by Beth Goobie
Desperately Nellie squinted through the stars shooting across the lenses of her virtual-reality glasses. They seemed to be speeding up and multiplying in every direction. How was she supposed to see a target through this kind of mayhem? Hand shaking, she began to lower her gun. As she did, a searing line of electric shock erupted from the electrodes connected to her right arm, and Lt. Neem’s voice screamed into the speaker in her right ear, “Code 999, cadet! 999! Shoot all targets!”
The shock and command cut through Nellie’s hesitation like a blowtorch. Whipping her hand back into position, she pulled the trigger. Instant red blossomed at the boy’s throat, but before she saw him hit the floor, the disk had rotated her past another divider. Immediately a line of gangsters appeared before her, carrying pulse guns and semi-automatics. Without blinking, she took them down rapid-fire, all the while cursing her hesitation at the last target. Fucking moron. Wimp. Civilian. The slightest sign of hesitation meant a pejorative on her file and a possible session with the Black Box. No holograph was worth that, even if it was screaming for its mommy. Hissing and swearing, Nellie mowed down everything that came into view, including the closedown target — an image of herself, dressed in a black bodysuit and firing a pulse gun from each hand. It was always there, that final holograph of herself, the final death. As the disk jerked to a halt and the virtual-reality glasses shut off, she stood panting for breath. That had been some workout. What would her score be?
“Cadets, lower your weapons,” ordered a voice in her ear, and then a door opened opposite and Lt. Neem appeared. Leaping onto Nellie’s section of the disk, he began to undo the harness that anchored her feet. “Well done, cadet,” he said with a wide grin. “One of your highest scores ever. Very well done.” Removing the electrodes from her right arm, he clapped her on the shoulder.
“Lt. Neem, sir.” Hesitantly Nellie ran the back of her hand over her sweaty mouth. “That little boy target ... when you yelled into my headset — I was going to shoot, I really was.”
“Of course, cadet,” said the lieutenant, stepping off the disk. “I knew that.”
“Well ... ,” Nellie toyed with the question, then pushed it away and went for second best. “Did I get a pejorative?”
“No, no,” said the lieutenant with a wink. “You shot him, didn’t you?”
“Yeah,” Nellie shrugged.
“Remember, cadet,” Lt. Neem said sternly. “Enemies come in all sizes. A kid could be carrying a bomb in a candy bar. We have to prepare you for any possibility. Now,” he added, another grin crossing his face, “go take a shower. My nose tells me you’re desperate for one.” Winking again, he turned toward the next shooter.
“Lt. Neem,” Nellie faltered, her heart pounding.
“Yes, cadet.” The lieutenant turned back to her, some of the friendliness leaving his face.
“That kid,” Nellie said uneasily. “He looked so real. Was ... ?”
Lt. Neem’s face tightened and he looked at her silently. Suddenly Nellie was shaking, her skin dotted with acid sweat. “I only meant ... ,” she stammered. “I just wondered if he was a holograph or a drone. I wasn’t complaining, I ... “
The lieutenant continued to stare without speaking, and Nellie’s head sagged. Staring at her feet, she mumbled, “I’m sorry I bothered you. I guess I’ll go take my shower now. Can I take my shower now?”
“You do that, cadet,” said Lt. Neem in a clipped voice. “And then visit a Mind Cleanser. That’s an order.”
“Yes, sir. I will, sir.” Head lowered, Nellie slunk off the disk and out of the range.
Nine
“PHILLIP.”They were in a back section of the library, Phillip at a computer and Nellie at a nearby table, both doing research on a virus for Bio-weapons. This was the third time she’d hissed his name, but Phillip was so deeply engrossed in a computer file that he’d barely raised his head. For a moment Nellie paused, hunched over the list of fatality statistics she’d been copying into a notebook. She was taking a big chance here. After all, she didn’t know if Westcott could tune into her mind any time he wanted, or if she had to be wearing the Relaxer helmet.
