A Long, Long Sleep

by Anna Sheehan

  “Run!”

  Bren heard me, and to my surprise, took the warning to heart. He dropped and rolled beneath the hover yacht before the Plastine was fully able to designate him as a target.

  For an eternity of a millisecond, the Plastine crouched in the door of the yacht, flipping through options in his processors. Then, the impediment gone, he climbed back into the yacht with me and we took off. I yearned to turn around and be sure Bren was okay, but my body belonged to the Plastine.

  But it was a complicated body. A hundred autonomic functions, a thousand nerves containing all my motor control. There were so many systems in my natural programming that he was forced to keep running through his limited processors. It made him slow.

  Slow enough that I was able to acclimatize. I tried to fig-ure out which part of my mind was still my own. There was enough of me left to hurt, so I knew there was enough to think with. Otto’s manipulation of my own electro impulses was subtle, delicate, and easily breakable. I suspected that if I wanted to force Otto from my mind, I could. The control collar’s impulses were a ham- fisted, violent seizure of control, stealing all my autonomic functions and all of my motor control.

  But higher brain function was still mine.

  Moreover, I wasn’t exactly alone. Like with Otto, I could sense the Plastine’s presence in the corner of my mind. He was linked to my systems, but —without his being entirely aware of it — I was also linked to his. The control was all his, but my attention could go where I wanted.

  Once I tuned in to the Plastine’s processors, the echoing presence in my mind was almost overwhelming. It was a deafening roar of information, far too much for my own organic processors to encompass. If I could have shut my eyes and turned away, I would have. But it was inside me, and I couldn’t. Panic swelled, and I feared I would go insane. But then the stream of information mercifully ceased.

  DATA STREAM 197 SCANNED, came the thought in my head. PRINCIPAL

  UNAVAILABLE.

  What? What did that mean?

  BEGIN SCAN DATA STREAM 198: INITIATE.

  A further string of incomprehensible information flowed past my consciousness. But I thought I recognized some of it. With a burst of understanding, I realized that the Plastine was searching through the net.

  Once I knew that the stream of information was from the net, and not from the Plastine himself, I was more able to distance myself from that and focus instead on the Plastine’s programming.

  At first all I caught was SCANNING . . . SCANNING . . .

  SCANNING . . .

  DATA STREAM 198 SCANNED. PRINCIPAL UNAVAILABLE.

  I focused on what he meant by “principal.” It was there in his programming, a sub file connected to the word. PRIN-CIPAL: PRIMARY OPERATION

  PROGRAMMER. That had to be the one who had programmed him. The one who had sent him after me. I looked more closely. The first file the primary operation program was keyed to was a retinal scan, which meant nothing to me. The second was a voice recognition program, which was nothing but wave patterns. The third was a name.

  MARK ANDREW FITZROY.

  Daddy.

  All the functions that would have made me blanch or sob or feel nauseated were being run through the control stream of the Plastine, so all I could do was feel it burning inside my head. But it all made perfect sense.

  Mom and Daddy were highly prestigious, well- known figures. They’d stressed to me a million times the dangers of being kidnapped and held hostage by people who wanted to hurt them. I’d taken the warnings to heart and feared leaving the preset patterns Mom and Daddy had set for me. School to home, home to school, otherwise never leaving Unicorn Estates, certainly never leaving ComUnity. If I wasn’t in either of those places, I was always with Mom and Daddy.

  If I had been kidnapped, this plasticized horror had been programmed to rescue me. Guillory died, and Otto and Bren and Zavier were targeted, because the Plastine was programmed to disable or eliminate the kidnappers.

  Terrifying, yes. Sad . . . but calculated. Because suppose I hadn’t been kidnapped. Suppose I had run away.

  Suppose, just suppose, their perfect, delightful little child had decided that she didn’t want to live with them anymore. What were they to do? Allow an undisciplined child to ruin their standing in the global community? Let people know that I wasn’t the perfect plastic child they’d tried to mold me into? Allow me to possibly tell their secrets, splash to the net all their shortcomings, send all the skeletons buried in the closets on a parade down Main Street? No. That wouldn’t do.

