by Eric Warren
“We…uh, I mean—”
She held up a hand. “I’m sure you feel very close because he’s the first human male you’ve met and that gives you a connection but take my advice. Keep yourself insulated. You’ll only get hurt otherwise.”
Arista could only nod.
Echo indicated the door. “Hudson will take you back down to Research. Don’t forget: I’m counting on you.”
Arista bit her lip and turned, passing through the sliding doors to where Hudson waited for her, steadfast as always.
Nineteen
By the time they reached Research (Purple Nineteen Epsilon) Arista’s heart was in her throat. Hudson hadn’t said one word on the way there and Arista had tried to keep her focus on him as a distraction. He was the model soldier: compliant, attentive and always on duty. Were all the soldiers here like that? She hoped she wasn’t around long enough to find out.
“Hi, Mir—Arista,” Jessika said softly as they passed through the biofilter.
“Hello again.” She did her best to avoid eye contact for the moment. Breathe. Just breathe, calm yourself down, you can handle this.
The ward looked exactly like it had before, except David was nowhere to be found. If it was just the two of them, she might have a real chance at this. “Um,” Arista said, glancing at Hudson.
“Yes, Miss Barnes?” That was the nice thing about Hudson. He hadn’t changed the way he’d addressed her yet. It made her like him just a tiny bit more than the others, despite the fact he was human.
“You don’t need to be here, do you? I mean, Echo said it was a simple procedure.” She turned to Jessika. “Right?”
Jessika nodded, as if it were an afterthought.
Hudson pinched his features together. “I’ll be outside if you need anything.”
“Thanks, Hudson,” she said to his back as he passed back through the filter into the larger research area. She turned back to Jessika. “He never takes a break.”
“He’s stalwart,” Jessika replied. “Get any sleep?”
“More than I’ve had in a while.”
Her biological mother smiled. “I’m glad to hear. I was worried, you looked pale when you left yesterday.”
“It’s been a very trying few days.” Arista walked around the area, picking up and inspecting random pieces of equipment, none of which she recognized. She doubted the Device would recognize them either.
“Echo said you were willing to proceed with your arm?”
“About that,” Arista said, still not meeting Jessika’s gaze. “I have this…phobia about procedures. You know, with losing my hand, and then my arm. And both times I ended up in a place like this—or close to it. Even if the procedure is very simple I don’t know if I can do it.”
“How can I ease your fears?” Jessika asked.
“It’s just…I’d rather not do it, ever.” She had to test the waters, see if she could discern Jessika’s emotional level. Figure out exactly how to turn the woman on herself.
Jessika sighed. “Would you feel more comfortable if you were asleep? You wouldn’t even need to experience anything. You’d wake up and it would be over.”
“No!” Arista said, too loudly. “Don’t put me under. Please.”
“Okay, okay.” Jessika held up her hands, her voice soothing. “It’s okay. We won’t put you under. God, they really did a number on you, didn’t they?”
“It wasn’t easy.” Arista made sure to start breathing heavier.
“Let’s just…calm down,” Jessika said. “Let’s have a seat over here. We can talk.” She indicated a couple of chairs in the next alcove down. Arista hesitated what she thought would be a sufficient amount of time then made her way over to the chairs.
“Tell me what happened to you. I need to know so we don’t trigger any kind of anxiety.”
There it was, the empathy. Exactly what Arista needed.
“When I woke up the first time, after the incident with my hand,” she said, making her lower lip quiver, “they had me strapped to this table. The machines. And of course my hand was gone. They’d removed it before it got any worse. But they thought I was a spy—rightly I guess now I know what I know—and they tortured me.”
Jessika winced but kept her eyes on Arista.
“And when I woke up again I was in this room. With no door. They’d rigged a Gate inside the building so the only way in or out was when they activated it from the other side.”
Jessika averted her gaze and wiped away a tear. “They shouldn’t have done that,” she whispered. She reached a hand out. “I can’t even imagine what that was like for you given your condition.”
“My condition?”
“You’re claustrophobic. Or you used to be. Are you still?”
Arista tripped over her next words. This woman knew something she shouldn’t know. Only the people closest to her knew about her fear of enclosed spaces. It had gotten better ever since meeting Frees and she’d been so distracted trying to find bodies for her parents, but it was still back there, in the recesses of her brain, lurking.
“I…I am,” she admitted. She reached out and took Jessika’s hand, though she wasn’t sure why. It was warm to the touch, something she still hadn’t become used to. She gave it a squeeze then let go.
“What about the rest of your arm?” she asked.
“I was in Japan and a…Peacekeeper trapped me,” she said, suddenly turning away as a thickness grew in her throat. “In the struggle they crushed it and I couldn’t use it. And I couldn’t keep it. I found the medical ward…used the exoscalpel.” She couldn’t tell if Jessika was buying all this or not. Cutting off her own arm with an exoscalpel would have required a level of skill Arista wasn’t sure any human had. Frees had done a very precise job.
