Madelyn's Mistake

by Ike Hamill

  “I wonder if I could get it working,” he said. “My neighbor had one of these. He used to take it everywhere. The battery is supposed to last forever.”

  Madelyn studied the floor. She found fresh holes in the wood. They were pretty small—maybe the size of construction screws.

  “The thing kept the dog up all night, trying to teach it new tricks. Drove the dog crazy.”

  Madelyn stood and looked through the window.

  “His doll never got a chance to be recalled. The dog tore the doll to shreds before it went psychotic.”

  Madelyn finally turned her attention back to Elijah. He was poking around in the panel on the back of the doll’s neck.

  “Why would you want to get it working?”

  “You disable the motor control first, so it can’t move, and then they’re fun to talk to. It’s like a live tap to the ether’s subconscious. They say some fascinating things. Plus, they’re always recording. They make decent surveillance cameras.”

  “Let’s get out of here,” Madelyn said. She looked down and scuffed the screw holes with her foot. “Bring the doll.”

  Elijah smiled.

  # # # # #

  Elijah bound the doll’s wrists with a shoelace he found in the stairwell. As they headed outside, he looped the doll’s arms around his neck so he could wear the doll like a backpack. If they had to run, he wouldn’t be carrying the thing in his arms.

  “That thing is going to wake up and choke you to death,” Madelyn said.

  “I pulled the cabling that connects the limbs,” Elijah said. “The worst thing it’s going to do is whisper in my ear. Besides, I’m pretty sure it’s bricked. The jostling should have made it say something.”

  “Bricked?”

  “Dead. Forever,” he said.

  Madelyn shook her head.

  “You should toss that thing in the fire. It looks evil.”

  Elijah smiled.

  A couple approached them from the path.

  Madelyn smiled at her nephew.

  “Hey, Aunt Mac,” Jacob said.

  Standing next to him, Harper looked nervous.

  “Didn’t see you at the ceremony,” Madelyn said. There was a question below the statement. She punctuated it by raising her eyebrows and waiting for an answer.

  “Yeah,” Jacob said. “We had other things going on. We just came by to sign up for the housing.”

  “Oh yeah?” Elijah asked. They all looked at him as he adjusted the dolls arms around his neck.

  Harper elbowed Jacob gently in the ribs.

  “We’re moving in together,” Jacob said. He blushed and looked down when he said it.

  “That’s great!” Elijah said. “Congratulations!”

  Madelyn was silent. Eventually, her silence drew everyone’s attention.

  Elijah glared at her.

  “They’re moving in together,” Elijah said. “Tell them that’s great.”

  “Yes, that’s great,” Madelyn said. “Didn’t I say that? I meant to say that.”

  “Thank you,” Harper said.

  Elijah was still staring at Madelyn.

  “Congratulations,” Madelyn said. She moved forward and shook Harper’s hand and then Jacob’s.

  Elijah laughed at her.

  “We have to get going. Good luck with the lottery,” Elijah said.

  “Thanks,” Jacob said. He and Harper practically ran towards the dry lakebed, where a couple of people were still taking down names.

  “That was awkward,” Elijah said. “You know they’re practically living together now, right? Why were you so weird about that?”

  “I don’t object to them being a couple, I just think it’s a bad idea for them to live here. I couldn’t think of a diplomatic way to say that.”

  “Well at least you didn’t make it weird,” Elijah said, rolling his eyes. “They probably won’t be chosen anyway. I saw tons of people who wanted information, and there aren’t that many inhabitable apartments. There’s little chance they will happen to land one. But, if they do, they’ll be surrounded by friends. They hang out with a lot of the construction folks. Harper’s grandfather used to run that unit.”

  Madelyn nodded. “I guess.”

  “Regardless, we should find something nice to give them—let them know that you’re really in favor of their relationship.”

  “It shouldn’t matter what I think.”

  “I’m sure it doesn’t, but you’re his aunt. You’re the only family he has here. Your opinion has to mean something.”

  Madelyn nodded. “I didn’t ask his approval when I moved in with you.”

  “You’ve moved in? I thought my house was just a convenient place for you to sleep at night and keep your extra flannel shirt.”

  Madelyn scowled at him. Her eyes moved to the dead eyes of the doll hanging on his back.

  “If that doll wakes up, I’m moving back out.”

  Chapter 6

  {Retool}

  “YOU HAVE TO ROUTE the wires around to the side, like this,” Amelia said. “You’ll get parasitic induction from the regulator if you do it that way.”

  Niren looked up from his circuit board. “How do you know?”

  She shrugged. “I read it somewhere I guess. You remember when we had that problem where the unit would send noise when it should have been quiet?”

  Niren nodded. “Yeah.”

  “I think that was why. The current makes a field here,” she pointed.

  They both looked up when the door banged open. Amelia was halfway to her feet and then recognized the people who entered. Brook and Caleb worked on interfaces, but it wasn’t unheard of for them to mingle with the hardware side of the team. They took seats at the wooden bench. Brook reached for one of the boards.

