Between Two Minds: Revelation

by D C Wright-Hammer

  The Alliance is necessary but misguided. You must gather data from the console at the prison to see for yourself where our priorities should be. The navy-blue autocar will take you there.

  A friend of the resistance

  “Do you have any idea what any of this means?” Charlie looked around to see if anyone was watching as he handed the note to Natalie.

  She scanned it quickly. “No, but I’m guessing it was from that guy who helped us get out of that.” She was tense. “Anyway, we gotta keep moving.”

  Charlie followed her lead as they made their way to the street.

  “There.” Charlie pointed to a strange blue car. He motioned for Natalie to follow him.

  “You know how to drive that thing?”

  Charlie shook his head. “No, but I’m guessing I can figure it out.” He tried the door, and just as he was about to apply force, it opened for him. He sat in the driver’s seat, with Natalie, the passenger. He pressed the ignition, and the car came to life.

  A hologram of the auto-driver appeared. “Good morning, sir and madam. I’ve been instructed to take you to the condemned Countyville prison. Please, sit back so that our safety harnesses can strap you in, and we’ll be on our way.”

  Charlie eyed the holo with suspicion, but he complied, as did Natalie. The seat belts quietly darted out and clipped into place around them. The car drove off.

  They were thinking the same thing at the same moment, but Natalie got to the question first.

  “Who the hell are you?”

  “Charlie Rios. And you?”

  “Natalie Goodrich. Now, where the hell are we?”

  He thought for a few second, then uttered two words. “The future.”

  She gave him the stink eye.

  He shook his head. “It’s slowly coming back to me. My body was taken against my will. It was placed on ice. And someone else was put into my brain. Their mind was placed in my brain.”

  Her expression didn’t change.

  Charlie scrambled to try to explain. “His name is Ryan,” he said. “That’s right. And he was a paraplegic. But in this era, the future, they can move minds between bodies. But the body isn’t supposed to have a mind already.”

  Natalie took a deep breath and tilted her head to the side. “I don’t really follow. But how the hell do you know all this?”

  “Ryan told me.” Charlie smiled. “I’ve met him several times. In our brain.”

  She seemed slightly disgusted. “It all sounds impure to me.”

  Charlie thought for a bit, and he was surprised that everything was starting to make sense to him. He had an idea for explaining it to her. “What was the last thing you remember? From before?”

  Natalie thought for a moment, then hesitated and cringed. “I was…working at a hotel. I blacked out. When I came to, I was being moved by men in gas masks and white jumpsuits. They injected me with something. That’s it.”

  “Anything really strange more recently? Maybe something much more dream-like?”

  She took her time processing the question, then nodded. “Now that you mention it, yes, there was some building where I was strapped to a table. One of the straps came undone, and I got free. There was a man and…a robot? I freaked out and dropped them both to the floor.”

  Charlie was going to continue the conversation, but then he saw a dilapidated building coming up. He recognized it, oddly enough. He attempted to step on the brakes, but he couldn’t find the pedal. Then, he spoke without thinking. “Car stop.”

  “Sorry, sir. I have specific orders to go to Countyville Prison.”

  Natalie was confused. “What the hell are you doing?”

  “Stop now!”

  “Sorry, sir. I have—”

  Charlie began fighting with his seat belt. “Car unbuckle me.”

  “Sorry, sir. But it’s against federal law—”

  “Charlie, what is it?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know, but I have to get to that building.”

  He pointed as they passed it, and he scrambled to find a solution. He scanned the dashboard and saw the manual override button. He punched it.

  “Caution, sir. Manual driving is a dangerous endeavor. Please reconsider. Otherwise, press manual override again.”

  Thud!

  A steering wheel and pedals appeared, and Charlie was in control. He pulled a U-turn, causing a few auto-cars to spin out, and headed back to the building.

  “Dammit, Charlie!” Natalie was more annoyed than angry.

  He parked the car and popped out.

  Natalie followed. Rounding the building, she got a good look at the spidered glass and the security caging, mentally prepping for a fight.

  They entered and saw the bullet-proof glass protecting the desk of the building. Charlie was drawn to the PO boxes on the wall. As he walked over, they saw the clerk pop up behind the glass, and he made an angry face.

  “You again?! Get your cop ass out of here.”

  Charlie mindlessly assumed it had something to do with Ryan, and he pleaded, “Why was I here before? I need to know.”

  The man was obviously confused. “You crazy and bad for business. Get out.”

  “Please. As soon as you tell me, I promise I’ll leave.”

  Someone opened the door behind them, and the man’s face revealed his concern before he ducked under the desk.

  Charlie and Natalie turned around to find that a hooded person had entered. The person didn’t hesitate to bolt the second they saw Charlie.

  For some reason, Charlie knew he had to chase this person. “Come on!” He waved to Natalie.

  They darted out of the building, and the person hadn’t gotten very far before falling to the pavement, succumbing to a coughing fit. Pulling back their hood, Charlie found it was a woman. She retrieved something from her pocket and pressed it against her face.

