Pennsylvania Omnibus (26 page)

Almost at the same moment—just a few beats after the data
stream with Dawn had been compromised—the Tulsa lurched under Amos’s feet, and
his own stream blanked out. Sitting at his desk, he was thrown violently out of
his chair and he sprawled across the floor. A sharp pain stabbed through his
chest and immediately registered, even through the Q—

A broken rib
.

The Tulsa was shaking and groaning, something he’d never
before experienced with the ultra-silent ship. He grimaced and tried to pull
himself to his feet.

The door slid open and an ensign ran in with two officers,
McKay and Warren.

“Sir!” McKay shouted.

They helped him to his feet and then sat his chair upright
so that he could sit in it.

“Are you all right, sir?” McKay asked.

“Don’t worry about me,” Amos barked. “What’s
happening?”

McKay straightened up and reactivated the screens in
Amos’s office; they’d gone into hibernation mode while he was on his BICE.

“We’re under attack, sir,” McKay said matter-of-factly.
“Three warships, Berlin class. Apparently they’ve located the Tulsa and they’ve
engaged.”

“We didn’t see them coming?”

“No, sir.”

“How did they breach our defenses?”

Warren winced noticeably. “Somehow they hacked us,
sir.”

The ensign was trying to unbutton the SOMA’s shirt to
inspect the injury, but Amos was ignoring him and pushed the young man away.
“Someone…
somewhere…
has tracked and penetrated our data stream?” Amos
said, pointing to McKay. “An impossibility! Shut down Corinth communications…
NOW!
”

Jed floated in the inky blackness,
wondering how long he’d been in that state. Ages? Lifetimes? Then slowly, his
consciousness returned to him, and he was in his black room with the glowing
screen. He remembered now: he’d been talking to the woman named Dawn, and he’d
asked her if he was on Earth. He remembered kissing her. He could recall it now
that the darkness was rolled back a bit, with the white screen shining garishly
in the darkness and illuminating his body.

And then he remembered something else. Matthias shaking
him; he’d opened his eyes and found himself standing next to the horses and the
plow, and Dawn had disappeared, never able to answer the question about where
he was. That was all a memory, too.

Matthias had been worried, and despite Jed’s insistence,
had made Jed go lie down for a nap. Jed remembered that now, Matthias pushing
him toward the little house. And he remembered that he didn’t argue too much,
because he wanted to be with Dawn.
Was that her name?
Yes. Dawn. He’d
thought then that if he could go to sleep, Dawn would come back for him. So
he’d gone to his room and climbed on the fleeces he used for a mattress, and
before long he was in a deep sleep.

Sometime during his slumber he’d entered this present
blackness. And now the screen was here, and he could remember Dawn, and was
hoping that she’d be back to get him. To take him somewhere to talk. But she
didn’t appear this time; another woman did.

It was his mother. Only it wasn’t his mother. He knew
that. The word “avatar” floated over her head and then disappeared. It wasn’t
her, but it
looked
like her. And she was talking to him, and pulling up
data as she talked. Reorganizing files. Telling him that someone evil—someone
named Dawn—had hacked into his mind, but that now he was safe again.

Jed watched as files opened, and the thing that looked
like his mother was erasing and changing the information in them. And then he
had other memories—memories that didn’t seem right. He remembered watching
battles with Dawn, but this time the Transport forces were performing
heroically, and as the battles progressed, martial music played. He saw an
image of a city being destroyed, and there was death, destruction, and horror,
and words appeared in the smoke and clouds…

TRACE DID THIS
.

While the woman worked in front of a long wall of file
drawers, Jed searched in his memory for Dawn. He found her, and he remembered
that she had once taught him how to hide data. She’d taught him so many things
that he was only now recalling. So he gathered all of the information and
conversations he’d had with her. He did it in his mind so that his avatar
didn’t move, and he tagged all the data just like Dawn had told him to. The
woman worked away in the drawers and mostly ignored him.

