Interlude: Echelon

Sixty-eight years previous:

Sergei blinked his wide brown eyes, once, then twice. In front of him was a flat area, full of green spikes.

“Danger,” he mumbled to himself. “Sharp.”

He fought the urge to sit and lost. Once he was closer to the ground, everything was better. There was less to see, less… world. He closed his eyes and rocked, counting with each movement.

“One, one, two, three, five, eight, thirteen, twenty one…”

When he reached seven billion, seven hundred and seventy-eight million, seven hundred forty-two thousand and forty nine, he stopped and opened his eyes again. It was his favorite way to calm himself, he’d been doing it as long as he could remember. Of course, now that he had his system, he didn’t need to count for nearly as long to make the world settle back into place. Still, it was an old comfort, and one not easily abandoned.

Now that everything made sense again, he noticed there was a white, stone path wending its way through the danger. “Don’t forget. Identify and learn,” he announced.

He focused his vision against the bright light and captured an image. “Identify.”

“Hello Sergei,” said a soothing voice. “You are seeing grass. Closest match is Poa chaixii, broad-leafed meadow grass.”

He rolled the words around, tasting the colors of the letters. Chaixii seemed a little threatening, but when paired with Poa the name became well balanced. He was quite pleased with himself for remembering his mission. “Identify and learn,” he affirmed once more.

Abruptly he felt tired. This new world was too much to take more than a little at a time.

“System. Log. Out.” he pronounced, closing his eyes in anticipation of the jarring transition.

When he opened them again, he was home. He could hear his mother in the light room, softly cleaning.

She must have forgotten I can turn down my ears now, he decided. His system was still pretty new for all of them; he was the only one in the family to have one. His parents had paid forty years for it, whatever that meant.

Over the next week, he made his way across the field, identifying and learning as he went, careful not to miss a single unique aspect of this new world.

His new world.

Chapter 30: Homecoming

The lush grass of the meadow served as a comfortable resting place for a weary Urglah. He rested his eyes, enjoying the patterns of the warm light seeping through the lids, waving bands of white and orange.

This is the life, Anda thought, listening to the excited sounds of the little group he was overseeing.

“Get it!”

“Where’d it go?”

“Hey, watch where you’re waving that thing.”

“Watch out! It’s about to-”

“Ouch!”

“I know… little sucker packs a punch, eh?”

After several more minutes, there was a final sounding crunch, and he opened one eye lazily.

Ah. Looks like they finally got one.

“All hail the mighty warriors,” he called out.

A grandmotherly woman looked over her shoulder with a girlish smile where she stood, holding what in any other context might be mistaken for a walking stick, the broken body of her ferocious enemy at her feet.

“Killed a bunny, huh?”

“You better believe it, sonny boy. Bow at the sight of my might!”

Mrs. Chang was one of Anda’s favorites. She ran a small food stand just off the market square, and he hadn’t let a day pass without passing by to pick up some of her amazing jiaozi dumplings.

Too bad she’s only level four. What on earth did she do in the Trial anyway?

He could understand why very few of the crafters had leveled during their Inside indenture. Monotonous service to a clan, doing exactly the same things every day for years on end was hardly a recipe for gathering experience. Mrs. Chang hadn’t been outdoors on the Inside until she finished her term the previous year.

“And...” she continued, “I just received a notification of level five!”

Anda smiled inwardly at her phrasing. “That’s fantastic!” he exclaimed. “Don’t spend those points until we have a chance to chat later.”

She winked. “It’s a date, dearie.”

The rest of the gray-haired group gathered around to congratulate her, as a message from Lilijoy arrived.

Hi Anda – I think it’s finally time! Can you log out when you are free?

He stood. “All right, everyone. I want each of you to get at least one rabbit before sunset. Maybe Mrs. Chang will use them for dumplings tomorrow. Remember what we worked on and you’ll be fine. Just make sure to get back to town before dark. We don’t need any more deaths dragging you down.”

Lilijoy had passed along her knowledge of how death erased recent experience gains. Since his little group was well past the point of receiving experience for act of dying itself, leveling without dying had become the main priority.

Not so easy when the average age is north of seventy, and the average level south of five. Another thought struck him. I wonder if they know they can alter their appearance over time?

It wouldn’t surprise him if they didn’t. The clan’s ability to limit their knowledge, coupled with what seemed to him an appalling lack of curiosity, meant that most of them took everything at face value. He was working on changing that, and thankfully, his new friends were very receptive, if not always incredibly quick to apply new information.

He looked over the group one more time as they turned to face a new lagomorphic peril, weapons held over their heads, feet firmly planted.

This is going to take a long time, he thought.

***

By the time Anda returned from the Inside, Lilijoy had the hovercar moving toward the Piles.

“Any sign?” she asked.

“Of Attaboy? Not a hair. I have all the crafters and merchants keeping an eye out for an Academy student your size, but no luck so far. Mr. Sennit says hi by the way. He keeps asking when you are getting back to show him your hand-weaving progress.”

Lilijoy winced. Her crafting had not been high on her list of priorities recently. Or really on the list in the first place. Anda saw her reaction and continued.

