Descended from Darkness: Vol II Read online

  "Ssst..." Sebastian's hiss brought the line to attention.

  One by one the air limousines disgorged their owners.

  Here were the Originals. Descendants of the first settlers, there was something about them that wasn't quite human. The sleek males in their long silver coats, and the females in their Basque-like skirts floated onto the tarmac. Sparks glinted from their feet as they glided onto the purple carpet spread along the length of the lobby and down the front steps of the hotel.

  Pyn made her bows, keeping her face still and void of emotion. She was a Dollygirl now. A commodity to be bought or traded as her master wished. If she performed well, her value would go up. If she were lucky, she would find an owner who would eventually give her freedom instead of sending her to the scrap heap.

  One of the females paused in front of Pyn. Her eyes were pale and heavy-lidded, the skin of her face pulled so taut there was only a bump where her nose should have been. She brushed her finger over Pyn's nose, and Pyn controlled the shiver of fear that ran down her spine as she met the woman's considering gaze.

  "You're new, hnn," the female's voice sounded flutelike. "Have you got enough amps on you, I wonder."

  Her fingers felt cold against the curve of Pyn's cheek.

  "Warm," the female said. She shuddered and her eyes opened and shut quickly. "So much passion for one so young."

  Down the line, one of the men had stopped in front of a Dollyboy named Anjo. There was no hiding the avidity and the excitement in the eyes of the Originals. Their voices rose and filled the hall with cooing and compliments.

  "What a fine fleet of girls and boys, Sebastian," one of the females crooned.

  "Lovely, lovely," a male said. "I might be tempted to add one more to my collection."

  Pyn watched from the corner of her eye as Sebastian bowed and smiled.

  "You haven't seen them in action yet," he said. "My fleet has prepared a show. After you've seen it, you'll remember why it's well worth your time and your money when you come to Sebastian Uraro."

  In the backroom, Pyn and Korian, shrugged out of their costumes. Strands of filament joined them to each other---an almost invisible line feed connected to the built-ins in their elbows and their ankles. Except for the gossamer threads floating about them, they were both naked.

  Pyn knew the dance well. The renovations created the appearance of delicate grace and hid the effort behind the movements. Tiny holes along her ribcage opened up to the jacks allowing music to flow through her system. The feeds tapped into the energy produced by the dance, enhancing emissions. She'd practiced with Korian for months, going through the steps of coupling and disengaging until the slightest touch produced a constant surge of energy issuing from their combined strength.

  Onstage, the light turned blue. Music fluted in through the walls of the auditorium. Pyn couldn't see the audience, but she knew they were there. She felt Korian's hand on her back, and she closed her eyes.

  Her nerves shivered as music fed into her system. She felt the trace of Korian's movements and allowed her body to follow in the patterns of the dance.

  There was a brief moment of static when her hands pressed against Korian's hands. Pyn opened her mouth to his kiss, felt the bloom of energy, heard the oohs and aahs from those watching as light rose up and dissolved into an illusion of birds and fire. She was on fire, fountains burst into sparks of flame around them.

  A curse on your soul.

  She brushed away the echo of her mother's voice.

  This is for Sien, she reminded herself. Her body opened up, flowered under Korian's touch, their limbs entwined, coupled and separated, and the air reverberated with rainbows of color and light.

  She heard gasps and shrieks as the assembled audience fed on the rays of ecstasy induced by their coupling.

  The pale-eyed female bought them.

  "Sandusy's a good owner," Sebastian said. "She's always taken good care of her property, so you two should be in good hands."

  Pyn was in no doubt about the profit to Sebastian himself. Sandusy had offered not only a large amount of credits, but she'd also offered Sebastian a large holding on the edge of the Siargao region.

  "Better me than anyone else," Sandusy said after negotiations were done. "I would've taken only you, but Sebastian insisted I take the boy as well."

  Pyn didn't know what to say to that. She cast a glance at Korian. He was staring straight ahead, his face void of emotion.

