Tag: fiction

Razor Mountain is a serial novel, with new parts published every week or two. For more info, visit the Razor Mountain landing page.

Christopher rubbed his eyes and forced the complaints of the voices out of his head. He found himself back in the apartment entryway, in front of the stone doors. On the wall screen was an image of Cain, standing awkwardly in the hall beyond the doors and holding a brown paper bag.

Christopher opened the door. Cain stepped inside and held up the bag.

“Breakfast, unfortunately.”

They made their way to the apartment kitchen, where Cain poured out a pile of pre-packaged breakfast foods. The cardboard boxes and plastic wrappers gave Christopher an odd emotional twang. These were cheap, probably unhealthy, and shockingly normal. They were the sort of thing he might eat in a hurry when he was late for work. They felt out-of-place and alien here.

“I was hoping to have a proper chef cook you something fancy, to celebrate your return,” Cain said, by way of explanation. “Instead, you get the bounty of my personal freezer. I’m afraid I have a weakness for the kind of food that takes no effort to make. I usually just want something I can throw down the hatch and get on with what I’m doing.”

He hefted his belly. “The results are self-evident.”

“This is fine,” Christopher said. “Maybe even weirdly appropriate for this morning. Besides, this is exactly the sort of thing I’d eat when…well, in my other life, I suppose you could say.”

They selected breakfast burritos and microwaved them while Christopher put a skillet on the stove and tore open a package of Jimmy Dean breakfast sausage links. Cain made a move to get in front of the stove, but Christopher waved him off.

“I’m not an invalid,” he said, then worried that he might come across as irritable. “I don’t mind doing things for myself. I don’t expect to be treated like a king.”

“Sorry,” Cain said. “It’s been a long time, and I’m not sure how to navigate…all this.”

Christopher chuckled. “Believe me, I get it.”

“I just thought today deserved some sort of, I don’t know, ceremony,” Cain said. “Of course, it should really wait until everything is resolved. I discovered that the hard way, this morning.”

“What do you mean?”

The microwave beeped, interrupting their conversation. Cain took one burrito and handed the other to Christopher. He ate one-handed and gave the half-thawed sausages a shake in the skillet.

Cain sighed. “There was a meal prepared—rather nice, I thought—but we did a test run last night, and I gave it to one of my engineers. Called him first thing this morning, and he was knocked out with food poisoning. Maybe proper poisoning, the doctors are looking him over now. Thus…”

Cain raised his partly eaten breakfast burrito.

“You used someone without their knowledge to test my food for poison?” Christopher said.

Cain shrugged. “I honestly thought it was far-fetched. But there were a number of people who would have known what I was doing and guessed the food was for you.”

“I don’t like the idea that someone might die that way.”

“You’d prefer to eat the poison?” Cain asked.

“Of course not. But don’t you feel bad about doing that?”

“I feel bad that the man is ill, but that doesn’t mean it was a bad choice. And hopefully it turns out to just be some coincidence or allergic reaction.”

Christopher studied Cain’s face. There was a streak of cold, unemotional intellectualism there that Christopher hadn’t noticed. The man was an engineer, and Christopher had known one or two engineers like that, who unexpectedly failed to grasp the emotional import of some things, despite being incredibly intelligent in other ways.

“So whoever killed me last time around may or may not be trying to poison me now?”

“We’ll have to make sure you only eat and drink things that we’ve thoroughly vetted,” Cain said. “I’ve also got people trying to trace the ingredients. The chef is also being thoroughly questioned, although I’ve known him for some time, and I don’t think he’d purposely do something like this, unless someone had some kind of serious leverage over him.”

Christopher took a fork out of the drawer and shuffled the sausages around the pan as they began to sizzle.

“This would all be a lot simpler if I could just shuffle through these memories in some kind of orderly way and open up the ones I need.”

Cain nodded. “But you’ve said that’s not how it works.”

“No, that’s not how it works.”

They stood in the well-appointed kitchen, finishing off their breakfast burritos, the sizzle and smell of the sausages filling the room. Christopher felt untethered from reality, unable to really believe in the sequence of events that somehow ended in this moment.

He dumped the sausages onto a plate. Cain followed him into the adjoining dining room to eat them.

“So what now?” Christopher asked. “There must be something I can do while I wait for the eureka moment.”

“I had some thoughts on that,” Cain said. “I thought it might be beneficial to meet with some of the other secretaries today. We’re all still getting used to the idea that you’re really back, and it would probably do them some good to talk with you in a venue other than a chaotic conference room. Of course, there’s some risk involved, whoever has it out for you might try something, but we can take precautions. And it might jog some memories loose.”

“It might,” Christopher said.

“If anyone does try something, it can be at the battle-ground of our choosing,” Cain added. “We have to assume they’re getting desperate, and that should play to our advantage.”

To Christopher, Cain sounded a little too much like a man playing a game. He wasn’t wrong, as far as Christopher could tell, but the man wasn’t in the cross-hairs. Christopher could feel worry lodged in the too-tight muscles of his shoulders and neck, the constant knowledge that someone nearby was desperate to kill him.

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Razor Mountain is a serial novel, with new parts published every week or two. For more info, visit the Razor Mountain landing page.

Christopher awoke.

Christopher. Not God-Speaker. Not yet.

His inner landscape had changed once again. There were still stray memories, like flags in the wind, untethered and confusing. Others were sorted and collated, slotted neatly into larger narratives, anchored to times, places, and events. The swirl of emotions in his chest had a different timbre, a different color. He couldn’t explain it to himself in less synesthetic terms.

He realized that the desire to return home, to return to Christopher’s life, had faded, even if it wasn’t quite extinguished yet. That life felt impossibly remote, and how could he ever return to it? How could he make sales calls with the voices of the mountain ringing in his ears. How could he visit his parents and talk about how the back-yard garden was coming along?

The things that made him Christopher hadn’t gone away, but they were being diluted by the flood of God-Speaker washing over them. Christopher had thought that the transition might be like flipping a switch. Now he realized it was more likely that he wouldn’t be able to pinpoint the moment when he crossed over. Perhaps he already had. Christopher wouldn’t go away. He would become a few small branches in a very large, very old tree of thought and memory.

