Chapter 40: Captured Again!
As a species, humans have always sought to live forever. Initially, we looked to a place that existed outside of the physical plane. A heaven, if you will. We created eternal characters that inhabited this plane. They took the form of gods and monsters. After death, we might be able to join these eternal creatures and live forever.
The lifespan of a human being has been increasing steadily since man first stood on two legs. At first this increase was all due to improvements in the standard of living. More wealth meant better health and longer life. By the end of the second millennium, the discovery of DNA (1953, Watson and Crick) heralded the beginnings of extending human life directly through gene manipulation and organ transplantation.
One hundred years later, there were many other ways of living longer. The introduction of microscopic machines to the human body had totally done away with all diseases by making genetic repairs a few days after conception. These techniques allowed medicine to progress to the point where more affluent people could have their bodies repaired by these machines on a constant basis. But there were problems with these machines. Rogue programming resulted in some humans serving the microscopic machines. The Anti-cyborg movement took hold in society. People saw these micro machines as something alien. They did not want to become more machine than human.
Many techniques were used to help people live longer. Still, people died. Accidents happened. It wasn’t until the advent of connectome scans and recordings, that a truly eternal human mind became a possibility.
Jayne’s eyes popped open. She blinked rapidly but there was no change in the darkness that filled them. She blinked again and tried to lift her arm to her face. The arm would not move. She stopped and took inventory, but she could see nothing. The darkness was pure. She listened to her own breathing and the beating of her heart. She tried again to lift her arm. It was restrained at the wrist, elbow and shoulder. She tried to move her head. It seemed to be completely encased in a helmet of sorts, with her face exposed. Her body and her legs were also restrained. She could move her fingers and toes, blink her eyes and move her tongue. Her mouth was parched and her lips were dry. She tried to conjure up some saliva. She cleared her throat and felt the strap around her neck press painfully into her. She tried to make a sound. She heard the high-pitched moan of her own voice. She tried to whistle but no sound came out. The soft inner part of her lips was threatening to crack. Finally, some moisture appeared in her mouth and she wet her lips and tried to whistle again. She thought she might be able to tell the size of the room if she could whistle. The small cheep she was able to make echoed in her head and she realized that the helmet was covering her ears. Jayne let out a sigh and tried to fill her lungs with air. Even that was restricted by the tight strap around her chest.
Not being able to fill her lungs pushed her panic to near critical. Jayne breathed short and shallow and tried to relax all her muscles. But each flex pushed her panic higher. She could feel air move over her skin. It was warm and she now knew she was close to being naked. She felt a pinch on her arm and a warm glow flushed her skin and the tension fled from her muscles. Someone or something had drugged her. She felt soft and pliable. Her ability to concentrate seemed to have disappeared. A part of her brain tried to fight against the feeling. It was wonderful but it was partnered with a nebulous fear. She tried to speak and only two words came out. She croaked, “Help, Poppy.” The fear faded and soft drug-created pillows formed around her. She fell into them. She felt her mouth form a smile and she sighed.
Later she heard voices and saw a soft light in the distance. She heard a whirring sound, felt her body move with the bed and, like watching a holo video, the ceiling, and the machines attached to it, panned into her vision. She could see a body-shape scroll into her line of sight. It was not a person or a body. It was her suit hanging on the back of a door. Sergio Partelli was in the room with her. It was right there. If only she could get to it, she could cover her nakedness. But she couldn’t move. The whirring stopped. Jayne was now just a few degrees from the vertical. She closed her eyes and the drugs in her system flooded her with softness and warmth.
“Jayne,” a female voice called softly.
Jayne smiled and responded, “Yes, pwease. I will have a strawwberry one.”
“Jayne,” the voice called again.
“Two squoops, pwease,” Jayne slurred.
“Miss Wu, listen,” said another voice sharply.
“I sorry,” replied Jayne and she started to cry.
