Adaptive Consequences

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Adaptive Consequences Page 17

by Lucy L Austin


  * * *

  Solo’s mobile-home was stiff with unease. Guang lights hung limply outside like frozen fireflies. A few frazzled weeds sat in a mini-vegetable patch, protected by a sun-shield. There was no decoration in the window like the others. Solo flung the door open and launched herself inside, then Lucas, Chandra and the man with the kind eyes went in after her. Jun and Kau followed a few steps behind them. Jun recognised the interior at once – it was where Kodi had brought her earlier.

  ‘Kodi lived with you?’ Things trickled in to place. Jun lingered awkwardly by the door with Kau, unsure how they would accommodate five adults in the squeezed space.

  Solo emerged with two stools and dropped them with a thud, before lowering herself on the sofa, folding her legs origami-like. She invited Lucas and Chandra to sit next to her. She looked hesitantly at the man with the kind eyes who stood barricading the door. ‘I don’t live here,’ Solo said sharply. ‘It’s somewhere I come to…’

  ‘To think, right…?’ Kind Eyes finished, breaking their gaze to glance down at his feet. The black canvas straps on his sandals were newly flourished with dust from the walk here. He sighed and looked around the place, unwilling to rest anywhere.

  Solo gestured to the stools and said, ‘Sit then,’ to Jun and Kau, all the while still looking at Kind Eyes. Jun assumed he was her husband.

  The party remained quiet until Jun and Kau sat down. Lucas was as broad as he was tall; he cracked his knuckles, while his foot tapped to an imaginary beat; a body in revolt against sitting still. Chandra, poised and thoughtful, dwarfed next to him. His liquorice-coloured hair was woven tightly in a top-knot, which pulled his eyes feline-wise. They looked at Lucas with a soft warmth, but they whipped with hostility at Jun.

  ‘Yes, Kodi stayed with me,’ Solo said. ‘But only recently.’ The silence that followed gave Jun the impression there was more to be said on the matter, but Solo said no more about it. ‘And how do you know Kodi? From some experiment?’

  Jun pursed her lips and tried for a piece of thread but was left wanting. She quickly studied the faces of the two men in front of her and smiled at them faintly. Chandra’s face seemed familiar, but she couldn’t think from where. Their eyes connected for a moment, but struggling to place him, she carried on. ‘When I came to see you this morning, Kodi was kind enough to show me to the Circle. After you and I spoke, I was… disorientated. She found me, brought me back here, and gave me some water. We spoke for a while. I thought it was all quite by chance, but now…’

  ‘What did you talk about?’ Solo growled.

  ‘Hey. I know you’re upset, understandably,’ Kau’s voice sharpened to match his eyes, ‘but if you’re going to take the time to listen to us, lay off the aggression. Cut her some slack, or don’t listen at all.’

  ‘Hey!’ Kind Eyes loomed over Kau; his shoulders tensed. ‘And you cut my wife some slack – she’s gone through enough without this from the likes of you.’

  ‘Batz!’ Solo said wearily, like scolding a tempestuous child. ‘It’s fine,’ she said, figuratively drawing a line under it. Her chin jutted out, and she traced her teeth with her tongue. Seemingly to no one in particular, she said, ‘Go on.’

  Jun cleared her throat, hoping to empty the tension. ‘Kodi told me fragments of her story, and we talked about why I’d come to see you, about your mother, and her capabilities. Some of the questions she asked, I thought odd at the time, but now I see she was asking not out of curiosity, but reassurance. To compare with her own abilities, to understand a bit more about the Pre-Emptive Perception…’

  ‘Oh ömkhii baas,’ Solo held her head in her hands, shaking her head. Kind-eyed Batz sat next to her and wrapped a cricket-bat wide of an arm around her, swelling her silhouette. ‘Kodi arrived in the Ghetto, scared and in need of water and food,’ Solo, said and took a deep breath. ‘She told me she was running from the Police, nothing new – everyone here is on the run from the Police. She said they were trying to fix something on her, but she was biding her time. She told me about her family and what happened, and that she’d overhead them talking about Odgerel Zaye, a woman with similar capabilities. There was something in the way they spoke about her death that made Kodi think there was more to it. Now she had a name, and could build a picture, her… Pre-Emptive Perception, or whatever you call it, showed her coming to the Ghetto, meeting me. Kodi asked me about my mother, and badgered me to get in touch with you, and find out what happened. At first, I was unsure. I didn’t want to face all that again. I let her stay here while I went home and…’ Solo looked to Batz, and dipped her head to rest it on his shoulder.

