“There’s no other way.”
“But we have to do something!” he cried, wheeling around. “If we can’t save them, then maybe we can do something else. Something we can’t see yet.”
“That’s why you’re here!” Addison said, leaping to his feet. “I know you can help me. I know you can see things I can’t. Perhaps there’s a different way to do things. I’m just asking you to help me.”
Taka frowned.
“You don’t know me,” he said. “I could be a serial killer. What makes you think I’m that sort of person?”
“I read your file,” Addison replied quickly.
He hadn’t told Taka he’d been resurrected once before. He wanted to, he didn’t want to lie even a little to this man, but finding out you’d died days ago was perhaps a step too far, even for someone as open-minded as Taka. Still, it was tripping Addison up. Taka kept saying things he’d said before, last time.
“Taka, will you help me?” he asked, sitting down on the bed. “Please.”
“I need time to think,” the man replied, heading for the door. “I need time to process all this.”
“Take as long as you need.”
As the door hissed shut Addison pulled his knees up to his chest. This was already going wrong. Perhaps he should have just let Taka rest. Perhaps this had been the wrong way to go about things. He had envisioned them working as a team, but it had taken all of a few hours for them to fall out. Addison closed his eyes, horrified he had made a terrible mistake.
When Taka returned a few hours later, he had calmed down. Addison got the impression he’d met one of the levellers – Five hopefully, Four more likely – and this had impressed on him the reality of their predicament. Either way, it must have worked.
He had come back with ideas.
As Addison sat listening, Taka paced the room reeling off the changes he wanted to make to the way they did things. Before long, Addison was smiling. And not just because the suggestions made perfect sense, because they also vindicated his decision to bring Taka back. The man had only been here, only been alive, all of half a day and he was already doing more than Addison had in weeks.
“I’ll ask One,” Addison said. “I’ll go right now.”
With the good will he’d stored up from rescuing Five, Addison got One to agree with only a minimum of resistance. The storm had forced the levellers to take a begrudging day off for repairs, which gave Addison and Taka time to try out their new approach.
The first change Taka made was for the returnees to start doing things together. Addison had always gone to the returnees one by one – meeting them in the vision room, taking them to their cellsuite, repeating with the next returnee – but Taka insisted on collecting them up for a ‘group session.’ It seemed contrived at first, a little forced, and Addison was skeptical, but Taka was resolute.
The first session was held that evening in Taka’s cellsuite. It wasn’t mandatory, and not everyone came (many of that day’s returnees were too angry or withdrawn) but Addison was surprised at how many did. At first, they came in dribs and drabs, but as the night wore on more turned up looking for company and solace. They repeated the process the following evening, after trials had recommenced and in time it began to work. The first evening was slow, the second a little better, but by the third intake they were beginning to see progress.
Taka’s process was deceptively simple. He gathered anyone who wished to come, left his cellsuite door open and simply begin to talk. Talking was key. He would have each of the returnees talk about their old lives; telling simple, everyday stories of who they were and how they had lived.
And what stories.
Some returnees were born as early as the sixties, some as late as the new-twenties, but each had a tale to tell. And in the institute, those tales assumed a significance far beyond the events themselves. They spoke to a West German doctor who had been present when the Berlin Wall came down, a Chinese athlete who’d held the torch at the Beijing Olympics, a Canadian marine who’d fought during the fall of Tallinn, a Nigerian maritime engineer who’d helped create the first of the global flood defences. People talked so eloquently, so emotionally about their old lives, it broke Addison’s heart. He was disgusted with himself, appalled he’d once thought of these people as mere clones. Now, finally, he saw them for what they were: special. Gloriously flawed, irredeemably special human beings.
But most special of all was the tree lady.
“Dendrologist,” the old woman corrected. “As in, I studied wood.”
It was a week after Addison and Taka had begun their sessions, the seventh intake of returnees, and the woman’s name was Mansi Harper.
She was a scientist in her sixties with a kind face and silver hair she had twined into a braid. She had been the third or fourth returnee to arrive that evening, and although she hadn’t moved or made a big fuss, as she had told her story the room had pivoted around her, people shifting and shuffling until she was the undeniable centre of attention.
“It was a good life,” Mansi told the rapt room. “I wasn’t wealthy, but my job took me to wonderful places. I saw the Amazon, the bamboo forests of Japan, the old-growth forests in the Pacific Northwest. I discovered new species, recategorised old ones. Saved a few, lost a lot. I slept in tents, on windthrow, in ancient forests and new. Yes, a good life.”
Mansi smiled, playing with her braid.
“But it was so much more than that,” she continued. “I got to see how the world stitched together, all its interconnecting branches
