Flyover Planet Ch. 9. Patches. Takeoff.

The kids are patched up... well, patched, anyway; and sent on.

Chapters One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Eight, Ten, Eleven, Twelve, Thirteen, Fourteen Pt. 1, Fourteen Pt. 2, Fifteen, Sixteen.
(Non-SF Flyover Valley starts here.)

Time passed.

There was nothing of the mechanical about Seti’s "tutor," as he referred to himself. He was a tall well-built man with a square jaw and slightly droopy eyelids grafted to give him a sympathetic look. The look was somewhat spoiled by the total absence of any lines except the three symmetrical tracks that splayed out of the outer corners of his eyes. They bore as much resemblance to real crow's feet or smile lines as margarine does to butter.

The man prodded and pinched Seti’s arms and neck and stuck on various plasters that dissolved within a couple of minutes. Seti was feeling woozy and disoriented, as if he’d nicked a couple of shots of Tian Sokol’s moonshine and then got on a merry-go-round.

The man was warm and understanding in a tough kind of way, and he seemed to have a perpetually listening expression (a couple of frozen micro-muscles around the eyes and a minor modification around the mouth, standard stuff) and he related, he really knew what Forseti was going through —

He knows what you are going through, said a calm cold voice in his mind, because he is one of those who is putting you through it, Forseti my boy.

He did not know what they were giving him and he could not quite focus on what was missing from the picture, but every time the tough yet friendly voice of the guy with the chin got to the point where Seti was starting to nod, he would hear the voice in his head. He knew the voice even in his muzzy state. It was the same voice that told him to muck out the barn; to have another helping; to bite down on the belt hard because that’s gonna burn like a right little fire but you hang in there, Seti.

Now Tia Mara’s voice was asking, with the same dry calm she had used when he got stuck on the belt of the preprogrammed thresher, Seti my boy, you are not going to kiss the hand that chokes you, are you? Don’t you thrash now, but think.

“Tell me about the farm then,” the man said.

“I don’t ... remember... why I am here,” Forseti said. Talking hurt his mind.

“We barely got you out in time,” the man said, for the fortieth time or so, with no diminution of good humor. “You are safe now though.”

“Tia and Tian...”

“Your family? Quarantined, but safe too. You can see them when they are better, and you. No sense rushing things.”

Well look who’s lying through his teeth, Tia Mara’s voice said in Forseti's mind.

“...Friends?”

“Sure, all safer than steers in winter, just getting the same shots as you, takes a while to recover.”

“... from ... what?” His breath was coming a little better now, but his throat was still dry.

“From the quake, boyo. Don’t worry, it will all come back to you, just don’t push it too hard.” The man glanced at his screen, just behind Forseti. “Time for another one, I’m afraid. You just hang in there, and we’ll have you fixed up in no time.”

That’s what I’m scared of, Forseti thought.

“Why can’t you just go after the assets' memory and the cogno centers or whatever they are called, that’s what beats me,” the junior Developer muttered, pulling on her uniform and checking her short hair in the mirror. Carroll hadn’t minded that it was natural; she was a Developer, they could be a little offish sometimes. He had really wanted to schedule a physical with her because she was the only beige bracelet in her sector, other than her chief, and that more than made up for any minor oddities.

“It’s not like getting psych modifications on schedule,” Carroll explained, checking his hair in turn. His boss Anais had been right as usual when she prescribed a physical and a detox; the physical had let him unwind and the detox helped too. “They are not normies, like you or me. What they got is more like tangled wiring. You can’t go cut a random one; most of them are the same color on Off-ers.”

The DO worked it out.

“Their brains don’t light up right, you mean?”

“Something like that. You gotta color the wires and untangle them a bit.”

“Plus you Negs want them because of the weird wiring anyway,” she sighed. “That’s why I went into developing, none of that neuro shit or retroforming for me. Clear the ground, job's done. Speaking of jobs,” she turned to Carroll, smirking.

“Not bad, for a Neg,” she told him. “I’m gonna put that on your report if you’re going for a bracelet.” Carroll gave her an answering smile that was more like a leer. Developers were not subtle, you had to hit them right between the eyes.

“Keep the beige,” he complimented back, and she nodded, accepting her due, as they left the room and headed their separate ways.

