The Other

by Matthew Buscemi

  “Great job.” Dr. Aarogy smiled. “This is excellent progress.”

  “I haven’t made it to Bharo’s room, yet.” Sahaan laughed. “Is he expecting me?”

  “He is.”

  Lachel, Jaan, and the doctor followed at his side all the way out the door and down the hall. Dr. Aarogy indicated a right as the hallway ended splitting into two perpendicular corridors. Feeling winded and exhausted, Sahaan wanted to ask how much further, but decided not to, for Lachel and Jaan’s sake.

  “Here.” The doctor indicated an open door not much further after the turn.

  Sahaan hobbled in.

  “Sahaan?” Bharo’s voice rasped a bit, but sounded firm.

  “It’s me, Bharo.” He fell into a seat at his friend’s bedside, while his family took up positions on the other side of the bed.

  “Hey, kiddo.” Bharo smiled at Jaan. “Hi, Lachel.”

  “Hello, Dr. Meharab,” Jaan replied.

  “Hi, Bharo.” Lachel smiled.

  “How are you feeling?” Sahaan asked.

  “Like I was hit by a train.”

  Sahaan chortled. “And you wonder why they give me the speech writing jobs.”

  “You all caught up on the news?”

  “Yep. I take it they told you about Charles, and about this new one, Samantha.”

  Bharo nodded. “The vice president was here. He filled me in.” He turned momentarily to Jaan. “You’ve been following the Quantums?”

  “Well, their last game was canceled. But when they start up the season again…”

  Bharo nodded.

  “Lachel,” Bharo said. “Is it all right if Sahaan and I talk privately for a bit?”

  Lachel nodded and guided Jaan out of the room.

  “Feel better, Dr. Meharab!” Jaan said.

  Bharo turned to Dr. Aarogy. “Doctor?”

  She nodded toward Bharo’s bedside console. “Hit the button if you need me.”

  “Thank you.”

  Once the doctor had shut the door, Bharo shook his head. “I don’t like this, Sahaan.”

  “The election? The reports of the terrorists?”

  “I don’t like those either. I was talking about Samantha.”

  “I had the same thought when talking to the vice president. We got much more out of Charles in much less time.”

  “Exactly. After twenty-four hours with Charles, we’d established a few things, found some directions to take the conversation further. It sounds like Samantha is different. They’re not learning anything. That’s why the vice president is taking over himself.”

  “She might just need more time.”

  “Maybe. But also, why send two?”

  “Charles did guess that there could be others.”

  “Sure. But I imagine someone over there is signing off on these procedures now, even if Charles managed to slip through because he was the first one. You got the same call I did from Dr. Anaveshan, right? About how these have to be sinking an enormous amount of energy into these events?”

  Sahaan nodded.

  “Why do this twice? Why another visitor while Charles is still here?”

  “Maybe they can tell he got kidnapped?”

  Bharo’s eyes went wide. “Let’s only hope they can’t tell that.”

  Sahaan took a deep breath. “Are you suggesting we do something differently?”

  Bharo shook his head. “No. It just… it just doesn’t feel right!”

  Sahaan had learned to trust Bharo’s intuition.

  “You’re worried about Charles,” Bharo said.

  “Yeah,” Sahaan admitted. “It’s odd. I feel like I should be worried about the election, or even about Samantha, but I can’t stop thinking of how I could possibly help find Charles. It seems now like the only thing I ever really did for him was tear that damned doctor off him—” Within a matter of moments, Sahaan’s mind had moved from the incident with Dr. Paape to the nanite injection she had given him to the fact of a specific Reclamation legal mandate.

  “My god… Bharo, remember Dr. Paape? She gave him a nanite injection.”

  Bharo’s eyes lit up. “Those nanites are almost certainly traceable!”

  Sahaan tried to stand, took it too quickly, and felt a jolt of pain shoot up his spine. He howled and fell back into his seat, which caused another, duller version of the pain.

  Bharo slammed the button on his console, and a nurse came immediately in.

