by Sean Platt
All traces of humor gone, I leave the bathroom and find Willow’s father standing with Aunt Trudy.
She waves me over.
I hope they can’t smell the weed beneath the perfume.
Trudy says, “Mr. Fairchild just gave us some great news.”
I look for Willow. She’s with her mom, talking to some other people. I wonder if she already knows the nature of this news.
I look at Mr. Fairchild and try to offer my best smile. “What’s that?”
“The Headmaster and I agree that it would be a shame for you to leave the Academy. We’re going to waive your tuition and dorm costs through graduation. And after you graduate, you can get a job at AD while taking university courses online.”
“What?” I can hardly believe it. “I can stay?”
“Yes. If you want to.”
Trudy is smiling. It’s hard to read her expression since she’s so good at faking it, but I think she’s cool with this.
“Yeah, I want to! Thank you, Mr. Fairchild,” I say, shaking his hand.
He pulls me into a hug. “You’re welcome, son.”
Chapter Nine
Ben Shepherd Age 19
I’m sitting alone in one of the many labs at AD eating a turkey and Swiss on rye that Willow packed in my lunch last night, waiting for Kotke to show so we can run the latest numbers.
Willow and I got a place together, and both took jobs here after graduating the Academy, though she finished a year before me. To call it a “job” is a bit of a stretch. I’m basically doing the same things I was doing at school, helping to evolve a few Top Secret projects which will hopefully someday prepare us to save Willow. But now I’m being paid.
My powers, as Kotke calls them, are growing more by the day, though it’s hard to measure the progress when there’s so much I don’t know about the project I’m working on.
Everything at AD is part of a “project.” Most have a Top Secret classification, requiring a ton of signed paperwork before I can even start. My current projects are Project Snowblind and Project Lantern. I only know about the things I’m involved in, and am given no line of sight to each project’s primary purpose.
I work on two different things at AD, improving my telepathic communication with humans (Project Snowblind), and telepathically communicating with electronics and computers (Project Lantern).
I’m told that both will prepare me for my role in Project Willow, which I assume is a project to save her, though I, nor Willow, have any clue how. And I hate that they have me doing all of this computer work. I don’t see how that’s anywhere near as important as the mind stuff. Even as hard as that is on me, body and soul, the work is rewarding. Every time I ask why, I’m told that I need a full understanding. Eventually I’m supposed to be able to transfer information from a computer network to a human soul. That sounds impossible to me.
Willow’s been working on another project with her father, though she’s not allowed to tell me what it was. I assume it has something to do with her psychic powers, but who knows, maybe she’s counting mustard packets from some Top Secret Mustard Spy thing.
Even after more than a year here, I still haven’t learned what my father did for AD. Given the size of the place, and the number of employees, he could’ve been anything from civilian to spy. I asked Mr. Fairchild once, but he said that Dad was “a consultant.”
I’ve thought about trying to probe his mind, but I’m not particularly good at it, even with test subjects willing to let me, let alone someone who guards against it. Though Willow hasn’t confirmed it, I fully suspect that her father is a Deviant, too. And I’m guessing that his power is telepathic in some way.
As I’m about to ball up my paper lunch bag, I feel something hard at the bottom of the bag.
Under the folded paper towels at the bottom, I find a red cardboard heart.
I pull it out, smiling as I see Willow’s handwriting on the front:
I LOVE YOU
I turn it over and see more words on the back:
SEE YOU TONIGHT
XXX
Tonight is one of the nights she’s supposed to be most fertile.
We’ve been trying for six months. Ideally, we would’ve waited until we were more established or at least in our twenties, but Willow’s convinced that she doesn’t have much time and wants to enjoy a few years of motherhood before she dies.
We used to argue about it a lot.
I asked, why bring a child into the world if you think you’re going to die? Why do that to a baby?
She argued that the whole point of life is to create more life. And she wanted to leave her mark on this world in some way or another, so some part of her lives on.
And who the hell am I to say that’s a bad reason to have a baby?
I might have argued more if we were poor young kids struggling to get by. But between her father’s wealth and the surprise insurance money I got a year after my father’s death, our child will be fine.
Oddly, even though she wants to start a family, Willow doesn’t want to get married. She says that there’s no point in making it more difficult for me when I want to settle down with someone else down the road. And since we don’t have a child, we’re not really a family. There’s something sad about that sentiment. Made sadder by the fact that we haven’t been able to conceive.
I wonder if I’m sterile. And if so, should we look into some other method of getting her pregnant? I hate being the thing keeping Willow from having a family of her own.
I wipe a tear from my eye as I place the heart in my front shirt pocket, then crumple the bag and toss it to the garbage can across the room.
The shot bounces off the rim of and hits the shiny white tiled floor.
I stand to pick it up.
The door behind me opens.
Kotke.
“Sorry I’m late, Ben. Got stuck in traffic on my lunch break.”
