Resurrection

by Sean Platt

  “I thought he might,” Clara said.

  “Do you believe it? That Meyer is …”

  “Yes.”

  “Just like that?”

  Clara nodded. “Just like that.”

  Piper thought about pressing further. Somehow she’d expected a no. It might help Piper to reconcile what she didn’t doubt herself, though part of her very much wanted to. On one level she’d raised this so that Clara could talk her out of believing Kamal. But on another she had to tip a virtual hat to Clara’s straight-faced acceptance.

  “I felt like he’d changed when they returned him. And then when I learned that they’d returned someone else — and that the real Meyer had stayed on the ship — it all made sense. Now I find out he’s been one of them all along, and it doesn’t strike me as odd at all. Why is that?”

  “Because he’s not one of them. He’s himself.” Another tiny smile creased Clara’s lips, but it wasn’t for Piper. She was looking forward, smiling for herself. “And I can tell from what I see in the collectives — both collectives: he’s not what they expected, either.”

  “Can you talk to him? With your mind?”

  “Not directly. But he’s there, and so am I.” Clara looked over, and the maturity of her expression struck Piper as almost jaded. She’d once been a thirty-year-old in a child’s body, and now she was like an old woman in the body of a twentysomething. “And I can see how he’s spreading through their minds, as he realizes more and more that it’s his collective, too. He’s like a cancer. Something they set loose, and now can’t contain.”

  “Kamal said you know what we’re supposed to do.”

  Clara nodded, that cryptic little smile still on her lips. “We need the Ark. On the ship.”

  “Why?”

  Clara laughed.

  “Clara?”

  She kept chuckling, giddy like a kid.

  “What?”

  “It’s ironic.”

  “What’s ironic?” Clara seemed almost manic, and this from a woman who barely ever smiled. The change was almost scary, and Piper felt a need to push through whatever this was, to get a sensible answer for her strange mood.

  “Mom told me that you were always giving her crap.”

  “Giving her crap?” Piper searched her feelings. As Clara brightened, some of Piper’s own empathic sense was returning. Based on what she could feel from Clara, the woman wasn’t unhinging. Clara felt sure and confident, but Piper couldn’t tell why, or what epiphany she might be having.

  Clara turned to Piper, now openly smiling. “For playing games. For always being online. Mom said that when you guys went to dinner, she’d take her little pocket computer — her phone, though she said it was a computer, too — and she’d pull it out and mess with it at the table. And that when she did, you’d yell at her for it.”

  Piper felt her lips soften into a sympathetic crease. So it wasn’t confidence she was getting from Clara after all. It was nostalgia and sorrow.

  “Honey, I’m so sorry.”

  “She said that one time, she brought her headphones, too. And that you really lost it. You wanted to have a nice dinner out, but Mom put on her headphones and started watching videos right there at the table.”

  Piper put an arm around Clara’s shoulders.

  “Your Uncle Trevor used to do it, too. I hated it, but Meyer liked that it kept you occupied. He’d let them stare at their little screens like zombies because then we could talk without interruption. Every once in a while I’d try to lay down the law and insist that there were no devices at the table, but it never lasted. Because then Lila and Trevor would whine and roll their eyes and complain, and we’d usually end up fighting. So Meyer would say, ‘Just let them do it, Piper, so we can eat in peace.’”

  Clara laughed, reaching back to a time she’d never experienced. Some of the networks had survived the occupation, but they’d been paltry compared to the once-mighty Internet. There’d been no social networks after Astral Day, no constant pings of incoming emails chiming from everyone’s pockets. Before that fateful day you’d enter a group and only see the tops of heads as everyone stared down at their screens.

  “Everyone was like that back then, always checking this or that. And your grandpa used to love watching that series The Beam, about this hyperconnected future world where everyone was always online with body and mind. But when I suggested that the world was heading there for real, he laughed at me. But it was. Nobody could go five minutes without checking their email or something else inane.”

  “You make it sound so horrible.”

  “In concept. But trust me, I was as addicted like everyone else.” Piper sighed. “It was hard not to be. It was like everyone, everywhere, was on a drug. Even when you saw what it was doing to our culture — to our families, when everyone could sit at the same table and pay no attention to each other, like your mom and her brother at dinner — you couldn’t make yourself stop. Scientists said it was changing our brains. That for your parents’ generation, the constant multitasking and distractions was altering them on a biological level. There were studies, showing how modern kids’ brains worked differently from adult brains.”

  Piper looked ahead. Across the barren landscape.

  “Well, I guess we solved that problem. It only took an apocalypse.”

  She turned to Clara, but Clara was still looking forward, taking in Piper’s sarcasm like a point in a logical proof.

  “All it took,” Clara repeated.

  “Clara?”

  “That’s what made the difference, Grandma.”

  “What?”

