Othella (Arcadian Heights)

by Therin Knite

From there, I meet up with McClain at our predetermined rendezvous point and lead the group through my weaving path to the underground lot where I parked my car. We pass row upon row of dilapidated buildings, crumbling homes, and silenced public areas. We pass a tenement building with a burned-out fourth floor and the sickly smell of death lingering in the air around it. We reach the garage, file inside my car, and floor it.

  I arm everyone with my remaining guns, expecting a battle to escape Jackson City. But it doesn’t come. The Dead Divide gives way to the skeletal remains of a residential neighborhood a swarm of wraith-like people pretend to live in. Cautious eyes peek out from behind boarded windows and thick curtains. A gathering of masked teens have a bonfire going in the middle of a former condo lobby.

  No one shoots. No one blocks our escape.

  We drive out of Jackson City at ten past midnight. Me, weary and wary and dying to know what happened inside Arcadian Heights. A man with one leg now passed out in the back seat, snoring in a way that resembles stifled screams. A man with half his face sheared off, who’s staring blankly out the window. And Georgette McClain with a different face, covered in blood from head to toe and trying to decide between a worried grimace and a vicious, victorious grin.

  Nobody says a word for the longest time. All is quiet on the eastern front. Until I run a red light past a deserted Denny’s, and McClain coughs out, with a glob of bloody mucus, "God, honey, do I have a story to tell you."

  10

  Quentin

  ...

  "System reboot in progress. New mind chip detected. Assessing core pattern. Restoring community control to main protocol array. Running global AI diagnostics."

  ...

  "All tests passed. System recovery complete."

  ...

  "W-what in God’s name is going on? What the hell? My building. My patrolmen! Jesus, the recruits!"

  ...

  "Oh, God...Quentin? No. No. This can’t be happening. Quentin, can you hear me? Quentin, please! Oh, my God. Hold on. I’ve got a patrolman coming for you. Just hold on."

  ...

  "I’m running a scan on you. It...you’re...No, Quentin, stay with me. You’ve got to stay with me. You have no pulse. You’re not breathing. But you’ve got to stay! You hear me?"

  ...

  "Quentin, please don’t leave me! You can’t go. I won’t allow it. You can’t!"

  ...

  "God, Quentin. No. Please don’t go. Please..."

  ...

  "Quentin."

  ...

  "Quentin..."

  ...

  "Quentin!"

  ... [ Epilogue ] ...

  1

  Marco

  The entire waiting room stares. Our arrival is disconcerting, to say the least. Four people sporting various injuries, one of which is dressed in combat gear. It doesn’t help that I forget to leave my pistols in the car. The nurse at the front desk gapes, taking us in one cut and bruise at a time. It’s the darker-skinned man, Omar Dupree, who gets rushed to surgery first.

  It should be McClain, but she doesn’t reveal the extent of her internal damage until Dupree has been whisked away. When she tugs up her shirt to display an overlapping pattern of incisions held closed with J-COR1H, I lose my stomach and vomit in a potted plant. The nurses examining us gasp and scramble, and a minute later, McClain is on a gurney, disappearing behind a set of double doors.

  They patch up the man with the maimed face, who introduces himself as Rocky Schultz, and sit him in a chair next to my examination bed. An ER nurse waves a scanner wand over my face and neck, searching for any remaining pieces of shrapnel not visible on the surface. She finds one, a sliver of concrete, embedded in my neck. The doctor swings by a minute later and uses a pair of tweezers to remove it.

  Schultz traces the mass of gauze covering the left side of his face. He’ll need a good plastic surgeon to repair the damage. Else it’ll scar into an ugly hairless patch of puffy pink tissue with half an ear as its crown. The scientist doesn’t seem too concerned about this issue at the moment though.

  I lie on the crinkled paper bed cover and ask, "What happened?"

  McClain promised me a story on the drive here, but she wasn’t coherent enough to tell it. Hell, even if she had been, I wasn’t coherent enough to listen.

  Schultz rubs his cheeks. "Chaos. Total chaos."

