Those That Wake 02: What We Become (18 page)

“You can’t let him die,” Rose said, her ears deaf, her eyes blind to anything else. “You
can’t
.”

“Rose, listen. This situation is bigger than Mal, bigger than me, bigger than all of us. Did Mal say anything about what he learned?”

“No!”
she screamed, her voice rising louder than it ever had in her memory, driven by the terror of Mal’s stillness.

Remak’s eyes lingered on her briefly, searching for the truth beneath the emotion, then went back to Mal.

“I can save him,” he said heavily, as though it was not a relief, but only greater hardship. “I can save him.”

“Do it. Please. What are you waiting for?”

“It comes with a price, Rose.”

“I’ll pay it.”

“It’s not for you to pay. When I went into the neuropleth, my body was converted into neurological impulses. Essentially, I’m made of an energy that can enter other bodies through their nervous systems. This energy is what my life is made of—do you understand that at all? I can use that energy to kick-start Mal’s metabolism, to knit his bones, seal his organs, mend his flesh. The energy will become Mal’s life.”

“Do it,” she said, repeating the only words that made sense to her anymore.

“Rose.” His voice fell on her like a hammer. “That energy is
me
. Once it’s been spent to heal Mal, there won’t be a Jon Remak anymore.”

“You made this happen to him,” she said, desperation igniting her words. It was hard, so hard, to feel something for Jon Remak when she was not even facing the same man she had met in Silven’s office. How easy it was to tell a disembodied idea of a man to give himself up. “And . . .” She stumbled over the outrageous demand she had made, trying to mitigate it without withdrawing it. “And you can’t stop the Old Man yourself. Mal is the only one who can do it. The only one.”

His eyes slid from Rose, found Mal. With his head bowed, he considered the boy.

“Yes,” he finally said. “I know.” He knelt down and rested one hand on Mal’s head and one hand on his chest and closed his eyes.

Rose’s heart hammered. She stared at Mal, waiting to see the tears of his flesh close, the bruises on his face disappear. A minute passed.

Remak’s head came up, his eyes opened.

“What happened?” Rose demanded. “Why isn’t he healing?”

“He’s almost gone, his mind is shutting down,” Remak said without looking at her.

“But if you heal his body—”

“Is that what you want, Rose, an intact body with no mind? I have to fix his mind first; I have to pull it back.”

“How?”

“I need to go in and find something that will make him fight his way back. Mal is an unyielding fighter, but he has to
want
to fight. Only then can I heal his body.”

“You’re going into Mal’s mind?”

“Yes, I have to.”

“Take me,” Rose said.

Remak looked up at her.

“Take me with you,” she said again, doing her best to keep the need from filling her voice. “I’m the only person Mal has. I can help bring him back.”

“Rose, I’ve never—”

“But you
could
.”

“I don’t know. Theoretically, if we had neural sync . . .”

She could see something shining in him, fascinated by the idea.

“Then what?” she prompted.

“I can move through the neuropleth from brain to brain on my own, but if I’m going to take you into the neuropleth with me, then our nervous systems have to be in sync.”

“Okay,” she agreed, needing nothing more but the hope of it.

“For neural sync, we’ll need to make physical contact,” he said. “And once you’ve synced, you’ll have a door to the neuropleth in your head forever. Are you ready for that, Rose?”

She twitched a nod. Her body was spasming with fear and anticipation.

“Sit down,” he said, and she sat on the floor with her back against the cracked plaster of the wall.

The man Remak was occupying sat beside her, rested one hand on Mal’s bare skin, and took her hand with the other. His eyes closed, and the room was left with only the sound of Mal’s shallow, ragged breathing.

“I’m ready,” she said, her eyes searching for something she knew had no form, no solidity. “I’m—”

A bolt of lightning cracked through her, starting from the hand Remak was holding and lashing up her spine, across every nerve in her body, and turning her brain into a searing current of electricity. She was no longer in a room, no longer in a body. She was a synaptic flash, pulsing along a highway that branched infinitely, connecting into a limitless panorama of human brains that throbbed with their own bursts of electrical life.

