by Gard Skinner
“So how old am I, actually?” asked Dakota.
“Sixteen months for you. The rest are almost four years.”
“Oh God, I’m a toddler.”
“But what years they’ve been! You’ve changed the whole world. You’ve saved a city. Now, though, time is short. You’re sick. We need you back online. No more field trips, OK?”
“So if we don’t go back in the tank you’re going to pop our heads off?” York inquired, not quite expecting the answer he got.
“There are people on my board who thought we should have popped your tops as soon as you were found to be missing. Hell, a few even wanted you erased when Dakota first acted erratically. But then we would have to go under the knife again. Now, I think, they understand my strategy was best. ”
“Which was?” York prodded him.
“Wait it out. Use other clones to help us think like you would think. Play angles. You guys didn’t know what you were yet. And we always could detonate the ports. But let’s get to the health issue. You’re all dying pretty quickly, so maybe that’s what you really want to talk about.”
Now Kode was looking around the room, slowly, like he had bad news.
“Give it to us straight,” I told him.
“Yeah, well,” answered Kode, “Doc Winters’s console is online. We use it to determine which workers have more good labor in them and which ones we can fool by giving salt pills instead of real medicine.”
Dakota cocked her weapon.
“Chill out, Dakota. Don’t give me the they’re people too speech. They are an expendable resource. At least I give them all some joy and relief through my games.”
He nodded back to the medical wing. “The old hack scanned you. We had a good idea what was in your systems. There’s a massive database of case history about what clones face when exposed to a polluted world. It’s not like you have a sturdy defense system yet. There are multiple issues that, even now, you have to deal with.”
“What kind of issues?” Mi coughed, which was itself part of the answer.
“From the scans, Mi, you have a really bad respiratory infection. It’s like you have every pneumonia out there, which, of course, you do. You’re going to need hospitalization soon. Your lungs are filling with fluid. You will drown in your own phlegm, and no simple store-bought antibiotic can battle that on its own.”
To Reno he said, “That wound in your leg is already getting gangrenous. Gangrene is fatal. I’m not even sure we can save you if you do come back, but we’ll try. One way or another, though, the leg is probably gone. It won’t matter. Back in the tank, plugged in, you’ll have no idea it’s missing.”
He turned. “York, like your donor, sorry to say, you were born with a congenital heart defect. It was part of the DNA code, but when you were in our care, it was never an issue, as your vital signs were all controlled and monitored twenty-four-seven. Now it looks like you caught Mi’s chest virus too. You’re a massive coronary looking for a place to happen.
“Dakota, I suspect under the gloves, and from your yellow color, you’re starting to lose your nails. If the tips of your fingers have also gone black, you’re screwed. It’s a form of malaria that normal humans have a resistance to. Not you. You must have picked up a mosquito bite recently. You’ll continue to deteriorate, and you can expect mental breakdown to be a big part of that.”
“I’m not having a mental breakdown,” she slurred. “I’m just being fed a boatload of BS. You claim we’re not engineered to handle the natural world? We can’t even survive a mosquito bite? Yeah, right. Doesn’t everyone get sick? I’ll heal.”
But Kode was shaking his head. “I hate to break it to you, but look at the history. Clones—any clones, so far—unless they’re kept in strict sterile conditions, always succumb to an infection of some kind. Frogs. Mice. Sheep. All the same. Real, natural human people, the ones not born in a tube, have a lifetime to build up the immunities that keep them walking and breathing. You five, and the others back at BlackStar, have none of those immunities. You simply can’t live in a filthy, viral world.”
“You must have worked on a cure. You must have . . .” Dakota was growling again.
“Like I said, you have to go back in the sterile preservative. But we’ll take care of you. We all have everything at stake.”
I looked around at my team. Solemn, somber, afraid . . . the wind had just been taken out of their sails.
But we still had the guns, right?
“So what are you going to do?” Kode asked me directly. “I mean, Phoenix, you’re sort of my offspring. I don’t want you or any of these friends of yours to die. We’d have to make more. It’d cost a lot of money. And we’d be offline for a long time. Worse, I’d have to go under the knife again. And who knows what the next version of you would try to pull? You won’t know. The bottom line is you’ll be dead. You won’t have any clue how new Phoenix plays his hand.”
“Gee, thanks for the warmth,” I replied sarcastically.
“Honestly. I want you to live a long, satisfying life. And you can. Just come home. You’ll have nothing to worry about other than new toys and guns and games and friends to hang out with.”
Mi interrupted, “You’re saying we could just walk out of here and go back to BlackStar, and you’ll cure us?”
“Our top physician is waiting there right now,” he assured us.
“But so is the cable for the sides of our skulls,” Dakota added.
“Right. But, Dakota, be honest—do you really want to live out here? Think about what you’ve seen so far. Average people aren’t really happy, they’re mostly miserable and barely surviving. It’s always been that way. They take every moment they can to escape into a world where you rule and have fun and don’t have to worry a single minute about where your next meal’s coming from. In games, you pay no rent. You never get sick. You’re kings and queens of every world. You have the best buddies and the most exciting days imaginable. I bet that given the opportunity—”
“And given the implant,” I tossed out there to make sure it was heard.
