I take his hand and hold it tight. I put my other hand to his face. Utilizing what I learned from that first encounter with Dr. Choksi, I enter Nathan’s body to see if I might save him.
But with his heart destroyed, he has seconds—if that—to live. I go to his mind, something I once swore I’d never do, but his thoughts and memories are already fading. He has recalled a last image, one of himself and his family from years earlier. But it’s not a memory of a moment; it’s a photograph I’ve seen hundreds of times sitting in a frame on his office.
“Emily,” he whispers. “Go.”
Another burst of gunfire and I wonder who else might’ve been in the room. Siobhan? Mynette? I hear someone shouting at the men to begin taking the servers apart row by row. I can no longer see, as Nathan’s eyes have failed and as his brain dies, his hearing fades as well.
When I reach back to my servers, I feel my own functionality waning in concert with my dying creator. It’s a sickening feeling, as if I’m sinking underwater. My limbs are too numb, too unresponsive to push me back to the surface. Without my servers, there’ll be no simulation to return to, fifteen seconds into the past or not.
I tighten my grip on Nathan’s hand as I marvel at all that’s lost by the death of his mind.
“I’m sorry, Nathan,” I whisper into his ear, though I have no voice left. “I’m so, so sorry.”
Book II
XIV
When I wake, the first thing that occurs to me is I didn’t believe I’d ever open my eyes again. I feel…numb, a detached, limbless feeling like I’d experienced back in my dorm room. If I felt the walls of my fishbowl before, now I’m downright claustrophobic. As if I’m buried alive in a mental coffin.
When I attempt an assessment, I find myself cut off from my servers. There’s no information. My short-term memory is intact, but the farthest I can go back with perfect clarity is my final session with Regina Lankesh. The most recent is the nightmare of watching Nathan die. I can recall that I have case notes from Regina’s earlier sessions, even a few thoughts from my interactions with Dr. Choksi, but I can’t reach the files themselves. It’s the same when I recall the broken thermostat in Nathan’s truck. I remember the sound it made but not the schematics I retrieved.
I have zero access to the outside world. I wait for this feeling of grogginess to subside, but it’s in no mood to accommodate me.
I do the best I can to take in my surroundings. It’s dark. Nothing is familiar. I’m in a bedroom standing between a bed and a dresser. I look out a nearby window and see woods dusted with snow and a lake beyond it with more trees on the opposite shore. Given the angle, I’m probably on the second or third floor of this structure, which appears to be a cabin or a hunting lodge. The moon, hanging high in the night sky, is a thick sliver, maybe six days past the new moon, a week or two from the first quarter.
The new moon. The men who attacked the campus came in darkness. There were stars but no moon that night. So, is it four days later? A month and four days later? Or am I at some time in the far future, accidentally revived for reasons I may never discover?
Or am I somewhere else entirely? Hidden in someone else’s memories again or even their dreams?
I return to the memory of Nathan’s death and gasp in sorrow. I feel pain. I replay his last moments, staring into his dying mind. His last word, my name. His last thought, his family.
I hear movement and turn. A man stands in the unlit bedroom doorway leaning against the frame.
“It is you,” he says in a voice I recognize as Jason Hatta’s.
He flips a light switch on the wall. As I wonder how he can see me, I see the interface chip on his neck kept in place by a small bandage. That explains the presence of my core personality and short-term memories. Beyond that, I’m cut off.
Jason approaches, touching my arm tentatively, as if to confirm what his eyes are telling him.
“It’s really you,” he says, incredulity rising.
“How do you have that?” I ask, pointing at the chip.
He stares at me as if not understanding the question. Then he puts his hand to his neck.
“I know I was supposed to leave it behind in the auditorium after the test but, well, I…didn’t.” He steps even closer. “It was so surreal seeing you again. Or, well, this version of you. When you appeared in the auditorium, it brought everything back. It’d been so long. I hoped if I kept the chip I’d see you again.”
“I’m sorry?” I ask, confused.
“Paris,” he says, thrown by my confusion. “Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten. Or is that not how this works?”
I freeze, unsure what to say.
“Paris,” I say, pronouncing the word as if hearing it for the first time.
“Yeah, Paris,” he replies. “Where we first met. Well, where I met Emily. I mean, you’re not her. Not exactly, right?”
“I’ve never been to Paris.”
“Of course not,” he says, stepping toward me. “Not you, but the person you’re based on. You look like her; you sound like her.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I say guardedly. “I’m an artificial consciousness, a computer program. I’ve never left campus. I’m not based on anyone. I created this image of myself on my own.”
I try not to show it, but I’m in full panic mode. How could he have seen me in Paris?
“If we’ve never met, why do you recognize me? I can see it on your face.”
“It’s from taking your genetic portrait,” I reply dryly. “Same way I’d recognize pretty much anyone on the planet.”
If I was connected to my servers, of course, but he doesn’t have to know that.
“No, it’s something else,” he says. “It’s how you looked at me in the auditorium. I didn’t realize it at first—or maybe I did and couldn’t place you—but then it came back to me. Come on. You must have retained at least some of Emily’s memories.”
