Othella (Arcadian Heights)

by Therin Knite

The turkey is undercooked, and my slices are uneven. I pass them out plate by plate, each recruit’s interest fading as they notice the state of the meat. Unfortunate. It used to be that the kids could enjoy the dinner before the transfer, but Howard’s indifference toward such "trivial" things as food has bled over into the orientation execution. He berates me for my appearance and my act, but he fails to notice his own shortcomings.

  When the recruits begin to eat and talk amongst themselves, I pin my gaze to the gap underneath the dining room doors. Sweat beads on my neck, and I sip more wine than I should, but my nerves are off kilter. I have to be ready. First to take my usual escape route. Then to sneak out of the kitchen, access the security feed panel in the third corridor on the left, and wipe out Howard’s eyes and ears—and his ability to control the patrolmen. Long enough for me to race to the basement, retrieve the backup chip, and replace the infected one in the CPU room.

  A physical feat the likes of which I have not attempted since high school track.

  I’ve been exercising for the past three weeks in preparation. Whether or not I succeed, however, is more dependent on whether I can sabotage the network feeds before the patrolmen kill me. And they will kill me. If Howard categorizes me as more of a nuisance than an asset, he’ll eliminate me in a beat of the heart he doesn’t have.

  So my imperative is the feed. Rip the panel off the wall. Cut the green wire, the blue wire, and the top yellow wire. Easy.

  Now it’s easy.

  I owe a great deal to that community plan manual—

  "Excuse me, Mr. Q?"

  I jump, wine sloshing out of my glass and onto the white tablecloth. The red soaks the fabric, spreading into a deep-hued wound next to my unused fork. A few nearby recruits halt their conversations, glancing from the spilled wine to my frozen form. On my left is Adele Marks, who’s produced the strangest look I’ve ever seen. A horribly misshapen glare of suspicion that so ill suits her pudgy face you’d think her an alien wearing a human mask.

  I sit my wine glass down. "Yes, Dr. Marks?"

  "Oh, I’m sorry. I d-didn’t mean to startle you."

  "No need to apologize. It was my fault. I should be paying attention to you all, not wandering around in my own thoughts." I attempt to smile, but Dr. Marks doesn’t buy it, if the tight grip on the stem of her glass speaks to her state of mind.

  I observe her. Note the stiffness in her shoulders. The tightened muscles of her neck. The awkward expression that doesn’t quite become her face. The tone that perfectly conveys her meek and nervous nature while probing in a manner that meek and nervous people don’t.

  Earlier, during the tour, she lacked such contradictions. She was a hundred percent scared kitten in a world of tigers on the prowl. Her file pegged her as such. The representative report claimed the same.

  Perhaps it’s a public front she puts on to trick her colleagues. It’s hazardous to underestimate someone you’re competing with. Perhaps the real Marks slips through the cracks every now and then. Perhaps the true geneticist is every bit the cautious predator that many of the other recruits have trained themselves to be. Even so, she can’t be that dangerous. The selection process weeds out the overly aggressive for safety reasons.

  At least, it did.

  "Is there something in particular you wanted to ask me?" I say.

  She shifts in her seat, an anxious gesture. "Yes, I wanted to know about the..."

  A shadow creeps across the floor from underneath the doorway. Another joins. And another. And another. Marks’ question fades into background noise, and cement settles in my trachea, choking off my breath. This is it. This is the day, the hour, the minute I kill Howard’s shadow, destroy Salt, and restore the balance of my best friend’s beloved community.

  Strange how decades of work boil down to a single defining moment.

  I push my chair away from the table, ignoring Marks’ inquiries, and power walk to my escape door. But before my hand can touch the knob, Edith Cain shouts, "Ambush!"

  I spin on my toes. Not in twenty years has a single recruit noticed their impending doom. No one but Clarissa Salt has come close. And yet, scientists and mathematicians and engineers leap up from their chairs at Cain’s warning. Adele Marks rounds the table and darts toward me. Omar Dupree grabs two steak knives and backs away from the dining room doors. The others follow his example.

  What on Earth is happening?

