When Captain Case took me to my guest quarters, the first thing I did was to throw my clothes into a cleaner. Case had suggested just tossing them, and I told her that she was welcome to let Lauren burn my Beta team shirt, but the pants had a special purpose. I didn't want to leave them behind. The next thing I did was to step into the shower and scrub myself about a dozen times. I didn't think the stench of the sewer pipe would ever come off, but eventually, it did.
Once I was as clean as I could reasonably expect, I sat on my bed and checked my messages. Captain Case came in, looking unsurprised at the sight of the tablet, though she did shoot me a grin. "That little toy could get you into a lot of trouble if you aren't careful," she murmured.
"Hence the reason I'm keeping the pants," I admitted. "Hidden pockets."
After the revelation that I'd been a patient for months, I give up. The pain and guilt- not for myself, but for what I'd put my dear grandfather through- is just too much for my young heart. The next time the doctor comes into the room, he tries to get me to eat, but I refuse. I insist I'm just not hungry, that I feel too sick to eat. I can see it in his eyes... he knows the truth. Fortunately, at that point, he chooses not to push me.I wonder what shape the computers are in, but no one will tell me. That, by itself, tells me something. They aren't in good shape. If they were just fine, no one would hesitate to tell me they were just fine. Eventually, they try to tell me that anyway, but I don't believe a word of it.I spend the entire week refusing food. The doctor tells me sternly that I need to eat, that starving myself won't do me any
The next morning I was awake early, sitting on my bed, fighting the tears. Grandfather... I missed him so much. He'd saved me from myself, and I could tell from the tenor of his messages that he desperately wanted to protect me. He wished he could call me home and find another way to complete my mission, especially after hearing what had happened to me in the Underground.He couldn't... I was the best candidate to complete this mission, if not the only candidate. We'd lost too many good people already... it was my fault and my task.I wished, though... oh, how I wished that anyone else could do this job! That I could just return to Central Control and wait for someone else to find the damn keys and make the computers work!The door opened and my pity party was interrupted as Jake stuck his head in. "Hey, Cap sent me
The trip took about a day and a half. With auto-pilot on the long stretches, the driver just drove right on through, stopping only to use the toilet or to visit young ladies for reasons I won't get into. He asked me not to tell the captain about them. I just replied that it was none of my business and I wasn't likely to see her again anytime soon.When we arrived at the neighborhood, he stopped after about three blocks to let me off. "Good luck on whatever it is the captain sent you here for," he called to me. "Oh, and watch out for the Dame.""The who?""Not sure which house it is, but there's some crazy lady in these parts that lost her husband a few years ago. According to the locals he was robbed and killed on the street, but she's so nuts, she thinks he just stepped out on her and she's waiting for him to come
As much as I loathed pretending to be a dead man, at least I got a shower out of the deal, something I only had once a week in the Underground. Captain Case had been very kind to let me have free access to the water at her base, and I figured it would be a long time before I ever had another shower. Clearly, I was wrong... never had I so wished to be right.I went into the bathroom, took a very quick shower to get rid of the dust, then wrapped myself in a towel and returned to the bedroom. I caught a whiff of something familiar and I felt a complicated mix of dread and anticipation.The mist... this woman somehow had access to the same stuff the general had used in the Pit... and her bedroom was now full of the stuff. At least it gave me a decent excuse for getting dragged into her bed. It didn't help the guilt all that much; I had no idea how I would explain a
For the first day, Vanessa alternated between sex and sleep, putting me through all kinds of insanity. She released me only long enough to use the toilet- while she watched, of course, then she marched me at gunpoint back to bed and locked me in place.After a full day of meeting her demands, I started to feel weak, and I wasn't sure if it was from hunger, dehydration, or the damn mist. She kept it turned on at all times and my brain felt like it was slowly being baked by it. I begged her for food and water. She gave me occasional sips of water but withheld food."I think you need to earn it, Richard, given what you've put me through," she told me airily as she indulged in a large bowl of exotic fruit, making my mouth water. "When you learn to obey me, then we'll see about food.""I won't learn much if you starve me
