“She’s usually on a beach. In Seattle, I think.” I only really saw her the one time, but I can’t let on about that.
“Is she there every time?”
“Yes.”
Marcus taps his lips. “So heaven’s a beach in Seattle?” There’s humor in his voice that makes my stomach turn. “And why is the unfortunate Mr. Thompson trapped in a gray cell?”
“Maybe he’s paying a penance for working with ascenders.” There’s no humor whatsoever in mine.
Marcus is unimpressed. “The attractiveness of the afterlife would certainly be dimmed if it was spent in a box.” Then an expression of clarity comes across his face. “Then again, perhaps that’s exactly where you need to go.”
“Um… not quite following you,” I say.
Kamali takes a step back, and I can’t help flitting a look to her, but the turmoil on her face is inscrutable. I swing back to Marcus. “Let’s just get this started. What do you want me to do first?”
He edges forward and gestures Kamali closer to me as well. She hesitates, then obliges. “There are a great many nuances I would like to explore in this alternate plane you seem to have access to, but for the moment, there are really only two key things I need. First, a sense of what life after death looks like and whether it depends on the method of death. And secondly, proof that it exists.”
“Okay. How exactly am I going to do that?” I hope he has some ideas because I’ve got nothing.
“First, tell me: to your knowledge, have you only contacted humans?”
“Um… yeah.” To cover the lie in my voice, I quickly add, “I mean, I think they were all humans. I guess I wouldn’t really know. Most of the people in my visions seem human enough.”
Marcus is nodding to himself. “I suspected as much. There haven’t been many ascenders who have died, and so the chances would be small—if this were entirely random. But I suspect it’s not. You were drawn to my mother when you were with me. And last night, without instruction, you visited someone who was unknown to you. But when I instructed you to find Thompson, you were successful. Correct?”
“Yeah.” I’d been too busy recovering from the fugue and passing out to give it much thought, but Marcus is right: I basically summoned Thompson. I have no idea why that would work, but it did. Maybe Marcus’s God-mode patch unlocked an ability to seek out people in the fugue, like he’s saying. Or maybe the fugue state is unlocking itself the more I go into it—expressing like Lenora hinted at before.
Marcus’s eyes take on a shine I don’t like. “There’s an ascender—a dead ascender, or at least one who is suspected of being dead—that I want you to contact next.”
“I can try.”
Kamali is taking this all in with lips pressed tight.
Marcus acts like she’s not even in the room. “There’s a certain group of ascenders who have chosen to go completely non-corporeal. They live without bodies, away from Orion, and they’re essentially disconnected from ascender society. They have chosen this path for their own reasons, but there are some who think they are more holy than the rest of us.” The disdain in his voice is pretty clear. “They’re called vapors, and their admirers think they have achieved some kind of higher consciousness level because of their seclusion. In actuality, they’ve done nothing more than voluntarily put themselves to storage.”
“Storage,” I repeat. “That’s like ascender jail, right?” A concept that still kind of blows my mind.
He waves that off. “Well, yes, there have been certain unstable personalities who have had to be put to storage for the good of Orion—and really themselves, before they could become one of the scrubbed.”
“The ascenders who kill themselves,” I check, just to be sure. “Leopold told me about them.” Marcus has to know about Leopold’s attempt to take his own life—after all, Lenora, Marcus, and Leopold were all involved in the experiments that created me.
He smirks. “Ah yes, your rebel friend, Leopold. It’s unfortunate Lenora stopped his rather inept attempt to leave this existence.”
I just ignore that. “I don’t really understand this—you’re saying these vapors put themselves to storage on purpose. But that’s not the same as scrubbing? Meaning, they don’t actually wipe out their… cognition?” I think that’s the term Leopold used when resurrecting Lenora. “So they’re not dead.”
“Not typically, at least,” he says. “But there’s one vapor, a particularly obnoxious and delusional one, who was convinced of his own godhead. Only a few cycles after he secluded, his storage registry went dark.”
