by C. A. Gray
“We’re set up with local connectivity on these,” Mack explained to me when I peeked downstairs to see them. “There’s no labyrinth connection here, but I figured at least local connections would be necessary to communicate with the Commune.”
Madeline, I thought with relief. I was so proud of myself that I’d had the foresight to tell her to take over my netscreen’s LP address. I still had to tell her what to do with herself to get her out of Geneva, but I’d do that as soon as someone could tell me how to get on the Commune.
Beyond the door leading to the basement was a very large, elaborately carved wooden dining table with matching chairs and benches. Deeper in was a hallway leading to what looked like hotel or dormitory-style rooms.
“There are manual locks from the inside,” Mom told us. “They’re all open, and they’re pretty much the same, so pick whichever one you want. The stairs are at the end of the hall here, and there are three more floors of rooms upstairs and downstairs, too. We didn’t know how many of us would be staying here when the time came. Since there’s just a few of us now, though, I figure it’s easier if we all just stay on this floor.”
I selected a door halfway down the hall and went inside. The room was cozy, much more so than I’d expected. It had an electric fireplace like in the den, but not a hearth. The bed was a queen, and a thick gray rug covered the hardwood floors. Two sun lamps filled the room with plenty of light, and there was another little reading light by the bed. A cherry wood dresser sat in one corner, too—not that I had any clothes to put inside. Beside it, a little door led to a bathroom lined with dark brown tile, with a large oval-shaped tub, a freestanding wash basin, and a shower.
When I went back into the hall, I found Mom waiting for the rest of us to settle in.
“I don’t suppose we have things to wear?” I asked, gesturing at the sweater and jeans I’d already worn for two days.
“Of course,” she said. “We’d anticipated that when we came here, we wouldn’t have had much notice. We’ve been accumulating garments for both genders and in various different sizes for years as well, not knowing who would be with us when the time came. They’re all downstairs, adjacent to the laundry room.”
I shook my head in amazement. “You did all this? In secret?”
“And with someone else’s money, for the most part,” she winked. “Your dad started building it, I just finished it. Come on, I’ll show you my favorite part.”
I followed her back into the dining room area, and to a spiral staircase in the corner. At the top, it opened up onto a new floor, but it seemed to be a great room, with another large fireplace with a stone hearth in the corner, and—
“What?” I gaped at the ceiling. “How it that possible, aren’t we miles underground?”
It looked like a large glass dome, through which we could see the morning sky, now blue and streaked with puffy white clouds.
“We are,” she grinned. “The ceiling is shaped like a dome, and there’s a few cameras attached to each of the silos. They send the image of the sky here, and we merge the images from the different perspectives and project the composite on to the ceiling.” She looked at me, and I saw that there were tears in her eyes. “Your father created this part for you. He knew how much you like to see the sky.”
A lump rose in my throat, and I had to look away from her.
“E-hem.”
We both turned around, to see Francis and Larissa. Larissa gaped at the ceiling, and started to giggle, “This is amazing!”
Mom grinned at her, but Francis sighed heavily as if her very exuberance annoyed him. “Those netscreens in the basement have fiberoptic connections, yeah?” he asked Mom.
“They do,” she nodded. “But you should get some sleep before trying to connect to the Commune.”
“I slept on the way,” said Francis, glancing at Larissa with raised brows. “How ‘bout it? Ready to blow the lid off Halpert and his board, to at least the three hundred and ninety-one people connected to the Commune so far?”
She nodded eagerly. “Let’s do it!”
“I want to help,” I said, surprising even myself.
“Why?” said Francis. “Not like you’ll be useful.”
“I can help you craft what to say so it doesn’t come off sounding like you,” I retorted.
“All we need to do is communicate the facts,” Francis pointed out. “What do you want to do, make it rhyme?”
“She’s right,” Mom said, “Let Rebecca write the copy.”
Larissa looked crestfallen, and I knew she thought she had been rendered unnecessary.
