They relaxed in the shade, Larmeck brought them a minty flavored drink and spoke with someone through an earpiece.
“The merchants will send someone shortly to take your requests.” He said.
They spent hours in easy conversation as the sellers brought samples of their wares and Maddy haggled with them over the prices then supervised the loading of the ship. They told him they needed to be in complete isolation for some experiments they were conducting so they were headed out into an asteroid field.
Larmeck explained how the religious cult came to be in possession of the planet. He said the mega corporations created the agro-worlds. The entire planet had a good ecosystem to begin with and an agricultural conglomerate had filled the lakes, leveled the rolling hills and terraformed the dry areas. They exterminated or relocated the native wildlife, eliminated any insects that could harm the crops and created a perfect planet sized garden. They installed irrigation systems, automatic planters and chemically fertilized the soil. The entire surface of the planet was organized, categorized then planted, watered, fertilized and harvested by machines. A hundred thousand machines were kept in operation by ten thousand droids and a thousand men and women were all that was needed to maintain them. When the crop yields fell below acceptable levels the planet was sold to the highest bidder and the conglomerate moved on to terraform more promising worlds.
The Jalamons produced a more natural crop without the grow enhancers and had enough patents on various fruits and vegetables to make a nice profit for themselves. They had used those profits to purchase the planet when it became available.
When Larmeck said he should probably finish up the repairs on the droid he was working on, Jessie and Maddy walked to the far end of the terminal where the few shops and the living quarters were. The population of the entire planet was strictly regulated and everyone lived in the sprawling structure. There wasn’t really a café but there were a handful of tables and chairs in a common area near the windows and a tall dark-haired woman offered them something to eat while the last of their purchases was packed and sent to their ship.
“It’ll be about an hour.” She said. “I’ll not have dinner finished until my husband gets back from the fields.”
“That would be great.” Jessie said. “Do you take credits?”
The woman tittered a laugh and waved him away. “We only charge the cargo ships when they come in and we have to open the stores.”
They wandered around, looked for doors to get outside the massive building and were surprised there weren’t any. The only exits were to the center where the landing pads were.
“Makes sense.” Maddy said when Jessie started to complain. “They have the perfect eco-system here. If we happened to have a tiny little insect on us from one of the other planets, it could wreak havoc. They don’t use pesticides because they have no harmful bugs. I’m sure they have a decontamination unit for those that go outside.”
They sat near the windows and watched the wind dance over the crops that went on for as far as the eye could see in every direction. Larmeck joined them as the food was brought out and more people filled the empty chairs. No one was in a hurry, dinner lasted hours and various others wandered over to join them for a time then move on to allow others to speak with the strangers if they wanted. They were a peaceful and tranquil people and waved goodbye when the pair finally left, nearly full to bursting from the plant based meal.
Maddy punched in the coordinates to a cluster of moon sized asteroids that were barren, remote and deemed worthless. It was their final destination. Jessie eased the ship skyward, waggled his wings to those watching below then blasted through the atmosphere into the vast emptiness of space. He circled around one of the smaller moons of the agro-planet and used the gravity to slingshot the ship up to its maximum speed. He set the autopilot and leaned back in the modified captains’ chair. They had a long way to go and a boring month of travel ahead of them.
The aching never went away. The need. The hunger for her. He could almost forget it when he was on world somewhere or if he got engrossed in working on a project but in the quiet moments it came back. He missed her. Sometimes when he slept the dreams were good. She would appear out of the darkness and they were happy. Most of the time not. Most of the time he started himself awake as some undead thing ripped at him or he felt the impact of a bullet slamming into his body. He usually didn’t even remember what jolted him awake.
They passed the time with training and games and Maddy would tell him stories of the empire she’d once been a part of. They spent hours in the kitchen learning how to cook more and more complicated meals with the fresh fruits and vegetables. He wrote in his journals, practiced the gun katas and taught himself to read the strange universal language. Maddy practiced being human and became better at it. He forgot she was a machine most of the time and the longer she pretended to be a person the more realistic her movements and actions become. She breathed in and out. Her hands were warm to the touch. She sneezed. She yawned. She blinked. Her hair got messy. She learned and grew and developed her own personality, her own habits.
Jessie wrote long rambling thoughts in the journals. He wondered if it was possible for a machine to forget it was a machine. Could she execute a command to make herself not remember what she really was? He wondered why she was helping him; machines didn’t have loyalty. She said it was her duty to preserve human life but there were billions of others out there. They didn’t look the same as him, they’d evolved differently, but they were still human. He was glad she was with him; grateful she’d risked her existence to pull him out of the void. He would have been obliterated otherwise, he’d been heading directly towards a civilized system and the disrupters would have stopped his long journey in an instant.
33
Home
A week later they circled an asteroid that orbited a frozen, desolate ice planet that had a thousand-year orbit around the dwarf star and searched for the best spot to build. It was a ball of rock without any vegetation or water that no one had ever visited. Unmanned probes had been sent a century ago but the results had shown nothing of interest. No valuable minerals, no viable terraforming options. It had been noted on maps then promptly forgotten.
