The Agent smiled; or rather, he tightened his face so that his teeth were exposed and his eyes narrowed. “I see,” he said. “Still trying to play doctor.” He laughed condescendingly. “I know what real doctors are. And I know you’re not one of them.”
“Really? You’ve seen one? I’ve never met anyone who has actually seen, as you said, a real doctor. That’s quite something, since each one has something like thirty thousand patients. They’re hard to see when they hide behind their equipment and their money.”
The Agent unfolded his arms. “A couple of mutations are all that separate you from fruit flies, too. We are what biochemistry makes us, and I am a more highly-evolved species.”
“No. I evolved,” Dok said. “You are a creation of man. You’re a machine, built for a particular purpose. Maybe your mutations actually made you closer to the flies.”
“Listen, freak—”
“Freak? Who’s the freak, here?” Dok said. “I was made by nature. You were made in a laboratory.”
The Agent casually slapped Dok’s face, the hand heavy and dense like scrap iron. “You are an animal, jungle man. Nothing more.”
Dok wiped a little blood from the corner of his mouth. How much time had passed? Enough for Eadie to get safely into Mrs. Klaussen’s?
“Look,” Dok said. “Mutation is good. When some catastrophe wipes out ninety-nine percent of all living things, it’s those little mutations that keep life’s hold on the planet. Life without mutation would vanish. All I’m saying is that we’re not so different, you and I.”
The Agent laughed. “Different enough. My kind runs the whole planet,” he said. “And you’re—” he gestured around the tiny room. “You’re nothing.”
“Maybe my kind just couldn’t afford good law enforcement to protect us,” Dok said.
The Agent grabbed his shoulders and his shirt again, flinging him to the floor face-first. He stepped on Dok right between his shoulder blades, pinning him down. The foot lifted slowly from his back and Dok started to raise himself to hands and knees. The Fed stomped down again, this time on the back of Dok’s head.
Turning, the Agent grabbed the woman who had been sitting on the floor, hoisting her to her feet by one spindly arm. “How about you? Do you know where the waitress with a cut face might have gone?”
Fiend territory
Brian crept silently among the rubble, moving one foot forward, gingerly touching the heel to the ground, lowering the rest of the foot until the entire outside edge touched, and gradually shifting weight to the new foot. The sky grew steadily darker, but he couldn’t tell whether it was due to the storm or from actual nightfall. He carefully breathed in through his nose and out through his mouth so as not to make the slightest sound. He grabbed large stones and walls as he passed, shifting some of his weight to them whenever they proved stable to allow better balance and faster movement of his feet without disturbing debris on the ground. Years of practice had made him extraordinarily adept at this.
As adept as the Fiends?
He squinted, concentrating. He froze, squeezing his eyes tightly shut to focus his mind.
Nobody does this better than Fiends.
Lightning flashed directly overhead and thunder boomed. He made a few quick, running steps while it echoed.
Two soft popping sounds came from ahead and to the right. Brian could make out some hazy building outlines through the storm but very little else—certainly nothing that could make sounds like that.
They could have come from anything. In a place with anything but Fiends.
He immediately adjusted his path, aiming ahead and left, eventually reaching a spot of fine, sandy gravel. It was powdery enough to let him move in a rolling motion, putting the popping sounds behind him as he moved from heel, to edge of foot, to toes, one foot after the other, over and over.
Another soft pop sounded, this one a single snap, as faint as the first, but now in front of him in the new direction. Brian shifted again, heading away from it.
He glided silently over piles of debris, slow-motion danced across long patches of gravel, and slid through thin, slippery layers of mud until he reached the corner of a building. He felt along the wall for a few paces until another popping noise stopped him, this time only a few steps ahead. Brian saw only the darkness and an occasional glimmer of reflection from the blowing, icy rain.
Upstairs in Dok’s building
Eadie knocked again softly at apartment five-seventeen. Nobody answered.
