The Sentient Page 4

  “So, my dear,” he said. “The Pandora project…the creation of the first human clone! Quite a starting assignment. And quite a name, by the way. Pandora. Valerie Singh almost begs for the negative press.”

  He smiled encouragingly but Amira’s eyes were distant, her thin brows fixed in somber lines across her forehead.

  “Do you think they’re just bringing me on as a prop?” she asked, finally articulating the question that plagued her all afternoon. “Using me to deter accusations that they’re exploiting girls from the compounds?”

  Dr. Mercer considered the question, leaning back in thoughtful repose in his oversized rocking chair. Amira always admired that about him, that he never treated any question of hers as insignificant.

  “No, I don’t think so,” he responded. “That would be a foolish move, and the Pandora team are not fools. They’ve made mistakes, no doubt about it, but doing something that transparent would be laughed off by the people of Westport and they know it. No, Amira, I’m sure you have been given this assignment because you possess skills and talents they need. Don’t doubt yourself.”

  “Should I be nervous at all then about this assignment?”

  “Ah.” Dr. Mercer smiled. “A lot to unravel with that question. I would say ‘extremely cautious’ would be a more appropriate response. This is a high-profile project full of high-profile characters, with considerable stakes. And the cloning effort is the most ambitious project that the Pandora group is attempting – that I know of, anyway. If it succeeds, it will be a watershed moment for humanity, one that will change how we have families and more deeply, how we perceive ourselves as navigators of our own evolutionary story. If it fails, however, as I’m sure your former home desperately hopes it will, the ramifications will be felt in Aldwych for years to come, and likely become a black eye on your resume.”

  “And I would take a good share of the blame if the subject dies,” Amira said.

  Dr. Mercer nodded thoughtfully. “You need to have your own interests at heart, my dear. No one else will protect you on Pandora, you can be certain of that. It just baffles me that the Academy is so eager to put young people in such a precarious position.”

  “Is that why you left?”

  Dr. Mercer sighed and gestured toward one of the photographs, in which he stood smiling in front of the Avicenna building.

  “I never approved of the Academy’s pact with Aldwych,” he said. “The district is too powerful and its reach extends into space, where the laws become murky and enforcement nearly impossible. Look at the Carthage, exploiting prisoners for test subjects. To offer our students to them was dangerous; I said it then and I see how true it is now. But the alliance with Aldwych had deeper problems.”

  “Science for profit.”

  “Well, that’s nothing new,” Dr. Mercer said dismissively.

  Amira picked up a photograph on the end table. A small group of scientists posed in front of a statue in Aldwych Square. Amira identified several famous faces from Stream newscasts but didn’t recognize others, despite the impressive array of badges on their lab coats. The caption below read, ‘Associates and Friends of Sentient Cosmology’.

  “You’re not in this one, Dr. Mercer.”

  For the first time during her visit, Dr. Mercer’s genial air faltered and he fidgeted in his chair. He eyed the photograph in Amira’s hand.

  “No, I’m not, thankfully,” he said at last. “I avoided that rabbit hole, although there are many in that picture who I respect greatly. I keep it as a reminder of what happens when scientific inquiry becomes polluted by wishful thinking.”

  “Some famous faces there,” Amira said. “Dr. Alvarez from Galileo, Felicity Knox from McKenna-Okoye’s space division. Competitors, right? Why are they all posing together? Is this some kind of cross-Aldwych organization?”

  “Yes, and you know them,” he said. “They started recruiting at the Academy right before I left, despite many objections from faculty. They call themselves the Cosmics.”

  Amira knew of the Cosmics. They had become a regular sight on the campus’s quadrangle in recent months, sweating in sleek, tailored pantsuits as they distributed pamphlets, paperbacks and free Eye downloads to passing students. A quick skim of their literature revealed it to be a New Age religion of some kind.

  “Yes, the Cosmics,” Dr. Mercer said under his breath. “It started off well enough, you know, as many things do. An astrotheorist developed a theory to tie together what we know about the universe – the Quantum world, dark energy, dark matter, predictive consciousness – with a spiritual understanding of our existence. Many of the founders were ex-compound, if you didn’t know.”

