Afterlife (4 page)

Chaz:

Pete Laskin leaned over his laptop, thick bangs tousled on his forehead, his pale skin blue from the monitor's glow. He cleared his throat, typed in a few more keys, long fingers looking almost ghostly as they flew in a blur. He glanced over at me, dark circles beneath haunted eyes.

“Where'd ya gets this?” he asked.

We both focused on the marker, still inside the plastic bag.

I shrugged.

He shook his head, then leaned back. “No, man. You gots ta tell me. I gots—I mean, this here—we's in way too deep here.”

I peered over his narrow shoulders, tried to figure out what all the numbers on his screen meant.

“Look, Chaz. I promises I won't tells nobody, but you gots to be honest with me.”

“I took it off one of the Stringers,” I said finally.

“It was your Newbie, wasn't it?”

I just stared at him. The less he knew, the safer he was.

“This here's a government job, boss.”

I frowned. “What do you mean? Since when does the government put markers in Stringers?”

“Is she in there?” he asked, gesturing toward Angelique's room. The door was closed.

Outside, New Orleans fought against the inevitable. Fringes of black clung to the horizon, stale fluorescent light sputtered from spindly streetlights, and a steamy haze hung over the broken skyline. Somewhere in the invisible distance daylight crouched, like a golden panther ready to leap across the heavens.

Angelique would be waking up soon.

I nodded. I didn't say anything but I couldn't help wondering how he knew my Newbie was a woman.

Pete's mouth slid into a short-lived, sardonic grin. “Okay, so you don't wants to talk about your current assignment, but it seems likes somebody is pretty interested in her. Or him. Or whoever they was before they jumped.”

“We were followed last night.” I took a sip of coffee, glanced at Pete from the corner of my eye. We'd been best friends since we were nine, but I still wasn't sure how much I should tell him.

I could almost see the gears shifting in his blue eyes, thoughts processing through the motherboard in his brain. “Has you been tailed before?”

I shook my head.

Just then I realized that Pete wasn't looking at me anymore. He was staring at something behind me. I turned and saw Angelique standing in the doorway, wearing a T-shirt that barely covered her thighs. Her long hair hung in a Rapunzel tangle, a glittering mass of gold and silver. Somehow she was even more beautiful without makeup. She yawned.

“Do I smell coffee?” she asked.

“In the kitchen.” I pointed toward a short hallway.

She ambled away on long sinuous legs. Poetry in slow motion.

Pete raised his eyebrows. “Man, I don't ever wants to hear you complaining abouts your job again,” he whispered.

“It's not what you think.”

“Trust me,” he said as he stood up. “You gots no idea what I'm thinking. And you should probably puts that thing away.” He gestured toward the marker. “My opinion is ya gots ta tell Russell. Forget about all the crap you two gots going on in your personal life for a few minutes and deals with this.”

He paused at the door, ready to leave, laptop folded up like a sheet of paper and tucked into his shirt pocket. “I don't wanna scares you, boss, but that thing is trouble. The government's been wanting to gets their paws on your company for ages.” He lowered his voice, forcing me to lean closer to hear him. “And it looks like they finally gots a way to do it.”

Angelique:

Chaz said that I should start writing things down, that it will help me remember my past lives. He says that everybody keeps a journal now—even One-Timers. A secret collection of memories that no one else ever reads. It's supposed to help me remember what I don't want to forget. But I'm afraid of the past and the future. And I'm worried about what I might find out about myself.

There was blood on my sheets when I woke up. My hand hurts but I don't know why, and a heavy pain has settled in my chest, like my lungs are made of rock. We went to a jazz club last night, I think. I ran into a bald man there—his face, his voice—he seemed familiar. But then a fight broke out and in the midst of it, a picture flashed in my head: a stone crypt.

The City of the Dead.

Chaz took me there, but it didn't help. The picture got louder and heavier, like the pain in my chest. I ran away from him through the misty fog, feet pounding against cement while the mist hung heavy and wet, almost like rain.
I thought I heard a howling death, felt white fangs ripping my skin and I knew that I never wanted to fall in love again. Ever. That was when I saw it. The place that had called me. But I was too weak. Too afraid.

