Contribute (Holo, #2)

by Kristy Acevedo

  “Thank God,” I say.

  “It’s bad over there,” Doctor A. says and nurses a wound on his leg.

  “Benji pulled us free,” Dominick says. “We were pinned under rubble. He was right behind us . . .”

  I scan the crash site for signs of movement.

  “He might need help,” Dominick says.

  We race to the disaster, my uniform pulled over my mouth to help filter the smoke. My ankle throbs, so I limp some of the way. Katherine and Doctor A. scour the area to the left, so I take the right. Rita follows me, and Dominick stays in the center. He climbs over a metal panel, and I try lifting one away, but the heat of the metal burns my hand.

  “Something smells toxic,” Rita says with her hand over her mouth.

  A familiar dread crawls under my skin. “How could you not notice he was missing?” I ask Dominick, frantic.

  “He’s Benji. When does he ever need help?”

  If he’s not okay, it’ll never be okay. He’s the glue that holds our family together. He’s held me together. We will never be okay.

  “Way over there,” Rita says. “His foot looks wedged.”

  I spot Benji among the debris. His foot is stuck between two pieces of the ship. He pulls and pulls on his leg and it eventually releases.

  Relief runs through my veins as I run forward to help him. To thank him for saving Dominick. To apologize for . . . holding so much against him, being difficult, being such a basket case—I’m not even sure.

  He raises a hand to say something—

  A tremendous fireball knocks us off our feet as the entire shipwreck explodes. I’m thrown backward and land hard, pain shooting up my spine. Benji’s body disappears in the flames.

  “Oh God. Benji!” I scramble to my feet and ignore the pain in my leg and shoulder. Rita holds me back. A group of Umbra rush in to help.

  All we see is dark smoke and bluish-orange flames.

  “HME OPEN!” I scream. Nothing happens. The damn thing’s offline.

  Katherine and Doctor A. remain on scene while Umbra members force Dominick, Rita, and I to retreat to a safer distance with them. Dominick and Rita hold onto me as I fight to run, fight to stand. Rita hides her face in her hands.

  Minutes later, Doctor A. returns. “I’m so sorry, Alex.”

  CHAPTER 26

  DAY 55

  KATHERINE RETURNS FROM the scene of the explosion, tears streaked across her face in the dark.

  “We need to move.” Her strong voice doesn’t portray the worry on her face. “Let’s go. The magpods are offline. Everything is offline.”

  There are so many feelings racing through me I cannot process them. My body goes numb.

  My brother’s dead. I should’ve let everything be.

  I came here to bring the truth. My brother, who drove me nuts most of my life, finally believed in me. Now he’s dead. It’s all my fault.

  “Alex, we have to leave.” Dominick pulls me to join the retreating Umbra.

  My feet won’t listen to my brain. I’m short circuiting in a brand new way. Dad’s way. The way only war can.

  Rita shakes me. “Alex, we have to go back. Let the special troops handle the rest.”

  Katherine intervenes. “The impact of the crash temporarily brought down the vances’ barrier. Beruk will rally the troops to attack while they have the opportunity.”

  Waiting for Benji’s instructions.

  “Benji’s death won’t be in vain. I won’t let it be in vain. It’s my fault. I don’t know what happened with DOT . . . We can do this, Alex. We have a chance to bring everyone home.”

  Everyone but my brother. Home. Oh, God, my parents . . .

  I think I’m crying. It’s hard to tell. Dominick holds my body tight. It’s the only thing keeping me up.

  “Alex, listen to me,” Katherine says. “The greatest sacrifice always comes at the expense of self. Your brother knew this. That’s why he was military. I have to follow his lead and make it count. Let’s make it count together.”

  Make it count. Her words allow me to temporarily ignore the truth, ignore the painful tide rising inside to drown me. She thinks Benji did it for the Umbra, did it for the cause. Did it to save them. But he did it for me. I know he did it for me.

