The Bloodlight Chronicles: Reconciliation (23 page)

Zakariah returned the phone, and the guard nodded his clearance to Mia. They dashed forward to Helena's suite and knocked on the door. A young man ushered them in, a frail man with a pointed chin and wispy goatee. He led them quietly to Helena's bedside, where a clear plastic bag hung on a metal pole beside her bed, dripping life through a needle into her arm. The sun coming through a nearby window lit her face with a glow of health. Her gentle smile promised peace.

Zakariah felt tension slip away like a scarf from his neck. Helena would recover. He hadn't killed her.

“Are you a doctor?” he asked the young man.

“No, I was travelling with Helena. We are but friends of circumstance.”

“How is she doing?”

“She'll be fine, slumlord. She's dreaming now. I've been watching her rapid eye movement. The eyes are conjugate even in dreams, you know. Fascinating.”

“Do I know you?”

“Oh, we've met a few times offplanet. I wouldn't say we're intimate by any means. My name is Colin7.” He offered a handshake and a mischievous grin. “I knew you before the mindwipe.”

Zakariah studied him carefully but couldn't find any memory reference. “This is my wife, Mia.”

“Enchanting.” Colin7 took a bowing step toward her with arm outstretched.

Mia shook his hand with reticence, her expression dour.

Helena groaned. “Zak, is that you?”

Zakariah bent to one knee at her bedside. “It's me. You're going to be okay.”

“What happened?”

“Electrochemical backlash. Your circuits have been overclocked. Your wetware will have to be replaced.”

She opened her eyes and squinted through pain. “I don't understand.”

“I'm sorry, Helena, I don't have any answers. It's probably all my fault.”

Helena groaned again and shook her head weakly. “You cowboy,” she murmured.

“Why did you come back? I thought you were happy in paradise.”

“I don't know. For you, I guess.”

“For me?”

“I was touched by your plight. And poor Mia.” She tried to rise, and Zakariah gently lifted her shoulders and propped her upright with a pillow. Colin7 offered a cool glass of nutrient water over his shoulder and stepped back respectfully.

“Thank you,” she whispered and took a few sips.

“What about your expensive upload? You gave up nirvana for me?”

“It was boring.” She waved a hand dismissively. “Infinite experience grows quickly tiring.”

“You're just saying that to make me feel better.”

“It was too easy, Zak. It wasn't life. Not real life. Oh, it was satisfying, I'll admit. Too satisfying by far.” She exhaled wistfully past quavering lips. She took a long drink of water and handed the cup back. “I missed the conflict of experience. I missed the pain. When I saw Mia's heart break before my eyes, I knew I could never go back to Soul Savers. I pulled the plug.” She offered a weak smile. “You were right all along, in your own mixed-up way.”

“I completed our mission, Helena. I brought an activated sample back. We ran it through the lab. We inoculated fifty human subjects but only one tested positive. My son, Rix.”

Helena nodded. “The ampoule was for him alone. Silus must have been devastated at the outcome.”

“He's coming around. He sends his regards.”

“He's a good man.”

Zakariah glanced over at Colin7 and bent forward to Helena's ear. “What about you, Helena? Where did you get your own vial? Are you free to tell me?”

She sighed, barely a whisper. “I didn't get a vial, Zak. I didn't contract the virus through blood transmission.”

Zakariah stared at her in confusion. The virus was in the blood. It could not be transmitted by any other means. “But how?”

She turned her face close to him, her breath gentle on his cheek. “I saw it in a vision, Zak. I knew in my heart that the virus was inside me. Do you remember anything about the phaser cannon, the unapproachable light?”

“No, I lost some data.”

She winced at his understatement. “I was offered a choice. I don't know how it works. Consider the metaphor of light itself. A photon is both a particle and a wave until we take a measurement, and then it decides to be one or the other. It's quantum potential is collapsed by observation. In a similar way, the mitochondria of every living cell can be programmed to decay or regenerate. Does that make any sense?”

“Not really.”

“I thought not.”

“So by believing the truth, the virus springs up spontaneously?”

“Perhaps the carrier is merely a catalyst, a ceremonial technique.”

