Emergence (Fox Meridian Book 5) (36 page)

At the top, the door to the stairs opened into a circular room set at the core of the dome. Straight across was the elevator, and to the left and right were heavy doors which led to the lounge and the garage. Grant turned right, toward the garage, and reached for the button to open the door.

‘Colder…’

He spun on the spot, aiming his pistol at the lounge door, half-expecting to see Fox standing there. He advanced, keeping his weapon raised, and punched the button. The door opened and light blazed through. The screens had been opened up and he was sure he had closed them. Shielding his eyes from the glare, he stepped through into the room and the door closed behind him.

‘Over here, Grant.’

His pistol led his eyes toward the sound. He saw her, a female shape silhouetted against the light from outside. The colours were all washed out, but she looked almost like an angel with the nimbus surrounding her. Grant had never believed in angels, but he was damned if some ghost was going to finish him. He took aim.

‘I wouldn’t do that if I were you.’

Grant fired off three rounds at the angelic form in front of him. Not one of them hit its target, but they did punch through the canopy behind her. The shrieking sound of air passing through small holes into vacuum filled the room and Grant’s eyes widened.

‘Told you,’ Fox said.

There was the sound of plastic under stress, a groan of distress almost lost in the whistling of air, and then a large section of the dome, already cracked, gave under the pressure, ripping a hole in the protective shield.

It was not like in the movies. There was no massive suction, no bodies dragged through the gap, but the atmosphere in the sealed room began to vent quite rapidly into space. Grant turned and rushed to the door, thumping the open button, and nothing happened. He hit it again and again, but still nothing happened. The air pressure was dropping alarmingly and his vision blurred briefly. Pain seared through his head as his eardrums burst and he barely heard the voice behind him.

‘The system locks down in the event of decompression. You need the override code.’

Grant spun around and looked into Fox’s cybernetic face. His eyes widened. ‘Help me,’ he said, but there was no sound in the near-vacuum they were now standing in. He saw her lips move and thought she was saying ‘fuck you,’ but could not be sure. Then he pressed his gun into her stomach and fired. She smirked at him, stepping back and looking down. There was a black mark on her skin from the propellant, but no sign of any damage. Turning, she walked away from him and he fired again, rapid and random, wasting valuable seconds and hitting nothing but the already broken dome.

Fox found her suit where she had hidden it beneath one of the lounge chairs and began to put it on. The temperature was already rising in the evacuated room and she wanted to be out of the heat. Fully dressed and in her helmet, she looked back toward the door. Grant’s brain had caught up with his need for the override code, but not fast enough. His body was slumped against the door, mouth gaping wide in an attempt to pull air out of the vacuum.

Turning, Fox stepped out of the hole in the broken dome, set her new navigation target, and set off across the grey surface.

Jenner Research Station.

Fox stepped off the shuttle, lifting her helmet off as she did so. Eyes that glowed a steady blue scanned the hangar deck and found what she was half-expecting to see. Jackson and Terri were walking across from the elevator.

‘Before you ask,’ Fox said, ‘I’d rather not repeat myself, so can we wait until Kit’s around to grill me?’

‘Actually,’ Jackson said, ‘that’s reasonable. We’ll go straight down, but you can tell me how the suit and cyberframe performed on the way.’

Fox made him wait until they were actually in the car before speaking. ‘I wasn’t exactly pushing either of them to their limits. Actually, I don’t think I was pushing them much above baseline, but they both functioned flawlessly. I didn’t need air, of course, but the suit insulated me and I don’t believe there were any leaks. The body works as advertised, so far.’

‘Excellent. Field trials are always useful, even if I argued for you not to go.’

‘I think you’re underplaying the level of argument.’

‘I may be.’

‘And there were three of you.’

‘You still went,’ Terri pointed out.

‘I’m still stubborn. Kit’s loading into my second processor.’

‘Then you’ll get shouted at by her soon too.’

Kit’s avatar appeared, presumably so that Jackson and Terri could hear her, just as the elevator doors opened. ‘Did you kill him?’

‘Wow, Kit, why don’t we shout it from the rooftops, huh?’ Fox stepped out of the car, the others following.

‘This is one of the most secure facilities in the system. Did you?’

‘No.’

