by Rayya Deeb
“Dom is here. He wants to flex you,” he said.
My knees buckled me to a seat in the mud. I was as grungy as Seattle in the nineties and I really didn’t care but I couldn’t let him see me like this.
“Not right now,” I replied.
Reba was taken aback and I could see why. He’d witnessed me go schoolgirl for Dom since day one and now I was telling him I’d rather Dom not flex me. But I was on my own and my mind was consumed with the search for answers.
“Campbella?”
“I just don’t get it…” I said, “You appear out of nowhere, but I have no idea what you want or who you’re with.”
“I don’t want anything, I’m trying to help you. Come on, you know I’ve always had your back.”
“I’m not sure of anything right now. One guy is always keeping secrets, and the other wouldn’t accept my apology, so now I’m on my way to a foreign Seneca hub, on my own.”
Reba looked worried, but remained level-headed. “I told you Colombia was the wrong direction. Remember, Campbella? I know you do—”
“And look at me now. This was the right direction?”
“Exactly what Anika said could happen with your flex implant is happening, Doro. It’s why we searched so hard to find you. You’ve been hacked.”
Huh?
That, I did not expect.
Shock. Confusion. Denial. They hit me all at once.
But maybe…
No.
“Oh come on, Reba. Don’t you think I would know if I’d been hacked?”
“No. You wouldn’t. That’s not how it works. Actually, part of it enhances your paranoia by sending interrupters into your critical thinking to trigger a fight or flight response, so you will most likely think what I am telling you is a lie. You really have to try hard to silence all the noise in your head and listen to your heart.”
I couldn’t believe it. I felt totally normal, and my feelings were all I could trust because they were real. They couldn’t be faked. They were inside me like helium and that helium was vigorously pumping. I floated up into the air rising above all of this low-lying confusion where I could see everything for what it really was. It was clear that Dom hated me, so I couldn’t possibly imagine why he’d be trying to help. There had to be something more to his actions. I was certain someone had put him up to it.
And then Dom flexed me.
I zoned in on ‘Accept’ and ‘Decline.’ ‘Accept.’ ‘Decline.’
‘Decline.’ ‘Decline.’ ‘Decline.’ ‘Accept.’ Back and forth rapidly, my weary, fidgety eyes leapt. I told myself, hit ‘Decline.’ Stop the madness, keep moving forward, stay on the mission. This kind of uncertainty had already wounded me before.
I hit ‘Accept.’
There he was.
There. He. Was.
“Doro.”
Face to face with hologram Dom. He looked better than ever and I wanted so badly to hug him. I wanted to lay my head in the nook above his shoulder, get that subtle wisp of musk and cedar, the faint sensation of his heartbeat with my cheek against his neck, and forget all about the ickiness of the recent days leading up to the present. His hair had grown in and it was kind of curly and dirty blond, unexpected because I always thought of him as a straight-haired brunette, but this worked. It really worked. Seeing Dom there in Peru opened the floodgates to my heart. I didn’t even know where to begin, what to say to him. My emotions yanked me from one direction to the next: love, anger, sadness, desire, confusion and an overwhelming feeling of uneasiness for not being forthcoming with the truth. I was paralyzed by the emotional tug of war going on inside and I couldn’t say a word.
Dom and Reba. These were the two best guys in my life. But then I imagined them conspiring together just moments before this. Figuring out how they were going to stop me on behalf of S.O.I.L. Because if Reba is so intuitive (as the Intuerians are supposed to be the masters of this domain,) wouldn’t he have told me not to get the Necrolla Carne vaccine to begin with? Wouldn’t he have said we shouldn’t go to the party where the son of notorious Seneca Senator Frank Wallingsford, G.W. Wallingsford, crashed the flighter? Had he the inclination that Dom would have been framed for it and then banished to the Aboves with a wiped memory? Maybe Reba wanted Dom to be banished.
Whose side was Reba really on? Had he manipulated Dom in his vulnerable state of being upset with me?
