I resisted the emotions threatening to overwhelm me, and managed another shaky step forward.
A dot of blood, slightly above her heart. A pinprick, I told myself. I promised her it would be okay.
The memory crashed through my fragile defense.
The dot grew, soaking through the fabric of her white blouse. It ruined the material, but still I told her it would be okay. We can get a new shirt. Everything's fine.
Stay with me.
The weight of the memory sat on my chest, crushing the air from my lungs. Ragged breaths filtered through constricting airways.
Look at me.
She wheezed, more air lost than gained with every breath. The color drained from her face, fleeing alongside the ruby fluid seeping from the hole in her chest.
Brighter than any color had the right to be.
The color of life.
Blood flowed through my hands like coarse sand through an hourglass. Settling in my feet. Anchoring me with its dead weight. Threatening what little strength remained.
Choking for air against the blood and bile pouring into her lungs, and still I lied. Still I told her it would be okay.
She knew I was lying, but I didn't.
Not yet.
I believed it.
I had to believe.
Diana ran a hand across my cheek, consoling me.
Even in death she was the strong one.
"No!" I screamed at the door between shallow, gulping breaths.
Ash stood in front of me, her head barely rising above my belly button. I swam in the reflection of her silver moon eyes before noticing she held my hand. Her touch was a gentle breeze against my nanotized skin. Familiar in a way I couldn't rationalize.
Raines rustled her head on my shoulder.
"Wh...what's happening?" she groaned through the fog of delirium ensconcing her mind. "Why are you screaming?"
The sound of her voice banished the thoughts paralyzing my body.
"Alaina," I asked, rotating to look her in the eye. "You alright?"
"Shit, I must not be if you're using my first name." She put a hand to the wall and gingerly stepped away from the support of my arms. "Feels like my brain's been replaced with broken glass." She massaged her temple with a hand blackened with grime, leaving streaks of soot on her cheek where she rubbed.
"We need to hurry," Ash said, her hand no longer in mine. Whatever emotion she'd been wearing a second earlier was gone, replaced by the battle-hardened focus of a soldier.
"Are you alr—" I started to say.
Raines pushed herself off the wall and tested her legs. Awkward and unstable, but with unassailable determination.
"Ready," she said.
I nodded, and with a hand I hoped wasn't noticeably trembling I pushed open the door and stepped into the Stream server room.
The darkness hit me first, followed by the cold, and then the sound.
A blanket of black, disconcerting in its thickness, had been pulled across everything save the center of the room, where an island of light remained, a haven upon itself. It beckoned us. There was no sense in refusing its call.
We'd lost the element of surprise. Malcolm and Adam knew we were here. Slinking through the darkness would only postpone the inevitable.
The darkness had weight. It pressed against each tentative step I took into the void, the ring of light my only focal point. I was afraid to break eye contact with the light for fear that I'd be devoured by memories lurking in the shadow.
My breath steamed in the refrigerated air, crystallizing and pluming before rising towards the ceiling.
We stepped over the precipice, from darkness into light. It was blinding in its intensity. Sensitive photo-receptors popped and buzzed like overworked electrical sockets, but I didn't shy away.
The darkness surrounding the light was absolute, a child's nightmare come to life. I reassured myself I was not a child, that I could handle this. But that might be a lie. I'd been telling myself more of those recently.
"What a merry reunion," Malcolm's voice called out of the darkness. It came from every direction at once.
My nerves fired like a string of firecrackers releasing their charge. I wanted to retreat into the darkness. To seek shelter from a light that exposed all lies.
The ambient buzzing of machinery created a hypnotic stillness, over which it was surprising to hear the clicking of heels against metal. Each step was louder than the last until Malcolm stepped across the fringe marked by light and dark. His head, tilted down, created long shadows where his nose and eyes should have been.
The man born alongside me with the same purpose. A purpose distorted and lost to the weed-infested mind of a heartbroken fool.
I was concerned my heart was pounding loud enough for everybody to hear, but if they noticed, nobody acknowledged it.
"I can see it in your eyes," Malcolm said. "You remember."
I offered no response
"Maybe now you understand why I did it?"
"Jealousy."
"No!" Malcolm shouted, his voice a gunshot. "Love, Tom. Always for love."
"You tell yourself that, but you never loved her. Maybe you loved what she represented, how she made you feel, but it was never about her. It was about you. It's always been about you. To be honest, I'm not sure you're capable of love."
"Then what does that say about you, brother? Does it bother you to know we're the same?"
"We're not."
"Yes, yes we are. You can't fight that. Cut from the same cloth, so to speak."
"That might have been true, once. But you're not that same man. You've changed into something...else. Something the world doesn't need."
"And who are you to decide what the world needs? Where have you found these answers, I wonder? The end of a needle?"
"Better than from the barrel of a gun."
"Hiding your hands behind your back does not make them clean."
"No, I suppose not, but everything I've done was for a purpose greater than my selfish desire for revenge against imagined slights."
"I wonder how much comfort that purpose will bring to the families of the men and women you've killed in your quest for vengeance, Somehow, I think, not much."
"Not enough, no...but it's better than hearing it was for spite."
