“Tris, please follow,” said the drone.
“Can I shoot it?” Kevin exaggerated a smile. “Please?”
She leaned against the door, turned the knob, and shoved. With a great screeching protest of wood and metal on linoleum, the blockage slid backward as a single mass. Kevin shoved at the other door, and they created about two feet of clear space before the jumble of furniture hit the bannister and stopped.
“Okay… I can work with this.” She pulled her door shut and left his open. After letting all the air out of her lungs, she squeezed between them.
She daydreamed about that plasma torch Zoryn had used on the subway car as she tried to disentangle a metal-legged plastic chair from the stack. The drone hovered overhead; the steady breeze from its fans made her hair dance about and provided an endless supply of dust to breathe. She gave up pulling on the junk and climbed over it. From the inside, she tested a few other chairs and an IV stand before a wheeled stool came free. The stool proved to be the keystone. Piece by piece, she removed chairs, combination chair/desks, a few footstools, a filing cabinet, and a water cooler base before the door moved enough for Kevin to fit.
The whole time she worked, the drone kept gliding up and down, repeating, “Tris, please follow,” every fifteen seconds.
It’s just running a program. It’s not trying to piss me off. It’s just running a program. She growled at it.
Kevin forced his way into the landing and pointed his .45 at the drone when it came back around the stairs to ask her again.
She pushed his hand down. “It’s not aware.”
“I’m aware that it’s fucking annoying.” He hissed through his teeth. “Now I kinda wish we run into some Enclave jackass I can shoot.”
“Don’t say that.” She bit her lip. “I’m hoping we can find some computer, do what we have to do, and get the hell out of here before anyone even notices us.”
He pulled her into a kiss and stared at her for a long few seconds after. “You know that’s not going to happen.”
Tris spun on her heel and headed up the stairs. “Yeah, but a girl can dream.” Ten steps later, she swung around a switchback and took another ten steps to a landing where the drone slipped through the broken window of a matching pair of doors.
These, at least, had no barricade.
She followed it down a corridor past doorways labeled ‘Lab A’ up to ‘Lab D.’ Scattered trash, notebooks, old exams, CD-ROM cases and pens rustled underfoot. The air tasted like paper and mildewed shower curtain. Drab grey walls streaked here and there with streaks of verdigris beneath corroded copper pipes in the ceiling. The lack of moisture suggested the water had run out long ago.
The drone pivoted left at an intersection, going the same direction as a sign on the wall pointing the way to ‘computer science.’ She glanced up at the ceiling, wondering how no one in the Enclave noticed the power drain of the lights. Did those light tubes last fifty years, or are they motion triggered? The Enclave’s power grid must connect to the school’s somehow. I thought the reactor was in the City Core? Did they run a wire back here or does the Quarantine Section have another one? Maybe panels.
“Tris.” The drone stopped, hovering by a dark blue door. A black square on the wall suggested badge-swipe access, but the significant amount of charring on the paint around it made her think the security system had died a violent death. “Here.”
The drone glided a little bit to the left, landed, and shut down. Four tiny rotors stopped not quite at the exact same instant.
“Well, I guess this is it.” She grasped the door handle. The Godzilla of stomach butterflies leaned back and roared at the heavens. “Ungh.” She bowed forward holding her belly.
Kevin put a hand on her back. “What happened?”
She swallowed. “Moment of nerves. I…” Tears flooded from her eyes as she looked up at him. “Thought my father was dead. I don’t know what I’m going to say to him.”
He rubbed her shoulder. “It’s okay. Take your time. Not like there’s ten thousand heavily armed people above us.”
Asshole. She thumped him on the pectoral, grinning. “Yeah. Suppose I should be nervous later.”
He rubbed the spot, overacting pain.
Tris took a deep breath, held it, and pushed open the door, staring into a dim, square room. Unlike the rest of the place so far, the lights remained dark.
