19
THE MEASURE OF A MAN
“DARWIN? DARWIN. COME on, wake up.”
He felt a light slap on his cheek, followed by another one. He opened his eyes to the bright cold flicker of fluorescent tubes.
“He’s coming around. You, bring me the first aid kit.” The blurry shape of a blue anti-static smock swung into his view. “I’ll bandage the cut on his head.”
He blinked slowly, willing the noise to stop, just for a second. He felt the Threads respond, though they were slow and sluggish. He stopped them before they listened to his wishes.
Someone slapped him again. This one stung and he jerked away. “Come on, Darwin. Stay awake. Stay focused.”
“Where . . . Dad?”
“Your father’s pretty busy. He’ll come and see you when things are—”
“Dad!” He pushed off the back wall, ignoring the throbbing in his head. He reached behind him, yanking on the window frame, and got to his feet. Shattered glass shook from his clothing as he rose. The woman beside him tucked herself under his shoulder and pulled his hand off the broken glass still stuck in the frame, sinking a little as his weight transferred to her. He didn’t even notice the pain of the fresh cut on his palm.
His dad stood at a desk only a few feet away, hunched over a control panel beside Garth. The schematics from his office lay scattered over the surface. He ignored Darwin’s call.
“Come on, sit here.” The woman led him to a chair near the door. “Let’s get a bandage on your head and hand, then I’ll get your father, okay?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “Now, sit.”
Looking around the lab, he saw people huddled around computers. A few of them just stared at the overhead monitors, slowly shaking their heads. All of them seemed to be talking at once, and the air felt thick with tension. Two people lay on the floor, fellow workers helping them to their feet or tucking lab coats and sweaters under their heads. He didn’t see any major injuries, but most of them looked groggy and out of it.
He was back home at the exact same time he had left. He hadn’t Seen any green in the hole.
He leaned back in the chair as the woman worked, watching the Threads move around the room. Over her shoulder, he could barely see the top of the QPS. The Threads coming out of it were fresh, young. He pulled at them, and they responded again.
When the woman had finished patching him up, she did as she had promised, and pulled his dad over. Darwin didn’t know what she said to him, but he dropped everything he was doing and jogged to where Darwin sat.
Darwin stood, faltering on shaky legs and almost falling, to meet his dad halfway. He wrapped him in a hug, gripping so tight his dad had to pull away.
“Slow down there, buddy. You’re okay.” His dad grabbed his shoulders and pushed him an arm’s length away. He looked at Darwin, his gaze lingering on the bandage. “Come on, let’s get you sitting down again. I’d never forgive myself if something happened to you.”
If that was true, then why was he by the computers when Darwin came to? Darwin shook his head. That wasn’t him talking, it was what was left of Rebecca’s attack. It would take time to get rid of the remnants of that.
“What happened?” Darwin asked.
His dad sighed. “We’re not sure. We went to a hundred percent and people started falling, you included. You hit your head on the window ledge. Are you feeling all right? Dizzy? Sick?”
“No. I’m fine. It was just a little bang.” He paused, taking a deep breath before continuing. “You need to shut it down.”
“I know. We’re trying. It seems to have a mind of its own, though. Nothing we’re doing is working.”
“I can do it.”
His dad scoffed. “I know you worked on almost every part of the project, but we have some of the best minds, the actual developers, working on it, and they’ve been unsuccessful. What do you know about shutting it off when it’s gone rogue?”
“I’ve done it before.” Darwin reached for the QPS, trying to create a Thread that would carry him into the heart of the machine. The Threads were still too weak, too scattered to be of much use. He’d have to touch the QPS.
He left his dad and walked to the door. It was closed and locked when he tried to turn the knob. Returning back to the window, he scraped glass from the empty frame using a keyboard lying on the floor, put his hands on the frame, and jumped through the opening.
“No! Darwin, wait!”
Walking over to the QPS, he placed his hands on top of the blue logo. The machine’s pulse pumped through his fingers. It was different than the other QPS, but somehow the same. It felt young. New. Fresh. He felt his mother touch his cheek. He pushed Threads into the machine, reaching for its core. The heart lay open. Smaller than he had Seen before, but the pattern of its death was the same. What was missing was the will to die.
When he pumped the black Threads into its heart, and the blue glow died from its logo, a cheer rose from behind him. Silently, he tried to create a hole back to Teresa, using every Thread he could find, pulling them into him and spinning them back out. A hole tried to form, but the Threads dispersed before he could finish. There was no going back.
Exhausted, he slumped against the QPS. Teresa was gone forever. There just wasn’t enough power in this world to recreate the hole.
When the noise behind him started to quiet, he turned. His dad stood in the now open doorway, staring at the cold QPS.
“What did you . . . How did you . . .?”
Darwin smiled. “Later, Dad. Let’s just go home.”
His dad looked around. “I can’t. I need to figure out—”
Darwin strode up to his dad and grabbed him by the shoulder. “Dad!”
His dad refocused on Darwin. “I . . .”
