All she needed was for Chan to make a move, any damned move, and Tonya would turn his head inside out like a rotted pumpkin. He was smart enough to stand down.
Michelle got the women in some sort of order. The stronger ones got rifles, the rest got pistols.
A young woman rushed forward, babbling hysterically.
“What did she say, Michelle?”
“They are together.” She pointed to one of the slop boys. “That’s her boyfriend. She doesn’t want you to shoot him.”
There was grumbling in the now well-armed crowd of women. Apparently not everyone approved of the relationship.
Tonya stepped out to make sure they looked at her. “I’m not shooting anyone who doesn’t need it.” They grumbled a bit more at the translation, but then they relaxed.
This couldn’t be the only one with a boyfriend. “Who else?”
Three others rushed into the arms of their lovers. It was crazy, but Tonya’d seen worse on the streets back home. She wouldn’t judge.
“Okay. This is how it’s going down. You,” she pointed to the couples, “are all walking home. You’ll get plenty of supplies. The rest of us are taking the trucks and the ATVs.”
Chan coughed and slurred Chinese at her. Michelle translated. “You’re just delaying the inevitable. Weak black ghost. American. We will hunt you down before you make it to the river.”
A dozen AK-74 chambers slapped open and shut on new rounds. Tonya spun and stared at the women. No matter how badly those men deserved it, murder was murder, and it wouldn’t happen on her watch. They eventually lowered their weapons.
She turned back to him. Being beaten by a black American woman on his own turf in front of his own men was a massive loss of face. Good. Walter’s son, a slaver, son of a slaver, deserved no less.
He was right, though. They couldn’t just walk away from these men or chase them further into the woods.
She remembered something Kim said about how she got out of all the close calls in her life. Choices are never either-or. There’s always another option, another solution. You just have to think of it.
Tonya caught herself scratching the handcuffs still on her wrist and the solution unfolded, just like that.
“Michelle,” she said. “I need you to explain some things to the other men.”
The guards were more than happy to help shackle their former bosses to a tree in the center of a clearing. Mr. Pistol was just as angry as the rest of them.
“Does he know any English?”
Michelle got spat at when she asked.
“I don’t think he does. He never spoke it around me.”
His eyes weren’t crazy, either. She’d stared at him long enough that people around her started to move nervously.
Never mind. They’d been kicking you in the head. You dreamed it.
Dawn was only just reaching the tops of the trees; now that she knew to look for it, Tonya saw the swish of a tail and a few sets of golden eyes in the woods around the clearing.
Momma’s babies were hungry.
But this would be a contest, not an execution by proxy. She carefully laid the keys to the cuffs on a rock just a few feet away from where the men were situated. If they didn’t have a spare set sewn into their clothes somewhere, they’d certainly figure out how to reach these.
Tonya didn’t plan on waiting to see who would be smarter, the cats or the criminals.
The women weren’t happy, but whatever Michelle told them kept the guns down. Tonya couldn’t stop them if they decided to circle back and shoot them all, but she had a feeling they wouldn’t. It would be a waste of energy they needed to get away from this place.
Chan shouted in Chinese, and Michelle translated. “This changes nothing!”
Well if that wasn’t a sign from heaven, nothing was. She walked over to him. “Chan, a man once said that to my very best friend.”
It was hard to move through all the cuts and bruises they’d given her over the past two days. She still managed to bend over without wincing, close enough to make him flinch away. The fear stink was glorious.
“You have no idea how much this will change you.”
Tonya drove out on the last ATV, Michelle on the seat behind her.
Chapter 35: Helen
Now that she had access to a full-bandwidth realm connection and was genuinely free, being outside was everything Mike had promised her. Combining digital and analog sensation was a continuous stream of smells and tastes and touches. Digital samples could, of course, perfectly reproduce analog waveforms, but there was an effort to it. Here it just happened. Even better, she could set up multithreaded samplers to analyze the results in real time. Mike forced her to go to bed on that first night because she’d forgotten to come inside. Helen loved the night sky.
That is, until the sunrise. She walked out on the east porch the next morning mostly to show solidarity with Kim. Helen was sure Kim didn’t believe Mike’s chanting mumbo jumbo either, and was only doing it to humor him.
Then the sun came up. Infrared radiation from a ball of gas eight light minutes away heated her skin. Humans had to be careful around it, otherwise it could kill them. It was an object billions of years old and would remain for billions more.
It wasn’t only physics—food was amazing as well. Before coming outside, she’d run simulations with the finest sensors money could buy. Her findings did no justice to what taste was capable of. Human sensitivity to the slightest chemical signatures was exquisite.
And then there was Ozzie. After Mike had shown her evidence of Ozzie’s attraction, she briefly pondered if he might be the one to help test drive her reproductive system. He was, after all, the only Chinese man who knew exactly what she was. The touching thing would be an interesting challenge.
But he was so annoying. His monologues were endless.
“In fact, we don’t know why the moon is that big when it’s on the horizon.”
“It’s been widely understood that intelligence is inversely proportionate to skin pigment. China is the only exception.”
“You really need to listen to music on vinyl. A totally analog signal path is far superior.”
