Animalis (29 page)

In Jax, she saw a young man, full of potential, just like Jax saw, ready to change the world. Not knowing the depth that would come from living a long life as she had. A long life. If Jax had had full control over his body, he would have staggered at what he found hidden in the history of Hurley’s DNA. She had lived for seventy-five years. Twice as long as his own mother had lived, longer than his grandmother. And yet, her body was still vibrant with healthy tissue. She had done what she could to remain in her youth: vitamins, stringent control over her diet, and having skin treatments every five years. Nothing unusual for the majority of the population. But even she didn’t know the real reason her body had defied the deterioration of age. Jax followed the connecting ripples of cause that had affected her. Tiny fragments of DNA had been influenced, shifted by something, like his leg had been. The trail faded off without a record from the mysterious entities.

Someone had changed her. Jax widened his view of the DNA, taking in thousands of lives over a hundred years, and saw the lines that connected to her strangeness from across time and space. They spread out, being pulled by a kind of momentum that was building in the communal being of life. The movement was a swelling, like a wave starting to form. His own leg had been caught in it.

The changes in her were anonymous, just like Jax’s leg had been. But he could almost make out a pattern in the changes spread through history. Changes, leading to more changes, building in importance. It was like a movement flowing through life itself. Something big was coming in the future. It looked like the entities were preparing to transform the balance of coexistence within the sphere of life. She had been saved to come into contact with his own life, but the reason eluded him. Was it for this moment? So that he would be here, to use the machine? To do what? The question came back:
“What will he do?”

Was he supposed to do what Hank and Captain Hernandez wanted? End the war? Destroy the Animalis?

His body compressed with the resonance of the answer that the focus of life gave to his thoughts. Jax could feel his real, physical body contorting with the agony of it. He could feel all of the suffering contained in those few words:
destroy the Animalis
. The sorrow of genocide from the past locked in the memory of the DNA felt overwhelming. Jax was sucked down in it, incapacitated, drowning in the pain. There was a whole eternity of suffering. But it wasn’t the physical pain that stood out, and would stay with him forever; it was the betrayal each individual—animal, Animalis, and human—had felt. A hand that could extend love and mercy, had lashed out instead. Where friendship could have been, should have been, there was cold, indifferent cruelty. Fear, mistrust, and separation were the result.

He tried to flee the experiences, and the guilt of having been a part of it, focusing back down on the one twinkle of kindness he could think of: Hurley. Within her mind was the hope he needed to feel. Kindness, trust, faith in those around her. How was she so pure? How could she continue to leave herself so vulnerable in the face of such a callous world? She loved Jax, she loved Hodge, Little Hank, and Moxie. Jax could even see the compassion she had for Hank, even while he had been torturing the Animalis, but how?

He noticed a rift in her DNA that caught his attention. Jax tried to bring it into focus. It was strange, remnants of pain and regret, but he could tell some sections were out of his reach. Couldn’t he see everything? There was a limit? He had thought the secrets of all DNA were in his control, but not this. He started to form an idea of what had happened, guessing from what came before, and what came after the gaps.

Chapter 25

Hurley

Hurley’s DNA displayed her life to Jax. From an early age, the Animalis stood out in her mind.

“The census from last year was unaware of the groups of Animalis living in northern Mongolia. This could increase the estimated population by tens of thousands,” a news reporter had said.

“A new study is underway. Researchers are hoping to find the answers to the question: ‘Just how human are the Animalis?’ Many theorize that their brains—like their bodies—are half way between humans and animals,” said another reporter from her memories.

Conversations from her childhood friends drifted through Jax’s awareness: “If I could have any Animalis? I’d want a dog Animalis. I’d train him to clean my room, go to the bathroom in the toilet, and he would guard our house.”

But the dream of owning Animalis was quickly quelled. Protective Animalis rights groups held popular sway within the United Nations and laws were passed to prevent ownership and mistreatment. With the world economy doing well in the twenties, the Animalis were welcomed into the work force. When the economy collapsed in the thirties, the Animalis became despised.

Her father had been in the military, and it was a natural choice for her to follow in his footsteps. She hated the training, the mental games, and the manipulation, but she made it out of boot camp, alive, but hardened.

Jesus Hernandez was there, joining the military several years after her. He was young and cocky, like Jax had been, ready to save the world. He was younger than her, too, ten years younger. In the present, he had aged far more than she appeared to have. She knew that he was attracted to her, but her attraction to him wasn’t the same. She needed someone to share her fears with, and Hernandez was always willing to listen. Letting the other men in the unit think they were dating helped to quell most of their own ambitions for courting her, but it seemed to fuel a dangerous protectiveness in Hernandez.

