"Coming," I called. Her footsteps receded down the hallway, and I walked to the table where the box sat and lifted the lid.

Closure.

In the bottom were two small black cubes no bigger than six inches across. Plain, not impressive, not as endless or frightening as the world inside them. Environments, is what Dr. Gatsbro called them. They were the so-called groundbreaking technology that Matthew Fox abandoned, at least as far as Kara and I were concerned. How could this six-inch cube be called an environment? How could an entire mind be uploaded into it? How could anything survive inside for 260 years?

This is where we were. This is where our minds were uploaded and kept spinning when the rest of the world thought we were dead. I had picked up the one labeled with my name first and held it in both of my hands. I felt sick, angry, and afraid all at once when I touched it, and then, unexpectedly, protective. If I could so easily disappear from this world once, could it happen again?

Then I lifted the other cube from the box and held them side by side, just as they had always been when they were on a forgotten shelf in a warehouse. I stared at the six-inch cube that had contained Kara.

Tick

Tick

Tick

Every bit. Every dark corner. Did they get it all?

That's when Kara walked in, telling me it was time for dinner. She hadn't wanted to see them. She didn't need closure like I did, she told Dr. Gatsbro. Two steps through the door and she spotted them in my hands. She shrugged her shoulders and said, "That's it?" like it was nothing, but I saw her eyes frozen on the black cubes and her chest rising in shallow breaths.

"That's it," I said.

She nudged a few feet closer. Her steps were calculated and cautious.

"There were ten lifetimes in these," I said. "Even if they're empty now, it seems like they deserve more than a box in another storeroom."

"It wasn't lifetimes, Locke. Never fool yourself that it was."

She took the cubes from my hands, looked at them, turning them at different angles, then stepped to the side of Dr. Gatsbro's desk and dropped them in the trash. She looked at me and then, as an afterthought, swept some papers from the desk into the can. "There. Now, that's a proper burial. That's what they deserve."

Closure.

Maybe there's no such thing.

Chapter 5

"Kara, why don't you begin? Tell us about the Fox Inheritance."

Kara slouches back and yawns. "Zip. Snip. Here we are."

Dr. Gatsbro sighs. "Perhaps only Locke should meet our visitor today? Unless you would like to try again with a bit more eloquence and flourish? I think our visitor deserves that much."

Kara sits up straight. A visitor is a curiosity she doesn't want to miss. "Which version?"

"There is only one, my dear. The one I've told you."

And the one Cole told us late one night when Kara and I discovered him in Dr. Gatsbro's study, dipping into the liquor cabinet.

"Right. Only one." She stands, and giving Dr. Gatsbro the flourish and eloquence he wants, she begins, carefully pausing, smiling, modulating her voice and moving her hands for effect in all the right places. "Locke and I were in a most unfortunate accident. Technically, Locke died two weeks later, and I was removed from life support three weeks after the accident."

I think about Cole's description. It had much more detail and color.

The medical records said you were in a gruesome wreck. Way beyond saving, but your families wouldn't let go right away. Finally the doctors convinced them it was for the best, and legally, they had no choice. The law said you were beyond saving too. Your parents never even knew about the project. What Fox BioSystems did with you back then was illegal. Still is.

"Luckily, Dr. Ash, a researcher at Fox BioSystems who had incredible foresight, managed to scan and upload our minds into a special environment using some untested but promising new technology. When others abandoned the project because of setbacks, he made his own copies of our minds and forged ahead, determined to save us."

Matthew Fox, the head of Fox BioSystems, abandoned the project when your parents had your bodies cremated before he could collect any tissue. It's assumed that Fox destroyed the original mind uploads. But Dr. Ash was a colleague of his and secretly continued the project without the knowledge of Fox BioSystems. He made copies of your mind uploads--backups--and hid them away.

"Dr. Ash then managed to retrieve tissue specimens so that our DNA was preserved."

Then he hired some, shall we say, unsavory characters to retrieve specimens from your old rooms when your parents weren't home. I think they broke in during the funerals, actually. These people weren't exactly trained in proper specimen recovery. Their expertise was more in the collection of items of value for quick resale.

"With painstaking attention to detail, Dr. Ash secured everything he needed."

With you, Locke, it was a nail clipping found in the corner of the bathroom. With Kara, it was a strand of hair from a brush. No one could be sure that either of those things belonged to either one of you, but it was all that they could find. Tokens, we call them. Those were stored with the uploads, along with your medical records and several photo chips they stole as well.

"Through tragic circumstances, however, this brilliant and selfless man died before his hopes and dreams for us could be realized, and our uploaded minds became part of his estate, the value and importance unknown to his heirs."

It's possible that Dr. Ash's intentions were honorable, but the fact that he kept his actions a secret leads most to believe that money was his motivator--either blackmail or perhaps selling the technology to a competitor. He was in enormous debt. Unfortunately, shortly after the backups of the mind uploads were made and your DNA tokens were secured, he died under mysterious circumstances in a freak boating accident. Some think that his plan to eliminate the trail of unsavory characters he had hired backfired on him. Either way, he couldn't carry out his plans.