  The patrolmen burst through the doors with three times the necessary strength—Howard. One of the doors rips loose from its hinges and plows into a recruit standing a foot too close. Her skull cracks open in a flash of bloody bone fragments, and she hits the floor dead. Lucretia Melbourne.

  Adele Marks, stripped of her mask, rams into me elbow first, knocking the air from my chest. We collide with the kitchen door—it flies open under pressure—and crash into the rack of pots and pans next to a central stove. Metal clangs and rings and reverberates, and for ten seconds, I can hear nothing of consequence except the panic in my head. Dear God. Dear God. Dear God.

  Marks straddles me, hands wrapped around my throat. Squeezing. A thin line on my neck where a knife once sat too close aches at her touch.

  Her hideous face, misshapen by a fury all wrong for such a woman, closes in on mine. "Guess the party starts now, eh, Q?"

  "Who the fuck are you?" I gasp onto her grin.

  "I’m the bitch who just took you prisoner. And you’re the bitch who’s going to lead me out of this hell pit and tell me every single thing I want to know about the Heights." Her grip tightens, and I can’t breathe. At all.

  Behind her, recruits are screaming. But this time, the screams aren’t cries of fear. They’re battle cries. Omar Dupree and Edith Cain are leading a charge against the patrolmen, throwing chairs and plates and knives and the entire fucking turkey at their assailants. The patrolmen dance to Howard’s puppet strings, and like with me, he has no patience for rebel recruits. His programming is so distorted, he doesn’t even understand that snapping a wayward engineer’s neck is sabotaging the community. That tearing off a woman’s arm might not benefit our goals.

  Marks—or not—squeezes harder, and my vision starts to fade out.

  How? How did this happen? How did men and women with such volatile personalities end up with invitations? How did Howard not notice such a group would breed resistance? How did a fake slip under our radar? Slip past Howard’s facial recognition software? How did he not notice this wolf in sheep’s clothing standing at the gates this morning, waiting for the feast?

  The answer, of course, is that Howard is blind.

  He’s blind, and he won’t let me see.

  "You listen to me, Q, and you listen to me well. If you want to live through this, you will do exactly as I say. You understand me?"

  This.

  "Understand me?"

  This is...

  "Q!" The pressure on my neck doubles. "Do you fucking understand me?"

  "Yes. I understand."

  This is chaos.

  ... [ Chapter Ten ] ...

  1

  Georgette

  Got the dog by the collar, and I drag him along, knife to his throat. Four others escaped from the death dinner, too, and they rush to stall the oncoming patrolmen. Dupree and Cain block the kitchen door with a stove on wheels and a metal shelving unit, but the patrolmen on the other side hack away at the obstruction. A black armored hand punches straight through the door and seeks out the knob. Rocky and Porter scramble for the exit on the other side of the room, both of them armed to the teeth with a variety of silverware.

  As soon as they give the all clear, the rest of us pour into the corridor. Q is slack in my grip, head lolling. He passed out for a minute or two, and his neck is bruised where I strangled him. Maybe I was a bit too rough, but I’m not up for getting ripped apart by big bastards in suits today, so the fucker will just have to deal with the sort of treatment I dish out when pissed.

  The hallway is empty, but the thundering steps of the patrolm
en boom through the walls from an ambiguous distance. We stop at the first intersection, and I picture the blueprint Salt showed me—the third floor has two stairwells and two elevators. The patrolmen could be using any of those access points. And given the security cameras, they can see us but we can’t see them, so we’re the underdogs here. We have to find a way out of this deathtrap.

  "Marks, care to tell us what the hell is happening?" Cain rolls her steak knife around on her palm.

  "First off, I’m not Adele Marks, honey." I adjust my grip on Q, who moans when my knife nicks his collarbone. "Secondly, the Heights has a little dark secret, as you’ve probably discerned. I’m here to investigate that secret and blow the lid off this hellhole."

  Cain wipes her sweating face. "Blow the lid? You mean expose to the public? You’re a muckraker?"

  "She’s Georgette McClain." Dupree sheds his suede jacket, now stained with food and blood. There’s a deep cut on his temple where a piece of debris sideswiped him. "Right?"

  "Yup," I say. "Guilty as charged. How’d you know?"

