Chapter Forty-Four

The files were labeled, “SHP TJ,” “Prom Casual,” and “Spec.”

At first glance of course, my human mind read them as “Ship TJ,” as in a relationship with someone named TJ, “casual prom,” as in no formal wear required, and “specs,” as in glasses. But of course after a second of staring at them, I recognized them as abbreviations for something else. With a sinking feeling, I knew “Prom Casual” stood for Prometheus Casualties. And given Zero’s strange obsession with me, I was guessing the “SH” in the first file name meant Samantha Hart. The rest, I had no clue about.

Just pick one, Sam. You have to go through them all and you don’t have much time. I nodded to myself and clicked on Prometheus Casualties. Get the worst over first. It was like taking bad medicine and then chasing it with candy. Maybe. Or at least chasing it with less bad medicine, in this case.

Softly I said, “Open Prometheus Casualties.”

The file with that label blinked then expanded, filling the screen. All at once, I was watching video footage. There was no sound, but in this case that was a good thing since I didn’t want to be overheard.

I watched the video unfold, and as I did I found myself leaning further and further forward. “What the…”

The scene was shot in what appeared to be a lab. There was a figure in the lab, tall and broad-shouldered with dark hair, but the footage was cast in a reddish hue from the laser projection and the man’s back was turned toward the camera. There were several work surfaces in the room, various interfaces and screens, and a large table sat in the center. The man stood beside the table, working diligently.

The table itself was covered in white sheets, medical instruments, cybernetic instruments… and an enormous, furry white bear.

I recognized him at once. I was no different than Christopher Robin in that respect; no matter what happened to the animal or what state he might be in, a girl always recognized her bear. It was the shock of that perception that had me leaning forward, eyes wide and glued, yet tearing up with each passing second.

“S-Saxon?” I whispered, my voice quaking. But I continued to watch, the scene unfolding before me by way of various camera vantage points, obviously spliced together after the fact. At one point the bear jerked with movement, life seeming to surge through his limbs and forge blue fire into his eyes. It lasted a few seconds before its lumbering shape settled down again into inanimation.

I wasn’t sure I could watch this.

My body shuddered as a quiet sob forced itself out of me. It was as if in this scene here lay the crux of every one of my heartbreaks. It was the lost children. It was Jonathan and Nathan. It was Ruby. It was Jack… and Lucas. That enormous animal that I loved so much had been rendered vulnerable at the hands of an indomitable enemy. Now it was so easy to manipulate, so easy to destroy. Like children, like old men and young women, and like friendship itself.

Another sob wrenched itself from the depths of me, and I barely had time to place my forearm across my lips to stifle the sound. Despite the pain of what I was witnessing, I did not want anyone to hear me. I wanted to be alone.

I took a deep, uneven breath, wiped furiously at my cheeks – damn it Sam, you don’t have the liquid to spare right now – and got ready to turn off the video that to me amounted to no more than a cruel man’s idea of an even crueler joke. I knew who he was now. I didn’t need him to face the camera to recognize his brand of ruthlessness.

I raised my free hand to press my thumb on the scan surface – and then Saxon moved again.

I froze in place, my fingers hovering over the leep drive, my eyes glued to the projection.

The light returned to the bear’s eyes. His body moved. I expected the life to leave his form again just like last time, but something was different.

Zero straightened, placing his tools in the trays on the table, then taking the trays off the table. All the while, Saxon remained on his side, twitching every now and then as if testing each limb. Zero stepped back.

Saxon moved his head, turning it to look up and down. Then he gave a mighty shuffling shove. The table overturned beneath him, which explained why Zero had taken a step back. My mouth hung open as the bear landed partly on his legs and partly on his side on the clean marble tiles beneath him. He skittered and shuffled some more, making a sound that was part whine and part chuff deep in his chest.

A sound involuntarily emitted from my own chest then, and I clutched at my throat with my free hand. I recognized the sound he was making. It was one of frustration and surprise. But not of pain. And when he got his paws back beneath him again and he had steadied his enormous body, I could see at last that there was not a scratch on my bear. At least not from any camera angles I was privy to.

The man who still had his back turned toward me slowly extended his right hand, palm out and down. His normally crisp white button-down was rolled up at the sleeves, revealing muscled forearms that I could not deny gave me a warmth in my belly. But the majority of my wayward mind was fastened to the site of my android polar bear coming back to life.

“Easy, boy,” said Zero in his deep, accented voice. His words were careful, calm, collected. Saxon turned toward him, tilting his massive head to the side the way a dog would when attempting to understand its human.

My heart broke a little – and my lips unwittingly curled in the smallest of smiles.

“Listen to my words, big guy,” Zero continued softly. “I promise I mean you no harm.”

