Contribute (Holo, #2)

by Kristy Acevedo

  I take a moment with this new information. “Their planet is gone?”

  “They told us the meritocracy empties planets to create future bioholograms. It requires full cooperation to ensure the biouploads aren’t rejected, so they create a massive ruse to encourage submission. Forcing contributions creates rebellious tendencies, probably what you witnessed at the HME facility. Then they deplete the planet of precious metals to build nanoholocom units.”

  “So Earth is in danger?” I imagine my parents on a dying world.

  “According to the vances, yes, but we have a window of time before the damage is irreversible. They ran out of time.”

  “And you think,” I lie back down, “that we can defeat the meritocracy when people who have been living here for centuries were abandoned after their rebellion? The same thing’s going to happen to us.”

  “We have a new plan, but it won’t work without you. The troops need a rallying cry. You are that cry. Our troops are hurting. “ She doesn’t mention Benji’s name, but I know what she means.

  “You’re there. You do it.”

  “Their morale is too low. I don’t have the crowd. You do. They know how far you’ve come for the truth. How much you’ve lost. And you are the uniting force with the vances, and the other Earth refugees have come around now that they’ve heard what the vances have gone through. If you believe, they’ll believe.”

  “You don’t get it. I don’t believe in anything.”

  “You have to. You’re the prophecy.”

  KNOWING THAT I'M no longer a target of the masses and the nanoholocom network is fully functional, I move back into the LU that Benji, Marcus, and I shared so I can escape the Umbra and Geotroupes nonsense in the soothing PSF.

  My bandwidth COM lights up. It’s Rita.

  “Heads up. Dominick hasn’t been sleeping or eating. He’s spending all his rations in the Holospaces.”

  My stomach sinks. “Why?”

  “Benji’s program. You need to talk to him. He won’t listen to me.”

  I end the call with Rita and fix my hair for human interaction. Using my bandwidth,

  I track down Dominick in the Holospaces. On the way there, I pull a leaf off a bush and hold it in my hand. A new habit. Trying to see how long I can hold onto things before they disappear.

  His name is on the door’s holoscreen, but when I try to enter, I am refused access. My old paranoia rises again, and I use my bandwidth COM to talk to him.

  “Dominick, it’s Alex. I’m outside the Holospaces. Can I come in?”

  After a few moments of silence, the door slides open. He’s standing in a field of grass, grizzly bears charging toward us. He doesn’t say hello, just turns and shoots. His body shifts, waits, and shoots again in a three-second timed rhythm. Bear after bear freeze and then disappear. I block my ears from the constant humming and crackling sounds, a terrible choir of violence. He’s so good, it terrifies me.

  “Dominick, stop.” I pull his arm holding the simulated DQD. He ignores me, so I pull harder. The gun fires right through my body, harmless in these circumstances, but it’s enough to get his attention.

  “Alex, what the hell. Don’t ever do that.” He brushes me off his arm and pauses the program with his bandwidth. “Do you want to join in? I can set the filter to two players.”

  “I know what you’re doing,” I say. “Rita said you’re in here all the time, using up most of your rations. Skipping meals.”

  He unpauses the game to resume action.

  As he shoots, a sadness builds inside of me for what we’ve become. This is what they did to us. Always remember.

  “Okay, two players. Set me up. One hour, then you need to take a break.”

  He agrees and activates my role. I pick up the DQD and think about that day in the attic with my dad. I take a deep breath and put the strap around my head and across my body. Benji would want me to prove him wrong.

  EVEN THOUGH IT'S not necessary, I strip off my clothes and let the PSF clean them separately while I allow the white light and waves to penetrate my skin. My shoulder aches from the weight of the DQD. At least I helped Dominick and got him to eat.

  I want to feel alive again, but I don’t know how. A childhood memory of Benji and me playing in the snow circles in my mind, and I break down. Nothing will ever be the same.

  SIDEKICK suddenly opens without my prompting.

  “Alexandra Lucas, please state your needs.”

