Bypass Gemini

by Joseph Lallo

  “Uh... I must have hit my head MUCH harder than I thought,” he muttered.

  The thing had seen better days. A faded yellow paint job bore black letters that read “Ruane Girls Academy.” One headlight was completely missing, and the second looked like it had been replaced with one from a much larger vehicle. A flashing red stop sign flipped out from the side and the doors creaked open. A few seconds later the PA system crackled to life with a familiar voice.

  “On the off chance that there is something alive at the crash site, I suggest you climb inside,” said the same voice that had been cursing at him before the crash.

  “Listen, I don’t know who you are, but-”

  The voice cut him off. “If you are looking for motivation, take a look at all of those craters. Then look up. That mess you came crashing through is none too stable on a good day. There are about two dozen impacts per minute, so if you haven’t seen one, that means you’re overdue. The chances of you getting hit are pretty low, but one of those hunks poking a hole in the planet tends to make the area inhospitable. Also, if you’re outdoors come night time, I hope you brought a parka, since last night it hit negative forty.”

  “Uh... okay. But how do I know-”

  “If you are dead, I’m going to salvage that ship, assuming there’s any of it left. Hell, if you’re alive I’m going to salvage it, too.”

  “Hey, that’s MY ship you’re talking about, you-”

  “Also, in case you haven’t figured it out, this is a recording. This is the only chance you’re gonna get to partake of my hospitality, so I suggest you step aboard. Doors close in five... four... three... two...”

  Lex hopped inside just as the doors closed. Regardless of who this guy was, or where this bus was headed, it couldn’t possibly make his situation worse than it was now... Could it?

  Chapter 7

  The inside of the bus was as typical as the outside. Row after row of uncomfortable seats, windows that could barely open, and upholstery the color of mulch and chewed gum. The only significant difference was the lack of a driver in the driver’s seat. Automated cars weren’t outside the norm, these days, but they still stuck a driver in the school buses to supervise things. This one was puttering along all by its lonesome. He stacked the two cases he’d rescued on the seat beside him, elevated his injured leg, and leaned back to watch the scenery. As he did, he raised an eyebrow. Evidently there was one other difference between this bus and the standard one. The speed.

  It may have looked like an old jalopy on its last legs, but the scenery was zipping by like he was in a top of the line speedster. The ride should have been a nightmare of bumps and jostles, too. The old hover buses weren’t meant for off-roading, so they stayed pretty tightly coupled to the ground. With road surface that looked like the global pothole preserve, his teeth should have rattled loose by now. That meant someone had stuck an inertial inhibitor in this sucker, too. Lex had half a mind to take control of it to see how well it handled, but when he craned his neck to check out the driver’s seat, he found that there were no controls to speak of. Just as well. He wasn’t one hundred percent recovered, brain-wise. Getting behind the controls of an unfamiliar piece of equipment wasn’t a great idea.

  Instead, he just watched the landscape go by. In almost every direction there was nothing but more meteor-battered landscape. A bright red or white streak would drift down from time to time, kicking up a huge dust plume. Ahead of the bus, though, a cluster of three low complexes was approaching over the horizon. The craters were steadily increasing in density as they got closer, until finally, about two miles away, they stopped completely. A perfect ring of flawless gravel surrounded the buildings, which were clearly the destination.

  There wasn’t anything remarkable about them. They had the minimalist, boxy sort of architecture that industry and the military tended to favor. Simple, quick to build, easy to maintain. They were identical, about a dozen stories tall, maybe a few city blocks wide, and about a quarter mile long. They were arranged in a radial pattern around a massive circular landing pad, easily a half mile in diameter. Lining the roof of each building was the customary array of antennae and satellite dishes, along with a few rows of some sort of long, thin, articulated cylinder. They looked like telescopes, but it didn’t make sense that there would be so many, and that they would be so big. While he pondered them, three suddenly repositioned, pointing at the same point, somewhere high in the sky. Then there was a flair of light, just for an instant, leading from the end each cylinder off into the sky. They were lasers, the light had been caused by the beams vaporizing whatever dust had been floating in their way.

