Emily Eternal

by M. G. Wheaton

  He looks ready to protest, then relaxes. “Tell me you’re not doing something illegal.”

  “Not even close,” I say.

  He eyes me as if determining whether I’m lying. Then wanders away. Thank you, I don’t say.

  The elevator dings and the doors open. I struggle to wheel myself forward, gripping the wheels instead of the hand rims. I realize the brake is on and struggle to release it before the doors close.

  “Come on,” I whisper.

  The commotion draws attention. The nurse who checked on me twice before comes around the corner and stops short. She takes in the clothing, the wheelchair, and the pleading look on my face.

  Then she reaches into her pocket and pulls out a cell phone.

  I abandon the wheelchair and lurch through the closing doors into the elevator. The last thing I hear before the car begins to descend is the nurse’s voice crying out, “Code Gray, level eleven!”

  XXVI

  I have no idea what a Code Gray is, but I’m leaning toward not good. Siobhan’s heart rate jumps, which can’t be good given her body’s delicate condition. I hit the button for the fifth floor—only six flights down—and scoot into a corner to catch my breath. The elevator races past the first three levels only to slow at the eighth floor. Realizing the door is about to open, I struggle to stand, gripping the hand rails as tight as I can in preparation to launch myself past anyone who enters.

  “Ovidia? Will you look at this?”

  A female doctor is already halfway into the lift when she turns back to grab an X-ray from a male colleague. She looks it over, holding the elevator door open as she does. She turns it sideways, peering closely at it as if inspecting for microbes. Her younger colleague, a resident of some kind, sees me, forces an apologetic smile. Rather than shove both out of the elevator, I return the smile and shrug as if I have no place to go.

  There’s a commotion down the hall. Security, no doubt. I casually move down the wall as if trying to get to a better place to lean. The doctor finally takes a pen from her pocket and is about to write something on a form. The resident glances toward the commotion and I can see security guards checking each room, reflected in the windows behind him. He looks at me, and for the second time in as many minutes, I feel my stomach drop.

  An aggrieved beeping erupts from the elevator. Ovidia, without glancing around, steps back out of the elevator to let the doors close and silence the alarm. The guards reach the pair.

  “Anyone in there?” a guard asks Ovidia.

  “No,” she says absently, absorbed in the X-ray.

  I catch my breath when the elevator stops at the fifth floor. I wait for the doors to open all the way before stepping out, ostensibly to listen for running footsteps, but then hear multiple voices along the hall. I emerge and find the place packed unlike the rest of the hospital. Nurses, doctors, and family members move from room to room along the maternity ward, checking on young mothers, both new and imminently expecting. Every room is filled, likely, I imagine, due to other hospitals being closed.

  Arrows point toward the parking garage and I follow them, keeping my gait as casual as possible. Just another visitor heading back to their car. As I go, it’s impossible to ignore the same looks of tension in every room and on the faces of all who pass me. The walls are decorated with colorful posters and murals of baby animals and balloons. While at one time, they must’ve reflected the atmosphere, now they stand in harsh contrast.

  Birth is meant to be celebrated, the beginning of something. After the announcement of the Helios Event, it feels like some cruel trick guilty parents have inflicted on newborns who will never grow old enough to understand the gravity of what’s happening. There are tears, but not of joy. Though my body is still weak, I speed up, unwilling or unable to witness this scene any longer.

  The doors between the hospital and the long-term parking level in the neighboring garage slide open, revealing rows and rows of cars. I search through them quickly but don’t see the Volvo station wagon. About halfway down one of the aisles, the headlights of a Chevy Blazer blink twice and its engine starts. I walk to it quick as I dare, seeing Mayra behind the wheel as I near.

  I climb into the backseat and find Jason already there, ducked low on the floorboards.

  “Got to keep our heads down,” he says with a calm I find comforting.

  I nod. He takes in Siobhan’s features as if wondering if I’m there. I place my hand on his, interweaving our fingers. He smiles, but I cannot. Not yet.

