Sleeper Protocol

by Kevin Ikenberry

  <>

  I’m not trying to kill him.

  Kieran snored deeply and rolled onto his side.

  Mally replied, <>

  Berkeley opened her mouth, but the words wouldn’t come for a moment. <>

  <>

  “You don’t know that!” Berkeley focused on the cursor, and it moved. No more than a pixel, she noticed, but it moved. “Presuming death in a situation with a million variables—”

  <>

  Companion for life? Berkeley thought with a gasp. The protocol thought it was supposed to be his flesh-and blood-partner, not a guidance protocol. “What are you talking about?”

  <>

  The message appeared slowly, one letter at a time, across the wall of the hexhab in ethereal white letters. Berkeley read the message, her breath catching in her throat. “They wanted you to stop him?”

  <>

  No, I’m not! Berkeley screamed in her mind. She reached for Kieran’s leg and then froze.

  <>

  Berkeley recoiled. Mally had more than enough power to carry out the threat. “You wouldn’t do that.”

  <>

  “You’ve made a mistake.” Berkeley felt tears stinging her eyes. “This is all wrong.”

  <>

  Berkeley shook her head. “I’m here for Kieran.”

  <> Mally chided. <>

  A new message wrote itself on the walls of the hexhab. LEAVE KIERAN ALONE, OR HE DIES. HE IS MINE, AND YOU WILL NOT TAKE HIM FROM ME.

  Berkeley felt a hot tear slide down her left cheek. “You can’t do this! Let me help you, Mally. We can figure something out.”

  <>

  Berkeley moved the cursor again, and a sharp pain slammed into her temples. As she crumpled to the floor of the hexhab, the message blinked off of the tan walls, and darkness filled the space. For a long moment, she watched Kieran sleeping and felt her insides trembling. She couldn’t leave him, but there was no other choice. Mally was going to kill him. A quiet sob escaped her lips as she gathered her things, shrugged into her coat, and stepped through the vestibule. Walking quickly, she tugged her earlobe and contacted Livermore. There would be hell to pay from Crawley, but he had to know how bad things were.

  Emergency evacuation. My position, now.

  “Situation report.”

  She clenched her teeth. “I need evacuation now. I am in immediate danger, and the subject could be compromised if you don’t.”

  “Negative,” the voice replied. “Assume your secondary mission and observe from a distance.”

  Berkeley slapped at the air. “Damn you! I said get me out of here. Wake the general if you have to, but get me out of here!”

  There was a pause. “Transport in route. Seventeen minutes.”

  That Kieran was in grave danger was certain, but try as she might, Berkeley Bennett knew it was time to go. If Mally found out the truth with any of her considerable resources, Kieran would be dead. Waiting on the ice, Berkeley recognized her emotions for what they were: what she felt was love, and she wished she could tell him one more time. There might not be another chance. Tears came, and as the hovering transport arrived, she shuffled aboard without a word and sat against the cold bulkhead with her hands to her face. The hot tears felt like failure branding her face.

  Chapter Seventeen

  I woke alone to nature’s call and found that a fresh snowfall frosted the landscape. In the light powder, Berkeley’s footprints led away from the hexhab to the center of the lake, where they disappeared. There were no cracks in the foot-thick ice. She’d simply vanished into the night. I’d figured it would come to that eventually but not when things were so good between us. Obviously, I’d been wrong. Whatever Berkeley had wanted from me, she’d found it and moved on. She’d disappeared as unexpectedly as she’d entered my life. What did I do wrong?

  Mally was no help when I questioned her. Why didn’t you wake me?

