Chapter XVIII
Lyra
With my sprained ankle and Ian's zombie-like gait, it took nearly ten minutes to reach the exit at the opposite end of the gigantic enclosure. I was relieved to see that Ian's wave of energy had wiped out all the robots-- in my weakened state, I would have had no chance of evading any oppositon.
The heavy steel door opened without resistance, and we stepped out into the hall. The fluorescent lights, in their artificial day/night cycle, had begun to dim as evening approached outside. To the right were the dormitories, the cafeteria, the examination room with its bizarre robotic monitors... no good hiding places. To the left lay a long corridor of unmarked doors. Any one of them could open into a small niche full of medical supplies and armaments with a heavy lock, or a roomful of robot guards. There was no time to spare; I turned left and ran down the corridor, Ian following silently behind. I tried several doors, but all of them were locked.
What a surprise.
Suddenly Ian grabbed my arm.
"We're being followed," he said. His voice was quiet and raspy and lifeless.
I scanned the hall behind us carefully, but saw nothing.
"There's nothing there."
Ian closed his eyes, and I could tell he was "tuning" his ESP.
"There!" He pointed, his eyes still closed.
I looked closely at the spot he pointed to. It just looked like a normal section of hallway, at the spot where the floor joined the wall. Except... were the lines just a little curved? Was the white tile just a little darker than it should have been?
Suddenly, the image jumped out at me like an old-fashioned "magic eye" book: one of the tiny spy robots. It had been standing perfectly still, its reflective hide blending in almost perfectly with the hallway, but when I saw it, it began slowly backing down the hall. Hefting the assault rifle, I chased it down and backed it up against the wall. It began scuttling like a cornered animal, it's claws scrabbling furiously as it climbed backwards up the wall. I took careful aim, then fired a steady stream of bullets at it. Most of them pinged harmlessly off the narrow front portion of it's body, leaving tiny scratches and dents. A few found their way under it's armor, hitting the wireframe legs. It's right front leg gave out, and it dropped to the ground, the damaged leg trailing uselessly. It shuddered a bit, and I took aim once again, confident that this tiny automaton would yield quickly to the tearing bullets.
A warning signal of precognition flashed briefly through my mind, but it was too late: in one swift movement, the robot crouched like a grasshopper on it's four hind legs and leapt into the air, slashing my left arm as it passed by.
Letting the gun dangle from my neck by its strap, I held my hand to the deep gash on my arm. The three fingers of the little robot's remaining front leg had locked together into a single long, wickedly sharp blade, which it held, dripping with blood, like the front leg of a praying mantis. It's other legs were braced for combat, and it whirred menacingly.
Infuriated, and with adrenaline pumping through me to counter the effects of blood loss, I grabbed the assault rifle and flung it into the air, catching it by the barrel. Wielding it like a cudgel, I bashed the robot into a tiny mess of twisted metal plates and circuitry. Finally, satisfied that it would not get up, I once again pressed my hand to the wound on my arm to staunch the flow of blood.
"Let's get out of here."
After several turns and twists in the hallway, I judged that we were far enough away from the destroyed training room that we would not be found immediately should someone search for us. Finding an unlocked door, I slipped inside and quietly closed and locked the door. I fumbled for a lightswitch. A tiny, dim bulb hanging from the ceiling snapped on, illuminating our dissapointingly unsecret hiding place: a janitor's closet.
Disheartened, I sat down on a liquid soap box.
"Great. It's only a matter of time before they find us here," I said.
But Ian seemed distracted. He kept looking around as if trying to find the source of a sound only he could hear. Finally his eyes rested in the far back corner of the long, narrow room.
"Aha."
He walked to the back of the closet. Following him, I saw that there was no floor: the tile simply stopped, and gave way to dirt. Ian crouched, sweeping dirt away from in front of him as if searching for something. A small metal ring was revealed, which he pulled up on.
A large square panel, about three feet by three feet, swung open, dirt and dust spilling off as it was lifted. In the hole it had covered, I could just barely make out a rusty iron ladder, and beyond that, cavernous darkness.
