Fragments

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Afa slept on a king-size bed on the seventh floor of the building, in what looked like it used to be a dressing room. Kira tucked him in like a child before searching for a room of her own, eventually finding a vast, dark studio with stadium seats on one side and half of a stylized living room on the other. A talk show set, she guessed, though the logo on the back wall didn’t spark any memories. She knew that talk shows existed, because someone had watched one in her house—her nanny, maybe—but she doubted she could recognize even that one’s logo. Afa had filled the chairs with boxes, each carefully labeled, but the talk show couch was empty, and she checked it for spiders before laying down her bedroll and going to sleep. She dreamed of Marcus, and then of Samm, and wondered if she’d ever see either of them again.

There was no natural light in the building, thanks to Afa’s logical insistence on blackout curtains, and even less light in the studio, but Kira had been fending for herself for too long, and jerked awake at the same time as always. She found her way to a window and peeked out, seeing the same familiar sight that greet her every morning: ruined buildings laced with green, and tinged with blue light as the dark sky turned pale in the sunrise.

It didn’t sound like Afa was awake yet, and Kira took the opportunity to skim through some of his files, starting with the boxes in the studio. They were numbered 138 through 427, one box per chair with more ringing the walls, back-to-back around the entire perimeter of the room. She started with the nearest box, number 221, and pulled out the page on top, a folded printout with a faded military letterhead.

“‘To whom it may concern,’” she read. “‘My name is Master Sergeant Corey Church, and I was part of the Seventeenth Armored Cavalry in the Second Nihon Invasion.’” The First Nihon Invasion was one of the early major defeats for the NADI forces in the Isolation War, the world’s failed attempt to take back Japan from a suddenly hostile China. She remembered learning about it in school in East Meadow, but didn’t remember much of the details. The Second Nihon Invasion was the one that worked—the one where they went back with two hundred thousand Partial soldiers and drove the Isolationists back to the mainland, kicking off the long campaign that finally ended the war. It was the reason the rest of the Partials had been built. Kira read more of the letter, some kind of battlefield report, recounting the man’s experience fighting alongside the Partials; he referred to them as “new weapons” and said that they were “well trained and precise.” Kira had grown up knowing Partials only as bogeymen, the monsters that had destroyed the world, and even having met Samm—even knowing that she herself was some kind of a Partial—it was strange to see them referred to so positively. And yet so clinically, as if they were a new kind of Jeep from the quartermaster. The master sergeant mentioned that they seemed “insular,” that they kept to themselves and ignored the human soldiers, but that was hardly a negative—a bit ominous, in light of their eventual rebellion, but not immediately threatening or scary.

“This is how it started,” she said out loud, setting it down and picking up another paper from the same box. It was another combat report, this time from a Sergeant Major Seamus Ogden. He talked about the Partials the same way, not as monsters but as tools. She read another document, then another, and the attitude was the same in each one—it wasn’t that they thought the Partials were harmless, it was that they barely thought of them at all. They were weapons, like bullets in a clip, to be spent and used and forgotten.

Kira moved to another box, 302, pulling out a newspaper clipping from something called the Los Angeles Times: PARTIAL RIGHTS GROUPS PROTEST ON CAPITOL STEPS. Beneath it in the box was a similar clipping from the Seattle Times, and beneath that another from the Chicago Sun. The dates in this box were all from late in 2064, just a few months before the Partial War. Kira would have just turned five. Obviously the Partials would have been all over the news at the time, but she didn’t remember her father ever talking about them; now that she knew he’d been working for ParaGen, that made more sense. If he’d worked with them, or even helped create them, he would have had a different attitude from the rest of the world—probably a pretty unpopular attitude. At least I hope he had a different attitude, she thought. Why else would he raise one as his daughter? She vaguely remembered her nanny as well, and a housekeeper, but they never talked about Partials either. Had her father asked them not to?

Had they even known what Kira really was?

