The Puzzler's War

by Eyal Kless

  “Push those memories back,” I said quickly. “They are not good to dwell on, believe me.”

  “Aye, you’re probably right.” Galinak looked at himself again. “This is going to take some getting used to.”

  “I know.” I looked, fighting the urge to cover my loins with my hand. “It’s as if this body is not yet my own. I wonder if we’ll sort of settle in with time.”

  Galinak turned around in a slow circle, saying, “Right. Care to explain what’s going on?”

  “I assume you were not briefed.”

  He completed the full circle. “No, last thing I remember was what I am trying not to remember right now. Since then, completely blank. Did they speak to you?”

  I nodded.

  “Those smart-arse Tarkanians knew better than to wake me up for a chat,” Galinak grumbled. “I would have said several things they would be sorry to hear.”

  “My conversation did not take long,” I said carefully. There was no use in agitating my only protection. “We were supposed to get more information and, you know”—I indicated both of us—“clothes and equipment and weapons.”

  “Where, down there?” Galinak pointed at the cave.

  “Yes, something must have gone unexpectedly wrong, some sort of malfunction or . . . a sabotage. But we need to get back and retrieve them.”

  “That rebirth must have crossed your wires.” Galinak shook his head. “Because this new body of mine told me we were going to die down there, and that a normal human would have already been convulsing on the floor. Whatever was in that air was nasty, rust, I can still feel the sting on my skin.” He made a point of moving his hands around his naked body, brushing the invisible particles away.

  “But we are naked, weaponless, in the wilderness,” I protested.

  “We’re alive, healthy, and there are no Lizards that I can see.” Galinak raised a hairless eyebrow. “I’ve been in worse situations.” When he saw the look on my face he added, “I would tell you to grow a pair but that would be an inappropriate comment at this time, Twinkle.” His laughter was short-lived. I guess he wasn’t used to the sound of it, either. “You know what they want us to do, right? So just fill me in on that, but first let’s find out where we are.”

  He drew my attention to an elevated boulder with a flat top. “You told me your eyes still have that special twinkle in them. I’ll give you a leg up.” He crouched into position and lifted me up with such force I almost missed the boulder and barely stopped myself from falling to the other side.

  “Sorry,” Galinak apologised when I peered down at him accusingly. “I guess I am stronger than I look.” He crouched and jumped up, landing next to me in an impossible feat for any nonaugmented human. “I am starting to really like this new body,” he said, grinning.

  I shook my head slightly, trying to hide my jealousy, then turned my head and began scanning the horizon. When I’d woken up in the poisonous bunker, I’d tried to use my night sight on reflex and had been unable to control the shifts in perspectives. This time I was more careful, but just to be on the safe side, I steadied myself by grabbing Galinak’s shoulder.

  And like magic, it happened. I zoomed. I could see for miles in each direction. “There is a farm. Over there.”

  Galinak squinted. “Where?”

  “Hard for me to judge, looks like several miles.” I checked the position of the sun. “East . . . seems deserted. The windows are shut and the barn doors are open.”

  “You can see that far?”

  I turned to face him and had to steady myself as my sight shifted again. “I guess they gave us abilities that we are familiar with.”

  Galinak ignored the bitterness in my voice. “Right,” he said, “we’d better start tracking while the sun’s still up, so we can get a nice tan.”

  “I still think we should go back.”

  “Look, Twinkle Eyes.” Galinak was starting to lose patience. “If you’re lucky, you’ll have a moment or two down there. Definitely not enough time to listen to your Tarakan friends, so all you can hope for is some gear, and rule one in the unwritten Salvationist rule book says ‘no gear is worth dying for.’ I would have been long dead if I hadn’t obeyed that rule.”

  I wanted to protest further, but Galinak simply grabbed me by the waist, lifted me over his shoulder, and jumped down from the high boulder.

