by Brin, David
“Yes, yes, yes I know. Kaybe Winters. Some kind of math prodigy, by the looks of things. Let me have it.”
“Have… it?”
The man sighed, rolled his eyes. “Your proof. You think I know nothing? Show me what you want to show me, I’ve got a lot of work to do today.”
Make it seem like his idea. Not your own. But how was she going to do it? He already knew. They’d probably already sent him photos of her scritch-scratch on the wall. How on earth was she going to make it look like it was his idea?
“Well,” she said, “I am just a girl. I mean, I’m fourteen, you know? I’m probably doing it all wrong. Maybe you could show me where I’ve made a mistake?”
He looked at her over his glasses. “Don’t waste my time, child. Either you’re a math prodigy, or you’re not. Which is it?”
So that’s how it was going to be. Kaybe twisted her lips, crossed the room to a blackboard. Someone else’s handwriting covered the board. She lifted the eraser in a mute question.
“Get on with it.”
She cleaned the board, picked up a piece of chalk, and, as she had done for Saizon, marked out her proof. Only this time, with the new corollary she had discovered an hour ago. Halfway through, the man stood and grabbed her wrist. He plucked the chalk from her fingers.
“You may go.”
“But I—”
“I am not overly fond of life, child, but I am not prepared to give it up just yet. And you are a lot younger than I am.” He pointed to the door. “You may go.”
“But don’t you under—”
“I said—”
“—could solve all our—”
“—you may—”
“—all our problems!”
“I said out!”
His upper lip trembled. He craned his neck up at Kaybe, one finger jabbing at the doorway. Two soldiers stood there, weapons at ready. One of them was Max.
“Orders, sir?”
“Incin. All precautions. Stat.”
“Aye, sir. Incin, all precautions, stat.” Max flicked off the safety on his automatic rifle. “This way, please.”
Kaybe looked at Brian, mouthed the word, “incin”?
He winked back, took her by the hand, and walked passed the two guards.
They are going to kill us now. Incinerate us. She could hear Max’s breathing behind her. But Brian doesn’t seem concerned. What does he have in mind?
She wondered where her father was, what he was doing right now. The outlaws—Johnny and Saizon all the others. Had they left the cave? Fled because of her? Their home for five years.
And what of Tin Lady? She had to be somewhere here in this complex. Camp Wannamaka. They zapped her circuits or whatever, but somehow Kaybe didn’t think that would keep the android down. She hoped the android would survive… although given everything she’d seen so far, she doubted it.
A soft pop noise made her turn.
Brian held two heads in his hands. The bodies lay crumpled at his feet. She opened her mouth but his hands clamped down over her face before the heads hit the ground.
“Not here,” he said. “No screaming. Not now. We’ve got to get out of this place.”
Kaybe stared down at Max’s body, twitching beside his head. She took a deep breath. Nodded. He removed his hand.
“Where do we go? How do we get out?”
Brian looked both ways down the corridor. “Nowhere to hide the bodies. We got to get topside as fast as we can. Race you.”
He disappeared in a blur. He was fast. But she was fast too, as it turned out. Almost as fast, anyway. He left an odor, a trail of molecules in the air she could easily follow. Bounding up the stairs, toes silent on each step, doors opening, doors closing, Kaybe felt like a red ghost flitting through a haunted mansion.
A really weird haunted mansion underground where the owners did secret genetic experiments on innocent people. But still, a haunted mansion.
Kaybe took the stairs four at a time, and halted on the landing. An instinct told her to remain quiet.
“I can explain!” a voice whined on the other side of the door. Brian.
“Nothing to explain,” said the voice, familiar, mechanical. Tin Lady?
A crash.
The door was open a crack. She peeked.
The android and Brian were fighting. Wrestling. Or something. Trying to rip each other’s heads and arms and legs off, but they were well matched. Neither seemed to gain the upper hand. Men with guns on top of crates and barrels watched. The main warehouse room. Right.
