by Shaun Barger
“Well,” Jem said, savoring the smoky sweetness of the bourbon as she took a swig. “I’ve definitely got questions. Maybe some suggestions.”
She offered Eva the bottle. Hesitant, Eva accepted.
Before, Jem had been too blindsided with the atrocious revelation of Eva’s plans to consider that condemning them outright might close the door to any sort of productive negotiation.
This time, she did what so many seconds-in-command throughout history had done when presented with a flawed plan by a stubborn superior: lavish it with praise. Then, once she’d convinced Eva of her support, get down to the nitty-gritty of making it better.
By all means she’d use the Synth VR network to turn the civilian population into skilled soldiers. But would they really need Torment? Maybe instead of traumatizing everyone into an aversion to virtual escapism, she’d order them to destroy all the VR beds as a declaration of solidarity, or adjust the virus in a way that would rewrite their Synth mods to prevent VR access.
Maybe she’d find a way to evacuate Base Machado instead of letting it die with Armitage. Covertly sabotage their nuclear capabilities, then push them into a conflict with the Synth. Unable to blow themselves up, they’d be resettled in Philadelphia—away from the Armitage-killing blast zone. A whole army of soldiers already trained and eager to join the fight.
Orbital bombardment from the colonists was a problem. But Jem didn’t think it was the treaty that was keeping the Synth safe from the colonists—not really. It was the human presence.
The moment full-scale war once again broke out across the planet, the Synth would know that things could only play out in a couple ways:
1. The Synth kill all the terrestrial humans. The colonists bombard the planet, destroying the Synth as they reduce Earth’s surface to a molten slurry—the atmosphere peeling away like a ghost, the divots and valleys left in the wake of vaporized oceans looking like shallow bites out of a ruby apple.
2. The Synth launch an attack against the orbital blockade, despite having to split their forces to maintain control over earth as humans rise up in population centers across the globe. The colonists bombard the planet, destroying the surface-bound Synth. Then, having spent thirteen years militarizing the vast abundance of the solar system’s natural resources (outstripping those of Earth by many magnitudes), they easily destroy whatever orbital Synth forces might remain.
3. The Synth, realizing that this is a war they can’t win, have no choice but to call for a diplomatic solution.
Jem became gripped with the fantasy, her enthusiasm building as she and the virtual Eva deliberated. But then she remembered that this was just that—a fantasy.
Only then did she realize that Blue had been right. Jem could have made this work. Could have saved them. Could have saved everyone.
It was Jem who’d been wrong. Not Blue.
“No . . .”
The virtual Eva looked at her, concerned. “No?”
“No,” Jem said again. “No, no, no, no!”
“Jem! What’s wrong?”
“Me!” Jem screamed. “About everything!”
She snatched the bottle of whiskey from the startled Eva’s hands and smashed it against the wall.
“Fuck! FUUUUUCK!”
Jem tore out of the simulation, wheezing.
It was too much. It was too fucking much.
She put the new version of the memory at the end of the queue, tweaking it so that when she immersed herself again, she’d believe that it was real—that she and Eva had fixed the plan, together. She extrapolated the memory, shuffling the list to make room for the happily ever after that might have followed.
The final simulation was ready. All she had to do was trigger the command, and she’d be locked in a paradise of her own making. Blissfully unaware of its illusory nature—this miserable ending, forgotten.
Jem closed her eyes.
“I’m sorry, Eva,” she whispered. “I’m sorry Mom. Dad. Blue. Everyone.”
Taking one final breath, Jem silently activated permanent immersion. Emerald light began to fill her vision.
A man cleared his throat at the foot of Jem’s bed.
Jem slammed the brake on her descent and opened her eyes to find that weird white kid from earlier looking down at her.
The boy was ghostly in the moonlight. The black of his hair and clothing made his face look like a mask, floating in the darkness. For the briefest moment, she thought he was Eva.
“Nikolai?” Jem hissed. “What are you doing here?”
Noticing the blade hanging at his side, she grew tense.
