Those That Wake 02: What We Become

by Jesse Karp

  Hands came up from the hole and anchored themselves on the ground, straining to pull the rest behind. A head appeared, a torso, legs. The body pulled itself from the grating achingly, stopped, gasping for air on the dull pavement. It was covered in blood, and, even in the viscous light, the blood was so bright compared to the world around it that it burned Rose’s eyes.

  “Mal,” she said, squinting at the red explosion of life covering the figure. “Mal!” She lurched forward, unaccustomed energy animating her limbs. She sprinted over, rounded the bench, knelt beside him.

  His cargo pants and hooded sweatshirt were soaked through with blood in large patches. His face was warped with lumps and discolorations. His dark hair was matted with more blood.

  “Oh God, Mal. How did you get here?”

  “Forgotten subway tunnel,” he said, blood trickling from his lips as he did. “East Side line, never finished, abandoned, and forgotten. It runs straight beneath Lazarus Towers and the park. That’s why I put you here.”

  She could not have cared less about the geographical explanation. She had meant to understand how he had gotten here in the state he was in, his body ruined, life ebbing away. Trapped in a middle ground between relief at his return and a futile desperation to help him, she gently wrapped her arms around him and lowered her head to his chest. He didn’t have the strength to stiffen as he had in the past when she tried to embrace him. She could hear his heart thudding weakly, feel the bones beneath his flesh cracked out of alignment.

  “It’s not fair, Mal.” Tears ran down her face and mingled with Mal’s blood. “I can’t do this. This isn’t . . .” She could barely form the words through the sudden violence of her sobbing. “This isn’t how it’s supposed to work.” He was supposed to protect her, be the strength for her. She managed their life, the apartment, the food, the clothes. Mal was supposed to be the strength.

  “We have to get out.” Mal’s voice was so weak that, at first, she had thought it her own wishful thinking. “Call Remak.”

  Remak. Yes. Sense stirred in her head. She had been in here too long. They had to call Remak.

  She felt him moving beneath her, and she came away from him, her clothes stained crimson. He was trying to pull himself up, but his arms trembled and his teeth gritted at the effort. She came to her feet and used her own arms to help steady him. His weight nearly pulled her down, but he came up, and, using her as a crutch, they moved together to the edge of the park.

  One instant she was staring at the prison of concrete and rusted metal, and then Mal brought them forward, and the memory of the street, the buildings, the people flooded her head. She remembered that the world existed.

  It was a world she had never had an acute fondness for, but it now looked joyous to her in its smallest detail: the people rushing by intentionally heedless, the sky offering rays of genuine sunlight, the walls of the buildings that met behind her, showing no access to a park at all. Even in her head, the park was fading, already not like a memory of her own but like a memory of someone else’s only vaguely related to her.

  “Remak,” Mal said, the burden of his weight on her growing greater.

  Her cell was already out, and with unsteady fingers she keyed the private, direct line Remak had given her for Alan Silven. She could only hope that Remak was “in” Silven when she called.

  “Hello?” Silven’s voice and features held an edge of uncertainty, as though he couldn’t figure out what a number he didn’t recognize was doing coming through his private line, what a face he didn’t know was doing staring back at him.

  “It’s Rose,” she said, her voice teetering on the edge of panic.

  “I’m sorry,” said Silven, “I don’t know any . . . Rose.” The tone of the voice suddenly and distinctly changed on the last word, and the uncertainty vanished from his face.

  “Mr. Remak?”

  “Yes, it’s me,” Remak said. “Is Mal all right?”

  “He’s . . . he’s . . .” She chased the words down her own throat, unable to commit to one.

  “Where are you, Rose?” Remak asked. “Turn on your geolocator app.”

  Her fingers fumbled to key it in. An ad for car rental services scrolled merrily across the bottom of the screen.

  “You’re right where I left you,” Remak said, regarding the locator on his end. “Is Mal there?”

