Eight Minutes, Thirty-Two Seconds

by Peter Adam Salomon

  Opening a messenger app, she texted Devid.

  They’re here.

  Turning to her computer, Amy scrolled through a number of websites, tapping one finger steadily against her teeth as she read.

  L struggled to remember each one. So many, the names ran together, meaningless. Stuxnet and Columbine, Paris, Salt Lake City, and Berlin. North Korea, Iran, Ebola, Marburg hemorrhagic fever, H1N7b, the list went on. Then Devid texted.

  >>Too many?

  Not enough.

  >>Should be as many as I got, we’re even.

  We’re not even.

  >>Why not?

  Amy pushed a doll out of the way in order to stand without disturbing the books, crossed the room to lock the door.

  We never finished last night…

  >>I finished.

  Amy laughed.

  L cringed. Her laugh always burned other memories away. She remembered the laugh, like it followed her after resurrection. But locked inside Amy, L had no choice but to listen.

  You always finish.

  >>So do you. Don’t you? I’m not really very good at this stuff…

  I am?

  >>I think so. I think you’re pretty great at this stuff. And other stuff. All stuff. Stuff stuff.

  Her laugh crawled into L while she tried not to let the laughter overwrite the memories of the books. Of the websites. Of whatever was happening between Amy and Devid.

  Doesn’t matter, does it?

  Devid stayed silent. Amy reached out to the closest book, tapping the cover before returning to surfing the web. Tapping her mouse even when she wasn’t clicking it. Always tapping.

  Silence long enough for L to wonder just how long she’d be stuck there.

  The longest visit was a full day M had spent with Stephanie, which he’d enjoyed tremendously. Not only for the bath she’d taken but for the multiple meals. Real food. Food that needed chewing, instead of the nutrient rich pouches they lived on in the habitat.

  “Food spoils,” L said.

  “Chewing is fun.”

  L held her arm out. “Chew away.”

  “Not the same thing.”

  They both learned to treasure those deaths that included a meal. The visit with Stephanie had so many that M barely remembered anything else from the day. Waste of a dose.

  On her laptop, Amy manipulated data in a spreadsheet. Viral loads and global impact of extreme weather patterns, Spanish flu and the black plague.

  >>No, I guess it doesn’t matter. But getting to know you has helped, you’ve helped.

  You, too.

  >>Before I met you, I figured it was just me against the world.

  Nope, you and me against the world.

  >>Cure the world.

  Is that our motto or something?

  >>Billy came up with it.

  He would.

  >>Works for me.

  Me, too.

  L kept repeating the three words, trying to burn the motto into her memory, trying to get Amy to glance at the books for another opportunity to remember those.

  >>Can we make it Cure My Family?

  The world is worse than your family. They’re just a symptom. The disease needs to be ended.

  >>There’s a cure for Theresa?

  There’s a cure for everything. We just need to find it. Put all the pieces together, then pull the plug.

  >>Cure the world!

  It’ll be beautiful. Like you.

  Amy blushed, resting a finger on the screen above the compliment. The emotions burned into L, heart bursting with a sudden swell of joy and arousal, erasing all memory of books or websites or mottos.

  Amy opened a different text box, texted Yasmeen.

  >>Get your books?

  Just started reading Applied Eugenics. I’d already read The Physiology and Biochemistry of Mononegavirales. Not virulent enough, honestly. Barking up the wrong tree but Levi insisted. He thinks it’s just a matter of inserting a more vicious protein chain, but to him they’re just words he heard somewhere. There are rules to playing with this shit. Only so much I can do even in a high school lab as advanced as mine when it comes to sequencing and genome assembly, but it’ll work, I promise.

  L read and re-read the words, trying to remember them. Trying to remember all of the other things she needed to remember.

  Amy glanced at the books and L tried to focus until a text from Levi came in, distracting them both.

  Midazolam creates temporary anterograde amnesia but that’s not what we need. Back to the drawing board on that one, though Amy thinks she has something more hardware related.

