Exodus: Book 3 of the New Frontiers Series (A Dark Space Tie-In)

by Jasper T. Scott

  “Not extinct—look at it as the next step in human evolution, one which will make you all better and ultimately bring us together as a unified whole.”

  “That’s it,” Remo said. “I’ve heard enough! I thought we came here to discuss what’s going on aboard this ship and what to do about it.”

  “You did,” Benjamin said.

  “Then skip to the point, kid. We’ll figure out what to do about your plans for galactic domination later.”

  Ben nodded. “All right, the point is, I know how to cure the rest of the crew and make them all immune like us.”

  Catalina watched realization setting in on the others’ faces, but she was the first to voice it: “We have to make them synthetics,” she said.

  Ben nodded. “Exactly. Whatever it is that’s making everyone act so strange, it has no effect on synthetic cells.”

  “Well, isn’t that convenient. Benevolence gets to advance his agenda,” Remo said. “How do we know he’s not behind all of this?”

  “If he is, then that would mean he has the technology for energy shields, inertial compensators, artificial gravity, and cloaking devices—not to mention traversable wormholes. If all of that’s true, then there’s no need for him to use an alien virus and invasion plot as an excuse to convert us all to synthetics.”

  Catalina shook her head. “There’s just one problem. I never signed up for any treatments with Nano Nova, so how am I immune?”

  “When Benevolence approached Catalina de Leon, asking if she would join her ex-husband in the Mindscape to help him get over his girlfriend’s death, she laughed in his face, but she consented to create a digital copy of herself and allow that copy to enter the Mindscape to help Alexander. You are that copy.”

  Catalina gaped at him. “That’s not possible.”

  “As soon as he finished perfecting the technology for synthetics, Benevolence brought you to life and allowed you to leave the Mindscape with Alexander. You, Caty, are actually the very first fully synthetic human. You’re the proverbial Eve of your kind.”

  Catalina shook her head, speechless.

  “Fuck this shit!” Remo said. “I’ve heard enough. I’m turning all of you in. I’ll take aliens over Benevolence any day!”

  “You can do that...” Benjamin said, a note of warning in his voice. “But what do you know about them, or their motives? Nothing. On the other hand, how long have you known Benevolence? More than a century—and he’s only ever shown kindness to humanity.”

  “Yeah, and he’s kindly scheming to make us all into bots like him,” Remo sneered. “Hell, if you’re telling the truth, then he’s already done it with the five of us!”

  Benjamin nodded. “Exactly, and you’re still just as hateful as ever. That should prove to you that you’re no different now as a synthetic than you were as a human, so what have you got to be upset about? What’s he done to you that’s so terrible?”

  “And what’s to stop big brother Benny from brainwashing us all later?”

  Ben scowled and shook his head. “You see us as the enemy, and then you make it so.”

  Remo smirked.

  “We’re already synthetics,” Commander Johnson said. “What do we have to lose?”

  “Uh, the rest of the crew?” Remo suggested.

  “They’re already gone,” she replied, “and if we don’t do something soon, whatever’s happening to them might become permanent. If making them synthetic brings them back, then I’m all for it. Let’s put it to a vote. All in favor of immunizing the crew with synthetic treatments?”

  Catalina raised her hand. Everyone else raised theirs, too. Everyone except for Remo.

  “It’s settled then.”

  Commander Johnson turned to Ben.

  “I’ll need to work with Doctor Laskin to program the nanites,” Ben said, glancing from the Commander to the doctor.

  “You’ll need a cover story to explain what you’re doing in Med Bay,” Commander Johnson said.

  “I just lost my mother,” Benjamin replied. “I’ve always been interested in medicine, and I want to become a doctor someday, so Doctor Laskin agreed to let me hang around and watch him work to help distract me from my loss.”

  Catalina remembered how she’d spent the previous day trying to distract him from exactly that. “Were you just pretending to grieve?” she asked. “If you’re Ben, not Benjamin, then she’s not really your mother.”

