by Daniel Quinn
“The girls follow you, Sister Amara,” she says coolly. “You need to tell them to cooperate. You are meant for this—your awakening is the reason for which you were created. It will go badly for all of them, including you, if you continue to resist fulfilling your purpose.”
Dread trickles through me, but I hold my tongue as I realize: she will keep pushing no matter what I say.
At the far side of the room, another door slides open. Mother Grace herds my sisters through, one by one. Their eyes are wide, their faces scared. Maya’s shoulders are hunched up. Chloe’s hand flutters nervously against her face. Even Sophia looks unnerved, her hands held tight in a prayerful position, but tormenting each other. Sister Hadley is the only one who doesn’t look nervous—her attention wanders to the walls, the chairs, and the floor in a circular pattern.
“We’re going to increase your dosages, just like Sister Amara’s,” Mother Superior announces to them.
A gasp goes around the room. Mother Grace ushers them toward the chairs designated for each. None of them takes a seat.
“Don’t do this,” I say harshly to Mother Superior. “It’s too dangerous, and you know it!”
I’m speaking far out of line—the long hesitation before she replies feels like a noose drawing tighter and tighter around my neck. As if she’s contemplating a hundred ways I could die before she finally says, “All you need to do is tell me, Sister Amara.”
“Tell her what?” Sister Sophia asks. But she has to know. Even if my sisters don’t know about my traveling, they know I’ve gone further than any of them. And might have the most to hide.
I hold Mother Superior’s steady gaze. I tell myself that revealing what happened to my mind on the cusp of death is a small price to keep her from sending my sisters there. That I’m still keeping the true secret of my ability to travel outside my body—which may not be the power or the awakening the Masters wanted, but it is still something.
“Just before I died,” I say, holding my chin up as I face her, “it felt like my mind was expanding. Blowing apart into a million pieces. Whatever you did with the med patch, it was too much.”
A smile forms slowly on Mother Superior’s face. “Too much for you, perhaps, Sister Amara.”
What? No.
She turns her smile to the rest. “But perhaps one of your sisters is stronger in her faith.”
All my pride flees in an instant. “No! You can’t… I’m begging you…”
Her smile drops away. “You wouldn’t deny your sisters their chance at fulfilling their purpose, would you?” But her voice is cold, an icy flow that’s freezing air in my chest.
“You don’t have to dose me!” Judith is backing away from her chair, eyes wide, her back edging up against the glass wall. “I’ve seen visions! Sister Amara told us to lie, but I won’t lie. You don’t have to dose me, I’ve already awakened!”
“Judith.” The word hurts my heart even as I whisper it. She’s always been more fearful than the others. Her betrayal stings in more ways than one. If her words are true, she has lied to all her sisters, keeping her visions for herself alone. And if her words are lies, she is merely betraying our sister-bond to save herself, even as I know it will make no difference—Mother Superior will dose every last one of them. I can see it in the way she’s ignoring Judith’s frantic words, Chloe’s small whimper, and the horrified, wordless tremble of Sophia’s lips.
Mother Superior flits to the wall and summons a holo screen. Mother Grace urges my sisters to take their seats. It’s a gentle persuasion backed up by mechanized strength more than capable of ensuring compliance. And what can my sisters do? The twelve of us outnumber the bot and the ascender, but our flesh and bones, our humanity, is our weakness—we’re no match for the strength of even one mechanical bodyform, much less two.
Sister Judith protests and cries out as Mother Grace grabs her arm and drags her to the chair. Once the chair has her, Judith ceases her struggle. The others quickly take their seats, locked in by the cushions.
I alone am still standing.
“I will take their place.” The words are out of my mouth before I even think it through.
Mother Superior pauses at the holo-screen. “And you will report back fully?”
I give her a short nod. An unspeakable dread chokes me, but I manage to say, “I’ve already died once. This time, I’ll know what to expect.”
“Very well.” Mother Superior gestures to the one open chair.
