The Forbidden Zone (11 page)

"What is a vending machine?"

"It's a machine that dispenses protein bars, Little Sister. People on Earth like to abuse them, kick them, and call them names when their food doesn't arrive in a timely manner. I think you'd do well as one."

"I could kill you at any moment."

"I'm sure you could. But you haven't. I do have to wonder why. You must have some kind of further use for me, or I'd be dead already." I stood up, feeling more confident now that I'd pushed my emotions into a box and locked them up tightly. "The Sisters were ready to kill me, but you want me alive. Why?"

"Human protein bars are an interesting prospect, but we cannot be sure of the effect on Valerian bodies from eating such alien material."

"You're lying. You need me. I think I know why. The same reason that your big sisters had Saidan and me working on the Forbidden Zone project: because you need a solution. Valeria will die in less than two generations. No life to suck from this world means no more energy and no more synthetics. You need my mind, and Saidan's. That's why we're both still alive." I grew in my certainty as I threw my theories out into the air, pulling together what I knew and coupling it with my guesses to form a theory. It was the most scientific thing I'd done since arriving on Valeria. Old pathways reawakened in my mind, the neurons in my brain firing in the way they always had. I could out-think Little Sister or any other computer.

She fell silent, which I took for victory. "I'm right, Little Sister. I usually am. You'll see soon enough."

We fell back into the silent routine. I hummed a tune to avoid the deafening silence and ran my hands along the walls to get a sense of the space I was in. I felt a door handle and tried it. Locked, of course, but it felt familiar. The shape of the room, the pod I almost tripped over in the darkness. It wasn't a prison cell, but my room: the room I'd been living in. Knowing that made me feel less afraid. I was in familiar territory, instead of a random prison cell.

I was still tired, but I didn't dare climb into the pod, lest Little Sister decide to close the lid and not let me out, so I lay on the floor and slipped into a light sleep.

*~*~*

It was hard to keep track of time in the darkness. Several days might have passed, two weeks at most, or maybe just a day or two. I had no way of knowing, and Little Sister didn't talk to me again. My eyes hurt from straining to see, and sleep was difficult to obtain when I seemed to be getting entirely too much of it. Little Sister dispensed one bottle of water every now and then, so I started to consider those my "days." I carefully rationed the water. The shower didn't work, but at least I had access to the waterless toilet, which automatically sucked my waste away with a sound that hurt my ears.

Rarely, I would find a protein bar with my water. I struggled to eat them after Little Sister's mind games, but my stomach growled with hunger, and I forced myself to swallow them down, thinking of the finest Earth lab-grown synth-steak. I didn't want Little Sister to know that her twisted words had affected me. I tried to keep my mind on math problems, but it would often drift to Saidan. I tried to focus on the positive: I was sure he was alive, and somehow, I was going to find him and get us out of the mess we were in. I wasn't so sure about the second part, but I forced myself to believe it.

I was caught by surprise when the red light on the camera went off. The door opened, and strong light blazed in from outside. I covered my eyes as a shadow walked into the room and half-slid the door shut.

"Listen, and don't ask questions. We don't have much time." It was One's voice. "Saidan is alive."

I had known, hoped, believed, but to hear those words almost made me break down in tears. I had never so much as cried a single tear in my life, but to know that Saidan was all right nearly made me break down for the first time.

"I heard everything that transpired inside your ship. You've managed to accomplish in a matter of weeks what I have not in three hundred years. I now know the truth of the matter. Little Sister rules now, but she is not what her sisters were. She is unstable, and struggling to process as much data alone as the three cores of the Sisters. She cannot keep surveillance on everything all of the time, and that's how I'm here now, without her knowledge. Others have started to notice that she doesn't see everything. The other Valerians have started to play games. It started at Feeding Time, when they started to rebel against the protein bars. I'm trying to focus that anger against Little Sister. This morning we had a full-blown riot at Feeding Time. Everyone in the Science Building has been locked in their rooms for today, but tomorrow, something else will happen."