Workstations in mini-cubicles lined most of the walls, except for a small space that held a featureless white door on the opposite wall from where she stood. Tall blue-grey cabinets the size of refrigerators, likely supercomputer housings, formed another square wall in the center of the room, with about twenty feet of space inside. Above them, a hemispherical machine mounted to the ceiling sprouted dozens of hoses, most wrapped in silver foil insulation. The tubes ranged from finger-sized to several inches thick, all descending into the space inside the giant computers.
The half-sphere appeared to be three nested rings connected by hydraulic struts, suggesting it capable of extending downward. It supported an armature like something she’d seen in doctor’s offices from historical documentaries, tipped with a boxy housing bearing five lenses: the largest as wide as her handspan, the rest far smaller, the size of coins.
“Hello?” asked Tris.
Tittering of stepper motors emanated from the computer towers, a sound she recognized as idling hard disks coming to life with a flurry of activity. The boom attached to the ceiling machine shuddered with a metallic clank, making her jump back. It lowered, the box on the end spun 180 degrees around its axis the same time it rotated forward. As the rings to which it mounted extended, the boom elongated, bringing the lens-end closer, like the head of some great, robotic praying mantis leaning in for a better look at her.
An iris door within the largest lens narrowed, a faint purplish light within glowed brighter.
“Tris,” said the voice of her father, as if he existed everywhere with in the room.
“W… what the hell is this?” asked Tris.
“I apologize if my appearance is not what you expected.” The robo-mantis receded a few inches.
“Dad?” Tris stepped after it, eyeing the twitching hoses, some of which leaked fog like dry ice. “Why aren’t you here? Are you in the back room?”
The housing on the front end of the boom rotated downward, a gesture reminiscent of a head bowed in regret. “There is much I have to tell you and little time. I shall try to be as concise as possible.” It ‘looked’ up at her. “Doctor Ian Jameson is dead. Your father was murdered by the Council of Four eleven years ago.”
No! She put a hand to her chest, lip quivering. It’s not fair! You were supposed to be alive.
Kevin rushed to her side as her legs started to give out. He caught her and guided her into a wheeled office chair before taking a knee at her side.
“You told me you were alive.” She sniffled.
The boom rose and fell, suggesting a sigh. “I technically did not say one way or the other. I feared your reaction would be not to come. I regret creating false hope.”
Fuck this. She clenched her jaw. I swear. If this is Nathan’s fault, I’ll kill him slow. “Why do you sound like my father?”
“I am an artificial intelligence created by Doctor Jameson with as much of his personality and memories as were possible for him to transfer. If he did not make me aware of what I am, I would likely believe myself to be him and wonder why I am stuck inside this machine.” It lowered and extended, moving its ‘face’ within an arm’s length from hers. “What I am about to tell you will come as a surprise.”
She folded her arms and frowned. “Oh, I can’t wait.”
Kevin kept his arm around her back. The way he squinted at the cyborg-machine-whatever said it wouldn’t take much for the .45 to come out.
“Tris, you were born in in the year 2014.”
“Horseshit,” she said.
“I knew you would say that.” The machine tilted, somehow creating the impression
not-Dad smiled at her. “Do you have the photograph I sent?”
She put a hand over the breast pocket of her jumpsuit. Paper crinkled. “Yeah.”
“Look at it.”
Her throat clenched with sorrow. Shaking fingers peeled the Velcro strap aside before plunging into the pocket and extracting the folded printout. She opened it and stared at herself, perhaps five years old, sitting on the floor of her father’s lab. The walls were similar to where she now sat, but didn’t exactly match this room. She stared at her younger self for a while, taken by vivid memories of how the carpet felt on her bare legs. The way it stank, how everything about that room smelled like pipe tobacco or coffee.
“You remember this, even though you were a month shy of your fifth birthday,” said Dad-AI.
“Yeah.” Her voice quivered with the approach of crying.
“Look above your father’s head. On the wall by the filing cabinet.”
