by Taya DeVere
To Jason.
In my books, your star will forever shine bright.
DVM Press
Ajurinkatu 2, 3. Krs,
20100 Turku, Suomi-Finland
www.dvmpress.com
www.tayadevere.com
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2020 by Taya DeVere
All rights reserved. This book or parts thereof may not be reproduced in any form, stored in any retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise—without prior written permission of the publisher, except as provided by Suomi-Finland and United States of America copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher, at DVM Press. Ajurinkatu 2, 3. Krs, 20100 Turku, Suomi-Finland.
For information about special discounts available for bulk purchases, sales promotions, fund-raising and educational needs, contact [email protected]
ISBN 978-952-7404-41-6 First Ebook Edition
ISBN 978-952-7404-42-3 First Print Edition
Cover Design © 2020 by Deranged Doctor Design - www.derangeddoctordesign.com
Ebook formatting by Polgarus Studios – www.polgarusstudios.com
Editing by Christopher Scott Thompson and Lindsay Fara Kaplan
CONTENTS
SHORT STORY — SINKING
CHAPTER 1 — TEA FOR THE DECHIPPED
CHAPTER 2 — THE ALGORITHM (5 YEARS EARLIER)
CHAPTER 3 — THE RESORT
CHAPTER 4 — KNOCK ON THE DOOR
CHAPTER 5 — THE SAFETY BELT
CHAPTER 6 — CITY OF ENGLAND
i — Dear Reader
ii — About the Author
iii — Final Thanks
iv — UNCHIPPED Series Release Schedule
SINKING
A short story in the world of the Unchipped series
Her finger hovering above the video camera icon, Kaarina closes her eyes. Holding her breath, she wishes that Markus would say something to make her change her mind.
You mean you wish you would say something, she thinks, reminding herself that Markus doesn’t exist in this new reality. It’s just her. Kaarina, and her ever-growing need to learn what happened that day when her mother ended her life without a single word of goodbye.
This surreal state of her life is becoming impossible to bear. She tries to focus on the task at hand and keep her emotions in check. But the bitterness, the endless thoughts of why-the-hell-is-this-happening-to-me won’t leave her be.
Markus is dead.
Because you ran out of the mansion.
Because of your stupidity. You are to blame.
You are the reason he now exists only as a selfish memory at the back of your rotting brain. Just a self-serving creation of your mind…
Kaarina stops to stare into space, as the realization hits her hard. Just like your mother’s empty note. Because… there is no note. No hidden meaning. Just a worthless inkling—a hunch—of something not being right. Is it even worth chasing after, her foolish mind’s desperate creation? What if it’s just her need for her mother not to have abandoned her?
Painful thoughts and memories fill her mind. Kaarina slams her fist against the Home-Helper’s monitor, but the impact doesn’t break the screen as she wished it would. The IT-room glitches around her as she gasps for air and tries to calm her raging mind.
“Are you okay?” Markus’s ghost asks, somewhere nearby. “Is the AI not finding the security camera feed?”
“No, it did,” Kaarina replies to the ghost, her voice shaking. “Or at least the last two hours of it.”
“Is the screen frozen?”
Kaarina hangs her head. It takes all she has to take a deep breath, then exhale slowly. She needs to watch the footage. She needs to know why that note was blank; why she’s so sure it was her mother’s suicide note. Why she herself was abandoned and left alone. But most of all, she needs to know what happened that day in the house where she grew up.
“Maybe if you…”
“Markus, I got this! Just…” Kaarina curses the hostility in her voice. She’s not being fair—only moments ago she was hoping Markus would intervene. “Just let me do this on my own. Okay?”
And just like that, Markus is gone. Kaarina’s mind has hidden him somewhere, socked him away for future use. Or maybe she just recreates the man every time she needs him to hold her hand? Who knows how this place really works. Kaarina sure as hell doesn’t.
She stands taller and takes a breath. The cold IT-room flickers around her, but the walls settle down again once she succeeds in taking another deep inhale. And another.
