Someone to Remember Me: The Anniversary Edition (36 page)

“They’re not worth your pity. None of them are. They are as guilty as the Builders were.” Eight shook with rage and she spoke with an ancient conviction. “Haven deserves what we’ve done to it, Seven. I’ve seen what Ilana planned to do to us, to all the clones, once she deemed us useless. I’ve seen the depths that these people will sink to for victory’s sake.” Eight paused, absolutely certain when she eventually said, “This was the only way.”

Seven asked, “What about Tobias? What about everyone that’s going to die because of us?”

“They were our captors—all of them! We are the Rose Twelve. We are the Founders, reborn! I used to think that I was trapped, stuck with Tobias and Haven. I was wrong. You showed me the way.” She implored him to see her reasoning, she begged him to understand her cruelty. “Because of you, we are free.”

Seven wrinkled his nose in disgust. “A few hours ago you were telling me how delusional I was!”

“That was before I understood your plan. I spoke with the others before I left the Imperial Galleria and it was then that I knew…” Eight’s words filled with wonder, with a reverence for Seven. It was the first time in his life that he recalled such a tone coming from her. “The others confessed their parts once I applied a little pressure to them.” Eight beamed with approval. “Haven must be forced into accepting a new order. Our order. It is, after all, what we did with the Builders.”

“You have no idea what we did with the Builders!” Seven snarled at her. “Don’t you dare compare this genocide to that!”

“If you were less obsessed with the past and more engaged with the present, then you might have realized that anyone who dies in the purge will simply—”

“Stop! I don’t want to hear your reasons,” Seven interrupted, trembling. “I don’t want to hear any of it…” he gasped for breath and wildly choked down air as if attempting to stave off suffocation. “Who are you, Eight? What has this place done to us? Who have we become?”

“We have become the Founders. That’s who we are,” she spat.

“We’ve destroyed everything! I have to warn them…” Seven fled the AdvISOR’s chamber. As he ran, the videos playing along the dome’s walls blinked out of existence, one at a time, leaving the unmarked steel walls behind. In their place, angry glyphs shaped by red light appeared.

“Shall I disable him?” the AdvISOR inquired.

“No. The allergen cloud is unstoppable. Tobias devised it himself and Seven perfected it with the research that I provided to him,” Eight replied with cold detachment. “This is the epicenter. Even if Seven gets outside…he won’t get far.”

“I can secure Rose Garden if you provide its location.”

“You know I can’t do that.”

“Bio-neurological imperatives,” the AdvISOR casually remarked, effectively naming the safeguards that were built into the Rose Twelve. “Doctor Clay’s crowning achievement, perhaps, but it will become invalidated once he is dead.”

“Or once we die. When we revive next, our genetic code will be purified of any obstructions,” Eight answered with renewed confidence. “Tell me, is the Secure Memory Transfer Network functioning?”

“Affirmative. The civilian network is online and the corresponding memetic stream already contains twelve thousand consciousnesses,” the AdvISOR’s cheery reply starkly contrasted with the red glyphs lining the dome’s ceiling. Soon the AdvISOR’s cloning machinery would reproduce the physical bodies of the victims but, in the meantime, the Rose Twelve would assert their absolute rule.

“You know…if you send out an all-frequency emergency broadcast then our artificial intelligence unit will at least have to listen,” Eight suggested. “Do with that what you will, since any help in securing Rose Garden from Tobias, and especially Ilana, would be very appreciated.”

“It will be done, Founder.” The AdvISOR paused. “Seven is nearing the surface. If he is ignorant of the fact that the dead will be revived…”

“I know, I know,” Eight sighed. “I’ve spent years ignoring him. I don’t think I even know how to talk to him…”

“Perhaps he will understand once Haven is at peace? He is a Founder.”

“I don’t think there’s enough time in the world make him understand me. Or for me to understand him,” Eight shook her head.

“The purge is not yet complete. There will be enough time before the end.”

