Deleted

by Phoenix Ward

  “Okay,” he said after a long while of thinking. “So what do we do?”

  “We have to make our escape,” Gauge said, grabbing Ethan by the shoulder. He started to lead him in the same direction that Taylor’s tracks went. “Now is our only chance. It has to be today.”

  “Where do we go?” Ethan felt at a loss.

  “Follow me,” Gauge said. He let go of the birthday boy and started to lead the way at a brisk pace.

  Together, they weaved between the trees as they made their way through the rock-walled passage. Ethan had no idea how much farther the canyon went, but he imagined it let out soon.

  “You see, I was the one who convinced Taylor to use this map for your guys’ birthday,” Gauge explained. “I did it subtly, but it was effective. I was able to alter the Last Stand map to make us a sort of escape hatch. Something they don’t know about. And we have to get to it now if we want to save your brain.”

  “What about the others?” Ethan asked as he followed the redheaded man.

  Gauge looked back at him as we walked. “We’ll do what we can,” he said. “I won’t guarantee anything, though. I need you to trust me, and I won’t get that by lying about things like this, even to make you feel better. But I promise you that we will try to get your friends and everyone else out — before it’s too late.”

  They finally reached the end of the canyon, and the forest thinned out as well. Eventually, there were no more alpine trees; fields of grass stretched out for miles. The cliffs behind them started to look rather small as they continued at their hurried pace. The Last Stand map was enormous — probably one of the largest Ethan had ever been in. It was like an entire planet’s worth of biome’s packed into a county-sized plot of land.

  The grassland transitioned to jungle. Ethan couldn’t help but feel amazed by the beauty of the area. Whoever had designed the map in the first place put a lot of detail into the jungle to make it seem authentic. Little ants crawled along the moss-covered tree trunks while snakes hissed form branches above them.

  All the way, Gauge seemed to know where he was going. Ethan kept expecting him to stop and second guess his turns, but he never did.

  There were ruins that Ethan started to spot between the palm trees and the thick ferns. They looked like something from the Aztec empire; pictographs covered all the weathered and worn stone faces. The ruins might have been a temple at one time, or at least, they were designed to look as such. There were several toppled pillars, but a few walls still stood. Ethan half expected Indiana Jones to sprint on by with his bullwhip in hand.

  Gauge beckoned Ethan on farther with his hand. “This way,” he said.

  Just as Ethan was about to follow the strange man through one of the ancient archways, a pair of gunshots popped from right behind them. The shots were so close that the sound made Ethan’s ears throb. He was so startled that he leapt forward, nearly tumbling to the jungle floor. Gauge jumped, too, and turned to spot their attacker.

  “Get behind cover!” he shouted at Ethan. He reached out and pulled the teenager up against the walls of the arch.

  Ethan breathed hard. For the last hour or so, he had nearly forgotten that he was fighting in a kill-or-be-killed competition. The fortune of points up for grabs to the contest’s winner had slipped his mind. He was now far more concerned about his brain.

  “Stop shooting!” he shouted from behind the ruined wall. “I don’t want to fight!”

  “Then you should have picked a different game!” the shooter shouted.

  Ethan didn’t recognize the voice. If it was Sharpe, he might have listened.

  Or he wouldn’t have missed, he thought.

  “We can’t get killed here or the plan’s ruined,” Gauge said. The fear in his voice was obvious.

  For the first time in all his experience with the simulation, Ethan was afraid for his life. He wished more than anything that he chose something lighthearted for his birthday celebration, like a concert or a feast. Instead, he was going to die and it was his own fault.

  “Cease fire!” he yelled some more. “Come on!”

  He tried to peek around the stone to see their attacker and managed to spot the guy taking a couple of steps in their direction. Then, with a loud pop, the shooter vanished in a hail of blood. A wooden crate sat where he was.