“What should we do, Prophet?” she asked.
The Prophet shook his head, removing a fresh bottle of sodje from some hidden pocket in his shapeless rags.
She knocked harder, then pounded, looking up and down the hallway to make sure no one was coming. She tried the door handle.
Eadie crossed to the other side of the hall and ran at the door, kicking it near the handle. The hallway echoed as it cracked and splintered, but the lock held. The bruises on her face, breast and midsection throbbed. She backed up and kicked again. The door gave way and she tumbled to the floor on the other side. The scab on her face cracked but the stitches remained intact.
An old woman sat in a chair, facing out the tiny apartment’s lone window. Churning storm clouds blocked the last of the early evening twilight.
“Mrs. Klaussen? I’m really sorry about your door,” Eadie said. The woman did not turn her head. “But Dok, downstairs, he sent me, and I was worried about—Mrs. Klaussen? Are you all right?”
She fumbled for the switch on a little lamp. “Prophet?” she called softly out to the hall. “Prophet? Why don’t you come on in? Mrs. Klaussen won’t mind. She’s dead.”
Dok’s clinic
“What was that?” the Agent asked.
“I thought you were a cop,” Dok said, still holding the edge of the counter he’d used to pull himself up. “Don’t you know what a door gettin’ kicked in sounds like? Why don’t you go investigate like cops are supposed to?”
The Agent had been holding Dok’s patient by the shoulders, pretending to be gentle while he scared the hell out of her. He let go and turned, punching Dok in the face, leaving him with a bloody nose and a split lip. “You don’t learn.”
The words hung in Dok’s mind, sounding hollow and distorted, as if they had been spoken through a tube. He tightened his stomach and back muscles, clinging to consciousness.
The Agent turned back to the woman. “I have no further use for you. You may go. Now.”
Amelix Retreat
A SUBSIDIARY OF AMELIX INTEGRATIONS
Reconditioning Feedback Form
Seeker of Understanding
INVOLUNTARY, GRADE ONE
Subject: Eric Basali, #117B882QQ
Division: Corporate Regulations
1. Please describe your relationship with Amelix Integrations, including your feelings about the company and your interactions with it. Honesty is imperative.
You are trying to steal my soul.
Actually, it’s worse than that.
You’re trying to persuade me to surrender it willingly.
2. Please share some details of your experience here at Amelix Retreat today.
I couldn’t believe it was already morning when the computer woke me. It felt like I only slept two or three hours. I know you must watch me through cameras, which are probably everywhere in this room, though I’ve never seen one.
I may as well confess this, since you are undoubtedly aware of it anyway: I find myself unusually aroused in this place. It’s not surprising, when you keep me naked all the time and pathway amplification kicks in every time I move against the sheets. I wish you would allow me just a few minutes of privacy.
This morning, we all met up in the conference room. Or, that is, we virtually met in the virtual conference room, wearing computer-generated camouflage. A serious Seeker called 6T showed me how to use a gun. He seemed older than me, so I imagined his nickname as “Sixty.”
The combat simulation was amazingly real
istic. I could feel the cold metal as I hefted the weapon and worked its mechanism. A long blade gleamed at the end of the barrel. DeeElle’s ponytail still showed beneath her head cover. She noticed me running my fingertips over the gun and came up to me, gesturing toward the door. “It seems even more real once you’re out there,” she said. “Be careful. When they kill you in this game, it feels like you’re actually dying. You’ll be fine when it’s over, but the pain can get pretty intense.”
They showed us some holos of Andro-Heathcliffe “soldiers” in a brown camouflage that was easy to distinguish from our gray, and then they checked the security cameras and the steel door unlocked with an ominous, echoing metallic thunk. Outside, the terrain was all ruins—collapsed buildings and crumbling streets. It had to be the Zone. 6T was leading the team today. He motioned for us to move forward and we headed down the street, with DeeElle next to me. We let the rest of the group get ahead of us.