“Come on,” I murmured to her, “I’m sure Francis needs your help too.” Plus, the less time I spent alone with Francis, the better. With one last glance at the domed ceiling and a smile at Mom, I followed them.
In the basement, Francis booted up a netscreen and went to work, typing furiously on a black coding screen. Larissa sat on a hard plastic chair beside him, lifting up her ankles so that her legs could swing freely as if she were a bored seven-year-old. I rummaged around until I found a notebook with the chewed remnants of missing pages still stuck between the metal spirals. I started to craft the alert—just the facts, but non-alarmist as much as possible. “We have confirmed beyond a doubt that William Halpert and his entire board—” and here I listed the other five men, “are themselves illegal Synthetic Reasoning robots, created some twenty years ago by an underground team that has since disbanded. We can reasonably guess that that knowledge was what killed many of the older generation of Renegades, including—” I swallowed, hesitated, and wrote, “Quentin Cordeaux. We also were pursued by an assassin after we learned this, and narrowly escaped with our lives. We are now in hiding. Please do not send personal comms to any of us except through the Commune, as we will not be able to connect to the labyrinth to retrieve them without revealing our hiding place…”
“So,” ventured Larissa, still swinging her legs from her chair. I glanced up but saw that she was looking at Francis, not at me, so I went back to my work. “Have you always been like this? So… intense?”
He glanced at her irritably. “Yes.”
“Even when you were a kid?” she pressed. “Like, elementary school Francis. You weren’t coding yet, surely. When the other kids were out at recess, what were you doing? Were you playing kickball? Or were you… I don’t know, researching government conspiracies?”
There was a long silence. I thought Francis didn’t intend to answer her. But finally he muttered, “I don’t know.”
Larissa and I exchanged a look, and she said, “You don’t know? What do you mean, you don’t know?”
He sighed, pushing back from the netscreen and turning to face her. “I mean,” he said, slowly and deliberately, “that I don’t remember specifics from my childhood. I was the only child of a working class family in New York. I was home schooled until I was twelve. After that I went to college prep schools and entered university when I was sixteen. I can tell you the name of my first public school teacher and the name of my first dog—Coltie, by the way, and he was a sheltie—and that my favorite candy was the water taffy my mother made. I remember facts, but do not ask me for specific childhood memories because I don’t have any, and not for lack of trying. And don’t you dare try to analyze that!” He jabbed a finger in my direction. “Yes, I have an unparalleled memory at present, and yes, it’s odd that I can’t remember anything from before, but no, it does not mean that I was traumatized even though I know that’s what all your textbooks will say, because I’ve read them too and can even quote to you exactly what they say and on what page. Photographic memory.” He tapped his forehead beside the gauze.
His tirade over, he abruptly turned back to his netscreen, leaving Larissa and me in stunned silence.
“So… that’s not a touchy subject,” I commented. But Larissa rushed to his side.
“I’m sure you had a wonderful childhood!” she soothed, seating herself bes
ide him without invitation and rubbing his back with an open palm. “You must have, because you grew up to be you, and if you can’t remember, it’s probably because you remember everything you’ve ever learned—and there just isn’t enough space for everything! I’m sure that has to be it. Don’t feel bad, Francis!”
“I. Don’t,” he said, his words clipped and brimming with disgust as he shrugged out from under her motherly caresses. “Are you done with your sonnet?” he snapped, reaching a hand in my direction. Wordlessly, I ripped it out of the notebook and placed the page in his open palm. He glanced over it and shook his head irritably. “What’s so special about this? I could have written this.” But he re-typed my words to the Commune anyway.
“What is your earliest specific memory, then?” Larissa ventured at last.
I saw the little muscle in Francis’s jaw tighten. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Eight?” I persisted, emboldened by Larissa’s question. “Ten? Twelve? Fifteen?”