There was no oxygen, nearly no gravity and the temperatures never rose above subzero. They had chosen this desolate corner of the galaxy because Maddy said there was statistically zero chance that any ship, and their time travel disrupters, would ever venture near it.
The low gravity and the instant-up construction helped them get the structures built, the supplies stowed and everything up and running in a few days. Fission reactors gave him electricity, light, heat and powered the oxygen generators. The supplies had been expensive and he’d accumulated quite a collection of gadgets and interesting odds and ends, souvenirs from their long journey across the galaxy. They’d sold all the artifacts and spent most of the credits on the second-hand buildings, generators and an old medical pod she’d insisted was necessary.
“It will heal you in days instead of months if you get into trouble.” She said. “And from the number of scars you have, I think you have a knack for finding trouble.”
He set the date to shortly before Samed gave her the poison that accelerated the infection. If things went perfect, he would come out at the survey stake a few weeks before he did, hurry over to the Tower and wait. It didn’t occur to him to worry about the other Jessie, that he might have different ideas about someone stealing his girl away. If he was successful, if he cured her then they jumped back to stop the outbreak together, the other Jessie would still be blissfully ignorant. He’d still be in high school. Together, he and Scarlet might be able to change the world, make it right. He wouldn’t be in a rush with a madman trying to stop him. They would have the bracelets, their own private time travel machines. They could take their time, think things through and not make mistakes.
He and Maddy cooked dinner together and Jessie was glad they’d taken the time to bu
ild the poly steel shelter. He could have jumped from the spaceship but after a few days’ work they had a nice home to unpack and unwind in. Also, it was good to have a place where he could relax, go over the numbers with Maddy and try again. They both knew it would take him a bunch of jumps to get it right. It was going to be trial and error to come out of the time stream at the right time and at the right place. Plus, it gave her a place to do whatever it is she was going to do when he was gone. It would take him years to get there and years to get back. Even though time didn’t pass in the same way when he was in the stream, it would go on like normal for Maddy. He wouldn’t be returning a minute after he left like he had on earth when he only moved a few years and a few miles. It would take forty years to travel the distance and forty years to return. He supposed she’d shut down, maybe keep part of her awake in case anything went wrong but she could turn off the lights, the power and oxygen. She didn’t need them. For her, he would be gone for eighty years even if he hit the return button as soon as he got there. He was forty-two light years from home. Over two hundred trillion miles. The time wasn’t nearly so long for him, or at least it didn’t seem like it. He remembered time passing but not forty years’ worth. That would have driven him mad to be awake with his thoughts for that long.
Jessie stood in the living quarters of their pod and psyched himself up for what he was about to do. Time travel was easy. Horowitz’s entire miles long particle accelerator and the clunky returner belt was reduced to the size of a wide bracelet. One of his teachers had said that his smart phone had more computing power than entire rooms of liquid cooled computers from twenty years ago. He supposed it was the same principle. It was so far advanced from anything he knew from earth that it almost seemed like magic.
He had the bracelet on, his beat-up leather jacket zipped up and the blasters hung low on his hips. He didn’t have any Glocks and he wasn’t about to go back, possibly to the middle of a zombie horde, without any protection.
“I’ll be waiting.” Maddy said and smiled.
Jessie nodded, made sure his finger was on the right button, and then pushed it.
34
Time Travel One
Jessie spread out across space traveling faster than the speed of light, shot across the cosmos and blipped back into existence when the numbers and times of the bracelet deemed it was the right.
He knew the first jump would be a long shot that he might be miles or years off his mark, but he wasn’t prepared for what he saw. The earth was a blue and green orb floating in the blackness and he only saw it for a second before his eyes felt like they froze. He slapped at the return button and missed; his fingers were swelling to the size of sausages. He held his breath for as long as he could but felt his lungs ripping apart as they exploded inside his body. He pawed at the bracelet, his throat choked with freezing blood, his eyes blinded by the unfiltered radiation pouring out of the sun.
He blinked out of existence, his atoms shot back towards home and for forty years he felt the slow agony of his ruptured lungs.
35
Time Travel Two
The air shimmered, Jessie popped back into existence and Maddy caught him as he fell, his mouth crusted with blood and his eyes glassy with ice. She had been awake and waiting with arms poised ready to catch him for a week, the earliest possible time he could return according to her calculations. The house was in full operation and had been for a month. The healing vat was fully functional and ready if it were needed. She lifted him easily and ran to the medical lab. She wasn’t gentle when she dumped him into the opaque liquid and let it start the process of oxygenating his blood, pumping his heart and keeping the brain functions alive. She closed the lid, adjusted a few settings and read the information as it flashed across the screen. He should be dead, the only thing keeping him alive was the serum in his blood. He’d been ice cold when she grabbed him and she knew what happened. He’d missed earth entirely; he’d reappeared in outer space. She wondered if he got a chance to spot his home planet or if he’d been facing the wrong way or too far off to see it. She hoped he did, they needed some point of reference to make adjustments if he was foolish enough to try again.
