Manuel Gonzales - The Regional Office Is Under Attack!

She hadn’t always liked him, the doctor, but she had always respected him, and now she was going to have to kill him.

She is the one who first brought you here. Did you know that? Your mother? She brought Mr. Niles to you when you were still a girl and he brought you to the Regional Office, but it might as well have been her leading you there by your hand. Might as well have been her opening the door to Mr. Niles’s office for you, moving Mr. Niles’s mouth as he offered to change your life forever.

And she brought us to you.

So here we are.

We are at your door and we are not empty-handed. We are offering you a way out, and once out, a way forward. They have lied to you and manipulated you and for too long we have stood by silently and watched this play out, but now we are here, speaking out, reaching out to you, to tell you this:

Stay home. For a week, for two weeks, for a month or six. Or better yet, leave. Cape Town or Nova Scotia or Taipei. That is your way out. And when it is time, we will find you, and we will show you your way forward.

Sarah didn’t, though. She didn’t kill the doctor.

He killed himself. He left a note but it didn’t say much but that he was sorry, but not what he was sorry for.

It didn’t matter anyhow. Her plan to kill him had centered around her plan of keeping her transformation a secret, but now so much of her was inorganic or some strange mix that there was no way for her to hide the mechanical parts of her anymore.

It had been six months, almost seven months now, since the assault. Oyemi had not been found, and when she was honest with herself about this, Sarah would admit that Oyemi was probably dead, or had been so compromised that she might as well have been dead. No matter. The Regional Office was operating again, not at 100 percent, but not far from it, either.

And no one had asked her to step down or to begin the search for her own replacement, not even now that she was in the middle of her own replacement of sorts.

She missed Henry, would find herself some mornings seeking him out in his office or the break room, and then would wonder what had happened to him, how his cards had fallen, but she found she missed Mr. Niles most of all, and most mornings, when she came into work and made her way to his office, she forgot he was dead, that the office was hers now.

She was thinking about him now, in fact, sitting at his desk, now her desk. She couldn’t make herself comfortable sitting there, so she stood up and walked around the room and then made her way to the bathroom. She turned on the light. She looked at herself in his bathroom mirror, at the two mechanical arms, at how obviously mechanical they were, and then thought about how sad that would have made him.

She pushed against the soft parts of her, but this didn’t satisfy her, whatever it was she was trying to satisfy.

Pushing against the soft, organic parts of her with a mechanical forefinger, all she felt was the cold metal against her warm, squishy skin. Something inside the mechanical finger, some bit of sentient technology, sent a reading to her still-organic brain that determined for her, almost as quickly as if that finger had still been a human finger, that she had touched living skin.

A readout scrolled through her mind in a strange and unsettling way. Her brain was still her brain, but everything came in as a readout now.

Looking in the mirror, she wanted to cry because it was all so beautiful, the thing that the thing had created, the thing that the thing had made her into, all shining chromes and swooping tubes and artificial ligaments, so beautiful and flexible and powerful that if she’d seen it in a tech conference showroom, she’d have wept at the beauty of it. She wanted to cry, too, because it was her, not some showroom prototype, and she was afraid and she didn’t know when it would stop.

She didn’t know if it would stop.

How long? she thought. How long will this go on?

Which piece? she thought. Her very next thought: Which piece of me will go next?

She thought this thought, or rather this thought popped unbidden and unwanted into her head, and before she could whisk it away, before she could bury it deep in the darkest recesses of her mind, she felt it, she felt a soft but urgent pressure in her chest.

A twitch in her heart.

From The Regional Office Is Under Attack:

Tracking the Rise and Fall of an American Institution

One can imagine, in light of the not-unfathomable notion that Emma and Henry had conspired to fake her death and enact revenge on the Regional Office, that it would have been Emma leading the team that burned Oyemi’s complex to the ground. No records can place Emma at that scene, though in all truth, any records placing any of this anywhere are difficult if not impossible to find.

But Emma — if she lived — Emma especially was a ghost at this point.

Even had Oyemi suspected Henry’s actions, she would not have expected anything from the realm of Emma. And the Oracles? As far as they were concerned, Oyemi had already been duly warned of both Emma and Henry. In light of this, one can imagine the warning system that Oyemi had come to rely on almost completely — the Oracles — failing her when she needed them most.

Imagine: Emma with Windsor and maybe another of Henry’s personal Recruits — Jimmie or Becka — on the Amtrak out of Penn Station. The two (or three) of them sitting in the dining car, not hashing or rehashing out their plans, because they know them by now so intimately, so completely, that to go over them even one more time might tip the scales in the other direction, might cause one or more of them to overthink and slip up.

The lot of them jumping off the train as it slows to round a curve.

The cover of darkness. Their stealth, aided by their mystical properties.

Imagine the quiet deliberation as Windsor unmoors the locks — physical and magickal — that Oyemi had set in place to protect herself, her Oracles.

Windsor’s soft, quiet, consistent breaths, the care with which she works her magick — both literally and figuratively — and the softly tingling buzzing feeling this gives Emma, just under her ears, where her jawbone connects to her skull, how much this relaxes her, how much her own relaxation sets Windsor at ease.

Dogs roaming the compound that never know the three of them have slipped through the fence and are making their way to the house on the hill.

The house itself smaller than they imagined, modest, even.

The small kernel of doubt lodged deep within Emma, unretrievable and not wholly ignorable, that maybe the best course, the smartest course, would be to abort the mission, to find Henry, to set these girls free before it’s too late for them, to jet off with Henry to Finland, maybe, or New Zealand, to let bygones be bygones.

Oyemi there on the porch, her eyes wild with fire and power, her hair lifted not by wind but by the electromagnetics swirling around her.

Because she knows.

It is too late, but she has seen the necessary and pointless five minutes of her future, knows they have come for her, that the prophecy has come for her, that she read it all wrong.

Windsor falling first, struck by a fireball, incinerated before she hits the ground. Jimmie screaming, her urgent need to leap out of the way rendered inert by fear, by the sudden reality of death and magick and power and the realization that, truly, she has none, or next to none, in the face of Oyemi.

Emma uncaring. Or caring, but not yet, not now.

Emma will remember to cower in fear later. The fear will make her temporarily deaf and mute. She will cower and shake just on the other side of the fence from the still-burning compound. She will scream and scream until she is hoarse, but she won’t hear herself over the crackling and violence of the fire, but she won’t hear that, either. She will shiver until her whole body aches, but not yet, not now.