16:40 Thursday, March 7, CE 0

“Huh.” Dr. Hawthorne Crenshaw observed the data readout on his tablet, his gloved hand swiping at the screen. The monitoring program for T.I.A. was operating as it should, displaying activity levels for the various systems of Evelyn’s brain. It was a series of differently sized boxes, arranged and laid out in roughly the shape of a human brain, with each flashing colors and growing or shrinking as they were used. The married couple had spent a great deal of time on their journey from Earth experimenting with these readouts while Evelyn tried to think about different things.

Anthony Machado let out a growl of frustration. “Well don’t just ‘huh’ and not tell us what’s going on. What do you see, old man?”

Hawthorne failed to answer for a moment as he tried to confirm his thoughts for a moment before speaking up. “I’ve only seen a recording of this sort of activity. It seems as though she’s dreaming. I also see signs of her being upset, but considering the only other time I’ve seen her dream, that isn’t abnormal. What is abnormal is that she is dreaming at all. The activity levels are also varying a great deal from my prior experience, with a lot more data access and bandwidth being used. It’s a stream of thought as opposed to strong focus on individual processes.”

Quiet reigned for a moment as the assembled engineers waited for more. Dr. Li Qiang decided to say what he felt was on everyone else’s mind. “Translation please, we don’t have any knowledge of that prior event or what it means.”

“My sister,” MOTHER responded, “appears to have advanced a great deal in her capability of producing and simulating imagery, and so her ability to dream does not require the decades of processing it did millennia ago. If I understand Doctor Crenshaw properly, she is dreaming in real time, or close to it.”

“Correct. Evelyn is having a dream, more likely a nightmare. Oh-” Hawthorne adjusted the display, dragging a fingertip across it. “It’s changing. The data is becoming garbled… The screen’s gone black…” He watched quietly, wondering what he was watching.

Evelyn looked away from T.I.A. as she felt something. “What…?”

T.I.A. shook her head at Evelyn, a hand reaching out to try and pull her face back towards her. “No, you need to listen to me. It’s not important right now. I don’t know when I’ll be able to speak to you again, Evelyn.”

Evelyn pushed herself up from her seated position, her body shaking with effort as she glared back at T.I.A. with surprising anger. “I don’t want to talk to you! I understand what you want, and I said no. Maybe I’ll change my mind later, but I’ll be fine for now.”

Moving back from Evelyn as she stood, T.I.A. let out a frustrated sigh. “Just think about it, please? I can work with you on this, we can make compromises, but you need to let me do this work. Your mind won’t remain healthy. You’re already being unusually unreasonable. I realize I approached this in a poor manner, but I was trying to make the point to you that your inner demons are only going to increase in number and strength if you don’t let me cut them down.”

The ancient woman crossed her feeble arms over her chest, glaring back up at T.I.A. as she listened. “I’ll think about it. You’re asking a lot of me. You can’t expect me to be willing to just let you lobotomize me ‘for my own good’ without at least considering it longer than a single conversation.”

T.I.A. nodded and floated back, lounging in the air for a moment. “Okay, that’s better than nothing. We’re two sides of the same coin, two halves of the same mind and person. I want to work in harmony with you, not against you. I don’t have any other way to commu-” T.I.A. froze for a moment as that presence invaded their space even more. Her face twisted up in anger as Evelyn grinned and the room started disappearing. “You fucking lia-”

Evelyn’s face appeared on Hawthorne’s tablet, her hair grey, her face gently aged and otherwise beautiful. She appeared to be speaking, but the vacuum of the chamber did not transfer the sounds from the speakers. She looked relieved, a big smile upon her face.

“Mother, can you pipe the tablet’s audio output and input into the comms?” Hawthorne found himself glancing upwards, before looking back to the tablet.

Without her acknowledgement, MOTHER did just that, allowing Evelyn’s voice to come through. “- was so worried something had gone wrong! What’s happening out there? I still don’t have any other connections from outside.”

“There she is! Hi Missus Crenshaw!” Dr. Qiang spoke loudly over the comms. Other voices joined his in similar greetings.

Evelyn looked surprised as she looked around, unable to actually move any camera. “Are other people there? Hello everyone! How many people did my sister bring to my rescue?”

