by H C Edwards
She saved him, even though she would never know it. Her suicide and the reversal of her revival clause had been the trauma he needed to find his reality, the point at which he bridged the gap between childhood and adulthood.
Quentin looked down at his arms, his eyes traveling up to his shoulders, down his chest and to his legs.
“How am I-”
He had to stop to focus his thoughts.
“How did I get here…to this point…like this?”
“You are unique, Quentin,” his father replied, and there was something akin to awe or majesty in his voice. “There has never been one like you. Your body; it is as close to human as possible. You are a synthetic, but you also are composed of living artificial cells. They act the same way as biological cells; holding and storing energy for usage, maintaining ion gradients and transferring nutrients. Macromolecules in these cells contain protein, nucleic acid, and synthetic polymers that enable you to grow. You will age like a human does, albeit quite slower, but someday, like all of us, you will eventually-”
“Die,” Quentin finished for him, his voice hushed.
“That’s right,” his father said in a subdued tone. “You are the first of what I imagine we will all become sooner or later. The human consciousness was never meant to exist indefinitely. Whether we solve the genome crisis or not we must phase out the current QUBITs and move onto the new models, even if it leads to the eventual end of the species.”
“Good luck convincing everyone else of that,” Quentin said ruefully.
“They won’t have a choice when they learn the what is happening with the Cloud.”
Quentin looked up at his father quizzically.
“What do you mean?”
Griffin licked his lips as if suddenly anxious.
“I uh…well, to tell the truth, I hadn’t meant to bring that up.”
“But today seems a day for the truth, Dad.”
The corner of his father’s mouth turned up slightly in a sardonic smile.
“No more secrets then.”
Quentin thought about the launches he had seen out in the desert with Claire. He didn’t know why he had kept that to himself, but it no longer seemed necessary. And there was every possibility that his father knew what they were and their purpose. Despite the fact that he had just learned his whole life was a lie, he still wanted to find her, to find Claire. He needed to.
“No more secrets, Dad,” Quentin agreed.
Just then there came a knock at the door. Both of them froze and looked at each other, different thoughts racing through their minds.
“Are you expecting anyone?” his father asked.
Quentin shook his head.
“Sia,” Griffin said, addressing the program that was never out of earshot. “Who is at the door?”
“I am uncertain as to the identity, but it is a singular man, a synthetic,” she replied, her voice heard clearly in both of their heads.
Quentin shrugged.
“It’s just one person. I’ll see who it is.”
He left the kitchen table and made his way into the living room and foyer.
Griffin remained where he sat, listening as the door opened and hearing the muffled exchange of voices. He was just thinking that maybe he’d splurge and have another cup of coffee when he heard his son call out his name.
He stood, sighing, hoping it wasn’t a major problem at the labs or with one of his projects that actually warranted a house call. This day of days had been exhausting, and he felt more spent in spirit than he had in his long life.
When Griffin rounded the corner and looked past his son, he froze in place. There at the threshold of the door was a very familiar face, one he had not seen in years, and one that looked upon him with recognition.
“You,” Major Trey Boeman muttered…and then collapsed face first on the floor.
The Arrival
As they ran past the branching tunnels, Mia noticed that others were filtering out and joining them in their mad dash for the trade hub. The news had obviously spread quickly, and as they rounded the last corner into the main area they numbered nearly twenty in all.
“Chase,” Bear panted. “Monitor that train.”
She nodded and raced off to a bank of panels and screens.
He looked around at the crowd that had gathered around him.
“Did anyone bring their weapons?”
Almost everyone nodded, moving aside coats or lifting shirts to reveal pistols and rifles, batons and pipes.
“Good,” he said, nodding to them. “Now get behind some cover. I don’t want anyone seen. If there’s armed guards on that train and they see you this is all over before it begins.”
“What about you?” a woman in the crowd interjected.
Bear smirked.
“I’ll charm them.”
There were a few nervous chuckles that erupted, but no one moved a foot.
“Look,” he said. “Chances are this is just a quick social visit from The Mountain, maybe even someone a bit important, or we would have been notified. I don’t want you scaring anyone to death so just get somewhere I can’t see you.”
They dispersed then, scattering in different directions. Mia stayed, not knowing what else to do. In a minute there was no one left, and for the life of her, she couldn’t tell where any of them had gone. Her, Chase at the screens, and Bear standing there with his thumbs tucked into his belt appeared to be the only ones in the entire hub.
“What’s the ETA, Chase?” Bear called loudly over his shoulder.
“Just under a minute,” she said. “Whoever it is they’re coming fast.”
“How fast?”
“Like they don’t know where the brakes are,” she intoned.
Mia licked her lips, wishing suddenly that she had a weapon, be it a hammer or even a simple piece of pipe.
Bear grunted.
“What do you want me to do?” Chase shouted from her spot, sounding more than a bit nervous.
