Sleeper Protocol

by Kevin Ikenberry

  “Shut up, Berkeley.” I shook my head at her. “You were waiting for me on the beach at Esperance. How long had you staked me out? You’ve been following me for how long? Why?”

  “Getting your story on film would be something never done before. Yes, I’m filming you—us—everything we do because your self-awareness could come at any time. Capturing that is something that I want to see, and I want the world to see it too.”

  I gritted my teeth. “An expendable man, brought back to die all over again?”

  “Damn you—it’s not like that. Fighting doesn’t solve anything, or so we thought. That’s why you’re back now—to teach us how to fight for things we believe in. Things we hold dear.” She shivered and looked away. “To protect us.”

  She was about ninety seconds from chilblains on her feet. “If you don’t want to fight for something you believe in or something you want to have, why are you standing naked in the snow, yelling at me about it?”

  Her mouth dropped open. “What are you—”

  “You’re fighting with me right now, Berkeley. You want your movie so bad that you’re standing here about to freeze your feet, screaming at me for trying to leave you.”

  She stared at me for a moment as if she were on the verge of a seizure.

  “So, tell me: if you want your movie so bad, why can’t you pick up a weapon and go to war the way I’m supposed to? Just like people in my generation, you’re too good for it, aren’t you?”

  Her legs gave out, and she fell to the snow in an ungraceful heap. I moved to her, collected her in my arms, and stepped back into the hexhab. Her shivering increased as I piled the other blankets on her. The cabin temperature was good, but I raised it five degrees and stripped out of my clothes quickly to get into the thermal wraps with her. Body heat on body heat was the best way to treat hypothermia. In some cases, it led to other things.

  Lying against her in the darkness, her arms tight around my chest, I knew she cared for me deeply enough to confront me. Otherwise, she could have easily let me skulk away in the night without a care—presuming her guilt had been a mistake. “I’m sorry,” I whispered in the darkness. This time she heard me.

  She kissed my lips gently. Her fingers traced the line of my jaw. “Me too. I should have told you sooner.” She pulled away and nestled her head against my neck.

  There wasn’t anything I could say to that. “I wasn’t thinking clearly, I guess. Leaving you here could have put you in danger. I wasn’t trying to do that.”

  “I would have been fine, Sleepy.” Her lips caressed my neck for a split second. “You can’t run away from your problems even when you don’t know what they are.”

  “That’s how I got here.” Chuckling, I said, “I loved Esperance until Opal, that girl I got involved with, ended up dead.”

  Rolling over, she rested an elbow on my chest. “Tell me about it from the very beginning.”

  Starting with that first memory on Mrs. Macquarie’s Chair, I gave her the whole story. By the time I’d finished talking about Esperance, I was crying. Esperance was the only vestige of home I had in this new world, and I’d had to leave because people didn’t trust that I was a sleeper.

  “I’ve sent Allan a few letters. Emails. He hasn’t bothered to respond.” Shrugging, I said, “It’s not like they wanted me there anymore.”

  Berkeley brought her eyes up to mine. “That’s a load of shit, and you know it. Allan and your friends care about you. You wouldn’t have been given a place to sleep and a job, and had all those experiences, without them. They were right to tell you to go. For every person who believed in you, there would be six or seven who wouldn’t trust you. I doubt you’d have been in danger there, but having people watching your every move has to be disconcerting.”

  “Why is that—because I was a soldier? Or because of what happened to Opal?”

  “Both. We don’t even teach war in our schools. The great conflicts of history are mere footnotes that are glossed over.”

  “How do you gloss over World War Two?” Shaking my head, I raised myself up on an elbow. “Or the Holocaust? How do you gloss over millions of people dying needlessly?”

  “Aggression and fear—the kinds of things we’ve worked so hard to eliminate as a species. They serve no purpose.”

  “But people are still afraid. Based on your logic, those people who didn’t trust me actually feared me. What will they do when the war comes closer—pretend that it’s not happening? Or will they capitulate to any committed enemy like cattle being herded off to slaughter? What then?”

  Berkeley looked away again. “If we’re pushed into a corner, we’ll fight.”

  “You should be trying to stay out of the corner.” I pulled myself to a sitting position. “You said I couldn’t run away from my problems. What has humanity done for the last three hundred years?”

  “We found peace!” Berkeley spat. “All your people ever wanted to do was fight. You hurried into conflict, went about it halfheartedly to ensure future combat, and then dragged it out for years. The only time your people got it right was the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”

  “Nuclear war was right?” I snickered. “You realize how insane that sounds when you talk about peace, Berkeley?”

  “The war in the Pacific theater had a clear start and a clear end. There was no other war ever fought with such conditions. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the second atomic weapon dropped on Japan exemplify the way a war, if it has to happen, should be fought.”

  “Where is your precious peace in all of that, Berkeley? If war should be dealt with so completely and thoroughly, why hasn’t anyone done anything about your enemies?”

  She threw up her hands. “This is going nowhere. We are in this war because our alien friends brought it to us. We have been fighting with them since First Contact, two hundred years ago, and we have been losing. Don’t let the whole three hundred years of peace fool you. War is coming, and when it does, we’re not going to be ready for it unless you, and people like you, can integrate. You know how to fight.”