After giving myself over an hour to attempt to come up with a solution, I started to look around the room for ideas. I dug into whatever drawers I could reach for tools to dismantle the bed but found nothing useful.I did find a few leftover snacks, which I devoured with an appetite only the truly starving could understand, but they gave me very little strength.I turned back to stare at the body, my mind working furiously. There was only one solution... the bed wasn't fastened to anything that I could tell. It was damn heavy... but if I wanted to get out of here, I needed to drag it across the room to get to Vanessa and get the key. It was my only hope.I moved to the foot of the bed and tugged. It might as well have been cemented in place, for all the good my tugging and yanking did. I leaned my head against the b
And so, my new life as one of only five children living within Central Control began. I don't understand why I am not allowed to go home- aside from the fact that it takes over a year for me to recover well enough to function properly again- but eventually, Grandfather explains it to me. Central Control has been a tightly-kept secret for years. Centuries, even. Ever since the very founding of our colony world.Now that I know about it, I can't be allowed to talk to anyone else about it. They wanted to use their mind machine to wipe my memory, but after one of the scientists made the mistake that resulted in a drug interaction- that nearly killed both of us- it's no longer safe to even try it. As far as my family knows, I just vanished. Grandfather too... he can't go home, either. He will stay with me at the mountain, stay with the Ten... he will be one of the world's heroes that tries to keep
Dragging myself out of my memories was getting harder, but I finally succeeded. I woke to find Lauren leaning over me. She turned and called out, "He's awake!""About damn time, but I can't say I really blame him, all things considered." Captain Case appeared on my other side. "How are you feeling, Toby?""I've been better," I muttered, taking a quick inventory of my physical condition, and finding it in better shape than I expected. "I've been worse, too. I feel pretty good, considering that you found me on the floor shackled to a dead woman's bed. How the hell did you find me?""It was a series of deductions that even the ancient detective Sherlock Holmes would be impressed by," Captain Case said dryly. "Here's the basics: your driver regularly drives this route. When he made his next trip, I asked him to check an
One week ago, Professor Jonathan Spafford's mortal consciousness fled this world. Every time I let myself think about it, I feel the agony anew, and I have to take a few seconds to hide in his memories, to hear his voice and feel his love around me. I understand more and more what Mirele meant... but at the same time, it's different. As long as I'm still alive, still drifting in my digital home, I'll keep his memories safe until we can find a way to bring him to life, just as he turned us into living computers.I've been in contact with a few people that have such programming experience, creating Artificial Intelligence constructs, both as programs and as actual droids. Some of them worked on the droids that are now moving all over the surface of Horus, rebuilding our world into the beautiful, shining Utopia we remember it once being.They have told me that my idea is a long shot at best, insane at worst, but one of them admitted that he had worked on a project where an AI's m
Four hours later, Lance stood at Grandfather's bedside with a grim look. He had done as much as he could to treat the stroke, but this one had been far worse than before. Grandfather had no motor function left, and the only reason he was still alive was because the machines around him wouldn't let him die. He hadn't regained consciousness even for the shortest time. Lance had activated a speaker in the room so that I could talk to Grandfather directly, but he hadn't moved or reacted. Seeing him like this broke my heart. It looked like I was going to be cheated of the chance to say goodbye. The rest of the council came to his room and surrounded his bed. Candy took Grandfather's hand in hers, squeezing it a little as tears rolled down her face. "Lance, we've been talking, and... I think we should go through with Toby's idea."