  “The Astrals want us to form a collective like theirs. Each time they come back, I think we’ve come closer, but still no cigar. That’s what Kamal said Mara’s records showed — past cultures who seemed to have developed psychic bonds, like the Astrals’. But for one reason or another, those cultures weren’t enough, so the Astrals erased them and started over. This time, we hadn’t developed those bonds at all. We weren’t remotely psychic — at least not in ways we understood. But we’d still learned to think as a collective. And this time, it was in a way they didn’t understand.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “That’s what the Internet was. Our collective. It allowed people all around the world to think as one. It was much more effective than anything the Egyptians or Mayans came up with; it was just made of wires and computers instead of thought waves. They shut it down when they destroyed our cities. But you nailed it.” Clara tapped her head. “Our brains were already changed.”

  “But you weren’t even around then.”

  “Mom’s brain was different. Dad’s brain, too. Yours, probably, but I’m sure it was a bigger difference for people raised after the collective was already built. Once the Internet was gone and the Astrals started planting those stones and waking our natural abilities, we had a head start with all those connections. The aliens thought they knew what we were capable of, but they were wrong. They underestimated our collective, and thought they could step on it like they had in the past. But this time, we’d become something different. Our collective was unique. They treated us like Cousin Timmy, but the Internet must have primed us to become something bigger. Better.”

  Piper watched Clara, feeling dizzy. She hadn’t been waxing nostalgic at all. This was something else.

  “They didn’t expect the Lightborn. The products of next-generation, network-ready minds exposed to the Astrals’ own intense psychic energy. They didn’t expect Grandpa, and what might happen if they tried to fix what they thought had broken with his special mind. They didn’t expect that trying to eliminate the problem might create the Pall. They didn’t expect Kindred. They didn’t expect Stranger.”

  Clara turned to face Piper. Her face wasn’t bothered, even with this daunting journey still before them.

  “And they didn’t expect me, born in the middle of it all.”

  Watching Clara’s suddenly hard and vengeful eyes, Piper swallowed. They were
still marching in the hot sun, but suddenly she felt ice cold.

  “They can’t figure out our minds. They can only truly know us through their Ark — the relic they can’t touch until the next judgment, that’s ours to fill with memories and deeds in the meantime.”

  “Clara?” Piper asked, needing to ask a question, not wanting to know the answer. “Why are we going to the freighter?”

  “To take back the Ark,” Clara said, “and poison it.”

  CHAPTER 38

  Liza was in an all-white space. It was like floating in the middle of nothing except that she could definitely feel a floor underfoot. The wolves had brought her here. Or at least, her ride had. She’d never actually seen the wolves.

  “Liza.”

  Liza looked up. She’d been looking down, trying to reconcile the floating. There was a woman in front of her. Medium height with short brown hair. Seeing her took Liza back in time and shook some of the dust from her increasingly foggy head. Because as she noticed the woman’s pretty brown hair, and how carefully it was styled, Liza became aware of her own rat’s nest. Hadn’t she once been an important person? She’d always kept her shit together, and yet here she was, in front of this other important person, with her hair all mussed. It was unforgivable.

  “Your name is Liza now, right?”

  Liza wasn’t sure how to respond. Yes, her name was Liza. But the woman’s implication was that it might not always have been.

  “Yes. And who are you?”

  “You can call me Divinity.”

  Liza’s brow furrowed. “Do I know you?”

  “We’ve met before. But you probably don’t remember.”

  “Why not?”

  The woman’s mouth moved. It was a human mouth, and that was confusing. Liza felt a little drunk, but she’d once been a perfectly cogent person. And as that person, she was quite certain she’d known the word “Divinity.” And it referred either to gods (not relevant) or the high class of Astrals. But this woman was clearly human.

  “Because you’ve been erased.”

  “Erased?” The word, like the implication that Liza might not always have been named Liza, didn’t make sense.

  “Do you remember who you are?”

  “I’m Liza Knight. I run the rectory in The Clearing.” She could do better than that. “I was the viceroy of Roman Sands.”

  “I meant, do you remember what you are?”

  Liza puzzled.

  “Your erasure had complications. We thought we could do it cleanly, but we were wrong.”

  “Why were you wrong?” Liza asked, not understanding the context behind her own question.

  “The other hybrid was able to be erased during the Forgetting along with the humans. You retained your memories, per the intention. We thought the other Forgot because of the defects we’d already identified, and that implied your bond didn’t carry the same defects. His Replacement caused schisms and birthed a Remainder. We did not attempt to replace you. Do you remember?”

  Liza shrugged. It sounded like a lot of metaphysical mumbo jumbo. She was more preoccupied with what had happened to her backpack. Someone had wanted her to go and find it because that person couldn’t. Was it this woman? Liza wasn’t sure.

  “There were complications,” Divinity said.

  “Nobody’s perfect.”

  The woman looked at her cohorts, whom Liza, with her foggy head, was only now starting to recognize. She’d missed them at first. They were white-skinned against the room’s background.

  “This isn’t working. Dissolve her erasure block. Do we need a probe?” the woman asked one of the Titans. The Titan shook its head. The exchange was simple but struck Liza as odd. Another strange, above-the-subconscious behavior Liza had never seen from an Astral.

  “Try to relax,” Divinity said.

  Liza opened her mouth to ask what that meant, but then one of the Titans tapped a tablet in his massive hands, and the air crackled. Every muscle in her body seemed to tense, and then it was over and her head was suddenly clearer, a bit more focused.