  Chapter 4

  Peach

  I only let myself cry once, that very night. I found a secluded ruin and with a little reverse engineering, managed to spark a fire from the power sword, although it did cost me too many energy cells and I promised myself to try and do it the old-fashioned way the next time around. Then I cleared the bone and skewered the meat on several sticks from the broken bow so the meat would cook faster. I’d only resorted to cannibalism three times before, and it was never a cherished culinary experience. This time was no exception. As the human flesh sizzled and cooked, I moved away from the circle of fire and found a dark corner, where I curled into a ball and sobbed quietly.

  I was only a toddler when the Paralytic Plague, known as the Purple Plague, struck our town. Victims lost control of their bodies, then their respiration systems, and they fought to breathe until they died. My father and three brothers were gone in less than forty-eight hours, and I still remembered my little brother’s body being wheeled away to the local crematorium. My mother was not affected, but I was already developing high fever and had lost control of my arms and legs. The doctors moved me to a large hall where many lay waiting to die.

  I’ve heard the story from my mother so many times, I’m sure my memory is as false as it is vivid. But I remember a group of men and women walking into the hall. They wore thick bio suits and blue facial masks even inside their helmets. Each carried a temperature-controlled medibag imprinted with the glowing logo of Tarakan. They quickly dispersed among the sick and dying. One of them, the only one who was also wearing old-fashioned spectacles inside the protection of his helmet, came and sat by my bed. He spoke in a soft tone of voice, almost a whisper, to my mother and told her he was from Tarakan University and that he had an experimental vaccine for the plague, but that it was not fully tested yet. The vaccine could kill me or it could cure me, and my mother had less than a minute to decide whether he should administer it to me or move to the next patient.

  After watching her three sons and husband die, my mother didn’t hesitate. She told me years later that she had made a pact with herself that if I died, she would take her own life. The Tarakan doctor administered the vaccine by touching the fevered skin of my stomach with a metal object. I remember sweet coolness spreading quickly through my body. The next day I was on my feet. Out of 822 patients who got the vaccine, 645 survived.

  My mother, a tax consultant by trade, applied for Tarakan residency the following week. Luckily, Tarakan was still accepting ordinary people back then. We moved to the City of Towers within a year, even though her trade was not needed there. She took any jobs they assigned her to, all below her skill and pay levels, but she never complained. Her sole ambition was for me to become a full Tarakan citizen.

  I tried. I really did. But the shock of losing my family was too great. My mother worked hard and tried, without success, to compensate for the trauma we’d both endured. On the brink of adolescence, I became notoriously short-tempered. The puzzles and riddles were especially infuriating to me, and one day I threw a puzzle box at my teacher’s head, and someone came to speak to my mother. I was sure we were going to be sent away, but the Tarakan talent scout had a different idea. I was sent to the newly formed military academy and became a professional Tarakan soldier, eventually rising to the rank of colonel major.

  These were pre–Guardian Angel days, when Tarakan still followed the international treaties forbidding them from using clones as soldiers. Keeping Tarakan assets safe meant biological humans had to do the soldiering. That was my job, more or less. I worked my way up the ranks not by solving odd puzzles but the old-fashioned way; killing
Tarakan’s enemies.

  I watched as Tarakan expanded and flourished, but I also saw the looming shadows and growing threats as other countries’ jealousy turned to fear, which festered to deep loathing and eventually hate. There were terror attacks, acts of sabotage, cybertheft, and even the danger of direct hostilities to many Tarakan assets around the globe.

  When the decision was finally made, I helped train the first Guardian Angels. Well, trained is not the right word for it, as they knew how to fight from the moment they were created, but I did make them march in beautiful formations and sent them on countless black ops. It did not take me long to realise they were the future and I was becoming obsolete.

  Eventually, it was my time for an early retirement. I never married, never had children—never had the urge, frankly—and was not big on friends, either. I had seen enough of the world to satisfy my need to travel without those endless boring vacations retired people take. So, it was either sit around in an undistinguished two-bedroom flat somewhere in the Eastern Spires till I died, or accept a second offer from the Tarakan security agency and become a hibernating agent, or a sleeper. When the offer came, I didn’t hesitate.