A full month passed and we had managed to restore at least partial function to most of the critical systems. Communications, transportation, utility services, the replicators, and a basic shell of the entertainment system. As things stood at the moment, aside from illness or injury, there really was no reason for anyone else to die from the Crash. Not easily. We got the system of surveillance cameras back online, and for a while, Mirele and I would use our break times to just watch happy couples getting married in parks that were slowly coming back to life. We'd watch new parents stroll along streets with their newborns, and we'd watch older couples, the rare survivors of their generation, as they would walk through their towns and reminisce. Once the general story of what had taken place was finally revealed- and the people could use the Net again- an electi
When Grandfather rolled in the next morning, looking much better than he had the previous day, I was reasonably sure that I was ready. Mirele and I had let Candy in on the plan and practiced with her for an hour. It was about as good as it would get without giving it entirely too much attention. That would require ignoring what was supposed to be our real job. Putting our shattered world back together. As soon as he had rolled up to the computer and looked over the screens to check our status, I figured it was time. I could feel Mirele near me and caught a wordless wave of encouragement from her. It was now or... well, not never, but I knew that if I waited too long, I'd lose my nerve. "Good morning, Grandfather." His head lifted so fast, I saw him wince as it kinked a nerve. He stared into the camera. The voice
For the next hour, I wandered around the hard drives with the data files. I learned all kinds of things about audio systems, about how sound mixers worked, and how we could alter the samples to mimic what I recalled of our own voices. The thing was, I needed to use Mirele's memory of my voice and my memory of hers, because what we remembered of our own voices wasn't accurate to what others heard. Our memories were filtered through our heads and typically sounded much lower than our real voices.I then dove into the process of altering and creating a ton of sound clips for different syllables, creating a small dictionary of voice clips. This was how they had done it in the old days and I knew there had to be a more efficient method, but I wasn't a programming genius.Yet. By the time I was done, I would know more than any computer engineer in existence.
We'd been given a task to perform, and we took it seriously. Perhaps a bit too seriously. In our laser focus on getting the systems back online, neither of us noticed that Grandfather had been trying to get our attention for several hours. I finally spotted the data stream as I was flying back and forth between several of the sector computers, getting all the droids active and back to work.Initially, it looked like he was just being conversational, asking us how things were going. The last few messages sounded downright panicked. I think he was afraid that we were indeed getting lost... getting so deep into the system that we were losing contact with the outside.I felt so bad for panicking him. We needed a better way to do this, some method for him to signal us. A summons command, or something like that."I think there's supposed to be one programmed in, but I'm not sure why it isn't working," Mirele said as she started to explore the inputs again."Maybe it's
I had no idea how long I'd been digging in the files before I finally located the highly sensitive files that involved the actual functions of the hunk of rock and metal that we called Horus. After a quick consultation with Mirele- I had discovered that we could communicate with each other without having to vocalize actual words- we decided to pull a copy into our server since it was critical data. We couldn't risk damaging the original copies held by the Ten. I went through the files... there was so much here, it could take months to comprehend it all. Fortunately, whoever had designed the Ten had done so in a way that actually made it pretty user-friendly for the central control systems. We didn't have to know everything about how they worked, we just had to know whether the data we received from the systems were telling us that they were working right, or whether something was wrong.
Mirele had to get my attention again, pulling my back from my fascination with the complexity of the system. "Do you have all the inputs and outputs figured out?" she asked.I took another look around... it wasn't long before I had figured out where everything was coming from, and I was encouraged when I realized that I actually understood what it all was. This wasn't all that different from our practices. The only real difference was that we were now fully and permanently engaged in the server, with no sense of the outside except through our peripheral devices.I missed it, to a point, but having such incredible clarity and speed of thought was a decent trade-off. I had Mirele with me... the only thing that would have made it perfect was if my grandfather was in here as well.I focused on the output where Mirele wa
"Toby?"Ugh, not this again. I was so incredibly tired of having to be woken up after blacking out.Wait... I was in a computer, so how the hell could I have passed out?"Exactly... you didn't pass out, you just lost your orientation. Now pay attention to me.""Mirele?" I asked."Duh, who else? There's no one else in here, at the moment, anyway."I couldn't see her, since I had no eyes, but all at once, I sensed her presence as I would have through the wires before we'd been dragged in here. I was so relieved... I was afraid that she would be fried like Lance had thought might happen."In case you haven't noticed, my father has a bad h