by Ben Wolf
“I’ve been crammed into one room for the last few days, and I’d love nothing more than to head out, but the doctor said I was supposed to take it easy.”
“So come along and take it easy, then. I’m not askin’ you to drink a gallon of vodka. Just come along, and we’ll have some fun. Let loose.”
“I’m also tight on money from not working this past week.”
“Drinks and dinner are on me, bro.” Keontae smiled. “You can pick it up next time.”
Justin grinned. Keontae was right. He could use some time away from the mine. “Alright. You convinced me. How do we get out there?”
“The mine runs a hovercraft back and forth every hour on weekends. We can catch the next one in about fifteen minutes if you’re ready by then.”
Justin nodded. “I can be ready. Let me change into something that doesn’t smell like the medbay, and we can go.”
He swapped out his clothes for a fresh pair of denim pants and one of the few nice shirts he owned, then he slipped back into his boots and followed Keontae toward the door.
As he walked past Keontae’s desk, Justin noticed that sprigs of blue had sprouted from each of the pots containing the Nebrandt plants, and he smiled.
Etya Stielbard pulled the report from the first Sector 6 incident onto the screen in her room, then she pulled up the latest report from the incident a few days ago. She knew the initial report front to back by now, but she wanted it up for the sake of comparison.
Despite Admin’s attempts to conceal the incident, she’d heard that something had happened. Given her history with Sector 6, she had to take a look.
Her prosthesis enabled her direct access to ACM-1134’s network via a neural uplink, so instead of swiping at the screen with her fingers, she reclined in her chair and commanded the screen with her mind.
Normally, her clearance shouldn’t have allowed her to view the report, but thanks to the patch Garth had uploaded into her personal system, she could maneuver freely through any of ACM-1134’s network infrastructure.
As for Garth, all he’d needed was a reason to tinker where he shouldn’t be tinkering. And, on occasion, some extra incentivizing.
She scanned the reports, ignoring the obvious differences like date, time, number of workers involved, killed, injured, and so on. Instead, she focused on what made them similar.
In both instances, the turbines had shut off before the gas began to billow out of the floor.
Could that be right? She scanned the second report further.
Technical readouts from the sector during that period gave the times of the turbines’ shutdown and the time of the first registry of phichaloride gas by the sector’s sensors. They corroborated the worker’s story. The turbines had shut off about one minute before the sensors registered the gas, a comparable timeframe to the first incident.
Etya had been there, and she had long since stifled her emotions associated with what had happened. Better to paint everything with the cold blue of apathy than endure the full spectrum of rage, grief, bitterness, and regret.
She blinked. Her vision ceased in both her human eye and her prosthetic eye, and then it came back.
The doctors who’d saved her life and preserved it with robotic augmentations had painstakingly routed her neural pathways into her prosthesis, including her vision. At first, Etya had tried to adjust to her artificial vision remaining on during all waking hours.
But after a few days of headaches, nausea, and a ferocious desire to plunge sharp objects into her new prosthetic eye, she had altered its settings. Ever since then, when she blinked, the feed from her prosthetic eye “blinked” as well.
She pulled up the image of the worker in question from the incident, Justin Barclay. She didn’t recognize him. According to the report, around 0300 he’d noticed and followed “a green light” that eventually led him into Sector 6, which was supposed to be sealed.
But it wasn’t sealed. Security and IT had noted a widespread system failure around that time that enabled Justin to freely access the mine and Sector 6. Also, by their assessment, he’d had nothing to do with the system failure.
Etya would have to ask Garth about that later. If he’d been toying with the network at that time, it could have explained the failure.
She scanned more of the report. The ensuing accident had nearly killed Justin. Like in the initial Sector 6 incident, the doors refused to open, and Justin had ended up trapped inside, just as she and so many others had the first time around.
He’d survived, though, like her.
Now there were two survivors of Sector 6.
The report ended with a note that Justin remained delusional as to the happenings surrounding his rescue from Sector 6, but it went into no more detail than that. Etya couldn’t be sure, but she surmised there was more to the story.
She saved the report to her prosthesis’s memory for easy access later on and then sent a message to Garth: Can you meet me in my quarters in a half-hour? I need you to do some digging for me.
His reply scrolled across the vision of her left eye: I work in IT, not with shovels. :P
Etya sighed. Garth was an idiot, but a brilliant one. She replied: Just come over here. I need you to find something for me.
He replied: I’ll be there in fifteen. Wear something cute.
She scowled and clenched her teeth, half of them prosthetic. She found Garth’s interest in her disgusting. He mostly liked her because of her prosthesis. The idea of being with a “cyborg”—a term she despised and refused to use when describing anyone, including herself—turned him on.
The thought of giving him what he wanted twisted her half-mechanical stomach, but he’d more than return the favor. Besides, her body was only sixty-two percent her body anymore. If it meant finding out what really happened in Sector 6 and exposing the company’s wrongdoing or negligence, she’d do what she had to do.
She replied: I will wear the red lingerie.
He responded: Yesssssssss. I’m coming over.
