by Sean Platt
“It’s this way,” Jonathan said after another long moment.
They walked single-file with Jonathan two steps ahead, their path illuminated only by a string of tea lights.
CHAPTER 51
ARTIFICIAL SCARS
“What would you have done,” Jonathan asked, “if I was dead?”
Ephraim was sitting in a big chair in the living room, trying to look comfortable. Jonathan was at the built-in wet bar getting them drinks. Ephraim needed one, but this wasn’t how he wanted to spend his time. But it felt as wrong as the new Altruance Brown and Sophie Norris.
This was his brother. He should want to spend time with him.
It was a good question. Ephraim had come to Eden looking for Jonathan. Finding his lost brother had been his singular driving thought for years. What would he have done? And given that he had thought Jonathan dead, what did he almost do?
That aside, why couldn’t he just sit in a room with this long-lost brother and have a drink? Why was he so damned uneasy? He’d been medicated for anxiety in the past. Off meds had always felt like this. Maybe that time of his life wasn’t over. Maybe his head wasn’t as clear as he thought it might be.
Churning thoughts were costing him time. When Ephraim finally knew how to respond, Jonathan was standing over him, holding a glass with liquid and ice.
“I’m not sure,” he said.
Jonathan shrugged as Ephraim took the glass. He moved to another of the big chairs. He sat and crossed his legs, trying to appear as comfortable as Jonathan.
“I suppose it would depend on how I died. Did I trip and break my neck walking down the sidewalk? Or did Wallace Connolly shoot me dead?”
Ephraim could barely think. He forced a smile. “Sounds about right.”
“It would depend on whether Evermore caused my death the way I caused those deaths at UCLA …”
“That’s hardly a fair comparison.”
“Or whether it was an accident, like falling off a lawnmower.”
Ephraim’s head ticked up, meeting Jonathan’s eyes. “What did you say?”
“Accidents happen everywhere. The only difference is who got hurt. And if the person who got hurt matters.” Jonathan sipped his drink.
“I should go to bed.”
“It’s only nine.”
“I’ve had a long day.”
“Not as long as your second day here, though. Come on, Ephraim. I know you have more in you.”
“My second day?” He remembered it well. That particular day he’d woken outside in cafe chairs, witnessed a bloody trauma, had his clothes stolen, and committed a murder that apparently never happened. He’d gone to bed early and slept like the dead. “How do you know what my second day was like?”
“I was here,” Jonathan said simply. “We talked a lot, though I’d swear you forgot it right away. How is your memory today, anyway?”
“You mean my second day here, on the Denizen,” Ephraim clarified, now understanding. “Here in this house, after my Tomorrow Gene treatment.”
“What did you think I meant?”
“Never mind.”
“Do you remember that day? The day you woke up, and we met again?”
“Of course.”
“You weren’t as out of it as I thought. That’s good. Such a long recovery time isn’t typical. You took it hard. Elle said your reaction to the process, from an emotional and mental standpoint, was one of the most extreme she’d ever seen.”
“How long does it usually take for most people to—”
“Almost as if you’d cracked. As if you’d gone insane.”
Ephraim took that in. He didn’t like the way it felt.
“You remember talking to me.”
“Yes.”
“And Wallace. You remember talking to Wallace Connolly.”
Ephraim’s brow furrowed. “You mean during the treatment? You said he came to the Pearl to see everyone, but I don’t remember him.”
Jonathan’s face became a mixture of confusion and pity. Perhaps a touch of frustration.
“No, Ephraim. I mean that second day. You don’t remember talking to Wallace here, upstairs, in the bedroom? That afternoon. After we finally had our little reunion.”
“You mean after our fight?”
More disbelief. Jonathan slowly shook his head. “No. Before it.”
“There was no break, though. You were sitting behind me in a chair, and then you came out and showed yourself. We argued after that. You didn’t leave and come back.”
“Ephraim.” A sigh. “You fell asleep. The fight you’re thinking of? It didn’t happen until evening.”
