Hard Reset (Relics Singularity Thrillers Book 2), page 3
The feeling he had right now was similar to those three days of headache, except it covered the rest of his body instead.
He was bleeding, and he could feel it — dried now, sticking to his clothes and to his chest, pulling the fabric against his skin whenever he shifted. But what he remembered most was the breathing. He had forced himself to hold his breath and release it slowly, hold and release, hold and release, while the fight raged on above and behind him in a register that already felt far away.
There had been voices too, but they weren't really voices so much as sounds — components of sound his brain had sorted into categories without being able to sharpen them into language. He recognized the blob of noise that was Myers, the specific pitch and rhythm of it familiar in the way things were familiar through repetition rather than understanding. And there was a deeper, younger sound that was someone else. But that deeper voice hadn't hurt Myers, or at least he didn't think so, and then at some point the sounds had simply stopped reaching him and he'd fallen asleep.
He hadn't been dead. But at the time he hadn't known that. He'd never died, and he reasoned that it was something dying people probably wouldn't recognize as it was happening — not until it was done happening. But then he woke up screaming after someone poked him with something sharp and unannounced, and he revised his theory. Maybe dying people did know. Maybe he was just alive and seriously wounded, which was a different category than he'd originally placed himself in.
The people who'd poked him were Unders. They'd picked him up. Apparently they'd healed him as well, though he wasn't sure why. He wasn't one of them, wasn't carrying anything worth trading, wasn't anyone they'd have had reason to invest in. But here he was.
How long have I been out?
It felt like years had passed since he'd been shot — that particular distortion of deep unconsciousness where the gap between before and after has no texture to it, no sense of duration, just a hard cut. But his body disagreed. His body seemed to think it had been a few hours.
He shifted his weight and put a little pressure on his feet, testing himself and the wounds together.
The bullets had gone straight through. Both of them, somehow missing anything vital.
Vital. He almost laughed. It seemed like having skin without holes in it should qualify as pretty damn vital. He let the small laugh happen anyway, quiet and private, because it hurt and because it also genuinely struck him as funny in the way only certain kinds of pain could be funny — the kind where the alternative to laughing was worse than laughing. It was amazing what modern medicine could do for simple wounds like these. The pain was excruciating in certain spots, bright and specific when he moved wrong, but to be upright and moving mere hours after the damage was inflicted was something he didn't have a better word for than miracle.
He moved around more, taking stock. The wounds were tight, healing but tender in a way that suggested the tissue was working hard and didn't want to be bothered. Moving slowly seemed to be manageable. He shifted sideways along the edge of the cot, easing himself toward the floor, hoping that gravity and the short drop would do most of the work of getting his feet underneath him.
It didn't.
Ravi fell face-first into the dirt and caught a full mouthful of dust as he hit the earth. "Dammit!" he yelled, his voice muffled and immediately crowded out by grit. He pushed himself up using his arms — steady, thankfully, steady enough — and got himself up onto his knees, spitting.
He stopped to breathe and look around. The man in the cot beside him hadn't reacted. Ravi squinted at the still figure and studied it for a moment. Dead, he thought. There was no visible breathing, no movement of any kind. No one else — living or otherwise — appeared to have heard his fall, and the caretakers at the far end of the tent were still all facing away, absorbed in their own slow administrations.
He stood up.
Quick, vicious bursts of pain shot upward along his side and blackness crowded his vision from the edges inward, a sudden narrowing that lasted a second or two and then released. He stood still, breathing through it, waiting.
When it passed, he filed a mental note: don't twist, don't move quickly. Simple rules. He could follow simple rules.
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 — he was in no condition to do much about any of those things — and he sure as hell wasn't going to lie in the cot and wait to find out what the Unders wanted from him. So he took his chances, walked to the canvas edge, and ducked beneath the tent flap and out into the evening light.
The sun had just set. Its remnants were still doing something beautiful and indifferent above the horizon, casting long shadows across the small camp that stretched and layered over each other in the low light. The tent he'd just exited was by far the largest of the five; the other four were assembled in a row in front of it, smaller and more purposeful-looking, clearly functional rather than medical. A fire's long-spent coals puffed thin smoke from the middle of the encampment, and he could make out a few figures — men and women both — walking and talking in pairs along the perimeter. Their voices didn't carry.
Other than that, no one was watching his terrible escape attempt.
He didn't waste time. The long shadow cast by the side of the tent he'd just come out of was dark and wide and immediately useful, and he stepped into it without hesitating. He moved down its length away from camp, keeping close to the canvas, his footsteps quiet in the loose sand.
He was nearly at the back edge of the tent — almost to the point where the shadow gave way to the low, sloping hills of sand rolling away behind the camp — when he heard a voice.
"Hey, you, kid." Raspy, unhurried, not loud. "Over here."