  I thought I’d already seen it all, but the training to become a sleeper was a whole different ball game. You left everything and everyone behind, your body included, and uploaded your consciousness into Adam. You would wake up in different vessels, on different continents, countries, and cultures, knowing only who you were, what your alias was, and, most of the time, your mission. Despite what the name suggests, you didn’t actually spend your time there sleeping. The downtime was filled with training and briefings, teaching, virtual vacations, assignment preps, and a few more activities designed to keep you from losing your mind.

  Once in the physical world, I could never recall the full details of my past operations, a needed security measure should I have fallen captive, but I did know the missions were getting significantly more aggressive as time passed. From simple data theft or blackmail to high-risk sabotage, kidnappings of major political figures, and high-profile assassinations. I even lit the spark, via a well-placed chemical bomb and several misleading fingerprints, to a major war in the Middle East, causing seven figures in casualties and the breakup of two regional powers.

  Was I always on the just side? Hell if I knew. Many of my missions were on the shady side of the moral scale, and in my reports, as I remembered them, I mentioned more than once that aggressive subterfuge and iron-fist diplomacy led only to short-term gains at best. We were becoming the bad guy for too many global players, and although they were weaker and far behind us on the technology scale, their combined force was a real threat.

  Now I sat among the ruins of mankind. From what I gathered, they . . . well, we, as a species, seemed to have somehow survived Armageddon only to continue to fight and kill each other over and over again. Tarakan, the shining-bright gem of humanity, was destroyed. All I’d worked for and risked was for nothing. Billions of people had died, and those who were spared simply picked up a gun or a sword or even a club and kept at it.

  Yet here I was. Someone had downloaded me into this vessel and given me a mission, so there must be some hope. I wiped away the tears and walked back to the fire, where the meat was slowly turning black, then sat down, picked up a stick, blew carefully on the meat, and chewed off a mouthful. The taste matched my mood.

  Tomorrow would be a new day. I would find a way to reach the City of Towers and find out what my mission was. Tarakan was defeated, but perhaps it was not dead yet.

  Chapter 5

  Twinkle Eyes

  It was a much longer trek to the farm than anticipated, even considering our condition. The land was hilly and hard. Only bushes and an occasional low, twisted tree grew. Coming down the hills barefoot left the soles of my feet bleeding from countless cuts. As before, the pains were a little distant, and I stifled the unmanly yelps and cries I made after several amused glances from Galinak, who bore his pain in stoic silence. At some point, he found a hefty chunk of wood which in dire circumstances could perhaps be used as a club.

  “You won’t knock out a hungry bear with that,” I half joked, filling the silence.

  “No offence, my sharp-eyed friend,” he said, waving the chunk of wood at me, “but if we meet a bear I am planning to knock you out with this and run for it.”

  That shut me up for a while. Normally I would have dismissed that kind of talk as Galinak’s rough sense of humour, but he was in a foul mood. I filled him in on the details of our mission as I knew it, and that caused two major tantrums and several more outbursts.

  “No wonder everyone hated those rust fuckers,” he exclaimed, his unfamiliar face turning red. “They are playing us again.”

  “They kept their word, and kept us alive.” I knew it was a mistake to try this argument as soon as I said the words.

  “Did they short-circuit your wires, Twinkle Eyes? Tarakan only brought us back because they need us to do their dirty work.” Galinak waved his finger at me. “I ain’t gonna play their game again. You might have struck a deal with them rusters, but no one asked me to chase no little girl.”

  “She’s not a little girl anymore, she’s probably seventeen by now.” If I thought that such a fact would cool Galinak’s temper, I was mistaken.

  “I don’t care how old she is,” he bellowed at me. “I ain’t doing this again. They can kiss my naked, hairless arse, if they ever find me.” He began walking faster, leaving me behind.

  I stiffened a yelp as I stepped on a sharp stone. “Wait, Galinak.” To my surprise, he actually stopped and turned, and I hopped closer.

  “Remember what Rafik said. We’ll die in less then three years, and not in a nice, quick way.”

  He looked at me. “Sometimes living a short, free life is better than a lifetime of bowing your head to a master.”

