The Reborn (The Day Eight Series Part 1) (3 page)

But the moment passed, and they receded once again into muddled consciousness.
What the hell am I? Or what are we? Am I Michael? Or Ezra? How do we stop this… make it go back? Please, please, somebody fix this. It’s not real! This must be a dream. I’m sorry I missed curfew! I’m sorry! Make it stop!

Ezra stumbled through the copse toward home, but didn’t make it. Near a withered bramble, she fell to her knees and cried. She rubbed her eyes with the palms of her hands, but the world became no clearer. Ezra wailed and screamed. She rolled around in the fetal position kicking at the air. Tears scorched rivers down her cheeks. They were the tears of two people.

~

Ezra’s caretakers spoke to each other through a video call.

“I don’t understand how this could have happened,” said the man. “I’ve…”

The lady on the screen shook her head. “But clearly it’s possible.”

“She’s only fifteen and she was able to do this?” the man said.

“Poor Ezra… do you think she’ll be all right?”

“I certainly hope so. I ran diagnostics on her, and indeed, what happened is exactly as it appears.”

“We need to talk to her,” said the lady. “I’m going to give her something to help her sleep tonight. In the morning, we’ll sit down with her and explain all that we left out before.”

“Yes...” the man agreed, “but we need to be careful. She’ll be extremely delicate right now.”

“How will this affect the others?”

“We won’t tell the others,” said the man. “But Ezra has been the most promising of all, and this – all things considered – is a breakthrough.”

When the World Opens Up

T
revor Leighton plummeted over ten stories toward the cold, indifferent stones of the plaza below. He tumbled upside-down as the masonry whipped past in a blur of browns and ivories. Daggers of wind tore at his scalp and whistled past his good ear – his other one still bleeding. But what did it matter now? Barely thirty, and he was about to die.

As the ground approached, time slowed, and he found a moment to give attention to his senses. He could smell the thick, billowing humidity in the air that carried undertones of age-old cathedral stone. A hidden taste of apples played on his tongue, perhaps a recent memory, or from odors wafted on an updraft that had curled through the food tents below.

The closer the ground came, the longer it took to get there, like the time dilation experienced when falling into a black hole. Maybe it was because all other portions of his mind were shutting down and concentrating on the inevitable.

Trevor’s body twisted in the weightlessness of freefall until he was looking at the sky. A memory of his sister, Amy, smiled at him. The fiery crescent of the eclipsing sun also smiled at him.

He smiled back.

But the ground was upon him. Only feet away.

Less than a second to live.

And then, before he’d even reached the ground, his soul began to join with the universe, as if it knew it could reclaim him just a little early. Trevor was a solitary drop of water reuniting with an infinite ocean. In this premature moment, his memories siphoned from his mind and splashed into the world around him. It was his entire life flashing before his eyes.

Many of his memories were happy ones, and Trevor clung to them. But he was also different than other people. He needed to keep his soul in a warm, cozy place. Otherwise, the darkness would seep through the cracks of his thoughts.

He had to hold strong.

He was nearly there. He couldn’t let it in. He couldn’t let
her
in.

And then something went wrong. In the deepest recesses of his mind, he felt something slip through. Something unwelcome.

In that same moment, the world sped up. The moon snuffed out the final sliver of the sun and cast the land into grim twilight. It was the last thing Trevor Leighton saw before he hit the ground at one-hundred and two miles per hour.

Two Weeks Earlier. November, 2012.

T
revor Leighton shivered suddenly, then blinked and rubbed his eyes. He ignored the strange sensation, and then returned his attention to the computer monitor.

He was in. Butterflies tickled his stomach. Trevor glanced around the office to make sure nobody was watching him. He readied his favorite online journal of genetic engineering so he could switch to it if anyone decided to drop by.

It was too easy how he’d gotten the password. He knew he’d get a standard administrator password, but getting
this
password was unexpected. Two weeks ago, he’d purchased a key logger – a device you could connect to a computer between the keyboard and the motherboard, and then it would collect a log of all key presses anyone typed. Really cool stuff. He’d procured a high-end model, one he was able to install inside his laptop without hassle.

Then he simply dropped his laptop at IT for routine updates, knowing they would log in with their administrator password. When they returned it the next day, he checked for the logger, momentarily uneasy that they might have found it.

Still there. Safe.

Better yet, it had worked perfectly. Scanning through the data, Trevor found that not only had IT installed the updates, but the guy had visited a dating website, and then logged into one of the company’s firewalls to change some settings.
The firewall.
Trevor had the firewall passwords. Just
knowing
the firewall passwords was badass.

At first, he had no desire to use them. He’d just been doing this for fun.

Until yesterday. Trevor had found a not-so-legit public server that kept copies of hundreds of great movies. He wanted to download them through his office’s blazing fast fiber optics network. Except the firewall blocked not-so-legit network traffic.

That’s how Trevor had decided to step across the line of legality.
But only for a bit
, he’d told himself. It wouldn’t hurt anyone. He just wanted to transfer some harmless data.

He looked at his desktop computer screen. Yes, he was definitely in. The passwords had worked on the first attempt. While taking a big slurp of his apple flavored juice box, he glanced around to make sure no one was coming. Coast clear.

