Chapter Nine: Real World Blues
Sean struggles against his dreams, trying to wake up. They were bad dreams, as all his sleeping dreams had been since he had come to in that nasty goo-filled pod. He remembers yelling, or at least thinking of yelling, 'It's only a movie!' at the mechanical spider-thing that came in response to his waking. It hadn't responded, had just pulled out all the tubes and wires connected to him and flushed him like used toilet paper.
Then had come a period of confusion, blurred faces and cold hands pulling at him. Everything was cold here, the air and the metal of the ship and the pallet he was lying on. The clothes he was given didn't do much against the cold, either, and had the special little bonus of being dirty and torn, and rather fragrant. There wasn't spare water for washing on the ship, as everything had to be brought from their city. And the city wasn't Zion, either, which came as just one more surprise. These people had their own, separate city.
Eventually he woke up, again, and was given a brief tour of the ship and shown to a little box of a room he was told would be his own. The crew was friendly to him, at least. Especially Kami, who was the only a year or two older than him and the one who had been free the next-shortest amount of time.
Someone bangs on the door to Sean's cell, and he finally manages to break free of his dreams.
"Uh... Come in," he yells.
The door opens. It is Zip, the operator for the ship. "Hey, Sean," he says. "I know you've seen the movies, so I'm just gonna say it. You ready for your training?"
Sean nods. "As I'll ever be."
When he gets up to the main deck, he notices Kami also strapped into one of the chairs, eyes closed and plugged in.
"Is she in the matrix?" asks Sean.
Zip shakes his head, his short dreadlocks bouncing against his cheeks. "Naw. I'd be watching the screens if she was. Kami's just having some alone time." He reaches out and pats the headrest of the nearest chair. "Climb on in."
Sean nods, nervously, and sits down. This is his second time in one of the chairs. Some time ago (he isn't sure exactly how long, since there isn't a sun in the sky and the ship is run on some time schedule he hasn't figured out yet) the captain had plugged him in and given him a brief introduction to what was going on, how the war ended and started up again and about those traitors in Zion.
He squeezes the armrests tightly as the needle goes in. If anything it is colder than everything else in this world. Sean has a hard time focusing on what Zip is saying, with the needle in.
"...gonna give you the ops training first, I know in that movie he gets combat training right off, but that's just the wrong way of going about it." Zip shakes his head and punches a few buttons on the console. "There ya go."
The feeling is of months and months of lessons and studying and learning, compressed into a moment and then suddenly over.
"Urgl," says Sean, coming out of it. "That was... something." He looks around, suddenly aware of the proper names for everywhere and everything on the ship. The Namtar. That's the name. Ajax had told him that on the tour, but Sean hadn't quite remembered it. He did now, along with everything down to the location of minor electric lines.
Zip nods. "And you're gonna get hours more of it."
Sean tries to relax. It's going to be a long sunless day.
Kami lies on a towel at the beach, staring up at the sky, soaking in the sun. This is one of her favorite relaxation programs. This started as one of the basic construct programs in the ship's catalog and was based on some generic beach, and Kami had modified it to look like the beach right close to her grandparent's house in Sarasota, Florida.
A regular feature of her summers during her childhood had been a trip east to see her grandparents. Most days of the trip she ended up down at the beach for hours, captivated by all that water. Especially when she was younger.
Now, even knowing that the beach she remembered was as false as this one, it comforted her to come here. It was always sunny, the water was always warm and quiet, and there was no one here to bother her. Well, except for the times she had invited Theta here with the express intent to be bothered.
She shifted on the towel, turning to lie on her back. Mmm, Theta. When she signed up for the Namtar, she hadn't expected Theta. He had been a pleasant surprise, in a world which held so many unpleasant things.
Like agents. She frowned slightly. Why was she thinking about agents so much, lately? She did have quite a close call the other day, but she had been in close calls before and was never so fixated on them before. What was different about this last time?
Kami pushes herself up into a sitting position. "Zip?" she says to the sky, "You there?"
She waits for a response. "Yeah, Kami? You ready to come out now?" says Zip's voice out of nowhere.
