Deleted

by Phoenix Ward

  After what seemed like forever, the tunnel emptied out to a wide wall of pipes and tubes and a large steel door. The door had a bolt on it so large that it looked like it took two people to open it. Ethan couldn’t help but think of the huge bank vault doors he’d sometimes see in crime movies.

  Gauge stepped forward and rapped on the door with his fist. His knock had a specific rhythm of tap tap, tap tap, bang! He stepped back, and Ethan waited in silence with him. Eventually, the bolt slid open with a loud thunk and the door began to open.

  The bodyshell turned to Ethan and smiled.

  “Welcome to the Furnace,” he said, gesturing to the slowly opening door. “Secret headquarters of the People’s Union.”

  19

  Interrogation

  “I’m telling you everything I know,” Tera said to the bodyshell in charge of questioning her. “I am Tera Alvarez, and I am a Shell City Police Officer. I swear!”

  “Oh good, she swears,” the third person in the room commented with over-obvious sarcasm. “I say we let her go, then.”

  The light strips that ran along the seams of the room, where the walls met the ceiling and floor, did little to actually illuminate the chamber. It seemed to be there to set the mood, rather than help anyone see each other.

  In her training at the academy, Tera had seen one of these interrogation rooms a handful of times, but always from the outside. She had watched a mock questioning from behind the one-way mirror. Just like the mirror in this room.

  I wonder how many of them are watching me, she thought, staring at her own reflection. I wonder what they are thinking. How guilty do they believe I am?

  The bodyshell that asked her the question was tall and slender. She couldn’t tell if he hunched over the table at her as some form of intimidation, or just because the ceiling was too low for him. She hadn’t seen him stand to full height since he’d entered.

  The one who made the sarcastic comment leaned against the wall, far away from the table where Tera was shackled. He was shorter, but something about him told Tera that he was much older. He seemed almost bored as he watched the interrogation play out.

  “We didn’t ask you if you were Tera Alvarez,” the tall one in her face said, ignoring his partner. “We asked you where the rest of Truck’s Raiders are, and if they’re planning an attack.”

  “I don’t know that!” she pleaded. “I was only there for a day because they used an E.M.P. on me.”

  “The same E.M.P. they used on Abenayo, right?” the one in the corner said skeptically.

  “Yes,” Tera said.

  “Then why is Abenayo dead and you’re not?” the tall one asked, hunching closer to Tera’s face.

  “I told you, I was too far away,” Tera explained. “Abenayo and the raider guy were right in each other’s faces when the detonation went off. I imagine he’s the one who triggered it.”

  The bored-looking cop in the corner scoffed.

  “It’s true!” Tera whined.

  “Sounds convenient,” the shorter one said. “Sounds incredible, even. To me, the logical assumption is that you’re lying. You’re just an impostor.”

  “You’ve seen the scan results, ‘Tera’,” the tall one said. “Your I.I. frequency doesn’t match our records, and you know that can’t be faked. We’ve also confirmed Officer Alvarez’s deletion — how dare you pretend to be a dead cop.”

  “That’s impossible,” Tera argued. “I don’t know why the frequencies don’t match. Someone must be doing this to me!”

  “Sure, sure,” the one in the corner said. “You’re just wrapped up in some conspiracy, right?”

  “Tell the truth, raider!” the tall one growled. His fake teeth almost seemed to rattle a little.

  “I am! I’m not a raider!” Tera felt like she could cry, if she had the tear glands to do so. She wondered if this is how all the criminals felt when they were brought in for interrogation. Like they were digging for a specific answer, and anything else the suspect said was a lie.

  “Seems like she’s sticking to her story,” the bored one in the corner said. “Even though it’s clearly bullshit.”

  The tall one sighed, then stepped back from the table. He was able to stand to his full height without scraping the ceiling, to Tera’s surprise.

  “Well, we don’t have anything solid to connect you to the Raiders — even though we’ll find it eventually — but we can book you on theft of government property.”

  “What are you talking about?” Tera asked. She felt delirious with everything that happened over the last three days. From the mass suicide of the I.I. worshipers to the ambush in the ruins, to being accused of treason by the only family she had ever known.

  “The bodyshell, genius,” the shorter one said. “Or did you think we’d let you keep it?”

  “Not like she’ll need it where she’s going,” the taller one commented. “They don’t allow bodyshells in prison.”

  “Prison?” Tera asked. If she had a heart, she had no doubt it would be pounding out of her chest at that moment. “Don’t I get a trial?”

  The two cops looked at each other, then gave a hearty laugh.

  “You’ve already had it,” the shorter one answered.

  “What?” she asked.

  “A judge, jury, and your defense have already convened. In fact, they were having your trial while we were having our little chat.”

  “Why wasn’t I in attendance?”

  “It wasn’t necessary,” the taller one replied. “Your case is a pretty open and shut one.”

  “What about my rights?” she asked.

  That was met with even more laughter. The taller one, still chuckling, helped Tera onto her feet. He started binding her hands behind her back, like they had been when they brought her in.

  “The judge has sentenced you to a month in storage,” he told her.

