Neurotopia

by Tony Mohorovich

  To her right, in another bed, lay a woman, Winona Marion, her mother. The medical data showed that she was infected with the Tellinii virus.

  Moments later, the data found no sign of the virus, just some neural degradation, but nothing serious.

  That was all it took; one thorder to Geppetto and the virus was gone.

  Her mother was cured.

  Sky had done what she had set out to do, and for which she had sacrificed so much. Her tears bubbled like the domes of Shackleton City. These tears did not evaporate; they poured down and warmed her skin.

  Now all she had to do was to bring her mother out of her coma. But how could Sky explain what had happened? Her mother might not believe her, or worse, refuse to come with her.

  No, Sky decided, I’ll wake her once we’re a safe distance from Detroit.

  To Sky’s left, beside her bed, sat a man. Okiro? He was asleep. No, under the spell of a sedative-virus, according to Geppetto.

  Sky disabled the virus. She took pleasure in seeing his face shift from slumber to surprise and then shock.

  ‘Sky?’ he said, testing reality.

  ‘It’s me.’ Her voice was hoarse, but audible.

  Okiro’s eyes darted left and right, his mind searching for answers. ‘I don’t understand. The virus—you were infected.’ He looked over at Winona’s data. ‘Both of you.’

  ‘You came for me,’ she said.

  He paused, then mirrored her smile.

  She remembered his eyes as honey, but now they looked more like oak. ‘Our lives are in danger,’ she began, ‘we don’t have much—’

  The banging of the door cut her off. A square-faced man in a suit entered, taser drawn and aimed.

  ‘NIA—step away from the offender,’ he told Okiro.

  Okiro raised his hands. ‘Offender?’

  A second agent entered, gun in hand and a swarm rising around him.

  ‘I thought only the rammer was supposed to wake,’ the first agent said.

  ‘Carlos,’ Sky addressed the second one, ‘take care of your friend for me, will you?’

  Without hesitation, Carlos zap-zapped two taser spikes into the back of the first agent, who dropped to the floor in convulsions. His shaking eased, his eyes closed, and he was still.

  Carlos let his swarm drop to the floor, grabbed his immobile colleague’s arms and dragged him into the wardrobe.

  ‘You too,’ Sky said.

  Carlos entered the wardrobe with his weapon whining. There was another zap, followed by a thump, then nothing.

  Okiro’s face had frozen in a silent scream. ‘What the hell just happened? They were NIA agents… following your commands?’ He took a step back. ‘You’re one of them? A brainbender?’

  The bedroom door opened again, this time with less force. A nurse entered, his eyes glazed, his face devoid of expression. Two auto-wheelchairs followed him and rolled into position beside the two beds. The nurse pulled back Sky’s sheets and lifted her into a wheelchair.

  ‘I shouldn’t have woken you,’ Sky said as the wheelchair’s head-brace latched onto her skull. ‘I just… when I saw you here…’

  The nurse turned to Sky’s mother and began detaching the various catheters.

  Okiro shifted, uncertain. ‘This isn’t you.’

  ‘What is?’

  Her answer seemed only to confuse him.

  ‘Sky, I don’t know what they did to you up there, but we can undo it. Let me help you before it’s too late.’

  Sky thordered her chair into action and she rolled to the door, passing by Okiro. ‘There are many things I wish I could undo, but this is not one of them.’ All Sky had to do was reach out with Geppetto and he would come, he would follow her to the ends of the earth, and beyond.

  ‘I won’t hurt you, Okiro. You’re free to go.’ She turned to face him one last time. ‘Thank you, for everything.’

  Sky linked with her mother’s wheelchair and it followed.

  ‘This is ludicrous,’ Okiro said. ‘The NIA will hunt you down. The scanners—’

  ‘Can’t read me.’

  ‘Your mother—’

  ‘I’ve cloaked her signals too.’ The fallen NIA swarm slithered to Sky and fashioned itself into a beige compartment on the back of her chair. ‘I’ve also cloaked your neurals, for the time being. We’re free of the scanners.’

