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Thirteen

[["The story is just a bit strange and has Amarillo, Texas, usually a staid oil and farming community, abuzz.

"Apparently, one of the Rewound Children, Paula Katherine Deborah Caulfield, was abandoned by her legal guardian, her sister, Georgeanne Dumas, at the behest of the two women's mother, Henrietta Caulfield. This would make the third Rewound pushed out by family, but this case was a bit unusual. Ms. Dumas took Paula to the Amarillo Wal-Mart store on the pretense of doing some Christmas shopping and abandoned her there. Paula panicked at first, wandering the aisles crying and confused, according to Texas family welfare officials, but she was afraid to approach strangers. Now, Paula had worked at this store as a cashier for fifteen years, and knew the place pretty well. Well enough, in fact, to find a niche to hide in when the store closed. She avoided the security guards, who never did figure out she was there. For five days, she lived in the store, borrowing fresh clothing off the racks and food from the grocery areas. This is Wal-Mart, after all, and she should have been able to find whatever she needed. And, apparently, she did.

"Wal-Mart officials have said with the Christmas crush keeping store associates busy, it probably was easy for her to go unnoticed. As for her former co-workers, none recognized her because, as one pointed out, asking not to be put on camera, Paula Caulfield used to be heavyset, moved rather slowly, and always complained about her feet. How could we, the co-worker said, recognize her as a small child?

"No one can say how long things might have remained this way if two other Rewound Children, Linda and Jerry Rithen, hadn't accompanied their son, Dale, to the store. Paula saw the Rithens and told them what was happening, and Dale Rithen agreed to take her home. Store officials still haven't discovered where she hid all this time. Dale Rithen and his wife, Sue, designated guardians for Linda and Jerry, have officially petitioned to be the designated guardians for Paula, which is how the story finally came to light. The final decision will be made by the Alden Commission.

"Dale Rithen, who works for a local natural gas company, has declined to be interviewed. The Rithens also were in the news lately after winning a case against former creditors. Texas authorities say no action will be taken against Ms. Dumas or Henrietta Caulfield because of the extraordinary circumstances surrounding the case. As one social worker put it, Paula's mother is eighty-six years old, and just how much of a burden can an elderly woman be forced to take?

"Marinka Svoboda, CNN, Amarillo."]]

 

* * *

 

December 18

I don't yet completely know how this works in a normal human, much less someone who's had their cells rejiggered by an offworld visitor.

Miranda stared at the single neuron and its attendant dendrites and axons floating before her in virtual three-D. This particular neuron was an assimilation of data from various noninvasive scans of one of the Rewound Children, combined into a graphic representation by a supercomputer chain at Livermore and Los Alamos.

"Rewound Children." She grimaced inwardly every time she heard it. She was responsible for the name, which made it worse, but it also trivialized them.

She sat back, stared at the image, mind drifting to other neurons in other heads, and wondered how the personalties of, say, Sumo and the Harpy, could emerge from the tangles.

She could see Harrison Conroy—Sumo—wrapped in his suit of brown as immovable as one of those bulky wrestlers on the couch in Avram's Washington office. On the other end was the Harpy—despite all her efforts, Miranda could not shake the image of a bird with a woman's breasts and Radmilla Everett's face flitting around the stoic mountain of a man screeching and berating. The names had popped suddenly into a tired brain suffering from having to fly an all-nighter to another meeting.

"I can understand your distress, Dr. Sena—" Radmilla had begun with the smooth tones as she always used, but Miranda's perkiness refused to be roused.

"Distress my foot," she had snapped, rousing a different emotion. "Three deaths and three disownings. I would say that constitutes an emergency."

"Aberrations, Doctor. Overall, the success rate of assimilation has been successful."

"It ain't over until the fat lady sings. And in this case, she's going to be singing dirges for seventeen innocent lives lost because of bureaucratic ineptitude—"

"Really, Avram," Conroy said from the couch, "I don't know why you insist on bringing Dr. Sena to these meetings. We can't get much done because of her, well, her—"

"Hot Latina blood?" Miranda said.

A red flush chased a look of shock across Conroy's face. Avram chuckled.

"I need an ally," the elder scientist said. "Dealing with you two is like swimming in gravy."

"Look," Conroy said, pulling himself erect, "I've told you before, the consensus is we're on the right track. A couple incidents are to be expected. Not with quite the deadly force expected—"

"The coroner's report on Charles Romplin said because of the close range, the pellets did not have time to spread," Miranda said. "Many of them ripped through several organs before imbedding themselves in the door."

"What is your point, Doctor?" Radmilla asked, black-stockinged legs clamped together with knees at the apex of a sharp angle at the edge of the couch.

"Your complacency is what's aggravating. Two violent deaths and a possible suicide and you treat it like normal everyday circumstance. We warned you this would happen."