I felt the same way now.

I sat down with a stylus and a VR tablet, with trembling hands I began to write down random thoughts and words. Then it started to come back to me. Images. Sounds. Voices. The black holes in my memory dissolved into shocking memories; they thundered awake, sudden, immediate, demanding. My emotions were ripped and shredded.

A familiar face floated before me, a moment of joy and hope.

Then I remembered. It wasn't clear at first, but after a minute I could see.

My first life…

 

We lived on a farm in Scotland, William and I, on a parcel of hilly land near the River Esk. During the day we tended our herd of Hampshire sheep, watched as the wind ruffled the long grass, commented on how each blade enticed the sheep to linger, to fill their bellies. In the evenings after dinner we would sit before the fire, I playing my clarsach harp, he singing the old Celtic songs.

We were a strange pair, I know. Both of us willing to give up the modern city life to herd sheep, but you have to remember that the government gave incentives back then, trying so hard to get folks back to the farms. We were the lucky ones, that's for sure. Got our little piece of property for almost nothing.

He was ten years older than I was, and quite dashing, with his rugged, country-squire looks. Not at all the sort of man I'd hoped to meet when I went off to university in Glasgow. Not the sort of man I'd planned to marry, but
there it is. You don't often end up doing what you have in mind in the first place.

I was going to change the world with my new ideas. I'd wanted to sail across the ocean and marry an American, leave this dull land of brilliant blue skies and emerald hills behind. Wash my hands of it, once and for all. Catherine MacKinnon, I said to myself more than once, you need to break with your clan and make a difference in the world.

Of course, I didn't know then the things I know today, but I still don't think I would have lived my life any different. It was time for one of us to stop the madness, to take a bold step into the future.

William never saw it the same way I did. And I don't know if I can ever forgive him for it.

He was the true love of my life. The love of every life I've ever had, and I don't like the counting of lives anymore. It makes me weary. But this was my first one, so it was different. It was special. It was the time I made my first decision to jump.

We were Catholics, both of us, but I never really took it to heart the way William did. He rose up in the morning and went to bed in the evening with his prayers. Granted, everything around us was changing. The Pope had made some radical changes recently, and the one before him was maybe even more liberal, if that was possible. So what we had wasn't the same as what our parents before us had.

It all started when the Pope took the ban off resurrection. “It's not the unpardonable sin,” I think that was how he phrased it in the beginning. It took a few years, but then pretty soon almost everyone I knew got the implant. Even my mom. Two of my sisters, Kelly and Coleen, decided against it, which didn't surprise me since they made all their bad decisions together.

But my husband, William, he wouldn't even talk about it. If we were ever divided about anything, this was it.

“One life was all God gave us,” he told me one day when we were herding the sheep into a different pasture. “It's all I want.”

“But we could be together for almost five hundred years,” I argued. I had calculated it all out, from Life One to Life Nine, carefully reading between the lines of the contract. I knew each of the resurrected lives began in a body about twenty-one years old and that you would live to be about seventy-two. So with no accidents or major illnesses, a person could live to be around four hundred eighty-eight years old.

It wasn't forever, but it was damn close.

I'll never forget the look he gave me right then. The sunlight came down through the trees, touched him on the face, set his hair on fire and made his eyes glow. It was like the Almighty had taken residence inside him for a few moments.

“We can be together for all of eternity,” he said. “It doesn't take a blasted Fresh Start implant to give us what God already promised.”

“But—but that's not the same,” I said. “This is guaranteed—”

Another stony glance. He looked like Moses just after he stepped down from the mountain, when he had the
Shekinah
glory of God shining all around him. I wished the sun would set.

“Guaranteed? You don't think Jesus rising from the dead was a guarantee?” he asked. “Not a promise from God: ‘Look here, this is what I can do for you'?”

“I don't know,” I answered.

“Since when don't you know?”

“Since always. I never knew for sure.”