Ian stood and turned back toward the door from which we had come, raising his hand. I moved aside as a concentrated band of distortion rippled out from his fingers, and wrapped itself around a flashlight sitting on one of the metal shelves of the closet. As if moved by an invisible hand, the flashlight levitated a foot off the shelf and flew straight into Ian's hand.
"How are you doing that?" I asked as he wrapped his fingers around the thin transparent tube, and the shimmering energy dissapated.
"I don't know," he said. "I just can. If I think something, it happens. I'm sure it was their intention when they did whatever experiments they did to us to give us some kind of telekinetic powers, but I don't think anyone really knows how it works. But the ghosts have something to do with it, I know that much."
He shook the self-charging flashlight to power it up and switched it on and grasped it in his teeth, then began descending the ladder. Closing the hatch above me, I followed him down into the darkness.
The ladder plunged deep into the earth, finally ending several yards below the trapdoor, its ends held by bolts driven into a dark stone floor. Ian dropped past the last few rungs, tensed, and made a sweep of the darkness with the powerful flashlight. The beam revealed an immense, oblong artificial cavern, perhaps a hundred feet wide and several hundred feet long. The walls, floor and ceiling were of rough-hewn basaltic rock, carved straight out of the earth by heavy machinery. I could not see the far end of the cave in the stifling darkness.
Ian's shoulders slumped, and he slowly exhaled. His relief was comforting-- if there was anyone or anything in this cave, I thought, Ian would sense it.
He led the way toward the far end of the chamber, sweeping the beam of light back and forth. Finally we reached the far wall. Shoved against it in a neat row were ten or so large plastisteel supply crates, their lables obscured by layers of thick dust. A few feet away were a large mahogany desk and a leather office chair, looking ludicrously out of place in this subterranean vault. They too were covered in several inches of dust.
Ian swept his hand over the desk, and the dust was blown away by a wind that suddenly sprang up from his fingertips, revealing a single crowbar, a pad of paper covered in scratchy print, and a pen.
"You could have just blown it away, you know," I said.
He shrugged, and leaned down over the piece of paper. The writing looked scratchy and hurried. The first line started: "If you are reading this..."
I looked at Ian. "Do we really want to know?"
"It doesn't matter; we have to read it." He levitated the flashlight into a permanent hanging position illuminating the note, and began to read.
"If you are reading this, my final message, know that I am dead, or might as well be, having been captured and imprisoned by my own government. No credit card companies or goveernment datalinks, save perhaps one, have record of my existence: every trace of my life has been wiped clean, for the simple reason that I knew too much and didn't like what I knew. I write this now in hopes that it will soon be discovered and released, and my plight made public.
If you don't already know, this installation is dedicated to deforming and twisting humans for the purpose of creating an army. A handful of powerful political and technological leaders from around the world have formed a pact, pooling their resources in an attempt to expand the limits of human beings to create supersoldiers through experimentation on living human subjects. These experiments are unethical, painful, and potentially fatal to the subjects: according to my observations, an average of less than 20% of them live through the procedure and the following long-term coma."
Ian stopped and looked up.
"Less than 20 percent," he said softly. He looked as if he might be sick. He took a deep breath and went on.
"These few survivors are further thinned by dangerous and intense training sessions against active robot enemies using live ammunition. Some, faced with a life of servitude, choose to take their own lives.
Due to the nature of these experiments, the nominal age range for the subjects is twelve to eighteen years. Most minds outside of this range are destroyed by the cerebral and psychological tampering integral to the experiment, or their bodies are unable to survive the weakening coma that effectively shuts down their bodies while their minds reset.
Most of these children (for that is what they are-- children!) are selected based on their genetic makeups and psychological and physical resilience, then snatched away from their families, usually from third-world countries where there is no record of their birth, although in recent months they have been collected from major cities attacked by the Tenae and declared dead or missing..."
"Bastards," I said. "How could they do something like this?!"
Ian set the paper down, his hand shaking. He was breathing heavily, and his already pale face was even paler, and tinged with green.
"I can't keep reading this," he said. "I just need some time to think... rest. That's what I need."
