End Program

by James Axler

  “How long?” Ryan asked.

  “Eight days,” Krysty said, fixing him with her stare. She was looking at his new eye, Ryan could tell, trying to get used to seeing it in his face.

  “Eight days,” he muttered, shaking his head.

  “I waited, but I wasn’t allowed to see you in all that time,” Krysty told him. “They were worried about contamination, because you were in such a fragile state.”

  Ryan pulled on his shirt, buttoning it from the bottom up. “What about the eye?” he said.

  “I didn’t know about that until you came out of the bath,” Krysty told him. “None of us did. The surgeons thought you’d lost it in the mat-trans accident, I guess, because your patch was missing. They replaced it while they were working on you, fixed it the way they fixed everything else.”

  Krysty looked at Ryan, examining his face, his eye. “How is it?” she asked.

  “It’s...” Ryan stopped even as he began to reply. How did he feel about missing an eye for the better part of his life and waking up one day to find it had been put back? How could he react to that? How could he even process it?

  “The eye has capabilities,” Ryan told her. “It’ll take some getting used to.”

  “There are counselors here in Progress,” Krysty said. “One of them will tell you how it functions, show you how best to use it.”

  Ryan nodded uncertainly as he finished buttoning his shirt.

  Krysty looked at him and smiled that dazzling, beautiful smile that would make any man’s heart melt. “It looks good, Ryan. If I wasn’t spoken for, I’d fall for you all over again right now.”

  Chapter Seven

  “The eye has many properties that you will find useful,” the gray-haired woman told Ryan.

  Once he had dressed, Ryan and Krysty had been escorted to another room by Roma. Mildred and J.B. tagged along.

  The new room was wide-open with white walls, a raised bed and a desk-type arrangement that pulled out from a recess in one of the walls, smoothly folding out in sections. A long window dominated the opposite wall of the room, looking out over the industrial center with its towering chimneys. Ryan could see that a river flowed fast and furious along the edge of the ville.

  The woman stood before the desk. She was dressed in a long white robe with a high collar, and gloves molded into the sleeves. Her iron-gray hair was tied back in a neat ponytail. She acknowledged Ryan with a warm smile, introducing herself as Betty. Ryan’s companions had met Betty before, and she knew them all by name.

  J.B. took one look at the examination room and stepped back through the door. “It’s going to get mighty cramped with all of us in there,” he said. “Krysty, why don’t you and me go to the lounge while the healer checks Ryan over?”

  Krysty checked with Ryan before agreeing, and he assured her he would be fine. “Mildred’s here with me,” he said. “Finest shot in the Deathlands—she’ll look out for me.” He said that last statement as something of a couched warning, uncertain whether he should trust the whitecoat.

  Roma led J.B. and Krysty from the room, the door whispering closed behind her. Once they were gone, Betty adjusted something on the desk and the long window assumed a tinted aspect, cutting the bright sunlight like sunglasses and casting the room in a grayish shadow. There was a machine in the room too, Ryan saw now—cylindrical and almost as tall as he was, the thing moved on hidden wheels, a bank of lights running across its metallic skin.

  “You’re looking well, Mr. Cawdor,” Betty said, smiling. “Your recovery has been excellent.”

  “He’s strong,” Mildred said, taking up a position to one side of the room so that Betty could examine Ryan.

  “Now, you’re not going to start punching me, are you, Mr. Cawdor?” the woman in the white robe asked.

  Ryan shook his head. “You heard about that, huh? I was a little disoriented when I woke up and I wasn’t getting answers.”

  Betty nodded. “You were in recovery for a long time,” she said. “It’s understandable.”

  Then she indicated the bed and Ryan lay down, unbuttoning his shirt. Betty checked him over with detached professionalism, assuring him—and herself—that his scars had almost healed. The cylindrical thing waited silently beside Betty, scanning Ryan with its emotionless camera eye.

