Emily Eternal

by M. G. Wheaton

  It’s after that I realize it’s not the sex that made me feel more human the night before; it’s being wanted by another human. It’s the closeness. The intimacy Mayra mentioned. With his physical acceptance of me, I feel worthy not just to exist, but also to be loved as an equal. This is so unusual because I’m accustomed to my humanity being seen only through extremes—I’m a computer program that could never be human. Or, my humanity is something greater than, something to be lauded, my exceptionalism celebrated.

  Never simply equal.

  But right here, neither Jason nor I are greater or less than. There’s only us. I’m not beset by troubling emotions and self-doubts. I can just be.

  The inevitable invasion of our private universe comes not with a knock or phone call, but the gentle sounds of other humans outside. They speak, they laugh, they pass by in the parking lot. It’s such a crowd, and this is such a small motel, they can’t possibly all be guests.

  “I’ll check it out,” says Jason, breaking away from me to rise and dress.

  I search him for vestigial signs of anger but find none. I realize something our fight revealed—a budding trust. Most people seethe over things but seldom confront people. You only express real anger with someone if you think they care enough about you to not turn and walk out the door.

  He glances back to me just as I’m lustily eyeing his half-naked form.

  “What?” he asks.

  “Your body is fun to look at,” I say as blithely as possible.

  “Yours too,” he says, edging aside the curtains to glance out. His eyes widen almost imperceptibly.

  “You’ve got to see this.”

  XXXI

  I dress quickly, and we head outside. We didn’t see it on the way in the night before, but there’s a small chapel tucked into the woods on the other side of the street. Its steeple rises forty to fifty feet over the roof but still doesn’t clear the balsam fir overhead. Dozens of people stream in, some on foot, some on—incredibly—cross-country skis, and then even a few in the back of two large wagons that must be a century old, pulled by horses twice as large as—by my own reading and the Internet—I believed horses could grow.

  “What’s all that?” I ask, pointing to heavily laden tables set up out front.

  “Canned goods, blankets, clothes,” Jason says, holding a hand over his eyes to shield his view from the sun. “Looks like a swap meet.”

  I spy Mayra coming back across the street with what appears to be a tall, thin olive oil bottle, a small handwritten label on the side.

  “Try this!” she enthuses to Jason.

  He takes a drink and almost immediately doubles over. Alarmed, I check him for illness and see his throat has reacted to the liquid as if attacked.

  “What is that?” he asks, hoarse.

  “Orahovac,” Mayra says. “It’s a sort of Serbian brandy made with walnuts.”

  “It tastes like gasoline!” Jason replies.

  “They probably cut it with something similar,” Mayra admits. “I’ve had Italian hazelnut liqueur, all kinds of amaretto and Italian Nocello. Never anything like this. Great, right?”

  Jason nods to appease her, though his eyes fill with tears. We watch for a few minutes, seeing our first snowshoe-wearing arrivals a moment later. It looks like a scene straight out of the eighteenth century, a small community coming together to trade for necessities outside the town’s meeting place. There are smiles and handshakes, children playing and adults laughing. While I’m sure the fear of what’s coming next can’t be too far removed from their minds, these people aren’t letting themselves be dominated by it.

  For a second, though it’s impossible, I wish I could join them in some way. I’d soak in that feeling of well-being, find out how to bottle it like so much Orahovac, and pass it to the next person over.

  But it’s not meant to be.

  Jason is looking at me, perhaps reading my thoughts on my face. He wriggles two fingers around my hand and presses tightly.

  “Let’s go,” he whispers.

  It takes us eight hours to reach the Canadian border. Though we imagined we’d be under greater scrutiny trying to cross at night, there are no guards and the gate is raised. We don’t trust this at first and circle back to a small market we saw closing up shop a town back. A woman tossing the day’s trash in the Dumpster shrugs and nods.

  “Everybody went home,” she explains. “Yeah, makes it easier on the smugglers, but we don’t have traffic jams like we had a few weeks back. I think they’ve still got guards at the Route 59 and 18 crossings, though.”