  “Yes?” he said.

  “Please get Mr. Vitar. It’s urgent.”

  The nurse nodded and ran off.

  Sahaan sat with his eyes closed, willing the pain to diminish, but it wasn’t cooperating with him. So instead he stayed as still as possible. He heard the sounds of Mr. Vitar arriving and Bharo asking for a secure handheld connection to the Hilltop Suite. Vitar responded that he was on it, and it was then that Sahaan heard a throat clearing from beside him.

  Sahaan opened his eyes and found Dr. Aarogy standing over him with crossed arms. “Dr. Ekeer?”

  “Yes?”

  “Did you try to stand up the way you normally do?”

  “Yes.”

  “Please don’t do that again. Not for a while, anyway.”

  “Yes, doctor.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I got this,” Bharo said, just as Vitar returned with a phone.

  “Thank you,” Sahaan grunted as he pulled himself carefully up into his walker. The long way back to his room didn’t seem so intimidating. As he walked out the door, he heard Bharo giving the orders to organize everything: find Paape, get the signature of the nanites she used, get the satellites scanning for them.

  “You’re in a good mood,” Lachel said as she and Jaan joined at his side.

  Sahaan nodded. “Bharo helped me remember how to find Charles.”

  Jaan held up his handheld. “Check it out, dad! Una just took the lead.”

  Sahaan smiled. At last, it finally seemed that everything was going to turn out all right. There was just one thing niggling at the back of his mind: Bharo had some kind intuition about Samantha. And the thing about Bharo’s intuitions was that there was usually something to them.

  ~

  When Sahaan had finally managed to get himself back into his hospital bed, he wanted nothing more than to close his and eyes and rest.

  “Any dizziness?” Dr. Aarogy asked.

  Sahaan kept his eyes closed. “No. Just tired.”

  “That’s fine. How about pain?”

  “Some. But dull.”

  “Also good. Sounds like your body needs a break. Try to relax.”

  “Thank you, doctor,” he said. But how could he relax? His mind was going a million miles a minute. He wished he could be tied into the Hilltop Suite, directing the search for Charles, rallying the leaders of the military teams who would go in and pull him out, telling them everything he knew about Charles.

  His body ached, and drowsiness kept his eyelids held fast.

  He forced his eyes open. “Lachel?”

  “Yes?”

  “Can you wake me up if there’s anything on the news about Charles?”

  She smiled and nodded, kissed him, then returned to Jaan, who had found some new tidbit about the election on his handheld. Sahaan let himself drift off to sleep.

  It was a deep sleep, and before long he began to dream.

  He dreamed of the ocean. Not the ocean near Besserine, but a wide, open, wild ocean. He stood on a beach, and there were no walls in sight anywhere on land, nor aloft buoys on the water. Somehow, he wasn’t afraid of nanites.

  Gulls circled about a large rock protruding from the water, some ways out into the ocean. He had only seen gulls once before, on Alterra. He’d gone through the portal, taken a train to Delta Province, and seen the great floodplain where the river spilled out into the ocean.

  There were no gulls on Asura anymore, and the biologists told them they would need to reclaim much more coastland if they were ever going to be reintroduced.

 
Sahaan also spotted a crab scuttling across the sand—another creature from his visit to Alterra. And plants—so many plants—many of which he had never seen in such abundance and others he didn’t even recognize. There were grasses up further beyond the dunes, seaweed woven into the sand of the beach, driftwood logs.

  The sea left foam wherever it receded.

  Sahaan walked up to the edge of the water and watched the ocean, listening to the crash of waves and the screeches of the gulls. He heard another screech and turned.

  Figures had appeared upon the grassy dunes. There were two of them. They towered over him, five or six meters tall each. Their bodies shimmered gray, and their eyes were fiery orange orbs. Their legs were haunched back like a quadruped’s, but they stood upright. Their feet and hands were enormous, shimmering, metallic claws. Orange holograms danced across the surface of their bodies, always changing shape and form, too quickly to see if they were comprised of lettering, shapes, or some other form of symbology.

