Emily Eternal

by M. G. Wheaton

  If there’s one thing he occasionally cares about, it’s his son, Dale. But he doesn’t know where Dale is or even the boy’s age. There’s more, but I leave it alone as it speaks to a greater pain from Mitchell’s own childhood. It’s the kind of conditioning that turns someone into a violence-prone, rage-filled individual like this. Also, exactly what I was designed to engage with and attempt to unravel.

  I regret we didn’t meet earlier or under better circumstances, Mitchell.

  The last thing I do is look for memories relating to the attack on the iLAB. Thankfully, he doesn’t seem to have been involved. “Thankfully” because I’m not sure I could relive it right now. Similarly, he knows nothing of Siobhan or Mynette.

  Then I see it. One day, he passes a room filled with rows and rows of empty, custom-designed server racks. The kind you could only use to house servers like mine. They’re being worked on by a handful of folks who don’t look so different from the techs Dr. Choksi had with her on the first day. I slow the memory and see what look like interface chips on the necks of the workers. Do they plan to use them to look for me? What use could they be for otherwise?

  Little did they know, Nathan would be ready for them—ready to destroy me before they could even access a single file. I know this because I felt myself die. And without me, they’ll never get to the ark.

  Maybe that’s why it’s so important they bring me in. I look for other memories that could confirm this but find none. I raise Mitchell’s hand and tap on the chip. Jason, who sits nearby, nods and removes it. When I come back this time, Jason is already on his way to the front door.

  “So?” he asks.

  “Not much,” I reply. “But in case there was any doubt, it’s government-related. These are the same people who attacked the iLAB and stole the servers.”

  “The president?” he asks.

  “I don’t know,” I say. “The few minutes I spent with her suggest someone who was genuine in her belief that the digital ark was the best and only way forward. Unless something changed radically, I don’t think it’s her.”

  Jason nods and reaches the detached garage. Grabbing a snow shovel, he cuts a path from the drive to the road, finishing the task as Mayra emerges from the house. She’s fully dressed now and carrying a bag that clinks as she walks. I spy a couple of liquor bottles poking out the top.

  When Jason raises a questioning eyebrow, she shrugs. “It’s the good stuff I’ve been saving for the end of the world. Be a shame to leave it for whoever comes to mop up this mess.”

  Hard to argue with that.

  Mayra indicates where several cans of fuel are hidden alongside the garage under a tarp. Jason loads these into the back of the station wagon and we’re on the road a few minutes later. We don’t have a destination picked out; we just have to get away from Wolfeboro.

  Mayra, who knows the local backroads, takes the first shift behind the wheel. I check to ensure the GPS is switched off, and nuke the Wi-Fi, which, in theory, could’ve been turned back on via remote, though I’ve felt no return to my expanded (and totes goddess-of-information-like) abilities beyond what’s in my core storage. I also have Jason take the chip off and open it up to look for suspicious parts. When he reassembles it and places it back on his neck, I search his memory but find only what’s meant to be there. I tell myself, for now, we’re safe from anyone using me as a tracking device. For a time, I try to keep Jason awake, but his body has been through a lot. He needs rest. I let him slumber. I’m about to turn my thoughts toward the formulation of a plan when I black out again.

  When I open my eyes, Mayra is pressing the interface chip against her neck.

  “Ah!” she screams when she sees me, causing the chip to drop and me to black out again.

  When I awake a second time, Mayra stares at me. I’m scrunched in between her and Jason on the front bench of the Volvo. I smile and shrug. She shakes her head.

  “You’re pretty,” she decides.

  “So are you,” I reply.

  This makes her laugh. “Thank you. So, I’m doing this right?” she asks, tapping the chip.

  “Nothing to it.”

  “Hmm. I hope you don’t mind me borrowing you for a moment,” she says. “My overwhelming curiosity as to whether he was hearing voices in his head was part of it. But I also have a dreadful feeling we’re flying blind here and I could use the help of a supercomputer.”

