Cemetery Planet: The Complete Series (3 page)

7.

“Why are you looking at that, Harvey? What are you looking for?”

Lea stood next to him as he opened the access panel to her holomemorial terminal. She sounded nervous, yet another reason for him to believe she’d grown from more than a simple interactive program. Emotions were new. So was clairvoyance.

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “This might not be anything, but in all the time I’ve been on this planet, I’ve never seen so many things go wrong all at once.”

“But, why are you looking at me? Don’t you trust me, Harvey?”

“No-I mean yes, of course I trust you,” he looked her in the eyes. Those sad eyes. “I’m just worried that…I just wanted to check your circuitry, that’s all. Make sure you’re not gonna break down next.”

He hated lying to her, but something about the whole ordeal gnawed at him. A thorough inspection of Lea’s architecture, though, yielded no technical irregularities. All systems normal.

“If you want to know something, just come out and ask me,” she crossed her arms as he resealed the panel. “You don’t have to go digging like that. I wish you wouldn’t, actually. Makes me feel violated. It also makes me feel like you’re keeping something from me.”

He tried to find a way to ask without sounding suspicious. Then he remembered he was talking to a machine, albeit the most realistic machine he’d ever encountered. Sure, they had robots on Earth, all kinds of them. Companion Bots, they called them, machines capable of doing it all, even simulate sex. Harvey knew firsthand they were nothing like the real thing. Artificial emotion. Easy to spot from a mile away. Lea, though. She was different. She seemed so real, he didn’t want to hurt her feelings. But he had to ask.

“Lea, how did you know something was going to happen on that repair trip?”

He heard the reluctance in her voice.

“You mean the train?”

“Yes, the train. How did you know? How?”

“Why do you have to be so angry with me?” she recoiled. “I was just trying to help you, to protect you.”

“Protect me from what? What was it? What caused the train tube to malfunction like that?”

“I-I don’t know.”

“How can you not know?” he rushed toward the hologram, so cleverly and exquisitely contrived to recreate a woman who’d lived and died so long ago. “You have to know. You knew something was wrong. Why don’t you know what it was?”

“Because I just don’t, okay?” she turned her back to him and walked to the limit of her projector’s range. “I don’t know what’s happening to me. I can’t explain it. Ever since you put that intelligence thing in me, things have started to change. I’ve started to change.”

Harvey expected to see her vanish partially when she reached the space in front of the next plot in the mausoleum, Amanda Peterson, a woman who’d died in 2025. Instead of disappearing, though, Lea became even more defined as the projector from the Peterson plot powered up. She paced two steps before it hit him what had happened.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“What?” she stopped and presented a look of confusion.

“You’re using another projector. You shouldn’t be able to go over there.”

She looked at her own palms. “Well, it looks like I’m here,” she read the name on the epitaph. “Sorry, Amanda, but I’m borrowing your projector.”

“This-this is impossible,” he ruminated.

“Anything’s possible!” she let out a laugh that resonated down the long corridor of tombs built into the walls. Level after level of concrete and marble, an interconnected labyrinth of individual vaults. On her tiptoes, she flicked her heels, springing and flexing and landing with the grace of a swan. He imagined a bird, newly set free, fluttering from her cage and singing in sweet liberation. That’s what she looked like—a bird, flying for the first time after years of being unduly imprisoned.

She pirouetted to the next crypt, and then the next, on and on, prancing and singing a happy tune, presumably from her day, the early two thousands. Each time she came to a new grave, a new projector took over, displaying her three-dimensional form perfectly. She sprinted to the next hallway like a kid. From there, she ran out of his sight. Suddenly worried, he gave chase.

“Lea!” he cried. “Don’t go too far! Your programming might get corrupted!” he stopped at the intersecting corridor. It had to be at least a hundred meters long. No way could she have traveled the entire length that fast. “Lea!” his voice carried forever. No answer. Only the steady humming of the atmospheric controls. She could have been lost, or deleted by accident. Discovering her missing, his worst fears were confirmed.

“Boo!” he jumped out of his skin at her sudden exclamation. Spinning, he found her standing behind him, flushed with hysterics. “Scared ya’ didn’t I?”

“Lea, you need to get back to your own…grave,” he shook his head. “It’s not safe for you to be doing this.”

“But why?” she twirled gracefully, then again and again. “I’m having so much fun!”

“I’m worried about you. I’m not sure the system was built to handle this type of thing, and I’m afraid your data…that you might be damaged. It’s just not safe.”

“It’s perfectly safe, Harvey,” she swirled her arms like she was testing the water. “Aren’t you happy? Isn’t this great? Now I can go anywhere there’s a holoprojector,” she squinted like her mind was working. “Let me try something,” she closed her eyes and her hologram faded to nothing. He felt a lump in his throat, worried his theory had borne out. She’d gone too far, and now she was lost in the computer, her data scattered into the matrix. Then her voice, off in a distant part of the mausoleum, lifted his hopes and had him running, searching.

