I take in a long breath, feeling the wide expanse of huge lungs, tasting the wet sweetness of warm and alien air. The realization suddenly hits me that I have not stumbled out of Mother’s wardrobe, and that my body has undergone some sort of radical change. The revelation should terrify me, but the recent uncomfortable feelings I attributed to the Sartixil have fled, leaving only a sanguine taste in my thoughts. I realize all at once that not only am I far removed from the intruder, but I am back to being Salomi again, at least in my head, as if the invading presence of another mind—which had secretly inserted itself into my subconscious—had been exposed to a burning light and been extinguished.
Nevertheless, I am trapped and confused. But am I truly alone?
“Hello?” I call, then immediately gasp. I spoke as a man!
The strength and size of my limbs, the baritone of my voice—how can I suddenly be a fully grown man?
Before I have the opportunity to ponder, there is light. Just a sliver, but there is definitely a glowing strip extending vertically, a little beyond arm’s length. It’s beautiful as it widens. Aquamarine in color, ebbing and rolling gently like tidal ripples in a tropical pool. It sounds like a thousand tiny tongues lapping water as the lips of this window to another world relax, and as my surroundings fade into view, the walls of my prison are revealed, glistening and black with thick, leaflike veins pulsing gently on their surface. I am inside some sort of cocoon.
The gap is wide enough for me to squeeze through now, but I am still immobilized. Beyond the widening oval aperture are more curved walls, but these are more precise, more streamlined, undoubtedly artificial; and I have the impression my cocoon is suspended at the heart of a giant sphere. Again I am awed by the light, but I see now that its source is myriad. Studding the distant walls are hundreds, thousands, perhaps millions of glittering specks embedded in perfectly ordered lines. Oh, so beautiful! This place is blissful, and I wish I could free my hands and feet so that I could explore it all. The mystery of how I got here and why I am suddenly a man holds equal fascination for me. I hope there is someone here who can answer my questions.
“Hello?” I try again, calling through the gap.
I giggle at the sound of my new voice, compounding my amusement further, and say it again, even deeper this time.
I’m not sure whether it is a response to my call or not, but the hiss of hydraulics answers, and seconds later the clamps retract from my wrists and ankles. A cool sensation caresses my scalp as though a mountain stream is trickling out of my brain, and in the periphery, I glimpse delicate silver threads sliding away from me. I instinctively reach for my head and gasp when I find hair. Soft, fine, and long. I play with it in my fingers, laughing again, not caring as I fall to the sticky bottom of this bizarre chrysalis. It takes me a moment or two to regain my balance and crawl through the gap, but I have to grab hold of the wet sides before I fall again.
I am right. The cocoon is suspended at the center of a vast sphere. I feel like an ant clinging to the withered stone of a peach that has been emptied of the pulp beneath its skin. My feet, which are missing shoes and considerably larger than they were a few minutes ago, are perched on the rim of the opening, and I wiggle my new toes so that the slippery edge tickles my skin—more sensory proof that what I am experiencing now is reality and not some peculiar dream. At least, I think it is real. It is not the sort of place my mind would invent.
With no obvious way forward, I peer below. I see only a long drop, and craning my neck outward to look up, I see a similar distance to the domed ceiling. Again I am taken aback by the scale and beauty of this place: vast and exquisite, like being inside a perfectly ordered geode.
“Hello? Can anybody hear me? I seem to have arrived by mistake.”
Only the sound of my own giggle greets my ears in response. There isn’t even an echo, which feels strange too.
“I’m coming out,” I call to nobody but myself. “If I break my legs, it’s your fault, and Mother will be very cross if she finds out you let me get hurt.”
Squatting to rest my backside on the bottom of the opening, I let my legs dangle as I grip the edge. Three . . . two . . . one . . . After a sharp intake of breath, I do the ridiculous thing and jump. I am flailing. There’s a twisty feeling in my stomach, and I can’t help but cry out in my man voice.
Crack! Even gravity seems stronger than normal here. There is an instant of pain—or something like it, but more like a flash of acknowledgment inside my head that wants to be noticed, as if my brain cannot understand why the screaming agony of a broken bone is mysteriously absent.
Pain has always been a confusing experience for me. It is like a different kind of pleasure—one that I want to stop. This time it is different, though. Both my legs are bent at the knee in the wrong direction, and the skin has split on my right kneecap to reveal what I think might be cartilage poking through pinky-red mush, and yet I really don’t feel the pain.
“Hello? Excuse me, I have got blood on your nice clean ball wall. Ha! Ball wall.”
I think the little hatch opening in the floor a few paces away from me might be an automated response rather than an answer to my call, because it busies itself rapidly scanning me rather than addressing me in any way. An articulated metal appendage examines my injuries with a pin-spot red laser light and a series of random beeps. It pauses after shining its beam into both my eyes, and then a spike the length of my forearm shoots out from the end, twists above me in a manner that is obviously threatening, and lances my temple.
