Called, page 19
What? Yes!
As his visor began to overlay reality with the wealth of digital information about each of the identified members of the next party waiting to exit, Ern’s mind let go. He was no longer thinking about where he ended or where the Guardian began.
Instead of counting down every grueling moment of the remaining seven chrons of service, it was as though they passed in an instant. To him, it was a millichron between saying yes and being back in the little room at the base of the Gateway where nothing itched, and his under-suit wasn’t bunched up nor damp.
He even felt strangely rested.
A smile broke across his face as Ernie thought he could get used to this.
He brushed some dirt off the elbow of his jumpsuit and started towards his residential unit with a little spring in his step.
Sub-Basement C
Susan Carlton was cold, tired, nauseous, and dizzy all at the same time.
And yet, somehow, it was more than that.
She was exhausted to her very bones.
The physical symptoms grew more intense each time Stratton returned her from cryo. Early on, the effects passed quickly, and she hoped they might plateau sooner than she and Jonas initially feared. Their research indicated cryo could have a myriad of wide-ranging side effects on the body and mind.
Her mental capacity didn’t seem affected.
Her body, on the other hand…
Each time Stratton returned her from stasis, Sue had the same mental capacity but continued to tire more easily. Before long, she’d lost fine motor control, followed by sensation in her extremities. As the physical effects worsened, her mental capacity remained unfailingly high. It was torture to be so alert in a body that would not respond. If she endured too many more cycles in and out of cryo, she was certain her body would fail.
As sensation returned, she could feel the muscles in her face, almost able to control her expression. If not for the angle of the bed, she wouldn’t have been able to see anything. He was impatiently waiting for her to come around.
He was no longer the same man who abducted her all those solarii before. His once-handsome features were disfigured well beyond the ravages of time. He had changed.
Twice.
The young man who had been her neighbor, peer, and colleague was long gone. That first Stratton had turned cruel at the promise of power. After her abduction, he relished telling her of his plans. When he finally killed Jonas, Susan’s resolve faltered. In a moment of weakness, she let one thing slip.
One detail that changed everything.
Susan Carlton had only let out a little part of their biggest secret and she would die before she revealed any more.
When she next returned from cryo, Stratton had changed. His face had undergone reconstructive surgery, and he seemed another man altogether. That second Stratton was the only one who ever had any warmth in his eyes. The single nox they met, they spoke as equals. She recognized something in him that she struggled to place. He seemed remorseful, and she thought he might finally release her. Alas, the sadness in his eyes was not for what had happened but for what was coming: “We each have a part to play in all of this, and we can’t know what that might be. You are here and must remain so for a reason.”
Before she could say a word, the cryo process had begun, consigning her to the dark oblivion beyond the reaches of time. The pain had all but ruined her.
Something feels different this time.
He seems excited, like he has new information.
After all this time, she still hadn’t forgiven herself for falling into his trap in the first place. She had planned to manipulate him, offering to let him exploit their science commercially. She was going to offer him their legacy in exchange for freedom, and in her folly, she missed the rather obvious warning signs and spent decennia in the bowels of Elysium because of it.
Early on, Stratton held her in solitary confinement. He sensed she knew more than she told him, but the harder he pressed, the stronger her resolve grew. She knew he was motivated by two things: power and money. The complete view of the algorithm could never fall under his control, but she thought she could play to his greed by offering him cryogenics.
Instead of entering a cryogenic state with her husband and daughter, Susan Carlton was forced to build a cryo unit for the Chairman. Sue suspected he wanted to use it to extend his life, cementing his hold on his empire, but he didn’t simply accept the cryo unit when she finished with it. Stratton had it reviewed, and his engineers discovered the failure in coolant regulation that resulted in an exponential decrease in efficacy and increased susceptibility to cryo-sicknesses. Without modifications, Sue’s unit would cease to sustain a subject in stasis, more frequently rotating through a consciousness loop by degrading to cryosleep. Cryosleep triggers the aging process, and this can lead to severe physical cryo-sickness.
The prototype she built became her prison.
The Chairman was confident his team remediated the problems in her completed designs. Yet, as the solarii showed, they only preserved his physical body. In his vanity, the Chairman was concerned with keeping a monument to his power and virility. Regretfully, no one had thought to take similar care of his mind. Sue couldn’t imagine what he was like outside of her cryo cell, but it was clear to her that he was damaged. She suspected his brain wasn’t able to handle the introduction of an inferior technology rapidly prototyped from the same one she had.
There were huge gaps in what she knew but, by the time they met, the second Stratton seemed to have learned about cryo-based illness, perhaps explaining his maudlin demeanor.
Sue, it was more than that.
She was reluctant to agree with the echo of husband’s voice speaking in her head.