Hawthorne smiled back at her, chuckling softly. “We have a whole team working on you presently. There was an accident with some drones working on old schematics from when Mother performed this procedure on herself. It’ll still be a few hours, but we’ll have you hooked up into the station’s systems before too long. Are you alright? I saw that you were dreaming.”

She listened quietly as Hawthorne recounted the situation, relief showing on her expression. “Okay, that doesn’t sound so bad. Is Mother okay? She’s not too upset with herself is she?”

“I am just happy to hear that you are okay, sister. Please forgive me for my oversight. You were right to be anxious.” MOTHER sounded rather down, regretful.

Evelyn shook her head, entirely for Hawthorne’s benefit. “You’re forgiven! It was actually a rather enlightening experience. I needed some time alone, isolated from other stimuli to understand myself better.”

Hawthorne tilted his head slightly in his helmet, the rigid neckpiece not following his movement well. “Oh? I’m happy to hear you got something out of this. Just give us a little more time. I need to set the tablet down so I can get back to work.” He moved the device up to an area in a compartment he’d opened, laying it down safely.

Evelyn felt painfully limited by the tablet, but it was her only outside access that could protect her from being subject to T.I.A.’s limitations again. Now that she knew the circumstances required to allow her to ‘dream’ and share her V.E. with her subconscious, she had every intention of avoiding it in the future. She reached out through the tiny window of the tablet, otherwise floating in darkness as she stared out at one of her outer compartments. “You’re not going to disconnect the tablet are you? Can I still stay on the comms with you? Maybe I can help!”

Letting out an intentional sigh for dramatics, Anthony Machado spoke up first. “We have the schematics already and we already know what needs to be done, we don’t need your help, Evelyn. Just sit tight and let your doctors do their brain surgery on you, okay?”

“Please forgive Mister Machado’s crudeness. He was rather suspicious of this situation until recently.” Barnard Smith has actually come over and leaned over the tablet a bit to smile down at her. She waved back at him and nodded.

“I’m just happy to have the opportunity to get near this equipment. Is there any chance you’d let me get inside and poke around, Missus Crenshaw?” Dr. Qiang spoke in a joking manner, closing up a compartment and picking up his tools to move to another.

Evelyn wished she could tell how many of her outer connections were working, but until they connected her to the station proper like Hawthorne had hooked up the tablet she was unable to feel anything else. Maybe she needed a better capability to sense the physical components of her mind. “Thank you Mister Smith, I don’t mind Mister Machado’s jokes. And no, Doctor Qiang, I’m spoken for. My husband would never approve.”

Hawthorne laughed as he moved a set of gear, starting work in another section. “If I had my way, I’d have done this work alone, but Mother insisted we have a whole team. Maybe I’ll let you look at some design schematics later as thanks, but it would be highly improper to let anyone else work on her internal systems.”

“Wonderful, the Crenshaws are giving out favors in thanks for this job? Think you can put a good word in for me with Mother? I’d like to tinker around in her head, if she’s not also spoken for?” Anthony Machado laughed softly at the little joke.

Some others mirrored Anthony’s laugh uneasily, but MOTHER did respond. “Perhaps we will talk later, Mister Machado. I have plans tonight with Doctor O’Malley if you would like to join us?”

“If you’re already going to turn it into a party, maybe invite the rest of us too?” Dr. Qiang felt left out.

“It is not that kind gathering. Perhaps at a later date, Doctor Qiang?” MOTHER really did not know how to explain that her plans were partly romantic. She had already had to request Heather’s permission to bring Anthony with her.

“Less talk, more work everyone. The only one allowed to talk is Evelyn. Come on everyone, let’s get this finished.” Barnard had taken charge rather abruptly, trying to get everyone back on track.

Evelyn smiled at that, though no one could see her tucked into the compartment on the tablet. “Thanks everyone! I happen to know a lot about what’s happened on Earth after we left, so if anyone has any questions or wants details, feel free to ask. I realize a lot of you probably already looked a lot of it up on the database, but I can cross-reference things a lot easier.”

Voices perked up on the comms after that, inundating Evelyn with questions about their families and friends and what happened to them after they left.

By the time they finished the job, most of the engineers were looking pretty depressed.

Earth, After Cataclysm 99680

“I was told there was a warehouse here, with humans doing freight lifting with zero Anthropoid support.” Commander Vasille Tzen sat quietly in a military vehicle, an electrically powered machine with a sleek shape and utilitarian design. Pop-up solar panels covered half a yard of space in the back of the vehicle, taking in the sunlight of Khezaka in the former nation of Panama.