  “Who is this?” he asks as Mayra weaves through the parking garage to the exit.

  I tell him. He blanches. “I’m surprised you didn’t kill her.”

  “She knows way too much,” I say. “She’s the key to all of this. We need to speak to her.”

  “Speak?” he asks. “Can’t you take anything you want from inside her head? Like the guys in New Hampshire?”

  “Of course,” I reply. “But we didn’t have the option then. It was an emergency. Siobhan, well, her betrayal may be more personal, yet she’s still a person. I’ve violated so much of what I hold dear by staying with her this long. I don’t want to keep taking liberties.”

  He’s surprised, raising an eyebrow as if I’ve said something quaint or old-fashioned. Maybe I have.

  “You’re pretty selective when it comes to this kind of nobility,” Jason says.

  “Doesn’t mean I don’t feel ashamed about it,” I reply. “If I don’t at least give her the chance to answer, I’m just as bad as she is.”

  Jason isn’t too satisfied with this response, but doesn’t say as much. I wonder about it myself; the truth is I’m very scared of the answer. Siobhan was my friend; she helped make me who I am. Looking into the mind of one of my creators who betrayed every person I know is about as appealing as holding a burning coal in my hand.

  The exit is automated. Mayra puts in a card, feeds it a few dollar bills, and then we’re out on the street heading toward the Tobin Bridge. Only when we’re four blocks away and can see no one’s following us do I ask for a piece of paper and pen. Mayra finds both in the console and hands them back to us as we hop up onto the backseat and buckle our seat belts.

  “Where’d you get the car?” I ask, then wonder if I really want to know.

  “Traded for it,” Mayra says. “Cost us half our fuel and the Volvo, but too many people might connect what happened in Cambridge to what happened at my house back in Wolfeboro.”

  “Makes sense,” I say, already writing on the paper.

  Jason eyes it curiously. “Who are those people?”

  “This is what Nathan left for me to find,” I say.

  “Wait, I thought it’d be a piece of tech or something,” Jason says, confused. “If he had to hide it from those guys, wouldn’t it be whatever they were after?”

  “Not necessarily,” I say, then tap the name Shakhawat Rana. “I recognize this one. I’d been reviewing his genetic portrait when the soldiers invaded the school. He was different from all the others. His genes, or at least a long stretch of them, are completely distinct from those of Homo sapiens as we know them to exist. But when I saw a picture of him, he looked completely average, suggesting the genes must be dormant or unexpressed.”

  “What’re you saying?” Jason asks, lost.

  “I may have been looking at the next stage of human evolution. The extra DNA was like nothing I’d seen before. It was malleable. Reactive. Cells that could evolve not over time but in an instant, as if in response to environmental change.”

  Jason goes still. “Like a chameleon or something?”

  “That, but also closer to what humans have already with immune responses. The histamines and immunoglobulins the body produces to combat allergens in the nose or eyes, the muscles that pull or relax hairs when responding to changes in temperature. But these cells suggested a body that was completely malleable down to the bones and musculature.”

  Mayra stares at me in the rearview. “If that’s the case, why wasn’t th
is Shakhawat Rana shape-shifting like a werewolf or something?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “The strand might’ve been incomplete. Or maybe he was but in less demonstrative ways. We won’t know until we see what enzymatic catalyst activates the cells.”

  “Okay, well, that’s over my head,” Mayra says. “You think the other people on that list have that same DNA strand? And Nathan picked up on that, too?”

  “There were over five hundred million portraits in that database by the time it reached Rana. That Nathan and I would both sync up on the same person for different reasons would be an impossible coincidence.”

  “If the people who killed Nathan have your servers, then they have this information, too, right?” Jason asks.

  “They have it, but they may not have realized it yet,” I say. “Still, Siobhan didn’t exactly seem surprised I showed up.”

  “Good point,” Mayra interjects. “I can see why we need to have a talk with your host there.”

  “I know a place,” I say.

