Algo Updates 2 | 4-5-2078 | Received
Algo Updates 3 (I fucked up) | 4-6-2078 | Received
Alliance Foundation | 5-2-2077 | Received
While Orissa was interested in what the mentioned algorithm was for, she speculated it wasn’t much use to them now. So she ordered the emails by date, hoping for something more alluring.
An Ode to the End | 8-29-2079 | Sent (Failure)
Disconnecting | 8-19-2079 | Sent
Pittsburgh Lab | 8-18-2079 | Sent
AL, LA, GA Have Fallen | 8-15-2079 | Received
Orissa clicked Pittsburgh Lab.
Leon was silent, his eyes glued to the screen like hers.
Rebecca,
My apologies for seemingly disappearing into the wilds. I assure you I’ve not yet gone mad. A whistleblower alerted me to suspicious activity being conducted at the Pittsburgh lab. It was serious enough to warrant a visit in secret, and at my immediate convenience (or inconvenience).
Upon my arrival, the lab was empty. Every computer had been stripped to the bones. There appears to be some blood in one of the chairs, but otherwise, it looks as if all twenty-five of Ivan’s researchers have up and vanished into the air.
I am sending this to you only, and I trust you’ll do with it what is best. I will continue digging around for evidence and foul play. I should return within the week.
Yours,
Dr. Varugus
“This lab has been in this state for a while,” said Leon.
Orissa only nodded. She clicked on Disconnecting.
Rebecca,
Misfortune will not stop its assault. I have just now received the alert about Missouri’s fall. I am so very sorry for your parents. I hope they are safe. The Machines’ sudden and unopposed movement toward the eastern countryside is… disturbing, to say the least.
I have my own perturbations to reveal, involving our dearest “friend,” but only when I return. I cannot risk sending them over these channels.
I anticipate frequent disconnections as I further my search for knowledge.
Be safe, Rebecca.
Yours,
Dr. Varugus
Leon sniffed. He glanced at Orissa, her eyes were unblinking, staring at the screen. She clicked the last email, An Ode to the End.
Rebecca,
Machines have descended into northern Pennsylvania. I have ensured my safety, don’t worry about that. My plans are nothing if not redundant. If the worst comes to pass and a Machine assault descends upon DC before I get there, it will be up to you to convince President Gilliad and her council to flee for Illythia. The Governor will see the light of day there, I swear it.
I will meet you at Illythia. I promise. We will bring humanity back from the edge. We will save it.
Yours,
Mattias Varugus
Leon read every word three times before he finally had the urge to speak up. When he did, he noticed goosebumps pimpling across Orissa’s neck and he went silent again.
Minutes passed, but they felt like hours before she pushed herself away from the table. She sat there for a long while, mute and unreadable.
Finally, she said, “Do you know who the Governor is?”
Leon shook his head.
“Or where Illythia is?”
Another shake of his head.
In the soft glow of her computer screen, wrinkles creased her forehead, and her jaw clenched.
“Neither do I,” she said, her words measured. “It was a waste coming here.”
“What?” Leon asked, incredulous. “You’re kidding me. A waste? How was—look.” He touched her shoulder for reassurance. “We need to find this Illythia place.”
Orissa sighed. “Why? So we can step across more bones in a dark crypt?”
“You read the same words I did. This Mattias Varugus said it was where humanity could be saved.”
Orissa looked cross. “Give it up, Leon. What are we going to find there? A cryogenic lab that serves as the womb to a new humanity?”
The way she said those words, it sounded farfetched, but Leon shrugged. “Why not? You know as well as I that humanity made some giant leaps in technology during the Rise.”
“Leaps. Not light-year-distance jumps.”
Leon shook his head, crossing his arms. “You’re just scared.”
She narrowed her eyes on him. They’d turned from jade to pools of poison. “Excuse me?”
“You’re frightened of what might be there. It’s easier to pretend nothing, to just stay here in the comforts of—”
Orissa rose from her seat like a mother bear from her den. “Comforts? You think I’m comfortable here?”
Leon didn’t budge. “I do. You have a place to live and a defined job: kill Machines. I’m asking you to follow a thread, flimsy as it might seem, that humanity might still exist—and that scares you, because you don’t know what we’ll find. Maybe it’ll confirm your suspicions, that our kind has gone extinct, and that scares you too. Because you hold some hope, some fleeting little piece of hope, that all isn’t lost.”
From the corner of his eye, he saw her fist clenching. He set his jaw. I can take a punch, he thought.
Had he pushed her a smidgen more, she would’ve swung. He was sure of it. But in his silence, she relaxed her hand and sat back down, returning to her computer. She searched the email folder for the term Illythia.
Three results appeared.
An Ode to the End | 8-29-2079 | Sent (Failure)
Termination | 4-24-2079 | Received
Coords | 4-24-2079 | Received
Orissa opened Coords.
To Admin,
Joseph Crooley here. Logistics. Newly promoted. I’m reaching out to confirm the coordinates of Illythia. In the documentation here, it says the coords are 52.254, 33.001. But in an email from my commanding officer, who I’ve not been able to reach, the coords are listed as 30.566, -6.500, putting Illythia at the Atlas Mountains in Africa.
