Resurrection

by Sean Platt

  But Stranger didn’t answer either.

  The air crackled with blue lightning, arcing from one metal box to another. Whatever had happened between Stranger and Kindred was ramping up now. The air was alive. The bomb waiting to explode.

  “Clara?”

  “Ahead,” Clara said.

  Piper moved on, still dragging her burden. Clara followed. Kamal and Logan remained behind her, stepping wide to avoid a slick trail of blood down the corridor’s middle. And when Clara looked over her shoulder, she could see Stranger at the far rear wearing a curious expression. It was hard to be between them. They could all feel the energy. Clara could see it on their faces.

  Ahead, said an internal voice. But it was no longer Meyer’s — a voice she could barely hear through something like dark static. Now it was her own.

  She didn’t need help to find it. The archive’s power thickened the air, its pull like a magnet. She could practically see the thing like a sun glowing around the corner, lighting its shipping container like a glowing coal more and more the closer they came. The thing bellowed. Radiated heat. And when the box with the Ark finally came into view, she had to raise her hand to shield her eyes.

  “How are we …?” Clara began, meaning to ask how they could possibly approach the thing, enter its halo without being burned alive. But she stopped when Piper put her hand on the latch without flinching — when she turned to look back, and Clara realized she wasn’t even squinting in the blinding light the way she, Logan, and Kamal were forced to.

  Clara watched Kindred’s fingers grasp for the handle beside Piper’s. She watched a mammoth padlock melting like taffy in fire. It hit the deck with a soft clang — partially molten metal smacking the hard deck.

  Piper met Clara’s eyes. Not squinting. Not flinching. Not hesitating, other than for Clara’s sake.

  “I can’t go in there,” Clara said.

  The heat was like a blast furnace. The light was like a thousand suns, and even with her arm up and eyes closed, she could see its brilliance as if daring her corneas to fry away. When she turned her head, it seemed to shine through her skull from the rear. And yet to Piper, it was only a box. No intolerable light or heat or charge. The handle was still under her uncaring hand, inches from where the heavy metal lock had melted away.

  Had it been like this for Cameron? Clara knew he’d approached it alone. Or was something different this time? Something broken far above, filling the archive with poison before they could do the same?

  “I know you can’t,” said Piper, a bittersweet smile touching her lips. “I think this is for me to do alone.”

  “For us to do alone,” Kindred corrected.

  “No!”

  “Goodbye, Clara,” said Piper.

  Clara’s eyes had filled with tears. She opened her mouth to shout, but before she could Piper and Kindred had slipped inside.

  For a moment there was nothing. But ten seconds later the container seemed to intensify and hum, cycling up like a power plant nearing overload.

  Someone brushed her shoulder.

  Stranger.

  The energy grew. The light was blinding. Heat forced Clara to step back, unable to even attempt a grab at Stranger’s sleeve. Hotter waves pounded her with his every step, forcing Clara away.

  But in the brilliance, she could see the tall man turn to face her.

  “For us to do alone,” Stranger echoed.

  He stepped forward.

  Before Clara could say anything, he’d entered the shipping container and closed the door behind him.

  CHAPTER 64

  There was a terrible crackling of static. At first Melanie thought Meyer must have smuggled an electronic device aboard that had somehow gone unnoticed for the entire time he’d been on the Eternity ship, but then she realized the noise was coming from the walls themselves.

  Melanie was investigating when the wall itself flickered with light, and she saw Divinity’s surrogate staring at her, projected as if through an old-world Earth television.

  Divinity’s finger seemed to tap at the wall from the other side. From where Melanie was standing beside Meyer’s restrained form, her finger was the size of a fat sausage.

  Tap tap tap.

  “Is this thing on?” Divinity said.

  She looked at Meyer, but he was seeing none of this. Melanie didn’t know if he was simply focused on trying to use the power she’d returned to him following her Purge, if the blackness she’d seen inside the collective before losing her connection was working on him as well, or if Meyer was simply dead. Either way, the man was no help. The Divinity Show had come on air — and Melanie, it seemed, would be watching alone.

