Protectors of Earth

by Felix R. Savage

  The girl is oblivious to the tension among us. “Excuse me, but phones are not allowed here.”

  “Not … allowed?” Francie says.

  “No. They are not period. Please turn them in to the office.”

  Patrick says, “What if we keep them in our rooms?”

  “Your cells,” the girl corrects him. “No. I am sorry, but it is not allowed.”

  “Why not?”

  The girl stares at him like he’s braindead. “They are not period. Please read the sign.”

  She flounces back to her tomatoes.

  Sure enough, there is a sign on the wall, hand-lettered in Victorian script: NO PHONES, COMPUTERS, OR OTHER ELECTRONIC DEVICES.

  As everyone slowly pockets their phones, I feel a prickle of anger at Elsa. Did she realize how strict this place is? It really is like being back in the army.

  A second later, I think maybe she chose it for precisely that reason. Maybe she realized that we would need rigid rules to live by, to help us readjust to life on Earth.

  Patrick leans over the table, cueing us to huddle around. “Fuck that,” he says in a low voice. “We’re not turning them in.”

  A minute ago he was ordering us to turn our phones in to him, but no one reminds him of that.

  “We’ll need them to pay for shit, after all. And we’ll also need the GPS functionality when we go egg hunting.”

  *

  As it turns out, we have neither the time nor the energy to mess around on our phones, anyway. When Maxime mentioned hard work, I didn’t know what he was talking about. Now I do.

  Francie and I shuffle across bare dirt on our knees. Every ten centimeters, Francie digs a hole (precisely 2.5 centimeters deep, garçons et filles!) with her right index finger, and drops a single seed into it with her left hand. I am doing the same thing, except I’m using a stick to dig the holes. I used my finger for the first half a day, until the pain made me want to curl up and cry. I’ve never told anyone about my arthritis, though, so I said my stick was an agricultural innovation and I might patent it.

  “Better forget about that patent, Scatter,” Francie teases. “I’m a whole row ahead of you and it’s only nine thirty in the morning.”

  She’s disgustingly chirpy. I’d forgotten how she thrives on hard work. She’s happiest when she has a job that she can do well—and if she’s not an expert planter yet, she’s a heck of a lot better at it than I am.

  She also looks great in her peasant blouse and high-waisted skirt, whereas I look and feel like an idiot in my shapeless, scratchy period garb. I don’t even have any pockets. I have to leave Tancred’s blankie in my cell while I’m at work.

  The stretch of tunnel where we are is long and straight. There is not a single green growing thing in it. Of course there isn’t. Our seeds will turn into the green growing things, months from now. Francie’s planting broccoli and I am planting cauliflower. Stooped figures like ourselves dot the distance. Someone’s playing authentic 19th-century music further down the tunnel—there are these groups called wassailers who go around annoying everyone. They’ll be here soon, which will give us an excuse to take a break, anyway. Right now the music is a mosquito buzz, deformed by the echoes. Crumbs of soil lie on the train tracks that run between me and Francie. It’s chilly, yet the growlights burn the back of my neck.

  “I can’t believe people do this for fun,” I whine.

  “Not exactly fun,” Francie says. “It’s more like meditation. Getting in touch with the planet. Our roots. What it means to be human. Y’know.”

  Jab the stick into the soil.

  Drop a seed in.

  Cover it up.

  Jab.

  Drop.

  Cover.

  “So I guess you’re not having fun, Scatter?” Francie says when she comes level with me again, on the other side of the train tracks.

  I have thought about, and dismissed, the idea of telling her how much I miss Tancred. She’s the only other one with a Void Dragon egg of her own. But she was allowed to bring Pinkie Pie with her, and anyway, I don’t think she feels the same way about Pinkie as I do about Tancred.

  I say, “Yeah, well, I guess this isn’t as much fun as I thought it would be.”

  She breaks her planting rhythm to glance across at me while tucking a lock of hair behind her ear, and even that she does athletically, and for an insane moment I think about saying, I’m in love with you. I’ve been in love with you since the first minute I saw you in the gym in Tech City.

