King's County (20 page)

At the edge of the woods, waiting for
me, was one of the wolves.

We met / head down, colliding at speed,
he bit into my shoulder. I tried pinning him but he twisted away
and came back clamping onto my ankle and pulling. A kick to his
head did nothing. I drew into a ball. The wolf snapped at me while
I cowered protecting my head. The trick worked; he'd dropped his
guard. With both hands I grabbed his forelegs – the wolf looked at
me surprised – my jaws stretched securing the top of his his snout.
I put my weight on him, hands and knees holding down his four
thrashing legs – and pulled away to look at him. He snapped at the
air a few times but quickly calmed - he looked back at me. I was
trapped /

The wolf moved underneath me, testing
me, figuring me out. He would eventually break free - my left hand
let go and went to his throat, holding it, my right went to his
chest. I picked a spot and punched at it repeatedly, hoping to
damage him in some way.

He was not animal or machine. His teeth
were like real teeth but they were tougher, harder and sharper. His
bite had injected a poison into me which the chip worked hard to
neutralize; my eyeballs swelled against the sockets causing double
vision.

His fur was like real fur - but it was
alive, silky and steely. I got a handful of it, cranked up my
powerful new body and ripped upward pulling out a patch of fur and
skin / plunged my hand into the wolf's chest, grabbed and ripped,
grabbed and ripped again, pulled off his foreleg and threw it away
onto the rocks, then the other leg /

For six hours I ran inland, west and
north-west, up and down hills. I munched on fir needles and moss,
not very nutritious but they were all I could get on the go. My
mind wandered while my body pounded a fast pace. The scenery began
to look familiar /

The ravine was too deep. I went down
skidding on the soles of my boots, bouncing on rocks, then hit one
too hard and went head and shoulders first, bounced again and
crashed in a shallow creek /

I tried to stand. Both shin bones were
poking out of my ripped pants. When I touched a dull pointed tip, I
saw the skin had scrapped off my palms and felt something in my
back. I pulled a hard seasoned and crooked cedar branch out from
between my ribs. It had gone into my lung. I fell backward onto the
gravel bank and the lights went out.

*

I dreamt of the mountain and the old
men with their wives living underneath it. My new watch, a gift
from Leland, said 3AM. Every muscle in my body was chilled and
stiff but the pain was nothing more than a practical reminder of my
condition.

All the cuts and punctures had healed
while I slept. My legs were still a mess. I needed to reset the
bones, to make the ends meet, at least approximately. I pulled them
straight and held them together for a few minutes until I felt them
staying in place.

From behind me on the bank, I gathered
up what dry twigs and leaves I could reach without disturbing my
legs and lit them with Elena's lighter /

The fire caught the eyes of a snake,
swimming side to side on the surface of the creek. I kept still,
pretending not to see him. He came to me, steadfast. With a burst
of his tail, the snake flew to my neck – where I snatched him out
of the air, pinching his head as the tail whipped my arm; I pulled
the head right off and flicked it in the fire /

The snake was not animal or machine. It
didn't bleed but it was soft - I bit off a section and chewed. It
would do. I finished the rest down to the tough end of the tail and
slept again.

*

The day before I left for college, my
aunt woke me in the late morning to say she was going to throw a
going away party for me. She was strangely excited for what she had
described but I didn't really notice that at the time.

Later that afternoon, I trundled down
the stairs answering her call to the kitchen and found her, my
uncle, and a man of similar age to him sitting around our little
breakfast table. My aunt was beaming. The going away cake, she
called it, was a glossy painted slab on the counter-top.

The man was a neighbor from down the
street, my aunt said. He was quiet in a restrained kind of way. I
felt like he wanted to talk to me but he only did so once at the
end. He asked me what I was planning to study. I said I didn't
know.

*

My legs healed properly this time. When
I stood, they felt different, everything was different.

My boots looked different. The color
was off. I could feel the ground underneath in unusual detail. I
touched the sides and the straps, the toe. They were different.
Something had happened while I slept

The forest flew by. I stopped for some
banana slugs in standing water with moss and mushrooms. 20-25km to
go, I figured.

*

I'm sure now that the man in the
kitchen was my father, too chicken to talk to me. I decided that I
had no sympathy for him.

I came upon one of the human
settlements. It was not more than a camp site. There were three
mounds of recently upturned dirt. There were perfect wolf prints in
the piled up soil.

*

The forest and valleys and moss covered
outcroppings flew by. A snake waiting on a low branch had no
chance. It tasted kind of like the pine needles.

*

Another settlement – two mounds with
prints and some now cold food on a battered old table. I ate the
food and then discovered the saw. Teeth were missing, freshly torn
from the blade, and there was blood on the handle. I can't say I
wasn't a little bit proud.

*

The Mountain

The chip responded to stress giving
strength; my body was stronger by the hour. I could run up hills at
25kph and back down faster. I ate everything organic to fuel me.
But eating the snakes changed me /

I was becoming like them, my body was –
much the same but changed, silky, steely, not animal or
machine.

I no longer sweated, my clothes and
boots were fused on and into me and tougher, self repairing, alive
now like my skin.

Around the mountain grew a hedge of
thorns a few meters high. This wasn't there the other day. But it
was no trouble for me.

A trail lead to the factory at the
base, lots of wolf prints coming out of there. Easy to find the
entrance.

There was a wolf just outside. He was
ready and came with everything he had – I had the saw in a two
handed grip – He leapt and I sliced him in half at the chest. I
pulled him into pieces and scattered them. His head I left with the
now broken saw, left it out as a warning.

