The Last City Read online

  After several moments of staring at me, he said, “And it’s not like that anyway.” Amusement then turned the corners of his mouth.

  I was almost afraid to ask why he found me so amusing this time, but I was sure he was going to tell me anyway.

  “If Mya were to be interested in anyone,” he began, but then paused no doubt to prolong my curiosity. “She would be more interested in you, than me.”

  His sentence could have been taken many ways, especially considering the teasing way he considered me. Perhaps Mya saw people as interesting objects to be studied. But the rational side of my brain was sure that that was not where he was going. Which for Mason’s sake, was a shame. For a moment there, I had hope for him.

  “What are you working on today?” I asked, attempting to divert his attention.

  “Still analyzing the Guardian,” he said, but he was still grinning at me. I however, did not want to indulge his attempt to draw me into whatever conversation he was having with himself inside his head.

  “Have you made any progress?” I said to him, instead.

  “Actually, I have. I’m just now piecing it all together,” he answered, finally changing the subject. “So, back for another history lesson?”

  “If I may?”

  “Take a seat,” he said, and led me to the memory table.

  He placed my hand upon the table, bringing up several images, and then gently squeezed my hand before releasing me. He then rose from the table, to return to his own research, though this time he stayed close by.

  I was thankful that the scene he’d brought up, was where I’d previously left off, I couldn’t imagine the time it would have taken to find that memory again. But I wasn’t sure who to select next. I wanted to follow the development of the Spire, but I had no way of knowing which person to choose. And instead of trying to make my own decision, I silently asked the Central Unit for help. Within moments, the images before me changed. It was clear I was no longer with the historians. The person who rose above the others, was in a room very much like the one I was sitting in.

  I selected this person and she moved upward, covering me like a second skin. Her emotions were strained. She could understand the need for the Spire, but she struggled with the ethics of restoring life from memory. ‘What if they weren’t the same person?’ she argued. ‘How would we know otherwise? And if they weren’t, would we then be creating a new person?’

  An argument ensued. Another woman, across from me, not dressed as the other scientists, vehemently defended the need for the Spire. A small group stood behind her, and something about them was familiar, too familiar, and it bothered me because my field of vision was limited to the person’s memories I was visiting. But before I could get anywhere near to understanding what it was I was looking at, the woman whose memories I was witnessing, had ended her access to the conversation. It was abrupt as though cut off, and I couldn’t help but wonder if she had ended it, or if it had been censored. I brought forth another scientist, and then followed the records through to the next scientist’s memory, and then the next. Their anger and frustration at one another, boiled within me, to the point where I felt a need to return to the Arena, just to strike out at something.

  As the construction of the Spire began, the arguments, for and against the Spire had escalated around the planet, to the point where the city had become off limits to all not permanently residing there. An army guarded the city day and night. They watched over the fields, the forests, and the mountains beyond, protecting the city and its citizens.

  And as progress with the Spire continued, the arguments fell away, and one scientist after another came forward to speak of their breakthroughs with the small group who had initially defended the need for its existence. One man who had previously remained only in the background, as though watching, waiting, came forward to speak out against it. His presence though, was puzzling. He seemed to be the only person not entirely solid. I could see through him, as though he wasn’t really there. Several of the scientists called him Sater, and I wondered if he appeared the way he did because he hadn’t been inserted. I wasn’t ready to stop watching though, and so I made a mental note to ask Mason about him later.

  I scrolled through the images, moving them forward to the point where the Spire was finally erected. It became a part of the Central Unit, a storage of infinite capacity.

  The team of scientists that congratulated one another on their work, contained amongst them, a familiar face. He was somber as though he also didn’t agree with the Spire, and he discussed the Spire with the half-way-present Sater. I gasped, pausing the memory I was viewing, and moved it several inches away from my body. I looked up, squinting between the man in the image and the man who stood before me. I was sure they were one and the same.

  “Mason!” I exclaimed, and completely removed the scientist that covered me.

  Mason’s head whipped in my direction so fast, I was sure he’d hurt himself. Instead, he only stared at me, surprise and concern dropping his jaw, as he took in my expression. But before making a move toward me he glanced down at the images and realized the source of my shock.

  And he smiled.

  “This, is you?”

  “Of course. They didn’t tell you how many years I’d walked this planet?”

  “You built the Spire?”

  “I participated,” he complained, holding up his hands, as though he wanted nothing to do with its credit.

  “But,” I began, and then I distinctly remembered Grid explaining to me, that Mason was over two thousand years old. I felt a nervous compulsion to find out exactly how much over that number he was. “How old are you?” I timidly asked him.

  He sat beside me once more, then picked up one of my hands and held it between both of his. I felt that the gesture combined with the way he was studying my face, was in preparation to catch me, if I should fall off my chair.

  “I’m two thousand, seven hundred and thirty-eight.”

  I decided in that moment to never ask that question again, of anyone. The span of his life was inconceivable compared to my mere twenty-eight years. Hearing Jordan reveal his age of over five hundred years was shocking enough. The power of their Central Unit never failed to amaze me. And in that moment, I found myself hoping it was stopping my cells from aging, keeping me as young as they were. Though only time would tell.

