World Walker 2: The Unmaking Engine

by Ian W. Sainsbury

  But he had made a promise.

  He reached out a hand and placed it on Mason’s cheek.

  Within a minute, a little color had returned to the skin of the body in front of him. Then, his lips moved slightly and the fingers of his right hand twitched. Finally, his eyelids flickered.

  Seb stood and got a glass of water from the desk. He took it over to Mason and lifted his head. The closed eyes fluttered and opened. Seb tipped the glass, and after some of the liquid had made it into his mouth, Mason swallowed convulsively. A thin, shaking hand came up and held onto Seb’s own, guiding the glass as he drank. After Mason had drained the whole glass, Seb dragged a chair over and sat in front of him.

  Mason coughed a few times. His mouth moved, but he seemed to be struggling to make a sound. He swallowed again and pushed himself a little more upright. He looked across at Seb. Seb looked back, marveling at the change. It was Mason—of course—yet somehow, it wasn’t him. The changes were so subtle as to be almost invisible. The line of his mouth, the way he was sitting. But mostly, it was his eyes. Those pitiless eyes, blank, unreadable, were suddenly full of human emotion. Fear, sadness, regret, empathy, compassion. It was like looking at an entirely different human being.

  “Mason?” said Seb.

  The skin around Mason’s eyes contracted briefly, as if in pain. He coughed, then spoke. His voice was weak, grating with lack of use, but it was no longer a whisper.

  “No,” he said. “My name is John.”

  From the burner phone on the desk, Sym watched and listened.

  “I would have just killed the son of a bitch,” he said, before sending himself deep into the chaos of the internet. The World Wide Web now had its own spider.

  ***

  Seb stood in the middle of Mason/John’s apartment. He felt a mixture of adrenaline and relief. Adrenaline because he’d been prepared to kill another human being, but it hadn’t happened. Relief for much the same reason.

  The tumor in Mason’s brain had been a dark ball of cancerous gristle, pushing its mass into various clusters of synapses. Seb’s Manna had sunk into his skull, diagnosed a malfunctioning brain, and cured the disease by replacing each cancerous cell with a healthy one. It took nearly seventy seconds to remove the cancer. The resulting change in brain chemistry made it obvious that Mason had been removed with it.

  Seb wondered how he would feel now, if he’d actually killed the man.

  His speculation was interrupted by the sudden knowledge that the aliens were minutes away from reaching orbit. It was a strangely disorienting feeling knowing this, since the information would previously have come from Seb2.

  Seb locked onto the ship’s position, and using telemetry gleaned live from several airplane tracking websites and some less public NASA communications, worked out how he could get to it undetected. His link with the ship would alert him when they began to prepare the Unmaking Engine.

  Seb returned his attention to the apartment. The wheelchair was next to the picture window. Standing next to it, holding on for support, John looked out at the view he had seen every day for nearly thirty-four years. Now, finally, he could take it in properly. Central Park, a smudge of green to the northwest. He turned to Seb.

  “Please,” he said, “can we go there?” He pointed with a trembling hand.

  “Sure,” said Seb.

  They took the private elevator down to the parking garage and walked out into the early afternoon sun. John held on to Seb for support. His legs were healed now, the bones, cartilage, ligaments and muscles capable of bearing his weight. It was just the mental adjustment to walking for the first time since he was thirteen years old that made his steps slow and hesitant.

  Seb hailed a cab.

  Central Park was busy with the usual eclectic collection of joggers, European au pairs, dog walkers, business people with a sack lunch in one hand and a cellphone in the other. Cops walking in pairs, a group of art-school students filming each other in a variety of comic poses, a cluster of Hasidic Jews huddled around the screen of a tablet. Every echelon of the drug-dealing business was represented for those who knew where to look; from the meth guy near the underpass to the cocaine supplier who played outdoor chess with her customers while they negotiated. Schoolchildren, teachers, nurses, stockbrokers, journalists, analysts and bums sat, or lay on the grass, eyes closed, the heat of the sun on their faces.

