The Roadhouse Chronicles (Book 3): Dead Man's Number

by Cox, Matthew S.

  “No. This is Aura. She caught me connecting the Petafiber line.” She jumped to the floor and carried the girl over. “I had to bring her with me so she didn’t get the ISF and unplug the line. Hold her. Don’t let her run off ’til Dad’s inside. After that, it won’t matter if she sets off an alarm.”

  Aura pressed herself into Tris, staring at Kevin. “He’s a Wildlander… No! He’s gonna give me something. I’m gonna get sick, or he’s gonna kidnap me!”

  Kevin put his fists on his hips and blinked at her. “Technically, Tris already did kidnap you.”

  Tris pushed Aura at Kevin and rushed past him. “Make sure she doesn’t run away.”

  “Tris…” Kevin caught Aura and held her as she struggled to pull back. “I’m not gonna tie up a little girl.”

  Tris whirled around, yelling, “I didn’t ask you to! Just watch her. I don’t have time.”

  Aura writhed and pulled, sniveling. “Please don’t hit me!”

  Kevin sighed. “Oh, stop it. I swear we’ll let you go as soon as she’s done doing whatever techy shit she needs to do.”

  “Are you gonna eat me?” asked Aura in a mousy voice. “Or put me in a cage?”

  Kevin grumbled to himself for a second. “Kid, you’ve been watching too many ‘historical documentaries.’”

  Tris rushed the Petafiber line to the PC she’d found, connected it to the prototype network interface card, and plugged in the USB stick Not-Dad had given her. Oh, please be self-booting. She restarted the computer, and waited.

  Aura cried.

  Kevin carried the girl closer to Tris and gestured at her as if she had brought a too-expensive purchase home and needed to return it. “What the hell are you doing? What the hell are we doing? I’m not this guy? I’m the guy who shoots the guy who scares the shit out of little kids. What’s happening to us that we have to kidnap someone’s daughter?”

  Aura wiped her eyes, sniffling.

  Tris glanced between them and the monitor in front of her. “We’re not ‘those people.’ All we’re doing is delaying her running off to get the ISF involved. Once Dad’s inside, they won’t be able to do anything. It won’t matter if she”―Aha! She highlighted the option for a USB boot and jabbed the enter key―“runs off and whacks the hornet nest.”

  A progress bar crept across the screen above the word ‘Loading.’ Damn old computers were so slow.

  Kevin carried Aura four steps away and put her in a chair. “Can you sit still for a little while? We’re not going to hurt you. I’m not going to eat you, sell you, hit you, or whatever. We’ve got a kid your age.”

  Aura gasped. “But… he’s a Wildlander. Eww!” She pointed at Tris. “You did it with a Wildlander?”

  Tris turned away from the still-creeping ‘loading’ bar. “Look at me, Aura. Do I look old enough to have an eleven-year-old daughter? We took her in after the Enclave’s virus killed her family.”

  “Oh.” Aura glanced down.

  “And yes.” Tris snapped her head back to the monitor when an interface panel appeared. “We’ve ‘done it’ quite a few times.”

  Aura cringed, sticking her tongue out a little.

  The screen looked like an attempt to reproduce a high-tech looking Enclave display with the limits of a prewar graphics processor. Text scrolled across a status readout line near the bottom under a pair of windows showing data throughput stats for both the Ethernet and Petabyte networks.

  “Plug in, Tris,” said Not-Dad, from a speaker on the PC.

  “Eww!” yelled Aura. She cowered away from Kevin. “Are you gonna do it to me too?”

  “God dammit! No!” Kevin went red in the face. “What the hell kind of shit do they make you kids watch in that place?”

  Tris glanced back at him. “You really don’t want to know. She’s not even old enough to have seen the bad ones yet.”

  “I heard some older kids talking about it,” whispered Aura.

  Kevin pulled a chair up near her. “Just relax. You’ll be home in no time. I wanna get out of here too.”

  “This place is, like, old.” Aura looked around at the room. “Where are we? I wouldn’t even know where to go if I tried to run away.”