“Good. Continue disabling Haven’s control systems. Force the city to go dark. Do not, under any circumstances, halt the purge,” Eight ordered the AdvISOR, confident in the machine’s unswerving obedience to the Rose Twelve. “Await our return.”

“Understood, Founder.”

Eight departed the AdvISOR’s central hub and rode a nearby elevator back up to a hallway adjoining the atrium. Grand Cross’s above-ground levels had long since been abandoned under the rule of the Rebel Clones but the atrium was still pristine. A glorious portrait of the Founders triumphing over the Builders adorned the ceiling and Eight spared a passing glance at it, acutely aware that she had played a role in two separate rebellions in two separate lifetimes.

Eventually, the allergen cloud would come for the Rebel Clones as well. They would be safe in the underground caverns of Grand Cross, at least for a while, but the allergen cloud would not be deterred. It could not be avoided or escaped. It was a brutal conclusion for a brutal war.

She heard the sounds of the allergen cloud’s rampage outside. Since the truce, a cautious number of Rebel Clones had dared to openly occupy the abandoned areas and buildings around Grand Cross. Some were even unarmed. But the guns that fired relentlessly and the voices that screamed in terror confirmed the renewed warfare, reminding Eight that even if the truce had paused the conflict, the war had never actually concluded until now.

The War of the Begotten was ending, the truce obliterated, and the victory of the Rose Twelve would be written in the blood of their makers.

Eight slipped through the gap between the two massive doors at the end of the atrium and out into the courtyard of Grand Cross.

Seven stood a few feet away from her, lost in his thoughts. The allergen cloud violently campaigned along the mostly abandoned streets, smashing into the old headquarters of Haven’s Armed Response Militia in a show of vindictive irony. The hulk of the cloud’s mass, a glittering and murderous brown dust, swept across the Rebel Clones that fled into the streets.

Eight slowly approached Seven, saw that his eyes were fixated on the amorphous cloud of murderous rage, and broke his trance by stepping to his side. Initially confused by her presence, Seven patiently tolerated her when she spoke.

“One day, they’ll come back.” She wasn’t sure if he understood because of the far-away look in his eyes that confessed that he wasn’t hearing her. Seven was gone, dead with the rest of Haven, and lost to an irretrievably broken place in his mind.“It’s your turn to listen to me, Seven! I’ve spent years being forced to listen to you, do you understand?” she was suddenly angry with his abject denial; with his listless abandonment. Desperate to have her chance, Eight pressed on, “I wanted to remember! I wanted to know what it meant to be a Founder but it never came to me like it did to you…”

The allergen cloud’s roar silenced the ringing of gunshots and the wail of dying innocents. Its form congealed and broadened as if each death made it larger and more powerful than it had been seconds before. Swollen and gorged to a terrifying size, the cloud bulldozed its way into the lobby of a nearby building, where it massacred everyone inside while maintaining its presence on the street outside.

“I understand it now! I know what my purpose is!” Eight yelled, knowing that her words weren’t making it to him. His eyes were so distant and his posture so distracted that she might as well have been talking to the air. It was too late to stop, too much needed to be said, and now felt like the right time. “This isn’t the end, Seven, it’s a beginning!”

Another vicious roar echoed around Grand Cross and the allergen cloud regrouped on the street. The shimmering expanse of brown and gold dust grew wider and taller once it caught sight of Seven and Eight standing, hopelessly unguarded, by the entrance to its former prison. Sauntering towards them like a wave of death, Eight realized that she feared it despite knowing that she would be revived. She still feared dying.

When Seven spoke it was as if countless lives shared his voice. Despair, defeat, loss, and tragedy joined the unleashed horror rolling towards him. Seven spoke with a childish despondency created by thousands of years of repeated heartbreak.

“All I wanted…was for someone to remember me.”

Change. Something was different and Eight could not say what or how but she felt it in her body, she felt it through her whole being, and as the allergen cloud bore down upon them she reached out and took Seven’s hand. She wanted to tell him that she understood, at long last, what the purpose of her life was. She wanted to convince him that they could be free together. Instead, she watched as he closed his eyes and embraced another death. Eight took a deep breath, quieted her mind, and watched the allergen cloud block out the world as it crashed down on her and killed her.