My stomach turned in unison with every one of those thoughts that crossed my mind. They had to have teamed up, because otherwise none of this made sense. Ellen, Reba, Dom. They were all suspect. The entire lot of them.
Dom looked at my grubby, bare feet.
“I shouldn’t have ever let you go alone,” he said quietly as he looked into my eyes. We were so right together. Our souls connected in such a supernatural way and I didn’t want it to disappear again, but I was torn in half. There were too many “What-ifs?” firing off in my mind, casting waves of doubt upon Dom and Reba, and I couldn’t stop them.
I couldn’t let myself respond to my heart believing that Dom's overture of care and compassion was completely genuine. The suspicions were too strong and oozing with logic. My logical brain was screaming at me as my heart melted into his. Tears streamed down my face. I wiped them away and closed my eyes, trying to stop my mind from thinking for just a moment.
“You’re in trouble, Doro. We’re all in trouble, and I want to help more than I’ve ever wanted to do anything.”
What felt like a rational thought suddenly occurred to me— “Is Ellen Malone with you guys?”
Dom looked at me like I was speaking an alien language. “What? No.”
Reba interjected, “Campbella, it’s just us. Your boyfriend and your best bud. You have to know we are one hundred percent on your side.”
I didn’t know that. I didn’t blame them for me coming on my own. I understood why Dom was mad and Reba was never supposed to come. But now I was in this position, and maybe it was exactly the position they wanted me to be in. I’d better play my cards right by not listening to them at all and letting them crash into my head. I needed every ounce of consciousness I could get. If Dom and Reba really cared, what took them so long to reach out to me? Why now? The only reason could be that they were up to something unspoken, something they were keeping from me. I had to get away from them. I was too weak. But at the same time, I wanted them. I was beyond happy to see them. I was elated. My whole body buzzed in their presence.
“Doro, we need to stick together right now. I know you can understand the reasoning that your mind has been compromised and the people who care about you want to fix that.”
Me? Shutting him out? Was this even real? Was this some computer-generated version of Dom? Because we were both speaking to different realities. Suddenly hologram Ellen glitched in. She was wearing the very same suit she wore when she came to recruit me.
I gasped. I blinked. As quickly as she appeared, she was gone.
“Ellen,” I mumbled. The words started getting harder to push out of my dry, cottony mouth.
Reba desperately wanted to reassure me. “You really need some clean water.”
His desperation almost tripped me up, but then I felt that that was his intention: to play to my heart and trick my mind. Didn’t they realize I was onto them? Ellen was just standing right there! As I was running this over in my mind the graphic watermelon with purple eyes that tumbled down the mountain glitched in. It rolled behind a massive tree stump just to my left and I dragged my increasingly unresponsive body over to look for it. The flickering holograms of Reba and Dom floated along with me as I moved.
“What are you seeing, Doro?” Dom asked.
I couldn’t answer, I didn’t know.
Reba grew more and more worried by the second. I could tell by the way his voice shook as he said, “Doro, you lost connection to the grid because your flexer implant has been hacked.”
“By who?”
“That’s the thing. We don’t know yet.”
�
�Come on.”
Dom chimed in, “Doro, it’s the truth.”
“And because you are saying it I should automatically believe it?”
Reba was taken aback. I kind of was too, but I wasn’t at the same time. I felt way off.
“You know I’d never lie to you,” Dom replied, quietly.
“No, I don’t!” I could tell that burned him by the way he flinched at those three words, but we weren’t exactly in happy-go-lucky-couple mode at the moment, prancing through fields of daffodils into the sunset. I knew quite well that my not telling Dom about the flighter crash was wrong but what these two were doing to me was way worse than that. I wasn’t just going to sit back, blissed out and ignorant, with butterflies, because Dom popped up in hologram and said he cares.
At the same time, Dom apparently wasn’t going to give up trying. “Well, whether you believe me or not right now, I am going to tell you this because I know you, Doro, and I know that eventually you will. There is an anonymous faction in Seneca with eyes and ears everywhere, from the C.I.A. in the Aboves to S.O.I.L. We’re pretty sure it’s them doing this to you.”
