The Legacy Human (Singularity #1) (Singularity Series)

by Susan Kaye Quinn

  I stop my slow backward creeping and stand strong against him. “And if I ascend? Will that kill the idea?”

  A smile tugs at the corner of his mouth, unsuccessfully, like he can’t quite control it. “When you ascend, your mind will be open to every other ascender. It’s part of the process of your first upload to Orion, before your personal key allows you to lock everyone out. Anyone who cares to can peer into your ascended mind and see what I already know: there is nothing special about you. You’re not a bridge to anywhere: you’re an ordinary legacy who happens to occasionally sling paint better than the current crops of agonites at the games. And, on the off chance that I’m wrong, I’m quite sure the ascendance process will cleanse your mind of any abnormalities that Lenora has managed to introduce with her experiments. She and her fellow believers can believe whatever they wish about you, but they will no longer be able to whisper in the dim corners of Orion that a savior is coming. An answer to The Question. I can expose what they’ve done and hold you up as the failed experiment that you are.” His intense gaze, which is boring holes into me, suddenly softens. “And you, my little human oddity, will have exactly what you’ve wanted all along: to ascend. To save your mother’s life.” He smirks. “Perhaps you can have Lenora as well. I will certainly have no use for her once we’re done.” He holds his hands out, palm up. “So, you see, Eli, we both get what we want. In a rather amusing touch of irony, our interests have been aligned all along.”

  My chest is tight. He’s not going to kill me. He’s actually going to ascend me… so he can kill the hopes of Lenora and every other believer out there, human and ascender alike. And when those ascenders stop believing, stop hoping, what will become of the resistance? What happens to people like Kamali and Basha and Delphina? Cyrus and my mom, too, because there’s no way they’ll be able to return to Seattle now. Not if Leopold cures her. Even if Lenora’s wrong about me, even if I’m not what she thinks, if I take what Marcus is offering, I’ll destroy the one thing that’s holding the dissenters and their ascender-enablers together: hope. Tristan’s words fill my head again. It’s an honor to know you, sir. Only his faith is misplaced. What will happen when I destroy the hope he and the others have? Will Leopold still keep our bargain and cure my mom, if I ascend?

  The answer to that can only be no.

  Marcus is watching me, waiting.

  “No,” I say. Then I clear the tremor from my voice and say it again. “No. I don’t want your ascendance.”

  Marcus takes a deep breath and gives a long, well-of-patience sigh. The kind that has always signaled his true feelings of disgust for humans.

  “Well,” he says lightly. “The procedure would have gone much smoother with your cooperation.” Then his voice drops. “But you’re very much mistaken, Eli, if you think I need your approval to proceed.”

  “What?” It’s a gasp more than a question.

  My brain doesn’t want to believe I heard Marcus correctly.

  “You’re going to ascend, Eli. If it was voluntary, you’d have a much higher likelihood of surviving. And I would very much like you to survive. Your cooperation would have made things so much simpler, but I should have expected as much from you. You’ve been trouble since the moment you were conceived.” He grabs my arm, and in a small stroke of great good luck, it’s my right arm. I clamp onto his exposed hand with my left one, making sure that my middle finger makes contact. A small pinch tells me Leopold’s device has left my finger and adhered to Marcus.

  He shows no sign of any effect.

  Meanwhile the pain of him crushing my arm makes my knees buckle. He drags me toward the med bay, my hand clawing uselessly at his, my feet kicking up puffs of mist as we go. Black stars zip across my vision as Marcus nearly wrenches my arm out of its socket. He throws me into a reclined seat that’s half stretcher, half luxury body-conforming chair. The cushion absorbs the blow of my body so I don’t recoil back out again. I recover from the stun and try to climb out, but the seat has grabbed hold of me, like an enormous suction cup, and the more I struggle, the deeper I sink into it.

  I force my frantic movements to still, breath heaving out of my chest in ragged gulps. I can still turn my head, if I move slowly, but the rest of my body is held fast by the cushion. I ease my head to the side, straining to see Marcus. I can’t, but I hear his bodyform shuffling to the cabinets behind me, the swish of one opening, the dull click and scrape of something he’s taking out.

