by Lee Doty
“Orders?”
“Secure her.” Smith said, waving a hand to where two technicians in hazmat suits were finishing the work of securing Jo to a sturdy looking gurney.
Smith turned away and began to walk in the same direction that the first man had left, but then turned back long enough to say “…Better than last time.”
The man in the white lab coat turned his back to the camera and strode a few steps away. The video ended.
Jo sat, staring at the tablet between her hands on the table. She sat, letting the odd déjà vu wash over her… she remembered this scene. She remembered being strapped to the table, remembered the opiate haze, the sparkling, shimmering lights and wavering walls that had so amused her at the time. She remembered the sizzle of the exotic tranquilizers in her blood. She remembered fighting the straps and the man in the dark gray suit, remembered being tranquilized like an enraged gorilla in the zoo.
She remembered her target. She remembered why she’d had a target.
Her hand blurred down, then came up holding the pistol. Jeremy jumped again, but Smith didn’t flinch, even as the pistol came to a stop two feet from her face, pointed across Jeremy’s dining room table and directly between her eyes.
“You murdered the world!” Ash shouted in a sudden heat, finger darting into the trigger guard for the first time since she’d entered Jeremy’s apartment tonight.
Still, Smith didn’t move. Her palms were pressed into the table top, fingers splayed wide. She returned Jo’s stare with a remarkably passive expression on her face, intervening and highly threatening pistol notwithstanding.
“When?” Smith asked, her voice mild, her eyes clear.
“When what?” Jo’s finger was now resting on the trigger, the pad at the tip of her index finger feeling the thin ridge of the raised safety in the middle of the front face of the trigger.
“When did I murder the world?” Smith asked with a reasonable voice.
When indeed? The question was a dark and slippery stone well that if examined too closely would swallow both her and her final scream. She didn’t want to see… didn’t want to know, easier to just do what was necessary… the trigger seemed to taunt her, daring her to squeeze just a bit harder and be done.
Sitting there, looking at Smith’s face across the pistol’s sights, Jo had the most intense déjà vu. She had been here before, done this before. She had a mission to do and hesitation wasn’t how she’d been trained.
She saw a commlink held in a shaky hand, heard a woman’s voice pleading.
Jo had a mission.
“You don’t have to be what you were, Jo.” Smith said with a sad and strangely hopeful smile. “Tell me what you remember and maybe we can solve this together.”
Ash had a mission.
“You murdered the world!” Jo’s voice was hoarse, her vision blurred with unspent tears.
“How?” Smith asked, all reason and curiosity.
Ash had a mission. She had to save the world. Before her conscious mind had time to resist it, the knowledge flashed through her mind and between her lips. “The Palsy.”
“You mentioned that before, when you were unconscious.” Smith said, motionless, eyes searching Jo’s eyes.
“It killed everyone…” Jo saw whited bones littering an empty street on a small television screen.
“It didn’t kill you.” Smith observed casually.
“The Clerics found a solution.” Jo said, “they slowed it down… everyone who is left is dying slowly, our bodies are wasted, broken. We’re ghosts of people, we can’t taste or touch or smell.” Jo was crying, eyes welling, voice rough, but the hand with the pistol was as steady as one carved from stone. “We can’t cry, we can’t sleep, we can’t dream.”
“Jo, who are the Clerics?”
“They’re machines.” Jo sobbed, “They’re machines who care for us, they run the League, and they put us in a computer simulation and run missions here in the past. We thought—I thought—I thought it was a game, the only purpose left in our lives, they told us it was to keep our minds active, told us that it was the only… Victory is Life. That’s how we pray… victory is life.”
“Jo,” Smith said, trying to control her expression. Before she’d been able to mask the terror nearly completely, but the inspiration that she felt now and the hope it brought with it could not be held inside so easily. “Jo, if you could just hold off killing me for a few more minutes… I think I finally understand what’s going on here.”