“It was right away. I didn’t fall asleep. You’re talking about something else.”
Another sigh, this one heavier. “I’m sorry. I was worried this might happen. The doctor said that your memory would be fragile for a while. I shouldn’t be surprised. But what I’m saying is true. You’ve got it wrong. Check your MyLife if you don’t believe me.”
MyLife?
Ephraim had almost forgotten about his ocular recorder during his time on Eden, flaky as it had been. He’d written it off as in need of replacement. But when he tapped behind his ear to activate playback, the small screen superimposed on his vision appeared without delay.
He scrolled back to that day’s index, and scanned through the recording. Jonathan was right. He had shown up in the morning. Then there was a long cut, and beyond tha,t he had a record of their evening quarrel.
“I could’ve sworn …” Ephraim said.
“Memory is a funny thing. Sometimes you think you know something, but it’s only the mind manufacturing explanations to fill gaps in a story. It’s a lot like self-hypnosis. What we do to ourselves every day isn’t that different from what a mentalist could do, implanting suggestions we’d swear were real — and fake events that never happened.”
“I …”
But there were no words. Being confronted with his fallibility was surreal. He’d been so certain.
“So you don’t remember talking to Wallace?”
“No.”
“But you’ve met him. He said you’d met before.”
“I’ve never met Wallace.”
The matter was black and white, but Jonathan appeared to be weighing an argument, seeing if he could understand his brother’s side of the story. “Maybe not. I guess you wouldn’t technically have met him.”
“What does that mean?”
“I think the bigger question,” Jonathan said, “is what I asked to begin with. If you’d come here to find that I was dead—”
“I did think that. I did think you were dead.”
“But I mean with proof.”
“I had proof. Jonathan, Eden is …” They’d glossed over this the first time, but Ephraim hadn’t suggested he had any reason, other than bad feelings, to believe that Jonathan was dead. He hadn’t told him about his foray into Eden’s computer system, or his tense encounter with the strange black-bearded man. It felt wrong to do so. Jonathan spoke of Eden with pride. He spoke like a half-owner — like he and Connolly were partners.
“Eden is what?”
“I just got a feeling,” Ephraim said. “I figured if you were alive, you’d have found a way to get in touch.”
Jonathan looked at Ephraim as if weighing a judgment. “It does make you uncomfortable to lie, doesn’t it?”
“What do you mean?” Because he couldn’t be that transparent.
“Just that I can see my little brother in you. You’re just like him.”
“Okay, what does that mean?”
“I mean that it’s been a long time, Ephraim. In some ways, you’re a stranger to me. Just as I’m sure there are ways I’m a stranger to you.”
“Older, I guess.”
“We’ve diverged, is what I mean. We’ve evolved away from each other.”
“Evolved?”
Jonathan nodded. “It’s hard not to see day-to-day life, especially in cases like ours, through th
e lens of my work. So yes, it’s a microcosm of evolution. Just like two halves of the same species will become two entirely separate species if they’re kept apart for long enough. That’s you and me, Ephraim. We used to be us. But over the past ten years, you’ve become you. And I’ve become me.”
“You make it sound bleak. Like our brotherhood is over.”
“There are things you’ve experienced that I’ve had no part of. The same is true for me. Divergence happens. That’s life.”
“What’s this about, Jonathan?”
“Tell me something.” He pointed toward Ephraim’s shoulder. “Your scar. It’s new.”
“It happened after you left.”
“How did you get it?”
“I broke up a mugging. I stopped it, but the guys managed to kick the shit out of me anyway. One had a knife.”
“Why did you feel the need to stop a mugging?”
“Damaris. Because of what happened to her.” And as Ephraim said it, he remembered what Jonathan had said — about how she’d been older than Ephraim. He’d shuffled all sorts of details about their younger lives, gotten them all wrong. Ephraim remembered it clearly. But then, he’d remembered the argument and its fallacious timing just as well.
