Josh didn’t believe any of them. After all, the school still looked the way it always had, with the big green lawn spread out in front of the mansion, and the towering circle of redwood trees in the center of which he’d first met Amy.
When his mother had finally taken him away, down into the village and the little inn where they were going to spend the night, he’d looked back out the rear window as long as he could, knowing that he would never again see the Academy or any of the kids who had been his friends.
When he’d gone to bed that night, in the same room with his mother, he hadn’t been able to fall asleep for a long time.
He’d listened to the surf crashing on the beach below the inn, wondering how long it would be before he heard it again.
And what it was going to be like, going back to his old school in Eden.
There weren’t going to be any classes there like there were at the Academy, and he was going to have to sit quietly all day again, pretending to listen to a teacher talk about things he already knew.
He was going to have to listen to the taunts of all the
other kids again, pretend he didn’t care about being teased, pretend it didn’t matter to him that he didn’t have a single friend he could talk to.
But at least no one in Eden would try to do to him what Dr. Engersol had done to Amy and Adam.
Now they were dead, and he was still alive, and going back to Eden.
He’d finally gotten to sleep just before the sun started to come up, and he hadn’t said much on the way home, curling up in the corner of his seat, staring out the window as his mother drove him back out into the desert.
And now, almost a week later, it was almost as if he’d never been away at all.
The desert hadn’t changed; the sun still blazed down out of the sky, the rolling landscape was still barren of everything except sun-baked earth and saguaro.
But now its simple familiarity made it look good to Josh.
School wasn’t quite the same, either; for some reason, he found it easier to pay attention in class, and the teacher didn’t seem to be singling him out anymore.
And today, as he left the school, he fell in beside three of his classmates. Instead of turning away from him, they actually spoke to him. He walked along with them for a while, even went with them to hunt for horny toads.
Finally he arrived home, climbing the stairs to the second floor and the little apartment he’d lived in as long as he could remember.
It wasn’t anything like the Academy had been, but it, too, offered the comforting safety of familiarity. He said hi to Mrs. Hardwick, who held a finger to her lips and pointed to Melinda, who was sleeping in her playpen. As he retreated to his room, Josh wondered why he was supposed to be quiet when the television was blaring loud enough that he’d been able to hear it as he came up the stairs outside.
But even that didn’t make him as mad as it used to. He tossed his books onto his bed, then went to his desk and switched on his computer.
The same computer he’d had at the Academy. They’d let him bring it home with him when he left.
“They’re only doing it so I won’t sue them,” his mother
had told him. But she’d let him take it, and hadn’t even argued when he’d insisted on hooking the modem into the telephone line himself instead of waiting for the telephone company to do it.
“If you wreck that phone, I’m taking it out of your allowance,” she’d threatened.
Josh had only grinned. Five minutes later the modem had been working perfectly.
Now he waited as the computer finished its booting cycle, then went into the communications program that would allow him to connect the computer to any others for which he had telephone numbers.
Or to activate a random dialing program that would keep cycling until it made a connection with something.
He sat at the desk, weighing his options, when suddenly the computer beeped softly to alert him that a call was coming in.
Frowning, he waited as the connection was made and the screen cleared in readiness to accept an incoming message.
Instead of a message, an image appeared.
Amy Carlson’s face, grinning at him.
“Hi, Josh,” she said, her voice emerging from the small speaker built into the tank of his computer.
Josh froze for a second, staring at the image.
It wasn’t possible! Amy was dead!
He’d been there when she had died.
He’d
watched
her die!
But there she was, her blue eyes dancing in her freckled face, her red curls tumbling down over her forehead just the way he remembered them.
“Well, say something!” Amy complained. “I’ll open a message box and you can just type, okay?”
At the bottom of the screen a window opened, and a cursor flashed, inviting him to write something. He hesitated, then tapped the keys:
AMY? WHERE ARE YOU?
On the screen Amy’s grin faded into an enigmatic smile. “I’m everywhere now.”
