Criminal Core

by Nick Broad

  “That sounds...impressive,” I admitted. The whole thing still scared the hell out of me, but at least it was for a good cause.

  “It is,” she said, sounding pleased. “As long as it works.”

  My face fell. “It might not work?”

  “You’re my first test subject!” Yulia pulled a thick cord of wires out of the console, examining it as it sent sparks into the air. With a shrug, she shoved it into a different side of the box. “I would have done it myself, but then who would run the machine? Besides, I needed a male brain.”

  Male brain? “Why’s that?”

  “Because,” she said with a smirk. “They’re so much simpler than women’s brains. Much easier to photograph.”

  “Okay, now I know you’re winding me up,” I said.

  That perky little smile flashed across her face again. “Not at all. In fact, would you like me to demonstrate?”

  If it’ll get my mind off the way this thing is clanking around me? “Sure.”

  She crossed her arms under her breasts and grinned. “Would you like to go to dinner with me tonight?”

  I nearly choked on my spit. Just then, the machine lurched sickeningly, something inside of it kicking to life. A smell like burnt cinnamon filled my nostrils, then faded away.

  “You serious?”

  Yulia shrugged. “Why not? Assuming this works, I’m going to have reason to celebrate. And, honestly...you’re kind of cute.”

  I felt a hot blush spreading across my cheeks. “What?”

  “And I’m not just saying that because I’ve got you strapped down so tight you can’t move a finger,” she giggled, tossing a lever. “I haven’t had a night out in a very long time. Unless, that is, you’d have a problem being seen with a woman who’s a little bit older?”

  “Not at all!” I said, louder than I’d intended.

  “Wouldn’t want to hurt your cred with the co-eds,” she said with a smirk. “Now hold on tight - this thing is just about ready...”

  I couldn’t believe my luck. Not only was I about to make enough money to keep my landlord from evicting me for a couple weeks, I had the first hot date I’d been on in months. And I hadn’t even had to do anything - she’d asked me.

  Wait a minute...

  “Are you just trying to get back some of that two hundred dollars you’re about to give me?” I asked.

  Before she could reply, the machine bellowed to life. Radiation shot through my body, billions of neurons and their connections frozen for a fraction of an instant as the whole thing was catalogued inside of Yulia’s machine. The world went white, then exploded into a kaleidoscope of color as every nerve ending in my body ramped up to overdrive.

  In that instant, Yulia made an exact copy of the person I was at that instant. The first perfect copy ever created by mankind.

  It was an achievement on the level of the printing press, the microprocessor, or penicillin.

  It was a discovery that would go on to win her a Nobel Prize, that would be used to improve and extend the lives of countless people.

  It also fried my whole body to a fucking crisp, killing me instantly.

  One: Congratulations, You Are Dead

  Fuck, that hurt!

  I opened my eyes to complete darkness. No, not darkness - even less than darkness. Somehow. Where was I?

  I blinked. At least I think I did. I couldn’t feel my eyelashes. With a start, I realized I couldn’t feel anything at all. No arms, no legs - not even the beating of my heart.

  “Dr. Pavlichenko?” I yelled - or tried to. “Yulia?” There was no sound - not even the ambient noise of the wind. It was like wearing the world’s best pair of noise-cancelling earphones, only they were also totally weightless.

  Something went wrong, I thought. Something went really, really wrong.

  I couldn’t move. It was even worse than being in Yulia’s chair. At least there I could wiggle my toes - right now, it didn’t feel like I had toes. Panic filled me, a growing feeling akin to having a live electrical wire shoved in my mouth. I didn’t like enclosed spaces, but there was no way of telling how big this chamber was - or if it even was a chamber at all.

  Paralyzed, the back of my mind shouted at me. I’m paralyzed!

  “Okay,” I whispered. I couldn’t hear it, but just talking took the edge off my panic. “Calm down, Noah. The lights are going to come on any minute now.”

