TWO

Dr. Coal returned with a steaming mug of coffee and a familiar scowl that said, “I’m not happy, don’t cross me.”

“What’s your problem?” Lauren said, turning away from the pilot to face Coal. Her white lab coat was ruffled and her jet black ponytail was beginning its escape from it’s hair tie.

“They only had decaf. What’s your problem?”

“We thought we’d found him in A4, and we were closing in on him when this little miser,” she said, gesturing at an indifferent looking drone pilot, “Gave the command to open fire at him with one of the drones. The subject ran and hid behind a stump, diverted the drone’s reflex system, and by the time we ordered him to cease fire and set up a tranq dart, we lost him in the woods.”

Coal, halfway through a nonchalant sip of his coffee, spit it out and coughed, partly because of the taste of the coffee, and partly because Bay managed to escape a fully-armed scout drone opening fire on him.

“Don’t worry, I fired him for you… isn't that incredible? Hah, you alright?”

Coal wiped his mouth and cleared his throat.

“No, that’s not it.” He lied, “This coffee tastes like balls. Why don’t you take a sip?” He growled, pouring it all over the scared looking Pilot’s face, who gasped and swore, mumbling about an accident. “Secretary! Go find us a drone pilot who doesn’t accidentally, or intentionally, gun down our test subjects.”

“Jared, Extract all drones from Sector A4. We need to let him think he’s escaped so he’ll come out of the woods. He won’t last long in there, its infested with mutants. We need to find him ASAP. Lauren, come with me.” Scientists and officials got busy with the new order as Coal and Lauren left the command center, headed to the observation room.

“Which sector was he headed towards when he ran off? And how on earth did he survive that drone strike?” Dr. Coal asked, dumping the rest of his coffee into a potted plant despite Dr. Pau’s audible sigh of disapproval.

“How expensive was that coffee? That stuff isn't easy to grow down here.”

Coal looked a little guilty. “More expensive than it was worth. The drone?”

“He must have noticed, or somehow knew, that the drone was equipped with motion sensors, and threw a rock to distract it while he ran off."

"Well, before we had him erased, he probably was pretty adept at escaping police drones just like that..."

"You don't think he's remembering again already?" Lauren's eyes widened and she spoke barely above a whisper, looking around for potential observers.

"That was a piloted drone, but it was semi-autonomous. He tricked its automatic reflexes based on just a fiber of a memory. A bullet grazed his shoulder but we were unable to find traces of blood past a few feet, he must've stopped the bleeding with one of his socks or something. The pilot realized it was a distraction but couldn’t fight the drone’s autonomous firing system until it was too late.. He was like a ghost, he just vanished.”

Dr. Coal was torn between immensely proud and very irritated with Bay, but mostly he was worried for his safety. That pilot, like all drone pilots, worked for the government and was much more intelligent than he seemed. Usually, though, they weren’t trained to hunt genetically modified super-soldiers. That wasn’t a mistake, he’d deliberately tried to assassinate Bay, he just messed up by relying on the dron's AI to aim. Coal already knew about at least two government spies in the command center alone, and there were probably more. If they saw Bay as a threat to their program, they would do everything in their power to kill him.

Coal caught himself strategizing ways to keep Bay safe.

He was no longer trying to test Bay’s abilities. Now he was trying to keep him alive.

“Lauren.” Coal stopped her as they walked.

“Hmm?” She looked up from her tablet.

“You aren’t going to like this idea.”

Lauren raised her eyebrows.

“Let’s … find another use, for Subject 0023,” Dr. Coal said quietly.

Lauren’s face morphed from confusion, to a loosely contained surprise as she gestured behind Coal.

It was Dr. Jared. In his eye was a sick kind of excitement.

“Pau, Coal?” Jared said smugly.

Dr. Coal turned around with a forced smile.

“Yes, Dr. Jared?”

“You might want to check your messages. Control just released an order.”

He turned back to Lauren. Her expression was conflicted and broken.

She held out her tablet.

“Why? After all these years of work?”

The command blazed on the glass tablet- a death penalty blazing in the dark hall like blood red fire. It was from headquarters.

TERMINATE THE ROGUE.

Coal’s gaze hardened. The hourglass had been turned over.

Jared walked away, and he turned back to Lauren.

“Are you really going through with this?"

He paused for a moment.

"Control doesn't know about the Error... about memory return. You know it's only a matter of time. S:0017 wasn't the first to begin to remember her past..."

"Coal, what are you saying?" Her voice was tense with danger.

He inhaled. His hands shook and he tightened them into fists.

"Lauren... everything we've done. I can't take it anymore. I feel like I'm dying."

She nodded slowly.

"What we've built... this isn't an experiment. This is cruel. This is brutality. I've spent my life serving... them. Their empire. Their reign."

"Coal, you can't blame yourself. They took-"

He shut his eyes, pain written across his face, and Lauren couldn't find it in her to finish her sentence.

"The experiment is a success. It's not easy- but it's possible. Life can exist on the surface. And we've build the weapons and the soldiers they need to claim it as theirs. But... there's a flaw with their system. You can't rewrite the past. You can't erase everything. Some things... are burned into you." He spoke from memory.

Lauren nodded slowly, hands involuntarily tightening into fists.

"Those memories never leave. As soon as you can remember those things, everything comes flooding back in. We can't hide from that anymore."

Her expression began to change. It began to turn into acceptance. There was even a flicker of hope behind her eyes.

