The Gate (2 page)

Then she’d ‘argued’ with Daniel and
he’d left. No doubt the sensors had picked up the distress, as
well.

“Damn it!” What were the chances, she
wondered, that Trude hadn’t figured out the dream was about
Daniel—or what the computer might construe as her
obsession?

She had a bad feeling that Trude had a
very good idea of the focus of the dream even if she had no way of
knowing exactly what the dream was about.

The shower shut off and Carly cursed
again. She’d been too wrapped up in figuring out whether or not
there was any danger to actually bathe and she’d used up her shower
quota! Telling herself to look on the bright side—at least she
hadn’t soaped herself up and wouldn’t be left with a film of
soap!—she got out and finished her morning ritual.

It wasn’t until she’d finished and
headed to the door that the real source of her distress hit
her.

Daniel had said he wanted his life
back! He’d been angry, but she’d sensed other emotions,
too—frustration, sorrow.

What would make her dream
that?

Chapter Two

Carly’s focus was off during her entire
work shift. She hadn’t dared asked the computer to produce the
report she’d asked for the night before when she realized Trude was
already suspicious of her behavior. Instead, she’d pretended she’d
forgotten all about it and rushed through preparing herself for
work and then rushed to the job.

Unfortunately, she was distracted
enough with her thoughts that she had a bad feeling her performance
had raised more alarms. Despite that uneasiness, the debate of
whether or not to find her friend, Brenda, when it came time for
her lunch break was a brief one.

“Hey! I’m taking my lunch break. Want
to join me?” she said by way of greeting when she found Brenda at
her console where her friend monitored the trawlers harvesting the
helium three from the moon dust. “I need to talk,” she added in
Arapaho.

Brenda had turned to look at her with a
smile of greeting. At that last, her smile stiffened slightly, but
she merely nodded. “I’ll catch up with you in about …,” she glanced
at her console to check the time, “fifteen minutes. Can you grab me
something from the cafeteria while you’re there?”

Carly grinned. “Lazy! What do you
want?”

“Whatever you get. It always looks
better than what I get,” Brenda responded with a grin.

“I know what you mean. No matter what I
get, whatever you picked always looks better.”

It occurred to her forcefully that the
request might just be another nail in her coffin, so to speak, yet
one more deviation from ‘normal’ behavior that the computer would
make a note of, but a sense of defiance welled inside her. She
didn’t care!

Well, she did. She just didn’t care
enough, at the moment, to worry too much about it.

She was almost due for another
psyche-eval anyway, she reflected. Anyone stationed on the moon
base facility was required to have a quarterly evaluation even
though conditions on the base had improved dramatically since the
facility had been opened over a decade earlier. Then—for the first
four or five years, actually—there’d been a legitimate reason to
require the careful monitoring of everyone’s mental health. The
conditions had been atrocious. The facility had been barely
adequate to sustain human life and there’d been nothing else on the
moon—no place to go to relax and feel as if they were ‘at home’. No
one had been allowed to stay on base more than six months without
at least a month on surface (back on Earth) as a break.

Because half of the first crew to
inhabit the station had ‘cracked’ from the isolation and the harsh
conditions.

Carly pushed those thoughts aside as
she joined a ‘herd’ of other workers heading toward the cafeteria.
Fortunately, the breaks were staggered so that there was never very
much of a wait to get food, because they were only allowed a thirty
minute break and nobody wanted to spend half of that waiting in
line just to get the damned food! Of course, when she decided to
eat with Brenda in their ‘special’ place, she never had more than
fifteen minutes anyway, but it was worth it.

Brenda had found one of the few places
on the entire moon colony where they could relax and talk freely
without being under the watchful eye of the central computer
system.

Carly had never figured out how Brenda
had managed to find it. She hadn’t wanted to infringe on their
friendship by asking, but she suspected that Brenda had ‘rebel’
connections, a shadowy group of people that distrusted ‘the system’
and electronic surveillance even while they used technology to
outwit technology.

In fact, it had been Brenda who’d
approached her and she suspected it might have been because Brenda
had heard about her ‘strange’ request to keep the monitoring system
out of her bathroom.

Brenda was Arapaho. Carly had actually
felt silly when Brenda had suggested teaching her a little of the
native language so that they could communicate without the
computer, or any of their co-workers, knowing what they were saying
because Arapaho was one of the few languages that hadn’t been added
to the computer data bank.

It had seemed like a slight to the
Native Americans that it was one of the few languages excluded
because most of the languages of Earth had been added—all but those
considered ‘dying’ languages because there were only small segments
of the population that could and did still speak them. So even
though she hadn’t particularly wanted to learn the language and had
felt a little silly about it besides because it almost seemed like
some sort of childish rebellion—learning a ‘secret’ code--she’d
felt uncomfortable with the idea of turning down the offer to learn
Brenda’s native language.

She was glad now that she’d learned the
smidgen she had—only enough, really, to let Brenda know when she
had something to talk about that she didn’t want ‘overheard’ by the
system. She’d been uneasy about it, afraid she might make the
‘list’, the list everybody somehow knew about that supposedly
didn’t exist of people under watch because the government suspected
they might be plotting insurrection.

That was absolutely absurd of
course!

No one of intelligence wanted
anarchy!

Unless they were also insane and it was
highly unlikely that anyone with ‘a bolt loose’ could get through
the regular psyche evaluations!

She was no rebel! She just didn’t
appreciate not having any privacy. She knew the system had been
designed for the greater good and it worked. There was very little
crime like there had been in the less civilized days before, very
little true hunger—occasional outbreaks of diseases or
illnesses—but those were quickly dealt with and the danger of a
pandemic like the one that had killed millions only a quarter of a
century earlier had vanished.