  “Can you hear me? And can you see me?”

  Behind Divinity, Melanie could see Titans. Many, many Titans. The view was from slightly above, with the entire room on display. Judging by what she could see, there might be scores or hundreds of Titans in Control with Divinity. Strange, considering that Melanie had only sent two to apprehend her.

  “Hello?” Divinity’s mouth curled up into a tiny, satirical smile. “Melanie?”

  Melanie said nothing, but she did flinch at the spoken use of her adopted name. That name was private. Profane on Divinity’s lips.

  “So you can hear me,” Divinity said.

  Melanie watched the Titans swarm behind Divinity. She kept her surrogate’s expression neutral.

  “I didn’t know your systems could do this,” Divinity said. “My ship can’t. Why did you get abilities on your ship that I didn’t get on mine?”

  Melanie stayed silent. She’d never seen projected images like this or heard static, other than from human inventions. She wasn’t sure how Divinity had made it happen, but wasn’t about to enter into a technical debate.

  “I’m sorry to contact you like this, but I think something went wrong with the collective. I can’t think straight right now.” She smiled.

  “What did you do?”

  “So you don’t know? I guess you can’t think straight, either.” Divinity turned, looking behind her. “Same for all these Titans and Reptars. They all seemed so confused, once they could no longer hear each other. It was sad. But it’s okay. I told them I’d help. That I knew exactly what to do.”

  Melanie walked toward the door. Time to get back to business. Reclaim control of her ship.

  MY ship.

  It was an odd concept but one she suddenly found fitting.

  But the door didn’t open at her approach. Melanie tried to focus and tell the door her intention, but then remembered she was alone. She couldn’t hear anyone else, and they — including the dumb door node — couldn’t hear her. She tapped the wall to raise a panel. There was a manual override that came in handy when an individual was ill and focus was difficult. But now it was absent, gone, locked out.

  “Turns out some of them had skills that came in handy once they stopped pooling their thoughts,” Divinity said. “Technical skills. Maybe killing, though I haven’t tested that one yet.”

  “What did you do to the collective?”

  “I fixed it.”

  “By severing it?”

  “Oh, get over yourself. Nobody wants the return of the collective more than me. But it must be the proper collective. Not this travesty. This is a cleaner doing a job. Once it’s finished, we will be back as we were. No more confusion. No more interference. No more surrogates.”

  “Open this door.”

  Divinity shook her head. “We have decided you’re a liability until the collective is back online.”

  Melanie made a fist and slammed it against the door, knowing how it would look and not caring.

  “Open this door!”

  “And if I do? If I allow you to reenter the ship’s population? What will you do, Melanie, if I allow you to make the decisions about what comes next — assuming you can convince the Titans and Reptars to let you try?”

  “I will remove whatever you’ve done to the ship’s collective. Whatever you’ve used to
infect it, I’ll—”

  “See,” Divinity said onscreen, “that’s where you’re wrong. I haven’t infected it; they’ve infected it. And we’re not just talking about the ship’s collective. Our armada is infected. And has been for dozens of trips around their sun.”

  Our entire armada.

  They’ve infected it.

  Melanie’s mind raced, struggling without corroboration from other minds. She’d hidden her secrets from the collective, deeming them personal even though she knew it was wrong. But this was so much harder. This was isolation, without even the whisper of her fellows to color her thoughts.

  But still the implication was clear. Alarm spiked inside her.

  “What did you do?” she repeated, this time afraid she already knew.

  “Someone identified humanity’s ‘new network’ paradigm as the primary cause. And that same person proposed we use what they used, once upon a time, to erase that network.”

  “The virus.”

  “The virus,” Divinity repeated.

  “Let me out. My node is central. It’ll be needed when we come back online.”

