The X-Variant (The Guardians Book 1)

by Rosemary Cole

  Kala sat by a window so she could see the land scroll away underneath them as the train headed west. She liked to watch the herds of deer grazing in the meadows, small brown freckles on the world’s green skin.

  She had only been traveling for a few minutes when her caremother, Fawan, sent her a message via the Dronet. Fawan spoke the words subvocally, and the symbiont in her body translated the impulses to a coded message. Some of her internal drones left her body and passed the message to her near drones, the ones who always stayed very close. They in turn passed it on to her far-ranging drones, those to someone else’s drones, those to someone else’s, and so on in a long relay to the receiver. When the information finally reached Kala’s drones, her near drones entered her body and delivered the message to her symbiont, who translated it back into words in her head, duplicating the sender’s voice and even her emotional nuances.

  Good morning, my darling, Fawan said. Are you at the lab today?

  Yes, I’m helping with that new case. Liet and I were planning to come by later for lunch, if that’s okay.

  Of course, Fawan replied, smiling. I was hoping you would. I want to hear all about your work. See you later, sweetness.

  Her caremother still lived in the house where she had raised Kala, but these days Fawan’s new bondmate, Marin, lived there with her. Kala was quite fond of the man. They had recently taken another baby to raise, a little boy they had named Onisha, and Kala always looked forward to visiting her new caresibling.

  She turned to watch out the window again, but before she could settle back into her thoughts, Liet contacted her to ask if everything was all right. Her bondmate sounded anxious.

  Of course it’s all right, why wouldn’t it be? Kala asked.

  I don’t know. Something seems wrong. I can’t explain it, it’s just a feeling.

  Liet was always having these feelings. Sometimes they bore out, sometimes they didn’t, but usually it was nothing of consequence.

  Nothing’s wrong, sweetness. Have a great day and I’ll see you later for lunch at Fawan’s, Kala said, sending her a kiss.

  All right. Just... keep in touch, okay?

  Kala watched the sparkling sea in the distance grow larger as the train approached Chandika. Near the shore sat a wide area of ruins. The low, crumbly shells of once-tall buildings poked up from the land like the stumps of rotted teeth—all that was left of the human city of San Diego. The graceful spires of Chandika were visible through gaps in the leafy canopy surrounding the ruins.

  As the train slanted down to approach the air train platform, Kala checked ahead at the laboratory with her drones. Some of her colleagues were already gathered with the patient, and she greeted them and let them know she was on her way. Imagine not being able to connect to the Dronet, she thought, shuddering. You would be just like a human from the old days, cut off from those you loved unless you were physically with them.

  The Unathi were human, but at the same time, not. They were a symbiotic race that had evolved from the ashes of a manmade apocalypse that had taken place over six hundred years ago. Post-human was the old name for it; Kala had read about it in a pre-pandemic article that had been preserved on the Hub.

  She had always found human history a depressing subject—all those wars and genocides. Like most Unathi, she found it difficult to grasp the concepts of war, racial hatred, religious creed, or even country.

  And then, in 2079, the humans had almost succeeded in wiping themselves out.

  It was so ironic, Kala thought, that their syms had evolved from the very same virus that almost destroyed humanity.

  Every Unathi individual was carefully engineered in a science that had developed over the centuries since the pandemic, selecting the most desirable genetic material from around the globe. Over time, this had made the roughly four billion Unathi people of Earth fairly homogeneous. Everyone was more or less the same. Everyone was connected by the Dronet. United people, united planet. That was the meaning of their name, Unathi.

  But now there was something wrong. People’s drones had stopped functioning, and no one knew why.

  Kala clenched her jaw. They’d soon get to the bottom of it.

  Greetings, Kala, Ukuna said in her mind as Kala entered the skylit, airy laboratory building. He was a junior symbiopathologist and her mentor. She let her drones guide her to the room they were in, in the south wing.

