Eve and Adam

– 30 –

I open my eyes.

I see something. It’s a picture. It’s a picture I know. It was already in my brain before I ever saw it. Now the sight of that picture resonates.

It’s a girl.

The picture slowly cross-fades to a different picture. Same girl. This time she’s at poolside with another girl.

This picture in turn cross-fades to the original girl, and her name pops into my head.

Evening. Her name is Evening.

I’m sitting upright in a chair.

I’m staring at a monitor.

Why? When did I move to this chair? How did I get here? Where was I before?

I reach a tentative hand to my head. There’s a tight band, and I can feel wires, dozens of them trailing out and away.

Is this normal? I have thousands of images of people. None of them have a band with wires.

Yet another picture of Evening.

I love Evening.

How do I know that? It’s obvious. It’s true. I have to love her. She made me. I have the pictures in my head, moving and still, of Evening at a console making the decisions that would soon define me.

I see myself through her eyes, unformed, partial, incomplete. I see that she chose my hair and my face. I know that she sculpted my chest. That she had the vision to create perfect, muscular legs.

I am perfect. I’m Adam.

Perfect for Evening.

Mine is the face she will find impossible to resist. Mine is the skin she will long to touch. As I will long for hers.

She designed my body. She wants me to be her mate. Of course she does.

I haven’t been told this, but I know it. I can draw my own conclusions.

In fact, I realize, I haven’t been told anything. No one has spoken to me. I just… arrived… here in this chair. Came here from nowhere and nowhen.

I am wearing clothing, so I can’t see my perfect, Evening-sculpted legs or my artfully symmetrical biceps or my hard abdomen.

“How did I come here?” I ask.

It’s the first time I have spoken. I search my memory. Can it be true? Surely I have spoken before. To someone. But my memory reveals no someone.

I’ve just been born. The realization shocks me. I’ve just been born. But my memory tells me that is not the way it happens. My memory tells me of wombs and mothers and wrinkly, squalling infants.

None of that applies to me. I am full-grown. I am not a weak, dependent baby; I am strong and tall and I love Evening.

“You have always been here,” a voice says.

A woman steps into view. She’s tall, beautiful, glittery.

“There is no always,” I say. “Nothing persists forever.”

“Nothingness persists,” she says. She is testing me.

“No. So long as anything exists, nothingness is impossible. In fact, it’s nothingness that cannot persist. Nothingness gives way to somethingness. The nothingness that preceded the Big Bang was obliterated. Nothing became something.”

The woman nods. “Good. You’ve absorbed data well. Your intelligence is obviously fully functional. You sound like a college freshman taking his first philosophy class way too seriously, but that’s good. Evening will like it.”

“I would still like to know how I came to be,” I say.

“Consider it a mystery,” Terra Spiker says. “Like the Big Bang. One second there’s nothing, and the next second there’s a universe.”

“Evening created me.”

“Yes, she did. And now you’re going to find her. You’re going to bring her here. For you, she’ll come back.”

“Where is she?”

Terra Spiker says nothing for a long time. I wonder if she hasn’t heard me. But I can see that she is thinking. Her forehead creases. Her eyes narrow.

She corresponds to images I have of thoughtfulness.

“I have an idea where she might be,” she says at last.

“What if she won’t come with me?”

“Oh, she’ll come,” Terra Spiker says. “It’s the fate of all creators: They fall in love with their creations.”