Architect (Last Resistance Book 3), page 25
I come up alongside Samuel, shuffling my feet so as not to startle him. “Good to see you up and about,” I say. “How are you feeling?”
“Like I was shot.”
I wait for a smile, some indication of a joke, but none comes. “Yeah. I can imagine. You had us all worried for a while there.” I touch his arm through his blanket, relieved when he doesn’t pull away. “Me included. I’m surprised you’re up this late—or early, as the case may be.”
His gaze slowly shifts down from the horizon to where his hands are picking at some flaking paint on the side of the ship before finally glancing over at me. “Couldn’t sleep.”
“Me neither.”
As the wind picks up Samuel catches me shiver, concern pulling his brows in low over his soft brown eyes. For a moment, the distance between us suddenly closes back to something resembling friendship. “You must be freezing.” I didn’t anticipate how frigid the sea air would be and dressed in far too thin of a shirt. “Hold on. I’ll grab another blanket.”
I massage my arms while Samuel searches for a spare blanket from a small white cabinet nearby.
Its weight is surprisingly soothing as he drapes it over my shoulders a moment later. The feeling starts to return to my hands as I pull it in tighter. “Thanks, Dad,” I tease him.
“Can’t have you catching a cold now, young lady—no, wait, this is weird,” he says, cutting himself off with an embarrassed laugh.
He’s right, but joking with him eases the knot in my stomach. These familiar rituals make up our friendship, a source of comfort and reassurance. Samuel’s always looked out for me.
Now it’s my turn to look out for him.
“Is everything all right? Gunshot aside,” I say. “Do you want to talk about what happened while you were with the higher echelon? What happened to Ximena?”
“She’s not dead,” he says quickly, like he needs to confirm this fact to himself. “As long as her group made it to the bunker, she should be fine. She’s fine. The higher echelon wouldn’t have created a bunker that would fail to protect what’s important to it.”
“And what’s important to the higher echelon besides… I don’t know, murder?” I mean for it to be a joke, something to cut the tension, but Samuel doesn’t laugh. “Hey.” I rub his arm. “Don’t worry. We’ll get her back.”
He nods. “Yeah. I know,” he says, and then quickly adds, “What about you? What’s keeping you up?”
That doesn’t have a neat answer, but the biggest part is probably my connection to the machines. Was I hallucinating back in Portland when I thought I controlled them? It’s not entirely out of the realm of possibility, given my history of psychogenic attacks. But in all my previous blackouts I never saw anything. Everything had felt so real, almost like a movie, albeit one in low definition. And I know I wasn’t imagining it when Glasgow used the signal on me. If even Glasgow knows something’s up then it can’t be purely psychological.
In the past I would have told myself it doesn’t matter either way. Just keep your shit together, Long. People died getting you this far; don’t let their deaths be in vain.
But it does matter. My health and personal well-being, they matter. I can’t keep treating myself like a machine and expect to stay human at the end of all this. I’ll break before then.
“Actually, there is something else I want to talk to you about. This is going to seem like it’s coming from out of the blue, but remember when you ran all those tests on me at McKinley? Those all came back fine, right?”
He hesitates, just a few seconds too long. “Why?”
“Wow. I really hoped you were going to say, yes, of course they came back fine, Rhon. You’re in peak physical fitness. Never better. I don’t know why I deepened my voice just there, but you get the point.” Bringing any humor to this moment feels like bringing a knife to a gunfight. I’m not coming across as calm and unconcerned. I just sound—panicked. Afraid. I think Samuel must sense it too.
“Tell me your symptoms,” he says. Gone is my childhood friend, replaced by my doctor. Well… my creator, at any rate. But that description feels so gross and possessive that I immediately banish it from my brain. Samuel has never, not once, attempted to leverage his role in my pseudo-resurrection for personal profit and, knowing him, he never will.
“I’ve been hallucinating. I think. It’s difficult to describe.”
