The Sentient

by Nadia Afifi

  “Is everything ok?” D’Arcy asked, her voice quieter than Lee’s but thick with tension.

  Amira switched to text. Armed guards at entryway. Looking closely at everyone who passes. They’ll notice the mismatch when my Eye is scanned. At the Academy and the tolerant enclaves of Westport, no one would question the masculine name attached to a young woman, but she sensed the stern-faced guards ahead would treat her with a higher degree of scrutiny, and a single facial recognition scan in a back office would end the charade swiftly.

  “Can you sneak past?”

  No. Need distraction.

  “I got it,” he said. “Keep walking.”

  Amira drew closer to the security checkpoint. She glimpsed the small, inconspicuous camera near the ceiling and pulled her hoodie around the sides of her face. The security guards stood directly ahead, peering closely at badges and faces as they waved people through.

  Suddenly, the music blaring from the hall’s main speakers cut off abruptly, replaced by loud, ecstatic moans that drowned out the hum of the crowd. Bewildered, hundreds of eyes turned to the screens that flanked the curved walls of the room. The generic footage of smiling Sherpas and Tibetan cuisine had been replaced with the source of the moaning – a naked woman engaged in enthusiastic sex with an indiscernible number of equally willing partners, both human and mechanical.

  A moment of stunned silence was followed by shrieks and gasps. Parents rushed to shield innocent eyes, while others remained transfixed by the screens, pulling out handheld cameras to record the moment. The two guards floundered for several seconds, equally distracted by the scene, until both ran forward to help a beleaguered woman with the main monitor, where the actress was now performing a handstand with her legs spread wide, and Amira walked swiftly and silently past the now-abandoned checkpoint. Welcome back, M. Young, the checkpoint screen read as she crossed into the restricted area and rounded the corner.

  “Nice work,” she said softly as the chaotic sounds of the main hall faded behind her.

  “I’d already hacked into the communication channels, so the switch was easy, but they’ll override it soon,” Lee said.

  Amira pictured the sullen teenager with the smile that was evident in his voice.

  “I should never have taken you to the Satyr Road with me,” Amira replied, though she was grinning.

  “The other kids here think it was a great idea,” Lee said over roaring laughter in the background. “Now take a left and go down two levels to the docking zone.”

  Past the security checkpoint, Amira walked swiftly, keen to evade scrutiny. With Lee’s help, she navigated through the dimly lit hallways of NASH’s restricted zone. She lowered her head, avoiding eye contact when the occasional NASH employee crossed her path.

  The NASH docking bay resembled its maritime equivalent. It comprised of a long line of shuttles at its center, each with its own air-locked exit. Beyond the parked transports was a landing area through an arched door, where worker robots signed in departures and arrivals.

  “How am I getting out of here?” Amira asked softly.

  “You’re not going in a shuttle,” Lee said. “I’ve checked the security log and it looks like they aren’t letting anyone or anything into the Carthage, like you said. Even in the private docking bay.”

  Amira sighed. Two women in lab coats walked past her and she stood upright, pacing as though waiting for someone to arrive.

  “There has to be a way out,” Amira continued in a low voice. “Is the Carthage too far to get to in a space suit?”

  “Let me check,” Lee said over a flurry of typing. “Yes. You won’t have enough oxygen and power to get there from its current location in orbit.”

  “Then there’s no way to get there, if there’s no traffic allowed.”

  “Wait,” Lee said. “You just gave me an idea! There are no shuttles going to the Carthage from NASH.”

  “Right.”

  “Doesn’t mean no shuttles are going there at all.” Lee went silent for several minutes while Amira continued to pace.

  “Found it!” Lee said with triumphant satisfaction. “This is going to be tough, but I have a plan.”

  Minutes later, Amira stood in a narrow, isolated corridor below the restricted area’s private docking bay, quickly fitting into a slim, silver-toned space suit, the flag of New Tibet fastened to the lapel. She slid on the helmet, wondering how something so sleek and simple could keep her safe from the cruel vacuum that awaited her beyond the airlock. Only decades ago, space suits were twice the size, but demand had fueled a new necessity for something light, minimalist and even stylish.