  “How’s that?” Divinity asked. “How do you feel?”

  Liza blinked. She was in an all-white room with a brown-haired woman and two Titans, same as before. But it all struck her as if she’d just walked in, though she knew she’d been here for a while.

  “How do you feel?” Divinity repeated.

  “I’m fine.”

  “Do you remember meeting me before?”

  Liza didn’t. Not entirely. She searched her mind and came up only with the same vague feeling of familiarity. There was something else, like a faded snapshot: a ghost of a memory involving her rectory’s cafeteria, this woman, and a sense of foreboding.

  “No.”

  “It might return. It might not. I don’t have time to wait. Do you remember … anything else?”

  Liza blinked again. She almost gasped as — in the split second of darkness with her eyelids shut — she seemed to see something staring back at her. A black mass: a giant worm with no mouth or face — only a pair of giant yellow eyes. The sight made her start. She bucked backward and almost fell, one of the Titans grabbing Liza’s arm to steady her.

  “What the fuck?”

  Divinity turned to one of the Titans. “She sees it.”

  And an echo, repeated inside Liza’s head: She sees it. She sees it. She sees it. As if Divinity’s voice were plucked and repeated, a call sent out and perpetuated by other sources.

  “Listen to me,” Divinity said, now taking Liza’s shoulders and staring into her eyes. “I don’t have time to be anything other than blunt. You, as Liza Knight of Cape Town, are host to an observer. It might frighten you as the top part of your mind adjusts to what it believes is news, but this is something you’ve always known deep down, because the observer has always been with you. Breathe.”

  Liza felt the peak of an adrenaline spike. She shook beneath Divinity’s hands, her heart rate climbing. She wanted to run, but the woman’s grip was strong. Her breaths were short and fast, her eyes darting everywhere. Every time she blinked, she saw that thing, looking back at her, coiled inside.

  “Breathe. The feeling will pass.”

  “What the fuck is that thing?” Liza demanded.

  “It’s part of you. It always has been. But it’s also part of us. I need you to focus, Liza. It’s like remembering how to inhale. Your body knows it even if panic wants you to forget. You must accept this — and do it fast. Just like you need to inhale for your body to keep living, so you need to integrate this knowledge of what you’ve always known. Can you do that?”

  Fuck no, she couldn’t do that. There was a worm inside her mind, with giant yellow eyes. Liza’s hammering pulse was in her neck. In her clenching hands. In her tiny, shallow breaths.

  “Liza.” Divinity shook her. “Liza!”

  Liza’s head snapped to center.

  “Watch my eyes.”

  Liza held them, willing herself to Divinity’s requested calm. Slowly, grudgingly, it came. Then, still keyed up, Liza watched those brown irises and said, “You’re not human.”

  “This body is a surrogate.”

  “Am I a surrogate?”

  “You are a hybrid. I can feel the observer touching our collective. You’re intertwined with the observer. I know you can access all the answers you need if you’ll allow it to happen. Do you see?”

  Liza didn’t. But then, as she watched the woman’s eyes, answers came. Fog departed. Clarity returned.

  “It was you in my head. You sent me to that canyon. To that cache of stuff.”

  “Circumstances made a trip necessary, and I could not go myself.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s complicated.”

  Liza dipped her toe into the new mental water. Her memories were more or less crisp, save that one blank spot between the rectory and the moment she’d awakened near the freighter to find Peers Basara and Stranger. And she had new memories, too. New senses that must be her mind — or the observ
er’s — reaching into the Astral collective. She could feel its concerns. Its rough spots. Two places, in particular, where things weren’t as harmonious as a collective was supposed to be.

  “Who is Eternity?” Liza asked, feeling one of the rough spots.

  “An Astral who’s been compromised. Which is why I need your help.”

  “Where is she?”

  “She is on this ship. Being held captive.”

  “By who?”

  Divinity’s mouth worked again, probably deciding if she could trust Liza enough to tell her a closely held truth.

  “A hostile.”

  Liza reached into the collective. It was there. Like Eternity. But there was a block — something twisted enough that she couldn’t see.

  “I know you can’t see far,” Divinity said, as if reading Liza’s facial expression. “Eternity’s … abduction … has caused more knots than our collective is equipped to deal with. Communication has broken down. In many cases we’re having to transmit mouth to ear like humans.”

  “Shout for more Titans. Let’s break in there and get her back,” said Liza.

  For a third time, Divinity seemed to consider. “Many Titans have been compromised, as well. These two will help us.” She nodded at the pair. “But you should not leave this room without me because others might be … less helpful.”

  “But you’re a group. Like a hive mind. All thinking as one?”

  “That’s the way it’s supposed to be, but right now it is not. There is too much to explain. I just need to know if you’re with me.”

  “With you?” It was a bizarre question from an Astral. Humans thought this way. Not aliens. Not Liza, if she was to believe the big yellow eyes she was slowly getting used to seeing.

  “Look inside, Liza. Consult your observer. I know you can feel it. I can feel you feeling it. Haven’t you ever felt our pull? A desire to understand what Astrals are doing and perhaps even join us?”