"What would you have us do? Assign a psychologist to each one?"

"I return to the idea I had before of the central place to let them stay and—"

"Dr. Sena, you don't understand," Conroy said. "The world is more complicated than that. Such a project would be a drain on our resources. And, frankly, there are more important things for this government to consider. The President just came off a bruising campaign and will face a Congress split between three parties. She is sympathetic and wants to help your group of people, but for God's sake there are only fourteen of them. She has to deal with many issues that affect everybody in the country, not just a small group, no matter how unfortunate recent events have left their lives."

"You're the one who missed the point, Mr. Conroy," Miranda said, rubbing the back of her neck. "This goes beyond a third political party or any other issue the current president or any current member of Congress thinks—"

"I fail to see how this small group—"

"It's not just that group, damnit. It's the Holn, man, you have no idea what they represent for every man, woman and child on this planet. No idea whatsoever."

Conroy stood up, and a half-second later, Radmilla shot up as if a broken spring had stuck her. "I think this conversation is ended," he said. Sumo lumbered out with the Harpy at his heels.

Miranda watched the door close, then said, "You think they're lovers?"

Avram burst into laughter.

He wasn't finished with her, though.

"All entreaties to the Holn are going unanswered. They're ignoring us, absolutely, completely. Desperation calls for any idea, no matter how wild. Ben wants you to send a message."

She stared at him. "Me?"

"Not as scientific head of the task force, but as the human who discovered their creativity. We think you made quite an impression and they might remember—and respond."

"Well, I . . . if you think it has even a slight chance of helping."

"We have nothing to lose by trying."

Back in her office, still staring at that same neuron, Miranda sighed. She had written and rewritten the message. Then she set it all aside.

"Rotate, all axes," she said. The pyramidal neuron slowly presented all its prickly sides like a chicken on a rotisserie. A comparison routine against a standard neuron had found polarization–depolarization occurring within normal chronological and chemical/biological parameters.

Still, the Holn could have introduced a subtle change, say a variation in the way the transmitting neuron jumped its signal across the synapse, or perhaps the way the chemical ions bound. Such changes almost would have to be that tiny; nothing on a larger scale had been discovered. These brains seemed to process information the same way "normal" brains did. The trouble was, the picture of how "normal" brains operated still was incomplete. On top of that, each person's genetic legacy caused variations in the thinking processes, and so did experiences and so did environment, adding a thousand more pieces to the puzzle.

She sat back. Perhaps she was letting Samuel Innes apply blinkers to her thinking, insisting something had to be different about these people.

The neuron still spun slowly before her. Just one, isolated, separated from its kindred.

"End rotation. Back seven." The single cell shrank and was joined by others until it disappeared into a net of ropy connections like Spanish moss hanging from a tree.

What do I see here? A personality, a character trait, an aberration?

The cells floating in front of her have been tampered with by agents of the same God the sisters the Catholic girls high school she had attended in San Antonio believed in so fervently as the prime mover of all in the universe. She put her elbows on the desk and rested her head in her hands. Back at the apartment complex where she lived, holiday lights snaked around the buildings and up the naked trunks of palm trees. Christmas—a celebration of the birth of the Lord Jesus, or just a myth sprung full-blown from a tangle of neurons, dendrites and axons? Where do the Holn fit into the Christian pantheon? Or—where does Jesus fit into the Holn pantheon?

Miranda pushed herself erect. Too many undisciplined thoughts rumbling through her brain. She took several deep breaths, stretched her legs and arms, tried to focus her mind on the task at hand.

You don't know what you're looking at.

She sighed, angry at the refusal of those thoughts to go away.

You don't even know who you're looking at.

A physical jolt snapped through her body at that thought. This could be one of the dead ones—

"Reference: Name of subject."

A blue window popped out of a corner: SUBJECT NO. 2 stood out in white letters.

"Cross-reference," she snapped. "Personal data."

Three seconds passed.

SUBJECT: MARIAN ANNE ATHLINGTON

AGE: 41

FORMER OCCUPATION: PLANNING ANALYST, CITY OF BELLINGHAM, WASHINGTON

"Marian Anne Athlington." She tasted the syllables with her tongue.

?? COMMAND.

"Buzz off." The window disappeared.

Somewhere in the real brain, represented here only by a computer-generated tangle, neurons were firing in a constant pattern, delineating all of what Marian Anne Athlington was—personality, curiosity, fear, love, hate, her vision of the world, the way she reacted to stimuli. Unique, at least as far as any measure now known could tell. Her past determined everything she was now—and a whole new set of conditions, never before encountered in any shape or form by any human, were creating new patterns that would take her life in totally new directions.

Who is this person?

Miranda realized she could not put a face to the name. Suddenly, it wasn't enough.

"Back, next stage."

The tangle coalesced into a solid mass of cells. The view switched to the outside, where the smoothness of the surface became convoluted with fissures and curves that folded and refolded around each other. Movement stopped.

