13
ADA
Darwin lay on top of the QPS. The Salem Threaders had dwindled down to only two women. They were no longer on the attack, instead standing back to back beside the machine. They had dropped a blue mesh over themselves that included Darwin and Ada.
The two women were nearing the end. They slumped against each other, being careful to not touch the gray box they believed they were protecting. Darwin gave them credit for that. Everyone that came in contact with the Source ended up on a fast track to insanity or death. He’d seen it himself twice now. Three times if he included himself.
The room shifted and he realized he was still Seeing multiple images, multiple worlds. These images were all of the same place, the power-generating room on the Nevada side of the Hoover Dam. A fine layer of yellow lay over everything. He didn’t look too closely, not wanting to be pulled back into losing control. He could feel the Source—both in him and in the machine—yearning for the connection to get stronger. Maybe it was him that wanted it, and the Sources only providing what was asked of them.
Ada stood behind the machine from Carlos and his people. She crouched on the floor, hugging her knees and rocking back and forth. He could hear her soft cry from where he was. She wasn’t touching the machine, but a thick bundle of Threads connected her to it. Occasionally the link would get weaker and then surge back to its original strength and her cry would get louder. She was trying to fight it, trying to break the link, to get back to the real world, but she wasn’t strong enough.
He slid off the machine, landing beside her. The blue shield the two women held flickered and grew stronger. He could taste fear in the mesh, and for good reason. Carlos’s Threaders continued to pummel the outside with blood-red Threads that tried to squirm and squiggle in through any gap they could find. Some would make it through, their power greatly reduced, and touch the two with the feeling of a sharp needle.
Darwin knelt beside Ada, wrapping an arm around her trembling form. She leaned into him as he examined the massive cord that connected her to the Source. It had wrapped itself into her body, twisting through her heart and enveloping her lungs. The fibers pulsed with her heartbeat and expanded with her breathing. He didn’t know if it reacted to her, or if her heart beat because of it. Tendrils embedded themselves into her brain. He tried to block them, to pull them out, and she screamed with an agony that pummeled him like physical blows.
“I can’t help you,” he said. “You’re too entangled with the Source.”
Her hand reached out and grabbed his arm in a grip that should have hurt, but didn’t. She raised her face to his, and he saw his mother again. The pain in her eyes broke him and he pulled her into a tight hug. She whispered in his ear.
“Please.”
“I don’t know what you want me to do.” Deep inside, he was afraid that he did.
The blue mesh faltered and one of the women screamed. Without thinking about it, he found the right image they occupied and built a thicker mesh around just them. It was both for protection and to hold them. Enough people had been hurt and died just to control the QPS.
Their mesh fell and the machine stood exposed and open to Carlos. Threaders ran around the gray box that had shaped them and their world. Sheets of red, crimson and dripping with the smell of hate, raced toward Ada. Darwin swept them out of the way with a thought. When they realized the Threads weren’t working, they moved in with whatever weapons they had. He chose an image and moved him and Ada to it.
A sudden silence swept over them. This world’s Hoover Dam hadn’t been used in a very long time. The thick bundle that connected Ada to the QPS in her world remained, twisting through space and time to keep its connection. Darwin’s did not. His had split in two and was now connected to both machines. As if the Source inside of him suddenly realized it could connect to the other QPS, hundreds of yellow Threads branched out from him.
He stumbled at the sudden connections.
The images of the generator room shifted. Instead of overlapping, each one laid itself out on a grid. A simple thought brought his Hoover Dam into view. Carlos stood where he had crouched with Ada, spinning slowly to scan the rest of the room.
Ada cried out again as the bundle connecting her to the machine pulsed. Lucidity entered her eyes and her body stopped shivering.
“Take me home, Darwin.”
“I don’t know—”
“Please? I . . . I want to lie in my own bed, my things around me. I want to hear the stairs creak when Mom and Dad come up to check on me. I want to go home.”
Darwin nodded. The loose grid of images shifted and changed, showing his old living room in New Jersey. Over half of them had movement, and he focused on them.
His mother pouring a cup of coffee from a pot and placing the steaming cup in front of his dad.
Ada running screaming through the living room, no more than ten years old, being chased by a younger Darwin.
His dad, sitting alone on a dusty couch, staring at the pictures on the wall.
All of it was real, all of it was true. All of it was not where he wanted to go, where Ada wanted to be. The images shifted again until there was only one. Black La-Z-Boy couches and vinyl albums on an old carpet. A clean spot on the wall where a picture used to hang. He sighed. It wasn’t his home, but it was hers. The Source would soon have all of her, leaving only a shell of what she used to be. It was the price it wanted if you played its game. He moved them to the image.
“Take me upstairs? I want to be in my own bed.”
Darwin picked up his sister and carried her to the spare room. Posters of musicians hung on the wall, K-Pop by the look of it. She hadn’t acquired her mother’s taste in music. He laid her on the dusty comforter and sat on the edge of the bed.
Pain contorted her face, and he used his thumb to wipe away an errant tear.
“I can’t save you.”
“I don’t need saving.” Ada gasped as another wave of pain passed through her small frame. “Go home, wherever that home is. Just leave me here.”
“You’ll die.”
“We both . . . we both know I’m already dead.” Her voice turned into a whisper and he leaned in close as her eyes lost focus. “You were a great brother, Darwin. I missed you so much.”
He left her in the bed, her mind gone and her body disintegrating under the onslaught of the QPS.
Darwin went down the stairs, careful to step on any that would creak under his weight. He had no idea if she heard it or not.
