Archived Parts: One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Eight, Nine, Ten, Eleven, Twelve, Thirteen Fourteen, Fifteen, Sixteen, Seventeen
Part Eighteen
The outdoor air had a cool snap to it, and was filled with scents, living scents, green scents, that Audrey's POD had been filtering out of its internal atmosphere. Ernest knew, even before he was fully awake, that he was at the edge of the city.
He was horizontal now; he opened his eyes carefully, expecting harsh sunlight and Styrofoam drifts. But instead, a cool canopy of branches and leaves stretched overhead.
"Are you awake now? Can you hear me?"
A woman's face filled Ernest's field of vision. Had he seen her before, or was her vat so common that there were many of her in the mix of the population? No, it wasn't her features that seemed familiar, as much as her hair, peppered with gray. Though her features were familiar, too. Ernest seemed to remember her smiling.
"Maybe you'd better hold him down," she said, not to Ernest, this time, but to someone he couldn't see. He craned his neck in the direction in which she'd spoken.
"He is awake! Ernest?"
Will's face. Upside down. With a hitch between the eyebrows. Worried. And then Ernest placed the woman--he'd seen her in the coffee shop, talking to Will. Old friends. Everybody knows Will.
"Ernest? Just nod if you can understand me."
Well, of course he could. He parsed the spoken word much better than most. But it seemed like such a great effort to reply, to even move his head. Ernest blinked slowly. He could do that much.
"You've lost a lot of blood. We're trying to get our other C754 to top you off. And Martha says the best thing to do with your shunt is to remove it altogether."
"But...." How would Ernest survive with no shunt? That would be like stitching a homo sapien's eyes, mouth and nostrils shut. He couldn't find the words to ask.
Will seemed to know what Ernest was thinking, in that way that he often did. "You won't need it anyway, not where we're going."
"I was serious about holding him down," Martha said. "We're out of pain hypos, and his shunt's torn free on one end and fused deep on the other."
Ernest's hand felt exquisitely heavy as he guided it to his pocket and patted the hypo inside. Its wrapper crackled gently. "Slumber," he said. The word felt heavy and strange. And judging by Will's deeply furrowed brow, he had no idea what Ernest meant by that.
But Martha was obviously attuned to the crackling sound of the cellophane hypo seal. She dug into Ernest's pocket, and Ernest allowed himself a small smile for having managed to do something correctly.
"Would you look at that? How many do you have here, six? Very good. I think this would've bought your way onto the railroad even if you don't count the salvaged--"
"He's in pain. Don't get into all of that now."
"I'd better start with a quarter dose. It's better to underestimate with sedatives. Too much would stop his heart."
"Maybe you'd better forget that stuff. I'll hold him down."
"Just a quarter. It'll be fine. He might be slightly awake, but he won't care very much what I'm doing to him…."
There was a bright point of pain in Ernest's good arm. He gasped. Martha had shoved the syringe through his flesh and directly into his vein. Will was at his head, caressing his cheek. "Don't worry. Everything'll be fine."
Ernest recalled one of the many strange things Zach had told him, the thing about security ops using a sedative to stop his heart, should he have fallen into their hands.
And he remembered the security op slumping as he depressed the plunger. The op had only been in forced slumber. Correct? The tree canopy spun overhead, and Martha was instructing Will to stabilize Ernest's shunt arm. Metal tools clicked together. And then there was pain.
Martha had not been entirely correct. Ernest did care what was happening. He was just too weak to do anything about it. And before the sounds of her gouging the shunt out of his flesh grew too horrible to bear, like the sounds of the great cremation machine chopping off limbs, the swarming gray motes overtook Ernest's field of vision and he once more succumbed to his body's own version of forced slumber.
His arm still hurt when he began to come out of sleep mode. Both arms, in fact, hurt. "Don't move," Will told him. "Don't bend that arm. You're shunted in."
Ridiculous. There was no shunt in his right arm. "Shunted in to what?"
"Hold him down," said another voice, a man's voice. "He's still drugged."
"He'll come to fast."
So many people! Ernest knew that voice. "Elizabeth…."
"See, he's already partially recovered. Ernest? Keep your right arm stationary. You'll damage yourself. Do you understand?"
Ernest nodded. There seemed to be hands on him everywhere, at his shoulders, his wrist, his ankles. The world was a blur of colors that Ernest tried to resolve into faces. One hand fell to his hair, and began to stroke. That must have been Will.
"How much longer?" said the first man who'd spoken. "I need to install the propulsion panel if we plan to get out of here tomorrow."
"Let Audrey work on that," said Will. "She's more accurate than you are, anyway."
"How would you know, shopkeep? You can't tell a magnet from a rat turd."
