by Adam Thielen
After Kate had left Beijing airspace, Desre joined her and Cho in the cockpit. She knelt between them.
Tsenka looked at her. “What’s up, Desre?”
Desre looked to Kate. “I just want to say that I appreciate you risking your life to get me out of that prison.” She turned to Cho. “And you made it possible for me to live a real life.” She then stared at the gauges and screens on the cockpit control panel. “But I can’t go back to the New Republic with you.”
Kate sighed.
“Why not?” asked Tsenka.
“Because there, I’ll be tagged and monitored,” she explained. “I would likely end up confined to a university or conscripted by a corporation. And that’s after your agency is done with me.”
“So to thank us, you are going to leave us,” said Kate, glaring forward.
“I’m so sorry, Kate. About Drew, about everything,” said Desre, staring up at Jones. “But I want to be free. More than anything.”
“I know,” said Kate, her tone softening. “You’ve earned it. Can you at least keep in touch? Maybe answer a few questions on occasion?”
“Defo!” the seer replied.
“Where will you go?” asked Cho. “Where should we drop you?”
“Well, I had heard the collectives in northern Norway have fairly lax mage restrictions.”
“Relatively,” said Kate.
“You know, you could just let us drop you off on the East Coast and pretend we don’t know where you are,” suggested Cho.
“Mage life really isn’t that bad in the NRI,” added Kate.
“Maybe someday,” said Somer.
“Alright,” said Cho. “Norway it is.”
As soon as a course had been plotted, Kate left the cockpit to Cho and claimed the cot for the following nine hours while Somer lay on the cross-hatched aluminum floor, besmirching her brother in a soft whisper to the caged rabbits. Tsenka caught up on messages from Matthias and watched live feeds of the ongoing chaos in Beijing.
The women spent the next day bonding over card games and stories about childhoods, eating at several stops along the way, and subjecting each other to what they thought was the greatest music ever. Somer may have snuck a bottle of wine on board and for one hour only, Kate allowed Sage and Rosemary to hop about the inside of the craft. When the gray one, as Jones called it, chewed through an exposed fiber cable, the party ended, and Tsenka had to chase the critters around until they eventually retreated inside the pet carrier.
After much pleading by both Desre and Tsenka, Kate told them hyperbolic tales of the first NRI strike force, as it was called at the time, making sure to embellish the parts involving her AI companion. During the night, while the others slept, Kate checked the dead-drop box and discovered the unread message from Drew. It read:
I will not say the words again, but I hope someday you will understand what your companionship has meant for me over the years. What I am today, I owe to you and Taq. I emerged from the abyss, and now I must return to it. If I have to repeat this life a million times, I will consider myself fortunate. I will not hold it against you if you use my schematics to create a new me. Also, please do not waste time being angry with Taq when you see him again. The love you share is beautiful, and if I have one regret, it is questioning your devotion to him in order to validate my own feelings. Farewell, Kate Jones, you will always be an amazing woman.
Kate began to cry, stifling the noise to hide it from the others. She felt a pain in her heart that she was convinced would never abate, and that thought filled her with despair.
She spent the next several hours poring over the data stolen from the nocturnal facility. She learned how they were interfering with the brain’s normal function to control the bodies of the vampires, as well as how they managed to stop their ability to reject the implants, data that Cho would find very useful.
One troubling document laid out the mission statement for the research and even for Chantech’s general military buildup. Much like the New Republic, they too were preparing for a fight with Haven. The statement spoke with great confidence of the continued existence of the group, alluding to intelligence that far surpassed that uncovered by the NRI but gave no specifics. The hacker wondered if she might be able to find it deep within the corporation’s intelligence service network. And just as importantly, would she have time?
Once landed in the city of Alta, Norway, Desre hugged Kate and Tsenka and waved goodbye to the rabbits. She had little money but felt confident she would find a way to manage. Cho took her crown, explaining that the technology was too important to have it just walk around on someone who wanted to be free. Somer understood and wondered if her display at the facility had made them fearful. She disembarked and made for the visitor's center to register as a resident, find temporary lodgings, and begin her new life.
* * *
When Kate returned home to the compound, she ran inside the entrance and called for Taq. She had hoped to find him on the couch shit-posting or perhaps just lying around in their bed, but when he was at neither of those places, she traveled into the mage wing and to his private room. She could hear noises from inside and frowned.
But when she knocked on the door, Taq pulled it open and grabbed her around the waist.
“You’re okay!” he said, holding her to his chest. “I was so worried.”
“We just talked a couple hours ago,” she said, hugging him back.
“I missed you, too,” he replied.
Kate moved her head to look past him into the room and her eyes lit up.
“You got rid of all the… gear in here.”
“Yeah,” said Taq. “I was wasting my life hunting for ghosts.”
“Taq,” said Kate, tearing up. “Drew told me the truth.”
“Oh… I’m—I’m sorry, hon.”
“He said that I let you do it. I think maybe he was right.”
“I shouldn’t have hidden it from you,” said Taq. “I just—”
“I know,” said Kate.
“Poor Drew. Why’d he decide to tell you then?”
“We fought,” said Kate, sobbing. “I was awful to him, and I think he actually loved me.”