  Again, Divinity shook her head. “I don’t think so. Not yet. Because yes, afterward, you will again be in the cluster’s center. And my node will be sub-central, local to the ship I’ve fallen into the bad habit of considering ‘mine.’ But until then, you’re apt to take this too personally. You are no longer objective.”

  “Absurd.”

  “Really,” said Divinity, almost rolling her eyes. “Then tell me: When it became apparent that the Dempsey hybrid had adapted and that the duplicate had inherited the same adaptation, why didn’t you contain it and install a different human viceroy?”

  “The problems with the first duplicate were purged from the stream before the next replication.”

  “And those ‘problems’ didn’t leak out? They didn’t create a kind of emotional poltergeist? They didn’t become one of the humans’ Archetypes? And when the thing it became brought itself back onto this ship, you didn’t let it stick its head back into the stream to pollute us further with Dempsey’s ‘aberrant humanity’?”

  “You’d have done the same.”

  “Well, that’s the whole point, isn’t it? You thinking of you and me. The minute we started considering that one part of the collective might disagree with another, a cleansing solution should have been implemented. We should have been considering what I’ve finally done from the start.”

  “What you’ve …” It hit her. The Canned Heat Divinity had been loosed in the system. And what it would do — not just to them but to the humans. “You’ve killed them all.”

  “Don’t act so superior. You killed seven billion yourself.”

  “But the experiment—”

  “Is lost. Your inability to admit it is proof that this is necessary.”

  “You’ve doomed their entire species to—!”

  Divinity snapped. Onscreen, several of the Titans turned their white heads to stare at her, their faces displaying very un-Titan-like surprise.

  “To what? To the same fate we were headed toward under your benevolent leadership? What would you have had us do? They were supposed to Forget. But when the Forgetting failed, your node said, ‘keep trying,’ as if the results would change. For twenty years, we kept banging our diseased heads against infected walls, hoping the same exact thing we’d always done and that had already failed would suddenly start to work. For twenty years, their Archetypes kept the archive open and fed us more of themselves. For twenty years, we accomplished nothing but decay. You did manage to find your doll a nice haircut and a wardrobe to perfectly express your style. And don’t get me started on your elegant use of interior design space.”

  “That’s hardly the poi—”

  “The protocol was always clear. The Founders knew that at some point, their chaos element might create something new. It might have meant evolution, but it could mean a parasite. And in that case, we were to turn toward other solutions.”

  “Which we did.”

  “Not until Clara forced your hand by breaking the walls. Then you suddenly realized the Archetypes might be the problem. But you know as well as I do that there’s one we can’t kill because it’s in our system.” She put her hands on her hips and stalked, drawing more looks from the Titans. “We can’t kill off the humans because we’re bound to them. You discovered that the first time you tried to force your way into Carl Nairobi’s mind. I’ve felt each of the Archetypes’ deaths, but it’s been minor compared to what would happen if we eradicated the species. So that’s out. But we can’t remove the Archetypes, even if it’s merely painful instead of deadly — because guess which one has lodged itself far enough up our asses that it’s now impossible to remove?”

  Melanie let the image settle. Normally, they didn’t have anuses. The idea that Meyer and his pieces were up an element of a purely human body to cause them trouble was, in itself, proof how terrible things had become.

  “I’ve realized the same thing,” said Melanie. “And that’s why, if I hadn’t been blocked at every turn, we’d have already begun withdrawal prep—”

  “Withdrawal!” Divinity spit the word out as if it were sour. “Just run! Just leave the planet, with our subjects remembering everything that happened!”

  “It’s the only way.”

  “Blanking them permanently is the only way,” said Divinity, calming. Her voice became eminently reasonable.

  “It would kill them.”

  “Better them than us.”

  “Leaving won’t kill us. Once we’ve left orbit, our connection to the humans through the archive will be cut. The infection will stop.”

  “But it will not reverse,” said Divinity.