Jo’s eyes hardened slightly, suspicion and anger emerging from the storm of facts that seemed to be crashing through her mind. “I can’t trust you!” Hot accusation, “I can’t trust anyone.” Sorrow. “Jeremy doesn’t love me, Jackie isn’t my friend, you are not my doctor, The Hallow isn’t a game… I’m a lie, there is no truth, Jo isn’t my name.”
Smith’s eyes widened, she arched her brow with the implied question, but left it unasked.
“My name is Ash.”
“Nice to finally meet you, Ash.” Smith said with a sad smile, “I’ve been waiting for so long.”
“Uh…” Ash said, caught off guard and not able to find any deception, sarcasm, or even irony in Smith’s statement, “I guess this is kind of a breakthrough.”
Smith snorted out a small laugh, “I hope I live to talk about it.”
“Okay.” Ash laid the gun on the table, to the right of her plate. “For now, we talk.”
Jeremy seemed to deflate with the long relieved breath he released, burying his face in his hands. Smith also took a steadying breath. “Well, not to sound too optimistic, but that was the most frightening thing that I’ve ever done.”
“You’ve done,” Ash gave Smith a look, “Seems like I did all the scary stuff.”
“Really?” Smith matched Ash’s look, “You may have done all the threatening, but I’m the one who entered the dragon queen’s lair and showed her evidence that I was both helpless and tasty.”
Ash did a double take, “Wow, you really did. Why?”
“Because I know you, Jo.”
“Ash.”
“Well, I knew Ash by reputation, if not by name—but I know Jo personally.” Smith paused, but Ash gave her time to elaborate. Eventually, Smith continued. “Of course we didn’t know your name, that’s why Dr. McParty… er, Dr. Nelson gave you the name you have now… maybe he thought it was only fair, as you gave him one… you realize, some people still call him McParty? He does not love it.”
Jo tried, but wasn’t able to restrain the smile, “Why Jo?” Ash knew that she was dwelling on the unimportant, but whether it was curiosity or a deep desire to do no more digging, she couldn’t tell.
“We call people like you Dragons, Jo…”
“Ash.”
Smith nodded, raising her hands apologetically, “And our agents started calling you the Iron Dragon after that business in New York, then it really stuck after Moscow… do you know what I’m talking about?”
Ash thought furiously… Where her memory had been empty before, now it was cluttered with facts, but not yet organized. She’d replaced the empty darkness of amnesia with the hoarder’s clutter of unindexed facts. She tried to remember her League missions, but couldn’t untangle much more than the highlights that had been haunting her dreams recently. She remembered getting hurt a lot, remembered that she was part of a four-person team… she shook her head, both in response to Smith’s question, and to clear her head, and keep her from thinking about her team. She didn’t want to know it all, and something about her team troubled her terribly. Were they dead?
“Well,” Smith continued, “when it came time to give you a name, Dr. Nelson, who is an intense nerd and cares deeply about such things, just combined the Chinese ‘Jaio Long’, or ‘dragoness’ with the Old English ‘Farris’, for ‘strong iron’, and gave you your name.
“McParty is catchier.”
“Touché, Jo.”
“Ash.”
Smith nodded again, more dismissive than
apologetic this time “Do you have a last name?”
“No.” Ash said, “Nobody does. Not in 2119.”
“2119?” Smith mused, her eyes sparkling. “So, that’s where you come from?”
“You don’t believe it?”
“Well, I’ve seen some pretty amazing things since I started with OSI.” Smith nodded conspiratorially, “For example, vampires are real.”
“What’s a vampire?”
“Really?” Smith looked surprised, “You don’t watch videos at all, do you?”
“She thought unicorns were real.” Jeremy put in.
“They are.” Smith shot back immediately.
“Really?” Jeremy looked up from his hands to give Smith an appraising look.
“No.” Smith gave Ash a conspiratorial wink. “But like I said, I’ve seen some incredible things… but time travel?” She shook her head, “I’ve seen no evidence of it.”