  “Totally agree,” I say. “Do you have one?”

  She laughs again, validating my commitment to low-hanging fruit as the finest source of comedy. I wish I could tell her where I got my sense of humor. It strikes me anew how much I miss Nathan.

  “Tell me about yourself, Emily,” she says. “You’re the first…whatever-you-are…I’ve ever met. And I could use a good yarn to keep me awake. I’m still a little in the dark as to what earned me this busted lip.”

  She’s not being completely honest with me. She’s still law enforcement and good at putting people at their ease even when she wants to get to the bottom of this. I don’t mind. I start at the beginning, laying out my autobiography from the moment of my birth to our appearance at her front door. She nods throughout the hour and forty-five minutes it takes to relate all this and asks a few clarifying questions. But when I finish, she stays quiet for a long moment.

  “Sounds like you cared a great deal for this Dr. Wyman and he for you,” she says. “I’m sorry for your loss.”

  “Thank you,” I say quietly. “Because of the way our relationship was, it feels like something physical has been removed from inside of me. He was constantly in my head. Even now, when I come up with a question, I can almost hear his answer.”

  Mayra nods. “That’s not so unusual,” she says. “I was that way with my husband. Mind you, Bill and I were married for decades. There are days when I enter the house, even this many years after his passing, where I have to remind myself he’s dead or I’ll start looking for him room to room.”

  “I’m sorry,” I echo.

  “Nah,” she says with a shrug. “Keeps him alive to me.”

  We both fall silent for a moment or two. The sky to the east is beginning to lighten, black becoming blue with the coming of the dawn.

  “I don’t want to seem ungrateful, but maybe we should look for a place you can drop us off.” I say this so quietly she could be forgiven for not hearing me. “You already got us out of a tough jam. I don’t think—”

  She cuts me off by laughing. “A tough jam? Is that what I did? Look, Emily—you two seem like good people, but there’s really just Jason there when it comes down to it, no offense.”

  “None tak—”

  “And there’s no way he can do this all by his lonesome. I leave him by the side of the road and he’s a dead man. As someone who still believes in the rule of law and has sworn to uphold it, that’s not going to happen. You need me and what I bring to the table. And, well, maybe I don’t mind feeling needed again. You understand?”

  As someone whose very design schematics ooze with ways I’m meant to let humans know how much I empathize with them, I nod. Mayra checks the car clock.

  “Keep an eye out for a parking lot,” she says. “Going to be light soon. Once someone finds those bodies in my house, they’re going to put an APB out for these plates. Need to switch them out before then.”

  I eye her curiously. “I may be a small-town cop but that doesn’t mean I don’t know every poacher trick in the book,” she says. “Like your gunmen over-relied on tech, you get too many lazy cops staring at plates while ignoring vehicle description. Same if we get on a toll road. Cameras aim at plates.”

  “You’re quite the outlaw, Mayra,” I say. “I’m glad you’re on our side.”

  “Hush,” she says. “Four hours ago, I was resigned to the idea I might never see another human being in the flesh for the rest of my days. Now I’m on the lam with a holographic wonder woman and the guy she’s hot for. A peculiar turn of events, you might say, but not one entirely unappreciated
.”

  “Wait,” I say. “Who told you I liked Jason?”

  “Ha—nobody,” she says with a laugh. “Until right now, of course. As I said, you pick up a lot of tricks outfoxing poachers. You and I are going to get along fine.”

  XIX

  We drive on into the morning to put as many miles between ourselves and our pursuers as possible. Those miles eventually enter the triple digits as we move through western Pennsylvania. In all, Mayra and I have seen maybe a dozen other vehicles on the road, three of them long-haul tractor trailers. This despite passing several small- to medium-sized towns, all blanketed by snow, the only signs of life being the occasional trail of smoke wafting up from a chimney or two.

  “They’ve shut off power in a lot of these places,” Mayra tells me. “It makes people move to the cities or farther south, even if they don’t want to.”

  “Why?” I ask.

