Crack!
The crate popped open, and the wooden wall in front of us buckled, then slowly started to fall. I chucked the utility stick aside, its metal clanks echoing loudly as it skipped across the concrete floor. I immediately grabbed my weapon, shuffled back, and aimed at anything that might be inside.
The wall hit the floor, and we both pointed our rifles for a moment longer. Another sigh came from both of us as nothing of danger presented itself—only pallets of canned beans, vegetables, pastas, and meats.
“And all we get are those disgusting MREs.”
Sierra breathily snickered and then gave me the signal for all clear. She motioned me back to the glowing room, but something still didn’t add up. Why would the enemy steal the locals’ shitty rations? I was turning to follow Sierra when I caught something else out of my peripheral. The bottom pallet was missing, and in its place, the floor of the crate appeared to be about eight inches higher than it should have been.
“Hold on.”
Sierra turned to see me fling my rifle back over my shoulder again and scoop the pry bar from the ground. I went to work on the false floor, finding the seam of the two pieces and pressing down hard. The floorboard popped up. Dropping the utility stick again, I grabbed the board and walked the four feet back to pull it out.
The scout walked past me to discover the real contents of the crates. “These look like what they chucked past me in the hallway.”
Reading the side of the canisters, I couldn’t disagree. “RPS-X2. You’re damn right it is. We need to get one of these to the lab. Maybe it can help the squad if it’s not already too late.”
Sierra obtained a hazmat bag from her pack and steadily handled one canister from the crate without incident. “That should do. We’ll have the cleanup crew handle the rest.”
“So, if the munitions were in the crates, I wonder what’s in there.” My curiosity was palpable as I turned back to the room with light.
“Let’s go.”
The unmistakable, low hum of a generator could be felt as we closed in on the room. Sierra headed for the door, and of course, it was locked. She molded another bit of explosives from her pack and placed it on the door. We slipped around the corner for safety, and she completed another countdown
Bang!
The door rattled as it flung open. With weapon ready, I flew around the corner first, looking to engage anyone dumb enough to confront us.
“Wait!”
Sierra’s yell stopped me dead in my tracks right in front of the doorway. Focusing hard, I was again face to face with a cloud of fog, and felt like my time had come. But luckily, the mist was white, not yellow, so I was certain it wasn’t the same stuff that had dropped the rest of our squad. My hypothesis was confirmed as some of the mist began to wisp up toward the ceiling of the factory.
“Thanks. It’s just water vapor.”
With pockets of visibility through the fog, I could see that the room was clear of hostiles, and gave the signal to Sierra. I stepped in first. It was almost too cold to feel good after the intense heat we’d endured the entire mission. Harsh chills covered my body. As the rest of the frigid haze began to recede, the strange nature of the room revealed itself. Much smaller than it appeared from the outside, there were columns of handles, three deep, lining three of the inner walls. It made the room feel like a grouping of giant filing cabinets.
Signaling that I would investigate, I approached the far wall, pointing my gun with one hand and extending the other. Grabbing the handle in the center of the grid, I gave it a hard tug. But it didn’t budge. Leaning back, I was only straining myself.
“Give me a minute,” the scout said.
Peering over my shoulder, I saw that Sierra had found a control panel on the wall by the door. She put it through the paces, typing away, eliciting clicks, beeps, and buzzes. All of it returned the red and yellow lights of failure over and over. She continued working frantically until she realized that she wasn’t going to be cracking the code.
“Dammit!”
“We can just let the cleanup—”
Pop! Pop! Pop!
She’d drawn her gun and let the computer console have it.
Beep!
With a jolt, the hum from the generator slowly subsided as the room’s lighting changed from a crisp fluorescent to a dull yellow. The temperature in the room rose quickly. Sierra waved to me to try the handle again. Before turning back, I caught a glimpse of the silly smirk on her face through her gas mask. She was obviously entertained by her accomplishment.
Getting back in position, I firmly gripped the handle and pulled with a steady force. The handle gave way to what seemed to be a large drawer, and as its wheels produced a deep grinding sound against the rails, I stepped back slowly to make room for it. Sierra appeared by my side as we discovered the black cover that obscured the contents of the drawer.
With our eyes locked inside, I reached down and grabbed the cover. I gave Sierra one last glance and a wink, and with a forceful swipe, I pulled the cover away. Our collective gasp will forever haunt me, and in that horrible moment, I couldn’t control myself.
“What the hell is this! A morgue?”
Chapter 1:
The End Is Nigh
What the hell is this! A morgue? Vicious goosebumps running up my neck forced the morbid thought into my brain.
