King's County

by James Carrick

  At Bainbridge, I hit a sliver of beach and sat down to pull on my boots. The forest started at the water. All of the settlements from times past had been removed years ago. There was only a power relay remaining, seemingly still in use by its blinking green light.

  I looked back to Seattle. It was dusk already with clouds moving in. The haze of smoke obscured whatever was left of it.

  An hour of running got me to the opposite shore of the island. I needed food again. The chip regulated everything internal, including feelings of hunger. I felt a pulsing at the back of my throat and at my cardiac sphincter. It lasted only a few seconds and stopped. As my need to eat increased, the pulsing would become more frequent.

  The boots went back around my waist. I dove in and pushed, swimming hard to get out into deep water then whipped my head down and up and breached out like a whale. I hit the surface head first and kicked until touching bottom.

  My eyes adjusted to the water but little light reached down here. I sat on the sandy bottom for a minute. Some discomfort in my chest came and went much like the hunger pangs. I knew I wouldn't need to breathe again for awhile.

  Half crawling, half swimming along the bottom, objects gradually became visible. The sand was much lighter in contrast to the rocks and boulders. In a hole in a pile of rocks, a fat salmon floated asleep. I grabbed him by the midsection. My fingers dug in around his big body, breaking the skin to get a solid grip.

  *

  The inlet to Silverdale was a short swim for me, less than an hour, and I was running again on the old road going west and northwest.

  I'd eaten the salmon soon after catching it. I stripped the bones of raw meat with my teeth. Without thinking the better of it, I chewed on a fin and some skin. The vertebrae were an easy shape to crunch and swallow. I ate them and then all the skin and then everything else.

  All I saw was the road with the forest on each side. All the little spots and houses, restaurants and things were removed and the land reclaimed by nature. Four hours of dogged running in the light of a half moon got me to a flat stretch of beach and sharp rocks. At one time it had been a resort. I knew this from a sign made from stacked river stones and redwood logs that the KC+9 landscapers must have passed over. Across the canal was Olympia, still too dark to see. I'd rest and wait. I dug up some little crabs to eat along with handfuls of wet green algae.

  Lying on my back, napping in the sand, a storm came in ruining the morning light. To hell with waiting - I took a roughly westward heading. I swam in my boots, having mastered the technique by now. Diving down, I got a couple of steelhead and ate them both while standing up on the bottom of the canal.

  My body was getting stronger. Arriving at Olympia, my arms and back were swelled with larger muscles. The previous 24 hours exertion had not tired me at all. The chip had responded to the stress and made adjustments, adapting me, building my muscles and bones in hours instead of weeks or months.

  At the edge of the woods, waiting for me, was one of the wolves.

  We met / head down, colliding at speed, he bit into my shoulder. I tried pinning him but he twisted away and came back clamping onto my ankle and pulling. A kick to his head did nothing. I drew into a ball. The wolf snapped at me while I cowered protecting my head. The trick worked; he'd dropped his guard. With both hands I grabbed his forelegs – the wolf looked at me surprised – my jaws stretched securing the top of his his snout. I put my weight on him, hands and knees holding down his four thrashing legs – and pulled away to look at him. He snapped at the air a few times but quickly calmed - he looked back at me. I was trapped /

  The wolf moved underneath me, testing me, figuring me out. He would eventually break free - my left hand let go and went to his throat, holding it, my right went to his chest. I picked a spot and punched at it repeatedly, hoping to damage him in some way.

  He was not animal or machine. His teeth were like real teeth but they were tougher, harder and sharper. His bite had injected a poison into me which the chip worked hard to neutralize; my eyeballs swelled against the sockets causing double vision.

  His fur was like real fur - but it was alive, silky and steely. I got a handful of it, cranked up my powerful new body and ripped upward pulling out a patch of fur and skin / plunged my hand into the wolf's chest, grabbed and ripped, grabbed and ripped again, pulled off his foreleg and threw it away onto the rocks, then the other leg /

  For six hours I ran inland, west and north-west, up and down hills. I munched on fir needles and moss, not very nutritious but they were all I could get on the go. My mind wandered while my body pounded a fast pace. The scenery began to look familiar /

  The ravine was too deep. I went down skidding on the soles of my boots, bouncing on rocks, then hit one too hard and went head and shoulders first, bounced again and crashed in a shallow creek /

  I tried to stand. Both shin bones were poking out of my ripped pants. When I touched a dull pointed tip, I saw the skin had scrapped off my palms and felt something in my back. I pulled a hard seasoned and crooked cedar branch out from between my ribs. It had gone into my lung. I fell backward onto the gravel bank and the lights went out.

