by Alex Kirko
“Good. I don’t think I can disarm a self-destruct program right now.” He thought about it for a moment. “I’ll check everything later. Even with the vulnerabilities I built into it, there is a chance the hardware isn’t completely dead.”
With a groan and a push of his left hand, Blake flipped onto his back, catching his breath. The diagnostic systems had just been restored, and what they showed him didn’t look good.
“Are you okay, Blake?”
This time he was sure he didn’t imagine the concern in her voice.
“Took you long enough, Aileen.” He could have just thought the words, but he preferred to say them out loud. Tell the predators of the forest that he was alive and confident. “Did something damage your emotional circuits?”
“No, it’s just that we’ve been pretending for too long. It’s hard to remember what our life was like before Terra Nox.”
He sighed and stared at the canopy above his head, while the nanites and chemicals in the suit did their best to stabilize him. He was only half a mile away from the settlement, but his sight was getting murky from all the pain and anesthesia. Even in the quasi-stasis that the suit kept him in, it was a narrow fight between the regenerative tech and a body that just wanted to give up.
“It has been forty minutes, Blake,” she said, her voice sounding almost like the old times. “Your liver can’t handle the toxins in your blood, and I’m running out of medicine. Get up.”
He chuckled and said, “Aileen, unless this suit developed the ability to do nerve-altering surgery, I can’t get up. My legs might as well be gone.”
He heard an annoyed huff inside his head. “No, you idiot. Get up the tree. I’ll charge the inertial dampeners—it’s only half a mile.”
“What are you—” He cut himself off and laughed. “You can’t be serious.”
“There are no other options Blake. Just like old times. Now get up or I will take over.” She paused. “Besides, by my calculations, you managed to make it four miles into the jungle. What’s another thousand feet?”
She was right even if she was full of shit about taking over—the safeguards would never allow it. He plunged into the broken mindscape of his suit’s routines. Most of the software tree was dormant, cut off from his nervous system. Blake navigated to the part responsible for his right arm—a greying, fragile offshoot. Aileen was busy with keeping him alive, so he had to do this himself.
Blake moved his focus to the dazzlingly bright part of the system that was responsible for the life support, while keeping his right arm in mind. His left kidney was severely bruised, but he could survive on his right for a while. He redirected some of the healing to the nerves, re-connecting his right arm to his brain.
Somebody poured a bucket of molten steel on the limb, and Blake was instantly knocked out of the system and back into the real world.
“Blake, I severed that connection because there aren’t enough painkillers,” Aileen said.
“Well, I need two hands to climb, don’t I?”
“You do know that you will make a paddy out of your arm, right? The artificial muscles work, but the bone is broken in twenty-six places.”
“Like you said, no options. Redirect the anesthesia to my arms. Everything else can wait.”
Blake plunged his left hand into the bark, adding some thruster power. He had been expecting to pierce the tree he was about to climb, but the grove had stood for thousands of years of fires and battles between jungle predators.
He said, “How the fuck does a tree get tungsten coating?”
“The roots go half a mile deep into the rock, mining the metals for protection.”
“Great.”
The outermost layer was, thankfully, just bark, but after that there was what felt like armor to his fingers. Still, the bark provided enough purchase. He plunged his left hand, got a grip and pulled himself up making gouges in the tree. Then he would grab a branch with his right arm and hold his weight while he pulled himself up with his left. Even through the haze of painkillers, using his right hand felt like he was breaking it over and over.
“Aileen, cut the nerve pathways to everything I can survive without for ten minutes. Make sure you’ll be able to heal it later.”
“Done. It’s not much.”
The jungle was quiet while he cursed and worked his way up. The air was stifling, there was no breeze, animals scurried above and below with barely a sound, and a small swarm of palm-sized purpleheart butterflies played in the canopy above.
It took him seven minutes to climb a hundred feet, and he realized he couldn’t make it another five. Blake sat on a thick branch and grabbed a thinner one with his left hand.
He said, “Redirect the power to thrusters and artificial muscles. As soon as we are moving, transfer everything to inertial dampeners and patch up the nerves.”
“Done. Good luck.”
Blake nodded and yanked on a metal-coated branch above him with everything he had. He felt agony tear through his entire body as the non-dampened acceleration hit, but he couldn’t afford to pass out. If he did, Aileen would switch off, and without her he would die on impact.
It hurt worse when Aileen began reconnecting his nerves. Blake sailed an arc through the canopy, making enough noise to put to shame an after-graduation university orgy. His suit wasn’t the heaviest one, but it still weighed a quarter of a ton, and it was armored. He crashed through leaves and twigs, scaring a colony of some lemur-like creatures that dashed away, staring at him with giant black eyes.
Then he hit a larger branch and ricocheted toward the ground. There were no buildings or people where he was about to land. There was, however, a burrow of some sort with an animal poking out. Its furry head was about as large as Blake’s armored torso.
Seeing a chance, Blake corrected his trajectory with thrusters and slammed into the beast heels-first. The dampeners made a soft whirr as the animal’s skull caved in, and it became a meaty cushion for his fall. The ground was less forgiving than the fauna though. The impact went over the suit safety threshold and he passed out.
