by Sean Platt
“Stop speaking in riddles!”
Sadeem’s composure broke. He laughed.
“I suspect we’ve always been connected a little, Clara. That’s what you’re able to see. You’ve kept an eye on what humanity lost. It changes nothing, but at least offsets the burden of being how you are.”
“So I can remember things that everyone else has let go? How is that a benefit? I wish I’d forgotten, too!”
“They told me everyone would forget, Clara. But they’ve never been able to see the Lightborn. It’s one tiny piece of victory. They knocked down the buildings but left the foundation, in you.”
“And what good does it do me?”
“You won’t get lost, for one. And at least until you die, a small piece of the old world won’t be gone forever.”
“The same is true of you. Big whoop for being special. Even if we told people how it used to be, nobody would believe us.”
“Part of their plan, I suppose. The Astrals wanted us to start over, and that could only happen if we were blank slates. It had to happen before they left. But it’s good because we needed them to go. The healing had to begin, and if memory was the price, so be it. The network you see won’t last forever, Clara. It’ll wither and die. Enjoy it while you can. Your mind, my mind, the minds of other Lightborn and perhaps the one you call Stranger? That might be all that’s left of the world we knew. But like all things, it’s only for a time. I’m already forgetting things — naturally, at least. Just as your subconscious network is fading. Don’t resent it, Clara. Pity it. Don’t push those people’s remains away. Embrace and celebrate them while they’re still here.”
Something sighed inside her. Sadeem was speaking as if the world wasn’t dead, but dying. As if the people she already knew and loved, in the small village and the others pocked across the planet, were dying.
She closed her eyes, feeling exhausted. She saw the network almost immediately. And it was as he said: a still-vibrant core of bright nodes surrounded by endless acres of slaughtered chattel. Subconscious minds of the more than seven billion humans who’d died during the occupation were now husks. But the rest of what Sadeem had said wasn’t as obviously true: As those old minds shed, leaving the living to burn inside Clara’s mental network, the remaining nodes weren’t dimming. Each mind still in the grid fit perfectly — more perfectly than they ever could have during humanity’s populous but scattered heyday.
Clara opened her eyes.
“Sadeem?”
“Yes, Clara?”
“You say the nodes — this collective network — I see inside me … you say those are the roots of people before they forgot everything? So the Peers Basara node inside my head, for instance — that’s Peers as he used to be, not as he is now?”
“It’s his entry into the collective unconscious. So yes.”
“And because everyone has forgotten, that’s why the whole thing should be shutting down? Because all those old memories and thoughts are erased?”
“That’s right.”
“But Sadeem?”
“Yes, Clara?”
“It’s not shutting down. The network keeps growing brighter and brighter. It’s not dying. It’s almost like it’s coming alive.”
“I think you’re imagining things.”
“No, Sadeem, I’m not,” Clara insisted. “It’s been getting brighter since we boarded the vessel. Since those other, non-Lightborn kids started to light up, and even some of the adults.”
Sadeem looked puzzled. “But they forgot. All of them. The kids. The adults. Everyone.”
Clara closed her eyes. Watched a small blip of internal light move from a live node to a darker one. The new node brightened a hair, then passed the light on.
She was about to try and describe it when the walls began to shake. Dust sifted, and Mullah began to shout. Then Clara saw it, all at once — inside her mind before she saw it with her eyes, as the people of the distant village saw it first, and uploaded the knowledge directly to her screaming cortex.
“It’s a quake,” Sadeem said.
“No. It’s not.”
They walked up the tunnels, reached the cave’s mouth, and emerged into the open air. There they saw it together: overhead, covering half the sky, was the enormous Deathbringer that had supposedly left Earth three months earlier.
Sadeem gaped up at the thing, his Mullah ranks speechless beside him.
“They were supposed to leave,” Sadeem said. “Why didn’t they go?”
Clara looked inside. And in one gestalt leap, she knew the answer in full.
“Because this time it’s different,” she said. “This time, they can’t.”
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Johnny B. Truant is an author, blogger, and podcaster who, like the Ramones, was long denied induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame despite having a large cult following. He makes his online home at SterlingAndStone.Net and is the author of the Fat Vampire series, the Unicorn Western series, the political sci-fi thriller The Beam, and many more.
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Sean Platt is speaker, author, and co-founder of Realm & Sands. He is also co-founder of Collective Inkwell, home to the breakout indie hitsYesterday’s Gone and WhiteSpace, co-authored with David W. Wright. Sean also publishes smart stories for children under the pen name Guy Incognito, and writes laugh out loud comedies with Johnny under the pen name Max Power. You can see Sterling & Stone’s complete catalogue at SterlingAndStone.Net/Books. Sean lives in Austin, Texas, with his wife, daughter, and son.
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