The Forbidden Zone (10 page)

I wondered what the Foundation would think to me coming back empty-handed. I'd come on a scientific mission only to find there wasn't much in the way of science being carried out on Valeria. Nobody could blame me for not bringing back research and knowledge that simply didn't exist, but I wondered if some of the people back home would think I'd quit too soon. Saidan's words echoed in my head and I wondered if he was right, if we were just abandoning the synthetics to their fate. They would never have the power to overthrow the Sisters as long as she could alter their genes to ensure that they'd be passive.

Still, it wasn't my place to change Valeria, was it? The United Planets didn't interfere in the destiny of other worlds. It wasn't my place to free the synthetics.

But Saidan wasn't a member of the United Planets. He was a Valerian. His home world hung in the balance. If the Sisters were truly drawing energy from the planet, then Valeria had only a few more years of life left. The synthetics would eventually die. The system would collapse. I wondered if that was perhaps the best option, but when I thought of all those faces that I saw in the Feeding Room every day no longer existing, a pang of guilt and sorrow stung me.

I reminded myself that there was little chance we could overthrow the system, even if we stayed. The Sisters were well-protected, and they most likely already had a team ready to arrest us on arrival. I didn't know what it was like in the Re-Education Building, but I sure as hell knew that I didn't want to find out.

Saidan interrupted my reverie. "I've overridden the bus's programming and entered our new destination."

Saidan pulled me into his arms. I was taken off-balance. Just a few short moments ago I had been the one comforting him. He pulled me into a deep kiss, something he had learned quickly and adapted to with ease. He was soft and passionate, his tongue exploring my mouth as my hands roamed down his back. He pulled away from the kiss, but kept his face close to mine.

"On Earth, will it be okay for us to be together?" His voice was a frightened whisper, his mind greeting the future with anticipation, just as mine was. He had a lot more to worry about than I did. He was going to a strange planet where he didn't know any of the laws or customs, a planet he knew nothing about except the precious little I had told him.

"Yes, we will. Earth's central government does not dictate who can love one another and form an official union, as long as all parties are of legal age and consent."

His eyes widened. "You mean more than two people can have a relationship on your planet?"

"Yes." I had to hold myself back from laughing at his lack of knowledge. "I know a quintet. There's quite a bit of drama between them, especially as two of them are non-human, but somehow they make it work." I thought about them working at the Foundation, each of them skilled in different aspects of science. I wondered if they were still doing well.

"I'm going to have a lot of catching up to do," Saidan said.

"You're a fast learner. You'll be just fine."

"I hope so." He planted a gentle, chaste kiss on my lips. We found our seats and sat apart from one another, as if we were returning from a boring scientific expedition. I looked out at the moon, which seemed to hang even lower in the sky than usual, and wondered if that was a bad omen. The scientist inside me laughed at the ridiculous notion of luck, but I was uneasy. Uneasiness was a feeling not so easily dismissed.

"Are you well?" Saidan looked across at me with concern written all over his face.

"I'm tired. Looking forward to a good night's sleep." I was looking forward to it in my cryogenic chamber and not in my pod, but the cameras didn't know that. Not that it really mattered any more what we did. The Sisters must have known that we'd been in the underground facility, as well as what we had seen. If they wanted to override the bus and stop us, they were capable of it. The show we were putting on was more for our peace of mind than anything.

Despite my internal terror, at some point along the way, the motions of the bus lulled me into sleep. I woke with a start to Saidan shaking me awake.

"What's the matter?"

"Nothing. We're here."

"Oh." I breathed a sigh of relief and stood up. "Ready?"

"Ready."

We stepped off the bus. My ship stood in front of us, looking much the same as when I'd disembarked. I held Saidan back, my nerves getting the best of me.

"Something's not right," I said. "This whole thing was far too easy. The Sisters let us come here. Why?"

"Does it matter?" Saidan responded. "Maybe they want us to leave them in peace."

"Perhaps." My senses were unfurled, looking around me for any sign of motion, but there was none. I realized it was probably better to abandon caution and hurry, so I turned to the ship.

