Genesis Alpha

by Rune Michaels

  Lehcar.

  The fifth gold-starred memo.

  I open it and see Karen’s name.

  Rachel’s chair scrapes on the carpet. I hear her footsteps thud on the stairs. She’s gone. I wait a few minutes, my eyes frozen to the memo on my screen, but she doesn’t return.

  I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to think, I can’t think with the tornado swirling in my head, the horrible sick feeling in my stomach. This doesn’t feel real, it feels like a bad dream, like being stuck inside a nightmare with no way out. I’m looking at proof. I’m looking at evidence that Max is a murderer.

  But it can’t be. It can’t be Max. It can’t be for real. There must be an explanation, it must be a mistake.

  I access his mailbox again and continue reading his mail. Rachel’s letters this time. I know she doesn’t want me to. I’m not even sure I want to. But I read every last word, every one of their mails, and the room feels colder and colder.

  I’m shivering by the time I leave the hut and put Rook’s stuff back in the chest, getting ready to quit the game. I hesitate before clicking quit.

  I should save this.

  I don’t want it on Dr. Ashe’s computer though. I rummage in my bottom drawer until I find Rachel’s pocketknife. I locate the flash drive on it, flip it open, and connect it to the computer. The knife looks creepy sticking out of the laptop, buried in its side, so I hurry, export Rook’s character and his mailbox to the memory key, unplug it, and push the knife deep into my pocket.

  I log off, erase the player file so there’s no trace of Rook on the laptop. Then I log in as myself, close the chat channel, and find myself a difficult solo mission. Eventually I stop shivering.

  When lunch has passed and nobody shows up, not my parents, not even Dr. Ashe, I check the shed, not really expecting Rachel to be there. But she’s there. Alone. No cats.

  I sit at the other end of the mattress, back against the wall, my arms around my knees. After a while I notice we’re breathing in sync.

  “Did you read it all?” Rachel asks at last.

  “Yes.”

  “You see. He did it.”

  “Yes,” I whisper, saying aloud what’s been growing in my head since I first saw Rook. “He did it.”

  Rachel makes an odd sound. Her hands cover her face, her hood covers her hair. She’s a puddle of darkness, and I wish my dad were here. Dad always knows what to say. Most of the time it’s very annoying, but he’d be useful now.

  “He guessed.” Rachel’s voice drifts from the black heap. “Lehcar. It was a stupid name for me to pick, wasn’t it? He guessed my name was Rachel. Mom’s a freak about Internet safety. I get endless lectures about keeping safe. So I panicked. I said the first thing that popped into my head. I told him, no, it wasn’t Rachel, it was Karen.” She moans. “Stupid.”

  “You told him a hell of a lot more,” I blurt out. It was all there, in the memo. Karen’s college. Her major. Her sorority. All sorts of details. More than enough to track her down. Some of it I found in their e-mail exchanges. But most of it must have come from their chats.

  I see the glint of her eyes as she raises her head. “Yes. I told him everything. Everything he needed to know.”

  Sneaky. Patient. One little fact this week. Another one the next month. A clue, a hint, accidental slips here and there. One detail at a time, until he had enough pieces of the puzzle to put his horrible picture together.

  “Rook told me about you.”

  “What?”

  “Rook talked about you. He thought you were cool for a little brother. He liked your computer graphics stuff. You make spaceships and robots.”

  I nod.

  “He said you played Genesis Alpha together. I asked him about your game name, so I could say hi, but he wouldn’t tell me.”

  My head spins. Rachel has talked about Max as something subhuman. But she talks about Rook with familiarity. I see Rook as the killer, Max as my brother, a real person. For her it’s the other way around.

  “He said his little brother was about the same age as my little sister. Which is me. I was my little sister.” She mutters something under her breath. I think she’s saying “stupid” again.

  “What else did he say about me?”

  “Not a lot. Not that you were a designer baby or anything. He was careful. I wasn’t the only one, was I? He had a whole list of girls. Maybe Karen wasn’t the only one he killed. Or maybe he was just getting started, and she was the first.”

