by Kieran Shea
Seconds, minutes, hours seem to pass and when Flynn climbs over the threshold of a narrow passage he looks to the right and sees that the passage leads outside. Moving toward the light at the end, he discovers upon exiting that he’s so high up on the structure that a sudden vertigo threatens to topple him off. He holds on and below sees a lone person dressed in white at the pyramid’s base. From where Flynn is it’s too far to make out the person’s face, but when they wave at him he hears Koko’s voice in his head.
Keep going…
Flynn feels stupid. Dream or not, he can’t believe he does what Koko tells him. Pulling himself up along a vertical outcropping, he mounts the pyramid’s summit seconds later and balanced up top he finds a small wooden box. When Flynn lifts the box’s lid, he sees two black marbles. Intuitively Flynn realizes he must choose one of the marbles, but if he selects wrong he also knows he might just die.
LODGE DELTA
Outside, Koko’s bare feet slip on the wet bricks as one of her escorts speaks.
“Watch your step. Please tell us if you’re going to be sick.”
Strength sapped, Koko nods her head even as she attempts to keep track of her surroundings.
Wambling off to her right are the whitewashed walls she remembers seeing when they came back from the wreck. Smooth-surfaced and thickened at the base, the ramparts are high and bank off in opposite directions—suggesting that wherever she and Flynn are being held is possibly a large, circular fortress. As they make their way across a courtyard, a woman in yet another red poncho scurries past and looks shyly at them. With her paper gown soaked like a tired flag, Koko imagines she must look quite the sight. The twins jar her forward and the big blue dog whimpers, keeping its head low to the wind.
Soon the four of them arrive at a brick-faced oblong building. After passing through a set of windowed doors, they turn left and climb a stairwell. Koko counts the levels. One, two… at the third floor they enter a dimly lit hallway that runs the length of the building. There are arched metal doors on either side of the corridor, all of which are closed. When they reach the end of the hallway, Gammy gives her damp fur a good shake, and Koko’s escorts stop. One supports her slumped body as the other taps in a code on a keypad and unlocks the door.
Like the hallway, the room they guide her into is also dim—lit by a single floor lamp. A round Persian-style rug covers most of the room’s polished, pale tongue-and-groove wood floor. One of her escorts points ahead.
“Here we are. You’ve got a bed over there on your left, and the door to your bathroom is just over there on the right. A desk and a couple chairs… the window is shuttered because of the weather. Sorry, but we’re going to remove the floor lamp and any surplus materials in the desk and bathroom that might be used for other purposes. Can you stand on your own?”
It takes a long time for Koko to respond, but finally she nods, and the two step aside and watch her as she rocks from side to side. One of the men backs up and retrieves a few items from a single drawer in the desk and then something else from the bathroom. The other man then removes the floor lamp and the room goes dark. Sitting and waiting in the hallway, the dog observes everything.
Somewhere deep down in Koko’s fuzzy brain a message surfaces. Now. Now would be the perfect moment for her to do something. But she can’t find the coordination, the strength or the will. Dreamy seconds later she hears the metal door close and the secondary bite of its electrified catch behind her.
Koko urges her legs forward. It takes forever and a day to reach the window and she nearly falls twice along the way. Bracing her weight along the sill, Koko lifts a hand and blindly feels for the shutters’ latch. The next thing she knows she’s on the floor, her soaked paper gown bunched around her waist like a sad tutu.
Another five hundred years seem to pass before Koko crawls over to the bed. Curling up into a ball beneath a brown woolen blanket and cool sheets, her head spinning, she can’t help but wonder one more thing before she gives in to sleep.
If this place is a fortress… then where the hell are the defenses?
Why aren’t these people properly armed?
CAUTION WORDS
“Sébastien, wait.”
Sébastien rotates as Dr. Corella catches up with him in the hallway outside the infirmary.
“What is it? There are things I need to attend to, Doctor. I need to organize another group to head out to the wreck.”
Dr. Corella palms a hand through his pate of frowzy hair. “Of course, I understand completely. However, I thought I might have a few words with you first.”
