Pittacus Lore - The Search for Sam

Fuck the Mogadorians .

I start dumping every link on my monitor into the Discard directory, as fast as I can. There’s no upper limit on the number of links that can get routed to a single monitor—the more links you process, the more get routed your way—so before I know it I’ve chucked upwards of three hundred links into the Discard directory.

I’m making a spectacular mess of their system. The clock counts down to the end of the hour. How many unevaluated Discards can I cram into the directory before my fellow surveyors catch on? For that matter, how long until my treasonous evidence-burying gets discovered?

I’m exhilarated.

The hourly rankings come in. I’ve discarded 611 links. Investigated 0. My provisional accuracy ranking is a hilarious 11 percent. Better yet, as if to make a mockery of their entire ranking algorithm, I come in first place.

“What the hell, Adamus!” Serkova snarls at me. The others turn around to face me, all the work in the surveyor facility grinding to a halt. No one knows how to react to my total breakdown. “Are you fricking nuts?”

I smile at Serkova, dizzy from my own outlandish behavior. “Yeah, I think I might be.”

Then an alarm goes off.

I hear the heavy march of footsteps coming down the hall: soldiers dispatched from HQ.

“You deserve whatever you get,” says Serkova, spitting at me.

I run.

I dodge out into the Northwest tunnel to see the soldiers coming, fronted by the General. They look pissed .

If I’m going out, I’m going out with a bang. I run towards the marching guards … then pull to a stop in front of Zakos’s lab.

“Hey Pops,” I say, taunting the General. “Did I do something wrong?”

“You know what you’ve done,” he sneers at me. He gestures to the guards to seize me.

I resist, swinging my arms wildly, shouting as loud as I can. The Mogadorians hardly know how to react to such an undignified resistance. I can feel my father cringing in embarrassment.

The guards manage to subdue me, but the ruckus has attracted Dr. Zakos’s attention. He steps out into the hall, as the guards begin dragging me away, probably to feed me to some hungry piken.

For a moment I worry my plan has failed, but then I hear Zakos’s voice, calling from down the hall.

“General! Wait!”

My father halts our progress to listen to what Zakos has to say.

“If I may be so bold … I may be able to put your son’s life to some use.”

CHAPTER 11

I’m back in the chair.

Zakos has convinced my father to allow him to perform an accelerated mind transfer between me and One. The process will be so intense it will kill me, literally frying my brain. But Zakos has guaranteed the General that he will be able to download the contents of One’s transferred memories from my brain after my death. “If your son has been such a disappointment in life, at least allow him to be of service in death.”

Zakos assured the General that even if the intelligence he extracts from my brain is of little consequence, the results of the experiment will represent a tremendous leap forward for Mogadorian technology.

“You don’t need to make a hard sell, Zakos,” I said, still trapped in the guards’ grip. I turned to my father, an impudent smile on my lips. “Isn’t that right, Pops? He had you on board at ‘Kill Adamus,’ didn’t he?”

The General didn’t even look at me. He nodded at his guards, who released me, then turned to the doctor. “Have the results on my desk by tomorrow morning,” he said.

I’ve been in the lab since.

Guards monitor the door, but I’m not bound or watched by anyone but Zakos. Where am I going to go? How can I possibly escape? As my little demonstration in the hallway proved, I’m no match against Mogadorian soldiers.

Neither my father nor my sister has seen fit to visit me in my final hours. But my mother ventured down to deliver me a last meal. She entered the lab a few hours ago, carrying a couple slices of fresh-baked bread wrapped in a napkin and a plastic container filled with soup. She hesitated for a moment, looking for a suitable place to lay the meal. Then, realizing there was no good place for it, she wordlessly put the bread and soup on a laboratory counter. Then she turned her back to me, her hand on the door.

“Is it true?” she asked.

“Is what true?” I asked, a bit spitefully. I wanted to make her spell it out.

“That you’ve betrayed the Mogadorian cause.”

I guess my father figured we were past sugarcoating things and had told her everything.

“Yes,” I said.

Without another word, she left.

Moments later, as I held the still-warm bread in my hand, I realized that final home-cooked meal would be the last kind and motherly thing she would ever do for me.

I threw it in the trash.

Now Zakos is prepping me for the procedure. He’s filled a syringe with some kind of anesthetic, explaining that this time he will render me unconscious before the procedure begins, which should give him greater precision over the neurological mapping. Soon I will be put under, then I will join One in her memories, and then I will be dead.

Zakos opens One’s pod, to make a couple of adjustments before the procedure begins. I think of One and all the Greeters in their pods.

“Does it hurt?” I ask.

“Excuse me?” He’s absorbed in his preparations.

“What you did to all the Greeters, keeping them alive, raking their brains for intel all those years.”

“Oh, I never really thought about it,” he says. “Yes, I would guess it’s quite excruciating.”

Just then I hear her voice. “You’re not really going to let him get away with that, are you?” I turn to see One, flickering beside my chair. I had wondered if I would get to see her again before going under, if she hadn’t already flickered out of existence.

I don’t really have a choice , I say. I’m trapped here .

She leans against the counter. “You always have a choice. You had a choice to screw up today on the job, to bait your father into sentencing you to death, to do it in Zakos’s earshot so you’d end up here....”

I was afraid you were already gone. I couldn’t think of anything else. I ran out of hope, figured I was going to lose you anyway, and we could at least—

“See each other one last time?” she says, finishing my thought. She gives me a flirty, cockeyed grin.

“That’s sweet,” she says. “But that wasn’t the real reason you went haywire today.”

She’s right. That isn’t how all this started. In the moment, I just couldn’t bring myself to rat out those humans to my people. That was the first time the work I was doing as a surveyor was clearly going to help the Mogs and hurt others, and I couldn’t do it. Over the past week I’ve had to take some crazy, on-the-fly risks, but that was the first time I acted completely without a plan, without any clear sense of what the consequences would be.

One , I say. I don’t even really understand why I did what I did .

She doesn’t answer me immediately, but instead turns back to the tiled wall, crossing her arms. I can see an idea brewing in her head. After a moment, she turns back to me and fixes me with a cryptic stare.

“Don’t worry, Adam,” she says. “You will. Seeing as you’re going out anyway,” she says, leaning close to my ear. “Don’t you want to go out swinging?”

I look at her, confused.

“A giant leap for Mogadorian technology,” she whispers, casting a glance over at the tiles where the Greeters’ bodies are kept. “Is that what you really want your legacy to be?”

It’s time.