“I don’t think he really cares about that though. He just wants to see you.”

“I want to see him too. Thanks for helping them while I’m away.”

Anda chuckled. “It’s been entertaining, when I didn’t want to pull out my hair in frustration.”

“You don’t have hair,” she reminded him.

“Oh, but I do! There ain't no words for the beauty, the splendor, the wonder of my… well, I guess it’s more like fur. But still.”

Lilijoy ignored his quotation abuse. “Anyway… I think we should leave the car back a bit so we don’t alarm them. Can you remote pilot it if we need a quick pickup?”

“I don’t love the idea of walking in without a quick escape. What if there’s a trap?”

“I’m going to send in the midges first. Unless they’re wearing a space suit, I’ll see anyone who’s hiding by their breath. But I think the odds are pretty good that there won’t be any surprises.”

Any surprises like that, anyway, she thought.

After another thirty minutes, the terrain became familiar.

“There,” she said. “Let’s stop by that gulch.”

There it was. The ditch where she had found the cattails on that fateful day. It was smaller than she remembered, and the water was nearly gone, the cattails that remained dry, brown sausages waiting to explode with any impact.

“It’s only a couple miles from here. Hold on, there’s something I need to do.”

She left the hovercar and walked across the cracked earth to the nearest cattail. She grabbed hold of the fibrous stick and wrenched it loose.

“Attaboy and I used to hit each other with these the few times we found some. It was the closest thing we had to a toy that actually did something.”

She waved her cattail wand in the air, and then smacked it on the ground as hard as she could. Instantly an explosion of fluff filled the air, swirling with the breeze, which at that moment changed course and delivered the bulk of it directly into Lilijoy’s face. Waving her hands and sputtering, she backed away from the cattail fluff calamity, listening to Anda’s laughter in the background.

“Well,” he said, walking over and pulling a white puff from her hair. “You were always comparing yourself to this stuff. Maybe it’s not as harmless as you thought.”

“Ha. Very funny,” she replied as she watched the last of the white strands float away on the breeze.

***

The walk to Night’s Safety was even shorter than she remembered. She had realized that her plan to use the midges was once again foiled by the prevailing winds, so they chose to leave them in the craft. They moved slowly, carefully scanning the area as they went. She had a knife, and Anda carried his usual array of firearms.

“I think that’s where I fell,” she said, more to herself than her companion. The Piles were already in sight, a few hundred meters away, and she could just see the stand of trees that marked the inner region of the tribe’s territory. Already, she could almost taste the sour smell of the refuse discharged by the factory-mine and feel the vibrations of its ponderous heaving. The air carried with it a cascading crackle of atomic decay, almost like recordings of the surf from distant oceans.

Nice place to grow up. Wonder if there are any food pellets lying around? Why would the tribe stay here for so many years?

As they passed the trees, Lilijoy could see the branches where she and Attaboy had played, see the flat area where Pinton had tortured their half starved bodies with exercises every morning, and finally, she could see it.

There’s no place like home.

Night’s Safety.

Little more than a mound of dirt and rubble with a large rectangular opening. As they approached, Lilijoy could see the remnants of cinder blocks and exposed rebar. What she couldn’t see was Mooster and Grabby, sitting in their chairs on either side of the opening, as they had done virtually every day of her childhood. She suppressed a spike of panic.

What if they’ve been taken? What would Sinaloa do to them? What if… I never get any answers?

The last thought made her feel a little selfish.

“I don’t like this,” she told Anda softly. “There should be people all around.”

“What do you want to do?” he asked.

“Nothing to do but go in, I guess.” She resisted an urge to take his hand as they walked up to the entrance. The large metal slab that served as a door at night lay propped against the side of the mound. The opening smelled of unwashed bodies, mold, and damp earth. She could see hinges on the side, massive loops deep set in a column of metal. They were broken and twisted, as if some giant had ripped the original door off in a fit of pique.

How is it that I never saw that before? she wondered. What the hell was this place?

She ventured a few feet into the darkness, her eyes quickly compensating.

It looks like home. It also looks like a bomb went off in here. Literally.

It looked the same as it ever had, but with her new perspective, she could see the broken concrete walls, the filled in crater of a floor. The ceiling had collapsed nearly throughout, leaving only a few areas where Anda could walk without hunching. Here and there, tattered sheets made from loosely bound leaves hung, marking one sleeping nook or another.

“So, this is where you grew up.” Anda’s voice was filled with incredulity and sadness.

“Yes. This is the first level. It goes on for a bit, then there’s a way down.”

With every step into the empty space, her heart sank.

They’re gone. All of them are really gone.

She had no sense of love or profound attachment for her tribe, but with every passing moment she understood more and more that her past had been an anchor, a reliable reference for her sense of who she was and where she came from. To have the people who she had known almost all her life simply vanish…

Don’t fool yourself, she thought. They’re all in a dark cell somewhere, being taken one by one for experiments.

Still, it was odd that there were no signs of conflict, no bodies, no blood. She would have expected certain members of the tribe to fight to the death.

Maybe they just finally moved to a nicer place.

