by Russ Linton
A deep rumble stampedes down the cavern walls, causing the catwalk to sway. Martin grabs the handrail and crouches as Eric plasters himself to the cavern wall by the door. Hurricane barely moves, keeping his eyes on me in a steady stare. Perhaps a search for doubt, fear, I don’t know, but when he fails to find it, his nostrils flare and he flashes fierce eyes.
“Just a little earth-shakin’, yeah? Could be Fat Boy if he’s still around,” Hurricane hobbles toward me. “What’s the plan, boss?”
Second time today I’ve had to field that question and I actually have an answer. Turning, I stare up at Charlotte. I follow the tubes under the glass until I see one that travels up to the neural cage on her skull. “I’m going to have to set up a meeting. Martin, what can you tell me about some of these readings?” I point toward one of the small screens on the cylinder’s base.
Martin finishes crossing the catwalk and squats next to the screen. “Vitals. Pulse is bradycardic, but decent. BP low.” Hesitantly, he reaches up and taps the screen, cycling through several menus. He stands and strains to examine the girl. Unsatisfied, he climbs onto the lip of the base and leans against the glass. He shakes his head slowly as he scans the motionless figure head to toe. “My God, what did they do to this girl?” His eyes linger on the scar-braided skin of her skull before he hops down to the catwalk. “She’s in a coma, I think, but there is some bizarre brain activity I don’t understand.”
“Is there a log? What about, say, two hours ago? Before I got trapped in that room with you?” I ask.
Martin scrolls through the menus. “Actually, yes.” He makes eye contact, a pensive expression on his face. “Brain dead.”
“Now we’re getting somewhere,” I say.
His eyes go back to Charlotte. “The hoses, must feed into that hardware on her head. This system indicates some serious chemicals getting passed around, too. We might be able to revive her, but I’m not sure.”
“No. I need her to keep ignoring us. I’ve got a different idea,” I say.
“Any chance this idea involves me gettin’ into the action?” Hurricane claps his hands together, palms blurring at the last second, and the sound echoes through the cavern.
“Um, sure,” I say. “First, I need you to bring me the Battle Armor’s head.”
“You mean break that shiny suit out there? That could come in handy in a fight.”
“Yes, it does. But there’s one way to end this and more fighting isn’t it.” Hurricane’s shoulders slump as I continue, “I left it wide open, so your level of friction and should be able to wrench it free. A bundle of wire runs along the back seam. Try to keep most of that intact.”
Hurricane nods and the walkway rattles as he disappears.
“Eric, ready to party?”
“Not really,” he shouts from the walkway.
“Too bad. Come here, I need you to send out the invitations.”
Chapter 51
Hurricane’s back with the helmet with his traditional speed. Martin is binding a few wires together like I showed him. Meanwhile, I’m trying to convince Eric that I’m not crazy.
“So now you’re the one with the crazy theories,” says Eric. He’s crouched in front of an open panel on Charlotte’s cylinder, elbows-deep in a spaghetti plate of wires. He glances at the screen. “But you’re right, the system is infested with those nanobugs. I’m getting traffic on the same frequencies we used with Cuddles.”
“Perfect.”
“How did you even know?”
“I saw them. All these guys were riddled with Drake’s hardware.” Makes sense to me, but he looks skeptical, so I go over more of the facts. “The government wanted a way to control their toys, not completely shut them down. They tried turning Polybius into Robocop in the early days of the program and wound up with Cyber Veg, so they mothballed him at Whispering Pines—”
“Why? Why not leave him here?”
“I, well, I’m not sure.” His question is a good one, but I can’t let it throw doubt on the whole theory. Right now, it’s all I have. “Whatever the reason, at some point, the bugs got here. One failed experiment or another got woken up, Charlotte caught on, and probably steered the whole damn place back on the cyborg agenda.”
His gaze floats upward. “But if she can control all those Augments, why does she even need the hardware?”
