by Natalie Reid
She tried to answer as best she could, trusting that her gut responses would naturally prove her humanity. However, the man’s last question caught her off guard.
“What are your feelings towards your father?”
Jessie stared at him in confusion, her eyes uncomfortably shifting to where Carver and Tom stood. There was something different about this question. It had nothing to do with proving her humanity. It was as if they were probing for information.
Clearing her throat, she stated, “I would prefer not to answer that question.”
The government man stared down his nose at her. “I’m afraid I must insist.”
She shifted in bed, wishing she could lift her head up higher. “I never knew my father. So how could I feel anything for him?”
“Is that how you truly feel?”
Jessie clenched her jaw and stared at the only part of the wall that wasn’t blocked with people. “Are we done?”
The man put his tablet away and let out a dissatisfied sigh. She didn’t know if it meant she failed or not, but there was obviously nothing he could do about it, not unless he had a Task Force squadron waiting just outside the door.
When the government man left, Tag gave a long talk, informing both her and Carver that Jessie would need to rest for several weeks and to be monitored for much longer after that. She was told of the uniqueness of her situation, how no one had survived wounds like hers, and that they would need to be extra careful with her to make sure that their break-through technology didn’t have adverse effects on her system.
Jessie remembered nodding at his words, trying to take them in as best she could, but so much was just colors and noises to her. The weird feeling of pain in her chest kept so much at bay. She didn’t really know how to feel until finally, the next day, they allowed visitors into her room.
Denneck had been in before, of course, but her hands shook in nervousness when he sat beside her bed and explained that Aaron and Trid were outside, waiting to see her. She nodded to give him the okay, but inside she felt the flood of emotions that the physical pain and disorientation had kept back. The first fear that crept in her mind was that Aaron would look at her differently for having done this to save him. She didn’t want to tie him down to some honor-bound sense of duty. She just wanted to be one of the team again.
When the door opened, her best friend Trid came bursting through. Denneck had to grab him from jumping on the bed and hugging her.
“She’s just had her chest torn to bits, you moron!” he scolded him.
Trid was the first friend she had ever made in the military, and that was just the kind of greeting she would have expected out of him on any day.
Trid gave her a lopsided grin, saying, “The second you get better, you’re in for it, Chance.”
She smiled up at him and managed to give him a laugh, feeling genuinely happy for the first time since her crash.
“I don’t see what’s so funny,” Aaron’s voice called out from the doorway. He stepped inside the room, stopping halfway between the door and her bed. “You nearly scare us half to death, and here you are, lying down and laughing!”
“Yeah, well, I had a friend that needed saving,” she said, catching his eyes.
Aaron took a step closer. “Next time just let me die,” he said, his voice barely breaking a whisper.
The air in the room grew heavy. Jessie didn’t know where to look or how to respond. Luckily her best friend was there to bail her out.
“No arguments here!” Trid joked, shrugging his shoulders nonchalantly.
Aaron came forward and cuffed him on the arm. He shook his head and threw Jessie a smile. It reminded her so much of the first time she had seen him. They had been out flying on a practice run. When they pulled into the same hangar and stepped out of their cockpits, Aaron had taken his helmet off and waved over to her. She didn’t know why this strange boy was saying hello to her, but somehow it made her feel good inside, like he was someone she was always supposed to meet, and so waving back to him was just the natural thing to do.
She didn’t learn his name until a few weeks later, when they were assigned to the same squadron. “I hear they call you Chance,” he had said when they shook hands in front of Denneck. “I’ve seen your numbers in the air a lot.” He had then lowered his voice, adding, “I’m glad you’re on my squad.”
Back on the recovery bed, Jessie tried to sit up. Denneck put a hand on her shoulder to stop her. “If you try that again, I’m going to send them away,” he warned.
Behind him the door opened, and Tom stepped through, holding his glasses in his hands. “Actually, she can try and sit up now if she likes.”
Trid and Aaron turned around to see who had come in, and Tom nodded briefly at them and looked away. “I’m sorry guys. I’ll need you to leave while I run some tests.”
“But we just got here!” Trid complained.
Tom looked up at him, a little startled and at a loss for what to say.
“Can’t you give us a little more time with her?” Aaron asked in a less confrontational voice. “I mean, we thought she was going to die, and we’ve had less than a minute to talk with her.”
“She’s not going anywhere,” Tom stated, as if it was really obvious.
Finally Denneck spoke up, saying, “Come on boys, you’d better let him take care of her. She isn’t out of the woods yet.”
He ushered the two young men out of the room, leaving Tom alone with her. Tom looked at his tablet for a few more seconds, and then went over to the screen monitoring her vitals. He studied the numbers and then swung in such a way so that he could walk to the cabinet in the corner without having to look at her.
“I’m not mad at you for having to do your job,” she told him.
He turned back around, carrying a blood pressure monitor in his hands.
“I’m sorry?” he asked, blinking.
“It’s just, you seem like you don’t want to face me.”
“Oh,” he said, nodding his head. Then, realizing what he was doing, he shook it, saying, “No, I wasn’t… I mean, I didn’t think you did.”
