Blood, Ink & Fire

by Ashley Mansour

  “Not that cleanly,” Miriam says. “Their methods leave, shall we say, a unique residue. Namely, the memory of the act of reading, what it felt like, and the emotions and experiences it brought you ultimately remain intact.”

  “All the better to help you mourn them,” Hale says.

  “Precisely, Son,” Miriam answers.

  I feel myself slump into the desk. I must be outside my body. “So this is what they do to us,” I mutter. “In immersion.”

  “We don’t yet understand their technology, or how exactly they inflict this condition upon the human brain,” Hale says. “As you can imagine, getting any information out of the bioslice is virtually impossible. But what I can tell you is that what Fell has developed is extremely advanced. The effects of their immersion often resemble what used to be known as a stroke.”

  “A stroke?”

  “An insult or trauma to the brain. It used to happen naturally to people, but Fell has found a way to actively trigger such a trauma in order to erase this part of us.”

  “Us?” I ask. “You mean they did this to the Sovereigns, too?”

  “Sovereignty had a price, dear,” Miriam says. “They only had to erase a couple of generations, of course. A little forgetting and fear goes a very long way.”

  “You see, literacy ignites free will, something Fell is deathly afraid of,” Hale says.

  “They intend to rewrite humanity,” Miriam whispers.

  “And they have infrastructure and the tools to do it,” Hale finishes.

  Ginny turns to me, her eyes bloodshot from crying. “They take over from the inside. Like a virus.”

  I feel my heart drop, my gut churn. So that’s what they’ve been doing to us. That’s what I narrowly escaped. Fell wasn’t going to erase the words. They were going to erase part of me. Maybe the only part I felt was right . . .

  I turn to Miriam. “Is this what happened to you?”

  Her eyes fill with tears. “I was one of the first to be erased. My punishment, for having an association with the Rising.”

  “This program will help us see whether John has been immersed,” Hale says. “And of course we pray he hasn’t.” He positions a helmet-like instrument around John’s head. A series of wires sprout from his temples. Hale attaches them to a display one at a time. “Let’s begin.”

  Hale passes the wrist-plate over John’s head, activating the helmet. With each movement the display lights up, developing a map of John’s brain. When it’s finished, he enlarges the left hemisphere on the display. Hale swings the map around, entering the small lobe at the back of John’s brain. He twists and turns the flesh, distorting and resizing it as he goes. “That’s strange,” he says quietly.

  “What? What is it?” Ginny goes to his side. “What do you see?”

  Hale shakes his head. “That’s the problem,” he says. “I don’t see anything. If the scan is correct, John has not been through immersion.”

  Ginny puts her hand to her mouth. “But, I don’t understand. How can there be nothing? Something must have happened to him!”

  “You’re wasting your time,” Miriam says. “You won’t find what you’re looking for.”

  Hale repositions the helmet and carefully adjusts the wires. “The equipment might be off,” he says. “It has been a while since I performed an update.”

  “I’m telling you it isn’t there,” Miriam says. “He shows none of the characteristics, Hale. Trust me. I should know.”

  “Scan him again,” Ginny says. “Go on.”

  Hale performs the scan a second time. The room is silent. When he’s finished, he brings up the results on the display. Hale shakes his head as he reads them. “There is nothing there. Nothing irregular that would indicate . . .” His voice trails off. “Nothing that would indicate he’s been compromised.”

  Ginny thrusts herself at John. She takes his face in her hands. “What happened to you? You have got to tell us! Tell me what happened, John!”

  John sits forward in the chair and stares at her blankly. “I am not John.”

  “I told you,” Miriam whispers. “I have been trying to tell you.”

  Ginny kneels in front of him. “Who are you, then, if you’re not my little boy?”

  “The data will tell us,” Hale says, not taking his eyes off the display. He zooms into a small part of the brain scan, in the lower left corner. “Science never lies.”

