by Amber Stuart
Chal remembered herself as a little girl playing in the streets, remembered herself as a young woman studying hard in the deep recesses of the university libraries, remembered too the person who had loved, been heartbroken, done too many things which she later regretted. Was she the same person throughout? Certainly not.
The Chal Davidson who stood in front of a lecture hall a few days ago was light-years different than the Chal Davidson who had stood, nervous and shamed, in front of her childhood classmates after she had been caught selling test answers to a friend. Every cell in her body was different, every neuron in her brain had died and been replaced. All that was continuous was a fallible memory and the fact that from one day to the next she had felt like the same person.
But when she slept, her brain changed. When she slept, she had no waking consciousness to tie her to her past self. Chal liked the idea of being given a new chance every day to create herself as a person. That was as religious as she got.
When she would argue with lovers, she told them that she didn’t mind going to bed angry.
“I won’t be the same person tomorrow,” she said, and she was usually right. She would wake up refreshed, her brain settled down and not flushed with adrenaline and all the other chemical compounds that induced anger. She often wondered why she had been so mad the day before. The answer that she found made the most sense was just that it was a different version of her self that was mad.
Of course, sometimes she would wake up and realize that the Chal she had turned into didn’t care for the person sleeping next to her anymore. She took this in stride, although she often wondered if there would ever be someone who could catch her attention for longer than a few weeks at a time. She had been criticized for her callousness, but Chal thought this was misguided criticism. She was never cruel, simply honest. It wasn’t her fault that all of her past relationships had slid into boredom. The worst relationships were not those which were rife with anger or sorrow, but those which wandered aimlessly and ended up mired in impassionate routine.
It may have been the type of man that she attracted, but she found nearly all of them boring after a while, their sex life stalled into blank routine, their conversations void of any spark of life. She had tried counseling after one relationship with a man who had insisted on it before letting her go. She went obediently to the first three sessions and then quit.
“It’s like trying to resuscitate a rock,” Chal had said when her lover had begged her to try just one more session.
It didn’t matter anyway to Chal. Tomorrow she would be a different person. If the philosopher Locke was right, she couldn’t tell what she would do next or who she would find herself attracted to. She would just take it in stride, one day at a time. This worked for her, or at least she told herself it did.
Now as she was carried through the long, sloping tunnel, she felt her mind drift in and out of the world and considered herself reborn each time she opened her eyes.
One blink, one lifetime. One person born, one killed.
She could do anything, she thought hazily. She could wake up as anyone. In the clouds of her mind, she yearned for something new, and did not know what it was. Something else. Something that was not Chal the lecturer, Chal the precocious daughter, Chal the great and famous scientist.
In the recesses of Chal’s consciousness, she found herself holding tight to the man who was carrying her.
***
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
When Chal awoke she did not know where she was. She heard a low roar coming from behind her and when she wiped her eyes clearshe saw the stars. She blinked hard, turning her vision to the side, and what she saw left her breathless for a few seconds.
She was in the cockpit of a small airplane, in near-total darkness, and Alan was piloting.
“You’re awake. That’s good,” Alan said. He seemed calm, and Chal, scared as she was, allowed herself to breathe for a moment before replying.
“Where are we?” she said, her voice trembling.
“We are heading west over a desert,” Alan said. “There’s a road to the north of us that I’ve been following.”
“How--” Chal said, then stopped. Her head hurt and she raised her hand to touch it, wincing. There was a bandage over the wound. “How did we get here?”
“You were asleep,” Alan said. “I carried you out. There was a plane just outside of the tunnel. I thought it would be faster than walking.”
“A plane?” Chal asked.
“I imagine it was Dr. Fielding’s.”
She closed her eyes, seeing Dr. Fielding again crumple to the floor as his clawed hands beat spasmodically at his own head. She would never be able to wipe the image out of her memory. “You know how to fly?”
