Virtual Immortality

by Matthew S. Cox

  EAO-106 looked down; a light breeze caused her hair to shimmer. A twinge of guilt in her expression made everyone nervous. “I fucked that up the last time… I promise won’t do anything stupid this time.”

  Katya squinted. “You’re making me nervous, acting like a kid.”

  The girl pulled at the sweatshirt. “One of the scientists got upset when he realized the de-aging process hurt so much.”

  Katya tossed two socks to her, muttering about how disgusting the company was.

  She smiled and pulled them on. “He argued a lot with the other scientists. He said the system that kept us small didn’t work right and wanted to call it off. I think he felt sorry for us. They made us look like children so we would be sympathetic to an enemy, they did such a good job it worked on him too.”

  “Side benefit.” Joey glanced at the destroyed armor. “They wanted you small to fit into that armor. I’m not sure if that’s worse than just growing brains in a jar for doll bodies.”

  “Not as easy as it sounds, the CNS architecture does not develop properly outside of a body.” Masaru tilted his head at the stares. “No, Kurotai has not tried that. I read a research study.”

  The girl stared at her armor, leaning into Katya as if frightened by its presence. “When the dogs came, they decided to evacuate. Andy turned on them. He said what they did to us was wrong, even if we weren’t ‘real’ people. He wanted to get all five of us out of here.” She paused with the face of a kid caught in a lie. “I thought he was a traitor, so I got my suit to try and stop him. Then the bombs started falling. I ran into the woods to hide and saw them flying out. He stole a transport and took the others. I thought he lied and wanted to kill us. I’m still here coz I’m stupid.”

  Katya patted her on the back. Amber looked closer to tears than the girl did.

  “I’ve been waiting out in the woods for them to come back for me ever since they left, but they didn’t.”

  “So you knew all along that the company had disavowed you?” Eldon made a face at her. “Why the hell did you shoot at us?”

  She grimaced. “I… I don’t know. The pains make me crazy. I get in these moods where I just want to kill everything I see.”

  “Are you related to her?” Joey snickered.

  “Can you control yourself?” Katya ran a hand over the girl’s hair, scowling at Joey.

  She shrugged. “If I could control it, I wouldn’t be nuts. I’ll try, but I can’t promise anything. Of course without the suit I’m not much of a threat. I still have the body of a little kid even if my brain doesn’t match it.”

  “You can still do a lot of damage with a gun.” Katya folded her arms.

  The kid pointed north. “There’s some portable kennels over in the wreckage of the colony area. If you want you could put me in one of those.”

  “Absolutely not.” Kenny startled them with a sudden shout. “We’ll just keep an eye on her. Everyone keep control of your weapons at all times.”

  “The crazies usually come hours before the shakes. I think it’s a panic response to the expected onset of that much pain. Either that, or I’m trying to pick a fight with something that’ll kill me so I don’t have to feel it.” She looked down, curling her toes in the socks. “I’ll probably be okay for a couple of days at least before it comes back.”

  “Good enough for me.” Kenny waved at the truck. “We should be out of here by then.”

  Eldon shook his head. “If this girl is psychotic… She could slip in and out of being rational without warning.”

  Kenny spun to face him. “I don’t care; we’re not putting a little girl in a damned cage.”

  “That would be fun to explain to the gate cops.” Joey laughed.

  “I’m not psychotic. I’m just suffering trauma induced dissociative states where my natural personality retreats and the combat training takes over.” She stood up.

  Everyone looked at her but no one could think of anything to say.

  “What?” She cocked her head.

  Joey could not stop grinning. “I’ve never seen a little kid talk like a shrink before.”

  “Guess you weren’t paying attention. I’m twenty-one.”

  Joey cackled. “Good luck getting a bartender to believe you.”

  The girl squinted.

  Joey’s eyes widened with a flash of insight. “So, kid. Do you know anything about the Mayberry incident?”

  “No.”

  “If someone wanted to hide something here, something very secret, where would they put it?”