“What about me?” Ash said.
“Like I said, I think I understand some of what’s happening here, but do you mind if I ask you a few more questions before I give you my theory?”
“Shoot.” Ash said.
“If these clerics think I destroyed the world, and they have access to time travel equipment, why not just kill me when I was a baby and much less protected?”
“Because it’s a limitation of the hardware.” Ash said before she fully knew why. She thought a bit more, trying to dig up the relevant memories, or maybe reassemble them, “The equipment they use to send me back has a hard limitation… it can only send you back 100 years.”
“100 years, huh?” Smith seemed to consider that for a moment. “Jo, do you think the universe has ten fingers?”
“What?”
“A year has 365 days, not 100 or 1,000… and that’s not even considering the need for leap year every 4 years, and even that’s an approximation.” Smith observed. “So why is this time-travel limitation a nice human-friendly number like 100 years?”
Something about that struck Ash as compelling, but before she could think it through, Smith continued.
“Years have to do with the movement of the planet, and that’s not going to yield you a nice, base ten number with a lot of zeroes for the purposes of time travel, I don’t think.” Smith seemed to think some more before continuing, “If you assume this is a computer thing, all of digital technology is base 2, binary, which is the on/off states of transistor switches. If the limiting factor were digital, you’d expect it to be 64 or 128 years, but again, all of that’s ridiculous as the planet wasn’t in this spot a hundred years ago… if I went back 100 years in time, I’d end up floating in empty space, as the Earth would have been in a different place when I appeared in the past.”
Ash thought furiously, but didn’t have a response.
“While you’re thinking on that one, here’s another:” Smith continued after a moment of silence, “If the world was destroyed in 2020—this year—then when does time travel get invented?”
“By the Clerics?”
“Machines invented it?” Smith asked, the irony in her voice approaching sarcasm. “I guess that’s possible, if the machines were intelligent and curious enough to discover new science.”
Jo nodded, but Smith continued, “But who invented the Clerics? You say they’re machines, but its 2020 now and do you see any androids around ready to take care of mankind when most of us die?”
Jo blinked.
“I mean, if almost everyone dies pretty quickly this year, how likely is it that the few sick, struggling survivors are going to have the resources, time, and even desire to make a quantum leap forward in artificial intelligence and robotics?” Smith risked an indulgent smirk, “You think they’d mostly be resting between bouts of looting the Walgreens for cold medicine.”
“No.” Jo breathed, the hair on her arms and the back of her neck were rising away from her skin… it made no sense at all what the Clerics had led her to believe, it made no sense unless… “The world didn’t end?”
“At least not yet. And there still is no evidence of time travel.” Smith reached across the table and squeezed Jo’s hand. “Jo, You’ve been lied to, but not by me.” Smith gave Ash a focused look, through which an encouraging strength seemed to flow, “And it is my fondest desire to help you find the truth of who you are.” She paused, gaze hardening into a focused fury that Ash had not seen on her before, “And then to find the people who did this to you and make them pay for what they’ve done. To you, and to a lot of other innocent people.”
As if in punctuation, Jeremy’s phone rang.
Smith and Jo looked at Jeremy inquisitively. He looked back dully for an instant, then gave an elaborate shrug, involving his face and hands. There was few seconds of uncertainty and near-comical glancing about between the three of them before Jeremy finally asked, “Should I get it?”
Smith looked at Jo, who shrugged her assent and Smith nodded at Jeremy.
Jeremy pulled his phone from his pocket, which was set to ring in the whole house when he was here, and answered it. “Hello… who?” His face grew grave, “Are you calling from Home?”
Jo noticed the focused interest that tightened Dr. Smith’s features at that question, her eyes narrowing, her lips pursing slightly. Jeremy covered the phone with his hand, muting it. “It’s for you.” He said to Jo.
“Who would know that Jo is with you?” Smith whispered.
“It’s not for Jo.” Jeremy said, “It’s for Ash.”
