by Lizzy Bequin
“It’s okay,” she says to the group. “Sloane had a curse put on her by the Outsiders, but she is better now.”
A curse? I look over and notice her casting me a wry glance out of the corner of her eye.
Got it. Too much trouble to go into the details of the neural implant with these guys.
As we are standing there, one of the sleeping babies starts to stir and cry lightly.
“Oh,” Lily whispers softly. “Little Eva is hungry. I’ll feed her while I talk to Sloane.”
Eva? So that little baby must be an omega then, and the other two are little boys—little Alphas.
Ever so gently, Lily scoops the little omega from the blanket. She is precious. She has soft chubby cheeks, rosy with life, and the tiniest, most delicate nostrils I’ve ever seen. Her round head is tufted with a bit of reddish fuzz that matches her mother’s auburn hair.
As Lily lifts her, the baby stops her crying. Her beautiful, curious eyes latch onto my face for a moment, and my heart melts.
It’s so strange. I’ve never really done the whole baby thing in the past, but it seems like that’s changing now.
“Who is that, Eva?” Lily says in a soft, loving voice to her child as she bobs her gently in her arms. “Do you see Sloane?”
I smile and wiggle my fingers at the baby, who just stares at me wide eyed.
Lily giggles and turns the baby in her arms so that she is facing her chest. Tiny hands grasp weakly at her breast, and the baby's lips finally find and latch onto Lily’s nipple.
Lily watches her for a moment, then turns toward her Alphas.
“Sloane and I need to talk,” Lily explains. “I’m going to introduce her to Seraph.”
One of her Alphas, the youngest one with raven-black hair, rises and places his hand on her shoulder. His handsome face is taut with concern for his omega. Maybe it’s because of his youthfulness, but he reminds me of a dark version of Truk.
Lily smiles serenely and places a soothing hand against his marble-statue chest.
“It’s okay, Kadmon,” she says softly. “Everything will be okay. Besides, we won’t be far away.”
The Alpha casts one more uncertain glance in my direction before nodding and rejoining his two pack brothers.
Lily grins and takes me by the arm with her free hand.
“They are really protective of me,” she whispers.
“I know the feeling,” I mutter.
Lily laughs at that. There’s something in the sound of her voice and her bright eyes that makes me instantly like her. I feel happy in her company, like she is my long-lost sister.
I haven’t had another woman to confide in during these last days. In fact, I haven’t really had that since I was a little girl. Now I’m starting to realize how welcome that is.
As we stroll slowly toward the big device in the center of the dark chamber, my eyes stray to the baby feeding happily at Lily’s breast. It’s like I can actually sense the connection between these two lives. The love between mother and child is almost palpable.
A wave of emotion surges over me.
I wouldn’t call it envy exactly, because that has negative connotations. I’m not jealous of her, but I want what she has. The idea of feeding and nourishing this tiny living being with her body is so natural, and yet it seems miraculous somehow.
It never even occurred to me that I would want to do that until this moment, but now my desire for it is irresistible.
Lily catches me looking, and I quickly glance away.
“You don’t mind, do you?” she asks. “Sorry, I’ve just been in the Zone for so long, I kinda forgot.”
“No I don’t mind.”
How could I mind something so natural?
Besides, I’m half naked too, dressed in nothing but a primitive loincloth that Kane reluctantly brought for me. So even if I did mind, I really wouldn’t be in any position to talk.
I decide to change the topic, and the obvious choice is the elephant in the room. I incline my head toward the massive, thrumming device that we are moving toward.
“Lily, what is that thing?”
“That’s the Source.”
Dog already told me that earlier when I was resting. But that answer doesn’t help much.
“I mean, what does it do?” I whisper. “And who made it? And for that matter, what is this place?”
Lily stares at the massive, spherical device for a long moment before she answers.
“It’s too bad that my messages never made it through,” she says dolefully. “If they had, you would already know the answer to those questions.”
Once again, I wonder what messages she is referring to. I’m certain it must be connected to the reason I’ve been sent here.
When Frostgrave told us that we were going into the Zone to rescue this scientist, it didn’t make sense to me. It was totally out of character for SynerGen to expend so many valuable resources for one person, especially a woman. Then, I learned that it wasn’t a rescue mission at all, but an assassination. Now, I’m sure that these messages Lily keeps referring to must be the reason the leaders at SynerGen want her dead.
Anyway, the suspense is killing me.
“So are you going to tell me what the deal is with this thing?” I ask.
We sidle up to the base of the gigantic device where there is an inset console.
“I’ll let Seraph tell you,” she answers.
“Seraph? Who the hell is Seraph?”
“You’ll see.”
Cradling her feeding baby in one arm, Lily uses her free hand to tap a series of commands at the consoles keyboard. her fingers race over the keys with incredible speed.
The hum emanating from the Source takes on a slightly different frequency. A strange blue light flickers across the massive orb’s surface, gradually resolving itself into a spectral face.
Just when I thought I couldn’t be any more shocked, the face speaks. Its voice is cold but oddly pleasant.
“Hello, Lily. It is good to see you again. I see that you have one of your offspring present. I will keep my voice at a moderate level.”
