“Like the super hearing and the night vision and the upper body strength of a gorilla?”
The doctor huffed as he walked across the white, sterile room. He stroked the screen of a full-size VPad monitor mounted to the wall.
“Why can’t I run like Steve Austin?”
“Who?”
“Can you put in a sensor to make me run fast?”
“No, Mr. Sterling, I can’t.”
“Robert could do it.”
“So, if you want to run like you’re a superman, tell Fiender.”
“Steve Austin.”
“OK, Mr. Sterling. Next thing you’ll want to do is fly without a personal flight pack.”
“I wouldn’t fly with a flight pack. Robert says I have a phobia.”
“Somebody like you, with all the money and privilege of a prince, doesn’t use a flight pack once in a while? I bet we can program that phobia right out of you.”
“Robert said that wasn’t possible. Anyway, do you know how many people die on those things every year?”
“More people die in those so-called crash-proof Selfdrives. Why are you worried about dying, anyway? We brought you back from the dead once. We could do it again.”
“I have a Selfdrive. But I don’t know where I put it.”
The doctor mumbled something and left the room. Chase pushed away the sheet, rose from the gurney, and put on his clothes. He held up the tag on the black string in front of the door. The door slid open, and Chase draped the string over his head and pulled the tag under his shirt. “Program away a phobia,” he said to no one. Or to anyone monitoring his COP. “Jack can do it. Then he could make me fly.”
His stomach—the only thing left in his midsection that was truly his—beckoned him to find some lunch. Walking to the cafeteria, he was approached by a nurse. The dark woman in green scrubs matched Chase’s stride. She put her hand under his elbow, turned him toward an empty hallway, then squeezed herself into a corner and pulled Chase close.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Chase asked.
“No cameras here,” the woman said.
“Doesn’t matter. I have cameras in my eyes. Now what do you want?”
“I managed to disabled your COP, but we only have a minute or two before someone notices.”
Chase started to turn and run, but the woman grabbed him by both arms. “If you know about the COP, then you know I can get away from you,” he said.
“Don’t you remember me, Mr. Sterling?”
He studied her. “Nurse Patty.”
She let go of him. “I asked about you,” he told her. “They said you got reassigned.”
“Got sent to a mental ward in Minneapolis.”
“Well, they must have needed a good nurse.”
“I didn’t get sent there as a nurse, Mr. Sterling.”
He paused a moment. “Oh.”
“I got caught contacting the underground.”
32
“What has that got to do with me?” Chase asked the woman.
“You asked me to contact Melody. I found her in New York, and I sent a message to her. She replied back to me. She told me some things. I wanted to know more, but before I could get in touch with her again, she went underground. So I called the main church house in New York. I only got as far as the contact man.”
“That’s how you got caught?”
“Yes. Two weeks in a facility—first time offender. My contact disappeared. Thrown in prison, or worse.”
“Two weeks, that’s it?”
“Enough time for some attitude adjustment,” she said. “Didn’t work—only made me stronger. Now I’m out of the system. No new assignment, no income, no WR insurance. But I don’t care anymore.”
“Why are you here?”
“You need to know what Melody told me.”
“I’m the greatest example of technological augmentation in the world. I don’t need an assistant anymore. You didn’t need to come.”
The woman’s eyes got even darker, and she pushed Chase against the wall. “I just got out of a mental ward. I wasn’t crazy when I went in, but I must be now. To think I’d come sneaking back in here. Melody was wrong about you.” She turned to leave.
“She was my friend.” Chase pulled up his COP sensor as he reached for the woman. News of Mel seemed to clear his thoughts and untangle the knots between him and the exoself. “I think she was my only friend. She’d do anything for me.”
Patty faced him. “You have no idea.”
“Don’t go. Tell me what she said.”
“No time—we’ll get caught. Your COP will be back on. I should never have tried this.”
“It’s not coming back on. I just left an exam room, and I set the program to show I’m still there waiting for the doctor.”
“You can do that?”
The feat surprised even Chase. After what happened at the institute, he was sure he couldn’t do it again. “Yes, and I turned off that camera.” He pointed to the tiny lens at the end of the hall. “I didn’t know I could do that, but I’m sure I just did.”
“They’ll come looking for you,” she said.
“Not for a while. Talk. Where is she?”
“Melody had to go under. I heard she’s in the Southeast Territory. Atlanta.”
“What did she tell you?”
“She put some information trails in you. In the exoself. If you can tap into her programs, you could be a great help to a lot of people.”
“She put them in? What does she know about such things?”
“She studied AI in college.”
“Artificial Intelligence? I never knew that. At least, I don’t think I did. Things from the past are a little fuzzy.”
“She didn’t want to be put to work in the field. The WR doesn’t care what you study anyway—they just put you wherever they want. But she didn’t want to take any chances, so she kept it quiet. She decided it was wrong to mess around with the created order.”
“That, I knew. I think.” Chase remembered his assistant touching the nodding head of a ceramic figure. “But she just fed some poor people—stuff like that. She wasn’t in the Underground Church.”