  “No!” Amira said, horrified.

  “There are some core tenets they share,” Dr. Mercer said, pouring Amira another cup of iced tea. “The Conscious Plane, the level of existence where all things are bound together and the individual soul is subsumed into the whole. They also subscribe to multiverses, which science has all but conclusively proven exist in some form. But unlike your former community, they don’t project morality to these different realities. There is no heaven or hell concept. What was it they taught you? If you eat your peas and have many children under holy matrimony, you go to the Nearhaven, whereas if you disobey the Elders, you go to—”

  “The Neverhaven,” Amira finished for him. “The shadeless and waveless world, in which the Cataclysm never ended, and the ground burns beneath your feet.” She flushed. Even years later, she could recite the Elders’ sermons to the word.

  “Exactly. So the Cosmics are more benign than your Elders in that sense. But it’s dangerous to try to fill in the gaps of our knowledge with anything other than scientific proof. That is what religion has tried to do for centuries, and these Cosmics are no different, even if they use scientific jargon to make it more palatable. They’re everywhere in Aldwych now, and I fear they will try to remake the District in their image.”

  “Are they involved in Pandora’s cloning effort at all, do you think?”

  Dr. Mercer laughed.

  “Henry will pitch me off a high cliff before Valerie Singh has anything to do with the Cosmics,” he chuckled. “But that doesn’t mean they’re not involved in some way on Pandora, and it certainly doesn’t mean they’re not interested. Watch yourself, Amira. Watch yourself, and remember what drives you and what made you one of my best, most dedicated students.”

  The knot in Amira’s stomach tightened at Dr. Mercer’s warning, so starkly delivered. Her senses heightened, just slightly, as they had always done in the compound before an impending punishment – the birds chirped louder, the sun grew a little brighter through the window. The flickers of doubt that followed her from the Academy grew stronger. She was a neuroscientist, not a politician. Was she out of her depth in the political jungles of Aldwych?

  They walked together along the gravel path leading to the main road down the mountain, Henry shuffling behind them. Amira stopped abruptly, facing Dr. Mercer.

  “I’ll come visit again soon,” she began. “I should have come a long time ago, before all of this, but I’ve been so busy—”

  Dr. Mercer raised his hand.

  “Don’t worry about me here. Life is for the young. Go forth and live! And if Pandora lives up to its reputation, I suspect I’ll be hearing from you again before too long.”

  On that ominous note, he turned back, leaving Amira to continue down the path to the trains, alone.

  * * *

  “Are you sure you don’t want to go out tonight? There are some great bars down by Sullivan’s Wharf.”

  Amira studied D’Arcy’s face, attempting to discern how badly her friend wanted to spend the night drinking before their first day in Aldwych. An enormous plate of Ethiopian wat lay between them, nearly stripped of injera bread and surprisingly flavorful synthetic lamb, along with a half-empty bottle of hybrid wine. The rich foo
d left Amira sedated, dulling the anxiety of her conversation with Dr. Mercer, and the coming day ahead. She hesitated.

  “Don’t you girls have an early morning tomorrow?” D’Arcy’s father called from the living room. “You don’t want to walk into those shiny buildings with hangovers.”

  “I’d prefer to stay here,” Amira admitted, silently thanking Mr. Pham.

  “Of course,” D’Arcy said kindly, reaching for the wine bottle, as if to formally seal the decision to stay in. Although she shared a room with Julian in the Canary House, D’Arcy visited her father for dinner at least once a week. Amira accompanied her more often than Julian did, relishing the opportunity to cook and escape the Riverfront’s exhaustive pace.

  “Mind if we finish off the wine, Dad?” D’Arcy called out, refilling Amira’s glass with a wink.

  “I suppose you girls have earned it.” A soft note of pride crept into Mr. Pham’s gruff voice. “Although I’ll never understand exactly what it is you do, no matter how many times D’Arcy explains it to me.”

