Paradox (21 page)

“Okay,” Ana says quickly. Questions, she can do. “Tell me, why did we go into the sim? What did we hope to find in there?”

“New information,” Todd says. “Something, anything, we’d missed when we were actually on the planet. To help us crack the disease.”

“Experience, discover, survive,”
Ana whispers, thinking of the instructions she found in the rocket hatch. “But, Todd, it’s only a simulation. What new information could we hope to learn from it?”

Todd shakes his head weakly. “The sim is more than just code. It’s a real-time experience shaped moment by moment through satellite feeds and probes and the new ParSpace
transmission tech. Even user memory affects the grid. It’s an immersive and dynamic construction, cutting-edge stuff.”

“So by going back to the source of the disease, we hoped we could uncover some type of cure?”

Todd nods. “Or something to lead us there. Anything that would help. We were supposed to follow the path we took after APEX2 landed on the planet. Submerge, gather the information, and get out. What could be simpler? Although Chen and Ysa took some persuading; they didn’t want to go back, not even in the sim.”

“They seemed so familiar with the planet,” Ana whispers. “No wonder. They hadn’t been there all along, like I thought—they had been there before, and they were back. Only … not back. Since it wasn’t real …” She trails off, her mind tangling into knots, confusion still threatening to overwhelm her. “So we all made this decision to go back in, really?”

“We did. But you … well.”

Ana looks up. “What about me?”

“You took it a step further. The simulation is rooted in the mind. It builds around existing constructs, forms around what the user already knows, inserting new and updated information as needed. You thought—what if the information we’re looking for is small, or if it’s something easily overlooked? What if the sim doesn’t overwrite or update properly, and we miss it?”

“But if someone was a clean slate …”

“Right,” Todd agrees, coughing and shifting in place. “If
someone went in with absolutely no baseline, a first-timer, they’d get the most accurate, up-to-date rendering of the place. The idea was for you to do the route alone, just using the map as your guide. With no preexisting expectations, you figured you would see more details, especially any
new
details.”

Ana’s mind is reeling. It’s almost more than she can take in.

“Honestly?” Todd continues. “I think maybe you had other reasons, too, for wanting the memory wipe. That this was just part of it. But in any case, Pritchett agreed. They were so desperate they would have tried anything. Our ‘trial’ was a twenty-eight-hour stretch, a half cycle of what goes for daylight on the planet—Torus’s sunrise to sunsmeet. Zero hour was the auto-eject. Meanwhile they could monitor our vitals and see everything we did.” He closes his eyes, then opens them, looking directly into hers. “We got ready to go in, and you took the wipe. Surgical amnesia. Boom.”

“Wait a minute, though,” Ana says. “
You
had amnesia, too. How come you remember all this and I’m still blank? How did you get it all back?”

“No,” he says, glancing quickly away. “I didn’t get the wipe at all. I lied about that. I’m sorry.”

“What are you talking about? Then why did you tell me you did?”

“I just … wanted you to feel more at ease. It seemed to make sense at the time. Then with the worm after us, it made sense to ditch the original solo plan and stick together. And once I’d started, I had to keep going with the amnesia story.
For the sake of the mission, you know, to preserve the original experiment.”

Ana can tell right away that there’s something he isn’t telling her. But one thing’s definitely true—Todd never had amnesia. And if he lied about that, what else was he faking? She has a flash of orange sunlight playing across his hair, kindling it gold and copper. She shakes her head, horrified that she can no longer even trust her own memories, sparse though they are—
it was all make-believe, all in my head … in more ways than one
!—and pulls herself back to the present.

Todd groans softly and Ana sees blood gathering in his left ear. Above his head, the readout shows 85.3%. His back jerks suddenly and he starts flapping his hands in front of his face. “No! Don’t let it come any closer! LET ME GO!” His back arches and Ana throws herself on top of him, heart pounding, steadying his face with her hands.

“Todd,” she cries, “keep fighting it. Keep talking. Come on! Tell me about the disease, Todd—the new mutation.
Vermiletum-V
. Is that what finally broke through our immunity?”