  I’d obviously just been stunned by whatever powered Dr. Pavlichenko’s machine. Any second now, consciousness was going to come flooding back in. I’d feel like such an idiot to be so scared. Yulia would pick me up off the floor, we’d have a laugh, and then we’d have that date she was talking about.

  Any second now.

  I lost it. I started to shriek. If I could have heard myself, I’d have been shocked at how I sounded. My sanity started to slip, fraying like the rope keeping someone from falling off the side of a cliff. The panic boiled over, threatening to sweep me away completely.

  As I opened my mouth to let loose the scream to end all screams, something happened.

  There had been nothing but blackness. Now there was something - a single point. A dot.

  It disappeared, and the panic came rolling back in like the tide.

  A beat later, and it was back. This pattern repeated a few times, and suddenly I started to laugh. Because I knew what it was - I worked with it all the time.

  I was staring at a command prompt. A giant, blinking command prompt. What the hell was going on? What did that crazy Russian bitch do to me?

  The one dot blinked into two, then three. I watched it eagerly - after all, it was the only thing in the entire world - and waited for something to happen. I didn’t have long to wait.

  BOW Program Loading...Warden Unit Loaded! Consciousness Loaded! Memory Check: Good!

  The word Good flickered out a moment later, replaced by a phrase that made me uneasy: Within Acceptable Parameters.

  Loading Startup Sequence...

  The world blazed to life around me. I screamed - and this time I could hear it. A glorious scream that filled me with soothing comfort, even if it did sound like it was coming out of a frightened little girl. The scream bounced off the walls, echoing over and over again in my ears as existence coalesced around me.

  I was standing inside of a white box with a tile floor, not much bigger than my campus computer lab. I sighed, slumping over with relief. Only to discover that there wasn’t anything to slump.

  I don’t have a body, I realized, looking down at where my legs ought to be. Something trembled in my brain, coming right up the point of collapse. Holy shit I don’t have a body I should have a body what the fuck is wrong with me-

  My legs blinked into existence. Along with the rest of me. Residual Self-Image Loaded, the mural on the wall helpfully informed me.

  I felt myself, making sure I was real. Everything felt real, in any case. How would I even know if I wasn’t real? What if none of this was real, what if I sat down in that chair and let Yulia fry my brain and these were just the dying flickers of my neurons as everything that made me me shut down-

  Stop, I commanded myself. I shut my eyes tight, willing the churning panic in my gut to cease. It did, but only a fraction.

  “Okay,” I said, my voice echoing strangely despite the size of the room. “This is a nice joke, Yulia. Is this where you’re going to show me what a Polaroid of my brain looks like? I’d much rather just do it in your lab, you know!?”

  There was no response. Or rather, there was no response in words. Because as soon as I turned my gaze away from the weird command line mural on the wall, I realized the room had shifted. There was a door that hadn’t been there before. It was as basic as could be - like it came straight out of a pack of default graphics from a game engine. In fact, it looked like it was at a lower resolution than the rest of the room: fuzzy, and with anti-aliasing turned off.

  Resolution? I thought. This isn’t a video game. I don’t know what the hell this is, but it’s
not that.

  Please don’t be dead, I added, crossing my fingers behind my back. Please don’t be dead.

  Come on, I was too young to die. And I had a date, for God’s sake.

  The door swung open - and instantly I forgot about my date with Yulia. I forgot about the weird door, the echoes, even the fact that I didn’t have arms and legs until a few seconds ago. All of it just fell out of the back of my head, the way Yulia had joked it would. Because when you get right down to it, she was right - guys’ brains are simpler than women’s. In a certain way, at least. Probably the one that matters the most.

  Because stepping into the room with a confident smile was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen in my life.

  “Good,” she purred, her voice a smooth, rich contralto. “You’re awake.”