“Thank you,” Lily answers.
It’s so weird. She’s just talking to this thing like it’s totally normal and not a giant floating head.
She turns toward me.
“Sloane, this is the Sentient Evolving Recursive Algorithmic Population, um…”
She snaps her fingers as if trying to remember a word.
“Heuristic,” the face says calmly. “Sentient Evolving Recursive Algorithmic Population Heuristic.”
“Right, heuristic. I can never remember that bit. Anyway, we just call him S.E.R.A.P.H. for short.”
“Seraph,” I gasp.
I don’t know what I was expecting, but it certainly wasn’t this.
“At your service,” the face says. It even seems to nod politely.
“What is this?” I whisper to her. “Some kind of AI?”
Lily nods. “You had some questions, right Sloane? Let’s start with ‘who.’ Seraph, would you be so kind as to let us know who made you.”
“Certainly,” the AI answers, “I was constructed under the auspices of the SynerGen Corporation by a team of programmers comprising Dr. Rudiger Dorn, Dr. Uli Roth, Dr. Jaeyung—“
Lily gestures with her free hand.
“That’s enough, Seraph. We don’t need the full list.”
She fixes her nursing baby’s weight in her arms, then turns toward me and quirks one eyebrow.
“SynerGen?” I say in a hushed voice. “SynerGen made this thing?”
Lily nods.
“Yup. And it gets better. Or worse, depending on how you look at it. Seraph, why don’t you go ahead and fill Sloane in on what it is that you do.”
“With pleasure,” the AI responds in a mechanical voice that doesn’t actually seem capable of pleasure.
Over the next few minutes, Seraph lays out the whole story for me. The Source, as the Alphas refer to it, was originally suppos
ed to be a sexual suppression field. Even one hundred years ago, overpopulation was rampant, and the government contracted SynerGen to figure out a way to stop it. This massive device was intended to emit a suppression field that would basically make people less horny.
But they didn’t want to just turn off people’s sex drive’s completely. If they did that, the whole population would be gone in a generation. So instead, they created Seraph. His purpose was to modulate the suppression field based on all sorts of data—economic growth, unemployment rates, resource supplies and shortages.
“The suppression field,” Seraph explains. “is actually a misnomer. It is not in fact an energy field at all. Rather, it is a nanotechnological virus that infects all humans within the operational radius of—“
“Wait, a nano-what?” I interrupt.
“Nanotech,” Lily says. “Tiny machines the size of a cell.” She gestures toward the Source. “This device manufactures them by the billions, and once they are inside a human body, they can replicate on their own.”
“You mean I’ve got a bunch of little machines swirling around inside me?”
Lily nods.
“Yeah, basically.”
I shiver at the thought. It’s even weirder than having that neural implant.
“And that’s why it is so hard to develop protective gear,” Lily goes on. “The little nano-viruses can eat right through all kinds of materials. But there is a limit to their range. They get their power from electromagnetic waves emitted by the Source.”
I guess that explains why the so-called contamination of the Zone gets stronger the deeper one goes.
“But I don’t get it,” I say after a moment. “I mean, I thought this thing was supposed to be a sexual suppression field. If anything, it seems like the exact opposite.”
A blush comes into my cheeks and neck as I think about all the dirty things I’ve done since I became an omega. Letting my body be used and shared by three dominant Alphas. Begging for it.
My libido is anything but suppressed.
“So what happened?” I ask “How did a suppression field end up making a bunch of Alphas and omegas? Was it a malfunction or something?”
“Not a malfunction,” Seraph says. “My objective was optimization of human reproductive processes. I noted a significant flaw—an imbalance—and I corrected it.”
“What imbalance?”
“Females of the species were grossly undervalued by their mates, and this in turn exacerbated the overpopulation problems. Women were impregnated by men who had no intention of supporting a family. In some cases women were even impregnated through forcible intercourse. They were viewed merely as sexual objects. Their reproductive value was not adequately appreciated, and as a result that value was used in dysfunctional ways. I have rectified that.”
I look around the massive chamber at the small clusters of people milling about. Little knots of Alphas and omegas. It’s not hard to see that the Alphas outnumber the omegas three or four to one.
And then I think of all the women who died in the great Cataclysm when they became betas.
“Rectified? How, by killing all of the women off? There are hardly any left now.”
“As a rule, a rare commodity is a valued commodity,” Seraph replies flatly.
I can’t believe what I’m hearing. My blood heats with anger. I would yell at this frigging machine if it weren’t for the little baby suckling peacefully at Lily’s breast beside me.
“You’re talking about people, not commodities,” I hiss.
Lily’s hand touches my shoulder.
“Sloane,” she says in a pacifying voice. “Remember. Seraph is a machine. He doesn’t think like you and me.”
She’s right of course. I take a deep breath to calm my nerves.
“Look around,” Seraph says. “Are you omegas not valued?”
I do as he says, and glance about the chamber one more time, and I have to admit that he is right. Everywhere I look, every omega has the attention of three or four massive Alphas. For every Alpha, his omega mate is the focus of his life—his whole reason for being.
