Girl of Fire: The Expulsion Project Book One (A Science Fiction Dystopian Thriller)

by Norma Hinkens

  Girl of Fire

  The Expulsion Project Book One

  Norma Hinkens

  Dunecadia Publishing

  Contents

  Preface

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Afterword

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  1

  Oka trudged across the gleaming hextron-tile floor, his feet dragging like concrete blocks chained to one another. In his arms he carried his only child, the wires that would be her lifeline for the next two weeks trailing from her bare, blue-veined chest. Three-year-old Trattora’s red curls lay matted over her forehead; her long lashes swept closed in an induced sleep. Oka kissed her button nose softly, hating the jarring antiseptic odor that filled his nostrils where the sweet smell of her baby breath still lingered.

  “We both know it’s the right decision,” Fir said, her expression solemn as she took the sedated child from Oka’s arms and positioned her in a poly-palladium oxygen pod. Trattora’s tiny crimson lips parted in a barely perceptible moan when Fir’s latex-gloved fingers checked her airway one last time. Then she deftly connected the cardiopulmonary monitoring system and nutrient line that would sustain the child on her journey.

  Oka shivered deep in his bones at the sight of his comatose daughter lying in the expulsion pod he had designed, and which now eerily resembled a casket to his overwrought mind. He hunched over it, his eyes desperately drinking in what would surely be the last sight he would ever have of Trattora, her chubby fists flung wide in slumber at the very moment he needed to feel them wrapped tightly around his neck.

  The modified CoMMonitor on her left wrist would track her perilous voyage from Mhakerta through the Netherscape and confirm if she made it to one of the inhabited planets within the jurisdiction of the Syndicate … or not. After that, it would automatically deactivate and the last tangible link would be broken between them. Other than her name and birthdate engraved on the CoMMonitor, Trattora would have nothing left to connect her to her old life.

  It was for the best—he and his colleagues had all come to the same gut-wrenching conclusion. But his heart still ached with the knowledge that his daughter fell asleep trusting he would be there as always when she opened her intelligent, green eyes. If the expulsion pod avoided the Maulers’ detection radars and embedded successfully, she would soon forget him. She would grow up ignorant of the life she was born into, and the father who was by her side when she took her first steps on Mhakerta.

  There would be no more firsts for them. His breath caught in his throat at the soul-destroying thought.

  “It’s time, Oka.” Fir laid a commanding hand on his shoulder.

  He turned to her, his red-rimmed eyes betraying the agony he had wrestled with through the long hours of the previous night. He wondered if Fir had also gone back and forth on whether to go through with it—even up to these last minutes. Her demeanor was as composed as ever, her dark hair slicked back in her trademark immaculate bun, but there was an air of defeat in the hunch of her shoulders that spoke of the burden she bore.

  Oka let out a shuddering sigh and followed her over to the control hub. Despite this being the only course of action left to them, it was ripping his heart out every step of the process.

  Genocidal Artificial Intelligence was on the verge of taking over Mhakerta. The self-actualizing software program behind the hostile takeover had named itself Preeminence, and as a member of ASRI, the Advanced Scientific Research Institute, Oka was among a handful of Mhakerta's elite scientists privy to the truth of how close they were to losing the race for control of Mhakerta's quadrants to AI. Eighteen months ago, during an upgrade of the universal natural language processing system, Oka and his team inadvertently uncovered Preeminence’s insidious plan to assimilate all tracer molecules in human brain matter with an IQ of 110 or higher into the mainframe by 2217. Preeminence would begin with the youngest and freshest material.

  “We need to stay strong for the others,” Fir said, frowning at Oka as she pulled off her gloves and disposed of them in a vaporization chute. “They’ll be here any minute.”

  Oka bobbed his head in response and ran a trembling hand over his unshaven face. He, Fir, and three of their most trusted colleagues had worked tirelessly over the past year on a radical counter initiative to save their gifted children from becoming scientific soup in the new world order to come. They had created the top-secret expulsion project or TEP as they referred to it, to evacuate their children in specially designed pods to various planets under the jurisdiction of the Syndicate. It was a high-risk venture—all interplanetary travel was now restricted from within Mhakerta, and there was also a chance of being intercepted by Maulers. But the statistical probability of duping Preeminence’s IQ screening program was zero.

  Oka wandered over to the pod opposite Trattora’s and pressed his lips tightly together at the pitiful sight. Fir’s four-year-old son, Velkan, lay peacefully curled to one side, the smooth, chocolate skin on his handsome face flushed with sleep. “I’ve never seen him this still before,” Oka remarked, choking up. “He’s usually tearing around your feet like a nitro-tornado.”

  Fir’s lips curved upward, but her eyes clouded. “I only hope he lives to run again one day—far from here.”

  Oka blinked back stinging tears. He struggled to find something comforting to say, but he could think of nothing. There would be no happy reunion. As soon as the expulsion pods launched, the laboratory would be vaporized in a well-timed industrial accident that would bury the evidence of their clandestine project. They wouldn’t even have this room left to meet in and reminisce about their children.

