CHAPTER 25 KORI #5
Dozens of experiments have led to this moment.
Carefully chosen volunteers, some whose memories were scrambled like eggs, some who forgot their own names when they came to, but my scientists are confident now—they’ve cracked the human code.
They can move any of us, at my behest, from one body to another.
From the newfound pedestal of my elevated body, I’ll select others who are worthy, and together we’ll ascend to command all the lesser organic cogs in the settlement machine, who will finally know their betters.
The revelation will take time. The people surely can’t accept this right away, or they’ll all want to Evolve, and then who would uphold the settlement’s lower pillars? Who would I rule, if all could cheat death? No, the truth must be veiled until the appropriate moment.
Then I, and the others worthy of Evolution, will exert total control over the Daylands. And, if all goes according to plan, the Shadowlands, too.
From the Shadowlands, we can seize the source of the radiation, formerly death to us all—now the ultimate power source for new, better bodies.
The body we’ve built for me, painstakingly carved from supple and smooth altered Pagonian plate, is indistinguishable from the one I currently lug around.
If only for appearance’s sake, it will still hunger and thirst, still tire with use, still shed appropriately scarlet blood when struck.
Except it will never bend to time. It will never age. The radiation that threatens to poison
my mortal body will empower my immortal one, ever absorbed through its synthetic skin.
The new body stands defiantly across from me now, still nothing but a perfect corpse, begging for a spirit to animate its beauty.
On the other side of Evolution, the Daylands’ throne will belong to my family’s dynasty alone. When I’m done, so will the Shadowlands.
Yet my whole body trembles as I lie down on the stretcher, as I hold Ednit’s silent, professional gaze with wordless trust. I do not watch the needle go into my wrist. I stare at the ceiling until it starts to swim.
What am I, if not a million memories, interwoven into the ever-shifting tapestry of a self? Will I not still be me, when the induced sleep fog fades? Shivering all over, hands curled into fists, nails digging into my palms, I slam my eyes shut.
And open them.
And from across the room, I’m staring at my body on a stretcher, hollowed out like freshly cleaned animal bones, spirit torn free of muscle and sinew, my self reignited in a perfect Pagonian form.
“Chloe,” Ednit says, voice clipped but wavering with wonder, “can you hear me?”
“My name …” My new vocal cords creak and ache, unfamiliar with use, but even now, the sound is resonant. Glorious. “… is Chloe.” I swallow hard through my strange throat before trying again to form familiar syllables. “I can hear you. I’m here. I’m … me.”
Ednit drops his comms tablet altogether. It clatters on the floor, the screen maybe cracking, but neither of us cares. He lets out a childlike whoop, throwing his hands into the air. “Stars above, we’ve done it!”
My name is Chloe, and I am the first of the Evolved.
But not the last.
Aspect is the only thing holding me upright. My knees are like gelatin, all the fight gone out of me. Gently, Aspect holds me up against the
wall, lightly smacking my cheeks with alternating hands until I fully return to myself.
“Stars,” I gasp, sagging against the mech’s steady body. “Stars above.”
My persistent nightmare—strapped to a table, groggy but terribly aware, recognizing myself but not my body—it wasn’t a nightmare at all, was it? Just a memory, stubborn as the rest of me, that even the Daylands’ best Morpheus technician couldn’t fully remove when they—
When they … transferred me into an elevated body.
When I Evolved.
“Why didn’t they tell me?”
Aspect tightens their grip on my sinking shoulders. “Tell Kori—what?”
I blow out a deep breath, but it does nothing to steady my staggering heartbeat. “Chloe—my mother—found a way to move all of someone’s memories at once. To move their whole person. And they built better bodies, fueled by the radiation instead of destroyed by it.”
“Isn’t that—a good thing—for Kori?”
I squeeze my eyes tight to lock the tears in. The room spins wildly behind my eyelids.
A lifetime spent suffocating in an armor suit, if ever I wanted to see the sun.
An entire existence living a lie, at my mother’s knowing behest. I’ve seen her wear her own armor suit countless times, and for what?
Just to convince her citizens that she was exactly like them—even as she plotted to exert deathless, merciless power over all of them, and eventually the Shadowlands, too?
