Friends gone. Family gone. She had nothing else. She could let Alice Xie have her little victory, end all this suffering, and go on to whatever she had planned for herself next. She could let it be somebody else’s problem. Mesa was sick of running—and sick of losing.
No, she told herself, no, not like this. She lay there, broken and half-blind. Nearly everyone she knew was dead—and for what? So she could roll over and say, “Fuck it all,” and let their killer—her killer—walk away untouched?
Fuck that.
She took a sharp blow to the kidney and knew she would piss blood for the next few days, but she didn’t care. She kicked herself forward. The pipe wrench was a hair’s breadth away. Alice was too distracted with stomping on Mesa’s spine to notice her seeking fingers brushing against the wrench. She crawled again, reaching for the handle.
Alice grabbed at the disheveled hair hanging off the side of Mesa’s shaved skull and pulled. She yanked Mesa’s face back, standing on her spine, straining her neck.
“Where’s the fun in that, now?” she asked, glaring at her with baleful bloodlust.
Alice reached out and grabbed the pipe wrench and held it as she kicked Mesa high in the belly, knocking the wind from her. Then she swung the wrench in a high, violent arc, slamming it down on Mesa’s arm. The force of the blow tore through the radius and ulna, splintering bones and pulping the flesh and muscle around them.
She never seemed to tire of hearing Mesa’s screams. But then Mesa twisted, rolling aside. With her good arm, she grabbed the silk-wrapped handle of the dao hidden behind her body.
In the throes of violence, Alice’s world had narrowed to tunnel vision. When Mesa had reached for the pipe wrench, the wrench had been all Alice saw. She hadn’t even noticed the dao, so near, just behind Mesa.
Mesa rolled back toward Alice, driving the sword up, impaling her through the stomach. The wrench clattered to the floor as Alice stumbled backward, a primitive echo in her mind demanding escape. The blade slid from her belly as her knees went weak. She fell, her hands staunching the wound, pressing hard to keep her insides contained.
Regaining her feet was no easy task, but Mesa used the dao as a support. Cradling her shattered arm against her waist, she stepped forward. The blade carved a shallow groove behind her as it dragged against the floor. Jade–No, she told herself, Alice–knelt before her, blood running through her hands.
Mesa swung the sword, her aim slightly off. Her depth perception was ruined, but she still got the job done. The blade sliced through Jade’s neck and into the crook of her shoulder. The woman went deathly pale, and seconds later, she was no more. Her blood loss was too severe and much too rapid for the medichines to do any good.
Alice Xie, like Jade before her, was gone.
“Kill me,” the old woman begged. Her eyes followed Mesa as she fell into a nearby chair.
“Kill me,” she said again, her plea an electronic whine.
“I’m done killing,” Mesa said, her voice hollow. Her throat ached from the anguished screams that had been ripped from her lungs.
“Please,” Alice said.
Mesa didn’t respond. Instead, she sucked on a bloodied tooth, distracting herself with the coppery taste while avoiding Alice’s eyes.
The old woman seemed to understand that her groveling fell on deaf ears and gave up. Still, she watched, alert and focused.
Navigating the Somnambulist hub, Mesa went through the process of creating a new thread and organizing her thoughts. She wanted a clean, easy-to-follow upload.
Before sitting, she had extracted the memory chip from Jade’s skull. The project had been a grisly, painful affair. The task was difficult with only one good arm, and the guilt over violating the corpse of her friend had taken a toll. Mesa had told herself it was necessary and dug in.
The mems held useful information, and she plugged Alice Xie’s sequences into her minor convergence web, along with Kaften’s. Her own memories of Schaeffer were homicidal, but those chips would fall as they may.
A second ping from Rameez struck the DRMR dashboard. She’d been too engrossed in compiling her post to respond to the first. She debated answering the second attempt.
“Oh, thank God,” he said as she accepted the channel.
“What is it?”
“I’ve been trying to reach you. I was worried. Is everything…?”
“Almost finished.”
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“Getting ready to burn them,” she said. “Burn them right down to the fucking ground.” She filled him in, watching his face grow crestfallen.
“Are you sure this is wise?” he asked.
“People need to know,” she said. “What Daedalus is doing, what they’ve already done—this is huge, Rameez.”
“But if you send this out, then everybody knows. Everybody has access to this technology, it could be—“
“It could be a nuclear deterrent,” she said. “Or at least something similar. I’m not naïve enough to think this all ends here with a push of a button, but there needs to be an awareness of this. This isn’t something that should be confined to the dark corners of secrecy. People need to know. We need to figure out how to prepare for all of this. Ethics committees, new rules, whatever. Just fucking awareness, you know?”
“They’ll arrest you,” he said.
“I know. This is going to be big,” she said. “Too big for Daedalus to risk coming after me again. This my safeguard, my last chance.”
“Go nuclear and level the playing field.”
“As I said, this is all I’ve got left.”
“I tried hacking into their white rooms, but they’ve got incredibly strong mojo.”
