by user
A perfect man, escaping from chaos.
But escaping into what?
Chal fell onto the metal door, spinning the heavy wheel as she regained her balance. Air began to hiss around the edge of the door as the seal was broken, and Chal remembered, too late, that the lab was positively pressurized. The door would have broken her arm had she not let go at the last second, for it swung open with such force that the wall behind it rained down a fall of dust and rock. Another alarm, this one higher-pitched, began to squeal above the buzzing.
“Come on!” Chal said, but her voice was lost in the whistling of wind out of the pressurized lab. Papers blew past them in gusts and the shattered glass tinkled across the floor. Chal yanked Alan’s arm and he began to sprint alongside her as though he had just realized the danger they were in. She had to push herself to keep up with him.
They ran through the tunnel into a darkness that was broken only by occasional emergency lights set into the concrete floor. The wind howled through the exit, pelting them with debris as they ran out and up. Chal felt like a rat being chased through the sewers by some unknown force.
Dios te salve Maria,
plena eres de gracia, el
Señor está en vostra
compañia,
The old words she had prayed with when she was a child came into her mind. As they ran forward, the noise behind them grew fainter and fainter, until finally Chal could hear her own breathing again. The wind still whistled through the corners of the hallway, but more softly, the debris far behind.
She stopped then and bent over coughing, her sides aching from the effort of running so fast. The adrenaline that had sustained her was wearing off and she felt dizzy and weak. When she raised her hand to her head she felt a wetness and knew it was blood.
Beneida tu eres
entre totes les dones, y
beneit es el fruit del vostro
ventre Chesus.
She realized that she was going to pass out at the same time that she noticed she was saying the words of the prayer out loud.
She slumped against the wall, and Alan caught her before she could fall far. Her vision swam before her eyes and she clutched at his arm for support. Had she hit her head against something, or was it the glass?
A small aftershock of the earthquake trembled the floor below her, and she felt her legs turn to jelly. Alan stumbled and she slid down against the wall, smearing blood onto the rock. She couldn’t go on. It was all too much.
The lights had gone out, or had they? She blinked and there was Alan in the dimness, kneeling in front of her, his face full of concern. She tried to whisper to him to leave, to run away and get as far from this place as possible, but for some reason she could not speak. Then she blinked again and everything was dark.
Santa Maria,
mare de Dios,
suplica por nosatres
pecaors, ara, y en el hora
de nostra mort.
Asi-siga.
***
She woke twice more that she could remember. The first time she opened her eyes, Alan was clutching her to his chest. Pebbles fell loosely from cracks in the ceiling, and a thick air of dust whispered through the corridor. She could hear in the far distance the echo of the laboratory alarm, its incessant buzzing now as faint as a blood-seeking insect in the corner of an otherwise empty room.
They were in the tunnel that sloped up and away from the lab. She tried to estimate the length of the tunnel, but her mind couldn’t hold the numbers long enough to figure it out. She thought about what they were leaving behind. The code that she had never gotten to look at. How Alan was made. Then blood ran into her eye and she blinked again into darkness.
The second time she woke they were at the exit. Alan had shifted her in his arms so that he could open the door and the jostling woke her. She looked up as they walked through the doorway, and, despite her tiredness, she gasped in surprise. Underneath the lab she had imagined it would be daylight when they emerged, but the desert stretched out before them in an inky, moonless night.
There was a huge object off to the side of the exit doorway, but Chal couldn’t make it out. That was the last thing she remembered.
***
Sleep had always troubled Chal. Not going to sleep – she had never had to deal with any sort of insomnia, fortunately – but the philosophical implications of sleep.
John Locke had been the first one, in the 1700s, to define a person by their consciousness – specifically, the continuity of consciousness. When a person went to sleep, their continuity of consciousness was broken. Sleepwalkers who perpetrated crimes while they were asleep could not be prosecuted for their actions; they were, after all, not themselves. How far could we take this?
Chal remembered herself as a little girl playing in the streets, remembered herself as a young woman studying hard in the deep recesses of the university libraries, remembered too the person who had loved, been heartbroken, done too many things which she later regretted. Was she the same person throughout? Certainly not.
The Chal Davidson who stood in front of a lecture hall a few days ago was light-years different than the Chal Davidson who had stood, nervous and shamed, in front of her childhood classmates after she had been caught selling test answers to a friend. Every cell in her body was different, every neuron in her brain had died and been replaced. All that was continuous was a fallible memory and the fact that from one day to the next she had felt like the same person.
But when she slept, her brain changed. When she slept, she had no waking consciousness to tie her to her past self. Chal liked the idea of being given a new chance every day to create herself as a person. That was as religious as she got.
When she would argue with lovers, she told them that she didn’t mind going to bed angry.
“I won’t be the same person tomorrow,” she said, and she was usually right. She would wake up refreshed, her brain settled down and not flushed with adrenaline and all the other chemical compounds that induced anger. She often wondered why she had been so mad the day before. The answer that she found made the most sense was just that it was a different version of her self that was mad.
