CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
LEAVE NO ONE BEHIND
Next morning Ryan said, “You know, I had the weirdest dream I ever had in my life last night.”
“Really?” She asked showing mild curiosity.
He looked at Arabella. Careful. She was so cool. Perhaps he should have killed her when he had the chance. He felt so sad, so betrayed, so played, he felt like crying, or killing her, or making love to her. He loved her so much. So he just took a deep breath and did nothing. That was always the safest course when dealing with someone like her.
He said, “the dream....”
“What was the dream like, James?”
He shuddered, “I don’t think I can talk about it.”
“It was so bad, that you can’t talk about it?”
“Yes,” he said.
She said, “Was I in it?”
He shook his head, “Were you ever!”
She smiled, “Do you know what I really like about you James? You’re an agent, a killer, but you’re smart. Even better, you learn from your actions. You also learn from the actions and mistakes of others. You learn from your mistakes, you learn from the books, you learn from life, from me. You learn, James, and that’s...priceless today.”
He shrugged, not knowing where the hell she was going with this. He allowed a playful grin, “I always figured I was a priceless kind of guy.”
“And you have a good sense of humor, usually. Though that last remark.... And one more thing, James, when presented with a problem you restrain yourself from acting stupidly. You know? You don’t do stupid things, like days ago when you had that stupid gun. What were you going to do with that gun? Shoot me? Kill me?”
“I thought about it,” he told her, taking a slow, deep breath, “I love you, you know that, but I couldn’t let you destroy everything, everybody here on Mars.”
“But you restrained yourself.”
He nodded.
“And in doing so put yourself and everything here at risk.” she said thoughtfully, waiting for his answer.
“Yes,” he replied finally. “It was stupid.”
“But you restrained yourself, James.”
He did not reply.
“Why?” she asked.
“I don’t know.”
She shook her head. “James, you damn-well know. You’re the best killer the DOC has ever produced. Our most special agent. You could never, ever restrain yourself because your programming is too powerful. Your natural order of action on Earth would preclude such individual independent behavior. Why did you restrain yourself out here on Mars?”
“I don’t know.”
“You know.”
“You were ready for me?” he asked.
She smiled, “Of course, but you did not know that.”
“You know so much why don’t you figure it out for yourself and then tell me!”
“James, you’re being a real hardhead!”
He said, “Maybe I know something that you don’t?”
She looked at him carefully, softened her gaze, said, “James, I love you. These last few days here with you have been.... But you just don’t understand what’s going on. The secret war. It’s in DOC itself. It’s deep. It’s serious now. That’s why I am here.”
“I had a bad dream last night, Arabella.”
“James, it wasn’t a dream.”
He looked over at her, chilled now to the bone. He mumbled, “It wasn’t a dream?”
“No, James.”
He shuddered, shaking now like some wirehead junkie. She came over to him and held him in her arms, stroking his forehead softly, “Baby, baby, I’ve been so rough on you. I’m so sorry. I never thought it would come to this. Simon did things to me too. After I killed him, I thought...I thought it was all over. I thought that I had won and things would be better. When I took over DOC I didn’t realize it was just the beginning of Simon’s revenge. His real power over me was inside me. I never knew that. Last night you insisted on helping, you even insisted on the brain-wipe and the reprogramming. We can still get your old self back if you want it and get rid of this new self—this new Mars-created James Ryan....”
He stopped shivering. The cold left him almost as quickly as it had entered him.
“You want to know what made me change?” he asked.
“I know what it is, now, James. It’s the long trip out here. It’s the seclusion, the loneliness, the amount of time. One year to be able to slow down, rest, think, reflect, reevaluate.”
He nodded, “It has a certain mind-opening effect.”
She held him and kissed him, and he kissed her back.
“I love you, James Ryan. The new you. The better Mars you. The new man—not the old DOC killer agent. And you’ve changed me too. At first I couldn’t believe it. I thought Simon’s vile spirit had been locked inside me forever, making me do terrible things I can not even talk about, but his programming has been breached, or corrupted. Or it somehow deteriorated. I began to realize that there was something else involved here. Something none of us had ever anticipated. It was Mars. The trip out here. And what’s written in all those old paperbacks. A change came upon me. It wrought freedom. Life. Love.
“Freedom from Earth.”
“And the Department of Control.”
He smiled at her. “That’s a very subversive statement.”
She said, “It sure damn-well is, James.”
“So what’s your game?” he asked. “Why did you come out here? What do you want?”
