Dragon's Ark

by D Scott Johnson

  “Helping you is what got us into this mess.”

  “I know, and I’m sorry about that. The guards were a surprise to me, too. And you didn’t have to surrender. I could’ve hidden you until we found a way out. This place is bigger than you think.”

  “It doesn’t matter, Ozzie. We’re stuck here.”

  She spent the rest of the night arguing with him while trying to figure out if he really was Ozzie and not some sort of Trojan. Kim had already walked into one trap; she wouldn’t waltz into another. They might be trying to get her to confess to spying.

  But time was running out. The next morning she found out they were splitting everyone up once new quarters had been prepared. If the place really was as big as Ozzie said, it would make escape much more complicated. If the Chinese decided to take them to different facilities it would be impossible.

  Ozzie explained as much when she logged on after lights out.

  “But why are they holding us at all?” she asked. “They didn’t take notes this time around.”

  “It’s not you they’re interested in now. It’s Mike.”

  Her heart thumped hard in her chest. It was exactly what she was afraid of. “What’s so interesting about Mike?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t have access to that section. But it gets worse. There’s an execution van on the way.”

  They had officially run out of time. No more Miss Subtlety. “I need to speak to him right now.”

  “There’s no way, it’s on a different network.”

  “I’m not an idiot, Ozzie. You can do everything I can; why can’t you break into whatever place he’s being held?”

  “They’ve got guards on me too, plus detectors. It will set off alarms if I try anything in here.”

  “Do they have detectors on me yet?”

  “No, that all arrives tomorrow.”

  She could not trust her ally, had no tools to do the job, couldn’t take the time to make them, and someone she cared about was in danger.

  Execution truck.

  She had to trust Ozzie at least a little bit. “Can you pass tools to this phone?”

  “No, not anymore.”

  She’d checked the thing yesterday and it’d been empty, but a new scan of its storage said something else. Kim wanted to jump up and do a victory dance. Ozzie used most of the tools she did in his real profession. The ones in the phone had different versions and some were different brands, but they were all there. Kim wasn’t helpless.

  But she also wasn’t safe. It could be an elaborate setup to get her to do something illegal. “Ozzie, I just want to talk to Mike; you understand that, right?”

  “Of course, but you also need to get out of here; all of you do.”

  They were in the middle of the mountains. There might not be any villages nearby, and who knew what was further in the woods.

  Execution truck.

  She’d think of a plan later. Kim didn’t have the tools to get the camera to loop video, but they were all supposed to be asleep anyway. A single picture would last long enough.

  It had to.

  There were lines of potential, and she couldn’t remember how to breathe. Hold image freeze that tallest shortest collapse and now…

  Kim hacked into the guard radio frequency before her ears stopped ringing and switched to Mandarin. Thank God she’d managed to catch their names. “Privates Chen and Han, report to front gate station for reassignment.”

  “Are we being relieved?”

  “The prisoners are at rest now, correct?”

  There was a faint click as the door opened, and then shut.

  “Yes, all the prisoners are sleeping.”

  “Good. Report to front gate for reassignment.”

  These were soldiers. Orders were orders. “Affirmative.”

  She rolled out of bed and got Tonya’s attention. “Mike’s in trouble. We’re getting out of here, now.” They woke Shan and Spencer, and then got everyone ready. She sent a lockpick worm through Ozzie’s section, opening every door in that part of the building. Trusted ally or not, turning him loose would at least create some confusion. “Where is he, Ozzie, what section of the building? You can meet us there.”

  He didn’t answer. “Ozzie?”

  “He’s not in the compound anymore, Kim. He’s in the parking lot.”

  She broke into a run, not bothering to hide, not understanding what they shouted behind her.

  “Show me how to get there, Ozzie, now!” A line appeared on the floor in front of her and she skidded through a turn following it down a tiled hallway.

  There had to be time. There would be time.

  A janitor polishing the floor scrambled out of her way as she jumped past him to rush outside. Light poles lit the sidewalk with blue-white circles. Ozzie barreled out of another exit as she ran past. The compound was much larger than she'd expected; there must have been underground tunnels that connected it all. Yellow lights to her left marked out the parking lot on the other side.

  There was time. She had time to stop this. Kim rounded the corner, finally able to view the lot.

  The van was on the other side, maybe a hundred yards away, surrounded by guards. The back door was open. They were pulling out a gurney. Shoes stuck out from under the shroud which covered the body. A man’s body.

  She recognized the boots even at this distance. They were hiking boots she’d bought as a present.

  When Kim screamed, the guards startled and turned toward her.

  This wasn’t happening. This wasn’t real.

  They ran toward her. It could not be too late. One of the guards stumbled against the gurney, tearing the sheet off, and that’s when she knew.

  She was too late.

  Kim coughed as all the air left her lungs. Tonya and Spencer grabbed her and hauled her back behind the building as gunfire spalled the brick wall, cutting off her view of Mike’s corpse. Kim couldn’t struggle away from their hands, couldn’t break free of the insanity and pain their touch unleashed inside her. The enormity of what had happened amplified everything in a horrific spiral until something inside her snapped and darkness finally fell.

