Fragments

by Dan Wells

  This is a data center, she thought. It’s filled with business computers, and since everyone who worked here was probably a tech nut like Afa, it will have other devices as well. There’s bound to be another screen somewhere. She checked Afa again, making sure he was okay, and swept the shards of glass away from him as much as possible before heading back upstairs to the offices. She started in the corner offices, hoping that their extra prestige might mean an extra computer or two, but found nothing: several docks, but none of the screens to dock in them. They’re designed to be portable, Kira thought. Anyone who had one probably took them home. She kept looking, checking each office one by one before starting in on some of the cubicles. It reminded her of the offices she’d searched in Manhattan, and the memory gave her an idea. On a hunch, she left the cubicles and searched the back halls and rooms for anything marked with the initials Afa had had on his door: IT. Information technology. She finally found the IT office on the first floor, knee-deep in water. The IT director was still there, dead at his desk, his upper body covered with slime and his lower body stripped clean of everything but bone. She held her breath, sorting through his shelves, and found a screen slightly smaller than Afa’s in the desk drawer. She fled back outside, gagging and closing the door behind her, and made sure to rinse herself off in the cleaner water outside before heading back upstairs, where she found Afa had woken.

  “My screen got shot,” he said. His voice was soft and vapid—he had again regressed to the “confused child.” Kira sighed, knowing that an attack like this had made it inevitable, and sat down beside him to comfort him. He looked at her with worried eyes. “Where’s my backpack?”

  “It’s right over there,” she said, checking his pulse. Elevated but normal. “How do you feel?”

  “My screen got shot,” he said, trying to stand. He screamed in pain the instant he put weight on his leg, and collapsed back to the floor.

  “Forget the screen,” said Kira. “I’ve got a new one, but you’ve been shot, too. You need to take it easy.”

  “I need my backpack.”

  “You’ve been shot, Afa, right here in your leg—”

  “I need my backpack!” His eyes quivered, on the verge of tears, and Kira stood up to bring him his backpack, wondering if maybe he had another screen in there and she hadn’t had to actually spend all that time with the dead IT director. She dragged the pack over to him and he clutched it to his chest, rocking back and forth. “I can’t ever leave my backpack,” he said. “I’m the last human being on the planet.”

  “He looks bad,” said Samm. Kira nodded, too exhausted to care about whatever Samm still thought about Afa; besides which, he was right.

  “He’s retreated inside his own head,” she said. “It will be a while before we get him out again.”

  Samm jutted his head toward the server, and the screen handle still connected to it. “Did we get everything?”

  Kira held up the handle. A small green light still shone at the tip of it. “I don’t know. I don’t dare disconnect it in case it’s still transferring data.”

  “How long will it take?”

  Kira shrugged, gesturing at Afa. “The only one who knows is currently singing a lullaby to his backpack. And he’s losing blood, and I don’t have the antibiotics I need to help him, and I have dead guy soaking into my pants, and I’m really starting to wish that a whole lot of things had gone differently.” She took a deep breath, surprised at her own outburst.

  “You’re under a lot of stress,” said Samm.

  Kira felt tears coming close to the surface, and wiped one from the corner of her eye. “Yeah, what else is new?”

  Samm stayed silent for a moment, and picked up the screen she’d brought up from downstairs. “You think we can plug this into the other one?”

  “It only has one port,” said Kira, wiping her eyes again and sitting up straighter. “We can’t connect the new screen until we disconnect the server, and I don’t want to mess with it if it’s still downloading.”

  “Then we’ll set up a perimeter and stay here for the night,” said Samm. He glanced around the room, computer towers obstructing visibility in every direction. “We can’t stay here, though—there’s no good way to guard it, plus the generator was damaged in the battle. And the exhaust pipe. It’s pumping the whole place full of burning paint thinner.”

  “Great,” said Kira. “Life wasn’t crappy enough yet.”

  Samm rose to his feet and held out his hand for Kira. She took it, standing to face him. They didn’t turn away. She looked in his eyes and felt . . . something. The link was still hard to interpret sometimes.

  Samm looked away first. “I’ll grab his arms,” he said, stepping behind Afa. “Let’s get him somewhere safe.”

  Kira jolted awake at two a.m., certain that something was wrong. She looked around wildly, grasping for her gun. “Who’s there? Are we under attack?”

  “Calm down,” said Heron. “The generator just shut off. The change in background noise probably woke you.”

  “I’ll go check it out.”

  “It’s probably just out of gas, and we’re not getting it restarted anytime soon.”

  “Then I’ll get the screen handle,” said Kira. “If we’ve gotten all we’re going to get, I’d rather have it in here with us than down there by itself.”

  “Take your gun,” said Heron. Her expression was unreadable in the dark, and the link, from what Kira could tell, was silent. “There might be more fish monsters.”

