“Groovy.”
As Enna led Petal into the dome, they crossed the familiar GreenWay Park and headed toward the presidential building. Petal couldn’t believe what Enna was saying, but as they got further in, she saw them: her picture plastered digitally on the public screens, in shop fronts, and the most disturbing thing of all, the statues.
There was one outside the presidential building.
“That’s just gross,” Petal said. She climbed the stone steps, ignoring the whispers and looks from the dozens of people passing by on the sidewalks. On either side of the glass doors of the building were identical statues: Petal and Sasha. Petal had her spikes out and crossed over her chest. They’d even got the detail of her jacket and the pink tone of her Mohican correct.
For Sasha, they’d equipped her with a pair of pistols and pigtails. If Petal looked at it quickly enough, it was almost like Sasha was still there. Petal stopped. Enna carried on to open the doors. Behind the glass, a group of three security men and women were staring out, pointing at Petal.
A deep sense of sorrow overwhelmed her, and she approached the statue of her sister. Her clone. The closest she had to a sibling and someone she had known for far too brief a time. Petal reached out, almost wishing it was a prank and actually was Sasha standing there, stifling the desire to laugh and give away the trick.
It wasn’t a trick. The marble was cold to the touch. The eyes dead.
As close as the similarity was, Sasha was still dead, and this was still just a statue.
Before Petal turned away, someone tugged at the cuff of her jacket.
She looked round and then down. A young girl, couldn’t be older than twelve or thirteen, stared up at Petal with the same wide-eyed expression.
“Excuse me, miss,” the girl said with the typical upper-class Libertas accent, all perfect tone and annunciation. “May I have your autograph?”
“Um… sure…” Petal reached down for the girl’s slate. It had Petal’s face plastered on the screensaver and on the case. Whoever was producing this stuff sure was making a lot of money off it. Petal pressed her thumb to the screen and with her index finger scrawled an exaggerated “P” with a small “x” next to it.
The girl beamed a wide grin. “Thanks,” she said, taking the slate back. She hugged Petal around the waist briefly before giggling and skipping off down the stairs to join her parents and brother standing by on the sidewalk. The mother and father mouthed, “Thank you,” before heading off.
“That’s fucking weird,” Petal said as she turned to enter Enna’s HQ.
“Get used to it,” Enna said. “You’re a celebrity these days.”
Ignoring the onlookers, Petal followed Enna to the elevator. They climbed to the presidential floor and, passing through extra layers of biometric security, entered Enna’s new purpose-built lab.
Although she was the prime minister now, it appeared that Enna was still heavily involved in her science and research. They entered the white room with all the shiny marble and ceramic surfaces. A pair of familiar transcendent tanks took up the right side and a large computer rack the left. Wires and cables trailed throughout, coiling around the legs of an operating table.
Lying casually on the table was the figure of a youngish woman. Thinking it was one of Enna’s newest transcendants, Petal slapped her hand across its thigh. “Nice mode, Ens.”
“Oi, bitch, watch who you go slapping!”
The transcendent lurched up as it reached out a pair of clawed hands, aiming for Petal’s throat.
Chapter 10
Petal dashed back into a combat stance and brought her forearm spikes up in front of her.
“No, it’s okay,” Enna said, dashing in between the two women. “She’s not a transcendent.”
Between her spikes, and staring around Enna’s body, Petal saw a wide grin and mischievous eyes. She couldn’t believe it. “Holly? Is that you?”
Enna stepped out from between the two to let them talk.
“Petal!” Holly said, swinging her legs off the table and standing upright. “It’s me. Remember? I told you I’d see you again.”
“Holy shitballs, it is you. How the hell have you been? Where’ve you been all this time?” Petal stepped forward and grabbed the girl by the shoulders. She was shorter by a few inches than Petal but not less capable or spirited.
“Since I left you and Gabe after that little incident at Shelley’s, I just wandered about a bit. Travelled west, wanting to see if there were any other towns or settlements.”
