Eight Minutes, Thirty-Two Seconds Read online

  Something more Levi.

  After combining it with a few other pieces of refurbished software and precious strings of his own code, every so often he’d let the genie out of the bottle long enough to play a game or two.

  The MMORPG opened to him as though no firewalls defended their servers at all, before completely forgetting he’d ever been there.

  He smiled, playing the game with the powers of a god.

  “Clear.”

  “Computer games,” she said after reviving in the infirmary. M waited, holding a notebook but not writing anything.

  “And?”

  The memories faded. She blinked, trying to recall something more than the impression of computer games. So many trips, what memories survived resurrection sometimes got all jumbled. “Billy? I think.”

  “Playing computer games? More likely Levi, no?”

  “Right,” she said. “No, felt like Billy. Or was that a different death?”

  “Did he say anything?”

  The memory waited on the tip of her tongue. Just out of reach unless a strong emotion imprinted them deeper. But nothing remained. Only the game, playing god.

  Then, she remembered. “‘Can you get it?’”

  “Get what?”

  “No,” L said. “That’s what she asked Devid.”

  “Who asked?”

  “Amy,” she said, remembering her annoying laugh.

  “That was your last death,” M said, but still wrote the question in the notebook. “This one was computer games. Probably Levi.”

  “Right,” L said. “Levi.”

  “Can you get what?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Did he answer?”

  She remembered the answer, but the memory disappeared as quickly as it arrived. “I think so.”

  “Is it important?”

  She frowned. “Probably. Isn’t everything?”

  L burrowed under sheets and pillows, but the voice kept intruding on her dream.

  M snored.

  The computer chimed again.

  “Forty hours,” the computer said.

  “Shut up,” L said.

  “You asked to be informed.”

  She poked M, which stopped his snoring but little else. “It’s time.” Then, to the computer. “What time is it?”

  “Three-forty-seven AM.”

  “Wake up,” L said, poking him once more.

  “It’s the middle of the night.”

  “I’m not carrying you again.”

  He rolled toward her, pinning her to the mattress with his arm and burrowing into her hair. “Ten minutes.”

  “In five you’ll be asleep, now get up.”

  His hand, where it rested on her cheek, twitched, fingers vibrating against her skin.L threw the covers off, pushing M out of bed. He staggered against the wall, stood, and took one deep breath after another.

  “Walk,” she said, leading him by the hand to the infirmary.

  “Yasmeen,” he said after being born again.

  L wrote the name in her notebook.

  “She was young.” M pulled the sensor array off, letting the needled pads fall to the side. “All excited about a new quadcopter. She was trying to reverse engineer the hardware to exceed height limitations. Very excited, wouldn’t shut up about it.”

  “Was she talking to anyone?”

  “Mom, maybe? Dad? Someone.” He paused in the doorway. “Something about Homeland violations, I think. No, FAA, that was it. FAA.”

  “FAA?”

  “That information is not located in any accessible databases,” the computer said.

  “What information do you have?” M asked while they walked into Yasmeen’s room to add the details to the walls.

  “Accessible databases include complete medical and meteorological systems. Courses of study available cover a range of educational subjects from anatomy to zoology. Do you require a complete listing?”

  L sighed. “No,” she said, glaring at M. “You had to ask.”

  “I had to ask.”

  “Any life forms?”

  “Negative. No radio or wireless signals indicative of human habitation. Sensors detect no biosignatures above the microbial level.”

  “How are they doing?”

  “Satellites at 87.744% efficiency, an improvement of 4.496% since diagnostics and repair. Improvements projected to be temporary due to continued hardware and software degradation.”

  “Anything you can do?”

  “Negative.”

  “Anything we can do?” M asked.

  “Full maintenance routines require access to satellites in both geostationary and low earth orbits in order to upgrade the firmware and perform all necessary repairs on their operative systems and mechanics.”

  “Anything we can do that we can actually, you know, do?”

  “Negative. No palliative procedures are able to be performed from inside the habitat.”

  L stapled the page of notes to the wall of Yasmeen’s room.

  “I need food,” M said.

  “And a nap. Go, I’ll finish.”

  Alone, L walked the room, hoping to remember something new by looking at the old information. All six of them so well known. L and M had died so many times, there was little to gain by staying in the room. Yet, L stayed.

  She had, literally, no place else to go.

  Whenever she died, she lived. Really lived, not an artificial life behind insulated walls with monitors showing old nature scenes that no longer existed. What use in seeing pictures, to be reminded that everything had died? All that remained outside was a landscape of barren greys and blacks, hidden by clouds and fog. Months had passed since they’d bothered checking, relying on the computer for detecting signs of life.

  The habitat itself was huge, but they’d stopped exploring it long ago after finding too many locked or empty rooms to count. Airlocks led outside, but the atmosphere couldn’t sustain life, so they still needed to use suits. Too much of a hassle, for the most part.

