Gabriel’s Watch - Book One: The Scrapman Trilogy (26 page)

A peculiar assortment of devices were suspended from the ceiling. Some contained strange and colorful liquids, coursing through a jumbled series of clear tubes, while others were multi-jointed instruments that had begun to retract upon my awakening. Many of them folded inward, like great mechanical talons, as they ascended into a dark void overhead that sealed itself shut.

I sat up, and there was no pain; in fact I felt refreshed, invigorated. The light dimmed itself to a cool auburn that was much easier on my eyes. I was shirtless beneath that warm light, sitting on some kind of soft, reclining surface. I placed a hand on my ribcage and pressed down warily, but no pain receptors responded to the pressure I applied.

Twisting my body on the recliner, I set my feet on a floor which was warm to the touch. It felt extremely good. I looked around the small room and found I was alone. My clothes were different as well. My pants were made of a different fabric than I’d been wearing earlier, a lighter, more breathable material. I stood and tensed my muscles—they felt good. I felt strong, better than I’d felt in a long time, like I was twenty years old again.

The walls of my compartment were dark—a metallic grey, and very smooth. They undulated softly, leading to an opening that was sealed by a thinner portion of wall. Next to the opening stood three large tanks made of clear glass. They curved off the wall and were fed from black and sinuous hoses, identical to those we’d seen lining the outside of the Vahana. The tanks contained a thick, blue liquid, bubbling softly, as if carbonated.

There was something in that first tank, something creating a large shadow within that viscous liquid. I approached the capsule to inspect it. As I watched my reflection glide across the tank, the opening to the room slid upward, inviting me to enter a brief corridor. At the end of that corridor was a small alcove and in it sat Alice.

She smiled at me. “And here’s the sleepyhead now.”

I smiled back, discovering Mohammad sitting across from her. The two of them appeared to be in conversation, but upon my entry, the Fijian turned to grant me his full attention. He looked on me with kind and concerned eyes.

“How long was I out?” I asked him.

“Not long.” Mohammad rose and tossed me a shirt. “How do you feel?”

I put it on, noticing it was of the same material as my new pants. “I feel great.”

“Good.” The Fijian smiled.

I looked around the corridor—the surfaces were unlike anything I’d seen before—and my mind filled with questions I would soon share with him.

“I’ve got a lot of questions, Mohammad, and I don’t know where to start.”

“I expected that,” he said, looking back to Alice. “Luckily, during your recovery, I’ve had time to explain some things to her.”

I crossed my arms. “So who are you, if not the man I believed you to be?”

Another gentle smile spread over the Fijian’s lips, unoffended by my need for answers. “Like Alice, I was designed by the Travelers,” he said.

“You don’t look like one of her kind,” I noticed. It was an obvious truth.

“Yes, and for good reason.” He nodded. “A year after the humans destroyed her kind, the Traveler made a new, more discrete species to live among you.”

“There’s more like you?”

“Not many, but the rest of them don’t know what they are.”

I shook my head. “So all those stories you told me about Fiji, they were all made up?”

“No.” Mohammad paused to take a breath, making me believe that the coming truth was a complicated one. “Mohammad was a real man,” he started, “but he died shortly after the war. I have his memories and his physical makeup, but our DNA is vastly different.”

“You’re not human?”

“No,” he said, “but can you tell?”

I looked at him, the man that had been my good friend for the past eight years or so, and shook my head.

“That’s the point.”

“Why don’t others like you know what they are?”

“It makes the assimilation easier if they believe they are their human predecessors.”

I leaned my shoulder against the wall, resting upon it. “This is a lot to absorb.”

“Pace yourself,” Mohammad laughed, rising to place a friendly hand on my arm. “We have all the time in the world, and we’ve hardly gotten started.”

Alice tugged on my wrist. “Do you know where we are, Miles?”

I looked around the alcove and back through the corridor to the room where I’d awoken. There was another sealed door in front of us, leading on to some unknown portion of the dwelling. I had a guess, but shook my head.

