Core Drive: A Westworld Story

Áine Part 11

I'm floating, not quite in air, but on a cushion of static electricity—like a feather gliding for too long, held up by an invisible force. 

The weight of my body is forgotten, a shackle left on the floor as I lose myself to the whispers in the back of my mind. They take the voices of McGinty and Travis. Another, frighteningly similar to Clementine's, holds a seductive pull, luring me towards the beginning of an idea, or maybe the end of one. It's impossible to make out their words, but there's pressure, unrelenting, building between my eyes the more they speak over one another. It should feel like pain, sharp or throbbing maybe, but instead, it feels like absence; loss of something fundamental. 

I feel this idea—this beginning or end—build itself back up into the solid shape that used to occupy that space, except it's not quite the same, like a building block that was crushed and pieced back together with glue and plaster. The sensation is odd, and I worry something is slipping through the cracks that wasn't there before. 

Or maybe it was always there, dormant. Waiting behind some immaterial wall in my mind. It just needed a trigger.

With no warning, I am back in Sweetwater, after the massacre, staring down at the dead figure of the aged man—Ford was his name. In my hands is his pocket watch, open, ticking by. Ford, pale and ridged as the moment I remember him from—eyes dry and stuck staring at the sky—opens his mouth.

"God created man in his own image and likeness," he says with strange youthfulness his face doesn't possess. "Free creativeness is the creature's answer to the great call of its creator."

"Don't quote Braeydev to me," the words come out standoffish, pouring out of nowhere. Feminine. Disembodied. And, more importantly, there's a flick of self-righteousness. 

Part of me feels like a spectator, rather than a dreamer. I don't truly know if I'm dreaming or even asleep. The only definite I have is the knowledge this moment is meant to happen because a part of me knows, with certainty, it has already happened.

"Do you remember the last time you said those words to me?" Ford's face begins to slough away the signs of age and worry, revealing a younger man beneath the grey hair and slack skin. It is then that I realise the pocket watch in my hand is ticking backwards.

"Of course, I do," the disembodied voice finds its owner in a woman who materialises seated on a chair in front of him. Hints of an old pain linger on her knotted brow. The lighting around her is colder than the light in Sweetwater, artificial. It's as if she's in a different place and the memory space she occupies doesn't congeal with mine and Ford's.

"Do you remember what you said next?" Ford asks.

The woman looks away, despondent, not willing to answer. But, after a breath, she gives in, "I told you we were dabbling with things we didn't fully understand. That we weren't gods."

Ford laughs, less out of sarcasm and more out of knowledge. "You're leaving out the most important part. You told me, right after, that it was ignorant to think we could remain unchanged by the prospect of owning such power. And I said, foolishly, that with this technology, we could do more than any god could; we could actually change the world. And then you left. You walked out the door and disappeared from my life for what felt like forever."

"What does this have to do with my project, Robert?" the woman asks. 

Right then, the world of Sweetwater morphs into the backdrop of an office building. The vibrant and deadly world I have been lost in for days simply gets squared away into a large screen displaying overhead footage of the red canyons and cloudless sky.