In response, he swiveled to face me, rolling not just his eyes, but his hands and head as well. “Did I not just tell you not to analyze me? Go upstairs, I’m done with you!” He jabbed a full arm in the direction of the stairs. “I can do the rest on my own. I could’ve done it all on my own, actually, I never needed you in the first place.”
I glanced at Larissa, who looked much more distraught by this outburst than I felt, but we both stood. Not wanting to give Francis the idea that I was fully obedient, I stood behind him as he typed a message on his black coding screen. On the other side of the netscreen interface was an open database, with lists of nine digit sequences in one column, names in another, physical addresses in another. One name caught my eye: Rebecca Cordeaux. My heart jolted, and scanned over to the nine digit sequence beside my name. Larissa climbed halfway up the stairs until she realized I wasn’t behind her.
“Why are you still here?” Francis snapped.
“Just watching how you do this,” I said casually. I knew he’d think I was merely trying to annoy him, but I tried to memorize both my own LP address, and the brief gibberish code to initiate contact with someone on the Commune. I pointed at the screen, at the nine digit sequence after a series of commands and before Francis’s messages in English. “So this is the database of LP addresses, and this is the LP address of the person you want to reach?”
“Go. Away.”
“Yes,” Larissa whispered, having crept back to my side. She grabbed my hand and pulled me to the stairs after her. “I think we should probably leave him alone now.”
Before we reached the stairs, though, I leaned over and grabbed the notebook and pen I’d used for my composition, shrugging at Larissa.
“I don’t have a journal here,” I explained, and she nodded at me, satisfied.
But as we climbed the stairs, I rehearsed my LP address, and the gibberish commands I’d just memorized, scribbling them down as soon as I reached the landing.
Chapter 5
The next two days passed in something of a blur. We slept on irregular shifts, trying to get back on schedule after the adrenaline and exhaustion of staying up all night fleeing for our lives. Mom spoke to me very little, instead consulting with Mack and Rick the bodyguard. I even saw her with Francis, Larissa, Nilesh, and Dr. Yin from time to time. Whenever I overheard their discussions, they seemed to center on finding some of the other men who might have worked with Youssef in the creation of Halpert’s board.
“…I located Giovanni eight months ago, I’m almost positive,” I heard Mom say. “But now I don’t have access to that data anymore, since we can’t get back on the labyrinth…”
“We can find him even without the labyrinth,” Francis insisted, “That’s why we built the Commune. We’ll just have them search for us. Nobody’s flagged any of the other Renegades yet.”
“Having them search for us will take twice as long as doing it ourselves,” Dr. Yin said, “but I suppose if there’s no other option…”
“We’ll get Matt Ripley to do it for us,” I heard Francis reply. “He’s dumb as a rock, but he follows every instruction, provided they’re absurdly detailed. But fortunately, I am absurdly detailed. Matt’s never had an original thought in his life, which means he’ll only do exactly what I tell him and report the results to me verbatim, including copyrights and disclaimers because he won’t understand what he’s reading,” Francis assured everybody. “He’s the ideal man for the job.”
While the others met and talked strategy, I mostly split my time between caring for Liam and preparing meals. Not that I was the least bit domestic, especially without the labyrinth to aid me with recipe instructions. But somebody had to do it, and while our compound had been furnished with a dining hall and a stockpile of both perishable and non-perishable food items, a maid bot was the one contingency Mom had apparently forgotten to plan for.
“That cut of meat will taste much better in a stew, you know,” came a voice behind me while I prepared our dinner on the second day. I whirled around to find Liam leaning against the large industrial refrigerator.
“You are supposed to be in bed!” I declared.
“I’ve been sleeping for the last two days,” he complained, hobbling over to me and stooping to swap out my pan for a sauce pot that could feed an army. “I’m going crazy. I have to do something.”
“Did Hepzibah say you could get up?” I asked dubiously.
“She said I’m out of immediate danger.” He met my eyes. “Thanks for taking good care of me, Bec. You know, if I didn’t know better, I’d think you wanted me to stick around,” he added with a wink.