Was anything real? Anything at all? I know now that my nightmares were maybe the realest thing in my head, but what about everything else?
How long have I been living in a facsimile of a human body, my flesh-and-blood inheritance abandoned entirely?
Where is my original body—reduced to ash like a malfunctioning mech, or kept in cold storage somewhere like a sick trophy of Ednit’s experiments?
Does the real Kori stare, unseeing, from the inside of a test tube somewhere, her soul scooped clean out like guts from a fish, her limp
hand pressed, pale and lifeless, to the glass, her empty, cloudy gaze permanently wondering if I’ll ever come back to me?
I open my eyes and stare at my hands. They’re trembling.
Not my hands. Hands built in a lab, hands designed in spreadsheets and algorithms. The hands that modified Aspect.
The hands that pulled Adria’s lips to mine.
Not human. Not mine. A dark laugh slips out of me.
What would Adria say if she knew that she’d kissed not a girl but a machine?
The trembling won’t stop. It travels up my arms, into my shoulders, radiates all through my body. Not my body.
When I was little, first beginning to tinker with technology, I accidentally sliced my forearm open on a rogue wire.
There’s a scar there—faint and white, half-faded, but still there.
How many bodies ago did I earn that scar?
Was it artificially added to every new rendition, an increasingly false echo of real pain? Kori 2.0. Kori 3.0 …
If I bashed my head into the wall right now, over and over until my skull split open, would I actually bleed out?
If I screamed until the sound broke me, do I even have vocal cords to strain?
How many bodies ago did my mother press a good-night kiss to my forehead after a nightmare?
How many bodies ago did Ednit poke me in the ribs with his elbow and tell me I was growing up too fast for even the best doctor to keep up?
Are all my memories even mine—or were some strategically selected to mold me into the perfect daughter, the perfect heiress? Clever, but still obedient. Strong, but still containable. Only ever capable of dreaming as far as my mother could bear it.
And isn’t that exactly what I’ve done to Aspect, playing Dreamgiver as though I have any right? Poking around in their brain like a mere science experiment? Trying to raise them to personhood, to choice, but only insofar as they still stay close to me, loving me, needing me?
Leaning on the wall with both hands, I violently vomit on the floor. Another thing that seems like it shouldn’t be possible, but the details in every iteration of my Evolution were painstakingly applied.
Aspect lightly rubs my back, the way my mother would when I fell sick as a child, and the irony isn’t lost on me: my artificial child, parenting me instead. I’m too shaken to summon any protest. My legs quiver, muscles spasming, like they might just dissolve into liquid beneath me.
“They took … my body,” I gasp, when I can breathe again. “They relocated my whole person as part of their own sick experiment, and then, to top it all off, they lied to me about it my entire life. It doesn’t matter if this body is better. It doesn’t matter if they were going to tell me eventually.”
I spit. My mouth still tastes like sick. A hurricane brews between my ears. I kick the floor so hard, the impact runs straight up my leg and into my hip.
“All those forced medical appointments. It had nothing to do with my sun-forsaken health. They were trying, and failing, to remove my only memory of the procedure. To ensure Chloe could literally program me into exactly the daughter she wanted.”
And why birth a daughter at all? Why not build the perfect heir from scratch?
Why have an heir at all, if Chloe fully intends to live forever?
Are there backups of her artificial body?
Of mine, for that matter? Did she just need something to control so badly that snatching eternal life from the Dreamgiver’s hands wasn’t enough—she had to inflict eternity on someone else, whether or not I wanted it?
Do I exist solely to preserve the illusion of a generational heir?
Or am I just a backup, a save scum, in case something were to go wrong with her personally maintaining power?
Was she always planning to delete me, if things spiraled out of control? Hardly a daughter at all. No, a bug in the code. A flaw in the system.
My father, I’m told, died in my infancy. Was that by Chloe’s hand, too? Was my father merely a tool for organic creation, necessary so that she might have a real daughter to transfer into an Evolved body?
Did she deem him unworthy of living forever alongside us? Or was he among the earliest experimental transfers? Did he volunteer to Evolve? Did he even know what was happening? Are there records of his life and death somewhere in this room, poised to add even more weight upon my nearly broken back?