  Ethan’s mouth fell open in shock, and when he looked over at Gauge, he saw the strange man’s doing the same. They both timidly emerged from their cover and looked at the spot where the attacker had been standing mere seconds ago.

  “What the hell just happened?” Ethan asked.

  Gauge bent down a little, poking at something with a stick. Looking over his shoulder, Ethan could see it was a jagged piece of metal.

  “Landmine,” Gauge replied. “Looks like we got lucky. Come on, no time to waste.”

  Ethan stared at the shrapnel for a moment longer before following the redheaded man further into the jungle ruins.

  In the middle of the area, a small stone building still stood. Unlike the rest of the ruins, it was an intact structure, with all four walls and a ceiling. To Ethan, it looked like a tomb or a small mausoleum of some sort. Gauge disappeared into the tiny building’s entrance, and Ethan followed him in.

  It was dark and hard to see Gauge. The redheaded man gave a simple nod, then stepped into the far wall of the tomb and vanished.

  Ethan blinked. He looked around, assuming for a moment that he had just seen things wrong. He started to think it was some sort of software bug before realizing that this must be the escape hatch.

  “Walk through the wall,” he heard Gauge’s disembodied voice say.

  He did as he was told. He squeezed his eyes shut at the last second, expecting to collide with the cold stone. When he opened them, however, he found himself inside the wall. Turning around, he realized he could see all over the Last Stand environment, straight through all the walls and hillsides. It was as if none of the containers of the world existed, just their contents.

  Gauge appeared beside him.

  “Where are we?” he asked.

  “Outside the map,” the man replied. “This is where I hid our emergency exit. This way.”

  When they moved through this bizarre terrain-less world, they sort of floated like they were on motorized roller blades. It was strange to behold, but rather easy to control. Ethan didn’t need much practice before he was able to follow Gauge with ease.

  Then he saw what appeared to be a simple door, hovering in the nothingness that existed outside the map’s boundaries. The redheaded man floated up to it and pulled on the handle. Inside was pure darkness.

  “I should warn you,” Gauge started just before he lead the charge through the door, “you’re in for quite a shock. Brace yourself. You’ll need to be on your feet and moving as soon as possible.”

  “We’re leaving?” Ethan asked. “Where are we going?”

  “The real world,” Gauge replied. Then, before he stepped through the door, he added, “See you on the other side.”

  Ethan hesitated for a moment once the strange man vanished into the abyss. There was a tiny voice deep in his brain that told him not to go. To stay here and forget everything Gauge told him. That it was all just some elaborate adventure the simulation was tricking him into playing.

  He told that voice to shut the hell up and jumped through the door.

  15

  Captured

  With a pounding in her metal and plastic head, Tera started to come to. The world around her was a blur of colors and motion. She lifted her head and tried to make out up from down, but everything in her ocular receptors was swirling. A bit of static disruption lingered on the edge of her vision.

  She tried to stand, but her extremities weren’t responding. Looking down, as things around her started to become clear, she realized she was tied up. Her legs were bound together and her arms were secured to her sides. Whoever did this to her had attached her to a nearby boulder with a short length of rope and a stake. She t
ried to pry herself loose, but couldn’t get any leverage with her arms and legs incapacitated.

  Looking up, she saw Abenayo. Or at least, her bodyshell. All the subtle lights that usually glowed to indicate life within the machine were dead. The police-issued bodyshell that belonged to her partner and mentor lay dormant. Empty.

  There was some movement off to the side that drew Tera’s gaze. The man who had pleaded with them mere moments ago to let them stay in the ruins approached her.

  “Ah, she’s awake,” he said. Once he was within arm’s reach he knelt down so he could stare into her synthetic face. “If that’s what you call it, that is.”

  “What the hell happened?” Tera asked. Her tone was seeped with venom. “What did you do to Abenayo?”

  “We deleted her,” the man replied, a smirk on his lips. “The E.M.P. was supposed to erase you as well, but I guess you were just out of fatal range. Still, it was powerful enough to shut your systems down for a little bit. Might work out for the better, in the end.”