The first voice cut in again. It was hard and cold. “How much did you give her? She is no good like this. I need her in top form. God, you are an idiot.”
“You saw what she can do. She destroyed three of your best agents with a wall of air conjured up from her mind. I have no intention of giving her the chance of making me a victim. She is one powerful little girl,” he said in awe, as he looked at Jayne strapped to an almost vertical table in front of him.
“That drug is designed to stop her from doing that. In large doses it turns her into this,” the female voice said and she gestured to Jayne, still weeping. “I swear, if you screw this up for me….”
“You’ll what?” he asked assuredly.
“Just because you have completed the takeover doesn’t mean you can—” she said and she was cut off by the young man.
“I can do anything I want. Look at me. I’m 18.” He smiled a macabre smile and patted the old woman on the shoulder. “Don’t worry. You will be with me soon. I wouldn’t leave you out in the cold.”
“Not if you know what is good for you. I am still in charge and don’t you forget it,” she threatened.
“Yes, you are in charge, but for how long? Remember, I am walking around in this and you are walking around in that.” He gestured vaguely at himself and then at her. He smiled and relented. “I’m just giving you a hard time. You know I would never abandon you.”
“You had better not. I can still do a lot of damage, even in the few months this body has left,” she said.
An old woman and a young man stood in front of a control panel flanked by a series of mini holos. Jayne could see them, blurred through her tears. She stopped weeping and the final tears rolled down her cheeks. She blinked and tried to clear her eyes. The woman was old, very old. Jayne thought she had seen her somewhere before but she could not remember. She brought the man into focus. He was much younger. Just a little older than her. She blinked again as he turned to face her. She did recognize him. It was the boy from the bean bag game and the flier to the Neuroscience Center.
“It is good old Ranovich 91. What the heck is he doing here?” she thought, as both figures turned and manipulated the shifting holos in front of them. Jayne felt a pinch on her upper arm.
“There, that ought to make her a little more lucid. In a few moments, you should be able to talk to her and have her understand,” said Ranovich.
Jayne could not turn her head to see, but the cotton that filled her brain was starting to thin and clear. She looked at the two people in front of her. The male was definitely Ranovich. Jayne had never known his first name. She had met the old woman once before in what seemed like a lifetime ago. It was in the biome on the first day of her apprenticeship. Poppy had told her the name. Jayne searched her memory. Her brain felt like it was moving in slow motion. Winter Bancroft. She remembered. Doctor Winter Bancroft was her name. This is the woman with an old body and perfect eyes. This is the woman that Jayne suspected of murdering and stealing body parts from the biomes. As her mind cleared, a thousand questions rushed in. She glanced at the boy who spoke like a man. It sure looked like Ranovich, but it didn’t behave or talk like him. What was happening here? What do they want with me?
The old woman spoke again. “Jayne, can you understand me? Jayne?”
Jayne shifted her eyes from Ranovich to the old woman. “What are you doing to me?” she rasped. “Let me go!”
“I’m sorry, dearie, but that is no l
onger possible. By this time tomorrow, I will be you and you will be…” she made a ppfffff sound and snapped her fingers. “Just like Ranovich here who is now my good friend and colleague William Thurston. You remember Ranovich, don’t you? I think you first met… when?” she turned to Ranovich for the answer but did not wait. “Oh yes, I saw the recordings of you in the Psi Center when we were just figuring out exactly how clever you are. That bit with the bean bag still amazes me. You sure took his arrogance down a notch or two. He had some skills too, you know. Old Thurston here has been exploring them. Show her,” she commanded, as she looked at Ranovich.
Ranovich smiled. “Watch the fixer suit on the back of the door.” He concentrated and the arms of the suit lifted and flapped and fell. “Pretty cool, eh!”