I stumble over and climb in. The full-body shudder makes me tremble so hard that the gel cushions grabbing at my skin almost don’t lock on. But then they do.
In the chair to my left, Sister Chloe’s eyes are wide, but she’s not protesting my last-ditch effort to save them. To my right, Sister Hadley’s absent-minded gaze still roams the room, lands on me for a brief second, then looks away. I wonder if she even knows what’s happening.
Mother Grace comes around with the med patch and places it on my forehead. My mind is racing ahead, trying to figure out how I can evade this. I reach out desperately for the sister bond, the calming connection I felt when I was traveling, but my fear is like a thick wool blanket I can’t fight through.
Then the dosage activates and I’m flung out of my body.
The shift is so sudden, I’m not quite sure what has happened until I’m standing by the door and looking back at the twelve sisters in their circle of chairs, including my inert body. Mother Superior is still at the wall, and Mother Grace hovers nearby.
Only now… I can move. Even faster than Mother Superior and her vastly stronger physical body. I will myself to Sister Chloe’s side and touch her shoulder like before, when I was in her cloister cell. Her thoughts stream into me—waves of fear and hope. Then I flit to Sister Judith and touch her as well—if she’s been seeing visions, maybe I can use that to save us all in a last-second attempt to fulfill our purpose. But there’s only terror in her mind; she lied to escape the dosage. One by one, I visit my sisters, touching them briefly to see if they have any knowledge to help us.
I leave Sister Hadley for last.
When I arrive at her side, she sees me. And smiles. “Sister Amara.” Her lips move but her words are almost inaudible. She has to be half in and half out of the traveling state—still bound to her body, but able to see me.
A cool shudder runs through me as Mother Grace literally walks through my body—or whatever this nebulous form is while I’m traveling. She leaves an aftertaste of metal and electricity behind, but more importantly, she places a med patch on Sister Hadley’s forehead. Hadley’s gaze is locked with mine, and she doesn’t see Mother Grace, doesn’t understand what’s about to happen… but I do.
Mother Superior doesn’t care if I’ve volunteered—she’s going to dose everyone anyway. Too late, I realize Mother Grace has already made the rounds of all the chairs with med patches for each.
Chloe cries out and thrashes in the chair. I flit to her side, desperately searching my mind for something to do, some way to stop it, but I’m a helpless, disembodied form who can feel my sister’s pain without being able to do anything about it. I reach out to her shoulder, and everything that’s Chloe rushes through me… then fractures, flying apart into a billion pieces. I try to grab hold of her mind, but I can’t hold it any more than I could keep water from slipping through my open fingers.
She falls limp in her chair, and, suddenly, my hand passes through her shoulder—she’s no more substantial to me now than the chair she’s sitting on.
No. Pain sears through me—what heartbreak would feel like if I were still in my body. I should have seen this coming. Should have been able to stop it.
Chloe’s gone… and Mother Superior isn’t even slowing down. Judith goes next, convulsing in her chair, then Maya tumbles into death throes. Thea holds hands with Naomi, but they can’t hold on, neither of them, as their minds are ripped from their bodies, shattered by the experiment-in-progress that Mother Superior is determined to conduct. She must be con
vinced one of us will make it, and she’s clearing the chaff before the wheat, culling the crowd to get at the one mind who’s capable of awakening.
Me.
I’m the one. The first and the only. My sisters’ minds are exploding just as mine did, but they’re not surviving it. They’re broken, scattered, and every small thing I love about them is being destroyed before my eyes. My sisters. Their cries stab me with knives of regret.
The only one not thrashing or horribly, permanently still is… Sister Hadley. I move instantly to her side, and my touch brings a flood of confusion mixed with a hazy sort of awareness. Her gaze is vacant, but she’s still present.
“Sister Hadley!” I cry out, willing her to understand that I’m here.
My call gives her focus. Her eyes find me.
