by Joshua James
It wasn’t just the green spaces of Vassar-1 that made it beautiful. Not tied down by the history and norms of Earth-bound architecture, everything on the AIC’s capital planet was wholly unique. That, combined with its relative freedoms compared to the other colonies and especially to Earth, had resulted in a strong artistic community that made the homes, monuments, murals and structures of Vassar-1 beloved in the galaxy.
“All right, so if we hurry, we can get to the meeting with the defense minister and still have time to brief the Senate before the mid-day window closes,” Stacey said. “Which we really need to do. Everyone knows—”
“Stop the car,” ordered Engano.
“Madam Director?” the driver said, looking up from the hover car’s controls.
“Stop the car, dammit!”
Thirteen
The car stopped just beyond a small huddle of people next to the street. A bald man, dressed in what amounted to rags, was talking to, or maybe just preaching to, a crowd of orphans. The hover cars in the rest of the column came to a sudden stop.
“Wait…what? No! Why are we stopping? We’re on a really tight schedule as it is,” Stacey said, making little effort to hide her freakout.
“It’s fine, Stacey,” Engano said, waiting until she saw two of her security personnel outside her door before getting out. “This will only be a second.”
Engano’s eyes had to adjust to the bright light of Vassar-1’s afternoon sun, but once they did, it was clear the man was preaching to the kids. He was preaching the beliefs of the Oblivion.
“We can take care of this, Madam Director,” offered one of Engano’s security personnel. “You can keep moving, we’ll round these freaks up.”
“Freaks? Those are kids, Sergeant.” Engano crossed the street, not caring that it would stop traffic. No one honked when they saw the armed security that followed close behind her.
At first the bald man, clearly an Oblivion cultist with chalky black skin and one good eye, didn’t seem to notice Engano and the armed men with her. He kept preaching to his congregation.
“Do any of you precious children go hungry at night? Do you feel those pains?” The bald cultist pointed at his own stomach. “Do you feel those pains when you try to go to sleep and wish that there was some way to make them stop?” The man’s one-eyed gaze shifted from the children’s captivated faces to Engano. “Do you want an end to people hurting you for no better reason than because they can? Because they have the power and you don’t?”
“Hello, children,” Engano said, careful to address the children first. She wanted to take them out of the equation. Yes, an assembly like this one was illegal, but she wasn’t about to have kids arrested. Especially not orphans, whom she always had a soft spot for and whom, unfortunately, with the war, the city had a lot of. The kids all looked at her, almost at once, which was unsettling.
“Look, it’s one of those with power, children. But don’t be afraid, for you’re being protected by the love of the Abyss.” The man smiled at Engano with rotting teeth.
“The love of the Abyss, huh?” Engano only briefly looked at the cultist before turning her attention back to the kids. Her security, however, kept their stares firmly on the creepy bald guy.
The cultist nodded his head. “Exactly.”
“Are you kids hungry? Looking for someplace safe? This man here,” Engano pulled over one of her security officers. “His name is Sgt. Harryus. Sgt. Harryus is going to make sure all of you are fed and, if you want—nobody is going to force you, but if you want—you can stay at St. Janus Vassar Shelter for Children, over on 433rd Street. Would you kids like that? A roof over your heads? Food in your stomachs?”
Some of the kids, as Engano expected, walked or ran away. The sad truth was that Vassar-1 was far from perfect, and that included police and people of authority. There was good reason not to just automatically trust all of them. Thankfully, though, the majority listened to her and gathered around Sgt. Harryus.
“Ma’am?” asked Sgt. Harryus.
Engano felt a little bad, since he looked like he was drowning a little. “I know, just take them to some food stalls, use your service credit. I’ll see to it that you aren’t stuck with a bill or in any trouble. Then take them to the shelter and give the woman who runs it my name. She’ll get them all set up. I really appreciate it. They will, too.”
“You can feed their little bodies, yes. But can you feed their souls?” asked the bald cultist.
Engano was making her way through the kids when one caught her attention. It might’ve been her imagination, but something was off about the kid. Their face: it changed, swirled around for a moment—just a split second—and then went back to normal. She figured it had to be her imagination.
“Everything is not what it seems. Is it? The universe just isn’t that simple,” the man said. He seemed to notice her hesitation, and smiled wider.
“Really? Because I think this is exactly what it seems to be,” Engano said. “First off, of course, you’re under arrest. Not only for openly spreading this, I don’t think I should even give you the satisfaction of calling it a religion, these poison words in public. But for doing so to kids. Street kids, at that. What’s your name?”
“Unimportant,” answered the man as one of Engano’s security personnel put magnetic shackles on him.
“You’re right. Unimportant. That’s what you and your kind are here on Vassar-1. We’ll get your name during processing, though. Don’t worry about that. You wanna tell me what you were trying to do with these orphans before you face the sentinels?”
“I was simply exposing these kids to the truth. I was preparing them for what’s to come. Would you like me to prepare you?”
