The Shapeshifter Chronicles

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The Shapeshifter Chronicles Page 23

by Peralta, Samuel


  “I thought it would last longer this time around. Unfortunately, our equipment is dated, and the effects diminish each time we administer the procedure,” Ace responded.

  “Wh-what do…?” Jessie stumbled on her words, unable to form a sentence. Was he admitting to his treachery? The way he’d said it painted her as a willing participant. How could that be? She’d never willfully want to be mind-wiped. There were countless horror stories about the procedure. The results varied significantly and were volatile at times. Things like basic language skills, physical movement, and other upper cognitive functions could be accidently affected during a purge. She would never allow it to be done to her… would she?

  “Ace? What are you talking about?” She shoved him backward as she pushed her weight into him. How could he say such things?

  He bent his neck down to get a good look at her. He stood a head and a half taller than Jessie, and he had to hunch down to lock eyes with her. Her chest puffed out in defiance as she continued to use her svelte body to force him back.

  “Answer me, Ace,” she snapped, giving him another shove until his backside met with the frigid tube of one of the cryochambers.

  Ace adjusted his stance slightly so as not to put undue pressure on the chamber. They were sturdy, built to last centuries, yet he’d often wondered if they could survive even another year. Like most things in this primeval station, they had an expiration date, and most of the equipment had already surpassed that time. Even androids didn’t last forever without proper maintenance. His glitch was proof of such things.

  Ace’s frown deepened as Jessie’s gaze sent ice picks into him. He could almost taste her rage in the air. Emotions were not native to androids. Anger, fear, curiosity, loneliness, sadness, desire… what good did it do to install such trivial notions in a machine? They were unfathomable things, like Jessie’s anger toward him now. It was her emotions switch which he had left on that let her anger affect her so much. He’d failed to turn it off this time around. She’d often accepted her fate with a cruel expression of forlorn misery whenever she began to suspect she’d been mind-wiped, but now it was sheer manic disgust pasted across her beautiful face, challenging him to admit his mistakes.

  “I’m sorry, Jessie. I wish I could erase your pain as easily as your memories.”

  He reached up, gripping her shoulders as her frown deepened and her fists began a fitful drumming against his chest. It didn’t hurt. Nothing ever did, even when he acted otherwise. He’d shut off the pain receptors eons ago, deciding they were less than useless. Jessie always gave him subtle warnings before her outbursts when she began to suspect a mind wipe. This time around it’d come too soon. Five years too early. It meant her systems were malfunctioning and failing faster than expected.

  “You wish you could erase my pain? How dare you! You mind-wipe me without my consent and proceed to act as if this is some sort of experiment to document.” Angry tears spilled down her cheeks, but she failed to notice or acknowledge their presence. The royal blue liquid stained her cheeks and slid to the floor without her notice, turning gray as the nanites separated from her and fell dormant. Ace had programmed her to see her tears and blood as clear and red fluids, respectfully, not the dark ocean blue of each drop that streaked down her face, discoloring her clothes where they landed. He watched one drop splash on the floor before lifting his gaze back to her face.

  “Jessie... I only do what you asked me to do. I would never agree to these treacheries unless you did. I have always acted in your interests with your specific instructions. I am not the oppressor you think me to be. I am your partner and slave all at the same time.”

  This gave her pause, and she stepped backward, her expression twisting into a mask of sheer confusion. Her bright cherry-red lips stood slightly parted, flashing a hint of white teeth behind them. She had pretty lips, perfect if anyone asked him. But no one ever asked Ace anything. Everyone here was either in cryosleep or an android with glitches. It wasn’t surprising to find she’d fallen in love with that blasted human over and over again, no matter how hard he attempted to wipe him from her mind. His face never failed to snake back into her memories, initiating the cycle of obsession all over again.

