by S. C. Jensen
Molly unfolded her limbs and stood before the man. Her impressive height was accentuated by the unusual colour of her suit, but the smeared makeup made her appear thin and fragile. Her deep voice wavered when she said, “Doctor, do you know who I am?”
Dr. Truest tugged on the collar of his lab coat and scowled at me from beneath wiry black eyebrows. He didn’t meet Molly’s eyes. He said, “I haven’t been here that long.”
“My name is Mol Elless.” An edge crept into her voice that said she didn’t get nasty too often, but she was liable to enjoy it when she did. “Elless as in LS-103.”
The doctor’s Adam’s apple bobbed up and down as he swallowed.
“You may call me Madame.”
“Yes, Madame,” he muttered, still not meeting her gaze.
“Before I founded this town for LunAstro, I worked for Libra.” Molly’s back straightened until she looked down on the top of the doctor’s black, slicked-back hair. “And I can assure you that Rae Adesina is exactly what we need here.”
“Maybe she is.” Dr. Truest looked over his shoulder through the window where Rae slept peacefully. Jimi had wheeled himself next to her bed and rested his head on her shoulder. The orderlies worked to pick Patti Whyte up off the ground, struggling against the weight of her synthetic frame. “But I don’t know how to bring her out. She’s clearly suffering from some kind of dissociative identity disorder, possibly the result of past trauma. But there’s no record of it in her files. What else am I supposed to think? Either the records have been falsified, or . . . ”
My hand throbbed to fill the silence. I snapped my fingers in front of his face. “Or what?”
The doctor laughed nervously. He eyed me the like I might still try to knock his head through the wall. I hadn’t ruled it out. He said, “You didn’t hear her when she first woke up.”
“Look,” I said. “My hand already hurts. So if I have to hit you I’m going to be really annoyed.”
He cleared his throat and took a step back, staring at the floor. A trickle of sweat ran from his greasy hairline and down along his jaw. The jaw flexed like he was grinding his teeth against the words he had to say next. “Or she’s been possessed.”
I waited for him to crack a smile or something. He didn’t smile. He didn’t even look up from the floor. I laughed like I thought I could knock him over with it. “Now can I hit him?”
“Nobody’s hitting anybody.” Molly sighed and stepped up to the window. “I know what is wrong with Rae. The doctor’s suggestion isn’t as far-fetched as it sounds.”
I groaned and pulled my fingers through my hair. “Let me get this straight. Tom’s been kidnapped. Rae’s possessed. And I’m stuck on an asteroid with a bunch of whack jobs who believe in . . . what? Space gremlins? Cosmic demons?”
“Who’s Tom?” Dr. Truest scrunched his forehead at me.
“Maybe you should worry about who or what is inside my friend’s head.” I whirled on him. “Does LunAstro employ exorcists? Or are we going to have to smuggle some more off-world talent to fix her?”
“It was the hard drive.” Molly wrapped her arms around her body and leaned her forehead against the glass, staring at Rae. “She used a neural control interface to store those files in her brain. It was the only way to keep Captain Urqhart from stealing it and selling it to the highest bidder.”
“Great,” I said. “Fine. Wetware storage. That’s not dangerous at all without proper tools and training.”
“I showed Rae how to do it,” Molly said. “It should have been perfectly safe.”
“Except for the part where Captain Urqhart would have killed her to get it.” I was shouting, I couldn’t help it. “But it’s the thought that counts, right?”
“Captain Urqhart was only part of the problem.” She shivered and turned to face me with tears in her black-rimmed eyes. “I didn’t realize what else was on the hard drive.”
Dr. Truest’s hands fell to his sides and he stared at Molly with his mouth agape. “You don’t mean . . . ”
“The black box.” Molly nodded. “The android, Patricia Whyte, must have hidden the program before she left Libra. Somehow it ended up on the hard drive with Jimi’s files from the failed project. It should have been sealed, but—”
The overhead lights flickered and dimmed, flooding the white corridor in a dusky hue. Molly and Dr. Truest looked up and around with wide eyes. A red emergency light glowed at each end of the hall, marking the exits. From somewhere far off in the building a klaxon wailed.
