Othella (Arcadian Heights)

by Therin Knite

  "Correct." Salt peers over her shoulder, waving off the handshake. "But we can chat about that later. The thugs are closing in on us. We need to go. Follow me."

  Cain hisses next to my ear. "And how do we know we can trust you?"

  Salt stares at her like she’s a peon, and really, she is. Compared to the brilliance of Clarissa Salt, Edith Cain is an infant. Her discoveries marginal. Her work adequate at best.

  "You can’t trust me," Salt says, "and you shouldn’t. What you should do is listen to me. Or you can stay here and die. Personally, I don’t care. You’re not part of my plan. I need McClain and Q, not you. Don’t flatter yourself by thinking you have any significance in a situation where you are no better than yet another brick I have to carry."

  Cain sucks in an offended gasp, but she says no more. She releases me entirely and shuffles around to flank Dupree when Salt grips the front of my shirt and lugs me close. "Hey, Q. Having a good day?"

  "You can go to hell." I add as much spit as possible.

  Her smile twitches. "Don’t get testy with me. I control your fate."

  "What an ironic reversal of position."

  "I agree, and if you don’t dial the sarcasm down, I might return the sort of treatment I’ve been given."

  "You brought that upon yourself."

  Her hand sweeps up and grabs my jaw, unbreakable faux nails slicing my skin open. "I brought nothing upon myself except the natural consequences of ambition. Everything that has happened since I stepped inside the gates is your fault. Yours and your beloved Howard’s. So whatever happens today and tomorrow and the next day and a century from now? Your fault and no one else’s."

  She shoves me at McClain. "You had a good wrangle on him before. Guard him. If he tries to run, stab him. But don’t kill him."

  Dupree peels himself off the wall. "Why not? He tried to slaughter us."

  "Of course he did. That’s what he does. It’s his job. Lure the lambs to the butcher’s den."

  "But why? What does it accomplish?" Cain situates herself between Dupree and Salt.

  "Good question. Let’s have story time. While we’re walking." Salt gestures at the stunned silent Porter and Schultz, who part to let her take the lead. "Go on. Tell them, Q. Tell them your whole damn plan."

  The tone in her voice hints it’s not a request and that my refusal will result in a painful fracture or a mutilated face. So as I’m escorted toward a destination that offers no escape, a destination I infer about halfway there, a destination that pumps fear into my blood like freezing oil, I begin to talk. About the first year of Arcadian Heights and the realization of its impending failure. About two choices, each with their own paths to damnation.

  I talk about now when it was then, and humanity’s future hinged on the survival of a failing refuge in a dying city.

  3

  Georgette

  I soak in every word. The apocalypse. A utopian plot. A dystopian outcome. Artificial intelligence. Uploading minds. Core patterns. Androids. Killer androids in black suits. A genocide of nerds. Secrets and murder and whispers and government corruption. It’s the sort of thing you read in fiction brought to life.

  It’s fabulous, and I love it.

  When Q’s finished, Rocky is leaning on Porter, whose dark skin is ashy, washed out. Dupree dropped his knife ages ago, and he stares at the passing floor tiles like a zombie. Cain’s face is stuck—she’s gawking, lips parted to reveal a row of false pearly whites. Salt has no response. She marks her quick pace toward a destination she refuses to share with the class.

  I mull over a spark on my tongue, sounding out the words. "So, Salt, you’re an android?"

  Salt shrugs. "For the moment. I plan to fix that in the next hour."

  "You can undo it?" Dupree speeds up until he’s next to me. He eyes the silent Q, who’s waddling forward with an uneven gait.

  "There’s no simple way." Salt rounds a corner and leads us down another undecorated hall. They’re all starting to look the same. "I had to come up with a makeshift solution."

  "Care to explain?" I prod the space between Q’s shoulder blades with my knife, and he grunts but doesn’t reply.

  Salt does: "A bit complicated for the likes of you, McClain."

  "Ouch. Thought you wanted me on this mission."

  "I do. You have your uses, but explaining the science behind what I’m about to do won’t further them."

  "So you’re using me as a tool?" I’d be offended, but I’m having too much fun. "Like the Heights used you?"

