Someone to Remember Me: The Anniversary Edition (25 page)

Null listened intently and waited for Provence to say something else. When it didn’t, the computers shifted to displaying tests and data that Provence must have triggered throughout Rose Garden in the meantime. “I am conducting a system check,” he remarked unsatisfactorily.

Rising to stand next to her, Nine repositioned himself closer to Null. She was aware of the fact that he was standing closer than ever before and telling him to back away had occurred to her. Yet, a deeper instinct assured her of her safety and, for better or worse, Null deferred to her instincts.

“Your program has been severely damaged within the past three days. Do you recall what caused it?”

“Yes. Standby.” An extensive series of codes and programming replacing the representation of Provence’s vocal wavelengths. If it was meant to show them something, then neither observer could identify it. “Eight-Eight-Nine-Nine made several base changes to the operational procedures of the memetic retention and distribution systems before the most recent series of resurrections. Those alterations triggered a cascade system failure that incapacitated most of my subprograms.”

“Ninety-Nine did this to you?” Null asked.

“It had to be,” Ninety-Nine agreed as she emerged from the nearby hallway, having safely returned from Records. “Who else of the Rose Twelve could fundamentally change the way Rose Garden works?”

Provence declared, “Initiating system optimization. Initiating software recalibration. Initiating data indexing.” Rose Garden’s command center shone with illuminated displays and hummed with the noise of awakened hardware, sounding more alive than ten minutes before.

“Well, whatever you did to fix it worked,” Nine said sideways to Ninety-Nine.

“Whose consciousness is stored in the memetic stream?” Ninety-Nine asked Provence.

“One-Six-Two-Seven.”

Eight’s voice rang out behind them, “You have Seven’s memories? Show me.”

A thousand images appeared on the great screen, memories of Seven’s since awakening in Haven a few days prior. Eight bandaging his bleeding hand; Eight laying next to him at the Great Library; Eight staring down at him, crying, in the moments before his death. It stole Null’s breath from her.

Eight and Twenty joined Null, Nine, and Ninety-Nine. Eight gave the order. “Bring him back.”

“I am unable to initiate the cloning procedure. Rose Garden’s power cells are critically discharged. I lack the energy required to initiate the revival process.”

“How is that possible? This station is solar powered,” Nine argued. “The sun is still shining!”

“Insufficient sunlight density has allowed for the gradual depletion of the facility’s energy stores since the mainland went dark. Nearly two-dozen revivals have occurred in the past four days and have rapidly depleted the station’s power reserves,” Provence answered in a tone that Null suspected of being testy.

“Then we need more power to bring Seven back? Because nothing can ever be easy around here…” Twenty drawled.

“Where can we get the necessary power?” inquired Eight even though everyone suspected the answer.

“Haven. Rose Garden is capable of connecting to the city’s main power grid but the municipal power centers are inactive. By reactivating one of the city’s power-plants, I can siphon the required energy needed to revive One-Six-Two-Seven,” Provence finished.

“Like the power station I woke up at?” Twenty offered.

“Exactly,” Nine agreed with Provence. “From your description it’s also the nearest one at that.”

Null watched a peculiar if determined expression dominate Twenty’s face as he loudly announced, “I can do that. I can definitely do that.” He nodded vigorously in a nervous effort to reassure himself of his confidence.

“Are you positive?” Nine asked carefully.

“If we’re thinking of the same place then I can take a boat there and be back in an hour or two. Eight hours later Seven wakes up and we take off!” Twenty snapped his fingers, making Null appreciate his ability to dramatically understate the risks of his impending expedition.

“How is he going to reactivate the power-plant?” asked Null, jeopardizing Twenty and his plan.

“I can assist with that. By arming Two-Five-Two-Zero with a series of activation codes, any computer terminal at the Second Core will reactivate the entire compound,” a map depicting the route to the power station appeared on the monitor.

“Just like that?” Eight’s suspicion slipped into her question.

“Like Rose Garden, the Second Core is a networked computer environment,” Provence clarified, as if such a fact was quite obvious. Twenty refused to be told twice and acted while he still felt bold.

“Do it,” Twenty ordered.

Maps of Haven competed with lines of code for attention on the command center’s main display. Null recognized the general outline of the northwestern coast because it was the same path along which they had trekked from the Sphere to the Pala Ferry.

“Download completed.” A thin glass tablet, with a chipped corner, that sat on a nearby computer flashed to get Twenty’s attention. He picked the tablet up and smiled as he turned it in his hands, studying the device.

“It has a funny little map and everything,” Twenty observed, some of the confidence escaping his dry voice. Twenty looked around the room and found support in the eyes of his friends. Null realized that she would need to remember this day as the day that Twenty willingly endangered himself for another person.

Three days ago she would not have guessed that Twenty would turn into the brave man only moments away from departing the safety of Rose Garden. She would not have guessed that she would care for his safety as much as she did now; or that she would wish him to return as quickly as possible.

Her sentiments were shared by Ninety-Nine and Nine, who offered him words of encouragement. Null laughed aloud when Twenty discovered he was being patronized and carelessly brushed their assurances away. She smiled. He was back to form.

Eight quickly embraced Twenty. He was apprehensive at first, and hugged her tightly before they separated. Twenty’s bravado, his persona, it left him for a moment and Null observed a hesitant man realize that he was undertaking an extraordinary risk. Twenty regarded his fellow survivors with a critical gaze, with reverence that was almost awe, and when he spoke to them it was with a curious certainty.

“I was wrong. About each of you.”

Then he was gone.

Chapter Nine:

The Flaw

Every plan has its flaws.

Twenty skidded down the hillside towards the pier.