He could see now that he wasn’t unique. There were many other branches like his. After all, this was how God-Speaker had always achieved his immortality. He jumped into the body of another. These vessels were typically prepared for the experience, and it would be done with great ceremony when the new host was a few years into adulthood. He didn’t like to make the transition more often than necessary, but if he was going to take on a new body, why not one that was young and healthy?

These new bodies weren’t empty. They brought with them the thoughts and memories of their original occupant. They weren’t wiped out—they were incorporated. And while God-Speaker was the dominant personality, especially with the accretion of years and memories, these others were still present in some way. They could not easily be pried apart; they were no longer their own entities. But Christopher could sense that some of them might be disappointed by what had become of them, while some would hold some amount of satisfaction or pride at being incorporated into this larger whole. Together, they were a power, a unique creature on the face of the earth.

The voices had also changed, or he was hearing them differently. They no longer grated against him or overwhelmed his other senses. They were still present, but he could more easily “tune” them in or out. He could set them aside and listen to the quiet of the room. He could concentrate on other things again. If he focused on them instead, he could hear them with a new clarity.

They still had a neediness, an irritating quality of demanding attention despite being utterly powerless. They were kings without kingdoms or subjects, still issuing opinions and decrees, and Christopher was the only one who could really hear them. Now, though, he understood that they were subservient. If they had some morsel of knowledge, he could take it, and they had no say in the matter. They wanted so badly to strike at him, to make him obey, but they could not. Some trick of evolution and brain chemistry prevented them from entering into him the way he entered into a new host body.

There was a buzzing sound, and Christopher realized it was the sound of someone at the main doors to the apartment. He stood, but he was in no hurry. This internal world was too interesting to set aside just yet.

He focused intently on the voices. There were many of them, but not as many as he had initially thought. They were a choir, not a crowd, even if they didn’t sing in harmony. They were so much like God-Speaker, and of course they were, they were the ones who had taught him the original trick to immortality. Despite their current impoverished state, they were far more than God-Speaker.

Christopher reeled in shock as he saw a flash of them as they truly were. They were so very old—less individual personalities and more geological forces. God-Speaker’s reign of a few thousand years under the mountain was nothing in comparison to them. It was too much time for Christopher to fit in his mind.

They were creatures born in the adolescence of a strange world. They had learned many things, and eventually, a few of them learned the trick to immortality. They had warped their people and their world around them, just as God-Speaker had done with Razor Mountain. They were true kings. They had watched a young world grow old and weary, and finally die. Even then, they remained kings, albeit diminished. They set out into a vast universe, confident in the long arc of time. Eventually, there would be another world, another people who were compatible enough to continue their endless line of immortal rule.

But destiny had a cruel streak, or a sense of humor. Something had gone wrong. They had found a new place, a new people ripe for control, but there was an accident. They had come down in a streak of fire and light, cracking the mountain asunder, bathing it in noxious smoke, and burying themselves deep in its roots. Still, it might have been fine, if not for the other problem. The people of this place, as primitive as they were, were somehow immune to the interlopers’ power. Their minds, so similar to the invaders’, were impenetrable. Most of them could barely even hear the voices howling their futile anger from buried caverns.

There was one who heard better than the others, one who followed the voices down into the darkness. But even that one could not be used. The voices remained trapped. Even worse, they were at his mercy, used for his own ends. They were forced to watch his petty kingdom rise up around them, in defiance of the vast domains that now lived only in their memories.

No wonder they were pissed.

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Razor Mountain is a serial novel, with new parts published every week or two. For more info, visit the Razor Mountain landing page.

There were other rooms accessible from the hall: a living room with luxurious couches, a bedroom, a bathroom, a kitchen. At the end of the hall were two more heavy doors, and these led out onto a balcony carved directly from the side of the mountain. Christopher unlocked them and stepped out.

It was drizzling, and the patter of it was a balm to his exhaustion. The balcony was cleverly concealed from below, and a roof of stone kept it mostly dry, but the far end was open to the elements. The small drops ran down the heavy stone railings and ran together, flowing into narrow slits in the floor.

Christopher lay on the cold rock with his head in the rain. He looked up, blinking against the drops. Fast-moving gray clouds streaked the black sky, but he could see a dark sky and a few stars beyond. Instinctively, he reached out a hand for a presence on his left. There was nobody there to grasp it. An aching loneliness filled him. He remembered a woman’s face, but he couldn’t think of her name. Whoever she was, she was gone. Thousands of years gone.

Other faces came to him then, and some he could put names to. Strong Shield, and others who had betrayed him. There would soon be another to add to that list. But really, who hadn’t betrayed him? They all died, all left him behind, going away and never returning. Going where he couldn’t follow. Wouldn’t follow.

He stood and wiped his eyes. Back inside he found the bedroom. He stripped off his wet shirt. There were still clothes in the drawers here, only faintly musty. He found something soft to wear and lay on the bed, on top of the blankets. The images still flickered on his eyelids. He held up a hand. It looked steady, but he felt as though he were shaking.

He stood and walked across the room. There was a long strip of dark glass, a gas fireplace stretching the length of wall. He turned the knob and pressed the ignition switch, setting the flames racing from one corner to another with a satisfying whoosh. It immediately put out heat, more than he really needed in the already-warm room, but the flickering firelight comforted him. He lay down again, imagining himself alone in a cave with a roaring campfire as his only company.

Is that what it had been like, after he lost the rest of the tribe? Had he found some wood while wandering the halls of ice and stone? Had he somehow been able to set it alight? He couldn’t remember. Those ancient caves were a dream place. He couldn’t quite bring himself to believe it had ever been real, even if their remnants still existed, far below him.

He had wanted to give up. That was all he had wanted, really, ever since Makes-Medicine had been taken from him in the warm valley where the tribe had wintered. When he had lost the tribe, there was no reason to keep going. No reason except the voices. They kept pushing him, kept telling him what he could build. He could make a tribe, lead it himself. He could be in control of everything. He could be the greatest shaman anyone had ever known. They would give him secret knowledge of the world.

Of course, he wasn’t really a shaman. Perhaps there was something wrong with his brain, something that had once convinced him that a chunk of rock in the vague shape of a man could somehow speak. Something that made him think he could see the magic and spirits behind the ordinary world. Maybe it was that same defect that let him understand the voices of the mountain when nobody else could. He wished they would shut up, even for just a moment.