  ‘When I came back, we hung out a little. She was an easy person to be around, she felt familiar. It felt in some way being close to my mother. I know that sounds weird… but I abandoned her, and now she’s gone.’

  ‘No, not gone,’ Jun said and tried to put her hand on Solo’s arm, but Solo pulled it away.

  Batz and Lucas looked at her with a mixture of accusation and distrust, and Jun felt herself flush. Only Chandra looked dead ahead, his countenance didn’t waiver. ‘If we work together, we’ve got a better chance of helping her. We all have things we wished we could do-over, Solo, but there are opportunities to make them right.’

  Jun didn’t expect it, but Solo’s demeanour softened, her armour slipped. She took a deep breath and pulled herself away from Batz. His body rebounded in her wake.

  ‘Lucas, we need descriptions. Chandra, we need footage. Any and every detail…’ Solo said. ‘Let’s hope you can connect the dots, Doctor.’

  * * *

  Jun hadn’t known what to expect when Solo insisted Chandra take her ‘below the clay’. Now she was here, she realised it was a bunker, like the kind when there had been separate nations, and they’d fought each other; pre-United Adaptive, pre-migrations. No wonder the airspace was protected, and they operated with a band wave shield. If the UA caught wind of this, the Ghetto wouldn’t have a chance.

  Solo, Chandra and Jun had walked in the opposite direction from the Circle, near to where their Intuimoto was parked. Kau had stayed with Lucas and Batz; Jun hoped he was alright. Both men were as hostile as they were broad. Now meeting Batz, some more pieces of the puzzle of Solo came together. She could see how their dynamic worked, and, conversely, didn’t. This continuous sense of push pull would be exhausting for them both; Batz didn’t want to let go, Solo, she wasn’t so sure.

  They came to a spot Jun remembered from earlier when she had been with Fan, a mini tor-rock formation. Four larger rocks grouped with one smaller one. They stood solid, nature’s guards to the entrance of the Ghetto. Solo forced her hands over Jun’s eyes. Jun didn’t question it. A few hours ago, she might have resisted, backed away nervously. Jun was surprised by the softness of Solo’s hands, and their citrus smell which tickled her nose.

  In one deft movement, Solo removed her hands from Jun’s face and spun her around. The smaller rock displaced, revealing a dimly-lit hole, like a mouth craning open; a stony, miniature set of stairs, a flinty-tongue. Jun didn’t like it at all.

  Solo hadn’t followed them down, saying she would go back to Batz and Lucas, and now below, Jun could see why. With the equipment, two chairs and a hammock, it would be a tight squeeze with the three of them. The lack of natural light didn’t help, compounding the feeling they were in a person-sized hermetic capsule, buried beneath the ground. The saving grace was two air conditioners flanking either end of the bunker dispersing cool air.

  The bunker was similar in size to one of the lab’s smaller observation rooms, and their purposes were the same – watching and recording. In front of Jun was a master control Interface, a wall of screens and equipment. An observation room on steroids. On the Interface, she could see various places across the Ghetto. In the top right were a cluster of screens showing different angles of the Circle. To the bottom right was an area she didn’t recognise; it had a flat plain with a canopied crop field and water tower, and a similar rock formation in the co
rner of the screen. The centre monitor showed the land directly above the bunker, as well as the entrance access road, so they could see who was coming and going. Mob-homes populated the bottom left screens, and in the top left, and there were the usual Telestream channels of news reports and Province updates. Carefully contained in this small little bunker, were thirty digital eyes across the whole of Ghetto West.

  ‘Do you have microphones as well?’ Jun asked, thinking about the UA’s CC equipment.

  ‘In some places,’ Chandra said. ‘Not all. We have strategically placed bunkers and drones for monitoring,’ he said and gave a weary sigh. Even with their fastidious coordination and planning, it hadn’t helped them when they needed it the most. ‘Tunnels too, with signal blockers, so the UA can’t detect our technology, nor the tunnels and bunkers. But you don’t need to know about that,’ he said and gestured for her to sit down.

