Devastation Class

by Glen Zipper

  Gazing into his eyes, I found myself searching. As if my gut was trying to find something I didn’t know I was looking for.

  Anatoly and Bix interrupted before I could make any sense of it.

  “Do you know where JD is?” Anatoly asked.

  “I don’t,” I responded as I stood and wiped the sweat from my forehead.

  “Weird,” Bix said. “PE is the one block he hasn’t been cutting.”

  “Maybe he’s not feeling well,” I replied.

  “He seemed fine when he left the mess,” answered Anatoly.

  It was no surprise to me that JD was suddenly MIA. Disappearing acts were increasingly becoming part of his repertoire.

  “I’m going to get dressed, then I’ll track him down.”

  Bix gently touched my shoulder as I turned to leave.

  “I was waiting for JD to tell you, but since we can’t find him . . . Your . . . thing . . . is ready,” he said, unable to suppress a mischievous smile.

  “Oh, is it?”

  “Twenty-three hundred. Iso-Rec.”

  “After curfew?”

  “Live a little,” Anatoly playfully chided me. “It will be fine.”

  He was probably right. If there was ever a night to break curfew, this was it. The command staff and most of the crew were still on Gallipoli, and the few NCOs who remained aboard were all housed on Gamma Deck, an entire deck below Iso-Rec. The only real wild cards were Gentry and Lewis.

  “Gentry and Lewis will be working graveyard tonight, prepping the ship for departure. What if they check our biosigs from the bridge?”

  Bix disappointedly shook his head at me. “Who do you think you’re talking to here?”

  “So it would be safe for me to presume . . .”

  “Yes. If they check our biosigs, we’ll all be safely tucked into bed.”

  “This one thinks of everything,” Anatoly chuckled.

  “So see you then?” Bix asked.

  “See you then.”

  “Perfect! You think you might convince Safi . . .”

  “I’ll try. But you know her.”

  “She doesn’t know what she’ll be missing,” Bix said as he turned to leave with Anatoly.

  Despite everything weighing on my mind, I was excited to see what they had in store for me. For all their efforts to keep it a surprise, JD and Bix hadn’t done a very good job of hiding their enthusiasm. Which made it a pretty safe bet it was going to be special. I just needed to get something out of my system first to enjoy it.

  CHAPTER 9

  JD

  I COULD FEEL HIM WATCHING ME. IT wasn’t ESP or anything. I could literally feel his electromagnetic pulse. Yet another “gift” I woke up with after the attack. Except this one I didn’t tell anybody about.

  “Are you hungry, John? Shall I begin to prepare your dinner?” asked Charlie while affectionately tousling my hair.

  “Sure. Thanks,” I replied, my eyes never losing focus on the holoscreen in front of me. I was finally going to solve Level 173 of Gyrosphere. The game console’s interface tracked the movement of my pupils as I guided a sphere through an increasingly complex maze.

  The further I got, the faster the game became, and so far I had been able to avoid crashing into the obstacles materializing and transmuting in my path. Level 174 was in my grasp. Before I got hurt, I couldn’t even get past Level 120. The doctors said my hand-eye coordination got better because of the way they had regenerated the damaged parts of my brain. There were other things too. I seemed to learn things faster. I could remember things easier. I even started to use bigger words than other kids my age. They said it would all fade with time, and eventually I’d be back to normal again. I wasn’t sure I wanted to be.

  “John!” my mom shouted from her bedroom, breaking my concentration. “I told you to shut that off and get started on your assignments!”

  My eyes slipped downward for a fraction of a second. That’s all it took to send my sphere hurtling out of bounds. Game over.

  Frustrated, I glanced over at Charlie. He offered me a funny smirk as he pulled ingredients for my dinner from the pantry. My partner in crime. Charlie didn’t care if I did my assignments.

  From the moment I opened my eyes in the hospital, I felt more connected to him than I did to anyone else. It wasn’t the fact that he wasn’t family that made our connection so unusual. It was the fact he wasn’t human.