As Christopher’s consciousness grew fuzzier with sleep, he turned inward. It felt like looking down an endless well. Or perhaps up into the endless blue light above the chamber of the voices. God-Speaker was waking up, and he was a vast ocean of thought and memory. Christopher was just a drop, and his gut tightened with the fear that he would cease to exist.

He was dreaming now, the flickering images still playing across the sky above the endless ocean. He wondered if he would still be himself when he woke.

The mountain was there, in the ocean. It was the mountain of old, its freshly split peak still vomiting black smoke. People, like insects, swarmed over it and built upon it. They scratched its surface and begin to dig. They dug deeper and left the surface altogether. They popped out only briefly, connecting new little structures to their network of holes and tunnels. Soldiers marched around the perimeter, protecting the mountain from a strange outside world. But it wasn’t really the mountain they were protecting. It was the lone figure at the center of the mountain. It was God-Speaker.

He was in his body again. So cold and so tired, his hands were dirty and bleeding, but he couldn’t stop. They called to him. He stumbled and crawled through the rough, uneven tunnels. There was no light. He was far too deep. And yet, there was something blue in the distance. It hurt his eyes, even when they were closed.

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Razor Mountain is a serial novel, with new parts published every week or two. For more info, visit the Razor Mountain landing page.

Christopher stood before an array of screens. Some of them were tuned to the places outside his apartment: the hall that led to the long staircase, the balcony, the other, secret exits. Some showed areas of the city. Some showed the places above, where only his cabinet and their subordinates could tread. Some showed the places below, the military facilities, the geothermal plants, and all the areas that were generally off-limits to the civilian population. Once, this had been one of the few places in the city where he could be sure he was not watched by cameras. Now, even this sanctum had been invaded, with little gleaming lenses in the corners of most rooms.

There were several keyboards on the console in front of the screen. The keys were familiar. His hands moved across them and the pictures changed. He didn’t need to know what keys to press. His hands knew.

This was the center of the panopticon, where the head jailer had been long absent. Or perhaps he was the head prisoner.

He felt suddenly uneasy in the presence of the screens, as if the too-wide view of his little world would overwhelm his senses and he would lose himself. The irony wasn’t lost on him as he stepped out of the dark room, into the brighter hallway. The process of losing himself was already well underway. Visions of past lives still flashed through his mind   now and then, as something new bubbled to the surface.

He couldn’t escape the screens completely. There was another one on the wall by the main doors, showing the hall and the wide stairs beyond. There were blank screens in almost every room. They were all tied into the ubiquitous system that sent its nerves throughout the walls of his apartments. The phone in his pocket—a parting gift from Cain—could control all of them.

Cain had suggested he sleep, and Christopher knew it was good advice. He was exhausted, and rest would help him deal with whatever was happening inside his brain. It just felt unlikely while his body was vibrating like a plucked string. When he closed his eyes, moments from the past were projected onto his lids. Like an electric current, it was too much, but he had seized up. He couldn’t let go, so he had no choice but to let it flow through him.

Down the hall, he found his office, or at least one of them. The room was paneled in dark wood, with absolutely no stone to be seen anywhere. It didn’t matter. Christopher could still feel it. The weight of the mountain was always pressing down, no matter what clever decorations were used to hide it.

He perused the tall bookshelves along two of the walls. It was an eclectic mix, with many old volumes and even a few carefully preserved behind glass, but several shelves were filled with mundane modern works that had clearly been printed within the city. There were reports and statistics and other dull bookkeeping. Christopher wondered why he had bothered to have these things printed.

One shelf was filled with sheet music. Much of it was from beyond the mountain, again a disparate mix. Some of it was hand-written, and this, he realized, was his own work. Christopher had never been a musician beyond a few piano lessons in grade school. His mother had played sporadically. Even with memories and knowledge from God-Speaker bubbling through his thoughts, he had a hard time imagining the sound of the orchestra from the marks on the page.

What was more strange was how he felt, holding those pages of music. There was familiarity there, but little emotion. Did God-Speaker love music? Christopher couldn’t say with any certainty. Christopher got the impression that the old man felt almost obligated to have hobbies like this. After all, a person had to derive enjoyment from something. It was something with no real, objective measure of quality. Was this great music? Terrible music? Did it even matter? Christopher set it aside and moved on.

There was a large wooden desk dominating the center of the room. A wide screen, keyboard and desk lamp were the only things on its surface. The lamp had a timeless quality that Christopher liked. It was black wrought iron with a shade of stained glass in reds, oranges and yellows. The screen and keyboard looked oddly anachronistic, the sort of thing that would have seemed futuristic in the eighties or nineties.

Christopher wondered how powerful these computers actually were. This one was surely old by Razor Mountain standards. But how far ahead of the rest of the world was Razor Mountain? The buzz of the voices played perpetual counter-melody to his thoughts, and he knew that they could provide him with an understanding of electronics far beyond anything any human had ever built. Still, there were limits to what the small population under the mountain could realistically build. Advanced computers required incredibly specialized factories. For some things, Razor Mountain would have to seed knowledge out into the world, relying on the vast manufacturing capacity of the rest of the planet to produce what they needed.

He sat at the desk, and once again his hands knew what needed to be done to start the system and log in. Some things had changed, but most of it was straightforward. He found himself scrolling through messages, reports and data. He was tempted to scroll back to the day he had died, to see the chaotic flurry of information that would surely follow. Instead, he bounced between random things that had happened in the intervening years.

There were endless meeting minutes, reports and data logs. He noticed a report flagged as a severe problem. He re-sorted the reports by priority. A wave of red filled the screen. Cain had made it sound like the cabinet had kept the ship afloat while God-Speaker was gone, but it was clear that there had been plenty of leaks, and despite whatever patches had been attempted, the whole thing was taking on water. Plenty of things in the list remained unresolved. Christopher wondered how long they could have continued on without him.

Those would be problems to address in the weeks and months ahead. Christopher wasn’t prepared to work on any of those things now. He turned the screen off and stood up.

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Razor Mountain is a serial novel, with new parts published every week or two. For more info, visit the Razor Mountain landing page.

