Ashes of Foreverland (25 page)

All that red.

Gramm handed him a glass of water. “You're infused with maximum biomite capacity. Your body is now 49.9% biomites, as close to artificial as we can make it without the government coming for you.”

The government's halfskin laws denied humans the right to exceed 50% biomites. At that point, the lawmakers claimed, people were more machine than human. And machines, the government decided, didn't deserve to live.

As long as he was breathing and thinking, Tyler didn't care how many biomites kept his heart ticking.

“There are special biomites we can use,” Gramm said, “ones the government can't detect, if we need to increase your levels. There are advantages, Doctor.”

Doctor? Who's he talking to?

Gramm was addressing Tyler, not the good doctor. It was confusing.

“It would halt some of your health concerns, but it'll take some time to locate—”

“No, thank you, Gramm. This is just fine.”

Tyler caressed his forehead. It was senseless and leathery, without the deep wrinkles that once carved horizontal tracks from temple to temple. There was something missing.

“The stent was removed. No more needle, Doctor.”

“Why are you calling me that?”

Gramm looked to the good doctor with concern. “Do you know your name?”

“I know my name, damn you. Why are you calling me ‘doctor'?”

“Please tell us your name.”

“Tyler Ballard.”

“You are
Doctor
Tyler Ballard.”

That wasn't it. He was calling him doctor. He never called him that.
Or maybe I don't remember it.

“The stent,” Tyler said. “You removed it completely?”

“Yes.”

Tyler's sense of emptiness was confirmed: he was now a junkie without his needle.

“Reed was coming through the needles.”

“Reed?”

“The volunteers. We determined it was Reed that killed them.”

Tyler rubbed his jaw. Numbness was slowly fading. He was riding a wave of dull sensations into awareness, his thoughts becoming sharper and cleaner.

“The biofeedback suggested a termination command was initiated,” Gramm said. “Someone or something simply told the bodies to just...turn off.”

“We lost them all?”

Gramm shook his head. “No, we saved one. You saved him, actually.”

Tyler had run to the back of the room. Samuel was the only one he needed to save. The rest he could lose, but that one volunteer he had to keep alive.

Alessandra depends on it.

“The Institute?” Tyler blurted. “Were they—”

“No, the volunteers at the Institute were unaffected. We took Samuel off the needle, increased his brain biomites, and converted him to wireless connectivity like you. He was offline for a short spell, but Alessandra didn't notice. Even if it's not Reed causing these problems, something's out there, Doctor. We can't risk you using the needle. We're too close.”

The emotion got to Gramm this time. He rubbed his eyes and apologized. It seemed genuine.

“It's all right,” Tyler said. “I understand.”

“I thought we lost you, that all of this was...that Foreverland would just...”

“Now, now, Gramm. You did good. You and the good doctor, you both did good.”

The good doctor, in a brief moment of clarity, nodded.

Perhaps Patricia was right: he should cross into her Foreverland and leave his body behind. Gramm and the good doctor would watch over it until Alessandra was ready.

Tyler held out his hand. They helped him stand. His legs were weak. Blood rushed to his head, thumped in his forehead. The guards appeared with a wheelchair.

“No, thank you.” He waved them off. “Let's go to the basement.”

“I don't think that's wise, Doctor.”

“Nonsense. Time is short.”

“You need rest.”

“Apparently, I've been resting for months.”

He made it to the elevator before succumbing to the wheelchair when the fuzzy static of the random voices buzzed in his head again. He assumed these were thoughts from the inmates, that the new biomites were spontaneously connecting with other minds, but they crackled in his inner ear like a stadium of angry spectators.

Gramm pushed him to his cell, where he closed his eyes and laid back on his bed to rest. The basement would have to wait.

——————————————

T
yler spent weeks sweating on his mattress like a heroin addict gone cold turkey. The voices of static had become fingernails clawing through his scalp, pulling his brain apart a neuron at a time.

And Patricia...she was a snowflake in a blizzard of thoughts. If he couldn't find her, if he couldn't go to her, be with her, then none of this mattered.

He sat up and squeezed the sides of his head, as if that would quell the voices, but the vertigo caused him to vomit. Gramm assured him this would end, that he would return to normal. Occasionally, Tyler heard Patricia's voice rise above the din.

She was out there, waiting for him.

“Do something, Gramm.” His voice scratched his throat.

It was another week before he was able to leave the room. The static of voices faded. Gramm and the guards came for him and took him to the basement.

The room was dark.

The lights had been turned down. The tables were empty slabs, red lights casting enough light to illuminate the aisles. The bodies had been removed and disposed of, all done while Tyler was in an induced coma.

Despite the emptiness, he opened his mouth to breathe, the heavy odor of decay and infection saturating the walls, clinging to the ceiling. Nearly a lifetime of work wasted in a single day.

These were the volunteers, the inmates that readily gave themselves to the needle. Their deaths would go unnoticed. They were lifers without family, men forgotten by the world.

It took great effort to make them disappear from the system—creating false documents, trails of paperwork, deleted notes. It had been over twenty years and no one had come looking for a volunteer.

And volunteer, they did.

Once Tyler showed them a way out of their suffering, a simple means of closing their eyes and going to a new reality, a way to leave their life, go where they could be anything they wanted, do anything they desired. They would never be imprisoned as long as their minds were free.

And Foreverland was the doorway.

Tyler's son, Harold, had learned this lesson from his father. He discovered that people would do anything to escape their suffering and they would take the needle willingly.

Harold found an island, found investors and collected the lost children that would never be missed. Their bodies would not go to waste, and neither would the minds of the elderly men that didn't deserve to die.

