The Unhappening of Genesis Lee

by Shallee McArthur

  No shouting today. No signs waving. The Mementi had their Link buds in and the Populace had their Cortexs or earphones on, listening for news. Angry eyes stayed trained on faces across the pond. The sun had begun to heat up the day, but the people’s faces were cold. Police in black with large clear shields ringed the area.

  This wasn’t a protest. It was the precursor to a battle. The air hung thick and heavy as the crowd waited for the first gunshot.

  Ren held her Link buds to her ears.

  “News reports say the entire police force is out today. They arrested like twenty people last night.” She snorted. “Most of them Populace. That’s really going to tick people off. Drake Matthews is giving a press conference tonight. Probably another ‘we’re closer than ever’ speech about memory backups.”

  She put the Link buds in her pocket. “Matthews is an idiot. He’s been making the same vague promises forever, and nobody listens anymore. It’s not going to calm anyone down. There’s going to be another riot like at the Memoriam.”

  The Memoriam. Ren had told me about it burning. I couldn’t think about it right now. No room for another pain.

  “This is insane,” I said.

  “It wasn’t supposed to be like this.” Ren’s hands fell to her sides. “This is my fault.”

  It kind of was. Except. “You didn’t do this.”

  She looked away.

  “You didn’t do this,” I said, stepping closer. “Whatever you did, these people are the ones who chose to come stare each other down like they’re going to eat each other.”

  “I’m the one who did what they suspect each other of.”

  “Yes.” I took a deep breath. “And I’m not going to lie, that’s really horrible. But this isn’t about the Link thief anymore. It’s about revenge.”

  Ren let out a half-snort, half-laugh.

  “Now come on,” I said. “If we can get inside Happenings, you can help fix this before they turn the city into a warzone.”

  She followed me around the outskirts of the Mementi crowd. Nobody noticed us. Maybe this would stay a ridiculous all-day staring contest. And maybe Toben Roberts from Frankie and the Boy would climb in my bedroom window and declare passionate love for me.

  We climbed the stairs to the Happenings entrance slowly. My anxiety built as I counted the hired security guards lining the top steps. I beat out a rhythm on my legs as I walked, not caring if I looked stupid. Everything was too still.

  Ren’s lab coat made the guards relax, and they parted a bit. “Serenity Lee, data lab assistant,” she said, flashing a nametag.

  We strolled right past them.

  Ren exhaled. “I thought Liza might have told them not to let me in.”

  “She’s sort of got bigger problems.” Like the swelling, silent crowd.

  “This is so not going to work.” Ren paused outside the glass doors.

  “You said most people aren’t coming in anyway. Liza might not have announced that you left.”

  “Even if we get past the lobby, my DNA access is probably already revoked from the computers.”

  I peered through the doors, noting a figure behind the reception desk. “It’s a big company, and there’s a lot going on. We have to try.”

  Ren squeezed her hands together. She knocked on the glass of the revolving door. I counted the steps of the girl inside as she approached the doors. She squinted through the glass, and her face lit up when she saw Ren. With a soft click, the door unlocked.

  “Ren!” she said. She gave a funny squeal—and gave my sister a hug.

  “Samantha!” Ren returned the hug.

  The bitterness in my heart surprised me. Sorry, Gena, I know I hardly even smile at you anymore, but don’t mind me while I hug this obnoxious Populace girl.

  Samantha pulled away. “This is nuts, I’m afraid they’re going to set the place on fire or something.” She shivered. “Anyway, what are you doing here? I thought you quit, there was a memo this morning.”

  Okay. Problem. I focused on not blinking or breathing too fast. Plan B.

  Ren forced a smile that actually looked natural. She’d gotten good at acting. “Yeah, I did. I came to say goodbye and pick up some stuff I left.”

  “Ah, ‘Renity, did you come to bid farewell to the bobbleheads?”

  Ren laughed. “You know it.”

  Bobbleheads? Who the devil was this girl, and why did my sister hang out with her?

  “Someone looks confused.” Samantha tilted her head toward me. “Sister?”

