Spirited (30 page)

“No one will grant it a chance beyond this one,” he warned. “Not even if the God directed them to do so. It’s dangerous. Something’s off in its wiring.”

“So fix it.”

“Think I haven’t tried? It won’t ground. Runs hot. Too much juice—could power a city, that one. Or blow like a star. Deactivation’s best.”

“No.” I stood my ground. “I take responsibility.”

“Who the hell do you think you are to shoulder that responsibility?”

I muttered, wanting to avoid the truth. I’d been assigned here under a name that kept me safe. A name that also gave me no power. And to save Helvetica from deactivation I needed power.

“Speak up, boy.”

“I’m Asa Gray,” I straightened my shoulders and pushed out my chest. “Son of County Prime Izhar.”

“Identification.”

I rolled up my sleeve, showing the single mark on my shoulder, the tattoo of the Blunted Star. Symbol of the star systems’ hub and the United World Government.

“For a government brat you pulled one hell of a duty here—carrying keys. Piss off your old man?”

“Hardly.” I stared at him. “I take responsibility,” I repeated.

“Stubborn prick.” He looked away with a snort. “Others made the same mistake with the pretty ones of their kind. But beauty must be found in the soul, Asa Gray. That thing’s got no spot to house beauty at all.”

~*~*~

Helvetica didn’t act soulless. Two days after the compound had gone black, she returned to duty. “It is the indomitable nature of the human spirit,” she explained.

Human
spirit.

“Why do you do that?” I asked as we headed to her post.

“What?”

“You walk taller along the wall. Stretch up.”

She paused, glancing from me to the huge wall that ran the camp’s perimeter. “When they brought us here, I was nine.”

“And?”

Bending, she examined the line where the wall’s concrete base joined the clear impact-proof plasticene that provided a view of the outside world. “I was too small to see out. I saw only”—she turned more gracefully than I would have thought possible with her heavy metal leg and foot and spread her arms to encompass the whole camp—”
this
.”

Squat concrete buildings with ribbed metal roofs stacked a hundred deep across a treeless plain were wrapped tightly together by a wall that teased the shortest Shippers. A filthy sky smeared into the dust that made gears groan.

“I did everything to see out. Finally I grew. But—” Her eye fluttered shut. “Has it changed much? I have been here seven years. I remember flowers…”

She looked down, short hair falling across her eyes, soft and silky brown on the left, ethereal blue tendrils of fiber-optics tumbling across the spinning scope of her right. “I want to see it again.”

“So look out.”

“The wall is a lie. A projection.” She paused as I processed the concept.

“Smoke and mirrors.”

“Augmented eyes know,” she whispered. “I want to see the truth.”

Before thinking, I stepped forward and swept the hair back from her face, hooking it behind a perfectly human ear. “I’ll help you see the truth again.”

Beside the reflection of my own image in her eye, I saw fear and something else. Something that emboldened me as much as it frightened her.

Helvetica stumbled back. “I must get to my post…”

She left me, my hand hanging in midair, fingers more alive than they’d ever felt—all from the touch of her.

~*~*~

I waited outside her post until she finished her duty, only leaving briefly to accomplish the tasks Jared threw my way. Now that word had spread that County Prime Izhar’s son was at Camp, my workload became more tolerable. That was important because I was on a quest.

Helvetica remembered flowers.

What girl didn’t like flowers? What
girl
?

Although half of her was muttering motors and a tangle of wires, the other half was soft flesh and firm muscle. Somehow she seemed more together—more spirited—than any girl I’d met on the outside.

Did any amount of metal matter if beneath it you had compassion… spirit? Didn’t
that
make us human?

My mind kept drifting to flowers, and I knew what I needed to do. If the wall was a lie and I couldn’t get her outside to see the truth—that spring rioted with blossoms just beyond the walls of Camp 13—I would bring the truth inside.

But there was no way to sneak flowers in for Helvetica.

She headed past me when the shift changed, but I caught her arm. “Come with me.”

“I cannot,” she said. “It is time for the Game.”

“The Game?”

Her eye sparkled. “Come.” She touched something that hung on a cord around her neck. It looked like one of the game console keys for the system I kept hidden in my closet at home: a vice my Luddite parents would never forgive.

I followed her to a large blockhouse near the camp’s center. Inside was a ring of cradles: metal and rubberized half shells with wires springing from every seam. Connecting them, a system of curling cords fed into a cylindrical screen.

Along with her co-workers—other Shippers our age—Helvetica headed to a suspended cradle, climbing into it when it descended. Pulling off the gaming key, she motioned me closer. The key slipped into a small console, and she tugged off her single boot, pressing both of her feet into a special board at the base of the cradle. Jacks sprang up, inserting themselves into a system of holes along the soles of her feet. I winced, but she laughed. “It tickles.”

Helvetica lifted her shirt, exposing a bit of her stomach—skin and a material defying flesh or fabric. She lifted a flap of it and withdrew a connector to plug in another set of wires. “You can watch part of it. Your people call it the Game. We call it Atchen Tan.”

“Atchen Tan?”

“It means
the stopping place
. It is as close to the outside as we get. Atchen Tan is a world of adventure. High fantasy.”

“So Atchen Tan is…”

She lifted the hair at the nape of her neck, exposing one final port. “A reward for services rendered. An escape,” she added softly.

