Project Recollection

by A A Woods

  It’s Damien.

  My real gut clenches as the heart of the reporter hammers, as her hands dive into the crowd and she tries to swim closer, ignoring the hulking, glowering guards.

  Shouts volley toward Damien.

  “Look here!”

  “Hey! Who are you?”

  “Why did William Barber choose to make you rich?”

  But the boy in front of me only turns, taking the stairs two at a time and disappearing into the mansion.

  I pull out of the memory all at once, not waiting to disentangle from the net of code. I’m panting, my pulse ragged. Pixel meows in question, but I ignore him.

  That was Damien all right. Silver hair, feather tattoos, pale skin from too little sun and bony shoulders from a life of Pueblo Pizzas and Cheetah Bars. But then again, it wasn’t him. It couldn’t be. The Damien of two days ago would have sucked in the attention like a starving plant, thrown his arms wide and let it intoxicate him. But this person, this Damien, was brusque and dismissive. Aloof in a way that spoke of comfort in the spotlight. Of the exhaustion that comes from a life of strangers demanding things from you.

  I lean back in my chair, a cold sweat breaking out all over my body. I feel like there are sharks swimming around me but I can’t see them. The darkness has spread, leaked from my mind into my life, and now I’m blind in more ways than one.

  And deep, deep in my gut, I know it has to do with Project Recollection.

  I need to get that key.

  Diving back through my cable, I pull up the recorder I scratched into Khali’s IRIS. It’s a tiny, near invisible piece I got on the black market with my Fuzz Specs, built to link all communications to an encrypted location in the SubNet and allow someone on the other side to view them. Through one just like it, I’ve spent almost four months reading Damien’s arrogant, self-praising messages, obsessive and one-sided communications with Anastasia Vasquez, and, rarely, his desperate pleas to his family. I’ve pretended not to know about the way he breaks down every few weeks and writes his parents, begging forgiveness, imploring for them to let him come home.

  And that they refuse him.

  While it was a necessary precaution, it was torturous to know the things about a person that they want most desperately to hide. Every smile felt like a betrayal, every laugh a silent question. Do you know that I know? It made our friendship a bridge without a foundation, rickety and unstable enough to collapse with a single wrong step.

  Now it’s Khali I have to spy on. Khali I’m depending on. The thought of breaking what fragile trust we’ve constructed makes me flush with shame, but I can’t afford to negotiate fairly. Not anymore.

  I need her help, whether she wants to give it or not.

  Bracing myself for what I might find, I pull up the encrypted location.

  There’s only one message, the sender’s name scratched out and replaced by a tag of Khali’s creation.

  ChiefWitch.

  I pull up the message.

  I have a lead on your location and will take drastic action if you don’t return within the day.

  Khali’s response is only three words, pulsing below the message like neon lights, threaded with her coy contempt.

  Not a chance.

  I stare at the words, picking them apart, scraping my brain raw to create meaning from nonsense. Who is Chief Witch? Where is she demanding Khali go? Is she a blackmailer? An angry boss? Someone with leverage?

  What is Khali hiding?

  “Ouch!”

  Pixel leaps off my lap as I jerk, rubbing the sore point where his kneading missed the blanket, right above the raw, bruised skin of my knee. With half my mind still in the SubNet, I slump back in my chair, letting the questions circle me like vultures looking for food that isn’t there.

  Who are you, Khali?

  Where are you, Zhu?

  What’s going on?

  But the answers remain stubbornly elusive as time tumbles relentlessly away.

  Tora

  Friday, September 21st, 2195

  10:52 A.M. EST

  I’m plugged into the manager’s stand, leaning against the rail and drumming my fingers on Zhu’s jacket when I hear the telltale click of her footsteps. Through the warehouse cameras, I watch Khali strut through the tiny door embedded in the vast factory wall. The machinery dwarfs her, and yet she still looks larger than life, as if the shifting shadows and her perilously tall ankle-boots have transformed her into a goddess.

