THE KEEPER
Stephen Lawson
Beside a stretch of forgotten highway stood a forgotten gas station, its roof and windows repaired with scrap metal and its structure reinforced with pressure-treated lumber and railroad steel. There was a diner in the gas station, which its new inhabitants used as a kitchen, chemical laboratory, and sometimes as a hospital. They repurposed what had once been a detached automotive garage to manufacture tools and weapons.
A series of greenhouses made of PVC and sheets of transparent plastic occupied the area near the gas station. In several clearings they had set up deer blinds to harvest meat. There was a windmill up the hill that they had used to generate a bit of electricity a decade ago, before Ma Kelty and Rusty Wilcox had managed to cobble together the reactor.
There was little danger of an overseer sending troops to raid the compound, as its residents weren’t telepathically linked to the Party. There were no resources here that the Party wanted—what had once been a nearby mining town with a depleted mine had evolved into a last stop for supplies for hikers on their way into the backcountry, and no one in the new world hiked in the backcountry for pleasure.
There were no rare earth metals here, nor oil, nor large bodies of water. The gas station stood on what couldn’t even be considered an afterthought of a place, because no one thought of it after anything else. It didn’t even exist on the Party’s maps. And even if they had known about it, the Party likely wouldn’t have cared. What were a couple of deer stands and greenhouses when the rest of the planet was theirs?
People had changed from what they were before; more accurately, they had been changed. The Party bought real estate companies and corporate debt. It purchased critical infrastructure. To control information, it acquired media conglomerates and politicians. Because the Party had ignored the global moratorium on germ-line CRISPR experimentation in the beginning of the twenty-first century, it had an advantage over backwaters like the United States in pharmaceutical development. The Party cured diseases, and people paid to be cured. Then the Party gained a monopoly over the pharmaceutical industry, and thus dictated what went into every antidepressant, erectile-dysfunction pill, and vaccine. The Party’s products were perfect because they’d undergone extensive testing on disposable test subjects—Uyghurs, Christians, Falun Gong practitioners. When one product failed, a dozen new “volunteers” were always available for the next clinical trial.
Genetics changed on a global scale. Within a decade, people behaved more like a massive ant colony than individuals with unique hopes and dreams. They became compliant and susceptible to telepathic suggestion from the Party’s overseers—abominations who shared most of the DNA of their worker counterparts, but with five times the brain mass. With that greater cerebral capacity came not an arithmetic increase in psionic output, but an exponential one. Yet even the overseers were engineered for compliance to the great mind, the one referred to behind closed doors as The Emperor. There was no need for obedience rituals as in ancient empires—no golden statue of Nebuchadnezzar looming over his subjects and demanding that they bow or be cast into a furnace. All people everywhere bowed with their minds and were happy to do so. Together, they could accomplish so much more.
They were all in it together.
China won the Third World War without ever firing a shot. They’d simply used slave labor to extract riches from the rest of the world, then used those riches to tunnel under the walls of the last refuge of human freedom—the mind.
Five genetically unaltered human specimens remained in what had once been a gas station. Their colony had once grown as large as twenty, but things had happened that often happen to small groups of isolated humans, and now there were only five.
They referred to themselves as the United States of America. Ma Kelty had been in her grave two years now, but she’d told them all that America was something you carried in your heart. It wasn’t a geographic border—America had been America when it was thirteen colonies, and still was when there were fifty states. It wasn’t people in buildings in Washington, D.C.—those had sold their country to the Party without any illusions about China’s endgame, all to be first in line for luxuries that never came.
“I think,” Ma had told them, “that there must be some way to fight the Party, but I don’t know what it is. No one wants to join us. We don’t have anybody to liberate. Their brains are all mush now, and they’re happy they’re mush. We’d have to destroy the whole rest of the world to save it, and I don’t think that’d be the right thing, even if we could. It’s like a nightmare I want to wake up from, but I don’t know how.
“I won’t wake up until I see my Earl again. I won’t wake up until my feet don’t hurt anymore and I’m not cold all the time. I won’t wake up until you’ve shoveled dirt over me. Plant a tree in my ribs to get some use out of me at least. I ain’t been much help to you since we moved here.”
Rusty had laughed. He’d poured a bit of the grain alcohol he’d made into a tin cup for her and she’d drunk it. She’d coughed, as she always did, and for a few minutes he’d known her feet wouldn’t hurt, and that she wouldn’t be cold, and that life wouldn’t feel quite so much like a nightmare. A few minutes of relief had been all he could give her.