Swallowing hard, she hissed Phillip’s name again. This time his head came up quickly and he turned to her, a questioning look on his face. Briefly she considered scanning his vibes for irregularities, anything jagged or out of sync, a clue that would tell her if Westcott had warned him against talking to her. Then she rejected the idea. A week ago Phillip had behaved oddly for a few days, as if something had been bothering him, but he seemed fine now. Besides, he was her friend.
“Find anything yet?” She wasn’t sure how to come at this. If there was anything she’d learned during her years in Advanced, it was that what she was about to do was absolutely forbidden. There was no way she could come at it directly. Her approach had to be so camouflaged, Phillip would think she was talking about something else entirely.
“I think they tested it in the Outbacks under a different name.” Raising his arms over his head, Phillip went into a long stretch. “A city called Keloowen. They put it into the water supply. Killed seven seniors, two infants and a couple of kids who were already sick.”
“Mm,” said Nellie. “What did they call it?”
“The forven virus,” said Phillip, “but it’s got all the same symptoms. The victims died of respiratory failure.”
Phillip had an incredible mind for this kind of stuff. He seemed to have developed a second internal filing system that he used to store incredible amounts of data in an orderly, easily accessible fashion. Some days it bugged Nellie so much, she imagined knocking him off in unusual and creative ways, but she chose him as her work partner whenever possible.
“I found another one that’s kind of similar,” she said hesitantly. “They did the same sort of thing with it — tried it out in a water supply. Geez, what was its name? Leerwendor? No, shorter. Leerwen. Leer ... Lierin.”
Heart thundering, she forced herself to hold Phillip’s gaze. Cadets were trained to watch each other for the slightest change in mood, but no sign of suspicion crossed Phillip’s face. With a shrug he said, “Lierin. I don’t think I’ve come across that one. Sounds kind of familiar, though. Just a sec, I’ll key in a search.”
“No,” Nellie said hastily. If Lierin’s name was keyed into the Detta computer system, surveillance would pick up on it, Phillip’s access code would be identified, and someone would be on their case within minutes. “I just remembered,” she added. “Lierin is something else. Not a virus. You wouldn’t find anything.”
“You sure?” asked Phillip. “It’d only take a second.”
“I’m sure,” Nellie said firmly. “Absolutely. One hundred percent.”
“Okay.” Phillip continued to sit facing her, a slight frown on his face. “This really bugs me,” he said slowly. “I can remember the word, but not what it means. Lierin.”
Fear oozed through Nellie’s gut. “It’s not important,” she blurted. “It’s a ... kind of candy actually. Not sold anymore. I think they tested a poison in it once.”
“Lierin,” Phillip repeated with infinite deliberateness. “A poisoned candy. Hmm.” Slowly he turned back to the computer. Hunched in her chair Nellie stared at his back, willing him to return to his research, but he continued to sit staring at the screen.
“What were the symptoms?” he asked after a pause.
“Of what?” Nellie asked faintly.
“The Lierin candies,” he said.
“Uh ... vomiting, diarrhea, dehydration, I think,” she faltered. “It wasn’t very effective. Maybe ten percent kill rate.”
“Hmm,” said Phillip, and she could almost hear him open a mental filing cabinet, slip the phrase “Lierin candies” into a folder, and close the drawer. Abruptly his shoulders came up and he focused on the computer screen. It was obvious he’d forgotten the entire conversation.
Swamped with relief, Nellie slumped in her chair and let her thoughts run wild. So, the reason Phillip hadn’t men
tioned Lierin since that fun-gun free-for-all in Weapons was because he didn’t remember her. He hadn’t been pretending to forget, nor were any of the other cadets. They must all have been told to eradicate their memories of Lierin with a Mind Cleanser, or store them in a filing cabinet. Perhaps every cadet now carried a newly created, locked-and-sealed filing cabinet numbered MK5DZ inside their head. Either way, Lierin had lived, breathed and trained with approximately seventy other cadets every day for several years, a popular cadet without any obvious enemies, yet upon her death, she’d been erased from their memory as if she’d never existed. The question was why? She’d had a bad maze run, but so what? It wasn’t a crime. Why not let her friends at least say good-bye before she was released?
