by Joan He
“You may use the solution.” Heads turned toward the conference room door as Kasey stepped through, in person and alone. Actinium was waiting outside headquarters. She told me if there was anyone who can change the world, it’s you, he’d told her before she exited the copterbot, and Kasey had wanted to scoff. Then it came back to her, what she’d said to Celia that day in the water. It’s just the way things are. Both of them had been wrong: Celia, in thinking Kasey wanted to save the world, and Kasey, in accepting the status quo.
“I’ll do whatever you need me to do,” she now said to the policymakers in the room. “On two conditions.”
TWO DAYS.
That’s how much time passes before I wonder if sea monsters exist.
I know, I know. Not exactly the best thought to have when you’re traversing the great blue in nothing but a mattress boat. But I can’t help it. There’s not much else to do out here besides think, row, and rest.
Right now I’m resting, the oar laid across my lap, and all around me, the water’s glass-still, mirroring the clouds in the sky.
Maybe it’s that—the clouds are making me pensive. Or maybe the clarity of the surface is drawing me to the mysteries still beneath it. That’s what we do as humans, right? We unwrap the secrets of one thing and move on to the next, like kids tearing into presents, leaving a trail of ripped paper in our wakes.
It’s kind of sad, honestly.
The thought rings through me. I double over, hands splayed on the mattress encasement, remembering.
“It’s kind of sad.” I’m in a boat and Kay is sitting across from me, the sea glittering around us. The sun beats down, warming my skin as I say, “Everyone’s so focused on outer space, but we haven’t even finished exploring Earth.”
Kay considers my words. “Like the sea.”
“Exactly! Like the sea.”
“Maybe it’s not sad,” she says. “We would have drained it long ago if we could, just to find the secrets at the bottom. And then it’d be like everything else. Discovered.”
I blink. Then smile. We don’t have many shared hobbies or talking points, and I’d almost dismissed the idea of visiting the sea when it came to me in the middle of hot yoga. I’m glad I didn’t. It’s brought us to the island, and Leona, and to moments like these, when Kay reveals that she understands me more than she lets on. I reach for her—
—My fingers grasp the air.
My surroundings haven’t changed. The sea is still glassy, the sky still cloudy. But everything is different. I feel different, my head swimming with names.
Leona.
Who else is there? Did I know a Hubert? A Genevie? Why have I forgotten them? And Kay and me. On a boat. In the sea. Is that how we were separated?
I take deep, calming breaths, like I did in yoga. That’s right. I actually did yoga. I remember now. But I’ve either gotten rusty or I was never any good because my body won’t calm. I plunge the oar into the water and start rowing to distract myself from my building panic. I wish Hero were here. But then I’d have to tell him: Even now, years later, I don’t remember everything.
What if I never do?
Not even after finding Kay?
I ease Genevie into choppier waters. The sight of normal waves relaxes me, and I’m about to set the oar back across my lap when my grip tightens around the handle. I raise the oar, paddle poised in the air as something cuts through the water in the distance, swimming toward me.
Not something.
Someone.
SHE’D COME A LONG WAY. From the girl she’d been two weeks ago, hiding behind her own kitchen island, to this: standing center stage, in the flesh, before a full auditorium. Five hundred holographic people in attendance, yet the questions were always the same. How long before a consensus is reached? Not up to Kasey. How long will rollout take? Too long, if it went like these questions. And most popularly:
“How long before it’s safe to repopulate Earth again?” asked a person in the front.
Longer than people would like, and in the past Kasey would’ve hesitated before giving the distasteful answer. But the beat of her second heart made her fearless. “One thousand years.”
The audience reacted violently. Kasey expected no less. At every presentation (and this was the eleventh) someone argued that radioaxons decayed in less than a century, so why, then, the millennium? Why not? was Kasey’s question. Allow the sea to reuptake a millennium’s worth of carbon emissions while they underwent stasis. Wipe the slate clean. Save future generations.
But she kept her mouth shut. People wanted the quickest, easiest solutions. To solve their most immediate problems, they could steal from any future other than their own. And to think they acted like Kasey was the villain, shortchanging them, when she was offering them a deal to better the world.
Well, offering it to some of them.
“You expect us to spend a thousand years holoing through our lives?” one audience member asked, as if holoing were a prison sentence.
“No,” answered Actinium, more diplomatically than Kasey might have. She was glad to have him on the stage at her side.
Condition one: I get to present with a partner of my choice.
“Unlike commercial ones,” Actinium explained, “medical-grade pods administer a version of general anesthesia.” This was key: Only in pure stasis could they shave extraneous habitat mass down to zero and lower per-capita storage volume. “The passage of time won’t be experienced.”
The voices dropped to unsettled mutters.
A hand rose in the back. Actinium nodded, and the person asked, “How can we possibly expect to return to the same standard of living if we abandon the planet for one thousand years?”
Standard of living? Kasey’s teeth clenched. “Standard of living” was the reason why so many had refused to move to the eco-cities in the first place, only to decry the imposition of ranks later, when outside conditions deteriorated enough to impact their day-to-day lives.
