by Ramona Finn
Beside me, Wolf sloshes forward. “We’re only passing through,” he tells the man. He clenches his hands, then winces. I’m reminded that his hands are still badly burned. Still, his voice remains calm and steady. He pretends like his hands don’t hurt, but I can’t tell if he’s genuinely unaffected by the grotesque appearances of the people around us.
I wish I wasn’t.
“Passing through?” the man asks incredulously. “To where? There is no passing through. There’s only the Norm.”
Wolf and I share a glance. I speak next. “No, there’s more. There’s the Outside.”
At my words, a ripple of murmurs circles the strange group of people. The man shoots them a harsh look and the murmurs subside. He fixes his mismatched eyes on me. “The Outside? So, that would make you Rogues, right?” His eyes look me over skeptically, and then he compares me to Wolf. He must notice the differences. “You don’t look like a Rogue.”
I shake my head. “I’m not. I’m a Glitch.”
The man narrows his eyes at me. “A Glitch? Impossible. Glitches don’t come back to the Norm. If you think that the AI can send you down here to destroy us—”
“We weren’t sent by the AI,” I tell him quickly.
“Then why are you here?” he demands.
I glance at Skye, then at Wolf. Finally, I look back at the man. “We’re here to stop the AI. For good.”
I see Skye frown, but she doesn’t say anything. I know that some part of her still hopes that she can return to the Norm—in peace. But I’ve already accepted the truth: the AI has to be stopped.
For a second, I don’t think the man is going to believe me. Then, he laughs. A good, long laugh. It’s light and airy and sort of sweet. When it dies down, he shakes his head. “Well, if that’s the case, then we have something in common.” He releases Skye, and then jumps down into the water, slogging closer. I can see now that the scars aren’t burns, but rather are from some type of surgery. And beneath them are blue lines, like veins. Except they’re not veins. They’re wires.
“My name’s Mech, and I think you should come with me.”
I look at Wolf, and the message between us is clear. What choice do we have?
…
The man escorts us deeper into the tunnels. I’m thankful that we’re no longer walking through the disgusting waters at least, but I’m surprised that the tunnels are almost similar in nature to the clan’s. They’re made of concrete, of course, and there are wires and tech hanging from the walls, but otherwise they serve the same purpose. I think it’s strange to find something so similar in a world that’s supposed to be so very different.
I move a little closer to Wolf and lean in towards him. “How are your hands?” I ask. A dumb question; I know they’re not okay.
“Fine,” he answers gruffly and doesn’t let me examine them when I try.
As we move through the tunnels, I see more of these people. They’re all disfigured in some way or another, though some are much worse off than others. I notice that the common theme among them is the tech melded into their bodies. Whether it’s prosthetic limbs or eyes that belong in scabs, they look caught somewhere between human and machine.
Their eyes linger on us as we move, but no one says anything. And there’s no mistaking that these people are still wary of us. They keep their guns at the ready and we’re surrounded by them as we move.
The man leads us to a smaller, more private room. Then he dismisses everyone else. A woman lingers, half of her face coated in what looks like metal instead of skin. She doesn’t seem happy with leaving us alone with him, but when he orders her to go, she reluctantly does as she’s told. She closes the door behind her.
“Please, take a seat,” he encourages us, sitting down himself. There’s a large oval table taking up most of the room and he sits at one end of it.
I glance at Wolf for confirmation. When he takes a seat first, and both Skye and I follow suit, taking the empty chair on either side of him.
“Now, before we can do any real talking, I need to be sure of your intentions,” he tells us matter of factly.
“How can you know for sure?” I ask nervously.
He only smiles at us.
I notice her presence a second before I feel the prick in my neck. My hand slaps over the spot on my neck where the girl standing beside me has just pricked me with a rather long, thin needle.
“What was that?” demands Wolf, who’s rubbing the same spot on his neck. Skye also looks unhappy, eyeing the girl angrily.
