Someone to Remember Me: The Anniversary Edition (31 page)

Chapter Twelve:

Mortal Coil

At the edge of the water on the far side of Rose Garden stood a large warehouse whose gray outline was hardly visible against the night sky. Suspended in the air within the structure was a ship that contained six hibernating clones, those of the Rose Twelve who were lucky enough to sleep through the last adventure. Dormant floodlights blasted awake as Nine led the others into the warehouse, gesturing to the metal arms that held the yacht aloft. Null and Ninety-Nine gawked at the ship.

Glossy white, with four visible decks above the main hull, the ship exuded a graceful confidence. He led the others aboard by crossing a narrow walkway that linked the ship with the landing around it. Ignoring the height of the drop beneath them, Nine hurriedly crossed the plank. He was the first aboard the ship on the empty aft deck. The four upper decks were stacked atop each other and clustered towards the bow of the ship.

Sleek lines and black windows gave the ship a sensation of velocity. Nine imagined that he could hear the ship whispering
fast
in its silence. Sliding a doorway open, Nine slipped inside the ship with Null and Ninety-Nine in tow. He took them through an empty gathering room whose couches and chairs were collecting dust after endless disuse. Then up the stairs, where they spied the kitchens on the second deck, an observation room on the third, with the navigation room siting at the top.

He sighed when they reached the navigation room. Unharmed and healthy, the glass control panels that dotted the room called out for use. Moving his hands across the panes caused the controls to activate, calling the rest of the ship back into the waking world. The sounds of the ship coming to life echoed across the hull. As the yacht woke up, Nine struggled to accept that leaving Rose Garden meant that Null might never recover her memories. He feared that she might resent him because of it, and if not now then maybe in the future. Boxed into a life of limitations, a life of regret, by a life she could not remember. He thought that she would hate a new life marred by the hauntings of what might have been. When he finally looked at Null his anxiety intensified and the truth emerged: he wanted a sign from her. Something to give him hope as they sailed into the wilderness.

She met his eyes and when she spoke, calmly and with conviction, all Null said to him was, “It’s time to go.”

“Right,” Nine replied lamely. Null and the others would be unshackled by their vacant memories, excluding him and the remaining six of the Rose Twelve. He didn’t care for any of the Rose Twelve nearly as much as he cared about Null, in the past or in the present. The ring on his finger, battered but enduring, made him feel childish for hoping that she might, somehow, feel the same way…

Nine’s hands slid across the control panel in front of him. He didn’t trust himself to speak so he worked in silence. Through the glass windows in front of him, he watched the warehouse’s doors grind themselves open. Water rushed in through the breach and filled the empty space below the yacht. Null’s panicked expression caused him to speak. “Don’t worry, I’m only opening the outer doors.”

“Let me lower the ship,” Ninety-Nine commanded from her spot to his left. Her deft hands traveled across the glass, as if she already knew the intricacies of the yacht’s controls. Then again, Nine realized, a boat must be a thousand times simpler to master than Rose Garden.

The ship buckled as the suspension assembly carefully lowered the yacht into the water. Nine stared at her, speechless.

“I learn fast,” Ninety-Nine remarked casually.

“Right,” Nine returned his attention to his workspace, irritability nipping at his ego.

He navigated the ship out of the warehouse. Within seconds the yacht slid across the water far enough to see the back of Rose Garden’s island with the empty night sky draped above it. Nine wondered where the stars had gone and, in their absence, he wished for comfort’s sake that he could see the island’s roses one last time. With their ship sailing across the inert ebony water, racing alongside a city of gray and rust, Nine’s memory of the roses were his only assurance that color existed in the world.

Hoping to stump her, he tasked Ninety-Nine with setting the engines to full speed. Two minutes later, when she accomplished the task, he yielded the majority of the navigational tasks to her. Watching her setting the destination and optimizing the ship’s path, Nine decided that computers were not his calling.