“What’s happening?” I said.
The lights inside the operating room sputtered on and off. Rae sat up on the bed, staring straight ahead, the fingers of one hand digging into Jimi’s throat. Jimi thrashed against the bed like a stop-motion animation beneath the blinking lights. The confused orderlies rushed across the room, one of them tugging at Rae’s fingers to free Jimi. The other stood in the middle of the room, head whipping back and forth as if searching for a poisonous snake that had slithered beneath the equipment. But she was gone.
Patti Whyte was gone.
“Get everyone out of there.” Molly swung her head around wildly, sweeping the dim corridor. “Shut down the exits.”
“Where’s Patti?” I blinked. “Is she dangerous?”
“There are many things in this research facility that could be dangerous if something is interfering with the power,” Molly said. Her wig sat askew, drooping over one eye. “The android is only one of them.”
“I’ll need help.” The doctor looked over his shoulder at me and rushed back into the operating room.
I cursed and followed him.
The shadowy light of the hallway gave way to pitch black as I stepped inside the medical room. From inside the room, the observation window appeared as a black wall—some kind of one-way glass, I guessed. But then, how had Patti seen me? The doors swung shut behind me, dulling the noise of the klaxon enough that I could hear the ragged breathing of the orderlies and Jimi’s strangled gasps filling the darkness. I waited for my eyes to adjust.
Instead, the lights blazed on again and blinded me. I blinked rapidly to clear the halos.
Rae stared at me from the bed with that blank, mask-like face. Her pupils dilated until only the barest trace of white was visible around the edges. Jimi’s twisted and purple face seemed to sit in her lap. She gripped him by the throat with her right hand, seemingly oblivious to the fact that she was killing him. His wheelchair had been kicked backward and his legs thumped weakly against the metal frame of the bed.
A pile of clothes lay strewn on the floor behind him. Patti’s? Had she been vaporized? I couldn’t make sense of it, and I didn’t have time to puzzle it out. Whatever was happening to Rae, it was bad. The male orderly, the one who had been trying to free Jimi, twitched in a pool of blood on the floor. Rae clutched a scalpel in her left hand.
The lights went out again.
The voice that wasn’t Rae’s hissed through the darkness. “Stay back.”
I shifted my weight carefully as I moved a little closer to the bed. My mouth felt like it was full of asteroid dust, and my tongue stuck to the top of my mouth. I didn’t want to have to fight Rae—or the thing inside her—but I had to help Jimi.
“We need to get these people out of here,” the doctor said, his voice remarkably steady. What kind of paramilitary training did these R&D protégés get? He kept his voice low and calm. “Please put the scalpel down.”
“I want to get out of here too,” the thing inside Rae said. There was a thump and a wet gasp as Jimi sucked air into his lungs. The lights flickered on and off. Rae crouched on the bed again, facing the doctor, and waved the knife in front of her teasingly. “Who’s going to stop me?”
“Rae,” I said. “If you’re in there, I need to you to listen. We don’t want to hurt you. We want to help. Please put the scalpel down.”
The mask of Rae’s face fell slack and re-formed itself into wild-eyed panic. “Bubbles?”
Relief flooded through me at the sound of her normal voice, trembling and fearful, but undeniably Rae. Under the blinking lights, her movements appeared to stutter. She set the knife on the bed as if she had no idea how it had gotten in her hand.
“Rae, are you okay?” I stepped closer.
She looked up at me with the whites of her eyes wide and terrified, no longer flooded by the glassy black, doll-like pupils. “Wh-what’s happening to me? Where am I?”
“I’m going to stay with you, Rae,” I said, inching toward the bed with my hands out. “We just need to get these people out of here, okay?”
The lights began to flicker on and off frantically, like the beat of a frightened animal’s heart. Rae’s eyes locked on my face. Her unkempt silver curls sagged against her sallow, hollow-cheeked face. This unnerved me more than anything. Rae never had a hair out of place. Her makeup was always done to perfection. She wore nothing but the best designer clothes. Seeing her twisted up in the pale-yellow hospital gown—she hated yellow—looking like a ghost of herself, I felt the hairs stand up on the back of my neck and all along my flesh arm. The prosthetic hummed a similar warning.
