“We all have to wait until we’re thirteen to get cranial hooks,” Salli said. “Our brains need time to mature.”
Armintor tried not to roll her eyes. “I know.”
Barta took a long drink of water, then wiped her mouth. “But it’s loops that you’re the last one in our entire class.”
Armintor shrugged and dug her toes in the sand. “At least my birthday is in—
“Ten days!” shouted Barta and Salli in unison.
Though she tried to stifle it, Armintor’s laughter broke through her scowl. Her friends tackled her, and they all rolled around making a sandy mess out of their towels.
It was almost the same as it used to be.
But then Salli and Barta shared a look. “Is it okay if we, you know?” Barta gestured vaguely. “Go back under again?”
Salli was already flapping the towels to shake off the sand. “There’s a sequel to the one we just expied. We really need to know what happens.”
In a few minutes, her friends were once again dead to the world.
Armintor pushed to her feet. Everyone else in her class sprawled on the beach, slack-jawed, immersed in the Underworld. She stepped over Sally and Barta, then stomped around the rest, not being careful to avoid getting sand on anyone.
A group of younger kids played volleyball down the beach. “Armintor, come play with us,” they shouted.
“No thanks,” she called and slouched off into a nearby stand of trees.
Almost every tree growing on the planet was a Blue Mist poplar. They were native to Terry’s New Earth. Over seventy-five meters tall at their full height, their bark was an almost luminescent grey-silver, and their leaves were a translucent purply-blue the size of elephant ears. Off-worlders were always amazed at the trees. Not even her mom, the best dendrologist on the planet, had been able to discover any seed, seedling or offshoot. It was a complete mystery how the trees managed to reproduce. Dendrologists had even tried and failed to get transplants to grow on other planets.
At least there was something she had that others didn’t, she thought. Even if it was just enjoying some stupid trees. Her smile felt sour on her lips.
A few weeks ago she’d given a big presentation in her speech class, on how much sense it would make to just waive the Hooks at 13 law in her case, because she was holding up the entire class by not having a cranial implant. She’d shown brain scans of twelve year olds and thirteen year olds, showing the modicum of difference between them, developmentally speaking. She’d even interviewed a neurologist at Charles Town University, who’d agreed that, medically, a few months would not make a difference.
On the day of her presentation, she’d been shaking with righteous joy. But the speech teacher’d laughed at her. “Enjoy yourself while you can. It’s all downhill from here.”
Whatever that meant.
Her parents had been a little more sympathetic.
“If I’d known how much fitting in meant to you, I’d have held you back a year when you were young,” her mom said.
She knew her mom was trying to make her feel better. But the thought of being one year back didn’t make Armintor any happier.
Her dad was the only one who understood. He’d listened to her practice her speech, and made suggestions. He’d greeted her at the door when she’d come home from school in tears, and held her and patted her back when she cried in frustration.
“Don’t let it get to you,” he said in his gentle voice. “You tried your best.”
“It’s not fair!”
“But someday it won’t matter so much. Someday, perhaps soon, perhaps later, you’ll have a problem, a misery, something will happen in your life that will put this in perspective. Then you’ll know that this was just a temporary thing.”
Despite herself, she laughed. “Is that supposed to make me feel better, Dad?”
He chuckled. “Not sure. It worked though, didn’t it? I made you laugh.”
He’d made her a grilled tomato sandwich, and they’d sat on the back deck and watched the sun glinting over the lake, waiting for her mom to get home from work.
Yet now here she was, standing in the forest, waiting for each slow minute to pass.
She kicked the nearest Blue Mist poplar. It shuddered, the shudder rising all the way up its bole and into its leaves. The leaves twisted and turned, showing their purply-blue tops and fuzzy grey undersides.
That grey fuzz on the underside of the leaves was new this year. Her mom and all the other dendrologists and botanists over at the university had gone loops, taking samples every week. It’d been big news, that perhaps this was the propagation, and maybe the trees would be the new cash crop that would cause Terry’s New Earth to become fabulously wealthy.