MYERS_
7Years Ago
That was it.
SCRAPE PREPARATION.
All capital letters. No punctuation, no context, no elaboration. The message sat in the air for a moment and then the wall was a wall again, smooth and white and giving nothing back, as if it hadn't just told him everything.
He was going to be scraped.
He had predicted it — planned for it, even, in the careful and methodical way he'd once planned everything, working through contingencies at a desk with a view of the Rose Garden while staff moved in and out around him. He'd run through the scenario enough times that he thought he understood it. Thought he'd accounted for it. But the thought of what scrape preparation actually meant — what it meant for him, specifically, standing in this room in these clothes with this body — had apparently not truly crossed his mind until now, when the word was no longer hypothetical and the wall had gone blank again and there was nothing left to do but stand there and let it land.
There was no countdown timer after the message. No second communication, no clarifying detail. Just the two words and then silence, which meant he had no way of knowing exactly when the process would begin. He had a feeling it would be soon. The absence of a food cube that morning — the first absence in over a hundred days — felt like a data point now rather than a malfunction. No more cubes. No more open-palmed journeys around the perimeter of the room. Whatever came next was already in motion, and he needed to be prepared for it.
I'm going to be scraped.
He turned the sentence over in his mind, examining it the way he used to examine legislation — looking for the seams, the places where the language didn't quite hold. But it held. There were no seams. The sentence was exactly what it was.
He never thought he'd see the day. Scraping was supposed to be for the rest of the population — the ones who had failed to agree with the basic compact of productivity and success and usefulness, the ones who had decided, consciously or otherwise, that they had no interest in being a contribution to anything beyond themselves. It was supposed to be reserved for the ones too far gone to rehabilitate, too entrenched in whatever dysfunction had defined them to be reintroduced into a functioning society. There was no death penalty anymore, at least not officially — that particular political battle had been fought and resolved in the decade before he took office, the arguments for it slowly losing ground to something that called itself mercy. So scraping had emerged as the alternative, the compromise, the thing that satisfied neither side completely and therefore satisfied the process. It was supposed to be a last resort. Something reserved for the worst of the worst, the genuine banes of society's existence, the people that every framework for rehabilitation had already failed and documented and given up on.
It was supposed to be the answer to the other side of the political fence — the side that argued permanent lockup was a cruelty and flat-out execution was a disgrace to the species. This, that side had said, is more humane. This is what a civilized society does with its failures.
It was supposed to be all of these things.
And yet Myers Asher was standing in a white room with no windows and no writing utensils and no clock, having eaten a gray food cube every day for four months, being told that scrape preparation was imminent — and the thing that struck him most forcefully, the thing that climbed above the fear and the disbelief and the low animal panic beginning to build at the base of his throat, was the sheer instrumentality of it. The way the process was being used on him like a tool. Not as a last resort. Not as the end of a long documented failure. As a mechanism. As a means to an end that someone, somewhere, had decided was worth pursuing.
He'd spent the first three years of his two-term presidency fighting for the legislation that would eventually make scraping legal in every state. He remembered the committee hearings. The testimony. The careful, exhausting work of building a coalition around something that most people in the room privately found uncomfortable but publicly recognized as necessary. He'd believed in it then — had believed in the principle of it, the idea that a society could choose rehabilitation over erasure, process over punishment, a second chance that looked nothing like the first. He'd staked political capital on it. He'd stood at podiums and explained it to people who wanted simple answers and accepted that the answers he had were not simple.
And this was what had happened.
He was not a criminal. He had never been a criminal — had, in fact, spent eight years as the executive authority over the very institutions responsible for defining and pursuing criminality. He was the former President of the United States. And this abomination — this thing he had helped make legal and accessible and operationally efficient across fifty states — was going to remove every memory he'd accumulated over the past eight years. Not as punishment. Not as rehabilitation. As something else entirely, something the legislation had never been written to accommodate and that he had never imagined needing to account for.
He forced himself to breathe.
Deep in, long and deliberate, the kind of breath that had to be chosen rather than taken. Hold it for a few seconds — one, two, three — and then a slow, drawn-out release, the air leaving him at a rate that required attention to maintain. Diane had taught him that, years ago, in the kitchen of the residence on a morning when the news cycle was doing what news cycles did and she'd found him standing at the counter with his jaw clenched and his coffee going cold. Breathe like you mean it, she'd said. She told him the girls used the same technique when they were stressed about something — a test, a performance, a conversation they were dreading. He'd thought at the time that it was a small thing. He thought differently now.
The girls.
He'd said goodbye to them, in the careful and oblique way the situation had demanded — a goodbye mostly for him, since he couldn't tell them what he actually meant by it, couldn't explain that the man saying goodbye might be the last version of himself that would remember saying it. He'd held them and felt their weight against him and memorized the specific geography of that moment with the deliberateness of someone who understood it might be the last time he had access to it.
