“The Enclave is misguided. They’re afraid of the outside world, but they don’t have to be. Much of the stuff they teach us is exaggerated. Yeah, there are some bad people out there. That’s why I have a gun. Mostly, it’s because of the damn Infected. The teachers and the Speaker are lying to everyone. The world outside isn’t a threat. We can do so much to help civilization recover from the war, but all they want to do is kill everyone who isn’t Enclave.”
“Infected?” Aura’s sniveling lessened, but didn’t stop.
“The Council thinks that everyone outside the Enclave is genetically impure and should be put down like an animal too sick to save. They created a biological weapon that destroys people’s minds, makes them incredibly strong, and gives them the urge to kill everyone they see.”
Aura stopped crawling amid the throes of a coughing fit. For a second or two, she appeared about to vomit, but choked it back. “You’ve been outside?”
“Yes.”
Fan noise grew louder up ahead. Once they passed the intake duct, the wind would drop off to almost nothing.
“I can’t feel my fingers anymore.” Aura’s voice stuttered past chattering teeth.
“Crawl faster. We’re almost there.”
The girl picked up a little speed. She tried a duck-walk for a few yards, but returned to crawling on all fours. “Yinyang fetches like a dog, but Lily’s too proud. Whenever I throw the fuzzy ball, she looks at me like ‘pff… you go get it.’” A few seconds of silence later, the girl burst into tears again.
She still thinks I’m going to kill her. “Aura… I told you I have a daughter, right?”
“Yeah,” whined the girl.
“If I found someone taking her away like what I’m doing to you, I’d probably shoot them.” Her mind ran off with a daymare of Abby in Katie’s place; rather than a pair of decent guys, a couple of raiders carted her off screaming. “You have every right to be terrified. Please believe me when I say the only thing I will do to you is stop you from setting off an alarm for a little while. Once I do what I need to do here, it won’t matter who you tell about me. I don’t have any reason to hurt you. I couldn’t.”
Aura raised her arms to shield her face as she passed the port on the right where the fan blasted a jet of freezing air into the duct. Fierce wind caused the girl to slide backward on her knees. Tris palmed her rear end and pushed her forward past the gale. The girl stopped once out of the windblast, rubbing her hands up and down her arms, shivering, teeth chattering.
Tris took a moment to enjoy the warmer air on the far side of the fan. “Damn, that’s cold.”
Aura looked back at her with a pouty-pleady face, reddened by emotion and from spending the last two minutes crawling into an arctic gale. “Would you have shot me if I tried to run away?”
“No.” Tris sighed. “If you’d gotten away and sounded the alarm, you would’ve probably caused a few thousand people to die because I wouldn’t be able to stop the Enclave from releasing their virus into the world… but I couldn’t have shot you.” She stared at the bundle of red wire for a few seconds in silence. “You’re a little shorter, but you remind me too much of Abby.”
Aura’s expression held more confusion than anger or worry. “You’re really going to just let me go?”
“Eventually, yes. I promise.”
A hint of trembling returned as the girl resumed crawling. “Why were you in the ACP/AD room?”
“Huh? I thought that was a quartermaster’s office.”
“I’m taking advanced computer programming and algorithm design… it’s a sophomore level course. There’s only a couple of us. It’s an after-school extra work project. I think they use it as an office during the day.”
Abby’s barely able to read. “Wow… that’s. You’re in what, sixth grade?”
“Gonna be next year. We’re on summer break now.” Aura coughed. “There’s a turn up ahead. Is your daughter in school, or does she shoot people and run around with no clothes?”
Tris let off a somber laugh. “No. Abby’s terrified of guns. I doubt she’d touch one to save her life. And most people out there aren’t tribal primitives. We live in an old city that we’re trying to rebuild… and the Enclave wants to kill us. They want to kill my daughter.”
“Why? She’s just a kid. Like me. It’s bad to hurt kids.” Aura looked back with huge saucer eyes. “Especially cute ones.”
“You’re right. And that’s why I’m not going to let them. If you’d gotten me caught by the ISF, my daughter’s life… as well as everyone else in what’s left of the world, would’ve been in danger.”
