The Search For Sam Part 5

I can tell he's ecstatic to use the equipment on me. Adamus, the Mogadorian lab rat.

I sink into the chair, trying to get comfortable while Zakos sets up. I should be happy: my ruse worked. I deliberately let my father overhear that I didn't want to be used in Zakos's mind-transfer experiments, and he had Zakos on the phone within minutes, giving him the go ahead to plug my brain into One's corpse.

The General still hates me, and seeing me weak and afraid, as I'd pretended to be at the dinner table, gave his meager conscience whatever license it needed to risk my life again in the lab.

The General is free to hate me. I hate him too. And now that I've succeeded in tricking him again, my hatred has a new depth, a new dimension: contempt. I fooled him.

The machines begin to whir.

I'm afraid of what will happen while I'm under, but push that aside. More than anything else, I'm relieved to know that One may have a chance of survival. If the technology has improved, maybe I can get through the procedure unharmed, rescuing One in the process.

"The transfer rig will take about twenty minutes to warm up," Zakos announces.

I nod as I watch the doctor approach the steel console beside the tile containing One's body. He presses a few b.u.t.tons and the slab comes out with the same hydraulic whoosh as before.

From where I'm sitting I can't see One's body. Zakos presses a few b.u.t.tons on the edge of One's slab, then presses the console again. The slab whooshes shut.

"You don't need ..." I start, then catch myself before I call her One. "You don't need to connect the body to me?"

"No," he says, with professional pride. "All of the containment pods are linked to this mainframe terminal," he says, pointing at the largest monitor. "Everything besides the pods' hydraulics are controlled through here: brain scans, vitals, preservation protocols ..."

"Do you have other bodies in there?" I ask.

"Yes," he says. "Quite a few. Some of them are unaffiliated mortals I've used for experimentation. The rest of them are Greeters."

Zakos, oblivious to the fact that I'm a traitor to the Mogadorian cause, explains to me that when the Loric were first scouting for a planet where they could hide from the Mogadorians, they made contact with a few scattered mortals. The Mogadorians captured these humans almost ten years ago and subjected them to a series of interrogations. However, Mogadorians knew next to nothing about earthling psychology or behavior back then, and at that point our interrogation techniques were quite crude. Some of these "Greeters" caved to Mogadorian interrogation, but it was quickly discovered the intel they gave-about the Loric's locations, what they told the Greeters upon contact-was often faulty. Because of this, my people began an ongoing research endeavor that used complex brain-mapping technology to find a more accurate means of extracting information. In other words, rather than asking for it, we tried to find a way to take it.

"And, as a matter of fact, Anu's experiment with you was an offshoot of that research. Unfortunately it failed, but I was intrigued. The procedure you are about to undergo represents a ma.s.sive refinement of his work."

I can tell that Zakos thinks this little history lesson is complete, but I want to know more.

"And you've kept these Greeters alive this whole time?"

Zakos gives a breezy laugh. "Not exactly. We've raked their brains so thoroughly trying to extract information about the Garde that all but one of them have perished. Of course we're keeping the others preserved, should our technology advance to the point-"

"Who lived?" I ask, interrupting him, steering him back to information I know One will want, should both of us survive the procedure.

Dr. Zakos looks at me silently for a moment. For a second, I worry that I've raised his suspicions.

Instead, he impishly raises an eyebrow. "Want to see?"

He dashes over to a panel next to another tile and opens the containment pod. After the mist clears, I crane my neck to get a better look.

I see a handsome, solidly built middle-aged man. His skin is shockingly white from being in containment for so long: it's practically the color of vatborn skin. But otherwise he looks healthy. His eyes are closed.

"Just one moment," Zakos says, pressing a few b.u.t.tons inside the pod. Then Zakos leans over the man.

"Malcolm Goode?" he says, addressing him gently, like a normal human doctor addressing a normal human patient. "How's it going in there?"

Malcolm Goode opens his eyes.

I feel a chill, a wave of nauseating pity for this poor human, trapped in a cold box for years on end.

"h.e.l.lo," he says, looking up at Dr. Zakos with an expression of utter guilelessness and trust. It's like he has no idea how much time has pa.s.sed, or what he's been subjected to. "I seem to have forgotten where I am," he says, smiling innocently. "Could you tell me where I am?"

Dr. Zakos only chuckles in response. "Well," he says, addressing me. "You get the idea."

And with that he reaches over to the panel, presses a few more b.u.t.tons, and Malcolm is prompted-whether by wire or chemical-to return to sleep. But not before he fixes me with a haunted, quizzical look.

