by Travis Borne
Jim became red and tightened up. And Jessie could feel his rage as if she’d just fallen into a cauldron of boiling water. But she fought it with something powerful. She remembered when Amy had bunted George. She saved my life, Jessie thought. And when she heard Amy’s voice and felt that surge of forgiveness, when Amy had said, “Run, Jessie. Go get help!”
But I froze, allowing time to plow me over. I could have saved her! And Jessie’s tears became a flood. And the hate boiling her alive was pushed from her body, forced out by love. The love came as light and hit Jim. And so did she. She bunted Jim just like Amy had bunted George. And the two of them flew off the cliff.
96. Holding Hands
They ripped each other’s clothes off like a couple recovering from a fight. It was a release of anger and a torrent of love, and they embraced one another while falling into the crevasse. And time slowed until they were no longer falling, just frozen between the cold and the hot, which like ghosts, were warm sheets snaking and enwrapping their bodies. They made love for a year.
“I love you, Amy,” Jim said, after they had finished.
“I love you too,” Jessie said. She looked like Amy, to him, but she was Jessie. On the inside, however, Jessie was reborn. She was Amy in the sense that she had a new level of compassion, and she was touched by Jim’s memories. They were deeper, now, far more so than they had been within Marlo’s world, somehow. The system in the hover-jet was considerably less powerful and it should not have been possible—but here they were.
Jessie bore witness to Jim’s first dream as if she was standing in the room, sharing it with him, and his pain—when he witnessed the wall explode at the base of the lender facility. The angry fist punched the sky and the mushroom cloud voraciously devoured it. Then he got up, burnt like toast and laughing. He staggered to the shattered sliding glass door and she stood by his side the entire time, sobbing, feeling just what he felt. Through life-changing reverberations that made her heart purr, she experienced the exact moment when he had changed, the instant he saw Amy trudging along in her brand-new lender uniform, covered in blood. Jim’s hateful skin shed just then.
Jessie took in more than even that, too. She received him powerfully; their mental channel was white water falling off the cliff. She saw flashes of Herald when he fell in love with the love of his life—that very first glance in the club, and the kiss Herald shared with Ana, overlooking the Pacific Ocean at 2 a.m. And with a third eye she saw love float around, and hate, and other emotions. Some were locked behind a gate, and some, were too terrible to look at, and she realized she had the key. A part of her was still holding Jim, his skin was hot and he was inside her, and she never, ever wanted to let go. Another part of her was manipulating time, changing things, and still making love to him. And a third part, the one with the third eye, the one that had to act, the part that would never again sit idly by, the eye that was opening for the very first time, reached for the gate. She, like Jim in his dream, stepped up and out of her snake skin, and like Herald, ripping Troll from his shoulder, tossing him into the gutter, throwing Snake, and kicking Demon in the gut, then bringing up his knee to uppercut the red one’s massive chin, she herself took action with passionate resolve: she unlocked the gate. Then another.
Gate after gate opened, and although she never wanted it to end—they were deep enough to share this eternity, and make love forever—it needed to end. As the gates opened Jim’s face changed. And in the course of minutes, he recognized who he was holding.
Jessie was worried for a second, until Jim held her, and he said, “I forgive you, and I’m sorry. Thank you, Jessie.” Then he released Lia from the trap within his mind. They both felt Lia’s release like the relief of a cramp.
Jim’s strong nude body held Jessie tight, and he squeezed her, and she him. They shared a moment that could have taken a year—had they wanted it too. But just between them they did take some time, an amount they agreed upon.
Jim too received a flood of memories, and love, from the beautiful woman in his arms—and the new realization allowed him to understand her deeply. He saw the painful moments of Jessie’s life, how George punished her so terribly in the beginning, how he’d put her in the closet and locked it, how he forced her to do unimaginable things both sexual and not, and not a soul knew about it. And he realized just why she had allowed David to see her naked. She felt David’s pain in a way no one else could have, because in his eyes for a second, she saw her own pain, and herself objectively—she was just beginning to wake up.
