Recall

by M. Van

  I followed in line with my companion ARs. There were seven of us on this night shift, which seemed odd, but my mind was too distracted to linger on the fact. Seven enforcers were enough to hold up the law in a five-mile radius of city blocks, but also enough to keep us busy. I stood last in line behind the intake desk, where we were supposed to register before we started our patrols. A round-faced law enforcement officer with a mustache and a thinning hairline registered our thumbprints and assigned us our designated areas for the night.

  As usual, the hallway buzzed with people. Human law enforcement officers in light-gray uniforms milled up and down the hall. Some carried the standard kind of delinquent by the shoulders to their pit stops hosted by the district jail: drug users, hookers, and I saw some members of a local gang that had terrorized the neighborhoods for years.

  I moved up another place in the line and watched a man at the front desk explain how he had gotten a bloody nose to the officer assigned. At least that was what he seemed to be doing from the way he gestured wildly from his nose to his bloodied shirt.

  The AR ahead of me pressed his thumb onto the tablet and was appointed a partner. I stepped up to the desk. Without much interest, the officer behind the desk held the tablet out to scan my thumb. He didn’t look at me as he waited for the readout.

  “Enforcers 959, you will be going out on a solo run tonight—congratulations,” the officer said without a hint of sincerity. I glared at him, but he wouldn’t have noticed with my eyes hidden behind tinted glass. It seemed obvious as the other six had paired up, and I was the only one that had remained. Still, I had no memory of ever going out on my own, although that wasn’t a surprise.

  I checked for information transmitted to my heads-up, but there was no information to check. In fact, the screen had gone blank. The officer behind the desk cleared his throat. He glanced at me curiously before a grin emerged on his face. As he lifted his oversized butt from his chair, he reached a hand out and tapped my heads-up with an outstretched finger. If I hadn’t been wearing the tinted goggles, I was sure the officer would have frowned at my bulging eyes.

  “Is that thing working?” he asked in a condescending manner. Most human officers did not have a lot of respect for ARs taking over their jobs for free and thought of us as mindless drones. He thought I wouldn’t be able to function without the device strapped to my head, and he was probably right, although I wasn’t going to tell him that. Playing along, I tapped the gadget and said, “No problem, sir, just a delay in the upload.”

  The officer watched me curiously as he sat down and then glanced at the tablet on his desk. He scrolled through a couple of pages that had my designated number printed on the headline.

  “Everything checks out,” he said. “You’re clear to go.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  I turned and headed for the door at a fast pace. That tablet should have detected my heads-up wasn’t working. With firm strides, I passed the front desk where the man with the bloody nose seemed to have gotten more agitated by the minute.

  At the front door, I had to stop to let a couple of officers pass as they dragged a man who didn’t seem to be bothered to use his legs. I held the door for the men as I felt a shudder rack my body. The sight of the street outside raised the hairs on the back of my neck. Was I supposed to go out there without the aid of a heads-up? How could I do my job if I wasn’t able to receive assignments or reach a judge if I needed a verdict?

  I was still holding the door as another officer entered. His brows furrowed as amusement filled his eyes. As the man stopped before me, my chest tightened, and I felt a tremble in the hand holding the door.

  “Did they add doorman to the job?” he asked his partner jokingly as a second man stepped inside. Ignoring the shiver running down my spine and the two men, I managed to compose myself enough to walk out.

  I moved down the steps of the old justice house and cornered into the darkness of an alley hidden in the wake of tall buildings on either side. I shied away from the colorful lights along with the facade plastered over this city, and I sought out the furthest and darkest corner where no one could see me.

  I fought to breathe as I tried to release the tightness in my chest. Painful gulps of air forced their way down into my lungs without much relief. My mainframe screamed, sending electric shocks down my circuits. This was not possible! I couldn’t think; I wasn’t supposed to think; I was only supposed to react; I wasn’t anything but a mere machine stuck inside a vessel constructed of the dead.

  Pain similar to what I had felt standing in front of that woman yesterday jabbed at my eyes as if someone was poking at them with needles. With an awkward motion, I ripped the heads-up display from my head.

  By the time the goggles hit the ground, I had sunk down the wall to sit next to them. My head pounded as a rush of images invaded my mind. My hands wrapped into fists clenching hard until my knuckles turned white and I pressed them to my temples. That picture, that tattoo, the pain in her eyes, images forced their way into my head. Was this what a system overload felt like? Pictures kept pouring into my mind. Steaming-hot drinks in paper cups with a green logo, a grimy-looking teddy bear, the sound of the ocean combined with screams of scattering gulls. I locked my head in a vice of arms and tried to squeeze out the images that didn’t make any sense. Anything to ease the throbbing in my head.

  A thought occurred, and it seemed as ridiculous as what was happening to me, but I wondered if these images could be memories. Maybe being hooked to these machines didn’t wipe the memories I had acquired over the years, but just buried them.

  As if something clicked with the thought, the storm inside my head calmed down, and my breathing relaxed. My brain started to function again, and I tried to analyze the images. None of them seemed to have anything related to what an artificial representation would encounter during their daily tasks.

