Resurrection

by Sean Platt

  She looked to Stranger then followed his eyes back to the Ark. This time, she let her gaze linger. And through the white mist, she saw blackness spreading like ink. Piper gasped, feeling what it was more than knowing. Death. The reaper. Nightmares and terror.

  Piper put her free hand on the side. She applied subtle pressure, like leaning out over a balcony railing to see the world below.

  “You don’t have to do this, Piper,” said Kindred, shocking her. He was so close, his breath now a whisper. He hadn’t moved in what felt like forever, save barely propelling his feet under her lead — an increasingly heavy burden.

  She gently lowered Kindred. But rather than sloughing to the ground, he staggered back to the nearest wall and remained upright, watching her. Stranger took another step. More lightning, and crackle.

  More steps. Stranger and Kindred were six feet apart when Stranger’s side met Piper’s, his hands also on the edge, looking down into the box.

  “I have to go in,” Piper said. “Like Cameron did.”

  “No.”

  “It needs a sacrifice. I saw Trevor last night, Stranger. Meyer sent him. And he told me, I’m the poison. We need a toxin to make it sick.”

  “It’s already sick.” He pointed. The black was swirling with red, like an infection.

  Piper pressed down again. Steeling herself. It would only take one good heave, and she’d be in. Forever.

  “I understand now.” Stranger’s voice was distant, full of awe. Piper looked over and saw him peering into the depths, his gaze fixed.

  Stranger looked at Piper. In his eyes, she saw so much of Meyer.

  “The Astrals thought something had gone wrong with Meyer,” he said, speaking as if someone was feeding him lines. “They tried to fix him, and created us.”

  An intense push from Piper’s side. She felt as if a gust of wind was stirring, threatening to tip her. But her hair wasn’t blowing. It was rising a bit with the charge, popping around her in the growing hum. She felt a hand near hers and saw Kindred beside her, while Stranger flanked the other side. Kindred no longer seemed ill, his face fixed in a grim expression of destiny.

  “I thought I was a remainder,” Stranger said. “I thought I was an element of chaos — something spit out of their machine when they tried to eliminate all the ‘Meyer’ that had caused them so much trouble the first time. I was leftovers. The thing that no longer fit. So I walked the Earth and sowed my disorder, trying to be a wrench in the works. I thought it was chaos for chaos’s sake, that I was staying alive by resisting order. I thought that if I could stir their equation enough, I could carve out a place for myself. It worked, and the system broke. But now I understand. I see what I was actually doing.”

  Piper looked from Stranger to Kindred. Kindred to Stranger. The air hummed. Blue lightning crashed like thunder.

  “Nothing went wrong,” said Kindred on her other side. “It was exactly as it was supposed to be.”

  An arc of energy jumped from Kindred’s chest to Stranger’s, then back.

  Piper waited for more, then finally said, “What do you mean?”

  “Meyer wasn’t a mistake—”

  “He was evolution,” Kindred finished Stranger’s thought.

  Piper looked into the Ark. Red and black were swirling faster and faster. It seemed angry. Furious, like a swarm of wasps waiting for someone to sting.

  Stranger put a gentle hand on Piper’s chest. He pushed her back two steps, where she stood without support, her hand on nothing. Then the men turned to face her. Kindred extended his remaining hand, and Stranger took it.

  “Two halves,” said Kindred.

  “Made whole,” Stranger finished.

  A pulse pounded the container’s walls, making them reverberate like a drum. Piper took an involuntary step back, streaks of light lancing between the men. At first they were only large sparks, but then they multiplied, every inch of Kindred’s left side bound by a thread to Stranger’s right. Their conjoined hands vanished behind the thousands of light threads, pulling them together. Threads became membrane. The double bodies touched, overlapping. The air shook with aural pulses, knocking Piper toward the wall. It was like hot gusts of nothing — a padded smash, forcing her away.

  Their faces were almost lost in light. They closed upon one another, becoming a Gemini silhouette, then finally only one man.

