The Book of Olivia Read online

  And so, my story was over, but Axel’s… his had just begun. It was a story for another day. Tonight, we celebrated our freedom in Aeropia and embraced what we’d been given.

  A second chance.

  Long live Aeropia!

  May it be worth our sacrifices.

  Epilogue

  I saw him this morning, standing across the courtyard, just inside the open door of the conservatory. Weeks had passed since I made my choice, yet it seemed like eons. He’d not been around, and I had ached every second of his absence. There was nothing I could do about it. I’d made my proverbial bed—and now I must live with it.

  As I watched, I noticed his mouth was set firm and a line creased his forehead as though he concentrated on a grave topic. I remembered how it was to kiss those lips, to comfort him when he was troubled. I recalled the moments we’d shared when we would hold each other and talk for hours.

  “You can’t love me.”

  “Don’t tell me who I can love. There’s nobody else I want.” Pain racked my body, starting in the pit of my belly, reaching out with icy tentacles to my fingers and toes. Oh how his words had made me ache. It had been years since our argument, and yet my wounds felt fresh—raw and open. “Please don’t you tell me what I can and cannot feel. Not you.”

  “You’ll condemn yourself to a lonely life, Olivia. You can’t love me.”

  In the end, I had condemned myself as he’d warned, but not because I loved him—because I couldn’t love him.

  “Tell my heart and head that.”

  “No, you just told me not to.” The memories from before the uprising assaulted me, and I found myself frozen, unable to stop watching him.

  As intense as ever, I could see the gears turning in his head through his actions. He plucked a leaf and rolled it between his new fingers, his cyborg limb working as fluidly as the one it replaced, the only thing different about the man I fought so hard to save, and in the end—lost. He watched as the brown vegetation crumbled and fell to his feet. For a moment, he stood flash-frozen in time, an image from my past—the boy I fell in love with so long ago—the same man I couldn’t let go of now.

  My hand slid over my breast, and the beat of the organ underneath thumped against my palm. It spoke to me—no, screamed. Sacrifices. My mother made them. I’d made them, but I never knew how much it would hurt to do what was right for my people instead of doing what my heart wanted.

  Oh, how it hurt.

  Axel looked up, in my direction, but I didn’t dare to move. With the sun in his eyes, it would have been reasonable to assume he couldn’t see me in the window, but my body told me otherwise. In my belly, the awareness woke, activated by one soul recognizing another. I couldn’t tell you exactly how it worked, only that it was real. There existed this connection between two people meant to be, and Axel and I shared it. Try as hard as I liked, I could not deny it.

  A tingling started in my face, blooming across my cheeks to a warm flush. It rolled down my chest, speeding my pulse, and it became difficult to breathe, but what triggered it wasn’t a malfunctioning heart. Shortly after, my stomach fluttered. I knew then, without a doubt, he’d seen me. “Shit.” I jumped back and bumped into my husband.

  “What?”

  “A spider… on the sill.” I sucked in air now that I could, and turned around, giving Marcus a smile, the kind a doting and faithful wife would give her spouse. Yet it, like the fictional arachnid, was an untruth. My life had become full of them and in short order. One look at the clone below and I knew I’d never stop loving him.

  “Nothing to fear. It’s probably more scared of you than you are of it.”

  “Of course.” I raised up on my toes, giving him a peck on the cheek, and brushed past, anxious to lure Marcus from what I’d really been looking at. I didn’t love him the way I did Axel, but that didn’t mean I wanted to hurt him. When I stopped at the door and glanced back, I noticed him at the window. He’d drawn the curtain aside with one finger and peered out. He didn’t say anything, but I wondered if he’d spotted him.

  “I’m going for a walk. Are you coming?” I wanted to grab him, lead him from the glass, but I knew that would create more questions I couldn’t answer.

  “Sure,” he said as he surveyed the courtyard. He released the drape, and the fabric dropped shut. “Most spiders are harmless. They will leave you alone if you leave them alone.”

  Marcus was a good man—the right man for me. He’d seen Axel but had chosen to be diplomatic, giving me a gentle warning. I was to stay away from Axel. I’d made my decision.

  They say if you tell a lie long enough, it becomes real. I wondered when that would happen. I’d become so very weary of living an untruth.

  Preview of Clone, The Lost Chapters

  A bump jolts me awake. I lift my head and a warm breeze ruffles my hair. It’s not like the waves haven’t bounced the five-acre field around like a trampoline with half a dozen six year olds attempting to reach the moon. It’s the suddenness that’s grabbed my attention, even while I slept so deeply a storm wouldn’t have woken me. The bump had substance, the kind that means I’ve hit something stationary after floating for what I can only guess is around three weeks on the open ocean.

  I have survived on solar-powered water filters that pulled moisture from the air to recycle it into drinking water, and hydroponic crops grown on a floating agricultural mat. In the center is a guard post and control center. It provides some shelter from the sun and operates everything from the misters to the clear high-tech fabric that would form a giant dome over the fields during heavy storms, protecting crops from salt spray. The twelve-foot deep field consists of fruit trees and vegetables of every possible type, a marvel that took a decade to design and another ten years to build. There were hundreds of these fields where I came from, but, like myself, it finds itself a rare commodity on an alien beach.

