The Unfortunate Expiration of Mr David S Sparks

by William F Aicher

  Rosa stood, pulled her hand back from David and walked to the shore of the pond. “Yes, something happened,” she muttered, rubbing her forehead. Standing there, silhouetted against the water, David couldn’t help but appreciate her figure. Shapely, athletic. The body of a survivor.

  “Come with me, David. We have a lot to talk about.”

  THIRTY-THREE

  THE BEST PART OF

  WAKING UP

  “A meltdown. That’s how they described it in their last communication.” Rosa led David back through the Fern Room, into the larger glass area housing the ancient palm. “I didn’t understand it. We didn’t understand it. The message was short. Cryptic. Just that there was a meltdown.” They passed a set of blue rain barrels connected to the roof via a series of copper pipes and through a pair of doors into another room.

  In here, the atmosphere immediately felt heavier—hotter for sure, but also thick with moisture. The rich air hung in his nose, earthy and full of life. Hanging vines formed a natural ceiling of leaves, blocking most of the glass roof above. Tendrils dangled like beaded curtains, separating this room from the last. They pushed through, Rosa’s bare feet making a soft slapping sound as she passed through a puddle of water accumulated on the pathway. Another, smaller pond lay to the right. Mangroves sprouted from its waters and goldfish again swam about, wandering lazily through the trees’ woody roots.

  Ahead on the path an oval shape was carved into the cement floor. Letters, worn through the passage of time and countless footsteps, spelled out a series of words:

  Leaves use sunlight to split water into its basic elements

  “They used to call this room “Sugar from the Sun.”” We call it “The Growing Room” now.”

  “Seems fitting,” David said. “Though from what I’ve seen in here so far, it seems every room here is a growing room. Is there a Death Room I should be worried about?”

  Rosa stopped and waited for David to catch up. A smile spread across her face—not a grin, but still her lips curled enough David could see even his little joke, as silly as it was, at least temporarily pulled her from whatever worries battled inside her head.

  “We try to take advantage of the space we have,” she said. “It’s not a lot, but it’s enough to provide our small community here with food and shelter. We pretty much live on what we can grow, and to keep the food as safe as possible we try to grow most of it here, inside where the air and water’s scrubbed. This room,” she waved her hand across the garden before them, “is where we grow the largest variety—including most of our treats. Cinnamon, sugar cane, kumquats, bananas, guava, papaya, pineapple … even allspice, vanilla and coffee. It all grows in here. Obviously, there’s not room here for a lot, but there’s room enough for us. Come on,” she pulled at his hand, leading him onward. “Let’s grab a quick cup … and make sure you are who you say you are.”

  They continued in silence, though David considered speaking up, insisting he was, in fact, David Sparks. But was he? He didn’t even know for sure. His sporadic memories hardly explained everything—and they didn’t even bear any resemblance to any place he found himself over the last several weeks. Like they were memories from long ago—decades earlier—farther back than his life even reached. Memories from before all of this. Before everything changed and the world went to hell. Something about them was off. Just didn’t seem quite right. So, no, he wasn’t about to argue who he was—especially since he wasn’t sure himself.

  An explosion of sound met his ears as they entered the next room. Screams, shouts and laughter sprang up from around him. Children ran about, chasing after one another. A few climbed what looked like a giant nut while others scurried above in a plastic treehouse. A faded yellow sign hung above, wrapped in a bundle of vines. Plants Alive—the rest obscured. Another group of children sat, attentively listening on a ring of artificial logs, as a teenage girl attempted to teach over the racket.

  Beyond the classroom, another set of doors led into yet another new room, this one different from any of the others they’d been through. Unlike the rest of the building, the air in this room was remarkably dry—even drier than the air outside. A row of cactuses ran the length of the room, each sprouted from a garden of rock and sand raised up in the center of the chamber. Pathways surrounded it, the outer perimeters of which housed tables and shelves covered in an array of assembled and disassembled electronics. Men and woman sat along the tables, heads down and focused as they worked on various devices.