“Miranda,” she says to the AI, “Play the security feed.”
PLAYING SECURITY FEED – SEPTEMBER 23, 2088
The sight of a familiar kitchen table appears on the Home-Helper’s screen. Kaarina’s mother sits at the end of the table, eating a piece of crispbread while her dog, Ässä, drools and pretends not to be begging next to her on the floor. The rest of the seats around the kitchen table are empty.
Kaarina muffles a sob and looks away. After a ragged breath, she slowly turns her gaze back to the screen. She taps the monitor twice to bring up the control buttons.
“Miranda, fast-forward one hour.”
FAST-FORWARD OPTION - NOT AVAILABLE
“What do you mean not av…” Kaarina scoffs at the AI’s claim. “I said, skip forward one hour.”
FAST-FORWARD OPTION - NOT AVAILABLE
“Oh, for fuck’s sake…” Kaarina taps the monitor repeatedly. “This is my mind! You work for me! If I say you skip, you ask how far!”
FAST-FORWARD OPTION - NOT AVAILABLE
The scream starts from somewhere at the back of her muddled and frantic mind. She screams so loudly she can nearly feel her dead and buried lungs burning as they empty of all air. Then she screams some more, grabbing onto the Home-Helper screen as if to rip the stupid piece of junk off the wall of her imagination and cast it down onto the floor of the Egg.
The walls start to shake. Suddenly, the air crackles with static. A prism of otherworldly blue rays pours from the crumbling walls.
She howls louder.
The ground underneath her pitches alarmingly. Kaarina stumbles backward, glancing around in confusion. Then her eyes lock on the Home-Helper’s crackling monitor, where she sees her mother step into the bathroom and stare directly into the camera. She must have been looking at herself in the mirror, but since the camera is in the mirror it seems as if she’s staring straight into Kaarina’s eyes.
“Miranda, pause feed.”
PAUSED SECURITY FEED – SEPTEMBER 23, 2088
The floor lurches, then rumbles underneath her. Kaarina loses her balance and tumbles into a gaping crack in the concrete floor. Oddly, Kaarina hears waves breaking, followed by a grinding reverberation. She shields her head with her arms and squeezes her eyes shut. She screams again—this time in fear.
After falling helplessly—sinking—for what could be seconds, minutes, or hours, Kaarina finally thumps against solid ground. Restless waves swarm around her, then gradually travel farther away. Soon, she no longer hears water surrounding her, but something else. Something more… solid. Swaying trees. Crackling ice floes. Hostile wind. Without opening her eyes, she feels the wind tossing powdered snow on her face. Murky skies crunch and crackle with a blanket
of thunderous clouds above.
Bundled into herself and lying on the hard surface, Kaarina listens as her surroundings slowly scrunch together as if to take a new form. Once the sounds settle, fade, and then vanish altogether, she opens her eyes, her arms still wrapped protectively around her head. Ice. A thick layer of ice. That’s all she sees, as she evens her breath and rapidly blinks her eyes.
“Ma… Markus?”
But the ghost is not there.
“Miranda?”
HOME-HELPER — ACTIVATED. The voice travels across the frozen seascape.
Snowflakes swirl downward around Kaarina, and though she can’t feel the frost biting her face and body, she is now shivering. One hand at a time, she takes support from the hard surface and pushes herself up. Once she’s sitting on her hindquarters, she stops to listen. Is the ice cracking under her weight? Slowly, she drops to her hands and knees, then moves her weight to her left hand to see if the ice holds. A small crack appears, darting out from under her palm, then traveling a few inches toward her feet. Kaarina inhales sharply and freezes in place. She sits back down, staring at the fractured ice.
“Miranda,” she breathes out. “Play the security tape.”
PLAYING SECURITY FEED – SEPTEMBER 23, 2088
A blue light fills the sky above her, flickering and glowing like some cyber version of the northern lights. Soon, up in the sky that now shows the security feed like some giant, otherworldly cinema, Kaarina gazes into her mother’s eyes, staring into a bathroom mirror and the hidden camera within. The sky fills with a pop as her mother opens the cap on the pill bottle she’s holding. With her index finger and thumb, she fishes out a white pill, shaped like a tiny American football. She holds it up to the bathroom light, investigating it as if seeing medicine for the first time.
