by s. Behr
“Hailey, can you see it?” I begged, hoping she would prove I hadn’t gone completely crazy.
“Princess, your heart rate is dangerously high, and I am sensing microbleeds in your capillaries. Your temperature is rising and your epidermis… You need to calm down.”
“Hailey… It’s so bright. It’s too much.” My head ached, and my eyes burned, but I couldn’t close them. It was as if they were frozen open. Just then, a shimmer of light encased me like I was in a box of pure energy. The buzz vibrated through my eyes, making them feel like they might burst. Every breath I took was thin, as if I had less and less oxygen, and the edges of my vision dimmed like a cone of darkness.
“Hailey,” I whimpered.
“It’s going to be all right, Violet. Don’t worry. Just hold on.” Her voice sounded like it was being forced through a narrow pipeline. Then, the colors, the brightness, even Hailey’s voice were gone.
A chorus of voices serene, desperate, and defiant called out my name. “Violet.” With a jolt, I sat up and banged my head into the med bay scanner hovering above me.
“Princess,” Hailey said in what sounded like a sigh of relief as she materialized beside me.
“What is this?” I rubbed my head where I had struck the scanner and pointed to the thin tubes running from under my skin to the bed with fluids of different colors in each.
A soft alarm sounded overhead as a beep quickened, and Hailey looked genuinely worried. “Please try to stay calm, Violet. You are in the med bay.”
“I know where I am, but how did I get here?” I asked, pulling on the lines until flexible needles emerged from my skin, and colorful drops of liquid dripped onto the sheet covering my legs.
“I transported you here with an energy barrier.”
“Energy barrier? How long have I been here?”
“Long enough to get your vitals back to normal.”
I searched her face, wondering if it had been hours or days, but it all came flooding back when the memory from the greenhouse flashed in my mind. “Did you see it?” I asked, in desperation.
“See what exactly, Princess?”
“The colors. The whole greenhouse was covered in them.” My eyes closed, squinting against the brightness and the pain that was now only a shadow in my mind.
“I am not sure I understand your question, Princess. The greenhouse lighting was programmed as usual; there were no special colors in the UV simulators.”
I shook my head. “It was more than that. It was everything—maybe even the air itself.”
“No, Your Highness, I saw nothing out of the ordinary.” Her forehead crinkled.
“There has to be some way to prove that what I saw was real,” I mumbled. “Is there a recording?” I asked, despite the disgust it left coating my mouth.
“Of course. Would you like to see it?”
Looking into her round eyes, I wasn’t so sure, but with resolve I nodded “Yes?”
A shimmering holo-screen appeared before me, and an image of the greenhouse filled the entire rectangular projection. I could barely make out the tree in the center of the square of soil, but then the far wall opened.
“Hailey, can you make it focus on me?” The video feed zoomed in on me until I filled the screen. I appeared crazed and disheveled, and I watched with morbid fascination as I crossed the field. The camera panned when I fell to my knees in front of the tree and screamed.
In the playback, the girl who was me, but not me writhed in pain, her eyes wide. The video quality wasn’t great, but something looked off about my skin, something more than the bruising.
Jane and Hailey appeared by my side. Watching our exchange, I was surprised by the look of panic on Hailey’s face. It was so human. Then, an energy barrier like the ones we used on Jane appeared, boxing me in like a coffin.
My fingers rested on my neck as I watched the screen version of me clutching the jacket around my throat, gasping for air, then falling limp as Hailey repeated that everything was going to be okay. The energy field rose off the ground with Jane hobbling underneath as my body was transported out of the greenhouse and down the corridor.
“Would you like to see more?” Hailey asked, snapping my attention away from the image.
“No,” I whispered, and the image faded away. “It was all in my head.”
“What did you experience, Princess?”
“I truly don’t know.” I turned to her. “What did you mean when you said there was something wrong with my skin?”
“I am still analyzing.”
“What does that mean?”
“That I don’t have an answer for you at the moment.”
My head dropped into my hands. I didn’t have the patience for another one of her open-ended answers.
“Has it happened before?” she asked, sounding just like my mother trying to make a diagnosis.
“Yes, this was the third time.” I told her everything I could remember. When I finished, I realized how I sounded. Falling onto the pillows, I shook my head and whispered, “I’m insane.”
She gazed at me with a concerned expression. “I am not familiar with the abilities of your people, other than what you have told me, and what you have demonstrated. However, I do know the proposed genetic strategies. For many, they were essential in the colony’s plans for survival, performing the tasks they were designed to be able to do. But evolution has had a long time to choose its own path.” The way she spoke of the early generations of my people sent chills up my spine as if they were nothing more than lab experiments. All the reasons we had split into two separate species isolating ourselves from each other were being explained to me by someone who was there when it all began. A unified world never stood a chance.
“And your point is?” I asked, trying to steer her back to the original question.