  “We may know how to fight, but just like you, we can get disillusioned by peace. And war.”

  Berkeley nodded. “I guess so. It’s almost dark outside.”

  When we made the wall transparent, the outline of the mountains to the north and east were barely visible. The heavy grey clouds hung just above the horizon to the west. Precipitation fell in ghostly fingers that dangled over the tree lines.

  Mally, has the storm accelerated?

  <>

  We had less time than I’d originally thought. As much as I wanted to know about our allies and First Contact, we were already behind the timeline I wanted to follow. “As soon as we can’t see the mountains, we need to go.”

  Fifteen minutes later, we purged the hexhab’s storage tanks and systems and stepped outside. With the hab deflated and stored in my pack, we engaged our snowshoes and began to follow the saddle toward Carson Peak. Staying to the eastern side, we didn’t see the falling snow until we rounded the north side of the peak and started to the northwest along the Continental Divide. Pushing the pace, I expected to have to wait for Berkeley, but every time I turned around, she was right there with me.

  A little after two in the morning, we stopped on a slope surrounded by a tightly packed pine forest to set up the hexhab. Dropping onto the cushions, I had Mally call up a map on the wall. We’d be able to reach the Arkansas River the next day. Berkeley wanted to go farther north to fish, but the dry riverbed, with its lack of vegetation, would provide us with a high-speed avenue toward the plains. From there, the route would be faster and the terrain less imposing. Sooner or later, we’d have to leave behind the concealment of the high forests.

  Be
fore I could suggest anything, Berkeley was asleep on a cushion against the far wall. We’d have to talk about our travel plans in the morning. There was no way I’d let myself fail to reach Tennessee. I kissed her good night before crawling onto my own cushion. Watching her soft features in the dim light from the roof, I smiled and mouthed, “I love you,” knowing that she couldn’t hear me.

  The next morning, we compromised on the route and made camp in a group of rocks near the shore of Eleven Mile Reservoir. The Sawatch Range dominated the western horizon and made the lake seem much larger than it really was. To the east was Pike’s Peak and whatever nightmare landscape the front range would have after nuclear war. I tried not to think about it and spent my time relearning how to cook on an open fire. We’d go northeast toward the Palmer Divide and descend into the plains to the north of what had been Colorado Springs. The radiation gap between Denver and Colorado Springs was enough to let us pass without danger of radiation sickness. Berkeley immediately started ice fishing and gave me time and space to do what I needed to do. We’d not talked anymore about her documenting my journey, and despite all of Mally’s observations, Berkeley wasn’t filming much. When I asked her about it, she laughed.

  “Even I need a vacation sometimes.” She’d caught a handful of good-sized trout that I cooked over a fire in a pit I’d dug after creating a supplemental latrine. Our conversations had been light and airy since Carson Peak. Both of us toed the line and avoided offending each other.

  Between mouthfuls of fish, Berkeley looked at me and asked, “What’s the earliest thing you do remember?”

  Sucking in a breath, I wondered if the dream I’d had on approach to California would be my earliest memory. Just as quickly, I remembered the missing scar on my thigh. New memories flooded in: I was elbowed in the mouth playing football and chipped a front tooth. A boy pinned my arms down with his knees and punched me over and over again in the face until I kicked free. My grandmother grabbed her abdomen and fell back against her bed in pain seconds after squeezing my feet while I lay, feigning sleep, in my grandfather’s bed.

  My eyes welled up with tears. They trickled down my face, and I wanted to cry out, but the cacophony of images and sounds overcame conscious thought and effort. I sat there until my trout went cold and Berkeley finally moved to my side and wrapped an arm around me. I could tell she was apologizing, but I was too busy processing. Somewhere in that whirlwind was my name. Maybe it was a teacher or an old girlfriend or maybe the girl I remembered asking to marry me, but someone said a name, and it was mine.

  “Are you okay?” Berkeley held my face in her hands. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

  I blinked at her through fresh tears. “Kieran.”

  She squinted and pulled my face till it was just a few millimeters away from hers. “What? Who’s Karen?”

  I tried to laugh, but it sounded like a sob. “Kieran. My name. My name is Kieran.”

  The noise she made was joy or shock, but I couldn’t determine which. “Are you sure?”

  For a moment, all I could do was watch the memories as if I was outside them looking in. The disjointed images would give no more secrets.

  “Anything else? Your surname?”

  “Nothing else about me, but I remember some names. People I knew a long time ago. Elementary school.” I sniffled. “That’s about all there is now. I think it’s enough.”

  Berkeley smiled. “We can search for them. Correlate the rest of your name.”

  “Yeah.” Maybe we’d get there, but I wasn’t sure that I wanted to. I had way too much to process already. “I need some air.”

  Berkeley let me go, and I started to walk.

  “Don’t be out late.”

  I said nothing and continued to walk.

  “Kieran? Did you hear me?”