“He died.”
“That’s just the thing.” Marcus’s eyes light up. “No one can ascertain his demise for certain because the vapors take their personal key with them. Unlike those who are put to storage and locked in from the outside, the only ones who can release the vapors from storage are themselves. What I want you to do is contact this vapor in the afterlife… and get me his personal key.”
A chill sweeps through me. I don’t know all the details, but I’m certain that having someone’s personal key gives Marcus control over their life. Or death. But if this ascender is already dead…
“What’s his name?” I ask.
“Diocles.” Marcus waves a hand at the wall, and it transforms into a screen. A man with smooth features and brown skin smirks from an image splashed across it. He’s young, maybe twenty-five, with intelligent eyes. “Most of the pre-Singularity information about ascenders was purged—or at least there were attempts to do so, as the freshly ascended took on new names and refashioned themselves as gods.”
I try to hide my surprise, but Marcus still notices.
“Oh, yes,” he says. “I know about our delusions of self-importance. Given that the newly ascended at the time of the Singularity were barely capable of not killing themselves, it’s safe to say they had not yet grown into their potential.” He gestures back to the smirking man. “I managed to find this pre-Singularity picture of Anthony Ramirez—Diocles. I don’t know if that will help or if it will just lead you astray.”
“Lead me astray how?”
Marcus fixes his tar-black eyes on me, which only reminds me that in his fugue-state form, his eyes were brown. “You’re searching for his soul, Eli. And I’m not entirely sure he has one. Or if he does, if it’s the soul of Anthony Ramirez, pre-Singularity physicist, or the soul of Diocles, ascender vapor gone dark.”
I frown. Do ascenders have souls? And if they do, does their soul go into storage with them? Storage seems like just another form of backup, which begs the question: how do you back up a soul? None of this makes sense to me.
Marcus is waiting for a response.
I clear my throat. “I guess I’ll ask Diocles about his soul when I see him.”
Marcus’s face lights up with this—both the smirk and the gleam in his eye make my stomach churn. He glances at Kamali. “I’ll give your revolutionary second a chance to induce your God state—but if she fails, we will use the adapted monitor.”
I swallow. “Fine.”
Kamali’s fists are clenched tight, but she moves toward me when Marcus indicates she should start.
“God state?” she says quietly as she passes behind me. It’s arched with unspoken questions behind the real one. I can only imagine what she’s making of all this talk of the afterlife.
I twist to look at her, but she rests her hands on my shoulders, so I look forward instead.
“You need to relax.” She starts to gently massage the muscles at the crux of my shoulders and neck, which are still bundles of cramps from last night’s induced fugue. Her thin but strong fingers kneading my flesh feels impossibly good—I let my head drop forward and roll it, going with the motion of her hands working my muscles.
I manage not to moan.
But I’m more than a little surprised that she’s helping me. Maybe all this talk of God and the afterlife has changed her mind.
“Picture a safe place,” she says softly, her hands still moving. �
��Somewhere not here.” Her voice takes on an edge, and her massage grows weaker, tapering to just the warmth of her palms resting on top of my shoulders. “Imagine yourself floating on a peaceful lake. There’s nothing but calm surrounding you. Even the trees are still. No waves. Just your body, floating, completely relaxed.”
I nod because tension is draining out of me like a plug was pulled somewhere around my feet. Kamali’s presence has always had that effect on me: soothing, calming. I half expected the meditation to not work at all, but with her hands touching me and her soft voice, she’s successfully lulling me into a buzzed state.
I close my eyes.
Kamali’s voice drifts into my ear. “There is nothing that can harm you…”
“…nothing that can touch you.” But her voice has gone deep, transformed.
I’m in the fugue state.