  Best to pretend, then, that I had been kidnapped. Even if I went of my own free will, the Plastine wouldn’t care what I said —he was not programmed to obey me. He was programmed to assume that anyone trying to impede his mission was an accomplice. Anyone who tried to stop him from retrieving me —friend, classmate, official — was designated a hostile target and destroyed accordingly.

  With no record. No fingerprints. No way of tracing the deaths back to my parents.

  DATA STREAM 199 SCANNED. PRINCIPAL UNAVAILABLE.

  Of course the principal was unavailable. Daddy was long dead. But I couldn’t explain that to the Plastine.

  I tried to look at the Plastine’s programming as a whole. Just at the top of all of his programming was the file PRIMARY DIRECTIVE. I focused in on that. I saw what I’d expected to see.

  PRIMARY DIRECTIVE: RETURN TARGET TO PRINCIPAL. I was the target, and I was to be returned to Daddy.

  But then there was that other directive, hidden beneath the first one.

  SECONDARY DIRECTIVE, PRINCIPAL UNAVAILABLE: TERMINATE TARGET.

  When he was completely certain that he could not get me back to my parents, he was programmed to terminate me. The full horror of my parents’ plan dawned on me. I had known that the Plastine was an assassin. That my own parents would rather have had me dead than out of their control? That was not love. That was slavery.

  Already suspecting what I’d find, I turned my attention to the date of the implementation of the Plastine’s mission. This macabre thing hadn’t even been commissioned until after I’d received my Young Masters Award. Daddy, and probably Mom as well, had only decided to set this thing after me after I’d shown that I was no longer theirs. My love for them boiled into hatred as I read the precepts of the Plastine’s implanted mission.

  But my attention was caught by the TARGET file. To my surprise, I saw more than one sub file there.

  The first one, when I looked at it, was what I expected to see. Retinal scan, voiceprint, and my name, ROSALINDA SAMANTHA FITZROY.

  The other two files also had retinal scans and voiceprints. And two names.

  STEPHANO LUCIUS FITZROY. SERAPHINA ALEXANDRA FITZROY.

  Both files were still active. The people whom those files represented had not been terminated.

  Seraphina . . . the name rang a bell. Sarah. My little friend Sarah, back when I was so young. What if she hadn’t been the caretaker’s daughter? Seraphina Alexandra Fitzroy. Sarah was my sister! My big sister! I wasn’t alone. I had family. I had a brother and sister somewhere, probably stassed, as I had been.

  I had to find them. My purposeless hatred turned into something fierce and protective, and suddenly it didn’t even matter that it was impossible.

  I forced my attention back to the Plastine’s scan of the net. He was going through a systematic check of all possible net screenings. While the net seemed never ending, and was constantly fluid, it was ultimately finite. He’d find and scan his way through all data streams eventually, and when he was unable to find retinal scans, voiceprints, or a current entry for the name MARK FITZROY, he would terminate me. So where the hell was he taking me?

  Even having the question provided me with the answer. It was there in his programming. RETURN TO STATION. Great. Where was the station? I looked under that file and found exact latitude and longitude, down to the fiftieth decimal, but that meant nothing to me. I looked more d
eeply and was able to find a tactical report of his station. It was a chair, probably a recharging station. I backed away and tried to find a log of his movements through the last few days.

  He’d been busy. I flipped through it backward. He attacked Uni Prep and managed to fulfill phase one of his programming.

  Retain. Before that he had been on his way back to his station in Guillory’s hover yacht when he caught my retinal scan over the net at Uni Prep.

  It was the retinal scan! Every time I was scanned, he was alerted over the net.

  I’d been saved by the antiquated fingerprint scanner at home and the fact that I never went anywhere but school and my physical therapist’s of fice. If Otto had decided to talk to me in the quad instead of the dorms, we’d all still be there, hale and whole, instead of Otto broken and bruised, and me on my way toward termination.

  Before that, he’d been at the Uni Building, ascertaining that I was not on the premises. Lots of security guards and broken glass. I even caught of glimpse of Xavier once, shouting at someone, and my heart leaped.

