EHuman Dawn (25 page)

The eHumans across the landscape, both on the security perimeter and within the confines of the city, cheered. Even without their beloved Dawn they stood by the cause. Origen realized that it didn’t matter who was leading them, as long as the leader was worthy and the people had hope. And Origen was determined to give them the hope they needed to hold the line.

“Victory is our only option! To return our cities to the WG is a fate worse than death! It’s time to kick some WG ass and send the bastards back to Gemetria where they belong!”

On that note, Origen ended the TeleConnect and moved over to a makeshift control center that had been set up on the western edge of the perimeter. He touched the screen of a portable EC, and the images of the other Resistance cities under siege began to scroll past his eyes. All machines and troops were in place and ready for combat. Now all they had to do was wait.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

“Elijah!” Edgar Prince cried as he descended the massive staircase outside of his mansion with open arms. Adam walked forward, meeting his father at the bottom step and entering into his embrace. It was cold and lacking any of the energy he’d experienced in Dawn’s arms. Adam pulled back and stared.

Again he marveled at his father’s choice to model his eHuman body after the one he’d been born with. If you could design anybody you wanted, why imitate the one of the flesh? What Adam didn’t fully realize was that Edgar Prince was obsessed with his own genius. At a mere five years of age, he’d already read the entire works of Euclid and had discovered with delight that volumes eleven through thirteen were his favorites, special geometry being a subject that fascinated him tremendously. At the ripe young age of eighteen, he’d founded Guardian Networks, which quickly became the most powerful networking company in the world. By age fifty, when he’d become the “Father of eHumanity,” Edgar Prince was completely enamored of himself.

In the pre-Great Shift world, the face of Edgar Prince was famous, imprinted in the minds of every single person in power. To lose his face would be to lose his brand—and Edgar Prince, being the business guru of his age, was very concerned about branding. Besides, truth be told, Edgar Prince found himself to be the most interesting man he had ever met. It made him lonely
at times, but he believed that such loneliness was the price he had to pay in order to be an evolutionary figure in history.

“Welcome home,” Edgar Prince continued with a huge smile upon his handsome face. He turned from Adam and gazed upon Dawn with an intense look. After a moment he spoke.

“Dawn, it is so good to see my original creation once more.”

In response, Dawn stepped forward and offered an embrace to Edgar Prince. As her arms wrapped around him, she found herself flooded with memories of betrayal and pain. Unlike Adam, she could still recall the hurt and terror she had felt when she had discovered how Edgar Prince had used her to enslave the human population. The familiar feeling of guilt began to creep up into her mind and she pulled back to regain her composure. She wouldn’t let him get to her. Nothing mattered anymore except the mission’s objective—to plug Adam into Archion as soon as possible.

Dawn turned from Edgar and noticed a young woman with milk-white skin and deep auburn hair descending the steps, wearing a beautiful black silk dress that clung to her overly voluptuous body. Dawn envied the gown, realizing that other than the green suit she now wore and the red sequined dress she’d purchased in order to meet Adam for the first time, she rarely wore anything except the utilitarian clothes of the Resistance.

“Oksana, my dear. Please meet my long-lost son,” Edgar Prince suggested to the woman, who held out a slender pale arm upon which dangled seven golden bracelets. Adam shook her hand, gazing deeply into her brown eyes, noting a look of both passion and fear.

“Pleased to meet you, Elijah,” she said demurely, “I’m Oksana Natarov. I have heard much about you.” Adam noticed that her red lips turned slightly downward, just like Edgar’s secretary had. His father seemed to have a thing for sexy, pouty women.

“The pleasure’s mine,” Adam replied, instinctively charming the beautiful woman and ruefully noting his own appreciation for classically sexy women. Like father like son.

“And you must be the Dawn,” Oksana said, eyeing Dawn suspiciously through narrowed eyes.

“Yes,” Dawn remarked, shaking the woman’s hand, “I love your dress,” she added.

“Do you?” Edgar Prince cried, “Then we shall have several just like it sent to your room. Consider it done. My staff accommodates me the moment I desire something. I love the instant satisfaction that comes from a networked civilization, don’t you?”

