Continuance (37 page)

“It’s not a
hospital.” Gray said. “But it is a safe place for you. Just until you can get
re-acclimated.” For a moment, his words took on a faint echo, as if the sound
of his voice verged on splitting before coming together again.

He extended a
hand, helping her from the chair. The process was shockingly easy. She should
have needed a long recovery time. Surgeries. Physical therapy. There should
have been pain. Why did she feel like she could run a basketball court doing
layups?

“You’ll have a
lot of questions, but first things first.” Gray tapped a control in the wall,
and wood paneling morphed into a perfectly reflective surface. He gestured with
a beckoning hand.

“What is it?”
she asked. “Some kind of diagnostic device?”

Gray’s laugh was
rich, like warm coffee. “I guess you could call it that. I suspect you’ve used
one before. It’s a mirror.”

Her breath
caught. She’d seen TV programs – the kind where they unveiled the stabbing victim
after nanosurgery. Former models after being burned with sulphuric acid. The
teary, horrible moment when the bandages came off and the wounded bravely greeted
a grisly approximation of a former face. Could she do the same?

Gray must have
seen her fear. “Don’t worry. Not all surprises are bad.”

She stepped in
front of the mirror and stared at the full length reflection of another woman.
No, a girl. A
beautiful
girl. Round of face, with creamy skin and auburn
hair, she stood there, staring back with ice blue eyes.

Michelle looked
at Gray, ready to accuse him of playing some kind of parlor trick, but the
words died in her mouth when she saw the girl jerk her head in time with her
own. The reflection turned back to regard her with the same astonishment she
knew was plain on her face.

 
It’s me.

She remembered
the cold, falling into the icy abyss of sleep. She remembered Mandy’s hand intertwined
with her own, growing warmer and warmer the further she fell.
My God. The
stasis protocol.

“It worked,” she
breathed. “Mandy was right.”

“It worked,”
Gray agreed. “You’ve been continued. Welcome back to the world of the living.” He
put a reassuring hand on her back, looking over her shoulder at the reflection
along with her. “What do you think? Sorry for the makeover, but it was
necessary.” His words echoed in that near discordance again, then settled back
into the smooth baritone. “It’ll take some getting used to, but speaking
strictly from personal opinion, I think the results are …decent.”

“How long?” She
remembered the sensation of time passing. She’d assumed a few days or weeks. Then,
seeing the new body, maybe a year or two. But from the way Gray hesitated, she
knew the truth would be as shocking as the new face.

“Fifty-three
years.”

The ground swayed
beneath her. The high-tech photoscreens, all the technology they would have
needed to bring her back, even Gray’s funny clothes – it all made sense now. The
ground steadied, and she realized Gray held her by the shoulders, keeping her
from losing her balance completely.

“I know.” His
voice was gentle. “We thought you might find the news a little upsetting.”

We.
“You’re not a
doctor,” Michelle said. “And you said this isn’t a hospital. Who are you?”

“We don’t have
an official name. But people who know what we’re about call us Viceroy.”

The days that
followed carried almost as many surprises for Michelle as the first. Gray walked
with her around the Viceroy facility while he talked or she asked questions. He
gave her fantastic explanations about cloning and the continuance process. He
described the political firestorm leading to the Moratorium Act and the ensuing
ban. The evolution of the Digital Interment Authority to hunt down resurrected
people like herself.
Retreads
, they called them.

He’d explained that
was why she looked like her own distant cousin. They’d tweaked her DNA just
enough to keep this new body unrecognizable as the old Michelle. Not only that,
they arranged a new identity for her, a new name. Chaela Laurensen.

Chaela
. Gray used the name
whenever they talked, telling her she needed to get used to it, for her own
safety. She wasn’t crazy about it, but if what he said was true, she needed to
learn to accept it.
At least they didn’t pick ‘Bree.’

When she asked
Gray about Mandy, the answer gave her another shock.

“Your daughter’s
done well for herself while you were away,” Gray said. “Got a few degrees. Had
a family of her own.”

“When can I see
her?”

His hesitation
might as well have been a punch in the gut. “I can understand your eagerness,
but I wouldn’t advise it. The DIA monitors all close relations of anyone with a
compromised biorecord. That includes you. It’s one of the ways they catch
retreads.”

So when Gray
asked if she was interested in news of anyone else, she shook her head. Robert
would never have opted for the protocol, and she wouldn’t have wanted to find
him in any case. The only other person she could look for would be Patrick –
he’d opted for the protocol almost as soon as it was available. But when she
asked, Gray told her Viceroy had no record of having continued anyone named
Patrick Dawes. So except for Mandy, she was alone. And she couldn’t even see
her without putting them both at risk.

The next day, Gray
took her to the main cloning center. Laid out in a circle, from above she
imagined the blueprint would look like a huge wagon wheel. Windows covered the
wall of the outer perimeter – some kind of glass, super strong and designed to regulate
direct sunlight. A cylinder with three elevator doors lay at the hub, and
walkways connecting inner to outer served as the spokes. The spaces between
defined pods of cloning stations, dominated by flattened tubes mounted at
forty-five degrees and surrounded by electronics.

No. Photonics.
All of the
technology used photons rather than electrons now.

For Michelle,
the most interesting thing about the tubes wasn’t the glossy black surface or
the nanofluids inside. It was the butterfly emblem in orange and black adorning
the surface of each.
Nothing stays the same forever.

Most of the
tubes were full, protecting and nourishing the developing clones inside while
some process involving microscopic machines guided the formation of neural
pathways to match the subject’s original brain. Neural vectoring, Gray called
it. Techs in white coats circulated from tube to tube as if tending the flora
of some strange garden. Gray even showed her the empty tube that had been hers,
where this new body had been grown in a little less than a year.

