Last Descendants
“Yes,” Monroe said. “One of my own modifications. So what do you say?”
Owen was intrigued by the offer, and he kind of liked the idea that Javier wouldn’t be able to totally take his place, after all. He stuck out his arm without asking Javier if he was okay with it. “Let’s do it,” Owen said.
“Right on.” Monroe closed the gauntlet over Owen’s forearm. Owen felt the sharp pinch of the needle, but tried not to wince. “Data coming in,” Monroe said. “It’ll just take a couple of minutes to analyze it and then tabulate your Memory Concordance.”
Owen stood there next to the recliner, his arm tethered to the computer, watching the screen.
“What if we don’t have ancestors at the same place?” Javier asked.
“If you have no concordance,” Monroe said, “I can’t generate a shared simulation.” But after a few minutes passed, and the Animus core had run its analysis, he announced, “Wow, you … you actually have a few really strong intersections.”
“A few?” Owen said.
“Yeah. This is extremely rare. Your ancestors have crossed paths several times, at different places and points in history …”
He stared at the screen, as if his mind was still working hard on something.
“So are we gonna do this?” Javier asked.
Monroe blinked. “Yes. Right. Okay, while the memory compiles, let’s get Owen situated.” He went to the front of the bus and brought back a thick yoga mat, which he unrolled on the floor near the recliner. “Not as comfortable as the chair, but it’ll do.”
Owen lay down on the mat, staring up at the ceiling of the bus, Javier’s arm hanging over the chair above him. Owen felt and heard a slight hum from all the animus machinery pulsing through the floor beneath him. Monroe pulled out two black visored helmets, and helped Javier and then Owen put them on. The visor was lighter in weight than it looked and comfortable, dominating Owen’s vision with wraparound blackness, while the helmet smothered the hearing in both his ears, disembodying him.
Can you hear me?
Monroe’s voice came from inside the helmet.
“Yes,” Owen said.
“Yeah,” Javier said.
Right on, Monroe said. Okay, this is how it works. The first thing I’m going to do is load the Memory Corridor.
“What’s that?” Javier asked.
It’s a transitional simulation, Monroe said. You can think of it as the Animus’s waiting room. Exposure to a full simulation can be overwhelming, even damaging, psychologically and physically. I need to ease you into it. Once you’ve adjusted to the Corridor, I’ll load the full simulation. Are you ready? This’ll be weird.
“Ready,” Javier said.
“Ready,” Owen said.
A second passed, and then a flood rushed in, a torrent of light and sound and sensation, like walking into the sun from a lightless place, but Owen couldn’t shield his eyes from this. He simply had to endure it until his vision settled, his nerves quieted, and his surroundings came into focus.
He stood in an endless gray void shot through with crackles of lightning. Clouds of mist billowed and heaved around him, occasionally coalescing into geometric angles that hinted at something tangible, the edge of a building, the reach of a tree branch. Owen next looked down and saw that he was not himself.
His chest was covered by a sleeveless chainmail shirt over a heavy, riveted leather jacket. Both were long, reaching almost to his knees. He wore tall leather boots that covered his calves, and leather gloves, while a sword hung in its scabbard from his belt. When he turned his head, a strap under his chin pulled in a way that irritated his skin, and he realized he had a thick beard. The strap held a metal helmet, which had a conical shape, and a slightly downturned metal brim, tight over his head.
“Is that you?” someone asked, just behind him.
Owen turned around. “Javier?”
The figure before him nodded, but it wasn’t Javier. Different body, different face, different voice. A middle-aged man with dark skin, wearing a loincloth and a thick, quilted tunic, with bare arms and legs, and sandals on his feet. Stripes of red and white paint covered his face, and he wore a headdress with colorful feathers sticking up in the back.
“You look like the conquistador,” the figure that was Javier said.
“You look like an Aztec or something,” Owen said.
Not quite. Monroe’s voice sounded directly in Owen’s ear, and he guessed in Javier’s ear, too. The Aztecs conquered much of Mexico, but not all of it. Javier is a Tlaxcaltec warrior. Their nation was one of several who fought against the Aztecs before the Europeans arrived.
