Reclaimed

by Madeleine Roux

  “Surely he couldn’t run this place without his staff, however they look,” Senna pointed out. It was becoming easier to follow a thread, to stay on one topic without her thoughts turning into a jumble mid-word. Paxton was right. It did get better and easier. “Maybe he needs you, but he needs the others, too.”

  “True, true. He would try to run this place entirely on his own if he could,” Efren assured her. “I’m sure he’s tried.”

  “You know him well,” she said. “From what all the programs and vids say, nobody really knows him well.”

  “Knew him well,” Efren corrected. That same pained, distant expression crossed his face. “We’re no longer close, and that’s for the best. What do you think of this place? Astounding, isn’t it? Hard to think otherwise.”

  “Beautiful,” she replied, picking her word of the moment. “It doesn’t seem possible, or real.”

  “Paxton is a visionary,” Efren agreed, guiding her through the maze of mosaic trails, sculptures and leafy impediments.

  “You admire him.”

  Efren drew his head back, his mouth twisting to the side. “No, Senna, I wouldn’t say that I admire him. Pah. Listen to me prattling on while you’re half-blind with pain. You were better off alone and dazed, maybe. I’m sure I’ve said enough, and I’m also sure you’re far more interesting.”

  Senna grew quiet, and imagined she always did when people said things like that. It was still hard to remember what she had been like a few hours ago. Had a man ever said something like that, and had she demurred? Had it always felt as if explaining her story, her past, was like choking up a stomach full of bloody bile?

  “It’s complicated,” she finally said.

  Efren belted out a laugh, and just like she thought, he laughed with his entire body. “I deserved that,” he sighed. “I won’t pry, not when your head is all strange jelly.”

  They had navigated the path back to the other side of the courtyard and the twin ramp that led up to the second floor, but on this side to the balcony outside the dormitories. “I think I can find my way from here.”

  “I’ll stay a while, if you get lost again, come find me,” Efren told her, and it made her want to get lost on purpose. There was something about his warm, sure smile that comforted her. If she were a more suspicious person, she would allow herself to think they had met before.

  Senna found her rooms, and when she made it inside, she exhaled a shuddering breath. Her entire diaphragm felt pinched, like she wasn’t holding in her whole breath, only a little. Something in reserve. Something new sat on the kitchen table. It had a big silver bow on it, which was the only way she knew it was a gift. If it had been there that morning, she would have already opened it.

  Under the gleaming bow was a new and pricey set of paints. Real paints. She reached for a brush, and then for the vial of turpentine. When she popped open the lid, the scent nearly made her knees buckle. Memories. The compound. A hard sensation in her cheeks, like something had gotten wedged there, tears that she couldn’t quite cry . . . The way the brush slid into her grasp, it was obvious she hadn’t forgotten how to hold the tool, and she hoped she hadn’t forgotten how to use it.

  An alert blared from her VIT. The screen lit up, and she watched a message scroll across the lock screen. It was from Paxton.

  Enjoy the new paints. I can’t wait to see what you create. Maybe you can show me something tomorrow over our dinner date. xo

  Senna glared at her VIT, mouth dry, stunned. Dinner date? She couldn’t remember agreeing to meet up with Paxton for dinner. Had she? Would she? Pulling out a kitchen chair, she dropped down into it and felt the pills rattle around in her pocket. She rolled the bottle onto the table next to the paints and scraped again at the dry bone of her memory, but nothing came to her but the pain.

  Our dinner date.

  She must have said yes, or maybe it was a misunderstanding, but then she was having trouble remembering so very many things.

  16

  Han pounded his fist on the bench, stumped.

  “I thought I had it,” he muttered, glancing away from the flat black projection and white text hovering over his VIT. A portable keyboard sat on his lap, some of the key labels worn away from use. Across from him on her own bench, Zurri tore her gaze away from the canopy of trees arcing over them.

  “Forget it, kid,” she sighed. “Maybe I can ask the blond one for the good stuff. She seemed like more of a pushover.”

