Kade
Page 25
I grunted. I guess the secret wasn’t really a secret.
“I know that your body is failing. And worse, it is just a matter of time until it starts to affect your mind.”
“Yeah, those moments I told you about are all that more precious, now.”
“I can imagine.” He scooted his chair back and stood up, facing the window. “Will you, at least, come and look at the program?”
“I’ll tell you what I’ll do,” I said. “I’m going to go eat some pudding. Then, if you’ll help me do something, I’ll go with you and look this thing over.”
“What can I help with?”
“You help me steal that car.”
He looked at the car with a grin, “Done.”
“And one more thing,” I said.
“What’s that?”
“Drop this off at the front desk.”
I pulled Carl’s wallet from the pocket of my robe and placed it on the table.
Bern raised his left eyebrow.
“Made me walk all the way across the place.” I shrugged.
He chuckled. “Done.”
It was almost half an hour later when I eased into the driver’s seat of the Camaro. I grunted as I reached under the seat, looking for a spare key. Always check before trying to hotwire a car. A lot of folks just throw the keys under the seat, out of sight. Something jingled, and I raised my head and saw Bern holding a set of keys.
My eyes narrowed. “Your car?”
“No, sir, Mister Kade, yours. It would be a shame to damage the steering column.”
“No doubt,” I said and took the offered keys.
The engine rumbled with power, and I smiled. Immortality? Hmmm.
* * *
“This place looks well-guarded,” I said as the Camaro rumbled into the drive of a military compound.
“It is,” Bern returned. “The guards don’t even know what they’re guarding.”
“There’s plenty of them.” I pointed to our left. “Looks like seven posts on the left, four on the right. Then the two guys in the shack.”
“Pretty good, Mister Kade. There are six on the right.”
“Damn these old eyes,” I muttered.
“Pretty good for an old man, Mister Kade,” he said. “Stop at the gate.”
I stopped at the gatehouse and watched the two guards approach the car from either side.
“Doctor Bern,” the guy on the left nodded. “Who is this?”
“If you’ll look on the orders in the shack, you’ll see I am expected with company.”
He grinned. “I did, Doc. Didn’t really expect someone so…”
“Old.” I chuckled.
“Yeah,” he said. “Most of the folks coming in here are a bit more spry.”
“I used to be, Sarge.”
He smiled as I commented on his rank. “You served?”
“Back when the DU was causing a ruckus. Took some shrapnel to the hip back in forty-two.”
“Those were rough years, sir,” he said.
“Don’t call me sir, I worked for a living.”
“You’re still around after all that,” he said. “I’ll stick with sir.”
“Guess I’ll live with it as long as you don’t start thinking I was a lieutenant or something.”
“Staff?”
“Gunny,” I answered.
“Maybe I should salute.” He grinned.
“Been civilian for a long time,” I said with a laugh. “I don’t think they’ll let me re-enlist.”
He smiled and waved us through.
“You’ve been re-enlisted since we left the vets home,” Bern said.
“I’ll be damned,” I said. “Obsidian must be pretty desperate if they’re re-enlisting ninety-year-old gunnery sergeants.”
“This is the Hail Mary, Mister Kade,” he returned. “If this doesn’t work, we’re back to enlisting sociopaths. I, for one, would like to change that.”
“I guess we’ll see,” I said.
“You’re on board?”
“Really, what have I got to lose?” I shrugged as he motioned toward a parking spot near the smallest of the clustered buildings on the base. “Six weeks of hell as my mind begins to go?”
“The report says you have a year and a half before the effects are seen in your mind.”
“It says six weeks to a year and a half.”
“You may have more time…”
“Expect the worst, Doc. You’ll never be disappointed.”
“That’s a pretty bad outlook, Mister Kade.”
“I am almost never disappointed, Doc. Disappointment will eat at your soul.”
He chuckled. “Alright, then.”
I brushed my hand across the top of the magnificent car as we headed toward the door to the small building. My walker kept us moving at a pretty slow pace.
“Welcome,” Bern said as he motioned me inside.
There were three checkpoints along the hallway that made its way around the perimeter of the building before ending at an elevator. The walls were reinforced steel with the standard concrete on the exterior that hid what was inside.
“Hard place to get into.”
“It needs to be,” he said. “This is the future. What we do here could end the wars. Not the war. The wars.”
“You have a lot of faith in this system of yours.”
“There’s nothing wrong with the system. The hardware is flawless, Mister Kade.” He tapped his head. “It’s the wetware that seems to be the problem.”
“Good luck,” I said, pointing at my own head. “The noodle you’re about to try hasn’t ever been considered flawless.”
“I think you may surprise yourself,” he said.
“Whatever.”
I stopped and leaned on my walker. This was the farthest I had walked in some time.