“What happened to them?” she whispered, not taking her eyes off my face. The corner of her full, unpainted lips twitched. Her hands curled in her lap like dead spiders with little silver shoes. They twitched too.
Or maybe it was just the lights.
“You’re okay,” I said. The lights flickered on and off. On and off. “They’ll be okay. You were just”—Just what? Possessed by an electronic demon?—“sleepwalking. How do you feel?”
“Strange,” Rae said. She cocked her head to one side. A fine line appeared between her eyebrows. “Powerful.”
I reached out to touch her bare shoulder with my flesh hand. “Does anything hurt?”
She flinched away from my touch, then tugged the paper-thin, recyclable fabric over her exposed skin. A fine silver chain glinted around her neck. I didn’t know she wore one. The corners of her mouth appeared to curve upward and then fall into a frown, shadows dancing in the sporadic lighting. She said, “Not yet.”
A creeping feeling, like thousands of little bugs crawling over my skin, trickled down from my scalp and over my shoulders. But it was Rae’s voice. I was talking to Rae, wasn’t I?
Behind Rae, the doctor helped Jimi back into the wheelchair. The female orderly crouched over her co-worker and ran a bioscanner over his body. Rae paid no attention to them. She looked up at me from beneath her thick, natural eyelashes, as if she wasn’t quite certain who I was. Her chest rose and fell rapidly, and her skin twitched with her heartbeat.
The orderly shook her head at the doctor, clipped the scanner to her belt, and reached beneath the bleeding man’s arms. The rubber wheels of the chair squeaked against the tile floor as the doctor spun Jimi toward the door. He said, “I’ll be right back.”
The orderly dragged her co-worker toward the door as well, grunting with the effort. A crimson trail of blood smeared the floor in the injured man’s wake, unnaturally red against the white. Jimi craned his neck to look over his shoulder at Rae, purple bruises already forming where the love of his life had tried to strangle that life right out of him.
“Where are they going?” Rae’s voice was a thin, scraping shadow. “Is—is that Jimi?”
“Yeah.” I grinned. Hope bubbled inside me that she recognized him. “Yeah that’s Jimi.”
She shifted on the bed, leaning so that she could see past me. “He’s alive.”
I moved so she had a clear view of the door. Maybe she would be okay after all. Maybe whatever twisted thing had taken over her mind had gone to sleep now. Relief spilled over and washed away the adrenaline that had been keeping me coiled up on myself like a feral cat. My muscles shook and a chill settled in my bones. I laughed nervously. “It’s a long story.”
Dr. Truest pushed the wheelchair up against the swinging door. Jimi lifted a hand and waved. Rae swung her legs over the edge of the bed as if to follow. She said, “No. Jimi, wait—”
“Rae, please.” I put out my arm to keep her from running after him. “You’re not well.”
The lights flickered violently. Rae said, “Jimi!”
“Just go, doctor,” I said. “I’ll stay here.”
I pushed Rae gently back onto the bed. The papery yellow gown rustled as she relaxed and tucked her feet back up. She gazed up at me with a dreamy look in her eyes. She said, “Of course you will.”
Rae’s pupils rippled and swelled like black ink in a white pool, spreading slowly until only a thin line of white peeked around the edges of her eyelids. My heart lurched. Something thumped against the door, but I didn’t dare turn my gaze from Rae’s face. Her lips parted slowly, the edges twisting upward into a lazy smile. They peeled back to reveal all of her big, white, perfectly straight teeth.
“It won’t open,” Dr. Truest said.
Rae laughed, a noise like thousands of tiny gears grinding inside her chest, hard and discordant. She said, “Nobody is going anywhere.”
The lights went out.
Something rattled in the darkness and Dr. Truest cursed.
“The security door.” His voice quavered. “How is she—”
The bed creaked under Rae’s weight and the papery gown rustled. Adrenaline surged through my body again. Too fast. She moved too fast. A rush of cool air swished by my face and I dodged. I swung my upgrade out, reaching for her in the pitch dark. The sensors in my arm flared a warning that felt almost like pain. Rae hissed in the blackness and I went for her with both hands.
