More Than This (39 page)

Seth frowns. “We
aren’t
going to go down.”

“I know you are trying to be brave for me, but we might. That is a risk when you are fighting with death. You do not always win.”

“But we’re going to today,” Seth says firmly. “There’s no way we’re going to let that thing take Regine. Just no way at all.”

Tomasz grins. “She would very much like to be hearing you talk this way. Yes, she would be very much liking this indeed.”

“Tomasz, I can’t let you –”

But Tomasz is already backing away, still grinning. “How funny that you continue to believe I am in need of your permission.”

“Tomasz –”

“Go find her, Mr. Seth. I will not be far behind.”

Seth makes an exasperated sound. “Well, don’t take any unnecessary risks.”

“I think we are in a place where all risks are necessary,” Tomasz says, and takes off running.

Seth watches him go, his stumpy little legs crossing the square and disappearing around the far corner of the building opposite, where the van emerged the last time they were here.

“Stay safe,” Seth murmurs. “Oh, stay safe.”

He takes a deep breath for courage, then takes another, and runs across the square himself. He’s half expecting the Driver to leap out from somewhere, but the sun is shining down on every corner and he sees nothing. He reaches the prison door and listens. There’s no buzz of an engine, no sound of footsteps.

No sound of Regine arguing or fighting or struggling.

He opens the door. The milky-glass inner door and stairs are the same, glowing with light. He steps through the first doorway and edges to the second.

Still nothing but the electric hum coming from downstairs.

He crouches low as he takes a few steps down. Then a few more. He reaches the turn in the stairway. His heart is thumping away in his chest, so hard he wonders for a crazy moment if the Driver will be able to hear it too.

And then there’s a scream.

Regine.

He runs down the rest of the stairs before he can even think to stop.

He pounds through the lower corridor, tearing around the final corner and into the vast room, his blood rushing, his fists actually up, ready to fight.

Go in swinging,
he thinks.

But he can’t see her. From this little platform, it’s just rows and rows of coffins, like before. He sees the one he opened, now closed and sealed like nothing ever happened. The vast room stretches before him, and he remembers the cameras on the display flashing through endless farther distant rooms.

She could be anywhere.

“Regine?” he calls out, his voice swallowed by the huge empty space.

There’s nothing. No response. No further screaming.

He turns to the milky panel on the wall to see if he can get it working again. It lights up under his touch, smaller screens within the larger one, scrolling rapidly through information that makes no sense and is often too fast to read anyway, plus changing pictures from the cameras, too, taken from all through the complex.

But at the very center of the screen, one image is remaining steady. An open coffin, somewhere out there in the vastness.

Regine lying inside.

The Driver standing over her, wrapping her in bandages.

“No!” Seth says, pressing the screen wildly, trying to find any information that’ll tell him where she is. There’s a grid map next to her, like the ones he saw before, but it could be anywhere and the coordinates are written in a way he can’t understand.
2.03.881,
it says, which could mean anything. Room two, row three, coffin 881? But what does that tell him?

He looks out at the room, thinking he’ll just have to chance it, he’ll have to run until he finds her and do whatever he can to stop –

She screams again.

He whirls back to the display. Regine doesn’t seem to be resisting the Driver or even know that it’s there. Seth watches as she screams once more, the sound reaching his ears separate from the image, coming from deep within the recesses of the huge building.

“You son of a bitch!” he shouts at the image, the Driver going about its business, ignoring Regine’s fear, ignoring whatever it is that’s happening to her. “I will kill you. Do you hear me? I’ll
kill
you!”

He slams his fist on the screen.

And it changes.

Her name pops up in a box. R
EGINE
F
RANÇOISE
E
MERIC
, it says, atop a list of facts. Height, weight, her birthday, then a date that could be when she was put online.

And one more date, listing itself as D
ISCONNECT
.

The date she was thrown down the stairs. It has to be. The date there was a mistake and, instead of dying, she woke up here.

O
RIGINAL
C
HAMBER
O
UTSIDE
P
ROTECTED
G
RID
, he reads. That must be why the Driver brought her here instead of her house. Years too late, it was bringing her inside with everyone else.

Another line pops up, blinking red: L
ETHE
C
ONNECTION
P
ENDING
.

“Lethe?” Seth says. “Why would it . . . ?”

He scans the screen again. There’s so much data surrounding Regine’s screen it’s hard to figure out what any of it means. He presses L
ETHE
C
ONNECTION
P
ENDING
and another screen pops up.

The disconnect date is there and below it, R
ECONNECTION
T
IMECODE
.

Seth reads it.

Then he reads it again.

“No way,” he whispers.

The reconnection date, the time she’s being put back online –

It’s before her disconnection date.

The Driver is placing her back in time. It’s putting her back
before she died.
Only a few minutes, but definitely before.

“How?” Seth says, pressing more and more buttons, trying to find some answer. “How is that possible?”

It’s a program,
he thinks.
That’s all it is. A program everyone’s agreeing to, a program everyone’s a part of
–

But still just a program.

If Owen was a simulation, then who knew what could go on in there? Who knew if the present and the past were even the same online? He’d relived his own past, after all, over and over again in the dreams. He’d been right there in Tomasz’s too.

And if Regine’s death had been a mistake in the system –

Maybe the system needed to fix its mistakes.

Maybe it could place her back to a time just before her death, so she’d go through it again, but properly this time.

Be properly killed.

