Yet here it was. I could feel the softness of the material, could smell the detergent my parents always used. I was wearing my most comfortable pair of jeans, and the ratty sneakers I’d worn into the ground. I felt no wounds anywhere on my body, which I knew was impossible.
I looked around again, trying to find the source of the voice I couldn’t hear. If I squinted, I could see that what I’d thought was static was actually lots of tiny numbers and letters. It was like what I’d seen back on my world. It was the swirling storm of FrostNight, and I was at the very center.
It was calm here, and quiet, though there was an underlying uneasiness boiling beneath the surface. A rage, something that felt like what you’d see in a wounded animal. Betrayal. Pain. Confusion.
“Joaquim,” I said, my own voice sounding strange to me. I sounded younger, my voice lacking the rough edge of the growth I’d already gone through. “Joaquim, this is you, isn’t it?”
That was the name we were given, the words came to me. I felt a faint rush of relief; my gamble had paid off. I’d been rig
ht about the “he” Lord Dogknife mentioned. Joaquim’s consciousness still existed within FrostNight, which meant I might be able to reason with him. I might be able to convince him to stop this.
Slowly, so slowly I thought I was imagining it at first, I became aware of little sparks of blue light. They winked in and out like stars in a cloudy sky, twinkling and seeming to move. There were more and more of them until they came together, forming a figure I recognized. He looked like me, as so many of us did.
“It is you,” I said. “You’re alive.”
I was never alive, he said, though the little blue stars that made up his mouth didn’t move.
I took a breath. Technically, he was right. Joaquim had been a clone, grown by Binary from our blood and powered by the souls of those killed by HEX. But . . . he’d had a personality, a consciousness. He’d had desires and goals, and in the end he’d wanted to live when he’d been told it was his destiny to die.
“Yes, you were. You were your own consciousness, different from the souls used to power you. You knew your identity. You considered HEX and Binary your parents, and you felt betrayed when they used you. You were alive, and you wanted to stay that way.”
He formed into something more substantial in front of me, into the person I remembered. His hair was dark, skin pale, eyes brown. I could still see the glimmering lights at certain points on his body, like he was an image superimposed over a field of stars, a constellation given form.
“You still consider yourself a child,” he said, and this time his lips moved and the voice that issued forth was the one I remembered.
“What?”
“You exist only as your consciousness here,” he explained. “As do I. You have a body because you are used to having one, and thus you give it the form you most identify with.”
“You mean, this is how I see myself?” I asked, glancing down. I wished I had a mirror, but I was pretty sure I knew what I’d see; a young, kind of goofy-looking kid who was in way over his head.
It wasn’t really surprising to learn that was how I still saw myself. It was pretty accurate.
He nodded. I looked him over, taking him in. His image was faint, like an echo, and I could see the souls used to power him far more clearly than I saw him. I wondered if this was how he saw himself as well.
“That was you I heard, wasn’t it? When I woke up?”
He hesitated. “I was not sure if you had heard me. Your consciousness brushed mine as you were extracted from your Earth.”
“What do you mean, ‘extracted’?”
“It was the Professor’s wish that you be saved for later use.”
I remembered the last few moments on my world, with all the figures swirling around me. Some of them had come toward me, covering me like a swarm of bees, and I’d felt myself fragmenting. I’d been broken down into my most basic chemistry, and re-formed elsewhere. It was basic teleportation, really.
“He wanted FrostNight to absorb me, to use my energy,” I said. Joaquim nodded. “Did you stop it?”
“It was not possible right then. The worlds that were destroyed were broken down and started clean so my parents can enforce their will upon them. Taking you at that time was not in my protocol.”
My mind whirled. He had just told me two very important things, and I wasn’t sure which meant more. One filled me with hope that was immediately quashed; the other filled me with anger.
If my world had been restarted, that meant, in a sense, it wasn’t dead. If the planet was left alone, there was the smallest chance that maybe life would evolve as it had before. There was the smallest, tiniest chance that maybe my family would live again someday. I’d be long dead by the time that happened, but it was something, at least.
The other thing was his saying my protocol. This told me something very important.
“You’re not just within FrostNight,” I said. “You are FrostNight. You’re its consciousness.”
“Yes.”