Jed found that his ability to manipulate the data happened
faster and cleaner the more he worked with it. He was even able to retrieve
files directly from the woman without her knowing he’d done it. Once he stole a
file right out of her hand, and the avatar of his mother kept moving as if she
still had it. She continued to file a piece of information that she could see,
but which was no longer really there. She began humming as she worked, in the
same way Jed’s mother used to hum, and he knew then that they were mining his
memories in order to trick him.

While the woman hummed and worked, Jed worked too. He
flicked his wrist, and a keypad appeared before him, and it had the letters of
the alphabet on it, and numbers, and symbols too. The words for everything he
needed appeared before him and were logged into his memory. Jed typed in the
words COFFEE CAN out of pure instinct, and a drawer slid open next to him. He
quickly dropped all the tagged files into the drawer and pushed it closed, just
as the woman who looked like his mother turned to face him. She saw nothing.

“There,” she said, and smiled at him. “Everything back as
it should be.” Then she reached up to him and waved her hand in front of his
face, and the darkness swallowed him again.

Only, this time
he
controlled the switch. She
thought she’d powered him down, but he willed himself to stand—and then he
brought the screen back up.

And he worked.

He didn’t know for how long, but it seemed like he
explored the BICE system for hours. For him, it all was just beginning to make
sense, like when he’d first learned to work the horses. And just like Dawn had
said, he could now
see
how the BICE interacted with his brain and his
nervous system. He practiced controlling the electrical flow of impulses,
changing the way that synapses fired.

Often he ran into roadblocks. The words
Access
Denied
would appear whenever he tried something his BICE wasn’t cleared
for. So he’d experiment around the edges of the information, looking for things
he
could
see and know.

Then he began manipulating the screen in his room. He
brought up a scene from his childhood—a Thanksgiving with his family—and he
zoomed his consciousness around the room while his family ate their meal. He
could smell the turkey, and his mouth watered at the wonderful aroma.

Then he zoomed out through the front door like a bird, and
his mind took flight. He shot straight upward and hovered over the farm; then
traveled like a rocket or an airbus until he was floating over the City. The
City, long before it had been destroyed by a bomb. He tried to zoom in on the
Transport station, but when he did, the image froze and
Access Denied
flashed before his eyes.

He blinked his eyes, and the City was gone, but he was
still hovering over the planet, so he began to look for other things. For
storms and squalls and flocks of birds moving en masse. When he saw these
things, he looked deeper, and found that he could see the very pixels that made
up the wind, and the invisible streams of data that flowed constantly around
the planet, wirelessly, through the air.

And he understood it all. It made
sense
to him.

He blinked again and he called up Dawn.

Her avatar appeared before him in her beautiful navy dress
and her white cape and apron. Her likeness seemed to be asleep, and her whole
appearance was not quite solid. He stood in front of her and touched her face,
but she didn’t stir.

“Dawn,” he said.

He flicked his hand, trying to activate her avatar, but
nothing happened. He tried a dozen other tricks and motions to wake her up, but
none of them worked.

Jed paced the room, rubbing his head with his hands to try
to stimulate thoughts and answers. His frustration grew, and when he knew that
he had no solution to the problem he screamed at the top of his lungs:
“DAWN!”

Dawn’s avatar flickered. Her head raised and she sucked in
air. As the flickering stopped and her form became solid, she opened her eyes.
And then it was as if a bolt of electricity hit her, and Jed reached for her
hand, and when he touched her the two of them rocketed up and through the
ceiling, and wordlessly they soared over the Amish Zone, and Dawn took him
until they were hovering over a farmhouse at the end of a lane. Then she
blinked out and disappeared, and Jed awoke in his bed.

“There’s a farmhouse not two miles from here,” Jed told
Matthias as they ate. He knew the food was laced with Q but for now he didn’t
mind. He wanted to be sure he had access to the full capabilities of his BICE,
in case he needed it. “There are three lightning rods on the roof of a banked
barn that has green trim, and there’s a young orchard to the east of the barn
with a white picket fence around the orchard.”