Grace had been thirteen when they’d had this conversation, and she’d sat in the corner grinding black cumin seeds while she’d listened.
“You’ve been our doc for—” Rusty had said.
“Fifteen years,” she’d said. “Long time.”
Ma had shrugged and looked down at the cup.
“You miss Earl,” Rusty had said, and patted her hand. “I remember he used to know when something was bothering you from across the compound and he’d get that look on his face, and how you woke up in the middle of the night and knew he’d broke his leg falling out of the deer stand.”
“Telepathy,” Ma had said. She’d frowned. “Like the Party. Like their monsters—the overseers. We could all probably do it, I guess. For me and Earl it’s just a fluke of being soul mates. The Party understood it better, like the Wright Brothers figured out the best way to build a wing.”
“It doesn’t mean we can’t build a wing too,” Grace had said. She rarely spoke up when Rusty was in the room, save when she thought she might impress him with an idea. “We could do gene editing in the kitchen if we wanted to.”
Grace was the one Ma had taught to sew up lacerations and make salves and cure fevers, but Grace had never been content with just medicine. She’d wanted to understand everything, as Ma had, and it all had come easily to her. She’d read every book they’d ever found—dusty books with covers falling off salvaged from the small town’s abandoned library, paperbacks they’d found in a couple of cars, magazines from the gas station’s rack. Then Tomas had managed to access a Party Internet Service Provider via satellite, and Grace had begun downloading books to read on a tablet computer.
When Grace was fifteen, she told Rusty she was in love with him despite his being thirty-five. Though he did his best to gently dissuade her, his face stayed in her mind constantly until she nearly went mad one winter. She distracted herself by building a CRISPR gene-editing lab in a corner of the diner’s kitchen. Then she began to experiment on herself.
When a pack of coyotes attacked Rusty, she’d known exactly where to find him, and known exactly how to stop the bleeding and the pain.
“I knew where you were because I love you,” she whispered as she disinfected a wound—her voice quiet enough so the others wouldn’t hear. He’d been kind enough with her feelings to say nothing to the rest, despite what any of them might’ve noticed, and she knew it. “It’s like Ma and Earl.”
“I know what you’ve been up to,” Rusty said. With a finger, he brushed aside the bangs she’d grown to hide the swelling of her frontal lobe. “I know you’ve been getting headaches too.”
“Why won’t you love me back?” she whispered, and glanced up to see if his eyes would tell her something his lips wouldn’t.
He swallowed.
“Can’t you tell what I’m thinking?” he asked.
“It’s not like that,” she said. “It’s like your mind was screaming before. It was much louder; now it’s quiet. I guess I need a way to focus my perception. The overseers were born with their enhancements—that kind of growth would kill me at this point.”
She looked back down to her forceps and pulled the first suture tight.
“The overseers use psionic fields, right?” Rusty said. “It’s like a high-power radio station broadcasting in all directions. Maybe you wouldn’t get so much signal loss if you made a directional antenna.”
She considered this as she tied the next suture, and the one after that.
“It’s possible,” she said. “Would you help me build it?”
“I—” he said. “Of course I’ll help you.”
“Then maybe that’ll be enough for me,” she said.
She worked beside his bed while his wounds healed and started experimenting with reading his thoughts when she deemed it safe to do so. They began with her identifying which playing card he was looking at and moved to her verbalizing words he was reading on a page. But if she tried to suggest anything to him, she found that his will was still his own. She couldn’t do what the overseers could. Was it because he was too strong, or because she wasn’t strong enough?
When he was back on his feet, he joined her in the shop. Together, they built a larger power supply and a more powerful antenna, but the psionic signal boost still gave her no power over him.
A day had passed since Grace had stitched Rusty’s wounds, and he came into the diner from the greenhouse. When he walked in, Grace was lying on a table staring at the ceiling.
“You okay, kid?” he asked.
“There’s still so much noise from outside,” she said. “Outside my head. Other sounds; other smells. I need to go inward. I need to shut down everything but the sixth sense.”
“Like meditation?”
“Maybe.”
Then she looked at the basket of vegetables and herbs he was carrying, got up, and without another word she disappeared until nightfall.
