Rebellion

by K A Riley

  “It’s an odd combo,” Cardyn explains. “They’re excited, eager, desperate, hopeful—”

  “And scared out of their minds,” Brohn finishes.

  Talking back and forth like the partners and almost-brothers they’ve become, Brohn and Card continue to fill us in on life up on the fifth floor.

  “Some of them actually have military training,” Cardyn explains. “The older ones know a bit about tactics and weapons. A lot of them are just kids, though. Most of their parents hate Krug and the Patriot Army, but they don’t know what to do about any of it. Underneath the eagerness and bravado, there’s kind of a numb helplessness about it all.”

  “They’ve been to rallies and protests. The older ones and their parents have tried voting for different politicians. They complain to anyone who’ll listen.”

  “Well, they used to,” Cardyn informs us.

  “Right. Turns out there’s all kinds of censorship and surveillance systems in place. People who get too vocal in their opposition tend to disappear.”

  “Or die.”

  “There’re no secrets anymore,” Brohn says. “No anonymity. As it turns out, if you have an opinion these days, you’d better be willing to die for it. Because if it’s against Krug, you probably will.”

  Cardyn rubs his eyes as he nods his agreement. “One of the younger Insubordinates told us his parents both got arrested along with hundreds of others in one of the recent protests. No one’s heard anything from them in weeks.”

  “Not even where they are?” I ask.

  Brohn says, “No. The local police don’t like the Patriot Army being here, but they can’t do much about it. Technically, the Patriot Army is run by Krug, and his orders take priority over local law enforcement.”

  Cardyn rubs his eyes again and sighs. “But there are plenty of police out there who are sick of all this. They may even be ready to help the Insubordinates drive out the Patriot Army.”

  “Or at least not get in our way,” Brohn adds.

  Rain sits up in her bed. “What about retaliation? Even if we pull this off, won’t Krug just send in more troops to take back the city?”

  “I asked Granden the same thing,” Brohn says.

  “And?”

  “And Krug doesn’t have as much power, pull, or personnel as he wants everyone to believe. Granden says a lot people are sick of this endless war against the Eastern Order, and some are starting to suspect the truth.”

  “You mean about the Order being fake?” I ask.

  “Among other things. Wisp wasn’t kidding. A lot of people really do seem to know about us, what we’ve been through. You heard those kids this morning. They’re hungry for anything other than what Krug’s been feeding them. People are still scared. They’re just sick of being scared, especially about an enemy they’ve been asked more and more often to believe in on faith. A lot of people are ready to get back to their lives.”

  “Well,” I sigh as I my eyelids flutter, and I feel sleep taking me over. “Their lives are worth fighting for.”

  I lie back in my bed, and I’m fading off to sleep when Brohn stretches his arm out and rests his hand on my forearm. His hand feels big and warm like the world’s best security blanket.

  Since our time in the Processor, Brohn has always slept next to me like this, always in the adjacent bed, always within arm’s reach. Remembering Render’s ominous thought from before—part feeling, part warning—I start to worry that, this time, proximity alone might not be enough to save us all.

  10

  Tuesday

  I’m deep into a dream about Manthy getting up in the middle of the night and sneaking out of our dorm room to go downstairs to be with the Modifieds when the sound of shuffling bedding next to me wakes me up.

  In the dark, I can just make out Manthy’s ghostly figure as she disentangles herself from her sheets and blanket and slips into her black cargo pants and army-green compression top. Barefoot, she tiptoes toward the door, which eases open. Without looking back, she slips out into the corridor, quietly clicking the door shut behind her.

  Wondering if I’m still dreaming, I untangle myself from my own covers and sheets, throw on a robe, and follow her, completely unsurprised to find that she’s heading downstairs to the second floor to where we first encountered the heartbreaking group of lost souls known as the Modifieds.