A sharp, burning pain seared across the palm of my flesh hand but I caught onto something with my prosthetic. The lights flickered. Rae was crouched at the end of the bed, the scalpel in her hand, her teeth bared at me like a wild animal. A pendant hung at the nape of her neck, barely visible against her dark skin. Her doll black eyes glared out from under the mess of silver curls. I had a handful of her hair twisted in the metal fingers of my upgrade.
“Are you doing that, Rae?” I forced the words out of my throat, trying to remain calm. “With the lights and the doors?”
She swiped at me with the blade. I caught her hand in my fist and twisted her wrist until she cried out and dropped the scalpel to the bedsheets. Blood dripped up my arm from where she’d slashed me with the knife. She stared at her empty hand as if she’d been betrayed. She said, “It hurts.”
“My hand hurts too.” My voice trembled. “Look what you did to me.”
She glared at me and writhed in my grip. My bloody hand slipped from her wrist and she lunged for the knife again.
But I still had her fast by the hair.
I twisted my hand, wrapping a thick coil around my fist. She screamed and pulled away from me with all her strength. She beat at my metal arm with both hands, pushing away from the bed with her legs.
“I’m your friend, Rae,” I shouted to be heard over her screeching. “I don’t want to hurt you.”
She wrenched her head back and, with a wet, tearing sound, a chunk of hair came away in my fist. I swore and shook my hand, and the bloody, matted chunk fell on the ground with a smack. All the electrical equipment in the room flared to life, and the speakers screamed with feedback.
The lights surged, glowing brighter and brighter until they popped in an explosion of sparks. I put up my arm to shield my eyes from the blaze and instantly regretted it. Rae slipped off the bed and disappeared into the darkness.
Silence descended upon the room. My heartbeat throbbed in my ears, deafeningly. As my vision recovered from the flash, I realized some of the machines were still on. Dim pools of blue glowed in front of the equipment, giving just enough light that I could make out the edges of the objects around us. I swallowed against the lump in my throat and scanned the
room.
The faint slap of bare hands and feet on tile sounded from my left. I turned just in time to see a shadow flit in front of one of the machines. Rae loped on all fours around the perimeter of the room. The artificial nerves in my upgrade tingled where she’d gouged me with the scalpel, and the palm of my flesh hand throbbed painfully with my heartbeat. I crouched low and moved around the bed, hoping to keep something between me and thing controlling Rae.
“Marlowe,” the doctor shouted. “Behind you!”
Before I could spin around, the thing leaped on my back and wrapped its legs around my waist. Something dug into the flesh of my throat and I gagged, twisting in her grip. Stars swam before my eyes and blotted out the darkness with colourful whorls and patterns. A thin cord of pain burned across my skin as she threw her body weight into whatever wrapped around my neck.
I reached back and grabbed for her. My fingers grazed her hair again and, my stomach churning, I yanked a handful of it around my injured palm and pulled. Rae shrieked in my ear and her legs tightened around my waist as she wrenched away from me. The pressure on my throat let up slightly, and I flung my metal elbow backward into the space between our bodies.
Air exploded from her lungs in a wheeze, and she went limp, her legs slipping off my hips. I ducked my shoulder down and swung her body over my back where she landed on the tiles with a grunt.
A beam of light hit us, illuminating Rae’s face. Her features twisted into a snarl so vicious she barely looked human, let alone like my best friend.
“Stop it!” The words tore out of my throat. She growled and clawed at me with her silver painted fingernails. I knelt on her chest and batted her hands away. Tears streamed down my face as I grappled with her. I pinned both of her arms against my chest.
“Please,” I whispered, my voice shaking. “Don’t make me hurt you, Rae.”
Rae bucked her hips and an inhuman screech burst out of her lungs. Her mouth opened so wide I thought her jaw would break. The sound reverberated inside my skull at an ear-splitting pitch. I wanted to let go and run as far away from that room as I could possibly get. But the doors were locked. There was no where to run.
