Binary Pair

by Michael-Scott Earle

  “Shit,” I said. “Are you both sure those things are dead?” I asked.

  The twins looked at each other, and then they both gave me sheepish grins.

  “Great.” I let out a half-laugh.

  “I can go. The drones didn’t attack me on the street the other day.” Kasta pointed to the door of the car and then bent over forward to grab the release handle.

  “Let me think about it for a--”

  “There is nothing to think about. They won’t attack me. You both can watch through the drones.” Kasta yanked on the handle of the door, but I had to stand so that I could raise the hatch with both of my arms.

  “Thanks, Captain,” the android said as she grabbed onto the front of my gun belt to hoist herself up. There were six other places she could have put her hand, and Paula let out an exasperated sigh after her sister jumped out.

  “Ha!” Kasta laughed, blew me a kiss, and then walked around the side of the car.

  I closed the hatch again, and then I glanced onto Paula’s screen. The drone was a few meters above and behind Kasta, and the android was kicking aside piles of birds as if they were snow drifts.

  “See? They have no power.” Kasta’s voice came through our transponder.

  “Be careful, please,” Paula pleaded.

  “I’ll be fine,” Kasta replied as she waded through the mass of drones. Then she let out a yelp, and Paula gasped.

  “What’s wrong?” we both asked.

  “One of them poked me with a needle. Didn’t break the skin, though. I guess I should be more careful.” Kasta laughed again, and then she made a show of sweeping the drones out of her way with a more careful movement of her leg.

  “She’s such a show-off,” Paula whispered to me.

  “Hard to believe she is an android. You are an incredible engineer,” I said.

  “Oh. Uhh. Thank you.” Paula glanced away from the screen so she could look at me. “Sorry she grabbed your belt.”

  “It’s fine,” I said with a shrug.

  “Don’t tell her that, or she’ll keep making passes at you.”

  “I’ll let you handle it, per our discussion,” I replied.

  “I’ve talked to her. She’s her own person though.” Paula shrugged. “I’m not in any position to tell her what to do.”

  “Aren’t you her creator?” I asked, and Paula’s face soured. “I don’t want to be rude. I don’t understand how it works. You do both seem like sisters.”

  “Oh, I’m not offended by your question.” Paula’s lips twisted, and she glanced down at her screen to make sure that Kasta was still sweeping aside the bird-drones. “We are sisters. So I can’t tell her what to do.”

  “I’m not sure I--”

  “She is my sister, I am her sister. Yeah, I made her, but I’m not her mother. I had to teach her a few things when we were growing up, and I built her four new bodies as mine matured, but I never programmed her to do what I told her to do. I just told her that I loved her. She doesn’t want to listen to me about you because she--”

  “You two are awfully quiet,” Kasta interrupted. “You aren’t having a quickie are you?”

  “No!” Paula said, and then she rolled her eyes at me and took her finger off the transmit button on the transponder to mute us. “She likes to do the things she says I want to do, but don’t have the courage to.”

  “Ahh,” I said. “So you telling her not to make passes at me--”

  “She’ll stop eventually. I apologize for her behavior.”

  “It’s fine,” I said.

  “As I said, don’t tell her that.” Paula let out a light laugh. “Or she’ll be waiting in your bed one night. I’m sure you have enough relationship problems without us in the mix.”

  “Yeah,” I said as I stared at the screen. I thought about asking her how obvious the situation was between Eve, Zea, and I, but I didn’t want to get into it right now.

  “I don’t want us to get kicked off Persephone,” Paula whispered.

  “I’m not going to kick you off--”

  “Don’t say you won’t.” Paula shook her head. “If we were men, and you were a woman, and one of us kept making advances you refused, wouldn’t that be different? We would probably be off the ship already for harassing you. She is taking advantage of your honor because you are a man and she is a woman. It isn’t fair to you.”

  “It normally isn’t,” I said. “I’ll take care of all of you because it is what men do. You can think it isn’t fair, but I embrace my role. I have strength and power, and I’ll use it to help and protect people that need it. Especially if they are my friends.”

  “Ahhhhhhh.” Paula let out a long sigh. “You are a great guy. I remember what you told me in my apartment.”

  “Which part?” I asked.

  “When you said that if you had been in the alley, you wouldn’t have let those men kidnap my sister. I know you wouldn’t have. I saw you fighting to save Queen’s Hat. I saw how Zea looked at you.”

  “As I said, there are good men and women in this universe.”

  “And now I believe it.” Paula met my eyes for a few seconds, and then we both looked down at the screen on her wrist.

  “How is it looking?” I asked Kasta.

  “Good,” she said. “I’m almost there. None of them have power, but you two can have some more alone time.”

  “There isn’t anything going--” Paula started, but her sister cut her off.

  “I’m at the door. Take a look.” The drone hovered lower, and Kasta moved to examine the two door handles.

  “Can you open them?” I asked.

  “I’ll try.” Kasta rested her hand on one of the handles and then pushed down. It didn’t move, and she tried the other one.

  “Both locked, but there is a keyhole here.”

  “I have a tool that will fit,” Paula said.

