Terminal White

by James Axler

  He waited. The booster aerial on the tracking unit would power his signal through the difficult conditions, and maybe—hopefully—reach the members of CAT Alpha if they were anywhere nearby.

  Snow fell, creating that muffled silence that snow always brought. And with that silence came the silence of Edwards’s Commtact, receiving no response from Kane and his crew no matter how many times he tried hailing them.

  * * *

  BEING ON THE ground was proving very disappointing. It should have come as no surprise—the area was just snow, lots and lots of snow, stretching in every direction, falling from the sky, hiding and masking and smothering everything that existed here. Things lived, no doubt—things always did—but any sign of habitation, animal or human, was utterly masked by the falling snow. Domi could not even find animal tracks in the white blanket; she suspected that she would have to dig if she wanted to locate any of the indigenous creatures.

  Domi turned around, heading back to where she had left Edwards fifty minutes earlier, her ghostly form almost lost amid the falling snow.

  Edwards was standing beside the advanced tracking unit from his backpack, clapping his arms together to keep warm, his breath hanging about him in a clump of foggy moisture. “We’re the only heat source in a two-mile radius, Domi,” he stated glumly. “Wherever Kane and company are, it sure ain’t here.

  “Seventy-two hours is a bastard long time in this game,” he added through gritted teeth. “Kane’s team could be on the other side of the globe by now, even without a mat-trans or interphaser at their disposal. I’m calling it.”

  With that, Edwards crouched and shut down the scanning unit, watching the screen as it committed one last sweep of the terrain before it shut off.

  Domi shook her head in disappointment. It felt as though they were failing their colleagues and, to Domi, that felt like a very personal shortcoming. CAT Alpha had found her not very long ago when she had been taken off world in a hijacked spaceship. There was no tally of who owed whom, not with Cerberus, but still there was that sense that Domi should try harder, should not quit until she had found her friends.

  But it was needle-in-a-haystack territory; they both knew that. That was the only possible conclusion they could reach once they experienced the true enormity of searching this barren landscape with no clues and no promise that their colleagues were still here.

  “We’ll try another site,” Edwards explained, “but I don’t hold out much hope. If the scan was going to pick up anything it would have done so by now.”

  Domi nodded absently, watching the falling flakes of snow. “Brewster said that the snow never ends,” she said.

  Together, the two Cerberus rebels trekked a half mile in the treacherous terrain, tried another scan and then a third from yet another locale, but every result was the same—nothing showed on the scanner, and there was no evidence of Kane’s team anywhere on the ground.

  Eventually, as darkness arrived, casting the snow in an otherworldly blue, Edwards and Domi agreed to head home.

  They could not know, could not guess, that the Mantas were less than a mile away, but that they had been so perfectly buried by the snow that they could not be seen. The only way to find them under all that snow was by pure fluke.

  Eventually, Domi and Edwards traipsed back to the parallax point, the air turning even colder. There they fired up the interphaser and dematerialized in that lotus blossom of rainbow colors, returning home. Had they been just twenty feet to the west, and twenty minutes later in their departure, they might—perhaps—have spotted a snow-generating wagon of the type that Kane had clambered aboard and which had taken him into the heart of Ioville, passing by on its automated circuit around the vast terrain of this hidden barony.

  Communiqué to Ioville Magistrate 620M:

  Enact Protocol 1-9-9, gates sentry duty during receipt of snow wags. Please respond to protect citizens.

  Message ends.

  Chapter 19

  “Brigid? Brigid Baptiste? This is Edwards, please respond.”

  Citizen 619F heard the words in her head and wondered where they came from. She was busy on the production line in the Sandcat factory on Epsilon Level at that moment, using an electric screwdriver to attach the screws that held the vehicle’s back plate in place. Each screw had to be tightly put in place from behind, so that it could only be reached from inside the vehicle. The screwdriver whirred in her hand with a high-pitched whine as she fastened the fourth screw on this plate, her fifty-sixth today.

