Hella

by David Gerrold

  When J’mee came back, she said, “It’s safe. We can talk. Daddy has the place swept for bugs sometimes two or three times a day. He doesn’t trust anybody. Not about business.”

  We stopped talking because Doctor Rhee was on the phone. “Sandwiches for four. No, make that five. And lemonade. No, not that crap—they need some real protein. Send them to the executive Med-Bay. Jolly will know where to bring them. Yes, that’s right. Thank you.”

  She turned to us. “First things first. You’re going to rest, clean up, get some real food into you, and then you’re going to tell me everything. Or maybe we should start with that.”

  “We need to get to the HARLIE box,” said J’mee. “This is closer.”

  Charles said, “It’s around the corner, down the hall and—”

  Doctor Rhee finished the sentence. “—and right behind the security desk. There’s the problem. How do you get security to buzz you through? Have you figured that part out?”

  “We were hoping that Captain Boynton could get us in. Or even J’mee’s dad.” Charles said that.

  “Yes, well—” Doctor Rhee stopped there. She didn’t know how to finish the sentence. “Maybe. I dunno.” She shook her head.

  “You have an idea?”

  “No. Not really. Why the HARLIE box?”

  “It’s the easiest way to get the video onto the grid so everyone can see it.”

  “Hm. Can I see this video?”

  “Better not,” said Charles. “If we play it anywhere, it could be tapped, and Mr. Layton will know we still have it and what’s on it and—right now, it’s still safe because he thinks he has all the copies. As long as he doesn’t know, we have a chance.”

  “All right,” she said. “I have to trust you. You have to trust me. I guess that’s fair.” Doctor Rhee turned to me. “Kyle, I have to ask. As your doctor. How are you doing?”

  That made Charles and J’mee look up. Charles said, “Huh? Is there something wrong with you?”

  Doctor Rhee looked to me. “You didn’t tell them?”

  “I didn’t tell anyone. There was a lot of stuff happening all at once. There wasn’t time. When I finally had a chance to think about it, I decided to wait and see if anyone noticed a difference.”

  “And?”

  “Well, Jeremy said he did, but that was only after I told him. I didn’t tell anyone else.”

  Charles spoke up then. “Kyle? What didn’t you tell us?”

  “I turned my chip off. For a while.”

  “Oh,” he said. “That’s cool. Are you okay without it?”

  “I think so. I’m feeling things different. More personal maybe, but not like selfish. Maybe it’s that nuance thing. I dunno. I do miss being able to know stuff just by thinking. But—it’s okay. I don’t miss the noise. I feel . . . nicer. Like there’s more me.”

  “Are you ever going to want it back on?” asked J’mee.

  “I don’t know. Maybe. But only if it isn’t so noisy. It’s a little harder making decisions without it. I have to ask myself what’s right and wrong. There’s no one else to ask. But at least they’re my choices, aren’t they? Not something the implant says.”

  Doctor Rhee said, “You might make more mistakes without the implant.”

  “But they’ll be my mistakes, won’t they? Not someone else’s.”

  She didn’t look happy. “That’s one way of looking at it, I guess.”

  “Making my own mistakes—isn’t that what responsibility is all about?”

  “I will not argue with you, Kyle. You are not a dummy. And right now, I’m think that maybe you just proved something. Remember that thing we were talking about? That the implant might have caused some parts of your brain to change. Maybe develop some new abilities? I think that might have happened.”

  “Wow,” said Charles. J’mee too.

  “But—” said Doctor Rhee. “I also think it’s because of the way you used the implant. What you studied, what you learned, what you practiced.”

  Jolly arrived then with a big tray of food, and we fell to it eagerly, stuffing our faces with fried egg sandwiches—adult-sized sandwiches with bacon and cheddar cheese on fresh wheat buns, and strawberry lemonade to wash it all down. Charles made grunting noises like a pig, and we all laughed.

  “Did you have any trouble getting in?” Doctor Rhee asked.

  Jolly shook his head. “Nah. Just another tray.”

