CHAPTER 15
“So you’ve never been abused yourself?”
As they were not currently plotting anything, concealment seemed moot, which is why they sat next to, and facing, each other on the beige couch. Sabrina’s skull was still protected, yet Uriah could see her melancholy face as she explained what she’d said. It was midnight.
“Right. I don’t even know any abuse victims personally, but that doesn’t mean I can’t sympathize with them, of course.” She took a deep breath. “This happened before I went to Luna. I must’ve been eight or so. One night, I saw this … alien.”
He looked down and to the side, nonplussed.
“Relax, I’m not gonna get my foil hat and analyze crop circles. I know it was a hallucination, probably from sleep paralysis, temporal lobe stimulation, or a combination of the two. But at the time I was terrified.”
“Understandably so,” he said with less skepticism.
“It was a grotesque thing, and it did some, er, things to my body.” She kept her eyes away from him. “So I imagined, anyway. I also felt like I was floating a few feet above my bed, and I believed this was some sort of telekinesis. I screamed out so loud I thought I’d make myself go deaf.”
“Sounds like an abduction story, all right.”
“That’s not what the psychiatrists thought three years later. Guess what it reminded them of.”
Uriah winced. “Oh.”
“Yeah, ‘oh.’ The scary thing was, I believed them. I still don’t get how I could betray Dad like that.”
She didn’t weep. All the tears she had had been squeezed out in the closet so as not to shame herself in front of Uriah, but he knew. “I’d rather I had just come across as a loony abductee. Sure, it might’ve killed my chances of going to the moon, but this hurt me, my therapist, and most of all my father. And it made a mockery of people like your girlfriend, who went through real pain.” She caught herself. “Sorry.”
“It’s all right. She would appreciate it, if anything. Is there anything else you’d like to tell me?”
“Besides that I hate that we’re back to square one here? Not a thing.”
Back to the “secret meeting tent,” as they came to dub it, they went. “Okay, we can all but rule out Zolnerowich,” said Uriah. “If he isn’t sparing us for repopulation, what could his motive be? I mean, if we go with your ‘power trip’ theory, is there any way we can make this guy believe he still has power even as he lets us out?”
“We could just sneak a secret weapon out as we surrender out loud – nah, forget that, he’s probably been monitoring every object here to make sure that doesn’t happen.” She groaned.
“Not like we have anything that could stand up to all those bots, big and small. Face it, the only strategy we have is to earn his trust, and even with that there’s the problem of whatever he used to get me drunk.” He paused, then punched the floor. “There’s gotta be a way out, somehow!”
“Let’s not reject ideas before we test them. Check your pockets.” He only just realized the implications of his wearing the clothes he’d worn as an Organic, but he decided not to mention it. “Is there anything that could help us and that he wouldn’t know about?”
Turning to one’s pockets was the last resort of a very desperate soul, but the search did yield a crumpled sheet of paper, the fruit of his snooping through the nether regions of the Bio-Bazaar. Spread out on the floor, it depicted the intricate mechanical anatomy of a spider-like robot.
“Where’d you get that?” Sabrina said as if she’d take even a wad of lint seriously.
“At that store that ended up breaking my leg.” He described what he’d found down there. “I took it because I knew from the scale that it was for a nano. Could’ve helped with Project Immortality, like that’s gonna happen now.”
“Dennis, do you remember any names you saw in that basement?”
He looked at her with significantly less enthusiasm than she was showing. “What, don’t tell me you think the crackpot who had an insecure bomb shelter integrated in his store is our perp?”
She ignored his tone. “So it’s a ‘he’?”
“Yeah. I remember yoinking the card key from him, but I couldn’t tell ya a name. I really doubt he’s our guy, though.”
“Why not?”
“Uh, he’s dead?”
“Sure, but it takes more than one human to run a store, even these days. Think about it. Isn’t it possible that he wasn’t really crazy after all, that he made that shelter to protect himself from some, I dunno, radiation that caused the Dethroning?” He supposed that was her word for recent tragedies. Sabrina’s eyes brightened. “Wait – no! It’s not radiation, it’s nanos, like you said before! Maybe a human could hack the security and get inside the shelter, but could nanobots?”
“Sounds brilliantly convenient, which is exactly why it isn’t likely. Possibility isn’t probability, and even granting you’re right, why would he mess around with us? Someone who runs a market ain’t a disgruntled potential power addict.”
“Well, didn’t you say yourself that Transhumans tend to commit hate crimes against Organics? And if that’s the case, he could be willing to let you go now.”
“Shh.” He thought about it, a little disturbed by the zeal with which Sabrina had presented her hypothesis, but he gave in. “Okay, I’ll humor you. I’ll go to the stairs and see if he’ll let me out. But I’ll need a wedge in case this works, for your sake. It has to be discreet.”
“Not necessary. You’re a Transhuman, remember? You could out-box almost any Organic in the pro leagues.”
Somehow that perk had never before occurred to him. “All right. Wish me luck.”
Uriah stood up into the exposed basement. Strangely, it had become a quaint home away from no home to him. His eyes scanned the surroundings before he headed for the door.
Unnatural Page 41