  “You don’t have to patronize me like I’m a child. I’m almost as old as you are.” She smirked. “Maybe older.”

  Joey made a series of strange faces. “Okay, where would they stash the top secret crap that they don’t want anyone to see?”

  “In D4.”

  Joey pinched the bridge of his nose. “And that is?”

  She pointed. “On the other side of the colony housing there’s an underground bunker restricted to the people with max level clearance. Only Welker and the lead researchers would go there.”

  “Who’s Welker?” Eldon lifted an eyebrow.

  She glared. “I dunno, some suit. Everyone kissed his ass all the time so he had to be important.”

  “I know that name.” Masaru pondered. “Alastair Welker, I believe. He still works for StarPoint, if I remember correctly, Senior Vice-President of research and development.”

  “Thanks. One more question.” Kenny pointed at Amber. “Do you know who she is?”

  “Yeah. She’s one of the HLM rats. Out of six, she and one male were the only two that survived apprehension.”

  Amber perked up. “Someone else lived? Was it Kevin? Where is he?”

  The child looked at everyone in turn except Amber, then down at her socks. “He’s uhh, in the security building.”

  “Can we go get him?” Amber pleaded at Kenny.

  “I got this.” Joey smiled and led her a short distance away. He took no small degree of pleasure in holding her when she sobbed into his chest at the truth.

  “Imma punch him right in the forehead if he touches her.” Eldon shook his head as he watched him.

  “Relax, he’s just acting like a dick. He’s not really like that.” Kenny chuckled at Eldon. “I hope.”

  Masaru gave the kid a sideways glance. “The component installed near your spine must be the control source and manufactory for the nanobots. If it is removed you should cease having those episodes.”

  She pulled the sweatshirt up to expose her back. “Go for it, your sword should reach it.”

  He pulled her arms down. “No. I thought you were supposed to be smart. That part also repairs you, if we remove it you won’t heal anymore.”

  The girl shrugged. “Whatever. The pain stops either way.”

  He jostled her until she looked at her reflection in his helmet. The sight of him still scared her into cowering.

  Masaru ignored her reaction. “When we get back to the city a friend of mine, a real doctor, will get rid of that thing and the pain will stop. I will not slice you in half just because you feel sorry for yourself.”

  “She’ll probably need a shrink too.” Joey chimed in.

  The girl held a middle finger at him for a moment before letting her arm fall. “Yeah, maybe… I suppose I am pretty messed up.”

  ith the onset of night, further searching would have to wait for morning. Kenny and Eldon set about rigging a perimeter of proximity sensors as Katya, Amber, and the white haired girl climbed into the truck cabin to sleep. Katya stretched out across the rear bench seat with her arm over the little one as Amber curled into a ball in the passenger seat. The men set up their sleeping bags to the rear of the truck with a rotating watch every ninety minutes.

  The touch of sunlight tugged Katya’s eyes open one at a time. As a sense of her surroundings filtered into her consciousness, she jumped up at full alert. The child was gone. As much of a dick as Joey was to her most of the time, he pulled a double wat
ch to let her rest the whole night. Amber still slept in the front but the girl, as well as her sidearm, vanished. Fearing the worst, she stumbled down the boarding ladder into the cold damp morning air.

  Kicking sleeping bags, Katya yelled. “The kid’s gone; she’s got a gun.”

  Joey startled awake, propped against a tree a few yards away. He grimaced as if her voice smashed into a hangover. “Keep it down, will ya?”

  “Chill!” A tiny voice drifted over from the forest. “I’m just pissing.”

  Katya stared toward the voice. After a minute, a little figure appeared among the trees, walking towards the truck. Her gaze focused on the ground as she stepped with care around branches and rocks. She had the pistol in her right hand and the socks in her left. Eldon relaxed at the childlike quality to her motion, but kept his hand near his sidearm just in case. When she entered the clearing and no longer needed to watch where she put her feet, she smiled up at everyone. As she neared, she held the gun up by the barrel, offering the handle end to Katya.