“And were there?” Petal said.
“Nah, nothing. It’s why I came back, traced you and Gabe’s exploits until I came here.”
Enna returned with a syringe. Holly rolled up her sleeve and held out her forearm. She winced a little when Enna jabbed her and injected the liquid.
“You hurt?” Petal asked.
“Just a bit of fever. But hey, I’m being treated by Libertas’ head honcho. That’s pretty cool.” Holly and Enna smiled at each other. Enna wiped a swab across the small blot of blood on Holly’s arm.
“That’ll bring your temp down,” Enna said. “You’ll be fine within a few days.”
Enna placed the medical supplies on a small metal stand and leaned against the operating table with her arms crossed. She looked from Holly to Petal. “You two are more alike than I realised.”
“We’re not clones,” Petal said. “I know that much.”
“Shit, girl, Enna told me all about that, about Sasha and the crazy ones—that’s some heavy times. I’m sorry about what happened to James and the others.”
Petal smiled and nodded, not wanting to take that conversation on further. When they came to a natural lull in the whole catching-up thing, Petal pressed on with the reason why she had returned. “I got your message,” she said to Enna. “About Gerry…”
“You have Holly to thank for this,” Enna said. She stepped away from the operating table and walked across the lab to the transcendent tank with the dark blue liquid bubbling inside, obscuring the details of the transcendent inside.
“Nah, Enna takes all the credit,” Holly said. “I just provided… parts.”
“I don’t understand,” Petal said.
Enna tapped a finger against the tank. “Inside there is the next stage of my transcendent technology. More advanced and more capable than ever before, with two major differences.”
“And that would be?” Petal urged as she stepped closer to look into the murky liquid.
“Part cloning, part transcendent. The problem with the latter, as you know from our last experiment of bringing Gerry back, the capacity in the neural system isn’t enough to maintain the full bandwidth of a human consciousness, let alone one as powerful as Gerry’s.”
“So how does Petal hold his mind inside hers?” Holly said. And then added, “Oh, I’m sorry if I’m overstepping here, Petal. Enna had filled me in what happened with Alpha and Omega and all that jazz—and on that note, didn’t I tell you that Alpha would save the world some day?”
“Yeah, girl, you did.” Petal wrapped her arm around Holly’s shoulders. She didn’t realise how much she missed the urchin until now. Although the time they had together in Baicheng doing a job for Shelley was brief, Holly had made quite the impression on Petal. And if it wasn’t for Holly taking Shelly down when she did, both Petal’s and Gabe’s skins would be adorning the old bitch’s walls as decoration.
“Petal’s brain is real in that, although cloned, Petal is completely human, and thus her brain has the full capacity and more with her internal upgrades,” Enna explained.
“So why couldn’t that be done in transcendents?” Holly said. “Why were their personalities so humanlike, but not complete?”
“Because their brains weren’t cloned, they were artificial quantum core neural grids. Powerful in computer terms, but an entirely different design to that of the human brain. I could create a facsimile of a human personality—one that would work within the confines of the grid, but t
o transpose a full human mind proved impossible, or at the very least, incomplete.”
“Oh,” Holly said. “Heavy.”
“So what’s the breakthrough?” Petal said, eager to know if bringing Gerry back was a real possibility or still nothing but a pipe dream.
Enna leaned against the tank and smiled with the expression of a proud parent. “I’ve developed a completely human cloned brain but—this is the crucial part—with no pre-existing mind or consciousness. It’s a blank slate.”
“No way,” Holly and Petal said at the same time.
“Yes way, girls. As you would say: I shit you not. It’s something the Family had been working on for decades. I got close a few times, but there was always something missing. Eventually the cloned brain would always develop its own mind, even if it wasn’t fully formed. Thus it would prove impossible to transpose an existing mind into the brain. The cells wouldn’t coexist, and things would break down too quickly.”
“So how’d you fix it?” Petal said.