“Catherine, my love, you're swimming in treacherous waters.” He paused for a long moment. “Are you having doubts about your faith, or are you telling me that you never really believed?”

I took a deep breath, afraid of what I was going to say next.

“What I've been trying to tell you—” I stopped to lick my lips nervously. “What I'm telling you is that I got the implant. Yesterday. I just signed up for resurrection.”

“Did you now.”

A silence hung between us then, like the distance between two continents.

Chaz:

Sun splattered the near empty streets. Only a few drowsy commuters passed us, all yawning and sipping coffee from paper cups. Apparently everyone in the Big Easy had a rough time last night, me included. Angelique and I stopped at a French bakery and picked up a couple of
beignets
drenched in powdered sugar. Her mood lightened and she laughed while she licked her fingers. Most of the city was still asleep when we got back in the car and drove over to the head office.

So I wasn't expecting the voice memo that came blasting through my Verse.

“Stand by for the latest Nine-Timer Report—”

Felt like I'd been standing by my entire life. Right now I was waiting for India to self-destruct. I was glad Angelique didn't have her smartphone implant yet. Explaining the end of the world wasn't on my to-do list today.

“Explosions rocked the suburbs of Jaipur, India, a few hours ago,” the newscaster said.

Jaipur. We've got a Fresh Start plant there—it was probably the target of a local pro-death demonstration.

“Our sources are limited,” she continued in a bright, cheery voice. “But apparently the explosions triggered a Nine-Timer scenario that spread for about ten blocks—”

I'd bet right now Russell and his board were scrambling to cover all this up.

“Almost all clones within that radius froze up and went off-line—”

Went off-line
. The PC term for “died.”

“—but as far as we can tell, this was a pocket of Six-Timers. Obviously, the mechanical breakdowns we've been hearing rumors about are no longer restricted to the Ninth Generation clones—”

There was a dramatic pause.

“Remember to stay tuned for our next Nine-Timer Report at noon,” she said. “And may your afterlife be even better than your life today.”

I pulled into the Fresh Start parking lot just as the broadcast concluded. Angelique's mood changed again when she stared at the building. Almost every Newbie has some sort of reaction when they see one of our plants, based on some hidden memory of when they first got their chip, so I didn't really pay too much attention.

I was still thinking about the report.

When I was younger, the end of the world always seemed a bit poetic. In between gigs, my jazz buddies and I would sit around and talk about it for hours, sipping coffee or whiskey, cigarettes burning, taking bets on the future.

But the bottom line was that the end was coming, whether we believed in it or not. Folks have been talking about this afterlife time bomb for the past fifty years.

I should know.

After all, it was my family that lit the fuse in the first place.

Chaz:

Sometimes my arguments with Russ were universal, no different from those that brothers have had throughout history. You got a bigger slice of pie, all the girls like you better, you always think you're right. But lately our words carried a sharper edge, a growing hostility that was pushing us apart.

And despite the increasing tension, I still saw myself in his shadow, following in his oversized footprints.

I hated those moments. Like now. When I knew that I needed to confront him, but I also knew that somehow he was going to make me feel like I had messed up; I was the one tracking mud through the house; I was the one leaving dirty fingerprints behind that would let the rest of the world know, once and for all, that the Domingues were to blame for everything.

Majestic cedars stood outside the window, a patient audience dressed in shades of mossy green and burnt sienna. Their rich fragrance drifted through an open door, a woodsy incense that made me think of childhood. Then the VR projection flickered. Probably a power surge somewhere in
the city. For an instant, the large vaulted room filled with wooden desks and spiraling dust motes temporarily faded away to reveal the plant warehouse.

Meanwhile, the debate continued, like it always had. I'd heard this dispute before. I knew there was no conclusion. No happy ending.