Sébastien measures the doctor’s insistence and then nods.
“First, I’d like to offer my condolences,” Dr. Corella says. “I know, well, I know how special Kumari was to you.”
Sébastien’s eyes slit.
“Kumari knew,” he whispers.
“Knew? Knew what?”
“What do you think?”
Dr. Corella’s face goes ashen. “My God—why didn’t you say something?”
“Too many people around,” Sébastien replies. “And there hasn’t been time. I thought the search party could bring her back.”
“But how? How do you know she discovered everything?”
“I found an extraction signature on my personal systems,” Sébastien says. “That’s why I sent out the search party. When I first noticed it, I immediately went to Kumari’s family quarters to confront her.”
“When?”
“Around nine or ten. Her parents told me that Kumari had gone to bed. I didn’t want to alarm them. I told them I was merely following up on one of her lessons.”
“And?”
“And they looked in on her and she wasn’t there. I told them not to worry, but immediately I had people search the entire grounds. Someone had noticed her heading for the tunnel, so I assembled a search party and had them take Gammy along. The real kicker is just now, while you were attending to Flynn, I found a needle drive squirreled away in Kumari’s clothes, along with some of her mother’s jewelry. She probably intended to barter the jewelry to back whatever it was she was planning.”
“A needle drive?”
“Yes. I haven’t had a chance to check it yet, but knowing her and the fact that she left an extraction signature, I’m willing to wager it has everything. The Tranquil Adaptive Modifier research, my pharmaceutical contacts and communications—a needle drive possesses ten psi-bits’ worth of memory. That coupled with the jewelry seems a likely explanation as to why she was running away.”
Dr. Corella swallows. “Do you, God, do you think anyone else knows?”
“I need to search her quarters. Her parents don’t even know that she’s dead yet. She may have left clues to her intentions.”
“Sébastien, this can’t, I mean, this can’t happen.”
“I know.”
“I’ve risked everything to do this. We’ve risked everything. If my TAM research,” Dr. Corella quickly corrects himself, “I mean, if our TAM research gets out prematurely, it could ruin five solid years of clinical trials. And if anyone outside the Commonage finds out what we’ve been doing all this time, using these people as subjects—”
Sébastien grabs the doctor’s arm. “Will you calm down? No one knows anything yet. Yes, there was an extraction signature and I was damn fortunate I saw it, but there’s no way Kumari could’ve hacked into our outside communications relays.”
“She managed to get into your other systems, and those are supposed to be protected. How can you be so sure?”
“Our relay safeguards are different. There’re crash-out, flush protocols that are impossible to skirt.”
“But the girl is a genius, you’ve said as much yourself.”
“Was a genius.”
Dr. Corella looks down. “God, I can’t believe you could’ve been so careless…”
Sébastien drags him toward an empty alcove across the hall. When Dr. Corella shakes himself free, Sébastien shoves him up against the
alcove wall.
“You’re a fine one to be calling me careless. If you’d started Kumari on the adaptive modifiers earlier, we wouldn’t be in this mess.”
“But she’d just started menstruating, Sébastien! I couldn’t start her on TAM until after her first few cycles became regular.”
“You said you were working on that.”
“I have, but with female pre-pubescents the pharmacokinetics don’t work. Everything I’ve tried has failed.” Dr. Corella clenches his teeth, “God, if you hadn’t been so enamored and taken with the girl’s intellect…”
Sébastien fights the urge to push the doctor again, throws his head back, and slaps and kicks the wall in frustration. Peeking around the alcove corner, he looks down the hallway to see if anyone has noticed his outburst. So many problems all at once—Kumari’s death, these shipwrecked strangers, the fading storm and the de-civs’ encampment—his mind reels. Cynically, though, Sébastien remembers that he and the doctor are still partners. They need to diffuse their rancor and get all their thoughts together, en masse, because blaming each other right now isn’t helping.
“Okay,” Sébastien says, “Okay, I’m sorry. I’m sorry for grabbing and accusing you just now. Let’s take a breath and step back, take everything in for a moment, all right? Each thing singularly and calmly.”
