The Restoration of Flaws (The Phantom of the Earth Book 5) (10 page)

“Don’t talk of this around them,” Pasha said. “I don’t trust Mintel.”

“But you trust Antosha, over your own sister?”

“I didn’t say that. We serve Chancellor Masimovian, we serve the Great Commonwealth of Beimeni and we live forever, this is what Father would want.”

“As a strike team captain, our father would want us to stand up for him. As a supreme scientist, he would want us to uncover the truth.”

“What truth?” Dahlia said.

Pasha stepped away from her. “The truth,” he glanced at Oriana, “is that my sister and I are going to succeed in the mission. We’ll find out what happened at the end of the Quaternary and we’ll retrieve the synthesis of the Reassortment Strain.”

“Right,” Mintel said, “assuming you don’t die along the way, or get my cap’n—”

“My captain,” Pasha said, turning to Ruiner, “I promise you that we won’t let you down.”

“Good lad,” Ruiner said. “Come, your new synsuit awaits you.”

Tomahawk Facility

They entered a room labeled REGENESIS CHAMBER. In its center lay a black marble slab surrounded by six workstations. Oriana didn’t recognize the data readouts suspended above them, but she suspected it had something to do with the Lorum synsuit. Antosha stood in front of the slab, his head bowed, dressed in his usual silver synsuit and fur-lined cape. He lifted his head and opened his eyes.

“Welcome,” Antosha said.

Kiss him now
, Oriana thought,
cut him later.

Antosha twitched his lips before he continued with his adjustments.

“Have you conducted clinical trials with this … Lorum synsuit?” Oriana said.

“I’ve done what’s necessary to ensure our survival.”

Ruiner, Dahlia, and Mintel entered. A medical bot ordered them behind a barrier at the room’s edge. “Aha, Madam Champion, that goes for you as well,” it said. “Please, over here, for your safety.”

Antosha shrugged. “The bot’s orders, not mine, my dear.”

Oriana joined Ruiner, Mintel, and Dahlia on the other side of a neck-high barrier. Antosha raised his arms and telepathically adjusted the holographic images—data feeds, levers that activated robotic arms on either side of the slab. Pasha lay down on it. He wore a bodysuit cut at his elbows and thighs. He turned his head to Oriana. He moved his lips:
I’ll be okay.

She heard his voice in her mind.
Love you, O.

“Are you ready to change the world?” Antosha said.

“Yes, sir,” Pasha said.

“We’re ready for the Metamorphosis,” Antosha said to his medical bots. “Retrieve the orb.”

A medical bot labeled AUDREY set an alloy trunk atop a workstation beside Pasha and inserted a massive key in the workstation. The trunk’s walls descended and revealed the shimmering Lorum orb. Its gold, scarlet, black, silver, and yellow colorations swirled counterclockwise, then clockwise.

Pasha swiveled his head and stared. His dark blue hair lay across his face, just like it had when Oriana used to wake him in the morning.

The vein in his neck pulsed.

Please gods
, Oriana thought,
please protect him from this evil man.

The holographic vitals near Pasha flashed a warning. A medical bot scurried to one of the tubes in his arm and injected him.

Pasha’s eyelids sank.

When he awakened, Antosha hand-signaled a Janzer division, and they surrounded Pasha’s gurney. The Janzers strapped his arms, legs, and torso to the gurney.

“What’s this?” Oriana said.

Antosha ignored her.

“Sir,” Pasha said, “I can’t feel my face.”

“Good, you won’t want to feel this.”

Audrey moved forward with the orb.

Antosha took the orb. “I’m going to put this on your chest. Don’t move.”

Pasha swallowed, and Antosha set the orb down. It flattened and oozed over Pasha’s body, spreading over his midsection. Oriana saw gooseflesh on his arms.

I’m all right
, she heard.

She could feel the cool synsuit as it leaked up her twin brother’s neck, over his head, up his nose, and into his mouth, over his tongue, icy and foreign. He choked and she choked with him. She grabbed her throat as he did.

“Gods,” Oriana said, “he can’t breathe—”

Oriana moved around the barrier, but the Janzers interfered. Pasha lurched on the slab. He broke through the straps and fell off the gurney. He writhed on the ground, then stood and backed into a shelving unit, which tipped over.

Pasha held his throat.

Oriana pounded at the Janzers, but they wouldn’t let her through.

Audrey called for aid, and the medical bots streamed around Pasha. Oriana cried out, and the Janzers held her. She flung her arms over them and screamed, “Get it off him, get it off him!”

Pasha backpedaled, his metallic hands on his metallic face. He lost his balance and took out another shelving unit. He clawed at his mouth, layered with the alien synsuit. She felt it in his eyes, his ears, his nose and mouth. His body was not his own. He reached for her and she heard,
O, help, please help
.

She elbowed a Janzer and stole another’s Reassortment baton, but there were too many. They subdued and held her. She writhed and gasped. “Somebody do something!”

Pasha crashed into a glass platform. He fell with it and convulsed on the ground. He rose again and stumbled into another workstation, into bots, into Antosha.

Blood poured down Antosha’s face from his broken nose. “Get him under control!” he yelled.

Oriana broke free from the Janzers and stole another baton. She slashed it across one of their visors, spun, and kicked the other out of her way. She slid on the ground near Pasha and plucked at the synsuit. He lay limply, one arm across his chest, the other in Oriana’s grasp.

She couldn’t hear his heartbeat or his thoughts.

“Antosha, you’ve got to do something,” Ruiner said.

Antosha held a towel to his nose. Dahlia and Mintel remained behind the barrier, while Ruiner ran to Oriana and knelt beside her. “What’s wrong with him?”