Then the Animalis started attacking humans. Not just the random bitings that had been known to occur, but deliberate, planned assaults on humans. There were discussions about the intent with which the Animalis had been created. If they should be controlled, registered, if their population should be limited. Then she was deployed.

“What?” the voice of Hernandez echoed to Jax from the DNA memory. “They’re splitting up the unit!” He didn’t have much of a temper, but it was coming out now.

“I’ll be online most nights,” Hurley tried to reassure him. “That robotics company, Nano Wrimo, might actually have their robot avatars ready for public use within the year, you know. I’ll rent one and come walking with you.”

He didn’t want to hear it. “I should be coming with you. I’ll put in a request. I don’t care what they have planned for me.”

He kept it up for the two days leading to her departure. But when the time came, he had never sent in the request, afraid to have discipline come down on him, and he said good-bye.

They were sending her into the heart of Siberia, where the bulk of the Animalis had built communities. Whole cities of nothing but Animalis. Apparently they were going to be helping reduce excess Animalis population. She didn’t know what it meant, but wanted to imagine it would be a clean euthanasia of an overcrowded animal shelter. But it wasn’t.

The first mission was frightening: Animalis in an urban environment, talking, playing, curious at the troops forming barricades and buildings for themselves. Jax felt the anxiety she felt; it was not an animal shelter. The Animalis were just as alive as the humans who had come to eliminate them. And it was sickening how willingly the Animalis obeyed. They came to the buildings, Hurley worked at the desk, helping them fill out paperwork before being led, one by one, into another room, never to come back out. One week at the desk, the next week in the room the Animalis were led to.

Jax came to the first gap in the DNA’s records. It wasn’t a subtle change, like Jax’s leg had been. There was a small piece of time and space that had been clipped out of the universe, and then sown back together. After the gap, Hurley was different. She had closed off a piece of her emotions. She thought she should feel bad about something—gap—but everyone seemed to think they were doing a great thing. It was important, they were protecting the world, and she was a part of it, playing an important role.

One of the weeks while Hurley was working at the desk, Hernandez walked in. He was smiling.

“Hey, firecracker. Did you miss me?” he asked.

“Jesus!” She ran to him. She needed someone familiar, she needed someone to tell her she was a good person, and she needed an ally. Jax felt the relief of being held in the familiar arms.

“Hernandez, your first shifts are going to be back in this room.” Another soldier broke up their reunion.

“Let’s catch up tonight, alright?” Hernandez said.

“Alright,” she said, smiling.

The two men started to walk to the other room.

“Watch it, freak,” the soldier warned one of the Animalis.

Hernandez laughed. “Ugly aren’t they? Back off, apestoso.” He pushed the mole to the ground with the Spanish insult.

Jax felt Hurley’s hope pull back. Hernandez hated the Animalis just like everyone else. She wanted to say something; the unspoken words were all a part of the DNA’s memories:

Leave it alone. It trusts us with its life and we are crushing that trust under our feet. The least we can do is let it enjoy the last few moments of its life. I thought you were kind. I thought you would see the pain we were causing and want to put up a fight with me, refuse our duties together. But I can’t say any of this to you because you’d say I was wrong. You’d push me down, just like that Animalis.

When they met later, she found she couldn’t open up to him anymore. He thought they were still a couple, and didn’t seem to notice that it was only him speaking when they were together.

When the Animalis began to suspect that their friends and companions weren’t coming back, they became hostile, refusing the demands they had given into before. Hurley and the others were ordered to use deadly force if an Animalis showed signs of defiance. She was sent into the city to escort Animalis that hadn’t come at their appointed times, and then there was another gap. The gaps were not in her memory, but seemed to be whole sections of the universe, clipped out and sown back together.

The disconnection from her emotions widened, robotically obeying commands. But something was trying to get out from inside her. Jax could feel doubt building, with every gap in the story that he came across, but she held it back. She held onto any justification she could, trying to shield herself from the guilt.

She broke down in the third city they were ordered to reduce. Standing in the room where the compliant Animalis were being taken to die, she held the syringe in her hand. It was meant for the Animalis, but she, and Jax, caught in the experience, were going to turn the needle on themselves; they were the ones that deserved to feel the deadly prick of it. She couldn’t get away from the military. She couldn’t disobey, or run away, or feel sorry for what she was doing. There was no way for her to escape. The dam she had built, between herself and her feelings of guilt at betraying the trust of the innocent Animalis, broke. Jax passed the last gap.

Hurley was put through a rehabilitation program and discharged from the military. She had known what she was doing, and had chosen to ignore the voice that had called out from inside her. The deaths of thousands of innocent Animalis weighed on her conscience. There was no way to ask for forgiveness, no way that the debt could be lifted from her shoulders.

