The NEXT Apocalypse (Book 3): AFTER Life: Paradise Page 4

  “I didn’t choose this, either, so please call me Daniel. It would make me feel a little less like a monster.”

  The chains around the man’s neck rattled as Crenshaw elbowed his prisoner in the side of his head. “Shut the hell up, monster.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Okay, Daniel.”

  Chapter 6

  DANIEL

  No one spoke as the jet helicopter buzzed west. I closed my eyes and waited for the nanites to talk to me. Though I heard nothing from them, it was a strange feeling to know they were working away in the darkness of my skull, changing me, remaking me. What if the AI decided to rework me on the outside? The tiny robots running around inside me might decide that a human needs four arms, four legs and a bunch of eyes. Every man wants to be Jeff Goldblum. Nobody wants to be Jeff Goldblum in The Fly.

  When my dad got sick, I asked him how he dealt with his shitty prognosis.

  “Atavan for the anxiety,” he said, “but they’ve got nothing for the fear that’s bone deep. Alzheimer’s makes you go away slowly. Every time I forget something, it’s another ring of the bell, reminding me the fun’s over at the county fair and I’m on my way out. The worst part, I think, is waiting for the worst part, when I stop thinking. One day, Dan, I’ll still be here but only sorta. I won’t know my brain is riddled with holes and plaques. I won’t know your name. I’ll probably forget my own name before I go. When that day comes, be happy for me. When I’m sick but I don’t know it anymore? That’s the day I’ll be free.”

  Theoretically, I was the opposite of sick. I could see and hear better. My sense of smell was sharper and, except for the pangs that tied my belly in a knot, I felt good. That growing hunger, that shameful grisly need, made my eyeteeth ache.

  I looked up and down the dim cabin, searching the grim faces around me. Chloe sat farthest away from me. Since I tried to eat her in Echidna’s lab, the security guys had kept her at a distance. I still had the order to kill her in the back of my mind, like a subroutine ready to kick in as soon as a successful attack became probable. I wanted to tell her it wasn’t me who wanted her dead. It was some guy I’d never met. The same subroutine that demanded I kill Chloe Robinson also wouldn’t let me say why.

  I wanted to declare, loudly and repeatedly, “I’m two people!” But a nuclear blast is a mood killer. Worries about radiation sickness stomp out conversation. No one wanted to listen to me so I shut up.

  Instead, I thought of Toronto and one of the first arrests I ever made. It was at the BestBuy at Bay and Dundas. A person was causing a disturbance and had been asked to leave. Instead of going out the easy way, she’d tipped over a big flat screen television and cracked the screen.

  As soon as I walked in, the woman who’d thrown the fit at BestBuy walked up to me. She introduced herself before I could ask her name. “Mary Ferguson,” she said. “It wasn’t me.”

  Several staff and the manager formed a circle around us and they talked over each other, all saying the same thing. According to a honking gaggle of witnesses, Mary Ferguson had indeed knocked over a 58 inch Sanyo worth $700.

  She looked from face to face and her cheeks reddened as she broke into a sweat. The woman shivered with nervous energy and spewed her words in a torrent. “I came in looking for a Wii. I have a Wii at home and it’s how I get exercise instead of spending money on a gym. I bowl and play tennis and sometimes I do the Wii Resort, y’know? I like the flying game and archery but the sword dueling thing makes me work harder and my doctor says I should do more of that. I’m better if I can follow doctor’s orders but now I can’t do that and I’m worried. I came in hoping they still sell the Wii console but they don’t and they won’t even try to look in the back or order it for me. I’m sorry if something happened but sometimes things happen when I’m anxious. The Wii will help with that. Can you help me? I really need a Wii.”

  She began blinking rapidly and fell silent.

  Another officer arrived about then. She took a statement from the manager while I arrested Mary. She was cooperative and went quietly. I drove her to 52 Division for processing. It wasn’t far but we got stuck in traffic. While we waited, she became talkative. “You can just drop me off at home.”

  “You understand that you’re under arrest, Ms. Ferguson?”

