by Anthology
“Be careful, if the priests hear you, you’ll get recogged.” Virgil reached up and ran a finger along the black veins running under the skin of his skull. His short blond hair did nothing to hide his biomechanical enhancement.
“I’m Nelson, this is Virgil.” Nelson reached out a meaty hand to Avi and she took it, her own small hand disappearing inside his grip. Instead of recoiling or being repulsed, she laid her other hand on top of his and smiled.
“How old are you?”
“Ten,” Nelson said.
“I’m twelve,” Virgil added, not wanting the girl to forget he was there too.
“Well, I’m thirteen and I’m hungry. Let’s get some chorizos, they look amazing.” Avi kept Nelson’s hand and led the boys toward the conveyer belt filled with delicacies they never ate in the dorms. No bland sandwiches or soupy oatmeal at this meal.
Avi spoke as they took trays and walked the line, picking treats to savor. “I met an upper 4our last week who said they’ve been growing the ingredients for baklava in the hydrofarms since last year. You know they can detect the nutritional value of anything they smell? And they can determine any mineral deficiencies just by touching the plants.”
“Sure, that’s what 4ours are for,” Virgil said, trying to sound older, like he knew all about the other series’ duties.
Avi frowned and turned toward him. “And that’s all they are?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never talked to one.”
“Don’t talk about them like they’re furniture.”
“I didn’t mean…I’m sorry.”
Avi walked away from the boys toward the crowded tables.
“What’d you do that for?” Nelson hissed.
They followed Avi to an open table and sat down. Virgil didn’t know what to say. Should he apologize? He’d probably look even stupider.
“Do you get to go out in the city much?” Nelson asked as he shoveled chocolate soy pudding into his mouth.
Avi’s eyes shot at Virgil. “Why? Curious about what the 5ives do in their free time?”
“No,” Nelson mumbled around his food.
“Why don’t you go sit with the other 9ines? You’re just like everyone else.” She gathered her utensils and started to stand, but Virgil reached out and grabbed her hand.
“I didn’t mean anything by what I said. I don’t know any 4ours. Until now I didn’t know any 5ives. No one wants to talk to us.”
“Because we’re freaks even in this madhouse,” Nelson added.
“All the other Teks are afraid of us. Will you please eat with us? It’s nice talking to you.”
Avi narrowed her eyes and sat back down with a huff. She crossed her arms over her chest and stared at Virgil.
He felt like he was being dissected, like she had tacked directly into his brain to evaluate his thoughts. Her gaze made his cheeks heat and he had to look away before he started babbling every musing that had ever crossed his mind. Something about her made him want to talk, and he had never been one to say much.
“Assuming Teks are nothing more than their series is such a simian cognition,” she finally said, accusation and blasphemy falling from her lips in tandem. “It’s the same thing as the others thinking you’re freaks. Are you just big gorillas or is there more to you under all that mass?”
Nelson stuffed another bite of sweets into his mouth and Virgil looked down at his hand. He opened it and laid it on the table, palm up. The metal fibers woven through his skin danced across the calluses already thickening from hard labor.
“I want to be more than this.” He whispered it, like a vow.
“You already are.” Avi reached out and wrapped both her tiny hands around his one large one. Her delicate fingers traced along the veins and wrinkles of his palms.
He may have had the body of an adult, but the twelve-year-old heart beating inside his chest leapt at her touch.
3 Years Ago
Avendui snuck down the dormitory halls. Her black tunic and loose pants made it easy to move quickly and hide in the shadows when the guards or nuns passed by. That and no one ever expected a Tek to be out past curfew.
Her sensitive blue eyes took in the shadowy movements through each door’s small window. 5ives all had enhanced vision thanks to genome sequencing and feline cells spliced with their own cells. Every now and then, one of the 5ives would come back from a med upgrade with a tinge of yellow in their otherwise uniform blue eyes, and it always gave her a sense of an oncoming storm. There was something not quite right about the Tek system. Something she couldn’t completely place her finger on.
She tiptoed around another corner, heading deeper into the building where the nuns slept. Where were the 9ines? Virgil had sent a message to her that morning to come see him as soon as she could get away. Waiting never had been her strong suit, but too many people had already seen them together and rumors were flying through the dorms. Even cyborg teenagers had nothing better to do than gossip about each other’s love lives. Plus, it wasn’t like that. There was something about Virgil she trusted.
When she found his note under the leg of the cafeteria table, a place she could easily check, but hard for him to get to, she knew it had to be something serious. Why else would he risk the evidence of a note? And one asking her to be out after curfew!
Avi’s mind spun as she approached a door at the end of a hall. She was exposed, standing there in the middle of the hallway leaning up to look through the window. Why was she risking so much to talk to someone everyone else feared? Why bother with Virgil or any of the 9ines? She honestly didn’t know, but she couldn’t seem to stop.
Beyond the window, the dark room glowed with the moonlight drifting in through the barred windows. She could make out rows of large beds along one wall. Two or three kids could easily sleep in one of them, but these all held only one of the oversized 9ines.
Virgil had moved to the Upper Tek dorm last month.
