Othella (Arcadian Heights)

by Therin Knite

  When I crouch next to her, she attempts to lash out. Her floppy hand, dangling by a few wires, slaps my injured thigh, and I hiss as a slow burn crawls up my abdomen. I grab the ruined hand and rip it off, tossing it aside.

  The droids don’t feel pain, but my action inspires in Salt a new wave of fury. It pools in her eyes, and it’s like she nails a homing beacon to my sternum, the way her gaze follows—almost predicts—my every move. I get the feeling that if she could, she’d break into a military system and shoot a nuke at my ass. To this woman who should be a docile robot, I’m worth less than dust.

  She says nothing as the patrolmen drag her busted body across the war-torn floor. They lift her up onto a waiting gurney, strap her in, and head for the elevator. They’re taking her to the transfer room, where Howard will tinker with her day and night, searching for what could be an error in a single line of code.

  Howard’s voice emerges from hidden speakers in the wall to my left. "Don’t worry, Quentin. I’ll start working on her right away. If all goes well, she’ll be good as new by the end of the week."

  "Howard..."

  "Hm?"

  "Be careful, will you?"

  "Huh?"

  "Around that woman. Be careful."

  "Sure. But really, there’s nothing to fear. Her main systems will be dormant for most of the process. She won’t be able to do anything else to the community. Promise."

  "I wasn’t talking about the community. I was talking about you."

  "I don’t..." His voice fades to an uncertain whisper. "What do you mean?"

  I flick a piece of plaster off my sleeve and sigh. "Never mind. You’re right. Everything will surely work out in the end."

  5

  Marco

  ( 4 Years Ago )

  The gun slips out of my fingers and bounces across the peeling porch floorboards.

  I tumble forward, and Reggie leaps into action. He wraps his arms around my waist and helps me back inside. To the leather couch in the too-bright living room where I have to keep my eyes shut or risk my brain boiling. Reggie backtracks to the porch to retrieve the gun, which he sets on the side table in the hallway. Then I hear him stomp off into the kitchen, run the sink for a minute, and return to my side. He stoops over me and blankets my eyes and forehead with a cold, wet dishtowel.

  "Ah, thank you," I manage to whisper.

  "Migraine still going strong, I take it?"

  "Sorry."

  "Don’t apologize."

  "I could have killed you."

  "You didn’t." Reggie’s voice is soothing, but a muted hiss slithers through his teeth when he begins to inspect my mangled hand. "What happened?"

  "Mirror."

  "You punched it?"

  "Yep."

  "Why?"

  "Angry. It won’t leave me alone, Reggie."

  Reggie huffs and retreats again. It sounds like he enters my bedroom and stops to look around. He reemerges a few minutes later with what I realize is the first aid kit from my bathroom. Reggie remembered where it was, and I didn’t.

  I let the man do his work—clean and dress the wound—while I stew in self-loathing.

  "You should try cutting yourself off, Marco. From the tech, I mean. I’ve got guys searching, you know? My best guys. They’re going to find the sender, and then I’m going to beat the shit out of the bastard for doing this to you. Until then, take it easy, okay? Go vacation in the Keys or something, like you told the Board you were doing. No tech. Just you and the beach."

  "Too much sun. It hurts." Reggie hasn’t mentioned this taskforce before. How long has it been in the works? How long have they failed to track down the sender of one repeating message? Four words. "It always hurts, Reggie. I can’t make it stop."

  "It’s stress induced, Marco. You need to stop worrying yourself sick over this. Clarissa is fine."

  "How can you be sure?"

  And there it is, the crux of the issue. Doubt. No matter how many times I say to myself what is more than likely the truth. No matter how many times I drink it slow like good wine. No matter how many times I rewrite it and retype it and repeat it aloud, I can’t bring myself to eradicate the doubt.

  What if my daughter is in danger?

  The great Marco Salt, conquered by four words.