  “Hurry up,” Lee said tensely.

  “Is someone coming?”

  “More like someone’s going,” he said. “I’ve been watching NASH’s radars on everything in orbit in the area. There’s a shuttle heading toward the Carthage. It came from the Atlantic Harbor, looks like.”

  And Amira understood how Lee intended to get her to the Carthage.

  “Amira? You ok?”

  “I think so. Lee, you should be in the Academy, you know that?”

  Lee met her compliment with silence. Amira longed to see his reaction – excitement, dismissal, apprehension. Given his stoic demeanor, the likeliest reaction was none at all.

  “If I make it back in one piece, let’s talk about it again,” Amira said seriously.

  “Ready?” Lee asked.

  “Ready. Let’s do this.”

  In her years at the Academy, Amira completed her share of space simulation training, an unspoken requirement for ambitious students who planned futures in orbit. Despite this, she lingered for several minutes in the airlock, gripping its handles to steady herself. After several deep breaths, she opened the outer door and passed through.

  Overwhelmed by the black canvas before her, she stared at her feet as she rotated around the airlock’s entrance. The door closed behind her and Amira fought the urge to retreat back into the harbor. Space was not welcoming – Amira felt consciously alien in her infinite surroundings.

  “Amira?”

  She drew in a sharp breath at the closeness of Lee’s voice, surreal in her surroundings.

  “Still here,” she croaked.

  “How is it?” D’Arcy shouted in the background.

  “It’s….” Amira’s voice trailed away. She faced Earth, tracing the familiar borders between land and sea. Night fell over the western Americas, the horizon spreading along the deep blue of the Pacific. Along the coast, the bright lights of Westport shone back at her like a flare amid the web of roads and habitation, marking the spot where Lee and D’Arcy sat on a ship, guiding her. The American southwest, a patch of darkness amid intricate webs of city light, peered through a curtain of swirling clouds, where Amira once gazed into the sky every night in search of passing stations. Now, she looked back.

  “Incredible, indescribable, amazing,” Lee finished for her. “Amira, you need to move diagonally away from the station, to your northeast. I’m sending you the path on your Eye.”

  Guided by the coordinates, Amira propelled herself forward with her suit’s jetpack. Despite her many hours of anti-gravity training and space simulations, she sensed the beginnings of motion sickness. Her stomach flipped with each movement of her legs and feet, which searched in vain for solid ground. She closed her eyes, but it only worsened the feeling of being upside down. Instead, she focused on the navigator displayed on her Eye.

  Earth was to her left and she kept it in her vision, a reassuring anchor in the void. On the other side, the Osiris station shone brightly despite its considerable distance, the only station besides NASH that operated in geostationary orbit. The remote station’s purpose was the subject of much speculation, and though curious, Amira had no desire to deviate off course.

  “Turn your lights off,” Lee said. “The shuttle’s getting closer.�
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  Amira switched off the reflection on her suit and the small light in her helmet, rendering her invisible for the crucial part of Lee’s plan. The suit she wore was identical to the ones at the Academy, a small comfort as she steered ahead.

  Then she saw it. A single compact shuttle, speeding forward with a thin sliver of fuel exhaust trailing silently behind. Gently, she propelled herself toward the vehicle, timing her forward momentum carefully. As it approached, she pressed firmly on her jet accelerator and sped alongside its center. Her stomach lurched violently but she continued to accelerate. She reached forward. Her fingers barely wrapped around the handle of the side door when it veered slightly. Her arm jerked violently as her body swung against the side of the craft, but she maintained her grip as the shuttle neared medium Earth orbit. Amira clung tightly to the handle, hoping no one inside heard the impact of the collision.

