The Gate

by Kaitlyn O'Connor

  Carly didn’t especially want to talk to her friend, but she merely nodded. “See you at lunch.”

  Brenda rolled her eyes. “It is lunch.”

  Startled, Carly glanced at the time on her monitor. “Oh.”

  She dimly noted signs of agitation in Brenda as they got lunch at the cafeteria and headed to their secret place, but she barely registered it and had no trouble ‘acting casual’.

  She’d known when she ordered the cyborg that she was going to be playing at having a real relationship instead of actually having one, but it had seemed like the best solution at the time to a problem that couldn’t be resolved.

  Because she couldn’t have the man she really wanted.

  She hadn’t considered that it would just make her feel worse, but it did. She thought it might not have been so bad if she hadn’t had to prompt Devlin/the cyborg to behave like her lover. She could’ve pretended it was real then.

  She frowned. She shouldn’t have had to tell him, damn it!

  He was supposed to have come already programmed to adore her!

  Not that she had anything to complain about regarding his performance! He’d really knocked her socks off!

  But it had been tainted by the knowledge that she’d prompted him and she just couldn’t enjoy it like she wanted to knowing it was a performance to prevent Trude from reporting him as defective and her as a nut case.

  Not that she was at all certain that there was any way to avoid that particular threat anymore. She didn’t for a minute believe that Trude had been convinced there was the possibility that their disagreement might escalate into violence instead of ending in a round of makeup sex. She’d known that Devlin was laboring under a good bit of distress because she’d been there during the very unhappy reunion with his sister, but he had seemed completely in control by the time they’d reached her apartment—not on the verge of going berserk!

  And she didn’t believe Trude wasn’t able to evaluate the situation or that the surveillance system had been thrown by her reference to makeup sex.

  Trude had simply decided to use the override protocol to snoop!

  She would’ve been worried about her state of mind herself at becoming suspicious of the HESS except that the comments Trude had made hadn’t sounded mechanical and unemotional at all as she’d come to expect.

  “I’m in trouble,” Brenda announced as soon as they’d reached the secure location. “Actually we might all be in trouble.”

  Jerked abruptly from her own thoughts of trouble brewing, Carly stared at Brenda in dismay, wondering for several moments if Brenda had heard anything about what had transpired at her apartment. “In trouble?” she echoed. “How? What kind of trouble?”

  Brenda’s lips tightened. “The door wasn’t shut! I think we compromised that entire location when we used it for a meeting place. The group does too and they’re totally pissed off with all of us for using it as a personal rendezvous and possibly compromising everybody’s safety.”

  Carly held up a hand to halt Brenda. “Wait a minute! You’re saying you’re part of the rebel alliance?”

  Brenda gave her a disbelieving look. “How do you think I got that info for you? How do you think I knew about secure meeting places?” she demanded sarcastically. “Honestly, Carly! You need to get your head out of your ass!”

  Carly glared at her indignantly. “I didn’t think you were in the middle of it! I thought you just knew people that knew about rebel hangouts!”

  Brenda shook her head. “That’s not important now. The important thing is that we compromised the location and it was our primary meeting place—well, connected to it. We actually met a lot deeper in the labyrinth, but it’s still too hot to meet there anymore.”

  “Why do you keep saying we?” Carly demanded indignantly. “We didn’t do anything! You’re the one that jumped Devlin before he could even get in the door!”

  Brenda’s face darkened. “He caught me off guard when he called me Bunny. Nobody ever called me that but Dev and it used to totally piss me off!” she added in an irritated mutter.

  “Don’t start that again!” Carly said angrily. “I don’t know how he knew it! You never told me that so there’s no way I could’ve known and I don’t know why it would’ve been in the companion Sim. Actually, I don’t know how it could’ve been in any of his records. Why would they make a note of something like that?”

  Brenda looked like she might cry for several moments. “That’s just it. I thought about it and thought about it after …. Well, afterwards. And I can’t think of how he could’ve known unless ….”

  Carly lifted her brows questioningly when Brenda stopped. “Unless?” she prompted.

  “Unless, somehow, he really is Dev.”

  * * * *

  Ignoring her discomfort, Carly smiled at Devlin brightly. “I brought my best friend, Brenda. We’re going to do a three-way in the shower. Come on.”

  The look on Devlin’s face might have been comical if Carly hadn’t been so worried about the possible repercussions. His lower jaw went slack and then hi face slowly turned redder and redder until even his ears were red. He blinked at her several times, flicked a glance at Brenda, and then looked at her again. “I’m sorry, what?”

  Instead of trying to give him a broader hint, Carly headed toward the bathroom with Brenda on her heels. Devlin looked leery, but he followed them in. The fit, with three of them, was so tight Carly had to stand in the shower and that seemed to make Devlin more uneasy.

