Explorations: Colony (Explorations Volume Four)

by Dennis E. Taylor

  “Well…I think I have a lead on a lead. If that makes any sense. It involves Theo Yates.”

  “Yates?” Mariah screwed up her face. “What could he possibly have to offer us?”

  “It’s his hobby to tinker around with sim tech, and from the way he’s been talking lately, I think he’s made a breakthrough that would improve it by leaps and bound. He refuses to do anything but talk around it, but from his bragging I think it’s something big. And I think it could help us improve ViroBuddy enough to get a better handle on the Imagovirus.”

  “Okay. So let’s ask him to give it to us.”

  “He won’t. He can’t stand me.”

  “That’s irrelevant, isn’t it? This isn’t about you, it’s about saving the colony.”

  “I’m afraid he may very well be that petty. Even if he does give it to us, I think he’ll want something in return—something involving my sister. I’m not willing to use her as a bargaining chip, Mariah. She’s fragile enough as it is.” Harriet hoped her indignation was coming across as authentic.

  “All right,” Mariah said, shaking her head. “All right. So, what do we do?”

  “I think I can get him to leave his house. When he does, we break in, hack into his terminal, and copy its hard drive onto a com to sneak back here with it.”

  “This is getting a bit bizarre, Harriet.”

  You have no idea. “I know. But I really can’t think of another way. Things get bizarre when you’re trying to get any good out of someone like Theo Yates.”

  “All right,” Mariah said. “If you really think this could lead to a cure…”

  Twenty minutes later, Mariah was hiding in an alley between another residence and one of the colony’s two general stores while Harriet rang Theo’s buzzer.

  He opened the door, squinting out at her. “Harriet?”

  “Theo. I have a favor to ask.”

  A smile slithered across the creep’s face. “Really? That’s fascinating. Do you want me to move even farther away from your sister? Maybe you want me to leave the colony altogether, to live in a tent in the woods?”

  “No…the opposite, actually. I’ve decided that if tweaking her sim will make Sabrina happy, then I’m fine with it. She’s been having trouble with it, but she refuses to contact you after I…well, after I scolded you at the hospital. She’s mortified that I might have scared you away.”

  “I see. This is unexpected. So what are you asking, exactly?”

  “I’m asking you to go to the hospital and help her calibrate her sim the way she wants.”

  “I did that already.”

  Harriet shrugged. “She says it isn’t working properly.”

  “Strange.” Theo cocked his head to one side. “Sims don’t normally glitch after I set them up. But I’ll have a look.”

  “Thank you, Theo.” She tried to give him a genuine-looking smile, but she was worried her disgust for him was showing through.

  “If I do this…I want you to know that I’ve been considering asking your sister out again. If I do this, I want you to stay out of my way. In fact, I want your blessing.”

  “You have it,” Harriet said immediately. “No problem.” If all went well, this reality would end soon, and Theo would be in the Delphi’s brig, so she had no problem agreeing to what would hopefully be a very temporary arrangement.

  “Perfect. I’ll head right over.”

  “Thank you so much, Theo. I can’t tell you what it means to me.”

  He held her gaze for a few moments longer, scrutinizing her, and for a moment, she was worried that he’d begun to cotton on to what she was doing. Then, that creepy smile broke onto his face again.

  “Not a problem.” He shut the door without another word.

  With that, Harriet walked casually down the street—until she judged she was far enough away. Then, she circled back around to join Mariah in the alleyway.

  They watched Theo’s door for several minutes, each of which felt like an hour. At last, he left his house, carrying a suitcase that no doubt held whatever equipment he expected he’d need.

  Once Theo disappeared down the street, Harriet dashed toward his front door, motioning for Mariah to follow.

  The door was locked, but when they skirted the house they found a window he’d left open, which the back patio gave them easy access to.

  They both climbed in.

  “Oh my God,” Mariah said, who’d entered first.