  “Yes,” she said. “He’s right—”

  “Pardon me, who is this?” Silven’s face showed polite confusion, and his tone had changed once again. “I believe you’ve got the wrong number.”

  Rose stared at the face on the screen, looking for Remak’s eyes and not finding them.

  “I’m . . .” She barely managed to choke that much out. Had Remak left him on purpose? Why was he leaving her alone?

  “How did you get this number, exactly?” Silven asked, his face growing harsher as he collected details through the screen. “What’s your name?”

  “Hang up, Rose,” a man standing next to her said. He was short and overweight and had long hair tied in a ponytail. But his eyes, those were unmistakable.

  “Mr. Remak,” she said.

  “I’m here,” the man said, and moved around to take some of Mal’s weight. Rose keyed the phone off on Silven’s confused expression. “Bring him through the building on the left. The man I’m in now lives right there. We’ll use his apartment.”

  They struggled Mal through the door, then down a short, dark, foul-smelling hallway to the first door, which Remak pushed open. By the time they rested Mal’s body on a bed with old, torn sheets, he was no longer moving.

  Remak leaned over, examining him carefully, lifting clothes away from bloody wounds with chubby fingers.

  “He’s dying,” Remak said, clutching Rose’s heart in her chest. He looked up at her, the eternally incongruous eyes sharp in the soft, fleshy face. “Did he tell you what happened? Did he say what he learned?”

  “You can’t let him die,” Rose said, her ears deaf, her eyes blind to anything else. “You can’t.”

  “Rose, listen. This situation is bigger than Mal, bigger than me, bigger than all of us. Did Mal say anything about what he learned?”

  “No!” she screamed, her voice rising louder than it ever had in her memory, driven by the terror of Mal’s stillness.

  Remak’s eyes lingered on her briefly, searching for the truth beneath the emotion, then went back to Mal.

  “I can save him,” he said heavily, as though it was not a relief, but only greater hardship. “I can save him.”

  “Do it. Please. What are you waiting for?”

  “It comes with a price, Rose.”

  “I’ll pay it.”

  “It’s not for you to pay. When I went into the neuropleth, my body was converted into neurological impulses. Essentially, I’m made of an energy that can enter other bodies through their nervous systems. This energy is what my life is made of—do you understand that at all? I can use that energy to kick-start Mal’s metabolism, to knit his bones, seal his organs, mend his flesh. The energy will become Mal’s life.”

  “Do it,” she said, repeating the only words that made sense to her anymore.

  “Rose.” His voice fell on her like a hammer. “That energy is me. Once it’s been spent to heal Mal, there won’t be a Jon Remak anymore.”

  “You made this happen to him,” she said, desperation igniting her words. It was hard, so hard, to feel something for Jon Remak when she was not even facing the same man she had met in Silven’s office. How easy it was to tell a disembodied idea of a man to give himself up. “And . . .” She stumbled over the outrageous demand she had made, trying to mitigate it without withdrawing it. “And you can’t stop the Old Man yourself. Mal is the only one who can do it. The only one.”

  His eyes slid from Rose, found Mal. With his head bowed, he considered the boy.

  “Yes,” he finally said. “I know.” He knelt down and rested one hand on Mal’s head and one hand on his chest and closed his eyes.

/>   Rose’s heart hammered. She stared at Mal, waiting to see the tears of his flesh close, the bruises on his face disappear. A minute passed.

  Remak’s head came up, his eyes opened.

  “What happened?” Rose demanded. “Why isn’t he healing?”

  “He’s almost gone, his mind is shutting down,” Remak said without looking at her.

  “But if you heal his body—”

  “Is that what you want, Rose, an intact body with no mind? I have to fix his mind first; I have to pull it back.”

  “How?”

  “I need to go in and find something that will make him fight his way back. Mal is an unyielding fighter, but he has to want to fight. Only then can I heal his body.”

  “You’re going into Mal’s mind?”

  “Yes, I have to.”

  “Take me,” Rose said.

  Remak looked up at her.

