The Infinite Sea (25 page)

57

CLAIRE TIES a
rubber strap around my arm and taps the inside of my elbow to bring up a vein. Razor stands on the other side of the bed. The man in the white coat—I never got his name—is by the monitor, holding a stopwatch. Vosch leans against the sink, watching me with bright, flinty eyes glittering, like the crows’ in the woods on the day I shot Teacup, curious but curiously indifferent, and then I understand that Vosch is right: The answer to their arrival is not rage. The answer is rage’s opposite. The only possible answer is the opposite of all things, like the pit where the farmhouse once stood: simply nothing. Not hate, not anger, not fear, not anything at all. Empty space. The soulless indifference of the shark’s eye.

“Too high,” murmured Mr. White Coat, looking at the monitor.

“First something to relax you.” Claire slides the needle into my arm. I look at Razor. He looks away.

“Better,” White Coat says.

“I don’t care what you do to me,” I tell Vosch. My tongue feels bloated, clumsy.

“It doesn’t matter.” He nods at Claire, who picks up the second syringe.

“Inserting the hub on my mark,” she says.

The hub?

“Uh-oh,” White Coat says. “Careful.” Eyeing the monitor as my heart rate kicks up a notch.

“Don’t be afraid,” Vosch says. “It won’t harm you.” Claire gives him a startled look. He shrugs. “Well. We ran tests.” He flicks his finger at her:
Get on with it.

I weigh ten million tons. My bones are iron; the rest is stone. I don’t feel the needle slide into my arm. Claire says, “
Mark,
” and White Coat clicks the stopwatch. The world is a clock.

“The dead have their reward,” Vosch says. “It is the living—you and I—who still have work to do. Call it what you like, fate, luck, providence. You have been delivered into my hands to be my instrument.”

“Appending to the cerebral cortex.” From Claire. Her voice sounds muffled, as if my ears have been stuffed with cotton. I roll my head toward her. A thousand years go by.

“You’ve seen one before,” Vosch says, a thousand miles away. “In the testing room, on the day you arrived at Camp Haven. We told you it was an infestation of an alien life-form attached to the human brain. That was a lie.”

I can hear Razor breathing, loud, like a diver’s breath through a regulator.

“It is actually a microscopic command hub affixed to the prefrontal lobe of your brain,” Vosch says. “A CPU, if you will.”

“Booting up,” Claire says. “Looking good.”

“Not to control
you
 . . . ,” Vosch says.

“Introducing first array.” Needle glinting in fluorescent light. Black specks suspended in amber fluid. I feel nothing as she injects it into my vein.

“But to coordinate the forty thousand or so mechanized guests to which you will play host.”

“Temp ninety-nine point six,” White Coat says.

Razor beside me breathing.

“It took the prehistoric rats millions of years and a thousand generations to reach the current stage in human evolution,” Vosch says. “It will take you days to achieve the next.”

“Link with the first array complete,” Claire says, bending over me again. Bitter almond breath. “Introducing second array.”

The room is furnace-hot. I’m drenched in sweat. White Coat announces that my temperature is one hundred and two.

“It’s a messy business, evolution,” Vosch says. “Many false starts and blind alleys. Some candidates aren’t suitable hosts. Their immune systems crash or they suffer from permanent cognitive dissonance. In layman’s terms, they go mad.”

I’m burning. My veins are filled with fire. Water flows from my eyes, trickles down my temples, pools in my ears. I see Vosch’s face leaning over the surface of the undulating sea of my tears.

“But I have faith in you, Marika. You did not come through fire and blood only to fall now. You will be the bridge that connects what-was to what-will-be.”

“We’re losing her,” White Coat calls out, tremble-voiced.

“No,” Vosch murmurs, cool hand on my wet cheek. “We have saved her.”

58

THERE IS NO DAY
or night anymore, only the sterile glow of the fluorescent lights, and those lights never go out. I measure the hours by Razor’s visits, three times a day to deliver meals I can’t keep down.

They can’t control my fever. Can’t stabilize my blood pressure. Can’t subdue my nausea. My body is rejecting the eleven arrays designed to augment each of my biological systems, each array consisting of four thousand units, which makes a total of forty-four thousand microscopic robotic invaders coursing through my bloodstream.

I feel like shit.

After every breakfast, Claire comes in to examine me, tinker with my meds, and make cryptic remarks like,
You better start feeling better. The window of opportunity is closing.
Or snide ones like,
I’m starting to think the whole very-big-rock idea was the right way to go.
She seems to resent that I’ve reacted badly to her pumping me full of forty thousand alien mechanisms.

