The Fox Inheritance (2 page)

The darkness I had wandered in became something else, spreading, reaching, becoming more than I thought darkness could be. It was molten metal filling imagined lungs, ears, crevices, and pores. Darkness everywhere, until it had oozed in so deeply it was a part of me and I wondered if there would be room for anything else inside me ever again.

When Jenna disappeared, the only thing that gave me hope was Kara's voice. It was the only light I had. The only air. Even when she screamed. Even when she accused. At least I knew I wasn't alone. And when there were no screams, her thoughts reached into mine, and mine into hers.

Are you there?

Here. Always here. For you.

Are you there?

Locke, I'm here, here, here....

Just a thought that can do nothing. Only know. Whatever hell it was, I knew we had gone there together. I told myself that someday, some way, I would get us both out. That's what I hoped for. But the darkness creeps in there too, until hope is as black as every thought within you.

"Locke, it's getting late," Miesha had said through the door.

"Coming," I called. Her footsteps receded down the hallway, and I walked to the table where the box sat and lifted the lid.

Closure.

In the bottom were two small black cubes no bigger than six inches across. Plain, not impressive, not as endless or frightening as the world inside them.
Environments
, is what Dr. Gatsbro called them. They were the so-called groundbreaking technology that Matthew Fox abandoned, at least as far as Kara and I were concerned. How could this six-inch cube be called an environment? How could an entire mind be uploaded into it?
How could anything survive inside for 260 years?

This is where we were. This is where our minds were uploaded and kept spinning when the rest of the world thought we were dead. I had picked up the one labeled with my name first and held it in both of my hands. I felt sick, angry, and afraid all at once when I touched it, and then, unexpectedly, protective. If I could so easily disappear from this world once, could it happen again?

Then I lifted the other cube from the box and held them side by side, just as they had always been when they were on a forgotten shelf in a warehouse. I stared at the six-inch cube that had contained Kara.

Tick

Tick

Tick

Every bit. Every dark corner. Did they get it all?

That's when Kara walked in, telling me it was time for dinner. She hadn't wanted to see them. She didn't need closure like I did, she told Dr. Gatsbro. Two steps through the door and she spotted them in my hands. She shrugged her shoulders and said, "That's
it
?" like it was nothing, but I saw her eyes frozen on the black cubes and her chest rising in shallow breaths.

"That's it," I said.

She nudged a few feet closer. Her steps were calculated and cautious.

"There were ten lifetimes in these," I said. "Even if they're empty now, it seems like they deserve more than a box in another storeroom."

"It wasn't lifetimes, Locke. Never fool yourself that it was."

She took the cubes from my hands, looked at them, turning them at different angles, then stepped to the side of Dr. Gatsbro's desk and dropped them in the trash. She looked at me and then, as an afterthought, swept some papers from the desk into the can. "There. Now, that's a proper burial. That's what they deserve."

Closure.

Maybe there's no such thing.

Chapter 5

"Kara, why don't you begin? Tell us about the Fox Inheritance."

Kara slouches back and yawns. "Zip. Snip. Here we are."

Dr. Gatsbro sighs. "Perhaps only Locke should meet our visitor today? Unless you would like to try again with a bit more eloquence and flourish? I think our visitor deserves that much."

Kara sits up straight. A visitor is a curiosity she doesn't want to miss. "Which version?"

"There is only one, my dear. The one I've told you."

And the one Cole told us late one night when Kara and I discovered him in Dr. Gatsbro's study, dipping into the liquor cabinet.

"Right. Only one." She stands, and giving Dr. Gatsbro the flourish and eloquence he wants, she begins, carefully pausing, smiling, modulating her voice and moving her hands for effect in all the right places. "Locke and I were in a most unfortunate accident. Technically, Locke died two weeks later, and I was removed from life support three weeks after the accident."

I think about Cole's description. It had much more detail and color.

The medical records said you were in a gruesome wreck. Way beyond saving, but your families wouldn't let go right away. Finally the doctors convinced them it was for the best, and legally, they had no choice. The law said you were beyond saving too. Your parents never even knew about the project. What Fox BioSystems did with you back then was illegal. Still is.

"Luckily, Dr. Ash, a researcher at Fox BioSystems who had incredible foresight, managed to scan and upload our minds into a special environment using some untested but promising new technology. When others abandoned the project because of setbacks, he made his own copies of our minds and forged ahead, determined to save us."

Matthew Fox, the head of Fox BioSystems, abandoned the project when your parents had your bodies cremated before he could collect any tissue. It's assumed that Fox destroyed the original mind uploads. But Dr. Ash was a colleague of his and secretly continued the project without the knowledge of Fox BioSystems. He made copies of your mind uploads--backups--and hid them away.

"Dr. Ash then managed to retrieve tissue specimens so that our DNA was preserved."

Then he hired some, shall we say, unsavory characters to retrieve specimens from your old rooms when your parents weren't home. I think they broke in during the funerals, actually. These people weren't exactly trained in proper specimen recovery. Their expertise was more in the collection of items of value for quick resale.

"With painstaking attention to detail, Dr. Ash secured everything he needed
."

With you, Locke, it was a nail clipping found in the corner of the bathroom. With Kara, it was a strand of hair from a brush. No one could be sure that either of those things belonged to either one of you, but it was all that they could find. Tokens, we call them. Those were stored with the uploads, along with your medical records and several photo chips they stole as well.

"Through tragic circumstances, however, this brilliant and selfless man died before his hopes and dreams for us could be realized, and our uploaded minds became part of his estate, the value and importance unknown to his heirs."

