“Wrecked, John,” she murmured, dragging the medkit across the floor. “Just wrecked. It’s all my fault. We can’t head north tomorrow. Not now.”
A cloud floated aside, exposing a small patch of clear thought. He looked up at her as she tried to sop up his leaky body with sponge pads.
“Hey,” he said. Fraught eyes locked onto his. “Not your fault. I said five. Was much worse. Thought I could handle, I guess. Stupid.” She dabbed the sweat from his head with a clean sponge. “Listen … I have to tell you something. A secret I’ve kept a long time.”
Minerva’s face scrunched. “Oh please, no. I don’t need any secrets right now. Save it for when your judgment’s on a bit more solid ground.”
“No, nothing weird. There’s nothing like that. I promise. Now listen … listen before I start swimming again. A decade—no. A decade and a half after launch, a pod was sent up. Special pod. Huge. Inside, an RRM—Rapid Return Module. Major upgrades all around. All over. Back to Earth in almost half the time to take to get here. To took. Ah, dammit … half the time it took! Eleven years.”
Minerva’s expression had morphed into a familiar chilly intensity. “When is it supposed to arrive?”
“Fourteen months.”
Calculations seemed to scroll across her eyes. “Fourteen months until orbit. Until it attempts to dock with a nonexistent station. A hell of a lot of good it’ll do us down here.”
“No, that’s the thing …” A wave of euphoria drifted through his brain. He shut his eyes for a second … juuuust a second—a light slap from Minerva on his good cheek. Eyes open. “Right … look, it has a lander. Full escape capability. If it can’t dock with station, it automatically sends the lander to our original rally point.”
She considered this information. “BS. Why exactly are you feeding me this crap? We hadn’t even arrived when your supposed RRM launched. I didn’t set our rally point until seven years later.”
“Retro update, Minerva.” He smirked. “Remember that whole thing we all learned about the speed of light? Laser comms?” The term escape capability struck him funny. He murmured it to himself. “Escape capability. Escape cape. Scapecape.”
“So this isn’t a load of crap?” Her hopeful gaze searched his face. “Then hang on. How long have you know this?”
“Only a few years.”
“Only? Dammit! Do you realize that none of this would have happened if you’d just shared this tidbit of info? If that looner bitch knew there was a way home—an escape from walls and tiny rooms and monotony—she wouldn’t have felt the need to blow the place up! She’d still be alive. My friends—Aether—would still be alive!”
This was true. He hadn’t been thinking about this quite disturbing hypothetical.
Hypothetical … Ish would still be alive?
“You found Ish,” he said. Minerva nodded, stone-faced. “Dead.”
“Thoroughly,” she said. “Thanks to secrets and effing rules.”
“We don’t know it would’ve made a difference.”
“Oh, good one! That’s brilliant. When were you going to tell us? Or was it supposed to be a last-second surprise? ‘Hey folks, guess what’s showing up in ten goddamn minutes?’”
His head was again sinking into a muddy abyss. Vision blurring. “Two months … orders … not before ETA twelve months.”
Minerva slapped both hands over her face and produced a stifled maniacal laugh. “Two months. Eff me ... eff you. Hahaha, ridiculous.”
She struggled to her feet, all strength appearing to have drained from her body. Her boots skidded across gravel as she shuffled outside. John thought he could hear her weeping as she left, but his ears had dipped below the surface. The real world returned to some intangible realm just out of reach. And he didn’t mind so much.
* * *
Minnie set her bag on the kitchen counter, slid open the pantry, and browsed the empty shelves for a snack. On to cold storage. Equally vacant, of course. The shelves and coldstore existed here solely as décor. If she cared to take the time plugging in Qin’s food hack, she could slap a full banquet across every counter and gorge herself into a coma. If she was hungry.
She walked into the living room and peered out the panoramic window to the dock and lake. Some kids were standing in a canoe, playing balance. So carefree in their perfect world. Well, it probably helped to be only a vis. The kids were, essentially, animated paintings with zero AI. That would change if she went outside and actually interacted with them.