  “Take me with you,” she said again, doing her best to keep the need from filling her voice. “I’m the only person Mal has. I can help bring him back.”

  “Rose, I’ve never—”

  “But you could.”

  “I don’t know. Theoretically, if we had neural sync . . .”

  She could see something shining in him, fascinated by the idea.

  “Then what?” she prompted.

  “I can move through the neuropleth from brain to brain on my own, but if I’m going to take you into the neuropleth with me, then our nervous systems have to be in sync.”

  “Okay,” she agreed, needing nothing more but the hope of it.

  “For neural sync, we’ll need to make physical contact,” he said. “And once you’ve synced, you’ll have a door to the neuropleth in your head forever. Are you ready for that, Rose?”

  She twitched a nod. Her body was spasming with fear and anticipation.

  “Sit down,” he said, and she sat on the floor with her back against the cracked plaster of the wall.

  The man Remak was occupying sat beside her, rested one hand on Mal’s bare skin, and took her hand with the other. His eyes closed, and the room was left with only the sound of Mal’s shallow, ragged breathing.

  “I’m ready,” she said, her eyes searching for something she knew had no form, no solidity. “I’m—”

  A bolt of lightning cracked through her, starting from the hand Remak was holding and lashing up her spine, across every nerve in her body, and turning her brain into a searing current of electricity. She was no longer in a room, no longer in a body. She was a synaptic flash, pulsing along a highway that branched infinitely, connecting into a limitless panorama of human brains that throbbed with their own bursts of electrical life.

  This is the neuropleth. Remak’s voice filled her consciousness. Your body still exists, unlike mine, but by coming here with me, you now have a doorway to the neuropleth in your brain. Mal will have the same doorway when he awakens. I suggest neither of you ever open it. You might be able to touch other minds through it, but if you ever try to inhabit another body as I do, your own body will be converted into neurological impulses. You will become like me.

  She took it in, felt the pulsing minds connected to her by this neurological tether.

  Tell me you understand, Rose.

  I do, she said without words. Mal and I will have these doorways. If we ever try to inhabit another body, we’ll become like you.

  You have to make Mal understand it, too, he said.

  I will.

  Then, gently, she was pulled along the pathway, the sensation of Remak’s presence guiding her. The brains, coursing with electrical fire, rushed past her.

  This, Remak said, is Mal. It crackled with hard gray light, like burning iron. But the iron light of the mind was dim and growing dimmer as they watched.

  The spark of Remak leaped out and joined the synaptic buzz of Mal’s brain, and Rose was drawn along. Together, they entered Mal.

  The Town

  “I NEED TO ASK YOU something,” Laura said, her eyes on the flat road stretching out endlessly before her.

  “I told you, I wasn’t looking at you in the shower.” Aaron’s voice was modulated into a plaintive whine. “I thought you were in trouble. I was trying—”

  “Fine, whatever. That’s not even what I’m talking about.”

  “Okay. So what, then?” His tone instantly shifted to that of impatient condescension. He was a master of disguising defensiveness by being patronizing. They had been driving for another day now, without even the occasional respite of stopping to investigate one of Aaron’s sites. Laura had become intimately acquainted with his defense strategies, though for her part, she often incited them by calling upon the bathroom incident. She found herself falling into that dangerous babysitter/child dynamic of playful aggression to relieve the pressure of hanging around this little punk. She had to remind herself that he was, in many ways, still a child and that he was not benefiting from someone keeping him on the defensive. This was a boy who desperately needed to feel superior, in control, at all times.

  “You said that those cellpatches do cause brain cancer,” she said, loosening her fingers on the steering wheel and trying to flex her knotted shoulders.

  “There’s a statistical correlation, yes. But like I said, mine is several generations ahead of the current model.”

  “Yes, that’s exactly what I want to ask you about. You’re brushing the whole thing off because it’s not going to affect you . . . as far as you know, anyway.”

  “Do you think I’d be using one of these if I wasn’t—”

  “Again, not where I’m going.”

