“Let’s not escalate this any further,” I said aloud, as I finally got a chance to unlock my seatbelt. “Our friend here already feels terrible, right?”
Apparently I was wrong. “Fucking Agents!” he spat.
Now that I had a chance to look at him, I could take in the details. A younger cop, probably in his early thirties, with a pale complexion and dark hair. A few extra pounds, but he wore it well, like it was an extra layer of armor. The local uniform was made from a thicker fabric than the cops wore back home, and he finished it off with heavy hiking boots instead of the usual light-duty tactical versions. He looked like he could spend a few days in the woods and come back with nothing more serious than good stories.
“Officer Tamino?” The nametag on his uniform was bold white lettering against black. I must have mispronounced his name, as he sneered at me. I tried again, changing the long a to a short one. This time, he snorted and looked away. I recognized the misdirection. “Officer Tamino, I’d like to discourage you from jumping me. Agents are highly trained.
“That goes for Agent Murphy, too,” I said, as I nodded towards her.
“Yes.” Mare squeaked.
This time, Tamino laughed. “She’s an office rat,” he scoffed. “And your whore.”
“We won’t be continuing this conversation,” I replied.
I made him lie face-down on the ground with his hands beneath his chin, and Mare and I moved a safe distance away. We leaned on the car, watching the officer as we took in the morning sun. “What do you think?” I asked her through the link.
She shook her head. “Hell if I know, Josh. You’re the people person. Does he hate Agents or is this about Pappy?”
I glanced at Tamino. He glared back at me, an ugly sneer peeling his lips away from his teeth.
“Agents,” I replied. He wouldn’t be the first person I’d encountered who hated Agents on principle. Take a helping of technological aversion and cram it into someone who is anti-government, and the result was a person who felt that federally employed cyborgs who could control computers with their brains were abominations.
I had seen this mindset in cops before. And yes, cops can be surprisingly anti-government. Probably has something to do with seeing how the sausages are made.
Another police car arrived a few minutes later. The middle-aged woman driving wore a Sergeant’s stripes, had blond hair and a Viking’s build, and was obviously furious with Tamino.
“I am so sorry,” she said the moment she stepped out of the car. “I’m assuming this is on camera?”
“Yes,” Mare and I said, as Tamino scoffed a “No!”
“We recorded the incident ourselves. If you need additional footage, his body camera is on, too,” Mare said to the sergeant. “It must have been mistakenly turned off when we got here, so I turned it on for him.”
“How thoughtful,” the sergeant said, staring at Tamino as if she was trying to slice him into pieces with her mind. “I’m Greta Hungerford. I’m responsible for my officers’ behavior. What can I do to put this right?”
“Did your office tell you who I am?” asked Mare. When Hungerford nodded, Mare pointed towards the cabin. “Agent Glassman and I are going to find my grandfather. We were planning to start here and then head into the park.”
The older woman chuckled. “If Connor doesn’t want to be found, he won’t be found.”
Connor? That took me a moment. “You know Mr. Murphy.”
“Our paths have crossed once or twice.”
Something about the way she said that made me think those paths had crossed in the dark, possibly while not wearing clothing. “Are you about to ask us not to go?”
She chuckled again. “Connor loves Agent Murphy. Speaks about her all the time. If anybody can coax him out of the woods, it’s her.”
Mare gave a sad little smile. Through our link, I felt sadness, regret, a longing for the courage she believed she used to have…
“Can we look at the house?” I asked, as I took her hand in mine and gently sent her feelings of love, resilience, empathy.
Hungerford’s nose wrinkled up as she squinted. It was a familiar mannerism; Mare it all the time when she wanted to say yes but was obligated to say no. Must have been an Alaska thing. “Can’t,” she said. “There’s a chance it’s a crime scene.”
“We understand,” Mare said.