"ID portion."

LEFT HEMISPHERE

FRONTAL LOBE

INFERIOR FRONTAL CONVOLUTION

"Total hemisphere."

The brain moved away from her while adding more mass to itself until the left hemisphere cortex had formed, with the striated cerebellum just visible underneath.

"Rotate."

The right hemisphere was missing, exposing the thalamus, hypothalamus, fornix, amygdala, hippocampus, limbic system, pituitary gland—connections, wiring, transmission circuitry. Plus the pineal gland, where the soul once was thought to inhabit.

"Where has the romance gone?" a pre-event Dr. Innes had asked at a symposium in Switzerland.

Gone to MRI, CT, PET, and computer crunching.

"Complete brain."

The right hemisphere's convoluted form quickly spread into its niche, obscuring the inner parts, snuggling up against the other hemisphere, forming the "two brains" of humans. The whole structure rotated to a bottom view. The midbrain formed, the pons swelling to fill the cavity, then extended downward to form the medulla, the vital switching center for so many automatic body functions. The brain stem continued downward to form the head end of the spinal cord. More rotation, and the occipital lobe came into view, cerebellum fitting snugly below. The right auditory nerve extended out and stopped, and as the frontal lobe again swung into view, the olfactory nerves grew, stopped in bulb-shaped ends. Then optic nerves, originating in the lateral geniculate nucleus, extended outward, crossed and swelled. The white sclera formed spheres, with the irides showing their lack of melanin in the bright blue rings surrounding the black dot of the pupil.

Rotation stopped. The brain of Marian Anne Athlington stared back at her.

The naked eyeballs began to make her nervous. Out of all the dissected heads and brains she'd seen and handled in her career, only this configuration ever gave her the willies. She felt she was being mocked: How can you know me?

Sometimes she wondered.

"Finish."

The pia mater began to form over the convolutions like Spandex. At the same time, nerves extended outward like live tendrils. Olfactory. Oculomotor. Trigeminal. Glossopharyngeal. Growing, splitting, reaching everywhere. Now blood vessels, tiny, hairlike at first, swelling as they formed branches and grew into more branches. The arachnoid membrane blanketed the pia mater; then the dura mater—now, finally, bone began to form, cranium first, coming together at the fontanelles. The Holn had left the edges soft, telling Miranda they expected growth.

Swelling into the domed heads of bug-eyed men of science fiction, minds seizing control of hapless humans, making them do vile things—

"No," she said softly.

The cranial bone swept forward to the face, wrapping sockets around the eyeballs, building up into the nasal passages, sweeping down into the jawline. Teeth appeared in the upper and lower jaws, giving the old grin of death—until things like worms began to wriggle out of the orifices, squirming and spreading; more blood vessels, nerves, and the beginnings of tissue, attaching first to the seven bones of the face and spreading upward to the cranium. The tissue spread into striated muscles, wrapping over and around, turning red with the iron oxidation of the blood. Now these began to disappear in turn under the subcutaneous tissue, fat cells and dermis, in turn erupting into sweat glands and hair follicles, nerve endings and capillary networks, turning the whole head into a grainy mass of wriggling tissue. Then the epidermis spread, smoothing and covering, softening the edges and giving definition to the face. The auricles took shape on each side of the head as darker cells filled into lips.

Now the face looked human, or at least not something out of a horror movie. Clusters of hair formed into eyebrows as eyelashes grew out of eyelids that finally reduced the wide stare into a steady gaze. Long strands of dark brown hair by the millions sprouted out of the scalp and flowed down each side of the face like a scarf.

The machine beeped.

COMPLETE

ELAPSED TIME: 3 MIN 22 SEC

That long? A face now peered out at Miranda, who unconsciously touched her own hair, cut short at the base of her neck. The face carried all the attributes commonly associated with beauty—clear skin, high cheekbones (which she had noted back in the skull stage), lustrous hair (she impatiently let go of her own locks), firm mouth.

"Reference, this subject, image before June 10."

Several seconds passed until the computer beeped, opened a new window next to the simulation.

PHOTO TAKEN 1-17-03.

Definitely. Both as child and adult, this woman was a classic beauty.

But—

Who is this person?

Miranda decided to find out. She would talk to them, discuss their situations, let them know what the task force was finding out, what the future might hold. It wouldn't be much, but it would open lines of communication.

Before they all die.

She grimaced. "Reference, this subject, current status."

She'd ask a couple of the others if they wanted to go. Matt, Constance, Randall, Olive, for sure, maybe Wanda. Dr. Innes? She smiled at the response she might get from him.

The computer beeped and she froze halfway toward standing up. Her smile disappeared. A chill swirled over her body like a blast of icy wind. She stared hard at the words on the screen:

STATUS: UNKNOWN

 

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