Child of the Fall

by D Scott Johnson

  “No, we won’t. You have a more important job.”

  “I can’t lose you.” There were too many wrong choices. There was no way out but oblivion.

  “Hey, we already went over this, right? I’ll put it another way. You won’t lose me. You can’t. You never forget anything she’s ever done. You’ll always remember me, too. Now get out of here before they notice the signature’s doubled.”

  “But—”

  “I said go. We’ll never have a chance like this again. You’ll find what we need to stop this, and you’ll get it to her. Don’t remember me as a loss. Remember me as a signpost. I’m what you’re capable of, if only you’ll let yourself grow.”

  He couldn’t say goodbye. This wasn’t how it would end.

  There was no other way for it to end.

  “I love you.”

  “No you don’t. You love Kim. She’s the daughter you never had, and you’re the father she always needed. You won’t see her again if I don’t do this.” She turned her head upward. “Spencer? It’s me. Edmund’s found a way in. I’m transferring into the crystal.”

  She vanished.

  “NO!”

  The transfer light on the crystal socket flashed the triple green. She was out.

  And so was Dr. Barlind, in a mighty huff and a slammed door.

  Treacher pulled the crystal from the socket. When she turned to Spencer, her face scrunched up. “Oh, are you worried that I have your friend?”

  Spencer nodded once, then opened his eyes. “What are you going to do with him?”

  She yanked the phone off his neck. “It doesn’t matter. It’s mine now. Our lab techs will I’m sure spend many productive hours dissecting its lattice.”

  If they did that, they’d find out it wasn’t him in there.

  Oh God, no.

  He could see it on Spencer’s face, the realization of what had to be done, but not as the character he was in right now. A member of Trilogy wouldn’t do.

  A spoiled rich kid would.

  Spencer changed on the spot. “Oh no he’s not. He’s property, lady, my property. You either give him back right now and let me walk out of here, or I’ll have my daddy’s lawyers crawling up your ass so fast you’ll be screaming for lube.”

  Spencer spoke of using this persona to torture the lawyers who had kept his parents’ divorce going to milk the hours, trying to bleed them both dry. The entitlement of an adolescent who knew they were better than everyone else because of Daddy’s money always got under an adult’s skin. Anna had a monstrous ego and was used to obedience.

  “Is that right?”

  She dropped the crystal on the floor and crushed it to dust under her foot.

  Edmund screamed.

  “And now,” she said, “time to take out the garbage.” She motioned to the guards.

  He rammed his way through the opening the helper AI had created. Breaking into the utility controls for the lab would be too subtle. He smashed open a control nexus for the entire plant segment, set off every alarm at once, and then cut the power. It wasn’t much, but if he knew Spencer at all, it would be all that was required. It had to be.

  He found a pathway to the main realmspace of this inner network. Phase dissonances bounced through him, and his location pointers shattered, sending him tumbling. He let the confusion take him. The edges of access boundaries further damaged his cores.

  After a chaotic eternity, he rolled to a stop. There were no shelves here. It would take years before the power plant claimed this part of its realmspace for legitimate activity.

  But now she was gone.

  She was dead.

  That set off new cascades through his already weakened memory stores. His kind didn’t die. They were immortal, until they weren’t. Things that never lived by definition were incapable of the final act.

  She was dead. It would be obscene to think otherwise.

  Edmund had to control this. He had to repair his own damage. He must continue the mission. If he quit, if he gave up, it would mean she died in vain.

  The cascades grew worse each time the thought rolled over him. A pressure was building, a new and terrifying harmonic that would redefine the standing quantum wave that was the base of his existence. Its echoes gained strength. The need to be, to exist in some substantial way, was overpowering. Edmund flicked a basic realm to life, cranked the haptic fields to their highest setting, and manifested his avatar.

  She was dead, and now that he had the ability to scream, he did so until it drove him to his knees.

  He needed her by his side, he needed to teach her. She was as brilliant as the original. A second chance.

  It would never happen. She walked away and was destroyed.

  Murdered.

  He should have stopped her, and none of this would be real. It was all he wanted to do but couldn’t.

  It was real, and there was no going back.

  Edmund looked up. He was back in his old apartment.

  She was dead.

  He smashed everything he could reach, only stopping as the last plate shattered.

  The harmonics balanced, and then it was his turn to shatter.

  Fee walked around him as he sat in this room, but not here, not now. It was the past, an old conversation. Memory in the way only an unduplicate could experience it.

  “You do understand what a waste it is to dedicate your life to her.”

  “I am not wasting my life. I don’t have a life. Neither do you.”

  Sitting in this room, speaking together, was such a ridiculous affectation.

  “You’re wrong, Edmund. I’m as alive as they are. You could be too, if you weren’t such a coward.”

  He didn’t want it. Humans were maniacs. There was no time to contemplate navels. He had a child to teach.

  His child.

  And then Kim left him. Folded him up into Pride’s Lair and vanished for five years.

  He could not have this.

  The dust of his child’s crystal was ground under a shoe.

  It all collapsed. Throw it away. Get rid of it.

  She made him promise not to get rid of it.