  XXVII

  It’s two hours to our destination. The highway gets us most of the way there but once we’re off the Mass Pike, we head down a small road that leads into the woods. We bounce along an ever-narrowing, one-lane road until reaching the gravel driveway of a small, one-story red house set back from the street and down a gentle slope.

  Mayra navigates the ice-covered drive as best she can on the Blazer’s bad tires. She comes to a halt alongside a door I know leads into the kitchen. We won’t even have to break in, as I know where a spare key is hidden.

  “This is nice,” Jason says as we step inside, kicking the snow off our shoes.

  I check Siobhan’s body. She’s cold. I need her responsive when we speak, so I find a sweater and coat in the hall closet. I pull them on, zip up the coat, and move to the kitchen where Mayra boils some water for tea.

  “Electricity is out,” she reports. “Gas is still going, though. Should be able to heat the place up a little.”

  Though a one-story house from the front, a slope exposes the basement to the rear of the house, making it appear to have two levels. An aboveground pool, now empty and unlikely to ever be filled again save for leaves and snow, stands at the point where the slope plateaus. In the summer, both the patio and the pool were used almost every weekend and sometimes every day. Dinner would be on the picnic table as the sun set. If it was warm enough, breakfast might be there the next morning.

  “Found these in the bedroom,” Jason says, holding up a box with a pair of interface chips. “They’re the old versions. Do you think you can modify them?”

  “Probably,” I say, checking them over.

  “How’s the wound?” Jason asks, returning from a sweep of the house.

  “Fine, I guess. Siobhan’s comfort isn’t high on my list of priorities right now.”

  “I understand,” he says.

  Do you? I want to ask, but refrain. Being in this house is making me angrier by the minute.

  I indicate for Jason to follow me into the basement. We find a heavy wooden chair with armrests and pull it to the middle of the room. We move everything else aside, so nothing is within arm’s or leg’s reach. I head to the small garage beyond the basement’s laundry room, one never used for a car but filled with the tools of a Massachusetts winter—snowblower, snow shovels, and ice scrapers.

  I take a length of rope down from a nail and hunt down a laundry line and a pair of extension cords. I carry these back to Jason and sit in the chair, which he ties me to, binding my ankles with the extension cords and the laundry line for my arms. He uses the rope around my torso and waist, winding it around and around behind the chair until there’s just enough left to tie a knot.

  He inserts a large wrench into the knot, which stays in place.

  “Too tight?” he asks.

  “I don’t care,” I say.

  Mayra joins us, placing a cup of tea near Jason as she blows the steam off her own. Jason opens the chip box and places one on his neck, handing the other to Mayra.

  “You ready?” he asks.

  “Yep,” I say from Siobhan’s mouth for the last time.

  I emerge from her now, a fourth person in the room, using Jason’s chip to group interface with the others. It’s the first time Mayra’s seen me at the same time as Jason. I expect her to react, but she doesn’t. She’s as focused on the task at hand as I am.

  I wake Siobhan by making her feel like her face has been doused in ice. Her eyelids pull back and she stares straight ahead, wild-eyed, as she tries to catch her breath.

  “Gah!” she exclaims.

  She tries to dodge away only to discover her bindings. None of this makes sense to her brain. She stares up at Mayra, then at Jason, uncomprehending. When she sees me, she turns venomous.

  “What the hell is this?” she asks.

  “We have a few questions for you,” I say, seething. “Answer them and we’ll leave you alone. Don’t answer and the rope around your chest will move up to your neck.”

  She’s stunned by my anger and looks around for some means of escape. Finding none, she turns back.

  “Where are we?” she asks.

  “Nathan’s house in Southborough,” I reply. “His family left a while ago, but I remembered the address.”

  “Ah, so this is about revenge,” she says. “Fine. Get it over with. Don’t waste my time.”

  Her words are brave, but her pulse races even as her hands begin to sweat. In that, I see just a hint of the young woman I used to know. The Jekyll to this Hyde.

  “Not revenge,” I reply. “We want information—everything you know about Project Argosy.”