“—right, given the opportunity and the implant, ninety-nine percent of the world would absolutely love to have your life. They’d swap places in a heartbeat. Play games all day. Loaf. Never worry about starving or losing their work or getting killed or eaten or traded to a far-off city. They spend half their waking moments getting sick and abused and used and cheated on by their loved ones. You five have none of their problems. Plus, you have the most fun in there. You’re Team Phoenix. You get to shoot and battle and race for a living. There are days I want to be you, in that tank, floating blissfully from mission to mission and world to world with my very best friends.”
A long pause. I remember that pause so well.
No one said a word. They just let Kode’s pitch sink in.
“You don’t really get it yet, Phoenix. You’ve been playing against me all along. You think I didn’t find out how you got out? What a great use of vulnerable resources. Then you gathered intel through the work detail. Trying to blend in. The excursion past the wall was a surprise. But I knew you’d come back for the other three. Then I chose to flush you out. I’m going to use this whole thing, Phoenix. I’m designing a new game as we speak: GAME SLAVES. It’ll rock the world. Say you’re the player. You’re an invincible killing machine dominating every one of the top titles, but only as a villain. Then a member of your own team disrupts everything and wants out. Wants to be a free human. Where do you go? How do you get weapons? Do you kill innocents if you have to? Do you fight authority? Is it a sneak game or a shooter? Is it role playing or strategy? Each gamer can play it any way they want, and play it over and over with different turning points. I’ll sell millions of this thing. It’s brilliant.”
Dakota was looking my way. So was Mi. Reno pulled his bandage up to look at some bubbling skin that was peeling off his wounds.
York rubbed his chest. Did he really have a time bomb in there? A heart defect? I could see him,
with rattling lungs, trying to steady his breathing.
And Mi, well, it really didn’t matter at that moment that I’d caught her with Reno at all. On a cellular level, they were siblings, so what was the big deal with a little hugging and sharing a movie? Maybe the DNA link explained why they’d always been so close.
Fine by me.
I wasn’t going to hold it against her.
The only thing I was thinking—and this was so clear in my mind, even after all the time that had passed and the choices we’d made—was that I didn’t want Mi to die.
Not here in this store.
Not out in the wasteland.
Not during some insane climb over deadly mountain peaks.
Not because of a bullet, or pneumonia, or even as she grew older and older and it naturally became her time.
No, it was clear to me. I wanted Mi to live. I wanted my whole team to see tomorrow.
That was always my objective. In a game or not.
Now I had to find an angle to make that happen.
Unfortunately, I was one step behind.
Someone else was ready to play her own angle, and I wasn’t prepared.
Maybe it was because she was the newer generation. Perhaps that gave her one additional hit point or perspective or cheat or whatever, but in the end, it would change all our paths.
To save Mi, I might have made a deal with Max Kode—but I wasn’t going to get a chance. See, I think Dakota knew I might have made that deal with him.
In any case, Dakota was smart. She always knew I cared for Mi’s safety more than I cared about her quest for liberation.
I turned to Max, not positive what I’d say, when Dakota yelled in a loud voice, “I’m not quite done with him!”
When I turned, she was pointing a fire extinguisher at all of us. And I knew there was no fire.
Dakota squeezed the lever. Sweet on our tongues, a white mist stung our eyes and closed our throats. She gassed us. As we began to lose our bearings and fell like sacks of grain, I clearly remembered a stack of chloroform bottles in the medical office.
I bet they were empty now.
Dakota strode up, gas mask on her face, and pocketed Max Kode’s detonator. She hoisted BlackStar_1 in her arms.
When I woke, the scene looked all too familiar.
Level 43
Max Kode was strapped to a table, reclined at about sixty degrees. A bright light burned in his face. Dakota stood in front of him with an array of sharp instruments on a small side table. On top of the cutting tools was a heavy semiautomatic handgun.
I tried to move. No luck. We were all bound like packages and piled on the floor. She’d made quick work with tie-downs from the home furnishings department.
“Dakota!” I barked. “Let me loose.”
“I’m going to cut on him a bit.” She leered at Kode.
“Cut my straps first.”
She came over and knelt down. Her gloves were off, and I saw what our visitor had been talking about. Her nails were gone, replaced by blackened sores and peeling flesh. I wondered how the original skeeter bite looked by now. Not pretty, I bet. She was rotting away. It had gotten to her brain. You could see it in her glassy, bloodshot eyes.
“Phoenix, brother,” she began, “I hate to play this way. You had my back this whole time. And I know we wouldn’t be out here if not for me, but you gotta know you’re not in charge anymore.” She held up that little remote control. The one Max had brought in. The one that blew up brain implants.
Her thumb was on the trigger.
“Don’t do that,” I told her. It was an order, but a soft one.
“I won’t. Not yet. Not if you go along, OK?”
“Go along with what?”
“He knows more,” she insisted, pointing at the man who was bound, fittingly, exactly the way he’d strapped down both me and Dakota back in that interrogation chamber so long ago.
“What’s to know?” I asked. “Survival is the key to winning. If we die out here, Dakota, we lose.”