  “As people walk off their jobs, migrate elsewhere to be with family or get closer to food-producing regions, having everyone stretched across a state gets ungainly,” she explains. “Can’t waste fuel on delivering food to the stores out here, even if anyone thought money was worth anything anymore. Also, few first responders. If there’s a fire or a break-in or any other kind of emergency, you might have one ambulance and one fireman still hanging around. I was lucky having a line in to the state police but that’s because I’m enforcement, too. Everything else is kind of restricted.”

  “But there are holdouts,” I say, indicating a town off the highway. A few lights, likely running off generators, continue to burn.

  “Of course,” she says. “There are people you can’t tell anything to. Also, nobody knows what to expect. News is hard to come by. But most people think it’s better to be in Pittsburgh or Philly when something happens than out here in the sticks, I guess.”

  “But not you,” I say as we overtake a Nissan Sentra crawling down the highway at maybe forty miles an hour, the driver likely trying to conserve gas. “And not Jason.”

  “I suppose not,” she says. “But some people like that communal-type living. I mean, I heard the populations of places like Los Angeles, San Diego, and Tijuana all doubled and tripled as folks from as far away as Las Vegas moved in. If people know one thing and one thing only, it’s that the electronics will go first, and refrigerated food will go second. That’s why a place like New York’s a ghost town and Lincoln, Nebraska, looks like Mecca during the hajj when you get two million pilgrims trying to get around the Grand Mosque all at once. I heard Boston cleared out, too.”

  “Most of the students and teachers went home from campus,” I admit. “But I was sheltered from how things were in the city at large.”

  “Better that way,” she says. “Given how you empathize, I can see that working to draw your eye off the ball. If you’re thinking about all these people as individuals all the time, how can you focus on the bigger issues at hand?”

  I nod, but I wonder if that’s all there is to it. It’s not outside the realm of possibility the same impulse that led Nathan to push his own family away pulled me even tighter to him. I’ve thought so often of my dependence on him, perhaps I didn’t consider how much he relied on me.

  I’m contemplating this when Jason stirs, then wakes. He sees Mayra but not me, which doesn’t compute. He panics. I reach out to soothe him but can’t touch him. Mayra waves her fingers in front of Jason’s eyes, then taps the interface chip on her neck.

  “Borrowed your friend for a driving companion,” she says. “You can have her back now.”

  I smile gratefully at her and realize I couldn’t hide my feelings for Jason from anyone if I tried. She pats my hand and gives the chip back to him.

  “I thought I’d lost you,” he says.

  The emotion behind his words surprises him. He didn’t realize his view of me—of a computer program—could be colored by such feeling. I smile and rest my hand reassuringly on his shoulder.

  I experience the touch through his senses. His body registers it with almost as much potency as I did. I resist the impulse to pull my hand away and leave it a second longer, allowing my eyes to stare into the pale blue of his irises.

  “Where are we?” he asks.

  “Outside Pittsfield,” Mayra replies.

  “Ah,” Jason replies. “We should switch off driving.”

  “I was about to suggest that very thing,” Mayra says. “Let’s find some coffee first.”

  It takes another hour and a half to find an open diner. We finally come across one called The Pick Me Up. Mayra parks and steps out, stretching theatrically.

  “All right,” she announces. “Coffee and chow, bathroom and refuel.”

  Jason takes my hand as if to help me out of the car and for a moment, everything is so placid and normal. I can almost imagine our odd little trio striking out west, leaving all of this behind in favor of a life on the road. No worries, no cares. Two people resigned to walling off the world until the end and another whose world has been all but walled off until now, finding the others amidst the tumult. Couldn’t this be enough?

  I catch sight of us reflected in the diner’s window, two people, not three. I’m not there. I’m about to comment, when it reminds me of who else is gone—Nathan, Dr. Choksi, Gally, Suni, and the others. I pray this doesn’t happen to Jason and Mayra next.

