Shifting Reality (ISF-Allion Book 1)

by Patty Jansen

  Cocaro just nodded, but her expression was grave. “I want you to keep your eyes open on our behalf when you go stationside.”

  “Anything you want me to watch in particular?” What was this? What did she know?

  “In all confidence, I doubt Bassanti’s story that they’ve taken these security measures because of New Pyongyang. I think he’s been slapped by his supervisors about being too lenient to criminal interests.”

  “That makes more sense.” Except the enforcers yesterday hadn’t seemed keen to go after the smugglers. They said they were on another mission.

  “Whatever is happening stationside, at the moment we can’t afford to stir people up, especially if we get a lot of refugees. Bassanti has given me assurance that once the enforcers have made the checks they need to make, they’ll ease off, but I have no way of checking that. I don’t think this is the time for his people to catch up on any lapsed administration work. I would like you to let me know the moment you think there is a problem, so we can interfere if necessary.”

  Melati nodded. Just what she wanted: to be a spy amongst her own people. Also, interfere in ISF parlance almost always involved weapons.

  Chapter 11

  * * *

  IN THE CAVERNOUS breakfast hall, all the base’s constructs sat at long tables, one for each cohort. Most were children of various ages, but others were almost ready to leave the base for military training. The air hummed with voices, primarily male. Grimshaw and other low-ranking constructs often were, because they filled frontline combat roles. The Kessler tech specialists and pilots were usually female, but the base did mostly Grimshaw. Workhorses.

  Melati walked through the hall looking for her boys in the sea of the same blue jumpsuits, each with their cohort tag on the chest.

  An older male construct in ISF uniform pushed a trolley through the aisle, collecting plates.

  Melati’s boys sat around a table near the back of the hall, in between two groups of almost-adult Grimshaw constructs.

  The first thing she noticed was that the boys were still not speaking much. Simo and Zax were eating, a couple of others were playing with their food—she couldn’t blame them; the high-protein diet took a bit to get used to—and a few others were staring into empty space.

  As soon as he saw her, Simo’s face lit up. He got up from the table, ran to her and flung himself in her arms. “Melati!” She was nearly knocked off her feet.

  She patted his back and ruffled his hair. “Calm down, calm down.” Men from the adjacent tables had turned and frowned at her.

  The others had also gathered around, making a knot of boys. Melati patted their heads, glancing at the table. Most of them had barely touched their food. These boys needed to grow into adolescents within the next few months; they needed to eat lots.

  “Come, sit down.” She took Simo’s hand—it was warm and sweaty in hers—and led them back to the table. She took a chair. They all sat with her, expressions expectant. “You must eat your breakfast, or you’ll be hungry—”

  Not one empty chair, but two. She counted. There were only seven.

  “Where’s Esse?” Panic rose in her. Where was Christine, where was Louise? What had happened while she’d been away?

  “He wouldn’t come out of bed,” Tyro said. Tears welled in his eyes.

  “We tried real hard, didn’t we?” asked Simo.

  “He said to leave him alone.”

  “Yeah, and he wasn’t even nice about it.”

  Zax said, “You mean he used a swear word. One we learned from Keb yesterday.”

  When the boys spoke, they spoke like one, in intertwined sentences, finishing each other’s thoughts.

  “Did you call a carer?” Christine of the C shift wasn’t half as good as Louise, but Melati still respected her work and she should have had no trouble getting the boys out of bed. They were usually full of energy.

  “ ’Course we did.”

  “The lady came and shook him, but he just lay there and did nothing.”

  “And then she called the nasty nurse who took him away.”

  “It was my fault,” Shan said. His eyes were red. “Last night, before we went to bed, I told him to stop that thing he does with his feet.”

  “Yeah, he’s kicking the chair all the time, bang, bang, bang, bang.”

  “Yeah, but he wouldn’t stop it, and it was really annoying,” Kari said.

