Defiant: Quantic Dreams Book 2

by Elizabeth McLaughlin

  After basic shelter and food supply was established, we used one of the storage containers that previously held replacement hibernation pods to set up a medic tent. As more and more of the shelter recovered from the sickness the pressure was relieved little by little on the medical team. Several of the volunteers who put themselves forward to assist the nurses and doctors during the crisis had taken it upon themselves to receive advanced training. Soon we would have double the medical professionals available to us. Seeing as we were about to venture out into a new and strange environment, I had a feeling that we were going to need them.

  One day, Dr. Rickman came up to see the fledgling settlement. She looked a hundred times better than the last time I saw her. The bags under her eyes had nearly disappeared and it looked like she was freshly showered and dressed. I asked someone to take over setting up the new weather station we were installing and jogged over to her.

  “Hey! Good to see you up and outside!”

  “Hey yourself.” She caught me up in a hug. “For a guy who’s exiled from the shelter you seem to be doing okay for yourself.”

  “I am becoming a proper Paul Bunyan.” Phoebe looked at me curiously. Okay, maybe that reference was a little too old school. “A real outdoorsman,” I clarified.

  “That you are.” We chatted for a little while about the progress of the settlement, and Phoebe updated me on how things were coming along below. There was still some grumbling from Gabriel’s former fans but they found themselves outnumbered. Any disagreement was quickly extinguished.

  I was about to return to my task for the day when Phoebe’s tablet emitted an ear-splitting alarm. We both jumped and she scooped it up. Red lights flashed across the screen. “Fuck,” she swore and ran off. I started to sprint after her but remembered my exile, skidding to a halt just in time. Several other people’s tablets blared to life. They dropped whatever they were doing and ran inside. I picked up the tablet one woman left behind and what I saw turned my veins to ice. The alarm was sounded because of a critical failure in the shelter’s systems. From what I could tell from the message scrolling past there had been a fault in the air supply. I closed the alert and opened up a diagnostic schematic. There was only one section of the shelter that was affected.

  The field hospital.

  “Oh God.” I hadn’t been the only one who was curious about the sudden departure of nearly a dozen people. A small group had gathered around me. When they saw that the air had evacuated from the field hospital, they bolted towards the shelter entrance. I dropped the tablet and bolted after them, using my body as a barrier to block the door. “Stop! You can’t go in!”

  “Fuck you Alvaro, my wife is down there!” One of the men yelled. He rushed at me and I grabbed him around the waist, tackling him to the ground.

  “Get out of our way Jacob!” A woman shouted. “We have families down there!” I scrambled up and tried to

  “So do I!” I bellowed, “You think I don’t want to run down there too? If you go down there, you could die right along with them!”

  That stopped them. “You’ll suffocate,” I pleaded with them. “Please. There’s nothing you can do. Don’t go down there and die in vain.” The woman who had tried to bolt past me before shoved her way past me and ran down the staircase to the shelter below. I didn’t try to stop her this time. No one else moved. “Please. We have to let the medical team do their jobs. They’re doing the best they can and they’ve accepted the risks. The only things we can do is get in their way.”

  Several people fell to their knees and a couple started crying. I turned to the shelter’s entrance and waited, bouncing on the balls of my feet, instincts warring with the impulse to save my family. The minutes stretched on. Just as I started to fear that the worst had happened, a breathless Phoebe appeared at the top of the stairs.

  “Fiona?” I asked.

  “She’s fine.”

  “What the hell is going on?” Another woman asked.

  “The oxygen was evacuated from the field hospital.” She looked like she was on the verge of tears. “Someone hid a program in the system’s vital functions to suffocate the sickest patients on a precise day and time.”

  “Gabriel.” One last act of defiance, planned to take effect whether or not he was still there to see it.

  Phoebe ignored me. “We managed to save anyone who wasn’t yet in critical condition. They were without air for two or three minutes but we have them hooked up to supplemental oxygen now.”