  So his host was the sort of person who kept a battery of lasers and fired them randomly in the air. That wasn’t a good sign.

  The bus slowed to a stop in front of the doorway of one of the three buildings. The door was in the center of the wall that faced the landing pad, and beside it the word “Lab” had been crudely spray-painted. The doors opened, letting in the icy air.

  “End of the line. I was in the lab when I recorded this. I’m probably still there now. Busy. Just follow the green lights, but don’t bug me unless I’m done,” the recorded voice buzzed across the PA speakers.

  Lex grabbed his things and limped down the steps of the bus. Once he was out, the door snapped shut and the bizarre vehicle whisked off toward one of the other buildings. The injured pilot eyed “Lab” warily. He wasn’t terribly confident in the wisdom of entering a strange building on a strange planet after a surreal trip, but the alternative was sitting outside until the cold became lethal. He shrugged and stepped up to the door.

  “Greetings, unknown person. You are new to this facility, please answer a few short questions before entry,” said a female voice, or rather, several of them.

  The speaker next to the door was clearly part of an automated system, but it had the characteristic screwed-up inflection and awkward pauses of a message assembled by slicing the words out of other messages. It sounded like the words had been sampled from announcements from at least three different people, all women.

  “Please state your name.”

  “Uh... Lex.”

  “It sounded like you said... Alex... Is that right?”

  “No. Alexander. Trevor Alexander.”

  “It sounded like you said... AlexanderTrevorAlexander,” it droned, pronouncing the full name as one word and without pauses. The name was spoken in a fourth, clearly synthetic attempt at a female voice, “Is that right?”

  “No. Trevor Alexander,” he groaned through clenched teeth.

  “It sounded like you said... Trevor Alexander... Is that-”

  “Yes.”

  “Thank you, now please-”

  “Listen, can I talk to a real person? Or at least a better computer?”

  “Processing. I’m sorry, but the real person is busy doing very important things. And insulting the computer is not going to win you any friends,” the voices said, somehow managing to sound petulant despite the comment being assembled from unrelated ones.

  “Uh...”

  The doors of the lab slid open and a green stripe illuminated along the wall of the hallway within.

  “Please follow the green lights to workshop F. And you are officially on my S-list, Mr. Alexander.”

  Lex stood at the door, opening and closing his mouth as he tried to put his confusion to words. Finally, he shrugged.

  “Why would things start making sense now?” he muttered.

  After a single step past the threshold, it felt as though someone had dropped a load of sandbags on top of him. He staggered and leaned heavily on the wall to keep his injured leg from collapsing. A second later the doors hissed shut behind him and nozzles doused him liberally with a fluid that stung viciously, but evaporated almost instantly. The shock and awe of the assault left him dazed for a moment.

  “Please brace yourself for artificial gravity and decontamination. Thank you,” the computer said.

  After he st
raightened up and shook away the notion that the computer had done that on purpose, he looked over the entryway. The inside of the building was as institutional as the outside, and extremely old. The lighting was provided by overhead hanging banks of bulbs, and it was the sickly yellow of fluorescent instead of the cool blue of LED. The floor was some sort of rugged plastic material, scuffed and marred with use and faded with age. Walls, ceiling, and floor were all one shade or another of neutral blue. Identical metal doors and large, reinforced glass view windows lined the walls on either side. The rooms were all filled with various tools and disassembled machinery on work tables, but there was no sign of people in any of them. In fact, there was no sign of people, period. No one walked the halls. There was no sound of conversation. Nothing but his own footsteps, the echoing growl of power tools somewhere further down the hall, and a pulsing green strip that traced along the tops of the doorways. It led to a workshop near a bank of industrial elevators. Inside was the source of the noise.

