The Soul Continuum (6 page)

“We've seen her,” Mother says. “I don't know if she's still safe, but—”

“Where? Where did you see her?” Ezra looks up, a glimmer
of hope in his eyes.

“She was with Salomi not two hours ago, but we have no idea where she is now. I assumed she went back home.”

“Unlikely. She hates us . . . Always has.” The last two words were breathed out, rather than spoken. “I think she might have found out about . . .”

Ezra shoots a furtive glance at Mother, then looks at his feet. Father squints at him, then at Mother, and there is an awkward moment of silence as she avoids his inquiring stare. But then Ezra sits up straight. “But that doesn't matter now. We have the other children to think about, and I need your help.”

“It's not my help you need,” Father says. “Elba is far better with coding than I, and she knows everything about the nanodrones.”

“I assume you need a portable field manipulator,” Mother says, “and the latest drone schematics. I have them in the study.” She heads for the back door.

“Are we still going away, Father?” I ask.

“We don't have a choice,” he says. “But first it seems we have to deal with the drones. I doubt they will allow us to leave.” He turns to Ezra. “Do you know what they've been programmed to do?”

“Not exactly, but I can guess. They have killed four people so far, and they were all technicians at the power plant. Colleen was the last person they reached. She was out in the fields, checking the cows.”

“You think they're targeting the Absorption Tower,” Father says, shocked.

“I'm sure of it. I doubt the children here are anything more than protocol violations to the government now, and they'll . . .” Ezra glances nervously at me, and something like pity shadows his features.

“We can't let them succeed,” Father says.

“It won't be easy,” Ezra says. “We have to get to the tower first.”

“Agreed.” Father nods, then licks his lips as he studies Ezra. “A minute ago, you were about to tell us that Candice had found something out, but you held back. Is there something I should know?”

Ezra won't meet Father's gaze. “It's . . . not for me to say.”

Mother comes back into the room carrying a big silver box by its handle. A tablet is tucked under the other arm. “We can deactivate the drones from here,” she says. “I can generate a cascading algorithm and broadcast it in a broad-spectrum transmission.”

“No. We need to go to the tower,” Ezra insists. “The drones' shielding is too strong. I don't know how the government did it, but it's a powerful enough dampening field
to block any transmission from a portable device. The only way we can get a signal strong enough to take them out is—”

“By boosting it through the tower's power distributors,” Mother says.

There is a lot more talk between them about algorithms and coding and electro-thingy-pulses. Things that sound exciting, but things I don't understand. Ezra says he thinks it will all end if they can do everything, though.

“End this?” Mother says. “I doubt that. It'll just force the government to come here directly.”

“That was going to happen sooner or later,” Father says. “But at least we will buy some time to prepare for when they come. If we don't stop the nanodrones tonight, they'll wipe out everything in the eco-bubble.”

“What if we run into the nanodrones en route?” Mother asks.

“I doubt that will happen,” Ezra says. “I imagine they are on their way to the tower right now. They probably think they've done enough already to subdue any threat to them. But what choice do we have? We have to get there first.”

“Then there is no more time to waste. Salomi,” Mother says, crouching down to meet my gaze. “Stay here. Continue to pack. And don't leave the house until we return. If you hear any noise outside, or if anyone comes to the door, hide. Do you understand?”

“Can't I come with you?”

“Absolutely not.”

“But—”

“No!” With that, she stands and nods to Father and Ezra. “Let's get this over with.”

L
ess than two minutes have passed since they left when I hear a window smash in my bedroom. My instinct is to investigate, but Mother's instructions were clear, so instead, I head quickly into my parents' room and duck into their wardrobe, using my fingernails to pull the door closed by a tiny screw that fastens the handle on the inside. It's awkward. It keeps slipping from my grasp so that the door creaks open an inch, but after the fourth attempt, I manage to hold it in place.