  Tris fumbled around looking for an interface cable. After twenty seconds of searching, the tiny drone whirred to life and glided across the room to a storage cabinet, where it bounced in midair. She followed its lead, and located a two-pronged wire in a drawer. Only three feet long, it wouldn’t give her much room to move, but how much mobility did one need while unconscious to the real world.

  The plug resembled a headphone jack, but each peg consisted of thirty-two wafer thin contacts separated by equally thin plastic rings. Somewhere, she’d learned it supported data transfer speeds in the Exabyte-per-minute range, but except for her training time in VR, hadn’t used one much.

  Kevin muttered in the background, keeping Aura’s mind off her situation by telling her about Abby and Nederland, trying to make a case for them not being child-abducting criminals. Tris sighed, her gut leaden with guilt. That kid’s going to be terrified of me for the rest of her life. She stared at the ceiling. Come on, focus. No big deal if one kid doesn’t like me.

  She leaned back in the chair and let her body go limp as a test to make sure she wouldn’t fall. Satisfied her perch would hold her, she connected one end of the wire into the PC, and the other into the socket behind her left ear.

  Nothing happened.

  Shit. They found the damn wire. We’re fucked.

  “Tris.” The voice of Dad-AI echoed in her mind. “I am still uploading myself to the Enclave system. Seconds remain. Close your eyes and relax.”

  She exhaled, closed her eyes, and tried not to shake from nerves.

  “Do you have a gun too?” asked Aura.

  “Yeah,” said Kevin.

  “You’re kinda clean for a Wildlander.”

  Kevin chuckled. “Thanks. I had my yearly shower this morning.”

  “Yearly?” A chair rattled. “Eww.”

  Tris smiled. She sounds calmer. I wonder if―

  Kevin’s laughter pulled away into the distance. The chair evaporated, leaving Tris falling into darkness.

  Seconds later, she spilled out on the floor. Cool air blew over her bare legs. She sat up and gazed down at herself, white dress, no breasts, little spindly legs.

  Cute. I’m five again. Is that for his benefit or mine?

  “Yours,” said Dad.

  She stood, finding herself not quite eye-level with the top of the desk she’d been sitting at seconds before… only it didn’t look battered anymore. Or dirty. In fact, the entire lab appeared rejuvenated, as though she’d shot back in time to 2019.

  Her father, or at least a digital simulacrum thereof, walked into view from her left. Frazzled white hair went in all directions. Thick, black-rimmed glasses made his eyes look like those of a bug, and he wore the knee-length white lab coat she always pictured him in.

  “If it bothers you, it isn’t necessary.”

  Tris looked down at her toes. The appearance of being a child again hurt. It made her think about how much she wanted to go back for real, and have the war never happen. She wanted to grow up like a normal kid, in a normal world… without the Enclave ever having existed.

  “It’s nothing I can ever have. I’m not a child anymore.”

  Dad smiled. “Sometimes it’s nice to allow a little fantasy. It can help the mind heal.” He took a seat at his desk and picked her up into his lap. “We have a little time… things move faster here.” A small book with a metallic gold spine appeared in his hand out of thin air. He opened it and started reading a story to her, the kind of story one might read to a seven or eight year old.

  Her throat tightened as the smell of pipe smoke saturating his coat filled her nose. Virtual reality, even funneled through the ancient computer, created such a believable lie to her brain that the temptation to let go and embrace the not-world made her cry. She could be an innocent again, never cut open to h
ave a bomb put inside her. Never having killed anyone. Safe at home with her father.

  This isn’t real.

  “Dad…”

  “Hmm?” He peered at her over the top of the book. “What’s the matter, sweetie?”

  “I’m sorry, but as much as I want this to be real… to go back and wish that the war never happened, I can’t. Real people are depending on us. Both of us.”

  “Yes… I suppose you’re right.” He closed the book. “As you know, I am merely a set of program instructions based on his memories, thoughts, and personality. I thought you would benefit from this.”

  “Sorry. It isn’t helping. It’s like teasing me with something I want and can’t have.”