And in the next moment, her world turned suddenly gorgeous. At first she thought it was a freak snowstorm, those falling great white puffs. But they weren’t cold, and they didn’t melt. They fell rapidly, drifting into massive piles in just a few moments.
She looked up. The fuzz had fallen off all the poplars. Sunlight shone through the leaves again, turning the forest a beautiful shade of pink-lavender. Drifts of poplar fuzz piled up against the silvery tree boles like unmelty snow. A faint scent of honey filled the air.
The wind caught a few puffs, wafting them toward the beach. They looked so pretty, like lace.
It was then that the idea popped into her mind. It was the weekend. The Hook Clinic would be closed, because of course having hooks installed wasn’t ever emergency surgery. She’d done a lot of research for her speech, and knew exactly how the patient was prepped.
And, she’d even written an override prog for the mecha-doctor, so that after her speech when everyone agreed that she’d get her cranial hook early she could triumphantly march forward with the override already written. But none of that’d happened.
Armintor ran to her h-bike and pedaled furiously toward the hook clinic. She would get her cranial implant installed right now. She winced as she thought of how angry her mom and dad would be. But they’d never remove the hooks from her cranium if they’d already been installed, because that was almost guaranteed to cause brain damage.
Dark and empty, the clinic seemed much creepier than it should have. The door was unlocked, because the law said any clinic with a mecha-doctor had to be accessible so people could use it in emergencies. She plugged her flake into the multi-input control panel. The control panel kept asking for authorization, and she worked on it for ten minutes in vain. Armintor glanced out at the street. A skimmer flew past and she ducked reflexively, but it didn’t even slow. Reluctantly, she opened an infiltration prog she’d been working on. She’d written it to… well… just to fool around. Not really to use. But if she’d already gone this far… She took a deep breath, and downloaded the infiltration prog into the control panel. It dinged.
“Welcome,” it said.
“Hi.” She downloaded the second prog, the one to override the Hooks at 13 law. She’d have to erase that one before she left.
“I’m here for my hook installation,” she said. “Are my cranial embed and tie-in socket in stock?”
“Affirmative,” said the hook clinic. “Proceed to decontamination.”
She stripped and stepped into the decontamination chamber.
It took a long time, longer than she’d thought it would, to wash her hair three times with the brown, astringent shampoo, to scrub off the sun/sand repellant, to stand underneath the antiseptic spray. After all that, the exit sensors still detected contaminants underneath her fingernails, and she had to re-scrub herself and use the antiseptic spray again. Once dry, she pressed a button and a sterile gown popped out of a chute like a soft bullet, hitting her in the stomach. Wrapping it around herself, she emerged into the operating room.
The mecha-doctor rolled in, faceless, silent. It was a three-meter tall wheeled metal cylinder with a multitude of appendages. A wave of terror rolled over Armintor, and she felt an automatic, reflexive need for her parents.
/> “Patient, prepare for anesthesia.” One of its metal appendages extended toward her.
“Wait,” she gasped.
Without comment, the mecha-doctor paused its metal appendage. A needle almost too thin for human vision waited mere centimeters from Armintor’s arm.
Her parents would be disappointed in her. Salli and Barta might even be miffed. And what if her teachers decided to just start teaching via data push tomorrow, instead of waiting until her birthday? It wouldn’t matter, then, that she hadn’t waited, because she’d barely have any time left for all her projects.
“I…” She cleared her throat. “I’m not sure I want to do this.”
“Patient, I cannot provide assistance or advice for mental processes.”
“I know.” Armintor rubbed her face, sighed, then sat up straight. “Okay. Do it.”
The mecha-doctor immediately extended its metal appendage again. “Patient, prepare for anesthesia.”
The needle was actually touching her arm, was actually creating the tiniest of dimples against her skin, when the mecha-doctor paused. It retracted its appendage, whirled, and rolled silently from the room.
Armintor’s jaw gaped. “Hey!” she yelled. “Hey! What are you doing? I… I’m thirteen, you know!”
Nothing answered her but silence.
She slipped from the cold metal table and walked slowly out of the operating room. The front door of the clinic closed silently. The mecha-doctor was nowhere in sight. There was only one reason a mecha-doctor would leave its station: a catastrophic medical emergency.
