S.W. Tanpepper's GAMELAND: Season Two Omnibus (Episodes 9-11)

by Tanpepper, Saul

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  Chapter 21

  The laboratory forms were blessedly brief. They asked for the standard identification information, followed by a few questions regarding her health. Jessie didn’t know how to answer the question about medications, once more wondering whether she should mention her inhaler. The drug inside of it was illegal, meant to mask her immunity, but was she putting herself at greater risk by not informing them of it?

  Or worse, putting someone else at risk?

  A nurse, Sarah, came over and asked if she needed any help. She was young, probably still a student, her eyes bright with the newness of her responsibilities. Jessie couldn’t imagine what it must be like, when the sum of one’s life’s calling was drawing blood and asking personal questions of complete strangers. Sarah had to be at least four or five years her senior, yet Jessie somehow felt so much older.

  “Oh, and don’t bother listing vitamins and supplements,” Sarah said, noticing Jessie’s hesitation. She gave Jessie a wink which seemed to assume something, though Jessie had no idea what it might be. “We don’t count those as medicines.”

  Jessie typed in: NONE.

  Sarah nodded and grinned and made a note on her own tablet. The girl was just way too chipper.

  “And are you sexually active?”

  Jessie blushed and nodded, almost reflexively, but even this seemed like a lie.

  “Single or multiple partners?”

  “Single.”

  Sarah’s smile widened. “Have you ever been exposed to, or are you a carrier of, any communicable diseases?”

  Jessie blinked uncertainly.

  What if they screen for the Reanimation virus?

  Why would they even bother? The disease was almost always fatal within twenty-four hours. And, as far as she knew, nobody out here in the real world knew about immunity or treatment, so it wasn’t like people were walking around with the disease in her blood.

  Except you.

  Her immunity wouldn’t prevent her from infecting others, would it? The thought nearly immobilized her. Maybe she shouldn’t let them draw her blood. Maybe she should just forget the whole thing and leave.

  You have to go ahead. You need to get this implant out of your head, get a new Link.

  She shook her head and coughed lightly. “No, no diseases.”

  “And have you been, either to visit or live, to any place where any of the following diseases is known to be endemic?”

  She showed Jessie a list. Jessie was glad to see that Reanimation virus wasn’t among them. This time she could answer honestly.

  Sarah asked Jessie to roll up her sleeves and Jessie heard the sharp inhale of her breath when she saw the old cuts and the newer bruises. “I was in a car accident recently,” Jessie explained, which the young nurse seemed to accept without further consideration.

  Two tubes of blood were drawn. Dark red and viscous, the fluid didn’t look any different than anyone else’s blood, or any different than it had on any of the numerous other occasions she’d had to come in at her grandfather’s insistence for her ‘allergies.’ Yet that blood held three terrible secrets: a virus which could kill everyone, a variant of the infective protein that neutralized it, and a masking agent.

  You can’t tell anyone. They will come after you. They will put you in a laboratory somewhere and they will kill you.

  Wonderful terrible secrets. Her mother had told her not to share them with anyone, but she hadn’t listened. She’d told the one person she thought she could trust the most. And now that one person was the one person she most feared.

  “You’re all set,” Sarah told her. “Everything looks fine. We’ll send these results right over to Arc.”

  “Results already?”

  Sarah nodded. “White blood count is normal. Normal platelets. You may be slightly anemic and your electrolytes are at the high end of the range, but nothing to worry about. This should just about complete your application.”

  “What about CR?”

  “Citizen Registration?”

  “I was hoping to get my implant replaced.”

  Sarah stared for a moment, looking confused.

  “My implant is faulty.”

  “Oh.” She shrugged. “Well, if you’d like, I can ping them and see if they have an opening. No promises. And you’ll need to get yourself up to Hartford—”

  “That’s not a problem. Just check. Please.”

  “Okay, honey.”

  She glanced back once with a curious frown on her face, then went to check.

  † † †

  Jessie pinged Eric as soon as the appointment was confirmed.

