The Saffron Malformation (70 page)

             
“That mean’s you’ll take the wager, I suspect?”

             
“All night and into the morning,” Reggie assured him.  “I’ll take Rachel again.”

             
Quey nodded and said, “Alright.  Come on Ry.”  Ryla looked up at him, a little stunned.  “You gotta help me win back my shine.”

             
“I don’t know how to play,” she confessed.

             
“It’s not hard,” he said crossing to her.  “We’re either stripes or solids and you just knock those balls into the hole.”

             
“Go on,” Rain said and Ryla looked at her.  Rain nodded, “It’s fun.”

             
They started the game and it was quickly apparent that Ryla wasn’t lying, she’d never shot pool in her life.  “I’m sorry,” she said after her second failed attempt with the cue.

             
“It’s alright,” Quey assured her.

             
Rain stepped up next to Ryla and told her, “Its geometry.”  Ryla looked at her, then back at the table.  “Physics and geometry,” she said again and Ryla nodded.  The next time her turn came around she sank three balls in a row but it was too little too late and when she missed the fourth shot Reggie cleared the table.

             
“One more,” Quey insisted and the big man shook his head.

             
“You got a little secret weapon there,” he said, pointing to Ryla.  “You get her again then I get Natalie.”

             
“I’m out of this,” Natalie said.  “And if Ryla knows what’s good for her I think she’ll do the same.”  When Ryla looked at her she said, “Nothing worse than getting between two men waving their dicks around.”

             
Quey gave Natalie a look and said, “Fine then.  Table tennis.”

             
Reggie thought for a moment and said, “Agreed.”

             
Quey was good at table tennis as no camp for wayward children was complete without a ping pong table, which was why he was so angry when he went down three nothing.  Reggie was grinning and goading him.  Quey didn’t understand how things could be going so wrong for him.  As he looked down at his paddle he saw it was new and lacked the ware he’d grown used to at the camp.  Most of them were down to the wood.

             
“One second,” Quey said.

             
“Take all the time you need,” Reggie offered.

             
“Botler, you got a knife?” he asked and the robot obliged.

             
“What the hell are you doing?” the big man asked as Quey began to cut the rubber off the paddle.  After a set of ticks and more than a few tocks he returned to the table with a pure wood paddle.

             
“Ready?” he asked.  Reggie nodded and Quey served.  Reggie returned the serve and when Quey sent the ball back again it hit the table, jumped left and flew past Reggie’s racket.

             
The big man looked at him with a bit of fear in his eyes and as the game went on it was quickly apparent that Reggie was outmatched.  He was good, but Quey was faster, more accurate and able to send the ball back with various spins.  Now that the rubber was gone the big man didn’t stand a chance.  Three games in he’d lost all the shine he’d won and more.  Finally he threw up his hands and said, “Wise man once told me to know when to cut my losses.”

             
“I think that was two games ago,” Rachel told him and they laughed.

             
“I never said I was the wise man,” Reggie admitted.

             
“I’ll play you,” Ryla said.  She could feel eyes on her.

             
Quey nodded and waved for her to, “Come on then.  You want a shot at the title, I’m game.”

             
“You’re going to put up a bottle of that pumpkin moonshine?”

             
He cocked a glance her way, “I thought that didn’t perform a function you had need for.”

             
Ryla shrugged.  “A need just occurred to me.”

             
“Sure,” he said.  “You win you can have a bottle.  What if I win?”

             
Ryla looked at him and said, bluntly, “You won’t.”

             
Everyone laughed.

             
“You still have to wager,” Quey said.

             
Ryla shrugged.  “What do you want?”

             
He thought for a moment and said, “A painting.”

             
Her brow furrowed.

             
“Framed and on canvas.”

             
“A painting of what?” she asked.

             
“Anything,” he replied.

             
She shrugged and nodded.

