by Ben Chaney
He had to be between Matteo and Jogun’s age. Sunken eyes studied Matteo in the dark, set in a gaunt, scruffy face. He was thin except for a slight gut and dressed in a filthy undershirt and baggy sweatpants. They watched each other in silence for a moment.
“Well?” asked the raspy, young voice, “What’s up Inner Ring? How can I be of service?”
“You’re Illyk?” Matteo asked. The strange kid spread his arms and bowed.
“A votre plaisir,” Illyk intoned, “Now, I’m busy so get to your fucking point.” Matteo had just about enough.
“I’m not ‘Inner Ring.’ I’m not any ‘Ring.’ My name’s Matteo and I grew up in Rasalla. Scrap, ashes, and dirt, but this,” Matteo held up his left arm, “This says my name is Aden Rindal.” Illyk sucked on the filter of the cigarette, staring. The others in the room stopped typing and turned in their seats. Matteo felt hard, expectant eyes on him. The air hung dead as Illyk exhaled a curling plume of smoke.
“That’s...a heavy story...‘Aden,’” Illyk said, “‘Long lost son of the fallen hero.’ Not sure I believe it, although trust me...I’d like to. That’d get some serious cloudtime, and way beyond just the forums. Dad, prep the Chair for our guest here.” Simon crossed the room, opened an inner hatch door, and dipped out of sight. Illyk stepped closer to Matteo, his sour breath seeping out as he spoke.
“To reiterate, I’d like to believe you. But I don’t. My time and services are not only valuable, they are very, very risky and, as I’m sure you know, very, very illegal. We’ll take a look for you, but it comes with a price. Whatever I find, I copy and keep, got it?”
Matteo didn’t. He squinted at Illyk.
“TM Data, bro. Your worst, most traumatic memories. Don’t ask me why, but people pay max credits to live through someone else’s pain and anguish. Not exactly pretty, but it’s how we keep the lights on and fight the good fight, so I’ll repeat: Whatever I find, I copy and keep. Got it?”
Matteo clinched his fists. Looking around the room, the others were still seated in front of their screens. Illyk looked pale. Underfed. He could take him. A quick punch to the jaw or throat, then he’d flip around to deal with…
Matteo felt the gun barrel dig into the small of his back. Simon. Father to the grinning rat boy in front of him.
“Sorry, kid, it’s for the cause,” said Simon, “Think of it as your contribution. Now let’s go have a seat.”
It was a reclining chair bolted into a platform in a small separate chamber. A headdress of electrodes and wires sprouted from the headrest like some kind of techno jellyfish. Open shackles waited for his limbs on the arm and leg rests, each blinking inside with strange technology. Where the main cabin had been for prisoner transport, this room was for something else. Interrogation. Matteo had heard rumors around the market about it. The EXOs would strap you down in this chair, hook you up to machines, and put the screws on you. A few T99s would try to brag that they got put in the chair and never gave up a thing. But the ones that really went through it...they never came back the same. Most spent the rest of their lives as permanent patients in the Temple. Matteo prayed a silent prayer that the hardware in his head made him different. Corey said I was recording...maybe they’ll just hit ‘Play’?
No choice. Matteo tried to imagine he was sitting in Utu’s healing chair back in the Temple, waiting for a check-up. He regained focus as he sat down.
“What ‘Cause’ is this for again?” Matteo asked, “All I see is a buncha guys sittin’ on their asses in a rusted out dropship.”
Illyk turned his forearm over in the humming blueish light. A long, ragged scar ran the length of his pale flesh where the chip should be. It rippled as Illyk closed a fist.
“To show people that their paradise is a prison. Death Row for the human race,” Illyk said as he stepped to the chair control panel and punched a few buttons. The shackles clamped shut, trapping Matteo’s forearms and ankles. The tentacles of the headdress grasped his skull and squeezed. He felt the electrodes arrange themselves with little ice-cold snaps. Illyk tapped a few more buttons then inserted a smooth, rectangular cartridge into the panel.
“Brace yourself,” Illyk said.
The comforting memory of Utu’s office dissolved as bits of blinding light streaked toward him from the room. They gathered faster and faster, blotting out his vision. Before leaving the present moment entirely, he heard Illyk’s grinding voice.
