Emily Tree

By R.A. Conine

EMILY LEFT THE WARMTH OF THE BED and crossed the carpet. She was naked and uncaring. She went to the great windows facing the mainland and stood for a while, staring outward. She gazed across the bay at the towers and spires of the dead metropolis, her mouth working soundlessly.

Eddie watched her, relaxed, his head resting on a flattened palm, his body adrift in a storm of sheets. Her Nordic flesh was colorless, so white and translucent she was nearly blue. She was all azure veins, gently rounded curves and rolling, sinuous muscle. She moved like an albino cat, gliding rather than walking, nearly untethered from the Earth and gravity.

He had never met a woman who looked so cold. He took a sort of selfish pleasure in the way the morning sun warmed her skin with subtle hues of rose and peach, transforming her into something she wasn’t. She seemed to have a luster then, at dawn. But the glow was brief and false. It was missing the rest of the day. Her personality was as bereft as her pale flesh. There was no pleasure or angst in her, no extremes of emotion or desire. She simply was.

She passed the long days as she walked, with feline grace and dignity, uncaring and detached from all that concerned him. Not that they didn’t laugh and enjoy each other’s company. Not that they didn’t share many of the same pleasures. Still, she lacked something important. He wanted badly to give it to her, to make her whole and joyful again. But he could not identify, much less find, the puzzle pieces she had somehow misplaced.

She turned, her swan-neck arching gracefully, her cheeks glowing in the soft morning light. A cascade of blonde hair fell to her hips, enveloping her softly padded woman’s body like a shimmering cloak. She said, “Let’s go into the city today.”

He was surprised. He stared past her moon-white shoulders, through the green glass and across the restless, choppy water. Hong Kong had been a sprawling city of seven billion souls. Now it was empty and still. There weren’t even any ghosts in that place.

His reply was full of concern. “You don’t want to go there. Remember how upset you got the last time? Remember how you felt after? It took you a long time to get over it.”

She nodded, her chin dropping. “I remember. But you shouldn’t have to do it by yourself. We’re supposed to be a team. Right?”

“We are a team,” he told her. “You do some things better than me and vice versa. I’m no good at cooking the stuff I find. You’re no good at ... dealing with dead things.”

“I know,” she conceded dismally. “But I can’t stay in here forever. I had a thought last night. I thought, everything is dead. What could possibly hurt me? That’s so, isn’t it?”

“Yes. You’re being brave right now. But what about when you have to step over the bodies? What about the smell? Do you remember the baby in the carriage?”

She nodded, once, twice, firmly, her eyes averted from his. He didn’t like reminding her. He felt terrible about it.

Nevertheless he said, “You thought the baby was alive. His eyes were open. He had beautiful blue eyes and he was staring right at you. Then the maggots ...”

“Stop it,” she snapped. “Just stop.”

“Alright,” he replied in a near whisper. “It was understandable, what you thought. Anybody could have made that mistake. Emily, I think you should stay here, in the apartment. Everything you need is here. I’ll only be gone a few hours. I was just going up-island a bit, to check out the shops at Skyline Terrace.”

He was lying. Skyline Terrace was all emptied out. There was nothing left on that miserable sandbar, no food or fuel for the generator and certainly no medicine. The island’s residents should have been safe. They were isolated from the mainland by six miles of open water and constant scouring winds that carried away the sickness. But they panicked anyway. They cleaned out the stores and fled with everything they could carry. He doubted any of them were alive now.

He continued, “I wasn’t planning on crossing the bay today. I might not go again for weeks. We’ll need some things before winter sets in. We can’t get those on the island. But it’s only August. I’m not in any hurry”

She was resolute. “I want to go, today.”

“Why is this important to you?”

“I have my reasons, Edgar.”

“You’re being mysterious. And you almost never call me Edgar.”

“You don’t know everything about me and you don’t need to, Eddie. Sounds like a child’s name.” She sniffed condescendingly.

He was amused. “I know more than you think. I know when you decide to do something, there’s no standing in your way. I know your mind is like a bear trap. When it clamps down on some squirmy little thing, there’s no opening it up again.”

