Red

by Ryan Rinsler

  “What thing?”

  “You. I don’t get how you can be so different to him.”

  “Connor!” came a shout from the doorway, interrupting them. It was Mana. “Come, there’s something I need you to see.”

  24

  “Watch your step.”

  Connor and Rachel followed Mana downstairs, deeper into the darkness. The dim, yellow wall lamps illuminated nothing but a few meters around them, and the steps were crooked and uneven, the edges rounded to the point of being dangerous. Kyle’s injured knee was becoming more apparent with each footfall, and the air was growing cooler the deeper they descended. Seeing he was in pain Rachel took his arm and helped him down the last of the steps, and once they reached the bottom Mana turned to him.

  “This is going to be difficult for you,” he said. “But you need to know this. This is our world and you’re a part of that now.”

  He unlocked a heavy-looking metal door and pushed it open, stepping into the darkness. Connor looked at Rachel, who beckoned for him to follow. As he stepped in a strip light flickered into life, revealing a laboratory of sorts, with stainless steel tables and beds filling the room. It smelled medicinal, that odor of disinfectant he remembered from being in hospital as a child.

  Rachel walked over to a closed door and began unlocking it as Mana took a seat on a nearby stool. He pulled one out for Connor and patted it.

  “What’s going on?” he asked as he sat down. “Is this my training?”

  “This is really the beginning for you now,” said Mana. “This is where everything starts. All the things before this, everything you’ve been doing so far was to get you to this point. Don’t think of this as training. Maybe what you’ll do with Ruby could be considered that, but now, what we’re going to be doing over the next few days, think of it more as a journey of discovery.”

  Connor puffed out his cheeks and rubbed the top of his thighs. His adrenaline was kicking in. “I’m not sure I want to!” he said with a nervous laugh.

  Rachel unlatched the door and disappeared behind it, and after a few seconds reemerged. Her arm was extended, as though she were guiding something, and then that thing emerged. It wasn’t a thing — it was a man.

  He was gaunt, vacant, malnourished, almost… dead. He was walking under his own steam, with Rachel’s guidance, slowly and deliberately toward them. His feet shuffled awkwardly as he stepped, left… right… left… each foot landing flat and hard. His skin was pale, almost grey, his eyes dark and hair long and unkempt.

  “Ruby gave me an idea of how much you’d been exposed to during your last visit,” said Mana.

  Connor looked at him nervously. “Is, um…”

  “You’ve seen this before, yes?”

  “Yeah, in the school.”

  “They call them Defective Complyers. We call them duds.”

  “Are they… zombies?”

  Rachel chuckled as she sat down. “No,” she said wistfully, her head on one side, looking at the man’s face. “They’re still alive.”

  “If you can call it that,” said Mana. “I’ll let Rachel explain, but what you’re looking at now explains nearly everything you need to know about what is going on here.”

  “Do you remember last time you were here, I spoke to you about Silk Corporation’s NanoTech division?” asked Rachel.

  “Yeah, the microscopic robots.”

  “That’s right, well, nanoscopic, actually,” she said. “They’re what govern this world now.”

  Connor glanced at Mana then back to Rachel. “Robots?”

  “The first time you were here you were apprehended by Scouts, yes?”

  He nodded.

  “And they hit you with something which made it impossible for you to move, right?”

  “Yeah, not only that but they could move me. I swear they were doing it with their BlackBooks as well,” he said with a nervous laugh.

  “They were.”

  Connor blinked. “What?”

  “What you were hit with was a dose of SCRB52s,” she said. “Restraint bots. They hit you in your spine and these restraint bots penetrate your nervous system and allow them to control pretty much whatever they want.”

  “Is that what happened to this guy?”

  “No.”

  “Oh.”

  “What we know about their Pacification Program is that they rolled it out on almost a global scale and it was effective within about thirty-six hours of them announcing it. Ninety-nine point, um, nine, nine… six percent of the population were affected. About 9.6 billion.”

  “Nine billion?”

  “Much of the undeveloped world was unaffected. They’ve since rectified that.”

  “What do you mean by ‘affected’”?

  “Ruby said you’d run into a complyer before getting taken in, is that right?”

  “I’m, um, not sure.”

  “We call them Slaves. The woman you knocked out in the street, you remember?”

  “Oh yeah, not one I’m proud of, but she was going to call the cops.”

  Rachel smiled. “You did the right thing,” she said. “The cops she was going to call were actually Silk Scouts. They’re the cops now. Unfortunately you got taken in anyway, but luckily Ruby managed to get you out of there.”

  “So what was her deal? I mean, what’s a Slave?”

  “A Slave is their design. The end product.” She looked at Mana. “We’re the opposite of them.”

  “So it’s someone under control by Silk Corporation?”

  “Exactly,” said Mana. “At the time of the coup most people became instantly docile. The few of us that were unaffected grouped together, and day by day that group got bigger. Once they found out that there were some of us that were immune to their program, we became their enemy.”

  “So when I was being examined, they said I, well, Kyle, had immunity. So that’s what that is? I’m immune from these NanoBots that they use to control people?”

