Archived Parts: One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Eight, Nine, Ten, Eleven, Twelve, Thirteen Fourteen, Fifteen, Sixteen, Seventeen, Eighteen, Nineteen
Part Twenty
Ernest focused on the book-shaped monitor and tapped the audio interface, though he suspected the crackly distortion was caused not by a malfunction of the old hardware, but a degradation in the ancient data itself. If Ernest could gain access to the code, he might be able to repair it -- but the "book" wasn't designed for developers. It could only read the part of the data that had been meant for public consumption.
Consumption. Ernest smiled to himself. The "campers" had been marching happily through the forest, talking to one another and laughing, eating things like "berries" and "mushrooms."
And then the screen went red, and a disclaimer that many species of plants and fungi were poisonous appeared, in an attempt to absolve the creator of the datafeed from any potential liability.
Ernest was so focused on the datafeed that he didn't notice one of the others approaching until he sat down hard beside Ernest, shaking the makeshift bench.
It was Abraham, the other C754. His eyes should have looked the same as Ernest's, since barring modifications, the two of them were genetically identical. But they didn't. Abraham's eyes looked…shrewd.
Ernest attempted to congratulate himself on locating the perfect word -- only he didn't feel very successful. Not when Abraham looked at him like that.
"So. How's the studying coming along?"
"Well, we shouldn't put any plants or fungi in our mouths. They might be poisonous."
"And what do you think soy is?"
The answer seemed obvious, but the way in which Abraham asked the question suggested that maybe it was not. "Soy is what the protein bars are made of."
Abraham leaned forward. "What is soy made from?"
Ernest leaned back an equal distance; being in close proximity to Abraham made him nervous in a way that being close to Will never did. "I don't know."
"You don't know. But you're a C754. You're as smart as they come."
"That information hasn't been on any of the feeds I've seen yet. I would remember if it had."
"Do you have some aversion to biology?"
"Not that I know of."
His gaze went to the white streak in Ernest's hair. "Then how is it that you didn't figure out you should stop shunting when the thirty-year mix kicked in?"
"I only heard of it after I turned thirty. I didn't meet Will until then." And he'd had no reason to believe Will, not yet, so he hadn't acted on the information. Not right away.
Abraham stared at Ernest's hair. He stroked his wispy beard, then stood to leave. "Convenient that you stopped shunting before any major physiological damage occurred."
Convenient? That made no sense. Ernest wondered if Abraham might be working from a different definition of the word, one he was unfamiliar with. Fortunate -- that was the word Ernest would have chosen.
"Abraham, I--" Audrey stepped into the clearing and smiled crookedly. "There you are, Ernest! Last time I saw you, you were blooding all over. You're vertical now."
"Yes."
"It's a hoot to see you next to Abe--hear that? A hoot. Avian idiom."
Ernest attempted to parse it, and failed. "Why--?"
"Did you want something?" Abraham said.
"Oh. Yes. There's something wrong with the magnetic receptor. It goes for about three point two seconds, then it shuts down."
Abraham stood and brushed off his trouser legs. "I know. You're the mod expert--that's why I asked you to re-mount the magnets."
"They're mounted just fine. It's not the mounting that's the problem."
"Then what?"
Audrey shrugged. "You tell me. It's your design."
Abraham followed Audrey without a backward glance at Ernest. Rude? Not quite, not exactly. Not like the characters in old time feeds who said insulting things to "get a rise out of" the other characters, and then manipulate them when they were flustered. It was more like Ernest had ceased to exist for Abraham the moment his machine -- his creation -- was mentioned.
Ernest tried, and failed, to continue studying the "camping" feed. The problem of the magnet mod seemed much more interesting than watching homo sapiens walk through vegetation.
The multi-person POD was difficult to see among the undergrowth. Abraham had covered it in branches so it would be difficult to detect with a quick visual pass. The sound of Abraham and Audrey arguing was easy enough to follow, though.
"It must be the connection. The only thing it could possibly be is the connection."
"I told you, they're on there the right way. Something else is interrupting the flow."
Ernest looked at the system Abraham had created from disassembled PODs. Once he identified all the parts -- the large ones, at least -- he decided the arrangement was really very clever, though he'd expect no less from a C754.
Within the grid, the axles were charged to provide resistant propulsion to the POD bases. If the grid went down, or someone wished to travel off-grid, the PODs' solar power could provide propulsion for a limited amount of time.
Abraham had set up pairs of magnets -- presumably with the same poles facing, otherwise they'd draw together -- to provide their own resistant propulsion. The metal rails would create a sort of feedback loop, and when the magnets' solar power was turned on, the invention should be able to travel on its own much farther than a traditional POD -- as far as the metal rails stretched.
Audrey was saying, "…but if you do this…" and the "railroad" moved forward a few meters, and then stopped.
"There -- it should only do that if we activate the brakes. Would you stop spitting on it? That won't help."