  “So-o,” I began, trying to figure out which question to lead with. “You… helped build the Central Unit, the Spire? The city as well?”

  “I wasn’t part of creating the city, or the Central Unit they were both well before my time. Although,” he trailed off, looking down and away from me. “We did rebuild the city,” he murmured. “And developing the Spire took centuries of work. It is alive, you know. The Spire. A living organism. Growing, expanding even as we speak,” he said, with a distant smile. Then recovering, he looked back up at me. “And once we realized the new capabilities of the Central Unit, people began to volunteer for insertion.”

  “They volunteered?” I exhaled my words. “Were they insane? What if it went wrong? What if when they were brought out, they weren’t… normal?”

  “Most of the volunteers had lived a very long time, only a few were young,” and he gave me his best smirk. “But still much older than you.”

  “Were there… problems?”

  “There always are. But we made sure the volunteers knew every step of the process. They were well aware of all we’d done, all of our successes, and all of our worst failures. They knew what the worst possible outcome could be for them. But they were willing to risk it. And as with any experiment,” he said, and then groaned. “At first, we didn’t succeed,” he paused once more, and rubbed his brow with his forefingers, before resuming. “A lot of them, we were able to send back into the Spire for safe keeping until they could be regenerated again. There were a few though…”

  His eyes narrowed for a moment, and his lips strained in a grimace, and
I couldn’t help but wonder what memory was passing through him. But I didn’t inquire about it. I didn‘t want the images that continued to torture him after all of this time, to plague me as well.

  He rose from the table without another word, and turned back to his screens. I figured he needed to refocus his thoughts, and I left him to it. However, as I returned my attention to the images on the table, I realized I hadn’t asked about Sater. Mason, as far as I knew, had not been inserted, and in the memories that I’d seen so far, he seemed as solid as the others.

  Glancing back up at him, I was tempted to disturb him with my question, but after his revelation I decided it could wait. Neither Sater, nor any of the others in the memory table were going anywhere, and I refocused my attention on the memories of the scientists.

  I witnessed their failures and eventual successes with inanimate objects, plants, and small living creatures, until finally they moved onto people.

  However, as these experiments began, the scientist whose memories I was seeing, had stopped, as if frozen, and a voice in my head declared that the information was not available for review. I had to wonder if it just wasn’t available to me, or if the record was old and had become corrupted as computer records tended to go. But somehow, I doubted it was their system.

  I tried connecting to a different scientist in the room, but the same voice stopped certain memories from being viewed. I even tried the woman, the one not dressed as the other scientists, the one always there, watching their progress, urging them onward, but her memories were not available.

  When I landed upon a scientist whose memories I could access, his feelings and thoughts overtook mine once more. For the scene I was witnessing, was about the first successfully regenerated human. After numerous scans and comparisons with pre- and post-insertion data, they had proven him to be one-hundred percent recovered.

  I looked up at Mason, only to find him staring back at me, with a solemnity that spoke of regret and loss. I didn’t question. I didn’t want to think about what he may have done, seen, and felt, all of those years ago. I was having trouble keeping the images from taking some imagined shape in my own mind, without even having the actual facts. I was also having trouble controlling the stirring in my stomach, but that feeling could have been from the scientist whose memory I was hosting. I had no doubt, that the unavailable information was blocked, or perhaps deleted, for good reason. For most people, when making a breakthrough in any field, would celebrate. The scientists before me however, were only relieved. One, openly wept.

  The worst was behind them.

  And the wave of nausea growing within me, I knew, was not mine. The scientist whose memory I was experiencing, was definitely going to be sick. I moved him back down, pausing the memories for several moments to clear my eyes and my thoughts, before resuming. I also didn’t want to experience the man’s sickness, if his stomach had given way.

  However, as I studied the paused images, I noticed that Sater was no longer amongst them. And upon scanning back through the recent memories, I discovered that he seemed to have disappeared shortly after the Spire was built.

  I wasn’t sure if I should disturb Mason with my questions, particularly after he’d revisited his memories. But I decided, either way, that I needed to stop. The history that I’d just lived through, was enough emotional torture to last the rest of the week. Part of me regretted not having gone to the Arena. And that same part of me, anticipated the change of pace tomorrow would bring.

  I looked up to find Mason. I decided for both of our sakes, to ask him about Sater. For his part, I was sure he could use the distraction, and for mine, I needed to have that one little curiosity satisfied.

  But he was no longer in the room with me. Instead, I heard his voice coming from across the room. It was in fact, coming from the room he’d made me swear never to enter. And he wasn’t alone.

  Jordan’s voice responded to Mason’s questions, quietly, and with authority.

  What shocked me though, was that I hadn’t felt Jordan’s presence close to me. Nor did I hear him arrive, or even speak until that moment. It was only after the Spire memories had left me, that I felt my mind become my own again. I had been so overtaken by the thoughts and feelings of the others, that there hadn’t been room for his.