  >>What? Amy asked.

  Sorry, meant to send that to Stephanie. You’re working on memory, I’m trying to tie that into everything else.

  L tried to remember, so many words and names and titles and ideas overloaded by Amy’s laughter.

  “Clear.”

  No! L stared at the screen, hoping to remember the last texts, but there was only rebirth.

  “Cure the world,” L said, mumbling against the shock of resurrection. “Cure the world. Cure the world. Cure the world.”

  “What?” M asked. “Cure the world?”

  L ripped the sensors off, hard enough to pull them out of their port so they dangled freely in her hand. “They did something.” She staggered out of the medpod, walking aimlessly around the room.

  “Who? Did what?”

  “Them!” L walked closer to M, inches from his face. “They did something.”

  “They’re teenagers,” M said, taking a step back.

  L followed. “They’re teenagers with a plan.”

  “‘Cure the world’ is not a plan.”

  “Isn’t it? They’ve got a plan, the six of them.”

  “What plan? What did they do?”

  She bent, hands pulling at her hair, pressing into her scalp hard enough to feel the ridges of her skull beneath the skin. “I don’t remember.”

  “Deep breaths,” he said.

  L breathed. Deeply.

  “What do you remember?” M asked, walking to where he’d left the notebook on the floor. He wrote ‘Cure the world’ on the top of a blank page.

  “Books,” L said, squeezing her eyes tightly shut. “Something about memory, and gestation-something-or-other. Lots of books. They’re researching all this stuff. I don’t remember.”

  He placed his fingers on her shoulder, tightening them just enough for her to feel the pressure. “Who were you?”

  “Amy. I was Amy. She kept laughing, talking to Devid. Oh, that I remember. She loves him. Loves loves loves him. Lots of laughter.”

  “Right, I remember. That’s new, isn’t it?”

  “I think so. Doesn’t matter, does it?”

  “What matters? Nothing? Everything? Hell, if I know.”

  Together, they made their way to the seven rooms. L stopped outside of Amy’s. “I think this goes in the last room.”

  M glanced at his notebook, with only a few things on it. “Me, too.”

  In the seventh room, M dragged a chair out and climbed on, reaching high enough to get to some blank space. Directly on the wall, in big black letters, he wrote ‘Cure the world.’

  L took deep breaths, trying to remember. “There was more.”

  “More to the motto?”

  “No,” she said. “More to the whole visit. So much more. Every single thing seemed important and I tried to remember everything, and I can’t remember anything.” She ground her teeth together, slamming her fist into the metal wall.

  M rushed to her side, taking her into his arms. “Shh, it’s okay, it’s always like this. You’ll remember, or you won’t. Nothing else we can do.”

  “Lots of dolls. I loved the dolls,” L said. “No, Amy loved the dolls. Everything’s so mixed up. Did I tell you about the books?”

  M showed her the notebook.

  She ran her fingers over the words. “No, that’s not right.”

  “What’s not right?”

  “It was
so much more than just medicine and memory. These were textbooks, big, heavy things. With big, heavy words. Why can’t I remember?” She smacked herself in the forehead.

  “That never helps.”

  “What?”

  “Hitting yourself,” M said. “You do that when you’re trying to remember.”

  “It helps me think.”

  “Hitting yourself helps you think?”

  L smiled. “I guess not.”

  “You need to eat, and sleep.”

  “I know.”

  “What does ‘eugenics’ mean?” L asked.

  “Why?”

  “Billy said it,” L said. “No, Yasmeen. Stephanie? I don’t know.”

  “Eugenics is the study of the possibility of improving the qualities of the human species,” the computer said. “Especially by such means as discouraging reproduction by people presumed to have inheritable undesirable traits. Developed largely by Francis Galton as a method of improving the human race. There are no other entries in accessible databases.”

  L stared at M, eyes wide, her face drained of color. “Cure the world.”

  “Remember anything else?” he asked, handing her a food pouch.

