Free Radical (16 page)

Deck nodded. He had to live through the procedure first. He changed the subject, "So what's with your bots?"

D'Arcy threw his arms out in surrender, "I have no idea. I usually have one bot guarding my door - usually a small one. Today I showed up and there were two of them, both of them brutes. They have treated everyone like they were an armed terrorist. Doctor Stackhouse wouldn't even come in."

"Did you tell somebody about this?"

"I called down to maintenance, and they told me that it didn't sound like a mechanical problem, so they couldn't help me. I called security to find out they never assigned me these bots. After a big runaround I got them to agree to recall the bots, but they haven't gotten back to me since, and the bots are still there," he shrugged.

The exam ended with D'Arcy telling Deck that he was in acceptable physical shape for the surgery, but that he should get a decent night's sleep first.

Deck had one more stop to make.

He needed to talk to Diego and make absolutely sure he understood what needed to be done with Shodan. Shodan was still without any sort of behavioral guidelines, and Deck assumed his brush with the security bots was the result. Diego had probably assigned Shodan a bunch of new duties without properly instructing it on what sorts of behaviors where allowed. He was willing to bet that Diego had already put Shodan in charge of accounting, research, and the security bots. He would probably have Shodan cooking the damn Salisbury steak in the cafeteria if it was possible.

He rode up to the command deck and headed for Diego's office. On his way, he passed the system administrator's office and noticed that two large security bots had been given the post of guarding the door. He shook his head.

"Is Diego in?"

The sign on the desk proclaimed its owner to be Bianca Schuler. She looked up from her computer, "Who should I say is here?"

"Nobody," he said, walking around her desk and finding the buzzer. He gently rolled her office chair out of his way and pressed the button. There was a tone and Diego's office was unlocked for a moment. Schuler looked at him in utter dismay as she coasted away from her desk. After several seconds she finally blurted out, "You can't... just..."

He ignored her protests and stepped into Diego's office.

His entrance brought a sudden halt to the ongoing conversation between Diego and Shodan.

Diego looked disapprovingly at him. Schuler appeared in the doorway behind him and Diego waved her off.

"What can I do for you, Mr. Stevens?," he asked. His tone had changed. The salesman was gone and had been replaced by a cut-throat executive.

"I need to talk to you about Shodan. I need to make sure you understand what you need to do."

"I'm clear on what I need to do. Keep in mind that this station is my responsibility, and I take that pretty seriously."

"Yeah, well - I need to make sure."

"Fine, go see my secretary and we'll set up a time to talk."

"It can't wait."

"It's going to have to."

"When I went down to medical, there were two bot sentries posted to D'Arcy's office. Their behavior was not normal."

"Normal? You've been on board for four days, ninety percent of which you spent sleeping in Perry's office, and all of a sudden you are an expert on bot behavior?"

"D'Arcy even admitted they were acting strange. 
Hostile
 and strange."

"Did they shoot anyone?"

Deck rolled his eyes, "That's not the point - "

Diego cut him off, "Yes it is. This is Shodan's first -"

Deck raised his voice, "You are going to get people killed. Shodan doesn't even -"

Diego cut him off again, his voice remained even but firm, "This is Shodan's first time running the bots. She is learning a whole new skill and hasn't quite figured out the etiquette part of it yet."

Deck didn't even attempt to hide his anger, "I just want to know that you have instructed it to not kill people. Just tell me you've done that much."

Diego stood up from his desk and walked over to deck, "It sounds like you're the one who doesn't understand how this works. If I tell Shodan she can't kill anybody, then I will have a team of security bots that can't guard anything, because they can't ever attack people. No, I will instruct Shodan to only kill those that threaten my station."

Deck tightened his face into a defiant glare, "Who is that gonna be?"

"I'll worry about that. I hired you to hack Shodan, not storm into my office and tell me how to run my own station. Now get out before I call the bots."