“We have to break free,” I say, trying to gather the pieces of her mind. She’s the only one who’s survived this state. She’s been in it for who knows how long—scattered but not lost, broken but not gone. Her mind is a swirling storm, a shape that forms and reforms, like a flock of birds in flight, no will, just instinct. “Hadley, I need your help!” I hope my plea will bring her back from whatever dosage Mother Superior has sent through her patch.
Suddenly, Hadley’s arm clutches mine, and her eyes peer sharply at me. The strangeness of this is beyond me, but her otherworldly form is connecting to mine.
Sister Amara. Hadley’s lips form the urgent words—there’s no sound, but I understand all the barely cohesive thoughts behind them. She has an idea. She wants to help me.
Then she shoves me away, breaking contact.
I’m cut off from the chaotic flow of her thoughts. Slowly, slowly, her head moves with tortured grace to the side, an intention of effort that must be radically intense inside her mind. She stares at my limp body in the chair, concentrating.
I don’t know what to do. She threw me out—she must not want me to interfere. Then a tiny thing happens, something no one would notice if they weren’t looking for it—the cushions of my chair release my body.
Hadley slumps in her chair, her eyes rolling back in her head.
No. I reach for her… but she’s gone. She expended whatever she had left, holding herself together to somehow interface with my chair and set me free.
I’m not going to waste her sacrifice.
I will myself back into my own body and open my eyes.
My sisters are dying around me. I hear their final struggles. Mother Superior and Mother Grace are preoccupied. I may be foolish to think they won’t notice, won’t stop me, but I have no choice.
I lurch out of the chair and run for the door.
It slides open and I tumble through.
I keep going, my bare feet slapping the cool glass floor, and I don’t dare look back.
Mother Superior and Mother Grace are fast enough that if they wanted to catch me… they would. The fact that they don’t—that they stay with my sisters in their dying throes—tells me all I need to know.
I have to leave my sisters behind.
V
I’m running for my life through glass hallways.
I keep flitting half in and half out of my body, like Sister Hadley, even though I’ve swiped the med patch off my forehead. I’m strangely detached from my seizing heart, pounding feet, and the panic surging through my brain. I make several wrong turns before I finally find the hallway that will take me out of the cloister.
I can feel my sisters dying, one by one. Burning bright and burning out.
They’re reaching for their holy purpose and being destroyed by it, all while Mother Superior gathers all her data. She’s using us up and throwing us away.
And that can only mean one thing: we’re not her only experiment.
Every second her instruments record will serve her next experiment, the one where she makes something better than us. Better than me. Next time—and I’m suddenly wondering if we’re even the first or the only—she’ll create beings who can survive the higher doses. Who can do more than just travel away from their bodies. A new set of clones with a new holy purpose. She’ll keep trying and trying, and the collateral damage of our lives isn’t a terrible tragedy to the Masters—it’s an integral part of the process. We’re simply the latest version of the experiment. I wonder how I never saw that before.
Keeping our secret takes on even stronger meaning. Sister Hadley kept her ability secret. And so did I. Together, we denied them that much, at least.
I reach the hallway with the double black lines and the six-foot-tall mechanized sentry. It becomes instantly clear why Mother Superior and Mother Grace didn’t bother running after me—they knew I could never get past this wall of death.
I try to dash around it anyway, daring it to kill me.
It moves with lightning speed to clamp its mechanical hand around my arm of mortal bone and muscle. The pain makes me yelp, but the sentry doesn’t even have Mother Grace’s programmed tenderness. It only carries out the orders Mother Superior no doubt transmitted. Capture me; hold me; bring me back. Its heavy clomping on the glass flooring is a slow gong tolling my return as it drags me back into the cloister, toward the room where my dead sisters lie.
I struggle, but it’s absolutely no use.
Anger and frustration make me fight anyway. I bloody my fingers as I tear at its glistening silver hand digging grooves into my flesh. I kick and scream and smear blood against its implacable metal face.
All for nothing.
I stop.