“It’s not like there’s anything you can do about it,” she told me once. “The procedure is irreversible.”

“There is one thing.”

“What? Oh. Sure. Ringer the irreplaceable.” She pulled the kill switch device from her lab coat pocket and held it up. “Got you keyed in. I’ll push the button. Go ahead. Tell me to push the button.” Smirking.

“Push the button.”

She laughed softly. “It’s amazing. Whenever I start wondering what he sees in you, you say something like that.”

“Who? Vosch?”

Her smile faded. Her eyes went shark-eyed blank. “We will terminate the upgrade if you can’t adjust.”

Terminate the upgrade.

She peeled the bandages away from my knuckles. No scabs, no bruises, no scars. As if it hadn’t happened. As if I’d never pounded my fist into the wall until the skin split down to the bone. I thought of Vosch appearing in my room completely healed, days after I smashed his nose and gave him two black eyes. And Sullivan, who told the story of Evan Walker torn apart by shrapnel and yet, somehow, hours later, able to infiltrate and take out an entire military installation by himself.

First they took Marika and made her Ringer. Now they’ve taken Ringer and “upgraded” her into someone completely different. Someone like
them.

Or some
thing.

There is no day or night anymore, only a constant sterile glow.

59

“WHAT HAVE THEY
done to me?” I ask Razor one day when he carts in another inedible meal. I don’t expect an answer, but he’s expecting me to ask the question. It must strike him as weird that I haven’t.

He shrugs, avoiding my gaze. “Let’s see what’s on the menu today. Oooh. Meat loaf! Lucky duck.”

“I’m going to vomit.”

His eyes widen. “Really?” He looks around for the plastic upchuck container, desperate.

“Please, take the tray away. I can’t.”

He frowns. “They’ll pull the plug on you if you don’t get your shit together.”

“They could have done this to anyone,” I say. “Why did they do it to me?”

“Maybe you’re special.”

I shake my head and answer as if he were serious. “No. I think it’s because someone else is. Do you play chess?”

Startled: “Play what?”

“Maybe we could play. When I’m feeling better.”

“I’m more of a baseball guy.”

“Really? I would have guessed swimming. Or tennis.”

He cocks his head. His eyebrows come together. “You must be feeling bad. Making conversation like you’re halfway human.”

“I
am
halfway human. Literally. The other half . . .” I shrug. It coaxes out a grin.

“Oh, the 12th System is definitely theirs,” he says.

The 12th System?
What did that mean exactly? I’m not sure, but I suspect it’s in reference to the eleven normal systems of the human body.

“We found a way to yank them out of Teds’ bodies and . . .” Razor trails off, gives the camera an abashed look. “Anyway, you have to eat. I overheard them talking about a feeding tube.”

“So that’s the official story? Like Wonderland: We’re using their technology against them. And you believe that.”

He leans against the wall, crosses his arms over his chest, and hums “Follow the Yellow Brick Road.” I shake my head. Amazing. It isn’t that the lies are too beautiful to resist. It’s that the truth is too hideous to face.

“Commander Vosch is implanting bombs inside children. He’s turning kids into IEDs,” I tell him. He hums louder. “Little kids. Toddlers. They’re separated when they come in, aren’t they? They were at Camp Haven. Anyone younger than five is carted off and you never see them again. Have you seen any? Where are the children, Razor? Where are they?”

He stops humming long enough to say, “Shut up, Dorothy.”

“And does that make sense: loading up a Dorothy with superior alien technology? If command decided to ‘enhance’ people for the war, do you really think it would pick the crazy ones?”

“I don’t know. They picked you, didn’t they?” He grabs the tray of untouched food and heads for the door.

“Don’t go.”

He turns, surprised. My face is hot. The fever must be spiking. That has to be it.

“Why?” he asks.

“You’re the only honest person I have left to talk to.”

He laughs. It’s a good laugh, authentic, unforced; I like it, but I am feverish. “Who says I’m honest?” he asks. “We’re all enemies in disguise, right?”

“My father used to tell this story about six blind men and an elephant. One man felt the elephant’s leg and said an elephant must look like a pillar. Another felt the trunk and said an elephant must look like a tree branch. Blind guy number three felt the tail and said an elephant is like a rope. Fourth guy feels the belly: The elephant is like a wall. Fifth guy, ear: The elephant is shaped like a fan. Sixth guy, a tusk, so an elephant must be like a pipe.”

Razor stares at me stone-faced for a long moment, then smiles. It’s a good smile; I like it, too.

“That’s a beautiful story. You should tell it at parties.”

“The point is,” I tell him, “from the moment their ship appeared, we’ve all been blind men patting an elephant.”