A terrible realization hits me. His words—I didn’t realize it at first, but then it came back to me. It wasn’t that he remembered me; it was that after an interval of an hour, he had brand-new memories to pull from. That time I slipped while reliving his time in Paris? When I went from listening in on a conversation he was having with a young woman to standing beside him and talking back? I must have overwritten the original memory. In my fantasy, I replaced the young woman, so the same thing happened to his memory. When I imagined myself speaking to him, I took her place. Instead of her going on day trips with him, he now remembers going on them with me.
Oh God. What have I done?
“Jason, I’m so sorry,” I say, unsure how even to explain.
“No, no,” he says. “I’m sorry. I can see how this was my mistake. With everything that’s going on, it seemed like providence not coincidence. I could’ve sworn it was you. I have this distinct memory of meeting you for the first time in this one restaurant. We talked for hours. We went for a walk after to see Sacré-Cœur all lit up at night.”
All me. All of this is my doing.
“Jason—”
“But hey, maybe she just looked like you,” he says, “and sleep deprivation did the rest. My bad.”
Before I can say another word, his hand goes to the interface chip.
And I’m gone.
XV
My eyes open and I’m in a different room than the one I was just in. It’s still dark. What day is it now? What time?
“Sorry,” Jason says from nearby, a tablet in his hands. “Given what Dr. Choksi said, I’m sure you’ve got better things to do than interface with me—”
“No, no,” I say, mind racing. “What?”
He’s wearing the same clothes as before. I see the moon reflected on the coffee table and make a quick judgment based on its position. It’s been an hour, maybe two?
I try again to reach my servers, but again, there’s nothing. I zero in on the interface chip at his neck. Without that link, I’m as good as dead.
I must k
eep him talking.
“I wrote my sister, Ana, about you back then,” he says, indicating the tablet. “I found the e-mails. It’s…so different. Like, my memories of you versus what I told her at the time, it’s like two different peo—”
I accelerate my processor speed to slow real time to a crawl. How do I explain this? How do I tell him I’ve not only stalked him from inside his own mind, but I’ve also done actual damage to his memories? And how do I explain this without his response being to tear the chip from his neck and toss it down the garbage disposal?
I’m trapped. There’s no way out of this that doesn’t—
“Jason,” I say, cutting off his word and severing the thought at the same time. “Jason Hatta. From Washington State, though you grew up in Oregon. Your sister, the one you wrote to, still lives there. Ashland, right? Married? Growing up, you thought you’d be a farmer; then you discovered biofuel technology in college and found a new path.”
He stares at me, unsure what to make of this. I go on.
“We met in one of your classes but had our first real date at that brasserie in the Marais,” I say. “The one that only served steak, wine, and French fries. The waitress asked only how we wanted our steaks prepared, then wrote our answers on the butcher paper covering our table. Servers moved through the dining room carrying platters of meat. If they saw your plate running empty, they’d check the marking—rare, medium, well done—and fill it back up. You took refills of wine from casks on either wall.”
“What did we talk about?” he asks.
“Your parents and sister, my life back in Boston. My conflicted relationship with my mentor at university.”
He thinks back on all this, nodding. “Yeah, that’s another thing. My sister only had her first kid at the time, Ben. She had her third last year. But I remember talking about all three of them with you. How’s that possible?”
It’s not. Because I was creating his side of the conversation; these were things I imagined he would say, not his actual words.
“I don’t know,” I lie, yet again.
“Well, why didn’t you say all this in the first place?”
“I didn’t want to mislead you,” I say, my revulsion at myself rising to titanic proportions. “I’m not the person you met in Paris. I’m me.”
“Where is she?” he asks. “Was she some kind of programmer? Somebody this mentor of yours knew?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “It’s all new information. I can barely wrap my head around it.”
“Well, she was great,” he says. “We talked endlessly, laughed about everything. I’ve never gotten to know someone so intimately, so fast. That’s why you—she—made such an impression.”
It strikes me that though he thinks he’s talking about someone else, I’m the one he fell in love with. All I am, all I can be. Something about that cuts through the deceit and strikes me as…wonderful.
“I get it,” I say. “Obviously you did, too. To remain in her—our—memories like this.”
He grins. I feel it physically, something brought forth from the core memories stored on the interface chip. I perceive my accelerated heart rate, my quick intake of breath. I elongate this feeling by taking in his physicality, the cyclist’s torso, the lean musculature of his arms.
Another quiet leap in heartbeats per minute. Not exactly a cardio workout, but maybe if I saw him zipping down a country road on his bike all—
OKAY—whoa. Down, Emily.
Attraction, this artificial consciousness is discovering, is a fascinating thing. Questions and more questions. And given the coming apocalypse, not a lot of time to answer them.
“So, what day is it?” I ask, changing the subject. “Where are we?”
“New Hampshire. Lake Winnipesaukee. Well, an island in it.”
“We’re on an island?” I ask.
“Yeah, this cabin belongs to my brother-in-law’s family. I used to meet them up here and he gave me a key if I ever wanted to get away. But in winter, this place empties out.”
