Total pages in book: 173
Estimated words: 169266 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 846(@200wpm)___ 677(@250wpm)___ 564(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 169266 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 846(@200wpm)___ 677(@250wpm)___ 564(@300wpm)
March 15, 2038.
The day Nate Whitaker died.
The day I was born. This version of me. This thing that walks and talks and feels and bleeds but isn’t really alive, not in any way that matters.
“I remember my whole life,” I whisper, staring at my arm, at everything that’s wrong. “I remember all of it. Even the parts I don’t want to remember. But was that me? Was that really me, or was that a dead man whose memories I inherited like—like a hand-me-down coat?”
Neither of them has an answer for that.
We stay there for a long moment, the three of us, in a sterile room on a remote island, surrounded by the wreckage of everything I thought I knew about myself.
Finally, James clears his throat.
“I should close the incision,” he says quietly. “The tissue will heal quickly, faster than human tissue would, as you know, Nate. But it needs to be sealed properly.”
I nod. I don’t have the energy to do anything else. I am both boiling with anger and grief, and yet numb to the core.
As James works, stitching my artificial flesh back together, I stare at the ceiling and try to find something solid to hold onto. Some piece of myself that still feels real.
Mia’s hand finds mine again. Her fingers intertwine with mine, warm and alive and human in a way that I’m not.
She’s human and I’m not.
I’m not anything I thought I was.
“We’ll figure this out,” she says. “One step at a time.”
I glance at her and to her credit she’s still looking me in the eyes, she’s still here beside me. She’s not on the other side of the room dry-heaving because she discovered she was fucking a robot this whole time.
“But why not tell me?” I say. “Why not just say, hey we killed you and we downloaded your consciousness and uploaded it into this new body?”
Mia squeezes my hand. “Do you really think that would have been a good idea?”
“They were ensuring the experiment was a success,” James says. “Had they told you the truth from the get-go, it wouldn’t have been. You’re probably the only person in existence that this applies to, but it can’t be an easy thing to reconcile with your own death. It would have made you unpredictable from the start. You might have been suicidal. Perhaps you never would have retained any of your humanity had you known you weren’t human. They needed to keep up the charade and never tell you the truth, that’s why they went through so much trouble to ensure your body was exactly the same as before and why it needed to behave exactly as a human body does.”
The use of the word human, over and over, and how it no longer applies to me scrapes away at something inside me. Is he right? If I had known I had died and was no longer human, would I have started to act decidedly inhuman?
“The tattoos should have been the first indicator,” I say.
“What tattoos?” Mia asks.
“I had a few tattoos,” I explain. “Got one when I was a teenager, the rest when I was in the army. After that final procedure, when I woke up, the tattoos were all gone. They’d told me that Vanguard couldn’t have tattoos, so they used lasers to remove them…”
And I just believed them. But how could I have ever believed the truth?
James finishes the stitches and steps back. “You should rest. The body—your body—will need time to recover from the trauma, even with accelerated healing.”
“I don’t want to rest.” I sit up slowly, looking at the bandage on my arm. Underneath it, wires and metal and god knows what else. “I want to make them pay.”
James and Mia exchange a look.
“You said that Project Prometheus involved trafficked people, that they were doing consciousness transfer on them to, what? Create an army? Well, we can’t let that happen. What if…what if there are people out there who had this done to them and they don’t even know it? What if there are people who do know it and are trapped in different bodies. We can’t just…we can’t just let Global get away with this. We can’t let Julia…”
“There’s a lot we don’t know yet,” James says carefully. “We need to take our time to figure out the scope of this.”
“No, we need to head back to New York and I’ll find Julia and rip her head off myself.” I push myself off the table, testing my legs, finding them steady despite everything. “We expose what Global Dynamix has been doing, and we burn the whole fucking thing to the ground.”
James lays a careful hand on my shoulder. “You aren’t going anywhere yet, Nate. Please. You can’t just go and start a war without being prepared for one. They have Paragon, who is fully synthetic, no humanity in him whatsoever, and probably calibrated to be stronger than you. They might have more than one of him by now, waiting in the wings. And they might have ways to control you that you aren’t even aware of.”