Dr. Corella looks at him and then down thoughtfully. “You’re right. Clear thinking. Address the problem. There’s no need to panic.”
The two pause for a long moment.
“So this needle drive of Kumari’s,” Dr. Corella says. “You’ll look at it as soon as you can?”
“Yes. And Kumari is now gone. So if her parents are unaware of what she was planning, then for all intents and purposes TAM looks contained. What’re your thoughts on these wreck survivors?”
Dr. Corella scratches his hair vigorously and paces to and fro in the alcove for another long silence until he looks up.
“I think discretion is the best call,” he says.
“How so?”
“Well, Flynn is recovering. He’ll be out of the IC tank in the next hour.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning, with a former soldier, posting guards and locking up Koko could be problematic.”
“But she attacked people here earlier.”
“Yes, she did, but she didn’t know who we were.”
“We just saved their lives and that is how the woman reacts?”
“I know,” Dr. Corella says, “but I still think we ought to make a concerted effort to not present ourselves as a threat. Enflaming her obvious agitation and treating her like an inmate—if this needle drive turns out to have everything you think, drawing any excess attention to our efforts here won’t help.”
Sébastien bites his lip. “Couldn’t you, I don’t know, maybe do something about her?”
Dr. Corella stiffens and glowers. “Sébastien, Koko is a problem, but I am not, repeat not, deserting the greater potential of our long-term aims, however profitable they may be. Good lord, man, have you lost your mind?”
“I didn’t mean eliminate her. I was thinking of long-term sedation.”
“But for how long?”
“Indefinitely?”
“Indefinitely isn’t recommended. No, look, she’s exhausted. She’s confused. Given the circumstances and her background, her reactions before were logical and expected.”
Sébastien gives the doctor a dubious look and then retrieves a rubber band from his pocket. A few short years ago when Dr. Corella first approached Sébastien about the lucrative global applications of the Tranquil Adaptive Modifier program, and after he lent the last of his significant capital to move forward on the Commonage project, Sébastien had his notions about his partner’s hoity-toity ethics. Deserting the greater potential of our long-term aims? Once they get TAM to market, Sébastien is sure such disinclinations will vanish. Using the rubber band to tie off his hair in a shaggy ponytail, he decides not to press the matter of sedating Koko further, at least for now.
“So you propose we do nothing about her.”
“Not nothing,” Dr. Corella says. “I mean, for now Koko is sedated, yes, but maybe it’s better to simply keep up the face with her until we’re able to further vet their situation.”
“Keep up the face? How?”
“Display the Commonage’s operative principles. We don’t have to give anything away. Let the community and people’s behaviors here speak for themselves. Listen, think of Koko as an inconvenient batch of strong acid. Without betraying our specific motivations with TAM, we can act as a neutralizing base. Besides, we’re helping Flynn heal. That may count for a great deal for someone like her. I sensed a palpable connection when we brought her in to see him.”
Sébastien puts his hands on his hips. “You’re saying they’re intimate?”
“Possibly. And Flynn, he has negative ocular implant trauma. He isn’t like Koko. While they both had cuts on their wrists congruent with the removal of temporary biometric identifiers, this deep connection, coupled with Koko’s abrasiveness, may indicate they’re merely in flight from something. There could be extenuating circumstances.”
“With them blundering through the offshore restrictions I paid handsomely for, I’ll bet there are extenuating circumstances.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake. If Kumari did bypass the communication relays and some entity did manage to find out about our efforts here and sought to capitalize on them, do you really think they’d pair up a former soldier with someone who’s obviously not?”
“They’d have been much more assertive.”
“Right. They’d have sent a whole team. In all probability this could be a misunderstanding. A mere tempest in a tea cup.”
Sébastien scowls. “Fine choice of words given the weather. So what else do you recommend we do?”
“Well, seeing that Flynn was born in the Second Free Zone collectives, I wanted to tell you that I ran some more extensive tests. In his blood I found trace deposits of powerful anti-Depressus medications.”
“He has Depressus?”