  Olivia may consider herself one of them, but in reality, she’s a whole other world away. The people we met down here a couple of days ago barely register as people. They’re more like the spirits of people entombed in cold bodies of flesh, metal, and code. I don’t judge them. I wouldn’t even if I could. I don’t know them. I don’t know their hopes, fears, circumstances, and I certainly have no idea what led them—voluntarily or under duress—down this path toward what people today are calling the “post-human.” Personally, I think we, as a species, ought to figure out what it means to be human before we start jumping into being post-anything. But that’s just me. If these people want to modify their genetic makeup, tinker with their synaptic networks, and swap out their organic parts for something mechanical, that’s their choice. I don’t begrudge them that right. I don’t necessarily agree with it, but, then again, I don’t totally understand it either. That leaves me ignorant and in no position to rain moral judgement down on people I met once and whom I don’t know at all.

  Still half-immersed in the fog of sleep, I shake my head to separate the dream I was having from the reality I’m living.

  From the creepy quiet of the corridor outside the room, I hear Manthy talking with Caldwell, caretaker for the Modifieds. He seemed like a nice enough man when we met him that first night in the Style, but we don’t know him well enough to be careless. Manthy’s tone, however, is relaxed, and he sounds genuinely happy about her unannounced, middle-of-the-night visit.

  I shouldn’t be able to hear them this clearly, but it’s like their voices are traveling through a vacuum instead of through the thick night air, and I’m wondering if Render is around. Maybe he’s feeding me intel like he did at the Armory. Or maybe, like Wisp claims, there’s more to him, more to all of this, and more to me than meets the eye. Either way, I hear every word, breath, and whisper as clearly as if they were coming from inside my own head.

  “What am I?” Manthy asks from deep inside the room.

  Caldwell clears his throat. “Are you asking if you’re one of them?”

  “Yes. I guess.”

  “You’re not. It’s possible to do what you do without being what they are.”

  Manthy doesn’t say anything, and I can only imagine that she must be looking around at the nearly-neglected half-human, half-machine people under Caldwell’s care. I hear her footsteps on the tiled floor inside the room.

  “There are always freaks,” she says.

  Caldwell doesn’t answer. Maybe he’s nodding. Maybe he didn’t hear her. Their voices continue to slip into my mind on something other than vibrations in the air. I stand with my back to the wall in the quiet corridor and continue to take it all in.

  “Krug isn’t the problem,” Caldwell says at last. “It’s in here. It’s in our heads. And our hearts. We want to have stability and still be on the move all at once.” I hear what must be the sound of him patting the breast pocket of his lab coat. “In here, we want to belong, but we’re taught to keep others out.”

  “Seems like everyone wants to be alone. But no one wants to be lonely.”

  Caldwell agrees. He says Manthy is wise. “So much better than being smart,” he adds.

  Manthy’s voice sounds so sad when she says, “We can’t escape our own defects.”

  “Did you think I could help you?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you seem to know people. And you seem to know the Modifieds. And I think maybe I’m somewhere in the middle.”

  “And you don’t want to be?”

  “Who does?”

  “I think I can help.”

 
“You can?”

  “Sure. Here’s my help: You don’t need any help.”

  “I don’t fit in.”

  “Manthy, do you really want to fit in?”

  Manthy pauses before saying, “Sometimes.”

  “You know how the Eastern Order is all just a big trick?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll let you in on a secret. That’s not the only trick being played on you. Like the rest of us, you’ve been tricked into thinking you need help when really it’s the rest of the world that’s just too ignorant, lazy, and afraid to have you walking around being yourself.”

  “Ignorance, laziness, and fear,” Manthy mutters. “There seems to be a lot of that going around these days.”

  “It’s been going around for as long as there’ve been people. Unfortunately, those things tend to be the driving force behind most of what people do. The secret is to not let those things be the driving force behind you.”

  In the brief silence that follows, the guilt about eavesdropping is finally too much for me to bear, and I give a gentle knock. The sound of my knuckles on the old wooden door sounds thunderous in the graveyard silence of the empty hallway.

  The door swings open.