“A little help from a friend. He should be here anytime now, actually,” Enna said as she checked her watch.
From outside Petal heard a whine and a rumble of an incoming craft.
“Perfect timing. Ladies, let’s go meet our new best friend.”
***
Petal and Holly followed Enna through the presidential building’s rear secret entrance and exited onto the far east side of the city’s landing pad. The cool air tickled at Petal’s neck, making her shiver. But it wasn’t just the weather. Enna’s apparent confidence over the new tech to bring Gerry back made her feel high like she was riding a shot of ’Stem.
“Ain’t it coming in a bit hot,” Holly said from the edge of the steelcrete landing pad. The hatch in the dome slid open, and a Family-designed shuttle arced through, its rear thrusters burning lines of red flame.
“Um… yes,” Enna said, taking a step back.
Petal dragged both Holly and Enna away. There was no way that craft was coming in under its own control. A crowd of a few hundred citizens out for an evening stroll had gathered on the west side to watch the craft.
A siren blared out from the control tower’s PA.
Two of the security hover cars exited a small hangar and floated over the pad, dodging between parked shuttles, warning lights flashing on their curved sleek roofs.
The shuttle, resembling a dart with its pointed nose and long fuselage, barrel-rolled away from the control tower, just missing the mushroomed top, but this just made it arc lower in a steeper angle. It crossed over half of the landing pad, the engines screaming, drowning out the screams of the crowd as they fled away like mad ants.
Petal and the others were safe from their side, making Petal feel useless as the craft came crashing down. The nose pulled up just in time, and the fuselage struck the pad, sending up a wave of sparks behind it. The momentum kept it careening forward into the park, where it chewed up grass and dirt, and crashed through trees.
Petal had a flashback to when she and Xian landed in much the same way from a damaged Jaguar. That memory brought Xian back to her in full colour. She had almost forgot about him—and Jess.
Before she could ask Enna where they were, Enna had run off to the crash site, shouting orders to the gathering squad of Libertas security personnel. The two hover cars spun around and sped off in the same direction.
“Shit, girl, you’re back for a few minutes and you blow up a quad bike and witness this,” Holly said, jabbing Petal in the ribs gently.
“What can I say? Trouble and me are like this.” She twisted her index and pointer fingers. “Come on. Let’s see if we can help.”
The two women sprinted toward the crash site. Even during this situation, Petal still felt the eyes of the public on her. She’d never get used to that, having spent most of her time on the wrong side of polite society and actively rebelling against it with Gabe.
A bout of grief stabbed her in the guts when she thought about her long-time friend. How she wished they were still adventuring together. She scanned the landscape and saw the beginnings of the alley where Gabe had first found Gerry. That seemed so long ago.
Gabe had his family now, they needed him more than Petal did, and besides, Petal had Holly, and that was almost as good.
When they arrived at the crash site, Enna was directing a squad of about twenty security people. They cordoned off the area, pushing the public back out of the way for their own safety. The craft had caught fire on the rear. The engine stack had come away with the impact, and steam hissed up.
One of the hover cars turned to the side, and a robotic arm eased out and sprayed anti-fire foam over the site, causing the engine stack to tick and steam as it cooled.
“There’s someone in the front. They’re alive,” Enna said. “Help me get them out.”
A pair of security officers checked the craft before giving Enna the all-clear sign of a thumbs-up.
Petal and Holly pushed through the confused throng of security men and women and helped Enna prise open the craft’s main door. The metal was twisted and buckled, preventing it from undocking properly.
“Here, Hol, help me with this.” Petal pointed to a twist in the ship’s fuselage. The two women gripped the edged and pulled. With a concerted effort, they managed to shift the panel enough so that Petal could reach in and push from the other side by wedging her body against an upright and pushing out with both her arms and her leg.
“Nearly… there,” she said, gritting her teeth and straining her muscles to the limit.
Holly yelled as she pulled, cutting her hand on the edge of the panel.
It shifted then and creaked, the hinges finally giving way.