  If the Umbra and Geotroupes are ready for attack, I’m going with them. I am done being their victim. I want revenge. Rage is power

  Together, we head back on foot to destroy the meritocracy, my grief a quick fuel that will burn until I realize that I’m empty.

  THE CROWD REMINDS me one again of the Stop & Shop riot back on Earth, and all those old feelings come rushing back inside me. But grief is stronger than anxiety, and right now I couldn’t care less about my safety. Fear has its limits. Grief is fathomless.

  “As far as we can tell,” Beruk says, “the vances inhabit that LU community. The area appeared to be a canyon before, but when the barrier crashed, the scenery changed.” He looks at me. “I’m sorry for your loss. He was a good man.”

  The Umbra have explosives strapped to their bodies, DQDs drawn in front of them. I thought those were only for holograms. In the darkness, Jackson leads the way. We storm down the hill in the darkness and enter the LU. My ankle hurts as I run, but my heart is broken. As soon as we reach the first Hub, I know something is terribly wrong.

  The vances are waiting for us. They wear robes, not uniforms, but other than that look similar to Earth refugees. They stand with their hands in the air, weaponless. It’s too easy.

  Is it an ambush? Did they know we were coming? Did DOT really turn on us?

  “You’re surrounded!” Beruk yells. “Surrender!”

  The Umbra and Geotroupes send up a mutual cheer.

  I don’t join in. The enemies, they don’t feel right. There’s so much confusion in their silence. Confusion in the noise. Questions upon questions upon questions in jumbled sounds. The language filters are offline with the power down. We can’t understand each other.

  It’s in their eyes, on their faces. They are heartbroken. They aren’t even trying to fight. Like they’ve already been defeated.

  The hairs on my arms raise. Like truth molecules hitting each skin pore.

  One vance moves forward too quickly, and a young Umbra soldier turns to fire.

  “Hold your fire!” Jackson yells.

  The Umbra soldier freaks and misfires, and the first cryowave misses its target and hits an LU solar window. The panel freezes on contact and then shatters. The sounds ricochets through their Hub. Another vance steps forward and holds his arm up, his bandwidth smashed and clouded inside. He places his other hand on his chest. Like pledging a courtroom oath with the heart in place of the book. Like holding up a Vulcan peace sign.

  No one moves. Another repeats the action. The tension in the air shifts slowly from one of anger and attack, to one of peace, and then shifts once more to far deeper acknowledgement as we see the growing crowd holding up smashed bandwidths and hands over their hearts.

  It takes a few seconds for the whole truth to sink in. They destroyed their bandwidths in rebellion since they couldn’t remove them.

  We were naive to believe we were the only victims.

  How many others are there? It’s impossible to know how many others are hidden behind veiled walls of oppression. Collected from parallel universes. Nothing can be done to stop it.

  Motives don’t even matter anymore.

  We are as insignificant in the universe as a grain of pollen on a windshield. I mean viewshield.

  And we still don’t know where the meritocracy is hiding.

  One of the vances shifts focus and points at Katherine. Others follow, and soon the entire front group is pointing at her, saying something we can’t understand.

  “What’s going on?” Katherine asks. “Am I a target?”

  “Don’t know,” Beruk responds, DQD raised and ready. Another vance mumbles something and extends his hand out for Katherine to hold.

  “I think he wants you to go with th
em,” Rita says.

  “Like hell,” Katherine says.

  The rest of the vances sink to one knee.

  “Let’s go,” Jackson says to Katherine. “We need to find out what they want.”

  The team follows the vances down through their region, similar to our LU communities but with an unkept, much older design. Much of their daily life seems to take place outside instead of inside based on the amount of items strewn in the walkways. The Geotroupes would get along with them.

  “Get ready for anything,” Beruk warns. “It could be an ambush.”

  Without a weapon in my hands, my adrenaline goes into hyper vigilance mode.

  “There are nanoholocoms here,” Katherine says. “But none of them are active. It looks like it’s been that way for a long time.”

  Dominick and Rita are silent. They know I can’t handle reality right now.

