Unchanged (39 page)

Hopefully.

His fingertip hovers over the surface of his desk, shaking as it readies itself to send the final command.

If this works, she will be the most perfect human being in existence.

If this works, she will be beautiful. She will be infamous. She will be a scientific miracle.

If
this works.

His finger starts to tremble. The doubt starts to seep in.

Can he really handle another failure? Can his heart, his resolve, his career really survive another broken, lifeless corpse on his table?

He pushes the thought from his mind. He wills himself to stay positive. To stay optimistic.

To stay hopeful.

S:E/R:A will be the one. The one that survives. He doesn't know how, but he feels it in his bones.

Maybe it'll be the modifications he's made to the DNA sequence that finally do the trick.

Maybe it'll be a miracle.

He takes a deep breath and prepares to send the initiation command. But just before his finger brushes against the cool surface of the desk, another ping appears on his wall screen.

Without even bothering to look at the metadata, he angrily accepts the incoming request. The reprimand already bursting from his mouth. “Sari! This is not a debate! I'm—”

He's halted by the sight in front of him. It's not the face of his daughter that greets him on the other side of the connection. It's his business partner.

“Alixter,” he says with relief. “Sorry, I thought you were my daughter. You'll be happy to know I'm just about to implant the next sequence in the gestation chamber. I've made some significant tweaks to—”

Once again, Rio is cut off.

And it is not words that immobilize his tongue, but rather an image. An expression. A burdensome silence.

“Alixter?” he asks warily. “What is it?”

The blond man on his screen anxiously wets his dry lips.

“Havin,” he says, addressing him by his first name, something he rarely does.

Rio is already out of his chair. “What? What's wrong?”

His business partner hesitates. As if time is irrelevant. As if he knows it won't change anything. “You need to come to the Health Center right away.”

 

65

REARRANGED

He bypasses the hovercart, opting to run on foot. It's a little less than a quarter of a mile, on the other side of the Medical Sector. The cart would be decidedly quicker, but there's something about the running, the sweat, the heavy breathing, that makes him feel as though he's getting there faster.

As if effort somehow equals efficiency.

He always thought this compound was designed poorly. It should have been set up in adjacent rings, spiraling outward with the most important buildings huddled close together in the center. As opposed to these alienated, squared-off sectors.

He also never understood why the Health Center was housed in the Medical Sector as opposed to the Residential Sector where it could be closer to the people who actually use it. Not that many people get sick on the compound. Illness is a rarity here.

But the layout of this place was never up to him. That was his partner's domain. They had agreed early on to split the division of labor by specialty. As Dr. Rio was clearly the more gifted scientist, he would oversee the research projects and experimentation, while Dr. Alixter, who was innately more charismatic and articulate, would handle operations and public relations.

He bursts through the doors of the Health Center a few minutes later, drenched and panting. He skids to a stop when he sees the crowd of people gathered around the gurney parked in the lobby.

The body it's supporting is covered in a pristine white sheet. The shape is too small to be a scientist. Too narrow and slender to be an adult.

Why are they just standing there?
he thinks, pushing through the small swarm.

Why aren't they doing anything?

Upon seeing his face, the people surrounding the gurney disperse. Breaking apart for him. Clearing a path to the worst sight his eyes will ever be forced to take in.

It's not her
, he thinks as he peels back the sheet and takes in the child's freckled face, light brown hair, and thick eyelashes. She's too small. Too fragile. Too …

Still.

Then his brain gets a precious moment to catch up. His brilliant mind slowly processes the data. The details. The facts.

And then he's screaming. “What the glitch is the matter with you? Why are you all standing there? Get me a resuscitation pack NOW!” He leans close to her breathless lips. “Sari,” he pleads. “Can you hear me? Sari?”

He winces as his cheek brushes against hers and he feels the coldness of her skin.

When he stands up, no one has moved.

“Flux!” he shouts. “Get out of my way! I'll get it myself.”

Dr. Alixter is the one who catches him as he shoves his way through the crowd. Dr. Alixter is the one who holds him as he thrashes. “She's gone,” he says, his voice gentler than Dr. Rio has ever heard it. Gentler than
anyone
has. “There's nothing we can do.”

But Rio won't hear that.
Can't
hear that. He breaks free. “Like hell there isn't.”

He sprints down the hall, returning a moment later with a small, unmarked box. He rips off the sheet, exposing all of the girl's frail body. That's when he sees what they've already seen. That's when he knows what they already know.

The unnatural angle of her neck. The slight protrusion of bone.

“She fell,” the familiar voice narrates from a safe distance behind him. “From a tree. It happened instantly. She felt no pain. I'm sorry, Havin.”

The world starts to turn an angry shade of red. The temperature of the planet rises until he swears he lives on a furious, bitter sun. The same sun that invited him to play only moments ago.

Someone pulls him away, trying to shield his eyes.

Someone else mumbles illogical ramblings into his ear. Nonsense about how life is a mystery, and we can't always understand the deeper meaning.

He breaks from the feeble grasp and suddenly he's running again.

Lies,
he thinks as more sweat pours down his face.

All lies.

He won't stand for them. Not when rational things can be done. Things that make sense. Problems don't get solved by tricking yourself into thinking they don't exist. By believing in manipulative malarkey.

Problems get solved by logic and reason and hard work.