I fully expected Zero to exact some form of control over the bear then, to use his android link to delve into Saxon’s mind and rearrange his thoughts, forcing obedience from the mechanical animal. But that wasn’t what happened at all.

Instead, Saxon slowly inched forward. Zero bravely held his ground, his EED inactively blue with the slightest telling flicker to yellow every now and then, indicating a healthy touch of wariness. When Saxon was within arm’s reach, the bear first bent down, stretching his nose closer to Zero. Then he reared up on his hind legs, his head brushing the ceiling of the admittedly tall lab more than ten feet up.

Saxon weighed a ton. I knew that from personal experience. When Nicholas had designed him, he’d taken information from accounts of the largest of the now extinct species. He was also three meters long from end to end. And Nick had instilled within him all of the behavioral mannerisms known to belong to the last polar bears to die in captivity.

They reached their largest in size while in captivity, just before dying off entirely. I surmised this was not evolution, as it happened too fast. It was instead simply a result of finally having adequate nutrition under human care. They were also bred among humans, so naturally they were less wary of the bipeds. Saxon was that way. Even so, something tipped him off to Zero’s threat and even though polar bears had never really stood on their hind legs like other bears to signal aggression – they did it when playing instead – Nick went ahead and threw that in there because it was cool. And he was a guy.

But Zero wasn’t clueless. He was doing everything right, maintaining his height, not backing off, remaining calm.

Saxon tilted his head to the side again, which, during the times of polar bears, had actually meant the bear was in the mood to play. Again, Nick had added his own idea of what was cute in this instance. So as far as Saxon was concerned, I knew the bear was still trying to figure things out.

I wondered if he remembered Zero. I wondered if he recalled that Zero had shot him and kidnapped his human friend.

But then Saxon dropped down to all fours again, and Zero calmly said, “That’s it.” He took a slow but confident step toward him, his hand still out. Saxon lifted his head again in curiosity. “See there? We’re good, aren’t we?” Saxon dropped his head a little, averted his gaze, and nudged Zero’s hand with his nose. I knew that meant he was in the mood to play.

“Holy shit,” I said aloud.

I blinked a few times, sat back, and thought hard, recalling what Sonia had told me about the attack on Prometheus. She’d said Saxon’s body disappeared. Now I knew who’d taken him. But she’d also said Zero’s soldiers were trying to make off with two of the children as well before they’d been stopped. The children had been too far gone to be revived, their neuronet processors damaged beyond repair. So, what had Zero wanted with them?

Had… he been planning on reviving them somehow? The way he had Saxon? Would that even have been possible?

On the video, Zero gently ran his hand over the bear’s head and neck. I watched in silent bewilderment while my mind continued to work.

Sonia had also told me that Zero’s soldiers changed tactics half-way through the attack, either switching to tranquilizer rounds or pulling back altogether. Which was weird. Because I’d distinctly heard him telling his men to leave no survivors.

What did this mean? Why would he say one horrible thing in front of me, then privately change his orders when I wasn’t aware?

He’d gone out of his way to make sure I thought the worst of him another time too. When he’d told me he was aware I was watching while he verbally accosted and terrified Grace. But then Grace told me a different story. One that showed a completely different side to Zero.

None of this made any sense. Why would Zero want me to hate him?

On the laser screen, my bear made a soft rumbling sound, butting up against the android’s legs hard enough to knock him temporarily off balance. Zero laughed.

I inhaled sharply. It was only the second time I’d ever heard him laugh. And just as it had the first time, the sound ripped all sorts of holes in everything I thought I knew about the man. It was a beautiful sound.

He was beautiful.

I was staring mesmerized when the doorknob to my bedroom suddenly and quietly rattled. My head snapped around, my attention at once refocusing. I looked at the knob. It was still turning back and forth, very slowly testing the edges of its locked movement. My heart thudded hard.

There was no knock, no questing voice from beyond the barrier. Just that covert attempt to open the door and get in. And it was perhaps one of the most unsettling things I had ever seen.

I remained absolutely still, just watching and waiting. But eventually the attempt stopped, the knob settled, and there was silence. I don’t know how long I stayed there in that bed like a statue, my eyes glued to the doorknob and my ears pricked almost painfully for any sign of life beyond the bedroom threshold. But at some point I realized the person was gone. And I was running out of time.

I turned back to the video. It had stopped, having reached the end of its footage. However, a light in the top right corner of the projected screen was blinking, reminding me of the presence of two other folders I’d yet to read.

“Close file. Open SHP TJ,” I instructed softly.

The stilled video image vanished, and I watched the first file on the laser desktop flicker, then expand. This, too, was video footage. Only this time there was a time stamp on the footage, the image was fuzzy, and it was in black and white.