There’s a sudden flash of blue on the screen. L
ETHE
I
NITIALIZED
, it blinks. In the image, the Driver has placed a breathing tube in Regine’s mouth. Probably how they get Lethe into your body, Seth thinks.

It was going to make her forget. It was going to make her forget him and Tomasz. It was going to wipe all this away from her.

And then it was going to kill her. Just to make the world work.

“The hell you are,” Seth says, pressing L
ETHE
I
NITIALIZED
. A screen pops up beside it. P
AUSE
I
NITIALIZATION
? Y
ES
/N
O
.

Seth stabs Y
ES
. “How do you like them apples, you piece of shit?”

In the image, the Driver turns.

And looks right back into the camera.

As if it’s looking right into Seth’s own eyes.

And then it begins to run.

Seth listens for footsteps. He hears them, approaching fast, from around a corner on the right, some distance away.

Which is where Regine must be.

Seth’s breathing increases, his heart pounding again. He has no weapons. Nothing to fight it with. If it reaches him, there’s no way he can overpower it.

But maybe he can outrun it. He used to be a pretty good runner, after all.

He jumps down from the platform, racing down the rows of coffins. All that matters in these immediate seconds is to keep the Driver away from Regine, away from whatever process is about to kill her. He takes a turn at the far end of the room, heading now in the general direction of the Driver’s running footsteps. He ducks as he sees it turn the corner. Seth stops by a coffin, ready to run wherever the Driver might chase him.

But the Driver isn’t coming for him. It’s moving down the central aisle, past him, not even looking –

Heading for the display screen.

“HEY!” Seth shouts, standing up. “OVER HERE!”

But the Driver keeps on. It reaches the platform and immediately starts pressing the display, no doubt recommencing the process on Regine.

Seth looks around frantically for something,
anything
to throw at the Driver, anything to even slightly slow it down. But there’s only coffins, stretched wall to wall and around every corner and disappearing into further recesses –

He has a thought. That first coffin he’d opened, now back in place like nothing ever happened –

It’s a caretaker,
he thinks.
That’s what it does. It cleans up messes.

He reaches down to the coffin he’s leaning against and tries to find the seam, struggling like last time to get his fingers into the lid, forcing all his weight up, straining against its resistance –

And he nearly falls over again as it pops open. A short man is inside, wrapped in bandages, lights sailing through his coffin, doing their mysterious processes. Seth looks over at the Driver.

Which is looking right at him.

It turns back to the screen, its fingers flashing wildly over the display.

The coffin in front of Seth starts to close.

“No!” Seth says, trying to catch it. But it comes down with implacable force, no matter how much he struggles against it. The Driver goes back to programming whatever it needs for Regine.

“Shit!” Seth lets go of the lid. But then he gets an idea. He reaches into the closing coffin and grabs the man’s arm. He drapes it over the lip of the lid and steps back. The lid keeps closing, closing, closing, threatening to crush the man’s arm –

But as soon as it touches the man’s skin, it springs back open.

“Ha!” Seth says, triumphant, and looks up.

The Driver is looking at him again.

And it starts to move toward him.

“Have to fix them all, don’t you?” Seth shouts, scampering away. He stops at another coffin. He’s got a sense of the lid now, and this one pops open easier and faster. It’s an old woman, and he drapes her arm over the lip, too.

He sees the Driver at the coffin of the man, putting him back in place, then pressing a particular spot on top of the coffin that lights up a small display across the metal surface. The coffin closes immediately.

Seth looks down at the coffin next to him and presses the same spot. The display appears on the coffin’s lid. “So
that’s
how it works,” he says. There’s a box labeled O
PEN FOR
D
IAGNOSTIC
? He presses it. The lid lifts, revealing the sleeping body of a middle-aged black man. Seth takes the man’s arm, drapes it over the lip, and runs away as the Driver approaches.

Seth moves fast down rows of coffins, stopping randomly and opening first one, then another, repositioning the inhabitants and moving on. The Driver is behind him, tending to each coffin in turn.

It’s doing it faster than Seth can. It’s catching up.

Seth rushes to the next and opens it. It’s a tiny, pale woman. “I’m so sorry,” Seth breathes to her, and he reaches his arms under her, lifting her out of the coffin and setting her gently onto the floor. Her coffin starts beeping and flashing with warning lights, some of them running along the tubes still attached to her. Seth takes a handful of them and hesitates a moment.

“It’s to save my friend,” he says to the woman’s unconscious form. “You probably won’t remember anything anyway.”

He yanks the tubes on the coffin end. They come out surprisingly easily. Sprays of gels and liquids fly out in a wave as other tubes spark, one of them burning Seth’s hand. He hisses and drops the tube –

And barely avoids the Driver as it arrives next to him, its baton up and blazing, ready to fall –

Seth tumbles out of the way, the baton smashing into the floor and leaving a scorch mark. The Driver stands over him as he moves back, the baton ready again –

But it turns to the woman. She’s now in an increasing puddle as the liquids from the disconnected tubes spill across the floor.

Seth takes his chance, jumping to his feet and starting to run. “I’m sorry!” he shouts back at the woman as the Driver picks her up, places her back into the coffin, already reconnecting tubes and pressing panels with blinding speed –

Seth keeps running. He turns the corner the Driver had come around and slows down, amazed at what he sees.

Stretching in front of him are more coffins than seems possible, so many it’d take him hours to even partially count them. The wide passageways connecting the rooms stretch farther back than he can even see, turning around other corners, too, to delve who knows how much deeper beyond.