by Gentry Race
Could that be what this was all about? Imagination?
He had never been short of imagination as a kid, but adulthood changes a person, and war especially changed them. That was an imagination he hadn’t wanted to explore. After his tour on that time ship, he’d been ridiculed and accused of imagining the time loop he experienced.
Such irony.
His shoulders slumped with the thought of war. “The sounds of firing are louder than the images.”
“Visualize in your mind’s eye.”
Nathan thought back to his days of Ætheria use. His squadron had been compensating for the long hours of duty. Sure, Ætheria had “opened his mind,” but nothing like this.
He thought of Richter and the nights the two had spent on the road as kids. It had been the love of his brother that showed him the way to change his thinking and drop the negativity.
Nathan shoved aside the pity, feeling the weight of Richter’s death as a sign of strength. He was a Marine like his brother, even if he’d only been a new one. If there was one thing he wanted to make sure of, it was that Richter’s death had not been in vain.
“You’re doing it!” Hastings called out.
Nathan looked down to see that from each small printer port within his palm a small blade had begun to form. Nathan held the edge, analyzing its validity. An inscription was engraved on the side—Richter. This was his lucky knife.
“Good. Level One Æther.” Hastings was now looking at Nathan differently than she had before. “That was faster than most.”
Sasha Hastings walked down the hall with a switch in her hips that could have tamed a lion. Even though her exosuit looked stiff around her fluid movement, it still managed not to impede her authoritative strut. Outside the Disaster Room, the quiet Rockheed hallway doglegged to the left, and she rounded the corner to another long corridor.
She typed on her forearm, and her suit’s paneling began to change, repeatedly shifting to a smaller size. Each printer port diminished in size to small, flat segments that resembled stitching. What had been grey and black was now a soft, blue, flowing garment, appropriate for an office setting.
Hastings entered an open door leading into a room filled with screens and sensors that had recorded the earlier events with Nathan. Tang sat there, leaning back with his legs spread in a comfortable position. Even though his demeanor was rough, Hastings liked his long hair better when it was down, which seemed to soften him up. Perhaps that was why he left it coiled in that god-awful man-bun.
“What do you think?” Hastings inquired, walking to a sensor that showed a small section of the brainstem. “That was the fastest anyone has psyched up to a Voxel suit.”
“I think he’s a jerk,” Tang said.
She rolled her eyes, and he got up to place his arms around her waist as she brought up another monitor reading.
“I don’t like the way he looks at you.”
Hastings knew Nathan had a thing for her in the past, but that was then, and this was now. She was with someone, and she wouldn’t hesitate to let Nathan know he was crossing the boundary.
“Nathan has always had an affinity for being… less than charming,” Hastings said, “but his past is proving useful down here, along with yours. If it wasn’t for your Ætheria use, you wouldn’t be wearing that suit either.”
Tang let go of her small waist.
Hastings noticed a strange reading on the monitor that said: Brainwave Functionality.
“Well, the nanocytes have filled in the holes nicely,” she said. “Look at the two hemispheres. They’re almost united now.”
“What should we do while we’re down here?” Tang asked. “Topside ice crust is showing we’re melted in.”
“Well, ROAS is still silent.”
"It's like they fucking abandoned us.”
“There’s only one way to find out,” Hastings said, walking to the doorway. Her dress swayed just as she stopped and turned around, her sleek body framed perfectly in the space. “Let’s get acquainted with our guests and see how they handle the sequence. Maybe we can breach our way out of here.”
Tang shook his head as he touched his sleeve where a solid surface formed. After tapping a few buttons, his standard brown army fatigues changed to black and hardened to the familiar-looking shell of a Voxel suit. Hastings could tell he felt powerful in it, and deep down she hoped she wouldn’t regret putting him in one.
“Looks like it’s time to show Nathan how to use both eyes,” he said flatly.
