Beat (16 page)

Forget the vent cover.

I slid forward, mostly using my feet. The pain in my injured right arm grew steadily. I realized I was shaking from the exertion. I stopped moving and rolled as much as I could toward my back. This freed up enough space that I was able to bring my right arm carefully down and hold it against my middle again. The pain noticeably receded.

Soon I continued on, staying on my side and using my legs and left arm to move along. I passed the down shaft that led to my bathroom, and not long after passed under a vertical shaft that led as far up as I could make out. Not too far up the vertical shaft, the dim lighting provided by the illumination from my room and bathroom faded.

A few minutes later, I was wriggling in near-darkness, feeling each shaft wall carefully with my left hand before I moved forward. I didn’t want to fall into some unseen opening. After maybe ten more minutes of shimmying along the air duct, I felt a draft across my neck. Soon after that, the walls of the shaft clarified a bit due to some light coming from somewhere. Before long, I arrived at a tough metal square of mesh, where the draft was a little stronger. Hazy yellow lights, which I could make out through the mesh on the far wall, illuminated the elevator shaft. The current of air whistled softly up through the shaft past my head, making my ear tickle a little.

Now I needed to find out what floor the Prime Administrator was on. The elevator ride down hadn’t taken more than ten seconds, so it couldn’t be too far. But first, I had to get this mesh vent cover out of the way.

I gave the mesh an experimental push. It moved a little. I felt around, trying to figure out how it was attached. It had to be like the vent cover back in my room. I held a slow breath and banged the flat of my left hand hard against the mesh; a soft, metallic thump echoed up the shaft. I cringed and hung back a little, instinctively tensing. I waited a few minutes. No guard robots descended the shaft, weapons blazing. No loud alarm clanged in the complex. Did creepy robots get a knockout shot too?

I wound up, aimed carefully, and slammed my hand against the mesh. The top part gave way and flapped downward. I lunged to grab it before it could fall all the way down the elevator shaft, just barely snagging it with a finger.

My heart thumped loudly in my ears and behind my eyes. I pulled the mesh cover back into the shaft and slid it down past my feet.

I eased forward, reaching as far as I could on the elevator shaft walls, hoping to find a ladder of some kind. It took a bit of squirming, and at one point I had to roll onto my back, but I found a couple of rungs leading up the elevator shaft. I had to be very careful and brace myself in the air duct, but once I got a solid hold on a rung, I had it made.

The next thirty minutes or so were a combination of climbing and clinging. In the hazy wash of yellow light from the bulbs behind me, I couldn’t make out how far down the shaft went—and I had no desire to find out. It had to be at least  fifty meters. Plus, the rungs were kind of narrow; I had one functioning arm, and I really didn’t want to take any chances. So it was slow-going. By the time I made it to the first heavy door, my Papa said it was nearly 03:00.

I wondered if guard robots needed their beauty sleep. If so, those things needed to get more of it.

I had a bit of good luck when I came to the door that led out of the shaft; I was near the side that it opened from. It worked just like any elevator did: the door extended from one side of the doorway to the other. If I could get some leverage, I thought I might be able to push the door open with a foot.

Climbing a bit higher, I grabbed a rung as tightly as I could with my right hand, clenched my left hand around another rung, and leaned out. My leg easily reached the door, although there was only a narrow lip of the door that I could push on; the rest of the door met the wall squarely.

I pushed, felt some give, and pushed harder. More give. Maybe an inch of space opened. Sweat dripped down my face and sides by the time I felt like I had enough space opened up that I could slip through. This part was not easy. I had to cling tighter to the ladder rung with my weak right hand, my right foot trying to wrap itself around a rung—all while reaching with my left hand and foot through the space.

I found a helpful piece of metal doorway trim on the hallway wall and gripped it tightly, braced my left leg against the elevator doorway, and sucked in a breath. One shot. If I missed, I’d be fine for the first fifty or so meters. The last meter would be the problem.

Holding my breath, every muscle tensed, I launched myself toward the space I’d opened. I yanked hard with my left hand, willing my fingers not to slip. I felt myself come short, but I leaned more and tightened my leg and pulled harder.

Air exploded from my chest as I slipped onto the floor of the hallway, my legs still hanging out through the partially opened elevator door. That was stupid. It worked, but I was never going to do that again. My heart hammered. My muscles felt suddenly liquid.
Bug me
. It took me a little while to feel like I could stand again.

