by Eric Warren
Jessika dropped her eyes. “You’ve seen the machines. They did all the work. They carved all of this out for us. Did it all in under a year. The colony was constructed over the next five and we’ve been adding and expanding ever since. But the truth is we used your people as slaves. They’re still slaves today.”
“That’s what we think happened to Max,” Arista said. “She’s always been combative, but she’s never tried to hurt us before.”
“They put inhibitors in her,” Jessika said. “They not only block our ability to give machines autonomy, but I’d be willing to bet they prevent a machine from exercising free will. That’s probably why they have them all up there. To see if they can find a way to control the autonomous machines too. In case the gate doesn’t work.”
“Backups on top of backups,” Arista said.
“That’s our motto,” Jessika said. “Redundancy is the only thing you can count on. We’ve made enough mistakes to have at least learned that much.”
“Great, so even if we destroy the Gate we’re going to have to deal with this inhibitor now.” Frees tossed one of the little pieces of equipment across the room where it shattered on the wall.
“Destroy the Gate? David’s Gate?” Jessika asked. Arista couldn’t tell if she approved or not.
“I’m sorry. But we can’t let him travel back in time,” Arista said. “It’s wrong.”
“I agree,” she replied. “I thought about trying to sabotage it myself but have never been able to get close. How are you going to destroy it?”
“I have some…batteries I brought with me, “Arista said, patting her pocket. “Highly explosive batteries.” But Jessika’s words stuck in her head. If she had never been able to get close to the Gate, how were they supposed to? Especially now they had targets on their backs. “Wait,” Arista said. “You said the colony goes on lockdown when there’s an emergency. Does that mean sensitive areas might not be guarded?”
Jessika rubbed her chin. “It does! But to get in we’ll need David’s DNA. Just enough for a scan.”
Arista searched the area for the device she’d seen him use. “Here!” she said, finding it on one of the tables off to the side. “Have you touched this since yesterday?” She pointed to it.
“I don’t think so,” Jessika said.
“David used it to scan my arm. It might have some residual DNA.”
“That’s a good point, though I’d prefer a swab this may do.” Jessika gingerly picked up the scanner by the edge and took it to her workstation, placing it on a small table. “Give me a few minutes, it might take some time to identify his DNA and construct a usable sample. I can probably get away with a ninety-five percent match.”
While Jessika worked Frees guided Arista to the far side of the room. “Do you really think this is a good idea? We can’t trust her. She’s human. She left you to die.”
“We don’t know that,” she whispered. “And she’s helped us so far.”
“Did your interactions with Sy teach you nothing?” he snapped.
That stung. Arista turned away from him. “I’m not stupid, Frees. I only want to use her to get us as far as we can, then we cut her loose. I’m not infatuated here, okay?”
“If you say so, I just don’t want you to get confused.”
She set her face and turned back to him. “Trust me, the last thing I am is confused.”
“I think I’ve got it,” Jessika called to them. “It’s a good sample, it should work.”
“Perfect,” Arista said, returning to her. “Then we’ll go back up to twenty-four, remove the inhibitor from Max and grab Jill, and then take out the gate.” She had a thought. “Can the gate act like any other gate?”
“Yes. It works just like the rest of them until David focuses the ‘lenses.”
“Perfect. Then we’ll time-delay these.” She patted her pocket again. “Somehow. And we can all use the gate to escape before it blows.”
“Aren’t you forgetting something?” Frees asked.
Arista scrunched up her face at him. When it hit her, she had to work hard to hide her shame. She’d forgotten her parents. They hadn’t eliminated the possibility they were here somewhere.
“What? What are you forgetting?” Jessika asked. “Seems like the perfect plan to me.”
“My parents,” Arista said automatically. But as the words left her mouth she wished she hadn’t said them at all. Jessika’s face was one of surprise which turned into rejection.
“I mean…Sy said they were here. But she lied about everything else, so she probably lied about that too.”
“I don’t think she did,” Jessika said softly. She picked up the container with David’s sample inside and placed it in her pocket. “Follow me.”
The elevator doors opened back up on Orange twenty-four Rho. Frees checked the area first then motioned for them to follow.
It had been uneventful getting back up here, the patrols had apparently cleared this wing of the colony and were now focusing their search on different locations, hoping to flush Arista and Frees out of their hiding spots.
“You’re sure?” Arista asked as they made their way back down the hall.
“Like I said, everything they don’t want people to know about is on twenty-four. It was one of the earlier parts of the original colony and isn’t used much anymore. Except by those who don’t want a lot of questions,” Jessika said.
“For someone without access, you sure do know a lot about the secret areas of this place,” Frees said over his shoulder.
Jessika scoffed. “It’s easy to get around when people aren’t paying you much attention. Most think of me as some meek scientist, locked away in her corner of the Research lab. It’s amazing what you’ll overhear when people think you aren’t listening.”
They rounded the corner and Frees put his hand up, signaling they should stop. “Something up ahead. Do we have to go this way?” he whispered.
Jessika nodded.