“Trust me, she’s gone under.”
“Why?”
“After you called her office in Brooklyn, WR detectives started following her. They found her group supplying the underground. Most of the group got caught. Melody and a few others escaped, but there was no going back to their old lives.”
“It’s my fault.”
“No.” Patty put her hand on his arm. “Those of us still functioning in the system know it’s only a matter of time.”
“I don’t understand.”
“The government leaves us alone, lets us do our religion thing, as long as we remain loyal to the WR. Or appear to anyway. But we’re not loyal to anyone but Jesus, and eventually, that gets us in trouble.”
“And then you go under.”
“Right.”
Chase barely remembered making the call to the WR office in New York. “I couldn’t get through to Mel. The woman in Brooklyn said Mel thought I would never recover. She had to have known differently if she worked on me.”
“She was never allowed near you after the shooting. I know, I was here, too. She asked if she could work on the systems that might be used if the augmentation was a success. And she hid things in you. No one, not even Fiender, knew it. But after a few weeks Ms. Bennett got suspicious. She told Melody you wouldn’t recover, that the whole thing was a waste of time. And then she sent her to Brooklyn.”
“Fiender let me call there. He didn’t mention he had worked with Mel, or that he knew her at all.”
“So many people come and go in this place. He probably just didn’t put two and two together. The guy’s a little absent-minded if you ask me.”
“And confused about where his loyalties lie,” Chase said.
“What do you mean?”
“He told me how to find Mel. He taught me how to mess
with the COP. I think he might have even helped me escape in the desert.” Chase crossed his arms. “But then he turned me into a puppet.”
“Mr. Sterling, I don’t know about any of that. I’m just here for Melody. She went to so much trouble for you, I had to come.”
“How did you get in?”
“I still have friends here, and so do you. Remember Jimmy?”
Chase thought about the young man who’d put him in touch with Patty weeks ago. “He let you in?”
“What with the live show tonight, more workers than usual are coming through the estate entrance to get to the studio. Jimmy got me a tag. Getting in was pretty easy. Getting out might not be.”
“I remember something in my data bank about church locations. Mel did that?”
“And more, Mr. Sterling. She’s got you wired to church houses and sympathizers all over the world.”
“Why? Why would she do that? Hoping I’d come over to the other side and start saving souls? Don’t you people have your own computer systems?”
“We don’t use tech methods underground—too dangerous. Believers still in the system have access to aid and encouragement and warnings, but those underground get by with messages passed along by word of mouth. Sometimes it works, sometimes it gets us caught. Or else we end up lost in a maze of misinformation. The data bank locked in your head is one of a kind. You could help us. If you wanted to, that is.”
“When I said Mel was my only friend, you said I didn’t have any idea. Sounds like she wired me to help her other friends.” Chase felt something spark in his processors, and he reset the COP to repeat the scene with the doctor again. Someone would notice soon that he wasn’t where he was supposed to be.
“Accessing her trails could be just as helpful to you as it would be to us,” Patty said.
“How do I do it?”
“I wish I knew, Mr. Sterling. I lost touch with Melody before she could explain it all. I don’t have any idea how to get to all that stuff in you.”
“Time is up,” Chase said. “You need to go.”
“One more thing. Puppets don’t know they’re puppets. Fight it, Mr. Sterling. Fight what they did to you.” She looked to the floor, covering her face with her hand, and walked away.
Chase remembered the second call he’d made—the one to Mel’s VPad. “My mother.” He started to call after Patty, but she was gone. He didn’t dare follow her. He set the COP to real time and walked to the cafeteria. Maybe no one was watching all that time he’d had the program playing reruns. Maybe he got away with it.
He prayed Patty could do the same.
33
Chase ate his lunch listening through walls, expecting conversation that would let him know he’d been caught misbehaving. He heard nothing except a nurse getting hit on by one of the surgeons the network had moved in from the Southwest Territory.
He returned to his suite, sat on the plush sofa, and spoke the big GV into operation. Elaine Jenz appeared on the screen and gave a report of the evening’s upcoming events.
“Chase Sterling, in his international debut, will not only show the world some of his capabilities, he’ll come face to face, for the first time, with the final contestant of the canceled program, Change Your Life. Larin Andrews’s future is certain as he and his new show, Reach Your Destiny, replace Sterling and the old program. But Chase’s future is not so sure. The network is trying to figure out what to do with their over-budget guinea pig.”
“Off,” Chase said. The GV continued as Elaine Jenz announced to the world that Chase Sterling may not be worth the investment.
“Off!”
The screen went dark, and Chase stretched out on the sofa and buried his head with a gold-tasseled pillow. He listened for sounds of interrogation or an arrest being made on the grounds. He heard nothing. Patty made it out, he hoped.
For an hour he thought about his future, about what Elaine Jenz said in her news report. He drifted in and out of sleep and dreamed of being a little boy on the beach in Florida.
“It’s a beautiful old bottle,” he heard his father say. “Let’s take it home. Maybe your mother can—”
“Chase, wake up.”