He isn’t alone. Arnold Fairchild is behind him, impeccably dressed as usual in his white suit and red rose.
“Ben,” he says, shaking my hand firmly. “Good to see you.”
When we meet on the occasional weekend dinner at his house, he gives me a bear hug. But on the rare times when he comes to the research labs, it’s always a firm handshake.
“Good to see you too, sir,” I say, surprised that he’s here.
“Mr. Kotke shared the latest numbers,” he says, cutting right to the chase.
“And?”
“You’ve come a long way. We think you’re ready.”
“Ready for what?” I ask, looking and back and forth between the men.
“Ready to start on Project Eden.”
After a long walk down several hallways and a trip down multiple floors in an elevator I didn’t know existed, I’m standing with Kotke and Fairchild in a short hallway outside a pair of double doors.
An armed guard nods us through.
I follow the men into a long, dark, cold rectangular room with nothing inside it. Despite the emptiness, there’s a low humming and a constant rush of cold air coming through the vents above.
The men stop in the middle of the room. Just as I’m wondering if this is a hazing ritual, Kotke bends down and pulls at an inconspicuous handle set into the floor.
This triggers a sound like something unlocking and a long hiss of air.
He backs up as large glass tube rises from the ground.
I fall back, startled.
The tube extends all the way to the ceiling, then stops, followed by a rattle of locks turning beneath it.
The hiss fades.
Red lights inside the tube snap on, illuminating the girl inside.
“Ben,” Mr. Fairchild says, “meet Eden.”
Chapter Ten
Ben Shepherd Age 19
“Who is she?” I stare into the tube, at a girl who can’t be more than seven.
She has long red hair and is wearing a white jumper like most of our test subjects. She looks a lot like Willow in pictures
from when she was younger.
Her eyes are closed.
Is she sleeping?
Is she dead?
“This is Eden. Willow’s twin sister.”
“Sister?”
“They were seven-years-old when Eden died. Willow doesn’t like to talk about her. Plus, Eden is very top secret.”
“She’s a Deviant?” I ask.
“Yes,” Fairchild says.
“What was her power?”
“She was a Jumper,” Fairchild says. “Mr. Kotke, can you please explain to Ben what a Jumper is.”
Kotke tells me about Deviants who can Jump into the bodies of other people. There aren’t many, and most can’t control it. It isn’t uncommon for Jumpers to lose their minds and commit suicide. He explains his theory of self as soul, and that it’s the Jumpers’ souls making the trips into other bodies.
Fairchild stands there as Kotke talks, staring at the girl in the tube. I can practically taste his sadness. And there’s another emotion. One that surprises me: hope. And with that hope, fear.
“Is that what happened to her?” I ask.
“No,” Kotke shakes his head. “We were monitoring her body after a Jump when something went wrong with her vitals. Specifically, she went into cardiac arrest and died. We couldn’t revive her.”
“Shit. So what happened to her soul?”
Kotke sighs. “We don’t know for certain.”
“Bullshit,” Fairchild says, turning around. “She’s lost in The Void.”
The sound of that word — the memory — stops my heart.
I approach the tube, staring at the girl.
She doesn’t look dead. She looks asleep.
“Is she in a coma?”
Fairchild looks back at me, shaking his head. “No. Her body is dead. We’ve preserved her using state-of-the-art technology decades ahead of anything else.”
“Why?”
Fairchild’s eyes widen, and his brows go up as if I slapped him across the face.
Shit! I think I’ve offended him.
“Why? Because you are going to transfer Willow’s soul into Eden’s body.”
“What?”
Kotke steps toward me. “This is what we’ve been working toward. And the first phase starts now. We’ve installed a fully-functioning AI into Eden’s body. We need you to make the connection. Turn the engines on, so to speak.”
An AI? An actual artificial intelligence? I wasn’t aware that AD was working on AI, but I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. They have their fingers in deviant education, biotech, psychic warfare, pharmaceuticals, and who knows what else?
“How the hell am I going to turn Eden on?”
“Don’t worry, son,” Fairchild slaps my back, “You’ll figure it out.”
I’m standing in front of the examination table where Eden lies motionless.
We’re alone in the lab, but I can still feel eyes on me from behind the overhead two-way mirrors.
They’re all counting on me to do something that I’ve never done. Something that nobody has ever done.
They want me to wake the dead.
But is it waking the dead if Eden’s soul isn’t there? According to Fairchild, her soul isn’t. I don’t know how he can tell. Maybe his telepathic abilities allow him to see inside her.
I’m supposed to connect to her like the others, like the computers I send and receive data from telepathically. But she isn’t like the others, awake and functioning. Even if they put chips in her brain, she isn’t a computer. She’s more of a cyborg — if I can wake her/it up.
I close my eyes and focus on her.
I can usually sense an opening. In computers and people, there are often ways in. It’s like a doorway. My mind knocks, and I enter.