  “Well, then,” he said, “maybe it would help if you get there.”

  “What about everyone else? What about all the other people who are going to die because they let someone drill machinery into their brains without knowing the facts?”

  “What about them?”

  Her shoulders were tighter than ever and her knuckles were stark white against the steering wheel.

  “You’re in a position to help them. Why don’t you?”

  “What in the name of God are you talking about? I didn’t sync them with cellpatches; they made their own choices. That’s the way human existence works. The people who are weaker for whatever reason—including inadequate knowledge—die out. It leaves the stronger ones.”

  “The stronger ones have a responsibility, Aaron, to help the weaker ones.” She was certain this would appeal to his sense of superiority.

  “Not to help them,” he said. “To lead them.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Society produces unusual individuals of greater ability. Other people try to tear them down—out of jealousy, generally speaking. But the superior man must take a position of leadership.”

  “And just how are you leading all these people who are going to be wasting away in hospital beds inside the next few years?”

  “I’m not talking about leading people, per se. I’m talking about leading society in general, guiding it upward. Read some Nietzsche, and get back to me when you know what you’re talking about, Laura.” He turned away from her and gazed at the fields of grass tediously streaming by.

  She choked down the astonished shriek of rage boiling up from her stomach. Honestly, she couldn’t remember anyone who could throw her so easily into a fury. Remember, she told herself, remember why this boy is here.

  “Did your father read Nietzsche, Aaron?”

  “Yes,” he said, his eyes not leaving the world outside the window. She pictured him sitting at home, listening to his father lay out the philosophy of the world to him: the strong and the weak, those who led and those who followed.

  “Your father chose a side, Aaron,” she said. “Or it was chosen for him by his situation, by the power he had and the company he made. He chose to honor profit over service. Don’t let his memory choose your side for you.”

  “Don’t talk about my father.”

  Laura sighed.

  “Don’t come running to me when
the revolution comes for you,” she said, thinking the argument finished.

  “Revolution?” Aaron said incredulously, spinning on her and clearly fired up for a whole new argument. “A revolution is no longer possible. Our society, the one you’re so concerned about, is no longer capable of standing up and making their voices heard, because all they have to do now is sit down and log on.”

  “You just made my point.”

  He looked at her with clear disdain for that idea.

  “Corporations,” she said, “like Intellitech, have lulled everyone into subservience through technology. By giving everyone a voice through it, they’ve taken all our voices away. They push it and push it and push it on us. Now, with cellenses, everyone can be talking every second of the day. With six billion voices going all at once, how can anyone hear anything worthwhile?”

  “Are you suggesting some kind of antiprogress philosophy to me, Laura? To me, of all the people in the world?”

  “I’m just saying that maybe we’re not meant to become so intimate with technology like this. Maybe it’s not natural for us to be so dependent and so entangled with technology, and that it’s blinding us.”

  “Not natural.” He played around with the word on his tongue, obviously searching for its flaw. “Well, Laura, it’s not ‘natural’ for us be outside when the sun isn’t up. It isn’t ‘natural’ for us to buy our food instead of hunting and foraging for it. It isn’t ‘natural’ for us to live in gigantic structures made of concrete or even to be able to preserve a record of our thoughts by writing it down. So, tell me, are we better off putting a chokehold on our own evolutionary capacity to create tools and grow, or are we supposed to stagnate?”

  “I’m not saying we should be static. Just that . . . I don’t know.” It was true, these things were occurring to Laura practically as she was saying them. She hadn’t spent her life dwelling on them. But by the same token, they seemed to spring into her head fully formed, as though shot forward from some deep, dusty recess of her mind. “Just that we might be going too fast. You said yourself that a year was like a millennium when it came to technological development. That’s so much faster than it ever was before. We were ready for writing when it came along, right? I mean, we couldn’t have grown without it. Now we’re hurrying to grow ourselves just for the sake of the growth. I just think we’re getting more clever, but we’re not getting any smarter or any wiser.”