  When Harriet joined her, she saw the reason for that reaction: the place was a total mess. Between dishes, clothes, takeout boxes, used tissues, and other unhygienic miscellany, there were almost no surfaces not covered with something.

  Mariah’s left hand was pressed to her forehead. “This could take forever, if we have to sift through all this junk.”

  “I doubt we’ll have to. He must use his terminal a lot, so we probably won’t have to dig for it.”

  But a cursory search of two floors yielded nothing. Harriet was about to start overturning mounds of garbage when Mariah noticed a door they hadn’t tried yet. When they did, it opened onto a set of stairs, which led down to a finished basement with a single room.

  They found the room just as dirty as the upstairs, if not dirtier, but its focal point was Theo’s terminal—uncovered by anything, just as Harriet had predicted.

  Gingerly, Mariah lowered herself onto the office chair in front of it, which was also uncovered, other than a sweat-stained t-shirt hanging over the back.

  Blinking, Mariah looked from the terminal’s screen to Harriet. “No hacking required, looks like. He’s left himself logged in.”

  Nodding slowly, Harriet said, “Mariah, there’s something I haven’t been totally honest about.”

  Her assistant’s eyebrows climbed toward her hair. “Oh?”

  “I don’t actually think Theo made a breakthrough that can help us. I needed to access his terminal for a different reason—one I would have had a lot of trouble explaining without us actually being here in front of it.”

  Mariah hesitated only for a few seconds. “What is it?”

  They didn’t have much time, so Harriet gave her as condensed a version as possible of what Philip Mann had revealed. She told her about the ensign visiting her in the dream, the discovery that Imago was really a lifeless rock, and how Captain Gregory and his crew were keeping the colonists in cryo while taking their organs to survive.

  While Harriet spoke as quickly as she could, the expression on Mariah’s face went from perplexed to skeptical, and then to a little angry.

  But at last, Harriet finished. “I know this sounds crazy, and you’re probably feeling pretty pissed off right now that I talked you into coming here for a reason that seems so insane. But please—do me the favor of at least verifying what I’m saying. Have a look on Theo’s terminal and see what you find.”

  Scowling, now, Mariah turned back to the screen in silence, clicking around the terminal gingerly, as though unsure why she was bothering to comply. But then, when she ran a scan for all the programs installed on the terminal, she hit upon sim management software that had clearly been set apart from other such programs on Theo’s machine.

  “That has to be it,” Harriet said. “Open it.”

  When Mariah did, an interface popped up with a long list of colonist names, as well as locations throughout the colony.

  Mariah clicked on her own name, and it showed an overhead view of her and Harriet in Theo’s basement, as though the upper floors had been torn away and they were looking at themselves from the sky.

  Even from where she was standing at Mariah’s side, Harriet could see her eyes widen.

  Mariah clicked on Sabrina Vaughn’s name, and it showed her sitting up in her hospital bed.

  Next, she clicked on an icon that bore a sun shining through white clouds, and when she did, a list of weather conditions popped up.

  When she clicked “thunderstorm,” a rumble sounded from outside, and even though they were downstairs, they could hear rain
pelting the windows above.

  “Okay,” Mariah said, her voice barely above a whisper. “I believe you now.”

  At that moment, they heard the front door open overhead.

  Following that, Theodore Yates’s thin voice called out:

  “Who’s down there?” he demanded.

  *

  Harriet and Mariah shared wide-eyed glances, and then Harriet steeled herself.

  This is no time to freeze up.

  “I’ll go upstairs and try to stall him,” she whispered. “You see if there’s anything that can be done from here.” She nodded at the terminal.

  Mariah nodded back, planting her fingers on the keyboard, where they flew.

  For her part, Harriet forced herself to raise her foot to the first stair, and then the next.

  Theo didn’t come down to meet her. Instead, she found him standing near the front door, his stance signaling wariness. When he saw Harriet, his eyes narrowed.

