“I can eradicate all of them,” came Rove’s voice behind her. “I can erase them all without doubt or concern. Or you can leave with me now.”
Sienna looked up at him with eyes reddened by tears and rage.
“I know what you’re thinking. But before you could get close enough to me to leech, I could incapacitate you in twenty different ways, murder you in four. Yes, even from this short distance.”
Sienna thought of her brother still out there, the dozens of Northerners still alive.
“Let’s go.”
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DataLog Text-MemxJourn: Doyle, Sienna A. / 10-07-24
“Get out,” snapped Rove.
Sienna blinked in the dull morning light. They only made two stops a day, so she knew this was the morning one. The sky was overcast, matching the desolate stretch of road they were on. The tall grass that lined the road like squat, green walls was reclaiming the highway. The grey clouds and their promise of rain added a vicious humidity to the heat. Rove’s pudgy features were puckered with sweat.
There had been two vehicles, his SUV with a driver and guard along with a cargo van with two more additional guards. She was placed in the back of the van, completely sealed off, with only a few rations and bottles of water. They stopped twice a day so everyone could take rest breaks, refuel, and find a spot in the woods to piss. The guards never took their laser-targeted assault rifles off Sienna’s torso.
“Do you need to… relieve yourself?” asked Rove, his face screwing up the last two words.
“No, thank you,” replied Sienna, smiling sweetly. “I’m sweating out all the water back there, and you’re not feeding me enough for anything else.”
Rove tittered, as if even that was too much information. They both knew Sienna had every intention to kill him as soon as the first opportunity presented itself. What she didn’t know was where she was going and why. That didn’t stop her from asking every time they stopped for a break.
“Are you going to tell me what this is all about yet?”
“Oh, I think you know.”
“Oh, I think I don’t.”
“Then you truly are as much an imbecilic whore as you look.”
“Right… is that because you prefer the hirsute gentleman type?”
She wasn’t sure what is was, but Sienna had slowly picked up on the fact that, while they were terrified of him, neither Rove’s driver nor any of the guards could stand him. She got the impression they had never seen anyone talk to him like this before, let alone some twenty-something blonde chick. While they might not defy him on her behalf, they were loving every minute of it and it might eventually be beneficial.
“How dare you!” sputtered Rove. “How dare… you insinuate that… I am not one of those disgusting…”
“Awww, homophobia! How quaint. Didn’t that die out with all the other infectious diseases?”
“Throw her in the van!”
Sienna couldn’t help but notice two of the guards failing to stifle their chuckles as they directed her back inside.
Lying back against the warm metal, she could hear Rove barking orders at the men. Already piecing together that they would arrive at their destination tonight, she still wasn’t quite sure why he had allowed her to keep her earpiece – he had to realize it was a cog-jack design. Not that it mattered; she couldn’t leech through it.
Rove seemed certain that she knew why she was being captured. Maybe he hoped she would put it in her eJournal at some point. She was going to be really happy to further piss him off when he finally realized that she honestly had no real idea.
Gemmel. Gemmel was dead. She had sobbed for hours after Rove had led her off to where the Guards were waiting with the van and they had tossed her in the back. She mourned the loss of her friend, and mourned the loss of what she had realized might have been. Sienna raged in every direction, at everything taken, at Rove, at the Northerners, at the Gimmes, Sigma-8, Camus, Gemmel… everyone. In the end, it was mostly directed inward, onto herself.
Now? Now she just waited.
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DataLog Text-MemxJourn: Doyle, Sienna A. / 10-07-24
After the Mancer Wars had drifted to a close, those still alive and in power had staked out their territories clearly. Occasional skirmishes did still occur, but even those had grown quiet of late. Mancer warlords ruled his or her own little fiefdom according to whatever bizarre ideology struck them as inherently correct. In Raleigh, Margaret Kepler-Madison saw utopia as a totalitarian state, with her at the top, its rigid class system held in check by a placid conformity. Any expressions of individuality were considered an opposition of her authority – unless one of her citizens were informing on a potential dissident. Only then, would The Madam applaud original thinking.
