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When Skull awoke again his mind was rainbow clear where before there had been only blacks and whites. He felt young again, but his hands still showed their age. That proved the EP hadn’t gotten him. Getting up, he went into the waste closet - what passed for a bathroom, but there was no mirror. I’ll ask Raphaela later.
Never had he felt so dependent on someone else, so out of control of his own destiny. Seemed like a good idea at the time. Kill some aliens, be a hero. Stupid and shortsighted. I always prepared thoroughly until now. Not like me. Must have been the nano. Here I am trashing the others, but the power-high got me too.
The rancor and self-loathing he was accustomed to circled at bay, unable to break through his new and better mood. For the first time since Linde died, he didn’t want to kill something for breakfast, but thinking of his dead love threw him back to the day that gutted his life.
—-
Linde was beautiful, viewed as only a young man does, perfect beyond perfection. She was everything to him, and his world had been complete that day as a thousand cubic centimeters of motorcycle screamed between their knees, her body pressed against his as they took the turns at twice the limit. They’d raced up and down the California coast, Mount Tamalpais gazing down on them, a benevolent god. She’d laughed squealing, delighted, until the blind curve at the top of the hill.
He’d slowed the big Kawasaki, but not enough to miss the bicycle that appeared out of nowhere, rider boy pedaling joy madly within his own cocoon of speed, a mirror of Skull’s. Only Skull wasn’t Skull back then, just plain Alan. But his crotch rocket had taken the kid’s leg off and the crash had thrown Linde high, a freak flight of physics ending with her chest spitted on a bent old signless post.
He’d tumbled clear into soft earth and grass, had rushed to her in time to watch the light fade from her eyes. Clamping down on his grief to save the boy, he’d ignored his fiancée’s corpse impaled there, an offering to some twisted and vengeful spirit.
His belt was a tourniquet for the boy’s severed leg and he held the kid’s shaking body in his arms by the side of the road, jacket wrapped around both of them. He despaired of help until an antique Mustang convertible piloted by a ruthlessly cheerful young Special Forces lieutenant drove up, picked them up and hauled them in to Marin General in a mad screaming rush.
The boy had lived, but Linde’s death robbed all humanity from Alan’s heart. He and Lieutenant Ezekiel Johnstone had returned with an ambulance to pull her lifeless corpse off of the rusty pole, shoving the paramedics away to place her gently on the gurney and lift it onto the truck themselves, premature pallbearers.
He’d sat stoic through his abortive court martial for negligent homicide, deadlocked by Zeke Johnstone’s testimony and eventually pleaded down to loss of a stripe and Alan’s motorcycle license. The only good thing to come out of the whole crippling circumstance was the unwavering friendship between the two men, a bond that lasted almost thirty years.
—-
For the first time since, he replayed the day in his head without descending into a cold killing rage. A black bird flew free, the death-crow carrying its carrion stench away. Skull watched it go with fearful regret, but he found himself unable to hold on to it in the face of his new sanity.
And he realized what that must mean. He could think of no other explanation.
Angrily barging through the iris into the control room he leaned down over her seated form. “I don’t know how, but I’m a God-damned Eden now.”
She put a hand up to his chest, but didn’t push. “You shouldn’t swear. It’s uncouth.” Raphaela’s tone was light but her eyes weighed him down. “I’d say ‘thank God’ if it’s true.”
He seized her hand, bringing a wince. He shoved it away then and rolled his eyes, trying to hold on to the edge of his anger and failing. “Not you too. To hell with God.” His voice held little conviction. “Do you even believe in God?”
She shrugged, massaging her fingers. “Not really. But I believe in being thankful for what I have, and in getting along with people. If it takes a plague to do that...is that so bad?”
“Yes, it’s bad. It takes away your free will. If you can’t choose evil, is it a choice?”
“Edens can choose evil. We still have cops and courts and jails. Just a lot fewer of them.”
Skull snorted skeptically. “Same difference. I didn’t want this. Now I’m useless.”
“Useless how?” she asked.
He thought for a moment, trying to frame his arguments. “Look, I’m a killer – and now I can’t kill.”
“You sure?” Her tone held no trace of sarcasm or taunting, for which he was thankful. His walls, his emotional armor so recently cracking, now seemed to have disappeared entirely.
She went on, “How do you feel about all the people you killed?”
He thought about it for a moment, then shrugged. “Not terrible. No burden of guilt. Is that what you mean?”
“Then you’re not really an Eden.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“Because I talked to them. Edens. And I am one. And when I Blended I took on the memories and experiences of a four-thousand-year-old alien that has killed countless beings starting with over a hundred of his Meme siblings, and I still feel it; I still feel every one of them. I have to lock those memories away from myself, because Meme have perfect recall. Every piece of knowledge, every experience, is physically encoded in an RNA-like molecule, like a video recording. If I brought them to mind my Eden brain would never function. But you...”
“...Aren’t affected that way!” He raised his fists overhead as if in triumph, to bump the ceiling. “Then what the hell happened?”
“There’s no way to tell for sure. This ship doesn’t have a laboratory sophisticated enough to find out.”
“What about your base?”
She shook her head. “The base is crumbling. Perhaps a quarter of the biomachines are still alive.”
Skull put his head into his hands, rubbing his eyes. “So overnight my brain gets rewired but I’m still me.” He turned over, did a one-handed stand. “I’m just as strong,” he said as he sprang back to his feet, “and fast. Maybe it was my nanos? Maybe they got into my brain?”
“I don’t know, and there’s no way to tell. More practically...here’s a test. Imagine killing someone. See how it affects you.”
“Huh. Right.” He did as she suggested, visualizing the frantic minutes when he wiped out the missile team in Geneva. “Nothing. No problem.”
“So you’re not an Eden. You just...got better. Maybe...” She bit her lip.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
He grabbed the sides of her command chair, face close to hers. “What? Come on.”
She crossed her arms beneath his looming presence as her eyes smoked. “Nothing. Don’t push me.”
He stared at her for a long moment, nose to nose. Before I’d have been angry. Now...it’s no big deal. He shrugged, backed off. “Okay. Let me know when you want to talk about it.”
Her jaw dropped. She whispered something under her breath that he didn’t catch.
He wished the nanos could heal his hearing but apparently they couldn’t do such fine work. He was still somewhat deaf from all the gunshots he’d fired in his lifetime, so he put a hand on her shoulder. “It’ll be okay,” he said, banality to fend off the dark.
She touched his hand, not looking at him, staring instead at the viewscreen. They stayed that way a long time. Neither wanted to move or ruin the moment, nor make more of it than it was.
Whatever it was.
