He picked something up and walked back toward Deirdre and the hunk of raw meat. She stared. He’d found a large, thick branch while she slept, and had removed the twigs and bark. The end tapered to a fine point. He moved to the mouth of the beast and pushed the pointed end in before glancing up at her. “Hold it still.”
She took a step before pausing. “How’d you fashion the point?”
He beckoned at the raw shoulders of the dead animal, reminding her she needed to hold the creature still.
She knelt down and seized the “shoulders” of the meat slab, glaring at Jeffrey and his selective silence.
To her surprise, he spoke. “I’d normally take greater care with inserting this stick, but we won’t be here long and it’s not worth the hassle. And we frankly don’t have the greatest supplies for this, so we’ll make do with what’s available.” He checked to be sure she held the shoulders down before wriggling the sharp stick into the mouth and throat and down the interior of the creature’s body.
“How’d you make the point, Jeffrey?”
“Effectively.”
She rolled her eyes. “You took the knife while I was asleep.”
“It’s my knife.”
“So you put it back when you were done?”
“Naturally.”
“Why not just put it next to me, then?”
She could hear the smile in his voice. “What’s the fun in that?”
The stick emerged from the creature’s posterior, and Deirdre resisted the urge to compare that part of the creature’s anatomy to her human companion.
They each grabbed an end of the stick, lifted, and carried the beast toward the fire. Jeffrey had tied pyramid-shaped bundles of sticks together using twine made from weaving the bark off branches salvaged from the lake. He’d pushed those sticks into the ground, leaving them a place to stow the ends of the spit. The arrangement left the meat above the open fire. The pair took turns turning the meat over the fire, ensuring that the meat cooked evenly.
They sat in silence, something she found maddening. Her life had been a whirlwind of activity and noise, and she’d rarely been alone or faced extended periods of silence. The sounds of television, music, people talking, the general thrum generated by the electronics in and around her home… those sounds had become part of her, and their sudden removal felt like the loss of part of her soul. She kept flicking her eyes toward Jeffrey, trying to ascertain his interest in conversation. She knew she had questions. How had he come to her father’s attention? Who was the mysterious woman who’d owned his heart, a love strong enough to embolden him to refuse Oswald’s command to marry his headstrong young daughter? And what had happened to that woman? She remembered their meeting in the parking garage the day before, and the impression she’d gotten that he’d lost someone close to him. Had she left him? Had she died? She swallowed. Or had she been killed, punishing him for his refusal to cooperate?
Though she’d prefer conversation, Jeffrey made clear his preference for silence. He faced the lake and watched the water, occasionally moving to the fire to rotate the meat.
She opted to respect his desire for silence; if she pressed for conversation, he might well leave. She preferred silence to solitude.
Hours later, she heard the words she’d longed to hear. “It’s done. Time to eat.”
She rose to her feet and felt her mouth water. She wished she’d been able to smell the meat cooking, but the suits blocked external odors. She glanced down at her suit, illuminated in the darkness by the flickering flames of the fire and the steady luminescence of the swirling Ravagers. “Great! Um… how do we eat?”
“First, we need to re-secure our perimeter.” He looked around. “We should be safe from carnivore attacks; if they haven’t shown up after that meat’s cooked for several hours, they aren’t coming. All dead, most likely. We still have to worry that the Ravagers will try to infiltrate our camp.”
He moved to the lake and carefully splashed water from the basin to the land, moistening the ground once more. He controlled the water’s trajectory, ensuring nothing hit the fire. Deirdre followed his lead, and they slowly watered the ground between the lake and the fire. She wondered about the ground around the fire, though. If even a small number of Ravagers breached that area and somehow infested the meat, and then she took a bite…
“This should help.” He plucked something from the ground, a tree branch hollowed out by insects or water, leaving a deep hole in the wood. He moved to the lake, dipped the branch into the water, and then carried it over and dumped it carefully around the fire. He repeated the process another five times before offering the “bucket” to her. She repeated the process until the ground around the fire softened beneath her suit, her boots sinking into the damp earth.
He turned to face her. “You’ll need to wriggle an arm free inside your suit.” He demonstrated, using his left hand to pull and bend the right arm of the suit while pulling his right arm in toward his body. The right arm soon hung limply by his side. She copied the process, freeing her right arm inside the suit. She took the opportunity to scratch an itch on her stomach, sighing contentedly.
Jeffrey opened the flap and lowered the zipper with his left arm, just enough to wriggle his right arm free of the suit. His right hand carried the same knife he’d used earlier. He moved to the smoked meat and Deirdre followed, undoing the flap and lowering her own zipper. With the seal broken on the suit, the aroma floated inside. It smelled fantastic, leaving her mouth watering and her heart horrified. She’d killed this animal just hours earlier, had sawed its skin off… and now she couldn’t wait to eat its cooked flesh.
What was wrong with her?
Jeffrey didn’t seem concerned. He sawed a chunk of meat off the beast and pulled it inside his suit. After zipping the suit closed and smoothing the flap down, he offered her the knife. She took it while watching him. He wriggled his left arm free of the sleeve so that both arms were free inside the armor. The suit gyrated in a strange manner, and a few seconds later a small chunk of the meat he’d pulled into his armor appeared inside the helmet. Jeffrey snapped the meat up with his teeth and started chewing, eyes closed, a blissful expression on his face.