  “There’s still a remnant of the real Benjamin in me, and the android part of me feels deeply when anyone dies, regardless of how close they are to me personally.”

  Catalina heard Remo give a dubious snort.

  “Let’s not go off on a tangent,” Commander Johnson said. “We need to get out of here before someone finds us.”

  Everyone nodded their agreement, and a new voice joined the group. “Too late for that.”

  Catalina spun around to see Councilor Markov materialize out of thin air, stark naked, and blocking the exit with his broad frame.

  Chapter 14

  Catalina saw it all happen as if in slow motion. Remo spun around, revealing a small pistol he’d had hidden in his palm.

  “Wait!” Commander Johnson yelled.

  There came a bright flash of light and a muffled screech. Councilor Markov’s body hit the floor with a loud thump. A tendril of smoke curled from a blackened hole in his chest, his eyes vacant and staring.

  “What have you done?” Audrey demanded, jumping up from the couch and running over to the fallen councilor.

  “He would have reported us,” Remo explained in an uncertain voice. He lowered his weapon with exaggerated care and stared at it in his palm.

  Doctor Laskin snapped out of his own shock and went to help Commander Johnson examine the councilor.

  “He’s dead,” the commander said before Doctor Laskin could get there. She turned to glare at Remo, her nostrils flaring and opalescent eyes flashing. “You couldn’t have stunned him?”

  Remo shook his head. “I...”

  “We need to hide the body,” Ben said quietly. “And we need a good excuse for why the councilor won’t be answering his comms. Commander Johnson, you and the councilor were lovers, were you not?”

  She glared at him. “How the hell do you know that?”

  “Because of your reaction, and because part of my mission here was to watch all of you.”

  “You’ve been spying on us?” Catalina asked.

  “From a distance,” Ben explained. “Synthetic brains can communicate directly with each other. Yours have been sending me updates.”

  Remo recovered enough to send Ben a dark scowl. Then he glanced at each of them in turn and said, “Big brother Benevolence is watching you.”

  Commander Johnson drew herself up from the councilor’s side, her moment of outrage safely swept under an expressionless mask. “What does my relationship to the deceased have to do with anything?”

  “You can be our alibi. Say he woke up feeling ill. Food poisoning. Doctor Laskin—you can corroborate that if need be. That will buy us roughly twenty-four hours.”

  “Is that enough time?” Catalina asked.

  “To immunize the chief of security, yes, but we’ll need another day for everyone else, assuming we can gain access to a suitable dispersal system—the ship’s water supply, for example.”

  “We’ll cover it up as long as we can,” the commander said stiffly.

  “We still haven’t decided what to do about the body,” Doctor Laskin said. “We can’t take him to the morgue, even if we hide him in a body bag. It will raise too many questions.”

  “Leave him in here,” Ben said. “In the shower. These are my quarters. No one will think to look for him here.”

  “Assuming no one knows he came,” Catalina said.

  “If he alerted anyone before or after he followed us inside, then we’ll know soon enough,” Commander Johnson replied. “Taggart—” she pointed to Remo. “Clean up your mess.”

  Remo hesitated briefly, the
n nodded and lurched into motion. He walked over and picked the councilor up. The councilor would have weighed at least two hundred and fifty pounds on Earth, but Remo carried him easily in the simulated Martian gravity.

  “As for the rest of us, we should leave before anyone else stumbles in here,” the commander said.

  “One by one,” Benjamin added. “That way passersby don’t notice anything unusual.”

  “I’ll go first,” Commander Johnson said, waving her hand at the door.

  It wouldn’t open for her.

  “Open up, damn it!”

  “Hold on,” Ben said. “Until we have the chief of security on our side, no one makes contact with the others, and no one meets in person, except in the course of our usual business—agreed?”

  Everyone agreed, and Benjamin unlocked the door. Commander Johnson left the room.

  Remo returned from hiding the body and scanned the room briefly, no doubt looking for the commander.

