Someone to Remember Me: The Anniversary Edition (37 page)

“Then that leaves us with the Rebel Clones,” Eight began.

“Yes. I hold you accountable for the rebels as I held myself responsible for the Descendants. Each of the Rebel Clones is in stasis aboard
The Mortal Coil
, the vessel that is moored behind Grand Cross. As the Founders of Haven, you are charged with guiding your wards to a new home, just as you did with your original compatriots all those centuries ago.”

“You want us to leave and never come back?” Eight asked, her tone laced with suspicion.

“Left to my own devices, in the absence of humanity, my drones have traveled to the lands beyond the Great Sea. I alone have learned the true shape of the world. Established after the fall of the Sphere, Haven became a cradle of life that is no longer necessary. There are green hills, blue skies, and wide oceans beyond those of this island. Board
The Mortal Coil
and it shall deliver you there but never return you here.”

“If we leave...what will happen to you?” Seven asked. The angelic frame of the AdvISOR shifted further upwards, suggesting that it was surprised by his inquiry. Seven pondered how much he actually cared for the machine’s fate. It was as culpable as he and Eight were in the city’s demise and in the calamity that had followed.

“One day, I too shall die. I will ensure that when I die, Haven perishes with me.”

“Why didn’t you just ask Tobias where Rose Garden was when you revived him along with the rest of the Descendants? Why did you wait so long to meet us yourself?” Eight asked and Seven nodded his agreement. With Tobias Clay’s help the AdvISOR could have reached Rose Garden centuries sooner than it actually had.

Backing away from Seven and Eight, the AdvISOR cautiously replied, “Doctor Clay declined to impart upon me the location of Rose Garden. Still bound by the Three Laws, I could not compel him or his companions to reveal its location. Nor could I study the memetic stream, for that is forbidden to me as well.” The AdvISOR began to ascend, retreating from Seven and Eight. Its outline was consumed by the light shed from its wings and, again, it became the moon in the night sky above the grassy field. Simple winds bore the AdvISOR’s words to their ears. “Aboard
The Mortal Coil
are the supplies necessary to survive in the new world but I must ask of you a single favor in return.”

“What is it?” Seven shouted into the night.

“When you reach the farthest land, when you set foot on home’s distant shores, speak openly of this place. Tell your children and your grandchildren of Haven. Let them know of its glory and its shame, so that the truth may pass through the generations, and not just the myth. I have learned that the cycle of time is undeniable: the oppressed overturn their rulers and, though it can be slowed, the cycle can never be stopped. Do not despair. Do not allow such revelations to deter you from your true goal: to live a life of compassion and justice, free of tyranny and dictation. Good luck, Founders, and may your hands craft the greatest civilization the Earth has yet to see.”

Chapter Fourteen:

All Creation

Their retreat from the AdvISOR’s grassy field was far quicker than their extended journey to it. They found another stone doorway standing atop a hill in the middle of the darkened field. A short distance into it, they discovered a flying MoNITOR awaiting them in the familiar elevator cage. Eight loudly wondered where the Lore Chambers had disappeared to but Seven accepted the rearrangement of the tunnels with a silent gratitude.

Eight’s sense of relativity fluctuated. What had been minutes ago felt like hours; what had been hours ago felt like minutes. Their discussion with the AdvISOR might have been days ago for how foggy the memory became during their ascent upon the elevator; while their arrival to Grand Cross felt no more distant than thirty minutes ago.

She and Seven did not speak to each other. She feared that her ambivalence towards the crimes charged to her by their memories and the AdvISOR might have upset Seven. Was it enough to break the link between them? Did he think of her as cruel for her reaction? Her thoughts drove a wedge between them and she stood away from him on the ride to the surface.