  Charlie and Natalie approached with caution.

  “Really, asshole?” The woman gasped. “I told you to leave me alone. You didn’t know my father.”

  One word the woman said struck Charlie in an odd way.

  Really. The R had the faintest hint of a W. Then, he saw that the woman had an inhaler, and he was overcome with the strangest feeling. After a moment, he knew why.

  “Lucy?”

  “Leave…me…alone.”

  Charlie couldn’t believe his eyes. His little girl. The same little girl he’d met at the bus station after coming home from the war. The same little girl who had taught him how to be a parent, how to give a child the love and care they deserve. She was alive. She was in front of him. She was all grown up. Charlie literally had no idea what to say.

  Lucy stood up and started walking away. “Don’t follow me again.”

  Charlie was still standing, stupefied, as she got farther from him. But the fear of losing her again won him over, and he had to figure out some way to get her back.

  He felt a force inside him that he couldn’t hold back. Suddenly, he began to sing, “We love you. You love us. It’s time to go to bed now. Don’t give any fuss. Special days await you, tomorrow and beyond. It’s time to go to bed now, so you can grow up strong.” He made sure to put the right intonation on the word “strong.”

  Lucy stopped dead in her tracks and took her time turning around. When she did, her face seemed torn between glaring and crying. In the end, she said softly, “How do you know that song?”

  “I know it sounds crazy”—a tear ran down his face—“but it’s me, Princess. It’s your dad.”

  They had gone back to Lucy’s apartment. Lucy’s skepticism peaked as their discussion began, and it didn’t help that Charlie was unable to fill in all the blanks without Ryan’s input. But the more they talked through it, the more Lucy’s tension waned. Charlie explained how Ryan’s consciousness had somehow been pla
ced into her dad’s still-functioning brain. Lucy began to accept that her father was somehow inside the man with Ryan’s bio-copied face. She had many questions, simple ones at first, but then she got into their history.

  “Why’d you take a job with that scumbag?” Lucy’s lifelong angst was surprisingly subdued.

  Charlie shrugged more out of discomfort than uncertainty. “All I have are excuses at this point. It was the biggest regret of my life. We would have struggled if I had kept working the line, but at least we would have been together. I’ll forever be sorry.”

  Lucy was speechless. As odd as Natalie’s day had been, the scene was touching for her, having had the father she’d had. She admired that Charlie was taking responsibility after all the years that had passed. The conversation was getting better when the netphone in Charlie’s pocket rang. He pulled it out.

  Incoming call from Mom

  Charlie wanted to hit ignore and keep talking to Lucy, but the technology was so new to him, he inadvertently answered it. A bright holo lit of the room. He scowled.

  “Ryan, honey. It’s your mom.” Ryan’s mother and a man were tied to chairs, and the duress on their faces was obvious. “I need your help.”

  Chapter 22:

  Just Passing Through

  “I need your help.”

  At his desk, Junior watched the holo on the dupe of Ryan’s netphone. After Ryan’s arrest, he had wanted to keep closer tabs on him. He knew it was common practice for the police to dupe the phones of anyone who’d had a run-in with PMU. They would fish for political activists to blacklist and harass. So, before getting Ryan out, Junior had strong-armed the chief into giving him the only dupe.

  Junior worried that Ryan would again find himself in a bad situation like the night he’d been taken by Junior’s father. When Helen and Ryan had left in a hurry the previous day, he was more than suspicious. It was then that the duped phone had come in handy. He’d played the voice recording of a man named Tony and followed Ryan to the bar on the corner, but by the time he’d gotten inside, Ryan was gone.

  Worrying about Ryan was strange for Junior. He hadn’t really worried about much in the last decade other than making sure his father had really died. Before that, he’d only worried about making his father pay for his crimes. His father had consumed him all these years, and it sounded pathetic when he thought of it that way. But it was the life he’d chosen, and he could have done a lot worse.

  When he joined the police force, his goal was to rise through the ranks so he could help steer the department’s time, money, and resources towards busting his father. Unknowingly, he had positioned himself to work directly against his primary goals. He hadn’t realized how deeply the Marktown police force was in his father’s pockets.

  As a patrolman, he had been ordered to do a number of things which he was certain were for his father. He had to keep the street gangs from other parts of the city in line, so they could never pose a significant threat. His superiors made him alter and forge police reports that ended up keeping his father’s jobs running smoothly. He even had to clean up several crime scenes. Crime scenes with bodies. It was like some sick, twisted dream where Junior basically joined his father’s gang by proxy.

  As a small act of rebellion, Junior had secretly gathered and run finger prints from a number of scenes. Every single time, he’d find a smudge of the same man’s prints. Those of the one and only Charlie Rios, the baddest dude in Marktown lore. The fact that Ryan had inquired about Charlie made Junior nervous. After all the years of hearing nothing about Charlie, suddenly his name came up, and it wasn’t long after his father, in the woman’s body, had been killed for good. Junior began to wonder if it wasn’t a coincidence.

