The door closed, and a man sat down sat down opposite me. He appraised me for a minute then looked up at the Guardian.
“Take the cuffs off her, please. She will be fine with me.”
The woman passed the control band on her wrist over the cuffs, and when they unlocked she flicked them off me and dropped them into a pouch on her belt.
“I’ll leave you to it, Professor.”
The man was tall and thin. His sunken cheeks and slicked back hair brought to mind nothing so much as a hungry vampire.
“My name is Professor Wilhelm Klunker.”
An odd name for an odd looking man.
Perhaps he was waiting a few seconds for a response. When he saw none was coming, he smiled thinly at me.
“I am actually a medical Doctor. Yes, one who is a human being. I am a member of a rare breed in this day and age.”
“You are a human Doctor,” I responded.
My voice sounded flat. Like it came out of a machine. I was not interested in conversation. I would rather have curled up on a bed and gone to sleep, never to wake up.
“I want to see the father I’ve never met, the one in the gulag.”
I’m not sure where that came from. It wasn’t something I had decided to say.
“Listen carefully to what I am about to tell you,” he said, ignoring my request to see the man I only knew as Conrad.
“If we had not intervened, you would have been processed, and by now be in a camp in the bitterest cold of the far North,” Klunker said. “A work camp where you would have in all likelihood remained for the rest of what would have been a very short life.”
“Conrad is in one of those,” I told him.
He ignored me and continued.
“Instead, you have been selected for a special program. An important mission in fact. This is Burbank and Rosen Hall, a top-secret research facility.”
He told me completing the mission successfully would give me the opportunity I needed to redeem myself in the eyes of Earth Inc. All he needed from me was to my consent, and since I was no longer on the Blockchain I could give it to him by holding my hand over a scanner ray.
“It might seem a little odd to you given your present circumstances, but for this once in a lifetime offer we really do need your consent.” He said this to me without a hint of a smile on his face and with no suggestion of sarcasm at all.
“Your thumb and all four fingers, please,” he said reaching for my hand.
“What am I agreeing to exactly?” I asked pulling my hand back from his.
He looked surprised and smiled the way the wolf might have done as little red riding hood stood before him.
“Taking your handprint is part of our verification procedure. Nothing more than that, but having evidence of a formal acceptance from you is essential for us. The system requires your freely given consent. It can tell whether we forced it from you, and that will not do. Please, give me your hand.”
“And if don’t cooperate?” I asked flatly.
“Either you complete the mission you have been selected for, or you find yourself locked up in a permanent holding facility in Alaska, where you will work the rest of your days. A short harsh life with no opportunity to ever see your family or friends again. Is that what you prefer?”
“N-n-no.”
“Good, now place your hand on the imprint board.”
“What is going to happen to me after that?”
“You will undergo an augmentation procedure immediately.”
“A what?”
“A memory adjustment that enables your best performance and complete cooperation on the mission we will be sending you on.”
I feel the heat of a scanner passing under my hand.
“After the procedure is completed, you will wake up feeling like a new person. You won’t know it immediately, but you will have the equivalent of years of advanced study locked inside your head. You are very lucky.”
“I will be a hybrid?”
“Considering your situation at present, how could that possibly matter to you? Now, listen to me. You were chosen because you fit the necessary parameters required for this assignment. You are fit and healthy and we have taken into consideration your interests and your abilities. In your case, we will give you an array of complementary knowledge including advanced orbital mechanics and electronics. We will also give you a superior ability to learn, particularly to learn languages. When we finish with you, you will be very special and very valuable.”
“How am I going to use all that?”
“Let’s just say this addition will help you with any questions you will have.”
“Am I going to look different? Will it hurt?”
He shook his head.
“You feel some confusion over the first few days and things will settle down. There’s absolutely no pain from the procedure. We are going to take away some specific memories and add a whole memory bank of others. Then we are going to feed you lessons directly into the implants, that otherwise would take years for you to learn.”
“We do all of this by injecting nanobots into your circulatory system and directing them to travel through your blood vessels to your brain. Then they are manipulated to erase memories of your family, and to build what is effectively an extra-lobe to contain the new memory packages we give you.”
What is the point of all these useless details he’s dropping on me?
“How do I use this memory?” I asked. My ADHD mind had latched onto the details, despite myself.
“Let’s say you have a question about the mission or a particular situation, you ask yourself the question and it will give you the answer you need. The answer will come in an instant. Just like you had read the explanation and memorized the words.”
“You mean I am going to be re-programmed?”
“In an indirect manner of speaking, yes. We repress specific problem memories that we think affect our work. Memories of your family and everything that happened immediately after the Doctor discovered you were a Zero. But, rest assured, you will function much better without those memories. You won’t find yourself weighed down by depression. This will help you to deal much better with the problems you will face where you are going.”