She wondered if he liked it better than being with the little kids. She missed the lower dorms.
In the back of the room, a large, dark figure shifted and looked right at her. His blue eyes caught the moonlight and sparkled. She imagined that’s what the oceans used to look like, before they’d turned brown and acidic.
Virgil gave her a half smile and moved through the room to the door. Despite his size, he had a gracefulness about him as he maneuvered around the furniture and clutter on the dorm floor.
Avi kicked herself for being surprised. Even she fell so easily into the assumptions about the other series Teks. She hated when someone called her a worm or dirt-dweller, but then she turned around and did the same thing to Virgil, someone she knew didn’t deserve the reputation of a 9ine. He wasn’t cruel or stupid or clumsy. He wasn’t just brute force, no matter what the priests had done to his body.
She ran a fingertip along the scar of her most recent surgery: mineral and nutrient sensors implanted in the palm of her left hand and tied into her internal neural weave through the conduits running throughout her body. The priests had done plenty to all of them.
“Avi,” Virgil whispered as he slipped through the door. In the hall, his bright white tunic and matching pants shone under the dim lights.
She giggled, pointing to his clothes. “You’re glowing.”
“I didn’t think of that.” He hurried back inside the dorm and returned with a thin gray blanket wrapped around his hulking shoulders. “Better?”
“Definitely.”
“Come on.” Virgil took her hand and the sensor in her palm automatically worked to break down the mineral content of his skin. Iron, magnesium, sodium, potassium, silicone…The names ran through her mind by concentration level. The steel fibers didn’t harden his grip though. She wondered for a moment if the iron levels in his skin could be poisonous.
In the distance, the heavy footsteps of Series 9ine guards headed in their direction.
“In here,” she said, ducking into a med-sensor closet where the data files for all the biodata
the grid collected on the Teks was stored.
Virgil gripped her hand and held his breath.
Standing so close to him, Avi could practically taste the metal infused in his sweat. She leaned in, letting her shoulder rest against his chest.
The sound of boots climbed to a crescendo and then passed by.
Avi let out a breath and slumped against Virgil. He wrapped an arm around her and held her tight, dropping his chin to the top of her head.
“Thank the Mother,” he whispered into her hair.
Avi pulled away and placed a hand on his chest. He looked the same as always. Bright blue eyes, close-cropped brown hair, and strong features. She’d grown up since they met, filling in and growing strong from training to work underground in the mines, but he never changed. Always kind, always steady.
Avi reached up and stood on her tiptoes and placed a soft kiss on the corner of his mouth.
Virgil backed away, slamming into the rows of data storage units.
“We’re hiding, remember?” she whispered through a smile. “Be quiet.”
“Why did you do that?” he asked, touching his mouth with the tips of the fingers on his right hand.
“I was curious.”
He stared at her, eyes wide, breath short. She’d never seen him rattled before.
“Did I do something wrong?” The idea that she’d humiliated herself in front of her only real friend terrified her. What if he stopped talking to her? What if he stopped meeting her eyes after work shifts or during events? Could she survive here without him?
She opened her mouth to apologize. She’d just turned sixteen and had never been kissed. It didn’t mean anything. But before the words came, Virgil stepped close and dipped his head down. His face hovered barely an inch from hers and her breath caught when his eyes darkened and dipped down to her lips.
He ran his hand through her hair and kissed her.
He tasted like the air before a toxstorm, metallic and dark.
When he pulled away he took her hand again and opened the door back to the main hall.
Her mind whirled. Virgil had kissed her. Well, she’d kissed him first, technically, but hers had been a peck, a trial run. His had felt so much more real.
Virgil led her through the halls, quickly navigating through the maze of the Tek dorms. All the while, he held her hand and she followed, mind spinning. Soon they arrived at the maintenance hub, where spare Tek parts and repairs were handled.
“Why are we here?” The large room echoed her whisper.
“I was here last week for a neurocheck and saw a 3hree get led in. Her eyes were white, like she’d tacked into 3Spek, but she didn’t respond to anything. The Med-teks hurried her into a back room and when I asked what happened, they ignored my question.”
“She was walking around tacked in?”
“Yeah, but not really, more like they were leading her in the right direction. Like she wasn’t even there. When I asked the Upper 9ine who does our training, she grabbed my arm so hard I bruised and told me not to bring it up again. Avi, I’ve never had a bruise before.”
The darkness in the room took on an ominous tone and Avi swore she could hear whispers from the corners. It was probably the air vents and her imagination, but she grabbed Virgil’s hand tighter and stepped closer to him, his large body providing comforting warmth.
“Definitely weird, but why are we here?”
“Nelson.”
Virgil dropped her hand and walked further into the room. He passed the series-specific bays and continued on to a door Avi had never paid much attention to. She’d written it off as a supply closet or some other useless storage area because no one ever used it.
He gripped the handle but it wouldn’t budge. Mournful eyes looked back at her before he jerked it, his arm bulging with strength.
The 9ines were strong. They were built to carry, construct, and destroy. Their very DNA was coded by the priests for that purpose, but Avi had never seen Virgil display it before. Sometimes in the distance, she’d seen other 9ines loading transport ships or felling trees that had encroached into the terraformed city, but up close, the sheer power of him shocked her.
