Unnaturals (36 page)

He laughed. Then he pulled her to himself on the bed and kissed her. "And didn't
you
come for me, Mel? I don't believe, for even one moment, that you would have done all you did only to destroy the City of Death."

Or that I would destroy it at all
.

"Besides, they didn't heal you. They only helped, you healed yourself. They couldn't have. They can't heal everything, Mel."

They couldn't. She knew that. They'd never been able to heal the cities' death from young age, for example. Hundred-years-old Benedict might look as if he'd been successful, but there had been a price to pay.

It was a wonder Benedict was alive at all. Most who attempted what he had didn't survive it. As for Ben, he had survived, somehow—at the price of emotions heightened to hundreds of times of what emotions would be for someone like Mel. Extreme anger, extreme sadness, extreme longing for love. Ben closed himself off in a room with padded walls and no windows at night.

Life was so much easier for the other watchers.
They
didn't have to suffer emotions—because, Nicolas said, Jerome had told him that a person grew used to it. That you may press your hands to your face and wish you had never been born after the first few times you did what was right—but then it became easier, just like training a muscle for fitness.

"Our genes allow us that," Jerome had said. "Because we are right. Because we do it all for the world. We don't yearn for more and more power. We just must bear using the power we have."

"You're to blame for everything," Mel murmured in Nic's hair. "If you hadn't stopped that interweb, I wouldn't have met your granddad, and—"

"—and if you hadn't come to that village, I might have remained there alone forever. They accepted me, when I stumbled there lost and alone. They healed me when I was sick. Julian taught me. But none of them were you."

"How about Belle?"

"She was my friend. Your friend, too. I might have married her one day if the girl who questions everything and teaches children to make glass hadn't appeared. But"—he squeezed Mel's hand and kissed her again—"I wouldn't have abandoned the village because of her."

"He tried to part us, you know," Meliora said. "Jerome."

"He must have thought he was right. He doesn't care about individual people, Mel. A world is enough for him."

And are you like him?
she thought.

She was quite certain he could not read thoughts, yet he wrapped his arms around her more tightly and pressed his lips to her hair.

"No," he whispered.

She turned back to kiss him, and for once in her life she felt that she did have a place and that she didn't have to leave it.

Network

It became the Academy again in the next few months. She and Nic were learning so many things that they barely had time for thinking about what they learned. How the databases for thoughtmotion interfaces were built. What microbes had existed centuries ago, and what chemicals the earth's soil and atmosphere had consisted of, how this had all changed after centuries of slow poison and after all the wars. How farms worked, and how meat was made exactly. How glass was made in factories run solely by machines.

"So,
you
can't make it," Meliora told her teacher for the day, a woman with some wrinkles and eyes that sometimes showed expression. Exasperation, it was now.

"I have more important things to do than making glass by hand, Meliora." Yelena sighed. "Indeed, I have more important things to do than teaching you youngsters things that you can just read or watch videos for, but Jerome seems to think that kids should be able to ask
questions.
Especially the kid who has made the first steps towards the hivers. He fancies you, though I never saw that old fart fancy anyone before."

"So
who
would make glass if an asteroid hit us? The villagers? When do you think Ronny and the others will learn to make stuff like this?" Meliora pointed at a crystal bowl with exquisite ornaments. "In a hundred years, maybe!" Yelena shrugged.

"People should know, Yelena—people in the cities. They should at least know how to give the machines instructions. No, that wouldn't be enough if the machines broke—They should, well,
someone
should know."

"What do you think the corporations are for? Their people know enough."

Yes, how to sell things and pay for advertisements. How to select the best genes for a baby based on the strict formulas provided by the City of Death. The higher levels of corporations—like academies, art schools, and farms, contained those people unnatural enough to not be content with an entirely worry-free life. But not all unnaturals would set off to seek a City of Life or some equivalent. Meliora had lived and worked with them. She knew they didn't know much. And if the City of Death itself didn't know...

"We have feeds," Yelena snapped. "Paper books, even, blame Olivia for wasting so much space with them."

"But people should be helped to learn! They should have a faster way than browsing through feeds to know what is
important
out there."

"Oh, yeah?" was Jerome's response when she told him this later in the day. "People put all kinds of junk in the feeds for tens of years—hundreds of years if you count the feeds from before the wars, or at least the ones we managed to salvage. Fairytales, for example. Kings and such—we salvaged those things, and I have no idea why they caught on. We changed them, of course. You can't have the kings killing each other with swords and spears. We left the horses. Ben wanted
horses.
I've had more than enough of dealing with feeds. Why should it be
me
cleaning all this so that I can spoon-feed it to people? Besides, if you clean it too much, sort it too much and give out only what you deem necessary, all it leads to is indoctrination. That never worked properly."

"But of course, you and
cleaning,
" Nic said. He'd just come into the room. "You and work. How can you be so lazy sometimes? When are we finally going to go through the clunkers out there in the City of Death and see which ones might still work?"

Jerome strode out of the room, slamming the door. Nicolas and Meliora laughed, then kissed.

Then they went to see Ben for their lesson about microorganisms and other living things—and found him on the floor, wailing and tearing the skin off of his own face.

"We destroy everything we touch!" He crawled to them and gripped their hands. "Do you understand!? Even now, even with this"—he squeezed their hands tighter—"we destroy! He says there are no gods, but who is to forgive us!? Who is to save us!?"

"There might be real gods somewhere, Ben.
Jerome
doesn't know everything."

Ben just wailed.

They knew what to do next—they must give permission to the medstat that hovered nearby. Ben must have forbidden it to treat him. He sometimes did, in his worst moments, when he thought that he could hear the microbes screaming.

The medstat made him sleep. Nothing else worked on him, and they knew even sleep was bad, but it was the lesser evil. Everyone in the City of Death, all fifty or so people, knew how to deal with Ben.