  “Yeah, a sandwich can go anywhere—” She stopped in mid-bite.

  We all stopped. We all realized it at the same time.

  Sandwiches. Can go anywhere. Because people are always working.

  “What?” said Jolly. “Something wrong?”

  “Uh, no. We’re good.” Doctor Rhee’s voice went funny. “You know what—I came up here in a hurry. I forgot to grab a kit. And um, these kids are still kinda hyped up, so I’m gonna want to check them over again. Will you grab my kit from the Med-Bay? And um . . . make sure the sedative-injector is loaded, will you do that? Thank you, Jol.”

  “Sure, Doc.” And he was gone.

  As soon as the door whooshed shut behind him, we all looked at each other.

  Doctor Rhee said, “Wait. Finish eating first—”

  * * *

  —

  Of course, we didn’t wait. We all started talking at once, mostly with our mouths full. It wasn’t the greatest plan, it was silly and probably wouldn’t work, but it was just silly enough that nobody would suspect what we were really up to.

  The best part was that it didn’t take much planning or preparation—all we had to do was show up. We only needed one thing. Well, maybe two. Jolly brought up Doctor Rhee’s medical kit. She said she felt naked without it. I thought that was a weird thing to say, and I explained. “But we’re all naked, always. All of us, all the time—under our clothes, I mean.” Charles and J’mee stared at me for a minute, then they both burst out laughing. Maybe I was missing something. Nuance? Without the noise, I couldn’t check every sentence.

  When Jolly returned with the med-kit, he looked puzzled, but we couldn’t tell him what we were up to. The fewer people who knew, the better—especially if we were caught. We didn’t want to get anyone else in trouble. Doctor Rhee told Jolly that she needed to be sure that we weren’t still suffering from shock. The three of us were still so turmoiled we might have trouble sleeping. Maybe even nightmares. Jolly seemed to accept that and she told him to turn in for the day.

  The second thing—actually, the first—required a call down to the caf. Doctor Rhee called. They said it couldn’t be ready for at least an hour, so we used the time to shower, and this time it didn’t matter that we were all naked—“naked without our clothes,” Charles joked. We started rehearsing our separate parts even before we dried off. Finally, it was time to dress.

  We have lots of holidays at Winterland. Summerland too. Everything’s a party. There’s a big one for the equinox, another for the solstice, one for the start of a migration, another for the arrival. We do Thanksgiving, New Year’s, and Memorial Day. Then there are the anniversaries. Arrival Day is an important one, but Acknowledgment Week is the biggest. So the executive apartments always have an assortment of costumes and makeup and masks. We burrowed through the closets to see what we could find. There was plenty.

  J’mee wore an exo-skeleton costume. It made her as tall as Doctor Rhee and she looked like a Power Warrior.

  Charles chose a carnosaur costume. He had a huge headpiece and a big floppy tail, red-brown scales and floppy feathers. We could see his grin inside the carnosaur jaws. He looked like he’d been swallowed whole.

  Doctor Rhee put on a rainbow wizard hat and a rainbow coverall. She took a few things from her medical kit and stashed them somewhere under her robe.

  And I dressed as a ground-monkey. HARLIE was the baby-monkey on my back.

  As s
oon as the cake arrived, we were ready. Doctor Rhee stuck some sparklers in it and we headed for the security desk, all singing. “Today is your birthday! So put on your pants! We’re having a party! We’re all gonna dance!”

  We hopped up and down around the security desk, making as much noise as possible. Doctor Rhee plopped the cake down on the desk in front of the reception guard. “Okay, Nance—let us in!”

  Behind the desk, Nancy Varga blinked in confusion, looking from one to the next, trying to sort us out. “Nobody told me about a birthday—”

  “It’s J’mee’s birthday,” I said. “It’s not on the calendar yet.”

  Charles added, “Her dad promised her!”

  Doctor Rhee said, “In all the excitement, he must have forgotten. Come on, Nance. This is important—”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I should check—” She reached for a button.