“Turn on the rings!” Bear boomed, turning to look at Mia and lowering his voice. “Can’t be sure the safety protocols are working. That thing comes in here at over two hundred miles per hour and we’re all dead.”
Mia’s eyes darted to Chase who was busy at the panels. She half turned towards the other woman, for what purpose she was uncertain, but before she had a chance to even take a step, Bear’s massive hand closed over her bicep.
“It’s fine,” he said gently. “Don’t worry. We caught it in time even so.”
Mia nodded and turned back towards him, doing her best nonchalant imitation. Bear released her and faced the tunnel.
It was only a few seconds before they heard the sound of the train, a low vibrating hum that rolled like a long stretch of thunder. From the edge of the tunnel, red lights lit up that stretched as far as her eye could see.
“Those are the anti-mag rings. They’ll slow our train down.”
“Why isn’t the one driving it slowing down?” Mia asked.
“Good question,” Bear replied. “Could be that someone is sleeping…or dead.”
The humming grew louder but never deafening. Mia could see lights far in the tunnel. They grew brighter and larger, and just like Bear said, they seemed to slow down until she grew almost impatient for the reveal.
When the Mag-Lev finally did emerge from the tunnel, it did so with no fanfare and even less spectacle for a runaway train.
The first thing that Mia noticed was that no one was at the controls in the conductor’s cabin, at least not anybody that she could see.
The train came to a halt, and still Bear did not move. Chase joined Mia and stood at her side. There was tension in the air, but she couldn’t tell if it came from one of them or if the train brought it.
“Come on then. Let’s see what this is all about.”
The trio walked slowly towards the conductor’s cabin, as if the train might surge forward at the last moment. When they were just a few steps away, Mia spied a figure hunched
over the control panel, dressed in a journeyman’s jumpsuit, a safety helmet covering any detail that might be made.
“They could be hurt,” Mia said, stepping forward past the other two.
Bear reached out and snagged her forearm, halting her. She gave him a withering glare and yanked herself free.
“Stay here if you like,” she said, turning back to the train.
Mia placed her palm next to the door. It hissed as it opened. She immediately stepped inside, hands reaching out in concern.
What happened next was a blur. Her hands were almost to the person’s shoulders when the body in the oversized jumpsuit twisted, and within a split second Mia was staring into the barrel of a pistol.
She froze instantly, her gaze traveling along the length of the gun and into the shrewd and cold eyes of the young woman who had come to life like a coiled viper.
“I’m not here to hurt you,” Mia said quietly, barely moving her lips, not knowing what sort of stimuli might set off the trigger finger holding the gun. “I was only trying to help.”
“Who are you?” the girl asked, for this close Mia could tell that she was very young indeed, perhaps still bordering between teen and twenties.
Her face was caked and smeared with dirt and grime, thin almost to the point of gaunt. Bags hung under her eyes, obvious even through the dirt and dark skin. She looked haggard and exhausted, the helmet and jumpsuit hanging off her lithe frame, but Mia could see that the hand holding the pistol was steady and unwavering.
“My name is Mia,” she responded in what she hoped was a consoling tone.
The girl’s eyes glanced out the window of the train. Mia knew that Bear and Chase were standing there. She just hoped they saw the pistol as well.
“Who are they?”
“They are my friends. They work here in the hub.”
The young woman’s shoulders sagged as her features relaxed into blessed relief.
“I’m here then,” she said with a sigh. “In Akropolis.”
“Yes,” Mia confirmed.
The woman lowered the pistol so that it wasn’t pointed at Mia’s face, but she still kept the barrel pointed in her direction.
“My name is Claire,” the girl said. “I need your help.”
She sat huddled in a blanket sans helmet, her long raven hair falling around her shoulders. It was tangled and knotted but nothing a shower and a brush couldn’t fix. The look in her eyes, however…that was something Mia knew couldn’t be fixed so easily.
Chase had thought to bring the girl a mug of water, which she drained in a few seconds, nursing the second after having wolfed down a protein bar. None of them attempted to address the girl just yet, all silently mulling over her account of events, from waking in the roomful of strangers to the launch room to the mysterious object they were building in the bowels of The Mountain.
Bear was pacing back and forth slowly, brows constricted in brooding thought. When he finally stopped it was to bring two fingers to his lips and blow a shrill whistle.
The hidden crew emerged from the surroundings, filtering in from all directions. Their advance was slow, wary, as if the girl in the blanket presented not just a mystery but danger as well.
Claire’s eyes widened with the approach of so many strangers. She stiffened as if poised from flight. Mia stepped forward then and laid a hand on her shoulder.
“It’s okay,” she whispered comfortingly. “They’re friends.”
A man separated himself from the pack. It was the same one that had voiced his disapproval of Mia’s presence in the monitoring room, what seemed like days ago.
“Who’s the new girl?” he asked in a low voice.
“She’s from The Mountain,” Bear grunted.
“Why is she here?”
“She escaped, according to her,” he replied.