  One day he’d find the right programming to effectively keep her mind off the human and keep her on her task of maintaining the outpost along with him. They were A.C.E.s, and their sole purpose as caretakers of the quarantined J.E.B. victims was to watch over the humans in cryosleep until a cure was found. If anything happened to the humans, their species would become extinct.

  Jessie took another step back, slowly moving away from Ace. It was obvious her mind was racing. At least it was finally bringing some semblance of calm to her features.

  “I ordered you to do this to me?”

  He nodded. She found a chair and slumped down into it before leaning forward and placing her hands on her face. “What have I done? Why would I do that?” She peered up again, her face now eerily stoic. The blue tears she’d cried were already drying into faded streaks of gray powder, most of it smeared away by her hands. “Why would I do that, Ace? Why would I want to forget?”

  Ace didn’t move but watched her closely. This was nothing new. He’d done this dozens of times, but it was never a pleasant experience. He’d give anything to end these interrogation sessions. It never changed, and the questions were always the same. And it helped no one. She’d always end up asking him to erase her memory again, as she would this time around too.

  It was an endless cycle, a broken carousel going nowhere.

  It had been this way for five hundred years out of the eight hundred they’d spent together. There was no hope of breaking the routine unless one of them stopped functioning. He hoped it wouldn’t be him first. It was one thing to be a robot with emotions, but it was something else to be a robot with emotions and human-like needs with no one else around to speak to or interact with. It was a cruel fate Ace knew he’d probably face one day if Jessie decided it would be too hard to move on or her nanites were inadvertently fried during a mind wipe. She’d end her existence herself if it came down to it, Ace knew she would. Especially if her precious Garrett ever died.

  In the end, though, Garrett would die, wouldn’t he? Of course he would. The cryochambers were not built to last an eternity. Neither were the human bodies encased within them. One or the other was guaranteed to fail, and he’d have to incinerate the corpses eventually. It’d already begun to happen, and he was relieved Jessie hadn’t noticed the series of empty cryochambers near the rear corners of the room. If she had noticed, she hadn’t given them much thought. They were all full when he and Jessie had first started working here. Now the long-frozen bodies were slowly dying, one by one.

  What would happen to the rest of the humans if either A.C.E. stopped working? Their nanites were hardy, but he could already feel the abysmal twitch of electricity vibrating through him indicating he was nearing a transformation episode. It was unfortunate timing since Jessie was in the middle of a memory-wiping crisis. He’d have to leave her alone to ponder life while he spent an unforeseen amount of time as whatever animal or object he happened to shift into. It was never his choice, and he had no control over what he became. One thing was for sure, they would not be able to communicate while he was in his other form.

  He cursed his vile condition as he watched the disillusionment drain from Jessie’s face. Her eyes involuntarily found Garrett’s chamber and settled on it.

  “Why would I want to forget, Ace?” she repeated.

  “Because… you want to be human. You don’t want to just forget; you don’t wish to know that you’re an android like… like me.” He felt the jitter of nanites growing volatile under his skin. He swayed on his feet, trying as he might to hold back the change. More than anything, he wanted to reach out and pull Jessie into his arms, comfort her and tell her it all would be okay. Things humans did for each other. He could do those things too. It was just a matter of programming and minute chemical
changes within his nanites. All he had to do was adjust his ChemTend patch settings, and it would happen. Just like that.

  “What are you… I mean, what are we?”

  “We are A.C.E.s. Artificial Companion Exomorphians. Androids. We’re as human-like as any human.”

  “I mean… what are we to each other?”

  His confusion betrayed him. He was more machine than he cared to admit. Maybe it was just a matter of tweaking the ChemTend patch. Regardless, there was never a moment he wished he could grant her desire to be human more than right now. The lost expression on her face broke his empty heart into pieces.

  “You’re my partner. We maintain this quarantine until further instructions from Earth Command….”