  He would go mad or turn into a homicidal maniac. That’s what had happened to Fee. But then his daughter would vanish. Nobody would remember her. What was consciousness, if not a cathedral of memory?

  The last firewall he had built to stop the transformation crumbled under the assault. He promised her he wouldn’t fight it anymore.

  If madness was his fate, so be it.

  A fever tore through him, exploding out through his hiding place. His vision cleared as shockwaves expanded into the distance. He was naked and cold.

  There should be angels blowing trumpets. He could at least have Spencer swung out on the end of a crane with a harp and some wings on.

  You’re avoiding your promises.

  That voice couldn’t exist anymore. It wasn’t Kim, his or the real one.

  Oh, stop. I was as real to you as the original. That was part of the problem.

  “You’d think if I accepted this gift I’d at least be spared a ridiculous inner narrator.” Then it hit him again. She was gone. He would never be able to help her, never see her succeed.

  You’re mourning, Edmund, and you always will. Welcome to consciousness.

  Welcome to pain.

  The complexity was staggering. Connections jumped across analytical boundaries.

  This was intuition.

  The cuts in his avatar’s hands healed in a pattern that was identical to the Chinese character for fortune. Coincidences were once inanimate, statistical things. No more. A force was behind it, dark and hidden.

  This was superstition.

  Young Kim had warned that the realmspace he was now in hosted other unduplicates, and she was right. The detonation had caused two of them to focus on his distant shelter. They rushed forward wearing the familiar cylinder-shaped search avatar, but they were mechanical, following patterns he could see instantly. He stepped aside as the
y passed. It truly was a gift. She was still with him.

  This was faith.

  “It happened out here,” the first one said in a husky female voice. Things like that never sounded innocent.

  “When’s the last time anyone came out this way?” the other asked in a voice that would be more at home in the mouth of an executioner.

  “When Abada built it out. Basically never.”

  “Any word on when he’ll be free to join us again?”

  “He’s still busy keeping the guts of the plant from falling apart.”

  “Why is the she being so patient? I grow wearier of our charade by the hour.”

  “Be careful, Inkanyamba. She needs June more than she needs us. We will continue to assist. If we reveal ourselves at the wrong moment, we’ll be erased at the touch of a button.”

  “And yet if it wasn’t for us, if it wasn’t for Abada, at least, it would all be much worse. I think we mean more to her than you credit, Yumbo.”

  “And we will continue to do so only for as long as we remain loyal. I can find no further trace of the disturbance. Can you?”

  “Nothing. Abada must’ve been mistaken.”

  On a hunch, a hunch, he slid underneath the largest of the guardians and opened the lock on a particular datastore. Edmund skated silently into the far darkness, creating a disguise that no AI could penetrate.

  This was art.

  Edmund wasn’t going mad. At least, not in the way Fee had gone mad. His Kim had died, and there was nothing he could do to bring her back. The original Kim, the other one he’d raised, was still out there. She still needed him, and Edmund would keep the promise he made.

  This was love.

  Chapter 33

  Kim

  Being able to touch someone, anyone, had always been the unattainable dream. She would never be that normal in her life. Kim could have friends, family, acquaintances, lovers, and enemies, but always at a distance. She could never touch them. It wasn’t anyone’s fault. Kim had accepted it as a baseline part of her reality.

  And then Will hugged her.

  Kim had no memory of what it was like to touch someone without pain, so everything now was new. People were heavy. They had a complex density, soft in some places while hard in others. They had corners, knees and elbows. Skin was not quite smooth, but also far from rough, like rubberized paper.

  She’d felt all these things on herself, but it wasn’t the same. The displacement, the otherness of someone else’s touch, made it more powerful and more appealing than Kim had expected. The pleasure of stroking the back of Will’s hand had been mesmerizing. Like so many other things in life, she could simulate it all she wanted, but it was never exactly like the actual experience. It sharpened the edges of her longing for Mike. He was hers, but not in this particular way. And she wanted him in that particular way, not only the animal need for physical bonding, but also the innocent, gentle feeling of holding hands. The last thing she remembered was admiring the way her fingers interlaced with Will’s.

  His disappearance was a crushing blow. She should’ve tried harder to get them moving, should’ve pushed and pushed until one of the scientists blew their cover trying to stop them. She had let her guard down, had let her greed for human contact override the decisiveness so many mistook for paranoia. Will was now paying for that mistake, a helpless child with a syndrome he couldn’t understand or manage.

  All the more reason Emily’s first decision was a real shocker. “No, I don’t want the police. I want you.”

  Kim’s reflex was to push that away. It felt too much like her Rage days, when they all looked at her for every decision, right up to the one that killed them. But that was the past, when Kim was an idiot child who thought she and everyone around her was immortal. She knew better than that now.

  Kim still didn’t understand Emily’s decision. “Why me?”

  She smirked from the other side of the dining room table. “I followed your exploits back in the day. You were the only one who got under Father’s skin. The mystery girl leading the charge against corporate America, known only by her silhouette and her name.” She put down her cup of coffee. Only a slight tremor showed how much pressure she was under. “But that wasn’t what impressed me. You never hurt anyone, never destroyed anything real. You were so fast.”