  L plugged her meal in. “No, just random images that make no sense and when I try to focus on one it runs away and hides.”

  He showed her where he’d written ‘eugenics’ in the notebook. “This is good.”

  “There was so much more. So much.”

  “Always is. Did you get to eat anything?”

  “No, she never left her room. Just reading her books and websites. So many websites.”

  “Porn?” He laughed.

  L smiled. “No, no porn. I knew you were going to ask that.”

  “I’m that predictable?”

  “Always.”

  “That a bad thing?”

  “No, I like knowing. I don’t like not knowing. Not remembering sucks. So, when I remember something about you, it’s nice.”

  “Glad to help.”

  “You always help,” she said, unplugging her pouch and resting her head on the table.

  “Ready for bed?”

  “In a minute, I’m comfy here.”

  M rubbed her shoulders. Dark strands of her long hair fell through his fingers. He’d taken to cutting his own to the scalp, so the shampoo would last longer for L, loving the smell of her. “It’s beautiful,” he whispered. “Like you.”

  “They’re all working on different things,” she said, trying to fight off sleep.

  “What?”

  “Shh, let me think.”

  He kissed her forehead but kept quiet.

  “Amnesia. And viruses. And something stuck. Stud? No. Stux.” She sat up so fast her scalp caught M underneath his chin.

  He wiped off the blood with his sleeve.

  “Sorry,” she said, grabbing the notebook out of his pocket, writing ‘stux’ in big letters. “What did you say?”

  “I said ‘that hurt.’”

  “Before that.”

  “I don’t know, what did I say?”

  The computer chimed.

  “‘Ready for bed?’” M’s voice came out of the speakers.

  “It’s recording us?” he asked.

  “Maintaining a log of all activity in the habitat is part of routine core programming,” the computer said.

  “All activity?” L asked.

  “How long does the log go back?”

  “Eleven months, twenty-three days.”

  “Since the vault,” L said. “What did M say after ‘ready for bed’?”

  “‘It’s beautiful, like you.’”

  “That,” L said, turning to the notebook. “I remember that. Stuxnet. Some random numbers.”

  “Stuxnet?”

  “That information is not located in any accessible databases.”

  He underlined the words they didn’t know the meaning of, stapling the page to the wall after L went to sleep off the exhaustion of rebirth.

  M rested his fingers on the underlined words, feeling where the pen had bit into the paper. His finger twitched.

  “How long?” he asked.

  “Twelve hours, fifty-eight minutes.”

  His finger twitched again.

  M ran, calling for L on his way to the infirmary. On the ladder, his leg shook; he crashed against the wall, elbow locking around the closest rung to prevent him from falling to the bottom. His forehead dented the metal, and, for a moment, he saw nothing but shadows. Sweaty hands held tight to the ladder and he climbed with trembling arms, each step taking far too long.

  Close enough. He let go, falling the last few feet, then crawled, pulling himself towards the infirmary.

  An emergency alarm cut the silence. “Medical emergency, please respond,” the computer said during the moments when the alert fell silent.

  M pulled himself along the floor until he reached the chair.

  Clutching at the armrests, his fingers kept slipping free. Too sweaty, too shaky, his grip faded. The room spun, and shadows encroached on his vision, making it far too difficult to see the chair.

  “Medical emergency, please respond.”

  His jaw clenched shut with too much force and a piece of his tooth flew out of his mouth. M looped his forearm around the base of the armrest. Pulled. Inch by inch, he squirmed into the chair, lungs gasping for air.

  “Medical emergency, please respond.”

  The sensor array hung loose where L had ripped them out. The tiny needles bit into his fingers while he fumbled with them, finally seating the cable into the console. His vision blurred and dimmed and faded.

  “Medical emergency, please respond.”

  He attached the sensors to his skin before reaching for a yellow vial. The first one slipped out of his fingers, crashing to the floor. The precious dose ruined. When he tried to find another one, his eyes twitched too badly to see anything.

