Writers of the Future, Volume 29 (5 page)

Then Traci blinks, her invisible puppeteers slipping back into the role. “Just tell your parents. Both of them. I'm sure you'll find a way.”

“And afterward?”

Traci's avatar makes a strange motion with her hand. She rubs her fingers across her palm. I recognize it from my earliest undercover training, back when I was assigned to infiltrate the Partisans.

Erase yourself.

Somewhere in my new head, Traci must have planted a kill switch. Always handy when behind enemy lines. I haven't had the chance to thoroughly review my subfile, but I do a quick search now and find the kill switch icon: a tiny grim reaper.

Too bad Clint Frederick Jamison's wife didn't have one implanted.

I thank Traci and log out. Peter's bedroom returns, and I swivel on the pilot chair, wondering what to do.

There's a brush of movement at my bedroom door. Suzie enters, tail wagging. Poor girl must have missed Peter.

I scratch behind her ears, considering the problem before me. Across forty-one years, Shane's voice enters my thoughts:
The Partisans were famous for being able to sniff out a mole.

I know I'm on borrowed time.

T
he next morning Dad is gone by the time I get to the kitchen for breakfast. Mom's at the counter, wielding two knives as if they are her hands, dexterously pinning a raw venison roast and slicing it up.

“Good morning!” Mom coos. “Breakfast is on the table!”

I regard my breakfast plate of polenta and minced seaflower, glass of cranberry juice, and a sprig of mint.

“Did you sleep well?”

I nod, helping myself to the juice. When Peznowski dies, he'll eventually be regenerated at the same center where he picked me up. What was Traci's plan for that? Had her hack team placed other operatives, insidiously tucked away inside hijacked bodies? Were they even now combing through save files, locating and deleting the encoded remnants of the Partisans?

Mom rubs her blades together. She lifts the diced meat into a pan.

I finish the juice, grab some polenta and approach Mom/Peznowski from behind while she splashes tenderizer over the meat. I'll make it clean and quick, and handle Dad when he comes home. Reflexively, I glance out the window. There, pacing amid the rows of adobe homes, was a lone man, e-cig dangling from his mouth.

It's Dad.

Perplexed, I go to the window and press against the cool glass. Dad is a block away, the gloomy apartment buildings hover like gothic towers above him. He's talking into his wrist, though by his animated movements I'm guessing he's in full virtual conference.

“Dad didn't go to work today?” I ask, turning to Mom.

She's rinsing her knives. The kitchen looks strangely fuzzy, gray at the corners of my vision.

“He did, dear.”

“But…” I feel my head fogging, suddenly aware of the empty cranberry glass with ghastly implication. Panic novas in my chest, galvanizing a last desperate action. My fingers are tingling, legs turning rubbery. I leap at Mom.

She turns me aside with ease, twisting my attack away and slamming my head into the oven. White sparks explode in my vision. I try to get to my feet but Mom is already backing out of reach. The strength leeches out from my limbs. Ceiling spins once around, like water in a drain, and before all goes black, I see Peznowski's cruel eyes glinting out from that imposter face.

How did they…know…?

W
hen I regain consciousness, my optic readout shows me that sixteen minutes have passed. I can't move my arms or legs. Vision clears, but my head feels as if someone has put a drill behind my ear. I'm on my parent's bed, limbs strapped to all four bedposts. The pillow is wet behind me.

Mom is holding bloody knives and smiling.

“Mom?”

“Cut the charade,” Dad says from the corner. He flicks something at me and it lands like an earring on my chest.

My kill switch. He must have dug it out of my head while I was drugged.

“Who are you?” Dad says. He sits down like a gargoyle beside me, hunching and eager, the old jackal expression on his face. “I already know you're not our son. We grafted a rotating verbal tic into his consciousness when he was young, triggered whenever he steps into the kitchen. He's not even aware of it. Subtle, comes across as mild OCD.” When I don't answer, Dad's nostrils flare. “You've got a damned name. What is it?”

“Maximilian.”

Dad turns to Mom. “Take out his eyes.”

She springs into action so fast it's as if she's been waiting her whole life for this. Mom kneels beside my head, still wearing the checkered apron from breakfast.