  “Yeah. She’s going help me clear my stuff out.”

  “Well, little sister, we must introduce you to the company of the bobbleheads.” With a forced laugh and her head turned firmly away from the crowd outside, she pranced toward the reception desk.

  Ren followed without hesitation, but I had to grind my teeth to stop them from clicking. We had to hurry. Liza Woods could show up any second.

  “Behold.” Samantha made a grand flourish, gesturing to something on the desk.

  She wasn’t kidding. It was a lineup of actual bobblehead dolls. Some of them familiar. I leaned closer. “Is that Stephen Hawking?”

  “Yup.” Samantha laughed. “It’s my bobblehead boyfriend collection.”

  Einstein. Carl Sagan. Jeremiah Lowton. Their oversized heads grinned up at me.

  “He’s my favorite,” Samantha said, tapping Stephen Hawking and sending his head rattling.

  Okay, maybe we could be friends. “Mine, too.”

  Ren cleared her throat. “Listen, Sam, I’ve got to get going before this mob does something crazy. Do you mind scanning me into the back?”

  Samantha darted a look to a looming door flanked by a DNA scanner. Next to it, a sign stated, ALL VISITORS MUST BE ESCORTED BEYOND THIS POINT.

  Above the sign was a large map of the building. To be safe, I committed an image of it to a metal Link.

  “I can’t let you back, Ren,” Samantha said. “If they revoked your access already, I could get in trouble.”

  She had to let us in. She had to. If Ren tested the DNA lock, they’d know immediately she was here whether the door unlocked or not. This was our only option.

  “Please, Sam.” Ren’s smile faltered. “I just need to grab some of the stuff I left at my desk.”

  “I can’t. I could get fired, especially if your sister’s there too.” She brightened. “I could call someone to escort you back, though.”

  My pulse skyrocketed. Brilliant. Call in the cavalry to march us to jail.

  Ren said, “I guess that works.”

  Uh, no. What? This wasn’t the plan, we had to regroup, come up with something else before Liza Woods descended with fangs bared.

  “Ren,” I hissed under my breath.

  She ignored me.

  Chills prickled up my legs. Was I being betrayed by someone I loved again?

  Samantha picked up the earpiece on her desk. Ren lunged for her.

  I caught the edge of the desk. Ren clapped a hand to Samantha’s face. For a brief moment, Samantha struggled. A smothered scream gurgled to silence, and she flopped into Ren’s arms.

  “What—” I gaped at Ren as she lowered Samantha to the floor.

  She stuffed a piece of fabric in her pocket. “I’m not exactly strong enough to knock people out by hitting them.”

  A chemical. Something she used to knock out her victims. My pulse pounded, and I remembered my sister was the Link thief.

  “She was your friend,” I said.

  “Which is exactly why I did that,” she snapped. She turned, her eyes watery. Maybe even teary. “Now she won’t get in trouble, and she won’t get hurt.”

  “But they’ll notice, the security . . .” A security camera sat tucked in the corner of the wood-lined ceiling.

  “All security is patrolling the grounds, they have been for days.” Ren picked up Samantha under the arms and dragged her toward the door by the desk. “The security feeds are unmanned most of the time lately.”

  Outside the glas
s doors of the entrance, the security had their backs to us. No one had seen a thing.

  Samantha’s head lolled to the side as Ren lifted her hand to touch the DNA scanner. A beep and click announced the door had unlocked.

  “You can’t hold the door open, it’ll set off an alarm,” Ren said. “Go through and open it for me when I knock. I’ve got to hide Sam.”

  The door closed behind me. An empty hallway stretched away from me, doors lining the sides. Thoughts of Samantha being crammed under her desk fled. My ears strained for the sound of a door opening, for angry words demanding why I was here.

  A knock behind me nearly made me yelp. Shaking, I opened the door for Ren.

  She pushed past me. “We’ve got to hurry. Sam’s schedule said Liza’s actually in today. I’d rather not get arrested.”

  I forced a grin in an attempt to not cry. “I’m all about having new experiences today.”

  She let out a strangled laugh. “Wow, Gen. You really did grow a backbone.”

