Paradigm (17 page)

Still, he got into the GTO and started her up. Nathan threw the food into the trunk and jumped into the passenger seat.

“Let’s go!”

Sam peeled out. As they overtook the Rover convoy he glanced in the rearview and saw Vincent wave cheerily. Nathan had to be nuts.

It was late by the time Nathan felt safe enough to let Sam pull over for the night, and even then he insisted that they drive about five miles off the road and into a dusty ravine, invisible from the distant highway. Sam sighed and complied, shivering as he stepped out of the car and into the freezing desert night.

“You stay here,” he said, pulling his coat close. “I’ll see if I can find anything we can use for a fire.”

Nathan nodded.

“Here,” he said. “Take this.”

He handed Sam a small red plastic flashlight that looked like it had been the prize in an old cereal packet.

“You’re kidding, right?”

“Hey, it works.”

Sam sighed, flicked it on and went in search of firewood. After half an hour of stumbling among the rocks and tripping over the abandoned holes of rabbit-things, he’d found nothing but a couple of desiccated tumbleweeds that would probably burn for less than a minute each. He turned and trudged back up the ravine. They’d have to move on, that’s all. The desert cold can kill you as fast as the heat. Nathan would just have to suck it up and agree to camp nearer the highway.

Sam was still working on exactly how he was going to break the news, when he saw a faint orange glow up ahead. He picked up his pace and discovered Nathan warming his hands in front of an old space heater hooked up to one of the pocket generators.

“I didn’t think you’d find much out there,” he said, grinning.

“Thanks for the heads-up,” muttered Sam, sitting in front of the heater and letting the warmth thaw his bones.

“Can’t cook over it, though,” said Nathan. “What did you get at the store?”

“Water, oatmeal and honey. I got some cans, too, but that stuff needs to be heated.”

“That’s all?”

“Well, there were a couple of sleeping bags, which would have come in handy right about now, but some loon dragged me away.”

“Well, I guess oatmeal and honey might be okay.”

Sam shrugged. Nathan waited a moment, then went to the car and returned with two bowls and the oats and honey. Sam expected it to be dry and cloying, but it turned out to be pretty good. They washed it down with some of the water and huddled closer to the heater as a chill wind whipped through the ravine.

“How long will the generator last?” asked Sam.

“Until morning, I reckon. It was fully charged.”

Nathan shivered, retrieved a blanket from the car and sat down again.

“Sam?”

“Yeah?”

“What does the box do?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Yes, you are. You could have just dumped the thing and avoided all that hassle. But you didn’t. You said it was important. So what is it?”

Sam stared at the glowing bars of the heater. He didn’t want to explain anything else. There had been a time when he never explained anything. Never told anyone what he thought or felt. When had that changed? And why? The world he’d grown up in was far too dangerous, and people you thought of as friends could turn on a dime. But it was hard, holding all his cards close to his chest all the time. Keeping his own counsel. As if his own opinions were the only ones of any value. On the other hand, he’d already told Nathan pretty much everything else.

“It’s an interface,” he said, finally.

“An interface? What, like a keyboard?”

“Kind of…I guess.”

“You guess?”

“Look, I was ten when my dad died, right? My mom went two years before that. They told me stuff, but you don’t…you don’t remember everything. Even when you want to.”

“What
do
you remember?”

Sam wanted to tell him about the yellow and green kitchen, and the summer days and the laughing, but that wasn’t what Nathan wanted to hear. Sam had a sneaking feeling that Nathan was trying to work out if the thing was valuable or not and, if so, what it might be worth in barter.

“Sam?”

“It’s called the Paradigm Device,” said Sam, keeping his eyes on the heater and casting his mind back. “It was made by Hermes Industries Research in San Francisco.”

“Huh. Should’ve guessed,” said Nathan, grimly.

Sam glanced at him sharply, then turned back to the heater.

“Yeah. Well, my mom and dad worked there. They developed new systems. The place was divided into divisions and Alpha Division was new systems.”

“What does that mean?”