Deck collapsed into bed. He was hungry but too tired to go down to the cafeteria. It was a safe bet their convenient delivery service had ended for him once his job on Shodan was done. He knew he wouldn't be able to eat once he woke up, since it would be too close to surgery.

This was finally it. In the morning, he was either going to get his implant or die. All of the risks, all of the sacrifices, everything was coming down to the coin-toss of whether or not Diego was going to have him killed.

Either way, it would finally be over tomorrow.

He had no clear moment of awakening, no definitive instant at which he moved from unconsciousness to being aware of the world around him. Instead, the cloudy layers of heavy, numbing sleep were peeled away, one at a time, allowing his mind to slowly flicker to life like some ancient florescent light. Like the rising tides, there was no perceptible change, only a slow, laborious advancement stretched over a featureless expanse of time.

He felt himself rising from a deep, timeless abyss. There were no dreams, nothing in his mind but a cold blank hole where thoughts and dreams and recent memories would normally reside.

He fumbled with consciousness, slipping briefly into the darkness again for short periods, only to be tugged out again by some subtle compulsion.

As his mind struggled to recover, he slowly became aware of his body. At first it was distant... unrelated. It was some slow, pulsating sensation that seemed only vaguely relevant to him. Then, the pulse became stronger, and he was somehow aware of some discomfort, some nuisance that nagged the functional corners of his mind. His murky thoughts could not process the input at first , but as he fought his way out of the depths of sleep, he became aware that something was horribly wrong.

The input from his body was confused and disjointed. Strange sensations enveloped him. He felt hunger. He felt pain. He felt cold - a deep, penetrating, absolute cold.

He suddenly realized that he was gagging. Something was caught in his throat. Something was holding his mouth open, extending down his throat and choking him. His gag reflex fought against it, but it only made him choke more. He tried to cry out and expel it, but he could not find his voice.

He tried to open his eyes, but they could not adjust to accommodate the light. Opening them only brought stinging agony. The world around him seemed to be bathed in penetrating white light.

He rolled over onto his side. His body felt like it was made of mercury. His limbs and face were numb from the cold.

He grasped at his face with his numb, limp hands, trying to find what was in his mouth. His skin was wet and slick with some unknown substance. He could feel the icy wetness of his hands against his chest, but his hands could feel nothing. It seemed as though someone else's hands were grasping at him. He tried again to cry out, to scream, but only managed a weak, animal-like rasp.

He tried to force his eyes open, and his eyelids trembled as the painful, searing light poured into his eyes. He caught a brief glimpse of his surroundings before his eyes slammed shut again, but he could not make sense of the image. He saw a white, cushioned surface beneath him, encased in clear plastic, and a white featureless wall in front of him. He continued to gag.

His trembling hands had somehow grasped something protruding from his mouth and nose. He pulled. He forced his eyes open again as he franticly pulled at his face. He tugged at the long wet, tubes reaching into his face and and felt them sliding against the inside of his head, but the gagging continued. He continued to pull and produced more tubing from his nose and throat, but it seemed to extend deep into his body.

Pulling the last of the tubes out, he felt his throat open up and he began to vomit. Clear water ejected from his mouth onto the spongy, plastic-sealed surface beneath him and gathered in a puddle.

Deck lay, gasping, in the puddle of water as his eyes focused on his surroundings. He was in a hospital room, on some low, narrow bed. Overhead was a potent florescent light, beating him in the face, while the rest of the room lay in relative shadow. His eyes couldn't focus well enough to take in the rest of his surroundings.

He looked down at his body. He was naked, and covered in a slick, wet gel. More tubes protruded from his lower extremities. His skin was ghostly white. His body looked thinner than he remembered it, almost emaciated.

He pulled the last of the tubing from his body and rolled over onto his side, shivering violently. As he exhaled, he could faintly see his breath in the chilled air.

Deck could feel a powerful, stabbing hunger like he had never experienced before. His head ached and throbbed. He could see his vision actually waver in time to the pulsing of the potent migraine.

