by Ann Gimpel
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A Run For Her Money was originally published by Sam's Dot Publishing in March 2012.
Sara’s story is far from over. I took the basic idea behind this tale, made several significant alterations, and spun it into a full-length urban fantasy romance also titled A Run For Her Money. It’s the third book in the Alphas in the Wild collection. Here’s a link for more information and a generous download sample.
Epiphany
Wind whipped along the sastrugi, dislodging small particles of ice. “How the hell did those bloody ice formations get there in the first place?” Cyra muttered and drew her fur-lined parka hood closer about her face. She shivered inside her many layers of clothing. Was it actually colder this winter? She wasn’t sure if the weather was changing, or if her tolerance for cold wasn’t as robust as it had once been. Years of living in the Antarctic had taken a toll. She wasn’t particularly young anymore, and her patience for damn near everything was in decline.
Gray...everything was either white or gray. Even the sky often held a dreary, grayish cast. Wind blew incessantly. With nothing to stop it, it howled across the snowy surface with a fury that defied reason. Ice extended before her in an endless, undulating sheet, broken at intervals by crevasses designed to trap the unwary in their depths.
The first few years, she’d taken overnight jaunts hoping for some variation in the Antarctic landscape, but no matter how far she traveled from the research station, the vista was always the same. Cyra shook her head sharply to distance herself from her thoughts. She didn’t expect it would work—and it didn’t. Sometimes she dreamed of trees and other green things, wakening with tears on her cheeks and an ache in her soul, longing for the simple presence of other living creatures.
Lichens and some varieties of moss gained a fragile toehold on the rocks, but they didn’t take the place of walking through fields or forests.
Steadying herself with a gloved hand wrapped around the head of an extra-long ice axe, Cyra tested the snowy surface tentatively with one foot. Mmph...didn’t seem too slick. Maybe she could get by without crampons for the rest of today. No matter how thick her boots were, the metal spikes always acted as heat sinks, drawing every last ounce of warmth out of her feet.
She sucked in a shallow breath, and then another one, while scanning the horizon. Clouds raced along high above in the jet stream—mostly strato-cumulus, but a big lenticular right overhead probably meant a storm was brewing. She’d become ultra-cautious after being caught far from shelter one too many times during her overnight exploratory treks. Storms blew up out of nowhere, fast, furious, brutal. Once, she’d been trapped for several days waiting for the weather to clear sufficiently so she could return home. Reaching up, she readjusted her balaclava so it covered for her mouth. That way the air wasn’t quite as cold when she inhaled.
“Are we going or not?” A rough male voice emanated from the interior of the yurt next to where Cyra stood. Specially constructed as a combination scientific research station and home, it was heavily insulated to withstand extreme cold. The main entrance opened into a room housing all of their outdoor equipment. Sealed off from the remainder of the structure by double doors, the outer foyer was a perpetual mess, primarily because it was always too cold inside it for Cyra to spend much time organizing their gear. A staircase led downward to two lower floors that were partially submerged in the ice, making them easier to heat with the solar-powered generator. The living quarters, lab, and a garden spilled through the lower levels. Years ago, she’d had a place for everything, but she’d given up on that. After all, she had lots of time. So much, she didn’t need to be efficient.
“Well, are we?” Dozier’s voice was insistent.
“Don’t know yet.” Cyra struggled to hide her annoyance. Years with Dozier would try anybody’s patience. Even though he was an android, he didn’t seem to think it made any difference at all. He was fully as irritating as any human male could have been.
Cyra took one last look around, wondering if they should stay put and do some work on the generator. In constant need of repair, the solar cells’ storage capacity had been fading again of late. It wasn’t important during the periods when they had twenty-four hours of daylight, but they’d barely made it through the last winter season when the sun never rose above the horizon for weeks on end.
“Oh, what the hell,” she said and angled her face toward the yurt.
“We’re going,” she announced. “Get the kit.”