  We thank her. Mayra tries to barter for some sandwiches, but the woman gives them to us for nothing. It’s hard to tell if this is genuine kindness or an acceptance time is running out and accruing more goods is pointless.

  As we head back north, a light snow begins to fall, one that grows heavier with every mile north. By the time we cross over into Canada, the roads are almost impassable. We go from making decent time to crawling along, especially once the snow picks up and we can’t even see through the front windshield.

  We relax a little when we finally see a sign for Steinbach. Only forty miles to go until we reach Winnipeg.

  “Do you mind pulling over for a sec?” Mayra asks. “I just want to move into the backseat, stretch out a little.”

  “Sure,” Jason replies, feigning nonchalance. “You okay?”

  “Yeah, fine,” she says. “Might’ve overdone it with the Orahovac.”

  We pull over. Mayra climbs in back. I’m there when she arrives, eliciting a giggle from the onetime sheriff as she piles in.

  “I’ll never get used to that,” she says, but in a way that tells me alcohol isn’t what’s troubling her.

  “Can I help you out?” I ask. “Like, make your body feel as if it’s had a long restful sleep followed by a relaxing massage?”

  “You can do that?” Jason asks from up front.

  “I hadn’t thought of it until now, but I imagine I can,” I reply. “It’s not far removed from comforting volunteer psych patients or taking control of someone’s body.”

  Mayra shrugs even as she raises a skeptical eyebrow. “If you think it’ll do something, let’s give it a go.”

  I nod and merge into Mayra. Immediately, I discover her muscles in such a weakened state that anything I attempt would cause her to ache for hours after. I glide from muscle group to muscle group regardless, easing her existing pain while resting her mind and heart. It’s when I move to her lungs I find first the surgical scars, then the cancer cells. I follow them out to the pancreas, liver, and kidneys. It’s fully metastasized.

  I don’t panic. Rather, I approach it like any problem that appears on my radar. I look for the algorithm that will solve it. I develop plans of attack and run scenarios, looking for potential reactions and counter-reactions. When it’s clear her immune system fights me off, I postulate attacking the cancer at its source. When this will prove too much for her organs, I consider surgical options.

  It takes eighty-nine treatment plans, including several involving gene therapies with the use of stem cells, for me to realize it’s a no-win scenario. Each only led to greater suffering before an inevitable death. The body is listening to the cancer now. Fighting it is fighting her.

  I…I don’t know how to react to this. I can’t simply emerge and admit my failing. I can’t say that even with my limited knowledge, it appears as if Mayra may have months if not weeks to live. Also, she’s likely in far worse pain than she means to let on. How much of this does she know?

  It’s okay, dear.

  These words ring in my head. Though I haven’t been tuned in to her thoughts, she’s found a way to broadcast them to me anyway. I quickly emerge, sitting beside her in the back of the Blazer now. She looks at me with the kindest eyes.

  “It’s okay, dear,” she says quietly.

  Mayra’s face tells a story of reluctant acceptance. Also, she loves me for trying and the same over again for being devastated a
t failing. I feel like crying, which makes me feel embarrassed. For the second time, I wish I was a little less human and a little more analytical. I take her hand and she takes mine. I try to think of something to say, but there’s nothing.

  She smiles again and pats my hand before looking away and out the window.

  “There it is,” Jason says, pointing through the windshield at a street sign marked LAURISTON.

  The relief I feel at the journey ending is quickly countered by the trepidation I feel at reaching the address. What if Rana isn’t here? Given the sheer number of people who’ve uprooted their lives to migrate south, that this could be a dead end is a real possibility. We don’t have a fallback plan.

  Though the main streets are clear of snow, the neighborhoods—sprawling subdivisions lined with nearly identical, prefab houses with sparse trees and fenced in backyards—are almost completely snowed in. The roofs, driveways, and yards are also thick with snow, only adding to the look of uniformity. The Blazer, despite its high tires, can only make it half a block before it gets bogged down. Jason pulls off to the side and parks.