Of course, sometimes she would wake up and realize that the Chal she had turned into didn’t care for the person sleeping next to her anymore. She took this in stride, although she often wondered if there would ever be someone who could catch her attention for longer than a few weeks at a time. She had been criticized for her callousness, but Chal thought this was misguided criticism. She was never cruel, simply honest. It wasn’t her fault that all of her past relationships had slid into boredom. The worst relationships were not those which were rife with anger or sorrow, but those which wandered aimlessly and ended up mired in impassionate routine.
It may have been the type of man that she attracted, but she found nearly all of them boring after a while, their sex life stalled into blank routine, their conversations void of any spark of life. She had tried counseling after one relationship with a man who had insisted on it before letting her go. She went obediently to the first three sessions and then quit.
“It’s like trying to resuscitate a rock,” Chal had said when her lover had begged her to try just one more session.
It didn’t matter anyway to Chal. Tomorrow she would be a different person. If the philosopher Locke was right, she couldn’t tell what she would do next or who she would find herself attracted to. She would just take it in stride, one day at a time. This worked for her, or at least she told herself it did.
Now as she was carried through the long, sloping tunnel, she felt her mind drift in and out of the world and considered herself reborn each time she opened her eyes.
One blink, one lifetime. One person born, one killed.
She could do anything, she thought hazily. She could wake up as anyone. In the clouds of her mind, she yearned for something new, and did not know what it was. Something else. Something that was not Chal the lecturer, Chal the precocious daugh
ter, Chal the great and famous scientist.
In the recesses of Chal’s consciousness, she found herself holding tight to the man who was carrying her.
***
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
When Chal awoke she did not know where she was. She heard a low roar coming from behind her and when she wiped her eyes clearshe saw the stars. She blinked hard, turning her vision to the side, and what she saw left her breathless for a few seconds.
She was in the cockpit of a small airplane, in near-total darkness, and Alan was piloting.
“You’re awake. That’s good,” Alan said. He seemed calm, and Chal, scared as she was, allowed herself to breathe for a moment before replying.
“Where are we?” she said, her voice trembling.
“We are heading west over a desert,” Alan said. “There’s a road to the north of us that I’ve been following.”
“How–” Chal said, then stopped. Her head hurt and she raised her hand to touch it, wincing. There was a bandage over the wound. “How did we get here?”
“You were asleep,” Alan said. “I carried you out. There was a plane just outside of the tunnel. I thought it would be faster than walking.”
“A plane?” Chal asked.
“I imagine it was Dr. Fielding’s.”
She closed her eyes, seeing Dr. Fielding again crumple to the floor as his clawed hands beat spasmodically at his own head. She would never be able to wipe the image out of her memory. “You know how to fly?”
“There’s a manual in the side pocket,” Alan said. “It wasn’t that hard to figure out. There’s a medical pack too. How is your head?”
“It’ll be fine,” she said. She was thinking about brain structures and Evan’s preprogrammed capabilities. “How long have I been asleep?”
“Around an hour,” Alan said. “We’ve been in the air for fifty minutes.”
An hour. They must be flying over the Mojave desert, or maybe the Sonoran, depending on how far south Alan had taken them. She looked down but could not see anything at all. There should be a map somewhere. She rifled through one of the packs in the back of the cockpit.
“There are some pills for alertness. I’ve taken two so far, but I should probably sleep soon,” Alan said.
Chal simply nodded, but she was thinking of how quickly he had fallen asleep during the last session. How had he stayed awake for over an hour? She darted a close glance at his face. His eyes were rimmed red, twitching from side to side. It was more than dangerous for him to be staying awake for so long.
“Let’s land,” Chal said.
Alan nodded. “I’ve been considering it for the last few minutes, but I thought I’d consult you first. There’s nothing down there but sand.”
“And? We can’t land there?”
“It’s not so much the landing,” Alan said. “It’s the taking off afterwards if we damage the landing gear. And I’m pretty sure we’d scrape off everything underneath the plane landing on bumpy dunes.”
“Oh.” Absently, Chal considered the neurological development that must have allowed him such foresight. She continued going through the packs, thinking of what they could do if they hadn’t any map. They had to land somewhere, and soon.
“Here’s a change of clothes,” she said, pulling a shirt out of the pack, then a pair of pants. Alan was still stark naked, sitting in the pilot’s seat, and she couldn’t help but be distracted by his sitting so nonchalantly. “You’ll need them once we get down .”
“I’m just going to try to get us down first.” Alan smiled wanly.
She found the map tucked into the side of her seat. The coordinates pinpointed their location with remarkable precision. They were close to the California border, which was good. One of her mom’s friends had immigrated nearby into America, and she was the one Chal most wanted to see now. Lucia would be able to help them if anyone could. Chal just hoped that they would make it there.
“Let’s turn south,” Chal said. “There’s an old highway we can land on not too far from here.”
