The Tau Ceti Transmutation (Amazon) (21 page)

“Cheers to that.” I held up a cup of sake.

Carl clinked me with a spare chopstick, and we ate in silence. Carl stopped after his lone platter of stinky fish rolls, but I kept going. I polished off an additional three plates before my partner interrupted.

“So…care to bounce ideas off one another?”

“I’m not sure there’s much to talk about,” I said. “We’re at a dead end.”

After ditching my blisteringly-hot robe and mask combination, I’d caught a cab with Carl out of Knottington to the tube station, whereupon I’d had Paige give Valerie a few more Brain calls only to be rejected repeatedly. After arriving in Cozy Harbor, we’d booked it to Valerie’s apartment, where I found that her front door had been fixed. Whether or not Valerie was home, I couldn’t tell, but repeated chime activations, knocks, and calls for her by name didn’t rouse her, though they did rouse some neighbors and bring me various threats of violence and police action. From there, we’d headed to Val’s bakery, but similar actions there brought similar results. In a fit of inspiration, I’d tried the pass code from the morning on the door, but it no longer worked. Hungry, thirsty, and depressed, I’d settled on Katoh’s for some solid and liquid pick-me-ups.

“We’re not at a dead end,” said Carl. “The information you gathered at the Veesnu chapel could prove incredibly useful.”

“How so?” I asked. “All I discovered was that, in all likelihood, both me and Professor Castaneva from the Cetie U biology department are right. Her, in that Veesnu is a combination religion and science, one that involves the use of complicated, home-brewed medical equipment, and me, in that those Veesnu headcases are brainwashing their disciples. Literally. I can’t imagine what else those resonance scanners and holoprojector arrays are for.”

“To be fair, we’re not sure what any of that equipment is for,” said Carl. “I’ll have to go through your feed later tonight with Paige to see if we can glean any additional clues from what you saw and heard. But it’s useful information, even if you weren’t able to access any Diraxi data from the displays.”

I shook my head. “I don’t know, Carl. What if I’m right? What if the Diraxi
are
brainwashing religious ‘pilgrims’ and Valerie is one of them. It may be immoral, but is it illegal? Valerie accepted Veesnu of her own free will, as far as we know. Why should we interfere?”

“Because she came to us for assistance,” said Carl. “As you put it earlier, if she’s suffering from mental foul play, some part of her is still lucid enough to seek help. And we agreed to provide it to her. Besides, even if what the Veesnu believers are doing is legal—something we’re not sure of, by any means—breaking into Miss Meeks’ apartment isn’t. Neither is attacking you at the race dome. And let’s not forget someone trespassed in your office—possibly the Diraxi. Those are all criminal offenses.”

I shrugged and played with the last of my sushi rolls.

“Come on,” said Carl. “What about your sermon-inspired blackout? Or the mysterious Dirax at the chapel who helped you escape? None of that interests you?”

I looked up at my pal. Apparently, he took the look on my face as an answer.

“Oh, I see,” said Carl. “You’re down in the dumps because Miss Meeks won’t answer your calls.”

“Yes, Carl, I am,” I said. “I’ll admit it. I’m worried about Valerie. But there’s nothing I can do. She won’t answer my Brain pings. She hasn’t posted to her social media profiles in weeks. We can’t find her. I don’t know what else to try. And the stuff you mentioned? The break-ins, the blotchy faced Dirax? Yeah, they interest me. But it’s been a long day. I’m tired. Right now, I just want to pop a few more Buzzkills and painkillers and go to bed.”

Carl grimaced.

“What?” I asked.

“The Buzzkills and painkillers? We left them at your office.”

I frowned and shook my head. “We’ll stop there on our way home.”

Paige paid as I got up to go. After leaving Katoh’s, Carl and I caught a cab and headed back to my office, which wasn’t as huge a burden as I’d made it out to be. The building wasn’t more than a few minutes drive from my apartment.

The entire ride, thoughts of Valerie accosted me. I’d been honest to Carl—to a degree. I was worried about her, but more so than I let on, and on multiple levels. What if the Diraxi meant her bodily harm? She’d implied as much in our last conversation, and if the Veesnu chaplain had tried to injure me, why not her? Surely she knew more about whatever was going on behind the closed Veesnu church doors than I did. If they suspected her of spreading information…

I also fretted over the emotional and mental damage the Diraxi might be inflicting upon her—not only the deleterious effects on her memory, but her overall ability to think, reason, and process information.