Kira turned to the earliest numbered boxes in the room, finding number 138 and pulling out the top piece of paper. It was another newspaper clipping, this time from the financial section of something called the Wall Street Journal, describing in vague terms the awarding of a massive military contract: In March of 2051 the US government contracted ParaGen, a budding biotechnology company, to produce an army of “biosynthetic soldiers.” The focus of the article was entirely on the cost of the project, the ramifications for stockholders, and the impact this would have on the rest of the biotech industry. There was no mention of civil rights, of diseases, of any of the massive issues that had come to define the world right before the Break. Only money. She searched through the rest of the box and found more of the same: a transcript from a news interview with ParaGen’s chief financial officer; an internal ParaGen memo about the company’s new windfall contract; a magazine called Forbes with the ParaGen logo on the cover and the crisp silhouette of an armed Partial soldier in the background. Kira flipped through the pages of the magazine, finding article after article about money, about technologies being used to make more money, about all the ways the Isolation War, despite being “a terrible tragedy,” would help heal the American economy. Money, money, money.

Money had a place in East Meadow society, but that place was a small one. Almost everything they needed was free: If you wanted a can of food, a pair of pants, a book, a house, whatever it was, all it cost you was the effort to go out and find one. Money was used almost exclusively for fresh food, things like wheat from the farms and fish from the coastal villages—things you had to work for—and even then, most of those commodities were traded in kind, through a barter system in the marketplace. Nandita and Xochi had built a lucrative business trading herbs for fresh food, and Kira had always eaten well because of it. Money, such as it was, was usually just work credits: government vouchers for her time spent in the hospital, her reward for performing a vital service that didn’t actually produce a tradable commodity. It was enough to keep her in fresh fish and vegetables for lunch, but not much else. It was a minor, almost insignificant aspect of her life. The documents in box 138 described a world in which money was everything—not just the means of sustaining life but the purpose of living it. She tried to imagine being happy about the war with the Partials or the Voice, rejoicing because it would somehow bring her extra work credits, but the idea was so foreign she laughed out loud. If that was how the old world worked—if that was all they really cared about—maybe it was better that it had fallen apart. Maybe it was inevitable.

“You’re real,” said Afa.

Kira spun around, startled, hiding the magazine behind her guiltily. Would he be mad at her for looking at his records?

“Did you say I’m . . .” She paused. “Real?”

“I thought you were a dream,” said Afa, shuffling into the room. He stopped at one of the boxes and sifted through it idly, almost as if he were petting an animal. “I haven’t talked to anyone in so long—and then last night there was a person in my house, and I thought that I’d dreamed it, but you’re still here.” He nodded. “You’re real.”

“I’m real,” she assured him, placing the magazine back into box 138. “I’ve been admiring your collection.”

“It has everything—almost everything. It even has video, but not in this room. I have the whole story.”

Kira stepped toward him, wondering how long he’d stay talkative this time. “The story of the Partial War,” she said, “and the Break.”

“That’s just part of it,” said Afa, picking up two stapled sheaves of paper, examining his own pen marks in the upper corners, and then reordering them in the box. “This is the story of the end of the world, the rise and fall of human civilization, the creation of the Partials and the death of everything else.”

“And you’ve read all of it?”

Afa nodded again, his shoulders slack as he moved from box to box. “All of it. I’m the only human being on the planet.”

“I guess that makes sense, then,” said Kira. She stopped by a box—number 341—and pulled out some kind of government report; a court order, by the look of it, with a round seal stamped in the corner. She wanted answers, but she didn’t want to pressure him again, to freak him out by saying or mentioning anything he didn’t want to remember. I’ll keep it generic for now. “How did you find it all?”

“I used to work in the clouds,” he said, then immediately corrected himself: “In the cloud. I lived my whole life up there, I could go anywhere and find anything.” He nodded at a box of dusty clippings. “I was like a bird.”

I saw your name at ParaGen, she wanted to say again. I know you have information about the Trust: about RM, the expiration date, what I am. She’d been looking for these answers for so long, and now they were right here, split into boxes and trapped in a failing brain. Is it just from the loneliness? Maybe his brain works fine, he just hasn’t spoken to someone in so long he’s forgotten how to interact with people. She wanted to sit him down and ask him a million questions, but she’d waited this long; she could wait a little longer. Win him over, don’t freak him out, get him on your side.

She read a bit of the court order in her hand, something about the words “Partial Nation” being declared a sign of terrorist sympathy. Students couldn’t write or say them on school campuses, and anyone caught using them in graffiti was subject to prosecution as a threat to national security. She waved it lightly, grabbing his attention. “You’ve got a lot about the last days before the war,” she said. “You’ve really worked hard to put this together. Do you have anything . . .” She paused, almost too cautious to ask. She wanted to know about the Trust, which Samm had implied was part of the Partial leadership, but she worried that if she just blurted it out, like she had with ParaGen, he might shut down again. “Do you have anything about the Partials themselves? The way they’re organized?”

