Now that they’re
Madelyn Sorensen. Everyone said we were so cruel to give her rhyming names. That we were bad parents. Did she think I was a bad father? Did she blame me? God, I hope she knows how hard I tried. I wanted to go to them. I wanted to be with them.
Freedom said they were going to tow the Guardian in but they didn’t have to. It still had half a tank of fuel. Sitting there in the sun for months and still over twenty gallons of diesel in it. There was no reason it should’ve stopped.
I remember at first I was very happy, because if the armored carrier still had gas, perhaps it meant Eva and Madelyn hadn’t... that the whole thing had been a mistake. Perhaps they were still back at the airstrip. Maybe they never even got on the plane.
Freedom was very good about calming me down. He was a good man. He still is, I think. I don’t see him that often. They leave me alone. They all have a lot on their minds.
The puzzle had been that half his soldiers still insisted the tank was empty. He had a dozen of them look at the gauge and only five of them saw the needle above E. Even when they drove it in, some of them still said there was no gasoline. Nothing the captain did could convince them otherwise. A few of them couldn’t even start the engine.
He’d wanted to know about hallucinations. If they were a side effect to the process I didn’t warn the Army about. He hadn’t reported it yet, but he was very firm his soldiers couldn’t be put at risk. “I don’t want anyone else to die,” he told me.
I think it was a year ago today he was here. It may have been a year ago yesterday. No, it was two days ago. When I was talking with Freedom it had been exactly ninety-nine days since they went missing. Since one of the super soldiers I created tried to bring my little Madelyn across half a mile of sand and was attacked by an army of exes that tore him apart. Since they crawled into the armored carrier and they
I need to work. I need to think of other things. That’s all I need these days. To work and be left alone.
On the other side of the lab there were six exes strapped down on gurneys. They were also handcuffed to the rails and gagged with a wooden bit. One of the soldiers trained as a field medic, Franklin, I think, came up with the clever idea of using back boards and head restraints to keep them immobile.
All my attempts to return the brain to a cogitative state had failed. This set of exes had new contacts in place. I think they were in place. I remember I was drilling placement holes in skulls when Captain Freedom came to talk to me. He had a problem he was trying to work out. That was day ninety-nine. Not yet one hundred.
I attached the Nest box to the leads and it sent a new pattern of electricity down into the dead brain. Nothing. No response at all. I checked each of the six subjects. Their EEGs were all flat.
Back to the first one. It was a young man with blond stubble and a large hole in his right cheek. I think it was a bite, but they’d all been cleaned up before they came to me. For the first six months they’d also all been male. I think that was John’s doing.
I could see the young man’s teeth through the hole. He didn’t have a single filling on this side of his jaw. Madelyn had very good teeth, too. Freedom said he couldn’t find their bodies. There was no trace left of them. Not even one of Madelyn’s glittery sneakers. He was polite while he told me they were dead. He insists on seeing the evidence that way. I tried for weeks to tell him it could also mean they got away, but he wouldn’t listen. Still won’t.
I’ve had dreams about those sneakers. I see them running across the desert toward the gate. I still wake up crying most of the time.
No, no, no. Can’t think like that. Must stay focused.
There was something odd about the young man’s eyes. All exes have the same gray eyes. They accumulate dust because of the lack of tears and then get scratched. It’s a process of refraction, the same way a scratch on clear glass looks white.
Its eyes were gray and they were odd, but I wasn’t sure why they were odd. I checked one of the other exes to be sure, then I came back to the first one. I moved my head back and forth to see if it was something about the light. Something was wrong. I needed to focus on this better. I was missing something obvious.
Oh. Of course. Exes always turn their heads. They lack the fine muscle control to move their eyes. I’m still not sure they need to move their eyes, in the same way some blind people never move theirs.
The dead man with the hole in its cheek was watching me. It was following me with its eyes.
I found myself very focused. I checked the Nest again. It was still on, still sending the new pattern.
“Wehhh ahhh I?”
The ex was trying to talk. This was more than I’d ever hoped to achieve. I was so amazed I couldn’t wait to tell Eva and Madelyn about it, and then I was horrified I’d forgotten they were