Authors: A. J. Paquette

Paradox (24 page)

Suddenly Ana discovers she is less
in
the memory and more to the side of it, watching, free of the devastating emotional riptide. She lets it rush around her, watches again as her younger self loses control on that dark windswept night,
watches as everything she has left in the world is torn away from her, and then
—blood and twisting metal and the screeching of brakes and everywhere the horrible smell of burning
—Ana pulls the memory tight inside her mind for one trembling moment, catches her breath—

And then flings it outward.

The car explodes, shattering the air around her and filling the worm’s body with razor-sharp glass and white-hot metal and horrible, crunching death. Thick liquid pours over her broken body, covering her face, running down her neck as the beast roars and roars and roars.

Ana knows she’s in the simulation, knows with every part of her that it’s not real it’s still not real none of this is happening, but the pressure is still clawing, raging in her head, and she knows it’s the worm fighting for its life now, but if it’s fighting then it must be dying—it
is
dying, she knows that, she can feel it inside her brain, clawing on to life, trying to inflict as much damage as it can, but—

It’s weakening.

As she holds on, the pulses of pain grow fainter and the grinding grows quiet. There is a dull, reality-shaking
boom
and a rush of cold air, and Ana falls to the ground, the hard-packed, blood-soaked sand of Paradox beach.

Ana is alone in the dim half-light, and there’s not a breath, not a movement, not a sound.

The worm is dead.

She closes her eyes.

When Ana opens her eyes, the light around her is clean and white, and the air is still. There’s no wind, no waves, no sand in her hair or grit in her teeth.

She sits up slowly, trying to reorient her mind. The two hours have expired; she’s back in her little room at Savitech. First things first: she turns to check the monitor behind her. The panel is flashing bright green:

Infection: 0%

Some wall inside her mind bursts, the dam behind which she had held back her hopes, her fears, all the ways that it couldn’t be possible, that it could never work. And yet—it has! She’s done it. Somehow she turned the tables, took the worm’s own weapon and used it against the creature. And won! Killing the worm in the simulation has cleared the malignancy from her brain as well.

And if the virus is connected the way the researchers thought, the way she hopes …

She swallows a sob, only wishing that she could have learned this,
done this
, sooner.

Working quickly, she disconnects herself from the simulation’s wiring, then slides off the bed, pushes through the plastic strips, and steps into the adjoining room. Todd is lying where she’d left him, his face covered with dark red blood. Is he breathing?

One of his hands is stretched slightly out, index finger pointing toward the door.

Ana’s heart skips a beat.

Before she left, she’d laid his arms flat by his side. He wasn’t gone yet then, so
there’s still hope!
Dropping to her knees by his bedside, she holds his wrist to check for a pulse, laying her ear on his chest … but she can’t tell. She’s so nervous she can’t tell anything right now.

She looks at the display monitor.

Infection: 99%

Ana’s heart sinks, crashes right down onto the rocks and shatters into a million fragments. But wait … 99% isn’t 100%. She thinks of the readouts over Chen’s and Ysa’s beds.
That’s
what final looked like. There’s still time.

There’s still hope.

But what can she do? She thinks again about Bailey’s report. She’s cleared the disease from her own mind—that’s the first
step. Now she just has to give it time and hope that science is on her side, that the infection
did
permanently change her brain—and that it changed again with the worm’s death—so it will still be transmitting signals, yes, but not one that’s radiating out the disease.

Now, she hopes, her brain is transmitting a signal that will do just the opposite.

Ana leans over and rests her head on Todd’s shoulder, letting herself remember him. She remembers his hand reaching over the cliff’s edge, pulling her up to safety. She remembers the look he gave her, as if he saw who she really was, someone she herself didn’t even know. She remembers his voice in the cave, soothing her to sleep. And as all these memories flood through her, a feeling surges inside her, a feeling that goes right to her core. And suddenly she knows that she fell in love with Todd Oslow on Paradox—simulation or not—because she
was
in love with him before. She’s been in love with him all along.

Maybe she wouldn’t acknowledge it then, buried as she was under the crushing weight of her own guilt and pain—maybe she didn’t even fully know how she felt. But that love was there, below the surface. And it wouldn’t be kept away.

Ana closes her eyes and lets the tears come. She’s lost so much of herself, her past, but this one thing, so late—too late—has come back to her.

She’s so lost in thought that the faint
ping
from above her doesn’t register at first. But when it does, her heart leaps into her throat and her eyes fly to the display.

Infection: 93%

Ana’s eyes widen as she watches the number quickly fall:
89%
…
85%
…

Todd’s breathing is labored and slow, but she can hear it clearly now:
79%
. His eyes flicker open for one quick second, then drift shut again. And Ana knows—knows in the deepest part of her—that he
will
recover. It will be a slow process, she’s sure. But he’s going to make it:
67%
.

And if Todd can make it, then why not others? There must be people still alive, people who are not yet infected, or who contracted the infection late and haven’t yet succumbed.

55%

She has no idea what happens next.

But if there are survivors to be found, she will find them. She and Todd together. There’s still so much that’s broken inside her, but her new foundation is strong and clean and ready to work. After all, there’s a lot broken about this new world, too.

Ana knows that it’s nothing she can’t handle.

She’s going forward.

APPENDIX A

Interview with Rosa Ortez, APEX1

Savitech Corporation (Office #3476):

Boston, Massachusetts, September 2041

*CONFIDENTIAL—Internal Eyes Only!*

Q: Please state your name, age, and occupation for the record.

R/O: My name is Rosa Ortez. I am thirty-nine years old. I am an astrophysicist employed by Savitech. Or I was.

Q: Please explain how you came to be part of APEX1.