“Is this leading up to you guys blaming Ellen? Because she’s the easy target?” I asked, knowing full well they would feed me the answers they wanted me to hear regardless of the truth.
Reba proclaimed, “Ellen is the one who hinted us toward the Colombia hub to begin with, and Anika helped us get here! We’ve been trying to get to you for weeks!”
“Well maybe you shouldn’t have.”
What was I doing? My heart questioned everything my head forced me to say. My insides were out of sync and that twisted my guts up into a massive knot.
Ellen abruptly flickered in again, this time between Reba and Dom!
I looked at my FlexOculi and slammed my hand downwards onto ‘Disconnect’ for Dom, and then Reba stuck his hand out. “Don’t!”
Poof— Reba vanished.
The guys were both gone. Gone, baby, gone.
Hologram Ellen smiled.
I ran.
And ran, and ran, and ran. The thick, cold mud splattered all the way up my tired legs. My pants were wet and heavy from the rain and that slowed me down.
I lost my breath. An intense cramp materialized in my right calf muscle. I bent over to rub it, trembling in pain. I was so dizzy the sky became the ground. Clouds bounced off the earth. I spotted a clearing inside a grouping of weathered trees. No one would be able to find me if I posted up for a breather in there. But then, right in front of me, there appeared a snake! A giant, fast-moving, bright green snake and it saw me. It was coming right for me! I turned to run.
5
I STIRRED AWAKE to a low, raspy voice with a Latin accent. “I’m still here.”
Oh boy. Still?
I realized I had goggles on and tore them off because I had no memory of putting them on.
“You need to keep those on, or you will damage your eyes.”
I rubbed at my eyes with the back of my clammy hand and pulled the goggles back over my eyes. I saw a guy’s blurry figure about two feet away. This habit of waking up with strangers kneeling before me was something I needed to kick. The last one was Anika, and I trusted her. But I most definitely wasn’t trusting this guy with… dreadlocks and a Jimmy Cliff t-shirt? Hmm, I do like Jimmy Cliff, though. I quickly began to adjust to the fact that he could kill me and sell my organs, and quite honestly, at that point, I really didn’t care. Maybe, just maybe, he wouldn't kill me, I reasoned to myself, because from the looks of me right now, my organs weren’t worth squat. In Seneca they were growing them like weeds.
“You had nightmares all night,” he said, very matter-of-factly.
I was floored— all night?! With this guy?! How could I be so unaware of my surroundings? Had someone drugged me? What was happening to me? What happened last night? How many nights had I forgotten? Severe knots began forming in my gut, a direct response to the warning signals fired off by my mushy brain. I started to get choked up, but then I remembered I was not alone.
“Have some water,” he offered, and I suddenly had déjà vu. It triggered the events of the past few days to come rushing back to me.
I recalled the grueling moments I had experienced through dusk just before I fainted. I was laid out under a bush, hiding from a sun that had scorched the skin at the top of my cheeks. I must have drifted off to sleep because, when I awoke just after sunrise, six backpackers surrounded me. Their faces looked blank in my memory but this guy in the Jimmy Cliff t-shirt was definitely one of them. I remembered his dreads from the day before, only now he had them held up with a red band. He had said, “Have some water,” then, too.
I grabbed the canteen from his hand and drank from it so hard the water streamed down from the corners of my mouth.
“Slow down,” he said with a smile.
I did.
“Try and breathe from your belly. Let your lungs relax.”
I did that too as I looked him over.
The first thing I was taken by were his glinting green eyes and the way they mirrored the canopy of trees above. They were flecked with pops of sunlight and the colors of bark, and I reminded myself not to fall for that kind of crap again. It was the eyes that got me every time, followed closely by the chemistry, the mystery and don’t even get me started on the mind. No, I, Doro Campbell was not immune to crushing. I swiftly threw up a chemistry blocker: A mental image of Dom. The way he looked at me on the Brooklyn Bridge just before we kissed for the very first time. I felt sunlight in my heart. I thought about how enveloped into our own little world I became. It was a world I was so far away from and I missed it so much.
