[Internal Communications Log] VVI Control Zone, May 28, 2043
Lieutenant Roger Garrett, A3-1; Director Adam Smith; Head Researcher Andre LeClerque
- - - - -
Smith: We’ll lose control of Victoria within forty-eight hours. I want an evacuation plan on my desk in six.
LeClerque: I have one now. Sending it over.
Silence for a few moments.
Garrett: Leaves a lot of people behind, and a lot of anomalies. What are we doing with them?
Smith: You’re sure you can pull this off?
LeClerque: It requires full commitment from both RSTs, but we can punch a column through Victoria and cross the islands via boat. We’ll pull all mobile Qishi and Xuduo containment cells, all personnel of Level Three and higher, and all RST-capable troops. I’ve got a team of agents holding a ferry for us.
Smith: Plan approved. Get your departments ready to move. You have until tomorrow at 1300.
Garrett: The anomalies and lower-level personnel? What about them?
Silence for a few moments.
Garrett: Can we at least let the Ones and Twos know we’re leaving?
Silence. Log ends.
◄▼►
Victoria, British Columbia - May 28, 2043, 2:01 PM
- - - - -
The first thing I notice is pain, but it’s not the sharp pain I had from crawling through Mrs. Helquist’s window. This is more achy body pain and less the intense, clean pain of cuts and slashes. Then, a moment later, I realize I don’t have my helmet anymore.
It’s not anywhere I can see. Not in the bedroom—an adult’s this time—that I’ve crashed into. Visions of the mindless people infected by whatever that picture did fill my mind; I can’t become one of those! I can’t! My breathing picks up, and I turn toward the window. The rope still dangles there, and I reach for it, but a moment later, it starts falling. I watch it coil messily on the concrete at least a dozen floors below.
Okay. Okay. I’m alone in a basic living building, without the safety gear I need to make sure I stay…me? Yeah, me. But the briefing said all the danger was on the fifteenth floor, right? So if I can get down to the truck, I’ll be okay.
My aural aug pops, and a moment later, James’s voice fills my ear. “L4-5, I have her. She’s not responding to her helmet, but I’ve got her on her aug.”
“Yeah,” I say. “I’m not sure which floor I’m on. My helmet’s gone. I can’t find it anywhere.”
“Copy that, Three. We’ll send someone to pick you up once we’ve reestablished containment,” Strauss’s voice says. He sounds stressed, and a moment later, I hear gunshots. “For now, report back to the fifteenth floor. We need all our firepower at that door.”
“But I can’t—“
Smith’s voice breaks in. “L4-3, you are Level A personnel. Your job is to complete the tasks assigned to you and keep your teammates alive, not to act independently. Get to the fifteenth floor and help contain this. Lives depend on it.”
Has he been listening this whole time? Why? Doesn’t the director of the entire island have better things to do during what, according to him, is the possible end of the world? Instead of spying on me, he could be, I don’t know, doing something! The apartment’s not interesting; there are no threats here, just a single guy’s dirty man cave, and I need to get moving. I start toward the door, which I’m pretty sure opens onto the same common area but a few floors down.
As I open it, I’m greeted by wordless howling and screaming from above—one that just about drowns out Strauss’s editor, which is still running. I can’t say what it's editing, but it’s not the meme. The device is somewhere below me. Someone must’ve thrown it off the edge.
I lift the Revolver and start heading for a stairwell. Luckily, all these basic living buildings are the same, so I have a pretty good idea of where I am. I turn the corner past a few vending machines.
“Shut your eyes and back up!” James says in my ear.
“Why?” I ask while backing up with my eyes closed.
“Got a meme up ahead. I have no idea how it got here. As far as we can tell, no one outside of the fifteenth floor is infected. Okay, you should be able to get by. I’m going to run an antimemetic filter on your optic aug. Keep your other eye shut.”
I squeeze my eye shut, and a moment later, a ‘Filter Engaged’ warning pops up in my vision. When I round the corner, it changes to ‘Memetic Threat Detected, and the filter blurs out a bunch of the hallway. At the same time, my eye starts heating up, so I hurry down the hall past the blurred sections. But as I do, something walks through one of the apartment doors, seeming to phase straight through the faux wood.
{Stability 3/10}
My closed eye pops open, and for a moment, my head goes fuzzy as I see the symbol scrawled on a wall in something that might be blood or might be something else…
----------------------------------------
{Skill Learned: Memetic Resistance 2}
{Stability 2/10}
My head pounds, but I look down anyway, staring at the half-painted symbol I’ve been working on with fresh eyes. How long have I been out? I quickly close my eye, letting the aug take over, but all I get is ‘Filter Engaged.’
I’ve lost two Stability, though, and even though I’m back in control, my head swims. I don’t remember painting the symbol on the wall, but whatever pulled me out of it, I’m glad it did.
“L4-3, come in. Claire, do you hear me?” James asks.