While she could not be certain, the reconstructive surgery on Stratton III looked suspiciously like it repaired a self-inflicted firearm wound. The third Stratton had no knowledge of his condition. Sue had no doubts that he was still the same man underneath it all: the surgeries, the stasis, his obscured memories all jumbled together in the body that started out as her friend in school so many solarii before. She suspected the explicit alterations to his appearance were the result of surgeries. Perhaps the madness was the result of his handlers holding him in cryo until the right solution could be found.
It would take a while to put together his face if he shot it off.
Susan sighed.
Jonas’ voice in her head was not helpful.
On top of everything else, Stratton’s instability now seemed to make him even more formidable an opponent. He’d been diabolical enough before whatever trauma his mind had endured in the intervening solarii.
We still have a part to play.
She had lasted this long. She was no longer afraid of death and accepted it as the likeliest outcome. Were Stratton to destroy her, she would at least know peace. If only her mind had been decimated instead, she might have been spared.
Suddenly, she yawned.
It took her a moment to remember the sensation, but millichrons later, she realized she had the reflex because she hadn’t returned from cryo; she had woken up from sleep.
You weren’t in cryo.
After the rest and flow of intravenous sustenance, she could wiggle her fingers and blink her eyes. She could shift her head slightly from side to side and gradually loosen her jaw.
She would need strength if she would be any match for him.
They needed to talk.
Speak of the devil.
The door opened, and their eyes met.
“Awake already?”
“Whaa…u…wahn,” she mumbled. Her mouth was a tumbler of rocks in motion and exceedingly difficult to precisely control.
“The same as ever, Susan. Tell me about the algorithm.”
“’n fff…’ell…oo?”
“Look at you, still fighting for something. Besides your words, I mean. Impressive, truly. You don’t see that kind of spine often anymore. Certainly, none in the executive corps; the Conglomerate owns them all. And all citizens still think they’re part of some great enterprise.”
The sides of her mouth twitched in the hint of a smile.
Only Clementine matters now.
“Save your strength. If you’re not ready to speak now, we can try the trip back to cryo again. The coolant levels have decayed far enough that I’m not sure how many more smooth trips to stasis your unit has left. One of these times, you’ll slip away. I guarantee my resolve will outlive yours. If you tell me what you know, I can help your condition improve.”
“-‘o.”
He balked. “No? You’re prepared to go back into cryo?”
“N-oo ‘uffin’…”
“I know it exists! I know the two of you built it! An algorithm capable of predicting anything with astonishing accuracy.”
His face was in hers now. She smelled terramalt in his spittle as it flecked her cheek.
“In the solarii of the mystics, they would have called it the power of prognostication. They hoped such power could be used to serve our race. I have a different outcome in mind.” He turned, bringing the terminal online. “The algorithm of life has the power to harness our race. It is the ultimate weapon, crushing any rebellion and guaranteeing total subservience.”
Sue’s face bent with disgust.
“You and Jonas left the pieces. We built the schools, we refined the food, we prescribed professional pathways, and we placed them into a competition where none will ever win—the race to have the most. A race they help me win just by running in it. The citizens toil to earn discretionary enough to afford the luxuries we produce to tempt them. They work for an imaginary surplus we provide.”
He sat on a rolling stool, gleefully rocking back and forth.
“Nearly every credit paid to a citizen is redeemed in exchange for goods and services the Conglomerate provides at some point. Our citizens use our healthcare system, consume our entertainment, work to afford all of it, and foolishly still believe they remain part of the greatest nation on the planet.”
“Ph…ools.”
“I agree, the pair of you were rather foolish. Dangerous, dangerous fools.”
She closed her eyes, her mind racing through myriad solutions to the problems before her.
What would it take for JP to tip his hand?
Could he really help her condition improve?
If they’d built the healthcare, perhaps it wasn’t bluster. It was clear to her they preserved Stratton’s body, and he was over a centad by now. Without access to the world outside, she would never know the truth of anything he said to her. She had never heard anything about her daughter and dared not ask.
“’ell ‘bout…’aver. Ra…ampffarr.”
“You should consider elocution lessons. I thought ladies of your time did so as a matter of course. Still, I was able to discern something about a request for the story of my family from your mumbles,” he said with a condescending smile. “Very well if it will hurry this along. The Chairmanship and Board seats are passed along their familial lines to preserve institutional memory. Heirs are genetic clones of their ancestors, infused with the consciousness of their predecessors. This practice keeps the mission’s continuity and makes operations much more efficient.”
As he continued, he rose from the stool and began to pace back and forth in front of her bed.
“I know my grandfather as if I had been him - I share all his memories. Same with my father. Yet, I am my own man. My interests lie in different areas than either of them. My father seemed intent on ignoring you; he spent no time in the Chairman’s lab. He pretended you didn’t exist. I’m much more like my grandfather.” He smiled grossly. “I want what he wanted: for our nation to remain unrivaled. For that to happen, we must continue to expand. We have reached a financial stasis. We cannot raise profits without more citizens, but each one is a large investment. We know there are settlements outside our walls. To expand, we need to ensure we will face no resistance, and that requires the remaining pieces of the algorithm of life.”