Etya stood up from her chair and headed over to her dresser. She pulled open the top drawer and removed a lacy red corset and matching panties, then she stripped off her dress shirt, slacks, and undergarments and let them fall to the floor. Holding the red lace in her hands, she turned to face her mirror, naked.
Her prosthesis took up the left half of her face and neck, her entire left arm, shoulder, and a third of her torso, including her left breast. Under her skin, a network of circuits, wires, tubes, and connections linked her organs, veins, tissue, and nerves to the prosthesis, achieving total symbiotic union between metal and flesh.
Alloy ribs had replaced her original bones, and they housed her prosthetic left lung, her replacement spleen, and her mechanized pancreas. Below her ribs, doctors had replaced a sizable portion of her large and small intestines with tubing that functioned the same way, and they’d swapped out her decimated left kidney for a mechanical alternative.
The prosthesis extended down into her hip, but she hadn’t needed her left femur replaced—just some of the surrounding muscle and tissue. Starting with her left knee, metal, wires, and circuitry constituted the lower half of her left leg.
Through countless hours of surgery and prosthetic installations, not to mention the nearly unbearable pain of the recovery, the doctors had saved her life by splicing together machine and mankind in a cybernetic, Frankenstein-esque amalgamation. At the time, they’d heralded it as a miracle, a perfect union of medicine and technology, paid in full by ACM.
But to Etya, they’d made her into a monster. She would’ve rather died.
A faint chime resonated throughout her quarters—a familiar tri-tone popularized in Johann Olegg’s breakout hit The 12th Symphony. She messaged Garth, Just a minute, then she slipped into the lingerie.
Etya approached the door and opened it.
Garth Winkler, computer genius extraordinaire, pushed his long blond hair from his round face and gawked at her with wide brown eyes.
&nbs
p; Were he not sixty pounds overweight and greasy like the fried food he favored from the mine’s cafeteria, he might’ve had a chance at being attractive. And perhaps if he’d learned to use a razor on his face as well.
“I will never get tired of seeing you in that.” He leered at her, and the sporadic blond stubble on his lips, chin, and cheeks fanned out.
She stepped aside and allowed him into her quarters, then she locked the door behind him. “I need you to examine a report for me. I believe it has been heavily edited. I need you to work your back-end magic and find the full report.”
He scanned her body. “I’ve never seen something more beautiful in my entire life.”
Etya forced a small grin. “Thank you. Can you help me?”
Garth scoffed and scratched the bulge that made up his midsection. “Puh-lease. Of course I can. There’s not a secret I can’t find, not a scandal I can’t uncover.”
“You have not found much regarding the initial incident.”
He pointed at her. “Can’t find what doesn’t exist, sweetheart. We’ve been over this. I’ve searched every digital crevice and cranny in this damned network, and there’s nothing else to be found aside from the report I already gave you.”
Etya folded her human arm over here prosthetic one. “So you keep telling me.”
The only reason she’d gained access to the report on the initial incident was because Garth had extracted it from the system.
As one of the mine’s network experts, he maintained the network and kept outside threats at bay. As such, his position and access allowed him to glean virtually whatever he wanted from within the network—as long as he didn’t get caught.
“I promise it’s true. I can get you salaries, employment contracts, personal messages and emails, and passwords to anyone’s account that you want, but that report is all that exists within this system. Maybe there’s more on ACM’s corporate network about it, but I don’t have clearance to access that.” He winked at her. “Yet.”
“And when will you gain access?” Etya glared at him. “It has been almost six months.”
Garth held up his hands. “Easy. I’m working on it. This isn’t like hacking the Galactic Donut Collective’s network—which I’ve done, by the way. ACM has security features that can repel even the most dedicated cyber-terrorists. It’s really quite impressive, actually.”
“How long?” Etya asked, her voice hard and flat.
“A few more weeks. Their system is smart. It evolves based on different attempts to breach it. But once I get past it, I’m in forever.” He looked at the ceiling. “At least I think so, anyway.”
“Very well.” Etya motioned him over to her screen. “Then let us see what you can uncover here.”
“Absolutely.” Garth rubbed his hands together and sat in her chair. The chair only contained about three quarters of his large rear-end, and he pulled his white undershirt—standard non-work attire for Garth—down when it tried to creep up and over his gut. “What do you want to find?”
Etya pulled up the report for him via her prosthesis. “I want the original version of this report.”
“How do you know there’s an original?” Garth looked up at her.
“I do not know for sure, but I assume there is one since the initial Sector 6 report went through multiple renditions before it finalized into the version you recovered for me.”
“So you don’t know if there are other versions or not?” Garth shook his head. “The report I got for you is the only report on that incident. There’s nothing to indicate that it has other versions either, aside from your insistence that they left out sensitive information.”
Etya bristled, but she leveled her tone. “You do not find it strange that they left out half of what I told them in my briefing? Keep in mind, I was never supposed to see that report at all. Why would they withhold what I told them unless they were concealing something?”
“If you say so. Alright, let me dive into the stream, and we’ll see what I can find.”
As Garth worked his wizardry, Etya caught another glimpse of herself, now clad in red lingerie, in the mirror. She adjusted her hair and pulled it away from her face.