“What is that, Miranda?” Kaarina says and fidgets on her seat. She stumbles up to sit on her knees. The crack in the ice travels toward her, growing in length by multiple inches.
ANALYSIS - NOT AVAILABLE
Kaarina sits still, her hands gripping her knees, holding her breath. After staring at the ice for a while, she looks up at the sky again. Murky clouds move in, surrounding the blue glow—and her mother’s face. The snow has turned into rain. Shivering, Kaarina forces a breath, then says, “Miranda, resume the security feed.”
PLAYING SECURITY FEED – SEPTEMBER 23, 2088
After staring at the medicine in her hand, Kaarina’s mother claps the pill into her mouth. A couple of steps take her from the sauna bench to the bathroom sink. She takes a gulp of water and washes the pill down. Leaning against the sink, she looks into the mirror, her bottle-green eyes once again staring at Kaarina.
Those are not suicidal eyes, Kaarina thinks and stares back. Those are rebel eyes.
Smiling, her mother turns to leave the bathroom. But as she reaches for the door handle, she suddenly hangs her head, then grasps it with both hands. Stumbling backward, she slumps onto the bathroom floor. Foam dripping from her mouth, she bundles into herself, her eyes locked on the mirror.
“Front door — unlocked.” Miranda’s voice on the security feed sounds like it’s coming from under water. “Test subject — vital signs low.”
“No…” Kaarina exhales. Tears should be streaming down her face, but the pain she feels stays bottled up inside her, with no release. “No, it can’t be.”
The bathroom door opens. A woman in a white doctor’s coat and a pair of white lab shoes leans forward to inspect the cold, sweat-covered face of Kaarina’s mother.
“You!” Kaarina leaps up, ignoring the rapidly cracking ice underneath her feet. “You sadistic…” she gasps for air, “murdering… psychopath.”
Doctor Solomon kneels next to Kaarina’s unmoving mother. She carefully places a pill bottle into her upturned palm. Kaarina recognizes the bottle with the red triangle on its side. It’s the same one she found when she walked into that bathroom to discover her allegedly suicidal mother’s body.
“That’s why your suicide note was blank,” Kaarina says. She clenches her fists tight. “You never killed yourself. Solomon did.”
“So sorry about this, dear,” Doctor Solomon says, scattering colorful pills around Kaarina’s mother’s motionless body. They spread around the white bathroom tiles, some landing in her hair, some rolling under the sauna bench a few feet away. “Should have kept your thoughts to yourself. People like you are simply too dangerous to keep around.”
Kaarina’s scream travels across the frozen ocean. Booming with echo, her scream grows stronger, climbing up the invisible walls of powdered snow and wind until it fills the restless and thunderous sky. After spreading in the gloomy clouds like a wildfire, hurricanes given life by her raging voice slam back down, swirling, drilling into the ice. Breaking the now rattling floes, it fills the whole ocean beneath. She stomps on the ice, fracturing the surface further. The widening cracks on the ice snake forward, forming little ice floes, slowly creaking apart from one another.
“You killed my mother!” Kaarina wails at the sky. She yells at the Egg, at Doctor Solomon, who’s somewhere here with her. With Kaarina’s friends. Her allies. Her Yeti. That sick, malicious piece of scum has taken everything from her—and lied about it since day one. She’s not remorseful. She hasn’t come to her senses because of her Unchipped daughter. Laura Solomon saved nobody that day in the burning mansion. Everything she has ever done, she has done to help and benefit one person, and one person only: Laura Solomon herself.
Kaarina’s knees buckle, then give out. She falls hard against the ice. A cracking sound fills her ears, and she closes her eyes, ignoring her crumbling surroundings. Her chest heaves with sobs, but no tears appear on her face. The anger, bitterness, and hatred build up within. Kaarina punches the ice hard with her fist. It hurts her knuckles, but she hardly notices. She hits the ice again. Then with two hands. Once more.
