Thunderhead (Arc of a Scythe #2)(22)

The elder scythe took the wheel this time. The hood was dented, but the car still started. ?They backed up, carefully avoiding the boy in the road. Then a shadow fell over them. It made Citra gasp until she realized it was just the ambudrone arriving for the boy. It ignored them and went about its business.

There was only one residence on that road—only two people who would be driving it that morning—so there was no question that they had been the targets. If that wire had been tripped, there wouldn’t be enough left of either of them to revive. But the day was saved by this mysterious boy, and Citra’s bad driving.

“Marie . . . who do you think—”

Scythe Curie cut her off before she could finish. “I am not partial to uninformed conjecture, and I would appreciate it if you did not waste your time in guessing games, either.” ?Then she softened. “We’ll report this to the scythedom. They’ll investigate. We’ll get to the bottom of this.”

Meanwhile, behind them, the ambudrone’s gentle grappling claws grabbed the body of the boy who had saved their lives, and carried him away.





* * *




Human immortality was inevitable. Like cracking the atom, or air travel. It is not I who choose to revive the deadish, any more than it was I who decided to halt the genetic triggers of aging. I leave all decisions on biological life to the biologically living. Humanity chose immortality, and it is my job to facilitate their choice—because to leave the deadish in that state would be a severe violation of the law.? And so I collect their bodies, bring them to the nearest revival center, and return them to full working order as quickly as possible.

What they do with their lives after they are revived is, as it has always been, entirely up to them. One might think that being rendered deadish might give a person increased wisdom and perspective on their lives. Sometimes it does—but such perspective never lasts. In the end, it is as temporary as their deaths.

—The Thunderhead



* * *





10


Gone Deadish


Greyson had never lost his life before. Most kids got deadish at least once or twice growing up. They took more chances than kids had in the mortal days because the consequences were no longer permanent. Death and disfigurement had been replaced by revival and reprimand. Even so, Greyson had never leaned toward recklessness. Certainly he’d had his share of injuries, but his cuts and bruises and even his broken arm had been summarily healed in less than a day. Losing his life was a very different kind of experience, and not one he cared to repeat any time soon. And he remembered every last bit of it, which made it even worse.

The sharp pain of being struck by the car was already being numbed as he was launched into the air over the car’s roof. Time seemed to slow as he tumbled. There was another jolt of pain when he met the asphalt, but even then, it was one step removed from the real thing—and by the time Scythe Anastasia had reached him, the screams of his devastated nerve endings had been tamped down to a muffled discomfort. His broken body wanted to hurt, but it was forbidden to. He remembered thinking, in his opiate-induced delirium, how sad it must be for a body to want something so badly and to be completely denied.

The morning leading up to his road-splat took a sharp turn from where he expected it to go. The way he saw it, he would simply take a publicar to the scythes’ door, warn them that there was a threat to their lives, and then be on his merry way. The threat would be theirs to deal with as they saw fit. If he was lucky he’d get away with it, and no one—least of all the Authority Interface—would know what he had done. That was the point of this whole thing, wasn’t it? Plausible deniability? The AI wouldn’t be breaking the law if Greyson acted of his own free will, and would be none the wiser if no one saw him do it.

Of course the Thunderhead would know. It tracked the movements of every publicar, and always knew precisely where anyone was at any given time. But it also imposed upon itself very strict laws regarding personal privacy. It would not act on information that violated a person’s right to privacy. Funny, but the Thunderhead’s own laws allowed Greyson to freely break the law, as long as he did so in private.

But his plans took an unexpected turn when his publicar pulled to the side of the road half a mile from Fallingwater.

“I’m sorry,” the car told him in its familiar cheery tone. “Publicars are not permitted on private roads without the owner’s permission.”

The owner was, of course, the scythedom—which never gave anyone permission for anything, and was known to glean people for asking.

So Greyson had gotten out of the car to walk the rest of the way. He had been admiring the trees, pondering their age, wondering how many of them had been here since the Age of Mortality. It was only luck that he looked down when he did, and caught sight of the wire in his path.

He saw the explosives only seconds before he heard the approaching car, and knew there was only one way to stop the car from barreling through. He didn’t think, he just acted—because even the slightest hesitation would have permanently ended all of them. So he hurled himself into the road, and surrendered himself to the time-honored physics of bodies in motion.

Going deadish felt like wetting his pants (which he may have actually done), and sinking into a giant marshmallow so dense he couldn’t breathe. The marshmallow gave way to something like a tunnel that came around on itself like a snake swallowing its own tail, and then he was opening his eyes in the soft, diffused light of a revival center.