There was another alternative I could try. “If there’s a way to look at the scene without going within fifty feet of the building, do we have permission to enter?” When Hungerford raised an eyebrow, I added, “It’s a cyborg trick. Nothing we’d enter into any record, of course. Just collecting data to find Pappy.”
It was the nickname that did it. “Pappy,” Hungerford said, smiling. “That’s just the sweetest, yeah?” Tamino snorted. “In the car,” Hungerford told him, pointing towards her cruiser. The officer shuffled off, grumbling.
The sergeant turned back to us. “All right,” she said. “What do you need?”
CHAPTER FIVE
Our footsteps made no sound as we crossed the ruined cabin. Broken glass didn’t shift beneath our shoes. We didn’t kick any of the crisp horrors stuck in the dried blood across the small main room.
This was only possible as we didn’t actually have any feet.
OACET Agents can digitally project ourselves out-of-body. I’ve heard it explained as astral projection via technology instead of meditation, although it is much easier to do if you have the opportunity to close your eyes and park your physical body somewhere comfortable while you do it. When we go out-of-body, the sky is the limit. Scratch that: Patrick Mulcahy, the head of OACET, likes to go hang out on satellites, so the sky is not the limit.
(Now that I think about it, Mare and I had sex on the moon once. Digitally, of course, and as the effort to project our digital avatars that distance is mentally taxing, it was less about the pleasure and more to say we were the first ones to ever fuck on the moon. Or the first ones to admit to fucking on the moon. We recorded it for posterity, of course.)
[SUPPLEMENTAL RECORDING ADDED TO FILE: PRESS PLAY TO VIEW]
Anyhow, I digress. Probably out of avoidance, as Mare and I were walking through what was very obviously a murder scene.
Mare’s avatar looked exactly like her physical self, except it was bright green and her long hair tended to get blurry as it fell past her waistline. Avatars are self-projections, and we tend to remember ourselves through what we see in mirrors and photographs. I pay quite a lot of attention to Mare’s butt, so I noticed the difference… Ah yes, I’ve fallen into more digression.
I’ve never been comfortable with murder, but at least I had experience with crime scenes. Mare didn’t. That, along with the emotional load of gallons and gallons of blood plastered all over one of the most memorable places of her childhood, had dragged her emotions from worry straight into terror.
“This is terrible,” she whispered, her arms wrapped tightly around herself.
“Would you like to wait outside?” I asked.
Mare straightened and shook her head. “What am I looking at?” Her voice was small but steady.
“Someone came in the front door. Pappy either let them in, or was taken by surprise.” The blood told me that much; it was flung towards the door, as if Pappy was against the far wall when the confrontation began. “They continued the fight on the floor…” The red smears went all over the place, with thick and thin spots to suggest two people sliding around. “…and then…” I pointed to the largest pool of blood, with the knife mark. “…it ended.”
Mare’s avatar was starting to get wobbly around the edges. “Pappy survived the fight?”
“I think so, but there’s no way to be sure.” I never lied to Mare. “I don’t think there were more than two people in this room, and since the only one who was bleeding wasn’t your grandfather, it’s likely he was the one who walked away.”
She nodded. “Where’s the other body?”
I paused to look around.
“That’s a good question.” The cabin had a side door and a back door, and where there wasn’t a door, there was a large window. Not exactly practical, considering the Alaskan winters. Pappy had prioritized his cabin for easy escapes over insulation.
I checked all of the windows and the doors. The doors appeared to be locked. The windows, on the other hand…
I stepped back into my physical body and opened my eyes. “Sergeant, was the window on the west side open when you arrived?”
Mare and I had parked ourselves in the front seats of her father’s old sedan while we went out-of-body. Hungerford was standing beside my open door, watching the two of us with professional curiosity. “Yes,” she replied. “How did you know?”
“Fingerprint powder all over the sills,” I answered, as I stepped out of the sedan.
“We closed it after it was printed,” she said. “Wanted to keep the weather out of the crime scene.”
