“So, she was just a program?” I said. “Clare? And you just made her tell me what you wanted me to hear?”
“While I did manipulate your senses to perceive Clare, the version you saw was actually all her. I simply borrowed her program from the simulation, the virtual version of her, and made some slight alterations—don’t tell the Colonial Ethics Board. What you saw of her ship and the supernova, at Antares, all that really happened. We really were on our way back from a salvage when we ran into the quantum rift. We drifted toward it, helplessly, until it pulled us through and we crashed here, across the galaxy and far back in time. I just altered Clare’s virtual memory packet so that she thought she was crossing the rift on her own, and so that she’d forgotten the part where we’d already crashed.”
“The nanobots,” I said, trying to piece what she was saying together. “You made me sabotage my own ship. I thought I was bringing back a shell, but it was a machine.”
“Yes, but it wasn’t really sabotage, was it? The nanobots I had you plant simply created the impression of a dangerous situation, which you quickly solved.”
“So the power surge wasn’t real?”
“Not exactly, no. It just appeared to be so. But to your question: Clare never knew that she was acting out my program; in fact, most of the time she was just being Clare. She really is a good girl, and you two make a great team.”
“But she did know,” I said. “She had these moments where she felt like something wasn’t right. It scared her.”
“Interesting. I didn’t anticipate that, but I am just a subservient machine myself. Only as advanced as the creatures who made me.”
“What happens to her now?”
“Clare? Oh, I’ll wipe this whole sequence from her virtual memory. She’s already been reinserted into the simulation—that is, until her rescue is complete.”
“And what happens to me?”
“Well, now we come to the whole reason I brought you here, Will. I am hoping that you’ll help me save Clare and her family.”
“How am I going to do that?”
“Actually, I’ve already trained you in what to do. I simply need you to perform the polarity reversal that you were planning to do with Clare. Resetting just a few key circuit systems should allow me to finally reboot the ship’s engines and get the Derelict back online.”
“Why didn’t you just do that yourself?”
Alina made a sound like a sigh. “It’s funny. Despite all my functions and capabilities, rewiring the circuit boards requires the one thing I don’t have: a body. Specifically, hands.”
“Then why didn’t you just have Clare do it, or one of her family?” I said, motioning to them—
But as I did, my vision swam, and a hot flash of dizziness washed over me. I glanced at my communicator and saw that the treatment Judy had given me was at 82 percent. The treatment she’d designed to remove metals from my system… were those metals the nanobots? I blinked away the woozy feeling and glanced at Clare’s body in the pod again—
And nearly screamed.
Clare’s face had changed. It was no longer her peaceful, sleeping self. Her cheeks looked sunken, the skin stretched and gray. There were holes by her temples, pits on her neck, and her eyes were hollowed-out black sockets. The rest of her family, too; all their faces looked like corpses—
Then normal again. I blinked and it was back to Clare, just like I remembered her… but my heart was still pounding. Had that been real?
“I didn’t know the solution to resetting the circuits until you figured it out,” Alina was saying. “And I no longer have enough power left even to wake Clare and her family to do it.”
Another stab of pain in my head, a shudder—the faces in the pods flashed again: Clare, her parents, her brother, all of them like mummies, skin like ancient paper, bone and teeth pushing through—
“Will?”
I blinked hard, tried to slow my breathing. The faces were normal again.
“Sure, yeah, that makes sense,” I said, but I was stalling now. My brain felt like mud, and nothing made sense. Those dead faces echoed behind my eyes. Why was I seeing that?
But maybe I knew. Ever since I’d started Judy’s treatment, I’d been seeing Clare less. She’d disappeared those times. If the treatment was removing the nanobots from my system, maybe now I was seeing—
Less of what Alina wants me to see. The thought hit me like a gravity well. Judy… she hadn’t actually seen Clare; none of them had, until—until they were infected, too. I remembered now: They’d all been sniffling with cold symptoms like mine. The allergic reaction that meant the nanobots were inside them, too. And what had Judy’s note said about the medicine? Writing this down before I forget… Almost like she knew there was something wrong with her.
“Will, are you feeling all right?”
I snapped out of my thoughts. “Yeah, I’m okay, sorry. This is just a lot. Um, if I’m going to restart your ship, I need those batteries I told Clare about.”
“Yes, I have already identified the location of the correct supply closet. It will appear on that panel that is now lighting up to your left.”
A square on the floor, which was actually the wall, lit up. I turned to it, but as I did, I felt another hot flash in my head, my neck burned, and I glanced at the pods. Clare looked ancient again, like a zombie—
They’re dead, I thought, a freezing certainty coursing through me. Or at least, their bodies are. They’ve been like this for thousands of years. And: Alina is lying about being able to save them.… No matter how much power she had, they are too far decayed to ever be awakened. But then why lie? Suddenly, a new certainty flooded through me: Alina doesn’t know I know. She doesn’t know that Judy’s treatment is working and that I can see through her lies. At least not yet.
And I knew I had to keep it that way. “This panel here?” I said, crouching and running my fingers over the map.
“Yes, can you decipher it?”