  Reggie growls. "I’m going to prove it to you. I’m going to find the sender, and I’m going to bring the hammer down on him. And I’m going to drag his quivering, shit-stained carcass in front of you, shove his sullied soul back into its throat, and make what’s left of him uselessly beg for forgiveness until his voice is an empty rasp." He taps my shoulder with something made of soft plastic. The tablet. "No more of this invalid crap, Marco. Your tech is going in the trash, and you’re taking a break. A real one."

  "What about South Sydian?" I peel the cloth away from my eyes and dare to peek at Reggie. His face is contorted with the desire to harm. I’ve fallen into madness, and Reggie has fallen into rage. What a chilling world this has become. Over four words.

  "Fuck South Sydian. This is about your health, Marco. Your life. We can have someone step in for you. How about Lisa? She’s plenty capable."

  I let a light laugh bubble up from my chest. "Lisa the secretary, CEO of South Sydian Incorporated."

  "I’m not kidding, Marco. I already asked her, and she agreed. The Board meets tomorrow to approve it, and they’re going to."

  "So I’m being tossed out?"

  "No. You’re being given an out. And it’s one you need, and you’re damn well going to use it."

  I move to drag the cloth over my eyes again, but something catches my attention. The tablet screen is lit. I have a message. And since Reggie is holding the tablet by a corner, the unfolded screen displays the full information about the new arrival. The sender is blocked.

  Three messages in one day.

  Never.

  I sit up abruptly and tear the tablet out of Reggie’s hand, opening the message before his good intentions can stop me.

  This is Arcadian Heights, it reads.

  And there’s a folder attached. The file size indicates a substantial amount of data resides within it.

  I double tap the folder.

  Then I scream.

  ... [ Chapter Four ] ...

  1

  Georgette

  ( 1 Week Ago )

  Adele Marks is twenty-five and going on dead. At least, she is if she enters Arcadian Heights. To dissuade her, I arrive at her Cleveland home one bright, cold day in March wearing my funeral best. Complete with shiny black pumps. A doorbell is rung, a white glove removed, and I rearrange my face to project a life-saving tone instead of a life-ruining one.

  So when Adele appears in the doorway, hair damp, eyes bewildered, there’s no immediate apprehension. No slamming doors in faces. No running for her life. She sees only another young woman who looks somewhat like herself—about five grades higher on the beauty scale, to be precise.

  "May I come in, Dr. Marks?" I tap my heels against the stone front step.

  Adele pouts. "Have we met?" There’s a brief flare of recognition. "Oh! I know you. You’re that reporter." She sounds like a toddler lost in a mall. Sweet, innocent, and stable as a fault line.

  Well. I’m about to cause a complete mental breakdown.

  "Yes, I am that journalist. May I come in for a brief chat?"

  "Are you doing a story?" The woman runs her fingers through her limp locks, self-conscious. "This isn’t a good time for me."

  There will be no more good times for you, honey, if you don’t let me in. "It’s not a story. It’s more important than that."

  Adele cocks her head to the side, a worried pout now a wary frown. "What could be more important than that to a reporter?"

  Dear all the dead gods, I have to pretend to be this imbecile.

  "First, Dr. Marks, I’m an investigative journalist, not a reporter." I place a firm hand against Adele’s front door. My nails bite at a too-thick coat of paint, and the young geneticist parts he
r lips, fear escaping with a helium-pitched whine. "Second, this is a matter of life and death. Specifically, your death. So if you want to avoid that, let me in."

  Five minutes later, I’m seated on a worn couch cushion in a living room that appears to belong to a septuagenarian. Adele’s hands shake as she offers me a cup of iced tea, which is accepted and sipped on while Adele staggers to a gaudy violet loveseat on the other side of the coffee table.

  I remove a plastic folder from my purse and set it on the table between us. "You’re going to be invited to join Arcadian Heights."

  Adele’s eyes bug out. "Really?" Sad mall orphan to kid in a candy store in two-point-four seconds. I want to barf. All over her ugly yellow shirt.

  "Yes. Really. But you won’t be going."

  The woman starts to rise, her cheeks reddening. "Who do you think you—?"

