by Sean Platt
“We have disabled her remotely. But it has become apparent that the infection is systemic.”
“What the fuck does that mean?”
The woman put a hand on Carl’s forehead. It slipped in abundant sweat. His hands were restrained, and his body was pulled tight by ankle straps made of something that felt like cool, flexible steel. He could only raise his neck so far, or else he’d have tried to bite her.
“How did you access the stored race memories?”
“So this is about race,” Carl said. “Bitch.”
The woman half turned toward the Titan with the control ball. He raised a finger, ready to touch.
“Wait!”
The woman turned back to him, looked down. Loose blonde curls hung around her face.
“I don’t know what you mean,” Carl said. “Really.”
“Have you imbibed any substances known as hallucinogenics?”
“No.”
“Do you practice meditation?” Said as if she barely understood the word.
“No. I’m just a blacksmith. And a silversmith. And whatever other smith they need.”
“Can you repair electronics or computers?”
“No. I never—”
The woman cut him off with another smirk. Shit. That had been a trap. Apparently he wasn’t even supposed to know what electronics or computers were, which would have been true maybe an hour ago. And yet he’d answered without confusion.
“You would not be able to access the race memories without a conduit.”
“I don’t know what you mean. Honest.”
“When were you in contact with Clara? Our probe shows her signature within your cortex. Yet each human we left behind after the first apparent incursion was meticulously scanned. We would not have departed without surety that those latent connections had been severed.”
Carl’s face contorted, his bottom lip pursing against the top.
“That’s what happened when you came back the first time,” Carl said, now remembering the arrival as if it were yesterday. Yet another thing they’d all forgotten, but now that it was back in his mind he could remember that day’s terror like fresh blood. It wasn’t just his. He seemed to feel it all, from everyone. “You came to erase us.” He paused. “Again.”
“The collective believed there was a glitch that necessitated an extra pass beyond the scheduled departure date. It was not wholly unexpected. There was an incursion by a party who—”
Carl had no idea how he knew the next thing, but it arrived front and center, certain and clear, as if someone had held a sign in front of his eyes.
“You’re talking about Stranger.”
The woman seemed confused then looked back at her Titan cohorts. Silent knowledge passed between them.
“What do you know of the one you call Stranger?”
“You first.”
The woman glanced. The Titan touched the ball. The ship’s bridge was gone, and again Carl writhed in psychic pain — far greater, it turned out, than anything physical. If Carl had a soul, it was being torn in half. He imagined a thousand dislocations, happening again and again.
But through the pain, the blue-and-yellow grid beyond beckoned him. Its voice was soft and filled with echoes, like many people whispering at once. He tried to crawl his way toward it, now seeing the dots on the grid as familiar, comforting presences. People he knew, rendered in light.
It’s a network of minds, and they can’t touch it. It’s a cancer. The more they try to amputate it, the more it grows. And now it’s gone critical. Now it’s systemic. Now, they’ve lost a few of the cards, and others hold them instead. Or the barbs. Or the leashes.
But the thought vanished as reality returned, the woman’s blue eyes so near Carl’s.
“We can pull the information from you if we have to,” she said. “Like extracting a tooth.”
She settled back, and Carl realized she’d grown an anger born of frustration. He could relate. The trick was that Astrals — and particularly the higher classes — normally couldn’t.
And Carl realized: She’s lying.
“I don’t know Stranger personally. I only know who he is,” Carl said, hoping the woman couldn’t see through his lie. “I just meant, what does he mean to you?”
“Irrelevant.”
“Unless, by knowing context, I could tell you what you want to know.”
The woman’s eyes flicked away, then back.
“He represents a remainder of a chaotic variable in the system.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“Our models are complex by human understanding. You only need to know that he was problematic but eventually accounted for and contained. After the first false restart, certain minds in your human collective stayed connected. It was a glitch we didn’t anticipate. But because we would not leave the planet before ensuring that all memories of your past had been erased — to ensure a fresh restart for the coming epoch — we monitored your minds and, yes, eventually returned to make a second pass.”
“You mean that you tried to erase our minds once, but something didn’t want to erase. So you came back three months later and did it again, more thoroughly.”
“Yes.”
But something wasn’t clicking. As his mind returned to its prior state, Carl remembered the sequence of events perfectly. The Astrals had flooded the planet, erupted volcanoes, and prompted earthquakes. They’d sent billions to indirect deaths and killed off hundreds of millions more with their energy beams. When the world’s population had dwindled to just a few million spread across the planet, the Astrals were supposed to pack up and leave. And that — even to someone who hadn’t forgotten — was what had happened. Except that three months later, the big black ship returned … to erase them all again, and finally get it right.
But now here they were again, eraser and erased together for round three. Whatever that second-pass erasure had been, it certainly hadn’t been effective. Twenty years later, all the old memories were flooding back, down to the Nintendosaurus T-shirt Carl used to wear as a kid.
They came back.
Except that Carl could see quite plainly that they hadn’t actually come back, and that was the missing piece right there.
“You never left,” he said.
“Our ships have been in orbit, beyond your visual range.”
“For twenty years.”