Deirdre sawed a chunk of meat off the roasted carcass, pulled it inside her suit, and zipped up. She struggled and squirmed before finally freeing her left arm from the metal sleeve. The smell drove her nearly mad, exacerbating the raging hunger she felt. She tore a smaller bit of meat from the chunk in her suit and slid the bite-sized piece inside the helmet. But her fingers weren’t long enough to get the meat to her mouth, and she nearly cried in frustration. She finally laid down on the ground and arched her back up, letting gravity do what her fingers could not. Juice lined the interior of the helmet, but she didn’t care. She snatched the morsel up with her teeth and chewed ravenously. She, too, closed her eyes, the taste far better than any gourmet meal she’d ever consumed.
“Eat slowly,” Jeffrey announced around his own chewing. “It’s critical that we eat as much as possible without getting sick, because we don’t know when we’ll get the chance to eat again. If you gorge quickly, you may find something a lot less pleasant than juice inside your helmet.”
She slowed down.
They each consumed the original bits of meat and sawed off additional chunks, eating slowly over the course of an hour. When she finally swallowed the last bite, she’d never felt more sated by a meal, or more in need of a nap.
“I’ll take the first sleeping shift,” Jeffrey said, settling down on the ground. “Give me at least four hours before you wake me.”
And just like that, he fell into a deep sleep.
She stared at him, startled that he’d fallen asleep so quickly. His snoring soon assaulted her ears, much as his manners had assaulted her sense of decency. He’d not offered to take the first shift like a gentleman, hadn’t even opened the topic for debate.
She grabbed a long stick from the woodpile, trudged over near the fire, sat down, and sul
ked. Periodically, she poked the fire and stirred the embers, ensuring that the fire kept burning. Outside the light, she had no idea why they bothered maintaining the fire now. They’d already cooked and consumed their food. There were few predators—if any—still alive, and thus the fire deterrent was unnecessary. And as she’d noted, more warmth meant faster evaporation of the water they’d splashed upon the ground, eliminating the liquid barrier for their most lethal enemy.
The food settled in her stomach. Her eyelids grew heavy. She stood, found the “bucket,” and saturated the ground around them once more, then added more of the damp driftwood to the fire. She sat down and thought about Roddy. She’d hurt him by her actions and decisions. He deserved better than that. He was a good man, selfless, the type of man who’d offer to take the first guard shift in a situation such as this. Her eyes fell upon the still, prone form of Jeffrey. She felt a moderate bit of hurt that he’d judged her harshly before even meeting her, though she now understood his reasons. And she couldn’t help but feel that his decision had been best for her because it meant she’d ended up with Roddy.
And then she’d thrown it all away, choosing deceit and ego and a foolish plan over a good man.
She laid down on the ground on her back and looked up at the stars once more. She knew where he and her father had gone, and knew it was Roddy’s first flight into space. How would he handle the shock? And what would her father do when he learned she wasn’t on board? She swallowed. Her choices had left her running for her life with a strange man who’d rejected her once and preferred her dead now. Her choices might well lead to Roddy’s death as well.
She let the tears flow as her eyes closed.
She had no awareness that she’d fallen asleep, no dreams scared her upon waking. She knew only that bright sunlight blinded her, knew only that a thin film of the dark, oily Ravagers rolled over her Diasteel armor, probing, looking for an opening.
She sat upright. How long had she slept? Was Jeffrey okay?
She looked around. She felt her pulse race and could hear the sound of her heart beating inside her mobile Diasteel prison as she realized her predicament.
Jeffrey had vanished.
—7—
MICAH JAMISON
VIDEO INPUT SENSORS guided by the primary processing unit focused on predefined regions of the subject’s face. Images were gathered many times per second and turned into bits and bytes of information, fed into a specialized processing center that traced the changes in position of the lips and cheeks, dilation and movement of eyes, minor adjustments in the wrinkling of the area above the eyes. Those microscopically measurable changes—all detected over the course of just a few seconds—were codified and sent to a behavioral and emotional processing zone, a system that matched particular forms of what humans called “non-verbal communication” and “body language” against a vast database showing the most common “meanings” of those forms of communication. The patterns were matched against the universe of observed human targets, weighted more heavily to patterns specific to the subject under observation.
Once matching patterns and likely emotional states were assessed—the human, Sheila Clarke, was “motivated to action”—the system processed the audio input. Distinct tones turned into phonemes, combinations of phonemes became words, words were matched against a database of millions of such auditory communication mechanisms, filtered against the particular language, dialect, and historical timeframe in which they were uttered. Those words provided data regarding the literal meaning of the uttered words. Other processing units then measured specific changes in word delivery speed, checked the volume and pitch of each syllable relative to its neighbors, and used those to pattern match intent. The patterns of Sheila’s most recent spoken words suggested genuineness, indicating that she meant the words just as she’d spoken them. Variations in verbal tone and volume could suggest an intent opposite the literal words, or some subtle variation in between. The processing systems concluded that was not the case here.