TEN
I wake suddenly in another new place and feel an ache in my lungs and a throbbing rush of blood in my head that fills my ears, but it only lasts for a few seconds. My blurred vision sharpens to show me clean white walls, and a gentle hum replaces the rushing in my ears. A metallic male voice breaks through:
Cellular generation complete.
Circulatory systems stimulated.
Neural transfer complete.
Subject 9.98768E+14 resurrection successful.
My eyes are adjusting to the light and the walls are becoming more defined: cushioned, like soft white leather, with gentle lighting coming from lamps embedded at regular intervals. I am inside a booth. The floor is warm on my soles as I take tentative steps out into a wider space. It is a large cylindrical room, also with cushioned walls and more booths set into them, all empty, save for one to my right.
There is a woman within. She is naked. Beautiful with bronzed skin, flowing silver hair, and large, deep brown eyes staring upward to the roof of her booth so that it is mostly the whites I see. She is festooned with cables covering her modesty, and pain twists her youthful features. She is still but for the erratic movement of her chest, as though the many coils of silver penetrating her skin are causing her great difficulty in breathing.
I take two slow steps toward her. “Hello? Are you hurt?”
She flinches, blinks several times, and scrunches her eyes before setting her gaze on me. “Salem,” she says.
“No,” I say. “Salomi. My name is Salomi Deya. Who are you?”
Pain causes her to flinch again, and there is a moment of confusion in her eyes before she answers, “Oluvia . . . Wade. I am Queen Oluvia Wade.”
I shake my head and shrug. “Don’t know you. Where am I? I was at home. Well, it was Saliel actually, and then I was—”
“Listen to me,” she says. “You are not who you think you are, and I have very little time to explain. The virus is . . .” She flinches again and cries out.
“You’re sick?”
“Yes. I am dying, and I need you to do exactly as I say before we run out of time. When this body expires, there cannot be another.”
“Is it those cables? Shall I pull them out?”
“No. I did this. Needed to connect to the Control Core . . . Needed to . . .”
“Can I get you out of there?”
“No time. I need you to listen to me.”
“I’m listening.”
&n
bsp; “Good.” She seems to relax a little as she controls her breathing. Oluvia studies me. “You truly do not know who you are?”
“Of course I do. I’m Salomi . . .” I look at my hands, my feet, hear the deep tone of my voice again. “I’m Salomi Deya . . . aren’t I?”
Oluvia’s eyes lose focus for a moment, as if she is trying to remember something. “Your name, your real name, is Salem Ben. The person you believe you are died many billions of years ago. This place is called the Soul Consortium. It is a place that holds the memories of every human being who ever lived, and you, Salem, are the last human. You are living the memory of Salomi Deya, but I had to risk bringing you out prematurely, before I die. I could not invoke the neural flush that returns your mind back to who you truly are. Your brain configuration still matches Salomi’s, but your body is Salem Ben’s.
“When you woke, I had to bring you to me, and the only way to do that was to contrive your death. You fell, and the Control Core would have detected the need to repair your body. The most efficient way for it to do that was to kill you so that a new body could be generated for you here in the genoplant. Your consciousness, as it stands, was transferred into Salem’s new body. The same is true for me. This body is only a few days old.”
I stare at her. I think I understand what she says, and the evidence of my body persuades me to trust her, but I am stunned into silence. If it were not for my condition, I am sure that panic and fear would send me into shock.
“I am going to tell you more,” she continues. “Things that you will find hard to understand, but you must accept what I say. So much depends on your complicity. Will you do as I ask?”
It takes a few moments to find my voice. “That depends on what you ask me to do.”
A tear rolls down her cheek as she grimaces. “Please!”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Here.” She reaches toward me with a trembling hand. There is something in her palm. A small green strip that looks like a data wafer. “It is an algorithmic implant. Peel off the backing, place it anywhere on your skin, and it will secrete a nanocode program into your bloodstream. Once inside, it will protect a small region of your brain where your higher reasoning will be given instructions on how to proceed. You will be given a mission that must remain secret, even to you. A quest for answers.”
“Why? Answers to what? I don’t understand.”
The woman squirms inside her nest of cables to wrestle her pain into submission. “Soon you must go back, and when you do, you will forget everything that happened here. The answers you must look for are connected to an individual named Keitus Vieta. He is an aberration, a rogue entity, and his presence in this place—in this universe—is an anomaly.”
“Keitus Vieta? I have seen him. He was the statue where the Absorption Tower should have been.”
“Yes, that was my doing. It is why I have connected myself to the Control Core. I had to instill in you the danger he poses. I reconfigured part of your brain while you were living Salomi’s life to prepare you before waking you. A little piece of Salem Ben was in your subconscious. Did you feel like two people were living inside you?”
“I did, yes.” I smile in spite of myself. “I was very frightened, but I can’t remember what that feels like now.”
“But you remember the importance of that feeling?”
“Yes.”
“Then you know why you must trust me and wear that patch. We have to learn more about him. We must understand him, and I must rely on you to find out the truth.”
