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

by Tanpepper, Saul

  If I shout in my own mind and nobody hears it, do I make a sound?

  The ground rises frighteningly fast as she falls, like a tree, its roots rotted away.

  Timber!

  It is a curious thing, to watch the earth rising to meet one’s self, to fall without pain or fear. To be suddenly lying upon the ground, blades of grass pressed up against the surface of her eyes. Her vision fills with its greenness. She wants to cry out in alarm, in pain, to breathe in the wetness down here, but her body knows to do none of these things. She wants simply to lie here and sleep. But fatigue, like surprise and pain, no longer exist, and want and sleep are no longer truths of this world. They are as everything else: the lies of the Living.

  It was my decision to come here.

  If I could just sleep.

  But already her body is lifting itself. The Deceiver is pushing her up, standing. And now she is witness to what she has become as she sees her own wilted hands and tattered feet planted on the slippery ground in front of her face. The gnarled knuckles. Something akin to fear and revulsion sweeps into the room of her mind, but these emotions are smoke, wispy thin and elusive, and she cannot grasp them anymore than she can grasp a wish and hold it.

  They are ruined, her hands. The skin is flayed and dangles in ribbons; her cartilage is dried yellow and hard. Her nails are gone. They have been torn away, taking the tender flesh and leaving the exposed stubs of bones. They glisten greenish-gray, blackened with the first mossy signs of rot.

  I am dead, she remembers. That’s right. I died. I am dead, and this is what has become of my body.

  She tries to recall something, anything, about her life before. But now her memory is as blank as the sky above her.

  No! No, I had a life. I was someone!

  And then she does remember. There is a thing, a very small thing: a boy who loved her—

  Kyle?

  Daddy! The boy shouts and the shout echoes, fades.

  No! No, these are not my memories. You are the imposter! You are the Deceiver! Get out of my prison. Get out of my mind! GET OUT OF MY BODY LEAVE ME ALONE GO!

  But she is not he. No. She is she, and he is he, and the Deceiver is the Deceiver. He and she can sense the Deceiver, but the Deceiver cannot sense them. The Deceiver knows nothing, is not welcome.

  It’s taking her (his? their?) body now, taking it somewhere, always walking, searching.

  Fighting?

  Playing.

  I am in The Game!

  She can’t remember how it happened.

  No! Resist!

  But she has only one weapon: Hunger. Now she beckons it forth.

  But the Hunger cowers; it lowers its head in defeat. It cannot overcome the will of the Deceiver. In the battle between Truth and Lies, the latter always wins.

  The silver, shimmering wall grows distinct. It is not water, but wire. A fence, chain link. And she senses that the Deceiver wishes to move past it, needs to get past it to the other side.

  What’s there? No! Please, no.

  These are her thoughts. Or maybe his. Or the Deceiver’s. But of course her (their!) body does not obey. Because it—

  smells

  —knows what awaits. And yet she waits, does not touch the fence. She knows what will happen if she tries.

  She calls forth her anger. She beckons her frustration. But while they bubble and roil deep down inside of her, far away in the darkest pits of her memory, they are too weak to rise. They reside too far from the skin of her mind, from the land where emotions are mapped. They have faded into nothing, like ancient tapestries.

  Because feelings, too, are lies of the Living.

  The Deceiver walks her body along the fence. She can feel the life inside the wire prickling her skin. She doesn’t touch it. She can feel it in her mind. She can sense the low hum it makes inside her skull, inside this tiny little box that tells her in whispers not to touch. Stay away; dangerous.

  Before her, a building materializes out of the gloom, small and orange, like a giant square pumpkin. And suddenly another memory comes to her. She knows where she has come, where the Deceiver has brought her. She has been here before.

  And she knows why she has come.

  The Deceiver waits.

  She (they) wait.

  What? she wonders. What will happen?

  And finally something happens. Someone is coming. She can almost sense it, can almost feel the expectation coming off the Deceiver, like steam off cement after a rain.

  Get out get out GET OUT! she wants to yell, and is surprised when her mouth opens and her ears pick up the low croak that her throat makes.

  But the Deceiver only waits.

  Until, finally, the thing they have all been waiting for is here and now it’s really here yes YES! And when she (it, they) sees it, the Hunger awakens and blooms inside of her body like the sun rising, spreading its warmth through her and driving her mad with its want. And everything inside of her rushes up to the surface, boiling and exploding with such naked fury that now she can feel it— she can FEEL it! Everything: the anger and pain and hope and love and dying and living and everything that she remembers about being Alive. They come and propel her forward.

  She raises her hands and lunges — No! No! Stop! Danger! — but she can’t stop herself because she cannot control this body. Her fingers curl around the wire and suddenly there’s a blinding white light and all that she had felt a moment before, everything that she once was before the time she became Forever, suddenly collapses and sinks back into the darkness. It coalesces again deep inside of her. It turns into a tight dark stone without light and sinks away.

  And the sky darkens to night and the rain dries up and all is silent.

  She suffocates.

  Drowns.

  Yet she cannot die.