  The flat line that was Sandusy's lips twitched slightly.

  "I take care of what is mine," she said.

  For a brief moment, Pyn felt a twinge of rebellion. If not for Sienna, she'd still be free. She suppressed the thought. She'd made her choice. With the signing of the contract, her future was sealed and Sienna's ensured.

  Fifty-nine beads. Pyn kissed her prayer necklace. Each bead on the necklace represented performances and alterations she'd undergone since Sandusy had bought her. She'd stopped counting years in service when the number of renovations she'd undergone exceeded them. With Sienna still in process, Pyn wasn't sure if there was such a thing as redemption. At least, she wasn't sure if there was redemption as far as her soul was concerned.

  Still, she kept on saying the prayers.

  She kept on praying because no matter if she no longer believed in miracles and all the religious crap preached on the streets, she had to hold onto the hope that everything she'd gone through hadn't been in vain.

  She kissed the statue of the Godson and dropped the beads into her pocket.

  Sandusy was giving a feast to celebrate her retirement from public office, and her acquisitions were expected to be at their best.

  She'd sent Pyn for renovations.

  "You don't have to, if you think it's too much," Sandusy had said.

  Pyn had wanted to say no, but her pride wouldn't let her.

  "If Korian can do it, so can I," she said.

  "You don't have to prove yourself to me," Sandusy said.

  "I'm not doing it for you," Pyn said.

  "If I set you free, would you stay with me?" Sandusy asked.

  Pyn didn't know what to say to that. A Dollygirl staying with an Original after ownership had ended was something she'd never heard of.

  "I'll take the alteration," was all she said. She pretended not to hear Sandusy's sigh. Her owner favored her, she knew that, but she didn't understand what else Sandusy expected of her.

  She'd taken the alteration, ignoring the signs that her body was no longer as young or as quick to heal as it used to be.

  "Maybe you shouldn't perform," Sandusy said.

  "I can perform," Pyn insisted. "I won't give you an excuse to send me to the scrap heap."

  She regretted the words when she saw the way Sandusy's eyes refracted.

  "I'm sorry," she said.

  But Sandusy was already turning away.

  "I'll be waiting in the practice room," was all her owner said.

  Pyn's elbows and ankles hummed and sent waves of pain through her body. She hugged herself and waited for the spasms to pass. The intensity of her body's reaction told her what she'd refused to admit. The constant upgrades were taking their toll.

  She straightened up, holding onto the wall for support.

  Korian would be waiting for her. They'd been practicing with the newest feeds all week. Mangled music sent rivers of pain tumbling through Pyn's veins. The new routines were torture, and Sandusy wasn't satisfied with anything less than perfection. Micro-sized boosters upped the production of their energy. Every move sent fresh burn through Pyn's body, but the waves of color---the release of evoked emotion was stronger than any they'd ever produced before.

  Pyn stopped, her breath coming in short gasps. Sandusy might just decide to gift them with freedom. She could feel it in her bones. She hugged herself and whispered a prayer to the Godson.

  Through the open door, she could see the sun shining on the smooth green curve of the front lawn. An air limousine swooped down and hovered above th
e gleaming driveway. Sandusy's valets rushed out to welcome the new arrivals.

  Whoever they are, they're early, Pyn thought.

  Then her thoughts ground to a stop. Sienna, her eyes gleaming with excitement, hair shining black under the light of the reflectors, descended from the limousine. Beside her, a woman wearing the badge of a state keeper twisted her hands in nervousness.

  "Sienna," Pyn whispered.

  She watched as Sienna moved on past her.

  "We shouldn't be here," the woman said.

  "I want to see the Dollygirls," Sienna replied.

  "We'll have to wait for Sandusy," the woman said. "That's what the letter said. Wait for Sandusy."

  Sienna's laughter tinkled, as she skipped alongside the keeper. Pyn fought the urge to reach out her hand and touch her sister.

  "Here, that won't do at all," the woman said. "Sandusy won't be pleased."

