Virtual War, page 6
“I told Them it’s my hair and if I want to wear it long I will,” she answered matter-of-factly.
She amazed him. Sharla seemed to break rules and suffer no consequences. How did she get away with it?
“I could look at these stars forever,” Brig said, “but when do we get to the Mutant Pen?”
“Soon,” Sharla answered.
Corgan kept watching her in the pale light. Suddenly it occurred to him that the same light must be making him visible, too, and not just to Brig and Sharla. “All those people working there in the gardens,” he said, “can’t they see us? I mean, the light from there is shining in here. On us.”
“Don’t worry. The car’s bubble dome has a reflective coating on the outside. If the people in there bother to look up from their work, all they’ll see is glare.” She peered ahead. “Something’s wrong, though, on the track about twenty meters in front of us.”
“Get off my lap, Brig,” Corgan said. “I need to look out.”
He leaned forward, pressing his face close to the transparent bubble dome. “We’re coming up on it pretty fast, whatever it is.”
“It’s another hover car,” Brig announced. “Looks like it’s stalled. See, it’s not moving. It’s just sitting there on the floor.”
“Move, move, move, MOVE!” Sharla cried, clenching her fist.
“Who, me?” Brig asked.
“No, that car up ahead. Get out of our way!” she ordered, as if saying it would make it happen.
Brig braced himself. “Are we going to crash?”
“No, we can’t crash. This car stops automatically if it comes within three meters of any obstruction. But I can’t tell if there’s another car in front of that one,” Sharla said. “If there’s a real jam-up and we get stuck here, we’re in major trouble. Corgan, how much of our hour is left?”
“Twenty-three minutes, forty-seven seconds and …”
Their car came to a sudden halt, rocking them forward. “We’ve got to get out of here!” Sharla cried. “There’s at least six stalled cars up ahead.”
“Can’t we just reverse this one?” Corgan asked.
“Hover cars only go in one direction. They loop,” she told him. “Corgan, if we run from here back to our Boxes, how long will it take?”
“I don’t know! I don’t know how fast you can run, and Brig …”
“You’ll have to carry him. Right now we need to get this bubble dome open so we can get out. See that handle on your side? Push it hard.”
He pushed, but nothing happened.
“Harder!” she commanded.
Corgan pushed with both hands. Nothing.
“Okay!” She took out the small flat control box she’d used to make the wall turn transparent at the Supreme Council’s meeting room. “I’ve got to figure the code that secures the latch. Lean back, guys. The beam has to focus straight on the door.”
Her long thin fingers flew over the numbers on the control box. “I don’t know what’s wrong,” she said through clenched teeth. “Either something’s jamming the door or the whole hover-car system’s down.”
Corgan stayed quiet. This was outside his area of expertise. Sharla would have to handle it.
Desperately, she kept punching numbers. “I can’t make it work!” she cried.
Corgan asked, “Do you want me to break out the bubble dome?”
“Yeah, right!” Brig scoffed. “You break it, and every security guard in the gardens and every mechanic in the whole transport system will be here in about ten seconds.”
“Yeah, well, there’s about nineteen minutes left right now before we’re locked outside of our Boxes for the rest of the night,” Corgan lashed back at him. “So come up with some other strategy, Double Genius Mouth-Off.”
“Break the bubble dome, Corgan.” Sharla sounded grim. “We’re out of options. Just do it.”
Corgan had no experience with molded aerogel. Regular aerogel, the kind that lined his Box, was too flexible to break, although with enough pressure it could be torn. All he could try to do now was smash the molded bubble dome with both arms and hope it would break outward, hope it wouldn’t explode into fragments that could fly into their eyes and cut them.
“Here goes!” he said. He raised his arms chest high, with his fists together. In a burst of force he flung both fists outward against the dome. His first blow shattered it. All the pieces flew away from them in a spray of chips that caught the light like tiny stars.
“Get out!” Sharla picked up Brig, ready to hand him to Corgan as soon as Corgan climbed over the side.
