by K A Riley
“True. And remember how the Auditor asked to be liberated from the Patriot network?”
I tell him, “Yes,” recalling in vivid detail the conversation I had with the disembodied techno-consciousness claiming to be my mother.
“With Olivia’s help, we managed to solve both problems. For now, at least. We downloaded the Auditor into the quantum micro-network making up Terk’s life support system.”
“So I’m here,” Terk beams. “For a while longer, anyway.”
The slightly breathy female voice of the Auditor adds, “Me, too.”
“It’s crystal clear,” I say through a squint. “But I can never tell exactly where its…I mean, her voice is coming from.
“That’s because it’s coming from here,” Caldwell explains as he motions for Terk to turn around. He does, and strapped onto his broad back, we see a thin, nearly two-foot wide version of the smoky black disk that housed the Auditor in Caldwell’s basement lab in the Deenay Headquarters.
Caldwell seems especially proud at the moment, his words tumbling boyishly out in an excited flurry. “There’s nano-tech running throughout parts of Terk’s body, just under his skin, mostly on the left side. Not that different from the microfibers running through Render. The voice you hear as the Auditor comes out of a modulation amplifier on an adapted frequency.” Caldwell gives the disk a light tap with his finger. “She doesn’t have access to the scope of the Patriot network like she once did. But she’s in there.”
Terk grins and squirms through his neck and shoulders. “It kind of tickles when she talks.”
“So your Conspiracy gets a two-for-one,” Caldwell continues. “Terk gets to live, we hope, a lot longer…”
“And I get to have mobility,” the Auditor coos, “and be freed from the Patriot network.”
“Plus, Terk gets a cool backpack,” Cardyn adds, reaching out to run his fingers over the shimmering black disk, mag-bonded like a shield between Terk’s shoulder blades. He elbows Terk. “So…got a little thing going with Kress’s mom, eh?”
Terk and I both say, “Hey!” at the same time as Cardyn skips back to avoid Terk’s pretend punch.
It’s Cardyn who smiles first. “The Auditor and Terk…our very own AudiTerk.”
“Come on,” Cardyn pleads into the silence that follows. “That’s pretty clever, right?”
If someone could hook me up to a generator, I’m guessing the force of my eyeroll alone could power a small city.
After getting our final instructions from Granden, Kella, and Wisp and saying our last round of goodbyes to the crowd, my Conspiracy and I climb the access ladder and enter the fat-bellied cargo plane.
Without proper seats, we’re forced to plunk ourselves down on the short steel benches on either side of the hold.
Parts of the interior have been cordoned off with thick steel partitions, so there’s not a ton of space, and I’m sandwiched in a small compartment between Brohn and Cardyn. Terk and Rain are sitting across from us with Render perched on an overhead storage shelf, his talons curled tight around the metal bar running along its length.
The pilots, handpicked by Granden and Kella to take us to London, call out from the cockpit for us to “Buckle up!” and “Hold on as best you can!”
“I’m a little nervous,” I confess under my breath to Brohn.
“You? You may not have flown, exactly, but you’ve had plenty of high altitude, bird’s eye views through Render.”
“Maybe that’s why this is so terrifying. Like Render says, for this kind of flight, there’s no control. I’m just along for the ride.”
Brohn leans over and gives me a light kiss, pulling back before Cardyn has a chance to see us and tease us with a litany of his annoying, drawn out, “Ooohs” and “Ahhhs.”
The plane clacks and clunks to life, vibrating in a violent spasm as it chugs down the pitted runway.
Opening and closing his talons on the metal bar, Render belts out a succession of worried kraas!
The rest of us hold our breath, and Brohn holds my hand as we blaze up into the fiery afternoon sky with Washington behind us, London in front of us, and a whole bunch of frayed nerves all around.
5
Flight
Over the eight and a half hours it takes us to get to England, the plane never really manages to lose its unfortunate case of the shakes.
