Molly Fyde and the Blood of Billions

Great Rift could be seen, the gold glimmering like a nearby star. It felt strange to see an object residing in her own galaxy while her home was so impossibly distant and inaccessible.

She looked at the foreign design of the ship they had become stranded in. Massive and black, with menacing barrels and rocket pods, its fearsome demeanor hid its toothless condition. She looked down the hull at the strange squiggles adorning it.

“What’s its name?” she asked Edison.

“Increase specificity.”

“The ship,” she said, pointing. “What’s it called?”

Edison gazed out with her. “The Exponent,” he said.

“The Exponent,” she repeated. “How coincidental is that?”

“I believe ‘ironical’ is the correct term. Exponent is a mathematical notation for enormous numbers, and we are but two. It also pertains to rapid growth, and barring advances in xenobiology, such is statistically unlikely for us.”

Anlyn smiled and shook her head. “That’s what I love about English. So many words have multiple meanings, the reader ends up injecting some of their own. Like the Bern Prophecy, for instance.”

Edison grunted. “That’s what I loathe about the language. English can be imprecise when wielded improperly. It leads to conversational derailments such as this.”

“I don’t see a derailment—I see a detour. And where you see a mathematical notation, I see a deeper meaning, a coincidence that’s hard to ignore.” Anlyn turned and faced her love. “Exponent can also mean a person who brings forth a new or great idea. Like maybe the one you just had about hyperspace.”

Edison frowned down at her. She leaned close and wrapped her arms around his waist, resting her head against his tunic. “I think we need to test your theory, and that scares me,” she said.

Edison lightly stroked her back with his massive paws. They both looked to the side, out through the glass to the quiet cosmos beyond.

“I’m unable to deduce a reason for your frightened state,” Edison said. He smiled at Anlyn’s reflection. “Calculate the statistical likelihood of my incorrectness.”

29

“Hello? Son, can you hear me?”

Cole cracked his eyes. There were no goggles, no bright, searing light from everywhere, just the soft warmth of artificial bulbs. Two men leaned over him. One of them he recognized but couldn’t place. He had short hair and a generic-looking face. Very generic, like Cole had seen a hundred people who looked just like him.

The other man seemed slightly familiar as well. Cole blinked and attempted to bring them into focus. The second figure had wavy brown hair and a neatly trimmed beard, both laced with gray. Cole felt he should know their names.

“Can you hear me?” the man with the beard asked.

Cole nodded.

He looked around and saw the same room from his last dream: beds and curtains and white walls.

“Can you move your arm?”

Cole watched the lips move, forming the words. It all seemed to be happening at a normal pace. Very un- dream-like. He smiled up at the men.

“Your arm, son, can you move it?”

Cole raised his left arm. He tried to make a fist, but it felt weak and tingly, like he’d been asleep a long time.

The generic-looking man smiled. “The other one,” he said.

Cole continued to admire his own hand while the other arm came up. He lifted his head and stared at it in disbelief. It wasn’t his. Flaps of skin hung open like fleshy shutters. Inside, small pistons, bundles of wiring, metal plates—they moved at his command. He traced the mechanics down past a hinged elbow until it met his own flesh, the two slightly different colors of dark skin adjoining in a neat line.

“Very good,” someone said.

But it wasn’t good. It wasn’t good at all. Cole tried to sit up, but several hands forced him down. He tried to complain, but a mask was placed over his face. He took a deep breath to protect himself from whatever was about to happen. He looked up at the man holding the mask and tried to remember where he knew the guy.

Dakura! The guy was a Stanley! Cole gasped in disbelief—then he found himself hoping and praying that all his nightmares had been dreams, some simulated hell—

All he got for the sudden intake of air, however, was a heaping lungful of the stuff from the mask…

••••

He came to again, but in a different room. Sitting up, the various visions mixed together, confusing and piecemeal: his own face reflected in a visor, a boy he had murdered so many years ago, a girl with fiery red hair—

Cole looked down at the black bedsheets draped over him and the cot beneath. Glancing up, he saw an IV dripping fluids into his arm. Beyond, rows of elevated cots stretched down the narrow room, most of them full of still figures with their own IVs and breathing machines. Two doctors stood by one of the cots, obviously working on someone. Tools clattered on a tray; their heads remained bowed in concentration. One of them whispered commands to the other, calm but insistent.

Cole looked at the needle taped to his left arm. He turned and studied his right one. It appeared perfectly normal. He couldn’t keep all the nightmares straight, couldn’t sort out the real from the unreal. He hoped Riggs was part of the latter. It certainly hadn’t felt real at the time. But then, some things he knew to be dreams had felt incredibly, indelibly real…

Hoping to sort the true from the fake, Cole tapped along his right arm with the pads of his fingers. He came across tendons, but they felt strange and unyielding. He felt the same part of his other arm, just to make sure. Completely different. Except that he could sense stuff through this other hand, could feel with the pads of the fingers as if they were real. He was pretty sure that sort of thing was still science fiction.

Cole pulled the sheets back and discovered he wore the barest of coverings: a surgical gown made of some thin material. He started to swing his legs off the cot to see if he could stand, when an alien groan emanated from the body next to him. Cole watched the bulky form stir slightly beneath its black sheets, then fall still.

When he looked back to the doctors, he saw one of them looking his way. It was a Stanley, there wasn’t any doubt. He held up a gloved hand—blue latex dappled with blood—and said something to the other person, the doctor whose back was to Cole.

When she spun around, Cole recognized the hair immediately. It was mostly tucked away under the hood of the surgical gown, but bright, red trails of it hung down over the white, making the splattered blood on her gown seem pale and lifeless by comparison. The girl’s eyes met his for a brief instant—then she dashed out of the room, leaving the Stanley to continue his work alone.

Cole grabbed his pillow and sat upright. He then became distracted by his arm, as it had done what he’d asked without him having to think about it. He held it up again and flexed his fingers one at a time. The girl and another man strode into the room, both of them visible between his new digits.

It was the man with the beard. Cole tried to place his face as he crossed the room; the girl went right back to helping the Stanley.

“Where am I?” Cole asked, as the figure approached his bed.

The man ignored the question. He grabbed a stool from beside another cot and rolled it next to Cole’s before sitting down.

Cole realized who he was, the sudden recognition hitting him like a bullet. He remembered seeing the man’s face—a younger face—in pictures aboard Parsona.

“Mortimor?”