by Xander Gray
I pushed the kennel door open and stepped onto the sidewalk. The SHU’s entry door stood ahead, a gray monument set into red brick. In the real world, this door would be locked electronically from inside. I pushed through it into the lobby. Monitors flickered on the reception desk in the dim light: empty isolation cells, one after another.
The last time I had seen Gar, he had literally vanished into thin air. Was he roaming the streets of Bagdad or Kabul, dodging enemy fire? And if so, how might I join him? Perhaps I would find him huddled in one of the doctor’s offices, overwhelmed and rocking in the dark. Maybe I could convince him none of this was real and free his mind. I had no idea, but I had to start somewhere.
I stepped into the general population block. The riveted underbelly of the atrium roof—a black canopy adorned with skylights—loomed above three stories of vacant cells. Sunlight illuminated curtains of dust along the catwalk. My footsteps reverberated between the steel rafters.
I found the door to the hobby room open, the way I had left it. As I approached, the smell of kerosene—sharp and metallic—filled the corridor. The bucket of kerosene was still here. The lighter lay next to it, flashing in the sunlight.
There were no windows in Medical, and the lights were out. I would need a torch.
I retrieved a wooden stake and scissors from one of the benches in the hobby room, and cut my shirt into strips. I wrapped these around the stake, then twirled the makeshift torch through the kerosene like I was stirring a big pot of soup. Finally, I raised the dripping instrument into the air and flicked the lighter.
The torch ignited, blasting my bare chest with heat. I felt like an ancient hunter, a caveman stalking elk. Flame and shadow danced over pipes and cinderblock as I made my way through a long hallway toward the medical block. Once I reached the reception area, I raised the torch overhead and looked around. The room was as I had last seen it. The huge crater in the center of the floor lay littered with pick axes, and the room itself was lined with mesh barricades loaded with concrete. On the far side of the room, a hallway led into darkness. Sand covered the floor in front of the door, a remnant of Gar’s desert girl.
Something clacked down the hallway.
I shifted the torch, coughing as its smoke tickled my nose, and stepped into the hallway, expecting to see something slithering behind the exam tables or grinning in the reflections on the steel cabinets, but all I saw was syrupy darkness retreating from the orange glow of the torch, empty rooms where nothing stirred. The only sounds were the tap of my shoes and the guttering of flame.
A delicate whimper rose from around the corner.
I noticed a trail of dried blood on the floor, starting within an exam room doorway to my right and ending beneath a wall-mounted fire extinguisher to my left. Gar had left this trail of blood. This was where he had vanished.
“Gar?” My voice echoed.
Another click-clack to my left, high heels on concrete. My hackles rose just before Helena caressed my cheek. “Did you finally remember?”
I looked into her pale face, her blazing eyes. I felt a shiver of revulsion when I saw the purple smoke wafting from the bullet hole in her head, but pushed through the fear. “I know what happened. But I don’t think it’s accurate to say I remembered.”
“What would you call it?”
I reminded myself she wasn’t real. “I lived my life out of order. You were holding me responsible for things I had not yet done.”
“Oh, you knew.” She pushed the torch aside and pulled my face to hers. “Even if you hadn’t experienced it yet, you knew. Some fragment of a memory knocked loose from the endless stream of time. Some intuition.”
“I’m sorry for what I did to you. I accept responsibility.”
“No you don’t. You’re thinking you tried to change things, to save me, and the universe conspired against you. Do you even remember pulling the trigger?”
“I do remember.” That was true. I had shot her during my seizure outside the holding cell on the day my wife visited the prison, long before my experience of driving to the campus and long after I had been convicted of the crime. The universe had removed causality from my experience of her death, but when viewed in the proper order, there was no debating what had happened. The concepts of atonement and retribution degenerated into shades of meaninglessness in a universe where time was not linear. But this was Hell, so I figured I should atone. “I am to blame. I brought the gun to the campus. I pulled the trigger. I did not kill you on purpose, but a court of law made no such distinction, and neither do I.”
