Rise

by K. T. Hanna

  The system was quiet, like it didn’t know how to deal with sarcasm. We were going to get along just famously. I could already tell.

  It was all I could do to not throw myself into the seat in my lecture hall. I was so not in the mood for this subject today. Ethics and I were on shaky footing. Call me stubborn, but I wasn’t sure bringing me back to life and asking me to break into nice little mom and pop shops so I didn’t die again was entirely ethical. Not to mention baiting me with a perfectly disguised secret door and then pretending it didn’t exist? No, that was unforgivable.

  Ethics has nothing to do with it. We are preserving humanity. For this, some sacrifices must be made.

  Oh, because humanity is so worth preserving. This was a sore point with me. It always had been. Humans destroyed as much as they created. Sometimes I wondered if we were sent here because someone else got fed up with us.

  Humanity must not be permitted to kill itself, or the world around us. Checks and balances must exist.

  Odd. The phrasing didn’t sound quite right, and it made me think the system had missed a few moments in our history. Why did you let the second world war happen then? Hell with that, what about the first?

  There was a pause, and it went on so long, I didn’t think it was going to answer me again, but it finally did, only a moment before my teacher entered the room. I never thought it would be able to sound sad. But even SC surprised me with the amount of remorse in its voice.

  Those were the best possible outcomes.

  Wait what? How?

  Trust us when we say WWI and WWII were not intended. It was simply the best possible outcome at the time.

  Talk about chills. How was that possible though? The best outcome couldn’t be remotely true. The sheer number of lives lost, the cruelty. Not to mention the high count of civilians caught in the crossfire, and the genocide. Fuck. How could it purport to be protecting humanity and do this? It carried on like I’d asked it my thoughts.

  Ultimately, we settled for the best possible outcome at the time. We always do. The least lives lost, the most integrity preserved.

  Integrity? If it were tangible right now, I’d punch it. It was back to using we again. And I guess that was all the answer I was going to get. I had to think about this later. Right now I needed to pay attention to my class. My scholarship didn’t only depend on athletic performance. Try as I might, I couldn’t get the system’s sadness out of my head. It sounded almost human, complete with failed logic. I wasn’t sure that was a good thing.

  It was so difficult to focus on the subject matter of the lecture that it got annoying. I’m not sure how I managed to make any notes at all. It certainly wasn’t going to help my note taking job. It sounded odd, but for each lecture there was a student note taker whose notes were sent out to any students with disabilities who could benefit from said notes. Mine were usually organized perfection, and I did it for each lecture in every one of my subjects. That and training a high school track team two times a week was how I paid for my expenses. Note taking paid for my food. Training paid for my rent.

  I pushed the haunting words of the system to a corner of my mind and pulled out my cell phone to bring up my bank’s app. I didn’t get paid until next week, so I was expecting it to contain about forty dollars. But it didn’t. I’d received a payment from SC Corp. One hundred dollars. It took me more than two weeks to earn that much with note taking.

  I’d broken the law, stolen a file, found a secret laboratory, and they paid me one hundred dollars. Seriously? No wonder they wanted us to maintain and hold down our previous lives. When it mentioned compensation, I’d assumed it wouldn’t be much, but I’d secretly been hoping I was wrong. Guess they had more overheads than I thought.

  With the lecture over I finally glanced down at my notes and ran through them. They were better than I’d expected. Maybe a part of my brain just kept writing down what it was hearing. Since I’d already read the materials covered in this lecture, I was sure that I’d detailed everything included in those. Fifteen dollars was fifteen dollars, especially considering I was already attending. If I played it right, it could feed me for up to five days.

  I pushed my tablet into my backpack and slung it over my shoulder. Heading out to lunch after the two hour lecture, my legs were seizing up. I didn’t stretch enough after all the running I did. I was going to pay tomorrow. On the bright side, my back wasn’t hurting anymore, so that had been more shock than smashing into a row of metal lockers. Still, I could feel this buzzing on the surface, bouncing from fingertip to fingertip as I walked. Glancing down I could see a spark of blue jump from one of my digits to another. I needed some way to stave off this nervous energy without killing myself or others.

  Cyan surprising me as I exited the room was not one of those ways.

  “Hey, Dare!” She grinned at me, nudging my side with her elbow in that infuriatingly co-conspirator way of hers. It made everyone around her think we were in on something.

  “Hi, Cyan.” I could only imagine her parents named her after the bright color when they saw her eyes. They were alarmingly blue. Unsettling even. Not like Orion’s, whose were calming and soft. No, hers were a blue that no one believed weren’t contacts. Yet I’d known her for the last few years of my life, and sure as shit, her eyes had always been that disconcerting color.

  To compensate, and probably to irritate people, especially her parents, she’d taken to dying her hair cyan blue since the senior year of high school.

  Her personality matched her clothes: today, a white shirt with a dancing blue cloud on it, and a pair of bright blue leggings. Bright. Bubbly. And slightly blinding. That was Cyan. “Come on! You’re slow today. What happened, did you hurt yourself?”