“How do you know that?” Javier asked.
The Animus, Monroe said. As it analyzes your genetic memories, it extrapolates from them using known historical data. It also tells me that Javier is right about your ancestor, Owen. You’ll be in the memories of a conquistador. A soldier named Alfonso del Castillo.
“Ah,” Javier said. “So your people conquered my people.”
Again, not quite, Monroe said. Hernán Cortés did defeat the Tlaxcaltecas, but they eventually allied with him against the more powerful Aztecs.
“Oh,” Javier said. “Sorry. I guess your people just gave my people smallpox.”
“I didn’t even know I had a conquistador ancestor,” Owen said.
It seems that your simulation will take place in 1519, Monroe said. Right before Cortés defeated the Tlaxcaltecas.
“So we’re going to Mexico?” Owen asked. “Hundreds of years ago?”
Technically, Monroe said. You’re not going anywhere. You’re still on the floor of my bus. But it’s going to feel like you’re going somewhere. That’s why we’re using the Memory Corridor.
“So what now?” Javier asked.
Now, Monroe said, I want you to relax. Move around a bit. Get used to being in a simulation of someone else’s body while the memories finish compiling.
Owen took a step, and then another. It did feel odd. This Alfonso guy was shorter than he was, with a different balance, different proportions in his arms and legs. As Javier walked over toward him, Owen pulled his sword out of its scabbard. It had a round golden pommel at the base of a wire-wrapped leather grip, and above that a sweeping hilt that encircled his hand beneath the crossbars. The three-foot blade gleamed like silver.
“Check this out,” he said to Javier, and gave the air a slice with it. At first, the sword felt a bit awkward in his hand, heavy and unsteady. But then Owen noticed a tingling on his neck and in his mind that gradually turned into a kind of pressure at the back of his thoughts. As he gave in to the pressure, and let go of his own thoughts, his control of the weapon became more practiced and fluid. He slashed and parried and stabbed as if he’d done so thousands of times before. But he knew he’d never held a sword in his life, and as that thought asserted itself against the pressure, he lost a bit of control.
“Watch it,” Javier said, stepping out of the way just as the blade missed his arm.
“Sorry,” Owen said, staring at the sword. “That was weird.”
What was weird? Monroe asked.
Owen looked up, as if Monroe were somewhere up in the gray void. “The sword,” he said. “It was like … I knew how to use it.”
You do, Monroe said. Or rather, Alfonso del Castillo does.
“So that was him?” Owen asked.
You have access to his memories, Monroe said. All of them.
“It was like he wanted to take over,” Owen said.
In a way, he does, Monroe said. And in a way, you have to let him. The simulation works by a process of synchronization. To experience your ancestor’s memories, you have to kind of take a back seat and let your ancestor do their thing.
“So we don’t have control once we’re in there?” Javier asked.
You have some latitude in the simulation to do your own thing, Monroe said. But this isn’t time travel. You can’t change what happened. You can’t change the memory, and if you step too f
ar outside the parameters of the memory, you’ll get desynchronized. That’ll break the simulation and either drop you back in the Corridor, or even back into the real world. Either way, it’s not a pleasant experience.
“So how do we know if we’re about to be desynchronized?” Javier asked.
You’ll feel it, Monroe said. And the simulation will start glitching. But try not to worry about that. You’ll learn. Just relax. The whole point of the Animus ride is to get out of the nutshell of your own head and walk in someone else’s thoughts for a while. Are you ready for that?
Owen looked down at the sword and slid it back into its scabbard. “Ready.”
Right on, Monroe said. When I throw the switch, it’s going to be overwhelming, much more so than it was when you entered the Memory Corridor. Just take it easy, and it’ll pass. And one more thing: When you go through, your ancestors may not be anywhere near each other, but they’re close enough to share the simulation. Don’t go racing off to find each other or you’ll desynchronize. You can’t talk to each other as yourselves, anyway. Just let the memory unfold. Got all that?
“Got it,” Owen said.
You ready? Monroe asked.
“Throw the switch,” Javier said.
