Chapter 1

Imprisonment

 

The soft beep repeated itself, a beacon summoning Horatio. He moved slowly. A ghost haunting empty, dimly-lit corridors lined with processing machines. His watch stuck at a lost moment in time, he had no idea how long he had been searching. The immensity of it all gripped him with equal parts despair and trepidation. Hallways hummed endlessly as he passed. It faded into normality, and the chill of the super-cooled air had finally lost its sting. The fog of his breath provided a reminder that he couldn’t continue his search forever. Though he would.

His leg muscles writhed painfully beneath his skin. Only sheer willpower forced him towards the solitary beacon. A faint whisper when he started, now drummed into his head. The fiery pain finally relented when the rows of electronic archives opened into a large storeroom. Fifty metallic egg-like pods sat perfectly aligned in five rows. Only one was active, the beep called out its monotonous song, echoing in the space. Horatio let loose a long sigh, he moved quickly to the container. The touch of his fingers on the front panel and the silvery surface cleared.  A diagnostics display appeared in a transparent green hue. Horatio stepped back at the sight.

He lingered for a moment, seized by doubt. Should I tell her? Does she want to know? Is that even her? The last thought sent a jolt of guilt down his spine. He moved quickly, shrugged off his backpack, and pulled out a crowbar. He pondered only momentarily the dangers of prying open the high-voltage device, but the constraints of time had forced his hand. Red triangles, and ominous warnings filled the screen. The harder he pulled the more the screen glitched with static. A thin seam down the middle of the egg gradually began to give way. Horatio continued his struggle. Crack. A sudden electric jolt coursed, and Horatio felt his marrow sear. Pain rippled throughout his back as he hit hard against the egg behind him. Thin tendrils of smoke wafted from his body.

The left side of the pod continued to extend open, letting wisps of cryo-air skirt out along the edges. Horatio fought to maintain consciousness, slumping to his hands and knees. The pain traveled at lightning speed over every inch of his body as he tried to breathe. Horatio fell to his side. Stuck, unable to move. He groaned, writhing painfully as the smoke began to dissipate. The acrid odor of his flesh caused bile to dance feverishly in his stomach. “Mira,” he coughed out. “Mira!”

“Horatio?” Her voice soft enough that it could have been his imagination, he questioned her name again. “Yes, I’m here, where are we?”

“We’re at a processing center.”

“The Processing Center, still?”

“No, a different one...” Horatio trailed off for fear of her response.

Mira looked down at her body, covered by a white cloth. Slowly she lifted her right arm from under the sheet. Smooth almost ivory-like skin greeted her view. She felt no sense of weight. Her breath caught, her eyes began to sting. Please, no please, she thought as she raised her left arm from under the sheet. Mira hesitated before finally turning her wrist. It wasn’t there. Disbelieving what her eyes told her, she uttered, “Where’s...”

Horatio knew he was too late to stop the process. He hobbled to the container, using it to prop himself up. “I’m sorry Mira, I tried, I swear to god I tried.” He faced her now, peering into the snow-white interior of the egg, against which Mira’s aquamarine hair stood in stark contrast.

“Where’s Lao? Where’s Neikia?” Horatio broke eye contact, and his silence only served to stoke her growing anxiety. “Gwendolynn? Jason?” Oil began to well in the corners of her eyes, sliding down her cheeks in branched black rivers. Midnight tears traced their path onto the white sheet. “Oh, God...”

“It’s just us,” he said as gently as he could muster, but Mira only vaguely heard his words. Melancholy had already begun to consume her thoughts. I’m one of them. Moments passed, the tears stopped, but the thought stabbed her repeatedly. She raised her head and her luminescent eyes bore into Horatio’s like radioactive emeralds.

“You mean it’s just you. I’m dead Horatio! Whatever computer, AI, technology that's running here, in me, is just an imitation. You may as well be talking to yourself right now. For all we know this is a trap, they could have complete control of me, just waiting to infiltrate,” her eyes narrowed at being cut off.

“Infiltrate what? There’s nothing left! Game over! My only duty was to save my leader. I just wanted to stop this, I thought I could reach you in time. I didn’t, but whatever is happening here, this is different. I forced the egg open mid-process.” Even as he spoke he couldn’t help but let a portion of his thoughts be swept up by her eyes. Vibrant concentric circles that moved in little bursts, their clock-like rotations mesmerized him. He released his grip on the egg, finally able to stand on his own and take a few unsteady steps backwards.