“Are you gonna blow us up?” Aura stopped. “’Cause if you’re gonna do that, I won’t help you. You’ll have to shoot me here.”
That thing pretending to be my father hasn’t said what its plans are. I’m pretty sure the City Core has a reactor… As much as she’d become hostile to the Enclave, she’d always known innocents lived within. She used to be one of them. The terrified girl in front of her made the idea of ‘one more nuke isn’t so bad’ painful to consider. “It’s not my plan to hurt anyone here. I only want to stop them from making that virus.”
Aura stared at her for a little while, ice-blue eyes narrow. “Okay.”
Tris followed the girl around a left ninety-degree turn. Forty yards ahead, the opening back to her father’s old lab leaked light into the shaft. “Head to that light up ahead.”
The girl crawled forward.
At the opening, Tris dropped the donut of cable down the vertical. It bounced off the curved bottom and rolled out of sight. A half second later, the thud of it hitting the table echoed back up. She pulled Aura around and held both her wrists.
“Slide your legs down there. It’s okay. I won’t let you fall and hurt yourself.”
Aura gave her the most pathetic, heart-crushing look of ‘please don’t.’
Tris closed her eyes and focused on her complete lack of any plan to hurt this kid. That she had to be cruel to a child wound up being Nathan’s fault. “Please.”
Sniffling, Aura squirmed around and put her legs down the shaft. Tris held her by the arms like a caught fish, and lowered her until the distance between the child’s shoes and the vent bottom looked trivial.
“You’ve only got a couple inches left, but the bottom’s a curve. I’m gonna let go.”
“Tris?” asked Kevin. “Who are you talking to?”
Aura’s eyes snapped open. She drew in a gasp to scream, and let it out as Tris released her grip on the girl’s wrists. The child slid over the elbow at the bottom of the vent. Tris jumped down after, and caught herself against the sidewalls before she bumped the kid out of the short section at the bottom. She slid up behind the girl, wrapped her arms around, and scooted out to stand on the table below the opening.
Kevin stopped in mid-stride, halfway across the room on his way over. “What happened? Decided to pick up another orphan?” He grinned.
“No. This is Aura. She caught me connecting the Petafiber line.” She jumped to the floor and carried the girl over. “I had to bring her with me so she didn’t get the ISF and unplug the line. Hold her. Don’t let her run off ’til Dad’s inside. After that, it won’t matter if she sets off an alarm.”
Aura pressed herself into Tris, staring at Kevin. “He’s a Wildlander… No! He’s gonna give me something. I’m gonna get sick, or he’s gonna kidnap me!”
Kevin put his fists on his hips and blinked at her. “Technically, Tris already did kidnap you.”
Tris pushed Aura at Kevin and rushed past him. “Make sure she doesn’t run away.”
“Tris…” Kevin caught Aura and held her as she struggled to pull back. “I’m not gonna tie up a little girl.”
Tris whirled around, yelling, “I didn’t ask you to! Just watch her. I don’t have time.”
Aura writhed and pulled, sniveling. “Please don’t hit me!”
Kevin sighed. “Oh, stop it. I swear we’ll let you go as soon as she’s done doin
g whatever techy shit she needs to do.”
“Are you gonna eat me?” asked Aura in a mousy voice. “Or put me in a cage?”
Kevin grumbled to himself for a second. “Kid, you’ve been watching too many ‘historical documentaries.’”
Tris rushed the Petafiber line to the PC she’d found, connected it to the prototype network interface card, and plugged in the USB stick Not-Dad had given her. Oh, please be self-booting. She restarted the computer, and waited.
Aura cried.
Kevin carried the girl closer to Tris and gestured at her as if she had brought a too-expensive purchase home and needed to return it. “What the hell are you doing? What the hell are we doing? I’m not this guy? I’m the guy who shoots the guy who scares the shit out of little kids. What’s happening to us that we have to kidnap someone’s daughter?”
Aura wiped her eyes, sniffling.
Tris glanced between them and the monitor in front of her. “We’re not ‘those people.’ All we’re doing is delaying her running off to get the ISF involved. Once Dad’s inside, they won’t be able to do anything. It won’t matter if she”―Aha! She highlighted the option for a USB boot and jabbed the enter key―“runs off and whacks the hornet nest.”