The image of her tribe, dirty and disfigured as they were, sitting on a beach and sipping tropical drinks passed through her mind, and she stifled an entirely inappropriate hitch of a laugh.

“You okay?” asked Anda.

She waved him off and pressed forward, passing the hole in the floor they used as a toilet if someone absolutely had to go during the night. It had never occurred to her to wonder where it actually went.

Well, I’m sure as heck not going to find that out today. Or ever. Probably some closed off part of the lower level.

There were nooks and crannies, some almost tunnels, permeating the first level. Growing up, she hadn’t been able to see in the dark nearly as well as she could now, and it was fascinating to see her old space with so many details. Parts of the fallen walls and ceiling had old, peeling paint, mostly gray, but with the odd line of red or yellow.

But what she saw as she moved into the final stretch before the floor dropped away into a sloping rubble-strewn path that curved around and under the current floor made her gasp. There, on a piece of intact wall about a foot over her head was a symbol. A logo of a curving ‘S’ bisected by an angular ‘T’. The ‘S’ was the interior of a taijitu and its line was divided between black and white, as if the invisible yin and yang were permeating from either side.

It was the logo for Tao Systems.

Her surprise battled with a sense of resigned inevitability.

Of course. Of course. What else could this place be.

She pointed it out to Anda.

“But why would they have a… what, an outpost, a bunker, out in the middle of nowhere?” he wondered. “This was in the middle of hundreds of square miles of uninhabited jungle.”

“I’m sure that was the point,” she said. “Something went on here, things happened here, that they wanted as far away from civilization as possible. It all led to this.” she gestured to the surrounding destruction. “I’m betting that it was a laboratory, or a testing facility.”

There wasn’t much to say after that, and they proceeded in silence, weighed down by invisible history.

Getting to the lower area was a bit of a scramble for Anda, but Lilijoy found that her feet remembered where to go, which blocks moved and which didn’t. The scent of mold and mildew became stronger as they went.

“This floor floods in the rainy season,” Lilijoy explained as she pulled herself under a fallen beam. “It was the closest thing I had to a bath until I went Inside. There’s not much down here, as far as I remember, though the ceiling’s in better shape.”

She came around a final corner and could see the open space of the first room in front of her. She stopped, shocked by the sight before her, before she called back to Anda.

“Um. I think I know where the tribe went.”

***

It took another minute for Anda to join her on the mud floor and take in the sight. The tribe, or the Bros anyway, stood motionless against the one intact wall like mannequins. If it wasn’t for her ability to see body heat, Lilijoy might have assumed they really were statues, or that their dead bodies had been pinned there.

There was Timout, with his long matted white hair and oddly stunted limbs. Next to him stood her nemesis, Pinton, bald head covered with thick scars.

Oh god, she thought. How could I have forgotten his ear?

It wasn’t just the ear, but the entire side of his head that looked like it had been ground off and replaced with a dark mat of scabs. For all of her life, it had simply been how Pinton looked. Next to him was Skymore, and Onlee, and Slepper, and then, there they were. Grabby and Mooster.

Henry and Gabriella Choi, we meet again for the first time, she thought.

She felt relief, and she felt disturbed. It was certainly not on the rather long list of possibilities she had prepared herself for. She had anticipated the tribe could be dead, or missing, or acting as if she had never left, but this?

I wonder where the rest of them are?

The Bros had always been the core of the tribe, but there were always others as well, more normal in their appearance and behavior. They had always kept their distance from Attaboy and Lilijoy, and not for the first time she wondered if that was because they had been told to do so.

She walked up to Mooster, looked at his face, seeing past the scars and matted beard to trace the resemblance to the smiling father from Emily’s memories.

Why the hell did you call yourself Mooster?

On the long list of mysteries, this probably ranked close to last, but it bothered her nonetheless.

So what are they doing? Hibernating? Hiding? Both? Should I try to wake them?

Anda moved up beside her and touched her shoulder. When she craned her head to look up at him, he mouthed, “what now?”

“Got me,” she replied in a quiet voice. The atmosphere was creepy, but she refused to act intimidated. “I have no idea what’s going on here.”

She refused to believe they were in any real danger, but it was hard not to imagine the motionless bodies suddenly coming to life and grabbing her. She shivered. Not intimidated, she told herself.

She came to a decision. “Move back, but not too far. I haven’t come all this way to give up on getting answers now,” she said.

Anda looked at her. “Tell me you’re not planning to do what I think you are.”

She shrugged. “I grew up with these people.”

“Oh, you mean the same people who left you to die in the wastes when you’d been mauled by dogs? Those people? Let’s at least try normal ways of waking them before you go using your system.”

“All right,” she said, raising her voice. “Hey! Hey, Mooster, Grabby. WAKE THE FUCK UP!”

Her voice echoed around the enclosed space and died, leaving behind profound silence. Anda’s eyes were a little wider than usual. She didn’t know if that was because of her volume or her vocabulary. She turned to him.

“There, you see? Do you want to try shaking them next? I’m telling-”

Anda was gesticulating to something behind her. She turned around.

Mooster’s eyes were open.