  He picked her up and set her on her feet before him. The room changed perspective as she grew back to her normal self in the span of two seconds. Her child’s dress melted into black liquid that ran down her legs and reshaped itself into the Enclave jumpsuit and shoes. Fortunately, the simulation did not provide tactile sensory feedback for the transformation.

  “Dad? Why would you go to all the trouble of writing whatever attack worms you wrote, and then secure everything behind a programmatical lock that only I can open? What if something had happened to me?”

  “Not exactly.” He smiled. “I could’ve opened it too, but… I don’t have genetic material anymore. If you ever have children, they would likely be able to open it as well.”

  Tris looked down. “They harvested my eggs after I rejected Dovarin.” She pushed her feelings of violation aside after a fleeting instant of rage at Nathan. “I still don’t buy it.”

  “Quite a lot of things had to happen perfectly for you to be standing here talking to me right now. This AI your father created could have failed to execute upon his death. It could have failed to compile properly and manage to gain self-awareness. You might’ve tolerated that unfortunate pairing assignment.”

  “Wait… what?” Tris blinked. “You know about that?”

  The white haired old man pretending to be her father smiled. “When I mentioned I had no connection to the Enclave system, perhaps I stretched the truth. I did have an extremely slow link through one legacy backup system that the current Enclave occasionally accesses… an old tape array that’s not long for this world. I’m amazed it still functions.”

  “So…” She massaged the start of a headache out of the bridge of her nose. “You had a connection but not one fast or stable enough to transfer your AI program core?”

  “You are correct. What you did with the Petafiber link was vital.” Dad bowed his head. “I know you will not trust me if I continue to obfuscate the truth. The arrangement to pair you with Dovarin was my doing.”

  Tris glared at him.

  He raised a hand. “I had no intention that it would result in you living with him. I knew who you were, and I knew who he was. To me, no doubt existed that you would reject him and wind up in Detention. Nathan Savros had already gotten it in his head that you were a threat purely because of your relation to me.”

  “I was only nine when you died! What threat could I be?”

  Dad let out a sad chuckle. “He suspected I had things lying in wait that would somehow enable you to be a threat. Of course, the man wasn’t wrong. I feared you would soon be targeted for ‘enhanced interrogation.’ By setting it in motion for you to be detained on record, it prevented him from proceeding with any plans of that nature. I had expected to make contact with you once you were placed in Detention, but the uplink via that backup array is unreliable. I was unable to reach you before Nathan did. By that time, you were out of VR.”

  “Out of VR? You mean training?”

  He shook his head. “No, Tris. Detention is virtual reality. So is University.”

  That’s why my cell had… Her mind leapt back to the feeling of lying paralyzed on a gurney while that creep stripped her. A momentary caress of his hand switched to plunging into cold slime. She shuddered. “No toilet…”

  “I was able to reestablish connection while you were placed in the training sim. I adjusted the surgical protocols to add the combat augmentations used by the military, including an upgraded nanite unit, but the low-bandwidth connection did not permit me to join you in the simulated reality.”

  She squinted at him. “Is that why I still look like I’m eighteen? Am I going to go backward like Amaranth?”

  “No, Tris. She is not going backward, but she is a special case. I do not know exactly what happened there, but my calculations estimate that a software error occurred after she suffered a normally fatal wound. The nanites managed to resuscitate her and likely became stuck in a mode where they think she is injured even when she is not. That girl got extremely lucky. She should have died, so I do not recommend you shooting yourself in the heart to freeze your aging process.”

  “Thanks for pointing that out, but you didn’t have to. Wasn’t even a thought on my mind.”

  “You technically are eighteen as your time in stasis forestalled your aging. The Nanites do have an inhibiting effect against aging, but you won’t get younger. They slow the aging process to about a tenth of normal.”

  She blinked. “So I could live to be hundreds of years old?”

  “Yes. The same is true for all Enclave citizens.” He smiled. “Provided no one shoots you first. A heart injury like that poor Yaro girl suffered is not typical to recover from.”