Jessika dropped her head and put her elbows on her knees. “I see why you don’t want the procedure,” she eventually said. “We’ll have to figure out something else.”
“Does that mean…?”
When she raised her head again her eyes were wet with tears. “I’m not putting you through that again. You’ve endured so much already. And I’m your mother. I’m supposed to protect you from things like that. You’re not going through anything invasive.”
Arista’s heart panged at the word mother, and she felt both betrayal and pride at this woman who was willing to stand up for her. “But what about Echo? She said I needed to have it done.”
“But fortunately I have a backup plan,” she said, standing up.
“What are you doing?”
Jessika walked back over to her workstation and began entering commands. “I’m making my official notes, for Echo and the rest of the bosses.”
“There’s more than just her?” Arista asked.
“There’s always more than just her,” Jessika said. “Always committees behind committees. Subject…” she said as she typed. “…has appendage …nerve damage. Recovery unlikely…recommend …no…further…invasive…procedures.” She finished typing. “There. That should do it.”
Arista was touched. She’d hoped to get Jessika’s cooperation, but she hadn’t realized how much the woman would be willing to give. “Thank you.”
“It’s the least I can do, after everything else. Now. What else?”
Arista hesitated to bring it up. If Jessika really did want to remove the Device maybe it wasn’t the best idea to call attention to it. But she needed the functionality. If she was going to find her parents and get them out of here she needed it.
“Can you turn it back on?” Arista asked. “The implant? I feel kind of…exposed…without it.”
Jessika leaned in. “They’re not supposed to be on inside the colony. They want to make sure they can monitor you and yours has a dampener in it which could shield you from certain systems. It’s why they turned it off as soon as you got here.”
Arista dropped her voice to match. “Can you turn it back on?”
Jessika’s gaze flitted left and right, then she leaned over to look out in
to the main research wing, but no one was close.
“You can’t act like it’s on,” she whispered. “You have to pretend like you can’t see everything you’re seeing. It gives you an unfair advantage and they don’t like that here.” She tapped a few commands into her interface and Arista experienced a flood of information coming back to her. All her vitals, the composition of the floors, walls, Jessika’s vitals including her body temperature and heartrate and a hundred other pieces of information. She had to focus to move it all to the back, to allow it to run back there. “Jarring?” Jessika asked.
“Somewhat. I forgot what it was like having it on all the time.”
Jessika took another look at Arista’s arm. “Let’s try something.” She walked over to the alcove and pulled an arm out of a drawer. It resembled Frees’ arm and the hand attached looked exactly like the one Sy had installed. Arista recoiled.
“I know. It isn’t what you want to see. But look at this.” She pointed to the end of it where it looked like a mechanical port would attach to something. “I built this specifically for you. And you can remove it at any time you like. It’s like a plug and it fits right into the end of the sleeve David showed you yesterday. It’s nothing permanent.”
“Nothing permanent?” she repeated.
“Right, you can pop it on and off as much as you like. And because you have the sleeve it automatically syncs up with your nervous system.”
Her mind y went back to Sy performing surgery on her to install that hand. She really had wanted to kill her. If technology like this existed and limbs could be swapped in and out at will, then there was no sense in permanently attaching a weapon to her.
“Are…are these standard?” Arista asked.
“Well, no. We don’t have any sleeves down here. Even though they’re older technology.”
Arista’s eyes narrowed.
“You know how sometimes things are discovered by mistake?” Jessika asked. “That’s how it was with the sleeves. Back before, long before I was born we had a few, but we could never replicate the design process. It was just one of those things that was lost to us when we lost the planet.” She glanced at the arm in her hands. “Typically we’d hardwire something like this into your arm permanently. But because of everything you’ve been through, I think it’s better if we just make it less permanent. It’s easier for everyone this way.” She held the arm out to Arista who reluctantly took it.
“It won’t attach permanently?” she asked, her heart pounding.
“No. Worst case it doesn’t come off the sleeve and you just pull the sleeve off. But it will come right off.”
Arista wasn’t sure. She’d been down this road before and it had bitten her on the ass. But Jessika was right, Echo had ordered her to have a new arm installed. And if she could remove it whenever she wanted—if Jessika was telling the truth—then it might be the best way to go.
“I coded it to you already, you just have to put one end near the other,” Jessika said.
Arista still needed this woman’s help. And she was already being very compliant. It was a risk, but it might be worth it. She slowly moved the port of the mechanical arm up to where her elbow used to be, and the sleeve did its little thing again: creating the small port automatically. As if it were hungry for the arm itself. She winced as she touched the two ends together, plugging the arm directly into the port.
“Turn to complete the connection,” Jessika said. Arista took a breath and made the turn, locking it in place.
A new flood of information reached the Device, statistics and operational efficiency of the new arm. Arista told the Device to search for any kind of weaponry, or anything that might harm her, coming up empty. She flexed the fingers and turned the arm back and forth. It was a perfect match to her other arm. Reaching out, she touched the table in front of her, feeling the cool metal of the surface. This was different from last time, but she couldn’t tell exactly how. It just…was. She reached up and brushed her hair out of her eyes, feeling each individual strand sway back.