“They developed Mutha. Well, not
them
. The division did. But that was a long time ago. Anyway, the interface was always a problem. The interface between the plex and the users.”

“Why?”

“Dunno. Probably the hyperspatial thing. Anyway, they tried a bunch of things over the years, including drones, which worked. But they were banned pretty fast.”

“How come?”

“They’d developed a kind of pod and…um…people would be placed in them. Then they were…I don’t know…jacked in or something.”

“Jacked in? You mean a brain-computer interface?”

“Yeah.” Sam nodded. “I always remember that story. It gave me nightmares for years. They’d plug the people into these things and then the machine, Mutha, would communicate directly, using their brains and voices. They’d only last about six months. Then they died. My dad said they were like husks—completely empty.”

“Shit. That is messed up.”

“They were outlawed some time before the third collapse, back when there was still a national government and they could do stuff like that.”

Another icy wind sliced through the camp, creating stinging dust devils as it went.

“Okay. So where does the Paradigm Device fit in?”

“That was later. Years later. Systems division started developing it, but then… something went wrong. My dad said it was all a crock.”

“It didn’t work?”

“No, it did work…at least I think it did. But he said it wasn’t them. They didn’t design it.”

“Wait.” Nathan leaned forward, forgetting about the cold. “They developed it but they didn’t know who designed it?”

“Something like that…lots of people have a hand in projects like that, I guess. Specialists for each element. They were building it, but then they found out.”

“Found out what?”

“That…someone else had designed it. Someone they didn’t trust.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know,” said Sam, adjusting his coat and hoping that Nathan couldn’t detect the lie. “Someone bad, I guess. Anyway, my mom and dad and some others thought they should stop, but they got overruled. So a bunch of them left. They stole the prototype box, along with most of the specs and hid them. Then they all just vanished into the Wilds.”

“But I don’t get it,” said Nathan. “What was so bad about it? Why did it matter who designed it?”

“I’m not sure. I think there was something else. Something my dad never told me.”

“So…okay…why didn’t they just destroy it?”

Sam shrugged, but Nathan didn’t seem satisfied.

“That doesn’t make any sense,” he said. “Why didn’t they just build a new one?”

“Dunno. Maybe they did.”

“No, they can’t have. If they’d made a new one then no one would care about the prototype. So why—”

“I don’t know!” Sam felt suddenly angry. “I was ten! That’s all I remember!”

He glared at Nathan, wishing that he was still traveling alone. The answer to his question was Mutha, of course. Mutha designed the box. But Sam couldn’t tell him that without revealing that the great brain was sentient, and every instinct screamed at him not to do that. It would just prompt more questions and more suspicion. He realized now that he shouldn’t have told Nathan anything, he should have just made up some plausible story about how he escaped from Bast and left it at that.

“I’m going to sleep,” he announced, lying on the cold earth and curling up as tightly as he could.

He closed his eyes. He could feel Nathan’s boring into his back, but he didn’t turn around. He wasn’t going to talk about it any more. He was free. They were in the Wilds and out of California. None of that old stuff mattered.

Except that it did.

After a while the sound of regular breathing told him that Nathan had fallen asleep. Sam tried to do the same, but every time he started to drift off, instead of a restful oblivion, there was the blue muthascreen and those words: “
Hello, Samuel
.”

Chapter 15

T
he generator ran out of juice
just before dawn and Sam woke, shivering, the hard ground of the ravine sparkling with frost. Nathan stumbled off to the car, still half asleep, leaving Sam to pack up the heater and place the pocket generator on the dash to recharge.

The inside of the car felt even colder than the morning air and the addition of two warm-ish bodies soon misted the windows. Sam wiped a hole in the condensation, pushed the cigar lighter in and turned the key. The old engine turned over slowly and stopped. He tried again. Same thing. He sighed. One day, he knew, the GTO would give up the ghost forever and become just another of the rotting hulks that littered the ruined highways.

“But not today,” he whispered. “Not today. Come on, old girl.”

He turned the key once more. This time she fired. He let her run for a few minutes, then pulled slowly out of the ravine and headed back to the highway.

