Citadel by Kevin Tumlinson

Author:Kevin Tumlinson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Happy Pants Books

Chapter 6

Alan stared at the table in front of him and wondered why he wasn’t dead. He should be dead. If anyone involved in this whole, sorry mess deserved to die, it was him. Not Billy. Not the colonists.

Not Penny.

Penny wasn’t dead, he reminded himself. She was changed. In all of his planning, he hadn’t really considered that success might mean failure, but there it was. Embodied in one girl was the great irony of 150 years of planning come to fruition. Just as he’d pushed the button and brought the change on for hundreds of colonists, just as he succeeded in bringing the dead back to life, he had discovered that the cost was too high after all. All these years of planning and preparing. All these years of steeling himself to what would happen, and what the consequences might be. At the end of it all, he still found himself filled with an unexpected emotion.

Regret.

Having his father back helped. It had been odd, if not downright difficult, to accept that the man who had been Taggart was now his father. But Alan never was one to discount the facts just because of appearances, or because they were inconvenient. He had satisfied himself that his father was in there. His father was alive again.

And it was wrong.

All these years of planning and sacrificing and risking everything, and it all came down to the most unexpected realization of all. He had never questioned whether it was right to replace the minds of the wealthy colonists with those of his parents and the rest of First Colony. He accepted that it was wrong, and had not even bothered to create elaborate justifications for it. But what he had not counted on was the sudden realization that, beyond being wrong, it wasn’t right.

It wasn’t a contradiction. He wasn’t thinking in terms of a moral or ethical dilemma. He was considering the physics of the situation, such as they were. He had used the waveform cancellation technology to rewrite the minds of the wealthy colonists and implant the minds of the First Colony crew, and he had assumed that one would cancel out the other. But now he realized that this was not the case. And what he had created, inadvertently, was a hybrid of the two. A hybrid that was unstable, and would eventually lead to the destruction of both.

He’d realized what was happening during a conversation with his father. He was discussing Penny, and how her transformation was somehow different from the others. The fact that she still seemed to be there, buried but still somehow functional, had alarmed Alan. It meant that, despite his careful planning and his complete understanding of the technology, there was a flaw. Things did not work quite the way he had thought.

That was when he noticed his father’s hair. His dad had been shaving his head since before Alan was born. He hadn’t touched a comb to his head in years. Yet here he was, perfectly groomed, and with the exact hairstyle that Taggart had kept out of daily habit.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.