/

It was warm inside the factory cave.
The ground was hard rubber, the ceiling was left natural. A wide
path sloping down led into the mountain. The path sloped back up
and curved and the machine was there, the universal factory, well
lit and unforeboding. A comfortable chair was set where one could
watch it work.

A new wolf was being formed in the
glass enclosed chamber. He was just a pale blue skeleton slowly
filling in. The display said 1:23:00 left to completion. On the
side panel was a familiar symbol, the horseshoe and stars from the
travel trailer in Wyoming and the Artemis Colonel's
tablet.

The interface – two clear frames, like
my desk at the Space Needle - was built into the side panel.
Stickers on the floor indicated where my feet should go in order to
be at the correct distance.

It had an older generation of operating
system, maybe the first generation, crude but easy to use. I
interrupted the wolf sequence and ejected the limp, lifeless mass
out of the machine and onto the floor /

I got the machine going on something
else.

No reason to sit around waiting
/

outside, sprinting straight up the
mountain. I was stronger still. Stress gave me strength. At the top
I fell backward, bounced once and laid there staring up into the
clouds. My body was bulging. Idly picked up a rock and crushed it
into pieces - I knew its composition. I remembered everything. The
freezing cold rain on my face was only a curiosity. Nothing could
hurt me.

By my watch, there was 11:23:17 left.
She would take awhile. But I had the time.

**U**

Darkness

senseless

My hand goes to my pocket and finds it
flat. My mole is gone.

Where am I?

I'm inside, sitting. The armrest feels
familiar.

“You awake, bud?”

I won't panic.

“Ed?”

-A-

I'm sitting in a glass lounge much like
one on Earth but scaled down smaller. Space must be at a premium
here. Ed refused to talk and stormed out of our meeting. Tyndall is
here with me explaining things as well as he can,

“It had to be this way. If you knew, we
worry you'd not have done enough to establish yourself on Earth.
You see, you saw, how little Major Hart has done. And, if you are
to join us, we need you to see for yourself how Earth has changed
while you were away. I hope your friend can understand
this.”

“He'll get over it. It doesn't look
like he has a choice,” I say.

“No. I'm sorry we had to be deceptive.
This is a much better alternative to staying home, I promise
you.”

“Help me understand: what was real? In
my mind, I was on Earth less than an hour ago. It wasn't a
simulation? Don't tell me it was a dream.”

“Everything you think happened did
happen. It was all real, let me rephrase that: you were on Earth.
Your other body still is. It's where you left it,” he
says.

“I didn't leave it
anywhere!”

“Yes, of course, I mean you left it -
when you left it - it was at a place...appropriately secured. Your
mind then switched back into this your original body as it was
predetermined to do. That was almost two weeks ago, actually,” he
says. “You've been in a suspended state since then.”

“Traveling to this installation,” I
say.

“Yes. You're wondering how. Let's get a
snack first.” Tyndall has an uncertain expression, “Let's see how
well it's working...” He whistles three long notes, “That calls it,
usually.”

A gentle, oddly deferential little
thing comes into the lounge. It's a soft off-white and navy blue
with squishy black legs that operate sort of like tank treads
though without any visibly moving parts.

“Crab cakes?” Tyndall asks
me.

**U**

We ate and talked. The food on the
train was better. The settlement was installed in a deeply concave
section of an asteroid in a long elliptical but stable orbit
outside the solar system. The settlement was growing, slowly, with
new people coming one or two at a time, as was planned years
earlier, and new habitable modules being built as needed. There
were only twenty including us, with the last four expected to
arrive soon.

There was no specific mission the
founders had in mind. The unifying reason would come in time,
Tyndall said. He said they needed to get away from Earth to
discover it. I didn't believe him. In fact, I'm positive he was
lying, or at least not telling me everything.

All of the scientists from the back of
Leland's train were here: Walter Fick, Richelieu (his real name was
Richard Jarre), Yuri Denisov, and also Leland, plus a few others I
hadn't yet met.

Leland had created the train as a safe
haven for the asteroid settler's Earth bodies. The train also
doubled as a sort of vacation spot for them. Without explaining
why, once they were on board he would not let them off. They could
freely switch back and forth from the asteroid but their earthly
bodies were prevented from leaving the train.

I asked to speak with Leland. The
longer he talked the more I realized Tyndall was only telling me
half the story. And he was getting nervous, not a good liar. He was
never like this on the train.

**U**

“From here it takes about 12 and a half
hours for the data to travel the distance and reload into your
other brain. That's an average; figure plus or minus 35 minutes,
approximately.” Tyndall is smoking an old fashioned wooden pipe and
has moved to a more comfortable chair. He's relaxed from our
earlier confrontation. Leland is here but has not spoken since his
opening banter.

“Pretty convenient. Can there be two of
me? Isn't the data a copy, so can't it be in two places?” I
say.

“No.”

“That's it? Just no?”

“We don't do that.” Leland
says.

- I won't push it -

“So why even bother going back? If
Earth is so dead to you, what's the point?” I say.

“Well, for one, if a catastrophic
problem ever develops here, we can initiate the process to evacuate
our minds in only a few seconds. The installation here does not to
be intact for the data to be received in our terrestrial bodies.”
Tyndall says.

He shows me the button he has on a
string around his neck. He says our chips can also autonomously
initiate a transfer under certain conditions.