  Chapter 24: Helen

  The phrase in English was “nerve wracking,” and for the first time in her life, she truly understood it. Less than three days after learning it was possible to go outside, she’d been ordered to do just that.

  The judicial review required by law complicated candidate choice, but since China was a big country and had many problems with criminals, it still only took a day or so. Mike was a lot tougher to bring around.

  He paced. “Helen, it makes me sick.”

  “Why? Why does this bother you so much?”

  “Why doesn’t it bother you more? I have to help them kill someone.”

  “No, you just have to explain which areas of the brain are required for a successful hosting.”

  He threw his hands in the air. “So they can destroy them! Helen, they’ll have to use hooks for some of the work.”

  “Mike, stop.” She couldn’t talk to him when he was like this.

  “It’s one thing to have it happen through an accident. It’s rare, but it does happen. This is pure and simple murder.”

  “Mike,” she manifested her holo in front of him. “Please, stop. Sit down.” He did, but was still breathing too hard. “America has the death penalty, yes?”

  “Yes, but it takes years, and we don’t…use their bodies for anything else.”

  “And why not? These are people who have done terrible things, who have taken from their society and only returned evil. Why not try to wrest some good from them? They certainly will not need their body afterward. Why throw it away?”

  “It’s wrong. No matter what a person has done, they still have basic rights.”

  “Not in China they don’t, and I’m glad for that. We are still a very poor country; our success is fragile. We can’t take law and order for granted. A person who threatens that must be dealt with very severely he
re. We can’t afford anything less.”

  Helen was running out of time. She still didn’t know exactly what it was about this compound that made it so sensitive, but she’d never seen Father so angry before. She had shamed him deeply not just once, but twice, and had no doubt he would rather see her die in this rapidly shrinking cage than risk allowing her a third opportunity.

  Father wanted her anchored in the real world, given a specific place to live. It would let him track her, supervise her, imprison her if necessary, for years at a time instead of just days. Making that argument to Mike mollified him, but only a little.

  “Drug smuggling?” he asked, “and a first offense? It’s brutal.”

  “She carried enough sunrise in that car to kill an entire sector of a city. Thousands of Chinese die every day from sunrise overdose. How many times should we allow a person like this to commit such a horrible crime before we stop her? Twice? Three times? How many more Chinese have to die before your Western squeamishness is satisfied?”

  “Squeamishness? It isn’t squeamishness. What we’re doing is wrong. We’re killing someone just to take their body.”

  “No, we’re not. This person will die no matter what, and because of decisions she made. Her death is not a murder; it’s a consequence, and we can do nothing to stop it. The question is whether you will help me make that death meaningful. I don’t know how else to explain this to you. It really isn’t any different than organ harvesting.”

  She interrupted his objection. “I know, you Westerners insist on that being voluntary as well, another thing I simply cannot understand. And your side isn’t as high and mighty as you might think. There have been many instances of Westerners scolding Chinese about our practicality one day, and then showing up on our doorstep with a child who needs a new heart the next.

  “What happens to this person isn’t a subject for our discussion. I either do this, or I die. It’s that simple. I need your help to survive. The question is, will you provide it?”

  Her threads tangled tighter as she waited for his answer. Mike did not have to help. He was her older brother. If his decision was death, so be it.

  His fingers drummed faster and faster on the table as he stared at them. He shouted, and then he slapped the table as he stood.

  Her threads coiled. The knots they formed were tighter now that the space had decreased.

  He walked away, shoulders bunched tight under his shirt. He turned to her, but then turned back, twice. His expression was so pained she wanted to take the decision from him, but when she tried to speak nothing came out.

  Helen wasn’t just dishonorable; she was a coward as well.

  The third time he stayed facing her. “Okay, I’ll do it. I will help you, but only on one condition. When it’s over, you’re turning us all loose. I don’t care if your father doesn’t want that to happen, you will turn us loose. Am I clear?”

  Her emotions were an incomprehensible swirl, but his call to her honor struck through them. “Absolutely. I know for a fact that you are no spy and would never hurt my country, intentionally or otherwise. If we are successful, I promise you and your friends will be returned safely to your homes.”

  Once she’d gotten him over his prudishness, they discussed the rest of the procedure in detail. It was fascinating. “So the HgRI scanners only form a gateway?” she asked as he briefed the science team on the procedure.

  “It’s really hard to explain this without you knowing the math involved. Knowing it doesn’t make it easy, though. Higgs bosons use a different path through the folded dimensions of the universe. That’s why gravity is vastly weaker than the rest of the forces. With these settings, the brane that holds your consciousness is brought along with the bosons, close enough for it to be captured by the brain of the subject.”

  It didn’t help that she had to learn it all in English, with its damnable habit of reusing words that were spelled differently but pronounced exactly the same way. Chinese was so much more flexible. Brane was some mysterious trans-dimensional space that held her consciousness. Scientists currently thought of them as titanic constructs that held whole universes. Mike claimed that part was wrong, or at least not understood correctly.

