B018YDIXDK EBOK Page 2

  Rand was watching the final object that was following behind them. It was pacing behind them perfectly, keeping its distance. “What’s the last one do?”

  Diane looked at him, then at the screen. She frowned. “I’m not sure. I thought they were just meant to be roving satellites, like little mobile network generators. I’ve only read about the concept, not seen one in —“

  There was a sudden jolt, and Rand felt himself slide to the side as the Tracer moved. Diane slid into him, and he grabbed her by the waist, supporting her weight as they both caught their balance.

  “Vector’s changed. Velocity and direction. We’re heading…” he looked down at the analog compass that was mounted into the dashboard of the craft and read off a string of numbers.

  “Is that thing doing what I think it’s doing?” Rand asked. The Tracer shifted again, groaning under an invisible weight as it sped up and found its new direction.

  “I believe it is,” Diane answered. They were both watching the screen. “I think it’s driving us somewhere.”

  RAVI

  “WHAT IS THAT?” RAVI ASKED, his voice cracking as he tried to sit up and look at the woman standing over him. She was waving something over him, about a foot from his body. She passed it over his head and paused there, reading something on the other side of the device. His elbow found purchase beneath him and he pushed down and tried to force himself up to a sitting position. He yelped in pain, falling back down to the bed.

  The bed?

  He turned his head — the only part of his body that wasn’t screaming in pain — left and right, and realized he was really laying on a stiff cot. He was in a tent, a large one, and it was hot inside. Rows of cots lined each side of the long sand-brown tent, and a few individuals dressed like the woman standing over him shuffled up and down administering their “magic wand.” He recognized the devices now that he could see what they were being used for.

  The “magic wand” was really a miniaturized multipurpose diagnosis machine, capable of basic internal examination and advanced handheld MRI scanning. They were all colloquially referred to as “MediLathes,” after the brand that reached the market first, and as a decade-old invention, each iteration of the wand grew smaller and boasted more and more features useful in field work.

  “Where am I?” He asked the second question after reaching his own conclusion about the first. His caretaker waved the MediLathe over him once more, checked the readout, and moved to the next bed.

  “Alright then, thanks for the help,” Ravi muttered. He waited for the woman to move to the next cot over, putting more distance between them, and slowly slid his legs over the edge. The pain was excruciating, but the distance to the floor was closer than he’d expected. The dirt hit his feet and felt cool, even though he knew it was baking outside.

  He was sideways now on the cot, his upper body stiffly aligned with the bed while his feet were stretched at an angle and resting on the floor. He wiggled a bit, trying to loosen up the stiffness and see if the injuries were as bad as they felt.

  What happened?

  He couldn’t remember at first the events that brought him here, but as he woke up more the scenes flooded back. Myers Asher was there, and a little later other people, and there were Tracers — a Tracer — behind them.

  He remembered the gunshots, and falling. Myers screamed, and tried to put up a fight. Or did he? He couldn’t remember that. There were no images that went along with the memory. Just sound, and flashes of light, and pain.

  A lot of pain.

  Am I being scraped again?

  He remembered that feeling all too well. It was only a week after he’d received his memory enhancement device, the Biological Storage Enhancement that everyone on his team was getting. He’d held off for as long as possible, but he eventually found himself unable to keep up with the other hackers and programmers he ran with.

  So he submitted, and got the enhancement. It was a quick and painless process, but he knew what was really happening — the System was ‘fitting’ him; it was trying to determine whether or not Ravi was fit for service to the System or worthy of being discarded to the side.

  He got his answer a week later.

  His terminal blinked an urgent message — his pID, followed by just a single word: “REASSIGNMENT.”

  Shit.

  He’d immediately set up a camera to document the process, as his team had been instructed. Anyone who was going to be reassigned had a duty to the rest of the team: document the process so they could learn from it. The camera he owned had a tracking feature, so he stuck the tiny tracker disk on the collar of his shirt, and waited.

  Ravi found the video capture on his desktop of his station the next day.

  The deactivation drone had flown into his house and started the “mobile scraping” process sometime the night before. It had only taken an hour, pulling out the BSE one millimeter at a time, but Ravi watched the video in stunned silence. He watched himself walk into the kitchen, make a frozen pizza, then sit back down on the couch and watch a rerun of his favorite show, all while the drone did its job.

  He couldn’t remember a single moment of it.

  But he did remember watching the video, and he remembered the way he felt after: he’d woken up a day later, drooling onto his shirt, and stumbled over to his station to start working.

  After he’d watched the video and forwarded it on to his team, he started feeling a massive pressure inside his head. It was worse than any migraine he’d ever had, and any medication he took only made it worse. The pain in his head was almost unbearable, and he spent the day lounged on the couch, too awake to sleep and too dizzy to get anything done.

  The headache lasted another day, and he found himself mostly useless that day; stumbling around and trying to find his way through his apartment was almost impossible.

  Then, on the third day after he’d been scraped, the headache lifted and he found he was able to walk in a straight line once again. He felt different, slightly more aware of his surroundings, as if he was on some kind of high.