He sounded desperate. I could tell he had been running on fumes, both physically and emotionally, and he now looked like he could keel over at any moment. He moved out of the funnel of light cast by the flashlight, to one corner of the cave. Within a few moments I heard his breathing become slow and steady, and I knew he was asleep.
I flipped through several pages of the message on the table, but I didn't dare read any more of it. I would already have nightmares about all this into my forties, if I even lived that long, and I did not think I needed to hear another grisly detail.
At the end was the author's name and title; "Ted Langford, Director of Janitorial Services", and a date: August 7, 2251. The name, of course, was meaningless to me, and the date as well, but the "P.S." below caught my eye.
"P.S. In this cave you will find several crates, the contents of which might be very useful, as well as an electrical generator. I took the liberty of excavating and stocking this cave in hopes that it might be of help to someone attempting to escape this hellhole. That's one perq of being a janitor: you have all the keys to all the rooms, and no one ever questions you. Good luck."
I grabbed the flashlight from it's bizzare hanging position-- as soon as I touched it, the field of distortion around it dissapated. Shaking it to renew the charge, I swept it in a circle, finally resting it on a small indistinct shape near the wall, a few yards away from the desk. As I got closer, I could make out more details. Sure enough, it was an old energy generator/storage unit, with a cable leading up the wall of the cave and into the darkness. It was not quite antique, but certainly old enough that I had only seen its kind in museums and old photographs. I searched it for a minute before finding the gauge showing how much energy it held-- not an LED readout, an actual gauge. It read as full. I had heard that these things could hold energy for practically as long as it took for them to fall apart. Still, I would not get my hopes up until I actually saw it working. The power switch was right next to the gauge. I lifted the clear plastic cover, switched the switch from "O" to "I", and stepped back to see what would happen.
The machine slowly hummed to life. A red power light flicked on. I looked up toward the ceiling, waiting to see what the cable led to. Slowly, yellow spots began to glow. I realized I was seeing the filaments of lightbulbs-- not fluorescent, thank God. The light increased in intensity and spread, banishing the deep shadows of the cave, filling it with a warm yellow light. I could now clearly see the lights fixed onto the featurless ceiling, the walls and floor, the supply crates, the desk, the generator, and Ian still asleep in a corner.
"Better," I said to myself, simply to hear a human voice. "What next?"
I took the crowbar from the desk. It was surprisingly heavy, or maybe it just seemed to because of my weakened muscles. I cracked open the first crate in the long row, and smiled at its contents. Inside were many square partitions. There were about twenty assault rifles to one side of the crate, each with its own square prism-shaped partition, and to the other side, stacks upon stacks of ammo clips. The next crate held enough foil-wrapped MREs, Meals Ready to Eat, to feed two people for two weeks.
I methodically worked through the whole row of crates, finding camping supplies, mechanical tools, spy hardware, communications equipment, clothing in several different sizes, everything one would need for a long-term hike and then some, down to the two-ply toilet paper... except the thing I most crucially needed at the moment.
I realized, when a drop of blood dropped from my arm and spattered onto the top of a crate, that I was in serious need of some medical supplies, the physical activity of this morning having re-opened the cuts. I had been bleeding almost nonstop for hours, including the new gash I had just received a few minutes ago from the surprisingly vicious spy robot. As if realizing this reinforced it, I suddenly felt terribly weak, in both body and spirit. I felt weaker than when I had awoken, and my legs had refused to respond. I felt weaker, I guessed, than I had ever felt in my life. It was not just the loss of blood; it was that the weight of my predicament had suddenly come crashing down on me. I had no memories. I had no life. Unless Ms. Fletcher had been telling the truth, I didn't even know my own name. If I had had parents, they were probably dead now, if not at the hands of the Tenae, then at the hands of the U.S. government. My government. The one person I had met who hadn't tried to kill me so far, besides a few nameless scientists, was Ian, and what proof did I have that he could be trusted?
I leaned back against the rim of the crate, and slowly slid down until I was sitting on the dusty rock floor. For the third time that day, I felt like just lying down and never getting back up. The first time, Ian had pulled me back up, both figuratively and literally. But now he was as disheveled and dispirited as I was, perhaps even more so after his unique encounter with the "ghosts".