  Not again. She can never die.

  And that is the final, unbroken Truth.

  ‡ ‡ ‡

  Chapter 23

  Jessie’s body jerked itself upright, and she coughed as she tried to suck the thin air into her lungs. She gulped, gasping, as someone pounded on her back. Her fingers clawed at her throat. She would tear a hole in it if it would just allow the stingy air to pass through it more easily.

  Eric was there, panic showing on his face. He grasped her shoulders and shook. She could see that he was yelling. His mouth was opening and closing, and his lips formed the sounds of her name and Help her! and Please! But she couldn’t hear any of it, could only hear the high-pitched whine inside her head, the same whine she’d heard after she’d fallen down the stairs.

  Someone shoved him away.

  Jessie recognized the new face which came into view. It was the nurse who had been with her right before it started to rain.

  She forced her hands away from her throat and reached around to the back. The skin beneath the hair was slick, and when she brought her hand forward again, she saw that it was smeared with blood. She puzzled over the sight, rubbing her thumb and fingers together and marveling at the stickiness of the ocher liquid. It was already drying in the cool, filtered air.

  Is it done?

  The whining inside of her head began to fill and rattle with other sounds— words and voices, the clatter of equipment, an urgent beeping. She blinked around at the others in the room, her chest still heaving. The demand for air wasn’t as dire as it had been a moment before.

  Jessie!

  Her name. Not inside her head. It came from somewhere else. She turned.

  It was Eric, still shouting, his face rising up before her, falling away, reinserting itself back into her field of vision. She was dizzy, tilting, and he was calling her name.

  Jessie pushed the nurse away so she could go to him, but her legs failed and she started to fall. Her knees collapsed beneath her, arms like rubber. The table betrayed her, lurching upward toward the ceiling. The floor rising, too. Her brother took her and lifted her into his arms. Get away! he shouted at the nurse, at the others who had piled through the doorway into th
e too bright, suddenly white, noisy room. Give her some space!

  She was surprised when they obeyed.

  “Can you speak?”

  She turned her eyes to Eric, still gasping, and tried again to stand, and this time her knees wobbled, locked, held. The buzz in her head was dwindling. She nodded, but didn’t try to say anything.

  I’m alive. I was dead, but now I’m back and how can that be?

  She raised her hands to her eyes and her mind registered that they were not the tattered, skeletal fingers she had expected. Her hands were as they always were, except one was sticky—

  It’s not blood.

  She reached back again and there was no bandage, no incision. The sticky liquid was disinfectant.

  “What happened? Did I get a new implant?”

  Eric glanced up and toward the person behind her, then back down. He gave her a quick shake of the head, then helped her back onto the table. The nurse took the opportunity to wedge herself between Jessie and her brother, brushing him aside again. She muttered to herself as she scanned her implant for her vital signs.

  “They couldn’t proceed,” Eric said. “And they couldn’t wake you.”

  Jessie frowned. “It was the anesthesia, it knocked me out and—”

  He shook his head. “They didn’t give you anything, Jessie.”

  She frowned. “B but I felt it! I couldn’t move or see.”

  “You passed out.”

  “What? I didn’t pass out!”

  The nurse shushed them both. “What was the last thing you remember?”

  “You told me to roll over. I I . . . .”

  The nurse frowned and shook her head.

  “They thought you’d fainted, Jessie,” Eric told her.

  “I didn’t faint! I don’t do that!”

  But of course she did, didn’t she? Just the day before. She’d fainted down the steps.

  No!

  “I don’t think it was a faint,” the nurse said. “We tried to wake you, but we couldn’t.”

  “I don’t understand.” Jessie looked at the woman, pleading, then to a third person standing to one side, observing. She didn’t recognize him. When they made eye contact, he stepped forward.

  “Miss Daniels, I—”

  “Missus.”

  He blinked a couple times, processing the correction, then nodded his understanding. “Missus Daniels, my name is Doctor Hines. I’m a cybernetic implant specialist. I was scheduled to replace your implant this evening. It appears that you may have had some kind of neural episode.”

  “A what?”

  “A seizure. Has anything like this ever happened to you before? Any history of epilepsy?”

  She shook her head, glancing cautiously at Eric.

  What about when you saw your mother? In Manhattan, on the bus? Wasn’t that—?

  That wasn’t the same thing!

  And yet it felt eerily similar. Just like the day she’d imagined being in the woods.

  What the hell is going on with me?

  Eric’s face was pale. He looked frightened and his eyes bulged. “She did faint yesterday.”

  “That’s because I forgot to eat!”

  “You were throwing up.”

  Jessie glared at him.

  The doctor grunted and pulled a light out of his pocket and shined it into her eyes. He asked her to track his finger as he moved it from side to side. Someone’s Link pinged while he was doing this.

  “It’s Kelly,” Eric told her.

  “Give it to me!”

  Jessie reached over for the Link. This is his fault! But Doctor Hines stopped her. “Whatever it is, it can wait.”

