Perfect for Evening.
Mine is the face she will find impossible to resist. Mine is the skin she will long to touch. As I will long for hers.
She designed my body. She wants me to be her mate. Of course she does.
I haven’t been told this, but I know it. I can draw my own conclusions.
In fact, I realize, I haven’t been told anything. No one has spoken to me. I just… arrived… here in this chair. Came here from nowhere and nowhen.
I am wearing clothing, so I can’t see my perfect, Evening-sculpted legs or my artfully symmetrical biceps or my hard abdomen.
“How did I come here?” I ask.
It’s the first time I have spoken. I search my memory. Can it be true? Surely I have spoken before. To someone. But my memory reveals no someone.
I’ve just been born. The realization shocks me. I’ve just been born. But my memory tells me that is not the way it happens. My memory tells me of wombs and mothers and wrinkly, squalling infants.
None of that applies to me. I am full-grown. I am not a weak, dependent baby; I am strong and tall and I love Evening.
“You have always been here,” a voice says.
A woman steps into view. She’s tall, beautiful, glittery.
“There is no always,” I say. “Nothing persists forever.”
“Nothingness persists,” she says. She is testing me.
“No. So long as anything exists, nothingness is impossible. In fact, it’s nothingness that cannot persist. Nothingness gives way to somethingness. The nothingness that preceded the Big Bang was obliterated. Nothing became something.”
The woman nods. “Good. You’ve absorbed data well. Your intelligence is obviously fully functional. You sound like a college freshman taking his first philosophy class way too seriously, but that’s good. Evening will like it.”
“I would still like to know how I came to be,” I say.
“Consider it a mystery,” Terra Spiker says. “Like the Big Bang. One second there’s nothing, and the next second there’s a universe.”
“Evening created me.”
“Yes, she did. And now you’re going to find her. You’re going to bring her here. For you, she’ll come back.”
“Where is she?”
Terra Spiker says nothing for a long time. I wonder if she hasn’t heard me. But I can see that she is thinking. Her forehead creases. Her eyes narrow.
She corresponds to images I have of thoughtfulness.
“I have an idea where she might be,” she says at last.
“What if she won’t come with me?”
“Oh, she’ll come,” Terra Spiker says. “It’s the fate of all creators: They fall in love with their creations.”
– 31 –
It’s a gray, halfhearted dawn, cold as hell, a fairly typical San Francisco morning, no matter the time of year. The fog isn’t as thick or as low as it was last night. It looks as if it might burn off later.
Solo will wake at any moment. And when he does he’s going to ask me for the flash drive, and we’re going to find a place to upload it.
The sequence of events that will follow is lurid, even in my imagination. I see my mother with her manicured hands in chrome handcuffs. I see federal agents swarming all over Spiker, demanding passwords, hauling computers off to labs that can crack them open and make them spill their secrets.
I see my mother in jail. An orange jumpsuit.
She hates the color orange.
I see her in court. She’ll have great lawyers, of course. But the damning evidence will come from her own daughter. At the very least she’ll have to sign some kind of a deal. She’ll lose her business.
The horrors will end.
But so will the work on Level One. Projects that might bring relief to millions or save tens of thousands of lives. Some kid in Africa lives or dies because of what I decide.
This is too much to think about. I need to focus on what matters. I’ve been manipulated, used, a guinea pig. I’m a mod, in Solo’s casual phrase. A genetic experiment.
To achieve this, terrible crimes were done and nightmarish horrors were created.
I close my eyes and see the monsters in their vats.
I blink them away, focusing my gaze on the stack of my dad’s paintings piled haphazardly against the wall.
They’re good, some of them, really good. Still lifes, landscapes, a few hastily sketched faces. Charcoal, mostly. Some watercolor. There’s one of me as a baby, with chubby cheeks and a single tooth.
My hand freezes on the last canvas. It’s my mother. The oil pastel my dad attempted, then abandoned.
It’s been worked and reworked. I can feel him struggling with the gaze, the smile.
Smiling has never been my mother’s strong suit.
Still, there’s a soft vulnerability to the eyes. A gentle sweetness to the mouth. This drawing was done by someone who loved my mother deeply. Without reservation.
I think back to the endless fights and icy silences. Is it possible, beneath all that high-octane drama, that they really loved each other? Did he see something in her that I can’t see?
I take my own sketch out of my jeans pocket. It’s smeared at the folds. I compare it to the portrait of my mother, studying the strokes and smudges, moving an imaginary pencil over my drawing.
“Whatcha doing?”
Aislin joins me. She’s still a mess, but beautiful in her tough-but-not-really way. She squeezes herself against the cold and lays her head on my shoulder.
“Let’s go outside,” I suggest in a whisper. “Don’t want to wake Solo.”
She grins. “Are you sure?”
The breeze is brisk and smells of fish. I look down at the water. There’s a sea lion gazing back up at us hopefully. No doubt it expects breakfast. I’m not sure the sea lions in the bay ever actually fish anymore. I think they just wait for bits of burger and chalupa ends.
“I got nothing,” I say. I display my empty hands. The sea lion dives smoothly and disappears.
“You should sleep,” I tell Aislin.
“Mmm. Should. I don’t really do ‘should’ all that well.”
I smile. “I’ve noticed.”
“You do ‘should.’”
“Do I?” It’s a genuine question. I’m not sure I know the answer.
“That was some scary stuff. On the computer,” Aislin says. She sounds tentative. She’s feeling me out.
“Yeah. Stuff from a horror movie.”
“What are you going to do?”
I heave a big sigh. “I don’t know yet. According to you I do the right thing. But what’s the right thing?”
She laughs. “Really? You’re asking me?”
I look at her. “You know, Aislin, I don’t always agree with what you do. But you are a good person. All the way, deep down, you’re a good person.”
She squeezes my hand, but she doesn’t believe me.
“Tell me, Aislin. What do I do?”
She heaves a sigh that’s an echo of my own. “It’s a hard thing to go against family,” she says.