  “Yes, that’s right,” said Rachel. “We don’t know enough about their technology to find out why that is — why some are immune — but what we do know is that our immune system is constantly having to work to fight these things off.”

  “What, all the time?”

  “We all take medication to lessen the symptoms,” said Mana. “It’s been the same since the beginning. We’re immune but it’s draining on the body. After too long you start to become susceptible to other diseases.”

  “Because your immune system is working so hard?”

  “Yes,” said Rachel. “When you were hit with the restraint bots, what did you feel as time went on?”

  “I remember my fingers itching,” said Connor.

  “That was the effect of the restraint bots wearing off. You were basically getting your feeling back. Anything else?”

  “Erm, I started to feel like I was getting a cold.”

  Rachel nodded. “That’s the one. Flu symptoms are a side effect of your immune system battling against the NanoBots that are circling your bloodstream and trying to hijack your nervous system. It takes a few hours for you to work them out of your system but eventually you do. They can only hit you with the same bots a few times before they become virtually ineffective.”

  Connor rubbed his eyes. “So I’ve got NanoBots in me now? Well, Kyle.”

  “Traces, yes. His immune system gets rid of most of them.”

  “And where do they go?”

  “We don’t really know, but expect you’ll breathe them out or eject them when you go to the toilet.”

  “It’s important to remember,” said Mana, “that we’re only immune to the general wave of bots they use across their initial wave of the program.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means,” said Rachel, “that if they get their hands on any one of us they can sample our DNA and generate the bots based on that. This way our body doesn’t reject them as it assumes the NanoBots are part of us.”

  Connor let out a short, heavy si
gh. “So what about this guy?” he asked, pointing to the man still stood two meters away from him.

  “This guy, well, he’s not immune but he’s not under their control either. Whatever happened to these people when the takeover kicked in just seemed to… brick them.”

  “Brick them?”

  “We call them ‘duds’,” said Mana, “because that’s exactly what they became. Something just didn’t work properly and now this is what they are, just empty shells, unable to make their own decisions or function properly.”

  “They still have their reflex actions,” said Rachel, “but any cognitive function beyond breathing and swallowing is pretty much non-existent.”

  “How many of them are there?”

  “We only know about the ones we find around here,” said Mana. “We haven’t seen any new ones for months, so a handful, maybe twenty. You get to know them.”

  “Do they move?”

  “Occasionally. They just kind of walk around like zombies in old comic books.”

  “And how do they stay alive?”

  “We’re not quite sure,” said Rachel. “That’s why he’s here.”

  “You’re doing tests?”

  “It’s the only way. We think maybe the NanoBots take some of the load off the organs, meaning they need less nutrition to stay alive. How they stay alive for years on end though we don’t know. This guy has been like this since we got him down here. Maybe two years or more.”

  “Do you feed him?”

  “It’s best we don’t,” she replied. “As soon as we do that we’re nullifying the test.”

  Connor looked at the man. His eyes were vacant, like someone with the world on their shoulders, doing the thousand-yard-stare on the subway. This was a man who once had a life. It was someone who had hopes and dreams, aspirations, which were one day been switched off, powered down like a laptop, everything still existing but at the same time disappearing from view.

  “Can they come back?”

  “We hope so,” said Mana. “They don’t do anything with them, so when we can we go out and bring them here.”

  “There are more here?”

  “Oh yes, we have sixteen in total,” he said. “We keep them here so that they’re safe and monitored. We provide nutrition to the others in the hope that one day we can undo what those criminals have done to them.”

  Connor immediately felt awkward. He felt his cheeks warm with embarrassment as he tried to think of something to say.

  Mana flinched when he saw this. “We don’t put you in that bracket, Connor,” he said, placing his fingertips on his arm. “I’ve said before, you’re not him, and you never will be.”

  Connor inhaled deeply and nodded.

  “But what you do bring is the power to think like him, which surely gives us an edge.”

  Connor looked at the man once more. “So what now? For these guys.”

  “We keep them alive,” said Rachel, “and once we have the facility to do so we’ll find out how to fix them. At the moment we don’t have access to a nanoscope, nor do we have the expertise to know what we’re looking at.”

  Connor was surprised. Their lack of knowledge of what was going on in their world was unexpected. He’d imagined they would know the entirety of how Silk is controlling these people, and how to fix it, yet apparently they had no idea. His surprise must have been showing on his face, as Mana began to explain why this was.

  “What you must understand, Connor, is that the access we have to people in the field of NanoTech is virtually zero. There are fifty-six of us here, none of whom are experts in technology, nor do they have any experience in what it is we’re fighting against. Even if they had they’d have no equipment, and aside from just trying to find sources of food and luxuries like, I don’t know, a bottle of shampoo, these people are constantly having to try to stay alive. They live down here. They sleep, eat and socialize down here. When they go out they’re under the cover of darkness and have to keep to the shadows, disabling cameras wherever they go and ducking out of the way of any signs of life.