  John’s eyes dart to Hale. Everything is still, as though the air has been sucked from the room. “Science?” John says. His voice is as still as a bone-dry seabed. “You don’t have a science for what I am.” Ginny stumbles back. For a second, I think she’s reaching for me.

  “It doesn’t make sense,” Hale is saying. “None of the usual signs.”

  Ginny touches my shoulder, then the wall. Her hands find the butt of Hale’s gun.

  “Miriam!” I gasp, but she’s already thrown herself between Ginny and John.

  “No!” she shouts. “I told you before, he is not here to hurt us!”

  “Stop!” Hale leaps up from his desk. “There’s something else here. Look at this!”

  Ginny lowers the tip of the gun and turns to the display. A trace of hope finds her. She seems to forget her panic.

  “The scanner is picking up some very strange activity.” Hale circles a finger over a lit part of the display. “See this?” Colors light up all over the brain map, firing little sparks from one hemisphere to the other. “This is technically consistent with the neural activity of someone who is asleep. Someone asleep and having a very lucid dream, to be exact.” John’s brain activity looks nebular, with tiny bursts of light flickering in every corner.

  “I don’t understand,” Ginny says. “What does it mean?”

  “I don’t know,” Hale says. “I couldn’t tell you.”

  John rises from the chair and removes the helmet. “I have been patient. But now it is time,” he says, calmly. He looks at Miriam. “You must help them understand.”

  Miriam nods, her eyes transfixed as if she’s watching a star being born. “It might help if you tell us your name.”

  John locks his eyes on me. His expression reveals none of our friendship, our past. All of it is gone, as though it’s been erased, as though it was lost in immersion. “My name?” he says. His lips part, ready to unravel everything I have come to know.

  “My name is Ledger.”

  LEDGER

  NINE

  The body of John Potts was still warm as Ledger entered it.

  He felt the boy’s heart kick inside his chest—John’s chest—as he died. It was a good heart, strong and sturdy. It beat one last time in protestation, as if it had been trying to save the boy from his fate. But Ledger knew it was not to be. The boy’s lungs had collapsed when the voltage pierced them. His final breath had already escaped. The blood in his veins had stilled and congealed. So much of it had been lost, so gruesome was his murder. Ledger stayed with him then, until the vital things in him ceased and his too-short life was fully extinguished.

  When the boy departed, Ledger took up his body. He did it quickly, the sooner to feel his soul embodied. He did not like the sensation of being intangible energy, a weightless, invisible thing without form. Here, it was unsettling.

  The boy’s heart regained its rhythm. A sudden jolt of pain gripped him. Yet Ledger did not mind this sensation. He knew, as the squelch of his flesh closed the wounds in his chest, as the blood ceased to flow out of him, as the optic nerve regained its function, that this was his choice. Whatever pain he felt now, he had been longing for it.

  Longing itself had been part of him for quite some time. Ever since he felt himself catch fire at the end of the twenty-first century. He had been burning ever since. He remembered now the way his skin—hundreds of millions of pages—had been eaten alive by flames. That feeling entered him now and hummed within his human bones. The long ache of wanting to return pinned him to the earth. And now he was here. At last.

  His lungs swell
ed as Ledger inhaled a single, long breath. With the inrush of oxygen, his blood began to flow.

  He waited within himself until the feeling of death dissipated, and the air filling his lungs gave life to the parts of him he’d never had before. His muscles, tendons, and ligaments. His organs. His skeleton. The neurons in his brain lit up like distant solar flares. His body twitched as newly minted matter. Finally, the agony eased, and Ledger knew the first part was over. He was fully alive. But Ledger also knew, as only one who had descended could know, it was only temporary.

  Before his eyes could open, the memories of the last ten minutes of the young man’s life drained into him. Ledger tilted back his head, absorbing the final instances of John’s existence. The noise and chaos consumed him. He felt the harsh light flash toward him, and though he could not perceive its color, he knew it was there. The faces of the men responsible for his ending were mere shadows, lit by the cadence of their voices. He felt a slow color leaving him and permeate the floor. Somewhere, a girl was screaming. He listened, searching the dark, the way John had done, for her voice. She was calling his name, and in it, a fearful apology hung heavily, like a tear that would never fall. The thought struck him then: the girl had watched John Potts die.