He found her again after a successful hunt, this time with a boar across his shoulders. Rather than building a larger machine or changing her genetic code though, she sat with a basket of herbs, some of which she ground with a mortar and pestle.
“There was a formula,” she said without looking up, “in a book about European witches. It was supposed to be used for mind control. It’s called Keeper’s Draught. It has some overlap with their traditional flying ointment.”
“Flying ointment?”
“They used to go on drug trips and think they were flying to a Witches’ Sabbath, and they could share hallucinations—see the same things—which added some credibility to their belief that they’d gone to the same place. This one’s a tea though, which is great because it’s less messy than smearing fat on your . . . um . . . face.”
Rusty peered into the basket. It was filled with green leaves, purple flowers, and a few mushroom caps.
“What’s in this recipe exactly?”
“Psilocybin, wolfsbane—”
Rusty’s eyes widened at the mention of aconite.
“Never mind,” he said. “I don’t think I want to know, actually.”
“Whatever they believed they were doing, they had a few things figured out. Modern attempts to re-create flying ointment almost always resulted in fatal poisoning. They at least had the chemistry down, and apparently the shared altered state of consciousness.”
“Do I have to drink this stuff too for it to work?”
“No,” Grace said. “I won’t be able to hand an overseer a cup of tea.”
“If it’s not taking us both down some collective subconscious road together, how will it let you affect me?”
“I think,” she said, “there’s something underneath all our minds. A connected space. There was a drawing of a man in all the books I read about astral projection and ESP and all that. He’s called the Keeper. No matter what culture the people were from or what time, the Keeper is always drawn the same. So either they communicated across vast distances before such things were possible, or he’s some remnant in everyone’s subconscious, or—”
“Or he’s real and resides in a place you can only access in an altered state of consciousness.”
“Which necessitates such a place existing and that’s accessible to people who can return from it. Like Tomas hacking the Party’s ISP. It’s a tunnel into the collective they don’t know about. This is just psionic instead of electronic. And—”
“And?”
“And it’s a relatively new technology, which means security gaps will exist. To my knowledge, no one’s ever tried to hack the psionic network, so security is probably nonexistent.”
Rusty cocked his head to one side.
She realized it was a fringe, paranormal idea that bordered on lunacy, but the same could’ve been said for Chinese Communists devolving the human race into an ant colony using vaccines and controlling people through enhanced overseers. Until that actually happened.
“Interesting,” Rusty said.
“Now you’re caught up,” Grace said. “We’ll test in the morning.”
Grace was in the midst of setting up the psionic antenna when Rusty walked in. She adjusted the thing so it pointed toward the middle of the floor. She placed a cushion in the dish’s focal point, and then put another cushion next to the machine.
“Could you sit on that cushion please?” she asked.
“We have chairs.”
“This could be disorienting. I don’t want either of us to fall out of a chair. If you fall, I’ll probably have to redo your stitches, and you don’t want me sticking a needle in you while I’m on my trip.”
They sat, and Grace donned the headset with its evenly spaced sensors on the front. She took a sip from her teacup, then a bigger swallow.
“We’ll start with something simple,” she said. “Just relax.”
She closed her eyes.
“What if—”
“Hush,” she said, without opening her eyes. “I won’t die.”
Rusty sat and waited in silence.
“Do you—”
“I said hush.”
At just the moment he was about to give up on what was obviously a farce, Rusty felt an irresistible urge to raise his right arm. He tried to fight it, but his arm simply lifted into the air.
Grace opened her eyes, but they didn’t quite focus on Rusty’s arm, or on any one thing at all. There was a strange light in them he hadn’t seen before.
“Is your arm in the air?” she asked.
“Yeah,” Rusty said. “You can still see, right?”
“So far. Just wanted to make sure that wasn’t part of the hallucination. It looks kind of like a floppy tentacle from here. I just reached over and lifted it with my hand, but my hand’s still—”
She looked down and a wiggled her hand as if to verify it was still attached to her body.
She reached for the cup.
“Maybe you should—”
Grace tipped the cup back and downed the rest of the tea.
“Grace—”
“Do you want me?” she asked. She wiped her mouth with her sleeve. Her eyes settled on his face, but they still didn’t quite focus on any one point.
“Grace.”
“It’s a simple question,” she said.
Rusty swallowed.