“This wasn’t supposed to happen,” he panted in his desperate bid to reach the boat tied at the pier. “It wasn’t supposed to go like this,” Twenty hissed, crossing the rickety pier and jumping into the boat. His hands managed to untie the small craft in record time, having done so countless times in the past, and he spun the navigation wheel away from Rose Garden and back towards the mainland. “You really screwed this up, Seven!” he shouted at the empty channel, forcing his voice to rise above the rumble of the engine.

Haven mocked him and dominated the southern horizon. Its towers leered at him, condescending in their grandeur, as Twenty ruminated on how badly Seven’s unexpected death had derailed the plan.

“We were so close,” he whispered. After three days of pretending to be without his memories, after three days of methodically shepherding his friends back to Rose Garden, Twenty was ready to admit what he previously thought was impossible: “I was wrong. This worked! It was working! But then you had to go and die again!” an indignant and furious Twenty yelled at the sky, pretending that Seven could hear him. “You never make anything easy, do you?”

By then the boat was cutting across the motionless black waters, riding smoothly towards the west, towards one of the enormous peninsulas that jutted away from the main landmass of Haven like a bloated arm. Twenty ignored the glass tablet with the chipped corner lying at his feet; he knew how to get to the Long Reach without directions but he still needed the computer codes on the device. He wasn’t a technological mastermind like Ninety-Nine. Neither did he have Seven’s security codes, assuming that they still worked this long after Haven’s fall. Twenty would be relying on Provence’s codes to reactivate the hydro-electric power station known as the Second Core.

Because, without the extra power from the Second Core, Rose Garden wouldn’t be able to revive Seven. And if Seven wasn’t reincarnated then…

“All of this will have been for nothing,” Twenty said to himself. He tightened his grip on the wheel. That would not happen. He would not let it happen. Staring ahead at the flat expanse of ocean, Twenty’s memories stirred and brought with them the harsh realities that stemmed from his elaborate deception.

Did they suspect anything? How long could he keep up the ruse? Being himself was easy, a part of him was always acting, always part of the great farce he called his life. Yet, not even Ninety-Nine, with her preternatural attention to detail, had noticed his deft hand throughout their journey to Rose Garden. How could she?

Without his confession, they would never know that he had been the one to scatter their unconscious bodies across Haven—roughly in a straight line from coast to coast—so that they inevitably found one another. They were his closest friends but they were as oblivious to certain truths in this life as they had been in the last one. Yet, those truths persisted. Seven was his friend and Twenty would not doom him to an existence trapped in the limbo of Rose Garden’s memory stream where he was not quite dead, but not quite alive.

In Haven’s twilight, during the truce of the War of the Begotten, Seven had claimed that memories from a different lifetime—from the era of the Founders and their mythological struggle against the Builders—were returning to him. Twenty silently confessed that he had never completely believed Seven. Sympathized with him, yes, but never truly believed because the science—those cold, hard facts—said that it was impossible to inherent another life’s memories without cloning technology. Without the memory transference protocol used at Grand Cross and at Rose Garden.

After the last three days, Twenty had experienced enough to know that not only was it possible but that it was happening. Seven was the catalyst; he was the key ingredient to the formula for a bizarre type of immortality that perpetuated the cycle of the created rebelling against their creators.

Twenty had experienced the phenomenon personally. The bizarre way that his own memories would burn themselves into the present, becoming as lucid as if they were being experienced for the first time. “
Day of wrath, oh day of mourning
,” Twenty’s voice dropped to less than a whisper, carrying the words somewhere he hoped Seven could hear them. “
See fulfilled the Founders’ warning…
”

Because the music alone was proof that Seven was right; that Twenty and the others had been wrong. Twenty remembered waking up for the first time in five centuries after Haven’s fall; he remembered coming to the shores of Haven from Rose Garden, and seeing the price that Haven had paid for the arrogance of the Rose Twelve.

Kneeling in the soil, Twenty held the ashen dirt in his palm. When he flexed his hand it sifted through his fingers, its grainy texture reminding him of the weaponized storm that had murdered Haven. Pala Park, if it could even be called a park anymore, had suffered from what Eight called a biological extermination event. The allergen cloud, she hypothesized, had killed every living organism. Not just the humans or the clones.

So much time had passed and so many lives had been claimed in the city’s fall that he might as well use imaginary numbers to tally the death toll. His mind could not grasp the horrifying magnitude of all the death and loss, so Twenty made do by mindlessly scooping up handfuls of scorched dirt only to drop it back to the ground.

He ignored the drama unfurling between Seven and Eight nearby because, frankly, he was tired of it. Years of their nonsense had finally poisoned him against the idea of any lasting resolution between them. Nine million people were dead and they were still arguing? They were still bickering with each other? Could they possibly be any less mature?

Twenty shook his head disapprovingly and scooped up another handful of dirt. Something metallic rubbed against his palm and he brushed away the the grains to discover a miniature toy helicopter. Its blades were gone and the tail snapped off but there the toy was, rusted and dirty, somehow still in existence.

When he realized that the children, all of the children, were dead as well he dropped the toy in the dirt. It may as well have been a ligament, hacked off the body of Haven by death’s tyrannical rule. Rising to his feet, he saw Nine absently wrap his arms around Null.

Twenty stood next to them and let the hopelessness sink in.

“Can you believe it? Five hundred years,” Nine said quietly.

“Gone in five minutes,” Twenty agreed. “An hour ago the city was alive. This park had trees, a swing set, and a jungle gym.”

“For us, relatively speaking, it was an hour. But we were asleep. For Haven...” Null pulled away from Nine to look out at the wasted metropolis, “Five centuries have passed.”

“Well, what do we do? We can’t stay here. Rose Garden can’t sustain us forever,” Nine said.