“Meh,” she said, plopping down on one of her crescent sofas. Across from her, she spotted a bundle of luxurious silver fur. Emilie was curled up between two pillows on the opposite sofa, sleeping as usual.
“Wake up, you,” Minnie said, and lazy lids rolled slowly upward to reveal a pair of lethargic cat eyes. “I’m home!”
Emilie stretched out a leg, splayed the paw and claws, began to purr, and settled back into an even more luxurious slumber.
Minnie threw a pillow at her. “You suck. Where’s Noodle?”
Emilie opened one eye. “Probably destroying something,” she said. “Check the attic. You see I’m trying to nap here, right?”
“I’m up here!” Noodle called from the attic, appearing a second later, orange tail swinging as he dangled by a single paw. He let go, dropping to the hall floor, and skittered into the living room. He hopped into Minnie’s lap, curling and twisting, his incredibly soft fur caressing her hands. “Where’ve you been? It’s been weeks!”
He arched his back, white belly on full display for an overdue rub n’ scratch. Minnie smiled and obliged.
Noodle raised his head and gazed at Minnie, remorseful. “We thought maybe … like maybe you were punishing us.”
“We?” Emilie sneered.
“No, no.” Minnie cradled his head in both hands and scratched his cheeks with her thumbs. “Nothing like that—I’d never. Just some bad days at work. You missed me?”
“To put it mildly,” Noodle said as Minnie etched circles into his tummy fur. “Ferrets are highly social creatures. This girl,” he nodded to Emilie, “can’t be bothered. I wanted to play chess.”
“Takes too long,” Emilie said without opening her eyes. “And you’re terrible at it. I don’t even have to cheat.”
Minnie smiled and turned on the tube. The media options appeared in the air between the sofas. “What do you guys want to watch?”
Emilie ignored her.
“Whatever you want,” Noodle said as he spun around on her lap, tail whipping across her arm.
Minnie let the tube pick. A semi-recent series played from her archive. All presumably famous actors she’d never seen or heard of.
Noodle cleared his throat like a person. “I know you can watch and scratch at the same time.”
Minnie loved her pets. Maybe she’d adopt a few more. But why? To fill the emptiness? Why not get a mate like others? A kid or two? Even Aether had a husband and daughter in her game. Oliver and Trista. Minnie had never met them—never wanted to. Whatever Aether had gotten from them were clearly things Minnie couldn’t provide. Plus, they’d been around long before Minnie had come into the picture. Maybe even before John?
John.
She’d come here to escape from him, and yet here he was. What to think of this return module situation? If they could make it across this continent, build a boat, get to Threck Country, and make it another year, they could actually go home. They’d sleep the whole way, so the time would pass like nothing. Probably dock in Earth orbit, deal with some company folks—debriefs and whatnot, take a shuttle down to the surface. See her dad again. He’d be, what, a spry young 85? She’d probably travel the world, give speeches, plant roots somewhere, and be a professor. The idea of going back wasn’t entirely unappealing, but she’d spent so long disassociating from Earth, knowing she’d never go back, knowing that the game would forever be her sole experience of her former home. The game, and actual human interaction. Her friends.
Oh, how she hoped
they didn’t suffer. Hoped they weren’t scared. Hoped that Aether, as she drifted into the black, didn’t only try to be a mom to Qin. She better not have waited for the painful, suffocating, dehydrated end. They would’ve had ample meds and access to the air mixture so as to avoid inevitable agony.
Meds.
John again.
Had he tried to kill himself, or had it been an accident? He was too stubborn, too sure of himself for suicide. Then again, being disabled, no longer able to take care of himself—what did that sort of thing do to a proud, bigheaded personality like his?
Minnie looked down at Noodle, writhing in delight as she absentmindedly pet him from neck to belly. “I gotta go, guys.”
Noodle was outraged. “What? No!”
“I was just about to go over there,” Emilie said, stretching her back. “I don’t mind if you pet me now. If you want.”
Minnie grinned. “I love you two. I’ll be back.”