She rolled her eyes at the comment. She hated how Tang was always so defensive about their relationship. It was never good enough that she chose to be with him, and she always felt like she had to prove she loved him. Tang was an interesting guy who didn’t really know how to treat others. I hope that will change someday, she thought as she stepped out of the room.
10
Nathan waited patiently in the Disaster Room, sitting on a bench made of voxels that had printed up from the ground. The large walls were now a dim purple that faded to an orange hue.
He still couldn’t believe where he was and what he’d seen. This very place was the answer to his dreams, and he was closer to actualizing his time loop than ever before. On top of that, now he was holding something he’d actually recreated—Richter’s knife. That was monumental, especially because it had been with Richter when he died.
Hastings entered from a door that seemed not to have been there a minute ago. Nathan was taken aback by her beautiful dress and how incongruously adorned she was given that this place was called a Disaster Room.
“Will we really be down here for months?” Nathan asked.
She motioned along her arm and her clothes snapped tight around her figure, changing back to the recognizable Voxel suit that was identical to Nathan’s.
“Be careful what you wish for,” she warned. “The mind can dream up some terrible things. You need to learn to focus and control your forethought.”
Nathan nodded.
“If you push this button,” she said, moving to touch his arm, “it will deconstruct the voxels back into their protoform.” Richter’s knife disintegrated into his suit. “Come on, newbie, it’s time for you to meet the team.”
“The team?” Nathan said hesitantly. He felt a bit unsure about the new team. From what he remembered, it would be comprised of Switch and Fery. Then there was Tang. Even though he’d spent the last two years leading ex-militia and had seen some bad apples, he wasn’t sure if he was ready to go around with another batch.
“Let’s go one by one,” Hastings said, now pointing to the far wall.
The wall changed to glossy black with a sheen that looked like a slick, polished shoe. Contours seemed to indent, forming a door and turning translucent. Just behind that was what looked like an overly large prison cell.
“What’s this?” Nathan asked, trying not to look concerned.
“Voxelized individual cells,” Hastings said, trying to explain without making it sound terrible, but she was unsure about whether she’d been successful because his expression was a bit unreadable at the moment.
Within a cell lined with mixed martial arts posters of the nineteenth century, a girl sat in an ordinary chair. Her head was down, and she had short black hair hanging over her face. Nathan leaned in, trying to get a better look. She appeared to have a small frame that resembled a muscular dancer.
“This is Vix,” Hastings said.
Vix lifted her head and stood up, and Nathan could now see her face. He wondered if she was related to Tang. As she walked toward them, her gait was more graceful than most.
“Vix, time to play,” Hastings signed in American Sign Language and slowly said the words, allowing Vix to read her lips. “His name is Nate—Nathan. I took some shots with him when the Syndicate first struck. He’ll be joining us.”
Hastings stood silently while Vix signed, looking at Nathan's eye.
Nathan was ready for the question and looked to Hastings to explain.
&n
bsp; “Wounded by the Syndicate,” Hastings signed to Vix, “and during his first battle, too.”
“I bet you felt like a shaved tail, Louie,” Tang said, interrupting them as he walked into the room.
Nathan loved to hear banter among squad members, just as long as one of them wasn’t Tang. Nathan hated Tang’s attitude and remembered that they didn’t work well together. Tang was known for being a loner most of the time, and Nathan was surprised he was even working with ROAS.
Nathan picked himself up, squaring his frame to Tang’s shorter, rugged stature. “Nothing like getting your tail shaved to teach you respect for the battlefield.”
Tang smiled. “Well, what’s the holdup? Let’s bring ‘em out.”
“I wanted to ease him into it slowly,” Hastings said, holding a hand up.
“Ease into what?” Nathan asked, looking at Hastings like he wasn’t being told the full story.
“This is a sparring session, One-Eye,” Tang said as he dialed into his armband. “It’s time to show us what you got.”
Three more doors formed in the glossy black wall and opened. On Nathan’s far right, he saw Switch’s pudgy body stepping out. His long dreadlocks were now tied back except for a few that interlinked to his ported suit. He wore frames that connected to his scalp like a beret holding his hair back, reflecting the flickering glare from the action video game he played. He noticed the group looking at him and broke his attention on the game.