There was no transition and no pain. One second Blake was flying into a tree and then he woke up somewhere else with his sensors shut off and only Aileen for company once again.
“Didn’t we do this an hour ago?” he asked.
“Don’t move. I have your brain shielded, so they can’t see that you are conscious,” said the AI. “It appears we have been rescued. I didn’t risk checking, but I doubt it’s the Council.”
Even thousands of years after the technology had been first introduced, melding minds with an AI was horrifying to people unfamiliar with the process. But it had its advantages. Playing dead was a lot easier, for instance, when somebody else was there to keep him still.
“Switch one of the microphones on,” he ordered. “But keep the cameras off. They might be able to detect that.”
The first thing he heard was the rustle of clothes and an exasperated sigh.
“You are wasting your time, Mei,” a man said with an underlying growl. “What’s the point of covering him with a blanket? He’s in a suit.”
Somebody else gave an indignant huff.
“Shows what you now,” said someone throaty—a woman. “You aren’t a doctor, Sam, so shut up. We can’t give him a proper check-up, so an auto-regulating blanket will keep his temperature stable in case I missed something.”
“You aren’t a doctor either. Anyway, we have other wounded. Put some more inhibitors on him, and I’ll post a guard. All of this would have been so much easier if we had let him lie there for two more minutes.”
“Just because he is an enemy—”
“None of that, sister. Blake Drummond is one of top Council engineers. Given time, people like him can hack through anything—I’ve seen it. And you are telling me we can’t take off his suit or we risk losing him?”
There was a long pause and then the female one said, “What will happen when he wakes up?”
“Who
knows. Now set up the inhibitors—I’m pulling rank.”
Metal clanged against metal, two sets of footsteps disappeared into the distance, and he was left alone.
“Can you run diagnostics, Aileen?”
“They’ll be able to detect that I’m active. All I can tell is that they have replenished the supply of medication and worked on at least some of your injuries.”
“How do you know?”
“The regenerative tank is full and stays that way, and there are logs of the arms and legs being opened with medical emergency codes.”
Blake tried to focus. He was in an unknown location, surrounded by what sounded like Heatsworth’s people. The ones holding him knew who he was, and then there was the monitoring equipment and the guard outside. Sounded about right for his luck.
Darkness without smell or sense of touch pressed upon him. The pressure grew, and Blake began to count backwards from one hundred to stop himself from ordering Aileen to switch video on. He needed a plan, but the problem was that getting the information for a plan also required a plan.
“I’m sorry, Tim, they want you at the south perimeter. I’ll look after our prisoner for a while,” said Mei somewhere to his right. Blake hadn’t even heard her or the guard walk there.
“But I just got here.”
“I’m simply the messenger, okay? Take it up with Sam, if you want to.”
“Right. See you later, Kitsune.”
There was a shuffling of steps and somebody stopped by his bedside. A faint hiss was all the warning he got before Blake overrode the controls and sprang back. His movements were pathetically slow because of the electromagnetic disruptors stuck onto his suit. Cameras flicked on filling his vision with white.
There was a woman keeping a plasma blade against his neck, and she followed when he tried to get away. She grinned at him with a mouth full of canines, the brilliant green of her eyes roaming over him while vulpine ears perked up through a mane of red hair. With fur covering all the exposed skin except her face, she would have looked like one of those anthropomorphic animals that had been in videos for children for millennia if not for the claws and the ravenous expression.
“Do you like what I’ve done with myself?” she asked, a free hand stroking her fur. “I don’t mind you staring, but you should know better than faking sleep in front of another mech engineer, Mister Drummond. Let’s talk.”
There was no more point in pretending. At least, the plasma didn’t move nearer. With the white noise generators they had stuck onto him, Blake couldn’t even activate his shields. “How about you get rid of the knife tickling my neck first?”
“Oh, this?” she asked, switching off the blade and clipping it to her belt. “This was just to skip the part where you try to convince me you are still unconscious. Just in case you have more dumb ideas, the building is heavily guarded. Not that I can’t take care of you myself.”
That didn’t sound like it needed to a response, so he gestured for the medic-engineer to continue. She said, “Alright, be that way. I’m Mei, the top mech specialist here. So you can believe me when I say that without help you will be stuck in your suit for half a year max and then die. Help that only we can provide.”
“You aren’t a doctor,” he said.
“Aileen, run diagnostics,” he thought.
“Heavens, no,” she said, laughing. “I’m an AI and mech specialist. Started with AIs and re-trained into mechs after we made an alliance with Heatsworth—great guy, by the way. I mean, what would even be the point of a Freefolk doctor? We don’t get sick for more than a few minutes. Mech pilots, on the other hand, get hurt all the time. Someone must take care of you lot. Someone not easily killed.”
She sat on a chair next to the bed. “I believe everyone deserves a chance to live,” she said. “I was able to set your bones and stabilize you with regenerative agents, but your nerves had suffered too much damage. Your AI managed to strengthen the peripheral nerves and fix a lot of stuff—damn impressive, by the way—but your spine and internal organs were out of position during the process. The only thing keeping you alive right now is your suit.”
