The Dream Cloud, page 6
part #2 of Akropolis Series
Her transport began to slow as it left the ramp and crawled to a stop at the first block intersection.
“Please provide another destination,” the voice prompted her.
Mia looked around. On either side of the street were large factories that sat far back away from the main thoroughfare. Little roads branched off from the main street and made beelines for the front entrances. One looked just the same as the other.
“This will do,” she said, opening the door of the transport.
She knew that once the ASF found Tom’s body in the remains of their burnt house, it wouldn’t be long before they tracked down her transport. She had a few hours before they showed up looking for her, and when they did, she intended to be far away from this particular section. With any luck she could hide for a few days like this.
It wasn’t a permanent solution. After an initial search procured no results they would rely on tracking her down through her quantum signature. There was no place she could hide after that, but hopefully by then she would have a plan.
Mia began walking down the main road, her footsteps reverberating off the walls of the buildings and factory walls. She imagined herself the last person in Akropolis, a fantasy that seemed more enticing with each passing step.
If she had been even the least bit observant, as opposed to thoughtful about all that had happened in the past three weeks, she might have noticed the silent figures that appeared here and there, seemingly at random, beings whose faces and bodies were partially obscured in shadows.
One stood like a silent sentinel on an outside catwalk of the glass recycling building. Another peered through a half open window on the first floor of the water plant, while yet another lounged against the chain link fence that barred the entrance to the textiles factory a mere thirty yards away from her passing.
For fifteen minutes Mia walked, head bowed and mind heavy with thoughts. She knew her options were limited. The only one that seemed to have any sort of appeal was going beyond the Wall, though how she would accomplish this exceeded her imagination. She knew the other side was a wasteland where even her synthetic body would hold up for only a couple of days, if that, but death did not scare her. At this point she would have welcomed it like an old friend. It was the path to the Ether…and to her little lost lamb.
There was the possibility that she would be sentenced to the Ether anyway, but she doubted the ruling council had the stomach for such condemnation. No one had been subjected to that punishment in almost three hundred years. The most likely scenario involved an interview with a psychiatrist, at which point the source of her ‘deviation of conscience’ would be identified. From that marker a deep wipe would occur, erasing all that she was and knew from that point forward.
Mia’s trepidation of this possibility stemmed from the fact that she was certain her ‘marker’ involved the loss of her Ambrose. He would be taken away from her again, only this time permanently.
She couldn’t allow that, but she didn’t know how to prevent it. Her profile was stored in the Quantum Cloud. Even if she made it beyond the Wall somehow and found her end in the Wasteland, they would just revive her. They would want answers after all.
Mia finally stopped walking. She looked up at the sky, squinting against the artificial orb that passed for the sun in Akropolis. It seemed hopeless. There was no circumstance where she could envision avoiding a wipe. It was inevitable, so why run or hide?
She knew the answer to that. Her life had been filled with meekness for far too long. She couldn’t bow her head and go along anymore. When they took her, and she had no doubt that it was a certainty, it would be with a fight.
Looking around for the first time in a while, Mia realized how far she’d walked, closing the gap between her deserted section and one where production was ongoing. Now that she was paying attention, the sounds of operating facilities were much closer.
To her right was a metal recycling plant and to the left a giant fenced in area full of separated materials. It had large piles of random scrap metal piled high all around a mess of conveyor belts, giant furnaces, and huge magnetic drums. Behind this was a small warehouse where they no doubt kept the recycled materials.
Mia felt a twinge of something akin to providence. In a former life, before they made the move to Akropolis, her father had been an engineer in The Mountain. He designed motors for automated machines in the plants that used electromagnets. One of the things he always complained about was not having enough copper to create the shielding needed to house the electromagnets and block the EMI waves, thus preventing them from affecting other systems, waves not unlike the ones emitted by the quantum processors that every QUBIT had in his or her brain.
Mia’s eyes traveled along the conveyor belts to the magnetic drums. She chose the largest of them all and walked towards it, snagging a metal rebar that was in a pile nearby. She slammed the end of the bar into the corner of the drum and began to move it back and forth until she could get enough leverage to pop off the rivets.
It took a few minutes but finally she popped off the whole front copper shielding of the drum. She dragged the piece to the small warehouse that stood behind the piles of scrap metal, snapped the lock with help from the rebar, and dragged the copper in, closing the door after. Picking the closest corner, she bent the shielding to create a haphazard tent-like structure that she then crawled into, folding a piece over to act as the flap. She then lay down on the floor utterly exhausted, using her arm as a pillow.
The copper plating would scramble the waves emitted by her quantum processor, thus making her untraceable, or at least she surmised as much. Her father could have given her a straight answer on that one, but he had been dead for over twenty years. All she possessed were a few facts and the recalled tidbits of information he had passed onto her before they had left for Akropolis.
It would have to be enough.
Mia closed her eyes…and hoped that she wouldn’t dream.
She awoke for only a few seconds. Her head felt groggy and stuffed with cotton, but even in that state she felt a foreign presence above her. She squinted, attempting to focus, but before she could something was pressed against the side of her neck, something cold and hard and vaguely familiar…and then everything went black again.