  “Marcus!” I yelp. “Marcus, don’t do this!” I know it’s useless, but I can’t help saying it. I pant, struggling to control the panic that’s threatening to strangle me. Time. I need time. What did Leopold say? It might take minutes for the device to break Marcus’s encryption key. If it’s going to work at all. If it doesn’t… I can’t think about that. I have to stall him. Talk to him. Get him to slow down. Anything.

  “Marcus, I… I changed my mind!” I try to clear the hitch out of my voice. “If you’re going to ascend me anyway, I just… give me a minute to prepare, okay?”

  Marcus appears with ascender speed at my side, causing me to jerk, which just makes the chair grab tighter. The cushion somehow seeps through my agonite uniform to my skin, cool and clammy on my back and shoulders. I shudder, but that just makes it worse.

  Marcus’s cruel smile makes my heart seize up. He has a small silver tube in his hand identical to the one Leopold used on me. I can’t help staring at it.

  “I would like you to survive, Eli,” he says matter-of-factly. “Although I will admit to a certain level of annoyance about all the trouble you’ve caused. If you should die during the procedure, it won’t break my heart. I’ll be sure to explain to Lenora that you were a willing participant all along. Just to wipe away any faith she might still have in you.”

  I force words out of my mouth, saying anything, just to keep him talking. “Wait… okay… I can see you’re serious about this. And, you know, on further thought, you’re right. I mean, I never believed what she was saying. It’s crazy, right? I’m just a legacy from Seattle. I’m nothing special.” I gulp. I’m completely rambling now, and Marcus is ignoring me, checking his tube for something I can’t see. It must contain the nanites or whatever the first step in the procedure is. I have no idea. “Is that… are you going to knock me out first? Is it going to be painful?”

  He gives me an amused look, like he knows I’m stalling. “No, the procedure works best when you’re awake. And unfortunately, it will be quite the opposite of painful.”

  Unfortunately? Some part of him must like watching me squirm in the chair. He’s relishing it too much. Maybe I can work with that. “What do you mean the opposite?”

  He gets a faraway look, gazing past me out the windows to the city. “Ascendance is like every pleasure you’ve ever known multiplied together. It’s been a long time since I experienced it myself.” His gaze zooms back down to me. “But trust me, it’s not something you’ll forget.”

  “Are you sure? I mean, if I’m not ready for it, you said it might kill me. Last time I checked, dying wasn’t a pleasurable experience.” I don’t have to try to put fear into my voice.

  He leans casually against the back of my prison-chair and smirks down at me while he dangles the tube near my face. My heart-rate kicks up as I alternate between staring at the open tip of the tube and Marcus’s sneering rental face just past it. “No, I imagine it’s quite painful as your brain rejects the nanites. As your neurons fight a losing war against the invading filaments. You begin to die, one neuron at a time, until your basic systems stop functioning. Your brain swells as your autoimmune response system floods your skull, trying to fight off an enemy it cannot recognize but knows is killing you. It’s your own body that finishes the job, crushing your brain tissue with the pressure until your brain matter, blood, and all those complicated but ephemeral and ultimately inferior organic tissues simply leak out of your body through every orifice in your head.”

  He’s definitely enjoying this.

  Meanw
hile, I’m working hard not to lose the contents of my stomach.

  “Okay, so… you’ve convinced me, all right? I don’t want to die, Marcus.” The truth of that rings in my voice. It’s strong enough that it may have convinced him, because he pulls back slightly, and the leer drops off his face.

  “Just give me a minute to prepare, okay?” I say. “Just a minute. I want this to work.” There’s a jittery fervor in my voice. I’m pleading now. And hoping like crazy that he will buy it.

  He frowns slightly. “One minute.” He taps the tube lightly against the back of my chair then eases away from it.

  I nod my appreciation. As he drifts toward the cabinets, taking that tube with him, I close my eyes and try to quell the shaking that’s taken hold of my body. I think of Kamali and her meditation techniques. Breathe in. Breathe out. One minute… one minute… I’ll have to think of something else to stall him after that, if the decryptor hasn’t done its work by then. And if it doesn’t work… or it doesn’t work in time…

  I really don’t want to die.