“I suppose I can pick up the story from there,” Cain said. “Christopher was eventually deemed to be an accidental arrival, not a significant threat. It was left to the court system to determine what to do with him, with the expectation that he would likely become a permanent resident. He must have made some friends, because his advocate registered an unusual request for relief. It was that report that was flagged in the system. When we were planning Christopher’s extraction, I set up some regular searches across all the systems I have access to, just in case someone caught wind of my plans. Those searches flagged this report by a Specialist Gabrielle Speares, the subject being none other than Christopher Lamarck.

“When I got over the shock, I immediately intervened. I confirmed that he was, in fact, the person I was looking for, and I brought him to the chamber of voices, the heart of the mountain.”

“And here we are,” Christopher said.

“Here we are.”

“All it took to recover your memories was a trip to the chamber?” Cas Bell asked.

“The process has started,” Christopher replied. “As I said, it’s going to take a while. This is not as neat and tidy as the usual ritual, where the host is a well-prepared adult, and the transfer happens under controlled conditions in the chamber itself.”

“Why is it different?” she asked. “There were hosts being groomed back then.”

Christopher blinked. He knew in his bones that it was different, but he wasn’t sure how to respond. The truth was that the chamber didn’t belong to him, not really. It was built by the voices, for their own purposes. Despite all he had built, he was still the interloper, using their tools as best he could.

“The process is difficult, and it’s not easier when making the jump under the stress of a knife in the gut. I overshot the mark, so to speak. After that, I was forced to latch on to whatever host I could find.”

“In this case, a newborn in Minneapolis,” Cain said.

“Indeed.”

There was a moment of heavy silence around the table. The bald man at the far end was the first to speak.

“I suppose the question we must resolve now is whether we should believe all of this,” he said.

Christopher stared at him.

“I’m sorry, I can’t recall your name.”

The man nodded. “I’m Reed Parricida, Secretary of Labor.”

“For what it’s worth, I can corroborate a fair bit of Cain’s account,” Cas said. “My people were involved in monitoring Christopher, and, of course, in the failed extraction.”

“That doesn’t prove he’s God-Speaker,” General Reese said.

Christopher looked around the table, spending a moment on each face. It was still a mix of familiar and unfamiliar, but he could feel relevant memories rising from the depths. He grabbed an empty piece of paper from the open folder in front of Cain, and a pen from the middle of the table.

“Ask me something you think only God-Speaker would know,” he said. He looked from face to face and began to scribble on the paper, tearing strips off as he went.

“Can you even remember the names of all your secretaries?” Reed asked.

“If you were a fake,” Cas said, “it would be expected that Cain would have coached you.”

“You already offered yours,” Christopher said to Reed. “There’s Cain Dolus, Secretary of Energy; Cassandra Bell, Director of Intelligence Operations; General Simon Reese, Director of Military Operations; you I don’t recall, although I suspect you must be the Secretary of Justice, which means you were the deputy secretary under Moira…”

In the end, he could remember about two-thirds of the people around the table, although some of them seemed more real in his memory than others.

“Surely there must be things I would know that Cain couldn’t have told me,” Christopher said. He had finished writing on his strips of paper, and began folding them in half and passing them to particular secretaries.

“For example,” he continued, “I believe I gave every one of you a code. You were each told that only you had a code, but I have to confess, that was a lie. This was a code specifically to confirm my identity after I moved to a new host. Unfortunately, like everything else, I don’t remember all of the codes yet. But perhaps the ones I do remember will at least convince a few of you.”

The secretaries’ eyes went wide as they opened their slips of paper. General Reese took out his phone and tapped the screen a few times, before holding the paper up to it for comparison.”

“God Damn,” he said at last.

“I have a question,” Reed said. He had not been a recipient of a slip of paper. “Can you tell me what you had asked me to investigate in the days before your death?”

Christopher rubbed his forehead and stared at Reed. He waited for a few seconds, in the vain hope that some memory would present itself, but nothing did. He wanted to dig for it, but that didn’t seem to be how these memories worked. They came to the surface when they were ready, and in no particular order.

“I’m sorry, I don’t.”

“Do you have any idea how long it will take to fully recover your memory?”

Christopher sighed.

“No. It’s been a very long time since this has happened. Thousands of years. It’s a lot of memories to recover.”

“No doubt. Can we assume then, that you’ll let us all know when you remember which of us betrayed you?”

“Of course,” Cain interjected. “And now, everyone knows that it’s only a matter of time. Until then, I will ensure that God-Speaker is safe and monitored, so any further attempts to harm him will be subject to the harshest spotlight possible.”

“Perhaps a foolish question,” Cas said, “but how fair is it to trust you with that?”

“I’ve done more than anyone to bring him back,” Cain said. “If that isn’t enough to exonerate me, I don’t know what is.”

Christopher felt a headache creeping from the nape of his neck toward his forehead. He suddenly felt as though his brain was trying to burst his skull. Too many memories, he supposed. Surely a human brain couldn’t hold thousands of years of memories without ill effects?

“I understand this has been shocking,” he said, massaging his temples. “I promise you, it has been even more shocking for me. I know there will be many more questions and things to resolve, but I think this is about as much of this as I can take, for the moment.”

“What will you do now?” Cas asked.

Christopher suddenly remembered a suite of rooms at the top of the city, filled with cozy firelight. A balcony to look at the stars. A private office full of books…and his sheet music! He had forgotten about his compositions.

“I think I’d like to go to my apartments.”

“I’ll bring a team to set up the surveillance,” Cas said. She turned to the room. “And we’ll make sure all of us have visibility.”

“Great,” Christopher said, the migraine now throbbing between his ears.

“Follow me,” Cain said. “I’ll take you home.”

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Razor Mountain is a serial novel, with new parts published every week or two. For more info, visit the Razor Mountain landing page.

Christopher studied the faces in the room. Again, there were a myriad of different expressions, from those who looked confused or irritable to those more prepared to believe. If this had been a movie, Christopher thought, someone’s face would betray their guilt when Cain accused them of harboring a murderer. He didn’t see anything like that, but he supposed that whoever had done it had already fooled him once, back when the deed was done, and he had known more back then.

