The man walked around behind him. Tez felt his hands resting gently on his shoulders. Then, he felt the man’s beard tickling his left ear. ‘My friend…it’s not fear that opens a man’s heart to the voice of God…it is love.’
‘I…I…want to learn. I want to-’
‘We don’t frighten people into believing. We invite them. That is our way.’
‘I w-want to believe! I want to join you-’
‘Shhhh…for you, my friend, I’m afraid it is far too late. Are you ready to die?’
‘Oh G-god…! Please! Please…not those th-things!’
‘The passing from one state to the other is brief in the span of time. Your pain…will give way to oblivion. There’s your consolation my friend.’
The man reached down, pulled up the mesh on the end of the box and Tez began to scream.
CHAPTER 14
Mason was mentally 'wool-gathering'; dreaming about being a much younger man; a time when he believed in the Administration’s purpose, it’s firm but fair control of this vastly sprawling human universe.
The ‘safe house’ that had been provided by one of the church’s Awoken sympathisers was a two room habicube beneath a raised pedestrian plaza. One of many habi's stacked like sugar cubes placed precariously on top of each other, right up and nearly scraping the plasticrete belly of the plaza above. An illicit tower block that gently leaned against, or more likely was held upright, by one of the plaza’s thick support stanchions.
‘Teacher! Teacher!’
Mason stirred, bleary eyed. Exhausted. The thoughts of his naive youth blown away like scented smoke from a tookah-pipe.
It was almost impossible to get any sleep in this cube. Its wafer thin plastic walls kept little of the city’s incessant noise out; the boom-boom of that awful street music, the warbling jingles of holo-board adverts floating by like released party balloons, the echoing whoop of Law Marshal sirens. Worse than that, he was kept awake most nights by the clopping backwards and forwards of somebody in the cube directly above his. He suspected there was a freelance flesh-worker up there, taking in clients at all hours of the day and night.
He’d been stuck in here for nearly a week now. Not daring to step outside. There were soldiers everywhere, at almost every intersection and pedestrian level ramp, all of them equipped with DNA scanners. Illegals - those that weren’t registered by immigration records as being allowed in New Haven - were being rounded up and held in detainment camps.
‘Teacher,’ whispered the young man. ‘There is someone here to talk with you!’ The young brother initiate, visited twice a day with food and water, the only person he’d interacted with in days. He left Mason to get dressed.
Mason looked out of the small porthole window. From the sickly cyan tone of the pallid light leaking in from above he guessed it was officially ‘day’. He pulled himself up off the cot, threw a loose shirt over his vest and pulled on some baggy pants. He slipped his bare feet into a cheap pair of gaudily coloured gel slappies. He licked his palm and made a go of patting down the tufts of his thinning grey hair.
Dammit. Good enough.
Mason emerged from his sleeping quarters into the main cube; a small space in which there was a pull-down wall table, a stool, a broken FoodSmart and little else. The young man had gone. Sitting on the stool was an older man with grey-looking skin, his jaw and chin blotched with scratches and razor-burn.
He must have wet shaved his beard off that morning. it made sense…the colonial marines would be looking out for terrorist-looking types, men with beards.
‘Mason?’
‘Yes?’
‘I have a message for you.’
‘From who?’
‘From the…top.’
No names, of course. The ‘top’ could mean anything from another cell leader, to one of the senior Teachers….to The Leader himself.
‘What’s the message?’
‘They’ve located the girl.’
Mason reached out for the curved door frame beside him. He took a deep breath. Not wanting to hear the answer, but needing to know. ‘Tell me, is she okay?’
The man nodded. ‘She is alive.’
Mason closed his eyes and sighed with relief. ‘Thank God.’
‘Great God be praised,’ echoed the man.
‘They have her? She’s safe, right?’
‘They…they know where she is.’
Mason opened his eyes and looked at him. ‘What the hell does that mean?’
‘I only know what they have told me.’
‘I…I have to go to her!’
