Time thief, p.30
Time Thief, page 30
“Is that why you’re here and not him?”
I smiled. “Maybe.”
“Well, you weren’t marked as individuals, but rather as a team. Together, your wisdom and courage make you rare souls who we might choose to recruit. It’s very special.”
“Would you have known I was a candidate if I never came here?”
“No. Only once you’re in my system. I only know about your friend because I see that you’re a potential team, not individual.”
Flare’s words ran through my mind. She’d trapped me in the simulation so I couldn’t leave the afterworld. “Could Dr. Henderson trap someone in the simulation and conceal the record of them?”
Dr. Drake drew back. “That would be worse than murder.”
“Is it possible? Is it possible because your people are so certain of themselves that they think you’ll all stay pure?”
Understanding lit her eyes. At least, I hoped that was the look I was seeing. “We’ve evolved, Max. There’s never been a need for precautions against crimes and evils. I’m sure if she had malice against someone, she could do that, though.”
I buried my head in my hands, temples throbbing with each heartbeat. Dr. Henderson had planned to leave me dead in the simulation forever. Probably Piercey, too. It was the only way to ensure that we never recovered our memories in the afterlife. “Would Dr. Henderson know that Piercey and I were potential candidates?”
“Yes. As a supervisor, it’s her job to watch over people like you who the computer identifies.”
I bit off an angry chuckle. “She wanted me dead. Permanently dead. Because I knew too much.” I lifted my hand to Dr. Drake. “Take it all. That woman cannot be trusted with my world. I don’t know if I can trust you, but I have learned sometimes it is too dangerous not to trust the person who you need to trust.”
She reached for my hand. “You’ve shared memories before. I give you my word I will do right by you.”
Dr. Drake took my hand in her soft one. Her presence was so inviting that when we connected, I easily let all of myself slip away to her entirely. I couldn’t even hold on to the fear that this was a mistake.
When she released me, sorrow filled her eyes.
“You’re self-aware. You knew you were living in a simulation and you tried to make it here. This has never happened before, Max.” Tears sprinkled onto her cheeks. Her voice was breathy and urgent. “We must take this to the council. This is worse than you know.”
“What if they shut down our world? Dr. Henderson said our experiment is unethical, so if it doesn’t yield results, it’s only ethical to end it.”
“Dr. Henderson has devolved. Her words are not to be trusted. This is evidence that the experiments were a mistake, a terrible mistake, and that we must make corrections. I know you’ve seen only evil from our world. That is only one grain of sand in a world of goodness.”
I rubbed my chest. Sharing with her had brought it all back, so it couldn’t be numbed. With my people on the forefront of my mind, I felt so close to the life I had just lost, that no matter how urgent this business was, my mind clouded with grief. I bent forward, memories zapping through me like shots of lightning.
“Hey …” Dr. Drake touched my back. “It’s hitting you. Breathe through it.”
“I don’t have time for this.”
“You do. Time is relative. It hasn’t passed in your world since we paused the flow of time here. We have time for you.”
I clutched my chest. I needed to ask, but I was too afraid of the answer. “Will I …” Sobs gripped my tight shoulders and shook them. “Will I ever get to go home to them?”
Dr. Drake’s silence carved down my spine. When she spoke, her voice was heavy. “I don’t know of any way to go home, Max. You died in your world. The physics of that world match the physical world. There’s no way to resurrect the dead.”
I scrambled off the bed, my legs desperate to run, though I had nowhere to go. Fear exploded in my mind. Dr. Drake stumbled out of my way as I pried the window open and clambered out. I landed on soft sand and sprinted forward, sliding with each step. Ocean waves rolled against the shore. I stopped before reaching the lapping water and fell onto my hands and knees. Fell and wept until I couldn’t even utter a sound.
Her hand came to my back again and warmth flowed from it, easing me to sleep.
I tightened my arms around myself, back in the yellow room on the bed, tears filling my eyes again. “I’m not ready to leave them.”
Though my emotions had been dulled again, the grief still tinged my thoughts. “They’ll be here one day.”
“They won’t remember anything.”
“It’s very traumatic remembering your life. The memories come back when people are ready. But sometimes seeing a person you knew can help spark it. You never know. Nash may remember you quickly when he comes. Usually parents remember their children right away. Sometimes it’s the same for lovers.”
I didn’t want to grieve. I finally had reached the gods. Gods who might be able to help. Right now, I didn’t need to worry about Nash remembering one day. I needed to help him. It didn’t matter that Dr. Drake said I had time. I had to see this through before I could do anything else, including mourn the life I’d lost.
“I can’t fall apart now.” I sat up and clutched my aching chest. “Dr. Henderson is in control of our world and she’s fucked up. I have to help them. I can’t leave them trapped with her.”
“We’ll report it. Right now.”
“Who do we tell?”
Dr. Drake sighed. “I don’t like to give so much information at once. You’re already overwhelmed.”
“Please. Please, the only thing I care about right now are my people.”