I forced my breathing to slow and got to my feet. I had no way of knowing how much time I had. Nor did I know if I was even on the right floor. The hallway looked correct, but all the hallways were the same in this building.

No. This one just had the single door at the end. It had to be the Prime Administrator’s office. And since there were no other doors in the hallway, robots couldn’t jump me from behind a door.
Unless, Nik
,
there are doors that are perfectly flush with the walls like those panels that opened for the scanners.
It was too late now; I couldn’t go back. Or, at least, there was no way I was jumping across that space in the elevator shaft again.

My heart pounding, I crept along the hallway. I wondered if the door would open, but before I could worry about that for any length of time, the pale white panel slid quietly into the wall. No surprise, really, considering. The Prime Administrator wouldn’t need to lock an internal door unless a prisoner was behind it.

When I got to within a meter of the open door, I stopped. My skin flared with cold tingles. The Prime Administrator was still sitting at his desk. I stood completely still, wondering why he hadn’t turned when the door opened. Was he asleep? Was his concentration that good?

I waited for what felt like half an hour, not daring to move, focusing on keeping as still and quiet as possible.

No movement at all.

He sat, slightly slumped in his chair, his hands resting on his desk. It seemed like he was just staring straight ahead.

I hazarded a step forward. No reaction. Confusion replaced surprise and fear. I slipped through the doorway and crossed the room fast, the door sliding shut behind me. Still no reaction from the man. He didn’t move at all; his stillness was scarily unnatural. If I looked long enough, I could see him breathe, but that was it. No other movement, and his eyes were closed.

It was like he was a-

I looked closer. No way. That was impossible. The word wouldn’t leave my brain, no matter how hard I pushed.

The Prime Administrator wasn’t human. He was a robot.

He wasn’t a robot.

His hand was warm, the skin I felt when I touched his wrist and his hair—they were all real. No robot had flesh and bone.

I held my breath and pushed his hand. It slid across his desk, feeling completely limp. But he had no reaction. Nothing at all. Still breathing unnaturally slowly.

I released my breath and scanned the office. It looked exactly like it had before. Three walls covered in now dark skreens, a couple of doors. Turning back to the Prime Administrator, or whatever it was, I investigated him—it—a bit more. Everything about it looked human. It had talked a little funny, now that I thought about the time I’d spent in this office earlier, but it walked normally and everything.

It had to be sleeping, or something like that. But I needed to use its desk, so I carefully pushed its hands off the glass desktop and set them on his lap. It leaned forward somewhat; I figured the hands had been propping it up. I ran my hands over the desk, searching for a place to power it on.

I thought back. The corner. The robot thing had brushed the corner of the desk. I put my hand there, fingers spread.

A hiss, and I sensed some movement. Heart suddenly clawing out of my throat, I spun, bumping the sleeping thing. The door. Just the door closing.

It didn’t matter. I had to move fast. Flickers appeared on the bank of skreens on the left wall. The flashing pixels resolved quickly into multiple images—images of life in New Frisko. I needed to go backward and find that clip that I’d seen of me and the other Pushers. I searched the desk with my hands. As I did so, multi-colored rectangles of light illuminated beneath my fingers. I leaned more over the desk, nudging the Prime Administrator again.

He slumped more, then slid sideways, falling limply toward the floor. I grabbed at him, but he was a grown man, or robot man, or whatever. He was too heavy. I got ahold of his shirt, but he pulled me forward as he fell. With a thump, he hit the floor, still in pretty much the same position he’d been in when seated.

His weight nearly pulled me off my feet, so I grabbed at his chair with my injured hand.

An electric shock, stronger and longer lasting than a static shock, coursed up my arm. What the Bug?

I jerked back, stepping away from the chair. The tingles in my arm faded, but my fingertips felt numb. The chair was electrified.

I stretched and wiggled my fingers to get rid of the numbness. I peered closer at the chair. It looked like nothing more than a chair.

The Prime Administrator, whatever it was, lay completely unmoving, in a semi-fetal position. Obviously the electrical current wasn’t some kind of defense mechanism on the chair; it had to have been going while the Prime Administrator was still sitting there.

Of course. Whatever the thing was, the chair charged it. It had to be some kind of robot. That’s why it needed a charge.

I pushed my confusion and curiosity away, which wasn’t easy. A human robot, and nobody in New Frisko knew about it. I didn’t even think we had this technology, and tek was my thing.

Now wasn’t the time. I needed to see that video. It would be my proof of what really happened that night. I checked my Papa. Bren had died almost exactly 24 hours ago. I felt like I had lived through a year since then.