She snatched the torch and waved it at me, grimacing in orange light. “Do you know what they did to me?”
“What who did?”
“McSorley and his men.” She stepped toward me; I stepped back. “They took me downstairs to their quantum computer and uploaded my brain before my last synaptic pulses died. I was already dead. Already dead and they persisted me.”
This was not possible. She was a delusion. She was not sentient. “If they loaded you into a computer at Walt U, how did you get here?”
“McSorley stored these servers in the warehouse for years until he brought them here and plugged them into his hell.”
“But you knew about my past. How?”
“We’re connected down here.”
“You’re not real.”
She dropped the torch between us and put her hands on my shoulders. “How can you properly atone when you don’t think I’m real? This is my hell. There is no way out, not anymore, not unless you shut the servers off. McSorley will never do it on his own. He enjoys this too much. He comes down here sometimes and tells me about the outside.” She pressed her mouth to mine, filling me with purple light.
Her consciousness unfurled within mine, and I saw all the years of her life.
She was a toddler, a beautiful child, sitting in her father’s lap. She had placed two of her dolls in the bed of a bright yellow toy truck and was pushing them across a hardwood floor. The wheels rumbled and she made motor sounds. Vroom vroom. Her father picked up a red truck and gave it a voice, and the two trucks journeyed across the sofa cushions and under the chairs, visiting candy shops and toy stores. Let’s get ice cream, Daddy. Let’s visit the unicorn farm.
She was seven, in her back yard beneath an enormous sycamore, playing tug of war with a puppy. The puppy growled and thrashed the rope while she laughed and pulled with both hands. Her laughter rose like fairy song, delighting flowers in the butterfly garden and hostas beneath the deck. Her mother called to the puppy, and it ran over and snatched her sandwich. Little Helena chastised the dog. No, Buster. Stop that, Buster. But when Mom laughed, she laughed too. The dog galloped across the yard with the sandwich and turned back, the sandwich tumbling out of its mouth as it flashed its happy dog smile.
She was in McSorley's office at age eight, examining a familiar poster: Does your child need help learning? It showed a picture of a little girl struggling to read a book, and she thought, I’m like her. Young Doctor McSorley strode into the room. He barely looked at her. She watched placidly as he connected corrugated tubing to a glowing cube. When he placed the mask over her face, she lost consciousness.
She woke in a hospital bed, the number 58 written in black marker on a sticker applied to her hospital gown.
Helena Isaacson was subject 58!
A young boy lay in an adjacent bed—she held his hand through the railing. Shadows concealed his face, but in a flash of lightheadedness, I knew who he was. Helena held the hand of an eight-year-old version of myself, gazing at him as though he might save her.
A strange but familiar bubble floated above her. She leaned into her pillow, eyes wide. “How are you doing that?”
The child Joshua kept his eyes on the sphere. “Sometimes I get a powerful feeling and it appears.”
“What powerful feeling are you having now?”
“I’m afraid.” He covered his face, but watched the sphere through his fingers. “I see strange things som
etimes, like I’m much older, but I can’t understand what’s happening.”
“Daydreams?”
“No, I actually go somewhere else and suddenly I am all grown up. I think I’m sick. Something bad is happening to me.”
She reached toward the sphere. “If something bad happens to me, will you help?”
He nodded, but never looked away from the bubble.
The scene changed.
She was twelve, sitting in an exam room beneath cold fluorescent lights as McSorley explained all the tests he intended to run on her. You’re passing our trials, Helena. You have all the appropriate quantum connections to host Attis. She had no idea what he meant, but I knew. She would be forced to give her body to Attis, and other children subject to the same repeatable process would soon host the remaining Ouroboros. She kicked her heels idly against the exam table and swallowed everything he said. At some point he had won her over. Brainwashed her. I couldn’t watch anymore; I turned away.
Then she was a middle-aged woman on the campus of Walton University.