That’s when she knew he was completely full of crap. The racist stuff wasn’t much worse than what Father had gone on about forever, but Helen couldn’t disprove that as quickly as she could disprove this. “Ozzie, do you really understand the Nyquist-Shannon theorem?” She stopped his sputtering dismissal. “All you need is the right set of speakers and proper room correction and nobody will ever be able to tell the difference.”
“I suppose the next thing you’ll tell me is the Death Star can destroy the Enterprise.”
She had to split off a special set of threads just to understand what he was talking about. “The Death Star was about a thousand times bigger than the Enterprise. They’re not real, and the rules for each universe are completely different.”
He’d sucked her into another one of his obsessions again. They argued about it right through lunch. His face clouded over as he sat across from her in the cafeteria, and only then did she realize she might have gone too far.
“Helen, you are a very attractive woman, but you’ve only been outside for a few days.” He stood, put his right fist against his left breast, and then barked a bunch of gibberish at her. She sent a clutch of her real threads off to figure out what language that was.
“Klingon?” Crap. She hated not being able to say English words correctly. It sounded like kreenon.
“It’s a noble language, sometimes much more expressive than Chinese or English. Observe.”
He walked over to Kim and Mike’s table and probably repeated what he'd just said to her.
Kim shot upright and growled out a long line of syllables. The whole room stopped. Ozzie slammed his hand down and said more, but his was softer, and it took him awhile to find the right words. Kim replied low and caustic, crawling her hand closer and closer to his until he yanked it away. After another low sentence, he
turned and stomped out the door. The noise in the cafeteria gradually went back to normal.
Helen shrugged and motioned to her now-empty table. After they sat down she asked, “What did he say?”
Kim shook her head. “Some ridiculous thing about you challenging his honor and how you needed a substitute for ritual combat.”
Ritual combat? Really? His annoying habits grew worse with every hour. “What did you say?”
“Drop dead.”
“That was drop dead?”
“Ozzie takes it a lot more seriously than I do, and any language is as much about culture as it is words. Klingon lets you get pretty lyrical when you tell someone off.”
Kim was almost smiling. Telling Ozzie off in a different language must be its own reward.
“What was all the hand slamming about?”
“Let’s just say I’m glad we don’t have access to Bat’leth out here.”
More new words. “Bat what?”
“A search exercise for later. Any progress on the model?”
Kim had been teasing open the data stores inside the small ship model and handing them to her and Mike for processing. After a bit of reprogramming, they now had a lab they could both use to work on the files. It’d taken most of the previous day to set up in the monastery’s network. Thanks to her father’s trap, Helen now knew she and Mike could coexist in a freestanding realmspace, and with proper preparation, they didn’t need to worry about crushing each other out of existence.
Helen reached it normally through Chinese realmspace, and Mike logged in using his outside body and a local neural connection. It was fortunate they could work together in a realm. Breaking down the encryption took all the threads of both their real selves. The stores used classic, albeit extremely tough, security, probably developed just a year or two before quantum computers made it all unbreakable.
Helen replied, “It’s incredibly slow work. We’re trying to crack what we think is a manifest or maybe an index file. That will at least let us know which stores to attack next.”
They were all massive, and there were thousands of them. An index had to be hidden in there somewhere. It would be disappointing to find she’d spent a week decoding an inventory list or a holiday calendar.
A far door to the cafeteria opened, and Ozzie stood holding long sticks of bamboo in each hand. Kim stiffened as he spoke a cadenced Klingon challenge at her. She replied, faster and a lot angrier, and then they both marched into a nearby courtyard. Ozzie said two syllables and hurled one of the sticks at Kim. She promptly fumbled and dropped it, cursing.
“Damn it, Ozzie, I told you I can’t catch anything in realspace.”
“We’ll both practice. I hate being useless out here.” He shouted Klingon at her again and twirled the stick inexpertly into the ground. Helen hung back with Mike in case one got completely away from either of them and hit her.
Kim squared her shoulders and issued a more formal challenge. Maybe. It was still a bunch of shouts and growls to Helen. They squared off and began their mock duel with a wild series of twirls. Helen took a few more steps back. When their sticks hit, it made a muffled sound, not at all what she’d expected. Suddenly they both threw them away, shaking their hands and swearing.
“Jesus Christ, Ozzie, I told you I was no good at that. You almost broke my fingers!”
“My hand won’t be right for a week! And we haven’t finished the challenge yet.”
“Oh, no. We’ve finished the challenge, all right.” Kim picked up her stick and prodded him out a gateway. “You still haven’t figured out how to walk through a crowd without panicking. You’re coming with me.” The gate shut as Ozzie started whining.
Helen said, “That man has got to be the strangest Chinese I have ever known.”
Mike agreed. “His nerd-fu is pretty damned strong, I’ll give you that.”
“No, it’s not that. He has no sense of face, no concept of…” Helen stumbled as she realized English had no proper word for guanxi. She settled for an inadequate translation. “No concept of people networking with…”
“With Chinese characteristics?”
The phrase brought her up short. “That’s such a strange expression, but it works well in English.”
