Emily Eternal

by M. G. Wheaton

  Saitta, on the other hand, does believe the hype, but he also believes the government has a plan they’ll soon unveil, likely one to do with large underground cities. I remember this really was a scheme they’d proposed on one of the many pie-in-the-sky lists sent in by lower-level federal employees, moving folks into temporary housing in subway lines and the like with New York City being the test case. But as soon as they brought it to us, we pointed out the NYC tunnels must be constantly pumped free of seawater, something impossible to do once the geomagnetic storms begin to wipe out power. The plan was shelved.

  He seems like a good guy, this Timothy Saitta. Good grades in high school, went to work at an office supply warehouse, got a girlfriend, lost a girlfriend, got that girlfriend back. Took the job as a security guard to save money for a car so he can visit said girlfriend more, as she lives three counties over. Hmm. I’ll try not to get him killed.

  “She reminded me of my grandma,” I say. “A lot of people in trouble these days.”

  Cory laughs, offering me a cigarette. “Not our problem,” he says.

  I check to see if Saitta is a smoker. He is not. I shake my head. Now comes the hard part.

  I search Saitta’s memories to see under what circumstances the guards can enter the iLAB building. Turns out, they’re not supposed to go in at all. However, they slip in from time to time to get out of the cold, sometimes using the first-floor conference room as a shooting range complete with heater inside the command shed doing little to warm such a large, thin-walled space.

  Also, they much prefer the restrooms inside, which still work, as opposed to the freezing port-a-johns set up nearby for the security detail.

  “Hey, I’m going to hit the head,” I tell Cory, using a bit of vernacular Saitta’s picked up from his navy days. “Be right back.”

  “I’m going to join you,” Cory says. “Anything to get out of this cold.”

  I nod. I didn’t think it would be so easy to go in on my own. I have a plan either way.

  I lead Cory up the snowy steps into the iLAB. The wind whistles through the building, blasting icy air coming in on the sixth floor down through the stairwells and out into the lower hallways. Given the way Saitta’s body is reacting, I can’t imagine it’s much warmer in here than outside.

  “I wanted to show you something,” I say as we move to the restrooms at the back of the first floor. “Found it on my last shift. Or, really, Lopez found it and told me to check it out.”

  “What’s that?” Cory asks, suspicious.

  “Food,” I say. “Up on the sixth floor.”

  It’s a gamble. I don’t know how much time I’ll need in Nathan’s office, but I’ll need to be on my own. If there’s even a chance our barter closet is intact, sending Cory after it might give me just enough time.

  Only, he goes quiet, eyeing me like a crook. Huh?

  It dawns on me too late that sharing food in this dog-eat-dog economy probably isn’t done. If you find a cache of food, the last thing you do is tell anyone. If it’s more than you can personally eat, the black market will be happy to take it off your hands in trade.

  “Fine, Lopez asked me to tell you because he wanted to use your truck to get it out of here,” I say. “He figured you were more likely to do it if I asked, not him.”

  “Nah, sixth floor is too unstable to walk on,” he counters. “It’s why we’re not allowed up there. Lopez wants us to do his dirty work for him.”

  “I’m still here, ain’t I?” I ask with a shrug. “But hey, more for me.”

  “What kind of food?” he asks finally.

  “Granola bars, gummy bears, crappy cookies, chips, waters, sodas,” I say. “All hidden away in this cabinet. Tons of it. Student munchies.”

  I think of Bjarke hauling the stuff up in the freight elevator, mostly boosted from other departments. He’d once liberated a box of soap from a nearby motel—two hundred tiny .75-ounce cakes—and had never been prouder.

  “You serious?” Cory asks.

  “As a hurricane,” I reply.

  “I’m in,” Cory says, holding out a fist.

  I fist-bump him. We move to the rear stairs. As we ascend, I wonder what might happen if the floors collapse. Saitta will die, certainly, but will the interface chip be found when his body is recovered? Or will they ignore it and move on, making my end so ignominious, so less than a footnote? No way of knowing.