The explosion and the subsequent surgeries had left her with about eighty percent of natural coverage on her head, but she’d neglected to accept synthetic hair implants in her prosthesis. When first presented with the option, she found the synthetic hair too artificial to her touch. With eighty percent of her hair follicles intact, she’d decided to make do.
Despite her general disgust at her appearance, the doctors had indeed crafted a prosthesis that complimented her already lithe body. Even with so little clothing, her prosthesis accentuated her proportions and curves almost as perfectly as her natural form had.
Her left breast, now metal, was a bit larger than her right, but everything else worked. In normal clothing and undergarments with proper support, she looked fine—as fine as a monster could look, anyway.
Except for her face. No amount of clothing or makeup could conceal the horror her once beautiful face had become. She could’ve accepted a skin covering for her face, but like the synthetic hair, it looked and felt wrong. So she’d gone without.
Better to see the truth of who—or what—she’d become rather than deny it.
“I think I may have something.” Garth straightened up in his seat.
Etya turned toward him and the screen. “That was fast.”
“It’s me. I always get it done fast.”
Etya raised her eyebrow. Garth was oblivious to how true that really was.
“Boom.” He tapped the screen, and a file expanded to fill it. “The initial access date is the same, but the time precedes your version by about six hours. I found other versions as well, but they all have less information in them because they were reports filed before Justin Barclay woke up. This is the most complete version that exists—or existed, anyway.”
“It exists again. You have breathed new life into it.”
Garth looked up at her with another greasy grin. “I do what I can.”
Etya ignored him and scanned the new content in the report.
Barclay claims that as he began to lose consciousness, he saw a glowing green figure dressed in mining attire. He says that figure waved his hand, and the doors to the sector opened, and then the hazard team rescued Barclay. He also claimed that the figure had a jagged scar on the right side of his face.
Etya straightened up. “Mark?”
“Huh?” Garth tilted his head.
Etya shook her head. “Nothing. I mean… that cannot be right.”
“What? You can’t just not tell me.”
Etya shook her head again. “I think Justin Barclay, the worker in the incident, saw a ghost. He must have, because the man he describes as glowing green seems to resemble someone. Someone I knew. Someone from the first incident.”
“Mark?” Garth stood up from his seat and faced her. “His name was Mark?”
Etya nodded. “Yes.”
Garth’s eyes narrowed. “Was there something between the two of you?”
Etya hesitated.
“Look, I understand if you don’t want to talk about it, but I can find out who Mark was within five minutes anyway.”
“It is personal, Garth. Please do not pry.”
“Was he your lover?” Garth’s voice hardened. “Did you two have a thing?”
Etya’s fists clenched. “I am asking you not to pry, Garth. Please.”
Garth shrugged. “Then tell me.”
Etya’s jaw tightened, and she exhaled a long breath. “We were engaged, but he died in the first incident. I watched it happen.”
“Okay. I can live with that.” Garth exhaled a long breath. “And you think this Justin guy saw his ghost?”
“Mark is dead. Either Justin was hallucinating, or he saw a ghost. I am inclined to believe the former hypothesis rather than entertain the possibility that somehow…” Etya stopped and stared at the report ag
ain.
“You’re a scientist, Etya.” Garth stood and approached her. He cupped her shoulders, one metal and one human, with his meaty hands. “Ghosts aren’t real. You know that.”
Then why did Justin specifically note the glowing man’s scar? And why did he see the man in Sector 6, the very location where Mark died?
Etya nodded and looked at Garth’s crater-marked face. “Perhaps you are right.”
He grinned at her, glanced down at her chest, then refocused on her eyes and gave her shoulders a squeeze. Both her prosthetic arm and her human arm registered pressure.
“I saved the report and all the associated files I could to your personal network,” he said. “They’re secure. Shall we advance to the good part?”
Etya gave him a faint smile. Memories of Mark’s death flooded her head.
Garth would never compare to him. The idea of fulfilling Garth’s desires sickened her.
“Could we do this some other time?” she asked. “I am not in a suitable frame of mind to—”
“I did what you asked.” Garth shook his head. “And I came all this way to do it for you.”
“Your quarters are only two floors down,” Etya said, her voice flat.
“I took the stairs. Trying to lose some weight.” He patted his gut. His eyebrows arched down, and his voice hardened again. “Besides, you promised. We had a deal.”
Etya swallowed the bile in her throat, along with her pride, and nodded. “Fine.”
She pulled out of his light grasp, headed over to her queen-sized bed, and lay across it on her right side, so Garth could better see her prosthesis, the parts he liked the most.
Then Etya extended her prosthetic arm and beckoned him over to her.
13
Neon lights cast vivid colors amid the bland blue lighting that lined the ceiling above Justin and Keontae as they walked. Since Keontae had been to this part of the station once before, he led the way through the crowded entertainment wing.
Storefronts offered clothing, food, and amenities, and other businesses promoted virtual reality simulators, liquor, and other frivolities. They lined both sides of the wing for nearly a mile. The aroma of sizzling food tantalized Justin’s nose and sent tremors rumbling through his stomach.