For a moment, I think about ignoring him. It’d be easy to slip away—except they’re almost certainly tracking me, and James has been watching through my aug. Then I say, “I’m here. I…it let me go.”
That’s the truth—or at least as close as I can get to it.
“Okay. We need to get you out of there. Whatever that was, it triggered every antimemetic program in our defenses. We don’t have it on record, and wherever it shows up on screen, there’s nothing but a blur, no matter which angle we look at. Can you describe it?”
“Yeah. It’s shaped like a person, and it walked through the closed door. Dark colors, but I couldn’t see any features. Is it a ghost? Do we have ghosts? James, if we have ghosts, you have to tell me.” Ghosts would be the worst, and if we have thinlings and infovampires, we could definitely have ghosts. That’d be too much. Way too much!
Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.
“It’s not a ghost, but we do have them occasionally. Post-Life Entities are a different class, and antimemetics wouldn’t cut them out. Your onboard one didn’t, but a helmet-based system would have,” James says. “I’m going to guide you back up to the rest of the team. We’ll get you a backup helmet, and you can start helping to contain this.”
I follow his directions down the hall, keeping one eye closed and letting my aug heat up painfully as I go. The whole time, I keep looking for the dark, person-shaped thing that surged through the door. The truth—the one I didn’t tell James, but I’m sure he’s figured out—is that if it walked through the door, whatever sort of containment Recovery and Stabilization Team Lambda-Four is set up to do won’t work here.
The whole time I move, James keeps talking. “237-V-13/MP - Alpha is probably a Class Two Memetic Entity. If so, keeping it under observation is critical, but you’re not equipped to do it. If you see it, report its location and keep moving. L4 will have a drone up and running soon, and we’ll track it from command.”
“Got it,” I say, lying. If I see it, I’m following it. There’s a truth there, and while I haven’t made it an Inquiry, I want to know it for myself.
I’m actually in the stairwell when I see it floating below me, heading down. It slips through a door a floor below me, pushing through more like coffee through a filter than like it’s not there. I turn and start following it.
“What are you doing, Claire?” James asks. "You need to get to the rest of L4. L4-5 is already there, and they’re getting ready for another containment attempt.”
“This thing—“
{Painter (-1) - Memetic Entity}
“—Painter,” I say, correcting myself, “isn’t contained. It’s going to leave the building soon. You want someone to keep an eye on it? I’m here, watching it.”
“No, my mission is to get L4 through this,” James says. “If you get infected, the team will lose another member.”
I push the door open, still looking through one eye, and watch it quickly paint the meme’s braided pentagon on the wall. Then it pushes through another door, its body seeming to shimmer, and vanishes inside.
Smith’s voice fills my ear, sharp enough to cut and filled with tension. “L4-3, this is a direct order. Return to your team.”
“No,” I say. “I’m following it.” I check the door the Painter went through. Locked. I pull the Revolver again, sighting down the barrel at the lock’s keypad.
“L4-3, stand down!” Smith says.
“Claire, no!” James shouts.
I pull the trigger. The Revolver fills the hall with an orange light, and the shot obliterates the lock and everything behind it. I open the door before either James or Director Smith can start talking and stare at the Painter.
It’s still up, halfway through making another meme. It looks toward me, but I use Slither and get behind it, then Bullet Time to fire a triple-shot of flame into it. The world speeds up, and all three shots hit. I blink back the afterimages and point my gun at it, but that’s not necessary.
The Revolver’s shot looks like it’s killed it, whatever it was. It’s black, with what almost looks like static around its edges, and no matter which angle I look at it from, the gray static only silhouettes it. That doesn’t seem possible.
James speaks in my ear, almost unbelieving. “You…you killed it.”
“Yeah,” I say. I don’t feel bad about it, though I would like to have known more about it.
Smith’s voice cuts in. “Initiate Class-A personnel security measures.”
A second later, my aural aug goes dead. So does my optic one, and I blink as my vision swims. My glasses aren’t helping anymore, and I pull them off, but that doesn’t help either. The whole world spins, and my heart pounds. Did they just shut down my augs? They’ve downloaded enough software onto them. There had to be a shut-down process in there. And if they’ve shut my augs down, then…
…Then they’re not on my side anymore.
I stagger toward the door, and the whole world lurches with me. It takes me three tries to get the door open, and when it does, I can’t help it. My stomach’s churning, and I puke in the hallway. Whatever they’re hitting me with, I can’t see straight, and it feels like I’m falling sideways, but all the time.
I make it five steps. I even try Slither, but the tiniest reposition only makes the vertigo worse. Then I have to sit down against the wall. The stairwell door is right there. It’s so close, but I can’t even move my head. Instead, I sit there, eyes closed and Revolver held limply in one hand. I don’t even fight back when L4 bursts through the door, kicks the Revolver away, and drags me down the stairs.