“I think so.” Except I was barely looking at it. “This is where we are?” I said, tapping a dot.
“Yes, and that red dot is where the panels are. Two corridors away.”
“Okay…” I traced my finger over the route, slowly, to buy myself more time to think.
So first, Alina had infected me, and then, when the rest of my family tried to stop me from coming here—they’d known Clare wasn’t real, even shown me the proof on Penny’s video and the security cameras—she’d infected them, too. That made sense, but it still felt like there was something I was missing, a shadow in my thoughts.
“Will, do you see where to go? It’s time to get moving.”
“I think so.” I turned and looked at the pods. Clare’s long-dead face… it was all I could see now; the spell had worn off completely. I checked my communicator and saw that my treatment had reached 90 percent. I stood, starting to shake, but I couldn’t let Alina see. “And once I fix the circuits, you can restart your engines, and then… that’s it? You leave?”
“That’s correct. Off we go.”
The mummified skin, in all four pods…
“And then you can just wake them up?” I managed to say, but at the same time my mind was racing. Alina had described what happened next a little bit differently before; this time she’d said off we go, but last time she’d said until her rescue is complete. But you couldn’t rescue Clare and her family. These bodies could never be woken up. In order to rescue them, you would need—
“Oh, Will, stop stalling.”
“I’m not stalling, I—”
“You figured it out, is that it?”
“I didn’t—”
I stopped because a sound was reaching my ears from somewhere in the ship. A rhythmic banging, gentle, but steady. Getting louder.
“I had my suspicions, of course,” said Alina. “Don’t you think I could tell that I was losing my link with your nanobots? Nice job, trying to conceal that, by the way. You really are a sharp mind.”
“Wha
t are you talking about?” I said.
That clanging sound grew louder.
“I think you know.”
Lights flashed in the doorway overhead. Shuffling, rustling sounds, now legs swung over the edge, and a person in a space suit appeared—a suit just like mine. The figure dropped down on a safety line into the compartment.
“Hey, Will,” said Judy.
Dad dropped down next.
“What are you guys doing here?” I shouted. “You have to get out!”
“Get out?” Mom had lowered beside Dad, a smile on her face. “Why would we do that?”
I waved my hands at the pods. “Because it’s a trap!”
But Dad and Judy just shared a look.
“What’s he talking about?” said Dad.
“Not sure,” said Mom.
“Guys—” I shouted.
But Mom talked right over me. “Alina, what did you want us to do next?”
“First things first,” said Alina. “Grab your son.”
CHAPTER
Keep moving,” Judy said, shoving my back.
“Judy,” I pleaded, halfway up the safety line out of the lab. “She’s controlling you. This isn’t—”
“Don’t listen to him, Judy,” said Alina. “You know that you and your family are doing a great service.”
“Okay, I won’t,” Judy replied, her face blank.
“They’re going to steal our bodies!” I said, because now I understood what Alina truly wanted. “She’s going to download Clare’s family into us! That’s what she means by a rescue.”
“Will,” Judy said in her stern doctor’s voice, “you are not making sense right now.”
“Yeah, that’s ridiculous,” said Dad, who was crouched outside the hatch. He reached down and yanked me up out of the compartment. Judy climbed out behind me and the two grabbed me by the arms.
“Guys! Don’t do this!”
“Mom,” Judy said, looking back into the lab. “Get yourself prepped for the transfer.”
“No, don’t!” I shouted. “The transfer is going to kill you guys!”
“Will, come on,” said Mom, grinning. “Alina says we’re getting uploaded into a fascinating simulation. She says she can cater it to our every whim.”
“Yeah,” said Dad, “it’s going to be a thousand times better than this watery dump we’ve been living on.”
“Can’t wait,” Judy agreed, smiling.
“You GUYS!” I shouted, struggling against their grip. “You have to listen to me! She’s controlling your minds with nanotech! That’s what my rash was from! These colds you have are an allergic reaction—”
“Will,” Judy said, her face darkening. “You’ve always been smart, but I’ve told you before: I don’t do science fiction.”
Dad and Judy dragged me down the hall, and after a few useless minutes, I stopped fighting and just stumbled along through branching corridors until we reached the hatch to the engine room.
Inside, they pushed me against the circular railing. My headlamp reflected on the giant engine coil that had been glowing so brightly when I’d first seen this room with Clare. It was dark now, crusted with corrosion and dripping with rusty water.
“This one over here,” said Dad, opening a panel in the wall.
“Here are the batteries.” Judy removed a black equipment bag from her shoulder and tossed it at my feet.
“You brought our batteries?” I said.
“You see the corrosion on these walls?” said Dad. “Imagine what four thousand years of that did to their batteries. Now, hurry up. We need time to shave our heads for the transfer.”
“Dad!” I pleaded. Couldn’t they hear themselves?
“Will, stop fighting this,” Alina said pleasantly over the ship’s comms. “I promise I’m going to take good care of you. Now, attach the batteries to the fourth circuit panel on the left.”
“No,” I said. “I’m not going to help you.”
“I understand that you might feel this way,” said Alina, “but I should be clear: I have you, and I’m going to use your bodies either way. If you would like to live on past this moment, I would suggest that you do what I say.”
