by Tobias Wade
Tareesh stiffened, touching the red mark on his skin without drawing away. He cooly picked up the tablet again as though nothing had happened. “I detect no trace of the virus in the simulation, or in Sali Halzey. Will you let me log off now?”
Hallum stared at the screen as the roots and vines slithered away from their grasp of the Draith Queen. The hulking body slumped to the ground, inert and lifeless like some sea monster washed up to shore.
“Why do you think you’re still in the simulation?” Hallum asked, momentarily taken aback.
“I don’t have a hole in my head. I know the tetrode hyperdrive implant that you’d have to install to achieve this level of simulated reality. If you’re waiting for me to beg, then you might as well leave me here, because I’m not going to do it.”
Senator Hallum wrenched the tablet back from Tareesh’s unresisting fingers. He stared glumly at the prisoners as they cautiously approached the Queen, poking and prodding at the heaping mountain.
“I am a man of my word,” Hallum replied somberly. “Why don’t you have a hole in your head though? Working for Morolox, they could have equipped you with all sorts of gear to help your work. Why are you so satisfied with being merely human?”
“The same reason as you, I’d imagine. We both think too highly of ourselves to share the credit with anything.”
Hallum scoffed, but his avatar remained inert. Hallum was already walking across the room to where Tareesh’s physical body lay sleeping. No point in having the Quasi Crystal debrief him first; Tareesh would never believe it anyway.
“Or maybe it’s because neither of us trust Gamber Halzey,” Tareesh added thoughtfully.
Hallum paused to turn back to the console, his hand resting on the copper wire inserted into Tareesh’s brain.
“If you think the Senators are bad, you don’t know the kind of schemes that crone gets up to,” the boy continued. “Whatever old Gamber gives you with one hand, she’s taking twice as much with the other.”
Hallum considered this as he withdrew the wire. He considered how Amore hadn’t just delivered the goods, but had volunteered to enter the simulation exactly when he’d needed to upload someone. He considered the hard drives she had brought with her, and the fact that Amore was a Cyber despite her own husband not knowing. He then considered the wet, squelching explosion as brain matter splattered the room, drenching him in the genius who failed to anticipate the final move.
“I know that sound. Not again!” Buddy the janitor cried from down the hall. “What is the matter with you people?”
“Oh my,” Hallum said, wiping his eyes clean with the back of his hand. “It would appear the virus is still in there somewhere.”
Hallum turned and walked briskly through the general buzzing excitement from the surrounding Masks that always accompanied the explosive detonation of someone’s head. He watched the screen where Amore moved without direction, somehow knowing to check inside all the beaks of the dead beast. She found what she was looking for when one mouth opened to produce a golden egg, much like the one which had encapsulated the villagers. Unlike the deflated victims occupying the other eggs, however, this one contained an unfamiliar child no more than two years old. His dark skin and curly black hair bore a striking resemblance to Tareesh, although it was difficult to compare now that the original was plastered across every wall as well as a big, gooey bit dangling up there on the ceiling.
Senator Hallum leaned forward and pressed a button, doing his best to shield the microphone from the swearing janitor behind him.
“Step away from the egg, Amore,” Senator Hallum commanded sternly.
Amore didn’t acknowledge him in the least. She placed both of her hands against the egg and closed her eyes. A soft blue light began to shine through her temples.
“If you and your husband ever want to leave this place, you’ll do as I say. Now.”
Amore opened her eyes, a mischievous smile upon her lips. She didn’t remove her hands, and the blue light continued to shine. The other prisoners were still circling around the monstrous body and hadn’t caught up with her yet.
“I don’t understand,” Amore replied. “Haven’t I done exactly what you’ve asked?” The blue light faded from her temples, and only then did she remove her hands.
“What orders has Gamber Halzey given you?” Hallum demanded.
Amore shrugged innocently. “Only to help you, Senator. Would you like me to destroy the egg as well? I don’t mind.”