  Nothing but light.

  “You can’t contaminate what’s already poisoned,” said the new thing, reborn of the Ark. “You have to cut it open, and wash the sickness away.”

  Piper flinched forward as the merged body of Kindred and Stranger turned — away from her and toward the open Ark.

  “I hear them on the other side,” said Stranger’s voice as the being looked into the mist.

  From the same mouth came Kindred’s answer, almost a whisper: “I hear them, too.”

  Piper saw what was about to happen and lunged forward, ignoring the sparks and the heat and the light and the power, ignoring the peril and her fear and her brewing tears, ignoring everything but the certainty of what was about to happen.

  But she was too late. By the time she reached the new being, it was already toppling into the void.

  CHAPTER 66

  Meyer was sitting beside a small fire in a room of absolute black. The fire was fresh, not mature, and burned only wood at its surface, with no hot coals beneath it. He was in a camp chair like he’d once had, back on some unknown trip between New York and LA, when they’d all still been together. He’d been a young man, married to Heather, though they were already on their way out. Trevor and Lila were still young enough to believe their dad could be a good father, well before the world had ended and he’d rediscovered the trick of fatherhood.

  A small burning log — somewhere between kindling and the bedrock of a true cook fire — rolled from the center of their new flame. It struck a pile of snapped branches, which began to burn as well.

  Meyer looked up, alarmed for some reason — something he’d forgotten. And he said to Lila, just thirteen years old in this vision, “Lila, put out the fire.”

  “You put it out, Dad. That’s your job.”

  Meyer looked around, but there was no water. No fire extinguisher.

  Another stick rolled away. This one caught a small pile of paper litter, birthing new flame.

  “Come on, Dad,” said a younger Trevor beside Lila. “Put it out before it burns down the forest.”

  “Where’s the water? Where did it go?”

  But now Lila and Trevor were yelling at him, annoyed. The fire was contained but spreading. And that’s when Meyer realized he couldn’t move. None of them could. They were rooted in place, with the tiny fire spreading among them.

  Heather arrived at his shoulder.

  She’d somehow gathered all of their gear in her arms — the tent, the sleeping bags, pillows, extra blankets. With all of it piled atop her small grip, she looked like a cartoon.

  “Smother it, dumbass,” Heather said, rolling her eyes. “Take away the oxygen, and it’ll die just fine.”

  Then she dropped all the gear atop him. It had to weigh hundreds of pounds. In a moment he was covered, unable to see, unable to breathe, unable to—

  “Meyer.”

  His eyes opened. Meyer was on the floor of an all-white room. The camping vision was gone as if it had never been there.

  But it was a beautiful blonde and not Heather above him. It took several long seconds before his brain could place her. He’d somehow ended up on his back, tipped from a bench, seeing her from below as he’d never seen her before, hair draped around her face, closing their two heads into a private space. His hands were now free whereas they’d been recently bound, and the device that had been binding them was open in her palms, which made no sense. Most importantly, her voice and manner were soft as silk atop a featherbed.

  She touched his face. A hand on his cheek. “Are you awake? Can you hear me?”

  “I can hear you.”

  “You
were mumbling. You were in a trance. You fell.”

  “When did I fall?”

  “Minutes ago.”

  “So you woke me. Not the fall.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Why?”

  Meyer was searching, prodding, following his gut. Now he remembered. He’d seen a way to reach the Reptars on the planet as the collective failed — and once their little trick ended, Meyer knew his people had dispatched them and made it to the Ark. Then he’d sent himself to Stranger and Kindred. He’d shown them the way. They’d done what needed doing. And now it was over.

  But then his mind realized why he was following his gut, in this matter of speaking to the silky Astral. He’d only been able to do what he’d done because she’d let him. She’d removed a block from his mind and built him a tunnel. Now she’d freed his hands, and woken him gently. Why?

  She didn’t answer, so Meyer asked something else: “Why did you let me contact them?” He corrected himself. “Why did you help me contact them?”

