A Hero for WondLa

by Tony DiTerlizzi

  Rovender looked over at Eva and shrugged his shoulders. It was clear he still could not understand what Hailey was saying. I wonder why Hailey hasn’t used the transcoder yet. Eva thought. “He says to leave it on the ship for now, Rovee,” she translated. Her lanky companion pushed the glider back up into the hold. He grabbed his belongings and joined Eva and Hailey underneath the bow of the Bijou.

  “This way. Follow me,” the pilot said, leading them to a recess in the back of the cavern.

  “I don’t like this,” Eva whispered to Rovender. She held his hand tight as they trailed behind Hailey.

  “Do not fret, Eva Nine. Let us see where he takes us and go from there,” Rovender replied, lighting his lantern.

  Chittering could be heard high above them coming from the shadows of the jagged ceiling.

  “Knifejacks?” Eva asked.

  “Perhaps,” Rovender replied. “Try not to make any loud noises.”

  “It’s just ahead,” said Hailey as he rounded a thick stalagmite. “Here we are. Watch your step.”

  Eva and Rovender followed Hailey and arrived at a hovel nestled in the back of the cave.

  Upon entering, Eva recognized the painted weathered pieces that formed the walls of Hailey’s ramshackle home as the hull paneling from the wreck out in the hanger. Empty crates and hovchairs from the wrecked ship’s galley made up a dining area, while a multitude of wires snaked over the floor, providing power to all aspects of the cluttered abode. Hailey dropped his bag of belongings onto one of the hovchairs and slid open a large rolling door. “You guys can use my room to REM in tonight. I’ll take you to the city in the morning.”

  Eva looked at Rovender and stopped, not following Hailey into his room. “Why can’t you take us now?” she asked.

  “The city registrar is closed,” the pilot replied.

  “The registrar?” Eva asked. Cautious yet curious, she peered inside his room.

  Like the rest of the home, his room’s décor was made up of reconstituted parts of the wrecked airship. The majority of the space was dedicated to an enormous half-assembled engine held in place by stacks of worn tires. Intricate components and other bizarre parts littered the floor, creating winding footpaths to walk through. Empty upturned crates acted as provisional workstations, all of which were buried under an assortment of tools. Two cots sat alongside each other at the far end of the room.

  “Yes,” replied Hailey. He picked up a stack of loose electra-papers and dirty clothes heaped upon the two cots. “All reboots have to register and be admitted into the city’s computer system to become a citizen. I’ll deliver . . . er, take you to the offices myself. From there you’ll be given a medical checkup and orientation.”

  “It sounds like a lot to do,” said Eva.

  “It goes quickly. So we’ll leave first thing in the morning, okay?”

  “Okay.” Eva clutched her satchel strap.

  Rovender picked up one of the tools and examined it. A hand-size heavy clip held a metallic rod tight in its pincers. Rovender sniffed the tool and set it back down. As he did, the rod brushed against the metal of the engine and ignited in a bright blue spark.

  “Hey! Be careful!” Hailey rushed over. “I can’t believe I left the arc welder on,” he muttered, and shut off the generator that powered it.

  “Sorry,” said Eva. “He didn’t know.”

  “It’s okay,” Hailey said. “Look, I have to go recharge the ship and take care of some other maintenance. There’s Nutri-pills and bars in that crate over there, and the bathroom is here.” He slid open one of the hull panels to reveal a simple bath, basin, and toilet. “Make yourself at home, but don’t touch anything, all right?” He hurried out toward the hangar. “I’ll be back in a bit.”

  Rovender leaned his walking stick against the wall and hung his hat from the top. He pulled his bottle from his rucksack and uncorked it. “Well?” he said, stretching out on a cot.

  Eva stood in the room, still clinging to her satchel strap. The oily machine smell permeated everything here. It was much stronger than it had been on the ship. Somehow the scent wasn’t as reassuring to Eva as it had been before. She let out a long sigh and sat on the cot opposite her friend. “Well, this is not what I was expecting.”

  “What were you expecting?” Rovender asked, unpacking his sleeping mat and blanket.

  “A home. Not a garage full of junk.”

  “This is a home. This is my home,” croaked a voice from the back of the room. Startled, Eva squealed and jumped off her cot.