  Siobhan scrunches her brow. “Why do you have to ask me? Can’t you just dive into my head?”

  Of course I can. But there’s that little fear in the back of my mind that if I rummage too hard, I might create the same false memories I did in Jason’s mind. No, I need to hear it from her mouth.

  “I wanted to give you the opportunity to come clean,” I reply, a half-truth. “Maybe explain what made you betray me—betray all of us.”

  “Oh, like I’m one of your subjects now?” she asks, but there’s more fear now.

  “No, because we were friends once,” I say. “We were in this together. I’ve known you as long as I’ve been alive. Except right now, I’m trying to figure out when you stopped being the person I knew and the one I’m talking to right now.”

  I see it again. Regret. She knows what I’m saying is true. I wait, hoping the Siobhan I knew resurfaces. Tells me in a way I can understand why this had to happen.

  But then she scowls. “‘Alive’? You were never ‘alive,’ Emily, any more than you are now. Maybe that’s why Nathan never told you about all this. Given how focused you’d been on developing this ‘humanity’ of yours, maybe he saw your overreaction coming.”

  “Told me what?” I counter. “He was trying to stop you.”

  “Stop us? He knew about us from the start. It was only when he came up with some crackpot idea he thought was even better that he chickened out. He could be so irrational. Which is where you get it, I guess. What did he call you? His ‘most emotional Emily’?”

  Most emotional Emily?

  “Are you going to tell us about Argosy?” Mayra asks quietly. “Or do I have to give this a turn?” She indicates the wrench knotted at the back of the chair. Siobhan looks confused. Mayra turns the wrench clockwise, tightening all the ropes at once. Siobhan gasps in pain.

  “When Argosy came along, the number of potentially positive outcomes for humankind had dwindled to zero,” Siobhan explains. “There were no solutions other than ‘wait and see.’ But even in its infancy, Argosy was about hope. The digital ark was a good first phase. But then we realized what you were capable of and understood Argosy could be about so much more than that. It could be about life. That’s when we decided to move forward on a phase two.”

  “Meaning what?” I ask.

  “Before you came along, w
e could only guess at who the best and brightest—the most genetically deserving specimens of the human race—should be allowed to attempt the colonization of another moon or planet. But because of the way you evolved, we’re now able to do better. Much better. We don’t have the capability to save everyone, but through you, we can establish the Select—the genetic best of the best—that will take to the stars. Those with the best immune systems, strongest muscle groups, longest lived cells, and so on. Argosy’s goal was to identify this Select and recruit them for off-world exploration and colonization, a way to perpetuate the species once Earth had become uninhabitable. Once Nathan realized the scope of our plans had widened…”

  Meaning, they lied to us about preserving the sanctity of the DNA portraits. This also explains why, when I looked in the dying gunman’s mind back up at Mayra’s place, I saw the tech workers setting up to use the servers.

  “…he accused us of playing God,” Siobhan continues. “He said we were thinking like old-fashioned eugenicists and our plans were doomed to failure. It was quite the one-eighty. How grand he got there at the end. When we told him it was too late, that there wasn’t a reverse gear on this protocol, he tried shutting us out, saying he’d discovered a better way forward. Which is what necessitated us taking the servers.”

  She says it with the zeal of the converted. Isn’t it clear? Don’t you see? But Nathan really had found a better way. And, in the eleventh hour, he seemed to have found believers of his own.

  “Did you know they were going to kill Gally when they killed the others?” I ask.

  Siobhan looks stricken. Maybe it wasn’t fair to bring him into this, but I didn’t think her feelings for him were a lie either. She looks on the verge of tears, both of anger for me saying his name and for the loss of this talented young man who used to brighten whenever she entered the room.

  But then, as if by rote, she forces down the memory, swallowing her tears and sorrow.

  “That was unfortunate,” she says, her voice cracking on the understatement. “But he and the others would’ve followed Nathan no matter what. If we hadn’t stopped him, he would’ve snuffed out any chance mankind had of surviving past this cataclysm.”