  “Really annoying, yes. You were right to ask him. We should have done that before. Like in class yesterday.”

  “I don’t think it was you, Shan. It was that nasty lady.”

  Melati’s heart jumped. “What lady?” She should have stayed here last night, not have left them alone. “What did she do?”

  “I don’t know what she did,” Simo said. “She went into a room with Esse, but he wouldn’t talk about it later.”

  “She asked questions,” Tyro said, self-importantly. “I know ’cause I listened at the door.”

  “You shouldn’t do that!” Kari sounded outraged.

  “No, that’s bad.” Shan said.

  Tyro’s face crumpled.

  “That’s OK,” Melati said. “What sort of questions did the lady ask, Tyro?”

  “All about Keb. About coming here with us, and why Keb would want to be called Jas.”

  “Yeah, and then he wouldn’t reply, and the lady got angry.”

  “And Esse screamed, didn’t he?”

  They all nodded.

  “Which lady was this?”

  “The one who came yesterday,” Shane said.

  “I don’t like her at all.” Kari.

  “What, Laura Jennings?” Melati asked. “The nurse from the hospital?” Melati didn’t like Laura, but she was not stupid.

  Simo shook his head. “The one who came to get us after class.”

  “Louise?” Surely that was a misunderstanding. Louise was the kindest person Melati knew.

  Tyro nodded, his face grave. “I don’t like her.”

  “No, I don’t like her either.”

  “Me neither.”

  “But . . .” Melati was astonished. “What did she do wrong?”

  “She asks stupid questions. Like she has no feeling at all.”

  “She doesn’t listen,” Tika said.

  “And then she started asking all these questions about Keb.”

  “Yeah—like why didn’t she ask Keb the questions if she wanted to know these things?” Simo asked. “He’s in the hospital. She can go there.”

  “Isn’t that obvious? He isn’t Keb,” Tika said, his little face bright. “I don’t know why you can’t feel that.” He was definitely the sensitive of the cohort.

  Silence. A couple of them nodded, uncertainly.

  “But then who is he, and where is Keb?” Zax asked in a small voice.

  Shan shrugged. “Where we were . . . Before.”

  “Before?” Melati watched him intently. Constructs spoke of “Before” when referring to memories transferred to them in their pre-awaking module. Most of them eventually worked out that those events weren’t true, but the boys were too young for that.

  “It was nice. We never had to do any work.”

  “We played all the time.”

  “Outside.”

  Several of their faces took on a dreamy expression.

  “Yes,” said Zax. “Before is pink.”

  The boys nodded. Pink was good.

  “I want Keb back,” Abe said.

  “Yes,” said Shan. “I’ll go back to Before, and I’ll bring him. Because he was there. I remember it.”

  “And Esse.”

  “I want to come to Before, too,” Tika said.

  “Wait,” Melati said. “You’re saying that Keb was there with you?” Of course, there was no way they could go back, since Before consisted of artificial memories.

  “Yeah, and I think he got left behind,” Simo said.

  “He told me he was coming with us,” Shan said. “In the park, when we were playing.”
>
  Tika frowned. “There was a man at the park, and he talked to Keb.”

  “Yeah, I saw him, too.”

  “What sort of man?” Melati’s heart was thudding. None of the memories she prepared contained any adults, and certainly not men approaching the boys in a playground.

  “The man was kind of sad,” Tika said, his dark eyes large. “He stood there all alone, watching us while we played. Zax kicked the ball and it rolled near his feet. Keb went to pick it up, and then the man spoke to him.”

  “Did you hear what he said?”

  Tika shook his head. “It was too far away. I was on the swing, and when I finished, he was gone.”

  “And what did Keb do, then?”

  Tika frowned.

  Shan’s brow knitted.

  Simo raised his hand to his mouth. “He wasn’t there. Did you see him?”

  Abe shook his head.

  “I didn’t,” Tyro said.

