Render

by K A Riley

  Granden puts his hand on my shoulder. “Kress, your father lived to fight evil. Mine lives to spread it.”

  26

  “Your father is…?”

  “President Krug. Yes.”

  “That’s why Granden was assigned to the Processor,” Wisp tells us. “Apparently, you were the most promising of all the Seventeens in the three different towns currently under lockdown.”

  “Three?” I ask.

  “Three so far,” Granden responds. “There are more planned. Not just here either but in other parts of the world as well.”

  “Here,” Wisp says as she stands up from her seat on the couch. “We’ve been talking for a long time. Let us show you what we mean. We have an entire room just down the hall we call ‘Intel Central.’ It’s where we work to uncover everything Krug doesn’t want anyone to find out. Follow me.”

  Wisp stands up and invites the rest of us to do the same. I thought getting some answers would make me feel lighter somehow, more liberated. Turns out it’s the opposite. My legs feel tired and sore. My head is throbbing and spinning at the same time. I can’t focus or figure out if I should be angry about the past or worried about the future. Brohn must be going through something similar because he lets out an aching groan as he stands and begins to walk toward the door with everyone else. Rain follows just behind him. Cardyn and Manthy bring up the rear.

  Wisp and Granden lead all of us out of the room and down the hall. “It’s so good to see you all,” Wisp beams as we walk along the dark corridor. “Just having you here…it’s all I’ve dreamed about for ages.”

  “Us, too,” Brohn exclaims.

  Walking up next to me, Manthy mumbles that her head is hurting again.

  “Can you give me a second?” I ask Wisp. She looks from me to Manthy and nods her understanding.

  “I’m okay,” Manthy insists, although her fingertips pressed to her temple say otherwise.

  “It’s happening when she gets around digi-tech,” Cardyn observes.

  “This room where you’re taking us,” Brohn asks, “any chance it’s tech-heavy?”

  “Unfortunately,” Wisp says, “it’s about as high-tech as we get.” Her voice is soft and oddly matronly for a teenage girl and leader of an underground resistance movement. She asks Manthy if she would rather wait back in the other room. “I can call down one of the Insubordinates to stay with you in the lounge and keep you company.”

  “No thank you,” Manthy says with a slow shake of her head. “I just needed a second to get used to it.”

  “It’s like waves in her brain,” I explain to Wisp. “This connection she has. It takes some getting used to.”

  “I can’t say I completely understand,” Wisp says with bright eyes and a sympathetic smile. “But I’m looking forward to talking with you more about it.”

  “Are you sure about going in?” I ask Manthy.

  She nods and slips her hand into mine, and we follow Wisp into the room. Unlike the first room with its comfy couches and chairs and mostly open space, this one is filled wall to wall and ceiling to ceiling with holo-monitors, viz-screens, mag-pads, and a whole bank of holographic input panels floating above a long glass console. The darkness of the windowless room is pierced by the hazy glow of the shifting images on the semi-circle of spherical monitors floating around a person sitting in a hover-chair facing away from us. The person is busy fiddling with some of the floating screens, spinning the glass basketball-sized monitors, and watching images zip through the air and pass from screen to screen.

  “So this is Intel Central,” Wisp says with a wave of her hand. Her voice is laced with pride. “Thanks to Mr. Granden and Olivia here, we have some of the most sophisticated civilian-level tech available with eyes in a lot of places. We’re doing our best to watch the watchers.”

  “Olivia?” Brohn asks.

  “Oh. Of course. You haven’t met Olivia yet. She’s a Modified.”

  “Not one of those people from downstairs?” Cardyn whispers to Wisp from behind his hand.

  Wisp puts a finger to her temple. “No. She’s one of the rare ones who didn’t go completely…you know. Here. I’ll introduce you.”