“I don’t think it works that way. She can only control a few minds at a time—a ‘vessel’ for her brain, that’s what she called Emily, and another one she uses as her puppet. And it’s localized. She could mess around with my dreams while I was at the bunker, but I was out of her control.” Eric is already scowling and shaking his head as I finish. “After she took over Dad, she was having trouble with Emily, I saw it.” And Mom, Mom was able to contact me.
“What about the walk of death back there?” He points wildly at the crash doors. “How’d she kill all those people?”
“Jesus, I don’t know how that happened. Look, somehow she’s exploiting the tech. I’m pretty sure she had to use everyone here for their expertise—she isn’t a techie. My guess is that, like Emily said, those nanobots have a kind of hive mind going on. Charlotte’s plugged directly into it in a way nobody ever anticipated. I’m betting she’s here,” I gesture at the girl suspended in the cylinder, “in the wired ‘vessel’, so she has a stronger link to the Augments. This weird cylinder farm might be acting as a psychic repeater.”
Eric soaks it all in. His terrified face glows green in the light from the cylinder’s touchscreen. It suits him, the glow of pixels. Maybe the terror, too, brought on by being the smartest guy in the room. “Are you sure about this?” he asks, fingers busy on the touchscreen.
“Fuck, no.” I look down and stare into a sea of my own faces, framed by the geometric lenses of the Battle Armor’s eyes. Once again, this could be the dumbest idea I’ve ever had. I seem to keep topping myself as the week wears on. I check the wiring, bound together in a messy knot and fed into the cylinder base. I’ve got power. The interface is as good as it is going to get. We’re ready to go.
“Why don’t we just unplug her?” asks Martin.
Practical, might work. But then what happens to Emily and Dad? Are they stuck in Charlotte’s playhouse? Trapped, like Mom? Do the other Augments drop on the battlefield and get slaughtered?
“No. Too risky. It has to be this way,” I reply.
“You think Hurricane’s okay out there?” Eric asks.
“That old goat? He’s fine. I doubt they can even see him.” And he knows what he signed up for. He went out there with the regular Hurricane zeal, when I asked him to rush into whatever hell was raging above and pull out as many people as he could, Augment or not.
Dad’s stupid rules start to make sense. Neutralize the threat first, because there’s always more damage to be caused. More lives at risk, until the job’s done. You have to accept that. That’s probably why he worked alone. But it’s a big reason why he kept failing. That, and he couldn’t follow those rules when it came to me.
I sit next to the helmet. Martin crouches next to me, his worried face searching mine.
“I’ll monitor your vitals. The first sign you’re having trouble, I’m shutting this off.”
“Okay, but keep an eye on Carrie there and tell me if she starts to wake up.” I grab his arm and he squeezes my elbow, then pulls me toward him in a quick bro-hug, patting my back. As much as I hated this guy at one time, I needed that.
“Spencer, I’ve got a channel open to the bugs,” Eric shouts.
“Be ready to use them to lock her down.” Too bulky to lift, I slide into the helmet balanced on the floor. “Battle Armor, you there?”
“Armor operational. Power intermittent. Sensors reporting extreme damage. Weapon systems offline.” Drake’s collected, prerecorded words call out from the blackened visor display. Martin rests a hand on my shoulder.
“Forget all that. Battle Armor, you should detect a new interface. Same tech, different purpose.”
The view screen flickers then projects in harsh edges and shadowy lines. Details are hard to make out at first, until an orange, fiery blast fills the lower corner. Soon after, the cavern shakes in a concussive wave. I must be seeing outside, through the eyes of her current “vessel”.
From high above the base on a ridge, destruction rains down on the neighboring hills. Energy blasts and enormous shapes barrel through military machines tucked away in defensive positions. The machines fire back, belching smoke and fire. Already, the military forces are retreating under the Augments’ assault.
The view turns, and I can see Dad’s face in the pixelated image. His eyes are globes of mercury. “Spencer. What are you doing?” he says in an empty voice. This must be Emily’s view.
“Breaking the rules. Pulling my punches.”
“Spencer, return to the room and wait. We’ll be back for you, soon.”
“Charlotte, we need to talk. We need to talk or I’m going to have to do something drastic.” I feel a hand grip my forearm reassuringly.