  Standing toward the back of the main room, her head down, Manthy looks embarrassed, but Caldwell invites me in with a welcoming and unsurprised smile like he’s used to entertaining stray visitors in the middle of the night.

  “Did you hear…I mean, how long have you been out there?” Manthy asks from behind his shoulder.

  “Just for a second,” I lie. “I didn’t hear anything,” I lie again. “I heard you get up, and I was worried about you.”

  That part’s the truth.

  “Come in,” Caldwell says as he steps aside. I enter the room, and he closes the door quietly behind me. He plunges his plump little hands into the pockets of his white lab coat and looks at me sheepishly. “Couldn’t sleep?”

  I nod and have a long look around. Two of the Modifieds we met the other day are in mag-chairs like Olivia’s and are plugged nearly lifelessly into a charging port on the far wall by the window between two other Modifieds lying just as lifelessly in adjacent hospital beds.

  “Marcelo and Retta, right?”

  “Yes. Good memory.”

  “Thanks.”

  Caldwell told us about these two. A husband and wife who basically fried their brains trying to be whatever comes next after human.

  “Why?” Manthy asks. When Caldwell and I just stare at her, waiting for her to finish, she wipes her eyes. “What were they hoping would happen?”

  Caldwell pushes his square-framed glasses up from where they’ve slipped down on his nose. “There are too many answers to that. But, if I had to sum it up, I’d say they were hoping you would happen.”

  “Us?” I ask.

  “Both of you. Yes. They wanted it all. The warm blood of a human being and the calculating coldness and lightning-fast processing speed of a computer.”

  “That’s not us,” Manthy objects.

  “No. It’s not. And I’m not saying it is. Only that it’s what some people misunderstood you to be.”

  “We’re not anything,” Manthy says. “No one should try to be us.”

  “Actually, from what I hear, the two of you are far too important to what happens next to be down here in the middle of the night talking with me.”

  “I think talking with you might be exactly what helps us to accomplish what happens next,” I tell him.

  When we talk about the upcoming encounter with the Patriot Army, I notice we don’t say “battle,” “fight,” “war,” or “rebellion.” It’s like saying it out loud might make it happen faster, make it more real. Or maybe saying it out loud will prevent it from happening at all. It’s still an abstraction, this thing we’re about to do. Something days away whose costs haven’t yet been calculated.

  Caldwell invites us to walk with him though an interconnected series of rooms. “It’s time for me to make my rounds, anyway.”

  “Are you the only person who works with the Modifieds?” I ask.

  He chortles an, “Oh no” and tells us about volunteer support-workers from a place called Haven House before explaining that the Major, the girl the rest of us know as Wisp, is the real person in charge. “She’s made it her mission to find the Modifieds out there and to bring them here for the kind of help they can’t get anywhere else. Especially with the Patriot Army here now. Krug wanted to weaponize the Modifieds. When that mostly failed, he discarded them. That’s where the Major steps in.” Caldwell folds his arms across his chest and grins appreciatively like he’s surveying a room full of beautiful artwork. “Without the Major, these folks would be scrap. Homeless. Possibly dead.”

  We follow him as he makes his way around the main room where he tends to six of the Modifieds, including Marcelo and Retta. Part doctor, part mechanic, part digital technician, he examines their pupil dilation, inspects the scrolling red holo-notes floating in the air above and around each bed, and he tends to a variety of ailments from bed sores to misfiring circuits in the neuro-chips some of the Modifieds have embedded in their brains or fused to the base of their necks.

  Then we go into a second room, just off the first, to find a dozen more Modifieds—some seated, some standing—lined up around the perimeter of the room. They’re all leaning against a long horizontal strip of blue light running like glowing wainscoting along the wall behind them.

  Some of them I recognize from the other day when we first arrived. Others are new to me. One of them, a woman, I think, stares at me and Manthy as we walk past. Her exposed titanium jaw hangs open like she’s trying to greet us, but the only sound that comes out is a horrifying crackle of static. Another woman, the entire top half of her face replaced by a pane of black glass, tilts her head in our direction. A flickering series of green computer code I can’t read fills the mirrored glass.

