Celeste climbed, taking it carefully until she reached the top of the dome. There was the opening to the interior. She hung back from it, unsure why. The hi-buzz was wearing thin, like a song dying away. She wasn’t certain she wanted to look, to see what was there.
This’s what happens when you do too many blacks at once.
Something could be in the dome: a trigger for this trip to go bad. All she had to do was look, to set eyes on it, and things would start to collapse around her.
From her vantage point, Celeste looked around, following the shifting desert out to the mild curve of its horizon. This cluster of domes, this sign of life, was alone out here in the wilderness, utterly isolated. There was a cold, disturbing beauty in the emptiness around her.
Strange that after almost forty years as part of the Crawl’s infrastructure – physically, psychologically, and spiritually – she should feel some kinship with this state of being. Is this what happens to the soul when it is exposed to too many people, too much constant noise and activity, too much life? Does any state become preferable, as long as one is alone?
Celeste turned back to look at the opening, waiting like a mouth eager to either consume or vomit out blackness.
I have to look. There’s no way I can’t.
She crawled to the edge of the hole, leaned in, and looked down.
Celeste saw herself, bloodied and broken, side-by-side with a man she didn’t know. He was made of black glass and scattered in a hundred pieces. His fine suit torn to shreds by the impact of the fall. But where, she thought, where did we fall from? How high and how far?
…all the King’s horses and all the King’s men couldn’t put back us together again…
Celeste took a deep breath – and came back to herself.
She was in her module, in the lo-secs.
There were tears in her eyes.
“Am I going to die down here?”
Chapter Fifteen
He missed her.
The man in the moon stood at her bedside and pressed his fingers to her lips. Micro-processed neurons fired in his brain and his teeth ground against each other. He was trying to remember her name. The information wouldn’t come. The data was rotten and bare. Too long since he’d last been down here to see her in repose. Had it been a century? Two?
The cryonic air coated his skin and suit with a layer of ice crystals as he rested the tips of two fingers against her paralysed lips, letting her know that he was still alive and looking after her.
Would she even know, or care for him, when she revived? She was old but preserved whereas he was ancient and had been rebuilt time after time. There was little of the original man left that was not embedded with circuitry or layered over by enhanced internal systems. Still, love was love, as much as he understood it. He’d made a commitment to her. To survive and forge the future ahead.
His eyes wandered steadily over the frozen woman – her hair was composed of fragile, white wisps – and wondered if the word love was his to use after all the numb years alone. Commitment was more an act of loyalty than love, closer to a contract. An agreement that he meant to see through. Contracts and agreements he understood. Love he did not, which must be why it had somehow managed to work upon him. He could feel the ghost of the grief he’d been wounded by rising to the surface again. It made him shiver. He did not like being vulnerable.
The woman who was the seed of their future had done this to him. The first sign of her growing strength. She’d managed to break down the implant they’d installed by unconscious will.
“She is almost ready,” he said to the woman in the bed, “she will be coming to us soon.”
He was not feeling love for the bedbound woman, rather remembering it. Scenes from their life together played over in his brain; mem-cordings downloaded from the hard drive inside his brain. I felt love then, he thought, I made sure the memories were kept safe. Was it not the first part of myself I had upgraded? Yes, I wanted them preserved even while my body fell apart.
The first time we met. Drinks in the Ty Warner Penthouse at the Four Seasons in New York. You, so beautiful and blonde in a red dress. Me, sober and grey in a suit. Good food. Champagne. He tried to remember other moments but the pieces were too diffuse and over-written from numerous data recovery crashes.
Her family had been wealthy but they were paupers compared to what he’d been able to offer. Old money versus new money. Her parents approved because he came from the right stock, had the right standing in society – but they never liked him. As a businessman he was cold, renowned for it. There’d been an affair with a secretary. After it was over, the girl cut her wrists in his office. He found her body the next morning and had it cleared away with the rest of the rubbish. His executive assistant made the call to the girl’s family. The suicide and how he dealt with it cemented his position. It was very good for business, and bad for his relationship with his love’s family. But he cared about business and her, not them, so it didn’t matter too much.
How strange, he thought, that after all this time her parents should finally matter to him. Not because he cared but because of what he could not remember. Their names – they were lost too. Insignificant data but he wanted it all the same. He’d forgotten too much, become too empty.
She’d been a part of his life he’d been unable to quantify. Her presence defied the tenets that defined him. Love was a chemical imbalance in the brain caused by hormones and neuropeptides. War veterans returned from conflicts with damaged brain structures and associated emotional impairment knew this. He’d considered love to be the same form of damage yet the feeling persisted in him when she was around. She was a part of him. Indivisible. A future without her was not worthwhile, that’s why she was here, why he became the man in the moon.
For her, the future had to be perfect.
And still, he couldn’t remember her name.
Chapter Sixteen
Celeste heard a voice. It was young and bright with life, out of place in the machine-born gloom she’d wrapped herself in after her space-trip on blacks.
“Heia. You’re new. Just been dropped?”
Celeste turned in the direction of the question, but the voice seemed to be coming from all around.
“Who’re you?”
“You looking for a welcome to the lo-secs? Others not responding so well?”
“Not real good, no. Who are you? What’s your name?”
“I’m me. You can call me Grace.”
A holo-face resolved into clarity before Celeste.
“How’re you able to do that down here?”
“Because I’ve been down here long enough to know how,” Grace said. “Not much else to do down here but learn up. I didn’t dig staying high on nothing but sex dreams and buzz highs.”
“You’re young to be down here.”
“My folks got dropped when I was an under-five. They died. Dull and wiped out on the Flood, like the rest of the zeroes.”
Celeste said nothing. Under five, in this hell. That was grim.
“So, why’d you come looking for me?”
“I always say hi to new zeroes. Most ignore me. Think I’m a Flood glitch or something. You’re the first one to ask who I am.”
“You could be a glitch. I’ve seen you before.”
“You have? Where?”
Celeste gestured upwards.
“You’re joking me. I wasn’t born that high.”
“I’ve seen you three times now, and each time you’ve not been who I thought you were. You could be an overlay with a rogue identity trace.”