He walked over and carefully placed the compressor around her arm. Jessie winced at the contact, but Tom did not notice, as he was staring at the clock on her monitor.
She waited for him to finish his test and type a number into his tablet before saying, “It must have been scary, waiting for me to wake up.”
“What?” He caught her gaze for a second before looking back to the screen.
“Well, you thought I could have been a Bandit. That must have been a bit… nerve-wracking.”
He reached into his lab-coat pocket and pulled out a syringe. “Yeah, I guess.” He stuck the liquid into her IV and went to the corner of the room to throw away the needle.
Jessie tried to sit up in bed so she could be on a higher eye-level with him. “If I had been you, I’d probably still look at me a little warily. I mean, how can someone be a Bandit one second, and a person the next? You can’t just switch things so easily in your mind.”
Tom finally met her gaze, sea-blue meeting forest-green, and shook his head. “You were gone. As gone as I’ve ever seen a patient. And we pieced you together with synthetic tissue; we brought you back and just stitched you up. Just like that. Like death didn’t mean anything. My hands helped put something back in you that nature took away and nature was only supposed to give in the first place. So yeah, I feel a little weird around you.”
Jessie let her eyes drop at his confession. She looked to the door of her room. “You know, I was never supposed to be born,” she said. Her hands met together in front of her and she rubbed her thumb across a cut on her knuckles. “My mom wasn’t allowed to have kids. When she got pregnant, she was supposed to terminate me. Then when I evolved and needed my numbers, the government got a hold of me. They could have killed me then. And every time I go up in the sky in my fighter, every time I could be shot down and killed, or worse. I guess all I can say to you is t
hat, I’ll die when I’m supposed to die. And something is keeping me alive until then.” She looked up to find him staring at her, and added, “Even if that something includes a messy-haired scientist who carries around a pair of glasses he doesn’t need.”
Tom looked down at his left front pocket and regarded his glasses in there. “There’s a monitor built into the lens,” he explained. He lifted them from his pocket an inch, but put them back as if that was all he needed to explain his statement.
“They probably come in handy during dull meetings,” she commented with a smile.
Tom either did not understand the joke or did not feel like laughing, for he picked up his tablet once more and started typing into it. “Someone will come back later on today to check your vitals,” he explained without so much as a glance to her. “Then tomorrow we’ll do some more extensive testing to get a better look at how the synthetic tissue is holding up. But, that’s all for now.”
With that, he turned around and walked out the door, leaving Jessie feeling very much like she had offended him.
* * *
Kenji Thirty-eight-Fifty-two looked out of the kitchen window of the Ancient Ramen Restaurant. Government Task Force helicopters were circling around an apartment complex in the distance. To his right, a skillet of vegetables was cooking, and a pot of noodles was boiling on the stove. From the front room of the restaurant, a chair screeched against the wooden floor as a customer stood up.
Kenji turned down the heat on the stove and left the kitchen to watch as his customer headed out the door, giving him a kindly wave before walking down the street. He was about to turn away and head back into the kitchen, when he noticed that a young man in a green military uniform was coming up the street towards his restaurant. A smile began to spread on Kenji’s face as he recognized the mop of blonde hair and youthful brown eyes.
Running out to meet him, he exclaimed, “Aaron! You didn’t tell me you were coming!”
Aaron smiled feebly and gave his old guardian a brief hug before following him inside. “I didn’t know I was coming until just a little while ago,” he admitted, taking a seat at a table near the entrance. He reached across to clap Kenji on the arm. “Sorry I haven’t been to visit for a while.”
Kenji waved off his apology. “I know how it is with the military. You forget; I was once in your position. You’re so cut off from Aero City that there’s no real incentive to come down, especially not with Ward’s agents running around all over the place.”
He gave a tired nod in agreement and rubbed at a dark circle under his eye.
“Is something wrong?” Kenji asked.
The young man leaned back in his chair and ran his hands down his face. “Not anymore…at least, I hope not.”
“Did someone in your squadron get hit?”
Aaron slumped forward and let his head bobble up and down to form a nod. His hand lifted up from his lap and rested on the table. In the center of the wood, two lines had been carved, one smaller and one bigger, intersecting so that they formed what looked like a small “t”. Aaron absently began tracing it with his finger.
Kenji watched him in silence for a few moments, remembering how many times he would see him do that as a boy. Whenever something was troubling him, whether he was remembering what happened to his mother or getting over some disappointment or another, he would sit at this table and trace his fingers over the mark in the wood. The methodical action was the best cure he had found to numb away the pain in his head.
“Do you want to talk about it?” Kenji asked after a while.
His fingers stilled. “The shot had been meant for me,” he admitted, staring blankly at his hand. “I had been careless and attracted two Bandits on my wing. I would have been shot down if she hadn’t flown in front of their attack.”
“What happened to her?”
“One of the stray bullets hit her chest. She died before she hit the ground.” He ran a hand through his blonde hair and shook his head as if the memory was an aching poison.
“That’s awful,” Kenji whispered, looking out to the window and remembering what it had looked like when he was up in the battle field of war and had to watch as his fellow pilots were shot down.
“She’s alive now,” Aaron added, letting a sad smile form at the corners of his mouth. “Everyone says she shouldn’t be; it’s a bit of a mess really, but she’s alive.”