This is the neuropleth.
Remak’s voice filled her consciousness.
Your body still exists, unlike mine, but by coming here with me, you now have a doorway to the neuropleth in your brain
.
Mal will have the same doorway when he awakens. I suggest neither of you ever open it. You might be able to touch other minds through it, but if you ever try to inhabit another body as I do, your own body will be converted into neurological impulses. You will become like me.

She took it in, felt the pulsing minds connected to her by this neurological tether.

Tell me you understand, Rose.

I do,
she said without words.
Mal and I will have these doorways
.
If we ever try to inhabit another body, we’ll become like you
.

You have to make Mal understand it, too,
he said.

I will.

Then, gently, she was pulled along the pathway, the sensation of Remak’s presence guiding her. The brains, coursing with electrical fire, rushed past her.

This,
Remak said,
is Mal
. It crackled with hard gray light, like burning iron. But the iron light of the mind was dim and growing dimmer as they watched.

The spark of Remak leaped out and joined the synaptic buzz of Mal’s brain, and Rose was drawn along. Together, they entered Mal.

“
I NEED TO ASK YOU
something,” Laura said, her eyes on the flat road stretching out endlessly before her.

“I told you, I
wasn’t
looking at you in the shower.” Aaron’s voice was modulated into a plaintive whine. “I thought you were in trouble. I was trying—”

“
Fine,
what
ever
. That’s not even what I’m talking about.”

“Okay. So what, then?” His tone instantly shifted to that of impatient condescension. He was a master of disguising defensiveness by being patronizing. They had been driving for another day now, without even the occasional respite of stopping to investigate one of Aaron’s sites. Laura had become intimately acquainted with his defense strategies, though for her part, she often incited them by calling upon the bathroom incident. She found herself falling into that dangerous babysitter/child dynamic of playful aggression to relieve the pressure of hanging around this little punk. She had to remind herself that he was, in many ways, still a child and that he was not benefiting from someone keeping him on the defensive. This was a boy who desperately needed to feel superior, in control, at all times.

“You said that those cellpatches do cause brain cancer,” she said, loosening her fingers on the steering wheel and trying to flex her knotted shoulders.

“There’s a statistical correlation, yes. But like I said, mine is several generations ahead of the current model.”

“Yes, that’s exactly what I want to ask you about. You’re brushing the whole thing off because it’s not going to affect you . . . as far as you know, anyway.”

“Do you think I’d be using one of these if I wasn’t—”

“Again, not where I’m going.”

“Well, then,” he said, “maybe it would help if you get there.”

“What about everyone else? What about all the other people who are going to die because they let someone drill machinery into their brains without knowing the facts?”

“What about them?”

Her shoulders were tighter than ever and her knuckles were stark white against the steering wheel.

“You’re in a position to help them. Why don’t you?”

“What in the name of God are you talking about? I didn’t sync them with cellpatches; they made their own choices. That’s the way human existence works. The people who are weaker for whatever reason—including inadequate knowledge—die out. It leaves the stronger ones.”

“The stronger ones have a responsibility, Aaron, to help the weaker ones.” She was certain this would appeal to his sense of superiority.

“Not to help them,” he said. “To lead them.”

“What do you mean?”

“Society produces unusual individuals of greater ability. Other people try to tear them down—out of jealousy, generally speaking. But the superior man must take a position of leadership.”

“And just how are you leading all these people who are going to be wasting away in hospital beds inside the next few years?”

“I’m not talking about leading people,
per se
. I’m talking about leading society in general, guiding it upward. Read some Nietzsche, and get back to me when you know what you’re talking about, Laura.” He turned away from her and gazed at the fields of grass tediously streaming by.

She choked down the astonished shriek of rage boiling up from her stomach. Honestly, she couldn’t remember anyone who could throw her so easily into a fury.
Remember,
she told herself,
remember why this boy is here
.

“Did your father read Nietzsche, Aaron?”