  “Because you have become the least of evils.”

  “I thought evil was a human concept,” Meyer said, still on the floor and looking straight up.

  “It has become ours as well.”

  “Because of us?”

  She nodded.

  Meyer sat halfway up, onto his elbows. The woman shifted to allow him room. She was squatting, still very close.

  “You can’t hear them anymore, can you?”

  Meyer thought of his dream, of the campfire. Had it only been a dream rather than something prescient? It had dovetailed from his psychic efforts, but now Meyer wondered if he’d simply exhausted himself and collapsed. Because no, he couldn’t hear them. He couldn’t feel Piper or Clara or Stranger or Kindred. Only a sense of foreboding remained. Of something dark just beyond the horizon that he couldn’t quite see.

  “There’s a sickness spreading through the collective. Soon it will extend through our mental junction point in the archive, to the humans on the surface. Then it will erase you. What’s left of humanity will be unable to function. You will be less than animals. You will barely know how to breathe.”

  Meyer sat up farther, alarmed, but the woman kept speaking. He got the impression these were thoughts she’d spent time curating while he’d been dozing. Something he needed to hear, that she needed to tell him.

  “It will erase you. But it will merely cleanse us. That’s why it’s happening. There are parties above this ship that believe that loosing this plague on both our races is the only chance we have to save ourselves.”

  “I thought you couldn’t disagree?” But that, Meyer knew, was wrong. Ever since he’d come aboard, it had been clear the Astrals were different than they’d been. They acted like individuals. Like people.

  “Times have changed.”

  Meyer looked the room over. The chamber was silent. They were alone.

  “Nobody can see or hear us now,” she said, as if anticipating Meyer’s thoughts. “For a while, perhaps while it resets for the cleaning, the collective has gone dark. At first it terrified me. I had only my own thoughts. But then I realized something that scared me even more — I was hearing thoughts through the lens of this surrogate’s brain. You can’t know what it’s like to be us, to be on our own.”

  Meyer watched her, waiting, knowing he shouldn’t interrupt.

  “But after a while, I grew used to the quiet. Then something seemed to unlock inside me.”

  “Unlock?”

  “We know very little of our Founders — the first of our kind, that traveled the universe to seed populations like yours. They are to us what gods are to humans. We have no memories of them. Some believe that bank is simply fragile, and that the oldest memories will always be lost over time. But there is another school of thought, though it only surfaces in those who find ways to separate themselves from the collective for long periods of time. An alternate reason for the absence of Founder memories within us.”

  “What is it?”

  “That the Founders existed before the collective. That there was once a day when we were disconnected. When we were like you.”

  Meyer came to his knees. He moved to the bench along the wall and sat on it, silent. The woman was still on the floor, now sitting. Beneath him like a pupil, though clearly she was the teacher.

  “In my natural form, I am the nerve center of the collective around your planet. In human terms, I am this fleet’s admiral, whereas the instances of Divinity you’ve seen are captains of ships. My class is considered core to our larger collective, and one of the reasons some feel it’s so important to cleanse us before we leave your planet. They worry that if we go home infected, I will pollute the rest of them. But there’s another distinction the Eternity class has beyond the others that I’m only now seeing.”

  Meyer watched her, fascinated. A clock was ticking inside, playing her words over with thoughts of a dark metronome metering beats. Something had happened on the surface and now she told him of another something on the ship. Both felt like bombs. But this moment to Meyer was a fold in time, bound to last as long as it had to.

  “We are secret-keepers. But those secrets hidden inside me — and surely within all Eternity — are individual memories, incredibly ancient. Not fragile, but quiet. They can only be heard when the collective is silent. Those secrets inside only light up, it seems, when the power is off, and we are alone in the dark.”

  “What secrets?”

  “That the chaos sown into your population by the Founders is not as unpredictable as it seems. I can see it clearly now. We centered on you because we thought you were broken. You were a hybrid that had somehow malfunctioned, or so we believed. But that’s not the case. The Founders knew you would happen. Not you, Meyer Dempsey, but something like you. Because that’s the nature of chaos: Its variables make it predictable. Given enough time, every unlikely possibility will inevitably occur.”

