Ain't Talkin'

“You can’t bring her back.”

“You say that with such finality, Walter.” Grin, grin.

“Because it’s true.” Roche said it with real finality.

“You might think so. Of course it is true that resurrecting the dead is impossible. Such things would be the work of miracles. Yet what if I told you that this was a time of miracles. And they that dwell on the earth shall wonder, whose names were not written in the book of life from the foundation of the world?”

“Speak sense.”

“I do. Have you heard of my science? My genetic reconditioning?” Grin.

“No.” Roche spat on the pavement. The world remained still besides the dust that blew across the wasteland. Somewhere far away a powerline snapped with a twang. Hundreds of years of wind and sand had been abuse enough it seemed.

“The human mind is a collected encyclopedia of data and experiences. Noise and endless transcripts of every iotic detail. Prerecorded instincts derived from millions of years of genetic drift propagate the majority of the data but there’s that insignificant bit. The couple lines of ones and zeroes that make up the person, the individual. Minutiae in comparison to the preemptive data. I can encode that bit, that last little bit, like writing a program for a computer before it’s more than a couple wires. A fetus that will grow into the woman you loved. You see I’ve been following you a long time, Walter. Most of my life, not so much of yours. It wasn’t difficult in the course of things to track you down, to find your history, to find what was left of her family. Ancestry is a beautiful thing. Isolated genetic codes-”

Roche whipped the grinning Doctor Weaving across his teeth with his revolver’s barrel.

“You ever try to sell me on creating some genetic fucking copy of a human being again and I will gun you down. It’ll be worse if you ever speak her name again, I’ll end you slowly.” Roche growled through cigarette smoke.

Weaving just grinned his many-toothed smile, his teeth gone pink from the bleeding in his cheeks. A fresh bruise was welling across his face, but he pushed his sunglasses back in place. It was not before Roche had seen his eyes. Pale eyes, like a predator, like something that should have been woven out of humanities thread a long, long time ago, but was still poisoning it from the inside.

He laughed something like a raspy chuckle, a dark sound, like chalk.

“You’re still believing I haven’t done it yet. That’s your fault, Walter. That’s your fault.”