“They’ll see us!” Brig wailed. “It’s light out there!”
Sharla hesitated. “You’re right.” Once more her fingers flew across the controller box. Suddenly everything went dark.
“Here, Corgan, take Brig,” she said. “I’ll lift him out to you.”
Corgan heard a tearing sound and whispered, “What happened? Did someone get cut on the shards?”
“Just my LiteSuit. It’s ripped,” Brig answered. “Don’t drop me, Corgan!”
“Go!” Sharla cried. “Corgan, follow that magnetic strip—it gives off a glow. Run back the way we came. Fast!”
“I’m gone.” Even carrying Brig, Corgan could move faster than Sharla. She stayed behind him, close enough that he could hear her breath coming hard as her feet pounded the floor.
“How much time?” she panted.
“Eight minutes seven seconds.”
“Go without me,” she said. “You have to get Brig back to his Box first. Brig, can you tell Corgan how to get there?”
“I’m scared!” Brig whimpered.
“Can you tell Corgan how to get to your Box!”
“I guess so.”
“That’s not good enough!” Corgan hissed in his ear.
“YES! I’ll tell you! But you probably won’t listen to me anyhow,” Brig whined. “You don’t trust me.”
“You crybaby! Do you want to get us all into trouble?” Corgan shook Brig in exasperation, but stopped shaking him because it broke the rhythm of his running stride, and anyway Brig really was starting to cry. “We’re a team!” Corgan barked. “Act like a team!”
“Go on, pull ahead of me,” Sharla said. “I know I’m holding you back. How many minutes left now?”
“Six minutes and twenty-eight and nineteen hundredths seconds.”
“Dammit, Corgan, do you always have to be so exact? ‘Six and a half minutes’ would have been fine.”
That was the last he heard from her. Sharla dropped back at the same time Corgan increased his speed. He felt exhilarated. He’d never before run in an open area. Always before he’d run on a treadmill on the floor of his Box, although it never looked like a treadmill: The virtual images that surrounded him made it appear he was on a sandy beach, or running along a forest path, or a mountain trail, or a racing track. Now his legs stretched almost straight out as they pumped faster and faster in a sprint. His balance adjusted easily to the slight weight of Brig in his arms.
“Turn! Turn!” Brig yelled. “Over that way!”
“Are you sure?”
“Do you think I don’t know where my own Box is?”
“You didn’t seem to know back there.”
Corgan spun into the turn without losing momentum. He felt great! He’d never tried anything like this before: running at top speed on a real floor, carrying an awkward, lumpy weight, and yet being able to talk in whole sentences without even panting. He was stronger than he’d thought. Brig’s skinny arms clamped Corgan’s neck like a vise, but even with that little leech hanging on to him, Corgan ran like a champion. I’m the best! he thought.
“Here! Stop! This is it.” Brig tried to leap from Corgan’s arms and almost tumbled to the floor. Without as much as a thank-you he scurried into his Box, scrabbling like a scared rat.
“And good night to you, too, Big Brain,” Corgan said. Then he turned and raced back along the passageway. He reached the fork where he should have angled toward his own Box, but he was enjoying himself so much he spun around and retraced his path, sprinting back in the direction of the abandoned hover car, just for the freedom of it. And to see if Sharla might still be in the corridor. But she was gone. The clock ticking in his head told Corgan he had enough time to make it back to his Box and slide through the door with at least a tenth of a second left before Sharla’s programming clicked the door shut. He laughed out loud.
Seven
“Where did you get that cut on your hand?” Mendor demanded.
Corgan had forgotten about his scrape from the hover car. He hadn’t even noticed it during the morning sanitizing in his Clean Room.
“It’s nothing,” he said.
“Let me see!” The tactile simulator turned on and Mendor the Mother Figure reached out to grasp Corgan’s hand. “How did this happen?”
“I don’t know. Leave me alone!”
“Any little break in the skin can be dangerous,” she said patiently. “Be a good boy, and—”
“Stop it!”