“I don’t want to feel like I’m dying today,” I told her. “How about you?”
“Not at all,” she said.
“Let’s sit this one out,” I said. I guided her toward a doorway with stairs leading down where we might be able to hide. She giggled and went along with me.
The steps led to an empty cellar. I had just leaned my gun against a wall and turned toward DeeElle when she took a running leap and plunged her bayonet into my stomach. The pain shot through my limbs and I heard myself making jerky gagging sounds as my body twitched. She twisted the gun and the blade cut an arc through my middle. I collapsed on the floor. She slung my rifle over her shoulder and went back out to join the others. I writhed in pain for what might have been an hour, and then I blacked out.
When I came to, I was on the floor of the conference room again. The others were congratulating DeeElle on her performance. I struggled to my knees, panting, and felt for the wound, but of course there was none. “Oh, 2Q is hurt,” DeeElle said. “Do you feel betrayed, 2Q?”
I refused to look at her.
“It’s the rest of our team who should feel betrayed,” she said. “They depended on you and you abandoned them, left them to face the enemy outnumbered.”
“It’s no different when you shirk at the office,” said another guy, who goes by BT (“Burt”). “We are at war! Now you know what it feels like to be betrayed. You were afraid that maybe the company would reject you, that you’d become one of the Departed, weren’t you? You were concerned only with yourself. What you should have been worried about was that the entire Amelix operation would fail and we’d become a Lost Populace!”
I groaned and tried to get up, but my legs were still shaking too much.
“One will fail, 2Q,” he said. “Either Amelix or Andro-Heathcliffe. If our company fails, we’re all out there, fighting and starving in anarchy. Not just you, but us, too, and all the people we love!” He kicked me hard in the ribs. “I want to live, you shit-eating coward! The company has sheltered you so much you don’t even know how good you’ve got it.”
“DL, your performance during today’s exercise was exceptional,” 6T said. DeeElle pressed her palms together and interlaced her fingers excitedly. “I’ll grant you a level 6 reward,” he added benevolently.
She thanked him breathlessly and climbed up onto the table, the surface of which now appeared soft and comfortable. Her clothing disappeared, though her face remained covered, and she masturbated herself to a shuddering orgasm, its level of intensity apparently controlled by the holograph program. Level 6. I wondered what the highest possible level was, and what one would have to do to earn it.
When she finished, the rest of the group turned to me. My camouflage clothing had disappeared and I, too, was naked except for the hood, my arousal from having watched DeeElle embarrassingly evident. Then they all came at me, kicking and slapping and punching until I blacked out again.
I awoke in my room (but of course I’d never actually left it). Andrew sat down in my chair without saying anything. I sat up on the floor, leaning my back against the bed.
“They were right, 2Q,” he said finally. “Amelix is at war.”
I aimed my hatred at him like a weapon. “War? You’re just a company! Andro-Heathcliffe is just a company! You compete with each other to see who can make and sell more products, who can make more money. You aren’t sending real armies out there to bayonet each other. This simulation was a game, nothing but a trick to get us to work together.”
“War is as it has always been, 2Q,” he said calmly. “A fight to acquire resources. Don’t mistake our modern, civilized form of war for anything less than that. Those who don’t help us fight for what we need will find themselves fighting alone, the old-fashioned way.”
3. Please describe the important relationships in your life.
You turned my family and everyone around me into zombies that exist only to serve the company’s interests. Writing in that stupid notebook every day was the closest I’ve ever come to meaningful, truthful interaction, because it was the one part of my life you hadn’t invaded.
Maybe I was also writing because I hoped there was someone else out there who would understand, that some sentient being might someday read my words and connect.
I guess it doesn’t matter why, now.
4. Please share any additional thoughts or comments.
Why didn’t I learn my lesson back in the office? The sentient beings were weeded out long ago. We can never have a thought of our own or anything hidden inside us at all because you need us to be hollow and programmable. You build us to be empty.
