Hard Reset (Relics Singularity Thrillers Book 2), page 9
Ravi nodded. Sol nodded. Both men dropped slightly lower without quite deciding to — the instinct of people entering terrain where being seen had consequences. Ravi noticed cave openings on both sides of their route as they climbed — dark holes in the rock face, some barely distinguishable from shadow, none of them large enough to conceal anything bigger than a small animal. He passed each one with a careful look. Nothing moved inside any of them.
He loved caves. Had loved them since he was old enough to understand what they were — the idea of a small opening widening inward to something vast, a whole geography of tunnels and chambers hidden beneath the surface of the visible world, patient and permanent and entirely unconcerned with what happened above it. He'd spent years out in terrain like this and the feeling had never left him.
His father had taken the family to see caverns at a park near their childhood home when Ravi was six or seven. He could still see it — the tour guide moving through the groups with a practiced calm, the lights strung along the walls catching the minerals in the rock and making everything glitter. The guide had explained that the temperature inside was constant year-round, and that the largest chamber had once been used as an underground dance floor a century ago.
Ravi had asked his father how they got the electricity down there. How they hung the lights on walls that far underground.
His father — a round, jovial man with a laugh that arrived before whatever was funny — had answered without hesitation: a team of huge underground hamsters, spinning on a giant wheel deep beneath their feet, generating electricity for everyone above.
Ravi had laughed until his sides hurt. His older sister too, both of them losing it while their mother scolded his father in a tone that couldn't quite hide that she found it funny as well, and the tour guide just stood there with an expression he'd clearly never been trained for.
The rest of that visit had been Ravi and his father taking turns elaborating the mythology — the hamster civilization, its internal politics, its occasional catastrophic failures. The time the smallest hamster, still larger than an elephant, escaped to the human levels of the caverns. The time before electric light when the hamster overlord, in the dark, accidentally ate his own children thinking they were food.
Ravi laughed out loud at the memory. The sound surprised him — loose and genuine and entirely out of place on this hillside. The memory was vivid in a way most memories weren't, with the particular clarity that certain things retained when everything around them had been lost or damaged.
Then the other part came, the way it always did — not the physical pain, though that was present too, but the deeper thing underneath it, the weight of what those memories meant about everything that came after them and couldn't be recovered. His family. The specific texture of having had something and no longer having it and knowing the exact shape of the absence because you'd lived inside the thing itself.
He pushed it back down. That was the trouble with memories — you couldn't choose which parts of them came with the ones you wanted.
He realized he had stopped walking.
Sol and Ary were several paces ahead of him on the trail, both looking back.
"You okay, kid?" Sol asked.
"Yeah, sorry, I —" He started moving again, catching up.
"Need the meds?"
"No." He shook his head. "I've still got some. I'm fine." Sol's question redirected his attention to the physical pain with the efficiency of a spotlight, and he reached into his pocket and found one of the blue diamond pills with his fingertips. He put it in his mouth and swallowed dry, the pill catching briefly before going down, and forced a quick nod at Sol's waiting expression.
Sol nodded back and turned uphill. "How much longer?" he asked quietly, directing the question to Ary above them.
"We're here, actually."
Sol stopped. Ravi came up beside him and stopped too. They both looked around.
They were standing in a thick tangle of trees, low bushes, and tall grass growing in the undisciplined abundance of a hillside that had been left entirely to its own preferences. Ravi turned in a slow circle, examining each direction with the careful eye he'd developed over years of finding shelter in terrain exactly like this. He had a particular facility for it — for spotting the shadow that was deeper than the others, the outline of stone that didn't fit the natural geometry of the slope, the small asymmetry that announced an opening. It was a practiced skill, and he trusted it.
He didn't see anything.
He looked again, more slowly this time, breaking the visual field into sections and working through each one. Bent leaves, scraggly bushes, rock faces half-covered by vine growth and loose soil. Nothing that read as an entrance.
Sol, beside him, was doing the same kind of scan — the methodical sweep of a man whose instincts for concealment were considerably more sophisticated than average. His eyes moved across the hillside with the patience of someone who knew that what he was looking for was there and simply hadn't revealed itself yet.
He wasn't finding it either.
"Here," Ary whispered. And then again, her voice rising very slightly on the repetition, her eyes moving left and right in a quick, controlled sweep that was different from the way her eyes had moved before. "Here."
Something in Ravi's spine went vertical. His body registered it before his mind assembled the thought — some animal precognition that didn't require language to communicate that something had changed, that the air on the hillside had acquired a new quality, that the word spoken three times meant something other than location.
"Why are you —" Sol started.
Then he stopped. His voice cut off cleanly, mid-sentence, and Ravi saw the understanding arrive on the man's face a fraction of a second before it arrived on his own.
He looked at Ary.
Her expression lasted only a moment — a flash of something that moved through her features too quickly to fully read. Regret first, sharp and genuine, there and gone. Then anger, at herself or at the situation or at something Ravi didn't have the context to name. Then neither of those things, replaced by the same clear, open expression she'd been wearing since the moment he'd found her behind the boulder — sweet, uncomplicated, present.