“True,” she admitted.

“Will you take the pills? They’ll help your nerves.”

“But they make me sleepy.”

He looked at her reprovingly.

She said, “Okay. I will. Then it’s settled? We’re going?”

The whitecaps on the restless bay, the looming gray heavens and her determined attitude filled him with anticipatory dread. She’d made a decision about something. It involved the city. A storm was coming. He was sure of it. “We’ll go. But when I say we’re going home, we’re going then and there. Am I clear?”

She feigned a smile. He knew it was fake. She hadn’t really smiled in a long time. “Of course. What you say goes.”

She didn’t take the pills. She didn’t really need them.

* * *

The ride to the mainland took nearly two hours. Victoria Harbor was wide, deep and subject to many of the same forces and stresses as the open ocean. When there was a storm at sea, the harbor was upset too. He didn’t cut right through the waves as he would have done normally. He took it slow and avoided the rough patches. The old wooden cruiser was sluggish and subject to rolling and he was concerned about Emily’s stomach. If she had a bad time of it on the way in, they’d both suffer the rest of the day.

He’d considered upgrading to a fancier boat but there was no place on the island to dock and maintain a larger vessel. And he hadn’t cared much about comfort until then. After the incident Emily stayed away from the boat and wanted nothing to do with the mainland. For months the supply run had been a solitary passage, his only company the marine radio.

As usual, he spun the black dials trying every frequency. He was in signal range and in the clear. If anybody was broadcasting live he’d have heard them. As expected, the only thing he got was a looping series of locational pips broadcast by Hong Kong Maritime Rescue Coordination Centre. It was a comforting noise, very human in its precision and sameness.

Without the beeps the city would have been completely silent. He’d thought about going out to Pier Road to shut off the tape. It would have been a small mercy. He wasn’t above that. In another time and another universe he’d been a pathologist, a very good one. He was the kind of doctor who always remembered to shut the eyes of the dead after an autopsy, except when there were no eyes to close. His colleagues didn’t care. But he was different. He couldn’t stand to see the corpses staring like that, cold, blind and somehow vulnerable.

In the end he didn’t turn off the tape. The silence, the void, the knowledge that nothing would ever live in that place again, would have been unbearable. There was still a flicker of hope buried in his chest like a slumbering coal.

Emily came up from the little cabin with its miniature kitchen and sleeping quarters. She was looking slightly green. The diesel fumes were bad down there. They worked a particular kind of voodoo on the human physiology. The saltiest tar would have vomited after an extended stay in that place.

She sat beside him on the bench taking deep breaths, balancing a tray of sausage and cucumber sandwiches on her knees. She didn’t eat. Her long hair was tied back in a thick ponytail. Her eyes were bleary. She yawned constantly. She was fighting back the nausea. He knew the symptoms too well. He said, “Watch the horizon. It doesn’t move. If you focus on it, the sickness will go away.”

“I’m okay,” she reassured him for the tenth time. “Those noises on the radio ... do you know what they are?”

Of course,” he replied immediately. “Navigational broadcast on a loop. Somebody at MRCC left it running.”

She stared at the sandwiches. She was trying to make some sort of point but he couldn’t figure out what it was for the life of him. Eventually she asked, “Do you hear anything at all, from out there?”

He nodded. “Sometimes, on good days, I can get what sounds like people in another room from a station in Guangdong Province. But it’s not voices. It’s equipment still running in the background, a generator maybe or an air compressor. That’s all I’ve ever heard.”

She looked at him with a bland sort of stare. They’d had so many similar conversations. “Do you think we’re the last ones?”

He shrugged. “It’s hard to say. I think it’s possible but not probable. There are likely some others who were also isolated and resistant. The nuclear submarines stay down for months at a time. There could be a few crews down there who weren’t infected. I remember they were beginning to incorporate women onto the ships in the last few years. If they find a place that’s clean, they could start over.”

“Why do you think we survived?” she asked suddenly.