  He stood there, dumbfounded.

  Sky swivelled and rolled toward the doors. She heard a zap.

  Though she had no sensation in her body, her skull felt the jolt. She spun around as two more zaps hit her in the torso.

  Okiro held a taser gun, its double barrel aimed at her. One of the agents must have dropped it.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘You had a neural spike after that brainbender hacked you at your apartment. They’ve been manipulating you ever since. This is for your own good.’

  His confidence waned when he realized her swarm had caught all three stun-bolts. The next moment, the swarm wrenched the weapon from his hands.

  ‘It’s okay,’ she told him. There had been no malice in his neural signals, only concern for her safety. ‘I understand. It’s hard to escape your programming. Goodbye, Okiro.’

  Sky rolled away, into the corridor with her mother in tow, and with a sickening sense that she had left something behind.

  ​15:3

  Sky recalled her last visit to Detroit General Hospital, when infected patients had filled its corridors. Now those corridors were empty.

  The NIA will be here soon, she thought. The two agents may have alerted the NIA before they had entered her room. In any case, the NIA would soon realize that two of its operatives were offline. They would spot her on the network of cameras.

  < Ma’am, > Uncle Jesse said, < You’re forgetting me. >

  No, she had not forgotten Uncle Jesse.

  When she had first learned that her Brain Operating System had reported on her whereabouts, she had felt betrayed. But now she realized they were alike; both victims of the NIA, programmed to do its dirty work.

  ‘You’re the only one who knows what I’ve been through, Uncle Jesse. I don’t want to lose you.’

  < Shucks, ma’am. I appreciate the sentiment. Still, it ain’t worth losing your head over. >

  It pained her to wipe him, to do what the NIA had tried to do to her.

  She gave the order and it was done.

  When the new BOS installed, Sky did not request it take on the personality of her Great Uncle Jesse. She allowed the default female voice to remain.

  < Pleased to meet you, Sky. I am Liberty, your new Brain Operating System. >

  Another stranger in her head.

  Sky and her mother passed a ward full of infected patients, the survivors, the ones whose families had clung to hope. They were comatose, and their only signs of life came in the form of excretion bags. Tellinii had already begun to degrade the neurals of some of them.

  One by one, like the pitter-patter of rain outside, the patients opened their eyes. They winced, yawned, and stretched as far as they could in their restraints. They looked around, registering the environment, unsure how they had come to be here.

  An orderly, bag of excrement in hand, stood slack-jawed at the sight.

  ‘Come to stun me again?’ Sky asked, sensing Okiro approach.

  ‘You know I haven’t,’ he said. He stood a short distance from her and watched as patients rose from their nightmares. ‘Is this… are you doing this?’

  Sky nodded.

  He stared at the waking patients in awe. ‘But a brainbender wouldn’t heal infected…’

  She observed his mind as it began to connect the dots.

  He said, ‘You just attacked two NIA agents, and now you’re healing a ward full of Tellinii victims? That doesn’t make any sense.’

  There was not enough time to explain. Sky knew she had to get moving. Yet, she wanted him to know the truth. She couldn’t just leave him like this.

  Why does it matter?Why do you need him to believe
? Sky asked herself. The answer came to her; the disconnect between her and Okiro was a wound. That disconnect between how she saw reality and how he saw it. That disconnect pained her so much that she needed to bridge the gap. Why? Because she wanted him close. Closer. The distance between them was dizzying.

  She opened her mind.

  He froze, as if he were about to be pushed off the edge of a cliff.

  ‘Telepathy? But it’s unnatural and… neuroviruses and…’ his mind searched for excuses.

  ‘It’s a one-way connection. You can see me, I can’t see you. You can keep your distance; watch my memories through a maya, if you like. All the answers are there, if you want them,’ she said.

  His mind turned, balancing pros and cons and playing scenarios. The sight of cured patients had opened something for him, a space where he could begin to question his programming. He became aware of a discomfort, an unease, that he had lived with for some time. Now that he was aware of it, that unease grew.

