by E A Carter
She leaves me alone. The door slides closed behind her. The lock engages. A threat. A promise. The lights on the panel flicker and pulse once more, a quiet beat. It reminds me what I am to them, a thing to serve their purpose, a thing they can control and cage. I puke onto the floor and don't give a shit about the mess.
de Pommier lied. The worst wasn't over. The puking and pain lasted for hours. In the end, there was only pain. Eventually, I slept, or at least it felt like sleep, because I dreamed, which was new. I hadn't dreamed once since they brought me back. It's vivid, a hyper-real dream, my senses soaking in every detail with acute clarity. It begins with me standing in the centre of a vast curving corridor lined with brushed metal pods the size of single beds. Every hundred steps or so, the logo for Genesis II glows in a smooth cubic font lit in soft white, the only source of illumination in the otherwise shadowed space. The curved walls, floor, and ceiling are a smooth, brushed metal fitted together with absolute precision, the joins thinner than a millimetre. The air tastes a little too oxygenated, as though the balance isn't right, but it works, at least for me. There is no one else there. Lifelessness soaks the place. I sense I am walking through a museum or a three-dimensional model of an architect's plan. An opening in the corridor rears up ahead, also dim, lit only by the somnolent light of the logo for the project de Pommier loathes. I pass through the opening, its heavy blast doors retracted into the walls, their girth thicker than my height. Ahead, a long, straight corridor. I follow its gloom for several hundred steps, pass three more logos.
At the corridor's end, huge metal doors to an elevator large enough to transport a digger. There is a keypad to the right of the elevator. I key in a sequence of numbers and letters. The doors open with a quiet hush. In its metallic, pale-lit interior I punch another sequence into the elevator's panel. I don't bother to ask myself how I know the codes, I just go with it.
It takes a long time to reach the surface. I decide to have a look at myself. All of myself. I am entire, exactly the same as I was in the moments before a firestorm engulfed my senses. I bite back a smile thinking of how pleased Blue will be. It doesn't last. Even this, the solace of our love has been stolen from us. I close my eyes and concentrate on the lift's thrust carrying me to the surface, force myself to think of nothing.
The doors open and I step out. I expect to find activity, but silence oppresses me. I keep moving, hot with trepidation. I wonder if I am seeing what is to come. The city is abandoned. I make a note of the location of the elevator, concealed in a lower level of the slaughterhouse, accessed via another elevator with another code I know without knowing how or why. I walk backwards, eyeing the nondescript building, impressed. The location to one of the most expensive projects in the world is almost invisible.
I find my way back to the building where Blue and I are being kept, even though I couldn't possibly know the way. It's far, but not too far. As I reach the building, its doors shimmer and dissipate into lines of code. I turn, the city slides away from me, transforming into strings of numbers and symbols. Darkness slams down from above, a ravenous thing, devouring the code, coming straight at me. I can't help myself. I duck. Oblivion.
I open my eyes. The pain is gone and so is the puke. The door is open. Fresh air circulates through the room. There's movement at the edge of the door. An Elite steps into the room and tilts his head at the exit. I get up. A frisson runs up my spine as my body moves once more strong and familiar. I am me again. The Elite turns and leaves, the contacts in his eyes shimmering with data only he can see. I follow him, my heart tight—or at least what feels like my heart—as I imagine Blue seeing me again, resurrected from the dead. I feel a stirring in my groin and bite back a smile. I'm whole again. And hers. And I have a plan.
ELEVEN | CASSANDRA VALLIS
* * *
de Pommier's avatar wakes me at 05:00 hours with a cup of tea. Disappointment floods me. Every night I go to sleep hoping it will be Ryan there with the tea in the morning. But for the third day in a row, I am left wondering where he went and why, and my only company intent on squeezing every last scrap of my abilities out of me in record time.
I drink my tea as I dress in the soft material of a jumpsuit the color of an unpolluted sky. Made especially to fit me, it has pockets where I can tuck small items. Foci, de Pommier calls them. In the lab, there is a table filled with beautiful things. I am allowed to choose whatever I want to 'help' me focus on creating life: Sachets of fresh flower petals, colourful gemstones, vials of scent, seashells, minuscule figurines of animals made of glass. I get to keep whatever I have chosen if I am successful in my 'work'. So far I have kept everything, and my little collection on my bedside table is growing fast.