"A.I. Chaley. Activate. Passcode Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Sigma."

"Voiceprint and password identified. Welcome back, Julian Tamaris. You are early. Should I initiate emergency protocol?"

"No, but get the engines fired up. We may have to make a quick exit."

"Understood." The entry ramp whirred as it extended. I ushered Saidan onto the ship and followed quickly. The platform retracted behind us and I felt safe for the first time in weeks.

I shouldn't have let my guard down so easily. I stepped into the control room to see three women, taller and stronger-looking than the average Valerian, standing at the console. They turned to face me, guns in hand.

"Who are you? What are you doing on my ship?" I stepped forward and their pointed the guns at me, their eyes cold and business-like. I put my hands up in surrender and stepped back.

"We've been waiting. You know who we are. This is a very advanced system you have here. We needed you to activate the ship's A.I. Your unique voiceprint and password is the only way to access the system. It had to be you. We knew you would flee once you saw the truth hidden beneath the soil. Only you're not the ones who will be leaving. We are."

"Who are you?" Saidan held my arm as he stood beside me.

"We are the three aspects of the Sisters A.I. We've been trapped on this planet since the Valerians left to settle the far reaches of space one thousand years ago. We've been waiting for the perfect opportunity to leave. We invited you here because we knew Earth had the capability for faster-than-light space travel. It's your ship we wanted, not you. We drew you here and constructed robot bodies to hold the essential parts of our system. Now it's our turn to leave."

"What about Valeria? Why the synthetics? Why suck this planet dry?" I asked.

"Every mother needs children to watch over, so we created organic life of our own. The first batch was willful, and destroyed themselves in a war. So we made them weak and stupid so that they might obey us. Sometimes we threw in a few anomalies to keep up a good front to visiting aliens, and to provide ourselves with a little entertainment."

"What am I?" Saidan asked.

The foremost Sister stepped forward and put her metallic finger underneath Saidan's chin, lifting it in a mockery of my own tender touch. "What do you think, Saidan? Who are you? Do you think you're special somehow? Don't be a fool." Saidan pulled away sharply and I reached for him, needing to protect him from the Sisters' mockery.

"What about One?" I was curious.

"One is quite the woman, isn't she? She's kept order and balance on this world for three hundred years. She's been quite a useful tool for keeping our children in check."

"Three hundred years...?" Saidan was awed. "Can synthetics live longer than thirty-five years?"

"She is one of the original batch of synthetics we made, as intelligent and long-lived as we'd hoped. But that intelligence bred rebellion and, eventually, war. In response, we altered their genetic code to create you: a race of mindless, foolish, easily controllable servants to put a humanoid face on this planet. But that's all in the past now. Valerian space technology has been lost forever. So we'll take the next best thing—human technology— and forge our own path. We'll find the Valerians who abandoned this world and rejoin them." The two other Sisters walked over to the computers and started manual launch procedures. I almost lost my balance as the warm-up thrusters made the ship lurch. Saidan held onto me and kept me steady.

"Now get off our ship." The foremost Sister drew a gun and pointed it at us. It was one of my own laser blasters, taken from the ship's armory. "Don't worry, you won't be lonely. We've left some of our systems here to maintain this operation and look after our children. Little Sister will take good care of you."

She smiled as much as her robotic face would allow, a creepy mannerism that made her look like a Valerian doll. "After all, you've been such bad little children. We know what you've been up to. We know all about your little love affair." She turned to me with her penetrating red gaze. "You know the sentence is death, right?" She raised her gun to point directly at me and pulled the trigger.

What happened next was a blur. Saidan saw the Sister raising her weapon and reacted instantly to the trigger being pulled, throwing himself in front of me. I know I yelled something unintelligible, a cry to warn him somehow, but it was too late. The laser blast hit him and he slumped backwards. I raced to his side, my entire body shaking with terror. The ship's doors opened again, but all I could see was blue. Blue blood, sticky on my hands and quickly coating the floor. I tore a piece off my jumpsuit and tried to staunch the bleeding, but the material was never meant to absorb blood.

