The Search for Sam (5 page)

Our job is to sift through the links on our respective screens and sort them, moving
material that is clearly of no pertinence to the Mogadorian cause to the “Discard”
directory, while kicking material that
might
have some bearing on our interests up to the “Investigate” directory, where it will
be assessed personally by the lead surveyor before being dismissed or moved up the
chain to Command HQ. We are also supposed to tag and grade the material we move to
the “Investigate” directory according to our judgment of its possible relevance: “PV”
for Possible Value, “HP” for High Priority, and “EHP” for Extremely High Priority.
Items we flag with an “EHP” rating are simultaneously routed to the lead surveyor
and to a small cadre of analysts over at command HQ for immediate review.

Ultimately, if Command HQ is persuaded a news item is a legitimate sign of Garde activity,
reconnaissance teams are dispatched.

All three eliminated Garde members were located with some degree of surveyor assistance.
But despite our importance, we’re really just data monkeys. Exciting stuff like reconnaissance
and combat occur outside our purview as surveyors.

Not that it’s easy work. Within minutes of struggling through this endlessly updating
data stream, I miss the clarity and simplicity of my physical labor back in Kenya.
Jumping all over the place on the internet—from a story about the birth of quintuplets
in Winnetka, Illinois, to a grainy web-video from a Syrian insurgent—without getting
involved in what I’m reading or seeing is a challenge, and after just twenty minutes
of wide-eyed staring at the monitor, my eyes feel like they’re going to bleed.

Then it gets worse.

At the end of the first hour, a little digital bell sounds and a tab pops up on the
upper right-hand corner of my screen. My heart sinks.

“Oh yeah,” says Serkova, managing to smirk at me without looking up from his monitor.
“I forgot to mention. We get ranked hourly.”

Our individual results are tabulated at the end of every hour and broadcast to all
the terminals. Number of Discards, number of Investigates, as well as a provisional
computer-graded percentage score for accuracy.

There I am, all the way at the bottom, in last place: twenty-seven Discards, six Investigates,
and a provisional accuracy ranking of 71 percent. I scan up the list to see Serkova
in second place, with a whopping eighty-two discards, thirteen Investigates, and a
provisional accuracy ranking of 91 percent. I’m going to have to go
a lot
faster.

“What was that you were telling your father?” Serkova cracks.

I’m too distracted to respond. I need to improve my score, and I resent Serkova’s
ability to work and needle me at the same time.

“Something ’bout what a great tracker you are, how much better you’ll be at surveying
than we are?”

Ugh. Not only has the General given me an impossible task, in which failure will result
in my
death
, he’s also poisoned the well with my new coworkers by reporting what I said about
my superior tracking skills.

But I don’t bother to respond: I don’t have time.

I get back to work, fighting against my own dismay. One reason I manipulated the General
into placing me in the Media and Surveillance facility was because I thought I might
have enough downtime to use my console to hack into the servers of the adjacent laboratories,
do some digging into Dr. Zakos’s research. I know that One’s only hope lies in those
files. But if I don’t pull my ranking up soon, my father could justifiably terminate
our agreement: I’d be killed before I even got a chance to help One.

I need to improve my score.

I manage to go faster. The trick, I learn, is not to process any of the information
I encounter. Instead I let my consciousness skim just above the text or video, then
let my judgment occur without thought or reasoning. Basically the trick is to accept
that I am just a cog in a data-combing machine.

Finally, I feel myself getting into a groove. In the next hourly ranking, I’ve climbed
two positions. In the one after that, I’m position thirteen out of twenty.

“Luck.” Serkova sniffs.

I glare at him. I know I’m not here to compete with this jerk, but I can’t help it:
wanting to knock him down a peg drives me on. By late afternoon, I’ve climbed up to
position eleven.

I figure I’ve bought myself enough of a cushion to give myself five minutes of snoop
time. I quickly page away from the hyperlinks and try to access the hub’s central
servers.

But doing research with a ticking clock hanging over my head proves disastrous. I
enter in searches for phrases like “mind transfer,” “Dr. Anu,” and “Dr. Zakos,” but
they all lead me to restricted areas on the server, and I don’t have time to hack
into them. I try to be more general. Remembering what Arsis said about humans in the
lab, I do a search for “human captives.” Instead of directing me to anything about
Anu or Zakos’s research subjects, I’m led to some internal, hub-wide memo about a
broad new policy regarding human captives. “Whenever possible, humans suspected of
aiding and abetting the Garde shall henceforth be held at the government base in Dulce,
New Mexico.”

A government base? Why would the U.S. government have anything to do with the Mogadorians?

I put it aside for now. It’s an interesting—and unsettling—tidbit, but it’s not going
to help me save One. Before I even have a chance to enter a new search, my five minutes
is up.

I turn back to my work. Predictably, that short diversion cost me, and my hourly rank
plummets. Regretfully, I accept that I can’t afford any more “independent research”
today.

We finish at seven p.m., replaced by the night shift, who we’ll relieve at seven tomorrow
morning. My body aches from remaining hunched and sedentary, and my eyes feel like
they’ve been blasted with sand. I’ve finished the day back in the middle, at position
eleven.

“Not bad,” admits Serkova, getting up from his chair. “But hardly what you promised
the General.”

He’s right. Landing right in the middle of a group of twenty can hardly qualify me
as a master tracker. I can only hope my ranking is enough to let me live another day.

I walk the tunnel alone, heading back to the hub.

I’m too tired to even consider sneaking off and snooping around the other tunnels:
I’d definitely blow my cover.

“Arsis, you flaming moron!”