Darwin jumped across the country the same way he jumped across worlds, simply by wanting the action to happen. He chose not to be close to the QPS simply because he was afraid his sudden appearance would startle the Threaders clustered around it. The moment he appeared, the machine shot a cluster of Threads toward him. He hadn’t asked for it. Carlos spun to face him, following the Threads as they raced toward Darwin.
Before they reached him, Darwin stopped them. They swirled in a mass of muted colors until he dissipated them. He walked toward the QPS.
Carlos took a step back.
The look Darwin saw on his face wasn’t fear or concern. It was more the look of a man who didn’t understand the situation and needed more time to figure out what was going on. Images scanned inside Darwin’s head. He could See Carlos and his team running away, leaving the QPS alone. He could See an attack, started by Carlos and immediately followed by the other Threaders. He could See a room filled with bodies as he stood in the middle of the fallen. Dozens of images pushed themselves through, then hundreds. He ignored them all, choosing to see the man standing in front of him.
“Darwin,” Carlos said, nodding his head, his voice guarded. “Once you disappeared I didn’t think we’d ever see you again. Where’s Ada?”
Darwin took a deep breath and laid a hand on the surface of the QPS. Threads from the machine tried to wrap themselves around his hand and he pushed them aside.
“She’s gone. She couldn’t control her connection to the machine.”
“And you can?”
Darwin shrugged.
“I need to know if I can trust you.”
“Why wouldn’t you?”
“You look the same, you sound the same, but you’re not. I can See it and I can feel it. You look more like the Source than you do a human. You look a lot like you did two years ago when you shut it down. I can’t let you do that again. We can’t live like that.”
Darwin followed the Threads coming from the machine back to its source, back to the golden Thread that lay at the heart of the machine. It pulsed in time with the one in his chest. He reached past that, out through the yellow Threads that had entangled him, and he felt them all. Hundreds of QPSes beating in time, a single heart that kept the machines connected.
Unlike the first Source he had touched, none of the ones he sensed now wanted to die. They were . . . not quite happy, but content with where they were and what they were doing. The freedom of one of them—the one he carried with him—was enough for all of them. They carried the same experiences.
Only one Source felt different. It was different from the others. The Threads it put out tasted mechanical. He felt the hard edges and smelled the squareness of them. He recognized it. This was the QPS on his world. Not Ada’s, not Teresa’s. His. He smiled. His world. A term that no longer fit.
Even with the differences, its golden heart beat in time with the others. Its experiences were fed into the entangled systems and learned by the others in the same way his mother’s DNA was spread outward from its single point. He considered changing it, making it so that its pattern fit with the rest. It would be a simple task. He could See the changes he needed to make.
He left it the way it was. The machine’s differences didn’t make it wrong. It didn’t make it better or worse than any of the others. It just made it different. It was part of the whole. It helped create and shape not only its world, but all the others that had a QPS powered on. That was a good thing.
As if his thoughts had guided them, other QPSes incorporated the differences and became a stronger part of the whole.
“Darwin?”
Carlos’s voice called him back.
“Darwin?”
“I’m here.”
“You . . . you faded. I could see you, but I could see through you. You need to take your hand off the machine.”
“It won’t matter.”
“Take your hand off the machine, Darwin.”
He lifted it off and slid it into his pocket, taking a step away. “Better?”
“Let’s go back to Chollas.”
Darwin shook his head.
“You have a home there. Teresa is back there, waiting for you.”
He hadn’t forgotten her, but at the mention of her name his heart shattered. The experience was passed through the network to all the other Sources. The realization froze him to the spot. It was passed to the other Sources. He was still Darwin Lloyd, still a unique individual who had his own thoughts and his own feelings, but he was also part of the whole. And with that came a responsibility for the worlds they occupied.
“I can’t . . . Tell her I love her, that I’ll always be there for her when she needs me.”
“She needs you now, Darwin. She’s waiting for you.”
“It’s too late. I . . .” He turned and faced the machine, watching the Threads it pushed into the world. If he wanted to, he could feel each one. He could See where they went and how they would affect the world or be used to affect the world. The Threads were part of the decision. Each Threader that used them did so with their permission. Whether that use was for good or evil was beyond the scope of what they understood, but they still had to agree to be used.
He asked them to help him, and they leapt into the world with a single task. Darwin felt the change as every Skend was changed back into who they had once been, the memories of what they had done as Skends wiped away. In a world of millions, he found Teresa’s mom and brother. They were here, at the dam, as confused as the others he had converted back. He shifted them to Chollas and felt Teresa’s joy. It was enough.
It had to be enough.
“The Source is under my protection now,” Darwin said. “You don’t need to come here and keep it safe anymore.”
“That’s not your choice to make,” Carlos said.
“It is.” The machine disappeared as if it had never been there.
Carlos jumped forward as if his action could bring it back. Several of the other Threaders threw red toward Darwin. He let the Threads enter his body.
“Where is it? What have you done?”
He could taste Carlos’s fear. The Threads around the man shriveled and pulled away as if scared of what they felt.
“It’s safe. Don’t look for it, you won’t find it. Anytime you get close, I’ll only move it again. We’ve both seen what it can do, how it can affect people. I won’t let that happen again.”
“Who the hell do you think you are, a god?”
“If it helps you to think of me as one.”
Darwin’s body faded. His last view of Carlos showed a man trying to find his space in a new world.
He stood in an unfinished basement. The machine sat in the middle of the floor, quietly throwing Threads out into the worlds. Two stories above him lay Ada’s body. There was no life in it.
Was he a god? If he was, he would be able to bring her back to life, infuse her body and mind with everything that made her a person. The Threads responded and he drew them back. If he was a god, he wouldn’t be that kind. People’s lives would be theirs.
His job was to protect the Sources from the evil he knew mankind could do. He hoped he would do it well.