  “I’m in the back of a police car. Of course, I know that. I’m not stupid.”

  “Have you been drinking?”

  “I don’t drink, sir.”

  “Do you understand the charge against you?”

  “Those people at BestBuy wouldn’t listen.”

  “That’s no reason to damage property, Mary.”

  “I told you it wasn’t me. It was Siobhan who caused the trouble.”

  “Siobhan knocked over the TV?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And where is Siobhan now?”

  “She’s … here.”

  “Come again?”

  “I’m two people,” she said.

  “Oh, I see.”

  “Do you? If you let me look through my purse, I can give you my doctor’s number. She’ll explain, though it’s past four and her office closes at four and I don’t know what to do. When I don’t know what to do, I’m supposed to go home and call my mom or my counselor.”

  “Are you on any medication?”

  “My pill bottles are in my purse. It helped me.”

  “Have you been taking your meds?”

  “Nah. I’ve been feeling better lately so I stopped taking it so much. I still take it, but only when I think I need it.”

  “Most medication needs taking as directed, not when you get around to it.”

  “That’s what I told Siobhan. She … well, we don’t agree on much. She’s the troublemaker. I work in a stationery store. I shouldn’t be in the back of a police car!”

  “How about we work it all out at the station, Mary?”

  “Ms. Ferguson.”

  “Sure thing, Ms. Ferguson.”

  She kicked the back of my seat with surprising force for such a small woman. “Call me Siobhan!” The way she kept on shrieking, I was convinced. She really had become a different person. The detail that caught my attention was that my prisoner cursed me out in a thick French accent. Mary hadn’t had an accent but Siobhan did.

  Mary had entered my cruiser like a lamb. It took three of us to get Siobhan into a cell. She went kicking and screaming and tried to bite us. I wonder now if there’s something deep in the lizard brain, like throwing a switch, that makes humans and zombies want to bite.

  Mary Ferguson’s mother spoke with a subtle Irish lilt. Her name was Alannah. When I told her what happened at BestBuy, there was a long, miserable silence on the line followed by a tired sigh. “So that whore showed up again, did she? Shit.”

  “Pardon me, ma’am?”

  “My daughter was in a car accident, Mr. Harmon. Run over, actually. The doctors don’t know if it was that or abuse when she was a kid. Her swim coach … well, just think of it. If she hadn’t watched the Olympics, she might never have wanted to swim. She was too short to compete at that level but I didn’t tell her the truth of that because encouraging a child is what a good mum does, isn’t it? Then that damn car. If she’d taken half a second to look when she ran out into the street after her bus … looking both ways before they cross the street. It’s what they learn before you let them walk to school on their own. You ever notice how it can all turn to shit in a second?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “The long and the short of it, Mary was a happy little girl. She’s not that girl, not anymore.”

  “Mary told me she hasn’t been taking her medication regularly.”

  “I warned her but I’m only her mother. She’s grown up. I did my best. I can’t do it all. I’m almost 65. I should be retiring but as long as Mary and Siobhan are alive, it looks like I’ve got a full-time job. My daughter’s got Dissociative Identity Disorder.”

  I hadn’t run into this before. “Like, Multiple Personality Disorde
r, you mean?”

  “No, I don’t mean MPD. I mean, DID, as in ‘did you listen?’ Do the Toronto Police take sensitivity training? That’s the old thinking you’re talking now, ya bastard — ”

  “Okay, okay,” I said. “I understand you’re upset and Mary’s got a bad break. You can beat me to death with your victimhood and call me names or you can take down the address I’m about to give you.”

  “When’s she getting out?”

  “She’ll have to stand before a judge. How that goes is up to the judge and the lawyers. In the meantime, you can post bond and take her home.”

  “Nah. If she’s off her meds, I might not be taking Mary home. It might be Siobhan. I think there’s no rush in me getting down there to pull that bitch out. I love my daughter. She’s not the brightest spoon in the drawer but she’s sweet. That Siobhan, though? That bitch wants to kill me.”

  “Do you have a message for your daughter?”

