Heading out to her room while Ace bathed in the tub, Jessie sighed. Sooner or later her android friend would transform back to his normal human-like body. He was, after all, a unique A.I. made specifically to keep her company and work the maintenance of the outpost, but the unpredictability of how long he’d stay that way was a problem. She couldn’t run the whole station by herself. It was impossible to keep things working smoothly without help.
If only he didn’t malfunction so often, morphing into any number of unusual creatures. No matter how hard she had tried to fix him, she couldn’t quite get rid of the unusual glitch. This had contributed to the levels of stress frequently affecting her during the long work days. When Ace was a toad, bird, or rabbit for weeks on end, her workload tripled.
Dressing, she resolved to get to work. The repairs on the hydraulics of the blast doors had to be redone. The violent atmospheric storms continually pelting the aged metal wreaked havoc on the seams she’d welded. If they tore away, the blast doors would become useless. There were no spares available either.
Jessie racked her brain, trying to remember when the last shipment had arrived on Ezra but came up with nothing. Her mind was a maze riddled with empty holes like Swiss cheese. If she didn’t know any better, she would’ve sworn her memory had been altered. But there was no need for that here. Not on Ezra. There was only Ace, Jessie, and the cryos here. Ace could barely take care of himself with his damn glitches. His android protocols didn’t allow him to tamper with any human at the facility, meaning he couldn’t kill, alter, hurt, or put into danger any person unless another human was in danger. There was no way Ace had altered her memory, and there was no one else here who could do it.
It’s like an unseen mutiny, she thought. Luckily, that wasn’t an issue here. She was the only human stationed on Ezra at this time, so naturally she couldn’t have been tampered with. There was no evidence of such, so she had to just face the fact that her memory was abysmal.
Jessie made her way toward the front of the facility, taking the lift to the top floor. The overhead lights flickered on as she passed and resumed their dormant state seconds afterward. The motion sensors kept the lights on just long enough for her to use them. Keeping them off extended the life of the bulbs, which was especially important with no new supply ships. This was the only floor of the facility that had all the lights working. She’d closed down some of the other unused levels, ten in total, and stored extra bulbs to save on energy. Every additional floor was sealed off to keep them dust free and clean for future residents.
It was a peaceful existence, just Jessie and Ace, quiet and routine. Melancholic more often than not. The massive reinforced doors leading to each floor flashed by undisturbed as she walked on. She lived on the sixth floor, and there was a good reason to reside there. It was where they were kept for safekeeping.
She brushed the thought from her mind, getting off on the first floor. After grabbing her welding equipment from the storeroom, she hit the switch to turn on the bright floodlights ahead. The room was so large she had to turn on the lights manually, for motion sensors were useless. The hangar, where Ace had saved her the other day, was full of machinery, sitting dormant for whatever or whoever may come.
It’s all for them.
The outpost had been built by androids and would never have been habitable by humans without the help of the machines. Now the only intelligent machine left was Ace. The med-bot was little more than an automaton; it was capable of performing the most delicate of procedures, but it wouldn’t do to have it overthinking its tasks.
She dropped her gear at the base of one of the doors and walked along the side of the hangar and into the control room. From here she could see live feeds from every camera in the facility and receive any signals from Earth or the other planets. She slid into the chair and switched on the radio transmitter in the hopes of hearing something beyond the unchanging drone of static.
It was her only comfort when Ace was not around. The noisy void from the radio was more calming than most tasks she set out to do every day.
No voices or signal beacons came through. Years ago there had been many. Now the crackling static was overwhelming.
Only dust, unrelenting sandstorms, and miles of arid desert as far as the eye could see awaited outside. Building a containment facility way out here in the Ezra star system—at the edge of the explored sector—was insanity. At any rate, there were many outposts set up throughout space, manned by androids and humans alike. It was just a matter of finding them.
“Ezra Outpost to… anyone. Do you copy?”
Static. White noise. Distant memories. She didn’t know what else she expected. Through the subspace transmitter orbiting the planet, the signal should have reached Earth almost immediately. But Earth had been silent for months. That couldn’t be good.
“Ezra to Earth. Still awaiting our last two supply shipments. Please respond.”
She switched off the control panel, and her tight frown deepened. How many years had she spent out here? She’d lost count but could easily look it up. There was no point in looking at the numbered days, though, it only mattered what day of the month it was. The supply ship was supposed to arrive on the third Friday of each month. That’s when she left the facility with Ace—if he was able-bodied—to pick up the huge cargo container dropped into the atmosphere and guided by drone to a landing site a quarter mile from their facility. They’d hook it up to their tow ship and bring it back to the facility, insert it through one of the smaller gates in the massive blast doors to minimize the amount of sand and debris in the hangar, close up, then unpack the shipment.
It was a pretty routine but always welcomed task. The container never failed to provide the excitement of new delights.
How long would Earth make them wait for another? Something must’ve happened on Earth. Something horrible.