  Citizen 619F stopped, letting the screwdriver power down, curtailing the high whine it made. Around her, other citizens were working at their own designated tasks, stretching the caterpillar tracks over the wheels and affixing them there, pushing in reinforced armaglass windshields and side windows, oiling the swivel mounts that would hold the twin USMG-73 heavy machine guns in the bubble at the roof. Citizen 619F ignored the noises, listening more closely to the voice in her head.

  It came again, distinct, almost as if someone was standing a foot behind her and speaking right into her ear. She turned in place, looking behind her, her brows furrowed in confusion.

  There were people in the Sandcat. She was half lying on the deck beside the back plate, her butt pressed against the side in a cavity where a fire extinguisher would be placed before the vehicle was deemed combat ready. There were four other people working on the ’cat that she could see—one in the turret, its bubble not yet in place, one close to the front smoothing down the runners where the seats would fit, and two more attaching one of the gull-wing doors—on the passenger side—to its hinges. None of them looked up from their respective tasks, and none of them spoke—as was the norm. Working diligently and in silence was the only way to get the jobs done efficiently; anything else was tantamount to a challenge of the baron’s authority.

  Citizen 619F turned back to her own task, reaching for another screw before pressing her hand against the metal plate that would protect the rear of the Sandcat from entry.

  “Brigid? Brigid Baptiste? This is Edwards, please respond.”

  It was a man’s voice, gravelly and subtly accented, and it was there inside her head. She let go of the back plate and reached for her cap, pushing her flame-red hair back from her ear to listen more closely.

  “I hear you.” She mouthed the words, too afraid to say them.

  The voice in her head said nothing for a very long time, a full three minutes of silence where she was certain she had heard a man speak. When he spoke again, the voice was harsh with static, like a poorly tuned radio: “CAT Alpha, we are at your last known location. If you can hear this message, please respond.”

  CAT Alpha? Who was that? A woman’s name? A citizen? But all citizens here were known by their designated numbers, which they had been assigned at induction. Names were considered frivolous for the citizens of Ioville; only barons and the Supreme Magistrate had a name.

  But if that was the case, why did she recognize the name? CAT Alpha? Could that be her? CAT—Catherine, maybe?

  “Catherine Alpha,” Citizen 619F said, the words barely a whisper. As she said it, she glanced surreptitiously over her shoulder, eyeing the other members of the shift crew. None of them heard her speak; none of them were even looking in her direction.

  Could CAT Alpha be her name? Maybe. But there had been another name that the voice in her head had used, which the man who had burst into her apartment on that other day had also used when he had grabbed her by the arms. Baptiste. She had almost forgotten it, forgotten that he had said it to her. It was a strange name, not functional like Citizen 619F was functional. That name told her fellow citizens everything they needed to know about her—that she was a citizen of Ioville, that she was the six hundred and nineteenth to be inducted here and that she was female. Baptiste, however, told a person nothing.

  Who was Brigid Baptiste?r />
  * * *

  AFTER HER SHIFT in the factory, Citizen 619F was dispatched to Designated Task #008. Food Distribution. Food Distribution was performed on every level of Ioville, several times a day. Each citizen attended at the start or end of their shift at any assigned task, where they would be served a nutritiously balanced but otherwise bland meal. Some meals were designed to be taken from the grand cafeteria area and consumed at home. They called these “baggies.”

  Citizen 619F worked the slop, her red-gold hair tied back now in a hairnet so that it would not touch the food, a ladle gripped in each hand where she would operate two separate meal groups—proteins and bulkers. Each person was assigned one spoonful of each group, which they could choose as either warmed or cold, and which was then eaten with the designated cutlery. Magistrates and other key players of the ville were assigned additional food and drug supplements as required, and this additional supplement was granted to Citizen 619F on those days when she attended Designated Task #015, Fitness.