“Understood.” I walked over towards the window. Mare and Hungerford joined me. The path from the west-facing window went straight into the woods. “Did you bring dogs out here?”
Both women laughed. “Pappy can shake a trail without trying,” said Mare.
“I did try dogs, though,” Hungerford added. “Due diligence. They got about five hundred feet into the woods and then gave up.”
“What are you thinking?” Mare asked aloud.
Our link was still open. “Later,” I said. “Something’s off.”
She nodded. Hungerford noticed, and unconsciously moved a few steps away.
Mare noticed that. “What else can we learn here?” she asked the sergeant.
It was a very normal question, and it helped pull Hungerford’s attention from the strangeness of cyborgs. “I don’t know,” she admitted. “But there’s not much I could share with you even if I did have more information.”
“All right,” Mare said, resigned. She popped the sedan’s trunk and started to unload the gear. “Thanks for your help.”
“You’re going in after him.” Hungerford’s eyes moved to me. “…Wait, you’re going in after him?”
I was beginning to think I didn’t look as rugged and manly as I’d always assumed. “I’m just here for moral support,” I replied, as I shouldered the larger pack. It didn’t seem to fit correctly; Mare grabbed the pack by the sides and twisted something around, and it settled against my butt as if it lived there.
Hungerford made a sound that sounded awfully like a muffled laugh. “Can I give you my number for check-ins?”
“Appreciate it,” Mare said, and went through the motions of reciting back the sergeant’s contact information.
(I had already lifted the number straight from the phone in Hungerford’s pocket, and was pretty sure Mare had done the same, but cyborgs need to mind our manners.)
Then, the pleasantries were over, and there was nothing left to do but enter the woods.
Mare led the way along the back wall of the cabin to where a well-traveled path carved a slim brown ribbon through the underbrush. Five steps in and the feeling of thick living green fell around me, and I thought, oh, this is nice.
Fifteen steps in and I remembered exactly why I hate anything that isn’t made out of metal, plastic, and concrete.
We—and by we, I mean everybody who lives within a city or a suburb or a community which has roads and basic utilities—have forgotten about the power of forests. Remember those fairy tales you read as a child? When the hero is lost in the woods, they do everything they can to escape. A dragon’s lair or a witch’s cottage? Great! Anything’s better than this fucking forest!
Into the woods my firm ass.
Trees are pleasant, manageable plants. They cast shade and make oxygen. All things considered, trees are pretty great.
But a forest wants to kill you.
No. I’m wrong about that: a forest doesn’t want to kill you. It doesn’t want anything from you, except maybe you’re kicking the leaves around a little, turning over small patches of topsoil to renew the surface layer of the earth. And maybe it’s a little grateful for the carbon dioxide. But that’s it. That’s all. You are on your own, and if you break a leg or the wolves get you, the forest will quickly claim the extra calcium in your bones.
You are nothing to a forest, and if you don’t recognize the truth of that, you’ll die all the sooner.
Give me a nice city any day. Cities are people: we made them, we shaped them, we are them! A city without people is just a collection of buildings. A forest without people is a forest.
I did not belong here.
CHAPTER SIX
“Stop.” Mare turned, and pressed both hands against my chest. “We can’t do this if we’re both screaming balls of angst.” I began to mentally withdraw and break our link, but she took my hands in her own, staring up at me with those beautiful green eyes. “That’s not what I meant.”
I nodded, and allowed her to lead me over to a smooth stretch of ground paved in moss. I shucked the pack and sat cross-legged, hands in my lap, eyes closed.
Mare stood behind me, resting her hands on my shoulders.
We began to take slow, deep breaths.
Together.
A strong sense of personal identity is the most important part of being an Agent. If you don’t know who you are, it’s too easy to lose yourself in another person. As I’ve said, any link between cyborgs seeps out of the mental realm and into the physical one. Links are like any form of conversation, with some being brief superficial statements, while others turn into immersive moments in which you and the other person experience an intimate connection. In a tight link, like the one Mare and I typically share, we’re usually able to maintain a small peripheral awareness of another’s body.
