Cemetery Planet: The Complete Series Page 7

  “I have something to show you,” he told her when they were in the food court. He put his tray in the recycler. Her glowing form graced the menu display.

  “Don’t tease me,” she giggled. “Tell me what it is!”

  “I can’t,” he teased her anyway. “It’s a surprise.”

  “Oh, come on,” she whined playfully. “Tell me!”

  He laughed out loud.

  “I can’t tell you. I have to show you.”

  With that he hopped on a PMD and whisked down the ramp to the café’s first floor, out the automatic doors, and into the visitor center concourse. And at every turn, appearing in each successive wall-mounted computer display, appeared Lea, squealing with anticipation, telling him how cruel he was for making her wait. He rolled past the auditorium and the viewpoint overlooking the vast sea of grave markers outside. Her face became immense when he got to the interactive cemetery plot map room, the image filling the gigantic projection screen. And every time she appeared it was the same thing—smiles and giggles and breathless anticipation.

  When he made it to the mausoleum complex, her bubbliness evaporated into startled disbelief. Her mouth dropped open and she ceased all sound, except for when she finally squealed in ecstasy when Harvey winked at her, setting the elevator to level three. Lea’s level.

  “Did you?” was all she could say. The elevator’s indicator rang at the correct level, and Harvey rolled his PMD out toward section C-6 and all she could say again was, “Did you?”

  He remained mute, smiling a stupid smile. Finally he reached her grave and pressed his palm on the interface. The once dormant electronic control panel lit up with a series of gentle tones and cobalt blue graphics. It was her holomemorial.

  “You did!” she squealed. “You fixed it, didn’t you?”

  He remained quiet while making a few last second adjustments. A diagnostics check. A system debug. Then it was ready. He tingled with excitement.

  “Harvey! Answer me!”

  “I thought you might like to get out of that stuffy computer for a change. You know, stretch your legs,” he rested his hand over the startup icon. “What do you think?”

  “What do I think? I think it’s an amazing idea!”

  “So you’re ready to try this?”

  “Absolutely,” she said immediately.

  “Are you sure, because I’m not one hundred percent positive this will work. It might be dangerous. You might get lost in the conversion process or—”

  “Harvey!”

  “Okay,” his breath was shaky. Pressing the icon, he watched as Lea’s image faded from the wall monitor and, at the same time, a flood of scattered light, fractured and frail, shot out of a small opening on her headstone. The beams coalesced into the dimension of a person. A woman. A beautiful, five foot six inch goddess. Long black hair. Not large yet not petite, with enough curve appeal to satisfy any desire. When her striking gray eyes met his, in that snapshot in time, all he wanted was to hold her, and when her life-sized, three-dimensional presence came into full being, that’s what he intended to do.

  What she said next erased those intentions, and replaced them with a sudden shot of anxiety.

  “Hi, everybody,” Lea stood tall and waved. “Family and friends…maybe even people I don’t know. God, I don’t know what to say on this thing. This is kind of morbid, actually. I mean, if you’re watching this right now it means I’m dead.”

  “Lea?” Harvey waved his arms in front of her oblivious eyes. Nothing. No response. No reaction. Nothing.

  “I just want to tell future generations a little about what it’s like to live in the 21st century…”

  “Lea!” Harvey yelled over the nonresponsive projection. It was lifelike. It had dimension and depth. When he touched her shoulder, he felt resistance, a feature of the hologram he found wonderful yet still a little unnerving. She looked real. Felt real. But she wasn’t real. She was a recording, a digitized facsimile made hundreds and hundreds of years ago. And the more the recording played on, the more he realized, like his earlier pessimistic prediction, his companion seemed lost.

  “Lea! Where are you!” he hurried to the wall computer. Nowhere could she be found. Nowhere could she be heard. Not even as an apparition or a wisp of ethereal haze or a twinge of cold on his cheek. Nothing. And when he called out for her, he was calling out for something inside of himself. Calling for that part of him that perished at the very thought of her being gone forever.

  “Lea! Come back!”

  “Oh, Harvey,” he heard laughter, boisterous and alive. “You’re so gullible!”

  Lea’s hologram met him with a sparkling smile, her dazzling personality shining though in full ultra-high definition color and sound.

  “Lea! It’s you! It is you, isn’t it?”

  “Of course it’s me, silly,” she sidled up to him and he felt her smooth touch. The developers of the tactile interface were geniuses. Every nuance of her virtual palm on his cheek, every quiver of her simulated breath on his neck—exquisite. Their embrace lasted forever, yet seemed only a blink of an eye. He wanted to hold her forever, and thought maybe he could.

  “This feels so good,” she pressed against his chest. “I’ve been waiting so long to do this again.”

  “I’m just-I’m sorry I wrecked your holomemorial in the first place,” he was riddled with guilt.

  “Don’t think about that now,” she imprisoned him in her gaze. “It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters now.”