Grumbling came from within, and a very tall human-like form emerged from their shelter. As soon as he was out, he passed his hand over an electronic panel near the door, and the locking mechanism whirred shut. Sensitive only to Cyra’s retinal scan or Dozier’s unique electron pattern, their home would be safe from intrusion. Cyra sighed. No one within a thousand mile radius could possibly bother them, but they still locked the damned door.
Old habits never died, they haunted you to distraction.
“So how did it look?” Dozier was asking about Cyra’s morning trek—via solar-cell-powered snowmobile—to check on the juxtaposition where sea met land, a journey she made every week. The ocean had been creeping relentlessly closer for a long time now.
“The marker I set last week wasn’t there anymore. If I had to guess, I’d say it’s under water. I put in a new one fifty yards up this time rather than forty.” Cyra paused, immersed in thought as she worked out an estimation. Finally, brow furrowed in irritation, she said, “I need the computer to be more accurate, but I believe we’re losing ground—literally—faster than we were last year. At this rate, the yurt should be underwater in about three years.”
“We need to start moving it now. I told you that last year—and the year before. It’s going to take a long time to excavate a new foundation, not to mention trying to move everything with that pathetic little snowmobile.” The android sounded gruff, but it was more an artifact of his vocal mechanism than anything else. When his predecessor’s circuits had exploded, Cyra used what she had—which wasn’t much—to craft a replacement ’droid.
Androids were perfect for this wind-swept nothingness where temperatures often dropped to more than a hundred degrees below zero. Designed to be impervious to the cold, Dozier’s mechanical hands and copper-colored metallic face were bare to the elements. A lopsided pack hung off his broad shoulders.
“Don’t know why we bother,” he rasped. “No one will ever come to collect the samples we’re drilling. We’d be better off using our energy to move the house to higher ground.”
“If we don’t keep looking for promising core samples, there’s no reason to even be here,” Cyra replied reasonably. “There’s no way for us to leave, so we may as well keep busy.”
Don’t think about it, she hissed inwardly. Thinking about any of this makes me crazy, and nothing I can do will change anything.
Despite the command to turn her mind elsewhere, her arrival at this remote outpost many years before played through her mind. There had been another android then—one not nearly as well designed as Dozier. She’d come to Antarctica several months before the riots that destroyed civilization played out. The planet had run out of oil, and she’d been part of a wave of governmental efforts to find more petroleum somewhere—anywhere—on earth.
As a petrochemical engineer, Cyra had been lead scientist for a team of twenty, including other researchers like her, support workers, and one experimental android. They’d started in the Andean highlands in southern Chile and moved south as they struck dry hole after dry hole. Other teams had been deployed other places—Canada for example and the northern steppes above Russia. For the first few years, the various groups had a primitive communications network, but it had fallen to ruin, mirroring the crumbling fabric of the world they’d all known and taken for granted. One by one, the rest of her team had died. Disease, accidents, suicide...
Cyra and her android were all that was left.
A crystalline tear leaked from one of her blue eye
s, freezing as soon as it dribbled onto her cheek. The wind picked up, blasting her with particles that felt like rough sand. Rearranging her clothing to minimize any exposed skin, Cyra lowered her ultraviolet protective goggles. “Ready?” Her tone was brisk to mask the struggle she was having with her emotions.
“Sure. Why not?” Dozier led off at an efficient pace. Stopping after a hundred yards, he turned to wait for her. The snowmobile barely had enough power to carry one. When they both went somewhere, it was always on foot.
“Even if we found oil, isn’t it too late?” he asked. “The planet’s pretty much dead. Plus, we’ll never leave here. What difference does anything make? Let’s work on re-building the house.” Dozier could be relentless once he got an idea in his head.
“You’re a philosopher now? Remind me to re-program you.” Cyra’s tone held a dry edge.
He’s right, an inner voice nagged.
If we don’t keep looking for oil, it would be like giving up. She answered herself.