Mech shrugs his shoulders. “Sorry,” he says, not sounding very apologetic. “But we had to be sure. That shot is a nano tracker. If you’re working for the AI, that tracker will find the connection and sever it.”
Skye repeats nervously, “Nano tracker?”
Mech glances at her. “Yes. Every Tech within the Norm has a connection to the AI. This allows them to be under the AI’s control. We’ve developed a tracker which allows for that connection to be destroyed. If you don’t have it, then all of that is moot, of course, and the tracker is completely harmless.”
Completely harmless.
I don’t miss his meaning, though I don’t know that Skye and Wolf realize the unspoken words hanging in the air. If we don’t have this connection, then we’re safe. But if we do… If we do, severing the connection may very well mean severing our lives.
A cold sweeps through me. I’m not working for the AI. Not intentionally. And I would never want to. But there’s always that question in the back of my mind: what if I am working for her, without realizing it?
What if I have this connection and don’t even know it? Fear washes through me quickly and I open my mouth to tell him to stop it. To tell him that I don’t want to work for her, but that I might be. On accident. But before I manage to get a single word out, Mech glances at the girl. She nods her head once. When he looks back at us, he says, “You’re all clean. Now we can talk.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
I have a moment to feel complete and utter relief. I’m not working for the AI. I didn’t realize how worried I was that it could be true until this strange man told me that I’m not.
“As I’ve told you, my name is Mech. This is my sister, Med.” He waves towards the girl who injected us with the trackers. She looks younger, maybe Skye’s age, and waves from the back corner. As far from us as she can get. I see that she, too, has the blue wiring veins beneath her skin, but her scars aren’t as gnarled. They’re matted over her skin, making her look as though she’s a patchwork of different skin grafts. It makes her unnerving, but not wholly displeasing to look at.
“My name is Wolf,” Wolf says, and then introduces me and Skye. “What exactly is this place?”
“We call it the Underground. Not very original, I know, but we don’t need anything fancy.”
“Why are you down here?” Skye asks, leaning forward. She seems fascinated by Mech’s appearance, and I wonder what’s wrong with me that I’m the one having the most difficulty looking at him.
Mech grins at her, and then winks his human eye. “Living down here.” Before Skye can ask why, he goes ahead and explains. “We’re what’s known as Rejects. Not so long ago, the AI was working on bioengineering.”
A frown tugs at the corners of my mouth. Bioengineering? Like the biogear we’ve been working on?
“The AI was determined to create an enhanced human body that was able to link up directly with the central mainframe without the side effects most often shown in humans.”
“Side effects?” Wolf asked.
Mech nods. “Yeah. Seizures are the most common. Usually, seizures happen the most in people who are interacting with the AI mainframe, so you won’t see them in every tech up top,” he points above us, “but the more often they link-up, the more likely they’ll show symptoms. Headaches. Nightmares. Disassociation. Things that the AI determines as undesirable qualities.” Mech’s eyes flicker to Skye again, and he adds, “Which I’m guessing is what happened to y
ou.”
Skye’s cheeks color and she looks away. “How did you know?”
He shrugs his shoulders. “You don’t look like a Rogue. I figured you’re one of the perfect techs that spent a little too much time in the system. The AI decided you didn’t belong anymore, right? Called you a Glitch and threw you to the outside to die?”
Skye only nods.
“I figured,” he says. “Me and my people are the AI’s attempts at correcting these problems, by making humans that are closer in make-up to machines. Obviously, it decided that we weren’t exactly desirable either.”
He waves his hand across his body, indicating the scars and the bits of mechanics woven in with the biological. He does so almost mockingly, as though he’s making a joke of the ruin that’s his body. But beneath it there’s pain. I know there is.
“Now, would you folks like to tell me what you’re doing here?”
I clear my throat. “We’re here to stop the AI.” My eyes flicker to Skye. Her eyes are downcast and she doesn’t look happy, but she doesn’t contradict me. I wonder if encountering these Rejects has helped to show her that destroying the AI is the only option. Looking back to Mech, I hesitate a moment, but add, “And we’re looking for a friend.”