R/O: I’ve been working in astrophysics for seventeen years. I was recruited by Savitech out of MIT and completed my doctorate at Princeton with a special focus on manned spaceflight and the greater physical solar system. I met Jim there…. We were colleagues….

Q: How did you come to be part of APEX1?

R/O: When the trip was planned, Jim and I both knew we wanted to be on it. Savitech was heavily
involved in the mission from the start, a big sponsor, so we were right in the loop. The day we learned we were going to be part of the team to Paradox was the happiest of our lives. If only we’d known then …

Q: How did you come to be carrying a child on the eve of such an important and far-reaching mission into space?

R/O: That was never supposed to happen. Jim and I had no plans to have children, and we certainly weren’t trying for it at the time. I don’t know what went wrong. We went into partial suspension for the flight. By the time we woke up months later on Paradox, it was plainly visible.

Q: What happened next?

R/O: Jim was frantic, as you might imagine. He wanted me to return to Earth immediately, but how could I do that? The ships carry four, and the idea of either taking half the team back with me or leaving them stranded was unthinkable. Jim insisted that at least I shouldn’t go on the early scouting trips, not until they knew everything on the planet was safe.

Q: What scouting trips were these?

R/O: The early exploratory sweeps, checking out the landscape. The Cranium was a perfect landing zone, but it was no place to set up a permanent colony. The planet has a huge groundwater lake, the Maraqa Sea, and that’s where we were going to establish the colony, somewhere along the shore.

Q: So you stayed with the rocket.

R/O: That’s right. I was close to four months pregnant, after all. Jim and the others set off. They had their communicators, and they kept in touch.

Q: How did you occupy yourself during this time?

R/O: They had gone out in a few different directions, and I spoke with each team two or three times a day, plotting their course and keeping notes on their findings. I also started taking soil samples and logging plant life….

Q: When did you first suspect that something had gone wrong?

R/O: It happened so suddenly. It was two weeks after the landing, and they had found a spot that looked promising. Everyone had gathered as a group in that location to do some digging—excavating on the shore
in preparation for setting up a base. I was getting ready to make the trip over to join them—Jim was going to come back and escort me in a few days. And then …

Q: Yes?

R/O: And then … things got weird.

Q: Ms. Ortez?

R/O: (crying) The communicators kept turning off and on, like there was some kind of interference. But … I’m sorry, no matter how many times I go over it in my mind, it still doesn’t make any sense.

Q: Just state the facts, Ms. Ortez.

R/O: I heard Jim yelling. It was like he was seeing something. Almost like one of those really bad nightmares, where you’re reliving something horrible from your past. He kept yelling about an ambush. He was in the war years ago, but …

Q: (clears throat)

R/O: I heard gunfire—everyone was carrying the standard-issue weapons. Then I lost contact for a while.

Q: How did you discover what happened to them?

R/O: They had left the remo-bot with me, the little robotcamera on wheels. I sent off the bot, and I waited, all the while scanning the channels, trying to pick up any more communications. There was nothing. The bot took hours to get there. But when it finally did …

Q: What did the robot show you, Ms. Ortez?

R/O: They were all dead. Jim was holding his pistol; they all were.

Q: Captain James Ortez murdered his companions.

R/O: No! That’s not what happened. You have to believe me!

Q: We’ve been over this many times, Ms. Ortez. Will you describe the scene exactly as you saw it?

R/O: Jim’s pistol was in his hand. He’d been shot in the side of the head. The others … The others were all turned away, like they’d been trying to run. They’d been shot in the back. I know what you’re thinking, but I know Jim. There’s no way he shot them.

Q: Despite the fact that he left his wife in safety before doing so?

R/O: I was pregnant! Why is everybody focusing on the wrong things? What about the strange stuff he was yelling about? That’s on the tapes! Why are you talking to me instead of analyzing that? And I told you they’d been digging. They’d uncovered something … I couldn’t tell from the feed, but it looked like some kind of huge hole, like a tunnel or cave. It was right on the shore of the sea. The sides of the hole were ridged, like it was a burrow for some kind of enormous creature.

Q: Ms. Ortez, you conducted life-sweep testing, did you not?

R/O: The tests showed no living creatures on the planet. But maybe—

Q: I think we are nearly finished here. What did you do next?

R/O: What could I do next? What was there to do? Jim was gone. They were all gone. The ParSpace communicator back to Earth never worked … what a joke that was. The only thing I could do was come
back home. I sealed the hatches and powered the engines. I got back twenty-three days ago, just in time to go into labor. If my child had died from all she had to go through in transit, I wouldn’t have been surprised.

Q: She did not die.

R/O: No. In fact, I need to go and feed her now. She’s all I have left, you see? I’ve told you everything, and not for the first time. May I go now?

Q: Yes. We appreciate your time, Ms. Ortez. I would like to inform you officially that the board is fully satisfied that you had no part in this tragedy. And that in deference to his years of service and contribution to the space-travel initiative, details of Captain Ortez’s demise will not be made public. You have been through a great deal, and Savitech is grateful for your service.

R/O: You think you’re being generous, don’t you? The only good thing that came from this experience is my precious girl. My little one. My Ana.

APPENDIX B

APEX2 TRANSMISSIONS LOG

PARSPACE8 DEDICATED CHANNEL 4057.3

**Encoded Transmission 12182057-000BX**

**Encoded Transmission 04012058-008XR**

**Encoded Transmission 04282058-021RI**

**Encoded Transmission 06092058-032BX**

**Encoded Transmission 06212058-039BX**

**Encoded Transmission 08302058-061BX**

**Encoded Transmission 10112058-121BX**

**Encoded Transmission 11082058-153BX**