Four
The rust was getting out of hand, Jessie realized as she walked through the halls of level six. It ran down the walls, marking the aged metal with the color of old blood. It betrayed the age of the outpost, and Jessie cringed every time she passed the streaking decay. Moisture was hard to stabilize the farther down into the station she went. It was a problem the original constructors had struggled with and subsequently failed to solve. The centuries had proven the planet would eventually take back this prized piece of real estate one square foot at a time. Outside, it was a desolate, arid desert, but down here, it was as humid as a rainforest.
Even the cryochambers were designed to repel water. The invading moisture had forced the engineers to develop a way to keep the rust off the tanks and out of the Cryolab. It was the one place in the station Jessie often retreated to. Not only was the atmosphere more tolerable in the roomy lab, but her skin welcomed the break from the intense humidity of the rest of the station, relishing the cold, dry air.
She leaned back, knowing Ace wouldn’t be joining her in an hour. He often said that. An hour to him could mean two or three later. Time meant something different for him. He’d been here from day one and for centuries had only the one uncontrollable glitch. It didn’t slow him down much. Time meant nothing to him, but an hour felt like an eternity for her in this metallic graveyard.
“That’s what it is, isn’t it, Garrett? This place… it’s a tomb for us all.”
She pressed a finger to the door of the Cryolab’s innermost room. A rush of frigid air sent a shiver down her spine before she stepped inside. The door closed behind her as she walked straight to her destination, the second to last tank toward the rear of the room. There, she leaned over the human-sized tube and slid the metal shielding away from the top of the transparent casing.
Inside, a faintly opaque mist drifted listlessly over its ward. Garrett 294H lay unchanged and unmoving, his eyes closed and his hands at his sides. His slightly long brown locks fell softly over his ears while his dark lashes were dusted with frozen crystals. If she didn’t know any better, she could have imagined he was taking a lo
ng-needed nap. Technically, he was. A centuries-long sleep.
“When will you wake up?” Her fingers pressed against the glass, her skin growing colder with every passing moment. His face was like a dream she could never quite recall. She knew him. Somehow she’d heard this man’s voice with her own ears. Now it was more of an echo of memory. Somewhere deep inside her head, it bounced about, tickling the edges of other things she should be able to recall with ease. But they fell out of reach, like they’d moved beyond a wall with no doors. She’d contemplated it often and wondered what it meant but knew it had everything to do with J.E.B. and Ace.
“What is it that you mean to me? If only I could wake you and ask you.” Her fingers slid over the glass until they hit the frigid metal encasing the rest of the chamber. It was a fruitless act, filled with a longing she couldn’t explain. Her memories failed to surface, and it only confirmed something she’d feared for some time now.
Even Ace, with his platonic love and sweet words of comfort, failed to keep the ache for a different kind of companion at bay. Nonetheless, she wondered why she was the only human alive in this aging station when all the others were sleeping peacefully in their cryochambers.
Could she have been pulled from one of the chambers? Had hers malfunctioned, necessitating the need to remove her from stasis? It was the most reasonable explanation. It could also explain why her memory remained affected; her awakening could have wiped her memory as well as any mind wipe.
It had to be what had happened, but that didn’t explain why Ace refused to tell her about it. That damned robot was stuffed full of secrets, but she was determined to break through somehow. Her days of quiet acceptance of her past were over. Garrett’s survival depended on knowing what had occurred at this remote station and finding a cure for the J.E.B. plague. There was nothing to document except the subjects in the Cryolab.
Nothing was off limits. She’d found records expunged from the outpost’s core memory going several years back, starting from around the time her memory disappeared. They hadn’t been erased or fabricated or destroyed. They just weren’t there. Like someone had removed the hard drive and replaced it with a new one.
A new start. But why would anyone here need one?
“Garrett,” she whispered and placed her hand on the glass once more. “I need answers before we all die here.”
Silence was her constant companion, one she didn’t care to coddle any longer. Tears formed in her eyes, but she blinked them away. No time for emotions. It was survival only. Especially since she could now hear Ace coming around the corner.
When he spotted her, he paused, tilting his head to the side, scrutinizing her. His nostrils flared as he sniffed the air, likely inhaling the scent of her tears. She jumped from her seat and grabbed several tubes of blood. Her research on the J.E.B. plague had stalled years ago, but it didn’t stop her from continuing her tests. Something had to work at some point. The rule of probability would have to favor finding a cure sooner or later.
“Any changes?” Ace stepped forward until he hovered above Garrett’s cryochamber, his facial expression still, settling into an unreadable mask. Jessie slipped the tubes of blood into a stand and drilled her eyes into them, wishing such a look alone could turn them into the cure she desperately needed.
“No changes. No breakthroughs.” She inhaled deeply, closing her eyes and feeling her circadian rhythm urging her to bed. Instead, she remained where she was, opening her eyes to peer at her injury from the previous day.
Her hand was healing slowly, and the dark bruising surrounding the burn concerned her, but it was the least of her worries. It wasn’t the J.E.B. plague that concerned her. Her tests never exposed her directly to the infected blood.