“We experience time differently than you do. Your twenty years is not—”
“Twenty years, you’ve been trying to wipe us clean,” Carl interrupted. “Twenty goddamned years, and you still can’t do it.”
“Tell us about Clara Dempsey,” the woman said.
“I don’t know any Clara Dempsey.”
“Do not lie to us.” The woman’s regained composure was starting to fracture. “We can see your connections to the wider collective. We can see your connection.”
“I don’t know what to tell you.”
The woman slammed her fist on the table beside Carl, in the hollow between his head and right shoulder. Carl looked up as she seemed to question the action too late, wrapping a clutch of blonde hair behind her ear. The ear had a silver ring, like half of an infinity symbol.
She’s kept her shape the entire time, whispered a voice in Carl’s head. She’s kept it because she’s grown a preference — and with her preference comes baggage.
“I don’t know her,” Carl said.
“Even remotely, we could see you in the collective from the others’ vantages. Even when we sent the pulse to shut her down, we could see you and the others from within Clara’s node on the network.”
“Why is this woman Clara so important?”
“She is the seed.”
“So find her, not me. I’m just a guy with a blacksmith shop.”
The woman shook her head. “You are important because he touched you. He changed your path just as he changed it for others.”
“Stranger?”
She nodded.
&
nbsp; “How am I important?”
“That’s for you to say.”
Carl looked up at the woman. Against every intuition in his body — as he lay restrained and tortured — he found himself wanting to feel sorry for her. She wasn’t giving him halfway answers to be obtuse. She was doing it because the twenty-year wrench in their gears wasn’t something they knew how to fix. The Astrals were stymied, and couldn’t go home until the unsolvable problem was finally resolved.
Tell her to turn it up, said that voice from inside. They’ve done what they can to fix our network on wireless. The only remaining option is to plug into the mainframe. They’ve come to purge our minds manually, one at a time. Tell her to go ahead and do it. Turn the machine up. Cut you from the network of other minds by force, if it’s the only way.
“Turn this thing on my head up,” Carl said, forcing the words past heavy lips. “I can’t tell you any more, and I’m getting tired of this shit. So whatever you did to this Clara from your ship? Do it to me now that you’ve got me, if there’s such a big fucking problem.”
The woman met Carl’s eyes, full of challenge.
“Earth is not our only farm. If we cannot purge your minds for the next epoch, the experiment will be a failure, and the stock here will be lost. If that is the case, we will give up on you.”
Carl stared back, heart pounding, forcing his face to stay neutral.
“Help us if you can, Carl Nairobi. Because if you do not, we will have no choice but to leave the planet barren. We will stop your planet’s core and let the solar wind blow your atmosphere from the surface.”
Carl’s tongue found the inside of his lip. “Do what you gotta.”
The woman turned. The Titan touched the sphere. This time when Carl saw the grid, everything felt like it was being ripped to shreds. He had a body only to feel it torn into dripping red pain. He had a mind only to feel it fracture, broken like the brittle shards of a thousand crystal glasses. He watched the network of lines and dots — friendly now, present to comfort rather than control him — waver. He watched its lines stretch and threaten to snap. But Carl held them tight, knowing they mattered, enduring the pain and the suffering, enduring it with the smallest, hardest core of being inside him.
The sensation died in a blink. Carl’s eyes opened, his brain shocked to find them intact.
He rolled his head. The Titan was staring at the woman. His finger hovered over the flashing red sphere — something gone wrong, broken mid-cycle. Then there was a strange, pained sound of squeezing, followed by a scratch. Carl turned his head to look as several wet snapping sounds turned the silence to terror.
The Astral woman had been gripping the table’s edge while the machine tried to cut Carl from the equation. And now, with her breath coming as hard as his, she’d squeezed hard enough to snap her long fingernails from the soft meat beneath.
CHAPTER 9
Clara bolted upright so suddenly that she nearly broke Logan’s nose with her forehead. Sadeem, watching, flinched more sufficiently than Logan. As it was, only Logan’s angle to Clara’s cot saved him a fracture, and her shoulder-length light brown hair merely swept his face like a dust mop. The kid’s reflexes were slow for a caste that seemed to know everything. Or “the young man’s” reflexes these days, ahem.
She said nothing, staring at the rock room’s far wall.
“Clara?” said Sadeem. Logan, beside her, was speechless. It had taken precious minutes to convince Logan that Clara still needed him despite all that had happened between them, and that she’d welcome what seemed to be an intrusion rather than resent it. But before he’d managed to try and reopen the door they’d mostly shut between them (except in dreams, Sadeem imagined), this had happened.
Whatever it was.
Looking at Clara’s profile, in stark relief to the rock behind her, Sadeem suppressed a chill. She’d been odd from the start, warm only once she surrendered her guard. But how many times had Sadeem seen her set focus aside for long enough to smile? The work consumed her. And now she was just this awakened thing without expression, not much more lifelike than she’d been horizontal with her eyes closed.
Her head turned toward them both, and Sadeem instantly saw the change. A half-dozen emotions warred on her smooth, still-innocent face. Sadeem thought she might laugh. Or maybe cry.
“What is it?” Sadeem asked. “What happened?”