Yesterday, something new, a selection of smooth, polished oak shapes no bigger than a joint of my finger. I took a cube and a sphere. Somehow they comforted me, being able to feel the solidity of the trees we lost. I think these are my favourite foci so far. I scoop them up and tuck them into one of my pockets, even though I have been told not to bring anything back with me to the lab.
In the kitchen I feed Miro real fish in a cream sauce as the door opens and one of the guards I now know sits at a desk outside my door carries in my morning meal and sets it onto the table. It smells delicious. One of the few highlights of my day: the food of Alpha VII.
It's something different every day. I join de Pommier at the table, who ignores me as she swipes through a tablet, scanning god only knows what intelligence. Under the tray's thermal cover: crêpes with maple syrup and bacon, fluffy scrambled eggs, and a whole avocado fanned out in slices. I don't ask if the bacon or maple syrup are real. I know it is. Everything here is real.
de Pommier glances up, mid-swipe. Notes my pleasure at the offering before me.
'Only the best for the best, no?'
From under her brow, she watches me begin. Her avatar's eyes move over me as if to unlock the secret of me. A secret even I do not understand. It unnerves me. The way she watches me. I know her avatar is a machine, and yet, I can sense something vaguely human in her presence, a hint of envy. Of regret. Of sadness. It's a strange cocktail to get from a machine. But, after Ryan I have learned not to trust my senses, but my gut.
She is not unfriendly, but neither is she friendly. She just is. I never ask where Ryan is and she doesn't mention him. It is as if he never existed. But it's there. The question which hangs between us like a undetonated bomb. I sense she wants me to ask. And even though the question claws at me hour after hour, of whether he has been shut down, or worse, repurposed into something else, a brute killing machine for god knows what the GC could use him for, I keep my mouth shut. I won't give her the satisfaction of seeing my disappointment. Of losing what I had left for the man I loved. I grieved him once. I can do it again. But I won't lie. I keep waiting for him to come back. I feel he will come back, even though I have zero reason to believe it. Still. Ryan. I miss him. Even what he became.
I smear a slice of bacon in what's left of the maple syrup. It's glorious. I try to make the bite last as long as possible.
'It has been more than ten years since I have had the pleasure of real bacon.'
I glance up mid-chew, surprised she doesn't get bacon every single day. Her avatar's lips quirk into a soft smile.
'That's from a real pig, not lab grown. Reserved for the most elite. I had to call in a few favours to get those four slices for you.'
I want to feel flattered, but in this place privileges make me feel uneasy. Great gifts are only granted for great sacrifices.
'I need you to work harder, Cassandra. Much harder. Time is short.'
Ah, there it is. 'I'm tired,' I answer and take a sip of fresh-squeezed orange juice. I assume it's probably from real oranges too. No lab-grown shit for me.
I wonder what she looks like under the elegant illusion of her perfect avatar. Probably old. I'm betting somewhere in her eighties, someone born around the turn of the millennium. Someone that calculating, that powerful, would have t
o be part of the old guard, the ones responsible for the exclusion zone and the hell they left behind on the wrong side of the barrier.
No. I won't ask. I will not give my sudden oppressor her little triumphs. I am good at suffering, and she hates my refusal to play her game, I can tell. I endured Zandiki. I can handle this. Still, it would have been nice to say goodbye to Ryan. But then again, I was never one allowed the luxury of closure. I finish the last of my bacon.
de Pommier rises from her seat. 'And now, to work.'
I get up, kiss Miro goodbye and leave, surrounded by four dispassionate guards and the machine who owns me.
It's almost midnight when de Pommier opens the door to my apartment. All I want is to sleep. I have nothing left in me, not even words. I stumble past the kitchen counter where my reward for a successful day's training sits. Roast beef sandwiches on rye that look as soft as pillows, a plate of French fries sprinkled with sea salt set on a thermal plate, accompanied by a little dish of mustard, another of ketchup. But I can't face it. Fatigue has butchered my hunger. I long for the silence of sleep.