  Designated Task #008 was monotonous but it gave Citizen 619F time to think. She watched the blank eyes of the other citizens as she served them, watched the way they sat and ate in silence, choosing to sit alone or together; it didn’t matter which.

  The dining hall was silent, the only sound coming from the scraping of cutlery as a bowl of slop was scraped dry, the hiss of the water coolers as diners filled glasses with water to drink.

  “Catherine Alpha,” Citizen 619F whispered to herself during a lull in the queue for food. That could be her name. That could be who she was before.

  She tried to imagine a life outside of Ioville, a life devoid of meaning and designated tasks. A life of aimlessness and caution and fear, where one did not know where one would be expected to appear next. It seemed chaotic in her mind’s eye, and doubtless fraught with danger. But she could not be certain if what she thought was memory or just imagination, a conjuring of the worst possible scenarios or a life she had truly escaped.

  She tried the other word instead, letting it tickle across her lips as she formed it: “Baptiste.”

  That could be a name. It could be her name. It felt strange that she had heard the word said by two different male voices, that two strangers had seemed to say it to her, one of them in her mind.

  Was the one in her mind just madness? The emergence of some mental issue she was unaware of, maybe? And would such a thing prevent her from being productive for the barons? That did not bear thinking about, surely.

  She continued slopping the gruel on the trays of the arriving diners, pushing all thoughts of Catherine Alpha and Brigid Baptiste to the back of her mind.

  * * *

  WHEN SHE RETURNED to her apartment, limbs aching, exhaustion pronounced, Citizen 619F ate a little from the baggie and sat down before the terminal that was built into the wall at the end of her couch-bed. She had begun keeping a journal there, as had been proscribed on her first day at Orientation.

  In the earliest days of the Terminal White experiment, the barons had discovered a strange quirk of human behavior that they could not seem to eradicate. That was the need to retain and process thoughts, to hold information, to make one’s mark, as it were. This need dated all the way back to cave paintings, and could be found in other mammals in their desire to mark their territory. Humans, it seemed, functioned more productively if they were assigned a place to mark. The terminals provided that place, as well as an opportunity to communicate new tasks and requirements to the citizenry.

  Citizen 619F used her terminal to keep a journal of her experiences in Ioville. The journal was perfunctory and lacked imagination, instead detailing the routine she was expected to adhere to along with her occasional insights into a particular aspect of that routine.

  She sat before it now, perched uncomfortably on the poorly cushioned sofa, unable to get quite the right height for typing. Still, she made her entry, this one about Designated Task #008: Food Distribution, the task she had been performing in the preceding three hours after her shift at the factory had ended.

  As she sat there, her red hair finally freed of the clips that held it tightly beneath her gray cap during the work day, Citizen 619F stared into the screen. She had stopped typing, almost without realizing it, and was now studying the tinted pixels that made up the glowing white screen, the infinitesimal flicker as they waited for her to add more to her journal entry.

  “Brigid Baptiste,” she typed, before stopping and staring at the words. They meant nothing to her. She sensed disappointment as she stared at them; perhaps she had been hoping that seeing them written down might jog something deep down inside her, might miraculously answer the questions that she could not quite seem to frame.

  She backspaced, deleting the strange words.

  Citizen 619F looked at the blank space on the screen where the words had been, and slowly typed another: “Catherine.”

  She stared at that word, the gray-black letters clinging to the white background at the foot of her incomplete journal entry, and tried to make sense of it. Was it her name? It was a name, she knew that much. But hers?

  She typed a second word beside the first, until it read, “Catherine Brigid.” Was that her name before? Was that who she really was?

  The red-haired woman shook her head in despair, backspaced through the names until they were no longer there. Then she typed the rest of her entry about Food Distribution, not noticing the elementary typing error she had included therein.

  The journal was wiped forty seconds after Citizen 619F completed it. No recollection from a citizen could be saved in Ioville, as the terminals were strictly to ameliorate the sense of being adrift that a complete lack of such facilities would give. It was very efficient.