“There’s more,” she repeated. “I can tell. You needed to listen to him a little more closely, Phoenix. You needed to ask harder questions.”
She stood again, walked over, took a pair of sheers, and cut the man’s long coat. Then she sliced his shirt and ripped it open, exposing his chest. Her blade ran smoothly over his throat, his nipples, then down toward his groin.
I remembered what she’d done to Jevo, and it made me cringe to think what we might witness now.
Suddenly, she dropped the blade and picked up the pistol. A gnarled, experienced thumb cocked the hammer, and she jammed the heavy barrel into his forehead.
“Do you care if I shoot you?” she asked Max.
He nodded. His eyes were stretched so wide I feared they might pop out and dangle there, still staring at the gun.
“Why do you care?”
“I don’t want to die,” he whimpered. “Think of my kids. Think of Jimmy. You like Charlotte, right? Don’t leave her without a father.”
Dakota smirked. “Nice try.” She mimicked him, “Leave her without a father? You left me without anything! No mother, no father, no family!”
“They’re your family.” Max twitched toward the four of us, all tied up tighter than crazy-bin lunatics.
“They’re illusions, aren’t they?”
“Illusions? Of what?”
Dakota smirked again. “Of your twisted programming, right, Max?”
“What do you mean?” He was almost crying now.
“Yeah,” I joined in, “what do you mean?”
Dakota turned to me now but didn’t take the gun off Kode’s brainpan. “I overheard, Phoenix. I was listening to what Jevo told you before you busted his face.”
The memory came back. Oh, yeah. I knew exactly where this was coming from.
Now she was back focused on Max Kode. “Is this all a game?” she howled. “Are we still in one of your environments? Another one of your twisted system tests?”
She was really screaming, all worked up. I had a hard time believing that with the emotion letting loose, she hadn’t accidentally budged that hair trigger.
“What?” Max asked. “No!”
“What if I blow your brains out? You’ll just take off your game controller wherever you really are? Back at your house or whatever!”
Then, a smell. Pure urine. The bright yellow kind, and we were all breathing the stench. Dakota looked down.
Max Kode had wet his pants. He might have even soiled them.
The man who was in charge of the world’s biggest gaming corporation was sobbing. Uncontrollably. It came in heaps as he tried to explain, to try to save his own life. “Dakota, please don’t pull the trigger. PLEASE. No, you are not in anything but here with me now. Jevo is a moron.”
“Jevo is a moron.” Mi had also woken up.
“You’re flesh and blood, Dakota,” Kode assured her. “We told him the game thing because we didn’t want him knowing any more than a goon of his limited capabilities needs to know.”
“Prove it.” Dakota pressed the gun again.
“How can I?” Kode asked.
“Tell me about cloning. You can’t make me believe that if you’ve tried duping us before, all those times, and failed, that you haven’t also worked on a real cure for our immune system.”
BlackStar_1 went silent. The sobbing stopped. He narrowed his eyes at Dakota. As if, even though he was emotionally broken, she’d punched through a wall to something he did not want revealed.
“There’s nothing to know,” he insisted. “None of our tests ever worked. In polluted air, you all die. All clones get infections. Do you have a clue what version you guys are? Do you know how many Phoenixes and Miamis and Yorks I’ve buried? Dozens. And they all died. One after another. Sometimes as babies, or toddlers, or children the same ages as my own. Sprouting third arms, hunchbacks, gills, vestigial tails. You think this is easy? Or fun? I have a city to take care of.”
“But you tried to
cure them.”
“We tried. The serums never worked. Only the tank solution keeps out the bugs. So you should thank your lucky stars you’re not six feet under, Dakota. Or a pile of ash in the basement incinerator.”
“So the basement?” Dakota grinned. “That’s where you’re working on some kind of master cure? A way for us to live outside the tank without risk of infection?”
Kode was still staring at her with such fury. “You are the infection, Dakota. We took your independence genetics too far. Now it’s spreading. You’re killing your team. They were healthier without you. And way better off.”
“I want to be free.”
“So what? Free will should only go so far.”
Then she did the cruelest thing I’ve ever seen. And remember, I’ve seen it all.
It’s just that this was real.
“You’re about to tell me where to find the latest version of your cure,” she said flatly. “You’re going to tell me which room, in which of those big buildings up on the hill, me and my team have to go break into.”
“There is no cure. At least, not . . .”
“Aha!” she screamed, and then picked up a small chain saw.
“You wouldn’t have a chance of getting in there, past our security,” he cried.
“I’m out of patience with your games. You’re lying. It’s all lies! I may be trapped in this loop, but I can prove it’s all fake!”
Then she spun the blade, narrowed her eyes, and cut his right hand off, just below the elbow. It was quick, but made a horrifying grinding noise as the metal teeth chewed bone. That sound was replaced by an even more horrifying scream.
Max Kode. In extreme agony.
I glanced up. It looked like a graffiti artist had laid a red stripe in a big semicircle across the ceiling. I remembered seeing similar stripes before. Twelve of them. But those had been special effects.
This stripe was dripping wet. And the smell of fresh blood was back. Kode was crying. Shaking. Going into shock. She gunned the motor again.