  Splayed out on the work table inside was a carefully arranged layout of parts and tools. A hydraulic jack held what was certainly a piece of an engine, but Lex couldn’t quite identify it. Whatever it was, there were lots of pipes, lots of tubes, and it appeared to be running, as the whole jack was humming and vibrating along with it. Working on the mystery component was a man in blue coveralls. He was focused intently on his task, his back to the door, and if he had noticed Lex’s arrival, he hadn’t acknowledged it. When Lex approached the door, it hissed open. He still didn’t turn, reaching awkwardly across the table instead.

  “Uh, hello. Are you the guy in-”

  “Gimme that auto-spanner.”

  “O...K?”

  Lex sidled painfully into the room and found the appropriate tool, handing it over.

  The mechanic silently accepted it and went back to work.

  “I recognize your voice. You were the one who was yelling at me when I was in the junk cloud. And you sent the bus. My name’s-”

  “In a minute. Gotta bleed this valve. Very important.”

  “What is that, a plasma manifold? You can’t bleed a valve on one when it’s running.”

  “Sure you can, you just need to time it right. See, watch.”

  Lex took a cautious step back as his mystery host started loosening fittings. The hunk of machinery started to stutter and vibrate, prompting the downed pilot to strap his helmet back on.

  “See, you just twist here, three quarters of a turn. Wait for that to actuate, then loosen and-”

  There was a short, sharp hiss. The room filled with a powerful scent of heat, ozone, and char, and the wall and ceiling received a spritzing of blood. Something pinged off of Lex’s helmet and bounced across the room.

  “Son of a- !” the mechanic barked in pain, clutching his left hand to his chest as he gingerly re-tightened a fitting with his right. “Forgot I changed the sequence.”

  “Oh God! Are you okay?”

  “Nope, nope. No, I lost some fingers,” he said quickly, holding up the afflicted hand.

  It looked like he had tried to palm a grenade. There was blood seeping down his arm, and if there were any fingers left at all, Lex couldn’t tell them from the rest of the mangled mess that remained of his hand.

  “Give me a hand, would you?”

  “Yeah! Yeah sure, of course! Oh, God. What do I do!?” Lex replied, panicked.

  “I just told you. Give me a hand. They’re in that box over there.”

  “Wh-what?”

  “Never mind. Frickin’ useless. Just look around for the fingers then. I used to have five. See if you can find two or three. I saw one go that way,” he added, gesturing with the ruined nub, “And another over there.”

  Lex threw down his packages and tore off his helmet. Amid protests from his ailing leg, he dropped to his hands and knees and started searching for the missing digits. He found a thumb under the edge of a cabinet, and two more fingers near the door. He took a few more frantic glances, found nothing, and decided speed was better than thoroughness. The mangled mechanic was on the opposite side of the room now, flipping open the top of a large plastic crate. Lex hurried over.

  “I couldn’t find the rest! What do I do with these, put them in ice or something?!”

  “Hmm? Oh, no. Just put them on that table there.”

  There wasn’t any pain in the man’s voice or features anymore. In fact, he almost seemed bored, rolling up the tattered sleeve to grasp his forearm and, with a few clicks and twists... remove the whole arm at the shoulder. He pulled a bin on the floor out with his foot and dropped the ruined arm inside. There were at least two other similarly chewed up appendages already in there. Then, from the freshly opened crate, he pulled a new arm.

  “Hold that,” he said, thrusting it at Lex, “And follow me.”

  Lex took the limb without thinking. Anger, disgust, confusion, and panic were all actively campaigning for time on his face. Confusion won. He stuttered and sputtered, trying to find the right words to adequately object to the situation, but his mind was not yet ready to be coherent. Meanwhile the mechanic rummaged through a drawer with his remaining arm until he found a pair of shears. He then cut the bloody sleeve off, revealing a complicated looking metal socket where his shoulder should be. Wordlessly, he took the arm from Lex, lined it up with the socket, and connected it.

  “There, that’s that done,” he said, life quickly returning to the limb, and the appropriate color beginning to fade into its pale flesh. He brushed himself off, swept the fingers from the table into his pocket, and proclaimed, “Who’s hungry?”