“Look,” the Secretary of the Treasury said, “If this man really is God-Speaker, shouldn’t it be a simple thing for him to tell us who killed him? Or are you claiming that he doesn’t know either?”

“That would make sense, wouldn’t it?” Christopher said. “Unfortunately, I only just visited the chamber. It’s been a long time, and the jump was unexpected, for obvious reasons. I’m beginning to recover my memory, but it’s going to take a while. Days, at least.”

“Why bother revealing yourself now?”

“We thought it best to have it all out in the open,” Cain said.

“I’m still curious how you got here,” said a voice from the far end of the table. The tall, skinny, bald man.

“Well,” Cain said, “I had agents around Christopher for years. I had them push on things here and there, where I could. For example, making sure he got a promotion that would put him in the position to travel north.”

Christopher’s eyes widened.

“No shit. I thought some things about that whole process seemed strange. You had people in the company?”

“Of course.”

Christopher shook his head.

“So Sean Wallace probably did deserve the job more than I did. I thought he was going to get it.”

Cain frowned at him.

“Does that really matter at this point?”

“No, I suppose not.”

“In any case, an opportunity to get him to Alaska finally came up. At that point, I decided I had no choice but to bring someone else in on the project. I told Cas what I had been doing, or at least what little she didn’t already know. We put a team in place. We made arrangements so that Christopher would be on a plane with our people. He would be drugged, the plane would be taken off the grid, and would land here, at the airstrip.”

“We have an airstrip?” Christopher asked.

“It’s tight and carefully camouflaged,” Cas said, “and only used for special cases and emergencies. But yes.”

“As it turns out, the airstrip wasn’t used,” Cain said. “You got on the plane, but the plane never arrived. We lost contact with the team during the flight. We were only able to find the crash site a few days ago. I thought we would have nothing but forensics to try to piece together what happened.”

“That certainly seems to paint Cas in a suspicious light,” said a man in a smart green uniform. The name rose to the surface of Christopher’s mind: General Simon Reese, Director of Military Operations. His purview would be mostly local to the mountain; the military administration. No doubt one of the people who would most often vie with Cas over certain arenas of authority.

Cas held up her hands.

“Cain had access to all the same information I did.”

“No offense, Cas, but I’ll reserve any judgment,” Cain said. “Perhaps God-Speaker can shed some light on what happened?”

Once again, all the eyes in the room shifted to Christopher. He took a deep breath.

“I don’t have all the answers, but I can fill in some blanks. I woke up on the plane—drugged, I now realize. I discovered pretty quickly that it was empty. No other passengers, no crew, just me. I would have to guess that your team bailed out while I was still sleeping, and they assumed that I would ride that plane right into the side of a mountain. Instead, I tried to fly it, and when that failed, I jumped.”

Christopher remembered his confused thoughts in those frantic moments. The drug they had given him was certainly part of it, but there was something else. He remembered waking up, seeing a strange vision of a cave, hearing strange voices. He remembered something compelling him to fly the plane, to change direction, and finally, to jump into the lake.

His eyes widened. “I didn’t know who I was. I didn’t know I was God-Speaker. But some part of him must have been awake in the back of my head. I changed the direction of the plane, and I jumped. I don’t know if that’s something I…Christopher…would have done on his own. I landed in a lake and somehow managed to swim to shore. I was hurt and I’m sure I was verging on hypothermia. Practically delirious. I found a bunker, one of the furthest of the old Razor Mountain out-buildings, although I wasn’t aware of that at the time. And when I punched some random keys on the keypad, it just happened to be the right code.”

“God-Speaker guided you,” Cain said. He wore a faint smile and glaze-eyed look of religious conviction. It made Christopher uncomfortable, but to the God-Speaker portion of his mind, this seemed only appropriate.

“The bunker saved my life and gave me the opportunity to recover,” Christopher said. “Not knowing who I really was, or where I was, I only hoped to be rescued. But days went by with no sign of human life, apart from the cryptic things I occasionally heard on the radio. Eventually, I decided to investigate other locations marked on a map that I found in the bunker.”

“The numbers station,” Cas said. “Coded orders.”

“Did you sense that you needed to go toward the mountain,” Cain asked, with the air of a defense attorney leading the witness.

“No, not back then,” Christopher said, honestly. “It was just a strange-looking peak in the distance. All I was hoping for was to find people and get back home. So I made a makeshift sled, packed supplies, and set off. I won’t bore you with the details, but I hiked until my supplies were gone, and all I had managed to find was what appeared to be the ruin of a building.”

“Where were you, exactly?” Cain asked. “It could have been that failed Tokamak site from the ’40s.”

“I don’t think it’s important,” Christopher said. “What matters is that I was out of food and lost in the woods, and I probably would have died if someone hadn’t found me.”

“Who found you?” asked the bald man at the end of the table.

“Some exiles,” Christopher said. “Traitors who fled the mountain and were holed up in another one of those old out-buildings.”

“Hold on,” Cas said. “You’re telling me there is a group of deserters that left the mountain without authorization? Why hasn’t this come up in any of our cabinet meetings?”

General Reese held up a hand.

“That situation is already handled. Two of the traitors gave themselves up, along with the positions of the rest. We rounded them up a few days ago.”

“All of them?” Christopher asked.

General Reese glanced away for a moment, and Christopher read a flash of uncertainty on his features.

“There’s one who is still at large, but the situation will be wrapped up soon.”

“I want them unharmed,” Christopher said. “Especially the girl that your soldiers are no doubt chasing aimlessly through the woods right now.”

“I don’t think we should be discussing sensitive intelligence in this meeting,” the bald man at the end of the table said, “at least until we understand this situation.”

“He clearly already has knowledge of the situation,” General Reese muttered.

“Write it down,” Christopher said, pointing at the general. “No harm to any of them.”

“They’re traitors.”

“They’re the only reason I’m here, alive, right now,” Christopher said. “When I was lost in the woods, and someone from the mountain was taking pot-shots at me, that girl got me out safely, and those exiles took me in. Granted, they immediately interrogated me, but it was a much more pleasant interrogation than what I received when I got to the mountain proper.”

“How did you finally get here?” Cain asked.