  “Thanks,” said Kira. She checked Afa’s pulse and breathing, almost by reflex at this point, and went downstairs. The poison gas, they’d discovered, was heavier than air, so the top floor was the safest place to be. Kira turned on the flashlight on the edge of her gun, comforted to have the rifle leading the way in case anybody was actually down there. The halls were dark, the stairs empty, the building silent except for the soft sound of drips and the lapping of water. Computer towers loomed around her in the data center, casting long shadows as the beam of her flashlight danced over them. The smears of blood from the earlier battle turned the scene from eerie to menacing, and Kira walked softly, holding her breath as she passed between the monoliths. Exhaust swirled around her shins and ankles, and the air tasted bitter. She found the handle, unplugged it from the server, and retreated upstairs as fast as she dared. When she got back to their camp she sat down on her bedroll, grabbed the second screen, and plugged in the cable.

  “You’re going to read it now?” asked Heron.

  “What are we waiting for?”

  “Good point,” said Heron, and sat down behind her, peering over her shoulder.

  Kira blinked as the screen flared to life, and dialed down the brightness to a tolerable level. A small icon in the center of the screen told her it was still trying to connect to the other handle, and she held her breath as the little hexagon spun around and around and around. It paused, then spun again. “Oh, come on,” she whispered. A minute later it stopped. CONNECTION COMPLETE. She opened the download folder and scrolled through the massive list, eventually giving up and just opening the search tab. “What do I look for?”

  “The Trust?” offered Heron. “RM? Expiration? Your own name?’”

  Kira typed in K-I-R-A and hit search. The little hexagon spun around but returned nothing. “What?”

  “Maybe you’re in there under a different name.”

  “I’ll try my father.” She typed his surname: D-H-U-R-V-A-S-U-L-A. The hexagon spun again, the machine thinking quickly, and soon it was spitting out results, file after file sliding by so fast she couldn’t even read the titles. She stopped it at 3,748 results and cleared the search. “We’ll have to narrow that down, I guess. How about . . .” She thought, chewing on her lip, then typed a new word:

  F-A-I-L-S-A-F-E.

  The hexagon spun. Twelve results. She opened the first file in the list and found it to be an email to her father from Bethany Michaels, chief financial officer of ParaGen. Kira read it o
ut loud.

  “‘The joint chiefs have one final request for the BioSynth army; a sort of Failsafe. I know you insist on the unimpeachable loyalty of the BioSynths—I know that it’s hard-wired into their brains and so on—but I think this is a very reasonable request, given the BioSynths’ capabilities, and not one we could choose to ignore in any case.

  “‘In conjunction with the engineered army, we need an engineered virus. If the army malfunctions, or rebels, or in any way gets out of hand, we need to be able to push a button and, essentially, turn them off. We need a virus that will destroy the BioSynths without harming anyone or anything else. I trust your team will have no problem with the design or implementation.’”

  Kira stared at the screen.

  “The Failsafe is RM,” said Heron. “Your own government ordered it.”

  Kira’s voice was a whisper. “And then it killed the wrong people.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Getting caught by the Partials had been easy. Marcus and Ariel packed their gear, started walking along the widest highway they could find, and got picked up by a patrol within the first two hours. The two-man team searched them, confiscated their weapons, and marched them toward East Meadow; a few miles later they met a truck, already half-full of human prisoners, which drove them the rest of the way in. The humans sat quietly in the back, their faces numb with terror, and Marcus didn’t have to fake his own fear at the prospect of Partial occupation. They had gotten themselves caught on purpose, but they didn’t have any idea what the Partials were planning to do with them. When they reached East Meadow they were dropped off, searched again, and interrogated. They didn’t seem to recognize Marcus, or if they did, they didn’t care. Near midnight they were released into the city with nothing but the clothes on their backs. They found an empty house and hid until morning.

  They didn’t risk going to Nandita’s house until the following night, wary of being followed; when they arrived, they found that the Partials had already torn through it with a vengeance, searching every nook and cranny in meticulous detail. “If there’s anything left, I’ll be amazed,” said Marcus, but they dove into it anyway, hoping to find a sign of Nandita’s plans that the Partials had missed, if they even knew what they were looking for. They spent their days in the empty house, tearing it apart as carefully and as quietly as they could, and their nights hiding in nearby houses, a different one every night, doing their best to remain invisible.

  The people who attracted too much attention always ended up dead in the evening execution.

  They started by searching Nandita’s room: all her drawers and closets, in the boxes under her bed, in the spaces behind the dresser and the large vanity mirror, even between her mattresses and hidden in the pockets of her clothes. They searched the hothouse as well, though in the months of Nandita’s absence Xochi had already taken over much of it, and there were very few spaces not already filled by Xochi’s ever-growing collection of herbs and sprouts. When they failed to find anything, they began searching the rest of the house, first looking in all the drawers and cupboards and eventually prying up floorboards, cutting open upholstery, and even digging holes in the garden. They found nothing.

  “I think we have to face it,” said Marcus days later, leaning tiredly on the kitchen counter. “These experiment logs either don’t exist, or they’re gone.”

  “They exist,” said Ariel. “I saw them.”

  “She may have taken them with her,” said Marcus. He stared at the gaping hole they’d just punched in the kitchen wall; Nandita had repaired a section of Sheetrock there about a year before, something the Partials apparently didn’t know, but when they broke it open they found nothing but a few dropped nails. “That might be why she left, to continue her studies or analyze the results or something.”