And he knows, better than anyone, that science can fix everything.

 

66

CONVERTED

His fingers fly over the surface of his desk. He moves so fast, his brain can barely keep up. It's his anger at the universe that powers him now.

I will show you who's in control,
he wants to shout at the sky.

You can't make these kinds of decisions for me!

With a swoop of his hand, S:E/R:A is pushed from the screen. Her DNA will receive no more real estate in his mind—or his processor—today.

He pulls the single strand of hair from his pocket. The one he took from his daughter's head as he bent down close and whispered to her. The one they didn't see him steal.

He inserts it in the sequencer and the code of her life appears on the screen. All three billion lines of it. He wastes no time or thought or consideration. His finger doesn't hover or tremble or hesitate.

This is what needs to be done.

He encodes the age. Eight years, three months, eleven days, and twelve hours.

She won't have to miss a second.

His finger slams down on the initiation button. The sequencer rumbles to life. Building, coding, resurrecting. In a few short hours, the stems will be complete. In less than a day, the cells will be implanted. Tomorrow her body will begin to grow.

And in thirty-seven days, she will be here again.

In thirty-seven days, he will leave this place with her in his arms and never look back.

He watches the sequencer work. He can almost
see
her crimson-brown eyes and honey hair reflected in the endless patterns of genes. He can almost hear her laughter echo in the biopolymers. Smell the sweet scent of her skin in the nucleotides.

But no matter how hard he focuses on the maze of genetic code streaming like rain before him, no matter how many times he orders himself not to think about it, the image of her motionless body—her deoxygenated lips, her slender, fractured neck—penetrates his mind every time he blinks.

He is haunted by her vulnerability.

He is plagued by how quickly her fragile life was stolen from her. From
him.

As he stares at the endless rush of data on his screen, he can no longer see her. Hear her. Smell her.

All he can see are her weaknesses.

Rippable skin and crushable bones. Collapsible lungs and a stoppable heart. Feeble, slow muscles. Fallible health. A mind too quickly fatigued.

A body too easily broken.

And he knows it's not enough. It will never be enough. Not until she's protected from this cruel and unforgiving world.

Swiftly, he aborts the procedure, which has barely reached the 2 percent mark. The overworked sequencer whines to a stop. He reopens the uninitiated code for S:E/R:A, the girl who will show that same cruel and unforgiving world what indestructibility looks like.

He's never believed in the existence of a soul. It requires too much faith and offers not enough proof. But as he carefully extracts portions of his daughter's DNA—the very pieces that make her her—and inserts them into the awaiting sequence, he prays that he's been wrong all along.

He prays for that miracle.

 

67

HER

Time is a funny thing.

I've traveled within it so many times. I've disappeared into the past, I've returned to the future. I've lingered in so many precious present moments.

To most people, I imagine time is like a highway, stretched out before you and behind you. You can only see so far ahead, you can only remember where you've been. Someday you may reach those faraway signposts in the distance, but you'll never return to those ever-shrinking landmarks of the past.

To me, however, time is happening all at once. It's not linear. It's everywhere I look.

Somewhere out there, right now, a seventeen-year-old boy is climbing a concrete wall that was meant to keep him out. A girl with no memories is waking up in a vast ocean, surrounded by the wreckage of a plane that was never meant to crash. A thirteen-year-old boy with curly blond hair is lying in his bed, reading
Popular Science
, dreaming of amnesiac supermodels. A seventeenth-century farmer and his wife are welcoming a young couple into their home. A silver-haired physicist is injecting herself with a gene that will allow her to travel through time.

And right now, somewhere in the middle of the Nevada desert, hidden deep within a top-secret research compound, a brilliant scientist is watching the most perfect human being emerge from an artificial womb and take her very first breath of air.

That girl is me.

And also her.

Sariana, the eight-year-old daughter of Dr. Havin Rio, was taken from this earth too early.

And she was returned to this earth thirty-seven days later.

She was the missing piece. The reason so many dead ExGens were pulled from that chamber was because they were lacking the one thing Dr. Rio could never manufacture in his lab.

Humanity.

Sariana is the reason I am here. Her death is the reason I live and breathe now. Without ever knowing it, I stole life from her. I claimed it as my own. I pranced around the compound and the past and the nation, pretending it was me. But it was never me.

The body may belong to Diotech.

But I belong to her.

I always will.

Rio wanted me to know. He wanted me to find the answer if I ever knew to ask the question. I wonder how long that memory has been buried inside me. I have a feeling it's been there from the very beginning.

*   *   *

I know exactly what needs to be done.

I work quickly, accessing the memory servers from Rio's screens. I'm now extremely grateful that the server bunker wasn't destroyed. That the heart of Diotech is still intact. Because that's how you take down a beast. You aim for the heart.

I find the memory files I need and upload them onto a public pod on the SkyServer. Then I dig the cube drive out of my pocket. The same one that Zen buried for me in the Restricted Sector. It's saved me more than once. Now I hope it can save me one last time. I place it on Rio's desk, swipe it on, and initiate the connection.

I erase everything that's stored on it. There's only one memory that will help me now.

The memory of what I'm about to do.

My hands don't shake or tremble as I work. My mind isn't full of doubt or reservation. My breath remains steady and rhythmic. My heart certain. For the first time in a long time, I know I am doing the right thing.