Arabella Rashid smiled, brushing the long hair from her eyes. She said, “It’s the secret war. The DOC. Mars. You. You didn’t start the revolution out here like you were supposed to do. You changed. You got smart. Started a resistance instead. A damn smart and strong one too. A real brotherhood. And it worked. And it screwed up the DOC’s plans for Mars.”
“The DOC?” he said. “Not you?”
“No, not me, James. Not anymore.”
He kissed her. “We can do it.”
“Fight them? It won’t be easy,” she told him.
“Freedom, liberty, life, love, the real big, important things are never easy,” he said.
“Listen, James,” she went on. “I have something here I want to show you. It’s a paperback. An old paperback. From LastCen.”
She placed the book on the table in front of him, face up. He looked at it. He thought he was back in the dream. It was that same rare Lion paperback of The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson.
“Nice book,” he said nervously, remembering it from the dream—that had not been a dream. It was incredibly old. From 1952. Way back LastCen.
She looked at him closely, said for the first time, “You don’t remember, do you, James?”
He said, “Remember what? I remember the dream, I think, but....”
“Not the dream, James! Before. Don’t you remember anything from before? I mean from before your previous personality and memory, before we did the brain-wipes and all the reprogramming. Before you came out here to Mars. You don’t remember anything else about this book, The Killer Inside Me?”
He shook his head. It was all a blank.
He said, “Actually, I never read the book.”
She said, “James, you are the book.”
“How?”
“In the book there’s a sheriff, Lou Ford, a nasty psycho, but he’s also a master of camouflage. And that’s you, baby.”
“I don’t know what you are talking about.”
She sighed. “James, you see this old Lion paperback from 1952, from LastCen? That’s your book. You purchased it. James, you purchased it when it was new. Lion Book #199. You bought it off the newsstand in that little candy store in Des Moines, Iowa, in the old USA in 1952! I know, because I was with you when you bought it. Before I ever become Arabella Rashid. In the old days of LastCen, when my name had been Kathleen Ryan. Remember, honey? I was your wife. Your child bride.”
She was twisting his brain into a pretzel now.
He didn’t remember any of it.
She explained, “We, us here now, are clones of those previous selves. The people we are today were created from DNA, memories and personalities we were given by Simon. They can do that with clones, not only replicate the structure and DNA of any subject, but include memory and personality also.”
He did not think that was possible. Then he realized it was just too freaky and screwed up not to be true. He looked at her closely and said, “That would make you, what?”
“One hundred and forty-seven years old, James.”
“And me?”
“James, you are one hundred and fifty-seven years old. You were always ten years older than I.”
“But we look...I mean, you can’t be more that thirty-five.... And I’m....”
“Don’t you understand? The DOC can do anything. The DOC has done it all. James, I came out here because I need an ally. Your so-called loyal and harmless little book scout of a brother back on Earth doesn’t really exist. It is a secret DOC department making a power play to take over control of The DOC. Nothing is ever what it seems to be. They have to be stopped! The leader, Michael, is not your brother, he is Simon’s clone, his son and successor-in-waiting. He’s Simon’s wild card. You see, Michael was never a part of Simon’s Janus Project. He was a sleeper mole deep in the DOC. He was Simon’s fallback. Simon programmed me to take his place in the event of his death. That was Simon’s revenge on me. If that didn’t work, and now it is all unraveling, then Michael was programmed to make his play for power and control from me.
Ryan didn’t know what to say. He couldn’t even put a face to his supposed brother now.
“Michael, your brother, was in fact, the manifestation of The DOC’s original intent in the flesh. You know what that is?”
“Orwell? The boot on the face of humanity?”
“Forever, James. Forever!” she said, “and he would become Big Brother in the flesh, and the very worst manifestation of all that means.”
He nodded, he had heard of all that but...still....
“That’s what they want. Not mere control anymore. They can destroy. They can create. They can program. They can reprogram. They think they are gods now!”
“And they can do it?” he asked.
“Honey, they can do anything they want if we lose. Simon had the plan, and now Michael will carry it out. I came out here concerned about a power struggle at The DOC and I was looking for answers because my own memories had been compromised because I was changed by Simon’s programming. That’s all different now. I changed. I want to fight them now. Really fight them, like I was meant to do before Simon doctored my mind. I want to beat them. I want to....”
“I know, now. You want to be forgiven for all the bad you’ve done? You want to make up for it?”
“Hell no! I can never be forgiven for the terrible things I’ve done, James. Even the terrible things you’ve done, under my orders. What we can do is try to set things right. This time we do it right and leave no one behind!”