Forget Ian, I thought. Back in that training room, you pulled yourself and Ian back up. You have arguably more information in your head than anyone else on the planet, a knowledge of practically every known martial art, a crateful of weapons, and no proof whatsoever that Ian has any kind of intention other than helping you! So get up, forget being tired, and figure out a way to escape before you're found!
I got up and rummaged through the crates until I found what I was looking for: a wrist computer. Unattached and in standby, it looked basically like a very tiny laptop, although those had been obsolete for years. I flipped open the protector panel and pressed the power button. The tiny screen flicked on instantly, to no big surprise: like the old generators, wrist computers could hold a charge for as long as they were intact, and this one had never been used before. Personally, I hated the things, but they did serve their purpose.
I found a box of data discs and slid one into the slot on the side of the computer. Then, holding it above the note on the desk, I set it to scan. After scanning all three pages of the note with the small scanning peripheral, I steeled myself and forced myself to look through the information. I found it was full of incriminating info, including a long list of names of people in on the operation, and the locations of several of the labs. I looked through the computer's files, trying to find one of the unmistakable Grid access icons, but to no avail. I realized it wouldn't have any reason for being hooked up yet: it was brand new, and the military hadn't activated it yet. I made two copies of the file, saved one to the computer, and saved one to the disc, then slipped it into a protective case and clipped it to a belt loop.
I spent about half an hour looking through all the supplies a second time, selecting useful bits and pieces, choosing rations, and piling them around the desk-- if we actually managed to escape the installation, it would be a long hike out of the mountains and back to civilization, since the nearest cities were along the coast. I didn't know the terrain or the exact distance, but I knew it would take a while. Oddly, when they downloaded information into my head, they neglected giving me any actually useful, practical information other than things having to do with combat. My only knowledge of things like survival techniques, geography, history (other than famous war tactics) was hazy and very limited, which meant I must have remembered some knowledge from school and life, even with my other memories gone.
I finished readying the supplies. Now we were almost ready... to escape!
---------------------------------------
Ian
My eyes still stung from burst blood vessels. The pain slowly brought me back to consciousness. I opened my eyes... and immediately leapt to my feet, ready to defend myself. My eyes were still blurry, but I could tell I wasn't in the cave. There was light-- a soft yellow glow.
I blinked several times, my eyes cleared, and I realized I was still in the cave. There were lights set in the high ceiling that had been turned on.
Lyra was a few yards away. She turned and saw that I was awake.
"Hi. I found a generator. Got the lights working. I guess you noticed."
"Ughhh," was all I could say. I slid back down onto the floor, and leaned against the wall to keep from slumping forward.
"Still tired?" she asked.
"Yeah."
I realized she was holding a roll of medical tape. Her arms were almost completely covered in it, and dark red blotches showed through it.
"You're still bleeding?"
"Not as much now," she said. "How's the burn?"
I looked at my arm, still hard and red, looking more like crabshell than human skin.
"It's pretty well cauterized, so there shouldn't be any problems. All the nerves are pretty much destroyed, so I can't really feel any pain."
She looked closely at the wound, and made an involuntary face of disgust.
"It'll leave a scar if you don't treat it," she said.
"I know. But it will heal well enough. It'll hurt like hell when it does, but I expect to be in a real hospital on the coast by then."
"Speaking of which," she said, "our friend the janitor left us some supplies for the trip." She motioned to two piles of supplies, food rations, weapons and ammunition.
I forced myself up and examined the supplies closely.
"Hmm. Should be everything we need. We just need some packs to carry it all."
Lyra pointed to one of the big plastisteel crates.
"Packs and camo gear in there." But almost as soon as she moved her hand away from the freshest wound, blood began flowing steadily from it again. She pressed her palm hard against the gash, wincing.
"We can't leave until those cuts stop bleeding. You're already starting to look pale. Where's the medical stuff?"
"Umm... there wasn't any. I found the med tape in the closet."