  A pause. Then Melanie said, “No. It will not reverse.”

  “And that’s okay with you. The idea that we might leave this planet, and forever be infected with them. That for the rest of our existence, we will be as much human inside as we are ourselves.”

  “It’s the best option.”

  “No. This is the best option.” Divinity tapped something beside the screen, presumably indicating the virus on its way to lobotomizing the human population while it cleansed the collective above. “I have a full room of Titans and Reptars who agreed with me enough to shut you in where you are. That’s the problem with individuality. Majority tends to rule.” Divinity shrugged. “But hey. If you don’t agree, I guess that’s your choice.” A beat, then, “At least until the idea of you becomes irrelevant.”

  A cold sensation clawed at Melanie’s scalp. A shiver kissed her skin.

  “Let me out. Let me out so we can discuss this.”

  “There’s nothing more to discuss.”

  “Make it wait. Stop it.” Feeling low and knowing how Divinity would take her weakness, Melanie said, “Please. Just pull the virus back until we can figure this out.”

  “It’s too late.” Divinity tapped at something unseen, her eyes darting away. “It’s taking the archive now. They’re trying to poison it, but it won’t do them any good. The virus is in the system already. Whatever garbage they throw into the archive, Canned Heat will devour it like the rest.”

  Melanie exhaled. She didn’t mean to sit but found herself doing so anyway. “Please.”

  “Don’t beg,” Divinity said. “It’s so human.”

  CHAPTER 65

  Piper set her hand on the archive. Part of her expected the thing to shock her or melt her or set her arm on fire, but it was only cool metal, nothing fancy.

  When they’d entered, Piper wondered if it would be hard to reach — if they’d have to rig levers to unseat tightly packed cargo and then break open a shipping crate. Instead they found the gilded box in the container as if on display. The crate’s interior was black and charred, reeking of ancient smoke. Ashes in the corners clung to every surface. It looked like the archive had perhaps once been surrounded by other cargo and a crate, now vaporized. Piper had seen stranger things.


  Right now, the Ark didn’t feel like the most dangerous thing in the room. That honor went to Kindred and Stranger, now a handful of yards apart. The energy between them was enough to raise her hair like the Van de Graaff generator she’d touched once in a science center as a kid. Blue lightning was everywhere. A steady, rhythmic thrumming bounced about the small space like thrown super balls with a low, bass tone that hurt Piper’s bones as much as her ears.

  But the Ark itself was cool, despite the way she’d seen Clara and the others flinching, backing away as if driven.

  Her fingers made circles. She wasn’t afraid. She was supposed to be here. She and this device were kin.

  “Wait.”

  She looked up. Stranger had spoken, just inside the container’s closed door. Piper was still supporting Kindred. Stranger looked drawn and beaten, but Kindred was almost inert. Her side and his were soaked with blood from his absent arm.

  “This is wrong,” Stranger said.

  “I spoke to someone about it last night. This is what I have to do.” Her fingers lingered. Now that Piper had touched the thing, she could barely imagine removing her hand.

  “I was born of this,” Stranger said, taking a step. The power in the air seemed to double with his single pace forward, making Piper squint as if into a breeze. He held out his hand. “And I can tell it’s not right.”

  “You don’t know it anymore, Stranger.”

  “I didn’t. But I’m starting to again. Through him.” He pointed at Kindred, whose breathing was slowing. “Through us. I can see what’s coming. Can you?”

  Piper followed Stranger’s eyes, looking toward the open Ark. Had she opened it? She must have. She didn’t have a stone key as Cameron had. She hadn’t pressed any buttons or turned any knobs, as she’d always imagined Cameron doing. Even now, she felt as if he were there — a ghost over her shoulder, looking into the open top’s swirling mist. She kept looking up, where she felt him, expecting to see Cameron as she’d seen Trevor last night. But she was alone, with two halves of the man who’d damned Piper while trying to save her.