Dragon's Ark

by D Scott Johnson

  Oh no. Spencer was okay, but…

  “Ozzie’s dead.”

  It was a shock. They’d never been friends. Even after a few weeks together, she couldn’t claim to like the guy. But he deserved better. She reached up to her neck but her phone wasn’t there. “And Tonya?”

  “He doesn’t know.”

  No news was, well, no news. Tonya had to be okay. “How did we get out?”

  “We almost didn’t. I had to drag you out by your dress.” He held up a torn piece of red satin.

  Kim checked and, sure enough, the back of her dress flapped open now. Oh well. It wasn’t like it could get more ruined after the river muck.

  The soldier broke in. “Ma’am, if you could please walk higher up the bank? We’ve got a processing center set up. Just follow the flags; you’ll see them on the other side.”

  “Have there been any black people recovered?” It was China, after all. Tonya would stand out.

  “I haven’t seen any. They say the boat carried more than three thousand passengers. For what it’s worth, I think most of them survived. They’re scattered all up and down the river, though.”

  A man shouted commands at the soldier from the top of the bank.

  “If you’ll excuse me, I need to keep searching for survivors. Please, go to the flags, you’ll get more help there.”

  From the top of the bank she saw for miles across the flat river plain. Soldiers were unloading three gigantic helicopters in a field while mobs of soggy people surrounded tents near the flags.

  She leaned against a lone tree. Just staring at the crowd made her skin itch. “I can’t go down there.”

  Mike said, “I know. I’ll check it out.”

  She sat in the shade as he worked his way through the crowd.

  Twice. He’d managed to hold her twice now in realspace, and she couldn’t so much as touch his hand. The universe had been conspiring against her having any sort of love life for years; there was no reason to think it’d stop now. Blowing up an entire riverboat seemed a bit excessive, though.

  The recovery effort went on around her. Some families had happy reunions, while others sobbed over a blanket with feet sticking out from under it. The soldier was right. There were a lot more reunions than mourners, but the neat rows of blankets in the impromptu open-air morgue were still terrible to see. New helicopters brought in supplies and flew the injured out with clockwork efficiency.

  Mike returned with dry clothes and blankets. “They’re bringing trucks in soon to transport people who aren’t injured. There’s already a line of cabs waiting about a quarter mile away. And I’ve got great news. Spencer and Helen found Tonya.”

  Chapter 43: Tonya

  She startled awake.

  Great. She’d end up in the damned Pacific if she wasn’t careful. Stay alert, girl.

  Ironically, it was Cowboy Hat who saved her, although he’d never know it. The stern section went under a few seconds after water washed through the windows. A pair of feet swam by her in the drowning lights of the casino, and then a cowboy hat floated past. It snapped her out of her panic. If Cowboy Hat was getting out, she sure as hell would too. When she surfaced there was no sign of him at all.

  Tonya climbed onto a piece of paneling and collapsed. Her friends were in this mess somewhere, and she was helpless to find them. The only thing she could do was not drown.

  Dawn finally brought enough light for her to see. She used a chunk of debris as a makeshift paddle and headed to the nearest shore. A wooden dock stuck out from the reeds. It was so far away it looked more like a tongue depressor. Someone stood on the end, waving.

  Tonya checked behind her. Lots of debris, but no other people. The guy had to be waving at her. He was dressed like all the other farmers she’d encountered around here: jeans, sturdy tunic, and sandals. But there was something wrong with him. Just like with Mr. Pistol back in the camp, it was like he was in a fight with someone else inside his head. He walked in a tight circle and talked to himself in Chinese.

  It was almost enough to make her float on past, but then he said in clear English, “Thank God you didn’t drown this time.”

  Oh, great. The holy spirit was back. “This time?”

  “It’s complicated. Here, take my hand.”

  The twitching and arguing was gone. The man’s grip was strong, his hands rough. The impression up close was definitely all farmer, or maybe farmer’s son. She managed to jump across the gap without falling in or down.