Arsis! The idiot assistant technician in the labs
. Advancing my secret agenda was the last thing on my mind until I heard that name.

“Sorry, Doctor.”

I round the corner to see an open doorway leading into one of the laboratories. Inside
the gleaming white lab, an incredibly tall and spindly doctor has a young guard backed
up against a wall, prodding him with an angry index finger.

“These samples were supposed to be refrigerated at
subzero
temperatures. You put them in the regular freezer.”

“Sorry, sir.” The boy is docile, subservient, nothing like the sullen brat I’d imagined
from his IM transcripts.

The doctor commands him sternly. “Revial the samples from our remaining cultures,
and get it right this time. You asked to be trusted with more important work; now
show that you can do it properly.”

“Yes, Doctor.” Arsis scrambles off to redo his work.

I stand gaping at Dr. Zakos, at his massive laboratory. This is the man who might
be able to save my only friend.

He catches me looking.

Shit
.

He glares at me. I either have to turn around and walk away, or think of something
fast.

“Doctor Zakos?” I say, deciding to wing it.

“Yes?” He looks puzzled.

I step forward into the lab.

“I’m Adamus Sutekh. Son of General Sutekh.”

He looks at me, evidently suspicious.

“I wanted to meet you,” I go on, “because my father has spoken so highly of your work.”

My ruse pays off: I watch Dr. Zakos flush with pride. Even Mogadorians have their
vanity. An exploitable weakness.

“I’m glad the General is satisfied,” says the doctor, giving a little involuntary
bow.

“I was actually a subject in your predecessor’s experiments,” I continue. “The work
he did with the first fallen member of the Garde … the memory transfer …”

“Ah, of course.” He shakes his head. “Dr. Anu’s work was a deplorable failure. I’m
certain the mind-transfer technology I have been developing since is much improved,
if I could ever get clearance to actually use it.”

I’m confused. Zakos keeps talking, looking at me with much more interest now. I struggle
to maintain a neutral expression. “You’re saying the procedure could be done more
successfully now?”

He nods. “That’s my theory.”

“How is that possible? I thought the procedure needed to be done soon after a subject’s
death.”

He cocks his head curiously and ignores my question. “Where have you been since the
experiment?”

“In Africa,” I tell him. I don’t want to get into too much detail about my activities
since I was last with the Mogadorians. But the doctor seems to accept my answer without
question.

“And did you suffer any … side effects due to the procedure you underwent?”

I’m tempted to be sarcastic.
Only that little coma
. But I hold back. “Nothing other than those that you already know about.”

The wheels seem to be turning in his head as he looks me up and down.

“It’s a possibility,” he muses, almost as if to himself. “The neural pathways of the
Garde have been dormant far too long to attempt the transfer again with a new host.
But with the original subject, from the original experiment—”

I can’t help interjecting. “What are you talking about? What Garde? You can’t mean
her
.”

Dr. Zakos just grins and struts over to the laboratory’s wall, which is covered with
ten or so off-white square tiles. He places his hand over a small steel control panel
next to the wall and performs an elegant sequence of hand gestures across the panel’s
surface. With a sudden and jarring hydraulic whoosh, one of the tiles slides out of
the wall, opening like a drawer, spewing cryogenic vapors.

It’s like a mortuary slab.

He stares down proudly at what’s lying on it.

“Have a look,” he says.

I step deeper into the lab, peering over the edge of the tile.

“Perfectly preserved.”

I can’t believe my eyes. She doesn’t even look dead: she looks like she’s sleeping.

My best friend in the world.

One.

One keeps me up half the night, bombarding me with questions I can’t answer: about
Doctor Zakos’s experiments, about what he meant when he said he could successfully
download the entirety of One’s memories, about what it meant that her body had been
so thoroughly well preserved.

“Well, you’re still dead,” I say.

“Uh? A little tact, please,” she says, laughing.

I’m in bed. She’s sitting on the floor in the corner of my bedroom.

“Sorry,” I say. I’m a bit rattled. Seeing her in the flesh like that, a corpse on
a cold steel slab, has upset me more than I’d like her to know. She’s been my constant
companion for years now, but the sight of her body brought home to me how tenuous
her current existence is.

“Did you notice?” asks One, jumping right back into her excited speculation. “There
were at least ten tiles on that wall. Remember what that Arsis kid said in those chats?
About humans being dredged for intel? You think they’re being kept preserved on those
slabs too?”

I marvel at One’s mind. She wasn’t even present until I finished reading Arsis’s IM
transcripts, and she was definitely gone when I was in Zakos’s lab.

She clocks my amazed look. “What?” she says. “You already know your mind’s an open
book to me. Just because I’m gone when stuff happens doesn’t mean I can’t see it once
I come back.”

And without skipping a beat, she returns to her obsession. “Anyhow, if I’ve been so
well preserved, that means we can probably jack into each other again somehow and
kick-start my memories inside you. I mean, I know I’m pretty, but I don’t think Dr.
Zakos has been preserving me for my
looks
. He must’ve been doing it to keep the stuff inside my brain, like, fresh.” She nods,
pleased with her reasoning. “We need to get back into that lab.”

I look away from her. “One, what I need is to get some sleep.” It’s the middle of
the night, and I have to be at the media facility in four hours.

One is silent.

“If I screw up at work, I’m as good as dead. And if I’m dead, you’re dead, and this
whole lab plan will be moot anyway. Okay?”

I turn back to One. But she’s gone.

It occurs to me that I’ll never know when one of her disappearances is her last. One
day she’ll blink out, just like this, and I’ll wait for her to reappear … but she
won’t.

For all I know I just saw her for the last time.