The frowning woman across the room must have agreed with me. Her arms were tightly crossed as if she was hugging herself warm. And if seeing my breath wasn’t bad enough, the interior decorator of the waiting room clearly had some kind of mental disorder. The fairly large room had no windows, so it felt claustrophobic. The walls were a drab off-white, and the bright, obscure hanging art stuck out more like bloody thumbs than sprinkled décor. The boring chairs and end tables evenly lining the perimeter would normally have appealed to my desire for symmetry and open space, except the center of the room was filled with an obnoxiously massive statue of Atlas holding up the world. I thought it was neat the first time I saw it, but every time after, it was just annoying. There had to be a better place for the thing. Worse yet was the carpet that could easily be described as “puke green.” Finally, to keep things sufficiently random, there was a sizable aquarium full of marine life built into the inner wall. While the tank seemed totally out of place, it was the most interesting thing around. It was next to the aquarium where I always sat, facing the main entrance.
The train of thought that always followed my being in the schizophrenically designed, frigid waiting room provided a much-needed distraction from the seriousness of my visits. In that sense, I had often debated whether the crude style choices were intentional, as if we were part of some odd social experiment and eventually, a man would jump out and point to the cameras. But deliberate or not, nothing could have fully taken my mind off what was to come next for me on this particular visit.
Over the last year, my life had been turned upside down while preparing for a revolutionary change. A core aspect of who I’d always been was about to be altered. Or corrected. And while they had said I put forth even more effort than the average person, I truly doubted it was sufficient. It seemed foolish not to doubt any amount of preparation. I was basically going to be born again, made completely new. How could only twelve months of preparation “to get you ready” be enough? I remember reviewing the preparation log and being genuinely shocked that it was actually only one hundred and twenty hours. Terrified didn’t even begin to describe the feelings steadily growing in the pit of my stomach during this eleventh hour. So, in an effort to calm my nerves, I thought back over everything I had done.
They had started with mandatory tutorials and simulations. It seemed like I spent countless hours in virtual reality, completing various tasks related to the procedure and life afterward. Unfortunately, much of my time was spent on menial tasks that nearly bored me to death.
Standing up.
Walking through doors.
Jumping up and down.
There was one particular virtual session that really struck a chord with me: taking the dog to the park. Maybe it was the fact that personally-owned canines had been illegal for many years since the passage of the Canine Fever Act, or perhaps that public green space hadn’t been around for years either. No matter, I couldn’t have been more content than when I had my hand tightly gripped around the leash, strolling with pride down the walkway. The simulations only lasted for an hour at a time, but the looks on the faces of the virtual people, or veeps as we called them, stayed with me.
Cutting-edge technology made the veep AI among the most advanced in the world. With respect, they would look directly into my eyes and smile, followed by an exaggerated but nonetheless sincere wave that felt like a grade school crush acknowledging my existence. After the warm greeting, the veep’s eyes would trail down my body, and it was always at that point I would get really self-conscious. In that sense, the training was effective because it helped me cope with what was coming. I had to actively remind myself that the veeps weren’t weighing my value as a human being in that moment. They were simply looking at my dog.
“What a beautiful pooch!” they would say.
“Thank you!” I would happily respond.
And with a polite nod, their eyes would again travel all the way up to catch my gaze.
Never getting enough of it, I had probably gone through that scene twenty times and asked for it at least ten times more. I would get so engrossed within the simulators that I ignored the environmental countdown to relax my mind for reconsciousness, and they would have to forcefully pull me out. At one point, the main VR operator threatened to bar me from the machine. It would have meant that I couldn’t complete my required hours or the procedure. She didn’t understand that the hardest part was leaving a place where I felt like a complete person to come back to the cold, unfair, real world.
Harder yet, I had to work with a slew of “recommended specialists” to overcome my issues. That was a grueling six months of mental gymnastics, and I most certainly should have won a medal for getting through it. They smugly called it “proactive psychotherapy” and treated me more like a client or patient than a fellow human being with the full spectrum of emotions. Admittedly, they did their best to empathize and even sympathize to some degree. Yet they doled out tough question after tough question.
“Why do you believe getting a new host will improve your quality of life?”
I cackled out loud because of the nervous itch that instantly seized my body.
“How will you handle life’s problems in your new host?”
“You know you won’t be able to use your body as an excuse in your new host?”
“Eventually, you’ll be just like everyone else. How will you handle that?”
By the end, I wasn’t laughing. Being brought to my mental knees, I wasn’t so sure I was going to make it. So much pain, insecurity, anger, and trauma erupted to the surface in those sessions. Despite countless tears, something inside kept me going.
The aquarium next to me came to life in an instant. It was feeding time, and a godlike hand appeared just above the water line. Tiny flakes fluttered down through the water, inciting the fish into a feeding frenzy. There was a small catfish, a few exotic types, and then I noticed something near the bottom far corner, something I had never seen before. A tiny gray fish was struggling to get around. I was no marine biologist, but it appeared that his fins were malformed. They seemed woefully too small compared to his body, and he was straining to get to the food—working, puffing, flapping those fins, flapping, struggling, flapping. Meanwhile, a large goldfish was zipping around, scooping up flake after flake as it went by. Were the doctors playing a joke on me? Were they toying with their clients?
God dammit!