Javier still wasn’t sure if it was a good idea to agree to this. But Monroe was right. Javier had overheard a couple of kids talking about the Animus, and he was curious. Or maybe he really just wanted to get out of his own head for a little while. His own life was so complicated and messed up.
Owen stood there in front of him, in the Memory Corridor. Only it wasn’t Owen, it was one of Owen’s conquistador ancestors, complete with a helmet and a sword he sort of knew how to use. Javier didn’t know how different his own face looked in that moment, but his body felt very different. This Tlaxcaltec ancestor of his was older, with pains in his joints, and the mind trying to share Javier’s headspace looked at the world in an utterly foreign way. Javier had taken this Animus ride to get into someone else’s thoughts, but his head had only become more crowded.
Here we go, Monroe said in his ear.
The Memory Corridor shattered with an eye-slicing flash of light, and Javier felt a roller-coaster lurch slam his whole body, but more than that, his mind. He gasped and blinked, dizzy, nauseated, as his vision slowly refocused.
He stood in an open field hemmed in by hills, the sun warm and the air cool. The grass at his feet was tall and supple. In his hands he carried a wooden shield, painted and covered with feathers, and in his other he held a kind of wooden sword lined its whole length with razor-sharp, toothlike obsidian blades, which Javier somehow knew was called a macuahuitl. Warriors armed and dressed in the same manner stood to either side of him, but many lacked the feathered headdress Javier wore. For a few of them, though, the headdresses were even more elaborate, rising like tall crowns with long streamers. Javier saw one man bearing some kind of branching standard or banner, covered in feathers, rising from his back six feet into the air, and another man wearing what appeared to be a large, long-necked, white bird with wings spread wide above his head.
Javier glanced behind him over his shoulder, and what he saw there stunned him. There were thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of warriors. They filled the open plain, right up to the edges of the forests and the hills. Horns bellowed and voices shrieked what could only be battle cries. This was an army going to war.
And it seemed that Javier was at the front line, with fighting imminent. He looked around again, this time for an escape, feeling panicked. A warrior next to him gave him a confused scowl and said something in a language Javier didn’t know.
“What? I don’t understand you,” Javier said, and immediately felt his perception getting fuzzy around the edges. He lost feeling through his arms and legs, like a disconnect from his body.
The warrior looked even more confused, and even took a step away from him.
Relax, a voice said in his ear. Let your ancestor do the talking.
“Monroe?”
Yes. I’m watching your simulation.
That reassured Javier, somewhat.
Let the memory ride, man. Just let the memory ride.
Javier took a deep breath. He tried to shut out the sound of the massive army at his back, the unknown fear of the battle ahead, and relax his mind. As he did, he felt a kind of drumbeat behind his thoughts, an eagerness, and as he listened to that, and even encouraged it, the sound grew louder, and louder, until Javier could hear someone else’s voice trying to get out. It felt like the most powerful and disorienting déjà vu, one part of his mind experiencing something at the same time another part of his mind remembered it. The drumbeat and the shrieking voice became deafening, and Javier finally surrendered to the mind and the will vying for control, and as he did, his own voice erupted in a battle cry in a foreign tongue he now understood.
The warrior beside him nodded, seeming reassured, and made a cry of his own. Javier’s awareness became honed, his perception clear.
He was Chimalpopoca, a noble tecuhtli, a leader of men and warriors who had distinguished himself on the battlefield many times over against his people’s greedy and haughty Aztec oppressors.
But now a new enemy had arrived in his people’s lands, come from the coast and, if it could be believed, from across the sea. The pale strangers marched toward them even now, astride their towering deer-beasts, armed with their weapons of fire, but here on this ground, this day, the people of the god Camaxtli would capture or slay them all.
“Do you think they are truly teotl?” a warrior next to Chimalpopoca asked.
“I don’t know,” Chimalpopoca said.
“The Totonac and Otomi say they can’t be killed. Their arrows and spears counted as nothing but reeds. Their very skin is iron—”
“It is only their armor that is iron.” Chimalpopoca stared hard at the line of oak and pine trees ahead of their line. “Beneath it, I wager they bleed.”