"Ary," Ravi said. His voice had gone to a different place than it normally lived — higher, thinner, the voice of a person whose nervous system had arrived at a conclusion ahead of them. "What did you do?"
The anger came back into her eyes. Just a flash. Just enough.
The blow came from behind him — a hard, sudden thud against the back of his skull, the world tilting forward without warning, the grass rising up to meet him with a speed that left no time for anything useful. He hit the ground face-first, the impact arriving in stages — knees, chest, cheek against the earth — and the darkness began immediately at the edges of his vision, moving inward with the methodical patience of something that had done this before and wasn't in any hurry.
His right eye was still open, pressed against the ground, and through the narrowing field of vision he could see Sol in front of him — still upright for one more second, shouting something at Ary, the words arriving blurred and out of sequence. Then Sol went down too, the same way, the blunt end of something catching him mid-sentence and taking him down mid-word.
Another blow. Ravi felt it distantly, the way you felt things that were happening to a body you were in the process of leaving.
Another.
The last thing he registered before the darkness finished its work was the grass against his cheek — cool and dry, smelling of dust and sun and the mountain above them — and the specific quality of the silence that followed, which was the silence of people who had been waiting and were no longer waiting.
Everything went black.
RAND_
Rand sat next to Diane at the large folding table that had been erected inside one of the permanent buildings, and spent the first few minutes simply taking in the room.
The structure was built primarily from cinder blocks, but the blocks had clearly been sourced from a dozen different prior structures — some brown, some a lighter sand color, some caked with the residue of old mortar and dried mud. The effect was accidental and oddly pleasing, a patchwork of mismatched materials that had been stacked into walls with more care than their origins suggested. Rand found himself studying the pattern of it the way he sometimes studied code — looking for the logic underneath the apparent randomness, finding it in the consistent coursing of the rows even as the individual blocks refused to match.
It's the simplicity, he thought. Stacked blocks for walls. Stretched fabric for a ceiling, pulled taut across a timber frame with the pragmatic elegance of something that had been designed to work rather than to impress. Hard-packed dirt for a floor, with wooden boards laid across the higher-traffic sections to provide stability under the table's legs and the weight of the chairs around it.
The chairs didn't match either. Three green folding chairs, four brown, and one black metal chair with a slightly higher back and a more deliberate construction that set it apart from the others the way a captain's seat was set apart on a ship — not by any announced authority but by the simple fact that it was different. Josiah Crane occupied that one, at the head of the table, and even seated the man was imposingly tall, his long frame folded into the chair with the patient discomfort of someone accustomed to furniture that had not been built with him in mind. His two assistants flanked him on either side, their matching black button-downs slightly wrinkled now from a night's sleep and a morning's preparation. Diane and Rand sat on one side of the table, next to one of the assistants. Myers and Lansing occupied the other side, next to the second.
No one had come in to offer food or water. Rand had watched a few people pass by outside the building's open doorway — visible for a moment against the morning light, then gone — but the room itself had remained undisturbed. The quiet had the particular quality of a space being deliberately left alone.
He tried to remember the last time he'd eaten. His apartment in Umutsuz. Before the Tracers, before the landing field, before all of it. Nearly two days ago, by his best estimate. It felt considerably longer than that — the way time stretched when the body was running on reserves and adrenaline rather than actual sustenance.
"Everyone get enough sleep?" Crane asked.
Nods around the table. No one offered anything beyond that. The question had been social scaffolding rather than genuine inquiry, and everyone present understood that.
Rand glanced toward the doorway, then at the empty surface of the table in front of him. Crane watched the glance with the unhurried attention of someone who had been reading rooms for a long time.
"You're hungry," Crane said. It wasn't a question. "I apologize — we should have had something waiting when you came in." He turned to one of the men beside him, who stood without being asked and left the building at a quiet, purposeful pace. Crane watched him go and then turned back to the table with the expression of someone who had just cleared a procedural item from a list and was ready to move to what actually mattered.
Even seated, he dominated the room in a way that was more about presence than size — though the size was undeniable. He leaned slightly forward with his elbows on the table, his large hands loosely folded in front of him, and looked at each of them in turn with the patient directness of a man who was accustomed to speaking to rooms full of people who hadn't yet decided whether to trust him.
"This town is called Relica." He paused just long enough to allow the name to land. Rand felt the reflex to smile and suppressed it — the name was earnest in a way that invited gentle ridicule and didn't deserve it. "Not the most elegant name in the world, I grant you, but it describes who we are and why we're here. We're all Relics. When it came time to name the place, there were as many opinions as there were people who'd held positions of authority — which, given our population, was everyone. Unanimity wasn't on the table. Relica was the compromise that offended the fewest people."
"Crane," Diane said. Her tone was measured, but direct in the way she was always direct when she had information that contradicted what she was hearing. "This place is far from small. I have intelligence that indicates there shouldn't be anything out here — certainly nothing the size of Istanbul or larger."
