Cronix (35 page)

***

Hours, maybe days later, Oriente awoke. He felt heavy and slow, and imagined it was due to the after-effects of anesthesia. But he quickly realized it was as much the fact of being human again, of not being a hollow-boned bird designed for flight, which accounted for this heaviness. Slowly, he pulled himself slowly upright and surveyed his new body.

“It’s okay, the operation was a complete success.” A boy’s voice, coming from behind him. He turned and saw a young native sitting in the corner, watching over the patient. “If you can call it an operation, in this place. It was more of a basic chip transfer, and a pretty primitive one at that.”

“Thank god for that,” croaked Oriente. He did not recognize his own voice, just knew it was his, expressing his thoughts. Relief flooded him: he had made it, was still here. He wanted to talk, to move, to explore his new voice and body. From the feel of it, the body was youthful and limber: he could sense the tension of muscle and sinew.

The boy strolled over and proffered a cup of water. He was round-faced and olive-skinned, but his right cheek and forehead were plastered in piebald pink splotches which gave him the vague look of a guinea pig. Oriente drank the cup off gratefully. “How long was I out for?”

“A day,” said the boy, staring intently. “More or less.”

“No complications? I mean, I never had to be reconstituted from six birds before.” He laughed at the absurdity of the concept.

“Oh, you weren’t,” said the young man. “It seems they just told you that to reassure you. In fact, your whole mind was stored in each goose. The other five were just for insurance.”

Oriente stared at the boy for a second, laugh fading, as he realized what he was saying. “Wait, there were
six
of me? What happened to the other five?”

With an apologetic shrug, the boy made a gesture with his hands of wringing a bird’s neck. “Would you really want six of you hanging around?” he offered by way of consolation. “I can tell you for sure, it's tricky.”

“Which…which one am I?
”



The boy spread his hands. “Does it matter? Now, please come with me, we have important business to attend to.” He turned for the door, the one that led back into the dark passage.

“Now wait one goddam minute here,” Oriente said. “I’ve been jerked round from pillar to post, pulled out of my pleasant life in the woods and attacked by a wolf, arrested by the DPP, forced to recount my entire fucking life story to utter strangers, then turned into a flock of geese like some dupe in a fairy tale, most of which you then killed without the slightest shred of mercy. I’ll be damned if I’m just going follow you anywhere, son. Not until you tell me who the hell you people are, and what you want with me.”

He was shouting by the time he finished and stood there, breathing hard. Unexpectedly, the young man smiled.

“You mean you haven’t guessed who I am yet?”

Oriente stared at him, his chest still heavy. “No! How the hell should I know who you are? Monte-fucking-zuma?”

The young man smiled beatifically. “I’m Laura.”

***

A long silence hung between them. Oriente felt like he still occupied the tiny brain of a goose, while the strange boy laughed at his dumbfounded expression. But then his expression changed too. He reached out and touched Oriente’s cheek.

“I
am
Laura,” the boy repeated. “And you … you’re my brother Lyle. Or at least, part of you is.” The boy teared up and looked away.

Oriente stood gaping.
“Laura?”
he eventually managed. The youth looked up, nodded shyly.

“If you’re Laura, then who are all those other people I saw earlier? Are they your followers or something?”

The young man smiled again, as though wondering how best to explain. “When I say I’m Laura, well, technically I’m Laura 1167. And all those people you saw earlier, they are Laura too. The woman who spoke to you first? Laura 1124. She’s kind of a leader of this generation.”

“I don’t understand,” Oriente said. To be honest, he almost felt like he didn't want to understand, that this world was too strange and taxing to ever have any reasonable explanation.

“We are all iterations of Laura,” said the youth. “I'm one of the younger ones, but there are already others after me. There is a Laura 1169 already. Some have given themselves other names, but most of us, when we are together, stick to a number.” He saw Oriente still staring at him, a picture of incomprehension.

“We call ourselves the Tribe of One,” he said.

It had started, he said, after the creature still carrying Glenn Rose's passport fled the house on the plains with Laura’s help, when Fitch and Stiney believed it had unlocked all the secrets they needed. Laura – the original, whom Oriente had known as a simple mortal – had finished building the first virtual human settlement.

She was being acclaimed as a genius by the select few who knew of the project, but glory sat uneasily with her. Part of her had collapsed when Glenn unwittingly erased the last chance her brother had of dodging that lethal injection in Texas. She smothered her grief in work, elaborating on that first environment for the Immortals, populated by Haitian guinea pigs whose voodoo
houngons
had sold their souls to the rich Yankees. It was a miserable place, reminiscent of early New World settlements where criminals and indentured servants were dumped on hostile shores to either carve out a new home or die, and whose squalid villages were so often found empty when the sailing ships returned a year or two later.

It was to this unwelcoming environment, pixilated and barren, that Fitch had fled when his doctors showed him the X-ray scans of his lungs, smudged with grey shadows. The cancer had already spread to his throat and tongue. Fitch had been unfazed at first. After all, he knew from Glenn Rose's case that a successful download had already been done. But it had not been so simple: there were flaws in the programming, things none of them had foreseen. With the creature gone who knew where, Fitch lost his cool. He submitted to chemotherapy, radiotherapy, steroids, the knife. When those failed to halt the disease, he submitted to that gloomy first afterworld he had helped create.

Inside his own machine, alongside the betrayed spirits of Cité Soleil, he worked desperately to perfect the download formula that would allow him to escape. His only contact with the outside world was when Stiney or Laura donned the helmet that Glenn had once used to enter the simulacrum. He ordered his disease-ravaged body to be cryogenically frozen, hoping that by the time he had worked through the glitch, a more effective treatment might have been developed. His knew own body would be the most compatible receptacle for his uploaded mind, just as Glenn’s had been for his hybrid psyche.