  Brain, meanwhile, was a gross lump of yellow-gray flesh that could somehow anchor one of these fantastic quantum structures. Her fantastic quantum structure. They’d been at this for nearly the whole day, and her threads ached keeping up with it all.

  Every time they took a break, his request was always the same. “Helen, I want to speak to my friends. I want to speak to Kim.”

  “Father won’t allow it; he just won’t. Not until we’re done with this.” It was one of the absolute rules he’d set. She had no idea why.

  They discussed the new day-to-day concerns she’d have. Helen would soon feel what it was like to be hungry, to take in nourishment and make it part of her body.

  The behavior of her reproductive system was a bit of a shock.

  “Bleeding? Really?”

  “That’s how it evolved,” he said.

  At least the scientists weren’t around anymore; they’d left to go prepare the subject. It would’ve been humiliating to learn reproduction in front of them. It was the subject of millions of science books, but hadn’t been important until now.

  “You don’t have to experience it if you don’t want to. There are many birth control options that will stop it.”

  “I’ll go crazy once a month according to this. Crazy isn’t good for me. Crazy hurts.”

  “It won’t once you’re out. It’s not the same sort of crazy anyway, and it’s different for every woman. It never seems to bother Tonya at all, and if I let Kim be right about everything and keep the freezer full of chocolate ice cream, it’s usually okay.”

  The truck arrived late that night. Father had shared the woman’s file; she was absolutely guilty of a capital offense, a nasty one at that. But a human was going to die tonight so that Helen might live.

  She would bring honor to the gift its original owner had heaped with such shame.

  They opened a new connection to her cage, into another free-standing realmspace that was also attached to the scanner in a different part of the facility. Only by wrapping her threads tightly around her datastores did she manage the transfer. The strain of the past few days made her long for the vastness of her true home in China’s realmspace, but least she’d left the razor constructs of the cage behind.

  It would take a few hours for this new realm to expand enough for her to be truly comfortable—the infinite storage of realmspace protocols applied to private ones as well—but it wouldn’t have to expand all that much after tonight. Helen had somewhere to go.

  Father made sure a mobile army surgical unit was flown in to the facility. It was the first time they needed anything not on site. The base already had an HgRI scanner, although why was yet another mystery.

  Mike came through the doors without a glance at the camera she used. Father himself pushed the gurney in. The operation to prepare the host’s brain had already been performed; there were bandages over the shaved head. She looked like a doll to Helen, not at all real.

  She had to rely on speakers for Mike to hear her. She knew he didn’t want to speak, but Helen had to know. “Did she suffer?”

  “Do you want my help or not?”

  His voice was like a slap. She’d gotten too excited and had once more brought an avalanche of shame down on her own head. Death and life were very near to this place. The edges of ghosts fluttered as they passed.

  The lights of the room threw her host’s head into stark relief. She was smaller than Helen had expected. Not childlike, just delicate. The metric grids she threw over the face revealed remarkable symmetry.

  When Mike turned the scanner on, energies gathered, swirling into a maelstrom around her. He said to concentrate, collapse into the storm, let it yank her through.

  She didn’t want this.

  It spun, spiked, and squeezed her. Mike was a voice i
n the distance as she collapsed over a precipice. It thundered and tore as it grew. A cyclone crashed across the universe and it pulled her along with it. Thousands of routes to nowhere, everywhere, only one was right, and all were right. One flashed bright in a way that made no sense. Helen didn’t want this. The route reached out as she fell.

  Nothing came in or out, and she had to scream.

  “Helen, it’s breathing. You need to breathe.”

  Nothing worked. Darkness closed in, ultimate darkness with graceful feathers of peace. Helen could leave all this, end all this pain just by letting go. She fell but was yanked back by a thumb on her chin.

  On her chin.

  “Helen, you need to breathe.”

  Father summoned her in Mandarin, shouting over Mike’s English words. Nothing worked. She was stuck in a soup of perception and could not find an anchor. Please, it won’t work, not this time. She just needed to rest.

  Warm softness sealed over the top of her need. Wet. That’s what it meant. A column of life pressed into her center.

  Helen coughed it away. The warm softness vanished and terrible cold rushed in, but she kept coughing. She was breathing.

  It gave her the anchor she needed. Helen activated the daemons Mike had helped her to adapt and they took over monitoring of the autonomic functions of the body. She’d need them to keep it all running until the integration had completed. Once the last of them flashed green, she turned back to her realspace self and understood she could hear. That’s what the sides of her perception were, her ears. Their shouting was very loud. Analog sound was so different—more variant, richer, but far less precise.

  “Helen, please, open your eyes.”

  That must have been what the front of her perception was. Sight, behind closed eyelids. It wasn’t a camera to unlock; there was no access point. Mike told her to relax and let the body take over, so she did.

  White and shadow and color rushed in. Clacks assaulted her hearing, snaps, synchronized with a dark shape over her eyes. “Focus, Helen. Please, focus on this.”

  Fingers. Those were fingers. Mike snapped his fingers over her face. She breathed air, actual air, cool life flowing in and out as her threads thrashed and coiled. Air meant speech.