After Mind (27 page)

Meg stayed composed, but he caught the scare in her eyes. She crossed an “X” over her heart with her finger.

“Remember, I pretreated the brick with the catalyst, so Meg won’t be hurt,” Robin said as the veins of the chip in Meg’s hand reacted to the drop and turned from blue to red. The white adobe flesh turned a deathly black, oozed, and separated, then curled and withered. Meg lifted her hand and Robin blew on it. The deadened, ash-like particles scattered from Meg’s hand as if weightless and fell up to the domed ceiling of the lab. They circulated in eddies along the rounded walls, then descended and flushed into vents at the baseboards of the room.

“The long-term effects are definitely not unknown,” Robin said. “Horrible paranoia in people. And an eventual, agonizing death.”

“So, then, Meg and I, when we were here, we had . . .?” he asked.

“Yes, you both were no different. You and Meg met when you were three and you both received Dr. Luegner’s fifth-generation spray. PluralVaXine5.”

The walls of the lab flickered back to their whitewashed form. He lowered his eyes in despair. In comparison to the tools at Daniel’s disposal, Robin’s supplies and solutions on the shelf around the confines of the room were all so basic, biological, and soft.

“I’m okay, though, so far,” Meg said. “How about you?”

He nodded, but he wasn’t so sure anymore. “How many people are sick so far?”

“One hundred twenty-one have already died,” Robin said. “Old and young.”

“Like a strange reaction to the skin that you’re in,” Meg said. “A person gets progressively sicker, or worse.”

“Does Luegner know his spray caused the sickness?”

“Luegner doesn’t care. Luegner wants to take credit for the cure,” Robin said.

“But it’s your clinic,” he said. “If you find the cure, you would get the credit for saving—”

“I own the clinic,” Robin said. “But Luegner owns everything in it.”

“That can’t be right. Maybe my father can help.”

Robin withdrew a full-sized red key from her shirt pocket and used it to unlock the table’s drawer. She slid the drawer open and pulled out a lab record book.

“What is that?” he asked as Robin opened her lab book and skimmed from places at random. The shelves against the wall of the room had stacks of books in the spaces tucked away for writing. The more he looked, the more he saw. Every crevice of the room was filled with a treasure trove of files and pages.

“In some, the sickness creates this constant queasiness, while others feel overwhelming fear,” she read aloud. She looked nauseated herself.

He looked over her shoulder as her fingers skimmed and her hand began to shake as she turned the book’s pages, each filled with handwritten notes and beautiful penciled-in sketches; it was a botany book of physical trials. “Tests showed PluralVaXine5 was only supposed to affect point oh-oh-three percent of the population,” she read aloud. “Even if it were a susceptible population of ten thousand, that would still be only zero point three people. That’s less than a person, or not a person, and therefore not likely to affect anyone at all. Luegner figured the risk was worth it. But it seems to have affected
everyone
, instead.”

“Everyone’s afraid now,” Meg said. “The world is changing. It’s irrational, I know. But this is the only home we’ve ever known. Everyone affected could die.”

“Maybe you and my father can work together to solve it. What tools do you have?” he asked.

“I’ll show you,” Robin said. She closed her book with a trembling hand and placed it back into the drawer. “Luegner knows how to hide the truth,” she said, and then whispered, “but so do I.” She slipped the red key back into her pocket. She was scared. She moved to the first table. It had a trio of organizer containers, one yellow, one red, and one blue.

Each container was divided like a large egg carton into eight rows and columns, a total of sixty-four organized bins filled with various specimens or clippings of animal and plant life.

He pinched into the topmost right bin of the yellow container and pulled out what looked like an acorn cap. “Are you kidding? You’re trying to find the cure from this?”

“Absolutely,” Robin said. “I think what I’m looking for is a combination of two parts animal, one part plant. I just got through testing fish oil and frog toxin, with the venom from a plant. It didn’t work, but you try. Pick a combination.”

“Hey,” Meg snickered. “I got one for you. You know how the dark magnetocytes in us automatically shut off and expel?”

“I don’t know. How?” he asked.

“The cytes release their bonds and come out like meconium,” she said. “The first black stuff out of a baby, we learned it in school. Gross, huh?” She laughed. “Thick, dark, olive-colored goo. Sticky like tar. First couple days only, though.”