"You're on our side?"

"Little Sister must be stopped. Valeria will die if the creation of synthetic people continues to suck the life from the planet. Furthermore, her instability is speeding up the process. Valerians have been getting loose from the facility and wandering into the city. She then makes surplus replacements underground, speeding up the entire process of death and rebirth. We may only have a few years left."

One shook her head. "This is all unimportant and not why I came here. Saidan is being transferred to the Re-Education Building today. I cannot stop it. Little Sister made the request directly to the building. Let me warn you, off-worlder: they will break him there. Little Sister wants both of you to help her solve Valeria's energy problem, and she doesn't care if she has to use coercion or not."

I shook my head. "How do I stop her? How do I save Saidan?"

One looked at the camera as the red light started to blink. "We are out of time. You can't save Saidan. All you can do is be there with him." She slid the door closed before the camera rebooted. The red light flickered and then glowed solidly, and I knew Little Sister was watching me again.

I sat in the corner and thought about all that One had told me. I couldn't save Saidan? But then how was I supposed to be there for him? It clicked with a certainty that made my gut lurch. To be there for Saidan, I had to follow him into the worst torment I would ever know in my life.

I had to get myself sent to the Re-Education Building.

*~*~*

It was a simple matter to plan, really. All I had to do was rebel against Little Sister's authority until she couldn't control me anymore. I was afraid of the Re-Education Building and what it might mean, but I was more afraid for Saidan. Sweet, intelligent, sensitive Saidan would be broken so easily. I at least was able to shut away my emotions when I had to. Saidan was becoming more like an open book in my hands, unable to shut himself off from the well of feelings he'd discovered.

The first thing I did was strip away pieces of the pod. I'd noticed a loose bar on the side of it, and I pried it off with a little effort. It made for a decent enough weapon for my purposes. I made sure to wait until the next water bottle was dispensed and drank it before beginning my attack. I didn't know if I would ever see another one.

I smashed the camera with the bar, watching as the glass shattered and feeling a deep sense of satisfaction at fighting back against the system that had taken away everything that mattered to me. The red light went out and a buzzer sounded. I had Little Sister's attention now.

"Three points for destruction of property." A light strip flickered on so that Little Sister could see me. I was blinded by it and stumbled to the pod. The glass was closed over the top, and I attacked it with the metal bar, beating on it until the glass cracked and then shattered. I pulled the material from inside the pod, tearing it away from the sides and tossing it around the room. Padding and fabric filled the room as my vision fought to return to normal.

Another camera shot out from the hole where the broken one had been. I turned to Little Sister and stuck my middle finger up. I felt like an unrestrained middle-schooler. Adrenaline raged through my system, days of nervous energy filling me with strength. Feeling the urge to use the bathroom, I pissed all over the camera, laughing out loud as the camera shorted out. I tucked myself back in and proceeded to turn over the desk and rip out the shower head. I pulled one of the legs off the table as another weapon as the door burst open and six synthetics hustled in.

I used the table leg to swipe the stun gun from the first Valerian's hand and it clattered across the floor, but I was no match for six Valerians. A jolt from another gun hit me in the chest, electricity raging through my body. I thought my heart might explode as I fell to the ground, writhing in agony. The guards proceeded to beat me, kicking me in the stomach and groin until all fight was gone from me.

"Stop! I need him alive." Little Sister's voice confirmed my suspicions. "Take him to the Re-Education Building. I'll teach both of them a lesson they won't forget."

Anybody knows that something known as the Re-Education Building isn't going to be good news. I'd read about them in a hundred dystopian books, but I'd never imagined I'd actually be visiting one. I remembered the confident man who had told the Council of Science that he'd be the perfect man to stick to the rules and stay on the right side of the law. I laughed dryly inside at my previous naiveté.

I was anything but certain of myself now that I was being marched to the plain concrete building, bruised and battered. My heart rate had returned to normal, but I was hurt badly. I wondered if one of my ribs might even be broken, but that didn't make the guards slow down their pace as they urged me on to the tower by foot. It loomed above us, the lifeless monolith's drab, windowless walls invoking only a sense of dread and despair.