A progress bar crept across the screen above the word ‘Loading.’ Damn old computers were so slow.
Kevin carried Aura four steps away and put her in a chair. “Can you sit still for a little while? We’re not going to hurt you. I’m not going to eat you, sell you, hit you, or whatever. We’ve got a kid your age.”
Aura gasped. “But… he’s a Wildlander. Eww!” She pointed at Tris. “You did it with a Wildlander?”
Tris turned away from the still-creeping ‘loading’ bar. “Look at me, Aura. Do I look old enough to have an eleven-year-old daughter? We took her in after the Enclave’s virus killed her family.”
“Oh.” Aura glanced down.
“And yes.” Tris snapped her head back to the monitor when an interface panel appeared. “We’ve ‘done it’ quite a few times.”
Aura cringed, sticking her tongue out a little.
The screen looked like an attempt to reproduce a high-tech looking Enclave display with the limits of a prewar graphics processor. Text scrolled across a status readout line near the bottom under a pair of windows showing data throughput stats for both the Ethernet and Petabyte networks.
“Plug in, Tris,” said Not-Dad, from a speaker on the PC.
“Eww!” yelled Aura. She cowered away from Kevin. “Are you gonna do it to me too?”
“God dammit! No!” Kevin went red in the face. “What the hell kind of shit do they make you kids watch in that place?”
Tris glanced back at him. “You really don’t want to know. She’s not even old enough to have seen the bad ones yet.”
“I heard some older kids talking about it,” whispered Aura.
Kevin pulled a chair up near her. “Just relax. You’ll be home in no time. I wanna get out of here too.”
“This place is, like, old.” Aura looked around at the room. “Where are we? I wouldn’t even know where to go if I tried to run away.”
Tris fumbled around looking for an interface cable. After twenty seconds of searching, the tiny drone whirred to life and glided across the room to a storage cabinet, where it bounced in midair. She followed its lead, and located a two-pronged wire in a drawer. Only three feet long, it wouldn’t give her much room to move, but how much mobility did one need while unconscious to the real world.
The plug resembled a headphone jack, but each peg consisted of thirty-two wafer thin contacts separated by equally thin plastic rings. Somewhere, she’d learned it supported data transfer speeds in the Exabyte-per-minute range, but except for her training time in VR, hadn’t used one much.
Kevin muttered in the background, keeping Aura’s mind off her situation by telling her about Abby and Nederland, trying to make a case for them not being child-abducting criminals. Tris sighed, her gut leaden with guilt. That kid’s going to be terrified of me for the rest of her life. She stared at the ceiling. Come on, focus. No big deal if one kid doesn’t like me.
She leaned back in the chair and let her body go limp as a test to make sure she wouldn’t fall. Satisfied her perch would hold her, she connected one end of the wire into the PC, and the other into the socket behind her left ear.
Nothing happened.
Shit. They found the damn wire. We’re fucked.
“Tris.” The voice of Dad-AI echoed in her mind. “I am still uploading myself to the Enclave system. Seconds remain. Close your eyes and relax.”
She exhaled, closed her eyes, and tried not to shake from nerves.
“Do you have a gun too?” asked Aura.
“Yeah,” said Kevin.
“You’re kinda clean for a Wildlander.”
Kevin chuckled. “Thanks. I had my yearly shower this morning.”
“Yearly?” A chair rattled. “Eww.”
Tris smiled. She sounds calmer. I wonder if―
Kevin’s laughter pulled away into the distance. The chair evaporated, leaving Tris falling into darkness.
Seconds later, she spilled out on the floor. Cool air blew over her bare legs. She sat up and gazed down at herself, white dress, no breasts, little spindly legs.
Cute. I’m five again. Is that for his benefit or mine?
“Yours,” said Dad.
She stood, finding herself not quite eye-level with the top of the desk she’d been sitting at seconds before… only it didn’t look battered anymore. Or dirty. In fact, the entire lab appeared rejuvenated, as though she’d shot back in time to 2019.