  “We’ll have to hike the rest of the way.”

  I look to Mayra with alarm. I open my mouth to tell Jason why this might be difficult for our companion, but she waves away my concern. The implication is clear: me knowing is already more than she wanted. “I have to walk that far to check my mail, sometimes with snow twice as high,” she says. “I’ll be fine.”

  We set off, but I see right away 266 will be at least a dozen houses down. I’d worried someone might be waiting for us, but the snow cover makes this seem unlikely. No one has been along here for days.

  I spy a thin wisp of black smoke snaking out of a chimney up ahead.

  “Please, let that be it,” Jason says.

  Rana’s house looks as nondescript as the others on the block. There are no lights on inside, but the drooping bag of Safe-T-Salt resting on the stoop looks recently used. Jason high-steps through the snow to the front door. I glance down the sidewalk but still see no one else. When I look back, what jumps out at me is the trail of footsteps in the snow—one line for Jason’s, one for Mayra’s, none for me.

  Jason’s finger hasn’t even contacted the doorbell when the front door swings opens. A man in his late forties with dark hair and a reddish tan complexion steps forward. Though he looks even thinner in real life, I recognize him immediately as Shakhawat Rana. He even wears the same checkered sweater I saw in one of his memories. He looks from Jason to Mayra, his mood darkening.

  “What are you doing here?” he asks suspiciously. “Everyone is gone.”

  “You’re not,” Jason says simply.

  Rana grunts. “If you’re looking for something to steal, I have very little food. Just enough for myself. You might try the houses on the other block.”

  “Because you’ve already sacked these?” Mayra asks caustically.

  “My neighbors left me their keys,” Rana replies. “They knew I had to stay behind. They were generous.”

  I stare at Rana for a long moment and realize I was wrong in my initial assessment. He would stand out if you saw him walking down the street. He’s not only thin; he’s emaciated. If it was the nineteenth century, he’d be labeled consumptive. I can hear a rasp deep in his lungs as he takes a breath, a condition made worse by the cold.

  There’s a…what—a joke? A would-be truism?—among those who don’t believe in evolution that states if men evolved from apes, why are there apes? Though meant to be a statement so profound it shut down any argument, the answer to the question is amazing.

  Nothing stops evolving and there are no straight lines, rarely to never a single evolutionary direction. Not the single-celled bacteria that gave rise to all life on Earth. Not the fish in the sea, the birds in the sky, or the butterflies in the garden. And not the primates that gave rise to mankind. There’s a theory that there wasn’t one branch of evolution that followed Homo erectus but nine. Of those seven, of course, only Homo sapiens survived, the rest eventually dying out.

  When I look at Shakhawat Rana, filled to the brim with genetically advanced DNA but in a body too weak to thrive, I understand how easily a species can slip into extinction before its time.

  “I need to speak to him,” I say.

  Jason turns to me, shaking his head. “What’re you talking about?”

  “Give him one of the chips.”

  Jason reaches into his pocket and nods to Rana. “I have something for you.”

  “I don’t want it,” Rana says, shaking his head.

  “We want to help you,” Jason says, taking out the interface chip. “If you’d put this anywhere on your skin…”

  “You can’t help me,” Rana says, stepping back into his house and putting a hand on the door. “Please, go away.”

  I grab Jason’s arm. “Tell him he’s right. You misspoke. We can’t help him. But because of who he is and what he is, he might be able to help us and many others.”

  Jason looks at me like I’m crazy, then turns back to Rana. “I’m sorry, I misspoke.” He recites my words, then waits for a response.

  Rana stares at him, then looks to Mayra. Finally, he reaches for the interface chip I modified back at Nathan’s house and touches it to the back of his hand, an almost sacred gesture. I appear alongside him.

  “Hi,” I say.

  His features soften. His eyes brighten, and he begins to smile. He places a hand on my arm and grins even wider when he feels my warmth under his fingertips.