“I'm sorry for what you had to do. I had never known—”
Jessie, her face glossy with tears, was a mirror, and reflected Jim’s face, which was also a mirror; she put a finger to his mouth, gently. And with the finger, and a final touch that spoke a universe, they pulled apart. She said, “Now what do you say we go and get the others.”
They fell and entered the hot air, and it scalded them and they screamed. The hit was punishing. Just as they knew it would be, the lava burned off their flesh—Hell from Heaven in a flash. It made them ugly, horrific monsters, disfigured burnt toast, but they banded together and saw only the beauty within each other. It took them months to heal, and the air continued to burn their ever-regenerating bodies as if they were wearing fourth-dimensional matter made up of the hot shiny steel from steam irons that had received surges from lightning strikes.
Together they hobbled, bent like broken sticks that had cooked too many marshmallows, and they traversed the crusty black lava flow they occasionally had to wade in to continue on. Holding hands most of the time, and comforting one another, they found Marlo first, a pile on the ground with a jaw like a flounder’s, smashed but working. His haunting moans tormented them nightly, but the time had come. They touched him and he vanished. And they knew Jon couldn’t be much farther.
Weeks passed, months, years uncountable, then it shocked them. A good thing. Anything with the power to disturb the monotonous hell choking their necks was a bookmark to reality. It was him. Finally, they had found Jon as they bumped into Rafael amid the darkness of a new cave. Upon touching Rafael, he disappeared, and then they touched Jon. Together, with dry, raspy voices they said, “Jon, it’s time.”
97. Vallecito
The mountains had the texture of crumbled, overused sandpaper, and the lake was a crater resembling the hole of an outhouse after a hot-chili-eating competition. Demolished was the reservoir’s dam and sludge drooled from the 13,000-foot peaks. Toxins slid down and as far as Bayfield, Colorado, which took the brown matter, just like any other place on the planet; Earth as seen from above had become desert, junkyard, or a coagulation of both, occasionally buried in what seemed crawling muck. But luckily for the twelve-member crew of the hover-jet, the overall shape of their destination matched the records: the mountain on the east side of the crater remained unchanged in its contours. Rafael overlaid before-and-after maps on the forward screens above the pilots, trying to keep all passengers in the loop.
“Hold position,” Alex said. He was sitting in the front now; Nanny could stomach it no longer.
“It’ll complete its pass in five minutes,” Rafael said, at the rearmost station.
They remained on the north side near what had once been a marina—now it provided cover in the form of junk dunes. The dunes looked as if they’d been swept up and onto the western face of the Vallecito mountains by the angry winds of Venus. The route to get this close had taken them almost two days, zigzagging, heading north farther than anyone had anticipated, but they were, finally, almost there. Herald’s bunker, and it looked like it was at least possible, that it had not been detected after all these years. The deeply embedded fusion room still providing power to the largest blocker, and Steve, Hal, Jay, or Blaire, Rafael’s friends, the first four bots to be powered up, after Rafael himself—could they still be down there?
After the massive blob of a ship finished lurking from west to east like a somber cloud over Europe, and the twisting drone swarms faded t
o nil, Rafael gave the okay and Alex swiped the route over to Fran’s control panel. She engaged and the hover-jet soared quietly across the abominable pit which had once been a spectacular fishing spot. Upon nearing the topmost bay, it opened.
The ramp descended.
There stood Red and his wife, three teenagers, three identical twin girls, and four younger children. Like a family posing for a photo, they stood closely together.
“Rafael,” he said, stepping forward; Red’s arms opened wide and he looked as healthy as a red-bearded Santa. “Damn, it’s good to see you. The old body again, but still your signature mustache.” Red fell onto Rafael like a giant crab; Rafael hugged him back like a crab getting caught in a net. “Come, meet the family.”
The others exited the ship and introductions went round. Some of the children, Red explained, were Manny’s and Blanca’s, the other couple that had remained; he added that they were currently sleeping. After ten minutes of small talk and brief explanations the weary travelers took the platform elevator deep into the facility; Vlad and Vinny remained with the ship, the only one in the bay save for an old heli-jet. A couple of ATVs that looked like they’d been kept in decent running condition, lined the wall to their right. Tools were everywhere—someone had been working.