There were rumors that people
occasionally simply ‘vanished’ but she knew that was just the human
need to add a little excitement to their lives.

Because there wasn’t a lot of that
either, she thought with a touch of resentment.

Brenda greeted her when she reached the
mechanical room that was their ‘secret’ place by rushing to grab
the tray Carly had used to carry their food and beverages. “What is
it you need to talk about?”

There was a thread of alarm in Brenda’s
voice that discomfited Carly considering her reason for calling the
‘meeting’. She felt herself blushing.

“Nothing Earth shattering,” she
muttered uncomfortably, hastening to reassure her friend. “I just …
well, it’s private/personal and I think Trude suspects I’m a little
unstable.”

Something flickered in Brenda’s eyes.
“Oh?”

Carly felt her face heating even more.
She settled beside Brenda on the floor with their tray of food
between them. It wasn’t the most comfortable way to share a meal
and yet Carly had discovered that she enjoyed it far more than
sitting in the cafeteria surrounded by so many other people. “It’s
about my sex-sim, Daniel.”

Brenda blinked at her but to Carly’s
surprise and relief, she didn’t laugh. “What about him?”

Carly squirmed but over the past months
she’d developed a bond with Brenda that had made it far easier to
share intimate details about her life with Brenda even than talking
to her assigned therapist. “I’ve … well, I’ve sort of gotten
attached to him. I don’t know how to explain it, but I feel like
he’s real.”

Brenda grimaced. “Because he
is?”

Carly felt her heart jerk reflexively.
“I mean really real.”

Brenda digested that in silence while
she looked over her food, flipped the top half of her sandwich off
and began to select what she wanted on it and what she didn’t.
Carly watched with a touch of disapproval as she discarded the
onions and pickles and replaced the bread. “You mean you think he’s
a specific someone?” she responded finally.

Carly stared at her own sandwich for a
moment and finally took a bite. She actually didn’t like the onions
or pickles herself but the sandwich was a perfectly balanced diet.
Discarding any of it was upsetting that balance and she wouldn’t be
getting all of the vitamins and minerals she needed. She didn’t
know how Brenda could so blithely play with her health! “Yes, I do.
I don’t know why, but I just have this feeling ….”

“What did you do?”

Carly felt her face reddening again. “I
asked Trude to research it for me and find out who the contributors
were.”

Brenda stared at her. “Oh my fucking
god! You didn’t!”

Brenda’s reaction sent a shaft of alarm
through Carly and she felt the color leave her face. “I was
careful,” she said somewhat resentfully. “I’m sure the computer
didn’t suspect.”

“You’re pretty convinced you raised red
flags or you wouldn’t have made that comment,” Brenda said tightly.
“Why didn’t you just ask me?”

Carly sighed gustily. “It was
impulse.”

“It was a bad one! I wouldn’t be a bit
surprised if you didn’t make the list!”

There is was—the mythological list
again! “Oh come on!” Carly said testily. “Just for asking the
computer to tell me who the contributors were?”

Brenda stared at her a long moment and
finally shook her head. “Carly … I know you don’t really believe a
lot of the things I told you, but it just isn’t safe to be …
‘different’, to let the government know that you haven’t accepted
everything you’ve been told without question. It’s the questions
that get people removed.”

An icy finger of dread traced a path
down Carly’s spine. “You don’t believe those stories?” she said
doubtfully. “It’s just … stories to make children
behave.”

Anger flickered across Brenda’s
features but she tamped it. She shook her head. “Do you really
think you can afford to dismiss it as pure nonsense? I know for a
fact that it’s true.”

Carly’s eyes widened.
“Seriously?”

“I’m dead serious. My cousin
disappeared.” She glanced around uneasily. “And I know of at least
three other tribe members that did.” Her face crumpled. “And my
brother was killed in a freak accident.”

Carly felt her jaw drop. Her uneasiness
had intensified considerably but at that comment, sympathy crept
in. “I’m so sorry! How could that happen? What
happened?”

She immediately regretted that her
shock had led her to ask such a thing when she could see Brenda was
upset.

Brenda shrugged. “Nobody knows. He was
doing some kind of research—on the side. He’d been assigned to work
on dimension technology, but he had a theory he was working on that
wasn’t ‘sanctioned’. He never told me what it was because the
transmissions to earth are always monitored, you know, but he
hinted at something and I think it was enough of a hint to get him
killed.”

Shock rolled through Carly again, but
this time doubts crept in. “You’re saying … you’re suggesting ….”
She couldn’t even say the word.

“Murder.”

Carly dropped the remains of her
sandwich on her plate, feeling nausea wash through her. “Brenda
….”

“You don’t believe me,” Brenda said
tightly.

“It’s not that …. It’s just
….”

“Unbelievable.” Brenda seemed to
wrestle with herself. “You’re right. It’s probably just
grief.”

Dismay settled in Carly. She could
almost see a wall developing between them. “Don’t be that way!
Please! I’m just having a hard time with this, Bren.”

Brenda stared at her for a moment and
seemed to relax fractionally. “I’m just trying to tell you to be
careful. Why don’t you let me get a friend of mine to get that
information for you? It’ll be safer.”

“I already asked Trude,” Carly reminded
her.

“So pretend you forgot all about it and
don’t prompt for the report. It’ll look better. My friend can get
it without raising red flags.”

Relieved that Brenda seemed willing to
overlook her doubts, Carly smiled. “You don’t mind? I mean, I guess
it’s stupid to take such a chance over something like
this.”