  “Krysty said I’d been placed in a bath of nutrients,” Ryan said. “Can you explain what happened?”

  Betty nodded. “Yes, you must have a lot of questions. The nutrient bath that your companion spoke of was to assist in your healing. While there, nano-machinery—which performs surgery on a molecular level—was used to repair your wounds, including those sustained in surgery when glass and other material was removed from your body.”

  “What other material?” Ryan asked.

  Betty stepped over to the desk and brought up a report on the embedded screen. “Some plant matter, much of it toxic. Similar material was found in almost all of your colleagues when you arrived, but we successfully removed all of it.”

  “We fought a plant,” Ryan said. “I remember.”

  “Tough bitch of thing, too,” Mildred added grimly.

  “The nutrient bath assisted in your body’s natural repair,” Betty continued, “after which you were placed in a regulated environment where your body temperature could be kept at the optimum for recovery and could be fed proteins to maximize your healing.”

  “The coffin,” Ryan stated.

  “What’s that?” Betty asked, turning her attention back from the comp.

  “I woke up inside a sealed box,” Ryan said. “I figured someone was trying to bury me.”

  “Quite the opposite,” Betty told him, flashing her teeth in an awkward smile. The teeth were good, strong-looking but yellowed with age. Ryan saw a sliver of metal there behind the upper right canine where a tooth had been removed and replaced. “Would you sit up for me?”

  Nodding, Ryan shifted himself until he was sitting upright once more. Then, while he sat on the bed, Betty asked him to do a few tests with his new eye, reading the characters on a distant chart that was projected in the air by the cylindrical machine, identifying colors and observing movement through a spinning device in its trunk. Once she had confirmed the eye was functioning correctly, Betty told Ryan that the eye had extra properties.

  “I think I stumbled on one,” Ryan admitted. “I focused my vision and a crosshairs target appeared.”

  “Yes,” Betty confirmed. “You can also magnify the image in the left eye, like a longblaster scope. Are you right-or left-handed, Mr. Cawdor?”

  “Right,” Ryan said, holding up his right hand.

  “Tsk, that’s a shame.” Betty sighed “But it is not a huge loss. Obviously, the targeting facility would have been better in the same eye as your blaster hand but that can’t be helped now.”

  “I’ll try to keep that in mind the next time I lose an eye,” Ryan told her sarcastically.

  The clinician acknowledged this with a snort before going back to her explanation. “The eye has other properties that feed directly into your optic nerve to be processed by your brain. You now have night vision, including an infrared functionality—which will also allow you to track the heat given off by a subject. You may access the former by blinking twice in quick succession while in darkness or semidarkness.”

  Since the room was shaded, Ryan first tried the night vision, blinking rapidly twice. The feed from his left eye switched to a gray-green hue. The feed from the night vision was confused because Ryan also had his real eye open, creating a double image, one normal and one cast in gray-green.

  “Whoa,” Ryan said, feeling a wave of nausea run through him.

  “You may find it easier to process if you close your other eye,” Betty said.

  Ryan did just that. Then he gazed around the room, saw the fi
gures and details of the room picked out vividly in what seemed to be a murky gray fog. He saw Mildred smiling as he experimented, her eyes and teeth a brilliant white lined in neon green, while the bank of lights on the surface of the cylindrical machine seemed brilliant in the gloom. “That’s...working,” Ryan said, blinking again until the feed switched back to normal.

  “The infrared requires pressure here.” Betty showed Ryan by touching the bottom left corner of her own eye.

  He mimicked the woman’s gesture and, after a moment’s trial and error finding the pressure plate, he activated the infrared function. This time, he had the foresight to close his other eye, ensuring he saw only the feed. Suddenly, the room was cast in a dull gray through Ryan’s left eye, with the two human forms burning a brilliant red-orange as they watched him. The cylindrical machine glowed a faint orange, cold and lifeless despite its ability to move independently. Ryan moved his head, looking around the room at the spots of heat at the desk and, more dully, across the bank of windows.