Jax started to feel peace replacing the shame five years later in her life. There was an opportunity to join a group that would be living with and helping Animalis, and she took it. The more she came to understand the Animalis, playing with them, helping to reinforce human mannerisms, the more she found she loved them. And the more she loved them, the more she knew that she never wanted to see another Animalis hurt the way she had hurt them. Jax had already experienced glimpses of the quality that she cherished so much in them: innocence. But seeing it through her eyes revealed the depth of their innocence.

The Animalis hadn’t known lies, and hadn’t known betrayal. They were all little children. And like children, as they were abused, taken advantage of, and trodden under foot, their trust grew thin and fearful. Their instinct of self-preservation took over, and they would lash out in violent ways when provoked.

Chapter 26

Awakening

Jax slowly receded from Hurley’s life; she should have some privacy left to her past. He had been seeking solace in her life, but had found more than he could comprehend. He had needed to know that there was more than misery in the world, and he had found it.

Jax pulled himself back to the DNA that had trails connecting to him in the present. His body floated in the timeless present. He couldn’t die. This couldn’t be the end.

Strands of possible futures trailed off in front of Jax. He was surprised to find that, within the next five minutes, he and Narasimha would almost certainly be picked up. The plane he had been on, Narasimha’s plane, was still in the upper atmosphere. The warthog that was flying the plane had waited for the others to leave, and was going to be returning.

The arena again!
Jax thought in despair. He checked inside of Narasimha and found that there was almost nothing he could do that would stop her from taking him back to that horrible place, and killing him herself.

He could feel the focal point of life still watching him, waiting on him, before it would continue on. Was there something he could do? Beyond saving himself even, if these were the last moments of his life, was there some role that life needed him to fulfill? He wished there was someone to just tell him what to do. Hank, Hernandez, Hurley—
Let them decide
—and he would be the tool in their hands. What price would he have to pay if he made the wrong choice?

He could use the pyramid to stop Narasimha to save himself and countless others she might kill. Just one life.

But his mind resonated again with the answer from pyramid:
“NO.”

Something shifted inside his mind. Lessons from Hurley’s life, and his own, combining and unconsciously taking root in him. He couldn’t say exactly what he was starting to understand, and he still didn’t know if there was some vital action he was supposed to take while he was here, but he knew what he wanted to do.

Narasimha’s life spread before him once more. He had to know what was motivating her. If he could understand her, then maybe he could change her.

Jax absorbed her life in giant gulps: she had been a mother, she was the last of her kind, her parents and her children had been killed one by one by humankind, she had suffered and lost everything and attributed all of her suffering to humans, she had a need to hunt and she had convinced herself that humans were prey. But behind all of that, Jax found her need to belong. She wanted to have a place in the world. Someone had to want her.

It was one simple thing, but impossible to achieve. She had demonized and debased humans down to the lowest and most insignificant creatures in her mind. How could Jax possibly make her believe that she was important to a human. He would have to conquer her first.

Jax remembered Grimshaw again, and knew that there was a way.

And he did it, delicately shifting sequences of DNA until the projections of the future seemed to follow his desired outcome.

When it was done, Jax brought his focus back to the pyramid, and to his body spinning within it. Before he tried to pull himself from the experience, he thought of Hank again. His best friend, driven crazy, knowing what the pyramid might be capable of, while no one had believed him.
Hank so badly wanted to see what the pyramid was capable of,
Jax thought.

Jax quickly found Hank’s DNA and watched it spread out before him. Hank sat, in the present moment, inside the company’s plane, within his small cabin, still aching from the near fatal dose of serum.

His mind was split, torn between his faith and friendship with Jax, and his hatred for the Animalis. The split was creating a chasm. His mind was a whole world of thoughts and information, carefully organized and cared for.

When the split had started to form, two months ago, the force of his emotions had pushed his actions out of alignment with his ideals, creating mental blocks, meant to stop his moral judgment from condemning himself for what he had done to the hyena, which had started to fragment his mind.

It was painful to see. On one side, he was taught and raised to honor life, and on the other side, where he had hidden his grief for his mother, was a boiling volcano of vengeance ready to explode with a deadly wrath. And the pyramid had been the ultimate tool.

Pain shot through Jax’s heart to see the chasm cutting through their friendship.

Jax was growing weak; he could sense the strain of using the pyramid for too long building up inside his body. He had to get his mind out soon. But he wanted to do something, give Hank some satisfaction that the pyramid was the Ivanovich Machine.

So he planted a seed in his mind as Hank sat in his cabin, linking their memories in a way that would give him an echo of Jax’s experience in the pyramid.