  Our footsteps squeaked on the tile. The sound scratched at the inside of my chest like nails on a chalkboard.

  Ren played with her gloves, tugging on the ends of each finger. “It’s a lot quieter than I expected.”

  Agreed. Shouldn’t there be someone to ask us questions? To wonder why Ren was here after she’d been fired? It almost would have made me feel better, instead of the waiting waiting waiting for confrontation that didn’t seem to be there.

  “Here.” Ren turned into a room filled with long lab tables decorated with computers, tablets, and projection screens. It was as empty of people as it would have been on a weekend.

  “What did you do, anyway?” I asked.

  “In addition to fetching and carrying?” She snorted. “I was a data processing assistant. Basically, I ran computer simulations on all the information the head researcher, Dr. Lassen, discovered. Most boring job in the world.”

  She slid into a chair and picked up a tablet. “These are on a different security network than the door locks. Only a few guys in IT can change authorizations, and I don’t know if they’ve been here today. Let’s see how slow bureaucracy made them.”

  She swiped her thumb along a dark strip on the side. The tablet stayed blank. A tiny red light in the top left corner started blinking. My heart seized up. Red was bad. System failure, explosion imminent, security alerted—that’s what red meant.

  Ren dropped the tablet. “We’ve got to bolt.”

  She leaped up and spun, then stopped.

  “Come on, Ren!”

  She swore.

  “What?” I jerked around to see who had found us. No one there, just an open door.

  “That door isn’t supposed to be open. It’s an entrance to one of the higher-level labs.” She tugged at the cuff of her glove. “This isn’t right.”

  All the people gone. No security doors to stop us. No, it wasn’t right.

  “How long till security gets here?” I asked.

  “Depends on how things are going outside.”

  We couldn’t leave with nothing.

  “Let’s check it out, fast,” I said. “If we are caught, we’ll have all those lovely memories of yours to prove our story in a trial.”

  “Unless she erases them and throws us in the basement to be guinea pigs with the others.”

  Oh, lovely thought. “Why didn’t Liza do that to you in the first place? Or instead of firing you?”

  “I have too many family members who still talk to me for her to risk putting me under.”

  We approached the open door like a nightmare might be lurking beyond it. A faint electrical buzz sounded as we got closer. Ren and I paused on either side of the door. She nodded, and we stepped in together.

  It was cooler inside, and emptier than the room we’d come from. No desks, no chairs, no people. Only an enormous machine in the middle of the tile floor, humming contentedly to itself. It came to my waist and was almost as long as I was tall. Several metal panels had been removed, showing a complicated maze of electronic parts. A large quartz stone and infrared Share port were embedded next to a touch screen.

  “She did build an SLS,” I said. “A giant one. What’s she going to do with all that processing power?”

  “Oh, Gena,” came a voice from behind us. “I’d think your own experience would make that obvious.”

  Ren and I spun to find the ever-smiling Liza Woods crossing the lab.

  24

  When fill’d with tears that cannot fall,

  I brim with sorrow drowning song.

  —Alfred, Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam XIX

  She’d trapped us. Behind us crouched the SLS, and Liza stood in the only doorway, blocking our exit.

  Ren stared at Liza, her mouth open. “What—what happened to you?”

  No kidding. Her media pics always painted the image of the stylish, approachable, youthful-but-mature CEO. Now, she slouched in her rumpled business suit. Her once-bobbed hair hung just over her forehead. Her bronze skin looked waxy, her face uneven and distorted, like a face-lift gone wrong.

  Liza smoothed her suit jacket. “My health isn’t the best, as you may recall. But it doesn’t matter.”

  Ren’s hands clenched and she gestured to the SLS. “What is this? What are you doing with it?”

  Liza flounced into the room like a bad-postured model and patted Ren on the shoulder. “Dear Serenity. So intelligent. So eager. And always so many questions. Someday, you’ll learn the value of silence. Someday soon, I should think.”

  Her sadistic smile focused on me. “And your sister. Genesis. So restrained and proper at first glance, and yet more like you than I’d realized.”

