The Quantum Gate Trilogy

by Eric Warren

  “What is going on with you?” Frees asked. “This is the third time you’ve zoned out on me like that. I knew I shouldn’t have let you drive.”

  “Fine, take it.” She pulled the keys from the ignition and tossed them into his waiting hand.

  “Look, if you don’t want to tell me what’s wrong that’s fine. But when it puts both our lives in danger then I need to know.”

  “Oh come on,” Arista said. “We weren’t even going twenty. I think we’ll survive.”

  Frees stared at her a moment, then mounted the bike again. Reluctantly, she got on behind him, trying to scoot back as far as possible. She wished they’d chosen a four-wheeled vehicle. At least then she’d have a little more personal space.

  “I think we need to call it. Head back to the hyperloop.” Frees said. “It’s been an exhausting day.”

  “I couldn’t agree more.”

  Arista really was sorry she’d crashed the bike, but not sorry enough to come out and apologize to Frees about it. She didn’t want to admit he’d been right; she couldn’t drive it with just one hand. Another thing she couldn’t do. She’d add it to the list.

  But it was more than that. She couldn’t stop thinking about those people. All six of them, suspended in those giant glass jars back in the Cadre. Charlie’s prisoners. Humans who had been grown and stored by the machines to turn the Peacekeepers into semi-autonomous beings. Since human beings were the only thing that could break through the base programming, Charlie had figured out he’d needed a store of them.

  Who knew how long they’d all hung up there. He’d said one of them was almost seventy-years-old. The woman’s entire experience being nothing but semi-comatose floating in some pink liquid for every day she’d existed. It felt unbearable to watch. And Arista couldn’t allow it to continue. She wouldn’t stand by while Charlie used those people for his own whims and then put them back into storage like they were a boat you only take out when the weather is warm.

  So she’d killed them. Terminated what little life they had in hopes maybe the next one would be better. At least they wouldn’t be stuck in some kind of perpetual hell. But what if there had been another way? What if she could have freed those people, taught them how to interact and live in the real world? Wouldn’t that have been better than eliminating them? Within ten minutes of Arista learning she hadn’t been the last human after all, it was by her own hand her solitude came to pass.

  Some nights she dreamed about breaking them out of the jars, just like she did. But instead of putting a series of bullets in their heads she had gathered them up, saved them from Charlie. Brought them to live with her and Frees, Jill, and Max. Figured out a way to find food for them all, taught them all what it meant to be human in a world full of machines.

  It was a pipe dream at best and she knew it. There was no way Charlie would have let her leave with them. Destroying his AI had brought so much destruction there was no way all of them would have survived.

  But what if one of them had? What if one had made it out somehow? They could have become friends. And for the first time in her life she would have felt like she wasn’t so alone anymore.

  “Hey!” Frees yelled over the roar of the engine. “You’re doing it again. That makes four!”

  She sighed, keeping her eyes on the ground. “Can you just get us back to the station? Do we have to talk?”

  “I think you need it. I know something is going on so you might as well tell me what it is.”

  “What do you think it is, Frees?” she snapped.

  “I think you’re upset about us not being able to find your parents,” he said, his voice more chipper than usual. “But as soon as I rebuild my scanning equipment I should be able to track them down. We just need to highjack a strong signal.”

  “That wasn’t it, but thanks for reminding me I’m failing as a daughter too.”

  Frees hit both brakes at once, bringing the cycle to a stop on the side of the two-lane. “Then what is it?” He turned back to look at her. “Because this is getting out of hand.”

  “The humans, Frees. Jesus. It’s like you can’t take a hint.” She closed her eyes and rubbed her temple.

  “The ones back in the Cadre? What, you don’t actually think you could have done anything else for them do you?”

  “I do. Maybe if I hadn’t been so trigger-happy we could have figured something out. There might have been a way to save some of them. Even just one. Just for a while.”

  He hesitated. “But they were vegetables. There was nothing inside. Their brains probably hadn’t developed, even the youngest one would have been too old to undergo any kind of therapy. It isn’t like my people have experience treating humans. Machine therapists are programmed to…well, you know. You dated one.”

  “We weren’t dating,” she said through gritted teeth.

  “Whatever you were doing is beside the point. Even Jonn, having full autonomy, would have no clue how to help someone who was developmentally an infant. There’s nothing else you could have done. You saved those people from a long, hard life.”

  “I guess,” Arista said. But now Frees’d mentioned him, she couldn’t not think about Jonn too. They’d been searching for him for the past three weeks with no luck. Maybe he’d died shortly after escaping the production floor. Or maybe he’d gone back to being his old self and just didn’t know how to find or get in contact with her. Whatever the reason, she didn’t really miss him. He’d often had a skewed vision of their relationship; he’d seen them as star-crossed lovers while she’d seen him as nothing more than a means to an end. Someone who could help her fit into machine society’s social situations easier. Wherever he was, she hoped he’d found peace.

  Frees turned to face her in earnest. “Listen to me. There was nothing else you could have done. You did the only thing you possibly could have. Don’t beat yourself up over being in the middle of an unwinnable scenario. For someone thrust into that kind of position, I thought you handled yourself really well.”

