by Geoff North
The warning from her mother that Selma had confessed crept back into her thoughts. Which of Uncle Neal’s creations weren’t to be trusted? Gunnarson and Reginald were gone. Had the threat died with them? It couldn’t be Oscar. She trusted the android completely. That only left the hard-looking lawman below her. Was he following a path already laid out for him? He’d murdered his own wife. Brinn had heard him say it. Would she be next?
They climbed by one more sub-level. Brinn paused to take a look as Oscar continued on above her. She held the lantern out at arm’s length. Two rows of six-foot-high lockers stretched off into the darkness. Most of the pale green metal doors had been torn away from their hinges. Others had been smashed in and looted. There were stained lab coats and rubber gloves everywhere. White plastic boots that could fit past a person’s knee were strewn about on the tiled floor, some caked in dry, muddy clumps that looked like congealed blood.
Lowe patted the heel of her shoe. “Get a move on. Ain’t nothin’ to see here.”
Brinn climbed and Oscar helped her onto the main floor. Fluorescent lights above flickered weak purple.
The marshal lowered the access door into place behind him. “Kill the lantern.”
Brinn did as she was told and the three stood there in silence, listening. They could hear a distant tapping sound from somewhere. They were against a wall looking out over a maze of empty work cubicles. Oscar started slowly between the desks, towards the large circular reception area and windows at the far side. Every work station had been smashed and lay in ruin. Metal file cabinets had been torn apart and emptied of their contents. Chairs had been reduced to mangled pieces and the floor was covered with a million sheets of yellowing paper.
Brinn scooped a handful up from her feet. They were filled with unrecognizable gibberish, diagrams that made no sense. She looked closer. There was something familiar about them. She remembered Commander Gunnarson’s equation of Endless Expansion and Contraction. These papers were similar. She looked at Oscar. “What was this place?”
The tapping got louder.
The android appeared stunned. “When Neal was still alive—during those times when I wasn’t with him—I used to work here.”
“What kind of work?” Brinn asked.
“Nothing like this,” Oscar answered, indicating the mess of equations all around them. “There were other agents and scientists. Some of them were my friends. We kept New Hamden running smoothly.”
Lowe grunted and tossed his own handful of papers back to the floor. “This crap don’t make no sense to me. Scientists my ass… This crap looks like it was made by children.”
Brinn looked back at the papers in her hand. The marshal was right. The equations, the diagrams—they all appeared juvenile.
Oscar appeared exasperated. “What did you expect? Those other agents, the scientists…they were all Neal’s creations. When he died, the place started to fall apart. None of them knew what to do next—myself included. We were like children without any guidance. I didn’t stick around long after. I couldn’t stand to see them all like that.”
“I don’t buy it,” Lowe interrupted. “You ain’t no kid, and neither am I. And what about Gunnarson? He was probably one of the smartest men that lived in any world.”
Brinn was nodding her head. “Maybe you’re both right. Maybe those other agents and scientists were just more ‘extras’ set in Neal’s world.”
The tapping continued. It had a regular three-tap beat and three-second pause.
Lowe placed a hand on the android’s shoulder. “And all them friends of yers—all those other folks you used to work with—they up and turned wannasee a long time ago. It explains why this place was torn apart.”
“It doesn’t explain this,” Brinn said. She was standing in front of another work station, pointing to a part of cubicle wall still intact. Two words smeared in blood had been left there.
DREEM KILLERS
There were more blood-dried words on the desktop in the next cubicle.
IMAGINASHUN THEEFS
Oscar ran his fingers along the letters. “They either turned wannasee…or they were run out by someone else.”
Lowe rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “What was it Emma said? Not the old Agency…a new one. Maybe that was the information that brought The Gloom out of retirement one last time.”
Tap-tap-tap…tap-tap-tap…tap-tap-tap…
It became louder as they neared the reception desk.
TAP-TAP-TAP…TAP-TAP-TAP…
Brinn squeezed Oscar’s arm. “Oh my God—look!”
It was full night outside. They could see a glowing red object the size of a small refrigerator rapping on the pane with worm-like metal fingers. It swiveled on hidden rollers beneath, looking to the right and looking to the left.
TAP-TAP-TAP…
Brinn ran to the door. “Reginald!”
She pushed on a wide black handle that automatically released the lock. It swung out, and Reginald rolled in. “Twenty-one thousand, six hundred and thirty-three!”
“What?” Brinn asked in surprise. Was he talking about the number of wannasee out on the city streets?
“I knocked on the door twenty-one thousand, six hundred and thirty-three times before someone answered!”
“He’s persistent,” Lowe commented as the door swung back in and re-locked.
Brinn was overcome with joy. She wrapped her arms around the robot’s body and squeezed. Reginald lit up an embarrassed shade of pink. “Please, Brinn—we’ve hardly made it past the hand-shaking stage.”
Oscar looked just as pleased. “How, Reginald? How did you get away from the wannasee?”
“The wannasee got away from me. Oh, they kicked and punched and scratched, but after a while they got fed up and left. As much as I hate to admit it—I’m not human. There’s nothing here for them to covet.” He stretched his rubber arms out and wriggled his fingers along the sides of his body. “No appreciable damage…but their probing was more than a little humiliating.”