The thing that stuck in my craw—the biggest piece I’d omitted from my conversation with Carl—was the effect of Valerie’s brainwashing on
me
. Despite my best efforts, I’d fallen for her. I knew that. What could I say? It was more than her physical beauty. She’d paid attention, spoken kindly, and shared a shy smile with me. But—and this was the part that scared me—what if the Valerie I’d come to know was instead a repressed part of her, a personality existing only in a corner of her mind, hidden behind a Veesnu-induced blockade? What if the real Valerie didn’t care for me at all? By curing her of whatever malaise the Diraxi had cast upon her…would she forget me entirely?

We reached my office building. I entered and sent for the lift, my thoughts still running roughshod over my senses.

A trill brought me out of my reverie. “Paige…is that Val?”

My digital lady friend had ridden shotgun with me throughout my mental excursion. She said, in almost a sad voice,
Sorry, pal. It’s another GenBorn number.

I sighed. “Seriously? They already called about my appointment earlier today. Decline it.”

The lift arrived and Carl and I entered. As the elevator accelerated upward, my Brain trilled once more.

GenBorn again,
said Paige, anticipating my question.
It’s not the same number that called this morning, if you’re curious.

“Fine, put them through,” I said angrily.

I anticipated the onset of the call and launched into a tirade as soon as it connected. “Yes, GenBorn? I’d like to talk to a manager please. I want to change my communication preferences so that—”

The voice on the other end of the line wasn’t the kind, secretarial voice that had dialed me in the morning. Instead, it was rough, masculine, and direct. “Don’t enter your office.”

The lift dinged and the door opened.

“Um…what?” I said.

“Do not enter your office,” said the voice. “It’s not safe.”

Carl stepped into the hallway, curiosity plain on his face. He gave me a silent head nod as if to say, What’s up?

I followed him into the hall so the lift wouldn’t close on me. “What do you mean? Who is this?”

Silence reigned, followed by the familiar, bubbly voice of Paige.
He hung up.

“Who was it?” I asked.

Not sure,
said Paige.
Like I said, it was a GenBorn corporate number. It’s not assigned to any one individual.

Paige had filled Carl in. “Why didn’t he want you to enter the office?”

Before I could answer that I didn’t know, the office exploded.

26

I found myself staring at the ceiling, hot and wet, as fine droplets pelted me in the face. A red light flashed intermittently—the fire alarm if I wasn’t mistaken—but the alarm’s distinctive, pulsing blare didn’t accompany it. Instead, the roaring of a thousand oceans filled my ears, waves crashing on windswept shores and breakers impacting stone.

Orange and yellow tongues licked the corners of my vision. I tried to shift to view them more clearly, but my neck declined to cooperate, instead rebuking me with a sharp, stinging pain.

Over the oceanic roar, I could make out a voice. A familiar one. Paige’s. She was saying something over and over. A name.
My
name. Rich. She seemed upset, or perhaps concerned. I couldn’t grasp why. The water was fine, and warm. Oh, so warm—like a sauna.

I felt a shaking underneath me—not the rocking of a wave, more like a mild earthquake. A rumbling. Perhaps the pounding of feet. Leaving my neck and its crankiness alone, I tried to shift my eyeballs from the intoxicating allure of the ceiling and the mysterious, roiling black cloud travelling across it.

They obliged. I peered down the hallway. I spotted someone. Carl! Good old Carl, he’d never abandon me—though he looked busy. He’d made some friends. Well-dressed chaps in gray suits. Some of them held long, oblong implements. Batons, maybe? And they were throwing a party. There were others. Diraxi, mostly.

I blinked. Actually, just Diraxi. And it wasn’t so much of a party as a mêlée. Diraxi pincers snapped at grey rayon covered arms, batons flew, and Carl darted here and there, chopping at carapaces with his bare hands. He turned and ran toward me, but didn’t stop.

I tried to shift my eyes his way as he left my field of vision, but the squishy orbs in my skull wouldn’t cooperate. The hot rain continued to fall, and the pounding of the waves continued.

A minute, or perhaps only a few seconds, later, Carl returned. He stood over me, his mouth moving, but no words came out.