“No,” Todd says weakly. He’s back. For now, at least. “We went into the sim clean. We all carried the disease, of course, but it was inactive. What are you doing on top of me?”

Ana laughs shakily, rolls off, and scoots next to him on the bed. “What do you mean the disease was inactive? We were immune, then we weren’t? That doesn’t make any sense, unless … The only new variable is the simulation. Maybe there
was
something new there. Something that reversed the immunity, made us susceptible?”

Todd’s nose is bleeding again, and she sees a trickle starting from his left ear. “Something was there, all right,” he says. “The worm. We went and landed on Paradox after all these millions of years, digging around the worm droppings, and we set those killer spores loose and brought them back to Earth and now there’s
no way to stop it!

“Paradox.” He laughs bitterly. “A fully habitable planet down to the oxygen in the air and water under the ground. Even the land formations! And then? It turns out to be not only uninhabitable but downright malignant, since it comes equipped with a mystery bug that kills everybody who sets foot there.”

“So the worm is the new variable,” Ana says. Her mind is working and she’s suddenly seized by an urgent sense of something she might almost figure out if she tried hard enough. “Let’s think about this, Todd. You said the simulation is shaped not only by satellite feed but also by our minds, right? Our memories? Okay, so
Vermiletum
lives in the brain’s memory center. And going into the sim is like going directly into our own brains … Do you think
we
brought
Vermiletum
into the sim with us?”

Todd’s eyes narrow, then widen in realization. “You mean the worm in the sim might be a physical manifestation of the disease in our minds? I don’t know.”

“And what about the disease itself? Think about Ysa and Chen. They shouldn’t have died in that simulation. The
Vermiletum
must have been warping the land formations, messing
with our minds—not to mention pumping in those fear attacks, just like all the other victims had in the real world.”
Just like you’re fighting off right now
, she thinks, and her heart breaks a little more.

But Todd is nodding. “It makes sense. Somehow going into the simulation reversed our immunity and activated the disease. We all caught it. Except for you.” He coughs again.

“Except for me,” Ana agrees. “And I think I know why: the memory wipe. Think about it: on the mountain, when the worm had us trapped in front of the cave, it ignored me, went right by me. Remember that? I thought it was chance, or lack of peripheral vision. But what if it was actually my lack of memory?”

“And when we first met, when I pulled you out of the crater?” he asks.

“What if it wasn’t tracking me at all that time? What if it was after you?” She shakes her head, wrings her hands together. “What if it couldn’t sense me at all? Maybe being wiped actually preserved my immunity!”

Todd is shaking his head. “Not for long, though. Don’t you see, Ana? You started out blank, but
you can’t stay that way
. You can’t live without making memories.”

Memories. Ana thinks about the little shreds of herself that she’s gathered since first waking up from the wipe. Oddly, some of the first—and clearest, strongest—ones weren’t even hers, they were Bailey’s.

Oh
.

The memory strands suddenly make perfect sense. While Ana’s mind was connected to the sim, Bailey’s disease-amplified brainwaves found her. Were they drawn to Ana in particular because of her wide-open, empty mind?

“You’re right,” she whispers.

Todd looks up at her so sadly. “Everything you do, every passing moment, you’re forming new memories. If your theory is right, then the more time passes, the more susceptible you are.”

Just then, as if to underscore his words, a cough bubbles up in Ana’s chest. It’s
wrong
, that cough, and when she pulls her hand away from her mouth, it’s sticky with blood. Todd’s right. The memory wipe didn’t preserve her immunity; it just delayed it. She just took longer to develop the infection.

Frantically wiping her hand on her jeans, she glances at Todd’s display monitor: 87.2%. What percentage would her own screen show if she were still connected? How far along is her infection, just now starting to show symptoms?

“I hoped … you would never …” He coughs again, his breathing rough and heavy.

“Todd,” she says. She pulls her sleeve up around her hand and tries to wipe the blood from his face. There’s more of it now, so much it’s hard to tell where it’s all coming from. She rubs at his cheeks, his eyes, knowing it’s a losing battle, knowing more will just take its place.