  He swept the penlight once more past her eyes, top to bottom this time, then tapped on her knees and elbows. He pricked her skin with a needle, asked her to count backwards. All the tests seemed to assure him the seizure hadn’t caused any damage.

  Finally, he leaned back on his stool and crossed his arms. He stared at his tablet for a long time, a puzzled look on his face, before finally standing up. “You appear to be fine, though I recommend you see your regular doctor, get a more thorough checkup.” He took a deep breath. “For now, though, we need to talk about that implant.”

  He moved over to the machine on the cart and flicked it off. The whining in Jessie’s head immediately began to fade.

  “What about it?” Eric asked.

  “In my ten years working with these devices, I’ve never encountered a fully functional device that we couldn’t modulate. Granted, we don’t do many replacements, but those we’ve done have been quite straightforward. Yours, on the other hand . . . ,” he said, looking at Jessie. The lines on his face deepened and he shook his head. “I’m honestly unsure how to proceed.”

  Eric’s face crinkled in worry. “What do you mean?”

  Doctor Hines turned toward him. “The implant in your sister’s head is clearly defective. It can communicate with her Link device and the streams. Where it’s failing is when we attempt to modify its programming.”

  “The firmware?” Jessie asked.

  He shook his head. “All implants are designed with certain—” He paused, searching for the right words. “They possess certain safety mechanisms. We need to modulate these safeguards before we can remove the device.”

  Jessie and Eric exchanged glances. They both knew that the doctor was referring to the self-destruct mechanism.

  “Is there any reason she has to have it replaced?” Eric asked.

  “Federal regulations mandate full compliance. That includes implant integrity. A faulty device is as bad as none at all. In fact, it’s worse because we can’t replace it.” He paused. “We have to think about what’s best for our fellow citizens. In the event of an outbreak, you would represent a considerable security risk to the general population.”

  Fear flushed anew through Jessie’s body. She didn’t like where the doctor was going with this.

  “I think it might be best to put Jessica into a—” He paused. “Into a controlled environment. For her own protection.”

  “There are tens of thousands of people walking around without implants right now!” Eric shouted.

  “And we are working very closely with our military and civilian partners to remove that risk, Mister Daniels. In just a few short weeks, every man, woman and child over the age of ten months will be implanted. If even one person remains without a functional implant, then no one is safe. The federal mandates are very clear.”

  “But she hasn’t broken any laws! You can’t hold her!”

  “We can, actually.”

  Eric pulled out his badge and shoved it into the doctor’s face. “This says I’m taking her home!”

  The doctor stared impassively at the identification for a moment, then shrugged. “In three weeks, the federal deadline will arrive. Any person not in compliance at that time must be taken into custody.”

  “Then you have three weeks to figure out how to fix my sister’s implant, because this isn’t her fault. Until then, she’s coming home with me.”

  “You fully understand the risks?”

  Eric glared at him. “Better than you know.”

  “Then you also fully accept the consequences.” He turned to Jessie. “I’ll work with our engineers to determine the cause of the bug in your implant. On the off chance we can’t come up with a workaround, we’ll have no other choice than to place you in protective isolation.”

  ‡ ‡ ‡

  Chapter 24

  They were back in the car again, heading home. Another hour-long drive filled with smoldering silence. For the first half hour, Eric watched Jessie warily out of the corner of his eye. He’d open his mouth, as if he intended to say something, then close it again without uttering a single word. Jessie tried not to let it bother her, but it was really beginning to wear on her nerves. She had more than enough on her mind than to worry about his fragile state of mind.

  There was no question that her implant problems and the file on her Link
were connected. She was going to have to confront Kelly.

  Eric cleared his throat, looked over, changed his mind and went back to focusing on the road.

  If she had to resort to coercing Kelly to tell her what he’d done, and to fix it, then—

  “You okay over there, Jessie?”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake!” she exclaimed and climbed over into the back seat and tried to lie down out of sight.

  “We need to talk about this.”

  “Like that’s going to solve anything.”

  “And how is not talking about it any better?”

  “Because it’s a programming issue, Eric. And unless you have some sort of super secret computer coding expertise I don’t know about, you can’t fix this.”

  Eric cleared his throat. “I won’t let them take you away, Jess. You need to know that.”

  She sighed and stared at the scuff marks on the back of his seat. “I know, Eric. Just . . . .” The old vinyl was cracked and torn along one corner. She started picking at it, pulling flakes of the material off with her fingernail. “Just let’s go home.”

  So I can deal with Kelly.

  But she had absolutely no idea how she was going to do that. What was she going to say? “Hey, honey. So, I know you’ve been lying to me all these years. But it’s cool. I just need you to do a little favor for me: This thing you put on my Link, would you take it off? If you don’t, then I’m going to rot in prison. So, what do you say, chum? For old time’s sake?”

  Leverage. That’s what she needed. Something to force Kelly to admit what he’d done to her.

  The only thing Kelly ever really cared about is his brother.

  But what could she do, kidnap Kyle? She didn’t want to do that. The boy wasn’t a bargaining chip.

  You’ve got no other choice.

  As long as Kyle doesn’t get hurt.