Archived Parts: One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Eight, Nine, Ten, Eleven, Twelve, Thirteen Fourteen, Fifteen, Sixteen, Seventeen, Eighteen, Nineteen , Twenty, Twenty-One
Part Twenty-Two
Abraham strode back toward the railroad with Will directly behind him. Will was still hollering, demanding that Abraham see reason. Abraham was calm and quiet.
Ernest crouched beside Audrey and put an arm around her thin shoulders. He wondered why it had occurred to him to touch her, but she leaned into him and cried, and he supposed she would topple forward if he let go now. He said, "I don't think Benjamin knew what happens in Reclaim. I found him in the lobby, so maybe he never really saw what was going on. And even the ops who work the machine, they only see the loading end of it. Or maybe he did know about Reclaim...but even if he did, I don't think he understood. Not like Elizabeth. Not like me."
Elizabeth stirred, and turned on her side. She looked at Martha, and said, only, "How?"
Audrey snuffled. Ernest said, "The security ops damaged her spine."
Elizabeth stared for another moment, and nodded. Ernest supposed she had seen death before in her profession, or maybe it was simply difficult to read the expression nestled in the delicate folds of her skim. She and Audrey began to speak of Martha, how intelligent she was. How funny. How determined. Elizabeth seemed much better suited to comforting Audrey than Ernest was. Which left a small chink in which worry about the railroad could insinuate itself.
"I'm going to go...check on...Will." It wasn't entirely a lie, and the women did not seem disinclined to let him leave.
He found Will and Abraham seated on a horizontal log a few meters from the railroad. Will had his arm around Abraham's shoulders. Abraham had his face in his hands. When a dry branch rasped against Ernest's shirt Will looked up, caught his eye, and patted the log on the other side of him. Ernest sat awkwardly.
He glanced at the railroad. It appeared that Abraham had not yet dismantled it. "Have you reprogrammed the nanties?" Ernest asked.
Abraham lowered his hands and gave Ernest a...what was it? Depressed? Despondent? Resigned? He gave Ernest a decidedly unpleasant look, and said, "What?"
"The nanites. In the magnet bay. They're set for a three centimeter loop, but you've scaled up the propulsion to power a larger POD, and now they're..." he glanced... "I'd say approximately five point five from terminus to terminus. The delay would shut the loop down."
Abraham gazed on the railroad with weary eyes. "I suppose you can reprogram nanites in your sleep."
"Not in my sleep, no. But if Audrey has an interface, you can give me the figures and I'll overwrite the code."
"Don't you get it?" Will said. "If you drag her body back into the city, they win. Those bastards who killed her for no good reason, they win. That's the last thing she would want."
Abraham stood, moving slowly and stiffly, and rested his fingertips against the side of the railroad. "I'm not leaving her like that," he said to Will. "If it were your lover," he glanced at Ernest, "you'd do the same."
"Don't bring him into this. I don't know what I'd do, okay? But dragging him back to Reclaim wouldn't be an option."
One moment Ernest felt a strange ringing in his ears, and the next he found himself sitting in the dirt. Will crouched beside Ernest, wrapping strong arms around him. "Are you all right? Were you injured? Is it your shunt arm?"
"It..." Ernest fought a wave of nausea by tucking his head between his bent knees. "It is passing."
Will hugged Ernest against him hard, so that Ernest's face pressed into his sternum nearly to the point of pain. Was it hunger? Fatigue? Ernest didn't think so. He'd been experiencing those things for days. No, it was the thought of his own body being fed into the cruciform hopper of the Reclaim machine that made him woozy and ill. "Promise me you'll never bring me there."
"What?"
"Promise. Now."
"Whatever you want." Will kissed the top of Ernest's head, then said, "There, do you see? Wouldn't Martha have said the same thing?"
"Very politic," Abraham said. "Very convenient."
Ernest almost asked L0U15E for an alternate definition of convenient, since that was the second time Abraham had used it in regards to him, and neither time was it in a context where Ernest found his own response convenient in any way. Whatever the alternate definition might be, it made Will very angry.
"If you have something to say," he told Abraham, "then come out and say it."
"You recruit someone for our team, and he just so happens to know how to fix the flaw in the repurposed mechanisms?"
"But I was a data clerk..." Ernest said quietly. Neither of the others seemed to be listening.
"And when I talk about going back to Reclaim, well, it just so happens he's been there too."
"He was looking for his POD, you twit. He thinks it's his mother."
"No I don't," Ernest said. "Of course I don't."
"So what's next? He starts reprogramming the Railroad's nanites, and then, when he gets the signal from the Deacons, he gives us the all-clear to launch. Right into their trap."
Too many emotions flashed over Will's face for Ernest to interpret. "I'm not talking to about this. Not now. You don't know what you're saying -- you're upset about Martha. We all are."
"I know, all right. He bats his eyelashes and what little common sense you've got rushes right down to your dick."
The color drained from Will's face. They were speaking so quickly, there was a distinct lag between the spoken words and Ernest's parsing of the meaning.
"You've been my best friend ever since I can remember," Will said, "since the Natal Center -- and this is what you think of me? You're saying I'd bring a traitor into our group?"
