Emergence (A DRMR Novel Book 2)

by Michael Patrick Hicks

  Inside, the ship was cool, frosty almost, in comparison to the desert heat behind her. The geometric art pattern on the outside carried over into the ship’s interior, where the walls and archways displayed a clean-cut pattern of squares and rectangles and the lighting was hidden behind adornments from another bygone era.

  She snapped the schematics into the lower-left corner of her heads-up retinal display, using the chart to track her movements through Alabaster’s interior. Using a synchronizing algorithm, Rameez located the other people on the ship and tracked them. She overlaid this information against the schematics, too.

  Jade had last been logged in at the infirmary, and Mesa decided to head there first. She rounded the corner, heading toward the elevator bank, then stopped, standing face to face with her friend.

  Behind Jade, a cluster of five men appeared as their chamelonware suits shifted out of the invisible spectrum.

  Her mind rebelled against the plain fact, and her final hope crumbled as it became apparent that her Jade was gone. Mesa’s eyes burned with fresh tears, and her stomach dropped into a hollow pit.

  “Hello, Mesa,” Jade said. “My name is Alice Xie. You have something that belongs to me.”

  Chapter 26

  Mesa crumpled as the final cylinder of Alice’s data packed unloaded and shot through her brain. The truth about Jade.

  The realization hit as her knees struck the cold slate flooring, and blood spurted from her nostril as pain racked her skull. The feedback of the bio-fi loop was a banshee howling between her ears, a klaxon of a much-too-late warning. Jade was a data carrier.

  Alice had known as much, but the secrets had remained locked away, buried deep beneath her shared memories with Mesa, until the final, necessary memory keys were in place to open them. The data packet unfurled, recognizing in Jade a common kinship, and reached out for a connection. She was denied, and the grasping tendrils of thought recoiled, turning back against the loop.

  The soldiers flanked Jade. Two men peeled away to step forward. Their meaty hands curled around Mesa’s biceps and hauled her forward, dragging her feet along the floor. They dumped her unceremoniously on the elevator floor and surrounded her. Jade stood over her, smiling.

  Mnemonic overload paralyzed Mesa and fried her brain. Alice had blinded her, keeping her in the dark while letting her walk into a trap. Mesa realized, far too late, that Alice had never planned on leaving her mind. Her goals were far simpler and far more insidious. She was hell-bent on taking over, on drawing her fragmented self into a single core body and eliminating Mesa entirely.

  Schaeffer’s accusation had been more than she’d realized. Jade wasn’t a spy—she was an organizer. There hadn’t been only five data packets. There had been five other data packets, aside from hers. Jade made six.

  You lied to me, she groaned. She curled up on the floor in pain, a sick feeling squeezing her torso tightly.

  This is wrong, Alice said, a strain of panic vibrating her thoughts. She blocked the file link.

  What do you mean?

  That isn’t an archive packet in control.

  Is Jade in there?

  No. That is Alice Xie. She is complete.

  How?

  A copy of the original. The full original, from Los Angeles. The one who wiped your mind. The one who killed you.

  So I kill her then.

  I can’t let you do that, Alice said.

  Something lunged deep inside her mind, tearing loose with maniacal pain. A seizure ripped through Mesa’s body; foam curdled from her lips.

  “Give her room,” Jade said as Mesa’s limbs twisted and flailed.

  Mesa’s back arched violently, and stars shot through the inside of her eyelid. The mems unveiling a kaleidoscope of pain as her throat seized, her heart hammering as she struggled to regain control. She was drowning, and she searched for something stable to latch on to, to stop the waves from crashing down atop her and forcing her under, farther and farther.

  Why would Schaeffer do this? she wondered. Why bring back Alice Xie like this?

  A test market to prove that it could be done, an echo of Alice said. A fully blank slate, a cocktail of drugs, and a full mnemonic load simply awaiting transfer. I’m sure he considered other alternatives, but this was much too easy for him to resist. There was a full control sample, and all the variables have been tested and eliminated. Using the original Alice Xie template was the only way to ensure a sound study.