  We travel into a much larger expanse with a huge statue in the center. The area looks like a homemade marketplace with items littering in rows for barter. Is this where we are headed if our rebellion fails and we don’t make it back to Earth?

  As we get closer to the middle, the vances talk more often, full of guttural sounds and clicks of their tongues. I’ve never heard a language like it. Like mixing German and dolphin. Without the language filters on, we have no way to communicate. They point toward the statue, and it takes a few seconds for the truth to sink in.

  The statue is a monument.

  The rusted and decayed surface doesn’t hide the fact that it’s clearly a statue of Katherine.

  “What the hell?” Katherine spins around to face us. “How . . . ?”

  “There’s an engraving at the bottom,” the professor says. “I can’t decipher it without the bandwidth’s instant translator.”

  I reach out and touch the dull metal surface. We are only a tiny piece to a very large puzzle, and without the outer edges, nothing makes sense. Nothing can be done to stop it. Their motive doesn’t even matter anymore.

  I look around at the faces of my allies, the faces of the vances, new friends and old enemies, and all I see are families just trying to survive.

  My mind caves in.

  I give up.

  I surrender.

  My brother is dead.

  PART 3.

  “Our truest life is when we are in

  dreams awake.”

  —Henry David Thoreau

  CHAPTER 27

  DAY 55

  WE INVESTIGATED A RECENT EXPLOSION AND DEATH. REST ASSURED THIS WAS AN EXTREMELY RARE ACCIDENT. ALL PERSONS INVOLVED WILL BE SUBJECT TO INVESTIGATION. THE MERITOCRACY WILL NOT PROVIDE FUTURE UPDATES UNTIL THE ISSUES HAVE RESOLVED.

  DOCTOR A. TELLS Marcus the news that Benji is dead. It must be hard to deliver news that will shatter people. I watch Marcus to know how to react. To kill the numbness. To find the pain.

  His face changes in stages. It morphs from frozen and open to wrinkled and pained. To fury. To devastation. Like a universe just collapsed before his eyes, and he alone survived.

  The past ruined.

  The present destroyed.

  The future erased.

  My pain follows. T.S. Eliot was wrong; worlds don’t end with a bang or a whimper. They’re not exclusive. One always follows the other

  WHEN I WAS eleven, Dad woke me and Benji in the middle of the night for a road trip. He wouldn’t tell us where we were going, just that it was a surprise.

  “What about Mom?” I asked in the car.

  “She wouldn’t understand,” Dad said.

  When we hit the New Hampshire border, I knew something was wrong. The silence in the car between Benji and me spoke volumes. For some reason, when a parent acts truly crazy, the children go silent. Not sure if it’s a genetic thing, self-preservation thing, or self-destructive thing. But you separate yourself in the moment, denying any relationship to avoid injury.

  Benji and I held our tongues and didn’t ask questions as Dad drove us farther and farther away from Mom. No one expects their own parent to kidnap them. I thought I would never see my home, my room, or my friends again.

  Dad checked us into a log cabin in the middle of nowhere. No phones. After many more hard drinks, he passed out cold.

  “Grab his feet,” Benji said.

  I listened. Together, we struggle to drag Dad back into the car. Benji drove us home before dawn. He didn’t even have his license yet, and he swerved a few times over the highway lines. I remember worrying we would crash but being more scared of never seeing home again. At least the highway was empty. I knew deep down that Benji would never put me in danger. He was always like that. Reliable. Predictable. He did what he said. Period.

  Dad woke up the next morning and acted like nothing happened. I actually don’t think he remembered.

  I never thanked Benji for not freaking out. For bringing me home.

  For being my brother.

  THE NANOHOLOCOM NETWORK mends itself, coming back online in the region within days. I stay in bed in Umbra headquarters. People come and go. Dominick, Rita, and Doctor A. take shifts, bringing me food from the Geotroupes’ camp, talking at me. It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters.

  Katherine pokes me awake. “You didn’t show up at the big meeting. Didn’t Dominick tell you I needed to talk to you?”

