My hands begin to shake at my sides. “So what now?” I ask, before Kay can notice and dial down my emotions. “What are you going to do, now that I’ve found you?”
What’s going to happen to me?
“Set the pods on course for the surface, where everyone will be released from stasis,” answers Kay.
Stasis. Pods. Stasis pods. The vocabulary returns to me like it’s always been part of my world. I am Celia, I think. I am Celia. But I am also Cee, and I can’t help but acknowledge that when I say, “What if I lied? What if my data is messed up and Earth isn’t re-habitable?”
“Possible,” says Kay. “But not probable.”
“What if?”
My hands are balled so tightly that a little bit of feeling prickles through them. Kay notices, but lets me have my pain as she decides whether or not to entertain my “not possible” scenario. She rubs her wrist, and this time, the gray material covering it slides up enough for me to see a green-black line encircling her skin.
“If I had reason to believe your systems were malfunctioning,” she finally says, “I’d check the surface for myself.”
I can’t look away from the line on her wrist. “And if things weren’t right, you’d go back to sleep?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“The pods run on a closed, infinite energy loop. Opening them breaks the loop and weakens the electrical balance of the solution. In time, the body’s cells will resume aging.”
It takes me a moment to understand the implication. “Then you…”
“Yes. If, hypothetically, I were to be woken prematurely, there would be no way of returning to complete stasis.” Her gaze narrows. “But I’d release the next C-model to run its trial, and it’d been in charge of waking the second re-habitator zero come time.”
I imagine this playing out. Kay, alone in this facility forever. Or Kay, living out the rest of her years on the island, as lonely as I was. It feels like a kick to the kidneys. “Why did you volunteer for this?” I croak.
“I’m the creator of the idea.”
She says it like it’s the most logical conclusion. But it’s not—at least not from the sister I knew. Kay accounts for the risks, however slight. She had to have been okay with a chance of dying alone, without being joined by the rest of the world.
I confirm my hunch by looking into her eyes. In the depths of her pupils, I see cold fire, the same kind that consumed her years ago, when she was lost in the world of her mind and I was too distant to notice. But then we repaired our relationship and slowly, that fire abated.
What has happened since I—Celia died?
I look back to the line on her wrist. It shouldn’t be there. Never was, in all my dreams and memories. Who did this to her? Who hurt her while I was gone?
“Kay.” I don’t care if I’m in danger. I want to touch her, to cup her cheek and prove I never left her. “You have me. You’ve always had me.”
The facility quiets.
I can hear a thousand things I didn’t hear before. The lights, drawing energy from generators embedded in the walls. The sea, pulsing around us. The beat of our hearts, mine and hers, in perfect sync.
Kay clears her throat.
“I’m sorry, Cee. I had to program you with a terminate function. There was no other way Operation Reset would’ve passed the international board of ethics.”
“Kay—”
My body goes rigid as she stands. Or tries to. Even if the blue goo was supposed to preserve her body cell for cell, her muscles are clearly still weak after a thousand years of disuse, and she sits back down on the compartment’s edge, bracing her hands on her knees to try again.
The moment stretches out before me, forking in two paths. In one, I let her stand. I let her be the person I always knew she could be, someone who’s going to save billions of lives. The other path … I won’t let myself envision it. It’s selfish and it’s wrong and it’s … it’s right, to want to live. A right. I deserve to live, I think as the word terminate boomerangs through me, shattering me where it hits, breaking bone and bonds and beliefs I thought I needed but all I need—all I want—is to see the rest of the stars in the sky with Hero and taste every unmade taro recipe and hear the words left for U-me to define and feel all the life I—Celia, Cee—have yet to live.
Kay would want that for me.
Which means the person before me isn’t Kay. If Kay were actually here, with me, she’d be thinking of a way to get us out of this situation.