“I’ve known you since you were ten,” he said. “Your folks were wonderful people, and I hate what happened to . . . You’re . . . you’re like a daughter to me. Or at least a little sister.”
“All right,” she said and closed her eyes again. “Good. That’s good.”
He waited for a moment.
“Just please don’t bring that up again,” he said quietly. “It makes me a bit—”
Rusty lost a moment of time. When he regained awareness, he was on top of Grace, who still wore her headset. His lips were pressed against hers. She tasted like strange spices and poison. He jerked away from her.
“Grace!”
“I had to know it would work if you were resisting me,” she said flatly. “The overseer certainly isn’t going to cooperate. This is science. We’re doing an experiment.”
“I’m—”
“Don’t hate me,” she said. “I didn’t take it any further.” She paused before adding quietly, “But I wanted to.”
Rusty’s face flushed.
“I’ll need to map coordinates to the nearest overseer,” Grace said. Her heart was racing now, and she pressed her hand against it. Was it from the drugs, or from what had just happened? Aconite could cause a slow or fast heart rate, and cardiac arrest. How close was she to a heart attack right now?
Rusty walked out without another word, leaving Grace alone with her proof of concept, and with the smell of his sweat on her. She sniffed her shirt, half smiled, and got to her feet.
“I love you, you stupid man,” she whispered, and put her cup back on the tool cart. Then, light-headed, Grace dropped to her knees and retched violently on the floor. She lay there for some time, alone, with the cool cement against her cheek.
Rusty would not come back, and for a moment she hated herself for what she’d done to him. The others were out tending to the greenhouses, the reactor, and the deer blinds. Her heart could stop, and no one would know for hours. By then she’d be as cold as the cement.
Grace closed her eyes tightly, like she did when she was having a nightmare and wanted to wake up.
When she opened them, she found herself in a cave. The cement’s coolness against her cheek was gone, and the gas station’s smells were replaced by those of plant life and dampness. Her vision adjusted slowly to the darkness, and she sat up. Before her lay water in every direction. Glowing lights under the surface swam and darted about. In the distance, perhaps half a mile away, she could make out what looked like a tree on a small island. It had a white trunk and white branches that hung down like those of a weeping willow. The branches stirred, but she couldn’t feel the breeze that moved them. Nor did they all sway in the same direction. It was almost as though they were feeling for something in the cave’s darkness, and were doing so under their own power.
Something brushed past her shoulder, and Grace yipped as she leaped to her feet. She spun and found another tree, this one much closer, with one of its willowy branch-tentacles reaching past her toward the water. It was thicker, she saw now, than a willow branch. Though thinner and longer, it looked almost like an elephant’s trunk. The thing twisted and began to curl around her leg, but she stepped free of it, taking notice only now of the shifting sand beneath her feet. The branch groped blindly in the darkness, and its tip passed within an inch of her face. At its end were three openings that could only be described as nostrils, and nearly touching her, it exhaled. Strange images flashed in her mind—a man driving in a car to pick up a Party auditor; the Chinese flag above the US Capitol billowing in the wind; a woman who wasn’t keen on children deciding now was the best time to have one.
The branch-thing gave up its search and reached back into the water. One of the lights swam close and attached to the branch’s end momentarily, then swam away. Other branches reached into the water around the tiny island. Lights came near, then swam away. With her eyes fully dark-adapted now, Grace could see that the other islands in this vast subterranean sea each held one of these trees with its elephant trunk-branches. Lights came close to the islands, transferred thoughts, then swam away.
It reminded her of a creation myth she’d read—the first god arising from the chaos of water. The first amphibious creature crawling onto land from the primordial soup of chaos—life in its first trial-and-error states of success and death. The conscious mind arising from a vast collective unconscious full of Jungian archetypes and the stuff of common nightmares. The space in panentheism where Krishna became a separate thing from the source. She was standing in the space beneath her mind, and beneath all minds. It was a thing she’d suspected but hadn’t wholly prepared herself to see.
Grace walked to the place where the water met the sand. She put her hand into the water and a light swam near. She touched the thing, and an image flashed in her mind. A boy was studying American history from before the modern evolutionary stage—from before the collective mind. The world was so disordered, so chaotic. People voted in rigged elections, wasting billions of dollars and man-hours in the process. The outcomes had always been certain, but the ruse of choice was necessary for some reason the child didn’t understand.