  A stevedore, D’Arcy’s father worked in Sullivan’s Wharf, loading cargo destined for the space stations. On occasion, he accompanied the cargo to the Pacific Parallel itself, the offshore platform where one of Earth’s two space elevators hurtled supplies and souls into space. Though the Stream provided countless images of the Parallel’s loading docks, anchored in choppy Pacific waters, it fascinated Amira to imagine Mr. Pham nonchalantly pushing crates, syntharette in mouth, under one of the greatest structures ever built.

  “Saving the world,” D’Arcy said, her smile faltering as she turned back to Amira. She gestured upstairs.

  D’Arcy’s childhood bedroom was a living exhibit to her twenty-five years on Earth, a vortex in which no object, once it entered the room, seemed to escape. There were stuffed animals and long-deactivated play robots from her childhood, posters of Vietnamese pop idols on her walls, books on physics and programming that spanned her school years. Every time Amira entered, she discovered some new facet of D’Arcy, a relic of an old hobby or fascination. Patterns drawn on the walls that would eventually become glowing, intricate tattoos. D’Arcy sat on the bed, the bedspread covered with anime characters, and Amira could picture her friend as a girl of seven, building her first computer from the wharf junkyard’s scraps.

  The room rattled as a train passed overhead, sending the entire building into seismic fits and drowning out the distant, drunken shouts of stevedores returning from night shifts.

  “I still can’t believe you grew up here,” Amira said, holding her glass of wine high as she joined D’Arcy on the bed. “It’s like a completely different city by the water.”

  “It’s as much a part of Westport as the Riverfront or Aldwych,” D’Arcy said. “One of the few parts of the city that didn’t get bombed out during the Cataclysm, so it was never rebuilt. It’ll always be home. It made me realize what mattered to me. I saw the conditions that Mom and Dad worked in at the Parallel and knew I wanted a different life.”

  Outside the barred window, the moonlight caught the ripples in the Pacific waters. The indigo glow reminded Amira of the compound at night. Though she dreamed about the desert from time to time, she never looked back on it as home.

  “Amira, you’ve had this dark look all night,” D’Arcy said. Impatience tinged her normally warm voice. “Try to see the bright side. Pandora is pretty elite for a couple of students like you and me. You’re on the most problematic part of Pandora, it’s true, but you get to work with Valerie Singh and Alistair Parrish. It’s not the space stations, but Pandora’s still a big deal. It’s where all of the great minds across Aldwych get together, break through their corporate barriers, and push the limits of science.”

  “Easy for you to say,” Amira said. “You get to write code to make sure cat articles on the Stream work in deep space. Everyone loves the Stream. I’m stuck treating a dying girl on a project everyone hates, when I could be doing experiments on one of the stations.”

  “Why are you so bent on getting into space anyway?” D’Arcy asked. “I’ve never understood that.”

  Like an involuntary reflex, Amira’s eyes turned back up at the night sky.

  “Space is where the boundaries are really pushed,” she said. “You know the psychology of space travel is a major area of study, especially with the Titan voyage. Learning how to keep people sane on long space missions, surrounded by nothing and hundreds of millions of miles away from home – I could make my mark there.”

  A textbook answer, but a truthful one. As much as D’Arcy may have wanted to, she would never understand the way Amira’s heart swelled, as a child hiding on her rooftop, when something man-made passed across the night sky. She couldn’t understand the hope the stations contained within their insulated, carbon walls, the potential for a better world than the restrictive life in Children of the New Covenant.

  Nor could she understand that for Amira, the more physical distance she put between herself and the place of her childhood, the safer she felt. She wrapped her arms around her middle.

  Realizing that her gloom was beginning to affect D’Arcy on a night of celebration, Amira changed the subject. An hour later, both sat cross-legged on the floor, laughing hysterically as D’Arcy’s holo-camera displayed footage from last year’s Climate Day celebrations at the Academy. The festival had devolved into pandemonium after an enterprising student botanist chose the day to unveil a new, fast-growing liana vine that responded to artificial light. Within hours, it had taken over the main auditorium and the neighboring swimming pool, emitting the smell of rotten eggs as it reached the chlorinated water. Students fled in a panic, as though the vines were a deadly nerve agent.