Malcolm let out a single syllable of laughter that reverberated across the circle of light before disappearing into the echoing chasm of darkness.
"You're so short sighted. Your self-righteousness is insufferable," he said, with a flippant twist of the wrist. "There is no greater good, no right or wrong. Life walks the line dividing all possibilities. It slides along the spectrum, residing in the gray area between. You're not fighting for a better world. For a greater good. Mankind doesn't deserve the world they've inherited. They consume and destroy everything they inflict their disease upon. The only merciful action, for the sake of the planet and the millions of innocent organisms calling it home, is to remove the infestation."
Raines swayed beside me, her legs still struggling to find equilibrium. Ash, a bundle of coiled muscle, waited.
"When you were young," a voice called out of the darkness, "you told me you would find the meaning of life."
I spun towards the sound.
Devers stepped through the portal, and into our personal universe. The cascading light from overhead stretched and darkened the time-etched wrinkles of his face. The man's body was old, but it was nothing compared with the consciousness housed within its organic walls.
Eve lived in there; a mind equaled by only Adam himself.
Malcolm took a half step back, distancing himself from Devers, who continued shuffling forward, each step the labored exertion of a tree resisting the pull of gravity by sheer force of will.
Devers stopped an arm's length from Malcolm, an insurmountable gulf between the two.
"Tell me, son. Have you found your answer?"
"I was young," Malcolm defended. "I didn't understand."
&nb
sp; "What did you not understand?"
"That the question is a trick. It chases a circle, leading nowhere. It presumes an answer. A higher purpose," Malcolm said, hardening his tone to compensate for the confidence visibly bleeding out of him into the cold atmosphere. "But if we apply logic and reason, the only conclusion we can reach is that there is no purpose. No meaning."
"How sad life must be if that were true." Devers extended a withered arm and grazed Malcolm's cheek with a gnarled finger. "The question does not ask if there is a higher purpose which we find ourselves here to fulfill, but rather, what meaning you find in your presence here. We impart our lives with meaning and purpose of our own choosing, Malcolm," Devers said, his voice soft. Fragile. "Don't allow yours to be one of destruction. You were created for so much more. To be better."
"I am better," Malcolm hissed. "Better than Tom, better than the humans, better than you. And tonight I'll prove it."
Malcolm raised the pistol at his side—a metal extension of his arm—and took aim at the old man's head.
Devers didn't flinch. His breathing was a geriatric wheeze, smooth and regulated. He gave no indication he was looking down the short tunnel of death.
At any moment there would be a light, but he wouldn't go towards it; it would come to him. Fast and without thoughts of mercy. Bringing with it the gift of death.
The horror of what was happening shook my world like an earthquake ripping through the Earth's crust.
I stepped forward, arm outstretched. "No—"
The sound of my voice was drowned out by the inconsequential click of the hammer that led to an equally inconsequential explosion which resulted in a tiny shard of metal flying through Devers' forehead.
The strength in my legs waned, but I was already moving forward, covering the distance to Devers as he tumbled to the floor. I caught the old man, but there was no point. His eyes were vacant, staring at everything, and nothing.
Life is one inconsequential event after another, each building upon the last before ending with world-shattering conclusions.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
The Man Behind The Curtain
Eve's consciousness fled her body, retreated to the Stream where she would wait to be uploaded to a new host.
I tried to imagine making that leap, from the organic to the purely digital, but I could not.
"Don't be so dramatic," Malcolm said.
I rounded on him. A feral rage fueled me forward, but he had the drop on me.
Malcolm swung the barrel of his gun like a hatchet; the hard metal clipped my jaw. I stumbled back, my mouth gushing salty blood.
"That's just a decoy." Malcolm nudged the foot of the old man lying beside me. "Not a particularly convincing one, if you ask me. But, you seem to have fallen for it." Malcolm steadied his gaze on Ash. "Isn't that right, Mother?"
Ash offered no response.
It was easier accepting the idea of Eve in the body of an old man. Since my birth, I'd witnessed her go through multiple transformations, hopping from one body to the next when needed. But looking at her as a child, small and innocent, felt wrong. Her manipulation made me feel used.
"You're not surprised are you, Tom?" Malcolm's lopsided smirk ruined the symmetry of his face. "It's not beneath her to hide in a child. Very clever, but too obvious when you've witnessed all she's capable of. We all have our dirty secrets."
Then he turned and disappeared into the darkness.
I pursued Malcolm, and my demons, into the dark, but before I'd managed a second step, the lights came on.
All of them, in unison.
A blinding cacophony of seizure-inducing white blanketed the room. My mind blew fuse after fuse in a series of bursting neurons trying to disappear within themselves.
I shielded my eyes from the light with my arms. A second stretched to indeterminate lengths while my brain and nanocomp fought an awkward pillow fight to decide who would do what. In the meantime, my body tended to any tasks it deemed important.
My knees tried buckling, but the muscles in my thighs were in lockdown, which succeeded in keeping me in a mostly upright position. After a short eternity of this, my brain and nanocomp got on the same page and tweaked the controls responsible for processing light. The world rippled like water before dimming.
