Chapter Thirty.
Gabriela woke with a start, followed by a whimper. The doctor had told her that her rapid recovery would be painful, but she never imagined just how painful. It wasn’t just the throb in her foot and side, but throughout her entire body. It felt like all her nerves were on fire.
She groped around in the dim light of the dingy apartment, looking for the auto injector the Doctor had left her. Her fingers brushed its cold metal before they wrapped around it. Gabriela felt almost instant relief the moment she pushed the injector to her neck and pushed the button, followed by a euphoric wave that washed across her body.
She let the injector fall from her fingers, her eyelids fluttered in the haze of the high. Slowly, Gabriela turned her head toward Soma’s surrogate, Maru. It sat it the corner next to an open closet with its leg splayed out. Brightly lit fiberoptic cables ran from its brain dock to sophisticated cyber deck in the closet.
It stirred and looked up at her. “How is your pain now?”
“Do you ever sleep?” Gabriela looked away. She felt like a prisoner, and Soma was her ever watchful warden.
“I am sleeping, or my body is at least. I let my conscious wander the Ether while I sleep.”
“Dream surfing?”
“Yes.”
“That’s dangerous.” Gabriela carefully pulled herself up, pressing her back against the wall so that she could talk to Soma face to face. “I once ran this case, for a wealthy lawyer whose son had died in his sleep. We had suspected malware, or a poorly coded digital drug, but it turns out his mind defragmented while he dream-surfed. He had learned about it from some dark sight. He altered his deck, went to sleep, and never woke again.”
“He was an amateur, a child playing with things he didn’t understand.”
“He was a kid that made a mistake.” Her hazy mind thought back to the doctor, and her interaction with Soma. “Have you always been this callous, or is it something that you developed when you started playing with other people’s lives?
Soma was quiet for a while, the fiberoptic cables blinked and glowed before the colored patterns shifted. “Cold and callous is how I have survived this world for as long as I have. And as far as playing with people’s lives, it’s business. Nothing more, nothing less. The doctor that helped you today is not an innocent victim. She was peddling hard drags from the clinic she ran.”
“And you black mailed her, over drugs.”
“No. I intercepted packets that contained the proof of her guilt, and destroyed the evidence, keeping her safe.”
“So, what? You are the hero?” She scoffed.
“No. But I am hardly the villain.”
“Who are you? Who are you really, Soma?”
“Who I am doesn’t matter.”
Gabriela rubbed at her nose. Her body seemed to itch all over. “It matters to me. You keep telling me I need to trust you, but you haven’t given me anything to trust. All I have seen is your ability to manipulate the people around you. Are you a man, a woman? Are you even human, or are you an AI?”
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“And if I disclosed more about myself, that would earn your trust?”
“It wouldn’t hurt.” Gabriela let her head fall lazily as she brought her knees up to her chest.
“I am human, though if I am a man or woman is irrelevant, even to me. Those are physical and social distinctions which have never applied to me. My body is little more than a wasted corpse, kept alive with machines. I have never walked or looked through my own eyes. I have never smiled or laughed. The Ether is all I have ever known. But if a sex is important to you, then I am male.”
Gabriela looked at the surrogate in mute shock. She had expected Soma to dodge the question, or answer in some riddle, or even feed her some bullshit about his past, but the information he had just provided her was enough for her to understand who and what he was.
“You are a prodigy of Project Cradle?”
“I am.”
Project Cradle, she thought. A hypothetical that the Church of The Augmented had proposed in its earlier years. When they were still a research firm called Everson Research. The goal was to take children who were born non-communicative and raise them in the Ether, to heal their broken minds and allow them to flourish. The project was responsible for the Church’s more radical beliefs of ascension into the Ether, and it was what lead to the legal dismantling of Everson. Everson had used children that had been slated for termination. All of them undocumented. It didn’t matter if the child was viable or not. Everson used them anyways. The UN had deemed the project inhumane, and swiftly took action to stop the project and dismantle the company.
“I thought that the project was a failure, that all the children died.”
“Most of us did, but not all. When the UN shut down Everson, they seized all the data they could. The subjects they found were euthanized, the project leaders arrested and executed. But some of the data was smuggled to safety, as well as a few subjects by prolife sympathizers. I was one of them. But the project was not a failure. I am living proof of that.”
My life was hard, but the people who intervened to save my life had made sure that I was given everything I needed to live; a home, security. Even though I experienced life in an artificial construct, they still saw value in my life.”
“So, there is no real record of your life? No way to verify if you are telling the truth?”
“No.” He admitted.
Gabriela pulled her knees under her chin and contemplated Soma’s story. There was something about it that rang true.
“A presumed dead child in a failed experiment.” Gabriela mused. “I guess I couldn’t think of a better background for an illegal mancer.”
“Nor could I. Not knowing who to look for has kept me safe for a long time, Gabriela. Few know about my past. It is a secret that could cost me my life.” Soma left it at that. He could not make Gabriela trust him, she knew that, so he had given her something else; leverage over him.
“I understand, Soma. Thank you.”
“We will need to move soon.” Soma’s voice took on a more somber tone. “The longer we wait to make our next move, the more likely we will be discovered. Net breakers are combing the Ether all over the city looking for us.”
“So they know I am getting help. Gabriela pulled herself up and tested her ankle. It hurt, but thanks in part to the medication the doctor had given her and her own genetics, she could bear weight on it. “We should get going then.”
“You need to shave your head, like the doctor suggested.”
Gabriela sighed and pulled a lock of hair away from her scalp, rubbing the silky strands between her fingers. The purple of her hair shimmered in the light cast by the surrogate. “I know. What’s our next move?”
“We need to go see a man named Vasily in the neon district.”
Gabriela was aware of what the neon district was, a place that sold vices of the flesh. You could find almost anything you wanted there; drugs, gambling, even companionship was available, for a price.
“What do we need from someone in a place like that?” Gabriela limped over to the small washroom, the hair clippers in hand.
“Vasily is a broker of sorts. He is keeping something safe for you, something you are going to need before we get you out of the city.”
“And what would that be? I have a passport that can get me out, and enough untraceable founds to get me anywhere in the world.” She reminded him.
“I can’t tell you what it is right now, just that you need it. It will all make sense once we retrieve what we need. All I can ask is that you trust me for a little while longer.
Gabriela looked into the dingy mirror, the hair clippers in her hand. “I trust you, Soma,” she said as she turned the clippers on and began cutting away at her hair.