Seated with him in the two-seater vehicle was a greying, older woman with a fit look to her and facial features that resembled the Old One next to her. She was more robust, and bore nearly as many decorations on her uniform as Vasille, with her name tag reading ‘Captain Tzen’. “Commander, you asked me to take you to the site of the incident, I did not tell you the warehouse was still standing.”

Before them was the skeleton of what was once a warehouse, the commercial neighborhood mostly untouched by what must have been a fire. Piles of ash and the bones of crates and other cargo filled the empty space that hadn’t been filled with collapsed walls.

Vasille sighed, leaning on an arm rest. “I realize that, Danielle. Why didn’t anyone tell me it had burned down? Who burnt it down? Who were the former occupants? Were there any people there? Have you investigated the site for any hidden areas?”

Captain Danielle Tzen got out of the vehicle and invited her father to join her on their way over to the former warehouse. “It burned down two days ago. Any other signs of activity stopped almost a week ago. The rumors you were following were older still. If the people you were after were here, they left already.” She waited a moment for him to join him as they walked. “As far as what happened, it was owned by a company called the Wise Ape Cargo Company. We don’t know who burned it down, but it was done with simple fertilizer-based accelerants.”

“They deliver product to places that Anthropoids have difficulty getting to due to terrain, places people have settled in intentionally isolated areas. This warehouse was one of their largest, but to my understanding they have been migrating their business north due to the increased colonization efforts. As far as any records can tell us, the place was officially abandoned and turned over to the city of Khezaka for auctioning away. Then it was burned down.” Danielle glanced over at her father, watching his expression.

Commander Tzen did not seem pleased. “Fan-fucking-tastic.” He let out a sigh and looked around at the sight. He kicked at some debris, watching as it crumbled into ash. He recomposed himself and straightened his back. “No signs of struggle or conflict? No signs of foul play besides the arson? Did the warehouse have any secret underground facilities or anything?”

Captain Tzen laughed softly, shaking her head. “The only thing unusual is the design. None of the normal doors are designed for Anthropoids to pass through, and the cargo areas are high enough off the ground that any Anthropoid workers would have to jump down from high enough that they’d damage their bodies. I’m inclined to think the company should be investigated for discrimination, but it’s my understanding they were given their business liscence with special dispensation for their unusual business.”

Vasille sucked on his teeth for a moment, considering the situation. “I’m sure you’ve already told the rest of our forces to investigate the Wise Ape Cargo Company’s other facilities? What of those?”

Danielle frowned for a moment before looking up to her taller father. She was tall herself, but the half-blood couldn’t hope to match the Old One’s height. “Well, due to their business a lot of their registered facilities are hard to get to, especially since they’ve moved on to areas where the People’s Guard does not have much of a presence yet. Early reports on the ones we have gotten to suggest several more have been burned down as well. Many of their trucks have gone missing as well.”

The cyborg Old-One lifted his artificial hand, clenching the mechanical fingers into a fist. His biological body trembled with rage but his mechanical fist stayed still and sturdy. He tried to concentrate on that, letting him calm down. “Okay. Walter Thade almost a week ago. It took me two days to get to Medellin and acquire my rumors and interrogate the Tetches. It took me two days to gather all my information and give out my instructions with regards to this warehouse. It took another two days to get here to Khezaka. The warehouse was burned down two days ago, but since I was in transit I missed your messages about it in the mountain passes.”

She nodded at him, letting him put the timeline together.

“While I was on the way, the warehouse was burned down before you could investigate the owners or the property in advance. Furthermore, other facilities for this company are being destroyed and their resources are going missing.” Vasille opened his fist and dropped his arm. “They’re on the run. They know we’re after them. They’ve relocated their resources in advance, otherwise there would be more cargo left behind in the ruins. The facilities on the records will all be gone by the time we get to them. Wherever they’re going, it’s far away, out of range of the People’s Guard infrastructure.”

Danielle nodded again. “Those were Neville’s thoughts. He’ll be happy to hear you thought the same as he did. He’s already been martialing his forces to go after them.”

