Those That Wake 02: What We Become (24 page)

Rose could not swallow. The air whistled dryly through her throat. His hand rested on her forearm, exerting the gentlest downward pressure, less than that of a sleeping baby.

She closed her eyes, her last sight that of the gray, cracking lips, seamed with dried saliva and yellow crust.

Mal,
she thought.
Mal
.

She brought her face forward until the putrid breath, the stench of his rotting insides, filled her nose. She gagged, and as she swallowed back bile, she felt the rasp of sharp, cracking skin on her lips. She almost pulled back, almost. But as soon as their lips touched, she felt his consciousness flash across, forcing its way in.

With only a small portion of her awareness, she felt his moist, flicking tongue enter her mouth, slide across her gums. But that was far, far from the worst of it. She also felt the slow crackle of the Old Man’s synaptic electricity prickling like spider legs across the folds of her brain, searching, searching . . .

She felt the aperture to the neuropleth in her head open; she glimpsed the pathway of buzzing light branching endlessly to the effervescent brains.

Then a flash of electricity, the spider amputating something from her brain and scurrying away with it. Instantly, the view of the neuropleth was gone. The aperture hadn’t simply closed—it had been burned out of her, stolen away forever by limitless greed, limitless hunger. Just as suddenly, the spider was gone.

The humid red world rushed back, and Rose tumbled to the floor, her mind aching with a sense of disconnection, of loneliness as she had never known in a lifetime full of loneliness.

“Mmmmmm.”
It was a deep, orgasmic moan from the depths of a primordial chasm. The Old Man’s flaccid body twitched in a hundred different places. “Feel them,” he said, the voice already growing more potent, the timbre deepening.
“Feel them.”

Rose tore her eyes from him, looked at Mal. Could she lift him, drag him out of here herself?

“No,” said the voice, vibrant with strength, responding to her unspoken question. “No, you cannot.”

“TELL ME, LAURA,” THE ELECTRONIC
voice inquired, and perhaps the merest touch of sentiment vibrated through the Hoffman tiles. Or perhaps Aaron was reading that into the exchange; the voice liked Laura better because she was sweet and vulnerable and Aaron was too smart. “What is your life like now?”

“What do you mean?”

“Over the last few months, what have you done in your life? Nothing more complicated than that.”

Laura stiffened, straightened her posture as though she were facing a verbal examination for a crucial grade. Her hands were trembling on her lap.

“I’m in college. I take classes. I see my friends. I date—I dated a boy. I speak to my parents sometimes.”

“Is that so bad, Laura?” The question rang down like a judgment on her.

“Yes!” Her response was instant and harsh. “Yes. Because it’s not
mine
. I know it isn’t. It’s like—” Aaron watched her face enter a rigor of strain. “It’s like someone dropped me into a fake life, with a family and friends and a job, but none of them are real. But I have to keep up the charade, have to keep up this
performance,
because if I don’t, if I run offstage, behind the curtain is horrible, horrible darkness.”

“Then don’t, Laura,” the voice said, and now Aaron knew that it felt this, that there was a person behind this electronic camouflage who was pleading with Laura, pleading with her to just, God help her, hold on to the fake life she had. “Don’t look behind the curtain.”

“I have to. Otherwise I’m empty. There’s only this fake person living a lie. There
is
no more
me
.”

The room throbbed with a heavy silence. Aaron looked at Laura’s trembling hands, and it struck him that now would be the time to offer his own hand, to let her hold it in that crushing grip again. That was what she needed right then: human contact. Aaron’s hand fluttered but didn’t take hers.

“There were four of you,” the voice said. “Each of you was caught up against the Idea for different reasons, had each stumbled across it in the course of your daily lives. But unlike so many others, you four resisted it. It took everything from you—your lives, your friends, your families. It snatched you out of their heads as though you had never even existed. But each of you had something that allowed you to cling to hope, to fight. Ultimately, that was how you beat it. One of you knew about me, and you came to me for information.”

“To Pope Springs,” Aaron said, driven by his unflagging interest in proving himself right. “At the site of the fire.”

