Archived Parts: One, Two, Three, Four,Five, Six, Seven, Eight, Nine, Ten, Eleven, Twelve, Thirteen Fourteen, Fifteen, Sixteen, Seventeen, Eighteen, Nineteen , Twenty, Twenty-One, Twenty-Two, Twenty-Three, Twenty-Four, Twenty-Five, Twenty-Six, Twenty-Seven, Twenty-Eight, Twenty-Nine
Part Thirty
The train car glided forward, occasionally swaying. The movement felt surprisingly POD-like, and Ernest's eyelids grew heavy where he sat, propped against Will at his side, with the wall of the car pressing into his shoulder blades. Even Will, who claimed that he hadn't slept in a POD in over four years, had trouble staying awake—though every time his head dropped forward, he jerked back to attention and blinked.
"You should sleep," Ernest said. "Last time we stopped, you cleared more of the blockage than anyone else. You must be tired."
Will ground his thumb into the corner of one eye. "I'm fine. How about you? Are you feeling okay?"
Ernest was nauseated and his head throbbed. "Yes. Good."
Will's arm tightened around his shoulders. "You're such a liar." He pressed his face into Ernest's hair. "Just so we're clear, I'm still livid about what you did back there in the radiation."
"Will…."
Will breathed into Ernest's hair, hot against his scalp. Ernest thought maybe he was trying to convey whatever it was he wanted to say through touch, but after a long moment he spoke again, quiet and desperate. "I can't lose you. Do you get it? Because everything we've done, recruiting the specialists and salvaging the PODs—everything I've ever worked for…." He squeezed Ernest against him so hard it was painful.
"Will…."
"None of it means a damn thing if I can't share it with you."
Ernest pulled out of Will's grasp so he could turn and face him. Will's eyes glittered in the LCD beam. "We are sharing it," Ernest said softly. "Look how far we've come." He thumbed a half-formed tear from the corner of Will's eye, considered it for a moment, then touched it to his tongue.
Salt.
Will cupped a hand around the back of Ernest's head and drew him into a kiss. A gentle kiss—because he was being tender, or because he'd realized they were most definitely not immortal, and even though he'd lured Ernest away from his POD and away from the city, it might not have been enough—and Ernest could very well be the next to die?
Eventually, though, exhaustion overtook grief, and Will's mouth slid from Ernest's as he sagged against the fiberglass wall in fitful slumber, brows hitched as if he couldn't let go of his worry, even in his sleep.
Ernest propped a pack of spare clothing under Will's arm and carefully extricated himself from Will's grasp. He cast around to see if there was anywhere he might reasonably expect to rest himself, and noticed everyone else was asleep—everyone but Abraham.
Abraham glanced over the top of Charlie's old, cracked datascreen. To his side, his fingers twitched as he keyed, slowing as he made eye contact with Ernest, though not stopping. He looked back down at the screen.
How much had he heard? Everything, Ernest supposed. He'd need a VR helmet to block out a conversation in such a small space. And how much had he seen? His eyes flicked up to meet Ernest's gaze, then back down again. No doubt he'd seen everything, too.
"What are you writing?" Ernest asked—because it seemed that anything would be preferable to the awkward silence.
"Maybe a gig of nothing. We'll see when I'm done."
Ernest moved to the front of the train car and pressed his eye to the hole. Even with an LED mounted on top of the bin, it was impossible to make out much more in the dark than fleeting shapes. Besides, Ernest could swear he felt Abraham's gaze on him like a physical weight. He turned. Abraham was looking, but his eyes dropped down to the viewscreen just as Ernest faced him.
"Why are you using the screen without the audio?" Ernest asked.
He'd expected the reason to have something to do with conserving solar charge, or maybe even the desire to keep quiet so everyone could sleep. But instead Abraham said, "It's more efficient."
That made no sense. Abraham was supposed to be as intelligent as he was. "Can't you parse written and verbal data at the same—"
"Of course I can." Abraham keyed even faster while he spoke, though he scowled down at the screen, not meeting Ernest's eyes. "If I had my own processor, I'd do it. But Audrey's got her POD-mind so heavily modded it would probably want to inflict some sort of grief counseling on me or sing me a lullaby instead of helping me write a routine."
