“What shall we do?”
His chest won’t move, his lungs stuck.
“Tom? Shall we look for your parents?”
Nothing here has changed.
“No,” he gasps. “We’re not here for them!” He crosses the expanse, strides through the kitchen, and mounts the stairs carved into the ebony wall at the heart of the apartment.
“Tom!”
He turns. Sylene is standing below him, framed by the dark wooden walls of the staircase. Her face is flushed and she is panting, out of breath. And the look in her eyes is . . . fear. For him. Concern.
“Do you want me with you or would you rather be alone?”
He looks down at her, at Kate there, pregnant again, back in this place he thought they’d escaped for her good. For the good of the baby. He has been alone, he knows, for a long, long time, but not, he realizes, recently. With a gasp his tears finally burst and he collapses on the stairs. Something gives. His frenzy snaps. “Of course I want you with me!” a voice he barely recognizes wails, but he knows it must be his own. “You know I need you now . . .”
Sylene runs up the stairs and holds his shoulders and kisses the top of his head. They both cry, with hope, with fear, because it’s the only thing they can do as she helps him stand and stagger up the stairs and onto an open walkway. Many wooden doors open onto other rooms; they hurry past . . . but Tom returns to one. His face is bloodless. He pushes open the door. A room with a deep-pile carpet is revealed. Huge windows show a vista of devastation that sweeps forever away. The flooding is clear from here, the swollen waters shining, swallowing the city, the lower tower tops breaking the surface like reeds. The utter devastation.
“This is their room.”
“No one’s been here for years, Tom. You can stop worrying. Where do you think they went?”
“My father was in his office when the Feed went down. That’s the last I knew. But he would have had something planned, I’m sure of it. Some way to survive. He always looked to the future. That was his life.”
And he’s back, in this room, over two decades before. There was a bandage on his leg. Whatever it was ached deeply, it was so very sore. That was why he was here, in the night, terrified because his parents were asleep but he was desperate for their help. It hurt too much. The loneliness and the pain. He heard his father breathe. He reached out toward him, in the dark. He’d had a test that afternoon, a deep one. Some bone marrow, his father had told him. And now, Tom knows, it was to make sure the implant had taken, that it had become latched on to his DNA. He was an experiment. A test to see that it would pass the Feed down through generations to come, and it’s like something flows between Tom now and his younger self then: an echoing dark loss, a loneliness and pain that is somehow companionable when it joins him together over time. A loneliness and pain that was solved, by Kate, by Bea, and now—
“And your mother?”
Tom looks around at the shelves and drawers and the sculptures—so familiar, so distant, so dead; at the bedside tables and machines; at the wardrobes, thrown open . . . but empty.
“I don’t know. She wouldn’t let me share her Feed.”
“Why?”
“Because I killed my brother.” He folds his fingers together and bounces his hands on his thighs. He nods over Sylene’s shoulder, remembering as he tells her. “We were in the room next door. President Taylor had been killed, the Chinese premier too. They had worked out we were being inhabited. We didn’t know why. They had one of you imprisoned, Ben told me, but he never talked, even though I’m sure he was tortured. There must have been many of you, waiting, and then inspired by Taylor’s death to action. It was carnage. People killed in the streets. Who knew how many sleeper cells there were? So fathers killed children, children killed mothers. Everyone was watched while they slept. How many innocents were killed? Who was going to be taken next? The fear was devastating, Sylene. It was everywhere. It poisoned us all in our heads. This is what you made. This is what you did. People hallucinating with fear. Lack of sleep. Terror. People killed without proof. But I saw those signs, I know I did, while Ben was next door, one night, asleep. He was taken on my watch.”
“And your mother wouldn’t forgive you.”