  Mesa shifted toward Alice’s voice, letting the tide carry her nearer to what seemed to be a small beacon of light in the recess of her mind—the other occupying the sea of her mindscape. She swam hard, but another tidal shift grabbed her legs and pulled her down. The pressure squeezed her body, choking her. The inside of her ears ached as if anvils were being pounded inside her skull, heating by the friction of violence.

  She fought to return to the surface, her hands reaching, fingers stretching, flexing, probing, and trying to find something—anything—to grab hold of. The tip of a middle finger brushed something slick, and she strained to make contact. The ocean swirled around her, pulling her farther off course.

  This is why you killed Schaeffer, Mesa said. You pulled the trigger. You knew. You knew this Alice was here.

  Of course, Alice said.

  Mesa locked on to the boastful pride in the other woman’s voice and kicked hard. She was close. Her fingers wrapped around an ethereal edge, hooking through and sliding into nothing. She brought her legs up, curled herself into a ball, and quickly exploded forward.

  There! she shouted. Her victory was entirely mental.

  Her fingers grabbed onto the phantom hair and pulled the other presence close, drawing Alice’s face toward hers. Alice smiled then slapped both palms against the side of Mesa’s head, grabbing her ears, and pulled her face forward into a smacking collision against her own forehead.

  Both women reeled back, but neither let go, two mental wraiths vying for control of a singular mind. Mesa was dazed and dizzy, her head lolling. Alice was much faster to recover, and she snaked forward, sinking her teeth into Mesa’s throat.

  Mesa’s legs cramped as she kicked, and her hands fought to unlatch Alice from around her throat. She brought up a knee, striking at the nerves in the inside of the woman’s thigh, but the kick was weak. She punched at her, twisted, and flailed.

  Then she realized her error.

  The problem, as it had been all along in her dealing with Alice Xie, was in thinking linearly. She couldn’t confront the problem head-on. She needed to take it from the sides and behind. Alice had been using Mesa’s mind against her, in the vain hope that Mesa would be struck off guard and forget one essential fact—they were in Mesa’s mind. All she needed to do was take it back.

  Get out of my fucking head! she roared then bucked and… vanished. She made a simple decision—to take control. Her mind. Her ethereal plane. Her weapon.

  The waves crashed down against Alice, impossibly fast, with the weight of collapsing steel. The girders of Mesa’s mind crumbled upon the invader, burying her.

  Alice was caught off guard. Cords tightened around her throat as fists pulled at her ankles, dragging her down, farther and farther into the recess.

  Mesa chased the beacon, homing in on the light, following it toward the bottom. Lightning danced through her mind as neurons fired and fired and fired. The ram’s horn of her hippocampus flared painfully. The agony shot through the entirety of her mind, and she ground her teeth against the pain. Still, Mesa followed her quarry with an unrelenting determination.

  You can’t do this to me, Alice screamed. Lightning struck out at her, wrapping her in nets of electricity, setting her ethereal body aflame.

  Mesa lashed out at her—an arc of light sliced down, bisecting the virus, hollowing its code. Reveling in the agonizing cries of
the other woman’s pain and fury, Mesa watched as Alice’s belly blackened and burned.

  Dragged down into the cluster of Mesa’s mind, Alice was forced into a void of nothing more than primal instinct and flashes of insight. Trussed and bundled in the sheaths of lightning, Alice was helpless.

  If you kill me, you’ll never recover your memories. You’ll never know who you were.

  I know who I am, Mesa said. She stood in what had once been Alice’s abode, a corner of her own mind cut off from her and twisted toward the bent artifices of a foreign data packet.

  In the elevator, a red warning prompt blossomed against Mesa’s retinal display.

  UNAUTHORIZED ACCESS DETECTED

  A churlish grin spread across Mesa’s face, surprising herself. She gave a command that was both simple and freeing.