Fear tightened all the skin on her body. Still in her hospital gown, she slipped her feet into her sneakers, ran out to the street, vaulted onto her h-bike. A commotion at the street corner drew her closer. Three skimmers had crashed together, creating a mess of blood, plazstik and metal.
Such a terrible accident was enough to create a medical emergency, and yet the clinic mecha-doctor had passed right by and was rolling down the street toward the town center. Like there was some other, more terrible emergency elsewhere.
She skidded to a stop and hopped off her h-bike, ran through a low drift of white poplar fluff to the nearest skimmer. It’d crumpled against the side of a building. The two people inside… were they people? They were blackened corpses. She backed away, ran to the next skimmer, and then the third. Everyone was blackened and shriveled and smoking as if they’d been burned to a crisp, although there was no heat.
“What’s happening?” she whispered, but there was no one to answer.
She jumped back on her h-bike and pedaled the few blocks to the beach. The pack of younger kids who’d been playing volleyball ran past as if chased by the galaxy’s worst monster, their mouths rigid and terrified. She threw the bike down and ran across the soft sand.
Everyone on the beach, everyone… They were all turning black. From their heads down to their necks, shoulders, their torsos. She ran to Salli and Barta.
“Armintor,” croaked Barta through black, cracking lips. Her mouth was filled with blue fungus.
“Help.” Salli’s crisping hands grabbed her ankle.
Armintor screamed and fell back hard onto the sand. Pain stabbed up her right elbow to her shoulder. She kicked her foot free, only to find Salli’s smoking hands already crumbling apart. Her best friends’ blackened and shriveled heads smoked slightly, as if they’d been burning mere moments before but the flames had now been put out.
Her parents. This couldn’t be happening to her parents. She wouldn’t let it. Scrambling across the sand on hands and knees, she went back to her h-bike. But she was trembling so much she fell off, landing hard on the ground. She abandoned it and ran through the chaotic streets, poplar fluff eddying behind her, heart pounding, breath dry in her lungs.
“Dad! Dad!” she screamed as she burst through the door. She ran through the empty kitchen, the bedrooms, the bathrooms.
In her mother’s workroom, Armintor found a blackened corpse slumped over a workbench. Her eyes filled with tears. She reached out with hesitant fingers. “Mom?”
Her touch caused her mother’s shoulder to crumple into fine black dust that sprinkled the worktable and wafted into the air.
“Mom.” Armintor’s voice didn’t even sound familiar. It was too thick, too strained. “I never… you never…” They’d never said the words I love you. Now it was too late.
She walked slowly through the house again. Her body felt as if it were moving through syrup. She found her father in the garage, in the skimmer. His charcoal body sat composedly, erect, hands in lap. She crumpled into the passenger seat. Her head felt heavy, her limbs clumsy.
“Dad,” she whispered. “Please. Don’t leave me alone. I need you.” He was the only one who could comfort her, and he was gone. She curled up beside him and wept.
It became known across the galaxy as the Blue Mist plague. It was caused by a toxin enclosed in the pollen of the Blue Mist poplars, and entered the cranium through the microscopic openings available via tie-in socket hooks. Everyone, absolutely everyone thirteen or older. Dead.
Members of the Alphahood from the planet Variegor were dispatched to gather up the surviving children, to decontaminate them of any spores, to take them away from Terry’s New Earth, to set the quarantine warning beacons in orbit at 5,000 kilometers and again at 8,000.
No one could confirm Armintor’s older brother had died, but of course he must have. Those first few days she couldn’t help but look for him in any crowd, but soon she abandoned even that hope.
Whenever Armintor thought of her home, she remembered it not as it was during her childhood, but as it must be now, with its crumpling corpses slowly becoming dust, h-bikes abandoned at the beach, homes with meals sitting uneaten on the table and slowly petrifying.
The Alphahood, a culture of teknophobes, agreed to take the Blue Mist plague orphans back to their planet Variegor. And since the Alphahood did not allow anyone to be hooked on their planet, they were the perfect storehouse for these thousands of obviously hook-shy, and possibly contaminated, children no one else wanted.