  One of the creatures opened its mouth a shrieked, but it did not move or change its stance. Sahaan decided that it was not a threatening act, although the noise had indeed sounded shrill to his ears.

  The creature shrieked again, twice, in the same pattern as the first time.

  All at once, the creature beside the one who had shrieked seemed to morph, its body parts bulging and elongating. The second creature exploded, sending blobs of gray goo hurtling in all directions. Where they landed, the blobs spread out across the ground, consuming the beach, turning it all into a monotony of metallic gray.

  The gray hurtled toward Sahaan, but there was nowhere to go. The ocean behind him, the expanding gray mass before him.

  The first creature shrieked again, the same pattern, but somehow sadder this time, as though begging him to understand what it was trying to communicate, as though that would save him.

  Sahaan turned, jumped into an incoming wave, and swam, fighting against the ocean. But where was he swimming to?

  “Dad?”

  With a jolt, Sahaan awoke. Jaan was shaking his shoulder. “They got him, Dad. You and Dr. Bharo. You saved Charles.”

  On the holocast, Sahaan struggled to see through blurry vision as he fully opened his eyes, how a contingent of both police and military were leading Charles out of a house at the edge of Citrine, while simultaneously leading four men in handcuffs toward a circle of police cars.

  Sahaan registered the announcer’s voice. “The visitor is back in the custody of government officials and is currently being transferred to the secure facility in Citrine until arrangements can be made to transfer him to Portal City. Naturally, the hope is that, once united with Samantha, the two visitors will be able to work together to tell us more about their purpose here.

  “In recent polling news, Pragati Una of the Reconciliation Party has gained a ten-point lead over Guardian candidate Abhiman Gadh. The quick and efficient response to the terrorist attack on our walls, as well as the response to our most recent visitor has increased confidence in the leadership skill of the Reconciliation Party.”

  Lachel and Jaan both clapped.

  “Awesome job, Dad!” Jaan was beaming.

  Lachel was smiling at him, too.

  Sahaan smiled back. “It was nothing. I should have remembered that detail much earlier.”

  “You remembered it in time,” Lachel said. “That’s what counts.”

  Perhaps. But what was he missing? He couldn’t get Bharo’s observation out of his head. Why two? What was the point? And what had Charles been trying to tell him? He would at least be able to find out the answer to the latter question very soon.

  ~

  “Mr. Vice President?”

  “Sahaan?”

  “How are things going with Samantha?”

  “This line is secure?”

  “So Mr. Vitar tells me.”

  A pause. “Not well.”

  “Nothing at all?”

  “She brings the conversation always back around to being hungry, thirsty, or tired. She avoids answering any questions. This is not how you described Charles to the president.”

  “No. Charles was very talkative. Personable. He did get tired a lot, but he also seemed to be trying to answer our questions. Has Samantha complained about her memory at all?”

  “No. I’m skeptical that she’s even trying to remember anything.”

  “Any ideas on next steps?”

  “One of the researchers here had an idea for a line of questioning. We’ll try tomorrow.” The Vice President stifled a yawn admirably, but Sahaan caught the telltale muffling of it over the phone line.

  “Thank you, Mr. Vice President.”

  “I’ll let you know as soon as we learn anything.”

  Sahaan ended the call. He looked up at the clock on the wall. Nine in the evening, only three full days before the election, Samantha was being unhelpful, and Bharo’s intuition was telling him something was wrong. No matter which way he took his mind through the problem, Sahaan came back to the same conclusion: he had to go see Charles himself.

  ~

  Sahaan summoned Mr. Vitar. When he’d arrived, Sahaan returned the handheld and asked him to send for Lachel. With a curt nod, Vitar vanished, and not a few minutes later, Lachel appeared in the door. She stood tall and proud. She walked toward him resolute. Despite having worn the same clothes the whole time she’d been here, she’d done up her hair as best she was able. She stood over him and she held his hand.

