by Unknown
Contents
Title 3
Chapter One - Free Books!
Myers
Rand
Ravi
Myers
Rand
Ravi
Peter
Rand
Ravi
Ravi
Ravi
Ravi
Rand
Peter
Rand
Ravi
Myers
Rand
Sol
Rand
Sol
Myers
Ravi
Rand
Myers
Peter
Ravi
Peter
Rand
Ravi
Myers
Rand
Rand
Myers
Do Me A Favor?
Books By Nick Thacker
About the Author
Copyright
RELICS
Reckoning
CHAPTER ONE
Free Books!
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MYERS
7 YEARS AGO
HE SAT up and looked around, wondering if the machine that had force-fed him the first time was going to return.
How long has it been? He couldn’t remember.
Remembering.
Remembering was something that had always come easy to him. He remembered everything he’d ever read, in school or business. Having an almost-eidetic memory was like that. Helpful, for sure, but useless in arguments with his wife or parenting or social interactions.
But there was no image he could conjure up in his mind that would allow him to ‘see’ when he’d last eaten. It felt like a long time, but that was because he was locked in a dark cell with nothing but his own thoughts to keep him company.
For the first nine days, he’d tried as hard as possible to keep track of the passing time. There were no windows to clue him in on things like the time of day or night, but the room had built-in recessed lights in the ceiling that — he swore — were subtly changing in brightness throughout the day.
Hours would pass, and he stared at them, convinced they were gently and slowly shifting from fully on in the middle of the day to almost off — midnight. That’s why he wasn’t sure. The lights never went completely dark. He slept with a dim glow and awoke in the ‘morning’ to the same artificially-bright square-shaped walls, staring in at him.
He wondered if they were slowly closing in on him as well.
There was nothing he could use to track the passing of time. No writing utensils, no desk, no paper. Not even a terminal or station screen built into a wall.
Sheer white walls, reflecting the ever-present light back toward his eyes.
He’d heard a story once about a musician who had such perfect time he could tap out any BPM like a metronome. On a long road trip, his band mates asked him to time sixty beats per minute — a beat a second — while they played a tune around him. He fell asleep listening to it, and when he awoke hours later, he still had the timing in his head.
There was nothing like that here. No metronomes, no musicians with perfect time. He thought a clock would be a nice addition to the otherwise empty space, but then he thought it would only cause him to go crazy faster. A clock would be something he’d fixate on, no doubt. He’d stare at it, all day and night, staring, counting, waiting with it.
Waiting for nothing.
He pictured the clock there now, hanging above the ‘door’ that was really a flat wall with hardly an edge to depict the vertically-sliding door that was always shut. The clock would have been bright blue, in old-school LED style, large numbers that didn’t blink or move until they changed.
Counting up, forever, like him.
The door was a discovery he’d spent his second week searching for. He walked around and around the room’s forty-foot diameter, his right palm open and feeling for any discrepancy. He wasn’t sure how he’d initially realized it was there, but on day fourteen he found a crack.
The crack was, again, almost nonexistent. He went through the full range of emotions between ecstasy and denial and back again, but it was definitely there the next day. He’d jumped up and walked purposefully toward his new discovery, reaching out and making sure it was actually there and not just a dream.
Though a dream would have made all of this much better. So much better. A dream would allow him to fly through a world he’d left behind, had been taken from. A dream would be lucid enough to control, a word he’d never in a million years use to describe what he was experiencing here in his room.
So, with these thoughts and fears and unfortunately fleeting dreams floating around inside his head, he waited.
He was sure of it now. The machine would come. Of course it would. He often wondered when the machine had brought the food into the room, and how, since he’d never seen it with his own eyes. Most ‘mornings,’ or after a nap, he’d awake to find the grayish cube sitting on the floor of the room. The immaculately clean floor that was as white as the walls and ceiling and was never cleaned.
The cube would be there, just waiting. He wasn’t sure what to do with it first, but he grew so curious after three days that he stood up from the bed, cracking his back and neck, and approached the cube. He squatted in front of it, waiting. It didn’t move, and after ten minutes or so he declared it ‘not alive’ and therefore safe to touch.
He picked it up. It was cold, hard yet a bit rubbery, with a little give. It seemed solid, but upon closer inspection he realized it was semi-porous. The grayness of it was the thing that actually made it most difficult to place into his mouth.
But there was nothing else for him to do with it, and he was starving. He remembered using that word in the past, before all of this, and not meaning it. There were a lot of words he knew people used that they didn’t really mean. It was a combination of not knowing the meaning of them and simply not caring much to specify.
In this case, however, he knew the definition of the word, and he was certainly experiencing it. He was starving.
There had been nothing for three days, then a cube had appeared on the floor.
