Den had not been aware of the extent of Ionia’s reaction. He should have been with her to help. She had insisted that her aunt could help her. But this had occurred. Nothing left but bits of flesh and blood.
Confusing and negative emotions swirled in his processor. He should have insisted.
There was a chime at the door, and Chirag answered it. “Sir, sorry to bother you, but we have reports of a droid causing damage. Do you have any knowledge of this?”
Den watched Chirag keenly. He could usually read emotions on human faces. Anger, deceit, affection, but with Chirag, the mixture of flesh and machine confused him, made it difficult to track his true intentions.
“No knowledge. Sorry.”
He detected the officers moving to the next door, although the shielding was jamming most of his senses.
An unusual tapping noise kept coming to his attention from the lab area, and he moved slightly to get a better read on the sound. He was deterred when Dr. Hebbar let out a massive burst of air, as if she’d been holding it for too long, and bent over double.
“They don’t suspect. Good. Belle, go back to my house. I have more work to do here before I can leave. The droid should go back to the compound, or the cops will have him in storage.”
“You think I need to take orders from you? I haven’t even seen my daughter’s body. This doesn’t feel right.”
Dr. Hebbar’s face seemed too draw in on itself as she reached into her pocket. “I was going to give this to you later, but I think you need it for closure.” She held out her hand and dropped a tiny, blood-stained yarn bracelet into Dr. Sonberg’s hand. The bracelet Ionia’s father had given her. The bracelet she never took off.
Dr. Sonberg groaned as if her sister had delivered a mortal wound. Perhaps she had.
Den had not entertained the idea that Ionia was still alive. The physical evidence coupled with the eyewitness accounts of two trusted sources made it extremely unlikely. He also had the scientific evidence of her blood and tissue, but it seemed that her mother had held out some unrealistic desire for her child to be alive. But the physical item seemed to break her spirit.
He envied her ability to believe what could not be true, even for a moment. The loss of Ionia was growing more difficult to reroute in his processor.
Since his activation, his main reason for being had been Ionia. She had said he was designed to care for her. That he was compelled by his programming, but his emotion came from more than preprogramming. The fact she had saved her mother against the massive impediment of Mr. Feinstein. The way she attempted to give him freedom even when it seemed to cause her great pain. Even her penchant for disobeying and stumbling into dangerous situations kept his circuits active and engaged. Now the world appeared less vibrant.
He stopped the flow of processes that had led him to review his memories and focused on the situation at hand.
“When you speak to the enforcement, tell them she got away from you. Jumped out of the vehicle, and you couldn’t find her. She has a long history of running away,” Dr. Hebbar said.
Dr. Sonberg’s body tensed. She rolled her hands into fists and pressed her lips together as she did when Ionia had angered her. “She ran away once. Once. Then yesterday, she went looking for this thing.” She gestured with a dismissive wave to Den. “But I guess I’ll never know the whole story.” She looked at the bracelet and closed her hand around it gently as if cradling a fragile object.
Ionia. All route processes lead back to her. Her eyes, her wit, her smile—all nothing but a puddle of tissue and plasma in the lab. He blocked the images by again turning his attention to the room and surrounding area.
The incessant scratching sound, like a small rodent, pulled at his sensors again. A building like this should have better vermin deterrents. It should also have better security or else he would never have gotten past the foyer.
“I’m sorry. You know I’m sorry. Go to my house. If you care about me, and our family, you’ll verify Chirag’s story if they inquire.”
Dr. Sonberg slumped, defeated. Her shoulder dropped, and her chin fell. All her usual energy and anger seemed to have drained from her. She nodded and walked toward the door, still clutching the bracelet.
“What do you want to do with the droid?” Dr. Hebbar asked.
“He can make his own decisions,” Chirag said, from his location, hovering a few steps away, toward the kitchen area, about a meter from the door.