“Those two traitors who gave themselves up,” Christopher said. “They wanted a little extra bargaining power, and at least one of them was convinced that I was some kind of spy. So they tied me up and snuck me out from under their compatriots. Then they brought me here, gave me up to the authorities, and begged for mercy.”

Christopher turned to General Reese. “Did they get any mercy?”

“They’re incarcerated in preparation for military tribunal,” General Reese said.

“So was I,” Christopher said. “I was thoroughly interrogated in a variety of ways that we will reevaluate in the near future.”

“Our methods with outsiders are not new,” General Reese said, scowling. “Perhaps you’ll be able to remember who instituted those policies in the next few days.”

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Christopher let Cain lead the way into the conference room. The cabinet members were already seated around the long, rectangular table. The group was quite old, most of them white-haired and heavily wrinkled. Through windows along one side of the room Christopher could see a panoramic view of the city below.

He had waited in a nearby room for the rest of the cabinet to arrive for the meeting. “Better to explain once than invite questions from each and every one of them as they enter,” Cain had said. Of course, that meant that Christopher would now truly make a spectacle of himself as the stranger entering the most private meeting of the de facto rulers of the city.

“Who is this, Cain?” one man grumbled, before Cain had even made it to his seat. Some of the others had taken notice of the stranger in their midst as well. They watched as Cain pulled out the chair at the head of the table and gestured for Christopher to sit. There it was, the king on his throne.

Cain cleared his throat.

“There really ought to be more fanfare, but I suppose we’ll make do. This man was born Christopher Lamarck, but he is, in fact, the reincarnation of our long-missing leader, God-Speaker.”

He pulled out a chair next to Christopher and sat, as if the matter was now settled. For a moment, it was quiet enough that Christopher could hear the clock on the wall ticking.

And then the clamor of voices rose up like a wave to crash over him. He leaned back in the chair involuntarily.

He was distinctly aware though, of a feeling lurking beneath the discomfort and uncertainty. There was a giddy, self-satisfied feeling. It came from a place that Christopher was beginning to recognize as God-Speaker’s influence, and it was slowly growing.

“What kind of game are you playing, Cain? He’s been dead for decades.”

“This is absurd. Why would he need you as his mouthpiece?”

“How is this possible? Are you sure?”

The general feeling Christopher heard in the cabinet’s exclamations was disbelief. One or two of the secretaries immediately suspected Cain of some sort of soft coup. One or two others, however, seemed more willing to hear him out. Christopher did not consider himself terribly good at reading people’s emotions, but God-Speaker did. Christopher noted the crease of a brow here, the shape of a mouth over there. It was almost like a movie, where the camera zoomed in on some tiny clue, and the voice-over explained what it all meant.

Christopher found that he recognized some of these people. There were familiar faces. He had names or titles for some, but not for others.

A woman in a black silk blouse stood and held out her hands over the arguing secretaries like a benediction. Christopher’s brain helpfully offered up a name and title: Cassandra Bell, Director of Intelligence Operations.

“Everyone, stop. This isn’t productive. Let them speak, and then have your argument when there’s something substantial to argue about.”

Cain stood as well.

“Thank you, Cas.”

She nodded and sat.

“I think I know more than most, but I’d still like to hear what you’ve been up to. From the beginning.”

“If he’s really God-Speaker, why don’t you just let him speak?” asked a man at the far end of the table, whose name Christopher couldn’t yet recall.

“I’d actually love to hear what Cain has been up to,” Christopher said. “I haven’t gotten the full story yet.”

“Of course,” Cain said. “As most of you know, I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time down in the basement, in the chamber of voices, the resurrection chamber, the place where the oracles learn their craft.”

“Or at least where they used to learn it,” someone muttered.

“Yes, yes, we all know about the basement. Can we get on without your mystical pomp and circumstance?” someone else said.

“This is the culmination of half a lifetime of work,” Cain said. “I think I should be allowed a little ceremoniousness.”

Christopher sighed. These were the rulers of Razor Mountain. He could imagine the years of petty squabbling that had gone on in his absence.

“While I appreciate all your hard work, I think we had better be concise for now,” he said.

Cain nodded.

“After the body was found and the Secretary of Justice was…convicted…I began spending as much of my time as possible down in the heart of the mountain. At first, I was simply hoping to find clues to the murder, or some explanation as to why nothing had happened when the oracles were sent back with their warnings. And very slowly, I began to see glimpses of things.”

“Is this all going to boil down to you seeing the truth in a vision?” said a man halfway down the table. The Secretary of the Treasury, Christopher thought.

“Is that strange to you?” Cain asked. “Is that any different from what the oracles do? What God-Speaker does?”

“The oracles are a rare few,” the man said, “and they all age out of their abilities when they’re far younger than you. And of course God-Speaker is altogether different.”

“Be that as it may, I began to see things,” Cain continued. At first it was nothing but jumbled images. Eventually I began to notice the same things repeating: the same rooms in a particular house. The same few people over and over again. And all of it revolved around one person: a child named Christopher.

“Now I will readily admit, I had no evidence. I had only grief. But I had an unshakable feeling that this child was God-Speaker. I became convinced that he had reincarnated, as he always does, but it had somehow gone wrong and he was far away from the mountain.

“It was at this point that I enlisted help for the first time. I began “borrowing” external operators from Cas every now and then, and I collected as much information as I could on this boy, while doing my best to not reveal who I thought he was.”

Cas Bell smiled. “I will say, it took me entirely too long to realize what your suspicions were. You’re not the worst spy.”

“In any case,” Cain continued, “Our people found the boy, his family, and his house: everything I had seen in my visions. I discovered that Christopher was born on the same day God-Speaker died, perhaps even the very moment of his death. It was too perfect to be a coincidence. The more I learned, the more convinced I was, and more determined to keep my beliefs hidden. I knew I needed to bring him back here, but I didn’t know how to do it without revealing what I knew, or putting him in danger.”

“What danger, exactly?” said a tall, bald man at the far end of the table.

“He had just been murdered,” Cain said. “There was no reason to believe it wouldn’t happen again, especially if he came back in the body of a small child.”

“McCaul was already locked up,” someone said. Christopher recognized that name. Moira McCaul had been the Secretary of Justice, head of the civilian police under the mountain.

