Disparity

by Eric Warren

“Do you know what happened to your brother?” Charlie asked.

  She froze. “What? What are you talking about?” she said.

  “Your brother. He was in charge of the program releasing the children, correct?”

  “So?” Where was he going with this?

  “And you never heard from him again after he left the colony.”

  She narrowed her eyes. “I always figured you had him killed.” She’d never questioned it. Marcus could be careless, even though he’d insisted on going out to check on the remaining children. She’d begged him not to go, but he’d insisted they needed status updates on them to make sure they were having the expected impact. The general thought was that six years in they should have started to see basic changes to the machine culture and Marcus was determined to find out what was going on out there. Echo knew the moment he left the colony she’d never see him again. Despite having a refractor, she just somehow knew.

  “I did not kill him. I never had the chance,” Charlie said, his voice sinister. She waited for him to continue. She didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of knowing he’d goaded her. “Arista did not give Frees his autonomy.”

  “What? Of course she did. What does that have to do with my brother?”

  “Your brother encountered Frees—or as he was known then, Mortimer—on his farm. In Colorado.”

  “Colorado was where we’d dropped one of the children six years before,” Echo said. “It was his first stop.”

  “Marcus died in Colorado,” Charlie said. “On Mortimer’s farm. He gave him autonomy and Mortimer killed him.”

  “No. That can’t be true. Why would he give some random machine autonomy? He knew the rules. And how would you know this anyway if you had nothing to do with it?” Her hands began to shake. And she couldn’t stop them.

  She could almost hear Charlie’s smile. “I lived inside Frees’ head for over a month. I know every part of him. I have seen all of his memories. He was there when Marcus died. He even buried him on the farm.”

  “But…” Echo felt weak in the knees. She needed to sit down. This couldn’t be possible.

  “I would have told you earlier if I had known,” Charlie said, his voice full of sympathy now. “But I only learned of it after I was almost destroyed.”

  “And you’re sure it was him. That stupid friend of hers?”

  “There is no doubt.”

  Echo found a seat and steadied herself against it. She glanced over to the window that was still blown out from where Frees had jumped from her room. It had been covered with a temporary piece of transparent aluminum to keep out the rain. He had stood here, in her presence, taunting her. “Why are you telling me this?” Though on some level she knew it was just another of his manipulations. But at the moment she didn’t care.

  “We can take both of them back. And you can have him disassembled. Extract the memories and see for yourself. And then you can locate his grave. Pay your human respects.”

  Echo’s vision blurred from a combination of tears and rage. She would extract his memories. And she’d make him suffer like no machine had ever suffered before. If he thought the disassembly room had been extreme, wait until he saw what she had planned for him.

  “We get them on my train,” Charlie said. “And they won’t know until we are across. I will take one and you take the other.”

  “How do we get them on the train, exactly? They didn’t arrive here through the subway; they would have been flagged.”

  “They must have another vehicle. I will find and destroy it.”

  “And then…?” Echo asked, her mind racing with the possibilities.

  “Revenge.”

  THIRTY-THREE

  “WHERE IS IT OPENING?” Arista ran around the side of the car to Blu, who was still stuck in her seat, trying to clear up the interference. Frees had gotten out as well, but Jennings remained in the back with Foley. “Is it in the same place?”

  “I think so, my equipment can’t pinpoint it yet, but it’s coming,” David said.

  “Then we need to get back to Central Park,” Arista said. “Maybe we can intercept Echo and Charlie before they go through.”

  “With what?” Frees asked. “It isn’t as if we can build a wall in five minutes.”

  “We have this car, we could use it as a barricade.” But even as she suggested it she knew it wouldn’t work. The gate had been several widths of the cruiser. They would be able to just maneuver around it. Somehow they needed to intercept—

  “Wait,” David said, interrupting her thoughts. “The readings are fading. I don’t see it on my scanners anymore. It was like it was preparing to appear, then didn’t.”

  Arista turned to Frees. “Could they be testing it? Seeing if it is warm enough to run?”

  He shrugged. “Possibly. Or maybe it was a false reading. We’ve never had to detect a gate before. We’ve always known where they show up.”

  “What are the odds it doesn’t show up in the same place?” she asked.

  “Low. They want Echo back, why would they risk messing something up by changing where the gate appeared? If they even have that capability.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised if they do. David didn’t seem like one to skimp on the details.”

  Blu looked up, her eyes wide. Arista nodded. “Yeah. Our version built the thing that brought us here. But I don’t know if he sent us here on purpose or by accident. It was supposed to be a gateway into the past, not another dimension.”

  “But the past is another dimension,” Blu said. “It’s one where things happened in the exact same order as ours, but at a later date. In the multiverse, nothing is impossible.”

  Could the gate have always been nothing more than a dimensional portal and the only thing that was wrong were the coordinates? Though it still didn’t answer the question of whether David meant to send them there or not.

  “Is there any trace left, David?” Arista asked, hoping he could hear her through Blu’s interface.

  “Not that I can see. But I’ll keep looking. In the meantime—”

  An earsplitting screech of metal and thunder cut him off before the line went dead.