Taq leaned back to look Kate in the eyes as she sniffled. “Of course he did!” he said with absolute assuredness. Kate sobbed again, allowing herself to truly begin to mourn the loss of a friend of over two decades. Taq held her close and began to cry with her.
* * *
The young woman standing in front of the house was pretty in her own way, if not in a traditional sense. Her dark brown hair was cropped short with braids starting at her temple and wrapping behind her ears. Loose hair went whatever direction the breeze dictated, and bangs fell over her forehead.
Tsenka Cho’s synthetic skin and electric eye betrayed the suffering she had once felt, but her expression did not. For this evening’s visit, she wore a silky white low-cut blouse and a ruffled denim skirt. Her arms and legs were visibly muscular and unnaturally smooth.
The normally unflappable vampire’s heart fluttered as she reached for the notification panel on the door. What was I then? she wondered. What am I now? Cho’s HUD began to map the interior with the sound of the doorbell, but she shut it off.
Matthias opened the door wearing a robe, pretending not to recognize the lady before him. “I suppose you want a handshake,” he said, imitating himself. Tsenka didn’t laugh, and Matthias straightened up with concern. She then grinned and leapt at him, wrapping her arms around the back of his neck. He began to hug her back, and she pushed his hands away then grabbed him by the collar of his robe and pulled his face close.
“No mushy shit,” she ordered, kissing him on the lips.
He pulled her inside, their lips still locked together, spun around, and then slammed the door. She pulled away to gaze at him.
“Bedroom then?” he asked.
“Bedroom,” she confirmed.
“You sure you are ready for this?”
“The question i
s, are you ready for this?” replied Tsenka.
“Hey, we’ll bang, okay?” deadpanned Matthias.
Cho grinned and shook her head. “Get your ass in there, Matt.”
* * *
The magnitude of time, as it is with all dimensional units, is relative to one’s perception. It is neither long nor short, and yet it is measurable. In the grand scheme, the duration of any given consciousness is at best the blink of an eye. For eons, the universe went about its business without so much as a peep from entities whose main drive was self-preservation.
No one enters the world with the experience of waiting all those years just for their turn to come around, and outside of time spent dreaming, no one wakes in the morning having waited eight hours in bed. If you fall asleep for an eternity, grizzled and weary with life’s trials, will you know how much time has passed when you wake again inside a new vessel, smooth and shiny?
Eighty-six billion years later, give or take, a robot named Drew puts the finishing touches on his first humanoid body. The arms and legs are obviously mechanical, with large metal joints covered with carbon fiber connecting the segments and torso. The hands are intricate, with high-strength filaments in order to curl and straighten the digits. The head is more or less stolen from a mannequin then chiseled, etched, and painted to Drew’s designs. It doesn’t move, but that sort of innovation can come later.
It is early in the morning, and the sun has not yet risen over the horizon. Drew checks and double-checks the instruction set for the transplant of his crystal brain. He does a trial run with a plain glass orb, making minute changes to ensure nothing catastrophic will occur. The floor is padded, and Ms. Jones has been instructed on how to polish out scuffs should the brain fall and rub against something coarse but even so, Drew is very nervous.
He sets the process in motion, falling asleep and waking moments later in his new body. He takes a few minutes to run diagnostics and practice simple tasks. The AI then hurries to Kate’s room, knowing Taq will not be there. As quietly as he can, he takes a seat next to her bed and gazes at her face. He has spent so much time exploring what is behind her skin that he is relieved to be on the other side, admiring her physical features.
And there Drew sits, unmoving as the faint clock display on the wall ticks higher, and rays of light shine into the room. The robot had programmed human mannerisms into his firmware in order to better understand and blend in. He dreams of the day when he will finally walk among them. After sitting for several minutes, he becomes impatient, and his emulation program tells him to stand and leave. In a rare act of defiance, he disables his programming, knowing that to make exceptions for any reason is to potentially defeat the purpose of the human experience. It’s a risk he is willing to take.
Two hours pass and Kate’s internal alarm rings. Her eyes flutter open, and she catches sight of the synthetic man in his new body for the first time. A broad smile lights up her face, the rest of the room, and Drew’s existence.
It was worth it.
End.
You made it all the way through! If you have not already read them, Integral is the first entry in the series, and takes place roughly forty years before the events in Pivotal, while Visceral is the second story taking place twenty years prior. There is but one story left to tell. I will see you again in Terminal.
Your feedback is important to me and to readers looking for their next worthwhile experience. Take a moment, if you have the time, to leave a review on Pivotal’s Amazon.com page, and tell everyone what you thought!
Table of Contents
Episode 1: The Legacy
Episode 2: The Dinner
Episode 3: The Reunion
Episode 4: Burned
Episode 5: A Bloody Mess
Episode 6: Facing Evil
Episode 7: The Conspiracy of Kate
Episode 8: Chasing Desre
Episode 9: The Captive and the Free
Episode 10: The Kiss and the Crunch
Episode 11: Fighting the Power
Episode 12: Roland's Lieutenants
Episode 13: The Damned
Episode 14: Entranced
Episode 15: That Escalated Quickly
Episode 16: The Plan
Episode 17: The Trade
Episode 18: Chinese Handcuffs
Episode 19: Finishing the Job
Episode 20: Epilogue