“We could go to the Collective. They control forty-nine percent of the voting rights for the council. It’s the easiest place to start.”
“Okay.” I nodded. “Who are they? What’s that mean?”
“This is so much to explain.” She pushed her dark hair behind her ears. “In the highest dimension, you experience all of time and space, as one. It’s like you become one with our universe. And the people who want to live in that plane are unified as well. Collective consciousness.”
I’d told her that I could handle it, but I couldn’t wrap my mind around anything she just said. Piercey would have been all over this. “They’re like one giant mind?”
“Yes. They have all the wisdom of humankind.”
My breathing sharpened. “And they know about my world?”
She hesitated and then nodded. “The experiments never would have been approved without their vote.”
I did slam my fist this time, hard against the bed. “All of the wisdom of humankind and they dreamed up this shitstorm?” I doubled over. “I just want to go home to Nash and Elsie.”
“I can ease the pain,” Dr. Drake said. “I can take it all away.”
“The pain will keep me focused.”
“Right now, it’s going to make you lose your mind. Let me.”
I closed my eyes. The acute panic and grief distanced from my mind, as if it had been locked away in a room inside me. “How did you do that?”
“We can do anything here, Max. Your world had to follow the natural laws of the universe for validity. There’s no reason for that here. We can simulate anything.”
“This is a simulation, too?”
“Everything is a simulation now, really. Except for the people still evolving out in the physical world.”
I had so many questions, but with my grief now muted, I had the ability to focus on what mattered. I couldn’t squander that. The haze of death cleared from my mind. “I know it probably doesn’t make sense to you, because my world isn’t even real, but I don’t want it to end. I can’t fail at this.”
“I do understand. And it is real because you’re real. It’s your experience. I told you … I’ve lived so many lives, and only one of them in the physical world. Every life I lived is as real to me as the first.”
I swallowed hard. “Do you really believe that?”
“Yes. You know, my world where I was first born is gone now.” She smiled. “But it still matters to me as much as it did then. All the things I saw, the good, the horrible, it matters that it happened. For the Collective, my world exists today. All time exists as one. Every day you lived in your world was real and will forever be a part of the Collective. They can’t access individual memories for privacy, but the sum of your existence is with them. Now it will forever be a part of at least one person’s memory. Yours.”
“I need to speak to the Collective. I’m going to ask them to send me back.”
Dr. Drake shook her head. “We talked about this. They can’t send you back. Your world operates under physical laws.”
“Dr. Henderson’s avatar doesn’t.”
Her eyes widened. “You want an avatar?”
“If she gets one, why can’t I? It’s my world. I’m the one who was unfairly experimented on. They owe me the chance to clean up the mess they made. If the individual is important, then the Collective has to see that my perspective is critical.”
“We can’t let what happened with Dr. Henderson happen to other supervisors.”
“I’ll petition them to leave our worlds alone. I used to hate the silence of the gods. Dr. Henderson showed me how much worse it can be when they listen.”
“Let’s go for a walk and calm your spirit before we see them.”
Crystal clear water lapped over my feet as I walked along the shore of a gentle ocean. Dr. Drake walked with me.
“Dr. Henderson said Nash and I died as babies,” I said.
“You did. Your world is populated by young souls who died as infants during a certain time period. It’s best for the subjects to actually be from the same world and time. For validity.”
“Validity. Of course.”
She smiled. “You were born on Earth in 2027.”
“And Nash?”
“I don’t have access to his record, but it would have been within a three-decade span of your life.”
Warm sand squished between my toes. “Why babies?”
“It’s our policy that people live at least one life to adulthood, so that you can develop properly. Normally, we would place infants and children together in a simulated world just like their own. Of course, your world was different.”
“Lucky us.” I stuck my hands in my pockets, because, apparently, I had pockets in the afterlife. “Why didn’t you just run simulations with fake people?”
“You can’t fake consciousness. Either you have it or you don’t. And conscious beings are very hard to predict. For valid results, we needed conscious people. The argument was that your life in the experimental worlds would probably be of a similar quality to your natural world.”
“Except we don’t get our lives reset in an actual world.”
“That’s true. Dr. Henderson has been lying in her reports.”
A sliver of pain managed to slip into my heart. “I just want to go back home.”
We walked quietly for some time.
“Am I healed enough to see the Collective now?”
“Already? You’re strong-willed. Not everyone can come back from the afterlife, you know.”
“When will you ask them to meet with me?”
“Already did.” She smiled. “Come on. They’re waiting.”
“Thank you.” I swallowed hard, palms sweaty. Time for another battle.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Dr. Drake and I stood before a window that stretched from the floor to the ceiling and opened to light blue water. Light filtered through from somewhere above I couldn’t see, catching just right here and there so some patches looked teal.
“This is it?” I asked.
“Collective consciousness.” Dr. Drake touched the glass. “You have the chance to teach the Collective something.” Her voice was as tender as the hand she placed on my shoulder. “So be nice.”