  Wisp taps the person on the shoulder. The woman who spins around in the floating chair barely looks human. Her scarred and angular face hosts a network of embedded circuitry with small gold microchips protruding in a neat row along her jawline. She has the strangest eyes, pixilated black and white like round chessboards. Her bald head is dotted with a half-dozen silver patches shaped like distorted puzzle pieces. Her round, legless torso ends in a band of silver and blue lights that seems to connect her to the hovering chair. What’s left of her body is packed into a shiny black compression top with white markings, not that much different than my tattoos, woven into its surface. It’s a startling image. I’m not sure at first if it’s beautiful or horrifying.

  There’s no question about her voice, however. That’s hypnotic and as lovely as a song.

  “I’m Olivia,” she purrs with a sweet smile and just the slightest hint of something tinny and almost mechanical behind her resonant voice. “And yes,” she says to Cardyn, “I’m a Modified.” She looks at what must be our sea of stunned faces and laughs. “Don’t worry. I don’t bite. Often.”

  “You don’t bite at all,” Wisp laughs.

  Olivia swings her pixilated eyes down along her body and back to us. “I’ll spare you the embarrassment of asking. This all started out with a few implants here and there and a few more after a training accident,” she practically sings, her voice lilting as it comes at us in slightly echoing but gentle waves.

  “Olivia was part of the training crew for the Telemachus mission to Mars,” Granden explains.

  Olivia nods. “After the first round of surgeries, I could run half the tech at NASA and most of the appliances in my house with a few taps on my implants. But pretty soon, it wasn’t enough. I didn’t just want to control the tech. I wanted to be able to communicate with it. For real, I mean. Not just the illusion of communication we’ve gotten used to. Anyway, it turned into a kind of addiction. That, plus an unfortunate six months as a human lab-rat in the Deenays’ facilities back East, led to this.”

  She holds up her arms and shows us the bundles of fiber optic filaments where her hands and the ends of her forearms used to be. The thin colorful threads glisten and dance like jellyfish tendrils in the sharp light cast by the glass holo-monitors, info-spheres, and viz-screens around us.

  At Wisp’s request, Olivia spins back to the holo-displays and calls up the information Wisp promised to give us. The dozens of tendrils bursting from her forearms snake in and out of tiny ports in the arm of her hover-chair and on the bank of monitors around her.

  A floating, rotating 3-D map of the earth appears in vibrant greens, browns, and blues with three silver circles hovering over three spots on the schematic.

  “Can you enlarge it?” Wisp asks Olivia.

  She says, “No problem,” and, although she doesn’t move, the image zooms in close, over one of the three spinning silver circles to reveal eight cube-shaped buildings around a large green courtyard underneath.

  “I’m sure you recognize these,” Granden says.

  “Processors,” Manthy mutters.

  “Three towns. Three Processors. Three Halos,” Granden says simply, pointing one at a time to the three different spots overlaid on the slowly-spinning globe of light and color. “This one is in a small town south of Chicago. This one is just outside of Philadelphia. This one here you know well. It’s in the middle of a place called Fort Leonard Wood not too far from St. Louis, Missouri. This one is where we met and where I trained you for three months. There are other Processors planned for other towns currently on military lockdown near Madrid, Ankara, Beijing. The point is, you are either the start of a global system of recruitment and experimentation or else you’re going to help put an end to it. Once my father found out how potentially important some of you from the Valta were to his dream
of a global network of weaponized teenagers, he said he wanted me to oversee you personally. Insisted on it, actually. The truth is, he’s been getting more and more paranoid. More crazy, really. I was the only one he trusted. Or so he said. Sometimes I wonder if he suspected I might turn on him and so he sent me off with Hiller just to get me out of the way.”

  Rain slips her jacket off and ties it around her waist. “Does he know what happened? I mean about our escape and your helping us?”

  Granden shakes his head. “He thinks I’m dead. He was told I died during your attempted escape. There were some others working on the inside with me. They made sure my body was found, identified, brought back to Washington D.C., and given a proper burial fit for the son of the great President Krug.”

  “Wonderful,” Rain says. “So now the psychotic president of a corrupt government and figurehead of a bunch of mad scientists thinks we killed his son.”

  Granden chuckles and corrects Rain. “They’re mad geneticists, technically. And don’t worry. Krug thinks you died during the escape as well.”