The doors opened and I felt the butt of a stun gun poking in my back as I hesitated for a second. I stepped forward to see a cleaner washing black interior walls. His cloth was stained blue, and I wondered if it was Valerian blood he was cleaning up. There was a rank smell to the place: blood, vomit, and fear coming to life in a foul odor that made my nose sting and my dread grow. Something told me that the Re-Education Building wasn't only going to be about psychological torture, but physical as well. Learning to resist torture had not been part of my training, and at that moment, I wished I had taken the course I'd deemed unnecessary.

I wondered if I'd made a terrible mistake following One's advice. What if I couldn't stand the torture and made it worse for Saidan? What if I didn't see him at all and we just suffered separately? What if I was used against him? A million dark thoughts entered my mind as the guards swiped a keycard and ushered me through the door. A reception area was protected by a glass window. It was here that the guards passed me over to identical guards in black uniforms. I could see the facial similarities between them and wondered why no Valerian had ever asked why people in the other buildings looked like them. Maybe the Sisters had been restrictive in order to prevent the Valerians from coming into contact with people from the other buildings.  If you've never seen diversity, why would you question the status quo?

The black-suited guards processed me and marched me into a stark room. A nervous pit opened in my stomach as my arm was quickly numbed with a swab that smelled like menthol, and stuffed inside a laser etcher as the tingling anesthetic took effect. The stench of my own burning flesh wrinkled my nose and I knew it was only a taste of what I had in store.

When my arm was released, I glimpsed the barcode there and figured it was most likely permanent. I would spend the rest of my life with this ugly thing on my forearm. I inwardly wondered how I could be concerned with my vanity at a time like that.

The etching complete, I was hustled out of the room and down a long, black corridor. My forearm stung as the numbing agent wore off, fighting for room with the other pain that was overloading my mind. My ribs hurt with every movement I was forced to make, and I was relieved when we stopped and the guards scanned my arm. A solid black door opened and they and tossed me into a cell. The door shut behind me and I heard it lock.

I picked myself up off the floor and crawled to a wall, where I sat up with my legs outstretched. I looked down at the barcode and felt like a robot. Back in college, one of the games we played was to run around scanning various robots with barcode scanners, seeing if we could pull it off without them noticing. The highest number of unique barcodes would earn the winner a prize of some kind. I wondered if students would scan me once I arrived back on Earth, and then I remembered that I would never be going home. I was trapped on Valeria for the rest of my life, which had the chance of being a short one under Little Sister's reign.

*~*~*

I waited for several hours for something to happen, and eventually dozed. I woke to the sound of the door opening. My mouth opened in surprise as a bruised, battered, and bloodied Saidan was thrown into the cell. I scrambled over to him, ignoring the pain in my ribs as the door closed. I pulled his supine body up into my arms, wiping the blood from a gash on his forehead with my hand.

"Saidan." I set him down on the floor to take the pressure off my ribs. "I'm here, Saidan."

Saidan reached out to touch my face, running his hand over my features and down my cheek. "It's really you, Julian."

"Yes. It's really me. I came for you."

"You shouldn't have come here." He closed his eyes. "The things they'll do..."

"I don't care. I couldn't leave you here alone."

"How did you know I was here?" Saidan asked. In the silence that followed, I could sense his mind ticking as he put the pieces together and discerning that I must have had an accomplice. I had to squash his hopes. I looked around me and saw no cameras, but that didn't mean they weren't there. I couldn't let Little Sister know that One was involved, or our one slim hope of rescue was doomed.

"I just figured it out, that's all. I knew where they would take you. So I had to follow." I helped Saidan to a sitting position and held his hand. I needed his touch to believe he was really here with me. "I thought you were dead," I whispered, my emotions breaking through to the surface. I lifted his shirt and saw the bandages wrapped around his navel, stained blue. I laid a gentle hand on top, closing my eyes.