“That won’t be necessary. Cherish it, keep it safe, take it with you. You will have my gratitude, and by the time I’m done, the gratitude of all humanity. You will, however, need to remain in the simulation for a little while longer…”
“Ew ew ew, it still has yellow eyes!” Harris Johnson made a gagging noise which suggested an insect had flown down his throat and built itself a two bedroom condominium there.
“It’s more of a him, than an it, really,” Sali added, deliberately unimpressed. “Aren’t you going to zap him too, lady?”
Amore stepped away from the ripe egg sack, her hands still sticky from where she held it. A low slurping sound drew attention to the sticky fluid dribbling through a hole in the egg’s side. She stared at her fingers as though the minor inconvenience of soiling them had been the most exerting portion of the experience.
“That was incredible!” Elden gushed, practically dancing as he circled Amore. “What power! What grace! Take that you nasty aliens, that’s what you get for messing with my Amore!”
“Don’t make a fool of yourself, dear,” Amore said dispassionately, wiping the egg fluid onto the back of his shirt as they embraced. “What do you think of the boy? Shall we keep him?”
“Keep him?” Sali asked incredulously. “He’s not a lost puppy. It’s still the same alien that killed all those villagers. It must have figured out how to copy them when it sucked them flat like that. Just get it over with so we can get out of here.”
“He is just a child, and not dangerous to anyone. I forbid any of you to lay a hand on him—and so does the Quasi Crystal, for that matter. He says that if anything happens to the boy, then none of us will ever see home again.”
“Who says?” Sali asked sharply.
“The Quasi Crystal says.”
“Who is the man with the mustache? What’s his real name?”
Amore was so ready to respond that her mouth had already been hanging open like an anticipatory alligator at the bottom of a water slide. She snapped it shut again at once, but that didn’t stop the electrical shock from pulsing through her body. She took a moment to catch her breath and pat down her frazzled hair before replying with dignity.
“The Quasi Crystal does not wish me speaking about it. You did see me demolish the hell out of that thing, right? And all the little ones? So maybe enough questions out of you, and start pulling your own weight for once and get those pods working.”
“Excuse me, what?” Sali said in tone that could have skewered a charging boar.
Amore’s eyes darted from side to side as she weighed her words carefully. “Elden and I have decided to keep him. The Quasi Crystal told me that we need to protect the boy and find our own way back to the Galactic Express. The crystal will help us get home from there.”
“What happened to the teleport magic?”
“He added another condition, okay?! It’s not my fault.” Another electric shock radiated throughout her body. “Holy hell, could you not?” she demanded of the Universe at large. “I’m doing my best here!”
Amore spun on her heel with fury, ripping into the bulbous egg with double dragon claws. Out poured the golden fluid in a torrent, sweeping the young boy onto the ground where he lay, curled in a fetal position.
“As your captain…” Harris began tentatively.
“Elden, get over here,” Amore interrupted. “It’s all over my hands again.”
“What? Oh, oh, I see, you’re wiping your hands… on me. Go ahead, dear, you did great out there. Oh my,
that is sticky though. Good thing I brought a change of clothes, ha ha… Only joking, of course. I’m just going to wear it and be… sticky… I suppose.”
Amore’s silence was cold and unflinching as she continued to wipe her hands on Elden’s jumpsuit, spreading the goo up and down the entire length of his back.
“Do you think we maybe ought to talk about the alien baby?” Elden persisted, the pitch of his voice steadily rising as Amore continued to not respond. “You don’t mean for us to keep him… as family? You don’t mean that we’ll be raising him as our first child?”
His voice was practically in orbit before Amore replied.
“Momma’s tired, divine work is so draining with this beastly gravity. I’m absolutely looking forward to this conversation later though. You’ll be a man and take care of Draith, won’t you? Don’t just leave him there on the ground, pick him up. And don’t fall behind!”
