Unnaturals

by Merrill, Lynna

  "So. Finally we are back to initiative." Jerome grinned from where the medstats were holding him. "Will the gods help me, I wonder?"

  Meliora made the medstats push, and Jerome's face twisted in pain, and then she knew that the gods would. She had Jerome at her mercy. She had this whole city at her mercy—and she knew she couldn't break it. Just like she'd known that she couldn't deliberately postpone Alice's healing to control Andreas, just like she couldn't make people deliberately sick. She couldn't hurt. She couldn't break just like this.

  The City of Death was evil, she tried to think. The city would certainly kill in the future—oh, gods, the city didn't even heal people when they reached their young age limit or fell sick in villages! But there must be, must, must be another way...

  The medstats let go of Doctor Jerome. Meliora pressed her hands to her face and cried, even though she'd said she'd never cry because of a man.

  ***

  They let her go out of the room with the medstats after that. They told her that she'd been sick but now was all right enough to walk around. And she was obviously no danger. She obviously couldn't destroy even what she hated. She went to the apartment she'd shared with Nicolas and curled up on one of the beds. Let them think it. Let them think she was someone who would go their way now. Those emotionless people who took lives and played with them so easily must have forgotten something. You didn't have to kill in order to change the world.

  There would be a cure for young age, for everyone. She'd failed in so many things since fleeing Lucasta—but that she wouldn't fail in. She only had to find the cure, and then she'd find a way to add it to people's young-age treatment. No one would ever again die before their time. And then, she'd take care of the villages, of the diseases and the use of bullets or knives. Jerome obviously wanted her here. The City of Death needed new blood, he had told her. Periodically, new unnaturals must come here—but first they must deserve it. He said that she had. He said she could be a part of it all now, of those who stood above the world.

  Nicolas came back that night. She had no computer on her, so she didn't sense him. Her father wasn't with him.

  "He stayed in the village," Nicolas said. "After we left, it was a mess. Devils coming from the skies—such things. A division of people of the gods and people of the devils. Whippings, the burning of houses, and—" He sighed, and it was heavy, as if a whole village, or a whole world, had been laid upon his shoulders.

  "Old Carlos is dead. He jumped in to defend Ronny from Andreas' wrath when Ronny said he was better with jars now, and that one day he'd build a flying thing himself. Ronny is all right. Mathilda is not—but she'll be better now that your father is there. In their eyes, he was taken by the gods—or the devils, or whatever he decides to make of it—but he came back. He told them he was healed from whatever had possessed him when he tried to kill his own daughter, the child of his blood. You know the Book of the Gods, you know about sacrifice. He said he saw the gods—no matter if it was the gods or devils who took him first—he saw the gods' shining cities and benevolent eyes and could have stayed among them forever, but he decided to come back to spread the gods' words. 'Do not fight. Do not be violent. Do not repeat our mistakes.' The village has a priest now in addition to the priestess. It might even work."

  He lay down on the other bed and closed his eyes, running his hands along his face. Meliora looked at him, then slowly got up and went to sit beside him.

  He opened his eyes. They were close to expressionless, though his hand had gone to enclose her fingers.

  "I need no consolation, Mel, though I am glad you're willing to give it."

  "Don't try to be like them. No emotion, just ruling or watching, even if it is just a village. And it won't always be just a village for you, I know. I am out of place in the City of Death—but you belong here, and not just as someone ordinary."

  "You can"—the eyes were suddenly not emotionless, and his hand was tight on hers—"have a place, if you want it."

  She lowered her eyes. "I know what you mean. A place with you. You left the village because of me, I know it now. Everything there would have been much better with you as a chief, but you thought I must leave, and you wouldn't let me stay in what you called this primitive world."

  "Someone like you"—he caressed her hand—"The village would have either broken you, or you would have broken it. And you would have stayed there. You had bitten into it and wouldn't let go, you would try to heal everyone and everything no matter what."

  "And you came for me later. Benedict told me. He told me exactly what Jerome told you."

  It had been something completely normal for Jerome. "Go, boy," he'd said, "but then you have the responsibility to bring her back alive. She might not make it. She's done something with computers that no one before her has succeeded in. It might kill her. It likely will. It killed enough others. If you go and she still dies, you lose the chance of ever seeing this city again. You belong here, you know that. Would you sacrifice it all for a girl? But if you stay now, you may stay forever."

  "Nic, I hated you for bringing me back here, yet it turns out they were likely the only ones who could heal me after my computer work. You did it all for me, and I—I don't deserve you."

  He laughed. Then he pulled her to himself on the bed and kissed her. "And didn't you come for me, Mel? I don't believe, for even one moment, that you would have done all you did only to destroy the City of Death."

  Or that I would destroy it at all.

  "Besides, they didn't heal you. They only helped, you healed yourself. They couldn't have. They can't heal everything, Mel."

  They couldn't. She knew that. They'd never been able to heal the cities' death from young age, for example. Hundred-years-old Benedict might look as if he'd been successful, but there had been a price to pay.