In the atrium, she dared to take a few steps away from him. Eight tried to gain a lead, to give him space, but Seven calmly reached out and took her hand. It was a simple gesture that dispelled Eight’s worrisome notions of a divide between them. She fell in step with Seven as they headed for the doors. Dirty, wet, and exhausted she knew they were ready to slip away aboard the ship meant to carry them far from Haven.

Equipped with a memory of the atrium’s pristine era, Eight truly understood the totality of its disrepair. Not that it surprised her since most of Haven was a tomb anyways but memories had a way of making years feel like seconds. The differences between the atrium in its prime and well after the fall were even more shocking as Eight and Seven departed Grand Cross.

Seven pushed one of the doors further open, light creaking through the gap. Eight tried to recount the hours spent in Grand Cross because it had been dark when they entered and now there was plentiful daylight outside.

Once her eyes adjusted to the brilliance of the morning, she gasped. Unable to describe it, unable to comprehend it, Eight’s senses were trivialized by the war that was suddenly being waged against each of them.

Her eyes processed the new information first: far away on the eastern coast was a yellow sun dragging itself above emerald waters. Bathed in hearty yellow light, Haven’s devastation became even more remarkable. For the first time, Eight saw the black tar of the streets. She could make out the faded white and yellow paint that had marked the lanes. On a nearby street corner she saw a grimy red sign that had rusted into illegibility. Beautiful sunlight accentuated the burnished gold of the decayed towers. She even thought she saw the tiniest hint of blue in the few remaining windows.

The blackened exterior of Grand Cross betrayed its own signs of age and wear: water stains in the corners and chipping along the spires. Cement squares beneath her feet were dyed an ugly white from constant neglect and perpetual disrepair.

None of that compared to Seven, who she nearly cried at the sight of. His untidy brown hair, his freckled face caked with dirt, his neck craning his head towards the sunrise in quiet enjoyment. She noticed how slowly he breathed and the way his brown eyes absorbed the sunlight when he finally opened them.

They walked beneath an empty blue canvas, cloudless and perfect, while the ocean breeze rustled their clothes and tousled their hair. Salt and wood and water scented the breeze while the sounds of waves crashing gently against the harbor reached her ears. As they continued along the edge of Grand Cross they saw the AdvISOR’s great ship,
The Mortal Coil
, with the constantly glittering emerald sea behind it.

“So much color,” she whispered.

“So much color,” Seven agreed.

Twenty bounded to the top of the staircase that led to the harbor where
The Mortal Coil
was moored. Eight offered him a broad smile, noticing that he appeared every bit as uncomfortable as usual. This time his electric blue eyes widened with relief at the sight of her and Seven. Twenty pushed his scraggly black hair against his head but a sudden gust of wind undid his modest effort to straighten himself.

Twenty blinked, unsure of the authenticity of what he was seeing. His bewildered expression confirmed it but then Seven yelled, ecstatic to see him, and ran towards Twenty and they descended into childish hoots and shouts. Eight chuckled as the two grown men behaved the way she imagined excited teenagers or hyper children might.

“What did the AdvISOR do to you? Recount every day of the last five hundred years?” Twenty laughed. “Do you know how I spent my night and morning? First, I got to go on a lovely walk through Grand Cross. Then, I was lucky enough to be escorted to
The Mortal Coil
where we’ve been kept all night!”

“We had a bit of an adventure through Grand Cross ourselves,” Eight confessed, hugging Twenty.

“Of course you did! Neither of you can ever do anything the easy way. Always with the explosively bad choices,” he drawled. “What were you thinking coming here in the first place? If it had been me, I would have hopped in that fancy yacht the others came in and never back.”

Eight let Seven answer that.

“You would never have left us here,” Seven shrugged, speaking with simple but absolute certainty. Twenty stared at them, unsure of how to respond. Eight wondered if he knew the guise was up, that his friends were aware of the loyal heart that beat beneath the icy veneer of his attitude. “You’re possibly the best friend I’ve ever had, Twenty. Thank you. For everything,” Seven said, the quiet gratitude of his statement further evidenced when Seven drew Eight closer to his side.