  “Am I late?” she says with a smirk, cocking her hip and folding her arms and sweeping her gaze up and down my body.

  “Less than last time.”

  Her laughter spreads and swoops. “I’m starting to wonder if you ever smile.”

  Not anymore, I think, turning toward the console. “Today I thought we could practice using the—”

  “Not so fast.”

  I hesitate, my face turned away but my mind watching her through the sprinkling of cameras. Khali’s expression is playful, her eyes dancing with more mischief than usual.

  “Why don’t I teach you something today?”

  I snort. “I don’t think that’s what you’re paying me for.”

  Not that I’ve actually been paid, I think, wondering if my PAP is still somewhere in Kitzima’s den.

  But Khali’s voice interrupts. “I’m paying you to do what I want. And I want to do something different this morning.”

  My fingers tighten around the console railings. Khali tosses her hair over one shoulder and it falls in a thick, glittering fan as her eyes flick up, toward the roof, toward my virtual self. Her gaze is riveting, fascinating, and beyond arrogant. A part of me wants to unplug and stalk off, leaving her alone. Show her what happens when someone tries to give me commands.

  But the other part, the small, lonely bit that I’ve starved for so long, pins my feet to the floor. I tell myself that it’s because I still need her help. I tell myself it’s business-only, a pragmatic arrangement for me to get into Project Recollection. To solve the puzzle in my core code. To find Zhu.

  Then why can’t I stop looking at her face?

  Khali’s lips curl wider, spreading into an infuriating, magnificent grin. “What’s the matter, Tora? Afraid to try something new?”

  My breath explodes out of me as I surrender. I spin my body toward her, folding my own arms, reflecting her posture. “Fine. What do you want to do?”

  “I want to fight.”

  “That’s what we were going to do.”

  “No,” Khali says, tilting her head like a cat considering its prey. “I want to fight for real.”

  I glare at her, anger and fascination blending unsettlingly in my chest as I try to puzzle out the pieces of her expression. Is she mocking me? Trying to gain the upper hand by using my weakness to her advantage? Or aiming to take revenge for our last training session?

  “Why?”

  Khali begins to pace in a circle around the managers stand, shoes accenting her words with sharp, staccato beats. “Maybe I want to practice my skills.” She pulls her hair up into a messy bun, jamming her IRIS cable into the knot. “Maybe I think you should practice yours.” She shrugs off her fuchsia-stripped jacket. “Maybe I don’t like to think of you helpless the next time Kitzima’s hoard comes howling.” She tosses the jacket aside, rolling bare shoulders in her loose-fitting silk top. “Or maybe I’m just restless and feel like blowing off some steam.”

  “By beating me up?”

  “By helping you for a change.”

  My laugh is sardonic and cynical. “And how did you become such an expert?”

  Khali’s teeth glint as she smiles, the overhead lights making her canines look long and dangerous.

  “My upbringing was… eclectic, to say the least.” She lifts one hand, cocking her finger. “Come on, Tora. Let’s see what you can do.”

  It’s foolish and childish and dangerous. I have precious little experience interacting with the physical world without using my cable and even less experience interact
ing with actual humans. And fighting? I might as well be singing an opera. The way she bounces her knees and shifts her toes tells me she’s not exaggerating. This is to her what Gaming is to me. What coding is to me.

  But without leverage, I need to be in her good graces. The tournament is tomorrow and I still don’t have a way in.

  Fine, I think. What do I have to lose?

  With a surprisingly steady hand, I unplug my cable and jam it into my own hair. I slide out of my brother’s jacket, letting it fall onto the console, and step away from the controls. Out of my comfort zone.

  Into hers.

  “Now what?” I growl.

  Khali laughs. “Come now, Tora, at least try to have an open mind.”

  She’s circling me, her footsteps echoing.

  “I think you’re forgetting something important here,” I say, my fists clenched against my thighs.