  PURGE

  Alice screamed as the light engulfed her, twisting about her form and pulling. Her limbs darkened and snapped, melting into the ether. Her screams deepened into an electric shrill as her code was destroyed.

  Mesa rose slowly with the tide carrying her back to consciousness. She floated there a moment, dazed and lost. Opening her eyes was a struggle, and her body was a catalogue of pains, aches, and soreness. Her eyelids fluttered, and her vision turned from a milky haze to crystal clarity.

  A face, familiar and welcome, hovered over hers.

  Mesa smiled. “Jade,” she whispered.

  Jade frowned, and her expression soured. Then she reeled back an arm and rifled it into Mesa’s face hard enough that the back of Mesa’s skull bounced off the elevator floor. Mesa’s eyes sank shut as the darkness welcomed her home once more.

  Chapter 27

  The thrum of the magnetometer lifts slowly drew Mesa back to wakefulness. Her eyes adjusted to the dim lighting, and she recoiled at the images transmitted along her optic nerves.

  She was surrounded by corpses. The five guards that had been with Jade all lay still, their throats opened wide. In the dim glow of the accent lighting, their blood was black and oily.

  The schematics snapped back into place, along with the real-time tracking algorithm. Opening a new socket, she sifted through the interior security camera views to confirm the reason for the lack of motion of the individual blips. All of the crew members had been slaughtered and were lying in their own slick, still-widening pools of gore.

  The ship’s systems detected pulses belonging to three individuals—her, Jade, and a third individual housed in a medical facility in the vessel’s bowels, near the engine room. There were no security feeds, and she scrubbed through Alabaster’s logs, seeking information. Other than the standard listing of “med bay,” she was unable to glean any other intel about the room’s occupant.

  Her hand slid in the blood as she tried to stand, realizing she was still in the elevator. She swatted at the controls, trying to get the doors to open. While she waited for the elevator to get over the hiccup in processing time, she studied the bodies at her feet then crouched to pat them down.

  No guns. No knives. They’d been stripped of anything useful. Even her black tote bag was gone.

  The elevator doors parted, and she stepped into a brightly lit hallway the color of sweet cream. She hesitated briefly at the sight of the woman splayed across the floor, her head chopped in half at a steep angle as if it had been nothing more than a melon on a butcher’s block. She wore a dark-blue button-down and a pinstripe black skirt. She was dressed like a secretary, and even in death, her hand seemed to be reaching toward the shattered remains of a data pad.

  What did you do here, Jade? Mesa wondered, remembering the much more painful truth. Not Jade. Alice. That name alone was enough to topple Mesa right into a migraine zone.

  Following the bloody footprints to the end of the hallway, she glanced at the live-tracking results overlaying the map. Jade—Alice was right on the other side of the door, which was marked Lido.

  Detecting her presence, the doors slid open with a quiet shush.

  Alice was sitting at a table, facing the door. More secretaries and crew lay scattered around the deck, clearly deceased. A long bladed dao lay across her lap, and she sipped from a small teacup held gently in both hands.

  “Ah, good. You’re awake.” She gestured to the open chair across from herself. “Please, sit.”

  Mesa was weary of following the woman’s orders, but her odds of going up against the woman unarmed were not good, particularly not when said woman had a sword in her lap.

  “I’m surprised you’ve kept me alive,” Mesa said, sitting on the seat’s edge.

  “Killing you would have been rude and premature. I first must thank you for all that you’ve done.”

  “I’m sure if I hadn’t killed Schaeffer, you would have.”

  “Yes, in time. Thank you for expediting that process,” Alice said.

  “Now you’re free—is that it? I did all your dirty work, and now it’s time for me to piss off, huh?”

  “My, but you are like your father.”

  “Stop telling me that,” Mesa said.

  Alice raised an eyebrow, curious.

  “Right, sorry. Other you. You know, there really are way too fucking many of you.”

  Alice conceded the point with a soft tilt of her head. “It seems you have helped remedy that problem, as well.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Mesa said, knocking a fist against her temple. “It’s all me now, bitch.”