Tom raises a finger, scolding. “Oh, no. She didn’t believe me. She had always said I was jealous. It’s funny what success does. She came from a very modest family, but isn’t it interesting how having more makes you less secure sometimes? She thought I couldn’t actually, honestly be happy with a comfortable life, an unambitious life, she called it. She had always assumed I hated Ben. Which, I suppose, I did. But not the way she thought. Because they liked him. They were kinder to him than to me! And I wish he wasn’t dead!” He weeps suddenly, fiercely, looking at the empty bed through burning-hot tears and remembering those who had slept there. In the end he turns back to Sylene. He has no barriers anymore; he’s too tired to hold anything back. “I killed him,” he says quietly, emptied. “And I killed Guy. But I could never do it to you. I didn’t watch you, I didn’t want to see it happen. I loved you too much; I wouldn’t have been able to bear it.”
“I’m sorry!” Sylene cries. “We didn’t have a choice! We didn’t know it would be like this!”
They fall into each other’s arms and cry until Tom strokes her flushed face and smiles. “Oh, we’re past blame now, Sylene. We’re not here for that anymore.” Then he grips her wrists and pulls her from the room, back along the mezzanine and up more flights of stairs. The stories narrow the farther up they go, tightening and turning until they break out at the top, where sky and slanting sunlight surround them. Dizzy, dizzyingly high. Sylene gasps behind him as Tom strides onto the platform, the city spread below.
“I remember being up here before they finished the building,” he murmurs. “Before the glass was put in. I don’t know what came first, his God complex or this.”
Sylene puts her arms out for balance. The view to the hills and the gleaming estuary is larger than can be absorbed. Clumps of clouds collect at their level and darken in wisps around them. There is glass, she sees, but it is almost invisible. And there, sitting opposite each other in low dark chairs, are two skeletons. Grinning at each other. They are clothed: one suited, the other in a dress with a handbag on its lap. Their skin has embalmed to the bone.
Sylene takes Tom’s hand as they approach them. The silence of the place is deathly.
“So they are dead, then. After all. I beat them.”
“Tom . . .”
“They hurt me so badly, Sylene.”
“Come now,” she says, trying to turn him away. “Forget them. What about the homeHub? That’s why we’re here, Tom, not for them. Let’s find our children!”
Tom pauses, frowns, and turns to look at her.
“Bea . . . I mean, let’s find Bea.”
He squints, and thoughts furrow his brow. Then his face relaxes. He nods at her before saying, “Hub?”—and something thickens the air. A high-pitched whine. A signal tuning back into life. It expands and, deepening, resonates in his bones.
“Did you feel that?” Sylene gasps. “Did you feel it?”
A molten lance weaves through Tom’s brain and connects to the implant there. His forehead rises as he senses something acute. Then his eyes twitch minutely. Incessantly they rove and dart. They jerk and snap around. His arms grab out at her as his legs go, and Sylene tries to catch him. She guides him, staggering, to a chair and he slumps back, his eyes widening, and flickering, and widening again, and his legs jerking as his head rolls. He spasms and kicks.
“I’m glowing, Sylene, I’m flying!” he gasps. “Look at me now!”
His back arches and his hands crush hers. His eyes stare flickeringly ahead, unseeing, as he sweats. So much information. So quick, so clean, so pure. His heart is going to burst. He pants, “You were right, Sylene, she’s stored. It has become genetic. All Bea’s BackUps are here. And mine. And Mother’s, and Father’s, and Ben’s.” Clenching himself, he turn
s to Sylene. Strange noises come from his throat, non-words, until, “They escaped.”
“Who did?”
“My parents. Sylene, they . . .” Tom palpitates. “He sent their mind states somewhere else. He sent them far away. They didn’t die at all! He—”
“Forget them, Tom!” Sylene pleads, grabbing his face, clutching his arms, his hands, his cheeks. “What about Bea? Can you see what happened to Bea?”
“I will,” he says. “But first there’s you. Kate. She’s here too. Her BackUps are saved here. Right up to the very last.” His lips contort. Sweat pours down his face. The tendons in his neck are stretching. Every word is a pain, but something victorious slides in. “You can find out who you are, Sylene. Look. Look, here, you can do it. Here, she’s still here. Oh, Kate . . .”
Sylene pulls back, but Tom’s eyes are hard on her. He grabs her wrist. Will not let go.
“Reinstall her, Sylene,” he growls. “Bring Kate back and erase yourself.”