  On a bench near the water, John looked out on it all and tried to piece his existence together into something that made some kind of sense.

  Once, he had been Boy.

  Then, he had been Mason.

  Now, he was John, the name Mom had called him when Pop wasn’t there. His given name.

  He had been a passenger in his own body for most of his life. A witness to terrible things, held hostage in the deepest recesses of his own brain. A dream of who he was, suddenly made real. He was forty-seven years old and his adult life had just begun.

  John watched the people around him going about their lives, and rejoiced in the freedom he felt in not being involved, not wanting to control, just letting them be. He sat like that for nearly an hour. He told Seb about his parents, his childhood, the cancer, and the encounter with Manna that had saved his life but given immense power to a parasitic personality over which he’d had no control.

  “The tumor would have killed you eventually,” said Seb. “Mason had slowed its progress to an absolute crawl, but I think you only had five or six years left. “

  “I can’t think of Mason as an entirely separate person,” said John. “I wish I could. But that would be too easy. He was the absolute worst of me, magnified horribly, but he didn’t come from nowhere. I was my father’s child as much as my mother’s. I have to accept that, somehow. He was me, a nightmare version of me.”

  “Whoever he was, he’s gone now” said Seb. “You have your life to live, but everything will be different. Destroying the tumor, and Mason with it, meant destroying your Manna ability. You will have to look after yourself. If you get sick, you’ll have to visit a doctor. You won’t live an abnormally extended life. You’re just a human now.”

  “It’s all I ever wanted,” said John. “Manna is a curse, not a blessing. I know there are Users who do good with it—the Order has always tried to be selfless in their Manna use. But I’m not convinced they ever really succeeded. I met some of the Order’s most powerful proponents over the years. I’m not sure they were as far removed from Mason as they liked to believe. Manna can be subtle in the way it corrupts, but it corrupts none the less. None of the Order ever considered giving up Manna to avoid confronting me. They were addicts, just as I was. Even now, with all the Manna flushed from my system, and most of my life stolen from me by its use, there’s still a small part of me that wants it back. Wants it desperately. I’m glad it’s not an option any more. What about you?”

  Seb looked slightly taken aback at the question. “It saved my life. I wouldn’t be here if it hadn’t been for Manna.”

  “But is it you? Has Manna changed who you are?”

  Seb stood up and looked across the park to the water. He looked back at John and had a sudden disorienting feeling of deja vu. A flash of Richmond Park and Seb2. Then it was gone.

  “I’ve changed,” he said. “I had to. I’ve grown up.” He stopped talking. He realized the man he was speaking to was probably the only other human being who had ever experienced anything close to the ability he had. Mason’s final attack on him, while not unexpected, was ferocious, clever, and incredibly powerful. A year ago, maybe even six months ago, it might have killed him. Seb knew he had evolved over the last year, so that any part of his body could recreate any other part in seconds. Even his brain. No other Manna user had the same ability. In some ways, it made him more Gyeuk than human: a colony of sorts.

  He sat back down on the bench. “Yes, it’s changed me. And I don’t know where the changes will end,” he said. “But I’m still me.” John said nothing. Seb wondered if he was trying to convince th
e other man, or himself.

  “What will you do?” Seb said. “Where will you go?”

  “I’m going to work,” said John. “I know a place where they’ll be glad of any help they can get. And, I think I owe them. I’ll paint walls, sweep floors, whatever they want. If they’ll have me.” He looked at the man beside him and started to say something, then changed his mind and was quiet again. A few seconds passed by in silence. “What about you?” he said. “What will you do? Save the world, one life at a time?”

  Seb looked at the scene in front of him, seeing different versions laid out across the multiverse. The cops were arresting the meth dealer in one. In another, the park had been cleared because of a bomb threat. Great birds circled a barren area devoid of any life in another. Most just showed variations on a theme: the same people going about their day. Seb looked at it all dispassionately. He knew the Unmaking Engine threatened every universe where humanity had discovered Manna. In none of those universes had humanity shared that discovery with the entire race and consciously evolved as the Rozzers had wanted them to. Seb felt a stab of despair for the selfishness of his species. He knew humanity could be better than that. Didn’t he?