Jayne watched the suit arms move up and down. She caught a glint of a light in one of the buttons of the suit. The light looked reflected but Jayne knew it wasn’t. She sighed at the knowledge that the suit still had a charge. She said nothing. She wondered what they had planned for her. She tried to push the bubble into place but nothing happened. Jayne tried to shrug but was unable to move enough to bring it off. The old woman spoke to Jayne. “It’s the drugs. They were designed to control whatever it is you do. I know flapping the sleeves on a jumpsuit is just a parlor trick in comparison. Oh, I am so looking forward to trying you on.” She giggled like a little girl who had just received a new party dress.
“Are you going to kill me?” Jayne asked, her voice raspy and dry.
“Oh no, dear, at least not in the way people are usually killed. I plan to keep your body alive for a very long time,” she said calmly.
“What about me? My mind? My personality?” asked Jayne.
“Oh that. Well, after some discussion, we have decided that we would try to keep it, just in case we needed to put it back. I did argue against the time and effort required. After all, you are 13 years old. There can’t be all that much worth keeping. We didn’t bother with Ranovich. There wasn’t much of a personality there in the first place. As I recall, he was rather surly,” she said. The grin that followed could only be described as macabre.
Jayne felt the panic rise in her. She pushed the bubble and it started to form and then it was gone. She closed her eyes and heard an alarm sound from one of the panels in front of the old woman and Ranovich, who was now William Thurston. She felt a pinch in her arm and the familiar rush of drugs hit her system. The panic faded.
“She almost did… whatever she does,” Thurston said, the fear in his voice rising. “The sensors caught the swell of brain activity and drugged her again. If you are going to do this, you had better do it now. The moment she figures out a way to reroute the drugs, we won’t be able to control her.”
“You think she can do that?” asked the old woman. The excitement in her stolen eyes glinted with the possibilities of becoming Jayne.
“You saw the brain scans. Look at the activity we just recorded.” He pointed at the lines dancing in the holos. “Her entire cortex just flared and she has enough drugs in her system to take out a body 10 times her size.”
“Everything is ready,” Winter Bancroft said. “All I have to do is start my scans and update my input data to the immediate present. Then we start the transfer.”
“Haven’t you forgotten something?” he asked.
The old woman shook her head.
“We all agreed that her connectome scan was to be preserved. It might come in handy some day. We do not have a scan. We have to run a scan on her before we start the transfer.”
“That could take hours, or even days in her case,” she said, shaking her head. “I want that body and I especially want that brain of hers. We start now!”
“Alright, but there are those that won’t like it. That will be your problem,” he warned.
“Once I have control over that body, nothing will ever be a problem again,” she said assuredly. “On second thought, forget my update. Let’s do a direct feed. As soon as the equipment synchronizes, start the transfer. And no more drugs. I don’t want my first experience as Ms. Wu to be a drug-induced blur. I want to enjoy every second.”
As she walked to the back of the room, a soft light bathed a lounge bed. She lay down and an opaque material the exact shape of her features pressed itself over her skull, exposing her eyes, nose and the lower part of her face. The lounge swelled over her body, holding it firmly in a soft grip. “I’m ready. Begin NOW!” she ordered.
Jayne felt the table, on which she was strapped, tilt back to the horizontal position. The change in orientation made her head swim. It also made her aware that something was about to happen. Everything went dark. The darkness was accompanied by a hiss and click. She had watched the helmet close a visor over her eyes, shutting out all light. She could barely hear, but the old woman’s words, ‘Begin NOW,’ echoed in her brain. This time there was no panic. There was no fear. There was no room in this moment for all those emotions. There was only calculation and a push. The bubble formed and there were no alarms and no drugs pushing back. The bubble swelled and receded. The first step was to clear what was left of the drugs. Nothing that required time could happen inside the bubble, but as it receded, Jayne’s blood swirled and the giant molecules that made up the drug were crushed and broken and removed from the stream. As each pulse of clean blood flooded Jayne’s brain, the clarity grew and her body relaxed and readied itself for a fight. This was going to be the fight of her life. If she lost, there would be nothing. Losing was not even a possibility in the great wash of all possibilities. Jayne knew she must win and to consider anything else was to give that consideration a probability greater than zero. Jayne pushed!