  I tuck a nail underneath one flap of the folder and flip it over, revealing the photographs inside. Adele’s gaze drops, and the color drains from her face. The picture on top of the stack is of Martina Gomez, a botanist Adele worked with on several occasions during her PhD years at UCLA. Martina is a body in the picture on the coffee table. One of many lifeless faces I’ve memorized in great detail.

  Adele’s trembling hands shoot up to her mouth, and she cries out, toppling backward onto the loveseat. "What in God’s name? What happened to her?"

  "The same thing that happens to all the recruits: she died."

  "All?" Adele’s hands slide across her face and grip her hair so tight a few hundred strands rip free. "I don’t understand. All of them die? Why?"

  "That’s what I intend to find out. By taking your place in the recruitment."

  She sits immobile for twenty-eight seconds, stops breathing, turns blue, and faints.

  Her head smacks the corner of the coffee table.

  Ouch. That’s going to leave a mark.

  2

  Quentin

  ( 3 Years Ago )

  Every square inch of my body aches. Tingles in the way small needles pierce the skin. Like someone dropped me into a pit of scorpions and left me there to suffer. But I’m in no pit. I’m on the floor, a cold, tiled ground tilting back and forth on a gentle sea. Or maybe the tilting is my imagination. I can’t see straight either.

  There’s an absence of memory where something important should be, and I try to locate it. Why am I here on this pesky floor, injured in some fashion?

  I rewind through my morning and start at the beginning. Attempt to retrace my steps.

  I’m in my office at eight-oh-two, reading this month’s global insurgency reports as Howard prattles on about the latest defense grid upgrade. I didn’t know the grid needed an upgrade, but Howard is insistent. There’s an edge of paranoia on his voice.

  "You must understand, Quentin." His digital face moves from side to side on the window. He’s pacing. "The Salt incident is a clear indicator that the system is vulnerable. It is not perfect. We need to be more vigilant, more hardnosed about our breach countermeasures. I have fixed the hole in the firewall Salt used to send her messages, but that does not mean we should sit idle and self-assured. The recipient of the folder could come for us at any time."

  "The recipient of the folder was more likely than not Salt’s father, who, rumor has it, suffered a mental breakdown last year. I doubt he’ll be coming for us any time soon, and if he does, it certainly won’t be with an army. Everyone thinks he’s mentally ill, and his own best friend has him holed up in some backwoods Florida neighborhood. Plus, we’ve got a tail on him. If he moves against us, we’ll eliminate him. Simple as that."

  I flip through the insurgency reports until I reach North America’s. The header claims a fifty-eight percent increase in domestic terrorist attacks over the past six months alone. I recall the original predictions from the Whittaker Report—two percent off. Astounding accuracy, given it was written four decades ago.

  "I am serious, Quentin."

  "I am also serious, Howard." I sip my steaming coffee and grimace. Damn. I added too much sugar today. "And why aren’t you using contractions? You sound like a toy store robot."

  "What do you—oh." Howard’s face pauses in the middle of the window, his mouth skewed down at one end. "Sorry about that. I hadn’t realized. For some reason, I turned that section of my verbal programming off. Must have done it during my debugging run last night. Easier to concentrate when there are fewer routines to worry about."

  I sit my cup on my desk and exit the reports. "Do you regularly do that? Shut parts of yourself off?"

  "No. It’s only necessary on rare occasions. Why do you ask?" His face moves closer to my desk.

  "It’s just..." I scratch my beard. It needs a trim. "You’ve been acting paranoid since Salt’s incursion. Beefing up the patrolman count. And now you’re upgrading the grid. You’re deviating from the defense measures laid out in the community plan, and up until now, you haven’t deviated from anything in the community plan. I’m worried about you. About your state of mind. Salt shook you badly." I reach for my cup again. "You need to remember that she was an anomaly, not some new, dangerous standard. You know that, right?"

  His face grows pensive. "I’m aware. But there may be more than one anomaly in any group, Quentin. I don’t want to be caught unaware again. Not to mention the repercussions of Salt’s actions have yet to be realized. Even if her ill father was the recipient, there’s no telling what consequences those images may have in the long run. If they’re released onto the net, the scrutiny that falls on us could be damning. At the very least, the Anti-Heights movement will grow. At the worst, the White House will begin to doubt us, even if we come up with a believable defense."

