None of them moved.
Danielle took a moment to steady her breathing and took a step forward. She made a point of setting her sneaker down hard and scuffing it on the concrete floor. The sound echoed in the workshop.
They didn’t react.
She took a few more cautious steps forward, dragging her feet on each one. If they started to move, she was sure she could beat them to the door. Of course, if they were even fair shots, they didn’t need to be that fast.
Her laptop was just outside the ring of dead soldiers. The cables ran between two of them to the helmet and the armor’s spine. She could see the suit was still hooked up and charged. No one had touched it. They’d just stationed guards.
She was five feet from the ring when the two closest exes took a step forward. Their shoulders bumped as they blocked her path. Danielle hopped back and they stopped advancing.
Her codes were still active. Shelly had said the programmed exes could take simple orders. And sometimes they understood priority.
Danielle took in a breath and looked at the closest ex. It was a man, shaved bald, in a sand-colored tee-shirt with a bullet hole in the chest. No blood. She cleared her throat. “Soldier,” she said, “I order you to let me pass.”
The ex didn’t move. She inched forward and it took another lumbering step toward her. Its hands shifted on the rifle.
“I order you to let me pass,” she repeated.
It didn’t move. It also didn’t change its grip on the M16. The ex stared past her with blank eyes.
“I repeat, this is a direct order from Cerberus three-zero-three-alpha.”
The dead thing started to move but shuddered to a halt. The withered head turned and locked eyes with her. It knotted its brow.
“I said, this is a—”
The M16 clattered to the ground. The dead thing lashed out with an arm that moved too fast and grabbed her throat. It glared at the redhead and marched her back, off-balance, until the work table hit the small of her back. The arm bent her over and she fell back next to the laptop. Her feet swung inches above the ground.
Cracked lips pulled away from the teeth. “Fucking puta bitch,” it growled. “Not so tough without your fucking armor, are you?”
She flailed at the arm, but she was weak. Just weak skin and bones.
The dead soldiers took in a dry, shuddering breath and spoke as one.
“IF I’D KNOWN IT WAS YOU,” said the chorus of exes, “I’D’VE RIPPED YOUR HEAD OFF YESTERDAY!”
Chapter 22 - Ghost in the Machine
THEN
Thinking is bad. That’s the lesson of the past year. I don’t want to think any more.
Captain Freedom told me the most fascinating story a while ago. He was very careful about telling it. He knew it was still a touchy subject at the time. Thin ice, as they say.
It’s been fifteen months, seven days, two and a half hours since Eva and Madelyn went missing during the rescue attempt. I still look at clocks and assign mental labels to every date. One month since they vanished. Ten weeks since they were lost. Six months since they were lost. One year since they
I mentioned it to John the other day and he said he did the same thing for almost two years when his father passed away.
Two years? How can I live like this for another year? I still feel cold and empty all the time. Will it be twice as long because I don’t know what happened to either of them? I can’t take four years of this.
Freedom came to see me. It was almost a year ago, now that I think of it. Three months since they’d gone missing. He had a puzzle, of sorts. They had gone out that morning to get the armored vehicle, the Guardian, he called it. It had been sitting out there all that time. Ever since they were
They
I need to get more work done. I still haven’t managed to get the Nest working and reboot the exes. They’re needed more than ever now. I need to focus on that. Must stop my mind from wandering so much. They weren’t here in the lab before, so it shouldn’t be hard to work now that they’re
Now that they’re
Madelyn Sorensen. Everyone said we were so cruel to give her rhyming names. That we were bad parents. Did she think I was a bad father? Did she blame me? God, I hope she knows how hard I tried. I wanted to go to them. I wanted to be with them.
Freedom said they were going to tow the Guardian in but they didn’t have to. It still had half a tank of fuel. Sitting there in the sun for months and still over twenty gallons of diesel in it. There was no reason it should’ve stopped.
I remember at first I was very happy, because if the armored carrier still had gas, perhaps it meant Eva and Madelyn hadn’t…that the whole thing had been a mistake. Perhaps they were still back at the airstrip. Maybe they never even got on the plane.
Freedom was very good about calming me down. He was a good man. He still is, I think. I don’t see him that often. They leave me alone. They all have a lot on their minds.
The puzzle had been that half his soldiers still insisted the tank was empty. He had a dozen of them look at the gauge and only five of them saw the needle above E. Even when they drove it in, some of them still said there was no gasoline. Nothing the captain did could convince them otherwise. A few of them couldn’t even start the engine.
He’d wanted to know about hallucinations. If they were a side effect to the process I didn’t warn the Army about. He hadn’t reported it yet, but he was very firm his soldiers couldn’t be put at risk. “I don’t want anyone else to die,” he told me.
I think it was a year ago today he was here. It may have been a year ago yesterday. No, it was two days ago. When I was talking with Freedom it had been exactly ninety-nine days since they went missing. Since one of the super soldiers I created tried to bring my little Madelyn across half a mile of sand and was attacked by an army of exes that tore him apart. Since they crawled into the armored carrier and they
I need to work. I need to think of other things. That’s all I need these days. To work and be left alone.
On the other side of the lab there were six exes strapped down on gurneys. They were also handcuffed to the rails and gagged with a wooden bit. One of the soldiers trained as a field medic, Franklin, I think, came up with the clever idea of using back boards and head restraints to keep them immobile.
All my attempts to return the brain to a cogitative state had failed. This set of exes had new contacts in place. I think they were in place. I remember I was drilling placement holes in skulls when Captain Freedom came to talk to me. He had a problem he was trying to work out. That was day ninety-nine. Not yet one hundred.
I attached the Nest box to the leads and it sent a new pattern of electricity down into the dead brain. Nothing. No response at all. I checked each of the six subjects. Their EEGs were all flat.
Back to the first one. It was a young man with blond stubble and a large hole in his right cheek. I think it was a bite, but they’d all been cleaned up before they came to me. For the first six months they’d also all been male. I think that was John’s doing.
I could see the young man’s teeth through the hole. He didn’t have a single filling on this side of his jaw. Madelyn had very good teeth, too. Freedom said he couldn’t find their bodies. There was no trace left of them. Not even one of Madelyn’s glittery sneakers. He was polite while he told me they were dead. He insists on seeing the evidence that way. I tried for weeks to tell him it could also mean they got away, but he wouldn’t listen. Still won’t.
I’ve had dreams about those sneakers. I see them running across the desert toward the gate. I still wake up crying most of the time.
No, no, no. Can’t think like that. Must stay focused.
There was something odd about the young man’s eyes. All exes have the same gray eyes. They accumulate dust because of the lack of tears and then get scratched. It’s a process of refraction, the same way a scratch on clear glass looks white.