Bern pushed a button, and the elevator opened. Inside was a pretty redhead with a wheelchair.
“Oh, my stars and garters, that’s the most beautiful thing I’ve seen in years,” I said and sat down in the chair. “You’re not too bad either, miss.”
She chuckled. “I thought you might appreciate getting off your feet, Mister Kade.”
“I most certainly do.” I turned to Bern. “Let’s get this show on the road, Doc.”
“Just like that?” he asked. “You’re all in?”
“Hell, Doc, I was all in the second we got in the car,” I said. “Like I said before, what have I got to lose?”
* * *
There was nothing. I would have smiled, but there wasn’t a mouth for me to use. I could understand why the others had gone nuts. But there was one huge difference, the pain was gone. I hadn’t even realized how much there was until it was gone.
Perceiving something in the distance, or what seemed like a distance, I moved toward it. It was disconcerting as the light that had seemed so far away a moment ago was right there. It was a door.
I walked through the bright white opening into a room. It wasn’t an impressive room, just a simple, round room with a table and two chairs. Walking toward the table, I realized I had a body in this room. There were none of the normal inputs you would have, though, except the visual. The virtual body moved with the same mental commands as the real body. It seemed to follow the same rules.
“Mister Kade?”
The voice came from everywhere and was just a bit disturbing.
“I’m here, Doc.”
“Unexpected, but a good sign.”
“Unexpected?”
“I hadn’t connected you to the room yet,” he said. “How did you find it?”
“Saw a light and moved toward it,” I said. “Then walked through the door into this…round room.”
“Interesting,” he said. “Can you remember everything?”
“I think so,” I answered. “How would I know if I don’t remember something?”
“True,” he said. “Let’s go through a few questions.”
“Sure.”
“Wha
t is the most important memory you can think of?”
“That’s easy enough,” I answered. “Elena.”
“And what memory is that?”
“Doc, that’s a whole lot of memories. Thirty-two years of them.”
“Good.”
“How about more recent memories?” he asked. “Do you remember stealing a car?”
“Which time?”
“We’ll discount the last one since it was my car and was more of a gift.”
“There were a couple of times, even without that one. I stole my first car after Elena died. I used the ‘Vette I stole to take her ashes to the ocean. She loved this spot out there where we used to go, and I spread her ashes there on the beach. When I came back, I left a bit of money and a note on the seat of the car. No one figured out who took the car for six hours. I was in better shape then.” I chuckled. “They noticed the last one within thirty minutes. I blame Ring. He was with me that time, so I might as well blame him.”
“Well, it certainly seems to have worked correctly, Mister Kade.”
“I like the pain being gone, Doc,” I said. “Hadn’t realized there was so much of it until it was gone. But it’s real dark in here.”
“I have some programs I made for the others to make it seem more hospitable. Programs much like this room.”
“Good.”
“There are a few things I would like to do differently with this trial that I didn’t do with the others. This has to work, or our program is over, so I will be giving you administrative access to the programs. This is as much an experiment as the rest of it, but the fact that you found the room without being tethered bodes well for the interface.”
“Okay, Doc,” I said. “Let’s do it.”
“I am inputting a program called Environ. It is a building program that you can use to build an environment around you like this room. It’s a rather large program because of the number of available aspects. What I don’t know is how the interface will work for you since you are inside the system. Your access keyword is HJDRFETY. You may change that after you access the program. I’m going to leave you to examine it for a bit.”
“Alright, Doc.”
I said the key aloud, and a console materialized on one side of the room.
“That was easy enough,” I muttered and walked over to the console.
“Enjoy the program, Mister Kade.”
“Thanks, Doc.”
I searched through the console commands to find the settings and found the access key. With a few commands, I changed the key to something I could easily remember, then I signed out. The console disappeared.
I walked out of the meeting room into the dark, moving away from the bright door.
“Who dat? Who dere?”
The console appeared in front of me again. Then I really dug into the different landscapes.
* * *
“You appear to have been busy, Mister Kade.”
The Doc’s voice came from everywhere again.
“It’s kind of fun,” I said.
“The gardens are quite splendid.”
“Elena loved flowers. She would have loved building something like this.”
“It is beautiful. I was planning to leave you alone for a pre-determined amount of time, but we have a small problem.”
“What is it?”
“You seem to have disappeared.”
“I’m right here.”
“No, the other you. He got a little upset when I told him we were going to download his mind so we could update your consciousness inside the machine. I let him be for a little while to calm down and came back to find him gone.”
“It must be getting worse,” I said. “He knows I’m free of the pain, now. He doesn’t want to send his pain to me.”
“I thought as much, but it might be needed to continue the experiment. We did this with the others, and it made them worse. They began to miss their bodies much more.”
