by Elle E. Ire
They eventually decide on four-hour piloting shifts with Lyle taking the first turn and Alex heading for his own bunk. Lyle heads for the cockpit. Alex and I walk aft in companionable silence. We reach his cabin first.
“Do you really think she’s okay?” I ask one more time.
Alex nods, but it’s hesitant. “All the indicators say so, and VC1 would find a way to let us know if something is really wrong.”
“But Carl’s command—”
“I know,” he says, holding up a hand to forestall my argument. “But the scanners show no problems. Maybe VC1 was fooled by Vick’s claustrophobia and thought Vick was in actual danger for a minute. Maybe she found one of those loopholes in the loyalty programming Vick’s mentioned a couple of times.”
I nod, wanting to believe it. VC1 has been searching for a way to set Vick free from her Storm ties, to eliminate the programmed compulsions that make Vick do whatever her superiors ask of her. To the best of my knowledge, though, the AI has been unsuccessful so far.
“Get some sleep, Kelly,” Alex says, giving me a sympathetic smile. “I’ve got her monitors set to alert all of us if anything goes wrong while she’s out. I even ran a quick diagnostic on the backups. She’s covered.”
I nod, stifling a yawn of my own, and let him step into his cabin and shut the hatch. Still, I can’t shake the uneasy sense that follows me into my own berth, hovers around me while I change into sleep shorts and a soft T-shirt, and nudges at my senses as I crawl beneath the covers of the lower bunk. I drop my psychic walls and reach toward the medbay with my empathic sense.
Nothing. I sense no emotions from her. I can just barely detect Alex’s worry despite his assurances. Lyle reads as exhausted, but a moment later there’s a spike in his energy, probably indicating he’s taken an approved stimulant for his four-hour stint in the pilot’s chair.
I can’t tell if my inability to read Vick is due to the stasis field, her suppressors, or something else, but there are so many factors, I shouldn’t be concerned. And yet I am.
The blue line that connects us, that signifies the love and affection we feel for each other, is wide and bright, leading from where I lie to disappear through the cabin door. That’s a positive sign. When she’s severely weakened or in any kind of extreme physical distress, the line fades to a dull bluish gray and narrows as if it were drawn by a pencil rather than a paintbrush.
It’s all the comfort I’m going to get, so I let my head drop back onto the pillow and close my eyes. A small twinge of guilt nags at me as I allow my body to relax. I’m permitted a full eight hours or more of sleep while the guys get catnaps. But my piloting skills aren’t up to being unsupervised and in full control, so it is what it is.
Before long, I’m drifting off.
My dreams are of Vick. They usually are, and they take on one of two genres—horror or romance.
The horrific ones have me reliving some of our worst moments: the shuttleport attack in North Carolina where I watched her die, or when I very briefly “killed” her in the courtroom on Girard Moon Base, or worst of all, when she died after being struck by lightning. And yes, I’m well aware of the running theme throughout them all. Vick dies. I watch. Or in the last case, I listen. And yet, after going through that with her again and again, I learned my lesson early on. I’m not tempted to block her love for me ever again. Whether I lose her that way or through some final death, the pain and torment will be the same—unbearable. So I will enjoy what we have together to the fullest I am able, for as long as fate gives us.
The romantic dreams, though, they make me want to go to bed early, especially when Vick is off on a mission without me. Ever since Vick’s memories of Rodwell and what he did to her had been blurred, she’s been much more willing to engage in amorous activities.
With the return of all her more pleasant memories, she’s got a wide repertoire of locations, approaches, and positions to choose from, her lack of sex toy knowledge notwithstanding. Since she’s my first and only lover, she’s taken great pleasure in showing me everything she knows, and those things stick with me.
I’m in the middle of one of the good dreams when something disturbs my sleep. I’m warm and cozy beneath the blanket, worn out from our exertions to rescue the slaves, and I was deep in REM, so I’m pretty groggy when I roll over to see why I’m awake.
The door to my cabin is just sliding shut, a shadow slipping through at the last moment.
Except the guys are either asleep or in the cockpit, and Vick is in stasis.