The picture featured the inside of a light rail car. From the looks of it, it was one of the latest models and the last of the line of public transportation rail vehicles to be deemed obsolete as the electric highways took over the planet. I studied the image. That I knew of, Japan was the last to shut down their rails. I glanced at the time stamp in the upper right-hand side of the projection. Beside the date were the letters, “TJ.” Above the few passengers in the car, an old model electronic billboard scrolled stock information, traffic information, and the weather. In Japanese.

The TJ stood for – “Tokyo, Japan,” I whispered aloud. That explained that. The date before the letters revealed the footage to have been shot approximately thirty years ago. My gaze narrowed on the moving image, and again I found myself leaning forward.

Inside the car was a smattering of different people. Two men in suits shared a bench seat, each silently reading something on out-of-date electronic pads. I wagered they were co-workers of some sort, but there were no labels or name tags to go by. A few rows up, a tall figure in jeans and a black hoodie, whose face was obscured by the hood seemed to be staring out the window at the passing blur. I could only ascertain that he was male by his broad-shouldered and narrow-waisted physique; everything else about him was a mystery.

An older woman traveling with what looked like groceries in two tote bags sat hunched over the bags, rifling through them as if searching for something to eat. Opposite her and a few seats up, a group of teenage boys with designer earbuds in their ears and their hands in the pockets of their jackets nodded their heads in time to some unheard rhythm. And finally, at the very back of the car, in the tail-end stretch bench seat was a young family consisting of a mother, a father, and a little girl. Actually, just like everyone in the car their true identities were a mystery; I could only assume the girl was their child, as she sat peacefully between them.

Something about the family seemed vaguely familiar to me, although I knew that was impossible due to the date. If my adopted age had been correctly assessed, then I’d only been around for half a decade at most at the time this footage was taken. I wouldn’t have known any of these people, and I’d never been to Japan.

But as I mulled that over and inadvertently repeated that affirmation in my head, Earth decided to stop turning. Just for a moment. At least, that’s what it felt like to me.

Everything seemed to come to a grinding, dramatic stop. The very molecules that comprised the air froze. I stopped breathing. My ears began to ring and my heart gripped itself like a flexing fist as I re-read the scrolling words on the electronic billboard inside the rail car.

I could read them.

But they were in Japanese.

Ben’s words came back to me like an echo from the other end of a subway tunnel. “You speak Japanese…. Why am I not surprised?”

I remembered thinking that I didn’t speak Japanese and letting it go at that. But why? Why had I let such an obvious untruth just slip away from my attention like that? As if it were not at all important, when it so obviously was? That wasn’t like me. That wasn’t like me at all.

Was I really that exhausted? Or was there something I didn’t want to know?

Feeling as if I were in a dream, that ringing still in my ears, my fingers and toes crackling and tingling uncomfortably, I leaned even further forward until I was raising up on my knees completely. “Pause video,” I instructed.

The video paused. I looked closely, so closely, my eyes squinting with the effort. The little girl was quite young. In fact, if I’d had to guess, I would have placed her at no older than five or six. Half a century. Her hair was long and wild too. Just like mine had always been.

But it was gold. Not white.

Still, there was something…. She was looking down, reading a book. It was an actual print book, the kind that cost a fortune. She was entranced with it though, her little legs swinging back and forth. She wore a dress and dress coat, but I noticed her feet were encased in combat boots. They were cherry red and had fandom patches all over them, but they looked like solid leather, with good, strong soles.

That was the way I always wore dresses. With boots. On the very rare occasion I wore a dress, that is. I always wore boots because you never knew when you might have to kick someone’s ass, or just plain run for your life.

I stared at the patches on the boots. They were too small and too blurry to make out. But… there was one thing I could check about the girl that would solve things for good. There was one thing I knew would be both visible and readily recognizable – if she would only look up toward the camera.

However, then I saw something else entirely, something that all but confirmed my earth-shattering suspicions. I saw the title and author of the book the girl was reading. At a mere five years of age she was caught up in a galaxy far, far away, held captive by A New Hope in a world created by George Lucas.

“Oh… my God,” I whispered. Or at least, I was fairly certain I did. I couldn’t be sure because the buzzing in my head was too loud, my body was going too numb, and my heart was thudding far too hard.

As I remained horribly, relevatorily glued to the projected image, the businessmen on the rail car suddenly stood up as one. In practiced, fluid tandem, they pulled guns from the inside pockets of their suit coats, turned to face the young family, and shot the girl’s parents point blank. The heads of the man and woman jerked violently backward with the impacts, spraying blood on the window behind them.

The girl’s book slid from her lap and onto the floor. The camera that I was watching through began to static, flickering in and out. The girl turned to face her mother. She seemed utterly confused, moving too slow, moving with uncertainty. I’m sure I made some sort of horrible sound in my chest, but I was no longer in charge.

Just as the girl had been trapped in her story earlier, I was now trapped in mine.