by Curtis Hox
He glanced at her a few times from behind his shades, offering reassuring smiles.
He understands, she told herself. He has to.
She rubbed her arms and felt the soreness in her ribs and between her legs and knew there were some things he couldn’t understand.
Hutto also cast a few glances at her, smiling like the schoolboy he was, obviously annoyed she was avoiding him. He was going to have to get used to that for a little while, but only a little.
“What happened last night?” Kimberlee asked.
They huddled alone on the far side of the stage near the curtain. No one was backstage on their end, and they stepped deeper into a niche occupied by a curtain-drawing mechanism.
“I scored myself a boyfriend,” Simone replied.
“No! It’s true?”
“Yep.”
“You did it?”
“Oh, yeah. Look at him.” Both girls watched Hutto entertain Beasley (who had warmed to Hutto much faster than anyone guessed) and Wally (who looked like he’d shovel Hutto’s shit with a spoon). Simone thought it was disgusting how people fawned over him, as if he were some divine being. “Just a boy with a Grizzly inside him.”
“Was he ... like that?”
When she’d gone to meet Hutto and allowed herself to summon without her bucky and without her lords, in that instance of bravery and desperation, Simone had stepped into the dark to face what would come. And something had come. And right now, while standing on stage, she didn’t know who she was angrier at, her mother or her lords.
Before Simone could answer, her mother pointed at the group. Simone obeyed, walking over, but shot a subtle but clear enough dirty look that signaled she’d rather be somewhere else. Kimberlee followed.
Rigon walked to the lectern. In seconds, the full house quieted as if he were about to reveal when the world would end. “We called this meeting to make a few announcements. The Sterling School is taking part in an authorized experiment to introduce Transhumans with altered phenotypic expressions into the current cyber conflict. The Consortium thinks that Sterling is the place to recruit them, place them, and cultivate them. Five students have been chosen”—he looked over at the group—”and we are proud to have them in the International Consortium Cybercorps Defense Program.”
Everyone cheered at mention of the elite institution that had come to defend humanity in its struggles since the social Rupture so many years ago.
Simone stood quietly next to Kimberlee, the rest of them forming the other end of a very nervous line. Her mother, dressed up in Consortium Bodyglove and Mirrorshades, stood in the wings with the principal and the rest of the Alumni members.
Simone wanted to do was something defiant, maybe run over there and snatch those shades off and force her mother to show everyone what she was. They had no idea what stood before them. Her brother did, of course. She could hear the slight hesitation in his voice as he talked of the “new recruits.” Simone recognized when she was being manipulated because she’d been manipulated into being what she was all her life. And she could tell Rigon knew it, as well.
We Wellborns are monsters, Simone thought. Isn’t that right, mother? But beautiful monsters.
She looked at a visible scratch on the back of her right hand. She thumbed it with her other hand. The boiling emotions surged in her as she felt the sting. She should have been ripped to shreds by the twelve-hundred pound Werebear.
But she hadn’t been.
She watched Hutto with that charming smile on his face and knew most of the people in the audience were going back and forth between Hutto and Rigon, the two guys with the best packages and the unique names. They had it all. What kind of name was Hutto, anyway? When infants received the quadruple packages like Rigon and Hutto’s, the law was to give them unique names on the Consortium registry. She smirked at the elitism behind the practice. There is none like you and none who will follow. But Hutto’s intellect/creative expression wasn’t anything special at all. In fact, he seemed to have gone in the other direction concerning smarts.
Simone crossed her arms when she heard her brother talk about the need for “the best and the brightest to help in the conflict.”
He stopped to a standing-room ovation. He exited with a wave; then Simone watched her mother take the lectern.
The crowd sat and hushed. A few years ago they might have thrown sharp objects at her. She was a witch, a sorceress, and a meddler in all the dangerous things that had brought the troubles. She could use her mind and body in ways that were contrary to natural law. She could summon and channel was what she could do. And society assumed that because these phenomena began at the same time the social Rupture began, Alters must be to blame for all the bad that had followed.
