Everything’s fine here.
“Operator Vectorovich, can you hear me?”
By the time Ravi finished speaking, she should have been yanked back to her own body.
“Keller wants you to stay entangled for ongoing feedback. You are being transferred to the buffer.”
“Feedback, what the . . . ?”
“Helen, are you there?” Keller’s voice came in abruptly. The readouts, the ones she could still read, showed Keller had taken over on the emergency channel. That got the panic going. If the strange eenies really were here, then there was a chance whatever had killed Ted was here too. That meant Keller was in danger.
“Keller, get the fuck off the line.”
“Not a chance. Worst-case scenario, we have five minutes to get you sorted.”
“Am I being handled?”
“Yep.” Keller didn’t screw around, she’d give him that.
“Okay, tell me what . . .” A sense of bliss flowed through her, the unassailable feeling that everything would be just fine if she stopped worrying quite so much.
“Helen, Doc just hit you with a big dose of ketamine, did you feel that?”
“Woo-hooo. I can ride this robot for days, man, dig every goddamn secret out of this space-rock.” Helen started to bring the mole up out of parked mode, but the controls remained silent, unresponsive.
“Right. Now, something is going wrong in your coffin. Doc’s working on getting you stabilized and out of there, but she needs you to keep talking to me while we do that.”
“Goddammit, Keller, this was my last mission. I’m so fucking close to getting back out there and now THIS!” Helen kept poking at the waldo’s controls, vexed at their lack of response. There was a feeling there, underlying the dreamy comfort. The need to get up, get out, and move was strong, but not as strong as whatever Doc had hit her with.
“Don’t know, don’t care, the techs will sort all that out later. Helen, I need you to do something for me—well, several somethings. All in order. Tell me each time you’ve completed one step.”
A list popped up in front of her eyes. More tests, more shit to do in just the right order. Her entire life was governed by a long series of to-do lists. “I am the absolute QUEEN of protocol, Keller. I can check off your little boxes all goddamn day long.” Helen giggled for no good reason. Then she giggled again because she really needed to be doing something to fix this and she just couldn’t bring herself to care.
“Oh yeah?” Keller replied. “Prove it.”
Helen tried to refocus, but it was getting harder and harder to think past the ever-present potential for giggles.
“Oh, and we shut off your control to the waldo, so don’t worry about that. Thanks for parking, though.”
“Noooooooo,” Helen complained weakly. “Not my mooooole! It’s a nice mole. We should totally make more moles like this one.”
“Wise words. Okay, give me number one on that list.”
“Okay, fiiiiiiine.” Helen stared for a long minute at the picture that had popped up.
“What do you see, Helen?”
She opened her mouth to speak, closed again. She recognized the image, knew what it was in form and shape and texture. She just couldn’t find the word, any word.
This is a test, she reminded herself. You have to get this right. Put a little work in.
“Helen?”
Something changed. She didn’t know what, maybe the doc had hit her with something else or whatever had crossed the wires in her head suddenly came uncrossed.
“Cat.” She had the word now. “That’s a cat. I fucking hate cats, Keller, you know this.” With that, she found clarity; thoughts and concepts came back. Not that they had gone anywhere. It was more like someone had simply turned the lights back on. They were screwing with the wires in her head, and whatever they were doing with the coffin was affecting the connections that allowed her to entangle with a waldo. If those got messed up, she was done.
“Perfect. Next one?”
“It’s a house. Hey, are you going to do the ink blot ones too? Those are lots more fun.”
“Nobody does those anymore. Let’s finish list item one, okay?”
Now that she had her right mind back, she had a better handle on the situation. Oh, there it is. The creeping sense of panic.
“Keller, why are they keeping me out here?”
“You’re not out there any longer, Helen. You’re back at Far Reaches. We’ve got you held in the buffer while we get the coffin sorted out. Doc wants us to move to list item two.”
“So you’re not NAV?”
“Glad to see you’re feeling more like yourself. No, we shifted you into the buffer and James patched me into the simulation.”
“I missed the transition. That can’t be good. I should have been able to tell the difference.”
“We can sort that out later. Doc didn’t want you to panic.”
“A little panic is good for the soul, Keller.” Helen opened her Insight and dropped into the programming interface.
“So can we move on to number two?”
“Sure thing, bring it on.” They had switched her Entanglement into one of James’s simulations, disengaging her from the waldo. The space was normally used as a buffer for when an OP had to drop out of entanglement too quickly for the brain to compensate. It meant Keller was safe. The killer sound couldn’t reach anyone in a simulation.
“Helen, get out of the programming interface and pay attention.”
“Yep, hang on.” There, she had it. Access to the security cameras in the Mortuary.
Oh fuck, that’s me.
A coffin was being run out into the hallway by a pair of orderlies, Doc sitting astraddle. The lid had been popped and Doc was hooking an IV into the support system. Helen tried to get a closer look, but they’d moved out of camera range and she had to pull back to find another.
Her focus stuttered.
“Helen?”