“What is it with you and eyes, Peznowski?” I shout.

“Wait,” Dad says. He's almost too late. Mom has already positioned the tips of both blades a half inch from the corners of my left eye. A horrific stainless steel V in my vision.

In my right eye, Dad's hybrid face appears. He's flush and excited, eyes like pale lanterns behind his glasses.

No kill
switch, no kill switch, no kill switch.

Dad looks apelike, cheeks swollen, eyes sharp. “Do you know me?”

“I'm Harris Alexander Pope.”

My parents let out an astonished gasp in the same instant. Their heads rotate to regard each other, slack-jawed and gratified.

“Harris?!” Dad sits back, laughing heartily. He stands up and does a fist-pump in the air. “Oh! The universe loves me!”

Mom leaps upon me, knocking the wind from my lungs. Her laughter is shrill and hideous as she gouges both my eyes out.

H
arris? Look at me.”

Dad's voice, followed by wicked female laughter.

I turn my head in the direction of the voice, trying not to think of my mutilated face. My throat is ragged from screaming.

“You know,” Dad intones in my ear, “I would never have known you were the traitor. I died up there…no memory of what happened. We always planned on regrouping in New Haven if things went wrong and at first, I wondered why you didn't regen with us. I spent hours combing through the files for your save. Then I saw all the magazines and news clips. Harris Pope, war hero, went undercover with the Partisans and popped our headquarters like a bad blister. Who sent you here?”

“The ghost of Christmas Past.”

There's a terrible silence. The pain in my eyesockets fans into my skull. Fear is an incredible emotion. We are nothing more than ragged pulses of fear, tossed out of wombs and onto a great frying pan. Even with technological miracles delivered through syringe or ingestible, we are still the primeval beast howling for all time.

“What was the plan?” Peznowski asks. Can't tell if it's Mom or Dad. Husky voice, almost a whisper. “You kill us, and then…what?”

“They didn't tell me. Honest.”

“They?”

“Christmas Past, Present, and—”

It must be his fist that smashes through my teeth. The attack stuns me into mute stupidity, the broken teeth in my mouth like peanut shells. I spit them out in a gob of bloody saliva.

“I'm going to torture you forever, you know.” Mom's voice in my ear. “But not like this. Matthew and I have been talking about how Peter grew up too fast. We want a little baby again. How would you like your consciousness downloaded into a helpless creature, engineered to never grow up. Your mind trapped in that prison for all time, slowly turning to mush, while we feed you, and wrap you up and change your diapers …year, after year, after year? Forever?”

A new scream starts in my throat, shredding my resolve.

I stutter through broken teeth and blood. “Earth will eventually step in.”

“No, they won't,” Dad says. “We made a mistake in our earlier dealings with Earth. Strict isolationism doesn't work. The birth world needs to be brought to heel. With their environmental problems, economic problems, political problems…all it will take is one big disaster to
reduce
them.”

“Earth will show up sooner or later and erase every last Partisan file!” I hear desperation in my own voice.

“A dozen captured asteroids too small for detection,” Dad says. “Hurtling toward Mother Blue. You think Mars was hit hard? Earth will be thrown back to the Stone Age, and we'll make sure they stay there.”

The terrible majesty of what he is saying is underscored by its plausibility. Even at the time of the Partisan war, Earth had been collapsing under the weight of environmental and economic pressures. If the Partisans strike Earth in the way he proposes, civilization really will come apart at the seams.

And meanwhile, I'll be screaming wordless for all time, cradled in my sadistic mother's arms…

“You Partisans always have a contingency plan,” I say numbly.

“Yes,” Mom and Dad say together. “We do.”

I open my sightless sockets. Black room, swirling in an oily eddy. Through the squirting fluids and ruptured flesh, my optic nerves are firing in dazzling pixilated bursts of color, a swansong for the world of light. The nerves are still reaching for information to process, phantom images like black plates of glass, all the same color, shifting over each other.

I clear my throat. “So do I.”

In my head, buried where Mom's knives couldn't get to, the dom patch is running. Since injecting my subject last night with the neuro-remote hidden in my fingers, it has never stopped running. Doesn't work on humans, but it turns lower life-forms into remote-controlled toys.