“What are we going to do if the media gets hold of this? Nobody expected the problems we had with the Ninth Generation clones to show up in the Sixth Generation. Almost any amount of stress will cause them to freeze up—”

“—you're worried about the media? Have you thought about what the UN might do? Did you see what happened to that hot pocket of Six-Timers in Jaipur this morning? We weren't able to cover it up because one of our nearby plants was bombed. All of our resources were focused there. Just like last year in Tehran and Bangalore. These pro-death organizations are out for blood—”

“—I keep telling you, the pro-death committee is not behind this. Somebody else is pulling all the strings—”

“—the experts said this wouldn't happen for another century. The problem that was supposed to surface first was infertility. We never anticipated that the host DNA would break down this quickly—”

It was a corporate board meeting with all the Fresh Start top-level executives. All wearing their pretty-boy monkey suits and their we're-so-very-important scowls.

Just then, Russell filled my vision, larger than life as always. Big brothers always seem too big to put into words, especially when a sizable portion of their life has been spent playing the role of father. I stood in the shadows, arms crossed.

“Look, it's not like we were blindsided here,” he said. “We tried to make changes, to give people incentives to stop
jumping so often, especially in India. But the Hindu population has taken a personal interest in resurrection. Something about their search for Nirvana, some quest for a higher rung on the caste-system ladder—”

“Why does this always come back to religion? Why do you One-Timers always have to make this an argument about God?”

Russ held his own for several minutes, arguing with Aditya Khan, the guy with the unfortunate job of overseeing our business in the Middle East and Asia, where the lion-tiger-and-elephant share of our problems was currently taking place. Then Russ glanced over his shoulder and realized that I had walked into his VR conference call.

“Well, look who decided to get his little hands dirty and pay us a visit.” He paused, then turned back to the board members. “We'll continue this later.” Aditya started to protest, but Russ ignored him. He hit the
DISCONNECT
button on his wristband and slipped out of his VR suit. Instantly the conference room vista, replete with rustic nineteenth-century woodland ambiance, sizzled and faded. We were back in the plant warehouse now: concrete floors, a buzz of activity in distant office cubicles, the clatter of hospital-grade carts rolling down hallways, and a vague sterile odor hanging over everything.

And somewhere behind us, Angelique was running through a battery of hand-eye coordination tests in a soundproof booth.

A fine layer of dust seemed to hang in the air. Like guilt.

“You really must be some sort of idiot,” Russ said, his dark-eyed gaze sifting through the dust. He seemed out of place, dressed in an evening suit, one of the latest designer-from-China things, the top buttons hanging open. There was a cut on his forehead and a few drops of blood stained his
white collar. “What kind of game were you playing in that bar last night?”

As much as I had tried to be prepared, he still caught me off guard.

“Do you realize we could have a major lawsuit on our hands,” he continued, “if that brute you tangled with decides to press charges?”

“Trust me, there's no way that Neanderthal's gonna slam us with a lawsuit—”

“You didn't identify yourself, bruh.” He sighed, then glanced over my shoulder at Angelique. “One of the mugs in the French Quarter sent me a VR report, minutes after you sauntered out of that club.”

I paused. Mentally re-enacted the events in the club last night. “I told that goon who I was,” I countered, but all of sudden I wasn't sure.

“You showed him your tattoo, all right.
After
you blasted him with light. Look, I'm not in the mood to fight,” he said wearily. “I got yanked out of a dinner with the mayor last night by another board meeting, came in here and had to fight my way through a pro-death rally—”

“Is this one of your infamous ‘my job is tougher than yours' speeches?” I glanced back at Angelique and noticed that she had stopped her tests. She was staring at Russ, a guarded expression on her face.

“—then I got in here,” he continued, “and found out that an e-bomb had crashed our computer system. We almost lost a Newbie in transit.”

“Okay, okay, you win. Your job really is tougher than mine.” I pulled the plastic bag with the marker out of my pocket and slammed it on the table in between us. “Just tell me one thing, what the hell is this?”

Russ looked at the bag, then back up at me. “It's a marker.
Apparently taken out of a Stringer, since there's blood on it.” He shrugged.

“It's not one of ours.”

I saw something flash in his eyes, something I couldn't quite pinpoint. Anger, maybe. Or fear. His face seemed to shift in the descending dust, like he was changing into someone I didn't know anymore.

Like the old Russell was gone.