But what had they done to Tin Lady? Why was she fighting with Brian in the first place? To stop him from trying to leave? Because the Austerity people found it amusing the watch them fight? Or had they re-programmed her somehow? She’d been subject to experiments, maybe they decided to… fiddle with whatever you fiddle with on an android.
Should I join the fight? The android threw Brian, but he was on his feet, claws slashing the android’s skin before she could hurt him. Two against one, she and Brian would win. But… they would still lose. All those watchers? Brian was doomed to the incinerator no matter what happened. The only question was whether she wanted to join him or not. But that’s Brian, out there, stupid. You want him to—
The android slipped past Brian’s arms, wrapped both hands around his jaw, and twisted. A crack, a thump, and Brian was gone.
Gone.
I waited too long.
He’s dead!
It took a few moments for the fact to register, and another to hate herself for not saving him when she could. Kaybe choked back a sob. You could have gone down fighting. Don’t get caught now. You owe it to him to get out of this freak show.
“Where’s the other one?” someone shouted. “Didn’t you say there were two?”
Bootsteps clattered toward her hiding place. She ran.
The sign on the door read “laboratory.” Kaybe replaced the broken lock and slid quietly into the room. A thick layer of dust covered everything. She tiptoed through shadows, tables, work benches of some kind. She dared not turn on the light, but she found her vision adjusted, and everything became crisp, almost as clear as daylight. Chalk one up for our genetically engineerical masters.
The problem with her hiding place, she realized, is that it was a dead end. She was trapped if they found her. So don’t let them find you. More easily said than done. How big was the complex? How long could she hide? If they searched every room, they would eventually find her. What was she—
A hand brushed against her thigh.
A body, a person, a something lay on the table, covered in a sheet. The room smelled dusty, but not of death. The hand was limp, but not stiff. Kaybe peeled back to the sheet. A face stared back at her. An electronic face. She did not know how else to describe it. Like an android had been dissected, the skin peeled off the skull. One eye lay in a bowl at its side. She had no idea how androids worked, but she had a pretty good idea what a human corpse would look like, and this definitely wasn’t it.
The room was filled with similar tables, shapes covered in sheets. An android dumping ground? What could she learn here, what could she use to get out of here, to survive? Her brain seemed to speed up, everything seemed to happen faster now. She was stronger, and quicker, and her thoughts happened so fast she gasped. One part of her mind, as it always eventually did, returned to her proof, and in the background was soon creating and proving theorems that she was positive no human had ever considered. Principles of mathematics that struck at the core of the universe, made possible thousand-year life spans, faster-than-light travel, the creation of new planets. Under the pressure to survive, it wasn’t fight or flight, it was think better faster better than the hunters.
Tin Lady belonged to them now. The hunted turned hunter. But all these androids… she leaped up and down the rows, lifting sheets, looking for an untouched android, one undissected, undamaged. To her surprise, the ones with faces all looked like Tin Lady: angular features, blonde hair, eyes of si
lver. Must have been a common model, back in the day. In the end Kaybe found one that was missing a leg, but was otherwise untouched. So far as she could tell, no important neural processing happened in their legs, only their body cavities and heads.
Now for the fun bit. By her calculations, given her estimated size of the complex and the number of guards, it would take five hours to search every room. That gave her a half-life of a little more than two hours. She had to be quick.
Kaybe knew nothing about android design, but it didn’t take her long to figure it out. The main problem, she realized, was the lack of an energy source. Androids without power made great paperweights, and that was about it. How did androids stay alive? What was their fuel, their power? They didn’t plug in every night, she was pretty sure of that. What did Tin Lady say? Androids lived twenty years or so, and she had fiddled with her own electronics to last longer. What had she fiddled with? Where did the energy come from?
Kaybe found what she was looking for in the center of the android’s chest. A small nuclear reactor. Technology that had been lost in the war. Or so she had learned in school. But here she stood, holding an android’s heart in her hand… You’ve got a room full of dead androids with fission reactors the size of an apple in their chests. And you really couldn’t use that to build more?