It was weeks before Forseti even saw anyone from Wayside. At least he thought it was weeks but for all he knew it might have been days or months. Every waking period was the same. He was brought out of sleep by some gentle changes in the ambient light in his cell (he refused to think of it as a room), and there was a gentle prick in the inside of the elbow, sometimes in his back, that made him need to get up, to move, to touch things, to eat. It was a crazy weird feeling, his heart pumping at the wrong rate, his mouth twitching, his feet itching to move. He was taken to the gym by his craggy-faced tutor where he would run on the treadmill for a bit or do pushups or something. He could not be sure if it even happened every day.

Finally he was being given fewer patches; his head felt clearer. Now there were lessons. There was a headset that sent him to sleep, the first several days, but it also made his head ache and gave him nightmares where weird voices chanted things he could not understand. The headset disappeared after a couple of awful sessions.

After that Forseti was taken to classes where a person with a smooth face would talk to him and some other kids. None of the kids were familiar; all of them looked apathetic and limp. He tried talking to some of them, but it was pretty bad. Some just did not respond. Others told him they were happy, unprompted, and their families were happy, and they were all getting on much better than before. It was scary, and it made him wonder even more what was in store for him, and whether any of his friends would recognize him, or he them.

The person — man or woman, Forseti could not tell — asked them to draw things on pads and to listen to stories from their earpieces. The stories made no sense; there was one about a man who wanted to build a big house but he had to give it up because some other people came and told him that he should not build a house on his own, and he should not live alone. Then he gave away his tools and materials and was very happy doing what some other people told him to do. It was dumb. If he’d wanted to build a house for himself, why not build it? And the one about the boy who really liked a girl and wanted to be with her forever, ok, that was pretty dumb (Forseti and Cheers refused to admit romance into their lives; both cried in secret over the part where Captain Beam’s one and only true love Morena got herself killed trying to save him); but why did the boys' friends explain to him that loving one girl was unhealthy and true love means loving yourself and not having a family? The bit about the doctors went over his head completely.

Forseti was very, very lonely. And scared.

So when he finally saw Guns’s familiar dark cap of hair on the blue promenade, his heart leapt. She had not been Forseti's closest friend but they had raced against each other with the mechs, and she and XieXie often had their heads together. At that moment, Guns was home.

He ran towards her:

"Guns! Gunnara! Guns!”

She was just standing there, staring at the freaky flickering walls. Forseti said it again, softly, urgently.

“Guns! It’s me! It’s Seti.” He touched her small hand. It felt too warm.

She turned her head, looked at him. It was Guns all right. But instead of Guns’s super-aware look of intelligence he saw the tightly miserable face of a lost child. And her eyes, there was something wrong with her eyes —

“Se-ti,” she repeated. Her voice was quiet too. Forseti squeezed her hand, touched the top of her head gently, like Tian Teacher sometimes did. Her hair was clipped shorter than she usually wore it. It felt strange to the touch.

“Guns...”

She cocked her head a little, as if listening to something else, eyes focusing on him, he could actually see the pupils expanding and contracting slowly. He did not know what to do.

Suddenly she took a deep shuddering breath and hugged him hard, crushing her cheek to his.

“Seti,” she gasped in his ear, barely audible, like someone who is used to hiding her tears.

“Oh Seti... Seti, I... I don’t remember... I can't...” She gave a hitching little breath, holding on to him for dear life. “Seti — ”

Strong arms caught her before she fell, Seti stumbling a little as he tried to hold on to her too. He looked up, eye to eye with his coach, the man with the trustworthy friendly face.

“It’s a good thing you met,” the coach said. “But she needs her bi-hourly, boyo—”

"Let her go," Forseti said in a cold hard voice his friends would not have recognized. He forgot that he was scared, that he was just a boy, small and alone. All he could see was Guns, unconscious in the man's arms, tears still glistening on her cheeks.

"I'm afraid we can't do that just yet, boyo," his tutor said sympathetically. "You see, she has sustained some injuries during the liberation—"

Forseti hit him hard in the stomach.

The holo was only slightly grainy. Considering the probable distance, that was more than outstanding.

“CNO Anais reporting,” Anais said. There was no tremor in her voice, because she was not afraid. But there would be little point in dissembling on purpose. Even on holo, she knew her reactions, her tiny modulations were all being recorded and analyzed. After all, she was doing the same to them.

“Report,” the cold-faced man was new, and he had not stated his rank or name, which was unusual. She called up his data with a small muscle contraction that would cause a little holo cloud to pop up over the communication, with the personal file info glowing in mid-air, visible only to Anais.

Nothing changed. She glanced sideways for a split second. Data clouds showed up wherever she looked; but not over the man in the holo.