“And there’s no…weapons in this?” Arista asked, continuing to inspect the appendage.
“Weapons? No, of course not. We don’t do that. That’s a very outdated concept.”
Arista looked up. “What do you mean?”
“The school of thought used to be that humans would be more effective against machines if they had weaponry and other advantages built into them. But it turned out most of those weapons killed their hosts. The continuous power drain would cause infections and eventually death. We stopped doing that a long time ago.”
“But you still make prosthesis,” Arista said.
“People have accidents. And not scheduled ones,” she said, leaning back. As if the idea was the stupidest thing she’d ever heard of. “But when the power requirements are kept to a minimum, such as daily movement instead of trying to obliterate an enemy, they remain quite stable. You don’t have anything to worry about,” she added. “That unit is completely self-contained. It will stop working before it does anything to you. Here, take it back off.”
Arista grasped the arm and turned it counterclockwise. There was the sound of machinery disconnecting and the arm went limp, detaching itself from the sleeve. It came off. “That was easy.”
Jessika smiled. She reattached the arm—less jarring this time—and flexed her fingers again. Arista realized she had no other choice but to trust this woman, and Jessika seemed quite genuine about helping her. She couldn’t help but feel like her plan had backfired somewhat. Here she was, trying to use this woman to get what she wanted, and Jessika was being very gracious. Could she really feel that guilty?
“Why are you helping me? Aren’t you supposed to…I dunno…do what the colony wants you to?” She couldn’t help but ask.
“I guess that’s the difference between us and the machines,” Jessika said. “We can choose to do what we want and what we don’t.”
“But won’t you get in trouble? When they find out?”
“I don’t see any need for them to. As long as you don’t go parading the ambulon around I doubt anyone would know it’s not hard-wired in.” She closed the drawer and returned to her desk, brushing some dust away.
“What about David?”
“I’ll handle David, don’t worry. Plus, he’s so focused on his other project I doubt he’ll notice either.”
Arista glanced out onto the main floor. “The new Gate?”
“Mmm-hmm.” Jessika narrowed her eyes. “He’s been working on it for years. And now it seems like he might get to use it.”
“What makes it different from the other Gates?” She obviously hadn’t seen it yet, but how different could it be?
“You know the Gate’s size is directly proportional to how far they take you, right?” Jessika asked.
No, she had not known that. She’d always just thought it they could be any size. “Yep.”
“Imagine how far one the size of the hangar out there could take you,” she said. How much farther was there to go? They could already go anywhere on Earth. Where else was there?
“The airport hangar? It’s that big?”
Jessika turned and placed her hand on Arista’s back, leading her away from the entrance to their section and into the furthest alcove. “I’m not supposed to know about this, but David gets mouthy when he drinks and he loves getting drunk when I’m around. Says it reminds him of the good times.” She rolled her eyes.
“You’re not supposed to know what?”
“I have to start at the beginning because you can’t remember, so if I repeat something you already know I don’t mean to.” She sat on one of the chairs and pulled it close to the one Arista took a seat in. “About fifty years ago David’s grandfather led the team that developed the Gates. Your great-great-grandfather. The man was a genius. He wanted to use the Gates to infiltrate the machines, drive them out, destroy them.
“But the machines were too smart. They figured out what we were doing, and they mana
ged to reverse engineer the Gates. Copy them, like they copied everything else. Those years when the machines first got their hands on the Gates I’m told were hard, because we didn’t know if they were coming in after us. We figured out how to split our Gates from the network, so only authorized users could come through. But by then the damage was done. David’s family’s reputation was destroyed. Everyone turned on them. And your father grew up with that. His entire life. He’s a very prideful man.”
“He’s trying to erase his family’s failures? My family’s failures?”
“In a way. See, the thing they don’t want the machines to find out here is the population is dwindling. There used to be ten thousand humans when the colony was first founded. Back then everything was overcrowded. Or so I’m told. But now we’re down to less than two thousand of us left.”
Two thousand? Arista could have sworn she’d seen more than that just being in here, with as many people as had passed her in the hallways? Not to mention all the soldiers out in the field attacking the Cadre.
“Confused? It’ll become clear soon enough,” Jessika said, glancing around. “See, the leadership has been working on a way to get us out of here. Humans don’t survive well in captivity. Which I personally find ironic, but that’s another matter. In another two or three generations we’ll have wiped ourselves out. There won’t be enough of us for a stable gene pool. And that will be that.” She dusted her hands in mock-fashion.
“This attack then, it’s an attempt to retake the planet?” Which contradicted what Frees told her he overheard.
“No, it’s a distraction. The real goal is to get control of all the Gates. David needs the combined power of all of them in order to activate that one out there. The other Gates will act like a lens, amplifying the power of the Gate itself.”
“Where could he want to go that would need that much power? Alpha Centauri?”
Jessika chuckled. “Good guess, but no. David’s entire life has been dedicated to achieving the impossible. He’s building a Gate to the past.”