  Inside my cabin, there are hundreds of thousands of seeds, filed by genus. Each is a viable beginning for a plant that not only will provide food but additional seeds for future generations. I could very well be holding the agricultural Genesis of the new world.

  My only companions have been robotic bees I have modified to run on solar power. We are not friends but survivalists. I need them to pollinate my crops and they need me to keep their power cells operational. I’m not their biggest fan, but, then again, I didn’t have a choice about bringing them along, not if I wanted to keep the crops producing so I could eat. I have also built a micro computer to fit on my wrist. It houses the motherboard from their hive so they can follow me around once we make shore.

  I am their queen been. I hold the kill switch and the remote guidance capabilities they once had full control over. They cannot function without me, and this is how I want it to stay. While planning my trip, I decided I might need a weapon when I landed in a foreign land. I can only begin to guess the dangers I might or might not face, and the bees were the best I could come up with on this man-made arboretum. They are what I know and understand, and are unbelievably dangerous for such a small package.

  I have not lacked food or water, but I have missed human companionship. A sharp pain, akin to a stab to the heart, knifes through me, leaving me feeling as though I’d boxed my way to a championship belt only hours before, weak and beaten. I have left all I know behind.

  As I turn to look at what brought me to a sudden stop, I feel like the only human remaining on the Earth. How could such a vast space, that once held a massive population, be so empty? Only the waves slapping against the field, a few sea gulls and a seal barking somewhere near the shore, make any sound. This place is the definition of desolation and isolation.

  When my supervisors asked me a few months back where I imagined myself in the future, I never would’ve envisioned this, alone, among three dozen or so partially sunken ships that dot an otherwise empty harbor. It is a boneyard of rusted metal and past mistakes. I have seen my share of shipwrecks, but never a place so void of life. In the distance, towers
of partially collapsed buildings stand guard over what could only have been a massive metropolis before the Great War. Vines and plants cover the sides of buildings, creeping over stone and metal and covering the cables and beams of a bridge that spans the harbor in the distance.

  My five acre field has snagged on a partially collapsed pier. I will need to tie it off or risk floating back out to the ocean on the tide. Not that I couldn’t survive on my living raft, but I have missed land and the company of people. This raft will provide all the food I will ever need, and it is best I secure it as soon as possible.

  I shade my eyes and study the city. Perhaps out there somewhere in that wasteland I will find others like me, orphans of their destinies? There is only one way to find out.

  I grab a spool of wire and begin lashing the mat to the dock. It will hold my field in place until I can relocate it. If I should change my mind about my new home, I can always take a pair of wire cutters to the lines and float back out with the tide.

  In my gut, I know that won’t be the case. Fate waited for me here. She brought me to this crumbling city for a reason, and I have to believe that. Without purpose, I am nothing, a flea on this giant planet.

  My name is Iia Danner. I am the last of the Danner line and a woman with too much living for her twenty years of age. I come from the island chain of Sententia and I have never been so out of my element.

  But perhaps I should start at the beginning so you know why I can never go back.

  * * *

  Sixty-five million years ago Earth experienced a mass extinction of the dinosaurs. Though they weren’t affected by smog, pesticides or war, something triggered their demise and, in a short time, only skeletons remained to tell the story. Great craters left behind in the Earth’s crust pointed toward the cause, but the scars of the planet, the bones of the dead, didn’t give scientists the complete story, only theories to argue about.

  I’d thought that’s all we’d have left if we couldn’t get the hives up and running properly again. Our need for self-preservation had brought us to a solution that no longer worked. We had no other way to bring our crops to fruit, then again, we didn’t want anything to abandon our destructive behavior. A certain amount of laziness comes with technology. We’d become addicted to our leisure, protecting it whatever the cost. We’d gambled, tinkering with nature, and, until that moment, when the bees stopped pollinating crops, there hadn’t been a problem. We could have changed our fate, stopped the self-created storm of destruction rolling toward us.

  We had everything we ever wanted but complained it wasn’t enough. So we pushed boundaries, sought out greater wealth, power, and prestige. We cared little for anyone on the outside. In our minds, they didn’t exist, and if they did, they were not our problem.

  Now, everyone had a theory as to why we had to resort to artificial bees for our survival in the first place, but none proved to help with the problem. A rift developed and the otherwise peaceful island chain became divided on what needed to be done to fix the situation. No matter what caused the problem, all the arguing wouldn’t change what would happen if we didn’t repair the technology.

  The islands, once called Hawaii, now known as Sententia, had all the amenities of home sweet home, but mankind had been too greedy to think it through. We wanted, we took and did whatever we needed to hold that ground and keep it for ourselves. In our minds, the people of Sententia were the only ones worthy to hold such power.

  Before the Great War, the scientists had built an engineering marvel to power our cities and make life easy and convenient. Great shields we’d added to become invisible had an unknown benefit when all hell broke loose, and prevented most of the missiles from impacting our cities and suburbs. For several years after the bombs dropped, Sententia was Utopia while the rest of the planet could only be described as a charred version of its former self. Knowing if we were discovered, we’d become a target, we chose to close ourselves off from any who might have survived the destruction.