“There’s a manual in the side pocket,” Alan said. “It wasn’t that hard to figure out. There’s a medical pack too. How is your head?”
“It’ll be fine,” she said. She was thinking about brain structures and Evan’s preprogrammed capabilities. “How long have I been asleep?”
“Around an hour,” Alan said. “We’ve been in the air for fifty minutes.”
An hour. They must be flying over the Mojave desert, or maybe the Sonoran, depending on how far south Alan had taken them. She looked down but could not see anything at all. There should be a map somewhere. She rifled through one of the packs in the back of the cockpit.
“There are some pills for alertness. I’ve taken two so far, but I should probably sleep soon,” Alan said.
Chal simply nodded, but she was thinking of how quickly he had fallen asleep during the last session. How had he stayed awake for over an hour? She darted a close glance at his face. His eyes were rimmed red, twitching from side to side. It was more than dangerous for him to be staying awake for so long.
“Let’s land,” Chal said.
Alan nodded. “I’ve been considering it for the last few minutes, but I thought I’d consult you first. There’s nothing down there but sand.”
“And? We can’t land there?”
“It’s not so much the landing,” Alan said. “It’s the taking off afterwards if we damage the landing gear. And I’m pretty sure we’d scrape off everything underneath the plane landing on bumpy dunes.”
“Oh.” Absently, Chal considered the neurological development that must have allowed him such foresight. She continued going through the packs, thinking of what they could do if they hadn’t any map. They had to land somewhere, and soon.
“Here’s a change of clothes,” she said, pulling a shirt out of the pack, then a pair of pants. Alan was still stark naked, sitting in the pilot’s seat, and she couldn’t help but be distracted by his sitting so nonchalantly. “You’ll need them once we get down .”
“I’m just going to try to get us down first.” Alan smiled wanly.
She found the map tucked into the side of her seat. The coordinates pinpointed their location with remarkable precision. They were close to the California border, which was good. One of her mom’s friends had immigrated nearby into America, and she was the one Chal most wanted to see now. Lucia would be able to help them if anyone could. Chal just hoped that they would make it there.
“Let’s turn south,” Chal said. “There’s an old highway we can land on not too far from here.”
Her face was pale but at least now she had a plan. They had a plan.
***
The last time Chal had been down to this part of the country, she had been struck by how desolate it was. Most of her time was spent in lecture halls and laboratories, hopping from one big city to another. For her entire adult life, she had surrounded herself with people. Now she looked down at the vast expanse of sand as an entirely alien thing.
Of course when they came close to the old highway it was not as desolate as Chal had hoped. In the darkness she could see pinpoints of light underneath them, headlights of travelers going somewhere in the night, or escaping from somewhere.
“Dammit,” sh
e said. “We can’t land on the road.”
Alan looked wearier than ever, his eyes bloodshot, and he reached for the pills. Chal stopped him. She had seen the medicine’s ingredients, mostly amphetamines, and they were not healthy for anyone to use three times in a row, let alone someone whose brain was just developing.
“I can’t keep flying like this,” Alan said. “I need to take another one.”
“We’ll land now,” Chal said.
“But the road--”
“We’ll land in the desert,” Chal said, looking worriedly at the map. “Where we’re going isn’t that far.” Fifty miles, maybe sixty. But even a short distance was long in the desert. It wouldn’t be good to depend on outside help, but it looked like that was what they might have to do.
“Where are we going?” Alan said. He turned the plane away from the highway so that they were running parallel to the road. Chal could see the desert floor dimly through the wisps of clouds.
“To a friend’s house,” Chal said. “To someone who might be able to help us.”
Alan nodded, his eyelids drooping half-shut. He blinked and shook his head, trying to stay alert. The plane nose turned down, and the low, level sand stretched out before them. They dropped below the clouds, then further. In the dusky sky, they crept downward, the black ground looming larger before them until Chal felt as though they would be swallowed by it.