  “Who is there?” Rovender stood, aiming his lantern toward the voice.

  A sound came from behind the engine. Stomp-hiss. Stomp-hiss.

  “Oh, it’s just me, little old me,” the voice wheezed in a singsong manner. From behind the engine an elderly man limped out into the lamplight with the aid of a cane. Stomp-hiss. Stomp-hiss. His small frame was draped in a long tattered dirt-brown jacket, similar to Rovender’s. A dingy flight cap sat atop his balding head. The grease on his cheeks contrasted with his stringy white hair and beard. He put a gnarled finger to his mouth and whispered, “Shhh. Don’t tell the boy I’m here. He gets cranky.” The old man smiled a yellow grin and hobbled toward Eva and Rovender. The stomp-hiss sound continued with every step he took.

  “This one I can understand.” Rovender’s voice dropped to a confidential whisper. “He must carry a transcoder.”

  The man stopped in front of the duo and studied them both. “A reboot! A reboot traveling with a newcomer. And I thought I’d seen it all,” he said to Eva, leaning on his cane. “We haven’t had a Sanctuary-born here in a long time. A long time.” A series of scars raked down the side of his withered face, causing his right eyelid to droop. With his good eye the old man winked. “Name’s Van Turner. But you can call me Vanpa if you want,” he said. He inspected Eva up and down. “You’re young for a newbie. Did your Sanctuary go kaput?”

  “It was raided,” Eva answered, though she didn’t quite know what to think of his questioning. “By an alien.”

  “This fella?” Van Turner pointed a crooked finger at Rovender.

  “No!” Rovender paused while dimming his lantern. “It was a Dorcean—”

  “Of course it wasn’t you. I knew that. You blue ones are nice,” Van Turner said, patting Rovender on the shoulder. He sang, “The blue ones are nice, the gray ones are mean, and the pretty ones are something else in between.” He gestured for Rovender to slide down. “Move over, slim. I need to take a load off.”

  Van Turner eased onto the cot next to Rovender. Eva could not take her eyes from the thick beard that grew from his face or the wrinkles that surrounded his eyes. It was as if Van were a different species altogether.

  “Never seen a fellow as old as me, have you?”

  Eva shook her head no.

  “Don’t worry. No one ages like this in the city.”

  He loosened his jacket and reached down to his left knee. Eva realized that his left leg was a makeshift assemblage of pistons and shafts, likely pilfered from the wrecked airship. Van Turner unstrapped the artificial leg, revealing a knotted fleshy stump underneath.

  Van Turner caught Eva’s stare. “Lost it to a sand devil years ago,” he said, rubbing his stump.

  “Does it pain you?” Rovender asked, offering his bottle.

  “Not at all.” Van Turner took a drink. “But you know, sometimes I swear I can still feel my foot, plain as day.” He handed the bottle back.

  “Who are you?” Eva asked.

  The old man jabbed a thumb toward the hangar. “I am Hailey’s grandpa. I’ve been taking care of him since he was a whiny whelp.”

  “Are you a returner too?” Eva asked.

  “A retriever? No, ma’am,” Van Turner said with a chuckle. He took the bottle from Rovender and paused, his eye sparkling in the low light. “I’m like you, little one. I was also conceived in a Sanctuary lab, almost two hundred years ago.”

  CHAPTER 8: TOILERS

  My given name was Eva
n Six, but I changed it when I registered with the city. After all, who wants a number for a name?” Van Turner took another swig. “You can do that too if you want, little one. Change your name, change your appearance, change your programming, change it all!” he said, and cackled.

  “You came to New Attica two hundred years ago?” Eva relaxed a bit. She sat cross-legged on her cot and pulled off her sneakboots.

  “Yup. I was a reboot like you, born and raised by ancient technology so that mankind can once again rule the world. Ha!” Van Turner handed the bottle back to Rovender. “I don’t think they’ve seen one of us in the last hundred years. You may get quite a welcome.”

  “Are there not many in your village, New Attica?” Rovender asked.

  “Oh, there are many,” Van Turner replied. “Too many, if you ask me. But no reboots really. There are not many of us left.”