  “That’s Tyressa,” Caldwell tells us. “She’s trying to scan you. But her neural network’s been so badly compromised over the years, she’s essentially locked into a cyclical computer diagnostic running inside her head.” Caldwell shakes his head and makes a little “tsk” sound with his mouth. “Must be maddening.”

  He sets about explaining little bits and pieces about the other Modifieds in this room as he squints at the red holo-notes hovering over each one like a halo. Caldwell taps at the scrolling text of diagnostics, skimming through some, lingering for a few seconds on others and making “hmmm” and “ahhh” noises as he goes. A couple of the Modifieds acknowledge us. One of them, a man with a patchwork of circuitry covering most of his fragmented body, even manages to ask us how we’re doing. I’m just telling him I’m fine when his eyes flicker like a glitchy viz-screen and then glaze over white.

  “Don’t take it personally,” Caldwell says without looking away from the holo-notes of his current patient. “Vasco fazes in and out like that. He was part of a military-led experiment designed to integrate neurotypical brain patterns with stochastic algorithmic learning optimizers. He spends half his life inside his own head trying to find patterns in the pattern-less. The ultimate introspection.”

  “Sounds like hell,” I say.

  Caldwell gives me a sideways glance as he taps out code on the display in front of him. “I can only imagine.”

  By the time we get to the third room and another collection of Modifieds—some immobilized on floating gurneys, others limping aimlessly around the sparsely furnished space—I’m struggling not to cry. Once we pass through there, Caldwell leads us through one more door to his office, an enormous and well-lit room packed floor to ceiling and wall to wall with shelves, worktables, storage lockers, and an array of cubbies, all labeled with the complex names of a wide assortment of surgical equipment, computer parts, and mechanical tools. There wasn’t a lot of need for me to study mechanics back in the Valta, but the little I learned comes flooding back to me as I scan the names on the boxes and drawers: camshaft bearing, c
ylinder bore, torque wrench, vacuum modulator, diagnostic scanner. Mixed in with those are the names of an assortment of medical tools including harmonic scalpels, retractors, distractors, microsurgical needles. On top of that, Caldwell’s office is dotted with specialized workstations and is hip-deep in computer-repair tools: copper tape, motherboards, mounting plates, couplers, multimode optical fibers. It’s a lot to take in, and I’m impressed that one man has learned how to do so much to help so many.

  “Have a seat,” Caldwell says grandly, as he drops down onto a hovering stool in front of the largest of the six silver workbenches in the room.

  Manthy and I sit in the two hovering mag-chairs in front of him.

  For a few minutes, the three of us discuss the tragedy of the Modifieds, the hopelessness. Unsure how to phrase it and less sure I should even bring it up, I finally ask Caldwell if any of the Modifieds ever ask to be put out of their misery.

  “Suicide,” Caldwell says, his head down, his eyes wet. “Euthanasia. Sure. It’s a moral dilemma we all live with every day. Well, they live with it. I can always just go home and turn that conversation over to the clerics, the lawyers, and the philosophers.”

  “Euthanasia,” Manthy says to the floor. “It means ‘good death.’”

  Caldwell looks over at her and nods but doesn’t say anything.

  Finally, Manthy raises her head and asks if she can walk around, and Caldwell assures her that it’s okay. “Just be careful.”

  “Are they dangerous?” I ask, looking toward the doorway.

  I expect Caldwell to laugh this off. After all, the majority of the people in these rooms around us can barely move or talk. But Caldwell looks up at the ceiling like he’s seriously considering my question. “Some of them are in a lot of pain,” he says. “It’s hard to communicate with them, even for me. They may not react well to an unknown person milling around. I don’t think any of them will react poorly to you. But I can’t say for sure at any given time how they’ll react to their pain. Pain’s a funny thing. If we can’t get at it directly, we tend to lash out at whatever else is handy. I don’t want that handy thing to be you.”