He led them up the granite staircase to the solid gold gate that functioned as the front door of his home. Images of crosses and chubby winged-cherubs decorated the handles and bars. Like any networked door in the eHuman world, it opened quietly as they approached. Adam stared at it as they crossed the threshold and entered Edgar Prince’s house.

“Do you like it?” Edgar Prince boasted, pointing to the golden gate, “I took it from a 16th century nunnery in Spain just before we burned the city to the ground. You’ll notice many artifacts in my estate that I saved before the fires. I now have the largest collection of pre-Great Shift art in the world! Most of my colleagues consider my estate to be the finest museum on the island.”

“
Interesting,”
Dawn TeleSpoke to Adam, “
He could burn the people of that time, but not their art.”

Adam nodded cautiously to her as they entered the study off to the right of the entryway. Many of the pieces Edgar Prince had mentioned hung upon the mahogany walls. Dawn’s eyes were drawn to the painting titled “
The Sistine Madonna”
by an Italian Renaissance artist named
Raphael. Adam also noticed it. The beautiful Virgin in the picture seemed to warn him,
Get out of here before you too become part of his collection!

“Well, what do you think of your new home?” Edgar asked after they had settled upon a set of green leather couches in the center of the study. He glanced at Adam and noticed how intently his son was taking in his surroundings. Obviously he was uncomfortable, which pleased Edgar to no end. He needed his guests to be uncertain about their fate—it would make discerning the true intent of their request to come to the island much less painful for everyone involved.

“Your home is lovely,” Dawn answered.

“Yes,” Adam agreed, “The art is especially intriguing. It must have been quite an effort to gather it all before the WG destroyed it.”

“Really Elijah, we all know the WG does nothing without my permission,” Edgar admitted. Oksana shifted uncomfortably in her seat, causing a lock of her amber hair to fall into her face. Edgar reached over and slid the luxurious mane over her shoulder, exposing her long white neck. Her lips formed a pouty smile, but her cold gaze revealed not even a hint of emotion.

“No need to pretend otherwise,” he continued in a lazy voice, “Nothing was destroyed unless I gave my approval. I’ve always loved art. Even as a child I would beg my mother to take me to the museums in Boston. Of course, the installations paled in comparison to what I collected during the Great Shift, but I still remember those days with mother quite fondly.”

“How can you recall the days of your youth? You’re an eHuman, aren’t you?” Dawn demanded.

“Yes, I Jumped like everyone else,” he admitted slyly. He was hiding something and both Dawn and Adam knew it.

Adam glanced at Oksana, who sat silently at his father’s side. She shifted her eyes to the floor, avoiding his gaze.

“Our memories of the flesh were lost when we Jumped, father—so how could an early exposure to art in your human life still inspire you?” Adam challenged him.

Edgar Prince allowed a devious smile to slowly cross his face. Again he reveled in his position of knowing more than the couple. They were prey to his advantage, perched upon their seats, completely at his mercy.

“You know, Elijah, you never should have left me,” he began, “While your eHuman body is attractive, you were much more handsome as Elijah. Had you remained at my side, you would have had an eHuman body created in your perfect image and likeness. The Princes have always been some of finest representations of humanity.”

Adam remained silent. He wasn’t sure where his father was going with the conversation.

But Edgar knew what he was doing. Like a cat, it was time for him to play with his prey a bit.

“You’d love to recall what it was like to make love to her, wouldn’t you?” Edgar Prince taunted.

“Make love to whom?” Adam queried, still unsure of the man’s intent.

“Sophia, of course. Don’t you wonder what was it like to lose yourself in her embrace, to kiss her warm, soft human lips?”

None of these images made sense to Adam, and Edgar reveled in his ignorance.

“You’d also probably kill to know more about Neuro and how it came to be,” Edgar continued, “Life would make more sense, if only you could remember what drove you to Jump in the first place.”

“We told you already,” Dawn cried out in frustration, “The Resistance forced him to Jump at my request!”