  I rose from the table, and made my way to the other side of the room. Despite my previous promise to Mason, I was determined to enter. But when I reached the doorway, I didn’t. I didn’t want to lose his trust.

  “Jordan?” I called from the entrance.

  Immediately, he appeared before me. He placed both of his hands upon my shoulders, then slid them down my arms to capture my hands. And he pulled me into the room.

  “No,” I hesitated, not sure if I should enter, and Mason’s expression mirrored my own objection.

  “Jordan, are you sure about this?” he asked.

  “Yes. She needs to know.”

  “I need to know what?”

  “That you are safe,” Jordan answered.

  The three of us stood before the tube of blue matter. It was calm, unmoving, only a solid glowing mass.

  “This is kept separate from the rest of the Spire,” Mason explained. “Access to and from this portion can be restricted as needed.”

  After several moments of staring at the tube, and waiting for Mason to explain further, I saw movement within it once more. At first, it was nothing more than a gentle swishing, but then a shadow appeared. It moved closer to us, and began to take shape.

  “This is where we keep those, whom we do not want to leave the Spire,” Mason said.

  8

  Sater

  I should have made the connection. But my brain was still trying to keep at bay, the flood of imagined human deformities, and the torturous pain they must have experienced, in those first few Spire experiments.

  Instead, I only watched the shadow thrash about and grow larger. Two points of pale white broke through the darker shades, and I realized I was looking at a person.

  The face then followed. The darkness within the whites. The cruel twist of the shadowy mouth. And I knew it was him.

  I stumbled backward, unable to breath, and tripped over my own feet. Jordan reached for me, catching me before I fell, and then pulled me to him.

  “He can’t get out,” Mason tried to reassure me.

  I knew that. But the shock of seeing that face once more, and so soon after yesterday’s beating, was something I wasn’t prepared for.

  “After what Lena did to you, I wanted you to be sure beyond a doubt, exactly where the ward was,” Jordan told me. “He can’t get out, not even for one of Lena’s simulations.”

  “But why does he look whole… inside there? I thought it was more or less, storage of memories and… data.”

  “It is,” Mason explained. “What you’re seeing is his memory of himself reforming into somewhat of a tangible image. Nothing more. It won’t last. It takes enormous effort for them to do this.”

  However, I felt it had lasted long enough already. And I waited, holding back my need to destroy the tube, to let the fluid and his memory wash upon the floor, wasting him away to nothing.

  As though he sensed my thoughts, his face, and his shadow dissipated back into the nothingness he now was. And I breathed once more.

  Jordan held me tight, his soul wrapped around me like a warm blanket, soothing me. I inhaled long, deep breaths, and filled my lungs with his scent. He calmed my nerves, and my stomach. I was safe again.

  “Thank you,” I whispered.

  “Was I right to show you?” Jordan asked, doubt filling his tone.

  “Of course, you were,” I readily answered. “I needed to know. I needed to see.”

  He pulled me from the chamber, and we followed Mason toward the opposite side of the room, and sat around the table I’d recently vacated.

  “Then maybe, there won’t be any more bad dreams,” he softly said.

  Bad d
reams… I didn’t want to think of those. They seemed to follow me around no matter how happy I thought I was. But I guessed it was just my nature to always have a nightmare or two lingering, waiting for my defenses to be lowered, before they attacked.

  Mason softly snorted, and I looked up at him to see him smiling, as he glanced from me to Jordan.

  “What?” I asked.

  But he didn’t respond. I did realize though, that he and Jordan were seated almost side by side around the table end. And Jordan, finally, was neither tense nor scowling at his friend. Perhaps they were waiting to see how long it took for me to notice.

  I squeezed Jordan’s hand, happy he had his friend back, and ignored their gentle teasing. I then scrolled back through the memories to the one that needed an answer.

  “Who is Sater? And why is he not quite there, like everyone else?”

  “Sater,” he began, drawing out the word as he studied the image on the table. He then looked up at Jordan, and stared at him before slowly responding. “Sater was a visitor from Rathe. He watched us build the Spire, while trying to talk us out of it. He watched us die for it. He then watched us enact the Guardian.”

  “Why was he watching?” I asked, hesitating. An uneasy feeling had begun to settle within me, and I turned my attention to Jordan. He was staring intently down at the image of the people on the table. Apprehension was drawing down the corners of his mouth, his eyes were narrowed and his head had twisted slightly to one side as though a memory was passing through him. The uneasiness I’d felt was coming from him, and I wanted to question him but Mason continued before I could.

  “Sater revealed himself to us,” he said, but when he didn’t say another word, I narrowed my eyes at him. I felt as though he was avoiding my questions, and wording his answers very carefully.

  “How? And where is Sater now?” I asked. I was sure he could sense my frustration and confusion.

  “Their technology is well beyond ours. We have been somewhat stagnant for some time. Not so much living, more existing, surviving. And Sater is on Rathe,” he quietly finished.