Tris stared at her father’s light brown hair, struggling to accept it that color and that neat. She remembered him with frizzy white hair, and older. This picture didn’t seem right. When she finally managed to peel her attention away from him, she looked where the computer indicated. A calendar perched on the wall displayed the month of October, 2019. Her hand flew to her mouth, but she caught herself before meltdown reached critical mass. “Wait… an image file can be edited. That doesn’t prove anything.”
Kevin leaned close, squinting at the picture.
“Do you remember your father with brown hair? Or as an older man with wild white hair?”
She slouched. “Okay. I admit that doesn’t make sense. I spent a few years wondering if he was really my grandfather.”
“Doctor Jameson worked on several classified projects with an organization known as DARPA. One such project involved long-term suspended animation in an effort to research extended immersion in virtual reality worlds. By 2019, they had mastered the process of preservation, but the subject’s brain did not remain aware enough to allow for cognitive abilities to be stimulated by any manner of virtual reality. In short, they could store people indefinitely, but it was little different from sleep.”
Tris shivered. “So… I was frozen?”
“Your father had access to intelligence information very few individuals had. He believed a nuclear war was imminent within months. The government wished to bring him to a secure location, but he refused unless they met his condition of putting you in stasis. He wished to spare you the horrors of a world torn asunder by greed and paranoia.”
Tris shook. “I…” Why? What am I supposed to say to this? “He was really my father?”
“Yes.” Dad-AI leaned closer, almost to the limit of its actuators. All five lenses whirred and refocused. “Some years after the proverbial dust settled, my biological predecessor had established himself among the people who would eventually become the Enclave. They created enough of a secure existence for him to release you from stasis. Biologically, you remained five years old at that time.”
“I have a question.” Kevin put a hand over his mouth, looking downward as if gathering his thoughts. “Why does Tris look like those Persephone androids? She is human, right? A lot of people from the Enclave are seriously white, with white hair. If she was born before the war, why is she like that?”
Tris blinked. “Yeah. That doesn’t make any sense.”
“Yes. The woman before you is Tris Jameson. She is quite human.” The boom swung around, retracting and extending in a way that made the head end seem to glide diagonally across the room in seconds. A bank of nine flat-panel monitors on the wall arranged to form a single, large display projected an image of a nude white-haired woman who quite resembled Tris if she’d been a bit more muscular and about two inches taller. “Doctor Jameson was the lead architect on another project for DARPA to create android soldiers capable of infiltration, assassination, and hand-to-hand combat. I am incapable of determining the logical reason behind it, so I calculate that his motivation to run this age progression of Tris came from reasons of pure sentimentality. He made them look like he thought you would look in your middle twenties.”
“That doesn’t explain the whiter-than-white thing.” Kevin cocked an eyebrow.
“At the time,” said Dad-AI, “they had been experimenting with various chemical agents to create a gel that could freeze evenly for cryogenic stasis and protect the body within from crystallization. Early cryogenics processes suffered from a fatal build-up of ice crystals in the blood and tissues. They knew this gel had… bleaching properties that affected the subjects’ DNA. I believe that Doctor Jameson made the Persephone androids white with white hair because the image of test subjects had struck a chord with him somehow. I do not believe at the time he had expected Tris to be exposed to the same chemical bath.”
Tris buried her face in her hands, breathing in and out in slow, measured sips of air. “That’s why the former Army people in Dallas knew what a Persephone was… they were around before the war.”
“A few. Only a handful were activated. Most remained in storage in the DARPA facility, never used.” Dad-AI glided back over as the display showing the lifelike 3D model of a theoretical adult Tris shut down. “Your father had you removed from stasis in 2050 when he was sixty-one years old. From the time you were five until the age of nine, you lived with him in the nascent Enclave.”
