The Soul Continuum Read Free

tiny bit. I think, every time I see her, I feel a little bit happier than before, and I love her just a little bit more too.
    â€œCome here.” She has her arms open and she wriggles her fingers in eager anticipation of a hug, and I am only too happy to oblige.
    We spend a few seconds in a tight embrace, and then she holds me at arm’s length to look at me. “I think you’re getting taller.”
    â€œTaller?” I say. “Like this?” And I teeter on tiptoe.
    â€œYou’re almost as tall as Daddy.”
    Her teasing always makes me giggle. My father is very tall. Taller than most other men we know. Or used to know. We don’t see many other men now. It’s mostly the other sick children my parents rescued.
    â€œIs Daddy coming back soon?”
    â€œNot for a few days. He has to make sure that our presence on Saliel stays secret. Otherwise the government will come looking for us.”
    â€œYou mean they aren’t already looking for us?”
    â€œI hope not, but without the database audit trail, they won’t have a clue where to start, so that’s what Daddy is doing. He’s erasing it.”
    â€œBut isn’t that difficult?”
    â€œVery difficult, but Daddy is a very clever man.”
    â€œI suppose he did find this place for us, didn’t he?”
    â€œExactly.” Mother is stroking my hair now, and she drops into a crouch so that she can roll up my sleeve, ready for the syringe.
    â€œI have decided,” I tell her, “that I don’t want to call him Daddy anymore. And I don’t want to call you Mummy, either. If I was a normal eleven-year-old girl, I would be having my secondary cerebral implants by now and be connecting to the Central Data Core, like every other adult.”
    Mother is no longer looking me in the eye. She is concentrating on the black fluid mixing within the saline feed. “You can call us whatever you like, darling.”
    Tension is in her voice, and the smile has gone. I think she doesn’t like the idea of me calling her Mother. It reminds her that I am growing up, and when that happens, everything will change. When they diagnosed me with the disease on my second birthday, the doctors did not expect me to live past seven, but they said I would definitely not make it to thirteen. My parents have been trying to find a cure ever since, and this is what eventually led us here, to Saliel.
    After I was diagnosed, my parents managed to find work in Genofect Laboratory 22 on a planet in the neighboring star system that’s a lot like Earth. It’s just one laboratory among many that contribute to the government’s grand project to create a range of genetically perfect bodies. It seemed like a good way to find my cure, but now my parents think the government is more interested in studying me than healing me, so with the help of a few other sympathizers, they sneaked me—and a lot of the other children—here to Saliel, home to what is supposed to be the next stage in the genofect project in a few decades’ time. Mother says we are just starting the project a little earlier than the government planned. In secret.
    â€œSharp scratch,” Mother warns me, but she hesitates as the needle rests on my vein.
    I rest a finger on the back of her hand. “Wait.”
    â€œIs something wrong?” She pauses to look me in the eye, withdrawing the syringe, and I sense something about her as she waits. More of the masked pain. She hates giving me these injections.
    â€œI want to do it.”
    She squints and her lips tighten; then she says, “Can you feel . . . ?”
    She is hoping for empathy. She is hoping that I want to do this myself because I can imagine her sorrow at having to be the one who does this. It would be evidence that the treatment is working.
    â€œNo, Mother, the treatment hasn’t started working yet, but I know you don’t like to do it, so I think I should do it