The warm light that had filled my heart was eclipsed by reality.
I finished the water. Wound my way back into focusing on the present. “Thank you,” I offered this stranger.
“De nada.”
Young green grass shoots borne of the rains covered the whole ground, like an inviting wool blanket. A magical-looking mist settled around our makeshift camp and a small pot of water boiled on an Infraready burner. I had seen one these gadgets at the adventure outfitter in Lima: small, stone-colored discs the size of a teacup saucer that glowed blue when they became hot. I didn’t purchase one because in no way did I think I’d be out in the wilderness for as long as I had been.
“Your oxygen levels were very low when we found you. We gave you some coca tea and an oxygen booster. Then you fell asleep and your breathing seemed to improve immediately. Mi amigos continued on but I wanted to make sure you were okay.”
“Wow. I don’t know what to say—”
“Say nothing.”
“Well, I owe you big time.”
“You owe me nothing. Human beings are meant to help each other, aren’t we?”
“Sure, but meant to do and actually do are two different things.”
“I am happy to see you doing better, so you see, I had something to gain.”
I smiled. Not sure if I was “better” per se, but I was one step closer to Hub 48 than I was when I imagined my body toppling off a cliff.
I watched intently as this guy stirred inside the small pot with a metal wand, and then he said, “You need to eat something.”
“I’m starving.” I sat forward and peered into the pot. “What is that?”
“Ever tried Peruvian caviar?”
“Uhh, I’m not really a caviar person.”
“It is funny because it is not caviar; it is snail.”
“Funny.” It wasn’t funny. “No thanks.”
He raised the pearl-black shell to his mouth and made an awful slurping sound as he sucked the snail out. He then closed his eyes and bowed his head to the shell before flicking it off into the grass.
“Mmmm.”
He went in for another.
“That can’t be good.”
“In a primitive sense it is quite delicious.”
I smiled. My first smile in… days? Weeks? I didn’t know.
“I’
ll pass.”
“It is very nutritious.”
He pulled a steaming snail from the pot with makeshift tongs and lifted his forehead to me.
“I can’t.” No way.
“Come on— what’s your name?”
“Doro.”
“I’m Jadel.”
The green-eyed guy stuck his hand out with a smile. I shook it. Jah-del, what a cool name. I’d never heard that before.
“You need to get energy and your strength back so we can get you back to your home. Protein, iron, your brain needs fat.”
My FlexCore validated what Jadel said about food, so if snail was my only option, I would eat some snail. But I wasn’t going home.
“Okay. You know what? Let me try it,” I said as I cringed.
“Good choice. Now you may do like me and suck it up…”
My utter starvation was enough to keep me from gagging. My body needed food. Or maybe not— the instant I considered sucking the snail from the shell, I gagged and covered my mouth as if protecting it with the back of my sticky forearm.
“…Or you can use a little pick like the fancy people do.”
“I am one hundred percent going fancy.”
I took the pearl-black shell that filled the palm of my hand, along with a little twig Jadel had sharpened at the tip. I poked it into the cooked snail’s shriveled, ash black flesh. I maneuvered the twig to scoop it out. It was only one bite and, who was I kidding, these snails were hardly a feast. I wished there was another way to gain sustenance but there wasn’t. I had to suck it up. I closed my eyes and popped the rubbery meat into my mouth. I took one chomp and gagged, then stopped before I reached a vomit. I grabbed for the water, and washed it all down in one gulp.
“Horrendous.”
“That snail just gave its life for you.”
“I’d better do something important with my life then.” I smiled. Jadel smiled back and nodded in agreement. Thank goodness this guy was helping me out. There was no way I would have gone into the river and caught and boiled snails on my own. I think I would have eaten my own hand off first.