“Looks like you found a good use for Switch,” Nathan said.
Switch took a bow in an exaggerated, amusing way, losing the glasses off his head to a chaotic dangle.
“These things are sweet!” Switch said.
“Yeah,” Hastings said. “The holes in his noggin were huge, and it took a lot of grey matter to fill them. Watch what you say now because he can map out everything—a quintessential numbers guy.”
“Okay...” Nathan said, turning his attention to the next door.
Fery was framed by the door as her petite form rushed to put on clothes that were tighter than the toned body she slipped them over. The hurry in her step was offset by the frustration of clipping up her brilliant, rainbow-colored hair as she pounced out of the cell like a teenager on prom night.
“You know Fery. Little country girl—and by country, I mean crazy,” Tang said.
“Yeah,” Nathan said. “I’ve seen her in action. Heard she was phased out.”
“Yeah, no,” Hastings said. “She escaped awhile back. I bet the only reason she came back was for Beightol.”
Fery put on her last pink sock with a two-step hop. She then ran over to the next cell where a large Slavic man sat reading Lady in the Water: A Bedtime Story. Unmindful of what he was doing, Fery swung her tiny arms around his thick, tree-stump neck like a flower child hugging a redwood.
“Papa Beightol, why do we let them keep us from each other?” she said in a southern drawl as she looked over at Nathan. One couldn’t help but sense her disdain.
“They want play with Silly Putty.”
Nathan was confused. “Silly Putty?”
Hastings shook her head, “That's what she’s calling the voxels since you can shape them however you see fit.”
“Please,” Beightol said as he shot a crooked eye over the book and settled back into the story. His thick Slavic accent was deep and hoarse. “Let me finish book first.”
“Beightol has been with us since the beginning. Due to his overuse of steroids, his body doesn’t know how to regulate his adrenaline anymore,” Hastings said. “We now do that for him.”
Nathan watched curiously as the large man interacted with the small girl.
“He was one of the missing soldiers who survived the Dreadnought Massacre of the Galilean War. He spent years as a POW, ‘roid raging on Ætheria while lifting weights and reading nonstop shitty thrillers with god-awful twisted endings. He eventually crashed a ship into a diplomatic official’s house after his facility banned an author he highly regarded. We found him on the run in the outer rim.”
"He loves tanks," Tang said, shaking his head.
“An author?” Nathan asked, puzzled. “Really?”
“M. Night Shyamalan,” Hastings said.
Nathan shook his head. “Never heard of him.”
Nathan couldn’t believe their predicament. They were a band of misfits stuck under nuclear fallout, and everyone seemed to have a problem with authority.
He stepped back for a moment and tipped his head toward Hastings. “Sasha, permission to speak freely?”
“What is it, Nathan?” Hastings said.
“Why Ætheria users?”
"Rockheed found that users of entheogen-like Ætheria had large abscesses in their brains,” Hastings said.
“This was the last measure,” Tang said, “the call ROAS didn’t want to make. They’d already assembled official teams like S.P.E.A.R. to help combat greater threats, but they needed a final contingency.”
Hastings continued, “We’re going to need to trust each other if we’re going to survive. We’ve all used entheogens—illegal or otherwise—and have had our minds altered in ways non-users haven’t.”
“Full of holes,” Tang added.
“The ‘eaten away’ parts allow us to fold in new grey matter that binds with the suits. This then allows us control of the dopamine, serotonin, and adrenaline levels that was lost to the chronic user, therefore returning them to a normal, healthy condition. Expanding their minds.”
“Expansion of the mind?” Nathan asked rhetorically, having heard this ancient saying from a long time ago—the old “turn on, tune in, drop out” mantra. “Screw the psychobabble bullshit. Just tell me how I’m going to get revenge.”
“We’ll need to work together,” Hastings said curtly.