  Goose bumps start crawling around my body again. “I don’t know.”

  “I met Rook three months before he killed Karen. I talked to him almost every day for three months, and I didn’t realize what he was. He was normal. I didn’t know. He seemed so normal. Like you. It’s easy, isn’t it? Easy to pretend to be normal. But then I got suspicious. Of little things. Like, I told Rook I didn’t have a boyfriend. A little while later, he asked again. If I was sure I didn’t have a boyfriend. He sounded jealous. When Karen came home for a weekend a bit later, I found out she had a new boyfriend. There were other things, small things. He mentioned something he wasn’t supposed to know. Like, I told him I hated cigarettes, couldn’t stand the smell. And he acted surprised. Like he didn’t believe me. I’d forgotten Karen smoked. Little things like that. So I got nervous. Then I got paranoid enough to quit the game.” She digs the toe of her sneaker into the floorboards. “I spent almost a year building up my character. Lehcar. She was a scholar, seventeenth level. I had to start from the beginning again, all because of Rook.”

  “You still play?”

  “No. I did. For ten more days. Until Karen died. I was only up to third level with my new character.”

  “But how could you be sure Rook was the one who killed her?”

  “I wasn’t. I didn’t have proof. Not until you showed me.”

  “I don’t understand. If you suspected him . . . if you knew he was watching Karen in real life . . . if you suspected he was stalking her . . . if you were so nervous you quit the game . . . why didn’t you tell someone? Why didn’t you warn her?”

  Cleopatra emerges from the tunnel. She rubs against my legs on her way to Rachel. Rachel curls her body around the cat, her knees up, her head down, her hood drawn down over her face, turning herself into a shadow, fading into the wall.

  I shut up. And I understand why she’s making herself bleed.

  “Where do you think evil comes from?” Rachel asks much later, when the shadows have gotten longer and Cleo has vanished inside, to wait with the others for dinner to appear. She stretches, raises her arms so her hands and wrists shine white above her head, but her face is shadowed by the hood on her sweater.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Where is it stored? In our brain? Are there evil brain cells? Evil synapses? Evil neurotransmitters? Evil brainwaves? Where exactly is it?”

  She’s asking the kind of questions I like to ask my parents, but I don’t think all the research in the world can answer these questions. “I don’t know.”

  “Maybe there are evil stem cells.”

  I yank my head up in surprise. I can’t see her face, but I can imagine a thrill of joy in her eyes at getting a reaction out of me.

  “That could be where evil comes from,” she continues. “Maybe Max is really innocent. Maybe he couldn’t help it, he got evil from your cells. Maybe it spread all over him from you.”

  “If evil is anywhere, it’s in our brain. The human part of our brain.”

  “What do you mean, the human part?”

  I flounder, wishing Mom and Dad were here to whisper the correct answer in my ear. “It’s . . . our mind. Whatever makes us different from the animals. The ability to . . . think like that. I guess.”

  Rachel tilts her head to the side in that way I’ve come to dread. “So, does that mean evil comes with intelligence? Is evil smart?”

  “I don’t know. But evil is human.”

  “Can you create evil? When you raise a kid, can you make him e
vil even if he’s born good?”

  “Maybe. I guess. Maybe the kid wouldn’t know the difference between good and evil if nobody taught him. Or if they taught him wrong.”

  “What did your parents teach you and Rook?”

  I don’t answer.

  “Mom and Dad want Karen’s killer dead. They want to see your brother die. Is that evil?”

  I know that when a murderer gets the death penalty, families of the victims have the right to watch them die. I wonder how it works. Would they sit in the same room as my mom and dad while they watched Max die?

  Sometimes I don’t like being human at all.

  “Is it?” Rachel demands.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Maybe you should die too,” Rachel said. “You deserve it. My sister wouldn’t be dead if it weren’t for you.”

  My anger is a molten flash, it burns up through my lungs and explodes through my vocal cords. “What about what you did?” I shout at her. “You set her up. You gave her to Max. And you never warned her. She’s dead because of you!”