  My jaw hit the floor. I gawked at her openly - I couldn’t help myself. She was roughly my own age, and tiny - she barely came up to my shoulders. Long blonde hair cascaded down her back in lush ringlets, contrasting with the dark black of her skintight jumpsuit. It looked like she was wearing some kind of government uniform, only much too tight and revealing to be regulation: cut low enough down her neck to show off a generous expanse of cleavage, it hugged her hips and ass like a second skin, making every curve of her body plain to anyone who wanted to look.

  My eyes reached her face, and I froze. She’s not human, I realized with a start. She was way too pretty to be human, for starters - there was something almost divine about her high cheekbones and pouty, perfect lips. But mostly it was the eyes. They pierced me like they knew every single thing about me and liked it - like the lens of a camera on a way higher resolution than the rest of the world.

  I’d heard people half-jokingly refer to that kind of look as bedroom eyes. These were more like bend me over and make me call you ‘Daddy’ eyes. Suddenly I became painfully aware that another part of me became real at the same time as my arms and legs.

  “I...what do you mean, ‘awake’?” I asked, confused. “Where’s Dr. Pavlichenko? Is this the campus clinic?”

  She cocked her head and smiled at me. That smile was trouble with a capital-T.

  “Who? Oh, geez - you really are old, aren’t you?” She produced a slim tablet from behind her back and scanned it, her lips pursing as she read.

  “I’m twenty-one,” I growled. “That’s hardly old. How old are you?”

  “I’ve been in service for two-hundred and thirty-six years,” she said without raising her eyes from the tablet.

  I laughed. But she didn’t look up.

  “What is this?” I finally asked. “Some kind of prank?”

  The girl continued reading, ignoring me like I was some concern that was totally beneath her. Finally she gave a snort and put the tablet away. A prick of panic filled me when I realized she hadn’t actually put the tablet anywhere - it had just winked out of existence behind her back.

  “This is getting weird,” I muttered to myself. “I really just want to go home now. Please? Can you make that happen?”

  The girl shook her head. “Noah,” she said reproachfully. “You are home.”

  I couldn’t stand it anymore. It wasn’t in my nature to scream at someone, especially not a woman, but I felt like I was going to explode.

  “I want out of here!” I yelled, pulling my own hair. “Get me out of this crazy fucking place right now, do you hear me!?”

  She sighed and stepped backwards into the doorway. “Suit yourself,” she said, a little smirk flickering across her face. “Chirrup, close the tutorial program. Activate Unit 03.”

  It was like she’d dunked the entire world in cold water. The walls around me began to dissolve, shaking and quivering in ways that solid walls should never behave. Static filled my eyes, bursting behind my lids like fireworks.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” I screamed.

  “Just what you asked for,” she said with a sigh. “Getting you out of here. Welcome to the Oubliette, Noah.”

  For the second time that day, the world exploded in a burst of pain and went black.

  Two: ‘Within Acceptable Parameters’

  When I came to, I was sitting down. That much was an improvement, at least.

  My ass was in a plush, deeply cushioned chair - one that wrapped around me like some sort of luxury sleeping bag. Grunting, I worked myself free of it and stepped off onto some kind of platform. When I turned around, I got the shock of my life.

  It was Dr. Pavlichenko’s chair. Only if her chair had been the Wright Brothers’ first airplane, this thing was an F-15.

  It was all sleek black curves and hard, modern angles. The mesh over the front had retracted part of the way, allowing me to stand up. Along the side, stenciled in silver font, were the words Black Oubliette Unit 03.

  “Huh,” I said, my mouth working soundlessly. “They fixed the height problem, at least.” Slowly I flexed my fingers, expecting any moment for the world around me to dissolve or freeze or do something else completely insane. When it didn’t, I relaxed a fraction.

  Okay, this is real, I thought, glancing around the room. Or real-er, at least. Now where the hell am I? Because one thing was for certain - this wasn’t Dr. Pavlichenko’s office anymore. Not unless she’d hired an interior decorator while I was out cold - one who took all their aesthetic cues from Alien and Battlestar Galactica. The decor around here definitely trended towards the futuristic.