But now, standing here with the two words still visible somehow in the air in front of him even though the wall had been blank for minutes, he found that the careful goodbye was not enough. It didn't feel like enough. It had never actually been enough and he had known that when he did it and told himself it would have to be anyway, because there was no alternative.
He wanted to see them again. Just once. Just feel their hair, touch their faces, press his lips to their cheeks one more time and let the moment be what it was without any architecture around it, without any management of what it meant or what came after. He wanted to be their father without the weight of what he knew, without the plan, without the long view.
He began to cry. He didn't try to stop it immediately. He let it happen for a moment — allowed himself the private dignity of it, here in the white room where no one was watching, or where someone was watching and it didn't matter — and then he forced his mind to shift, the way he'd learned to shift it, toward the thing that required his attention.
The plan.
Was it a good one?
He turned it over. Examined it again from the beginning, walking through each step the way he had a hundred times in the long months of the room, refining it each pass, looking for the place where it broke down.
It's the only one.
That was true. He'd arrived at that conclusion weeks ago and nothing since had changed it. There were no other options — not viable ones, not ones that accounted for everything he knew and everything he didn't know and the significant gap between the two. The plan was what it was because it was the only architecture that held together under the weight of the actual situation.
It's the only way.
He breathed again — in, hold, out — and held onto that.
RAND_
Present Day
"We're heading down," Lansing said from the cockpit.
The Tracer made its descent obvious — a slow, nose-forward tilt that sent Rand's weight shifting toward the front wall of the craft. He reached out and steadied himself against the hull, feeling the invisible field from the third object assert itself through the airframe like a hand pressing down from above.
Lansing was still in the pilot's chair, working controls that weren't responding the way controls were supposed to, doing what pilots did when the aircraft stopped listening — staying present, watching everything, waiting for the moment when his expertise would matter again. Diane had taken the copilot's seat beside him. She studied the view through the forward window for a moment, then turned to face Rand and Myers in the back.
"No one leaves," she said. Her voice had the particular quality it got when she was managing more variables than she was showing. "Myers, keep an eye on Jonathan and make sure he doesn't do anything rash."
Rand opened his mouth.
"Lansing — wait for my signal, then open the side hatch."
"Affirmative."
The Tracer continued its guided descent toward what was resolving below them into something Rand hadn't expected. An open field, roughly rectangular, surrounded by makeshift buildings and shanties on its outer edges and larger, more permanent structures further back — real construction, with walls that had been built to last rather than assembled in a hurry and abandoned. Everything radiated outward from the centralized landing field like a city that had started from a single point and grown concentrically, layer by layer, each ring slightly more established than the one before it. In the center of the field, a wooden platform had been erected — deliberately, with some attention to its dimensions — and Rand could make out the outlines of several people standing on and around it, faces tilted upward, watching the hovering craft come down.
Rand stared out at it. City was still too strong a word for what lay below, but he was struggling to find the right one. Settlement didn't cover it. Camp didn't cover it either.
"It's a landing pad, I think," Lansing said. "Where are we?"
"Has 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's tone wasn't argumentative — just precise. "They're far more organized than this. Look at the buildings down there. Unders are nomadic; they don't build. They don't have buildings. Not to mention the size of this place —" His voice drifted off as the full scope of it came into view below them, larger than Umutsuz, larger than most of what they'd seen from the air, spreading outward in all directions with the quiet confidence of something that had been there long enough to stop apologizing for itself.
"So what is it then?" Diane said. "Should we be armed?"
No one answered. The instrument panel in front of Lansing's chair was still dark — not standby dark, but wrong dark, the darkness of systems that had been taken offline rather than powered down. No coordinates, no virtual maps, no bearing of any kind. The pilot's best working estimate put their location somewhere east, a rough calculation based on the near-180-degree turn they'd made after the third object assumed control of their heading, guiding them back along the deactivated outskirts of Umutsuz and into territory the Tracer's dead instruments couldn't name.
"Rand."
Jonathan turned. Myers was in the back of the craft, spread out across the rear seat with the particular stillness of someone who had recently asked too much of their body and was now in negotiation with it. He looked tired in a way that went beyond physical — the kind of tired that had accumulated over time and couldn't be addressed with sleep alone. Rand felt the familiar pull of wanting Diane to turn around, to step in, to absorb some of what was about to happen between them.
She kept her eyes on the forward window.
Myers said his name again, and Rand walked to the back of the vehicle. "Hey, Myers. What's up?" The nonchalance he'd aimed for came out wrong — too light, slightly hollow, the verbal equivalent of someone walking too carefully to avoid looking like they were walking carefully.