A new thought thundered through Nellie’s brain and she slumped further into her chair. What if Lierin wasn’t the only cadet who’d been released without informing the rest of the group? Nellie had never heard of an Advanced cadet dying, but if it had happened to Lierin there could be others — many others — who’d died during maze runs, and their memory erased from the minds of the rest of the cadets. What if ... ? Nellie’s mind staggered under the implications. What if the reason for that erasure was to fool the remaining cadets into thinking they were invincible so they would do anything for the Goddess and Her empire?
Bunch of golliwash, came a voice inside Nellie’s head. Lies and superstition. Scowling, she sucked on her lower lip. Why in the Goddess’s name did that voice keep popping into her head? And why did it keep saying the same thing? She hated it, she hated it.
Bunch of golliwash, repeated the voice, unperturbed. Lies, lies, lies. Defeated, Nellie laid her head on the table. The voice was right. Lierin was dead, and everyone was behaving as if she’d never been born. That was a lie. And where there was one lie, there were bound to be others. The ultimate question was: if Detta had the power to make her forget her best friend Lierin, what else had they made her forget?
And how did she go about remembering it?
BODY TIGHT AND curled into itself, Nellie lay on her bed in the dark, trembling and alone. From the other side of the barricade, she could hear Tana’s sleep breathing, slow and regular. The dim hall light coming through the open doorway sketched the room in charcoal and gray; in the deep quiet that pervaded the dorm at night, only the faint ever-present beeping of the security alarm could be heard.
She couldn’t stop thinking about Lierin. Memory after memory kept returning, each like a small pocket opening in her brain. Nellie had never before realized how her internal filing system made her head feel: compressed, packed solid with shut-away memories. Why had she never before wondered what any of those filing cabinets contained?
An uneasy shiver ran up her back and she burrowed deeper into her pillow. Because it was forbidden. The Goddess forbade it.
Another shiver rippled through her and she whimpered softly. She was sure she’d been told to file at least one new memory from her morning’s classes. Each time she tried to recall what she’d done in Weapons, she drew a blank. Had another cadet died? She hadn’t noticed anyone missing, hadn’t felt any kind of absence. Nellie’s mouth opened soundlessly and she shuddered. There were no words for this kind of fear. It hovered like unformed sound in her gut.
For several days now, filing cabinet MK5DZ had been releasing memories of Lierin McNearn into her consciousness. The first had been a series of the expected: food fights in the cafeteria, goofing off during movie nights, team runs through the maze. But yesterday had brought a new series of memories so shocking, Nellie had initially slammed her mind closed against them. Handing out poisoned candy to children in playgrounds? Shooting people at random on Marnan’s streets? It couldn’t be. Why would Detta send out cadets to harm innocent civilians of the Interior? Her mind was playing tricks, it had to be fantasy. But if it was just fantasy, why couldn’t she remember yesterday’s Street Games? Whenever she tried to focus on the event, all she got was a high-singing rush of adrenalin and a quick blurred image of running along a back alley. She’d never before thought about the vagueness of her memories, hadn’t realized it could be significant.
The most recent memory had come tonight after lights out. Lying in the dark, she’d suddenly remembered trying to tell Lierin of her suspicions about the Relaxer helmet. As she’d watched Lierin’s response in the memory, Nellie had realized what she hadn’t understood when the actual event had taken place. Lierin had deceived her. With hindsight, Nellie could tell by the look on her friend’s face that Lierin had also been suspicious of Westcott, but she wouldn’t talk about it. There were many things that went on in the Detta complex that cadets were forbidden to discuss. Whether Lierin realized that they’d inadvertently stumbled across one of Detta’s deepest secrets, or was frightened that they were both somehow losing their minds, there was no way she was going to cross the line into the forbidden and acknowledge what Nellie was saying. Even if that meant deceiving her best friend and making her question her sanity.