  “Seems dandy,” Ryan said.

  When he drew his hand up to touch the pressure plate again, Ryan saw his own body recast in a brilliant swirl of red, yellow and white, as if he were made of fire. He pressed the hidden plate, toggling back to normal vision.

  “What else can it do?” Ryan asked.

  “You can hold an image for review at a later period,” Betty said. “To do this, focus on the subject for five seconds and squint your eye like so. You may then recall this image at a later date, where it may be shown as its own image or as an overlay to whatever you are looking at for means of comparison.”

  “How many images can it store like that?” Ryan checked. “And how do I recall them?”

  “Look to your left while holding down the pressure pad to retrieve an image,” Betty told him. “Do the same once the image is visible and hold your eye closed for five seconds to delete.”

  “Delete?” Ryan asked, uncertain what the term meant in this context.

  “Permanently remove the image from the eye,” Betty elaborated. “You may hold up to twelve images, but that number will be less should you take images while in night-mode or infrared.”

  Ryan nodded. “Got it.”

  Mildred spoke up from where she was standing close to the now-tinted windows. “Is there anything else Ryan or I need to know, such as how to maintain or service the artificial eye?”

  “The eye is self-servicing,” Betty said. “You may detect some deterioration over the very long term—by which I mean decades rather than years—but should that be the case you may return here and we would be able to adjust the eye or replace it.”

  “Just one more question,” Ryan said. “How did you find us?”

  “This is Progress, California,” Betty said. “The site grew out of the military redoubt you accessed via your mat-trans jump, which is how we found you.”

  “You found us?”

  Betty smiled. “Not me personally, no. A patrol was sent to investigate when the mat-trans activated. I don’t know how much you know about the mat-trans system, but it’s largely automated, and that automation includes an alert sent to a number of linked monitoring stations when the system powers up to receive someone.”

  Ryan said nothing, merely accepting the information without reacting. The mat-trans was his little secret, one kept by himself and his companions. They did not know much about the functionality of the devices, only that they transported them across the continent—and occasionally off the continent—via some kind of hidden pathways and that there was apparently no way to predetermine where a jump would lead. Ryan was hesitant of sharing any information with the locals, even ones who had saved his life. Save your life today, shoot you in the back tomorrow—that’s what Trader used to tell him.

  “It’s lucky we did,” Betty continued. “You and your friends were in a terrible state on arrival. I don’t know what you’d been putting yourself through, but it had left you all seriously wounded.”

  “The imploding wall of the mat-trans during the jump didn’t help,” Mildred said, deadpan.

  “No, I don’t imagine it would have,” Betty agreed. She touched something on the inset screen at her desk and the shaded tint to the window glass seemed to recede as Ryan watched. Nothing moved there that he could see. The opacity merely altered in a gradual manner until the windows were clear once more. He flicked momentarily to magnification mode, staring at the window frame.

  “You have some mighty advanced tech here,” Ryan said. “Heck of a lucky find.”

  “Oh, we didn’t find it, Mr. Cawdor,” Betty told him, “we built it.”

  Chapter Eight

  Once the examination with Betty was completed, Ryan felt the need to stretch his legs. “From what I can tell, I’ve been cooped up in a box for two weeks,” he told Krysty as he met her and J.B. outside the examination room. “I need to feel some fresh air, get the wind in my hair.”

  “It’s a large ville, Ryan,” Krysty told him. “You’ll be impressed.”

  “Yeah, I could see that through the windows,” Ryan agreed.

  Krysty led him to an elevator that spiraled through the building. The elevator was cylindrical with a door that slid silently back on a curved tread. Stepping into it was like stepping into an upright pipe. A single overhead light source was obscured by a screen that diffused the illumination into a subtle effect, preventing any glare. Ryan eyed it for a moment as he stepped inside, flicking through the different options with his new cybernetic eye.

  Crosshairs.

  Magnification.