The next time that Mia woke it was without the hazy vision or the befuddlement. She was lying on her back and staring up at rows of piping and wondering where she was and what had happened.
It took only a moment for it to come back to her; Tom and the house, fleeing to the Waste Belt, her attempt at concealing her whereabouts, but the place she was at now was not the warehouse where she had taken shelter at before falling asleep.
She tried to sit up and couldn’t. Raising her head she looked down the length of her body and realized that she was bound with a thick fibrous rope of some sort, her arms at her sides, feet pressed together.
A bolt of alarm shot through her body and she began to buck up and down, left and right, grunting and groaning as she willed her limbs to snap out of the constraints that kept her helpless. She was growing more panicked with each passing second, her frantic mind flashing back to the time Tom had held her down and did awful things to her with a pair of pliers.
A scream of rage and fear tore out of Mia’s throat and she started to bang her head against the hard floor beneath her even as she pistoned her feet up and down, her body jack hammering off the ground like a spastic caterpillar.
“STOP THAT!” a voice bellowed to her left, but she was beyond that point.
That feeling of helplessness, of being at the mercy of someone else once again so soon after tasting freedom, had done something to her mind. It was as if a tiny cog in her brain had skipped off the teeth of another and the whole mess of gears had tumbled apart.
She screamed again, but even as the sound escaped her lips something blasted the side of her head so hard that her body immediately went limp, her eyes rolling into the back of her skull.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” a woman’s voice shouted.
There was the sound of feet slapping the ground, coming close; hands gripped her face and turned it towards the ceiling. A shadow over her made a clicking sound and a blinding light shone into her eyes.
Mia reacted instinctively, driving her forehead up hard and fast. It connected with the flashlight, and then something much softer that let out a shout of pain and fell back.
This time the blow was to her stomach, driving the air completely out of her body. She rolled to her side, mouth open and gasping for breath like a fish tossed on land, but the muscles in her stomach refused to release the tension. Her eyes bulged in their sockets and she could feel the black of unconsciousness creeping at the corners of her vision. Finally, when she was mere seconds away from passing out, her midsection unclenched and allowed her a giant wheezing breath that immediately turned to hoarse coughing.
The fit seemed to last forever, but at least it was better than her floundering for breath. When it eventually subsided where she could start to breathe normally, Mia’s gave up the struggle and went limp, content to just take in oxygen for a bit.
As she was recovering a human man appeared above her, tall and broad-shouldered with a small barrel for a gut, dressed in a dark brown bushy coat that fell to his thighs. He was holding an EMP baton, which she correctly assumed had been used on her back in the warehouse. His face was mostly hidden by a thick black beard, an anomaly for this day and age, but his eyes were very expressive beneath a pair of bushy eyebrows.
With his forehead furrowed in anger, Mia knew it wouldn’t take much prompting for him to swing that stick at her again, whether it was turned on or not. Despite this, she seethed at the man, almost daring him with her eyes.
“Oh yeah, you got some fire and spit in you,” he said in a deep but quiet voice.
Pointing the EMP stick mere inches from her nose he threatened, “You keep that racket down or I’ll take your head off next, you got me?”
In response, Mia bared her teeth at him.
This made the man chuckle, though if it was with actual humor it did little to change the fixed expression on his face.
“The guards have been rolling by here every hour or so,” he warned. “It’s a good bet they’re looking for you, so don’t give me the excuse to dump you in the street wrapped up like a birthday present.”
At the mention of the ASF, Mia stiffened, her eyes unconsciously darting to the left and right before realizing her mistake and locking back onto the man.
“It wasn’t a stretch,” he said in response. “I found you sleeping in a tent of copper. Good idea; a little primitive but effective.”
He reached with his free hand to the waist of his coat and pulled it aside, tapping his finger on a square box that was emitting a pinpoint of faint, pulsing green light.
“This here scrambles their tracking signals. Haven’t had to use it for awhile but lucky for you it still works. Good thing I never throw anything away.”
The man squatted on his haunches and studied her, frowning deeply.
“You’re trouble, no doubt about that. Question is, are you worth the trouble? The best I can do is offer you a chance-“
“A chance?” Mia interrupted, her tone derisive and guttural, still smarting from the blows that had been delivered to her body.
The man’s eyebrows arched as if he were waiting out the retort of a small child with patient tolerance.
“Yes…a chance. It’s the only one you get, so think carefully before you speak.”
He pointed a thumb over his shoulder.
“Tell me why they’re after you; no lies, just the truth, or your version of it.”
“What happens after that?” Mia muttered.
“I don’t know,” he replied. “Depends on the story. Maybe we talk some more somewhere else or maybe I dump you in the street. Like I said, you have a chance…that’s it. You’ve got nothing to lose.”
Mia heard another set of approaching footsteps and glanced in the other direction. A human female with shoulder length brown hair and a mechanics uniform stopped at Mia’s feet. She was holding a rag against her nose, which meant she was probably the one that Mia had head-butted.