  “My wife? Please, tell me if she’s all right.” The man asked. A chorus of questions joined his. My heart ached for them. Things had been improving. Now their lives had been upended yet again.

  “I’ll have to check in with each of you to give you a proper answer. All I can tell you is that we lost some but the majority of the patients should recover. I’m so sorry to do this but I have to return to my team. One of the systems experts has taken a closer look at the programming. There does not appear to be further interference with the air supply, but we are equipping every person in the shelter with supplementary oxygen masks that will provide you with enough air to make it back outside should we experience another problem.”

  Very reassuring. The group glanced at me. “It’s not my decision,” I told the group. “Go if you’d like to go. I certainly have no more reason to stop you.”

  They rushed back into the shelter, tasks abandoned. I went to Phoebe and saw that she was shaking. “I’m not cut out for this shit Jacob.” Her voice was shaky too, like she could burst into tears at any moment. “I just ran into a room where I knew people were suffocating and only afterwards does it occur to me that I could have died.”

  I held out my arms in a question and she let me embrace her. “I know. We’ll be done soon, and then all of this will be an unpleasant memory.” We separated and she looked at me. “You and your team have gone above and beyond, and I personally owe you my life. I won’t forget that.”

  She barked a laugh. “What, you’re going to make sure I never have to work another day in my life?”

  “No, but I can make sure that you get a well deserved vacation.”

  She nodded. “I’ll go attend to the rest of the group and send them back out as soon as I can. You going to be okay out here in the mean time?”

  “Sure.” I opened my arms wide. “This is my kingdom now.”

  A quick smile and Dr. Rickman disappeared into the tunnel.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  The colony was humming along. New infrastructure was put up every day and things were starting to feel real. After Gabriel’s horrific stunt, more and more people were volunteering to live outdoors full time. Soon we had a proper encampment spanning nearly a mile in all directions around the shelter. It was strange to see everyone outside. Shelter life was always cramped but you never saw more than a hundred or so people at any given time. Out here you could see everyone at once. It was like living in a city without the anonymity.

  We lost quite a few people in Gabriel’s final act of murder. A little more than half of the extremely sick. It was needless. A cruel fate thrust upon innocents that disgusted me to my very core. I don’t remember how many bodies we burned in those ensuing days, only that they worked dawn to dusk to finish the job. Those who had lost loved ones were allowed an appropriate amount of time to grieve their dead. It was simple human decency.

  With the news that Gabriel had been responsible for the killings came a surprising forgiveness for his murder. It had been so long since there had been a killing that the violence still shocked everyone. The memory of George’s blood on my hands still haunted me. A couple of times a week I would jerk awake in my tent soaked through with sweat only to remember that I was alone, that the horror was already passed.

  Fiona was eventually permitted to come and visit me, helped along by Eliza and Marcus at her sides. She had lost a good amount of weight. Having been fairly slender before, the change in her body fat made me worried, but she seemed to be carrying on well en
ough. She even took a meal with me, sitting in the sunshine while she eyed one of the ‘popcorn’ bugs warily.

  “You eat these?” She held one already skewered to her nose and sniffed.

  I guffawed. “That’s the second time I’ve heard that, believe it or not. Try it. Shut your eyes and pretend it’s a biscuit.” Fiona screwed up her nose, put the bug into her mouth, and bit down. I burst out laughing as she discovered that the bugs still held juice inside them after roasting and spit the remnants of the carcass into the dirt.

  “You bastard! You could have warned me!”

  “You still fall for the same tricks kid, even as a mother.” She shot me a glare and pouted. I gave her a delicate hug, being careful not to squeeze her too hard. “It’s good to have you back, Fiona.”

  “It’s good to be back, Dad. But I have a favor to ask.”

  “Anything for you.”

  I cringed as she started whacking me on the shoulder with her hand. “Could. You. Please. Stop. Trying. To. Get. Killed! I’m only a bit more than half your damn age and I think you could beat me in a contest of who has been patched up by the doctors more!”