They hadn’t been friends, not really. Lierin had been fun, always at the front of the pack and ready to ride the adrenalin rush into the next adventure, but in spite of this she hadn’t been much more than a drone. Though Nellie raked her memories fiercely for evidence, she couldn’t remember Lierin ever questioning anything, ever thinking. She’d functioned as she was expected to function until Col. Jolsen had decided she was no longer functional. Lierin McNearn had lived and died, and it hadn’t mattered. She hadn’t mattered. With a jagged swallow, Nellie realized that she hadn’t really cared about Lierin when she was alive, and didn’t miss her now that she’d been released. After all, how was it possible to miss someone who was nothing more than what she was told to do? There was nothing to miss. Any of the remaining female cadets could easily replace her.
They were all the same. Functional. Unquestioning. Drones.
But how was she, Nellie Joanne Kinnan, any different? If she lost a hand tomorrow in a maze run and was released, would it matter to the other cadets or instructors? If they remembered her at all?
Probably not. At this point, curled into herself and oozing through the moan in her gut, Nellie wasn’t sure she mattered to herself. Perhaps tomorrow she would make that fatal slip in her morning maze run and let a drone take her down. That way she wouldn’t have to face further memories of Lierin and Street Games, or the mounting evidence that pointed directly to what Nellie Joanne Kinnan had become.
NELLIE STUCK HER toe into the security beam at the final checkpoint before Station Seven, then withdrew it, listening for the series of clicks that told her the computer was trying to figure out if she’d passed through. With a soft hiss she ran her wrist under the scanner a second time, then made a quick, 180-degree turn and poked her butt past the beam. Pulling it back in, she again listened carefully to the ongoing whir of confused clicks. When she’d first started these maneuvers, she’d even tried flattening herself to the floor and wriggling past a checkpoint, but the mechanism had nailed her anyway, recording her passage with a satisfied click. Eventually she’d realized she couldn’t beat the damn thing and had settled on trying to irritate it, the only way she knew of fighting off the surge of terrified bile that rose in her throat every time she had to approach a checkpoint.
As far as she knew, she was the only cadet who played with the scanners. Everyone else simply stuck out their wrist and passed through the beam as if they didn’t give the process a second thought. As if they’d never given it a thought, Nellie mused, doing a quick forward-backward step through the beam. Even Phillip, and that made him a lousy cadet. What if an enemy of the Goddess broke into the complex and altered all of the scanner-beam frequencies, making them radioactive or killer microwave vibes? Phillip wouldn’t realize anything was wrong until it was too late and he was dead or ... no longer functional and had to be released. The saboteur wouldn’t even have to be someone from outside the complex. There was no one to stop Detta from running its deadly experiments on its own cadets. Certainly the instructo
rs wouldn’t protest. Just look at how Col. Jolsen had released Lierin without a second thought.
Eyes slitted, Nellie continued to stand, glaring at the scanner. All of her superiors knew she did this. Westcott knew. Beyond the odd pejorative, no one really got on her case about it. They probably thought it was great training — a functional cadet never let down her guard. After all, the Great War was everywhere. And a functional cadet was expected to keep that awareness constantly in her thoughts.
Golliwash, came the dreaded words inside her head. Lies and superstition.
Nellie began to brush them away, then hesitated. Why not think about it? No one had specifically said it was forbidden to question the necessity of checkpoints and scanners. The reason given for their presence was possible infiltration by enemies such as the Jinnet and other Outback rebel groups, or infidel citizens of the Interior who’d turned against the Goddess and Her empire. “People are wicked,” the Goddess’s priests frequently reminded the cadets from the pulpit in the Advanced chapel. “The Interior needs scanners and ID chips to protect its citizens from pagans that lurk among us. An Advanced cadet is like a scanner or an ID chip, protecting society from evil, even the evil that lurks inside their own minds.”
And the minds of cadets were wicked, Nellie couldn’t argue with that. She had only to look inside her own to see thoughts of violence and killing, endless killing. Still, she thought, running a finger slowly through the security beam, even if we all do evil sometimes — when the Goddess commands it, of course — would violence really erupt all over the Interior if the surveillance cameras and scanners were shut down? Surely there weren’t that many traitors living inside the Interior. Couldn’t Detta simply ask civilians to report suspicious activity? Wouldn’t people be eager to help out? What if the Interior just ditched the scanners and ID chips, and stopped tracking people wherever they went? What if—?