Only, Meliora and Nicolas had known it only in theory. They hadn't
seen
Ben like this before.

It was a reminder. Microbes might or might not scream—but others did, in the villages, while people left at a young age in the cities. People like Jerome or Stella the witch played with the lives and feelings of unnaturals to see what would become of them.

Only two days ago, the City of Death had watched a strange village have a mini-bloodshed and done nothing.

"It was the right thing to do," Nicolas had told her. "Messing with that village right now would only make it worse."

She believed him. He understood the nuances of this better than she did, so she tried to avoid watching. She'd better not see. It would all become better in the end. When she did find the cure for young age.

She had avoided watching the screens—but now she couldn't, and wouldn't, avoid watching Ben.

The old man was thrashing in his sleep, still screaming, so she was by his side, holding his hand and unbuttoning his shirt, wiping the sweat from his face. The medstat was beside him, but it was doing nothing—because, what could it do? Machines could fix people only as much as people had taught them to.

Meliora gripped the machine's metal hand and pressed it to Ben's wrist. The old man thrashed some more, lunged at her face without knowing what he'd be hitting at all. He didn't throw Meliora on the floor only because Nic was fast enough, and strong enough, to hold him.

"Leave him be, Mel. You know we can't do anything."

"No, I don't know! If I knew anything like this, there would be no point in going on a single step further, or living a single day more!"

The medstat had already treated Ben's torn face. The blood was drying there, the gashes closed—so Meliora, who didn't have a knife, used her nail to tear Ben's wrist and let his blood soak into the metal. It wasn't enough. So, she tore her own wrist before Nic could stop her, and let blood mix with blood, and mix with metal, and with the computer parts shimmering in her mind. This needed strong emotions, pain, and blood. She hadn't learned to purposely achieve that state in any other way.

It might kill her, she'd been warned. It had killed enough others.

"
People connecting to computers like this must be a part of the world's evolution, just like the new microorganisms are,
" Jerome had said. "
But evolution is a slow thing. It works well for species, not for individuals. You be careful, girl, you're too valuable to waste.
"

Mel gripped the medstat's hand and Ben's tighter. The world blurred and objects started swimming around her. There. Slowly, ever so slowly, something crept away from Benedict into Benedict's medstat. Benedict started breathing more easily.

She thought Nicolas would be angry with her, but he didn't seem to be. He lifted her in his arms and carried her to their apartment, where their own medstat sewed her up and gave her shots against weakness and blood loss. The medstat could do nothing about the computer-sense, though. Computer nerves were pulsing in her mind. If she slept, perhaps it would go away. Or perhaps it wouldn't. For many, it hadn't.

"Oh, you fool." Nicolas clutched her hand. "Does an old man deserve something like this?"

So, he
was
angry. And afraid. Perhaps he was the only person here who wasn't happy that she had the computer sense.

It had given the City of Death inspiration and
ideas.
Computer specialists and human doctors had already managed to reproduce enough of it under safer conditions to start working on a new computer interface for the cities. Hive-mind. With that new interface, emotions would be easier to control in people. The current thoughtmotion interface let a person send emotions to another without knowing what these emotions were, and the hive-mind—or hiver—would do similar.

However, while using the thoughtmotion there were two databases to pass through, that of the first person's emotions
and
that of the second person's, and mismatches might occur. With the hiver, there would be only one database. Emotions would be stored on a machine as emotions, not interpretations of emotions, accessible to everyone. Everything would be
shared.
Infusing the very emotions into machines, not just adding their human-crafted interpretation to a database, would enable that.

"Perhaps," Jerome told her, "we can finally get rid of the wonderful experiences and move forward."

The wonderful experiences existed to satisfy the primitive needs that even city people with improved genes had—to treat, even if not heal, deviations that still existed. But people experienced the wonderful experiences alone. With the hivers, they wouldn't. Everything would be shared, which the doctors believed would help remove deviations completely in the future.

"It would kill individuality, too," Meliora said when she first heard this. "Whatever is left of it."

No matter what Meliora thought, the project went forward. She had no power in the City of Death, only skills.

And now, she'd helped Benedict with his pain. She knew what Jerome and the rest would make of this. This, too, was unprecedented if you didn't count those who had died doing it—and it meant that emotions could not only be shared among people through the mediation of a machine, but be
taken away
from a person completely. That was dangerous knowledge to give the City of Death.

If she could, she thought, she'd take it all back—she'd let Ben wriggle one more night instead of harming further all of the world's people—and then she realized that the City of Death had finally gotten into her. She
was
thinking like them.

She needed to get out of here for a while, and she didn't want to go with Nic on his airtrain tours. He liked to go watch the villages from above—to get a real look, he said, not just a look at a screen. How much more real it could be from above, she didn't know.

She went to Lucasta.

***

She walked in the streets and thought how nice the people looked and how unnaturally silent the city was. There was almost no humming any more. The thoughtmotion interfaces had been fully integrated. People weren't smiling much, either. She guessed there was no need. If you got what you thought was people's thoughts directly on your screen and no longer heard voices, what use were facial expressions? Any smiling should go directly into your head.

Meliora went to see Doctor Adelaide, who did smile at her.

"Oh, Mel, how happy I am to see you! Why didn't you visit for so long? Which city did you move to?"

"I—I am traveling between cities," Meliora said.

"A new kind of doctoring then? Nice. It is nice to have new things. I have a patient now, do you want to look at him with me?"

They saw the patient, little Garry234252, through a screen. He was in the waiting room—or was it the treatment room?—clutching the hand of his mother. She wore big sunglasses and the face of a happy Lucastan. Her computer was nail-sized and clipped to her collar and looked like celery.