“This isn’t gonna be fun.”
The scenes came on fast. Racing through settings and times and people and emotions at a thousand miles-an-hour. All from his living point of view. Every bit of it was as vivid and detailed as though the moments were happening. And somehow his mind kept up, tasting every breath and feeling, every hurt. The hurts seemed to slow things down closer to real time. Somewhere in his current awareness, he could almost feel Illyk watching.
Matteo felt the cold floor of his cell back in Themis, watching himself pound the glass as Jogun explained the truth. His past mind swam with confusion. Waves of anger crashed against denial and pain as the answers rolled out of his broken brother, destroying the world and his place in it. Then came Kabbard. Then the gas. Darkness. Fading to Jogun’s screams.
He blinked then winced as the cinder block wall above him was cratered by rifle rounds, raining hot debris down on his head. Suomo and the T99s huddled around him, popping up to take quick shots at the stranded EXOs. A boy beside him, no older than sixteen, took a bullet in the brain. Warm, red wetness splashed his ear and shoulder. Bits of gray in it.
Rewind through six years in the Pits. A chunk of falling fiberglass nearly took off his arm at the shoulder, crippling him for weeks as he healed.
Lying awake and starving to death on more nights than he cared to remember.
Jogun appeared, lying bloody and limp on the grooved metal roof of their old house. Kabbard and the EXOs had beaten him almost to death, and they kept at it. The sickening impact of each strike shook Matteo’s tiny body. His throat burned with wheezing, choked sobs as he shrieked for them to stop. Jogun smiled. ‘You got this.’
Then he was in the Dream. The same one he’d had off-and-on since he was a kid. Yet as the scene slowed to real time, it came into waking focus. He looked at his hands. Small, chubby fingers wiggled and flexed. The feeling made him curious. He waved the little hands in front of him, then squealed. So happy. A white bandage wrapped tightly around his left forearm, tugging the soft skin as he wriggled.
Two people sat in the front seats, talking. A man and a woman. Beyond them, bright white clouds and blue sky shone through glass, moving gently over them. The two familiar voices warmed him as they spoke, but his observing, adult mind understood words that the young mind did not.
“Dammit, Alan, would it kill you to look on the bright side?” the woman asked. “I know this is important to you, I really do, but it’s been eating you alive for years now. It’s been eating all of us lately with all the long nights, press conferences...cameras in our faces. We all need some time away, and this—”
“There is no ‘time away’ anymore, Patty! We’re not taking a break, going to visit old friends, we’re running for our lives...and I’m not sure I can live with what I’m leaving behind,” the man said. Somewhere in time, the icy tingle of recognition worked its way up Matteo’s spine. The voices...his real mother and real father, continued.
“Are you so goddamn preoccupied with that that you can’t see what you’re taking with you?!” The painful tone in his mother’s voice tightened Matteo’s small, weak chest. Tiny, wheezing sobs chirped out of him. His parents turned in their seats. The looks on their faces filled him, both then and now. The corners of his mother’s hesitating smile...he’d seen them thousands of times since in the mirror. Her opal eyes trembled as they looked down at him. Mama? He’d always wondered what she looked like. Dark, almost black skin, smooth like still water. Short black hair kept neat in gentle waves, the longer strands in the front draping across her forehead.
; Then there was his father. The man Jogun told him he didn’t want to know, except this was a different man. My real dad... Love radiated from the man’s gaunt, brown features, but through a mask of desperation. Matteo had seen that face in the mirror too. His parents turned back to each other.
“That’s all I can see now,” his dad said, “I look at you and Aden, and I just—I don’t just want us to be safe, I want us to be free. I’d do anything to find a place where he could grow up to be his own person and not a slave. To choose a life rather than it be chosen for him, but that’s not the world we live in now.” His dad held up the left hand. A thick black ring coiled around his middle finger.
“Like hell it’s not,” his mom said. She reached over and snatched off the ring.
“Patty, no!” he screamed, lunging for the device. She recoiled in her seat, holding the ring out of reach. Matteo...Aden started to cry. After several moments, the cabin stilled.