  “Emily,” he says brightly. “Welcome.”

  XXXII

  Please, come inside,” Rana says, ushering us in. “You should have said, ‘Emily is with me.’”

  Jason is at a loss for words, as am I.

  “I’m sorry,” Jason says.

  “It’s all right,” Rana replies. “Please, come to the kitchen.”

  Shakhawat Rana’s house is spare to the point it looks uninhabited. There is almost no furniture, nothing adorning its walls, and no carpets on the hardwood floors. But that’s not to say it looks abandoned or in disrepair. Quite the contrary, it looks as if it was cleaned as recently as this morning. There’s not a speck of dust anywhere, barely even a space on which dust could land save the floor. It’s this second piece of information that hands me a realization.

  “You have allergies, Mr. Rana?” I ask.

  “Acute ones,” he acknowledges. “Life-threatening ones.”

  “Airborne?”

  “Yes,” he agrees. “I take several medications, but they only keep certain responses at bay. I have built up immunities to certain things—items in my house, the foliage of this part of Canada, and a few other things—but if I were to travel, to encounter other allergens, they might prove fatal upon first contact.”

  “What medications are you on?”

  He reels off a pharmacological cornucopia so vast I’m surprised he’s alive at all. But I suppose that’s the point. In any preceding century, possibly even decade, he would’ve succumbed to his health problems. Modern medicine is keeping him alive and, in turn, his evolved strand of DNA in the gene pool.

  “Have you always had allergies?” I ask.

  “I have,” he says. “But it’s my body’s responses that were so unusual. The drugs tamp it down, but when I was younger, it would fascinate me.”

  “Tell me,” I say.

  “It’s so hard to remember now,” he says sadly. “But little things return to me in dreams. My skin growing rigid, my heart accelerating to well past what is normal, my vision growing so acute it’s as if I am seeing a whole new array of colors. I tell myself it is my imagination, but I know it is not.”

  “What caused the changes?” I ask, hoping I’m not going too fast.

  His mouth twists into a wry smile. “My allergies. My body can’t accept the world as it is, so it makes…alterations.”

  Alterations. It’s quite a word, suggesting a tailor stitching a pair of pants to accommodate a change in its wearer’s
size. Only in Rana’s case, his body is both tailor and garment.

  Regardless, his description is in line with my theory of how the posthuman DNA would respond to changes to its environment. Like producing mucus to arrest allergens entering the nasal passages, followed by a sneeze to eradicate them. In Rana’s case, this process might even include the rapid production of new cells, depending on how big its reaction to the body’s change in surroundings might be.

  “This is you, isn’t it?” he says, stepping into the house’s small breakfast room and returning with a picture.

  It’s a printout of one of Bjarke’s paintings, a close-up of my face. It’s so intimate, so detailed and textured I’m not surprised it’s one he never showed me. He was creating a portrait of someone he loved. I never knew.

  “It is,” I confirm. “Who sent it to you?” I ask, though I know the answer before he responds.

  “It was e-mailed to me last week. A man called Nathan. He wanted to come see me. But he said if that proved impossible, he hoped to send you and attached the picture. Then I heard no more.”

  Last week. Nathan must have reached out to Rana only hours before he died.

  No, not died. Was murdered.

  I force my emotions back below the surface and focus on the portrait, wondering why Nathan picked this one to send. It’s a good likeness, but I now realize the geometry of my face is slightly off. I try to replicate the smile but don’t succeed. But my eyes give me away. They’re as alive in the painting as they are in real life or, at least, as they’ve become over several evolutions.

  That’s when I notice, hidden in the retina, an in-joke. Rather than reflecting, the artist drew me a second time. I gasp at the reference only very few would understand. For a time, my retinas did not reflect. It was an oversight. Then a volunteer subject pointed it out as the thing that broke the spell for him. Everything was perfect except when he looked deep into my eyes and saw only darkness. You must see two things with eyes, we realized—the person and the world reflected. It took only a day to modify.