  Hybrids like Charlie were a creation of Dr. Samuel Fuller. Powered by Fuller’s Generation One CPU, they were engineered to be soldiers for the Alliance war effort. Artificial, powerful killing machines, they were supposed to fight the Kastazi alongside us. Before long they were fighting the Kastazi instead of us. That’s why we were finally winning the war. In a single battle, thousands of them could be lost, but we’d just build ourselves a thousand more.

  Charlie had been assigned to protect Mom, Viv, and me because we were what they called “high-value targets.” I hadn’t understood what that meant until the day the Kastazi came for us. All I could remember were the air-raid sirens, and then waking up in a hospital bed. Everyone said I would have died if Charlie hadn’t pulled me from the flames as quickly as he did.

  The attack left me with ugly, painful burns all along my stomach and chest. For a while it was excruciating just to breathe. I probably would’ve given up if Charlie hadn’t been there for me. It took me four months to get out of bed, and he never left my side. He’d even hold my hand while the nurses peeled the soiled re-gen packs from my sticky wounds three times a day.

  My mom, on the other hand, hardly visited. When she did, it made me feel worse. Every time she looked at me, it was like I was reminding her of something she didn’t want to remember. I told Charlie how sad it made me feel, and he tried his best to cheer me up. “When you almost lose someone you love very much, maybe for a while it’s hard to let yourself love them that much again,” he told me. He may not have been alive, but when he said stuff like that, it was hard for me to believe he was just a mishmash of artificially intelligent circuitry and biomass. That’s why I gave him a name.

  Hybrids weren’t supposed to have names, but Charlie deserved one. So I named him after the family dog we had before the war. It seemed fitting enough. He was loyal, compassionate, and nonjudgmental, just like Charlie the dog. At first Mom would cringe every time I called him that, but eventually she accepted it. Or maybe she just stopped caring.

  I wanted to go be with Viv at Farragut when I finally left the hospital, but Dad wouldn’t let me. Instead he insisted that Mom and I stay in an underground Alliance facility deep beneath New Oklahoma City. The domestic suites we lived in were supposed to be just like the aboveground homes we’d lived in before the war. They had comfortable bedrooms, living rooms, bathrooms, and kitchens, and we put art, photos, and other knickknacks on the walls to remind us of home. But no matter how we dressed them up, the suites’ gray concrete floors and bright overhead lights made them feel exactly like what they were meant to be: bunkers.

  I wasn’t surprised when Mom got even more depressed living under three miles of rock and dirt. Pretty soon she was spending nearly all of her days in bed and mostly only came out to eat. That’s when Charlie took on a lot more than a name. He became our caretaker. That meant doing a lot of things a Hybrid was never meant to do. He even cooked for us. It made me laugh to see Charlie wearing an apron, but he knew his way around the kitchen. Reconstituted protein fajitas were his specialty. He could almost make them taste like chicken. Almost.

  Mom slowly shuffled into the living room and sat on the couch beside me. No doubt it was the delicious aroma of Charlie’s fajitas that had coaxed her out of her bedroom.

  I quickly flipped open my geometry book. “I did most of my assignment this morning,” I said.

  “Uh-huh,” Mom replied, her eyes fixed on the holoscreen. It was frozen where my last game had ended. “Almost to Level 174.”

  There was familiar sadness in her voice.

  I shifted uncomfortably.
The tight scar tissue from my burns still hurt every time I moved. “Yeah, almost. Maybe tomorrow.”

  “How about tomorrow you go to the rec room and play with some of the other children? A normal nine-year-old boy shouldn’t be spending every day glued to a holoscreen, playing Gyrosphere.”

  It was maybe the eight thousandth time I’d gotten the same speech. I used to get upset and fight with her about it, but eventually I realized there was no need. In two hours she’d be asleep, and the next day would be half-over before she’d show her face again. “Sure, Mom,” I replied. “I’ll think about it.”

  She sat there quiet as the noise of Charlie clanging pots and pans echoed in the background. “Your father sent a message last night. Said he might be able to visit us sometime next week.”