It's dark in here, but soft with Mother's clothes, and the scents of jasmine and honey make me not want to hold my breath. The sound of splintering wood from my bedroom tells me I should stay as still as possible, but I know that whoever it is will probably find me soon. There is a scuffling noise and the grunt of someone struggling to get in, then the thud of feet landing on the floor. The screw slips from my fingers again, and the door creaks open. Worse still, the heel of a shoe slides into the gap and I can't close the door. I nudge it with my big toe. It's just enough, and again, I pull the door toward me. Whoever is in the house has stopped, and I wonder if they are listening. There is a foreign part of me that is unreasonably terrified, and a familiar part of me that thinks of this as a wonderful game of hide-and-seek. I am glad it's the latter that has control; otherwise my hands would be shaking and there would be no chance at all of holding the door closed.

But then a flicker of doubt infects my thoughts as I feel something new. Nausea. Dizziness. A side effect of the Sartixil? Then there is drowsiness, and my fingers weaken. I make one last attempt at keeping the door shut, but already I know it is too late. My knees are buckling and I'm going to collapse.

I
t's the strangest sensation. I stretch out my hand to break my fall, but it does not move and I flinch involuntarily, preparing for the hard slap of floorboards against my cheek. But it does not come. Something hard and metallic encloses my right wrist. It is still dark, and the smell of scented clothing is replaced by an acrid odor that makes me think of electricity and sweaty flesh. Whoever broke into the house must have cut the power, and they must be close. I try to move my hand again but it is held fast, and so is the other. Even my ankles are fastened. Not only that, but I feel completely different—more powerful, heavier, bigger—and I wonder what sort of cruel trick my mind is playing on me, at the brink of collapse with an intruder nearby. But stranger still, I feel more awake and alive than I ever have.

I take in a long breath, feeling the wide expanse of huge lungs, tasting the wet sweetness of warm and alien air. The realization suddenly hits me that I have not stumbled out of Mother's wardrobe, and that my body has undergone some sort of radical change. The revelation should terrify me, but the recent uncomfortable feelings I attributed to the Sartixil have fled, leaving only a sanguine taste in my thoughts. I realize all at once that not only am I far removed from the intruder, but I am back to being Salomi again, at least in my head, as if the invading presence of another mind—which had secretly inserted itself into my subconscious—had been exposed to a burning light and been extinguished.

Nevertheless, I am trapped and confused. But am I truly alone?

“Hello?” I call, then immediately gasp. I spoke as a man!

The strength and size of my limbs, the baritone of my voice—how can I suddenly be a fully grown man?

Before I have the opportunity to ponder, there is light. Just a sliver, but there is definitely a glowing strip extending vertically, a little beyond arm's length. It's beautiful as it widens. Aquamarine in color, ebbing and rolling gently like tidal ripples in a tropical pool. It sounds like a thousand tiny tongues lapping water as the lips of this window to another world relax, and as my surroundings fade into view, the walls of my prison are revealed, glistening and black with thick, leaflike veins pulsing gently on their surface. I am inside some sort of cocoon.

The gap is wide enough for me to squeeze through now,
but I am still immobilized. Beyond the widening oval aperture
are more curved walls, but these are more precise, more streamlined, undoubtedly artificial; and I have the impression my cocoon is suspended at the heart of a giant sphere. Again I am awed by the light, but I see now that its source is myriad. Studding the distant walls are hundreds, thousands, perhaps millions of glittering specks embedded in perfectly ordered lines. Oh, so beautiful! This place is blissful, and I wish I could free my hands and feet so that I could explore it all. The mystery of how I got here and why I am suddenly a man holds equal fascination for me. I hope there is someone here who can answer my questions.

“Hello?” I try again, calling through the gap.

I giggle at the sound of my new voice, compounding my amusement further, and say it again, even deeper this time.