“I’m sorry,” Mia said, realizing that she had been trying to help her.
“Its fine,” the woman nodded, her voice slightly muffled from the rag. “Took me by surprise is all.”
Mia turned her attention back to the large man. He was right. She had nothing to lose, and obviously these people knew how to hide. She briefly wondered why, except that didn’t assist her in the moment. They could help her if they so chose. It was a chance like he said, albeit a meager one, but one she would take.
“It’s a long story,” Mia said. “I don’t…I don’t really know how to start.”
The woman with the bloody nose brought over a resin crate and the man left his squat to sit down, her hovering at his shoulder.
“Why don’t you start with what you did, and we’ll go from there,” the man replied.
Mia glanced from one to the other. They were surprisingly stolid, impossible to read.
“I killed my husband,” she blurted the words out.
Their expressions didn’t change. In fact, it was as if she hadn’t spoken at all. She didn’t know what to say next, and so she didn’t say anything. All the excuses she had mentally prepared seemed pale against the greater truth that she just now accepted…she killed Tom because he had taken from her the life she had planned and replaced it with a perversion of guilt and fear and self-loathing. She killed him because he had deserved to die.
“Do you know how long it’s been since a murder has occurred in Akropolis?” the man asked.
Mia shook her head slightly.
“I’d say it was roughly in the second decade of our city,” he said thoughtfully. “In fact, it happened not too far from here, kind of an urban legend. Steve Blatz was his name, a waste recycler who kept being passed up for promotion. Apparently he lobbied for a year to get the supervisor position of his shift but at the last moment they gave it to a newbie from another sanctuary. The new guy wasn’t more qualified and he didn’t have more experience. It was basically a goodwill gesture, an extended hand if you will.”
The man grunted as he shifted one of his legs out from beneath him and extended it. Mia saw the dull hue of carbon fiber and realized it was a prosthetic, a very old looking one. It didn’t have the realistic look of the QUBIT extension models, which were wired right into the nerves and provided a full working and feeling limb.
The man noticed her staring and tapped the prosthetic with the tip of the EMP rod.
“Pretty, isn’t it?” he said with a wink. “Anyways, Steve Blatz figured he was mad enough to do something about it, and when that newbie supervisor came to check his shift report, good old Steve pushed the fellow right into a recycling incinerator...burnt him to a crisp.”
The man said the last with a snap of his fingers. Mia couldn’t tell but he seemed to be enjoying the storytelling part.
“Now, you may not know this but things weren’t exactly as civilized in those days; this was the first test of justice that Akropolis faced. They couldn’t kill Steve because they were promoting this new utopia where every citizen worked together for the common good and crime was a thing of the past. If they executed him, they were no better than Steve. So they locked him up, put him in a cell far away from everyone where his story would fade away or until they could figure out how to rehabilitate him. Unfortunately for them, Steve had a different plan altogether, and not too long after they found him hanging in his little cell by his bed sheets. What to do then, right?”
He stopped at the end of the question as if he expected Mia to answer. When she didn’t say a thing he continued.
“If they let him stay dead then it was like execution by proxy. It was a dilemma for sure, but they had to act quickly because there was already a lot of grumbling going on. In the end, they revived him, and to show good faith they assigned a security detail to him. They followed him around like good guard dogs for the better part of two weeks and then one day Steve gave them the slip for a few seconds and tossed himself in the same incinerator he had thrown the newbie into. Do you know what happened after that?”
Mia shook her head, hooked despite her present predicament.
“They revived him again!” the man boomed then guffawed like it was the punch line to an outrageous joke.
Even the woman standing at his shoulder seemed to be grinning behind the rag still held against her nose.
“Those sonsabitches just didn’t know when to quit! And do you know what Steve did then?”
This time he didn’t wait for an answer.
“The second he opened his eyes he went on a rampage. Hopped out of the tube and took out three lab techs before anyone knew what the hell was going on. Security had to riddle him with bullets to knock him down, and even then he kept coming until they stomped a mud hole into him. Finally, at that point, someone had the brilliant idea of a mind wipe, the first ever for a crime. They set a marker in Steve’s brain and deleted every memory from the moment he was first given his post at the recycling plant, and when they revived him yet again, good old Steve was as tame as a neutered dog.”
The man leaned back and began to rub his upper thigh, taking his eyes off of Mia for the time being. It felt as if a spell had been broken. Her eyes darted here and there but the shadows had grown long and she didn’t exactly see any opportunities for escape. She was consigned to whatever fate was being decided.
“Yep, Steve was as docile as a lamb. They got him a new job in the Garden, tending to the flowers and the insects there, far from his former place in the Waste Belt. He was even relocated to the Outer Zone. This didn’t mean he was oblivious. They made him aware that he had been charged with a crime but assured him that the resolution was to the satisfaction of all, and in the end Steve agreed. A half a year went by and he went about his new job and new life without a hitch, and just when his security detail grew just lax enough with his mundane routine, he jumped them and got a rifle away from one of the guards. Only, instead of dropping them, Steve turned it on himself and blew his head clean off.”