  “Well, I can’t wait to meet more people, especially kids my age,” Eva said wistfully.

  “There were no others in your Sanctuary cluster? Had to settle with this guy, huh, newbie?” Van Turner nudged Rovender in a playful manner. Rovender nodded and took a sip of his drink.

  “No,” Eva replied. “I was the only one.”

  “Woo! You’re both in for an eye-opening experience, then.”

  “If you went to New Attica, why are you now out here? Were you expelled?” Rovender asked before pulling a voxfruit out from his rucksack.

  Van Turner shook his head. “I left.”

  With a longing in his eyes, he watched Rovender peel the fruit. Eva noticed this and handed him one of hers. The codger seized it with trembling hands and began clawing it open. “Oh, yes. Green berries.” He closed his eyes as he put the fruit into his mouth. “I haven’t had these in over a decade.”

  The three of them ate for some time without speaking. Eva looked over at Rovender, and he gave her a relieved smile. She exhaled a breath that she hadn’t realized she had been holding. The old man seemed a little batty, yet somehow he made Eva feel more at ease than Hailey.

  “Why did you leave, Vanpa?” she asked. Eva liked that Van Turner had offered his nickname right away.

  “Too many rules, too many promises, too many things being done for you and yet for no one at all. I didn’t want to exist in that cocoon forever. I wanted experiences. I wanted adventures. I wanted to live.” He pondered his meal. “It’s like this green fruit here. Man was not designed to eat pills and powders and all the other chemicals they pump you full of. We were meant to live off the land in harmony with it. Not in some safety bubble.”

  Rovender gave a knowing look at Eva.

  “But why here?” said Eva.

  “Yes, this does seem a rugged existence,” Rovender added.

  “Oh, it is,” Van Turner said, running his twisted tree-branch fingers over his leg stump. “But we have not always lived here. The others and I, we left New Attica many years ago to start our own colony near the green spot.”

  “The green spot?” Eva asked.

  “Yes,” Van Turner said. “It is Eden reborn. It is where the air is fresh, the waters run clear, and the trees creak with joy.”

  “You’re talking about the Wandering Forest,” Eva said. Rovender agreed.

  “‘Wandering’?” Van Turner said. “I like that name. It certainly wandered far away from this place, that’s for sure,” he said, and then cackled.

  “So you left?” asked Rovender.

  “Yes,” Van Turner continued. “We took a couple of airships and left for greener pastures. But it wasn’t as easy as we’d hoped for. Our Omnipods failed to identify anything. They proved practically useless. There were all sorts of newcomers poking around, like this blue fella here, some friendly—some not. And the Wandering Forest, as you call it, was dangerous in and of itself. We lost some good people.”

  Eva remembered how scary some of the trees and plants had been when she’d first ventured into the forest. Between the weeping bird-catchers and giant sundews, it was amazing she was still alive.

  “So we moved camp to the outskirts of the forest, and that’s when the sand devils got us. Picked us off one by one in the dark of night.” Van Turner’s hands balled into fists. His raspy voice cracked. “Those beasts took my leg, and they took . . . they took . . . my son . . . Hailey’s daddy.” The old man sniffled. Rovender offered his bottle, but Van Turner shooed it away. “I didn’t want to have a new leg clone-grafted,” he said. “When you get this old, you start to remember things in the wrong order, or forget them completely. I wanted reminders—mementos of my life. I never wanted to forget what had happened.”

  “And so you came back?” Rovender spoke softly.

  “Yes, we returned. Defeated by the new laws of nature. We learned we are no longer rulers of the land. But what was worse is that Cadmus was furious that we’d broken away from his little utopia and left with his precious airships and technology.”

  “Cadmus Pryde?” Eva thought of the young man in the program. “He’s still alive?”

  “Yeah, the maker of us all still rules the roost. When we returned, he repossessed the working airships and most of our supplies, saying it was property of New Attica. He then forbade us ever to return to his city. And so, here we are on the outside looking in. Yet we survive. I don’t know how, but all of us here manage.”

  “Where did everybody here come from?” Eva asked. She thought about the gathering of grungy people running out to the airship when they’d landed.