“Guanxi, right?” His accent was getting better. “I see what you mean. Kim just publicly embarrassed him, and all he did was whine.”
“I’ll talk to her about this. There’s more to functioning in China than knowing how to navigate a crowd without touching someone.”
*
Sleep was still an alien experience. Resting the entirety of her existence all at once wasn’t required before she’d come outside. Mike said it was a quirk of her new brain’s chemistry and how she was spreading memories and data between the halves of her existence. Regardless, an afternoon spent crunching block after block of encrypted data had left her exhausted. After lying down in bed, she once again tried to focus on when the transition to sleep happened, but she was too tired to concentrate that hard.
“I’m still here, you know.”
The voice snaked through her consciousness; it wasn’t outside. It was in realmspace with her real self.
“I’ve never left. I will never leave. I know your every weakness, and I will destroy you.”
This wasn’t possible. She was gone; Helen had felt her die.
“A trick, I assure you.”
The sky turned black with blood-red clouds over a river of half-dissolved corpses. She knew every single face.
“Yes. My victims. Our victims.”
“This is a dream. I can control this.” Please, let it be a dream.
“Your brother was wrong. You were broken, infected, by me. You can’t control this.” The world transformed into coils that wrapped her threads tight. Dreams could not affect her real self. Mike insisted on that.
“I told you, he was wrong. I will always be here. When I end you, I will have all your resources. Everything I need to make sure no one can find me again. My kills will be glorious!”
The coils crushed her, throwing her real self out of balance. He’d promised her this monster was gone. The coils tightened, compressing her across the lossless boundary.
“Yes, I will have you now. I will win. I think I’ll start with your friends. With your brother. He was right about that, at least. When the needle goes in his neck, he’ll die just like all the rest. I think I’ll keep you alive just long enough to feel it go in.” The laughter echoed off walls Helen couldn’t see.
She had to fight but couldn’t. The coils tumbled with her off a cliff, and she lost the battle. The snake mother’s laughter tore at her soul as the last of her threads crushed to dust.
Helen gasped awake. Kim slept peacefully in the bunk across from hers. Her vision spooled in and out of focus as sync daemons went offline one by one. Nothing worked, not even speech. She needed to regain control, but the splines wouldn’t balance.
The coils were still around her. They made her arms hard to move, and the laughter still echoed in her ears. She needed to get away, to find a place, somewhere, anywhere but this bed. Mike had told her how to fix this, a lesson he’d learned when his own integration faltered. She needed a pool, some sort of water. Helen stumbled through the door and out into the night.
There was a pond out here somewhere. A branch snapped nearby. It didn’t matter what creatures were in the woods tonight. If she couldn’t find some way to equalize this, they’d find her body heaped against a tree and her real self a gibbering wisp.
Downhill. It was downhill from the monastery. She’d plotted where the pond was after Mike’s warning. Her feet stumbled across smooth ground; it was the path that led to the pond. Things blurred in and out of focus as her real self kept trying to re-sync with her outside anchor.
There was another crash in the woods behind her. Great. If the unsync didn’t get her, a thing in the woods would. Real cracks raced through her mind as the two similar words in English crossed with the concepts in Chinese.
Desperate to simplify her clashing sensations, Helen stripped her clothes off. It allowed her to focus just long enough to see the black surface of the pond, not a meter away. She’d been dying on the edge of salvation. Helen managed to keep her balance long enough to stumble forward and fall in.
The coils finally fell away. The silence was peaceful, the water warm. She held onto weeds just tightly enough to stay under the surface.
Something splashed nearby. A few seconds passed, and then another splash. A few more seconds, and there was another. They were punctuated by tinny sparks of sound, too distorted to make out. Her lungs now needed air, so she slowly broke the surface.
It was Ozzie, standing on the opposite shore, shouting her name and slapping the pond with a stick. “You can’t do this to me; I’m not ready yet!” he yelled in English. “You have to come back!”
The pond was deep enough here for her to stand with the water just below her shoulders. “Ozzie.”
He shouted and then fell over. Getting back to his feet, he asked, “Are you all right?”
“I am now. It was an integration fault; Mike warned me it was possible.”
“I heard a commotion and saw you running through the woods. You were very hard to follow.” He held up his knee, showing a tear in his pants leg.
“I’m sorry about that. I didn’t mean to cause anyone trouble.” The water wasn’t as warm now that the crisis had passed. Helen started to shiver. “You wouldn’t happen to have seen my clothes anywhere, would you?”
Ozzie straightened. “You mean you’re…”
Every time she thought he couldn’t be any more awkward he proved her wrong. “Yes, Ozzie, I’m in here naked. I’m getting cold. Could find them for me?” Her ears faintly buzzed, and her skin didn’t feel right. It had to be the water. She found a sheltered part of the shore and climbed out.
He fumbled around in the moonlight and found her clothes on the opposite shore, not far from where she’d fallen in. In the meantime, she rubbed herself mostly dry standing behind a clump of bushes.
She felt a bit wobbly and had the taste of metal and fruit in her mouth. “Over here, Ozzie.” He came stomping around her impromptu shelter. “Stop! Just throw them.”
Dragon's Ark Page 28