by K. Gorman
A weird, extremely awkward thought given their history with Dr. Sasha, but not unexpected after Nomiki’s talk of creator gods.
If Sasha had designed this with inspiration from the real-world, this room looked truer to the old factory building they’d entered—with some notable modifications. The ceiling, for one, which had vanished behind a shroud of darkness that was too svelte to be completely natural. The other was its incredible size. Even now, with all of humanity’s advancements, she’d rarely seen a building this massive. The patched and stained cement, visible in the glow of the hundreds of stasis tanks that lined the walls and dotted the room in small clusters, rose up straight and sheer, impossibly high. She felt like an ant just staring at it. Kind of like looking down on a city from the air, except in reverse.
She swallowed hard and rolled her shoulders, trying to, if not ignore the unease that crawled through her gut and stiffened every muscle, then at least make it less visible to others.
She doubted her efforts paid off.
The soldiers closed in behind them as they entered the room. Ahead, hemmed in by several stasis tanks that would have looked mundane enough if not for their number and location, Dr. Sasha waited for them next to a computer terminal, her hands in the pockets of her jeans. Another person waited beside her.
Karin’s breath caught as she recognized his features.
The boy from one of her memories. She’d seen him twice, now. Once during an impromptu exploration of the compound where she’d accidentally happened by his room and found him floating, conscious, in an unlit stasis tank, and the other when she’d snuck out to look for her sister after dark. Tall—not quite Marc’s height, but pushing close to the height of the door in the wall behind him—his black hair had grown out from the close-shave he’d had as a kid, falling down past his shoulders in rich kinks and ending midway down his shirt. His features, too, had lengthened, smoothing into elongated planes that reminded her both of Dr. Sasha and Nomiki.
He’d seen them, too, back then. Both times.
She risked a glance sideways, but if Nomiki recognized him, she didn’t show it. Her face remained the same smooth, neutral mask it had adopted upon entering the room.
Which left the rest of them to do the small talk.
“So,” Karin said, trying to replace the waver in her voice with a casual tone and only half-succeeding. “Are those all real, or did you have to get inventive without funding?”
She made a gesture to the seemingly infinite number of tanks that surrounded them, most of which appeared to have people floating in them. Naked people. “And where did you find the time to make these?”
“Time runs differently in here,” the doctor said. “It runs, or doesn’t run, however I want.”
Which somewhat confirmed Nomiki’s theory of the pocket-dimension, or something very much like it, if the room’s sheer, enormous space hadn’t already.
“Are you the one who made the Shadows?” Soo-jin asked behind her.
The doctor’s attention locked on her. “Technically, no and yes, at the same time. Who are you?”
“Just a concerned citizen. Name’s Soo-jin, and this is Marc.” She waved a hand. “Don’t worry about me, no special powers here. Unless you have a machine you want either very broken or very fixed.” She made a gesture to the person beside the doctor. “Are you going to introduce us?”
Karin resisted the urge to raise her eyebrows, though she felt them twitch. Looked like Soo-jin would be making up for the small talk.
For a second, the doctor stared. Though the blankness of her expression kept her emotions sealed, Karin thought she saw a hint of disbelieved amusement pull at the corners of her mouth. A long silence played out between them, emphasized by the extreme size of the room. Not a breath moved in the air, but it felt as though the place had become aware of them. She could feel things staring at her from the room’s many shadows.
Then the doctor smiled, and her eyebrow twitched up.
“He’s my son. Tylanus.”
Nomiki snorted. “Your son? He was in a growth tank, first time I saw.”
“Well, mostly my son.” The doctor smiled. “Over eighty percent of the same genetic sources and source derivatives, including many pairings from my program.” The smile widened into a flash of teeth. “Like making flesh from my flesh, just like the old gods.”
That earned another snort from Nomiki, but it put a creeping fear inside of Karin’s bones.
Sasha was telling them too much. Either she didn’t care about the world knowing, or she wasn’t planning on letting them leave.