  The ruckus of pots and pans gave way to the sound of Charlie chopping onions faster than any human ever could have.

  Chop-chop-chop-chop!

  Chop-chop-chop-chop!

  “That would be nice,” I answered, knowing better than to get my hopes up. It was stupid for us to expect to be a family in the middle of a war. Dad was, after all, captain of the UAS California. His responsibility to the Alliance was not something we could ever compete with.

  Chop-chop-chop-chop!

  Chop-chop-chop-chop!

  The sound of Charlie’s knifework added a soothing rhythm to the awkward silence between us. I listened as he worked his blade against the cutting board in perfect intervals, the pattern of his chopping so precise it was almost musical. And then with one loud, final chop, he abruptly stopped as if in the middle of a note.

  Chop!

  It sounded . . . wrong.

  I turned around to see what was happening. Charlie had his back to us and stood frozen in place.

  “Charlie?” I called out.

  He didn’t respond.

  “Charlie?” I repeated, a feeling of queasiness quickly rising up inside me.

  He remained silent, but his head began to twitch ever so slightly to the right.

  I got up to go to him, but my mom grabbed me by the wrist.

  “Don’t,” she said, pulling me back toward her.

  “But something’s wrong with him, Mom. He’s . . . malfunctioning.”

  “Hybrids don’t malfunction, John.”

  Charlie suddenly spun to face us. The look in his eyes terrified me. What I felt terrified me even more. The pattern of his electromagnetic pulse . . . the one I could feel ever since I got hurt . . . it was different somehow.

  “Charlie, what’s wrong?” I asked, my body quaking.

  He ignored me and moved to the suite’s exit. Before I could say anything else, he punched a code into its keypad. The dozen massive bolts in the security door slammed into place. We were locked in. Charlie still had a knife in his hand. Its blade gleamed brightly in the artificial overhead light.

  My mom ran to the fire alarm on the living room wall and pulled down its lever without ever taking her eyes off Charlie. A blaring siren sounded, and water began to gush from the ceiling like a torrential rain.

  Charlie didn’t flinch. He raised his knife in the air and marched right at me. Mom jumped between us, blocking his path.

  “Run to your room and lock the door!” she shouted.

  I was completely paralyzed.

  “Run!” she shouted again.

  I couldn’t move. I was too scared. Charlie charged at Mom and an instant later she buckled. It happened so fast, at first I didn’t understand what I was seeing. Then I saw the blood. So much blood. It splashed to the floor as if spilled from an overturned bucket and flowed away with the flooding water’s current.

  Mom fell to one knee, and Charlie tried to push past her. She grabbed him by the leg, slowing him down. He swung his knife backward, cutting her throat without ever looking back. Still she held on, buying me a few more seconds. Her mouth opened and closed, but no words came out.

  It was the most terrible thing I’d ever seen.

  Slipping with almost every step, I ran to my room and locked the door behind me. Before I could even catch my breath, Charlie was pounding against its heavy titanium alloy. It was like watching a cartoon as each of his blows left an inward bubbling dent in the shape of his fist. A few seconds later, the door completely gave way.

  I stared at the ground and cried. I couldn’t look at Charlie. With each step he took, I could hear the splashing water moving closer in my direction. His feet came to rest right in front of me, my mother’s blood slowly dripping from the edge of his knife. I waited for his attack, but it didn’t come. I looked up and saw his arm quivering. He was fighting against whatever had taken control of him.

  All of a sudden his arm fell limply by his side. He looked at me with wide, sad eyes, the water streaming down his face like tears. He was Charlie again. But only for a moment. In the blink of an eye, he stiffened and swung the knife back over his head.

  Just then, the room filled with the shrieking sound of pulse fire. Charlie fell to his knees, and his body writhed with each shot fired into his back by the Alliance soldiers charging into the suite behind him. It took at least fifteen hits for them to bring him down.

  The soldiers scattered in every direction as Charlie lay motionless. I could hear explosions and shouting in the hallways outside the suite. Something was happening. Something big. Something awful.