  “Sam, grab a wand,” Rosa commanded. A woman in a white coat matching everyone else in the room spun on her chair to face Rosa and David, grabbed a metal rod from her bench and brought it to them.

  “Your wand, ma’am.” The woman looked young, maybe early twenties. Skin clear, pale and free of wrinkles. In respectable physical shape, like Rosa—although considerably more petite. Her eyes betrayed her youth, however, shining with a glassiness worse than Ghost’s. From how she stared toward David, not quite at him but more through him, he assumed she was blind.

  “David, this is Sam. She’s going to check you over.”

  “What’s she going to do with that thing?” he asked, watching as Sam thumped the chrome instrument into her palm. He took a step back, reconsidering his earlier decision not to explain himself when he had the chance.

  “Calm down, would you?” Sam laughed. “I’m just going to wand you.”

  David looked to Rosa, who nodded. “Let her do it.”

  “So, do I sit?” he asked. But the only empty chair he found was the one Sam had been sitting in. “Where, exactly, does that thing go?”

  Sam stepped forward and grabbed a handful of David’s hair, holding his head still. He pressed his eyes closed and braced for pain.

  “Identity confirmed,” an electronic voice spoke. “David Samuel Sparks. ID number 231874.”

  “Yeah, it’s him,” said Sam. She returned to her desk and started fiddling with the equipment she’d been working on before the interruption.

  Rosa sprung toward David and wrapped her arms around him, enveloping him in a full-bodied embrace. “I can’t believe it’s you,” She put her hands to his cheeks and looked deep into his eyes. “I can’t believe they found you.”

  Tears began to stream down her cheeks and she embraced him again. And, in an explosion of passionate relief, planted her lips on his.

  “Now,” she said, wiping his spit from her lips, “how about that coffee?”

  THIRTY-FOUR

  SCIENCE!

  Unlike the rooms they passed through to get here, David found Rosa’s office surprisingly stark and fully devoid of plant life. Instead, a large aquarium, at least a thousand gallons, made up the back wall behind her desk. Schools of perch swam about lazily, while several bass sat suspended a few feet below the surface. A large catfish lumbered about the bottom, slurping up any bit of debris that could possibly be food.

  “Beautiful, aren’t they?” Rosa took a seat in the chair behind her desk. “I do love to watch them. But unlike those goldfish you saw earlier, these do have a purpose. The water in that tank is all scrubbed and continuously filtered, and the fish were bred in captivity. We’ve had enough generations now that any adverse effects from the chemicals in the wild have cleared from their system. Living here, in our little commune, we can provide quite a bit of food from what we grow—but when the occasion calls for it, or they grow too big, these guys do end up on our dinner plates. So, although they’re beautiful, they serve us as well.”

  Knuckles rapped on the door behind David and the door swung open. A young man, no more than sixteen, poked his head into the room.

  “Sam said to bring coffee.”

  “Oh, thank you Matthew.” Rosa squealed with delight. “On the desk, please.”

  The boy entered the room, staring at David as he came in. He placed a stainless-steel carafe and two terracotta coffee cups, shaped like little flower pots with handles, on the desk. His eyes never strayed from David.

  “Pe
rfect, thank you. Now, run along,” Rosa urged.

  The door closed with a click, and the two sat in silence as Rosa poured out two cups of coffee.

  “I do apologize for what happened back there,” she said, taking a sip.

  “The wand thing? I guess you had to be sure.” David took a cup for himself and held it between his hands. The coffee was still hot, and not altogether a welcome option for David as he was still acclimating himself to the shifting temperatures of the conservatory’s various rooms. “You could have told me about it. What was it, anyway? I thought I was about to be probed.”

