The Saffron Malformation (64 page)

             
They continued to talk and she explained that she hadn’t even painted a real sky in the room, just a jumble of pictures she’d seen telescopes photograph from deep space.  If she saw something she liked she added it.

             
The effort to treat Ryla like a person eased with the passing of each moment.  Rain looked over at Quey and thanked him with her eyes.  He nodded a, ‘your welcome,’ back to her and they exchanged a smile.

Curious Critters and The Secrets of Elevators

             
At the end of breakfast Botler began to clear the plates and clean the kitchen.  Ryla had eaten, though not very much.  She’d caught Quey watching from across the table.  When he saw her looking at him he smiled but it was in a way that seemed to make her very aware of herself, as if he were judging how much she had eaten.  It was a sensation she didn’t enjoy.

             
Afterward she slipped away unnoticed and went down to the second floor to check on the computers and begin looking through the data.  She sat down at the bank in the center of the massive room and saw the blank holoscreen to her right.  It was the one that controlled her personal security protocol.  It was still disengaged and she sat staring at it thoughtfully for a long time.  It was the way Quey watched her eat, the way they all watched her do things from time to time.  As if they were waiting for something.  It unnerved her and part of her thought maybe she should turn her security back on.  But then there was Rain, who she enjoyed having around.  Perhaps she could make an exception in the programming.  After a long time she sighed and turned her chair, shifting her attention to another screen without engaging the security protocols. 

             
Maybe later.  Maybe never.

             
There was a window open in the center of the screen where white letters ran across a black background and read, Data Compilation Complete.  Ryla used the menus to export the data to another program that would make it easier to analyze.  In this one the equations were simplified and the results displayed with a brief description of what everything meant.  She used the remote at her side, a small rectangle of plastic with a touch screen, to select some music and swayed to the jazz piano that began to play a moment later while she reviewed the results.

             
An hour later, give or take, Rain appeared in the doorway across the room.  She was a step inside when she stopped and watched Ryla behind the bank of holoscreens, dancing in her chair as she grabbed data from one screen and moved it to another, then spinning as she waited for the transfer to complete before typing in fresh commands to the rhythm of the drums in the music.  Rain smiled and laughed slightly, not because it was funny but because she was witnessing an honest moment of expression.  After that moment she continued through the room because she started to feel like she was spying.

             
Ryla didn’t notice her until she was standing on the other side of the computer bank.  She looked up and stopped suddenly.  Rain smiled down at her and began to dance along with the bridge of the song.  After a moment Ryla smiled at her and started up again, she was much better than Rain, as she’d learned real dance steps from instructional videos on the signal whereas Rain just sort of improvised.  She circled the computers and the two of them danced side by side in the light of the holoscreens until the song came to an end.  Then Rain took a breath and asked, “Going well?”

             
Ryla sat and peered at the screen, “Too early to know.”

             
“Say, I wanted to ask you… can you crack encryptions?”

             
Now Ryla looked at her with piqued interest.  “Yes,” she replied simply.

             
Rain moved to the chair beside her and sat while she told her, “Well I’ve got some computer data that I think might have some useful information in it but it’s all encrypted and I’ve never been able to look at it.”  She held out a small pin drive.

Ryla took it, inserted it into a computer and clicked on a new holoscreen.  She accessed the pin drive, saw the primitive encryption and asked, “How old is this?”

              “The first bits near fourteen years,” she replied with a shrug.  “The rest I got the last time I was home and some Leone got when he copied our father’s device.  The freshest of that’s still near four years back.”  She looked at Ryla for a tick.  “Can you access it?”

             
Ryla gave her a look and then started a program on the computer.  A window opened, more white text over black background and lines of code streamed down the screen to fast to note.  “Shouldn’t be long.  The encryption’s not very complicated, even fourteen years ago what they used on this first bit is inferior.  These other files are better off but it looks like whomever was in charge of securing it was pretty lazy.”

             
Rain chuckled and said, “Lucky us.”  She’d been carrying that around for so long, a burden she was finally to be relieved of.  She was about to know what exactly her father had killed her mother to protect.

             
“Are you okay?” Ryla asked.

             
Rain smiled as she cried, as if her emotions didn’t know what to feel, relief or sorrow.  Maybe a bit of both was right so all she could do was shrug and say, “I don’t know.”

             
Uncertain, Ryla asked, “Would you like a hug?”

             
Rain laughed easily at the awkwardness of her new friend trying to understand what she’d been neglected of for so long, but in the end a hug sounded good and so she nodded and Ryla embraced her and ran her fingers through her hair, same as Rain had done for her the night before.  Exactly the same, as a matter of fact.

             
“My father killed my mother,” she said absently.  Ryla merely stroked her hair and listened when she continued, recounting how she’d snuck into her father’s office and copied his computer onto an external source.  Then what had happened later, when he discovered the treachery.  She’d been stupid about it, left clues that someone had been there and so he accused his wife and in the end he’d tossed her to Sticklan Stone and he’d done things to her Rain dared not imagine.

             
“I thought married people loved each other,” Ryla finally said.

             
Rain smiled and chuckled at the simplicity of the observation.  “They’re supposed to,” was all she could think to say.  Then she added, “They’re supposed to love their children as well.”

             
The computer chimed and Ryla looked over at it.  “It’s finished,” she said and Rain sat up and wiped her eyes.