  Digging into Charlie’s medical history didn’t yield any good results. All the records said was he had an advanced form of PTSD that would cause bouts of short-term memory loss. Junior was sure that Ryan was looking for something else. The death certificate stated that he’d died of asphyxiation. Also, not helpful.

  As Junior had often done when he hit a dead end in a case, he let his mind wander. His father had been long considered dead, but he’d managed to fake his own death by migrating his mind into another body. Maybe Charlie could have too. Maybe Charlie wasn’t dead, and he was somewhere out on the street this very moment. The hairs on the back of his neck stood up at the thought.

  Junior suddenly wished he’d walked away from Ryan the night Charlie’s name came up. He’d usually distanced himself from anyone who knew his father. Anyone. But since that day in the alley where they first met, Ryan seemed different. Something in his eyes was honest. Truthful. And he was so close to catching his father anyway that he wanted to see what angle Ryan was coming from.

  From what Junior had learned before and after they’d taken down his father, Ryan seemed like a good person. Helen too. But the case against them was starting to add up. Ryan had gotten arrested. He asked about Charlie and then the two of them sat in Junior’s office and lied to his face. The holo in front of Junior was more proof that Ryan had gotten himself into something bad, and he didn’t like being dragged into it. All of this was on his mind as Junior watched Ryan’s mother continue to plead.

  She stood next to a man that Junior had previously identified as Jim. He was an old, but recently rekindled love interest. They were both extremely scared, and she seemed to be staring off as if she was trying to read something.

  Stacy cleared her throat. “There’s a place in the city that’s more than meets the eye. It’s where the dying go to live, and the living go to die. The poor frequent this lot. Don’t be late. Be there at one PM on the dot. Heed my words, or with danger you’ll flirt. Come alone and unarmed, and no one will get hurt.” She paused for a moment, then burst into tears. “I’m sorry, swee—”

  The feed cut off, and Junior scrambled to do his detective work. He plugged the little information he had into the Private I software, which was artificial intelligence for people in his line of work. It would cross-reference all the data from different sources and provide any potential connections or leads. It flashed up a holo attempting a source ping on the call to see if the captors were amateurs. Another holo appeared, running a search on the Net for anything matching the description: hospital, funeral homes, etc. It pulled up a holo-map, panned out, and added labels to potentially significant buildings. Junior tapped a few of the more interesting labels to bring up holo-feeds of the closest street cameras.

  Surrounded by all the bright, virtual screens, he rotated back and forth in his chair, scanning all the information, waiting for something to pop out. The Net brought back generic information about various places. The map and video feeds weren’t showing anything useful. Finally, the trace came back unsuccessful.

  Private I always yielded quick and helpful results. Within minutes, he would get leads, or hunches at the very least. This time, he stared blankly for a couple moments as the various searches were coming back red. Private I and he were missing something, and he couldn’t figure out what. He felt helpless, just like he did when his father had been an alderman.

  NO SIGNIFICANT LEADS PRODUCED

  “Damn.” Junior took a deep breath.

  There had to be some connection between Ryan’s current situation and Charlie, but kidnapping and ransom were definitely not Charlie’s MO, so there had to be something else or someone else putting this into motion.

  How the hell does Charlie fit in?

  Junior sighed. He only had one hour to manually investigate the holo, and he even considered calling Ryan. But the more he thought about it, the more it seemed like he was going to have to resort to drastic measures. Whoever was threatening Ryan knew exactly what they were doing, and Ryan might not be forthcoming about it anyway.

  He eyed his netphone, frowning as he remembered there was a number he could call for help. He’d used the number before when he felt powerless to stop his father as ald
erman. The call directly changed the course of Marktown forever. It was a time in his past that he tried to bury in his mind since it required him to compromise his morals without his knowledge. He’d pushed the shame from that experience so far down that it felt almost fresh as the thoughts bubbled to the surface. He physically cringed at what it may cost him this time should he use the number again, and Junior couldn’t stop the memories of how he’d obtained it from roaring back.

  After the Padre achieved great success as alderman, a position essentially given to him by his employers, his ego grew to monumental proportions. Playing the friendly politician became boring, and the Padre began running jobs on his own again. It wouldn’t have bothered Junior any more than what his father normally did, but the Padre was sloppy on a number of runs. Since Junior rescued his mother, he started putting a little pressure on his father. It was a mild irritation to the Padre, so to retaliate, he ordered the rest of the police force around as if they were his henchmen. Junior was at serious risk of losing his credibility among the rank and file. He even feared that they’d eventually pin something on him, and he’d lose his job at the very least. Maybe more. One night, when he’d felt particularly helpless, he decided to get some much-needed alcoholic clarity on the matter and wandered into Flannigan’s Pub on Main St. in Marktown.

  Flannigan’s had always been popular with the locals, even being called a “diamond in the rough” before the gentrification took place. Since its “revitalization,” Marktown developed the reputation among college age kids from the city that it was the place to be. Flannigan’s, as a business, benefitted greatly from more and more city hipsters flocking their way, but those who’d always lived in Marktown resented the outsiders who thought they’d discovered something new and cool.