by Jeff Wheeler
“That’s a waste of a lifetime. You go for this job. Whether or not you are compromised, you change afterwards. Very efficient.” As he turns, he says, “And no more day jobs. Now you know the risks.”
* * *
My life’s an irony. A hopeless one at that.
Right click for menu to add groups and entries. Edit or re-order any item. Use right click in editor to select which entry to paste. A hundred lifetimes seem like a very long time. I mean, anyone would welcome the convenience of not having to die and be reset every hundred years. But even though these lives are mine to wield as I see fit, it appears I will not outlive a third of one lifetime. Mr. Dixen has made sure of that. And the fact that I’ll inevitably lose yet another lifetime tonight widens the massive hole in my heart.
From across the road, somewhere in a darker part of the lamplit street’s penumbra, my eyes comb the imposing spires of the Poi Security building. The resulting strain in my neck must be a physical manifestation of the foreboding with which the structure torments my heart. Somewhere, in a glass tank probably, inside those towers buzz the prototypes of an invention. The wasps. The information my handler beamed into my biocrest suggests they are a new set of scanners in the form of tiny insect-like robots. And if they are anything like those pesky endangered invertebrates, whose work in the ecosystem has now mostly been designated to nanotechnology, they can’t be allowed to go beyond their prototype phase.
I slip across the lonely road and squat in a corner of the building whose gloom blends with my black elastic jacket and slacks. And when I’m certain that no one has discerned my intrusion, I unfurl my pack and tiptoe around the massive structure, planting nano-bursts on strategic pillars. Of course, I do understand how dangerous the explosives are. I do understand that when detonated they will unleash tiny robots that will eat every morsel of the building, including the things inside it, whether living or nonliving. I’ve never destroyed anything of this magnitude before, but the possibility that these wasps can fly around slipping into leather jackets and scanning crests overrides my judgement and makes my imminent action a necessity.
Since the explosives aren’t programmed to ignore anything with a human heat signature, and since I can’t murder the guards and possibly a few scientists that prefer late nights to early sleep, I step out toward the glass front door after planting the explosives. With any luck, the guards will spot me and hesitate to wield their sidearms long enough for me to scream “bomb,” touch a ray, and disappear. This is why I anchored on an old piece of paper and let it scamper off into Keepings Park a mile from here, a mile, which fits well within the range of the detonator in my hand. I’ll afford the guards and scientists five minutes to evacuate. Then I’ll press the bloody button.
When I reach the entrance, I discover that there are no guards patrolling the reception—not a single one. I’m instead welcomed by the tiny blue lights dancing in the air around it as if the door were a real flower (not one of the artificial ones that horticulturists now parade in their stores) and the lights were butterflies. They gather around me, buzzing like bees but not attacking, even as I cup a hand in an attempt to trap one.
That’s when the thought hits me. And it does so too late, as it’s accompanied by a pang that nearly has me grabbing my head with my hands. The pang becomes a headache, orchestrating an awful arrhythmic throbbing inside my brain. And I stumble to the paved ground with a great feeling of wooziness . . . disorientation. The structure begins to blare a name. Not my present name, but one I haven’t heard or used in a long time. The first name I ever answered to.
“Intruder! Guiyan Dungram! Intruder! Guiyan Dungram!”
Therefore, even in my immense confusion and bottled-up screams, I realise, much to my dismay, that the wasps have passed the prototype phase, and my soul crest, without any whiff of doubt, has been scanned. I stagger to my feet and begin to run, as quickly and precisely as my quaking legs and dazed mind can manage. It is only after I have run a few blocks that I realise my hand no longer clutches the detonator.
I stop dead and stand there in the middle of the road, panting and sweating, my chaotic mind jumping from thought to thought—dashing back to retrieve the detonator, the need for me to touch one of the many fine transit rays floating around me, the implications of my soul crest having been compromised, the lie I’ll tell Mr. Dixen concerning my failure, and many other thoughts, strange thoughts I can swear are alien to my mind.