So he decided he would eat it.
There was no one to judge him, and no one to discuss it with anyway, so it wasn’t much of a decision. He did try acting out a scene in his mind where there was someone to discuss it with.
“You’re going to put that in your mouth?”
“Where would you put it?” he said.
“That’s not what I meant,” the person said. “You have no idea what that thing is, and you’re just going to… eat it?”
He shrugged.
Even his imagination was having a hard time coming up with imaginary scenes. He finished the shrug and stuck the tiny cube in his mouth, biting off a chunk of the rubbery material.
He was immediately glad he did.
There was nothing, nothing like it that he’d ever tasted. He ran that thought through the logical side of his brain to determine if he was just thinking it because until then he’d been starving, or if it was actually true.
He had to admit it seemed true.
The little food cube was an absolute explosion of flavor in his parched mouth, steak and potatoes and apple pie for dessert all in one bite.
He tried to chew the rest of the cube but the jail cell had left him no willpower to resist. He popped the cube into his mouth and swallowed it, cursing himself for eating it too quickly.
His anger was short-lived. The cube was like real food, expanding a bit as it mixed with the hydrochloric acid and water in his stomach and filling him. He was satisfied, as if he’d just eaten a full Thanksgiving dinner but gotten up and started watching football before things got out of hand.
It really did seem like the best meal he’d ever had, and three days later there was another cube waiting for him. This time it was spaghetti and meatballs, and it seemed like even the consistency was correct. As he took bites, his tastebuds and tongue knew which particular piece of the cube was noodles and which was meat and sauce.
It was amazing to only need to eat a cube of food one time every day, and he began keeping track of the timing of his stay based on the feeding cube schedule and the lights.
But after what he thought must be about four months’ time — just over 100 cubes later — he decided to stop eating. There were two cubes that he’d ignored, and one morning he woke up to discover that they were gone. He frowned, but didn’t think much of it. Whoever was watching him in here must have assumed he was making a statement.
Which he was.
He wasn’t interested in playing by their rules anymore. He wanted out, and he wanted out now. If he could self-induce starvation or even a serious injury, they might remove him from the cell, if only for a short time.
Instead, he discovered that there wasn’t a person in control of his survival but a machine, and that machine was not interested in playing mind games.
He woke up a couple days after the two cubes had been removed from the cell to find himself held down in his bed by long, spindly mechanical arms. The two arms had clasping round metal hands which wrapped around his upper arms, holding him stiffly in place. He wriggled around, but nothing he could do freed him from the machine’s grasp.
He screamed, but no one answered. Even the machine was ignorant to his outcries, so he continued screaming right up until a third retractable hand extended from the ceiling and smashed a cube down into his mouth. It held it there until he could do nothing except bite down and start chewing, and only after he’d swallowed the last bite of food cube did the mechanical arms retract back into a tiny square on the ceiling.
He had no idea how long it had been since he’d come here. Longer than a few months but shorter than a year. That was all he knew, and even then it was iffy. He wondered, then, the next ‘morning,’ if the machine would force-feed him a food cube and hold him down until he ate it. Still sitting in the ‘bed’ that was made of white metal he wondered if the machine was watching him.
It should, he thought. It wasn’t what he wanted to believe, but it was the truth. It should watch him, if only to make sure he was still alive. The machine, whatever it was, was able to force-feed its patients and control the entirety of its nutritional needs. That was powerful enough to…
He wasn’t sure what. But it was powerful.
He stood up and looked down at the floor. A food cube stared up at him, its glorious-tasting grayness beckoning him to chomp down on it and discover what the machine had cooked up for him today.
Before he could scoop up the life-giving cube of food and discover what secret taste profile it carried today, he saw a light flash above the door. It was green, not blue, but it was LED.
MYERS ASHER, #2584.
Simple, short, and not something to freak out about.
Myers Asher freaked out about it anyway. He’d been inside the white-walled room for God-knew-how-long, and yet here was another secret of the room he hadn’t seen. He’d run his open palm over the entire surface of the room, including the floor and what he could reach of the ceiling by standing on his bed-like protrusion, and he hadn’t discovered this little screen.
And the screen wasn’t finished with its message. After Myers Asher, #2584, he saw the ‘screen’ go blank and become a wall again, then another message flash.
SCRAPE PREPARATION.
RAND
PRESENT DAY
“WHAT DO YOU mean they’re coming? Who? Another Tracer?” Rand was practically yelling, trying to be heard over the increasing drone of their Tracer’s engine as it picked up speed and flew over the city gates.
People were streaming out into the desert now, screaming as explosions rocked the buildings and homes in Umutsuz. He’d never seen such chaos, and it only made him want to yell louder.