  I turn in my cot to face the wall. “Benji’s dead, and we’re so over our heads outsmarted, why fight it? More people might die. We can just live here in luxury instead. It’s what the majority wants, anyway. Be lazy. Chill in technoworld. Everything’s back online like nothing ever happened. They can all go play in the Holospaces and eat until they contribute. I’m done.”

  Katherine grabs my arm and rolls me to face her.

  “Ouch!” I rub my arm where she pulled me.

  “We deciphered the engraving on the statue. Someone named the Navigator, a person who looks exactly like me, visited them one hundred years ago and delivered a message.”

  I sit forward. I don’t want to hear this and yet I know. The inevitable is coming. “What was the message?”

  “The river will save you.”

  My mind recalls the same message by the biohologram at the HME. “So do the vances think that water is the answer?”

  She stares into my face. “Mississippi, if I’m the Navigator, you are the River.”

  My heartbeat fights to escape. “What? That’s impossible. Did the vances say that?”

  “No, they thought the actual river would save them from the meritocracy’s rule, so in spite the meritocracy tainted all natural water sources in the region to stop the rebellion. It only made it worse, and they’ve been waiting since. For a generation.”

  The two of us sit in silence. I will myself not to let her in. Not telling her will save her. It has to save her.

  “What I don’t understand is how this can be true. How can I be a figure from their past? How did I refer to you in a message to them when we met here? Was it a hologram of me?”

  “Maybe,” I say, picking at my nails.

  She starts pacing the room, cracking her knuckles. “You said I told you to be a hero. You never said when. Maybe I time traveled through a vertex and warned them. To help our cause unite. To get you to bring the truth.”

  “Time travel isn’t real,” I blurt out and jump off the holobed. “It doesn’t work. We traveled from one parallel universe’s present to another. They were just more advanced so it seems like we time traveled. Actual time travel would rattle your brain as old history unraveled around you.”

  “So you do know something.”

  “Er . . . Dominick and the professor asked the holograms about it.”

  “What did they ask?”

  “How time travel worked. To see if we could just all go back in time and fix everything.”

  She stares at me. “Bullshit. I can see it on your face. Tell me why there’s a freaking statue of me with a prophecy about you on it if time travel doesn’t exist.”

  I clam up. She can’t ma
ke me tell her.

  She comes closer to me and points in my face. “This isn’t about you anymore. Or me. This is bigger than us. We affected history somehow. From the first day I met you, something has been off. Tell me what you know.”

  “I can’t.” I wipe tears and think about Benji and Nolan and everything that has already gone wrong. “I saw you die.”

  “What are you talking about?” Katherine spins around. “I’m right here.”

  I hold my head in my hands. “I met you on Earth, sort of, but you were . . . different.” There’s no way I’m telling her she was a crazy lady spewing poetry. “I don’t know anything about the statue.”

  She paces back and forth again, thinking. “We never met on Earth. We met here.”

  “We met on Earth. And I saw you die there.”

  “Maybe it wasn’t me. Maybe that was a hologram of me.”

  “You died.” I stress. “Holograms don’t die. You gave me a note and died. And . . .” the truth bubbles up inside me, “the only way you could’ve written that note was if it came from the future. That’s why I ran through the vertex at the last minute.”

  “What the hell did the note say?”

  I try not to look at my backpack leaning against the wall where my journal is safely stored. I shake my head. “Too personal.” I refuse to give her more details that will kill her.

  “How did I write you a personal note if I don’t even remember meeting you? How did we meet if I was in prison?”

  More time passes between us. The past mingles with the future.

  “You can’t do it,” I say. “You die. I saw you die.”

  “If I go back to Earth, I go back to jail. The future isn’t etched in stone,” Katherine mumbles.

  “That statue says the opposite.”

  “Fine,” Katherine says, “I’ll come up with something else.”

  “Promise?”

  “Yes.” She stands. “I promised the vances they could meet you as River. Ever since they smashed their bandwidth in protest, it trapped them behind the veil without the technology to escape. The meritocracy destroyed their planet before they ever got to return home.”