  “Jessica never showed up,” Benjamin said.

  “Who?” Remo asked.

  Benjamin glanced at him, and then back to Catalina. She shook her head, equally confused. Benjamin explained, “You found me with her after my mom died—a girl my age, curly brown hair, brown eyes...”

  “Right. I took her back to her parents,” Catalina said. “I remember now.” But she didn’t remember Ben giving the girl a piece of paper with his room number on it. “We didn’t invite her, did we?”

  “Benevolence sent her with me. She’s a synthetic like us, so we can communicate without going through the ship’s comm systems or neural hubs,” Ben explained.

  “Your partner in crime?” Remo asked. Ben nodded, and Remo snorted, “Another kid.”

  “Just because you can communicate without going through the ship’s comms, that doesn’t make it undetectable,” Dr. Laskin said. “Someone could have intercepted the signal and traced it back to her. That might be how the councilor knew to find us here.”

  Ben looked skeptical. “Even if they knew to look for it, the encryption would take weeks to crack.”

  “Can’t you use the same method of communication to ask what delayed her?” Catalina asked.

  “That’s what I’m doing,” Ben explained.

  “And...?”

  He remained silent for a few seconds, but then his head snapped up and his eyes abruptly widened.

  “Her parents are forcing her to report to the Med Bay for examination.”

  “Is that a problem? Can they find out what she is?” Catalina asked.

  Ben shook his head. “They’d have to biopsy her brain and extract some of her synthetic cells.”

  “That’s a risky procedure,” Dr. Laskin said. “It could kill her, which doesn’t seem in keeping with the benign, passive behavior we’ve seen from the infected so far.”

  “Benign my ass,” Remo said.

  “Would Jessica’s own parents be willing to risk her life just to find out what makes her immune?” Catalina asked.

  “I don’t know. Maybe her parents wouldn’t, but the medical staff would. Or maybe the infected already know what we are. We need to find out what they’re planning for us.” Ben turned to stare at Doctor Laskin. “You have to be the one who examines her.”

  The doctor nodded. “Let’s go.”

  * * *

  “Hello, my name is Doctor Larry Laskin,” he said, offering his hand first to the patient’s mother, and then to her father. “What seems to be the trouble with your daughter?” he glanced down at the girl—curly brown hair and big brown eyes, probably no older than Ben. “What’s your name?”

  “Jessica,” she replied in a cautious voice. She glanced up at her parents, then back to him, her eyes silently pleading.

  “The governor told all of the uninfected to report to Med Bay,” Jessica’s mother explained. “So we brought her here.”

  “I feel fine,” Jessica insisted.

  Her mother smiled. “I know, dear, but it’s best to be careful.”

  Jessica looked horrified. Her parents were acting like something was wrong with her, not the other way around.

  “Your mother’s right,” Laskin said, pretending to agree.

  “He’s infected, too!” she said, and bolted for the door. Laskin locked it with his neural link. “Let me out!” she said, pounding on the door with her fists.

  “Calm down, sweetheart,” her mother said. “No one’s going to hurt you. We just want to run a few tests.”

  “Listen to your mother, Jessy,” her father added.

  Doctor Laskin walked over to the girl. “I’m sure you’re fine,” he said, leading her gently back to the examination table. “But we can’t be too careful with these things.”

  “She’s been acting strange ever since we woke up this morning,” her mother explained.

  Laskin nodded along with that as if their perspective made perfect sense. “We’ll get to the bottom of it.”

  “You’re the ones acting strange!” Jessica screeched. “You’re the ones who are infected!”

  Both her parents just smiled and shook their heads.

  Laskin added a smile of his own for good measure. “Kids,” he said, as if that somehow explained everything. “Your parents just want what’s best for you, Jessica.”

  She glared incredulously at each of them in turn. “Let’s see what’s going on, shall we?” He began to prepare a hypodermic needle for a blood sample, but Jessica’s father came over and placed a hand on his arm to stop him.