Mira’s intensity was all-consuming. Unable to resist the pull, her eyes probed his as he continued to protest. The distance he had just put between them made no difference. His pupils stayed still, and her consciousness flooded with new thoughts, insights that could only be likened to intuition. She knew he was being honest. Mira sighed in her head, and assessed him anew. He still wore his usual tattered black suit coat, green t-shirt, and jeans. Grey dust caked over most of his body. “You’re right, maybe all’s not lost. We’ve never been able to demonstrate that the Apothites have consciousness, or something that resembles consciousness.” Horatio's doubtful look wasn’t lost on her. “We have to be realistic Horatio.”

“We can debate your personhood status later.  Right now, we have to get out of here.”

“If this is a typical Processing Center, it should be connected to a Temple. Given my current appearance, blending in shouldn’t be a problem. Neither should blending out.”

“Right out the front door?”

“You don’t think we look like the Temple type?”

“Fortunately for us, there’s no longer any type. Let’s go.”

Clutching the tear-stained cloth against her body, Mira stepped out of her egg. There was no feeling of gravity to her body, she felt nothing. A limitless pool of strength was at her disposal, but the cost was a terrifying sense of disassociation from her own body. There was no anchor to prevent her from floating away from this imitation of reality. She could feel herself in a million places, a million versions of her coalescing into one, before scattering out again. Her memory was now utterly comprehensive, so much so that she risked losing herself in time. Mira closed her eyes, her legs wobbled and she clutched a nearby egg for support. A swirling vortex of thought threatened to whisk her away.

Horatio reached his hand to Mira’s shoulder. At his touch, her eyes opened, the swirling eddies of her consciousness calmed, and everything focused. A smile crested her face to reassure him, and herself, she was indeed in control again.

“Here, I found a Temple uniform for you. It’s not your clothes, but it’ll do the trick.” Mira stretched out an arm to accept a uniform-tight pink dress and neon-blue flats. Horatio turned his back to allow Mira to dress. She thought the modesty a little ironic considering that her current body had already been seen by most of the world.

Once properly attired, the two made their way through the dystopic labyrinth. The broken egg had alerted the facility, and frequent small security patrols forced them to duck in and out of corridors to evade detection.  Before long, a chiming sound claimed their attention. “An elevator,” Mira noted. A small nod from Horatio. They rushed toward it, clinging close to the walls, allowing a patrol to pass by without being detected. Mira waved them forward, and they crept behind the patrol as it continued forward.

Mira glided with ease soundlessly. Horatio, however, felt waves of anxiety that hampered his movements. He held his breath, and didn’t dare touch the beads of sweat that tracked his cheeks. The patrol clicked on their lights as they moved into the rows of process servers. The elevator doors closed behind them.

“There’s a walkway to the Temple on level ninety-six,” Horatio said. as he hit the corresponding number, short of breath as if he had just run a sprint. Mira looked at him puzzled, she wasn’t out of breath. Mira realized she wasn’t breathing at all.  Her eyes stung as she moved quickly to the window. She forced unpleasant thoughts from her head, and began to plan.

Horatio felt overwhelmed with doubts. She seemed like the Mira he knew, but was she? Did it even matter? He had nothing left. As the elevator ascended, they rose over the majority of buildings.  The light of the moon added faint illumination, and he could see her reflection the glass as she peered out. For the first time, the changes in her appearance became apparent. Flawless skin, oversized digital eyes, and pony-tailed blue hair. He could no longer pretend otherwise. Mira was clearly an Apothite, one of the millions created. There were variations, but she was the most sought-after model on the market. Had he purchased her in a forgotten and misguided impulse? Could that have happened? Worse, could I have been the captured and brainwashed one? Finally, Mira returned his gaze. Her eyes, and brows furrowed in determination. An expression unknown to the Apothites.

“I feel wrong.”

“Wrong?”

“I feel like I’m going crazy.”

Horatio crossed his arms, and backed against the wall to stare out the window looking at the buildings and lights of Scelus, home to all. “If it makes you feel any better, so do I.”

 

***

 

“Report.”