Matthias laughed as he took a bite of home-baked bread.
“You just described most of the farms in the Amish Zone.”

“This one was different,” Jed said. He took a drink of
lemonade. “It’s at the end of a lane, and there’s a creek that runs right
through the property.”

“That sounds familiar,” Matthias said. “Marcus Yoder’s
place, I think. He’s cousin to the man whose family is bringing us the meals.”
Matthias ripped off another chunk of fresh bread and then used his pocketknife
to spread a chunk of homemade butter on it. “Speaking of which, the Yoders’
food… it’s the best I’ve ever had. I feel so peaceful after I eat it. Maybe it
has something to do with this alien planet, but I don’t look forward to the day
when the Yoders stop delivering my meals.”

Jed just nodded and kept eating. He knew that Matthias was
reacting to the Q in the food, but he didn’t say anything about it. All of this
would have to be part of a long conversation he’d have with Matthias once he
knew more about what was going on.

“Why are you asking about the Marcus Yoder farm?” Matthias
asked.

And that was one more thing he couldn’t tell Matthias
about. As if Jed could even explain how he suspected that a woman named Dawn
was being held on Marcus Yoder’s farm somewhere.

And what did Jed plan to do about it, anyway? He was
Amish. He couldn’t just take a gun and run over there to try to rescue her. 
She obviously wanted him to know where she was being held, but he felt like if
she was in some kind of imminent danger she would have said something to him.
Still, he wanted to find a reason to go search for her.

Jed shrugged. “I’m just thinking about going to look at
some of the unique farms in the zone, to get ideas for my own place when I get
my allotment.”

“How do you know about that place?” Matthias asked. He
motioned for Jed to pass the peach preserves.

“Oh, I think Mr. Zook at the immigration center might have
mentioned it. I’d just like to go take a look at it.”

Mathias laughed. “You sound like the English, or some
young Amish girl wanting to get married.”

Jed smiled, “I like to get ideas.”

“An Amish farm is an Amish farm.” Matthias stuck his knife
into the jar of preserves and pulled out a dollop of jam, then winked at Jed as
he stuck the sugary mass in his mouth. He sat the knife down and twisted the
lid back on the jar. “Well, this Sabbath is Visitation Sabbath. We could always
go over there and ask to look around.”

“That’s two days from now,” Jed said. “Any way we could do
it sooner?”

Matthias wiped his knife on his broadfall pants, then
closed the blade and tucked it back into his pants’ inner pocket. “I suppose we
could go tomorrow, but it’ll look odd. Nobody visits on Saturday.”

“Who cares if it looks odd?” Jed said. “Let’s do it.”

Matthias stood up and pushed in his chair. “All right,
I’ll talk to Marcus at the meeting tonight. But for now… you’ve been napping
while I finished the plowing. So you get dishes duty while I go do the evening
milking. If we can get all of our chores done before the meeting, maybe we can
make a few more fat lamps after we get home so we can get more light in this
dreary place.”

“Now who sounds like a woman?” Jed said as he slapped
Matthias on the shoulder. “No, I’m thinking of turning in early.”

“After the meeting?”

“After the meeting.”

“And after you napped the day away?” Matthias laughed.

“I’m starting to appreciate the value of a lot of rest,”
Jed said as he began to clear away the dishes.

When the chores were finished and Matthias had filtered
the milk, Jed helped his friend pour the finished product into sterilized
five-gallon canisters. The canisters were then loaded into the buckboard wagon,
and the two young men harnessed the horses and drove the milk over to the
neighbor’s farm. The clip-clop of the horses’ hooves on the road was soothing,
and Jed remembered riding in the buggy with his parents as a little boy, how
he’d sing or make up rhymes that went with the beat of horse travel. He
recalled traveling in the winter as a child—burrowing into the lap blanket and
wishing that nothing would ever change in his perfect life, that his parents
would always be there with him. These thoughts brought on a feeling of
nostalgia and melancholy like a fog, which only lifted when they’d pulled the
wagon up to the neighbor’s barn.