             
The game began but Ryla had been right when she told Quey he wouldn’t win.  Her hands were blindingly fast and everything he threw at her she returned with graceful ease.  No matter what spin he put on the ball she was able to sense and adjust her return stroke for it.  Her balls came with blinding speed and an unpredictable spin of their own.  In the end he didn’t score a single point.

             
There was a round of cheers after she won and Quey conceded the bottle of pumpkin moonshine he’d promised.  Ryla accepted it and handed it to Rain.  “It’s your favorite,” she said and Rain nodded accepting the bottle, then she gave her a hug and Ryla gave one back.

             
“That’s enough humiliation for me for one night,” Quey said as he finished his drink.  “If you’ll all excuse me I have every intent to pass out in a pool of my own shame.”

             
They bid him goodnight and he retired to the third floor.

             
Rain’s plan had worked.  For a brief spell they’d forgotten everything outside the walls and remembered that they were friends, a crew, as Quey put it.  Ugliness had a way of finding them and Rain was sure that the way ahead was going to be riddled with it, and if they forgot each other, even for an instant, then it was likely they’d end up dead.  She looked at Rachel who lost her love as Quey had lost a brother, and remembered the ride in the back of the car as they raced her to Natalie, a bullet in her belly.  She remembered the look on Leone’s face and the things he’d said, and the moments she’d been sure were her last and it scared her.  Not the idea that she’d die, that didn’t really bother her, maybe because she’d already been there and knew at the end there was peace.  What scared her was the thought that she’d be on the other side, looking back at Arnie or Leone, or any of them and that they’d have regrets.  The grief of that was something she knew she couldn’t handle so she got them together and reminded them that they were in this together because Quey was right, that’s what would make them mighty.  Unfortunately, it was that and that alone.

Discoveries and Desires

             
Morning came and it found Ryla sitting alone at the bank of computers on the second floor waiting for the last of the simulations to finish.  When she’d gotten up for an early start she’d been halfway into one of her cotton slips when she remembered what Rain told her about dressing.  After a thoughtful sigh she tossed the slip aside and donned a dark blue long sleeve shirt that sat snug against her slender body and a loose flowing black skirt that ended at her ankles before heading downstairs.

             
Sitting behind the holoscreens, she was playing with the braid Rain had tied in her hair when the door across the room opened and she looked up to see Quey come through in his faded jeans and t-shirt.  He was carrying a plate in one hand and a steaming cup of coffee in the other.  He approached and settled into the chair next to her with a sigh.

             
“Brought some breakfast,” he told her, holding the plate out.

             
She looked at the sausage and eggs and set of pancakes and said, “No thank you.”

             
“Don’t worry,” he insisted, “I had nothing to do with the cooking of any of this.”

             
She smiled slightly and glanced in his direction.  “It’s not that.”

             
“Well I’ll just leave it here,” he told her, setting the plate on the desk in front of her, “if you change your mind.  Coffee’s mine though,” he added and took a sip.  They sat in silence for a moment before he asked, “How long left on this one?”

             
“Thirty seven minutes.”

             
He nodded.  “Alright then, guess it’s your turn.”

             
She glanced over at him.

             
“To tell me about that sister of yours.”

             
Ryla seemed solemn for a moment as she gathered her thoughts, least that’s how Quey took it.  Finally she spoke.  “She didn’t live long.  Only a few months outside the sub-basement.  Her developmental phase went well.”  Ryla smiled with pleasant remembrance, “She liked to play games.  Not computer games though.  She liked to play hide and seek, but we played where one of us would get a one minute head start and then the other would go look.  The hider had to remain unseen for five minutes and then the goal became for them to make it to one of three checkpoints without being discovered.”

             
“What were the checkpoints?”

             
Ryla looked at him and said, “Randomly selected computer terminals.”  Ryla shrugged.  “It was silly but we had fun.”  Quey watched the nostalgia melt off her face as she went on.  “Then one day the people here turned on us, not just her and I but the building itself.  They tried to kill us all.  Only one person tried to help us and they killed him.”

             
“Who was he?”