  *

  I dreamt of the mountain and the old men with their wives living underneath it. My new watch, a gift from Leland, said 3AM. Every muscle in my body was chilled and stiff but the pain was nothing more than a practical reminder of my condition.

  All the cuts and punctures had healed while I slept. My legs were still a mess. I needed to reset the bones, to make the ends meet, at least approximately. I pulled them straight and held them together for a few minutes until I felt them staying in place.

  From behind me on the bank, I gathered up what dry twigs and leaves I could reach without disturbing my legs and lit them with Elena's lighter /

  The fire caught the eyes of a snake, swimming side to side on the surface of the creek. I kept still, pretending not to see him. He came to me, steadfast. With a burst of his tail, the snake flew to my neck – where I snatched him out of the air, pinching his head as the tail whipped my arm; I pulled the head right off and flicked it in the fire /

  The snake was not animal or machine. It didn't bleed but it was soft - I bit off a section and chewed. It would do. I finished the rest down to the tough end of the tail and slept again.

  *

  The day before I left for college, my aunt woke me in the late morning to say she was going to throw a going away party for me. She was strangely excited for what she had described but I didn't really notice that at the time.

  Later that afternoon, I trundled down the stairs answering her call to the kitchen and found her, my uncle, and a man of similar age to him sitting around our little breakfast table. My aunt was beaming. The going away cake, she called it, was a glossy painted slab on the counter-top.

  The man was a neighbor from down the street, my aunt said. He was quiet in a restrained kind of way. I felt like he wanted to talk to me but he only did so once at the end. He asked me what I was planning to study. I said I didn't know.

  *

  My legs healed properly this time. When I stood, they felt different, everything was different.

  My boots looked different. The color was off. I could feel the ground underneath in unusual detail. I touched the sides and the straps, the toe. They were different. Something had happened while I slept

  The forest flew by. I stopped for some banana slugs in standing water with moss and mushrooms. 20-25km to go, I figured.

  *

  I'm sure now that the man in the kitchen was my father, too chicken to talk to me. I decided that I had no sympathy for him.

  I came upon one of the human settlements. It was not more than a camp site. There were three mounds of recently upturned dirt. There were perfect wolf prints in the piled up soil.

  *

  The forest and valleys and moss covered outcroppings flew by. A snake waiting on a low branch had no chance. It tasted kind of like the pine needles.

  *

/>   Another settlement – two mounds with prints and some now cold food on a battered old table. I ate the food and then discovered the saw. Teeth were missing, freshly torn from the blade, and there was blood on the handle. I can't say I wasn't a little bit proud.

  *

  The Mountain

  The chip responded to stress giving strength; my body was stronger by the hour. I could run up hills at 25kph and back down faster. I ate everything organic to fuel me. But eating the snakes changed me /

  I was becoming like them, my body was – much the same but changed, silky, steely, not animal or machine.

  I no longer sweated, my clothes and boots were fused on and into me and tougher, self repairing, alive now like my skin.

  Around the mountain grew a hedge of thorns a few meters high. This wasn't there the other day. But it was no trouble for me.

  A trail lead to the factory at the base, lots of wolf prints coming out of there. Easy to find the entrance.

  There was a wolf just outside. He was ready and came with everything he had – I had the saw in a two handed grip – He leapt and I sliced him in half at the chest. I pulled him into pieces and scattered them. His head I left with the now broken saw, left it out as a warning.

  /

  It was warm inside the factory cave. The ground was hard rubber, the ceiling was left natural. A wide path sloping down led into the mountain. The path sloped back up and curved and the machine was there, the universal factory, well lit and unforeboding. A comfortable chair was set where one could watch it work.

  A new wolf was being formed in the glass enclosed chamber. He was just a pale blue skeleton slowly filling in. The display said 1:23:00 left to completion. On the side panel was a familiar symbol, the horseshoe and stars from the travel trailer in Wyoming and the Artemis Colonel's tablet.

  The interface – two clear frames, like my desk at the Space Needle - was built into the side panel. Stickers on the floor indicated where my feet should go in order to be at the correct distance.

  It had an older generation of operating system, maybe the first generation, crude but easy to use. I interrupted the wolf sequence and ejected the limp, lifeless mass out of the machine and onto the floor /

  I got the machine going on something else.

  No reason to sit around waiting /

  outside, sprinting straight up the mountain. I was stronger still. Stress gave me strength. At the top I fell backward, bounced once and laid there staring up into the clouds. My body was bulging. Idly picked up a rock and crushed it into pieces - I knew its composition. I remembered everything. The freezing cold rain on my face was only a curiosity. Nothing could hurt me.

  By my watch, there was 11:23:17 left. She would take awhile. But I had the time.