‘They…are intending to retrieve her themselves.’
‘No!’ Mason stepped forward into the small room. ‘It’s got to be me. It has to be me who reaches out to her.’
The man shrugged. ‘I only know what I have been told.’
‘You have to tell them…she’ll be frightened. The only person she’ll trust is me!’
‘They have only told me that-’
‘Listen to me! I’m the only face she knows! Anyone else….she won’t trust. She’ll panic.’
The old man shook his head. ‘This is not up to me. I’m only the messenger.’
‘Can you get a message back to them?’
He stared back at Mason, his face noncommittal.
‘Can you make contact with them!?’
‘It was not easy getting here.’
Getting here? ‘Where’ve you come from? Offworld?’
The man looked uncomfortable revealing any more than that.
‘You have, haven’t you?’ Mason stepped toward him. ‘Look…if you have a way to get off this planet…you’ve got to help me! I need to be taken to where she is, it has to be me that approaches her. She’ll be in a very fragile state of mind. If they frighten her, if they alienate her…then everything I’ve been…’ he corrected himself. ‘Everything we’ve been working towards will be ruined. It’ll be for nothing!’
The man shook his head. ‘I cannot help you. I am just a messenger.’
‘But you can make contact? You can get a message back to them?’
He nodded reluctantly. ‘That is possible.’
‘Then tell them this…tell them they have to get me to her first.’ Mason decided his best option was to exploit their superstitions, their beliefs. ‘She has no idea what she is yet. She believes she’s just a normal teenaged girl.’
‘She is the final prophet, Mason. She has come directly from God to us. How can she not know what she is?!’
‘You have no concept, your leaders haven’t the first idea how carefully she has to be introduced to what she is! I created this human vessel…I created a being that could contain the power, the energy of God’s spirit. But…they have to understand, The Leader, has to understand, this vessel is tissue thin. She’s so very fragile…she’s breakable. Her mind will collapse if they handle her incorrectly. Collapse into madness.’
Inside, Mason winced at how this nonsense might sound to any normal rational person. But to these people, these radicals, this spiritual gibberish was their language. It was the framework of how they thought, it was all they understood.
‘Tell them…there is one last key, to make her ready for this. One last important key that only I can give to her. And this will prepare her properly for the role she has to play.’
‘What is this…key?’
‘Like you said…you’re just the messenger. Pass the message along. Tell them they’ve got to get me off this world and take me to her immediately, or it’s all over. We all fail.’
The man looked uncertainly at him. ‘I will pass along to them what you’ve said.’
‘Do it. Quickly! And make sure you make this clear to them…they must not go to her first. It has to be me! Is that understood? It has to me that makes first contact with her! Is that absolutely clear?'
He nodded.
‘Go, then!’
The old man got off the stool, opened the round door of the habicube and stepped outside o
nto the metal steps. He quickly closed the door behind him and Mason listened to his hurried ringing footsteps recede into the throbbing hum of city noise.
He settled down on the plastex stool, still warm from the man’s behind. He looked out of the small round window and watched a yellow Skyhound slowly descend to street level amid a cloud of roaring propellant gas.
She’s alive. Thank God. She’s still alive.
He wondered just how much of this spiritual bullshit he could use as leverage. That was the one angle he could play on them, that was the angle he’d been using from the very beginning…but surely there’d come a point, even with these poor deluded fools, when they would wonder if he was scamming them.
To use an Old Earth aphorism, he felt like the Emperor wearing his new clothes, baring all to see…and waiting for someone, one of Them, to call him out.
I just need them to believe me a little longer. Just a little longer.
CHAPTER 15
Ellie emerged from the medipod, still woozy and lightheaded from sedation.
‘How are you feeling?’
She looked down at the bumps and ridges of knitting flesh around her waist. ‘Do you think I'll have scars?’
‘I dunno. Maybe. At least they’ll be concealed scars, as long as you don’t wear a crop-ee-top.’
Jez helped her across the infirmary to a gel-bed and sat her down on it. ‘How do your ribs feel?’