Things got better over the next few days. Nathan stopped asking so many questions, and they acquired some new stock at an abandoned settlement outside of what had been Phoenix. Sam pointed the car north up the I-17, stopping at every small settlement along the way. By that time, Nathan was back on form and sales were pretty good. Good enough for them to be able to afford to gas the car up with actual gas and still have enough stuff left over to buy an old ice chest for the food. As if that wasn’t enough, one store had a shelf with old books. Sam couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen any for sale, and snapped up two: “The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes” and “The Green Odyssey.” He hadn’t read either of them and reveled in that anticipatory thrill he always felt when he found something new.

He was enjoying himself, but between the stolen moments in Victorian England or on the plains of a distant planet, he couldn’t help noticing that, when he wasn’t actually selling, Nathan was tense and jumpy and continued taking much more care in selecting their campsites than he had ever done before. Sam thought it was ridiculous, but he kept quiet about it…and about the fact that he’d spotted some of the Rovers’ vehicles in both Bumblebee and Camp Verde. There was no point in making things worse.

Which is why he was surprised to spot Nathan talking to Vincent in a side street in Munds Park. Sam had been following up a lead on some motor oil for the GTO that had involved him being directed to first one house and then another before coming up empty-handed after all. He was headed back to the car when he spotted them. Nathan didn’t look as frightened as before and nodded and smiled as Vincent handed him something small.

Sam waited by the car, but didn’t say anything when Nathan returned. If he had ironed out his problems with the Rovers that was fine by Sam. It would certainly make driving around the country with him a lot more bearable.

They stopped for the night at a clearing among the pines. It was even colder than the desert, but the air seemed fresher somehow, though the sky was the same dirty yellow. Sam organized the food, roasting some something-or-other steaks that he’d bought in town. It was best not to ask too many questions when people had honest-to-god fresh meat for sale.

“Coffee?” said Nathan.

“You’re kidding,” said Sam, amazed.

He hadn’t tasted real coffee in over a year.

“Yeah. Managed to snag some back in town.”

Sam watched as Nathan slowly prepared the drink. It was such a rare treat, every care was taken in the preparation, as if it were some kind of religious ceremony.

“Sam…” Nathan seemed hesitant.

“Yes?”

“I’ve been thinking. I think you need to know…I want you to know…about …about…”

“The Rovers?”

“Yes. What have you heard about them?”

“Just what you told me and some stuff I heard from a journalist at Bast’s dinner—that they used to live on the shores of Lake Tahoe and were genetically mutated after Hermes Industries poisoned the water so now they die before they are twenty.”

“Not all of them.”

Sam looked at him as he poured the coffee into a jug, and a light dawned.

“You mean not you.”

“Right. I mean not me,” said Nathan.

He went back to the car to fetch the mugs then sat down on the other side of the fire.

“It wasn’t just me, though. There were others. Not many at first, I don’t think, but as time passed there were more and more of us.”

“But that’s good, isn’t it?”

“You don’t understand. We never thought of it as a curse. It was the price we paid for the gift.”

“What gift? You’re not talking about the fish?”

“The fish were the best thing that ever happened to us. It was the gift of the lake.”

“Wait…You’re saying that you all think that the poison in the water that turned the fish toxic and mutated your genes is actually some kind of mystical gift from the
lake
?”

Nathan nodded.

“But that’s ridiculous!” Sam couldn’t believe he was hearing this. “Hermes Industries
poisoned
the lake. It was an accident. That’s all. An industrial accident.”

“You don’t understand. Hermes was the mechanism. The lake was rewarding us. They say that we were so poor back then we could barely feed our families. The lake had once been a place where people went on vacation and spent money, but that had stopped years before. Before the second collapse, even.”

“Okay, say the lake did give you a gift and Hermes Industries was merely the tool it used. How do you explain the fact that your people were thrown off the land by the cartels?”

“Punishment.”

“Punishment?”

“We took the gift for granted and then some of us started to be born without it. Do you see?”