             
Ryla gave him a look and said, “I think he was my father,” she said.  “But I don’t know.  He was the one who made the developmental program, I know that.  I think they wanted to use his program for the projects they had running on the lower levels and he disagreed.  After that it was bloody.  Then Annie didn’t want to play anymore.  She became obsessed with history, especially the history of earth and the robotics era.  She read about the human implant catastrophe that led to the ban of the enhancement tech.  She was obsessed.  Her emotions… something happened.  She was sad all the time.  She said there was no hope in people, that they never learned, that even when they knew better they didn’t care enough about themselves to do the right thing.  Even when they start out with good intentions they always give in to the allure of greed and power and if they don’t then those that do come along and kill them.”

             
“Do you know why they tried to shut the place down?”

             
Ryla shook her head.

             
Quey sat back in his chair and sipped his coffee.  “What did you do with her?”

             
Ryla shrugged.  “I hooked her up to the programming computer in the basement.  I was just trying to help… then one day she…”

             
Quey nodded.

             
“She wanted everything to be good.  She lost hope in the world and I wasn’t… I couldn’t give it back to her.”

             
“It’s not your fault,” Quey told her.

             
“I know,” she replied.  “I just wish I knew how to fix her.  I thought I’d corrected the potential flaws in the developmental program, but then there was Jacob.”  She trailed off into silence for a moment.  “If he’d worked I’d hoped to maybe reboot her.”

             
“You still have her?” Quey asked.

             
“Of course,” Ryla replied briskly.  She looked down and added, “I don’t know what to do with her.”

             
“Maybe say goodbye,” Quey suggested sympathetically.

             
“She’s off,” Ryla said puzzled.

             
“No, I know,” he said.  “Its just… that’s not the point.  It doesn’t matter that she can’t hear you.  You can hear and that’s what you need.  After Dusty died we dug a hole and put him in.  We took turns saying things to remember him, saying what we maybe wished we’d had a chance to when he could hear.  It’s just something people do.  Helps with the feeling bad.”

             
Ryla wasn’t sure how such a ritual might serve any sort of function but after a bit of insistence from Quey, she agreed.  The two of them rode the elevators to the second basement.  There was an ominous feeling about the place that shivered inside Quey’s bones when the doors opened on that metallic hallway illuminated with sterile lights.  Ryla started down the hall and Quey followed, their footsteps sounded odd and somehow lifeless down here.  He thought he could hear Jacob on the other side of the door at the end of the hall, possibly still singing his song, though that was likely just in his head.

             
When they came to the cross section Ryla turned left and led him to the first door on the right.  She pressed a series of numbers on a keypad just outside the door and a light above it switched from red to green.  Ryla opened the door and they went inside a room of metal tables and computers.

             
‘Holy shit,’ Quey thought as he looked at the girl sitting in the chair along the far wall of the room wearing a green sundress, staring with blank eyes.  If he hadn’t known it was a robot he would have thought it was a dead body.  He stepped closer to where it sat lifeless in its chair and looked from it to Ryla.  He realized then that he’d expected them to be twins, or close to it, but they only resembled each other slightly, easily passing for sisters without being conspicuous.

             
“Her name was Annie?” Quey asked.

             
Ryla nodded and said, “Yeah,” softly.

             
He smiled at her.  “It’s a pretty name.”

             
Ryla forced a smile and laced her fingers in front of her.

             
Quey reached out and touched Annie on the arm and it took all his will to keep from jerking away.  The skin looked real, as real as his, but the texture was wrong.  He looked over at Ryla.  She shrugged and said, “You can’t do skin.”

             
He looked at her for a long moment then asked, “You want me to start?”

             
Ryla shrugged, “Okay.”

             
Quey stood, turned back toward Annie and said, “I didn’t know you, but maybe that’s why I should be the one to go first.  My experience is sometimes its better if a stranger breaks the ice in this sort of circumstance.  From what I gather you were a sweet girl who loved to play, and though your time lacked longevity, what you did have was enjoyed and will be missed.  I didn’t know you myself, as I’ve said, but after hearing those who did speak on you I think that was my loss.”