  I could sense there was no point in trying to convince him of anything at that point. “Look,” I said, tuning my voice to sound calm and reasonable, “let’s find something to wear, food and water, and perhaps a weapon that is better than a branch. Then we’ll talk about it.”

  “Fine.” Galinak nodded. “But there ain’t nothing to talk about. I’m done with those rusters.”

  We continued to walk at a slower, careful pace. Galinak brooded in silence while I took my mind off a possible encounter with a bear by playing with my sight. It was similar to the power I had in my old body, but tenfold. It was as if I’d attached a Tarakan artifact to my eyes. I could see ants crawling on the ground or a bird of prey far up in the sky as if it were up close, but despite looking all around us every chance I got, the seemingly abandoned farm remained the only man-made structure I could detect. It was no surprise, really. The Catastrophe had left behind only remnants of the human race and a lot of empty land. Many survivors instinctively congregated in hamlets, villages, or towns, but there were others who moved away, or simply stayed where they survived, choosing to brave the elements on their own.

  We reached the farm as the sun disappeared behind the mountains. Despite its abandoned look, we didn’t take any chances. I stayed low outside the premises and Galinak snuck in solo. After a while he came out and waved me over. It was indeed abandoned, from the look of the unkempt vegetable garden. We were in no condition to be picky, and we found several vegetables to nourish us. Eating for the first time in our new bodies was an odd experience. Like before, the feeling was duller than the awareness of the effect. I could tell that my body was being recharged by eating the rotting tomato, but thankfully, the taste was distant enough for me not to gag.

  The barn had been emptied out long ago, but Galinak did find a butchering cleaver, which must have fallen when the owners were packing. It was a lucky find, since metal was priceless in these rural parts. It had some spots of rust, but the edge was true. Galinak kept it for himself and gave me the wooden club with a sly smile and a meaningful wink. I chose not to protest.

  The living structure was only one sto
ry high but spacious enough to contain an extended family, perhaps even several generations, and it was almost completely cleared out. We found a few pieces of wooden cutlery near the cold hearth, too used and chipped to be worth taking. There was no food anywhere, and the wild ferret we discovered in one of the rooms wisely escaped via a hole in the wall before Galinak could make dinner out of him.

  “Galinak, I found something,” I cried out. Despite the lack of alarm in my voice he arrived, quickly brandishing the cleaver. I nodded toward the closet.

  “The door is stuck.”

  He shrugged, lay the cleaver gently on his foot, placed one hand on the handle, and braced the other against the twin door. He looked at me.

  “Why the gloomy face?”

  “Because I can see what’s inside.”

  He considered my words for a few heartbeats before pulling hard enough on the handle to yank it out of the door.

  “Rust,” he swore, and without preparation he simply punched through the wood, pulling back to break it into several pieces. Once the dust had settled, we peered inside. There were only two items of clothing hanging from the rack by a wooden hook: a farmer’s blue overalls and a farmer’s wife’s dress.

  Galinak looked at me again.

  “Oh,” he said. “Now I get it.”

  Chapter 6

  Peach

  Clearing the ruins of the Radiated City took several days and a third of my nourishment pills. As I walked through the empty streets I realised why, despite the dangers of contamination, the looters still came to plunder. The city was destroyed probably within hours, not weeks or months. Missiles rained from the sky, and power rays carved the ground, destroying everything in their path. The nature of most Tarakan weaponry was such that tens of millions died within hours, but a lot of their items survived. I know this because I had been in charge of security when those weapons were mounted, piece by piece, on the Star Pillar and smuggled up to the hub to be assembled in space, then sent on long orbit so they could not be shot down by antisatellite batteries on Earth. At first, I did not know what we were carrying up. Even with my security clearance, I still shouldn’t have known that we were breaking several international treaties by secretly carrying missile parts up the Pillar, but all the secrecy in the world can’t stop a drunken intelligence officer from blabbing while trying to pick up a woman at a local bar. We had surprisingly good sex that night, but the next morning, I got him fired.