"Lauren... we can beat them. We can turn their best soldiers against them. Their best soldier. S:0023 is our masterpiece, Lauren, I can feel it. Breaking out of his pod with his own monitor?! That's unheard of. And now they can't find him. What happens when he remembers who he is?"

"He'll destroy everything they've created... their whole system." she said the words with respect, as if they were about to explode.

Lauren’s eyes were of mingled emotion and uncertainty, but her trust in Dr. Coal shone through the brightest.

“If this is going to work, he’s going to need a friend.”

…

Bay crouched like a lion over a fresh kill on a small mossy rock outcropping, sculpting the ends of a long, straight sapling into sharp points. He knew what wood was, but somehow also knew it wasn’t common… at least wherever he was from.

In his hands was a work of art.

He had carved the branch on one side into a long, sharp edge in the same shape of the knife blade, adding two grooves ending in sharp teeth, angled in the in the side to give it a serrated shape. The other side was carved into a simple, brutal point. It looked like a short spear or harpoon- both sharp enough to penetrate skin and thick clothing, and sturdy enough to knock-out a enforcer in full battle armor.

Enforcer?

Suddenly he wasn’t in the forest. He was running from soldiers clad in black armor and visored helmets.

Blood.

Fire.

Running through dark cement passages, illuminated by flashlights, sparks and gunfire.

Fear.

Pain.

Rage.

He snapped back into reality again. For an instant, a shred of his memory had flickered through his eyes. Whenever he wasn’t paying attention, not concentrating on what he was doing or thinking about, he remembered things.

Scary things.

He tried to take hold of the image, but it felt like he was rising out of a pool of water- the memory trickled off his skin and slipped through his grasp, absorbing back into the same cage that trapped his subconscious.

He focused hard for 20 seconds, concentrating on what he’d just seen, but it was too late. All of it was gone.

Frustrated, he cursed and threw the stick as hard as he could. It cut through the humid air like an arrow and sunk into a clump of moss 20 feet away at a 45 degree angle, all the way to the handle.

His frustration dimmed a little bit.

That was satisfying.

He jogged through the forest and grasped the handle of the weapon, embedded deep in the soil. He pulled hard with both hands until it erupted out of the moss.

The stick in his palm no longer felt like a fallen branch. Now it was dangerous. He spent a second to clean the dirt off the tip, admiring it.

It was perfect.

About the length of a baseball bat, an inch and a half thick, both ends sharpened into points- wicked looking. He’d wanted this thing to have the ability to really screw up someone’s day.

In his hands, the stick took on a life of its own. His arms flowed like water, automatically spinning the weapon with speed and power, turning the weapon on a dime, striking hard and fast and stopping it by resting it against points on his thigh or shoulder. It was like riding a bike for the first time in years- it started slow, then the muscle memory flooded back into his mind.

He built a fire using the dry, brown, paper-like leaves that littered the forest floor and dry branches, something he felt oddly familiar doing, though with different materials, and he hardened and dried the ends of the short stick’s soft wood over the flames until they became dark, tough and stiff. He may be a newcomer into this bizarre, alien world of trees and grass and insectoid drones, but he’d been building trash fires in the slums since he was a kid, and he had a feeling he’s been making weapons just as long, if not longer.

Trash fires… I must’ve grown up in a city somewhere...

He scowled and shrugged off the infuriating feeling of another vanished memory lurking below, like a shark skulking beneath the waves.

He focused on the staff’s comforting feeling in his hand- it felt like a coiled viper. It’s power and weight re-energized him.

Bay felt powerful, strong, like a loaded spring. Not only this, but he felt comfortable with the strength beneath his skin- he was used to it, comfortable even, scaling buildings, breaking down doors, fighting. But this familiarity with his own danger freaked him out. He didn’t want to be dangerous.

He was afraid of himself.

A sound like a cannon rumbled in the distance.

Thunder… the distinctive sound that follows lighting, an explosion of static electricity in the stratosphere created by friction and static build-up in the clouds… common in thunderstorms.

They told me there would be storms… Whoever it was that taught me about… this place.

Another lost memory.

He knew things, felt things, that his conscious self was unaware of, and unable to pinpoint or describe. His conscious self, his personality, the awake and alive surface, was terrified. But his inner creature- memory and experience and whatever it was that hid beneath the skin, growled in its sleep. Its danger reassured him in at least one way- he could take care of himself.

His trust in his subconscious mind’s instinct was the only thing that separated him from death.

There was a monster inside.

“What do I call you, you little monster?” He spoke out loud in the quiet flickering sounds of the forest. His voice was like that of an old friend to him. He’d forgotten it’s timbre.

A murder of crows cawed in the distance.

The monster whispered in the shadows of his mind and chest:

My name is Danger.

TWO MILES AWAY

The ravens cackled in their trees and the crickets whispered to each other in the tall grass surrounding the clearing in the blue morning light. The air was still and brisk.

The trees shuddered.

Buried in the earth was a dark noise. With a boom and the sound of hydraulics, a clear, glass cylinder filled with semi-transparent, incandescent white liquid erupted out of the forest floor. It parted the loose dust in the clearing and glided upright, glowing faintly.

...

The chamber emerged like a pillar of ice, eerie and out of place in the natural, twilight atmosphere of the dawn.

...

Inside was the blurred figure of a sleeping girl with a halo of amber hair in the water, breathing with an oxygen mask.

...

On the side of the pod were the letters S:0024.