Mech’s eyebrows raise in curiosity. “I see. Well, I’ll tell you now that you won’t be successful.”
“In finding our friend?” I ask, feeling my body grow heavy with disappointment.
“Any of it,” he tells me casually, like he’s not worried about any of this. Like this isn’t life or death.
It’s not, I remind myself. At least, it’s not for him.
“We still have to try,” I tell him quietly.
He’s silent for a while. His mismatched eyes sweep over each of us, lingering on Skye for a moment longer than the rest. Finally, his gaze returns to me. It freaks me out that he’s staring at me through one eye that isn’t real, but I manage not to flinch. And to meet his gaze steadily. “Alright. Then I guess I’ll just have to help you guys out, won’t I?”
My eyes narrow suspiciously.
“You’re… going to help us?” Skye asks hesitantly. I can hear the pleased tone of her voice.
Mech offers her a smile, then winks at her again. “I’ll do what I can. It won’t be a lot, but I can at least get you guys into the main part of the Norm. From there, we wouldn’t be much help anyway.” He gestures to his face. “We don’t exactly fit in. But you guys can.”
“Why?” I ask before Skye jumps up and hugs him in thanks.
He glances at me. “Because any enemy of the AI is a friend of ours.” He stands. “Follow me.”
Mech leads us through the Underground. Several of the other Rejects eye us suspiciously, not trusting that we’re not part of the AI. Which I decide I can’t blame them for. They probably think we’re just another part of the AI.
I glance at Skye, who talks freely with Mech. She seems unconcerned with his disfigurement. I don’t know if he’s as surprised as I am by that, but he at least doesn’t seem accustomed to someone like Skye being so open with him.
As we walk through the tubing that acts as their home, Mech explains that they haven’t gotten any new Rejects in a while.
“The AI’s experiments consistently failed, resulting in people like us who just couldn’t fit in with the rest of the Tech above in the Norm. It had us scheduled for execution, but there was a glitch in the system and one of the drones categorized me and my sister as Glitches instead of Rejects. We were able to escape as a result, but I knew better than to think we could make it in the Outside anymore than we could in the Norm.”
I glance behind me to see that Med, his sister, has been following us. She stares at each of us for equal lengths of time, genuinely interested—it seems. But she remains silent. She’s like a ghost or a shadow trailing after us.
“So you’ve been saving other people scheduled for… execution, too?” I ask. I wish I was more surprised to hear that the AI has been killing people, but I’m not. She—it—wants us all dead, but somehow execution sounds different than everything else going on. More real. More terrible.
Mech glances back at me and nods. “Yes. Or at least, we used to. Since the experiments stopped, there’s no more need to rescue people. Now we just… exist, you know?”
I frown. “They stopped?”
He nods. “Yeah, like I said. The AI could never get it right, so it moved on to bigger and better things.”
Bigger and better things. I suddenly have a bad feeling. The AI has been trying to bioengineer, just like I have, but she hasn’t been successful. At least, not the way she wants to be. Right? I’m suddenly not so sure. I think of the Glitches, of our ability to hack into the system. We are the beginning stages of bioengineering, aren’t we? Haven’t the Rogues accused us of being less than human? And now I’m working hard to make that fact more prominent. I’m trying to make us less human through biogear, and—
I shake my head. The biogear isn’t a part of us. It’s only there to help us survive. And me… So what if I have a stronger connection to the virtual world—and the AI—than anyone else? That doesn’t mean anything. Right?
I don’t know, but thinking about it unsettles me. “What bigger and better things?” I ask Mech.
He shakes his head. “We’re not sure. Our information about the AI is fractured, at best. If we were to try and link up like the Tech above do, we’d get caught. We’re too noticeable, and the AI has too many firewalls. But we know it’s working on something big.”
“Like building a spaceship?”