  “Theo,” she said, trying to sound as placating as she could, though her voice wavered a little. She decided to go with the same fiction she’d originally concocted for Mariah. “I can explain. This is about my work in trying to find a cure for Imagovirus. It—”

  “Bullshit,” Theo said. “Someone got to you, didn’t they? We have a traitor on the Delphi. Someone told you.”

  She tried to feign ignorance. “The Delphi? The Delphi’s in orbit with no one on it, acting as a communications—”

  But Theo took a menacing step forward. “I started to worry a little, when you began to work so hard on curing Imagovirus. Because there is no cure—not in this reality—and I thought you might find that odd. But no. You can’t have figured things out this quickly. Someone got to you.”

  Knowing the game was up, Harriet was about to lunge at Theo when a pistol materialized in his grip.

  “I knew something was up as soon as you encouraged me to visit Sabrina. That’s not you at all. And then the sudden thunderstorm…” He shook his head. “Doesn’t matter. I don’t like to be the one to do this, but you’ve forced my hand. Say hello to Captain Gregory for me.”

  Except, Theo remained perfectly still, and he didn’t fire. Tilting her head sideways, Harriet studied him.

  “Harriet!” Mariah called from downstairs. “Get out of the way!”

  Immediately, she sidestepped—just in time. The pistol fired, and the bullet zipped down the hall, through the kitchen, and out the back window.

  Then, Harriet saw that Theo was actually moving, but with incredible slowness. With the speed of glaciers, his hand began to lower, and his face took on the beginnings of a rictus of rage.

  “Get down here!” Mariah yelled.

  Harriet wasn’t accustomed to taking orders from her assistant, but these were special circumstances. She scurried down the stairs to join her at the terminal.

  “That gunshot will attract people,” she said when she reached Mariah. “They won’t understand what we’re doing—they’ll think we lost it and broke into Theo’s house.”

  “They’ll also find Theo moving at the same speed my last boyfriend used to get out of bed.” Mariah shrugged. “Anyway. It looks like Theo controlled who departed the sim from here. You mentioned that any FCF members we see in the colony are actually low-functioning automatons. To avoid having too many of those walking around, Theo was obviously killing anyone who’d been chosen to have their organs taken. From what I’ve been able to glean, he’s been crafting each death to make it look natural and logical to the other colonists—like he did with Imagovirus. But there’s also a feature here that just straight-up kills people. We don’t know for sure that dying in the sim is what triggers an exit from the cryo-tube. It could be that escaping requires an extra step, maybe taken by someone aboard the Delphi. But if that’s true, we’re screwed anyway, unless you can get in touch with your dream friend again, and I doubt we have time for that.”

  “So we have to try this,” Harriet said. “It’s our only hope.”

  “Just to be clear, boss—are you asking me to kill you?”

  “I’m telling you it’s your job to kill me, as my assistant.”

  “That’s what I thought you were saying.” Mariah clicked through the interface, until an angry scarlet rectangle labeled KILL appeared. Below it was a drop-down list, and after Mariah found Harriet’s name and clicked it, she hovered the cursor over the blood-red button. She shot Harriet a glance with raised eyebrows.

  “Wait,” Harriet said. “You have to kill Andrew Ferdinand too.”

  “You’re telling me to kill the governor?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is that part of my job, too?”

  Harriet grimaced. “He has emergency codes that we’ll need to take over the Delphi.”

  “If you say so.” Mariah switched Harriet’s name to Ferdinand’s, and she clicked KILL. “That’s him dead. Ready for your turn?”

  Pressing her lips together and clenching her fists, Harriet nodded.

  Mariah clicked the button. Harriet crumpled to the floor, her consciousness fleeing.

  *

  The bottom of her cryo-tube unsealed, emptying all its liquid through the grate built into the deck below. Next, padded robotic arms gripped Harriet by her hips and armpits, lowering her gently to the same grate.

  Even though she wore a durable rubber bikini meant to provide a modicum of decency, leaving one’s cryo-tube was meant to be a private affair, and typically colonists were revived one by one, to allow them to dress before rejoining the others who’d exited their tubes.