Judging by Abraham's scowl and stiff shoulders, not to mention his tone of voice, he disapproved of Charlie's mods. Ernest, however, felt no impatience, only an empty, poignant longing. What if he'd been able to afford modding Louise to that extent?
She'd still be with him. Not the whole POD, not unless it was in pieces. But Louise…the strings of code that made her who she was…if only he'd known the truth about Reclaim, if only he'd known about the tattle-strip so he could disable it, he could have taken steps to keep her from being erased.
"As it is," Abraham said, "the damn thing keeps making winky faces at me."
"I'm sure Audrey built in a bypass. Even as creative as she is, I don't think she'd sacrifice functionality for—"
"It's fine. Forget I said anything."
Forgetting on command…that would be quite a trick.
Ernest settled back against the wall of the train car and shut his eyes, and tried to pretend he was back in his POD. The rocking motion of the car nearly lulled him to sleep. His consciousness flirted with the fringes of dreams, and if he ignored the hard fiberglass floor against his rump, he could almost pretend he was cruising down a magnetic strip, shunted, sedated, climate-controlled, and blissfully vertical.
The train car's clumsy, shuddering stop plucked him out of that fantasy. Audrey was the first to her feet. "What now?" She pressed her eye to the hole in the front of the car and sighed. "I can't tell what it is. Too dark."
She stepped over Will's legs and pushed the side flap open, but Benjamin, moving more quickly than he looked like he should be able to, grabbed her by the upper arm. "Stop. Be careful."
Audrey chafed at the spot he'd grasped. "But we're out in the middle of nowhere. Isn't that the best idiom ever?"
The expression was lost on Benjamin. "You don't go first, you're small and weak." He pointed to Will. "Him. Me. With Tasers."
"He's right," Abraham said before she could object. "You'll just have to 'hold your horses.'"
Will shook off his drowsiness when a Taser was pressed into his hand. He and Benjamin slipped out of the train car to assess what had stopped the railroad this time. Even the few moments they were gone made Ernest's pulse begin to race, and unease fluttered in his chest.
The melodramatic things people said and did in those old-time feeds made more and more sense every day. He wrung his hands to see if the action would help quell his anxiety. While he couldn't be sure if the motion really did any good, it at least distracted him for a moment—until Will pushed open the flap, confident as you please, and said, "It's all clear. And get this—it looks like a building fell on the tracks."
It wasn't a modern building, not exactly, but it wasn't an old-timey wood and brick building, either. Ernest wasn't totally clear on the timeline, but he suspected the building couldn't have been more than a couple of centuries old. The health monitors had been housed in a structure such as this, with polymer-infused cinderblock walls and compressed Styrofoam roof shingles. Though the construction methods had since been banned to keep the city from being buried in non-biodegradable materials, it didn't make sense to simply abandon the buildings that already existed. Ernest had read they were actually quite sturdy, if ungainly and utilitarian.
Not sturdy enough to resist the creep of wilderness, it seemed. This building had been tumbled by trees that hadn't even existed when it was originally erected. Many of the bricks were still whole, and though a few had fragmented into a few pieces, they didn't show the erosion and wear that the old structures at the edges of the city did. Or the other city, the radiation-poisoned city.
Ernest felt queasy.
"Why was there a building in the middle of the forest?" Elizabeth demanded, as if the discovery of something unexpected annoyed her.
"Maybe it used to be in the city, but someone moved it," Audrey suggested. "Or maybe it was here for maintenance on the tracks. Or maybe there were more buildings, but they've all fallen down and this is the last one left. Or maybe…."
Abraham checked Charlie's viewscreen. "Radiation levels are normal. It's almost morning; we might as well spread our solar panels. Those bricks are twice as heavy as they look. Clearing the tracks is going to take a while."