Today I breached a barrier I didn't know was in me, and the power which poured out of me stunned me. At first, euphoria. Then, dizziness. Then I vomited. All that beautiful, rare maple syrup-drenched bacon. Splattered into a metallic basin, stinking of bile. What a waste. We had to stop. But not for long. Again and again she put me through the same drill until I was able to call it on command, and not puke, or pass out. And now, all I want to do is sleep for days.
'Cassandra,' de Pommier's avatar says from behind me. 'Please, a moment before you retire.'
I stop, swaying from fatigue.
'I have something else for you,' she says, soft. 'Something I think you will like very much.'
I don't turn around. I hope it's not more bacon, because after this morning I never want to see or smell it again.
The door to the apartment opens, closes again. I wait, willing whatever it is that is happening is over with quickly. I close my eyes and wonder if it's possible to sleep on my feet.
'Capitaine,' de Pommier, says, 'Welcome back.'
My eyes open. The fatigue slides out of me, vanishes in a heartbeat. Ryan. de Pommier's brisk steps move to the door. It opens, a hesitation, then it shuts. Quiet. Silence falls. I still do not turn.
'Where did you go?' I ask. I am glad he is back, but I don't want him to see it.
'I'm not sure,' a voice from the past answers. I voice I thought I would never hear again.
I turn. And he is there. Resurrected from the dead. Standing in front of the double doors, wearing dark fatigues, and looking at me with a hunger I can taste, a hunger from beyond the walls of death.
My heart judders to a halt. I think I am dreaming. I must be dreaming. I am still in the lab, unconscious and not here in the apartment. With him, the Delta Force Captain who died in Lubochnia, the man I loved and lost. I pinch the inside of my forearm. It hurts. A red weal rises up on my skin. He watches me, a vortex of emotion storming over his features, the ones I had memorised while he slept.
'Ryan.' I breathe. 'Is it really you?'
'Yes,' he says. 'It's me. All of me.'
And then he is there. His arms haul me into his heat, his scent, his maleness. Him. His lips take mine, just as a remembered, just as I missed, as I have longed for. I realise I am not tired at all. I am alive. So alive. And I want to live forever. With him.
I wake, lost in Ryan's embrace as he slumbers on. For the heartbeat of dislocation between dreams and reality I think I am in London again, and Ryan has smuggled food in for Miro. I reach out for her, to stroke her. She chirps, but does not wake, content in her sleep. A quiet click. Cool, clean air fleets over my skin. My fingers drift to the cover on the bed, expensive and soft. Reality rams through me—a monolith of hopelessness. No. I am not in London anymore. Carney is not out in the graffiti-covered corridor, a metal toothpick in his ugly mouth, waiting, hoping for Zee's order to kill the man I love.
I am here, in Alpha VII, the most exclusive, privileged, and protected of places on the planet, lying in the arms of a machine burdened with the memory of us, of his once-heart belonging to mine. The one I loved to the core of my soul who died and lives again.
I let him make love to me. A machine clothed in Ryan's warm, familiar flesh, every plane, cleft, hollow and curve of him long since memorised. He came inside me, and it felt real, the heat of him, how he held me, his look of fierce passion, how he panted when it was over, his chest rising and falling, the false pounding of a non-existent heart. And yet even if what we did felt real, and he felt real, it was not. Ryan, the man, the Delta Force Captain, is dead, his love a mirage, a memory brought back to life, just like this place. A monument to defy the laws of nature, and of our destiny, where man can play god and create a simulacrum of life where none is left.
And then there is me. The Oracle, once used as a weapon to destroy—now de Pommier's singular hope to save the human race from its destiny. Within Ryan's arms I ease myself onto my back to seek out the ceiling, its smooth face lost in the deep gloom. I never wanted this. Any of it. It just happened. de Pommier mentioned in one of my debriefs they had run a DNA analysis of my genome and had found mutations never seen before, mutations which did not lead to disease but to neural enhancement which signalled the ability to inexplicably manipulate the quantum field—the foundation of reality itself. She spoke in reverent tones, as if she had found the key to all life. I should have been fascinated, but I wasn't.