“Yes. There. I told you what I could, and you went to confront it, as I already described.”

“Who?” Laura asked. “Who were the others? What were their names?”

Silence.

“Please . . .” Laura’s voice was choked with anger and grief, her expression caught between the two extremes, anguish and rage burning her face. “Please just
tell
me.”

“Jon Remak. Mike Boothe.”

Laura clutched her stomach, her shoulders folding forward to protect her from the names.

“Mal Jericho.”

It was as if a jolt of electricity went through her, seizing her muscles and bunching them into painful knots.

Aaron’s fingers moved across the cold space between the two of them and touched her shoulder as they would a most delicate piece of digital equipment, the fingers barely exerting pressure.

“Do you remember?” he asked softly.

“No!” Her eyes were on fire, gushing tears, and she glared up at him; he pulled his arm back as though it had been singed by her gaze. “No, I don’t remember
anything!
The names are killing me, but I don’t
know
them. Why can’t I
remember
them?” she demanded of the empty room.

“I’m sorry, Laura,” the electronic voice filled the room coolly. “I know you came here to find out what happened to you. For ‘the truth,’ as you put it. But this is an area where my information falters.”

“You’ve got to know
something,
” Laura said, and Aaron judged it not a question but a plea to salvage her fracturing sanity.

“All right, Laura, all right. I’m prepared to make you a deal. I can see you’ve already set yourself on a course. I’ll tell you what I can. Conjecture mostly. But as I do, you have to unmake up your mind. You have to examine what I say and, only
then,
decide on your course.”

Aaron stared at her, unable to understand why she sat there, in trembling silence.

“Say ‘yes,’” he whispered to her, like a stage manager prompting an actress who had forgotten her lines.

She didn’t heed him, just sat, staring into the middle distance, quivering as if chilled to the bone.

“What?” Aaron hissed. “What’s wrong?” But then he realized, even before the last angry syllable left his mouth. She was actually thinking about her answer. She was not simply working to get the information she needed. She was trying to figure out whether she could take that deal and then answer
honestly
.

“Yes.” Her voice echoed in the room like a pronouncement from God. “I’ll take that deal.”

“Mike Boothe”—the voice proceeded without further preamble—“died in the confrontation with the Idea. It was, in fact, his sacrifice that ultimately defeated it. You and Mal emerged from the battle together. You . . . stayed together for a time. I wasn’t keeping constant surveillance on you, but I did, of course, make a point to check in. From what I observed, you began to build a life, of sorts. But it was a troubled life, troubled by circumstance. Things kept . . . interfering, interrupting. Matters of settling your pasts: your parents, Mal’s brother; there was great trouble, a great deal of guilt and suffering putting things in some semblance of order.”

“Sounds like you were watching us plenty,” Laura said, not without a cool resentment in the midst of her desperation that managed to impress Aaron.

“And then, of course, there was the Old Man.” The voice carried on without noting Laura’s rebuke. “He was in the process of learning about you. He sent out tentacles, kept probing and testing you both to see what you were capable of.”

The narrative trailed off, and the electronic hum buzzed through the room long enough that Aaron was finally the one who could stand it no longer.

“Then?”
He struck angrily into the emptiness.

“Then you were in college, Laura, back with your parents and your friends. And Mal was alone.”

“How?” Aaron had taken the role of her proxy, since she was clearly too shaky to keep this goddamned torturous retelling moving along.

“Yes. This is where the conjecture begins. After your confrontation with the Idea, Jon Remak disappeared. From what I gathered, neither you nor Mal knew what had become of him. I know there was strife between him and the two of you, a differing of philosophies and strategies. I assumed he had died. But over the course of time, I have received both queries and information from an individual I believe to be Jon Remak, based not only on knowledge he had of how I work and intelligence he was able to turn up, but on purely factual elements: syntax, grammar, word choice, and tone.

“The thing of it is, that the inquiries and intelligence I received from what I thought was this single individual all came from wildly differing sources: CEOs of major corporations, directors of intelligence organizations, journalists with reputations for paranoid secrecy. And yet I would swear to the fact that every one of them was Jon Remak.”