  What I say is, “Is everything OK with you and Patrick?” They weren’t getting along that well when we were on the Bohemond. I get the impression they still aren’t. “If there’s anything you want to talk about …”

  At the exact same time, Francie says, “Well, what did you expect?” There’s a tiny pause and then the moment is lost. We will pretend I didn’t say that. “This isn’t a real job, after all,” she adds with a smile.

  “Oh, of course,” I say, breaking my own rhythm to gesture grandly. “It’s not a job, it’s a way of life. An escape from reality.”

  “That’s not what I mean,” she says.

  “What do you mean?”

  There’s a pause. Francie starts to say something, then changes her mind. “Nothing.” A second later, “Our real job is hunting Void Dragon eggs, of course. That’s what I mean.”

  I wince. The shameful fact is that Patrick is the only one who’s been hitting the egg-hunting metrics he himself devised. We’ve been here ten days. He’s been up top every single night, grimly searching his area. The rest of us? Paul, about half the time. The others, maybe once or twice. Me … well … this is absolutely awful, but I haven’t been up top even once.

  “I’ve been busy working on my mecha,” I mumble.

  This is true. I’ve been devoting every spare minute to S2X458 when I’m not working, eating, or sleeping. But I know it’s a pretty lame excuse, so it doesn’t surprise me when Francie raps out, “Patrick could use some help. So how about you quit messing with that mecha and go up top tonight?”

  I find courage somewhere. “Why don’t you?”

  She’s silent for a moment—shocked, maybe, that I’ve dared to call the kettle black. “I’m busy, too,” she says at length.

  “With what?”

  She is not busy. I know from Huifang that she plays with her phone in her cell every evening after curfew.

  And now she’s turning white with anger at being called on it. Hastily, I offer her an out. “Pinkie Pie? Are you busy with her?”

  “What’s to be busy with? She’s just an egg. She’s probably dead in there. I probably killed her, shooting her with a flamethrower and shit. And runnng her through all those scanners probably didn’t help.”

  “Francie—”

  “Whatever you’re thinking of now, it’s not going to work.”

  She is referring to some tests I ran on Pinkie Pie when we were on the Bohemond. I thought it would be useful to have more information on what her shell is made of. Admittedly, we got no closer to hatching her.

  “She’s never going to hatch,” Francie says.

  “That’s what I thought about Tancred, too—” Thoughtlessly, Tancred’s name crosses my lips, and it affects me so much that I can’t say anymore.

  Which is just as well, because Francie clearly doesn’t want to hear it.

  Jab.

  Drop.

  Cover.

  *

  But after our lunch of pottage and dry bread, after the wassailers have passed through and put us in a slightly better mood, towards the end of our working day, Francie says abruptly, “Remember how I said this isn’t a real job?”

  I nod. It feels plenty real to me just now, however. We are lying on the ground, a couple of feet apart. As usual, Francie finished her side of the tracks early and came to help me finish my side. Also as usual, come four o’clock or so, we are too tired to do the knee-shuffle anymore, so we have resorted to the side-shuffle: lie on your side, jab, drop, cover,
hitch yourself forward on your elbow.

  “It might not feel real to you,” I say, too tired to be tactful. “You used to crawl around on asteroids, clearing mines. But to keyboard-warrior me, this is as real as it gets.”

  Francie sighs, still jabbing and dropping. “I’m not talking about this. I mean egg hunting.”

  “Huh?”

  “It’s bullshit.” Emotion thickens her voice. “Patrick doesn’t believe me. He’s like, oh, it’s for real, this is so important, we’re going to save humanity. Yeah, fucking, right.”

  I’m almost too tired to take in what she’s saying. From down here, the end of my patch looks like some distant horizon. A rope-and-stake fence delineates it from the next patch. It’s knee-height, but looks about ten feet tall.

  “What it is, Scatter, is they need to get rid of us. Even the Department of Defense isn’t quite cold enough to shoot us in the back of the head. Plus, we’ve got Elsa’s protection. So they just decided on the next closest thing to killing us.”

  “Make us plant cruciferous vegetables? Yeah, I can see that.”