He shrugged. “Biology’s a funny thing. You know, mankind was nearly wiped out several times. About a million years ago there was some big event that killed off all but about two thousand of us. Not many breeding pairs left. Really cut down on genetic mutations, which is why everybody is ... was pretty much the same wherever you went. Everybody was susceptible to the same afflictions and viruses, like cancer, arthritis, flu. We were vulnerable after that. We were never a hardy species. We just bred fast. Kill us a little faster than we breed and that’s it. That’s what the virus did to us”

She took his hand in hers. “Do you remember, was it a disease, a natural thing?”

“I don’t think so. I’m pretty sure it was a bio-engineered plague, something out of a Chinese or American lab. But we’ll never find out. And anyway who cares. It’s over now. In a few years there won’t be anybody left to read the history. In a few million, there won’t be much evidence left that we lived here.”

“The submarines,” she persisted. “You said they could start again ...”

“I don’t give them much of a chance. Bio-diversity is what keeps a species going. We’ve been bottlenecked a bunch of times, reduced down to a few breeding pairs. We’ve been losing ground in terms of diversity and mutation all along, getting weaker. It was only a matter of time before nature wrote us off. Getting off the planet and spreading out might have saved us. But all we did was sit on our opposable thumbs and squabble over dwindling resources. We’re a stupid species, Emily. I think the ants will do a better job with things.”

She smiled. “All of us are silly monkeys. That’s what you used to say. Remember that?”

He didn’t really. But he said he did.

She continued, “You know what surprised me the most?”

He shook his head.

“That the cockroaches didn’t make it. I thought they’d outlive us.”

He laughed. “Cockroaches and Keith Richards. Problem with roaches is they shared about fifty percent DNA with us. And they lived with us, off of us, ate our food, drank our tap water, and crawled around in our walls. They threw in with us as a species and staked their survival on what we did. Not a smart move. Now ants, they’re really different ...”

She stopped him, squeezing his hand. She stared into his eyes. “How do you feel, Eddie?”

He shrugged. “Okay, I guess. Why?”

“Because I worry about you. It’s like some part of you is missing. Are there gaps in your memory?”

His forehead creased and his eyes played over the breaking waves. “I suppose. But nothing serious or unusual. Why would you worry about me?”

She looked away. “It’s nothing. Tell me about the ants.”

“Well,” he said. “They have almost no genetic resemblance to us, so ...”

So it went until they tied up at Aberdeen. Pretty much everything was still afloat in the harbor, including the tourist junks and the famously gaudy Jumbo restaurant. The weather had been calm for nearly a year. No monsoons or high winds had swept through the place. Despite the peaceful conditions, a number of the fragile sailboats were succumbing, shipping water and listing, their untended wooden hulls giving way to the corrosive sea air and heavy barnacle growth.

One made him particularly sad. It was an old J-Class racer that had been lovingly restored. It managed to survive the pre-war austerity years when most of the expensive boats were seen as needless toys and scrapped. In later years it was sailed onto a reef by a drunken captain and left to rot. It was eventually refloated and repaired by an Australian entrepreneur. It won a longshot second America’s Cup victory eighty-nine years after its construction. And here the old dame sat, sails mildewed and green, decks covered with fungus, leaning sharply to port. Nothing could save her now, nothing on Earth.

On his first trip to the city he found the owner of the yacht hanging from a spar, a homemade noose looped around his broken neck. He went up there to cut the man down and nearly fell. He might’ve died. It was then he decided he couldn’t and shouldn’t do anything more for the dead. Living was more important.

They followed Market Street, past the bus and rail station and up to the cluster of shopping centres at St. Nicholas. It was a long, hot hike. There was no driving in that place. The streets were impassable, clogged with derelict automobiles filled with desiccated bodies.

Once infected, painful headaches and vomiting set in quickly. This was followed by severe sweats, debilitating fever, thickening blood vessels and eventual death by thrombosis. The time from onset to demise was pegged at around seventy-two hours. The strong were able to keep moving for much of that time, until the blood clots, aneurysms, and strokes felled them like trees. That’s why there were corpses everywhere, as if they were all caught by surprise. They weren’t of course. They were in a mad panic to outrun something that was already in them.