Other than us, our heavy canvas sack of handguns and rifles, and some stacks of wooden crates that are bolted to the floor near the solid steel partition, there’s no real cargo in this part of the hold. But the big metal clips on the safety netting keep banging against the curved steel walls, and the few loose items in this section of the plane—some broken buckles, scraps of tin, and a handful of lag-bolts someone didn’t store properly—skitter and clatter around the dirty metal floor like shell casings in an oil drum.
Groaning, Rain suggests we at least stand up and stretch our legs, but I’m too terrified of getting pitched into the hard steel hull and opt to stay where I am. There are no actual seatbelts, so I’ve spent most of the flight with my hands locked onto the edge of the metal bench in an immovable death-grip.
Terk, with the Auditor attached to his back, stands with Rain. Clamping the six-pronged gripper of his prosthetic left hand onto the same rail Render is perched on, he sways along with the jostling plane.
With her cooing voice echoing in resonant waves throughout the cabin, the Auditor informs us that much of the turbulence we’re experiencing is a direct result of climate change conditions. “Runaway manufacturing and the resulting pollution disrupted a natural freeze-thaw cycle. The Atomic Wars exacerbated conditions. The heat and arctic bands now create violent and unpredictable storm fronts in the troposphere and stratosphere.”
Brohn leans toward me and whispers through a restrained chuckle, “Your mom is such a know-it-all.”
“Without plugged-in people like her and Olivia,” I remind him, “we wouldn’t know half of what we do, and we’d have been killed a long time ago.” I give him a sharp jab to the side with my elbow before adding, “And she’s not my mom.”
Across from us, Rain steadies herself against Terk, her hand looking impossibly small against his bulging right bicep. She reaches back and pulls her foot up by the toe of her boot to stretch the front of her leg.
“I don’t know how you can do that,” I call out to her over the thrum and thump of the quaking cargo plane.
“This? This is nothing!” Her voice sounds muffled and hollow in the steel-walled compartment.
Brohn gives her a drawn out “Riiiight,” but Rain insists she’s enjoying the ride.
“It’s not as effective as light-weight resistance training, but it’s still good practice for balance and for working the slow-twitch muscle fibers.”
“Great,” Cardyn moans. “We’re on our way to certain death, and Rain here has turned into a fitness guru.”
“We’re not going to die,” Terk snaps at Cardyn before turning to look down at Rain. “Are we?”
Wobbling but maintaining her balance, Rain gives Terk’s mammoth arm a gentle pat and tells him not to worry. “I promise. We aren’t going to die over there.”
“Sure,” Cardyn says. “We’re more likely to die up here.”
“You know,” Brohn grumbles, swinging around to point at the exit hatch, “If you’re going to be such a downer, the door’s that way.”
From their seats on either side of me, Cardyn and Brohn lean forward and glare at each other before they both break into a fit of spontaneous laughter.
“Seriously, though,” Terk mutters, “we are safe up here, right?”
The Auditor’s voice seeps out from seemingly all around us. “As a former military training specialist and as the deposed president’s son, Granden has connections in nearly every sector of Krug’s government. Planes continue to get shot down, so no one flies anymore.”
“Except for the Wealthies,” I add.
“And dumb kids like us,” Cardyn moans, “who do
n’t have enough sense to tell Granden where he can go stick his mission.”
Terk stares at me for some kind of consolation, but I don’t have any to give.
“Um. Seriously, though,” Cardyn asks. “What are our chances of getting shot down?”
The Auditor sounds almost cheery when she says, “Slim.”
“Define ‘slim.’”
“Without complete data, I can only guess.”
“So what do you guess?” I ask.
“Sixty-four percent.”
Cardyn cups a hand to the side of his mouth and calls out across the cargo hold. “I’d call that a ton or two heavier than ‘slim.’”
The Auditor apologizes for her access to only partial information, but Brohn speaks for all of us when he says it’s okay. “We wouldn’t be here without you,” he reminds her. “But Krug would.”
She thanks Brohn, but I’m still a little annoyed. This so-called Auditor may have helped us win the war, but she’s a wild-card I don’t totally understand and can’t completely trust.