  “Okay, okay!” I chuckled and held a hand up, three fingers extended with my pinky crossed over. “I solemnly swear that I will try to not get nearly murdered by psychotic artificial intelligences. Or other people. Or giant cat-things. Or…”

  “Cat what?” Her eyes widened.

  “Never mind. I’m sure you’ll get the chance to see one someday. For now, we continue.” I bid her goodbye and returned to my work. We now had an operational weather station, water collection, food storage, and basic medical abilities. Inside the shelter everything was being slowly dismantled for its parts. We needed everything from blankets to scrap metal if we were going to keep a settlement running. The 3D printers were busy fabricating everything that we didn’t already have. Medical supplies, machines, and other speciality items were stored away as they were made for future use. The printers themselves were carefully inspected and cleaned after each printing job had finished. Those were going to be what we shut down last. Medical equipment was likewise disassembled and stored except the capabilities we predicted we would need in the short term. Everything was handled with care and precision so that if all else failed, the shelter could be powered up again.

  I had taken it upon myself to pass on as much information as I could to the newcomers. Five years of life on the surface hadn’t gifted me with much, but my love of old movies and books had. Every day I led a class for anyone who was interested on various topics ranging from weather patterns to clean water. It was a humbling and happy experience to watch young men and women discover things about the Earth that I had taken for granted as a child.

  As for the flora and fauna of the area, we had no more trouble from the cat-thing or any other predators. The commotion of the settlement had scared away everything larger than the bugs for miles. I can only imagine what they must have thought. The reappearance of humans was probably just as strange to them as their existence was to us.

  To my great surprise and happiness, Fiona had thrown herself back into botany. She teamed up with Oscar, an older man who had sought out a new occupation for himself after he was widowed years ago. The two of them had teamed up to start in on farming. Fiona volunteered to plow the fields while Oscar followed behind her, replanting potatoes. Medicinal plants were kept in a separate area set up near the medical station to provide ease of harvest and storage. The potato plants transferred easily, the hearty little plants taking root almost right away. Thing was, transferring and planting the potatoes by hand was too slow. The settlement wasn’t hosting the full thousand people of the shelter but we were nearing three hundred. Even with rationed food we were struggling to keep up with demand.

  The 3D printers were still running full tilt producing essential objects and materials, so making any farming equipment was out of the question. Fiona took it upon herself to search out an alternative solution while she drafted extra hands to make up the difference in the mean time. I caught her laying down in her tent one afternoon, feet sticking out of the entrance flap.

  “Hi?” I pushed the fabric open. Fiona let out a huge sigh and slowly let the tablet fall to her face.

  “Dad, I feel like an old timey farmer, and not in a fun way. Short of press-ganging every person under the age of 30 to bend down with Oscar and me to plant by hand, I can’t figure out a way that we can get these potatoes planted quickly enough to feed everyone.”

  “Don’t we have any tools that can dredge the earth for you? I bet one of the utility spades can do it.”

  “Yeah, but only if I want to end up looking like an eighty-year-old by the end of the first week. We need something bigger. Are we sure we don’t have any cow embryos in the shelter? Even cow DNA would be a good start.” She lifted the tablet from her forehead and set it aside.

  “You think you’ve got time to raise a baby heifer into a full grown working animal?” I motioned her aside and sat down.

  “No. It’d be great, but I think I’d have a hoard of starving colonists on my hands far before then. What I really need is a plow.”

  I stroked my beard for a moment and jumped a little when I felt how long it had gotten. Not being allowed in the shelter meant that my life was devoid of mirrors these days. I could risk a shave without one but I didn’t want to end up looking like a half-shorn goat. It was better to risk looking a couple years older than I was.

  “We could make one.”

  “Dad.” Fiona pushed herself up on her arms and glared at me. “Didn’t we just discuss that the 3D printers are occupied?”