With one more shove of her leg, Petal kicked away the panel, revealing the inner fuselage. She poked inside the dark cabin and eased around the pilot’s seat. A human form sat slumped forward, the belts holding it in place like a doll.
“We’ve got one occupant,” Petal shouted out.
Enna appeared at the gap in the craft, illuminating its interior with a flashlight. “Are they alive?”
“Don’t know. They’re not moving. Hold on, I’ll bring them out. Holly, you got a knife?”
“Always,” Holly said, taking a six-inch survivor’s knife from her belt buckle and passing it through to Petal. She took the blade and used it to cut away the straps, freeing the pilot. She shifted her weight forward and gripped them under their arms. With another heave, she managed to drag them around the seat and into the rear compartment.
“Help me,” Petal said as she stumbled back, the weight of the pilot overbalancing her. Enna and Holly leaned in and grabbed the man’s shoulders. They soon had him outside and lying on the grass.
“Franklin! Over here,” Enna called.
The young guard from earlier dashed over carrying a medical pack. He slumped to his knees by the pilot’s body. Enna checked for a pulse. “Nothing.”
“Shit, he’s dead?” Petal said.
“Let me check,” Franklin said. He removed a three-inch-long cylindrical device from his bag and pressed it against the pilot’s chest, pushing a button on its side. A single blue OLED bulb flashed twice.
Enna smiled.
“Erm, what’s going on?” Holly said.
“Yeah, not quite the time to be smiling, surely?”
Petal’s internal systems suddenly flared with the sensation of connecting to a node… no, wait, two nodes, but so very briefly before one vanished. She couldn’t identify them, and they didn’t leave a digital signature. But there, one more again… a node tried to connect to her local network.
The pilot’s eyelids flicked open, and he stared up at Petal.
“Shit,” Petal said, realising the pilot was a node. “You’re kidding me.”
“Petal, please meet my special guest who is going to help bring Gerry back,” Enna said.
Franklin fell back as this guest lurched up and turned to face Petal. It smiled at her, its eyes growing wider and then narrowe
r as if struggling to focus.
“Wait a damned minute,” Petal said, the sense of recognition almost overwhelming her. “A guest? This is Jachz… the guy who tried to kill Gerry! What the fuck, Ens?”
Then it spoke. “Yes. I am Jachz, and I was ordered to kill Gerry if he failed to acquiesce with the command to return to the family.”
Petal lurched towards the Family’s AI-driven cyborg, releasing her forearm spikes.
“Petal, no, wait, listen to me,” Enna said, pulling her away. “Jachz has left the Family. He’s here to help. He’s the one that sent me the code to create the new cloned brain.”
“It’s true,” Jachz said.
His voice had a clipped tone to his accent, giving him a hint of artificiality, but the expressions on his face were entirely convincing.
“I don’t get it,” Petal said. She eased away, allowing Jachz to stand. “Why are you here? What’s going on with the Family?”
Jachz held up his hands. “It’s okay, really. They won’t be a problem any longer.”
A loud bang came from the rear of the craft, scattering the group. “We ought to get out of here. It’s going to blow,” Franklin said.
Petal wasted no time and dragged Holly away.
A cloud of smoke belched out of the rear of the craft as a panel went flying in the air with the explosion. As the smoke continued to billow out, Petal thought she saw a figure crawl out of the craft and disappear into the crowd lined up by the edge of the wooded area a few meters away from the wreckage.
She blinked and wiped the smoke from her eyes, but saw nothing else.
“Did you bring a passenger?” Petal asked.
“No, I came alone,” Jachz said. “This craft only has provisions for a single pilot.”
“Let’s all just get inside and talk this over,” Enna said. “Franklin, please help clear the citizens and liaise with the clean-up crew.”
“Of course, they’ll be here shortly. They’re just finishing cleaning up Petal’s quad bike.” He gave her a cute smile, blushed, and looked away to go about his duties.
Code Breakers: Delta Page 9