by H C Edwards
“You got it, Babe.”
When Mia opened her eyes they were wet and blurry with tears, the light of dusk falling across her face like a gentle caress. She was sitting under the maple tree in the backyard of their home, one of few the authentic trees released from the Grove, a sizeable request she thought at the time, but nothing compared to the automobile.
That damn relic of a bygone world. If she had it all to do again...well, wasn’t that the dream? It sure as hell wasn’t this place; it wasn’t Akropolis, the so-called last bastion of the human race. No, this dream had turned sour years ago, become stagnant…rotten.
Mia closed her eyes again and willed back the memory of that day. It wasn’t difficult. After all, a QUBIT was capable of instant recall if it so chose.
Claire replayed the car ride for perhaps the hundredth time since that day, and when the memory cut short at the exact moment it always did, right when she urged Tom for another lap, she wanted to tear at her head in frustration. She replayed it again, coming up to the same mental block as if she were running along a path only to find it ended in a cliff with nothing but a void; again and again and again until finally she couldn’t contain the scream that tore itself from her throat.
When the last echo rang out Mia parted her legs and looked down at the earth. She knew the spot as if it had been yesterday. Her hands began to scrape at the ground, clawing handfuls of dirt and grass from the earth and tossing them in every direction.
She was like a woman possessed; teeth gritted in a snarl, eyes squinted in slits. With each clod of dirt she threw aside she did so with a grunt that was close to a growl, until finally her fingers scraped against metal and made her pause.
Slowly, in direct opposition of her previous fury, Mia gently brushed away the dirt from the exposed lid of the box, using her nails to make trenches around the border. After a bit she was able to wedge her fingers beneath the bottom of one side enough to get a grip and pull the box out of the hole.
Scooting back, Mia propped her back against the trunk of the maple tree and placed the box in her folded lap. Gone was the frantic energy of before as well as the maniacal frustration. The look that fell over her face could best be described as reverent.
Her fingers fumbled for the lock. It was a four digit combination. She knew the numbers by heart. They were supposed to be the due date of her baby boy.
When the lock popped open she set it aside on the grass and gently lifted the lid. Inside was a single picture, the 3D mapping of her Ambrose. She had buried it here under the maple tree after the accident, when she awoke and was eventually told that her body and that of her son’s had been recycled. It was the only thing she had of him, the singular piece of evidence that proved he ever existed.
She picked up the picture with trembling fingers and lovingly caressed the image. He was beautiful, angelic. His curled up little body, safely nestled in her womb, a perfect little being.
Her dreams all these years had tortured her with what could have been and should have been but she had never once considered that it had not been her fault. It was she who had insisted on one more ride, just one more go around for the memories. When she woke up from the revival they had told her the accident was caused by mechanical failure. Tom confirmed it too, though she was so consumed by grief and horror that she could barely register what had happened, let alone question the circumstances. It didn’t enter her mind that it could have all been a lie…that because she had lost her status as a candidate they would cover up what happened to protect Tom, who was still an option for breeding.
Except now it did occur to her. After all these years of guilt and self-loathing; accepting the abuse and punishment as a tribulation of warrant, justified and deserving, she had formulated a new theory.
Tom’s drinking, his rage, all defensible through her guilt; only now there seemed to be a dim glow of realization, an epiphany of sorts that dawned on her like the rising of the sun on a world long gone.
Mia cradled the picture in one hand against her breast and used her other arm as leverage to stand up. She could hear the upgraded speakers in the house pumping out music. It took a moment to recognize that it was Lee Wiley from Tom’s vinyl collection, a jazz singer from ancient America’s 1920’s era.
She had always loved the song that was playing; something about a ship without a sail. It spoke to her, not just for the desperate loneliness of the lyrics but because there had been dreams of boats with sails fluttering against the ocean breeze after the accident; flights of fancy, no doubt, from all the old magazines and books they had acquired about the world before, but they had made her feel buoyant, almost free in the wake of her grief. Those dreams had faded over the years but they were still engrained in her memory, as well as the sense of escape they had provided. Only it wasn’t escape that Mia was looking for now, but answers.
When she walked into the house the music was blaring so loud that the walls almost seemed to throb and bow with each note. She walked with bare feet, treading dirt and grass across the faux pas hardwood floor until she stood in front of the record player. Her hand paused and hovered above the power button, then moved over to the volume control and lowered it just enough to keep the music from rattling the pictures on the walls.
Tom was not in his usual spot in front of the false fireplace, and though Mia didn’t venture into the adjoining rooms to investigate she knew that he was not on the lower floor.
It was not a large leap to assume he was in the nursery, a place he tended to wind up in after a heavy day of drinking, which had been every day since the ASF had brought her back home after the incident with the tree. He started in the morning, almost the moment his eyes opened, and was usually snoring loudly in his chair an hour after dark.
There wasn’t any conversation since that day weeks ago, no requests for breakfast, no bouts of rage or crying or any acknowledgement that Mia was even in the house. She could have been a ghost in her own home.