  Rachel smiles. It’s the rubber mask smile, and I shut my mouth, bend my head and hit my forehead against my knees, hard. Stupid. Stupid, stupid, stupid. This is what she wanted, and I walked right into it. She taunted me on purpose so I would slash back. She used me, just like she uses a rusty nail or a wood sliver or the Swiss Army knife, and I let her.

  “It can be like a game,” Max once told me, a long time ago when I asked why he kept teasing his high school girlfriend, making her run away in tears. “ To say different things and do different things and watch the way people react. I can call Nora right this minute, and if I say the right thing, she’ll come rushing back here. But people are pretty predictable, you know. It gets boring after a while.”

  Late that night Dad’s sitting at his desk, a red pen in his hand, a pile of papers to his left and a bigger one to his right.

  I love my dad’s office. When I was little, I’d sometimes sneak downstairs after I was supposed to be asleep, while Dad was up late, preparing a lecture or grading papers. He’d scowl when he saw me in the doorway, but then he’d push away the paperwork and hold out his arms. I’d crawl into his lap and put my arms around his neck and lean my head against his shoulder. And he’d tell me stories. Not fairy tales or fantasies, but real stories. Stories I couldn’t read in any children’s book. He told me about ancient kingdoms where brothers married their sisters, about autistic children who can calculate impossibly high prime numbers but don’t know what a smile means, about how experiments and history show that most people will hurt others if someone in a white coat or a uniform tells them to.

  But he never told me a story about a brother betraying a brother.

  For days I’ve been afraid that my brother is guilty. But knowing he’s guilty changes everything.

  I have no choice. There is proof.

  Without proof, they might let him out. And he might do it again. Rook might return to Genesis Alpha, he might go back to his hut, sit on the floor and sift through his memos, and maybe hunt down another girl.

  It’s up to me to turn him in.

  But if I tell, and Max is sentenced to death, then I will have killed my brother.

  I walk to Dad’s desk. Trail my hand on its edge and remember when the edge of the table was the height of my shoulder instead of my hip.

  “Josh.” Dad takes off his glasses and rubs his eyes tiredly. “You’re still up.”

  I look down at his hands resting on the table. Once, both my hands could vanish inside one of his, but now our hands are the same size. For a moment I wish he’d grow bigger. That everything in this room except me would grow bigger, so I could crawl into Dad’s arms and be safe there like I could when I was little.

  Instead I lean against the wall, slide down until I’m sitting on the floor.

  “What’s wrong?” Dad asks.

  “Dad . . . ,” I say, and he leans closer because my voice is so low. “If you knew . . .”

  “What?” Dad says.

  “If you knew . . .” There’s a lump in my throat. It stops the words.

  “If I knew what?”

  “If you knew Max was guilty . . . if you knew there was evidence . . .”

  Dad’s eyes widen. “What? It’s not poss—” He pauses. I see his throat move as he swallows. He shakes his head slowly. “Josh?” he whispers.

  It hurts, like talking with a sore throat, and my face is burning up, but I force the last words out. “What would you do?”

  Dad’s still staring at me. Then he stands up. He holds out a hand, and when I take it, he pulls me to my feet. He cups my face in his hands and brushes his thumbs over my cheekbones. Tears. I’m crying. Dad holds me tight, and I bury my face in his shoulder just like when I was little, squeeze my eyes shut and bite the inside of my cheeks to keep from sobbing like a baby. It feels weird when he hugs me, because I’m as big as he is now, and although I’m used to it, now it feels like I should be little.

  Then Dad grabs me by the shoulders, shakes me gently. I open my eyes. His face is pale, his eyes damp. He looks almost as afraid as I feel. If he doesn’t ask, I won’t say anything more.

  But Dad is braver than I am.

  “Tell me,” he says.

  I tell Dad about Rook. I tell him about the passwords, the fourth password in the sequence working, and I tell him about the evidence inside the game.

  I don’t tell him about Rachel.

  I mean to. I’m just not sure how.

  Dad, the girl on the news, the sister, the one who’s missing . . .

  Dad . . . you know, Karen Crosse? Well, her sister . . .