  Amira drained her glass and stretched across the floor, wiping tears of laughter from her eyes. D’Arcy turned off the holo-cam, her eyelids drooping.

  “It’s kind of funny,” Amira said.

  “What is?”

  “That man I met from the project, Barlow? He knew I was from a compound when he saw my hand. He asked me which ‘community’ I came from. I’ve never heard anyone from the city call them communities before. Only people from the compounds say that.”

  D’Arcy frowned slightly. “Well, he’s part of the project and they’ve been recruiting girls from the compounds, right? Maybe he picked up the language from them.”

  “That’s possible.” Amira drummed her fingers lightly, Barlow’s strange, appraising expression fresh in her mind.

  D’Arcy pulled herself onto the bed. Her breathing grew heavy with sleep after several minutes. Amira joined her on the bed and succumbed to exhaustion shortly after, her sleep punctuated by dreams of the desert, the choking vines along the Canary House, and the relentless scream of oncoming trains.

  Chapter Three

  Subject #42

  It was still dark when Amira woke. She fumbled in the pitch black for her overnight bag, stepping on a small robotic toy that squeaked in protest. Cursing softly, she settled on black pants and a purple hoodie that she fastened tightly around her head – it had turned frigid overnight in the heatless room. Over her clothes, she threw on the lab coat issued by the Academy the day before – dark blue, the color denoting an apprentice researcher within the hierarchy-conscious Aldwych. She nudged D’Arcy awake, who grumbled in protest but pulled herself out of bed.

  It was snowing steadily outside, blanketing the ground in grimy powder that crunched softly as they took long, hurried strides across the street. The block was silent, save for a few barking dogs in the distance. Through the fog and over the rusted buildings of the Wharf, Amira could make out the distant towers of Aldwych, always dotted with lights and visible throughout the city.

  The Red line was relatively quiet when they boarded, but gained new passengers exponentially as the train neared downtown Westport. Initially, they were mostly commuters. Stony-faced businessmen in expensive suits, teenagers with n
eon hair sheltered under their oversized headphones, and grim technicians in white lab coats; all jostled for space and avoided eye contact as best they could in the confines of the narrow tin shuttle. Tourists joined the throng from the downtown stops, their left pupils flashing brightly with each snap of their Eye cameras. Affectionately called the Third Eye, the models no longer required voice commands, and operated entirely on the thoughts of their users. A device that fit onto the eye like a contact lens, many now came with custom colors and patterns, leaving most people Amira encountered with mismatched eyes, one pupil shining with the Eye’s distinctive glow.

  A man next to Amira blinked twice and a small globe materialized in front of his eyeball, a hologram that flashed temperatures in different cities as it spun. Though impressed, Amira shuddered when the small globe retreated back into his eye, dissolving like water when it touched his pupil. Likely nursing a headache, D’Arcy still couldn’t resist laughing from her corner seat. Amira’s fear and distrust of Third Eyes had become a running joke between them. Beyond her squeamishness, Amira couldn’t fathom how people crossed streets and carried on conversations with a screen perpetually covering half of their vision.

  Turning away, Amira stared ahead as the train moved above ground and over the streets, where the glass skyscrapers of downtown Westport reached dizzying heights, higher even than the mountains that framed the city.

  She nervously gripped the safety rail inside the train car. Her Academy briefing papers offered few clues as to what she would encounter today. Beyond the media’s rampant, varied speculation on Pandora, the state of the project and its players remained a mystery. The two famous scientists behind the cloning effort, Valerie Singh and Alistair Parrish, the greatest living geneticists by most accounts, wielded unmatched fame and influence in North America. Though never officially married, they had a child together. Most interestingly for Amira, Parrish owned the Carthage station, where he divided his time between experiments in the Soma building.