Shaking my head, I looked down at my shriveled legs and winced. I couldn’t help but let loose an audible groan, catching the attention of a couple sitting near me. But I didn’t care. The life that I had been given really wasn’t fair compared to some. The super well-offs didn’t have to worry about the luck of the genetic draw. They got to choose their babies’ traits from the beginning and watch them grow in life tubes. The advertisements claimed that they kept the babies in the ideal conditions for the entire gestational period. Their perfect little babies grew in their perfect little tubes. It was bullshit.
With damn near all my life savings, the best I could afford was to divorce my body. Ugh. I had always hated that description. It sounded colder than the waiting room felt. For whatever reason, I liked the technical term better: mind migration.
News of the first successful procedure had broken just a few days after my twelfth birthday. I became obsessed with the idea of getting legs that worked, making a promise to myself that I would save as many credits as possible to one day afford a mind migration. It was a promise that had consumed me for the last decade. But it hadn’t become clear exactly what I’d be getting myself into until I actually signed up.
On top of the normal preparation, I had to deal with something that was apparently unique to me. One of my biggest hurdles was wrapping my head around the idea of life without my auto-chair, or Auto as I called him. He had been with me since junior high. In fact, I’d gotten him just a couple weeks prior to hearing about mind migration, and all these years later, he still ran on all cylinders. People in my condition didn’t grow much, so there was no reason to buy another one as I got older. And even if I’d had the credits for a newer model, Auto had never failed me. “If it ain’t really broke, don’t fix it,” I always said.
Still, I had always told myself that our relationship would be temporary, knowing I was planning on a mind migration. As odd as it was, though, I had grown extraordinarily attached to Auto, thinking of him much more like a friend or brother than an inanimate object. He didn’t even have any AI to help me personify him, and that didn’t matter. He was an extension of my being. He was part of me.
After the procedure, there would no longer be a need to keep Auto around. Strange didn’t come close to describing how that made me feel, knowing I’d have to say goodbye to him in an hour or so. Even though they worked with others in auto-chairs, the so-called experts didn’t seem to have any experience with the kind of bond Auto and I had built. When I asked if I could keep him afterward, they made it clear that our relationship would hold back my progress. They said that, while it would make the whole process that much more difficult, it was “for my benefit.”
As I was about to head straight for the most depressing thoughts, I was again interrupted. The auto-doors to my right whooshed open with a gust of dank, muggy air. It was almost refreshing compared to the deep freeze that I had been in for the last thirty minutes or so. I almost didn’t notice the commotion until the familiar hum of another auto-chair broke my concentration. I slowly peered over to see my favorite fellow auto-driver. Helen was preparing for the exact procedure as me, and I both envied and pitied that the hardest parts were yet to come for her.
“Helen!”
Startled, she turned toward me. “Oh hey, Ryan!” She zoomed over to me. “Isn’t today the big day?”
Nodding emphatically, I almost couldn’t contain myself. “Yeah! Can you believe it? The year has gone by in a flash. You don’t have much time left either, do you?”
“A couple weeks. I didn’t think it could get any more intense, but last week was rough.”
While I wanted to tell her it was going to be okay, Helen and I were close enough that I could be honest. “Hang in there. The good news is that when your day comes, there’s nothing else left to do but let it happen. The bad news is that it’s still scary as hell.”
“That’s what I heard. Hey, when we’re finally on our feet and all this craziness is finally behind us, we should get together and celebrate.”
“First round’s on me.” After the words fell out of my mouth, I realized that the conversation had me smiling for the first time all day.
“Deal! I’ve gotta get to my last personal-identity session, but it was nice seeing you. Oh, and Ry?” She rolled closer to me.
“Yeah?”
“Stay strong. I know you’ve heard the horror stories about afterward, but I really want to see you get through it.”
Her genuine concern took the edge off of my nerves for the first time that day, and it was enough that I had to joke with her. “Well, someone’s gotta give you hope!”
“Hope? I thought we already established that anything you can do I can do better.” She loved to zing me.
“Looks like we’re going to have a race once we get our legs.”
“If you want to recreate the tortoise and the hare, I’m game. Good luck, Ryan!”
“Good luck, Helen! Bye!”
As Helen rolled away, I could feel the silly grin on my face get bigger. I had been so focused on the preparation that it had been a month or more since I thought about how amazing it would be in my new body, or host as they called them. I really hoped my host would meet most of my specifications. They had made it very clear that with the package I’d bought, they couldn’t guarantee the perfect host but would try to get it as close as possible. The warning was on every form that I had filled out. Regardless, I was very particular about what I wanted. No shorter than six one, darker hair, green eyes. I had always wanted green eyes. It was my favorite color. I also really wanted a more athletic build where I could truly experience the breadth of human mobility—run, jump, tackle!
Hell, I would have been happy to simply walk down the sidewalk instead of having to ride. No offense to Auto, but it had been my biggest dream ever since I could remember, and to be mere minutes from the start of the process was incredible. Unfortunately, as excited as I wanted to be, my undeniable fear would only allow me to muster muted enthusiasm.
Between Two Minds: Awakening Page 2