Soft argue? It sounded just like an old-time feed, complete with the lilting, easy tone and the expanded vocabulary. Ernest blinked hard, and his vision began to clear. "Elizabeth…."
"I'm here. Thanks to you. By the time I figured out what was going on at Reclaim, it was too late to run."
"Look, he's fine. Are we done, here?" Ernest turned toward the unfamiliar voice, and experienced a surge of disorientation. It seemed for a moment that he was in his POD, and L0U15E was showing him a holo of himself--as he would look with short hair without any gray in it, and a beard. A wispy, small beard, just around the mouth. With a scowl on his face.
"I think you've damaged his brain," said the other C754.
"Keep squeezing that rag," Elizabeth told him. "And don't bend over like that. The blood flows downward."
"Twenty years of engineering did teach you that much," Will said, "didn't it?"
The other C754 smiled. Maybe smiled. The expression was a bit like Will's--when he was smirking. "What is your name?" Ernest asked him.
"Abraham. I'm an old friend of Will's."
"Everybody knows Will."
"True. I'm told he almost didn't try to recruit you because he couldn't handle living with two C754s."
"I was just worried he'd be as stubborn as you."
Abraham's smirk, or smile, intensified. "And is he?"
"He's worse. Walked right into the Deaconate to get his AI back."
"I didn't walk in," Ernest protested. "The security ops forced me to come with them."
Abraham squeezed a rag that was balled in his right fist. A line of red tubing--no, clear tubing, with blood inside--connected his shuntless arm's vein to Ernest's. "What did you do before?" he asked.
"I was a data clerk."
"There's no W3 where were going, so you'll need to pick up some new skills. Will says you're an outstanding reader, so I'll have you study up on some lost arts. We found a patchy feed on the survivalist movement of 2020, but no one can parse it. I'll load that into a handheld for you."
While Ernest understood Abraham perfectly well, the concept of learning new skills, skills he hadn't been bred for, skills that hadn't been mapped into his brain with years of theta waves and subliminal repetition--that idea was proving difficult to parse.
"Back off," Will said. "He just had his shunt pried out."
"He's fine. Right, Ernest?"
Ernest craned his neck and looked down at himself. His lower body was covered with a thin sheet of reflective plastic. His shunt arm, now missing its shunt, lay atop the silvery sheet. The limb seemed small and naked without its shunt. A shiny, clear bandage-coating covered the incision site, mottled purple and red, something like all the blood he'd lost, but darker. It hurt, a deep, sickening ache. But his whole body hurt, in places that were nowhere near the surgical site--and in fact, his head throbbed horribly, and his organs seemed to be roiling around inside his abdominal cavity. But this other C754 seemed…tough. And so, not to be outdone, Ernest said, "I'm fine."
"Stop squeezing," Elizabeth said. She clamped the line, removed the end of it from Abraham's vein, and pressed a tiny, clear square of sealant over the wound. "Be sure to shunt…er, drink…plenty of fluids. And no heavy lifting today."
Abraham had walked away before Elizabeth was even done giving him instructions. She looked after him, puzzled.
"Don't mind him," Will said. "He's almost done with the railroad and he can't wait to get going."
"But it's my job to mind him."
"Forget it." Will's face filled Ernest's field of vision as he leaned over Ernest's head once more. "How do you feel, really?"
"How can you always discern when I'm lying?"
Will smiled. Even though Ernest was seeing it upside down, it looked nothing like a sneer. Or a smirk. The corners of Will's eyes crinkled, and many of his teeth showed. "I can tell. That's all."
"What is this railroad Abraham is working on? Where is he going?"
"We're going. All of us. Elizabeth, too. That makes five. You and me. Martha, Elizabeth and Abraham. The railroad is the thing that'll take us so far away from the ops and the Deacons that they'll never find us."
"Far away from Reclaim, too," Elizabeth said.
"What about Audrey?"
"She won't come. Not yet, anyway. She's hooked on the W3." Will drew a flask from his pocket. "Don't worry about Audrey -- she knows how to take care of herself. Better than you, by the looks of you. Have some water."
"Then I'll need to urinate again."
"Yeah. That's basically the way it goes."
Ernest tried to remember if there had been a shunt in Zach's arm. Zach had been so stooped and shriveled, Ernest hadn't even noticed. "I guess I'd better get used to it."
"Look, I haven't shunted into a POD in years, and I don't miss it at all. If we had the time and resources to remove shunts for aesthetic reasons, I would've had mine off by now."
Ernest hadn't even considered the aesthetics. He wondered how Will would be able to even stand the sight of him, gray-streaked and shuntless.
"I saw the feed on eating," Elizabeth said, "and I think we must both begin eating as soon as possible. It will take our bodies some time to adjust. Better to do it while we're resting than when we're traveling."