  Dad, I’ve been hiding a fugitive crazy girl out in the shed. . . .

  No. None of it quite works. And maybe I don’t have to say anything about Rachel. Maybe now that we have Rook’s computer records, she’ll go home, leave me alone.

  “I’ll handle it,” Dad says a long while later, after we’ve accessed Genesis Alpha together. He has asked a lot of questions, and the answers have tumbled out of my mouth, and then there was an eternal silence while Dad scrolled through the letters, and as he read more and more, as he saw the list of gold-starred memos, his breathing sped up like he was running. His forehead is damp, his eyes red because he keeps rubbing them. “Leave this to me. You don’t have to get involved, Josh.”

  He means, Max doesn’t have to know I turned him in.

  Mom doesn’t have to know I turned Max in.

  “Are you going to the police?”

  “Don’t worry,” Dad says quietly. “I’ll deal with it.”

  “Max did it?” Although I mean it to be a statement, it sounds like a question. A question I want him to deny. I want him to figure out some logical explanation for the evidence not being what it seems.

  “How do I log out of this game?” Dad asks.

  I show him. He makes a note of Rook’s username and password. Taps his pen against the pad for a long time. He has made a lot of notes. I don’t look at them.

  “What are you going to do?” I ask again, because he didn’t answer and suddenly I’m afraid he won’t take this to the police. Afraid Max will come home. Afraid Rook will return.

  “I’m going to talk to Max,” he says at last. “He deserves a chance to explain this.”

  But what if he asks Dad not to tell? Will Dad be able to refuse?

  “What about Mom?”

  There’s a long pause. The taps of the pen against paper have formed a tornado of tiny dots under Max’s password. “I’ll wait a bit to tell her,” Dad says. “I mean, he was obviously stalking the girls, but maybe . . .” He breaks off. “Your mother is very fragile right now. I’ll talk to Max first.”

  I dream that night. I dream I’m in the shed with Rachel. There’s a snowstorm outside, the small windows white with snow and the wind shrieking through the cracks in the walls. Between us is a makeshift table, made out of three old car tires piled on top of each other and a round wooden board on top. On
the table is a candle. It flickers in the draft, and our shadows are spastic on the walls. It’s cold. Our breaths are foggy, our hands white. Somewhere, a clock ticks. We’re waiting for Max to die. We wait and the ticking gets louder, until at last, it stops. Just stops. I hold my breath, and I know Max is dying. Max is dying, and I can’t breathe, yet I can’t stop breathing . . .

  My parents are out when I wake up. Mom has left a note on the kitchen table with a P.S. in Dad’s handwriting: “Eat breakfast!” Some things never change. I make a face at the note but go get my cereal. Apparently brainwashing does work.

  I go out to the shed, but there’s nobody hiding in the shadows. Three of the cats are there, looking for her. Cleopatra lies on the mattress where Rachel used to be, her nose quivering.

  It’s over. She’s gone.

  I go online for a while, but it’s hard to concentrate. I keep thinking about Rook, keep seeing him when it’s just someone in a Nasarus battle cruiser or the flash of someone’s Bloodstone axe.

  The cats wander in and out of my room like they used to before an automatic treat dispenser took up permanent residence out in the shed. But a few hours later they’ve all disappeared. When not even the sound of the dry cat food pouring into their bowls brings them running, I pull on a sweater and my boots and run out to the shed. It was too good to be true.

  There’s a new smell there. Rachel has lit a cigarette. It dangles from her mouth. And there’s a bag on the mattress next to her. Sandwiches and juice cartons.

  Tuna cans.

  “I thought you were gone,” I say.

  “I was. I came back.”

  “Where did you go?”

  She blows a smoke ring. “I needed some groceries.”

  “Groceries.”

  “Yep.”

  “Didn’t anyone see you leave the yard?”

  “I went through the forest.” She gestures in the direction of the trees stretching into our backyard. “Nobody saw me.”

  “Didn’t anyone recognize you?”

  She puts a baseball cap on her head, pulls it down over her eyes. “No. Guess I’m not as famous as you think I am.”