Archived Parts: One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Eight, Nine, Ten, Eleven, Twelve, Thirteen Fourteen, Fifteen, Sixteen
Part Seventeen
A VR helmet hung from the wall beside each chair, and the surfaces of the tables blinked with W3 feeds. The room had once provided a space for many persons to congregate, to link in and distract themselves while they bided their time until Reclaim. But many of the tables were now dark, as if their power supplies had burned out, or the feeds were mottled with dead pixels. One retiree watched a holographic 3-D feed that stuttered and jumped as if the lenses that projected it were no longer stable, and clusters of broken wire hung from many of the VR helmets.
A retired man looked up and met Ernest's gaze. He'd been broad-shouldered, once. Now, he was stooped and gray. He was thirty and thirty. Ernest wondered how old he was himself. He'd lost track of the passage of time, and L0U15E was no longer there to ask.
Only that single man watched him cross the room. No one challenged him, or even asked him who he was, or why he was bleeding. Ernest felt a great pang of sadness, though its source was difficult to discern. Perhaps it was that it could be him sitting there, ignorant and docile. But his sadness felt greater, even, than that. Perhaps his new knowledge was too difficult to bear.
It was best not to think about it until he'd escaped Reclaim. He paused at the door, and turned. "Reclaim is broken. You must leave."
A woman looked up from her low-res W3 game. The others didn't pay any attention to Ernest.
"You must leave," he repeated, more loudly now. "Do you hear? Reclaim is broken." He indicated the dead VR helmets with a sweep of his hand. "Like everything else here. Broken."
"But I'm thirty and thirty," the old woman said. "Now I get my reward."
Elizabeth gave Ernest a startling shove to the upper arm. It was his shunt arm, and the pain snapped him to attention. "Just go," she whispered, and again shoved him toward the door.
"I already turned in my POD," the woman said. Her voice was a whine that grated on Ernest's nerves, and made him want to kick something. "Where will I sleep?"
Elizabeth shoved again. "Go. Now."
Of all the people in the waiting room, only one stood. The man who hadn't been in VR, or watching feeds, or playing games. The man who had once been broad-shouldered. The others ignored Ernest's orders.
"Please," Elizabeth begged.
Ernest turned toward the door, and tried the handle. This door was locked, which made sense, if it was to keep in a retiree who'd changed his or her mind. He flicked his fingers under the scanner until the readout flashed ADMIN, and entered the command to open.
He expected another hall, another room, another door. Instead, he found himself outside, on the walkway that led retirees to Reclaim. Elizabeth pointed urgently to a small shelter. "Security ops, there."
The three of them ran the other way. Slowly, because Elizabeth and the other retiree were stiff. And because Ernest's shunt arm was bleeding again, and the roaring in his ears was very loud. Still, he ran.
"Go toward that alley," he said. "They don't look there. If we could hide, lose them…."
"Yes," said the old man. "Losing visual contact is the first…uh…thing."
The ran, crouched and stooped, to the mouth of the nearest alley. All three were breathing hard. "How did you know that?" Ernest said. "Who are you?"
"Benjamin-942."
"What I mean is, what do you do?"
"I'm retired. Obviously."
Obviously. "Before."
"Security."
Ernest didn't doubt it. Benjamin's telltale white outfit was gone, replaced by a papery, disposable, easily incinerated smock. But even stooped, he was at least ten centimeters taller than Ernest. "Good. That's good. So you know what to expect."
Benjamin looked blank for a moment while he parsed the spoken words, and then he nodded. "Yes. But…no. Not the same. I do not run…from. I run to."
"But you can extrapolate."
No comprehension.
"You know what the ops will do."
Benjamin nodded. "Yes. They will scan for thumb chips."
"You can scan for those far away?" Elizabeth cried. She pressed her hands into her lower back and winced as she stretched.
"And don't talk loud," he added. "They will try to…uh…hear, since we're not in visual."
"They're listening," Ernest supplied. Quietly.
"Yes."
"What is the best way to stop them from bringing us back? Disable the chip?"
"But then we can't buy…." Elizabeth began to protest—but with the credits drained from her account and the possibility that her chip could be used to track her, what good would it do her anymore?
Ernest scowled. If only he'd known. He could have pressed his chip against the demagnetization plate…along with the severed thumb and forearm? He shuddered. Perhaps not.
"To disable the chip…." Benjamin thought hard. "A tool. Some tool." He shrugged.
They crept deeper into the alleyways as they tried to work out their strategy. "What tool?" said Ernest. "To demagnetize it, to cut it off, what?"
"I don't know. Stop yelling at me. You sound like my supervisor."
