Unknown - The_Growing_589064

Very gently, Koda asks, “How did you know that was the right answer?”

“There was one girl who told them she’d had a hysterectomy; I think she was a teacher at the middle school. They took her outside, and we heard her scream. We never saw her again.”

“I see.”

”So I lied. The rapes began the next day.”

Koda’s mind flashes back to her first conversation with Maggie. Slaughter the steers, keep the cows and heifers to make more steers, send the old cows to auction when they can no longer produce calves. But that doesn’t make sense. Droids do not eat.

If not food, then what? Slaves?

That possibility seems no more likely than the first. True, slaves bred to servitude from the womb, who had never known any other life, might be more docile than those taken as adults or even as children, but slaves require a slavemaster. Droids need slaves as little as they need food.

Someone controlling the droids, then?

Koda says, “Flora, did you ever see or hear the droids receive transmissions from anyone?”

“No. After that first day, they never spoke to us. They never spoke to each other at all.”

It is three in the morning and Koda’s head is beginning to ache. She needs coffee; she needs sleep. She will get neither. Tomorrow she and her troops must settle the women in the camp, and the day after they must move out again, toward Minot. “Black helicopters,” she says, suddenly.

“Pardon?” Sonia looks up at her, puzzled.

“Sorry. Twenty years ago, there were a lot of people, especially out in this part of the country, who thought the government was part of some vast international banking conspiracy It was going to take over and create a corporate state with its capital at Zurich. They thought they were being spied on from black helicopters.”

“Do you think that’s what it is?”

Koda stands and stretches; her legs and shoulders feel like lead. Another pinprick of light scuds across the sky as they turn back toward the cabins, and a shiver passes up her spine that has nothing to do with the temperature.

“No,” she says. “I think that whatever it is, is worse than that. Much, much worse.”

7

The whole world seems to hold its breath as the first gray streaks of dawn stand poised to paint themselves over the roof of the earth.

Seated crosslegged on a tallish bolder about a mile from the base, Kirsten faces east and watches as the earth prepares itself to give birth to another day.

Watching sunrises is, she believes, a pastime best left to dreamers and fools, and she considers herself neither. But the odd sense of peace that descends over her makes the break in her fastidious habits worth the effort.

She’s alone now. More alone than she’s ever been, and that thought brings with it a surprising twinge of sadness. Surprising because she’s quite sure that somewhere on some dusty library shelf, there’s a dictionary that sports her picture next to the word “loner”. Born into a family of loners, she’s always figured she came by it honestly. Add to that the fact that it’s hard to make friends when kids your age are sitting in kindergarten learning the pleasures of eating paste while you’re in a fifth grade classroom calculating the square root of pi, and you have the recipe for a person whose mind is her own best company.

When the plague of ’07 hit—the one they called the Red Death—the complete loss of her hearing hardly fazed her. If keeping the noises of the outside world at bay allowed her to delve more deeply into the rigid structure of her private thoughts and aspirations, well, that was pretty much fine by her.

She laughs now as she remembers that day, so many years ago now, when she woke up in the recovery room of Brooke Army Medical Center, able to hear again for the first time in two years. How joyful her parents had been, and how their faces had crumpled as she cried for the loss of her deafness.

“I’m sorry, Mom and Dad,” she says softly into the wakening world. “I know you only wanted what was best for me, and you did a damn good job giving it to me, too. Thank you for that. I appreciate it, and you, more than you’ll ever know.”

As if in answer, the rim of the sun peeks over the horizon, and, surprised, she wipes a dampness from her cheeks.

She laughs again, this time in self derision. “Alright, Kirsten, enough of this foolishness. You’ve got a job to do, and it’s about damn time you started doing it.”

Like a rude guest who’s bound and determined to pull up a chair and stay awhile, the strange, but welcomed, sense of peace travels with her to the back of the van. Opening the doors, she crawls inside the cool dimness, sharp eyes scanning the interior until they light upon the items she needs.

A powerful battery operated lantern lights the dim interior, and she settles once again into her cross-legged position, grabbing a set of carefully packed items and placing them within easy reach around her.

First she pulls out her laptop, the steroidal super-computer some of her staff jokingly named “Arnold”. The joke had to be explained to her before she got it. Movie watching had never been on her top ten list of things to do.

The computer obediently boots up courtesy of a special, long lasting battery and a solar panel tucked into one corner of the cover. Nimble fingers fly over the keyboard, opening a succession of windows more quickly than the human eye could ever hope to follow.

Seconds later, she sits back with a self-satisfied smirk accenting her features, green eyes seeming to glow as the light from the screen flickers across her face. Multiple incomprehensible lines of text are highlighted, but only one blinking and bolded word changes the smirk to a full-out smile on her face.

Active.

She wants to laugh, but holds it in as her quick mind replays the steps necessary to set her plan into motion.

Androids aren’t The Borg. Though each is connected to a massive data hub deep underground in the Silicone Valley, they are no more connected to each other than two refrigerators in two different houses are connected. It was the one concession she was able to receive as the Chairman of the Androids, Robotics and Bionics Administration. And it is a concession that will make her life, what remains of it, a good deal easier.

Though the droids are in no way Borg-like, they do have ways of recognizing one another, and of sending streams of information along pre-set pathways that human beings don’t possess. With that problem in mind, Kirsten drags over a second item; a box about half the size of her laptop.

Carefully opening the lid, she withdraws a second box, this one much smaller than the others. The tiny, plastic-encased hinges give a soft squeal when she pries the lid of this box open to reveal two large, brown contact lenses resting gently in a bed saline solution. Kirsten smiles when they are revealed, touching on the memory of her brief foray into the world of VR.

Her college classmates, all much older than her, seemed addicted to the fantasy of being able to instantly transport themselves into a world of their choosing just for the thinking. Pre-adolescent curiosity drew her into the web, and before she quite knew what was happening, a sizable amount of her scholarship money went towards the purchase of the items she now holds in her hands.

Placing the contacts aside for the moment, she lifts and opens a third, very small, box. Inside this box rests a small, flesh colored button no larger than half the size of the nail on her smallest finger. An earpiece that no audiologist has ever seen, it was used in the world of Virtual Reality to impart a sense of movement and sound to the wearer, taking VR to the bounds of reality none had ever seen before.

For Kirsten, however, the effect had been somewhat different. When combined with the workings of her cochlear implants, the result had been somewhat different than what the makers had doubtless intended. After her initial startlement, she discovered that what she was hearing was the actual wireless data being streamed into the microchip implanted into the ear piece. With a little tweaking, she was able to effect a sort of data translator, and from there on out, she recouped her scholarship losses by developing VR games for her classmates at a substantially reduced cost. She’d quickly become the darling of the Student Union at the ripe old age of fourteen.