“Let me check it out first, I’ll come back for you.” He took a few steps down the darkened hallway. The red lights that ran the length of the halls continued to blink on and off. There was no telling how long the lockdown would last, they may not have much time before they needed to reach the Gate.
Arista strode after him, unwilling to wait. If it was anything dangerous they might just have to barrel through it, time was too short.
She could see there was a figure lying on the ground, the walls and floor around it covered in blood and other fluids she didn’t recognize. Frees had crouched down and was leaning over the figure. He turned back, and his eyes caught her. “You never listen.”
She shrugged. “I do what I want. Plus, we don’t have time for—” She stopped as she realized who it was. “Hudson,” she said in a soft voice. He’d been riddled with holes of all kinds, and half the skin from his face was missing. “Is he alive?”
Frees shook his head. “He’s gone into body lock. Probably too long, the injuries are severe. I imagine he’s lost all cognitive function by now.”
“Damn,” she whispered. He really had gone out in a blaze of glory. There were paths of blood and splatter patterns all around him, but no other bodies. “I guess the humans retrieved their dead.”
“They have to,” Jessika said. “Otherwise we could have a potential outbreak or sickness. Let’s not stay here, they’ll send machines to clean up the rest and we don’t want to be here when they arrive.”
They gingerly stepped over Hudson’s body and continued down the hallway, turning another corner.
“Back to Sigma,” Arista observed.
“They’ll be right here,” Jessika said, stopping in front of a door to the side. She retrieved the small container with David’s DNA from her coat and pressed it against the pad beside the door.
It whooshed open. Inside were six containers, all reminiscent of the ones Charlie had kept in his underground lair. Except these had no liquid in them. Regardless the scene caused Arista to flinch and she had the su
dden desire to run.
“These are containment tanks,” Jessika said. “We use them when we need to place people in suspension, which isn’t often. We used to use them more back in the old days, when construction of the colony wasn’t finished, and it was less resource-intensive to have people sleep for a year or two rather than sit around waiting for things to be built.”
Arista barely heard her. All her attention was focused on the two forms inside the containers. The people she’d been searching for ever since she’d first burned her hand off, starting this whole mess.
Emily and Carver. They were here.
Twenty-Seven
She took a deep breath and stepped forward. “Are they still alive?” Arista asked.
Jessika moved around her, approaching the two tanks. She studied the information displayed on a small transparent readout on the front of the tank. Each one looked as if it was encased inside another metal tube, but the metal didn’t cover all the glass.
“They are still active—” Jessika began.
“But?”
“But I don’t quite understand these readings,” she replied. “I’ve never seen anything like this before. Their bodies have been shut down but their cognitive abilities…they’re making connections faster than anything I’ve ever seen. What are they doing in here?”
Arista glanced around, the rest of the tubes were empty and there wasn’t anything else in the room except some old equipment in the corner. It looked like an abandoned room. The newest things in here were the containment devices.
“Can we get them out?” Arista asked. “Can we move them?”
“I’m not sure,” Jessika said. “It’s like their minds are connected to the computers inside. And to the system at large. I don’t know how to shut this down. Or if it’s smart to.”
“What do you mean?” Frees asked.
“If we shut everything down while their minds are half-outside their bodies it could result in full body lock. We’d never be able to retrieve them. I need to study this further; figure out what’s being done to them before I can say it’s safe to remove them.
Arista ran her hand down the outside of the glass of her mother’s tube. She turned to Jessika. “We don’t have that kind of time. We can’t take them out?”
Jessika shook her head. “I wouldn’t recommend it.”
“Can we move the tubes?”
“What are you thinking?” Frees asked.
“Get them out of here, take them through the gate, back to Jill’s. Find a way to get them out. Maybe severing the connection with the colony is the first step to bringing their minds back to their bodies.”
“How do we know cutting them off from the colony won’t kill them?”
Frees had a point. Just moving them from this room might disrupt whatever the humans had done to them. But she couldn’t just leave them here. Not after all this time. How had they even gotten here? Had Sy gone out and hunted them down? Or someone else? At least they were still alive. In whatever form, they were still alive for now.
“Who would know more about this? About what’s being done to them?” Arista asked.
“David might. It was just a guess his DNA would open the door. But then again, he’s got high clearance. He might know and then again he might not.”
Arista frowned. They were running out of time. “Tell me exactly what you’re seeing.” She directed the Device to reach out for any information it could find.
“Each tube has an onboard computer. They were used to regulate a human’s body during storage. But it’s been modified—I don’t know how. They’ve each connected to the onboard computers of the tubes, which in turn connect to the colony. From what I can tell their neural processes have exceeded the limits of their cortexes. They need the onboard computers to maintain cognitive function.”
The Device confirmed hypersignals running from her parents to their individual computers and then to the colony at large. If they maintained the connection with the tubes, she didn’t see a danger. They weren’t directly connected to the colony. Not yet anyway.
“And it seems their capacity is increasing. It won’t be long before they reach the computational capacity of the onboard computers,” Jessika said. “Another week or two if the rate is stable.”