  By God. A boy kidnapped by an older construct inside the computer. Some sort of sick joke by one of the people in the coding lab? Or an autonomous mindbase? But then, where was Keb? And who was Jas Grimshaw? Was he the strange man?

  Melati rose, her legs trembling. “Come, let’s go and see if we can visit Keb and Esse, but first you’ll have to eat your breakfast.”

  Simo smiled. “See Keb and Esse?” His eyes were bright. “You promise?”

  “I promise. But only if you eat all your breakfast.”

  “But I’m not hungry.”

  “No, me neither,” Kari said.

  “You have to eat to grow.”

  Tika said, his eyes wide, “Does it mean if we’re not hungry that we can’t see Esse and Keb?”

  Put like that, it sounded stupid. Melati sighed. “Just eat as much as you can.”

  She waited while they picked at their food.

  The constructs on the table behind her—a cohort of Kesslers who had only just started eating—were talking in agitated discussion. Melati picked up the name New Pyongyang a few times, and figured they were probably old enough to be allowed to watch all the general staff announcements.

  “. . . but how did they even get into the station?”

  “They have spies everywhere. No one will admit it, but New Pyongyang is transparent to anyone who wants to get in. The question is not how did Allion spies manage to break in, but why haven’t they done it earlier?”

  “I think it’s utter stupidity on behalf of Station Operations.”

  “They must have had moles on-station.”

  “But to take out the entire operations database, and the docking data . . .”

  “Lucky they didn’t crack the istel beacon.”

  “Who says they didn’t? Everyone knows how bad New Pyongyang security is.”

  Melati turned around. The cohort in question were seven male, two female, and wore the yellow badges which meant that they had graduated from the construct education program and were waiting for transport off-station to wherever they would be deployed.

  “Station security is just as bad here,” one of the female constructs said. Her eyes met Melati’s over the heads of her brothers. There was a chilling implied accusation in her expression. Everything was the fault of tier 2, of course.

  “Yeah.” This was one of the males. “On my last leave outing to the station, we weren’t even checked once.”

  “The Taurus Army enforcers are plain incompetent.”

  “Well, you get what you pay for, huh?”

  Seen from here, StatOp was the cause of all that went wrong at the Station. Seen from StatOp’s perspective, the barang-barang were the cause. One day, Melati would shame all of them for their stupid prejudice, but mostly she hated it when either StatOp or the barang-barang did things that confirmed these infuriating stereotypes, and sadly neither group seemed to have any interest in proving the stereotypes untrue.

  Over the heads of the cohort, Melati spotted Christine come into the dining hall, in uniform. Glad for a distraction, she rose from the table and met Christine in the middle of the noisy hall.

  She said, “I thought you’d clocked off already.”

  “Oh no, I was at the hospital. I figured you’d come soon, and thought the boys would be fine by themselves while they had breakfast.”

  “Is this because of Esse?”

  “Yes, he went back to the CAU.”

  “The boys told me that Louise asked him confronting questions. Esse was upset by that.”

  “I’m not entirely sure what happened. They don’t want to talk about it. Louise told me nothing at handover. The first thing I knew of trouble was when I couldn’t get Esse to come out of bed. He just lay there, clutching his blankets between his knees, with muscle spasms.”

  “Dead body syndrome?”

  She nodded.

  It was a condition sometimes encountered when something misfired in the brain to make muscles so over-stimulated that they froze up, like in a dead body. It looked dramatic, but was easy to fix and given Esse’s behaviour, it shouldn’t have surprised Melati nor rattled her as much as it did. “They’re not doing very well, aren’t they?”

  Christine sighed and shook her head.

  Melati glanced back to the boys, silent, watching her with wide eyes, the food on their plates mostly untouched.

  “Did you hear the general broadcast?”

  “Yes.” Christine’s face went grim. “Dr Chee has just received orders to increase the number of cohorts we’re producing.”

