Lifel1k3 (Lifelike #1)(28)
She was alone.
“Lemon?”
Her call echoed in the gloom, fear for her bestest swelling in her chest. Squinting about her, she realized she was in a vast chamber, the walls curved, slick and gleaming. That same thudding beat was all around her, above and beneath. Eve’s stomach turned as she realized she was afloat in a pool of what looked an awful lot like snot.
“Lem!”
Rising out of the sludge ahead, she could see a towering pile of refuse, tangled and tumbled together to form a huge island in the sea of slime. It was rusting auto wrecks and crumpled shipping containers. Great tangles of plastic and Styrofoam, netting choked with rotten weed. Rusting cans and steel drums. The stench was like a punch to the gut, and she felt her gorge rising, barely able to swallow the puke.
“Cri–Cricket?”
Her shout reverberated around the vast space, nothing but that thudding beat in response. Lub-dub. Lub-dub. She kicked and pawed her way toward the trash island, the slime slurping and burping around her. Something solid was under her feet now, and she half swam, half walked, dragging herself out and collapsing breathless on a crumpled plate of rusting steel. Her stomach surged again and she gave up fighting it, puking the remains of her breakfast over the metal. She licked her lips and spat, looking down at the sad little puddle of regurgitated Neo-Meat? in front of her.
“I know just how you feel,” she croaked.
Rolling over onto her back, she clawed the goop from her eyes, clutching Lemon’s jacket to her chest. The air was thick with that thudding pulse, the stench of sulfur and rot. She was covered head to foot in slime. And looking up into the phosphorescent gloom, she realized the walls were made of what could only be described as … flesh.
“Lemon!” she wailed. “Can you hear me?”
“Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!”
The ceiling above her distended, opening wide and retching gallons of black seawater into the chamber. A tiny homunculus of spare parts tumbled down amid the flow, Excalibur clutched in his hand, arms flailing as he plummeted into the slime.
“Cricket!”
Eve slung Lemon’s jacket aside, plunged back out into the sludge. She pawed through the awful stuff, face twisted, gagging. Feeling no sign of the little bot, she drew a shuddering breath and ducked below the surface, clawing through the muck. Finally, her fingers found purchase on her stun bat and she kicked back up, the little logika clinging to the weapon’s handle. Eve fought her way back to the trash island, flopped down on her belly with the bot beside her.
Cricket was covered with sludge. He shook his bobblehead, slinging and kicking long, thick ropes of gloop off his mismatched arms and legs. “My vocab software lacks the capacity to describe how disgusted I am right now.”
“Think about how I feel,” Eve coughed. “I had to jump back into it to save you.”
“What is this, snot?”
Eve shrugged. Her skull thudding in time with that colossal pulse. She put her hand to her Memdrive, wincing at the pain. White light flashed in her mind. Jumbled freeze-frames. Faces she didn’t remember seeing. Words she didn’t remember saying.
“Where are we?” Cricket asked.
Eve couldn’t reply. Eyes closed. Just trying to breathe.
“… Evie, are you okay?”
Breathe.
“… Evie?”
It was happening again. She could feel it, coming on like a flood. Another rush of images, broken kaleidoscopes and shattered picture frames. She squeezed her eyes shut tighter, trying to hold on, her fingers digging into her arms as if to stop herself from flying apart. Cricket’s voice, somewhere distant. Calling her name.
Breathe.
“Evie?” he cried, shaking her arm. “Eve!”
Just breathe.
“… What’s happening to me?”
1.9
KRAKEN
Father says building a mind is like building an engine: easier if you take the parts from somewhere else, rather than weave them from nothing at all. And so he modeled the lifelikes after people he knew. Copied pieces of people he loved. Sat us in smooth, shell-shaped chairs and fit ’trodes to our temples and recorded our personalities. Our patterns. Breaking them down into equations and encoding them behind beautiful eyes of midnight black and old-sky blue.
Grace is patterned on my mother. Raphael, on my eldest sister, Olivia. Hope, on Marie, and Gabriel, on my father. Faith is apparently modeled on me.
We do become best of friends, just as Faith promised. We talk for hours about nothing at all. I love my brother and sisters, my family, but the life we live here in Babel is so sheltered. Our parents have kept us so far apart from the world most people know. I’m fifteen years old, and I realize I’ve never truly had a friend.
Until now.
Some of the lifelikes perform duties for Father, help him run the company he’s slowly coming to rule. He’s a genius, you see. Everyone at Gnosis Laboratories says so. Grace follows him like a beautiful shadow, accompanying him to board meetings and documenting his every thought and word. Gabriel and Ezekiel train with the security crews in the tower’s lower levels. Their purpose seems to be to protect us. But some of the lifelikes apparently exist only to learn. Faith is like that, watching with those lovely gray eyes as Marie and I talk or argue or laugh together. Faith seems to know me like no one else does. Asking questions that strike right to the heart of me.