  “You have to strap in before you touch that,” Niren said. He pointed at his grounding strap. Brook withdrew her hand and folded her arms.

  Caleb put his elbows on the table. He leaned forward to look at Niren’s work.

  “How’s the redesign coming?” Caleb asked.

  “We’re not redesigning,” Amelia said. She was sick of people blaming the hardware for all the issues. The hardware had worked just fine. The limited success of the experiment was due to the logistics of the mission. “We’re just making an incremental improvement based on the data.”

  Caleb waved his hand. “When you start from scratch and make a whole new device, I don’t think you can call that incremental.”

  “That’s not what we’re doing,” Niren practically shouted.

  Amelia looked over at him. He was already getting agitated. She had to set a better example.

  “Same concept, better implementation,” she said. “Anyway, I’m sure you didn’t come to talk circuits. What can we do for you?”

  “We need you to change your focus,” Brook said.

  “Oh?” Amelia asked. She was beginning to struggle with this conversation. Perhaps the example she should be setting for Niren was how to stand up to irrational people.

  “There’s no future in these gadgets,” Brook said. She gestured to the carefully built circuits that were spread on the table.

  “Okay,” Amelia said. She took a second for a deep breath. “We’re following the schedule that Ryan set out, so you might want to take your idea to him.”

  Caleb put up his hands to stop her.

  “That’s where we’re coming from. Ryan sent us here to put you guys on a different path. We’re working on a new direction for undercutting the Hunters.”

  Amelia brushed the tip of her soldering iron and put it back in the holder. This wasn’t going to be a quick conversation.

  Niren was still gearing up for a fight. “We’ve been working on this protocol for six months and we just had our first really successful experiment. Cleo gave a speech about it. You expect us to believe that Ryan wants you to sweep in here and suddenly change everything when we finally got some traction?”

  Amelia reached over and put a hand on his arm to quiet
him down. Everything he said was true, but she wanted to find out what was behind Caleb’s sly smile.

  “The problem is evolution,” Caleb said. “What happens if we go to use your devices a second time and you get no containment?”

  “If the people get into position, we’ll get containment,” Niren said.

  Caleb leaned across the table and locked eyes with Niren. When it was clear that Niren would make no more claims, Caleb continued.

  “We found some old documentation that suggests that a decade ago, Hunters weren’t even using multi-spectrum oscillations to transfer energy.”

  Amelia sat back in her chair. Her brain wanted to churn through the ramifications of that, but Caleb was still dishing out information.

  “Apparently, as late as nine years ago, they were using direct connections to send bursts of encoded energy from unit to unit. It moved through the groups like ripples through a pond. The standing wave would stabilize the margins at every reflection.”

  “That’s impossible,” Niren started. Amelia squeezed his arm and he stopped talking.

  “So we’re not talking about incremental improvements to their methods,” Caleb said. “This is a completely different mechanism that they evolved over no more than nine years.”

  “It could be redundant systems,” Amelia said.

  “Yes, you’re right,” Caleb said. “But we have no idea how many different systems the Hunters are capable of utilizing. Without knowing that, we can’t estimate the scope of what we’re up against.”

  “So we hit this method until it doesn’t work and then we diagnose the new method,” Niren said.

  “We could do that,” Caleb said. “That’s definitely the logical approach if we want to use a reactive method to solve this issue. You have to consider though—we lost twelve people in last-week’s experiment. And that was for a success. How many more times can we afford to succeed before we run out of people?”

  Niren blushed and looked down at the table. The engineers hadn’t been talking about the people who sacrificed their lives to execute the containment. It was too difficult to think about. Some of those deaths were directly related to mistakes they had made. Some of the recovered Quiver remotes had clearly failed the moment they were activated in the field. That life, and possibly the lives of the other two people who made up that triangle, were at the feet of a malfunctioning circuit. Thinking about the gravity of their work was a quick way to make an engineer shut down.

  “So what’s your plan?” Amelia asked.

  “No more containment,” Caleb said. “We work on starvation.”

  # # # # #

  After a moment, Niren broke the silence.

  “That’s crazy,” Niren said. “You can’t starve a machine.”

  “Starve it for power,” Amelia said.

  Caleb pointed at her. “Exactly. We got lucky the other night. I’m not saying you guys didn’t do fine work—you did—but there was still a fair degree of luck involved. The system worked, but there’s substantial evidence that the Hunters were shifting their attack even as we were setting up the containment. They were reacting to things that hadn’t even been fully implemented.”

  “It doesn’t matter how big your gun is if the target moves before you pull the trigger,” Brook said. Niren shot her a look.

  Amelia shook her head. “That containment is locked. Regardless if they know how we did it, we can build on that.”

  “Perhaps,” Caleb said. “And that’s definitely something that we can put a team on. But you guys are too important to have you working on a dead end. We need you working on the real next chapter. When I reviewed the logs, I saw several new wrinkles that nobody predicted. The Hunters build structured energy scaffolds and, given enough time, they could have used those scaffolds to mount a more thorough defense to your containment.”

  Amelia frowned. What he was saying was theoretically possible—in fact, another team had done small tests to guard against that possibility—but they had seen no evidence of those scaffolds.

