The End Has Come

“Please stop.” I did my best to shout. My voice was barely a whisper, soft and gray and featureless, like the great gray world outside.

“I would be glad to stop, Dr. Riley. Only open your eyes, and confirm that you are uninfected.”

Opening my eyes would mean facing the fact that the clean white room I had constructed in my head was not a reality. It would mean going back to the gray, to the impossible ubiquity of the soft, broken world. I didn’t know if I could bear that. But I knew I couldn’t bear her saying my daughter’s name one more time.

I opened my eyes. My pupils constricted in the glare from the lights overhead, an involuntary tear squeezing out of either eye. I didn’t blink. I didn’t dare.

The white room was real.

The walls were blank, featureless, devoid of any stains or rotten patches. I hadn’t seen anything so beautiful since I’d pulled Nikki’s smooth-polished skull out of the soft rot that had been her body. A mirror dominated one wall, reflecting back the scene in front of it: a skeletal mannequin of a woman in a white-sheeted bed, an IV connected to her arm, the bones of her own skull showing through the tight canvas of her skin like a palimpsest of the person she had been, before the gray world came and took it all away. I recognized and rejected myself in the same moment. I was irrelevant.

The woman standing next to my bed had short-cropped brown hair and wore Army green. Her face was hard but not cruel, the face of a woman who had taken a stand against the wolves of the world, and while she might not have won, she had at least acquitted herself admirably. There was a man on the other side of the cot, younger and thinner than the woman, occupying himself with the dials on the machine that controlled my IV drip. I couldn’t really see his face, because of the way he was standing. His cheekbone looked melted somehow, like wax.

I looked away.

The smell of bleach and cleaning fluid was real; either that or my overtaxed mind had finally decided to reject the world as it was in favor of the world as I wished that it had been. I turned my head toward the woman in green, who had been waiting patiently while I got my wits about me.

“Dr. Megan Riley?” she asked again.

I nodded minutely.

“I am Colonel Handleman of the Army of the Commonwealth of North America,” she said. “Do you confirm that you are Dr. Megan Riley, last surviving member of the Project Eden research team?”

So they were all dead, then: all those foolish men and women who had decided I didn’t need to know about the contamination in their superfruit. They’d been trying to develop hardier, easier-to-grow produce that could thrive in the world’s changing climate, produce that would shrug off things like droughts and flooding and early frost. Maybe they would have succeeded, if they hadn’t accidentally engineered a flesh-eating strain of hyper-virulent bread mold first. Science was not a toy, and it objected to being treated like one.

“I was Megan Riley,” I said carefully. “I’m not really sure anymore.” Can a thing still be itself when it’s removed from all context? Maybe I had died out there in the gray, and this was the afterlife. That would explain the clean white walls and the sweet smell of bleach. I was dead, and this was paradise.

“Your identity is enough, Dr. Riley,” said Colonel Handleman. “I’m glad we found you. It is my duty to inform you that you are under arrest for treason against the former United States of America, the former nation of Canada, and the former United Mexican States.”

Ah. I knew this had been too good to be true.

* * *

There were some questions after that — where had I been, what had I been doing, how much of Project Eden had I been aware of — but I could barely keep my eyes open long enough to answer them. I was exhausted, I was broken, and I was done. If they wanted to arrest me, let them. If they wanted to put me on trial for what my people had done, let them do that too. It was no less than I deserved. Maybe mine hadn’t been the hand that held the test tube, but I had been the one who approved each procedure and test. The team had falsified data, and they had died for their crimes. I had believed their lies. Who was to say that my crime wasn’t just as bad as theirs?

I don’t know how long I was asleep. When I woke up, I was still in the white room, with the smell of bleach hanging in my nostrils. There was another smell underneath it, a deep, earthy smell. I wrinkled my nose automatically, rejecting it. This was the safe place. This was the clean place. There was no room here for smells like that one, which made me feel like spiders were running across the soft folds of my mind, looking for places to spin their webs.

“Ah, good, you’re awake.” Commander Handleman sounded almost cheerful. Maybe having someone to try for treason had improved her day. “Open your eyes, Dr. Riley. See what I’ve got for you.”