“Well, the traces confirm long-term ingestions. Access to those kinds of medications are strictly regulated.”
“My God,” Sébastien whispers.
Dr. Corella gives him an expectant look. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”
“Why, all things considered, this could be the silver lining with these two.”
“Precisely.”
“We’ve only been working with terrestrial-based subjects with TAM. But the Second Free Zone confederacy markets with Depressus are enormous. My pharmaceutical contacts would be thrilled to know how TAM applies to Depressus cases.”
“Right, and if we start TAM on Flynn, we could—”
“Aggregate the findings into our overall research.”
“And here’s another plus. With Flynn being from SFZ we could even suggest to your contacts the eventual application of TAM for the sub-orbital correctional barges and prison populations.”
Sébastien rubs his chin. “God, I need to see what I can find out about them first.”
“Of course, that’s only prudent. But starting Flynn on TAM should balance things out. One less person to worry about acting out anyway. We can’t use TAM on Koko regrettably.”
“Why not?”
“Sébastien, TAM subjects need to be fully conscious to administer the first and second doses. Even if we could further sedate Koko and use response limiters, she’s a former soldier who would do her utmost to resist. In its current form the TAM procedure is extremely delicate. If Koko moves even a bit—good God, I don’t want to lobotomize the woman. But Flynn, well, he’s already being cared for. I could say the first injection is part of his treatment. We could take things from there.”
Sébastien pictures it.
“So, we’re in agreement?” Dr. Corella asks.
Sébastien steps closer and places a commiserating hand on the doctor’s shoulder.
“Ok
ay, we’ll play it your way. We’ll keep up the face with Koko to put her at ease and get Flynn started on TAM. How long will the inhibitor and sedative last?”
“Given her already depleted state? I estimate four to five hours,” Dr. Corella says.
SURABAYA, INDONESIA II
SHE’S BACK, BACK IN THE SURABAYAN GROOVE
Convalescing in her climate-controlled suite at The Grand Monggo-Monggo Hotel, Wire stands at her window, comfortably draped in a white complimentary robe. After shaking out a trio of antibiotic pills from a vial, she slips the pills under her tongue and chases them with a flood of potent, hot 126-proof arak.
While smogged, the view of Surabaya between the room’s drawn blackout curtains is impressive: a blazing seventy-story high panoramic of unrepentant squalor and industrialized blight.
On the other hand, in the sepulcher-like air of her luxury suite, Wire herself feels outstanding. Rested, fine-tuned, and pretty much amazing. After she’d had her ocular implant and teeth repaired, the interns at the pop-and-op clinic advised her that beyond precautionary treatments, with rest and plenty of fluids she was good to go. No signs of a parasitic disease manifesting in larva-laying microscopics, no exotic sub-viral infections or internal distress. Diligent, the pop-and-op interns provided Wire with a full regime of antibiotics and cautioned her to refrain from imbibing any alcohol. Yeah, right… like that was going to happen. Medically minded twits—they may have their remedies, but Wire has her own.
As she polishes off the rest of her drink, from the king-sized bed behind her drifts a somnolent groan. Turning, Wire smirks as a young man and woman cower in a knot of blood-spattered sheets.
Color her seedy, but Wire believes a little exhilarative extravagance now and then goes a long way in the healing of whatever ails you. The fact is, she’s never been one to eschew her own personal satisfactions, and at her request The Grand Monggo-Monggo’s concierge sent up two prostitutes to her suite the previous evening. The tantalizing talent arrived just after her dinner had been whisked in by room service, and the meal itself was superb—a platter of braised mimicry proteins and hydroponically grown fruits. Even now the extraordinary tastes of the dinner linger in Wire’s memory. Freshly broiled Sphynx cat with guava chutney, poached reptile medallions spiced with garlic, and a dome of sticky rice dusted with powdered cricket bacon. After finishing her meal, she gave the prostitutes explicit instructions to commence a full circus of carnal acrobatics while she drained off a magnum of solar ale. Later Wire brushed her teeth, stripped, and joined the two on the bed until they were all wrung out, beaten, and spent.