"Would you suffer?"
Maxime's expression changed. He saw something.
"Why should I suffer?"
So Joran showed him. He explained what would happen. The battery of tests was designed with breaks for recovery, so it would take two weeks for him to die. There would be peaks and troughs in the pain, but there would always be pain. Gradually Maxime would lose his mind as they shaved pieces away, measuring every second for analysis.
Maxime accepted. He'd fought in a war, or so he said. He made them promise to save his grandchildren, and they did.
Within a day he begged for them to stop. He took back his permission. In tears, he begged Joran so much that he grew hoarse. It hurt, he said. It hurt inside his mind, not just his body, not just his head, but in who he was.
Joran listened. He always listened, to them all, even when his team could not. He held the hands of his subjects, and stroked their brows, and said kind words, but still he killed them. Drop by drop, sliver by sliver, he cut them to pieces and turned the pieces into data across a thousand spreadsheets.
So Maxime died. So Joran's team came to look at him as a machine. They held him in awe. They called him the Angel of Death. And one by one, they waited for their turn at the bench.
Kaley's skin was the first to peel away, only six months in. Her death was slow, and from it they learned a lot about how to postpone the deaths of the rest. New developments in their treatment regime came, and they shared the data on James While's new fiber Arrays with the Arks, who did their own work, and processed the information for all it was worth.
The next death came at eleven months. By that point they'd captured nineteen different survivors, and learned enormous amounts. Every death took them closer, as Joran learned to better work the hydrogen line at the same time as the T4.
He talked infrequently with James While at first, keeping each other appraised of their progress. But that frequency grew as their teams died around them, until they spoke every day, and then multiple times a day.
Years passed by.
The last of Joran's team died at four years, around the same time the Maine bunker underwent its revolution. Joran and James watched it together along with all the other Arks. The flaws were there to see, in retrospect, fueled as they were by Lars Mecklarin's lies. Not all the Arks had required lying. Many of the Arks had been open from the start, but each person had been a fresh calculation. It was deemed that some of them could handle the truth, while others couldn't.
These were routed to MARS3000. In the end it was a failed experiment, and one by one the feeds from within Maine were lost, until the last image of Salle Coram in her Command hall faded to black, with her words echoing across the SEAL at large.
"No more lies."
Joran kept lying.
He'd killed sixty-seven more survivors by then; their dead bodies tipped off the cliff edge, their data captured in his shifting algorithms. He'd lied to every one of them, though now his lies were different.
He wasn't from the United Nations anymore, too much time had passed. Now he was an ambassador from a new civilization of survivors. He made up a backstory and designed a tatty uniform. He decked out the Alps bunker with the sad raiment of that imagined growing empire, though he couldn't afford them a full day of happiness any longer. Once they were in, already under the control of sedative drugs he slipped into his van's air, he gave them a choice of their final meal.
Most of them didn't eat it. To be at the mercy of a single man, a man promising torture with no hope of salvation, was quite different from how it had been before.
At seven years, his skin began to slip intolerably. At eight he was at forty percent. His work rate slowed. It grew harder to capture the specimens he needed, but he innovated ways around that; voice-controlled mechanical lifts to move their bodies, new ways to administer the drugs, a vehicle that could largely self-drive. He minimized his physical contact.
At ten years he was at eighty percent, and for the first time lost a lip. It didn't grow back. His ears left him next, his nose, his fingers began to stick together. It was always hardest to place replacement skin grafts on his back. He found a way to mechanize it.
James While grew ugly and monstrous, just as he did.
Eleven years passed, and together they watched the growth of Amo's little empire in Los Angeles, through the few satellites still remaining and snatches of long-distance radio transmissions. It was hard not to root for him, though he of course stood in opposition to the Arks. Joran even tried to argue the Arks into signing Amo's treaty, when those days rolled around, but by then the Arks had stopped listening to the two mad hermits who'd started this thing.
At thirteen years, when the Arks struck New LA with a nuclear weapon that changed the line completely, they didn't warn him or James While. Amo's treaty forces in Istanbul were broken and scattered in a land assault, sending them west, which offered a chance he could not ignore.
Then Anna's team fled to within range of him, and he roused himself for one final pick-up. He hadn't done any for a year. He knew it would be his last effort, and that it would kill him. He was already at one hundred percent and barely eking his way through each day. His faith had been flagging, with the fear that no second pair of hands would come to take up his research and carry his mission forward, and all the murders he'd done would just float away on the wind; the delusions of a madman no better than Garibaldi Sovoy.
On the pick-up of Anna, in a burning field after she'd brought down a helicopter, he received a second great gift that proved the true breakthrough; the intact brain and spine of a dead coma survivor. He'd never had one before, since he'd sliced them all into pieces as they died. With the spike on the line and this discovery, new possibilities surged to the fore. Back in his lab inspiration found him, and he condensed the best of his findings into a constructed embryo, part taken from the dead man and part from the girl, imprinted with his own hand-stitched code, which he implanted in the girl's belly.
So the telomeres had to be restarted from scratch. So Rachel Heron's vision would be blended with his own.