In a way it was a relief. She had time to think, to consider the past, especially the weeks following the accident. Those memories would always be fresh, rattling around in her quantum processor, data streams that could be recalled at any moment. It was how she came to the conclusion that she had been lied to all this time, and Tom’s new mood in the past few weeks only seemed to support this theory.
With the music turned down, Mia was able to hear Tom upstairs moving around, mumbling to himself. She couldn’t make out the words, though she often couldn’t, but she needed him to be sober enough to string coherent words together. She had to know the truth.
Looking down at her hand, she saw that the bandage wrap had come undone while she had been digging. Rather than send out for tech or putting in a work order for a repair after the incident a few weeks ago, she had merely kept it hidden. Out of sight, out of mind, as the old adage went, but scarcely a minute of the day went by that she didn’t recall the powerful feeling of her fist blasting pieces of the trunk apart. It was a stark contrast to the mind-set of ineptitude and weakness that she had harbored all these years, a welcome revelation that she was not as helpless as heretofore assumed.
It seemed important to keep the wound, an open reminder of her rage, the railing against unjust circumstances, a symbol of her newfound resistance. Each day as she re-dressed her hand was a reminder of what she had lost. Seeing the synthetic muscle fibers, ceramic fiberglass cartilage of her knuckles, the titanium wire-stranded bones; it was like an awakening.
Mia brushed off the dirt that had accumulated on the bandage and wound it tight around her wrist. She wasn’t the woman she used to be. That woman had died long ago. She was just a copy, a puppet with programmed memories, thoughts, and feelings. Her soul had departed with that of her poor baby. Somewhere, somehow, they were both together, maybe in the ether or the heaven she had read about, while this husk was left to exist forever with the memory of what had once been.
She carried the 3D imaging picture of Ambrose as she walked across the livin
g room and ascended the stairs to the upper floor. With each step up, Tom’s speech became more articulate. She could decipher the majority of the words but the context made no sense whatsoever. It sounded as if he was conversing with multiple people at once.
Ambrose’s room was at the end of the upstairs hallways. As she walked towards the half open door she could see Tom’s shadow wax and wane. He was pacing back and forth as he talked, which meant he wasn’t that far gone yet, but it also meant he was troubled, and when he was troubled he usually took it out on her. Except this time Mia was not afraid. In fact, she had not felt fear since that day weeks ago.
Such a fickle emotion, she realized. What was there to be afraid of anymore? Her guilt was what prompted her fear and vice versa. One fed off the other. Tom had just been the instrument of her self-retribution. She allowed him the power to cow and punish her under the assumption that the loss of their baby could be laid at her feet. Perhaps that’s why she didn’t scrutinize those memories all those years ago for the truth. Her grief blinded her and she had readily accepted the most reasonable explanation when it was given to her because it bore the ring of truth.
Mia didn’t believe that now. Maybe she never really did. She’d always assumed that Tom’s grief was the source of his withdrawal, which led to the drinking and the rage and the violence, but without the fear or care of reprisal these last few weeks it was like a fog had been lifted from her mind, and she finally began to realize that the memory wipe might not have been for her benefit at all, but for Tom’s.
When Mia finally stood at the threshold of the nursery door she loitered for almost a full minute while watching Tom pace back and forth. He was a mess, a shade of the man who once was, stumbling along on wooden legs and nearly capsizing on the turnaround, slopping his drink onto the carpet from the decanter that was half full, an empty one lying far off in the corner. With his free hand he wiggled his fingers at waist height as if he were playing an invisible piano. The corner of his mouth twitched uncontrollably, expressions flitting across his face too quickly to be discerned.
There was no furniture in the room besides the crib, a relic patterned after the Old World, replete with the side slats that always seemed suspiciously like the bars of some animal’s cage. The rest of the baby’s things had been sent to recycling long ago but she just couldn’t part with that last piece. It was like a buoy off the shore of a beach or a lone dinghy that a drowning man would latch onto.
The shadows in the room had grown long; night had almost fallen in the few minutes since Mia had ascended the steps and entered the nursery. She reached out and flipped the switch, bathing the room in a bright glow. The sudden expulsion of light made Tom pause in his drunken canter and squint up at the ceiling like a man blinded by the sun.
When his gaze finally traveled to the door and noticed her standing there, he appeared confused and unsure. Mia realized that she had been mistaken as to his state of inebriation. He was well beyond drunk. Despite the fact that he was upright and walking, Tom had reached a point that Mia had only seen once or twice before, a condition of complete oblivion. It was plain in the way he looked at her, not with fury or indifference but with a hint of hopeful longing that hid behind a slovenly mask of ignorance.
“Babe?”
There was still a slight twinge of something when he addressed her like that. It wasn’t anger exactly; more like a slow burning resentment.
Tom took another step and stopped again.
“Mia? I can’t find him. I can’t find Ambrose.”
He turned towards the crib.
“He was just here…just here.”
Mia’s heart thumped in a haphazard beat.
“I heard him crying,” Tom continued, his back to her. “So I came in here to pick him up…but he wasn’t here…I was trying to remember something…something important...maybe…”
“Tom,” Mia said, surprised by how calm her voice sounded despite the rapidity of her heartbeat. “Tom I found something.”