She closed the game and opened her eyes. The inside of Ish’s EV was still illuminated from the two portholes above. She’d been gone less than 30 minutes. A thermag glance through the wall revealed a still-idle John in the cave. His temp appeared normal, heart rate fine. He wouldn’t be truly lucid for a few hours. In the meantime …
Minnie plucked Ish’s fone from her pocket. A quick thrice-over with a few wetwipes. She held the device up before her, facing the optics toward her, “eye to eye.” Ish’s familiar pale yellow-brown iris, or rather, a reproduction of it. Up close, one could detect a fone’s lack of ridges and canyons, the replica iris and surrounding white sclera were merely a convex disc bonded to the inner casing. The optics orifice contained several lens layers behind a tinted concealer, without which someone could see inside. Minnie preferred to think of the data within the device before her, not the bio organ it resembled, the person it represented, the body from which it’d been extracted.
She set the fone on a console, reached into the medkit at her feet, pulling out the extractor—a simple, silicoated tool that looked like a warped eyelash curler—and turned to face her reflection in a shiny black display.
She opened her fone’s manual command interface. One of a few functions that had to be manually sight-typed for safety and security.
Shutdown.
ALERTS: FONE - Confirm full shutdown.
Yes.
Shutting down …
Blackout. Her ear module emit a tiny crack as it too powered down.
Stereovision gone. Optics gone. No HUD, no alerts, no apps, no access. She was cut off and helpless—in shock at the reality of being truly disconnected. It felt quiet, dull, unnatural, wrong. What the hell did people do before fones?
Focus on task. Get it over with.
She spread her lids wide, held her breath, and slid in the two circular ends, one on top and one beneath her fone. A gentle, scissoring squeeze, and she tilted her head back while steadily moving the extractor away. The gross (though not all that painful) final popping sensation shot a quick shiver down her spine. She moved the orb in front of her bio eye, giving it a brief inspection. Not too much film built up on the back, but she’d give it a thorough cleaning before reinstalling.
Ish’s fone drew in with the usual slorp Minnie had never grown used to. Her top eyelid folded in with the device and she had to pinch and pull out the flap. Preboot had begun upon contact with her housing, but it halted as expected a few seconds later with a white passcode prompt on a black background. Even with a mated housing, this was a standard safeguard.
Minnie hoped that one of the root accounts would’ve been set on their fones as part of exigency protocols.
?4rT~23eQ|p8
Nope.
She tried all of the others she knew. No access. All she could see in Ish’s fone was station time and batt level. 2% and slowly rising, Minnie’s electrolytes trickling in through her housing.
Such easy access would’ve been nice, albeit unexpected. On to Plan B.
* * *
John moaned. His cheeks tightened. It appeared his dreams were unpleasant. Minnie nudged him again.
“Hey, just wake up for a second. One question and you can go back to sleep.”
His chin constricted, mouth set into a grumpy toddler frown. A more assertive protest groan.
She poked his shoulder repeatedly. “I’m not going anywhere, John! One question! It’s your ticket back to dreamland. Wake up. You don’t even have to open your eyes. Okay?”
A quivering sniff like he was going to cry. Finally, a scratchy “What?”
“What’s Ish’s fone passcode?”
“Dunno.”
“Yes, you do.”
“No.”
“Yes. Tell me now. I’ll enter it right in and you go back to sweet, sweet, comforting sleep.”
One eye opened—his bio eye. It wobbled and blinked and found her. “You … you took her fone?”
Minnie smiled and widened her lids around the unmatched fone, cocking her head right for him to catch a glimpse.
Fog appearing to lift, he tried to sit up.
She pressed down on his shoulder. “No, no, no, relax. You’ll hurt yourself. Just give me the passcode. Once I’m in, I’ll dump it all to the EV system and we can both pull it off of there.”
“Minerva, we can’t just … every private moment, journals, pics and vids—”
“Yeah, exactly, all that stuff. Trust me, she’ll never know.”
“We have no proof that she did anything to—”
“Stop!” Her irritation with this man had once more bubbled up over the top of her patience pot. The woman was dead. Everyone was dead. And he was trying to protect, what, the dignity of Ish’s memory? She fought to unclench her jaw. “Give me the damned passcode. Let me grab her last few vids, prove her innocence for you, clear her name, set things right.”