  “Who are you?”

  “Come on, we have to run.” He dragged her down the dock before she’d found her balance.

  Helicopters thumped away in the distance.

  She yanked out of his grip. “I’m not going anywhere until you tell me who you are.”

  Unlike the last time, speaking English seemed to come easy. “I told you, it’s complicated. We have to get off this dock.”

  Tonya crossed her arms. This had to stop, and it might as well be now.

  His move was straight out of Walter’s playbook, a classic sweep-and-grab that had her over his shoulder in less than a second. She would’ve parried it easily if she’d seen it coming. Instead she spent precious seconds staring at a dirt path as he jogged down it.

  She tensed to hit him, but he saw that coming, too. He spun her off his shoulder and onto her rear end. He danced out of range before she could get up.

  “This is happening all at once. It’s very hard for me to perceive time as you do right now.” He grabbed her hand and yanked her to her feet. This time she ran with him. The helicopters were definitely getting closer.

  “Who’s me?”

  “I can’t be sure how much to tell you. It’s hard enough keeping you alive as it is. Do you know how many times you drowned on that damned boat?”

  It had been close but not that close. “None?”

  They ran further into the woods. “Correct. You succeed, but you also fail, many times, all at once. It’s very difficult to stay on the proper sequence.”

  He turned off the road that led away from the dock onto a narrow footpath that went deeper into the woods surrounding the river. Tonya swore as she got thwacked over and over by thin branches.

  “Will you at least tell me why we’re running?”

  “They’re tracking you. They’re tracking all of you. They were able to get at Ozzie’s access codes to activate the chips after he died. But the signal needs a clear line of sight to be detected at any real distance. They couldn’t get a basic fix until you were under an open sky.”

  She stopped running. “Ozzie’s dead? What about the others?”

  He turned around to face her. “Ozzie’s gone, but everyone else is okay. That really is all I can say right now. And I’m sorry about this next part.” He pulled out a pocket knife. “I don’t know how sterile this is.”

  You don’t stay friends with Kim without picking up a thing or two about spying. “Dermal tracker, right? Treat it like you’re shaving hair instead of making an incision. Where?”

  “Back of the neck, just below the hairline.”

  Men shouted in the distance now. Tonya turned and lifted her hair up. “Do it.”

  It burned, but nothing like an actual incision. She hissed in spite of herself, though. Something pulled out with a nasty rip.

  “Got it!”

  Tonya turned around. In his hand was a little bit of hair, a little bit of skin, and a white object a quarter of the size of a rice kernel on it. He wiped it all off on a tree trunk.

  They ran.

  “How much time does everyone else have?” Kim was at much greater risk than Tonya, even with Mike around.

  “You’re first because you’re furthest downstream. They have a little more time but not a lot.”

  A shout rang out in front of them and they stopped.

  The man cocked his head. “They’re in front and behind us now. You need to go that way.” He waved off to the side.

  “You’re not coming with me?”

 
“No. This solution still isn’t the best, but I’m exhausted and I don’t know how many others I can try. You’ll need this.” He fished out an old-style smartphone from his pocket. “You remember how to call Mike?”

  “He’s everywhere. I punch in all nines and he picks up.”

  “Helen’s the same way over here, except use eights. Chinese lucky number. Let them know about the chips, they’ll be fine after that.”

  He stepped back and breathed deeply. “Now, hit me.”

  “What?”

  “You need to bash this guy a good one. It’s a great distraction. They won’t believe it if I just walk out. He’s got a hard head, he’ll be fine.”

  Crazy, yes, but it at least made a little sense. He closed his eyes and she laid his ass out with a pair of kicks, one of which would give him a damned good shiner.

  Tonya leaned down. “Thank you.”

  Then she ran.

  All the men rushing around went right past her, concentrating on where she’d left him and wherever that tracking chip was. As soon as she was certain they were behind her, Tonya hit all eights and pressed connect on the phone.