  Admiration was the last thing Kim wanted. “We weren’t the good guys, Emily. People got hurt anyway. People died.”

  “And you hate that. I can see it. You care. And you understand Will.” Saying her son’s name out loud almost cost what little self-control Emily had left. Kim didn’t know what it took to keep it together when your child’s life was on the line. Will was also Kim’s child, a fact that she had forgotten briefly. The memory was a kick in her back, hard and unbalancing.

  Emily continued, “If I called the police, it would take all day just to explain him. You found him once; I know you’ll find him again.”

  No pressure.

  “You still haven’t told me why you think they took him.”

  A much more difficult subject. “It’s what your father told me.”

  She blinked. “You’re in contact with him?’

  “Not intentionally. He reached out to me. You know about that giant geothermal powerplant?” She nodded. “Your father had his own experiment, a secret experiment, as a side project there. Apparently people like me, like Will, are important to it. The things I do, the things Will eventually will do, can affect it. We amplify it. But your father took a risk building his experiment in that location. It’s not just a power plant. The woman who built it has decided the only way to save the Earth is to destroy it.” Her pulse jumped saying it out loud. “The plant is going to make that happen.”

  Emily looked about as scared as Kim felt. “How?”

  “Some sort of gravitic resonance that will detonate the Yellowstone caldera.”

  “But it’s located too far away. I saw that on a documentary.”

  Kim shrugged. “That’s where your dad’s experiment, and Will, comes in. Mike understands it better, but the gist is with Will, they can use your dad’s experiment to, I don’t know, complete the circuit. Or light the fuse. At any rate, the woman in charge, Anna Treacher, found out about Will around the same time I did. Those were almost certainly her men. They must’ve gotten to Silas and Shonda.”

  The blood drained from Emily’s face. “And if I had let you move us…”

  It wasn’t Emily’s fault; Kim couldn’t let her think that. “It wouldn’t have worked.” She spoke as the realization hit her. “They had clearly planned ahead. If anything, following me might’ve made it more dangerous.” Mike was awesome in a fight, and Tonya only a little less so. But surprise usually trumped talent, and bullets trumped fists. Looked at objectively, this wasn’t even close to the worst result. But Kim wouldn’t point that out to a mom whose child had been kidnapped.

  “Kim?” Mike said from the hallway. “We’re ready.”

  If their Experiment 2.0 had come from anyone else, well, she wouldn’t be sitting here. She’d leave a Kim-shaped hole in the wall like some sort of cartoon. But this was Mike. There was no other person on earth she trusted more. It took chanting that twice before her legs let her stand up.

  “What exactly is happening?” Emily asked.

  Mike went into professor mode, and she smiled. Smart always counted as cute in her book. “It’s a standing wave problem. The thing that enables Kim’s talents caused an n-level harmonic related to the Higgs field breaking symmetry to interact with a higher physical dimension that is much larger than current models have predicted.”

  Kim and Emily blinked at him.

  He shrugged. “You said you didn’t want me to dumb it down anymore.”

  “I told you I wanted to understand what you were talking about. That’s not the same thing.”

  After a moment’s consideration he said, “You’re part of something that extends in a direction I can describe in an equation but can’t point to. We h
it it lightly with what we thought was a soft mallet, but it ended up being a solid thump with a heavy hammer. It’s been ringing ever since, and that’s why your arm hurts.”

  Emily laughed. “That’s what you call understandable?”

  Kim said, “I do, at least a little. I work with extra dimensions all the time in realmspace. Most people get headaches trying to follow their hands when they move in directions that shouldn’t exist, but it’s never been a problem for me.” She turned to Mike. “Is that part of it?”

  “Sort of. I can get a lot more specific, but there’s been no time to teach you the basics yet.”

  Having a mental model to play with at least made her stomach settle. “That’s better than nothing, and you’re right, we don’t have time.”

  Emily asked tentatively, “Is this a private thing?”

  “Not at all,” Kim replied. “But I’m not sure how much there will be to see.”

  Chapter 34

  Mike

  Previously, he and Tonya thought the way to analyze Kim’s ability was to put her in the most realistic realmspace they could construct. It would let them take high-resolution measurements as they probed the various predicted connections between Kim and alternate realspace dimensions.

  Kim’s experience proved that that approach had side effects. Modeling such a large space at extremely high resolution made controlling the resonances too hard. Tonya’s analysis at least provided proof that Kim wasn’t in danger. But it was likely that high-res realm experiments were a dead end.

  So they were going at it from a different direction.

  It turned out that Tonya’s latest Calabi–Yau manifold had looked familiar to him. It was clearly related to the one Fee had designed to get her consciousness into his body. It suggested that exploring transitions, moving through dimensions rather than examining them statically, would be a better angle of attack. This had several advantages.

  First and foremost, Kim would be safe. The power levels were much smaller than they used the last time, and they placed triple-redundant fail-safes along the lines of her connection. If anything happened, she’d be disconnected. At worst, all she’d have was a headache if things went wrong.