“You see? Nothing’s happened. Nobody’s chasing us, your brain wasn’t hijacked. It’s not the end of civiliza—” she stopped as a loud bang erupted from the reactor compartment. The ship’s smooth glide dipped into violent, shaking free fall.
“Alan?! ALAN!” his mother screamed, clawing at her arm-rests. She fainted, rapping her head on the dash.
Though his dad’s hands were firmly locked to the flight sticks, trying to pull up, the man could still speak. Matteo strained to listen past his own piercing screams.
“You’ve seen what’s happened, Aden! You can’t understand it yet, but if you survive this, someday you will! Others have to see what you’ve seen, and they need the truth you carry! Five-seven-echo-alpha-zero-zero-one-two-one! Remember it! Remember forever...we’ll always love you!”
The roar outside the ship drowned out any other sound as they plunged. Matteo could still feel his cries stinging his soft throat. The dust-colored streets of Rasalla quaked in a blur below them. Closer and closer until...Black.
Then he was alone. Wheezing sobs reflected back to him in the tiny chamber of his child seat. It was hot. Smells from his wet pants choked him as he struggled to breathe. His sips for air grew smaller and smaller.
Muffled sounds came from outside his bubble. Yelling voices, heavy thuds, screeching metal...and a scraping. A chunk of foam broke away, spilling light into his car seat. A shadowy face appeared in the hole. More scraping. A series of pops released the bubble, and rough young hands scooped him up.
“Stay quiet, little brother,” the young voice whispered, “I got’chu.”
Jo.
The sunlit halo around his brother spread until all was white. As the blindness faded from his weeping eyes, Matteo found himself back in Illyk’s chair. The shackles clicked open and the head-tentacles retracted. Illyk, Simon, and all of the technicians in the room gathered around the chamber, staring at him. He wanted to hide. To shrink into a deep, dark hole somewhere and come out maybe five years later.
Suddenly, strange text files, blueprints, and photographs appeared on screens around the room. Some kind of ship... Beyond massive in the half glow of the curved Earth beneath it, the body looked almost whale-shaped. Miles of solar panels lined its broad, flat wing arrays. Giant glass domes punctuated both the back and the underbelly, housing every biosphere on the planet. And millions of pin-point windows covered the hull.
Without reading the screens, fresh memories bubbled up into Matteo’s awareness. ‘The Narayana.’ Total Occupancy: 2.8 million persons. Top speed: 99.9992% SOL. Destination: Gliese 581g. Distance to Target: 20.26 LY. Projected Launch Date: 09-2090AD.
“My God...” Simon said, “They’re gonna—”
“Leave us all to rot! Ho-ly SHIT!” Illyk shouted, “We got ‘em! Dead to fuckin’ rights, we got ‘em!” Excited laughter broke out all over the room. Matteo willed himself to sit up, but his head rolled into a mat of fuzz. He almost passed out.
“Whoa, whoa, buddy! I bet that was rough...but don’t worry man, ‘cause everything’s about to change! We’re gonna put this out on every channel we can think of. Hell, we’ll project it on the sky over Mesa-fucking-Park!”
Matteo heaved his throbbing head up and saw the control panel. The memory cartridge.
“No...” Matteo muttered. He yanked the head-tentacles off, killing the streaming data. Then, in one quick move, his hand shot out and grabbed the memory cartridge from its port. The laughter died in an instant, replaced by the click of Simon’s pistol.
“Now, you got what you came for, Aden,” Illyk said, “You’ve seen more truth about yourself than most people ever should, but we had a deal. Give us the stick, and you can walk away. Don’t, and...well...”
They’d never let him walk away. They would parade him through the streets for their ‘cause,’ and plaster his name all over the Net. A rallying cry that would destroy the City of his dreams, replacing it with...what? These people? His palm sweated as it gripped the digital sum total of his life, and the secret stored within.
BOOOOOM!
The entire cabin shook, throwing Illyk and his people off balance. Lights flickered and several monitors fell off of their mounts and smashed on the bulkhead. Matteo stumbled, but seized the moment. He launched his shoulder into Simon’s chest, wrenched the gun out of the man’s thick hands, and rolled out of the way. The group lunged for him then stopped, facing the barrel of the gun. Matteo kept it trained on them as he crept backward to the hatch door.