  But as Harriet stared through the haze of her returning vision, battling immense grogginess, the steel cold against her elbows and knees, she became aware of another’s presence.

  “Governor Ferdinand?” she croaked.

  “Negative,” a reedy voice rasped—a voice that shook in a way that came only with advanced age or illness. “Though it makes sense that you’d think so. It appears he was an important part of your plan, which explains why he’s currently kneeling below his own cryo-tube, coughing and sputtering.”

  Harriet looked to her right, where she saw confirmation of the voice’s words: the well-muscled, mostly naked Andrew Ferdinand was indeed on his hands and knees beneath his own tube.

  Next, with a great effort of will, she managed to lift her gaze to the owner of the voice.

  It took her a long time to recognize him. He had aged greatly, far more than she’d been expecting, and he resembled old photos of people who’d surpassed one hundred years naturally, before the invention of life extension technology.

  He also held a pistol—one that closely resembled the gun Theo had tried to use on her.

  “Your organs will come in handy,” Captain Gregory said. “But I can’t let Andrew Ferdinand live long enough to harvest his. He’s too great a flight risk outside his cryo-tube.”

  With the labored movements of old age, Gregory pushed himself off the cryo-tube he’d been leaning against and began walking toward Ferdinand, the hand that held the pistol raising toward the governor.

  Cryotechnicians strongly recommended waiting at least an hour after revival from cryo before engaging in activity that could be considered strenuous.

  Harriet figured that tackling the captain of the Delphi from behind probably qualified. But she couldn’t exactly afford to wait.

  Gathering her strength and her will, she surged upward from the floor, connecting with the captain’s hunched back and wrapping her arms around his torso.

  Gregory staggered forward, but Harriet maintained her grip, pinning his arms at his sides, trying to bring him down.

  The captain kept his feet. Now, Harriet was mostly using him for support to remain standing herself, and her grasp was quickly weakening.

  Still inside her loosening embrace, Gregory turned, and he managed to raise his pistol’s muzzle to her abdomen. He fired.

  Incredible pain radiated out from the bullet wound instantly. She fell back, but her arms remained around the captai
n, and this time, her backward momentum was enough to bring him down.

  Something broke inside the captain as they landed, likely a rib, and he cried out.

  Harriet fumbled at his grip, and she managed to pry his gun from age-weakened fingers. That done, she raised it to his skull.

  The gun roared, and Gregory’s head acquired a small, round hole where the bullet entered. His full weight came down on her then, causing her to cry out. When Gregory’s head lolled sideways, it revealed a much larger, much messier exit wound.

  Andrew Ferdinand crawled over to her. “Ms…Ms. Vaughn, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. Hello, Governor.”

  “You’ve shot the captain!”

  “Killed him, if I’m not mistaken.”

  “So you have,” Ferdinand said, fingering Gregory’s neck, presumably for a pulse. “There’s a lot that’s odd about this situation.”

  “I’ll explain everything later. But for now, the most salient information is that the captain and crew have kept the colonists trapped inside the farming sims while they harvest our organs, one by one. You need to use your emergency override codes to take control of the Delphi and trap everyone who’s awake wherever they are on the ship.”

  “All right, then,” Ferdinand said haltingly.

  “After that, if you’d be so kind as to help me to sick bay…”

  “Yes. Of course.”

  With that, everything went dark for Harriet—almost as though she was dying for the second time that day.

  *

  She woke in a bed in sick bay, with IV tubes sprouting from her arms and heart rate monitors clipped to her fingertips.

  From the bed beside hers, an elderly man smiled at her, his head nestled on a pillow.

  “Hello,” she said, her voice coming out as a rasp, just as it had in the moments after she’d exited her cryo-tube.

  “Hi there.”

  “Is…is everything all right?” Harriet asked. “With the Delphi, and with the colonists?”

  “It’s as all right as it can be. The colonists have been revived, and the crewmembers were apprehended, along with the FCF marines that enabled their crimes.”