The voice belongs to a man, sonorous and rich. You are separate. Unreachable. Unbreakable. The dark behind my eyelids zooms away, revealing a craggy-faced man. He sits in a room with ancient rock walls and stain-tarnished benches. Jars of paint and brushes crowd the flat surfaces. I know this place. I remember the man from my previous visions… he’s a master painter at work. He helped the woman who infused me with the knowledge of how to create Olympic-level art.
“Are you Diocles?” I ask, wondering if all along I’ve been having visions of someone who sequestered himself into storage.
The man smiles, a thousand wrinkles shifting and reforming. “No. That is not my name.”
Then I remember: he’s a painter from the past, the Dutch one. Of course he wouldn’t be an ascender. “I need to find Diocles,” I say, but that request feels tiny in this space, as if only great art and answers to important questions should be sought here.
“What you need is to paint.” The words fall from his mouth and form colors, just as they did from my own mouth with Thompson. The colors swirl in the low amber light and coalesce on a canvas that appears by the master’s side. He used the word paint, but it’s actually resonant with more meaning: create, color, illustrate. “Schilderen,” he says, beckoning me with one, aged finger. It means portray. “Kleuren.” Tinge with color.
I raise my hand, and the colors obey the motion. I bring the other one into it, both hands as brushes, color-mist as medium, and I form the portrait of a man. The one I’m seeking: Anthony Ramirez.
“You are the creator,” the master says.
His words are like soft chimes, but they don’t make sense, not really. I didn’t create Anthony Ramirez, just his image. “I’m just a painter.” I banish the portrait with a wave of my hand, and the colors dance out like galaxies pinwheeling through space.
“You are the bridge,” the man says, his voice gaining weight and volume.
“I don’t want to be the bridge.” My complaint feels small, like the need to find Diocles. It’s unworthy of this place. I want to leave, but the thickness of the air holds me.
The man nods. “Sometimes a bridge is crossed. Sometimes it burns.”
An icy wind sweeps through the workshop, stealing the soft glowing light and plunging the man’s face into darkness. He’s still there, I can sense him, but he’s shrouded in the murk.
“Wait!” I say, reaching into the dark.
His hand emerges from the inky blackness, palm up. I grasp hold of it—
“Eli!” It’s Kamali, painfully gripping my shoulders, only she’s in front of me this time. I blink up at her, and the relief is plain on her face. She drops her panicked voice to a whisper. “You were gone so long.”
I look down at my hands resting in my lap. There are no tremors.
Marcus edges her aside. “Did you find Diocles?”
“No, I—”
He moves with ascender speed—
I’m flying back through grayness, back in the fugue, back into nothingness… my mind rails against the lack of anything real, but the fog seeps into my brain, numbing it, making it heavy with inertia. I could float like this forever. Detached and unconcerned. No friends to rescue. No dying mothers. No girls with soft lips I’ll never be able to kiss. I could be lost like Thompson, only uncaring. Not responsible for anything or anyone, not even myself…
I’m supposed to be doing something.
Diocles. The name resonates in my mind like the aftermath of a massive bell rung once. Lights appear in the fog, hazy but moving in frenzied little jumps. As I watch, they become more distinct and larger. I’m zooming closer to them, drawn like the moon to earth, falling. The mist clears, and the shining lights resolve into the ascenders of New Portland, busy in their tower apartments, flitting with ascender speed. One flares brighter than the rest, and suddenly I’m pulled into an apartment with a woman. Her back is to me, and she’s working a holo canvas, rendering in virtual paint a fantasy of light and feathers.
“Angels,” I say, not really meaning to speak it out loud.
She continues to paint, not hearing me. Which makes sense because I’m not really here. At least, my body isn’t. I don’t understand the fugue, not even close, but I can tell this is real. This isn’t Thompson’s hazy gray box or the master’s ancient rock workshop. This is happening now, in the real world, I’m just seeing it through the fugue lens.
I drift closer, moving without intention, drawn to her. When I reach her, I say, “I’m searching for Diocles.”
She doesn’t hear me. But I was drawn to her for some reason.