A swirling dress, albeit smudged and torn and crinkled in a hundred places, marked her exit as Amore began to retrace their path through the jungle. The sun was high in the sky by now, but none of them could find a single nice thing to say about the jungle at the moment, nor a reason to stay amidst the ruinous alien carnage.
“I always knew she’d find her soft spot for children one day.” Elden sighed, carefully lifting the alien-eyed infant from the sticky mess of the egg. “It’s just that I’d rather hoped it would have been my child she took a liking to.”
The boy opened his eyes and hissed. Elden blanched and held the boy out at arms length, disappointed by how insufficiently long his arms apparently were. To be fair, making animal sounds was a perfectly natural thing for a child to do. To be better than fair though, as the Prian justice system claimed to be, anything coming from something as unnatural and sticky as that alien was bound to remain unnatural, thus requiring a firmly worded warning label that no one bothered to read anyway.
“Ah, well, this is the next best thing then, I suppose,” Elden finished meekly. Elden tried to cradle the infant against his chest, but the pressure of the child’s yellow-eyed scrutiny sent shivers down his spine. He kept turning the boy around to try to shift its gaze onto something else, but the child’s head rotated owl-like to keep its yellow eyes boring into him. Elden smiled meekly at the others, who watched with horrified fascination. “Could have been worse, right? We could have been sacrificed, or eaten.”
“The Draiths didn’t really eat any of them though, did they?” Sali asked uncertainly. “The queen learned how we were made, and did it well enough to make a pretty decent human copy. I still don’t see how anything good can come from taking that little monster with us.”
“You wouldn’t be alive if it weren’t for the Crystal Goddess,” Harris Johnson said uncertainly.
“He’s right, Sali,” Ramnus conceded. “Miracles aren’t really that different from technology. The less you think about it, the more sense it all makes.”
Sali would have doubtlessly argued about this if she’d been listening, but with a hand on the back of her ear, she had already tuned out the frequency of Ramnus’ voice. Just as she’d suspected, Amore hadn’t rushed ahead of the others merely because she was so eager to return to the ship.
“That’s not fair,” Amore whispered to herself. “We had a deal. I kill the Draith queen, and you set us free… You never said anything about looking after a child… Can’t you schedule the committee after you’ve let us out?”
Schedule the committee? Those words carried a familiar echo in Sali’s mind. How many times had she struggled to get her mother’s attention while Gamber spoke with government officials? Those nameless bureaucrats all much too important to even look at her. And if they did look, it was always with that pained boredom, a face that said ‘Morolox Energy services the needs of untold billions across Pria. How selfish can you be to think your need for attention is more important than that?’
“I don’t care what kind of power I have here; I’m sick of it. I want to go home.”
If Amore really was communicating with government officials back on Pria in real time, then the signal would still be traveling faster than light. Sali wracked her brain for any clue how this was possible to no avail. The atomic clock in her head couldn’t have lied to her, could it? Or what if Amore was communicating with someone much closer, perhaps a government base hidden in the jungle that monitors their every move.
“What she wants has nothing to do with our deal. You’re the only one who can let us out… How should I know what Mrs. Halzey knew?”
Sali stopped in her tracks. Mrs. Halzey? Was that her mother, or her?
“… Sali?”
Sali jumped nervously to feel Ramnus so close behind. It would have been a jump in normal gravity anyway; here the motion was more like a frog with glue on its feet. Ramnus must have been trying to talk to her while she was tuning out the frequencies of his voice. Sali cast one more suspicious glance after Amore before filtering the audio back to its normal channels.
“What’s bothering you, Sali?” Ramnus repeated. “You finally get your chance to fix the ship without any Draiths or villagers disturbing you. Isn’t this what you wanted all along?”
“What I wanted?” she repeated, the words clumsy and unfamiliar in her mouth.
“Just think how happy your mother will be to have you back where you belong. She probably won’t even have aged much; never been one to miss an upgrade or a maintenance check, Mrs. Halzey.”