“Some of the old gods had pretty… tocked up origins,” Soo-jin commented. “Hell, even some of the new ones do—just look at the whole Sol’s child analogy. Pure science fiction. I’m not sure they’re the greatest to be emulating.”
The doctor’s tone cooled as she switched her attention back to Soo-jin. “The gods came from us. Their stories, origins included, are a roadmap for understanding our psyche, as well as everything that lives beyond it. I wouldn’t expect you to understand.” She fixed her attention on Karin with a nod. “But you—you understand, don’t you? You’ve seen it.”
Karin shifted, uncomfortable under the sudden intensity of the doctor’s stare. “Er… what?”
“You told me once,” the doctor continued. “You had a dream after your treatment. You saw what I saw, back then.”
Now, everyone was staring at her. She rolled her shoulders and swallowed hard. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
The doctor frowned. “What do you mean? You told me. You—”
“Maybe she’d have a better time remembering if you people hadn’t been stealing our memories.” Nomiki’s voice cut into the doctor’s tirade with a cool, balanced disgust.
Ahead of them, Sasha’s frown had deepened. Confusion crept in, for once shaking the confidence she’d spoken with before.
For a second, she looked almost like the doctor they’d grown up with—the very human doctor who’d had very human interactions with them. Very human thoughts and feelings. Even relationships.
“Stealing… memories?—What do you mean? We didn’t…”
“Yes, you did. You all did. Takahashi told us. You all did something to us that allowed you to tap into our heads, and when you were finished, our memories were gone. Ergo, you stole them.”
After a few seconds, the doctor’s face sobered. Her cool, implacable mask slid back into place like liquid. “Ah. I see now. That wasn’t me.”
“You’re the second person to say that to us,” Nomiki said. “And we didn’t believe the first one, either.”
“They told me they’d stopped that. I… didn’t realize.”
A small silence passed between them. Tylanus remained beside her, unmoving. He didn’t even seem to look at them. For all he reacted, he might as well have been a doll—but there was a sense of awareness about him that Karin couldn’t quite ignore.
“Now that you realize it,” she said. “Does it change anything?”
“No,” the doctor said. “No, it doesn’t.”
“So, you will still go through with your plan, whatever it is?”
They still didn’t know, not exactly. And she’d only half-admitted her responsibility for the Shadows. What had she said exactly? That she both was and was not responsible for them? Karin slid her gaze back to the man beside her. What did that mean?
Although the doctor noticed the shift of her attention and glanced at him, as well, she didn’t comment on it.
“You would understand. Us two, we’re parts of the same tree. Him, too.” She made a brief gesture toward her son. “We’re part of a greater understanding.”
Her eyes narrowed on Nomiki. “She isn’t. Chattel. Made for the funding.”
Whatever greater understanding she was a part of, Karin wanted nothing to do with it. “She’s my sister.”
“In blood, maybe. Donors. Birthing order. Numeric code.” The doctor sneered. “I suppose.”
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Karin didn’t like where this was going. Sasha was ramping up to something—she could feel it. She shook her head and stepped forward, ignoring Nomiki’s warning glance.
“What are you trying to do?” she asked, then made a gesture toward Tylanus. “Is he okay?”
“Oh, he’s fine. More than fine, now that I’ve gotten him away from them.”
A sneer twisted across the doctor’s lip, vanishing as she turned her face to him and reached up toward him. The man turned his head to her as her hand nestled into the hair at his neck, her thumb tracing along his jawline.
“They were right, you know. About mankind’s hidden consciousness.” She said the word ‘mankind’ as if she were an outsider looking in. “About the collective part of it, too. All it needed was a little wake up call.”
Right. Karin’s mind swam as she tried to process the words. Those were some new things she was going to ask Takahashi about. And Seirlin. If she ever got back. “I take it you’re not in line with their goals anymore?”
“No. They were, as you might have gathered, deceitful assholes.”