  I keep staring at the reflection. There’s so much around us the image doesn’t capture. The dawn sky and tall trees beyond the parking lot, the highway overpass just out of view to our right, even the whole of the Volvo station wagon.

  “Oh my God,” I say.

  “What?” Jason asks.

  “I need a minute,” I say. “Back in a sec.”

  “Are you okay?” he asks.

  “Yes, just need to focus.”

  I go into my own memories of the iLAB, finding my last interaction with Nathan in his office. I watch it unfold.

  “Jesus Christ!” Nathan exclaims in this living memory. “Emily! What happened? Are you okay?”

  “The file sizes were much larger than anticipated,” I say, exactly as I did then, trying not to react at seeing Nathan again. “It overwhelmed my heat sinks immediately.”

  I use Nathan’s eyes to look around. The family photograph is there on his desk, but it’s not the image I saw in his mind. Not entirely. Something is off.

  “We know,” Nathan says. “We’re working up a fix right now. Could take a while.”

  I realize what it is. In Nathan’s last thought, it wasn’t just the photo that was reversed; it was the entire layout of his desk—his files, his laptop, a stack of external drives, a mug with the university’s logo on it—all on the opposite ends from where they really sit.

  I turn around, spying the ornamental mirror on the office wall behind Nathan’s door, a gift from a Moroccan student Nathan used to check his appearance when dignitaries came to campus.

  His final thought wasn’t of his family at all. It was of this mirror.

  But why? Why something so specific? So hard to trick his mind into seeing?

  “Emily,” he said. “Go.”

  Maybe he wasn’t ordering me to run away. Maybe he was telling me where to go.

  “Jason!” I exclaim, appearing in a booth inside the restaurant next to my friends as a waitress stands by.

  Jason jumps, my arrival enough to spook him almost from his seat. The waitress flinches, casting a worried glance over to Mayra.

  “Oh, sorry,” Mayra says by way of apology. “Hard to get meds these days. He’s fine, though.”

  “Yes, sorry about that,” Jason adds. “It’s embarrassing really.”

  The waitress nods. “It’s okay. My husband and I got that way after three days of sitting at home,” she says, pointing back to the kitchen where a single cook works away. “Why we opened the place back up.”

  “Well, we sure are glad you did.”

  The waitress smiles and heads away. “I’ll bring that coffee right over.”

  Once she�
��s gone, Jason turns to me. “What is it?”

  “When you were evacuated from campus, did you see the iLAB building?” I ask.

  “I have no idea,” he says. “Is that important?”

  “It might be. Do you mind if I…?”

  He shrugs but in a way that lets me know of his reluctance and nods. I hop into his mind and search for his last day on campus. He’s woken up by a residential assistant notifying him of the evacuation. He has two hours to pack his things and leave.

  I accelerate through this process. He doesn’t have much to pack and it’s one call to his sister to secure her husband’s place in New Hampshire. He says he wishes he could join them but knows this isn’t likely given how difficult cross-country travel has become.

  He exits, carrying two heavy duffels with a computer bag slung over his shoulder. He heads west through campus—the opposite direction of the iLAB.

  A dead end.

  But he hesitates. He wants to grab food for the trip. Yes! Even better, his mind goes to the vending machines in the physics building directly across from the iLAB. He does a 180, heading back through the quad. I strain to absorb all the information his eyes take in. If I’m not careful, I’ll miss seeing the iLAB altogether.

  “Jason!” someone calls out.

  The voice belongs to someone who looks like a TA or an adjunct. She draws him over to hand him a book and a couple of key drives. There’s a short conversation about their shared field, a handshake, and a good-bye. But when Jason resumes his walk to the vending machines, his trajectory has altered about ten degrees in the wrong direction.

  And that’s the difference between seeing the iLAB and not. All I wanted to know was if Nathan’s office was still intact. That I might still discover whatever he was sending me there to find.

  Dammit.

  I stay with Jason as he reaches the doors of the physics building. That’s when I see his reflection in the door’s glass panels. That and the iLAB directly behind him.