The ice underneath her collapses. Falling into the water turns her stomach, but she doesn’t try and struggle back up to the surface. As she sinks deeper, she looks up at her mother’s lifeless face and the colorful pills surrounding her corpse.
The white coat slips away through the bathroom door like a ghost. Like someone who never existed. Someone who had nothing to do with Kaarina’s mother’s death. Miranda falls silent as well. Not a sound echoes in the bathroom. Dead and empty. That’s all there is left—and the humming sound of the ocean as Kaarina descends toward her own nonexistence.
She closes her eyes.
She opens her fists.
She takes in two lungsful of water.
Then she waits.
A soothing calm washes over her as she becomes one with the water. It feels pleasant against her skin. The force that pulls her feet toward the bottom is reassuring. The bigger the growing distance between Kaarina and the one who murdered her family and then brainwashed her friends, the calmer she feels.
You win, she thinks as she relaxes her arms and lets them float above her head. Drowning. Evil overcomes good. I lose. You win. So be it.
The sound of rain drumming against the ice ceiling reaches her ears. The current around her gurgles steadily as the humming and swooshing of the water fills Kaarina’s mind. When she opens her eyes to look up, all she sees is a distant blue glow.
Suddenly, three white dots appear above her head. They run across the glow of the sky, at the shrinking spot where the ice has broken and the ocean’s surface slowly undulates.
OWENA BELL CALLING
Water muffles Miranda’s robotic voice, but the words are still loud and clear in Kaarina’s ears. She tugs hesitantly against the current that’s pulling her under.
What the hell…
The three dots seem to plummet down and catch up with Kaarina as she drifts toward the ocean bed.
OWENA BELL CALLING
But I’m not wearing my AR glasses, she thinks, unable to block these strange thoughts disturbing her peaceful drowning. And of all people… Owena is calling me?
OWENA
BELL CALLING
“I heard you the first time!” Kaarina yells at Miranda. The water doesn’t muffle her voice like it should. “I’m not going to answer a fucking AR call while I’m drowning myself!”
ANSWERING CALL
“That’s not what I…” Kaarina groans in frustration. She extends her arms at her sides, and the movement stops her from falling deeper into the ocean’s throat. As she floats in the darkening water, she looks up at the hole in the ice, then listens carefully. Not a peep sounds from above.
“Owena?” she whispers.
Someone clears their throat on the line. How is this possible? Is her mind playing tricks on her? Has Markus found a way to call her through the Home-Helper? Markus… being her own mind? Is she saving herself from her own suicide attempt?
She holds her head, then taps herself on her temples repeatedly. It’s hard to focus. The line between what’s possible and what is not is blurring and fading away minute by minute. Of course people can call her—she’s inside a computer system. And why is she so afraid of drowning? Dying? After all… she’s already dead.
“Kaarina Aho?” an unmuffled, nasal voice asks, snapping Kaarina out of her muddled but racing thoughts.
Kaarina holds her breath, then kicks her legs a few times to swim a bit closer to the sound above. “This, um…” She shakes her head, then kicks a few times more. “This is she.”
“Ahh, good. This is Nurse Saarinen calling. But you probably knew that already.”
“Can’t say that I did.”
“Oh.”
“It said Owena Bell.” Kaarina waves her arms and swims a meter closer to the ice ceiling. “Is she… Is Owena okay?”
“I wouldn’t know,” Nurse Saarinen says with her matter-of-fact voice. “She’s no longer with me. This call is just forwarded through her AR glasses.”
“Why?”
Kaarina can almost hear Nurse Saarinen shrugging. “She owes me a favor.”
A few more kicks and waves of her arms, and Kaarina is so close to the surface that all she needs to do is reach for the ice, and she could pull herself back up onto the ground. The brisk wind has pushed away the murky clouds, changing the sky’s hue from indigo to piercing white.