I throw off the covers and race through the door and down the hall to the medbay. The hatch barely gets out of my way in time for me to avoid crashing into it. I skid into the small room, slipping and sliding in my socks, not having bothered to put on my boots.
Everything is quiet. Vick’s stasis box is undisturbed, her passive face relaxed and unlined in sleep. The equipment hums softly, emitting an occasional beep when her vital signs are regularly scanned. There’s no indication of any problem. Vick hasn’t moved.
I don’t have my comm, so I step to the wall beside the door and activate the shipwide intercom. “Lyle? You up on the bridge?”
“Kelly? No, it’s me, Alex. I took over for Lyle about thirty minutes ago. You need something? You’re supposed to be asleep.”
I hesitate. What do I need? “I think I need your tech expertise.”
“Well, I can’t leave the bridge, but head on up here and I’ll try to help.”
Three minutes later I’m sitting in the copilot’s chair, trying to phrase my request so I don’t sound like a raving lunatic. “I was out of it, just waking up. I could have dreamed it,” I begin. “But I swear I saw someone leaving my room a few minutes ago. I checked on Vick in the medbay. She’s fine. You’re here, and—” I lean over and check a readout on the console. “Biosigns place Lyle in his cabin. So what did I see?”
Alex mulls it over. “We’re all exhausted. Undercover Ops is running us ragged, especially Vick. Look, I can check the security footage of your cabin for the last half hour.” He reaches forward and fiddles with some of the controls. A vidscreen activates in the lower right corner of the forward viewport. The timestamp shows it as thirty minutes prior. “Here, I’ll speed it up.”
“Are we always being recorded?” I ask, a little unnerved that there’s footage of me undressing somewhere. Or going to the bathroom. Or bathing.
“This is a Storm shuttle. Yes, we’re monitored. No one watches it unless there’s an issue. And after each mission debriefing, the footage is stored and locked down. You’d need to file a special request to see it and have a damn good reason.”
That… doesn’t really make me feel better about it, but I can’t change it.
We watch the feed in silence. I’m not a restless sleeper. Other than rolling onto my side once, I don’t change position during the entire half hour.
Nothing else changes, either.
The door doesn’t open. No one enters the room. Then without warning, I wake up, throw off the covers, and race from the cabin. A second camera picks me up in the corridor, and a third catches my actions in the medbay. I look like a crazy person.
“Must have been a vivid dream,” Alex says with a sympathetic smile. “You were deeply asleep. Seems normal enough to me.”
“Maybe,” I acknowledge. Except, no matter which way I turn it in my head, it feels real. Contrary to the evidence, I would swear someone had been in the room with me, and my empathic sense says that someone meant me harm.
Chapter 27: Vick—Mirror, Mirror
I am disturbed.
OF COURSE I can’t just go into stasis and catch up on the sleep I’ve lost, have a nice, peaceful, restful experience, wake up refreshed. No, that would be normal. By all accounts, most patients come out of stasis well-rested and not remembering anything from the time spent in the box.
Me? I dream. And I do it vividly.
My first sense is one of intense longing, so powerful it hurts like a gaping hole has been
cut in the center of my chest. I’m both parched and starving, but not craving water and food.
I want Kelly. So painfully that I feel incomplete without her.
So I go find her.
One minute I’m in the stasis box, my sensory perceptions cut off from the rest of the world. The next, I’m moving along the transport’s central corridor, being pulled like a fish hooked on a line. Except I’m not struggling against it. I want to be caught.
I am cautious, though. I check my corners. I’m careful not to trigger any hatches into opening. I have the implants deactivate the security cameras, instead instructing them to show and record old footage of empty passageways, leaving no trace of my being there. It makes no sense. Why am I hiding? I’m part of this team. Am I worried they’ll be mad that I left stasis?
Which prompts the most important question. How did I get out of the box?
I’m able to rationalize the answer pretty easily. I didn’t get out. I’m still inside, dreaming. But it’s all so very real. And if it’s a dream, why am I sneaking around? Cameras aren’t going to record my dream self.