The people of the world before had paid high-tech corporations to make devices to observe them.
They went on hikes in the wilderness just to observe nature rather than to collect resources or do research for the Party.
Such waste.
The simplicity of progress was obvious—a place for everything, and everything in its place. No one voted, so those dollars and man-hours were no longer wasted. The Party governed directly through the mind, which was really the most benevolent and efficient route to the greater good.
Monitoring software was unnecessary because all observation came directly through thought to the overseers. There was no more need for subversion or ruses. Mankind was one entity under the practical guiding hand of the Party and its Emperor.
The child scoffed at how stupid everyone had been to fight the forward march of progress. They were all in it together.
Grace attempted communication, as she had when she’d made Rusty raise his arm. She willed the child to be free, to think for himself, to detach from the overseer’s suggestions and simply do what he wanted.
She felt a stinging sensation in her hand and she recoiled. The light swam away. Her suggestion had been as unwelcome to him as the thought of using toxic psychedelic flying ointment might be to a modern doctor. Perhaps her ability to influence was weakening here, or perhaps Rusty hadn’t resisted the suggestion to kiss her as much as he’d put on.
Grace grasped another light that swam close to the island.
It was a man of perhaps eighty. From the first contact, Grace sensed that depression and guilt were his dominant emotions. He was a learned man, a scientist.
The overseer’s nearest branch slipped into the water, and she pulled her hand away long enough for the nostrils to connect to the glowing consciousness. When they were joined, though, she put two of her fingers and a thumb to the surface of the man’s mind.
The man had lived most of his life in a time before the engineering, in a time when minds had boundaries. Guilt coursed through him for not stopping the great unification, though she couldn’t tell why he felt personally responsible. His altering had come late in his life, so its effects were not as complete as they had been in the younger generations.
Drink. You have money. I give you money. You need not work any longer. Drink vodka, smile for my cameras, and live out your days in oblivious peace. Your only task now is to reaffirm the plan.
The suggestion resonated in Grace’s mind, though she knew it wasn’t meant for her.
The branch detached from the old man, but Grace slipped her other hand around the mind before it could swim away.
“Who are you?” she whispered.
An image of a name badge flashed in her mind—Li Shu-hui—and of a face. He was wearing a lab coat. Then he was wearing an expensive suit, and Xi Jinping was shaking his hand. The man was a scientist—an important one. He lived in Washington, D.C., now, where he could be consulted by the Party’s officials.
She let go of Li Shu-hui’s mind, and he swam away.
“Why do you think you’re not swimming down there in the chaos with the rest of them?” a voice asked from behind her.
Grace turned, and a figure appeared between the overseer’s branches.
“Probably part of the hallucination,” Grace said.
“This is no hallucination, Grace,” the figure said. “Your mind has simply traveled downward to its lowest levels, where all sentient minds connect. In the chaos swim the devolved minds, the lesser mortals. On the islands, like the first gods birthed by Nammu, are the Givers—the overseers. They bring order to the world. They guide the ones who’ve willingly crawled back into the primordial soup of semiconscious existence.”
“Who are you?” Grace asked, but she recognized the figure from the pictures.
“Your universe will continue its expansion until gravity can no longer hold the atoms together,” the figure said, “and all that will be left is a thin gas of hydrogen and helium—not enough to support interactive life. It could support a single disembodied mind, perhaps, but only that. You’re not far from that return to chaos, whether you realize it or not. A state of higher order exists when there are many liberated minds. With entropy comes the reduction of consciousness to the single Boltzmann brain—the single will—alone in the void. It is the return to Nammu.”
Suddenly the name she’d seen in the books didn’t seem quite right.
“Are you Death?” Grace asked.
“Most call me the Keeper,” he said. “Death is just a doorway.” He looked down to the shoreline. “This place didn’t have so much water in it before.”
Grace followed his gaze to the water. The Keeper didn’t warn her when one of the overseer’s appendages flexed toward her. When she looked back toward the Keeper, the overseer’s nostrils pressed against her face.
Grace Elizabeth Holloway.
The thought rippled through her mind when the thing exhaled. She recoiled, but the appendage followed her.
The Giver exhaled: Where are you?
It inhaled, and she felt information leave her body.
It exhaled: You’re—interesting. A settlement of disconnected nodes. Five of you, no less. Why did you come here?