  Instead, they stayed near the infirmary, close to their room, and their research.

  For a while, they attended to their studies, learning about math and science and everything else in the education software, even if it all seemed vaguely familiar. But the computer had little knowledge of recent history and what did they have to study for anyway?

  Instead, they collated all their deaths into six rooms, one for each of their ‘friends.’

  And a seventh room, with far less information.

  L opened that door, waited for the lights to come on, rested her fingers on one of the papers stapled to the wall.

  THE END OF THE WORLD

  To the best of their limited knowledge, eight billion people had died. The computer contained no useful information. Not on how many people once lived on the planet. Not on how they all died. Not on how two of them had survived.

  And that’s what L most wanted to know. Why her? Why them?

  Sure, it’d be interesting to know what happened, but the end of the world was past and done and ancient history. Well, not really ancient, she wasn’t that old after all.

  “How long,” she asked.

  “How long what?”

  “Have M and I been here?”

  “That information is not located in any accessible databases.”

  “How long since we found the vault with the yellow vials?”

  “Eleven months, twenty-three days.”

  She rested against the wall, rustling the papers, trying to remember how long they’d lived there before finding the vault. Memories skittered away, like liquid mercury scrambling across a surface.

  What were they doing before they found the vault?

  Exploring the habitat?

  What else would they do? They’d nothing else to do.

  Before the vault?

  Trying to remember hurt.

  She squeezed her eyes shut. Tried to remember and the harder she tried the more it pained her and the less s
he saw.

  Nothing was there, and the nothing bothered her far more than she was willing to admit. The agony of trying to remember and failing was worse than the headache the trying brought on.

  L blinked her eyes open, the light far too bright. She studied the room, staring at the scant information about the end of the world. Eight billion people dead and she bothered to complain about memory loss?

  They’d seen a few deaths every so often when visiting Levi or Devid or Amy or Yasmeen or Billy. People died, after all. Sometimes, the news broadcast reports of war or famine or natural disasters. That wasn’t the end of the world.

  This was the end of the world.

  It sucked.

  The six of them had banded together against a civilization they hated. They’d shared revolutionary slogans, conspiracy theories, and righteous indignation fantasies of revolution itself. But they remained slogans and beliefs and nothing more. They spoke with such anger the emotions burned the memories into L and M, but it was just talk, only words in an echo chamber of their own devising.

  They debated viral loads or hacked systems or electromagnetic pulses or half a dozen other doomsday scenarios. Trying to decide which held the potential to cleanse the planet, to heal the world.

  They never made a decision or chose a direction, not one that L or M remembered seeing. All talk and no action, speaking truth to power even though power wasn’t listening, and they weren’t speaking loudly. Just preaching to a small choir of the six of them, when they finally realized how powerless they were.

  Those notes lined the walls of the seventh room. The end-of-the-world room.

  L and M didn’t remember. They didn’t know. Maybe war broke out and swallowed the Earth whole. Or aliens. Or sunspots. Or zombies.

  A pretty extensive movie collection filled the computer’s media library. Not to mention hundreds of thousands of books or more. Zombies seemed to be a favorite topic of most of them. Some vampires, a handful of natural disaster movies, and one or two government conspiracy documentaries funnier than the comedies.

  The world had ended, sometime more than eleven months and twenty-three days ago. Far past time for Billy’s conspiracy theories about the United Nations or the Illuminati, since neither existed any longer.

  “How old am I?” L asked.

  “That information is not located in any accessible databases.”

  “How old is M?”

  “That information is not located in any accessible databases.”

  “How old are you?”

  L wandered the room, arm outstretched to run her fingers along the papers stapled to the walls.

  “That information is not located in any accessible databases.”

  She stopped, rested her hand on the end of the world sign, and ignored the first few things she wanted to say. “How long have you been operational?”

  “Eleven months, twenty-three days.”

  The mystery gnawed at her, the way the incoherent memories festered when she couldn’t remember all the details. When she tried to figure out a pattern.

  There wasn’t a pattern. No way to tell if a death meant visiting any one in particular, at any time in their lives. They might learn something important. Or nothing. Visit during a vital conversation. Or during a history test. Or worse.

  Yasmeen getting braces the day before she turned thirteen.

  M’s teeth had hurt for days, after sitting in someone else’s dentist chair for hours, begging for rebirth and being ignored while the orthodontist attached the metal to Yasmeen’s teeth.

  Some deaths changed everything.

  Billy placed his phone on speaker, ignoring Stephanie’s rant about Malthusian over-population and the corrosive effects of humanity on the planet. He worked on his computer, muttering something important enough that L remembered every word he said.

  It was the first detail they’d put in room seven. It was the reason they started room seven. Where so much else remained on pieces of paper, they’d written Billy’s words onto the wall.

  This is the way the world ends

  This is the way the world ends

  This is the way the world ends

  Not with a bang but a whimper

  “The Hollow Men, by T.S. Eliot, first published November 23, 1925,” the computer said when L was reborn quoting those four lines under her breath.