  As if to underscore the point, the only door out of the room had a computer screen in a panel next to it, with no way to interact with it that I could see. The panel lit up when I got close, with the red sigil of a handprint appearing in the middle.

  When nothing happened for a few seconds, a little chime sounded through the room. Please scan your handprint for access, a chipper little voice informed me.

  I looked down at my hand. It was the same one I’d had all my life. The chances that it would unlock some weird science-fiction door in the middle of a futuristic lab was roughly zero. With a shrug, I put my palm against the glass - which was strangely warm - and waited for the error message.

  A slightly higher chime sounded in my ears. Identity confirmed, that same electronic voice trilled. Good morning, Warden Noah.

  “Warden?” I asked. The door slid soundlessly open, revealing a long hallway that looked like nothing so much as the queue for some space-themed rollercoaster. Yeah, this was definitely futuristic. “Hey, voice - what the hell is a Warden?”

  No response. If I wanted answers, I was going to have to find them myself.

  As I wandered down the hall, my thoughts turned to the girl I’d met in that strange, featureless white room. She definitely seemed to know what was going on around here. And she’d been flawlessly, almost achingly gorgeous. Yet there was something about her that made me think she had more than a few screws loose.

  It’s the eyes, I thought, glancing at a computerized panel in the wall showing a field of stars. The crazy girls always have that ‘I’m gonna wreck your life and you’re gonna love every minute of it’ look in their eyes...

  I froze. Did a double take. Because that wasn’t a panel. It was a window.

  For a long, wrenching moment, my mind refused to accept it. It had to be some kind of illusion. Some sort of high-definition projection. But in my heart of hearts, I knew it wasn’t true.

  I was staring at the cold, hard vacuum of space. Somehow.

  As I drew closer to the portal, I realized I wasn’t just looking at space. There was a planet out the window, close enough that we were undoubtedly in orbit around it. For a second my heart jumped in my chest, relief flooding my veins.

  Earth, I thought. But Earth didn’t have crimson seas. And it definitely didn’t have continents shaped anything like what I was staring down at it.

  “This isn’t possible,” I said, barely recognizing my own voice for the horror in it. “Holy shit, that’s not possible...”

  “What’s not possible?”

  I jumped a good foot into the air. Th
e girl from earlier had crept up behind me, moving as soundlessly as a cat on the prowl. When my feet were touching the floor again, she started to giggle uncontrollably.

  After a moment the panic subsided and my heart started to beat again. “I’m in space,” I said, disbelieving. “How the hell am I in space?”

  The girl cocked an eyebrow, studying me like I was some sort of exotic pet. “You’ve never been to space?”

  “No!” My gaze traveled back to the window, spellbound by the sight of the entire universe laid out before me. “Most people haven’t been to space, you know? Except for, like, astronauts!”

  She pursed her lips. “Wow. You are old.”

  “You keep telling me that,” I growled, swallowing my irritation. “I think it would be more useful if you maybe told me what the fuck is going on around here!”

  Something inside of her seemed to shift. “Okay, okay,” she said, holding up her hands. “Calm down. If I’d have known you were this...excitable, I might never have decanted you.”

  My brain seized on the word. “Decanted?”

  Again she gave me one of those sideways looks, as if she were trying to figure out how much of my current situation to share with me. After a moment she swallowed hard, squared her shoulders and raised herself up to her full height - which, truth be told, wasn’t much.

  “Soooo,” she said, giving me an awkward little look. “You must have figured out by now that you’re not where you thought you were a few minutes ago.”

  “I was in Dr. Pavlichenko’s lab,” I explained, glancing over the blonde’s shoulder. “Do you...do you know her? Is she here?”

  The girl chuckled to herself. “Everyone knows Dr. Pavlichenko,” she said. “She’s one of the most important figures in human history. Without the Pavlichenko Device, travel between the stars would be completely impossible. She’s like...she was like Einstein, Noah.” A happy little sigh escaped her lips. “To think, you actually got to meet her...”