  It made her uneasy, too. Trude must be calculating the possibilities at that very moment.

  “How do you think it’s possible that you could really be Devlin?” Brenda said bluntly.

  Devlin stared at her for a long moment and relaxed visibly. He grimaced. “I haven’t figured that out,” he replied frankly. “Do you think this is the best place to sort this out, though? I’m almost positive Carly’s HESS has access to this room and uses it regardless of her programming.”

  Brenda shot Carly a horrified look. “I thought you said …?”

  “She never really tested it, did you Carly?”

  Carly felt her face heating at Devlin’s reminder. She hadn’t forgotten it, precisely. She’d just been too upset, on a personal level, at the way things had transpired to consider what Devlin had warned her of—that Trude hadn’t followed protocol. A few seconds might not mean much if one were talking about humans. They didn’t have that precise a sense of timing. Computers could track time to the nanosecond, however.

  And Trude had not only interrupted them without the time lapse it was supposed to allow, but it had cited a seriously lame excuse for overriding.

  And the cover story she’d cooked up, she realized now, was just about as lame.

  “Maybe we should make this brief and meet up in the underground?” Devlin suggested.

  “That may have been compromised after our last meeting there,” Brenda said tightly. “You were standing in the door, remember?”

  Devlin flushed. “Shit!” He thought about it for several moments. “There wasn’t any monitoring devices after the first flight.”

  Surprise flickered in Brenda’s eyes. “We know that. It’s one of the reasons we used that area for access to the tunnels. It could still have been sensitive enough to pick up the conversation. We weren’t exactly quiet,” she finished dryly.

  Devlin frowned. “It’s been days, though. Any indication that it did?”

  Brenda shrugged. “Not that I’ve heard of, but we didn’t actually discuss anything that would have been a high priority. They might still have flagged it. If we went back, we could be walking into a trap. Nobody wants to take that chance. I know I don’t.”

  “They don’t have the Arapaho language,” Brenda said in Arapaho.

  “That might keep them from knowing what we say, but it isn’t going to prevent the suspicions that would convince them to bring one of us in to investigate,” Devlin responded in the same language.

  Carly didn’t kn
ow what the exchange had been about. She hadn’t learned enough of Brenda’s language to catch more than a word here and there, but the look on Brenda’s face made her chest tighten with empathy for her friend.

  Brenda swallowed a little convulsively several times. “Dev?”

  He looked like he wanted to surge toward her and hug her but when he swayed toward her, Brenda seemed to withdraw and he stiffened. “It is me, Brenny.”

  She looked skeptical and his expression tightened.

  “I don’t know what happened or how it happened. There are still things I can’t remember. But I know I’m not just a machine programmed with your brother’s memories.”

  “You … Dev died. There is no way he could’ve survived. It just isn’t possible.”

  Devlin started to respond and paused. His expression tightened. “The HESS is trying to break the patch I uploaded. It will have it in a matter of seconds. Find a place where we can safely talk.”

  Carly stared at him in dismay, unnerved at the suggestion that they were getting in deeper and deeper trouble, but Brenda looked even more suspicious.

  “If you aren’t a cyborg, how could you do that?”

  Devlin shook his head. “I didn’t say I wasn’t more cybernetic than human now. Whatever happened I was majorly FUBAR. You’re right about that. I just said that I was in here, Brenny. I am here. I am your brother.”

  Chapter Seven

  Carly still didn’t know if she truly believed that the man she’d fallen in love with still existed inside the cyborg shell that she’d bought or if she just wanted to believe it and he’d managed to quite the threads of doubt with the things he’d said and done. It would’ve been easier to know her own mind if she hadn’t wanted so badly to discover that Devlin was alive and she had the chance of finding the love she wanted.

  Because she realized that, even if it was true, she only had a chance of it.

  She had fallen for the Sim lover that had shared her bed so many lonely nights. She’d gotten the chance to know him intimately and then come to know the other side of him through Brenda and even the history she’d dug up herself.

  As unconventional as learning the man had been, she knew Devlin Bear as well as anyone could possibly know another person. She thought it was entirely possible that she knew him better because of the unconventional way they’d met and she’d learned all the intimate details about him. If they’d actually met and gotten to know each other in the traditional way, it might have been years, if ever, before she’d come to know him as she did now.

  It hadn’t been that way for him. She’d chosen his Sim. He hadn’t gotten to know hers.

  And she was afraid that the way he had gotten to know her didn’t show her in her best light or allow for the possibility of him falling in love with her.

  In fact, as dismaying as it was, the circumstances might make it impossible for him to care for her at all.

  Even future tense.