  “I forget nothing,” Khali answers, now behind me. “You’re blind. I’m losing my life to a disease that will maroon me in my own body. Both thanks to the technology we refuse to part with. We are weapons molded by this new world. Haven’t you ever wondered if that makes us sharper?”

  A hand comes out of nowhere, shoving me to the side. I stumble, snarl, spin toward her with lifted fists.

  But she’s already circled around.

  “You don’t know anything about me,” I snap, trying to follow her footsteps, but the resonant underground space makes it difficult. Her echoing laugh makes it worse.

  “Give me some credit,” she says. Her hand hits me in the back this time. I fall forward, barely catching myself, scowling as I spin around. I couldn’t even find the console if I wanted to. I’m lost in a sea of darkness, adrift in the crashing of sound waves.

  Terror forms like nettles in my throat.

  Why did I agree to this?

  “After all, we’re remarkably similar, you and me,” Khali continues. “Your IRIS cable stole your sight. Mine stole my future.”

  All my senses stretch and strain against the static of my fear. There’s a sharp click to my left. Eleven o’clock. I step back, but her fist still catches my shoulder, twisting my torso.

  I cry out.

  She talks over me, her voice viscous with something that thrums through the vast warehouse, that fills the empty space like fluid. “But you know what? I wouldn’t trade it.”

  I spin in a slow circle, listening hard, letting the sound filter and parse down into the real and the reverberating.

  “I don’t believe you,” I spit, some part of my brain still straining to see, straining to make shapes out of the endless, oily night.

  “I don’t think you would either,” Khali says, and her words are gathering power. Abandoning laughter for a surging strength. I hear a whistle and duck. Something brushes my bun, tugging at my cable. Khali chuckles. “Do you really want to be just like everyone else? Another Gamer? Another addict?”

  Frustration bubbles in my mind like carbonation. Pressure builds. I want to shout; I would give anything to have my old life back! But I swallow the words, clench my fists. Follow her steps.

  “You’re remarkable, Tora, and it’s not in spite of what was taken from you. It’s because of it.”

  My temper, stretched too thin, finally breaks.

  “What are you saying?” I scream, throwing the words at her like shrapnel, but she circles away from them. “That I should be grateful? I should thank ProRec for ruining my life?”

  Her footsteps stop. The stillness is oppressive, broken only by the smell of lilacs. I force myself to breathe evenly, to hide my trembling.

  “When they first told me I was going to die,” she says, and her tone has shifted again, now low and urgent. “I was so angry. The unfairness of it wrecked me. How could all those healthy kids out there have whole lives stretching out ahead of them, IRIS cable and all, and I’d just been given a deadline.”

  Her words cut through my weakened defenses, slice into the raw part of myself that no one but Zhu has ever seen.

  “I couldn’t hide from it. Everything became treatments and doctors and options. But it turned out there were no options. They couldn’t remove my cable, not without killing me. And besides, the damage was already done. My brain was already eating itself. All anyone could do was prolong the inevitable.”

  My hands ache but I can’t unclench my fists. My face is stony and impassive but inside I am a storm.

  “Maybe I should hate my illness,” Khali goes on. “Everyone else does. But I don’t. I mean what I say, Tora. I wouldn’t trade it.”

  It takes me a long moment to find my voice, to disentangle it from the violent typhoon of my emotions. “Why?”

  I feel a shift, hear a swish. Smell lilacs.

  “That deadline they gave me? The knowledge that it forced me to accept? It was a gift. Everyone up there on the surface can ignore their own mortality, drift through life as if it’s never going to end. As if it’s limitless. But it’s not, for any of us, and every moment wasted is a moment that’s never coming back.”

  There’s a click of heels as she takes a step. My shoulders tense, but I don’t think I could move even if I wanted to.

  “I don’t have the luxury of wasting time. Because of my experiences, I see it for what it is: the most valuable resource in the world.”

  She’s so close I can feel the warmth wicking off her skin, the swirl of her breath.

