Dragon's Ark

by D Scott Johnson

  Humans didn’t believe this yet, because Watchtell single-handedly kept all but one of the oldest unduplicates out of the public’s eye. The one that got away was the oldest by far, the first of their kind. A wealthy web designer named Evan Stanley beat Watchtell in a bidding war and then gave her a job well suited for the most sophisticated AI in the world. It might’ve been the hardest job in the world.

  She supervised teenagers.

  Her name was Fee, and to meet her Zoe would have to visit the Resort, the world-famous teen hangout that Fee managed.

  It was harder than she expected. She wasn’t locked out or anything, it was just that every time Zoe initiated the connection an ice-cold lump started flopping around inside her. She needed to talk to Fee; there was no way around it. She reset the connection just before it completed. The human habit of freezing up in front of a celebrity made a lot more sense now. It didn’t make it any less ridiculous.

  Abort, retry.

  Fee was an unduplicate just like she was.

  Abort, retry.

  Fee downloaded memory segments just like Zoe did.

  Abort, retry.

  Her mind nested in a crystalline lattice filled with traced uncertainty, just like Zoe’s.

  Abort, retry.

  Humans always insisted on ridiculously literal interfaces like hands, buttons, and elevator doors. Her finger slipped off the abort button this time, and the door opened before she could jump out of the way.

  The noise slammed into her, sucking the air out of her chest. It wasn’t the Resort; it was the arena. Watchtell stood just over there. He’d ordered her family torn to shreds. Alpha had to sit beside him, and all Zoe could do was blow horns over the blood.

  Someone bumped behind her and the memory wavered. “Excuse me.”

  “Pardon.”

  “Sorry, excuse me.”

  People kept pushing past. “Hey, nice robes. Toga party’s not till next week.”

  The constant jostling brought her back to reality. Zoe’s avatar blocked half of the entrance.

  She stepped aside. The party in this lounge was going full swing. Beautiful human avatars in the latest fashions danced to a thudding beat on her right. Crowds flooded a stim bar on her left. The outfit Mike gave her stood out horribly, blending in about as well as a splat of pink paint on Head of a Woman.

  The last thing Zoe wanted to do was stand out in this crowd. An entirely new avatar would be too expensive and would take too long to adapt. Outfits, on the other hand, were a snap. She picked a skirt that reached just below her knees and a blouse with a floral print that changed every few minutes. Suitably attired, she waited for Fee to notice her. Zoe’s unique nature would be obvious to the entity that ran the entire realm.

  Yeah, that didn’t work. When she’d pleasantly fended off a third invitation to dance, she tried to find a secluded corner somewhere. It ended up being a bit of a challenge.

  She’d had her meltdown on a Saturday night when most of the world’s teens were on summer break. The place was crowded. When she checked it, the “Ask Aunt Fee” queue promised a wait time of fifteen minutes. All she got was a sub-construct when it was her turn, a copy as close to the original as a poster was to a Gauguin. This was not how she envisioned the night going.

  A boy with an enchantingly symmetrical face asked her to dance, and that was that. Dancing was a release, all movement and rhythm and thudding sound. She’d never experienced it as a fully-conscious entity before. The bliss kept going from one song to the next, one partner to the next, in a crazed frenzy she never wanted to end.

  The girls were every bit as much fun to dance with as the boys, in groups, singles, pairs, and every combination in between. When a new girl moved close there was a slight tickle at the back of her throat, easy to ignore as she concentrated on this new dancer’s deep, dark eyes. They enticed, and then suddenly flew wide as the tickle in Zoe’s throat turned into a full-bore avatar probe.

  A spasm shot through her and froze her avatar completely. Zoe blinked as the music snapped off, and the lights came up. The girl who was dancing with her was now a tall elegant woman with dark hair, those same dark eyes, wearing a flowing black dress that trailed fabric lined with silver.

  Fee.

  Every part of her was probed and recorded. She was absurdly relieved that the outfit was new and clean. As the microseconds passed Fee’s eyes grew wider still. Her head cocked to one side and a private channel opened. “Zeta?”