It's possible that Dr. Ash's intentions were honorable, but the fact that he kept his actions a secret leads most to believe that money was his motivator--either blackmail or perhaps selling the technology to a competitor. He was in enormous debt. Unfortunately, shortly after the backups of the mind uploads were made and your DNA tokens were secured, he died under mysterious circumstances in a freak boating accident. Some think that his plan to eliminate the trail of unsavory characters he had hired backfired on him. Either way, he couldn't carry out his plans
.

"And as a result of his untimely death, the uploads changed hands many times through several generations, waiting for the right person and the right technology to come along."

They were forgotten in a storage facility for decades. They were only labeled FOX, and came to be known as the Fox Inheritance. Finally, the battery docks that kept you suspended neared their expiration and gave a two-year warning signal. The small research facility that had acquired them didn't have the resources to decipher the outdated codes, and they didn't want to get mixed up in something they suspected might be illegal, so they gave them to Dr. Gatsbro, who was known to conduct research beyond established boundaries--for an agreed-upon price, of course.

"Finally, after two and a half centuries, the right person came along--someone with the resources, expertise, and vision--to give us a second chance, our very own Dr. Gatsbro." Kara smiles sweetly at him and tilts her head like she is truly touched.

Dr. Gatsbro is silent. He finally nods. "Excellent job, my dear." He turns to me. "And for you, Locke, your job will be to describe your new bodies and how they are every bit as good as your old ones. Better even. Can you do that?"

I look at my hands. Their sense of touch is amplified. They can detect a grain of sand in my palm. I rest them on my thighs, which are stronger and more muscular than the ones I remember from so long ago. Better. But not exactly mine. It's taken me a full year to get used to that. Could he have made them the same, or did he just have to guess? I look up, his eyes still fixed on me. "Yes, of course, Dr. Gatsbro. Better even."

I recite my well-rehearsed spiel, but I know my dramatics are subpar compared to Kara's. Still, he seems pleased.

"
Well done
." He draws the words out like a gourmet meal. "Very well done," he repeats to himself and sends us to our rooms to await the arrival of our visitor. When we are almost out the door, and perhaps at what he judges to be a safe distance, he adds, "And if our visitor should bring up the subject of Jenna, leave that to me. Understand?"

He couldn't leave it alone. My eyes lock on Kara, but she only nods and walks out of the room.

Chapter 6

Where were you, Locke? Where did you go when you didn't answer me? When you left me alone? Where did you go? Why didn't you answer me?

She doesn't want to know.

She shouldn't know.

Because where I went is hurtful, and I don't want to hurt her. I went where I had to go. I went where I survived on gulps of memory and scraps of touch. I went where I remembered a good kind of quiet. A peace. I went to be with my memories of Jenna. Her voice may have been gone, but my memories of her were still alive.

"I don't remember where I went. I died. I shut down. I was lost in a black hole. Just like you."

Where were you, Locke? Tell me. Where were you?

Chapter 7

It was always Kara, Jenna, and me. Or at least it seemed that way. We were friends for only a year and a half before the accident, but for me it was a lifetime. We were instantly bonded. Maybe it was because it came at a turning point in our lives--just the right window where our worlds were all aligned, all needing something, maybe the same thing, maybe one another. We lifted one another up. Strengthened one another. We held hands. We crossed a line. We made one another braver.

I was the youngest. Only two months younger than Jenna, but a whole year younger than Kara. A whole year. I shake my head, thinking of that now, but then a year meant more. When you're fourteen and you meet a girl who is fifteen and she smiles and is nice to you,
nice
, a new world opens up for you. And then when Jenna did the same, I couldn't get enough of either one of them. Jenna was the first girl I kissed, and then Kara. It was only in fun, and I laughed right along with them, but inside it felt like something more. Something important. I was somebody different.

When Dr. Gatsbro told us that Jenna had survived the accident, I was relieved. More than relieved--I had to sit down, 260 years of guilt flooding out of me for what I had done. And for the first time, I thought I could see tears in Kara's eyes. But when Dr. Gatsbro told us Jenna was
still alive
, that was when Kara had to sit down too. "They saved
her
? All these years, alive? Free? While we were--"

Dr. Gatsbro continued with his explanation, but Kara was only hearing a fraction of it, her voice rising as she tried to process it.

"Just because she still had ten percent of her brain and we didn't?
Ten percent?
"

I watched her change. Right then. Like veined marble was traveling up her legs, across her lap, up to her shoulders, stiffening her neck and finally covering her face, leaving a cracked version of who she once was.

"They saved
her
, but didn't bother with us?"

She stood up and began pacing. By this time Dr. Gatsbro had stopped explaining and was telling her she needed to let it go. Her voice only grew louder. She mimicked the words that Jenna had so often said to us when she was frustrated with her parents. "Precious Jenna. Their precious, adored Jenna. Anything for Jenna."

She stopped pacing and her eyes fixed on a lampshade across the room, staring at it like she was looking right at Jenna. "All this time, going on and living your life and you never tried to help
us
?"

That was when she grabbed the nearest thing to her hand, a decorative glass cube on Dr. Gatsbro's desk, and threw it. I don't think she was aiming for him. The Kara I knew would never raise a hand to anyone. But then again, she wasn't the Kara I knew. I had seen that from the first day, when she slapped me. She had changed. We both had. And by the next day, I was wondering right along with her,
Why didn't Jenna save us?
We would have saved her.

Chapter 8

"There, now. Hold still and let me straighten your collar."

"Miesha, stop fussing!" I try to dodge her grip, but she already has me. "Next you're going to spit on your hand, I suppose?"

"Now, why on God's green earth would I do something as nasty as that?"

Because it's what my mother used to do to tame my cowlick. But I don't tell her that. I don't want her to think my mom was a savage. And I don't want her to think I'm implying she's my mother, either.