  “They have a four-thirty opening. I’m going to get my devices replaced.”

  “Today?” he asked. She could see the surprise on her brother’s face.

  “I’ll grab the bus. There’s still enough time.”

  “Don’t be silly. I’ll drive you. I mean it this time.”

  “It’s okay, Eric. Really.”

  “I said I’ll drive you,” he repeated. “No arguing. Just Just let me ping my boss.” He turned away for a moment before returning. “You should ping Kelly, let him know so he won’t worry.”

  “He won’t worry.”

  Eric gave her a strange look.

  “Never mind. I’ll send a text.”

  To Reggie.

  She hadn’t seen him in school today and hoped he was okay. The cut on his arm was bad, but not bad enough that he’d pass out.

  You should’ve made sure you tossed those Zoners.

  It took Eric nearly forty minutes to arrive, but there was still more than ample time to get up to Hartford before the appointment.

  The ride up proceeded in stony silence, neither of them speaking very much. Jessie commented on how little traffic there was, though her mind was elsewhere. Even for off-rush-hour, the scarcity of automobiles seemed a little odd to her. But Eric just shrugged. His mind also seemed elsewhere.

  They had to pull over once, just south of the city limits, to allow a long line of emergency vehicles to pass. Their lights flashed and their sirens blared, and Eric watched them with a look of alarm in his eyes. Two of the vehicles had the NCD logo on the side, and one of the vans was from the county coroner’s office. But when Jessie asked what was wrong, he turned to her and said, “Probably nothing.” He kept glancing at his police Link mounted in the center console, as if expecting it to ping at any moment. But it didn’t.

  He pulled away from the shoulder and merged into an opening in the traffic.

  “I heard there’s a problem with the network in St. Louis,” Jessie said. “And Philly.”

  Eric gave her a sharp look.

  “Do you think—?”

  “It’s nothing, Jess,” he snapped. The muscles in his jaw rippled as he chewed the inside of his cheek. “Everything’s fine. Just . . . . Just stop it, okay?”

  “Stop what?”

  “Stop asking questions. Everything’s under control.”

  “Fine. Sheesh.”

  They checked in at Citizen Registration and were directed to the surgical suite, where Jessie was instructed to change into a gown and lie down. Eric waited with her until the prep nurse arrived.

  “I’ll be waiting for you just over here,” Eric told Jessie, giving her hand a squeeze. “I’m not going anywhere.”

  The nurse gave him a patient smile, though it didn’t seem to reach her eyes. “You’ll have to wait outside,” she told him, and she ushered him to the door against his protests.

  Jessie saw him nod encouragingly just before the door shut behind him with a solid click. The first soft flutter of anxiety rose in her belly. She’d been so eager to get her devices replaced that she hadn’t really given much thought to the actual procedure. The device at the base of her skull was fully entwined with her brain stem. How would they possibly disentangle it?

  “You’ll be fine, dear,” the nurse said, probably more out of habit than from correctly interpreting Jessie’s body
language. She barely even seemed to see her.

  “Do you do many replacements?”

  “In the six years I’ve been here, I’ve only seen two others. But don’t worry. Replacements are a lot faster and easier than initial implantations.”

  “Why is that?”

  The nurse blinked and looked at her, as if the question surprised her. “The device comes in two parts,” she explained, locking her fingers together to illustrate. “First, there’s the hybrid biosynth adapter. It’s the part that grows and becomes rooted into your brain; it acts as an interface for the actual device. We leave the adapter in. The second part is the processor, which is what we’ll be exchanging. It’s all plug-and-play. Just like swapping out the power cell in a Link.”

  Except that doesn’t require anesthesia or cutting, Jessie thought.

  The nurse wheeled over a cart with a machine on it very much like the one Jessie had seen on her previous visit.

  “To modulate device activity,” she explained. She busied herself with the instrument.

  Although she didn’t elaborate, Jessie could guess what the nurse meant. The implants were designed to prevent anyone from tampering with them. Or reverse engineering them. It made sense that Arc would have a way to override the autodestruct mechanism.

