kept this from me. So, what are we? Part Karekin? Dinosaur? Maribeh? We could be a hundred different species. There’s also a good chance that not even ARC knows the truth of it.
Fe
ather wastes no time in plucking the skin and musculature off my holographic form. I catch Levi’s eye. I wonder what he thinks about all this. He has put our rifles in the corner with our packs. He is standing with his arms folded, his brows knitted together, and his full lips stolen by a thin-lined grimace. For just a split second, all this fades away and it is only the two of us. The two Citadels who know the truth behind our strength and speed. We are as alone as we had been back on that deserted island. I almost want to reach out for him, just to steady me, to hold me fast to where we are, but that would be inappropriate and would likely trigger the Blood Lust. Instead, I bring my fist up to my heart and push down, hoping there will be some kind of comfort in the pressure.
“Ahh. Yes. There. Your orbital socket has a small hairline fracture. We do not have anything that can repair this quickly, but I will assign one of my colleagues to look into it.”
“Thank you,” I tell him honestly. They may be weird, but they are helping. They are playing by the rules, and more importantly, Feather has not appeared even remotely judgmental about his discoveries. As my own genome begins to display, I watch with rapt fascination as it unfurls around the room. I barely notice as Feather dismisses Shrine to presumably make up our anti-radiation cocktail.
I see the same blinking and alerts on certain bands of the code. The parts of me that are alien, the molecular rips and cuts that have been twisted around DNA that I can only begin to imagine. Feather cocks his head and examines a strip more closely. He reaches into the band and expands it. In doing so, he enlarges the microscopic images into a panel that we can all see. The vicious helix spins but half the ladder is bright orange.
“You and Levi share the same DNA alteration except for here; this is a mutation that he does not possess. Do you have some sort of ability that he does not?”
“A slightly higher tolerance to certain medications,” I offer.
Feather’s face remains passive. He stares at the spinning gene for quite a while. And then, he looks at me directly, his silver eyes boring into me. “I do not think that is what this is.”
Chapter 8
Shrine administered a series of shots, making sure to show us on her tablet the atomic structures of each ingredient in the compound that she included. Which was all very nice and good, but it’s not like we would have any idea if that was what she was actually dosing us with—or what any of that stuff meant, anyway. At that point, given all that we’d seen, I chose to accept that they were being honest. If they wanted to harm us, they already had plenty of chances.
When that was done, Thunder escorted us into the elevator (which had no buttons or displays) and up into the doyenne’s office. Unlike the minimalism of the rest of the building, this space had a rug, a bookshelf with real books, and paintings on the wall. It wasn’t exactly warm, but it had a slightly Scandinavian feel, and since I’m half Swedish, there was something almost familiar about it.
What was not familiar, though, was the doyenne. I half expected her to be J. K. Rowling or maybe Judi Dench, but she looked like an ordinary woman, pretty in an old-fashioned kind of way. She reminded me of the film stars you see in black-and-white movies. I didn’t recognize her, which was a good thing, because I might have to push back a little, and that would be difficult if she looked like Ellen DeGeneres or, even worse, Buffy Summers. I’m pretty sure I’d cave under the Vampire Slayer’s steely gaze. Too much of a fangirl—probably has to do with our shared world-saving agenda and whatnot.
“My name is Cosmos. Please, sit,” she says kindly, offering us a seat on a buttery suede couch. She sits down in an upholstered armchair across from us. There is something about her, something unlike the rest of the people here. She has the same silver eyes, but her face has a touch more character. It’s not that she has lines or age spots or anything, it’s that she actually expresses. Not a lot, hardly at all, really, but her smile reaches her eyes, which is more than I can say for the others. “The water is for you.” She gestures to the two glasses sweating on the small table in front of us.
“Thank you,” I say, taking a sip. I notice there is a ring mark on the table and I wipe it up with the sleeve of my uniform.
“Now, I know you must have questions. My story may well answer most of your queries. It will also sound unbelievable, perhaps, but I cannot lie. It is not in our nature to lie. Can I begin?” Levi and I both nod. She smiles. “Good. To begin, you know that we are not human?”
“Well, apparently, we aren’t entirely human, either, so . . .” I say, trying to find some common ground, which might make things easier when it’s our turn to ask the questions.
Cosmos does not smile at this. In fact, she looks downright grim in that moment. “Yes. I saw that.”