  “You do need to learn how to curb your rudeness.”

  Mesa was taken aback, her face screwing up in shock. “Excuse me? I need to… like, seriously?”

  Alice smiled softly around the porcelain cup as she drank.

  “And where the fuck did you get a sword?”

  “Schaeffer is a bit of a collector, particularly of antiquities.” She slid her fingers across the curve of the hilt and down the handle in an oddly sensual gesture, as if she were tracing the lines of a lover’s body.

  “Neat,” Mesa said, feigning disinterest.

  “We did not have a chance to talk before,” she said, waving her hand in the air as if to indicate the past, “before all that unpleasantness in Los Angeles some years back.”

  “I wouldn’t remember one way or the other.”

  “No, of course not. Still, it was a shame. I had hoped things would turn out better for each of us.”

  “Yeah, you kinda fucked the doggy on that one, huh?”

  Alice shrugged, the heat of her gaze turning briefly inward. “Crude, but, I suppose, not inaccurate.”

  “What’s your deal?” Mesa asked.

  “After your father killed me, Daedalus harvested my memory. I’ve been conscious post-death in white-room confinement.”

  “Schaeffer turned you into a fucking AI,” Mesa said, scorn dripping from each word.

  “My entire history was mined and reconstructed for his amusement. Daedalus is planning on weaponizing the body-shifting protocols. It would be quite the advancement for military strategy.”

  “Forgive me if I don’t get all excited and quiver.”

  Alice smirked. Mesa hated how Alice’s nerves drove that ugly smile onto Jade’s face, disfiguring the body of her friend, soiling her corpse.

  “You cut a deal with them,” Mesa guessed. “Volunteered to be their guinea pig.”

  “Have you ever been imprisoned? Cut off from society entirely and stuffed in a box? Imagine not even having the luxury of your own body, of existing purely as a mindscape. Something to be probed and studied, pulled apart and reassembled, dissected and examined. You will never know that particular brand of torture. You look around and see all those I have killed, and you think me a monster. You have absolutely no idea what monstrosity is.”

  “Why you?” Mesa asked. “Why would Schaeffer pick you to implant?”r />
  “There are various reasons, of course,” Alice said. “I was a familiar subject—one who, thanks to his arrogance, he believed could be controlled or broken, if necessary. I was a willing volunteer who could suffice as both a control and a variable for his little science project.”

  “You played him.”

  Alice conceded the point with a subtle tilt of her head.

  Mesa fumed. “You sold out the memorialists you delivered your data packets to. You put targets on all their heads and had them killed. Entire enclaves, wiped out. You killed my friends and my family and tried to have me murdered. You had Jade abducted, had her mind erased. You killed her so Schaeffer could play scientist and stuff you back into a body. Hell, you even cut up a woman’s head like a cantaloupe,” Mesa said, hooking a thumb over her shoulder toward the hallway behind her.

  “Don’t pretend that your hands are any cleaner, Mesa, dear. You’ve killed, as well.”

  “Yeah, I did. And I can’t help but think your lovely guiding hand was a part of that, too. A part of you being stuck in my head and all.”

  Again, Alice smiled with snake-like unpleasantness. “That was an unexpected outcome. Your redeveloping mind triggered a file cascade, effectively merging our disparate consciousnesses. I’d love to hear more about it.”

  “I’d love to shove that sword up your ass for all of it.”

  Alice choked on her sip of tea, gagging behind a cupped hand, and worked to regain her composure. Her coughing fit turned into a spat of laughter. “Like father–“

  “Don’t even finish that line.”

  “Of course,” Alice said. She set the cup upon a saucer and slid it to the side of the table.

  “What now? You going to become a corporate cash cow, the spokeswoman for body-shifting?”

  “Daedalus—Schaeffer, in particular—always overestimated my ambitions in utilizing this technology. I’m afraid there are far grander imaginations involved now than my own. I only ever wanted to escape, Mesa. To start over.”