“Why do you think?” The boy grinned, looking feverish. “I’m here to bust you out.”
He leaned over the footboard, offering her his hand. In his other, he held a rod that appeared to be covered in some sort of light absorbing super-black nanomaterial.
“Jesus, you look like shit. What the hell happened to you?”
He seemed scared—terrified, even. But despite the weapon, there was nothing about his demeanor to indicate an intention of violence. Not with her, at least.
“I lied to you before,” Nikolai said, sheepish. “About being a traveling . . . Amish . . . magician.”
Jem nodded at the rod. “So that’s not your magic wand?”
There were a lot that was strange about the boy. His sneakers, for example. They looked as though he’d commissioned a high-end Italian shoemaker to custom-make a pair of luxury Converse high-tops.
She couldn’t place his accent. No matches in her memory banks, despite a few clear influences from late twentieth to early twenty-first-century American cinema. He was like an alien imitating old TV shows that had just gotten to his planet, one hundred light years away. Or a time traveler.
The only thing she could tell with absolute certainty was that he was a soldier. A little green and wide-eyed, maybe—but competent.
“Look,” the boy said, glancing nervously at the door. “I’m a colonist. From Mars. We’re getting involved. Getting back into the war.”
“You’re really short for a Martian,” she said. “Low gravity on Mars, only point-three-seven-six gees. Six and a half foot average height for natives.”
There was a pen on the bedside table. A vase next to that. They’d have to do if she had to subdue him.
He held out his hands, pleading. “Please, listen to me. I don’t have much time. I messed up. I’m not supposed to be here. We’ve got stealth ships that not even the Synth can see. We were supposed to do quick recon. But I got separated—I had to hide here, to avoid capture. We’re developing weapons that not even the Synth’ll be able to fight.”
“Weapons?” she said, doubtful. His desperation was obviously real, that much was clear. “What kind of weapons?”
The boy smiled, held up his hand, and engulfed it in flickering blue flames. Another magic trick, like the coin from earlier.
“The human kind,” he said, making the fire twist in a colorful swirl between his palms. “Telekinetics. Pyrokinetics.”
Jem sighed, growing impatient. This is what she’d delayed virtual paradise for? A mentally disturbed magician?
“Bullshit.”
“Does this look like bullshit to you?”
Nikolai hefted the length of black, a barely visible line rippling through the air from its tip like a fold in the shadows. A glassy distortion, so ethereal it was practically invisible.
It wrapped around Jem’s abdomen like a rope and lifted her into the air.
She roared, flying into a snarling frenzy as she thrashed and tore at the phantom bindings.
“Oh fuck, I am so sorry!” Nikolai gasped.
The invisible rope dissolved into cool, quickly evaporating foam, and Jem fell crashing back down onto her bed.
“I was just trying to show off,” he stammered, obviously mortified. “I didn’t mean to—”
The door swung open and the boy spun out of existence, seeming to pull the darkness aside like a curtain, where he could hid
e.
“The hell is going on in here?” the guard demanded, drawing his sidearm.
“I—I—” she stammered, staring at him, then at the spot where Nikolai had disappeared.
“What?” he growled, following her gaze, then looking back at her, confused.
“Nothing,” she finally said. “I was having a nightmare.”
“Christ, kid,” he said, slowly moving his hand from his weapon. “Scared the shit out of me. I—”
An alarm pierced through the air, echoing loudly up and down the tile hallways.
The guard’s eyes went wide.
“What the hell . . .” He glanced down at a little screen on his wrist, which was flashing red. “Full alert. Full lockdown. Holy shit. All right, kid. Your surgery’s being delayed. Get dressed, quick.”
He slammed the door behind him.
The air seemed to boil off Nikolai as he came back into existence.
“What are you?” Jem hissed, scrambling to her feet. She grabbed her clothes, which had been folded up on the bedside chair, and pulled her pants on under her gown.
