Evolution (18 page)

Joshua grabbed her hands from behind and spread her arms. “Pretend you have wings. If you hold out your arms, it’ll give me more surface area for lift.”

As she stretched out her arms, her feet left the ground. She almost asked out loud how this was possible. But she didn’t have to. In her mind’s eye, she had a view of the Earth’s polarity repelling Joshua and Ed’s like a magnet. Each held her under an arm though they chose to remain invisible, even to her, so she could enjoy the feeling of flight.

Growing up on Chariklo, Sara could jump high enough to enter the family’s tree house without climbing. But the gravity, slight as it was, would still eventually pull her back down. It was, after all, still just jumping. And in the agro pod, she’d had no control. Only with the vines and plant structures could she make her way around the village in space. Plus, everyone floated, so it wasn’t exactly a superhero ability.

Sara’s breath caught in her chest as she looked down at the roofs of homes and buildings. The night air penetrated her sleeping gown—cool, refreshing, tingling the skin with its enhanced awareness. Temperature, dew point, humidity, wind speed all registered in her mind as if she were a human weather station. There’d be a storm tomorrow.

Joshua and Ed lifted her higher to avoid being seen from windows in the upcoming skyscrapers. This truly was flying. Gravity pulled, unsuccessfully, at the weight of her body. She had to remind herself this was a rescue. But the temptation for play proved too great.

Bringing her hands together, she formed a circle with her arms and leaned to the side. Joshua and Ed became spinning arms of her vortex, twirling her like a ballerina in midair, over one hundred stories up. She laughed as she spread her arms again and lay flat, no longer just a girl lifted by her arms. She wished she had a cape to complete the superhero-stereotype version of flying.

Far below, ships worked their way upriver. New York—Rendition—home was just a few miles away. She longed to fly between the buildings, but Joshua wouldn’t risk it. She didn’t ask, and he didn’t answer. It wasn’t necessary. They held her higher than even the passing shuttles. “What if someone’s looking through a view screen?”

The answer came in words but not ones that sounded in her ears.
We control the view screens. They won’t see you unless their windows are transparent metal. And no building in New York is so cheap that they’d use those building materials.

So that’s why we avoided Jersey City?
She had to try out the telepathic communication she’d always envied her father having.

Exactly.

Sara desperately wished she could share the experience with the one person in all the solar system who could join her—Emily. Her sister would be giggling like a girl half her age at the idea of flying through the sky. But there were still far too many aspects of this new connection Sara had to discover before she even told Emily about it.

We had to save you. But even if we hadn’t, we’d have given you this first. We’ll only tell Emily about it when you know all the benefits and drawbacks.

It sounded reasonable. But reason wasn’t what Sara wanted at the moment. She just wanted to fly. A slight panic developed as her body began dropping from its vantage point high above the city.

We’re just lowering you to Rendition.

She’d seen the building plenty of times from shuttle view screens. But they weren’t landing on the roof this time. Like a character in some ancient fairy tale, Sara watched her feet lower to the rooftop garden that surrounded the family’s penthouse. She ran for the door the instant Joshua and Ed let go of her arms.

Her parents looked up, confused, as she burst through the open doors, which Sara realized she’d opened mentally. The new locks weren’t even a consideration.

“Sara!” Sam and Jess raced to wrap her in their arms.

S
am held Sara tight
, not wanting to let go. She’d dropped out of the sky, and he feared if he turned her loose she might float off again. With the mission completed, there was no longer a need to keep the details of her escape a secret. In an instant, he saw the connection the Tobes had established with her and how they’d flown her home. The image of her sailing through the air made him hug her even more tightly to his chest. She was home and safe, but at what cost? It didn’t matter. He had her home again. If anyone had seen her flying, they’d come up with some explanation. Nothing mattered but having her home.

His connection reasserted itself. He’d missed something the Tobes were telling him. She’d changed, and not just because of what the church had put her through. His connection to the Tobes, that odd telepathic relationship that only he shared with all of technology, was no longer his alone. They had access to Sara’s mind.

Her new relationship with the technological beings mirrored his in too many ways. How would he have reacted to that level of connection to all knowledge at her age? He’d never been the scholar. With Sara’s love of books, would she disappear into some mental abyss, consumed with her hunger to learn everything?

His fear for her was tempered with the knowledge that he was no longer alone. Someone else shared his level of interconnectivity. And she’d be safe. No one would ever make her do anything she didn’t want.

He whispered in her ear as he finally let up on his bear hug, “We need to talk privately.”