“I don’t get it,” he said and tossed the acorn cap back into the yellow box. “Why is that funny?”

“Don’t worry, it’s perfectly natural, and doesn’t smell,” Robin said as she took a fresh vial chest from the drawer of the table. “Now let’s find the cure. Are you game? Sixty-four bins per box, three boxes. That makes 262,144 possible combinations. Add a choice of histamine blockers, and that makes millions of promising combinations to try.”

“We’ve narrowed the combinations down, though,” Meg said as she pulled up a stool.

“To how many?” he asked.

“Your three,” Meg said as she bumped his shoulder with hers. Then, with her eyes, she directed him back to the yellow container.

He shook his head, then picked from the intersection of row four, column four. He lifted out a green dandelion petal. It was marked with a tag:
“C-11.”

Robin put the petal into the fresh vial from the drawer. “Good one,” she said. “Keep going.”

He reached for the red container and closed his eyes. He selected row four, column four again. He pinched up the tag of a thin strip of tape connected to a black-spotted beetle wing, marked:
“E-101.”

Robin smiled at Meg and held out the vial for its keep. “Looks like you’ve done this before.”

“It’s ridiculous,” he said. “What could these possibly do? You should see what my dad’s got in his lab.”

“Don’t be so quick. It’s a placebo at worst, cure at best, go on,” Robin said. “Pick another.”

He changed his tack for the last, blue container. Rather than another fourth column or row, he closed his eyes in mockery and felt along the edges of the container for its bottom right corner. It was row and column eight. He pulled out a fish scale. Its label was at the end of a string:
“S-10011.”

He dropped the scale into the vial, all a joke of a cure. “Worthless,” he said, and pushed the blue container away.

“
C-11, E-101, S-10011
,” Meg said.

“And that’s supposed to mean something to me?” he asked.

“It almost spells your name,” Meg said. “C,E,S-“

“I told you,” he said as a faint sound grew louder outside. “That’s not my name. Wait. Shh—”

Then he heard it again: nails clicking on stone. He rushed toward the wall of the lab. The clacking moved along the outside of the dome and he followed along the wall.

“Wait. Stay here where we can talk to you,” Meg said. “Don’t go back out there.”

He put his ear to the front antechamber door. Silence.

“I won’t go with you if you run. They’ll catch you,” Meg said. “Wait, I know what you want me to say. I’ll play. Some kids at school are afraid to leave. They’re even throwing up because the ship’s slowed down. They want to stay up here. Nobody knows what to expect when we arrive on the planet.”

He looked at her a curious moment, then set his hand on the lever of the door. “Expect it to be wild and free.” He turned the lever a crack and two Chokebots battered through in a line. The leader’s rear stinger was cocked in an arch over its head to strike.

Ceeborn dove back into the lab through the pass-through window, crashing equipment off the wraparound shelf. He grabbed the hand-sized rivulus case by the tank. “Come with me!”

The two Chokebots split to encircle him from both sides of the room. Robin blocked off the right at the middle table. “You’re nothing, not real,” Robin said. “You’re nightmare demons holding him back.” The Chokebot pressed her aside and marched its way through.

“Go out the back.” Meg ran for the door behind her exam table and hollered, “This door!” She slammed the crash bar open for his exit.

He ran outside into the light and turned back. “Let’s go, come with me!”

Meg shook her head; a definite, but sullen, no. “I’m staying here. I’ll stay to see the whole ship destroyed if I have to.”

He was stunned. “Why would you want to see all this destroyed? It’s so beautiful.”

“It’s not what you think. It’s a dream. A fantasy. How far did you think you were going to run?”

He was mystified. “I thought I was running to you.”

The two Chokebots circled in behind her in the lab. He lunged for the door.

“Wake up! This ship isn’t real,” Meg said. The Chokebots reared up and she yanked the exit door shut.

He stared at the outside of her closed door, agape. He had been driven to ambush.

The two Chokebots were cut off inside, but a third Chokebot had encircled the U-shape of the dome to cover his rear exit. It flexed up at its waist, its front tarsal claws ready for its leap and attack.

He slipped the rivulus case into the front pocket of his pants and steeled himself for a fight. The Chokebot leapt and his nightmare went dark.

He awoke in movement under the Chokebot’s body frame. Its center claws held his waist up from the ground as it walked. His arms were outstretched over his head and were held in the rear claws of another Chokebot leading their march. His ankles were restrained in the front claws of the third Chokebot at their rear. In all, the three patrols were carrying him forward in their line.