I shivered—repulsed and intrigued all at once.

Sliding a wicked-looking needle into the back of her head, she jacked in, her eye rolling back as she sank into the cradle and entered a strange sort of sleep mode.

Images flickered across the screen as other Shippers joined the Game. Helvetica manifested on screen in a flowing medieval gown, her hair so long it fell around her shoulders in glittering waves of color. Sparks flickered around her head like a crazy halo. None of the others sparked and flared the way her image did—it was as if she lived in Atchen Tan as much as she lived in the real world.

Their characters materialized and then dissolved into the game realm, colored blips wandering a maze-like map as they adventured far from the reality of Camp 13. But I couldn’t see any farther than the opening sequence and an overview of the map.

Unable to jack-in, I was locked out.

After an hour the colored blips on the map faded out, and with a noise like the seal of an airlock breaking, the Shippers jolted upright and aware in their cradles, tearing free of the needle and jacks. They grinned or grumbled about their experience.

“Well?” I asked Helvetica. “How was it?”

“Beautiful.”

“Vet kicked ass,” one of the others exclaimed. “Took down the two-faced tiger on Chingary’s ninth level.”

“It needed to be done.”

“No one else could have done it,” the other admitted.

“It’s her
anomaly
,” another added, smirking. “The Game doesn’t know how to deal with a freak’s coding.”

Helvetica slid out of the cradle and reclaimed her key, slinging it around her neck in silence.

The other Shippers left. We were alone.

“
Vet
?” I asked.

She wrinkled her nose. “It is a nickname I do not care for. I am a veteran of nothing except someone’s fantasy. It is not real life.”

“Does it feel real—when you’re inside?”

“Yes. Very much so.”

“Then accept it as real. Maybe
this
“—I waved my hands at the dimly lit space crowded by cables and cords—”is the Game and Atchen Tan is reality.”

She shook her head. “The Game… it is my world, but it is not reality. It cannot be.”

“Why not?”

“There are no flowers in Atchen Tan. There should be flowers in reality.”

I blinked.

“Here, take this but do not lose it.” She slipped something off the wall and into my hand. A game key. “It will not get you far, but you can explore a bit of Atchen Tan. Of course, if you do not
have
a system…”

I took the key in answer. “Why not give me yours?”

“Mine remembers my last play. I have worked hard on my quest. It is time you start a quest of your own, Asa Gray,” she said, smiling.

“A quest of my own?” I grinned back, knowing I had one. “Can I rescue a fair maiden—or princess?”

She shrugged. “Not every quest includes a helpless girl. Some are only about finding your own path. And many princesses do not require rescue. We are not all kittens stuck in trees.”

~*~*~

My gaming quest began with the best of intentions, but the key only allowed me into the Game’s first stage. I could go no farther without augmentation. Frustrated, I returned to my original quest—flowers for Helvetica.

The next day I had a solution.

“You wanted flowers,” I explained, pressing a small canister into her palm. “I can’t bring you flowers. I doubt they’d grow in here anyway. So we’ll make our own.”

She squinted at me. “Make our own?”

I held her hand and the canister to point at the wall, pressing her finger so color shot free. She jumped back, her eye wide.

“Let’s make our own beauty,” I whispered.

“Our own beauty,” she repeated. She turned back to the wall. “Yes. We will make something beautiful.” She grabbed my arm, wrapping it around her and set my index finger on the canister’s trigger as she leaned back against me. She pushed down on my finger, moving us back and forth.

I didn’t pay attention to the design. My mouth was in her hair, my body pressed to hers. The gray-green sky above seemed to glow.

At some point she began to hum—not the mechanics of her—those always hummed, but she hummed a tune, a small song that played on in my head in an infinite loop.

She stopped. My fingertip ached. How long had we…?

“Look.” She stepped out of my grasp. “See how we’ve changed your world.”

The wall had been transformed into an amazing mural: a seed had sprung open to reveal a tree whose branches became circuits on a board of tremendous complexity. Those circuits wound back into branches and roots and the seed itself—everything interconnected. Organic and artificial sharing one reality.

How could something with no soul create art?

“It’s your world too,” I murmured.

She shook her head. “How can this be my world when I have no rights in it? Atchen Tan is my world. This is only my reality. But I thank you for your sacrifice, Asa Gray.”

I stared at her, stunned. Then I stepped forward and kissed her.

The canister fell from her hand.

“Oh, Hel,” I murmured against her mouth.

She kissed me back.

~*~*~

I expected a blowout when I got to work the next day, but I didn’t think it’d spiral out of control like it did.

“She did not do it,” Hel protested, her body shielding a younger Shipper who cringed in the shadow of our mural.

The crowd grew and became thick with guards, each one dressed in riot gear and bristling with weapons.

“Step aside, Shipper,” a guard ordered. “That one must pay for defacement of government property.”

The little one howled, human feet kicking as its metal hand grabbed Hel’s leg, biting down on her flesh until she cried out. “No-o-o-o…” Sparks shot out of Hel, light dancing across her skin and circuitry and jumping in biting arcs to the guard who stood too close.

He convulsed and dropped to the ground, foaming at the mouth, his limbs flailing. His eyes rolled back. His breathing shuddered to a stop.