  Oka jerked his head up as the doors to the laboratory slid apart. Gustin hurried inside wheeling a mobile microplane processor, his blanched face and bleary eyes a clear indication he too had slept little in the final hours.

  “No complications?” Fir raised a well-groomed brow at him.

  Gustin shook his head, unsmiling. He leaned down and opened the steel doors on the cart below the processor and carefully slid out a stack of lab linens. His fingers trembled as he peeled off the top layer and uncovered his young son, Phin. Oka swallowed hard when Gustin clutched his child to his massive chest like a giant wounded animal that knows his offspring is about to be ripped away.

  Oka turned away to hide his grief. He couldn’t cave in front of the others, especia
lly not Gustin. Gustin was a last-minute addition to TEP after another conflicted colleague backed out—he had been left with little time to steel himself for the enormity of what they were about to set in motion.

  “You’re already late,” Fir said, pulling on another pair of gloves. “Time to kiss him good-bye, Gustin.”

  His face taut with pain, Gustin lifted the sleeping child from his chest and pressed his lips to Phin’s forehead.

  “I’ll take it from here.” Fir held her white-sleeved arms out for the child.

  Gustin’s shoulders shook as Fir took his son and attached the nasal prongs that would deliver the requisite oxygen to keep the child alive throughout the expulsion to the Syndicate planets. Phin flinched, his tiny nose twitching momentarily before he sank back into his sedated state.

  Fir placed the child in an empty pod and adjusted the radiant thermablaster that would keep his temperature at a constant 98.6 degrees for the duration of the trip.

  The door to the laboratory slid open again, and Dinah tripped through pushing a cart loaded with supplies for the stock room. Her sunken eyes sought out Fir, and for a long moment, she stared at her, keeping a firm grip on the cart’s handle.

  “We talked about this, Dinah, remember?” Fir said gently as if addressing a child reluctant to relinquish a prized possession.

  Dropping her gaze, Dinah released her grip and backed slowly away from the cart as if it might detonate at any minute. She rubbed her hands nervously up and down her lab coat. Fir gave her an approving nod and wheeled the cart over to an empty pod. She dug through the polymeric materials piled on top of the supply cart and reached for two-and-a-half-year-old Ayma tucked beneath them.

  “Wait!” Dinah called out breathlessly.

  Oka jerked his head in her direction. Surely, she wasn’t going to back out now. He watched, heart pounding, as she stumbled over to where Fir stood.

  “Please, let her take this with her.” Dinah choked back a sob as she pressed something into Fir’s hand.

  Fir looked down at it and frowned. “You know the rules. We all agreed.”

  “I want her to know her mother loved her,” Dinah said, wiping the back of her hand across her eyes.

  Fir tightened her lips. She placed the locket back in Dinah’s hand and closed her fingers firmly over it. “Love is sacrifice, not sentiment. Don’t sabotage Ayma’s chance to forget. Be the clinician you were trained to be.” She gave Dinah’s shoulder a quick squeeze before turning her attention back to the child. Gently, she lifted Ayma from the supply cart and positioned her in one of the two remaining empty pods before attaching the infrared oximeter to her ankle that would monitor her oxygen levels en route. Ayma splayed her fingers briefly without uttering a sound. Dinah clapped a hand over her mouth, her eyes wild and watering.

  Oka bit his bottom lip until the coppery taste of blood filled his mouth. He desperately wanted to walk over there and comfort Dinah—to tell her he understood the searing pain slicing through her heart like a scalpel—but it was too dangerous to acknowledge that pain until after the children were safely launched. If one link in the chain broke, they would all fold, and he was already dangerously close to the edge.

  “So far, so good.” Fir smiled tightly around at her pale-faced colleagues. “Once Ivel gets here, I’ll review the final steps.”

  Oka glanced at the holographic timekeeper. They were out of sequence. Ivel should have arrived from the shipping department before Dinah. There must have been some kind of delivery delay. A little disconcerting, but not uncommon since the drone upgrade a few weeks back. Ivel had no choice but to wait for the delivery to come in. He needed the cover of the packages to smuggle his daughter, Leba, inside the laboratory for the scheduled expulsion.

  Oka’s anxiety mounted as the minutes ticked by. He ran a hand across the back of his prickling neck as he paced by the pods, not daring to stop moving in case he found himself ripping the tubes from Trattora’s chest and running as far away as possible from the lab with her. Even now, so close to the launch, he didn’t trust his heart not to fail him. But he couldn’t allow that to happen. Despite the pain eating him alive at the thought of letting her go, he wouldn’t keep his daughter here to suffer the same fate that awaited him.