  The memory of Micah prying the implant from the neck of a dead Player in Gameland came to her. He’d dug into the corpse’s neck with the tip of a knife and tried to lever the tiny device out. It immediately started to whine, as if he’d angered a nest of wasps, and then it had exploded. It wasn’t much of a blast— just large enough to splatter them with bits of rotting zombie flesh and gore. But it had left a ragged, gaping, smoking hole in the Player’s neck.

  “Link please.”

  Jessie handed it over and the nurse inserted it into the machine.

  “In thirty minutes,” she said, “you’ll be as good as new. You’ll have a whole new implant and the absolute latest in Link device technology.”

  She raised her hand and Jessie saw that she was holding a syringe filled with a clear liquid. “Anesthesia,” she said. She pushed the air out, finishing with a tiny squirt that spit a little on Jessie’s cheek. “Sorry, honey.” And she wiped it away with a tissue. “Now, roll over onto your side.”

  Jessie turned. Her last thought was whether the file on her Link would prevent them from shutting off the autodestruct mechanism. She was going to ask about it when she felt a pinch in the back of her neck. A freezing sensation filled her head and rushed through her body. She tried to scream, but she couldn’t move. She was blind, paralyzed. There was only darkness and a high-pitched whining sound.

  Then it was raining.

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  Part Two - Players

  Chapter 22

  The sky above her is an unbroken ceiling. Sooty white. Pressing its laden self upon the barren world. It’s raining, and the rain comes hard, without pity or vengeance, unbidden. And yet she welcomes it. She stands and stretches her parched throat toward it. She stands as tall as she can and lifts her cataract eyes and watches, watches. Watches the rain pour down from the ashfall sky.

  There are so few Truths remaining in her world, but this is one of them: Rain is good.

  Her mouth opens, not because she thinks to open it, but rather from some primordial instinct to breathe in the water. Her lower jaw drops and the rain pours in, all sweetness and wetness and purity, filling her mouth and nose. She revels in the fact that she doesn’t drown. She doesn’t need air. And that is another Truth.

  The water slips down her throat and into her body and washes away the badness inside of her, the badness that grows out of her hunger. The Hunger. And the water slips into her lungs, and she doesn’t choke. The rain makes pliable what had grown stiff and brittle. And now, when she cries out, now her moans are no longer mere whispers. Now she can be heard.

  The drops pelt her skin. Her cheeks. Her eyelids.

  She can no more feel the rain hitting her than she can sense it soaking into her clothes. They are all rags anyway. They serve no purpose anymore, whether to adorn or to protect. The rags hang rotting over her withered flesh, but her flesh does not rot. It is flesh that frays, not by the day, but by the decade.

  The water pelts her upturned eyes, yet she does not blink. It pools into the hollows beneath and around the blackened orbs until the solid gray of the sky bursts into brilliant prisms of color, vibrant lakes and oceans of molten light. And if she blinks, it spills out in a kaleidoscope of tears.

  If she could only blink.

  The water turns the darkness away from this dead, empty world and makes it bright once more.

  Yes, the rain is good. The rain is as close to life as she can come.

  † † †

  She is not alone.

  She can sense the moment it happens, when the stranger comes — not outside of her, but inside her mind, occupying that place where she once was, yet can no longer reach. It terrifies her. This other presence which somehow takes control of her in ways that she cannot. It steals her body away from her.

  She calls it the Deceiver.

  Against her wishes, the Deceiver lowers her head from the sky —

  No! No! Please! The rain is good!

  —and begins to walk her body away.

  She tries again and again, crying out: I don’t want to! But this body does not obey her supplications— hasn’t for so long. There was a time when she exerted some will over it, owned it. Then that time ended and there came a new age when it would allow only her feeble attempts to hide it from the drying sun, when she could bid the body out into the darkness to welcome the night or the rain.

  But now her broken body no longer even hides; it is ruined and does not know how the sun beats down with reckless reckoning. How the sun hastens her to her end, though the end itself seems never to come. Now her body heeds only the memory of rain.