  She linked her arm through mine and dragged me off to the coffee shop at the corner of the IT building. I had two hours before my next class, so I didn’t bother trying to escape. That took far too much energy when it involved Cyan.

  Please make sure you maintain your regular way of life as much as possible. This is a part of the TOS you agreed to.

  Luckily, Cyan was bubbly enough that she took my mind off the scathing retort I wanted to mentally scream at SC. Of course I knew it was in the bloody TOS. I’d read the damned thing.

  I slouched into one of the couch chairs, and pulled out a very squished ham and cheese sandwich with a wince. Ham would be better cold straight out of the fridge in the morning, and peanut butter didn’t have to stay cold to taste good. Had to remember that for next time.

  My other friends filed in, dumping their bags at the seating area we snagged, and headed over to grab themselves food from the cafeteria. A small voice in the back of my head that actually belonged to me reminded me that I had some spare money for once. But I wasn’t sure I wanted to touch it, and my sandwich was good enough, as was the apple I’d eat after.

  Orion threw himself into the seat next to me. He reached into his bag to fish out his own sandwich, and the smell of peanut butter drifted over to me, making me regret my choice anew.

  “I’ll remind you to make it with peanut butter tomorrow. Again. I think you’ve just fallen into a high school habit.” Orion grinned at me like he could read my mind, except he couldn’t. It was just that I’d told him so many times that I really should follow his example.

  “What did you get up to last night?” he asked. And I wasn’t sure if there was a hint of suspicion I saw in his eyes, or genuine curiosity.

  “Went out for food, only got a bagel. Ate ramen, tried to sleep.” And I didn’t even lie.

  “You forgot beat up the mailbox.”

  “I didn’t forget. I was deliberately omitting it.” I grinned and popped the last bite of my sandwich into my mouth before retrieving my apple. It seemed he’d forgotten about my scar.

  Orion’s laugh was silvery. It was the only way to describe it. When he laughed, people couldn’t help but smile wi
th him. Lucky bastard.

  I wasn’t in the mood to talk though. I was in the mood to give the Second Chance system a bit of a third degree, but I wasn’t sure how to. It was in my head. While I was glad to be alive, I didn’t ask it to save me, and now I was beholden to its whims? How often and when will I get the assignments?

  I waited, trying to see if I could sense a presence in the back of my mind, but nothing was there. And it didn’t answer me. Maybe it wasn’t listening in. It was infuriating. I didn’t even realize I was tapping my foot impatiently until Orion leaned over from his seat next to me.

  “What’s got you so worked up?”

  His expression held an earnest look, one I wasn’t willing to meet, so for one of the first times in our friendship, I avoided eye contact. “Just have a meet coming up in a couple of weeks, lots of exams are looming on the horizon.” I shrugged, hoping he thought it just the usual.

  His frown was anything but believing. “Oh, so you mean like you’ve had to do for the last, say three years of school?”

  He was right, and I knew it. “Yeah, like I’ve had to do for the last three years. And like I always do and never complain about. Sometimes you can be insensitive, Ry.”

  He cringed and offered me a grape as a peace maker. “Sorry. I know you like to keep shit to yourself, but you should know better than to count me out of it.”

  “If I lumped all my crap on you constantly, you’d be buried in a matter of minutes.” I chewed down on the grape, letting the juicy insides explode in my mouth. Grapes should be classified as drugs. You could never have just one. I held out my hand for another.

  Orion eyed me suspiciously. “Is this just another ploy to eat all of my grapes?”

  “You know me too well,” I said, forcing my laugh.

  He used to know me well, maybe that had changed now. We hadn’t been as close lately as we used to be in high school. He was always so busy. But then who was I kidding? So was I. And with this new being dead thing, it was only going to get worse.

  About to sigh, because fuck knows I needed to expend some of the pent-up woe, the system finally woke back up.

  Next Assignment.

  Immediately it had my attention, because you know, that wasn’t terrifying at all. The thing was, it was difficult for me to divide my attention. I still had no idea how I’d managed to take notes earlier. And I’d never got parts in the school plays because acting and I didn’t mesh.

  Orion’s expression could only be defined as quizzical. He knew I wasn’t actually paying attention, even though I looked at him. His brows pinched ever so slightly exhibiting annoyance. He scrunched his nose sort of like a rabbit, except it wasn’t cute; it meant he was about to get pissed. And right then there wasn’t a damned thing I could do about it.

  “Sorry,” I ventured to say when the stupid system delayed whatever it was about to tell me. “Totally spaced out.”

  He raised an eyebrow.

  “Sure,” he said, and I knew from his tone he’d believe the sky was purple before he believed that I’d only spaced out.

  This whole living in secret thing was going to get really complicated, fast. Even though his demeanor said that I didn’t deserve for him to repeat himself, he began to speak again.

  ASSIGNMENT

  Location: Professor Chapman, Head of Anthropology Department’s Office, anthropology department, your campus

  Objective: Do not get noticed in the performing of this task. Leave the target in your apartment mailbox at the end of the day.

  Target: Retrieve Professor Chapman’s Day Planner.

  Time Limit: By the end of the day tomorrow (11:59p.m.).