The dom patch menu tells me that these last few minutes of conversation have been successfully recorded by our ever-so-quiet listener in the doorway. I scroll down to the next option.

ATTACK PARAMETERS:
ALL
.

I
'm naked in a steel tub, and Traci is helping me sit up. Shane is nowhere to be seen, and my mouth still thinks I'm in midspeech at the save center. Behind Traci, I see Charlotte's lovely face, but it's strangely aged now. A towel is in her hands.

I snatch it from her and cover my nakedness. “Do you mind?” The surroundings settle into my thoughts. A regeneration pod, where they grow new bodies for mental downloads.

Which means that I've died. And I don't even remember opening my eyes.

Traci laughs, her shock of chestnut curls dancing with the movement. “Sorry, hero. What's the last thing you remember?”

Towel floating over my groin atop the slimy water, I look back and forth between their faces. A wave of irritation flickers in me. “It was three days after I returned from Phobos. I was talking to Shane. He said there were seven seconds left for the file uploading.”

Traci's smile straightens out, and she looks at me with strange respect and sympathy. “There's a lot to talk about, Harris.” She steps back, taking Charlotte's arm. “Get yourself toweled off and meet us in my office, third door down from the showers.”

Their celebratory joy is visible, and I get the impression of being the birthday boy about to be led into a surprise party. I glance at the regeneration pod again, my anger subsiding. “Is this Bradbury Station?”

“New Haven.”

“My contract states—”

“See me in my office,” Traci interrupts, and she walks away with Charlotte.

I finally notice a wall console within reach, and I slap its screen.

The first stunner is today's date on the ticker at the bottom of the screen: May 20, 2316! Forty-two years separating the blink of an eye and flash of a neuron! Then I see two recent news articles posted by Traci for my viewing. The first headline rocks my core. NEW HAVEN PARTISAN REMNANT ERASED, “GRISLY” PLANS MADE PUBLIC.

The Partisans? Hadn't we defeated them four decades ago?

I stand up, dripping synthgel, and tuck the towel around my waist. Forget the shower. Traci needs to explain a few things, and I think I'll start by prodding her about that second, weirder and older headline:

FAMILY DOG KILLS

DEPUTY MAYOR, WIFE, SON.

Planetary Scouts

written by

Stephen Sottong

illustrated by

JOSHUA MEEHAN

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Stephen Sottong was born and raised in the rust-belt town of Kokomo, Indiana. He was introduced to science fiction by his brother and sister. The first book he checked out of the public library was Ben Bova's
Star Conquerors.
From there, he made his way through as much of the library's sci-fi collection as possible, reading the classic novels of the '50s and '60s from Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke, Brunner, Le Guin and others. He started writing at ten and continued sporadically throughout his working career but never did so in earnest until retirement. In the interim, Stephen repaired radios in the Navy and afterward in civilian life until he decided to upgrade his education.

After ten years of engineering and another stint in college, he became an engineering librarian for the rest of his working career. As an academic librarian, he wrote numerous dull, scholarly articles published in library journals. The possibility of early retirement offered him the opportunity to return to his first love and write fiction full time. His short stories have been published in regional
magazines but Writers of the Future is his first national publication.

ABOUT THE ILLUSTRATOR

Joshua Meehan was born in Nevada in 1990 and raised with his five younger siblings in Anchorage, Alaska. His interest in art began at the age of three, when he used crayons and markers on the walls and pillows in his house. His parents were always extremely supportive in his artistic pursuits. Since Joshua was home-schooled, they made sure to foster his passion through an art-focused curriculum, which included private lessons from Betty Dye, a local art teacher.

Joshua and his family moved to Tucson, Arizona in 2002. Here he studied fine art at the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum and attended Ironwood Ridge High School. In 2008 Joshua received the grand prize in the Congressional Art Contest for his district and earned the honor of Eagle Scout. Later he studied fine art and illustration at the University of Arizona and pursued large-scale game and film projects, creating content and direction for production teams. Today he resides in Tucson, where he works as a freelance illustrator and concept artist and looks forward to the future in such a passionate field.

His website is
joshuameehan.com
.