Sienna was told all of this on her way to a cell.
The cold, monotone lecture continued, delivered by a man who introduced himself as Warden Ashmore. She didn’t pay much attention to the rest of it, only noticing that the humorless Mancer acolyte kept staring at her boobs. Sienna considered commenting on it, and decided against it.
“Raleigh is a place attempting to obtain perfection,” intoned Ashmore. “The Madam removes the uncertainty of choice and provides the joy of purpose. The Madam removes the suffering of desire and provides the glory of duty. The Madam removes…”
“Fucking hell,” exclaimed Sienna with sigh.
Ashmore spun on her in confusion.
“Right, you love the crazy bitch – I get it. Don’t tell me, tell her.”
As he turned bright red, Sienna waited for the fist he was cocking back to knock her unconscious. At least she wouldn’t have to listen to him drone on anymore. The punch never came.
“I said that’s enough, Mr. Ashmore!”
“This… vile little…”
“She’s no longer your concern,” said the fidgeting small man. “The guards will, er, escort this, um… to my facilities.”
“Claiming this piece of soft skin for your own needs, Doctor?” Ashmore asked, his voice dripping acid.
“Scientific needs, yes. Er, you were the one ogling her tits, Ashmore.”
Sienna gave the warden a girlish wave as she was marched off, watching him turn red again and sputter in fury.
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DataLog Text-MemxJourn: Doyle, Sienna A. / 11-07-24
Sienna had been locked inside a small observation room since she had first entered what she was referring to as “The Mad Scientist’s Lair” in her head. It was filled with more high-grade technology than she had seen in years, let alone in one place. While lit from above, everything was cast under a dull greenish-yellow cast from all the hard-light projections running. Along with charts and graphs, a series of equations were running in one spot, maps of the T-Net tower grids beside it, and a rapid-time digital composite of a human molecular system adapting to Leecher status with it’s eventual collapse into a Feeder.
She didn’t like to look at that one much, even if it was a median calculated avatar. Stuck in the room now for a few hours, she had watched the doctor rush past a few times, stop to fiddle with a device or two, then disappear again. At one point he had walked past, lost deep in thought, paused to look up at her with his index finger searching for somewhere to point to. Whatever idea he had been looking for must have come to him, because he dashed over to a table with two Servants and began tapping on them simultaneously. Then out the door again with one of them.
It was exhausting to watch him through the window, exhausting to be so filled with fear and sorrow. Even though the room was small and illuminated, a small cot had been set in the corner with some water. Sienna couldn’t take being strong anymore right then, not with everything that had happened. They would either kill her or they wouldn’t.
Either way, she was curling up and passing out.
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DataLog Text-MemxJourn: Doyle, Sienna A. / 12-07-24
�
�Um…” came an electrical voice, accompanied by a series of knocks.
Sienna struggled awake, almost fell out of the cot, and saw the doctor peering at her through the window.
“Hello,” he said, as if having a polite conversation over tea.
“Aw, for the love of…” grumbled Sienna climbing off the cot. “I need to pee.”
“Right, yes… er, press the wall there to your, um, left? Yes, left.”
She did and a section of the wall slid back to reveal a small alcove with a toilet.
“I’m afraid it doesn’t close when, er… you know, a subject… yes, um, is inside. But I can’t observe you through the window! Not, um… it’s not the right angle.”
Sienna went in, went to the bathroom, and came back out. The doctor was still standing there. They stared at each other for what felt like a full minute.
“Don’t you have more sciencey things to run around and do?”
“Um, no?”
“Of course.”
Silence.
“Er, what are you?”
Plain as that.
“Well, I’m a female, of the human variety,” she responded, growing irritated. “Blonde, twenty-six, about five and a half feet. I like acoustic music and shooting things that piss me off. Oh, would you like to make a note for Warden Ashmore that I’m a 34C?”