He touches his chest briefly, like he’s feeling for a pen or pad that’s no longer there. “Can you be more specific? What’s their frequency? How long ago did you start experiencing them?”
I relate the experiences in Portland as best I can. It’s tempting to leave out the part where I seemingly commanded the machines to fire on my team, killing several of them, but for Samuel to help me he needs to know everything. And I need help. Badly.
“Okay,” Samuel says when I’ve finished. He pauses to draw in a breath. “I’m not going to lie, Rhon. That is… a lot.”
Just what you want your doctor to tell you. “It stopped for a little while after I unloaded the EMP-G at my head,” I say, “so it must have something to do with my brain. I’d like to think it was a glitch, but it happened again in the wheelhouse when Glasgow reactivated the signal over comms.”
“Have you experienced anything else besides the hallucinations?”
I try to sound casual. “Like what?”
He hesitates. “Anything. Muscle pain. Nosebleeds... Difficulty breathing.”
“Difficulty breathing?” A disbelieving smile freezes on my lips. “No. I think I would have mentioned something like that before now. Wait, is that a possibility? Should I be worried?”
“I don’t want to frighten you. But the hallucinations concern me. Are they like your nightmares?”
“I didn’t say anything about nightmares.”
Samuel’s expression is sympathetic but unyielding. “We’ve shared close quarters together for months, Rhon.” When I still don’t fess up, stupidly hoping he’ll change course, Samuel adds, “I heard you. At night. We all did.”
I blanch, unsure whether I feel more exposed or embarrassed. “Everyone has bad dreams sometimes, right? Why didn’t you say anything?”
“I trusted you’d come to me about them if they were really bothering you.”
Maybe I would have come to you if you weren’t so preoccupied with Ximena. But of course I don’t say that. It’s an incredibly shitty thing to think, let alone tell your best friend, and a lame excuse besides. It’s not even how I really feel. I like Ximena genuinely, and I’m happy Samuel’s found someone, but it feels like we’re slowly slipping out of each other’s orbit. He still hasn’t brought up their relationship to me directly, and I’m not sure how to broach it without being weird.
I snuggle deeper into the blanket, wanting to disappear. “They’re just nightmares. Is it any wonder that I’m not sleeping well with everything that’s happened? Everything that’s still happening?”
“Stress—like the kind you’re talking about—is supposed to be a short-term response to change, not a way of life. The body perceives a threat and prepares for emergency action; the threat then over, the body returns to a state of equilibrium. But that can’t happen now because the threat is ongoing, chronic. Humans were never meant to endure the constant stimulus of danger we’re experiencing now. It’s unprecedented for our species. It’s like we’re all soldiers trapped in a forever war with no end in sight. No opportunity for relief.”
My fingers tighten on the edges of the blanket, white-knuckling the fabric. “Geez, Samuel. Tell me how you really feel.”
“This isn’t a joke,” he says, not matching the forced lightness in my own voice. “We’ve all experienced trauma—but you most of all. The body keeps the score, and your mind has two score cards. All that trauma is bound to have an effect.”
Trauma.
The word feels huge and dangerous. A great lumbering beast that’s been hunting me from the moment I jerked awake inside a cloning capsule, pre-made for this fight. I feel it gaining every day. Closing in. If I stop running, even briefly, I’m afraid history will overtake me, gulping me down into a vortex of grief. The dreams are bad enough. The machines even worse. What’s next?
Waves continue to beat against the hull of the ship like the hands of sirens trying to climb aboard or the strained drumming of a failing heart.
“Well, you know,” I finally say. “What doesn’t kill you.”
Samuel shakes his head. “Trauma doesn’t build you up. It breaks you down. If you’re experiencing hallucinations, it could be related to your implant—the one that first transferred Rhona’s memories to you. Or it could simply be your own mind grappling with everything that’s happened. I can’t say for sure until I run tests, and I don’t have the equipment onboard for it.”