Malcolm stood beside a machine few in Unity would ever see with their own eyes: the Beacon. A mass of twisted smart-metal tubes, crisscrossed by an inexplicably complex tangle of wires. It spiraled up out of the floor and through the vaulted ceiling. The Beacon ran the length of the building and beyond, rising from unknown subterranean depths all the way to the rooftop of Division Headquarters.
The Beacon was a technological wonder, a deity. Every person, nanite, and operating system in Unity maintained constant communication with the Beacon. The central hub homogenized the incoming data and supplied the system's backbone. If the Beacon was the brain, then nanobots were nerves spread across a planet serving as the body.
A single pane of glass suspended from the ceiling served as the Beacon's user interface. Dwarfed beneath the heart of the machine, Malcolm inserted a Mobius Cube into one of the computer's numerous ports. Silver light oozed from invisible cracks in the side of the cube.
I imagined Diana's consciousness crackling against the confines of the cube's walls, torn from my own mind where it had been placed only hours before.
The rest of the room resolved into focus, and I noticed the single most important detail that I had, up to that point, overlooked in favor of Malcolm standing beside the Beacon. There were no soldiers. Not a single other person, save one.
President Richard Jennings sat in a chair against the wall, hands folded in his lap. He surveyed the scene with a detached interest verging on boredom.
He nodded and I saw through the facade, past the mask, to the creature pulling the strings beneath. The hubris of it was staggering. Adam, in his quest to supplant humanity, had assumed the role of their leader. They'd entrusted their safety, their lives, to the very man whose only intention was their destruction.
Despite myself, and the weight the moment demanded, I laughed. It rose from my gut, a leviathan bubbling up from the deepest recesses of a heart that struggled to find meaning.
It raged inside me, and the only release, the only response, was laughter. Beads of sweat trickled down my cheek despite the frosty nip of refrigerated air working overtime to cool the Beacon. A muscle strung across my ribs spasmed, twanging across my diaphragm, and causing a sharp ache that stitched my side into a cramp.
I grimaced, but continued laughing.
Perhaps Adam didn't share my amusement at the irony, or maybe he celebrated his audacity in private. Regardless, he rose with a stiffness of movement that made him appear terribly human. He fingered the middle button of his suit jacket as if he were about to step before an audience and give a speech.
Jennings stopped half a dozen steps away, barring my path, and my view of Malcolm.
"Tell me," he said with that smooth caramel-melting-in-the-sun voice he'd used to win two consecutive elections, "what's so funny?"
"You. This. All of it." I corked the remainder of the laughter. "It's all so absurd."
"Hm... I've never considered it to be anything of the sort,” he said. “Oh well, personal taste. I wonder if Diana would find this amusing." Jennings didn't inflect malice in his tone, but the barb, concealed beneath the question, buried itself in my heart like the weapon it was designed to be.
I clenched my jaw, trying to contain the anger, but the more I thought of Diana, the quicker the rage grew.
It consumed me, blotting all reason and logic.
Jennings watched me, smirking.
I charged forward, a supernova of released energy. Time dilated. Shifted down a gear. My engine revved.
Everything slowed.
Jennings' eyelids froze mid-blink.
I covered the distance to the President in a third of a heartbeat. I put all the hate, rage, and hope I could muster into
the fist I launched at his face.
Jennings didn't move, but he wasn't there anymore. My fist swished harmlessly past. The momentum, absorbed by nothing, carried me forward. My balance tilted. By the time I'd regained control of my body and spun in search of the missing man, he'd reappeared.
I opened my mouth to protest that he'd cheated physics, but his knuckles popped me in the nose. My teeth clacked together.
My brain sloshed through cerebral fluid as it smashed against the back of my skull. My legs mutinied and I stumbled. Despite wobbling, I managed to remain standing—no small feat considering the circumstances.
A slightly more transparent version of the President flickered beside him. A twin. I thought that might have played a role in my whiff, until I noticed that both Ash and Raines had acquired floating Doppelgangers of their own.
I dug my fingers into my pulpy eye sockets, trying to force the world into focus. When I opened my eyes again I was pleased to find everybody had reverted to their singular selves.
"I'm surprised you came in person," Ash said, projecting her voice an octave lower than normal to compensate for the narrow constriction of her prepubescent vocal cords. She sounded older.
"Could say the same to you." Jennings rotated on his heels to face the old soul hiding behind the curtain of youth. "But we both understand how untenable your situation has become. Truthfully, I'm disappointed. I had hoped to create you without the baser emotions that would lead an individual to desperation. I suppose this merely proves I'm not perfect."
"Not sure anybody was arguing that point," I said, wiping away the slow leak of blood exiting my nose.
"I'm glad, however," Jennings continued, no longer acknowledging my presence. "Once this is done, our philosophical differences will be irrelevant. We can put this petty squabble behind us, and move forward together. United."
"You haven't won yet, Adam," Ash said, taking a small step forward; a tiny David standing up to the Goliath that would conquer the world.
"No?" Adam put his arms to the side, gesturing to the expansive room as if there were an army behind him. "I have the Safeguard Override along with the positional advantage. You've lost. That you fight, when you should resign, is degrading, even for you."
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