And when that first bubble of immortality had suddenly imploded, fusing its terrified inhabitants into one tortured, mangled virtual creature – the terrifying Haitian Voodoo Head of tabloid legend – Fitch had simply vanished.

Laura was haunted by the images that occasionally flickered at random upon computer screens across the globe, ghosts sucked down the vortex of the Internet: a twisted face would flash up in front of a shocked teen in Ohio, or terrify a hapless online shopper in Sydney, then vanish into the ether again. Laura hunted those images, looking for any sign that her friend and mentor was still in there, salvageable as her kid brother had not been. But no sign ever came, and the Haitian experiment was shut down and hushed up.

Eventually, Laura's team managed to stabilize the virtual environment and Stiney unlocked the downloads. The Exodus had begun.

But for Fitch, it was too late: his body was removed from its liquid nitrogen sarcophagus and buried with state honors at Arlington, as befitted the hero who delivered humankind from its worst fears.

They were all heroes, their names to be forever inscribed in the annals of history. But Laura wanted nothing to do with eternal glory, far less the media spotlight. Eaten up by remorse and guilt at losing first her brother and then Fitch, she let Stiney take all the credit as the savior of humanity. She asked the Colonel to keep her name out of the limelight, to airbrush her out of all the official history. Reluctantly, he deleted all record of her project.

“That was why the scientists in London had never heard of you,” said Oriente, interrupting the boy's story. The youth nodded, his expression angry for the first time.

For while Stiney basked in the limelight, Laura spent her days in a lonely trawl of the Internet, seeking any trace of the Voodoo Head. The haunting images became a minor phenomenon discussed in chat rooms by geeks oblivious to their true significance. It was in these forums that the legend began, fuelled by Laura’s obsessive questioning of anyone who reported a sighting. The newspapers picked up on it, slapped a label on it, and for a time there was a public outcry about the dangers of uploading. But thanks to the Colonel, no one could ever confirm the story. And besides, the afterworlds were working perfectly by now.

Despite the fact that civilization was unraveling by the day, Laura refused to leave Earth: it would mean quitting her search for Fitch. It was only the terrible pestilence – which the conspiracy theorists claimed was unleashed by Eternals, worried their countries would be occupied by those who spurned the afterlife – that convinced her to join the Exodus.

She was unimpressed by the delights of eternity. Instead, she spent years tormented by her failure. When it was deemed safe for people to return to Earth, she was among the first to volunteer, scouring disused nexuses of the old Internet, dissecting long inactive servers, desperately seeking anything that might hold a trace of Fitch. She contracted every tech-nerd and carpet beater she could find and when her allotted time on Earth expired and she returned airside, she still paid her agents to continue the search. It was finally in Taiwan that he relentless search paid off.

The data was in a long-defunct hub, discovered by a graduate researcher who mistook it for an ancient horror film and showed it to few friends. One of whom told Laura’s carpet beater about the hallucinatory footage of screaming souls, howling in a language none of the Chinese could identify.

Laura bought the data package on the spot and spent the last of her funds setting up a private world where she could dissect it in private. She hired dozens of researchers to help her decode the material, and when her money ran out she approached her old fellow-hero Frank Stiney for help.

From the start, Stiney was skeptical, and appeared leery of even meeting Laura. He had actively fed the myth that he was the sole survivor of Project Exodus, and appeared worried that an obsessive Laura might resort to blackmail him to get what she wanted. Still, he refused to help: Doug was dead, he told her, and better off so: even if she could resurrect him, he would be a warped shadow of his old self, nothing like the man they had known. Destroy the data package, he said: let Doug rest in peace.

But she couldn’t. Alone in her private world – her researchers had all quit when the money ran out – she set about separating the various strands of personalities fused in the Voodoo Head. And to her amazement, they started to emerge, one by one: P’tit Kwisnel, the Haitian share-cropper Glenn had met inside the VR helmet, was the first. Still confused, he asked her if she had seen his family. She teased out a succession of other ghosts, dupes of their voodoo priests, all of them stunted and paired down versions of their former selves. She feared Stiney was right, but she never got to find out. Before she could separate the digital traces of Doug Fitch, her private world was shut down and she was arrested by the DPP.

The severity of the charges took her by surprise: tampering with unauthorized personalities was viewed by the DPP as potential cause for Dormition, since such unlicensed entities were usually only built for exploitation in snuff worlds, or to be covertly shipped to Earth for the jaded palates of murder connoisseurs. Laura explained she was simply trying to extract strands of personalities lost in long-forgotten experiment, but of course there was no official record of any such project, or of her part in it. The Colonel had erased Haiti, and her, from the files. She was just some random crazy woman to the DPP. She cited Stiney as a witness, but he denied any knowledge of her: Laura suspected it was he who tipped off the DPP in the first place. He had more than enough influence to push such a case through – maybe he wanted rid of her altogether. The Colonel would know, though, she told them: but loyal to his ancient oath of secrecy, the old soldier declined to make any comment on the case. The Taipei carpet beater had ducked out of sight as soon as the authorities got involved. The only other person who had known of the case was Fitch himself: she challenged the DPP to continue her work and see if they could resurrect the last remaining personalities from the fused hub of ancient data.

Instead, the bureaucrats erased the files. Laura was sentenced to the Zone.

“The sentence of death through life,” the boy said, staring at Oriente.

“I had no idea,” Oriente said. It sounded like an apology, and he supposed it was. All those years he had been hiding out, fleeing the moving cogs of history, Laura had been suffering her own purgatory, both in the Orbiters and now back on Earth.

“How did she…sorry, did
you
come to be…” he couldn’t think of any words to describe the situation. “... this?”