             
Quey took a step back.  “Your turn.”

             
“What do I do?” Ryla asked.

             
He looked over at her and said, “I find it’s best to just start talking and let whatever’s inside that doesn’t want to be anymore come out.”

             
She stepped toward Annie and looked down at her.  After a moment she said, “Hello.”  She glanced to Quey who gave her a reassuring look.  Turning back to Annie, she took a deep breath and said, “I miss you.  No one played with me like you did.  No one has since.  I miss our talks, and you missed so many things.  Sometimes I would go to the city and think about how nice it would have been to have you there because then I wouldn’t be so alone.  Maybe we could have helped each other understand better.  Maybe I wouldn’t be so bad at understanding now.  Maybe everyone wouldn’t have to try so hard just to include me in the simplest things and maybe I wouldn’t have to try so hard either.”  Her eyes narrowed into a glare and she said, “I miss you, you selfish asshole.”  Her voice cracked as she began to cry and told her bitterly, “You left me alone, you know that?  All by myself.  There was no one else.”  She sunk to her knees and rested her head on her sister’s lap and wiped tears on the dress the robot wore.  “It was supposed to be you and me and this was our place.  I don’t understand.  I don’t understand why you left.  I was scared too.  I’m still scared.”

             
She wept, her body shuddering with sobs.  “I love you,” she said quietly.  Then she stood and added, “But I don’t forgive you.”  Quey crossed to her and rested a hand on her shoulder.  She was so slight under his palm that he felt silly at how afraid he’d let himself be of something so fragile just because it was a tad bit different.

             
She turned and looked at Quey, and it twisted his guts to see her like that, eyes puffy and red and dripping with sorrow, uncertain and confused.  For the first time he saw it.  Rain was right—she wasn’t some scary monster of the waste like her map tag suggested—it was the rest of the world, including him, that was wrong.

             
He stepped forward and wrapped his arms around her, holding her gently.  It took a moment for her to accept it and then another before her slender arms wrapped around him and squeezed, not hard enough to hurt but enough to surprise him with their strength.

             
After a while she asked, “Was that okay?  I mean… did I do it right?”

             
“Yeah,” Quey said softly.

             
“What I said, I don’t know where it came from.”

             
“That’s the way it is sometimes.  Matter of fact that’s proof you did it right.”

             
“But… does it make me bad?”

             
Quey smiled and shook his head, “No,” he assured her.  “It makes you,” he shrugged, “Like anyone else.”

             
She stepped back from him and wiped her eyes on her sleeves.  He looked around suspiciously for a second and she watched him.

             
“Just waiting to see if I get shot full of holes,” he said then smiled slyly.

             
She laughed lightly then teased, “I could call for help if you’d like.  I’d hate to leave you feeling cheated.”

             
“Not in the slightest,” he said with a bit more sincerity than he’d intended.

             
They stood silent for a moment, looking at each other, until finally Ryla said, “The simulation’s probably finished.”

             
Quey nodded and they left the room and started back to the elevator, waiting for their return.  This time he was sure he heard Jacob through the door, muffled but definite.  Something about the robot unnerved him but he knew this wasn’t the time to bring it up.  Still, he was glad when they were standing in the elevator with the doors closing.

             
“Thank you,” Ryla said as they began to move upwards.  He looked at her and she added, “I do feel better.”

             
When Ryla looked at the simulation readout Quey saw her face tense.  He watched her swallow hard and nod slowly.

             
“What is it?” he asked.

             
“We need to get everyone together,” she said.

             
“That bad?” he asked, hoping she’d assure him it wasn’t.  Her silence had the opposite effect.

             
Quey rounded everyone up and herded them into the kitchen on the third floor.  They took seats around the table, save Quey who leaned against the kitchen counter near Ryla, standing before the table.  The kids sat listening from the couch, Amber chewing her lower lip with a nervous look about her.