I had no response. All my hope was draining out of me. I glanced at Judy’s and Dad’s blank faces, and then knelt beside the panel, my fingers shaking, tugged out the circuit, and laid it on the floor, which was actually the wall. But at the same time, I yelled at myself: Think! There had to be something I could do to get out of this, to break the spell.
“Get to it, William,” said Judy. “We don’t have all day.”
I took out the first battery, tightened the wires, and then held it over the board, running my fingers over the light tubes. “Sorry,” I said quickly, “it will just take a sec.”
I attached the first battery to the circuit board, then chained the rest of them in a line. When they were all arranged, I ran a wire back to the board. “Okay,” I said, “this should reverse the polarity and allow the ship to come back online.” I connected the wire to the board.
There was a little buzz of energy, and then a small light grew inside one of the thin glass tubes on the circuit board and began to pulse. More lights ignited, and still more, spreading across the board and then jumping up to the other circuit boards in the panel. Lights bloomed into more lights, the ship coming back to life. Now a rumble of machinery in the floor and a burst of air through vents around the room.
“You did it, Will,” said Alina, like a proud parent. “I knew I could count on you. Now, I will be gone briefly as I reboot my core systems, but I’m leaving you in good hands.”
“We’re on it,” said Judy. “Okay, Will, on your feet. Let’s get back to the—”
A harsh sound cut through the silence: a siren blaring in pulsing tones that echoed through the corridors, louder than the rumbling floors.
“What is that?” Dad said, wincing and turning to the door. “It sounds like it’s right outside.”
“Will?” said Judy, peering at me suspiciously.
I held up my hands. “I didn’t do anything!”
Dad stepped out into the corridor. “It’s here,” he called from around the corner. “Looks like a faulty sensor of some kind, like a fire detector. Alina! Can you turn it off?”
“She’s still busy rebooting,” said Judy.
“It looks like if I hoist you up, you could deactivate it,” said Dad.
Judy glanced at me and I just shrugged. “Where exactly am I going to go?” She nodded and joined Dad.
With the alarm blaring, I knelt there, still trying to think of anything I could do to stop this from happening—
“Will!”
I heard a voice like a hissing whisper, barely audible over the alarm.
“Down here.”
I glanced to my side and spied one of those comms panels by my knee. A little light was blinking there. Was that—
“Clare?” I whispered, adrenaline surging through me—but at the same time I thought, No, this was probably just another a trick.…
“It’s me,” Clare’s voice said from the little speaker grate on the panel, the tiny yellow light beside it flashing as she spoke. “I escaped the simulation. Well, I had help from my family.”
“How is that possible?”
“Shh! No time for that. Did my distraction work?”
I glanced toward the hall and then lowered my head right by the panel. “Yeah, nice job.”
“Thanks. Alina placed me back in the simulation but hasn’t erased my memory yet. What she’s done… Will, I’m so sorry. You have to believe me: I had no idea what was really going on—”
“I believe you,” I whispered. “But how are you outside? Or, in there, in the wall?”
“My dad helped me download myself into the system’s online RAM. It’s… it’s weird not to have a body, but I guess I haven’t actually had one for a long time.”
“You’re in the ship’s systems? But why?”
“So I can help you. Now
, listen, quick. I’m going to display a code on this screen. Take a photo of it.”
A series of symbols appeared on the comm panel, in Clare’s language. “How are you doing that?” I asked.
“Just kind of spreading myself out there,” she said. “It feels weird, like I’m part of all this programming, sort of like I’m swimming in it.… This is what I’ve been all along; I just didn’t know.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. Did you get the code yet?”
I held my communicator over the screen and snapped a picture. “Got it. What is this?”
“That’s the passcode to reset the ship’s central computer. That will completely reboot Alina to her factory settings.”
“Okay. But…” A chill passed through me. “Won’t that also reboot everything else, including the virtual storage?”
“Nope. The virtual storage and other hard drives will remain intact. My family will be fine.”
“What about the ship’s RAM? The part you’re in.”
Clare didn’t respond right away. “You’ll know the ship is online when the engine core starts to spin. As soon as it does, put that code into the keypad on your terminal. You see it there?”
The side of the comms panel had two lines of symbols, perhaps to be used like a keyboard. “Yeah, I see it.”
“Okay, after you enter the code, hold the last symbol for five seconds. The reboot will start. And once it does you have to get out of there.”
“Out of the engine room?”
“No, off the ship completely.”
“But my family is all under Alina’s control.”
“The reboot sequence will cut Alina’s connection to them.”
“Why do we need to get off the ship?”
“Because I’m going to launch it,” said Clare. “I should be able to initiate the sequence as soon as the reboot begins.”
“Launch the ship? How? Aren’t you out of fuel?”
“We lost our electronics; we never lost our fuel. We’ve been sitting on nearly full tanks ever since we got stuck in the rift; we just couldn’t use them.”
“Okay, but how do we get out? Me and my family.”
“There’s an escape pod right off the med lab. Launching it should get you to the surface, and out of our way.”
Lost in Space--Infinity's Edge Page 12
