Someone to Remember Me: The Anniversary Edition (3 page)

Whether by force of will or the nature of the subconscious, the knowledge of the lyrics and the tune escaped her. They floated away into the morning to join the granite clouds hovering in the unremarkable air. Reminding herself to keep calm in the wake of the music’s departure, she steadied her pace, realizing that in her panic she had become hurried.

She reaffirmed her belief that this could be explained. She would make sense of the dead city, its ghostly music, and her solitary presence. What she needed, what she wanted more than anything, was a sign. A promise from the empty city that she could conquer its mysteries.

And from behind her came the sound of footsteps. Her ears dissected the expedited pacing, attuned themselves to the gasps for air, and she knew that whatever the source it was motivated by fear or excitement. Perhaps both.

Turning to meet the source of the noise, she saw a young man burst out of an alleyway adjoining the impressively wide boulevard. He stumbled into the empty street, roughly her same height and age, his forehead laced with sweat and gathering dirt. Clearly, he’d panicked in the face of the situation.

Their gazes met and the fear that was etched into the lines of his expression were painfully obvious to her. Studying his audience for a moment, he took a fearful step backwards at the sight of her.

Then she realized that the man was afraid of her, which was such an abrupt and comedic thought that she held back a chuckle. Could there be any substantial danger in a woman who recalled nothing before a handful of minutes ago? Trying to remedy the situation, she cautiously extended her empty hand. In one of his hands, he held a rose similar to hers. She kept her hand outstretched in greeting despite the man’s suspicious glare.

“Are you real?” he croaked, taking another step back. He didn’t believe his eyes, not that he lacked reason. In a city as vastly abandoned as this one, either of them could be mistaken as apparitions to the other. Noting the extensive detail in his face, his eyes, his hair and his clothes, she decided that both of them were real. She looked up at the air, watching the clouds pass, shades of gray pulsing against each other in the weak light.

“Yes,” she decided. “At least I think I am. What about you?” She turned her attention back to her companion. He was still moving away from her. She noticed that his hand was bleeding rather profusely. She frowned at the unattended injury, her mind calling forward a myriad of problems if the cuts went untended. “I think you can trust me. And that I can trust you.”

“What makes you think that?” he demanded, hostility creeping into his voice.

She held up her rose.

“You have a rose like mine.” Tentatively, she asked, “What’s your name?”

His guarded expression never faltered. “My name is One-Six-Two-Seven. What’s yours?”

“Two-Six-Five-Eight,” she answered immediately. A moment of silence passed between them, but the man with a number for a name visibly relaxed.

“Neither of us has a real name,” he surmised. “Just a number. And I didn’t even remember that until just this moment.” Disappointed, he shook his head at the emerging gaps in his memory, more severe than he initially realized. She didn’t feel disappointed at the revelation. Instead, she felt as if they shared an important bond.

“An effect of the memory loss. Just like me,” she tapped the side of her head. “Your name is a bit of a mouth full. Can I call you Seven?”

“Only if I can call you Eight,” he shrugged.

“Agreed.”

“I heard the same music, you know. That was why I came running,” he admitted, his words substantiated by longing. “I think that the rose and the music mean I can trust you. If the amnesia wasn’t enough, I suppose.” Despite his resignation, Seven’s remarks did not sound the least bit trusting.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” Eight assured him.

Seven made up his mind. “And I won’t hurt you, either.”

“Well. Since we’ve established that neither of us is going to hurt the other,” she smiled wryly, “Can I take a look at that hand of yours?” Seven checked his hand with visible surprise, obviously having forgotten that it was injured at all. Deciding that permission could come later, Eight acted.

She walked up to him and took the rose from his bloodied hand, guiding the reluctant young man towards the curb. After they sat down, she respectfully laid the roses on the pavement between them. Eight turned Seven’s injured hand over in hers as she examined the damage. Though deep, the gashes had stopped bleeding freely and were as clean as she could have hoped for.

Seven took the roses in his good hand, studying them while Eight considered her options. He kept his eyes on the flowers and hardly flinched when Eight prodded the cuts once more. She needed bandages, but a quick survey of the area reinforced her belief that supplies would be scarce.

“How do you know what you’re doing?” Seven inquired politely.

“I am, or was, a scientist. That’s how I know that the veins in your hand are fine. But I need something to bandage the wound.” Eight leaned away and looked down the empty street again, her heart sinking. If there was nothing to bandage the cuts with, then that meant the injury could get infected…

Her attention was caught by a ripping sound from beside her. With his uninjured left hand, Seven tore the long right sleeve from his gray shirt. For the first time since she had woken up on the beach, Eight considered her own appearance. Both herself and Seven were dressed in identically designed gray long sleeve shirts, pants, and shoes. When Seven unceremoniously handed the torn sleeve to Eight, she quietly praised his lucidity.

She bound it to his hand and laughed. Her powers of observation paled in comparison to his. Smiling at the makeshift bandage, Eight said jokingly, “My best work yet.”

Seven observed the bandage. He looked at Eight, unaware that he was staring. She refused to buckle from beneath his intense gaze. “Thank you,” said Seven, oblivious to the awkward silence. “I guess we get to worry about not starving to death now.”

Eight nodded and returned to her feet, desperately trying not to look at Seven. He seemed lopsided, with one long sleeve and one short sleeve. Somehow it fit his rapidly shifting attention span to be dressed awkwardly. She helped Seven up and together they meandered along the sidewalk, headed deep into the city. Eight kept both roses in her left hand, wondering what two people with no recollection of themselves could discuss?