The buildings they passed were new—compact, rounded and smooth. Those that did have portals in back also had locks beside them, and though Ernest suspected that he could easily hack the keypad locks that weren't W3 linked, he wouldn't know what to say to whomever he encountered behind those doors, him with his bleeding arm, and Elizabeth and Benjamin, stooped and withered, in their papery reclaim smocks.
"We must go to the older part of town, the historic district," Ernest decided. "The buildings are bigger, and we can find some tool to disable our chips without being discovered."
"Yes," Benjamin said. "Good." He pointed between two buildings, toward a main magnetic artery. "We must cross that. Watch for security, then cross."
Ernest's vision went gray around the edges, and he took several deep breaths. He ached from head to toe, and the queasy, sick feeling that had been coming and going had finally stopped going. "You're sure that's the right direction?"
"Yes. Old town is there." Benjamin squinted toward the street. "I'm not stupid."
True. He might have trouble finding words, Ernest reminded himself, but he had been the only one in the room who'd been motivated enough to leave without first seeing the loading end of the horrible machine and being stuffed inside.
Pods glided up the center of the magnetic strip, moving too quickly to successfully duck between, Ernest with his bleeding arm and wavering consciousness, Elizabeth and Benjamin with their shunt-aged bodies. "We should cross elsewhere," Ernest said.
"No, you wait," Ben told him. "Not long. A gap will come. It...uh...always does. Yes."
And the PODS continued to move, a row of glittering gray ovals, with some small variation in their proportion, or the location of their hatches. One had a mod on the shell, a representation of a cascade of glittering cubes from a W3 game spilling across the hatch door. But only one POD had been personalized. All the others were gray.
"You are losing too much blood," Elizabeth said. "You will need surgery. This happens to builders a lot. They forget to wear shunt protection, and they get caught on something an pull out their bone screws."
Ernest stared. It was the longest sentence he'd ever heard from anyone aside from Will, or Zach.
"I was a health monitor aide," she said. "Before I retired."
Benjamin glanced down at Ernest's shunt arm. The once-white towel that held the stainless steel in place was now nearly all red. "You put a...a thing. On the arm. Above. The blood slows down."
"A tourniquet," said Elizabeth. "Yes."
Benjamin used the slender edge of his shunt to nick Ernest's shirt and tear off a strip of fabric. He tied it around the biceps of Ernest's shunt arm so tightly it hurt. It was difficult to tell if the bleeding slowed or not, since the towel was saturated. But it seemed like a logical plan.
"There," Benjamin said when he was done, and he scowled toward the street as a gap in the traffic passed them by. He turned back to Elizabeth and pointed at her. His hand was huge. "You give me the Tazer. I know how to use it."
"No."
Ernest sighed. He wasn't accustomed to working in a team, as builders or security ops might be, since his job had been solitary—so it wasn't in his nature to share, either. But Benjamin had just stopped him from bleeding out, and he had a much longer reach than Ernest. "Here," said Ernest. "Take mine."
Benjamin took it, turned it around in his massive hand. "Not even charged," he said. But he threaded the edge of his papery smock through a slot in the Taser's handle and tied it to his thigh, anyway.
When Ernest realized he'd threatened his way out of Reclaim with an uncharged Tazer, the sick feeling in his stomach increased exponentially.
He willed himself not to pay attention, to force his body to get him out of the shadow of the Deaconate, at the very least. And to do that, he'd need to cross the street.
He looked down the line of gleaming PODS and searched for a gap. And in the row of nearly identical ovals, he found something that looked like a gap at first, but wasn't. It was a variation. A color. A metallic blue POD.
Audrey.
Ernest dashed out of the alleyway, waving his arms. He knew how to create a gap in traffic. "Stop! Audrey, it's me. Ernest. Stop."
In Ernest's imagination, the blue POD paused, and the grid caused all the PODS behind it to wobble to a stop so he could cross. But What happened in reality was much stranger. Audrey's POD sloughed off the magnetic strip without even pausing to switch to solar—a move Ernest had never seen a POD make—and stopped directly in front of him. The main hatch flicked open—again, faster than Ernest had ever seen a POD respond—and Audrey, as quick as her metallic blue POD, grabbed Ernest by the shirt. "Get in."
"But..." how could he? She was already inside.
The interior of Audrey's POD had as much gear hanging off the walls as the storage closets inside the Deaconate. The pod bristled with tools, every one of them poking or prodding Ernest as he squeezed himself in. "But Elizabeth, and Benjamin," he said as he struggled to wedge his arm in well enough for the POD hatch to close.
"You want out, meet us in grid 22-38," Audrey told the two retirees as they gawked at her from the street. "You know where that is?"
Benjamin nodded.