“The omegas are the source of life,” Seraph says. “Each one is joined with a pack of Alpha mates who jealously protect her from harm. And each omega produces a litter large enough to keep the population stable.”
Lily nudges me.
“Any more questions for Seraph?”
I shake my head. I feel like my brain is already overloaded. Lily reaches for the console.
“Thank you, Seraph, that will be all for now, I think.”
“Goodbye,” Seraph says in that strange, cold voice, and his visage fades.
This is all so much information to take in at once. My mind is reeling. I was never under any illusions that SynerGen was some kind of saintly organization, but this is beyond anything I ever imagined.
SynerGen caused the whole Cataclysm, resulting in millions of deaths. Sure, that wasn’t their intention, but their original plan wasn’t that much nicer. And now they are trying to cover the whole thing up by sending me to murder the person who knows their dirty little secret.
Lily has uncovered the biggest conspiracy perhaps of all time. If this information got out to the public, the shockwaves would be felt around the world.
“Look,” she says, picking up a cracked data slate that is wired into the console. “I nabbed this device off the head scientist of the expedition that brought me here. It’s basically the only communication device that we have here in the Zone. For the past six months, I’ve been using this device to send messages out to the city hive, trying to explain about everything—SynerGen, Seraph, the suppression field, and how they caused the Cataclysm. And there’s so much more than that, Sloane. For example, they are planning to use Alphas in the city hive to secretly kill off millions of people to bring the population down. Genocide, Sloane. Truly evil stuff.”
I rub my temples, trying to assuage the dull headache that’s building up inside my skull. I feel like my brain is about to explode.
“But your messages haven’t been getting through,” I say after a moment. “Nobody in the city hives knows anything about this, Lily. Nobody.”
Lily frowns and nods. She fiddles nervously with the piercing in her lip.
“That’s what I thought at first. But think about it Sloane. Somebody is obviously receiving the message. Somebody at SynerGen. And they are not happy about it. That’s why they want me dead.”
She sits down on the floor with a sigh. Little Eva has stopped feeding and drifted off into slumber.
“To be honest,” she says. “I’ve been expecting someone like you to come. I knew that SynerGen would be pissed about what I was doing, and I figured they would send someone to kill me. I just hoped that my message would get out to the public first, so it wouldn’t all be in vain.”
I slowly lower myself to the floor beside her. We just sit there as the silent moment stretches out into a minute.
At last I ask her a question.
“If you knew you were risking your life, why did you do it, Lily? Why did you keep sending those messages to the hive? I mean, you’ve got a new life here. You’ve got babies, a family.”
I try my best to keep my voice steady, to keep from betraying how much I envy those things.
Lily sighs again. She glances across the vast chamber to where her Alphas are sitting playing with her other two children. My three guys are talking with them too. I even notice that Kane is smiling and holding one of the little ones.
Shit, I think it may be the first time I’ve seen that guy actually smile.
“I know,” Lily explains. “All of those things are so important to me, Sloane. I can’t even put into words how much I love my children and my Alphas. I feel a bond with them that defies comprehension. But at the same time, the truth matters. The people who live outside the Zone deserve to know what happened here, and they deserve to know what horrible things SynerGen is planning to do to them. If I didn’t believe that, I wo
uldn’t be staying true to myself.”
She stares at me, her eyes moist with emotion.
“You must have suspected that SynerGen had sent me to kill you,” I say at last. “Or at least capture you and take you back to the city hive to be imprisoned. You could have just had your Alphas tear me to shreds as soon as you saw me in the cathedral.”
Lily just laughs quietly.
“Fuck that,” she says. “If wasn’t you, it would just be somebody else, Sloane. SynerGen is just going to keep sending assassins until they finally manage to shut me up. But I refuse to stop, and I refuse to live my life in fear. Whatever happens happens, but I’m not going to give up.”
She leans back and looks up at the Source, basking in the energy humming out of it, her little baby cradled in her arms.
I look at the cracked data slate again. The one that Lily has been trying to use to send her transmissions to the hive. Etched along the edge is the SynerGen logo.
“Lily,” I say, “I think I know why your transmissions haven’t been getting through.”
“You do?”
I nod and look one more time at my Alphas across the room.
“Yeah. And not just that. I think I have a plan for how we can change that.”
CHAPTER 25: SLOANE
The council chamber of the Alphas is an old theater.
I don’t mean a cinema. This was once an actual live venue, with a wide, wooden stage, an orchestra pit, and an upper level mezzanine in the back. Based on the ornate, arabesque architecture, I would say this place was already old at the time of the Cataclysm. I can imagine how it must have once looked, the box-seats along the walls filled with men in tuxedos and women in fancy gowns peering through opera glasses at the stage.
The years, however, have been unkind. Now the blood-colored stage curtains hang in moth-eaten tatters. The air is tinged with the smell of mildew, and the elaborate relief carvings along the walls and ceilings are streaked with dark grime and furred with green moss.
Dripping candles, hundreds upon hundreds of them positioned along the balconies and footlights of the stage, cast an eerie, flickering glow over the gathered Alphas who are murmuring to one another, filling the theater with the white-noise of their combined voices.