“You know what’s always bothered me about this whole situation? The cloning thing, I mean. Rhona—original recipe Rhona—didn’t leave me anything to go by. She could have but she didn’t. I’ve had to figure everything out on my own. It’s like she was this great explorer who expected me to follow in her footsteps without mapping out the path.”
“She must have figured it wouldn’t be necessary. That you’d have all of her memories.”
“That’s what I’ve told myself,” I say, “but I’m not sure it’s true. If you were preparing to have a clone take your place, wouldn’t you leave them something? At least a letter or a video explaining what’s happened?”
“I’m not Rhona,” Samuel says. “I can’t speak to what she—you—should have done.”
“I’m just surprised that with all the secrets and contingency plans you had together that never came up. Neither of you thought maybe she should record her thoughts and memories for posterity if nothing else?” I can hear the anger in my voice now, but it’s not until that moment when I feel it too. “So much pain could have been avoided with that small precaution.”
Samuel leans heavily against the railing, watching the dark water frothing below. I expect him to blurt out one of his usual apologies, but he doesn’t. “It’s not her fault,” he says. It’s rare for him to refer to us as different people, but in this case it’s true. “It’s mine. I convinced her I could do what she was asking. That I could replicate her mind and body and let her live again. What happened to you, Rhon… that’s on me. My hubris, thinking I could succeed where others failed.”
“Others?”
“I didn’t reinvent the wheel. A lot of the science was already there to work with, prepared by decades of trial and error. AI technology isn’t created in a vacuum and neither is cloning. The implant, for example, uses some of the same technology as the higher echelon’s wireless capabilities. Everything’s connected. A good scientist knows where and when and how to take advantage of those connections to create something new. But I should have been more careful. I should have sought out more opinions, had others check my work. I knew better.”
“Hey. I was just venting you know. I wasn’t trying to blame you,” I say. I can’t help seeking to comfort him, even though I’m annoyed that I’m only just now learning about the complicated nature of my implant. Samuel’s my friend, and it wasn’t my intention to make him feel guilty.
But he doesn’t accept my get-out-of-bad-friend-jail-free card. “You should. Rhona was struggling, and I should have considered all the possibilities. As a scientist, that’s literally my role, to anticipate every variable.”
“You had one job,” I tease, but still no smile comes to his face.
“Yeah,” he says quietly. “And what’s my job now?”
The question is so unexpected, I can only blink in response, slow to process what he means. Even then, I have to ask for clarification.
He shakes his head. “Never mind. We weren’t talking about me.”
“And now we are. So spill.”
“I’m just wondering… what I’m doing here. I can shoot and fight, sure, but I’m not a soldier, Rhon. You know that. I doubt anyone’s going to need a lesson on nucleotides or oocytes.”
“I need you here,” I say, unthinking.
His brow sinks into a frown. “Is that all I am, moral support?”
“Where is this coming from?”
“I’m tired of feeling helpless. Of not knowing how I can help or feeling like I’ll just be getting in the way if I try.”
I almost laugh. Not a kind laugh either, but cynical and strained. “And you think I don’t feel that way too? Like, all the time?”
“No,” he rushes to say. “That’s not what I’m saying. I know this hasn’t been a cake walk for you. I’m not trying to detract from what you’ve experienced or telling you that you can’t feel that way too. I’m just,” he inhales sharply, and lets it out slow, “done.”
The word drops between us like an anchor.
“I think,” he adds to soften the blow. There exists an apology on his face, even if he’s holding back the words themselves. “I mean, that’s how I’m feeling right now. Maybe it’ll change when my body heals more…”
“Done,” I repeat. “What does that mean?”
He shrugs. “I’ve made my contributions, Rhon. Imperfect as they’ve turned out to be. I don’t think there’s anything I have left to give to this mission except my life, and… I don’t want to die. I know that makes me sound like a coward.”
“It sounds like you think we’re going to lose.”
“I don’t know what’s going to happen. None of us do, though I’m pretty sure this isn’t going to end like you think.”