“McCaul never had a trial, and she wouldn’t have been convicted if she had,” Cain replied. “That was a sham, and I think most of you know it. You all wanted some sense of closure, but there was never enough evidence to know who did it.”

“We’ve been over and over that case a dozen times,” the bald man said.

“Not enough, it seems,” said a woman near Christopher’s end of the table. She was clearly the youngest of the secretaries. Christopher suspected she must be the new Secretary of Justice, the deputy who had taken the position when her boss was imprisoned. He couldn’t come up with a name.

“There is very little doubt in my mind that someone in this room was responsible for God-Speaker’s murder,” Cain said bluntly. “And if they did it once, they’ll do it again.”

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They walked to a less populous, more industrial-looking neighborhood at the edge of the main cavern. Christopher felt a sense of familiarity, even more so as Cain led him to a door and unlocked it. Once again, they were back in the maze of dull hallways.

“We might still be able to turn your unexpected arrival to our advantage. If it surprised me, then the others are even more in the dark.”

“There’s just one big problem,” Christopher said. “I hardly remember anything, and what I do remember is a disconnected jumble.”

“Well,” Cain said, “we could wait for you to recover more of your memories, but everyone has their spies. They’ll all find out eventually. If we give you more time, we give them more time.”

“Including the killer, if they’re still around,” Christopher said. “How many of the original secretaries are still working?”

“Most of them,” Cain said. “Everyone has just gotten older. The Secretary of Justice was replaced. The Secretary of Education died of cancer ten years back. Her deputy took over as well. That’s been the way that succession has been handled. But her deputy wasn’t as interested in the role once she found out more of the details of the job, so we had to pull the next in the hierarchy. There’s too much distrust in the group for any kind of election process.”

“If we reveal…me…what was your plan?”

Cain stopped walking and looked at his watch.

“There’s a cabinet meeting scheduled for today, about thirty minutes from now.”

“I just sit down with them and tell them I’m God-Speaker?” Christopher said.

“Something like that. I can do as much of the talking as you’d like.”

“And then all hell will break loose?”

“Undoubtedly. Some of them might be willing to believe, especially if you can offer them some proof. Others will be skeptical. If the person who killed you is in that room, they’re going to be extremely worried.”

“It’ll paint a target on my back,” Christopher said.

“You’ve already got a target on your back,” Cain replied. “This way we’ll know to watch out, and everyone else will be watching too. If we wait, we won’t know when or if they know about you. They’ll still have an opportunity for a cover-up. If we reveal you to everyone, then you can hunker down and wait for your memories to return. The traitor will know that they have very little time. They’ll either slip up, or be forced to flee.”

“So I’m the bait,” Christopher said.

“You are the bait.”

“I’m not entirely excited about this plan,” Christopher said.

Cain nodded. “Do not misunderstand. I am only making a suggestion. The moment you opened your eyes in that room, you became my leader again. You are God-Speaker. Whatever you want to do, we will do. I’ve spent half of my life trying to bring you back, and I didn’t do it to order you around.”

Christopher sighed.

“No. I’m practically a stranger here now. You’re the one who has been in the middle of this for years. If you really brought me back here, then I think it’s only right that we continue to follow your plan.”

“You say that like this is all carefully thought-out,” Cain said. “The truth is that I’m improvising.”

Christopher felt a twist of fear in his stomach, but also excitement. It would be dangerous, maybe deadly.

“Then let’s improvise together,” Christopher said.

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The walk back up from the depths was slower. Christopher felt shaky and a little weak, like he had been running laps for too long. They took the elevator back up into the utility hallways, where every corridor looked more or less the same. Christopher recognized it, or at least pieces, in a way he hadn’t before. This was familiar. This was home.

Cain led him out into the city. They stuck to the side streets. There were people going about their business here and there. Christopher felt like someone who had moved away from the town where they were born and raised and returned for a visit many years later. Most of the familiar landmarks were in their expected places. In fact, very little had changed. He found himself studying the faces of the people they passed, looking for any that he recognized. An older woman stood out to him, but he couldn’t place her or summon her name from his jumbled memories.

Their journey was accompanied by a faint murmuring, and Christopher eventually realized it wasn’t the voices in his head. It was Cain talking to himself. He seemed to be having a mumbling internal debate.

“You seem uneasy,” Christopher said. He wondered at the choice of words. Would he have said it the same way before his visit to the chamber below the cavern? Was he speaking, or was it God-Speaker? Was there a difference?

“I had so many plans,” Cain said. “Years upon years of plans, and none of them worked out. Then you fell out of the sky, quite literally, by the stories I’m told.”

“This wasn’t part of the plan?” Christopher asked.

“Not exactly. All at once, everything is falling into place. I wasn’t prepared, but we just have to make the best of it.”

“And how do we do that?” Christopher asked.

“Exactly what I was trying to figure out,” Cain said.

“What’s the situation?” Christopher asked.

Cain looked up, his distracted gaze refocusing, as though seeing Christopher for the first time.

“Of course. I’m sorry if I overstep my bounds. It’s just that you’ve been gone so long. We’ve had to make do.”

Christopher laughed. “Assume I know nothing about what’s going on. Overstep away. I’m not even sure I know who I am yet.”

“There’s something very important,” Cain said. “Do you remember what happened to you, before…”

A flash of memories assaulted Christopher. Pain and blood. The dark office. Falling. Scrambling. A looming shape and a glint of light on the edge of a knife. The memories did not form a neat sequence. They tumbled out in a disordered mess, like some cartoon closet overflowing with forgotten things.

“I was stabbed,” he said. “It was unexpected.”

“Yes,” Cain said. “We found your body. Your former body. Do you know who did it?”

Christopher tried to piece the memories together. He had known the person in the moment, but the memory was focused on other, more immediate concerns. He shook his head.

“No. Someone I knew. Someone I trusted.”

“Do you remember a face? A name? Anything?”

Christopher could sense long pent-up frustration behind Cain’s words. He shook his head.

“It’s all a blur. I remember the pain and the knife. I don’t know whose hand held it.”

Cain sighed. “This is the mystery that has haunted me these long decades while you were gone.”

“There were no clues?” Christopher asked. “I…it was a meeting with someone.”

“You had many meetings, every day,” Cain said. “But who you were meeting with was not common knowledge. You had a tendency to keep things secret, unless others really needed to know.”