“No, not a Tracer at all,” Diane yelled back. She was standing next to him, crouching into the cockpit where their pilot was stationed, maneuvering the craft. He’d turned the display module normally meant for the copilot toward the doorway, allowing Diane to see it.
“What then? How are there Unders following us?”
“They’re not Unders, Rand,” Diane said. “They’re… I don’t know. Smaller. Faster, too. Look —“ Diane held up a finger and pointed at the screen.
It was a top-down display view from a dedicated regional satellite Diane had synced with their Tracer. It followed in immaculate detail their flightpath, depicting with almost instantaneous updates the extreme-definition surroundings outside of the Tracer. He watched the machine flying low over the endless expanse of sand and rocks, alone at the center of the screen.
“We weren’t sure what they were when they entered imaging space, but we placed a tracker on them. Seems like they’ve used that tracker to track us.”
The view shifted to a wider angle from farther above the ground, automatically clicking between the two zoom settings, and Rand saw what Diane was talking about. Their Tracer was about a kilometer away from the city, but coming in from the northern section of the screen were three smaller streaks. The little objects moved with a directness and speed that screamed ‘explosive projectiles,’ but Rand knew better than to assume things.
“How fast are they moving?” he asked. “And why haven’t we started evading or defense?”
She shook her head. “We’re not sure exactly, but they’re going fast enough that they’ll probably be on us in less than a minute. We can’t just start shooting at stuff out here, Rand. This is no-man’s land as far as we’re concerned, and even a simple flare drop can seem like ‘overt aggression.’”
“Any ideas?”
“As to what they are, or what we’re going to do about them?”
“Yeah.”
Diane shook her head again. “Lansing, can you take us closer to the ground?”
Rand saw the back of the pilot’s head nod once, then felt a slight tilt as the man drove them closer to the desert floor. “Locked on horizon positioning; ten meters.”
“Good,” Diane said. Keep getting it lower until we’re at five, in intervals of thirty seconds.”
“Ma’am.”
Diane turned to look at Rand. “Jon, we’ve got other problems.” She handed him a small headset that he placed over his right ear. Apparently she wants me to hear this.
Rand swallowed. “Yeah, I…”
“Keep an eye on the screen for me, and let me know when they get close enough to be able to fire on us, assuming that’s what they’re trying to do.”
He stared ahead at the screen, focusing his hearing on the conversation that was about to take place behind him in the belly of the Tracer.
He heard Diane’s voice coming through the headset, small and tinny. “Myers. Hey, how are you?”
He couldn’t hear the response.
“Yes, there’s a lot to talk about, and we’re — yes, I assure you you’re going to be brought up to speed, but these wounds, your sunburn.”
A pause as she waited for a response.
“Yes, I will explain that, too. I — I’m sorry, Myers.”
Rand thought he heard the woman’s voice shake. Damn, h
e thought. Damn you, Myers.
“No, I swear to God, no. Listen, we don’t have time for this right now. I need to know what you remember. Can you talk to me about it? About the last three days?”
Rand saw the little objects reach their own machine’s air wake, and each of the three smaller lines turned slightly and fell in behind one another. Now it was a line of three small objects following the Tracer. He frowned.
They’re too small to have anyone inside them, he thought. But clearly they’re not going to fire on us with a formation like that.
He was wrong.
The first little object, viewed from directly above, seemed to explode and disappear in midair. A second later a smaller line appeared where the object had been, and Rand watched as the thin white line advanced and reached the Tracer. The second of the three objects sped up just a little and took the spot where the first had previously been.
Weird.
There was no impact, no sudden jolt or physical change in their flightpath. Rand looked away from the display screen to the pilot. The man was obviously struggling with something.
“Control, I’m zero systems up, repeat, zero systems up.”
Rand turned to see if Diane had heard the distress call. She was already behind him, standing next to him and pointing back at the screen.
The second of the objects exploded, another white line advancing on their position. Diane was yelling at the pilot. “It’s a tandem charge! Mechanical first, comm second, and —“
“Control, I’m zero comm, do you read me?”
“Lansing!” she shouted. The pilot turned around. “Comms are down, Lansing. They’re targeting us in stages so there’s no defense for the attack.”
He nodded, then yelled back. “Unders?” Lansing adjusted the baseball cap that was permanently affixed to the top of his head. Rand wasn’t sure how the man could see with the thing pulled so far down over his tiny head, but he managed just fine.
“No, not this time,” Diane said. “This is still supposed to be prototype tech. There’s no way it would be in Under camps for another year, minimum.”
“Well, whatever it is, they’ve taken us completely offline. I can’t steer, accelerate or decelerate, nothing. We’re locked onto this vector.”