“Psy Ops,” Nikolai said, subtly puffing out his chest. “United Colonial Marines. I can take you with me. I have a ship hidden in the lake southwest of here. Twenty miles, I think?”
Jem stared at him, going cold. Unable to stifle the nauseating flood of images summoned by the mere mention of the lake where her life had come to an end.
Blue, curled up into a limp ball on the mud.
The Armitage husk’s empty mirror eyes. A slender giant of quicksilver looming between them.
Nikolai barreled on. “I wasn’t medically prepped for fieldwork. I’m sick—I think I’ve caught your plague. I was going to leave in the morning, but the Synth, they know I’m here. I fought some of them—they don’t know what I am, but if they get their hands on me, everything’s fucked. Colonel Machado just attacked me—the Synth threatened him, told him to hand me over. The whole base is gonna be lit up soon. So we gotta go now.”
Jem finished getting dressed as Nikolai went to go look out the window. Outside, the watchtowers had begun to light up—their roving spotlights crisscrossing to illuminate the surrounding minefields and forest edge as bright as day.
“What does this have to do with me?” she asked, coming up beside him. Was this really happening? Had something somehow known how close Jem had been to diving headfirst into oblivion . . . and intervened?
Something at the edge of her memory stirred. Not from her mods—not even from the fuzzy pre-mod depths of her early childhood and infancy. It was more like a time traveler’s telegram, delivered as Morse code tugs through the connected fourth dimensional wires of her DNA.
A distant flourish. The faintest hint of a song. Then it was gone.
“I could never abandon a fellow Beatles fan,” Nikolai said.
She gave him a sharp look. This wasn’t VR, right? She’d never actually gone through with fully immersing. Right?
She checked her memory banks. No. No gaps.
Heart pounding, she remembered that she’d turned off the safety measures blocking selective digital memory suppression within VR. She rescinded her overrides, allowing all the safeguards she’d switched off to resume functioning.
Would she remember programming some sort of colonist rescue escape fantasy like this with just her organic storage?
In the rare occasion that her mods had been forced to reboot, it always seemed like a struggle to stand up, let alone think straight. But how much of that was just short-term disorientation? Her mods had never been disabled long enough to find out.
“What does this have to do with me?” she asked again, more firmly. “Why are you here?”
“I need help,” Nikolai admitted. “I’m sick, and I’m tired, and I don’t know how to get out of here. We’re both outsiders, and they’re being super shitty to you, so I’m pretty sure that even if you don’t help me, at least you won’t rat me out.”
“The people here are pathetic,” she said, still fuming. “A bunch of fucking cowards.”
“Help me get back to my ship. Then, once we’re in orbit, you can enlist. Join the fight. I promise we won’t take away your mods. We won’t lobotomize you. We’ll upgrade you. So. Are you in?”
Jem struggled with only partial success to stamp out the tiny petals of hope threatening to bloom in her chest.
She pulled on her worn jacket and nodded. “I’m in.”
The door burst open and the wail of alarms poured in from the hallway. The soldier rushed in sweating, terrified.
“Come on! We need to—”
The guard saw Nikolai standing there, deer-in-headlights frozen, and opened his mouth to shout.
Nikolai swung the super-black telekinesis stick (which Jem couldn’t help but think of as a magic wand), flinging a blob of smooth, opaque slime that covered the guard’s mouth with a wet slap.
The momentum of the first swing carried him into another full-bodied wave of his wand that slammed the door shut with a powerful burst of air.
There was an easy, vicious precision to the way Nikolai moved that gave him away as that rare sort of athlete who was a natural when it came to the arts of violence.
Like Jem.
The boy seemed to control his abilities, at least in part, with movements that pantomimed channeling energy to his “magic wand” from specific points along the center of his body. He was like a martial artist, guiding energy from his chakras.
The soldier’s protests were muffled as he clawed at the opaque slime, which had solidified over his lips. Eyes widening, he reached for his sidearm. Nikolai was already on him, knocking the man’s gun away as he pulled his feet from under him with a yank of the nearly invisible rope.