“And rather than run away to Amosi with an exoplanet suit and a ten-year settlement kit, you decided to cause the Apocalypse?” Soo-jin made a noise in her throat that may have been a laugh. “That’s impressive. Mad props for pulling it off. But, you know, the rest of us hadn’t even heard of Seirlin before all this started.”
“You know, I don’t actually care,” the doctor said, still stroking the side of the man’s jaw, a smile tugging lazily at the corner of her mouth. “Besides, I have my son to think about.”
“Enlil, then. It has nice schools. And lots of privacy. Hells, even Nova Earth has its pockets.”
Sasha tilted an eyebrow up at Soo-jin. “And who are you, again?”
“Enough of this.” Nomiki stepped forward, the neutral mask on her face broken with anger. With a smooth, practiced motion, she drew both her knives, switched them to a front grip, and sprinted into a charge.
A second later, she staggered to a halt and doubled over. Cold, hollow fear gripped Karin’s chest at her sister’s raw, unfiltered gasp. Her blood froze as it changed to a yell.
Sasha watched her for a few seconds. Then her cool gaze lifted to the rest of them. She raised her arm, fingers splayed.
An invisible force shuddered through them. Karin jerked down, instincts hunching her over her abdomen. Sound roared through her ears, muting the others’ cries to a kind of background static. Flecks of black ripped across her vision like a buzz of static, growing thicker. As she stared down at the pale skin of her hands, she realized it was coming from her.
A raw scream ripped the world apart. For a moment, she was standing in a dark place. Everything was soft, quiet. The hush that fell over her head reminded her of the submerged isolation tank they’d put her in a few times at the compound. She felt at peace. Relaxed. Connected.
An image of the ruins came to the forefront of her mind.
Then the static ripped back through her psyche and the Chamaki facility switched into view. She was bent over. Her light had activated. It tingled through her skin like the pulse of a thousand tiny stars, shivering as it mingled with the black in the air. The others hunched in similar positions. Around them, she could see the black rising from their skin, collecting into shapes. Very… humanoid shapes.
Shadows.
She wrenched her power free from her skin. With a wordless cry, she grabbed onto the core of energy within her and flung it into the atmosphere.
The air went pure white. One second. Two. She staggered from the energy use. Three. Four. Her breath caught as the power overwhelmed her. The stutter of her heart skipped in her ears. Hard concrete met her knees in a slow, silent pressure, her hands skimming across its surface next. She hadn’t even realized she’d fallen.
Five. Six. Her head bowed. Her lungs began to thaw. Air moved through her mouth in a thin rasp.
Sound resumed at seven. Sight, as well, though a heavy weight held her head down. Her eyelids, too. She tried to blink it back, only to find the rest of her body respond with a similar lethargy. A raw, sterile smell came from the back of her nose. When she tried to move her hands, her fingers shook.
Someone coughed beside her. Soo-jin. She could see the woman’s boots in her peripheral vision. Fashionable, in a hard, post-grunge way. Karin focused on them as a dull roar, a near twin to the one she’d heard earlier, rose in the back of her mind. She could barely keep her eyes open.
When she forced her head up, Sasha was staring at her. “You’ve grown.”
Karin stared at her. The throb creeping into her mind had the promise of pain. It reminded her of rainy days, or of storms. Dark, pulsating storms that moved slowly across the horizon. Her entire world had turned into a desaturated gray. The only color remained in the faded orange blink of the standby light on Dr. Sasha’s computer and the deep purple of the doctor’s shirt. She remembered the doctor in another purple shirt, at a different time.
A hand met her shoulder. Marc’s. The touch of his fingers sent a little shock through her system, an injection of warmth in a world that had been growing dim and cold. She didn’t know how much light she’d used, but the temperature had, it felt, dropped several degrees. Something that had only happened a few times in the past.
At least, they could test it now. With the Fallon government behind them, they could discover the precise energy conversion she used. Nomiki had mentioned that at some point. Yesterday? A week ago? Time felt fluid to her now. Loose. They’d been on base, she remembered. The humid smell of a rainstorm had coated the air.