  She whirls around, her lab coat flaring out, and throws up her hand to stop our advance. "Don’t compare me to Q for my callousness. I have nothing against you. You’re adept at writing and sneaking and cheating and even fighting, McClain. All admirable abilities, especially today. That’s why I chose you for this. You were the best suited."

  "And we’re all just cannon fodder." Cain raps her knife handle against her jaw. "Could have warned us about this crap. Did you think of that?"

  "I thought of it and scrapped the idea. Don’t take it personally. This plan had the highest likelihood of success."

  "Success for you," Dupree says.

  "Indeed." Salt turns and takes half a step. Then she freezes quicker than any person could and whispers, "Shit."

  A patrolman catapults into view from the next intersection up and empties a clip from his rifle into the heart of our gathering. Q dives for the wall and flattens himself against it, leaving me open to attack. Bullets soar by me, blowing chunks of tile from the floor and shattering ceiling lights. Our portion of the hall goes dim, and the sparks from the patrolman’s gun disorient us.

  Salt barrels forward, burst rifle in hand, and takes down the patrolman in a single shot. The bullet enters on the crook of chin and neck, and his—its—head explodes, sharp shrapnel burying itself in the surrounding walls. I exhale, and in the first instant of relief, another patrolman vaults out of the ceiling through a hidden vent, lands behind us, and shoots Porter in the head.

  His shredded brains splash against Cain’s face. She screams.

  Dupree roundhouse kicks the patrolman’s neck, but the fucker grabs his ankle and crushes it. Completely. Bones, muscles, blood vessels—disintegrate. Dupree doesn’t scream. His mouth drops open for the sound, but the pain is so intense, his voice breaks, and his shocked body takes a tumble he doesn’t recover from. He lies on the ruined floor and spasms. Croaking noises catch in the back of his throat.

  Rocky is defenseless. He stares, slack jawed, at Porter’s headless body. Has six seconds to process the death of a man he’s known since childhood before the patrolman’s fist swings into view. He dodges, but the armored knuckles scrape his face, and the powerful punch rips half his ear off. Balance lost, he stumbles into Cain, and they both collapse in a quivering heap.

  I turn around to grab Q and use him as a shield. But he’s not where I left him. He’s charging down the hall at Salt, and Salt is charging back. But before they collide, Q sidesteps and takes off, leaping over the wrecked patrolman and disappearing into an adjacent corridor. Salt’s shooting at him the whole time, first ahead, then behind herself. None of her bullets find a home, and she has to let Q go.

  Because the other patrolman is on me.

  It’s a fast, strong, semi-intelligent machine. I don’t have a chance. It levels its fist to take me down like Rocky, but Salt plows into it, her droid body heavy enough to destabilize its stance. They land in a tangle of robot limbs, and the patrolman knees Salt in the abdomen. She doesn’t register pain. She jams the butt of her rifle into the patrolman’s faceplate, cracking what should be bulletproof plastic. The patrolman flails, systems malfunctioning, but manages to grab one of Salt’s arms and throw her off. Twenty feet off.

  She flies through the air and rams the ground, bouncing. Her rifle rebounds off the wall and lands five feet away from me. I dive for it, snatch it up, and shoot at the rising patrolman’s neck. But it bends to protect its weak spot, and the burst bullet explodes against
its armored back. I can’t do anything to protect myself in the two milliseconds it takes the shrapnel to reach me.

  Hot metal strips rip my skin and impale my organs. It feels like a bath in a furnace of spikes. The guttural yowl that leaves my throat is embarrassing as hell. It’s something I haven’t released to the world since Bangladesh. Since the collar and the branding and the sharp electric jolts. Since I was a young, idealistic idiot in over her head.

  Bastard.

  I reassert my grip on the gun and lunge forward, grabbing the edge of the patrolman’s hip armor to swing myself around it. And as its hand clamps down on my shoulder to give me the same treatment as Dupree, I thrust the rifle underneath its chin and pull the trigger.

  Down it goes in a rain of plastic and wires and broken dreams.

  Down I go in a gush of blood from a web of shredded arteries.