The soldier grabbed Nikolai’s leg and pulled him down on top of him. Nikolai tumbled with a yelp and dropped the baton. They wrestled across the floor, punching and struggling as Nikolai tried to subdue the man.
The soldier drew the blade from Nikolai’s belt and tried to jam it into his throat, but Nikolai twisted his wrist, sending the blade spinning across the tile.
Jem pulled the soldier off of Nikolai and subdued him with three vicious punches.
“Thanks,” Nikolai wheezed, still lying on the floor.
“No problem.” She grabbed the strange knife the boy had dropped and pointed it down at the soldier cowering on the floor. “You. Don’t move. Don’t make a sound. If you cooperate, you’ll be unharmed. Understood?”
Nikolai became quiet, rising suddenly and holding out his hand for Jem to give him the blade back.
“Please don’t touch that,” the boy said, with the long-suffering politeness of a traveler trying not to be annoyed at a local who’d just committed what would have been a major breach of etiquette in the traveler’s homeland.
“Sure,” she said, turning the slick black blade in her fingers to give it to him, hilt first. “Go use it to cut that robe into strips so I can tie this guy up.”
They stowed the soldier in a closet.
“Nobody can hear you,” Jem said at the man’s muffled shouts. “Just sit tight, be quiet, and help will arrive soon.”
“Everything is going to be fine!” Nikolai added.
They closed the closet, dragging a table in front of it to keep the door secure.
Nikolai ran over to the window and rapped his knuckle against the pane. There wasn’t any way to open it—it was sealed shut, thick glass enforced to be bullet and shrapnel proof. “The checkpoints are probably locked up tight. Even invisible we wouldn’t be able to get through. But maybe . . .”
Jem watched intently as the boy pressed the tip of his blade against the surface and whispered something. Frost crystalized across the entire window so fast that it crackled audibly.
Nikolai took three steps back and shot a churning column of flame as thick as a python from the hilt of his weapon. He whipped the serpentine fire against the glass in alternating lashes, controlling it like one of the crystal jelly ropes to
form a superheated X.
Then he cooled it again, icy vapor pouring down the wall in waves.
Jem watched with awe as Nikolai alternated between fire and ice until cracks spread out across the glass in one spectacular burst.
How was any of this possible? Energy out of nothing. Programmable mass, with adjustable volume, density, appearance, state of matter—from nothing! Shields anchored immovably to their spots in the air without support. Ethereal tendrils able to lift a grown woman into the air without leverage, despite the almost complete lack of physical strain apparent on the part of the wielder.
Nikolai climbed up onto the windowsill, coated one of his sneakers in a shell of the crystal slime, and kicked through the glass. It exploded outward, crumbling easily.
Jem came over to the window. A hovercraft zoomed by—searchlight sweeping across the path two stories below. Nikolai and Jem ducked, hiding from view.
“So do you have a way out?” Jem asked. “Or is that my job?”
“The watchtowers along the fence. Do they have heat vision? That kind of stuff?”
“Yeah. They’re always watching on multiple spectrums. Along the inside and out. Synth have cloaking devices. Active camouflage. Not as good as yours, but decent.”
“What about the hovercrafts? The trucks? The soldiers?”
“Yeah,” she said. “But they won’t all be using it. Is anyone other than myself aware of your stealth capabilities?”
Nikolai shook his head. “Not yet, at least.”
“They’ll be searching infrared in the poorly lit parts of the base. But if they don’t know about your camo then they’ll just be searching visually on the airstrips, around HQ, and in civilian areas.”
“Okay,” Nikolai said. “So how do we get out of here? I can turn us invisible and fly us over the fence, but if they’re watching that carefully, they’ll see us.”
“Fly us?” she asked nervously. “Like with that telekinetic arm?”
“No. Lessen gravity’s pull on our bodies. Propel us with concentrated jets of jellied air. Here—I’ll show you.”
Jem gasped as a strange electric tingle covered her entire body, slowly sinking through her flesh until it dissipated in a burst of cold against bone.