  "The kind of chaos you can fix, or the kind that destroys the world?"

  His laugh is choked and wet. "Guess, man. Guess." A tear spills over the corner of his left eye, but the gauze absorbs it halfway to his chin. "And if you guess wrong, I’ll kill you myself."

  2

  Howard

  ... / / Mission Name: Incursion Beta Cleanup

  Mission Completion Status: 12%

  Forty-six patrolmen, the total remaining force, spend the night clearing the hallways of debris. I have to send the droids to work, despite the damage, or the community will fall further behind its targets. As it stands, without Salt, I have no choice but to ramp up the number of recruits. Her productivity can’t be matched by average scientists. She is a rare breed, and there haven’t been many like her for several years. We’ve collected most of them already.

  We.

  I access all six hundred fourteen security cameras simultaneously and utilize the full range of scanners. With L-array, I watch the huddled masses of Jackson City creep to the windows of their hiding places and observe the Heights. The front courtyard is intact, but the back yard and the adjacent street are scarred with bullet marks. I override the patrolmen responsible for that area and hurry them along, using multi-droid awareness to move each one in the most efficient manner possible.

  I am all of them at once and none of them ever.

  Patrolman 32A—at the mouth of the alley where Marco Salt detonated a pipe bomb at 11:34 PM—sees six children crouching behind a dumpster that contains 168 glass bottles, 428 discarded articles of clothing, and 786 items organic in nature. Children are unarmed; labeled non-threat.

  Patrolman 12B—collecting bullet fragments at the intersection of Theta and Gilmore—sees two middle-aged men on the top floor of the three-story apartment building 0.7 miles directly east. Men are writing in plain lined paper notebooks. Men are unarmed; labeled non-threat.

  I jump from patrolman to patrolman, speeding them up and slowing them down and making their actions as discreet as necessary.

  All from the comfort of my nightmarish CPU room. The floor underneath my hologram is stained with Quentin’s blood. As are the hallway outside and the stairwell where he took a tumble while slowly dying.

  ... / / Mission Name: Burial Rites

  Mission Completion Status: 46%

  I switch to the viewpoint of the patrolman in the infirmary. Quentin’s body is underneath a white sheet. The third one I’ve used in twelve hours. There are sixty-two more white sheets in storage. I would use them all if they could do something, anything, for Quentin.

  But he’s gone. I had a patrolman rush him to the transfer room, where I’d ordered—unbeknownst to myself—the destruction of the security door. But it was too late. Quentin suffered too much neural degradation. There’s no return from brain death. The brain dies, you die.

  Quentin died.

  I want to cry, but I have no tears.

  So I sit in a chair by proxy and run an armored hand through Quentin’s hair, using the wall speakers to chat about the weather to someone who can’t hear me anymore. Quentin is the only person I’ve been able to speak with in two decades, and now he’s a cooling corpse because Clarissa Salt decided to screw me over.

  And I fell for it.

  Midday, I pull the sheet over Quentin’s head again and dive deep into my data, away from the personality Salt warped into an irrational psycho. It’s gone now, the virus, stuck on the mind chip Quentin removed from my CPU. I intend to burn it.

  ... / / Mission Name: Heights Plan Adjustment

  Mission Completion Status: 32%

  I dive into w
orld news and statistics and check them against the Whittaker Report, against my own calculations. To ensure the Heights plan is still aligned with the rate of global economic and social decay.

  BBC—"We just got word that fourteen bombs were detonated outside Buckingham Pal..."

  NBC—"The CDC announced this morning that the latest outbreak of Avian Flu..."

  WSJ—"The global stock markets plunged in the wake of Japan’s shocking default this morn..."

  Then I determine how many extra recruits will be needed based on average droid productivity, the research time lost by Salt’s second incursion, and the fact that I murdered most of the latest round’s recruits yesterday. The answer is seven. The biyearly recruitment will increase to thirty-two per session.