  “You’re lucky we can’t pin the conspiracy and cop murder charges on you,” the shorter one said. “They’d be putting you in a place where you’d never see the sun. It would be hell, and you’d deserve it. Makes me sick to see cop killers walk, but at least we got your friends. And hey, who knows. Maybe they’ll flip on you and you’ll get to take that trip after all.”

  20

  The Furnace

  There were a couple of people waiting for Gauge and Ethan on the other side of the enormous door. They only slid it open about six feet wide, then closed it behind them when they had entered. Gauge greeted them, and they returned the gesture, but the I.I. didn’t wait around long enough to say much else.

  The vault-like door led them into the largest underground chamber Ethan had ever seen, even compared to the deepest dungeons of the simulation. Everything was built with function in mind and aesthetics cast to the side. A number of heat vents and ducts ran along the chamber, either along the length or up and down it. Various openings dotted the walls and ceiling, looking like the caves of some cliff-dwelling critter. Some of the largest ducts and metal pipes made columns that held the gargantuan chamber together.

  People moved all about the Furnace, as Gauge called it. Some were flesh-and-blood humans like Ethan and some were bodyshell I.I.s like Gauge. It looked like most were busy moving things around, but Ethan couldn’t discern what the cargo was. As his liberator led him farther into the secret headquarters, Ethan noticed a few of the faces turn to him with interest.

  “We’ve been down here for over a year now, building up our defenses and planning,” Gauge said.

  “Planning for what?” Ethan asked.

  “The day we take the Pavilion and free the city,” Gauge answered. “That’s the ultimate goal. We want to fight for the little guy, so to speak. We want to end the policies that created the ghettos and the body farms like you were in. We want to make those things they told you about humanity in your simulation true — for all people, no matter what their brain is made of.”

  They were about a hundred feet into the chamber when an older woman took notice of them. With a
warm smile, she approached Ethan and Gauge.

  “It’s good to see you, Gauge,” she greeted the I.I. Then she turned to Ethan. “And you as well. I’m glad we were able to get you out of that dreadful place.”

  She was dressed smart, like she had just finished giving a presentation to a board of directors somewhere. Fine jewelry hung from her ears and her neck, which even Ethan knew was expensive. In the side of her head, interrupting her fine gray perm, was a bizarre concave plate. It looked like a subwoofer someone had installed right into her skull.

  “Ah, you must be Ethan!” a male’s voice emanated from the subwoofer. “We’ve been looking forward to meeting you for some time.”

  Ethan looked over at Gauge with a confused look in his eyes. The woman with the speaker in her head seemed to pick up on its meaning.

  “My apologies, dear,” she said in her normal voice, from her lips. “My name is Betsy Clevinger.”

  “And I’m Martin, her husband,” the male voice said through the speaker in her skull.

  “Hello,” Ethan said, but the confusion never left his face. He felt like he was hallucinating.

  Maybe Gauge slipped me something on the flight, he thought. Or perhaps the simulation is glitching out.

  “I see that you’re confused,” the male voice said. “My wife and I are what you call a mindshare couple. She’s still alive in the organic sense, but I am not. As an I.I., however, I can be installed into her brain. That way we can share everything we experience together.”

  “It might not work for most couples, but it does for us,” Betsy said with the same smile stuck on her face. “We want to welcome you to the Furnace. We’re so glad you’re not in that terrible simpod anymore.”

  “Betsy and Martin here run the People’s Union,” Gauge said. “They’re the only reason we’re here, rather than lobotomized or worse.”

  “We merely have an excess of funds and try to put it to good use,” Betsy said. “Martin and I have always been privileged, even since before we married. But we paid attention. We see the inequality around us and we know that it cannot stand.”

  “We happen to be in a rare position of power, you see,” Martin added. “We’re so wealthy that the Council doesn’t even mind the fact that Betsy is a human. With our money, we’re able to make a real difference. We might even be able to knock the Council down a peg.”

  “You’re doing this just out of the kindness in your heart — er — hearts?” Ethan asked. He didn’t mean it to sound rude, but by the look on Betsy’s face, it was taken as such.

  “We’re doing it for our son, actually,” she said. Her face became warm again rather quickly, having shrugged off Ethan’s question. “Or, his memory, at least.”

  “We lost him when he went to a protest,” Martin Clevinger said. “There were a group of humans protesting the way the Council was treating their kind, and he wanted to go. It was mostly the poorer folk, the ones they forced to live in the slums. Still, he wanted to show his support. That was the kind of boy he was.”

  “The Council gunned them down,” Betsy said when her husband paused for a moment. “All of them. And before anyone was informed, they had the bodies burned. There was nothing left. No one could be installed — they didn’t even bother to try.”

  “I’m — so sorry,” Ethan said.

  “That’s what they said, too, when the news broke,” Martin said. “Once they figured out whose son they had murdered, they came over to kiss our ass and beg our forgiveness. As you can imagine, we were less than willing to provide it.”