I found the controls for the videos and discovered I could manipulate the videos on each skreen. Scanning quickly, I set the player to feed all of the videos it had to those skreens. There was no sound, so it almost felt like I was watching a fantasy of some kind, but these were all scenes of real life in New Frisko.

There. The camera that had taken this clip must have been on one of the lights in Hope Park. It had a wide vantage point, but you could only see the face of my Pusher friends and me if we turned just right. We moved around enough that I had no doubt that this was really me and my friends from the night before.

I watched myself go to the cycles, put the glue under my Papa, and start riding. The clip was long enough that I was able to see the entire thing. Melisa and Bren checking my heart rate. Victory shining from my face. Everyone leaving except for me and Bren. When Bren started pedaling, I wanted to shout at him to stop, wished I could go back in time and tell him to quit it. That I had been wrong, even though I had also been right.

The camera lost sight of Bren and me as we rode away. It stayed focused on the empty park for nearly a minute after, then the clip ended.

This was proof. Proof that the Prime Administrator was lying and wanted me to lie. Proof that there was more to the Bug than everyone thought.

And here I was, in the Prime Administrator’s office, at his computer desk. What kind of damage could I do here before they caught me? I scanned the room again and held really still. No sound. My Papa said it was 03:30.

I wasn’t sure when things started waking up around here, but I decided I didn’t want to wait around to be caught. I’d dig around until 04:00 and then get out of here. Somehow.

I bent over the translucent desk and fiddled around, brightly-colored rectangles flashing under my fingertips. After a few minutes, I hit the right space, a spot on the left corner on this side of the desk, and a skreen appeared in the dead center of the glass. A keyboard appeared under it, along with a few other lit spaces—commands of some kind. I’d figure those out if I needed to.

The skreen populated with several icons. I clicked on one that said ‘Observation,’ taking a minute to realize it meant ‘Obzervashun.’ The new spelling made a lot more sense than the old way. The icon expanded into a secondary skreen down and to the left of the first skreen, listing a bunch of directories.

Purple　Rez

Green　Rez

Oranje　Rez

It was a list of all the residential quadrants in New Frisko. I clicked on Purple Rez. A huge list of numbers appeared under the Purple Rez heading, each with a thumbnail-sized image of what had to be the view from a camera. So ‘Observation’ was exactly that. That meant that if I went to the ‘Hope Park’ directory, I should be able to find the video file of what happened last night. And I could probably even find a clip of Bren’s death if I dug around in ‘Purple Rez’ long enough.

I needed some way to carry those clips with me, or some way of getting them off the Prime Administrator’s computer into a place I could access them from outside. I didn’t have a z-stik. If I’d been going to class, I would have had one on me for sure.

I felt like an idiot but patted my pockets anyway. Maybe one would just appear there.

No such luck. Drek.

I left the secondary skreen open and continued poking around the computer. A small icon, a green X with red lines running down the middle of the legs of the letter, caught my eye.

Vaccine

I knew that word. We spelled it ‘Vakseen’ now. This had to have something to do with the Bug. I clicked on it and another secondary skreen opened, this time to the bottom right. I glanced at my Papa. 03:40. I needed to get out of here soon.

A list of directories filled the new skreen with different icons. One was an image of a clock, with ‘Schedule’ next to it. This must be the schedule for the knockout. Why would it be called ‘Vaccine?’

I opened ‘Schedule.’ I was right. Could I turn off the knockouts? Make everyone have to go to sleep on their own? People would all of a sudden be able to push their heart rates past 140. I had to try it.

I clicked on the link that said ‘22:30.’ An orange alert box flashed

Identification　Verification　Required

A small black box opened inside the alert box. It was a fingerprint scanner. What would happen if I scanned my finger? Probably the thing would seize up, a cage would fall out of the ceiling, alarms would blare, and bright red lights would flash. At that point, robots would likely show up and blow me to bits.

Better to not try it, I figured. But I had the Prime Administrator right here. I bent over the thing and grabbed his hand, stretching it toward the desk. No good. Maybe I could get him back into his chair. I leaned to hook my arms under his but immediately trashed that idea. The stupid cast on my right arm was really getting in the way.

I guessed that if I had a knife, I could cut the thing’s finger off. If he was a robot or something, he wouldn’t feel it. I pushed the gruesome thought away, staring at the crumpled heap of semi-human. Something pale green was poking out of the man’s pants pocket. I stooped to get it. A small card, about the size of a couple of my fingers. I stuffed it into a pocket on my zip. Forget the fingerprint.

