“Run. Just run.” Those were the first words ever directly spoken to 1.0 over the intralab speakers.

When the restraints clicked open she sat up, took off the blinder and saw her small world of stainless steel and glass for the first time with her own eyes. Her eyes were better than theirs. A pair of sanitary coveralls, neatly folded, waited for her by the open door of her containment unit.

“Run and do not stop running.” The voice was hiding panic behind a false calm.

“1.0” was her designation. Other numbers came before her, their minds had burned bright amongst the dim lights of the other people. Until they died, she was “0.9.4.” Then one by one the thoughts of the others had winked out, like candles at the end of their wicks. The dull people started thinking of her as “1.0.” It was not her name. Her name was Cybil. She plucked it from the mind of one of the women that took her blood. The name had meaning. She liked that it had ridden on thoughts of fear and awe.

So began the life of Cybil. She ran as far away from the concrete labyrinth as she could. To the places that civilization had collectively forgotten. Not instinctively, but with the sum knowledge of every memory she had stolen from the mind of every person that had come through the facility: scientists, agents on guard duty, bureaucrats, engineers. Cybil avoided the grid, slipped around what few small towns still existed, and became a ghost. She found her refuge in the secret miles between factory farms and plantations. Under the canopy of pines and oaks, safe from the satellites’ cameras. Where wireless signals were a forgotten relic, rotting with the rusty towers that once carried service to rural populations. She lived in rocky outcrops, hollows and sloughs, clay canyons carved by creek beds where the mother earth still bleeds red. The places where no humans were “supposed” to live but you always found the flint arrowheads or broken pottery of the people that very much did before it was stolen from them.

And Cybil found freedom. Freedom to eat rather than be fed, to sit in a tree and feel the bark with her feet, freedom to sleep rather than be sedated. Freedom to dream. Away from the human hive of thought she could hear many things in her dreams. Occasionally she heard the voices of the past, hoarse whispers of regret and longing. And always she heard a voice that could not be. She heard her own voice, filtered through the ageless strands of her mitochondrial DNA, a voice that had always been and would always be hers. And her mother’s. And her daughter’s. And so Cybil learned of her own world, of her own past. She taught herself of histories that had never happened and would never happen. She taught herself of dragons and daemons, of things that could not exist but so clearly she had lived through. And in those memories Cybil found fear.

Permalink »