  Suddenly the memory faded, leaving only traces of the girl’s voice inside him. Ledger held on to her as everything else grew faint, knowing she had been the last thing the boy had with him.

  At least he died this way.

  This thought disturbed him, because he knew if he had to choose a death, he would choose one like John’s so that he, too, could hold on to her. Though he didn’t understand why, Ledger thought that in his final moments, her voice alone would make returning to oblivion bearable.

  Who is she? The colors of the girl’s soul had infused him with the strangest warmth in the center of his chest. He tried to remove this feeling since he knew it would be counterproductive to his purpose.

  Ledger pulled himself from the floor of the RV. The clothes of the boy were soaked in blood and caked to the body—his new body. His chest ached, and Ledger rubbed the newly healed spots where the voltage had made contact. The ache itself wasn’t terrible. In fact, it was fair to say that he didn’t mind it. He knew this simple fact and had known it for some time: descending was an unpleasant business. There was no one to blame for this. The unfortunate blip of death that encircles humanity makes it so. There’s no getting around the surprise of being yanked from oblivion, unaware that the life you will endure, the vital breath that will instill the body you are given, will ultimately lead you back to where everyone begins.

  The nothing.

  The no place.

  The inexplicable everything.

  Ledger folded the white sheet that had been draped over him and examined his surroundings. The long, narrow interior of the RV was riddled with him now. It would never not have pieces of the boy inside it, no matter what was done. This bothered Ledger more than he liked, so he tried to distance himself from the death that brought him into existence.

  This was difficult to do. Ledger looked out the window. Outside the RV, a small circle of people had gathered. Many were asking about the situation, some in raised voices, though most were hushed, disturbed. An old woman cried and shook on the back steps of a house. A much younger woman perched next to her, dabbing her eyes with the side of her sleeve. People dressed in white came and went, laying pale blossoms near the RV’s wheel wells.

  Ledger could not leave without being seen. It wasn’t right that they should know of him yet. He surprised himself that he understood enough of their pain and confusion to spare them more. He escaped through the open window in the small room at the back of the RV and darted quickly into the alley, where he wouldn’t be spotted. He was surprised, too, that he felt sorry for doing so. He thought of how he could not simply walk up to the family of the boy and pretend for just a moment, giving them the smallest relief from their sorrow. Doing so would only make their hurt greater.

  The agony of transitioning had been expected. He had been prepared for the excruciating jolt of landing on the turning wheel of life. But not the other part—the interiority, the emotion. That was something he hadn’t quite known. No doubt there will be more of this. Ledger hurried from the alley toward the central thoroughfare. After feeling nothing for eons, any sensation, no matter how small, is more.

  This is not to say he didn’t understand what it was to be human. No. On the contrary, Ledger thought as he navigated the perilous streets. The emotions of humans had been poured into him for centuries. He liked to think he understood humans rather well, that he empathized with their condition. He had come to know what the sting of a bee is like, or why the sensation of falling in a dream wakes a person. He’d come to understand how the pain of loss mimics the physical, biting wound of the knife’s edge. Yet no matter how much he understood, he had never really felt it for himself. Without a body, human sensory experience—like human emotion—had always been beyond his reach.

  In minutes, he’d mastered the tilts and cracks of the chewed-up asphalt beneath his feet and was able to take off running. At the edge of the small town, Ledger took shelter under a sideways-growing tree near a long chain-link fence. He could practically taste the death of it as he neared and wanted to move away, but there weren’t a lot of options for concealment. The tree’s branches hung low, shielding him from the outside world. It would have to do. In the quiet, he listened intently, waiting.