“And the only reason the virus took hold in Rix is because he truly believed it was for him and him alone?”

“He knew what you sacrificed to get the activated sample. Somehow his expectation, his faith, if you will, made a difference to the outcome at a basic cellular level.”

“Everyone could have the virus?”

“Everyone.”

“Without cost?”

Helena tried to smile, but her effort made barely a slant in her pretty face. “The cost, Zak? We both know the responsibility is all-consuming.”

Zakariah nodded. “It costs everything to live forever.”

“Our old life passes away like a distant memory, a dream upon waking.”

“We die and are born at the same time.”

“I know it sounds crazy, Zak. Don't think I haven't wrestled with my own sanity.”

“Can we use this in the lab, Helena? Can we simulate it somehow?”

“I don't know. But we have to try. It's all that really matters to me now.”

“Perhaps there is hope, after all.”

Her eyes fluttered with frailty, and she turned her face away.

“Hope,” she repeated, lazy with weakness. “Hope and pain, they go together hand in hand.” She drifted asleep, her breathing deep and regular.

Zakariah stood. “She's strong,” Colin7 said. “She's a powerful woman.”

Zakariah turned to face him as Mia took his place in vigil at the bedside. She warmed Helena's hand between her palms. Colin7 motioned with his head, and Zakariah followed him into an adjoining sitting room with a picture window looking down on vast parkland below.

“You make no secret of being a clone of Colin Macpherson, which you must know is illegal on this planet. Why have you come to Earth?”

Colin7 spread his hands. “I have nothing to hide. We have a history, you and I, and my Father, a delicate relationship. You have forgotten many things.”

“Are you in contact with your Father?”

Colin7 grinned. “Now that
would
be a trick.” He tapped his forehead. “I've been fitted with digital mnemonics for the trip. A complete transcript will be available to him upon my return.”

“Why are you here?”

“I brought you a gift.” He gestured to a humming boxlike appliance that Zakariah had taken to be air purification equipment. “It doesn't look like much, but I can assure you the contents are most enlightening.”

“What is it?”

“Why it's you, Mr. Davis. A full backup.” He held his fingers up to his big ears to dramatize quotation marks. “A saved soul.”

“Really?”

“Absolutely. We uploaded a copy as part of our experiments, just before you talked with the aliens face to face.”

“All my memories are in there?”

“Everything.”

“And you're offering me back my old life?”

Colin7 frowned. “What is a man but the sum of his memories? The love and heartbreak, the passion and sorrow, the small victories shrouded in ultimate defeat. It's all here for the taking.”

“Do you know anything about System Intelligence?”

“The ghost in the machine? A watchword, surely. An urban legend.”

“I've heard that it requires a hardware component.” Zakariah nodded to the humming black box.

Colin7's face contorted into a devilish grin. “Perhaps so, slumlord. In any case, you'll need everything here to proceed on your path of destiny.”

“Why should I trust you?”

Colin7 held his arms up in a blessing of innocence. “This is a great opportunity for the right man, for that special person most gifted. Of course we'll get you rewired for V-space and upgraded beyond current standards. I think you'll find our resources most adequate, most adequate indeed. I'm sure you know the black labs have already pioneered Prime Level Eight. The time has come to rise above the rabble, my friend. Your time has come.”

The mighty Beast fell from an infinite height in Zakariah's imagination, talons splayed into a grey void of negative data, spinning and gnashing white teeth like daggers in a vortex of oblivion. And Zakariah stood alone on a high hill with the key of System Intelligence, sheltering V-space in his wing like a concubine, and she would serve him utterly. Complete freedom. Complete free will. His own father had planned this crown for him, working in secret across time and space with the ghost of a dead physicist. This was his heritage. Control the
AI
, control the world.

Zakariah reached for the black box and hefted its great weight. He ran and hurled it at the sunny window with all his human strength. The window cracked and the box bounced back at his feet.

“What are you doing?” Colin7 screamed. He jumped on the spot in amazement, his hands clutching at his hair.

“What the hell is going on in here?” Mia demanded as she peered in the door.