  Melati felt chilled. Would that make it more or less likely that her cohort would be declared unfit and discharged? No doubt they wanted battle-ready constructs, not ones who came with kid gloves and an instruction manual.

  “I don’t even understand what Allion wants here.” New Pyongyang was only on the other side of New Hyderabad. The war was something that happened elsewhere. Not in this system, where the abundance of asteroids made for hazardous manoeuvring for large war ships. That was the station’s protection against attack—wasn’t it?

  “It’s probably about Anak again. They want bases on the mining stations, because they want to engineer the planet’s atmosphere.”

  ISF considered the planet theirs. They wanted to engineer it, too, but they were still drawing up plans, debating the method and the cost, while quietly not admitting that the project was beyond their resources. They did not want Allion there because they did not ever again want to be dependent on Allion for technology. Like happened at Mars.

  Seriously, how much more bad news could she stand? Melati looked over the hall and all the familiar faces of the older constructs, who might be about to see fighting action. The station was in no state to defend itself.

  She put a hand on Christine’s shoulder. “Thanks for staying with the boys. I’ll handle things now.”

  Christine left.

  The boys waited for Melati, while someone from the kitchen removed their plates. The man spoke to Simo, holding out a half-empty plate. Simo shook his head. The kitchen hand turned to Melati and frowned.

  Soon, everyone would know that she had trouble with her cohort. At the same time, there would be pressure to churn out more cohorts and Simo and the boys might be retired before she’d had a chance to help them. The thought made her feel sick. Where did retired construct cohorts even go? StatOp had no facilities for raising children. If war came, who would have the time? Who would care?

  The kitchen hand cleaned the table, and Melati and the boys walked hand-in-hand to the hospital, like a mother with a bunch of children. The boys chatted and giggled. Their laughter sent shivers over Melati’s back. They had no idea how precarious their position was. They were innocent.

  She’d lived her life as someone who’d been written off. Unable to have children, she had no value for barang-barang men. Unwilling to play Ari’s or Grandma’s political games, she was written off as spy for ISF. And even though ISF told her how valuable she was to them, not many members of the force acted according to those words.

  Al
l I want is for people to respect each other and give each other equal chances.

  In the CAU, they found Laura Jennings in her glass-walled office guarding the activation room, which would be prepared for a new cohort soon.

  She looked up when Melati knocked on the door and eyed her up and down as she stood in the door opening, holding the hands of Shan and Zax, and the rest of the boys clumped around her.

  “I’ve brought the boys to see Keb and Esse,” Melati said.

  “I don’t know that it’s a good idea to allow them in here,” Laura said, looking at the boys.

  “They need to see their brothers and have confirmation that they will return to the cohort.” Melati added, in a soft voice, “I don’t think they’ll make any progress otherwise. They’ve had a very disturbing night.”

  Laura nodded, her mouth twitching. She hit a few keys on her computer. “I’ll have to ask the doctor if it’s all right.”

  “Sure.”

  Melati waited.

  Simo went to the window that looked into the activation room, standing on his toes and pressing his nose against the glass. The room was lit only by a few fluorescent tubes against the back wall. The two boys were silhouettes on their beds, surrounded by blinking machines.

  “Are they in there?” asked Tyro, who was too small to see.

  “I don’t know. I’m not feeling anything,” said Shan.

  “They’re asleep,” Melati said. It looked to her like both boys were sedated.

  Simo knocked on the window and yelled, “Esse!” There was no reply, so he wormed his fingers between the door and its frame.

  Laura jumped up. “No, you can’t—”

  Simo was too quick. He slid open the door and he and Tyro ran into the room, followed by the others, like geckoes escaping Uncle’s grasp when he was trying to chase them from the kitchen. Laura ran in after them.

  “Boys!” Melati called.

  They were already at the bed, stroking Esse’s hands. Tyro burst into tears, and Shan comforted him, but his cheeks, too, were wet.