He plugged in Charlie's audio, and the AI said, "There's fresh water nearby. You might as well get comfortable. And, by the way…I wouldn't dream of singing you a lullaby."
Will slung his arms around Ernest from behind, remembering Ernest's clear-coated surgical wound only at the last moment. He hugged Ernest's back to his chest and leaned his cheek into the top of Ernest's head. "I'll handle the solar panels. You need to rest."
Ernest strongly suspected the "hurling" might begin again if he got too comfortable. He took a deep breath to quell the nauseated sensation. "I think I smell that water Charlie's talking about. I'm going to go look."
The sky was pre-dawn pink, and the shapes of trees and landscape that had been hidden by moonlight and the harsh focus of their LEDs rose, mist-like, from the darkness. Ernest found a gap in the undergrowth with mammal tracks pressed into the earth. If Louise were there, he could have scanned them for her and asked her about them. But of course, she wasn't. He ducked a branch and followed the gentle curve of the dirt path. The sound of Benjamin and Will sizing up the bricks—discussion about how old they were, how many, and how to move them—was swallowed up by the forest more quickly than Ernest would have thought possible. The vegetation was not terribly dense, and red motes of sunrise began to shine through gaps in the leaves, twinkling, illuminating the trees.
The light shimmered through a gap, and Ernest squinted and averted his eyes. Green afterimages in the shapes of the spaces between the leaves danced beneath his closed eyelids.
Now that his eyes were shut, the scent of the forest flooded his senses. He'd never thought about water having a smell. He'd never thought about lots of things. His nose guided him deeper into the undergrowth, and though he did need to open his eyes to avoid tripping over tree roots and rocks, he didn't lose the scent.
Ernest walked, and walked some more, and finally, there was water. He tested the earth that bordered the creek. It was spongy, but it would hold him. The water's surface was nearly half a meter down from the bank, but if Ernest knelt he found he could reach it. He skimmed the surface with his fingertips. Cold. Water bugs danced away from the ripples his touch created.
He only had one flask with him, he realized. But that was fine. He'd fill it, and now that he'd found the water, he could go back for more. Several trips, if need be, because he couldn't carry much. Audrey wasn't the only one in the group who was "small and weak." And, he realized, she had full use of both her arms.
The ripples slowed and stilled, and Ernest paused to stare at his reflection as he bent to fill his flask. He hadn't realized he looked quite so worn and intense—though once he bent closer still to get a better look at himself and the reflection didn't move, the realization that it was not his reflection at all hit him, and he flinched back, startled.
He turned and found Abraham standing behind him. Not some other C754, some stranger, he told his pounding heart. Just Abraham. Unfortunately, his heart wasn't at all reassured by that knowledge.
"Why were you so interested in what I was working on?" Abraham asked. "I'll bet you could read my keying hand, even upside down."
"No."
"No?" He narrowed his eyes and raked them over Ernest, who wondered if perhaps he would feel less vulnerable if he stood, or if he'd look like he was trying to be threatening—when the last thing he wanted to do was make Abraham feel angry or threatened. "Are you sure? Because if I'd been stuck cleaning data fifteen hours a day for the past twenty years, I'll bet I could."
"You're you. I'm me."
Abraham gave a laugh that had a bit of humor in it, but only a bit. "How true."
Perhaps so, but when he squatted down beside Ernest, the way they balanced their weight on the balls of their feet and planted their elbows into their thighs, they seemed more like mirror images than two separate beings.
Abraham pulled his handheld from his pocket and passed it to Ernest. "It's ready now. Have a look at the code."
Ernest read, scrolled, and read some more. "Are these the nanites you programmed for Martha?"
"No. They're based on them, though."
Ernest read on. The routines where the nanites would undergo fission and render themselves into carbon looked consistent with what he'd seen at the funeral, but the rest of the program…he wondered if he was reading it correctly. "This is for decontamination."
"Will it work?"
Ernest scanned the routine again, tweaked a command, and saved. "You ran sims?"
"Yes. Successfully."
"Then, yes. I think it should."