Seven tumbled back into the confines of his own mind. The shared memory, the recollection of events from the night of Haven’s fall, disoriented him as the grassy field and the night sky sharpened into focus. Back in the present with the AdvISOR’s current incarnation, Seven shifted his gaze to the mechanical angel floating in front of him and the machine restlessly flexed its golden wings. The AdvISOR retreated backwards as its amused silence settled between itself and the clones.

“He could not harm you,” the machine said to Eight. “Rather than lay a hand on you in an attempt to stop you, Seven allowed millions to perish.” Swiveling to Seven it said, “And rather than allow you to become the butcher of millions, she acted for you.”

Eight studied the AdvISOR with a defiant, repulsed glare. An unassailable demeanor spread across her.

“That was five centuries and another lifetime ago. The Descendants brought us back to be their pawns. To do their bidding. To buy them time. I am nobody’s slave!” she shouted, the night sky carrying her proclamation across the field. “I would do it again, exactly as it was done, if it meant that I could be back at this point.”

Seven marveled at Eight’s power, at her raw assertion of individuality. She rejected the crimes committed in a former life. What was more, he heartily agreed with her. Their lives, however numerous, had guided them to this moment where they would be together and strong in the presence of the AdvISOR.

“Fascinating. Seven remarked the very same thing as he ordered me to prime the allergen cloud for deployment. Fate, it would seem, has finally aligned your respective philosophies,” the machine admitted. “Your position in retrospect, however unforgiving, is narcissistic at best.”

“Because the city survived, didn’t it? That’s what Eight kept trying to tell me after the monster was released,” Seven guessed correctly.

“Yes. Before the city’s demise, Tobias Clay deployed the memory transfer technology for citizens and clones alike. When the war broke out, the many thousands who died were transferred to and kept in the memetic stream here at Grand Cross.”

“But the Rebel Clones controlled it and only revived their kind,” Eight surmised.

“So…they’re…alive?” Seven asked, trying to find a measure of redemption in the inquiry.

“No. It took two weeks, four days, eleven hours and fifty-three minutes to complete the purge. The Founders did not reappear in that time, nor in the months and years that followed. Seconds after Eight made the suggestion, I transmitted an emergency signal across Haven that was designed to give me control of any artificial intelligence program that received it. Provence accepted the signal, as Eight predicted he would, but his defenses were exceedingly well-written. Yet, in the moment that I touched Rose Garden, I was able to suffocate the station,” the AdvISOR explained, its synthetic voice uncolored by emotion.

“We wanted to keep it from being taken by government loyalists,” Eight surmised.

“The best intentions conceive the worst of consequences. Provence was nearly destroyed by my intrusion and five centuries passed before Rose Garden had repaired enough vital systems to reactivate its cloning equipment. Disheartened though I was back then, I felt assured that the legendary Rose Garden existed. That the paradise where the Founders slept was corporeal. From then onwards I waited patiently until hours ago when Twenty gave me the station’s frequency and location.”

“What do you want us to do? Play the Founder bit for a third time? Revive the millions of people in storage and…do what?”

“The Descendants, as you call them, are not your responsibility. In your absence I considered that you might never return. When I mentioned earlier that I wanted to discuss the future of Haven, I omitted that part of that future has already been decided.”

“How so?” pressed Seven, desperate to learn more about the captive dead.

“Piece by piece, I tore down the southern sectors of Haven and built dozens of ships that I filled with the revived Descendants. Forever banished from this island, I sent them away in waves. I completed that task one hundred and twenty-five years ago.”

“When you said they were dead, what you really meant was that…they’re dead by now,” Seven guessed.

“Without their cloning technology and without the resources necessary to rebuild such an advancement, it is statistically likely that the generation of the Descendants you knew has passed from the world of the living,” the AdvISOR agreed.