“They’re an army,” said Afa. “They’re organized like an army.” He was on the floor now, looking at two of his boxes and the papers in them; every third or fourth one he frowned at and moved to the other box.

“Yes,” said Kira, “but I mean, the leaders of the army—the generals. Do you know anything about where they are now?”

“This one died,” said Afa, holding up a paper without looking away from his boxes. Kira walked to him and took it carefully; it was an article from the New York Times, like some of the others she’d seen, but printed out from a website instead of clipped from a real paper. The headline read NORTH ATLANTIC FLEET SUNK IN LOWER BAY.

Kira looked up, surprised. “They sank a Partial fleet?”

“The Partials didn’t have a navy,” said Afa, still sorting his papers. “That was a human fleet, sunk by the Partial Air Force, just off the shore of Brooklyn. It was the biggest military strike in the war, in retaliation for the death of General Craig. I have one about him, too.” He held up another page, and Kira snatched it away, poring over the information: “‘General Scott Craig, leader of the Partial uprising and former mouthpiece of the Partial rights movement, was assassinated last night in a daring strike by human commandos—’ We killed him?”

“It was a war.”

“And then they destroyed an entire fleet.” She counted up the ships in the article, a massive group sailing north to attack the concentration of Partial forces in New York State. The ships had been undermanned, their crews already ravaged by the plague. “Twenty ships, and they just . . . killed everyone on them.”

“It was a war,” said Afa again, taking the papers from her hands and dropping them back in the box.

“But it didn’t have to be,” said Kira, following him across the room. “The Partials didn’t want to kill everyone—you said yourself that they weren’t evil. They wanted equality, they wanted to live normal lives, and they could have done that without killing all those thousands of people on those ships.”

“They killed billions of people,” said Afa.

“Do you know that for sure?” Kira demanded. “You have all these documents and articles and everything else—do you have something about RM? About where it came from?”

“I’m the last human being on the planet,” he said loudly, walking more quickly to stay ahead of her, and Kira realized that she was practically shouting at him. She backed off, forcing herself to calm down; he had to have something about the virus, but she’d never find it without his help. She need to keep him, and herself, calm.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry I got loud. I’m very . . .” She took a deep breath, collecting herself. “I’ve been looking for some very important answers, and you’ve found them, and I just got overexcited.”

“You’re still real,” he said, backing into a corner. “You’re still here.”

“I’m here and I’m your friend,” she said softly. “You’ve done an amazing thing here—you’ve found all the information I need. But I don’t know your system; I don’t know how it’s organized. Will you please help me find what I’m looking for?”

Afa’s voice was soft. “I have everything,” he said, his head nodding up and down. “I have almost everything.”

“Can you tell me who created RM?” She clenched her fists, forcing herself not to get loud or aggressive.

“That’s easy,” said Afa. “It was the Trust.”

“Yes,” said Kira, nodding eagerly, “the Trust, keep going. The Trust are the Partial leaders, the generals and the admirals and the people who made the decisions, right? You say they made RM?” That was completely the opposite of what Samm had told her; he’d insisted that the Partials had nothing to do with it, but she’d already suspected that might be a lie—not Samm’s lie, but one that had been told to him by his superiors. If the cure for RM was in their breath, manufactured in their own bodies, then the connection between the Partials and the virus was undeniable. To learn that they had created it and released it was an easy jump to make.

And yet Afa was shaking his head.

“No,” he said, “the Trust aren’t the Partial generals—they aren’t even Partials. They’re the scientists who made the Partials.”

Kira’s mouth dropped open in shock. “The scientists? ParaGen? Humans?” She struggled for words.

Afa nodded. “The Partial generals still follow the Trust; I don’t know why. That’s where they get all their orders.”

“The Trust,” said Kira, forcing the word out. “The Trust created RM.”

Afa nodded again, never stopped nodding, rocking his whole body slowly back and forth.

“So the people who destroyed the human race were . . . humans.” She groped for a chair, realized they were all full of documents, and sat heavily on the floor. “But . . . why?”

“I know everything,” said Afa, still rocking back and forth. “I know almost everything.”