Arista cursed. First their bodies were dying and now their minds were expanding exponentially. There had to be a way to get them back to the parents she knew and loved. If there was a way, she was going to find it.
“We need to move them,” she said. “Get them through the gate.”
“We have anti-grav pallets,” Jessika said. “They’re used for transporting goods to different parts of the colony.”
“Great,” Frees replied. “Where do we get those?”
“Those gurneys you talked about,” Jessika said. “Where your friends were. What did they look like?”
Arista looked at Frees and shrugged. “They kind of looked like long pieces of metal with a bed of some kind on them. And they were placed on small islands in the room further down the hall.”
“Sounds like what we need,” Jessika said. “If we can bring a couple of those back we can move them. They have a weight capacity of a couple tons.”
Frees pinched his face together. “We need to hurry. They could call the all-clear any moment.”
Arista turned to Jessika. “Want to help me with some surgery?”
Using a small tool inside her new hand that Jessika directed her to activate, Arista cut a small circular section at the very top of Jill’s head.
They’d made it back into the room without incident, however the hallway outside was worse for wear. The area where the energy drive had exploded had taken out two walls and all the lights in the area, including the door to the room where they’d first found Jill and Max. As soon as they had arrived Frees had searched everywhere for Max, but she was gone. He even jumped up to the “windows” where he’d thrown her but there was nothing up there but bent metal and broken glass. Jessika had been right; there was no outside. It was just a bunch of artificial lights simulating light through the windows.
Arista had been considering that. Perhaps this place was why she hated enclosed spaces so much. Other than the windows in here she hadn’t seen another port to the outside world. She had to take Jessika’s assertion that they were in Antarctica; it wasn’t as if she could confirm it herself. She hadn’t liked leaving her parents back in that room, but from the look of it she doubted anyone would be back for them. It was as if they’d been inserted in those tubes, hooked up and left there for the rest of eternity. And she had no idea why.
“There’s the port,” she said, catching a glimpse of what had been a similar port on Hudson’s head. She touched it lightly and the doors retracted. “Son of a bitch,” she said. “There they are.”
The same green and red discs she’d pulled out of Hudson. Which meant the humans had installed them in Jill—and presumably Max—and then sealed her back up like nothing was wrong. Arista activated her small sharp knifes from her fingers and lifted the discs away, laying them in Jessika’s hand.
“Nice job Mir—Arista. You’re very dexterous,” Jessika said.
“Thanks.” It was weird taking a compliment from her biological mother. And yet, it felt good. But it also felt like a betrayal. Arista tapped the port again and the doors slid closed. “We just need to re-attach her scalp,” Arista said, holding the small piece of skin with the gray hair attached.
“Dermal regenerator,” Jessika said, trotting off into the other room. Arista glanced up at Frees who watched.
“You two are getting chummy,” he said, his arms crossed.
“Don’t go getting all jealous on me.” She’d meant it as a jab, but he looked away quickly and she felt her own cheeks flush. “It’s fine,” she said, trying to recover. “She helped us find my parents. I think we can trust her.”
“I hope you’re right,” he said.
“Here it is.” Jessika returned from the other room. “Y
ou’re right about in there. I can’t believe they’re doing such barbaric, inhumane…” she trailed off, looking at Frees. “I’m so sorry.”
“It’s fine,” Frees said. He wouldn’t look at either of them. Arista refocused on Jill. She took the regenerator from Jessika and put the piece back in place, running the generator all around the edge of the cut. It seemed to disappear before her eyes.
“Amazing,” she whispered.
“Keep that on you,” Jessika said when she was finished. “You never know when you might need it.”
That was a good point. “Okay, Frees, ready to reactivate?”
He turned back and reached over, lifting Jill up slightly so she was on her side. Two minutes later Jill’s eyes blinked open as Arista used the regenerator on the incision she’d made in her neck.
“Frees? ‘Zat you?” She looked up at him.
“How the—?” Arista smiled. She’d caught him off guard.
Jill cackled. “Got an intuition for these things.” Arista finished up and shoved the regenerator in her back pocket. She sat up, looking around her. “Where in the hell?” Her eyes landed on Arista. “Oh, child!” she yelled, reaching over and pulling Arista into a hug. “Yer okay! I thought for sure that horrible woman—”
“No, I’m fine, I’m good!” Arista rushed, separating herself from Jill. “Everything turned out fine.” Arista caught Jessika looking at her oddly.
“An’ who’s this?” Jill asked, taking notice of Jessika as well.
“Jill, this is—my biological mother. Jessika Thorne.”
“Oh, ho, ho.” Jill half-laughed. “Well. It seems I missed the most interestin’ things. Where’s Max?”
“We don’t know,” Frees said. “They did something to her. Planted something in her mind that turned her against us. They did it to you too, but Arista removed the problem.”
Jessika held her hand out, showing Jill the two discs. “So I’m in the colony then? Is that it?”
Jessika nodded.
Jill’s eyes slid to the side. “That bitch. I knew not to trust her.”