Simone knew that she wasn’t responsible. Besides, Rigon himself had stated it many times that the Rogues were at fault. Alters were just anomalies—sometimes dangerous ones—but not guilty for changing the fabric of society. And now society turned a blind eye because people like her mother were needed to combat the Rogues.
People like me.
She didn’t want to listen to her mother’s wacked-out rational explanations, all of them meant to assuage their fears of what they might encounter with these new Alter recruits. She cringed when she heard, “They’ll be Transhuman warriors in a battle they’ll win with honor and distinction. And they’ll make you proud they came from Sterling.”
Simone stood almost directly behind her mother, but at the back of the stage.
She pulled her arms through the long sleeves of her sweatshirt, pushed it over her head, and tossed it to the side. Kimberlee turned and stared, as if Simone had farted. People in the audience barely noticed, still enraptured by hearing a psy-sorceress talk. She then yanked her sweat pants down, kicking them off, and revealed the silver Bodyglove her mother had made her put on this morning.
Now people noticed, some even pointing.
Her mother continued, now talking about, “The need for solidarity in our quest to take humanity to its next level—”
“Whatever,” Simone said and yanked on the zipper under her chin.
By now the Alters in line were leaning out and looking at her. Principal Smalls was waving as if besieged by an army of gnats. Rigon wore a banana grin that stretched from ear to ear.
She stepped out of the Bodyglove and dropped it at her feet. She stood there in a sports bra, hot-shorts, and combat boots, looking like a teenage raver go-go girl about to put on makeup and wig. But she looked beat up, with bruises and scratches, as if she’d been thrown around in a room full of cut glass.
The murmur through the crowd forced her mother to pause. She turned and saw what Simone was doing. Without missing a beat, she returned to the mic. “My daughter, Simone Wellborn, is a unique case, as you can see. Her altered phenotype expresses itself in ... the most promising of ways. She is a high-functioning intellect with psychic capabilities that could level this building, if she chose.” The crowd was silent again, now under a chill sharper than when Rigon had spoken. “She is raw, and untested, but I have been guiding her to this point for years. She has just flowered in the last few days. She has shaken off the necessary but illusionary apparati I gave her to control herself. And now she is ready to help humanity, to help all of us, flourish.”
Yancey Wellborn turned and presented her daughter with outstretched hands. Simone guessed her mother was seething behind her lenses, even though she smiled, and looked like a proud parent. Simone watched the crowd bend to her mother. Illusionary apparati? What the hell is that?
With those words like barbs pulling at her, Simone stepped forward and, as if in a high school talent show, began her psy-katas. This was a slow one she enjoyed performing if she walked alone somewhere private, maybe in the woods, where skipping down a path wouldn’t be noticed. She had the entire stage, and within seconds a hush fell over the crowd. Then the old fear emerged in the blank faces and the accusing eyes.
But Simone didn’t care. I’ll be
what you want ... here goes.
The first people to leave from the back hurried out unnoticed when the dance began. Simone’s arms and legs moved, at first, with machine-like precision, as if she were a robot. She bent her body this way and that as she moved, each step disjointed and unexpected. Soon, the movements began to smooth into each other, as if in complete opposition to those that had come before. Where at first each movement was discrete and rigid, soon they blended. The performance began to have a consistency to it that was coherent, a sigh of relief issuing from the crowd.
Simone’s feet seemed to sometimes leave the floor for too long. The uncanny display rippled through the crowd, people pointing, some standing. A few seconds more of her gliding across the stage, as if propelled by wires, caused a nervous group to rush out from the middle rows. She paused, arms spread wide, her feet three inches from the floor. She faced the crowd and beamed at them like she’d just won that spelling bee.
“What?” she asked the crowd. “Never seen someone levitate before?”