Hope leads only to pain.
Outside the building where Lawrence had last seen Eadie
A Federal truck sat parked in the street in front of the building, the shape obscured by its electric camouflage and the deepening darkness. The Feds must have captured Eadie by now. They would bring her out any minute.
Lawrence had no weapon. Gene-spliced Federal Angels were three times his size, and there might be two or three of them with her. He would attack them anyway.
That was just how it was with Eadie.
Lightning flashed and thunder shook the ground.
His brain felt so tiny and insignificant with the EI shut down. For the first time in his life, Lawrence was completely cut off from everything and everyone, but he had brought those Feds to Eadie and he had to find a way to help her, even by himself, with his own minuscule, disconnected brain.
A woman emerged from the building, heading straight for Lawrence. He ducked back around the corner, pressing himself flat against the wall.
She came around to stand in front of him. Her frizzy brown hair spilled over a bright blue patch on the shoulder of her beige overcoat. Her pale face was wrinkled and haggard but her jaw was set and her eyes were steely.
“You’re that student who was with the General!” she said.
Lawrence looked past her, trying to appear disinterested. “What makes you say that?”
She gestured at his uniform. “Not many like you around here. And you better learn to look around corners right, or you’re gonna get killed.”
“What? I don’t—”
She tilted her head to the side, holding her fingers in front of her face as if they were gripping the vertical edge of a wall. “You can’t just poke your head around the wall.” She imitated him, moving her head around her hands. “That’s gonna get you hurt. Way to do it is stand back from the wall and scoot your body out so you can look.” She did it with the real wall this time, peeking at the Federal truck from a couple of steps back from the corner. She turned back to him. “That way, nobody sees your big ol’ head poking around the side.”
“Okay,” Lawrence said. He gave a tiny shrug. “Thanks.”
“You’re gonna need to know that stuff, serving General Eadie,” she said. “She’s fightin’ for all of us, and for God! Gotta know what you’re doing if you’re fighting for God.”
“What?”
The woman nodded. “The General. That Prophet, he told
me. She’ll set us all free. Sent to us by God, he said, and when you look at her, you can see it. She’s the solution, and I’m tellin’ everybody. Gonna get a piece a charcoal and write it all over.” The woman traced a shape on the wall with her fingers, boxing in an imaginary letter. “E,” she said. She moved her hands, boxing another imaginary letter. “D.” The woman smiled at Lawrence. “You should do it, too. She’ll end all the misery in this world, and I’m gonna help her. Just like you.”
Fiend territory
Brian pressed his back against the wall and slowly swung his head to the left, facing the way he had come, squinting and opening his eyes, trying to make out his surroundings. Only a dim silhouette of another half-crumbled building stood out from the darkened sky. He turned back to the right, peering ahead in the same way, but there was nothing visible at all.
“Ready to meet the Unity?”
It was not his own internal voice, not even the strange new voice that sometimes shouted from inside his head. This voice had definitely been spoken. Brian had felt the breath on his left ear.
8
Mrs. Klaussen’s apartment
Eadie had been sitting silently for more than an hour looking from the dead, expressionless face of Mrs. Klaussen to that of the Prophet, who looked scarcely more alive. There were photographs on the apartment wall of a young Mrs. Klaussen and a young man, sometimes with a baby, but nothing in the place suggested that she was anything but alone now. The newest pictures appeared to be at least forty years old. Mrs. Klaussen wore no ring, and all the clothes in the closets were women’s styles.
Someone tapped on the door. Eadie rose quickly to her feet, snatched the knife from the lamp table and moved cautiously toward the sound. She opened her mouth wide to make her rapid shallow breaths less audible.
The tap came again, more rapidly this time, rattling the chair she had wedged against the broken doorframe. She slowly leaned toward it, bracing it with her left hand as she held the knife ready in her right.
The Book of Eadie, Volume One of the Seventeen Trilogy Page 12