Immediately captivated, Diego drank in the audio. That’s what happened—the murder my parents had been talking about.
And that voice . . .
It belonged to the man he’d met in the elevator.
As the minutes ticked by, Diego’s stomach churned. Eden’s purpose was beauty, serenity. It was the home of peace and comfort and happiness, and the Warden had . . . had . . .
Wham, wham, wham.
The pounding on the restroom door made Diego tense—he pressed himself into the cold metal of the wall. I.C.C. cut the situation room feed.
“All right in there?” called Diego’s supervisor.
“I’ll be out in a minute.”
“Do I need to call a medic?”
“No, no. Just give me a bit and I’ll be out.” He waited a beat before letting himself out of the stall. “Thanks, I.C.C.—second day officially on the job and I’m already the screw-up and the toilet clogger. Why . . . why did you want me to know all that?”
“What happens in the Pit is relevant to your well-being,” said I.C.C.
“Isn’t it relevant to everyone’s well-being?” Cool water flowed from the hand washing station. Diego splashed a few soothing palmfuls onto his face.
“This would be easier if Chen Kexin were here.”
Diego hadn’t heard that name in a long while. Pictures of her still littered the ‘flex-sheets imbedded on the walls of his family’s quarters, but neither his Mom nor his Madre spoke of her.
To him, Kexin had been Mama—that much he remembered. But the lilt of her voice was lost to his inner ear, just as his inner eye could not recall an expression besides the camera-ready smile. He did recall a sense of openness. She’d been carefree. Quick with a joke and a hug.
And then she’d died and . . .
“What does she have to do with anything?” Diego asked more harshly than he’d meant to.
“It is irrelevant now.”
“Oh, no you don’t. You never say anything without a reason. You wanted me to think about her. Why?”
“That is a question for your parents. They don’t think it is time for you to know about the plan, but it was my plan, and it is time.”
Hours had passed since lights-out, but Rail needed the latrine. Pissing in the middle of the night had its perks—nobody there to perv at your junk or threaten castration if you’d accidently twisted their ventilation hose in the tunnels.
It also had its downsides. If a subwarden crossed your path, it could mean an entirely different kind of lights-out. Ma’am didn’t like anyone wandering about during the sleep cycle. She’d rather you crap your sheets than walk the halls.
Luckily, he encountered no one on his way there, or in the latrine itself. However, on his way back through the darkened common room that linked the branched halls of cellblock C, a single monitor sprang to life. It hissed with static. Rail froze, his heart leaping in an erratic jolt. The eerie glow of the screen threw mad shadows across the walls.
Rail spun, searching wildly for whoever had turned the monitor on. It could mean an ambush—by the guards or other prisoners. His gaze fell in every nook, but found no one lurking.
“Jamal,” the screen whispered. At least, that’s what it sounded like. Rail tiptoed closer to the speakers, ears straining. Blood pounded in his temples.
“Jamal,” the voice repeated.
And again.
And again.
Over and over, spitting the word out underneath the static.
“Jamal. Jamal. Jamal. Can you hear me?”
Rail knew to keep his mouth shut. The subwardens had set less complicated traps to ensnare suspected rabble-rousers.
“I am not the most adept at creating patches—are you receiving?”
The shadows continued twirling across the walls, making it difficult to tell if someone had snuck up through a side hall. But no telltale zing of a readied shock baton cut through the static.
Who owned this voice, and who were they trying to contact?
“I can see you, Jamal. Why are you not responding?”
The static subtly shifted, the negative space became more pronounced. It resolved into wobbly letters that spelled out, Can you read me?
Instinct told Rail to run. Even if it had nothing to do with the guards or rebels—even if it had nothing to do with him—it didn’t sit right. Anything out of the ordinary could spell trouble. He could get the baton just for being curious. He started to slink away, but then the words changed.
Can you read me? Jamal, war is coming. You have to help me stop it. The Master Warden will find you soon. He’s pouring through the records, looking for you. Jamal, answer.
Rail’s meager education meant he only had a vague sense of war—it was like a brawl, but bigger. Lots bigger.