The squad drags me back to the armored car, shoves me inside, and slaps an oxygen mask on my face. I try to struggle, but the spinning in my head makes it hopeless. My eyes shut, and I pass out.
----------------------------------------
When I wake up, I’m back in the SHOCKS building, in my room. I check the door, but of course, it’s locked. The Revolver is tucked away, safe inside its containment unit where I can’t get to it, and the lights are on—but my alarm clock’s off, and my computer is gone. I look around, and my head doesn’t swim, so they must’ve turned my augs back on. They read ‘Offline’ again. Other than that, there’s nothing out of the ordinary.
After only a few minutes, though, Director Smith appears in the airlock. The door doesn’t open, but his voice echoes over the intercom. “Subject - 573-V-1/IO Alpha, I am here to debrief you on your mission. You disobeyed instructions from Command multiple times, leading to the termination of an irreplaceable anomaly. That behavior is unacceptable in our RST agents, and your employment with SHOCKS as a Level A is terminated. However, before we remand you to more permanent containment, I have to finish this damn debriefing.”
I glare at Smith. He really doesn’t have anything better to do than talk to me, does he? He’s lied to me dozens of times, and he never trusted me, or SHOCKS wouldn’t have hijacked my augs. I shiver. Now that I have time to think about it, being infected by the meme felt less violating than what SHOCKS did. What James and Smith did. My gaze shifts to the ceiling, refusing to make eye contact with my captor anymore.
“Alpha, your decision to terminate the anomaly cut off potentially valuable research into the nature of the current disaster. It also created a chaotic situation, which we needed to pull our other RST in to fix. As a result, we’ve lost control of View Royal and our main line of retreat out of Victoria.” Smith’s lying, but I’m not sure what he’s lying about. Something’s not right, though.
“You’re confined to quarters while we remove your clearance. We’re going to evacuate tomorrow morning. You’ll be with us in a transport containment unit. We’re increasing your danger level from Anquan to Geren and removing your freedom to move around our destination facility.”
He clears his throat. “The rest of your former teammates asked me to tell you that Lieutenant Rodriquez, L4-1, broke free from the memetic effect when you terminated the anomaly. She’ll make a full recovery. L4 is inoperative, and people will die because of that. Think about that tonight. Goodbye, Subject - 573-V-1/IO Alpha. We’ll see you in the morning.”
When I still don’t say anything or look at him for more than a split second at a time, he turns and leaves.
The lights in my cell go out, and I feel my way to the bed. Once I’m safely in it, I close my eyes. He was lying again. I replay the conversation in my head, over and over, until eventually I hit on it. Goodbye, not goodnight. That’s a slip. It means he’s not planning on seeing me again.
If that’s the case, and he wasn’t lying earlier about leaving, is he not coming with, or am I staying here? I can’t tell which one’s the truth, but I’m happy not to think about Director Smith as a variable anymore. Still, the equation won’t balance. I can’t solve it with what I have. When I try to access the SHOCKS intranet on my augs, every page shows up as ‘Offline: No Intranet Access.’ I can’t tell if it’s because the network is down or because my clearance is gone. Probably both.
Knights of the Apocalypse isn’t even an option. Without the phone to assist, my aug can’t handle it.
I want to cry.
My breaths speed up until I’m panting and sobbing in the dark. I want to panic and pound at the door like I did in West End High when Alice told me everything would be alright and she lied to me. I want someone to break through the door and help me disappear away from here so I can find Sora and Keith and Dad and Alice and we can leave and be—
No. That’s not happening. I force a deep breath, then another, like the school counselors told me to. No one’s coming to save me, no matter how much I want it. No one even knows I’m here, so instead of focusing on wishes and hopes and the stupid SHOCKS intranet, I need to concentrate on what I can control.
So, as a distraction, I pull up the Halcyon System. I still have full access to that.
{Claire Pendleton}
►Stability 4/10
►Skills - Physical Anomaly Resistance 1, Endurance 3. Revolver Mastery 4, Memetic Resistance 2, Urban Combat 1, Bullet Time, Slither
►Truths - Anomalous Bond 2 (-2), West End High 1 (-2), SHOCKS Research Facility (-2)
►Inquiries (2/5)
►What is Merge Prime?
►Li Mei and Infovampires
Somehow, I haven’t made any progress on either of my Inquiries, and the six Stability penalty limits what I can and can’t learn from here. I need to figure out how to deal with that or see what happens if my Stability drops to zero. Not that I can learn anything here in my cell—at least, not without full System access. I don’t have any archived information or assistance functions, and both of those might help me balance my equations—or at least know what the variables are.
Claire - It takes a long time to get to sleep. I miss my bed at home, in my basic living apartment. I even miss Alice—but not as much as Sora and Keith. I’ve got so many Truths to share with them, and I can’t while I’m here. But eventually, my eyes close, and I drift off. ---------------------------------------- I wake up to two black eyes peering at me, only a foot away from my face.