Before the sentry can return me to Mother Superior, I’ll travel away from my body again. Let her kill me, as she has my sisters—her instruments won’t find anything in the empty shell of my body. I won’t let her benefit from my death.
Just as I’m about to travel, I notice the sentry’s cool grip on my skin, and a strange thought tickles at the back of my mind—Sister Hadley. What did she do to my chair?
I look up into the sentry’s unblinking eyes. Its form is only roughly humanoid, the better for intimidating and capturing wayward clone experiments, I suppose. But the intelligence inside is very low.
Not much more than the chair.
I lift out of my body, but only slightly, like Sister Hadley, and with the hand of my traveling form, I reach for the sentry’s head. I expect to pass right through just as I did with cloister cell doors and my sisters’ dead bodies, but instead, I feel something like a surge of metallic taste at the back of my throat and electricity zipping through me… not unlike when Mother Grace passed through my traveling form.
I easily find the sentry’s neural circuits. They are simple to control.
I hesitate, but I know there’s no escape for me. I could command the sentry to march me out of the cloister, out of the vast, sprawling glass prison of my home. It could take me out into the shining city… but then what?
It is a city filled with Masters.
It could carry me past the towers to the mountain, but Mother Superior will know I’ve survived. She’ll come after me. No, there’s only one solution; one way to keep Mother Superior from learning my secret and using it in her next unholy experiment:
I have to die.
The command is simple, and I give it fast.
The sentry spins its other arm, the one not holding me, and unfurls the light weapon in its palm. Just before it fires, I wrench myself out of my body. The shot burns bright as it tunnels through my skull.
I see myself slump in its arms. I float for a moment, nearby. Safe. Beyond the reach of Mother Superior and the Masters.
My body is dead.
I wonder how long it will take for the rest of me to die.
In a way, I’m truly awakened now, although not how I imagine they wished. Something pulls me further from my body, a strange detachment that makes me want to float away, but I don’t go far. I’m tethered somehow, connected to this place and time. Then I realize… my link with the bot is holding me here, at least for the moment.
Mother Grace comes flying down the hallw
ay, full speed, screeching to a sudden stop on the glass flooring and looking with horror at my bloodied and obviously dead body. She commands the sentry to release me—I sense the transmission in the sentry’s very low sentience cognition and feel the reaction in its mechanisms. My body falls toward the floor, but Mother Grace catches it on the way down, easing me gently to an awkward slumping.
Mother Grace passes her hands over my body, verifying there is no chance of survival.
I drift closer, keeping my hold on the bot while I reach my hand to Mother Grace’s shoulder. A flood of love and warmth and sadness fills me. Her mind is… complex. She was programmed to love, but the cognition required for that is considerably more sophisticated than the sentry’s. Her purpose may have been to serve Mother Superior, but the loss she feels appears genuine.
I’m drawn to it, just as I was pulled by my sister bond.
The closer I draw, the more it pulls. I release my hold on the sentry and step into her body. I don’t quite align. It’s not quite comfortable. Like putting on a metal suit that’s ill-fitting and three sizes too small. But I can wear it. And Mother Grace’s cognition welcomes me with loving open arms.
She gives up her identity, her will, and control of her cognition to me.
I am her Master and always have been.
It’s not clear to me that Mother Grace even understands what she’s done, but we are welded now, bonded… and she’s given me a gift as great as any mother could.
Seen through Mother Grace’s eyes, the world is far different. I sense things I’ve never been able to feel before. I can peer through the endless glass corridors and clearly see the way out. I hear the transmissions coming from Mother Superior, asking for a status update on Sister Amara’s now very dead human body.
I send a standard response.
Then I reach out to the sentry’s cognition and disable it. The heavy weight of his armory-filled body slumps against the glass wall of the hallway and shatters it. I march Mother Grace’s body—our body—along the straightest path toward an exit from the ascenders’ genetic research facility. Reams of information spin past my mind, all the stores that Mother Grace has accessed in the course of her duties.