Sienna almost laughed at the reaction her rant had on the doctor. He didn’t seem to have any idea how to process this stream of information, or even determine if it was in fact sarcasm. He basically rocked back and forth, eyes everywhere but on her.
“That dick warden called you ‘doctor,’ right? Hi doctor, my name’s Sienna. What’s yours?”
Motionless now, he replied, “I’m… Dr. Harvey.”
Sienna sighed. “Nice to meet you, Dr. Harvey.”
“You, er… you’re a very strange young lady.”
“Yeah, I’ve got that before.”
He blinked rapidly. “Um, do you appreciate, er… understand how strange?”
Sienna clicked her tongue. “I’m assuming you’re referring to the fact that I’m not going to end up a Feeder or a Mancer.”
“So you know?” Dr. Harvey exclaimed with excitement.
Sienna made a sudden decision not to tell any of her captors about Jean-Baptiste Camus. She wasn’t entirely sure why, but that piece of information seemed safer unsaid. If anything, it made her knowledge appear all the more like guesswork.
“My… friends and I,” Sienna said, also concealing the existence of her brother, “We had somewhat hammered together that theory on our own. I don’t have the same addiction other Leechers do, even if they do turn into Mancers.”
“Fascinating! I hadn’t, er, anticipated that particular aspect of the conversion.”
“Uh-huh. And what am I ‘converting’ into?”
Dr. Harvey said nothing. He stepped back from the window and lowered himself down into a battered folding chair. His fingers jumped around his coat pocket, finally settling on his face where he removed his glasses. No longer trembling, he folded his hands in his lap.
“I… I’m the only biophysicist left alive who specialized in Galvanic Sciences, as far as I’m aware,” he said slowly. “Before my, er, services… became exclusive to those of Madam President, I was working on… a theory.”
His eyes strayed to T-Net tower map. “Nearly twenty percent of the T-Net is down. That’s not a great deal when you considered the vast amounts of data saturation, the way the zettahertz frequencies, um… permeate everything. I keep checking the calculations, over and over… but, they’re the same.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Those few random dead zones, where there is, um, zero signal strength from the T-Net towers. It’s not a coincidence there are no Feeders present in those areas. It’s just enough… just enough…”
“Enough for what?” Sienna asked, voice raised.
“To keep them, er… active? Animated, existing. Alive? And we stay alive with our Servants, correct? Of course, Madam President had me abolish this line of research…”
“Why are you telling me this?” she asked, enunciating every syllable.
His eyes finally came back to rest on her in the observation room, and he gave her a very tired, very sad smile through the window. Making his way to get up and leave, he turned off two of the hard-light holograms and typed away at a third keyboard. Siena banged on the glass.
“Dr. Harvey? What am I converting into? Dr. Harvey!”
He paused by the door. “Long ago, it was postulated that ‘energy can not be created or destroyed, only transferred.’ Humans found a way to transfer their own energy, but Leechers absorb it as well. Feeders have lost the ability to transfer, to… um, manipulate it, while Mancers are, er… adept at it.”
Dr. Harvey took one last look at Sienna. “Some… might make the assumption that since Feeders absorb, and Mancers manipulate, er, that others might be able to somehow radiate. Um, expel, even dissipate.”
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DataLog Text-MemxJourn: Kepler-Madison, Margaret. / 12-07-24
/DataLog Text-SUPPLEMENTAL: Doyle, Sienna A.
“Release him. I can’t understand what the fool is saying.”
Rove relaxed his will and Dr. Harvey fell to the floor. There was a deep impression in the wall where his shoulder had impacted it. Blood came leaking from his mouth.
“Doctor, explain to me again why you have defied me and, in doing so, chosen to commit suicide?”
Dr. Harvey spat out a word along with a few teeth.
“What was that?” asked President Kepler-Madison.
Rove grimaced. “I believe he said ‘Sienna.’ The name of that crude whore we just brought back from Nashville.”