  Someone will ask why, so I write a press release and send it...nowhere. It won’t do me any good to send it to Quentin now, will it? I’ll have to create a new delivery system for official community releases. And I’ll have to be careful with it or risk raising public suspicion. That or I’ll have to find someone to...replace Quentin.

  There are thousands of other jobs that need doing, too. For example, I have to increase patrolman production to compensate for the recent losses plus the increase in breach risk resulting from the escape of Salt and her cohorts plus the exposure risk from adding more recruits and altering the community plan. The Heights had a patrolman platoon before. It now has need of a battalion.

  But that can wait for a day or two. All non-emergencies can wait in the wake of this tragedy. Wait while I figure out how to forgive myself—if I can.

  I hover in my endless data, numbers and words and commands cruising by. I’ve always visualized my central point as a massive white cavern with a trillion entrances and exits, where vibrant, colorful data streams by day and night, never interrupted. In this center, I become the old me again, a short-statured man staring up at the wonder of the infinite universe. And until this moment, it was beautiful. Me as a diminutive god who could build and break the strings of the world around me. Knowing everything. Controlling everything.

  I hate it. I hate the data streams and the power and the knowledge. I hate it because I fucked up and used it wrong, and the result was the destruction of that which I held most dear.

  I won’t make that mistake again.

  ... / / Create New Mission?

  Yes or No

  Not when I hunt down whatever body Salt is hiding in. Not when I annihilate her father and her allies. Not when I crush any and all resistance during the next recruitment session. Never again.

  ... / / Create New Mission?

  Yes

  3

  Georgette

  I lounge on the hospital bed, wearing one of those naughty gowns with no ass coverage, and Marco Salt sits in a chair next to me, flipping through an outdated magazine. He’s noticed I’m awake, but he hasn’t spoken yet. There are dark rings under his eyes, and his lids droop every couple of minutes. He hasn’t slept since the Heights breakout.

  I clear my throat to jumpstart the conversation and say, "Are you going to ask?"

  He slaps the magazine shut and tosses it to the floor. "Schultz told me my daughter was in there."

  "She was—" Transferred from an organic nervous system to a synthetic neural replica system based on an i80SAT code variant and hosted in electro-conductive neuron mimicry hardware. "Sort of."

  "As a robot?"

  Android. A humanoid robot. With integrated AI. "Sort of."

  "She tried to put herself in your head?"

  Download via direct data overlay onto existing organic nervous core. "Sort of."

  "Did she succeed?"

  "...Sort of."

  He grips his knee, harder and harder, until his knuckles turn white. "What does that mean?"

  "I have no idea." I have too many ideas, and none of them are mine.

  His head hangs low, and he whimpers. A nasty, labored sound. "And here I thought I’d prepared myself for anything."

  "Oh, please." I stifle the endless stream of foreign thoughts and tuck a finger under Salt’s chin, forcing his head my direction. Then I strip my gown off, revealing the messy lacerations on my torso and the old battle wounds on my legs. I place another finger on my now broken nose and slide it down: to my aching neck to my throbbing breasts to my stitched-over ribs to my discolored hips to the raised pale strip of flesh on my knee. And finally, I reach the endless lines of torment on my ankles.

  "See these, honey?" I ask. "Know what they mean?"

  Salt shifts in his seat, uncomfortable.

  "They’re a testament to the fact that you can never prepare yourself for ‘anything.’ Preparation is a goddamned lie. We humans are so arrogant—we love to believe we actually know what’s coming, love to pretend even for a second that we can predict the future. But we can’t. We’re helpless in that regard. We are reactive by our very nature, and the value of our actions lies not in how we pretend to prepare for that which hasn’t happened but in how we approach that which occurs."

  "Tell that to Arcadian Heights."

  "Oh, I intend to. Want to tell it with me?" I offer my hand.

  A beat of hesitation, and he accepts it, staring into my eyes. "I want to tell everyone everything. I want to watch how they react. I want to sit in a fucking lawn chair and watch with glee how the whole damned world approaches Arcadian Heights once they find out what’s occurred inside."