Abraham set his jaw. C754 or not, with that expression, he looked very little like the scans Ernest had seen of himself. "Not knowingly."
Understanding came to Ernest as the other two men faced each other, silent and grim. He struggled with a way to tell Will that Abraham was wrong, because he couldn't quite find the words -- and didn't the guilty parties in old-time feeds always proclaim their innocence the loudest? But before he could figure out how to phrase it, Will said, "That's it, then. We're leaving."
Will grabbed Ernest by his wounded shunt arm and dragged him toward the undergrowth where the supplies were stored. "Where are we going?"
"Some of these supplies are ours. We'll take what's fair -- what we can carry -- and we'll get out of here."
Ernest recalled the homo sapiens in the "camping" feed. "I don't think it's possible to carry more than a few days' worth of supplies." In fact, he was so much slighter than Will, and weak from his surgery besides, he worried he'd be able to carry even less than that.
Will dragged a container of protein bars out from a concealing thicket, crouched in front of it, and began counting out their share.
"Will? You don't think I have anything to do with the security ops, do you?"
Will counted out a few more bars, then planted his elbows on his knees and buried his face in his hands. "If you do, don't tell me. I don't want to know."
Ernest paused. He'd expected Will to say no. "I don't." He'd never had to explain himself before, and it was more difficult than he'd thought it would be. "When they came into the coffee shop looking for Matthew, I was afraid of them. And when I saw what they did to your reading room, I was angry." And then, of course, there was the Deaconate. Ernest could hardly begin to describe his feelings there. "Security ops are all lazy and mean, and they're cunning. I would never betray us to them. I..." he searched for the right word. "I hate them."
Will raised his head and ran a hand over his face. Dappled sunlight caught the pale stubble on his jaw and made it sparkle. "I can't imagine not having Martha to talk to. She was my friend, too."
Ernest suspected it would be an awful lot like having a question for L0U15E, being on the brink of asking, and then realizing she wasn't there -- and would never be again. But he knew better than to compare Will's homo consummatis friend to an AI. Will was already convinced he didn't know the difference between a person and a POD-mind.
He dropped to one knee beside will and placed a hand between Will's shoulder blades. Will did not sag against Ernest as Audrey had; he was all tension and stiff angles.
"We won't survive without the others," Ernest said.
Will let out a long, drawn-out sigh, and began pitching the bars he'd counted out back into the pile. "You're right. Not in the forest." He glanced back over his shoulder in the direction of the grid, even though its current location in proximity to them was obscured by undergrowth and trees. "But we could survive in the city. I've done it four years now. We'll just need to find some cover jobs in a place the ops don't care much about -- maybe somewhere the gaming signals are patchy...."
Ernest supposed that if Will had dodged the security ops once, he could do it again. Audrey could color the gray streak in Ernest's hair blue or green or some other improbable color, and for a few years at least, he and Will would be able to blend in. And if anyone looked up from their gaming long enough to suspect that the two of them were getting on in years...well, those people would probably have their own appointments with Reclaim soon enough.
Audrey had been planning to stay behind anyway, and Abraham was sharp; if he removed his whiskers he would have no problem losing himself in the population either -- but would he even want to reintegrate? He didn't seem very keen on compromising. And then there was Elizabeth....
"Will -- I don't think everyone else can survive without us."
Will was so quiet that Ernest wondered if he'd even heard. Ernest was just about to repeat himself when Will began to nod. "You're right."
"You've known me a lot longer than Abraham has. He has no reason to trust me. But if you do, that's all I care about."
Will slipped an arm around Ernest and pulled him close. "You know what I keep thinking? What if that had been you? What if the ops decided you were the biggest threat, and they killed you instead of Martha? What then?"
Then, Ernest thought, there would be no problem. The railroad would be the same as it always had been -- with the addition of Elizabeth to the group. It might not be able to travel for more than a three-second burst...but the reprogramming of the nanites was nothing more than a task. They could figure out how to complete it.
Abraham's mistrust of Ernest had no step-by-step solution.
Ernest stood and brushed dead grass from his trousers. "I was serious when I told you not to bring me to Reclaim when I die."
"I know."
"And I wouldn't take you there either. I don't know what I would do, exactly. Figure out some way to demagnetize you myself. It's more than they would have done for you at the Deaconate."
Ernest turned away to head back to the railroad so he could begin formulating a plan to solve the three-second firing issue.
"Wait."
Ernest paused and looked back. Will's face had gone white.
"What are you saying?"
"They're not demagnetizing anybody."
"But...how do you...?"
"I saw."
Will strode up to Ernest and grabbed him by both arms. Ernest's bloodied shunt arm gave a horrible twinge, but he didn't pull away. He welcomed the pain; it anchored him in his present reality, far away from the steaming, chopping hulk of the Reclaim machine.
"How can the Deacons do that?" Will demanded.
"It's very simple. They lie."
Ernest no longer wished to discuss the Deaconate. It left a cold, hard feeling deep in his abdominal cavity where he imagined his stomach might be, or possibly his liver. Will offered no resistance when Ernest took him by the hand and led him back to the railroad.
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