“You’re back with us, that’s all that matters,” Oscar said.
Marshal Lowe cleared his gravelly throat. “I hate to break up a nice reunion, but we still have a little ways to go.” He pointed above his head.
Reginald rolled over to the elevator bay doors. There were three of them, side by side. The robot stopped in front of the middle one and pressed the up arrow.
“There’s minimal power being fed throughout the building,” Oscar noted, opening a stairwell door off to the side. “The main generator below ground is dead. I doubt the elevators have run in years.”
There was a ding and the elevator doors opened. The robot faced the others, already halfway through the stairwell doorway. “It’s five hundred stories—and I don’t do stairs.”
They followed him inside and the doors slid noiselessly back into place. Brinn felt the familiar push from the bottom of her feet and up into her legs. The elevator had started to move. It was eerie inside. Every wall, including the doors, was made of translucent black plastic. As they passed floors, the walls would glow slightly lighter—a dark shade of gray—then back to black. It was like being inside the chamber of a cancerous heart. And the beat was speeding up.
“I never saw you press a floor button,” Oscar said.
“That’s because I didn’t,” Reginald replied.
Brinn watched as a purple digital floor indicator set into the plastic counted up. She remembered a time in her life, another elevator ride up. The numbers there had lit up yellow and the ride wasn’t nearly as far.
Her mother held her hand. It was cool and damp, a loose, nervous grip. Nancy was humming. She always hummed when something was bothering her. And she hadn’t held Brinn’s hand for a long time. That was something parents did with little kids. Brinn was twelve years old.
“You sure everything’s okay, Mom?”
“I’m fine, sweetie. Just a little tired. The doctor will check me over and tell me I’m a worry-wart. Don’t worry.”
“But you were just here last week. Why do they need you to come back?”
Nancy looked surprised. “…How did you know where I was last week?”
Brinn looked to the floor. “I heard you and Dad whispering about stuff after I was supposed to be in bed. I’m sorry.”
Her mother paused, unsure what her daughter may have heard, and unsure what to say. “Doctors like to be thorough, dear… Everything will be alright.”
There was a ding and the doors opened onto the hospital’s sixth floor. Brinn sat in a waiting area while her mother talked to the receptionist. She sat next to her after a few moments and started humming again.
“How long?” Brinn asked.
Nancy picked up a battered copy of Reader’s Digest from the table in front of them. “Five or ten minutes. But knowing how hospitals run we can probably expect to sit here for half an hour or more.” She tossed the magazine back down without opening it. She sighed. “I’m sorry I had to drag you along for this.”
“Hey, I don’t mind. I get to skip school.”
“If only your dad wasn’t away on work.”
“Don’t worry about me, Mom. I’m fine.” Brinn paused for a moment. “You know I am getting older. I could’ve stayed home alone.”
“Maybe. But you’re still too young to look after Logan.” Nancy smiled for the first time that morning. “It was hard enough getting your grandmother to look after your brother.”
Brinn watched the clock on the far wall. It took fourteen more minutes until a nurse came for her mother. It would be another forty-five until she returned.
Something had changed.
She no longer appeared nervous. There were pink patches around her eyes; the rest of her was deathly pale. It startled Brinn to see her like that. Nancy Addam looked resigned.
“Mom?”
She seemed lost. “We better get going. It’s three hours back to Hamden and I promised your grandmother we’d pick Logan up before supper.”
Brinn had to show her the way back to the elevator. It was a quiet ride. Her mother was no longer humming. She was no longer holding her hand. Brinn reached out for it and squeezed. Nancy squeezed back.
She watched the yellow numbers.
Five…Four…Three…Two…
Ding.
“Floor 499,” Reginald announced.
It was similar to the reception area below, filled with rows of work cubicles. But nothing had been destroyed here. It was all set out in an orderly, pristine manner. Leather task chairs were pushed up to desk edges where flat-screen displays and keyboards waited for another work day to begin. They walked through the middle of the room, down an aisle set between two rows of cubicles. There was something else odd about the place, Brinn realized. Something that just didn’t sit right in a world Neal Stauch would have created.
Brinn stopped at a work station and ran her fingers along a touchpad keyboard. “I know what’s wrong with this place!” Brinn pounded the desk with her fist. “This monitor is a flat screen! The keyboard is a touchpad!”
“So what?” The marshal said. “Reginald here beeps and sings. What’s so special about that?”
“Uncle Neal created all of you—all of this—back in the 1970s.” She pulled the screen out to show them how thin it was. “This stuff is twenty-first century technology—from Earth.”
Reginald swiveled in Marshal Lowe’s direction. Lowe looked at him and shrugged his shoulders.
“Don’t you get it?” Brinn asked. “Somebody from my world has been here… Oscar was right! Those people he worked with, the S.S.I.A. Uncle Neal created…they were run out by someone else.”
Reginald performed a full three-sixty. “Where is Oscar?”
The android called out from the far side of the room. “You three wait down here.” He was standing back in front of the elevator doors. “What’s happened up above is my responsibility.” He stepped in and the doors shut before any of them could protest.