She wished there was some way she could go instead of him but there wasn’t. Time didn’t stop for the one waiting. He would age eighty years as she made a round trip. He could keep resetting of course, jump back every week to stay young but eighty years would still pass. He’d never be able to stand it. She couldn’t use the bracelet to heal him either. It didn’t have omnipotent powers, it would reset him to the last time he’d activated it. Freezing and exploding in outer space. She checked the numbers on the machine again. Twelve days to complete the healing. She placed a hand on the glass cover and waited.
On the third day she opened the lid, removed his battered leather jacket, his blasters and the rest of his clothes. She dried the guns, disassembled, cleaned and put them back together.
His body floated serenely as it healed and she traced a finger over some of his scars. For eighty years she had shut down, let the time flow around her as she operated on minimal functions. At first, she hadn’t planned on going into hibernation mode, she’d done it for thousands of years when she was on the ship. She grew bored, though.
And restless.
And lonely.
They were new feelings she’d never had.
It was easier to override them and shut down.
She pushed the hair away from his forehead and remembered the taste of his lips before he woke up and pushed her away.
You’re not Scarlet.
It was true, she wasn’t, but she felt like her. She had emotions he’d unintentionally given her. She stripped off her clothes, climbed into the tank, closed the lid and wrapped him in her arms. He couldn’t push her away or look at her with disgust if he wasn’t awake.
“I won’t need a space suit.” Jessie said as he ate his first real meal in nearly a century. “I was close, the earth was big. I didn’t see the moon, it may have been behind me. If we can get closer, if I can get inside the atmosphere, the bracelet should do the rest. It’s not supposed to let you reappear inside a mountain or way up in the sky. I guess it got confused when there wasn’t anything solid for tens of thousands of miles.”
“True.” Maddy said as she ate with him. It felt good to do something so normal. “But you have time, do you want to go see the data hacker again, maybe make some adjustments to it?”
“That will take too long.” Jessie said. “We’re a month from the nearest jump gate.”
Maddy hid her disappointment behind a mouthful of the rehydrated stew. She wanted to spend more time with him. Maybe if she could become more human, more like Scarlet, he would call off his insane quest. Maybe he could learn to like her.
For him, he had left a few hours ago. The time in limbo was like dream time that went on forever and ever but when he woke, most of the slow memories faded like dreams. For her, it had been over eighty years of subconscious worry. Even with only minimal functions operating the quiet fear was with her. She didn’t know if he would ever come back. He may have died. He may have lost the bracelet. He may have found what he was looking for and forgotten about her. She was only a machine in his eyes. Would he abandon her as easily as he’d leave behind the building and the ship?
You’re not Scarlet.
Yes. She thought. He would.
She knew she was being ridiculous, being too human, but there it was. She didn’t want to be useless again. She’d found purpose and didn’t want to be forgotten.
They worked on the formulas and recalculated the extraction point. They had no way of knowing if the dates were close enough, the only way to narrow them down was trial and error. Jessie updated his journal and was ready to jump again. He wanted to keep trying before he lost his nerve. This time he would be close enough to the planet and the failsafe would kick in. His exit point would be readjusted so he would come out on solid ground. Or maybe in a tree. He’d be ready this time, rea
dy for anything.
Maddy double checked the coordinates one last time and watched sadly as Jessie got ready to try again. He’d only been awake for less than a day and was already leaving. He gave her a smile but no hug. No goodbye kiss.
He pushed the button.
Maddy cleaned up what little there was to clean then sat on the couch. She had eighty years to wait. She doubted his jaunts across time and space would be successful, the odds were they wouldn’t but Jessie didn’t care about the odds. She’d thought they would spend weeks between jumps going over planet wobbles, recalculating, triple checking every number but he’d done some quick math and was ready to go again. She could wander the rooms for decades or shut down again. If she’d known he’d be so hasty, they could have skipped laying in all the food from the Jalamon’s. She decided she wanted to be among people and justified it by telling herself she needed to practice being human. They were a strange people and wouldn’t notice if she made a mistake. Other savvier people would if she had to travel to more advanced worlds. She had to be ready for any eventuality.
An hour later she was in the ship and headed for the agro-planet. Maybe she was becoming too human, it was risky leaving the asteroid. Something might happen to her, what if she was unable to return and when he materialized, she wasn’t there. What if he needed her help and she failed him? She justified her trip, convinced herself if was worth the minimal risk. It was a human thing to do, talking herself into doing something that went against her original programming and logic but when she thought about it, she smiled. To do things that defied logic is part of what it meant to be human.
Zombie Road | Book 8 | Crossroads of Chaos Page 22