Harold made a great sum of money and funneled it back to the prison, where Tyler expanded his empire of volunteers. In a perverted way, Harold helped build the basement, helped bring his mother and father closer together. It was all in the name of science, a means of discovering a new reality. All the volunteers were potential candidates to become a permanent host of a boundless Foreverland.

But now they were gone.

As long as the volunteers at the Institute survived, none of that mattered.
And Samuel.

All the lamps were off except one. It shined on a bleached and sickly body, like that of a drowning victim. His once olive-colored skin, the genetic trait of his Hispanic heritage, was pasty. Teardrops were tattooed on the side of his face; an enormous crucifix on his chest was etched in fuzzy blue lines.

Samuel was one of the first volunteers.

He'd renounced his affiliation to gangs and crime, had taken up a life of solitary study in the library, of assisting other inmates in their spiritual study. He taught himself law at night, reviewing case notes. Serving a life sentence, he would never practice, but his advice was often sound.

Next to Gramm, he was Tyler's most important soldier. Samuel was caring for the new host.

Alessandra's husband.

Tyler's last trip through the needle was to meet Alessandra for the interview. She was in her own Foreverland and didn't know it. And Samuel was making sure she stayed there.

“He's stable, Doctor.” Gramm stepped through the green light. “Because of you.”

Tyler touched Samuel's arm, the veins still pulsing.

“Samuel discovered Reed is behind this,” Gramm said.

“How?”

“He intercepted a UPS package addressed to Alessandra. It was written in green ink. It's why we haven't been able to locate him. He's done nothing electronically—no email, no texts, phone calls or video conferencing. He went completely off grid. I suspect he's been communicating this way all along.” Gramm cleared his throat. “Clearly, he's alive somehow.”

“What was in the package?”

“More reminders of Alex's past and a poem of sorts. Cryptic. I assume he wrote that way in case we saw it. We could go back and search Danny's and Cyn's belongings, even Reed's old apartment. I still don't understand how he's doing it—”

“It doesn't matter now.”

“It appears he's trying to jar her memories loose, create a disturbance in her acceptance pattern. If she remembers certain events, it'll set her back. I think he knows our time is limited. He's just trying to stall.”

“We have more time than he thinks.” Tyler lifted his hands above the body. In the bright light, they looked twenty years younger. The biomites bought him all the time he needed.

But with the noise in his head, did he want to?

“It's time to relocate, Doctor.”

“What do you mean?”

“We need to leave the prison.”

“Move?”

“Alessandra is nearly asleep. It's almost time.”

Tyler felt dizzy. “No need to leave; I can do it from here.”

“You need to be closer to Patricia.”

“Distance isn't a problem, Gramm.”

“We'll need to be out—”

“We can't be hasty!” He bridged his temples with finger and thumb, the voices spiking with his anger. “I need her fully asleep; there can be no instability.”

Gramm knew this. If Tyler committed to the host, if he crossed into Alessandra's Foreverland and she woke up, there was the risk of being thrown into an expanding Nowhere. He had already taken that risk once when he went inside her Foreverland for the interview. To be sentenced to the Nowhere...that was worse than death.

“The feds are investigating the prison,” Gramm said.

“What?”

“There have been inquiries by the FBI into abuse and lack of response by the warden.”

“Why didn't you tell me sooner?”

“You were in a coma.”

“Now, damn you!” He backhanded him across the table. “I've been awake all this time, and you tell me this now?”

Gramm dabbed the bead of blood swelling on his lip with the tip of his tongue. “We've been holding the authorities off. The trail of missing paperwork, missing prisoners is unmistakable. They suspect the warden has been involved in a ring of money for escape. They came to investigate a month ago, but the warden kept them out of the basement, kept you hidden. They're scheduled to come back in a week.”

Fear radiated in waves. Gramm always cringed in the presence of Tyler's intense emotions.

He didn't flinch.

“There was no need to hamper your recovery, Doctor.”

The feds were coming. All of these tables wouldn't matter, empty or not, when they stepped inside. The trail would quickly lead to the Institute. They had contingency plans, they could relocate all essential personnel out of New York within the day.

But Alessandra is too close. It could disrupt everything!

“We'll disassemble the basement, Doctor. They won't know what happened. All data can be erased and reprogrammed. Evidence can be planted to set the warden and guards up. We'll keep Samuel in sick bay. He'll continue his mission until its complete, and then we'll pull the plug.”

When Alessandra is asleep.

Tyler pushed the black curly hair from Samuel's forehead. A red welt remained where the stent had been removed. Tyler had killed the connection just before his stroke.

Reed was coming through the needle.

“We transitioned him while you were out, brought his biomite levels up while he was still unconscious. We were able to explain his disappearance to Alessandra until he crossed back over.”

“How?”

“I went in, placed a few calls. Explained he was recruited by the government based on his past service with the CIA. I implanted a few vague memories in Alessandra that he'd served in the military before she met him.”

“It worked?”

“She's almost asleep, very open to suggestion. Now that Samuel's back, she's almost out.”

Tyler rubbed his face. He had to check with Patricia. She would be worried; he hadn't seen her in months. Gramm would've kept her updated, but he needed to see what she thought.

But how do I connect without the needle?

He looked inward and the voices cranked up like the knob on a radio.

“I can show you the way, Doctor. I guided Samuel back inside, I can do the same for you.”

Tyler's chest fluttered as he paced around the table, his hands against his head. It was all coming so fast.

Why didn't he wake me earlier?

“I've already arranged for your transfer to Attica in three days. En route, we'll detour to the Institute. We have time, Doctor.”

Gramm put his hand on Tyler's shoulder. Peace and calm flowed around him.

“I'll show you the way.”

The voices went quiet and still. As if they heard him.

And listened.

——————————————

I
n the middle of the prison yard, the afternoon sun fell on Tyler's face, warm and radiant. He sat on the frozen ground, legs crossed, Gramm beside him.