  I have no doubt that everything Marcus has told me is true, and I don’t want the end of my life to come while I’m strapped to an ascender chair in the clouds. Maybe I really should accept it, if the ascendance is going to happen anyway. It’s what I’ve wanted all along. To be like them. To be stronger, faster, more intelligent… better than human in every way. For as long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to join their pantheon of gods-on-earth, so I could have everything they have: all the tech, the riches, the spoils of the world. Their beautiful, perpetual bodies. Their incredible talents. But now I know the truth: they’re ruthless killers who will stop at nothing to achieve what they want. They’re not gods—they’re not even close, with all their conniving and striving and murder. Now Marcus is going to force me to join them, and I won’t even reap the one benefit that meant anything at all: saving my mom.

  An intense bubbling of hatred wells up in me. I would give anything to be merely human. To erase this thing that Lenora has made inside me, this monstrosity that her ascender ambition has created and that fuels all the scheming. My hatred for the ascenders and all their games boils up and forces my eyes open. Angry breath leaks slowly out of me.

  I would rather die than become one of them.

  A dull roar fills my ears. It sounds like the waves at the pier, distant crashing against the shore, only it’s rushing, rushing, rushing towards me.

  I suck in a breath and struggle, trapped in my chair. “No, no, no—”

  Not now, not now… but it’s too late. The rushing roar keeps going then slowly ebbs. I’m on the shore of a sandy beach that’s somehow familiar. Like a beach I know back home in Seattle, except it’s empty now. Kayaks drift by themselves, blankets lay crumpled and abandoned, shovels and toys sit next to a half-built sandcastle. I walk toward the water. The lapping of the waves dims, and a woman in a red swimsuit appears in front of me. I stop. She’s facing away, looking across the water. When she turns to smile at me, I don’t recognize her, but she’s beautiful even in middle age. Large chocolate brown eyes, long cascading hair falling down her back. She stands to face me.

  I step toward her. Who are you? I ask.

  I’m waiting, she says. Her voice is sad music, each letter a note so lovely it makes me ache.

  Waiting for what? I’m suddenly closer to her now, as if I moved without thinking.

  She smiles kindly at me, like I’m a child. She’s my mother’s age, beautiful like her, before the disease ravaged it away. Waiting for you, she says. She reaches her hand toward my forehead. I want to lean away, but I’m frozen. I sense the chair holding me, back in Marcus’s apartment, but at the same time, it’s the music of her words ringing in my head that keeps me still, entrancing me. You are the bridge, she says. Her lips shape each word slowly, and she finishes them just before her finger touches my forehead.

  A tsunami of images, sounds, and feelings buries me. I see a man that she embraces in passionate love, a sister dead and buried, a baby snuggled in her arms. Days and years and sounds and memories flash by. It’s a flood that I can’t keep out. Just as I’m swept under, I see an image of a handsome, dark eyed boy with a scraped knee that she kisses… It’s all right, Marcus, she tells him, but it whisks away like the rest, and I’m drowning in all of it, a dark, dark hole of nothingness closing in over my head…

  “Eli!” Something slaps my face. “Eli, wake up!”

  My eyes jerk open. Marcus’s face looms above me, holding as much panic as can be apparently wrought with his rental body. I’m still in the haze of the fugue state, the overwhelming sense of it still drowning me. I’m a glass jar filled to the brim with everything that was her life, the woman’s life, so full that I’m bursting with it. Her name comes to me—Lilith—along with every small thought and feeling and wish she had.

  I look up into the dull, flat eyes of Marcus’s rental body, but somehow I see beyond them. I see the dark eyes that belonged to the boy. “She’s your mother.” My voice is rough with the aftermath of the fugue, and already the tremors ripple through my body. “Lilith is… so beautiful.” The tremors work into my voice. “She… loves you… so very much.”

  Marcus’s eyes go wide, and he leans away from me. “What are you talking about?” But his voice is weak. Surprise mixed with a kind of horror.