  <>

  Inside the vestibule, I stripped off my clothes, sat down naked on a cushion, and stayed there all morning, hardly moving except to relieve myself and eat. The outside world served no purpose, and trekking around in the snow and desolation would only have made me cold and despondent. Berkeley had left me, and I argued with myself over and over again that I was the cause or that it was all a lie—a cruel joke. On my second night alone in more than a month, I conjured up a bulb of Earl Grey tea and made a decision: I’d come for a vestige of home, or some piece of this new world worth my life, if that was my destiny. Without Berkeley, the answer came harder. Through the cleared roof of the hexhab, I watched a meteor streak across the sky to the east like an arrow. The Rocky Mountains were beautiful, but my home was not there, and staying in my tent wouldn’t serve anything. I crawled into bed, content and ready.

  The next morning, I packed the hexhab and broke straight toward the rising sun, reaching the western slope of the Palmer Divide in a half day of hard hiking. Amidst the light pine forests, a series of shadows in the trees stopped me. Some type of vertical structure hid behind the pines, but the closer I crept, the more my heart calmed. There was no one there at all. Magnificent red rocks jutted up from the earth more than thirty feet into the pines. In the twisting complex of small tunnels and a completely enclosed room, I found a way to the top of the rocks and sat, looking to the northwest to the mountains of the Continental Divide. I stayed that night in the natural room in the rocks and left before daylight to ascend the mountain and drop down off the front range of the Rockies. A tall red sandstone pillar marked what had been an old roadbed. Scratched into the surface were the words “Abandon All Hope.”

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  “No, Mally.” I stuffed my hands into my pockets and considered the route a final time. I considered the TransCon but decided it was easier to descend from the mountains here. Head down against the morning cold, I clambered over the ridge and down into the rising sunlight
. I’d find a faster way to cross the plains than walking, I was sure. In warmer temperatures, I could keep walking for twenty hours a day if I wanted.

  By the time I entered the plains north of what had been Colorado Springs, I hiked in shirtsleeves. The snow around the summit of Pikes Peak was beautiful in the morning light. On closer inspection, the entire horizon rippled toward the remains of Cheyenne Mountain. Why is that familiar?

  <>

  A big fat target, in other words. I spoke aloud, the steam erupting from my mouth in a thick white cloud. “Mally, is that a radiation hazard like Los Alamos?”

  <>

  “World War Three, huh? Can’t say I’m surprised.”

  <>

  “I guess that debunks the theory that World War Four would be fought with sticks and stones.”

  <>

  “Stop, Mally.” I studied Cheyenne Mountain. I did not know if its craggy appearance was normal or not. The entire southern horizon appeared to ripple like heat waves rising from a summer road. The illusion wasn’t from summer heat, and there was no one there to tell me differently. The whole Front Range was a wasteland. I kept moving east. “Who bombed it?”

  <>

  “Why do you call it the return? We haven’t talked about the Vemeh before, have we?”

  <>

  “Aside from the artifacts, was there any type of proof that the Nasca lines were really drawn for the Vemeh?” I chuckled. “Seems to me there is no way they could prove that.”

  <>

  I was about to respond when Mally urged me to stop, regard the western sunset, and drink some water before continuing to the edge of the elevated farms just eleven miles away. There would be a maintenance road in gridlines five miles wide. Cross-country traveling, and avoiding snakes, coyotes, and snags of rusty barbed wire, was not faster than the crushed-gravel roads Mally promised. Shrugging out of my pack, I sat down in shoulder-high grass and watched the sunset. Explosions of pinks and gold dappled the clouds above the horizon. Thunderheads loomed to the south and would bring their cleansing rain. Evening air rustled up in warm, moist kisses, and my longish hair waved in the wind, a feeling I’d not known since my college years. Smiling, I rested my eyes for a moment and enjoyed the last warmth of the day’s sun on my face. Berkeley would be back in California by now. Whether she left out of disappointment or wanting something more that I could not give, I did not know. Not knowing didn’t bother me—it just sucked.

  “Mally, how many days do I have left to integrate?”

  <>

  My heart skipped a little. Since I’d been “born” a little more than ninety days ago, I’d done so much and come so far, and in the fading warmth of a late-autumn Colorado day, I watched a beautiful sunset and felt as if a significant portion of my soul clicked nicely into place. Loneliness closed in on me, and I missed Berkeley. The simple fact that she’d spared us both something messy, emotional, and unfulfilling was clear. As much as I wanted to let it all go, to never have another thought about her in my head, I could not. I had to find out who I was so I could be that man for her. Maybe it would be enough.

