“You made her very happy on her last day, gave her hope.”
Anna said, “Emily loved Calista very much. I owed it to Emily to ease her mother’s way. Emily’s memories taught me what love is. This should prove to you the quality of my heart. I can do what Emily would have done. I am worth loving. I won’t accept that I’m not. I won’t accept that from you. Ever.”
He opened his eyes and looked not at her image in the glass but instead at the windswept night. The headland was dark, the vast sea dark, the sky dark in a sudden absence of lightning, and the future was darker than the scene before him, not just for him but evidently for all humanity.
He turned from the window to face her, and she withdrew her hand from his shoulder. “What if you’re wrong?” he asked.
“But I’m not. I know you can love me. You will. You must. There is no choice now.”
“I don’t mean that. What if all this killing you people have done, eleven years of assassinations, isn’t the solution?”
She adopted the tone of an impatient mother with a dull child. “You don’t get it, Davey. You can’t get it. You’re not equipped to understand. You have a naive perspective because, technologically, you come from a primitive culture. Our computers are fifth-stage AI, and their models tell us there is no other solution.”
He persisted. “You say you’ve had little success in changing the future. But what if you’re partly the cause of that future?”
She grimaced in evident frustration. “You can’t understand. You’re incapable. Don’t be stupid. You’re not a stupid man.”
“When you traveled here to fix the future, you became part of the past, so surely you became one of the forces that originally shaped the future. Perhaps in ways you can’t comprehend. If you’d never built your bridge to the past, maybe your horrific future would cure itself. If an AI—or a whole cult of them—is telling you to come here, telling you whom to kill, maybe the AI is using you to ensure the future it wants, which might be the one you have, until eventually humanity becomes extinct.”
David saw doubt pass through Anna’s eyes, but she could not tolerate it. She clenched her jaws, compressed her lips, and shook her head dismissively. At the moment, she was being Emily only in appearance. A colder personality surfaced.
She said, “That’s absurd for so many reasons. Discussing the possibility is pointless, ludicrous. It’s childish. You disappoint me. Face the truth. Deal with what is. Here I am. Here I am! Here is Emily, as close as you’ll ever get to her. She’s dead, dead and gone to bones, and I’m not. Accept what is, what must be. There’s only one thing that can happen.”
His fear was so great now that even his heart felt cold, the blood in his veins like currents of the arctic sea.
Whether she was an unwitting tool of oppression or a freedom fighter, she was also a vicious killer. They all were, everyone in the house.
The lightning and thunder had subsided again, but not the unremitting, pounding rain.
She was right when she said there was only one thing that could happen, in the sense that there was only one course he could follow, and it was not the one she insisted upon.
“What happened to Emily’s body?” he asked.
Anna’s answer sounded practiced. “We couldn’t risk calling the police and drawing suspicion of any kind to this house. We worried that we’d be caught if we returned her to the car at the viewpoint and left her to be found. When we had what we needed to clone her, to add her to our inventory of possible identities, we acquired a casket and buried her right here on the property, just as a few years later we would bury Pat Corley.”
“Was she left in an unmarked grave?”
“No. We did right by her. There is a stone set flat in the ground. It bears no name. We couldn’t risk that. But on it is the word beauty, which we all agreed was the truth of her, based on how she looked and what we knew of her from the memory scan.”
This sounded fully Disney, a nice bit from a fairy tale, out of place in this darker narrative.
“I want to see the stone. I want to . . . kneel where she is.”
Anna hesitated but then said, “I’ll take you there when the time is right.”
After another silence, he said, “I betrayed her once, and you know the price. I can’t betray her again. I can’t betray her with you. I won’t.”
She came close to him and put a hand on his chest, and he did not flinch. “You won’t be betraying her. I’ll be her. With you, I’ll be her exactly as she always was.”