Ellie’s attention was entirely elsewhere. She gazed, stupefied at the large pink blob on the end of her left arm. ‘What’s that? Where’s my….’
‘Hand? Don’t you remember?’
Ellie recalled being crushed, fearing she was about to be scissored in half by those vicious claws, but nothing after that.
‘My scorpion,’ Jez shuffled guiltily. She looked down at her feet. ‘It…sort of took your hand off at the last moment.’
‘I’ve…got. no. hand. It’s a stump!’ whimpered Ellie. ‘I’ve got a stump instead of a hand!’
‘Hey,’ said Jez, ‘it doesn’t look that bad. Kinda drool in a piratey sort of way, I guess. Remember Captain Jessica Hook from Shuttle Stop 7? Her cyber-hook was pretty shting.’
She gazed at the rounded pink bump on the end of her slim wrist. It reminded her of a giant earbud. The wall screen next to the bed blinked and Mother’s avatar appeared. ‘How are you feeling, my dear?’
‘My hand…I’ve lost my hand!’
‘The gel on the end of your arm is a sealant and an antibiotic,’ she explained. ‘It will take a little while to harden to a resin casing.’
She raised it up to her face an stared at it. ‘That’s it? I’m only going to have one hand and….this….for the rest of my life?’
‘No, Ellie, of course not. We have the facilities here to do a number of things for you. Whatever option you choose, there would be no cost incurred, of course. On behalf of the company I would like to offer a full apology for-’
‘What are the options?’
‘Basically, Ellie, there are three options. One…you could choose to have a cybernetic enhancement.’
‘Yeah!’ said Jez. ‘You could make it, like, a fashion accessory!’
Ellie glared at her. ’I don’t want a robot hand!’
‘I understand,’ replied Mother. ‘Well then the other two options are pretty straightforward. We have several complete gene-neutral human cadavers in cold storage. They’ve yet to be used at all. We could take a hand off one of them and programme the medipod to attach it surgically. There would be no tissue rejection medication required’
‘Some one else’s hand?’ Ellie curled her lips.
‘It’s not ‘someone’’s hand, Ellie,’ said Mother. ‘These are just vat-grown bodies. No minds, no consciousness. They are not ‘someone’; they’re just a suite of replacement parts.’
‘But…I’ll have a mismatched hand, won’t I?’
Jez nodded. ‘That’s a point. She doesn’t want you to attach some big hairy man’s hand to the end of her arm!’
Mother’s cartoon avatar cocked a brow. ‘We have male and female cadavers, Jez.’ Her eyes swivelled back to Ellie. ‘The skin tone may differ slightly though. You really have quite a pale colour, Ellie.’
She wondered if having a different coloured hand would be a problem for her. She’d probably get used to it, but…there was another thought…
Won’t that make me easier to identify?
As things stood she was average looking, unremarkable in appearance and she was finally beginning to think of that as a blessing. Whereas Jez turned heads in any room, Ellie seemed to slip by unnoticed. Being on the run, as they were her being wholly unremarkable was a good thing. Anything about her that stood out, a noticeably different coloured hand for example, wasn’t going to help.
‘What’s the third option?’
Mother smiled. ‘Well, of course, my dear, we could just regrow your own hand in-’
‘Huh? You mean? Oh, God, I…I don’t want to go inside one of those bowls of-’
Mother sighed patiently. ‘You won’t have to go into a fabrication pod. We will take some stem cells from you and grow it in an incubator. Then we’ll have it surgically attached as we would with option two.’
‘So….’ Ellie looked at her stump. ‘It’ll be like it was.’
‘Exactly.’
‘That’s the option I want then.’
‘It will take a while to grow the hand from cells, though. We could fabricate it, that would be much quicker, but it might not be exactly right.’
‘I guess I can wait.’ She sighed. ‘We’re stuck here for six weeks, right?’