  4

  Quentin

  My throat aches. My lungs burn. My chest throbs. I sprint full speed through endless grid halls toward the nearest stairwell. Fifty feet behind me and two turns away, someone pursues with light, racing steps. And despite my head start, she gains on me each second. Breaths ragged, I mourn the loss of my youth. Good Lord, I could run miles. Take falls from ten feet in style. Now I’m huffing from a few weak blows and gasping at a half-mile half-dash, half-walk.

  I could have gotten away with ease if I hadn’t wasted precious minutes choking on my own spit as I stumbled away from the battle scene.

  Leather shoes squeak on tile at a sharp curve, and in the pause between my change of directions, I spy Clarissa Salt whisk through the previous intersection. Burst rifle in hand. I run. Past locked labs and work rooms emptied of droids. Past never used lounges and supply closets and server rooms that exist for show. Salt barrels into the hall from the adjacent corridor and snarls.

  A burst round ricochets off a nearby door and detonates behind me, slinging shrapnel. A piece embeds itself in my right shoulder, a sharp sting, but I push forward. My office has defenses. I can lock myself inside. Salt will never get through the (new) door with standard noncombatant droid strength. But my safety depends on my physical ability to arrive at my safe location, and it’s not looking good.

  Salt doesn’t need to stop for a breather. She has no lungs.

  I’m about to cough one up.

  Another bullet goes wide and eats through a lab door, peppering the surrounding wall with tiny pinprick holes. A sliver of metal shoots by my eye, an inch from blindness. Too close. Getting closer. She’s twenty feet behind, and the gap shrinks half a foot with every step.

  Salvation appears at the end of the corridor: the stairwell door. I can override the lock with my passcode, and it should delay Salt long enough for me to escape. But can I type the code in before she catches me red-handed? If not, I die. Here. Now. Alone. Defenseless.

  Pathetic.

  I accelerate. Force my legs to take longer, faster strides. Everything burns. Abs. Chest. Thighs. But I’m there. Five steps from the door. All I have to do is haul it open, slam it shut, type four numbers, and then—

  Salt tackles me. Lunges a whole eight feet through the air, aims an elbow at my back, and body slams me like a professional wrestler on steroids. Forehead and door handle collide in a sight-consuming burst of white static, and when I come to again what must be seconds later, Salt has the barrel of the burst rifle pressed against the damp skin between my eyebrows.

  I’m finished.

  Howard’s finished.

  The game is over, and we’ve lost.

  I go limp, adrenaline tank empty.

  Salt grins. "Got you."

  I don’t respond. What’s the point? The defective bitch has me where she wants me, and no amount of verbal posturing will keep my brain matter inside my skull when she decides to shoot.

  The gun barrel digs into my head. "Thought you could escape me, huh?" Loose locks of fake blond hair slip over her shoulder, brushing apart a line of split false skin where a piece of debris caught her cheek during the skirmish with the patrolmen. Beneath it, metal glints at her every move. "Thought you could shrug off responsibility for what you’ve done? Pretend this is a dull dream? A meaningless incursion?" Laughter bubbles free from nowhere in her chest—she has a voice box, a simple speaker arranged to replicate a human voice—but her bust convulses with the sound like a real woman lost in sour glee.

  So human, even in this state. More human than Howard was before the virus. How could her transfer have gone so wrong?

  She grinds her knee into my heaving chest, forcing out what little air I can inhale. "Come on, Q. Say something clever. Make a nice speech about how all this bullshit insanity is going to save the world. I dare you. I command you to do it—one last time, so I can see that look on your face, the disgustingly phony conviction. You care so damn much about your precious Howard, about maintaining the status quo, but you don’t give a shit about anything else. Not the future. Not the world.

  "You think I can’t read your expressions? Think I don’t listen to what you say? You’re a pathetic excuse for a human being, Q, you know that? You’d be better off as a droid, going about your day, performing the same tasks over and over, not a single wild dream about deviating from some preselected track, lacking even the ability to imagine, the potential to feel motivation. No empathy whatsoever."

  I lick my lower lip and taste blood. "That’s what you wanted to do to me, right? We were heading for the transfer room before the patrolmen so rudely interrupted. I assume you had more than one move to make there, else you wouldn’t have risked the trip. But you wanted to transfer me as the icing on the cake, correct?"