That word, “secret,” reverberated within Christopher. It was deep in his core, the desire to hide things, the inability to trust, the unwillingness to let his guard down, or show any weakness. For all the good it had done him.

“I think you’ve probably barely begun to understand the secrets I’ve kept,” Christopher said.

Cain smiled.

“These things happen over a few thousand years.”

“There were no clues left behind?” Christopher asked.

Cain sighed. “Precious few. There are surveillance systems throughout the city, but not in your office or home, or the immediate surroundings. At least none that we were able to find. Nobody knew who you might have met with, or nobody was willing to say.”

“What about the office itself?”

“There was plenty of blood,” Cain said. “Two or three smeared footprints that yielded no matches. No murder weapon ever found.”

“So whoever killed me was never caught?”

“Things got messy fast, once you were found,” Cain said. “The cabinet met, and accusations were thrown around. There’s no hierarchy among us, and nobody trusted anyone. The investigation was difficult because of it. There was a sort of trial held, but you can imagine how well that goes when everyone is simultaneously prosecutor and possible suspect. In the end, we held a vote. The Secretary of Justice was imprisoned.”

“You don’t think he did it?” Christopher asked. He couldn’t call up a memory of the Secretary of Justice.

“She,” Cain said. “There was some circumstantial evidence, but nothing concrete. Nothing that would have held up in an actual court. It wasn’t a trial, more like a desperate attempt to put the thing behind us and try to keep the place running.”

“Who do you think did it?” Christopher asked.

“I don’t know. There wasn’t enough evidence to say. I abstained from that vote.”

“What happened after that?”

Cain shrugged. “Some of the others pretended that it was resolved. Myself and one or two others quietly decided to keep looking into it. The Deputy Secretary of Justice was promoted to the council.”

“No more murders?” Christopher asked.

“Not among us. Murder isn’t unheard-of in Razor Mountain, but it’s rare. There’s been nothing that seemed related.”

“I would have assumed this person was trying to consolidate power,” Christopher said. “Maybe it was really just a grudge.”

“Maybe,” Cain said. “Maybe they were after power, but they knew that another killing would completely upend the system. Putting the Secretary of Justice away at least had some semblance of a resolution to the whole bloody ordeal.”

“Was there some attempted coup then?” Christopher asked.

“Nothing so obvious,” Cain replied. “Just years of endless jockeying for power. Arguments over little slivers of administrative control that fall somewhere between our individual domains.”

Christopher shook his head. “Of course, I never bothered to think about what might happen if I were gone.”

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Christopher lay on the floor, groaning.

“What did you do to me?”

Cain still stood in the doorway of the room, as though he were blocked by an invisible wall.

“What does it feel like?”

Christopher rolled onto his back and struggled to push himself to the edge of the room, eventually coming to rest with his back against the curved wall. There was a deep thrumming behind it, an endless note played below the range of human hearing.

“It feels…crowded,” Christopher said, squeezing his eyes closed, hands pressed against his temples.

He lay with the wall inches from his face, a matte gray, not-quite-metallic texture with strange shapes etched into the surface. But it was distant and unreal, like an image on a screen. Christopher felt lost inside his own head, a misty void filled with half-formed shapes. They milled around aimlessly, whispering. They were lonely, desperate for someone to listen to them, but Christopher also sensed a frustrated haughtiness; a royal irritation. They needed him, and they hated him for it.

It was possible to ignore the voices only because there were so many of them. If he concentrated, he might be able to pick out coherent ideas, but when they all washed over him it was just noise. That noise was a carrier signal, and he could follow it back to its source.

It was above, in the darkness and the weird, eye-rending purple light. Or perhaps it was in the walls, or the mysterious throb of hidden machinery beneath his feet. Despite his difficulty tracking its physical location, he was sure that it was buried with him under the mountain. Mentally, he had no trouble following that thread back to its origin. It was a vessel and a prison. It had brought the voices here, saving them from one disaster, only to deposit them into a new one. The voices had brought their tools with them, but they were unable to use them.

Christopher found himself laying on the floor in the fetal position. Cain squatted in the entrance to the room, watching him with some sort of pent-up emotion that Christopher couldn’t read. The scene barely registered.

Christopher found a place of memories. With a jolt, he recognized them as his own. They were past lives, a long, unbroken sequence back through time. He could see they were there, but he couldn’t fully process them. They went back so far that the world, the people, became almost unrecognizable.

When he reached the end of this human lineage, it didn’t stop. Shrinking back in horror, he saw another sequence of lives. The voices. They went back much farther, in endless generations before humanity; before any life on Earth was more complex than sludge in a fetid tide pool. They had experienced so much, and knew things far beyond human understanding.

He reeled away from those ancient, foreign memories, but the sequence of human memories called to him. He felt his connection to them. They wrapped around him like a warm blanket that threatened to suffocate. He could see flashes of the past, moments of memory, but they were jumbled and confused.

Instinctively, he found a balance between this new internal world and the external world he had lived in before entering this room. He couldn’t tell if it was something he had discovered or something remembered. In any case, he sat up, his head no longer spinning. He took a deep breath.

“I think I understand,” he said.

“Do you remember?” Cain asked. Christopher could sense the excitement under the calm facade.

“Some things,” Christopher said. “This place…jostled everything loose. I remember your face. I remember you, but younger. I know bits and pieces. I think it will take a while for everything to come back.”

“Do you remember who you are?” Cain asked.

“Tutanarulax Qatqa,” he said, his tongue stumbling over the strange words. “I’m God-Speaker.”

Cain nodded.

“But I’m still Christopher. It’s…not comfortable.”

“You never told me what it was like,” Cain said, “so there’s not much I can do to guide you.”

“Of course I didn’t,” Christopher said. “I hardly told anyone anything. This is so odd. It’s like seeing different viewpoints out of each eye.”

“Do you need some time?”

“I’m fine,” Christopher said, standing. “I mean, I can stand up again without falling over. I can tell what’s real and what’s not. Mostly. But it’s going to take a while to integrate. Days, maybe weeks. It’s never happened like this before.”

They stood together in silence for a moment.

“That last jump did not go well,” Christopher said.

“Yes, I know,” Cain replied.

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