  **U**

  Darkness

  senseless

  My hand goes to my pocket and finds it flat. My mole is gone.

  Where am I?

  I'm inside, sitting. The armrest feels familiar.

  “You awake, bud?”

  I won't panic.

  “Ed?”

  -A-

  I'm sitting in a glass lounge much like one on Earth but scaled down smaller. Space must be at a premium here. Ed refused to talk and stormed out of our meeting. Tyndall is here with me explaining things as well as he can,

  “It had to be this way. If you knew, we worry you'd not have done enough to establish yourself on Earth. You see, you saw, how little Major Hart has done. And, if you are to join us, we need you to see for yourself how Earth has changed while you were away. I hope your friend can understand this.”

  “He'll get over it. It doesn't look like he has a choice,” I say.

  “No. I'm sorry we had to be deceptive. This is a much better alternative to staying home, I promise you.”

  “Help me understand: what was real? In my mind, I was on Earth less than an hour ago. It wasn't a simulation? Don't tell me it was a dream.”

  “Everything you think happened did happen. It was all real, let me rephrase that: you were on Earth. Your other body still is. It's where you left it,” he says.

  “I didn't leave it anywhere!”

  “Yes, of course, I mean you left it - when you left it - it was at a place...appropriately secured. Your mind then switched back into this your original body as it was predetermined to do. That was almost two weeks ago, actually,” he says. “You've been in a suspended state since then.”

  “Traveling to this installation,” I say.

  “Yes. You're wondering how. Let's get a snack first.” Tyndall has an uncertain expression, “Let's see how well it's working...” He whistles three long notes, “That calls it, usually.”

  A gentle, oddly deferential little thing comes into the lounge. It's a soft off-white and navy blue with squishy black legs that operate sort of like tank treads though without any visibly moving parts.

  “Crab cakes?” Tyndall asks me.

  **U**

  We ate and talked. The food on the train was better. The settlement was installed in a deeply concave section of an asteroid in a long elliptical but stable orbit outside the solar system. The settlement was growing, slowly, with new people coming one or two at a time, as was planned years earlier, and new habitable modules being built as needed. There were only twenty including us, with the last four expected to arrive soon.

  There was no specific mission the founders had in mind. The unifying reason would come in time, Tyndall said. He said they needed to get away from Earth to discover it. I didn't believe him. In fact, I'm positive he was lying, or at least not telling me everything.

  All of the scientists from the back of Leland's train were here: Walter Fick, Richelieu (his real name was Richard Jarre), Yuri Denisov, and also Leland, plus a few others I hadn't yet met.

  Leland had created the train as a safe haven for the asteroid settler's Earth bodies. The train also doubled as a sort of vacation spot for them. Without explaining why, once they were on board he would not let them off. They could freely switch back and forth from the asteroid but their earthly bodies were prevented from leaving the train.

  I asked to speak with Leland. The longer he talked the more I realized Tyndall was only telling me half the story. And he was getting nervous, not a good liar. He was never like this on the train.

  **U**

  “From here it takes about 12 and a half hours for the data to travel the distance and reload into your other brain. That's an average; figure plus or minus 35 minutes, approximately.” Tyndall is smoking an old fashioned wooden pipe and has moved to a more comfortable chair. He's relaxed from our earlier confrontation. Leland is here but has not spoken since his opening banter.

  “Pretty convenient. Can there be two of me? Isn't the data a copy, so can't it be in two places?” I say.

  “No.”

  “That's it? Just no?”

  “We don't do that.” Leland says.

  - I won't push it -

  “So why even bother going back? If Earth is so dead to you, what's the point?” I say.

  “Well, for one, if a catastrophic problem ever develops here, we can initiate the process to evacuate our minds in only a few seconds. The installation here does not to be intact for the data to be received in our terrestrial bodies.” Tyndall says.

  He shows me the button he has on a string around his neck. He says our chips can also autonomously initiate a transfer under certain conditions.

  “Earth is not dead to us. Don't assume that. Though I can say I feel more human here than I ever did back home.” Tyndall says continuing, “We can still find recruits, occasionally. We have a program to train them there. Plus, there is still some useful technology being developed, however nothing like in years past.”

  “OK, something still doesn't add up. How do I have two bodies? Where did the one on Earth come from?” I say.

  “It was the Moon base, wasn't it?” Ed says from the doorway.

  “Good guess, Major Hart,” Tyndall says, “Your bodies wer
e duplicated during you stay there. They were put into hibernation on an identical Artemis craft that was put into a persistent lunar orbit. After the authorized mission at Jupiter was completed, your new bodies were activated, your minds and the mission data loaded from the original craft, and you returned to Earth entirely unaware of the whole thing. Meanwhile, the long voyage out here was just beginning.”