But we can go deeper.
It’s possible to give up your own identity, at least for the space of a deep link. There’s an element of trust to it, of course. It goes without saying that I trust every single member of OACET with my life.
I trust Mare with my mind and soul…and she trusts me.
As our breathing fell into a shared rhythm, Mare allowed me into her body.
No, not that way. We’ll get to that later. Trust me.
This way was…more intimate.
Imagine yourself as a ghost, unable to possess another’s body but able to sit within it, feel what they feel, think what they think. Still the chatter of your own thoughts, and live within their body, if only for a few moments.
We stayed sitting while we walked away. We had grown up hiking in these very woods. The pack on our back was heavy, but a familiar kind of heavy; it had been ours since we got it one Christmas in high school. There was an ebb and flow to this kind of walking, an awareness of how the foot rolled across the earth, weight on the heel, then on the toes, each step testing the ground before allowing it to take our weight.
The mountains didn’t like us, but…
But that was okay?
Why does everything have to like us, anyway? Can’t we just appreciate the mountains for themselves? They don’t have to be welcoming. They’re a form of pure majesty, and that’s all they need to be. We’re guests in someone’s mansion, and it’s so big and rambling that there’s no need for pleasantries. All we needed to do was appreciate where we were and what we were doing, and the mountains would mind themselves.
We controlled ourselves, not the mountains.
And that was okay.
We walked around a little more, until the sense of being at the mercy of the woods was no longer overpowering, and then back to our other body in the mossy patch. We rested our hands on our shoulders again, and breathed together, and then apart…
And I looked up at Mare.
“Better?” she asked, grinning.
“Yeah.” I leaned my head against her, and the two of us took a few moments to remember how to breathe on our own. Then, I stood, shouldered my pack, and we headed into the forest, together.
It still wasn’t great, but it was definitely bett
er. Mare had shown me how to walk within the woods, one foot in front of the other. More importantly, one of the people I loved most in the world had done all she could to prove to me that this forest wasn’t a great disembodied evil which would roll my corpse into a gully and leave me to the wolves and trees.
(She didn’t prove to me that the forest wasn’t this great massive force, by the way. No, she had actually reinforced this belief quite a lot. However, she had showed me how to manage my fear, and that was the important part.)
And that little heal-toe rolling step was quite useful. An energy-saver, really.
Up, up, into the mountains.
After several hours, the path had turned into nothing more than the occasional animal trail. I couldn’t follow it; Mare had to show me where animals had spent hundreds of thousands of years picking their paths up and down the slopes. We took breaks, made sure we stayed hydrated. The weather was hot for Alaska but cool by D.C. standards, and as we rose in elevation, the view below us couldn’t be beat. Her anxiety still sang along our link, but she was also happy to be home. All in all, once Mare managed to get my head out of my own ass, it turned into a decent afternoon.
“We’ll need to camp soon,” she told me. “There’s a good site by a lake about a half-mile to the west.”
It seemed early to set up camp, and I said so.
“We’re going to need sleep, and soon,” she said. “Hiking and altitude change are making us tired. We just won’t realize it until we sit down and rest.”
Right, right. There was a time change in there, plus we had been in motion from the moment Mare had wrangled me out of the cocktail party. Not to mention how half a day wandering the mountains had left us hungry enough to catch and eat a moose.
Actually…
“How large are moose?” I asked, as Mare started walking westward.
She gestured somewhere far above her head, and then stretched out her arms as wide as they could go.
No moose steaks tonight, then.
The hike to her campsite went quickly. We came to the edge of the woods at the beginnings of sunset, and found a scene straight out of a postcard, with trees surrounding the water and rosy light tipping gentle waves.
The Alaska Escape Page 3