“My, we’re a bit testy today, aren’t we?” she crooned as tiny flashes of light went off over his scraped knuckles. He was being cauterized with laser beams. “Your hands are extremely important, Corgan. They must always be protected.”
With a strong pull he yanked his hand free.
“Corgan!” It was Mendor the Stern Father now, glowering at him. “Since you seem to have no concern for your own safety, let me remind you what can happen. A microscopic bacteria called streptococcus pyogenes can invade your body through any chance opening in the skin. It can cause an infection known as necrotizing fasciitis, also called ‘flesh-eating disease.’”
Mendor’s image enlarged until his purple-gray face filled the Box. “If you get this disease and you’re lucky enough to survive, Corgan, you may lose quantities of skin and fascia—the fibrous tissue surrounding your muscles. Then your gangrenous fingers and toes will be amputated. Would you like to see some of the victims?” Instantly, pictures of grotesque, dripping bodies filled the surround-scene, their lesions so repulsive Corgan threw his hands over his eyes.
“Turn it off!”
The images slowly faded as Mendor said, “Tell me, Corgan, you’re a boy who was born with the fastest reflexes and the most unerring precision ever known to humankind. Just how would you play games if you had no fingers?”
Corgan shook his head.
“Now, Corgan, how did you get that broken skin on your hand?”
“Dammit, Mendor, I told you I don’t know.”
Mendor’s gasp was like a gale blowing through the Box.
“Where did you learn that word, Corgan?”
“What word?” But he knew exactly the word Mendor meant.
“That swear word. Never in your entire life has that word been spoken in your presence. Where did you hear it?”
“From you. You said it—you just don’t remember. Your internal programming must have some kind of a memory glitch….” Corgan felt the sweat break out in his hands as the lies came out of his mouth.
“My programming is never faulty,” Mendor hissed. “This time you really have gone too far, Corgan. You’re lying! I have no choice but to send you to Reprimand.”
Reprimand! Corgan’s LiteSuit turned dark from apprehension. He had never been put into Reprimand—he’d never before had to be punished for wrongdoing. He couldn’t even imagine what Reprimand would be like, except that it had to be something awful.
His ears filled with a staticky whirring that swelled and ebbed from loud to soft and back so rapidly that his head started to spin. Then he felt his whole body rotate, spiraling, whirling, pivoting, head up, head down, sideways….
And there he was. In Reprimand. But it wasn’t a place; it was simply total emptiness and almost total darkness and gloom. A feeling of despair swept through him, filling his heart, his whole body, and even his skin, down to each separate pore. He wanted to run, but couldn’t move. He hung suspended, motionless, not sure whether he’d landed vertically, horizontally, or at any other angle up or down.
“Corgan! Corgan!” It might have been Mendor’s voice he heard or the voices of the Supreme Council; it seemed he recognized all of them in the words. “We have given you everything. Isn’t that true?”
He nodded, glad he was able to move his head, at least.
“From the time you were a tiny boy, we’ve done all we could think of to make you happy. Haven’t we, Corgan?”
“Yes,” he whispered.
“We gave you toys. Dinosaurs decorating your walls. And do you remember the koala bear, Corgan? You wanted a koala with blue eyes and soft fur, one that would chase a ball like a puppy. You named it—what did you name it, Corgan?”
“Named the bear Roland,” he answered, the words like ribbons unwinding from his throat.
“Ah yes,” the voices continued. “We had to create a special program to make Roland do all the things you wanted him to. We set our cleverest engineers to work on the project, and we told them, ‘Don’t worry about how much time it will take you to perfect it. Don’t worry about expense. This toy is for Corgan.’ They worked night and day to build Roland for you.”
“I loved Roland.” Tears stung Corgan’s eyes as he remembered.
“For a little while,” the voices murmured. “For only a little while you loved him. Then you stopped playing with him.”
Now a whole additional chorus joined in to sigh, “We asked why you no longer played with Roland. And you said … you said … that Roland had bitten you. Do you remember that, Corgan? You told a lie.”
