Victor pulled at his collar. He knew what Gaia was trying to achieve. It was the same story—she was grooming a new race of Icarians: veemelds particularly suited for a virtual existence. She’d made a study of them and she knew veemelds better than even Victor himself, who’d understood from the beginning what incredible wealth they’d brought to his city. Julie, of course, and her daughter stood alone, like no others. Who better than Gaia, who had instigated the whole thing, to understand just how unique Julie and Angel were? Proteus symbionts. Was this her ultimate new race? In order for her to promote it, the plan had to be in her favor. What did she stand to gain? Was there some connection to Proteus that was beneficial to a woman coveting power? Perhaps Gaia envisioned manipulating the virus to her benefit through a veemeld
He stopped dead in his tracks and stiffened with a disturbing thought. That was it! And a cooperative veemeld would serve best. Would Gaia go after the daughter? Knowing the mother, there was little chance of cooperation there. More chance with an impressionable, naïve, eleven-year-old, fresh from the wilderness. If Gaia had her way she’d get both mother and daughter and play one off the other. Well, he’d be damned if he would let her! His decision made, he stopped, drew in a long, ragged breath and let it all sink in. This was it. He swallowed with difficulty as if the future he plotted was too much for one man to digest.
In all his years of ruthless manipulation, deception and illicit surveillance, he’d never openly defied anyone. He’d always buckled under the slightest hint of attack, carefully avoiding confrontational situations or people, skillfully dodging any interaction that might expose his inner fears and desires. Therefore, it shook him to his core that he’d finally decided to do the one thing he most feared: openly defy Gaia and contact Julie Crane, the woman he’d secretly loved for so long. Julie had given him his city back once before but this time he would have to ask her himself. How was he going to convince the woman who’s name he’d betrayed to help him?
17
“Where do you think we’re going, Dad?” Angel whispered to her father as the Pol prodded them through the bustling crowd so full of cyborgs and droids that Daniel was reminded of the over-populated inner city. Several shops were shut and a large part of the mall was not in use and shrouded in darkness.
“Be quiet,” the Pol snarled. He’d left all his friendliness behind.
Angel kept staring around her, smitten with images, smells and people who looked strange to her. Daniel had to admit some of them looked strange to him, too. He spotted a woman with shaved head and fought from grimacing in revulsion—her nose was broken and her face was a map of scars, tattoos and rings. Some new sub-culture he’d never seen, not even in the inner city, which had always been fertile ground for everything counter-culture. The woman’s rough appearance was very much at odds with Icaria’s obsession with outer beauty, he thought. Angel looked up at him and he shrugged.
As he looked away, a holo ad caught his attention: Icaria-5 openly boasted the highest proportion of veemelds in Level-1 positions on the entire planet, praising them for their intellectual prowess and leadership. Holo charts demonstrated how their numbers had transformed Icaria-5 into the most productive and self-sustaining city in North Am. Times sure had changed, he thought. Twelve years ago no one would admit they even knew a veemeld, much less liked or admired one. In fact, even he’d hated them with all his heart.
He’d once rationalized that hatred as a fear of the domination by machines in human society. Then, when he’d fallen in love with a veemeld, he realized that most of his hatred came from having been deserted by one. The very one he’d fallen in love with, ironically. Daniel wondered what he really felt about veemelds and realized that it was a lot more complicated than he’d initially thought.
He hadn’t realized he was staring when Angel asked him, “What’s a veemeld, Dad?” She’d followed his gaze to the holo.
“Uh, well,” he paused. Your mother’s a veemeld, he thought silently to himself. And you are too. “Eh, well,” he stuttered. “They’re...ah...people who—”
“Get out! Now!” the Pol bellowed. They’d reached a tube-jet car and the Pol was emptying the car by waving his gun at those who’d already seated themselves. “I said now!” He fired a shot into the car, singeing a durafoam seat.
People surged to their feet and bolted past them. Angel huddled into a chair next to her father. Thankfully she’d forgotten her question about veemelds, because after a moment of silence she whispered, “Why did he call Mom legendary, Dad?”