"That's all I can do," Audrey said. "It's not like I can fit all of you in here!" If she were full grown, or Ernest were any larger, she might not have even been able to squeeze him inside.
"What's at 22-38?" Ernest tried to deduce where the coordinates might be. Somewhere toward the edge of the city, if the Diaconate was 0-0. "And how did you find me?"
"Would you listen to this one?" The voice came from all around Ernest—a POD-mind voice, but nothing like L0U15E's. This one sounded like an old-time feed actor's, with subtle nuances of inflection that would have convinced Ernest it was an actual person speaking, if it weren't being broadcast over the POD audio. "Two questions at once—and handsome, too. He's a keeper."
"Stop trying to match me up with someone," said Audrey. "I don't have time for that kissey stuff. Besides, he's Will's lover."
"You know Will?" Ernest snapped. "Can you find him?"
"Hold your horses," Audrey told him. "Isn't that a great idiom? A horse is a mammal that was used for pulling transport before mechanical propulsion was invented. So to hold your horses means to pause. Of course I know Will. Everyone knows Will. And right now he's champing at the bit—another horse idiom—to storm the Diaconate to bust you out. Hey, Charlie, you'd better let everybody know Will's boyfriend flew the coop."
Charlie said, "It's already done."
"That's a poultry idiom. I was assigned the Reclaim door because we all thought that was the least likely place you'd turn up. And here you are."
"It had the fewest guards."
"Good to know."
Ernest's knees buckled, but he was wedged into the POD so tightly he remained upright. He felt giddy, and the roaring in his ears seemed overloud. "You named your POD-mind, too."
"Oh, yeah. His model number wasn't very catchy. You're all wet—is that blood? It has an odor—kind of like metal. And it's so red. Maybe I'll do that color the next time I mod my hair. Charlie, make sure you get a measure of its hue and value so we can duplicate the shade."
"I decoupled my shunt. I don't feel very well."
"Pull up a relevant feed on blood, too. And take us to 22-38."
"We're on our way," Charlie said smoothly.
The POD walls lit up with charts, diagrams and holos, but they were difficult to see through the clutter of Audrey's tools.
"I'm more interested in testosterone," Ernest said, though he was so woozy he had trouble remembering the word. "And eunuchs."
"Oh, we don't need a feed. I know all about that. It's a hormone. Carefully controlled, because it makes males aggressive, and focused on sex. Your shunt filters out most of it. If your mix was like most people's, it's set so that you only get enough testosterone to keep your bones from going soft."
"But I haven't shunted in for days."
"I think it takes longer than that to get back to your default hormone concentration, but who knows? I didn't scan it too closely, since I'll never have to deal with it personally. I don't think you'll get any taller, but maybe you'll start growing a beard. That's how you can tell whose shunt cocktails are different. The beard."
Like security ops. "A beard—is that what you call a lump at the front of the throat?"
"No, it's a short word for a hairy face."
"Oh. The bristles...."
"Excuse me," Charlie said. "I have audio from Will on secure channel five."
"Ernest?" Will's voice came from all around them. "Are you there?"
Ernest opened his mouth to speak, and then paused. Suddenly, he hardly knew what to say. "Yes. I'm here."
"What were you thinking—going back for L0U15E? It isn't a person, it's an AI, a machine. It doesn't have thoughts. It doesn't have feelings. It won't miss you if you leave it wherever it lands. It's just a hunk of gear."
"I know, but...."
"There were varying schools of philosophy on that in the twenty-first century," Charlie murmured.
Audrey shushed him. "Let them talk."
Ernest considered lying. He was good at it, after all, and it would be plausible to say that he'd only been trying to get his POD back, since Will seemed to want the POD so badly. But it wasn't true. He'd gone back for L0U15E. Because if he was going to live on past his thirty and thirty, indefinitely, he couldn't see doing it without her.
And he hadn't known about that tattle-strip.
"You sound angry," Erneset said, bewildered.
"Angry? You're lucky I don't kill you myself."
"Will," Audrey said, "he's blood...blooding? No, bleeding. Very much."
"Gah! Why didn't you say so? I need to go find Martha."
Ernest supposed he should apologize. "Will?"
"He's closed the link," Charlie said gently. His speech programming really was very good.
"Don't worry about him," Audrey told Ernest. "We translated a really good idiom to describe Will. Want to hear it? All bark and no bite."
"Rin Tin Tin," Ernest said.
"I haven't heard that one. Charlie, find me the etymology and put it in my leisure scanning file."
"Your wish is my command," Charlie said.
It was the last thing Ernest heard before the roaring in his ears crescendoed, and the gray motes around the perimeter of his vision multiplied, and everything went quiet and dark.
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