She was calm until Alan brought the plane down to about a hundred feet above the ground, and then she started to panic. The sideways wind made the small plane’s wings shake, and now that she had a background perspective to compare it against the dipping wings seemed certain to smash into the ground. Her ears were filled with the motor’s roar. Without thinking, she reached over and clasped Alan’s arm in one hand. The other hand braced against the cockpit dashboard.
“It’s okay,” Alan said. The cockpit lights flashed on his face, red and blue.
“What?” Chal said.
“The conditions are adequate,” Alan said, raising his voice slightly. Chal seemed to hear him from a hundred miles away over the roar of the plane.
“Adequate? What does that mean?”
“Better than poor,” Alan said. The plane dropped down with a sudden jerk, and Chal’s stomach rose upward in her chest.
“Better than poor.”
“But not as good as fair.”
Chal’s face had never looked so horrified.
“It’s okay,” Alan repeated.
She shook her head in mute agreement but stared out of the window at the rapidly approaching ground.
From the sky the desert had seemed like one smooth dark surface, but as they got closer and closer Chal could see the looming shapes that made up the desert floor. Craggy rock outcroppings dotted the landscape, and the ground was speckled with thick sagebrush, pocketed with ditches and gullies. There would never be an open space that was clear to land on. They were going to crash. There was no way they could make it. Her fingers were clenched white.
Still Alan dropped the plane lower, and Chal held her breath as the wings dipped and tilted. The desert rushed past them underneath at incredible speeds, rocks and brush and cacti whizzing backwards. Alan flipped the switches and the wing flaps opened, slowing their descent and making the roar of the wind ever louder.
The floor jolted under their feet, and Chal was sure they had hit a rock until she heard the familiar whir of the landing gear.
Closer and closer, until they were mere feet about the desert floor. There was a horrible pause during which Chal thought they would be dashed to pieces against the ground, and then the plane’s wheels hit the sand. Touched it, first, bounced back up, and then all of the wheels were on the ground and the plane was rumbling across the desert.
Chal had thought the plane descent was terrifying, but at least in the air the turbulence was only felt as a brief uneasiness in her body. Now, though, they were bouncing hard over rocks and brush. On the left, Chal saw a rocky, brush-covered berm emerge from the camouflage of the desert floor.
The brush rose up in front of them, and she averted her eyes, bracing herself for impact. Alan stomped down on the right steering pedal, pulling the plane into a careening curve. The wing clipped the high brush on the berm, the branches grating across the aluminum surface of the plane. Chal shied away from the cockpit window, her knees rising instinctively to protect her body, curling up into a fetal position.
They pulled out of the berm and into a gully, and this time Alan had no chance to react. The plane crashed down sideways, stopping with a jerk as left wing caught a rocky outcropping, and the cockpit glass shattered on Chal’s side, raining shards of plastic and metal into her lap.
“Ohhhhh.”
Alan groaned, turning his head to one side, and Chal’s heart wrested in her chest. She had been thinking of them as partners in this escape, but only now did she realize how much she considered herself dependent on Alan. And above all this rose her acute need to protect him. He was worth millions, tens of millions, after all, and she was sure that someone—the U.S. Military Intelligence Division, perhaps, or a Singaporean spy—would be out to find Alan and retrieve him. Kidnap him.
“Are you alright?” Chal asked. “Are you injured?”
Alan shook his head, but he was already falling sideways into a control panel. Chal pulled him back, and his head bobbed gruesomely to one side before finally flopping over onto his shoulder.
“Alan?” Chal’s voice was strained with worry. She opened one of Alan’s eyes to check for signs of trauma. Please, don’t let him be in a coma, she thought. Please don’t let him have a concussion. Please no internal bleeding. And please, oh please, any of these rather than that he were dead. Please don’t let him be dead.
“Not dead,” Chal said, after a brief look under Alan’s eyelids. “Not dead. He’s not dead, Chal.” She leaned back in the cockpit and looked up at the stars overhead. Her seat was tilted sideways and she slid sideways, her head lolling against the seatbelt.