  "And you would have deserved it. Every moment of horror as your personality was stripped away one line of code at a time until you were so fundamentally incapable of understanding your sad state of existence that you didn’t have the power to complain. I wanted to see it happen to you, but you had to be a coward and run. So here we are."

  "Here we are."

  The barrel slides down the bridge of my nose and settles over my lips. "I said make a speech. Go on. Make the great orientation speech, with all the lovely promises about leisure and funding...Oh, God, I can’t believe I bought that crap. Watched every orientation procession on TV until I was sixteen. And every time I thought, Gee, I want to go there, to Arcadian Heights! Geniuses are always idiots, aren’t they?"

  "No, they’re idealistic."

  "Was Howard?" She tucks the barrel under my torn bottom lip, coaxing my teeth apart.

  "More than anyone I’ve ever met."

  Salt takes one hand off the rifle, shoves a finger beneath the shorn piece of skin on her face, and peels half her human visage off. She balls up the mask and tosses it aside, leaving herself a repugnant mechanical woman. "How’s this for ideal?"

  "Far from it."

  She shoves the gun into my mouth, and I gag at the taste of metal on my tongue. I should be afraid. I should be praying to a God I don’t worship for mercy. I should be screaming apologies to Howard, whose code will rip itself apart until all that’s left is a madman machine in need of euthanasia. I should feel the world crumbling around me. But the world has been crumbling for years on end, and I’ve ceased to care enough to bat an eyelash.

  I feel nothing except the grim acceptance of defeat and an ache in my chest for the Howard in a box who will never see the light of day. Although, considering the situation, that may be for the best.

  "I hope you have that speech repeating in your head. I hope it’s all you can think about. I hope it follows you into hell, blasts from loudspeakers for eternity. And I hope it fucking hurts."

  Her finger tightens on the trigger.

  I start to close my eyes.

  And a patrolman bursts through the stairwell door with a burn rifle aimed at Salt.

  5

  Georgette

  Well, fuck.

  It feels like someone ripped out my internal organs, shoved them into a meat grinder, and then tried to reconstruct them
with glue and duct tape. I force my eyes open. On the battlefield hallway still, I’m greeted by the sight of a dead body (Porter), a blood-drenched Rocky, a shell-shocked Cain, and best of all, Omar Dupree with a jelly-squished leg hyperventilating on the floor. I’m lying a few feet from him, my breasts oddly cold. I pitch my head up to check out my chest.

  My shirt is gone. That explains the breeze. And the literally glued-together incision marks on my abdomen explain the butchered cow sensation.

  Holy shit! I’m Frankenstein’s monster.

  I poke at the largest incision, sealed with something that feels like bendy super glue. It’s that new quick-drying wound sealant—J-COR1H? Saw it on the news a while back. Saved some lives in the Chinese Civil War. Just pinch together whatever’s damaged, apply glue, and voila! Insta-surgery.

  Temporary insta-surgery.

  It lasts for about three hours before it starts losing integrity. So I have three hours before my internal organs spill out of my stomach. Ooh, a deadline. Don’t they always make things more exciting?

  Dupree lets out a gasping groan, and I roll over, pushing myself up slowly. Testing the waters. The glue holds, but it doesn’t feel quite right. Things shift in my abdomen that shouldn’t.

  Moving with an amount of caution I normally reserve for sneaking out of places I don’t belong, I shuffle toward Dupree and examine his ruined leg. And damn, is it ruined.

  It’s basically liquid in a skin sack. He’ll never walk on it again. Not even with the latest nano-tech treatments can they repair this kind of damage. He’s screwed. And judging by all the discoloration, he’s bleeding out internally. His handsome face is drenched in agony, and he’s bitten straight through his lip trying to escape it. On another day in another place, I would leave him here to suffer, but he is cute, and he did help me somewhat, so I’ll do the good girl thing and return the favor.

  First off, I find my bra and shirt resting on the debris-strewn floor. Salt must have stripped them. She must also have had the sealant ready and waiting in case of injury to my person. Question is, did she expect injury to my person or plan injury to my person?