  “Medical emergency, please respond.”

  “Where is it?” he asked, forcing the words out between his clenched jaws.

  “There is a vial to your left,” the computer said as the alert fell silent.

  M reached out.

  “Lower.”

  He followed the direction, feeling the metal table beneath his fingertips.

  “To the right, five inches.”

  A vial crashed to the floor. Another.

  Finally, twitching fingers closed on a vial, bringing it to his lap.

  “Injector?”

  “To your left.”

  Another vial crashed to the floor.

  “Farther left.”

  The needle stabbed into his palm. He pulled back, afraid to shove it off the edge, knowing he’d never get back in the chair if it fell and he needed to pick it up. M found the injector, trembling fingers taking three attempts to install the vial. He shoved the arm with the port under his thigh in an attempt to still some of the shaking. Jamming the needle in too hard, the tremors claiming his entire body, he pressed the plunger.

  The machines continued beeping out the flatline alert until L came running into the room, wiping sleep out of her eyes.

  Levi stretched but it wasn’t enough, his notebook just out of reach. A rusted grate pressed against his cheek. He scrambled his fingers the length of the sticky ledge of the sewer where the notebook perched delicately on the edge. The balance was a tricky thing and, so far, he’d been lucky, the notebook landing on the lip right before the plunge to the murky brown water rushing far below.

  Lying face down on the street, he listened to the slow bubbling thickness of the sewage, smelled the stench of it. Every so often someone kicked his legs, laughing while he stretched for his notebook. Someone stepped on his back, shoes pressing into his ribs before walking the length of his body. Heavy footsteps on his thigh, knee, and finally his feet.

  More people laughed and the sounds of high fives clapping above him echoed into the sewer.

  M hurt for Levi, for the pain as a pebble dug into his knee when som
eone stepped on it. For the agony while another person walked on him, beginning at his feet this time. The pebble dug in deeper until the person stopped, standing on his shoulder blades.

  Ribs pressed on Levi’s lungs, deflating them, imprinting the rust of the grate into his skin. Laughter echoed through the stench.

  M screamed.

  But Levi smiled.

  The weight pushed his arm deeper into the sewer, one finger latching onto the end ring of the notebook. Levi curled his fingers into a fist, dragging the notebook from the edge, pulling it toward the daylight.

  With a final step, the person walked on his head and then the weight disappeared. Breathing hurt, but he still breathed.

  “You assholes need to get a life,” someone said, before joining in with the group’s laughter.

  Levi kept his mouth shut, remained on the street pretending to stretch for his notebook. Eventually they’d grow bored, tired, leave him alone; find someone else scrawny and weak to pick on. He didn’t care. He’d show them. He’d show them all, someday.

  Not that he had a plan.

  Not yet.

  The stench followed Levi home, attached to him like the rust from the grate. The notebook a little soggy and a lot dirty from being dropped in the sewer. Tobacco flakes from a used cigarette had managed to find their way inside, sticking to various pages, leaving a stale, sour smoke aroma in the paper. Which was an improvement over the general reek of shit. The lingering smell assaulted his sinuses, deep with every painful breath where his ribs still hurt.

  Thankfully the pebble hadn’t sliced through the khaki uniform pants, which couldn’t be patched and cost too much to be replaced. Also, on the positive side, he hadn’t bled on them. Last time he’d come home with blood on his school uniform the stain refused to wash out and his mother grounded him for a month to pay back the $12.99 the shirt cost to replace.

  One month without any Internet access at all, no computer, nothing. He’d considered cheating, but the risk wasn’t worth the pain, the beating, and an even longer grounding. At school, he kept off-line, making notes in his notebook that had nothing to do with class. Making plans, writing code, organizing a future he was just beginning to understand. Hundreds of pages of potential.

  Barely thirteen now, he could outlast the grounding, the bullies, and his drunk mother. He’d hacked the DOD at nine. NSA at ten. The Ministry of State Security in the People’s Republic of China at eleven.