Someone to Remember Me: The Anniversary Edition (23 page)

“Just because it can be done does not mean it should be done.”

He chuckled an unhappy chuckle, remembering the decisions Seven and Eight had made simply because they could. Going to the Library, going to the school, going to the Sphere, going to Rose Garden…

He could list them off and make her look like a fool but his blossoming compassion forbade it. “Why the hell not? However this technology works, the same person seems to emerge from the process,” he asserted confidently. “Regardless of whether the memories are there or not,” he said quickly, stopping Eight’s objection before she could start. The woman scowled.

“How can you be so sure?”

“From what I’ve gathered memories are the measurable element of existence for this...” he searched for the word, “...resurrection technology. That’s how they judged that it was a success: if we died out there but woke up back here with our memories then death has been beaten.”

“But that argument is flawed,” Eight countered. Again Twenty was surprised to hear her indirectly object to reviving Seven. “Has that person truly been resurrected or is the person that wakes up here at Rose Garden just a cleverly disguised clone? A copy? A replica?”

“You’re debating metaphysics now. If my heart stops beating if only for a minute—death in the most technical sense—am I still the same person if my heartbeat revives? Or would I be someone else entirely?”

“That’s different,” Eight replied, her voice full of hardened condescension.

“How so?” Twenty scoffed.

“Well, for one, if you have a heart attack but are revived you’re still in your original body,” Eight pointed out.

“Then what you’re suggesting indicates that there’s something within my body, something deep in here,” and Twenty poked his chest right where his heart was, “Something that is bound to my body, to my memories and my experiences within this body, that makes this incarnation of me unique. Something ethereal and intangible yet inescapably definitive,” he paused, quite proud of his description and allowing it to sink in on Eight. “Something that you’re afraid is lost when the machines bring us back from the dead.”

Eight said the words that terrified her: “The soul.”

“The soul,” Twenty agreed.

“What if Rose Garden doesn’t catch the soul when it transfers memories from one body to another? What if all that Rose Garden does is program an empty brain to think and act and feel a certain way? What if the machines in Rose Garden tell us who to love, how to love them, and how much?” Eight demanded, her heart pouring out through her questions to him. He witnessed her every insecurity and fear being expressed. Twenty held back a grin: for him to be the person that she confessed to spoke to her lack of better options.

But her question stumped him for a minute. He studied the funerary towers of Haven on the other side of the channel. A land of death separated from an island of everlasting life, nothing but a relatively narrow body of water between them.

Bracing himself for possible retaliation, Twenty put his hand on Eight’s shoulder. He recognized the cost of her confidence. The only return he could offer her was a short break from his usual sarcasm when he said: “If you have to ask yourself that question then you’ve been ignoring the answer for the last three days. We’ve managed to survive this. Together. Had you told me that at the start I wouldn’t have believed it. Soulless creatures couldn’t have accomplished this. And only someone with a soul could want another person as badly as you want Seven. You do want him back, right?”

“Of course I want him back.”

“Problem solved,” Twenty declared, triumphant. He felt better seeing Eight laugh.

“How is it you wound up being the one with the inner clarity?”

His answer was like a song, wandering towards the wreckage of Haven as a consolation.

“Because I am as wise in this life as I was in the last.”

The Artificial Intelligence Mainframe on the Records level unnerved Ninety-Nine because it was, in reality, the hub of Rose Garden’s functionality. From this room, where the entity that Nine called Provence resided, the ability to defy death was administered. The biological component, on the Product level, might be responsible for building the bodies but this room was where sentience itself was gathered and distributed. Unlike the rest of Rose Garden, the Artificial Intelligence Mainframe felt purposefully unfinished with bronzed metal and black glass lining walls upon which circuitry and conduits lay exposed. She reasoned that it was due to the necessity of easy access and regular maintenance.

She swept her eyes across the mainframe and assessed the room’s circular design. At its heart was its centerpiece, its crowning glory, an orb wrapped in a wispy veil of multicolored light that floated above a cradle of sharp metal blades. The orb’s design was not unlike that of the crashed Sphere of Builders; with a dozen rings spinning along its outer surface while the whole device remained aloft. Like the metallic rods beneath the sphere, Ninety-Nine yearned to touch the sphere’s surface, to experience the knowledge contained therein, and reclaim her lost brilliance.

“What happens if I touch the sphere?” she asked, studiously observing the energy that pulsed along the orb’s surface. Was that, somehow, Seven? Were his memories dancing along the machine’s surface, waiting to be transferred into a new body?

“I wouldn’t do that. It’ll kill you instantly and incinerate your body. What you’re looking at is the corporeal energy of the memetic stream. Think of it as a river: it runs dry when you’re alive and floods to life when you die. All it wants from you is your energy, your consciousness, and it’ll destroy your body to get to it.”

“I’m looking at the machine that spools our memories into electrical energy before embedding it into a new body.”

A moment of surprised silence preceded Nine’s stiff answer. “Exactly.”

The path wrapped around either side of the floating device, keeping its observer at a safe distance, but if she reached over the railing…

Ninety-Nine shook her head. The resurrection technology wasn’t completely operational and if she killed herself then everyone would be stranded where they were, herself included. What could her memories do for her if she was trapped in the ethereal space between life and death?

She was passing the orb when the whispers started.

As if the past has begun to seep out—

Our methods paved the way—

I know how—

Slow and subdued, but certainly present, Ninety-Nine thought that the whispers might be her own voice. Where was it coming from? Who was it coming from? Perhaps the most importantly, though, was when it was coming from?