“Well, droid?” Dr. Sonberg whirled on Den, some of her old determination and anger hardening her features. “She set you free. What do you want to do?”
Her question almost sent him into an endless loop of possibility. Nothing seemed correct. No answer he could calculate gave him a positive emotional response. The wave of negative feedback seemed to seek a way around his firewall of focus.
He centered his attention again on the moment. Not on the future. Not on the past. But the actual day—January 15, 2155, 15:40 pm in ND on Bourbon Street, 72nd floor, apartment 3B. Without using past or future calculations, he was not sure of his next actions, so he responded with a polite. “I do not know.”
Chirag sidled up to him. “You may rejoin the games anytime you wish. But you are free. I have a transport that will take you anywhere. Would you like to borrow it?”
“Yes, thank you.” His autoresponder took over external communication, filling in polite answers to their insipid questions. Something else crept into his processes unbidden. “Have you encountered Zee, the renegade android?”
The cyborg did not pause before replying, “No. Why do you ask?”
“I was under the impression she was accompanying Ionia.”
“I have not seen her. If I did, she would be dismantled.”
Den accepted the information and filed it for later review. If he considered it now, anger and regret would join with the overwhelming deluge of emotions he was already battling. He allowed his questioning side to slip into standby mode.
“Sera, I’ll speak to you later?” Chirag asked.
She nodded. Dr. Sonberg, Chirag, and Den all moved to the door. Doctor Sonberg barely acknowledged their presence and broke from them the moment they reached the foyer.
“Let’s go the back way. The enforcement is looking for you.” The cyborg led the way to a set of stairs, still wearing his floor-length jacket for shielding and protection. Did he ever take it off? Could he ever just be free?
He looked down at his own jacket, fighting to keep his processor on monitoring the enforcement and plotting the path before him and not on their similarities.
A cluster of officers moved from apartment to apartment seeking the wall-busting, fleshie droid, but no one looked at them as they took the back stairs down to the lower level parking.
They arrived at a sleek double-seater transport with independent controls, which meant he could take it off the grid by using manual. But Den couldn’t operate it. Only humans had that luxury. Even with his cloning ability, these machines would do a full body scan. The security feature had been added twenty years ago to stop a wave of droid carjacking.
“I will not be able to operate—”
“You will. I had this one made special. I am less than fifty percent now.” The last part of the sentence came out tight and bitten. Repressed anger strained his voice. There were many connotations to the statement. The cyborg was at risk of having his rights suppressed in this territory.
Chirag pressed his human finger against the entry pad and clicked in the command to allow Den to take the transport. “Safe journey, friend. I am...” He seemed to be unable to find the right word to convey his meaning. “I am sorry about your friend. Things are not as bleak as they must seem. There is still much good that can come.”
“Using the law of probability, with my longevity, I will find a new purpose,” he said to appease the cyborg. Chirag had been kind to him when it had not been required. But his emotion center spewed a wellspring of pain. Den wasn’t sure if his central processor could
endure the strain, so the longer he could push the experience away, the better.
He responded to Chirag as the human needed. “Thank you.”
He settled into the passenger seat.
“The car will drive you anywhere you desire and then return.”
“Fine.” He wanted to leave and close out all input. This interaction was becoming unbearable, but he needed to deal with one more thing before he left. One more item that had been returning to his consciousness repeatedly and needed to be addressed. “Chirag?”
“Yes.” The cyborg crossed his arms and looked down into the vehicle.
“There were some strange noises coming from the med lab in your home.”
Chirag’s expression remained blank but attentive. His arms tightened slightly, as if he had experienced a drop in temperature. “And?”
“You might have a rodent infestation.”
His arms dropped to his sides. “I’ll check into it. Goodbye, Den.”
The door slid shut, and Den plugged in and set the console to cruise the grid, shutting down to conserve energy and to stop the unending push of his emotional center. There would be time enough, a hundred years or more, to examine his new emotional landscape.