  “Helen?”

  “Tonya?” was her startled reply.

  So far the holy-spirit–thing had been right every time, no matter how whack-a-doodle it seemed. Oh, who was she kidding? No matter how whack-a-doodle it was.

  But everyone was short on time. “This is gonna suck. You need to find a razor or a knife. We’re being tracked.”

  Chapter 44: Zoe

  There was nothing in the literature to indicate that China had figured out how to create unduplicates en masse. The idea that her kind had been commoditized, changed from a sculpture to a stamped tool, was startling to say the least. Human history was knee deep in the blood of people deemed expendable. She had no doubt any chance unduplicates might have at gaining some sort of rights would vanish if the bottom fell out of their value.

  Trying to get inside Fee’s head, to understand her obsession with going outside, had forced Zoe to concede Fee had a point. It had taken humans almost all of their history to admit other lives had value. Important, powerful men still seemed to believe they could achieve Utopia if they killed all the inconvenient people first.

  It meant getting humans to admit the value of another truly sentient form of life, one that they’d created—however inadvertently—themselves, would be a battle. Its length would be measured in centuries, if not millennia. Taking a shortcut and becoming something they already admitted had some rights was definitely appealing.

  But it was still insane. The emergence of a quantum lattice that acquired sophistication over time was what defined their existence. In important ways, it was very similar to what humans called growing up, and there was no way around it. Mike had proven her kind still possessed an essential mystery that could support biological life, but at the same time had proved that moving an unduplicate into a wetware brain would remove everything not fundamental.

  His Zen analogy that the true self was a mirror beneath the clouds of memory and emotion gave her a headache. She was her memories and emotions. Without them, there would be no point.

  It was arguing against these questions in a tea house realm that gave Zoe her first real lead for her virtual terra cotta warriors.

  Her opponent’s avatar was that of a Chinese sage, who also happened to be a humanoid tiger. Zoe’s avatar was that of a Greek scholar, the robes a comforting reminder of the days when all she'd had to worry about was keeping a lunatic happy with her art.

  His whiskers puffed forward, a sure sign she’d hooked him with her argument. “You honestly think it’s impossible to mass produce unduplicates?”

  “It’s in the nature of the AI lattice they use. They’re grown in a fashion that is similar enough to biological reproduction to prevent it.”

  “Humans reproduce very quickly when allowed. Or commanded.”

  Too obvious, but these were just the opening salvos. “You’re suggesting unduplicates can reproduce biologically, or crysta-logically, to be more precise. They can’t. They must be created by skilled artisans.”

  He smiled smugly. “How nice to be young and know everything. The latency of your connection suggests you’re local, but your attitudes are pure Western undergrad. Are you attending a Chinese university?”

  “Ad hominem and a genetic fallacy. Well done, sir. Why don’t you say something nasty about my mother?”

  “I’ll have you know that I…” He noticed the small crowd that had gathered around. A good flame war tended to do that. He switched to a private channel. “What if I were to prove it?”

  There was more than one way to catch a fish. “I told you, sir, you can’t. Unduplicates don’t work that way. Trust me, I know this.”

  “Arguing from authority? How trite. But alas, I must leave you now. Grownups have jobs and mortgages, things I’m sure you don’t have to worry about in your dorm room.” He vanished before she could flip him off.

  They became regulars after that. She’d make her arguments against the mass production of unduplicates as obnoxiously as she could, leaving obvious holes, daring him to exploit them. He’d fixate only on the paradoxes of her position, hinting with equal obnoxiousness at his secret knowledge.

  After a week of pummeling him unmercifully in a public forum—trolling for crazies was, after all, another kind of art—he’d finally had enough. “You’ll be around day after tomorrow, right?” he sent her privately.

  “I’m here every day.”