John closed his eyes. “I don’t think she’s innocent.”
“Regardless of what you think, there’s more at stake here than what she did or didn’t do. I guarantee you her entire Hynka wiki is in here. Language and dialects, other villages and concentrations, spiritual beliefs, triggers, behavioral patterns, favorite hunting grounds, geographic research notes. All of which is data we’re supposed to have right now! That’s mission data! For whatever reason, she wiped it all clean. There’s your criminal act—justification for a fone recovery. Right?”
She’d gotten him. He was making the acquiescing face. “S’true. We have to get that data out.”
“Yes, indeed. Passcode me, boss.”
“No.”
“No?”
He shook his head weakly. “I can’t just give you full access to her life. I’ll go in. Copy the wiki and work notes, last week of vids, dump it all in the EV.”
Minnie wanted to punch him in the nose. She needed into that fone! Some of the most important material was surely in non-work files. But she was powerless. No alternatives.
Maybe after they reviewed the vids—vids of dead crewmembers before they were murdered, of Ish effectively pulling the trigger—John might lose a bit of that self-righteous conviction and, finally appropriately outraged, be inspired to delve deeper into the loon cauldron.
She went to fetch the extractor.
3.2
Ishtab Soleymani flung aside the weighty fur blanket, rising from her stately bed of piled skins. Her fingertips parted the dangling curtain of piquant vines. A stand of trussed bones bore her long skin stole. She hung it over her neck, draping the wide, black strips in front.
Flanking her bedchamber’s tall, isosceles doorway, her servants bowed their heads as she approached. She presented a hand to one of the Lessers. He obliged the gesture by gently sandwiching the hand between his four thick fingers. Ishtab rewarded this obedience by stepping behind the servant, peeling open the protective skin pouch, and sliding her arm in, down to her elbow, until she’d found the hidden organ inside. Her servant twisted and squirmed, hissing his gratitude and undying loyalty.
The other would rece
ive only a stroke of the snout this time. He squatted low, hunching down to Ishtab’s raised hand.
“You good,” she said, and walked out into the sunlight.
In the shadow of her great palace stood crushing throngs of her disciples, Lessers and Greaters, all eyes glued to her. She raised her arms in a V, silencing the energized chatter.
“This day!” Ishtab shouted. “Westers join. We make. Strong us.” She allowed a lengthy outburst of approval. “Bring me. Now go.”
The masses cheered. The chests of a thousand Greaters expanded and contracted as they huffed the power breath. Dozens of Lessers fell for the clan, their bodies claimed for vital meat, destinies finally fulfilled. Once their bones had been scraped clean, broken, and drained of marrow, the clan set off to conquer the neighboring village.
Ishtab descended the staircase of short blocks, crafted for her height. Her bare feet reached the compacted dirt ground. She glided across the central court, stepping over bones and overlooked gore, a gentle breeze sending her stole under her arms and fluttering behind her. Lessers with other duties strolled through the village. In passing, Ishtab raised a preemptive hand before these faithful souls could ask if their queen required anything.
In the Greaters’ shades, Ishtab walked among the beleaguered expecting, and weary recent birthers. Newborns, not much smaller than her, nursed from the porous skinfolds in their mothers’ armpits.
“Good,” Ishtab told each mother as she passed. “Good.”
At the end of a row, outside the shades, she spotted a small cluster of birthers, apparently ejected into the harsh sunlight. Ishtab approached.
“Why here?”
One of the three mothers turned her head, regarding Ishtab with respect, and then lifted her arm to expose her nursing newborn. The baby’s small feet and ashen sides answered the question. These Greater mothers had birthed Lessers.
Ishtab regarded mother and child for a moment and then hailed a passing Lesser.
Pointing to the baby, she said, “Take. Follow.”
The Lesser complied without hesitation, throwing the sapped mother’s arm aside, and snatching away the baby. The mother’s prattles and howls faded as Ishtab strode across the field to the Lessers’ shades, baby and carrier behind her. Here she looked upon five times the birthers and expecting.
Exigency Page 29
