Replike, p.21
Replike, page 21
“Drop the gun, Mom,” Catch said, coming up from behind her.
Hugh raised his arms in surrender.
“Put that thing down, lady,” he said. “We can talk, but put that thing down. I’m not dangerous.”
“Oh, I know what a sweet man you are,” she said, crying.
“Mom,” Catch said, “don’t do anything stupid. You wanted to see Hugh. Now—”
“Stay back, Catch!” she screamed. “It’s all so confusing. I don’t want to do this. I really don’t, Hugh. I love you. You’re my brother. Look at me, Hugh, I’m your sister. You sang lullabies to me when my mother was gone.”
“It’ll be okay. We can talk about old times,” said Morgan, stepping forward.
“Stay back,” she screamed, shaking the gun. “You’ve been through so much. It’s not fair, but it needs to be done. My heart aches so much at the thought of this, but there is no other way. This is the natural thing for me to do—”
She pulled the trigger. The gunshot knocked Hugh to the side. The window shattered behind him. Catch jumped forward, wrapping his arms around his mother and pushing her arms down. She tried to pull her arms away and twisted herself in her son’s hold. He held her arms down as he squeezed her wrist to try to pry the gun away. There was a second gunshot. A burning sensation shot up Catch’s right leg, heat trickled down his leg, he gasped in pain. His mother held the gun tightly and pushed Catch against the wall. A rush of adrenaline surged through Catch and, with unexpected strength, he jammed his shoulder into his mother’s side. She was thrown sideways and fell, violently striking her head on the metal board at the foot of the bed.
Catch toppled back against the wall. He squeezed his leg in his hands and could no longer feel his right foot. Everything was spinning around him as he tried to make sense of what had happened. The man, Hugh, was leaning over the sick unconscious mother, wiping away with a corner of the bedsheet blood that had spattered onto her face. She remained fully unaware of the chaos that surrounded her.
Hugh’s shoulder was bleeding, his shirt torn. At the foot of the bed lay Catch’s mother, motionless. God, he hoped he hadn’t killed her. He looked down at his leg, his pants covered in dark red blood.
“She…shot me!” he cried. “My fucking mother shot me.”
Hugh approached Catch and wrapped the top of his leg with a blanket.
“Are you all right?” asked Catch.
“It skimmed my shoulder,” said Hugh. “You weren’t so lucky. I’m calling an ambulance.”
“I’m sorry, about my mother.” Catch grimaced as Hugh pulled the ends of the blanket tightly. “Is she alive?”
“Knocked out,” said Hugh, who was now over by her side, taking her pulse. He returned to Catch and asked. “Who are you, and why’d your mother try to kill me?”
“I don’t know,” said Catch, crying. “I swear I don’t know. She’s been weird lately. She said you were like a brother to her. That your mother wasn’t your real mother. I don’t know. She’s said lots of nonsense lately. I should have stopped her. Called for psychiatric help. I should have done something.”
“Relax, it’s not your fault,” said Hugh, placing a hand on his shoulder. Catch liked this man. “Things are often much more complicated than they appear.”
“You know what’s happening?”
“Not a clue! But things are messed up,” said Hugh. “I gotta go. I’m bringing your mother with me. She might have the answers I need.”
Hugh placed Sky over his good shoulder.
“Wait,” said Catch. “Where are you going with her?”
“I don’t know.”
“How will I find her?” Catch said. “Is she going to jail?”
“I don’t know,” said Hugh. “I’ll find you. Somehow, I’ll get to you.”
“My name’s Catch, to find me, it might be helpful.”
“I won’t forget that name.”
“Thanks,” he said, unsure why he was thanking him.
“You saved my life,” said Hugh. “I should thank you.”
The sound of sirens approached. Hugh looked back at his sleeping mother. The bed was spattered with blood.
“Tell the emergency crew to clean her up before she wakes up, and…” but Catch couldn’t piece together Hugh’s words as they spun into a blur. Something about the broken window…the breeze…the cold…that he had to escape…quickly.