  Jun thought back to when she first met Solo and the angry drone that circled. They had been monitoring her. She pulled out the chair. Despite the air conditioner, her dress clung to her back. ‘How did you get all this equipment down here, and have enough charge for it?’

  ‘Something else you don’t need to know,’ Chandra said, signalling it wasn’t open to discussion. His mind was occupied with the Interface. Some footage appeared in one of the centre screens.

  ‘Were you down here, when they arrived?’ Jun said, her eyes flicking from the monitor to Chandra.

  He nodded. ‘I was on my own. Another one of us was monitoring over in the East bunker,’ he said and tipped his head to the bottom right screen, to the other rock formations.

  ‘So this is the West then?’ she said tentatively.

  Chandra didn’t acknowledge her but tapped one of the monitors. Three heavy duty IntuimotoTrucks charged through the highway on the screen, the band of orange wrapped around them like ribbon on a gift. Chandra paused the feed.

  ‘I saw these coming and sounded the alarm.’ He pointed to the top right screens, which showed the Circle, and the bottom left, which showed the mob-homes. ‘That’s a high-pitch piping noise, like an eagle’s call, and flashing red-warning lights. When you came earlier today, we sounded the alarm. But when your husband stayed in the Intuimoto…and you appeared to be no threat, we declassified it. We have the technology to read health chips, but we can’t use it, the UA would detect us.

  ‘At this point,’ he tapped the centre screen again, where the footage had frozen showing the UA convoy, ‘I didn’t know where Kodi was. I learned later that she was at Solo’s,’ he said and pointed to the bottom left.

  ‘We were expecting this,’ he said and put his head in his hands and massaged his temples. ‘Kodi had orders to go to the tunnels and hide out,’ his voice strained. ‘Scanners can’t detect you down here. We have food, even exits out of the Ghetto. The UA could have ransacked this whole place, immobilised us all, but they wouldn’t have found her.’

  ‘So why was she?’

  ‘Ask Solo,’ he said quietly and focused on the screen again.

  Whatever had gone on, Chandra was torturing himself. Something she knew enough about.

  ‘People came from the Circle, they knew what the UA was here for,’ he said, pointing to the screen. The recording started again, and people gathered near the tor. Simultaneously, the IntuimotoTrucks pulled up, their doors opened, and bodies filed out, in top-to-toe black like ninjas. Ten or twelve of them concentrated near the trucks, and a further, maybe twenty light-footed ones dispersed like bloodhounds into the Ghettoites. Jun tried to study their faces to see if there were any she recognised. A stringier Markov perhaps, or a squat and dumpy Yeung, but all she saw were faceless rank-and-filers.

  The Ghettoites began to keel over one by one like stunned sheep, as the bloodhounds waded through them. ‘They waved Voltarms coolly, and you can see men and women on the floor here twitching,’ he pointed to the screen, ‘and a few were Immobilised too.’ Chandra’s fingers slid from the bottom left and right corners, dragging the screens to the centre. On each side, his fingers traced anti-clockwise circles.

  ‘You can see here,’ he pointed at the screen to the left. ‘Kodi runs out from Solo’s mob-home. She’s running to the tunnels. I’m not sure what tech the UA had with them, but like bears to a honeypot, they knew exactly where to find her. Watch,’ he said. Sure enough, the bloodhounds stormed defiant in one direction. Kodi disappeared from the bottom left screen and appeared on the right with the other tor rocks. The UA converged with Kodi, and Jun’s heart raced as she knew what was going to happen. They used the Voltarm on her. Her limbs, which were so much smaller in comparison to theirs jumped and jolted and then went limp. They carried her away.

  Jun followed the central screen again, which showed them all filing back onto the IntuimotoTrucks. Anyone who stood in their way got a Voltarm or were Immobilised. There was a sea of bodies left writhing on the ground as the UA floored it, dust-clouds mushrooming in their wake, filling the entire screen. Jun guessed it took them less than 10 minutes to arrive, track Kodi down and take her away.