  “I’ve got another surprise for you,” he held up a finger to ask her to wait, then accessed the station’s entertainment files with a vocal command, calling up a song he thought Lea would recognize.

  The corridor filled with the somber sound of a lonely piano. A little different than the modern music Harvey was used to. However, when the woman’s smoky voice crooned the first verse, he became hooked.

  “When the rain is blowing in your face, and the whole world is on your case, I could offer you a warm embrace. To make you feel my love…”

  “Oh my god!” Lea bubbled with joy. “This is Adele! I love her…how did you know?”

  “Well…I didn’t,” he confessed. “But I was hoping you’d like it. It is from your time, isn’t it? From the early 2000’s?”

  She nodded slowly, swaying her hips to the unassuming tune, reaching her hand in affectionate craving.

  “Care to dance?”

  They moved in perfect synchronicity, as if they’d practiced their steps before. Just one more example to Harvey of their shared bond. Despite the rift of time and space and even of death, they were meant to be together.

  Before the eight hundred year old ballad could reach its emotional conclusion, Lea pushed away from him and gave him a look he hadn’t seen in a long time. He knew in his heart what the furtive glance meant, and when she started running, the playful chase was on.

  She had an unfair advantage. She could disappear and, in a blink, resurface using a different holographic projector hundreds of feet away. She did this several times, giggling at him and disappearing just before he’d catch up. Then all he heard was her laughter, resonating throughout the complex, until he left the mausoleum altogether, finding her finally in the concourse, with the dazzling stars haloing her in an otherworldly glow. She lowered her eyes when he got close, and he stopped in his tracks when she slipped off her white lace gown, exposing her supple, naked perfection.

  6.

  “Harvey…wake up, Harvey.”

  He was dreaming. He knew that’s what it was. All a dream. Had to be. With everything that had happened to him, all the impossible circumstances surrounding his stay on Cemetery Planet, he was convinced none of it was real. At first it was terrifying. The worst nightmare ever imagined. Then it turned into something sublime and sweet. Something precious, priceless, and pure. That was why he knew it had to be a dream. Nothing good ever happened to Harvey Crane. Nothing.

  “Come on, Harvey. I brought you breakfast.”

  He di
dn’t want to wake up. If he did, he knew what would happen. It would be just him again, abandoned on a world overflowing with graves. Without companionship. Without hope. Then a nutty, sweet smell aroused a grumble in his stomach and, sitting up, he opened his eyes, hoping beyond hope she wasn’t a figment of his mind.

  When he saw her standing in his quarters, a sterling silver tray in her hands and a smile on her face, it all came back in a wave of relief. She was real. Regardless of the hologram projectors and the sonic tactile actuators and the fact that she’d died hundreds of years ago, she had a body. She had a soul. She was as real as anything could get. And she was serving him breakfast in bed.

  “Oh, hey,” he slid up even more, the sheets exposing his bare chest. “You didn’t have to do that, you know.”

  “I wanted to,” she placed the tray on his cluttered little table. “Now come on, eat.”

  He pulled on his shirt and sat at the table to a feast the likes of which he’d never seen. Strange things that he knew were edible, yet he’d never eaten before.

  “What are those?” he pointed to a stack of flat, round, golden-brown fluffy things.

  “Haven’t you ever had pancakes?” she looked at him strangely.

  “I…I’ve heard of them,” he said. “Vaguely,” he picked up a thin strip of something crispy.

  “And this?” he sniffed it. It smelled divine.

  “Don’t tell me you’ve never had bacon!”

  “Ah,” he nodded. “This is bacon! I heard it was delicious!”

  “You’ve never had pancakes or bacon?” she was incredulous. “You’ve got to be kidding,” she took a fork and jabbed it in a pile of fluffy, yellowish stuff. “And I suppose you’ve never had scrambled eggs, either?”

  “Uh…no,” he said, and she threw up her hands.

  “Wow! The future sucks!”

  He explained these foods were abandoned by people hundreds of years ago. Fatty, high cholesterol, and high sodium foods became things of the past when mankind had learned to eat healthy finally. It was essential for the survival of the species.

  “But what about the chocolate ice cream!” she was more incredulous than ever. “That’s not healthy!”

  “That’s why I always have trouble getting the food printers to make it for me. All they want to make is sorbet. Sorbet is healthy for you, so the computer has no problem spitting that shit out.”

  “Huh,” she huffed. “No wonder I had such a hard time getting it to make this. You don’t even know the trouble I went through.”

  “Oh, I can imagine.”

  They both got a chuckle from that, and then Harvey dug in, relishing every bite of the strange and ancient and maybe even a little indulgent nourishment. He could feel his arteries clogging with each swallow, but what the hell! It was enchanting.

  When he was done eating, Lea began cleaning up after him.