At the back of the room, with the orb behind her, Ninety-Nine found the enormous server tower that comprised Provence’s computational hub. She was disappointed by its lack of theatrical flair given the dramatic reception that the Unimatrix at the Great Library had extended its visitors. Movable displays were mounted to the server tower and she plied one towards her and a luminescent keyboard flickered into place beneath the screen as it relayed lines of code to its user.

Ninety-Nine bumbled through the process, using her fledgling knowledge of Rose Garden’s software to initiate a reboot of its most complex program. Her heart raced with fear and excitement because she would either kill them all or reactivate the revival technology within Rose Garden. She extended Nine and Null the only warning she could when she said, “I’m going to try rebooting the entire mainframe.”

“If that’s all that can be done?”

“From what I’m seeing, the last set of revivals disable the higher cognitive abilities of the Artificial Intelligence program. To restore it to functionality…”

“Just be careful,” Null advised.

Ninety-Nine didn’t bother to mention to Null that if something went wrong then they would be, in effect, dead. She chose to spare her friend’s feelings and hope that rebooting the Artificial Intelligence Mainframe would save them and Seven.

Speaking in a language that she was still learning, but ironically felt as if she already knew, Ninety-Nine instructed the mainframe to restart. After typing in the sequence of keys and codes required of her, she executed the task and backed away from the mainframe. One by one the lights along the server rack’s exterior blinked into darkness.

Then, as the terror welled within her, the lights in the Artificial Intelligence Mainframe blinked out in unison. Rose Garden’s software was so elaborate, so complex, that she couldn’t know if rebooting the mainframe or sucking the air out of the station utilized codes that were separated by a lonely zero. Were her friends going to pay the price for her ignorance? Were Nine and Null already dead?

Embracing her impending death, permanent as it would be, Ninety-Nine decided that her actions and their consequences were an occupational hazard. Besides, Twenty and Eight were still on the surface and they would survive even if the station was destroyed.

Death never came for her. The air was breathable, the ground stable. She perceived a distant rumbling, the sounds of the power shutting off throughout the Rose Garden. Stranded in the dark, the light of lost memories, of a lost life, reached over her shoulder.

Ninety-Nine turned to see that the orb was nothing more than light, illuminating the darkness around it, the whispers all but gone. Perhaps she would never regain the memories of her lost self? Perhaps that part of her life would remain gated behind her amnesia? As she stared into the incandescent light, the full spectrum of color bound within itself, she admitted that she could be at peace with herself as long as her friends survived.

The light shone brighter, burning the darkness out of her vision, creating a door into the past. Her consciousness began to dim as the light from the past overwhelmed it and submerged her into a memory.

Haven loomed overhead, rusted and rotten by neglect and time. Frosty light filtered down through the towers and came to rest on the ashen dirt of Pala Park. Wasteland did not go far enough in describing the horrible vacancy that rampaged through the decomposing towers. She turned away, desperate for a momentary reprieve, unable to compute the staggering loss.

Others were filtering into the park, leaving the relative safety of the pier and the boat behind them. The Rose Twelve, the men and women who were supposed to save the city, were instead gathered to observe the aftermath of its demise. Ninety-Nine swept her shocked gaze across the emptiness of the dead city, deeming the allergen cloud’s efficacy to be both horrifying and impressive.

From her perspective, less than an hour ago, she had been here at Pala Park when the monster caught her and unarmed civilians seeking shelter from the purge. In retrospect it had been a hollow effort, their lives forfeit, but the objective had been comforting at the time. She died somewhere in this park, the bones of her last body probably buried in the dirt, and had woken up at Rose Garden a short while ago.

“It felt like minutes,” she whispered to herself. “I was here. Minutes ago this place was alive...”

The once glistening towers shone with a different light, the former bastions of life and occupancy conversely reduced to hollowed, brittle pillars. No sound or color emanated from the dusty roads and cracked glass that lined the street sides that millions had once traversed.

“If the chronometers in Rose Garden are right...we were asleep for five centuries,” she overheard Null saying to Nine, their hands clasped tightly. Ninety-Nine felt an envious pain in her chest when she saw that Nine and Null had one another, at least, after civilization’s brutal end.

“Why would we wake up five hundred years after our helicopter crash? Why did the twelve of us stay asleep for five centuries?” Nine hissed.

No answers came to her mind. Her thoughts were silent, her typically hyperactive thinking forced to a standstill by the overwhelming absence of life around her. Beyond a few dead and scattered tree trunks, Pala Park lacked any suggestion of its former fertility. Vibrancy of any kind had been drained from Haven by the passage of time, leaving the islands with nothing more than grayish illumination upon rusted buildings and black seas to contain the mess.

Seven aimlessly wandered through the park and past Ninety-Nine. His movements were dysfunctional and erratic: the steps of a shellshocked survivor who could not metabolize the massacre’s result.

Weighed down by the gravity of Haven’s fall, he stumbled on a root and hit the dusty ground. Eight beat Ninety-Nine to Seven’s side and she was hauling the belligerent man to his feet. Seven shoved Eight away, upset by her presence, furious that she would dare to touch him.

“Every single one of them is gone!” Seven shouted at her.

“Nothing can be done about it now,” Eight assured him, her voice remarkably calm under the circumstances. Her once icy attitude towards Seven had, apparently, been destroyed along with Haven. This was the first time that Ninety-Nine recalled Eight speaking to Seven with anything other than blatant disdain. Could the notes of sympathy in her voice be genuine? Was the fall of Haven enough to change Eight to make her treat Seven with a measure of civility? “We need a plan or else we die too.” She put a hand on his shoulder in an attempt at solidarity.

Seven revolted against the gesture and pulled himself away. “A plan? What good will that be? I had a plan, Eight, and look at where that got us!” Seven shouted as he pointed at the city.