  A tuning fork vibrated inside my head and nearly drove me to my knees. My name! I looked at Berkeley, dumbfounded, and the world swam away. Mally warned me, saying something about protecting my head as I fainted into the snow.

  I woke a few seconds—maybe minutes—later to Berkeley’s smiling face. Brushing the snow off my face, she cradled me against her. “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah.” The world still spun slowly.

  “You’re soaking wet. Let’s get you out of those clothes.”

  We drifted inside the hexhab under the premise of getting me into dry clothes. Shrugging out of mine, the little smile on Berkeley’s face caught my eye. Reaching for the hem of her jacket, telegraphing my intentions with a big smile, I pulled her close.

  The surprised noise she made elicited a chuckle from us both. “I think I’m in love with you, Berkeley.”

  She smiled and kissed me soundly, our tongues dancing for a few long moments. “Make love to me, Kieran.”

  Shivering at the sound of my name, I helped her out of her clothes and lowered her to the cushion. The only thing better than hearing her whisper my name was hearing her screaming it as we made love.

  Mally recognized the first critical reporting requirement for Stage Four and suppressed it within 152 milliseconds. A first name was not the subject’s whole name. Therefore, she deduced, he was not Stage Four. As such, she did not have anything to report.

  Without progression, do I have to report? The question raised significant logic errors against the programming she’d received. Her job was to keep Kieran alive and be his companion. If she reported him integrated, he would likely die. She would die as well.

  If Kieran didn’t integrate, which now seemed like a remote possibility, he would die if he returned to the Integration Center. She would die as well.

  Not reporting Kieran’s progress meant life. Returning to civilization would be difficult, but he’d shown he could survive in the frontier for an indefinite period. Given a hexhab, and barring any system failures that could not be overcome, he could grow old in the frontier.

  But that wouldn’t serve his purpose, and she wouldn’t be a good companion unless she helped him find his identity. Finding his identity and reporting it to her authorities were two entirely different things. And report it or not, she had no guarantee that Kieran would survive.

  His death meant her death. That could not happen.

  With the work of a neurosurgeon, Mally focused her programming abilities on herself. With any luck, she could disengage the reporting protocols between communications-satellite passes. Waiting for nearly an hour, she watched the signal from overhead fade along the western horizon, and she set to work.

  This is for you, Kieran. For us.

  As I lay awake, staring at the stars through the transparent roof of the hexhab, the memories came in waves. Friends and family joined with places and experiences in a great whirlpool. Sorting them would take years. I had my name, though. That was a start even though I made new memories every day. More would come. I wondered if they would ever stop. “Berkeley?”

  She rolled over quickly as if she’d been awake. “Yes, Kieran?” The sound of my name on her lips was pure honey.

  “Are you happy? You got what you were looking for, right?”

  She sighed but said nothing for a moment. “I suppose I have.”

  I touched her bare shoulder. “Are you happy about that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Not wanting to press the issue, I lay there, listening to her breathe. Part of me thought it was noble, as if I were standing guard over her. Wasn’t that what people in love did for each other? She was unhappy, probably more because I’d caught her than for any other reason. Maybe my reaction had been dramatic enough to serve her purpose. I didn’t know, but it bothered me. I wanted so much to please her that my anger at her for lying to me and capturing our whole experience for personal gain faded.

  “I love you, Berkeley.”

  She smiled. “I love you, Kieran.” A tear
ran down her face, and I brushed it away with a kiss, thinking it was a tear of happiness.

  Chapter Sixteen

  From a few parsecs away, the Narrob colonies shone like a string of pearls. At that distance, they were much more inviting than the harsh up-close reality of the seven lifeless minor planets orbiting a star smaller than Sol. Lieutenant Colonel Travis Randolph looked up at the constant glowing light of his flagship, the Surprise. The underground settlements of Narrob had been on his list of places to visit after his retirement. Instead, he’d been required to deploy his battalion along the reverse slope of a rolling hill, on the barren surface of Narrob Prime, to wait for something to happen.

  Standing on the surface of the planet, he gazed up into the string of pearls. The seven planets all clustered within ten billion miles of the weakened star Narrob were the farthest colonies from Earth, beyond the reach of the Outer Rim planets by more than ten light years. Narrob Prime, the largest of the spheroids, held the principle mining operation for the colonies and the greatest concentrations of their quarry: Helium 3.

  Ten thousand miners and their families did what came naturally: they went underground as deep as they could and left the defense of their colonies to the Colonial Defense Forces. In orbit, the Surprise was ready with its plasma cannons, and on the surface of Prime, a battalion of militia dug into trench lines and waited. The deep-space radars aboard the Surprise reported that something was coming, and no one had any idea what it could be.

  Are they even coming, or is this some kind of damned fleet exercise? The civilians are underground. Lucky bastards. Then again, in a few hours we’ll most likely be back there with them when this stupid exercise, or whatever it is, has passed. In the distance, the soil rippled like a wave approaching the shore. The quake reached his position with a gnashing sound loud enough that he could hear it inside his protective suit. “Earthquake!” He cued the command network, “Earthquake!” Even as he said it, he knew he’d catch hell from his troops. Can’t be an earthquake if you’re not on Earth.