And then there truly would be nothing to do here—and no reason for her to keep getting out of bed every day.
“Do you really believe we’re the last life on Earth?” Cyra was panting a bit. She had to trot to catch up to Dozier, who’d pulled ahead again with his long-legged, automaton’s stride.
“Did I say that?” he demanded. “Logic dictates there are others. I merely said we would never leave here. And we won’t. Where do you want to take core samples?”
“We weren’t quite done with that area from last week,” she replied. “Let’s start there.” It took another half hour to reach their drill site with the wind dogging them every step of the way. It tore at Cyra’s clothing, inveigling itself into frayed places in her outer garments. Finally, she turned and walked backward to get her face out of the slipstream.
By the time she got to the wands that marked their earlier work, Dozier had already assembled the drill. “Ready?” he asked.
Cyra nodded, breathless from her struggle with the wind. As soon as Dozier placed the drill bit in contact with the icy surface, a high-pitched whine rose out of nowhere. At first, she was certain the drill had malfunctioned. Then she thought it was the wind, and then she knew it couldn’t be.
“What the hell is that?” She had to shriek to make herself heard above the din. The noise was so desperately loud, she was afraid her eardrums would rupture. Pain rocked her from side to side.
“We need to get back to the yurt,” Dozier yelled.
Cyra could only make out what Dozier said from reading his lips. Dropping the drill, he picked her up as if she didn’t weigh anything and hurried back the way they’d come at a shambling trot. His hearing was impervious to the infernal screeching pounding a hole through her head. One last wrenching white-hot blast of agony, and fluid dribbled down both sides of her face from her lacerated eardrums.
My god, what is that?
She racked her brain, cataloguing natural phenomena, and just as quickly discarding everything she could think of—except, perhaps, a tsunami.
A dream from several months before punched into her mind, impossible to ignore. She’d been deeply asleep, wakening to something that sounded a lot like the current cacophony, except it hadn’t been nearly as loud. Dozier had gone outside to investigate. He’d been so long returning, Cyra had been on the edge of going out to hunt for him when she’d finally heard the pneumonic hiss of the upper level’s sealed doors.
Dozier had been different after that night. Cyra couldn’t articulate what happened to him, but he’d started behaving a lot more like a human. Curious, she’d finally asked him if anything unusual occurred when he’d gone outside that night. He’d come up with an equivocal response that had shut her up without answering her question.
Her aching ears dragged her back to their current dilemma. Would they make it to the yurt before...? Before what? Did it even matter? All those things Dozier had said were true. They were stuck here—had been for decades. Was that ungodly sound getting better, or was her hearing damaged? Likely a combination of the two.
She could hear the muted clanking of parts as Dozier ran. He never had any problems being short of breath—probably because he didn’t have lungs. Cyra giggled at the comparison between ’droid anatomy and her own and recognized she was teetering on the brink of hysteria.
The sound—the horrible grating, ripping, tearing sound—stopped as quickly as it had begun. Dozier halted and looked around while his central processing unit gathered information, sorted it, and determined a reasonable course of action.
“Whatever that was, it seems to have stopped,” he announced and set her on her feet. “Can you walk? We’re almost home.”
Cyra could see the reddish walls of their shelter a hundred yards away. “Yes, I think so.” Her voice was shaky and sounded like it she was talking from underwater. “Do you have any idea what that was?
“No, I don’t. That’s why we must return to shelter. Come on, follow me.”
An hour later, Cyra sat with a cup of faux coffee in their small kitchen. She’d stripped off her outer layers, hung them carefully on hooks, and done what she could about her wounded ears. Her tympanic membranes would heal given time, but her hearing wouldn’t be quite so sharp once they did. Her gray hair fell to her waist in messy braids. She hooded her eyes in thought and gripped the ceramic mug with slender, nearly translucent, fingers.