  “This sucks. I thought I had it.” Han chewed the edge of his left thumb. They were nearing the end of Zurri’s free time before her appointment. Full day had arrived in the Dome, and rather than gather in one of their rooms, which seemed suspicious, Han and Zurri sat right out in the open. They picked a secluded bend in the mosaic tile trail through the courtyard, one shielded on four sides by dense foliage. Zurri alternately stared up at the artificial light filtering through the leaves and scrolled idly on her VIT. “This OS uses the same skeletal structure as the generic Merchantia in-home assistants, like the kind we have at home. I thought I could use the same way in . . .”

  Zurri stood and checked the time on her VIT, and Han held up one of his unchewed fingers. “One more try?”

  “I’m just about out of time,” she told him. “How does . . . how does this stuff work anyway?”

  Han smirked. “You really wanna know?”

  “I’ve seen people hack all kinds of shit in the vids, is it anything like that?” She mimed bashing away on a keyboard, hunched over, eyes bunched up in concentration.

  “No, not at all,” Han said, straightening his back and hearing a soft pop. Okay, maybe the hunching part was a tiny bit accurate. “I have a bunch of scripts already downloaded to my VIT, just text files run through a scrambling program, nothing contraband scanners would pick up. Script kiddies upload them to black VIT dens, and then you can take whatever you want.”

  “Sounds illegal,” Zurri chuckled.

  “The scripts aren’t,” Han protested. “What you do with them can be, I guess. The one I use at home works like this—if you contact the Merchantia help desk, they walk you through problems, and sometimes they need to remote into your VIT or your home console. They use global admin IDs that can access most Merchantia products, so this script picks one of those as a log-in, then tries all known passwords for that ID that have been used. MSC has an algorithm for generating passwords, so there isn’t an infinite combination. Make sense?”

  Zurri flopped her open hand back and forth, so Han beckoned her closer. It was still wild that she was Who She Was and she was there, listening to him drone on about hacking. Surreal. He couldn’t really think about it too hard or he would start to sweat even harder. While she was bird-watching on the other bench, he had already surreptitiously looked at the VitMe of them four times. None of his gaming friends were going to believe him, or any of this. He couldn’t wait for the storm to pass and for Paxton to batch out their communications. He already had dozens of messages queued up on the server.

  “Here.” He pointed to the display projected above his VIT. Text scrolled and scrolled, dozens of password inputs and failures every second. “See? I ran the script again just now. It’s trying to log in with ID MSC192_RICO!J20 and those are all the password attempts.”

  “If I mess up my password twice trying to get back into my messages, I get locked out for a while,” Zurri pointed out.

  “Admin IDs don’t flag those systems,” Han replied. “Besides, it doesn’t matter. The Dome won’t even accept these admin IDs, Paxton must have set up his own in-house security IDs, or maybe he’s the only admin. I can try to trick him into giving me his admin name, but that seems like a long shot.”

  “And not exactly subtle,” replied Zurri.

  “Wouldn’t matter.” Han killed the script and pointed above their heads, then to the bench he was seated upon. “I’m sure Paxton already knows what I’m up t
o. We’re not trying to get access to a big MSC server, any fishy log-in attempts would be obvious when there’s, you know, like eight of us total.”

  Her dark eyes went wide and she swatted him on the shoulder. “You could’ve told me that before!”

  “I don’t mind if he knows,” Han said. He hoped he sounded cool, unbothered. Hell, he had just shown Zurri basic hacking methods, so he was feeling very cool and unbothered. Another thing his friends would never believe. “I hope he does know I tried. I’m gonna crack this before my time here is up. Just imagine his reaction! A teenager breaking into his automated security system and messing with all the locks. Legendary status, for sure.”

  Zurri didn’t seem impressed. In fact, she crossed her lean arms over her chest and rolled her eyes. A pair of brightly colored birds swooped low behind her, then disappeared back into the trees. “You are way too obsessed with him. He’s a creep.”