They straightened their legs to stand, both shifting their weight to their heels at precisely the same moment. Ernest, though nauseated and woozy, needed to press his lips together to keep from whooping with joy. Abraham watched Ernest's reaction, and allowed himself the shadow of a smile.
Back at the railroad, Elizabeth seemed pleased enough to stop hauling bricks so she could double-check the program. "Add in a sleep routine. Decontamination will go faster if it's the main process your body is focused on."
While Ernest suspected his physical body was a lot like Charlie running on a too-small processor—no better at healing itself while at the same time trying to speak and think and digest and whatever else he did when he was awake—the notion of allowing himself to be mechanically sedated made him anxious. "We don't really need to, do we? I'll stand very quietly. I won't talk. I won't even think. About anything."
Abraham asked him, "How many nights did you shunt in and trust yourself to your POD?"
Ernest considered. "Seven thousand, three hundred, twe—"
"Then what's one more nap?"
Slumber without a POD was scary enough—horizontal and exposed—but out in the open without the capacity to awaken if need be, it was positively terrifying. Will's voice rose from the brick pile on the tracks, mingling with Benjamin's as they bickered over their task. Ernest turned and looked toward Will, what could be seen of him around the train car.
Yes, Ernest decided. He'd allow himself to be vulnerable. He'd accept being exposed. He would surrender control to this group of individuals rather than an AI. And if it were only his own life at stake, maybe he'd decline the nanites and let nature take its course…but seeing Will hauling bricks, perspiration glistening off his brow, his cheekbones, and his chiseled bare arms…knowing how much Will had invested in Ernest's recovery, how could he refuse?
Elizabeth set him up inside the train car, so it wasn't quite as frightening as lying there, splayed and exposed, in the open air. Even as hard as he tried to rationalize that the train car was really a giant POD, he still had to swallow back his panic with his nausea. Elizabeth scanned him and went over his readouts while Abraham swiped a foil square over the nanite port of his handheld. It was a small thing, innocuous…the same sort of medium fastened to the exterior of the simulated coffee drips Will once sold in his shop. Ernest tried to assure himself that the procedure was all quite safe, though deep down he knew, even with the sims they'd run, it had its risks.
Outside, there was a crash of stone on stone, and then the bellow of Benjamin's voice calling, "Health Monitor!" Audrey pushed open the door flap, stuck her head into the train car, and said with obvious delight, "Come see all the blood!"
Elizabeth set down the readout and sighed in exasperation—and Ernest noted she responded to the title Health Monitor these days as if she'd trained for position herself, and not just an aide. "Go ahead and get started without me. I'll be back soon. It can't be all that bad out there. The screaming's already stopped."
She eased her stiff joints and brittle bones out the door flap, and suddenly Ernest found himself alone, yet again, with Abraham. "Why?" he blurted out, and then he realized it was probably such a broad question it made him look foolish.
"You're part of my team. I'd do the same for any of us. Even Benjamin." Ernest studied Abraham's eyes, and wondered if maybe the set of his mouth was not quite so harsh as it had always seemed to him, and if maybe there was a kindness to his eyes. "Besides, if anything happened to you, Will would be useless." He handed Ernest the foil square. "Go on. No sense in wasting any more time."
The last foil square Ernest pressed to his thumbnail port had given him a flood of false flavor information. This patch was different. It didn't feel quite like shunting in; it was connected by much smaller vessels, and the nanites were far too diminutive to actually feel them entering the bloodstream. But the effects of the sedation routine were obvious enough. Ernest meant to speak, to ask Abraham to bring Will in one last time, so he could say goodbye in case the experiment didn't work, and the next batch of nanites he received were the same as those that turned Martha to silvery ash. But Ernest got as far as drawing breath to say Will's name, and then everything went black.
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.
The final version of Zero Hour is now in ebook, including 6 interior illustrations by Jordan and a gorgeous cover by PL Nunn. Buy Zero Hour at JCP Books
Dont miss the next serialized story, Magic Mansion. Sign up for JCP News and you'll know as soon as it's posted!