  "Sebastian said something about a surprise," Sienna said.

  "Well, Sebastian isn't here yet."

  Pyn's breath came in shallow gasps. She watched her sister walk carelessly over the smooth floor.

  "Sienna," she whispered.

  Tears pooled at the edges of her eyes and trickled down her cheeks, as she stared at her sister. Sienna's skin was smooth and unblemished, her limbs were strong and firm, and she moved with a supple grace that told Pyn her younger sister had never gone through renovations.

  "Sienna," her voice rose slightly.

  She waited expectantly as Sienna turned.

  "It's me," Pyn whispered.

  She watched as Sienna came toward her. Saw the look of wonder cross her younger sister's face.

  "You're a Dollygirl," Sienna said.

  Pyn smiled and nodded, waiting as Sienna reached out her hands. Her fingers felt cool as they traced the rigid landscape of Pyn's forehead. Pyn winced as Sienna's fingers probed the connectors recently installed along the line of her brow. But she stood still, allowing her sister to explore the ridges of her cheeks where new software nestled under sculpted tissue.

  "Do you remember?" Pyn heard the tremble in her voice. "Do you remember Cordoba's End? Sonatina's Point? Ecastasy Street? Sisters?"

  "Sisters?" Pyn saw the confusion in Sienna's gaze. "I don't understand."

  "Sisters," Pyn insisted. "Don't you remember? You said you'd wear a white dress with violets..."

  Sienna shook her head.

  "I don't have a sister," she said.

  "It's the rejuvenation," Pyn said quickly. "They said this would happen. But you'll remember. I'll help you." But Sienna was backing away, shaking her head in denial.

  "Sien."

  Desperate to keep her sister from leaving, Pyn forgot about the surgeon's admonitions to be careful. She stepped forward, felt the full weight of her body come down on her left foot, heard the crack as new bone gave way under unexpected pressure. As if from far away, she heard the skittering of beads as the prayer necklace fell out of her pocket and hit the hard stone floor.

  Wondrous Days

  Genevieve Valentine

  We should make a map," she says. "Just to keep track of things."

  I keep my mouth shut, try not to look at her.

  We live in a sooty half-dawn that never wakes. Nights are so dark it's better not to think about it. (The nights had only just begun to get dark at all; for a while it was just as bright as the day, from all the fires eating through the dry forest, and we walked until we dropped just to keep ahead of the smoke.)

  Sleeping is the worst. You don't know if you've been asleep for ten hours or ten minutes. I'm never rested---the darkness and the smoke have swallowed everything---and there's nothing to go on, and whenever I open my eyes everything's still pointless, and she's already awake.

  "It's morning," she says, or, "It's afternoon," like she knows any better than I do what time it is, and she's looking away from me and out at the wreckage.

  Maybe that's why she wanted to make a map; just to pretend that there was something better coming, that we'd meet someone who would need it.

  The real map of the new world is tacked to a wall in the Darkroad Project wing of the Ames Research Center. It's already yellowing; NASA's acid-free paper can't hold up against the atmosphere.

  The map is stuck with little green pins where explosions are most likely to affect the tectonic plates. There are circles drawn in black and red, in orange and purple and green. The map key names them: twenty years, ten years, five years, one. The black circles are widest, and marked Xibalba.

  The papers posted around it are from algorithms that have been run on the Pleiades supercomputer. They're printed thickly with core temperatures, trade winds, a Refractive Index to gauge the best chances to preserve the ice caps. There's a list of temperate vegetation six pages long, Latin names and English names side by side.

  There are smaller maps, anonymous close-ups of deserts and forests and plains and islands. Beneath each map there are pages of notes on maximum water levels, likely periods of drought, natural shelters; each one has a tacked-up list of flora and fauna marked with Xs, or E for Edible.

  It's a drastic future, carefully planned, waiting patiently for its day.

  She looked like she had been ready for something. She had hiking boots that laced up her calves, and a backpack big enough to live from. My canvas sneakers lasted less than a week; I had to wrap them with drawstrings from my jacket until we found a corpse with my shoe size.