  Tiny outstretched arms reaching for a grimy-looking bear, but the vantage point was all wrong. It seemed as if I were the one reaching for the bear, and I even felt the desire to hold it. But this couldn’t be. If I were the one reaching for that bear, I would have been a child—no more than four or five years old. If these images were actual memories, then what would that mean?

  Through a haze of thoughts, I barely heard the footsteps approach until they were right in front of me. Still, I ignored them. For a second, I wondered about the look on a person’s face at the sight of me, this figure dressed to intimidate and induce fear in the minds of others—garbed in black from head to toe, with those ominous goggles, now reduced to a pitiful pile, no more than a beggar. I would have ignored the passerby if he hadn’t dropped something. A piece of paper slightly lingered on a breeze before it fluttered to the ground by my feet.

  A five-credit note that would buy a person a new pair of shoes on the black market lay in front of me. I looked up to find the person, to point out to him what he had lost, even though I should probably arrest the person for carrying illegal currency.

  The figure, also clad in black from his long overcoat to his black boots, kept a firm stride, with his hands clamped behind his back. He glanced over his broad shoulder, and I noticed the black hat and shades that hid his face. His clothes weren’t local, and the color black hinted at him being an enforcer, but then his glasses weren’t the enforcer kind—besides, enforcers wouldn’t carry credits. Before he exited the alley, he looked over his shoulder again and threw me a two-fingered salute. I read it as a signal that dropping the note hadn’t been an accident.

  I stared at the piece of paper for a long moment while in the distance I heard vehicles passing by, men and women rushing to get home after a long day’s work, fleeing the colorful mirage before the real darkness fell over them.

  If my heads-up display had worked, I felt sure it would have told me all about the people passing this alley, but I also felt sure it wouldn’t have told me anything about that tall, dark stranger.

  With five credits in my pocket, I walked the streets as if
I had a purpose, and maybe I did. After I had found what was hidden inside the note, it didn’t take me long to get to my feet, although I had no idea why. Something compelled me to follow the instruction written on the note, and that shouldn’t have been possible.

  Could it be that someone had compromised my programming? But then how would that let me internally debate the issue? None of this made sense to me.

  The heads-up display hid my eyes but didn’t provide me with any of the information I usually needed to get by in this maze of streets and alleys. Fortunately, the location written on the note was strangely familiar to me.

  On the way, I had to handle a dispute over a stolen pack of unprocessed mushrooms. Although I hadn’t received an actual official call to interfere and wouldn’t be able to reach a judge, I figured I needed to step in, because it looked as if a kid was about to take a beating. Three broad-shouldered men had cornered a boy no more than eleven or twelve years old in the recess of a building. My mere approach seemed to calm the men’s nerves, although they protested after I sentenced the kid with a misdemeanor and three weeks’ probation.

  Usually, trafficking unprocessed mushrooms could get you jailed for three weeks, but a twitch of my hand toward my weapon was enough for them to back off. The kid actually thanked me before bolting into the shadows of the night. The holdup hadn’t taken long, though, and I had almost reached my designation.

  Tide View Hospital towered over most of the buildings in the area. With a facade made of glass to increase the effect of the blazing candy-colored lights, it had become the ultimate contrast of beauty on the outside with the horrors within. The lights bounced off the building so brightly that it wasn’t unusual for someone to wear sunglasses in the middle of the night.

  As I stood in front of the building, I reached for the credit note inside my pocket and unfolded it. Hidden in the folds of the credit note sat another note with a message scribbled on the surface: “She can help—Tide view—Dead man’s hour.”

  Chapter four

  The emergency room was bustling as I entered through the glass sliding doors. The waiting area sat packed, and staff was running up and down the halls. Gurneys lined the hallways with a diversity of people and a variety of injuries, from a kid with something stuck up his nose to ominous-looking thugs in disheveled clothes, cuffed to their beds and with law enforcement officers by their sides.

  Some of them glanced up as they saw me, but nobody dared to approach. As an enforcer, I had full clearance and didn’t have to answer to anyone in public. I only needed to obey the neon-green letters scrolling down the screen before my eyes.

  Today there hadn’t been any green letters, and thinking about it created this churning feeling in my gut. What if someone realized I wasn’t plugged in? Would they send someone after me? And if they caught me, would they chop me up into pieces to figure out the problem with my processor?

  I pushed the thought from my mind and straightened up. If they thought I was here on business, these officers wouldn’t bother me. To them, we were a necessary evil they’d rather avoided, but showing a little courtesy never hurt.

  An officer who sat next to a bald man in a torn sand-colored shirt looked up nervously. The buttons of his light-gray uniform struggled to keep the fabric in place, and the man almost choked on his fried fungi dough when I nodded my head to acknowledge him as I passed.

  I moved through the halls to the central information desk and stopped to take another look at the note. It wasn’t very specific, and I glanced around the area to see if I might spot the woman. For some reason, I knew it had to be her—the one whose picture seemed stuck in my head, but I had no evidence to support that. A clock on the wall indicated that it was two minutes till midnight.

