resting in his room, and she knew that she herself was becoming a Keeper, just like the creature Kai. When Red Cliff finally appeared, he confirmed her new knowledge, and told her many other things she did not know as yet.
"There are machines controlling that prison too," she said to Ember and Edeline. "The machines have the information we need, but we don't know how to get it out of them."
"What about the people who made the machines?" Ember asked. "Why don't you ask them?"
"They are all long gone as far as anybody knows." Soma said. "At least they are nowhere to be found in the world."
"What's it like?" Edeline asked. "The world beyond the forest?"
"It's an island." Soma said. "There are mountains and plains, marshes and deserts, all surrounded by ocean."
"And what's beyond the ocean?" Ember asked. "Surely some have gone out, built boats and explored. People still do that, don't they?"
"A few have tried," Soma nodded. "Even my friend Red Cliff was once a sailor. But the ocean is like this forest. If you sail off and go straight you come right to the other side of the island."
"So what's the hurry then?" Ember was not satisfied. If the forest world was surrounded by an ocean world that was just a different prison, then what did it matter if they left here and traded in one confinement for another?
"Time itself is running out," Soma explained. "I told you that change was rapid out there. It's fast, and getting faster. Time has already exhausted the forest world. You'll soon see for yourselves. And you'll start changing too, like me, or maybe not just like me. It's hard to say how you'll change. That's why we need to hurry. I'll tell you more on the way. We have to go, and we have to go now."
"Now?" Edeline asked.
"Right now?" added Ember.
"Yes," Soma said, getting to her feet. "The sooner the better. There really is no time to lose."
"I don't know," Ember shook her head, but Edeline was already rising.
"Come on, Em," she said to her friend. "When you think about it, what do we have to lose?"
"I don't trust her," Ember said, still sitting cross-legged and arms akimbo on the ground.
"Don't you want to get out of here?" Edeline asked. "And anyway, what's the worst that can happen? Do you really want to stay?"
"You can't stay," Soma said. "Even if you wanted to. Like I told you, it's all over for this place. This place is doomed. The system is shutting it down. The machines in here are done and we were too late to get their data."
"I don't know what machines you're talking about," Ember grumbled, but she got her feet anyway and followed behind Edeline as they both trailed Soma who was already walking away.
"The people who made the machines," Soma was saying, "left traces of their work. 'Sample code', Red Cliff calls it. He has some of their books. I don't understand everything but here's what he told me. A long time ago there was a group of people who got together under the name 'World Weary Avengers Incorporated'. Some of them were called "intelligence engineers" and they were given blocks of time called "work-away-from-work time". This group believed in something called Orgone Energy. They thought it had something to do with human sexuality and they figured if they could find a way to capture that and tie it into the power systems they could have unlimited resources until the solar system itself burned out. People themselves would be the source of all the energy they could ever need. So they worked on this project and wrote down a lot of stuff they called "code" which was like writing words but in a special language that machines could understand. Books are made by printing out words, but these people could print out other things too with special machines they had made. They could print out objects, anything really, as long as they put some of this code into the printing machine. One day the engineers put some of their Orgone code into the printing machine and it came out a greenish-grayish foul-smelling glob, so they flushed it down the toilet. Red Cliff says the legend is that once this clump of goo got into the water system it dissolved, introducing a new kind of self-replicating molecule. That molecule got swept into reservoirs and into the atmosphere where it circled the globe and came back down in rain. This molecule, which now only the machines know about, had a way of bonding with human genetic material."
Soma was walking quickly as she spoke, and Edeline and Ember had to clamber just to keep up, neither one really understanding much of what Soma was saying.
"There were already a few cases of what they called 'development inertia'," Soma continued, "humans whose bodies could not age, like you and me but not exactly. There were only a handful of them, and they stopped growing at random, some as babies, some as infants, some as children, but they all had one thing in common, a genetic distortion. The bad molecule caused the same mutation in the fetuses of some pregnant women who got it from the water they drank. The result you know. This is where we came from, you, and me, and everybody else in here. The engineers did not understand that they were the cause of us. No one knew. The only clue was how we stopped at certain ages that corresponded to the kind of numbers that machines use, but no one was ever able to solve the riddle, partly because World Weary Avengers was a secret group controlled by the government, and they did a lot of other stuff the government did not want anyone to ever know about."
"We were not the only result of this accident, but we were the first. You all know what they did to us, how they experimented on some of us, tortured and dismembered and murdered us until they finally just locked us up and forgot about us. In the meantime, all the while we were stuck in there, the world out there and the people in it were changing in other ways. God only know what they got up to. The books we still have don't tell us much about that. Mostly we have some crappy pulp fiction. All the other information is stored inside of the machines themselves, and only machines could get the words back out of them again. There were people who controlled the machines, but we don't know where they are, if they even are anywhere at all! Now we just have the machines themselves. Changes are still happening to us, out there in the other prison world, and we think it's all because of that original bad molecule, but we don't know for sure."