She stood on the sidewalk while he explored a little store filled with tinned goods. He carried out armloads of the precious loot and dumped the cans into a shopping trolley. She gazed around at the dying trees, the blackened lumps that had once been living people, and the dark windows.

Eventually she said, “I’m thirsty. I know where there’s a wine bar.”

“Oh good,” he said, wiping away sweat. “I could use a drink.” He started to push the trolley up a little hill but she pulled him away. “Leave it. We’ll get it on the way back. It’s not like anyone’s going to take it.”

“That’s true,” he said agreeably. “Let’s just remember where we parked it.”

There was no wine bar. Instead, she led him up King Street to a great plaza backed by a building made almost entirely of glass. They crossed a wide brick esplanade and trudged through a park filled with dead grass and soaring modern sculpture, most of the pieces reaching heavenward like jets of solid flame.

“What is this place?” he asked. “It doesn’t look like a bar to me.”

She gripped his hand tightly. They entered through broken doors, stepped over a spray of glass shards and stood in the lobby for a moment, staring at the gunmetal architecture. The reception desk had been ripped out and only bolt holes were left. The singular adornment in that place was a blazon of wall-mounted letters spelling out the words, “Turing Institute LLC., Hong Kong, Paris, London, New York.”

He said, “Funny. That’s my name, Turing. Definitely no wine here.”

“Do you remember?” she asked suddenly.

“No,” he replied. “I don’t know why we’re here, Emily.”

She stared at him hard. “You don’t remember anything?”

He was suddenly guarded and a little disgruntled. “I already said I don’t. It feels kind of familiar. I might have passed this place when I was foraging by myself. But I don’t pay much attention to the buildings. I’m focused on other things. Have you been here?”

She nodded rapidly. “You’ve never been foraging by yourself. I’ve always been with you, Eddie. We discovered this place together. We’ve been in this lobby several times. But this is the last time we’re coming here. I swear.”

He blinked. “No. That isn’t right. I’ve been on my own since ... well, I don’t want to talk about it. You were in bad shape for a while.”

“The baby?” she asked. She didn’t wait for an answer. “The thing with the baby happened to you. It kind of ... broke you. You were strong for a long time, mostly for me I guess. But you were never the same after you found the baby. I’m not surprised you decided to attribute the pain to me. You don’t like thinking of yourself as the weak one. Come on. The elevators are still working. We’re going to the basement.”

“I don’t want to go,” he said firmly. “I don’t want to know.”

“You already know,” she corrected him sharply. “You’ve forgotten a lot. You’re confused. But you know. You need a little reminder, that’s all. I’ve put this off for a long time. But we have to make some decisions. We can’t wait any longer. Now come.”

“I can’t,” he said piteously.

She took his hand again and led him. He went meekly and without any further protest.

They stepped out of the wood-paneled elevator into a softly lit white corridor. Emily led them through a series of glass doors, all equipped with card readers and combination locks which either didn’t work or had been overridden and turned off.

He found the complete lack of decoration in that place frustrating. There wasn’t a single human touch or a hint at what the people who roamed those halls must have been like. The environment was all business, cold frosted glass, gray steel and neutral carpeting. It was modern. It was sleek. It was heartless, as devoid of life as the rotting city above their heads.

At last they arrived in a great central laboratory with ranks of humming computers and a central basin. From that well sprang a great metal structure, so complex it could easily have passed as expensive sculpture.

Eddie was reminded of the blank monoliths outside on the lawn. They bore more than a passing resemblance to the towering tree of metal limbs that graced the lab. Despite the strong lines and perfect angles there was an organic quality about the creation. He thought of a metal flame when he saw it, a jet of molten steel forced into a recognizable shape.

Each branch of the tree was laden with a capsule, a human-sized, glass-walled, liquid-filled canister. In each canister floated a body. They were all the same, blonde-haired and translucent-skinned with powerful Nordic features. They all looked just like Emily.

His jaw dropped. He said, “I don’t understand.”