  “I bet you do,” Kasta said with a giggle.

  “You are incorrigible.” Paula sighed.

  “Thank you. I’ll wait here for you both.”

  I stood and pushed the hatch up again. Then I followed Paula out of the car, and double checked our surroundings with a sweep of the light on my rifle. Then I moved my gun back when I thought I saw something twitch in the endless pile.

  “Uhhh. One of them is moving,” I said.

  “Where,” both of the twins asked, and Paula came to stand next to me with her rifle pointed in the same direction.

  “There,” I said as soon as I saw something twitch.

  “It’s our flashlights!” Paula gasped, “And the lights from the car!”

  “Oh. I didn’t even think of that,” Kasta said through our transponders, “but I don’t believe you have to worry about the lights on our guns. Probably not enough lumens to recharge one of them unless you left it there for five minutes. Even then, probably wouldn’t be able to fly.”

  “Right,” Paula said with a relieved sigh. “I should have known. I’m still going to turn off the lights on the car, just in case.”

  The engineer leaned over the front side of our vehicle and switched the lights off, then I took the lead and walked through the trail of dead bird-drones Kasta had left. We made it to the doors in less than two minutes, and Paula reached into her tool satchel to pull out a device that looked like the one the twins used to yank Byron’s head off. It was a cross between a screwdriver and a saw. She pushed it into the lock, activated the unit, and then there was a loud grinding sound that punched through the silence of the giant room like an amplified chainsaw.

  I swung my rifle around and expected one of the bird-drones to dive bomb us, but nothing moved in the room, and I let out a sigh of relief.

  “Opened,” Paula said as she pulled the metal door.

  “I’ll go in first,” I said as I ducked between the twins and raised my rifle. There was a hallway past the door, and the brushed steel walls only gave a bit of a reflection when my light passed over their surfaces.

  “Clear,” I said, and the two women en
tered behind me.

  “I’ll close the door,” Paula said, and I nodded as I moved forward.

  “The door on the right,” I said after we had moved some twenty-five meters through the darkness. This door was also made out of steel, and Kasta moved to the side so she could open it for me. It was unlocked, and I pointed my rifle inside to see another hallway. This one was a bit narrower, and there was a sign hanging from the ceiling there.

  “Housing block 1A,” Kasta read. “The map is wrong.”

  “Huh?” I asked.

  “Lith Dae gave you maps with blueprints of the bunkers, but this isn’t even close to what I studied.” Kasta shook her head. “I thought something was weird when we first drove in and found the elevator, but now I know for sure.

  “Why would they give us incorrect maps?” Paula asked.

  “They wanted us to think this was their planet. If they told us they didn’t know what we would find in the bunkers, we might ask more questions.”

  “Let’s hope their claim about being able to open the northwest bunker doors from the southeast location was true,” Kasta said.

  “Let’s hope. Open the next door,” I said as I readied myself. Paula yanked this one open, and I stepped through into a living room.

  The room was furnished with a green couch, coffee table, and two easy chairs. There was an entryway on my right the led to a kitchen, a door in front of me, and a hallway to the left. A screen was mounted on the wall opposite the couch, and it smelled of new plastic.

  “I’ll check the door, you two get the hallway,” I said, but I already knew what we would find.

  My door opened to a bathroom that looked as if it had never been used. I turned around to face the main room and waited for the twins to return.

  “Bedrooms,” Paula said a moment later.

  “Looks like no one has ever lived here,” I said, and the two women nodded.

  “Here is a light switch,” Kasta said, and she moved to turn it on. Nothing happened when she pressed the button, and she tried once more to make sure.

  “The elevator has power, but the utilities don’t,” Paula mused. “There must be a switch somewhere that can turn everything on.”

  “It might be around the terminal we will use to open the other bunker,” Paula said, “but I’ll doubt we’ll find either in the housing blocks. We should return to the main hallway.”

  “Let’s go to the end of this one first to make sure we don’t miss anything, then we can go back to the main one,” I said, and the woman followed me back into the hallway for Housing block 1A.

  We moved down the hallway for another hundred meters. The hallway showed no signs of ending, and I opened a few of the doors to make sure we were passing apartments instead of computer or utility rooms. They were all apartments, and I started to think this bunker was as large as the city above it.

  “Do we keep going?” Paula asked.

  “I’ll send a drone,” Kasta said, and one of the small robots drifted down the hallway.

  “Can you send it through all of the complex?” I asked.

  “Nope,” Kasta shook her head.

  “Why not?”

  “Doors,” she said with a smirk. “I need to invent a drone with a hand that can open them.”

  “Oh. Yeah. Dumb question.” I let out a laugh.

  “The walls are also really thick. I don’t have much of a range down here. I’m hoping this will get to the end-- ahh yeah. Looks like there is an elevator at the end. It is another hundred meters down the hallway.”

  “Let’s check it out,” I said, and the three of us continued our walk down the long corridor. The darkness and silence around us were starting to become oppressive. I could hear Paula’s heart hammer in her chest and smell her fear.

  “Thanks for coming with me,” I whispered to her after we had walked for a dozen seconds.

  “No problem,” she replied.