Quietly, the large platform injected the mountain with its newcomers. A teal light seemed to scan their bodies horizontally as they passed into it. Their arrival was akin to a leaf falling from a thousand-foot-tall tree, and they sunk into the obscurity of a manicured forest. Jim, standing next to Jessie, said, “It’s nothing like I remember it.”
“Sir, I must admit, I hardly recognized you—your hair.” Under his thick red hair, a sly smile had no trouble making an appearance. “We all have a lot of catching up to do.” Jim angled his head; Jessie looked up to him with a confused smile, and as always, eyes that assuaged his tensions.
“Wow! I like what you’ve done with the place,” Jon added.
“You ain’t seen nothing yet.”
The forest stuffed the grand bay area where once had been myriad robots on a floor cleaner than Hubble's mirror. But now there were fruit trees growing every fruit imaginable; they looked like Christmas trees. There were coffee bushes, a pond, even a tree fort, and lights bright enough to compete with the sun. Small red-and-black robots were tending to gardens. Several of them waved. Jim said, “The flippers!”
Jon nodded, remembering their speedy actions atop North Mt. Franklin, El Paso, Texas. And they continued inside. Jim held Jessie’s hand. Lia walked as best as she could next to Abell, which was fantastic as her legs had been growing like a starfish regenerates—one on roids. Fran and Nanny were ahead, behind Rafael and Red and Maggie; their teenage sons and daughters were in close company, ecstatic and gleeful, and the youngsters did circles around the newcomers; a young teenage girl with darker skin and black hair, ran ahead. Tall Alex Pennington had short Trixie’s hand—awestruck, they followed last.
“Are you believing this, Alex?” Trixie said quietly. “It’s wonderful!” They soon arrived to the end of the line, a wall.
“Have a seat, you all must be famished,” Maggie said. She was a homely woman; if Red was Red Santa, she was plump Mrs. Clause with curly blond hair that looked white under the bright beams highlighting the path they had followed. She wore an apron and resumed dutifully as if her cooking session had been interrupted by the guests.
“Hungry, yes,” Abell said. Smiles fluttered about, an eye smile from Rafael, and a sliver of impatience from Jim. And Lia looked up to her famished, Russian giant of a partner, in agreement.
They sat at a grand, round picnic table right where the break room had been, directly below where the main cabin once existed, where Rafael had introduced Jon and Jodi, and Jerry and Valerie to the lenders, and had explained the unlicensed consciousness. The ground was a type of fine grass such as that skinning a golf course. The air was as fresh as Colorado air, as if they’d saved some from before, and the sounds of nature set most everyone at ease.
“It’s so surreal,” Jim said uneasily. “I recognize it from the memories I received, but in two ways. Amy’s memories were that of a young child and everything seemed so grand to her, as if she really was outside when she was down here. And Herald’s memories—I believe now, that I received them through a form of DNA transference.”
“We can talk more about that later, Jim,” Red said, “but first, let’s eat.” Maggie and the teens served the food, which was already prepared as if they had known of the coming guests; the meal was a cornucopia.
“A drink?” Maggie offered. And Jon, Jim, Rafael, Trixie, Fran and Nanny, as well as Red, accepted.
“Homemade still, I make it down below,” Red said. He raised his glass and all others followed, be it an alcoholic drink or juice or ice water from the table’s plentiful selection.
The counter where once sat a lone TV, in a very basic break room beside the bathroom door and steel door which led deeper into the facility, had been transformed into an elaborate kitchen, one that looked like it had been hand carved, or stolen from the backyard of a millionaire.
“So, is there a way we can get in contact with Herald?” Rafael asked. Red shook his head.
“Herald told us very little,” Red replied, “as I believe you all know.” Nods went round. “He left us here, something that we believe he’d predetermined early on as a part of his original plan. But there’s one thing I think Herald didn’t fully realize.” Red gestured at the lending area some fifty feet away—and the partition dividing tech from nature sank into the floor. The lenders eating at the table followed Red’s gesture as if he was a hypnotist guiding their eyes. The grass faded and beyond looked incongruent, a clean, vineless, grassless, treeless room; the walls had colors before, but now it would be akin to walking into a rainbow. Two young adult lenders were on the beds, as well Manny and Blanca, and two young children. There were more beds now, they’d been added like tics between a clock’s digits, around the broadcast spike.