Her face was pale but at least now she had a plan. They had a plan.
***
The last time Chal had been down to this part of the country, she had been struck by how desolate it was. Most of her time was spent in lecture halls and laboratories, hopping from one big city to another. For her entire adult life, she had surrounded herself with people. Now she looked down at the vast expanse of sand as an entirely alien thing.
Of course when they came close to the old highway it was not as desolate as Chal had hoped. In the darkness she could see pinpoints of light underneath them, headlights of travelers going somewhere in the night, or escaping from somewhere.
“Dammit,” she said. “We can’t land on the road.”
Alan looked wearier than ever, his eyes bloodshot, and he reached for the pills. Chal stopped him. She had seen the medicine’s ingredients, mostly amphetamines, and they were not healthy for anyone to use three times in a row, let alone someone whose brain was just developing.
“I can’t keep flying like this,” Alan said. “I need to take another one.”
“We’ll land now,” Chal said.
“But the road–”
“We’ll land in the desert,” Chal said, looking worriedly at the map. “Where we’re going isn’t that far.” Fifty miles, maybe sixty. But even a short distance was long in the desert. It wouldn’t be good to depend on outside help, but it looked like that was what they might have to do.
“Where are we going?” Alan said. He turned the plane away from the highway so that they were running parallel to the road. Chal could see the desert floor dimly through the wisps of clouds.
“To a friend’s house,” Chal said. “To someone who might be able to help us.”
Alan nodded, his eyelids drooping half-shut. He blinked and shook his head, trying to stay alert. The plane nose turned down, and the low, level sand stretched out before them. They dropped below the clouds, then further. In the dusky sky, they crept downward, the black ground looming larger before them until Chal felt as though they would be swallowed by it.
She was calm until Alan brought the plane down to about a hundred feet above the ground, and then she started to panic. The sideways wind made the small plane’s wings shake, and now that she had a background perspective to compare it against the dipping wings seemed certain to smash into the ground. Her ears were filled with the motor’s roar. Without thinking, she reached over and clasped Alan’s arm in one hand. The other hand braced against the cockpit dashboard.
“It’s okay,” Alan said. The cockpit lights flashed on his face, red and blue.
“What?” Chal said.
“The conditions are adequate,” Alan said, raising his voice slightly. Chal seemed to hear him from a hundred miles away over the roar of the plane.
“Adequate? What does that mean?”
“Better than poor,” Alan said. The plane dropped down with a sudden jerk, and Chal’s stomach rose upward in her chest.
“Better than poor.”
“But not as good as fair.”
Chal’s face had never looked so horrified.
“It’s okay,” Alan repeated.
She shook her head in mute agreement but stared out of the window at the rapidly approaching ground.
From the sky the desert had seemed like one smooth dark surface, but as they got closer and closer Chal could see the looming shapes that made up the desert floor. Craggy rock outcroppings dotted the landscape, and the ground was speckled with thick sagebrush, pocketed with ditches and gullies. There would never be an open space that was clear to land on. They were going to crash. There was no way they could make it. Her fingers were clenched white.
Still Alan dropped the plane lower, and Chal held her breath as the wings dipped and tilted. The desert rushed past them underneath at incredible speeds, rocks and brush and cacti whizzing backwards. Alan flipped the switches and the wing flaps opened, slowing their descent and making the roar of th
e wind ever louder.
The floor jolted under their feet, and Chal was sure they had hit a rock until she heard the familiar whir of the landing gear.
Closer and closer, until they were mere feet about the desert floor. There was a horrible pause during which Chal thought they would be dashed to pieces against the ground, and then the plane’s wheels hit the sand. Touched it, first, bounced back up, and then all of the wheels were on the ground and the plane was rumbling across the desert.
Chal had thought the plane descent was terrifying, but at least in the air the turbulence was only felt as a brief uneasiness in her body. Now, though, they were bouncing hard over rocks and brush. On the left, Chal saw a rocky, brush-covered berm emerge from the camouflage of the desert floor.
The brush rose up in front of them, and she averted her eyes, bracing herself for impact. Alan stomped down on the right steering pedal, pulling the plane into a careening curve. The wing clipped the high brush on the berm, the branches grating across the aluminum surface of the plane. Chal shied away from the cockpit window, her knees rising instinctively to protect her body, curling up into a fetal position.
They pulled out of the berm and into a gully, and this time Alan had no chance to react. The plane crashed down sideways, stopping with a jerk as left wing caught a rocky outcropping, and the cockpit glass shattered on Chal’s side, raining shards of plastic and metal into her lap.
“Ohhhhh.”
Alan groaned, turning his head to one side, and Chal’s heart wrested in her chest. She had been thinking of them as partners in this escape, but only now did she realize how much she considered herself dependent on Alan. And above all this rose her acute need to protect him. He was worth millions, tens of millions, after all, and she was sure that someone – the U.S. Military Intelligence Division, perhaps, or a Singaporean spy – would be out to find Alan and retrieve him. Kidnap him.