  The information desk sat empty, and I turned leisurely in a full circle. The white desk stood in the center of the room, and the projection of an enormous red question mark hovered over it. The sign gave the desk a predominant presence inside the room, but it didn’t have any effect. No one seemed interested in asking or answering a question.

  The rest of the large room was pristinely white, and I wouldn’t have been surprised if the immaculate walls and ceiling hurt my eyes to look at without the heads-up. The place also looked very clean even though dozens of people milled around, and some of them were bleeding profusely.

  If this hospital had the means to keep even public areas this clean, that would mean they’d have some serious government backing. Only the government could make decisions about who had access to technology like drones—one of which just sped by me. The thing looked like a square box that hovered over the ground, disinfecting anything that came in its path.

  A man screamed, drawing my attention, and a doctor wearing a device on his head that looked like my heads-up rushed by toward him. As I followed the doctor’s movement, another white coat drew my attention.

  Turning my head, I just caught her crossing the hall and entering a room. With firm strides, I followed, and without hesitation or knocking, I opened the door. The room was dark, but my heads-up quickly adjusted and switched to the green filter, boosting the little light available. It seemed the damn thing hadn’t died completely.

  I didn’t detect any immediate signs of movement and took another step inside. Without windows, the room had not much to offer. A desk with a chair stood on a shiny floor, and a stretcher sat crammed into the corner.

  I checked for another exit as I made my way to the desk, but I couldn’t detect it. She couldn’t have vanished into thin air. My eyes roamed over the papers laying on the desk, revealing some information on a research study. A picture frame that sat on the desk drew me in. Before I knew it, I held it in my hand and gasped.

  Pain and shock even worse than in that alley seized control of my body. It felt as if needles had sunk into my skull, exiting through my eyes. I ripped the heads-up from my face and tossed it on the desk. My hands wrapped around my head, and I bit my lip to stifle the scream that brewed inside my chest.

  I let my body drop until I fell into the chair. Head between my knees, I tried to gain my breath, but I couldn’t get the image out of my head. That face, those eyes, it was her in that picture. It was her maybe ten years ago. Her eyes didn’t hold the pain I had witnessed last night; sadness maybe, but not the sorrow that edged over into pain.

  As a young girl of maybe fifteen, she looked strong as she held a protective arm around a skinny kid who looked a couple of years younger. That other little girl in the picture had darker skin, even darker eyes, and frizzy hair that seemed to live a life of its own. As I risked another look at both girls, a similar jolt of pain as before struck my head, and I dropped the picture onto the desk. I bent forward, burying my face in my hands hoping for the pain to subside.

  It must have been because the pain started to lay off and my CPU started functioning again that I registered the lock clicking. My head shot up, my senses on full alert as I noticed someone in the room with me.

  A figure stood at the closed door, and without my heads-up, it should have been hard to identify the person, but even in this dark room, I could tell it was her. My body went rigid as our eyes locked.

  Hard, white hospital light filtered inside the room from under the door, enough to distinguish her features and barely enough to reach her eyes. Her arms lifted as if in surrender as she cautiously moved to the corner of the room.

  In normal circumstances, my heads-up would have informed me to subdue the intruder and ask questions later, but my heads-up lay on the desk. But I wondered if I would have complied. As it was, I sat frozen in the chair.

  With a click, a soft yellow light filled the room, forcing my eyes to blink to adjust for the shift. She had turned on a desk lamp that sat on a small table next to the stretcher. Without hesitation, she sat down on the makeshift bed, while her eyes never strayed from mine. A million things I didn’t understand raced through my head, and I couldn’t make much sense of them. Perhaps out of habit my eyes shifted to the heads-up lyi
ng on the desk.

  “Don’t,” she said as I reached for the goggles. Her voice didn’t reach over more than a mere whisper, but the urgency in her tone was evident. My hand hovered over the device, barely able to contain the need to pick it up. “Please don’t,” she said a bit more forcefully, but it still sounded like a plea. Hovering over the goggles, my hand balled into a fist, and I closed my eyes.

  “I don’t…” I started to say, but I fumbled the words and tried for something else, “Why am I here?”

  “It’ll be all explained—soon,” she said. The softness in her voice forced me to look at her. Her lips curved into a smile, but she didn’t seem able to hold it, and I could see the pain behind her eyes had returned. She let out a sigh of relief when my hand retreated from the device, but her shoulders tensed when instead my hand reached for the picture frame. Her reaction told me she knew more about this picture besides the fact that she was in it.

  “Why does my head feel like it’s about to explode when I look at this picture?” I asked. I held up the frame without looking at it. She sighed in exasperation as if she were about to explain electromagnetic fusion to a two-year-old.

  “It hurts because looking at it triggers a memory,” she said.

  “I don’t have any memories,” I said and shook my head. “Besides, I don’t know these kids.”

  She leaned back, pushing her back against the wall and crossing her arms over her chest.

  “Are you sure about that?” she said, raising an eyebrow, “You know, the kid on the left…that is me and—”

  “I don’t know you,” I said harshly as I interrupted her.

  “I see this enforcer business hasn’t helped in the manners department,” she said under her breath, but with enough bite that it hit a nerve with me. I wasn’t about to sit here and be lectured by a citizen.