  Rain slides her black hair back behind her ears and smooths it down with both hands, a sure sign she’s impatient and frustrated, bordering on angry. “So what do we do now? We’re outnumbered, and it sounds like most people who would be on our side don’t even know there’s a cause worth fighting for.”

  “That’s true, Rain. Olivia is our first step in surveillance and education. She’s been able to tap into certain communication networks. With her help, we’re hoping to gather as much of the truth as possible and then spread it around to as many people as are willing to listen. We’re hoping, this time, the virus that spreads will be one of truth instead of lies. If we can replace the illusion of the Eastern Order with the reality of Krug and the Patriot Party, we can get people to start fighting a real enemy instead of each other.”

  “To do this, eventually, we’re going to need to educate as many people as possible,” Wisp adds. “Knowledge. That’s the key to freedom. We’ll need to expose the lies and free the others like you who are still in those other operational Processors. There are as many as a dozen other Seventeens with abilities who are scattered throughout the two other existing Processors that Olivia has tracked down. Krug wants to turn those Seventeens into weapons. We can’t let that happen.”

  “You said, ‘eventually,’” I point out. “What do we do in the meantime?”

  “We do what anyone does in a fight. We fight.”

  “Fighting sounds more like an idea than an actual plan,” Brohn says to Wisp.

  “I agree.”

  “What do you propose?”

  “Well, first of all, we were hoping you’d find your way here.”

  “Which we did.”

  “Which you did. After that, we thought we might persuade you to help us, you know, save the world.”

  “Oh, is that all?” Cardyn chimes in. “No problem. After all, there are a whole five of us!”

  Granden, Wisp, and Olivia exchange a look and a laugh.

  Wisp steps forward. “Believe it or not and like it or not, you five may be our best hope at turning this thing around. The others look to me for leadership, which is fine. Being the Major, I can handle. But there’s no one here who can do what the five of you can do. Olivia can get us a certain amount of intel, but it’s limited, and the Patriots are learning how to secure their systems.”

  Cardyn sulks. “But only Kress, Manthy, and possibly Brohn have super powers.”

  Manthy punches Cardyn hard on the arm. “Getting headaches every time I walk by a computer isn’t a super power, Jerk.”

  “There may be more to all of you than you know,” Wisp says, and I swear I’m going to be blinded by the mysterious twinkle in her eye.

  “We do have a plan,” Granden assures us.

  Wisp gives a long look around the room. “We start here. In this very building. As you know, we’re taking care of the Modifieds downstairs. You met Sabine back in the Lounge where we were before. She used to be on the San Francisco city council until she objected too many times to the wrong people. Now she helps me coordinate logistics. This room, as you know, is Tech Central. The fourth floor just above us is sleeping quarters. With your help, we’re going to finish turning the entire top floor into a training facility.” As Wisp talks, Olivia is able to focus on and illuminate the corresponding parts of the holo-schematics on one the floating spheres around her. She zooms in from an overview of San Francisco down to a street view that shows the Style Building in chalky gray-scale with its top floor lit up in vibrant red.

  Wisp points to the third floor. “We’re here. In one week, there’s a control hand-off. The Patriot Army will be vulnerable.” She flicks her finger at three more spots on the map, these lit up in electric blue. If we hit them here, here, and here—that’s their Munitions Depot, their Communications Central, and their Command Headquarters—we can disrupt their entire chain of command, commandeer a good chunk of their weapons, sever their supply lines, and cut their ability to communicate with the outside. That gives us control of San Francisco.”

  “Then what?” Brohn asks.

  “We leave most of our people here while we put a special group together to go east. That group will pay a visit to each of the other Processors Olivia lit up for you. Chicago and Philadelphia. They’ll free the Recruits and then head to Washington D.C., where they’ll join up with the Insubordinates there, take down Krug, and free the nation.”

  “Wow,” Cardyn sighs. “That sounds like a really good plan. Just excellent. But things tend to get a bit more complicated when there’s an entire army dedicated to making sure excellent plans fail and we all end up dead.”