The machine that was wrapped around her head opened a stream and started to write the data that belonged to the old woman. A wave of nausea swept like an entire ocean heaving over a continent. Jayne lost focus. Something was nibbling at her mind, like a dream of a rat eating her brain and leaving its rancid droppings in its place. The droppings burned.
Jayne pushed again and locked out the destruction. She pushed hard and time slowed. She conjured a three-dimensional isometric plane of possibilities and searched. Once formed, the bubble would give her forever to decide on a course of action. Almost forever. Even so, she searched quickly and cautiously for a survival scenario with a probability of one. There could be no chance of Jayne Wu ending here. Forever in the bubble, was zero time in the real world and out there was a giant rodent about to eat her mind. Suddenly a possibility burped up like molten rock in the lake of a live volcano—hot yellow and searing crimson. Jayne looked and glowed with glee. She had found it.
The bubble collapsed and Jayne waved the welling nausea aside. She watched the dream rat as it nibbled and ate the pattern that contained her thoughts and memories, and left behind turds that were not Jayne; left behind the turds that were the thoughts and memories of the old woman. Some things were already lost forever. Jayne couldn’t stop it but that was not the plan. She could see what the dream rat would eat next. She grabbed that pattern just before it was consumed by the rat and replaced by the memory from the old woman, and immediately rewrote the original pattern back over the old woman’s. She blasted the turds that were the old woman’s memories. Whatever the woman and her machine took from her, she immediately took back and cleaned out the debris. Jayne saw that it was not all garbage and took some of the information for future use. Some of what the old woman knew, Jayne now knew.
The connectome software tried to confirm what it had written but found something else. It looped back and tried to write the same data again but during the confirmation process, it found that nothing had been written. The loop had no way out. Jayne had forced the rat to turn and munch on its own tail. The program crashed and the rat suddenly popped out of existence. Jayne could hear alarms ringing and the opaque visor covering her eyes retracted and she could once more see and hear. Behind her, she could hear the old woman scream. Doctor Thurston moved from the control center out of he
r field of vision. She could hear him helping the old woman from the lounge bed. She came into view, half walking, half supported by Thurston. As she passed, she slipped from his grasp and fell to the floor. Jayne could see blood coming from her ears, mouth, nose and eyes. She was coughing and wheezing.
“I’ll get help,” he said. He ran from the room, leaving the old woman to choke on her own blood.
Jayne looked forward and saw the top of the door close. She remembered the Sergio Partelli hanging there and willed more than the arms to flap. She willed it to her and it flew from the door and draped over her bound body.
She whispered, “Suit override – thirteen – suggest….” She paused, not knowing what to suggest. Finally she croaked out, “Help.”
The suit warmed over her and she felt it shift slightly. Suddenly, as if someone had flipped a switch, the table restraints released. The suit molded to her body like a wetsuit, covering her from head to toe. A force field formed over her face. This place had full Earth gravity and Jayne could barely stand up. The suit supported her. As she stood, she looked down at the coughing woman covered in her own blood. The woman struggled to a half-standing position and looked up at Jayne with raw hatred in her stolen eyes.
“You little bitch!” she spat and the spittle, mixed with blood, sprayed over the Sergio Partelli force field that protected Jayne’s face. The liquid sizzled and, in a smoky instant, was gone. Jayne looked down at her, reached out, put a hand on her shoulder. Jayne knew what she had done to the old woman when she forced the dream rat to eat itself. All the capillaries in the old woman’s body were broken and her blood was leaking out everywhere.
Jayne pushed gently with her hand and Winter Bancroft fell over in a heap of convulsing ooze. Jayne stepped over her and opened the door. She turned back just in time to see the light fade from those perfect young eyes.
“It is over,” she said to the corpse. Then she left the room.
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