“I knew he was hidin’ something,” Lowe muttered.
Chapter 22
Oscar had a feeling the final floor would be accessible to him and not the others. No. It wasn’t a feeling. A voice had spoken inside his head. It was an instruction—a command.
PROCEED TO FLOOR FIVE HUNDRED
It was the same voice he’d first heard days before—the voice that told him where the portal back into Neal’s home world was. It was Gunnarson’s idea to search for a descendant, but the voice had told Oscar where to look. He never told Lowe and Reginald about the voice. They would’ve been suspicious. They would’ve made him return to Canis Major, and Gunnarson would’ve taken him apart piece by piece to see where the commands were coming from.
Oscar didn’t feel like a traitor—he only acted like one. The android was as desperate as the others to fix things—to repair and restore their dying world. Perhaps he was more desperate than anyone else—more ridden with guilt. Neal was dead because he’d failed to save him. An entire universe was coming to an end because he let the boy drown.
This was the android’s opportunity to set things right. To make up for his wrongs.
The doors opened onto floor 500. Oscar stepped out. This was the room where all of Neal’s other imagined agents, scientists, and officials had once worked. This was the room—the nerve-center—that ran everything when the boy wasn’t able to attend to matters himself. This was the room once filled with towering computers—the same computers The Gloom and his sidekick had looted clean years before.
This was the room Oscar had brought Neal’s dead body back to thirty-seven years before.
The entire floor was now a vast operating theatre. It was separated into different sections by six-foot-high walls. They were like the computer cubicles below, but instead of desks and chairs and keyboards, this area contained operating tables and surgical equipment. Oscar walked by dozens of tables and trolleys containing vicious-looking instruments: drills and clamps, scalpels and needles and circular saws. He reached the main operating table raised up three steps above everything else at the center of the room.
A woman was lying there—asleep, unconscious, dead—it was difficult to tell. He stepped up and stared at her face. She was beautiful. He ran his fingers along the woman’s bald skull, down her soft white cheek, and stopped at a point on her slender neck. There was no pulse. He looked down at the rest of her. She was dressed in a single piece fabric of light blue, a jumpsuit that clung tightly to the curves of her body. Only her hands and feet were left bare.
“Welcome home, Oscar.”
He looked back at her face. The woman’s eyes were open and she was smiling at him.
“Welcome home, Oscar.”
“Who are you?”
“Welcome home, Oscar.”
Oscar stepped back as the woman sat up. She tilted her head to one side and then the other. It made a clicking sound. She was an android.
“Welcome home, Oscar. I’ve been waiting my whole life for you.”
He leaned in for a better look. “Who constructed you?”
“The S.S.I.A.IAIAIAIAIAIAIAIAIA”—click—“the S.S.I.A created me for you.” She kissed him. “I’ve been waiting my whole life for you, Oscar. Where have you been?”
“The S.S.I.A. no longer exists. Where…have I seen you before?”
“You haven’t. The little boy you let die knew me. I was created from the memories of his third-grade teacher.”
“Miss Wilkins?” The name came to him instantly. Was it a memory of his own, or was it remnants of something Neal had once told him? No. He did remember Miss Wilkins. He could picture her at the chalkboard in a green dress and white blouse. Her hair fell to the middle of her back in long curls of red. Impossible…I never went to Neal’s school. I couldn’t have seen her.
“The boy thought she was beautiful, Oscar. He wanted to marry someone just like her—like me—when he grew up. He didn’t get to grow up though, did he, Oscar? You let him die.”
“I-I tried to save him… I thoug
ht he could swim.” He struggled, trying to put it together. He had never met Miss Wilkins, but he had—or Neal had.
“There’s nothing human about you, Oscar. Your brain is as mechanical as mine. You’re a murdering robot, Oscar. But I still love you. Kiss me again.” She wrapped her hand around the back of his neck and pulled him in.
He resisted. “I am not a murderer.” Of all his creations, Brinn said I was the most like Neal…the most human. “I am not a robot.”
“The boy is gone, Oscar. He never married a woman like his teacher. But the Agency cared enough about you to make it happen. We’ve learned so very much about you in the last two years. I am yours, Oscar.” She forced her lips to his. They were warm and full. Oscar closed his eyes and kissed back. He pulled her up gently from the table so their bodies could meet.
I am human. I can feel this. I want this.
He felt her press up against him. Her hands worked their way down his shoulders, up under his arms, and onto his back. There was a ripping sound. Oscar tried to pull away as the female android’s nails tore through his shirt and into the artificial skin beneath. “What—what are you doing?” He leveraged his elbows to the front of her shoulders and tried pushing back.
“Not so fast, Oscar.” She pulled him in tighter. He could feel his titanium ribs beginning to bend. She was much stronger than him. “I’m looking for something.” The fingers began burrowing into him, moving circuits and tearing wires.
Oscar drove his forehead into the bridge of her nose. The grip lessened just enough for him to drop to his knees and roll down the steps away from her. “You weren’t made for me—you were made to catch me. You knew we were after Brinn, and you knew I would lead her right to you. What is it inside of me you’re after? Some kind of tracking device?”