  She managed a terse smile. “Thanks.”

  Frees turned back and started the cycle back up. As they made their way back down the highway, Arista leaned into him and accessed the net for methods on rehabilitating emotionally underdeveloped humans.

  Three

  Frees drove them back into the city, pulling up close to the nearest hyperloop station entrance. The network, it seemed, had been close to brand-new when the machines took over. It really hadn’t been used much. The machines didn’t like it because it was underground which provided too many opportunities for unexpected shutdowns due to lack of solar power; but why would they need to use it? They had the maglev trains, the personal transport ships, and even the Gates. The hyperloop was redundant almost as soon as it had been built.

  Most of the stations had been either closed or ignored, however, the entrance to this one was tucked in between two small office buildings. Before they pulled up, Arista and Frees yanked their hoods over their heads. Frees stood out in a crowd easily and Arista’s image had been transmitted to every digital screen across the globe when Charlie had first been hunting her three weeks ago. Even though it wasn’t up anymore, she wasn’t about to take the chance and show her face in a crowd. Not until she knew the Peacekeepers had fallen apart.

  They hopped off the motorcycle, grabbing what little food they’d procured from the other locations they’d visited. Frees stashed the cycle back where he’d gotten it: a parking garage behind one of the office buildings. “Just a little more dinged up than when we took it,” he said, walking back to the underground entrance.

  When they’d first found this station the entrance to the outside had been blocked off by a metal gate that Frees easily pulled aside. Once they were back in, Frees replaced the gate just as they’d found it, to deter any Peacekeepers from looking too closely. Arista wasn’t even sure they knew about the hyperloop network. It was buried much deeper than any of the other lines and when they’d first stumbled upon the main atrium everythin
g had been powered down and off for at least eighty or ninety years.

  After descending what seemed like an unending line of steps, they reached the small station, with Frees calling up a pod to take them back to Jill’s place.

  “Is one enough?” Arista asked, eyeing the satchel on his back.

  “I think we can squeeze in,” he replied. The hyperloop pods were compact and not spacious at all, but considering she only had to sit in them for a few seconds at a time, Arista had learned to white-knuckle her way through it. Still, she couldn’t help but feel a tug of anxiety every time one of those pods pulled up in the station.

  Frees ducked in first, tucking his satchel between his feet and Arista slid in beside him, having to push into his shoulder to make sure the pod door didn’t close on her. That was one thing about Frees, his structure didn’t allow him much give. It was like pushing up against a brick wall.

  The pod door slid closed and the vehicle jolted forward, pulling them back up against the seat. Arista closed her eyes and tried to think about anything else but all she could see were those people floating in those large, pink canisters. Comatose and yet crying out. Wanting relief.

  Bang!

  “What was that?” Arista yelled.

  “Nothing, we’re here,” Frees replied, his mouth set in a line.

  She opened her eyes. They’d arrived at the station closest to Jill’s house. The door on the pod slid open and Arista took a deep breath as she got out, no matter if it was dank and musty. At least it wasn’t inside that little pod.

  Frees got out behind her and they made their way back up the steps, adjusting their hoods to make sure they still covered their heads. Jill’s neighborhood was full of families; parents pushing their kids around in strollers, people jogging, or walking to the nearest maglev station to get to work. And all of them machines. All of them playing a part in what Charlie had called “the plan”. His great experiment to try and exceed human society on all levels.

  Jill’s house was only a few blocks away which they covered in very little time. They’d made the jaunt so many times they’d worked out a series of shortcuts. Paths through backyards and over private property, but it wasn’t like anyone would ever say anything. As long as they were still husks people wouldn’t make a fuss. They would shrug and go on with their lives as if they’d never even seen Frees and Arista.

  And that’s how they liked it. Until they could turn everyone, it was best to stay as inconspicuous as possible.

  “Whad’ya bring me?” Jill yelled from the living room as Frees opened the back door, allowing Arista to enter first.

  “Nothing,” Arista said, shrugging off her hoodie and hanging it on the coat hanger. “Got run off a farm by a crazy man with a shotgun, though, so that was fun.”

  “A shotgun, huh?” Max asked, appearing around the corner. She was tall with her strawberry-blonde hair cropped short on the sides and tussled on top. “Too bad he didn’t take the shot.”

  “Hahaha, you’re so funny, Max!” Arista rolled her eyes and pushed past her, in no mood for her attitude today.

  Max had been ambivalent toward Arista ever since she’d purposely broken her neck and stolen her clothes. How was Arista supposed to know she would become autonomous right then and there? That was back before Arista even knew what she could do or why. It was supposed to be an easy swap job; get the clothes, get out of there before anyone saw her. No one was supposed to go ochre. But Max had decided to blame Arista about everything bad in her life. Since then they maintained a shaky truce of Max making daily threats to Arista and Arista ignoring them to the best of her ability.

  Jill was in the living room, hunched over a small box with at least a thousand wires running out of it to all different parts of the room. Despite being trapped in the body of what looked like a sixty-seven-year-old human, she was the spryest of the group. Arista had also changed her, albeit unknowingly, ten years earlier when she was on the run with her parents. “Leavin’ me high and dry again, huh Isty?” Jill said, not looking up from her work.