I rolled my eyes and smiled back, unwilling to take the bait. “My cooking was so bad you decided it was worth risking your recovery to intervene, huh?”
He shrugged. “What can I say. I’m an epicure.”
“All right, what do you suggest?” I gestured at the sauce pot, where he was already heating up some oil.
He pointed at the several pound shoulder roast on the plate. “This meat’s too tough to be a stand-alone dish. It’s best to hide it in a sauce, over rice perhaps, and with a bunch of veggies. Got any garlic and ginger?”
I’d almost forgotten Liam could cook, since I’d only seen the evidence of it once before—what felt like a lifetime ago, back in my flat in Dublin when he’d first met Madeline. I sighed at the thought of her, and he cast a look at me over his shoulder.
“What?”
“I was just missing Madeline,” I admitted.
He looked sympathetic, which if I thought about it, was pretty remarkable for Liam. “I’m sorry,” he said sincerely. “You do have real, human friends here, though.”
I shrugged, suddenly feeling sorry for myself. “Only you. And Mom, if she counts, even though she’s barely looked at me in the last two days. All my real friends might as well be on another planet. I can’t even tell them what happened, or where I went…”
Liam fell silent for a minute, chopping an onion on the cutting board beside me. When the silence stretched too long, I glanced at him and saw that his brow was furrowed in concentration unwarranted by the onion.
“What?” I asked.
“I’m worried about my friends,” he confessed. “Halpert knows who I am. If he can’t find me, he might try to find someone he can use as leverage against me.”
I stopped scraping the skin off the ginger for a minute as this sank in. I don’t know why it hadn’t occurred to me before. “Dr. Rasputin knows who I am too!” Andy. Was he in danger?
Liam shook his head. “True, but I’m higher profile…” he trailed off, and his eyes met mine as we both realized the same thing.
Not anymore. My mother was M.
“Who do you think they’ll go after?” I whispered.
With what looked like a supreme force of will, Liam resumed chopping. I saw him wince as the back end of the knife collided with the cutting board, presumably reverberating up his arm and into his injured ch
est. “Halpert will send someone to my father. Or St. James perhaps, since he and my father work together all the time. They won’t go after him—he’s too important. They’ll just get him to give names. But Dad and I haven’t been in contact for five years, so the names he’ll give will be those he knew I palled around with at the time.”
“Is there anybody you knew then that you still hang out with a lot?”
Liam shrugged. “There’s a few, but not super regularly. Nobody I can think of who would know anything incriminating. I was always very careful.” He smirked at me. “Even though some people once made fun of me for that.”
“All right, all right. You were right, I was wrong.”
“I’m sorry, what was that?” He held a hand to his ear. “I’m not sure I heard you.”
“You’re lucky you’re a recovering invalid right now,” I muttered, but I could still feel the corners of my mouth curl upward. Then I added seriously, “But I talk to my friends all the time. You don’t think any of them are in danger?”
“Depends on the kinds of things you said to them. I’m sure someone who works for Halpert has our netscreens now, since we left them in Geneva, which means they’ve got your entire history—”
I shook my head. “I told Madeline to destroy my netscreen.”
He raised his eyebrows and his mouth fell open. “Nice thinking!” Then his expression grew dark and cautious. “Wait, when? How did you tell her that?”
“Don’t worry, I’m not an idiot,” I raised my hands. “I told her with my handheld, but pretty much right when we left Geneva, before our A.E. chips were destroyed. I haven’t used the labyrinth since.”
Liam’s face relaxed. “Nice thinking!” he said again. “I wish she could have destroyed my netscreen too, and Francis’s. But it probably won’t matter for us, because we always planned for a contingency like this. They were password protected with a randomly generated sequence that changes every two weeks. Also, I installed a code a few years back that would automatically wipe the hard drive if I didn’t log in for five days in a row. So if they can’t crack the code in that time, there will be nothing to crack.”