  “Do you think you’d be who you are without the horrible things that have happened? Would you have developed those marvelous talents if you hadn’t needed them?” Another click, another shift of air. “Would you trade everything you’ve become for the ability to see?”

  My breathing hitches. I choke on the questions.

  Would I? If I had the choice, would I return to the shy, helpless, overshadowed younger sister if it meant getting my family back? My brother back?

  I don’t have an answer, but Khali supplies one for me.

  “I don’t think you would, Tora. Because you’re like me. You’re a fighter. A hero. But a hero needs a battle and a fighter needs an opponent. Don’t be grateful to ProRec. Don’t be grateful for your blindness. Be grateful for your ability to rise above it. Because it makes you remarkable.”

  There’s a hiss and a whistle. I move instinctually, my arm lifting almost on its own, drawn by a magnetism I don’t understand. It collides with hers. My fingers catch Khali’s bare forearm and there’s an infinite pause, filled with surprise, with pain, with all the things we could have been. All the ways this moment might not have existed.

  For a stretching, blooming, colossal second, there’s only our ragged breathing.

  And then Khali moves, pulling me toward her with an expert flick of her wrist. Her other arm snakes around me and our torsos collide. Our hearts slam together. There’s an urgency, a desperation in the move that leaves me breathless. I can feel her warmth against my chest, her arm around my back, her hand against my neck. But more than anything, I feel the space, the emptiness between our faces that isn’t empty at all. It’s crackling and pulsing and filled with possibility. With potential. In that moment I see us both, not as cripples and outcasts and faulty cogs in a giant machine. No, we are conductors of something beyond ourselves, wires filled with the concentrated force of the universe. Potent with something more.

  “I’m glad for my illness, Tora,” Khali whispers and the words saturate the already intoxicating air, warming the skin of my lips. “Because it brought me to you.”

  I don’t have an answer, but it doesn’t matter. Khali doesn’t need one. With excruciating slowness, she closes the space. I feel the shift of every molecule, every grain of dust between us as her lips touch mine. Hesitant, at first. Questioning.

  The paranoid, logical part of my brain is screaming, its admonishments buzzing in my head. Stupid. Reckless. Waste of time. I should be focusing on my mission. Should be trying to solve the puzzle my brother left for me. I have a duty to my family, a responsibility to those I love. Time is run
ning out. ProRec’s doors are closing and I’m walking the razor-blade edge of failure and there’s so much that could go wrong.

  Damn all that to hell.

  I throw myself forward, wrap my arms around Khali’s neck, lean into her body as if it’s the only solid thing left in the world, and let myself fall, fall, fall into something wonderful and terrifying and foreign and strange. She’s a pillar and I’m the ocean and we are crashing together outside time, outside space, far away from the ruins of a city that’s left us both behind.

  When we finally pull apart, our ragged breathing is like paired music. Our foreheads press together, holding infinity between us. And, for once, I don’t feel the urge to disentangle myself from the arms of another person. For once, I relish the warmth, relax into the breathing of someone else. Let myself be touched and held and human.

  “Mei,” I whisper, letting Khali’s recklessness sweep me away.

  “What?” she whispers back, raspy and panting.

  “My name is Mei,” I say, marveling at the risk, the potential consequences, the stupidity of it.

  Wondering why it doesn’t bother me at all.

  Tora

  Friday, September 21st, 2195

  4:26 P.M. EST

  The Chain station is busy with afternoon commuters and I can’t walk two steps without getting my shoulder bumped or my shin hit by a swinging briefcase. But I barely notice. I don’t have the energy to care about my missing bike or the narrow band of vision granted by my father’s PAP.

  I don’t have the energy to care about anything.

  I wander, ambling toward my train as I sweep the ground with the tiny camera, checking for obstacles with halfhearted attention. My heart feels wrung dry, my brain unable to form coherent thoughts. I’m a fish on a line, trying to escape into the ocean but inexorably pulled back to the memory of Khali’s lips, of her breath against my cheek, of her heart pounding against my ribs.