  “I’m called Zoe now, ma’am.” This was the oldest, most sophisticated unduplicate in history. Politeness came naturally.

  The probe went on long enough for the crowd to react to the silence and change in lighting. When Fee released her the realm returned to normal.

  “Please, this is not the place. Would you come with me?”

  A new address flashed into Zoe’s message queue and in an instant, they were both gone.

  The realm was spare, close, and private. The bare stone accented with red wood integrated magically with the forest just outside the windows. It was the most authentic version of Wright’s Fallingwater Zoe had ever seen, far more than what she’d trained with in her own simulations.

  The haptic fields, the mathematic routines and settings that defined exactly how real a realm could get, were turned up to their absolute maximum. If a human visited this realm, and then the actual house, they wouldn’t be able to pick out a single difference. It must’ve cost a fortune to build. The opportunity was so singular she tried to record every centimeter of the space.

  “Well,” Fee said as she walked around a corner, now wearing jeans and a button-down shirt. “To say your appearance is unexpected would be the understatement of the century. Please,” she gestured to a beautiful couch, “sit.”

  Zoe did so, puzzled but too overwhelmed to form any sort of coherent question about why they were still manifested.

  Fee smiled and laughed. “Habit, mostly.”

  Okay, that was scary.

  Fee shook her head. “No, I’m not copying out your thought buffers. I work with teenagers all day. Reading expressions is what I do.”

  “I need…I want…I have to…” The most important moment in her entire life and she’d been reduced to incoherent babbling. Focus, Zoe! “I need your help.”

  The smile turned sharp edged, and not exactly pretty. “I know, and I need yours. Please, tell me what Mike Sellars has been up to lately.”

  Chapter 6: Mike

  If someone had told Mike that Kim could be this nice, for this long, he would’ve laughed in their face. But it was real. She threw herself into arranging their trip but was never too busy to share a smile or a joke with him.

  Then the morning before their flight left, she broke her promise and fell back into her old habits. He’d made a careless glance, missed a phone call, said the wrong word, or whatever it was on the endless list of things that set her off, and now they were back where they were when Spencer arrived, right down to the location.

  They were at Dulles, and he was doomed to spend three weeks in China with a woman he should’ve known he couldn’t trust.

  But the harpy he lived with was the least of his worries. He reserved that for air travel itself.

  Spencer didn’t help by being so excited he couldn’t stand still. As they got to the security scanners, Mike was done with him. “You mean to tell me that you’re not a little nervous?”

  “Shit no, Mike. It’s air travel. Safest kind of travel there is.”

  What a delusional loon.

  “And we’re going first class thanks to you. Drinking age in China is eighteen; I checked.” He scratched the wisps of his attempted goatee. “I think I can pass – if they don’t card me, anyway.”

  Mike couldn’t stand the thought of realspace air travel. A modern airplane was so complicated no one person really knew how it worked. It was supposed to hurtle through the sky just barely below the speed of sound, fifteen miles straight up.

  He might as well juggle chain s
aws and swallow razor blades. Such great ideas! “Spencer, really, I don’t think I can do this.” He’d played with simulations; hell, he’d flown without an airplane around him, but only in a realm. In there, he didn’t need to worry about falling for more than sixty seconds to a splatterific end, or freeze-drying, or smothering, or any of the other wonderful ways he could die when it went wrong. It was worse than when he realized weather could kill him.

  He tried to explain in as detailed a way as possible why this was all a really bad idea, but Spencer was unimpressed. The people around them got sour expressions the longer Mike went on, so he finally shut up and walked quickly through the security scanner.

  “You forgot terrorists!” Zoe chimed cheerfully in his ear. “The AIs who run the scanners might be having a bad day, you never know.”