The old man’s rotten teeth made his breath atrocious, but Engano held her ground. “And what’s that? What’s to come?”
“Heaven, Director Engano. Heaven brought by a baptism of fire and blood. It’ll be glorious.”
She frowned. “How do you know my name?”
The man said nothing. She was a public figure, but this man didn’t exactly look like he watched the news feeds.
“What baptism of fire and blood?”
The man started to answer when his head was blown almost completely off.
Fourteen
Pieces of the bald man’s brain and skull were sent everywhere. Some blood splattered on Engano’s face, but the direction of most of the gore was in the opposite direction, out the back of his head, which she assumed meant that whoever’d just shot him was behind her.
“Get down!” yelled Engano to all the civilians in the area. The security officer who was trying to arrest the cultist quickly zeroed in on where a flurry of gunfire was coming from. It was the second floor of a nearby building.
“Get those kids out of here!” yelled Engano at Harryus, who escorted the kids into the markets and away from the fighting. She took out her pistol.
Security personnel poured out of the vehicles that escorted Engano. They, too, engaged the shooters in the nearby building. There appeared to be multiple gun battles.
“We need you to leave, Madam Director!” yelled the security officer who was already with her. “Now!”
She didn’t want to go. Then a high-speed super-heated round tore through the man’s throat, nearly decapitating him in front of her.
Engano knew that her security would fight to the last to protect her. So the longer she stuck around, the more danger they were in. She knelt down and hurried back towards the convoy of transport vehicles that had brought her here. It was clear she was the target. How they knew she’d be here or would stop here, she hadn’t a clue. That was a mystery for later.
Engano was almost back to her vehicle when she saw that one of the orphans was left behind, a straggler. Bullets hit the sidewalks right near the scared little girl. Engano turned on a dime and ran for the girl.
“Don’t worry, I got you.” Engano grabbed the child and wrapped her up in her arms. She picked her up and kept mo
ving towards the transports.
Engano didn’t know how it happened, but in the middle of the street, as she was crossing it, the little girl slipped out of her grasp. When she looked back to see where she was, the little girl’s face was expressionless. She was standing in the middle of the street. Before Engano could react, a driver in a panic from the shooting raced his vehicle right into the girl.
“No!” yelled Engano. She tried to go back for the girl, but was pulled back toward the transports by more security personal.
Engano relented, feeling sick to her stomach. She’d had the little girl in her arms, and she’d just melted away from her.
Engano kept staring at the little girl’s prone body, dead in the street, as she was hurried back into her transport. The moment the door closed, the driver gunned the thrusters and the hover car leaped forward.
But just as the little girl was disappearing from sight, Engano witnessed something truly shocking.
As the firefight continued and a security officer shot a small gun-mounted rocket-propelled charge at the building where the shooters were, Engano watched as the little girl sat up in the middle of the road. Her shoulders were misaligned; one arm hung broken and limp. Her head was split open. It was gruesome.
But then the broken little girl’s shoulders aligned themselves back to normal. Her arm wiggled a bit, then looked to be healed, and her head closed up. Engano watched with wide eyes as the girl’s expressionless face returned. Then she waved at Engano.
“What the hell was that!?” yelled Stacey, furious but also terrified. She was staring straight ahead. She’d seen nothing of what Engano had seen of the little girl out of her window. She was referring to the sudden attack in the streets.
Engano had something else on her mind when she said, “I have no idea.”
Fifteen
Lee Saito found himself on the streets of Tokyo. He hadn’t been here since he was a child. When he looked down at himself—his arms, his legs—they were small, tiny compared to what he’d become. This was strange not only because he knew he was very much an adult, but also because he only seemed to have limited control over his movements. He was like a passenger in the mind of his child self.
Is this a dream?
If it was a dream, it was the most realistic one he’d even been in. The mega-supercity of Tokyo was exactly as he remembered it.
Saito even knew what his younger self was doing at this moment, and when this was. He was on his way home from school, having just been accepted into the Japanese UEF Naval School. Those same feelings of excitement and accomplishment bolstered his little legs as he ran through the streets of Tokyo’s fortieth level.
Above Saito were eight more levels; above that, new construction on what would become an eighty-level city. That made Tokyo the biggest, most densely populated supercity in the world. Only Hong Kong and Moscow rivaled it.
Sparks from the growing Japanese capital fell through the levels above, making young Saito and other commuters on the elevated walkways dodge glowing projectiles that wouldn’t actually harm them. To him it was fun, a game that most Tokyo kids played.
Young Saito saw something strange up ahead, standing next to a couple of street food vendors who were trying to lure anyone with a few extra credits to spend in their accounts.
A pale man stood in the middle of the walkway, hands in his suit pockets, obsidian eyes and mouth smiling at him.
“This is not a dream,” said the Pale Man as Saito ran past him.
As soon as Saito passed the Pale Man, he was no longer on the streets of Tokyo, but instead in his family’s apartment. He was in their kitchen. Everyone except his father prepared for dinner. His father, Sanada, knelt down at his position at the head of the table, waiting for his wife and children to bring him the food he earned for himself and them from working on the fleet docks.