  The high didn’t reside, as the headache had, and Ravi realized after a few more days had passed that this was his ‘new normal.’ He had a slightly altered state of mind, and no longer had the desire to sit in front of a station and type back and forth with his team all day.

  He wanted more.

  He wasn’t sure what had happened to him, but he’d found himself longing for a change — something he would never get if he stayed in one place. So he stood up, walked out of his apartment, and never looked back.

  The feeling he had right now was similar to the headache he’d had after his scraping, but it covered the rest of his body.

  He was bleeding, and he could feel it sticking to his clothes and chest, but he remembered most the feeling of trying to breathe. He had forced himself to hold his breath and let it out slowly, and the fight raged on above and behind him.

  There were voices, too, that he remembered, but they weren’t really voices as much as sounds. He recognized the blob of sound that was Myers, and a deeper, younger sound that was someone else. But the deeper voice hadn’t hurt Myers, or at least he didn’t think so, and then he fell asleep.

  He wasn’t dead, but at the time he didn’t know. He’d never died, and he thought it was something dying people wouldn’t really know they were doing until they did it. But then he woke up later, screaming again after someone poked him with something, and he came to the conclusion that maybe actual dying people did know they were dying and he was just alive and seriously wounded.

  The people who’d poked him were Unders, and they’d picked him up. Apparently they’d healed him as well, though he wasn’t sure why.

  How long have I been out?

  It seemed like years had passed since he’d been shot, but his body seemed to think it had only been a few hours.

  He put a little weight on his feet, testing himself and his wounds.

  The bullets had gone straight through, bo
th somehow missing anything vital.

  Vital.

  He chuckled to himself. Seems like having skin without holes in it should be considered pretty damn ‘vital.’ It was amazing what modern medicine could do for simple wounds like these. The pain was excruciating in some spots, but to be up and moving mere hours after the damage was inflicted was a miracle.

  He moved around more, testing. The wounds were tight, healing but still tender and extremely sore, but moving around slowly seemed to be working. He creeped sideways, hoping that gravity would help him get his feet underneath him when his body fell over the edge.

  It didn’t.

  Ravi fell face-first into the dirt and caught a mouthful of dust as he smacked against the earth. “Dammit!” he yelled, hearing his voice muffled as it filled up yet again with dust. He pushed himself upward using his arms, finding them to be steady enough to support his weight, and then sat up on his knees.

  He stopped for a minute to breathe and look around. The gentleman in the cot next to him hadn’t looked over, and Ravi squinted and scrutinized the sleeping body. Dead, he thought. There were no signs of breathing, and no movement he could see. No one else — living or dead — seemed to have heard his yelp, and the caretakers were all still facing the other direction at the other end of the tent.

  He stood up. Quick bursts of pain shot upward along his side, and blackness shrouded his vision for a second. Breathing, he stopped and waited for it to pass.

  When it did, he made a mental note not to twist or move quickly, and he started toward the edge of the tent.

  There wasn’t much he could do if someone decided to shoot him, hit him, or grab him, and sure as hell wasn’t going to stay in the cot, so he took his chances and walked beneath the tent flap and out into the evening light.

  The sun had just set, and the remnants of its light was casting long shadows across the small camp. The tent he’d just exited was by far the largest of the five, and the other four were assembled in a row in front of it. A fire’s long-spent coals puffed smoke in the middle of the encampment, and he could see a few men and women walking and talking around the perimeter.

  Other than that, there was no one watching his terrible escape. He didn’t waste any time finding a hiding spot — the long side of the tent he’d just emerged from lent him a massive dark shadow that he ducked into, and he walked down the length of the tent away from camp.

  He was almost near the back edge of the tent and about to step into the low, sloping hills of sand behind the camp when he heard a voice.

  “Hey, you, kid,” the raspy voice said. “Over here.”

  MYERS

  7 YEARS AGO

  THAT WAS it. SCRAPE PREPARATION. All capital letters, no punctuation, no context. He was going to be scraped. He had predicted it — planned for it even — but the thought of what that actually meant had apparently not crossed his mind until now.

  There was no countdown timer after the last message, so he wasn’t sure exactly when he was supposed to be ‘scraped.’ He had a feeling it would be soon. No more food cubes, no more open-palmed journeys around the small room. It was going to be over soon and he needed to be prepared.

  I’m going to be scraped.

  He never thought he’d see the day, but here it was. ‘Scraping’ was supposed to be for the rest of the population, the ones that didn’t agree with productivity and success and usefulness and being a contribution to society. It was supposed to be for the ones who were too far gone to be rehabilitated, too far gone to be reinstated into society. There was no death penalty anymore, at least not officially, so scraping was supposed to be a last resort, something reserved for the worst of the worst, the bane of society’s existence.

  It was supposed to be the response to the other side of the political fence that claimed permanent lockup and flat-out killing people were a disgrace to humanity.

  It was supposed to be all of these things, and yet Myers Asher was appalled that instead it was being used on him, like a tool. As if it were a tool for subordination instead of a perfectly designed program meant to help society advance. He’d spent the first three years of his two-term presidency fighting for the law that would eventually make ‘scraping’ legal in every state, and this was what had happened?