She tilted her head. “I have a theory. What you are describing, in a way, is similar to my vision.” She paused, and I waited on the edge of insanity for her to elaborate.
“What does that mean?” I asked my fists squeezed tightly.
“I have the ability to see as you or any human with normal vision would, to translate colors in the world the way human eyes would interpret them. But color is energy moving at different wavelengths. It is never lost; it just evolves and changes. The electromagnetic spectrum radiates throughout the entire universe. Human eyes can only see a tiny fraction of what there really is. Since your arrival, I have chosen to see the world as you would, using the light frequencies visible to humans. But if I tune through all the frequencies that I can see, then I can also see what you described. The tree is giving off energy as it goes through the stages of its life, taking in nutrients and converting it to grow. My theory is you are seeing the energy.”
My lips fell ajar. “You think I can see energy?” My eyes narrowed when I realized she was completely serious.
“When my projection came into view, you had a severe reaction. Until that moment, your vitals were still within sustainable ranges. After I appeared, you went critical. Your visual senses were having a reaction to energy fields. As it takes a higher frequency of energy to produce my projection and the energy barriers, it was the only variable that had changed when your vitals became unstable.”
I felt my mouth frozen in an awkward gape, unable to speak.
“There are abilities you have described of your people that have evolved in ways none of the prediction models were able to see. Perhaps this is an emerging ability, too. You have said you are still young enough for that to be possible.”
“Hailey,” I whispered, wanting to tell her that she was wrong. Of all the things I had told her there was one very important thing I had left out. In the beginning, it was fear of not gaining entrance, but then it was because for the first time in my life, my abilities didn’t matter. I thought about my time here in the Ark, my ability to conjure the water and the tree. I exhaled. “Something is different.”
“There have been fluctuations in your scans since you f
irst arrived…” She tilted her head and gazed at the walls as if she could see through them.
“What’s wrong with me?” I asked, my heart racing.
Hailey turned back to me. “Princess Violet, are you able to walk?”
Wiggling my toes and stretching my legs, I felt better than I had in a week. “Yes,” I said, feeling her sense of urgency.
Suddenly, the room began to reset itself. The scanner disappeared back into a panel far above my head. The tubes that had been attached to my body retracted into the sides of the bed. The sheets pulled away into the end of the bed, shooing Jane into my lap. With the sheet gone, I saw I was wearing a clean, loose version of my usual daily outfit. When I slid off the bed, a neatly folded jacket on top of another pair of shoes emerged from a panel.
“Put them on,” Hailey insisted.
Feeling a little wobbly, I suggested, “Maybe I would be better off without the shoes.”
“Princess, please put them on.” Her insistence started a twinge of worry creeping into my chest.
“Is something wrong?”
Her eyes hardened. “That is unclear, but I think you should retire to your room.”
“What’s happening?” I asked, fastening the shoes.
She started walking toward the door with a look that told me I was meant to follow. “Hailey, tell me what’s going on? Why are you acting so strange?” I stopped, refusing to take another step.
“There has been activity outside the outer access door.”
I felt the blood drain from my face. “They deciphered the signal,” I mumbled. I knew it was a good possibility that someone in the Archives would interpret the signal the Ark sent. But I thought it would take a couple of weeks for them to get an expedition together. At the very least, I thought I would have a few more days. I had not found the locations of the other Arks and a crushing wave of defeat washed over me.
I took a deep breath. “Hailey, I need to face them.”
The hologram squared up to me, staring me straight in the eyes. “You don’t understand. These people are not from Amera.”
Sitting in the chef’s quarters, the room I had chosen for myself, the walls had become uncomfortably close. Hailey and I were two sides of a coin staring at the short loop of video being replayed on the projection between us.
In the playback, the humans were dressed in dark tactical uniforms standing outside the Ark in the cavern. The image was awash in green, which Hailey explained was due to the late night and the security cameras using an active illumination technology.
“So, what you’re saying is there are seven humans standing in the dark at the gate of the Ark, and while we can see them, they can’t see each other?”
“That’s correct. Unless they have technology to aid them in night vision,” she added, although distracted.
“You could have just said that,” I mumbled as I continued watching the group come into view, moving with precise single-minded fluidity toward the door until the last twenty seconds of the loop.
“Stop,” I said, and the playback froze on an image of the man closest to the door. He had pulled off his head covering, revealing his face.
Even in the dim playback, I could tell he was young. In Amera, he might be old enough to be a full citizen, but not so old that he would be anything more than an apprentice somewhere. If he had been a prince or heir, he would still be in training. It seemed odd for someone so young to be leading a group like this, but what did I know about the Hg-1? Nothing.
“Why won’t you show me more?” I asked, twisting my fingers together in my lap. Hailey sat next to me with her eyes unfocused, her attention elsewhere and gave no reply. “Hello! Are you here?”
Her gaze flitted back to me. “Yes, I am here with you. I have told you, Princess, protocols regarding other persons prohibits me from allowing me to show you any video playback within the Ark.”