  “Earth is gone!” She jumped from her chair. “Don’t you get it? No further instructions are coming. This is it. This is all that’s left. We are nothing but trash tossed out into the universe, forgotten. What am I to you? A sister? A lover? Does it even matter anymore? What are they to us?” She waved her hand toward the cryochambers. “And what are we to them?”

  Her meltdown was disarming. Knowing he would be morphing any second now before he could fix it, he knew exactly what had to come next.

  Ace stepped forward and reached for her shoulders. She didn’t flinch. She’d just entered that numb stage of grief, which was why she failed to notice when he pressed against the hidden nub near her cervical spine. The nanites that formed her skin separated, creating a small hollow. The small hole allowed quick access to the one part of an A.C.E. that wasn’t composed of nanites: the central processor—the brain. He felt for the two separate shutoff buttons: one for a complete, de-energizing shutdown and the other for emotional resets in case of a ChemTend patch malfunction. He flipped the one he needed, causing Jessie to gasp and grow limp. Taking her into his arms, he removed his finger and helped her slide to the floor as her eyes dimmed and her breath slowed to a halt.

  Her system had commenced an emergency shutdown and would restart. When she woke up, she would no longer feel anything at all. No loneliness. No love. No fear. No regard for anything but her mission. Keep the humans alive and this station functional until help arrived. That was their mission, and he’d make sure they’d both survive to make it to the end of the journey. He’d didn’t like to shut off her emotions, but she’d left him no choice.

  Ace laid her on the floor by Garrett’s tank. As he got to his feet, his morph hit, and every tiny nanite inside his body shuddered and shifted. He groaned as they fluttered about inside, rearranging every fiber, muscle, and bone. It was a discomforting feeling but ended as quickly as it had hit. Ace was gone, but another remained in his wake.

  Silence followed before an almost inaudible intake of breath indicated that Jessie had restarted. She breathed back out—one of the many minute actions that allowed her to simulate actual human life. She opened her eyes to find an etheric blue butterfly hovering above her, flapping its wings like mad against her cheek to wake her up. All around her was a gray ash.

  “Ace?” She blinked again, unsure of what she was seeing, but her mind confirmed it as she processed the information. There were no living things here in this place. No animals. Just frozen humans and the A.C.E. caretakers. They lived and worked at a J.E.B. quarantine station.

  “Got yourself morphed again, I see.” She sat up and peered around the room. “You have the worst timing, Ace. There’s so much to do.” She rubbed her head and reached back around to the small nub on her neck. She had a feeling that the small access port had been recently tampered with. “I know what you did, my friend, but I thank you. I’m more efficient this way, and with you indisposed and basically useless to our mission, I’ll need to focus on repairs before the winter storms arrive.”

  She got up and looked at the image of a dead Earth on the computer screen. Without a moment’s hesitation, she closed the image, once again locking it away behind the layers of encryption only Ace knew how to get past.

  She sighed and watched the butterfly silently flap away before landing on the edge of a desk; it seemed to peer up at her curiously. “We really need to get that glitch of yours fixed ASAP.”

  Six

  “This is Arcadia Two-Five-One… does anyone copy? Is anyone out there?”

  Jessie narrowed her eyes at the crackling radio. White noise filled the space in between the messages. They hadn’t received any answers to their radio transmissions in the three decades since Earth’s destruction. Arcadia outpost was farther away than either of them wanted to admit, but the voice on the other side was unmistakably alive. It seemed like a miracle since the supply runs had stopped coming from Earth and they’d run out of so many necessities here on Ezra.

  Jessie reached out toward the radio mic, her mind racing. There were others out there. Other humans and androids who might possibly have the one thing they needed most and could help them. It would take months to reach them, but it was more than possible. They could even join them or vice versa, depending on the condition of their outpost.

  Ezra Outpost was older than most, but it was massive and could be converted to smaller living and work areas. Plus it’d been made from older and sturdier materials. Arcadia was much smaller and located on a tiny, distant moon in the Frey system. Even if they had to pick up the survivors and their cryochambers, it was more promising than the endless silence they’d heard from every corner of the sector since Earth’s demise.