  Ukuna and her other colleagues were gathered around Teret, who was sitting on a stool. His skin looked a bit gray and ashy; his expression was a portrayal of misery. Kala gave the man a pat on the shoulder and a sympathetic smile.

  We’re speaking aloud for Teret’s benefit, and at the same time sending the discussion onto the Dronet, Ukuna said to her privately.

  Understood, Kala said.

  All the external drones of every Unathi individual formed a thin, vast cloud—the Dronet—that reached across every continent. The drones bumped into each other constantly, communicating with each other each time they made contact. Each one had an imprint of its host. Thus, someone could quickly trace the location of any individual by following their chain of drones, and pass along information and messages.

  Kala noted that many people, including symbiopathologists from other places in the world, were listening in this morning via the Dronet. A few were present as holos, their seated forms shimmering slightly as the drones composing them shifted to reflect the light.

  “Greetings, Kala,” Bakar, a medical specialist, said. “I was just saying that Teret has been thoroughly checked out and there’s nothing medically wrong with him. His symbiont produces a normal number of drones. Here’s a representation of one of them.”

  A holographic display appeared in the central space of the room, showing a large representation of one of Teret’s drones. Fascinated, Kala peered at it. Thousands of these things entered and exited her body constantly via special tiny pores, but she couldn’t feel them or even see them except in a certain light, when they showed up as nothing but a thin sparkle in the air.

  Teret’s drone, many times enlarged to reveal every detail, looked perfectly normal. Kala could see its wings, like small metal blades, its blunt snout for burrowing through its host’s special pores, and its empty belly compartment for carrying samples, minerals, and other microscopic materials. It had tiny, hair-like legs for gathering materials and attaching itself to surfaces. The drones couldn’t travel at high speeds, but fast communications were achieved by the rapid relay of information from one to the next. The thicker the drone cloud in an area, the faster the message traveled.

  “Here lies the problem,” Bakar said. “His drones can fly around and enter and exit him normally, but they appear unable to pass information.”

  To test his hypothesis, Kala dispatched some of her drones to Teret to “sense” him. Under normal circumstances, her drones could bump into his and collect information about his location and his emotional state. They could tell her if he was in the next room, or anywhere else on the continent. But if Teret hadn’t been sitting right in front of her, she wouldn’t have known he was there. Her drones read him merely as a large living creature, which normally would be interpreted by her as an animal.

  Kala spent the rest of the morning working with her colleagues to try to determine the problem. Occasionally people left, and new ones came and joined in the work. They performed various tests, including an exhaustive comparison of Teret’s drones to normal ones, with no results. When lunchtime rolled around, the group broke up for a meal, planning to focus their studies on Teret’s symbiont in the afternoon.

  Liet was waiting for Kala in front of the lab building, wearing a light, floaty skirt and a tank that showed off her strong brown shoulders. She wasn’t smiling, and her dark heavy brows were pinched together tightly.

  Kala said, “Hello, sweetness. I thought you were going to meet me at Fawan’s.”

  Liet didn’t answer. Her head kept turning in every direction as she glanced around nervously.

 
“Whatever is the matter?” Kala asked, and then she felt it too.

  Something was wrong—terribly wrong.

  Kala became suddenly aware of a low roar on the Dronet. Voices grew in her mind, the sound swelling as she focused on it. People whose loved ones had simply disappeared were crying out for help. Kala knew some of the missing ones herself. She sent out her drones to search for them but found nothing. No indication of their presence or status. It was as if they no longer existed. Could they have suddenly developed the same syndrome that Teret had?

  A woman passing near them on a walkway stopped in her tracks, dropping the packages she had been carrying. “My bondmate—he’s gone!” she cried out.

  “What’s happening?” Liet cried, grabbing Kala’s arm.

  “I don’t know, but I’m sure we’ll find out soon,” Kala replied. She kept her voice calm for Liet’s benefit, but she felt a gnawing anxiety.