  The stairwell is dark until we reach the third floor where the doors have been blown off. Light trickles in. It’s only then I notice the long black fingers of smoke stain creeping up the walls from the various vents. Evidence of a fire. Maybe there really was an explosion. Maybe they blew up the lower levels to cover their tracks.

  “Is it much farther?” Cory asks, his breathing labored as we pass the fifth-floor landing.

  “Can’t you count?” I shoot back.

  He grunts. We climb the last steps to the sixth floor. It’s an odd thing to notice, but Jason’s body is more prepared for this kind of ascent than Saitta’s. He’s young and well trained, but whereas Jason’s stamina has been built up through cycling, Saitta is more muscle-bound. He might beat Jason in a sprint but not in such an ascent.

  It’s an odd thing to know, how one person’s body would work in such specific terms compared to another’s, I almost turn to Cory to describe the experience. Luckily, I catch myself.

  “Where’s the food?” Cory asks.

  I barely hear him. The sight of where I spent so much of my life these past five years now decimated numbs me all over. Entire sections of wall are missing, blown out by the Humvee’s turret guns, their barrels at an almost ninety-degree angle, or maybe even grenades and shells. That anyone would believe this was a chemical lab explosion is either insane or the willful belief of those already cowed by events.

  The last time I was here, Nathan was alive, and we thought the digital ark plan might provide some shot at salvation.

  “Conference room,” I say offhandedly. “Cabinets under the copy machine. It’s locked, but that’s what a Ka-Bar is for.”

  “If it’s locked, how do you know what’s in it?” he asks.

  “Lopez kept the key, the greedy bastard,” I say, moving away. “Serves him right for not telling everybody.”

  Cory accepts this, turning off at the corner. “You’re not coming?” he asks.

  “Figure if they had one they might have others,” I say. “Maybe even booze.”

  Cory nods and heads off. “Be quick and don’t grab anything too big to explain downstairs,” he calls back to me.

  But I’m already on my way to Nathan’s office. With every step, my trepidation grows. It’s when I step across the threshold and his smell fills Saitta’s nose I’m overwhelmed. The young security guard quakes as tears fill his eyes, then trail down his face. I grab the back of Nathan’s chair to steady myself.

  “Really interesting,” Nathan would say if he could see Saitta’s body respond not only to my physical controls but to my emotional state as well. “We should look at that.”

  I almost say his name aloud if only to hear it in this room again. It’d be too much like summoning a ghost. Cory is right. Time is fleeting.

  I focus on the desk. The photo of Nathan’s family is exactly where it’s always been, directly alongside the wireless keyboard he used for his tablets and phone. My memory of it is correct. What was in Nathan’s mind was the mirror image. I turn Saitta back to the wall behind the door, spying the legal pad–sized wall mirror still hanging there. The angle is perfect, the photo framed in it precisely.

  I move to stand in front of the mirror, half closing the door to get a clearer view. There’s nothing on the surface, nothing around the frame. I look at the back of the door, but there’s nothing there either. It doesn’t make sense. I step into the center of the office and glance around, comparing what I see now to my last memory of this room. If Nathan was here just before his death, there’s no sign of what he got up to.

  I see a drawer open
slightly, so I check it. Nothing out of the ordinary there. The trash can contains a single granola bar wrapper. There’s more dust on various surfaces. The chair is moved slightly, but I did that. The window is whole but covered in soot and ash from the bombardment.

  Have we come all this way for nothing?

  As I get frustrated, however, I put myself in Nathan’s shoes. What would he have been thinking?

  If he knew people were coming for the servers, then he would’ve known hiding something from me or a reprogrammed copy of me was a possibility. The reflection in the mirror may have been one layer of “encryption.” But what else?

  Mynette once criticized me early on saying I was incapable of comprehending things outside of two-dimensional space. She’s right. I’m approaching changes to his office the way I would changes to my simulation. They’d be superficial, painted on, but ultimately not entirely dimensional. I must think in 3D space, not pseudo-3D.

  I take the mirror off the wall.