  And Hunger. Hunger is the eternal Truth.

  Oh God oh God! she moans.

  How she hates the Hunger; she wishes she could flee from this tiny room, this prison in this wretched corner of her mind. But here, she is forever and ever shut off from everything else and she cannot escape. No one can rescue her. Even her own body has betrayed her.

  But when the Deceiver comes, then even the Hunger has no dominion over her body. The Deceiver takes control because it knows nothing of Truth. It is the antithesis of Truth. It steals her body from her, and she cannot even make known her presence. The Deceiver forces her to watch as it uses her own hands and her own teeth to rip and slash and kill.

  Not to satisfy the horrible, honest Hunger, but simply for Sport.

  Sometimes, when the Deceiver leaves her, it tears away from her in a way that leaves her soul bleeding. It casts away her body and leaves it to be ravaged by the relentless sun. She hates to see the Deceiver come, yet she fears even more when it leaves.

  Now it takes her body along a trail in the woods. A rivulet of water caresses her feet and she yearns for the wetness, to take it in her. But the Deceiver notices none of this. Or, if it does, does not care.

  The ground is uneven, yet somehow her body knows what to do, how to walk, where to go; it seems wondrous that her feet do not trip or fall or fail her.

  The ground slopes upward. They climb, higher and higher, until the shadows around her suddenly shatter and flee and the woods thrust her out into a grassy field.

  Where is the Deceiver taking us?

  The Deceiver shares nothing of its plans.

  She can see where the hard rain has beaten down the grass, matting it down so that it pulls against her ankles, resists her feet. She plows insensibly through it. The heavy growth barely slows her.

  Lift, she thinks. Lift your feet. But her body will not heed even this simple command. Her feet simply push harder against the lush grass, trusting that it will yield. The world will yield.

  And the world yields.

  Her body does not know fatigue.

  But the mind . . . . />
  The mind grows weary, distracted. She drifts, slipping away from her prison, herself, this hijacker of flesh. She slips down into that place which both time and death work so hard to erase: her past.

  At home, sitting in a chair, a cold bottle of beer in her hand. They are the gnarled knuckles of a laborer. The television is on and she’s watching—

  What?

  Someone. In a suit. Talking.

  A man (the president) is giving a speech, saying that this is the beginning of a New Age: one without taxes, one where a new breed of worker will do all the things the living would rather not do. Or can’t do. She can sense that this is a world where she no longer plays a vital role. She is obsolete. Her mind weeps. What good is a man who cannot work?

  I am a man.

  I was a man.

  Another time and another memory. Someone speaking to her (him?). She can’t see the speaker’s face, but she senses something filthy about them: “Think of your family,” they say. “Do this for them. They could sure use the money. Think of your children.”

  My children?

  A flicker and she’s somewhere else, in a room, lying on a table with bright lights and there’s a sharp pain in the back of her head and the darkness covers her and leaves her with only the sound of a little boy crying in the darkness and the wetness of tears on her cheek and her heart is torn into pieces inside of her. Or, it would be, if she could feel her heart.

  It is dead.

  All she feels anymore is Hunger.

  The memories fade. She forgets them. She knows nothing in this moment but the Here of this prison and the Now of the moment.

  The rain has stopped falling. The skies remain a stark white canopy, streaked, feathered and whorled gray. She can sense the heat of the sun; she cannot feel it. Her skin knows nothing; only a whisper from somewhere inside her head tells her that the air around her is hot. A memory of a memory. An echo of echoes. She is riven, herself from herself.

  The Deceiver is moving her again, forward, upward, toward what appears to be a mesh of metallic gray. Is it water? It’s a silvery, shimmering, transparent veil. How she wishes for the rain. But the gray wall is still too far away. She stumbles and suddenly she is falling. She opens her mouth — in her mind she opens it — but there is no breath inside of her, no surprise, and the memory of speech dies on her dead lips, unfulfilled, unuttered. Unheard.