Sue’s stomach soured. The Conglomerate she and Jonas fought against had become exactly what they feared—a machine stripping life of any real meaning and enslaving the population to a system that perpetuates subservience to it.
Even if his teams couldn’t tie all the pieces together, he had plenty.
What is our part here?
“’eed dr-dr’nk.”
“Let me get something to warm you and help the nausea too.”
He pushed a few buttons on the terminal’s touch screen and a panel opened to reveal a fluids bag. Stratton affixed it to the unit, beginning the flow of the substance inside it into her veins through the port at the base of her neck.
Almost instantly, she felt the fog and cold lifting. Her muscles responded to her brain’s commands, and she could feel a flush on her cheeks. As the full dose entered her bloodstream, she felt her mouth flood with saliva as she found the energy to lick her lips.
“That’s better,” she said.
“Cryorevive. Another Conglomerate marvel. When we began using it regularly, we noticed the common side effects among those held in stasis: dry mouth, temporary muscular atrophy, and lack of nervous response. Terribly bothersome when you need to interview a suspect for them to be shivering, drooling, and catatonic. The serum I just gave you revitalizes your body’s systems, but you’ll have a much better shot at surviving if we get you into motion.”
“Are you taking me somewhere after all this time?”
“I was thinking of visiting Bethelton.”
Her mouth was dry once more.
“For any particular reason?”
“Oh, Susan, let’s stop being coy. Because that’s where Clementine is headed, of course. After all these solarii, did you think we hadn’t already found her? Like mother, like daughter—both of you disappeared into cryo. It took my father a while, but he tracked her down…and then we waited.”
She could see his eyes burning with desire. The need for the algorithm had been there all along, barely out of sight.
“Before I speak with your daughter, perhaps there is something you would like to say? Neither of you could know that my grandfather razed everything norf of Zion’s gates. So, you see, there’s nothing for her to find there except me…”
He paused, considering Susan expectantly as his invisible offer hung between them.
“How many doses will it take before I can stand up?”
“There’s the spirit.” He clapped and waddled to the terminal, clicking the keys again before a larger bag appeared. As the next doses of the invigorating serum rushed into her system, Susan Carlson felt her body come alive.
She needed a chance to outsmart him.
He was suspicious of her.
He’s not entirely well.
“How soon do we leave?” she asked, taking her first steps off the cryo unit’s platform.
“After you.” He bowed toward the open door.
Her steps were measured but determined as she left the room for the first time in over half a centad. Though still unsteady on her feet, she was thankful she still had her wits about her.
At least mentally she could keep a step or two ahead.
Bethelton
The twilight was still, and the darkness behind Simeon’s automotor windows felt absolute Everything I’d ever learned suggested wild, marauding bands of violent criminals in a chaotic mess. So far, I see garbage and brush.
No signs of life.
This was not the Outside I expected to find.
Simeon and I sat in the auto, trying to figure out what to do. Despite multiple attempts at recalibrating the navigation, there was disputing we were at Bethelton. Simeon was currently scanning the horizon with his TESS glasses on.
He was so proud of her.
TESS this, TESS that.
He boasted she also had a younger sister, IRIS, and a cousin, MAIA. Simeon used their names and talked about them like they were real to him. IRIS could compile and review any information from any Conglomerate device at any time. She could get access to anything held anywhere in the Conglomerate network. TESS was Simeon’s private version of IRIS: anything IRIS could do, TESS could do better.
I didn’t share Simeon’s sense of wonder, finding it more than a little creepy that the Conglomerate could see and hear nearly everything I did.
For all her power, TESS found the same: nothing.
We were in the right place, there was just nothing here we could make out.
My impatience was reaching a peak.
What are we missing?
“I think we should get out and look, don’t you? If this is the place, we should check it out. Maybe there’s something we can’t see from here. We don’t have any more tech to scan the area here, do we?”
“There must be something we can’t see. It’s not possible. There’s just…nothing here,” Simeon replied.
His whole demeanor changed after seeing what happened to Jeb. He had been progressively more friendly with me along the way, but after that video, he seemed to change his mind about something.
I had, too: I was going to trust him.
“Before we go anywhere, you should change. Your clothes are too…Conglomerate. Outsiders defend themselves.”
“They might if there were still any civilizations out here for them to defend anymore. All of them are ruins like these now.”
“But I thought we were heading for one. What is Bethelton if not a place where someone is keeping a secret for me?”
“It might have been, once. But a lot has changed since your father’s time.”
“The fall of the Souvern Republic, the rise of the Conglomerate, yeah, yeah.” I squirmed in the seat. Even though it looked like there was nothing out there, something inside me was itching to move.
“That’s how they tell the story now, but in reality, many more people resisted the idea of the war in the first place. They tried hard to influence the Souvern Republic and fought against the Conglomerate. After they won, the new government responded by razing everything around the newly built Citadel walls.”