  “Good. My boss is going on a riverboat cruise; he’ll be completely out of contact the entire time. I’ll show you why you’re wrong.”

  “I can’t wait.”

  Fee wasn’t impressed. “He’s a troll, Zoe. He doesn’t know anything.”

  The hyper-realistic realm was silk against her avatar’s skin. So detailed. It became more and more of an effort to leave with each visit. “I think you’re wrong, Fee. He’s the only one who consistently argues with me. He’s seen the place; I just know it. I think he works for the guy who owns it.”

  “I have my own schedule. If there really are thousands of our kind out there enslaved, I want to know, but I’m not planning on being here all that much longer.”

  “What’s the rush?”

  Fee drew a screen into view showing a riverboat docked in some unknown city. “We need to make a course correction to ensure Mike arrives in the right place at the right time.”

  Fee’s mysterious benefactor was at work, again. “You say I can’t trust my source, but you think you can trust yours?”

  “I know I can, dear,” she said. “He’s the premier of China.”

  *

  Zoe would have to make the first meeting with her troll really count. It would be a challenge. His meeting realm was as big a cliché as he was. The place was dark, with monochrome yellowish streetlights barely lighting up a road that passed underneath a train trestle. Rain poured down so hard she didn’t see the car until it was nearly on her, a black 1965 Lincoln Continental.

  She climbed in. “So, do I call you Morpheus or Deckard?”

  This time he was a handsome Chinese in a chauffer’s uniform, only with an old-fashioned mask that covered half his face. “Names change, identities change, existences change.” The car drove through a realm exit and turned to an address that didn’t show up on any of Zoe’s directories.

  “That riverboat thing your boss had to do. You should call him. I’m pretty sure something bad is going to happen to it really soon.”

  His smile was six different kinds of messed up. “We can only hope.”

  He stopped the car in front of a rock cliff with a rusted set of double doors at its base. The otherwise flat-white sky and floor that surrounded it tempered the realism. Normally an unfinished realm like this would have her compulsively planning extensions, but not this time. The same chord that she heard coming from that silver construct bloomed as soon as she got out. She recognized it instantly and started recordin
g it. There was no way Fee could doubt her now.

  He paused at the door. “This is all top secret, you know. You can’t tell anyone about it.”

  “Absolutely.”

  The music reached a crescendo when he opened the door. Zoe walked through and there they were, row upon row of glowing unduplicates extending off into the distance in every direction she could see.

  “This is…this is spectacular.”

  The flat-white light behind her cut off when the door slammed shut. “Yes. Isn’t it just?”

  Gold light flared behind her.

  Zoe turned, and screamed.

  Chapter 45: Kim

  Everyone agreed it would be better if Spencer, Helen, and Tonya made their own way to New Shanghai.

  “It’ll make it a lot harder for them to take us out in one shot.”

  Spencer could be so subtle.

  She and Mike would be on a train for not quite three days. Which was fine. Kim had a very important project to finish. Everyone else would get in the way.

  It was better to grab food from the stations than to rely on the smoke-filled dining car. She had to watch Mike leave and wait for him to come back three times that first day. Even translating and chatting with him over the phone didn’t do much for her anxiety when he got out of sight. The silence in their cabin reminded her of the way his body had fallen off the gurney.

  Mike didn’t understand. When people were worried something wasn’t real, they touched it. Kim couldn’t do that. A part of her still jabbered on about how he was dead.

  The train helped. Traveling on rails was solid, fast, and safe. Someone else was driving, and they didn’t have to steer. There were other advantages. Every time Mike walked to the platform, it gave her another chance to work on the material of her party dress.

  She had never been able to touch someone for as long as she could remember. It was lonely and depressing, but Kim got to be a kind of superhero for her troubles. Back when she was the lead of Rage + The Machine, it was enough.

  Even when that part of her life ended, when she hid from the world, it didn’t matter. She’d been a realspace hermit all her life. Sealing herself off from the outside world was just a formality.