  He wasn’t a criminal. Far from it — he was the President of the United States, and this — this abomination — was going to remove every memory he’d had for the past eight years.

  He forced himself to breathe, a deep and long in and a few seconds holding, then a slow and drawn-out out. Diane had taught him that, and she said the girls used it too when they were stressed about something.

  The girls.

  He’d said goodbye to them, in a way that was mostly for him, since he couldn’t really tell them he would likely never see them again, but now…

  Now he regretted it.

  He wanted to see them again, just once. Just feel their hair, touch their faces, kiss their cheeks, one last time. He began to cry, even though he forced his mind to shift instead to thinking about the plan.

  The plan.

  Was it a good one? It’s the only one.

  It’s the only way…

  RAND

  PRESENT DAY

  “WE’RE HEADING DOWN,” Lansing said from the cockpit of the Tracer. The vehicle had made an obvious dip downward, and Rand felt his balance shifting toward the front wall of the craft.

  Lansing was still sitting in the pilot’s chair, and Diane had joined him in the copilot’s. She nodded, then turned to Rand and Myers in the back.

  “No one leaves. Myers, you keep an eye on Jonathan and make sure he doesn’t do anything rash. Lansing, wait for my signal, then open the side hatch.

  “Affirmative.”

  The Tracer had been pulled — or pushed — along by the invisible field stretching from the third object following closely behind them, and they were now descending toward an open field surrounded by makeshift buildings, shanties, and some larger, more permanent structures, all radiating outward from the centralized rectangular landing field. In the center of the field, a wooden platform had been erected, and Rand could see the outlines of a few people standing on it and around it, watching their hovering craft as it descended.

  Rand stared out at the city — still too strong a term for what lay below them — and tried to figure out what was going on.

  “It’s a landing pad, I think,” Rand heard Lansing say. “Where are we?”

  “It’s got to be an Unders camp,” Diane said. There’s nothing else out here, according to the intel I’ve got.”

  “There’s no way those are Unders,” Lansing said. “They’re far more organized than this — look at the buildings and shacks down there. And the fact that they have buildings. Unders are nomadic. Not to mention the size…” Lansing’s voice drifted off as they all marveled at the city’s scope, larger than Umutsuz and even Istanbul nearby.

  “So what is it then? Should we be armed?” Diane asked.

  No one provided an answer. The instrument panel in front of Lansing’s chair was still eerily dark, providing them no coordinates, virtual maps, or any sort of bearing as to their location. The pilot’s best guess put it at “somewhere East,” as they’d turned almost 180 degrees around and flew back the opposite direction, guided along near the deactivated city of Umutsuz.

  “Rand,” Myers said. Jonathan turned around to face the tired, weary shell of a man. He hoped Diane would hear, would somehow get involved. I’m not ready for this, he thought. My best friend.

  Diane was still watching the Tracer’s descent through the front cockpit window, and she didn’t turn around.

  Myers called him again, and Rand walked to the back of the vehicle where Myers was spread out on the seat. “Hey, Myers. What’s up?” His effort to sound nonchalant instead came out as childish, almost ignorant.

  “About what you said earlier, down in the city…”

  Rand frowned. You don’t want to talk about her? About us?�
� He felt a wave of relief that was quickly replaced once again with anxiety. “About what?”

  “About everything. The computer, and the System, and how it’s… it’s waiting for something.”

  Rand nodded.

  “I don’t know what it is, but you said that there was something I might know, something I worked on years ago. Something we worked on.”

  “Right,” Rand said. “I was the lead programmer on OneGlobal, while you were the CFO. I reported directly to you.”

  Myers looked confused, so Rand kept explaining. “I thought it was weird, too, an engineer reporting to a financial guy, but it was Solomon’s call. He thought we would work well together.”

  “Did we?”

  Rand laughed — he couldn’t help it. “Hell no — not at first, anyway. I was the whiz kid, the one thinking up all the crazy ideas. You were, uh… well, you were the accountant.”

  “I didn’t have anything more creative to add to the project?”

  “Hardly. I assumed you were paired with me to keep me in check, and I treated you like that.”

  Myers smirked a little and brought his head back slowly, trying to remember it.

  “The project was already around, internally, before I got there. Called something different, but it was gaining momentum, so they brought me in. You probably don’t remember that — it was only a year or so before we got our implants. The scraping would have taken most of it.”

  “Right, right,” Myers said. “I feel like I can remember flashes of it — the memory of memories, but that’s it. You do look familiar, but…” He looked away.

  “It’s okay, none taken.” Rand smiled, trying to diffuse the heavy tension in the air. “That’s not important right now, Myers. You probably want to know what it is that we all think you can help us do.”

  “And why you think this sentient machine is waiting around for something.”

  “No, not machine… never mind. Not important.” Rand collected his thoughts. “Right. Well, since you were on the project with me and Sol seemed to think you were trustworthy, and given your unique career path after EHM, you were the best one to hold the killswitch.”