***
OSI Headquarters, Rural Virginia, 2019
At Crow’s signal, Shadow raised his compact assault gun over the lip of the destroyed fountain in the center of what remained of the building’s main entrance and fired two short bursts blindly. The sound of Tink’s overlapping burst came from ten yards beyond Shadow.
Crow moved.
Shadow used the distraction of Tink’s fire to peek over a different portion of the fountain and give their opponents another two bursts aimed directly at where they’d taken up shooting positions, driving them behind cover. As Shadow began the aimed bursts, Crow sprinted from shelter behind the fountain, took three leaping steps, and vaulted the security desk, hopefully protected by the suppressing fire of his two teammates. Return fire came back, but it was blind suppressing fire, and Crow was already sailing through the air over the now unmanned security desk. As their opponents’ fire ricocheted off the fountain, Crow rolled in midair and his back bounced off the wall behind the security desk. He landed on his side not far from the upended swivel chair and the body of the security guard who had manned it. The guard looked like he’d been killed by shrapnel from the initial artillery barrage that had destroyed most of the lobby. Crow quickly checked the guard to insure he wouldn’t be a threat, then scrabbled to the console that was built in to the fixed security desk. It didn’t take him long to determine that it would be of no use to Shadow. Whether it had been damaged during the assault or had been disabled as some part of a defensive protocol, Crow couldn’t tell.
Crow moved into the corner formed by the security desk and the wall and crouched with both hands on his weapon. He made himself as ready to move as he could, balancing lightly on the balls of his feet with his back to the wall. Then Crow closed his eyes and listened.
The deafening sound of Shadow’s assault rifle, as well as the submachine guns that the installation’s defenders were using, slammed into him at sporadic intervals. The sounds from the unsilenced weapons were too loud, too overwhelming in this semi-enclosed space to be used to locate the shooters. Sometimes, after a longer exchange, Crow could hear the brief squelch of ringing in his ears as the contained explosions damaged his hearing, but then the ringing quickly ended as his body repaired the damage and his hearing cleared again. This was a tactical advantage that he’d used quite a few times before. His opponents were either wearing hearing protection, which decreased their perception of smaller, more subtle noises, or by now they were listening to a chorus of tinnitus from the gunfire.
Eyes closed, body still, Crow heard Shadow firing sporadically. He could tell from the cadence of the exchange that Shadow was firing blind or nearly so, moving to a different position behind the fountain between each shot. Crow smiled, hoping that the defenders would hear at least this much.
It became clear as Crow listened that they were receiving fire from three positions spread out across the inner edge of the spacious lobby, and that the fire was focusing on pinning Shadow down at the fountain. After a moment, they were only receiving fire from two positions, then one. As the second enemy position fell silent, Crow heard the snapping chuffs of three shots from Tink’s silenced pistol. Crow smiled, hearing a scuff from the nearest enemy position as they oriented to the new threat. Their next volley of fire was directed away from Crow—they had presumably seen or heard Tink as he dispatched the second group of defenders and had turned to engage him. Crow opened his eyes, rose into a low crouch behind the cover of the security desk, and located the last remaining target: a pair of guards in disheveled dark suits, each sporting a submachine gun. One of the guards was turned away from Crow, firing toward Tink’s position, the other was still trying to keep Shadow pinned down at the fountain.
The guard covering Shadow at the fountain threw himself to the right and swung his gun toward Crow, firing, but it was already too late. Crow’s silenced Kriss Vector K20 submachine gun burped out two two-round bursts and the two guards fell.
Crow dropped the weapon down and out of his central vision, then let his eyes sweep across the lobby. No threats. “Clear!” he shouted.
“Clear!” Tink reported, stepping out from behind the bullet pocked shelter of an interior doorway.
“Clear!” Shadow said, stepping out from behind the fountain.
They all turned toward the interior doorways, keeping plenty of space between them, dodging behind whatever cover they could find, rotating positions, covering each other as they leapfrogged forward into the inner complex.