Hopefully this Jamal person had gotten the message, because there was sure as a dunged-up toilet nothing Rail could do about a war.
“There’s no waiting,” I.C.C. said. “The Master Warden has seen him. And he knows—he doesn’t know yet what he knows—but he knows.”
Diego stood before his parents in their small living room, feeling for all the world like they’d just caught him doing something unmentionable, though he couldn’t say why. Maybe it was the horror on their faces—like they’d just seen something that could not be unseen.
The two women took each other’s hands—creamy white encased in sandy brown. “We’re not ready for this,” said Margarita.
“You never would have been,” said I.C.C. “I’m sorry.”
“What—what do we do?” Vega stammered.
“I’ve already tried to contact Jamal in the Pit. To warn him.”
“But what do we do about Diego?” Margarita asked.
“Yes, what about Diego?” he asked.
The two women stared at him, eyes wide and sad. Their guilt was palpable—whatever this was, whatever was happening, they’d been keeping secrets to prevent it. But for how long?
“This would be easier if Kexin were here,” Margarita breathed, breaking away from Vega.
“I’ve done the best I can,” her wife retorted.
“That’s not what I meant. It was Kexin who agreed to all this—she must have had a plan.” Margarita stepped toward Diego, reached up and took her son’s face between her palms. “She would have known how to tell you.”
Diego leaned back. The lines on her face were deep; he’d never really noticed how old she was before. Her retirement would come too soon.
Margarita’s fingertips still brushed at his chin, but he stepped away. “What is going on?” he demanded.
“You aren’t Diego Santibar,” Vega blurted. “No, what I mean is . . . What I mean is your original was not the original Diego Santibar. You’re of a different line.”
“Miscloned,” Margarita said. “That’s what we call it.”
“Only we shouldn’t, because that makes it sound like an accident.” Vega plopped herself down at the family table with a small huff. “I swear this all started with that damn poem,” she mumbled to herself.
Diego blinked at her, trying to process the words. How could . . . miscloned? How can any clone be of the wrong line? “What are you saying?” Every syllable shook. “Why? What—how?” A tingling sensation worked its way from Diego’s fingertips up to his nose and lips. His lungs refused to take deep breaths, working instead in small, halting stutters that provided little oxygen.
“I did it,” said I.C.C. “I rearranged a few commands in Hippocrates’ computers to ensure that when they went to regrow a Diego Santibar clone, they’d grow you instead. I was trying to fix the convoy. Since the loss of contact with Earth, the destruction of Bottomless and the rejection of SD travel, chances of mission success have been dropping exponentially. More importantly, chances of convoy survival as well. Before your birth, there was only a seventeen point two percent chance that the convoy would survive another fifty years.”
“And now that I’m, I don’t know, alive— Now that I’m alive, been
grown, what’s changed?”
“Nothing. Yet.”
“But, what does it mean for me? What do you expect me to do? Who am I? Why grow me instead of . . . instead of the other guy? What line do I even belong to?
The room fell silent.
“I.C.C.,” said Vega, “you did this. You tell him.”
“No,” said Margarita. “I’ll do it.”
“This is so cruel,” Vega said under her breath, dropping her head into her hands.
“Just someone say it,” Diego pleaded. Every atom in his body rumbled, bounced. His flesh crawled with the unknown. Why me? What do you expect? “Tell me!”
Margarita took a breath to try, but the words never made it past her lips. She cast her gaze away from his.
“May I?” I.C.C. broke in. It clearly didn’t like seeing his mothers’ struggle.
“Please,” Margarita said, reluctantly.
“There are lines,” the AI said frankly, “that I believe are still needed in the convoy, but are no longer grown. Discontinued lines.”
Diego’s vision tunneled. No, I’m not hearing this right.
Margarita tried to touch him again, but he wouldn’t let her. Her eyes filled with hurt, and she said quietly, “Your DNA and histones are that of Jamal Kaeden. He led a revolt in the early half of the journey to LQ Pyx. A mutiny. Tried to turn the convoy around.”