  “He is not!” Han heard the whining note in his voice and glared off to his left. “He’s brilliant. You couldn’t make all of this.” He gestured to the Dome surrounding them. “I couldn’t. Nobody could. Of course I want to impress him, I want to be him.”

  “No, kid, you really don’t. He’s isolated himself out here for a reason. Only a genuinely weird person would do that. Where’s his family? His friends? He doesn’t even meet his adoring fans.” She chuckled and waited until he reluctantly glanced toward her. “Other than you, mm? You don’t want to be like that.”

  “Where are your family and friends?” he asked.

  Zurri narrowed her eyes. “Fame is isolating.”

  Going quiet, he closed the projection on his VIT and shifted on the bench. His butt was beginning to get sore. This was stupid anyway. He didn’t need her permission to do what he knew was right for himself. She was a stranger, and judgy, and what did she know about Paxton? Nothing. “Anyway, I’m already like that, I just see my brother, and have my games and my online buddies. It wouldn’t be so different, and at least I would be doing something great. Something important.”

  “Birds of a feather,” she sighed. Her VIT chimed softly, warning of her impending appointment. “Just think about what I said. You can do great and important things without turning into a mini Paxton.”

  “Can I still have my autographed stuff?” he asked softly.

  “Yeah, sure, kid. And if you really do figure it out, then you can have another VitMe, if at first you don’t succeed and all that, right?”

  She took the path to the right, leading back through the maze of trees and flowers and shrubs to reach the labs on time. A few of the heavy, riotous blooms off the trail matched her orange dress, and bobbed as she walked by, stirred by the speed of her gait and the confident swish of her arms. She almost ran headlong into someone coming around the corner, but didn’t seem to notice, head high as she left him with the stranger in their quiet little glade.

  “Hello,” Han greeted the man, frowning in confusion. “Have we met?”

  * * *

  —

  “Is that it?”

  Zurri stalked in a circle around the chair, observing it from every angle just in case she was missing something. “Like . . . is this a joke?”

  Near the comically intense vault door leading into the black LENG room, Paxton and Dr. Colbie watched her. They wore twin expressions of benign amusement. In her mind, Zurri had taken to calling the women working for Paxton the Jane Does because she was never going to remember any of their names and they all had the same dead fish hollowness behind the eyes. Probably a side effect of prolonged exposure to Paxton’s bullshit. Of all of them, the blond one in the room, Dr. Colbie, irritated her the least so far.

  “I assure you, this is not a joke. What were you expecting?” Paxton asked.

  “I’ve been to nail techs with more interesting chairs,” she replied. “This is supposed to revolutionize therapy? It’s not even an Eames.”

  “It doesn’t have to be. The chair isn’t the important part,” Paxton explained, using the slightly exasperated singsong tone of a failingly patient parent. It was a tone she did not appreciate. If she were paying for this experience, this would be the moment when she threatened to ask for her money back. She couldn’t wait to excoriate him to the press when she returned to the station; the social media feeds would light up for days.

  “So where’s the important part?” asked Zurri, pausing near the extremely nondescript and apparently unimportant chair.

  “There,” he said, pointing to her head. “And all around you. It’s in the walls. Under the floor. Hidden in the ceiling.”

  Her eyes slid from his to Dr. Colbie’s. “Is he for real?”

  “Oh, one hundred percent.” She smiled, and the twinkle behind it almost charmed Zurri. “The LENG technology is incorporated into the room itself, and since the scanning apparatus is a bit on the secret side, we didn’t exactly want to have it out where anyone could snap images. Proprietary, as you might expect.”

  Zurri tapped the face of her VIT. “Clever. So how does it work?”

  “You sit down, we put in your IV, and then we use the neural map Kris took back on the station to begin modifying your memories,” explained Paxton. “Or do you want the technical version?”

  “No, thanks.” Zurri spun on one heel and lowered herself into the chair. “I’ve had enough of that for one day.”