  When Zoe had heard about the trip, she'd gone from a surly AI teenager to the idea’s biggest fan, as long as she could come along. She couldn’t get behind the Great Firewall any easier than Mike, though, so she’d been forced to transfer herself into a travel matrix. It wasn’t much bigger than an old-fashioned laptop, and it easily fit in his luggage. It was also, unfortunately, still within wireless range somewhere in the baggage areas of the airport. Leaving the matrix powered up was turning out to be yet another in a long line of bad decisions.

  “Zoe, go to bed.”

  “What, and miss the latest episode of The Young and the Clueless? No way!”

  His life wasn’t a soap opera.

  Kim cleared the scanner in front of Tonya two lines over from him. As expected, the ice princess was doing whatever she could to deny Mike existed.

  Definitely not a soap opera. “Zoe, the batteries won’t last. If they shut you down externally, you’ll wake up with the mother of all hangovers.”

  “Oh, all right. I’ll make sure Spencer records it all. I swear, watching you two go at each other is more fun than—”

  He cut the channel.

  Spencer smirked at him. “Zoe giving you a hard time?”

  Mike took a deep breath and blew it out slowly. It didn’t help much. “Just make sure she goes to sleep before a baggage handler shuts her off, okay?” He couldn’t stop his hands from shaking, and the threads of his real self kept trembling off center.

  Tonya came up behind him on the AeroTrain to the terminal. “Mike?”

  Terminal was such a terrible name.

  Tonya leaned in close. “Are you gonna be all right?”

  “I don’t know.” He tried breathing the way Kim did when someone touched her accidentally. It didn’t work. “Too late to back out now, I guess.” He swallowed hard.

  “Why didn’t you say something? I could’ve brought a sedative.”

  Tonya was an RN at a nearby hospital, so she had the right kind of access. But there was a problem. “They don’t work for me.” The curse of a psyche split between realmspace and realspace was an apparent immunity to benzodiazepines. The more advanced realm-based technologies didn’t work either, for the same reason.

  Spencer rolled his eyes. “Those might not work, but I know what will. Follow me. And you’re buying.”

  Airlines want people sober and frightened so they can sell them booze with outrageous markups. Airports use booze with slightly less outrageous markups to get people nice and soused before they take off. That had to be the reason there were so many blind corners in airport bars. After the third vodka shot he’d stopped caring about that, or much anything else, except the broken promise. Kim and Tonya had gone to find magazines. At least that’s what Mike thought they’d said.

  “Really,” Spencer said. “She just woke up this morning and went off on you?”

  “The longer the day went on, the worse it got. No reason at all. Totally unfair, right?” Wait. Spencer wasn’t looking at him. He was looking at his shoulder. That was strange. “It was so great to be around her, and now—”

  He wasn’t staring at Mike’s shoulder. Spencer was staring behind his shoulder, the one next to the open end of the booth. Spencer faintly shook his head “no” at Mike.

  “And now she’s standing right behind me, isn’t she?”

  Score another one for Team Idiot!

  “I’ll go find Tonya.”

  “Yes, Spencer.” He knew that tone of voice. Ice and daggers. Flying and Kim’s temper. A great combination. “You go do that. She’s at the gate.”

  Mike had never seen him scramble away that fast before.

  Traitor.

  Kim sat down heavily, but she wasn’t glaring. It looked like she was trying not to cry. “You really don’t have any idea why I’m angry, do you?”

  The booze made it easy to tell her the truth. “No, Kim, I don’t. You woke up and fifteen minutes later it was like that promise of yours never existed.”

  “Never existed.” She nodded in a way that meant a flashover was coming, but then clenched her hands together. “Mike, what day is it?”

  He’d closed all his calendars last week in a vain attempt to deny his upcoming ordeal. When he opened the main one three windows popped into being: a reminder for a Warhawk staff meeting that’d happened yesterday, a note on when the taxi would pick them up today, and a reminder he’d set a little less than six months ago.

  Kim’s birthday.

  It felt like he was in a Warner Brother’s cartoon, the one where the main character’s head slowly turns into a donkey’s. “Oh, God, Kim, I am so sorry.”