  “Actually, I’m going to save everyone all at once,” he said. “Hopefully.”

  John looked at the younger man.

  “You don’t seem overjoyed at the prospect,” he said.

  Seb smiled at that.

  “I don’t know if it’s the right decision,” he said. “But it will probably save humanity. I know that must sound crazy, but…oh, I don’t know. Forget I said anything.”

  He stood up again and stuck out his hand. “I did what I came here to do,” he said. “I killed Mason. And it worked out better than I’d hoped. I got to meet you. You’re a good person, John. Good luck with the rest of your life.”

  John took his hand and shook it. He looked as if he wanted to speak again but thought better of it.

  “Thank you, Seb,” he said. “I wish you the same.”

  Seb walked away a few paces, then turned.

  “Why do I keep feeling I know you?” he said. “As if we’ve met before. When I know that we haven’t.”

  John looked into Seb’s eyes and held his gaze for a few moments.

  “We did meet once,” he said. “Kind of. But you won’t remember. There’s something I want to tell you. I wasn’t sure, but—well, I guess you need to hear it. You’d better sit down.”

  Seb sat down.

  Chapter 45

  “The first person I killed was my father,” said John. “His death is probably the only one I can’t bring myself to completely regret. Beating the crap out of his family was the closest thing to a hobby that man ever had. I can’t even picture Mom without bruises.”

  John was looking straight ahead, hardly seeing the mid-afternoon Central Park population in front of him.

  “My mother died eight months after I last saw her,” he said “A few days after giving birth, she left her baby on a doorstep. A week later, the river police pulled her body out of the Hudson. I—Mason, I mean—was glad. She was a complication while still alive. There would have always been the tiny possibility she might have come back, or gone to the authorities, despite the threat to her and her child. But she did what she thought was necessary to protect her newborn son. She removed herself as a link, hoping that even if I had kept watching her somehow, I would lose interest in my sibling. And she was right, to an extent.”

  “To an extent?” said Seb.

  “Yes. She was right to be paranoid. I had no network of Manna users back then, so my methods were old school. I employed a private investigator. He found her fairly quickly and sent regular reports. She never went home. She saw out her pregnancy in a refuge for battered women in Brooklyn.”

  John stopped speaking for a while. When he resumed his story, his voice was quieter.

  “Some people say suicide is a coward’s way out,” he said. “They’re fools. Not an easy thing to do, deciding to end your life and then going through with it.”

  Seb thought back to the feeling of disconnectedness as the last of his lifeblood had seeped out of his veins into the dusty ground of the Verdugo Mountains. As he remembered, it was as if it had happened to someone else. In many ways, he had been someone else back then. And the gift of Manna, while saving his life, added to that feeling of disconnection with his younger self.

  “She had married an older man who knocked her up while she was barely out of school,” said John. “Then, he quickly showed his real colors. A hard-drinking, wife-and-child-beating bastard. Some women might have struggled to love the son of such a man. Not Mom. She taught me right from wrong, and I never felt anything other than unconditional love coming from her. But she never had the strength to leave him. I don’t know why. I can never put myself in her place. She was manipulated and tortured physically and psychologically from the age of seventeen. Who knows what that does to someone? And then, when she was finally free of him, she had to face the nightmare that the son she loved was even worse than his father.

  “I know now what I couldn’t know as Mason. She didn’t kill herself to protect her baby from me. She threw herself into the river because she thought her tiny newborn son might turn out just like his daddy and his brother. Hell, no wonder she couldn’t go on.”

  Seb let John cry for the woman no one was able to save. Eventually, he continued his story.