Armintor was sent with the other children to Variegor, to live in teknological poverty.
Chapter 3
A Vague Greyness, Underworld
Alessandro City, Bituminous Tarsi
Date: No Time Resolution Possible / 2422
But the Forger didn’t want to meet Redcholate. At least, not real-flesh.
Redcholate met him at their usual rendezvous point: a niche he’d carved out in the Underworld, filled with grey fog and deadened acoustics.
As soon as she’d left Cozplai she’d nixed the OTS avatar and wore her usual, which looked just as much like her meatsack as her skill level made possible. One hundred seventy-eight centimeters. Brown eyes. Cuteish face. Chin a little too strong for cuteness, but she yenned that. And her hair. Her style was holohair theme weeks. This week’s theme was beetles. Today Redcholate’s hair was scuttling green scarabs all over her head, and making chains of themselves midway down her back. She could almost feel their tiny tootsies on her braincase. Almost.
“Heyeoo, Forger,” she said.
“Redcholate.” In the Underworld, the Forger presented himself as a matte black cuboid. Faintly reminiscent of a coffin.
In his presence, all her well-rehearsed explanations seemed stupo, and slipped out of her mind like water. “I, ah, I have a job.”
“Tell me.” His voice filled the space, strong, deep, and resonant.
She shifted from avatar foot to avatar foot. “It’s, well, you know. Sensitive.”
The cuboid sighed. “I have a limited amount of time to spend upon this interaction.”
“I can’t talk about this job in the Underworld,” she blurted. “The client says it’s too sensitive.” There. She’d said it.
The cuboid snorted. “Every job is sensitive. Here, we are protected from infiltrators.”
She wasn’t a rubie. She knew the grey fog enveloping them was a representation of the Fo
rger’s kahuna code, protecting him from… well… everything. Maybe she should just tell him. Just, The client wants you to find the Butcher.
But something shivered her gibs. It was the Butcher.
OS, how many people has the Butcher killed?
Counting humans only, the Butcher has killed 11,169,322,198. Including humanoid and all other sentient species, 14,977,489,335.
He’d killed almost fifteen billio. Entire planets’ populations massacred, each with its own terrible, unique flair. The last forger—not a Bituminous Tarsi forger, but still pretty slick—to investigate him had been killed, along with her entire planet, when a hundred giant Yobbo attack cats had been let loose on their planet. Cats had killed the curiosity.
The Butcher, along with being the galaxy’s worst murderer, was also rumored as a maestro of tek. He had to be, or he’d’ve been caught by now. Maybe Watson was right. She shouldn’t say the Butcher’s name in the Underworld. She stared at the cuboid. She could stare at it for 1,000 years and never get any feedback.
“If you can’t clearly state the needed intel, then I can’t find it,” the Forger said.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “But I can’t say it here. I have to meet you real-flesh.”
“Well then, if you insist.”
Her heart leaped in her avatar chest. Half exulting, half painful. He’d get the intel. She’d get the 25,000 creds, and travel offworld.
“If you insist upon impossible terms,” he continued, “your client can just find the intel themself”
“No, the client’s desperate.”
“When they’re desperate enough to follow my protocols, we will do business. Until then…” The cuboid disappeared. One moment here, next moment a coffin-shaped hole quickly filled with fog.
Redcholate closed her avatar eyecubes. Rotting Womoronian citrus fruits. That had not gone well. OS, disconnect me.
Her OS didn’t answer, but she immediately felt her separation from the Underworld and her entry into real-flesh. She could always tell. This time there were no visual cues, because her avatar eyecubes had been closed, and of course her meatsack eyecubes were also closed. Sound… okay, maybe the sound gave it away a little. The hushed tones of the Forger’s niche were replaced by the ambient hum of her real-flesh room. But as always, the heaviness of her meatsack gave it away. In the Underworld, you could run forever, dance forever, swim forever, and your avatar would never tire. In the real-flesh world, gravity still worked.
The Disk Mirror Solution (Galaxia Mortem Book 1) Page 2