  “Call me again when Mary shows up. Oh, and don’t let her have nuts. Siobhan is allergic to nuts. Mary isn’t. Sometimes when Siobhan doesn’t get her way, she tries to kill them both.”

  Alannah Ferguson hung up on me. She and Mary and Siobhan were probably all ashes now. Problem solved?

  Mary had been two people. Finally, I really understood. I was one part Daniel Lewis Harmon and one part zombie at the whim of tiny robots run amok. The nanites were doing whatever they were designed to do and maybe quite a bit more. Apparently, they weren’t interested in having a conversation to pass the time on the long flight.

  I’d been pretty quick to write off Mary Ferguson and her mother. As a cop, I met plenty of people that had a bad break or two (or eight). That sounded heartless and dismissive now.

  Maybe the idea of identity itself was old thinking. With the nanites in control, who was I? If the brain is a computer that can be wiped so easily, what did identity mean? Maybe I was nothing more than a river of thoughts. Like Crenshaw, I latched onto who I thought I should be or what others thought I should be. Maybe everyone’s faking it, trying to live up to a lie.

  Consciousness is so fluid it can easily be diverted by Alzheimer’s, accident, injury or emotional trauma. Maybe there never was one Daniel Harmon. Perhaps I was never anything more than a collection of projections of culture and wishes. Maybe we’re all acting on hormonal influences and whims whose origin we don’t even recognize. Every kid is asked what they want to be when they grow up. Where does that answer really come from? Does the reasoning behind those answers get better when we get older?

  Just before we broke up, the girlfriend who ran off with my best friend said, “You aren’t in love with me. You’re in love with the idea of me.” I think she picked up that shit from a Facebook meme. She was right, though. Lying to ourselves is an affliction we all suffer. We all have an idea of who we are. We usually fall short of that ideal. There is not one self. There is only an idea of self that we decide to try to become.

  Wait. Stop. Stop!

  What did identity mean? Consciousness is fluid? What is this bullshit? These aren’t my thoughts! I’d never thought about this kind of stuff in my life! This isn’t me. This is them! This is the nanites talking!

  The AI was taking over, reinterpreting my memories to plumb new thoughts. I was already less and less Daniel Harmon. I wondered when the AI would stop taking bits and pieces away from me. One day soon, would I be erased? Like father, like son?

  Problem solved?

  Chapter 7

  CHLOE

  I was quiet for a long time on the trip to Bainbridge. With the bright light of radioactive death burning through us, I was reminded of the first time I died. When I was seven, my parents argued a lot. We were living in Winnipeg at the time. I was out of school for March Break. Since my father had a week off from teaching, he took me to Toronto to visit relatives. Mom stayed home. I pieced it together later that they were taking a break from each other.

  It was my first time on a plane. During the safety demonstration, the flight attendant pointed out that the seat could be used as a flotation device, “In the unlikely event of a water landing.” The way I was raised, the only silly question was the question unasked. I turned to my father and, in a voice that was too loud, inquired, “Do these planes crash a lot?”

  A woman directly behind me tittered and muttered, “Stupid kid.”

  I was embarrassed. Turning in my seat and getting up on my knees, I poked my head up to see who laughed at me. It was a pretty white woman, her curly hair was piled impossibly high and dyed bright red. In my mind’s eye, I can still see the thick links of her gold necklace beneath her amused smile. She wore a cream jacket over a tight red sheath. She looked like a smug barber pole. I don’t mind barber poles. I hate smug.

  Peering over the seat, I said, “Sorry, but there’s not much water to land on between here and Toronto, anyway, is there? I mean, flying in planes isn’t like if you’ve got a flat tire on a car. You can’t pull over in the sky and change a tire. Telling us to fasten our seatbelts and all that is just to make us feel better. If we crash, we all die screaming and burning. Isn’t that right? Is that stupid?”

  Her smug smile faded and a tinge of worry crept in around the woman’s eyes.

  Shushing me and apologizing profusely to the woman, my father pulled me back into my seat. He told me to read my book and be quiet. I did as I was told, but the fearful look on that woman’s face kept me warm all the way to Toronto. Even now, that memory gives me a little smile. We like to think we mature, get better and do better. However, very recently as a grown woman, I’d dumped an expensive bottle of wine down a man’s pants.