“Diagnostics complete,” Aileen said to him. “She is right, Blake. I’m so sorry.”
Blake felt the nanofiber in his artificial muscles tense as his vision tunneled around Mei’s face. She was somehow responsible for this, he just knew it. His fingers twitched, and if it weren’t for that plasma dagger and the inhibitors . . .
He said, “Well, don’t keep me waiting. How bad?”
“Two or three days, and the rest of your wounds will heal. However, because of the condition your body is in, you still won’t be able to survive without the mech for more than two hours.”
“Can surgery help?”
“Afraid not. If it were one or two things . . . Your nervous and vascular systems have been damaged and then restored without any consideration of what they are supposed to look like. You are now locked into your suit, just like our soldiers.”
She let him think her words over, and he did. He asked, “Half a year?”
“I’m sorry, but continuous regeneration in partial stasis isn’t something the human body is meant to withstand.”
He went silent at that, taking a moment to trace his fingertips across the flat surface of his helmet. Would this be his face for the rest of his life? Too little time to do what was needed. Stupid habit of rushing to the rescue of a comrade in trouble.
“There is a way to help you, though,” said Mei. “An Old Earth regeneration chamber.”
He scoffed. “I don’t think you are hard-selling enough. Lay it on thicker.”
Her ears drooped in what he interpreted as hurt. She said, “Sarcasm won’t help you here, Mister Drummond. Your bosses will sooner marry their pets and fly off into the sunset than give you access to a chamber. Even if you return to them with all the intelligence in the world.” She moved in closer, “But if you help us steal one, we won’t mind letting you use it.”
Blake shook his head and said, “I don’t know what you hear in these woods, but not even every major city has a chamber. Can it even fix me?”
“I don’t see why not,” said Mei. “They were designed to restore the person to what is specified in their genetic signature and they work fast enough. We won’t even need to uninstall your implants.”
“Old Earth,” Blake said. “They just left everyone out here. Two thousand years later, and I’m stuck in a tin can and talking to a fox, because we can’t crack the quantum programming without frying the regeneration chambers.”
“Nah, foxes are awesome. If we could just reproduce the programming . . . Too bad the creators of the chambers forgot—probably intentionally—to include a module that would let us download the software.”
He said, “If you could get the programs that easily, the Council would also be able to.”
An hour later the doors opened with a soft hiss. He and Mei’s brother Samuel stepped out of the medical facility and onto a motley carpet of moss that tickled Blake’s feet and muffled his steps to the point where walking didn’t make any sound at all. He looked around, cataloguing everything he could see—an old military habit—of the Freefolk settlement that Mei had called Hazy Meadows.
He had heard stories, of course—everybody had. Back when Terra Nox had been colonized, a group of scientists came up with the idea to make permanent the regeneration that had been used to heal injuries and illnesses back on Old Earth. They theorized that they could bypass the safeguards and keep the nanomachines replenishing themselves. After a couple decades they managed to do it, and the first Ascended were born. Political leaders chose the more stable procedure variant—some of those original few still lived in Delmor now. After discovering that the process damaged a regeneration chamber every time it was run, they moved to restrict access for anyone they didn’t want to let into the emerging caste. The scientists took more risk and turned into monsters who took on the traits of those they cannibalized. In a fit of mad
ness, they stole what chambers they could get to and moved to destroy all of the units in a crazy attempt to replicate the Old Earth technology fully and let everyone Ascend—they were the Freefolk. The other group formed the first Council and defended the planet against the madness, and the first and civil war started on the new world. Eventually, the Council won at great cost to the numbers of the original Ascended, exiling the Freefolk beyond the city barriers and making sure that they would never be a threat again by setting up satellite surveillance and manufacturing an extensive artillery arsenal.
At least that is what the Council history of the events was like.
The building they had left was squat, bulbous, and painted in mismatched bright colors that blended in with the luminescent moss that covered the ground in patches of purple, cerulean, and viridian. Glowing spores wafted through the air. Between huddled groups of one- and two-floor buildings stood the giant redwoods he had seen in the jungle. These ones were as wide as any house, and their canopies provided uninterrupted cover, even with the distance between them being enough to house buildings and pathways. The redwoods were not the tallest trees on Terra Nox, but there were no geronia groves anymore—only a rare colossus.
“The great trees protect us,” said Samuel, his tone reverent. “We still remember the orbital strikes during the first war with the Council.”
“There is barely anything in orbit these days.” Blake craned his head up to try to glimpse the night sky through the branches.
“Yet we haven’t survived this long by getting complacent, which is why you are getting assigned as a specialist to a team that will watch you. Can’t risk you telling your pals where we are.”
Blake didn’t answer.
He finally found a hole in the canopy, but only thanks to a flock of Nurma flying high above, shining like bloated stars with a light that lacked warmth. He shivered.
The jellyfish-like creatures were the only large avian species of Terra Nox. Dumb as hell, but pretty. They glowed to allow the flocks to avoid each other in the air. The animals needed it, because they were mostly air sacks and burst upon impact. Even with the glow, Nurma rain was a frequent occurrence. Brake had gotten caught in one a year ago—it was disgusting.