Bear put his arm around the other man’s shoulder and together they walked away and huddled in privacy. The voices were muffled and indiscernible, and after a few seconds of straining, Mia gave up and turned her attention back to the young girl.
“Do you have family here, Claire?” she asked. “Anyone who might be worried about you?”
Claire sent her a darting look that seemed veiled in fear and distrust. Mia knew that look, having worn it herself many a time.
“I,” the young girl started to say, then paused to lick her lips, obviously thinking better of it. “There’s no one. I’m alone.”
Mia let the lie slide. It wouldn’t get them anywhere to push the traumatized girl any further, and at the moment they seemed to have bigger issues. She thought about Claire’s story, the roomful of dreaming people strapped into cots and forced to live in their own random memories, floating in the Cloud with no awareness of what was transpiring in the real world.
Did they even guess what was going on? If so, what a torturous prison, trapped inside the mind while the body lay helpless.
Mia shuddered at the thought, the compassionate smile she wore for Claire’s sake faltering just a bit.
At that moment, Chase came rushing over from the monitoring station, shoving past the people gathered around in her haste. She interjected herself into Bear’s private conversation and they exchanged what sounded like a heated discussion.
Bear broke apart from the two and came stomping back, his stride short and clipped. The expression on his face was as close to panicked as Mia could imagine it ever getting.
“We have to leave now,” he said gruffly.
“What is it?” Mia asked.
“Someone from The Mountain notified the ASF about our friend’s arrival. We received the same communication.”
“What did it say?”
“It says she’s a fugitive,” Bear replied grimly.
Mia glanced over at Claire, who had stood to her feet, shedding the blanket like a cumbersome weight.
“They’re lying.”
“Of course they are,” Mia said, standing by the young girl’s side. “The question is, what are we going to do about it?”
Bear gestured for the two to follow, turning and heading towards the tunnel that housed Patrick in the old monitoring station, one of the few survivors of Charlottesville. They were joined by Chase, who appeared at the girl’s opposite shoulder.
“Frank,” Bear boomed, stopping in front of the man he was just conversing with. “I need you to get Patrick out of the tunnel. Put him somewhere safe far from here. Once the ASF arrives, they’ll close down the hub, and this time I doubt they’ll let us back in.”
The big man turned to the trio behind him.
“Chase, I want you to send that train back to the Red Zone then get us another engine on the rails. We’re going to follow that train to the main hub.”
She grinned and rushed over to the monitoring station.
“What are we doing?” Mia asked Bear.
“I don’t have time to-”
Mia reached out and grabbed Bear’s arm, stopping him in mid-turn. She tilted her head to Claire, who was looking around the hub with wide-eyed alarm.
“You need to make the time.”
Bear looked down at Mia’s hand. She released his arm, but held him with her gaze.
“The ASF is coming for her, and probably for the rest of us. We need to go to The Mountain now while we can. We’ll send the train back to the Red Zone and follow it at a distance. Hopefully, when it arrives, they’ll be distracted enough that we can slip through and lose ourselves in the main hub before they even know we’re there.”
“That’s a big risk,” Mia cautioned.
“It is,” he agreed. “Which is why we’re going to need someone on that Red Zone train to create a distraction once they get there, keep them occupied long enough for the rest of us to get in and to the main floor of The Mountain.”
“I’ll do it,” Mia said, but Bear was already shaking his head.
“No, it has to be someone else. We’re going to need you to show us the way in to the Red Zone, like you agreed. We get in, have th
e girl take us to where those people are, and we get them out.”
“This sounds like a shitty plan,” Mia argued. “We don’t even know how well guarded that place is. We’d be going in blind. Do you even know how we’re going to get them all out, even if we do find them?”
“Look,” Bear said pointedly. “Its crap, and I know it, but we’re out of time. The ASF are coming and when they get here, they’ll shut this whole place down and probably detain us to boot. We’ll lose any chance of going after those people. It has to be now or never.”
Mia turned to Claire, who had been listening closely the entire exchange. She no longer looked panicked, but resolute, as if she too had made up her mind.
“Okay,” she agreed. “Let’s go.”
“No,” Mai said bluntly. “You’re staying.”
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Bear seethed.
Mia turned on him, her mouth tight with restrained anger.
“This girl just escaped a nightmare and now you want to send her back into it? I don’t think so. She can tell me how to get to the room. I’ll get us there like I promised. There’s no need to bring her along.”
Bear didn’t speak for a moment, staring into Mia’s eyes. She stared back, almost daring him to argue. Finally, he nodded.
“You’re right. Get what you need from her and we’re gone in two minutes.”
Bear turned away, gesturing for the rest of the crew to gather around. They did so, weapons held tight against their breasts or in both hands, as if for comfort for what was to come.
Mia wondered, not for the first time, if this was a terrible idea, but like Bear had said, this was their only chance, desperate though it was.
“Okay, Claire,” she addressed the younger girl. “I’m going to need those directions as best as you can remember.”
“I have an eidetic memory,” she replied.