Her mother moved to her side and anchored her to the floor. “That’s enough. You made your point.”
Simone still floated in the embrace of her katas and let the power she channeled flow. “I guess I did.” Her mother seemed like some distant figure calling to her through a mist.
“Now you pay for it, little miss psy-sorceress.” With a simple flick of her wrist, Yancey Wellborn channeled just a tip of her immediate reserves and flung her daughter across the stage. She calmly walked over to her, where she lay on her belly, ass in the air, in the most unflattering position possible. “Get up.”
Simone turned and glared the kind of hatred only the outclassed can muster. “What? That’s it?” She reached her arm back as if to throw a baseball ... or strike.
Yancey felt the energy rising in her daughter—a wispy, insubstantial thing that wanted to be something more but was nothing in the face of Yancey’s presence. It was like a light breeze pushing up against a hurricane.
Her entity is young, Yancey thought, but brazen.
Yancey saw the tiny hand and, there it was, an image flashing of a massive taloned fist. Yancey watched it attack, as if in slow motion, and moved out of the way. She grabbed her daughter by the back of the neck and pulled her close. “Do you want to do this here? I thought we would finish this in private. Your entity needs to learn who’s in charge.”
Rigon appeared at their sides. “Mom, not in the auditorium—”
“She wants to fully summon. The thing in her wants out.”
Rigon and Yancey looked at the audience. At least a quarter of them had stayed, all with smart phones in hand, recording.
Yancey could see that her son didn’t want her to do it. “It’s time, Rigon.”
“No.”
He looked like the ground beneath his feet was crumbling away.
“It’ll happen soon enough,” she said again. “And everyone will know anyway.”
He stepped between them, allowing Simone to stand. He grabbed his younger sister to steady her.
“Not yet,” Rigon said to Yancey. “The incursion hasn’t begun—”
“It’ll begin soon, and it’ll begin here.”
“This is your fault.”
“Not mine alone!”
“Dammit! I know Dad’s at fault, but so are you!”
“It’s time the world sees us for what we are, what you repress in yourself. What your father wants us to be.” She gently removed his hands from Simone. “Step back, Rigon. She stays to watch. Maybe her entity will settle down. We need the recruits, even if you have rejected us. There aren’t enough of us. Simone will lead them one day. I know she will.”
Simone looked up like the young girl she was, unsure what was happening. “Mom?”
Yancey faced the crowd, a diva ready for a true performance, walked to the center of the stage, and let out a hellish roar that echoed from some faraway place. She said the words and performed the movement that let her entity push itself through her body, changing her. In only a few minutes of what looked like an agonizing change her physical body morphed. She became a twelve-foot tall, battle-tested, half-ton psy-sorceress entity in body armor. Her exposed skin was now deep charcoal-colored scales frilled in iridescent lines that ran up to her transformed face.
Myrmidon, she said to it. Yancey felt the change: she now had alien eyes and teeth and claws, and an elongated head, rounded in the front, pointed in the back. She looked through Myrmidon’s eyes and felt its urge to pounce to demonstrate what unimagined tools were used in humanity’s salvation. You are mine and will do my bidding.
She knew the Cybercorps Program would have to be a success now. Her life, and her daughter’s life depended on it.
She stepped forward, still in Myrmidon’s form, kicked the lectern, and pulverized it; she felt her entity thank her for such a delicious gift of contact.
That’s it for today.
Myrmidon was disciplined enough not to complain.
Yancey began walking offstage to diminish the energies somewhere private. Better than running through a few walls, she thought, knowing how good that would feel. She would repay her entity later for teasing it like this. She saw her son cradling her daughter, who cried openly. He tried to shield her eyes, but Simone stared at the thing her mother had become with horror, disgust, and fear.