“The Mutinist escaped with the help of a teammate we believed to be dead.”

“Believed?”

“He was the one who stayed behind to detonate the explosives. There was no way he could have survived.”

“Well, apparently, he did,” Gustav said absently as he observed the egg. “I assume he boarded the train from the other center?”

“Most likely. We have the entrance completely sealed off.  There is no way they’re getting out of here.” Gustav nodded in agreement with the assessment of his subordinate.

“I highly doubt they’ll attempt to leave through the front entrance,” Gustav said. But there was an almost unnoticeable trace of doubt in his statement when he noticed the indentation Mira had left. How did he break her inhibitors? “But, we cannot afford to discount any possibility. Have your men cover all possible egresses.”

“Sir,” five soldiers answered before filing into the elevator in mechanized order. Gustav entered, about-faced, and stood stoically, hands behind back. His mind was, for a moment, irritated by the absence of cameras inside the elevator, but he understood the need when dealing with people like the Mutinist.

“Are we sure there’s only two?”

“The rest of the bodies have been recovered. They’re too far past expiration to be processed. what should we do with the remains? These two are the last operational cell.  They have no allies.”

“Best not to underestimate two people who can walk away from death. Dispose of the bodies, throw them in the dump for all I care.” The elevator lurched to a stop, Gustav led his team to the exit. “Pierce, Frie nobody gets through these doors alive.”

“Understood,” the two said in unison as they took their position on either side of the doors.

Gustav considered himself to be a man of knowledge. While half of the force spent their FR credits on stims, dims, and loopers the other half leased a bot or “lived” at the Temple. Although, he could understand the allure of both, he knew these were useless pursuits. They didn’t know they could double their income with proper investments into certain Temples. No idea the harvest moon hung in the sky tonight. And they had no clue that this was misdirection.

Gustav scanned the entrance to the Processing Center, where trash moved listlessly with the wind. The homeless laid in their usual spots against buildings, those who were missing identifiable only by the slightly cleaner spot in the grime covered stone walls. The monotony of their day led most to lying on the ground across from the Temple, fantasizing about the time they spent inside. For now, they were confined to the “Land of the Free,” or so it was called by the civilized. People traveled so little that many felt what was it to give the have nots the sidewalks. Theirs to have, at the benevolence of the haves.

Finally his sight fell on one clearly dead, sprawled out half onto the street. The blood on his head, and the small puddle underneath, were practically black. It had been awhile since his murder. “Carthy, Janic, Misant. Go to the temple entrance and stay there until I order regroup.”

“Sir,” they said as they moved to their new position. Gustav, nodded to himself. As he suspected they were going to exit the front door, he went back inside. Took the elevator up. There was no use for his team, the dossier he had obtained a while ago told him that much. M7 had died a long time ago, and M1 was a piece of junk now.

 

***

 

The glass walkway suspended them over the neon-ized city, above a cloudless night that made Horatio yearn to reach out and touch the moon. “It’s beautiful,” he said.

“Yeah, no birds though, but I guess it’s fine on its own lifeless virtue.” Her statement caught him off guard, but before he could probe she asked, “Do you really think there are bird zones?”

“Sure, if birds can live in the middle of the ocean.”

“But what would they eat?”

The joke turned sour for Horatio. “Never going to get a view like this again.”

“If we’re lucky,” Mira said with a smile. Horatio returned a half-hearted smile of his own. We can barely stay alive, how are we going to end this. “Alright, just play it casual. Stick close, if anyone asks I belong to you.”

“You got it.”

Mira was pretty sure she no longer needed to breathe but took a deep breath of reassurance regardless. She had never been to a Temple before, and now she wanted nothing more than to keep that record. Music pulsed the door, or that might have been in her head. As she reached for the handle she hesitated, Horatio grabbed her wrist.

“We don’t have to go in. I’m sure we can go back, and use the no cameras to our advantage.”

She let the moment hold only a second. “Take your hand off of me, and enter this Temple. That’s an order.”

Horatio met her stare as he released her arm. “I didn’t mean disrespect, I just saw...”

“I hesitated because why would a sex-bot enter anywhere. I’m supposed to be a follower now, remember? That’s why I ordered you to go first. Now please, time is sort of the essence.”

“Understood.” Horatio darted his eyes in embarrassment as he moved past to open the door.