  “Probed?” Rosa asked. “Oh boy David, you haven’t learned all that much yet, have you? It’s just a proximity reader—scans the NFC field that comes out of that port of yours to check your ID. Bethany sent over your credentials in one of her earlier check-ins, after the port went in.” She took another sip and placed the cup back on her desk. “I do apologize for that too, I suppose. But what I meant was I apologize for the kiss. I bet you have questions.”

  “Questions? Yeah you could say that. I don’t even know why I’m here, or where here even is.”

  “You saw all the people here as we walked to my office, right? All the beds in the big room outside my office? We’re a colony, David. This place is our home. Here we’re able to live our lives, free from the Reconstruction. Free from The Progressives. This conservatory sustains us. It protects us from the dangers outside, while still letting us live within the old, natural world.”

  “But Sam, her eyes …”

  “It protects us, David. But it doesn’t shield us. Some of us, like Sam, have still taken ill from the chemicals. We try to keep this place pure, but we’re also not interested in living in quarantine. We come and go. Some of our farming is still done outdoors—we have a large corn field in back by the outdoor pond. A lot of the equipment’s outside too. Things like the solar panels that keep this place running.”

  “So that’s how you have power.”

  “And clean water, and temperature and humidity controls—and functional air and water scrubbers,” Rosa said, nodding. “I don’t know how much you’ve learned since coming to, but we’re what city people call “Organics” —not that I have much use for the label, but I guess it’s pretty accurate.”

  “So, this place, it’s a kind of base for The Cause?”

  “Not exactly. Some of us here, like me and Sam, we do work for The Cause. That’s what a lot of what you saw in our desert room is for—the tech, I mean. The plants are mostly used for medicine. We use the space for tech too since it’s the one place here where we keep the humidity low enough it doesn’t prematurely damage any of the electronics.” She stood from her desk and approached the glass wall of the aquarium, watching the fish, and continued, “Most people here don’t want to be involved. That’s what this place is for. Like our own little Switzerland, noninterventionist and living our lives away from the fighting and destruction that goes on in the rest of the world—in places like Plasticity.”

  “But if you’re harboring rebels, doesn’t that make you complicit?” David sipped at his coffee.

  “Oh David, like anything in life, it’s much more complicated than that. Don’t think of it in terms so black and white. Yes, we’re here, but we don’t involve the others. They’re free to join us if they like, just as they’re free to ask us to leave. Having us here, however, has had its benefits for them, from time to time.”

  “What kind of benefits?”

  “Let’s just say that even if most Organics are pacifist, we members of The Cause are not.”

  David took a second to contemplate this but decided not to pursue the issue.

  “So then, why did you kiss me back there? Do we know each other?”

  “Know each other?” Rosa laughed again and leaned over the desk, her face inches from his. “David, I made you.”

  THIRTY-FIVE

  THE MAKINGS OF A MAN

  “What do you mean, you made me?” David shoved away from his chair and leaned in dangerously close to Rosa’s face. “Just what the hell is going on?”

  “I don’t know what Calvin or Bethany told you,” Rosa said. “And I don’t know what things might have jostled loose in that brain of yours. But now that you’re here, and since it appears circumstances have changed, what with Calvin and Bethany AWOL, it looks like I have some explaining to do.”

  “You’re god-damn right you do,” David huffed. He returned to his seat and took a few breaths. “Go ahead. Explain.”

  “When you woke up in that field, you had no idea who you were. You still have no idea who you are—and that’s my fault. It’s how we made you.”

  “You keep saying that. What am I? Some kind of android?”

  “Oh, absolutely not. You’re a human, and you’re David Sparks. At least a version of David Sparks. The first iteration of David Sparks, the one you’re based on, was born over one hundred years ago. You’re a clone, David. A clone of the original David Sparks, with all the memories of the David Sparks of the past, preserved in your genetic memory. My job was to bring you back.”

  “Bring me back? For what purpose?”

  “Honestly, I don’t have the answer to that. All I know is that my job was to resuscitate David Sparks, as he was when he was 33 years old.”

  “How?”