  The girl did not move until Katya took the weapon. “I didn’t want to get caught by a dog without something to defend myself. You guys trashed my suit. I might think like twenty but I have the punch of a little kid. I’d be screwed out here alone now without help. If I kill you guys, I’m killing myself.”

  Katya could not sense any deception, but there was no way to know what she might do if she had an episode. She plodded past Katya and sat on the running board, wiped the dew off her feet, and put the socks back on, pulling them up to her knees.

  Masaru glanced at Katya, remembering how the girl had first stared malice at him. “Watashi wa kanojo o shin’yō shite inai.”

  The kid looked up. “You can trust me. I have nothing to gain by harming you.”

  Masaru blinked, turned on his heel, and wandered off.

  After packing the camp back into the truck, Kenny walked over. “Okay, kid. Where is D4?”

  She climbed into the cabin, straddling the center console. After studying it for a few seconds, she had the navigation map up and centered on the area. A few flicks of her hand through the holographic panel zoomed in on a spot.

  “About a half klick northeast of our current location used to be worker housing.” She pulled the map down with one finger. “D4 is about another klick north of that and little to the west. It would be about here.” A ripple spread outward from the display where she poked it. “At full operational capacity, the approach had proximity field sensors and automated pulse guns―but that’s all offline with the reactor shutdown.”

  Kenny stared at her as one of her too-large socks slid off and fell to the ground.

  “What?”

  “Uhh, nothing, just…” He gestured at her. “The whole… you’re just sad and creepy at the same time. What does it look like?”

  She retrieved the sock and crawled into the rear seat. “It’s hard to spot because the whole thing is underground. You’re looking for a metal plate with a cargo elevator in a large shaft, big enough to take this truck.”

  “The faster we find whatever we came out here for, the faster we can get you out of here.”

  The girl tilted her head. “What are you looking for?”

  “I’m not really sure.” Kenny stood on the running board, waving to the others. “Come on, It’s a bit far to walk.”

  Eldon kept his rifle aimed out the window. The others crammed into the back seat. Joey obligingly let Amber sit in his lap. The ageless girl crawled into the space between Katya and the side, trying to get as far away from Masaru as she could. As Kenny backed out of the small grove, Joey struck up a banal conversation with Amber about nothing in particular. She seemed to enjoy the attention and appeared a bit of an ingénue. Joey could see how the HLM had gotten their teeth into her. A girl like this was ripe for the picking of a group like that: naïve, idealistic, and willing to believe whatever sounded reasonable without doing any research.

  Bodies jostled as the truck climbed the uneven ground past a few more drop buildings. The kid clung to Katya’s arm, still hiding from Masaru. Kenny drove over the crest of a hill, down into a basin strewn with debris as if raccoons the size of cars had picked through a massive overturned trashcan. One structure at the far left edge did not look like a temporary building. He recognized the machinery hanging from its walls as ventilation pumps and figured it was the surface portion of a subterranean installation.

  “Think we found it.”

  “That’s not it.” The kid scooted forward. “This is the reactor shed. Over there.” She pointed.

  They came to a stop next to a large thirty-meter square opening in the ground, rimmed by black and yellow striped metal. Eldon and Kenny approached, finding it flooded to within a few meters from the top.

  “This is going to suck.” Eldon shook his head.

  “If I was going to build an underground facility I’d have put in pumps.”

  “Guess they didn’t.”

  A console sat atop a post at the far corner. Kenny went over, shaking his head as he examined flashing red warnings on the screen.

  “Guess what.”

  Eldon meandered around the side. “What?”

  Kenny’s finger traced the screen as he read. “The elevator shaft may be experiencing a flood condition; we should engage the sump pumps at the earliest opportunity.”

  “May be experiencing…” Eldon glanced at the ripples in the water. “Yeah, this is a government computer system.”

  Kenny smiled. “Well that at least means there is a pump.”

  “So turn that bad boy on.”

  Kenny poked the console but it flashed an error. After fiddling with the interface for a minute, he looked up. “Not enough power.”