Just then, an effulgent white light from a block or two farther in the direction I was running exposes me. And before my hands can jump to my face in reaction to the exposure, a spotlight flashes from a glider in the sky and stays. How did I not hear their approach? In fact, I still cannot hear the thrumming of the glider or even the cry of sirens.
A man steps forward from the light on the ground, about six other men in his wake. His tall, athletic silhouette mirrors my memory of the detective. He must have been tracking me; hence the police’s precise response. Since I don’t have the stomach to confront him, mainly for the shame of it, I sketch a mental drawing of my anchor—the paper’s rectangular shape and the blue lines that striped its brown (or was it white?) surface. Then tugging off my glove, I reach out with my right hand, touch a ray, and brace myself for the electrifying feeling that should follow.
Instead, I feel nothing. I can now hear my ears ringing over the muffled din that suggests the police’s proximity. And I still stand helpless under the revealing scrutiny of the lights. The detective and his comrades are now a few yards away.
I begin to draw, or rather paint, again, this time trying to include the texture and smell of the paper. I, however, feel the image slipping away, drowning in the otherworldly thoughts that keep splashing around in my head, thoughts I’m certain cannot be mine. Even so, I reach out for a ray again, but nothing happens.
“Ms. Guiyan Dungram,” the detective calls. Although his face is shaded in darkness, I can sense an aura of disappointment emanating from him. “That is your real name, isn’t it? Why do you look to the rays?” He makes a “go and get her” wave of his right hand, and his men scuttle towards me.
I recoil, the weight of my juddering heart making my legs drag. I can’t continue summoning the paper. It isn’t working. But I can at least rely on the rays to carry me away from my predicament. It doesn’t matter that without an anchor to focus my bearing, they can hurtle me off a cliff if there’s one around, or even bury me a quarter mile in the ground. I put my hands up, feigning a surrender, but in truth reaching for the closest ray.
An explosion booms behind me, its deafening waves and initial spark throwing everyone, including me, off their feet. As I regain my stance, I am tempted to look over my shoulder to ascertain whether the sound came from the Poi Security building and to wonder how that happened, since I didn’t press the detonator, but instead I touch a ray in that moment of chaos. The ray flows through me, sending an invigorating current up and down my whole body.
When the sensation leaves me, I find myself standing just a couple of metres from where I previously was. A painful cough escapes me. Although it draws out no blood and my pores aren’t bleeding (this is probably because the ray didn’t hold me for long), it does draw the attention of the detective whose manner is riddled with utter confusion. That he and his men do not immediately dart toward me to apprehend me is probably because they don’t understand what just happened, how I vanished and appeared again.
I don’t dawdle—I really need to get to Keepings Park where my handler waits, and it doesn’t matter how many rays I have to let rip me apart. I just throw my hand into another one. The ensuing pain as the lit street fades from my view is excruciating enough to have me screaming. Everything else becomes blackness and then murky images, as if I have ventured into a familiar nightmare. Perhaps this, along with my present failure, is connected to my soul crest being scanned.
I think this because I usually am not conscious, even if in a dreamlike state, while in the rays. But this time I
see things. I see Mr. Dixen and myself wed. I see us build the portals. I see him capture and clone me. I see him uproot my memories and implant new ones—like the memory of my foster parents. I see him kill the original me. And somehow I know why.
And when the ray releases me and places me, not in a random location, but beside my handler’s glider in Keepings Park, even though I didn’t pull on my anchor, I also know why. I do not need an anchor to travel the rays. And I also do not need an object to remain where I anchored on it in order to summon it to me. The strange thoughts clouding my mind are memories—my memories—from the time when Mr. Dixen and I were husband and wife.
I remember my life as a retriever stealing from corporations and selling to the highest bidder. I remember the first time my biocrest was compromised and I couldn’t escape the authorities. I remember the day Mr. Dixen brought his machines and I my magic, and we tore rips in the fabric of the universe to build the portals. I remember that while a touch with my reincarnation causes a switch of bodies, Mr Dixen touching his caused a merging of bodies. And so he touched the ninety-nine reincarnations accessible to him to become what he is today.