“Even as an amateur you’re the smartest computer scientist to ever grace Haven,” Nine assured her. “The way you pick things up…it’s unnatural.”

“Maybe I made improvements to my brain?” she shrugged.

“Possibly.” Nine saw Null, restless and bored, survey the room before she went down the stairs in the back and disappeared from his view. As if she saw it out of the back of her head Ninety-Nine said, “You can go. I have this under control.” Nine rolled his eyes. Of course she did. The ship was in more capable hands with her anyways.

He found Null on the observation deck underneath the navigation room. She was on its patio, leaning against the railing as the nighttime wind brushed her hair from her face. Off to the east lay Haven, a solitary dark mass whose impressive outline nevertheless failed in its quest to touch the empty heavens. Nine recalled how, in the past, the towers lit the night and nearly banished the darkness.

Tonight, it was the light that had been banished from the graveyard city.

“Did I say something?” Nine asked her, assuming fault.

Null smiled.

“I must have let you down. Giving up on my memories.”

“Not really. You hated everything to do with the system even when you had all your memories,” Nine said but kept his distance. “Do you want me to be angry with you? Do you me to be hurt?”

“I realize that I am not the person you were married to,” Null said very slowly.

Nine chuckled. “You are. You absolutely are. You have the soul of my Null. You have her eyes and her ears and her nose and her cheeks. Seven and Eight might do this more dramatically than us, but I love you just as much.”

Null was still away from him. She was almost hidden by the darkness of the night and gave no thought to how pained he was by her distance.

“What’s sad is that I do want to know. About you, about what happened between us. I think it would explain why I feel safe around you even though I don’t know you; or why I seem to forgive you so quickly for the dumb things you say and do,” she said, hardly louder than a whisper. Nine regretted, once more, the act of keeping this ship a secret for as long as he had. He deserved the distrust that he had brought upon himself.

“What if death can be conquered?” he tried to console her, though he suspected that his words were for his benefit as well. “I’m not talking about cloning, resurrection, or reincarnation. What if the simple things like trust, forgiveness, and love bridge lifetimes?”

Null considered his proposal, facing him as she cautiously extended her open hand. Laying on her palm was her ring, emanating with its own golden aura, fearless despite Haven’s smothering darkness. “I’m going to keep this. I want it nearby for when I’m…ready, okay?”

Nine stared at the ring. He held up his hand, where his remained affixed.

Null nodded and she pulled her hand, wrapped tightly around her ring, close to her chest as Nine assured her, “I’m not going anywhere. If you need time, we have exactly one mortal lifespan full of it.”

Time. Patience. Love. Things that hadn’t come to the forefront of his mind until nothing else had been left. Until nobody else had been left except for Null. Haven’s dead obelisks wallowed in the night and Nine pretended that the city envied their escape from it.

He was surprised when Null briefly kissed him on the cheek.

For a moment he forgot that they were headed to Grand Cross, to the domain of the AdvISOR, and instead he let himself be happy. It took all of his energy to pretend that there was nothing in the world but the two of them and for the moment’s joy that it brought him, pure and whole, he knew that the effort was worth it.

An hour passed and the yacht raced ever closer to Grand Cross. Uneventfully turning along the sharp curve of the southern shore, Nine and his companions found themselves on the last part of the journey. Grand Cross would be visible within minutes. Once there, they would wait for Seven, Eight, and Twenty to appear before leaving Haven behind them forever. Nine, with a wry smile on his face, admitted to himself that with such a simple plan everything was bound to misfire.

“Should we wake up the rest of the Rose Twelve?” Null asked when they were back on the yacht’s navigation deck.

“Let’s leave them in stasis. If the AdvISOR shoves us all into cold storage then we ruined their day for nothing,” he answered casually, lining the horror of their possible future with dark humor. Then he saw it. “Grand Cross is coming up on the left.”