Her continued tests to understand what it was which triggered these mutations so they could enhance me even further were thorough, though mainly painless. I suspected her true priority was to unlock the intricacies of my mutations so she could create others to be sent to Mars. I hoped she wouldn't have enough time. I wasn't meant to be, a freak of nature who would not wish this fate on anyone else. I was sick of her and her cronies, their machinations, their elitism, their wars, the destruction their generation had brought to Earth and the endless vortex of their hubris. I willed them to fail. I willed it all to fail so their parasitism of an entire planet would never happen again, neither here or on Mars.
Ryan stirs. His breathing tells me he is waking. I feel his eyes watching me, seeing me through the darkness with his enhanced abilities.
'Blue,' he says, low. 'Do you trust me?'
I turn back onto my side and face him. Nothing but darkness greets me, utter and absolute. His fingertips touch the curve of my cheek. The tenderness of it at odds with the power housed underneath his suit of flesh. 'I am still me,' he says. 'Underneath all this. That part of me never died. They managed to keep it alive. I am here, with you.'
I say nothing. I feel betrayed by my emotions, by the surge of love I felt when I saw him, of my passion as he made love to me, and later, the sense of alienation, of loneliness, of being both close to him, and a million miles away from him. I realise it's not enough. I want Ryan back: the man, the mortal, the one who could die. Not this. Not this immortal machine with Ryan's thoughts, memories, and feelings. I can never tell him this, because weirdly I sense it will hurt him, so I keep my mouth shut as he continues to stroke my face, trace the path of my eyebrows, the shape of my lips. Just like he used to do. Just like I always loved.
'I need you to trust me.' His breath is warm against my mouth and smells of nothing. Ryan used to have bad breath in the morning. It bothers me they missed this detail because it exposes the lie of what he is, of the erasure of his flawed humanity. Of what I am letting into my heart and body. A machine. Not a man.
'I need time,' I answer at last. The quiet rasp of his stubble against the pillowcase slices through the quiet as he nods. I taste disappointment seeping from him as he parts my lips with his thumb. A hesitation, then his lips brush mine, gentle, tender, filled with longing, though not for my body, but for my heart which I realise is still broken, even with him here, as close to the man I loved as I could ever hope, both dead and alive. I can't bear it.
I pull aw
ay from his kiss.
He waits, stoic, though I know I have hurt him.
'Blue?' uneasiness shrouds him. He didn't expect this. Then again, neither did I.
In the darkness, my name on his lips sounds the same as how I remember it from our nights in London. I reach out to touch his face, and feel the contours and planes of his jaw, the clench of his muscles as he holds himself back and gives me time. It's him, what's left of him. If I don't think too much—if I let go. If I allow this to be. If I give in . . . I realise I have no idea how to do it.
'Just show me how to make this fucked up shit make sense,' I breathe, as one then another tear slips free.
He pulls me to him, surrounds me with his heat, holds me as I hollow out the place where I have hidden the pain for the one I lost—and for what we have become, pawns in a sick game, watched now by unseen eyes in a room down the corridor and wherever de Pommier exists.
My grief morphs into anger, and I kiss him, hard, rank with hunger, kicking the blankets away so our naked bodies are exposed, aroused and primed for love.
'You know they can see everything,' he says as position myself over him.
'Let them fucking watch.'
And they do. I know they do. All of them.
TWELVE | RYAN MADDOX
* * *
They keep me busy when Blue is away training. I get parked in de Pommier's war room to work through top level data de Pommier wants prioritised, processed and compressed for the survivors to take to Mars. I am able to work at a speed incomprehensible to humans. I see it all, every detailed bit of information that runs this place from sewage pump maintenance cycles to which porno the Prime Minister last watched. Nothing is kept from me. It's noisy as hell. I wonder if this is what it feels like to be a god. Knowing everything—whether you want to or not.