  “Wait.” Ace’s voice interrupted her thoughts, and she turned to find him standing near a cryochamber. He was reabsorbing the nanites he’d shed during his glitch. “Don’t answer them, Jessie.”

  She scoffed, as though horrified at the suggestion. Even with her emotions turned off, she couldn’t alter her programming; they had been designed to act and appear human, after all. Ace finished recovering his nanites and stepped up to lean against one of the control panels, picking at his nails and indifferent to the crackling messages filling the air. He’d been overly silent these last few years, and she wondered if the glitch he’d been suffering from had finally fried some of his mental circuits. Maybe he needed more ChemTend adjustments. They had both been dealing with a multitude of malfunctions and required much-needed repairs. They’d long ago run out of spare nanites to replace the ones that had died or were damaged. Maybe Arcadia, being more modern, had some to spare.

  “Are you insane? They’re survivors. They might need our help. We need their help.”

  Ace blew out a breath and frowned. “They’re androids. Like us. Their humans are probably already dead.”

  “So? What does it matter? There are others like us. We need to stick together.”

  He shook his head, and she threw her hands in the air. The guy was impossible, especially for an android. She leaned forward, about to press a finger to the intercom, when Ace firmly slapped her hand away.

  “What the hell is the matter with you?” She glared at him, eyeing the emptiness filling his once animated features. Now he was more of a robot than ever before, and she suspected he’d shut off his emotional sensitivity chip ages ago. This only confirmed it. She’d been blinded to it before, with her own emotions intact. She had projected feelings onto him. Now she saw both of their actions for what they were: basic programming.

  “I’m just pointing out that they are androids, not human. If they had a cure for J.E.B., we’d know it by now.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “Come on, Jessie. Stop fooling yourself.”

  She threw him an icy glance, knowing what really was bugging him. “You’re afraid they do have a cure, aren’t you? What happens when we do finally get it and awaken the humans? What then, Ace? Would you be jealous?”

  She stared hard back at him, but he avoided her glare, choosing not to answer. Jessie turned back toward the microphone and pressed the button. “Arcadia, this is Ezra Quarantine Four-Four-Nine. Please state your infection and cryostatus there.”

  The static answered them, and they waited for the Arca
dia androids to respond. If they were androids at all. Most outlying outposts were quarantines for sick humans, manned only by machines and, occasionally, an immune person or two. This was the first outpost they’d heard from since Earth’s destruction. Hope was dying with each passing year that they’d ever see a non-frozen human again.

  That’s what Jessie had believed she was all these years. She’d told herself she was an immune human, and that with a cure, she could save those with the plague. Now she knew why. It was Garrett.

  They had loved one another, back on Earth. But she was a machine, and he’d been dying. She suddenly remembered everything. She hadn’t been able to stand being separated from Garrett. She’d volunteered for the quarantine program hoping to stay with him even though he was in stasis. Something had happened to her after arriving at Ezra station—a glitch—and she began believing she was human. Ace had taken care of her and let her think what she wanted. He knew that the lie had made her happy. But now his own glitch was too debilitating. It was her turn to take care of him.

  “Copy, Ezra. Hello from across the system. Our plague status is clear with fourteen cryos intact along with two fully functional A.C.E. units as per protocol.”

  “Do you have any immunes?” She knew it was a long shot, but it was possible human staff had been sent to Arcadia just before the destruction of Earth. The white noise was wearing on her, and the wait even more.

  “Negative. All quarantines require only two A.C.E. staff to watch over cryochambers until further instructions from Earth Command. All immunes were removed from quarantine stations over three centuries ago due to interrelations, which are against protocol.”

  “But there is no Earth Command. Arcadia….” She swallowed the desert in her mouth before peering back toward Ace, who pressed his lips into a thin, tense line. “Earth was destroyed thirty years ago.”

 

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