It was not Grand Cross that stole the attention of the sailors. Rather, it was the landscape surrounding the cathedral that demanded obedient study. Nine expected Grand Cross, already one of the smallest buildings he knew of, to be surrounded by the same skyscrapers that dominated the surrounding area five centuries ago.

Since none of the Rose Twelve had come this far south since the purge, there was no reason for Nine not to anticipate large swaths of corporate headquarters and intimidating office buildings. After sharing his expectations with the others, after persuading them to be ready for more neglected ruins, he was shocked to see the sight of Haven’s southern shore.

“What
happened
?” Ninety-Nine breathed, witnessing the devastation.

“It looks like the buildings were ripped right out of their foundations,” Null assessed, squinting at the darkened coastline.

“What could do that?” asked Nine. Where once there had been skyscrapers, there were empty craters in the ground. Instead of grandeur, neglected though it would be, they found emptiness and desolation. Whatever cityscape had once accompanied Grand Cross was gone; obliterated.

“In that clean of a manner? I don’t think so. Those buildings were deconstructed from the top down. See those square plots in the ground? Those are the empty foundations,” Null gestured at the darkened slopes.

Numb with fear and curiosity, Nine wondered how long ago whole strips of the southern sector had been ripped right out of their foundations. Had the AdvISOR done it? What purpose had it served? Central and northern Haven had escaped devastation on this scale while an indiscriminate force had targeted the southern region.

“Can you see that? Look! Ahead!” Null called out.

Grand Cross stood atop a stone base and lorded over the beach. Large spotlights bathed its obsidian walls in such brightness that it was easily visible from the sea. An illuminated path ran down the back of the compound to the shore where a gleaming network of docks and piers aggressively jutted into the water.

As Ninety-Nine guided their ship towards the dock, Nine saw a black mass blot out the light from the piers. What was big enough to take up that much space? Nine’s mind chaotically tried to make sense of what he was seeing when he realized that it was the shape and outline of a massive ship.

“That’s incredible! Do you see how big it is?” Null gasped.

“Yes. I see it,” Nine whispered.

Even at night, when its hull sprouted from the ocean itself, Nine could tell that the impressive vessel was hundreds of times larger than theirs. Laying in port at the the harbor behind Grand Cross, as if in response to their approach, its rows of deck lighting flickered on and revealed the truly staggering dimensions of the ship.

“Forty-two visible decks. One hundred and fifteen times the size of this yacht,” Ninety-Nine remarked, crossing the room and calculating the measurements aloud.

“It looks like one of the old cruise ships,” said Nine.

“Cruise ship?” Null repeated, unfamiliar with the term.

“By law ships were only allowed a certain distance away from Haven. Vacation companies built cruise ships that went all the way to that boundary. It was a way to get away without really getting away…” his voice trailed off, lost in awe of the other ship.

Everything that Nine saw, from the vessel to the scaffolding erected around it and the surrounding network of piers, simply screamed magnitude and power. On the scaffolding, powering up at their approach, were humanoid machines crafted from golden metal. A solitary blue light in each head flashed on in the darkness. “MoNITOR drones. Those are new models that I’ve never seen before,” Nine observed.

Another light on the side of the bigger ship erupted into being and revealed the name emblazoned on the silver hulk:
The Mortal Coil
. The drones idly stared at the newcomers from across the enormous vessel.

Their curiosity satisfied, the machines went back to their work. Nine wondered if they had been preparing the ship in the dark. Once illuminated the drones were little more than tiny golden ornaments against a hardened silver mass.

“
The Mortal Coil
? What does that mean?” Ninety-Nine asked.

“I don’t know. This is new. Everything. There used to be buildings around Grand Cross.”

“Well, they’re gone now,” Null answered bluntly. On the glass panel in front of Nine the navigation computer gave control to the docking structure’s autopilot program. With no resistance whatsoever their yacht headed to an empty berth next to
The Mortal Coil
under the control of a program that might very well be the AdvISOR itself.