  I flipped through the journey back from Nirvana. I mentally cringed at the backward, flickering image of Guillory’s death. No one deserved that fate. And it was even worse —I’d spent all this time hating him, and Guillory had actually been trying to stop the wretched thing. He must have grabbed my arm trying to pull me out of the way, but was too drunk to do it. I went back through the journey in the purloined skimmer. I saw, backward, and from a different perspective, the news program I’d seen on Nirvana, of the Plastine hijacking the skimmer.

  Ah, here it was. Finally, I watched the Plastine’s log as he traveled across . . .

  what? It looked like a garden. A secret entrance? I had no idea where he was until I caught a glimpse of the front gates of Unicorn Estates.

  The burned thing had been beneath my feet the whole time! The image went backward, and I saw the Plastine pass through the subbasement, past my very stass tube! He must have walked right past me as I huddled there the first night he attacked.

  A secret door . . . or probably not so secret. Simply forgotten. A metal panel opened and the Plastine returned, backward, to his station in the corner of the room.

  The room his station was in was hauntingly familiar. I recognized the layout.

  Daddy’s office at the Uni Building had been exactly the same, with all the multiple screens hooked up to the net, the rich leather chair by the desk. The screens were dark and dusty now, only one or two of them still throwing off an erratic flash as power trickled inconsistently through cables. The leather chair had cracked, and some kind of rodent had made a nest in the stuffing. But I knew this had been Daddy’s second home office: the one where he could organize all the not- quite- legal dealings it had taken to turn UniCorp into the largest commercial company in human history.

  I turned my attention away from the replay. I knew where we were going now.

  And I knew, or thought I knew, how I was going to stop it. It all depended on the crucial second when the Plastine stood me back up and made me exit the hover yacht. The one moment I’d had any control over my body was when he’d twisted my neck to get me into the yacht. If I could exploit that millisecond while the control collar’s implants were partially disconnected, I might be able to get out of this.

  The Plastine pulled the hover yacht into the courtyard of Unicorn Estates, and he climbed out. My legs moved to follow, my arms lifted to balance, and then my head ducked to move his precious target undamaged out of the yacht.

  Even before he moved me, I had been telling my arm to go up. Up, burn it, and grab my neck. As my head bent, the connection failed, and my arm reacted to the steady impulse I’d been sending it. It shot up as quickly as if I’d been burned. My right hand grabbed the collar. . . .

  And the moment had passed. I had moved my hand, but not fast enough.

  Instead of ripping the control collar from my neck, all I’d succeeded in doing was forcing my fingers underneath it. It was hopeless. If I could have sagged in defeat, I would have. But I was walking now, through the garage, to the subbasement, to my impending demise. My arm hung awkwardly, my fingers hooked beneath the collar.

  But something was happening. I could move. Not very much. I could twitch my leg, just a bit, and then it would follow the impulses of the Plastine again. I whimpered with the pain for a split second before such reactions were suppressed. What was going on?

  I realized it as the Plastine’s overburdened systems hit me with another arrhythmia. As my heart pounded, my fingers found stronger purchase on the collar. It was my pulse. The surging of blood against my fingers was causing the connection on the collar to pull away. It was less than a millimeter for only a millisecond. But that just might be enough.

  I wished I could blink so that I could see better. Things had gone hazy through my dry, unlubricated eyes. But as we turned the corner, I saw it sure enough.

  Right there. My stass tube, the shiny NeoFusion™ label visible even through the blur.

  With every pulse of my minimal control, I leaned my body to the left. I had been walking immediately behind the Plastine, but now I was slowly but steadily altering my course to collide with my stass tube. The activation control was right on the left side, by my knee. With everything Xavier had done to hack the thing, it had an absolute hair trigger. If I could aim myself right, when I collided with my tube I could activate it.

  It was a desperate plan. If this failed, I was history — just as my parents had intended.

  The Plastine continued onward, oblivious to my slightly altered course. He passed by my stass tube. And I didn’t.