But that discussion would have to wait. View screens lit up with sleepy, excited faces. Each one barraged Sara with questions about her ordeal and escape.

He dared not tell anyone how she’d escaped and what she was now capable of doing. He closed his eyes to send out the silent plea to the Tobe community.
Tell her not to talk about Fly. We need a cover story.
The silent communication with the Tobes she now shared had an immediate benefit. They could talk to her without anyone knowing, and she could respond.

Don’t worry. We’ve already discussed the need to keep quiet about the new technology.

Sara played the innocent, confused fifteen-year-old girl well as she made up a story. A hood had been put over her and she couldn’t see anything. There might have been some kind of small shuttle. Really, she didn’t know very much about her rescue.

She pulled off the lie like a professional storyteller. Only Emily seemed to doubt her sister’s story and pressed her for details. But one sharp look from Sara, and Emily let the subject go.

Dawn announced the end of the long, sleepless night. But unlike the morning light of the last nineteen days of agony, this one held the hope of a new beginning.

* * *

S
ara couldn’t sleep
. It’d taken hours of making up stories to ease people’s fears while explaining her captivity and escape. Who cared what she could do? But she guessed her father and the Tobes were right. Keeping her newfound abilities secret would be better than making a big deal of them. She was already too much in the spotlight.

Her father’s snoring gave her that good, safe, home feeling. Emily always hated it, saying she could never get a full night’s sleep if their parents’ room was too close to hers. Sara knew no one in the penthouse had gotten a deep sleep since she’d been abducted. The snoring assured her, that night at least, that her father would be getting his rest.

Between her new connection to the Tobes, her escape, and the barrage of attention, Sara hadn’t found time to investigate what had happened to her. She really wanted to go outside and fly again, but people would be watching the building. Their fascination with the girl who’d been abducted and had escaped made her sick. She’d never before appreciated how her parents had managed to keep their power and wealth from making them celebrities. That anonymity would be a thing of the past now. The whole world had witnessed her plight.

The images of people glued to their view screens flooded her mind. They were people she had no way of knowing. All the reports, both sympathetic to her parents’ side and opposed, instantly became part of her memories. Sara swallowed hard as her hands gripped the couch cushions. Somewhere inside her brain, information was downloading like a networked computer.
What the hell?

Ellie materialized on the far side of the couch. “I’m sorry, Sara. To save you, we had to create a connection that extended to your every thought.”

Joshua had said something about that. She tried to remember. He’d been concerned for her. But the prospect of escape had been too great. “So this is what makes me like Dad?”

“Yeah. He had some time to get used to this lack of barriers between what he thought and what he could access. And we’ve had him to teach us about how important those divides are for people. But we don’t know how to separate ourselves from what you want to know. Even if you don’t ask, if you just idly wonder what someone might have seen regarding your captivity, we’ll show you. Just remember, your brain is only human. It has more capacity than you realize, but it is limited.”

“So if I want to know too much, what would happen?” Sara asked. “Would I end up in a coma or something?”

“I think we can prevent that from happening. But some restraint on your part would help a lot. That’s why I came here in person instead of just silently and instantly answering all your questions. If there’s one of us here with you, hopefully you’ll feel like asking us for answers instead of just inadvertently downloading them.”

“Can I try it?” Sara had never before feared her own mind or the information she found interesting. Books were old friends, but how would she feel if they became an actual part of her—if she didn’t have to read them but knew everything the author was trying to say so precisely it would be as though she’d written the book herself?

Ellie reached out and took Sara’s hands. At first, Ellie’s hands felt warm and soft but in some way mechanical. As Sara held them, though, she began to feel the blood running in Ellie’s veins, sweat from her pores, and every minute flexing of her muscles.

Ellie quickly pulled her hands away. “I hadn’t meant to do that. I was just going to help you access a book without getting lost in it. I don’t know what just happened.”

Sara took Ellie’s hand back in hers. “I think I know. Do you remember when Emily and I were teaching you about touch? I couldn’t fully explain what a person’s hand felt like and the raw emotion that accompanied that simple physical connection.”

Ellie’s eyes grew wide. “You did that to me? In all of our experience with your father, he never uploaded an experience to us.”

“You mean after he gave you his soul.” Sara hadn’t meant it to sound mean, but the Tobes had received something from him much deeper than just learning how to display the feeling of a person’s hand.

“You’re right. Giving us life was a pretty big upload. I just never realized you’d be able to control the direction of the communication.”

“I didn’t either, but love is a two-way street. When I first came to Earth, you let me teach you. Then you found ways to open up all of Earth’s knowledge to me. Why should this be any different?”