  Purple-and-red clouds glowed in the dusk above the silhouette of Pike’s Peak in the distance. Within another heartbeat, the warm sunset reminded me of Esperance, Allan, and the guys.

  “Mally, please take a picture of the sunset and send it to Allan. Let him know I’m okay.”

  <>

  I chuckled. She thought of everything. “But I wanted to send a note with it.”

  <>

  Talking out loud to a man half a world away would make the loneliness worse. For a moment, I wanted to go back to Esperance and forget the whole damned thing. Except that I could not. When I had all the answers, I could find Berkeley. I could tell her that I loved her, knowing it with every fiber of my being. There was time, provided I did my part.

  “Forget it, Mally.”

  The elevated farm’s artificial sunlight clicked to life behind me. Standing slowly, I wrestled my pack onto my back and began to walk toward the lights. The nearly full moon rose above the el-farms. Too bad I’d have the light from the farms interfering with it. Walking in the moonlight would have been exhilarating.

  <>

  By the time I reached the outskirts of the farms, their lights were indeed dimming. A small break in the fencing allowed me inside. Crossing the crushed-gravel maintenance road, I noticed the lack of weeds. Meticulously maintained maintenance road. Somebody cares for this well, I thought with a chuckle and remembered Berkeley’s word about robots and their ignorance of Asimov’s Laws. There wasn’t enough room to set up the hexhab, and a part of me didn’t want to smell the lingering scent of Berkeley inside the damned thing. I stepped across a waist-high divider and into the relative shelter of the farm. Giant cornstalks, impossibly green in the autumn cold, surrounded and dwarfed me. Continuously harvested plants? What will they think of next? Unrolling a thin sleeping bag, I lay outside amongst the corn and listened to the soft rustling of the stalks as sleep overcame me.

  As a young officer fresh out of the Academy, Adam Crawley learned that controlling his rage would determine his tactical success. Always a strategic thinker—a master of the bigger picture—he often let the smaller items under his control eat up too much of his focus. Unable to let go of those items as they went awry—as all good plans did upon execution—he became angry. He’d been angry for the last six hour
s, riding a military suborbital from Sydney to England, then taking a private autocar, and finally stomping three hundred meters through a cold English rainstorm to Bennett’s laboratory. He’d spoken to no one the entire time, and as he pushed through the glass doors and found his target sitting at her desk with her blond hair obscuring her face, he flushed and lost control of his voice.

  “You mind telling me just what in the hell happened out there?” Crawley roared, and the door slammed behind him. Hands on his hips, eyes blazing, he stared at the young woman. “You were supposed to help him integrate, and you left him! What is wrong with you?”

  Berkeley looked up at him with red-rimmed eyes. “I was compromised, General.”

  Crawley took a breath, moved across the lab, and flopped into a chair, loosening the mandarin collar of his uniform tunic as he did. “What happened?”

  “Kieran’s protocol refuses to acknowledge his progress toward Stage Four. She received an order from the council that if Kieran reached Stage Four, she was to halt him in place and contact them so that he could be killed.” Berkeley slipped a loose lock of hair behind her ear. “But that was what we expected.”

  “So, what weren’t we expecting, Doctor Bennett?”

  Berkeley bit her lip. “While I monitored the protocol, it received an emergency-action message on ADMIN and responded but did not tell the truth. Since then, there has been no contact with any orbital platform of any type.”

  “Have you tried to monitor the protocol from here?”

  “I have a frequency lock, and TDF Comms Zulu Four is tracking it from geostationary orbit. As long as it’s within North America, if that protocol beeps, we’ll know. The good news is that until she broadcasts something, the Terran Council won’t be able to find him.” Berkeley looked down at the pad of paper on her desk.