Why should I care? I am lost without Mom and I will never see Dad again, or Ellie, or Tyler. It doesn’t really matter at all what they do to me. I am not going to be of any use to them. No treatment will ever fix what is broken inside.
There was a knock on the door and he looked up as two nurses wheeled a stretcher bed into the room.
“We won’t waste any time,” the professor said. “Don’t worry. You are going to feel much better once we are done with you.”
9
Odd Meeting
I stared at my feet.
I remember that I had been wearing handcuffs and sat before a man who looked like a vampire.
How long ago was that?
How many days had I been in this place?
Two nurses brought me outside and sat me in the sun on a painted metal bench before a large pond. Ducks paddled in circles on the water. They might have been geese.
I was wearing a white smock.
On the other side of the water a girl sat on a bench just like the one I sat on. She looked around my age. She also wore a smock just like mine. I watched her throw up on the neatly manicured lawn, cough, and spot a gob of saliva at her feet. I saw her wipe her mouth with the back of her hand.
“What are you staring at?” She called out.
“Sorry,” I said, looking quickly away.
A little later she called out again.
“You’re doing better today.”
“I am?” I asked in surprise.
She got to her feet and walked over to me.
“You mind if I sit beside you?” she asked. She sat down before I could give her an answer.
Her hair was long and brown and she had it in a ponytail. She was pretty, but there was an aloof air about her. I ha
d met that kind of girl before. They were usually impossible to get to know. They would never bother to waste their time with anyone except for those they saw as equals.
I stared back into her intense gaze.
“I thought you wanted to be alone?”
Her eyes flickered over me and a minute passed before she replied.
“We have the same clothes and the same sandals,” she said. “How about that?”
I knew it was sarcasm.
“Same prison, same clothes,” I responded with a shrug.
She sighed and rubbed her eyes her the back of her hand.
“I guess so,” she finally responded.
“How long do you think we’ve been here?” I asked.
She screwed up her nose as she considered the question.
“Do you think we’ve been here two days?” I suggested.
“I’ve been here longer than that,” she said. “And so have you.”
I felt a wave of panic. How come I couldn’t remember?
“I’m Isabella,” she said brightly.
She didn’t offer her hand for me to shake so I didn’t offer mine. Perhaps she was schizophrenic. If she was then what condition did I have?
“I’m Atoma,” I told her.
She frowned.
“What sort of name is that?”
“Mine,” I told her.
“Sounds Greek. Are you Greek?”
“I don’t think so.”
She looked around my age. Perhaps she was sixteen and had already completed her CCD.
“Relax,” she told me and gave me a tight smile.
I felt a sudden jab of emotion like sadness and wanting all slammed together. Funny how her smile was doing that to me.
“It comes back to you slowly,” she said, still with that tight smile. “I’ve seen you sitting here before now. You are looking much better today.”
“You might have been hallucinating,” I pointed out. “I am quite sure I’ve only been here a day or so.”
“Then I must still be hallucinating,” she replied. She held up her hands in front of her face and turned her wrists. “I look real enough to me sitting on this seat, and so do you.”
“You did throw-up,” I said pointedly.
We watched a cleaner with a side pack at her hip run a silver tube over the vomit on the lawn. The puddle quickly disappeared.
“They watch us all the time,” she said in a whisper, leaning close to my ear. As if there was anyone else close by who might overhear our conversation. I looked around. The only other person I could see was the cleaner and she was already making her way back to the building behind us.
“Do you remember anything about your family?” I asked.
“I recall people and places,” she said. “But nothing about my family or the house I lived in.”
“You don’t recall anything about your home?”
“Nothing,” she replied. “It must be to do with our condition.”
“Are we in prison or in a hospital?” I asked.
“Could be both,” she said.
“It’s more like an insane asylum,” I muttered. And if it was this girl sitting beside me was clearly one of the patients.
“That’s wishful thinking,” she said.
“If I’m crazy, then it feels nothing like I imagined it would be,” I continued. “And neither is this hospital. The trees and the green lawn. The pond… It’s all so, so…”
“Lush?” She asked, and she giggled.
“Yes,” I replied.
“The ducks are a nice touch,” she said with a smile.
There was a fragile quality to Isabella that I could see she tried to hide behind her bravado. She had become more relaxed and found I was beginning to like her.
“Why do you think we are here?” I asked.
“You know; I think you might be right about this being an asylum,” she said. “That means we are—patients.”
“If that’s true, there must be others. But I don’t see them.”
“It must be a very exclusive hospital,” she said nodding her head. “We must have rich parents.”
“That must be it,” I replied. “You know we aren’t so different, are we?”
She gave me a puzzled look.
“What makes you say that?”