  How did she know so much about me? My voice shook. “You knew we were coming.”

  The smile showed more teeth. “Indeed. One of the many advantages of our dear SLS. We managed to, shall we say, acquire the sales data of those nice little Link buds you all wear. All we need is the serial number of a person’s Link buds and a certain frequency, and we can wirelessly connect to your memories each time you put them in. It was very helpful for monitoring Ren after she left.”

  Ren had listened for news outside Happenings with her Link buds. I tried to count the number of times I’d worn my own. Too many. Plenty of opportunities for someone at Happenings to access my entire life. I squeezed my arms to my chest.

  Liza crossed to the SLS. She caressed it with hands I would have expected to be decorated with fancy nails. Instead, the nails were cracked, the hands dry and frail.

  “Of course, we have all the data on your SLS’s, too. Makes it so easy to obtain every bit of information we could want. That’s why this fellow had to be so big.” She patted the machine, which gave a dull metallic ring. “So much data to process.”

  Data. Personal memories connected through Link buds. Medical records, police evidence, scientific discoveries. Anything stored on the SLS grid—or in Links connected to Link buds—was at her fingertips.

  “It’s really quite a wonderful piece of technology,” she cooed. “In fact, there’s something else it can do that I believe you’re rather familiar with, Gena.”

  Dad’s SLS prototype. “My dad’s been working for you all along?”

  “Yes. Well, not exactly working for me...but yes.” She giggled, like a little girl with a secret. “He was quite distraught this morning, you know. The fade function was never meant for fully erasing memories. But now that we know it has that little side-effect, it seems it has its uses.”

  Dad. A spy for Happenings. Giving them Ascalon’s research, sales data, who knew what else. No way. Not after his tirade against Ren working here, his constant Happenings insults, his adamant stance against human experimentation. Except that last bit had meant surprisingly little to him in the end. All the rest could be lies, too. Lies to me. To Ascalon. To all the Mementi.

  I closed my eyes against the anger and tears. How could I hate him properly when I could never forget that I loved him too? It made his lies hurt so muc
h more.

  Liza tapped a rough fingernail on the control screen of the giant SLS. The sharp jab brought out a plea I nearly spoke out loud.

  Don’t make me forget again.

  I edged toward the door.

  “Guards,” Liza called in a sing-song voice, lifting a hand to her mouth theatrically. What was wrong with her? Was this all some kind of show to her, some kind of twisted entertainment?

  Two burly men came into the lab. Liza snatched Ren’s wrist. Ren shouted and I raced forward, but Liza shoved Ren into the guards’ arms.

  “Please escort Ren to the lobby, and be sure to follow the new protocol.” Her hand circled my bicep, cold and hard as steel. “I’ll be along shortly with her sister.”

  She was letting Ren go? She couldn’t possibly be letting her go. “Ren!”

  “Gena!” she yelped. They hauled her away and shut the door.

  I pushed Liza, trying to spin and twist out of her grasp. Her fingers bit into my arm.

  “Stand here, please,” she said pleasantly, shoving me at the wall at the end of the SLS.

  “Where are you taking my sister?” I kicked at her. She staggered back against the enormous machine.

  When she stood straight again I found myself staring down the barrel of a gun.

  The cheerful lilt in her voice vanished, exposing a guttural undertone. “Against the wall, Gena. I’m not fond of shooting pretty girls.”

  I slapped my palms against the wall. She wasn’t “fond” of shooting? But she would. Tendrils of fear snaked down my legs.

  “It’s only a tranq, of course,” she said, the faked lilt returning. The show must go on. She tapped at the SLS screen. “And much as I’d love another Mementi test subject downstairs, you present an opportunity. A large-scale test of the machine’s newly discovered feature.”

  Large equals worse. I didn’t want to know about worse.

  “You can make me forget whatever you want,” I hissed. “But someone will find out what you’re doing here.”

  Liza laughed. “Don’t be silly, dear. I’m not going to make you forget anything at all.”

  All the tension, fear, and anger leeched from my body, replaced by a single word.