  Citizen 619F went to the meager basin facilities and washed and cleaned her teeth, in preparation for sleep. Cleanliness in self, as well as ville, was important to the efficient running of Ioville.

  * * *

  AT NIGHT SHE lay on her soft couch-turned-bed with its gray blanket and low, too-soft pillow, waiting for the commencement of her designated 6.2 hours of sleep.

  The names were still with her, rattling in her head like a dice player rollin’ dem bones.

  They had been with her throughout her shift at the Sandcat manufactory, with her through her three hours at the cafeteria serving food to her fellow citizens, there on the trolleybus ride home.

  CAT Alpha.

  Baptiste.

  They meant something; she was sure of it. Something that did not exist in Citizen 619F’s life, but that existed outside the walls of her apartment and her designated tasks. But what?

  Citizen 619F, the woman once known as Brigid Baptiste, drifted into an anxious sleep, one marred by dark, oppressive dreams and the disconcerting sense that everyone around her knew more than she did.

  Designated Task #008: Food Distribution

  I am expected at the serving area of the west tower, Epsilon Level one day per week, where I perform a three-hour shift after my work at the factory is over. Here I am taught how to distribute food to my fellow citizens with efficiency and fairness. The food is of nutritional value but of little taste.

  The components for the food are grown in the hydroponics labs on Delta Level, where all preparation occurs. It is then transported to the serving areas, vast rooms with seats and long tables that can sit forty at a time. Despite the size of the room, the smell of the food is ever-present, and stays with me long after my shift is completed.

  The food itself is unappetizing, two paste-like slops of brigid gruel. The food functions to fuel the citizens, and in that it is successful.

  —From the journal of Citizen 619F.

  Chapter 20

  Alpha Level was spotless, all white walls and sterile corridors running in perfectly straight lines. It had that new-car smell, of dust in the sun, of t
hings sealed in airtight packaging. It was hardly used.

  Alone, Supreme Magistrate Webb paced the walkways of Alpha Level toward the baron’s suite, a spark of uncertainty nagging at his mind. Kane had said something when he had arrived three days before, as the two men had toured the towers of Ioville with its admirable cleanliness and order. He had said that the barons were all dead.

  Webb had dismissed the statement when Kane had attacked him and his cadre of Magistrate guards, naturally assumed the comment to be a last, desperate bid by a man still wanted by Baron Cobalt for his crimes. But the thought still nagged at him.

  The walls were blank white canvases, with gray piping to delineate the edges and where the doors resided. The elevator doors were a faint gray, as if a single spot of ink had been dropped into the whiteness, changing it, but subtly.

  Everything was big here, too, the proportions of the corridors wide, their ceilings subtly higher than the ville standard so as to dwarf a visitor, making them subliminally feel shorter. The barons used a lot of tricks like that, employing subtle ways to make men feel inferior. Some were not so subtle—rituals that involved clanging gongs, swirling incense and the use of gauzy curtains to create a kind of ethereal world within which they seemed to dwell. Supreme Magistrate Webb had visited that odd, unreal world three times, when he had been selected by Barons Ragnar, Cobalt and Snakefish for this task, to head up Project: Terminal White. Three times he had been interviewed by a baron, three times experiencing the same ritual of dark glasses and dazzling lights, mystical voices and curtains that shimmered like moonlight on water. And he had passed, been considered an acceptable choice to head up this barony until the barons themselves were ready to assume control or raze it to the ground, depending on the results of the protracted test.

  Supreme Magistrate Webb had wondered how many others had been considered for the role, how many had been tested, going through the obtuse rituals of meeting the unearthly barons and showing no fear, or perhaps just the right amount of fear. How many had been made to forget what they had seen after they had failed those tests? He remembered. He was the one man in all of Ioville who remembered anything before the orders began.