Kit, and the two humans with her, looked surprised, and a little relieved. ‘You didn’t?’

‘No, but I also didn’t save him when he shot out the window of his sun lounge, panicked, and died of oxygen starvation. He’s dead, but I just didn’t actually need to actively murder him.’

‘Uh… Oh.’

‘I sent a message to your home copy. She’ll pass his location to NAPA, NAPA will contact Luna City… Assuming they haven’t noticed the blowout already and gone to investigate, the cops at Tranquillity Base will roll out to arrest him and discover he’s dead. I
suspect
they’ll rule it as suicide, though he’s sitting in a vacuum in more or less direct sunlight so I wouldn’t want to be the guy who has to do the autopsy.’ She paused and then added, ‘We should probably go to the lab and check he didn’t crack anything when he shot me.’

‘He shot you?!’

‘Well, yeah, but I think I just need a damp cloth to wash the powder burns off.’

‘Looks like the field test was a little more rigorous than we thought, Poppa,’ Terri said.

Jackson actually looked rather happy. ‘Indeed. We’ll get it under a microscanner.’

‘Poppa, we’re still mad at her.’

‘Oh, of course. It’s been an interesting morning.’

‘Why?’ Fox asked. ‘I mean, what are you two doing up anyway?’

‘Oh!’ Kit exclaimed. ‘Yes, we need to get back. Fei is about to try out her new body too.’

~~~

There was a new cyberframe in the rack in the lab. It had been manufactured as a tall, shapely female figure with fairly natural skin, an elfin sort of face with a pinched nose, blue eyes, and platinum-blonde Tinkerbell hair. And pointed ears.

‘Elf ears?’ Fox said. ‘And don’t I recognise that model?’

Terri blushed a little. ‘Well, I used a Sylph series frame and did some resculpting on the features. She
is
called Fei…’

Fox looked over the fairly expansive chest hidden under a tight, blue jumpsuit. ‘You know, if you keep designing robot forms and avatars like this, Helen is going to start feeling inadequate.’ The Sylph was MarTech’s only current foray into the sexbot market. Fox had some of that model in her own frame.

‘I’m going to turn on the network connections and get things going.’ Terri walked over to a terminal and began clicking things.

There was a short pause, and then the Sylph’s head lifted a little and turned, scanning the room. ‘Hello, I am Fei.’

‘Hello, Fei,’ Terri said. ‘Do you recognise everyone?’

‘Hello, Terri. Hello, Jackson. Hello, Fox. I am pleased to see you again, Fox. This is your new body?’

‘Hi, Fei. This is it, but it’s not quite finished yet. It’ll look more like me… when it is.’

‘This afternoon,’ Jackson said. ‘We’ve got everything ready.’

‘Good. So, how does
your
new body feel, Fei?’

‘It is… strange. I cannot move.’

‘I’ll release the clamps,’ Terri said, tapping away.

‘I was expecting Kit to be here.’

‘She is, sort of,’ Fox replied. ‘She’s running inside my frame. She can see and hear you, and I can relay what she says. You just can’t see her.’

‘Tell her hello,’ Kit said, grinning as the blonde gynoid stepped out of the support frame.

‘Uh, she says to say hello. You seem to be handling that fairly well.’

Fei was holding up her hands and examining them, much as Fox had done the day before. Fei’s cyberframe was only a remote rather than a fully occupied body, but they had taught her the protocols to handle full VR control, so technically she could
feel
as though she were actually inside it. Apparently she did. She stroked her fingers over her hand, and then the sleeve of her suit, and a rather childish grin settled over her face.

‘Am I doing the smile right?’ Fei asked. ‘I have seen them, quite a lot of them, and I practised with a number of simulations.’

‘It looks pretty good,’ Fox said.

‘Perfect,’ Terri said. ‘Perhaps you would like to walk around the base a little. It’ll help you get used to the frame.’

‘Yes,’ Fei said, nodding. ‘I would like that.’

‘You do that,’ Jackson said, ‘but I need Fox for a while.’

‘Yes. I would like the opportunity to talk at a later time, Fox.’

‘We’ll do that. Maybe after I’ve got my new skin.’

‘Yes.’ And then Fei started for the door of the room, taking her steps carefully, with Terri walking behind her like a mother watching a toddler taking her first steps.

‘And you, young lady,’ Jackson said, pointing at Fox, ‘get out of that suit. I want to examine this bullet wound.’

‘I thought you didn’t like seeing me naked?’

‘For science, I’ll make an exception.’