They fell into a silence that fit their situation. With no objective and no destination, the two companions filed down the empty streets of the city. Neither of them had a plan of action to follow. Eight allowed their time together to become a period of unspoken acclimation. It was Seven, his voice breaking an extended silence of at least an hour, who ventured into the realm of conversation.

“You said you’re a scientist,” Seven repeated her claim back to her with factual accuracy. “I think I was a security guard.”

“Really?” Eight asked, her curiosity instantly ablaze at the idea. “Any idea what you guarded?”

Seven looked into the forbidding pylons that stabbed the sky.

“Yeah.”

Eight accepted the minimalist answer and did not argue when silence reclaimed their journey for itself. At intersections along their journey Eight made sporadic turns, goaded by the hope of progress as Seven followed her wordlessly. Wherever they happened to be, the scene remained the same. Ground level properties that lined the roadside had nothing inside of them. Any nature that had lined the roads had long since faded away. She wondered what the different tenements at the base of each tower might have been before the city met its demise. Maybe one of these empty shops had been a bakery? Or a bookstore?

She had become so obsessed with her questions, submerged in her theories of the city’s fall, that Seven forced her out of her reverie.

“Look,” he said, nudging her. Eight took heed of his suggestion. Ahead of them, the towers lessened in might and vanished completely. They emerged from the street into a wide clearing, filled with smaller buildings that were dwarfed by the towers that ringed the plaza. A guard booth and lowered gate marked the entryway. Eight watched as Seven knelt in front of the booth and wiped encrusted dirt from the exterior.

“Demna Clay University,” Seven recited, back on his feet and wiping his hand on his pant leg.

“A college,” Eight said, eyeing the barren landscape surrounding the academic buildings.

“Looks like all the trees died,” Seven observed.

“No one has been around to take care of any of it. Landscaping would grow wild for a few years but without proper irrigation and maintenance it would eventually die,” Eight theorized.

“How long would that take?”

“I don’t know. Seventy, eighty years? It all depends. We should take a look around.”

“Agreed,” Seven answered.

Concrete paths, which once cut through what must have been an impressive garden, were visible from the path that Eight walked with Seven. She imagined that it might have been a verdant maze in its prime, but death had stolen its glory. By coincidence they were closest to one of the larger buildings, an oddly shaped cylindrical construct with an uneven roof. It bore the hallmarks of modern design: sheets of metal cobbled together with panes of ancient glass. Again, a pang of longing stabbed at Eight’s ribs. What it must have looked like in its prime, surrounded by lush gardens and occupied with students, she would never know for sure.

“J. Fyne Memorial Science Building,” Eight read the rusted letters on the overhang above the building’s twenty-door entrance. Most of the doors were missing, their glass frames obliterated in the same forgotten conflict that extinguished the rest of the city.

“This place looks beat up,” Seven noted, gesturing at the burn marks across the front of the science building. “I wonder what happened here.”

Eight put her palm on her forehead. She took a daring step through the shattered doorway, standing in the fallow lobby. Breathing rapidly, she moved forward as her shoes crunched against the shattered glass. There were two main hallways on either side of the lobby and one large door ahead of her.

“The Cobalt Imaging Pavilion,” Eight announced, reciting the name despite the lack of signage. She was addressing Seven, who she could not see in the poor light but knew to be at her side without looking. His presence, like her knowledge of the auditorium beyond the door, was an indisputable certainty.

“You’ve been here before?” Seven asked.

Eight didn’t answer. Gingerly placing her hand on the door, she pushed it open. A gust of air hissed out, shoving past her, carrying on it the same melody that had summoned her back into the world with Seven. Holding her breath, she stepped forward into one of the many dark spots in her memory, humming the tune as the Cobalt Imaging Pavilion claimed her for itself.

Eight moved her hand among the photon particles that were creating, in conjunction with precision force-fields maintained by electromagnetic currents, a three-dimensional projection of a deoxyribonucleic acid sequence. With swift movements of her hand she controlled the interactive display, magnifying and lessening the most important strands of genetic information. A voice interrupted her solitary work, familiar to her but unexpected given the setting.

“Strange. An entire laboratory at home, but I find out you’re here of all places,” said the room’s newest guest, standing in the doorway with a yellow shaft of light coming from the lobby behind her. On the table in front of Two-Six-Five-Eight the projection’s sharp outline blurred, irritated by the hallway light.

“That door was supposed to be locked,” Eight grumbled loudly.

“It was. But your skills at encryption codes have always left much to be desired,” her friend complained. “It took me thirty-four seconds to break the lock.”

“That’s because you’re a prodigy with computers. Now would you please close the door? This project is important to me, and I need the university’s accelerated hardware to finish building my model,” she nodded deferentially towards the holographic DNA strand in front of her.

Her visitor nodded and closed the door behind her, plunging the projection room into a blue hue-drenched darkness. Descending the pavilion’s stadium-like stairs and rows of seats to join Eight at the projector table, the newcomer’s features were illuminated by the bluish aura coming from the images suspended in the air.

Eight’s friend was smaller than her, her features narrow and her hair cropped short and always in disarray. She was shorter than Eight, and considerably frailer looking as well, but her small demeanor masked an unstoppably talented individual.

“Three years without a significant hardware upgrade will do that to a computer,” the visitor added, forlorn. “I installed the last possible updates to the software a few weeks ago but unless we get some new hardware at home, our systems there have gone as far as they can be expected to. We’ll need new machines unless our supervisors want us to become hopelessly dependent on outside resources.”

“Which, as I’ve heard, is exactly what they want,” Eight turned to face her companion, speaking the brutal truth. “Ninety-Nine, our superiors have become complacent and are questioning the benefit we bring to the cause. Since the truce has managed to hold steady for almost a month, there’s no urgency associated with our requests. We’re more symbolic than practical at this point.”