“Doc, I don’t miss it, and bombarding me with memories of more pain isn’t going to make me want to go back. Let me think a minute, and I’ll help you find him.”
“Thank you, Mister Kade.”
“Call me Mathew, Doc.”
“One more thing, Mathew,” he said. “He stole a gun.”
“Shit.”
* * *
“He did, indeed, go where you said he would,” Doc said. “We were too late to stop him.”
“He’s gone, then.”
I wasn’t sure how I felt about what my old self had done. I had only spoken with him once since I had been downloaded into the machine. I’m pretty sure Doc was unaware of the conversation we’d had. He was beginning to lose some of his memories. Our worst fear had started. The cancer had moved into his brain. We had known it would come at some point, but we both hoped it would kill him before it took that. Most people with this form of cancer die well before it reaches the brain.
“How did he do it?”
“I expected him to commit suicide, Mathew,” he said. “Even after you told me he would not. He went down into the city and found one of the worst sections of town. There, he interrupted a robbery and shot three men before a fourth managed to shoot him. He lived long enough to shoot the fourth, who is now recovering in a hospital on Grave Street.”
“Tough old bastard,” I said.
“Yes, he was. But now we have no backup if your program doesn’t work.”
“We didn’t have one in him either, Doc. The cancer was into his brain.”
“He never said anything about that.”
“He told me he was losing memories of our past, Doc.”
“Then you expected something like this?”
“Actually, I didn’t. This place has changed the way I think more than I would like to admit. I can look back and see where I would have expected it, but time in here has changed me.”
“You have been inside longer than any of the other volunteers, Mathew. You feel no longing for the physical world?”
“Not so much, Doc.”
“The next experiment will be the one that tells us whether we will succeed or not.”
“And what’s that?”
“You are going outside for a bit, Mathew. Time to stretch your legs.”
“Alright.”
I was…familiar with the theory of being downloaded into a body. It was pretty anticlimactic when it actually happened.
“When are we doing it?”
“It’s done, Mathew,” he said. “The part where we see if the experiment is a success will be when we upload the copy back into the machine, and the two merge.”
“That could be interesting.”
“Indeed. Here we go. I will speak again with you after you assimilate.”
“Okay, Doc. Let me have it.”
The memory was as vivid as the memory of building the latest construct in the machine. It was as if I had lived them both, and in a way, I guess I had.
* * *
My eyes opened. I felt them this time, and the sensations of the body I had been missing inside the machine. There was only a little pain, but the sensations seemed odd to me. I raised my head and looked down.
“Doc?” My voice was much higher pitched, but very soft. A voice I would have enjoyed listening to, once upon a time. “Why do I have boobs?”
I heard a giggle from my left and turned my head and saw the red-haired nurse who had met us at the top of the elevator.
“You’ve changed your hair,” I said. “Close to a foot longer.”
“It has been some time since you last saw me, Mister Kade.”
I looked back down at my chest. “I guess it’s Miss Kade.”
She laughed again. “At least you’re a good sport about it. Doctor Bern insists that the first body one of you is placed into is of the opposite sex. It gets the shock over with.”
“One of you?”
“The others who came before you. Some of them handled the transition tolerably well. Some, not so much.”
“Sometimes, the Agent can’t be a male.”
“I got no problem with that,” I said and slipped off the bed and dropped a little before my feet touched the floor. “Where is the person who came out of this body?”
“There was no one inside the body, Mister Kade.”
“Now, I’m curious.”
“Extreme cases in the prison system are sentenced to death. Our mode of execution is much different than it used to be. Instead of killing them, they are sent to us, where we wipe thier mind. The body is an empty shell. Then we use the bodies for Agents. It’s a relatively new system since we have had little success with the ‘wetware’ up to this point. We have high hopes for you, Mister Kade.”
“Alright.”
The door opened, and Bern entered.
“How are you holding up, Mathew?”
“May as well call me Mattie for the time being, Doc.”
“You are handling it well,” he said.
“These,” I patted my chest, “are going to be a distraction. They seem to get in the way.”
I twisted and moved my arms, which kept connecting in unfamiliar places.
Red laughed again. “Welcome to womanhood, Mister Kade.”
“You may as well call me Mattie, too. At least as long as I’m in this body. Mathew when I’m not. Mister Kade is…was a crotchety old man.”
“I can do that.”
“Alright, Doc,” I said as I turned to Bern. “What’s next?”
“I have a job for you, Mathe…Mattie. One you just might be glad to take care of. It is somewhat of a personal matter. I want you to remove someone.”
I was silent for a moment. I’d killed many men in my time as an OAS trooper. This seemed different.
“Kill someone,” I corrected. “Don’t mince words, Doc. Own it.”
“Yes,” Bern said. “I want you to kill the man who killed Mathew Kade.”