Cronix (36 page)

“We struggled at first,” the boy said. “There's no technology allowed in the Zone. But there are ruined cities, buried electronic treasures. It took me years, but I managed to build myself a transfer engine. I couldn't get out, but I was damned if I was going to die here.”

The pie-bald boy fell silent. Oriente realized the kid was embarrassed by the implications of the story, which were not lost on him.

“Who did she…did you leach?” he asked. The boy winced and lapsed defensively into the first person plural.

“We … we felt it was imperative to survive,” he said. “There was a small child in the neighborhood whose mother had died in childbirth and whose father drowned in a fishing boat accident. No one wanted him, so we took him…”

“And erased his mind. Like you did with Glenn,” Oriente finished Laura 1167’s sentence for him. The boy nodded silently.

“And it just went on from there,” he said. “We didn’t want to hurt the parents whose children we took, so we’d leach the kids and then return them to their homes. Sometimes the family realized, sometimes not. We’d pretend to be a child, living a peasant’s life within a family, and every so often we’d steal away at night and meet here, in the cathedral. As our numbers grew, we became more confident, could reassure ourselves that what we were doing was right. No, not right, but at least justified. But the villagers suspected, they believed there was some kind of vampire that lived in the vaults, sucking the souls out of their children. Luckily, by the time they twigged to what was happening, some of us were already grown up and held positions of influence in the community, and could stop them from carrying out a purge. But still, they burned the vaults several times, thinking it was some kind of evil lair.”

Oriente stared at the boy, trying to grasp the horror that must have gripped this community over the years. An infestation of soul-sucking vampires in their midst, not knowing who had already been taken. He remembered the crone’s by the lake, who said the geese should be offered up instead of their children. He shuddered at what Laura had become. Yet there was more to come.

“There are complexities involved in any replication, especially an ad hoc one carried out under the constant threat of annihilation by the GoDD,” the piebald boy said in his confessional monotone.

Inhabiting the bodies snatched from the local population meant Laura’s new iterations also inherited random, physical peculiarities from the donors: some of the boys grew into men with extremely high sex drives, while others were overweight and disinclined to work: Laura 867 turned out to be so psychotically violent that she had to be killed by her fellow tribe members, for their own safety. Some were murdered by relatives of the host body who became suspicious at the sudden change in personality: Laura 59 was beaten to death during an exorcism. Soon afterwards, burnings on the
zocalo,
or cathedral square, were not uncommon. A few of those sent to the stake weren't even Lauras, but villagers with strange character quirks. Laura 77 was famously lynched as a heretic when she tried to explain to the indigenous community what was really happening, and that the 'gods' they worshipped were in fact simulations created by a post-human intelligence floating off the shoulder of the planet.

Slowly, though, Laura reached a critical mass that allowed her to wrest control of the community and calm its worst violence.

But even as the Tribe of One expanded, the integrity of its central character was being diluted, twisted into variants on a central theme, like a shirt losing its color after repeated washes. A class system started to evolve: those female iterations who most resembled the original Laura – wiry, nervous, intelligent – judged themselves “purer” than those who had less in common with her. Filtered through testosterone, blubber, indolence and abstinence, impregnated with memories from imperfectly leached childhood minds, some of these iterations started to suffer identity crises, doubting they were in fact either worthy of the name, or even interested in being part of this clan whose members lived under constant threat from the gods above or the population around them. One tried to escape, and made it as far as the canals of Xochimilco before being hunted down and executed for desertion by the wrathful tribe, fearful its secret could be betrayed.

And of course the incessant bifurcation of her soul could not prevent the original Laura from one day succumbing to the laws of nature she had managed to outrun for so long.

“Laura – Laura One, that is -- died at the age of eighty-seven,” said the young man hollowly. “I never knew her of course. Only one of us actually remembers her, Laura 1008, and she’s senile.”

“We all remember her,” a voice cut in from the doorway and a slim young woman came in.

“We all are her, and she is us,” she said, as though reciting a mantra. The woman glared at the boy, who shrank back. Oriente recognized her as the one who had first addressed him by his old name, Lyle, when he was still trapped inside the goose's body.

“Leave us now,” she ordered the boy, and he scuttled off. Clearly in the hierarchy, this was a “pure” Laura. She came up to Oriente.

“It’s been a long time, hasn’t it?” He was disturbed by her knowing smile, and flinched slightly when she put her hand up and rested her fingertips lightly on his cheeks.

“Lyle,” she whispered, staring into his eyes, that strange smile still on her lips. “Do you remember…when we were kids our mother…maybe you were too young to remember this, but…”

Oriente pulled back, leaving her hand outstretched in the air. She looked hurt. His heart was tripping over itself, racing some amorphous fear that lurked in the shadows of his consciousness.

“I’m not Lyle,” he said. “Whatever you think you remember, we never
were
those kids. Those aren’t us. My name is Luis Oriente. I’m not sure what yours is.”

He tried to control his breathing, wondered if she’d noticed his incipient panic attack. She was still staring, tenderness slipping into mistrust. To his relief, she turned away, as though embarrassed.

“You can’t stay here,” she said.

“What? You just dragged me across the Atlantic in the bodies of a bunch geese and now you’re telling me I have to go?”

“It’s too dangerous here,” she said, her voice hard again, commanding. “One of us is killed almost every week, one way or another. The lifespan of tribe members is horrifically short. That’s the reason there are so many of us -- safety in numbers. We have to keep scavenging for spare parts for the resurrection engines. Three have been destroyed already. The attrition rate for machines and humans here is simply awful.”

Her supreme confidence appeared to have deserted her. “I’m sorry we had to do this to you. I know it must be extremely…disorienting. Don’t think we don’t appreciate what you’ve done.”