“Tom, I thought we—”
“Listen to me, Sylene. Your children are gone. Your husband too. They died and you buried them. But her family is still alive.” He stretches a hand toward her stomach, his mouth still moving, gulping out breath without words. Even he doesn’t believe his argument, but what else can he say but appeal to some kindness, some form of human care? “Make something right, Sylene. That was why you came back. To make the world a better place. So give Bea back her family. Reinstall Kate now.”
“Tom . . . find her. Find out where Bea is. I can still help you find her!”
His eyes do not blink as he engages a different place. They flicker as he accesses SaveYou, scans what has been saved, looks for what happened to Bea. Something locks. His expression catches. A noise sticks in his throat. He shakes. Deeply. Spasms to the core of his soul. No one should see what he’s seeing. Water swells the rims of his eyes. He chokes. He tries to breathe but can’t. He tries to shout. For Bea. For help. Nothing. His body shudders. Nothing can be done. He can’t turn away from what he is seeing, what he is experiencing secondhand, the emotions of the girl, the final memories of the child, his eyeline tethered inwardly as his face screws into a scream, a silent, shaking scream as—
He collapses.
Sylene pushes his head back but he doesn’t move. She wraps her arms around him and tries to pull him up. Limp. His head lolls. She lifts it. As she tries to force his eyes open, his breath surges and he punches her in the face. He tries to defend himself, tries to fight her away. He finds himself. Finds her before him and cries: “She’s gone, Sylene, she’s gone!”
“What did you see? What happened?”
Tom pulls her toward his bloodshot eyes, and Sylene clings to him as he howls.
“You’ll get through this, Tom!” she yells, trying to hear herself above his cries. Animal sounds shake his body without form, with senseless, guttural pain. “We’ll get through this! It feels insurmountable now, I know, but I promise you, I promise—I will get you through this, Tom!”
“Sylene!” he gasps, then withdraws, abruptly quiet, and fixes her with a stare. He takes her arms in the sudden silence and searches her eyes. A sense of control now changes his tone. His voice drops. For all the pain in it before, it’s empty and burned out now. What he says to her is simple: “You can put something right at least. You can access the homeHub. Go into Kate’s Feed. Her BackUp states are saved. Bring Kate back, Sylene.”
“Stop, Tom!” Sylene says, yanking him forward.
“No. I’m going back to when we escaped the city. Kate and me. The Collapse, when she was pregnant with Bea. I’m resetting myself, Sylene. I’m resetting my memories to then.”
Sylene shakes him. Grips his wrists. Grabs his face, trying to look into his eyes. “You can’t do that. Listen to me!”
“I can!”
“But you’ll forget—”
“Everything! I’ll forget everything that’s happened since then. Exactly! And there won’t be this grief anymore. There’s nothing I want to remember. It’ll be like we’d never left the city. There will be only hope. It’ll be like the Feed’s only just gone down. We can start again, and I’ll never know. I’ll never know about you, I’ll never know that Kate died. I’ll never know that Bea . . .” He reaches out and strokes her stomach with his blood-soaked bandaged hand. “You can tell me whatever you want, Sylene. You can tell me this is Bea. Whether you reset yourself or not, whether you bring Kate back, whatever you tell me, I’ll believe it,” he whispers fiercely, before his eyes roll and defocus. He gasps again and shudders. Sylene grabs him. She tries to physically force the jolts to stop as his head slumps and his body quivers. As she collapses into his shaking arms, he goes totally limp beneath her.
Sunlight streams through the glass, through the clouds.
The skeletons in the chairs smile at each other still, their minds, their inhabitants, far away.