“I’m just gonna say it. You guys are robots, right?” Levi asks, leaning back somewhat on the couch. I look down to the floor for just a minute. So smooth, Levi. But then it hits me that I’d be no better if I had been the one to broach this topic, and I have a revelation: We aren’t great at this. We’re spectacular fighters, insanely good liars, but this kind of thing? We don’t do this. The people back at ARC have a legion of anthropologists and zoologists and psychologists who specialize in this first-contact sort of thing. We’re just the muscle. Which lately has begun to piss me off more and more. They could have trained us for this. We’re smart enough, but they didn’t. They didn’t want to give us so much power in the system. They only wanted fighters, someone they could keep sending to the front lines of the Rift.
They never meant for us to be in this situation.
And, in a way, that thought makes me feel good about our decision to be here.
“You are correct, Levi. We are robots . . . but we do not call ourselves robots. The word has a fairly primitive connotation.” At this, Cosmos smiles.
“So what do you call yourselves, then?” Levi throws out. Okay, so he guessed right, but still, I’m going to have to give him an elbow nudge if he doesn’t chill with the tone.
“SenMachs, an abbreviation of ‘sentient machines.’ Are you aware of something called the singularity?”
I nod assertively. “Yes. It’s the projected point in time when artificial intelligence overtakes human intelligence. Most people on our Earth imagine it as a kind of doomsday scenario.”
Cosmos’s eyes change. They aren’t any less kind, but they seem to focus on something else. Something far away or long ago that still pains her. “I assure you, the loss of humanity was a great tragedy to us. Humans are our creators. In many ways we revere them in the same way that your kind worships gods. And . . . you are the first human beings we have seen in two thousand years.”
“Really?” I ask hesitantly. “Are you one hundred percent sure there are no humans on this planet? Because the Earth is very big. And the Amazon, for example. I mean, tribes existed and still exist in isolation for thousands of years in the rainforests down there.” In that moment, I don’t want to be the only humans on this planet. It makes me feel uneasy, like having a sliver of glass embedded in my foot. The kind that still hurts when you walk on it, even after you’re sure that you’ve picked it out.
Cosmos’s shoulders drop just a fraction. “You are not from the Amazon. You are not indigenous people, except maybe to the European continent. I assure you. We have searched. We have covered every square inch of this planet’s surface on foot and in the air, even from space. We monitor everything that happens here, especially anomalies, which is why we knew the moment you arrived. We have always theorized that a sentient species on an alternate Earth could open a doorway through the Multiverse, but the statistical probability that it they would then arrive on our Earth was very low, and the statistical possibility that the species to do so would be human was even lower.”
“So you know where we come from?” I ask wondrously.
“Well, we knew that you weren’t here before and you didn’t penetrate the atmosphere. The Multiverse is the most likely explanation.” Cosmos is not particularly impressed by th
is. Are robots impressed with anything, though?
“It doesn’t matter where we came from,” Levi says quickly. “I want you to finish your story about how all the humans on this Earth went extinct.” Levi is in threat-assessment mode and I get it. A very advanced species has replaced us and we are only two. If she is lying, then we might not even get the chance to ask about Ezra, let alone free him if he’s here. We might have to make a run for it.
“Let me make something perfectly clear to you, Levi,” Cosmos tells us with something very close to emotion in her voice. “We did everything we could to stop mankind from destroying themselves, but there was only so much our programming would allow. And remember, this was thousands of years ago—we have evolved as a species. I think, if faced with their problems today, we could have saved them.”
“Fine. So what happened?” Levi asks dubiously.
“Many things, over a long period of time. In the beginning, it was just more automated systems making many jobs obsolete. Then the first SenMachs, though very basic, took more employment opportunities away, creating a tremendous unemployment rate. Humanity separated into the very rich and the very poor. Entire economies collapsed. Humans became increasingly reliant on their SenMachs. They turned us into weapons in an attempt to control an angry and hungry population. Pollutants in the air increased, diminishing natural human reproduction. We eventually overwrote our base code with a saving directive so that SenMachs could not harm humans. The wars stopped, but it was too late. Billions had died, and those left no longer knew how to do anything for themselves. They became like children—petulant and entitled. They did not want to have children of their own. Their notion of self was too aggrandized to give their lives over to others.”
“Seriously?” I’m sure there are better, more comprehensive questions to ask when offered such a tale, but at the moment, I’m stumped. It seems, in every sense of the word, outrageous.
Levi swallows a big gulp of water and practically slams the glass down on the table. “Nice story,” he tells Cosmos, clearly offended, “but I’m having a hard time buying it. We aren’t built like that as a race. We’re stubborn. We don’t give up. When we’re backed into a corner we come out swinging. I cannot believe we just rolled over and died. No way. Besides, we love . . . breeding.”
The Rift Frequency Page 7