  “You’ll spoil the surprise!” I shouted.

  She hesitated. She looked uncertain. “Coordinator Layton has been very specific. I really can’t—”

  That was as far as she got.

  “Okay. Plan B,” said Doctor Rhee. She reached over and pressed the sedative injector to Nancy Varga’s neck.

  “Hunh? What did you—” And then her eyes rolled up, and she sank back in her chair.

  Doctor Rhee grabbed Nancy’s hand and pressed her index finger to a green button on the desktop panel. The security doors whooshed open. “You have ten minutes. Go!”

  Doctor Rhee pushed us forward. Charles grabbed the cake. And he almost dropped it! A man walked carelessly around the corner, J’mee bumped hard into him. He was one of the aides who’d come down from the Cascade with Captain Boynton. He was a big man. He almost knocked her over.

  “Michael Brown!” J’mee looked up at him and smiled. “Unca Mike!”

  He blinked—and then he recognized her. “J’mee, you know better. Nobody’s allowed in here.”

  She grabbed his arm. “I need your help, Michael.”

  “Huh? What the hell—?”

  “Michael, I need to—Charles needs to get a message up to the ship. To his mom. He needs to let her know he’s all right. The network isn’t connecting, but we can do it through the HARLIE box, can’t we?”

  “You mean the transceiver?”

  “Yes. The big orange box.”

  Michael Brown scratched his head, puzzled. “Um. They moved it.”

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know. They didn’t tell me. Coordinator Layton said it was necessary. Something about protecting it from troublemakers. Everything is locked away.”

  Get out.

  That was the noise—except it wasn’t noise. The noise was gone. I said, “Well, um—okay. I guess if we can’t, we can’t. We’ll go now—” Charles and J’mee stared at me, confused.

  Michael blinked as if he was just recognizing me. “Oh, you’re Kyle, right. The kid with all the videos. Charles, why are you carrying a cake? J’mee, what the hell is going on here?”

  “It’s too long to explain. We need—”

  Get out.

  There it was again. “We need to go.” I said it aloud. “Now.”

  “J’mee, what is going on?”

  “Um, nothing.” J’mee frowned at me, but she gave Charles a push. “We just—it’s all right. We’ll go.” We left him shaking his head in confusion. “Kids—”

  Back outside, Doctor Rhee was checking Nancy Varga’s pulse. She looked up as the door whooshed shut behind us. “That was fast—”

  “They moved the transceiver,” Charles said.

  “We can’t get in,” said J’mee.

  Under the desk. Let me look.

  I didn’t question the noise. I pulled the monkey from my back and rolled under the security desk—

  There. Hold me up.

  I lifted the monkey up to the underside of the security desk.

  “A little to the left, please. Now up. Higher. That’s good. Thank you, Kyle.” The monkey extended a part of its anatomy and plugged himself into the socket. I didn’t know if I should be embarrassed or curious. HARLIE must have guessed what I was thinking, because he said, “Relax, Kyle. It could have been worse. Think about it.”

  Oh. Right.

  After that, the navel connection didn’t seem so strange anymore.

  “Kyle?” That was Charles. “You’d better come out. Now.” Something about the way he said it—the monkey disengaged itself, and we slid out from under the desk.

  Drop me.

  The monkey went limp in my hands. I left it on the floor and rolled out from under the security desk. When I stood up, there were two guards in black pointing guns at us.

  Jolly stood behind them.

  He was speaking to someone on his pad. “Yes! I’ve got them! I’ve got them! We’re at the security desk, executive level! Yessir, we’ll hold them!”

  Doctor Rhee was trembling. “Dom! What did you do?”

  “I did my job. I have a family. I have to think of them. And there’s a reward. An executive apartment. We want to have a baby. And . . . with all your damn rules, we were never going to be able—”

  Doctor Rhee shook her head sadly. “I am so sorry. I should have—”

  But that’s as far as she got. Coordinator Layton marched in, followed by Bruinhilda and three more guards. I recognized some of them, we used to be friends, but I guess not anymore.