  “There’s a chance that the Hunters pulled the idea right from our documentation.”

  “What?” Amelia asked. She looked at Niren. For once, he was too stunned to say anything.

  “What if the Hunters are pulling their energy right from our intellectual efforts?” Caleb asked. He knew the gravity of the idea he was proposing. He gave it a second to sink in before he continued. “If they’re leeching directly from us, then the harder we fight, the stronger they become.”

  The idea snapped into Amelia’s brain like the last piece of a puzzle. With the framework of that idea, the world suddenly made a lot more sense. Everything was terrifyingly clear.

  “Then we have no chance,” she said.

  “Right,” Caleb said. “We have no chance to fight them. That’s why even the people that created them fell victim. They created the perfect monsters. Their creation was not only smarter than them, it also gained power every time they tried to come up with a solution.”

  “They were defeated by their own ingenuity,” Amelia said.

  “Right,” Caleb said. “And that’s why the world was whittled down to people who were completely ignorant about how the things worked.”

  “Our approach with the bonfires…” Amelia began.

  “Only works because it’s such a stupid idea. If it were smarter, it would power up the Hunters and they would easily figure out a way to sidestep it.”

  “We survive only because we’re ignorant. Then this conversation…” Amelia said.

  Once again, Caleb finished her sentence. “This conversation has to remain between us. The more people who understand this concept, the more dangerous it is. For every intelligent person in this community who gets what we’re up against, we need a hundred, maybe two-hundred people who think that keeping fires lit will make them safe. We did somewhat of a disservice to ourselves by coming up with the clever containment strategy. Now we have to worry about what the Hunters will mutate into next. As far as I can tell, their last big mutation was nine years ago. We have to determine how to starve them out before they mutate once again. This window is small, and it’s closing rapidly.”

  Amelia looked down at the circuit boards. They didn’t look the same as they had fifteen minutes earlier. Now the circuits seemed childish and naive. They also seemed very, very dangerous. If their opponent evolved like Caleb described, then the danger of that evolution would be exactly proportional to how clever Amelia had been with the new design.

  “You’ll pass this work on to people who will finish it up. There are other smart people in the group. We need them occupied with this so they don’t brainstorm any new ideas while we’re working. We can’t afford to fuel the Hunters too quickly. They’ll get enough of a boost just from the four of us.”

  Amelia looked at Caleb and Brook. Minutes before, they had been rude and unpleasant. Now, in addition to rude and unpleasant, the two of them were also necessary. Somehow, the four people at the table would have to find a way to work together, and they would have to do it without anyone else finding out about the mission.

  Apparently, Niren reached the same conclusion at the same time.

  “This is the worst,” Niren said.

  Chapter 7

  {Crew}

  SHE WAS READING WHEN she heard the bang reverberate through the house. Madelyn climbed the stairs and opened the door.

  Logan stood there with his axe in his hand. She looked at the door. His axe had left a dent in the wood.

  “Yeah?” she asked.

  “We’re about to head out. I thought I would come see if you wanted to go.”

  “I’m off harvesting,” she said. “I’m going to switch back to gardening. We don’t start until later.”

  He nodded. “I figured. You shouldn’t though.”

  “I shouldn’t what?”

  “Don’t switch over to gardening. Anyone can do that. Only some of us are cut out for harvesting. We can’t afford to lose anyone.”


  “Listen,” Madelyn said. “I don’t think I was a good fit with you guys. All the harvesters are young and…” Madelyn glanced over and saw Wyatt and Scarlett down the street. They were trying to balance their bow saws on their chins. They were doing pretty well, but one bad angle and they would be in for a nasty scar.

  Logan turned to see what she was looking at.

  “I know we seem pretty stupid, but you have to consider what we do everyday. We’re out on the perimeter. Life is more dangerous out there. We go out in small groups, knowing that one of these days some of us won’t come back.”

  “You’re really selling this job, you know?”

  “Yeah, that’s why not everyone is cut out for it. Anyone could be a gardener. You just water and weed. As long as you don’t fall into a pattern, you’re as safe as a baby.”

  “My boyfriend is a gardener.”

  “So you know, right?” Logan asked.

  Madelyn smiled. The young man was so ignorant about his insults that they were actually a little charming. Still, it was tough to forget how she had felt with those three when trouble came. They were disorganized and selfish. She didn’t want to be a part of that again. The work was satisfying, but she couldn’t justify returning to it when she didn’t respect her co-workers.

  “We’re not walking today,” Logan said. “We’re supposed to escort that guy out of town. What’s his name… Darren, I think.”

  “David,” she said. “I thought he left days ago.”

  “No,” Logan said. “He got special dispensation so he could make some trades.”

  Madelyn realized that she had closed the door behind herself.

  “Trades?”

  “Yeah. He had some parts that engineering has been looking for. Apparently, he has been working with those guys to trade what he had and get descriptions of what they are still looking for.”

  Madelyn was walking alongside Logan. They were headed towards the others.

  “Why don’t they just fabricate what they need?” she asked.