“What about you two?" Nathan asked, looking at Tang and Hastings.
“I’m a rocket specialist,” she said.
Nathan remembered her telling him of growing up in the outer rim, helping her father manufacture explosives off a supernova-harvesting farm.
"What about you?” Nathan asked, looking at the devilish Tang.
“Grenadier. Love me some boom,” Tang said with a smile, turning to the team and yelling, "Okay, Psychonautz, time for training!”
Fery let go of Beightol, allowing him to finish his reading, and met Switch and Vix just outside the cell. Switch tightened his suit, which then morphed into the deep black goo and hardened into a standard Voxel suit from the neck down. His bulbous belly was now absent, the suit acting like a corset. He extended his arms, and a large, neon blue, holographic HUD bubbled up around him. Nathan could pick out a few familiar sensor windows that he’d used when he was with Homestead. Switch swiped the numerous windows around, finding the one he was sweet on, and eventually settled on Disaster Room Training Scenario.
“Switch will have all eyes on us, all the time,” Hastings pointed out, “and Fery will have our backs in the water.”
Fery pinched a small pendant earring she wore and her tight leggings morphed as well. Nathan tried to not take notice of the hardened Voxel suit panels that accentuated her small, womanly features even more. She pulled all her hair back into a tight ponytail, chewing a piece of gum as she stood with a ready stance. Small, sleek fins voxelized on each limb, and a water jet sprouted from her back. From her right forearm, a ranged weapon voxelized that looked like a cross between a bow and a harpoon gun.
But it was Beightol who overshadowed them all. As he stepped into line with Switch and Fery, his height towered over the two three-fold. Nathan thought the man must have been created in some lab, crossed with a rhino.
His suit appeared to be in accord with the others, save for the size of the portholes. Beightol leaned into his signature squat, bearing the load of a tank barrel that was Nathan’s size.
“Now that we’re all acquainted,” Hastings said, “Switch, fire up the training sequence. Let’s see how everyone handles their suits.”
11
&n
bsp; Switch gave a nod to Hastings, motioning on a keyboard that voxelized from his chest port. After typing in a few instructions, the room lights dimmed and then began to glow a brilliant green. Nathan felt his footing displace and looked down to see dirt, mulch, and foliage growing up around him. The smell of fresh jungle began to fill his nose as large trees sprang up out of the ground. Nathan felt like he was watching time-lapse photography at its smoothest frame rate. The sky turned to a bright, sunny day, and he felt like he was somewhere near the equator.
“Amazing. Is this all made of voxels?” Nathan asked.
“Yes. The Disaster Room is the bastard child of the S.P.E.A.R. Hazard Room. They allowed us to modify their tech with our voxel technology.”
Through the wet jungle, Nathan could see a tall compound in the distance. Thick fog crawled around its base and fire flickered from tiny torches. He noticed for the first time that his “bad” eye was experiencing no distortion, no distraction, no bugs.
Switch called out. “Here’s the scenario. Surrounding that compound just to the southeast is a horde of green aliens I created called Spillgoy. They’re modeled after bug DNA and our very own Tang, so you know they’re nothing short of prideful.”
The group chuckled. Beightol reached over, slapping Tang on the back. Switch projected a hologram of a gruesome, short, hairy bug that looked like a cross between a dust mite and a large wolverine.
Switch continued. “I programmed these Spillgoy, and they’re rendered at over three hundred frames per second. Super fast. Not even Nathan’s creepy-looking eye can see them.”
“Creepy?” Nathan asked.
Fery leaned over and winked. “I think it’s kind of cute, sugar.”
Switch continued. “The goal is to take out the Spillgoy leader. He’ll be bigger than the rest, so you can’t miss him. I’ll be tailing you to make sure none of them actually hurt you.”
“Wait, they can hurt us in here?” Nathan asked.
“This isn’t a virtual simulation. It’s a voxelization, and that means real things that can really hurt you,” Hastings said. “So, I suggest you voxel up a weapon. Try Level Two.”