“Alice?”
“She’s definitely in there. Or at least some form of her.”
“Well, then, I definitely have to do this. Send me the uploads?”
He paused for a long moment then gave a heavy sigh. “Sure,” he said. “Mesa, I…”
“What?”
“Be careful, OK?”
“Careful is not really an option for me anymore.”
She disconnected the feed and waited for his information to come through. One more data point to feed into the web.
A half hour passed before she felt finished. She ran through the data twice more, ensuring that everything was solid and ready to go. The distraction was a welcome change from the roaring pain in her arm and face.
She gave the entire splice one last run-through, a third chance to convince herself she was making a terrible mistake. Then she pushed it all through, dumping the entirety of the web into the public domain.
Imagining drone strikes sent to take down Alabaster, she disconnected and waited. The ship stayed true to its course. No missiles exploded against the hull.
Alice Xie, crippled and bedridden, lay silent, watching her.
“Rameez,” Mesa said, pinging him through the neural commNet. “Where the fuck am I?”
A momentary panic graced his chubby features, then his eyes hardened. “What do you mean?”
“Sorry. The ship, Alabaster. Where am I?”
“Jesus, you scared me.” His eyes darted across his own retinal displays. “Still in California airspace, heading north toward Sacramento.”
“Can you land me there?”
Whatever internal conflicts were raging inside of him began to surface. His entire face darkened, and the corners of his jaw ticked. He wanted to argue; that much was clear. Instead, he said, in a clipped tone, a single word. “Yes.”
She disconnected then shut her eye. Nothing left to do but wait.
Pain rolled over every square inch of her body. Her psyche felt as ruined as her form. Her life was an open, festering wound.
Alice
said no more, but Mesa felt her eyes pressing against her as if her stare were a solid weight. She ignored her, welcoming the aches and pains of her injuries instead.
After what she estimated was an hour, she felt a noticeable shift in the constant thrumming that rumbled through the body of the ship as Alabaster began its descent toward the capitol.
An hour after that, a small squadron of soldiers flanked her, guns leveled in her direction, barking orders at her. She raised her one good arm in surrender.
Passing her friend, she gave Jade a silent apology for being too late to help her. The phalanx of soldiers led her off the ship and took her into custody. As she was placed into the back of a waiting vehicle, state media vied for a good shot of her face.
Mesa kept a live feed running on Somnambulist to ensure her safety, until the PRC caught wind of it and slapped a dampener into the port behind her ear.
She let the pain wash over her, waiting for the darkness to swallow her whole.
Chapter 28
Mesa lost track of time during the drive. The dampener disconnected her from the world, turning her head fuzzy. Thinking was too difficult. And for that, she was grateful. It made it impossible to think of either Jade or Alice, two new hollow points in her life that she did not have the energy to reflect on.
She found a certain joy in losing herself amid the dulling static. Her mind was completely empty, maybe for the first time since she’d awoken three years ago.
She stared blankly out the window. Neither of the PRC soldiers in the front of the vehicle spoke to her—one more thing to be grateful for.
Time ticked by, then she dully complied as the men pulled her from the car and led her into a building. She took no notice of the design, and the world washed by in a numb haze. At some point, her brain adjusted to the dampener and the world resolved. She found herself sitting alone atop a thin mattress in a small prison cell. Her skull ached, and the skin surrounding her ruined eye felt taut and swollen. The gauze that had been taped over the wound felt stiff and crusty beneath the pad of her exploring fingers.
In the morning, more guards came for her and took her to the prison infirmary. A man who spoke broken English said, “We numb you. You sleep. Wake up, new eye. Yes?”
Still dazed, she nodded. She hadn’t slept at all, and she felt at least three steps behind everyone else. Or maybe the world was spinning faster around her, upsetting her balance. She was led to another bed, where she watched as a needle pierced the vein in the crook of her elbow.
“Count three,” the man said.
She made it to two before her eye closed of its own accord.
When she awoke, a new layer of agony had replaced the pain in her face and skull. Fresh gauze covered her eye, and she was too weak to sit up. She lay still, bored and uncaring. After an hour, the doctor returned and hovered over her. He flashed a penlight into her good eye.
“You see?”
“Kinda hard to miss,” she said, wincing against the bright, white glare.
He handed her a mirror and went about pulling away the gauze. “Good, yes?” he asked.
She adjusted the mirror, still too narcotized to feel shock. The skin was purple and swollen. A thick black bruise ringed the implant and stained the corner of her good eye. The implant itself was completely bottom-shelf tech, the kind tech corps gave away to impoverished developing nations to bolster their PR spins. A metal cup had been grafted to the bone, and in the center, where her human eye had once been, was a plainly artificial cybernetic replacement. The doctors hadn’t even made any attempt to match iris colors.
“It’s fine,” she said, passing the mirror back to him. In truth, she didn’t actually mind. The ocular implant would serve its purpose, even if it wouldn’t win her any beauty awards. But even that was unimportant. She found herself simply not caring. Not about the eye. Not about her forced confinement. Not about anything.