I'm under. At first it's just a void, a black so black I wonder for a moment if this is what One experiences when she disappears. Then come blasts of light and crackling static, as I find myself plunged into One's memories.

I look around, getting my bearings. I'm in a wooden shack, in bed, my head hanging over the side of the mattress. Through the cracks in the floorboards, I see rus.h.i.+ng water: a river.

The Rajang River.

"They're coming."

I turn to see Hilde, One's Cepan. She's staring through a slat in the door, ready to fight. She rushes to me, shaking me, pulling me out of bed.

That's when I realize I'm not just a spectator to One's final memories, as I was during most of my time in her consciousness. I've been plugged directly into her experience. Ghost-One is nowhere to be seen. I'm completely fused with her: every thought, every feeling. The humidity inside the shack. The sweat trickling down my back. I can feel Hilde's eyes on me, inspecting my readiness for combat.

I'm not ready, I think. I'm just scared.

The Mogadorian a.s.sault team kicks in the door and Hilde leaps into action. She dodges a Mog's knife, and as the Mog spins around to recover his balance she crushes his windpipe with a single strike. As he collapses, she whirls to another Mog, swiftly snapping his neck.

I'm too paralyzed with fear to move. I know what's coming. Hilde is about to die.

My heart screams. I love this woman with all of One's love.

Another Mogadorian attacks. Hilde flips him onto his back.

But this Mog is quicker than the others. He unholsters his blaster and shoots Hilde right in her chest.

Everything goes red. All of One's anger, shock, and rage at the loss of her Cepan-my Cepan-floods my system. No, she can't, they couldn't. It's my fault, I failed, how could I? These are One's thoughts but I feel them, hear them, as my own. I want her back. I want her back. No no no! Must pay, someone must pay, they must pay. Our combined fury rises. They will pay, yes they will pay, we will make them pay.

And that's when I feel it. Something ripping open inside of me, something so entirely new yet so strangely familiar that it's almost funny I never noticed it before, that it took this crisis for me to notice it. The floors start to shake, a ma.s.sive rumble coming from beneath my feet but also coming from inside me. And as my heart sings-yes, they will pay, they will pay-everything goes black and- Shadows. Hands waving in front of my face, fluorescent light burning through the dark.

I am back in Zakos's lab. He's cursing, ripping electrodes from my head, adjusting the console I'm plugged into.

"What happened?" I ask.

I'm still buzzing from what I've just experienced. As chaotic as the memory transfer was, as turbulent as it felt, there was something I was on the verge of understanding inside it, a promise of something great.

But now that I'm back, it's gone.

"Your vitals were spiking faster than I'd antic.i.p.ated. If I'd kept going ..." He lets out another string of curses.

I sit up in my chair.

He stares at me. "Are you able to recall anything? Do you have any usable intel I can send up the chain?"

I shake my head.

Of course I'm lying. Beyond what I just experienced, I already have an intimate knowledge of Loric psychology, the relations.h.i.+p between the Garde and their Cepan. I have the entirety of One's history burned into my brain. I've had that ever since the first transfer.

He levels me with his stare. He's evidently fl.u.s.tered, his hair damp with sweat, but that doesn't make him any less scary.

"I know it's in there," he says.

I feel a chill at his words.

"You may not remember it consciously, but I know it's in there, in your brain. And I know that I could get it," he says.

The way he speaks, it's like he's talking to himself. "Our understanding of Mogadorian physiology is well beyond what we understand about Loric or mortals. With my neurological mapping techniques, I could do what Anu couldn't. Run those currents three times as hard, and rip that intel straight from your brain and onto my hard drive."

He stares at me. I feel weirdly exposed, objectified, like a slab of meat at a butcher shop.

"But for that," he says, chuckling bitterly, "I'd need your father's permission to kill you."

CHAPTER 10.

I'm dismissed to finish out my day at the surveillance facility. I have no fight left in me, and my rankings take a nosedive. Sixteen, eighteen, eighteen, twenty. Last place.

I know Dr. Zakos immediately reported the experiment's failure to my father, but I doubt he took the risk of pitching his idea of mentally vivisecting me to the General. I have two more days left in the lab before my father decides if my results qualify me for survival. Either he will have me executed, or he will deem me an a.s.set to the cause and allow me to continue working as a surveyor. Oh joy.

After the lab it's another miserable dinner. The General is busy down in his briefing room, so it's just my mother and Kelly. Kelly refuses to even look at me. When my mother goes to the kitchen, I turn to her, try to start a conversation. We haven't been close since before the mind transfer, almost five years ago. I wonder if she can even remember back then, when she hated Ivan for teasing her and roughhousing with her, and seemed to adore me, her gentle older brother.