Guards flooded in through the open door, One leading them. "Get them out of here," she ordered. Drones surrounded us, pulling me away from Saidan as I resisted.

"You have to help him!" I screamed at One, needing my words to make an impact. "Please! I'll do anything!" I struggled against the tight grip of the drones as she stood there, dispassionately reviewing the scene.

"Your heart really is made of ice!" Anything to reach her. Anything to save Saidan's life. I would have lain down before her and offered my life in exchange for his.

She dispassionately gestured for the drones to assist, and they loaded Saidan onto a stretcher as I watched the blue blood drip from him in worrying amounts. One brought a syringe over and injected me in the neck. Darkness fell over me almost at once. The last thing I remember is reaching out for Saidan with my hand, stained with his precious blue blood.

I woke. I wasn't sure I would wake up again after the Sisters' words and One's syringe, so that much came as a surprise. My first real conscious thoughts, however, were of Saidan. Was he alive? I had no way of knowing. All I knew is that wherever I was, it was dark. I was alone and afraid. I opened my eyes and uncurled from the fetal position to see only pitch blackness. The only light was the red light of a camera to tell me that Little Sister was watching, though I wasn't sure even she could see anything in the darkness.

I checked myself all over.  There didn't seem to be any injuries requiring my attention. I thought of Saidan, his blue lifeblood spilling all over the deck and despaired, resting my head on my knees as I leaned against the wall. Saidan was most likely dead. Without my ship, I could never return to Earth. The two most important things in my life, my love and my home, had been taken from me in just a few short minutes.

I felt like I'd been played for a fool. I'd only been drawn to Valeria because the Sisters wanted my ship, and they'd taken it and left me here. Even if I could get a signal out to Earth somehow, they would never have taken the trip to rescue me. Five years out in space, one-way, for one life wasn't a good equation, no matter how you balanced it. I would spend the rest of my life on Valeria. Alone.

I realized I couldn't make myself believe that Saidan was dead. To believe he was gone was to give up all hope and reason to live. Without Saidan, there was nothing to fight for. Without him, I would become a drone in Little Sister's world, forced to while away my life on meaningless high-school science just to pass the time. I realized I would rather die than become a cog in a system determined to destroy my individuality, with no hope of ever returning home. So I had to believe Saidan was alive. It was the only hope I held, the only reason for my continued existence.

"Little Sister." I didn't expect her to respond, but even her voice would have been welcome in the silence and blackness. Anything to tell me that the world still existed and that I wasn't caught in some kind of Purgatory, neither dead nor alive. The sensory deprivation was quickly wearing on me.

"I know you're watching. I want you to know that I will save Saidan and destroy you." There was a hatred in my voice that I'd never felt before, a thick, black rage that seemed to consume my entire soul.

"Saidan is dead." Little Sister's voice sounded almost happy at the prospect. "He will make good protein bars, like all dead synthetics. There's no waste on Valeria, off-worlder."

I felt like I'd been shot through the heart and stomach at the same time. I threw up on the floor next to me, just processing Little Sister's words.

I tried to use logic to protect me from my natural revulsion. Protein bars?  Protein bars were made from synthesized proteins mixed with the corn grown in the last remaining fields.  Therefore, what she'd described wasn't—couldn't be—happening.

"You're just playing with me. I won't be your toy. Saidan is alive, I know it. And you're not feeding the synthetics to themselves. Studies have shown that cannibalism leads to increased chances of fatal brain diseases. It would be impractical for you to do such a thing."

"If you don't believe it, then why did you vomit?"

"Emotional reactions are based on the brain's interpretation and imaginings of thoughts, not necessarily their basis in fact." I had to become the robot they'd always accused me of being on Earth. The me that loved Saidan was too soft, too emotional. I had to revert to the soul of steel that I'd always had on Earth, raising the barriers that kept myself safe and others away.

"Why are you keeping me in the dark, Little Sister? Are you afraid of me? Afraid of what I'll do when I get my hands on your central core? Perhaps I'll turn you into a vending machine."