Trevor’s fingers trembled, hovering over the keys. Then his fingers became a blur. He typed a series of exceptions that would allow network traffic to and from his machine to flow unrestricted, then hit
Enter
. Done.

Firewall changes successful.

To test his reconfiguration, he attempted a connection to the questionable public server. It responded:

Connected to Reality’s Edge media server.

Come for a movie, stay for a byte.

Within moments he was downloading his first movie. And holy crap, the entire damned file was only going to take one minute to transfer. He queued up a long list, and then flipped back to real work.

Trevor resumed reading the genetic engineering journal. He finished his juice box, crumpled it, and tossed it over his shoulder into the trash. His arm caught his headphone cord and they ripped off his head and clattered to the floor. He leaned down to pick them up. When he returned his attention to his monitor, he did a double-take. He could swear he’d seen the text on the web page shift. It looked like the phrase “genetic chain reaction” had changed to “genetic chain rwaction.” Or was it a typo that had been there all along?

He stared at it for a few seconds, confused, and hit the reload button. The phrase “genetic chain rwaction” now read “gnnettc chnin rwacteon.” A few other words sprinkled across the page glared back at him, misspelled. Reload. “pnnottc uhnin rwpcteod.” Reload. “81`-[=bu2+n@*cpceo

Then his entire screen went garbled.

“Crap.”

He hit the keys and clicked the mouse. Nothing. His music player had been playing Lady Gaga off his personal memory stick. Now, it skipped over and over. Had there been a virus on the server? No, he’d made sure it was safe. This was unrelated. Hopefully.

Trevor reached for the power button on his computer and held it in until the green light of life faded from its body. It was a hyper-threaded beast of a machine faster than anything commercially available. One of the perks of working for a company that specialized in computer hardware and software was that you always got nice toys.

But this toy just had a seizure. It was the strangest computer malfunction he’d ever seen. Computers didn’t lock up in such an ordered fashion, with letters on the screen changing and rearranging themselves. It gave Trevor an uneasy feeling.

~

A faint, unpleasant odor hung in the air, like burnt rubber. As Trevor Leighton’s computer rebooted, he heard someone a few cubes away exclaim a drawn-out, “Ah, maaaan!”

Trevor sat up straight in his chair, planting his hands on its arms (the right one perpetually wobbly – one day he would tear it clear off), then craned his neck and glanced in the direction of the voice. Their cubicles had low walls to promote a more open environment. But it tended to cause health problems as engineers slumped in their chairs in attempts to be less visible. It wasn’t your most socially-inclined cadre of employees.

The voice was that of the new hire, a kinetic and wiry kid, freshly cherry-picked from MIT. The kid raised his arms and threatened his monitor with his middle finger and an obscene gesture originating from his crotch.

Trevor turned his attention back to his own screen.

Great
.

It had come back to life, but now coldly displayed the “blue screen of death.” Rebooting again didn’t help.

He thought he could hear a faint hum in the air, then the office lights flickered, dimmed for a few seconds, got bright, and then returned to normal – the kind of thing he’d expect to see if they’d had an electric chair in one of the conference rooms and just fried an employee for using too much Facebook. A power surge maybe?

He looked at his digital wristwatch: 2:41 pm. He might be able to cut his day short; it would take the rest of the afternoon for them to set him up with a new rig, and he couldn’t do real work on the laptop. Maybe he’d even have time to go get a haircut and do laundry. It had been too long, on both counts, due to long hours. He removed his sapphire-blue memory stick from the non-functioning heap of metal and silicon and stuck it in his pocket, preparing to head out after a call to IT.

~

In minutes, the office floor crawled with his coworkers as they huddled in groups, chattering loudly, pointing at computers and shaking heads. Apparently, nobody had internet access and half of them were getting the blue screen of death.

An IT guy wearing a
Barenaked Ladies
t-shirt and torn jeans careened from computer to computer with a CD book in one hand and some gizmo in the other. He winced every time he noticed another computer with a blue screen. He jammed the gizmo into a machine nearby, waited a second, then yanked it out with a huff. Then he barreled straight past Trevor, went into Trevor’s cube, and plugged the device into his computer. A red LED lit up on the gizmo and it chirped in a minor chord.

“What’s that mean?” Trevor said.

“Network card’s fried. They all are.” The IT guy said from halfway under Trevor’s desk.

“I didn’t know that was possible,” said Trevor.

“Under ordinary circumstances, it isn’t. But you wanna talk about impossible? It’s the first time I’ve ever seen
this
in my life,” he unplugged the network cable from the back of Trevor’s machine and held it up. The insulation coating clung melted and blackened around the connection tip.

“Jesus.” So that’s what the smell had been.

“Most of our networking hardware is toast.” He paused, squinting at Trevor. “What, exactly, were you doing when this happened?”

Trevor felt a sharp knot form in his stomach. He tried to speak casually. “Same thing as always. Reading the journals. Why?”

“Why?” the IT guy said, “Because our network monitor showed a huge spike in data transmission to your machine just before everything fizzled.”