The Phoenix

Reaching into her pocket as she lay on the bed, Ella coiled her fingers around the USB stick that the man had given her. She still hadn’t looked at the contents. Some combination of fear and defiance held her back, narrowly outweighing curiosity.

He wants me to look at it, thought Ella, which is exactly why I mustn’t. Doing what he wants, letting him set the agenda. That would be handing him the upper hand on a plate.

The man clearly saw her as naïve. As malleable, a sheep to be led. Ella intended to show him just how wrong he was. But how could she show him if he disappeared on her? What if he never came back, and this stick was the only clue to the truth about her condition?

Her fingers traced the grooves in the metal, warm now from the heat of her hand and slightly clammy with sweat. Pulling the USB stick from her pocket she stood up and placed it on the desk, next to her computer. The voices hadn’t come back, yet. All was quiet, in the room and in Ella’s head. She locked the door.

If I plug it in now, no one will know that I looked at it. No one but me.

He can’t manipulate me unless I let him.

She plugged the device into her laptop and waited for something to appear.

Nothing happened.

Ella clicked on ‘file’ and searched in ‘contents’. It was blank. The stick was completely empty.

‘Bastard!’ she said aloud. Was this his idea of a joke? Anger welled up inside her. She wanted to hit something, break something, hurt something – ideally him.

But then something strange started happening to her screen. First, it went black. Then it flashed brightly back to life, Ella’s desktop popping back up with its neatly arranged files and programs seeming to oscillate and shimmer, like signs in a heat haze. Finally, to Ella’s astonishment, then horror, her applications began disappearing, popping like balloons in front of her eyes, one by one.

What the …?

At the bottom of her screen, a counter had popped up, showing the ‘used’ memory levels dropping slowly at first: 225GB … 200GB … 160GB … then very, very rapidly indeed, 8GB … 1GB … 470MB.

The stick was wiping her drive! The man wasn’t giving her information – he was stealing information! Ella yanked the device out of her USB drive, but it was too late. With a dying flicker, like an old man’s last wheezy breath, her screen faded to black.

Shaking, furious at herself for her own stupidity, Ella sat mute, staring at the nothingness in front of her. After a few seconds her computer gave a crackle, the same white noise she often heard in her head, only this was external, real. Then a face appeared. It was a man’s face, half in shadow, and it was immobile at first, a freeze-frame on an old-fashioned video. Another crackle and it – he – began to move, leaning forwards out of the shadows, gazing into the camera.

Ella gripped the side of the desk. No. It can’t be.

‘My darling Ella.’ Clearing his throat, William Praeger started to speak. ‘If you are watching this, then you already know I have left this world. I can’t be with you any more, and for that, my darling, I am so very sorry.’

‘Dad!’ Ella gasped, fighting for breath. That voice! Ella hadn’t heard it for twenty-two years. Had completely forgotten it, in fact – or so she’d thought until now, as it assailed her like an old friend, enchanting and intoxicating, conjuring up lost love like a cruel yet beautiful magic spell. Instinctively she reached out and touched the screen, as if her fingers could somehow connect with him, transport her back into the past. But of course they didn’t.

‘You will have been contacted by someone from The Group. And I am sure that will have left you confused, and maybe even frightened. Please, don’t be.’

He looked so young, early thirties at most, and was wearing a white T-shirt and a string of beads around his neck. His hair was long, like a hippie’s or a surfer’s, and he was also deeply tanned, none of which tallied with Ella’s few, snatched memories of him. But his mannerisms, his movements, his smile; all of those were the same. She watched, transfixed, hanging off his every word.

‘Your destiny, like your mother’s and mine, has always been intertwined with The Group and its work. Our work. I know it may not feel like it right now. But that destiny is also a privilege, perhaps the greatest privilege a person can have. You were born to do good, Ella. To do good in ways that other people might not understand.

‘It’s not an easy path. There is evil in this world, Ella; evil of a pitch and intensity that most people can’t imagine. Sadly, those few who can see it usually choose not to act. They put their heads in the sand. They wish it away. Unfortunately, this often includes our own government.’

Ella’s stomach lurched. She loved her father, and over his long years of absence had come to idolize him, and her mother too. Yet on this recording, William Praeger sounded like every other brainwashed cult member she’d ever seen on TV, ranting on about conspiracy theories and corrupt governments and how only ‘The Group’ understands the truth.

‘Ella, you are blessed with unique gifts. You are the product of love, but also of science. Your brain can function in ways that nobody else’s can. The Group will explain everything to you when the time is right. Right now, we don’t know exactly how far those gifts will take you, or what their potential will be. But your mother and I know that you will use them for good. We believe in you, Ella. We love you.’

Silent tears streamed down Ella’s face. She wanted to climb into the screen and hug him, and kiss him … and then yell at him and shake him till his head hurt as much as hers did. How could he do this to her? Her own father! His so-called ‘gifts’ had condemned her to an existence of daily misery! To headaches, and paranoia, and a loneliness the depths of which he couldn’t possibly understand. How dare he and her mother play God with her life, trying out their experimental genetic bullshit on their own child? Or any other innocent human being, for that matter.

‘Stay true to yourself, my darling,’ William went on. ‘Trust in The Group and try to be patient. What you don’t understand now, you will eventually, believe me.’ Her father’s eyes welled up with tears then, and Ella could see the effort he was making to contain his emotion. ‘Above all, please Ella, never forget how much your mother and I have loved you. Give your grandmother a kiss for me. Goodbye, my precious Ella Mae.’

There was another final hiss of sound, and Ella’s screen went blank a final time.

‘No.’ Ella whispered under her breath. ‘No, no, no, no, no!’ That couldn’t be it? He hadn’t told her anything about her mother. Where was she? Why wasn’t she in the video?

Desperately she plugged the stick back in, trying everything to bring the footage back up again, to rewind. But it was nowhere. Gone, wiped, just like the man said it would be.

Nooo. Ella stood up, pulling at her hair in frustration that bordered on panic. There had to be more! It was bad enough that her mom was missing from Mimi’s box of letters and cards. But why wasn’t she on this footage? Why wasn’t she here on Ella’s screen, sitting next to her father, offering her own explanations, saying her own goodbyes? Hadn’t Rachel Praeger car