Panic again: she could feel her heart pounding in her chest. It could be her own mind trying to give her feedback in the absence of any body, even a waldo’s body. She felt, very acutely, that she been suspended somewhere in space. Someplace between the simulation and the waldo.
“Heeeeey, Keller.” Words came together very slowly again . . . concepts out of reach.
“Hang on, Helen. Doc’s moving you to the medbay.”
“I can see that. I don’t like the medbay. Can we go to the beach instead?”
“Nobody likes the medbay except Doc. And how are you seeing this? Stop hacking things.”
“The doc . . .” Thought stuttered and matched the static that filled her vision.
“Helen?”
Helen was aware, she could hear Keller, but she couldn’t respond. Her tongue was paralyzed. She couldn’t see or move. Not even the Insight lines and windows survived the blanket of static that swept up to envelop her.
“Hey! Operator Vectorovich. Protocols. Get on them, now,” Keller barked.
Helen tried to let the fear rise, to let the panic reach out to break her free, but it was like wrestling with a wet sleeping bag. She couldn’t get a purchase on it, couldn’t get a grip to tear or break through.
“Helen. Helen? You’re online, I can see you in there. Knock off whatever the hell you’re doing and get back on task.”
Abruptly Helen had access to the security cameras again. Whatever had been in Doc’s IV must have worked its magic. The coffin had been disassembled, sides pulled away, leaving her supersuit’s umbilicals still connected to the main board. Pinned like a beetle.
Doc was moving quickly, single-mindedly. One of the techs was plugging wires directly in from the coffin’s backboard to the bank of machines on the far wall, another rifling through the cabinets for something. Her vitals came up, displayed now on the far wall, but she di
dn’t understand what any of it meant. Helen knew it was for the benefit of the cameras, just another blip in the never-ending layer of cover your ass.
A counter had been instantiated in her line-of-sight, seconds ticking past with regularity. One by one, the readouts were dropping into the red. The static in her mind chattered, shifting like densely packed like sand at the beach.
Ha ha, the beach again, wonder where that’s coming from.
“Operator Vectorovich. Respond, please. Helen, respond.” She could have sworn that was Ted’s voice, but that was ridiculous, Ted was already dead. She missed his voice on the other end of the line, missed being able to trust her NAV.
Helen lost the camera, found the image in her mind’s eye replaced by a series of still images. Beach. Sand. Where are those coming from? She hadn’t been to the beach for nearly a decade.
Helen selected one of the images, one of the recent ones. Maybe her addled brain was pulling metaphors out of her personal log file. The stills she’d snapped on her Golfball run came spilling out, like grains of dust. Oh, it’s dust, not sand. The pictures multiplied and filled the space in her head, her vision, her ears. Keller’s voice, the Insight interface, everything vanished under an onslaught of static-colored dust that turned into billions of tiny waldos seeking something she did not have.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The inside of Far Reaches medical floor was becoming far more familiar than Helen was comfortable with. After two days, she woke up in a brightly colored treatment room, still encased in her supersuit, strapped to the coffin’s backboard. Doc had conscripted the coffin’s drug delivery system rather than trying to hook her up to a more traditional medical apparatus.
Helen remembered at some point Hofstaeder storming on about heavy metal poisoning being obsolete and just who the hell would bring such a low-tech trick into her goddamn wheelhouse. The entire incident left Helen with an unshakeable feeling of exhaustion underpinned with an all-body ache that reached down to her bones. She was trapped in a ten-by-ten room painted dog-dick pink, tiredly regarding the lost pillow on the floor. She was trying to decide if it was worth alerting the nurse to get it back when Ivester came in the door.
Well, he looks about how I feel. He was pale on the best of days, but now dark circles and red rims around the eyes suggested a chemical-driven lack of sleep. He stepped in, not quite furtively, but with the air of someone out of place. His usual entourage was notably absent. Even in her diminished state, Helen caught the glimmer in his glasses as his Insight spoke to the cameras in the room and they powered off.
“What’s up with the cameras?” Helen chuckled around the tightness in her lungs. It was funny to think about a project lead being constrained, just like everybody else. Whatever he had come here to say, he didn’t want it on the record.
“You caught that?”
“Of course I did. Your gear,” Helen tapped at a set of imaginary glasses, “isn’t really subtle.”
“I haven’t heard that one before.” He dropped into the chair closest to the door.
Helen stared him quizzically. She expected something from management, an apology, a statement of some sort. Not a personal visit, and certainly not a secret personal visit from Ivester at any rate.
“Why, exactly, are you here, Dr. Ivester?” Doc had been keeping her pumped with enough chemicals to keep her in the bed, and presumably, out of trouble. It was making Helen a little less careful of her tongue than she would otherwise be. Clearly trouble has other things in mind.
Ivester adjusted his glasses self-consciously. The movement pushed the nose piece a little higher, a little closer to his tired grey eyes. “Well, for one, I wanted to see for myself how you were doing. My team was getting reports, of course, but it’s not quite the same thing.”