When he told Anna, she didn't plead with him. Her gaze burned, and looking into her eyes he knew he'd found his successor.
He died in a back room with James While on the line. The two old friends celebrated, as Joran slumped before him, waiting for the Lyell's to finally claim him.
"You have your heir," James While said. Every word came slowly. He was at one hundred percent too, but held himself together with willpower more than anything. "Now we just need mine."
"Yours is coming," Joran said. Every breath hurt. It was only right he should feel some of the same pain his victims had felt. "I know it."
They talked about other things, about a world before the world ended. They painted fuzzy, fading dreams of the world they might birth, as Joran faded.
"You're a hero," James said, one of the last things Joran heard before the darkness finally took him. "I'm glad I didn't take your eyes."
Joran laughed. Mid-wheeze he stopped breathing and slumped to the ground.
James While stayed on the screen for a moment longer, looking out at nothing. Then he cut the transmission for the final time.
* * *
He continued on.
The Arks had long stopped listening to him many years ago, and his team had died, just like Joran's. Nobody was following the work that he did, but still he did it.
Clearing transport routes. Setting up new communication pathways. Developing theories and placing them in his information caches.
Each cache went into the old Multicameral Arrays. It was a decision long-debated, but the only logical choice. The information had to be entrusted somewhere that it could be found, but also where the shadow SEAL would not find it. Somewhere that only another person who'd taken the cure would be able to go.
In the caches he shared everything. Once a year he revisited them to add updates; over new global trends, heat spots, weather disruptions, carbon dioxide
levels, his latest theories.
Now Joran was dead.
While sat in his special chair, in his special office in the tower off the Prime Array, while the sounds of Joran's thousand kept him company.
He couldn't walk anymore. Sitting hurt. Standing was hard. Every movement made him bleed. Eating. Taking a shit. He hadn't washed properly for years. He stank, and only the constant stream of cycling antibiotics in his drip feeds kept him free from infection.
He didn't have Joran's skill with skin grafts. He only had the bandages, and they too were running out. Day after day he sat at his desk and whispered commands to the Olan Harrison avatar, which functioned now as his eyes and ears on the world.
They'd come a long way together.
He watched the hydrogen line for the coming of his successor. He saw the spikes at Bordeaux, Gap, Brezno, and Istanbul, and believed that he was finally coming.
Amo.
He believed.
Joran's heir had come, so now he stayed alive for his. Outside the world changed, and he waited. He worked old theories, as his bandages flopped off and he barely had the energy to replace them. The pain leveled him. He barely moved, and he waited, because he believed.
It was early on a cold fall morning when the knock at the door finally came. It came as an explosion, blowing open a wall. The vibration of it trembled up through the Prime Array's bones, and he watched on the last few working cameras that remained. His bloody, Lyles-bitten finger trembled on the touch screen to zoom in, leaving smeared blotches.
It was a single man. The image resolution was poor, but in his movements James While recognized the same burning intensity and sense of purpose that he had once felt as a young man.
A worthy successor. Someone to carry his work forward.
Coughs came up his throat, that in another time would have been laughter. His faith had been rewarded, and now the great work would go on.
The figure came straight for him through the building, never making a false turn, as if he knew exactly where James While was. He broke through doors and climbed up non-functioning elevators as if the world belonged to him, as if these minor defenses were nothing.
He came down the hallway with the crescendoing thump of footfalls, and James While waited, his heart banging, flooding his diminished system with adrenaline. He'd never been this excited before. It was hard to breathe, but breathing no longer mattered. He'd waited so long for this moment, and the moment of truth had come.
The door swung open…
16. WHITE RABBIT
Anna fell into chaos, and chaos fell into her.
The snowy mountains arced past her shoulder with a storm of rushing wind, the lepers spun wildly past her feet, and chaos on the line pummeled her from within and without like the RATATAT hail of anti-aircraft flak.
Come
Their noise consumed her like a scrambled radio playing all the stations at once, their nonsense pummeling all coherent thought out of her head. The leper in her embrace burned on her skin, the fall sucked the oxygen from her lungs, and the land below flashed clearer on each wild revolution; the scepter-like sharpness of mountain peaks, the glinting patterns of light off the snow pack, the fluttering trails of the spinning lepers sucking her deeper into madness.
Her people. Her Ocean.
Come
They called and she fell, tumbling like Alice down a rabbit hole with only one end ahead. Her body would smash into rock, her life extinguished along with Ravi's seed in her belly, just another casualty of a world that had taken all her fathers, all her family, until-
Blackness hit.
"I'm here."
She was lying in a dark space.
It took long moments to see, and remember, and forget.
She was lying in her bed again, tucked in so tightly she could scarcely breathe. This was the right way, after all. A little girl with a terrible headache, that's what her father always said. He stroked her hot head and told her stories about bird women and balloons made of custard and the robbers who stole the sun, and the weight of all the new things would crush her down, but she would love him for it.
She shifted position in the sheets, listening carefully.
The Hatter gave a little yelp from downstairs. Her father's soft voice in the corridor, speaking with someone Anna barely recognized, a voice she hadn't heard for so long.