  It was a wonder Benedict was alive at all. Most who attempted what he had didn't survive it. As for Ben, he had survived, somehow—at the price of emotions heightened to hundreds of times of what emotions would be for someone like Mel. Extreme anger, extreme sadness, extreme longing for love. Ben closed himself off in a room with padded walls and no windows at night.

  Life was so much easier for the other watchers. They didn't have to suffer emotions—because, Nicolas said, Jerome had told him that a person grew used to it. That you may press your hands to your face and wish you had never been born after the first few times you did what was right—but then it became easier, just like training a muscle for fitness.

  "Our genes allow us that," Jerome had said. "Because we are right. Because we do it all for the world. We don't yearn for more and more power. We just must bear using the power we have."

  "You're to blame for everything," Mel murmured in Nic's hair. "If you hadn't stopped that interweb, I wouldn't have met your granddad, and—"

  "—and if you hadn't come to that village, I might have remained there alone forever. They accepted me, when I stumbled there lost and alone. They healed me when I was sick. Julian taught me. But none of them were you."

  "How about Belle?"

  "She was my friend. Your friend, too. I might have married her one day if the girl who questions everything and teaches children to make glass hadn't appeared. But"—he squeezed Mel's hand and kissed her again—"I wouldn't have abandoned the village because of her."

  "He tried to part us, you know," Meliora said. "Jerome."

  "He must have thought he was right. He doesn't care about individual people, Mel. A world is enough for him."

  And are you like him? she thought.

  She was quite certain he could not read thoughts, yet he wrapped his arms around her more tightly and pressed his lips to her hair.

  "No," he whispered.

  She turned back to kiss him, and for once in her life she felt that she did have a place and that she didn't have to leave it.

  Network

  It became the Academy again in the next few months. She and Nic were learning so many things that they barely had time
for thinking about what they learned. How the databases for thoughtmotion interfaces were built. What microbes had existed centuries ago, and what chemicals the earth's soil and atmosphere had consisted of, how this had all changed after centuries of slow poison and after all the wars. How farms worked, and how meat was made exactly. How glass was made in factories run solely by machines.

  "So, you can't make it," Meliora told her teacher for the day, a woman with some wrinkles and eyes that sometimes showed expression. Exasperation, it was now.

  "I have more important things to do than making glass by hand, Meliora." Yelena sighed. "Indeed, I have more important things to do than teaching you youngsters things that you can just read or watch videos for, but Jerome seems to think that kids should be able to ask questions. Especially the kid who has made the first steps towards the hivers. He fancies you, though I never saw that old fart fancy anyone before."

  "So who would make glass if an asteroid hit us? The villagers? When do you think Ronny and the others will learn to make stuff like this?" Meliora pointed at a crystal bowl with exquisite ornaments. "In a hundred years, maybe!" Yelena shrugged.

  "People should know, Yelena—people in the cities. They should at least know how to give the machines instructions. No, that wouldn't be enough if the machines broke—They should, well, someone should know."

  "What do you think the corporations are for? Their people know enough."

  Yes, how to sell things and pay for advertisements. How to select the best genes for a baby based on the strict formulas provided by the City of Death. The higher levels of corporations—like academies, art schools, and farms, contained those people unnatural enough to not be content with an entirely worry-free life. But not all unnaturals would set off to seek a City of Life or some equivalent. Meliora had lived and worked with them. She knew they didn't know much. And if the City of Death itself didn't know...

  "We have feeds," Yelena snapped. "Paper books, even, blame Olivia for wasting so much space with them."

  "But people should be helped to learn! They should have a faster way than browsing through feeds to know what is important out there."

  "Oh, yeah?" was Jerome's response when she told him this later in the day. "People put all kinds of junk in the feeds for tens of years—hundreds of years if you count the feeds from before the wars, or at least the ones we managed to salvage. Fairytales, for example. Kings and such—we salvaged those things, and I have no idea why they caught on. We changed them, of course. You can't have the kings killing each other with swords and spears. We left the horses. Ben wanted horses. I've had more than enough of dealing with feeds. Why should it be me cleaning all this so that I can spoon-feed it to people? Besides, if you clean it too much, sort it too much and give out only what you deem necessary, all it leads to is indoctrination. That never worked properly."

  "But of course, you and cleaning," Nic said. He'd just come into the room. "You and work. How can you be so lazy sometimes? When are we finally going to go through the clunkers out there in the City of Death and see which ones might still work?"

  Jerome strode out of the room, slamming the door. Nicolas and Meliora laughed, then kissed.

  Then they went to see Ben for their lesson about microorganisms and other living things—and found him on the floor, wailing and tearing the skin off of his own face.

  "We destroy everything we touch!" He crawled to them and gripped their hands. "Do you understand!? Even now, even with this"—he squeezed their hands tighter—"we destroy! He says there are no gods, but who is to forgive us!? Who is to save us!?"

  "There might be real gods somewhere, Ben. Jerome doesn't know everything."

  Ben just wailed.

  They knew what to do next—they must give permission to the medstat that hovered nearby. Ben must have forbidden it to treat him. He sometimes did, in his worst moments, when he thought that he could hear the microbes screaming.