  “They’re like me—the disillusioned and disenfranchised. So they try to make a go of it out here. ‘Toilers’ are what they call us back in the city. I guess because we are willing to work for our rightful place out here in the real world. But those who live in the city are nothing but ‘sheeple,’ if you ask me. An overgrown flock of cloned sheep eating and sleeping whenever they are told. Safe with their shepherd.”

  “I’m confused,” Eva said. “Why don’t you all just leave on the Bijou?”

  “Right,” Rovender added. “Your flying machine will allow you to go anywhere. There are safer places to colonize.”

  Van Turner let out a drink-sodden sigh. “Well, that’s been the plan. But for the past year the boy’s been working on converting the Bijou into a fully manual air-breaker from scavenged parts. I think he’s almost done. He’s good with machines, just like his daddy was, but not so much with people.”

  “An ‘air-breaker’?” Rovender took a drink.

  “Yup, those retriever airships are completely automated. They’ll sit dormant for decades waiting for a reboot signal. Even if there’d been no pilots around, that ship would have tracked you down and brought you here by itself—it’s that smart. But since there have been no reboots in a long time, Cadmus has disbanded the retrievers. However, some pilots have figured out how to convert the airships to manual control. The boy is close to finishing. He just needs a few more components.”

  “So, Hailey isn’t a retriever?” Eva asked. Her mind flickered to the rows of human-shaped decals on the nose of the ship.

  Van Turner laughed. “No.”

  Eva shot a worried look to Rovender.

  The old man continued, “I mean, the boy wants to be one, just like his daddy was. But Hailey was asleep on the ship when it took off.”

  “Asleep?” Eva asked. “Are you serious?”

  Van Turner chuckled. “Yup. He must have been scared silly when the Bijou fired up and zoomed off after you.” He picked up Rovender’s bottle and gulped down the last swallow of the milky liquid. “There must still be some kinks to work out,” he said, lost in a thought. “You don’t want your only means of transport taking off in the middle of the night to pick up someone and fly ’em back to the city, right?”

  The door slid open, and Hailey walked in, holding his Omnipod. “Vanpa, what are you doing?” he said in an exasperated tone. “I told you to leave our guests alone. They need REM.”

  “They’re fine, boy. I’m just telling old stories.” Van Turner winked at Eva and stra
pped on his artificial leg.

  Hailey grabbed a pair of gray HRP blankets from a crate. “Well, don’t believe a thing he says. He’s a crazy old man.” Hailey made a silly face, mocking his grandfather.

  “Like you know everything at fifteen?” Van Turner said while Hailey draped a blanket over his shoulders.

  “Come on. We’ll sleep on the Bijou tonight.” Hailey led his grandfather out of the room.

  “We’d better. If that thing comes back on again to pick up another newbie, I want to be on it this time!” Van Turner laughed.

  “Of course, Vanpa. I would never leave you behind.” Hailey rolled his eyes and ushered him along. “Come on.”

  “Good luck tomorrow. Don’t let ’em rewire all your thinking,” Van Turner said to Eva with a wave, and he left.

  “Good night,” Hailey said, and closed the door.

  Fifteen, Eva thought. He’s barely older than me.

  Rovender lay back in his cot, resting his head on his rucksack. “I like the elder one,” he said, eating the last of his voxfruit.

  “I like him too,” Eva replied. “Even Hailey seems more normal, more relaxed, around his grandpa.”

  “Agreed. And the pilot must have used the transcoder, because now I understand him,” added Rovender.

  Eva smiled. Maybe Hailey isn’t so bad after all, she thought, and curled up under her blanket.

  CHAPTER 9: NEW ATTICA

  I can’t believe he decided to go exploring this morning! Today of all days!” Eva said as she ripped open her last voxfruit. “Ugh! And after he gave his word he’d always be there for me.”

  “Yeah.” Hailey poured two cups of coffee. “He and Vanpa were both up at sunrise and wanted to take a look around. I think a few of Vanpa’s friends even came with.”

  “Who knows when he’ll get back? Ooo! How typical,” Eva groused. “Rovee knew how badly I wanted to go to the city. He did this on purpose. It’s another one of his stupid ‘life lessons.’” She threw her voxfruit down into her satchel and sighed melodramatically. “What are we going to do?”