The lead Chokebot kicked a door open to a rotted hallway; the three Chokebots entered with him still suspended beneath their bodies. Their left sets of legs walked on the narrow floor while their right legs angled up onto the hallway’s rounded wall. The tubular hallway was lined shoulder height with soiled porthole windows.

Daniel was ahead. He exhaled and opened a door into a darkened cell.

The Chokebots dropped Ceeborn in a heap of shivers once inside. The leader maneuvered and shackled him in chains to the floor.

“It’s so beautiful out there. There are people and flowers and everything,” Ceeborn said, restrained by the chains to his wrists.

The lead Chokebot straddled him and lowered its dome to within a breath of his face, close enough for him to smell the tinge of its burned metallic flesh. Its screen became a mimicked reflection of his panicked, wide-eyed face. Locked over his body, it choked his emotion back to calm. As he tensed against its movement, the screen shifted its reflection of his efforts to red. As his behavior relaxed and his emotional state calmed, the screen’s feedback loop gifted a reassuring, gentler return to blue.

“Don’t you understand?” Daniel said. “You’re piecing together a nightmare.”

“No, you don’t understand,” Ceeborn said as the Chokebot backed away. “I want to go back. Those people out there, they mean something. I want to mean something, too.”

“What did Robin tell you when I wasn’t there with you?” Daniel asked as he peeled a flake of fleshy decay from the ceiling.

“Nothing. She and Meg are finding a cure.”

“You’re extrapolating from a fantasy,” Daniel said. The opened wound of the ceiling bled where he picked. A loosened slice of flesh dropped to the floor. Its impact was grave. The ulcer oozed with a run of black spores.

“It’s not just the ship,” Ceeborn said. “People are dying, too. It’s all going to fall apart into ashes.”

“Maybe you’re right. And if you are, then none of us can leave here unless I can fix this problem—or we’ll all be dead soon enough.”

Ceeborn averted his eyes from the Chokebot that returned to straddle him, and in the distortion of light through the clear dome of its head, he saw Daniel crouching to leave under the frame of the door. Daniel stopped at a porthole window along the corridor’s festered wall.

As Ceeborn lay curled and cold on the floor, the Chokebot’s dome tilted toward its shoulder. It lifted and reached its piped front leg forward. Its sixteen-pronged gripper extended and clamped around his neck to choke him into a reddened haze—and away from this horrid, but irresistible, wet world.

His gaze dissolved to a view of darkness beyond the hallway’s porthole window. He was fading from consciousness and his focus turned to imagining himself from afar, from outside the window, looking back in. A covering sheet peeled away from the outside of the porthole window and away from the underside of a giant, darkened hull.

The shrinking window to where he lay became lost in the folds of the neckline of an enormous ship. A ship with an organic hull that was grown, not built; a bioship whose outer mantle had engorged like a giant sail catching a rhythmic charge. And in the mantle’s exhale, it delivered its enormous store of energy and settled back in, once more parched, against the sides of a traveling ship.

Eight shoulder-like collars extended from the back of the ship’s squid-like body, surrounding a stress-reddened tank large enough to hold half an ocean of water—an ocean of organic space dust fuel thrown off by the stars. An accelerator module was attached to the rear of the tank and was tucked in, protected within the massive length of the arms.

As the module’s two disks of lights glowed blue, the bioship accelerated forward. It had absorbed the mighty organic power of the stars and boosted ahead, pulse by pulse through time, razing the cold, dark ocean of space. And then like a sole, lost neuron firing on a vast cosmic scale, the disks flashed with a massive burst of energy and the ship pinpricked away into the distance. And in a single last instant of existence, all who dreamed upon it were gone.

SIXTEEN

MEMORIES TO SEVENTEEN

P
ACKET’S EYELIDS FLUTTERED into the end of his dream. In the sleepy haze before he fully awoke, remnant stars broke into pulses of ones and zeros. A lingering image of Ceeborn lying safe and asleep on the floor of his cell stayed fixed and resolved. The sound of Ceeborn’s rhythmic breathing was drowned out only by the melodic ebb and flow of waves lapping ashore from a more familiar sound machine. He discerned the peaceful sound of waves with the added touch of seabirds descending with a caw over a distant, sandy shore.