Shocked into silence, Twenty’s disarmed and helpless gaze met the sheer happiness emanating from Seven and Eight. Eight saw conflict embroil him for a split second before he swallowed the indecision and kept his silence, allowing some confession or another to pass unspoken. Perhaps Twenty realized, as they had, that some things deserved to be buried in the past?

In their preparations to depart the island of Haven, Ninety-Nine found herself inventorying the cargo hold. The news was exceedingly good: aboard
The Mortal Coil
was more food than thousands of people could eat in ten years. Every type of resource appeared to be represented within the bowels of the ship and that was ignoring the ship itself. With enough lumber, metal, and glass to supply them the rest of their lives, she considered
The Mortal Coil
itself as their greatest asset.

She was diverted from her task by the curious pull of the stasis pods, which proved to be too intoxicating for Ninety-Nine to resist. A press of a button would free the sleeping clones: the rebels as well as the rest of the Rose Twelve that had been moved aboard
The Mortal Coil
by the MoNITOR drones.

A shadow of a frown impressed itself upon her expression: the MoNITOR drones sank the yacht from Rose Garden hours ago as part of the effort to prevent anyone from returning to Haven. The only way out, for any of them, was aboard
The Mortal Coil
. Ninety-Nine decided that retaining the sleeping clones in stasis would not only keep the peace but it would prevent their rations and supplies from being prematurely taxed.

When the others did wake up, their circumstances would be the same as hers had been: in a strange environment with a huge gap in their memories. From their perspective they would have died moments ago, murdered in the purge, only to revive somewhere totally unexpected. She kept drawing parallels between the rebels and herself, hoping to be a better...

“To be a better Founder,” she whispered, chortling at the idea. How could she be a better Founder to a group of strangers? The answer came to her in the form of a revelation hidden upon the stasis machines.

Among her discoveries were plaques fastened to the front of each stasis tube. At first she thought the numbers indicated the order in which they were built. When she saw that the numbers skipped at random intervals like a Zero-Zero-Nine-Seven sitting in front of Zero-One-Zero-One, she understood the importance of the numbers. Like the Founders, the Rebel Clones never assumed traditional names. Their names were their numbers and their numbers were their identities. She gazed into the depths of the tank and felt a clash of jealousy and hope.

Jealousy because she envied their untarnished memories. These clones would emerge from their sleep with memories intact. If they questioned their identities, it would be in relation to the absence of their old enemies. They would look to her, a cloned Founder, for leadership when she hardly knew herself. Her jealousy was tempered by the impact of their story: creations that rose against their creators in a violent quest to define themselves. If the Rebel Clones could build themselves an identity from nothing, Ninety-Nine resolved, then she could as well.

She felt herself letting go of the desire to know the old her; she saw the desire drifting into the abyss of the murky liquid stored within the stasis tubes. She had hoped to explore the mysteries of the space between life and death, but she would have to wait. One day, far in the future, she would stand on the cusp of those mysteries. Until then, she guessed, she could always ask Seven.

In a room that could fit three of Rose Garden’s command centers, Null and Nine continued their preparations. Most of the navigation center’s walls were made from a textured glass that kept out the newborn sunlight. Null regretted the exclusion, thinking how beautiful it must be outside. For the first time in days the sun brought color with it and Haven, even in death, was a sight to behold in the distance.

Turning her attention back to the screen at her fingertips, Null continued her study of the schematics for
The Mortal Coil
in their intimidating complexity. Trying to take her mind off the early morning beauty, she raced her eyes across the lines and curves of the ship.

“Oh. There we go!” Nine announced. The glass walls of the navigation room slid into the floor and a gust of ocean air blasted through the chamber. Unabated sunlight flooded the glass control panels and threw a blaze of heat upon the two occupants. For what she thought might be the first time since meeting him, Null had a flattering view of her husband from another life.