“So what’s this big news you have, son?” asked Sanada. One of his daughters, Saito’s little sister, poured her father some hot tea.
“I got accepted into the Young Officer’s Program! I’m gonna be a commander!” young Saito said, happy as a pig in shit.
“Calm down, Lee. You have to do the work first to become a commander.” Sanada took a sip of his tea. “You think you have that in you, boy?”
“I know I do,” replied young Saito.
“That so?” Sanada stared at his son in a way he often did, a judgmental gaze.
It seemed that adult Lee, looking through his younger eyes, could almost read his father’s thoughts. He didn’t believe his son, a lifelong “B” student, had what it took to be more than what he was, and his father before him. He always assumed Lee would work with his hands, on the docks.
“You’ll do great, honey,” reassured Saito’s mother, Sakura. She put both of her hands, still wet from her work in the kitchen, on his small shoulders and kissed him on the top of his head. “I can’t wait to tell everyone that my son is going to command a fleet.”
“I would hold off on that. Let’s wait and see if the boy actually goes through with it. After all, he has a history of not following through. Remember Judo, Sakura? Remember the Explorer’s Club, Lee?”
“Stop it,” protested Sakura.
“I can do it!” Young Saito expected congratulations from his father. Getting into the UEF Young Officer’s Program was difficult. Only about three out of every thirty applicants were accepted.
“Hmmm. I’ll believe it when I see it, boy. In the meantime, help your mother clean those fish.” Sanada said it in a dismissive way that cut deep into young Saito’s psyche.
Young Saito bolted out of his family’s apartment and made for the stairwell, ignoring his father’s voice behind him. Floor after floor, young Saito ran up, crying along the way. Nothing was ever good enough for his father; he was never good enough. But at the same time, that was all he wanted to do: make Sanada proud. Or maybe, maybe he just wanted his dad to eat his words.
Young Saito finally made it up to the top floor of his family’s apartment tower. There he saw the Pale Man standing near the edge of what was, then, not really a roof, but just a half-built floor of the building. The man stood where a wall hadn’t been built yet, behind a piece of plastic tarp blowing in the wind.
“If this isn’t a dream,” asked young Saito as he approached the ledge, “what is it?”
“A memory, Lee Saito. We are reliving your memories,” answered the Pale Man.
“How…why?”
“Like I said before, your own recollections aren’t dependable. No human’s are. But your mind, it recorded everything we need, accurately.” The Pale Man turned to young Saito. “But we need you in here to help navigate. We need context for what we see and hear. I need you to help us be, well, like you.”
“Why?”
The Pale Man’s smile got wider. “Don’t you worry about that now.”
Lee wanted nothing to do with this sick game. He was determined to do nothing at all to help them. If anything, he’d give them incorrect information. Wrong data. Whatever he could do to subvert whatever the aliens were doing to him.
And yet. There was something in the young mind, the child’s mind, that desperately wanted to please the Pale Man.
Lee understood on an intellectual level that it was something the aliens were doing to him, to make him receptive to their questions in the same way that they were dredging up these memories to relive. But he couldn’t understand how to fight it off. His mind, like the small body he was in, wasn’t his to control.
“Don’t fight it, Lee,” the Pale Man said.
Then he placed a strong hand on Saito’s back and pushed him off the ledge.
Sixteen
Instead of falling off the building into the Tokyo levels below, Saito landed on his stomach on the mats of the UEF Training Center in Hokkaido. He was dressed in gym clothing and staring at said mat, and at a line of other young recruits, watching, secretly dreading their turns.
Young Saito got up off the mat and turned to hi
s opposing fellow student. The other kid had just thrown him onto the floor, which naturally bred some anger in the pre-teen. Instead of their trainer, a UEF officer whose name wasn’t important, the Pale Man was in the uniform, barking orders to the others while, at the same time, talking directly to Saito.
“I see you were yet to be the warrior you’d become. What was it that held you back, I wonder?” The Pale Man watched as young Saito wiped the blood from his mouth and got in his stance to go again with his fellow student.
This time, instead of getting his arm caught after an errant punch, young Saito shot for the other student’s legs. Taken by surprise, the other student didn’t know what to do. He got picked up and thrown down hard on his back.
Full of anger and rage, fueled by embarrassment and the disapproval of his father, young Saito mounted and just started punching the other student. He got lost in his frenzy and just kept swinging. Half of his punches hit their mark; the others slammed into the mat. It didn’t stop until the Pale Man pulled him off.
Young Saito found himself in the office of the Hokkaido UEF Training Center’s head administrator, Colonel Tenzan. He looked down at his swollen hands, both broken, twice their normal size. Tears rolled down his cheeks as his father, in the chair to his left, talked to the colonel. His mother, in the chair to his right, tried to comfort him by gently rubbing his back.
The Pale Man paced back and forth behind Colonel Tenzan. “You failed your first time through. Interesting.”