  “It wasn’t her fault,” Frees said from behind her. “The machine she changed had some kind of built-in prejudice against humans.”

  “I know the feeling,” Max mumbled.

  “Oh, give it a rest already,” Jill said. “You’ve been berating the poor girl for long enough. Life’s hard enough without someone on your case all the time.”

  Arista appreciated Jill’s stepping in but she didn’t say anything. Best to make it look like Max’s barbs didn’t affect her at all than give her the satisfaction of appreciating someone standing up for her.

  “Didja manage to get anythin’?” Jill asked.

  “A few more parts for my scanners. And we picked up a few more days’ worth of food. Enough to get by.”

  Jill fell silent for a moment, her hands moving faster than Arista could see working on whatever was in front of her. It looked like a modified charging cube. “Well?” Jill said tapping her foot as she worked. “Ain’t ya gonna ask me what I’m workin’ on?”

  “She’s been dying to tell you,” Max said to Frees. She crossed her arms and leaned up against the doorframe.

  “What are you working on, Jill?” Frees asked, keeping his voice even and winking at Arista as he did it.

  “Don’t get smart,” she said. “I’ve almost got it. It’s a brand-new power pack. Three times the normal charge you’d get from one of these cubes. THREE!” she shouted. “And I’ve disabled the GLS. You won’t have to worry about uploading your location to central every time you need a charge. And it charges in half the time. Or it will when I finish.” She slapped the side of the cube for good measure.

  “No more energy drives?” He glanced down at his chest. When they’d first met, Frees had shown Arista all the energy drives Jill had given him. It was how he stayed powered off the grid since every charging cube uploaded your location. But he’d had to keep them supercooled in his modified refrigerator. This seemed much simpler.

  “What about mobility?” Arista asked. “Do we have to carry it around with us?”

  “Why would you need to carry it, dear girl?” Jill asked. “You don’t even need it at all. It’s the rest of us I’m thinking about. But if you need it in a pinch, I’ll make it mobile. Though we should all be fine charging here.”

  “Now that’s settled,” Frees said, stepping over Jill’s wires and tools. “I’m going to work on my own special project. See if I can’t get the scanners working. Wanna help?” he asked Arista.

  “No, I think I’m just going to lie down. It’s been a long day.”

  “Typical,” Max said.

  Arista ignored her. “Thanks anyway,” she said to Frees.

  Frees shrugged. It was a habit he’d picked up from Arista, from watching her these past few weeks. When they first met he didn’t do it at all, and even now she suspected it was involuntary. He copied her movements without even knowing it. If she brought light to it she was sure he’d stop immediately. He had prided himself on being as different as possible from humanity, hence the lack of skin all over his body. But she liked that he did it.

  Frees headed up the stairs when an image flashed in the corner of Arista’s vision. A notification from the Device. She glanced down at her left arm where they’d temporarily installed the phone she stole after Frees broke her out of the Cadre’s torture. It was the same phone she’d managed to contact her mother on, albeit briefly. She’d made the call shortly after destroying Charlie, hoping his destruction might trigger some kind of worldwide “all clear”. But all she’d gotten in return was a few words from her mother: I can’t. Then she’d lost the call. But she kept it in case her mother called back, despite trying over a hundred times to reach her again.

  “What is it?” Frees asked, staring at her.

  “My phone,” she said. “It’s ringing.”

  Four

  Arista stared at her arm for a moment, unsure what to do.

  “Are you going to answer it?” Jill asked
from behind her.

  “No, she’s not,” Frees said.

  “I’m sorry. She’s not?” Arista’s eyes narrowed.

  “It’s a trap. I told you that you should have thrown that comm away when your mother called, not install it in yourself. The Cadre could still track you using it. I’m sure it is some Peacekeeper who thinks he’s gotten smart, broken into the central database, and is tracking you right now.”

  “Then why aren’t they here with a gun to my head?”

  Frees didn’t respond.

  “It’s her. I know it’s her. This is exactly why I said we needed to keep it.” Arista reached around and tapped above her ear with the fingers on her left hand.

  “Wait—” Frees began.

  “Hello?” Arista said, her heart pumping. Warnings flashed in her vision, telling her to breathe deeply, to lower her excitement levels.

  “Arista Barnes?” A female voice on the other end asked. Not a voice she recognized.

  She cleared her throat too loudly. “Who is this?”

  “May we move to visual communication, please? I need your assistance.”

  “First tell me who you are and how you got this number.” Arista glanced at her companions. Jill eyed her with interest, Max had tensed up, and Frees remained frozen to the stairs, three steps up.

  “My name is Forsythia Wellington. I have this number because you used it to talk to your mother twenty-four days ago. I tracked the signal. You’re not going to believe me when I tell you this, but in the interest of transparency I will tell you anyway. I am a human…like you.”

  Arista cut the call.

  “Why did you do that?” Jill asked.

  “It was someone claiming to be a human. Obviously she’s lying. Frees is right; it is someone trying to infiltrate us here. A Peacekeeper. She said it herself, she tracked the signal. I need to get rid of this—”