Mech looks back at me, his expression one of genuine surprise. “Is that what you think it’s doing?”
I nod. “Yeah, I do. It seems to want to save humanity—whether humanity likes it or not.”
Mech snorts. “No kidding. Never mind the costs to humanity, right?” He waves his hand at our surroundings, indicating the people who’ve been mutilated and mangled by the AI’s attempts at bettering them.
“Exactly. That’s why we need to stop it.”
Shaking his head, he half smiles. It stretches his scars and the spindly veins just beneath the surface of his skin, making his face look eerie. “A spaceship.”
Wolf speaks up, having remained mostly silent up to this point. “If that is what the AI is doing,” he glances at me, “and we have pretty good reason to think it is, then you and your people should probably think about evacuating. In case we don’t make it.”
Mech waves him off. “We’re not going to leave our home. Where would we go? But, we can help you, at least.”
We finally come to a stop outside of a tunnel that opens up into a square room. It’s all made of concrete, but it’s mostly dry in here. Bins are stacked along the edges of the walls—some clear, some solid. They have labels on them, but it’s in that strange language I’ve only seen inside the virtual world. I can read it, but I know that’s not something I should be able to do.
“This is where we keep all the goods,” Mech throws over his shoulder by way of explanation. “It’s pretty obvious we have to take what we can form the Norm if we intend to survive down here, seeing as how we can’t grow a whole lot out of concrete.”
“We are doing some innovative things with reclaimed water and fungus, though,” Med adds.
Wolf, Skye, and myself all pause and turn around to stare at her in surprise. It’s the first time I’ve heard her say anything, and I’m surprised by the small, sweet voice she has. Almost childlike.
She blushes beneath our gazes and takes a step back. Like she’s afraid.
“Yeah, we are. It’s a small percentage of our resources right now, but we hope to expand it. It just takes time,” Mech explains, drawing attention away from his sister again.
“You said you take things from the Norm to survive,” Wolf comments, looking over the bins. I can tell he can’t read what they say. I don’t mention that I can. “But how?”
Mech grins. “That’s why we’re here. It’s not easy f
or us to get into the Norm, given our physical appearances. It’s too hard to blend in for most of us. But not everyone looks like me.” His eyes flicker to Skye, and then back to Wolf. “Some, like Med, aren’t as noticeable. Especially when we dress her up proper.”
He goes to one of the bins and pops open a lid. Digging around within it, he finds a long piece of flowing, soft-looking material. It’s all white. He offers it to Skye. She accepts it with a smile and then unfolds it, holding it against the front of her body. “A dress?”
He nods. “Everyone in the Norm is the same. So if you’re going into the Norm, you need to be the same, too.” He glances at Wolf. “You’ll be the hardest to pass off. You’re bigger than most of the Techs are since they rarely have to focus on things like physical labor. But hopefully we can find something that’ll fit you. Then you’ll just have to keep your head down and make sure that no one is paying too close of attention.”
Mech begins to pull out more clothing, handing pieces to each of us. I’m right; the fabric is incredibly soft. I’m admiring it when I hear Wolf hiss next to me as he catches a piece of clothing that Mech tosses him. I’m not the only one who’s noticed it, either.
“What happened to your hands?” Mech asks, not so much concerned as clinical.
Wolf tries to play it off. “Accident while getting in. They’re fine.”
Mech lets out a sigh. “It won’t fly. We’ll have to patch you up.”
Wolf doesn’t even argue, which tells me just how much his hands are really hurting him.
“We use things like makeup, too, to conceal the spider veins the AI puts beneath the skin. Obviously, it doesn’t work for me, but if Med keeps her head down, most don’t notice hers. She just has to keep her distance. You guys are lucky; you won’t need that.”
“We’re just supposed to throw on some new clothes and expect them to believe that we belong?” I ask, a little skeptical. It’s still a better plan than I have—which is to hide behind buildings and avoid interacting with anyone—but it doesn’t sound very safe or secure.