Ernest's stomach did a sickening flip-flop.
"We have some nutrients in bags," she said, "like a POD shunt but, uh, not as good. You are weak from surgery, so you can have one. But I will chew and swallow."
Ernest noted that Elizabeth didn't look very thrilled about the prospect. "Thank you," he told her.
"Oh, come on," Will said, "it's fun, once you get used to it. Things taste different, for real. Not just those stupid nano patches that make you think you're tasting something." He kissed Ernest on the forehead. Ernest would have backed away, except he was lying on his back, and couldn't very well sink into the ground. He wondered if he'd ever become accustomed to how uninhibited Will was with his mouth.
Elizabeth gasped a little, and then steeled her expression as if she hadn't just seen something horribly sacrilegious.
Will pulled a protein bar from his pocket and tore off a chunk with his teeth. "Chew, chew, chew," he sang.
Elizabeth paled, and backed away. Once she was out of visual range, her footfalls receded in the dryish grass.
After she left, the merriment slipped from Will's expression. "It's not so bad," he said quietly. "I promise."
As far as Ernest knew, Will had always been truthful with him. "Let me try it."
Will's eyebrows shot up. "Really? All right. But you'd better sit up first. Your, uh…" he pointed to Ernest's neck and made a downward motion, "throat tube thing…"
"Esophagus," Ernest supplied.
"Right. Esophagus. That works better when you're vertical."
Ernest took the protein bar from Will, and stared at it. It was brownish gray, and rectangular, and the edge had a hemispherical gouge in it shaped like the contour of Will's teeth. "I wish I had done this the first time you asked, when we were in the basement. Just me, and you, and the sparrows."
Will reached down and pulled up the thin silver sheet. He wrapped it around Ernest, and himself, pulled it over their heads, and closed it around them. Inside, with the diffuse sunlight that filtered through, Ernest could imagine that they were sharing the same POD, just Will and him, together.
"There," Will said. "Now you can pretend we're in the basement, or the attic, or the coffee shop, or wherever you want."
"Yes." Ernest reached for Will, and cupped his face in both hands. Ernest's shunt arm ached, but nowhere near as badly as it had when screws were rasping on bone. Ernest drew Will's face toward himself, and brushed a gentle kiss to Will's mouth. "Good."
Will held the silver sheet closed with one hand, and stroked Ernest's hair with the other. His touch was so intense it bordered on pain. His expression had gone very serious. "You told me you would stay with me."
"I was planning on it. I just wanted take Louise with me."
"Your POD was never alive."
"Not the POD. Obviously, I'd need to bring the POD, since it houses her electronics. But I'm talking about the AI inside, the one I named after the POD's model number."
"Your AI is not a person. You parse the difference, don't you?"
"She isn't in the same fashion that we are, no. But she's no longer a factory-issue AI, either. She has mods."
"That doesn't make it a person." Will stroked Ernest's hair more desperately. "It's a stream of data. It doesn't have a soul."
Didn't it? If a soul were magnetic, couldn't one be possessed by a machine just as easily, if not more so, than a homo consummatis body?
"I'll chew the food for you, if you like."
"Thank you." Ernest glanced at his shuntless arm, blood-mottled beneath the clear coat. "But I don't think so. I suppose I need to learn to do it myself."
"Start slow." Will unfastened Ernest's shirt, which was tattered and torn from his stay at the Deaconate. "Hold it in your mouth. And I'll provide some positive reinforcement."
Ernest raised the protein bar to his mouth, but stopped short of inserting it. The revulsion was overwhelming.
Will pressed his cheek to Ernest's and spoke in his ear, low and breathy. "You know putting things in your mouth can feel good." Will's tongue traced his earlobe, and Ernest squirmed. "Good" wouldn't have been the word he would choose. Strange. And yet, titillating -- judging by the war of sensations surging down his spine and coalescing in his groin.
Will trailed kisses along Ernest's cheek and jaw. He kissed Ernest's chin, and the corner of his mouth. His tongue grazed Ernest's lower lip, and another of those sensations, almost like a mild power surge, traveled down between Ernest's legs.
He was hard. Already.
COPYRIGHT 2010 JORDAN CASTILLO PRICE. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. UNAUTHORIZED USE, DUPLICATION AND/OR DISTRIBUTION OF THIS MATERIAL WITHOUT WRITTEN PERMISSION FROM JORDAN CASTILLO PRICE IS STRICTLY PROHIBITED.
Copy/Paste has been disabled.
Please direct your friends to this website if you wish to share the story with them.
Dont miss the next serialized story, The Starving Years. Sign up for JCP News and you'll know as soon as it's posted!