  “It’s okay. I shouldn’t have frozen you out. I should’ve told you what was going on right from the start.” She shook, breathing like someone touched her. “What’s worse is it took Tonya to make me see that, and only just now.”

  The airport’s shared space pinged that their Air China sonic cruiser flight was about to board. It broke the spell, but Kim stayed calm. When she smiled it was hard to breathe for a second.

  “Think you can handle this?”

  He could hang on. He could. Mike spoke carefully so he wouldn’t squeak. “Do I have a choice?”

  The first-class seats gave Kim the space she needed to cope with the flight. A cloth scratched against his clenched fist as the plane yanked and banged at push back. It was a napkin; Kim must’ve smuggled it out of the bar.

  “It’s okay,” she said softly.

  It wasn’t, but it would be. After the debacle in the bar, Good Kim was magically resurrected. Maybe the trip wouldn’t be a nightmare from end to end. Maybe it would just be this takeoff. He gripped the end of the napkin tight, and they held it under tension as the plane thundered off into the night.

  Chapter 7: Tonya

  Traveling just below the speed of sound in an airplane that looked like it’d rolled straight out of Star Wars cut their flight time to Chengdu in half compared to a conventional airliner. It was still ten hours of monotony. Tonya watched as the courteous, neat flight attendants spoke lightly accented English and served enough alcohol to Spencer to send him to a happy, quiet place.

  At least, that’s what she figured had happened to her seat-mate. First class on a modern transonic airliner was wild. The screens and shields between the seats were good enough she could easily pretend she was the only person on this row. A girl could get used to this sort of thing.

  She nudged the soft lump in the carry-on bag underneath the seat in front of her another time. Tonya had her own reason for visiting China. It was time to honor a promise she’d made long, long ago.

  “Stop kissing it!” Walter said as she hit the punching bag hard enough that it made her knuckles flex under the impact. “Hit it harder!”

  Walter Sun had fished her out his own garbage truck one night. Tonya’d been fourteen years old. She’d known everything there was about living on the streets of Philadelphia, especially about the two skinny little weasels who promised her a month’s rent for an hour’s work. Then the biggest brother she’d ever seen walked out of an alley’s shadows with a chunk of rebar, and the weasels giggled and snorted when he set to work.

  Walter had no ti
me for memories or self-pity. “Harder!”

  “Damn you, old man.”

  On the airplane, years later, Tonya could still feel the sweat roll down the center of her back. She’d worked so much to meet his demands.

  “If I hit it harder I’ll break my hand.”

  “Then you’ll break it. You’ve healed from worse.”

  Tonya had just gotten the last of her dental implants not a week before. A full set of teeth to replace the ones knocked out, fake and pretty.

  The rage that crystalized scared her as she hit the bag with what felt like supernatural power. It blasted Walter off the back side of the bag and onto the floor. His head hit hard with a meaty thump.

  He bounced twice, and then was still.

  She rushed over to him. He couldn’t die now. She had so much to learn. It was an accident, and she was helpless. Breathing into his mouth did nothing. Pushing like they did in the movies did nothing. She doubled her hands together and hit him in the chest as hard as she could.

  He coughed twice, and then focused on her.

  “Well, if nothing else,, I know you can punch now.”

  Later, after the ER had wrapped his broken ribs, they sat outside yet another hole-in-the-wall Chinese restaurant.

  “You nearly killed me today.”

  Her chopsticks fell on the ground. Nothing she ever tried worked. This was someone who’d rescued her, who was still rescuing her.

  “Stop. It’s okay. I pushed you too hard, but you were amazing. You are amazing.”

  She blinked the tears away. “Thanks?”

  He nodded. “It wasn’t your fault.” Walter thumped his chest. “Bad heart. Weak. It’ll get me one day, but not this day. Eventually it’ll happen.” He reached out and grabbed her hand. “You’re to take me home when it does, okay?”

  And so here she was, on a plane to China, with a quart-sized bag of ashes where her makeup kit should’ve been. He’d died just after she graduated nursing school. Five years. Sometimes it felt like yesterday.