But Clara’s attention was on Logan, just now seeming to recognize him. A tiny, almost bittersweet smile dawned. One of her hands flinched, just a bit. Logan reached out and took it.
“Clara? What happened?” Sadeem repeated.
Softly she said, “Logan. Why are you here?”
“Sadeem sent for me.”
“You should have called Stranger.” Clara lifted her blue eyes to Sadeem. They were like azure mercury, as if a glance might catch her irises shifting rather than staying where they belonged. Sadeem had always been her senior in years, experience, and knowledge, but between them Clara had always been the truest elder.
“I sent for both. Logan came first.”
“Where is Stranger?”
“I don’t know. He hasn’t arrived.”
“And Kindred. Did you send for Kindred?”
“Why would I send for your uncle?” Sadeem asked.
Clara shook her head — not in confusion but as if things were coming at her too fast and that particular wrinkle, which required too much explanation, would have to wait for later. “It doesn’t matter. We need to find them. When did you see them last?”
“I haven’t actually seen either,” Logan said. “But I sent someone to Stranger. Yesterday.”
“Who?”
“A blacksmith. Carl. He was having dreams. About the freighter. The one they call ‘the monolith.’”
“Carl Nairobi.”
“I think his name is Smith,” said Logan.
She turned the tables on Logan, taking his hand instead of him taking hers. She looked from Logan to Sadeem, speaking to both.
“Listen to me. Both of you. Sadeem already knows this, but Logan, you and the other Lightborn didn’t want to listen. The blacksmith—”
“Clara …”
“It’s not important right now,” she said, swinging herself around so that her legs rested on the floor, letting the young man’s hand drop. They’d had plenty of fights — Sadeem had only seen a fraction, and been a shoulder for Clara regarding many of the rest. But she brushed it away like an irritating distraction, returning the issue to center.
“The blacksmith, Carl, drove that freighter from South Africa in the flood. It’s his, but he’s forgotten. What were his dreams? Did he tell you?”
“Just that he was at the monolith. With …” Logan’s brow pinched. “With others.”
“And what’s he doing there? In the dream.”
“He didn’t tell me. Why?”
Clara didn’t answer. Instead she turned to Sadeem.
“I had my fingers in it, Sadeem. Same as every day.” She cast a quick apologetic look at Logan; between them, that “every day” had a hammer’s blunt force. “But it was like something started to move. And then it was there — just … there. But they must have felt it, because they stopped repelling me one to one and turned all their attention on me. It was like a blast. I was still in the grid. But I couldn’t move. Or pull back.”
“Pull back from what?” Logan asked.
“They — what? — shut you down?” Sadeem asked, ignoring Logan.
“I gave them a target. I’ve been hidden by the … you know, the firewall thing. But once I got it open …” Clara shrugged.
“So how did you …?” Sadeem trailed off, the rest of his question implied.
“What are you two talking about?” Logan said.
“But it’s happening, Sadeem. The puzzle. Its finally solving itself. But there’s more. Something went wrong.”
“Wrong how?”
Logan physically inserted himself between them. Both shut their op
en mouths, seeming to see him for the first time.
“You called me here,” Logan said. “So how about you clue me in?”
Clara hesitated, and for a long second Sadeem thought she might refuse to tell him out of spite. In the strictest sense, Logan had an opportunity to be involved from the beginning, but in the much more realistic, everyday sense Sadeem would have sided with Logan in the split. The work felt important now that Clara had broken through, but for two decades it had felt like a fool’s errand. Clara had given him little choice but to leave.
“I broke through, Logan,” she said.
“Through what?” Then: “Not through …”
“Yes. Through the Forgetting.”
“But …” Logan looked at Sadeem for help, and for a moment Sadeem thought the man might inform him that breaking through the Forgetting was a lost cause and that they’d been chasing that particular dog for twenty years. As if Sadeem didn’t know. But then Logan turned back to Clara and said, “How?”
“They’ve always erased our minds before they leave. Sadeem told me that’s what the Mullah knew—”
“What they believed,” Logan corrected.
“What they knew,” Clara insisted. “The Astrals and the Mullah have had a pact since much, much further back in time than is commonly believed. There’s always been a group who knew about the Astrals, so they could pave the way.”
“Traitors?” he said, glancing at Sadeem. But it was only a question, despite the word’s baggage.
“More like representatives. The Astrals returned regardless. The Mullah are there to make sure things are fair from our end.”
“Okay,” Logan said.
“Remember how I said humanity is like a big ant farm to them? How the Astrals don’t really care what we do so long as they can observe it?”
“But they judged us, Clara. That’s what the Ark was all about.”
“Yes and no.” Sadeem, watching, knew this was something Clara said that Logan and the others never truly understood. “At some point, if we develop in just the right way between visits, they’ll decide we’ve evolved enough and have become worthy. But even the judgment we saw wasn’t due to our doing something wrong. It was just another test. When the whole thing began — when Cameron opened the Ark — that was humanity saying it was ready to take its shot. All that the Ark had recorded while the Astrals were gone came spilling out and into their minds, sort of like a jury seeing evidence in a trial.”