  I grab for the clothes and cover my body. “Hello? Privacy! Did the HME activate?”

  “Privacy? We are a hologram.”

  “I don’t care what you are. Get out! HOLOGUIDE EXIT.” SIDEKICK remains staring at me. It’s probably worse that she’s a hologram. I bet she can memorize the vision of me naked and play it back for others. Like a Skylucent peep show of me in a PSF, on replay and in full color throughout the night sky.

  I avoid looking at SIDEKICK in embarrassment. Then I realize that she didn’t even notice; she doesn’t recognize embarrassment as a human emotion. They don’t care about most human feelings. Not in a real way. Only if it seems like a medical issue. The thought scares me beyond belief.

  “Is something wrong with your programming? I want to EXIT program.” I double tap my bandwidth.

  “Diagnosing my programming. No errors.”

  Maybe it’s my bandwidth. I’ll have to ask Katherine to look at it. “Turn around.”

  SIDEKICK spins in a circle.

  “No, I mean turn and look at the wall until I tell you. I need to get dressed.”

  SIDEKICK follows my orders. Once dressed, I tap my bandwidth COM and ask for Katherine. Across the screen it reads COMMUNICATION FAILED. I try Rita. Same. Both off grid.

  SIDEKICK still stares at the wall.

  Dominick answers instantly when I call. “Alex? You okay?”

  “Where are you?”

  “In my old LU to get away. You?”

  “Same. Have you seen Katherine around? I can’t reach her on her bandwidth. My hologuide is acting funny. Won’t shut off.” I watch as SIDEKICK reaches under Benji’s holobed and retrieves a small black box. She straps it to her ankle.

  “No, last I saw her was at headquarters earlier in the day. She was arguing with Professor Marciani. Something about the makeshift vertex . . .”

  My backpack lies zipped on the floor. It can’t be. It can’t be. I rush over and pull out my journal, frantically flipping for the right page. The page where the quote should be. My quote.

  The page has been torn out.

  The page after it says the following:

  Mississippi—

  Destiny calls so that others can follow.

  —Katherine

  I drop my journal and flee from the LU to the old vertex guidepost station behind in the Geotroupe camp.

  I run

  and run

  and run

  SIDEKICK runs beside me, a holographic reminder that I can’t escape.

  I can’t erase the past.

  Katherine’s actions now cause what already happened then. Cosmic effect and cause time reversal.

  If I’m the River, she’s the Navigator. If she’s the Navigator, I’m the River. One cannot exist without the other. Chicken and egg. Closed circuit.

  But I run anyway and I try to stop it anyway.

  Because that is what we do.

  We try to prevent the inevitable even when we are powerless to change it.

  I reach the ancient stone tunnels and open doorways lined in a circular formation. Scientists tinker in each corner. A magenta swirling vertex calls to me from the center. I watch the electric patterns crack and turn before me. I never had a chance. Professor Marciani stands beside me.

  He twists one of his curls and won’t look at me.

  “We couldn’t stop her. I don’t know what she was thinking. Maybe the pressure became too much for her. I’m not sure what happened to her. The vertex isn’t calibrated properly for travel.”

  MY JOURNAL IS splayed o
pen on the floor where I dropped it. Katherine’s note back to me serves as evidence. I tear every single page out of it, ripping and shredding and cursing the universe while SIDEKICK watches. If I had destroyed it sooner, Katherine would’ve never been able to copy the lines and give it to me in the past. Right? Isn’t that how time-travel and paradoxes work? Or would the time-space connection have crumbled and spun us all back to the dinosaurs?

  If the future can affect the past,

  and the past can affect the future,

  can the future affect the past and change the same future,

  therefore destroying the past and the present?

  Or once something is the past, it is the future. Locked in stone.

  My mind swims with logic and non-sense, and I continue destroying all evidence from the past so it can never be used against me again.

  My counselor was wrong. Words do have power. Tremendous power. The power to change, the power to mend, and the power to corrupt.

  I gather the pieces and run out of my LU, tossing them over the edge. They flutter down through the circular open air and onto the Hub below. I continue until nothing is left.