Kenji saw a look of relief pass over Aaron’s face as he said this, and he couldn’t help but wonder who this girl was.
“She means a lot to you, doesn’t she?” he asked.
Aaron spread his hands out in front of him in contemplation. Then, as if deciding on something, his mouth started widening into a smile. It was a gradual smile, filled with realization, hope, and even a touch of embarrassment.
“Yeah,” he nodded. “Yeah, she does.”
“Well, tell me about her!” he prodded excitedly.
Aaron’s face reddened slightly. “Uh, I don’t know. I don’t really feel like—”
“Just tell me her name then.”
He smiled down at his hands and started to trace the mark in the wood once more. “Her name’s Jessie Fifty-Fifty.”
Kenji froze at the sound of her name, a name he hadn’t heard in nearly ten years, but was not likely to forget. He stared down at the mark under Aaron’s hands. He had never told him how it had gotten there. It had been the one secret he kept from him all these years, the one story he never told him…about the girl and the carving in the wood.
Aaron suddenly reached across the table and put a soft hand on Kenji’s arm, drawing him out of his thoughts. “Are you lonely here?” His face darkened as he added, “Now that Ren and me aren’t around anymore?”
Kenji forced out a sad smile. “Don’t you go feeling sorry for me. I’ve got enough interesting clientele to keep me busy.”
Aaron returned his smile, but Kenji could tell that he did not believe him. So, for the next few minutes, he regaled the boy he had come to see as a son with stories of when he was younger, when Ren and he would get into trouble in the military, or when he was a little boy and his grandfather would tell him stories about times before The Contamination.
When Aaron finally had to leave to report back to the air-base, Kenji felt a heavy weight sinking over his chest. Quickly changing the sign in the front window to closed, he hurried up the stairs to the part of the building in which he lived. Going over to his bed, he lifted up the mattress and took out a dusty old notepad that had been stuffed underneath for almost ten years.
Chapter 4
The Bike
Aero City junkyard, if it could be called that, was an elaborate system of chutes and pipes, leading to a giant furnace in the center. Trash was generally discouraged in Aero City. Trash, no matter how strange, was always information. It was the general policy of the government that nothing should ever be left lying around for the wrong people to snatch up and capitalize on.
Yet, as with all systems, there is bound to be a flaw at one point or another. For many years, Harper was sure there was a flaw in the junk-yard furnace network, but it turned out to be nothing more than a wild fancy, and she gave up her dream of ever cracking this system. It wasn’t until she met her room-mate Griffin, that the two took up Harper’s old ambition with reinvigoration, and soon found a way inside.
It seemed strange when they gained access inside one of the tunnels; all that work just for a river of garbage. But it didn’t take long for them to realize that what some people labeled as broken down trash, an inventor and a computer whiz could label as potential.
It had been over a year since they had first successfully broken into the rich vein of discarded metal, and in that time, not once had they gotten caught. There was supposed to be a guard down there, but many times he was occupied on the phone, or asleep, or just plain gone, and the two of them had made off like kings. The only fear that ever scratched the back of their minds was if government officials ever had reason to look inside
their apartment. One look, in fact, one whiff would probably send them packing to Aero City jail. But Harper and Griffin lived for what they found in their secret tunnel, and the vague threat of jail time was not going to keep them away.
However, as they dropped down into their tunnel this particular time, Griffin’s mind was somewhere else. He was not that excited kid that had first bounded through these tunnels, grinning widely at everything he saw.
Harper kicked her foot at a particularly large piece of metal that looked as if it had once been part of an oven, and asked, “You ever wonder how many secrets were lost to this thing?”
“Hmm?” Griffin mumbled, fingering a circuit-board of a smashed up computer. The metal was slightly warm in his cold hands, and the furnace, still a ways off, managed to heat the tunnel to a comfortable degree.
“I mean, the government’s gotta know more than they’re telling us,” she reasoned. “Two hundred years ago, more than half the population dies. You don’t think we kept every bit of knowledge they had, do you? And are we really supposed to just take their word for it that we’re the last human city on earth?! For all we know, there could be another one fifty miles away!”
“Sorry, what are you saying?” he asked, glancing briefly at his friend and then down the dark tunnel.
Harper trudged over to him, using a metal pole she found for support, and then waved it in the air, exclaiming, “I’m saying with so many people dead, and no one even curious to leave Aero City, you don’t think the people in charge were tempted to re-write history in their favor. If there was something in the past that they didn’t like…” She snapped her fingers, finishing, “It’s gone! Just like that!”
Harper looked down and continued rummaging, poking at certain objects with her pole, and bending down to look at others that seemed more promising.
“It’s like this guy I was talking to the other day,” she said. “He told me, back before the air turned sour, there used to be something called the Internet. He said our database systems and tablets are all designed off of it, but they don’t come anywhere close to its magnitude. Apparently this thing stretched over the whole world. And you could ask it any question you wanted, and it would tell you. Want to know what some guy in China is doing right now,” she snapped her fingers again. “Boom! There it is! Makes you wonder what else existed back then that we don’t know about.”