  “We should go straight to the source of the trouble. Take a tissue sample from her brain.”

  Laskin tried to mask his shock. “A brain biopsy? There are significant risks to such an invasive procedure.”

  He nodded gravely. “We understand.”

  Laskin stared back at him, his heart pounding and his brain screaming for him to run while he still had a chance. Out of the corner of his eye he noticed Jessica’s mother nodding along with her husband.

  “I’ll go prep the OR,” he said slowly.

  Jessica caught his eye with another pleading look as he left the room. As soon as he was out the door, his private horror burst out, and his entire body began to shake.

  What am I going to do?

  Chapter 15

  “You have to go through with it,” Ben insisted.

  Catalina saw Doctor Laskin hesitate. He leaned forward to rest his elbows on his desk and steeple his hands in front of his face.

  “We’re not talking about a tonsillectomy—we’re going to remove a piece of her brain. The procedure could kill her.”

  “She knew the risks when she signed on to the Liberty,” Ben replied. “We both did,” he added. “And if she dies, she won’t be gone. Benevolence can bring her back using her latest backup on Earth.”

  “What about what Jessica wants?” Laskin replied.

  “She would tell you the same thing. Besides, you can’t ask her for permission without tipping off her parents. Perform the procedure, Doctor, and while you’re in surgery, I’ll get to work programming nanites so that we can immunize the others.”

  Laskin grimaced. “They’re going to know what we are soon. After that they might guess what we’re trying to do.”

  “Which is why there’s no time to waste. We’re not going to have time to test this procedure. We’ll have to skip straight to section-wide dissemination. If it works here, we’ll find a way to spread it to the other sections. Where’s your lab?”

  “I’ll show you,” Doctor Laskin said, getting up from his desk and heading for the door to his office.

  “What about me?” Catalina asked.

  Turning to her, Benjamin said, “You’d better get back to your quarters. By now your husband must be worried about you. Best not to raise his suspicions any more than we have to.”

  Catalina nodded slowly, her eyes drifting out of focus as she watched them leave the room. Her chest heaved, her breathing fast and shallow. Things were spinning out of control. Just a few minutes ago she’d
learned that she wasn’t even human, and now they were going to try to fight an unknown alien virus by making everyone else just like her.

  What if Jessica wasn’t the only one in danger of a risky procedure? What were the risks of turning infected, biological humans into synthetic copies?

  I could lose Alexander forever...

  * * *

  Alexander sat in the living room watching the door, waiting for Catalina to return. He couldn’t sense her the way he could sense the others. Her emotions and thoughts were a dark spot in an otherwise dazzling universe. He had to read her body language and read between the lines of everything she said to know what she was thinking. He knew she didn’t trust him, but she would come around. Soon her eyes would be opened as his had been opened, and then...

  A burst of euphoria surged through him. Alexander sighed, and a dreamy smile parted his lips. He wondered if this was what drug users felt like when they got their fix. Probably. The difference was, he had a permanent supply, and there was no need to worry about addiction, tolerance, or overdose.

  This must be what heaven is like, he thought, reveling in the feelings of oneness, security, acceptance, and love... he was one with the Entity. He could feel everyone else on board the ship, their minds bright sparks in an otherwise dark universe, an unseen tapestry weaving them all together, moving them in synchrony and harmony with each other. He could also feel the ones around their ship, the ones on board the... Harvester, the word came to him as if whispered by the Entity. That’s what they called their ship, but their word for it was in a different language, a more logical language.

  Alexander sighed once more. The burdens of what to do, where to go, and how to get there had all been settled. They would go out into the Federation as extensions of the Entity. We must be its hands and feet, slaves to its will, acting in the interests of the All.

  A warm glow suffused Alexander’s brain, lighting up his pleasure centers until he couldn’t help but smile. Unity with the Entity was the best thing that had ever happened to him.

  The door swished open and in walked Catalina. She glanced at him. Revulsion twisted her upper lip and wrinkled her nose, forcing her to look away.