“Everyone in Icaria knows Mom, Angel,” Daniel whispered back.
“You mean she’s famous?” she asked in amazement.
“Yeah,” he said glumly. More like infamous.
“What’s she famous for?”
“Oh, well...” She just killed a Pol and spread the worst epidemic since AIDS or Ebola. “She made a great discovery about a bad disease that had spread in the city. Something that would help cure it.”
Speaking of Darwin, he hadn’t seen evidence of it in the city. Not in the people walking the malls or in the holo ads, as if it had simply disappeared into the walls. Had a cure been found and had Julie’s info cube been responsible for that too? If so, it was fitting that the one who started it ended it. Then why did they want her back?
Angel watched, enthralled as the tube-jet accelerated out of the station and plunged into a tunnel. Daniel tried not to think of his days as a tube-jet driver and watched the Pol instead. He looked like he was talking in a low voice to himself. Obviously communicating with headquarters through his helmet com-system. They were done for. Julie was here somewhere but they were never going to find her, because they were going straight to chaos.
He watched Angel, looking around with the wonder of a child on an adventure, not quite comprehending the seriousness of their predicament. Innocent and naïve. Julie would have a meltdown if she knew he’d brought Angel here. This was exactly why she didn’t want them chasing after her. But she was probably never going to find out because they were probably going to die quietly in the Pol Station. Then he thought again—perhaps there was a worse fate in store for Angel, if they knew about her unique talents. Chances were good that they did; they knew all about her mother, after all. Good Earth, what had he done?! He took his head in his hands and closed his eyes to the pain in his heart. They should have stayed in the heath...
The train lurched to a stop with a howling screech. They jerked forward in their seats and Angel’s wide eyes snapped to her father. “Why’d we stop?!”
“Shut up!” the Pol snarled. He’d pulled out his weapon and dropped into a combat crouch, peering into the darkness outside the train, searching for something he couldn’t see. He waved his hand over them and hissed, “Get down on the floor. NOW!”
They scrambled to the floor on all fours. Abruptly windows on both sides of the car smashed in. Shards of duraplastic hailed on them, followed by heavy thuds as four hooded men swung inside. They’d obviously been hiding on top of the train. The Pol opened fire immediately, cutting two of them down.
“The girl!” shouted one of the remaining hooded men as he tackled the Pol. While they struggled, the fourth man made a grab for Angel. Daniel draped himself over her and lashed out with his foot. The man kicked back then pulled out a gun, his hood falling from his shaven head.
Daniel sucked in a breath at the sight. The man’s face was a tangle of healed-over tears and tattoos, a misshapen nose, insane eyes and a rippled slit where someone or something had ripped off his mouth. Daniel lunged at him, knocking them both off balance, and they fell forward. The man knocked his head against a chair. The gun discharged and Daniel felt an explosion in his chest.
Time collapsed.
He vaguely heard Angel screaming and realized that he was shot. A silent weapon, but just as deadly. His last thought before the darkness took him was: I’ll never see Julie again.
18
After appraising her with a smirk, Tyers swept his arm toward the open doorway. “Time to journey on. After you, Ms. Crane.”
Julie refused to move. “Where are we going?” she demanded.
He shook his head. “You’ll find out.”
Julie was tired of hearing that. She gave him a pointed stare then marched past him into the hallway of the Pol Station. Tyers closed the door to Frank’s suite then took the lead, steering her to an elevator. They rode down in silence to the main level and Tyers led her along the main hallway. Julie’s eyes roamed the giant hall, from arched ceiling to the black-tiled floors. It made her nauseous with deep, sick hatred. It was here that both her father and her uncle had died. Here that she’d been brought to be Shamed. Here where her friend Nancy had disappeared and where Julie had allegedly murdered the previous Head Pol.
Yet, here she was, walking its cold tiles with impunity, heading toward Darwin Mall. Where was Tyers taking her? Would she finally discover the purpose for her being brought here? Would she then be given a chance to plead her case and leave? That seemed more and more a foolish naïve hope, Julie thought with growing despair.