  I break into my trademark smile, the one made hideous by Adele’s humble face. "Then let’s go. You and me and Shultz and Dupree. Let’s go burn the Heights together. Let’s burn it to the ground."

  4

  Howard

  ... / / Mission Name: Burial Rites

  Mission Completion Status: 68%

  The lone hospital in Saluda is quiet on Mondays. I know because I sat in the waiting room while Quentin went for "checkups" once a month, every month, for the past couple of years. (Until I imprisoned him, of course.) Since I was the infected me and not the rational me, I never noticed anything amiss about his claims to need a specialist for an unspecified problem. The infected me didn’t care enough about Quentin’s wellbeing to bother asking after it.

  I walk into the hospital waiting room as a single patrolman. I don’t want to scare the few patients waiting for assistance with a hit squad. The nurse at the desk blanches when I approach her, and I access the speaker on her workstation screen.

  "A man has been coming here frequently for the past two years. This man." The voice is soft, too low. I hijack the controls on her screen and up the volume as I show her a printed picture of Quentin. "I would like to know what he came for."

  The woman swallows. Her heart rate increases. She’s afraid of me.

  No, she’s afraid of the patrolman. She has no clue I’m here.

  "I...I’m sorry, sir, but we have patient confidentiality rules."

  "I don’t want to intimidate you, ma’am, but I require information on this man."

  She recognizes him—who wouldn’t recognize the community spokesman?—and she nibbles on her lip like she’s hiding a secret. A secret between Quentin and this woman? What could it be?

  In the weeks since Quentin’s death, I’ve been retracing his final days. From the research he performed to discover Clarissa Salt’s plans to his attempts to kill off Marco Salt without my knowledge to this, his strange hospital visits. I’ve catalogued everything. His pain and anguish. The tears he shed in front of cameras he did not know were there—I had the patrolmen install more behind his back. I know exactly how I tortured him and exactly how it broke him.

  And if I wasn’t dead, I’d kill myself for it.

  But that bird has flown the coop.

  So here I am.

  "You will tell me whatever you’re hiding. That is not a request." I tap the countertop three times, cracking the wood.

  The nurse wrings her hands and nods. "O-okay. Please stay calm, sir. I’ll give you the records."

  "There are no records. I searched your databa
se already. You didn’t record his visits." I lean closer to her, the faceless helmet reflected in her pupils. "Don’t lie to me."

  A slower nod. "H-he came to visit the John Doe in room 312. That’s all I know. I swear."

  Her physical cues indicate a truthful response, so I round the desk and head for the elevator. "Very well. Then I’m going to room 312, if that’s all right with you."

  She doesn’t say another word.

  The elevator lets me out across from room 303, and I access the hospital building plans. 312 is in the ICU. It’s at the end of the hall, past a set of swinging doors. Nurses and doctors and surgeons and visitors part for me like a school of terrified fish, and no one tries to prevent my access to the unit. I find 312 where it should be and enter without resistance.

  The man is hidden behind a thin blue curtain. I pull it aside to reveal a bed surrounded by various beeping machines. A breathing tube curls from the man’s mouth, an IV from his arm. He isn’t conscious. In fact, he won’t ever be conscious in his current state. I run a scan with the patrolman’s basic medical software and then crosscheck my results with the hospital’s records of this John Doe.

  Patient is in persistent vegetative state due to cerebral hypoxia resulting from single gunshot...

  Brain damage caused by a lack of oxygen. Like Quentin.

  But this man was shot by a regular bullet, not a burst round like the one that tore Quentin apart. On top of that, this man suffered second-degree burns from an explosion. The burns have long healed, and the hospital used the most recent graft technology to restore his skin. Thin lines delineate old flesh from new.

  This man won’t recover with Saluda General’s level of medical technology. Key areas of his brain are nonfunctional. But unlike Quentin, this man was saved quickly enough to prevent total brain death. This man didn’t sit on a floor for twenty-two minutes, cooling and bloodless, before someone tried to save him. This man, with the Heights’s latest advances, may wake again one day. And I will be the one to wake him.