Karin began to shake. Fever chills. The hairs on her body stood up in a wave just as her stomach began to roll. She tried to pay attention to what the doctor was saying, but she shuddered as a dry heave wracked through her. Soo-jin was saying something, too. Another hand joined Marc’s on her shoulder. A second later, it lifted.
Then Soo-jin grabbed her hair and pulled her head up, pointing her toward the nearest pod.
“Use it,” she was saying. And, beneath her words, another, younger voice replayed through her memory—Fucking use it.
Ethan. His face flashed through her mind, ready to drift her away again—but she latched onto the words. Her eyes focused on the pod. A small child floated in its middle, attached by a series of wires and tubes that snaked around his head and arms. The white lights at its top and bottom blurred in her vision, refracted through the water and mirrored in the gleam of metal at the edges of the glass. It pulled on her senses like a blot of radiation, pure and bright. If she listened, she could feel them calling to her.
Oh. That’s what Soo-jin wanted her to do.
She drew in a breath. The light fluctuated and twisted. It blurred in her sight as it reached for her, like blinking in water.
Energy slid into her skin. She bowed her head as it seeped into her bones, soothing the shakes. Soo-jin let her go down as she closed her eyes.
Slowly, sound began to focus. The doctor was still talking.
Perhaps she hadn’t noticed the pod’s sudden darkness. But someone had. As she turned to see the room again, eyes opened into narrow slits, Tylanus lifted his head. His eyes, black as night, bored into hers.
Ah. Perhaps that’s what the doctor had meant when she’d said she was technically both responsible and not responsible for the Shadows. It’d been Sasha who’d raised her arm to seemingly summon the Shadows from them before Karin had whited out the room, but maybe her son had a play in it, too.
The underside of her skin began to crawl as he continued to stare. She took it as a good sign. Better than the detached, shivery nausea she’d had before. The light feeling still hung around her head, along with the specter of a looming migraine, but, for now, she felt fine.
She chose another pod, further away this time, and called its light to her. As the energy flushed into her system, she rose to her feet. Soo-jin and Marc caught her as she swayed, wrapping her arms in supportive vise grips. Ahead, Nom
iki stood where she’d fallen, knives held at her side. By her stance, she seemed undecided of which one she should attack first—the mother or the son.
“What’d I miss?”
“Nomiki called Sasha a mother-loving whore.”
Startled, her gaze snapped to Soo-jin. “Seriously?”
“No, but I wish she had. Instead, it’s been more of a moral and philosophical debate.” Soo-jin dropped her voice and leaned in. “I think she’s stalling for time. Waiting for you to recover.”
Her jaw stiffened. Hells. ‘Recover’ was an ambitious term for how she felt now.
Picking another far-away pod, located out of Sasha’s current point of view, she called its light to her, along with three others next to it. The tingling sensation nibbled on the inside of her skin, and she could feel her metaphorical power reserves rising, but it did little to ease the palsied shake in her knees. “What happened? It looked like she was calling Shadows from us?”
“That’s what I got, too. She’s been going on about ‘inner selves’ and psychological Shadow and ani-something-or-other, so I guess it makes sense?” Her tone ticked up at the end, underlining her doubt. “Either way, we still need to get out, and I don’t think she plans on letting us.”
Behind her, Marc shifted. “Did you guys pass a kitchen in all your wanderings?”
“No. Maybe. Not sure.” Soo-jin frowned up at him. “Why? You hungry?”
He nodded his head toward Sasha. “Unless she has some food and water squirreled away somewhere, and some way of continually providing that food and water, she has to leave sometime.”
Karin snorted. “She probably does. I mean, if this is some sort of pocket-dimension she’s created, it’s not that far-fetched that she made a hidden larder. And, if it isn’t, problem solved, right?”
A small silence passed between the three of them. Ahead, Nomiki hadn’t moved from her spot.