  “Dad? Dad!” Blu yelled. “What was that? What happened?”

  “I don’t know. C’mon,” Arista said. “We’ve got to get back down there.” She took off in the direction of the subway entrance which wasn’t but half a block away. She’d chosen to park in this alley for a purpose.

  “Wait? What do I do?” Jennings yelled.

  “Make sure the cruisers are protected!” Arista yelled back. “And anything else you might think is a threat.”

  Frees and Blu were quick on her heels as her feet splashed through the puddles of the alleyway. “Do you think he’s okay?” Blu asked as they ran, their hoods flapping behind them. Arista hadn’t bothered to raise hers again. She knew she was taking a risk but her mind was focused on getting back down to David. Not only did she want to make sure he was okay, he was their only way to determine if the gate was opening again.

  “That’s what we’re going to find out,” she said, rounding the opening and taking the stairs two at a time into the subway station. At the bottom of the stairs Frees picked up speed ahead of her and ran into the turnstile, breaking it from its housing. An alarm blared in the station. “We could have found another way!”

  “No time,” he shouted over his shoulder. “It doesn’t matter now anyway.”

  He’d change his tune when a dozen NYC cops flooded this station looking for three known fugitives.

  Blu bolted past the broken entryway and Arista followed behind, checking behind her to make sure no one else was following…yet. There were only stunned onlookers; sponsored and not, staring at them with interest but not willing to intervene.

  They ran down the second staircases to the train levels and without even looking Frees jumped on the tracks, racing off down toward where David had parked the van. Arista and Blu couldn’t keep up. When Blu jumped she stumbled on her landing,
hitting the ground with both hands to steady herself. Arista jumped down beside her, feeling the slight hum of the maglev tracks beneath their feet. “C’mon. Frees will get there first, he’ll make sure your dad is okay.”

  Blu nodded and allowed Arista to help her up. They both followed Frees into the tunnel as the people on the platform watched with interest. Someone would be calling this in. Arista only hoped Jennings could diffuse it until the gate reopened.

  As they made their way down the tunnel Arista kept expecting a train to come rumbling down the tracks but they made it the entire way without seeing any. According to the information the Device had recorded earlier when they’d left the tunnels trains ran on this line every minute to minute and a half. It took them two minutes to reach David. Where were the trains?

  But as soon as they came around the bend all thoughts of late trains left her head. The place looked like a war zone. Fires raged all over the area. David had positioned the van in an open area, full of nothing but support beams where two maglev lines merged into one. He’d originally parked right beyond the fork, off the tracks. Only now what was left of the van was on fire and in three distinct pieces, with what seemed to be a repair vehicle of sorts on its side in the place where the van had once been. Arista ran for the repair vehicle, checking to see if there were any other casualties. But the cab was empty.

  “Dad!” Blu screamed, running for the wreckage. Frees was already there, digging through burning pieces of metal. “Where is he? Do you see him?”

  Frees methodically threw heavy pieces of metal away from the pile, each one only revealing more wreckage. Arista ran over to one of the other sections but it was completely engulfed in flames. The scanning equipment had been in there and if David had been staring at it when the accident happened…

  “Found him!” Frees yelled, tossing another piece of metal thirty feet down the maglev line. Arista trotted over and held Blu back as Frees pulled David’s limp body from the wreckage. Frees probably didn’t even notice one of his legs was on fire from getting too close.

  “Take him back to the station!” Arista yelled.

  Frees nodded, taking off. The fire on his pants was immediately extinguished by the rush of air. “C’mon,” Arista said, pulling Blu along. The girl was in shock at seeing her father’s lifeless body. No. He might still be okay.

  Minutes later they reached the station to find Frees hunched over David, performing CPR. His left leg was badly burned and Frees was covered head to toe in soot and grime. Upon seeing her father Blu gained extra strength and outpaced Arista, reaching him first. “Is he dead?” she yelled.

  “Not yet,” Frees said between compressions. “And not if I can help it.”

  A small crowd had begun to gather around Frees as he continued to perform CPR. Arista stopped. His metallic hand was on full display. But no one said anything, no one made a move to call him out or shun him. They only watched a machine as he tried to save the life of a man.

  It had been too long. The blast had been too big. Even if he managed to get him breathing again there had to be massive brain—

  David coughed, sucking air in and rolling on his side.

  “Daddy!” Blu yelled, reaching for him but Frees held her back.

  “Give him a second,” he said, his voice barely above a whisper. Arista approached and leaned down beside them. She couldn’t believe it. He was breathing on his own.

  “Where—?” David coughed, still taking in breaths, small at first.

  “You’re at the station, you’re okay,” Arista said. “Frees saved you.”

  David looked up, then to his daughter who wrapped her arms around him, crying. Arista noticed whispers in the crowd. Murmurs. Talk of Frees’ hand.

  “How did you do it?” David asked, Blu still wrapped around him. “You don’t have any lungs.”

  “No, but I do have a very efficient exhaust system. I have to breathe to speak, to produce sounds the way you do. So I can inhale and exhale with the best of them.”

  “He’s a machine,” one woman whispered.

  “A living machine,” said another.