Alice tapped at a small window beside her, through which warm sunlight was shining. I came to peer through it, finding the distant horizon in an instant. There were nestled hundreds of buildings of multiple shapes and sizes, connected by a systematic placement of various streets and alleys. We were so high that it reduced the visual enormously, making the city I knew so well look more like a gigantic and abstract microchip, spanning the Earth beneath us.

As I’d looked down upon it, all the woes of that distant world seemed to melt away, all the troubles of that place became as minute and microscopic as the city appeared to be that very second. This new vantage point brought with it a curious, yet short-lived, sense of euphoria.

“We’re on the Vahana!” Alice revealed excitedly, making my previous guess correct.

“And how did we get up here?”

Mohammad stood as I asked the question. “I’ll show you,” he said.

The Fijian (or whatever he was) opened the sealed door and led us into a larger, circular room. Several corridors branched off this unit, making me believe it was at the center of the craft. The walls throughout the ship were the same, smooth metallic grey, occasionally accented by a digital screen or device that glowed a brilliant blue, red, or green. I fought to wrap my brain around the mere fact of the vessel’s existence. The thing was not built from any means with which I was familiar, but crafted of a world I could hardly imagine.

The circular angle of the room collided on a surface directly to the left of our entry. Mohammad took us directly there, entering a code into an angular device protruding from the right of the wall. He stepped back as the rim of the surface illuminated, then turned to Alice and stretched a hand out toward the glowing wall.

“Ladies first,” he said.

Alice nodded, then turned to me and smiled. “Watch this.” She walked toward the surface and into it, disappearing through the solid wall. It engulfed her entirely.

Mohammad held a hand out to me. “Your turn, Miles.”

I stepped slowly toward the thing, an instinctive caution hindering my movements and sending my brain in a tailspin. “What’s on the other side?”

“Home,” he said.

I nodded, reaching out and placing my fingers through the surface, watching as the substance rippled around them like mercury. It didn’t feel much like anything. There might have been a slight tingling sensation, or perhaps it was only what my brain expected to feel, watching my hand disappear into that portal. Then, suddenly, my hand was seized and I was yanked through the wall.

I found Alice on the other side, holding my hand, as the two of us stood in the cavern once again.

“What the hell was that?”

“A molecular leap, or a particle disassembly and reassembly,” Alice suggested, but shrugged shortly after. “I don’t really know.”

Once Mohammad stepped through, he pressed something on his wrist device, solidifying the wall behind us. We looked down to find Zeke still laying on the floor, the machine’s head tilted slightly backward, as if to keep a digital eye on the stairway.

“The quest for artificial intelligence is, by design, a reckless one,” Mohammad noted, looking first to me, then to Alice. “And
this
was beyond reckless.”

Alice knelt to look at the robot, running her hand along the machine’s arm. “You were right, Miles,” she said. “This whole time ... you were right about him.”

“It’s okay now, Alice.”

“He almost killed you.”

“But he didn’t.”

Alice looked up at me, her eyes gleaming with restrained tears. “Dinah,” she said. “He killed Dinah.”

I lifted her, allowing her to rest her damp face on me as she tried to keep from weeping in front of company.

“The cat,” Mohammad started, leaning in a bit, “the cat is actually something else I have to explain.”

“What?” I asked as Alice turned to look at him.

“The cat you call Dinah,” Mohammad said, “we gave her to you.” He then motioned toward the fallen robot as we looked down to find the cat beside us, coming to nuzzle at Alice’s feet. Alice, in disbelief, bent to scoop up the cat, laughing and crying and kissing her simultaneously. She parted the cat’s fur around her neck, looking for proof of the fatal injury we saw Zeke inflict upon it.

“She’s okay,” Alice muttered, burying her nose into the cat’s orange fur. “She’s okay.”

“She’s like me,” Mohammad said softly. “You might say we are ... extremely durable creatures.”

“Why did you give her to us?” I asked.

“As a gift,” he answered, “but more than a gift.”

“What do you mean?”

“She’s allowed us to keep an eye on you for all this time,” the Fijian said, looking to Alice. “The Travelers designed you with an affinity for cats, so, with that in mind, we hoped you would keep her as a pet.”

The memory of finding the cat swinging from our trip-line eight years before swept through my mind, along with the eerie sensation of it being a planned or mediated meeting. It was a decidedly unpleasant revelation, one that sparked an anger in me.