  At first, I see nothing out of the ordinary. I run my fingers over the stucco, but it’s exactly as it should be. I turn my attention to the nail the mirror was hanging from. The hole is slightly hollowed out as if the weight of the mirror has dragged it down over time. But Nathan was the most precise human being I’ve ever encountered. He would’ve determined the nail’s load-bearing ability before he even bought the mirror.

  I grab the nail head between Saitta’s fingers and pull it straight out. I am rewarded when wrapped around the pin is a nearly translucent slip of paper. Like the kind you’d find around one of Nathan’s ever-present cough drops.

  It’s a list of eight names scrawled in pencil. Check that, five are in pencil, three are in ink, though from two different pens. They’re in Nathan’s handwriting. Given the lingering, medicinal smell of the cough drop on the paper, they were written relatively recently with room at the bottom for more names.

  What strikes me most of all, however, is that the eighth name is one I recognize—Shakhawat Rana—the last portrait I took before the attack. The one with the 7.666% difference in DNA from his fellow humans.

  It also means Nathan lied to me. Or, at least, did so through omission. The digital ark was meant to be sealed, no back doors. But somehow Nathan had access. Not only that, but he was also able to search the portraits for information. After all his words about preserving the sanctity of the process, he was subverting it from the start.

  “Hey there, Emily,” an immediately recognizable voice says from the doorway. “That is you in there, isn’t it?”

  I whirl around. Siobhan smirks at me from four feet away, a gun in her hand. I stare at her in horror, thinking it must be a mistake. A trick? A game? This is my colleague. My friend.

  “Siobhan?” I ask. “What’re you doing? Put the gun down.”

  She responds by training it at my head. “Quite a trick you’ve picked up—your sister’ll be glad to have you back in the fold.”

  “Sister? What’re you talking about, ‘sister’?” I ask, growing more confused by the second. “Siobhan, it’s me. Talk to me. What’s going on here?”

  “We wondered how one student managed to wreck all our well-armed operators up in New Hampshire, but we learned long ago that assuming there were limits to your abilities was a sure way for you to surpass our expectations,” she continues. “Now, if you don’t want this young man’s brains blown all over Nathan’s desk, maybe you’ll hand over whatever you’ve got there. Sound good?”

  I say nothing, letting the feeling of betrayal wash over me in order to color my next actions. I assess how to close the distance between myself and her. As if realizing what I’m up to, Siobhan assumes a firing stance and cocks the weapon.

  “I’ll give you to the count of one to decide what you’re going to do,” she says. “And that’s…one.”

  XXIII

  Even as I accelerate my processor speed to determine how best to absorb a bullet, Siobhan’s finger pulls the trigger on the gun. I can’t outmaneuver a bullet, but, within this minute amount of time, I can determine the spot on Saitta’s body where it will do the least damage. As the round approaches my torso, I turn as best I can to allow it to penetrate my chest below my left vertebrochondral ribs. It shreds my skin, passes through my stratum corneum, tearing through sweat glands and sebaceous glands, nicks the rib, changes its trajectory to pass within a millimeter of my abdominal aorta without severing it, then exits out my back.

  The force of the impact spins me around, but I exaggerate the motion to make Siobhan believe a second bullet is unnecessary. I cry out, knock into the chair, and manage to slam into Nathan’s side table, tipping it over with a crash.

  I hit the ground facing away from Siobhan. She takes two steps closer and I slowly roll onto my side, gasping for air.

  “Drop it or the next one goes in your head,” she says.

  I nod, holding out the piece of paper. My movements are halting, as if I’ve lost at least some control over Saitta’s body. Using the gun barrel, Siobhan pushes aside Saitta’s collar to expose the interface chip.

  “You shouldn’t have come back, Emily,” she says, scoffing as she snatches the piece of paper from my hand. “Helpful, sure, but dumb.”

  “Why would you do this?” I croak. “To Nathan, I mean? He was our friend. Our mentor.”

  “He was also incredibly shortsighted. They approached him first, you know. Or maybe you didn’t.”

  “Who did?” I ask.

  “Argosy,” she says. “He turned them away. His mistake.”

  “Argosy?” I ask, playing dumb.

  “Don’t mock me, Emily. You know who we are.”