When silence fell again, Aaron had no immediate words. He was not even, strictly speaking, clear on just what the Librarian was suggesting.

“I believe,” the voice continued, unbidden, “that Remak was somehow able to alter your brain topography and that of your friends and relatives in such a way that you could be returned to your proper life.”

“Not my proper life,” Laura said in a soft voice.

“Maybe. But now comes your end of the bargain, Laura. Consider this: it could be that you got that life back because your companions didn’t want you with them any longer. If Remak did this, he did it for a reason. He was not a man who acted impulsively or without sound motives. What he did to you may have been motivated by factors beyond your ability to fathom now.”

“It doesn’t matter,” she said, and Aaron watched her muscles bunching again; not reflexively this time, but rather to contain her anger. “It wasn’t my choice.”

“Are you sure?” the voice responded coolly.

“What?” Her voice was struck empty of that anger all of a sudden.

“How can you be sure, Laura, that you didn’t ask for this? Who, in their right minds, wouldn’t opt for a future filled with warmth and love and hope over a life of constant tension and danger?”

“But . . .” Laura’s voice picked up its familiar tremble again, and Aaron’s stomach turned at her feeble inability to control this emotional roller coaster. “But I never would have left Mal alone.”

Aaron opened his mouth to respond, to remind her that Mal was no one she knew anymore. This Mal might have been a monster. He might have been cruel to Laura, might have beaten her every day.

“Maybe Mal isn’t alone,” the Librarian’s voice echoed down before words reached Aaron’s lips. “If Remak is alive, as I surmise. Perhaps others have been recruited. I’ve no doubt that they are fighting the Old Man right now. Maybe you’re here, Laura, because you don’t belong in the middle of a war, and you knew it.”

Laura stood up with such speed and intent that Aaron thrust back on his own seat as though he were about to be attacked. She held her place, her body extended as if she were about to give the room the harshest reaming out in history. But her clenched jaw formed no words.

She spun around, marched to a wall, put her back to it, and slid to the floor, clutching her knees to her chest.

Aaron watched her a moment longer. When he was certain she wasn’t about to burst back up again, he spoke.

“I think we’re done here,” he said.

When no response came back immediately, Aaron imagined an image of a man sitting in shadows, surrounded by screens showing this room, and the man in shadows staring at Laura like a precious creature, a child of his own, even.

“Yes,” the voice returned, obliterating the image. “All right, then. I’ll have Ms. Hubert come for you.”

Aaron rose and went over to Laura’s huddled figure. He stood over her, his hands at his sides, his eyes searching her warily.

“Where are they?” she asked, down to the floor. “Where are they now?”

“I don’t know, Laura,” the voice said. “And it surprises me. They were in New York the last time I knew of them, and I have no record of them trying to leave. I’ve tried to find them, but if Remak is alive, then he’s working hard to hide them. It only makes sense. The Old Man would have access to many of the same resources I do. Don’t go to them, Laura. Let something good have come of all this. Go back to the life you had, and make it your own. Make it a happy one.”

Laura looked up, and maybe there was a response within her. But the room suddenly felt lifeless. The electronic hum popped and disappeared, and the room felt like a coffin now.

Aaron looked at Laura impatiently. Her eyes wandered aimlessly about the white.

There was a sudden hiss of air seals, and the door opened, letting a musty darkness into the pristine expanse.

Ms. Hubert examined them with her curious blue eyes, beneath the neat cut of her short salt-and-pepper hair.

“This way,” she said, gesturing through the cellar, still dense with shadows.

They stepped through into another world—their world. Crossing the threshold, Aaron activated his cellpatch, and the information coursed into him, lighting the world up in the digital rainbow of data. It produced a nearly physical high in him, and he felt his muscles shudder, his extremities tingling. He was armed again.

“Did you get what you needed?” Ms. Hubert asked as they mounted the stairs.

Laura came to the top, out into the library proper, before she answered.

“Yes,” she said. “I suppose so.”

“I’m sorry,” the woman said. “Truly sorry.”