Then Jax was back, focusing on himself; what his breath had been. Breath in, hold. Breath out, hold. In sixteen seconds, out sixteen seconds. Time was starting to continue. He felt his legs and his arms. The synapses finished firing in his brain and his eyes cracked open. The Earth spun into view, the blue glow so beautiful to him now. The pyramid continued to rotate, and the stars came into view. He was alive. In: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen. Had it worked?

He could feel something shifting inside his body, sending out a sound of gurgling fluids. Something popped, but he didn’t feel any pain. He was changing.

Fatigue washed over him. In the eternity of the machine, he hadn’t had to hold all of the information flowing through him. Now the enormous wave of knowledge was crashing into his limited body. His muscles ached, his eyes leaked, and his mind started to forget. The wealth of information slipping away like a dream. And his consciousness began to drift as well, slipping into a recovery sleep.

The plane was coming to get them. He had seen the trails of his future leading back down to Earth. Narasimha would take him back to the arena to pay for his crime, and she would be the one to exact his punishment, when she found out what he had done.

——

Jax woke up strapped to the wall of the plane. His space suit was off, and he could hear the rumbles from sound waves propagating through the air again. His head was still pounding and his left hand was numb. His muscles couldn’t have moved even if they hadn’t been strapped down.

The light within the cargo hold burned his eyes, but he needed to see it. He held one eyelid open just a hair and looked down where the pyramid had been strapped. It was there again, cold and unmoving, held to the floor like the rest of the inanimate cargo. He shut his eye quickly to stop from getting sick.

“Run …
Run
…
Run
it again.
Run it again
. Run in again,” a voice was saying. “Get-
Get-Get
Get another scanner-
anner-anner-anner
.”

His brain hadn’t adjusted yet, and the words echoed and shot around his mind, circling past his awareness several times at a hundred miles an hour.

“We only-
ly-ly-ee-ee-eeeee
have the one, Nara. Only have one, Nara. I don’t see anything wrong with it,” the warthog said.

Jax opened his eye a little more. The two Animalis were talking next to the wall screen. A CT scan of the pyramid rotated in a three-dimensional image on the display. Narasimha saw him watching them. She held her hand up to stop the conversation with the warthog. He closed his eyes again.

“Jax-
ax
-
ax
. Jax. You lived. I lived.
I lived. I lived.
You keep making these mistakes-
stakes
-
aaakes
-
mistaaaaakes
. Your enemy, brought helpless before you—helpless before you—again and again, and you don’t have the strength to act,” she snarled. She started walking to him.

Jax wanted to speak, but he knew he wouldn’t be able to make any audible sounds yet.

“Unless you don’t think that I’m your enemy?
I’m your enemy?
I’m your enemy?” she said. “How did you activate the pyramid, Jax?”

She waited for him to respond. After a moment, he decided to try. It hurt to move his lips and tongue.

“We’re not enemies, Nara.” His voice was a gravelly whisper and came out of his mouth in slow motion. The effort sent his head pounding again.

Narasimha waited for more. When Jax remained quiet, she started to laugh. “Humans are always coming up with new-
new
-
new
-
new
ways to flaunt their stupidity-
eeeeeeee
.” She looked back at the warthog and laughed again; the sound of it rocketed around Jax’s skull. “Why don’t you think—don’t you think—don’t you think we’re enemies?” She seemed to be asking it for an honest answer.

“Because …” Jax pulled himself from the brink of unconsciousness. “I’m not fighting against you anymore.”

“I wasn’t sure-r-r-r-r you were fighting me before. You were—you were—you were scurrying across my path like a cockroach, trying not to be crushed?” she said, standing directly in front of him. She looked into his eyes.

Jax felt his body trying to tense up. Had this subtle part of his plan worked? Even if it had, there was no way to know how she would react to the change. He watched her eyes intently, trying to catch any hints of the change.

Her head jerked back, and her eyes squinted. She let a little growl into her voice. “Why is the pyramid different? Why-
Why
-
Why
-
Why
isn’t the DNA signature showing up in the CT scans anymore?” She pressed her broad nose close to Jax’s cheek. Her moist breath warmed his skin.

“I killed it,” Jax said. The numbness in his left hand began to sting. He wouldn’t last much longer before he would sink into unconsciousness again while his brain adjusted to the change. “It’s gone. The DNA inside it is completely destroyed.” He felt the breath stop on his cheek. The breath held for a long time, and when it returned, it was a growl.

“Don’t lie, human-
human
-
human
,” she said.

“I’d tell you how to use it, but it doesn’t matter anymore. No one will ever be able to use it again.” He started to let himself go; the sense of falling backward down a deep tunnel as his consciousness drifted away.

Then he heard a deafening roar that was loud enough to compete with the ringing building in Jax’s ears. “It was mine, human!” As his mind drifted away, the voice was squeezed down to a tinny echo: “I’ll tear you apart for all the world to see!”