27 — Somewhere to Hide
He called an Automated Last Mile Transit, or ALMT, vehicle to meet him on a quiet street, two blocks away from his mother’s place. He’d ordered the luxury version that didn’t have strangers traveling together. He would have to settle for the restricted five-mile radius this service served. To go beyond he would need to use a tramway line—not an option considering the unconscious lady over his shoulder. Inside the vehicle, he didn’t dictate his destination as was normally done but directly infiltrated the navigation system and ordered it to bring him to the wealthiest part of the neighborhood.
He slowed the vehicle down in front of the row of oversized houses separated by vast gated properties. From the vehicle, he infiltrated security systems, jumping from house to house. To infiltrate them, he imagined the system at the front gate, or the wiring at the door. From there, he worked his way up to the main control system. Many of these owners had several properties and moved south during these colder months. He found one with the security set at maximum with repeat property sweeps every week for two months. He stopped the vehicle outside the gate and pulled the unconscious woman out and placed her over his shoulder. He erased all information about their trip from the ALMT log.
There was no time to hesitate. The darkness was ceding to a new day. He deactivated the alarms on the property, unlocked the front gate, and hurried toward the house. A motion light above the entrance activated as they approached. Morgan heard an accelerating drumming noise trampling over the lawn. He turned to find a robotic security dog bolting toward him. It hinged on its back legs and leaped. The dog was already in mid-air when he infiltrated the robotic canine and retracted its razor-sharp metallic teeth and closed its mouth. He was too late to avoid the impact of the dog, which knocked them over into a hedge that dampened their fall.
That was close, he thought.
He replaced the woman on his shoulder and looked at the deactivated dog lying on its side. He hated those things but was relieved it hadn’t been a real dog, especially one of the latest security breeds that would have mauled them into ground beef in no time.
A light turned on inside the house. He shifted behind the hedge, holding his breath and perfectly still until the outdoor motion detection light switched off. From the home’s security cameras, he explored the interior and found no one inside. The light was automatically set to turn on in the morning, as a deterrent to make it appear the house wasn’t vacant. He double checked all systems to make sure there was nothing else he was missing. Everything seemed clear. They entered.
Morgan set the window’s integrated shading blind to their most opaque setting and made sure he had relocked the entrance gate while changing the access code. He didn’t want unexpected visitors and added an alarm to inform him if someone attempted to open the gate. He placed the woman on a leather couch. He searched the house for something to hold her securely. In a cabinet in the garage, he found a heavy chain and a padlock with the key in the lock. He secured the woman’s legs together with the chains. To tie her hands, he settled on using a skipping rope and a tight knot.
He examined the injury on her head and hoped the concussion wasn’t too bad. He examined her, as if her features could reveal to him why she had tried killing him. He removed twigs from her hair. He brushed aside the hair from her face. She seemed strangely familiar.
“Why,” he said, shaking his head. “What did I do? What do you know? Why do you call me Hugh?” He stared at her, confused. It was all so strange.
He recalled what her son, Catch, had said to him about his mother not being his real mother. Such a senseless comment would’ve been so easy to dismiss if it wasn’t for the woman’s comment on the train who had also claimed to be chasing him because of something his mother had done to him. Was this mere coincidence? Or was his mother somehow the mysterious connection to explain the insanity his life was becoming?
He considered his childhood memories with his family. The times that extended beyond those memories: photos of himself as a baby with his parents, videos he had seen of himself, the stories of his uncles and aunts. He thought of the video of his little hands wrapped around his mom’s finger as he tried to walk clumsily forward. He reminisced of his father’s stories of how he’d almost been born on the South Brooklyn Ferry because of the effects of the choppy water on his nine-month pregnant mother. He couldn’t believe that all this was some elaborate deception. Yet, Morgan was not ready to dismiss everything as nonsense. No, if there was one thing he had learned from the last few days it was that he must not underestimate the impossible. There must be something about his mother that eluded him. He would have to wait. This unconscious woman would provide answers. He was expecting answers from her. She was his only hope at piecing everything together coherently.