According to Caldwell, she’s the essence of my mother fused with a cyber-intelligence designed by my father, but I’m not buying it. At least not yet. And not completely.
Apparently, my father gave me my embedded forearm implants of black dots, intricate curves, and swooping lines to enhance my telempathy—my Emergent ability to synch my consciousness with Render’s—but also as part of a larger plan to access something beyond our normal human experience.
Fortunately, he also gave me the good sense not to believe everything I hear.
For now, I’ll accept that maybe he managed to salvage some part of my mother’s consciousness. I’ll even buy Caldwell’s claim that she and Render and I represent three key puzzle pieces of my dad’s lifelong project to make some kind of grand, mysterious breakthrough in the multiverse field of quantum physics, something I can’t even begin to get my head around.
As for accepting the Auditor as my mother…well, that’s not going to happen any time soon.
Over the next several hours, Brohn, Cardyn, Rain, Terk, and I do our best to sleep, although the plane doesn’t really to want to cooperate. The pilots, Bezra and Fredericks, take turns coming back every hour or so to check on us, and it’s like we’re kids being watched over by the two over-attentive babysitters our mommy and daddy hired to keep us safe.
That part feels weird. Especially because we’ve been without parents for most of our lives.
Other than that, though, and our sixty-four percent probability of being shot down over the Atlantic, the rest of this feels just about right.
Brohn is on my left with his arm around my waist. Cardyn is on my other side, smiling again for the first time in weeks. Crossing the cargo hold to slide onto the bench seat next to him, Rain is trying to convince him that his freckles are a sign of beauty and that the Insubordinate named Sirella asked her if Rain could set them up when we get back.
If we get back, I think.
“Really?” Cardyn blushes, his eyes darting away from Rain’s and down to the floor of the plane. “She wants to get set up?” He presses his thumb to his chest, his eyes wide with doubt. “With me?”
“Unless you’re not interested…”
“No. I am,” Cardyn insists. “I just didn’t figure…I mean, I thought maybe she was just…”
I have to laugh. Apparently, he still doesn’t realize how attractive he’s become after having been an insecure, scruffy-looking, tangerine-haired, pimply-faced kid for so long. I’m not sure myself when it happened. I mean, he’s always been cute, with his full lips, boyishly gleeful eyes, and his cherubic face full of freckles. But now, it’s like I blinked, and before my eyes, a pumpkin became a prince.
Tired but too agitated at the moment to sleep and doing my best to tune out Rain and Cardyn’s conversation about future hook-ups, I lean my head against Brohn’s shoulder. “Do you think everyone’ll be okay back in D.C.?”
“You mean because of the Devoteds?”
“Yeah.”
“That was a close call yesterday, wasn’t it?”
“After all we survived over the past year,” I sigh, “we nearly got crushed to death by a chunk of ceiling.”
“They got close. But there can’t be that many of them. And they can’t possibly have the resources to be a sustained threat.”
“Maybe. But I also can’t imagine them backing down.”
Brohn curls his arm around my shoulders. “I’m sure things’ll be fine. Olivia is working to reconfigure the drone protocols and restore the digi-tech and security networks. Clean-up crews are fixing things and clearing away the garbage. It won’t be long before the communication grid is back online. Granden and Kella have things under control. Everyone looks up to them.”
“They’ve turned into quite the team, haven’t they? Granden and Kella, I mean.”
“Absolutely. No one better to lead the transition. I’m especially happy for Kella.”
“I know, right? Things could have ended up a lot worse for her.”
“She had a bit of a sleepwalker vibe going there for a while, didn’t she? But she definitely seems to be back on track. And, of course, my sister is a human spark plug. If anyone has the energy for this, it’s her.”
“I didn’t expect there to be so much resistance to the idea of a free society.”
“Did you think it was all going to turn into paradise after Krug?”
“Kind of,” I admit. Brohn laughs, and I give him a playful smack to his chest. “None of us ever won a war before. How could we know what it would look like afterwards?”
“I guess.”