I don’t know how I do it. I don’t know how I do much of what I do. While I’ve managed to gain some control over my powers, I have no knowledge of the hows or whys. And theories aren’t answers.
In training, Kotke tells me not to think about the hows and whys, to focus on what feels right. He compares most Deviants’ powers to the instinctual things that humans simply know how to do. We don’t learn to breathe, blink, open our eyes, or suck from the tit. These actions exist in a biological knowledge base passed down from our ancestors’ ancestors. Same with Deviant powers.
I keep searching for the opening but sense nothing in the girl. I can barely feel a body in the room with me, or any electronics, save those in the walls and in the rooms around me.
If she has a way in, it’s a signal lost in the noise.
I think about this project and what it means for Willow. I wonder if she knows that her twin’s body is in a container, preserved as a child. I wonder if she knows that her father intends to transfer her soul into her sister’s body.
Are we even close to doing this?
We can’t possibly transfer a soul from one body to another. How does one even find a soul? Science, as far as I know, still debates the existence of a soul. But Fairchild and crew say there is one, and that Eden’s soul jumped from body to body and was eventually lost to The Void.
He called her a Jumper and said there were others. How many? And how do they jump?
Can Willow Jump too? Is it something she’ll need to learn before she can Jump into Eden’s body? Or am I somehow involved? They said I would be transferring her soul. But how? What does that mean? A soul isn’t a packet of data you can transfer from one body to another.
Or is it?
My mind fills with the noise I’ve learned to silence — the static, the electronic transmissions, the electric hum, exploding suns from millions of light years away.
As a child, I didn’t understand the sounds, and they overwhelmed me. Kotke helped me gain control, learn to tune it out, then eventually to receive and decipher transmissions.
I listen for Eden.
How I can recognize a particular person’s sound is another thing I don’t understand. And my track record is far from perfect.
As I push all the other sounds from my mind, I finally hear it, like a fluctuating musical note rising and lowering ever so slightly.
First I hear it, then I see it in my mind — a light pink aura radiating from Eden’s body.
Weird how I hadn’t sensed it before, but now that I’ve stripped away the other sounds, it’s as obvious as neon at nighttime.
I focus, changing my signal to match hers.
And then I’m inside.
I’m usually aware of my body when I go inside someone’s mind. It’s like I’m virtually touring their memories — a mess of tangled thoughts, scents, sounds, and tastes.
I struggle, sorting through memories until I find something I can work with, something close to complete, though memories aren’t finished objects like a video tape, but bits and pieces that are far more likely to be recalled out of sequence than in anything resembling an experiential memory.
But here there is only the hum.
No visuals.
No thoughts.
No sights.
No tastes.
It feels empty and cold.
And I can’t feel my body.
Is this what the Jumpers feel like when they wind up in someone else?
Have I jumped?
I can’t panic.
Have to focus.
The biological hardwiring that sits inside every human has a gossamer bond to the chips. I need to seep inside those seams.
I focus on the mechanical hum and radiate a similar energy pattern, pouring myself into it.
There’s a blinding flash of light and sound so loud and so intense that I’m kicked out of her body, and thrown back into mine.
The pain is instant. Intense. A fire is consuming my body.
I scream as I slam into the wall behind me, then slump to the ground.
I feel like I touched a live wire and got knocked on my ass.
The pain is over as quickly as it came, but it’s hard to focus or find my bearings.
I fin
ally manage to sit up and open my eyes.
Movement pulls my gaze to the table.
I look up and see Eden sitting up.
I stare, my heart racing, as she opens her eyes and looks right at me.
“Hello, Ben,” she says.
Chapter Eleven
Ben Shepherd Age 19
Later that day …
Willow and I are waiting in an overstuffed leather love seat in Mr. Fairchild’s private library at AD, where he holds most of his private meetings.
Willow knows that he has big news — good news — but she doesn’t know what and I’ve been sworn to secrecy.
She’s sitting on the couch beside me, anxiously bouncing one leg over the other, biting her nails.
“You sure you haven’t had any visions?” I ask, “Because this is a pretty big deal.”
“Stop teasing me!”
I laugh, but that can’t hide the anxiety I’m feeling for Willow. I don’t think she has any clue that her father has preserved Eden’s body. That’s Potential Freakout Number One.
When she learns that he’s put a computer into her sister? Well, that’s Potential Freakout Number Two.
And that he plans to put her soul into her sister's body when she dies?
Yeah, that’s a Freakout Hat-Trick.
Willow crosses her arms. “I can’t believe that you know and Dad won’t tell me.”
I desperately want to tell her, but I can’t. “Jealous?” I say, like a coward.
She gives me a cross look.
She looks adorable when pouty, but I’m not about to tell her that.
At times like this I usually giggle, but right now I can’t. Not when I’m so unsure of how this whole thing is going to go down. And if she’s mad at her father, will she be mad that I didn’t warn her?