I sighed. "This guy left us all this stuff, but he didn't think to put in any medical supplies? No med foam? No stitch kits?"
"I guess not."
I started pacing. I couldn't help it, it was just a natural instinct.
"Dammit! I hate this!"
Lyra looked almost as pissed off as I was, but for her finding med supplies was even more urgent.
"I know. If this keeps up, I won't even be strong enough to escape. It's not going to stop!"
I kicked the dust in frustration, trying to think of what to do.
"I feel helpless, just hiding in here."
"Helpless? You crumpled up two robots like paper, and shut down another two hundred without even moving!" she said.
"And it almost killed me. If I try that again, it will kill me. If I thought I could get the supplies, I would try. But I'm not strong enough to take on more of those robots, and I wouldn't know where to find med supplies. I wish I could do something--"
Suddenly, I felt a sharp tug in a corner of my mind. The "ghosts" wanted my attention. As soon as I directed my attention towards them, they once again rushed into my mind and took over.
No! Not again!, I shouted at them as they forced me back into a corner of my mind.
Their reply was muddled and confused, somehow, but I could just make out the meaning:
We have something to show you.
I realized they were using my own brain to translate their messages into words. Alone, they could not manipulate matter or contact humans. They relied as much on the products of these experiments (like me) for a passage into the physical world as these would-be soldiers relied on them for their powers.
Lyra realized what was happening.
"Hello? Snap out of it!"
I watched as if through a window or computer monitor as the "ghosts" moved my body.
"Do not be alarmed," they said, almost in my voice, but somehow slightly different. They moved toward her.
What are you doing? Give me back control! I yelled.
Please, watch! We wish to help!
Lyra inched back. She moved slightly into a defensive pose.
"We are here to help."
They held my hands up. I could feel their power surge through me as they began to work.
-------------------------------------
Lyra
I watched every move intensely. If there was even a hint of treachery, I would not hesitate to defend myself, even if it meant hurting Ian... or at least his body.
His hands hovered a few inches from my face, palms out. I saw the familiar distortion in the air, only this time it was more gentle, more like ocean rollers than the typical white-water waves.
I experienced a moment of panic as it reached me, for my whole body suddenly froze. My first thought was that I had been tricked, and they had paralized me somehow. Then, I felt the energy begin to move. It coursed past my brain, down my spinal chord, and out into all the nerves in my body. It was like being hit by lightning-- except that it didn't hurt. If anything, the faint static tingling was pleasurable.
It began to spring back up into certain areas of my skin. I realized the energy was collecting around all the cuts criss-crossing my flesh. Finally it stopped moving. I felt the intensity of the tingling rise, then slowly subside, followed by a maddening itch. It lasted only a few seconds.
When it subsided, Ian took control again. He stumbled back as if a bucket of cold water had been thrown in his face.
I tore off my bandages to look at my cuts, where the ghost energy was just starting to dissapate. I simply stood there, staring at what was happening: the cuts were healing, right before my eyes. In a matter of seconds, the skin grew back together and began building up again, until not a trace of any cut was visible-- not even a pink line were the skin was still thin. I felt my face. The cuts were gone from it, too. I rolled up my pant leg-- not even a bruise.
Ian stared in amazement. I stared back.
"We may just have a fighting chance after all," I said.
Ian simply nodded. Then, his shocked expression was slowly broken by a smile. It was not a particularly happy smile, but it was very meaningful nonetheless: it was finally time. We were ready. All that could be done in preparation had been done. It was time for action.
"Let's go," he said.
__________________
Step right up and shoot pasties off the nipples of a ten-foot bull dyke! Win a cotton candy goat!
|
It is done. If anyone is still reading, I will try to turn these out faster from now on. I am a big perfectionist, and I have to make sure that everything is just the way I want it before posting. I'm taking this a lot more seriously than the fics I've done before, because it has a lot more meaning. Or at least it will. Hopefully, if you compare this with earlier works, you will already find more meaning in this than in those old ones. If not, it's just me. I mean, someone else might find a different kind of meaning, or maybe it won't mean anything to them at all, but... it is meaningful to me. So. There you are.
Up top, Silversnow!