  “They tricked me…” Tris looked down. “Before they put me into Detention, they said they had to do a standard medical check for prisoner intake. That’s when they put me under VR, isn’t it? You set me up with Dovarin… what else did you do?”

  “Well, aside from the cybernetics, I stepped up the combat training and survival sims beyond what Nathan had requested. He gave you only enough for a modest chance of surviving to find the resistance in Harrisburg. I wanted to protect you.”

  She folded her arms and rolled her eyes. “Thanks for leaving that bomb inside me.”

  He reached over and patted her leg. “I apologize for not being able to stop that detonator from being implanted… The surgery for that happened in a separate batch. Delaying the explosion was the best I could do.”

  “Sorry.” She leaned forward and grasped the desk on either side of her legs. “I… guess I wouldn’t have made it without your help.”

  He leaned back and tapped his chin for a few seconds. “Do you think the Enclave is evil?”

  She balanced Nathan on half of her brain and Aura on the other. “They sure act like it. But it’s only the ones making the decisions.”

  Her father let out a heavy sigh while looking at a wristwatch. “What I’m about to tell you may come as a shock.” He wagged his arm. “Quaint little device these. Don’t see them much anymore.”

  Tris stared at him expectantly.

  “If you would prefer to have me change your avatar once more to that of a child, please just ask.” Dad winked.

  “After everything else I’ve learned? How bad can it be?” She sat on the desk and scooted back so her shoes didn’t touch the floor.

  Her virtual father laughed. “Good attitude. Tris… The Enclave you think you know is only about eight percent of the total population.”

  “Yeah…” She scoffed. “All the assholes.”

  He laughed. “Not entirely, but close enough to make debating the point arguably semantic. The vast majority of the citizens are in stasis. At any one time, only eight to nine percent of them are living in the real world.”

  Tris gasped. “People not in Detention?”

  “I’m afraid so. ‘Going to University’ is the soft term used by those who know the truth. Only the upper echelons of the administration as well as workers responsible for maintaining the systems are aware of it.”

  Tris’ mouth gaped in shock. “Why don’t they tell anyone? Do they threaten them?”

  “Not all the time. Most believe it when they are told that it is for the good of mankind. Though advanced, because they refuse to enter the ou
tside world, the Enclave does not have the resources nor the space to accommodate a population of its size all awake and functioning at the same time. What you know as the Core City is false. It’s an illusion in virtual reality. Did you ever wonder why the tram connecting to it only carries four people at a time?”

  She nodded. “Yeah. That does seem weird.”

  “It goes to the underground cryogenics facility. People are put through―”

  “Decontamination,” said Tris in a daze, staring into nowhere.

  “Again, you are correct. They finish the tram ride in VR and believe there is an enormous city underground. In reality, their bodies are floating in stasis pods. They don’t put anyone in storage until they turn eighteen. People who have been chosen for a pairing are kept in the Quar. There are real-world facades of University called ‘special advanced placement.’ Also, parents are left outside VR until their child turns eighteen and is put into storage. Soon after, the parents are brought in for a ‘routine checkup’ and transferred to VR unaware that they are no longer awake in the real world. They are told they have been reassigned to new housing.”

  Tris put a hand on her gut, feeling queasy. “They don’t put kids into storage until eighteen? What about me? I was nine.”

  “You represented a special security situation. They did not put you in a simulation, so the nine years it took for your surrogate family to ‘raise’ you passed in an instant to you. They are now back in the sim, unaware of the nature of their environment.”

  “How has no one noticed they haven’t been getting older?”

  “Everyone knows the nanites slow the process. I imagine the Council expects to retake the world before they have to explain why no one is aging at all. Come. We should do what we have come here to do.”

  “You’re not going to overload the reactor and blow everyone up are you?” She slid off the desk to stand. “I’m not going to help you if that’s the case.”

  “No, Tris. I wish to stop the virus and reveal the truth to everyone. We are trying to save people, not set off another atomic blast.”

  She bowed her head and rubbed her face. “And you need me to open the gate.”