  Reward: Progression experience. Monetary compensation. Both dependent on the quality of performance.

  Seriously. So now I’m a common thief? I directed my thoughts angrily at the sky, at somewhere in my head that could hear them.

  Please repeat the inquiry. Your question does not make sense.

  I blinked and noticed that Orion had turned his back to me and was talking to Neale, one of our other friends. Cyan sat, perched on the arm of his chair, leaning forward and eagerly listening to the conversation they all had while I spent time conversing with myself. I felt a flash of jealously rise in me, like bile in my throat threatening to overwhelm my senses.

  Swallowing it down, I opted not to analyze it too much. That would only lead to rampant confusion and irritation. I couldn’t put my finger on just what I was jealous of. Was I jealous of Cyan being close to Orion, or vice versa? Or was it just that I wanted to talk to them all like yesterday had never happened?

  Rephrase the question, huh? I’d give it rephrase the damned question. Why resurrect me, if all I’m doing is being a common thief?

  Your manner of death gifted you with an ability the program requires. The decision went in your favor. You are performing duties required to maintain a status quo, to keep the balance.

  My manner of death, huh. We still had to discuss how it had footage of my death from outside of myself, but I’d figure out how to approach that later. I grit my teeth, trying not to yell in my brain for fear that it’d come out of my mouth instead. Is this how the rest of my life will be?

  Your life is still your own. As you perform these tasks, you will grow in experience and control. As you do so, your rank will increase. Higher ranks receive more complex tasks. Does this answer your initial inquiry?

  How could I have forgotten that I have a rank? What was my rank again?

  Junior. This is the rank that all Second Chance agents begin with. Should you not perform in a satisfactory enough manner, your rank will not increase, and the odds are that therefore Second Chance will no longer have an agreement with you.

  Panic began to rise in me. Well, panic and anger. The sensation didn’t sit well. It made me want to vomit while I punched things. I wondered if the system could sense that because it followed with the most soothing words I’ve ever heard a computer, or system, or whatever it was utter:

  So far, you are not in danger of this.

  At least that was one piece of danger I’d manage to avoid. With my whole whopping one mission behind me.

  Thank you, I said again.

  My reply was silence, but a heavy one, like the system was trying to figure out just what it could say to me and ended up giving up. I got the distinct impression that being polite confused it. Considering I could understand it receiving irate responses, I’d take every advantage I could muster.

  It was too late in the day for me to worry about performing the task. Considering all of its demands, if it wanted me to keep my existing schedule, it needed to be better about when I got advised of assignments. I had to coach this afternoon, straight after class. For the first time, I didn’t feel like it. These kids looked up to me. I wanted to go home and hide in my room. Maybe punch a brick wall on the way. I don’t know. Maybe this way the system could just let me die in my sleep and what should have happened would have. It was still difficult to wrap my head around the fact that I’d died.

  There was that part of me that didn’t question it. A part of me wanted to live. Stubbornly, perhaps not even in my own interests, but I was young, and I’d clawed my way toward my dream. Disregarding a chance to maintain that life—that was foolhardy, wasn’t it?

  Excellent observation.

  I waited for it to say more, but the damned thing was picky about when it spoke and when it didn’t. I wished it was corporeal so I could punch it instead of a wall. The amount of catharsis involved in physical combat about something that annoyed me was unbelievable.

  Track kids were ferried from a couple of the local high schools to our field. The program was meant to keep kids out of gangs and drugs, and it pulled kids from all over the city, but mostly low-income areas. This university donated its facilities to the cause. Running was cheap. All you needed were halfway okay shoes, and
the will to work. If I’d grown up with more money, perhaps I’d have pursued a different athletic avenue, but as it was, running always worked for me.

  I ran when I was sad. I ran when I was happy. And everything in between. With the wind in my hair and my eyes on the road, there was nothing I couldn’t conquer. Except, apparently, death. For which I needed the assistance of a demanding voice in my head.

  “Dare?” Coach Marth startled me, and I whirled around from watching a group of teens finish their stretches.

  “Yes?” Maybe I looked worried, or panicked, or something else, but he frowned.

  “Are you okay?” Concern knit his brow, and his face held kindness.

  “Yeah, sure. I’m fine. Just been a long day, and with exams and the meet coming up. I’m a bit stressed.” None of it was a lie. I just didn’t add in anything confusing.

  He studied me. Hell, he’d known me since I was much younger. He’d been the teacher who encouraged me to apply for this scholarship, when he moved to this university just before my junior high school year. I hated having so many people around me who could call me on my bullshit answers.

  “Don’t overdo it. You’re strong, but you don’t have to shoulder the weight of the world on your own.” He smiled warmly and blew his whistle, heralding the end of the kid’s warm up session.

  Except even while I took the athletes I usually did and began to run them through the measures, I couldn’t help fuming. Don’t shoulder it alone? What a fucking joke. After just one day of being a bit absentminded, even my best friend had given up figuring shit out.

  The Second Chance program was feeling more and more like a thinly veiled curse, and I fully intended to do something about it. I just had no idea what.