Zakariah picked up the box and threw it again at the window. Safety glass shattered into a pebbly honeycomb as it crashed back to the floor. Components fell out and rolled away. The gentle hum degraded to a dissonant, coarse vibration. In a blind fury Zakariah picked up the box and launched it again with a grunt of exclamation, and his soul finally disappeared through the broken window into the clutches of gravity. An explosion sounded on the grounds below.

Helena cried out in the next room and Mia rushed back to her side.

Colin7 gaped in wonder.

Zakariah sucked exuberance like medicine from the air. “Tell your Father . . .” he wheezed. “Tell your Father that I decline his offer. I have a new life now, a better life, a woman who needs me and a son who loves me. I was not born for slavery in a gilded palace.”

Zakariah stared in defiance at the young clone, his body trembling with spent energy. In a panic of self-realization and doubt, he wondered what he had just done in such mad passion, what secrets he had thrown carelessly away. Was he strong enough to stand and fight on his own?

In surprise he watched a smile of respect curl on the clone's young lips, a smile of satisfaction, a glimpse of long-held plans coming to final fruition. The gesture would not be recorded on Colin7's digital transcript. This secret defiance might never reach his Father's ear.

“The vital decisions are yours to make, of course,” Colin7 said evenly.

The sun was hot up north, the sky patchy with playful tufts of white cloud, the breeze unfettered. The air smelled sweet with wildflowers and pollen, and birds sang in a wild cacophony. Zakariah sat on a squat stump outside their cabin and watched his wife climb up a jumble of boulders at the lakeshore. She wore ragged cut-off shorts and a string bikini top, her exposed skin bronzed and beautiful. They had run out of sunscreen weeks ago, along with deodorant and toothpaste and all the modern trappings of ease.

Mia carried a coil of rope over her shoulder and dragged a trailing length behind her. The end was tied to a tall oak tree beside Zakariah, already notched and ready to fell. The tree was dead and standing dry, hard packed with
BTU
s and easy splitting, but it hung over the cabin like a grand dame with wide arms raised. Zakariah had roped the old lady near the top and had nipped a few branches with a handsaw, but it would still be a dangerous drop. She might have stood another winter, but if they left her to gravity she might flatten their tiny cabin.

Zakariah looked down at his bare hands, sun-browned and calloused from hard work, from chopping firewood and hauling water, from scrubbing clothes and building cookfires in a makeshift barbecue made of gathered rocks and a rusty metal grate. His knuckles were bleeding where he had scraped them against the bark, but the wounds were congealing nicely and beginning to darken. They had used up their cache of food long ago and were now reduced to foraging for wild raspberries and black brambleberries that grew in clumps along the shore. They carried water daily to a thicket of wild leeks in a clearing nearby and knew where to gather morels in the early morning dew.

Zakariah watched as Mia climbed up a rocky tangle where the cliff face had fallen away in broken shards. He marvelled at the strength in her body as her long legs propelled her higher, her supple arms reaching for crag and crevice. He longed to touch her, to caress her fine skin again. He wanted to make love to her in the middle of the afternoon, in the wilds of nature outside on the rocks, or perhaps nestled in a shady bed of moss.

“You're hung up,” he yelled to her and pointed to where her rope had tangled on a stump.

Mia stopped and doubled back, tossing her line like a skipping rope to free it. The rope came loose finally, and she raised her chin with triumph. Zakariah gave her a thumbs-up signal and a wide grin that she probably would not see from such distance.

She continued climbing. What a beautiful woman she was, sure-footed and strong like a mountain llama on the rock face. The ancient granite was striated with jagged pink quartz like veins and arteries, as though the blood of Gaia might once have flowed therein. The land had been carved by glaciers long ago, the igneous bedrock crushed and crumbled and piled like forgotten toys beside deep gouges of lake and river. Zakariah wondered what it must be like here in the dead of winter, the surface covered with ice and frozen solid. Where did the animals find refuge from the wind and snow, the raccoons and the beaver, the deer and moose and giant black bears? How did life survive to bloom with such promise every summer? How could he and Mia survive a winter this far north?