“Not dead,” she repeated, letting her forehead rest for one moment against the strap. “Just sleeping.”
“Just sleeping,” she murmured, and the words had not yet wafted off of her tongue before she fell into deep, dreamless sleep. Overhead the light from stars millions of years ago continued their race through the galaxy to no particular purpose or end.
Chal’s eyes were closed, but the heavens kept on shining as they had for millennia. They shone for the rocks and the coyotes and all of the small slitherings in the night desert.
***
When Chal woke a few hours later, the sky was losing its last bits of darkness in the west. In the east, beyond the dunes and low mesas of the desert country, a light blush of grey began to paint itself across the sky. It was sunrise.
Chal blinked her eyes and looked around. Her breath whitened the chilly air, puffs coming out through her slightly open mouth as though she was enjoying a cigar. She brought her hands out from where they had been clasped under her legs for warmth. All of her back and neck muscles were tense with the cold, and her joints ached.
The half-shattered cockpit glass twinkled overhead, casting a thousand tiny rainbow prisms onto Chal’s face and body from the sun’s nascent rays. She raised one hand above her eyes and wiggled her fingers experimentally, watching the colored lights play over her skin. She felt as though she was still in a dream.
“Alan,” Chal said, looking over to where he slept, his chest rising and falling. She hoped he would be okay after such a long period of sleep deprivation. She didn’t want to wake him until he was ready, but the military would be searching for them, and a plane in the middle of the desert would not be hard to find in broad daylight.
“Alan,” she repeated, and this time Alan blinked his eyes open, looking around.
“We’ve got to leave,” Chal said. Her fingers were clumsy on her seatbelt as she unclasped the cold metal. Her fingertips felt numb. She reached over and unlocked
the cockpit latch. There was a tinkling of glass and metal as the window slid open. She bent her legs under her, getting her balance as she pulled herself up in the cockpit.
“Leave?” Alan said. He yawned, and Chal felt like tugging him out of the seat herself. It was dangerous here, and as the sun’s rays clawed over the desert floor it grew more and more dangerous to stay.
“We have to go to Lucia’s,” Chal said. She stood up and immediately bent over again, nauseated with pain.
“Easy there,” Alan said. Just like that he was out of his seatbelt, holding her by the shoulder to steady her.
“I’m fine,” Chal said, although she wasn’t sure of it. Her head had been knocked hard during the earthquake and although the blood had stopped she knew that she would still be weak. But there was no time to rest, not any longer.
Alan was up, though, helping her out of the cockpit. She slid along the scratched metal of the plane until she felt the relief of firm ground under her feet.
Alan pulled on the clothes she had gotten out for him and slung the packs onto his shoulders as though he had all the energy in the world. Chal tried to take one of the backpacks but he stole it off of her hand as she was bringing it up to her shoulder.
“Hey,” she said.
“Hay is for horses,” Alan intoned solemnly, and she giggled, immediately thinking that she must be in hysterics. Where had he learned that? He was dressed in the white buttoned shirt and khaki pants she had found in the pack, and he looked no different from any other man now that he was clothed. He seemed somehow in disguise.
And his brain was entirely incomprehensible to her. What other information had they programmed in? And why a sense of humor?
“I can take that, really.”
“So can I, and you’re the one with the injury,” he said. She watched as he took out the compass and used it to point them in the right direction, checking Chal’s markings on the map.
“It’s this way,” he said confidently.
It was so very strange to see him like this. In the lab he had been an experiment, a naked helpless creature waiting to be molded. Now he looked like a man, acted like a man, and Chal was having a hard time making the adjustment. She was not the one taking care of him anymore. They were partners now, both running away, escaping from something they didn’t fully understand. And, still in her lab suit, Chal was the one who stood out like a sore thumb in the real world.