  She felt guilty for even focusing on that, though, when his situation was so … well, bizarre.

  She should have her mind on more important things—like survival, she thought uneasily as they followed the guide that had been sent to take them to the meeting that had been arranged.

  They’d entered a different way than before, but they were still in the mechanical labyrinth of the colony.

  It was dangerous. Any doubts she’d entertained before that there was an organization of rebels that were dead serious about toppling the government stranglehold on the populace had vanished. As long as it was nothing more than suspicions and hadn’t involved anything more than the occasional ‘secret’ meeting between her and Bren, she’d comforted herself with the belief that the group was nothing more than a handful of malcontents that got together to complain.

  That comforting illusion had begun to fall apart almost as soon as she’d taken her obsession over Devlin to the next level.

  The lighting was poor in the room they were led to, but sufficient to make it clear that the room was filled with people. She wondered if the lighting was deliberate to help conceal the identity of the rebels.

  They were told to wait near the entrance.

  “We have reason to believe our security measures may have been breached and time isn’t a luxury we can afford so I’m going to get right to the point,” said the man cloaked in shadows who addressed the group. “I’ve been given permission to identify one of our members because she may have just the information we’ve been hoping for.”

  Murmurs rippled through the group, but despite their obvious surprise and excitement, they were careful to keep their voices low.

  The shadowy figure held up a hand. “Brenda’s brother was working on a secret, government sponsored project. As far as she knew, he’d been killed in an ‘accident’ that the government blamed on one of our splinter groups. He’s here today to tell us what really happened.”

  Carly felt the jolt that went through Devlin at that announcement. She was shocked herself. She certainly hadn’t heard Devlin say anything to that effect. He’d told both her and Brenda that he didn’t know what happened.

  Brenda joined the shadowy figure holding the floor.

  “My brother, Devlin Bear, was working on a top level security project at Area 173 in New Mexico when the facility was destroyed a year ago. As you’ve all probably heard, there were, supposedly, no survivors. My family was informed that Devlin was positively identified as one of the casualties.

  “I believe now, though, that he did in fact survive and he’s with us here today to tell us what he can about the project and the accident.”

  Carly glanced at Devlin. It was too dark to really see his expression, but she could tell from the stiffness of his movements that he wasn’t happy about the way things were going. Nevertheless, he moved forward to join Brenda and the other man.

  He surveyed the group and Carly realized abruptly, with a surge of fear, that their identities weren’t safe from him.

  What if he was nothing more than a ‘plant’ the government had sent to ferret out the rebels, she thought in sudden horror?

  “The project I was working on for the government was, as you’ve heard, a top level security project. Regardless, it had no weapons potential that I’m aware of,” Devlin began. “There was some potential that it could have military applications and that was the reason for the security.”

  “What were you working on?” someone in the back, who’d clearly made an almost comical attempt to disguise their voice, asked.

  Several people snickered, but it seemed as much a nervous reaction as actual humor.

  Devlin hesitated. “Dimensional theory.”

  “And that had the potential for military applications?”

  Devlin shrugged. Again, he seemed reluctant to proceed. He glanced around at the group. “As happens quite often, though, I found something … unexpected. An alternate universe. That had far more potential in benefitting mankind that anything I’d expected to find and … I didn’t report it.”

  He shifted uncomfortably. “It was a moral dilemma when I was under contract, but the implications were so fantastic that they couldn’t be ignored. I knew if I turned it over to the government some private sector would be allowed to exploit it and mankind in general would certainly benefit, but at cost when I felt like it should be free to everyone.

  “Without getting into technical explanations that some of you might find confusing, this universe exists in tandem with our own and it is pure energy. Tapping in to the moon’s resources saved us from complete disaster when we tapped out of the oil and natural gas used in the past, but we all know how that turned out. The government allowed private industry to exploit it and, economically, the common citizen only benefitted in so far as being able to continue to struggle to pay for their energy needs.

  “I’d managed to develop a … well, I called it a gate. I hadn’t gotten far enough in my research to figure out a way to capture the energy for use when the facility exploded.”


  There was a prolonged, expectant silence when he stopped speaking. Carly was dimly aware of it, but she was as caught up in speculating on the potential of Devlin’s discovery as everyone else seemed to be.

  Free, unlimited energy? It boggled the mind.

  But how was he going to figure out how to capture it without his lab?

  “We’d like to hear what happened,” the lead speaker prompted after a few minutes.

  That dragged Carly from her speculations and she looked at Devlin expectantly.

  He seemed hesitant to speak and she wondered why. Was he reluctant because of the trauma of his experience? Or was he afraid he couldn’t maintain the illusion that he really was Devlin Bear because he hadn’t been there at all?