I'm not sure whether it is a response to my call or not, but the hiss of hydraulics answers, and seconds later the clamps retract from my wrists and ankles. A cool sensation caresses my scalp as though a mountain stream is trickling out of my brain, and in the periphery, I glimpse delicate silver threads sliding away from me. I instinctively reach for my head and gasp when I find hair. Soft, fine, and long. I play with it in my fingers, laughing again, not caring as I fall to the sticky bottom of this bizarre chrysalis. It takes me a moment or two to regain my balance and crawl through the gap, but I have to grab hold of the wet sides before I fall again.

I am right. The cocoon is suspended at the center of a vast sphere. I feel like an ant clinging to the withered stone of a peach that has been emptied of the pulp beneath its skin. My feet, which are missing shoes and considerably larger than they were a few minutes ago, are perched on the rim of the opening, and I wiggle my new toes so that the slippery edge tickles my skin—more sensory proof that what I am experiencing now is reality and not some peculiar dream. At least, I
think
it is real. It is not the sort of place my mind would invent.

With no obvious way forward, I peer below. I see only a long drop, and craning my neck outward to look up, I see a similar distance to the domed ceiling. Again I am taken aback by the scale and beauty of this place: vast and exquisite, like being inside a perfectly ordered geode.

“Hello? Can anybody hear me? I seem to have arrived by mistake.”

Only the sound of my own giggle greets my ears in response. There isn't even an echo, which feels strange too.

“I'm coming out,” I call to nobody but myself. “If I break my legs, it's your fault, and Mother will be very cross if she finds out you let me get hurt.”

Squatting to rest my backside on the bottom of the opening, I let my legs dangle as I grip the edge. Three . . . two
. . . one . . . After a sharp intake of breath, I do the ridiculous thing and jump. I am flailing. There's a twisty feeling in my stomach, and I can't help but cry out in my man voice.

Crack! Even gravity seems stronger than normal here. There is an instant of pain—or something like it, but more like a flash of acknowledgment inside my head that wants to be noticed, as if my brain cannot understand why the screaming agony of a broken bone is mysteriously absent.

Pain has always been a confusing experience for me. It is like a different kind of pleasure—one that I want to stop. This time it is different, though. Both my legs are bent at the knee in the wrong direction, and the skin has split on my right kneecap to reveal what I think might be cartilage poking through pinky-red mush, and yet I really don't feel the pain.

“Hello? Excuse me, I have got blood on your nice clean ball wall. Ha! Ball wall.”

I think the little hatch opening in the floor a few paces away from me might be an automated response rather than an answer to my call, because it busies itself rapidly scanning me rather than addressing me in any way. An articulated metal appendage examines my injuries with a pin-spot red laser light and a series of random beeps. It pauses after shining its beam into both my eyes, and then a spike the length of my forearm shoots out from the end, twists above me in a manner that is obviously threatening, and lances my temple.

I
wake suddenly in another new place and feel an ache in my lungs and a throbbing rush of blood in my head that fills my ears, but it only lasts for a few seconds. My blurred vision sharpens to show me clean white walls, and a gentle hum replaces the rushing in my ears. A metallic male voice breaks through:

Cellular generation complete.

Circulatory systems stimulated.

Neural transfer complete.

Subject 9.98768E+14 resurrection successful.

My eyes are adjusting to the light and the walls are becoming
more defined: cushioned, like soft white leather, with gentle lighting coming from lamps embedded at regular intervals. I am inside a booth. The floor is warm on my soles as I take tentative steps out into a wider space. It is a large cylindrical room, also with cushioned walls and more booths set into them, all empty, save for one to my right.

There is a woman within. She is naked. Beautiful with bronzed skin, flowing silver hair, and large, deep brown eyes
staring upward to the roof of her booth so that it is mostly
the whites I see. She is festooned with cables covering her modesty, and pain twists her youthful features. She is still but for the erratic movement of her chest, as though the many coils of silver penetrating her skin are causing her great difficulty in breathing.

I take two slow steps toward her. “Hello? Are you hurt?”

She flinches, blinks several times, and scrunches her eyes before setting her gaze on me. “Salem,” she says.