  “I watched the boy grow up. Didn’t interfere, just had a report every six months. My main interest was in his Manna ability. As my network grew, I took the investigator off the case and had a powerful Sensitive pay a visit to the neighborhood every now and then. Right up to adulthood. No evidence of Manna use at all. I wasn’t sure whether to be relieved, or a little disappointed in my little brother’s lack of talent. At that point, I let him go. And I honestly barely gave him a moment’s thought until recently, when he reappeared. And I—Mason—wished I’d killed him while he was still in the womb.”

  “Where is he now?” said Seb.

  John’s eyes were unfocused. He wasn’t seeing the park at all anymore.

  “She loved music, you know,” he said. “She was a religious woman, and she used to listen to sacred music when Pop was at work. She thought certain composers were touched by God. One in particular. Bach.”

  “I love Bach,” said Seb, softly. John didn’t seem to hear him.

  “She even named her sons after him,” said John. “The English version of Johann is John.” He looked directly at Seb. “Johann Sebastian Bach.”

  The truth of it hit Seb like the huge wave that had dragged him under during his first—and only—attempt to surf. He gulped air into his lungs and stared at the man he had come to kill only hours before. This morning, he had been an orphan with no information about his family. Now, he knew who his parents were. And he had a brother.

  The signal came through from the orbiting ship.

  Seb blinked a couple of times, still looking at John. Then he stood up.

  “I have to go,” he said.

  John looked at the expression on Seb’s face.

  “I did the right thing? Telling you, I mean.”

  “You did the right thing. I’ll come back. You said you were going to volunteer. Where?”

  “St Benet’s,” said John, smiling. “Where else?”

  Seb couldn’t quite bring himself to smile back. This was all happening too fast. But he had to admit he felt a huge sense of grounding, knowing he had a family member. Even if his brother was a former psychopathic criminal mastermind and mass-murderer. It would all take time to digest. Time he didn’t have right now.

  “I have to—” he gestured toward the sky as if that might explain his intentions. John nodded.

  “Off to save the world, right?”

  Seb nodded and—to the immense surprise of two passing teenage girls and a pigeon—Walked.

  ***

  Innisfarne

  The beach at Innisfarne was nothing like th
e golden sands Mee had grown used to living in LA. And the temperature was a rude reminder that Britain, the country of her birth, served up some bitterly cold days, even in early Fall. She wrapped the shawl more tightly around her shoulders as she picked her way through the scattered rocks and shallow pools in the twilight.

  Even though she was shivering, she was still moved by the wild beauty of the island. She had been there less than an hour, had greeted Kate with all the intensity of a long-lost sister, then felt a strong pull toward the beach. She went alone, obeying her heart’s need for solitude. There were a few gulls still crying mournfully to each other from the cliffs, but other than that, the murmur of the sea, and the rise and fall of the wind, there was silence. Palpable, profound silence.

  She stood still for a few minutes. Innisfarne had been known as a Thin Place for over a thousand years, but the irony was that there was no Manna here. The members of the Order who took refuge on the island did so without Manna, ensuring a fairly constant turnover of guests as Users quickly became twitchy without their regular fix. The reputation as a Thin Place came from something quite different. ‘A deep sense of the eternal dance of silence,’ was how a visiting Hindu guru had put it.

  Mee hadn’t realized she had been waiting for him until Seb suddenly arrived, stepping out of nothingness and standing in front of her. The expression on his face was oddly unreadable: was he scared, happy, awe-struck, bursting with news, upset? She didn’t know whether to kiss him, shake him, or hold his hand and tell him everything was going to be ok. She settled on kissing him.

  When they took a breath, she looked at him again.

  “What is it?” she said.

  “Mason’s gone,” he said.

  “Dead?”

  “Long story. He’s gone and he’ll never be back, that’s the main thing.”

  She breathed out. “Good. What happened?”

  Seb took a deep breath.

  “You’d better sit down.”

  Thirty minutes later, it was Mee’s turn to take a deep breath. She tried to digest what Seb had told her.