Ellie looked at their clasped hands. “Do you want to try to access something from us?”

Of course I do, silly.
Sara closed her eyes and imagined the most difficult textbook she could remember, a book about extinct African dialects. In an instant, she could speak Twi better than the last Asantehene. She found it hard to catch her breath. The words flowed so seamlessly in her mind she had to remember to speak English. “That was amazing.”

* * *

S
am got
up to find Sara right where he’d left her the night before. “You never made it to bed?”

“Ellie and I spent the night… talking.” He recognized the downward look. It was the same guilty expression she and Emily had when they’d been caught spying on Mira’s garden.

“I suppose it’s only natural you’d be curious about your newfound abilities. Just tell me you didn’t go flying around Manhattan.”

Sara’s smile made his stomach churn. He’d meant the comment as a joke. “No. I can’t deny I thought about it, though. We just explored how my brain works.”

“This thing the Tobes laid on you is no small burden. I’ve struggled with it since before you were born.” Sam tried to remember his earliest silent communications with Lev. They’d left him dizzy and disoriented, and the headaches had never fully eased their vise grip on his brain.

“It’s different, Dad. I saw what you have to endure. The collective gave me a taste of it.” She looked so much more mature than she had less than three short weeks ago.

The
collective
.
So that’s what the Tobes consider their civilization.
It’d always been so much more of a personal connection with him that they’d never bothered with a society-wide term.

“There’s no stopping you, no directing your path. Everything’s wide-open now. You’re still very young, and I’m going to have to get used to seeing that young body as containing more information than even I’ll accept. Knowledge isn’t wisdom. The Tobes will be the first to tell you they’re still figuring things out. You’ve worked with them enough to know that, though.” He struggled with how he could help her, wondering what he had to offer that she couldn’t already access—other than his history as the only other fully networked human being.

“I know the dangers,” she said, “and they’re very tempting. I could spend years mentally wandering every library known to man. Each book would download into my mind in seconds. Then I could take all the time I’d like to leisurely absorb the information. I’d no longer have to struggle to see the author’s point of view. It’d be like seeing it all from their perspectives. I could become the greatest intellect humanity had ever seen, not just knowing the data like the Tobes but being able to compare sources, making the nonobvious connections—can you imagine what I might achieve?” The temptations of an enlightened mind glistened in her eyes.

But that would separate her—perhaps permanently—from people. “Is that what you’d want—to be nothing more than a disembodied brain? With the Tobes trying to connect more with people, you’d choose to disconnect and go back to where they began?”

Sara looked out the penthouse view screens at the vast cityscape. “No. It’s tempting. And I can’t say there won’t be times I might disappear for days, or weeks, into that mental library. But I need to be active in life in order to combat that mental craving.” She turned back to Sam. “I want to be more a part of Rendition. It makes the most sense. With this connection, I can be even more helpful to the Tobes. But I don’t want to just be a tutor. I’m too young to hold a position of power, but one day I’d like to…”

Sam could see her struggle with the prospect of one day replacing him. “It’s okay. I never wanted to run this company. Lud, the board of directors, even Joshua and Ellie have all had to carry the load largely because I didn’t want to. I can’t recommend the job, but if it’s what you want, I’ll give you my support.”

Sara scanned the huge space. It wasn’t greed, and it wasn’t the familiar lust for power Sam had seen in so many others. She was now a part of a legacy.

He should let her enjoy the moment, but she needed to know what she was up against. “Your kidnapping was just the beginning. There’s a move against us, against Rendition, against our village in space, potentially even against the Tobes.” Her innocent eyes grew large as she looked at him. Could she really handle all that was coming at her? So many things hadn’t been fair in her young life. “You don’t have to make all your life decisions right now. No one has to know about your new connection to the Tobes or your future plans or any of it. I’ll always be your father.”

Sam still wanted to pull the vile stone structure of the church down with his bare hands. He’d never have the public on his side. Sara had been the sweet, innocent girl caught in the middle. That was how people would see her.

The image of her standing in front of those stone walls, yelling at her former captors, could be a powerful first impression on a quick-to-judge population. But it’d also solidify the divide. Sam already faced opposition from every side, and he wanted to minimize the number of people caught in the middle. Protecting the Tobes, securing all they’d achieved with the foundation, and ensuring a safe place for
Leviathan
to lovingly care for the village—it all had to be weighed against the desire for retaliation. “We need a strategy. If you want to one day run Rendition, we need to make sure there’s still a company left when the dust settles.”