The Madam President leaned back in her chair and peered at Dr. Harvey’s broken form from over her desk. “Of all the ridiculous times for your withered heart to start beating again. Or was it another organ, doctor? That would still not explain why you would take Lopez offline, an act that would result in her death as well.”
Dr. Harvey pulled his face up from the carpet, spit out more blood and caught Margaret Kepler-Madison’s imperious glare with one of his own.
“Because… a supernova is just as devastating as a black hole.”
Her fist slamming down on her desk, Madam President shifted the velocity and kinetic energy onto Dr. Harvey’s head. Its potential capabilities increased tenfold through her Mancer abilities, the doctor’s head was obliterated in a pink mist. Rove managed to look mildly impressed.
“Get down to Harvey’s facilities with a team of techs and see if Lopez can be salvaged,” hissed the President of Raleigh.
“And the young woman?”
“Just kill her and let’s be done with this.”
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DataLog Text-MemxJourn: Doyle, Sienna A. / 12-07-24
Her thoughts were a tornado of confusion and implications, rocked by occasional lightning strikes of clarity. What little she had told Dr. Harvey had only seem to strengthen an opinion he already held. Feeders absorbed, Mancers manipulated, and she… what? Was going to be able to shoot laser beams from her eyes? She doubted that.
Why would he tell her about the T-Net? Could the Feeder epidemic really be solved with the destruction of the T-Net towers? Mancers would still be formidable, but a hell of a lot less so without their Feeder armies.
“Doctor? Dr. Harvey?” Sienna yelled out for what felt like the fiftieth time.
She had to get out, escape somehow. Find a weapon, bolt from Raleigh, go anywhere else. She idly considered Camus, but banished those thoughts when memories of Gemmel crept back in. Sean. What about her brother?
She had to get out. She had eyed the bathroom both when she had used it and since then. The window was made out of one of those weird poly-carbonites that could withstand a plasma explosion. The door…
The door swung open at her touch.
“Are you fucking kiddin
g me?” Sienna screamed to the empty room.
It must have been an accident. Or Harvey had unlocked it remotely before he left when he was turning off the holograms. Either way, Sienna was out the door and into the hallway.
Halfway down the hall, she realized she didn’t have a weapon or hadn’t leeched from anything back in the lab. Relatively defenseless, she tried to stay as stealthy as possible. A noise at the end of the corridor caught her attention. The windows lining one side were too high to easily access, so forward looked to be the only way out. Preparing herself for action, she nudged the door open a few inches with her toe.
Nothing, no previous experience in her life, could have prepared her for the sight of what was inside. An oval shaped room with a dark, four story high ceiling, there was even more recent pre-Feeder tech here than in the lab. Most of it was attached to a singular unit situated in the center, a medical prosthetics chamber. A piece out of historical texts, they were used to fashion bio-droid body parts and graft them on before the advent of Galvanic Sciences. Wired up inside the chamber, looking directly at her was a dismembered child.
“Oh hell, oh… “ Sienna babbled. “Oh shit, I… I don’t know what to… tell me how to help you.”
“That is why I like you, Sienna,” came a digital voice from one of the monitors. “You truly are a good person.”
A little girl. A little girl with her arms amputated at the shoulders, her skull opened and brain exposed to circuitry, portions of her hip bones gone along with everything below them. Even her lower torso had been splayed open to allow for a variety of cables and device to be inserted next to a number of still functioning organs. Her tiny dark eyes shone with a preternatural intelligence. And a cosmos of pain.
“Why? Why… who did this?”
Her mouth didn’t move, but the digital voice replied. “The Madam President, of course. She couldn’t allow another Mancer in her domain that wasn’t under her absolute sway.”
“But, I thought Rove was…”
“Rove is a sycophant, a loyalist who believes in Margaret Kepler-Madison’s vision perhaps more strongly than even she does. He has no desire to rule; only to destroy anything he finds doesn’t align with his views. While I was only eight years old when my leeching transformed me into a Mancer, Madam President decided I could be of certain use.”
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