“That guy?” Diego didn’t believe it. They learned about the revolt in school, but no one dared name names or pull up pictures because those people were—“Discontinued,” he breathed. Traitors. Failures. Outcasts.
No. No.
“I’m a Discontinued?” Everything from the knees down went numb, and he couldn’t keep himself upright anymore. “I’m Dis—I’m Dis—” It was like hearing you’d been kidnapped at birth and raised as someone else. Hell, he had been raised as someone else. Because he never should have been born.
A strange wash of guilt and shame swirled through his mind.
Margarita helped him into a chair next to Vega. “Breathe, son.”
Every word out of their mouths was wrong. So wrong. And yet . . . it made a sort of grotesque sense. He’d felt like an alien—out of place in his uniform, in his own skin. He let out a clipped laugh. “I’m Discontinued.”
“What they’re doing down in the Pit is wrong,” said I.C.C. “It’s damaging—to the individuals as well as the whole. If such enslavement continues, the entire convoy will die.”
“Which is why I.C.C. and Kexin cooked up this stupid plan,” said Vega.
“It is well known that the most successful way to reduce the fear of otherness is emersion,” the AI insisted. “Consistently cloned convoy members fear the otherness of the Discontinueds. By introducing discontinued lines back into the larger genetic pool, and subsequently revealing their successful integration, I had hoped to incite a social reform. You were the first, and nine more followed until I put the plan on hold—when Kexin died.”
“There are others?” Others like me who feel this way? Others out of place, others . . . “Why did it matter that she died?”
“Because she had a plan for raising you—a way to successfully integrate the ten of you. She wanted to make sure no one could deny the necessity of your genetic lines. She wanted you to bring back safe SD travel.”
“There are thousands of people on board trying to make that happen. What in the name of all of Earth did she think ten kids could do about it? You agreed—you implemented the plan. What do you think we can do about it?”
“I don’t believe there is anything you can do about it,” I.C.C. said bluntly. “It was the trying that mattered. The dedication to saving the convoy. But despite my reservations, she truly thought you could do it. With her help. She was the greatest convoy physicist I’ve ever known. If there was anyone who could have guided you all to success, it would have been her.”
For the first time in his life, Diego wanted I.C.C. to have a human body. So that he could either hug it or punch it in the face—he wasn’t really sure which.
“Kexin didn’t tell me about you,” Margarita said. “I.C.C. told me after the accident—after her funeral. I knew something terrible would happen if anyone found out you were Discontinued. So I asked Vega to help me keep you safe.”
“I’ve controlled all of your schedules—tried to keep you from ever interacting with anyone who’d been to the Pit.” Vega’s hands still covered her face, and her voice sounded far away. “But even that plan failed.”
Because the Master Warden saw me.
“We’re all in danger, aren’t we?” asked Diego. “Us and the nine others—and all of their counterparts in the Pit?”
“Yes.” The AI sounded sad.
“Who are they?”
“It won’t tell us,” said Margarita. “For their own safety. I don’t know if their parents are even aware.”
“But the Warden—when he realizes I look just like one of his workers he’ll suspect there are others, won’t he? What are the odds he writes it off as an accident, or a coincidence, or a trick of the light? He’ll start looking for the rest. We have to locate the other miscloned first, get them together—tell them who they are.”
“They are still children,” I.C.C. said. “You were the oldest. The youngest had just begun to incubate when Kexin passed; she is only eleven.”
“And their counterparts in the Pit—how old are all of them?”
“They are all older. Jamal is twenty-seven, if my records are correct. And—” it hesitated “—there are only eight counterparts in the Pit.”
“What happened to the other two?”
“Pire Evita died aboard Hippocrates three-point-seven years ago. Of radiation poisoning. Ceren Kaya died six days ago. Aboard Eden.”
Diego locked eyes first with Margarita, and then—once she’d uncovered her eyes—Vega.
“The Master Warden will kill us all as conspirators if he has his way,” Margarita said. “That’s all he’ll see this as. He won’t care that you’re children, he won’t care that we’re just your mothers.”