Emily’s cracked voice fills the helmet and I know that again, these are Charlotte’s words. “We will punish them. Burn them to dust. Scatter them to the wind. Then, we can all be together.”
“Charlotte,” I shout, “Mom doesn’t blame you for what happened. She knows you couldn’t help it.”
The untarnished image of Mom’s smiling face fills my mind. Dad’s jaw flexes and his eyes soften.
“Connie,” he painfully cries. Doubling forward, he clenches his muscles and convulses. Dad drops to his knees and a scream of primal rage echoes across the canyon, reaching down to the catwalk.
“Dad! Fight it!” I slide out of the Battle Armor helmet and Martin helps me up. “Eric, are you on the feed? Can you see any links?”
“Yep,” Eric replies. “I’ve got connections looping back here from all over. I can’t isolate the one directly to her, it keeps shifting, a single control distributed over thousands of nodes. I can sever them one by one…”
I dig out the remains of Martin’s phone and punch in a number. I’m barely finished when the catwalk rattles, and Hurricane zips into view gripping Eric’s phone. He’s leaning against the rail, wheezing through the goofiest toothless grin he’s worn yet. Blood trickles down his prosthetic, and the gown is shredded into a kraut-and-kielbasa number. Martin springs to his feet and begins checking Hurricane’s bleeding leg.
“Haven’t seen this kinda action since Normandy! Bunch of Augments who ain’t never seen a real furball, yeah. And they ain’t right in the head, just like you said. Not too hard to keep one step ahead. Whatcha got?” Hurricane asks through ragged breaths.
“I need you to get Emily and bring her here. Charlotte can’t afford to let go of my dad, but she might hurt Emily. She’s on a ridge. I could see the base from an angle closest to the runway, the end by Martin’s plane!” He’s gone before I can finish. “Eric, get ready to signal the bugs.”
“Right, the maintenance loop command.”
“Not exactly. I want you to use the one I used on Cuddles.”
Eric’s eyes get wide and he stutters out his thoughts, “When you told it to go home for repairs?”
I nod.
“But, they’re all going to come here!”
“Yeah, only you’ll lock up the signal once they show. What? Close your mouth before a nano flies in there.” I fix him with what I hope is a confident stare. “We can’t have them drop helpless out there. We need to keep anyone else from getting hurt, okay? And I need Charlotte busy trying to control them.”
Eric nods weakly.
“When I give the signal, sever every connection. This helmet, her connections to the others, everything,” I say. He nods blankly and I’m not convinced he heard me. “I’m counting on you.”
“Okay. But, even the nanomechs might not be able to do it,” He says weakly. “If what you’re saying is right, she’s tapped in through the hardware in some freaky way that I don’t get.”
“That’s why I’m going to knock again,” I say and slip into the Battle Armor helmet.
“What if she ignores you?” comes Eric’s muted voice.
“I’ll go all Jehovah’s Witness on her,” I shout. “Trust me, people can’t ignore me. I’m a pain in the ass. That’s my power.”
Inside the Battle Armor helmet, the screen has cleared, filled with a blue-gray fog that reminds me of television static. “Charlotte. You have to talk to me. You owe me that.” I clear my voice and brace for the next words. “My mom. You killed her. I want to know why.”
Drake’s calm voice breaks the muffled silence, “Warning, neural cage power fluctuation detected.”
With a flash of light, the interface is gone.
I’m back on the beach. Like last time, the surroundings are plucked right from my imagination. There’s the Bay of Safety, with a dilapidated tent house sitting on the shore. A dense thicket of cocoa plants, their yellow husks bright among the shaded canopy, rises on the far side of a stream trickling down a hillside.
I search the high ground for the treehouse, the Falcon’s Nest. I think I can just make out the top of the white sailcloth ceiling and walls. They built other shelters, all over the island, but this one was my favorite. Who wouldn’t want to live in a treehouse? Maybe that’s why Charlotte picked this place, where she keeps the books and the… the hammocks. I start on a jog through the jungle.