  “What are you talking about?” Meyer asked.

  “Evolution.”

  “Evolution?”

  “We cannot evolve as long as we remain homogenous. Evolution, as your planet has seen, involves variation. It requires experiments that fail and a few that succeed. There must be difference. There must be risk. There must be loss for there to be gain. Our Founders knew this. They knew we would ascend and reach an equilibrium. We would become a collective, and in that collective, we would be strong. But once we became strong, we would stall. And once that happened, there would be no way for us to advance further from within. It could only happen if we were acted upon by an outside force.”

  “Us,” Meyer said.

  “You,” she repeated. “Now that the collective is quiet, I can see the Founders’ intentions — just as they must have intended in a dire situation such as the one we find ourselves in. Only a catastrophe could shut us down, and only in a shutdown could Eternity hear the ancient thoughts. But yes, you are that force. A population with an anomaly we could not solve. A new breed of subjects that confounded our best efforts, and gave us the spark required to take our next steps.”

  “Are you saying that this is destiny?”

  She shook her head. “I’m saying that chaos is mathematical. This moment — here and now, with you and me — was not destined. But a moment like it? A moment where the chaos instilled by the Founders finally produced a large enough anomaly to do what had to be done? According to the math, that was always inevitable.”

  “So what comes next?” Without the Astral collective, Meyer himself felt mostly alone, stripped of his recently discovered powers. He was blind. They were two people in the dark, stumbling along by feel.

  “That’s up to you.”

  “But I can’t feel the collective either.”

  “What can you feel?”

  Eternity waited, as if she already knew. Then he saw the answer and gave it. “I can still feel the Ark. It’s open. And Kindred and Stranger … They did something to it.” He shook his head. “I can’t describe it
.”

  “You don’t need to describe it. You just need to do it.”

  “Do what?”

  She watched him again, and in Meyer’s mind, he saw his dream from moments before: Trevor, Lila, and Heather by the fire. The feeling that the fire was spreading too fast, and that they had no water to douse it.

  Just smother it.

  Meyer nodded at the woman. He understood. And he knew.

  Meyer met the Astral’s blue eyes, as if seeing her for the first time. He knew the aliens could animate human bodies, but all of a sudden this struck him as something different. More than a puppet before him. This was something more.

  “What are you?” Meyer asked,

  “You can call me Melanie,” she said.

  CHAPTER 67

  Clara staggered back, now around a corner, the presence of an enormous metal box doing nothing to quiet the light or staunch the heat. She thought of Stranger. Of Kindred. Of Piper.

  A great and intense sorrow struck her, suddenly sure that two of the three were gone. It pulled her back like a hook from the pit of her stomach. She wanted to cry but had no moisture left.

  The air grew brighter. And brighter.

  Logan took her hand, but even as she turned to looked right at their braided digits, Clara could not see them. She could only hear Logan inside her mind, trodding the long-forgotten Lightborn paths they’d once shared.

  Light.

  Heat.

  There was nothing else in the world.

  The next voice wasn’t Logan’s. Or Kamal’s. It wasn’t even a man’s.

  Clara turned. Without thinking, she opened her eyes and saw her mother sitting behind her, visible even in the intense brightness, plain as day.

  “It’s almost over,” Lila said.

  From the shipping container — from the Ark itself — there was a brilliant wave of light.

  And then Clara saw no more.

  CHAPTER 68

  On the surface, in a village not far from The Clearing, a woman named Mary Welch gripped her head with a brain-splitting headache. She sometimes got them — more before they’d all forgotten their pasts, but plenty during the days when she’d been the clueless wife of a farmer as well — but this was the worst one in a while. It felt like there was a steel band around her skull, tightened by a malicious god. Hot rocks in her neck ground together whenever she turned her head. The spike through her temple was coated in acid.