Were they incompetent? Or just evil?
Probably both, Kaybe decided, and got to work.
She finished just in time. As she made the final tweaks, she heard bootsteps in the hallway outside. She hefted the android onto her shoulder and ducked down behind the slab.
Bring it on.
Two men with guns entered the room. One flicked on the light. Shit. The sheets! She’d forgotten. The men saw it too. They backed into the corridor, leaving the door open. Kaybe could hear one of them talking into a comm device.
She flicked a switch. Here goes nothing.
Ten minutes later the others arrived. Tin Lady, a dozen men armed with automatic weapons, and other weapons she did not recognize.
“Come out of there, Kaybe,” a woman called out. The nurse. “We’re not going to hurt you. We just want to help you. Please, pretty please with sugar on top?”
Kaybe waited. They should be here soon.
A man’s voice now. “We can do this the easy way. Or we can do this the hard way. Your choice.”
Again she said nothing. What was the point in talking to them? Killing her was their only option. Even she could see that.
“I don’t want to have to hurt you,” Tin Lady said. “Please, Kaybe, I—”
The android screamed. The nurse screamed. The gathered men screamed. Kaybe pressed down on the button for a long moment, then released. A collective thump as her attackers slumped to the ground. Hundreds of dragonfly drones hovered over their unconscious bodies.
She stood up, the one-legged android still draped over one shoulder. The android must have weighed half a ton, but on her shoulder it felt light. One finger rested against the android’s open hand. The drone control switch. It hurt to get zapped, she knew how much it hurt, but it was the only way.
Lightly, quickly, Kaybe danced over the slumped bodies, along the corridor and up the stairs. The swarm of drones preceded her. At the door to the warehouse, she sent them into the cavernous spaces. Hundreds of screams echoed, and died. She waited.
The drones regrouped, formed a protective sphere. She stepped inside and jogged toward the elevator, the farmhouse, topside, freedom.
“Stop!” a voice called out.
Kaybe turned, finger on the drone control. A small man in overalls stood not ten meters away, his hands out wide, palms open.
“You really don’t want to do that,” he said.
“I’m pretty sure I do.”
“This is your home now. You don’t belong to that world anymore.”
“So I should stay here and let you incin me?” Kaybe moved half of the drones toward the man.
“Please don’t make me hurt you.”
Kaybe pressed the button to zap the man. The drones let go a barrage of energy, and fell to the ground. The man smiled.
Oh shit.
She jumped into the elevator, glad she still had half of her swarm left, and punched the close button. Come on, come on! The doors slid shut, but two hands appeared at the last moment, pulling them open again. Kaybe stomped on the finger with her foot, but inch by inch the doors parted. She primed her claws and slashed.
Fingertips fell at her feet. Metal fingertips. She slashed again, and the doors slid shut.
When they opened once more, she sent the swarm out ahead of her, ready for anything. A dozen of the 2.0ers appeared. Nobody else? No one? She considered trying to recruit them, talk to them in sonar, something, but when one of them attacked, the decision was made for her. She flicked a switch, and they all dropped.
Next the drone fence. Thousands—no, tens, hundreds of thousands—of dragonfly drones marked the physical boundary of the farm. She fiddled with the android’s drone control, this, that, a thousand combinations a second, until she found the right frequency.
Then the drones belonged to her.
She set off towards home at a brisk jog, fifty miles to go but that was nothing, the android draped over her shoulder, half a million dragonfly drones surrounding her, watching her back, ready to attack on her command.
No traffic appeared along the way. Kaybe considered going across country, but she was afraid of getting lost, and she could go much faster along the road than over tree stumps, hollow logs, and thickets of gorse. The sun was low in the sky. It would soon be dark. Pa would be home from work at the kelp factory, getting into the blackberry wine. Wouldn’t he be surprised to see her again!