  “Actually, sweet potatoes are worse. And the guys picking zucchinis are getting their hands cut to hell by all those little hairy spikes.”

  “Heat helps,” I say, thinking mournfully of Tancred. He used to warm my hands when they really hurt.

  “Stop changing the subject. I know you don’t want to hear this, but it’s true. They don’t expect us to find anything. Come on. Needle in a haystack? Try a Void Dragon egg in Belgium. They expect us to give up and just sort of … go away. Then, once we’re off the reservation, when we’re private citizens, by our own choice, with no official protection … then the deniable hitters show up at the back door.”

  A chill runs down my spine. But I don’t believe it. She’s wrong. “Where did you get that idea?”

  “It’s obvious,” she says pityingly.

  “Elsa wouldn’t let that happen,” I mumble.

  “Your aunt is not God,” Francie snaps. Then she sighs. “OK, I could be wrong. But I really don’t think I am. Remember Clappy Clappy Joy Joy?”

  She means Dr. Joy.

  “He couldn’t wait until we were out of the way, so he could test his shit on Tancred.”

  “Nuh uh, you’re totally wrong about that.” Elsa sent me a picture of Tancred just today. Admittedly, it wasn’t a very good one …

  “Fine,” Francie says. “Ask Patrick what he thinks. Tell him what I said … and tell him that if he doesn’t change his mind, I’m going without him.”

  “Going where?” I demand nervously.

  “Italy.”

  “Italy?”

  “Yep. That’s where my mom is from. My granddad still lives in Padua, so I’m going to stay with him. That’s the safest place I can think of. Patrick can come if he wants. So can you and everyone else, I guess. But you’ve got to forget this egg hunting shit.”

  I jab, drop, and cover. “Have you talked to anyone else about this?”

  “Paul might come,” she says. “But he wants to be in their stupid Christmas pageant. Badrick is, well, Badrick. He’s like, ‘Let dem try fi kill me. Mi kill dem.’”

  “What about Huifang and Milosz?”

  Francie snorts. “They’re hopeless. They aren’t even at work today, did you know that? They went into the city to go horseback-riding or something.” She jabs an earth-caked finger into my chest. “But they’ll go if Patrick does. Talk to him. Make him change his mind.”

  5

  After my shift, I gobble a quick meal of roast pork, boiled potatoes, and pea soup—the dinners here are actually pretty good—and go to my dungeon cell, as I think of it. The floor is a minefield. I’ve adapted too readily to no more room inspections. I step barefoot on a screwdriver and howl in pain as I wriggle into thermal leggings.

  The temperature in the tunnels is what I would consider normal. The temperature up top, I know, is not normal, in fact it is weather—something I haven’t experienced in years. Patrick said the other day that Elsa underestimated how much warm clothing we would need. Accordingly, I put on my entire wardrobe: a thermal undershirt, snowpants, a fleece, a parka, two pairs of socks, and snowboots.

  I transfer Tancred’s blankie from my suitcase into the inside pocket of my parka. Who me, superstitious?

  I’m also going to take S2X458. I haven’t quite finished modifying her, but we’ll call this a field test. I changed out her wireless comms chip for one that works on the frequency of my phone. I also removed her satellite uplink functionality. I know full well that hackers use hardened military comms systems as chew toys. Phone security is way better. No callow prankster in Lagos or Jakarta will be hijacking my mecha. I type in the security key and issue a voice command. “Heel!”

  S2X458 rises from the floor. Fur brushing the flagstones, she obediently follows me (actually, my phone) out of the room.

  I pop into the parlor. This is what they call the rec room. Paul and Badrick are there, but they’re with a group of neo-Victorians, talking about the Christmas pageant, so I don’t speak to them. I just grab my share of the eggnog and cake that is served in here before curfew, feeling self-conscious in my modern clothes. I keep waiting for someone to mention S2X458.

  “What is zat?”

  It’s Maxime. I didn’t see him in the corner. My luck is so horrible.

  “Um, it’s …”

  “It looks like aardvark.”

  Hallelujah! Achievement unlocked. “Um, it is an aardvark. It’s my pet.”