  The medstat made him sleep. Nothing else worked on him, and they knew even sleep was bad, but it was the lesser evil. Everyone in the City of Death, all fifty or so people, knew how to deal with Ben.

  Only, Meliora and Nicolas had known it only in theory. They hadn't seen Ben like this before.

  It was a reminder. Microbes might or might not scream—but others did, in the villages, while people left at a young age in the cities. People like Jerome or Stella the witch played with the lives and feelings of unnaturals to see what would become of them.

  Only two days ago, the City of Death had watched a strange village have a mini-bloodshed and done nothing.

  "It was the right thing to do," Nicolas had told her. "Messing with that village right now would only make it worse."

  She believed him. He understood the nuances of this better than she did, so she tried to avoid watching. She'd better not see. It would all become better in the end. When she did find the cure for young age.

  She had avoided watching the screens—but now she couldn't, and wouldn't, avoid watching Ben.

  The old man was thrashing in his sleep, still screaming, so she was by his side, holding his hand and unbuttoning his shirt, wiping the sweat from his face. The medstat was beside him, but it was doing nothing—because, what could it do? Machines could fix people only as much as people had taught them to.

  Meliora gripped the machine's metal hand and pressed it to Ben's wrist. The old man thrashed some more, lunged at her face without knowing what he'd be hitting at all. He didn't throw Meliora on the floor only because Nic was fast enough, and strong enough, to hold him.

  "Leave him be, Mel. You know we can't do anything."

  "No, I don't know! If I knew anything like this, there would be no point in going on a single step further, or living a single day more!"

  The medstat had already treated Ben's torn face. The blood was drying there, the gashes closed—so Meliora, who didn't have a knife, used her nail to tear Ben's wrist and let his blood soak into the metal. It wasn't enough. So, she tore her own wrist before Nic could stop her, and let blood mix with blood, and mix with metal, and with the computer parts shimmering in her mind. This needed strong emotions, pain, and blood. She hadn't learned to purposely achieve that state in any other way.

  It might kill her, she'd been warned. It had killed enough others.

  "People connecting to computers like this must be a part of the world's evolution, just like the new microorganisms are," Jerome had said. "But evolution is a slow thing. It works well for species, not for individuals. You be careful, girl, you're too valuable to waste."

  Mel gripped the medstat's hand and Ben's tighter. The world blurred and objects started swimming around her. There. Slowly, ever so slowly, something crept away from Benedict into Benedict's medstat. Benedict started breathing more easily.

  She thought Nicolas would be angry with her, but he didn't seem to be. He lifted her in his arms and carried her to their apartment, where their own medstat sewed her up and gave her shots against weakness and blood loss. The medstat could do nothing about the computer-sense, though. Computer nerves were pulsing in her mind. If she slept, perhaps it would go away. Or perhaps it wouldn't. For many, it hadn't.

  "Oh, you fool." Nicolas clutched her hand. "Does an old man deserve something like this?"

  So, he was angry. And afraid. Perhaps he was the only person here who wasn't happy that she had the computer sense.

  It had given the City of Death inspiration and ideas. Computer specialists and human doctors had already managed to reproduce enough of it under safer conditions to start working on a new computer interface for the cities. Hive-mind. With that new interface, emotions would be easier to control in people. The current thoughtmotion interface let a person send emotions to another without knowing what these emotions were, and the hive-mind—or hiver—would do similar.

  However, while using the thoughtmotion there were two databases to pass through, that of the first person's emotions and that of the second person's, and mismatches might occur. With the hiver, th
ere would be only one database. Emotions would be stored on a machine as emotions, not interpretations of emotions, accessible to everyone. Everything would be shared. Infusing the very emotions into machines, not just adding their human-crafted interpretation to a database, would enable that.

  "Perhaps," Jerome told her, "we can finally get rid of the wonderful experiences and move forward."

  The wonderful experiences existed to satisfy the primitive needs that even city people with improved genes had—to treat, even if not heal, deviations that still existed. But people experienced the wonderful experiences alone. With the hivers, they wouldn't. Everything would be shared, which the doctors believed would help remove deviations completely in the future.

  "It would kill individuality, too," Meliora said when she first heard this. "Whatever is left of it."

  No matter what Meliora thought, the project went forward. She had no power in the City of Death, only skills.

  And now, she'd helped Benedict with his pain. She knew what Jerome and the rest would make of this. This, too, was unprecedented if you didn't count those who had died doing it—and it meant that emotions could not only be shared among people through the mediation of a machine, but be taken away from a person completely. That was dangerous knowledge to give the City of Death.

  If she could, she thought, she'd take it all back—she'd let Ben wriggle one more night instead of harming further all of the world's people—and then she realized that the City of Death had finally gotten into her. She was thinking like them.

  She needed to get out of here for a while, and she didn't want to go with Nic on his airtrain tours. He liked to go watch the villages from above—to get a real look, he said, not just a look at a screen. How much more real it could be from above, she didn't know.