“And for two?”
“Line Drive operations have been completely suspended.”
Helen just stared at him. Suspended? That was . . . She searched for a word in between stunning and depressing, coming up empty. She felt momentarily sick, almost like she’d been punched in the gut.
“The eenies are on autopilot,” she managed to say. Then her brain started working again, latching on to the train of thought as if it led to a way out. “If everything’s on schedule, our payload just made it into orbit and the jumpgate is getting built whether or not we shut down Line Drive on this end.”
“Well, yes.” Ivester leaned back, a frown sketched across his features. Helen waited for some elaboration from him, but it became clear that this was going to be one of those conversations where she had to ask the questions. Keller did the same damn thing.
“Until the communications array comes back online with Phase II, we can’t even talk to the payload to stop the jumpgate being built,” she continued, stubbornly forging ahead.
“Also, yes.”
“That’s a big project. We need those resources. Why are we stopping?”
“That’s not the right question.”
Helen stared him down. Ivester opened his mouth as if to speak, closed it again, brow furrowed.
“Why do I get the feeling you’re going to say something I’d better consider when thoroughly sober?” Helen groused.
Ivester’s snort turned into a laugh—not his “on camera” laugh, something far less well-trained and nervous. “That’s exactly what I’d advise you to do, if you get time.”
“Time?”
He sighed, took his glasses off and fiddled with them nervously. “They’re shutting down the first stage of the Line Drive program completely. The Golfball’s become a liability the board doesn’t want to deal with.”
Helen’s sick feeling coalesced into anger. Scrapping the program meant Ted’s death, the pain and suffering of the other NAVs, that was all just going to get swept under the rug. All those months of work rendered null and void. They’ve closed the goddamn door. There’s no way to get back out there, she thought bitterly.
Ivester seemed to sense the shift in her mood, held up a hand to forestall her next words. “I’m serious when I say scrubbing. They’re going to terminate as many people involved with the Golfball portion of Line Drive as possible. The board wants to sell the whole thing off, but I think I can keep them off that idea for the moment.”
“Sell everything off? Ivester, we might have discovered an entirely new life form and they want to chicken out?” Helen clipped her words to keep the anger under wraps.
“They can’t terminate your contract, legally, as long as Doc has you under her care. It’s policy.” Ivester got to his feet and started pacing. It was clear his mind wasn’t on the loss of the Golfball, not the way hers was. He’s saying something else.
Helen shifted gears. “Wait. What?”
“The Golfball is officially being scrubbed, but arranging a sale will take time. The Board knows full well that if our partners at XERMo learn that we are looking at a new, possibly grumpy, life form, the government will simply seize everything and they will have to eat the loss as well as the responsibility. They don’t want to take that risk. I’m personally taking project lead on all the assets until a sale is arranged. IF a sale gets arranged. I need you here, at Far Reaches, for the next steps we take.” His eyebrows were down into a thin line. “I’m asking you to make sure Doc doesn’t discharge you just yet.”
In the unforgiving light of the LEDs, Ivester looked like a man who’d had his worst week ever. Not defeated, just wrung out, like he’d lost track of one too many moving parts and had suffered a complete train wreck.
Which is probably a fair assessment.
“You’re taking the Golfball underground?” Helen caught up.
“Let’s just say, I need you, and you specifically, on a special project.”
Helen eyeballed him critically. “I don’t even know if that’s possible.”
“It can be handled as long as you’re still working here. Lo
ok, we put our foot in something out there. You know it, I know it. You’ve encountered these things twice now, twice. They didn’t come from here. They cost you your NAV and now very nearly your life. Don’t you want to find out just what the hell is going on out there?”
Helen recognized that look, that evangelist’s stare. Ivester thought he had put two and two together and discovered a secret everyone else had missed. It was the kind of mindset that would push limits, break rules . . . end lives.
“Ivester,” Helen said slowly, “someone just tried to kill me over this. As much as I need to get back out there, I’m not sure I want to risk my life on it.” It was a sobering thought—another one best considered well after she was off whatever Hofstaeder was pumping her full of.
“I know, I know. Just think about it. I promise I will do everything I can to keep you safe.”
Helen sighed. “Is Keller in?”
“Is that a yes?”
Helen held up an arm, the tips of her fingers still a bluish tint as the machines continued to scrub the selenium out of her system. “I reserve the right to come to my senses after Doc is done with me.”
“Fair enough.” He got to his feet. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I think security is going to come chase me out of here.”
“Good luck.”
“I make my own luck, Ms. Vectorovich.” Ivester left as quietly as he’d come in.
“Make enough for the whole team this time!” Helen called after him.
Helen tried for another deep breath and came up short. She didn’t know what happened if you actually died while operating a waldo. Some operators said it was possible for your mind to get stuck in a waldo’s computer permanently. Judging by the experience she’d just had, that was a fairy tale, something to deflect from the creepy horror of knowing your body could die and you would be helpless to take any action.
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