Amore’s mouth was clearly moving, and it was frustrating not to hear what she was saying.
“Sure, yeah, maybe I’ll get a parade.” Sali’s hand was already tuning the back of her ear again, but she hesitated as Elden spoke from her other side.
“It won’t be the same Pria that we left. You know now that I’m a father, I think I’ve figured out what it’s like to be a Cyber.”
“You aren’t a father, and trust me, you have no idea,” Sali said.
“It’s not like upgrades are the only thing people do to try to feel complete. Amore, for instance—I don’t suppose I ever would have stayed with her if I cared for who I was before we met. Do you ever get the feeling that the real you is still sleeping, and that one day you’ll make a change that surprises you so much that it wakes you up? A brand new person in a brand new world? Maybe it will feel like that after the teleport, leaving behind our old bodies and starting over as who we were supposed to be all along.”
Sali sighed impatiently. She hadn’t heard the rest of what Amore had said, and it was too late now that the woman had finished talking. “No, it’s not a happy thought at all,” Sali said bitterly. “Because if this was all a dream, then something out there has the power to follow us into our heads and keep us trapped in there. And if that’s true, then a ship doesn’t exist that can carry us far enough to ever get out.”
“Who cares, as long as we’ve got a ship?” Harris asked. “I’m going to let you in on a little secret. Dream or no dream, there’s no such thing as a Captain anywhere. If people treat you like a Captain, then you are.”
“If you think you’re happy, then you are,” Elden agreed, looking down at the now sleeping child in his arms.
“If you lift weights, then you’re strong,” Ramnus added, not quite catching the underlying theme correctly but happy to be included all the same.
“When I get home, I’m not going to just settle in and forgive the people who punished us this way,” Sali said resolutely. “It’s not some inevitable law of physics that turned Pria into such a mess. It’s people like my mother, and all the officials she’s bought. I’m going to make it so no one ever has to go through something like this again. I don’t know how, but I’m going to change things when I get home.”
“Going to change things.”
Sali stared first at Ramnus, then Harris, and then Elden, her brain buffering as it processed where those words had come from. Elden’s gaze dropped incrementally as though he was struggling to hold up a head that suddenly weighed a ton. The child�
��s yellow eyes were open again, and a broad smile bristled with razor sharp teeth.
“Did he just…” Sali began.
“He did,” Draith echoed, giggling. “We’re going to change things, Sali.”
“Why else would we have kept you, creepy little bugger,” Amore said. She had stopped to wait for the others now that her private conversation had finished. She wore a mischievous smile as she swept Draith from Elden’s arms to cradle him, her finger tracing loops around his little grasping hands. “There are bad people out there who want to hurt you, but the Crystal Goddess is going to keep you safe. And in return, you’re going to make us a fortune.”
“What kind of bad people?” Sali prompted.
“How much of a fortune?” Harris added.
“The only thing you lot need to worry about is fixing the Galactic Express,” Amore said.
“Fine,” Sali replied, “but that means you’re going to have to listen to my instructions and do what I say. Do you think you can all handle that for a change?”
“Once I give the order, my crew won’t dare disobey,” Harris said with pride. “If that’s okay with you at least, Crystal Goddess.”
“Let’s get to work,” Amore said, rocking the child in her arms. “The rest of you, anyway. My job will be to keep an eye on our little friend here. He’s got so much to learn before he gets to Pria.”
The Overseer
“There was another death in your rehabilitation program, Senator Hallum.”
“Not to mention the electricity bill!” Willmanhall raged. “How much power could that virus possibly be consuming?”
The hearing room was darker than when Hallum had been here last. Was the atmosphere a product of their tension and displeasure, or had the janitor started messing with the lights now too? The grim faces of the three senior senators were wreathed in shadows as they glared down from their elevated positions on padded chairs. Nullbenbur’s lips were pursed, sour and angry as though he’d just bitten a lime, doing so for the purpose of revenge after the lime zero-handedly murdered his entire family.