They reached the Pol Station entrance to the mall and Tyers handed her a vee set. It was a newer model but still seemed to have the same features of her old set. When she hesitated with a glower, he pushed it into her hands and put one on himself. She gingerly pulled the metalloid legs over her head and couldn’t help wincing when she felt the semi-intelligent device claw her scalp for a snug hold, swing one arm down over an eye, another to the corner of her mouth then settle in. She never could stand the creepy things and had avoided wearing them whenever possible.
Tyers appraised her with a loose smile. “They make permanent models now, you know. People never take them off.”
“Terrific,” she muttered. Who’d want to do that? Then she thought of SAM and how comforting it had been to have him with her all the time.
“They also have a model just for veemelds, complete with a retinal scanner in the eye-com. A portable Interact-SYM.”
She forced a smile. “Convenient.”
“Not that you’d have any use for them, eh?” she knew he was referring to her being the only veemeld who didn’t need Interact-SYM to talk to her A.I., but she wasn’t sure if he meant it as an insult or just as a comment of interest. She couldn’t read him.
They then plunged into the bright mall. Blasted with sounds from holo ads and a sea of nudging bodies, Julie fought from cowering. Spun around, jabbed and prodded by passersby, panic rose in her throat, but she noticed that Tyers took it all in stride. His eyes went blank, mimicking the other commuters surrounding them as he clutched her hand and wormed his way to their still mysterious destination. She recalled having once liked this mall. How things had changed—no, she corrected herself, how she’d changed.
Julie looked closely at the tight, mechanized crowd and saw no one shaking or twitching or otherwise being avoided by the rest of the crowd. It was as though Darwin had disappeared. Had Burke used her information and found a cure? It would have explained Frank’s survival. While there was no sign of Darwin, the mall betrayed a disturbing amount of abuse and decay. She spotted signs forbidding access to whole areas, shops, and buildings. Many stores were shut down. It seemed that the tight order of Burke’s regime was crumbling, despite the lack of disease. Who was in charge now?
Darwin disease had gotten its name from the Darwin Mall Clinic in Icaria-11, where the first case of the disease was discovered, and where she was injected with Proteus, but this Darwin Mall held other dark memories for her. She scanned the mall for the Den, where, in an uncontrollable rage, she’d shot Frank because he had arrested her dystopian book-peddling uncle, who shortly thereafter had committed suicide in his cell. When she’d stormed into the smoky drug hole to confront Frank, slouching with his Pol friends, he’d shown no remorse and insulted both her and her uncle. She’d snatched his partner’s gun and shot him in the crotch. Hicks then made a dash for his gun and she’d shot him mistakenly in the struggle. It had changed the course of her life forever. If not for those terrible moments of rage, she and Daniel might never have come together and she might never have had Angel in the heath.
Before she was able to spot the Den, something else caught her attention—a holo that raved about veemelds. Julie stared, dumbstruck. Charts displayed veemelds as popular and in demand. She eyed the statistics with suspicion and recalled what her two pursuers in the heath had said about veemelds. She didn’t trust the charts. They hardly ever portrayed the underlying truth behind the figures. She should know, having worked in the Com-Center as a data handler who’d been required to manipulate the truth on a regular basis.
However, the trend toward mechanized and A.I. support had obviously continued, she thought, noticing how many people sported A.I.-assisting devices and the number of droids in the crowd. Daniel would feel very uncomfortable here. He’d never liked droids and always seemed extremely leery of intelligent machines. He was decidedly more comfortable in the heath, where organic and physical laws of nature applied.
Daniel never really had to deal with Julie being a veemeld because they’d left Icaria soon after he found out she was one. If they hadn’t been forced to flee Icaria, she wasn’t sure how the two of them would have fared together. His dislike of veemelds, while motivated personally through her desertion, was definitely rooted in a strong Luddite philosophy. It didn’t matter, she thought. She was going to get what she needed and return to the heath and they wouldn’t have to worry about this place, veemelds or droids any more.