Ernest lingered near the edge of the clearing and studied the setup. He was no engineer. He didn't know -- other than theoretically -- how to piece things together. And yet.
"Saliva is a great conductor."
"Should we hang someone out the side of the car and have them continue to spit on the magnets?"
"I guess that would be awkward."
The argue. It was so much more interesting, more nuanced, than any exchange Ernest had ever had with L0U15E, and yet…he missed her. Terribly.
"Maybe there's another conductor you could introduce," Audrey suggested. "One that won't dry up."
"There should be no need for a conductor at all. Something's interrupting the feedback loop. But that's impossible."
Even though L0U15E had summoned the security ops. That wasn't L0U15E's decision. She'd been programmed to do so. Being angry with her for that would be like being angry with someone for breathing.
"If this only runs for three seconds, then the plan is off. We can't go. You see how far we get on three seconds."
"But what if each wheel fired for three seconds, then turned off, then on again, at different intervals? Then there would always be one or two firing."
"Maybe…but it would slow us down. If the ops come…."
"You've been out here for weeks and they haven't found you. What does it matter if you go slowly? As long as you go far, you'll outdistance them."
And according to Will, the one thing they did have was time. Another whole lifetime, maybe even two.
Laughter filtered into the railroad clearing through a shifting wall of leaves. Ernest left Audrey and Abraham to their invention and followed the sound to the others, who were busy preparing for the journey.
Martha held one of the small metal flasks under a stream of water Will poured from a mostly-intact piece of curved resin that looked like it had been sawed from the top of an old POD hull. The water ran through a cylindrical device -- a filter to remove natural nanites, if the ancient camping feed had been accurate -- and then trickled downward, drawn by gravity, and out through a small opening in the bottom. When the flask was full, Martha handed it off to Elizabeth, who swapped it with an empty flask, quickly, so as not to lose any water.
The actions of filtering and bottling water might be novel to Ernest, but those movements he could parse. It was the way in which they interacted that was baffling, as if they were actors in an old, old feed. Laughter, smiles, camaraderie. They seemed like a sort of group Ernest had seem before. What was it called?
A family.
Before, in the Daddy is a Contractor feed, family conjured notions of biological reproduction. But here, in the way language often did, the word revealed a whole new facet of itself.
"Come help Will," Elizabeth called to Ernest. Her skin creased deeply around her eyes and mouth, but her teeth shone straight and white as she smiled. "His arms are getting tired."
"I'm no wuss," Will said. "Besides, Ernest needs to rest his incision." He sounded petulant, but not really, as if he were exaggerating the emotion for comic effect.
"I didn't say he needed to do any holding."
Martha laughed and added, "Now that someone you want to impress is here, suddenly you're keeping it steady."
They all laughed again. Ernest wasn't quite sure he understood the joke, but he felt a shy smile tugging at the corner of his mouth anyway.
Martha handed a full flask to Elizabeth and quickly put an empty in its place, then glanced over her shoulder at Ernest, still smiling. "Does it hurt?"
"Yes. But not like it did…" the small chute with water trickling out caused him to lose his train of thought. Overlaid, as if two feeds were playing at once in his imagination, Ernest saw the chute that led from the Reclaim machine, with its slurry of water and human ash sliding down toward the grate in the floor. "Not like it did," he repeated, as if that was what he'd meant to be the end of his communication.
"Watch the water," Will told Martha. "I didn't haul it all the way here so you could spill it." He was smiling. A…jest? No, not that. A jibe.
Martha switched bottles again. "You will need to make sure you don't feel too hot," she said. "That could indicate infection. And your temperature isn't being monitored anymore now that you're not shunting in."
Ernest felt a pang in his arm that he mistook for hunger--but of course it couldn't be, now that he no longer had a shunt. Pain, then. Except there was no reason for pain. He hadn't been moving it at all.
Sadness, perhaps. Loss.
Ernest shifted his focus to Will, still smiling, with the muscles and tendons of his bare arms showing, backlit against the lowering sun, in high relief. Ernest decided to think of that--of Will, and the way he felt...the way he made Ernest feel. Something like hunger. But not quite.
Ernest had words for so few things lately.
"Come and help," Elizabeth said. "I'm old."
Martha corrected her. "You're the youngest one here."
"I tire more quickly." Elizabeth motioned for Ernest to come take her place. "We will divide my duties. I will continue to twist the cap on, since both my arms are functional."
Handing the bottle to Martha at the right moment and taking the full bottle away required more precise timing than Ernest would have imagined, and a splash of water was lost to the ground. The others only laughed. It would have been a pleasant task, if only the mud at their feet didn't remind Ernest of the Reclaim grate.
Ernest was usually capable of parsing several things at once: code and language, audio and visual, research and games. But being among a group who were all speaking at once, trying to read everyone's expression and catch the nuances of their verbal communication, took every bit of concentration he had.
Which was how the men in white took them completely and utterly by surprise.
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