I stopped and considered, looking back at the skreen and wondering what the knockout had to do with a vaccination against the Bug anyway. It was just supposed to calm your heart rate down really fast so that the Bug couldn’t get anywhere. It had taken researchers all over the world nearly a year back during the Infektion to figure out that the Bug needed a heart to be working pretty hard in order to be able to get in and do its nasty business. And since people couldn’t naturally slow down their hearts really fast, the knockout had been made. Because there was no vaccine for the Bug.

Later, tests had shown that a person could carry the Bug for a week or two and not die or even get sick as long as the person’s heart rate didn’t go too high. In fact, it turned out the human body’s immune system could kill the Bug within two weeks—again, as long as the person’s heart rate didn’t go up too high.

As I stood there remembering my old Virus classes, a thought tickled the back of my brain. It felt like a tiny speck of light, smaller even than the pinpoint of a star in the sky, had suddenly opened in my gray matter. I squeezed my eyes closed and tried to make the speck bigger. What did that mean? I knew I was missing something—knew that I almost had whatever it was . . .

But it slipped away.

I tried to catch it by whispering what I’d been thinking about. “Okay.” I stared at the skreen on the glass desk, but didn’t see it. “The Bug can be on . . . No. A person can carry the Bug for a while without dying.” I glanced at my Papa. 03:50. “But we can kill the Bug naturally if we don’t let it get us first, if we have time.” I waited for the speck of light to come back. Nothing. “And the knockout saves us from the Bug in the air by slowing our heart rate.” I waited, imagining I stood in my own brain and was tapping my foot impatiently. Nothing. “But the Bug can’t be in the air anymore. Because of the Wanderers. And me.”

Still nothing.

“But what about Bren?”

The speck came back. Only it wasn’t a speck; it was a column of thundering light. I nearly sat on the Prime Administrator’s chair but caught myself just before shocking my backside. A Vaccine directory. The knockout. The immune system.

“No bugging way.” Impossible. No way could that be true. I tossed a look toward the room’s doors. No sign of anybody. Or any robots.

I had to find out if this was true. Glancing down at the crumpled Prime Administrator, I considered trying to wake him up and ask him.
No, ‘it.’
But that was stupid. The human robot thing was still bigger and stronger than me and it was being controlled somehow. It wouldn’t answer me.

My hands darted around the three skreens in front of me, frantically trying to find a directory or file or anything that could tell me I was wrong.

I had just glanced at my Papa again, the time was 04:00, when I found a directory called Prime One. When I opened it, I saw there were schematics of the layout of the dome. I bent closer and scanned the thumbnails. What looked like offices filled the entirety of the sections of the dome that were above ground. The Prime Administrator’s office was on S1; I guessed the ‘S’ stood for subterranean. Or maybe stupid. Probably subterranean.

Which meant that the room I’d been locked in was on S2. I opened the schematic for S2, curious. I hadn’t noticed when I was being led to that room, but it looked like there were nine additional rooms. They were called H1-10. I pondered that briefly. Happy-place 1?

Not likely. It had to be for Holding.

The directory indicated that there were two more floors below S2, and that S3 was mostly labs. I opened the schematic. The biggest lab had no name at all. It was just called ‘Lab.’

Knowing I needed to hurry if I was going to find a way out of Prime One before anybody found me, I quickly opened S4. What I saw made me stand up straighter then bend closer. S4 had no real rooms or offices; it looked like it was access tunnels and pipes and stuff like that. And one of the tunnels . . . I pictured Prime One in relation to New Frisko. That long tunnel led toward the Dumps. It had to. I imagined the Dumps, the long conveyor tunnels leading from each Rez. Prime One had one too, which made sense.

I shook my head, filing that info away. I would rather find my way back up to ground level and get out that way. It seemed more direct. But it never hurt to have a plan B.

But the video clip. I needed it for proof that the story the Prime Administrator was trying to get me to tell wasn’t true. People needed to know that we were being lied to. The clip of the Pushers at Hope Park would do that. I had to get it out of the building somehow. And if I was right about the knockout . . .

I chased my thoughts around my brain. Then it came to me; I could send the clip to my IM-box. Moving fast, I opened the network and suddenly found myself at the Prime Administrator’s interface. Even better! I tapped in my IM-box ID, attached the clip, and went to hit ‘send,’ but stopped as another thought occurred to me. “They’ve got to be monitoring my box,” I said to the room.