  He didn’t know her name or even what she had meant to John Potts, the boy whose soul now rested in hands made of clouds. But it didn’t matter. Ledger was prepared to wait as long as it took. The hours passed. The daylight faded to night. The evening grew cold. The air stilled. A steady awareness of time passing crept up on him, and by the time the sky donned its mantle, Ledger felt undeniably anxious.

  Before, he’d stood outside of time, and simply observed. Time had passed around him like a swirling fog of star matter, taking shape, forming constellations, creating patterns. But now time sat on his shoulders, heavy and rigid, marking his every heartbeat.

  In the night air, his body shivered. He was unable to see the stars above him, yet he knew they were there. That gave him some comfort. Yet as the sun came up without a trace of a sound from her, Ledger began to doubt himself.

  He jumped to his feet, not wanting to miss the moment when he would hear her. He paced in the dirt, listening for her words, for the cry she would utter that would tell him where to find her. Anticipation filled his body like electricity. He closed his eyes to recall the image her sound made inside him, to keep it alive. But he scarcely had to try. Her soul’s colors were so bright and vivid they filled him instantly, changing, shifting, nebulous. It was all he could do to keep up with the many incarnations of her.

  He ached to see her now, to see whether her face would match the terror in her voice. What would he say? What would he do when he saw her? It was no use imagining, though Ledger enjoyed the novelty of doing so. Soon it will happen. Soon her voice would cut through space and time, and he’d be able to go to her. But what would he find when he got there? Ledger shook the thoughts from his mind, refusing the possibilities. He lost all sense of time passing. It doesn’t matter how long it takes. I need to find her.

  And the thing that scared him, the thing that sent him reeling was a truth he wanted to deny. He knew it as sure as he was human now: he would wait out the eons all over again just to find her.

  NOELLE

  TEN

  Amanuensis,” Miriam says. “That’s what Prospero called me. I remember thinking it was strange. But I didn’t ask questions. Back then, everything was strange. And everything was burning.”

  Miriam takes up the armchair in the Potts’s living room, while Hale, Ginny, and I sit on the small sofa with Page at our feet. John—Ledger—stands against the fireplace, holding eerily still. The place feels smaller with all of us in it.

  Miriam scoots forward in her chair. “Now, I will tell you the s
tory the way it happened.”

  “Mom,” Hale says. “We don’t need to hear the story again. Not tonight.”

  Miriam looks at him, appalled. “You’ve never heard this story. I promise you.”

  “No? I can promise you I have. Let me cut to the chase, seeing as we’re all a little tired.”

  “Always so arrogant,” Miriam says. “You never did want to listen.”

  Hale turns to me. “This is pretty much the gist. Stop me if I miss anything, Mom. Once upon a time, this land under our feet had a little problem. The land of the free, home of the brave, so it went. Anyway, this place where all men were created equal had started to fall. Puppet presidencies. Corrupt legislators. Corporations getting away with murder. Illegal wars. Government persecution instead of the rule of law. Information deprivation. Knowledge privatization. Unequal distribution of wealth. You get the idea. Anyway, free speech had become an untidy impossibility. Equal rights, a thing that existed only in principle. In short, a slow and systematic trampling of the civil liberties that had once been upheld. Oh, and to top it all off, the fervent persecution of anyone bold enough to talk about it. Of course, with a thing called the Inter-Net, all everyone ever did was talk about it. Especially some folks who called themselves the Fellons. The government had no idea an attack was coming, and that the leader of the Fellons, Astral Cadge, was about to unleash his arsenal of hacktivists on every official government site on the Inter-Net.”

  “Hacktivists?” I ask.

  “They were skilled, intelligent people who wanted to break through invisible walls and remove the barriers put in the way of the people. They had an agenda called freedom and free will, and this frightened the government. So of course they labeled them criminals and cyberterrorists. The Fellons should have been given official jobs, but instead they were persecuted by the legal system, hence their name. Anyway, they took down the official government sites, the Inter-Net went dark, and was soon replaced with what they called the ‘Fellon Manifesto.’ Finally, people started listening.”