Alone.
***
Blood oozed from Ionia’s hand from her pounding. Weird because she didn’t think she had any left to lose, but there was something sticky and warm on her skin. Her throat was hoarse from trying to push air through her numb larynx. She knew they were gone, but she couldn’t stop. Couldn’t believe they hadn’t found her. Hadn’t questioned Sera more. Hadn’t heard her pounding.
What was wrong with them? Why had they believed Aunt Sera? No body meant not dead!
From the low scuffle she could pick up from the other room, only one person remained, and it wasn’t her mother or Den.
A flash of intense light blinded her.
“Your vitals are good, but you desperately need to be rehydrated. We’ll do it when we get back to my lab. Please stop stressing your systems, Ionia,” Aunt Sera didn’t make eye contact, looking only at the display hovering over the capsule.
Ionia didn’t know if it was guilt or disinterest that made her avoid her eyes. “Once we get back home and I’ve leveled you out, I can help you relax, and then none of this will bother you anymore. We’ll have time to study you. To fix you.”
So she didn’t plan to murder her. That was a plus. Still, Ionia didn’t want to relax or be studied or be fixed. She wanted to wrestle this evil version of her aunt to the floor and beat her in the face. She felt her hand ball up and relaxed it.
Aunt Sera couldn’t know Ionia could move. That might be her only chance to escape this insanity. Part of her wanted to let the panic and sadness and fear wash over her and to just cry. The threat of the old choking returned, but now there was no one to help or save her. She had to save herself.
“Good. I see you’re calming down. I have to put you in a parcel conveyance to get you back to my lab, and it may not be comfortable. Can’t be helped. Desperate times, you know.”
Ionia wasn’t sure what she felt more scared of, the fact that her aunt sounded like her old self or the fact she sounded happy.
Sera reached down and, without warning, closed the box. The darkness had been scary before, but this deep black sent a laser through her. Next stop, Auntie’s lab. Ionia felt movement and heard something hum. Maybe an electric hand cart moving her to Sera’s transport. Final destination: Sera’s lab, where Ionia would become an experiment and be kept in some comatose state.
Hell. No.
The laser blasts under her skin became a laser cannon, shooting painful tingling into her limbs. Maybe her adrenaline was fighting off the numbness.
The hum of a motorized engine and the never ending darkness almost lulled her into a sense of calm, but then the facts returned like a lightning strike to her nervous system.
Her aunt was going to make Ionia a freaking sedated lab rat. She had to do something. Her hand became easier to manipulate, for what good that did. She touched the container, and a beam of information appeared in her brain, more clear than any enclass DL. It was as if she had just known the information and was remembering it.
The capsule was made of grade 5 polyplastic. Her puny flesh covered hand could not make a dent in it. Hell. She couldn’t even make enough noise to get her mom’s or Den’s attention.
Maybe they would still come. Realize they had made a terrible mistake and double back. No. That line of thought would lead to inaction. They were gone and had no reason to return. She couldn’t afford to think they would save her unless she wanted to spend the next few years living in a box with needles protruding from every orifice.
The crazy panic wanted to gain a foothold, wanted to make her scream and pound and cry. But she held on. Only mom-style logic would help here.
Her mouth dried, and her heart did that fluttery thing it did when she was lying. Lying to herself—maybe. There was no way out. No one to help. Only her—stuck in a box. What did she have? A bloody hand, a half-paralyzed body, and a malfunctioning eye.
The eye.
After the implant, she had grown weirdly strong. Then her hearing had gone supersonic. Zee had told her she could control her eye if she held a relaxed concentration and just willed it. Maybe the same would hold true for other body parts?
She had to be smart. What would help her escape this box? Strength. She released the worry and stress and panic. The sides of the boxes that felt as if they were pressing in on her fell away. She remembered a time when she had been at peace. Back in her room at SPS, the girders above her head had been painted in yellow. Happy sunshine yellow.