He sat in a reclining chair and infiltrated the security cameras of the government bureau where he’d escaped. They had discovered his escape. The large guard was being interrogated, seated in an office. He was sweating profusely and crushing a plastic bottle of water in his thick hands as he answered their questions.
“You’re sure you had properly locked the door?” asked a man in a suit who paced around him.
“Yes. Of course. I always give it a good pull until I hear the click. Then push back to make sure it’s shut. The light above goes red when it’s shut. I couldn’t have missed that.”
“You say your taser was sabotaged as well as all of your communication devices.” The large guard nodded. “At any point in the night did you leave these items unsupervised?”
“I told you many times. They were on—”
Morgan switched to the camera in the lobby where the other guard was enacting what happened to a woman who watched him attentively.
“The lights flickered on and off. You know, like a strobe in dance clubs.”
“Has that ever happened before?”
“You’re kidding me,” said the guard, chuckling. “I’ve been working here twenty years. That shit never happened before.”
“Then what?”
“Then it stopped. I was standing right here where we are now, checking out the lights. They stopped strobbing. Then, I saw the screen in the waiting room flicker on. You see them back down there?” he said, pointing down to the hall. “Normally, those are all off during the night. Somehow, they turned on. I went to check them out.”
“What exactly was playing?”
The guard rubbed the back of his neck and gave a shy smile. “I'd rather not get into it.”
“You do know that this is a military investigation…”
There was a loud whack that startled Morgan awake. He jumped out of the chair and scanned the room, searching for any unexpected guests. He let out a sigh of relief when he found that the woman had fallen from the couch. The impact from the heavy chains holding her legs was responsible for the sound. He sat down to calm his racing heart. It was careless of him to have fallen asleep while in the government surveillance system. Who knew what that could have implied? Could they have trapped him in there? Without a better understanding of what he was doing and how he was doing it, he couldn’t imagine the possible implications.
He returned the woman to the sofa. She moaned a few incomprehensible words and turned over to hide her face in a crack between cushions. He switched on the screen that covered the back wall of the living room and set it to the 24WRLD News Stream.
“…rough night for passengers who rely on the VacTransit Train system. A wagon mysteriously separated, leaving passengers trapped between stations for the night. The situation remains unresolved, and the tracks remain closed until further notice. Authorities are still trying to determine the cause of these malfunctions and are not ruling out the possibility of it being linked to a terrorist group. Tracy has more on these latest developments, reporting directly from New York Central Station.”
He sat on the edge of the seat, hoping to learn more about the terrorist group who had been chasing him.
“That’s right, Jay, while there have only been some minor injuries, the FBI has not ruled out terrorist intent. The suspect who is believed to be responsible for this disturbance is the following man.”
An image of Morgan filled the screen.
“His name is Morgan Maverick Doyle. He is presumed to be armed and extremely dangerous. Authorities ask the public not to try to apprehend him. If viewers have seen him or have tips about his whereabouts, they are asked to contact the FBI hotline. For the moment, it remains unclear whom he works for, but…”
Morgan shut off the screen in disbelief. How could she? Tracy was friends with Aviva and knew him personally. They'd had dinner at Tracy’s place. They had laughed over wine together. They had talked about her nerdy brother who liked math just as much as he did. She knew he wasn’t a terrorist, and yet, she did not hesitate to portray him as one. Did she actually believe anything she was saying?
He felt a pressing need to find Aviva. He had to do something before being locked up in a military base, or before he was abducted by the mysterious group in Paris, or before New York was attacked. While exploring the surveillance cameras of the house, he had noticed the Simulation Portal room but had wanted answers from the woman first. He looked at her lying motionless. She showed no signs of waking soon.