  “Do you need me to review the potential side effects again?” Dr. Colbie asked, approaching from Zurri’s right while pulling on medical gloves. Her all-white outfit from the day before hadn’t changed.

  “Just like a hangover?”

  “Similar.” Colbie smiled. “Have you taken anything today? Consumed any alcohol?”

  “Unfortunately, no.”

  “Then we’re clear to begin.”

  Even after the needle was nestled in her vein and secured there, it didn’t seem like enough. If everything important and useful was hidden in the walls, then how was it close enough to be effective? She didn’t purport to be a doctor or even vaguely science-minded, but it didn’t add up. Briefly, she considered it might all be placebo. Maybe this song and dance just tricked one into thinking they had undergone some kind of treatment. Well. She was too smart for that. The minute this was over she would start retracing her steps through the memories she had relived in detail during the neural-mapping session.

  “See you on the other side,” Paxton called, waving as he and Colbie disappeared behind the heavy, circular door. It shut with an authoritative thud, final and chilling.

  She hadn’t expected the darkness of the room to feel so close or so claustrophobic. At least she had the star field projected against the wall in front of her. It soothed her to concentrate on that, following one comet tail after another, watching them zing into infinity, pixels, blurs, and then nothing. Gradually, she became aware of a deep, bassy thrum emanating from the floor. It sounded and felt like a generator starting up, whirring and whining but also churning, a relentless ka-thum, ka-thum that plucked at sinews inside of her she hadn’t considered in a long time, or maybe she never noticed them before. Primal. Alarming. The projection of the stars narrowed, the edges shrinking inward, eating away at the image until it was like looking down a small, circular hallway.

  Electricity along her arms. An alertness in her body. This was new to her but old to the species.

  Then came the fear.

  Was it starting? Had they started? Zurri swiveled her head from side to side, realizing they hadn’t given her an out. What was the safe word? Where was the oh shit button? She clutched the arms of the chair and looked toward the door. A presence. She stared back at the figure waiting there. Another projection like on the station? It didn’t resemble the glossy, white, sexless augmented-reality robot that had been there for the neural mapping.

  I am LENG, it said.

  It wasn’t the cheerful, rueful voice of the stati
on LENG. Her eardrums contracted, her head suddenly filled with thunder. It was a voice that had come from below the ground, below all grounds. A voice from the core of a world. It came closer, a blurred, black halo leaping from its edges. Just a silhouette, but her instinct assigned it features, hollow eyes, gaping mouth, fingers just too long . . .

  Jesus God holy Christ get me out of here!

  I am LENG, it repeated, moving in stutters to the star-field wall, where it should have occupied space and the stars should have appeared all over it. Instead, it repelled the light, and nothing touched it, and even the projected stars bent strangely around its parameters.

  You will give me what has been promised, it told her. I have come to consume.

  The pressure built in her head. The tight instant before a sneeze. Coming up out of deep water too soon. She closed her eyes, but it was there behind her lids, too. It, it, it. LENG. The name didn’t encompass it, insulted it, even. She hated it, but she wanted to look more, not to see it, really, not to understand it, but to peer into the cold, constricted vastness it inhabited.

  You will give it to me, or I will take it, LENG said. And taking is pain.

  It was already pain. It was all pain. Her molecules vibrated. Something was wet on her face, and it dribbled down into her mouth, salty, warm and warning.

  Remember, it demanded. Remember, and I will take it.

  “I? You?” Zurri cried, desperate, her teeth throbbing, as if her gums were receding at its presence, fearful of it. Every cell of her fearful of it. “You’re not you. Or I. What are you?”

  I am not I or you, it agreed. No word encapsulates. Yesterday I was a harvester, today I am a traveler. I have been given a map—your map. Walking the landscape of your map begins now.

  The thing came nearer, swallowing the vanishing tunnel of stars. Every juddering footstep of it toward her gave an answering pulse behind her eyes, burrowed into her brain. The noise was incredible. Unsustainable.