  She turned her thoughts inward. Araka?

  So it’s begun, her symbiont said.

  What has begun, Araka? What’s going on?

  No answer. Kala sighed in frustration. She was used to his reticence, but had expected more from him in an emergency like this.

  Are you and Liet all right? Fawan asked.

  Yes, we’re fine. What about you and Marin and the baby? Kala had already sent her drones to check on them, but wanted extra reassurance.

  We’re okay, too. Can you come to the house?

  Liet and I might be needed, Kala answered. We’ll be in touch and let you know.

  Okay. We’ll be here with the baby; come if you can.

  We will, Kala promised.

  Chapter 2

  Chandika Sobran

  August 2616

  KALA AND LIET WALKED to a nearby open-air dining hall, surrounded by leafy shade trees, where they got themselves cups of tea, then sat down and waited to find out more from the Dronet. Reports flowed in steadily; people were disappearing from all over North America.

  Kala fully expected someone to figure out what was going on and make the disappearances stop, but they went on and on. It was incomprehensible that anything should be so out of control.

  And then things got worse. As she was surveying various people on the Dronet, the status of some of them went from worried to terrified, and then to extreme distress. She heard their cries on the Dronet.

  Help, someone help me!

  No! Stop, please stop!

  And then they blinked out completely.

  Kala and Liet sprang to their feet, their faces draining of color. Those people had died. Kala’s heartbeat sped up and she began to tremble violently until Araka flooded her system with calming neurochemicals. She concentrated on taking deep, steadying breaths.

  The other Unathi in the dining hall stood up as well and instinctively clustered together, touching one another for reassurance. “What should we do?” murmured a distinguished gentleman in a long russet tunic. “What should we do?”

  Kala and Liet got up as well, and went to stand near the others. Kala focused on the Dronet again, and her heart filled with hope. Unathi with investigative and scientific skills were already hard at work, investigating the anomaly. She reached out with her drones to contact Ukuna.

  He was nowhere to be found.

  “I’d better get back to the lab and help,” she said to Liet, her heart fluttering. “We’ll figure this out and fix it somehow.”

  “I’m coming with you,” Liet said, clinging to her arm. “You aren’t going out of my sight.”

  The gentleman in russet who had spoken aloud wasn’t coping well. He was breathing heavily, almost panting.

  Kala turned to look at him and froze. He was right there in front of her, but her drones couldn’t feel him. Nothing was coming back to her. He was blank, as if she were sensing an animal. She looked into his eyes and saw nothing human, only a primitive rage.

  She backed away, her own eyes widening.

  The man bared his teeth and lunged at her. Kala dropped to the floor and he missed, landing instead upon a woman who had been standing behind her, knocking her to the floor. The others screamed and stumbled back, knocking over chairs and small round tables.

  The man sat on the prone woman, raised his fist and brought it down hard, directly onto her face. A red spray of blood flew up from her nose. She yelped and her hands shot into the air.

  Kala crawled away and got to her feet. Liet was whimpering. Kala’s blood throbbed in her ears; her limbs felt like they were full of hot lead. She tried to process the scene unfolding before her, but it was impossible. She had had neither seen nor imagined anything like this before in her life. She and all the others stood trembling, torn between trying to help and running away. It did not occur to them to intervene forcefully. That meant having to do violence. There was no violence in Unathi culture; it had been carefully bred out of them over centuries of genetic engineering.

  The gentleman in russet had become almost unrecognizable. His mouth was twisted into a snarl and his skin appeared grayish, with bits flaking off. He struck the woman’s face and head with alternating fists, as if he were playing a drum, and then stopped and closed his hands around her throat. Her whimpering was cut off and she struggled silently, jerking her limbs. After what seemed like an eternity, her arms dropped to the floor and her presence blinked off the Dronet. She was dead. The man let go of her and turned his glare upon the rest of them as they stood there, gaping helplessly.