"Haven't seen you in the tunnels," I say. "How are things going in the Nursery?"

She is silent, slowly chewing her food and staring straight ahead. It's hard to believe a fourteen-year-old girl could be so full of such a steely hatred.

"Kelly, I'm sorry if it's embarra.s.sing that I survived, that you have to explain that your loser brother has come back-"

"Ivanick told me," she says, hissing at me suddenly. "He told me the truth about you. I know what Mom doesn't. You're a traitor."

My stomach does a somersault. I feel like I could throw up my entire dinner.

"So you can pretty much stop trying to make up with me. It's not going to happen." She gets up from the table.

"I wish you were dead," she says, before running up the stairs to her room and slamming the door shut.

"Good night to you too," I say, laughing miserably to myself.

After dinner I go up to my room. One isn't there. I haven't seen her since last night.

Somehow, this doesn't surprise me. The mind transfer was so fast, and so quickly aborted that I doubt it did much to reestablish her foothold in my consciousness. Perhaps that's the thing I felt like I was on the verge of understanding-how to keep her alive inside of me.

It's funny to think Zakos thought he was covering his a.s.s with the General by protecting my life. If Zakos had killed me, my father probably would've given him a medal.

I have nothing to stay up for. I go to bed early.

Sleepless in bed, I consider the pitiful irony of my current situation. I came back here to rescue my one and only friend in the world, yet I fail to save her, just as I failed to save Hannu. If she isn't gone for good, she will be soon enough. And now I'm stuck here, trapped.

Alone.

A desultory day at work. I'm pulling in rankings in the thirten-to-fifteen range. Pathetic.

I've scaled back on my "Discard" trick. Why bother trying to impress anyone with my rankings, anyway? So I actually investigate each link that's fed to my monitor, even though it damages my productivity. At least it's more interesting than mindlessly shuttling the leads into one folder or another.

I click on a link.

This one leads to a forum dedicated to readers of some publication called "They Walk Among Us." The Mogadorian mainframe has isolated a thread t.i.tled "NEXT ISSUE?" posted by a user TWAUFAN182. A threaded dialogue unfolds when I click on it.

Please I've read TWAU no. 3 so many times. Please tell me when next ish will come out? Thanks! -TWAUFAN182 Sorry TWAUFAN. No plans for issue #4 yet, but be a.s.sured we have plenty material for one. Thanks for reading.-admin What? What material? U can't leave us hanging like that! Spill it!-TWAUFAN182 Come on man, give us a hint!!!-TWAUFAN182 It's been weeks with no updates. This forum is dead, RIP. LOL.-TWAUFAN182 That exchange was dated a year ago. Then, this morning ...

Sorry. Been busy. We've made contact, definitely extraterrestrial. True MOG in captivity.-admin I almost gasp. There are humans out there who have captured a Mogadorian? Or who at least think they've captured a Mogadorian?

I know at once that this is the first link that's pa.s.sed through my monitor that's truly worthy of an "EHP" ranking. I click on the hyperlink and drag it over to the "Investigate" directory ... but then I stop.

Why would I alert the Mogadorians to the location of these humans? Humans the Mogs will undoubtedly capture and kill? I might get in trouble if I discard the link-surely there are failsafes built into the system for erroneous Discards-but why should I make it easier for these Mogadorian b.a.s.t.a.r.ds? By discarding this link, I will save a human life ... or at least slow down the Mogadorian hunting machine for a few minutes.

It's worth it.

I don't care if I live or die. If One is gone and I'm stuck in this vile society, why should I fight to live? The pleasure of outperforming Serkova has faded; besides, with rankings like my current ones, that s.h.i.+p has sailed.

I click Discard.

They'll come for you.

In my bones, I know I'm going to reap h.e.l.l for what I've done. And I don't care.

f.u.c.k the Mogadorians.

I start dumping every link on my monitor into the Discard directory, as fast as I can. There's no upper limit on the number of links that can get routed to a single monitor-the more links you process, the more get routed your way-so before I know it I've chucked upwards of three hundred links into the Discard directory.

I'm making a spectacular mess of their system. The clock counts down to the end of the hour. How many unevaluated Discards can I cram into the directory before my fellow surveyors catch on? For that matter, how long until my treasonous evidence-burying gets discovered?

I'm exhilarated.

The hourly rankings come in. I've discarded 611 links. Investigated 0. My provisional accuracy ranking is a hilarious 11 percent. Better yet, as if to make a mockery of their entire ranking algorithm, I come in first place.