Her thin ascender shift swings as she moves. Her hairless head is flushed with the many colorful emotions of her work, almost as if her canvas is herself rather than the digital one in front of her. I reach my hand out to touch her head, to see if I can bridge the gap between fugue and reality: will she feel it?
My hand passes through, plunging deep inside her skull, but before I can pull back, horrified, the entirety of me is sucked in after it. I’m compressed and squeezed into an infinitesimal space and then blown apart. The haze is back, but it’s not gray: it’s a fantastical, overwhelming wonderland of color, like being swallowed in a tsunami of paint instead of water. I’m drowning and choking, both buried and exploding simultaneously. My awareness of the deluge grows—it’s endless and pulsing and filled with a multitude of white-hot burning points of light. People. Ascenders. They’re flying at me, passing through me, bombarding me with knowledge and feeling and color. There’s too much, too many, I’m drowning, drowning, I can’t… Some primal part of me, the part that knows I’m dying, fights against the barrage. My formless body struggles to gain shape. The blown-apart pieces of my mind fight to come back together. I have to return, escape, hold tight against the forces splintering me…
I’m back in the room with the woman, stumbling forward, my hand having just completed the momentary pass through her mind.
She jerks upright, looking all around the room.
For me.
She doesn’t see me shuddering on the floor, holding my hand, but she’s searching… for the ghost in her mind. Knowledge springs to the front of my thoughts: the tsunami is Orion. And I just tapped into an ascender mind to get there.
Our contact is broken now, but in that brief moment, I dipped into her mind and made contact with not only her but all of the ascender net. Images and knowledge come rushing back, memories that flooded my mind for that brief moment and stuck, like grains of sand embedded in my skin.
The woman’s name is Emma. She is Diocles’s second, and something about that connection drew me to her. I know things about her and him that only lovers would know. Things you would only share with someone you trusted with your very life. Your personal key. I have them both: hers and his.
I stand and back away. I have an urgent need to protect that information with my life, and I can’t tell if it comes from her, the flood of her memories still filling my mind, or from the realization that if I touch her… if all I need to breach her personal key is to travel in the fugue state and plunge my hand into her mind…
…then I can do that to anyone.
But this much I know: there’s no way I’m telling Marcus any of this.
I suck in a breath, sudden and quick, like I haven’t had one for minutes.
And then fall to the floor.
I’m back in Marcus’s office. Kamali kneels at my side, but I’m one giant cramp from head to toe. My eyelids keep twitching open and closed—I can barely see her. It’s like my physical body still carries all the shock that my fugue-state form absorbed—from Marcus’s God-mode device, the grayness, and now the overwhelming sense of Orion. Add in the knowledge that I can access personal keys—and can’t divulge that to Marcus under any circumstances—and my mind is spasming as much as my body.
“Eli, can you hear me? Are you all right? Eli, say something.” Kamali is panicking, and I can’t comfort her, can’t say anything even if I wanted to. Then she’s gone, and Marcus lifts me up again. Thankfully, he leaves me to shudder uncontrollably in the chair by myself, rather than holding me like a baby.
“Eli!” His voice is a demand for my attention. “Did you find Diocles?”
I nod my head, but I’m so jerky, I don’t know if he can tell. “Ye-ye-ssss.”
The gleam in his eye tells me I’ve got precious little time to figure out my lie. My body’s a wreck, but my brain is starting to clear. The personal key: I know its form and shape now. And it’s mostly a shape, as well as existing in an amorphous cloud of quantum information that only resolves under certain conditions, which are also hidden within the form of the matrix data. In short: it’s complex. Even as my mind feels like it understands the key, that understanding is quickly fading. It’s there—but not in any way I could express coherently in language, mathematical, spoken, or otherwise.
Which instantly makes me wonder how Marcus thought he would get this information out of my head once I had it—the kind of mental scouring my friends and family are undergoing jumps immediately to mind.
The Duality Bridge (Singularity #2) (Singularity Series) Page 16