The thing was blind but it could sense things about her with close contact. Its telepathy seemed more akin to smell than the sights and sounds she was experiencing. She couldn’t let it get more information out of her, but its reach extended to the boundaries of the island and into the water. She grabbed the appendage and wrestled it away from her face. A second appendage whipped down and knocked her off her feet. The first, which she’d released, returned to her face.
You wish to—fight—the Party? This would be like staring at the sun and expecting it to blink.
She struggled to pull away but the thing was powerful.
As you will. Burn.
The appendage retracted, indifferent to her presence once more.
“It’s not wrong,” the Keeper said. “Five humans against the unified swarm of what was once their race is a bit like holding a staring contest with a star.”
“It knows where we are now. They’ll send troops to exterminate us.”
“Also not wrong,” the Keeper said.
“Can’t you—can’t you kill them?”
“Not my place. I have a role to fulfill—as a custodian, not an executioner. The God that made this place gave me my abilities, and the proper use of them, as He did for you.”
“What does that mean?” Grace asked.
“Not many mortals have ever come down this far and returned to the surface of consciousness alive. It could be He has a plan for you.”
“How do I get back then? I have to warn the others.”
“You can walk on the water if you like,” the Keeper said. “You’re just a mind here. You’re massless, so you won’t sink. You’ll find the way from there.”
Grace stepped onto the water. Ahead, she saw the outline of a familiar form and walked toward it.
She woke in the diner with her head cradled against Rusty’s chest.
“Grace,” he said, then looked to someone else nearby. “She’s awake.” He looked back down into her eyes and smiled. “Thought I’d lost you.”
“Li Shu-hui,” Grace whispered.
“What’s that?”
“Chinese scientist,” Grace said. “Primordial soup. We’re devolving back into a single consciousness . . . entropy taking over . . . think the universe itself might cease to exist but I wasn’t quite clear on that part.”
“That was some drug trip,” Rusty said. “Did you see God while you were out?”
“The Keeper,” Grace said. “I think he’s like upper management. Said I was massless as just a mind. Seemed like that might—”
She stared at the ceiling for a moment.
“Might what?” Rusty asked.
“I had it, I think, but I lost it again. One of the overseers read my mind. It knows where we are. They’ll be coming for us.”
“Grace, it was a hallucination. It wasn’t—”
“I raised your hand,” Grace said. “That was real. So is this.”
Rusty sighed. “You need water and bed rest until the toxins are out of your system. Looks like we’re going to trade places.”
Grace woke in the middle of the night to find that Rusty had strung up a hammock on the other side of the room, and had a computer set up on a table nearby to monitor her vitals. She picked up a glass of water from the bedside table, and Rusty’s hammock rocked as he jerked awake. He was vigilant—worried about her rather than simply performing a task. That meant something—perhaps something he didn’t understand or didn’t want to admit. The dim light in the room reflected off a notebook in his hand as he kicked his feet over the side of the hammock and stood.
“What’s that you were reading?” she asked.
“One of Ma’s old notebooks.”
“What about?”
“Something you said jogged my memory, so I went looking for her notes from that time. She’d gotten hung up on the fine barriers between physics and metaphysics. Mind/Matter/Math was what she wrote in big letters at the top of the page.”
“Hm?”
“There was a physicist named Roger Penrose who said reality is broken down into mind, matter, and math. Math describes all matter but the numbers aren’t truly part of it. They arise from the mind. The mind may interact with the brain and the body, but consciousness is massless and weightless—dimensionless, in fact, like the numbers. A mind exists outside of spacetime even if the two realms interact through psionic fields.”
“How does that help us?” she asked.
“I’m not sure yet. I—”
The back door of the gas station swung open. Tomas hurried into the room.
“Sensor net picked up a convoy three miles from the bridge,” Tomas said. “From the looks of it, they’re heavily armed. We’ll blow the bridge once they’re on it, but they’ll have their own bridging assets. They might have boots on the ground here sooner if they decide to air assault.”
Grace and Rusty exchanged a glance.
“I can try to control the convoy commander,” Grace said, “with the psi antenna. It’s clear that it works.”
“If you drink more of that stuff now, you’re dead for sure,” Rusty said.
“We’re all dead for sure if I don’t.”
“And there’ll be another convoy if you take out this one,” he said. “And another. And you’ll still be dead.”
“Li Shu-hui—” she said.