  I reached down to touch Charlie’s face. For the first time since I woke up from the attack, I couldn’t feel a thing. No energy of any kind.

  That’s why I had no warning he was still alive.

  He plunged his knife into my stomach so fast I never saw it coming.

  I only felt the pain.

  I snapped up in my rack, drenched in a cold sweat.

  These nightmares were all too familiar. I used to wish they’d stop coming but had long since given up any hope of that. Eventually I had learned to accept them as part of my life. My new normal.

  A brief moment of disorientation passed, and the room around me came into focus. My bed beneath me. My unlaced boots on the floor. A photo of my mother staring back at me from the shelf above my desk. Bix’s perfectly made rack directly across from mine.

  I stood up to shake the sleep from my head and walked to the full-length mirror in the corner of my quarters. Lifting my shirt, I inspected the long scar running down the entire right side of my torso. The melted skin was still uneven. Beside it, in the middle of my belly, was the jagged stab wound from Charlie’s blade. That scar would’ve been easy to fix with dermal regeneration, but I told the doctors not to touch it. It was one more thing that could help me remember.

  A call chime rang out, startling me. I assumed it was Bix. Anytime I ditched, he was usually the first one to come find me. He knew how to tap into the ship’s biosig tracker—it was impossible to hide from him.

  “All clear, Bix!”

  The chime rang again.

  “Enter!”

  Another ring.

  “Seriously, Bix!”

  I shuffled to the door and opened it. To my surprise, it was Viv. “You missed PE,” she said before getting a good look at me. “Wait—were you sleeping?”

  “I wasn’t sleeping. I was napping. There’s a difference.”

  “During fourth block . . . you just decided to take a nap.”

  “Fourth block’s optional,” I answered, rubbing my eyes.

  “Optional? Since when?”

  “C’mon. No one’s logging attendance in PE while we’re hitched to Gallipoli.”

  “The Synths are.”

  “Bix can take care of that for me later,” I said, fighting my way through a yawn.

  Viv frowned at me. “Well, you look terrible.”

  “Thank you. I feel terrible. What time is it?”

  “Thirteen forty. We’ve got twenty minutes to get to fifth.”

  “It’s still fourth block? You cut out early yourself? The Synths are gonna log that, you know,” I said.

  “Bix can take care of that for me la
ter,” Viv said without missing a beat.

  “Hilarious.”

  “I learned from the best.”

  Still tired, I plopped back down on my bed. “So you got worried and came looking for me? Don’t worry. I’m fine.”

  “After this morning’s performance on the bridge, you bet I’m worried about you. And you better prepare yourself, ’cause you and I are gonna have it out once and for all.”

  “Are we really doing this again?”

  “Yes, we are, just not right now. Right now I need to borrow you for a few minutes.”

  “For what? Does it involve any kind of manual labor? Because if it does—”

  “The Interceptor. It’s been loaded into the hangar. I’m going to check it out, and I want you to come with me.”

  “That’ll actually involve a significant amount of walking, so technically . . .”

  Viv put her hands on her hips and shot me a formidable death stare. I was pretty sure I was the only one who could inspire her face to contort into such an unpleasant configuration. Anytime she went full death stare on me, I knew there was only one option left.

  “Let me get my boots.”

  Three NCOs were milling about when we arrived, still attending to the various power utility modifications necessitated by the Interceptor’s arrival in the hangar. The space was cavernous, stretching 220 meters long and 150 meters wide. Twenty-five bays lined the port side toward the stern—though only four of them contained Alliance shuttles, as the California had little need for a full squadron of auxiliary crafts on an Explorers mission. The tip of the Interceptor’s nose peeked out from a bay near the stern. One of the NCOs, Rania Saad, cut us off as we made our way toward it.

  “Where do you think you’re going?”

  “What’s the problem? We’re authorized to be here,” Viv replied.

  “No one is authorized to go anywhere near that ship.”

  “Says who?”

  “Says Captain Marshall.”

  Viv let out something that sounded like a grunt.