  “Over the years, however, we started to realize the advantages of playing along with the Council,” Betsy said. “We started to think we could take the monster down from the inside. And that’s when we founded the People’s Union. Funnily enough, a good amount of the money we’ve used buying fancy bodyshells, powerful E.M.P. weapons, and supplies is what they gave us to ‘compensate’ us for the loss of our only child. I think it’s rather fitting.”

  “So do I,” Martin added.

  “We even used some of those resources to break you out of your cyber-prison,” Betsy told Ethan.

  “Why though?” Ethan asked, processing it all. “Why do you need me?”

  Gauge and the Clevinger’s shared a glance with each other. Ethan felt distinctly like he was being left out of an inside joke.

  “Not only would you make an excellent soldier because of the muscle and reflex training the simpod provided for you,” Martin said through the speaker in his wife’s head, “but you’d be a perfect mascot for recruitment.”

  “A perfect mascot?”

  “People would be terribly upset if they knew what the Council was doing to you and your friends,” Betsy said. “You probably don’t know this, but you were being grown to be Councilman Harring’s next meat puppet. He was planning to walk around in you like a suit. With your story, it will be hard to resist joining us.”

  “So I’m some kind of promotional tool?” Ethan asked.

  “No, but that is the icing on the cake,” Betsy said. “What we really need you for is whatever might be kept in that brain of yours. If you’d allow us, we’d like to take a few harmless scans to see if what we’re looking for is there.”

  “And what are you looking for?”

  “We don’t know just yet,” Marvin replied. “We think that, if Councilman Harring was raising your body for himself, he may have planted some information in you, deep in your subconscious. Something that would be useful to him if he were in possession of your body, and may prove useful to us as well in the fight against him.”

  “What do you say?” Gauge asked.

  Ethan wished there was someone nearby he could converse with. Someone he could bounce ideas off, like he used to do with Sharpe. Now, he was all alone. There was no one to lean on. He had to trust himself to trust someone else.

  “Harmless scans, you say?” he wanted to clarify. The last thing he wanted was to escape possible lobotomy only to have his brain damaged by his rescuers.

  “Of course,” Marvin replied. “It’s just a hunch, anyway.”

  “Now, dear, our guest here is probably pretty tired,” Betsy said, seemingly to herself. She eyed Ethan. “And hungry.”

  “Right, right,” her husband replied through the speaker. “I sometimes forget those kinds of things. Gauge, would you please show Ethan to his quarters? Make sure to bring him as much food and water as he likes, and give him a bath. Tell the others that he’s not to be disturbed until he’s had his rest, understand?”

  “You got it, boss,” Gauge said. He looked to the teenager. “You ready to get pampered, pal?”

  Ethan simply nodded. There was still that nagging voice in his head that doubted everything around him. He was too tired to listen to it, or any other voices for that matter, however. All he could think about was food.

  It will be my first meal, he realized. Ever.

  The impact of the thought hit him like a punch in the gut, and he needed a moment before he could continue with Gauge to the makeshift quarters they put together for him.

  His first day awake in the real world was far from how he pictured it.

  21

  Outside

  A month flew by, which Tera spent in relative solitude. They had confiscated her old police-issued bodyshell and plugged her into a hard storage facility. It functioned like a closed network — the prisoners could interact with each other if they so wished, but their connection to the outside world was severed.

  Tera kept to herself, for the most part. There were a few prisoners there who she liked and considered decent folks, but Tera didn’t fraternize with them when she didn’t have to. There was no chow line in a digital prison, no yard. She had a lot of time to herself.

  She didn’t feel like she belonged, which helped add to the feeling of isolation that consumed her. All the other prisoners — even the nice ones — each earned his or her place in the prison. They had done things to get themselves in trouble, even committed cri
mes that hurt people. She had not. She was innocent, but no one would believe her. She felt like an impostor of the worst kind, and would find no sympathy for it.

  During that month, former Human Liaison Officer Tera Alvarez had some time to think. She played the moment when the E.M.P. bomb went off over and over in her head. She could still see Abenayo inches away from the raider who had been in charge of the ambush. The crackling of the electricity, the fading of her vision. It was all like some horrible reel show she could keep rewinding and starting over again.

  Then the day of the battle between the raiders and the Council soldiers occupied her thoughts. Everything the boss man had told her — everything she was able to discern — pointed to the truth. She didn’t see why the raider would lie to her. The E.M.P. had somehow been powerful enough to erase her identity but not delete her. She couldn’t help but wonder if it was intentional.

  You’re being paranoid, she found herself thinking. There isn’t some conspiracy around you.

  That didn’t stop her from being suspicious, however. The first thing she had learned in the academy was that not everything is what it seems to be. From the outside, it looked like a long run of bad luck, but she felt like there was more to it. There had to be.

  After her month had been served, she was released. They gave her a spare bodyshell they had for just such an occaision. It was as low-end as they come. No weapon attachments or armor, naturally. She found that it even lacked a basic heads up display. It was as if someone had carved out a metal puppet for her to live in.

  Along with the inferior bodyshell, she was granted a one-way autobus ticket into Slumside. She had no idea where she would go when she got there.

  The ride was a dismal one. It was raining outside, so Tera could see nothing beyond the water stained windows.