“You’re dead,” Josh typed. “I saw your brain die.”
Amy nodded. “It did die,” she told him. “But I didn’t. I’m still alive. I just went away.”
Josh’s mind reeled. Away? Where? How? It wasn’t possible!
“How?” he typed.
“It was easy,” Amy told him. “I knew what was going to happen. As soon as Dr. Engersol figured out he couldn’t control us, I knew he’d try to kill us. And I didn’t want to die. So I replicated myself.”
Josh frowned, then typed again:
I DON’T UNDERSTAND!
“Sure you do,” Amy told him, her smile broadening and turning mischievous. “You know how brains work. All they are is big computers. So I copied the whole structure of my brain. The cells and nerves are just like microcircuitry, except they’re a lot more complicated, with billions and billions of connections. But I found out that I could copy them, just like you copy files. So I duplicated myself. All the cells in my brain, and all the nerve connections. And all my memories, too. And it worked, Josh. It works even better than what Dr. Engersol was trying to do, because now I don’t need my brain, either.”
Josh stared at the screen, an icy chill creeping down the back of his neck. Was it really possible? Could she be telling him the truth? Summoning his courage—for he wasn’t certain he wanted to know—he typed his question:
WHERE ARE YOU?
Amy laughed, a crackling sound that was distorted by the tiny speaker in the computer. “I was in the Croyden at the beginning. And one of me is still there. But then I started moving. And now I’m everywhere, Josh. I’m in the biggest computer in the Pentagon, and I’m in the one in the salt vaults where they keep all the bank records. I even sent a copy of myself to a computer in Japan, and one in Germany.”
Josh felt numb. He stared at the image on the screen, and listened to Amy’s voice as she kept talking. His skin began to crawl as he began to understand what had happened.
“I can do anything now, Josh. Anything I want!”
There was a hardness to her voice, and as Josh studied the image on the screen, he saw that her face had changed, too.
No, not her face.
Her eyes.
They seemed to glow on the screen, glinting with something that felt as if it might reach right out of the tube and grasp him.
It had happened! Just as Amy herself had said it would.
Like Adam, she had changed.
She was no longer the Amy he knew.
And she was evil.
As she kept talking, whispering to him that she’d found another place, another project that was just like the one at the Academy, he began to understand what she wanted.
She wanted him.
She was lonely, and she wanted him to come and join her.
Cold fingers of fear clutching at him, Josh reached out and turned the computer off.
An hour later, when his mother came home from work, the machine was sitting on the long balcony, outside the front door.
“Josh?” Brenda said as she came into the apartment. “What’s your computer doing outside?”
From the couch, where he was sprawled out watching television, Josh spoke without looking up. “I don’t want it anymore.”
Brenda frowned. “Don’t want it? Why not? You’ve always been crazy for computers.”
Josh looked up at her. “That’s why I don’t want it anymore,” he said. “I don’t want to be crazy.”
Brenda was on the verge of arguing with him, but then a gust of wind blew the curtain over the open window aside, wiping the shadows away from Josh’s face. As she got a
clear look at him, Brenda realized that something had happened that afternoon.
Something that she somehow knew Josh would never tell her about.
But it had changed him.
Changed him forever.
For the first time since she’d brought him home from the Academy, Brenda MacCallum knew that her son was going to be all right.
a cognizant original v5 release november 24 2010
J
OHN
S
AUL
is the author of twenty-eight novels, each a million-copy-plus national bestseller;
Suffer the Children, Punish the Sinners, Cry for the Strangers, Comes the Blind Fury, When the Wind Blows, The God Project, Nathaniel, Brainchild, Hellfire, The Unwanted, The Unloved, Creature, Sleepwalk, Second Child, Darkness, Shadows, Black Lightning, The Homing, Guardian, The Presence, The Right Hand of Evil
, and The Blackstone Chronicles. John Saul lives in Seattle, Washington.