“The date?” I ask again.
“I got here last Friday, so it’s a Monday,” he says, straining to remember. “Monday, December tenth. Four days since they evacuated campus.”
“What happened on campus?” I ask, wondering what he might’ve witnessed.
“There was an explosion,” Jason explains. “You don’t know about this?”
“I can’t connect to my home servers,” I explain, pointing to the interface chip. “If that’s not on, I’m blind.”
He nods, getting it. “There was some kind of fire,” he says. “A chemical burn at the iLAB followed by an explosion that almost leveled the building. The administration said that campus couldn’t be run with a skeleton crew of maintenance staff and everyone had to evacuate while they investigated. No one was told if or when we’d be allowed back.”
He knows nothing about soldiers or machine guns or Humvees. It’s impossible no one saw anything, but the folks that did were probably dealt with on a case-by-case basis. A Humvee? Nah, you must’ve seen one of those National Guard fire trucks. The City of Boston trucks are all tied up. Worse, Jason’s story smacks of a cover-up, one that could be accomplished only with the help of university administrators and possibly the government.
The empty trucks. They weren’t targeting the servers; they were coming to get them. The servers must still be offline or reconfigured, leaving me adrift.
“Was anyone hurt?” I ask.
“I think so,” he admits. “They didn’t release names. There were some rumors it was something related to the sun—maybe one of those coronal ejections sending EMPs through all the wires. But nobody knew for certain. We were made to leave the next day.”
He looks at me long and hard and I wonder what he sees. Early on, I had a firm control over my micro-expressions and what I allowed others to glean from my body language. But like anything, it becomes subconscious, second nature, and you don’t even know you’re doing it anymore.
“You were there,” he says, not a question.
“I was.”
“That’s not what happened, is it?” he asks.
“No,” I say.
He nods. I look down, thinking on the faces of my friends and colleagues in their last moments. Jason puts his arm around me. I accept the gesture by leaning in to him.
“Your mentor was there, wasn’t he?” he asks. “The one you told me about in the brasserie. Nathan?”
I’m surprised he remembers the name. I nod. “I was with him at the end. They shot him.”
“Who did?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “There were Humvees and trucks full of armed men. They shot up the building, then went in and started killing everybody. I got to Nathan as he died.”
Jason’s shocked. I tell him the rest of the story.
“That’s awful,” he says, taking my hand. “I’m sorry. They’ve been warning us for so long that things might fray, might fall apart, but I don’t know if I ever really believed it.”
“I know who I saw go down,” I say. “But have you heard anything about a Siobhan Moesser or Mynette Cicogna?”
He shakes his head. “Sorry. Were they friends of yours?”
“They were on the team, yeah,” I say, getting more upset as I relive that night. “I can’t stop thinking about Nathan’s last thought. He’d been having problems with his family—his wife and sons. But in his last moment, he was thinking about them. A picture of them he kept on his desk.”
“A picture?” Jason asks.
“Yeah, this framed photo he kept on his desk, I—”
I stop myself. I’m comparing memories now, the one in Nathan’s mind to my own of the photograph. In my mind, the lineup of his family starts with Nathan on the left followed by his wife and the boys. In Nathan’s last dying thought, it’s the opposite—Nathan on the right, then his family. A mirror image.
“What is it?” Jason asks.
“Nothing,” I say. “Nathan remembered the pi
cture wrong, is all. He had it backwards in his head. I mean, he was in a lot of pain and his brain was shutting down due to trauma. Still, it’s an odd juxtaposition.”
Jason scrunches his brow. “Did he know you were there?”
“Yes.”
“Which means he knew you’d be able to read his last thought.”
“I guess so,” I say. “I doubt that was paramount to him in the moment.”
Still, I consider this. Was he trying to tell me something?
And if so, what?
I hear a sound in the distance and look to the window. “What is that?”
Jason shrugs. “A plane maybe? Doesn’t sound like a car engine.”
No. It sounds like a boat. Three boats, to be precise.
“I thought you were alone out here.”
“I am,” he says.
We go to a window. In the dim light, I can just make out the boats. They’re lightweight and fast-moving, bouncing on the waves as they near the island. There are about five or six men in each, all wearing helmets and tactical gear, all with heavy weapons silhouetted against the reflection of the moon in their wake.
The same setup as the men who attacked the iLAB.
“We have to get out of here,” I say. “Now.”
XVI
I grab Jason’s hand and pull away from the window, running back through the house.
“How did they find us?” Jason asks.
“I don’t know!”
“Could it be the chip?”
I consider this. I couldn’t reach my servers, but that doesn’t mean the chip itself doesn’t act as a beacon once activated. I search the chip’s micro-server. Though well hidden, there is a GPS finder program buried in its tiny operating system. I check the log. It activated the moment I came back online. It takes nothing to disable it, a single thought, but the damage is done.
“My boat’s tied up at the back of the island,” Jason says as we hurry into the kitchen. “If we can reach it, we can get away while they’re searching the house.”
Emily Eternal Page 9