  “And Mynette?”

  Siobhan shrugs. “Disappeared. Possibly overseas. Took a bunch of tech with her, too. Initially thought you two might’ve been in this together, but we don’t think she got away with any interface chips. Don’t worry. We’ll find her, too.”

  “You seem pretty confident for someone who didn’t exactly watch your six out there.”

  “My ‘six’?” she asks. “Is this some new trick of yours?”

  “Your situational awareness,” I say.

  “Really, Emily? What’re you playing at wi—”

  Her words are drowned out by the gunshot. The bullet strikes her on the arm. She cries out, dropping her weapon. Cory stands in the doorway holding his pistol. Siobhan instinctively goes to retrieve her gun, but Cory shakes his head.

  “I wouldn’t,” he says with an unflappable cool, ready to shoot again.

  Siobhan, mouth still open in surprise, nods and moves away. Cory picks up Siobhan’s weapon, eyeing me as he does. “You okay, man?”

  “She shot me!” I say. “I don’t know how she got in here, but I think she’s another crazy squatter. She keeps saying I’m being controlled by a computer program or computer chip or something.”

  “We gotta get them to pay for a few more guys at the gate,” Cory says, slipping the gun into his waistband.

  “This person isn’t who you think it is,” Siobhan says calmly.

  “Uh-huh,” Cory says. “Next you’re going to tell me you didn’t shoot him.”

  “No, I did that,” she says, blood oozing down her arm. “But she’s the invader, not me. I work for Argosy, same as you. My name is Siobhan Moesser. Doctor Siobhan Moesser. You can check me out.”

  Cory pauses, seemingly surprised by Siobhan’s composure. He looks to me and I shrug, rolling my eyes as if only a dullard would fall for a story like this. Cory reaches for his radio.

  “Stay there, okay?” he says, indicating Siobhan.

  “No problem,” she replies icily.

  “Hey, who’s down there right now?” Cory says into the radio as Siobhan backs away. “We got anybody with a supervisor’s number?”

  I race through my options. I could run out the door but with this wound, I doubt I’d get very far. I could try to distract Cory, but I’m not sure how well that would work at present either. I notice, too late, Siobhan inching toward
me. Before I can alert my partner, she drops to the floor, plucks a knife from a sheath on Saitta’s ankle, turns, and stabs Cory. It happens so fast, so without emotion, that neither I nor Cory can gauge the situation. Cory sinks to the floor, blood jetting from the wound. Siobhan blinks and turns to me.

  “Happy now, Emily?” she asks.

  I think back to the men who killed Nathan, wondering how they could’ve done it so dispassionately and without hesitation. They’d had training, of course. For Siobhan to have done it makes me think there’s either a lot I don’t know about her or a lot I don’t understand about people once the normal rules of civilization are suspended.

  I leap to my feet even as Saitta’s body protests in anguish. I grab Siobhan by the shoulders, wheeling her around until I can get my forearm under her chin.

  “What’re you doing?” she asks, gurgling. “Stop it, Em!”

  She still has the knife in her hand and stabs at me over and over. Still, I hang on, the improvised sleeper hold gradually draining her of consciousness. I can hear the cries of the guards out front. They must’ve assumed we were downstairs using the improvised shooting range when the first shot went off. Now they’re not so sure.

  I only need a few seconds more.

  When she’s completely out, I kneel and hastily bind her wound. Based on her reaction I don’t think it’s serious, but it’s leaking a lot of blood. That done, I remove Saitta’s radio and weapons from my pockets and place them in Siobhan’s. I find Nathan’s list of names and shove that in Siobhan’s pocket as well.

  I turn my attention to Saitta himself, and to my understanding of gravity, anatomy, and motion. I need one absent impulse, a single last vestigial action from his unconscious mind.

  I put my hand over the interface chip on Saitta’s jaw and lean over Siobhan’s neck until I’m mere inches from her. My fingertips encircle the chip’s edge, ready to pry it free. I need to visualize the motion, initiate it, and then rely on the various components of Saitta’s motor system to complete the movement. I take a deep breath and the world vanishes.