  "I understand your concern, but you let me worry about that, okay? My task is controlling our relations with the outside world, remember? Let me do my job."

  "I will." A security camera feed appears on the window to the right of Howard’s face. "As long as you let me do mine in peace." It’s the transfer room feed. Clarissa Salt’s mangled droid body rests on a table in the center, face down. The back of her metal skull has been detached, revealing the semi-liquid neural replication system Howard designed years ago. There’s a slot near the base of her skull where her "mind chip" should be. Instead, the square piece of plastic lies on a tray next to the table. Howard is running scans on it even now.

  I force the rest of my too-sweet coffee down my throat. "Howard, it’s not that I have anything against you performing your duties as the head of this community. But for God’s sake, man, you’ve been working on her for a year. Can’t you let it go?"

  Howard’s eyes slide closed. "No, I can’t. Don’t you get it? I haven’t been able to find the error in her programming. I’ve combed through every single line thousands of times. It should be there. A virus or an obviously mistyped command. Something. The fact that I can’t figure out what’s wrong with her...Quentin, that’s a problem. Because what if it’s not just her? What if she’s not the only anomaly? What if there’s some cleverly masked, dormant issue in a hundred droids, and some innocuous activity triggers it? We could have a full-scale mutiny on our hands."

  "Now you’re being melodramatic."

  "I’ve run the numbers. There’s a two percent chance that will happen."

  "Oh, dear Lord. Two percent. Call in the cavalry."

  His cheeks color. "Please. Take this seriously. For the benefit of the mission if nothing else. Do you really want to risk the future of the human race by sweeping this under the rug because it’s inconvenient?"

  I stare at the wall opposite the window, refusing to meet Howard’s steady gaze. "No, I don’t want to risk anything. Including your wellbeing. Don’t let that rebellious bitch consume you. She’s not—"

  A call window pops up on my leftmost workstation screen. The information bar identifies the caller as Marco Salt. "Oh. Will you look at that? It’s your paranoia calling, Howard."

  3

  Marco

  ( 3 Years Ago )

&nb
sp; The first mistake is calling Q. The second is not running fast enough.

  I press my forehead against the windowpane and listen to my flex tablet dial. It’s a number I’ve called many times before but never in this context. To negotiate contract prices. To alter terms. To ask for updates. Q is the go-to man for all things Arcadian Heights. Until last year, I had no qualms with our dealings. Then I opened a folder with a picture of Clarissa’s body in it. Can’t think of a better way to obliterate every ounce of goodwill in a business relationship.

  Reggie doesn’t know I’m calling Q. Reggie, who remains convinced this is all a cruel prank. To destroy me. To destroy South Sydian. A devious plot by one of its competitors.

  I’m not that optimistic. And it’s funny—because it used to be the other way around. I used to be the guy convinced a unicorn-and-rainbow future was on the horizon. Reggie was the worry wart. When did that change?

  Q answers. His face appears on the wrinkled tablet I left sitting in the rain last week. I lose track of things now. I wake up in the morning and forget where I am—New York is so far away. The towering skyscrapers have been replaced with sand and surf and silent nights. "Relaxing," they call it.

  "Marco Salt? Is that you?" Q searches for me through the camera, but I’m out of range. The tablet is on my desk. A desk devoid of paperwork and blueprints and all things tech related. The whole house is tech free. Reggie ensured that. No TV. No radio. Not even a game console.

  I’m supposed to take my tranquilizers, sit in the sunshine, and read a book. Every day for an indeterminate period of time. Until I show some unspecified signs of "improvement."

  If Reggie finds out I smuggled in a flex tablet, he’ll be pissed. Good thing I don’t plan on telling him.

  "Mr. Salt?"

  "I’m here." I breathe hot air against the windowpane, fogging it up. A cool morning in a warm state.

  "What can I do for you? I heard you were on leave. Illness or something?"