“—lives in Washington, D.C.” Rusty said.
“I saw him before, and the distance wasn’t a problem.”
“In a vast sea of minds? Can you be sure you’ll arrive at the same place, or that he’ll be near the same overseer?”
“I think I traveled to that overseer because it was putting out the strongest psionic field for our location. Must be the same for Li Shu-hui. We were listening to the same radio station.”
“This is insane.”
“It’s this or use up a stockpile of ammo fighting the entire planet. What’s the use of going down in a blaze of glory if there aren’t any liberated minds after us? We’d just be snuffing the candle out.”
“What is one scientist even going to do for you?”
“The whole problem with approaching faster-than-light travel and theoretical time travel is the energy required to accelerate the mass,” Grace said. “The mind is massless. So if it actually moves in relation to a point in spacetime, it can do so at any speed with zero energy to accelerate it. Maybe ‘moves’ isn’t quite the right word, but—”
“Aren’t psionic fields energy though?”
“They’re just the detectable ripples of the mind in spacetime where a consciousness has an effect. The ripples happen instantaneously—faster than light—at any distance. It’s been proven, like quantum entanglement. Which makes me think time travel is possible too. Telepathy’s not the only psionic phenomenon; precognition is another. How do we sometimes see future events as though we’re remembering them, or get a sense of dread before something bad happens? If mass and acceleration aren’t issues, then time isn’t an issue. If I have the means to do one, I can probably do the other.”
“See the future?”
“No,” she said. “Make the past see me.”
Rusty helped Grace—who was still a bit wobbly—through the hatch onto the gas station’s roof. They set up the antenna, and Grace brewed her tea. Then Rusty locked the hatch and piled several cinder blocks on it.
“Tomas and Maggie are going to snipe the convoy from the tree line to try to divert them and buy time,” Rusty said. “Ollie’s on explosives. I’m only going to start shooting if they make it onto the roof, so let’s try not to let them know we’re up here.”
He looked at the antenna, which she was aiming at the Moon.
“Grace?”
“Yeah.”
“You can’t do Earth-Moon-Earth if mass won’t affect your psionic field. It won’t bounce like a radio wave. Just aim it direct and it’ll go through the mass between you and Li.”
“Oh right. Duh.”
She loosened the mount and started recalibrating.
“I wonder,” Grace said, “if the Keeper appears down there because you’re having a near-death experience.”
“I’d say you came pretty close to not coming back last time,” Rusty said. “Guess that’s how he got his name.”
“Hit me with the epinephrine if I flatline for more than three minutes,” she said.
Rusty smiled wearily and nodded.
“It’s probably a one-way trip regardless,” she said. “Won’t have a body to come back to. The epinephrine just means I don’t have to say good-bye right now. Gives us that nasty little bit of hope of seeing each other again.”
She turned on the antenna, donned her headset, and drank her tea. Then Grace lay on the cool roof of an abandoned gas station—the sovereign territory of the last group that would call themselves the United States of America—the last five free minds that would ever exist.
She heard helicopters in the distance as the toxic substances in her tea began to take hold. It’d be an advance recon element. They’d see Tomas and Maggie in the woods with FLIR, and they’d see Rusty and her on the roof. They’d gun down Ollie before he could set off a single bomb.
Through poison or bullets, neither of them would be leaving the roof alive.
Li Shu-hui stood in his lab in China’s Hubei Province. He had just been promoted to lead researcher for the Party’s genetic weapons program. Their first trial run was planned to eliminate a large percentage of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region’s population.
Li Shu-hui had, however, awoken that morning from the most vivid dream of his life. He saw a future where his work had been used to reduce the entirety of the human race to an ant colony—collective, subservient to one master, simple. The girl who’d appeared in his dream with an older version of himself had explained step by step how that future had unfolded.
His future self—world-weary, filled with regret and vodka—had mentioned that on that particular day, a three-legged feral dog would bite a woman on the train platform when Li Shu-hui got off. The dog had obliged old Li Shu-hui as an authenticator to his younger self, and the younger man began pondering how to avoid becoming that regretful, world-weary old man.
Li Shu-hui, as one of the Party’s most trusted genetic scientists, had been entrusted with auditing the President’s DNA for indicators of disease or early-onset mental illness and with making repairs if needed. He also had access to the DNA of several key Inner Party members.