Regardless, I creep along until my implants inform me that I’ve reached the cabin Kelly and I had been sharing on our way out to the slave installation. Except I shouldn’t need that information. I already know this.
I step into the range of the hatch’s proximity detector, allowing this door to open. It slides aside, casting a swath of bright light across the metal flooring. The bunks remain in shadow on the left side, Kelly curled up, facing the wall, sound asleep.
And she’s beautiful, the way her thick blond hair flows across the blanket in soft waves, the curve of her body beneath the thin covering, the gentle sound of her breathing in the otherwise silent compartment.
I move to the side of her bunk. The hatch closes behind me, plunging the room into near darkness again, emergency lighting along the walls casting a faint glow throughout the small space. Closer now, I view her face in profile, the delicate slightly turned-up nose, the long lashes, the full lips.
I want… I don’t know what I want. But I’m incomplete. I have to make her mine, part of me, fill that hole that’s widening around my heart. And I don’t know how to do that.
Again, I’m struck by the inconsistencies. I already have her. She’s mine. We’re bonded by our empathic connection and by love. Kelly says for her it takes on a physical representation, a thick bright blue line that runs from her soul to mine. She’s still convinced I have a soul.
I’m still not sure.
Especially right now.
Right now, I have the terrifying urge to shake her awake, force her to open the channel between us, pour my negative feelings into her through that connection—and I have so many dangerous emotions right now: anger, fear, lust. It would overload her, send her into emotion shock, and I. Don’t. Care.
Back at the slave base, I couldn’t get to Kelly, so I took a replacement, a girl who looked like her, but she didn’t feel right. She had no gift. She couldn’t take my pain. I found no connection, so I carved one out of skin and flesh. When she died, I felt nothing, but the hole widened. The need increased.
I’m incomplete.
I will be whole.
I reach toward Kelly’s shoulder, but when my fingers are inches from contact, she mutters something unintelligible, then rolls toward me. “Vick…,” she sighs, still deep in sleep. So much love, so much affection in that one word. It hurts. I snatch my hand away. Her eyelids flutter, and I race for the door. The bunk creaks with the shifting of her weight as she sits up, but the hatch slides shut behind me.
Not clear yet. I need a hiding place. The computer in my head directs my attention to the overhead ventilation system. But that’s wrong too. It’s not a computer. It’s an AI, a… friend, and her name is—
Flash. Then pain and more pain. Blinding white lights pierce through my eyeballs, seeking the remnants of my organic brain and lancing it with agony. I squeeze my eyelids shut, wondering when I opened them.
Do not do that again, VC1’s voice warns in my head.
I’m disoriented, the last vestiges of the nightmarish dream fading into vague memory. Where the fuck am I? Hints nudge my senses: the lack of a ship’s murmuring engines, a hard table beneath me, antiseptic smells, humming and beeping medical equipment.
At a guess, I’m back on Girard Moon Base in the Storm’s medcenter or some other facility of its like.
You are correct. You are also still damaged, though some repairs have been made, and your timing is inopportune. Your heightened emotional state has burned off the anesthesia faster than anticipated and I am having difficulty returning you to unconsciousness. Between surgeries is not a good time for wakefulness.
I was having a nightmare, I tell her, turning my head from side to side, listening for other clues. Can’t remember the details. No people in the room. I really have surprised them. But the monitors are beeping faster, and somewhere distant an alarm sounds, muffled by a closed door.
That should not be possible. Stasis patients do not dream.
I’m not typical, I remind her, unnecessarily. If anyone knows how different I am from most human beings, it would be VC1. After all, she’s a major part of the difference. There’s something else too. Something disturbing that happened right before Alpha Team closed the lid and put me under. But it’s all hazy and vague and I can’t separate reality from dreams. Whatever it was, it slips from my mind like sand through a sieve.
I blink again, opening and closing my eyes too quickly to see whatever it is VC1 doesn’t want me to see, relieved that I now have two eyelids to blink with. So yeah, they’ve fixed some things. But not everything, according to my AI. I flex my hands at my sides. Some soreness, but nothing unbearable, so those have been repaired as well.