“Cluster: Epsilon; Unit Series: Chrysalis,” the man said. Over his head, the Epsilon Cluster popped its spiky petals open, verifying his ID. It was genuine all right. No one would fool around with the Epsilon logo.

Anais's mouth went dry. She held on to her body temperature and breathing and popped a stabilizer capsule in her subcutaneous layer. She hoped she had managed to hide the intensity of her reaction but you never knew where you stood with Epsilons. The series was an indicator in its way; she had never even heard of the Chrysalis before.

“Thank you for the verification,” Anais said; it seemed like the safest option.

The Epsilon inclined his head.

“The approach you used was unusual,” he said. “Explain it.”

Anais wondered then if it had been the counselors or the Chief Developer who had gotten the Epsilons involved. She never expected anyone she worked with to be loyal to her personally, though she had some hopes of Carroll. But the likelihood of the student replacing the teacher and burying her was quite high. After all, the best place to hold was quite often directly above you.

She told her story concisely, explaining her theories. The confrontation between Asset 03 (Forseti) and Asset 17 (Guns), Asset 03's reaction; similar experiments with other assets, the chemistry.

“What made you choose such a crude method?” The Epsilon interrupted her recital of the concluding episode.

"Crude worked," Anais said daringly. "These are crude people." Her old instructor had told her in a moment of openness brought on by getting thoroughly slatted together, "The Epsi, you gotta do something unusual to catch their attention. Whether they will take you up or bring you down for that, no one can tell. It's a risk of such magnitude that very few are prepared to take it." Well, Anais was taking it.

Nothing happened; the Epsilon's face was truly unreadable. He made Negs look unmodified.

He cocked his head, as if listening to something she could not hear, which he probably was.

“This is satisfactory. You have not processed the post-embryo or its biocarrier. And you have not separated them.” The holo expanded to surveillance from Tia Dhal's cell. She was rocking the baby to sleep. There were circles under her eyes.

Anais nodded. They were being serviced automatically. Asking human staff to go near a birther and her post-embryo could start a mutiny and have Anais processed out of her job in a couple of clicks.

The Epsilons would not be interested in the obvious; in her breaking the rules or protocol. As Chief Neg she had some leeway, though of course the punishment for not bringing a valid result would be correspondingly greater.

"There are two valid reasons. I will disclose them but I would prefer to do that once a hypothesis of mine has been tested thoroughly."

They don't have to ask you. They can slice into your mind from thousands of miles away; if you are lucky, you will still have a mind left after you are done, Sherman had said, articulating far more clearly than anyone that slatted should. Anais stopped herself from releasing another stabilizer. It would not do any good. The hormone blockade she had set would have to do to give her the external appearance of calm.

After what seemed like a very long pause, another image popped up. The assets' teacher in his cell, in an induced coma. Even at rest, his leg was crooked and Anais knew his unmodified face was full of furrows.

"Also a hypothesis?" the Epsilon asked.

"Yes," said Anais, more shortly than she had intended.

"Carry on then, Chief Negotiator. Anais."

The Epsilon disappeared abruptly, the holo winking out of existence. Anais stretched, walked casually to her shower unit, stripped off her clothes and turned on the waves. Then, and only then, she threw back her head, and then threw it forward, letting her breath course through her and her sweat flow. It was just possible that she had fooled her transmitters and her body’s data read as nothing more than a normal reaction to an important call. Usually she found the thought that she was being monitored, watched, recorded, her data stored — she found that thought comforting. It was comforting to know that you were never alone, always a blip. Right now she was very desperately wishing not to be noticed.

Because the Epsilons were early. It had been an important mission, true, but a routine important mission. It had not been completed. There were many others like that going on around the uncivilized world, many other Negs like herself deciding between courses of action, developing settlements out of existence. And that meant that Sherman might have been right. And that...

Anais shivered, in the scorching air of her shower unit.

Afterward she flipped through the screens, data projections popping up all over her room till she was surrounded by them. Yes, she was satisfied with the preliminary results. The magic bullet, her mentor had called it, the thing that would really give them infinity, eternal life, eternal acuity. Anais felt it was within reach, centered in these assets, these, these children, she said the curse word in the relative privacy of her mind. There would be enough eternity for every Ed, herself first and foremost...

And yet there had been the sudden Epsilon call.

Anais wiggled her fingers.

“Carroll here.” He popped up in the air in front of her, seated at his station. He was subvocalizing; he was not alone.