“Somebody should
talk to your graphic designer,” she told him when she looked closely.

“I’m sorry?”
Gray asked.

“Your emblem’s
wrong. The butterfly. It’s not a Viceroy.”

“Oh.” Gray
frowned, seeming more embarrassed than surprised. “What is it?”

“It’s a
Monarch.” Few people could tell the two species apart, but the distinction was plain
to spot if you knew how. She’d loved butterflies all her life, could tell the
difference as easy as most people could differentiate between bulldogs and
beagles. “See the lower wings?” She traced a finger across the surface in an
arc. “Viceroys have a dark line here. Yours doesn’t.”

Gray shrugged as
if she understood these little details had a way of slipping through the
cracks. “I guess we didn’t do our homework when we installed them.”

She cringed,
hearing that strange, echoing dissonance in his voice again.

“Is everything
okay?” he asked.

“Yeah.” she
shook her head. “I don’t know. I think there may be something wrong with my
ears or something. Sometimes you sound funny.”

“Funny?” Gray
wore a concerned look, and his brown eyes grew sharp. “How?”

 “I don’t know.
Like I’m hearing a second grade piano recital. Too many neighboring keys played
at the same time.”

They continued
along one of the raised walkways in a circuit around the cloning center. Gray
nodded to himself. “I think you may have some slight synesthesia.”

“I assume that’s
not the stuff they use to put you under at the dentist?”

“No,” Gray
laughed. “And we have sedation fields now, by the way. Synesthesia. Cross
sensory stimulation. Sometimes people see numbers as colors, or maybe hear
places as sounds. We’ve seen it from time to time as a side effect of the
neural vectoring process, usually temporary.” He nodded apologetically at a
passing technician as if he might share the blame.

“Should I be
worried?” she asked.

Gray shook his
head, looking unconcerned. “I doubt it. My guess is it’ll fade as your neural
pathways strengthen. Remember, this new brain of yours hasn’t had much sensory…”

The dissonant sensation
actually grew stronger as he went on. The recital became a crescendoing
ensemble, hopelessly out of tune. She squeezed her eyes shut against the cacophony,
fingers to her temples. Then the dissonance vanished, leaving only Gray’s
soothing baritone.

“…still burning
in, so to speak. Chaela?”

She had to
remind herself he meant
her
. She opened her eyes and found him studying
her. She was about to describe what had happened, but something in his stare
stopped her. She saw an intensity reflected there, and not the look of a man
concerned for her safety. More like a man sizing up a wild animal, deciding
whether he’d have to put it down.

She put on a
reassuring smile. “I’m okay. Just a lot of information to take in. It’s still a
little overwhelming.”

“Of course.” he
put a hand on her shoulder. “We’ve covered enough for one day. I’ll make sure
the team keeps an eye on you, just to be safe. Why don’t you relax and get some
air?”

Wary now, she
tried to look grateful and tired at the same time. “That sounds great. I don’t
think I’ll ever get tired of that view.”

The clack of her
shoes on the walk sounded loud in her ears as she headed toward the elevator
hub. She thought she felt his eyes boring into her back, but when she turned
around, Gray was gone.

A fresh breeze
greeted her on the observation deck one floor up, along with blue sky as far as
the eye could see. The Angeles Spire towered over the rest of LA like a slender
Olympus, and she bit back vertigo as she rested her hands on the mirrored
railing at the edge, peering out at the cityscape below.

A lift car
zoomed past on her right, swift and silent as it scaled the skin of the
building like a vertical maglev train. The first time she’d come out, she’d
noticed the recessed groove it travelled had been damaged in places at this
level, the metal scored as if some giant monster had clawed at it. Welds and
beaten metal covered several sections, and where mirrored glass covered the
rest of the exterior, here swaths of transparent panes showed repaired damage. Even
to her untrained eyes, the construction looked recent and hasty. She’d spent a
lot of time up here since waking up, and always found herself wondering what
had happened here.

Right now,
though, she had more important worries. Gray was keeping things from her, she
had no doubt. It had something to do with the dissonance when he spoke. When it
happened, it almost felt like hearing discord between the words and the
thoughts behind them. An audible manifestation of inner discontinuity.

I’m hearing
lies.

The realization
made her dizzy, and beads of sweat prickled her forehead. She didn’t know which
was more disturbing – that the very benefactors who’d awakened her were
concealing information, or that her mind could do something so freakish and
unreal. She squeezed her eyes shut, gripping the mirrored railing until her
knuckles turned white. She felt like she’d jumped off a moving merry-go-round
and landed at the edge of a cliff, teetering on the verge of falling.

I can hear lies.

She opened her
eyes, and froze. She’d hung her head to stave off the dizziness, and now she found
herself staring over the railing, down the half-circle lift car groove that ran
down the Spire’s skin. But the height wasn’t what held her there, motionless.

Across the
groove’s gap, a pair of figures stood outlined on the reflective glass. From
the angle, she could tell they were almost directly below her – somewhere on
the Viceroy level. Gray, in his strangely-cut suit of dark wool, gestured at a shorter
man dressed much the same, but in brown. The shorter man chewed something as he
listened, looking displeased. They stood in a room in the repaired section, the
glass letting her to see inside, watch their lips as they spoke.

 “…pretty sharp
leaving Chrysalis emblems on the tubes. I told you to shake this place down
when you recommissioned it.” An audible voice filled her head as the shorter
man spoke, though she knew the sound of his voice hadn’t reached her ears.
Watching his mouth move, her brain filled in a generic tone like an old GPS,
stringing the narrative together without effort as her eyes snatched the words
from his lips.