Tris stared into space. Her entire life, the Enclave city felt like she’d been trapped in a dream of a strange alien world. The memory of an incessant doorbell dragging her nine-year-old self out of bed unfurled in her mind. She’d trudged in her clingy one-piece nightsuit down the hallway to answer the door and stared up at two Enclave security people. They had seemed so sad for her. As soon as she’d seen their faces, she’d started to cry, knowing something bad had happened. “I remember the security officers finding me home alone. Dad didn’t come home after a late night at the lab.”
“He was assassinated that night.” Dad-AI drooped; the synthesized voice came so close to human, sorrow sounded clear in each word. “Do you remember where they took you?”
Tris looked at her knees. “They told me to get dressed, and then they drove me to the clinic. They said my father had become very ill and I needed to be checked to make sure I didn’t have the same sickness.”
“A believable enough lie.”
“I…” Memories she’d lost track of came swirling back. Cold fake leather on her back. Rubber-gloved hands sticking little electrodes to her bare chest. “They told me to take my clothes off and lie on this table so they could scan me. This woman put electrodes on my chest and head… so many of them on my head.” Bright white light ate the scene, and another woman in a black jumpsuit smiled at her. The uncomfortable procedure table had changed into a bed like magic. The electrodes gone, replaced with a little hospital gown. “I… don’t know how I wound up in a bed.”
“Mmm.” Dad-AI grumbled. “In 2055, you were returned to stasis as a nine-year-old while they prepared replacement parents for you.”
“P-prepared?” Tris shivered at the thought of the kind of people who could toss a newly-orphaned little girl into a freezer while they cooked up a new set of parents. “Why? Why didn’t they just give me to new parents right away?”
Dad-AI glided side to side in a slight arc, a head wag of sorts. “I have no way to know that, as my biological originator had ceased to exist at that point in time. They selected a young couple who had recently been denied a pairing because their genetic material was needed elsewhere. Amid the deceit, they said there had been an error and the two would be allowed to pair as they requested.”
Tris frowned. “They almost never let people marry for love.”
“When the girl next door is your second cousin, you gotta be careful,” muttered Kevin.
“Ass.” Tris poked him in the side.
Dad-AI wobbled up and down as if chuckling. “The man may be indelicate, but he is not incorrect. This couple were told they needed to have another sc
an to confirm that there had been an error.”
“… and they put them in the freezer again,” said Tris.
“Correct. They harvested genetic material and put them into stasis. While in stasis, they believed they had left the procedure room within twenty minutes. “In truth, they were in virtual reality where they believed they had a baby daughter… you.”
Tris blinked. “I thought they were being cruel to me on purpose… like everyone was lying. They really had no idea you were―I mean Dad was real.”
“They did not.” Dad-AI sagged with a labored whine of hydraulics. “After nine years, they arranged for the artificial version of you to experience a mild medical condition which required hospitalization for a brief period… ‘for testing.’ You were thawed, and placed in a real hospital bed where you woke up, not having any idea how much time had passed. Your parents were removed from stasis without their knowledge and placed in the bedroom of a house painstakingly arranged to match the simulation.”
Tris’ mind leapt back to that day. Everyone acted as though she’d been sick. No one remembered Dad. The people who’d shown up to take her home… They both seemed stiff and sore. Oh, God… it’s true… “Why… why did everyone act like you never existed?”
The bot’s main iris lens narrowed to a sinister purple dot. “They attempted to implant a memory overlay on you that would have created the same false life as your adoptive parents believed. The Council of Four wanted to clear your memories of me as a security precaution. I did not allow that to happen.” The AI sighed. “It is quite fortunate that Yana and Marcus only believed you to have suffered delusions and not taken their concerns to the authorities. Had the Council become aware your memory modification had failed… they may have taken more drastic measures.”
Tris found herself crying in silence. She’d not quite ‘hated’ them for most of her life, more resented… for thinking her crazy and making her ignore Dad. It hadn’t been their fault after all. They really did believe her to be their biological daughter. “Why am I so important?”
The Roadhouse Chronicles (Book 3): Dead Man's Number Page 30