Her mother.
"She doesn't need me. I make her worse."
It was a bad argument, she knew that much. The worst, and now she would listen to it again.
"You're saying that for you," her father said, as if reading from an old script. His voice was honey and chocolate rolled into one. He was kind and calm, even though he was crying. "It's for you, not her. Don't pretend this is for her."
"There's things I want to do still, things I need to achieve."
"She is the achievement. Every day she makes progress. It's phenomenal. If only you'd look at her. Look in and see her, and tell me that she's not an achievement She's braver than anyone I know, and you're missing it all."
Now her mother was crying too. Anna huddled under the thumping in her head, and imagined the tears smearing the makeup round her mother's eyes, but already she couldn't remember her face. Her eyes were mud pits, full of self-pity; her lips were a cradle of regret.
"Don't make me do this. We're not the same; I'm not like you. It will break me, and what good is it if I hate her? I don't want that. She's better with you."
She imagined her father holding her mother's hands. "Please. Don't give up on us. She's getting better. I've already quit my job; you keep doing yours, it's all right. We won't ask much. Just don't leave us, please."
Now her voice became firmer. "You're not listening. This isn't a whim. I can't be responsible for this any more. I'm no good to either of you in hospital." A pause. "I'll still send money."
"Money? She needs her mother!"
"Then don't call me her mother." The voice was fully cold now, and it cut into Anna's head like a drill. "Maybe that's for the best. You were always her favorite. Live in your fantasy world together, pretend she's getting better, when really this is all she will ever be. Yes, I've researched her condition. You tell tales of Alice to a little girl who will never leave that room again, and you want my help to lie to her? It's your choice to stay, not mine. I didn't make you. Don't blame me for doing what you won't."
"What I won't? She's my daughter!"
"Your daughter," came the sharp reply. "See, you're getting it already."
Her footsteps stamped away, clacking in high heels. The door slammed.
After that her father sobbed quietly in the corridor, alone. The Hatter yelped, even though they hadn't gotten the Hatter yet, but already he was here, because they needed him. She heard her door creak gently open, and shut her eyes tight as her father peeked his head through the gap.
"She does love you," he whispered, almost as if he was trying to convince himself. Anna's pulse raced. Did he know she was awake? It seemed suddenly very important that he not know. Those were things she should never have heard. She went very still. She barely even breathed.
Holding her breath hurt her head. At last the door closed. She gasped, and opened her eyes.
Someone else was there.
"I'm here," he said, like he'd already said once before, though she'd forgotten that in all the excitement. This wasn't her father, though it was another man. He had a gray face with glowing white eyes. He had red marks across his chest, as if raked by a bear-bird's talons. There was something very sad about him.
"Hello," said Anna.
The word came easily. The pressure in her head eased slightly. She even shuffled out of the covers a little, to better see him, though his eyes lit the room rather pleasantly, like twin pocket-sized moons.
"Do you remember me," said the figure. He was a man, but not old.
She concentrated hard, looking at his face. There was something familiar there, and a quote from Alice sprang up in her mind. I
t's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards. The White Queen had said it.
"No," said Anna, "but perhaps if you say a little more, I will. What's your name?"
He smiled. "Husband. Father. I would have been so many things, for you. And now here you are. Falling."
"I'm lying in bed. I'm not falling."
"Well," he said, generously, "there are two ways to fall, aren't there? I know that well. One is with our eyes open, and one is with them closed. Your eyes are closed now, Anna. I don't blame you. The monsters are really very strong. Too much for you, too much of a gulp, but you never would look before you leapt."
This didn't make very much sense to her. She showed this by frowning. Squeezing her brows together like that hurt, but it was a powerful expression that had the desired effect. It shamed him into stopping talking for a time.
"I should think you have no business here. In my room."
He grunted. "I heard them talking. Your parents. It's an odd moment to retreat to. I suppose it's a pivot point in your personality, after which you changed."
Now he was being nosey. He shouldn't have heard any of that.
"That is most certainly not your business."
"You're even talking like Alice, now," he said. "It's cute, and I understand. You're falling down the rabbit hole, and this place is solid ground, but you can't stay here."
"I can't imagine staying anywhere else," she answered, feeling quite indignant. "This is my bed, in my room. It's you who should leave."
"It's a memory, and they're hacking it now. It won't be long. But I won't leave without you." He smiled. "The madness out there exceeds the Hatter, I guarantee it, but at least we'll be together," he added a wink to his smile, for good measure. "I'll be your White Rabbit."
She gave him a blast of the frown again. "I'm afraid I don't have the slightest intimation of what you are speaking about." But that was a little too much Alice even for her.
"Remember forwards, Anna," he coaxed. "Look around you. Is this really your room?"
He swept his glowing gaze around the dark space, illuminating her sketches tacked to the walls. Strangely, they were not the pictures she remembered. They weren't happy and bright, with bird-women spreading their feathers, with cabbages wearing red polka dots on parade, but rather they were dark.
The Lies (Zombie Ocean Book 8) Page 24