Rather than targeting an unwanted minority in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, Li Shu-hui engineered a fairly unpleasant flu strain that only became symptomatic in key Party members.
The secret police launched an investigation. Contact tracing was performed, and evidence was collected. Several researchers in Li Shu-hui’s lab, including Li Shu-hui, were sent to labor camps on suspicion of a conspiracy against the Chinese Communist Party.
But Li Shu-hui regretted nothing.
With their most talented researchers in labor camps, the CCP’s genetic weapons program faltered. After a fruitless period under a new administration, its facilities were repurposed. The Party’s strategy reverted to purchasing real estate, controlling politicians, and acquiring media conglomerates with American money extracted through Chinese slave labor to influence the world beyond its borders, and maintaining a stringent social credit policy and a harsh penal system within China rather than using telepathic overlords to dominate everyone. The United States of America remained a nation far larger than five people living in an abandoned gas station with a population slightly less subservient than it might otherwise have been.
Grace sat at the shoreline of a tiny island. The Giver behind her had withered, and bits of it were falling off. The water receded, and the minds that previously swam began to float in the air again, effortlessly. They grew larger, more vibrant, and more colorful as she watched. They connected not to an overseer, but to each other.
“You did well,” the Keeper said as he approached. He sat next to Grace on the beach.
“I guess we drastically changed time,” Grace said. “Rusty and Ma and the others had lives before they went into hiding. But my parents . . .”
“They’ll never meet.”
“So I’ll never exist?”
“You’re here now aren’t you?” the Keeper asked. “Existing.”
“But in a body? I assume you’ve come to take me through the door. You’re the Keeper. One-way ticket, right?”
“I think you may be misunderstanding my name,” the Keeper said. “It’s ‘keep’ in the sense of a custodian, or a gardener, rather than one who takes and never gives back. I’m just the gardener here, Grace.”
“Oh,” she said. “Ohhh. Then—”
“He doesn’t do this for everyone,” the Keeper said, “but sometimes He gives people another cycle. It’s not everybody, and you don’t have to if you don’t want to. But it’s not like any religion’s going to come enforce rules on Him anyway. He just does what He wants to do, and what He said was that you can go again if you’re ready.”
“Will I remember this place, or what happened?”
“No,” the Keeper said. “Not on a conscious level. You’ll be happier that way honestly. You can live a life without constant reminders of the human race’s near extinction. I have an ideal point to take you back to—a miscarriage that doesn’t have to be one.”
“All right.”
“And Grace?”
“Yeah.”
“He said to tell you to stay away from witchcraft and hallucinogenic drugs this time.”
Rusty Wilcox sat on a stool in a gas station diner on a stretch of much-used highway. There was a wilderness area about a half hour down the road, and though he wanted to take a day to do some hiking, he only had until tomorrow to get his haul to Cincinnati. He didn’t like every aspect of being an owner-operator, but it was mostly honest work and sometimes he liked the scenery. Speaking of—
“You make up your mind yet?” she asked. Her name tag said she was Grace, and she was a lovely creature, perhaps a couple years younger than he was. She caught him studying her face, and a smile tugged at her lips. She let him look for a moment, and Rusty felt something change in his eyes—a nonverbal signal he didn’t quite understand. But she saw it, and the smile spread on her face. It was almost like telepathy, but not quite, and it was like the sun coming out from behind a cloud. “Maybe I should give you more time?”
He fumbled with the menu, but managed to point to a sandwich and indicate that he’d like to buy one from her. Then he watched as she walked away with the order, and he thought that Grace was a fitting descriptor for her.
“Is your route going to bring you through again?” she asked when she returned. Her gaze flitted from his pupils to his curly hair, which he needed to get cut. But she seemed to like it. She just studied him, and he knew most of the conversation they were having wasn’t with words. It was innocent, the way she looked at him—like they were children who’d met on a playground. There wasn’t a hint of world-weariness or cynicism in her.
“It, um—” he said. “Yeah. In a couple of days with a return haul.”
“Good,” she said. “And I know this sounds weird, but there’s something very familiar about your face. I feel like we’ve met before.”
Rusty slipped his hands under his thighs so she wouldn’t see them shaking. Women weren’t like this with him.
“I think I’d remember meeting you,” he said.
“Hm,” she said. “Maybe in another life. Make sure you have hiking shoes when you come back. There’s a trail I want to show you.”