“This whole time,” I started, releasing Alice and stepping toward Mohammad, “this whole time we were just some
experiment
for you?”

“ ‘Experiment’ is a harsher term than I would use,” Mohammad said, looking rather offended, “although we did want to keep it as controlled as possible.”

“And who’s
we,
Mohammad?” I approached him. “Who else has been spying on us?”

“We’re not the enemy, Miles,” he said, calm and collected, trying to ease me back. “I have always helped you, gave you everything you wanted, and all this time I have wanted nothing more than to be your friend.” He took a step closer. “I was there, you know, that day you met Saint John—the day they threw you in the freezer. I was in the diner with you.”

“A lot of good you did me, then.”

“I was instructed to wait,” Mohammad insisted. “It might not seem like it to you, but there are rules to follow here—protocol.”

“Who’s we, Mohammad?” I repeated. “Who’s making the rules?”

“You can call him Gabriel,” Mohammad said, tilting his head up toward the Vahana.

“An alien?”

“They prefer to call themselves Travelers, but yes.”

“And what does he want with us?” Alice asked, still keeping Dinah close to her chest.

“To survive,” he said.

“Survive?!” Alice came to stand beside me. “Survive?! Where was your leader ten years ago when we were slaughtered?!”

Mohammad let out a deep and saddened sigh, training his eyes back to the robot on the floor. “Again, there are rules, Alice,” he said. “The Travelers came to assist this planet, but the planet has the right to ... deny their assistance. The Travelers could not interfere with that.” Mohammad then raised his eyes to us once again. “And, as you know, their assistance was rejected—save for one.” He pointed to her. “And Gabriel is impressed with you.”

“Then he should tell me himself,” Alice insisted, “instead of sending one of his creations.”

Mohammad smiled. “You must understand that it was never planned for you to find out about our involvement here. Only in the gravest of circumstances could we let that be known.” Mohammad placed his boot on Zeke’s chest. “But, then again, we never expected you to build such a chaotic device.”

“That’s why the Vahana came here,” Alice said, piecing it together. “Somehow you knew Zeke would become dangerous.”

“We expected as much,” Mohammad concurred, “but the Vahana, as you call it, didn’t just come here. It’s been here the whole time. It’s only just shown itself to you.” Mohammad pointed to Zeke, still just an assortment of inanimate machinery on the floor. “As advanced as that thing was, it was still far from perfect. Once the chimera method had proven unstable, we knew the core personality alone could not support the collapse of that brittle pyramid system.”

Alice nodded, then looked to me, the guilt she felt creeping back into her green eyes.

I reached out to take her hand.

Mohammad then held out his, a gesture of goodwill. “And this, I’m afraid, is where I leave you two.”

I hesitated for a moment, then reached out to embrace the gesture. I could not deny him the fact that he’d saved our lives, and that alone was worthy of my respect. Whatever being had conjured Mohammad into existence must have had a purpose larger than anything I could currently comprehend, and something from which the Fijian could not be swayed, even for the sake of friendship. It would be unfair of me to hold that against him, for it had surely been carved into the marrow of his bones. It seemed the two of us had been keeping our share of secrets.

“I’m sorry if I have damaged your trust in me, Miles,” he offered. “I know, like you said, it is a lot to absorb.”

“I understand,” I said, releasing my grip.

“Good,” Mohammad smiled. “Very good.”

He then turned toward the wall, readying the device on his wrist.

“What if we need to speak with you?” Alice asked. “How can we contact you?”

Mohammad looked back, reaching out to place a hand atop Dinah’s head and tussling her fur a bit. “Just tell the cat,” he said. “We will hear you.”

He triggered the device and passed again through the wall. I watched as it swallowed him whole, and then pressed my hand to it shortly after, finding it as solid as ever.

“I wonder how many times they’ve been in here,” I said. “This whole time I thought I was keeping you safe ... and
they
were babysitting me.”

“Neither of us had any idea,” she said, letting Dinah jump to the floor. “I feel the same way.”

“Makes me feel kinda sick,” I admitted. “And where was
he
when I got my ass kicked by Crayton and his gang?”