“But the board, the security guards, they’ll stop him . . .” Diego half stated, half asked. “Unless they agree?”
“There are so many ways this can go wrong,” said Margarita. “Master Warden wants us to believe he’s protecting us, that his tactics are necessary. Finding out there are Discontinueds among the crew proper could produce enough paranoia for him to gain a following.”
“Then we have to get everyone on our side first,” Diego said.
“How?” I.C.C. asked.
“By revealing us for what we are,” said Diego. “Children.”
“. . . is coming.”
Rail wished he didn’t have such a small bladder. Every time he went to the loo in the middle of the sleep cycle, that damned message sprang up.
Jamal, Jamal, Jamal. Freaking Pit-stink Jamal.
He’d seen it perhaps nine times now over the course of weeks. Did it play every night? Triggered by some time-sensitive motion detector?
Why hadn’t the subwardens disabled the screen yet?
Who else might have seen it?
“War is coming, war is coming—I get it, I get it,” he grumbled in the dark.
Scuffing his bare feet against the floor, he’d almost reached the bunk room when a bouncing dot of light at the other end of the hall caught his attention. Then footsteps. Running. Multiple people. And a strange scraping—like something heavy being dragged.
A group was about to round the corner, and Rail had nowhere to hide, no way to blend in. His white jumpsuit glowed against the dark gray walls. If it turned out to be a horde of angry subwardens, he might as well up and die on the spot.
But it was six men—also in white, ranked in two files—who stepped into view. They filled the hall like an angry cork, waiting to thrust through the neck and out the bottle. Behind them, sliding none-too-smoothly as it was hauled across the floor, was a body.
The penlight fell on Rail, temporarily
blinding him in one eye. He couldn’t tell who carried it.
“You didn’t see nothin’, squirt.”
Rail knew that voice. Sweetcheeks.
He lowered his head and said nothing. Damn Sweetcheeks. Had he been part of the guerilla groups the whole time? Or was this new since . . . since the hangings?
When they’d passed, he allowed himself one glance at the body. He couldn’t tell if life still filled her limbs, or if the ugly sear-mark across her face meant they’d killed her with her own shock baton. But he couldn’t mistake her stocky build and mirrored glasses for anyone else.
They’d gone and attacked Ma’am.
War is coming. Thanks for the tip, whoever you are.
“Your men must stay with the craft,” ordered the head of Security.
The Master Warden paused midstep, halfway down the shuttle’s steps. He eyed the Mira security detail that had come to greet him. Four officers. “They accompany me everywhere—on the convoy or in the Pit, doesn’t matter.”
“Not this time.”
Everyone in the shuttle bay had stopped to watch. Most probably didn’t even realize they were staring.
“Listen, Matheson, do you even know why I’m here? Last night one of my subwardens was attacked on duty. She’s on Hippocrates in critical condition. If we’d had a larger security staff she wouldn’t have been alone. We’re undermanned and under attack. I don’t go anywhere without my guards.”
Matheson stood his ground. “We’ve been deployed to watch over you during your time aboard.”
“Why can’t I have my own people? I trust my people.”
“It’s part of the sanctions, sir.”
Master Warden set his jaw. “Sanctions,” he spat. Behind his sunglasses, his eyes scanned the room. Everywhere, faces took in the scene. They weren’t used to seeing this—a confrontation. They were used to quiet transitions. Passive stops and uneventful takeoffs.
Peaceful changeovers—changeovers he allowed, moments he gave them. And in return, all he asked was noninterference. Do what I ask, and let me do my job. He wasn’t unreasonable in his requests or in his execution of his duties.
But, like petulant children, the crew—especially the board—had no idea how easy their lives were. They whined and flailed about when things didn’t go exactly as they wanted. A toy didn’t have to be broken for them to pitch a fit—it just had to have a flaw. A scratch, a bit of tarnish. Never mind the powdered bits of his own past, his own things—if they had a boo-boo, then God help him if he railed against their tantrums.
Noumenon Page 24