"I still don't see how we can possibly help," Edeline said after Soma had seemed to finish her discourse. "We don't know anything about machines or code or any kind of engineers."
"The Coalition sent me to fetch you," Soma said.
"But why us?" Ember asked.
"The Coalition knows why," Soma replied. "But I only know this much."
"I don't anything about your coalition either," Ember said, "but I still think I don't even care. I'm not surprised those people made a mess of everything. They were always just doing whatever they could if they thought there was money in it, and damn the consequences. They were like rats sniffing out cheese. Of course it was bound to turn into some kind of a trap sooner or later!"
Ember was considering whether or not to just stop, turn around, and go home. Let the forest world collapse! Let the trees shrivel up and die. Let the sky go black! She would shut down with it all and not mind a bit, but just as she was making up her mind, the three stepped out of the forest, and onto a warm, sandy beach.
Two
Edeline Wills, age fifty one, also age thirty two, also age four hundred and nineteen (but who's counting?) stood on the sand staring out at the deep blue sea in astonishment and wonder. She hadn't seen the ocean since she couldn't even remember when, but she felt it. She felt the waves coming in and the tide pulling them back out again, felt it in the pounding of her heart and the flowing of her blood. She was entranced and without even knowing it she was walking straight towards it, memories flooding back into her brain from the earliest days of her youth, her long forgotten childhood, her whole previous life which she only now realized she hadn't thought about in years. Here she was with her mother, clinging to her hand as together they jumped over the tiny waves at the shore. There she was with her best friend, showing off their budding bodies in brand new bikinis to the boys who were too shy to approach them. Then a
gain, she saw herself on a hot night, sitting by a bonfire on a beach, toasting marshmallows and drinking beer with Maury, the man she later married. All of these visions came tumbling into her head like a rock slide, each one its own precious crystal of history.
In those distant first days of her incarceration she had thought about nothing else, and had recalled them to herself continually, sorting through her memories as if they were a deck of cards, telling one story from the past, and now another, to her fellow inmates, most of whom had let their own recollections slip away. It was pointless, they knew, and eventually she too succumbed to that knowledge as she adapted, and how she hated herself for adapting although she knew she had no choice. We wrap our minds around whatever condition we find ourselves fallen into, and she had been dropped into more than life in prison. She had been discarded and tossed into eternal oblivion by a world that had no other desire than to keep her and the people like her out of sight and out of mind.
Mere mortals had no use for them, only fear and disdain and horror at the fact that while they themselves would age and decay these lucky few, these randomly mutated souls, had happened onto a life of permanent physical stasis. They would never grow any older, nor would they ever change, no matter what happened, no matter what the others might do to them, and those others did their best, first to examine, then to dissect, then to punish, and finally to abandon. Edeline spent many long nights imagining scenes such as the one now spread out before her, the ocean and the beach, except that in her daydreams the beaches were filled with silly, happy people living out their normal lives as she herself had once upon a time been able to do. She saw them in her mind's eye now, her husband, their friends, and the memories brought tears to her eyes as she stopped and knelt in the sand, letting the waves lap up around her legs and waist.
Suddenly a loud roar rose up behind her, and Edeline heard Ember's voice shouting behind.
"What happened? What's happening?"
Edeline turned around and to her amazement saw the last of the trees sinking down, as if being sucked into a vast hole, toppling and tumbling over each other, smashing and crashing into pieces. Smoke and dust rose up and filled the air so thickly that the forest soon became completely hidden from view. Soma nodded as if she'd been expecting exactly what she was seeing.
"It's the Law of Five," she muttered, stepping back and raising her hand to her face to shield it from the approaching cloud.
"What?" Ember demanded. "How?"
She could not believe her eyes. They were only a hundred feet removed from the forest that was now being gobbled up by the planet as if it were a tasty dessert.
"The Coalition says that as soon as five immortals left the forest world, it would break apart and disappear forever. They called it the Law of Five. We were just the trigger. But it had to be now. It had to be us."
"Never heard of any stupid Law of Five," Ember grumbled as Edeline came back up from the shore and stood beside her, all of them now staring at the dusty sky.
"Is there a Law of Five about this other place too?" Edeline asked. Soma shrugged at first, but then said that yes, there was, according to The Coalition.
"What is this coalition?" Edeline wanted to know.
"Just some people," Soma replied. "The ones who know what's going on."
"Do we get to meet them?" Ember asked. "I'd sure like to ask them some questions."
"I never said they knew everything," Soma answered with some irritation. The clouds were already lifting before them, thinning out and dissipating into the sky. Below them there was nothing, not even a hole. Ember took a few steps towards the spot where
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