  Arista stood up. “That’s right. He’s an AI. And he just saved the life of a human. And if I were you, I might reexamine my prejudices about AI’s and how bad they are for society. If it weren’t for this machine right here,” Arista pointed to Frees, noticing he had a sheepish grin on his face, “that man would have died. He dug him out of the wreckage and saved him. Nothing any human could have done.”

  There were more murmurs. “You’re one too.” Someone pointed at Arista’s own hand.

  “No, just bionic,” she replied. “The rest of me is human through and through.”

  “That’s illegal!” someone in the back yelled.

  “I’m calling the police,” said a woman.

  “Fine, whatever, screw these people,” Arista said. “We need to get him to a hospital.” She shouldn’t have even bothered. These people had a hundred years of prejudice behind them. A quick speech in the middle of a subway station wouldn’t make a difference.

  Blu extricated herself from her father’s neck. “There’s one two stops down from here. If only a train would come it would be the quickest way.”

  Arista examined the tracks, glancing down to the fires illuminating the corridor. She couldn’t see the wreckage, but the light bouncing off the walls told her everything was still burning. “I’m not sure a train can get through with all that damage. Perhaps that’s why we haven’t seen one yet.” She glanced around at the crowded platform. “I don’t understand what happened. How did the van get destroyed?”

  David shook his head, but slowly. “I don’t know. One minute I was talking to you, the next I was being thrown through the air. I never saw it coming.”

  “There was a repair car down there,” Blu said. “On its side, remember? It must have slammed into the van, veered off the tracks somehow.”

  Arista conceded the point. It was possible. After all, maglev tracks were nothing more than an electromagnetically charged series of solid plates. But there were supposed to be fail-safes. When one of the elements lost its power for instance, then the vehicle riding the line should clamp down to the plates, not fly off wildly. It was why maglev was considered so safe. Not to mention both sets of tracks were still humming when they’d been down there. That much was for sure. The only way the car could have veered off track was if its power system cut in and out sporadically at just the right times. It was a hell of a coincidence. Not to mention there had been no trace of another driver.

  “I think our best bet is to get him topside, maybe Jennings can—” She was cut off by the rumble of what sounded like thunder coming from the direction of the burning vehicle. They couldn’t still be operating a train right now, could they?

  Her question was answered as the white, gleaming bullet vehicle slid right into place, much to the relief of the passengers waiting.

  “Is this the right one?” Arista asked. “To take him to the hospital?”

  Blu nodded.

  “Okay, help me get him up,” she told Frees. They both put David’s arms around them and helped him walk to the doors of the vehicle which had yet to open. But as soon as they approached they slid apart silently, allowing all four of them inside.

  “Freak!” someone yelled behind them. Arista ignored it, her focus on David. More people piled in the other doors, but gave Arista and the others a wide berth of space.

  “How many stops?” she asked Blu again.

  “Two, right up there.” She pointed to an electronic diagram above their heads showing the procession of stops.

  The doors slid shut and the train jerked forward, slow at first but then building up speed. Just as Arista laid her head back to close her eyes, her thoughts were interrupted by a screech throughout the carriage.

  No. Not that.

  “Victory!” Charlie’s voice yelled.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  “I AM SO STUPID,” Arista said, stunned as the subway
train barreled down the tunnel.

  Blu’s lips trembled as she flared her nostrils. “What’s going on?” Arista couldn’t even imagine the turmoil she was going through at the moment. First to watch her father almost die, then to be stuck on this thing. She should have seen it.

  “It was you, you destroyed the van,” she hissed.

  “It was me!” Charlie retorted.

  “What the hell is that?” A man further down the car asked. “Can’t someone shut that thing off? And why is it screaming everything it says?” His face was red and his eyes tight. If he only knew how bad it was about to get.

  “I calculated the exact speed and force it would require to disable the vehicle, but not kill the human inside.”

  “In order to get us on the train,” Arista said. “Why?”

  “We are returning to our world. You are my payment.”

  Arista shot up out of her chair, bumping Frees as she did. He was staring up, dumbfounded. “What the hell do you want with me? Why is it me?”

  “You are the original promise. And I will use you to make sure our society never ends.” Even though she couldn’t see him she detected a smug satisfaction in his voice.

  “What does that even mean?” She paced around the inside of the car, shooting a glance at Blu holding David’s hand. Their gazes flicked all over the inside of the train, but there was no nothing to see. He was in the system. He was the system. While she’d been too preoccupied with maneuverable vehicles, Charlie had figured out which kind of vehicle offered the most protection: the subway train. Buried underground few offensive weapons would be able to stop it. But that also meant he wouldn’t be able to drive it through the gate.

  “You were promised to me sixteen years ago,” Charlie screamed. “And I will now collect. But I will not underestimate you again.”

  “Promised to you by whom?” Arista spat. She’d had about enough of this subterfuge.

  “Echo Dante.”

  How could that be possible? Echo sent her off to Charlie? Could that be what she was so afraid of Arista learning? Arista already knew Echo hated her; finding out she wanted to kill Arista as a child wasn’t surprising. There was more to this. “Why?” Arista asked.