             
Rain rolled her chair in front of the Holoscreen and accessed the data on the pin drive.  She began looking through it, starting with the e-mails.  Ryla sat next to her going over the data Geo had collected and—more disturbingly—the data they’d collected at the tower.

             
Rain read through message after message with her jaw open.  Some were e-mails of instructions, others were reports submitted by the science division, and then there was an analysis of data she only partially understood.  Still, she got enough of it to be shocked by what she found.  She knew her father was power mad but what she read… she didn’t believe it.  She didn’t believe it until Ryla told her what her own data suggested… then she didn’t have a choice.

             
Leone and Amber were sick of the third floor so they went to the first.  They pretended they were wealthy aristocrats in a fancy hotel in the city.  They sat in the restaurant and ordered food and when they discovered no one had bothered to program the bot with an age restriction they ordered drinks.  Just a few though, the last thing Leone wanted to do was come back drunk.  His sister was small, smaller than him at this point, but her wrath was mightier than that of men three times Reggies size.  Besides, he hated it when she chided him so he limited himself to two drinks and sipped them slowly.

             
After eating they went to the other side of the lobby where there was a sitting room, but that wasn’t what caught their eye.  Through another set of doors there was a room for billiards and table tennis.  They allowed themselves a few more drinks and played for a while, Leone was better at Billiards but Amber surpassed him in ping-pong.  She knew how to hit the ball so it spun, making its bounce hard to predict.  Finally they returned to the elevator where Leone noticed the panel below the three buttons.  It opened easily (since Rain hadn’t closed it all the way) and he saw the three B- buttons.

             
Grinning he looked over at Amber.  “I don’t know,” she said.  “What if it violates her thing?  I don’t want to be killed by crazy robots.”

             
“They’re not going to kill us for looking around.”

             
“They would kill us for touching her.”

             
“Yeah, but that’s different.  Besides, I looked through the terminal and I didn’t see anything about the basements in the rules.”  It was sort of the truth.  He’d glanced over the protocols but hadn’t really read them thoroughly.  And he hadn’t seen anything about the lower levels.

             
“Alright but if anything happens,” she trailed off.  The booze gave them courage sense would have sapped and Leone pressed the B-1 button.  The doors closed and they descended.

             
The first basement was the food depot.  The elevator doors opened on a massive garden.  It awed Leone and he took a few steps forward.  It was like being outside.  The ground was dirt with rows of crops planted as far as he could see.  There were trees at the far ends of the room and above them an unseen light source simulated the sun.  There was no brilliant ball of fire passing across the ceiling but save that when he looked up he could barely tell the difference between it and the sky.  Off to his right water fell onto the ground but it wasn’t the steady spray of a sprinkler, it fell in fat drops in an uneven rhythm like rain.

             
They walked into the massive room and explored the… farm?  Leone tried to pick a berry from a bush but Amber grabbed his arm.  “Are you sure that won’t get us killed,” she said as opposed to asking.

             
He swallowed hard because he didn’t really know.  Deciding he’d pressed his luck far enough for one day he relented and let his hand fall back to his side.  They continued on until they found the barn room.  Amber stared inside, her face twisted with horror.  “What is that?” she asked, fighting an urge to vomit.

             
“I think they’re the animals.”

             
Amber’s stomach clinched and she gagged and had to look away.  She’d just eaten chicken in the first floor restaurant for crying out loud.

             
Leone couldn’t look away, what he saw was too bizarre.  They were attached to the wall by tubes, lumps of flesh without feathers or fur.  They had no heads or feet.  The fouls had wings.  Sporadically they flapped uselessly.  He could see ribs expand and contract with what must be breaths, but what was taking them?  There were no mouths or noses.  The things that must be used for beef lay on the ground, giant lumps of flesh.  He heard the buzz of electricity and watched as the beef creatures Muscles tightened with every jolt.  Artificial stimulation simulated the stress walking would put on the Muscles.

             
Slowly, Leone stepped away from the barn and said, “Let’s get out of here.”

             
Amber gripped his arm and nodded.

             
In the elevator again he hit the B-2 button.

             
“What are you doing!” Amber snapped.

             
“I want to see what else there is,” his voice was toneless.  The farm had only piqued his curiosity as to what might exist in these hidden lower levels and he decided that so long as he stuck to just looking he’d be okay.

             
“That wasn’t enough,” she said with a glare.  “I want to go back.”

             
He nodded.  “Just let me off first.”

             
“What!  You’re going to go wandering around by yourself?”

             
The doors opened on a long metal corridor where dull lights buzzed overhead.

             
Leone stepped from the elevator and Amber followed.  Their footsteps sounded strange as they walked along the solid metal floor.  There were two doors to either side before the corridor came to a t-section.  They looked one way and then the other and both led to another corridor with more doors.

             
“I don’t think we should be here,” Amber whispered.

             
The air was stale and left his mouth tasting of metal, probably from being recycled over and over.  Leone continued ahead, crossing the t section and making his way to the slightly opened metal door at the end of the hall.

             
“Nobody knows,” a low voice sang from the other side of the heavy door.  “The trouble I seen,” it continued.  “Nobody knows.  But Jesus.”

             
Leone pushed hard against the door to slide it open the rest of the way and saw the severed head resting on a table across the room.  He tensed at the sight of it and Amber squeaked.

             
“Hello,” the head said and both of their eyes widened.  “Are you her prisoner too?” it asked then continued its song.  “Nobody knows. The trouble I seen.”  Then it laughed, high in its throat and without smiling.