  I fight against the growing shakes in my body, which just sink me deeper into the chair, but my mind calmly sorts and files all the knowledge that has been given me. Gift feels like the right word, even though it’s nothing I asked for or wanted. I blink and look at Marcus again. He’s scowling at me now.

  “She believed you,” I say, with the certainty that comes from having every moment of her life poured into me. “She believed in you. She wanted to ascend because of you.” As I say it, the images flash in front of my mind’s eye: his impassioned pleas; his convincing arguments; his impossible promises. He was always so smart, her son, so clever. And he loved her, she knew that. He wouldn’t say it if it weren’t true. Then the pain and the darkness…

  Marcus’s mouth hangs open. “How do you know about…” He looks at me like I’m a horrible nightmare come to life in front of him. Then the anger rises up and takes hold of him. “This is some kind of trick or… I don’t know what you think you’re playing at, Eli, but nothing’s going to stop me from—” He cuts himself off, and his face goes blank, slack for a moment, then true panic contorts his features. “What have you done?”

  He casts about the room, looking for something, moving so fast I can barely track him. Then he disappears from my view, and there’s a tremendous crash from the direction of the wall of windows. The jitters that wrack my body make it even more difficult to fight the chair. I slowly twist my head to the side. Finally, I can see it: a whole section of the window wall is missing. Streams of mist fly off the carpet and whip out into the free air outside the apartment. Wind howls past the gaping hole, and my eyes are blinking fast from the sudden frigid breeze, the post-fugue shaking, and the realization of what the hole must mean.

  Marcus just jumped out the window.

  “But he’s dead, right?”

  I can’t help asking it again, even though Leopold already assured me that even an ascender body wouldn’t survive a fall from that height. The shakes from the fugue were mostly gone by the time Leopold arrived in his transport and freed me from the chair, but the wind is still howling around the hole in the window, and the cold makes me shiver.

  “His bodyform is dead,” Leopold says. “But that will only trigger the release of his backup. As I told you before, it would have been much better to capture him.”

  I gesture to the chair, my hand still showing the tremors. “I was a little short on options.”

  Leopold smirks, then gets serious again. “We should go, Eli. I don’t know how quickly Marcus will resurrect, but we certainly don’t want to be here when he does.”

  I nod, jerkily, and follow him and the heavily armed resistance militia he b
rought with him back out to the transport, which is hovering in the whipping winds outside Marcus’s broken window. The walk plank extension isn’t as steady as I’d like for a thousands-foot-drop, but we manage to get across it and safely aboard.

  I think I’m still in shock as I sit on the floor of the transport and stare at the cockpit wall, one hand clinging to the wall netting. Every time I try to think about what just happened—Marcus, the fugue, his mother—my mind recoils from it. Like it’s too much for me to take in. I take several deep breaths, trying to clear it and focus on what’s next.

  “Did Lenora say where she’s hiding my mother?” I ask Leopold, who’s standing at the threshold to the cockpit.

  “I didn’t have time to ask. But since Marcus only had her for a short while, he wasn’t able to break her personal key. So it’s safe to return to the resistance’s mountain station, which is where she and the girls are now, recovering. You can ask her yourself when we get there.”

  I nod, then resume staring at the wall. Time passes, but it feels suspended for me. Like I’m waiting for something to descend upon me and explain what happened in Marcus’s apartment. And when nothing does, and the miles pass silently underneath the transport, I slowly begin to think it wasn’t real. It happened… but it doesn’t mean anything.

  I know this is wrong. But I can’t think about it anymore without feeling like my grip on reality is slipping away.

  A jostle in the ship tells me we’ve landed. I follow Leopold to the door, and when it winks out of existence, I see the pilot has actually landed us inside the dissenters’ hideout. It’s crammed with militia, most changed out of their black-clad battle armor and back into regular clothes of all shapes and colors. Commander Astoria and Delphina stand off to the side of our craft, waiting for us, but as we debark down the walk plank, they don’t say anything or smile, they just start to clap. Leopold glances back to me, and as we keep walking, others join in, standing up from their bunks or stopping in their purposeful strides. It takes me a moment to realize they’re clapping for me, and I have no idea what to do with that.