  With an explosion of fresh pain, my left knee connected with the stass tube, and the quiet hum of gentle music floated from the cushioned bed. It was activated. The momentum from my collision knocked my rag doll body over, and I fell headlong over the tube. The stass system’s established program took over. Stass chemicals wafted through my lungs, lulling me into a fearless dream state. The clear lid of the tube automatically began to slide closed. And in my dropped rag doll position, it began to close upon my legs. But more important, on my twisted arm — the arm connected to the hand whose fingers were wrapped around my control collar. As my elbow was forced over my ear, and my shoulder was nearly ripped from its socket, the control collar was pulled off.

  I could almost hear the sucking sound as the electrodes were pulled from my skull. The stass chemicals were already doing their work, and my eyes closed drowsily. I’d always tried to hold on to my stass dreams. Now I fought them off, banishing the peaceful lightning storms of my imagination, forcing my eyes to see the dim blue- gray of the subbasement and not the bright colors of my dreams. I embraced the pain in my knee and the ache in my shoulder and my burning eyes and pulled myself away from the tube. It beeped, recognizing a flaw in the system. Slowly the lid began to slide open again.

  With the chemicals flowing through me, I felt no fear as I saw the Plastine, already turned, having recognized the disruption to his programmed procedure.

  He paused, his systems resetting, as his original plan was thwarted. He’d be after me in a moment, his program adapting. I could have run then, but I wouldn’t have gotten far. I hurt too much, and my nanos weren’t working, and he’d have cut me off before I got halfway to the lift. But there was an alternative to flight.

  Having no fear always granted a peaceful kind of clarity. I think that was why I always tried to hold on to stass, even when I didn’t have to. The clarity made me see that there was only one way to defeat a heartless plastic foe.

  Heat.

  With the edge of the control collar, I gouged at the soft, pink satin- of- silk cushions inside my tube. The sharp electrodes caught on the fabric, and the strong edges of the collar ripped up whole chunks of padding. I knew what I was looking for, and I knew where it was.

  With shreds of satin- of- silk clinging to my hands, I found the connections to the NeoFusion battery that powered my s
tass tube. I followed them down, ripping up the secondary safety panel, and there it was. The battery, a large cylindrical cannister as long as my forearm, as big around as my head.

  Adrenaline gave me the strength to rip it from its housing. It was heavy, but not impossible.

  With an angry whine, my stass tube died, its lights and chemical dispensers blinking off. The Plastine had started moving again and was less than five meters from me. I shook up the battery, with its huge UniCorp logo, exciting the neutrinos and reversing its natural polarity. I mentally cursed my father for making me believe I was too stupid to understand. I could have run UniCorp with no trouble. I’d picked up enough knowledge about UniCorp’s most impressive product, hadn’t I? Can’t use NeoFusion batteries in skimmers or anything that might have a collision. Too volatile.

  And so was I.

  I threw the battery at the Plastine, hoping it would explode on contact. The Plastine caught it deftly, and my heart sank. I fell into my ruined tube, hoping for residual chemicals, hoping my last moments would be without fear. I was dead. Good- bye, Xavier. Good- bye Bren, Otto, Mina, Sun, Moon, stars, love, pain, regret, happiness, art, beauty.

  But I’d forgotten the Plastine’s strength, and I had for-gotten its programming.

  Stop anything that tries to impede retrieval. With a quick flick of his hands, the Plastine crushed the battery casing, and raw power surged.

  I reached forward and grabbed the lid of my tube, forcing it to close over my head. I wasn’t quite fast enough. The first surge of heat blasted me with pain, and my entire body turned bright red, like a sunburn. My fingertips, which were the last to enter the tube, received blisters. But the tube had been designed to withstand fires and deep space and nuclear holocaust. It could more than protect me from a single mild explosion of NeoFusion.

  I squeezed my eyes shut through the worst of the blast. When I opened them again, a flickering light was flashing and I dared to look up through the NeoGlass of my tube lid. The sudden burst of heat had passed — it could last only a few seconds once the casing was compromised —but in those few seconds of intense heat, the Plastine had combusted.