  “Aardvarks are …”

  “… not period,” I mutter resignedly.

  Maxime laughs out loud. “Mais non! Aardvarks are known in our era. However, fluorescent ski parkas are not. ‘Urry up and get out of here.” He winks at me. “By ze way, I ‘ope you will play your ‘arpsichord at our Christmas pageant. I am looking forward to it!”

  Sometimes I think Maxime is a bit more clued up than we give him credit for.

  Anyway, I now have confirmation that S2X458, in her fake fur costume which I bought online and altered with my new sewing machine, does look like an aardvark. It had to be an aardvark because of the nose, which is actually a robot arm. I swallow the last gulps of my eggnog, then climb the long flights of stairs up to the real world.

  Brussels 2.0.

  The trees are underground and the houses walk.

  In front of the Brussels Sprouts head office, which stands on top of the old palace, walking houses crowd the Place Royale Koningsplein. They’re sort of big RVs with legs instead of wheels. Wheels would get stuck in the snow. It’s four feet deep where it has drifted against the walls of the historic buildings, trampled in the middle of the plaza. I thread between the crooked, powerful metal legs of the visiting houses, hoping their object recognition algos are good enough not to suddenly start moving and squash me. Their locomotion algos are great, anyway—that’s one thing we humans do really well.

  S2X458 uses the same locomotion technology. She handles the snow with ease. On the other hand, her fur is dragging, and will soon be wet and filthy. Snowflakes sting my face, borne on a bitter wind.

  “Nice night,” says Patrick, when I meet him in the Gare Centrale.

  Nice night? My nose is already frostbitten and I only just walked around the corner.

  “It was really snowing yesterday,” he explains. “It cleared up this afternoon. We might even get a moon tonight. What’s that?”

  “Aardie,” I say into my phone. She is dripping on the platform, holding her nose high in an un-aardvark-like way. “Shake!”

  She lifts a paw. Patrick laughs and stoops to ‘shake hands.’ “It’s that mecha of yours, isn’t it?”

  She used to be their mecha, but none of them were interested in repairing her. Anyway, if I’m honest, they haven’t got the technical background. So I guess she is mine now. You break it, you own it. “S2X458 doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, does it? So, meet … Aardie.”

  “Scatter …” Patrick shakes his head. Glances down
the platform. “Here’s our train.”

  “Is anyone else coming?”

  The train drowns out Patrick’s answer. The throng carries us into the carriage and mashes us against the doors on the other side. Patrick taps the glass. “See? There’s Huifang and Milosz.”

  “But they’re on the other platform.”

  “Right. They’re not coming with us. They’re going to Amsterdam.”

  “Amsterdam?”

  “Yup,” Patrick says flatly. “They met some people at that horseback-riding thing who invited them to go clubbing.”

  All the neo-Victorian discipline in the universe can’t keep the real world at bay, can it? Whatever Elsa may have hoped for, it’s not working. The team is breaking up. Drifting apart.

  And Patrick knows it. I can see it in his eyes.

  Our train starts to move. Patrick uses his elbows to clear a space large enough to take out his phone. “When we get there, you can have the park. That was supposed to be Francie’s zone, but …” He shrugs.

  “Is she coming?” I say, hoping against hope.

  “No,” Patrick growls.

  Screw it. I’ll talk to him later.

  As we travel, the crowd gradually thins out. By the time we reach Albert, at the end of the intracity line, we’re almost the only people left on the train. We exit the station.

  Now as ever, the suburbs are uncool. There are no walking houses out here. People still live in real houses, on the ground. Hardy commuters scatter into snow-choked cul-de-sacs. At a windowless convenience store, we load up on self-warming foilpacks of coffee and soup.

  “I’ll switch with you if you want,” Patrick says, at the entrance to the park.

  I am tempted to take him up on it. The park looks dark and spooky. But this is my job and I’ve got to do it. “No, this is fine.”

  He hesitates, then pulls a knife out of his pocket. “You might need this.”

  A knife. I take it from his glove without thinking. It is actually more of a dagger. It feels heavy and lethal. “Where’d you get this?”