“Don’t you know what this means?” I yelled. “There are humans on Ameran soil for the first time in hundreds of years!”
“Yes, you have said that several times, Princess. That doesn’t change anything for the Ark.” Her matter-of-fact demeanor frustrated me even more.
“But I’m Acting Commander of the Ark. That has to mean something now.”
“It does, but…” Hailey’s eyes suddenly focused back on the wall again.
“But what?”
Hailey’s head snapped toward me in her preternatural way. “They have authentication codes.”
“What does that mean?” I asked as fear and shock jolted me with a surge of adrenaline.
“I am discussing that with them now.”
“You are?”
Hailey’s eyebrow rose. “Surely, you know I can be in more than one place at a time. This,” she said, pointing at herself, “is a projection, not my body. I don’t have one. I could easily be in that tablet on the bed.”
Her response was another one of the frustrating moments when I had trouble remembering Hailey had limits, especially when it came to human interaction. “Do you have to tell them that I’m here?” I asked, my voice shaking.
“The codes they have given so far are only for specific areas.”
“What does that mean?” I asked, annoyed at her ambiguity.
“At present, their clearance will not surpass yours.” Her eyes focused beyond me as if she was listening for rats in the walls.
“How is that possible?”
“The simplest answer is, it is in the protocols,” she answered without looking at me.
“How did they get the codes?”
“It is unclear.”
“But, how does having the codes not supersede my clearance?”
“It is complicated, and I am still compiling information. It has mostly to do with genetics,” Hailey answered me with a look that made my lips stop moving.
Genetics. That made no sense to me. But, then I realized that there was only so much she was going to tell me, and the half-answered questions made me crazy. I wasn’t sure how much faster having codes would get the humans through the door, but since it took me almost a day, I sat back on the bed and waited, staring at the frozen image on the holo-screen.
I wasn’t sure what I expected, but the frozen face of the enemy on the screen in front of me didn’t look like a monster who wanted to enslave me for my abilities.
In three hundred years we hadn’t heard from the Hg-1. But after the Hundred Years War that ended with them leaving, stories of them were nothing more than myth, speculation, or prejudice.
I ran my finger along the screen. His cheekbones were normal and he had a straight nose and almond-shaped eyes. After twenty minutes of staring at his face, I noticed a small scar running through his left eyebrow. I couldn’t tell what color his hair or skin was, but from where I sat, he looked like any normal kid from Neyr. I looked at the shapes of people behind him; there was no way to tell if they were men or women, young or old. The only thing I knew was they were human.
Finally, Hailey turned toward me. “They have codes that grant them access to the history vaults, level two food vaults, and—” Her eyebrows knitted together and she said, “Princess, I have transferred my current consciousness to the tablet.” Her projection flickered with a look of alarm, then she disappeared.
The empty space that had been Hailey a moment ago left me dazed and afraid. On the bed, Jane, who had been sleeping, suddenly bounced like popcorn as if she understood my distress. Her left paw landed on the tablet just as it lit up, and Hailey’s voice filled the space of the room.
“Princess Violet!”
I snatched the thin plate of glass between Jane’s hops and Hailey’s face, now two dimensional, materialized, looking directly at me as if she could see me.
“Hailey! What happened? Why are you in the tablet?”
“Princess, I will answer as many questions as I can, but at present, we must move you and Jane from these quarters and quickly.”
“Why? You said that I have a higher clearance;
doesn’t that make me in charge?”
“In specific areas of the Ark, yes. In others, the codes they have given them equal or higher clearance. They have the commissary vault codes that give them access to this room. They will find you here if you stay.”
“How? The room is locked to my biometrics.”
“The codes override the biometric security. There is nothing I, nor the other Hailey can do to stop them from entering this room.”
“Excuse me, what?” I asked certain I misunderstood her.
“I cannot stop them from entering this room.”
My brows furrowed in frustration. “No, the part where you said, ‘the other Hailey.’”
“It was necessary,” she replied with a small shake of her head that on any kind of human would resemble sadness or regret. But then like a glitch, it was gone. “I do not know what the humans’ intentions are, and I have my protocols.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“Princess Violet,” she said, impatience edging her voice, “I have completely detached this tablet from the Ark.” Her voice trembled around the edges.
My chest tightened. “With you in it?”
“Yes. The Ark, however, will not function without a Hailey as curator, so I had to split in two. The uncertainty is too dangerous to wait here much longer. I will explain everything once we are in a safe area of the Ark.”
I pushed the thought of two Haileys aside for now. Where is safe? I thought maybe the reading room or the greenhouse would be safe, but I wasn’t sure. “How can we get by them without knowing where they are? If they have access to the corridors, won’t the other Hailey see me?”
“You will have to go another way,” she said. “Look up.”
I stared at the ceiling. “I don’t understand.”
“I cannot access the mainframe without alerting them, which means you will have to do things manually. We are going to use the ventilation system.”