‘Five weeks and two days now.’ Mother corrected. ‘You were in the pod for four days. There was some internal bleeding abrasions and bruising to your internal organs, three clean breaks and a number of hairline fractures to your-’
‘How long will it take to grow me a new hand?’
‘A week, Ellie. I will make sure your hand is my top priority.’
‘A week?’ She looked at her stump again. ‘Well…I guess we’re not going anywhere any time soon, are we?’
A week without a left hand? She decided she could cope with that. Perhaps it would even be educational; to live in the shoes of someone handicapped for a while. It might even be good karma-trip for her….to learn to appreciate what she had; a healthy body unplagued by genetic mutations. She recalled a docu-videe she’d watched on the toob once, about poor people who had mis-growths and tumours caused by insufficient radiation shielding on some of the early-stage worlds.
‘Gross-i-o freakos!!’ Ted had guffawed. Dad had told him not to be so bloody rude. That they were all so very lucky to be able-bodied and unaffected that way.
‘Okay, I can cope with that.’
‘Thank you for being so understanding, Ellie,’ said Mother. ‘On behalf of the company, and Shelby and Graham, I really am very sorry for what happened to you. And I will look into what went wrong with Jez’s creature design.’
Jez finished helping Ellie back into her clothes and they left the infirmary. Ellie wanted to find Shelby. There was something she wanted to discuss with him. She’d been sedated for four days. It might already be too late.
*
‘What?’ Shelby’s apologetic demeanour vanished in a heartbeat. A moment ago he’d been repeating Mother’s ‘official’ apology on behalf of the company. But now he was simply bemused.
‘I said…I don’t want my creatures recycled.’
The world had been left untouched since the emergency override several days ago. Pheromones had flooded into the atmosphere and knocked out all of the fabricated creatures. They were, in effect, sleeping and would do so until Shelby and Gray got round to clearing up the aftermath of the battle.
‘Please. I don’t want my creatures recycled,’ she pleaded. ‘My bears…please…don’t mash them up into that gloop.’
‘Why?’
‘They….they were so brave. They don’t deserve to be minced up into biomass
and thrown back into your vats.’
‘They’re not real bears, Ellie!’ said Jez. ‘They’re just, like, toys.’
Ellie shook her head. ‘They had some intelligence. At least my ones did. They could think for themselves and-’
‘It is artificial intelligence, Ellie,’ said Shelby. ‘Organic, rather than digital, yes. But still artificial. Like Frasier, here. He may sound smart, but he’s basically a set of AI modules embedded in an organic neural network. Isn’t that right, Frasier?’
The chimpanzee looked at him. ‘You can be so charming, Master Shelby.’
‘I don’t care! They were brave. I want them to live.’
Jez put an arm around her narrow shoulders. ‘Oh, you are such a mooshy sentimental chik. I guess that’s why I love you so-o-o much.’
Ellie shook her arm off.
‘We do need to tidy up World Three. More to the point, we need to recycle the creatures…especially those scorpion-like creatures of yours, Jez. Those need to be analysed by Mother to see what went wrong.’
‘Oh, sure, you can scrap those crazy things. But not her bears. Let my Ellie keep her creatures. That’s the least you can do for her.’
‘To do what with them, exactly?’
‘To let them live,’ replied Ellie.
Shelby sighed. Ellie could see he wasn’t particularly keen on the idea. She imagined the idea of World Three being occupied for no profitable reason, being messed up by un-policed teddy bears wandering around, irked his OCD obsession for squaring things away.
‘For how long?’
She shrugged. ‘For a while?’
Shelby tutted. ‘You think you’re doing them a kindness, hmmm? Letting them live?’
‘They deserve it.’
‘So you want to let them live in that world, in that castle for a while?’
She nodded.
‘You understand they will grow used to the idea of living. Their basic intelligence will begin to develop. They will forge friendships, memories, perhaps even genuine emotions….and what then? When it finally comes time to clean out that world, Ellie, and recycle those fabricants? Hmmm? Do you see what I’m saying?’