“Where is all of this coming from?” He hesitates, and I feel my heart sink. “You’ve felt like this for a while. Haven’t you?”
“Since Calgary,” he admits. “Part of me thinks I should have gone with Rash. To monitor her, make sure she’d be all right. I could have been useful then.”
“Why did you stay with me then?”
His smile is part grimace. “Force of habit?” I raise a skeptical eyebrow, and he relents. “Because I was afraid saying goodbye would mean forever. I’ve seen you in action. You’re incredible and you’re brave and I’m so proud to call you my best friend. But you inherited more than just genes and memories. You have a streak of selflessness that is reckless. And I feel I’ve helped contribute to it by encouraging you to be everything Rhona was and more. I know you’ve felt that pressure to not only be better, but the best.”
“And how did your staying help any of that?”
“I’ve tried to get you to slow down. Take breaks. Take care of yourself. But you won’t. And now you’re hallucinating. You’re having nightmares. What am I supposed to do with that knowledge when you won’t let me help you?”
His question is too close to the conversation I had with Camus earlier, about my inability to ask for help. I never considered how that might play out in my other relationships, the strain it would put on the people who loved me to watch me disintegrate under my own expectations. “I’m asking for your help now,” I whisper. I still need you, I want to say, but it suddenly feels selfish and maybe a little untrue. In fact, right now it feels like Samuel needs me. Like he’s been going through his own shit and I was too distracted by my own to notice.
He nods stiffly. “Right. Yeah, of course. Give me some time. I’ll…” I think he wants to say ‘do some research,’ but he doesn’t have access to any materials to do that. “I’ll think of something.”
I catch his arm as he’s leaving and pull him into an unexpected hug. I’m not even aware of my intent to do so until he’s in my arms.
“I haven’t been a very good friend lately,” I say as his arms come around me gingerly. “I didn’t know you were suffering, but I don’t want to use that as an excuse. I should have been paying attention.”
“Rhon.” He takes a shaky breath. “I’m not—”
“I know you aren’t looking for pity. But it sounds like you need help too. I want to provide it.”
He slowly untangles himself from me, and that’s when I feel the full expanse of the gulf that has grown between us. “That’s just it. You can’t be everyone’s provider. Everyone’s savior. I’m not asking you to be mine right now either. I don’t need saving, Rhon. I need...”
“What?” My voice is small.
“Time. Away from all of this.”
But what I hear is, away from you.
“You told me to find my tabula rasa, but it feels like I’m just rewriting the same story as before. Hitting all the same beats.” Before I can say more he shakes his head, stroking the back of his neck. “I’m going to go try for some more sleep. Maybe you should do the same. We can start diagnosing you tomorrow when we’re both less exhausted.”
“Okay,” I say as Samuel walks away. “Good night,” I offer lamely to his back.
“Good night,” he replies before disappearing below deck.
My blanket has slipped from my shoulders, and I tug it back into place, holding it with tight fists in front of my chest, my bare fingers red and aching from the cold.
I’m not sure how long I stay there. Long enough for the horizon to shift into the deep blues of morning and the light gray shape of clouds to darken with oncoming daylight. Others come on deck, passing briefly to another area of the boat. At one point Benji approaches me to tell me about a red train. I don’t know what he’s talking about, but it sounds urgent. He tries to make me understand some key point about the red train’s arrival before slowly drifting away from our conversation. It’s only then that I realize he’s sleepwalking. I decide to walk him back to his quarters to make sure he gets there safely and doesn’t accidentally stumble overboard.
Benji’s staying in another cabin with three other people, and I immediately feel guilty for Camus and I taking up an entire cabin, seeing how many people are pressed together in this one. I’m careful to avoid hands and feet as I help Benji into his sleeping roll on the floor.
“Thank you.”
At first I think it’s Benji who’s spoken, but then I realize it’s one of his companions. He’s in the sleeping bag beside Benji, and he sits up as Benji settles in.