She stood in the courtyard, chatting with a man as she waited for McSorley to introduce her to Attis. After thirty years of tests and willing supplication, today she would receive her reward: money, status, power. She had been promised all these things and more, but I knew the promises were false.
When McSorley came out of Redman Hall, her attention was so focused on him that she barely noticed the wild-eyed man standing in the courtyard not ten feet from her. By the time she spotted the gun, it was too late. She never even heard the gunshot.
She found herself drifting through purple fog, lost in a maze of black tunnels and never-ending switchbacks, alone and disoriented. She existed like that for a long time, and every now and then, a phantom voice descended into her nightmare. You are a miracle. A totally unexpected result! One day she realized the voice belonged to McSorley, and a dark flower of betrayal spread thorns around her heart.
The demon McSorley, calling itself Slaven, came to tell her about Joshua Briar. He’s the one who murdered you, dear. He left you all those years ago, and he only came back to put a bullet in your brain. I guess he couldn’t stand the thought of you succeeding where he had failed. You were the template! He was a useless aberration. She found a tight circle in the heart of the universe where she could touch the abyss—a great void where spirits roamed in hoards. There she reached out to him, felt his subconscious yield with a softness known only to the living, and bespoke the darkness of his dreams. For time indeterminate, he barely noticed. She was an afterthought, a subconscious memory long buried. She would never matter, not to him, not to anyone. The only one who ever thought of her was McSorley.
And then it dawned on her: McSorley was her real enemy. He had kept her alive and suffering, when she should have been allowed to pass into the void, to join the souls she could sense but never touch. Perhaps if she tried harder, she could get a message through to Joshua, convince him to turn the servers off, to set her free.
This became her singular obsession.
I felt her consciousness pulling away as she stepped back. I wiped my mouth, coughing out the cloud of purple smoke. When I had myself under control, I grabbed the torch from the floor. “What if I can get you out?” I thought about the bodies currently connected to the monolith, trying to figure out a solution.
She stepped back and tilted her head. “You would kill again? For me?”
I wanted to help her, but she was right. I couldn’t put her in someone else’s body—it would be murder.
“Maybe I could wirelessly tunnel you someplace else.” I barely understood what wireless tunneling meant, let alone where I might put her or why it might be better than where she was now.
“There’s only one way you can help me.” She clenched her fists, and twilight flickered in her eyes. “Any life imposed by another is a prison of the soul.”
I had shot Helena Isaacson on the day she would have become the first human to donate her body to the Ouroboros. I shook my head, knowing the odds would be impossible to calculate and knowing it didn’t matter, knowing this type of serendipity could pull a belief in fate from the staunchest nihilist.
“What is your prison of the soul?” She lurched forward and planted her hand on my chest.
I imagined synthetics replicating every cell in my brain. Was I human? Even my wife—an immutable warrior—had been unable to brave the philosophical consequence of the question, but I could no longer avoid it. Had eight-year-old Joshua died, only to have his consciousness supplanted? Was I an imposter?
The question overwhelmed me. I dropped to my knees. “Do you know the answer?”
She did not speak.
I sat with my back against the wall of the medical corridor, embers popping from the torch and drifting around me, and tried to envision the initial motivation for nanite brain technology. Not time travel—the Ouroboros had lived digitally for hundreds of years before the need for time travel. Maybe immortality? Synthetic cells did not deteriorate, die, or decay. But if the goal had been computerized persistence, why hadn’t they copied their cognitive functions as data to disk? Why had they replicated cells?
Because they hadn’t wanted immortal copies; they had wanted immortal selves. This meant maintaining quantum relationships between brain cells and as much synaptic activity as possible. It was easy to intuit the logic—if brain cells were replaced one at a time, and if each replacement duplicated the functionality of its predecessor exactly, such that the subject never lost consciousness or detected any change, the subject would theoretically maintain its identity even though its brain had been swapped.
What was human consciousness? Were we the cells in our brains? Were we synaptic impulses? Were we unidentified quantum fields? Could a person remain human—his true self—if every cell in his brain were replaced?