  “Guess we go to the reactor shed.”

  Kenny climbed into the truck. “The tunnel’s flooded and the pumps don’t have enough power. We gotta go sweet talk the reactor.”

  Back at the reactor shed, a vibro knife made short work of the door. Eldon kicked it open and they walked into a room that smelled of copper and caused a metallic taste to settle on their tongues. Clouds of unidentifiable dust swirled about in the disturbed air, and a chemical residue glistened a rainbow across the floor, leaking from damaged storage drums and running into an elevator shaft.

  “Anyone see an ‘on’ switch?” Kenny chuckled, moving right as the others fanned out to help him look.

  Katya stayed with their two foundlings at the truck, listening to boots crunch around inside. The interior suffered severe damage; fragments of consoles and broken glass littered the ground. Joey pulled the casing of a terminal open and fiddled with it for a few minutes, succeeding in causing a static-laced hologram of a man in a lab coat to appear in the center of the room. Shadows of the four men loomed over them, drawn by pale blue light.

  “Can I help you?”

  “We got a flooding problem, need some power.” Joey smiled. “Over at D4.”

  “Certainly. Please provide the access codes.”

  Joey stared at the ceiling. “Fuck.”

  The voice spoke with the aplomb of an English butler. “‘Fuck’ is not a valid access code. Please provide the necessary access codes.”

  “Sure… No problem.” Joey plugged his net deck into one of the interface ports.

  “‘Sure… No problem’ is not a valid access code…”

  Joey ignored the rest of the spiel.

  He tapped away at the floating keyboard.

  “Your mother is not a va―”

  Lights blinked on his deck’s surface as the holographic apparition flickered and spoke backwards at a high rate of speed. It stopped, faded into a human outline of snow, and returned to normal.

  “Thank you Mr. Welker. Access granted.” The hologram offered a placid smile. “Beginning core power up sequence. Shall the facility remain on standby power or return to operational levels?”

  Joey rubbed his chin. “Operational levels, return to standby in one hour. Also, shut down power to circuits
eight through eleven.”

  “Very good Mr. Welker. Command sequence authenticated.” The hologram vanished, darkening the room with its absence.

  “Figured you wouldn’t want the automatic defenses online.”

  “Nice work,” said Kenny.

  “I hate these old terminals, no virtual reality.” Joey feigned disappointment.

  Eldon landed a playful punch onto his shoulder. “Poor baby.”

  “Yeah I know. My fingers hurt from all that typing.” He flexed his fingers and pouted. “That was almost fourteen words.”

  When they returned to the shaft, the water level had dropped several meters and continued descending. The distant sound of machinery and rushing water echoed through the trees along with the occasional chirp of an unseen bird.

  “That’s a good sign.” Kenny smiled.

  Masaru and Eldon looked around before Eldon spoke. “What?”

  “Birds. If the birds are chirping, there are no predators around.”

  “None we can see.” Masaru squinted through the side window of the truck at the little girl talking with Katya.

  Katya discussed her imminent future. The girl could not decide if she wanted to look for Andy and the others or just play the part of a child and get adopted by some random family. They both assumed that her sisters had the part removed and would all be older now. She worried that she might not fit in with them. The others were closer to normal, 106 was the hardass, and did not really get along with them that well. Without knowing where he went, what name he used, or even if she would be welcomed, she decided that she wanted nothing to remind her of this place ever again.

  “Once Ido gets that thing out of you, I’ll ask Masaru to take you to the police; they’ll find you a home.”

  “Why not you?” She looked up at Katya.

  “Me? Oh…” Katya stammered. “I’m not ready for a daughter and I don’t live in one place very long, some people are after me…”

  “No. I mean why won’t you take me to the police?” She made a silly face.

  Katya exhaled. “I’m not…”

  The UCF did not throw people back to the ACC if they felt they could trust them; at this point in the conflict, they took everyone wanting to defect. Katya pondered coming clean. After all, her story was compelling enough. Her worry about company hackers finding her if she was on the books kept the thought at arm’s length.