  “Lea,” he stopped her by holding her hand gently. “I told you. You don’t need to do this for me.”

  “And I told you,” she was firm. “I want to. Besides, in my time, women liked to keep busy. We worked even more than men.”

  “It’s like that now too,” he said. “Women are independent and hard-working and carry a lot of responsibility these days.”

  “I guess some things never change,” she went back to bussing his table.

  “Listen,” he suggested. “If you really want something to do, you can help me.”

  “Help you? With what?”

  “I don’t know,” he shrugged. “Everything. There’s a lot to be done around here. And you can help.”

  And help him she did. She went along on all of his regular duties as caretaker, assisting as he tested features like the introductory presentation, the interactive maps, the food printers. She helped with the cleaning bots, making sure they were all functioning and accounted for. Everything had to be shipshape, and everything was attended to, down to the minutest detail. Even the holomemorials, which he swore he’d never work on again, were maintained with the utmost of care.

  With every new evening, Harvey felt more and more confident in his surroundings. And every new second with Lea, he forgot a little more about the mysteries that surrounded this place. With the passage of time, the troubled thoughts brought on by that harrowing experience in Zone 6 faded into obscure, albeit uncomfortable, memory.

  It didn’t even bother him greatly when he learned, via a subspace emergency channel, that the ionic stream was still being problematic, and that DeepSix had no real explanation why such a dependable and relatively safe natural phenomenon—a cosmic viaduct that humans had learned to harness and utilize for interstellar space travel centuries ago—had, all of a sudden, turned deadly. That didn’t trouble him anymore. With Lea his worries washed away in the glow of the morning star rises. He shed every hint of sadness and hopelessness and despair. No more feeling sorry for his predicament. And no more caving in to fear.

  Then one night it all changed.

  The audible command spoke in clear, if not monotonous English:

  Holomemorial random assignment: Zone 30, Plot T5-14382, Plot R4-2244, Plot A1-77. Zone 6 Plot Y7-990, Plot…”

  “Computer, wait a second,” Harvey’s heart skipped a beat. Lea stood next to him. “Did you say Zone 6?”

  “That is correct,” the computer stated coldly. “Cemetery Zone 6. Is that a problem, sir?”

  “Is that a problem?” he felt sweat building on his forehead. “Hell yes, that’s a problem!”

  “Harvey don’t—”

  “Just hold on, Lea” his apprehension took over. “Computer, why are you sending me to Six?”

  “That is your assignment for tonight.”

  “But the place is so old. No one ever goes out there. Caretakers don’t even go out there. You know that, computer. You’ve never sent me out there…why all of a sudden are you?”

  The computer paused, then reiterated:

  “That is your assignment for tonight.”

  “Don’t go,” Lea tugged his arm. “I have a really bad feeling about that place, about the souls who inhabit it.”

  “I’m not going,” he said indignantly. “You hear that, computer? I’m not going to Zone 6.”

  “That is your assignment, Harvey Crane.”

  “He’s not going, dammit!” Lea shouted.

  To that the computer had no response, but kept Zone 6 on the nightly work list. When he got to it on his route, he simply skipped it, and pretended the system hadn’t even brought it up in the first place, though the computer complained.

  The next night, Zone 6 was on the schedule again. This time Harvey got into the system and deleted the command. The system simply reinstated it, and when he saw that he was agitated beyond description. The computer was taunting him. Maybe it hatched some sinister plot to get him to go to Six. He wouldn’t fall for it, though, and kept ignoring the command.

  But the command for Zone 6 kept coming in, and Harvey kept disregarding, erasing, overriding. Alarms went off and the computer hailed him with demanding little messages. And the more he ignored them, the more adamant the messages became. They started as innocuous little notes—‘It is your assignment.’ But soon, ‘your assignment,’ became, ‘your duty,’ which turned into, ‘your sworn obligation to this planet, and to DeepSix,’ and finally it just repeated the word, ‘Urgent,’ over and over, saying:

  “Full-scale and catastrophic systems failures…your presence is required in Zone 6. URGENT!”

  But he refused to go. Lea agreed with his decision fully, and, together, they moved on as if the messages never existed.

  Then, one day, the orders stopped. During his usual nightly briefing, he waited for it, watched for it. It became routine, spotting Zone 6 on the list of sectors he had to visit that day. He expected it, almost wanted to see it so he could just get it over with. And when he got to the bottom of the list, finding no reference to the hated graveyard, he had to double check, then scrutinize the list a third time.

  “Lea
!” he called to her over the com-system, knowing she was probably in the food court. “Guess what I don’t see on the list today.”

  No response. He waited, then made another attempt at contacting her via the com, yet heard nothing in return. For the first confused moment, he tried to convince himself she was fine. Probably didn’t hear him, or maybe she was too busy to answer.

  “Harvey!”

  Her faint yet panicked shriek for help shattered his carefree delusions.

  7.