“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.