Tyers picked up his pace, pulling her along, and she saw why. Skirting widely around a small commotion in the crowd involving a tall Pol, Tyers led her to the tube-jet station where a train had just arrived. She glanced at the conductor’s car and noticed no one manning it. They’d finally opted for full vee-com control. Daniel would be out of a job if he still lived here. Thank the Earth he wasn’t, she thought and swallowed down her loneliness. She hoped they were still safe.
They boarded the train and Tyers motioned her to one of the last empty seats in the crowded car. He himself stood by the door. Julie took the seat and made futile attempts to dam the memories that spilled out: of a youth with Darwin disease staring at her with a broken smile...of making love in an empty car with Frank...of fleeing the outer-city with Daniel conducting the train.
She caught Tyers watching her with great amusement. Terrific. She probably looked like a wide-eyed child at a new vid-game site. Let him stare, she thought. She closed her eyes for a moment, took in a deep breath, then swallowed down her nervousness. When she opened her eyes, he was still watching her. She glared at him and he looked away, laughing quietly to himself.
After some moments Tyers cleared his throat loudly and caught her eye. He tipped his head to the door as the tube-jet eased into Pielou Station. The District 10 Med-Center, Julie concluded with trepidation. Was he taking her to the DP for “processing”? Should she bolt and make a run for it? She must have given something of her thoughts away because his lips tightened and he was instantly beside her, hand gripping her arm firmly. “No funny business, or I’ll have to get Raymond to shoot you, again.” She could feel his breath on her face and spotted Raymond, the skyship pilot, waiting for them at the door. “Now, get up,” Tyers said in a cold voice.
As she stood up, she thought seriously of kicking him, bolting and risking Raymond’s aim. Then Tyer’s own snub-nosed pistol nudged up against her neck. He didn’t care if anyone saw him holding a gun, which alarmed her. That meant he didn’t care if anyone saw him shoot her either. She decided against running—she was here to bargain, after all. She let Tyers and his gunman escort her to the Med-Center. He gripped her tightly, but still looked nervous as he led her through the crowd to the entrance. She caught him throwing anxious glances around them. What was spooking him in the mall? Then a shaft of alarm struck her: all of I
caria still thought she was a murderer. She’d been plastered on every holo in every mall twelve years ago. She became acutely aware that she was drawing a few curious glances and realized that her tanned complexion made her conspicuous. If anyone recognized her...
They made it to the Med-Center without incident. Taking her cue from Tyers own relaxed face, she felt her breathing and heart-rate return to normal. Tyers left Raymond at the entrance and led her down several corridors. Julie was surprised to find them heading toward the CDC. That was where...
“Nakita!” Tyers called as they reached the main reception area, where Zane Nakita stood, feet shuffling nervously, waiting for them. Standing straight, in well-pressed white tunic and pants, he looked much the same as the last time Julie had seen him at Kraken’s party—incredibly handsome with impeccably styled blue hair and dewy brown eyes that sparkled with confidence.
Zane grinned widely, perfect teeth flashing like halogen lights, as his eyes flickered between Tyers and Julie. He finally settled his riveting gaze on Julie and said with what sounded like genuine pleasure, “Hello, Prometheus.” He offered his hand.
“Hello, Zane,” she responded coolly, taking his hand briefly in hers. Twelve years ago Gaia had tried to fix them up and Zane hadn’t seemed adverse to the idea. Julie never was quite sure how she’d felt about it. Zane was a veemeld, and when Julie finally fled Icaria, he’d inherited SAM. She remembered feeling oddly jealous of that new partnership. It seemed that SAM had a new friend now and she wondered what Zane thought of that.
“Shall we?” Tyers prompted.
“Of course,” Zane said. He practically sprang ahead of them and led them through a maze of narrow corridors lined with nondescript offices and laboratories before stopping at a secured door on their left. He waved his security card over the ID plate by the door and offered his eye to the retinal sensor, and when the security algorithms were satisfied he was who he claimed to be, the door slid open and they entered what looked like a lab and office combined. A sharp-nosed, jade-haired young man and a raven-haired, tight-lipped woman, both about Julie’s age, stood waiting for them. They seemed hardly able to contain their excitement.
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