  Chapter 8

  The pair had made it to the mess hall, just a few doors down, before Lex managed to kick his brain into gear.

  “What just happened?” he asked.

  “Well, I was trying to hot-bleed a custom plasma manifold valve on a Class A power module and I forgot I went with the 3-6-3 sequence instead of the 2-4-3,” he said, matter-of-factly, while grabbing a tray and pushing it along the counter.

  “And you blew your hand off.”

  “Well, I blew my fingers off, anyway. It happens all the time. Hence all of the spares.”

  “Spares. So it’s prosthetic.”

  “I prefer cybernetic.”

  Lex nodded. After the crash, the strange bus, and the adventure in lost body parts, this cafeteria was the first halfway normal thing he’d had to deal with. Admittedly, the place was utterly deserted, but there was a counter with covered warming trays, and there were tables and chairs. That made sense. He took a tray, threw a plate and some silverware on it, and started pushing it along after his host. Now that he wasn’t coping with a life threatening situation or an acid trip, his brain was willing to spend some time processing things. It started with the mechanic. He was one of those men who was hard to pin to a certain age. From the looks of him, he could have been anywhere from a worn out thirty to a baby-faced sixty. His voice had a generic urban quality, sloppy and a little hollow. Build-wise he was a little pudgy, but irregularly so. He had a slight paunch that didn’t so much seem to be the result of overeating or laziness, but the kind of belly that accumulates like sediment over the years. He was maybe two inches shorter than Lex. His hair was salt and pepper black... but that’s where things started getting unusual. A swath of his hair along the right side of his head looked wrong. It wasn’t as fine as the rest, and was much shinier, like a doll’s hair. Most of his skin was blotchy and pitted with neglect, but there were patches here and there that were baby smooth. Strangest, though, were his eyes. The left one was hazel, but the other was silver. That’s not to say a fancy shade of gray. The whites were white, but the iris was actual, mirror finish chrome.

  “Are you a human being or... what?” Lex asked.

  “Karteroketraskin.”

  “Is that your...”

  “Name. It’s my name. It’s been a while since I’ve had to deal with the whole social interaction garbage, but I’m pretty sure you were supposed to ask me my na
me.”

  “Oh, right. I’m-”

  “Trevor Alexander. I know. You did the entry interview at the door. Good job pissing off the computer, by the way. I’m going to have to deal with that, now.”

  “Okay. Well that’s introductions out of the way. So... Are you a human or what?”

  His host began to answer. As he did, he pulled the tops from steam trays and shoveled food directly onto his tray. He hadn’t bothered to get a plate.

  “Accurately answering that question is a non-trivial exercise in statistics, anatomy, physiology, and philosophy. As of my last medical scan, the standings are as follows: Thirty-nine percent original equipment, thirty-five percent aftermarket parts, and twenty-four percent synthetic organics.”

  “… That’s only ninety-eight percent.”

  “I’ve got some bits on back order. So, the majority of my body is not human, but the plurality of it is, and that’s good enough to win an election, so I’m going with human.”

  The mechanic finished piling up his tray, which now had a few pounds of red beans and rice and three burritos on it. After grabbing an extra burrito and tossing it into the pocket of his coveralls for some reason, he reached into a tray of ice and pulled out a can of some sort of soft drink. After checking a series of the steam trays and discovering that burritos, beans, and rice were the only things available, Lex helped himself.

  “Where do we pay for this stuff?”

  “Just eat. This is the smallest amount I can get the automated system to pump out.”

  “Oh, okay. Thanks. So what do you do here, Ketraskin?”

  He answered with his mouth full, spraying rice irregularly, “Build stuff. Fix stuff. Blow stuff up. Various permutations of those concepts. Why the hell did you call me Ketraskin?”

  “You don’t like people calling you by your last name?”

  “Last name’s fine. You’re calling me by the last half my first name.”

  “Your FIRST name is Karteroketraskin?”

  “Yup. My full name is Karteroketraskin Onaserioriendi Dee.”