“Yes,” he said, his eyes not leaving the world outside the window. She pictured him sitting at home, listening to his father lay out the philosophy of the world to him: the strong and the weak, those who led and those who followed.

“Your father chose a side, Aaron,” she said. “Or it was chosen for him by his situation, by the power he had and the company he made. He chose to honor profit over service. Don’t let his memory choose your side for you.”

“Don’t talk about my father.”

Laura sighed.

“Don’t come running to me when the revolution comes for you,” she said, thinking the argument finished.

“Revolution?” Aaron said incredulously, spinning on her and clearly fired up for a whole new argument. “A revolution is no longer possible. Our society, the one you’re so concerned about, is no longer capable of standing up and making their voices heard, because all they have to do now is sit down and log on.”

“You just made my point.”

He looked at her with clear disdain for that idea.

“Corporations,” she said, “like Intellitech, have lulled everyone into subservience through technology. By giving everyone a voice through it, they’ve taken all our voices away. They push it and push it and push it on us. Now, with cellenses, everyone can be talking every second of the day. With six billion voices going all at once, how can anyone hear anything worthwhile?”

“Are you suggesting some kind of antiprogress philosophy to me, Laura? To
me,
of all the people in the world?”

“I’m just saying that maybe we’re not meant to become so intimate with technology like this. Maybe it’s not natural for us to be so dependent and so entangled with technology, and that it’s blinding us.”

“Not natural.” He played around with the word on his tongue, obviously searching for its flaw. “Well, Laura, it’s not ‘natural’ for us be outside when the sun isn’t up. It isn’t ‘natural’ for us to buy our food instead of hunting and foraging for it. It isn’t ‘natural’ for us to live in gigantic structures made of concrete or even to be able to preserve a record of our thoughts by
writing it down
. So, tell me, are we better off putting a chokehold on our own evolutionary capacity to create tools and grow, or are we supposed to stagnate?”

“I’m not saying we should be static. Just that . . . I don’t know.” It was true, these things were occurring to Laura practically as she was saying them. She hadn’t spent her life dwelling on them. But by the same token, they seemed to spring into her head fully formed, as though shot forward from some deep, dusty recess of her mind. “Just that we might be going too fast. You said yourself that a year was like a millennium when it came to technological development. That’s so much faster than it ever was before. We were ready for writing when it came along, right? I mean, we couldn’t have grown without it. Now we’re hurrying to grow ourselves just for the sake of the growth. I just think we’re getting more clever, but we’re not getting any smarter or any wiser.”

“That’s quite a little speech, Laura. Do you know what we’re doing here? I mean, do you understand what is happening right now?”

“You’re patronizing me like you’re my grandfather?”

“My cellpatch and the lenses they’re synced to are interpreting the wavelength we got off the digital core back near Pope Springs, and they’re picking it out of the air around us, differentiating it from a thousand other signals that are nearly indistinguishable. Essentially, I’m
seeing
an interplay of energy that’s invisible to the human eye.” Though his words were carefully paced and spoken in the low, heavy tone of the helplessly self-important, those eyes he was talking about were alive with the fervor of the fanatic. “It’s gotten us across four states and to within—what?—probably about six hours of our target now. Our target being somebody who’s been manipulating data and God knows how much of your precious human interaction for years without anyone knowing about it. We’re doing that because we’ve developed tools that enable us to overcome our weaknesses and make ourselves strong. Tell me, please, how by any remotely intelligent stretch of the imagination, that’s a bad thing?”

She turned away from him and back to the road. He had mastered this magical technology that let him glimpse the ethereal, but he couldn’t even drive a car, wasn’t interested in the least. For some reason, Laura found herself fighting back tears.

“Turn off here,” Aaron said, indicating a small road that broke off the highway, through grassy fields.

She was going to ask him how he knew the small road would get them to town, but realized he was consulting the GPS on his cellens. Laura’s head was still mired in the idea that you needed to be holding something in your hand and looking at it to see it. Hopelessly obsolete at eighteen years old. Was that the new way of things?