  Sky spotted a minute shift, no more than a hair’s breadth from his current neural trenches. She waited for his consciousness to confirm what his neurals had already decided.

  Okiro looked at the newly revived patients, then back at Sky. Then he linked in.

  His eyes flitted about as he uploaded the memories Sky had flagged for him, experiencing them at the speed of thought.

  Sky covered herself and her mother in the swarm she had commandeered from the fallen NIA agent, and initiated the cloak.

  ‘Wait,’ Okiro said before she had disappeared entirely. ‘Are those real memories?’

  ‘Unfortunately.’

  ‘I…’ he struggled to speak. He was sweating.

  Poor Okiro, Sky thought. She had hit him with a motherlode of revelations in a matter of seconds. He looked as if he were about to go into shock.

  ‘What am I supposed to do with this now?’ He sounded annoyed. ‘How can I go back to…? If your experiences are real, I…’ he sighed, the weight of the world on his shoulders. He crouched on the floor, holding his head in his hands. ‘They lied…’ he said. ‘They lied…’

  Sky wished she could comfort him, but she was running out of time. Okiro would be safe; they would give him a mem-wipe and he’d return to his old life, none the wiser. At least she’d had the opportunity to share herself with him, even if it was short-lived.

  Now that Sky and her mother were invisible, she headed for the elevators, leaving Okiro behind. She thordered a nurse to call for a lift (an empty elevator moving of its own accord might draw the NIA’s attention). The nurse stepped inside and Sky followed with her mother. The nurse requested the elevator head to the rooftop.

  Okiro was still sitting alone in the corridor, staring at the floor, when the elevator doors closed.

  *

  With Sky and her mother’s thoughts walled off from the scanners and their forms hidden from the cameras, Sky executed her plan.

  She tapped into the minds of fifty hospital staff and visitors on various floors and thordered them to rush to the railpod bay and take pods to various locations across the city. From the NIA’s perspective, Sky and her mother might be in any one of those pods, or even on foot.

  When the elevator delivered her and her mother to the rooftop, Sky found the minds of seven hopper pilots who commanded the ambulance hoppers. She thordered them to run to their vehicles and disable their internal cameras. Sky and Winona, under the cloak of the swarm, rolled into one of these hoppers.

  The night had come and there was a blanket of grey cloud over the city that stretched in all directions, as far as the eye could see. Finally, a little luck, Sky thought. The elements would help cover their escape.

  Sky.

  Someone was calling her. Someone close. Okiro. He was still sitting in the corridor, watching nurses unclasp the revived patients’ hands and feet.

  If your memories are true… I want to help…

  She hacked him with Geppetto. It won’t do you any good, she replied.

  He was shocked to hear her voice, for he had not expected Sky to receive his mental call.

  What’s the worst that can happen if they catch me? he said. A mem-wipe? I can live with that.

  Sky told herself to leave him be. He was safe where he was. He could not help them.

  Yet she told him her location, on the rooftop, in the farthest hopper from the elevator. She told him to walk there as if he were in a trance, as if he were being manipulated. That way the NIA would not assume he was accompanying her.

  When he entered the hopper he said, ‘I can’t believe I’m doing this.’ He was still struggling with… everything. She could not blame him.

  ‘You don’t have to be here,’ she said.

  ‘You’re right, I don’t.’ He sat down in the seat closest to her. He took her hand, and although she could not feel his touch, she valued his presence more than she could express.

  Sky thordered the seven pilots to lift off.

  The hoppers pushed through the clouds until the patters of rain on the hull had died down. She thordered the hoppers to remain inside the cloud formation, hidden from the eyes of cameras below and the satellites above.

  When Sky had first returned to Detroit with the intention of rescuing her mother, and before her father had dashed those hopes, she had planned to whisk Winona away under the cover of her swarm, head back to the industrial elevator port off the coast of Ecuador, and stow herself and her mother in an empty container bound for Apollo. It was as foolhardy a plan as any, but it was all she had at the time.