But what about…? Curiosity swells like a rising tide. I wrap my fingers around the edges of the table I’m lying on, bracing myself.
VC1 figures it out a moment before I take further action. Do not—she warns, but too late.
I open my eyes and keep them open.
It takes a moment for them to adjust to the brilliant white surgical lighting. It glints off the metal instruments gripped by robotic limbs positioned all around my head—immobile now, but no doubt in use on me within the last hour.
Mechanical surgery for a mechanical being. The irony is not lost on me.
I lift my head with effort, noting the wide view window embedded high up on the wall past my feet. There’s motion behind the glass, undistinguishable figures, some facing me, other rushing about doing indeterminable things, but I’m too weak, and my head drops back down with a dull thud.
Movement to my left and right draw my attention there, and I freeze from the inside out.
Mirrors. Two of them on each side, spotless reflections of my ill-conceived miniscule actions. The doctors in the observation booth would use them to view every step of the robotically conducted surgery, checking for precision and error.
I want to crawl under the table, but the damage is done. I can’t hide from my own reflection.
My eye might have been fixed, and they’ve replaced my ear. But that’s the extent of the surgeries my med team has performed so far. I can see why the doctors needed a break.
I’m as horrific, as grotesque, as I’d feared. The right side of my “face” glints in the harsh overhead lights, the metal flashing with each small movement of my head. My right eye blinks back at me, seeming out of place in its inhuman landscape of steel. The ear on that side, covered in synthflesh, stands out even more with no hair to hide it and everything around it in varying shades of gray.
My left cheek fared better. The real organic skin on that side is pock-marked in some places, crisscrossed by healing scars in others. When they’re done with me, none of this nightmare will be visible, the injuries concealed, the metal buried beneath a “Vick Corren” mask that’s fooled everyone, including me, into believing I’m a living, breathing human being.
I
knew. I’ve known since the accident. But I wanted the illusion. I needed it. When VC1 told me she couldn’t break the encryptions on my medical records, I didn’t press her to keep trying. Deep down, I didn’t want to see.
And now I have.
I take a deep breath that stutters in my chest. A single tear slides over the metal planes of my manufactured face like a raindrop down a corrugated roof.
A robot that cries. The Tin Man with a heart at last. And it’s breaking.
Somewhere behind me, a door slides open. Familiar footsteps cross to my side. Gentle fingers take my hand and hold it. “You weren’t supposed to wake up until they were finished,” Kelly whispers. “I reminded them that you need larger doses, and they listened, but you woke up anyway.”
I turn my head away. She lets go of my hand, takes my chin, and turns me back toward her. I close my eyes. “Don’t look at me,” I croak, sounding like I swallowed nuts and bolts.
“Why not?”
“Because you’ll flinch away. Again.” I give myself a mental kick. I hadn’t intended to mention that slip of hers at the slaver hideaway. But it hurt, and I’m hurting still.
A sigh. Her soft exhalation tickles my one skin-covered cheek. “I didn’t flinch because of how you look,” she says. “I flinched because of how much it must have hurt you, even with your suppressors running on full, even if I couldn’t feel it.”
“You’re ly—” I stop, unable to make the accusation of falsehood. Her fingertips stroke my chin. We’re in physical contact. My suppressors are down. Her love washes over me through our bond, drowning pain and self-hatred, or at least smothering them for a time. I open my eyes and stare into hers. “You’re not lying.”
“No. I’m not. You can’t lie to me. It’s unfair if I try to lie to you.”
I keep staring, disbelieving, but unable to doubt my own senses. More tears follow the first. “Why?” I breathe. “Why do you keep loving me? Why would you want me the way I am?”
“Oh, Vick.” She leans down, laying her head on my chest, wrapping her arms around my trembling form. I’m covered in a thin hospital gown and shivering from more than cold. “For one reason, because you don’t know how amazing you are,” she says, voice muffled against my shoulder. “You’re brave, loyal, protective, you encourage me to try the most incredible things, but you’re always there, watching out for me.” She lifts her head, her breath warm and close to my ridiculous human-looking ear sticking out of my steel cheek. “And you’re fantastic in bed.”