  She would not have long to find out. The Carthage station grew larger and larger by the second as the ship slowed in approach. It was modest in size compared to many other research stations but still made for an imposing sight. The station’s body was disc-shaped, three levels high with oval, blue-tinted windows encircling its perimeter. Several prong-like shapes stretched out from its base in every direction like the spokes of a spinning wheel, where shuttles could dock and depart.

  “Approaching the dock, Lee,” she said. “Can you see anything on your radar?”

  Silence on the other end. The map in the corner of the Eye flashed in and out, accompanied by faint static.

  “Lee, can you hear me?”

  No response.

  “Lee?” she asked again in a smaller voice. Lee and D’Arcy were gone, out of her reach. A low rumble signaled the shuttle’s connection to the Carthage, and Amira felt a loneliness she had never experienced before. An isolation that surpassed even her escape from the New Covenant.

  She remained alongside the shuttle while it docked on one of the station’s spokes. Her breath rattled back at her in her helmet, loud and sharp. After waiting for a period, hoping the shuttle’s passengers had all boarded the Carthage, she opened the hatch. Though at first she’d been terrified to step into space, Amira felt her heart now racing as she prepared to leave it, unsure of what or who would await her inside the shuttle. Counting to three, she pulled herself into the airlock.

  After confirming she was alone, Amira unfastened her helmet with a sigh of relief. The air felt cool and electrifying. The shuttle was thankfully empty, though it yielded no clues as to who took it to the Carthage and why.

  The entrance into the Carthage from the shuttle’s airlock was closed. Every station in low Earth orbit had a quote or proverb inscribed on each of its entrances chosen by its founder to signify the purpose of the station. The Carthage was built to research the effects of long-term space travel on the human body and mind, and its motto read:

  The seeds of life – fiery is their force, divine their birth, but they are weighed down by the body’s ills or dulled by limbs and flesh that’s born for death. That is the source of all men’s fears and longings, joys and sorrows. They cannot see the heaven’s light, shut up in the body’s tomb, a prison dark and deep – Virgil.

  Amira tentatively pulled down on the door latch of the Carthage station. She floated in zero gravity along the stretching, narrow pathway into the station’s main body, also known as the harbor.

  Something was wrong. Amira felt it the moment she passed the airlock. The air was thick with apprehension and her head throbbed as a high-pitched ringing pierced her ears. It grew louder with each pull forward along the corridor.

  Amira clutched the railings on the sides of the wall, her hands sliding with sweat. Eventually she paused, reeling from the pain in her head, and reached with careful fingers to pull out the Eye. To her surprise, the ringing lessened, leaving behind a faint, nagging echo.

  The lights in the narrow corridor flickered on and off. Another wave of dizziness struck Amira and a new sound rose above the faint ringing, clouded as though coming from a whispering voice. The voice was human, the words unintelligible. She could not tell if the voice was male or female, fearful or calm, nor what was being said or where it came from, but the whispering continued relentlessly until it rose in volume, reigniting the dull pain in her skull. She looked back at the entrance.

  At the end of the corridor, framed under convulsions of light, a body floated lifelessly.

  The body belonged to an old man with long, wavy gray hair that fanned out in every direction under zero gravity. He was clearly dead with bloodless, waxy skin and open but unseeing eyes. Before Amira had time to open her mouth to scream, the lights flickered again and the figure of Victor Zhang vanished, along with the whispering, ringing chorus in her ear.

  Trembling, Amira longed to turn back, away from this place of corpses and ghostly, distant whispers. But she heard new voices now, the sound of footsteps and muffled shouts from the harbor. She pressed forward.

  At the end of the corridor, she pulled out her badge.

  Don’t let me down, Hadrian, she thought, pressing the badge against the lock.

  The red light changed to green. With a sigh of relief, she pushed the door open.

  Inside the spinning harbor, gravity returned. She landed clumsily on her knees. Wincing, she pulled herself upright, every bone heavy and lethargic as her body adjusted to the renewed sensation of weight.