  There had been three prior attempts by AI to seize control of Mhakerta's mainframe architecture; all ultimately failed. This one would not. Preeminence had mastered the deep learning neural network it was built on and crunched an inordinate number of data sets into algorithms to outwit the software designed as a safeguard to control it. Any day now, Preeminence would seize power in a bloodless coup. With the entire robot military at its disposal, it would be an unstoppable force. They had met their match, and it hadn’t come in the form of a Mauler attack or annexation by the Syndicate, as some had feared for years.

  “I’m going to link to Ivel,” Fir said. “We need a status update. We can’t risk running late with the launch.”

  Oka stopped pacing and walked over to the control hub where Fir was adjusting an archaic headset. They had rigged up a basic link system to communicate outside of the universal access channels during the year they were secretly working on TEP. After today, the link system would go dark. They would never again discuss TEP. The eyes and ears of Preeminence were everywhere. There were even reports in the last few weeks of citizens being arrested for what their dreams revealed about them. Fearmongering, perhaps, but Oka and his colleagues knew that cranio-neural surveillance was now a real possibility. Preeminence was already vastly more powerful than anyone could have predicted, and could most certainly eliminate every perceived threat in its path.

  Fir set up the link to Ivel’s ID and waited impatiently for him to connect. “I ran a diagnostic. There’s nothing wrong with the radio.”

  “He may not be able to talk right now,” Oka said.

  Fir looked up, alarm flitting across her ordinarily composed features. “You think something’s happened?”

  Oka rubbed his brow. Part of him hoped something would happen to disrupt the launch, to give him another twenty-four hours with his daughter. But it was a selfish thought. It meant Trattora would share in the same fate that awaited him. “I just meant he may have been held up. Let’s give him a few more minutes.”

  Fir grimaced. “I don’t think—”

  A flashing red light pulsed over the ceiling, shocking the scientists into silence. Seconds later an electronic voice chimed through the space. “Breach alert in progress. Trespass detection. All sentinels to Gamma One.”

  Oka and Fir exchanged distraught looks.

  “If they don’t find the trespasser, the sentinels will sweep the entire building,” Oka said. “The children will be discovered.”

  “Can we bring the launch forward?” Gustin asked.

  Fir shook her head. “The pirate program is already running. We can’t alter the code or it won’t overwrite itself afterward. They’ll be able to track and destroy the pods.”

  Fir’s headset crackled briefly. Her eyes widened. “It’s Ivel! I’ll put him on speaker.”

  “Fir, do you read me?”

  Fir adjusts her headset. “Ivel! Where are you? Are you all right?”

  “I’m not coming.”

  “What do you mean you’re not coming?” Fir cried. “Where’s Leba?”

  “She’s with me … in Gamma One.”

  Oka sucked in a long, cold breath. This is what he had feared most, a nightmare that had woken him up trembling and dripping sweat many times; that one of them would crack and they would all be outed before the children could be saved.

  “What are you doing in the flight tower?” Fir asked, her tone even and controlled once more.

  “I can’t do it,” Ivel rasped. “I can’t let Leba go!”

  Fir inhaled and exhaled. “Listen to me very carefully, Ivel. You need to get out of there as quickly as possible. Use the service elevachute and—”

  “It’s over Fir. The tower is sealed. Are the others there … with you?�
�

  Fir blinked back tears, the first tears Oka remembered seeing in her eyes. “Yes,” she whispered.

  “Good,” Ivel replied. “I’m glad for them. Good-bye, Fir. May all our flights be successful.”

  The link disconnected abruptly.

  Fir looked around at the other scientists, her face pale and drawn.

  “What did he mean?” Dinah asked, her eyes bouncing back and forth between her colleagues like buoys bobbing on a wild sea. “What’s he talking about? Why did he take Leba to the flight tower? You don’t think he’s going to try and steal an ethercopter, do you?”

  Fir tightened her jaw. “I don’t know, but we’re out of time. Activate your children’s CoMMonitors.”

  The scientists exchanged uncertain looks as they pulled up their left sleeves. With trembling fingers, they keyed in the authorization codes on their own modified CoMMonitors. One by one, the devices on their children’s wrists lit up and beeped, indicating that the honing signals were operational.

  “Link protocol looks good,” Fir said. “Time to seal the pods.” She walked back over to the control hub and pulled down a green lever. Gleaming egg-shaped lids closed over the sleeping children like synchronized buds shutting out the world when the sun fades. Dinah buried her face in her hands and sobbed quietly.

  “Beginning launch sequence,” Fir said, squaring her shoulders. She flinched when another flashing red light pulsed through the ceiling.

  “Illegal ethercopter departure alert,” the electronic voice announced.

  Oka’s lungs froze over. It must be Ivel. What was he thinking? He would never make it out of the restricted zone.

  Oka scrunched his eyes shut and waited, his heart thumping so loudly in his chest he thought it would explode before the ethercopter did. But it didn’t. His own heart kept beating. A moment later, a dull reverberation rippled through the laboratory walls, confirming the inevitable. His stomach twisted with a new grief.