  “First of all,” Wisp says, “the Patriot Army isn’t the ‘entire army.’ It’s a faction under Krug’s control. If we can find the other Seventeens like you…”

  “You mean with abilities.”

  “Yes. If we can find more of you, we’ll have a chance.”

  “We’re ready,” Rain boasts. “We can do this. Granden knows what we’ve been through. He helped train us. He knows what we can do.”

  Wisp and Granden both nod, but it’s Wisp who finally speaks. “I don’t doubt what you can do or how much you can contribute to the cause. But there are only five of you. That’s hardly an army.”

  “But you said there were others. Other Insubordinates.”

  “There are. There are a couple hundred of us. But only about forty or fifty or so in this building at any given time. The rest of us are scattered around the city, hidden away in little pockets here and there. Some have managed to blend into the general population. No matter where they are, though, they lack training and leadership.”

  Card raises a hand timidly. “Then why don’t we train and lead them?”

  “Spoken like a true warrior,” Wisp says. “Exactly what I had in mind, myself.”

  “What do you suggest?” I ask.

  “I’ve been giving it some thought. It’s manageable if we break it down. Here. Rain and I will handle strategy. You and Manthy will team up with Olivia to handle surveillance. Along with Render, of course. We can do all that from this room. Brohn and Cardyn will get the top floor set up and head up the training.”

  “Training?” I ask.

  “You got drilled in all kinds of psychological tests and in armed and unarmed combat. The Insubordinates don’t have anywhere close to the experience you have. Brohn has the physical skills needed, and, from Granden tells me, Cardyn is good at communicating with people in a way they can easily understand. Granden is the perfect person to help coordinate it all,” Wisp says. “After all, he trained you. Who better than him to help you to train the others?”

  I look over to Granden who gives Wisp a squint and a slow half-hearted nod. “I had over three months with the Seventeens,” he says. “We have just under a week now. I’m not promising any miracles.”

  “I’m not praying for any,” Wisp says. “Just a little effort and some general competence.
We have the will and the resources. What we don’t have is time. In one week, our chances of pulling this off will go from slim to none.”

  Wisp thanks Olivia for her help and starts to head out of the room. “We start first thing in the morning. For now, time to get some sleep.”

  We say our goodbyes to Olivia and follow Wisp and Granden out the room, down the hall, and up a flight of stairs. At the top landing, Wisp takes us past a series of rooms. “These are our dorms. It’s where we sleep in between dodging the Patriot Army, gathering intel, and trying to stay alive just one day longer. I hate to pull you into this. I really do. If it’s any consolation, the beds are deceptively comfortable. Enjoy it while you can. Starting tomorrow, we’re going to be dealing with some pretty serious discomfort.”

  Wisp taps a small button on a bracelet on her wrist, and the door to the room swings open.

  27

  The beds are little more than low, white-sheeted and metal-framed army cots set up with military precision in a straight line against the near wall of the clean, high-ceilinged room. The far wall contains a tall dresser with two vertical doors and eight smaller drawers, a viz-screen of glimmering black glass, and a door-less entryway leading to a shower room decorated with a checkerboard pattern of white and yellow tiles. There’s just enough sun from the only window to give the room an angelic halo effect with beams of light from the rapidly-fading evening sun illuminating the tiny dancing particles of dust skittering around throughout the open space.

  “Anyway,” Wisp says with a sweep of her hand. “The rest of us are already set up in rooms along the hall. This room is all yours. Get some sleep. You’ve been through a lot.”

  “With a lot more to come,” Granden adds grimly.

  Wisp gives each of us a tight hug before leaving with Granden right behind her.

  The five of us stand in hushed awe of the room for a full minute and stare until Rain breaks the silence.

  “Beds!” she squeals as she dashes over to the nearest cot and hurls herself into it. The bed squeaks and sags as she lands. She bounces and rolls around, gathering the white sheets in a tangle around her until she’s little more than a soft cotton burrito with a beaming face and a head of long black hair splayed out in every direction.