He opened his eyes to find Dr. Fiender standing over him.
“Bob, old boy. Good to see you.”
“You’ve been having some problems, I hear.”
“Confusion.” Chase sat up and wiped his face. “But I think it’s clearing.”
The doctor pulled out his VPad and stroked his finger across the screen. “I’m shutting down some of your systems,” he said. “COP monitor, please do not interfere. I will need some time to examine Chase with no programs running. I’ll power him back up in an hour or so.”
“I really don’t think anybody’s watching today.” Chase ran his fingers though his hair and relaxed into the sofa.
“What makes you think that?”
Chase didn’t tell him about the nurse’s visit or that he’d rediscovered how to play tricks with the system. “That boy doctor, Jack, did he call you?”
“He’s nearly your age, Chase. And very smart.”
“I’m having some memory issues, I guess.” Chase looked Fiender in the eye. “But I remember the desert. I was allowed to escape. Did you do that?”
“Yes. I’m sorry—I knew you would get caught. There was no way you could make it.”
“Then why’d you do it? Why set me up like that?”
“It gave me an excuse to add the new device.”
“The NP?”
Fiender’s bushy eyebrows lifted. “How much do you know about it?”
Chase stuck his finger in his left ear. “Boy-doctor told me some things. He thinks it’s not working properly.”
Dr. Fiender smiled. “He’s right. If it worked, you and the exoself wouldn’t be at odds. But you’re struggling, aren’t you? Trying to hold on to your—”
“To myself? To my soul?”
“Yes.”
Chase stood and walked to the window. He put his hand on the frame and then made a fist and slammed it completely through the wall. “I don’t understand. Do you want me to lose my mind? Because that’s what’s happening. I can’t be your magical creation and be Charlie Redding at the same time.”
“You used your real name.”
“Chase—I’m Chase Sterling.” He fell against the wall and gripped the sides of his head. “I’ve been having dreams. Well, some of them are so real, they’re more like, I don’t know, visions. Real live visions of my past. Things I’d forgotten. But then there are things that never happened, and they’re just as real.” He came across the room and sat in a chair directly opposite the doctor.
“You’ve been dreaming about your life as Charles Redding?”
“He was a nobody.”
“He’s you. Your memories, your roots. It’s only natural to dream of that life from time to time.”
“You gave yourself good reason to mess with my personality, and then you secretly junked the system? Why did you do it, Robert?”
“They were going to do it anyway—alter your personality. They planned to do it without me. Then you’d be gone—there’d be nothing left of Charles Redding or Chase Sterling.”
“Why did they send you back to the desert?”
“To plan the next phase. The government plans radical augmentation of a select group, then a larger group. You were only the beginning, Chase. When they thought I had you under complete control, they put you in the hands of others—my protégés—and they gave me a more extensive assignment.”
“You left…holes in the NP. Holes I could come back through.”
“In a manner of speaking, yes.”
“Didn’t you know it would drive me insane?”
“You will not lose your mind, Chase, or your soul. I’ll help you escape the NP.”
“It would have been better to let me die the night I got shot.”
“I must do what I can to avert death,” the doctor said. “I saved you, Chase. B
ut I am no god. I don’t want to do this anymore.”
“I think I’ve been talking to Him in my dreams, or whatever they are.”
“Talking to whom?”
“To God.”
The doctor rose and came near Chase. “I’m sorry, son. I’ll completely remove the NP and no one will know the difference. I’ll teach you how to fake it.”
“You think the NP is responsible for me having conversations with God?”
“I don’t know, but something’s not right.”
“It started when I was first unconscious, after that night with Larin.”
“You mentioned a regression game, and we told you there was no game. Is that what you’re talking about?”
“Yes.”
The door to Chase’s suite slid open and several men came through, including the young doctor, Jack. Kerstin came in last, her eyes making demands before her mouth spoke the words.
“Robert I won’t allow this,” she said. “You will not come in here and examine him without supervision. No one person can control this situation. It requires a team.” She held her hands open before the men who’d taken position on either side of her. “Here is your team. You will work with them. Not without them.”
Fiender slumped into the chair. “My apologies, Kerstin. I didn’t mean to overstep. He stood. “But he is my creation. I only came to help him. Something isn’t right.”
“What isn’t right is that you think you can come in here and take over,” she said. “Jack told me that he called you in to consult. Your time as head of this operation ended when we brought Chase home. You know that.” She looked to Chase and fixed her eyes on him.
“It’s all right, kitten. Bob and I were just talking. He’s done nothing to me.”
“He should never have been allowed to enter your suite, just as you shouldn’t have been left in Jack’s examining room for an hour unattended.”
Jack took a step forward. “But I—”
“Never mind,” Kerstin yelled. “And you shouldn’t have called Robert. I am the one who will make decisions about Chase’s care.”
“I told him not to call Fiender. I knew you wouldn’t like it, kitten.”
“You wanted me to get him here. To program you to run like…” Jack crossed his arms. “It doesn’t matter—you need a complete exam.”
Wake the Dead Page 15