“Hey, Carl, it’s good to see you. What’s with the waves and the rain and the roar?” I asked—or I think I did. My mouth moved. I could feel it.

Carl’s lips continued to flap. I wasn’t sure what he was getting at, but his timing was lousy. Didn’t he know I was trying to sleep? I distinctly remembered desiring that in the near past. With Paige’s voice surging in my mind and Carl’s face centimeters from my own, I decided to take a nap.

27

I sat in a hard-backed excuse for an office chair, staring across a desk at a surly sergeant at the local police branch. The man sported a thick horseshoe mustache that he wore over his scowl, and his fingers drummed the surface of his desk with the same intensity as his gaze.

Nearby, a nasally-voiced Meertor proclaimed his innocence to a deputy detective. “I implore you sir, those anhydrous tetrachloride tablets aren’t mine. I mean, they are, I suppose, but I didn’t know that’s what they were. I was just asking that man for a dose of respirator inhalants, as my current stores are running low. He must’ve slipped them into my satchel when I wasn’t looking. Please—”

The sergeant’s gruff voice drowned out the Meertor’s pleas. “So, let’s go over this one more time. For my amusement, let’s say.”

“Really?” I asked.

“Really.”

I sighed. Despite reveling in the joys of an explosion-induced catnap, I’d never made it to bed.

I’d woken up on the sidewalk outside my apartment building. Carl had sat beside me, a worried expression plastered across his face. As soon as he’d seen my eyelids flicker, he’d sighed and asked if I could hear him. I could. The crashing wave-like roar that had filled my ears was gone, replaced instead with a dull, bothersome ringing. I’d tried to nod to Carl in agreement, but my neck took exception to that, so I’d been forced to use words.

My vocal cords had strained, my voice sounding scratchy and faint in my own head as I’d said yes. Carl had sighed, and suddenly Paige had appeared in my mind, asking if I was ok. I thought I was, and I’d tried to say as much, but I’m not sure how much of it came out the way I’d intended. I’d also noted how thirsty I was and asked if Carl could get me a drink of water. He’d said he would, but he insisted I wait until the paramedics arrived.

Above me, tongues of flame licked at the sides of my fourth floor office while firefighting drones zipped around the outside of the building firing water and fire-retardant chemicals in through broken windows. The inferno seemed to have been contained on my floor, though based on the twisting of the steel girders peeking through the smoke haze and the char covering the exterior of the building, some serious damage had been inflicted.

I’d asked Carl how I’d made it to the sidewalk, and he’d proceeded to fill in the gaps in my memory. The blast from the explosion had briefly laid him out as well—possibly damaging a few of his more finely-tuned sensors—but he’d recovered much more quickly than I had. His systems had come back online bare moments after the sprinklers had activated. And that’s when the party had started.

A squad of Diraxi had poured in through the stairwell down the hall, none of them wearing sashes, but according to Paige’s analysis of Carl’s feed, their posture and the prominence of their thoraxes had betrayed their evil intentions. Carl had prepped to defend me, but before the Diraxi took more than a few steps toward us, the door to the office down the hall from me, that of a self-employed financial advisor, had snapped open, spitting out a group of dudes in gray suits. They’d come prepared for trouble. With Carl’s help, they engaged the Diraxi, who apparently hadn’t counted on the presence of the suit-and-tie clad folks. The alien intruders put up minimal resistance before retreating. The guys in gray had chased after them, and Carl had returned to me. As the fire threatened to grow into an inferno, Carl whisked me downstairs and out to the sidewalk.

I’d asked about the men in gray, but Carl had as little knowledge about them as I did. He’d never considered pursuing them. His entire focus had been on me and my well-being. I’d smiled when he’d told me that. Good old Carl.

At that point, the EMTs had arrived and I’d been whisked to the local outpost of Pylon Alpha General, where I’d been poked, prodded, scanned, checked for burns, smoke inhalation, and popped eardrums, and run through a gamut of concussion and neurological tests. After a couple hours of exciting medical testing, I was diagnosed with moderate cases of whiplash and tinnitus, mild dehydration, and a bruised coccyx from where’d I’d landed flat on my ass. I was given a cocktail of medications and summarily discharged, but my night had only just begun. A nice, scowling police officer had met me at the discharge station and gently suggested I accompany him to the local station for a chat.