“I shouldn’t have allowed this,” Oriana said. She cradled Pasha’s head and pressed her face to his. She recoiled, surprised by the synsuit’s warmth. She rubbed her fingers around his colorful, hard, metallic ears. Pasha’s leg twitched. She put her hand on his knee and felt a vibration, like the flutter from a bee’s wings beneath her fingers.

Pasha’s body arched. He gasped, and the colors swirled all around his body, clockwise, then counterclockwise. Oriana lifted him in her arms.

She hugged him. “You’re alive.”

“I am,” Pasha said, though his voice sounded synthetic. “I’m oka—” His voice caught, and he gasped. He put up his hand. “I’m okay.”

“Get her out of here,” Antosha told the Janzers.

She helped Pasha to his feet. “You’re a monster,” she said to Antosha as she pushed the Janzers away from them.

Should I forget about the kiss and cut Antosha now?
she thought.

“Aha,” Audrey said, “vitals are normal. His body has been successfully fused with the Lorum synsuit.” The bot’s eye slit glowed, then dimmed.

“What have you done to me?” Pasha said.

“Made you more than transhuman,” Antosha said. A bot placed a bandage over Antosha’s nose and wiped the blood from his lips. Antosha pinched Pasha’s arm. “When you wear this synsuit, nothing can harm you. In time, you’ll realize you have the strength of a thousand Janzers and skin stronger than carbyne.”

“Then why didn’t you put it on yourself?” Oriana said.

“I’m not about to raid the most advanced military research complex this world has ever known.”

In the days that followed, Antosha worked with Pasha, Oriana, and Ruiner on the mission protocols, on the Lorum synsuit’s capabilities, and on Pasha’s abilities when he wore it, as he still did. During the last session, Pasha interrupted Antosha.

“I’m connected to the Lorum, and the Lorum is connected to me.”

Oriana wondered at the sound of his voice each time she heard it.

“That’s the point,” Antosha said.

“I can hear the Lorum.”

“What does it say?”

“It tells me all the time that it will protect me, and it asks about the treaty and the extremophiles.”

“Tell us what that means,” Oriana said to Antosha.

“It’s the Mission to Earth’s Core,” Ruiner said, “the mission delayed for this one.”

“The Lorum starves,” Pasha said. He held out his palm, and the Lorum synsuit reformed, rendering the insides of Planet Vigna, native for the Lorum, to a vacuum where extremophiles once lived. Then he shifted it to the Earth’s interior where a hypothesized pool of extremophiles swelled, glowing with radioactive hues. “We have the resources it requires for survival, you must let me go, let me retrieve the extremophiles for the Lorum, let me fulfill the treaty …”

Antosha overrode Pasha’s telepathy in the ZPF, forcing the organic, metallic substance back to Pasha’s hand and arm where the colors of the Lorum swirled wildly.

“First, you
will
complete the Timescape Mission,” Antosha said.

He activated a Granville sphere. The Vigna system and its three stars formed.

Pasha rushed for it and caressed the holograms. His metallic hand ran through them.

“Pasha,” Antosha said, “I promise you that if you retrieve the synthesis of the original Reassortment Strain, I will support the Mission to Earth’s Core, and when we find the extremophiles, you may deliver them to Vigna yourself.”

“We must act immediately. The Lorum will die.”

“The Lorum has survived for billions of Earth years. I think it can survive for a few more until we’re ready. I’ll speak no more about this.”

The gold, scarlet, black, silver, and yellow colorations swayed over Pasha’s body. He stepped away from Antosha and didn’t push the topic further.

More days passed, and with each, Oriana recognized her brother less. He took out Graka training bots with ease, sometimes many at once; he lifted ten-thousand-kilogram boulders in Gubertiana; he swam down the Archimedes River from Volano City to Yeuron City and back in a day; he climbed the Great Gorges of Hillenthara, with the water rushing over him; he survived pulse launcher attacks; he walked through magma and over water.

He’d become more a god than transhuman, it seemed.

He stood with Oriana now upon her terrace.

She looked over at him. Was the Pasha she had developed with still here, or was he the Lorum reincarnated?

“How goes your research with Dr. Shrader?” Pasha said. She was used to his artificial voice by now and glad to be distracted from her traitorous musings.

“Not good. I’m afraid he remembers nothing of his life before the procedure, and it isn’t clear when, or if, he’ll ever recall what occurred at the end of the Quaternary.”

“Antosha knows how to get the information, he just isn’t doing it.”

“How do you know?”

“He’s the most skilled telepath in the commonwealth, talented enough to block the Lorum on Vigna from communication with the Lorum on Earth.”

“He created a z-wall?”

Pasha nodded and the colors on his skin turned and twisted. “Yes, far more sophisticated than the one we broke through in House Summerset. He’s found a way to split the Lorum’s consciousness from the ZPF, yet I can sense it trying to break through. One day, it just might.” Pasha held up his fist in front of his eyes, then opened and closed his fingers. “I’m not sure if Antosha truly understands what the Lorum is capable of; it’s like I can hear everything, more acutely than during development.”

“Can you help me?”

“I doubt it. This is a power with the ZPF I don’t fully control, not yet, though I suspect that when I do, the Western Hegemony’s defenses won’t be able to stop us.”

The bustle from candidates in the courtyard stole her attention. If they knew how fragile the condition of their commonwealth was, would they joke as they did? Would they be shadow apprentices by day and party by night, mock the unbid-for candidates sent to the Lower Level? Would they envy her and her twin brother’s special positioning in the RDD? She shook her head. So much had changed.

“Come, brother,” she said, viewing the time on her armlet, “we’re late for the surface excursion.”