“You said I had to go back. You mean me? Salomi?”
“Yes. The life must be completed so that Salem can return. When Salomi dies, and the memory of her life is complete, the neural flush will be triggered so that Salem’s mind can be returned to its former state. He . . . you will retain the memory you experienced inside the WOOM, but this conversation will be gone.”
I look at the little green patch between my fingers. “And what does this do again?”
“It will not hurt you. It will just tell you what you need to do when you wake up as Salem.”
“What if I don’t want to wake up as Salem?”
She observes me, shocked, as if this was an unconsidered option. “You must.”
“Why?”
Oluvia holds my gaze, but I can see distance in her eyes, as if holding on is becoming harder. “Because . . . that is who you truly are.”
“Is it? Right now I am Salomi Deya. I have been for almost twelve years, and I will be dead soon.”
“Not in this body.”
“But if I go back . . .”
She nods. “When you go back, you will see the rest of Salomi’s life.”
“And if I stay here?”
“You might live a little longer, but your brain configuration is not built for Salem’s body. I don’t know what will happen.”
I look at the patch again, and then back at Oluvia. Her breathing is shallow now, and her eyes are rolling back.
“Can I look around first?”
She does not answer. Instead, her arms and legs go rigid and her mouth twists into spasm. She stares at me one last time, and as she slips away, I see more tears in her eyes. I recognize a look there. Like my mother’s, as if she loves me.
“Oluvia?”
“Yes?” she whispers.
“What will happen to me when I go back?”
She stiffens one last time, convulses, then sinks down into the cables. A soft sigh passes her lips.
“Oluvia?”
She lies still. Her eyes are blank, her mouth slack.
ELEVEN
A soft whirring of motors emanates from the booth next to Oluvia’s corpse, and flashes of bright light pop and fizz within. I take a step back, stumbling slightly because I expect my legs to be shorter, and gasp when another body slides out of the booth, wet with new life. It is Oluvia again, but this time there is no spirit in her eyes, as if the machine forgot to put a mind inside her head.
“Oluvia?”
She says nothing in return. She simply lies there, breathing steadily, twitching occasionally, staring.
I turn, look again at my surroundings and see a slim door behind me. It slides upward, allowing me to exit when I walk toward it, and I step through into a wide, featureless corridor that extends in a curved arc to my left. I continue through, walking slowly as I try to adjust to these foreign legs, and eventually reach another door, which also opens when I approach it. I have the impression I am walking the circumference of a gigantic sphere.
More corridors. More doors. Endless walking. No people.
It is a lonely place, and I wonder how the man who inhabited this body could have endured such a lonely existence. Who is this Salem Ben? And who was that woman, Queen Oluvia Wade, who brought him here? His partner?
Eventually there is a new door set into the side of the corridor rather than at the end, and hoping for a change to this monotony, I walk through. A tingle of pleasure plays along my spine as my eyes adjust to brighter light, like sunshine, and the new area is made clear. The room beyond—if I could call it that—is more wondrous than I could have hoped. It is a vast spherical space that greets me, but unlike the previous areas I have seen, this one carries with it a sense of grandeur and awe, as if I have stumbled upon the throne room of a galactic palace. A single gangway spans the sphere’s width, keeping me from falling into the deep drop below, and it leads to a raised disc-shaped plateau at its center, which must be a thousand meters away and almost certainly designed as a viewing point.
The walls are windows upon a night sky, split by a multitude of towering arches, and I marvel at the view. It is an all-consuming void, its depth defined only by the occasional scattering of fuzzy, pale blue light: distant electrical clouds drifting lazily into spiral-shaped clusters.
“What is this place?” I murmur.
I jump when the cold metallic voice I heard earlier answers my question.
You are in the Observation Sph
ere.
I look all around me, just to see if there is actually a mouth attached to the voice, but I see nothing and nobody. “Who are you?” I ask.
I am no one. I am the Control Core.
“Oh, you don’t sound like no one. You sound like a someone. Don’t you have a proper name? Where are you?”
I do not have a proper name. I am nowhere.
“Oh, I see.” But I don’t. “So what am I observing?”
Heat death. Quantum foam. The epoch between the first and second cycles of the universe.
“Between? So how long will it be until the second cycle begins? Can I see it? What will it look like?”
Yes. Four thousand five hundred twenty-seven million years, eighty-eight days, and eleven seconds. Not until the time of Heat Death has elapsed. The voice pauses before answering my fourth question. It looks like the first cycle.
“And what did the first cycle look like?”
It looks like the second cycle.
“Hmm. What can I do while I wait?”
Anything you choose.
“What would Salem Ben do?”
Salem Ben lives the lives of souls stored within the Soul Consortium Archives. He is currently living the life of Salomi Deya and experiencing a temporary interruption to the process. It is not recommended.
“Oh. That would be me. Here now, I suppose. I’ve never been called an interruption before.”
The Soul Continuum Page 5