“Good,” he said again, taking the mirror, then turned his back on her.
Through the medicinal fog, she realized one arm was in a cast. “What’s this?” she asked, slowly remembering the pain of her shattered ulna and radius.
“Metal rods,” the doctor said, pointing at the cast. “Had to put in. Very damaged.”
After what felt like at least an hour, she tried to sit up and realized her other wrist was handcuffed to the bedrail. She lay back down. The hell with it.
There were no privacy curtains and no other patients. She saw no doctors or nurses. Nothing to do but sit and wait. She was allowed two days to recuperate then injected with medichine boosters to speed up her healing process. On the third day, she was led back to her cell.
She passed the empty beds, wondering if she was the solitary prisoner in this building. She tried to ask a guard, but he only grunted at her.
“Do I get a lawyer? What am I being charged with?”
No answers. He motioned for her to enter her cell.
“Can I at least get some books?” she asked, standing on the other side of the bars. “In English,” she specified, realizing her request might be a specialized one among the native Chinese speakers.
Time ticked by very, very slowly. She felt alone and realized she very possibly was alone, maybe trapped in a PRC black site or at least a black hole.
The next day, the guard returned with her morning meal. When she was finished eating, he opened her door and led her outside to a small yard fenced in by massive electric fences and guard towers. A handful of other prisoners lingered in the yard. Most were Caucasian, but a few were Asian.
She strolled the grounds, keeping a wary eye on the other inmates and the guards. Then an older white man with silver hair approached her, but he kept his pace languid enough to demonstrate he was not a threat.
“You’re new here,” he said. “I’m Malcolm.”
“Mesa,” she said, watching him carefully.
He left a respectful distance between them.
After a moment of silence, she asked, “What is this place?”
He shrugged. “Political detainment. A place to keep us politically dangerous chaps out of their hair while they figure out what, exactly, to do with us.”
She recognized his British accent. “You’re not from around here.”
He laughed. “Not originally, no.”
“How long have you been here?”
He put his hands in his pockets, keeping a few polite feet away, outside her personal space. His brow crinkled, and he said, “Three years, maybe, give or take a few weeks. Kind of lost track of time.”
A whistle blew, and Malcolm nodded toward the solitary door.
After that, Mesa didn’t see him again. She was kept segregated from the others for reasons she never understood. Back in her cell, she found several thick, beat-up volumes of classic English literature. Thumbing through the books, she realized they’d been heavily censored. Thick black lines ran through the text, and entire pages were missing.
A month crawled by. The cast on her arm had been removed, and her physical wounds had healed. She got used to the eye and the subtle alteration to her depth perception, as well as being disconnected from the world at large. She missed the constant access to information and the data flow. She also realized that whatever emotions had roiled within her before her confinement had been replaced with an apathetic dullness.
At the start of her second month, the routine she had grown accustomed to was suddenly disrupted. The guard came for her, but instead of leading her toward the prison yard, he pulled her in the opposite direction.
The plain steel door opened into a bare concrete room with another door opposite. In between were a scarred metal table and an empty chair near her. The chair on the other side was filled by a blond man. A briefcase stood on the floor beside him, and he was dressed in a sleek shiny suit and black dres
s shoes.
“Ms. Everitt?” he asked. He spoke with a heavy accent that she couldn’t place.
“The one and only,” she said. Her throat was dry, her voice gruff.
“How are you feeling?”
“Sublime,” she answered.
He offered a wan smile, as if he had grown accustomed to the sarcasm of inmates. “My name is Matthieu Frutiger. I am an investigator with the United Nations Security Council.”
Mesa waited for the other shoe to drop. She crossed her arms over her chest, crossed her feet at her ankles, and waited it out. Let him make the next move.
Frutiger scooted his chair back and crossed his legs. On the table between them were a tablet and a pad of e-paper that transcribed their discussion with a talk-to-text algorithm.
“You’ve caused quite a ruckus. I’d like to ask you some questions.”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
“Your Somnambulist posting has become quite a sensation. Everyone is talking about it. It’s on all the newsfeeds. Very impressive. Even after a month.”
“Where are you from?”
“Switzerland,” he said. “The content of your now-quite-viral mnemonic uploads caused quite a stir. The UN has opened investigative panels, and we are working quite closely with our member nations and local law enforcement agencies to put Daedalus under a microscope.”
She gave Frutiger a long, appraising look. He was very prim and proper, his hair short. She had little trouble understanding him, but she was still deeply confused by this visit.
“Are you charging me? Am I a war criminal or something now?”
He let out a deep, boisterous laugh. “Quite the contrary. In fact, I am hopeful you will be our star witness.”
Frutiger spent several minutes explaining the initial barebones layer of the case that had been quickly assembled following her Somnambulist post.
Emergence (A DRMR Novel Book 2) Page 28