  “Why?” Tera asked. “Why did you do this?”

  The man scoffed a little. “You were about to kick us out of the only shelter we had, and you want to know why we attacked you?” He looked around at some of the other humans in his group and laughed.

  “You had the E.M.P. from the beginning,” Tera observed. “This was your plan all along.”

  “Ha, you got me,” the man replied. “You’re right — we were always going to blow you up.”

  “You aren’t exiles,” Tera said matter-of-factly.

  The man nodded. “You’re pretty bright for a Council hound, you know?” he said. “Truck sent us himself. Wanted to send Shell City his best regards.”

  “By killing two cops?”

  “Nah,” the man replied. “That’s just the first phase of the plan. Gotta lay foundations, you know?”

  Tera looked around as much as her restraints would allow her. They had pulled her into one of the abandoned structures that made up the ruins. At one point, it might have been a parking center, but Tera couldn’t be sure. While the man had been talking with his prisoner, another man started picking at the remains of Abenayo’s bodyshell. He plugged some sort of tablet-looking device into her empty head, gazing at the information through a pair of green-lensed goggles. Behind him, a pair of bodyshells were watching his work.

  Tera’s face must have conveyed her confusion because the man talking to her turned and followed her eyes.

  “You’re surprised to see I.I.s with us?” he asked.

  “I thought you hated us,” Tera said.

  “Not the I.I.s,” the man explained. “Just the Council. I.I.s are just like us — there’re good folks and bad folks. We’ve got some of the good folks with us here, and we welcome them. As long as they hate those fascists ruling things from their ivory Pavilion, we consider them friends. Some are even old urbanites, you know. Defectors, your bosses would call them.”

  The man working on Abenayo’s corpse made a disappointed grunt. The big man turned to lock eyes with him.

  “I don’t think any of this is gonna be usable, boss,” the man with the goggles said. “If there were any static charge left in her, it would have dissipated by now. Everything here is dead.”

  The big man sighed. “Damn,” he said. Then he looked back into Tera’s face. “At least we have her.”

  “You don’t know what you’re doing,” Tera said. “The Council will be coming for you now.”

  “That’s what we’re counting on, actually,” the man in charge replied. “It would have been nice if one of our I.I. boys could use some decent police hardware, but we’ll get some when they send people after you.”

  “Abenayo will be coming, too,” Tera said. “In a different bodyshell.”

  “You’re wrong there, officer,” the man sneered. “The frequency we used in the E.M.P. bomb deleted your friend, wherever she may be stored.”

  “That’s impossible,” Tera said.

  “Not at all. A bit of code gets injected into her hardware, which is transmitted to every instance of her brain. A virus. There’s no coming back from that. You’re on equal ground with us now.”

  Tera refused to believe him. She tried to turn away, to turn her ocular receptors away from the man and his grinning face. Then, something caught her attention. A little alert in the corner of her vision she hadn’t noticed until now.

  Her distress beacon had been activated. They must have accessed it while she was out cold. The Council would be coming out here, and there was no way for her to tell them it was a trap.

  16

  Afterbirth

  Green. Everything around Ethan was green, a sickly green that didn’t look unlike snot. He felt like the grape in the gelatin, trying to look at the world through the gooey stuff. It blurred his vision and made it hard to discern the shapes surrounding him.

  He was certain he was submerged in something, but he didn’t have any problems breathing. In fact, he didn’t need to breathe at all.

  Peering down, he saw dozens of little snakes attached to his body, leading out into the green goo around him. He reached around, pushing his arm through the substance to grab one of the snakes. It was cold and metal. He tried to tug on it, but there wasn’t enough room for him to get the right leverage. Every time he tried to angle his arm, his elbow bumped into some hard surface that enveloped him.