“So you don’t think we should try to make peace with them as the Totonac did?”
“I think we should follow the orders of our war leader.”
“But even Xicotencatl’s father, the Elder, would have us make peace. I’ve even heard a rumor that some on the field here today plan not to fight.”
“Then they must have been born under a coward’s sign,” Chimalpopoca said. He had been born under the sign of the first ocelotl, which meant he was destined to die as a prisoner of war, a fate he had long since chosen to meet with bravery, but which had so far eluded him.
“Perhaps it is wisdom to refrain,” the warrior said. “Not cowardice.”
“If that is what you believe,” Chimalpopoca said, “then perhaps you should join with the Totonacs and build these teotl a city where your farm used to be—”
The conchs bellowed loudly again, signaling the approach of the enemy. Chimalpopoca readied his shield, his macuahuitl thirsty for the blood of these strangers. Ahead of him, in the distance, the first of them, these teotl, emerged from the forest. They marched in formation with their shields and their giant deer-beasts, their iron helmets and their iron swords. With them came the weapon they called a cannon, which shot stone from its entrails, along with sparks and fire, pulled into battle by traitorous Cempoala collaborators from Totonacapan. At the sight of its black length, Chimalpopoca felt fear, and because of that, Javier felt fear, too.
Javier wondered then what would happen if his ancestor died on that battlefield. He wondered if he would feel the agony of getting run through with a sword or blown apart by a cannon. He knew his body was perfectly safe outside the simulation, but that didn’t stop the terror, because his mind was here. The realness of the simulation, the smell of incense and the warriors’ fear-sweat around him, the whinnying of the conquistadors’ horses, the sight of their far superior weapons—he knew how this would go down, and he wanted to get his ancestor out of there.
As Javier entertained these thoughts and asserted himself within his own mind, he took a step away from the
front line, and the simulation lost some of its clarity, like dropping from hi-res to low.
You’re slipping, Monroe said. Just let it ride.
That was harder to do now, with an army of Spaniards advancing with their guns and their swords, against which Javier knew Chimalpopoca’s wooden weapon and shield could do very little.
“I’m trying,” Javier said.
You can’t change it, Monroe said. It’s memory. Just try to remember this already happened five hundred years ago. You can’t avoid it. If you try, you’ll desynchronize.
Javier adopted a part of that as a mantra.
You can’t avoid it, you can’t avoid it, you can’t avoid it.
That actually helped him give his mind back over to Chimalpopoca’s memories, bringing the simulation back into its fullness of depth.
There were perhaps only four hundred of the teotl marching toward them. Against ten thousand Tlaxcaltec warriors. Chimalpopoca smiled with the surety that this battle would soon be at an end, and he wondered if teotl blood would feed the gods as well as human blood did, and hoped to take at least one of them alive for the priests to sacrifice upon the altar stones.
The men around him appeared less certain than he, but he rallied them with a war cry, and they echoed it. The valley shook with their voices and the blare of their conchs, and it seemed even the teotl quaked before it.
“Camaxtli is with us!” Chimalpopoca shouted to the men under his command. “The signs are with us this day!” To which his men cheered.
When the enemy reached the point of ground Xicotencatl had designated, Chimalpopoca shouted the order to charge, as did the other warriors, advancing on the teotl from all sides, completely surrounding them.
Chimalpopoca’s men unleashed a volley of their arrows and spears, which fell like rain, but most bounced harmlessly from the teotl shields and armor. Some, however found soft flesh and buried themselves. Chimalpopoca grinned as he and his men ran howling across the field, weapons raised high, but before they reached the enemy’s line, the fire weapons roared with innumerable cracks of thunder.
Men jerked and fell to the ground mid-stride on either side of Chimalpopoca, bleeding from gaping, mangled holes in their bodies. But he charged on without slowing his pace, leading his warriors through another explosion of fire, and then through a volley of those short, evil arrows that pierced the thickest hide armor. But then the teotl rode their beasts into the fray, trampling men and swinging their swords, cutting warriors down and breaking them underfoot.