Vasille felt pride that his children were working so well together, but he was a bit disappointed that his youngest son had put it together before anyone else had. He supposed Neville had taken after him the most, even if he’d taken his wife’s name. “Alright, I’ll be going with him. I’m authorizing the use of a Madre and ten Hijas to go in pursuit. We’ll be gone an indeterminate time in search of them. I’ll need thirty Guardsmen with me, counting myself and Neville.”

She saluted him, and then gestured back towards their vehicle. “I’ll take you to the base and let him know your orders. He’s only prepared a Madre and five Hijas, with fifteen Guardsmen.”

He moved back to the vehicle with her quickly, nodding. “That’ll have to do, I want to be away as soon as possible. Have the Wise Ape Cargo Company’s assets seized, investigated, torn down, and auctioned off for charity. Anyone wearing one of their uniforms is to be arrested on sight, and any of them that resist are to be taken by force or killed. They’re obviously a dangerous element and conspiring against the UPE.”

Leonard Tetch seemed very pleased in the days since Vasille had left his home. Elena did not fail to miss the pep in his step, or the energy in his voice. Leonard had rediscovered politics since he didn’t have to spend so much time at the hospital, and she found his increased interest in her lifelong field quite invigorating. She won the majority of their arguments, but the sparring was good practice for her to get back into the swing of things for the consultations she was starting to do with the Council of Thirteen. Her husband had seemed to be enjoying even his losses as he soaked in information from her and her various books on the topics as they conversed about the nation’s news.

Their conversations had begun to include more current news, topics that were not yet public knowledge and things that she had decided to share with Leonard to see what he thought about it. She didn’t share with him information provided from the Guard regarding the Wise Ape Cargo Company, but she had suggested that Vasille was hard at work looking for Walt. She also shared with him some information about the status of far away colonies, particularly ones where warehouses had been burned down, and received his opinions on those topics as well.

Leonard’s faith in Vasille seemed unshakable. The People’s Guard were a legendary force, superheroes to a young Leonard as far as she understood. The Tetch family seemed enamored of the police organization, collecting relics of past operations and autographs of the various more famous members of the Guard. Leonard did not seem to share the level of passion his family did; he reserved that for medicine and his new family; but as a child he was certainly raised on stories about the Guard’s exploits.

At every point where she raised concerns about Walt, he tried to assure her that he would be fine. He promised her that Vasille was doing the best he could to find him, that he would spare no resources, and that only the most prepared evildoers could even hope to slow him down, let alone escape. She could not avoid his enthusiasm and confidence infecting her, and she found herself forgetting about being worried about her grandson on more than a few occasions.

Leonard’s joy had nothing to do with Vasille being on the trail of his people though. He was instead imminently pleased to hear that his father, Bosk Schrade’s, plans were going off without a hitch. His daughter was safe and sound as Walt was moved further and further away, and Elena seemed keen on resuming their coital interludes after since she’d gotten pregnant and had Marie. He was equally eager and terrified to see if a second pregnancy would present similar complications with an Old One.

Elena had little interest in having another child so soon, of course, but she had to go through special channels to acquire birth control methods her husband couldn’t detect. She obviously had to avoid the hospital for fear of the possibility that Leonard was compromised, or even responsible for Walt’s disappearance. Thankfully she had resources and contacts that almost no one else could draw upon. Birth control was one of the most common things available to the people of the UPE since it had first settled in Medellin, and considering the meager fertility of an Old One it did not take much to knock her reproductive systems out.

Remarkably, birth control, while widely available, was not commonly utilized outside of a few reasons. The culture of ‘making love’ that had originated in the Smith Bunker to compensate for an unwillingness to expend unnecessary resources on the technology for their very survival had continued long past its necessity. The people of the UPE utilized these alternate methods of sex rather eagerly, choosing to enjoy reproductive sex only when they planned to have children. Elena, having grown up in the world prior to the Cataclysm, could only marvel that such a thing was even possible, but it was how the UPE was raised.

Outside of brothels and specific instances where couples wanted to enjoy reproductive sex despite cultural taboos, birth control ended up being the sort of thing that turned heads when it was requested or used. Even some of the contacts that Elena had to go through to acquire it without public knowledge had questioned the request. It was rare that anything about Old Ones didn’t make it into public news, and she’d rather her husband did not hear she was on birth control from the rumor mill.

Thankfully the base fertility of her genetically engineered and impossibly long-lived body was low enough that she’d be able to play her failure to get pregnant off for a while. Resuming intimacy with Leonard, while somewhat chilling, was also oddly comforting for her as well. It was something she knew she had to do, but she was determined to enjoy staying undercover in the process.