“Um…see what?”

“The lake was angry. We were exiled as unworthy. But then, about twenty years ago, there was this guy…Carter, his name was. Anyway, he realized that it was a test and that we would regain our place on the shores of the lake if we threw the bad ones back.”

“The bad ones?” Sam wasn’t liking the sound of this at all.

“The ones that didn’t have the gift. Carter came up with this system. When we are born we all get a tattoo. There are nine patterns so there should only be two age groups with the same pattern at any one time. The oldest ones should be dead before the youngest are born.”

“And if they’re not?”

“They’re given back to the lake.”

“You mean they drown them?”

“Yes. That’s why they never leave California. Well, that’s part of it. All Rovers go back to the lake when they die. It’s called the Return. They can never travel more than a few days distance from it, just in case.”

Nathan poured the coffee into the mugs and handed one to Sam. He cupped it in his hands and breathed in the aroma. It was wonderful.

“So you were one of the survivors,” he said, taking a sip and rolling it round in his mouth.

“Yes. I got rid of my tattoo and stayed out of California. It’s been two years. I was sure they’d have forgotten about me.”

“But Vincent recognized you out at the warehouse store.”

Nathan nodded. “What are the odds, eh?”

“And they’ve been following you ever since because they want to take you back to the lake?”

“Yes.”

“That is seriously messed up.”

He took a gulp of the coffee and considered that, turbulent as his own childhood had been, it was nothing compared to the life Nathan must have had.

“Anyway, so today Vincent found me and it turned out he didn’t want to take me back to the lake after all. Well, he did, but he had a…proposition. One that meant they’d leave me alone forever.”

Sam looked at him, but suddenly realized he was having difficulty focusing. Nathan must have noticed because he moved around to Sam’s side of the fire.

“You see, they’re bounty hunters, Sam.”

“I know,” said Sam. “You told me. Back at the warehouse.”

At least, that’s what he thought he’d said. Or had he just thought it? Something was going on. It was as if he was shutting down, a bit at a time.

“What…” He waited. Yes, he definitely said that. “What have you done?”

“I’m sorry, Sam, but they’re not going to kill you, just take you home.”

“Home?”

There was a movement in the trees and Vincent stepped out, flanked by two Rovers Sam hadn’t seen before. Sam tried to concentrate, to see what it was inside him. If he’d beaten the fish toxin, then maybe…

“San Francisco,” Vincent was crouching in front of him now. “You wouldn’t believe the bounty on your head.”

“I don’t…I don’t understand…”

“Hermes Industries Labs, Sam. They want their boy back real bad.”

Sam just stared. He couldn’t speak now. He couldn’t even feel Nathan going through his pockets and taking the keys and the cigar lighter.

“I’m really sorry, Sam. I really…I just didn’t want to die. And…well, I don’t think you’re human. Hearing the plex…all that shit…real people can’t do that.”

He heard Nathan walk away and then he heard the GTO as it started up and drove away into the night.

He tried concentrating again, tried to find the drug inside him…whatever it was. But there was nothing. Just the shrinking tunnel that was his vision.

“It’s a real humdinger, ain’t it, Sam?” said Vincent pleasantly. “The guys at Hermes were real insistent. Said it was the only thing’d work. Okay boys, let’s get him back to the van.”

Sam didn’t feel them pick him up, he just felt the slight change in the breeze on his face as they moved him swiftly through the woods to where a pick-up and trailer were parked. Then he was lying on a bed and a girl’s face was looking down at him.

“Is he still alive?” her voice was soft and far, far away.

“Yeah. He’s fine.”

Was that Vincent? Why was he whispering?

The truck fired up and the trailer lurched as they pulled out onto the old highway. But Sam didn’t hear it. He could only hear the GTO.

How could Nathan have stolen the GTO?

He struggled to sit up. Or thought he did.

There were muffled voices.

He’d kill Nathan for this. Drowning in a lake would look pretty damn good if he ever caught up with him again.

And the Paradigm Device was in the trunk.

And…what did they mean “home”?

And then…nothing.