But he soon realised that the portals are tied to my magic, that once I’m dead, they will become unstable. And when they finally crumble, he will disintegrate and die, a hundred lifetimes gone in a whiff. This was why he made many clones of me, so that when one clone dies he can wake another, keeping the portals open indefinitely and keeping himself alive.
As I lie beside the glider, bleeding from so many holes, waiting for my nanites to heal me, the memory got me thinking. If I’m a clone, where do my reincarnations come from? My original self and perhaps previous clones ought to have exhausted the ninety-nine reincarnations of me accessible to us. Surely, cloning a person doesn’t also clone the person’s reincarnations.
Someone looms over me. My handler is the only one fond of that. “What was your anchor?” is the first thing he says.
“A p-paper,” I mutter through the blood flooding my mouth and dripping down the sides of my lips.
For the first time, he seems worried. He suspects. I can tell from the way he hurries about, inspecting the ground around us. When he returns, his voice borders on a growl. “There’s no paper here.”
I don’t tell him that I somehow travelled the rays without an anchor or that I now know that I can summon objects to me whether or not they’ve moved—the former requires more concentration and the latter a more vivid mental likeness. “We have to go.” I try to push myself up but fall back down. “The detective is still tracking me.”
He considers me for a while. “That’s fixable,” he says, as if my life were merely a machine with spare parts—how long has this been going on? “So was the mess you left behind. It has been fixed.”
I feel my energy seeping away through my wounds so much that when he takes to his glider, I can’t follow. I just lie there and let the weakness render me unconscious.
* * *
My life’s an irony. A daunting one at that.
One would think that having glimpsed my past and the extent of my powers, I would feel a little less subjugated or daunted. However, opening my eyes and finding myself sprawling inside the first pentagon that marks the rough floor of the Hall and beside a paper instructing me to make the switch reaffirms how hopeless I am against Mr. Dixen.
I don’t understand it. I push myself to a sitting position. How can they treat me this way—like a slave branded with an eternity of servitude—when they know my history? For how long will this continue? The commands. The lies. The betrayal. I want to step into a portal and disappear to a distant timeline in my past, if not to escape the fact that my soul crest is compromised, then to escape Mr. Dixen himself.
Unfortunately, he will be in that timeline waiting for me. There is no escaping him. There is only confronting him.
I scramble to my feet, feeling rejuvenated. My wounds have all closed. I hurry to grab the blade on the sixty-first pentagon, slit my left palm open, and begin to coat the lines of the pentagons—all ninety-nine of them—with my blood. It takes me nearly two hours and an inadvisable amount of blood. The outlines of the portals now glow red. And I reckon that if we managed to summon ninety-nine of Mr. Dixen’s reincarnations at the same time in the past, I should be able to replicate the event using my own reincarnations.
I settle cross-legged in my own pentagon and chant in Igbo to the others. The building appears to vibrate so much that I dread the guards outside will feel the tremor and break their code of never venturing into the Hall with me. But the quake lasts only for a while, and then the pentagons light up, their ethereal azure shafts rising and setting the hall aglow.
The first reincarnation to come through is from my second lifetime. Her hair is auburn and her eyes are bespectacled. She is the one with whom I did my first switch. And somehow she wears the body I took from her and not the one I gave her. So do the others that follow. When I ask how, she says, “We are all clones. Made from our originals. Made to answer calls from this timeline. I found out years ago. Saw the body of the clone you once met burn.”
“How?” I ask. “Your soul crest is compromised too?”
She nods.
“He doesn’t know, does he?”
She shakes her head. “We should get this over with.” She pulls closer, her right hand extending towards me.
“No!” I jump to my feet and backwards. “I’m tired. I need to maintain this form, even if it damns me to years in induced coma.” And I can’t help but rue my not confiding in the detective when he offered the chance. At least with him on board, I would come out on the right side in the unlikely event that my plan succeeds. “He has to die.”