“Dad, let’s go home.” He pulled his dad from the lab. Rebecca stood near the door, a glazed look to her eyes. Darwin nodded at her as they passed. “You really should trust Rebecca’s work, Dad. She knows her stuff.” All he got in return was a puzzled look.
At home, Darwin made a small dinner for both of them. As they sat down, he leaned forward.
“Dad, there’s some things I need to tell you.”
He started with the Qabal, how they’d used the power of the QPS for their own purposes, how they corrupted it to become stronger. He didn’t mention Rebecca, there was no point. He talked about SafeHaven, about the Skends, and about Teresa. He didn’t get into all the details, but by his dad’s response, he knew. When he talked about the final battle, he left out how he’d violated Rebecca by entering her mind. The shame of it still washed through him.
He didn’t—couldn’t—mention his mother. What he had done was something he could never talk about, but it was something he would have to live with for the rest of his life. It was something he’d learned to do once before.
The gold Thread the other QPS had given him remained a secret as well.
As the hours had passed, it dawned on him how he’d gotten to the other world in the first place. It wasn’t any connection between the machines.
It was his mother’s DNA.
“The DNA sequence I saw in your office, that was in the QPS, wasn’t it?” he asked.
His dad nodded. “Your mother had some tests done when she was pregnant with you. We kept a copy of those records.”
“You hoped the QPS would link multiple universes, didn’t you? You used Mom’s DNA to try to target it, try to get it to create a hole to a universe with Mom in it.”
Another nod.
“Then you believe me?”
His dad didn’t answer the question. “Did . . . did you see her?”
Darwin just nodded his head. “She was different. She wasn’t Mom. She looked like her, but it wasn’t her.”
His dad had questions, more than Darwin could handle all at once. It was past midnight before they were done. He crawled into his own bed, crying himself to sleep, a gaping wound where his heart used to be, and dreamed of Teresa.
For the first time in months, Darwin woke in his own bed, in his own house, in his own world. The grass was still green outside, and winter had not yet dropped its first layer of snow. He wasn’t quite sure how he’d managed to travel back to the same point in time that he’d left. He hadn’t Seen a time component in the hole he’d created, hadn’t even known it was possible. Maybe that was the problem.
Memories of Teresa threatened to overwhelm him again, and he fought to push them aside, to forget her kiss, the way she’d pushed him into the hole and turned her back on him.
He felt his dad move in the kitchen downstairs, and with that thought came the realization that the only reason he knew was because the Threads had told him. But the QPS hadn’t been running long enough to create the quantity of Threads needed for monitoring.
He lay his head back on the pillow and closed his eyes, opening himself to the Threads the same way he had on Teresa’s world. The room shimmered with life. But how? He expanded his sight to the rest of the house and saw more Threads, saw his dad moving from the stove to the fridge.
The Threads stopped just outside the walls of the house, hugging the structure as though held there by an invisible hand. Further out, there was nothing. If any of the Threads the QPS had created still existed, they had either dispersed themselves around the world, or . . . or followed him back to his house.
As soon as the thought formed, he knew it was wrong. It felt wrong. He had learned to trust many things while he was gone, and one of those was his feelings.
If only he had done that with Teresa.
He pulled back into the house and followed the Threads backward, ending up in his bedroom. Of course he’d be there, he was the one monitoring everything. But again, it felt wrong. Where—
The QPS, back in the room with Teresa and Carlos and Mellisa, just before he’d—for lack of a better word—killed it. The machine had sent a gold Thread into him. What if the gift had been the Source itself, what if he was generating the Threads?
He leaped out of bed, the Threads responding to his touch, and ran to his bathroom. The mirror showed what it always had, a young man who was unsure of his place in the world, though he thought he might have seen a flicker of inner strength that hadn’t been there before. In the past, he’d always stopped there, too scared or too hurt to look any deeper. New was the white scar on the back of his wrist and one just below his ribs.
Today, this morning, he went deeper. And what he saw scared him more than Rebecca had, more than the Skends had. More than the rage and hatred on his mother’s face had. Today, he saw what the gift had made of him.
He stumbled back into the shower, tripping over the threshold and sliding down the wall. He looked in deeper and felt the pulse of the power given to him, matching his racing heart. He smelled apple blossom and vanilla.
This wasn’t a gift; it was a curse.
He didn’t know how long he sat on the shower floor, lost in a misery he couldn’t even share. No one would believe him. Maybe his dad, but look what he had already done trying to get his wife back from the dead. What else would he do when he found out his son was a walking QPS? Where would he stop? Even thinking those thoughts about his dad scared him. His mind would never have gone there before all this happened, before he saw what people could become given the right circumstances.
Walking back to his bed, he made a choice the machine couldn’t, despite its near sentience in wanting it all to end. He chose to not create the Threads, to not become what the QPS had—a thing to be coveted, hoarded by a few to give them more power.
He reached in and created his last Threads, wrapping the source inside him in a prison of blue, and went downstairs to have breakfast with his dad.