“How do our homes and streets stay clean?” said Actinium, turning the question back to the asker. “Bots already perform ninety percent of infrastructure maintenance in territories and eco-cities alike. A degree of rebuilding is inevitable upon re-habitation, but automated reconstruction measures will be put in place in advance to lighten the load.”
A lull, as people absorbed this information. Then came the surge.
“Is everyone in a pod?”
“How will we ascertain outside conditions?”
“You say Operation Reset will erect habitability barometers around the world,” someone said—the only one, apparently, who’d bothered reading their press release. “And that once certain conditions are met, the pods will transport everyone to the surface. But how can you be sure of those conditions? One thousand years is a long time.”
Finally. A worthwhile question. Because the person had a point: Barometers only measured what they were programmed to measure. Even if correct levels of sunlight, water, and minerals were recorded, humans were finicky. One oversight—a new species or disease—could mean the difference between survival and extinction.
There was only one way of knowing habitable for sure, and it called on Kasey to break the law a second time.
IN THREE COUNTS, HE REACHES the mattress boat. It’s faster than I can react.
Too fast.
That’s what gets to me. Not the fact he swam the whole way, or his ability to find me at all, but his unnatural speed. His hands clamp onto the mattress’s edge, his fingers white against the hunter green, and I can’t move. I’m paralyzed as he claws onto Genevie. She lurches, and my legs crumble. I collapse as he stands, water pouring off his person and pooling around his feet.
“H-Hero?”
He steps forward. I scuttle back, hand colliding with an object—the oar. I seize it by the paddle and stand as he takes another step forward. I shove the handle between us, gaze finally rising to his face—
His blue eyes are unblinking.
This isn’t the b
oy who cleans the house and grows the taros, who walked Genevie the mattress boat with me and showed me the stars. He’s wearing an M.M. sweater, sure, and he has the hair and lips and eyes. But this isn’t my Hero.
This is the boy who tried to kill me on the shore.
“Don’t move!” The wind steals my voice, but it doesn’t matter; he can’t hear me. Can’t see me. Just takes another step forward, crossing the midpoint of the mattress. Genevie sinks lower into the water. “Don’t come any closer!”
One more step, and the paddle knocks into his chest.
He stops.
Everything stops. My breath. My heart. The sea itself, even though I know that’s impossible. The sea is unending.
So is this moment, right before he lunges.
IT BEGAN WITH A SEED. Celia had planted it, and for two years after Genevie’s death, it grew inside Kasey before germinating on a day like any other: lunchtime, eighth grade, Kasey eating alone in the alcove where the cleaningbots were stored while her peers navigated cafeteria waters she didn’t care to swim, and the question flitted through her mind—why? Why didn’t she feel drawn to the same things as her peers? Why was she different?
What’s wrong with you?
She set to find out.
She’d been eleven years old. Top of her class, and the youngest, but not exactly well versed in international law. She saw nothing scandalous about her project. Humans already came in more forms than flesh, such as holographs, and DNA could be recoded to enable processes like photosynthesis. What did it matter if other functions were coded too? If the Intraface didn’t just supplement the brain, but supplanted it?
A lot, according to the Ester Act, passed precisely to draw a line between humans and machines, a boundary arbitrary to Kasey but intuitive to her fellow peers. They must have stumbled across her project because one day, the cafeteria went quiet when Kasey entered. She got in the protein cube line; someone moved away. “Deviant,” muttered the person behind her. Kasey ignored it. She advanced through her day as usual—until Celia appeared.
“Show me,” her sister ordered before Kasey could ask why Celia, a freshman in the adjacent secondary school, was waiting for Kasey outside the science team lab during fifth period.
“What?”
“The . . . thing you’ve been working on,” said Celia. “Or say it’s a rumor. That it’s not true.”
Saying so would have been untrue, so Kasey showed her sister, leading the way to the cleaningbot closet in the basement of the school.
Celia had taken one look at revamped model-891 and spun on her. “Why?”
Celia had rejected Kasey’s solution to her pain before but that was because Kasey hadn’t addressed its origin. “We could bring Mom back, if we had her memories.” As holoing and GMO procedures demonstrated, people remained people so long as they retained their brains.
“And why this?” Celia cried, pointing at revamped model-892.
“It’s me.” An upgraded version, with behaviors and thoughts more closely aligned to the average person’s. The only thing left was figuring out how to code reactions to novel situations. As a part of her research, Kasey had been studying facial expressions for weeks. Now it came in handy, enabling her to identify the emotion on Celia’s face as horror.
The magnitude of her error finally dawned on Kasey, if not its nature. That would be announced to her minutes later, when word finally reached P2C authorities and school security came to remove Kasey from the premises.
Suspended at home, she awaited her fate. Eviction seemed likely. She envisioned it to prepare for it, eliminated her fears one by one. Then David Mizuhara struck a deal with P2C: Kasey could stay.
Just not all of her.
After submitting herself to the science sanctions, her biomonitor tweaked and her Intraface modified with trackers, she’d returned home to find Celia waiting for her. The relief on her sister’s face convinced Kasey she’d made the right choice. Without science, her heart was hollow, but Celia’s could beat for the two of them.
How naive she’d been.
Condition two: Lift the sanctions on me.