  “I don’t mean with a 3D printer. I mean the old fashioned way. Why couldn’t we smelt one? There are plenty of metal scraps around. We just need to make a couple of molds. Most of the stuff we’ve got can be easily melted over a fire. Pour the molds and knit them together at the seam…no reason it couldn’t work!”

  “I’d need a lot of metal.”

  “Ask around. I think we have it. Even if we don’t, you’ll find plenty of folks eager to give up their metallic possessions to fill their bellies. I’m not the only one who is sick of living on rations.”

  “Hell, that just might work. Thanks! Hey…do you mind if I take the credit for this one? I’ve had a little trouble showing people that I can hack it since we left the simulation. I’d like the chance to be the hero of the day, if it’s all right with you.”

  I hugged her. “Kid, that’s what parents are for. Your mother would have been so proud of everything you’ve done already, you know that, right?”

  Tears formed in the corners of her eyes. “Yeah. I really wish she could be out here with us, you know? I wish she could have seen the sun again.”

  I felt a swell of sadness. “In a way, she is. Let’s give her a good show, shall we?” I bid her goodbye and let her present the idea to the relevant people.

  Fiona had gained a certain gravitas of her own since coming to live outside. Those who had survived the sickness held a certain mystique around them. Most of us hadn’t seen a sickness more serious than a cold in our entire lives. Coming out of the simulation to watch several hundred people suffocate on their own body fluids was traumatizing. As with all monsters, this one was starting to grow into legend. To be infected and not just recover, but recover fully, made you something special. Of course it was just sheer luck, but I wasn’t about to knock it. It was a chance for my daughter to regain a foothold within her community, perhaps to advance within it.

  To supplement our diet of spuds with a side of spuds, I asked Marcus to accompany me on some hunting trips. We hadn’t found anything bigger than the squirrel-like animals that were common to the brushy bushes. With the help of an outgoing non-binary person whose acquaintance I had only really made after the sickness had passed, I learned to use the long-stemmed plants and grass to weave baskets. They showed me that these could be anchored in the path of the stream to catch the small fish that swam upriver. Together we
devised a way to catch the crabs I had come to love, too. Using a utility spade, we dug ring-shaped holes a hundred feet away from each other just into the grass that led to the stream. On the platform that remained in the middle, the offal from caught game or cleaned guts from fish would be placed. Lightweight pieces of plastic were used to bridge the gap from the grass to the platform. Once the crabs stepped onto the plastic eager for their free meal, they would be deposited into the hole for later collection.

  I couldn’t have been more thrilled.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  To celebrate our newfound hunting strategy, a feast of sorts was planned for that evening. There wasn’t nearly enough meat to feed the couple hundred already present so no one protested when the scarce delicacies were served to the oldest among us. I was offered a portion but declined, much to the protesting of my stomach and insistence of my pride. I was certainly one of the oldest people in the shelter, but by no means was I about to admit it. Let the real old timers get the best; their days out here were numbered. It was only fair to have them enjoy themselves while they could.

  Being active every day had strengthened my muscles but we were still running on rationed food. The caloric deficit meant that I was far leaner than when we lived in the shelter and habit tugged at me to help myself to as much food as I wanted. Spoiled thing. I hoped we could get back to that someday. In the mean time, I had to get used to looking like a string bean.

  Keeping busy was the key to sanity, and there were as few moments of rest as you wanted. I decided that the best way to win back favor in the community was to make myself as useful as possible. That meant volunteering for every job, no matter how dirty or tedious. Digging out latrines, putting up tents and shelters, even planting potatoes by hand while Fiona and her team gathered the necessary materials to make a plow-each task gave me new and interesting knowledge. It was strange. I always thought myself an everyday man, somebody who fit in. The truth was that in unplugging the simulation and destroying Gabriel’s hold over the shelter had only served to separate me from everyone. I had been reviled by some, loved by others. Even more than that, most did not know me. Their only exposure to me had been never-ending crisis. Getting to know me in a time of peace would help them understand all that had happened, and I could learn from them all that was to happen.