“It’s solid,” he said.
“Then break it. Don’t hold back because of me.”
His eyes darkened and she knew he didn’t want to.
“I’m not afraid of you, Virgil.”
He took a deep breath, squared his shoulders, and gripped the handle with both hands.
She stepped back, unsure of what would happen if he managed to get the door to move.
Virgil closed his eyes, repositioned his hands, and in a smooth, almost liquid movement, hunched down and wrenched the door off its hinges. His body swung around, the door propelling through the air, but Virgil hung on, controlling its trajectory and using his momentum to bring it silently to the ground.
“Wow.”
Virgil shrugged and wouldn’t meet her eyes.
Avi stepped closer again and placed a hand on his arm. The muscles beneath her touch rolled as if trying to escape her. “You’re amazing.”
He stepped away and gestured to the gaping door. “Let’s go.”
Beyond the door, a dim hallway led further into the temple than she’d been before. While Virgil didn’t frighten her, the priests did. Their absolute control and rule over the city left no room for disobedience. “Nelson’s in trouble?”
“Yes.”
She may not know what to believe about why the Mezna had created the Series Teks—if they were truly a realization of the gifts the Holy Mother had bestowed on humanity like the nuns taught, or if they were nothing more than bioTek freaks like the people of the city whispered when they walked by—but she did know that for Virgil to risk being found together at night and to rip open a door, he must be scared. And nothing scared him. Not the prospect of being sent to the satellite cities circling in space above Earth, not mining the Moon, not even being strapped down and flooded with radiation while Mezna DNA was pumped into his bloodstream. In the years she’d known him, this was the only time she’d ever seen him afraid.
That alone convinced her body to follow him into the darkness.
“Nelson’s been exploring the deep grid, trying to hack into the Tek assignments. He doesn’t get along with the other 9ines. They all treat him like he’s weak because he’s quiet. My assignment is coming up next year and he’s been constantly worried I’d be shipped out of Greenland.”
She reached for his hand and entwined her small fingers with his. It hadn’t occurred to her that Virgil might leave. The thought knocked her sideways, like a tsunami crashing to the shore, and she felt like she had to hold on to him to keep from being swept out to sea.
“I told him it didn’t matter. Even if he found out, they would still do what they wanted. They never listen to us. But he kept digging, slipping deeper and deeper. Every night he’d tack in after curfew and spend most of the night in 3Spek trying to trace the lines of the weave. But yesterday morning he didn’t get up. He’d been tacked in all night and I couldn’t wake him. He didn’t respond at all. No reactions, and the worst part was he didn’t even have reflexes at all. One of the others tried to pull him up and he fell to the floor. We called the Med-teks and they hauled him away, exactly like the 3hree, and I haven’t seen him since.”
“And you think he’s here?”
“I don’t know, but no one will tell me anything, and when I checked the infirmary he wasn’t there. I tried tacking in, but there’s no record of him at all now. It’s like he’d never been here, and I’m afraid to slip down into the grid to search…”
“You think this could happen to you?”
“I don’t know.” He stopped walking and turned to her, his body close and imposing. “But what if there are more of them? The way the Med-teks acted, it was like this wasn’t a surprise. In one week I’ve seen a 3hree and a 9ine slip into some kind of catatonia. What if that could happen to any of us?”
The gray blanket dra
ped over his shoulders hid his body from her. He melted into the shadows like a specter. Night inside the temple gave her the creeps. She wondered if the Great Mother could see them sneaking around. Was it blasphemy to disobey the priests’ rules if they did it in the pursuit of truth? Was it a sin to seek answers for a friend?
Virgil seemed to sense her hesitation. His bright blue eyes glinted in the dim light radiating from the terraformed walls around them. She imagined this was what it felt like to be underwater, to be surrounded. What kind of world had this been when people could swim in the oceans without fear of acid burns or poisonous worms? What kind of world could it be if people would stop sorting each other?
“You’re worried,” Virgil said.
“I’m scared.”
“No, not you. Not Avi the fearless, the great defier of nuns.” He smirked, but his eyes didn’t reflect the humor in his voice.
Avi took a deep breath and narrowed her eyes at him, feigning a strength she didn’t feel. “Shut up, let’s go.”
He took her hand back in his and gave it a squeeze. This time, instead of the jolt of electricity she usually felt at their touch, she felt warmth reach out and wrap around her, as if he’d pulled her close and covered her shoulders with his blanket as well. She felt protected.
At the end of the hall they turned left and found the door to a brightly-lit room. The door was closed, but white light shone out from below the door and through a small window.
“They must have everything turned on high,” Virgil said.
“That’s not high, that’s solar flare high.”
He reached out for the door but a spark arced between his hand and the knob. Blue light snapped in the air and singed his skin.
Avi grabbed his hand and inspected it, leaning close. She could smell his flesh, and the skin on his hand had a black mark. It looked like a branch of a tree or a bolt of lightning. She traced it with her finger and Virgil’s jaw tightened, but he didn’t pull away. “It hurts?”