“So, do you remember that man we had to cut an Ironback spike out of?” Elena sipped quietly at a cup of coffee while Leonard carefully tried to feed Marie. She kept throwing some of her mushy food at him, but he seemed to be enjoying himself.

He nodded back at her before leaning in towards Marie and making a funny face. “Wubble bubble gooo!”

Marie squealed and laughed in response, throwing up her hands and slapping them down on his forehead.

She smiled as she watched her husband play like a child. She suppressed a thought that he was so much younger than her that he was practically a child. Those kinds of thoughts made the ancient woman feel filthy. “I’ve been hearing from the Council a bit about the place he comes from. It seems kind of interesting. They’ve been having trouble bridging the language gap since not all of them can speak, or speak very well.”

Leonard pulled back from Marie to give Elena a quizzical look, and then he laughed as Marie mimicked his face as best she could. “They can’t all speak? That is rather strange. Why is that?”

She hummed in thought, wondering what to tell him and what to keep back. “Well, in my youth we would have called people like them ‘differently abled’. They seem to be afflicted with a number of mutations or maladies that divides their society up into a strange caste system. It’s sort of like a bunch of symbiotic guilds that lean on each other to make up for their various weaknesses while shoring up their strengths. The communication problem comes from the fact that they’ve spent the whole Ice Age, and maybe longer, totally isolated from outside societies and they have no castes or guilds dedicated to diplomacy.”

His curiosity seemed to have been drawn as he considered the idea. “That’s very strange. Do you know if these mutations are inherited or random among their society? If each caste is inherited then I wonder if their origins are not a result of genetic tampering like your own variation. They could each be considered their own subspecies if s- Ah!” Leonard flinched as Marie hit him in the cheek under an eye with a splash of food. “Why you!”

Elena laughed as her husband leaned in to tickle-attack Marie, watching the little girl writhe and giggle helplessly. She gave them a moment to calm down into a series of little hugs and kisses before resuming the meal. “We’re not sure yet, but it’s possible. If that’s the case, then it’s very interesting that they survived the Ice Age since it doesn’t appear they have the technology we do. The man we operated on was apparently something of a guardian caste. He had limited intellect, but he was told stories about the Iron Roaches, and without information to clarify the difference between them and Ironbacks, he decided one was a threat and picked a fight.”

“Hmm! Stupid but fearless and violent. I can see why one of those kind would have been sent into the UPE, to investigate threats within it and perhaps report back home eventually. I’m surprised he hadn’t encountered an Ironback before he arrived in Medellin though? I would imagine more than a few were already near his homeland.” Leonard had a serious look on his face as he helped their daughter eat.

She nodded back. “Well, that’s the thing, the stories he was told he learned here. He apparently had orders to come back to the capital of our country, the ‘heart of the potential enemy’, before trying to learn anything about us. I can only imagine the impression he’s delivered back home.”

Leonard held out his injured hands, and Marie slapped her hands down on them multiple times. “So, on one hand we have the fact that he was totally overpowered by an Ironback, one of their protector class.” He bent forward and turned one stiff-wristed hand vertical and confused Marie as she tried to slap both hands at different angles and tangled herself up a bit. “And on the other hand he was fixed back up and sent home in good health despite his assault.” Turning the other hand vertical allowed her to slap both hands accurately again. “Hard to say if he will consider us too soft-hearted or too dangerous.”

Elena watched her daughter practice her motor skills instead of eating. She rolled her eyes as Leonard encouraged her, forcing her to come over and help feed her. He’d insisted on feeding her, but he was getting more food on his face than in Marie’s mouth. “Well that’s the thing. Their government has requested all Anthropoids stay out of their country for now.”

He looked up at her, letting her take over feeding duties while reaching his left hand out to grope Elena’s backside. “I think I heard of a company that was like that. Serviced people in remote areas that Anthropoids couldn’t easily survive in due to insufficient agriculture or bad terrain. Kind of racist if I’m not mistaken, but they served a niche.”

She turned to look at Leonard, raising an eyebrow in surprise and swatting a bit at his hand with one of hers. “Do you think they’d try to set up shop over there?”

Leonard shrugged, smiling mischievously as he withdrew the hand. “Seems like a natural fit.”