  After Tester had spotted her, she could no longer pretend her plan had any chance of success. The government would prevent her escape at all costs.

  She had to come up with something new.

  From this altitude, her swarm could not pick up any camera signals on the ground. Even so, she knew the cameras would be watching.

  The maya communication companies were responsible for the network of cameras. Sky linked to the Neuronet and accessed the companies’ network maps. The maya maps displayed camera locations in blue.

  Detroit was peppered in blue.

  Sky filtered for cameras that were pointed upward, those that might spot her hopper, and the blue highlights dropped to 30 per cent. Better still, the blue thinned out around Detroit’s edges and all but disappeared in the regional areas until you got to the towns.

  Sky decided to head to the country, to the most isolated areas.

  There must be somewhere we can lay low, until we can work out how to get back to Apollo, she thought.

  Then it occurred to her: there might be someone who could help her. Someone on Earth.

  Buoyed by the possibility, Sky thordered the other six hoppers in different directions and instructed each to remain under cloud cover at all times. She commanded her own pilot to open her hopper’s doors just enough for her cloaked swarm to exit and climb onto the roof. There it would hide the hopper from satellite cameras.

  Her hopper turned and made a path northward, shrouded in cloud, like a mole in the sky.

  It would not be so easy for Tester to find her this time.

  ​15:4

  Director Jeong-soo Tester had been looking out his office window, across the overcast city, his mind wandering to the sound of rain, when his office door burst open.

  It was his assistant, Ivana. Her mouth agape as if she intended to speak, but nothing came out. Her eyes focused on the two maya images before her: one showed an excited young reporter walking through a hospital ward full of revived patients. ‘Doctors say the infected victims were spontaneously cured.’ The other showed orderlies dragging two NIA guards out of a hospital wardrobe.

  It can’t be, Tester thought. How?

  He leapt to his feet. ‘Where is Sky?’

  The NIA network responded. ‘Location of Sky Marion unknown. Last known location was Detroit General Hospital.’

  ‘Code Red,’ he yelled. ‘Send all non-essential personnel after her. Find her.’

  Soon aft
er, a flood of swarm-wielding agents streamed out of the building to board NIA hoppers. Tester watched as the transports lifted and spread out like a cloud of locusts.

  He was not startled when the federator appeared in maya-form. ‘I made my sacrifice,’ she said. ‘You should have made yours.’

  ‘I wiped her,’ he stammered. ‘I was there, it was done. She must have had help. We’ll find her.’

  ‘And how exactly will you do that?’ she flared. ‘Your daughter has hacked herself out of existence. If the colonies discover the truth, the scales will tip, Director Tester, and not in our favor.’

  ‘I’ll find her.’

  The federator accompanied him by the window. She spoke in a more controlled tone this time, ‘The Security Council has cut off all links to offworld networks, suspended the industrial elevators, and ordered our gunships into orbit. Nothing leaves this planet until we find her. And your counterparts from the other federations are on route to our borders.’

  This news caught Tester by surprise. He did not like the idea of other Geppetto-wielders, Directors like himself, coming to his aid. He could handle this himself.

  ‘The council has lost faith in us, Jeong-Soo.’ The disappointment in her voice was unmistakable. ‘They don’t think we can do this alone and I don’t blame them, given our performance to date. They even suggested that I may not be running for re-election,’ her voice wavered. ‘There’s so much left to accomplish, Jeong-soo. I won’t go out like this.’

  ‘Sky won’t risk contacting the VOL,’ Tester said. ‘She knows we might intercept the signal and track her location. She can’t escape. We’ll find her and I’ll finish this. I’ll make the sacrifice… on one condition.’

  The federator’s maya spun. ‘You’re partly responsible for this mess and you’re making demands?’

  ‘I’ve sacrificed enough to earn the right. I’ll do what you ask but once it’s done you will accept my resignation.’ The words had come out easier than he had anticipated. Now that it was out in the open, he had no regret, only relief.

  The federator studied him. Had she seen this coming? How could she, when he himself had not?