“You felt the need to step in and stop some wrongdoing. Because when Damaris was killed, nobody intervened. They all stood around and allowed it to happen.”
“That’s right.”
“The memory of a past event caused you to step in on the mugging. Just like stopping the mugging made you step up and try to find me when you thought I was dead. It wasn’t just curiosity. It was at least partially about justice. And so I wonder, if you’d found out I was dead and that Eden was at fault — if Wallace was responsible, say. What would you do? Would you kill him?”
Ephraim considered the question.
The Doodad buzzed in his pocket.
Who could be calling?
“I don’t know.”
“If he’d killed me, Ephraim. If he’d murdered me with his own hands.”
The Doodad buzzed again.
“I guess I’ll never know.”
“But I’m curious. I want to know. I want to know how far you’ve diverged. The Ephraim I knew could never hurt anyone, just like he could barely stand to lie. He couldn’t even hurt people who had it coming, like those muggers.”
“I don’t know, Jonathan.”
The phone buzzed a final time, then stopped.
“Does justice matter?" Jonathan asked. "If someone took something from you — something you loved — what would you do to make things right?”
Ephraim didn’t answer. Jonathan waved the question away to say something further.
“You asked why I thought we’d diverged, is all. I want to know how far. That’s what I do every day. I look at the snowball effects that are born from small changes. That’s the real engine behind Precipitous Rise and all we do at Evermore. Speed. Controlled chaos. The rate at which we can grow life using our technology — crops, organs, or whatever else we need — means that it’s like handling an explosion. Seconds count. Nanoseconds count. And it makes me wonder about you.”
“Is this about something that happened during my therapy? With the Tomorrow Gene?”
“Yes. And not at all.”
“Christ, Jonathan …”
“What would you say, if I told you that mugging never happened?”
Ephraim sighed. What was with all the hypotheticals? Jonathan had never been a student of philosophy, but right now he felt trapped in a lecture.
“I don’t know, Jon. If I hadn’t gotten tangled up in the mugging, I guess maybe I wouldn’t be as dead-set on setting things right with you.”
“That’s not what I said. I’m not asking you what would have happened in an alternative world where the mugging didn’t occur. I’m asking how you’d respond, here and now, in this world where you’re telling me about the mugging, if I told you that the mugging never happened? What if I said that you’re remembering it wrong, the way you remembered the timing of our argument wrong that second day on the Denizen?”
“I’d say I have a scar to prove that I’m right.”
“What if the scar was from something else?”
“Who gives a fuck, Jonathan? What’s this about?”
“Just answer. If I said to you, ‘Ephraim, there was no mugging.’”
“I’d say you were crazy. And speaking out your ass, considering you were gone when it happened and don’t know dick about it.”
“Assume I’m not crazy or speaking out my ass.”
Ephraim sighed. Exasperated. Exhausted. Tense all over again.
“Just answer me. What if it didn’t happen?”
“But it did.”
“It didn’t.”
“Oh. Yes. Of course it did.”
But now Jonathan’s serious, borderline sympathetic expression was making Ephraim angry.
“How would you know anything about it? You weren’t even there!”
Jonathan leaned forward. He made his face serious. Ephraim had seen this before, his brother steeling himself for a carefully worded lecture.
“It’s an artificial memory, Ephraim. We put it there as a test for a new idea here at Eden. That’s what I want your help with. The next step in our revolutionary therapies and all Wallace hopes to do for the world. But it’s so hard to imagine in a vacuum. I needed you to see its power in yourself before you’d believe it.”
“What the hell are you talking about?””
“We implanted that memory of the mugging in you during the Tomorrow Gene process. It didn’t happen. None of it. You got that scar on a construction site when you fell into a pile of scraps.”
Ephraim stared at Jonathan. There was no question now. His brother had gone insane.
His Doodad buzzed again. This time, Jonathan perked up.
“You’re funny,” Ephraim said, their eyes locked.