  I suppose that’s one of the reasons I fell in love with nanotech. Artificial Intelligence can be programmed to learn and improve. Humans often do their best. However, with AFTER pilfered and made into a weapon and Toronto gone … well. It was pretty evident our best is not good enough a good chunk of the time.

  When I was very little, I somehow got the idea that we all die screaming. I don’t know where that thought came from. I was disabused of that notion when I died over that March Break in Toronto. The site of my death was a frozen pond somewhere in North York. Maybe the site of my first death isn’t there anymore. The water had probably burst into steam in the heat of the nuclear blast. What I didn’t know when I went skating on that pond was that there was a warm water exhaust pipe at one end of the pond. The post with the sign and the bright red marker toward that end was a warning: Keep off that end of the pond no matter how cold the winter got, no matter how thick the ice looked on the safe end.

  Entropy occurs when an organized system becomes disorganized. Systems can be repaired and improved but that’s not the trend of the universe. Death comes when we lack data or fail to act on intelligence. That’s what I learned on that pond in Toronto on that March Break. I didn’t think of it that way at the time, of course. Fate is comprised of many variables. However, a warm water pipe and thinning ice may have set me on the path to create AFTER more than anything else.

  On my first afternoon in Toronto, my cousin Cherry wanted to go skating. She was fourteen. I guess that’s why she got saddled with taking her little cousin skating.

  Her real name wasn’t Cherry. It was Cheryl. Her parents called her Sherry. To everyone else, she was Cherry. When I met her, I thought choosing your own name was just about the coolest act of defiance in the world. For a couple of hours on a gray afternoon, I idolized my cousin. She didn’t feel as warmly toward me. It was she who told me to skate to the end of the pond where the ice was thin and the water was deep and dark. Cold water waited beneath but Cherry assured me the pond was so shallow in that spot that even if I broke through, the worst I’d suffer was cold feet. “Skate around that post two times and I’ll get you an ice cream sandwich from the bottom the freezer. I’ve been saving ’em since last summer. Go on, Chloe! You afraid of a soaker? Don’t be a baby!”

  I didn’t like being called a baby and, I admit, it was a thrill at first. The sof
t ice cracked a little under my weight. I stood still, fascinated by the crystalline lines and a spider webs spreading beneath my skates.

  “Don’t just stand there!” Cherry yelled. “Skate around the post and come back!”

  A few guys were playing a pickup game of hockey at the far end of the pond. They stopped in the middle of play to stare at me. One of them pulled off his toque and waved to get my attention. I smiled and waved back.

  “Come back!” he shouted. “Don’t go past the red marker!”

  I started toward him when the ice opened up. I crashed through. It was not shallow. I must have opened my mouth to scream in shock but I made no sound. Instead of drawing in breath, I drew water into my lungs. The pond swallowed me into its cold belly.

  Thrashing but weighed down by my heavy winter clothes, one of my skates caught on something. Maybe I was just stuck in the mud. Toads bury themselves in mud for the winter and hibernate until spring. Little girls can’t.

  Cold and claustrophobic, the water closed over my head and reached under my parka to freeze my skin and paralyze my limbs. In dark, cold water, even flailing is slow. I struggled as long as I could. That seemed to take a long time. There is a point in the late stage of drowning when oxygen deprivation invites the cold hand of Death to reach into your brain. I wanted out. I wanted to be safe, back in my room at home in Winnipeg. My first feelings of worry and embarrassment were soon replaced by anger. Even that didn’t last long. Suddenly, I was merely sleepy.

  I looked up at the hole in the ice I’d left behind. Everything I’d ever known was just a few feet away, but my parents, friends and my safe, soft bed might as well have been on a remote planet in another galaxy. There was supposed to be a storm in Toronto the next day. I thought, if it had come a day early or we had come a day later, I wouldn’t be here. Soon, that hole in the ice will close over. I’m going to be down here with the frozen frogs.