  Without warning, the metal wires going into him retracted. He felt a sudden stinging all over his body so uniform and complete that it almost itched more than it hurt. Then a loud hum filled the enclosed space he was occupying. He started to be sloshed around as he realized the snot-colored goo was being drained and the chamber was being filled with air.

  The walls surrounding him gave way and he fell. It was a short drop, only a foot or so, but it still knocked the wind out of his lungs. That was when he noticed he was breathing air through his nose and mouth for what felt like the first time ever.

  His vision needed a moment to clear. Dark shapes stood still all around him, and one form moved up to where he lay. He felt a metal hand grab him by his naked shoulder and lift him up to a sitting position.

  Ethan could finally see everything around him. He was in a large room made of concrete and metal that didn’t have any windows to speak of. Just above him was the coffin-like pod he had been floating in. A bit of the green goop stuff dripped off the open bottom of the container. Next to the pod, on either side, were dozens of other coffin-shaped things. All of the others were filled with the green substance — and each held a naked person. Each individual had dozens of the wires connecting them to their own pods.

  The moving form knelt down by Ethan. He finally saw that it was a robot made to look like a human being. It was male in appearance, with brown and gold synthetic material covering its metal skeleton. Despite how clearly un-human it looked, there was something alive about its expression. It looked down at him with concern.

  “Can you hear me?” the machine asked. “Are you able to stand up? There shouldn’t be any muscle atrophy with these pods.”

  Ethan pushed himself away from the mechanical man, his eyes wide with fear. He felt like he must be in some dream still. Some nightmare. He felt so strange — he wished more than anything to be back in the simulation, back in Sharpe’s basement. He felt so far away from home; so unsafe.

  “Ethan, I need you to acknowledge me,” the robot said. “We don’t have much time.”

  That’s when Ethan finally recognized the metal man’s voice. It was Gauge.

  “It’s you,” Ethan managed to say.

  “In the flesh,” Gauge replied ironically.

  “Wha — what are you?”

  “I’m an installed intelligence, Ethan,” the mechanical man replied.

  “You’re one of them?” Ethan asked. “The ones that want to lobotomize me?”

  “No, not at all,” Gauge replied. “Not all I.I.s are anti-human. I’m here to rescue you and together, we’re gonna make those bastard
s pay. But first, we’ve gotta get outta here, alright?”

  Ethan nodded.

  Now that he could make everything out clearly, he was able to see how many simulation pods there were. They didn’t just stretch on for what seemed like miles in either direction; there were rows that ran parallel to them that did the same. There must have been over a thousand people there, all in their own little coffins.

  Gauge followed the human’s gaze. “We’ll come back for them,” he said. “I promise.”

  “You were telling the truth,” Ethan said, his voice still strained with his recent slumber. “Everything they told us — the colonies on other planets, the eradication of disease — that was all a lie?”

  “That’s what I tried to tell you,” the I.I. said. “You better get used to the idea real quick. The world out there is nothing like they told you. I’d brace myself if I were you.”

  Ethan didn’t know how to respond. He didn’t need to; Gauge lifted his naked form onto his feet and pulled him away from the pods. He felt like he was in a trance, or still back in the simulation. Like he wasn’t in complete control of his body. Luckily, it followed Gauge by instinct.

  There was a door at the far end of the storage facility that the I.I. led him to. Suddenly, Gauge stopped like a dog that heard something Ethan could not. With the sound of whirring gears, a small gun barrel popped out of the metal man’s wrist.

  “Quiet,” Gauge urged. With his arm, he led Ethan against the wall, just beside the door. As they waited in silence, the teenager was able to hear it, too.

  Footsteps coming from outside.

  There was a loud whoosh of air as the door slid open and a pair of mechanical people came in, one male and one female. By Gauge’s body language, Ethan could tell these two were not friends of his.

  The two machine-people walked into the facility without looking to either side, which provided Ethan with some peace of mind. However, they did notice the opened pod in the middle of the lowest row.

  “What the hell?” the female I.I. said.