“Harvey! In here! I’m in here!”

“Where’s here!” he ran past the last of the vaults, past her grave, and into the map room, built to accommodate a healthy group of visitors. He was surprised to find, for the first time, someone else beside him occupying the large space.

8.

Step…step…step…step...

The treadmill wore a hole into his brain. The numbing repetition. The stupefying endlessness. Even with the assortment of virtual overlays to choose from, an Italian countryside, a coastal mountain chain, a dense rainforest—the whole experience made him want to put a laser Beretta in his mouth and pull the trigger. However, exercise being mandatory, he pushed through. That didn’t mean he had to be happy about it.

“You work out a lot,” Lea said. She’d been watching him silently. Like every section of the base, the gym had a holoprojector, and she found it easy to follow him.

“You took the words right out of my mouth,” he chuckled.

“It’s good that you take care of yourself,” she sounded serious. “You need to stay healthy. I’d hate anything to happen to you.”

Her image dissolved, just for a flicker, when she strode to the porthole and stared out to Zone One, section A-1. The graves immediately surrounding the visitor station. Harvey, puffing to reach his fifth mile, wondered what Lea could have been thinking as she surveyed the expanse of headstones and obelisks and crosses and columbariums. Both Fomalhaut and Piscis Austrini had risen to a reddish hue, forming elongated double shadows in the harsh light.

“It’s so lonely,” she said, almost too softly for him to hear. “And so cold.”

“What is?” he asked.

She faced him. “Death,” her eyes traveled outside again.

“But, you’re not dead,” he waved his hand over the treadmill controls when it beeped, initiating the cool down sequence. “You’re alive. You’re…you’re here, with me, right now.”

“I
am
dead. My name is Lea Hamm. I was born in two thousand and twelve, and I died in twenty forty-one, at the ripe old age of twenty-nine,” she turned her head his direction again. “Twenty-nine. So young. So much more life to live,” her focus journeyed to the floor. “So much life.”

“That’s not really you,” he spoke without thinking. “That’s the person you were programmed to simulate.”

“No,” she said flatly. “I’m Lea. And Lea’s dead.”

She looked at him again, and it made him feel a chill in his bones. Hungry. Desperate. Isolated. For the longest time she just stood there, watching him. He wanted to say something, but she stopped him with the oddest look.

“Oh my God!” she put up her palms. “Stay here!” her hologram disappeared, and returned in the hall, just outside the exercise room.

“What?” he stepped off the treadmill and hurried to the exit. “What!”

“Stay HERE!” she waved her arm and the airlock slid closed. He banged on the glass, but she only shook her head and peered intently down the main corridor. Then her hologram vanished again. He tried the airlock controls and found they’d been frozen. A spark of panic rose in his gut. He struggled to keep it from taking over. Everything’s okay. Just a little glitch. Still, a holomemorial with the ability to manipulate the airlocks and shut him out of the system—not good.

After waiting five minutes, Harvey told himself to be patient. Lea would be back and let him out in no time. After ten minutes, he began taking apart the control panel. Overriding the system seemed his only alternative. Halfway into the job, Lea returned, harried and stammering for words.

“Harvey, I thought I—”

“Lea, what happened? Why did you lock me in here? How did you lock me in here?”

“I-I don’t know,” she sobbed. “I sensed you were in danger, and my reflexes took over. I wanted to keep you safe, Harvey. That’s all I wanted to do,” she fell onto him, her ultrasonic tactile display brushing against him in a simulation of an embrace.

“How did you do it?” he repeated. “How’d you gain access to the controls?”

She sobbed louder in response.

“You have to promise me you won’t do anything like that again, okay? No getting into the computer, all right?” he made her look at his serious eyes. “Promise?”

9.

The alarm woke him up from the nicest dream he’d had in weeks. He couldn’t remember exactly what it was, and hated when that happened. Must have had that dream of home again, although, really, when he thought about it in his unguarded moments, he knew there wasn’t much to go home to.

Emerging into consciousness, he recognized the alarm wasn’t his usual midnight wakeup call. A message had stolen him from his slumber this time, and it demanded immediate attention.

Disturbance of unknown origin in Zone 1, section A-1, row 111, plots 11387 through 11393. Investigate.

“Disturbance?” he said to the computer. “What kind of disturbance?”

Unknown. Investigate immediately.

“Unknown? Bullshit. This whole place is bullshit. They won’t spend a dime on the proper sensors, giving me this ‘unknown’ shit.”

He cursed all the way to the changing room. His least favorite thing on the planet, his spacesuit, waited for him there. He didn’t want to put it on. Even though the bulky, heavy getup had heating and cooling, it still wasn’t enough. When the suns were out, he cooked like a lobster. And when the suns weren’t out, his fingers and toes felt like they’d turn into icicles.

Most of all, he didn’t want to go out there. Into the cemetery. Not with a disturbance of unknown origin looming over his head.