Time freezes as Todd looks at her with those eyes that led her across Paradox, reaches up to stroke her cheek with the hand that pulled her out of the lava pit. The world is dead,
she is dying, neither of them will last the day. But they have right now.

And suddenly, it’s all so clear: O+O. Oslow and Ortez.

She gets it.

“Why did you let me do it?” she whispers. “Why would you let me wipe away our past?”

Todd looks confused.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” she continues. “About us, I mean?”

His eyes go wide and he slowly shakes his head.

“I love you, Todd,” she says. “I’ve always loved you. How could I ever forget that?” She leans toward him, but he lifts his hand and places it gently on her chest.

“No,” he whispers.

“What do you mean,
no
?”

“No, you don’t love me.”

She draws back. “What are you talking about?”

“It was never like that for you. Those … feelings were always on my side, Ana. You saw the O+O I wrote on your letter from Pritchett? That was our joke—we were pals, business-partners-to-be, best friends, nothing more. You wiped your memory because there wasn’t anything you didn’t mind forgetting. You wanted me to take the wipe, too, but I couldn’t let it go. Couldn’t let
you
go.”

Ana remembers the flash of memory she had while coming through Savitech’s main doors—her younger self coming through those doors with Todd, the longing look in his eyes, and her own oblivious preoccupation. Could he be right?

Todd swallows and says, “But then we were in the sim, and
I saw the way you looked at me, as if you’d never seen me before, like I was someone special, and I thought, ‘Maybe we could start again.’ ”

So this is what he’d been hedging about earlier, the real reason he’d pretended to have amnesia.

“But …”
I did
, she wants to say.
I did fall in love with you
. Except now she’s confused. She
didn’t
love him before? This rush of feeling, her love for Todd, has all the resonance of anything true and certain that she’s learned about her past. What is she missing?

“Look,” Todd says. He’s trying to be light, but his words are glazed with pain. “I know things changed for you after the wipe. But think about the circumstances: Alien planet, constant danger, on the run from a rampaging beast. Of course you liked me. Hey,” he says, and tries for a grin, but his life’s spilling out before her eyes. “I’m a charming guy.”

Ana shakes her head. So she really didn’t love him. Then again, should it even matter? How much of a connection is there between the person she was and the person she is now? As much connection as there is between real life and the simulation? Ana grows suddenly still. There’s a thread here, something tugging at her, and abruptly she shifts mental paths in order to follow it.

She rewinds to the beginning of what she knows: Somehow, entering the simulation activated
Vermiletum
for her, Todd, Ysa, and Chen, shifting the infection from dormant to virulent. Meanwhile, scientists and researchers around the world had
been unable to find a way to affect
Vermiletum. In the real world
. But inside the simulation, the
Vermiletum
took on a body, the form of the worm.

And something that has a body can be killed.

What if … what if she could kill the worm in the sim? Would that be the same as cleansing the disease from her brain?

And then, beyond that—she can’t allow herself to think, to hope, but the words from Bailey’s report sweep through her head, that a reversal of the disease in
just one person
might start a cascade effect. Could curing one person of the disease really provoke a reverse infection that would sweep out to others, too?

“Ana,” Todd whispers. His eyes are starting to glass over, his mouth opens, and she can see the effort it takes for him to pull back, to return to her.

She looks up at his readout: 93.7%.

“Todd,” she says. She leans forward and places her lips on his, whisper-kissing her breath into his mouth. “There’s something I need to do. Can you hold on a little longer? For me?”

“You,” he says, gasping, “are the past and the future. You are all there is. You will always … own me.”

How can she leave him like this, knowing where the disease is going to take him? But she also knows that her presence alone won’t be enough to save him. Not for long. His only hope
—their
only hope—lies in this step she’s about to take.

She has to try
.

“Todd.” She cups a hand on either side of his head and looks into his face.

His eyes are growing dull and his lips form soundless words, but his hand moves up toward her. She feels his cold touch on her face, drawing a circle on her right cheek, then one on her left. He shifts down to her chin and draws a line up and then across.