  CHAPTER 28

  DAY 59

  RITA AND DOMINICK listen as I explain what happened.

  “I shouldn’t have told her about the past. The vertex scrambled her thoughts. All she could do was repeat that T.S. Eliot poem.” I pace around my LU, SIDEKICK still activated. “Nolan is gone. Benji is gone. Katherine is gone. And I’m supposed to be the River and save everyone. Who are we kidding? We can’t win. I can’t help. I didn’t magically get superpowers overnight.” I point at SIDEKICK. “I can’t even shut this thing off!”

  Rita grabs me by the shoulder. “Alex, sit.”

  I have no special talents, no means, no plan. I only have the truth. What good is the truth without a plan? Without action? Without people who care?

  “I can’t lead. I’m not a general or a politician. I don’t even like politics.”

  “You have more political power than you think,” Dominick says. “You skipped the meetings. You don’t know what’s been going on since—”

  He stopped short. He meant to say since Benji died.

  “You brought them the truth,” Dominick says. “They need you to lead them into battle. They see you as the River thanks to Katherine. And they respected and miss your brother. We all do. You’ve brought us hope.”

  But to hope is to fear. “I don’t know how to rally troops for a hologram battle in a future galaxy.”

  Dominick cracks a smile. I almost want to crack his jaw. I stand back up and pace the room, raking my hands across my face and then shaking my fingers in front of me to stop the trembling as the two of them watch.

  Rita holds me by my shoulders to keep me still and focused.

  “Pep talk time,” she says. “Ready?”

  I roll my eyes. “Go for it.”

  “Okay, you need to feel your own sense of power. True power is standing in your own shoes, in your own truth, and not feeling ashamed but celebrating who you’ve been and who you’re becoming. When you speak from that place, people listen. When you listen from that place, the walls between us fall.

  “That’s who you need to be, Alex. You and only you. You are powerful when you use your empathy and voice for justice. That’s the best thing religion ever taught me.”

  The lump forming in my throat is a sign that I have no choice.

  “What she said,” Dominick says.

  SIDEKICK stands idle against the wall.

  “Any advice for me, SIDEKICK?”

  SIDEKICK responds, “We do not understand the question.”

  We laugh, and it breaks the tension in the room.

  Katherine said Make it count when Benji died. My new mantra. I can’t let both of their sacrifices go in vain. I can’t live with that kind of guilt. Plus, Benji wouldn’t think I could do it. I have to make it count and prove him wrong. He would want me to prove him wrong.

  PROFESSOR MARCIANI KISSES me on the cheek when he sees me again. An awkward shame washes over me, like he and I somehow conspired to set Katherine’s actions in motion. Dominick and Rita chat with the group of scientists. DOT, Katherine’s specialized hologuide, stands in the middle of the space with two other holograms next to her. Untethered from humans, wearing small boxes on their legs.

  “Wonderful. You are here,” the professor says.

  “I am here.” Without Katherine and Benji, headquarters does not feel the same. “I thought DOT died in the crash.”

  “She made herself transitive before impact. Katherine gave me strict orders to tell you and only you our plan if anything happened to her, and to allow you to explain it to others. She and I tweaked DOT’s programming.”

  I avoid looking into his face. His bushy eyebrows express too much emotion.

  “Tweaked how?”

  Dominick and Rita come over to listen, and the professor stops talking.

  “Do you trust them?” the professor asks.

  I look at my two dearest friends, and say, “With my life.”

  “We experimented with DOT based on something you told Katherine. About a biohologram at the HME? By my calculations, we determined that a small percentage of bioholograms have the ability to reactivate their emotional pathways under the right conditions, but it’s impossible for us to locate them. DOT has been programmed to seek them out and tamper with the program that keeps the hippocamus and amygdala from being stimulated. Remember, bioholograms still utilize the neuropathways of the contributed human brain, so if we can manipulate the programming to produce the proper neutrotransmitters, we can get them to join our troops.”