“We aren’t exactly alike, but I can already see plenty of things we have in common.”
“Like we are both stark raving mad, you mean?” She giggled again.
“Maybe,” I said with a grin. “I remember Guardians brought me here in handcuffs. That means I had been arrested.”
“I remember giving my handprint when I arrived,” she said. “This weird thin character was telling me I was recruited for a mission. But that doesn’t make sense, does it?”
I turned to her in surprise.
“I’m a Zero,” I said. “I remember that much.”
She nodded her head.
“Me too.”
“If I could remember the house that I grew up in…” I said. “I wonder if I have a family.”
A sharp voice from behind us made us turn, and we saw it was a stout middle-aged woman. She clapped her hands like an old-time schoolmarm.
“Time to go back inside, girls.”
10
Grimwade and Klunker
The days went by and I met more girls like me. They all looked to be the same age as me. All slightly damaged, just like me. Some talked freely. Some didn’t. Otherwise, we were all just peas in a pod.
I met the others in a dusty room full of ancient stuff: charts, wooden rulers, and antique globes. Even the air smelled like there was a forgotten moldering Egyptian mummy hiding in a closet in a shadowed corner.
Sunlight poured through windows that looked out on a garden of stone statues. A woman pressed the sun visor button in the control panel on the wall and the lonely statues were replaced by an opaque bronze tint.
They lined us up according to our height. I was in the center. Isabella was two girls away from me, next to the tallest girl in our group. It was the first time any of us had seen the tall girl who stood stiffly at attention. She was older than the rest of us by at least two years.
The woman known to us only as Matron told us we were not to speak or turn our heads. Matron was a tall, severe-faced woman who dressed in the plain white uniform that was worn by all the staff. All except the two professors, who wore their own uniform of tweed jackets over thick cord trousers.
Professor Samuel H. Grimwade was, to put it politely, large in girth. To make matters worse, because it exaggerated his width, he had an enormous gray handlebar mustache. He was a middle-aged man who had spent far too much time sitting on his fat backside. He was really old school and bossy.
He introduced himself and told us to call him Professor.
“When my colleague finally decides to join us, you will address us as Professor Grimwade and Professor Klunker.”
What a pompous old fart!
Grimwade was a good two inches shorter than the shortest end of the line-up. He stood before the first girl in the line and stared up at her with eyes burning fiercely like hot coals. Once satisfied he had seen all he needed, he stepped in front of the next girl. Every so often he methodically twirled his mustache, first one side then the other. He might have made a bizarre character right out of a holovid cartoon, but I didn’t laugh. None of us did. We sensed that would not be wise.
Once he reached the end of the line, he walked back to the short end and stopped once more in front of the shortest girl on the team.
I turned my head to catch a glimpse of what he thought was so interesting about the girl.
She wore her hair short and spiky in the popular style for many teens, and with her almond eyes, she looked as cute as an elf. To her credit, she did not so much as flinch under Grimwade’s stare. She might be diminutive but she was spirited.
“Give me your full name,” he said curtly.
“Nako Takeuchi,” she said.
“That’s all of it?”
“Yes, sir—I mean, yes, Professor.”
“You studied languages and are an impressive athlete,” he said. “Isn’t that so?”
“Yes,” she replied.
“Yes, Professor,” he reminded her.
“Yes, sir, er—I mean, Professor.”
“I shall call all of you by your first names,” he told us.
“Yes, Professor,” she replied.
“It might lessen the formality between us. Give you all a feeling of camaraderie. That kind of thing. You would like that, wouldn’t you, Nako?”
“Yes, Professor.”
“Good,” he said. “I like you. Would you like to be Executive Officer?”
“I don’t mind, Professor. What do I have to do?”
“I’ll get to that,” he told her.
From the corner of my eye, I saw the head of the tall woman at the end glance down the line.
Grimwade had noticed too.
“You will have many opportunities to get to know Nako and Jacinda.”
“Yes, Professor Grimwade, sir!” The tall girl at the end of the line barked in reply.
“Damn, if she doesn’t sound like she’s straight out of cadet school,” Isabella muttered loud enough for all of us to hear.
“No talking, unless the professor speaks to you,” the matron shouted.
Grimwade reached Jacinda at the end of the line and nodded his head as if in approval.
“You are indeed an exceptional bunch of Zeros. And each of you was selected from a pool of several thousand so we could obtain this combination of attributes. Each of you have a special something you offer the mission. Our selection was the culmination of a highly secret, long planned for, and incredibly costly research project. The science behind the mission is cutting edge as you will soon find out.”
He looked back at the matron.
“Where is my colleague?”
“I believe he’s on his way, Professor.”
“Find him, will you,” Grimwade snapped. “He should have been here by now.”
Atoma and the Blockchain Game Page 4