  Night vision.

  Infrared.

  “Hey, Ryan,” Mildred called as he stood with Krysty in the elevator. “You be careful. You only just woke up—don’t overdo it, okay?”

  “Sure,” Ryan agreed, still flicking through his visual options.

  “And, Krysty,” Mildred added, “I’m trusting you to keep an eye on the patient.”

  Krysty agreed and a moment later the door slid closed and the elevator began its smooth descent to ground level.

  Ryan moved close to Krysty, kissing her mouth and then her cheek. As his lips came close to her ear, he whispered, “This place safe? Don’t answer out loud.”

  Krysty nodded very definitely against Ryan’s head, moaning once as if in delight at his kisses.

  “Will I need my blasters?” Ryan asked, still whispering.

  “Oh, lover,” Krysty groaned. As she did so, she shook her head slightly: No.

  Ryan kissed her again as the elevator stopped its silent descent and the door drew back. They were in a vast lobby now, its proportions dwarfing anything Ryan could think of—it was like a predark aircraft hangar or a shipyard, ceilings so high they were almost four stories above him. There were a few people in the vast room—too few for its size, in Ryan’s opinion, but he had witnessed chronic overcrowding in the Deathlands and the sickness it had brought. The people were dressed in white and pale colors, loose-fitting clothes that better suited the climate of the West Coast. Some moved on wheeled devices, standing atop them, maintaining their balance with arms gently out to their sides as they sped swiftly across the room.

  A quick scan, automatic now after all these years, revealed that no one appeared to be armed.

  The room’s illumination came from an impressive wall of windows that looked out on to the ville. Ryan and Krysty strode across the room, fifty steps from the elevator to the nearest doorway, a twenty-foot-wide gap in the glass that opened straight out onto a veranda beyond. There was an awning up above to keep rain off, should there be any, and the veranda and its surrounds were designed in such a way that no wind could penetrate into the lobby itself.

  Ryan stepped out into the sunlight, taking in a deep breath of air. Morning sunshine and clear skies gave a fresh feel to the day. The wide streets were pave
d and clean, birds occasionally fluttering past, landing for a moment to scout the area for food. Buildings towered all around, eight huge structures clad in bold white like the great marble temples of ancient Greece. The lowest of them was two stories, the tallest much higher than that. The buildings were linked, Ryan saw, with bridges running across the streets from their upper stories. The bridges were open to the elements. Few people were about, given all the space, but Ryan noticed that several of them were traveling via the same wheeled disklike platforms, flitting between the buildings like a ballerina figurine pirouetting out of a music box.

  “This place is incredible,” Ryan said as he tried to take it all in.

  “They’ve been very hospitable,” Krysty told him. “We’ve wanted for nothing.”

  Ryan checked the weapon at his hip, noticed Krysty was still wearing her Smith & Wesson on hers. “Not that hospitable, though,” he said, indicating her blaster.

  Krysty smiled. “Force of habit,” she admitted. “I haven’t had to draw my blaster in two weeks. The only time it’s been out of its holster has been to oil it.”

  Ryan nodded. Oiling their weapons was a ritual the companions strictly followed. A well-maintained blaster could mean the difference between life and death in the Deathlands; it would never do to become complacent, no matter how tranquil the surroundings.

  And they were very tranquil. There was noise here—the hiss and drone from the factories, the sound of the nearby river rushing past—but it was muffled by the buildings and the wide-open spaces.

  Ryan and Krysty walked slowly down a wide thoroughfare. Outside, the building looked newly built and was a pale yellow that was almost white, better to reflect the fierce California sun. It ran over three hundred feet before Ryan and Krysty reached its edge, the same in the other direction. Ryan was impressed by its size.

  “Is this place all dedicated to fixing people up?” he asked Krysty.

  “They’re very advanced here,” Krysty replied. “Mildred said they’re doing a lot of experimental work into cybernetics—like the unit they put in your eye.”