Her request for a partner had been granted easily. This one, not so much.
“She’s extorting us!” Barry had cried, one raised voice among many in the P2C conference room. “I knew it! Why else would you withhold the solution until now?”
“Because it violates international law,” Kasey had deadpanned. And explained how. And after some debate for the sake of debate, laws, people seemed to realize, would have to be bent. Red tape snipped, regulations loosened. Drastic times called for drastic measures. Kasey didn’t know how to feel about it—that it took the world ending for five years of her life to be returned to her. But what was done was done.
She had much left to accomplish in the days ahead.
It’d start on this stage, with Actinium.
“One moment,” she said to her audience. She wouldn’t explain how they’d accounted for any loopholes in the barometers. She’d show them, just as she had shown Celia.
She stepped behind the stage.
HE SIDESTEPS MY THRUST AND grabs the oar. The paddle pops out of my hands and into my chin. My head snaps back, light exploding behind my eyes. A splash. It’s me, I think. I’ve fallen overboard.
But I’m still on Genevie when his hands close around my throat. He lifts me right off my toes and squeezes until his lifeless blue eyes are all I can see.
“H-H-H—” Hero. If I could just cover his mouth with my own and breathe his name into him, if I could just—bring—him—back—
My vision flickers. Goes. Kay. Her face—every detail of it startlingly bright, as if there’s a projector behind my retina, beaming her straight onto my brain.
Cee.
Find me.
My eyes fly open. My legs are already drawn up. I kick out, feet slamming into Hero’s abdomen. He rocks back but doesn’t let go, taking me with him.
Into the sea we fall.
THE DARKNESS DEEPENED AS THE duct whisked Kasey to the storage unit beneath the stage. Recessed lights in the high ceiling flickered on as Kasey walked past several stasis-pod prototypes and tanks of solution. She came to a pod in the very back and stood still for the retina scanner.
USER CLEARED.
The doors hissed open.
THE SEA RUSHES BETWEEN US as we plunge, ripping us apart. But the moment we resurface, he’s swimming for me again. My back bumps into Genevie. I try to hoist myself up by the elbows, but he’s too fast and yanks me under. Bubbles bulge from my mouth like jellyfish, swimming up to freedom as we go down, into darker and darker blue.
Cee. Find me.
Strength returns to my limbs. I fight him off and swim for the light above, head whacking into something as I break the surface.
The oar—the first thing that went overboard. I grab it before it bobs by and whip around, swinging it with everything I’ve got.
Smack. The ugly sound of wood against wet skin. And bone. Skin and bone, splitting. Scarlet, spilling down half his face.
The impact is still vibrating in my arm when his whole body goes slack. He sinks, water closing over the top of his head, and he’s gone.
Just like that.
I stare at that spot of sea, expecting him to resurface. I wait and wait, treading water until my legs burn.
“Hero?”
My voice is broken, my vocal cords crushed. I’m still seeing Kay’s face, clearer than ever, and it’s compelling me to get back onto Genevie, to find her, to sail away from the boy who just tried to kill me but Joules dammit, fuck me, fuck reason, fuck everything—
I dive.
I don’t know how long it is before I see him, suspended like a specimen in the middle of the deep. I pull him to me and swim us both back up, gasping for breath as I grab one of the ropes I tied along Genevie’s side. I push him on first, then clamber on after, trembling.
“Hero?” His skin’s almost sheer, his eyelids purpling like his lips. The sea
water has washed away the blood, but the gash in his temple unzips to the bone.
“Hero.” I clutch his face. “Hero. Wake up, love.”
He doesn’t wake up.
And after an eternity of begging, I finally check—
He’s not breathing.
His heart’s not beating.
Rain falls, silver needles melting into the sea, washing the salt out of my hair, bringing it down my temples and cheeks as I stare at the boy in my lap.
The boy I killed.
The rain stops. The sun rises. Sets. It’s night when I finally wrap my hand around the oar.
I row.
Back to the island. I try to carry him to the house. Buckle.
We fall into the sand, just like we did that night beneath the stars.
I drag myself over to him and lay my head on his chest. We lie there. How long, I don’t know. Maybe hours. Maybe days. I lose track of time.
I do know that the whirring begins at dawn. The vibration starts somewhere beneath his sternum and spreads outward, humming into my cheek. My mind’s too numb for thoughts, but my body reacts. I lift myself and stare down as color returns to his face and the gash to his temple fills itself in with silvery skin that turns a shade of flesh.
And then Hero, the boy I killed, takes his first breath.
“ACTIVATE.”
From the depths of the pod, a pair of lights turned on.
“Hello, C,” Kasey intoned.
The lights blinked.
CEE. FIND ME.
The voice takes over my body and mind. Emotionless, I move, not understanding what I’m doing until it’s already done.
I’ve carried Hero back into the house and placed him on the mattress-less bed frame. I’ve tied him—everywhere. Arms. Legs. Body. All trussed to the bedposts. He’ll be in for a nasty surprise when he wakes, but I don’t care. Can’t care. Can’t feel relief over the fact he’s still alive. Can’t feel apprehension over the ramifications of the only human I know being . . . not so human after all.