“What exactly have I done, Laura? Except contribute to the annihilation of whatever poor sap whose body I'm now inhabiting? Why did you drag me all this way over here?”

“You might not believe this,” she said, “but to be honest, we don’t exactly know ourselves.” She saw the anger rising in him and hurried on. “We got messages from GoDD. From one of their projected deities, some kind of a man with a stag's head. It told us someone would be sending you over here, in avian form, and that we should be ready to extract you.”

“And you never asked why?”

“Of course we did. But the thing just disappeared after delivering its message, to prepare for you arrival, then escort you to the northern wall.”

“The wall?” Oriente felt the ground slipping beneath his feet. “Are you insane? The DPP'll arrest me if I go back. Why the hell would they want me to go there? And who are ‘they’ anyway?”

Laura 1124 shrugged. “We’ve discussed it among ourselves for the past few months. The only thing we can come up with is
they
want you to be decarnated. This was the only way to ensure you’d go topside. Otherwise, the authorities might well have just let you go again after they’d established who you were.”

This is a trap, Oriente realized. He had to think his way out of it, to cut through the fear in his head and come up with a clear plan. Could he dredge up his inner Lyle, parlay those ancient memories for her sympathy? But he knew he could not do it. He had spent too long suppressing that part of him to simply trot it now. Make a run for it? He'd die out here in the Zone, even if he could get away from these freaks.

“Listen,” the young woman said, interrupting his feverish stream of thoughts.” There was one other thing the messenger said before it vanished. It said that for millennia, god had lived in the minds of people. Now it would be the other way round.”

Oriente stared blankly at her, before his anger flared again. It was as though she were being deliberately obscure. “That’s it? What are you, the Delphi Oracle? What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

She threw up her hands, then clasped them over her chest. It was the very same gesture he had first seen when Laura – the original, the
real
one, if such a term even applied any more -- emerged from the house on the plains, after she had slashed his car tires. “I don’t know,” she said. “I guess you’ll find out. Unless you know of some other way out of the Zone.”

He knew he was out of options. She turned to leave. “You leave tomorrow. At dawn,” she said.

“Wait,” Oriente grabbed her shoulder and she turned. “The wolf that lured me out of the woods. It said Laura was right. What did it mean?”

She appeared suddenly hopeful. “It did?” She shook her head. “I don’t know what that means. Except…maybe”

“Except what?” he said.

“You remember back in Kansas, at the bus station…you were leaving us, before everything went horribly wrong. I told you that I was right, that there was a god. And that we were it.”

Oriente’s eyebrows shot up. “You think this is the work of god? You still cling to that nonsense, after all this time?” The girl stood there defiantly, reminding him again of the old Laura.

“Something's happened,” she said. “Something’s changed. We all feel it. The message, you being here … Maybe there is hope. Maybe whatever it is that is doing all this can get me out of here. You can help, if you go airside. You can tell them Stiney's a liar, that I’m not some crazy person, I was there in the house on the plains…”

“You know what?” barked Oriente. “I already told them about you. At the Delpy Institute. I was surprised none of them had ever heard of you. Maybe they'd didn't believe me, who knows? But do you see the cavalry coming to get you out of here? Christ, the way things in London were going, they may not even be able to save themselves. It's too late. No one's coming, and you'll be distilling yourself through murdered children until you don't even know who you are any more.”

She looked utterly crushed. He pushed past her, into the dim-lit tunnel passage. When he emerged into the half-light of the deserted cathedral, Oriente sat by the overgrown alter, cradled his head in his hands and wept.

***

They left at dawn, Oriente and three members of the tribe: Laura 1167, with his mottled skin and hesitant manner; a young girl whose Laura-ranking Oriente forgot as soon as he was told it. The third traveling companion was a lean man who in his thirties who said next to nothing to any of them. He was the group’s guide and de facto leader, and was introduced only as Gutran: Oriente was not sure if he was one of the Lauras who had opted for a different name or whether he was a hired hand. He always walked some distance ahead, scouting and avoiding conversation. At nightfall, he disappeared as soon as Oriente had collapsed under a tree, either to hunt, or to keep guard.

It was hard going, and Oriente was grateful for his young regenerated body. The Tribe of One were used to long treks from their foraging expeditions, but Oriente found himself drained at the end of each day, barely able to make conversation around the camp fire. Laura 1167 seemed keen to talk, especially when they were alone: the kid was desperate to hear stories about Laura, stories from the old days, as though to offset any doubts about his hand-me-down personality. Oriente noticed some of the characteristics of the Laura he had once known, in particular the sense of guilt he had come to recognize in the latter days, after Lyle’s execution. But he could detect little of the acerbic wit or hard-edged determination of the original. Cautiously, he encouraged the boy to assert his own personality, told him that he, Oriente, had also been born of others’ characters and memories but had forged his own identity. The kid hung on every word, and Oriente sensed there was something he desperately wanted to share.

The only break in the tedium of the endless march was when the other Laura was bitten by a rattlesnake. Gutran killed the creature with his stick, inspected it and shook his head: the venom was beyond his control. The girl died hours later.

“Thank goodness it wasn’t you,” 1167 said. Oriente glared at him.

“Or me,” the boy added, and Oriente felt his fury dissipate into sadness.

***

He didn’t notice the wall at first. Its very size helped camouflage it, hijacking the horizon and cloaking itself in its shimmering lines like a hunter in his hide. It was only when Gutran stopped and squinted into the distance that Oriente was able to discern the watch towers poking through the heat haze.

“How long before we get there?” asked Oriente. He had been dreading this day.