  We built great walls, sealed off our borders, shut down outside communications, and, for forty years after the war, we lived in our little cocoon, oblivious to the world outside, preferring to keep it that way.

  At first, they, the outsiders, tried to contact us, but we ignored all attempts. Sensing a threat, our communications satellites were disabled by our own leaders, who preferred we play possum, and we went into a kind of blackout. They sent a few ships to sail across the oceans; we destroyed them before they reached our shores. Air travel was impossible without a long distance tower on the mainland receiving our signal. So, our government felt it would be prudent to disable the towers on our island that had once linked to them. A precaution, they told us, should survivors of the war pour in like locusts, exhausting our resources. We left them incapacitated. Anyone not a Sententian, wasn’t welcome, and, as far as we were concerned, had dug their graves. We were happy to let them lie in them.

  Though we had more than enough to share, we argued we didn’t not have the resources to share, nor would we abide their filth comingling with our society. They, our government decided, would have to make it on their own. After a few years, the attempts at communication from the other side of the planet ended. Perhaps they feared we no longer existed, or maybe they had simply died off. Whatever the reason, we never heard from them again.

  But that did not matter. We had the perfect existence. A massive power net called the Finis, blanketed the island chain and its waters, providing a safe and remote energy source. Our people wanted for nothing and, if anyone else survived outside our dome of existence, we didn’t care, as long as they stayed away and did not encroach on what belonged to us.

  No fuels meant no emissions fouled our skies. Anywhere you went in the bubble, available power could be found, snatched out of the air and used without fear of running out. Vehicles traversed with it. Air ships flew across the sky using it, and communications ran on it. Anything technological relied on it. It was the first thing that went back in before we rebuilt the cities on the outskirts of our kingdom and created the massive barricades to keep others out. We used it to power our equipment and build our perfect civilization. The net became as much a part of Sententia as the people.

  It took but a few years for our dream life to turn into a nightmare.

  Something about the power grid confused the bees. At first, with our technology in its infancy, the bees survived. Little impacted them. But as we became for greedy for convenience, increasing the power we consumed, the bees began to dwindle, and, with them, our food supply. After the expense of time and money, man refused to abandon the lifestyle he’d become accustomed to and was determined not to let something as small as an insect stop him from enjoying all technology had to offer.

  Apis mellifera, the common honeybee, had an immense job to do and should help crops to thrive within our dome of existence, but the scientists quickly learned that was not to be the case. The bees were unable to locate their hives and would fly around in circles until they dropped dead. Over and over, Sententia’s scientists tried to reintroduce them with the same result. No matter what subspecies of bee we farmed, crossbred, genetically altered, we found ourselves with empty hives and piles of useless carcasses. Soon, we ran out of drones and queens.

  The crops wouldn’t fruit and had to be hand-pollinated, preventing the land from creating enough food to support a population of living creatures. Thus, mankind could not live in his new designer ecosystem. For over twenty years, we struggled to find a solution, unable to colonize our shiny new cities.

  It took the genius of a nano-scientist to create a bee the infrastructure would accept. From there, the efficient ento-robites went to work, creating a Garden of Eden for mankind, running on the never-ending supply of power the net provided. After our lands once again became habitable, the population within our island kingdom exploded. Even so, the bees kept up, providing all we needed.

  Nirvana.

  The robotic bees, called Teslan bees, or ento-robites,
each had a computer for a brain, which responded to the hive’s commands. They could run for ten hours before they had to return to the hive to reboot their processors and receive new commands. Without doing that, they would do one of two things. They’d fly away to who knew where, failing to pollinate, operating off the never-ending supply of power, or they’d shut down their processors and drop, useless, to the ground.

  Twice as big as a bumblebee, the size necessary to house the energy pack that would harness power from the net, the bees looked frightening to those who had never seen them before, but we’d been assured they were safe. They were without stingers, had over twenty-four legs to make them more efficient with their primary function, and looked more like a flying brush than a bee.

  They had the ability to collect data and learn from that data, like when, where, and what plants or trees needed pollination. They did their jobs and then some—developing hybrids and heavy fruit-bearing varieties. The Teslan bees were even smart enough to know what plants should be cross-pollinated to get the best results.

  Then a storm on the sun flared up, sending out electromagnetic pulses, resulting in the robites refusal to pollinate. Many shut down before they made it back to the hives to refresh their programming, others vanished. Every day, workers had to go out and collect the disabled bees and return them to their stations to reboot. Some we never located. The scientists couldn’t keep up with building new ones to replace the lost, and the numbers of Teslan bees were dwindling with the food supply.

  In the last fifty years, nobody had seen anything like it, and the population began to panic. We activated the long distance travel and sent ships off to the other side of the planet to seek help. They never came back. We did not know what was on the dark side of our world, only what used to be there—and at one time, we’d ignored them. So mass evacuation was not an option, and neither was re-supply. Our government informed us in no uncertain terms we, Sententia, were on our own. No humans existed beyond our borders.