He knew he wanted to escape the piercing light. There was no comfort from the pain on the bed. He rolled his body forward and flopped onto the floor with a dull, wet thud. The floor was far colder than the bed, and he gasped as his chest smacked into the icy surface. He began to crawl.

Across the room was a gurney. Deck dragged his limp body over to it and pulled off the blanket. He wrapped the thin, stiff fabric around himself and slumped up against the wall, panting.

The room was bare and featureless. The bed he had been in had a twin next to it, and there was a locker beside each. There were no windows, no defining marks on the walls, save for the featureless blank display screen on the wall above his reach.

Where was the doctor? The nurse? Why was he being neglected? He summoned his strength, and drew in a deep breath. He let out a ragged cry for help. His throat was raw and horse. His voice sounded distant and empty.

He waited, watching the doorway and hoping for someone to come in to help him. After a few minutes, he cried out again, filling the room with his tortured, barely-human voice. Again, nobody came.

He wanted to stay there, leaning against the wall. He thought perhaps he could go back to sleep, that somehow things would be better when he awakened. Perhaps the doctor would come back. He longed to rest until his strength returned, but his hunger and the chill drove him to keep moving.

He crawled to the door and slapped his hand against the cold metal surface, but it didn't open. Locked. He looked up to see a control pad on the wall, out of his current reach.

He gathered his strength. Deck stood, bracing himself against the wall with one hand while he clutched the blanket around his shivering body with the other. His head spun as he brought himself up to a near-standing position. A spike of dizziness and nausea washed over his body.

Deck clung to the wall until it passed, and then turned to examine the control pad. The world around him was still a blurry haze, and he had to bring his face close to the controls before he could read them.

He found the spot on the smooth surface labeled "unlock" and poked it with a numb finger. The door slid open.

A wall of warm air greeted him as he crossed into the next room. It was probably still chilly, but far better than the room he had just left behind. He found himself in a large area separated by movable dividers. The room was trashed. Cabinets had been forced open and looted. Tables were overturned and most of the light fixtures were smashed. There were blackened, melted spots on the wall where something had burned the surface. Yet, there was something familiar about the room itself.

D'Arcy's office.

Citadel.

Questions rushed though his mind for which there were no answers.

He stepped further into the room. He didn't know what had happened, but he realized that medical help was probably not on the way. There had been some sort of emergency, or disaster. He began to think that perhaps Citadel had been evacuated, and he had been forgotten.

Suddenly he realized that he had stepped onto a sticky area of the floor. There was a tacky residue that tugged on his feet as he walked. He looked down to see the floor directly underneath his feet was a darkened outline of some long-dried puddle. He grimaced as he tried to imagine what he had just stepped in.

His eyes swept across the spread of out-of-focus debris lying on the floor and came to rest on the source of the puddle - an empty soda can. Deck looked to see an overturned mini-fridge nearby, its door hanging open as it filled the area in front of it in a tiny pool of light and chilled air.

Deck got down on his hands and knees and searched through the scattered collection of smashed, empty cans. He picked each up and shook it, in hopes of finding something inside. Instead, they had all long since leaked out and dried up.

Finally his eye caught the unbroken outline of a can. He scrambled across the sticky floor, abandoning his blanket, and grabbed it. There was a rush of joy as he lifted it and felt its full weight in his hand. His dead, shaking hands managed to crack it open and he began chugging greedily. In the back of his mind he knew he should drink carefully, unless he wanted to barf up the precious liquid as soon as he consumed it, but his hunger was absolute. He drank until the can was as light and empty as the ones on the floor. Deck pulled the can away from his lips and gasped, sputtering on the warm, carbonated solution of sugar. He held the can inverted over his mouth and shook it, making sure he had every drop.

A few minutes later, Deck stood, strengthened by the infusion of sugar. The sensation had slowly returned to his limbs, although his feet were still dead with numbness.