A little bit faster now. Plumes of smoke marked the cooking fires of the houses below. She stopped, just for a moment, not even breathing hard, to admire the view. There. Spread out below her. Her town. Her home. Her place. Where she belonged. She was so glad to be back. To be coming home.
The sun was setting as she stepped from the woods, the road emerging between two giant oak trees. She sent the swarm overhead, where they hovered, the sound of their wings thrumming like bees. Had anyone in town ever seen so many drones at once? Kaybe doubted it.
Where to first? Pa, she decided. He was most important. Everything else could wait.
She jogged through town, the drones a black cloud that followed her. Around the rusted hulks of cars and trucks she danced, somersaulting once, twice for fun. To be young and strong and fast and smart! She hated what they had done to her. She loved what they had done to her. None of it made any sense. Pa would know what to do.
Where is everybody?
The town was quiet. Dinnertime, but all the doors were shut, no lights in the windows, curtains drawn. Even the greengrocer’s was shut. She listened: Heartbeats raced in half a dozen houses. A baby squawled a block away, and she flinched at the noise. Everybody’s here. But they’re hiding. Why? What from? What does that mean?
She slowed to a walk. A woman peeked out a window, jerked back.
“Hi!” Kaybe said. The window shattered.
Whoa!
Inside the house, the sound of a shotgun being loaded. Ah, man… Kaybe sent in half a dozen drones. When she heard the bodies fall to the floor, she moved on.
Why was her voice destroying glass? What was that all about? The sound vibrations were at a frequency that caused such destruction? Was it the new sonar organ she could feel in her throat? She had no idea how to use it… was that to blame?
Kaybe stood outside her own home. The light was on, smoke trailed from the chimney. She could smell the blackberry wine, hear Pa’s sips. Only tonight they sounded more like gulps.
To knock, or not to knock? She fumbled in her pockets, realized with a start that her clothes were rags. They hung in strips from her body. She had grown and her clothes had not. Her nipples showed through, yet somehow she didn’t feel the cold. She covered her nakedness with one arm. Maybe just try the doorknob.
But the doorknob came away in her hand.
“Who-who’s there?” Pa called out.
Whisper now. No more broken glass.
“It’s me!” she said, in as low a voice as she could manage. “Kaybe! You know. Your daughter!”
A phone being dialed in the next room. “Emergency, yes,” Pa said. “The monster. From the bulletin. It’s here. In my house. Groaning and moaning in the hallway. I think it’s going to try to kill me!”
“Pa, no!”
This time it wasn’t a whisper. Every window, pane of glass, and bottle of blackberry wine shattered. Kaybe ran into the living room.
Pa held the neck of a wine bottle in one hand. A purple stain covered his trousers. He screamed, “Get away from me! Don’t hurt me! Please! What do you want? Just go away!”
Kaybe reached for him, but he flattened himself against the wall of the kitchen, brandishing the broken glass.
“Pa,” she whispered. “It’s me. Don’t you know me?”
“Wait… what?”
“It’s me. Kaybe. They did experiments on me. Am I so horrible as that?”
He squinted at her, mouth gaping like a fish.
Did he understand me? Will he recognize me? Will he—
“Kaybe?” he said at last. “But—what are you—I thought that—” He stamped his foot. “But what have they done to you? I thought you were dead!”
“That’s what they wanted you to think, Pa. I—”
A roaring noise overhead. Hundreds of miles away, but closing fast. A flying object. An airplane? Only flights of species importance were allowed. That meant—
“Pa, we have to get out of here, now. They’re going to blow up our house!”
“Blow up… our house? Why? This is my—our—our home!”
“Not anymore. Your phone call. Remember?”
Outside, Kaybe sent the drones aloft. Shit. She needed to see with their eyes, like the androids could. She picked up the one-legged android where she’d dropped it in the garden, found the control. I need to know where the attack is coming from. I can hear it… but I need to see it. Otherwise it’ll be too late. She’d used the drones in the warehouse on autopilot, but dropping jet fighters? She couldn’t take that chance.