  “So they’ll create sort of hologram zombies?” I ask. “But with feelings.”

  “Yes, so to speak. Who will fight for us.”

  How do you fight holograms? With more holograms.

  “How can you be so sure that they won’t attack us?” Dominick asks.

  “Part of the programming. They will been given orders to seek out the meritocracy members and alert us of their whereabouts. Since most of the last generation of holograms were former vances, they should want revenge once they understand what happened to their families.”

  “How long will it take?” I ask.

  “Not long. We tested our theory on a small scale and already had success stories. Of those, we programmed three additional bioholograms to seek out recruits. Once we release it on a wide scale, it should only take days before we see results and hopefully have enough holographic allies to form a holographic army.”

  He holds out his arm in a gallant show.

  “You’ve met DOT. Meet PIXEL and GALILEO.”

  “Where’s the fourth one?” I ask.

  “She said that one was a gift. For you.”

  SIDEKICK. Dominick, Rita, and I glance over at my rogue, clueless hologuide.

  “I highly doubt SIDEKICK’s going to be a soldier,” Rita says. “She just stands there.”

  “Do Jackson and Beruk know about the plan?” I ask.

  “They already authorized it. We need your help to fully implement it. The public isn’t going to like it.”

  “Because instead of contributing to their society, we are basically corrupting it to get home.”

  “Precisely.”

  The thought bothers me. And if we can’t get home? Why does it seem like the only avenue to freedom is destruction?

  THE NEXT MEETING of the Umbra and Geotroupes is held in the field outside the LU community near where Benji died. The turnout is tremendous. People I recognize from the Hub, and people I don’t recognize from other communities who weren’t part of either group, have joined the ranks. I was asked to make a speech, but I refused. The last time I made a speech for the Umbra, it almost cost me and Dominick my life.

  The Umbra thought of having the rally near headquarters, but the group decided to use the nanoholocom network to send our message to others through bandwidths using DOT’s stealth connection. Ironic
that we are using the network we are about to corrupt.

  There’s a palpable, somber silence. How does an eighteen-year-old girl like me become one of the leaders of a planetary rebellion?

  Would you rather contribute to society or destroy it?

  Am I starting a war I won’t be able to stop? Where’s the OFF button?

  Think about Earth. Think about your parents. Think about Nolan and Benji and Katherine. But the holograms didn’t kill them. I did. It was my fault.

  Beruk has asked me to stay out of sight. He’s worried about my safety. Dominick, Rita, and I watch the crowd using Rita’s bandwidth VID tossed on my LU wall. SIDEKICK stands fully activated beside me, a shadow that I can’t escape.

  “So when this starts, don’t hate us,” Rita says, handing me food.

  “It was important,” Dominick says.

  “What are you two talking about?” I ask. “Ooh, it’s about to start.”

  The rally begins, and an exact replica of me steps up on a high platform in front of the crowd.

  “What the hell?”

  Rita hides inside her skyscape shirt and ocean pants. A shark swims past.

  The hologram of me smiles, exhibits facial expressions, and even clears her throat. Then she gives the speech of a lifetime. My voice carries wide and echoes through the field, through each person’s bandwidth. The vances stand next to Earth refugees to listen since their bandwidths don’t work.

  “I’m here because of my brother Benjamin Lucas, Jr. and my friend, Katherine Kirkwood. Someone said to me that a soldier’s death cannot be in vain. They were honorable people, trying to do the right thing. Trying to get us back home. We have to make it count.”

  My real throat constricts, and I choke on tears. I lose it, and panic surges with emotion. The VID scans the audience, and I see Marcus crying on camera. I can’t. I can’t. My brother is dead, Katherine is gone. It’s personal. Private. Not revolutionary.

  I half-listen to the rest of my speech. It seems to be familiar to me. “I swear I actually said some of this recently.”

  “SIDEKICK recorded you,” Dominick says. “We were told to ask you the right questions to get you to say certain things.”

  My mouth hangs open. “SIDEKICK, is that true?”