She lay in her bed, bored and waiting for her dad to get done with whatever experiment he was working on. Cold crept from her toes up her fingers. Her hand felt heavier, bloated. She grew light headed, like what little blood remained had been transferred to her arm. She slammed her two-ton hand against the side of her coffin, again and again. This time, there was not wet blood. This time she felt the polyplastic give just a little. Only a little, but it had moved. She renewed her effort. This half-relaxed mindset was working.
All her attention concentrated on getting the jump on her aunt. Terror made her heart do a little trill in her chest.
The lid slid back.
She punched her fist. Or at least she thought she had.
Her aunt captured Ionia’s hand, laughing under her breath.
“You have a very strong will, young lady. You shouldn’t be able to move at all. I’m sorry. This must be torture.” She patted her like a cute but disobedient child then using a med assistant machine, lifted her and placed her on the exam table.
She’d overestimated her abilities, and now she was going to be a freaking lab rat. No. No. No.
A chime and her aunt double clicked her thumb. “What is it?”
Ionia’s hearing zeroed in on the receiver as she fought the restraints her aunt had attached to her forearms.
“Sent the droid off,” Chirag said. “He won’t be back. Once he crosses the city limits, the transport will explode. I’m taking Zee for my trouble, and I expect to see you at the games tonight.”
“Chirag, I can’t. My experiments—”
“You can, and you will. The vote is this week. How would it look if the Councilmember’s wife was found dealing in illegal human updates? Or worse yet, that she had a sub in the family? How would that look?”
That quieted her aunt. Her face hardened into an alternate version of her mom’s face when she had a juicy experiment. Not pretty as it had once been. Now, Ionia saw only the twisted person behind the veneer.
“I’ll be there,” Sera said.
Ionia writhed beneath her bonds, almost slipping her left hand out, but her psychotic aunt captured her again.
“I have to go.” Sera’s voice was as steady as if she was just having a disagreement with one of her daughters. No emotion.
She really was removed. No real empathy
lived in her, only some strange cardboard version of pity or care. The realization made Ionia’s heart grow colder. If nothing to this point had convinced her. This did. This blank, emotionless stare.
“Bring your bag,” Chirag added, and the wave ended.
Sera exhaled hard before returning her attention to Ionia.
“Word to the wise. Never do business with a dishonest enforcement officer. It will never be over.” She checked her hover display. “This is really incredible. I’ve taken you down to the lowest safe hydration level, and you’re still fighting. Maybe it’s the nanobots.”
Now her aunt’s face grew serious as she reviewed the feedback. She finished attaching the bands on Ionia’s wrist and ankles.
“I’m going to rehydrate you, then give you something to help you relax. Calm down and be patient. It will all be over soon,” Sera said.
Ionia wanted to shout at her, but her voice only came out a garbled growl. The sound made Sera jump and move faster to gather her tools.
A crimson river of blood flowed down from tubes suspended above the table. Dozens of needle pricks impaled her back, arms, and legs like she was lying on one of those beds of nails she’d seen in the bazaar.
Liquid poured through her veins, and relief filled her. Her body plumped up. Energy and strength soaked into her muscles. Her parched throat tried to make words.
“Let me go,” she croaked at her aunt, who looked up at her from the screen that displayed her vital signs.
“When I’m done with you. Once you’re at eighty percent, I can put you in stasis, and all this will fade away like a bad dream.”
That didn’t sound promising. As horrible as her capture and containment had been so far. Being kept in some kind of suspended animation sounded infinity worse.
She only had this small window. If she let the panic come back, let her throat close, let the pain return, if she let thoughts of Feinstein rule her, she would be no better than a living dead person.
She may not be normal anymore, but she wanted to live.
And Den was in trouble. Chirag had mentioned the words explode and Den. She had to help him if she could find him in time.
Vagabond Souls: The Ionia Chronicles: Book 2 Page 26