  She never said what she had been doing in the forest. She hardly ever talked. I talked; when we met I talked about what had happened, about where my girlfriend was. ("Dead," she said.) I talked about where we should go to look for others.

  There were none. Just corpses with my shoe size.

  After we'd walked where I wanted for ten days, she said, "I think we should try another way. "It was the longest speech she'd made, and the way she said it sounded like the whole thing was my fault.

  "Like you know where to go," I said, but we headed another way.

  That was when she started the map; like wherever I'd been going didn't matter.

  She kept a book in her cargo pocket where she made hash marks for the dead. She had a page for women, a page for men. Sometimes there was no telling from the parts who it had been to start with; those hash marks had a page of their own.

  "You should give up," I said.

  She knelt, turned the body over.

  (Eventually you stop throwing up when you see corpses; your body holds onto whatever nutrients you can get.)

  We found a deer. Most of the meat had turned, but maggots had kept part of the loin clean enough to eat.

  She cut off what she could with the knife in her pocket, and she found a cave deep enough to block the wind, and after she had twisted grass so it would burn, I used my lighter to start the fire.

  Weird what you're good for, when circumstances change.

  In the morning she's sitting at the mouth of the cave, looking out at the boggy forest. She doesn't like to be near me; when we've got tree cover she sleeps out of reach; when we're in caves she sleeps as far away as the walls allow.

  (Cave living. Shit. Sometimes you wish you had died.)

  After a second I realize she's looking at the sky; maybe she could navigate just by the stars, back when there had been stars.

  Something turns over in my stomach. Hunger, maybe.

  Point Zero, an activist group of historians and academics, had held a rally in New York to protest The Darkroad Project's access to Pleiades. They carried signs that read 13 TO ZERO; SCIENCE NOT SUPERSTITION; THE MAYANS WOULD BE ASHAMED.

  "The Mayan Solstice is just resetting a clock!" one guy shouted into the cameras. "We're wasting taxpayer money on an astronomy lab that only generates scare tactics! Mindless superstition like this is catching!"

  Point Zero vaulted to Public Enemy Number One. The Pope declared the intervening year a gift, and bid his congregation, "Use these wondrous days to make peace before the End Times, when Jesus calls His faithful ch
ildren to Heaven." Superstition about 2012 spread faster than the media could track it, and Point Zero's rationalism looked like a losing fighter until twelve of them took over the NSA's Sequoia computer.

  (They'd had an insider on the development team, which the NSA never admitted.)

  They hacked C-SPAN, announced the takeover, activated the nuclear grid, and held the Svalbard Seed Vault hostage.

  "We have no wish to harm Norway or any other country," they broadcasted, "but we are willing to take drastic measures to force humanity to confront its own future and to work for the planet's survival."

  Norway provided boats for evacuees. (The Wildlife Federation sent in their own boat teams to rescue the reindeer, bears, and foxes that had been forgotten in the crisis.)

  The Point Zero faction also demanded the dismantling of the Darkroad Project at the Ames Research Center, and the public acknowledgement of any quakeproof cities being constructed.

  The manifesto they disseminated talked about "the fetishization of disaster as religious experience" and "the inevitable emergence of suspicion as commodity."

  It named the Darkroad Project "an underreporting think tank whose members should be using their intelligence to educate the world about astronomic research, rather than burying their disaster-scenario findings under government hush money. "

  "Unless this 2012 Doomsday theory is debunked publicly," the manifesto concluded, "we will protest the waste of international resources in any way necessary to make it clear that we are serious about our goal, and ensure that we eliminate the rising and dangerous power of mass delusion in the hands of the under-informed."

  The manifesto was roundly decried as sensationalist.

  Construction on several subterranean cities came quietly to a halt.

  (No one could tell what Point Zero might already know; no one knew what Sequoia could do in the hands of the right people.)

  I was driving across the mountain when it hit.