The available data suggested that Sheila Clarke did, indeed, want to participate in the efforts to reverse the effects of the Ravagers and follow the stated goal of making the perpetrators deviate from their desired actions and outcomes.
The magnificent machine brain, stored inside the head of a being Sheila Clarke knew as “Micah Jamison,” processed the entirety of the verbal and non-verbal communications received from Sheila Clarke in a unit of time so short that it would be considered statistically insignificant from “instantaneous.” The brain also processed other sensory input signals, made note of weather patterns reported by the sensory bots monitoring the outside environment, and carried on simultaneous communications with a half dozen of the robots created by hands manipulated by the body form called Micah Jamison.
Outwardly, all of the sensor-to-data transformation, pattern matching, and response selection showed only as a faint smile on the face of one Micah Jamison, the very human-looking robot.
His brain reverted to a previously computed plan of action. With Sheila Clarke now committed to assisting in the resistance effort, he needed to ensure she knew what she faced in making that choice.
“Before I get into the details of what you can do—what we will do—I need to make sure you fully understand what we’re fighting against. It’s necessary because at some point, our plans will fail, and your situation will seem bleak, and you’ll want to quit. I’ll try my best to prevent you from experiencing anything too serious, but…”
“Battle plans last until you first encounter the enemy.” She nodded. “I understand.”
“I take it that, after the events of the past day or two, you’ve concluded that much of what you considered reality is, in fact, an illusion?” He frowned. “No, not an illusion. Perhaps a better phrase would be wildly incomplete.”
She frowned. “I haven’t had much time to think about it. But if you’d told me a week ago that there were people preparing to unleash swarms of miniature robots programmed to destroy the entire city and everyone in it, that I’d see bombs that were flying under control rather than as simple projectiles, that I’d travel in a car that drove itself and handled moving underwater as well as it did any road, that I’d try to kill you, and that you’d turn out to be a very human-seeming robot…no, I wouldn’t have believed that.”
Micah offered another faint smile. “Remember that sentiment later on.” He ignored the confused look on her face at his cryptic comment. “Some of what you’ve been told is true, or largely so. It is true that human civilization centuries ago entered a time of incredible peace and prosperity, triggering explosive growth and advancement in technology and our understanding of the world and the universe in which we reside. It is also true that several people living in that time had the foresight to know that even good times end, and they distilled the most critical technologies into what we today call the Time Capsule. It was buried, and had the intelligence to assess when it would be both needed and usable. Roughly two centuries ago, it surfaced.”
She nodded. “And those who found it shared the findings with the world.”
He shook his head. “They did no such thing. The original Time Capsule has been seen by only a very few people in our recent history. Anything you’ve seen is a fabricated device with only a small subset of the original material available for general display and consumption.”
“But—”
“Sheila, think about it. You must know that the East has a Time Capsule as well. Who has the original in that scenario?”
“But—” She frowned. “I assume by your comment that we don’t.”
“Neither the East nor the West are displaying the original.”
“Then where is the original?”
“We’ll get to that in time. The key point is this: those who found the Capsule were far from altruistic. They recognized that, given the desperate state of humanity, the staggeringly low numbers, the complete destruction of civilization, the total lack of available technology�
�� they knew they could rebuild the world and put themselves in a position of control and power.”
“So they… kept it all?”
He nodded. “A few items were released in the original capsules in easily consumable forms. Essential medicines, simple construction materials and techniques, the most fundamental weaponry for defense against the predators who made meals of men and women and children who had nothing but sticks and rocks for defense. That stopped the bleeding, so to speak. The exact duplicate Time Capsule was no more a duplicate than the original in the story you’ve heard; both were new constructs filled with what those who found the devices decided to share. They left what were widely considered encoded messages and information inside both replicas, suggesting that the ancients wanted only those worthy enough to crack the code to have access to the technology, or at least first access. Future innovations in things like power generation, transportation, mass production, computers, the Internet… those were all ‘found’ in the Time Capsule by women and men who profited handsomely.”
She nodded. “Just like history records.”
“History is written by the winners, Sheila. Those revered individuals found nothing, because there was nothing in the public Time Capsules that they could find. Those who controlled the original Time Capsule identified those through whom they could wield control over each new technology and gave them those answers. Those we laud as geniuses for their ingenuity in cracking codes did no such thing.”
Sheila shivered. “The people who controlled the true Capsule… they were that manipulative?”
Micah nodded. “Everything that’s happened has been according to their plan. And I do mean everything. Humanity had been thoroughly ravaged by tragedies and calamities after the Golden Ages. They were malnourished, sickly, and to be blunt, floundering on the edge of their weakest genetic potential in tens of thousands of years, leaving them prone to possible extinction. The Finders, if you will, wanted their own version of utopia, but recognized that those living at the time of the Finding… weren’t good enough. Humanity needed time to recover. Many generations of improved medicine, nutrition, and the like would strengthen our genetic pool back to its strongest potential. They needed a lot of people to rebuild the gene pool. So…”
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