I breathed in deeply, staring into the empty room. “Why bother with this visual?”
“We need something. Religious people didn’t want it to feel the same as praying. But how can you visualize the oneness of the multiverse? It isn’t possible. But water is life, water transforms. Water can drip as individual droplets or crash together as raging waves. It can span the greatest depths.”
“Okay. I guess.” I shifted, strangely uncomfortable by the thought. “Can they hear me?”
“Yes.”
I crossed my arms, looking down. “I’m here on behalf of my world. Not the one I was originally born into, but the one I came to know. The one you made for me.” I looked into the blue. “It’s all we know. So before I tell you more, I’m asking you to let the world continue and to grant the people the right to never be shut down.”
Vibrations rippled the water before me. My eyes widened. I heard a melding of voices, young and old.
“We’re sorry you have suffered for us.”
Anger stirred within me. “Be nice,” I breathed to myself.
“We’re sorry we have not yet found a better way. The simulations have helped us get close to mastering evolution. Very close.”
I straightened. “Does that mean you no longer need worlds like mine?”
“The data is valuable. We would like to continue gathering it.”
“So, you’ll let us live in our worlds?”
“Yes. The simulations are giving us billions of lifetimes.”
Heat fueled my core, as fiery as when my power would fill me. “Don’t you feel bad for what you’ve done? You created a world just to experiment on us. Gave us immense powers that we weren’t ready for and then let us kill each other with them.”
“Without the experiments, young worlds in the natural world would continue to suffer indefinitely. Now, we have proven what the best methods for helping to develop more peacefully are. However, with it, simulated worlds are suffering. We grieve the decision but we have mixed feelings on whether we regret it.”
“It’s not right … What you did isn’t right.”
“It is the last great evil of humankind. The last great evil of evolution.” A pause. I’d imagine it was for me, not the Collective. “The reincarnation of your souls in the simulation had the same effect as if you’d lived in the natural. We bear the weight of the suffering. We bear the weight of our evil.”
Tears sprang into my eyes. “Your words, many as they may be with so many speaking them at once, mean nothing.”
“We are sorry for what we have done to you and your people. We only wanted you to live and for us to learn from your lives.”
“Well.” I bit off the word. “Despite the wisdom you claim to have, you overlooked an incredibly crucial risk. If you can guarantee that my world will continue without interference, I will share it with you. Dr. Drake told me that you don’t get all of the information from our world without permission. You rely on data compiled by the computer. I’ll give you all my memories, if you can make this promise to me.”
“We promise. Please, share with us.”
That seemed too easy. When I paused, the Collective seemed to sense my distrust.
“We’re not looking to hurt you. We truly want what is best for you. If you, someone who lived in your world, wants it to continue despite its problems, then we must trust that it is only right to allow it to continue.”
I pressed my palm against the glass. “Creating unethical human experiments compromises your social evolution. Did you never consider these risks?”
“We countered any risk of corruption with lifetimes of evolution and ethical mastery. Yet, you believe that despite this, we’ve failed?”
“Being capable of unethical experiments requires that you are unethical. There’s no getting around that.”
“It isn’t so black and white. After making the decision, everyone involved in the experiments lived multiple more lives in simulations and were tested. Everyone was pure.”
“Not everyone is pure anymore. Dr. Henderson devolved. Who knows how many supervisors this has happened to.” The fury of my death rushed out of me. “That’s why you people should have never played god with us.”
“Share with us. We will listen to you.”
I let my life rush into them as it had with Piercey and Dr. Drake. This time, I felt hollow when I was done, as though I had given away everything I’d ever had.
“Do you see?” I asked.
The voices of the Collective leaked out in a quiet and sorrowful moan. “We see.” The words echoed, quieter and quieter, until all was silent.
“Dr. Henderson had me murdered. I believe she planned to trap me in the simulation forever. If I hadn’t figured out how to escape, I’d be trapped there, dead. I know for certain that she has abused her power in my world.”
“We did not expect these results.”
I ran my hand over my mouth. “She sentenced us to lives we couldn’t remember living. You left us with her. You placed us under untested conditions while she refused to intervene despite the dire consequences, all for the sake of your experiment. For the validity.” Slips couldn’t happen here. Even so, I feared that I’d open my eyes to the little red boots I’d worn as a child during the eclipse. That I’d be trapped forever in that moment, seeing the villager’s bodies crumple to the ground like I’d sucked the life from them.
I didn’t slip. But I was still there in my heart, beneath the dark of the eclipse, with my father listless at my feet. With his words hanging in my mind. Even after all these years, these lifetimes, still I didn’t understand how he could make me kill those people and abandon me by dying with them. How could anyone do that?
“You’re as guilty as my father.” They’d know what the words meant. “Do you think that making an afterlife for the people I killed makes up for watching them die? You gave me such incredible power when I was a child and didn’t show me how to use it. How can someone that has so much knowledge, so much power, still not have a better way?”
Their silence tore through me. I beat my fist against the window.
“Answer me!”