  “What were we doing before we discovered the vault?” L asked, out of breath from rushing to their bedroom.

  M didn’t look up from his food, squeezing the pouch into his port. An empty one already discarded on the floor by his feet. “Which vault?”

  “With the yellow vials.”

  M shrugged, still not looking. “Exploring, I suppose. Wandering the habitat seeing what we could find that was helpful.”

  “No,” L said. “Before that.”

  “We were—” His head tilted. He let go of the second pouch, so it hung from the port, tugging his arm. “What were we doing?”

  “I’m asking you.”

  “And is this one of those questions you like to ask that you already know the answer to?”

  L slumped to the bed, kicking the empty pouch out of the way. “You can’t keep eating two at once.”

  “I was hungry,” M said. “Now I’m sleepy.”

  “Lights out,” she said, moving to give him room. “No, it’s not a question I know the answer to. Neither does the computer.”

  “The computer doesn’t know?”

  “The computer wasn’t online until we found the vault.”

  M stretched out, his hand resting on L’s shoulder. “How’s that possible?”

  “That information is not located in any accessible databases,” the computer said.

  “Wasn’t asking you,” M said before curling around L. “Was asking you.”

  “I don’t have that information, either,” L said.

  “How long?” L asked after waking.

  “Fifty-one hours, four minutes.”

  “And for M?”

  “Ten hours, twenty-one minutes.”

  “How long did I go last time?”

  “Sixty-three hours, eighteen minutes without being symptomatic. Once withdrawal symptoms began, one hour, forty minutes.”

  “And M?” L asked.

  “Forty hours, eleven minutes without being symptomatic. Once withdrawal symptoms began, six minutes.”

  “Any pattern?”

  “Negative, other than the obvious.”

  “The obvious?”

  “The lengths of time before withdrawal symptoms are shrinking.”

  “So, I have about twelve hours, right?”

  “There is no way to validate that, but given recent parameters, no longer than twelve hours, nine minutes.”

  “You said I had until sixty-three, eighteen?”

  “That was nine minutes ago.”

  “Give me an alert at eleven hours, please,” L said.

  “Eleven hours and counting.”

  L attached the leads to her skin, the sensor array pads covering her upper chest. She inserted the yellow vial into her port. M sat against the wall, holding his notebook.

  “Could be another hour,” he said.

  “Or less.”

  “Why do you last longer?”

  “I’m a woman,” L said, smiling and flexing her arms. “Means I’m stronger than you.”

  The computer chimed.

  “Daily life support regimen protocol includes basic diagnostics,” the computer said. “There are no physiological anomalies that would contribute to the length of time before withdrawal symptoms manifest. If you require a specific answer there are a number of potentialities.”

  “Such as?” M asked.

  “One possibility is that like all addictions, some people are more susceptible than others.”

  “How likely is that?”

  “As likely as any other option,” the computer said. “Another possibility is that gender plays a role to an unknown significance.”

>   “Told you.”

  “Or not,” the computer said. “Bioscans show that M is chronologically older, so age is a possible contributing factor.”

  “Enough.” L’s leg shuddered against the chair, causing the metal to rattle.

  “Time?” M asked.

  “Sixty-one hours, thirty-three minutes.”

  M pressed the plunger. Yellow liquid swirled through the port and she died.

  “Get out of my room,” Amy said, throwing a pillow at her older sister where she stood in the doorway.

  “Get a life, bitch,” Theresa said. “Or die, that’d help us all.”

  Amy threw her last pillow. On the bed, half a dozen puppets and a couple dozen dolls remained. A marionette hung near the ceiling fan, dancing with each rotation.

  Theresa grabbed the closest pillow from the floor before throwing it at the puppet.

  “Go away,” Amy said, scrambling to stop the wires from twisting too far in any one direction.

  “I guess you don’t want the package that was just delivered?”

  Amy glared at her sister. “What package?”

  Theresa turned around and left the room. “How should I know? Get your own crap.”

  Amy took the stairs two at a time, squeezing past Theresa with a shove hard enough to send her big sister against the wall.

  “Bitch,” Theresa said.

  Downstairs, the package had been opened, the books inside rifled through. Amy scooped everything into the box and carried it upstairs before clearing out enough dolls to spread the books on her bed, putting them in alphabetical order.

  Not for any reason L understood, but the reason didn’t matter. What mattered was the emotional overload Amy experienced, burning the memories in.

  Cognitive Psychology (Cognitive Neuroscience/Memory and the Manipulation of Memory).

  Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society.

  Labor of Love: Gestational Surrogacy and the Work of Making Babies.

  Manual of Assisted Reproductive Technologies and Clinical Embryology. Obstetrics and the Newborn: An Illustrated Textbook.

  Amy touched each of the books, running her fingers over the titles, before entering the password into her laptop.