  A corridor ran along the perimeter of the Carthage’s central harbor area, a high-ceilinged circular pathway around the station that cut through several floors. Along its inner ring, doors led to interior rooms and stairways climbed the walls, up to walkways for two rows of visible prison cells. Stepping as softly as possible, given the return to gravity, Amira circled the perimeter. She noted the empty floors, the lack of guards and staff patrolling the station.

  Jeers greeted her from above. On the highest level of the station, arms dangled through bars and eyes peered from the back of dark cells. The prisoners called out to her, suggesting clothes to remove, body parts to suck. Others took no interest in her arrival, staring numbly ahead or rocking back and forth in their cells.

  Their words did not faze her but the attention they attracted did. She walked with brisk purpose, readying her hands to flash her badge at any passing guards. None revealed themselves, only a long row of convicts, subjects of science’s farthest boundaries. She scanned their feral faces, hoping to find either Parrish’s prisoner or a lone female face, framed in red hair, in the long row of men.

  Halfway around the station, the row of convicts ended. Amira entered the inner portion of the harbor through an open door. Her body tensed at the sound of new voices, angry, but different from the wild jeers of the prisoners. An argument underway.

  She followed the trail of the voices around the walkway and up to the second level. The muffled voices took shape near the door.

  “This is ridiculous, Tony, just tell us where it is!”

  “And what does M. Morgan want with Tiresia?”

  “It’s none of your damn concern!”

  “It is very much my concern, since it is my intellectual property. In either case, I couldn’t tell you where the last of it is now.”

  “If you don’t surrender it, we’ll have no choice but to create more of it. Go back to the Osiris and resume the process. I know neither of us wants that.”

  While Amira’s eyes remained fixed on the door, something in the air shifted behind her. She spun around to face a man in a red uniform and black ski mask.

  He grabbed her by the throat before she could react. In a swift motion, he pulled her roughly through the door.

  She struggled to her feet, disoriented. The guard grabbed the backs of her arms and pushed her into a chair. She kicked furiously in every direction but he was strong and quickly forced her arms behind the chair’s back.

  “Amira Valdez? How did she get here?�
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  As the man bound her hands roughly, Amira turned to the source of the question – Alistair Parrish stood anxiously before her, clearly thrown by her unexpected presence. To Amira’s right, Tony Barlow was similarly bound to a chair. He sat in dispassionate silence and turned to Amira with an odd, knowing smile.

  She scanned the room in earnest. Through the dim lighting, the walls were the dull, grimy color one would expect to find along a sewer. In addition to Parrish, the man who bound her joined a second man in a ski mask. Guards for Parrish and the Cosmics, wearing the same uniforms she saw at the police station. Another man sat strapped to a chair across the room, surrounded by trays of equipment. Though his face was bruised and bloody, Amira recognized him as the man who chased her and Lee through the Satyr Road alongside Reznik. He stared stonily ahead, ignoring the array of tools and monitors around him.

  As though the scene was not surreal enough, an even more disturbing sight awaited across the room – behind a glass partition lay a young woman, strapped to a complex apparatus of wires and feeding tubes. Her chest rose and fell softly. For a moment, Amira’s heart stopped. Had she been too late?

  Upon closer inspection, the woman was not Rozene. Her skin was the color of dark, thick honey, her jaw and angular cheeks unmistakably Valerie Singh’s, while her deep red hair, cropped around her neck, was the same copper shade as Alistair Parrish’s.

  Barlow muttered under his breath beside her. “Time deceives us. We are all things and nothing at once.”

  “Is that Maya?” Amira asked Parrish, ignoring Barlow’s strange prayer.

  “What’s that?” He blinked confusedly as he spoke, as though shaken awake from a dream. “Yes, that is my Maya. We brought her to the Carthage last year to try some experimental treatments that aren’t approved yet in Westport, but with no progress. She is as good as dead. Amira, you shouldn’t have come here.”

  Bound to a chair, far from home and her friends, Amira felt as if Parrish had given voice to her own feelings. But as the Cosmic guards glared at her with pure hatred, she refused to give in.