She didn’t explain. She led him to a raised platform and up a set of glass steps. They entered a small, glass-walled office that offered a breathtaking view of the laboratory and the tree. Here there was a little metal desk and on it a calendar blotter, journals filled with scrawled notes and a few gilt-framed photos. She picked one up and handed it to him.

He saw a middle-aged, bearded man in the picture, standing next to a woman with bland blue eyes, blonde hair and aging Nordic features. There was some weight on her bones and gravity had not been kind to her. But it was Emily. There was no question about it.

She asked, “Do you recognize the man?”

He pursed his lips and shook his head. “Is he ... related to me? I can see some similarities.”

“In a way,” she answered. “He made you. He made me. In another lab there’s a tree just like this one. That’s your tree. The man’s name is Edgar Turing. He founded, designed and built this institute. He was a pathologist, like you. He lived on Salt Island, like you. He was married to Emily Nystrom, like you. And he knew a lot about genetics, just like you. He was a brilliant genetic engineer, one of the best who ever lived. He cloned you and he cloned me. He raised us like his own children. I think he hoped that we would take over his research when he stepped down, that we would keep up the work.”

Eddie placed the picture on the desk again, reverently. “I don’t remember any of it. I thought ... I was Edgar Turing. But I’m not. Am I? Why am I so confused?”

She looked at him sadly. “There was a problem, a genetic breakdown that he never anticipated. It began to manifest when we were teenagers. We started to forget things. We regressed. We had to be reeducated. The memory lapses grew worse as we aged. You were severely affected, much more so than me. You forgot everything. You had to be constantly reminded of where you were, who you were, and what happened just yesterday. I took a lot of that responsibility on myself. I guided you, protected you, even when Edgar became horribly frustrated. But I have my own problems. It’s getting worse. I’m afraid one day we’ll wake up and we won’t know each other.”

“Oh,” he said, surprised. “That’s why we survived. We’re not like everybody else, are we? We’re genetically different, like the ants.”

She nodded encouragingly. But he didn’t offer anything else. Eventually she said, “I’m like the real Emily, strong. But it’s not very useful to us. You’re the smart one. You’re the key. You think like Edgar. He was teaching you. Do you remember?”

He nodded, frowning. “A little, I guess. Not much.” He did remember endless lessons and Edgar’s growing weariness and disappointment in him. He forgot. He kept forgetting.

She gazed at him bleakly. “I was hoping you could study the notes and maybe ... fix this. Maybe we can build a new Edgar and Emily. They can remember things and resist the virus. They can start over. They can be a new Adam and Eve. Can you do that?”

He shook his head slowly. “No. It’s gone too far. My higher functions are compromised, damaged. I wouldn’t know where to begin and the work is too ... complex. I can tell you some things. The stock on the trees, it’s not viable. Look at the ages of those Emilys: mid-thirties. They’ve been in the tubes since we were born, maybe even before that. Edgar was testing different genetic strains, experimenting with RNA variations. I think he was trying to overcome the human bottleneck, the lack of diversity in the species. He was trying to save us. But the virus killed him before he could codify his breakthroughs. It killed Emily first. He was beside himself.”

She bit her lip. “Can we wake them up? Can we set them free?”

He ran a tired hand through his hair. “Maybe. But do we want to? They’ll be like infants. Do you want to raise and educate a fully grown woman who’s bound to have terrible genetic disorders? With us it’s memory. With her, who knows?”

“What should we do?” she asked weakly. “I don’t know what to do anymore.”

He gazed at the women in the tubes. Their eyes were all open. They were staring coldly into space. He said firmly, “We turn off the lights. We close their eyes. We go home and live the best we can, for as long as we can. I love you, Emily. I will always love you, no matter what happens to my mind.”

She nodded and smiled through rising tears. “And I you, Eddie. I love you, always.” 

R.A. Conine is a Navy veteran and former counter-intelligence and anti-terrorist analyst. His published novels include “Dreamtime,” “Hellpointe,” and coming soon, “Lords of Dust.” He is a member of the HWA and the National Freelancers Union.