“This is my life,” Matteo said, holding up the cartridge, “Use your own for your ‘Cause.’” He opened the hatch. Sounds of chaos spilled inside.
“Kid, you’re making a mistake! Didn’t you hear your old man, he said—”
Matteo interrupted Illyk with a warning shot.
“Don’t follow me!” He jumped outside, slammed the hatch shut, and twisted the lever as hard as he could. As he got his bearings, he saw a column of ink-black smoke rising toward the sky. Sirens, screams, and shouting filled the air.
Spotting the opening in the path, he sprinted for it, bounding over the thick cables in the dirt. He’d almost made it to the opening when he heard the IG-6 hatch door slam open behind him. The familiar near-miss shriek of speeding bullets surrounded him. He tucked his arms and head toward his chest, then dove through the opening as rounds tore shrapnel off its metal frame.
Following the cables out was harder than he’d thought coming in. They curved down paths he hadn’t seen, split into several directions. He turned a right he thought he remembered. It dead-ended into a transformer box. With the violent shouts growing louder, he looked up into the hollow framework of the facility. Started climbing.
The labyrinth of multicolored supports, braces, and beams made picking a clear direction impossible. Gotta get distance. The same advice the vets would give young Nines for being chased into a strange district. ‘Don’t worry about where you’re going. Just go.’ He wove through the columns and swung over gaps. Climbed around generator hubs and over groups of sprinting workers. Before long, he realized that no one nearby was concerned about him anymore. They all ran in one direction. Matteo paused to breathe the acid out of his lungs, then climbed through to the top of the super structure.
Half of the sky toward the Border had turned black with smoke, filling his nose with the smell of burned synthetics. Then, eyes drifting downward, he saw it. No more than five miles away, a jagged, freighter-wide wound gouged through the Border in a giant ‘V’ shape. Glimpses of the Rasalla District beyond peeked through the billowing smoke. Matteo’s jaw dropped. Paralysis gripped his body, locking him in a blank stare. They did it. It’s happening.
“Corey! Corey, get the fuck down here, let’s go!” said a female voice carried by the wind. Matteo blinked. Others had emerged all over the rooftops, towers, and landing pads of the Outer Ring. Everyone faced the Border.
“Corey!” screamed the voice that had to be Liani. Matteo scanned nearby and saw Corey’s chunky silhouette climb clumsily over a catwalk ledge. The man struggled to his feet and lifted a
handheld camera. But the wind carried another sound to Matteo. A kind of low background noise that got louder. And louder. And louder. Then it was a roar. Thousands of voices chanting in unison.
The wave of shock dissolved into needle-flesh all over Matteo’s skin, waking his throbbing limbs. He sprang up, picked his route to Corey, and took off across the complex.
“Corey RUN!” He waived his arms then leaped to catch the next ledge. Pulled himself up to face Corey. Still filming. Matteo grabbed the camera and stared his new, dumbfounded friend in the face.
“Rasalla is coming!” said Matteo. As Corey opened his mouth to speak, a shockwave slammed into both of them.
BOOOOM! BOOOOM! B-BOOOOOOM!
Knocked flat on the catwalk, Corey pushed Matteo off of him. Both sat up. Columns of smoke and giant boulders of falling concrete rained down throughout the Outer Ring. Three fresh fractures had punched through the Border to join the first. Corey shouted above the ringing in Matteo’s ears.
“Okay, we can go!”
As they turned for the climb down, Corey’s van sidled up to the ledge, blasting them backward with exhaust. Liani at the wheel. The rear passenger hatch hissed open.
“You have five fucking seconds to get the fuck in the fucking van!” Liani shouted through the PA.
“Jesus...” Corey said.
“NOW!” she shouted. The two of them fell over each other to climb inside. Matteo barely got his foot through the door before the hatch snapped closed. The van bobbed hard and lurched up into the sky.
“About time,” Liani said, “Now quit dicking around back there and get a shot of that!” She pointed out the window. Matteo handed the camera back to Corey, and the two of them clung to the seats to take a look.