From down at her end of the cold steel bench, Rain snorts an irritated grunt. “The Devoteds will keep fighting. Nothing’s scarier to them than freedom.”
“How can freedom be scary?” Terk asks from across the hold.
Render, apparently bored with his roost up above and characteristically curious, flutters down to land in the crook of Terk’s metal arm. As Terk smiles, Render begins gently pecking at the servos and the small, whirring gears in Terk’s left arm and along his ribcage. For all his cyber-implants and weird, monkish wisdom, Render is still an actual bird whose instincts range from predatory, like in battle, to protective, and to inquisitively childlike, like now.
“Don’t kid yourself, Big Guy,” Brohn says to Terk, leaning forward. “For a lot of people, freedom is about the scariest thing there is.”
“Absolutely,” Rain chuckles through an unamused grin. “Especially for people like the Devoteds who’re committed to defending their right to be delusional frack-maggots.”
“Do they really think freedom for us means slavery for them?” I ask into the air.
No one answers at first. I don’t know if it’s because no one heard me or if it’s because it’s a dumb question, but I feel myself blushing.
“This is exactly why our mission is so important,” Rain says at last. “We helped to bring down Krug and his government. But we can’t assume everyone’s mind is suddenly changed, that no one’s afraid, and that everyone is suddenly magically enlightened.” She squints in thought as she gets ready to start ticking our options off on her fingers. “Look. I’ve been thinking about it. These Emergents and Hypnagogics we’re supposed to track down…there are three possibilities—”
“Assuming they even exist,” Brohn interrupts.
“Or that they haven’t already been tracked down and killed,” Cardyn adds glumly.
“All true,” Rain concedes. “But let’s say none of that’s the case. Let’s say some of them slipped through Krug’s fingers like we did. There are three possibilities: They’ll join us and help keep our quest for peace going in the right direction. They’ll start joining rogue, underground groups like the Devoteds and try to leverage their abilities for personal gain…”
“And third?” I ask after Rain trails off, apparently deep in thought or else immersed in worry.
“Or third, they pick up where Sheridyn left
off, kill us, and take over Krug’s position as the new tyrants of the world.”
Cardyn raises his hand. “I’m voting for possibility number one. Yes. Definitely number one. I’d rather have them help us than kill us.”
Brohn reaches over my lap and claps a hand onto Cardyn’s knee. “Way to go out on a limb there, Card.”
In the middle of our group laugh, Terk drops his eyes and looks serious.
“What is it, Big Guy?” I ask.
He shakes his head and latches more tightly onto the safety rail behind him as the plane shudders under an especially stomach-churning bout of turbulence. Render kraas! and flaps back up to his perch on the ledge.
“You guys made it out of the Processor,” Terk says. “I didn’t.”
“Of course you did!” I assure him. “You’re here, right?”
Terk pats his mechanical arm with his flesh and blood hand. “Not all of me.”
“Never heard you sound scared before,” Brohn says.
“I’m not scared of dying. I already did that once.”
“What then?” I ask.
“Where we’re going…what we’re about to try to do…I guess I’m afraid of dying again.”
6
Touchdown
Lieutenant Bezra calls back to us from the cockpit, “We’re approaching London.”
Brohn, Cardyn, Terk, Rain, and I huddle around two of the plane’s cloudy oval windows.
We’ve seen pictures of the city from long before we were born. Before the Atomic Wars and before the Eastern Order. It was even the subject, along with a host of other major cities, of a whole lesson on history and geography from one of our classes back in the Valta.
From up here, through a break in the low-lying clouds, the sprawling area looks more like an infected wound than the city we thought we kind of knew.
Honestly, I don’t know what I was expecting. The first thing Krug took away was the ability for us to know almost anything about anyone and everywhere else in the world. Sure, we had viz-screens in the Valta, but they mostly broadcast looped versions of President Krug’s and Mariella Mayne’s speeches and images of the Eastern Order destroying our country as the “noble” Patriot Army fought valiantly—and, as it turns out, in a totally fabricated campaign—to protect us all.