She paused. “Now you know, Simone,” she said with its deep rumbling voice. “Do you see why we must win? Not for peace on earth, or stability, or even safety. We humans are frail things, dear. And does it really matter if it’s your lords of goodness or alien interlopers or smart software or demon minds who toss us around?” She lowered her voice, knowing it was five-times louder than her ears registered. She knew she sounded like she was yelling. “We are humans. Not flies to be wantonly killed for sport. I am not. I’ll make our enemies bend the knee before me, then destroy them, or die trying. Welcome to the Great Conflict.”
Yancey Wellborn, in the form of her bound entity, Myrmidon, walked off stage.
FIVE
A GENUINE ROGUE INCURSION BEGAN that fine Saturday morning at the Sterling School, but barely anyone noticed.
Hutto sat on the roof of the main campus building, watching a line of vehicles waiting to exit through security at the gate. There was a hold-up for some reason. He couldn’t tell why. But all those who’d come for the announcement wanted out, as fast as possible.
A few of the football players had shown him how to get up there, and he’d climbed up to get away from everyone. No need to be himself on the roof. He had hoped his parents, or maybe just his mom, might come to see him when he’d sent the message last night that the Consortium was going to make their big announcement. His mom had sent a sorry note, and he knew she wanted to come, but not without his father.
Everyone was too busy, he thought. Always too busy.
Hutto saw the first flashes of light out in the countryside where the Ag Farm dairy and cattle fields and the orchards stretched to the mountains in the distance. He turned, no longer interested in watching the winding road full of cars. To the north, as if a block-sized camera kept triggering its flash, a series of unexplainable lights erupted along the horizon, just over the treetops where the mountains turned to retreating blue and gray ridges.
“What the hell?”
It was like nothing he’d ever seen, and for a moment, Hutto Toth was scared. The closest thing he could think of to describe it was like seeing heat lightning during a cloudless, clear sunny day.
He hurried down the drainpipe and rushed to the Gladial Club behind the gymnasium. The Glad Club was an old converted machine shed of vinyl siding and a corrugated tin roof. The place was so hot in the summer that they had to keep the huge garage doors open and run big industrial fans in the doorways. A line of hickories provided some shade, but only in the late afternoon.
Coach Buzz’s soaked Rejuv robe hung from him like a wet beach towel. He was sweeping the mats that occupied one side, and sweating heav
ily. The other floor was hard-packed dirt sprinkled with sand and mulch. Heavy bags had been hung along the walls, as well as wood dummies and posts. All manner of wooden practice weapons, as well as padded gear, hung from racks.
“What is it?” Coach Buzz asked when he saw Hutto.
“Flashing lights,” Hutto said, then pointed north. Coach Buzz rushed to his office. Hutto watched him, through the window, talking on his tablet. When he came out, he looked even paler than before. “Oh, shit.”
“Yeah, oh shit.”
“You going to be sick?” Hutto asked.
Coach grabbed a beat-up metal chair and sat down. “I just might.”
“What are those lights?”
“An RAI incursion, right here at Sterling. Another fabricator has activated somewhere in the mountains and is summoning the bad guys.”
“No shit!”
“No shit.”
“Fuck, yeah!”
“Hey,” Coach said, finally realizing both their mouths were running wild.
But Hutto was already stomping through the club, as if it were under attack by ants and his boots the only weapon. He threw a series of kicks, shadowboxed, and did some fancy footwork as well. His imaginary opponent would have taken a beating. “We’re not leaving, are we?”
“Not for some time.”
“Damn, now that sucks. But Sterling is going to be the bomb. I can’t wait to see what the authorities bring. Maybe a Megamech.”
“A what?” Wally rounded the corner. He’d been out back with his mech. Hutto had seen it for the first time yesterday. The mech was as big as a large man and comprised of a brushed-metal alloy frame covered in ceramic plating. It was light, fast, and—most importantly—responsive. The federal license they had was for everyday use. No firepower, of course. And Wally was small enough to climb inside its chest cavity and operate it. “Did you say Megamech?”