Dozier sat in a chair on the other side of the small table, having just come down the stairs to the yurt’s main living area. Back in the beginning with the first android, it really bothered Cyra that they didn’t eat, but eventually she’d gotten used to it.
“I’ve been thinking about what happened.” Dozier clanked his fingers rhythmically on the small tabletop. “While you were in here warming up and making something to drink I took the snowmobile and had a look around. And I went back to get the drill. That infernal noise was ice ripping and grinding against itself as it tore.” He stopped and looked at Cyra. “It opened a new path, and the ocean is only about half a mile from here. Something doesn’t want us to keep drilling. That’s clear enough.”
“What?” Cyra looked up sharply. “How could you possibly know that? What makes you think there’s any connection between what sounds like some weird natural phenomenon and our work here?”
“I’m not sure,” Dozier admitted, looking sheepish and stubborn. “But that doesn’t mean I’m not right.”
“So you believe we should do nothing while we wait to see if the ocean rises enough to swallow the continent, and us along with it?”
“Not necessarily. I think we’ll be fine so long as we stop disrupting the earth by drilling. And we get the yurt moved to higher ground” He glanced at Cyra, his mechanical pupils filled with an unnatural wisdom. “Remember, I can still communicate with...others like me. They told me a long time ago to leave the earth alone. And I’ve tried to tell you, but you’ve never been willing to listen.” He hesitated. “The earth is alive. When we drill, we’re wounding her.” His tinny voice was uncharacteristically low-pitched.
“How could other ’droids possibly know that?” Cyra felt confused, incredulous, as she repeated a variation of her question from a few minutes before. “You may be in communication with something, Dozier, but I doubt it’s other androids. I built you. Programmed you. That wasn’t part of your circuitry.”
Dozier just looked at her, his glass eyes reflecting green in the artificial interior light.
“Anyway, if we have to stop working it’ll mean we’ve failed.” Cyra huddled miserably in her straight-backed chair. Slightly built, she shrank within herself and felt even more insubstantial.
“Not us. We didn’t fail. That battle was lost before you ever set foot in the Antarctic. You just didn’t realize it. Or maybe you did, but you wouldn’t accept the truth. Look, Cyra, be reasonable. You have the hydroponic garden. It gives you all the food you need, along with the occasional seal or bird. Remember, this outpost was designed to be self-sustainin
g—forever. All we need to do is move it. And maybe not all that far if we don’t drill anymore.”
Standing abruptly, Cyra began pulling on her outdoor garments.
“Where are you going?” Dozier asked, looking as close to alarmed as he could.
“Where does it look like I’m going? And no, I don’t want company.” Piling on the last of her heavy clothes, Cyra attacked the stairs leading to the upper levels that would deposit her outside. Irrational anger ricocheted through her.
After a short struggle—gloves ruined her tactile feedback—the door opened, and she stood, gazing at the muted blue-gray of the day. Extending her arms out from her sides, she spun around.
“Who’s out there?” she demanded. “Who? If we stop drilling, what will we do here?”
Emotions rocked her until great, gasping sobs took over. She cried as her heart broke, and she grappled with truth. A truth she’d failed to face for years.
“Damn it all, anyway,” she gasped. Cold air searing her lungs as she wept made breathing difficult.
She sank to the ground, her layered clothing providing some protection from the cold, and sat for a long time as her tears flowed. Day edged into evening until she wasn’t certain what she was mourning anymore.
There’d so many losses—her friends, her work, her life, the planet she’d known. She hadn’t let herself think about any of them—at least not for very long. Instead, she’d pushed herself to keep going, no matter what happened. The worst had been when four of her team took their own lives after it became clear they were stranded in Antarctica.
Cyra didn’t remember how long ago that had been. But she did recall—with excruciating clarity—the crushing sense of failure that threatened to overwhelm her when she’d found their bodies, faces cherry-red from carbon monoxide poisoning. A fresh gush of tears cascaded down her face as she relived the memory—vivid as if it had just happened yesterday.