She goes into a fit of laughter that makes me feel idiotic for the plan. “You wouldn’t make a dent even with one of those items you retrieved. You kept one for yourself, right? I mean, I did.”
“You did?” However had she managed that?
“Oh, you didn’t. In that, you are wiser.” She sits inside her own pentagon, her freckled face further marred by dejection. “I tried the prototype of a new biocrest scanner on him once. Weakened him for a while. Ten seconds to be exact. He killed me for it and woke up another clone—me. I remember everything now.”
A sigh slips from my lips, although deep inside an idea brews. I have often wondered why Mr. Dixen doesn’t do the retrieval himself, what he does with the items retrieved, why his empire is mostly built on stone and slate and not light technology. Apparently, some technology can weaken him and he’s been having me retrieve or destroy them for him.
“I have a plan,” I say, and when the ninety-nine of them have assembled—this takes nearly a month of me having to sneak more food in via the few transit rays floating in the Hall, since the one my handler places at the door is enough for only me—and we’ve all established that we want normal lives in our various timelines, I announce, “We have to kill him.”
“Yesss.” My seventy-eighth life agrees. She’s too thin for her height and moves as if a little wind would break her in two. “We kill him here and he dies in all timelines.”
“He may be a hundred lives merged, but he can’t defeat a hundred witches,” another says.
A roar of concurrence echoes through the hall and we flow outside. The dozens of men guarding the building surround us. They don’t draw their sidearms, but they parade their cuffs and manacles, and when we clash, their punches and kicks are hesitant. Brute force is for men. Hence, we avoid employing it. We merely anchor on them as they attempt to subdue us. Then we summon them, not by painting images of them in our minds, but simply by looking at them and touching hovering transit rays—there is no better mental image than the one that is in front of you—and displacing them by inches and yards, leaving them weakened and confused.
As we sweep through them, we desist from touching one another, lest there are switches of bodies. We fight our way through a mile of artificial trees, stone houses, and hundreds of men, toward
s the heart of the empire. Getting in is quite easier than we anticipated, the best part being that the jacketed men can’t battle us with lethal force, since killing us would mean destroying Mr. Dixen if he fails to wake up another clone quickly enough. It doesn’t take long, and they quit fighting and instead usher us all into Mr. Dixen’s tower by flanking us.
This means Mr. Dixen is expecting us, and it makes my heart fret. He knows the one hundred of us have come for him. Still he lets us in.
He sits on a brick throne, swathed in nothing but tight leather trousers, his eyes narrowing from a face that is lean and unblemished, a face that, like a moon reflecting a sun, glows with a ghostly light and a wintry grin. I refuse to look at his naked torso. Instead I regard the many fine transit rays hanging in the air around him. With his phobia for technology, he obviously didn’t bother to equip the hall with scrubbers. This, I imagine, bodes well for me.
However, we have all barely entered the hall when he zips forward, breezing through us like a burning cold wind, unbidden and invisible. When he appears again on his throne, he has a glass dagger in his hand and it’s dripping blood. I look around in horror to find my companions sprawling on the stone floor, bloody and lifeless. The whole lot of them. I feel myself trembling, not because I’m surrounded by corpses, but because I now understand the foolishness of confronting Mr. Dixen.
He whooshes again, this time right to my face, and I feel his powerful hand around my throat. He squeezes. I want to cough, but I can’t. I could hit him with my feeble hands, but that would be useless.
“You don’t think many have tried?” His words resound like the echoes of many voices entwined and on his now-changing face hovers a medley of disgust and rage. “Many have tried.”
I try to clear my mind with as much air as his choking hand allows. And I begin to paint in the chaos of my mind. First, I draw two slim cylinders, one short and the other long, and merge them with a three-dimensional circle to form an L shape all puffed up at the centre. Then I wash the sketch in a silvery light to accentuate its transparency and fill the inside of the orb with a lacing of fine blue lines, transit rays. The image is perfect, a mental replica of the glassy gun. I should be able to summon it, even though it has moved since last I touched it, and I don’t know its present location.