  “Everything they had, anyone they knew and loved has gone. Everyone they ever met has become somebody else. If I met my wife now, there’d be no hug or kiss on the cheek. She’d sell me out without even thinking about it, without being able to think about it, and I’d be taken in and made into a Slave like her. Not only that, but they could extract all the information from my mind they needed to take us down completely.

  “The only thing we are capable of right now, is staying alive.” He paused, visibly distressed. “Even that isn’t going too well,” he said, choking up as he said it, his eyes becoming bloodshot and flooded. “Our family’s seen sixteen lost in the last two weeks. It’s getting harder out there. Every day is harder. Every time one of our family doesn’t come back from a patrol, we become weaker and they become stronger.”

  Connor stared at nothing as silence crept in. Mana was visibly upset, and to see a man of his size and apparent mental strength reduced to tears made it even more visceral for him. Rachel placed her hand on his knee to comfort him, and shared a soft smile with Connor.

  “We’ll do this, Mana,” said Connor. “I’m starting to get an idea.”

  25

  It was dark. And cold.

  Stanley had no idea how long he’d been in the bunker, but a long time had passed. He lay on the uncomfortable mattress, staring into nothing. He was a strange mix of both bored and nervous, being unsettled yet with nothing to do except pace and fidget. He slept most of the time, just to kill as many hours as possible, and all the while he was there he heard nothing, not even the slightest sound from upstairs. Ella had dropped in just once to let him know his family was safe, and that help was coming. She brought him some more replicator juice, but with the outdated portable Replicator she had provided having limited options, he was starting to get a little tired of meatless stews and curries.

  Upon her last visit Ella had also brought with her news that Connor had been successfully targeted and, when the time was right, he would hopefully be sent back to Pure Reality where somebody on the inside could get him in front of Mana, and into the world in which he needed to see.

  Quite how this would be done, Connor being sent back into Pure Reality and then placed in Red Oscar, Mana’s universe, Stanley wasn’t sure. Ella didn’t have any answers on either subject, and with Stanley being one of the only technicians in the resistance who was responsible for the Pure Reality insertions, the question of who was actually going to push the button was also a mystery. Ella was the most likely candidate, but how she’d accomplish this with it not being in her job role he could only wonder. Lisa may also have been an option, but entrusting this task to an intern was not ideal.

  What was also on Stanley’s mind was the time it was taking to get him off the Silk Corporation compound. He was sure it had been at least two weeks, judging by the number of meals he’d had. The battery on any electronic device he’d had on his person had run out long ago, so everything was guesswork from thereon in. He was expecting to have been extracted by now. The resistance take the wellbeing of their members extremely seriously, and rightly so — they risk their lives on a daily basis, and they are few and far between. The members in key positions within the Silk Corporation enterprise were guarded beyond all measure, and it was clear there had simply been no window in which Stanley could be taken out of there safely.

  The lamp had started to flicker. It was an old-looking thing, with a small glass strip bulb which was yellowing at both ends. Stanley had started to turn it off for long intervals, just to escape the incessant flashing, which couldn’t be done even by closing his eyes. The darkness, however, was even worse.

  I’ve got to get out of here.

  He flicked on the lamp and pulled on his trousers, followed quickly by his shoes, and then his shirt. He’d been semi-naked for the duration of his time there — with not having a change of clothes he wanted to keep them as fresh as possible for his extraction, whene
ver that may come. He climbed the ladder carefully and quietly, and pushed open the trapdoor. It stopped virtually immediately with a thud.

  The sofa.

  The gap was just enough for him to slide his arm through, which he did, groping around for anything attached to the underside of the sofa. His hand tapped against a leg, which he pushed and pulled as hard as he could with little success. After nearly slipping from the ladder he paused. He descended and grabbed an empty wooden box, about the size of a shoebox, and returned to the top of the ladder. He pushed open the trapdoor and wedged the box underneath, freeing his other hand. Pushing his chest onto the side of the shaft, he pulled the leg with both hands until it started to move, and with ten second breaks in between attempts, he eventually jolted the sofa out of the way of the trapdoor.

  He pushed it open and took a deep breath of the fresh air, closing his eyes and reaching his nose upward as he did. The white light of the overcast day peering through the windows made him squint, but that did not deter him from climbing out of the bunker and heading straight to the window, where he opened it slightly, taking huge gulps of fresh air. He didn’t realize quite how stuffy it was down in the bunker until the crispness of the air upstairs hit his lungs. Now he couldn’t get enough of it.

  He stood there, gasping at the air, drawing it in through his nose loudly, while ducking out of view at any sight of a car or passerby. After a while he picked up a dusty brochure of Silk Corporation and sat on the sofa, flicking through it quickly.

  He looked up, noticing sound coming from the coffee shop in the next room. It was just the norm, like chit-chat and the quiet dragging of chairs, but sound nonetheless. He walked over to the door and checked it was secure, before lifting a nearby cupboard and, being careful not to make any sound, placed it in front of the door.

  He plonked himself down on the sofa again.

  Why didn’t I come up here before? he wondered, brushing a little dry dirt from the cushion. There was nothing else of interest in the large, old room, but it was bright and airy, and a welcome change from the damp, claustrophobic tomb he’d been in for goodness knows how many days.