  She looked into his eyes. “You know something.”

  “I have suspicions of something.”

  “Tell me.” She had always been able to do this. He was an open book to her.

  “Bharo is worried about the situation with the visitors, and Samantha is not turning out to be anything like Charles. Now that Charles is safe again, we can ask him about what he remembers, but the only people who can effectively do that, after what he’s been through, are Bharo and me.”

  “You’re going to Citrine, then.” Not angry. Not needy. Not even disappointed. Just plain matter of fact. A statement of the necessity of the situation.

  “That was my thought.”

  Lachel sighed, smiled, and nodded. “Do you think it’s dangerous?”

  Sahaan shook his head. “I just don’t know. I want to believe Charles. I still have some suspicions, but all his behavior so far has been exemplary.”

  “Jaan and I should go back to Portal City, then.”

  Sahaan shook his head. “I was thinking you two should stay with your sister for a few days.”

  Lachel looked at him, must have seen the worry etched into his face. He’d given her all the pieces, and she’d put them all together herself. She squeezed his hand harder, kissed him, then said, “I’ll figure it out.”

  She inhaled and exhaled deeply, then set his hand down, and straightened her back. “Do you know if we’re making progress?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Not the two of us. I mean the Reclamation. I used to think, before, that Reconciliation was constantly making things better for everyone. But everywhere I look now, there are limits. We can only know so much about the nanite-bodied. Our walls can protect us only so much. Half our country wants to vote for a presidential candidate who is clearly incompetent. Some of our own people have even turned on the walls. Has the last hundred years been just an illusion? Were the dissidents right after all? Should we have simply evacuated to Alterra and closed the portal?”

  “I think our way of life is worth something,” Sahaan said. “Even for all that.”

  Lachel nodded. “Come back.” Spoken in a whisper, but with eyes firm and full of energy. Ready to tear the world apart for him, if need be. But all he needed, for the time being, was for her and Jaan to stay away from both visitors for the next three days.

  “I will.”

  With that, Lachel turned and left.

  Sahaan sat and thought for many moments. He thought about the next time he’d get to take Jaan to a v
oidball game. He thought about that dinner with Lachel he’d been supposed to have a week ago. He thought about the two of them holed up in Barine at Nishkap’s bachelorette-pad.

  Finally, he was able to wrench his mind away from those worries to his new goal: to get himself discharged from the hospital and on the morning train to Citrine.

  Sahaan rang for a nurse, who appeared promptly and was shocked to discover that Sahaan wished to discharge himself. He deflected Sahaan’s insistence admirably, but when Sahaan started to get himself up out of the hospital bed, the nurse was forced to make a nighttime call to Dr. Aarogy.

  The nurse pushed the handheld into Sahaan’s ear, and Sahaan grabbed it up.

  “Dr. Ekeer?”

  “Speaking.”

  “The nurse tells me you intend to discharge yourself?” The exasperation in her voice was evident.

  “That’s correct.”

  “Doctor, there is a wide array of medical reasons why that is a bad idea at this time. Besides, where do you intend to go?”

  “Citrine.”

  “Doctor.” Her voice now bordered on condescending. “Have you considered that perhaps you might not be psychologically ready for train travel?”

  “National security, doctor. I’ll endure what I must.”

  “Even so, the logistics of transport at this time—”

  “I’m sure the expenses can be covered one way or the other.”

  “You might sustain further injury. In fact, I would say that would be quite likely.”

  “And your prognosis on my eventual recovery if I sustain further injury?”

  “When it comes to your spine… anything could happen doctor. Most injuries can be recovered from. Some can’t. What I can tell you is that this plan is extraordinarily risky.”

  “I find the risk justified, doctor.”

  “Can I at least convince you to wait for a morning train? That will give me time to write up notes for my staff about what to prepare for you. We should send someone with you as well, at least for the train journey.”

  “I appreciate that very much, doctor. Thank you.”

  “Just remember me when they give your lifetime recognition award.”

  Sahaan smirked. “Will do.”