“Manny and Blanca are lending. My oldest son, Isaac, and my daughter, Madison, his twin sister,” Red said proudly, “they are learning, and living. The youngsters are having a bit of fun. Our children have been raised with technology, raised among the dozens of helpers Herald left behind, as well many, many other bots—some are tending to the gardens both here and below, and some are deep underground, excavating, building, or managing our other systems. Isaac and Madison possess an IQ beyond our ability to rate it. As well, all of our children are extremely smart, but those two, and one other, seem to possess a gift, and only recently have we been able to discover the cause. In coordination with Steve—” If Rafael had a mouth he would have smiled, but his eyes managed just fine. “—we’ve devised a method in cooperation with the brilliant minds of my oldest two children, as well as Manny’s oldest daughter, Winter, the other gifted one, to boost brain power significantly—”
“One of your projects,” Steve said, aiming his gaze at Rafael. “Hello, friends.” He appeared through the door which led deeper into the facility. Alongside him walked the young girl who had run ahead, as well a beautiful, tall, young Hispanic woman. The thick steel door closed after they passed through.
Red stood up, “Hello, Steve, and may I introduce Winter, Manny’s and Blanca’s oldest daughter.” Winter smiled and joined the table.
“Rafael,” Steve said, “it’s really great to see you again. Herald said you had deleted yourself, but I knew that wasn’t true.” Steve’s color changed throughout his robot body. His skin was as smooth as glass and went from light tan to the color of blushing cheeks. Then Steve skinned himself with the generated images of casual duds.
“Steve, you’ve changed—considerably,” Rafael said. He stood up and shook Steve’s marvelous hand with his basic white one.
Winter, sat next to Jessie, and the two beautiful women smiled at each other. Winter looked as if her name was an antonym. Her silky black hair was in a ponytail and descended past her ass, an
d her shape was a roller coaster that could send eyes into the tunnel of love-at-first-sight. She was taller than both of her sleeping parents.
“Upgrades, Rafael,” Steve replied, “which I think we can help you with, my friend.” Steve’s body was seamless and he could project any image onto its surface—and did so like shifting winds; Rafael's on the contrary, had seen better days. “Thank you for leaving your notes unlocked, it was as if you knew you weren’t coming back, after leaving so suddenly with the builders to construct the first city—but here you are, the one and only, my friend, the great Rafael.”
“It’s been quite a journey. Together we’ve been through some harrowing, and lengthy ordeals. And it is great to see you again, Steve. Have you managed to finish, The Stuff?”
“The Stuff?” Fran said. Nanny hushed her; she’d talked enough the past two days, enough to make some of the crew want to strangle the redheaded pilot.
“A simple name for the indescribable,” Rafael said. “It was just one of my early plans, rough mental sketches. I left many, which I had only partially completed. I wrote most while Herald slept. My sketch pad, both Herald and I had one, contained ideas enough to fill the old world’s every computer.”
“Your early sketches have evolved into countless wonders, and there’s a lot to talk about—”
“We don’t have time for this,” Jim interrupted. “Rico—remember? The others?”
“Go ahead, Jim,” Red said.
“Cancer is returning to those who have had their DNA reverted, all of us,” Jim said. “We need to retrieve a genetic modifier, in case we must alter those who are sick, then search the third city that had been built—Marlo gave us the coordinates.”
“Martin, Jim,” Rafael said. “He is Martin now. Much has happened while you slept, but please, continue.”
“Okay then—Martin. And if we cannot find a cell programmer in that city then we must begin a search of the hospitals, perhaps there is a pocket and some of the equipment has managed to survive. And we need parts to duplicate the sphere in Rafael's head—we will be building an army.” Red shook his head, as if he knew something they didn't, as if the others had been living under a rock.