Lie! Lie! Lie! The word echoed as if from a deep cavern.
Incredible, Corgan thought. They had to go all the way back to when I was six to find the last lie that I told.
“We didn’t mind that you’d stopped playing with Roland,” the voices lamented. “Even though we had put so much time and effort and scarce resources into that special koala that you wanted, and you only played with it for a few days—we were glad it made you happy. Even if just for a little while. We’ve always tried to make you happy, Corgan.”
“Yes,” he gasped. His throat felt like it was closing from the inside.
“But when you lied, Corgan …” Now the face of Mendor the Mother Figure wrapped around him, gray and furrowed, the surface sliding downward in despair. “You broke Mother’s heart.”
“And you wounded Father’s pride.” Slowly Mendor the Father Figure appeared, somber and dark.
“I’ve been bad,” Corgan whimpered, sounding like a six-year-old. He hadn’t meant to say that—where had it come from? He cleared his throat, wondering why his voice had suddenly turned thin and high-pitched. Then he saw himself in the wraparound image: He was a six-year-old, with straight black hair falling in bangs over his forehead, with his mouth drawn down and his soft lips trembling.
“No … you’re not a bad boy, Corgan,” Mendor the Mother Figure said once again, as she’d said so many years before. “You’re a very good boy. But you mustn’t tell lies.”
“I’m sorry! I won’t tell lies ever again.”
“We’ve always done everything we could to make you happy. We gave you everything you asked for. We gave you our trust. You must always tell us the truth, Corgan.”
He said, “Yes,” through trembling lips, not sure whether he was Corgan the six-year-old or Corgan the long-legged, strong-armed virtual champion. Discovering he could move his arms, he reached up to knead his throat, trying to get his real voice back.
“We trust you to do what is right.”
There was nothing Corgan could safely reply. A faint chord of music, deep and dolorous, rumbled across the dark emptiness.
“Your happiness matters to us, Corgan, more than anything.” The words matched the tempo of the barely heard music, which built slow, heavy, minor chords into a song of infinite sadness. “Your happiness will always matter. Our love for you will never diminish. Even when you betray us.” Betray! Betray! Betray! It hung in the air, vibrating.
“Honor, Corgan. Truth. These matter most. The trust between parents and son.”
He didn’t answer. Couldn’t answer, because it was guilt, now, that rose into his throat. They were right. He’d told a lie. Lying was wrong.
“After all we’ve done for you, Corgan, can you give us just one thing in return?” The music throbbed softly, like a slow heartbeat.
“What’s that?” he whispered. “What can I give you?” He knew what They were going to ask for.
“The truth, Corgan. All we want is that you tell us the truth.”
“What truth?”
“A very small matter. So small! Just tell us—where did you hear that word you used this morning?”
“I can’t remember.”
The music grew louder, anguished. The space around Corgan seemed crowded with creatures, all of them weeping, pressing against him, smothering him, drowning him in their tears.
“Please, Corgan, try to remember. We don’t blame you. You’re the innocent one. Others have led you into error. We want desperately to believe in you again. We love you. Tell the truth, and all will be forgiven. All will be forgotten. Nothing will be held against you.”
Shadows filled the darkness, moving shapes bent over in sorrow. The shapes hovered around him. Phantom hands reached up to touch him in supplication.
“Where did we fail, Corgan? What more can we give you? We gave you so much, but it wasn’t enough!” The music grew louder; the weeping rose to a new level of anguish.
Corgan’s tears rolled slowly down his cheeks. It was true; They’d always been good to him, and now he’d caused Them pain. Would it really matter if he admitted everything? He’d insist on taking full responsibility. They said he’d be forgiven.
“Once more, Corgan. Who spoke that word to you?”
“Sharla,” he whispered.
“When?”
“Last night. I don’t know!”
“Where?”
“In the corridor. Don’t punish her!”
Light blinded him. He was back in his Box, with Mendor beside him.
“We will not speak of this again,” Mendor the Father Figure thundered. “Ever! How many days remain before the War, Corgan?”