Her father, or at least a digital simulacrum thereof, walked into view from her left. Frazzled white hair went in all directions. Thick, black-rimmed glasses made his eyes look like those of a bug, and he wore the knee-length white lab coat she always pictured him in.
“If it bothers you, it isn’t necessary.”
Tris looked down at her toes. The appearance of being a child again hurt. It made her think about how much she wanted to go back for real, and have the war never happen. She wanted to grow up like a normal kid, in a normal world… without the Enclave ever having existed.
“It’s nothing I can ever have. I’m not a child anymore.”
Dad smiled. “Sometimes it’s nice to allow a little fantasy. It can help the mind heal.” He took a seat at his desk and picked her up into his lap. “We have a little time… things move faster here.” A small book with a metallic gold spine appeared in his hand out of thin air. He opened it and started reading a story to her, the kind of story one might read to a seven or eight year old.
Her throat tightened as the smell of pipe smoke saturating his coat filled her nose. Virtual reality, even funneled through the ancient computer, created such a believable lie to her brain that the temptation to let go and embrace the not-world made her cry. She could be an innocent again, never cut open to have a bomb put inside her. Never having killed anyone. Safe at home with her father.
This isn’t real.
“Dad…”
“Hmm?” He peered at her over the top of the book. “What’s the matter, sweetie?”
“I’m sorry, but as much as I want this to be real… to go back and wish that the war never happened, I can’t. Real people are depending on us. Both of us.”
“Yes… I suppose you’re right.” He closed the book. “As you know, I am merely a set of program instructions based on his memories, thoughts, and personality. I thought you would benefit from this.”
“Sorry. It isn’t helping. It’s like teasing me with something I want and can’t have.”
He picked her up and set her on her feet before him. The room changed perspective as she grew back to her normal self in the span of two seconds. Her child’s dress melted into black liquid that ran down her legs and reshaped itself into the Enclave jumpsuit and shoes. Fortunately, the simulation did not provide tactile sensory feedback for the transformation.
“Dad? Why would you go to all the trouble of writing whatever attack worms you wrote, and then secure everything behind a programmatical lock that only I can open? What if something had happened to me?”
“Not exactly.” He smiled. “I could’ve opened it too, but… I don’t have genetic material anymore. If you ever have children, they would likely be able to open it as well.”
Tris looked down. “They harvested my eggs after I rejected Dovarin.” She pushed her feelings of violation aside after a fleeting instant of rage at Nathan. “I still don’t buy it.”
“Quite a lot of things had to happen perfectly for you to be standing here talking to me right now. This AI your father created could have failed to execute upon his death. It could have failed to compile properly and manage to gain self-awareness. You might’ve tolerated that unfortunate pairing assignment.”
“Wait… what?” Tris blinked. “You know about that?”
The white haired old man pretending to be her father smiled. “When I mentioned I had no connection to the Enclave system, perhaps I stretched the truth. I did have an extremely slow link through one legacy backup system that the current Enclave occasionally accesses… an old tape array that’s not long for this world. I’m amazed it still functions.”
“So…” She massaged the start of a headache out of the bridge of her nose. “You had a connection but not one fast or stable enough to transfer your AI program core?”
“You are correct. What you did with the Petafiber link was vital.” Dad bowed his head. “I know you will not trust me if I continue to obfuscate the truth. The arrangement to pair you with Dovarin was my doing.”
Tris glared at him.
He raised a hand. “I had no intention that it would result in you living with him. I knew who you were, and I knew who he was. To me, no doubt existed that you would reject him and wind up in Detention. Nathan Savros had already gotten it in his head that you were a threat purely because of your relation to me.”
“I was only nine when you died! What threat could I be?”
Dad let out a sad chuckle. “He suspected I had things lying in wait that would somehow enable you to be a threat. Of course, the man wasn’t wrong. I feared you would soon be targeted for ‘enhanced interrogation.’ By setting it in motion for you to be detained on record, it prevented him from proceeding with any plans of that nature. I had expected to make contact with you once you were placed in Detention, but the uplink via that backup array is unreliable. I was unable to reach you before Nathan did. By that time, you were out of VR.”
The Roadhouse Chronicles Box Set [Books 1-3] Page 119