~~~

‘The process is a little overcomplicated at the moment,’ Jackson said. ‘This is the prototype and we separated the various stages out. Possibly more than we needed to.’

Fox looked at the machine she was about to go through, which looked like it had been constructed by someone presented with a lot of blocks and pipes and told to use them all. It had been constructed in one of the largest chambers in the base and was at least five metres in height and maybe twenty in length. Facing her was what looked a lot like an airlock door in the biggest of the blocks.

‘It’s big,’ Fox said.

‘It may also be a little over-engineered. We’ve already identified several stages which can be handled simultaneously. When we build the next one, in tower three in New York, it should be significantly more streamlined.’

‘And you’re sure it’s okay for me to go through this in the body?’

‘It’s safe, but boring. The system will need to control the motion of the body by remote so you’ll be a spectator in your own body, and it takes about forty minutes.’

Fox gave a shrug. ‘I’ve got plenty to read. Anyway, maybe I’ll spot something in there that’ll help you streamline your process.’

Jackson flashed her a grin. ‘I’m sure your engineering skills are up to the task.’

‘Huh.’ Fox turned and looked around at the people gathered in the room. Terri and Fei were there along with Jackson. Terri looked a little worried, and a little eager. Fei was… Her face held a vague smile and her eyes were bright with interest. Fei was still excited just to be out of her room. ‘Kit,’ Fox said silently, ‘why don’t you transfer into that gynoid you’ve got for talking to Fei?’

‘You don’t want me with you?’ Kit replied.

‘I think I’d like to do this alone. It’s not that I don’t want you with me, exactly. It’s just…’

‘I think I understand. This is likely to be a very personal experience. I will make the transfer and be waiting for you when you come out.’

Fox waited a few seconds for Kit to leave her and then said, ‘Let’s do this.’

Jackson nodded and tapped keys on a nearby terminal. The door opened. ‘Just step inside,’ Jackson said. ‘I’ll initiate the sequence when the door closes. You’ll lose control of motor function more or less immediately.’

‘Okay.’ Fox walked through the door into a fairly slim chamber with a grating for a floor, pulling up the process pipeline documents as she walked. The first stage was a cleaning process…

There was a slight sense of shock as the system took over physical control of her cyberframe and she found herself looking out through a fixed window as the room began to fill with slightly cloudy liquid which swirled around her. After a few seconds, the colour of the fluid changed and Fox got the impression that she was rising: the grill floor was pushing her upward toward the next stage which was the main processing tank. She was now surrounded by billions of tiny robots suspended in a carefully controlled medium.

Manipulator arms positioned her in the centre of what was, basically, an Yliaster fabricator tank, retracting to leave her hanging in the liquid bath. Her arms and legs, even her fingers, were spread out to give the nanomachines access to her surface. But she could see very little, hear and feel nothing. Jackson had been right: it was going to be boring until she emerged from the other side.

Fox could not close her eyes, but she turned away from her window on the outside world and just drifted…

~~~

The quality of the light coming through her ‘window’ changed and Fox returned her attention to the outside world. There had been changes of position before now, movements from chamber to chamber. Hair and nail growth was handled in a different section to skin, using different nanomachines, Fox assumed, but from inside Fox’s body, it had seemed no different. Now the light grew brighter, clearer.

Fox checked her process chart. The final stage was, basically, a wash. Filtered, deionised water was used to clean up any remaining Yliaster robots and clean the suspension fluid off the new skin and hair. The water started out quite cloudy, mostly thanks to the denser, coloured liquid from the tanks, and gradually grew clearer as it was swirled around her, pumped out, cleaned, and passed through once more.

A message appeared in Fox’s vision field:
Primary operator initiation in 5…
Fox readied herself for control. Her head lifted as soon as the processor systems let her go. Above her, a grill ceiling was opening up in preparation for her exit. She was standing on another grill, her hands resting on a pair of small stands set into the floor. A second later, the floor began to rise, slowly, and Fox was lifted up, emerging into the air above.