Every known useful plant and animal in existence managed to live on this remote chunk of land. Even if the seemingly infinite supplies of the wrecked ship hadn’t clung to the rocks for months, the family had every possible item they needed for survival and comfort. That, and a father with an encyclopedic knowledge of living off the land, which included making rubber boots out of tree sap and the proper way to tame any animal, or, more commonly, the most efficient way to kill them.
Pleasant thought, given that I’m the prey here today.
But I had a father that left home to protect the world. Go on missions to preserve liberty, freedom, whatever patriotic excuse he was fed. When I was really little, it was the fictional character, William, that was my father. Always there, sharing his boundless knowledge, encouraging my accomplishments and misadventures.
I don’t recall exactly when I figured out he was a jackass.
Soon, the stream trickles behind me and broad palms sway in a gentle breeze. As a kid I dreamed nightly of exploring this place. But in those dreams, it was always just Mom and me. Isolated and lost seemed a better alternative to the chaotic life I lived. Now, I’m positive that it isn’t.
Somewhere down the line, the book became a running joke. Maybe it was the way I would notice Mom cringe at the old-fashioned ideals. Stuff like the kitchen, made especially for the mother. The father’s “thoughtful” gift of sewing supplies. Or the Robinson mom, almost always left at home during all the adventures. She got tired of that.
And then there was the incredible indifference to escape shown by the family. By the middle of the book, two years had passed and nobody had explored the extent of this so-called island. Nobody had peeked over the farthest hill to make sure there wasn’t so much as a ticket booth for the zoo, which would explain the variety of animals they found to slaughter.
Two years is a long time.
I’m trudging up the hill toward this, the first real home the stranded family built—a treehouse made of spare planks and sailcloth in the branches of a giant fig tree. It was a home they abandoned during the first rainy season, because the wind and rain poured in through the large flap of cloth that served as their door. It no longer protected them.
The canopy of the fig tree looms above the thin palms. The roof of the Falcon’s Nest isn’t sailcloth at all, but a distinct red tile. It slopes down above a stucco wall, ripped open and filled with crooked chunks and shredded wire that form a fanged maw.
I’m home.
Chapter 52
The
roots of the fig tree stand twice my height, rippling out in wavy lines before tapering into earth. A length of rope knotted with debris hangs down from a gash in the stucco tree house. Woven into the rope are irregular wooden planks, evenly spaced to form a ladder.
“Incoming threat.” I spin in circles trying to pinpoint the source of the statement. Drake, again, but this time the calm voice-over has an edge of anxiety.
I try and will my heart to stop hammering so damn hard. Focus on the tree.
Even in my imagination, the tree wasn’t so freaking huge. I mean, it must’ve been—they built an enclosed staircase that wound down through a cavity in the trunk, and used the space between the tall roots as livestock pens. Livestock, no. More of a menagerie. They kept kangaroos, ostriches, jackals, monkeys, wild donkeys, pigs, birds of every imaginable type. But here, there are no animals and no open cavity for the stairs, so I reach for the rope.
The homemade rope ladder feels rickety and unstable, a bit of accuracy I don’t quite appreciate. The whole reason they built the staircase was to keep from falling to their deaths, because the sturdy branches that form the foundation of the treehouse are way the hell up there.
Climbing on, the ladder twists and squirms. A faint buzz brings the still air to life. I try to relax and let my weight even out. The ladder settles into a gentle swaying motion and I start to climb.
Bees; that’s how they made the interior staircase. The trunk was hollowed out and inside lived a massive hive of bees. The family laughed off getting stung by an angry swarm as they relocated the colony. I thought I had a weird sense of humor. Guess they hadn’t heard of anaphylactic shock back then.
A scream pierces the buzzing. I tense, and the ladder twists wildly, putting my back to the tree. I struggle with the planks and hook my forearm around one. Below, the ladder thrashes like twenty feet of wounded snake.
Not sure what’ll happen if I fall in this place.
I lock my legs around the rope, trying not to move until the twisting stops. The rope swings free and my shoulder collides with the rough bark of the trunk. Another scream sounds. A scream from inside that cavity, blanketed in the droning hum.