  “You are brave. I know you’re scared. We’ll get through this.”

  “I hope so.” The engineer gave me a wide smile, and then I saw the drone floating above the elevator door.

  “What do the words say?” Paula asked Kasta as she pointed to the painted Russian letters on top of the double doors.

  “Elevator,” Kasta said with a snort, and her sister laughed.

  “Let’s see if it works,” I said as I pressed the button to call the lift. I was actually surprised when the button glowed after I pressed it, and I was even more surprised when the doors opened a few seconds later.

  “It was waiting for us,” Paula whispered.

  “Now you are creeping me out,” Kasta said. She gestured with her hand, and her drones moved to hover a half meter above her shoulders.

  I stepped into the elevator and looked at the control buttons. There were ten of them there, and I let out a groan of frustration.

  “Fuck. It will take us forever to find what we are looking for.”

  “I would guess any sort of control center for the bunkers would be located on the bottom level to ensure less likelihood of damage,” Paula said.

  “Or it would be on the top most floor so it would be easier for the citizens to get to quickly,” Kasta argued.

  “That is a strong possibility also,” Paula agreed. “And we have only explored one hallway on this level.”

  Both of the women were now standing in the elevator, and they turned to me with a questioning look. I had used my nose to tell their identities, and I was getting better at identifying them from the way they stood and spoke, but they each had their eyebrows raised in a way that made them look like mirrored images.

  “Let’s try the bottom floor and then come back up to this one if we don’t find what we are looking for.” It wasn’t military procedure since I wasn’t clearing a floor, but I guessed a control center that managed other bunkers would probably be located at the bottom level.

  “We can always split up,” Kasta said with a shrug.

  “No,” Paula and I said at the same time.

  “We stick together.” I pressed the button for the bottom floor, and the doors slid closed.

  Then I felt the car descend.

  “It’s funny. I was a bit terrified of the sky when I first saw it.” Paula leaned against the wall of the elevator and closed her eyes.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “I thought I might fall off the ground and spin into the sky and drift amongst the stars. I’ve always had a metal roof over my head. I got over it quickly, and now I really want to get out of here so I can see the sky again.”

  “Agreed,” I said. Then the door opened on the bottom floor, and I leaned out of the elevator and swept my rifle across the hallway.

  There were patches of dried blood splattered across the floor, walls, and ceiling of the hallway, and the air smelled of death.

  “Shit, what happened?” Paula asked.

  “Those drones must have gotten down here. Look at the marks on the wall. Scratches from their needles,” Kasta said, and I moved my flashlight over to see the marks. As I did so, my light passed over a mound of metal some thirty meters further down the hall, and I swung my rifle back to get a better look. It was a pile of the bird drones, and I moved my light off them after a few seconds so that their batteries wouldn’t recharge.

  “Wait here,” I said as I stepped out of the elevator and moved toward the mound of dead drones. Except for the dried blood and scratches on the wall, the hallway on this level looked exactly like the one up above, and I saw a series of metal doors on each side.

  I moved to the first door on my right and pushed it open. I expected to find another hallway or living quarters, but the space beyond the door was a metal walkway that extended into a never ending sea of darkness. There was also a set of stairs to the left of the door, but these also descended into the abyss.

  “Kasta, send your drones in here,” I ordered. The woman nodded, and a pair of her drones drifted over my head and into the vast room.

  “What do you see?” P
aula asked after a few moments. She held her rifle pointed down the hallway toward the pile of powerless drones, but the engineer kept her flashlight raised so the light didn’t directly hit the drones.

  “I think we are in the right place,” Kasta said.

  “You found the control center?” I asked.

  “No, this is a water treatment center. I think. I’m not exactly sure, but there are a bunch of pipes, filters, and such. It looks a bit like what they had on Queen’s Hat. There are some computer terminals in there, but I think we should keep looking on this floor.”

  “Alright. Do you drones need to come back?”

  “Here they are,” Kasta said when they drifted back over my head.

  “Other door,” I said as I moved across the hallway. I opened this one, but before I could peer inside, Kasta’s drones flew through.

  “Another water treatment center,” Kasta said after a few moments.

  “Ugh,” Paula groaned.

  “I am not an expert on civil engineering,” the android said. “But there is something odd about this place.”

  “What?”

  “It’s too large. There are four of these bunkers in the city. This might be the largest, but how many apartments did we pass?”

  “Felt like a hundred doors,” Paula said.

  “It was two hundred and forty,” Kasta said. “One housing block numbered 1A. These water treatment rooms are large, and we’ve found two of them. I feel as if the bunkers can hold much more than the population of the city.”

  “What if the treatment plants handle all the water from the city as well as the bunker?” I asked.

  “Possibility?” Kasta shrugged. “Seems like a long trip for the plant workers to make, but then again, a lot of it might be automated. It isn’t being used now. The drones don’t hear any water passing through the pipes.”

  “Let’s keep going,” I said as the small robots drifted through the open door and back into the main hallway.

  We walked past the pile of drones, more dried blood splatters, and a second group of drones. The hallway was beginning to smell more of decay, but it wasn’t nauseating.