“I’m serious.”
“I know what happened, Jonathan. I know my life. I know who I am.”
“I know the feeling.”
The ring repeated, the Doodad vibrating against his thigh.
“Look,” Jonathan said. “Just humor me for a second. How do you know you stopped that mugging?”
“Because I did!”
“But how do you know? Here and now, what exactly makes you sure?”
“Because I remember it, dammit!”
Again the Doodad buzzed.
Jonathan’s eyes went to Ephraim’s pocket.
He leaned farther forward, his persuasive face firmly on. “Memories are just electrochemical signals in your brain. They’re no more real than your experience of the color red. There is no ‘red’ in the objective world — only your brain’s interpretation of light with a wavelength of around 650 nanometers. Just like there was no mugging in your past.”
“Bullshit!”
Another ring. Ephraim felt adrenaline saturate his blood, his electrochemical factory of a brain.
“Check your MyLife, then,” Jonathan said. “Go back and watch the day you got that scar. Check it, and you’ll see.”
Ephraim’s head slowly shook. And at that moment, he understood. Jonathan and possibly Wallace Connolly had modified something in Ephraim beyond his genes, but it wasn’t his memory.
They’d toyed with his MyLife implant, causing Ephraim to distrust things he knew by giving him false visual evidence. More, they’d probably been interfering with his MyLife’s signal all along — jamming it somehow, maybe, so he wouldn’t be able to recall the monster under the mower, the missing clothes, the night of drug-addled debauchery, his intrusion into the Pearl’s secret room.
And though he’d started to give Jonathan benefit of the doubt, it turned out that doing so was wrong after all. Because, hell. Jonathan couldn’t even remember his sister’s age.
It wasn’t Ephraim losing his grip on reality. It was Jonathan.
There was something very wrong with his brother. Someth
ing broken.
When the Doodad buzzed a fourth time, Jonathan calmly said, “Aren’t you going to answer that?”
“It’s not important.”
“You don’t even know who it is.”
“Why does it matter?” Ephraim snapped, his nerves whisper-thin. “If I answer and talk to whoever it is, you’ll just tell me later that I never talked to them at all.”
“Ephraim -”
“I’m tired. I’m going to bed.”
The Doodad buzzed a fifth time, and Ephraim’s resistance finally broke. Why the hell shouldn’t he answer? How could this strange evening — this whole odd reunion with the stranger who’d divergently evolved from the brother he’d once known — get any worse?
“Hello,” he said without so much as looking at the screen. His eyes were on Jonathan. His greeting came flat and featureless, like a gunshot with no echo.
“Ephraim? Where the hell have you been?”
Fiona. Now, of all fucking times. Apparently, radio silence stopped mattering if you ignored urgent messages for long enough.
“This isn’t a good time,” he replied.
Eyes on Jonathan. Staring hard enough to bore holes in steel. But he turned away, tapping down the volume so his brother wouldn’t hear.
“I’ve been trying to get in touch,” Fiona said, ignoring him. “Those photos you sent, of the files? I sent them to my team, Ephraim. To my geneticists.”
“That’s great. Congratulations. I guess you know the secret sauce.”
“I need you to leave right now. You’ll need to hide and improvise. I can’t help; I’m sorry. Do your best. I can’t send a plane. Evermore won’t even respond to requests from the dummy corporation. Access for your false identity has been completely blocked. I think they know, Ephraim. I think they know who you are and why you’re there, and they’re erasing all of your options. The airstrip won’t answer. Based on everything from my end, Eden’s locked down. A black box.”
“Except for calls, apparently,” said Ephraim.
After all the bullshit his brother had just tried to feed him, Fiona’s paranoid ranting sounded like a clucking hen. If Eden was shut down, why would they allow a call? It didn’t add up.
“Listen to me, Ephraim. I think you’re in danger. Given what you know, they can’t let you off the island. They can’t let you leave. Do you understand?”