  “It’s complicated, David. But think of it like this. I’ve been working on technology to extrapolate, from a combination of DNA and environmental factors, the recreation of a consciousness. The problem is, when we need to make a clone of someone who’s 33 years old, we don’t want to wait for 33 years of growth. So, what we do is separate the mind and body from each other. The body goes through a regimen of advanced growth acceleration, basically taking someone from zygote to adulthood in a matter of months. At the same time, we take your DNA and tap into its memory, building out a recreation of your consciousness which we put into a computer system. Inside that system we’ve carefully reconstructed the world in which you were born into—a kind of simulation. Since your DNA memory can unlock the memories from your entire existence, up to the time at which the DNA was collected, or you died—whichever comes first—we’re able to build out a continual recreation of your life. We take this infant consciousness, and put it into a manufactured brain, and allow it to run through the simulation—again, at increased speed. This allows us to provide your body with a brain, holding a recreation of the David Sparks self that had been formed through your life experiences. Since our brains shape over time, rewiring themselves through the events of our lives, a simple clone of your brain wouldn’t be you—it would have all its own memories—or no memories at all in the case of our accelerated physical cloning tech, since the clone aging takes place with an unconscious mind—a kind of coma. So instead for every clone we make, we actually start with at least two clones—one to allow to grow and advance physically to the required maturity level, and another to harvest a secondary brain from so we can run it through the life simulation and have it be a mirror replica of the desired version of the person. In this case, David Sparks at 33 years, 4 months, 3 days, 14 hours and 16.342 seconds.”

  Rosa paused, waiting for David to respond. When he didn’t, she continued.

  “The David Sparks we wanted was older than you are, David. Not by much … but by enough. They attacked us at our lab and the project terminated prematurely.”

  “So then, how am I here, if the project didn’t work out?”

  “The Progressives found us. I have no idea how, but they did. I don’t think they had any idea what we were up to, but they found out that we had labs in Raleigh and they came in, guns blazing. We were a research station, not a military base. We weren’t prepared for an attack. While the few soldiers we did have held them off, Bethany gave the order. We’d been working on you so long, David. We’d experienced so many failures—but this instance, this iteration of you was finally holding steady. It was either abandon everything, burn the place to the ground and start over ag
ain, losing months of work, or go ahead and do the transfer ahead of schedule.”

  “Why would it matter what my age was? Why did you need that exact version of me?”

  “I don’t know, David. My job was to make you—to make the exact version of you that Bethany requested. The reasons weren’t my concern—only Bethany and Calvin knew that, and well …”

  “So, you made me. Basically time-traveled me, to this time and place, and you have no idea why you did it?”

  “I’m sorry David, but you’re right. I believe in The Cause, and I believed in Bethany. It wasn’t up to me to ask why. It was only up to me to do whatever I could and trust she knew what she was doing.”

  David thought this over, taking another drink of his coffee only to find he already emptied the cup. “So, why don’t I remember anything—other than bits and pieces, if you built my historical memory into this brain?” he asked, tapping his head.

  “You weren’t ready, but we couldn’t abandon you. We had no idea what to do—but we did know if we just brought you into current consciousness you’d have no idea what was going on. The lab was in chaos, we were under attack, and … to be frank … we didn’t even know if your brain could handle that kind of trauma. So, I added in a prototype model of an amnesial blocker I’d been working on. Basically, your memories all happened, and they built your brain, but I made you forget it all. Exact same David from 33 years, 0 months and 16 days, physically speaking—but mentally a blank slate.”

  “But I do remember things, Rosa. In bursts here and there, they come to me, but only when I’m asleep or unconscious.”

  Rosa sighed. “The problem with prototypes. They’re not finished. I had no idea if it would even work. But what I do know is when we turned you on, you had no concept of who you were.”

  “So how did I wake up in the field? What are these memories? Are they real?”

  “Calvin took you from us, to get you out. I don’t have any idea what happened from there, other than that.”