  “Or to hide them,” said Ariel. “Or maybe just destroy them outright. Though I don’t know what would have prompted her to do it.”

  Marcus shook his head. “You’re assuming she left willingly. What if she was taken? Her and her records? That seems . . .” Marcus slowed, and laughed dryly. “I was going to say that seems needlessly paranoid, but under the circumstances it might actually be right. I don’t think anything would surprise me at this point.”

  Ariel shook her head. “If they took her, they wouldn’t be back here looking for her, right?”

  “There are a lot of Partial factions,” said Marcus. “It might have been one of Morgan’s enemies.”

  “Nandita and Dr. Morgan were both performing experiments on Kira,” said Ariel, nodding. “For all we know, they were working together.”

  “I certainly got the impression she was working for Morgan when Heron confronted me,” said Marcus, “but I suppose Heron’s not exactly the most trustworthy source. Consider this, though: As far as we know, Morgan’s recent experiments on Kira were purely coincidental. She just wanted a human girl, she never went out of her way to get a specific one.”

  “As far as you know,” said Ariel.

  “As far as we know,” Marcus agreed, “but I was there. I watched Kira go through this, making all her decisions in very Kira-like ways. If Morgan wanted a specific girl, all she had to do was raid the island like she’s doing now, not set up some ridiculously elaborate con game to trick her into visiting the mainland of her own free will.”

  “But what about that photo you told me about?” asked Ariel. “You saw Kira and Nandita together before the Break, which is weird enough already, but then to see them at the ParaGen building? That’s not like a huge red flag for you that something weird is going on here? There’s got to be more to that relationship.”

  “Like what?” Marcus asked. “Of course it’s a red flag, but for what? I’ve been trying to figure it out for weeks now, that’s why we’ve torn your whole house apart, but what does it mean? Does seeing them at a ParaGen facility mean that Kira’s different somehow? Most of us have some kind of gene mods from when we were kids—does Kira have a special one? Is she important in some way? I’m with you on this, Ariel, but I honestly don’t know what any of it means.” They heard a rumble, and immediately recognized the sound as an engine, probably a pretty big one. The Partials had brought motor vehicles back to East Meadow, thanks to their wealth of resources and energy, and the humans had learned to listen for the sound of approaching Partial “police.” They dropped to the ground, trying to look as not-home as possible. It worked.

  “That was the closest one yet,” said Ariel. “I think they know we’re here—that we use this house, I mean.”

  “The papers you saw in Nandita’s hothouse,” said Marcus. “What else can you remember about them?”

  “I told you,” said Ariel. “It said ‘Madison: Control.’ It had a lot of physical information, height and weight and blood pressure and all that, not just single readings but changes over time. Madison and I would have been ten, maybe getting on to eleven, just starting to go through puberty, so there were a lot of changes to track. At least half of it, though, probably more than half of it, was chemicals—herbs, I guess, but she’d scrawled in some notes about different properties of each herb, and different mixtures in her droppers from one time to the next. She was trying to find the right combination for . . . something. I don’t know. ‘Control,’ whatever that is.”

  “Oh damn,” said Marcus, staring at the floor. He closed his eyes, slowly shaking his head as the realization washed over him. “Double dog damn it and around again for another damn.”

  Ariel smiled. “You watch your filthy mouth, Mr. Valencio.”

  “It’s not about control,” said Marcus, looking up at Ariel. “How much do you know about the scientific method?”

  “I saw what I saw,” she insisted.

  “Of course you did,” said Marcus, “but you were ten years old and you didn’t know how to interpret it. When a scientist does an experiment, they always have at least two subjects: the experiment, which they screw around with, and the control, which they don’t. It’s a baseline
, unmodified test subject intended only for observation, so that whatever happens to the experimental subject has something you can compare it to. Nandita could have been using Madison as a control subject to help her understand her observations of Kira.”

  “She’d never raised children before,” said Ariel, seeing where he was going with the line of thought. “When Kira did something weird, Nandita had no way of knowing if it was weird because all kids are weird, or weird because of . . . whatever stupid thing we still don’t know about Kira.

  “So we were all control subjects,” said Ariel, slowly understanding. “Three controls against one experiment.” She frowned. “It makes sense, I suppose, but it doesn’t answer anything. We don’t know what she was testing for, or why, or what any of it has to do with ParaGen.”

  Marcus shrugged. “There are only three people who do know,” he said. “Kira, Nandita, and Dr. Morgan. I’d bet you anything Morgan knows at least some of it, or she wouldn’t be tearing this island apart trying to find the other two.”

  “Well I’m not going to go up and ask her,” said Ariel.

  “And Kira won’t tell me anything,” said Marcus. “I hear from her about once a week now, and never more than a few seconds. Wherever she is, the signal’s incredibly weak.”

  Ariel looked around at the ransacked house, now more of a junkyard than a home. “If there was ever any sign of Nandita, the Partials got it before we did. Even if we find a hint of where she might be, we’re weeks behind them, and we’re hopelessly outnumbered. There’s no way we’re going to find Nandita before they do.”