I’m reaching out for clarification.
Joseph Crooely
Logistics Officer, U.S. Army
“Boom,” said Leon. “Good thinking. I’m saving those coordinates in my watch.”
Orissa didn’t answer. She opened the next email, Termination.
Dr. Varugus,
Officer Joseph Crooely has been terminated and placed in indefinite hold for breach of confidentiality. I regret to inform you I cannot “quarter and hang” him on account of this country still being one of laws. I assure you no encrypted information was passed to the Machines.
Ted Boringer
“Good thinking and lucky,” said Orissa.
“It just dawned on me that Africa is… not close to the Northeastern United States. At all.”
Orissa closed up her laptop and disconnected the Cradle, removing the Vaunton cube. She began stuffing everything into her backpack. “We’ll need a ship.”
“You know how to navigate the ocean?”
“The skies, stupid.”
Leon lifted his chin sagely. “Ah. That kind of ship. All right, where are we going to get one of those?”
Orissa swung on her pack. “I know of a place.”
Leon narrowed his gaze. “Mysterious. I don’t like it.”
“We’ll need a lot of firepower.” She nodded at his rifle. “More than what we have. There’s an ammunitions depot about ninety miles from here. We can stock up.”
Leon thought about it. “Ninety miles is a helluva haul from here.”
“We won’t be walking. Come on.”
He rolled his eyes. “Is there a reason you’re being so enigmatic?”
“Because,” Orissa began, not bothering to turn around as she headed out of the lab, “I don’t like when people do what you did. So this is payback.”
“What? What did I do?”
She shook her head. “What didn’t you do, Leon.”
Chapter Five
The setting sun left a brushstroke of honey in the sky. The light flared in Orissa’s scope,
but she paid it no mind. Her target flicked its ears up, gave the air a sniff, and hopped along.
The moment it paused over a patch of thick weeds, she pulled the trigger.
A blast of plasma screamed from the barrel of her rifle, and the hare fled, no worse for the wear.
Orissa lowered the gun slowly in disbelief. It was such an easy shot. Forty feet away. No wind. No battling with differential heights. Even if a hailstorm was blowing through and she was shooting down from the canopy of the forest, the scope literally told her where to put the crosshairs.
She was breathing too heavily, her hands were shaking too much.
I’m too far in my own head, she thought. Everything she learned in the lab the previous day weighed on her like the gravity of a dying sun. Especially the name in those emails.
Rebecca.
Orissa couldn’t help but wonder…
No.
No, she told herself. Nothing good comes from wondering. Nothing at all. There were probably tens of thousands of Rebeccas in the world in 2079. The chances the one mentioned in Dr. Varugus’s emails was her Rebecca… no.
“There’ll be another,” said Leon.
He held up a sack containing a fox and squirrel that they—he—had shot earlier that morning. He and Orissa had also collected an abundance of walnuts to roast by the fires at night.
“We’ve got enough to last us the couple days it’ll take to get to Twilight Garrison,” Leon claimed.
Twilight Garrison. That was the name Orissa gave a Machine outpost thirty-some miles from the lab. She’d been there twice, and the second time was a few days before freeing Leon from his indentured servitude. It had changed dramatically in her six months between visits.
On her first trip there, an eerie quietness hung over the garrison. Deadeyes stood atop circular towers shielded by impervious glass, the barrels of their sniper rifles protruding from perfectly cut holes. What appeared to be a repair and refit station was empty, its assembly lines laid bare. Turrets stood without gunners behind them, and dust and debris clung to satellite arrays and communication towers.
On Orissa’s second visit, the garrison teemed with busying Machines. The modular buildings had been rearranged into vaulted vehicle bays, and the repair and refit station churned out heavily armored military-class Machines like cars on an assembly line. Lights atop communication towers blinked with pulsing blues, and the satellite arrays had been cleaned and polished.
Something had awoken the Machines.
Orissa had been through more than her share of terrifying experiences since being enlisted as a Rogue Hunter, but none more harrowing than knowing that the metal fiends were waking from their long sleep.
“It’s getting dark,” said Leon, glancing up at the bruised sky. The setting sun had made his straw-colored hair a shade deeper. “And I’m getting tired. Let’s call it a night and get an early start in the morning.”
He yawned, shaking his head like a wet dog. Dark bags blossomed under his eyes.
Orissa frowned. She was unaccustomed to having someone else slow her down. Usually, she’d forge on until her legs gave out, her lungs burned fiercely, her eyes felt leaden.
Probably it was a good thing to stop that nonsense. Humans could only keep up that pace for so long.
I’m not a Machine, she thought—a fact all the more evident as she felt guilt puddling in her stomach while looking at Leon. She should tell him the things she’d been hiding.
But she wouldn’t. Not now. There’d be a time for that later.
She and Leon cleared away a three-foot diameter’s worth of leaves and detritus from the forest floor, then went and collected armfuls of small twigs until they had formed a sturdy bed to support the larger logs and branches that storms had felled.