  "The smile. I knew I’d seen that shit-eating grin somewhere before. Put it together in the limo on the way to Jackson. Same height, build, and age as Marks. Different face, but with your record, I figured surgery was a far cry from the worst you’d do to sniff out a story."

  "I’m flattered. How about we discuss my indiscretions over a candlelit dinner some night, huh? Preferably after we get out of this mess."

  Dupree wipes the blood off his face with a sleeve and turns on the bedroom eyes. "Sure thing. But you’re paying."

  Cain gags. "Can we set up our we survived fuck sessions after we survive?"

  "Yeah, how’re we escaping?" Rocky hops from one foot to the other like the floor is made of burning coals. "Thought the defense grid was impregnable."

  Porter mutters in agreement; he’s scouting our hallway options. The footsteps seem to approach from every direction. Louder and louder. I can hear the clinks of sleek armor and rifle barrels bouncing off solid back plates. I remember several ways to reach various exits that will take us to the faulty grid panel, but without eyes on the patrolmen’s movements, it’s useless.

  I didn’t expect an attack so soon. Q doesn’t waste any time.

  Q.

  I spin him around and slam him against the wall, one hand on his throat again. The other holds the knife an inch from his unfocused eyes. "Hey, fucker, can you hear me?"

  He manages a noncommittal grunt.

  "How do we get around the patrolmen? No tricks. No cheats. You tell me, or I kill you."

  Somewhere in the distance, a man shrieks in pain.

  Porter shivers. "Christ, there are people still alive. Are the patrolmen torturing them to death?"

  "I’d like to know that, too." I grind Adele’s blunt nails into Q’s bruised throat. "And you’ll tell me when the time comes. But for now, an escape route. How about it, buddy?"

  Q rouses at the pain. One of his arms performs a shaky rise and point. "Need to blind the security system. Two more intersections down. Take a left. Feed panel marked by a red sticker."

  I loosen my grip on his throat. That was easy. Too easy. "You lying to me?"

  "No. Was planning to do it myself."

  "What? Why?"

  "Reasons." His foggy gaze clears for an instant. "You help me, I help you. How about that? I’ve got an agenda tonight, and it doesn’t concern you. Want to escape? Go right ahead. I really don’t give a shit at this point. I have more important issues to contend with than a batch of defiant brats..." His consciousness wanes again.

  Interesting. So I was right. Something is amiss inside the Heights. Something that leads to ugly, brutal death and not those pretty corpses I’ve come to know so well. What a delicious tale I’m in for tonight.

  "You heard the man," I say. "Go!"

  The group proceeds, Rocky and Porter at the front, dashing like madmen, Cain and Dupree acting as the rearguard. We find the panel on the wall per Q’s instructions, and Dupree pops the cover off. Inside is a series of color-coded wires. They aren’t labeled. Q, who’s on the verge of sleep again, has grown heavy in my arms. I pass him to Cain and smack him a couple of times.

  "Hey, I’m not finished with you yet. What do I do with the wires?"

  He blinks, bleary, glances at the exposed security panel, and motions to a number of different wires. "Cut them. Don’t just unplug them. It’ll take the patrolmen longer to fix."

  "You’re being very forthcoming." Cain’s knife brushes the mottled skin protecting Q’s jugular. "What’s this plot you’ve got for tonight?"

  "Got to fix something important," he murmurs.

  Dupree snorts. "Specific." He reaches inside the panel and snips the designated wires. "Now what?"

  "Now you’re on an even playing field." Q nods at the nearest security camera. "You can’t see them, and they can’t see you. Best I can do to help, I’m afraid." He blinks, slow and heavy. "Oh, you should try the secondary stairwell at the end of this hall. Patrolmen by default use the main stairwell. Won’t use the secondary unless explicitly ordered to."

  "And how do we know you haven’t ordered them to?" Rocky slicks his white-blond hair back. "How do we know this isn’t a setup?"

  "Because I’m not the one giving orders."

  My interesting fact alarm starts ringing. "Really now? So who’s in control of the Heights, then, if not you?"

  Q feigns an arrogant smile. "Trust me. You don’t want to know. Just leave me and run. You can get all the way to the back lot from the secondary stairs, though I don’t know where you plan to go after that. Grid’s still on."