“That’s not what I mean,” Edgar Prince snapped at her, “I know that both of you are driven by the longing to remember what life had been like before you became eHuman. The desire to know your past is overwhelming. You are powerless to the WG due to your forgetfulness. It makes you weak and unable to truly challenge the world I’ve created. Do you think I’d allow myself to experience such a vulnerability? No! I didn’t Jump until we had secured the MindScrape technology!”

“MindScrape? What are you talking about?” Dawn had never heard of it. She’d been intimately involved in the Dawn Project for over fifty years before she left for the Resistance and she knew that Edgar Prince had Jumped before that.

“The algorithmic science of MindScraping. The process of taking the memories of the flesh and reformatting them into a digital record that could be stored in the eHuman database.”

Both Adam and Dawn were shocked.

“What?” they cried in unison.

Edgar stood and began to walk about the room, enjoying in their incredulity. He had his audience right in the palm of his hand. If anything would drive Elijah to reveal his intentions, it would be anger. Learning about the MindScrape procedure would certainly piss him off.

“It’s simple, really. You know that the first set of experiments during the Dawn Project proved that memory wouldn’t permanently follow the Lux as it Jumped from the flesh to the eHuman body. On one hand, this discovery was very useful, because it meant that the WG would be able to form a New World Order after the Great Shift—since the population wouldn’t be able to recall what had just happened to them.

“But it also meant that those of us in charge would suffer the same fate of total memory loss. This simply couldn’t happen. How was my dear Ruth Donovan going to be a proper World Leader if she didn’t know our past?”

Oksana winced and Edgar Prince smiled at her.

“Tsk, tsk, my dear,” he said with a sardonic sweetness, “You must mind your manners. Jealousy isn’t becoming for one of your kind.”

Adam noted the tension between the two.

“
World Leader Donahi and Edgar have continued their affair after the Great Shift,
” Dawn TeleSpoke to Adam, “
And Oksana doesn’t like it.
”

Adam nodded to Dawn. Edgar Prince took this gesture as an indication that Adam wanted him to continue.

“As the Dawn Project continued, a special research team was created to look into the mechanics of memory. At that time in history we all believed that memory resided either in the brain or the Lux. It turns out that something in the middle occurred: memory followed the Jump, but faded after three days. Thus, neither the physical body nor the light body held human memory. This left only one other body to explore: the etheric body.”

“How could memory be stored in the etheric body? It has no physical form,” Dawn challenged him.

“That had been our original thought. But consider this: the etheric body is an electromagnetic field that surrounds the flesh yes?”

Adam was extremely glad he’d paid attention when Dawn and Origen had educated him on the human constitution during their first meeting.

“We also know that information can be sent along electromagnetic fields—correct? For example, our voice and digital images are distributed as analog waves of information over the wireless network in order to make a TeleConnect call. For that matter, all wireless networks exchange data via various forms of electromagnetic wave fields. The etheric body is no different, it too is an electromagnetic field that can send and store data.

“As the special ops team continued with its research, it was soon discovered that every action we took in the flesh, every bit of information we gathered while alive, every situation we had lived through, was recorded and stored, in the form of electromagnetic particles and wave sequences within the etheric body that surrounded us. And the brain of the physical body acted as a receiver, tuning the human being’s Lux to the various waves or channels, in order that data analysis and memory recall might take place.”

Adam and Dawn stared at Edgar Prince, not quite understanding him. Edgar wasn’t surprised. He’d always been a man before his time, and no one had ever really understood him.

“Consider it this way,” Edgar continued with a touch of delight, “The human brain was actually a radio, set to the correct channel frequency of the etheric body. In order to recall the information, it tuned in and transmitted the data waves to the Lux, which would then determine the day-to-day choices and actions that the human being would follow. When the brain was damaged and unable to tune into the etheric body, memory lapses and other forms of dementia would occur. When the brain was healthy, it kept the three-fold body in a state of harmonious communication.”

“So the etheric body was not only responsible for attaching the Lux to the physical body, it also recorded the life lived while in the body?” Dawn asked.