"Yes," Crane said. "Well. We're here." He acknowledged the contradiction without any apparent discomfort. "The city's geographic footprint is considerable — you're correct about that. But as you've seen for yourselves, and for reasons that I think are fairly obvious given our circumstances, we have very little of the technology the major cities depend on. No System infrastructure, no integrated networks, limited medical capability relative to what we'd all been accustomed to. And our population fluctuates. Our citizens come and go according to their own needs, and we don't hold anyone here against their will."
"Relics?" Diane asked. "All of them?"
"All of us. Every person in this city was deactivated by the System at some point. Every person here was, at some prior point in their life, considered a significant enough contributor to society that the System saw fit to equip them with a BSE." He paused, something moving briefly across his expression — not bitterness, exactly, but the particular gravity of someone acknowledging a long-held irony. "And then decided they were no longer necessary. You'll find we have a mayor from Tucson, three former military generals, an oncologist who published more peer-reviewed research than most university departments, several engineers, a few writers, and more than a handful of people who ran companies and organizations that shaped how the world worked for a generation." He spread his hands slightly, a contained gesture. "Relics, every one."
The assistant returned through the doorway carrying a wide platter — bananas, oranges, and kiwis arranged without ceremony, a loaf of bread sitting alongside them with the density of something baked from grain grown nearby. He set it in the center of the table and placed a wineskin full of water beside it, then returned to his seat.
"I apologize for the limited selection," Crane said, watching them reach for the fruit with the undisguised urgency of people who hadn't eaten in two days. "Our farming and harvesting capabilities are constrained by the region — the soil and climate here require more management than more fertile areas. We supplement what we grow with a moderate amount of Superstrain, which has been —"
"You have Superstrain?" Rand looked up from a banana.
Crane paused, mildly amused at the interruption. "We do."
Rand felt his brain shift registers the way it did when something commercially significant appeared in an unexpected context. IntelliPharm had released Superstrain seeds into the public market a few years back, and the reaction had been swift and extraordinary — the stock had launched from its IPO price with a velocity that made early investors feel briefly like prophets. Rand had picked up a handful of shares when the company went public, watched them appreciate into something he'd thought of as meaningful Current, and then watched with everyone else as the System quietly applied pressure to the company's growth trajectory and the miracle product vanished from shelves with very little explanation. The stock collapsed. The company was eventually shuttered.
What remained was the seeds themselves — and the proprietary programming interface that governed their development, allowing a single seed to be directed toward any of hundreds of possible crop varieties. The secondary market for Superstrain had become one of the more resilient black market ecosystems operating outside the System's direct reach, for the straightforward reason that a handful of seeds, given appropriate soil conditions and proper management of pH and light, could sustain a small homestead through a full growing season. Or, in sufficient quantity, considerably more than a small homestead.
"The CEO of IntelliPharm is one of our founding members," Crane continued. "She had the foresight, before the System shuttered the company, to stockpile a quantity of alpha seeds. The unmodified first-generation stock, which outperforms the commercial release by a considerable margin."
"How much stock?" Rand asked.
"A few crates."
Rand set down the banana. "A few crates."
"Yes. Enough to sustain a city nine times the size of Relica for approximately fifty years, with responsible management of the growing cycles." Crane said it the way people said things they had long since stopped being surprised by. "We're expecting to double our output this coming season — we've recently had several new assimilations who are taking on the construction of an additional greenhouse complex on the south side of the city, which will —"
"Assimilations?" Diane asked.
Crane paused. "My apologies — that's internal terminology. We call new arrivals assimilations. It's a reminder, more than anything else, that what we're building here is a collective system, that individual capability only matters in the context of how it contributes to the whole. When someone new arrives and is verified as a Relic, they're assessed and placed in a role that maps as closely as possible to their prior expertise and experience. We're not in the business of wasting what people know how to do."
"How does the verification work?" Diane asked.
"The System is thorough in its deactivation process, and thorough in its record-keeping. We have access to enough of that data to confirm a given individual's history with reasonable certainty. Beyond that, there's a practical component — the nature of what we ask people to do here tends to reveal fairly quickly whether their competencies are what they claim."
"So you're running the plumbing operation, then?" Rand said.
The remark came out before he'd made a conscious decision to make it. Diane's expression shifted immediately, a flicker of quiet exasperation that communicated several things at once without requiring her to say any of them.
Crane, however, laughed — a genuine, stuttering release that temporarily reorganized his face into something more open than the composed authority he'd been wearing since they landed. "Never gets old, Rand. Honestly. Never." He let it run for a few seconds, then settled back into the expression they'd been seeing. "In a manner of speaking, yes. We don't have modern plumbing infrastructure out here, but I designed the outhouse cycling system we're currently operating — the sequencing, the maintenance rotation, the waste management protocol. The actual work is distributed among citizens on a rotating basis, myself included."