She goes—
—plunging myface into a freezing pool and I am here, here, I’m on, and mynerves cascadingly scintillate because I haven’t felt this in solong! This sensation. It’s like home. I’m purethought, alive and unbound! I haven’t felt this rush, this purity, for such a longtime as I’m connected to theFeed but—but—but—wait, no, there is nothing else here
there is nothing
nothing at all
there is void, cold darkness like an ancient buried tomb. I am buried again, I am blind, I see nothing out there—nothing in the world at all—so I look inward, toward this homeHub that lets me in because I have KateHatfield1’s BioPrint, KateHatfield1’s Access, KateHatfield1’s DNA, & here like leafskeins are the BackUps of them all. All their SaveYou states. They’re saved. Bea. Here’s Tom. Here’s his father, his mother & Ben. & Kate. I riffle through them & they spring to life, their thoughts, their emotions, their memories through the years, sparking bursts of—fireworks, of color in this forsakenworld, & I see that yes, his parents have fled, they sent themselves away, they uploaded their mindstates to somewhere else & then their Feeds go blank, their BackUps empty after that. I abandon their memories & curl deeper into me, into KateHatfield1, past the pain that ended it all on the hill above the pond & the fear & the upturnedtruck, the fire & deliriousdreams. (& I feel a pulse of myself in these. It’s like looking into a mirror & being a mirror at the sametime & feeling the decades cascade between us.) & then I see a man who is Mark, whom I never met though I know him now because Kate does & because I am one with her, & Tom, who KateHatfield1 didn’t trust anymore; she used to love him so deeply but she doesn’t trust him now, doesn’t trust him as much as I—SyleneCharles29471—do, I realize. I realize not only that I trust him but that I can protect him, I can help him, & I realize that I want to keep him safe.
Back in the mundles, & going deeper through them, is like getting to the core of things. The blond-haired dog. Another one ravaging myleg. The camp. It thrums with people & Graham & life & Bea—Bea—Bea—in thereal I choke, I know, I gasp, & tears come with the memorysurge of whatIfeelforBea. WhatIfeelformychild. It’s the deepestfeeling, the fullestconnection I’ve ever, ever known, & I know it. I love it. Love is not enough of a word. It makes chemicals release in mybody & I follow them, the emotions, I follow the emotional addiction through the mundles as Bea grows younger, as the plants shrink & the huts deconstruct & I feel the slick weight of her as a baby. In the farmhouse bedroom. Darkened. Graham, younger. Tom, younger. That must be Jane. How Bea, the baby, looks. How she feels. The firstimpression she makes in the world. On my skin. Then earlier, Tom & I crawl across the country, Bea, a baby, unborn, back inside me, safe within my skin, never more protected than deep inside me now. The feeling of completeness, of being whole with someone else, is indescribable, it floods me, but the chemicals I must analyze to understand it, jetting through my veins, they say it all as eloquently as can be: the formula of love, burninghot, it’s the truest thing that matters.
Our heads were destroyed as we escaped the smolderingruins of the city & Kate’s/my memorie
s scramble out & distort, for weeks they blank away in the shock of theCollapse, & suddenly the world is alive with people & planes & cars all moving, all living, restored, so detailed, so real, all these memories & smells & sounds, & mymundles of theFeed explode into life. Everything is saved. I’m surfing like I did through my/her mundles of theFeed & in thereal I stretch in the sun over Tom’s inertbody & I know I’ve nearly made it! Darian, my boy, I’m here! In the ruins of thereal I can’t help but smile as I trawl Kate’s BackUps, as I search Kate’smundles of theFeed for just two words. For Darian, my son, my boy, for Darian, please. Let me find you. If you’re alive. If you made it back at all. I told you I would. I’ve worked so hard! I’ve fought so hard. To find you here. & after everything I’ve endured, you’re now just a simple search away, & neither of us will be alone again!
& with the search through KateHatfield1’s memories for [dariancharles] comes Arid Ranch Sale, China Lads Rear, Car Sandal Hire, Iran Ash Cradle while she/I sit with Tom in a train, & I search for the first occurrence of his name & I’m in a restaurant with a tattooedwaiter & she/I have been pooling all day about Energen (she/I reallycared about theworld, I didn’t know peoplethen actually cared thismuch about the planet, & I love her pool, [WhatWouldYouSacrifice?], which I dip into for a millisec, and I think I might have liked her if we’d ever actually met, I think we would have liked each other for sure, but I don’t care now because I need to find my son), & there it is, there, I see, is [dariancharles], & with a stomachplummet I see hisname a thousandbillion times—why so many?—fractalling across theFeed & the first time Kate/I heard it was—
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