Orissa unzipped a side pocket of her backpack and produced an air-tight jar. Inside were several wadded-up balls of compressed straw infused with oil. She placed one under the tinder, then took a lighter to it.
Fire hissed and spat, boiling trace amounts of water within the wood.
She and Leon sat on opposite sides of the fire, silently watching the flames creep upward and lick around the larger logs.
“Rest for a few hours,” Leon said. “I’ll take first watch.”
She scribbled in the dirt with a crooked stick. “You’re the one who said you were tired.”
“You don’t have to say anything. Your eyes tell it all. Just take my offer, huh?”
She sighed. I’m never going to get used to this. She dropped the stick and curled up beside the fire. Its heat a touch too warm on her face, but she’d slept outdoors enough to know that warmth was fleeting and she’d wake up cold and lonely soon.
Well, perhaps not lonely this time.
The dreams that night were the same as always. It seemed her mind was incapable of conjuring up more than the same three nightmares.
And nightmares they were.
She was in a bedroom, knees pulled up to her chin, shaking with fear. Her mother and father were fighting downstairs, keeping it verbal.
For now.
“I have the phone records right here, Rebecca!” her father shouted. “Christ. Fucking lie to my face again. I dare you. I dare you! You were talking to that bastard doctor again.”
“I’m telling you it’s nothing.” Orissa could tell her mother struggled to keep her composure, speaking through gritted teeth, doing her best to avoid raising her voice, if only to keep Orissa calm. “We are friends, Jonathan. Friends. That’s it.”
Her father bellowed a toxic laugh. “Friends. That’s fucking rich. Friends don’t talk for, what is it here… six hours on a Tuesday. Jesus, Rebecca. Six hours. What’d you do, gab the whole time about how you can’t wait to blow him while I’m at work next week?”
“Get out,” said her mother, words jagged and jittery.
Another laugh. If the devil could laugh, Orissa thought, doubtless it would sound the same.
“Whose name is on the deed?” her father asked humorously. “Whose name is on the credit cards, the car, every loan we’ve ever taken? You’re nothing without me, Rebecca.”
The ensuing silence felt like hot vapor in Orissa’s chest. It was a snake flicking its tongue, the unheard warning just before the deadly strike.
She knew what came next, for this scene played out the same every time: the sound of a fist hitting her mother’s jaw. The cries. The broken dishes. The overturned chairs, holes punched into the wall.
Then it would end with a murkiness swimming in her vision, and the next nightmare would begin.
Except on this night, it didn’t end. It forked in another direction.
Orissa scooted to the edge of her mattress. She closed her eyes, squeezing hot tears from beneath her lids. She got off, crouched, and reached under her bed blindly. Fingers moving, searching.
She came out with a lockbox.
Her fingers quavered as she punched in the combination. The lock clicked, the lid opened, and before she quite knew what was happening, she stood at the top of the stairs, a pistol in hand.
She heard her mom weeping in the kitchen. In the game room, bottles clanged. Shot glasses and brandy. Or maybe her father was pouring his favorite, gin with club soda.
Orissa winced, pain flaring in her chest.
Anxiety, she told herself, quenching what fears she could. She glanced at the kitchen to see her mother’s head buried in her hands, blood trickling around the lobe of her ear.
Whatever doubts Orissa had, that sight seared them right off like wine in a hot pan. She moved through the hallway, knuckles white around the grip of the pistol. She stopped in the game room entryway and waited.
Her father took a shot of island rum and looked up, belching. “What the hell are you doing out of bed?” Hate filled those bloodshot eyes. He got up, nostrils flared, a maniac hoping for a reason. A reason to bleed more violence into this world.
“I said—”
Orissa brought the pistol from around her back, aimed, a
nd shot.
Time leaped forward and visions blurred. Her mother was cradling her head, both of them sobbing.
“It’ll be all right,” her mother reassured her. “I won’t let anything happen to you, Orissa.”
The conversation fractured then, words running into each other without meaning or context. Sometimes there were glimpses of questions, of reassurances.
“…is a doctor. He’ll help us.”
Who? Orissa wished to ask. Who is a doctor?
But the ground quaked beneath her, and the roof overhead splintered to reveal a starless sky. The smell of pine filled her lungs.
A voice, urgent and pressing.
…Sa
…Issa
Orissa…
“Orissa!”
She sprang up, breath rasping in her ears. Leon stood above her, firm hand on her shoulder. His black pupils nearly swallowed the gold of his eyes.
“What?” she asked. “What is it?”
“Heard what sounded like a ship thruster, so I climbed that tree over there to have a look. There was a… I don’t know what the hell to call it. A vehicle of some sort—a ground vehicle—speeding through a field, just past the tree line. Had two Machines in it.” He licked his lips. “One of them was a Prime.”
Orissa hurried to her feet. “Helriders.” She rolled up her sleeping bag. “Snuff that fire.”
Leon stabbed a poker into the logs, separating them. Flames sparred between the wood, but then hushed to a glow of embers. “That’s as unoriginal a name as I’ve ever heard, but fitting. Looks like they came from hell.”
Rebirth (Archives of Humanity Book 1) Page 4