The room adjacent to the living room had two top-end luxury portals set up in reclined chairs made of leather. He picked up the wired head cap that was in the seat. The cap was impressively light and delicate, the fabric soft, cashmere, he assumed—the rich have no limits.
He hesitated to upload himself. There had been much public debate and controversy about the level of personal privacy when connected to The Virt. The possibility that linking your body could allow surveillance or personal tracking by the government had scared many from using the technology. Morgan had never given the debate much attention till now, since he figured he had nothing to hide. But now he couldn’t risk revealing his location to his many pursuers. If he entered, he would need to cover his tracks. The problem with The Virt was that he didn’t know exactly what tracks he would be leaving behind.
He attempted to infiltrate The Virt without a physical connection. He imagined himself infiltrating the wired cap, getting simulations of a fabricated world. He knew that inside he could control things, like he had done by overriding Fred. But as much as he focused on entering The Virt, everything stayed blank. Without a human brain, the portal couldn’t work. The Virt was nothing.
“Catch,” he heard the woman cry. “Oh God, Catch!”
He hurried back to find the woman squirming on the couch, frantically trying to release her hands. When she noticed Morgan, she stopped her struggles.
“Is he alive? Tell me I didn’t kill him.”
“He’ll be fine. He’s at the General Hospital. I checked the medical report; he lost lots of blood but there shouldn’t be any permanent damage,” he said, kneeling by her side.
He watched as her eyes traced the contours of his face. Tied up in a strange house, with a strange man, he expected her to be scared. Terrified even. He expected her to scream for help or to plead him mercy. But she did none of these things. As she examined him, he noticed her anxiety dissolve, the tension in her tight cheeks relax. She looked at him with a calm serenity. Who was this woman who had tried to kill him? Why did those eyes look so familiar to him?
“I need you to tell me who you are and why you came for me.”
“I will tell everything, Hugh, everything I remember. There is so much to tell you. So much that you don’t know. It will be complicated, but I will tell you everything. I promise.”
“I’m listening.”
28 — Something about Henry
He projected a close-up of his own face on the four walls of their cage. They gathered in the middle, standing back-to-back. With a push of a button, three walls moved inward to restrict their space. The only side that didn’t move was the one against the downward slope of the concrete ramp. At its base a metallic tile covered the small hole to the lower level—the shit hole.
“Ready to talk?” asked Omar, watching their faces across his displays.
He removed the mint from the steaming tea and added two cubes of sugar. He stirred and watched the motion of vortex settle in his cup. They didn’t see any of this. Omar’s stern face projected before them was pre-recorded, his mouth programed to articulate the words as he spoke.
They mumbled words to each other about staying strong, resisting, and remaining faithful to the cause.
“Very well, I’m in no hurry. I’m quite comfortable up here,” said Omar. “Give me a shout when you’re ready.”
He switched the projections to repeat a close-up sequence of Jerome’s face when the boar had charged toward them. Omar reclined his chair and sipped his tea, unsure if they could reveal anything useful about Henry. He probably knew more about him than any of the three. They were but pawns—disposable pawns—drawn under Henry’s control by their admiration for his intellect and his utopian goals. Smart individuals with the arrogant belief that they could salvage the world from its problems. Convinced that with reasoning—or with some technological hack—problems could become a thing of the past. Such an admirable goal, indeed, he thought with certain shame, as he too had once held such naïve beliefs.
The arithmetic of suffering was not an easy matter to resolve. Could the deaths of a thousand innocent people today be justified by a better future for millions? Could such a question even be answered at all? The simulated world could have resolved many inequalities that had endured for centuries. Resources didn’t have to be limited in a simulated world, wealth could be distributed, selfishness eradicated. Why had the Founding Forty not been bold in creating something better in Replika? Precaution—Omar knew their reasons. Precaution for what? The fear of changing humans into something unrecognizable. But if that was the only chance in creating something worthwhile and sustainable, was it not time to try something drastically new?