  Up until this moment Kala had been paralyzed, her mouth hanging open in shock. Dimly she became aware of Araka’s voice calling to her, telling her to run, now. She grabbed Liet’s arm and half-pulled her out of the dining hall, their feet skittering over the ground. They raced away, not even stopping to consider the direction. When they had gotten a mile or so away from the dining hall, they veered into a small park and stopped, looking for a place to hide.

  “There,” Liet said, pointing.

  They crawled under the heavy, overhanging branches of a bush. For a fleeting moment, the small, secret space with its earthy smell brought Kala back to childhood games, when she had imagined a place like this to be her own little house, but monstrous images of what she had just seen crowded into her mind, blotting everything else out. She put her arm around Liet and pulled her close as they crouched there, like small animals hiding from a predator.

  Araka, please, Kala begged her symbiont. Help me make sense of this!

  You’re going to be all right, dear heart, came his reply. Keep your head about you. You’re going to live through this.

  She shook her head and dashed tears from her cheeks with her palm.

  Liet touched her arm; more news was coming in over the Dronet. The number of attackers had grown, and more people had disappeared. Kala knew now that they were either dead or had become one of those things.

  The girls hastily checked on their loved ones. Fawan and the others were still at home. Jaen, Liet’s carefather, was all right, too; he had taken shelter up in Benaya, the region covering the northwestern coast of the continent, in a sobran called Panadi.

  We’re okay, we’re hiding, Kala told Fawan, and then returned her attention to the Dronet, searching again for Ukuna and her other colleagues at the symbiopathology lab. Her drones reported only dead bodies and a few large creatures roaming the building. Creatures that was how the drones read those things. Those violent monsters.

  Kala let out a groan.

  In Belem, a small sobran about ten miles southeast of Chandika, survivors were asking for help in fortifying a shelter.

  Kala wiped dirt and tears from her face, took a deep breath and looked at Liet. “Ready?”

  “Let’s just stay here,” Liet said, her voice trembling.

  “You know we can’t do that, sweetness. We have to help.”

  Liet nodded reluctantly, and the pair climbed out from under the bush.

  “There’s an air train platform not far from here,” Kala said after checking their location on the Dronet, and they hea
ded in that direction. They saw no one else; gardens and walkways were empty.

  The air trains were controlled by the Hub, a central exchange in the Dronet where massive amounts of data were stored, organized and distributed by everyone’s drones working together.

  In light of the current situation, Kala wondered if the trains were running. There were plenty of drones—those of the dead simply joined the cloud or found other hosts—but the minds controlling the Hub might be distracted at the moment.

  The air train platform was deserted. Kala sent notice to the Hub with her drones, and they waited. Hugging herself, Liet tried to watch in every direction at once. After a few minutes, their drones alerted them that three people were approaching the platform, still out of visual range.

  “Let’s go,” Liet hissed, but Kala shook her head. The fact that they could sense the others with their drones meant they should be all right. Then one of them hailed on the Dronet, sending greetings and saying they were coming to catch the train, and the girls relaxed.

  They came into view: a boy and a girl in their teens and a young man around Kala and Liet’s age. The two kids waved and trotted up to Kala’s group. “Greetings. We’re going to Belem, to the shelter.”

  “We are, too,” Kala said. “Want to go together?”

  The young man was Crisfer, the boy and girl Mani and Sunita.

  “Are you bonded?” Liet asked the younger two.

  “Oh, no, we’re just friends,” Sunita answered.

  Crisfer appeared as calm and good-humored as if he were going on a social outing instead of fleeing for his life. Kala had the impression he was the self-appointed guardian of the two younger ones.

  She looked him over. He was tall and muscular, but so was every other Unathi male. His short-cropped black hair and wideset violet eyes lent him an air of wholesomeness. He saw her looking at him and smiled, his shoulders hunching forward briefly—the Unathi version of a wink.