If I had killed and supplanted the child whose brain I had hijacked, I was a parasite. I cast my eyes up at Helena. “If you know, tell me.”
“No one knows.” She knelt before me, her face glowing like neon. “It is unknowable.”
I didn’t want to be a parasite. I didn’t want to be an instrument of murder.
“But you have been an instrument of murder.” She caressed my face with her cold hand. “How else do you suppose I got here?”
“Are you Helena Isaacson?” I bolted to my feet. “Or a copy?”
“What difference does it make? I am conscious. I am suffering. And you owe me, Joshua Briar. Turn off these servers and set me free.”
If Slaven knew Helena was recruiting me to betray him, he would wipe the slate clean and unplug the simulation—kill me and leave the servers pristine for his final containment of the Ouroboros.
“I’ll help if I can.” I backed away from her, waving the torch. “I need to find Gar.”
She raised her hand and pointed to an open door at the end of the hall. For a moment she became a little girl again: innocent and full of life, her hair in braids and a toy truck in one hand. Then she vanished around the corner, leaving me with the ragged sound of her sobbing.
#
I found Gar sitting on the floor in a doctor’s office, wearing desert camouflage and staring blankly at the ceiling lights.
Sand blanketed the floor. Wind had piled dunes around the exam table and swept sparkling streamers across the stainless-steel counters.
I crunched through the sand and sat beside him. “Gar?”
He turned toward me, gaunt and trembling. “Do you hear that?”
All I heard was the sizzle of the fluorescents and wind whispering from some impossible source deeper in the room. “I need to get you out of here.”
Gar’s eyes widened. “Joshua?”
“I’m here.” I put one hand on his shoulder. “We have to go.”
“There is no way out.” He shook his head, tears welling. “They follow me.”
“Who follows you?”
“The children.” He clutched my shirt. “The families.”
>
I felt an overwhelming compulsion to tell him none of this was real—Gar’s manifestations, unlike mine, had perished worlds away—but he would never believe me. What if I could show him? What if I could link to his mind, as Helena had linked to mine?
We’re connected down here.
I planted the torch in a sand dune, grabbed his hands, and looked into his eyes. “Close your eyes and concentrate on your breathing. Can you do that?”
“I can’t close my eyes.” He looked mystified. “I have to keep watch.”
“I’ll keep watch.” I squeezed his hands to reassure him. “I think I can help you. But you have to trust me.”
For a moment he looked like a frightened child, his eyes pleading. “Are you going to pray?”
I hadn't prayed since I'd been found guilty of murder, but Gar looked like a man in need of prayer. “Yes. A silent prayer.”
“Okay.” He gripped my hands and closed his eyes.
Now what?
I closed my eyes and concentrated on the trembling of his hands. In my fingertips, I felt my pulse juxtaposed against Gar’s, two drumbeats at different tempos, but slowly merging. When the heartbeats became one, I plummeted into a raging current of tragedy, bombarded by images of blood-soaked children and entire families scattered on rocky hills. I could not push clarity into his mind, for his chaos flowed freely into mine. I was drowning in it.
Gar was five years old, in a small wood-paneled room adorned with Christmas lights. His daddy loomed overhead, a drunken monster, screaming obscenities at his mommy. You baby him! He’s too old! Mommy’s response was unintelligible, soaked with defiance. Daddy punched her, and she stumbled toward the Christmas tree, her foot crushing a brightly wrapped present decorated with a red bow.
Tommy watched in confusion. Were they fighting because he spilled juice on the rug? Because he messed his pants?
Daddy snatched him off the floor. “Why are you such a waste?” he demanded, and hurled him into the Christmas tree.
Pain exploded in Gar’s back. He lay on the floor in a sea of broken ornaments, filled with fear and shock, as flecks of tinsel drifted around him like snow. While Daddy screamed incomprehensible insults and Mommy wailed, Tommy wished Santa would take all the presents back. He didn’t want them anymore.