He turned around, jaw slack with hazy eyes.
“Huh?”
Mia traversed the room and stood right in front of him. She held up the 3D imaging picture she had dug up from the back yard.
“I was looking through some old pictures,” she said softly. “Do you remember the day we first saw him?”
Tom leaned forward until his face was within inches.
“I remember,” he responded, slurring the last syllable.
“Do you remember when we came home that day? You picked out his crib from one of the old magazines and we went down to the factory and printed it out that afternoon.”
“Yeah,” he said just as a thin sliver of drool slipped out of the corner of his mouth unheeded.
He was still staring at the picture, entranced.
Mia stepped closer, her voice dropping even lower, almost hypnotic in its intensity.
“We were so excited,” she continued. “We didn’t think it could get any better. And then you came home with the keys to the automobile.”
Tom blinked and his face scrunched up in languid recollection. Mia hurried on.
“It was such a beautiful day, right after the rain. Remember how they were late with the transport and I suggested we make one more lap around one more time before they got there?”
“I said one more time,” Tom corrected her, his slur nosing past deception and closer to truth. “You didn’t want to go. You were tired…wanted to rest. They were late…it’s just one more time and then never again…we had to, you know?”
Mia nodded.
“I know,” she replied.
Tom’s face seemed to collapse all of a sudden, his features crumpling into a hopeless mass of guilt and grief. Tears flowed from his eyes and his lips trembled.
“I just wanted to open her up a bit, you know?” he said between growing sobs. “Just like they used to.”
“Shhh,” Mia soothed, her heart like a jackhammer now. “I know…its ok. It was just an accident.”
“It was so damn s-s-slippery,” Tom stuttered, his sobs almost making his words intelligible. “F-f-fucking r-rain.”
The words were like a spike of ice in Mia’s gut. She could feel the coldness as it spread throughout her body, enveloping her like a rising tide of water.
“You lost control,” she said numbly.
“The…g-goddamn…r-r-r-rain,” he cried, a pleading pathetic look on his face.
“You made them change my memory…block out the rest.”
Her voice was cold like the rest of her body.
“All these years…you made me believe it was somehow my fault.”
“I’m sorry!” Tom blubbered, falling to his knees, grasping the hem of her dress with fumbling fingers.
“You knew I’d hate you if I knew the truth,” she said.
“Oh G-God I’m sorry!”
Tom fell into inarticulate sniveling and bawling, burying his face into her stomach, the hollow womb that would never hold a baby in this life or any other.
Mia reached down and grasped him by the top of his head. She squeezed until his hair was entwined tightly between her fingers and then she yanked him up by it, unmoved by the surprised scream that burst forth from his lips like the screeching of an owl.
Eye-level, she could see the shock and surprise on his face, much like the day she had snapped the cutting board.
“M-Mia!” he blurted, and there was the fear.
She had never seen it before but she recognized it from all the years it had leeched off of her like a parasitic worm. It felt strange to see it stamped on his face now, when she felt absolutely nothing for the first time in her life.
“I’m not Mia,” she said. “You killed her a long time ago.”
Her hand let go of his hair and reached underneath to his throat, fingers like a vice closing around his windpipe. He panicked when she started to squeeze, hands flailing and beating at her arm, fingernails scraping against the bandage that was wrapped around the wound she h
ad never wanted repaired.
Tom tried to talk, scream, beg or cry but no sound was escaping his lips. His repeated attempts to strike her were getting weaker and weaker, arms butting up against her hand now without any real force. Eyes bulged in their sockets; his face swollen like something behind the skin was going to burst free.
She held him up when his legs gave out and his arms flopped to his sides like useless noodles. His eyes crossed and he began to twitch, as if a current of electricity were running through his veins, his fattened lips turning blue, spittle bubbling out and running down his chin…and yet he was still looking at her.
That was when she heard the resonant tone inside her head, the sound that signaled the upload to the Quantum Cloud. Everything that had transpired in the past couple of hours; memories, thoughts, and feelings, were being saved in pristine condition, and she knew that Tom heard it too, even if he didn’t register it.
She thought it ironic the memory of him dying was being preserved at that moment, except she knew that in his case there was no one to request a partial wipe or alteration. The end would be a permanent stamp upon his memories when he was revived, a continuous reminder that his lies had caught up to him after all these years and brought an abrupt close to his short life.
When Tom’s body finally gave up the struggle and went limp, Mia realized that what she felt was a resounding sense of relief.
The Dilemma
A catastrophe…
That’s what Talbot told her, and yet the word did little to encapsulate the entirety of the situation. Cataclysm was a better synonym for the loss of an entire sanctuary in one fell swoop, and even then it still seemed mild compared to the reality; almost 60,000 humans gone in minutes, and that was stacked up against the 400,000 QUBITs. The human civilization had not seen such a staggering loss since the last Great War.
Their meager satellite system had only detected the disaster after the fact. The radiation made such monitoring unpredictable and unreliable, but the information the council had been able to gather pointed at a major quake about six miles off the shore of Charlottesville, a quake high enough on the Richter scale to create the largest tsunami in recorded history.