Even if she did get infected, she could never spread it; the disconnect this quarantined outpost experienced extended to all outlying isolation posts. There were dozens of them, she had been told. It made Jessie’s desperation to find a cure even more urgent. It would be the only way she’d ever be allowed to leave. At least Ace wasn’t entirely indifferent to her cause, like most androids. He would help her when others never would. She had liked him immediately, and their bond solidified the more time she spent with him.
Ace sat at the desk behind her, tapping on the keyboard to sift through files. Finally, he settled on something, and his silence made Jessie turn around. It was an image of Earth. Hundreds of nuclear explosions pockmarked the planet, frozen at the moment of detonation. It almost looked fake.
“It’s time,” he said.
Her eyes widened at the screen. “Time? Is that…?”
“Earth.”
“What… when?”
“Thirty years ago.”
Her mind reeled. “No… it’s not possible. I haven’t even been here that long. And… and we had a supply run only a few months ago.”
He rubbed his forehead, looking weary. She wondered if another glitch was coming on. “The J.E.B. plague wasn’t eradicated on Earth. They thought it had been. But it survived. It kept evolving. By the time they knew it was back, it was too late. The nano-bacteria infected everything, human and robot alike. You have to understand that these people here and in the other cryostations are all that’s left of humanity. When Earth saw that the J.E.B. plague couldn’t be controlled, they did what they had to to keep it from spreading beyond the planet. It was the only way.”
“Do you think they felt anything when it happened?” Jessie asked finally, finding the image oddly intriguing. She felt numb, and it was hard to look away from it. Though the picture they saw now had happened decades before, the imagery conjured the dread she often felt deep inside. Earth was gone, and with it, any chance of help or redemption for this forsaken place. The cure would have to come from the quarantined outposts now. If there were any others left.
“No. Those who were still alive never knew what hit them.” He clicked through to another picture of Earth. The number of white flashes across the planet had doubled. “Quick and painless.” He threw a furtive glance at Garrett’s chamber. “More than some could ever expect from death.”
Jessie swallowed hard, studying her partner. This tomb of bodies they’d been unable to resurrect weighed heavily, and her hope died each day anew. She wondered if Ace would be the last animated face she’d ever look upon. It was a real possibility.
“Ace?”
“Yes?” He didn’t look up but kept tapping at the keyboard, a studious crease deepening between his dark brows.
It was then that she noticed they were not that much different from each other. His dark eyebrows and dark brown hair gleaming like white silver under the glowing LED lights above them reminded her of her own. Her hair was blonde, but he could easily change the color with one thought. She reached up, touching her cheek with a fingertip and tracing her jawline. Their eyes were even the same shade of brown. It was a wonder she’d never considered how much they looked like brother and sister, more than the humans slumbering soundlessly in the cryochambers.
“Why don’t I know about any of this? Why do I remember a supply shipment arriving three months ago?” She paused, trying to formulate the question she wanted to ask. “What am I to you?”
“What do you mean?” Ace stopped his search, leaning back and sighing before he jumped from his chair to face her. She didn’t flinch or move away when he approached. Somehow she knew he’d react this way to her inquiries. He peered down at her, his face almost as blank as a brand new page of a journal awaiting the spilling of secrets, but his eyes told a different story. Those eyes were full of things she should know and didn’t. It angered her that he held such power, but she was determined to remedy it immediately. Was he lying to her about Earth? Would he spill his secrets? Had he indeed been sent here to Ezra for the sole purpose of watching over her and being her ever-present companion? Or were there ulterior motives to all his actions?
Maybe this entire mission was in extreme danger, even with Ace as her artificial sibling, guardian and caretaker. It
was at that moment that she wished her life had taken an entirely different course than it had, but if it had, she could be amongst the dead back on Earth.
Without Earth, what would become of them?
“Ace, I need you to tell me the truth about everything. Leave nothing out.”
Five
“I’m not sure what you mean.” Ace remained standing, watching her as she rose to her feet and eyed him hard.
“Yes, you do. I know about the mind wipe. I feel it there like a wall that should be covered with graffiti but remains blank in the back of my mind.” Jessie narrowed her eyes, focusing on her friend. Supposed friend, she reminded herself. He could be a traitorous warden for all she knew. This could be her prison. What if he wasn’t at all what he’d seemed all these years? Was it all just a ruse?
Why bother? she thought. She could have left at any point in time and still could. The small ships she maintained were her ticket out of here. They worked, could be filled with rations, and required only solar energy to function. They were well-charged, connected to the solar batteries they had set up to run the station. She would just have to walk to the hangar, jump into the ship of her choice, switch it on, open the blast doors, and leave this dustbowl forever.
So why didn’t she?
After several moments of silence, she’d had enough. His lack of response was as good as a confession. This had to end now, and she needed every fact she could squeeze out of Ace.
He tilted his head down, focusing his eyes on her. They failed to show any kind of hostility and instead twinkled with deep-seated intrigue.
The Shapeshifter Chronicles Page 22