  ‘They let off canisters behind them as they went, so there wasn’t any visibility to follow them. We couldn’t see the hands on the end of our arms for a good five, ten minutes afterwards,’ Chandra said. Jun noticed his hands shaking. Had they been trembling the whole time?

  ‘The Autonarmy did away with most of their weapons as a commitment to peace,’ Chandra said, curling his fingers into a fist and stretching them out again. ‘But in some of the tunnels, we have a few stashed away, and some useful gadgets – CNC cutters, software development tools, drones and the like – but by then, it would have been too late.’ His eyes looked to the roof of the bunker and then to his knees as if looking for the solution somewhere in between.

  If Kodi was with Wei and Markov in the lab, Jun dared not think what they would be doing. She needed to stop them, but it was no good charging in head-first, she needed a plan.

  She looked at Chandra again; his body semi-slumped over the Interface. The familiarity of him wouldn’t go away. ‘Why did you,’ she said carefully, ‘come here?’

  He laughed and turned away from her like he had told this story a hundred times, or no one had asked him. ‘I didn’t want to do what I was employed to anymore. The way a parasite eats away at you, that’s what it did to me until it reached my core, and I couldn’t do it anymore. I knew too much, so I exiled myself here.’

  ‘Were you part of the Autonarmy?’

  He nodded reluctantly. ‘For all the help it was. It was operated out of the North Euro Province, but since the peace, it’s all disbanded. The Network still keeps in touch of course, but there isn’t the same unifying need as before.’

  Chandra looked away and was lost in his thoughts again, simultaneously playing with something on his wrist, it seemed like a bracelet tie. It reminded Jun of the endless knot Odgerel had given her all those years ago. What happened to that? She felt a renewed sense of shame thinking about the spirit in which it was given and what happened. The words came out before she could process what she was saying. ‘I chose to forget instead,’ she said, and tears began to fall down her face. ‘I knew something terrible and ran away too, but instead of running from the system, I ran away from myself and erased it like it never happened.’ Her face burned, but she felt relief from saying it out loud. ‘I wasn’t sure what was worse. Destruction by doing the right thing or survival overshadowed by guilt.’

  ‘If you chose to forget, you did neither.’ Chandra pulled back his lips to reveal a pearled smile. It was the first time she had seen him do that, it smudged the shadows beneath his eyes and gave them a feline outline. And then it hit her. The realisation barged its way into her consciousness like the UA had into the Ghetto.

  ‘Desai, is that you?’

  CHAPTER 18

  7th May 2062

  Solo’s Intuimoto hugged the curves of the access road, which in the night sky looked like a crystal snake, artfully sliding into the unknown. Jun and Sol
o weren’t venturing into the unknown. They knew their destination, and they had a plan for when they arrived.

  The strategy had come to mind when Jun realised Chandra and Desai were the same. His prickly exterior had softened when she had said his codename; spikes smoothed into curves.

  She remembered their first introduction at Adalbert’s, he had been quiet and reserved. He still was but had seemingly picked up some grit along the way. He was tougher, more calcified.

  Jun explained everything. From what happened back then, from Blum and Golov, to Odgerel, and what had occurred within the last 24 hours. Chandra listened, humbly nodding his head, without judgement or discrimination.

  As Jun had talked it through, thoughts began to percolate, drip, drip, dripping through her. Perhaps there was a way she could get Kodi back, but she needed Chandra’s help. Solo’s too, and back-up from the Ghetto. She asked to see where the tunnels and East bunker exits lead to, and what had the Autonarmy left, technology and supplies-wise. Chandra agreed to take her there. He must have decided he could trust her again now. What was bubbling in her head wouldn’t work if he didn’t. Walking out from the bunker into the dusking sky, the relief to be back above ground was like a congestion clearing.

  Music still sounded from the Circle. A slow but steady stream of morose songs, trickling far and wide, but, despite everything, Jun was invigorated. Perhaps it was being around Desai/ Chandra, or maybe it was the sense that she could lay Odgerel’s ghost to rest, and in some way, right what she had wronged.

  They walked past the Circle, and a few faces nodded to Chandra; others looked at her curiously. A sweet-spiciness swirled under her nose like punchy cloves rolled in smooth caramel. Even under the circumstances, there was a charm to the place she hadn’t seen before.

 

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