  "Your grid has a weak point, honey pie." I tap Q on the nose with the blunt side of my knife.

  He perks up, eyes widening. "What?"

  "There’s a defect in the grid," I repeat. "Thought you were perfect, didn’t you?"

  "No, there’s no defect. There’s never been a..." He appears to have some sort of revelation. What color is left drains from his cheeks, and his mouth hangs open. Then his attitude shifts into the red, and he lets loose a string of swears. "Upgrade. She used an upgrade to...that bitch!"

  Everyone in our group exchanges concerned looks. I expected Q to be a whacko as in a psycho, not a whacko as in a nut job. Salt was the one I expected to be a nut job. But this guy doesn’t seem to be all there. Which is mildly disconcerting when you consider his claim that another shadowy figure controls the Heights.

  Cain, Dupree, and I open our mouths at the same moment to ask Q more questions, but Porter cuts us off with a loud series of finger snaps.

  "Hey, guys?" says Rocky. "Whatever we’re going to do, I think we should do it now. Listen."

  We all shut up for about ten seconds.

  Then Cain says, "I don’t hear anything."

  Porter whispers, "Exactly."

  The surrounding hallway maze is quiet. Before we pulled the security plug, there was a boisterous army chasing us. Now, there’s nothing. To hear. But I can feel the approach of monstrous forms in the distance, that primordial fear scratching the backside of my brain. The patrolmen are there, searching for us using whatever senses their power suits possess. They’ve taken our security cut and raised us a black ops approach.

  I backhand Q, lean close to his face, and spit out, "Did you fuck us over?"

  His blank eyes betray nothing. "No. The patrolmen are no longer being controlled by an illogical and irrational force. They’ve reverted to their standard programming, which has protocols for security feed disruptions. But you’re still better off. Their programming is limited. They are demi-AI. You all are geniuses. Well, four of you are." He licks his dry lips. "You, Ms. McClain, are a strategist, and a damned devious one at that. Together, you should be able to come up with a somewhat viable escape plan, if the grid is really compromised."

  "Wait. The patrolmen aren’t people?" Dupree rubs his face.

  Cain sputters out, "So who was controlling them before?"

  Q doesn’t answer.
He stares at his shoes, obstinate. I’m about to signal for Cain to pass his ass back to me so we can vamoose, but then someone else answers for him.

  "That would be what’s left of Howard Sims," says a voice that should not be.

  The dead woman stands in the intersection behind us. Blond and blue eyed and armed with a burst rifle.

  "Hello, McClain," she says.

  I gape, Adele’s tiny mouth stretching to its boundaries. Not in my darkest dreams did I ever expect to come face to face with the beautiful corpse who so inspired me to accept this mission. Not in my wildest hopes did I imagine the Heights would contain such utter magnificence. For the first time in a decade, I can’t think of a clever response. All I can say is: "Hello, Clarissa Salt."

  2

  Quentin

  My nightmare screams across the hall, quiet as a mouse. Clarissa Salt in her padded flats exudes a shrieking rage. A primal howl. She doesn’t even have to open her mouth to let it out—the inaudible noise streams from her eyes and ears and nose. And every ounce of murderous fury is aimed at me.

  Edith Cain’s grip around my neck slackens, but if I run, Salt will shoot me. I have no illusions this machine knows mercy any longer, not for the man she considers her tormenter. If I tempt her, I will die now. She’s planning to kill me later—Salt is patient, if nothing else, and has no problem waiting for the "right" time to act—if that fiendish grin is any indicator. An expression never meant to mar a droid’s face. It’s almost as hideous as McClain’s mockery of Adele Marks.

  Dupree backs toward the wall when Salt nears the group, knife gripped hard and knuckles white. "Clarissa Salt. Jesus."

  Salt half-ignores his cowering form. "Not quite. But close. Suppose you could say I had an unholy resurrection, but I’m not saving anyone except myself today. And maybe you all, if you choose to tag along." She and McClain make eye contact, and she bows her head. "Glad you showed. I need your help."

  McClain stuffs her knife into her pants pocket and offers a hand to Salt. "Guess it’s safe to assume your father didn’t call me on his own whim?"