"Find a... a closet, anything," she was impatient. The holo flickered and held. He was now in a tiny room, shelves with cleaner and odds and ends behind him. A closet. He turned to show her that the door was closed.

“Do you see the background on Case Group 6.2?” She flipped the screen for him so he would know which bit she was talking about.

“Yes, boss.”

No delay, he was shaping up.

“Take them to camp. No jumping.”

This time there was a moment as his feed did the math.

“That’s 94 hours, boss. Do we have CMO permission?” So he understood the implications.

Anais shook her head.

“The CMO," she thought about what to reveal to him, "the CMO is not aware of the deeper implications of the project. Shon believes we will process the assets into biomass once the tests are done. You are under my direct command. There can be no demotion risk for you, even if you are caught.” That was too direct; the Epsilon call had taken more out of her than she had realized. For the first time in her life Anais imagined not being able to use her modifications to release hormones into her bloodstream, no stabilizers under her skin. She popped two at once.

Carroll thought for a few moments.

"And if I am not... stopped?" he asked. "What is in it for me?"

Anais smiled.

"Everything," she said, with complete sincerity.

Carroll did not share the deep-seated disgust most normal people held for the naturals, the unmods. He was certain that he himself had been lab-made and brought up in the regular way, in a healthy school environment, so he never felt threatened by the less fortunate ones. He figured they could not help it, being born to parents (as a well-balanced personality had to have minor defects, one that Carroll had been allowed to keep was his predilection for dirty words). Quite often naturals could be treated and successfully modified, when caught early. (Carroll had not known that most Eds were born not made; Anais had not pursued the same policy of frankness with him as her mentor had with her; partly because she knew how that ended for her mentor. Ended her, in fact.)

Carroll had read the case studies but it was only after his mission on Snowflake, under Russell, that he really understood what danger the unmods held for the normies. When Russell, his mission partner, went native, it was Carroll was who managed to bring her down, her and the scarred man she had taken as her ‘mate.’ This was why he was currently working with Anais, promoted to Junior Admin from Support Intern. Anais had spoken at the inquiry and stood up for him, not that there was much doubt which way it was going to go; and she was the one who recommended not adjusting this particular memory. She said it was formative and would stand him in good stead if he ever felt like going for some unregulated-looking woman with wrinkles on her face. Carroll had gotten really slatted that night with some staffers from the entertainment division (andies, humans, or merged, he was not sure). He did not remember much of that. But he did remember what she had said to him.

The assets were being herded into the small transport hold. Carroll eyed them with controlled dislike in spite of his moderate and balanced outlook. He was finding it harder to be tolerant when there were so many of them in one place. They had been slightly improved — at least the girls' hair had been cut short and everyone was dressed in gray overalls. The girls still looked like girls and the boys like boys. Normal juniors at their age would be undergoing Highlighting Uniqueness tests, being assigned to one of the genders and having their faces modified to reflect one of the Seven Special Types.

"There are reasons we can't have normalizing done to them," Anais subvocalized to him. The CMO was having shons psych treatment; that was a tiny window of opportunity where shon was incommunicative and Anais could deploy her mission, unapproved by the CMO.

Carroll released a calmer into his bloodstream with a muscle contraction. These Waysiders just looked messy, faces arranged any old how. A sorry bunch, all in all. They were not talking, or even trying to talk. The numbers girl, Asset 17, had that zonked look he knew from experimental research. The gecks had not wanted to give her up. Asset 17 had scored through the roof on calc/sci potential but had an episode with the second treatment series which made them put syncing on hold; now her eyes were flickering greenish-gold and going blank in turn.

“Are you sure about this, boss?” Carroll asked subvocally, glancing at the snooze units with longing.

Anais gave a slight regretful shrug.

“I hear you,” she said out loud in her gruff comradeship voice. “But you know what happens when we put them under without proper prep. They can’t relax, they go psychotic.”

“And we can’t take them off the meds to sedate, and the double whammy might kill them. Got it.”

“Take a vac and a full scan once you hand them over,” Anais clapped him on the shoulder. “You’re totally hopped up.”

Carroll laughed in spite of himself and nodded. He really was getting jittery despite his recent physical. That was a sign his body needed sequential rest, as did his mind; there was a point when no modification in the world could replace sleep.

“Will do, boss,” he said, and Anais smiled.

“Vox me when you arrive,” she said, and left the dock.

This one was going to be a win. And it was going to be hers.