  * * *

  —

  I didn’t know what happened to the others. I ended up in a half-finished apartment at the far end of the executive wing.

  It didn’t matter. We had lost.

  There hadn’t been time to hack the grid. There hadn’t been time to upload the video. Nobody would ever know the truth.

  There wasn’t any furniture in this apartment. There were a few working lights and no heat at all. There was a mattress and a blanket and a bucket. Every so often, one of the guards brought me a tray. A sandwich and lemonade. I guessed they didn’t know what to do with me. I wondered where everybody was. J’mee and Charles. Jeremy. Jamie. Mom. Captain Skyler. I didn’t know how much time had passed, they didn’t cycle the lights for night and day, so I wondered if they’d forgotten about me, but the guard was still bringing me food and once in a while emptying the bucket.

  I did cry.

  I hadn’t done a lot of crying in my life. I’d had tantrums. I’d had raging outbursts. I’d screamed a lot. I remembered some of it. Mom had held me in a restraining hug, more than once. But then they’d put in the chip and all that stopped. But so did the crying.

  Now I was crying again—but not like before. This time, I sobbed. I wept. I was alone and unhappy and I even understood why I was crying.

  And then maybe it was a long day, maybe it was longer, the guard opened the door and said, “Come with me.” I followed silently. She took me to another apartment. She pointed at the door to the bathroom. “Wash yourself. Put on a clean longshirt.” She pushed me forward.

  I wanted to stay in the shower forever. I didn’t think I’d ever get all the dirty feelings off. I washed myself twice, three times, and was starting to wash again when she banged on the door and said, “That’s enough. Dry yourself and come with me.”

  This time, there were two guards and they took me downstairs to the hearing hall, where important meetings were held. Sometimes it doubled as a courtroom. It looked like that today.

  Coordinator Layton sat at the high desk and he had the gavel and the bell and he wore a black robe and a hard expression. I didn’t see Mom or Lilla-Jack or Charles or J’mee—or anyone else I knew. Only Doctor Rhee. She looked sad.

  The hearing must have been going on for a while. Coordinator Layton looked up as I was escorted in. “Sit down,” he ordered me.

  I looked around. There weren’t a lot of people here. None of them
had friendly faces.

  “Where’s my mom?”

  “Sit down.”

  “Not until you tell me. Where’s my mom?!”

  Coordinator Layton took a breath. “Your mother is under arrest.”

  “Huh? No! Why?”

  “Because she’s part of the conspiracy. Now, sit down!”

  I saw Doctor Rhee on the opposite side of the room. She made a quick sit-down gesture, so I sat.

  Coordinator Layton was sitting on a high dais. Now he looked around at everybody else, all the people he’d appointed since taking over. “I think we can settle this matter quickly. Doctor Rhee has confirmed that turning off Kyle Martin’s implant has left him susceptible to audio-visual hallucinations and delusions.”

  He cleared his throat and put on his official voice. “It is the opinion of this hearing that while he was under the influence of his . . . his condition, his syndrome, and without the moderating influence of his implant, and consumed with grief for his older brother, Kyle Martin was able to convince his friends from the Cascade, especially Charles Dingillian, that his brother and others had survived the crash of the lifter, and they went looking for him in the lava tubes, where they were lost for several days. Even worse, when they returned, young Mister Martin was even able to convince Doctor Rhee that there was substance to his delusion.”

  He looked at me. “Kyle Martin, the purpose of this hearing is to determine your future here on Hella. I speak for all of us, not just the people here in the room, but everyone on Hella—we have great affection for you. We have great regard for the work you have done. But . . .” He took a breath before continuing. “But you have created an uproar. You have disturbed the stability of the colony. You have done great damage. Do you understand?”

  Don’t argue. Don’t say anything.

  Oh. That was interesting.

  I stayed silent.

  Coordinator Layton glared at me from the high desk. “Kyle Martin, do you understand what I am saying? Everything that has happened since your chip was turned off has been a hallucination. None of it was real.”