"Not quite," she says. "Do you still have the mission logs from Sean's extraction on file? Something's bugging me about those agents and I wanna get a closer look at them." Very basic logs were usually kept from major missions in the matrix. They had nowhere near the full amount of information, of course, but the stripped down files were useful for review of just what went right, or on occasion cataclysmically wrong.
"Sure, I still got 'em. Where do you want me to load them up from?"
"If you can just freeze it right near the end, when the agents had me pinned in that alley. That would be fine."
"Want me to put your default RSI back on, too?"
Kami looks down at herself, and her very brief bikini. "Yeah, that would be good."
"Righty-o, here ya go."
The world flickers white for a second and then goes dark. Kami is back in that alley. The buildings around her are just fronts, and forty or so meters away the buildings just end in a blank gray wall. All the action is here in the alley.
The two agents stand at either end of the alley, guns drawn. Kami stands next to a copy of herself, between the two agents, gun out and a ferocious grimace frozen on her face. A number of bullets are halted midair between her gun and one of the agents, along with a few other bullets coming from one of the agent's guns.
She walks over to inspect that agent first. She casts no shadow and her footsteps make no sound in the mission log, as if she were a ghost. But it is these agents who are the ghosts, not her. Kami pauses to consider this first agent. He just looks like the standard model of an agent, to her. Nothing special or striking about him at all. No emotion shows on his face or in the way he stands, nothing different about his suit.
After a moment of contemplation, she turns and walks past herself, weaving thru the pattern of bullets to look at the other agent. This one is a female. Same standard outfit, same total lack of emotion in body position and face. The face.
Kami gets up close, staring at the agent. What is so strange about her face? She knows she almost has it, that she's looking right at the answer to her uneasy feelings.
And then it hits her. She's seen this face before. This agent has the face of Renee. Her old best friend.
How? She wonders, mind boggling. Why would the agents steal Renee's face? Kami moves around, looking at the agent from all angles. She defiantly looks like Renee. But it's not her. It can't be. That would be... stupid. Agents are programs, not people.
Kami straightens up, now with more questions than she had before she looked at the log.
"Zip?" she says, "I'm done with this. Can you get me out of here now?"
"Sure thing," Zip says after a slight pause.
Kami shuts her eyes as the world seems to melt, and then she's opening her eyes back in the chair. She glances over and sees Sean in an adjacent chair, twitching slightly as he runs through one of the longer training programs.
"You find out what you wanted?" says Zip as he turns off Kami's chair consol.
"Maybe." Kami drums her fingers against the chair arm.
"We parked high up enough to access the matrix? I need to run a search."
"Yep. We're at broadcast depth. What's the search about?"
"It sounds crazy, but I think I recognize one of those agents that were chasing me. She... looks like someone I used to know. I want to check out what's happened to her since I got free."
"Weird," says Zip. He grins and gestures towards the main screen array. "Go right ahead and look. I'm still working on Sean here."
Kami nods, and then jumps into the operator chair. She starts determinately typing at the keyboards, trying to pull up any records or net activity or anything related to Renee Ackerman.
She finds something right away and pulls it up on a side screen. An article and something else that makes her stop typing mid-search. An obituary.
"No," she says, "I don't believe it."
"Believe what?" says Zip from his station at the main construct consol over by Sean.
"She's dead." Kami's voice cracks slightly as she reads on. "Gunshot. Sometime last week." This couldn't be happening. Renee was from the time before, when everything was normal and boring, and when Kami didn't know how to shoot guns and handle high explosives. Renee couldn't be dead.
Kami skims over the accompanying article, from one of the Tucson papers. Renee Ackerman... found dead... three gunshot wounds to the chest... tragedy for her family.
Zip comes up behind Kami, reading over her shoulder, as the search pulls up a recent photograph. "So what's happening exactly?"
Kami taps the screen with the picture. "She died last Wednesday in Arizona. On Thursday, an agent with her face chased me through San Jose."
Zip frowns. "Weird. Better tell the captain about it, 'cause I sure don't know what it means."
Kami nods. "Yeah. I'll tell Ajax."
Across the deck, the training sim finishes and Sean wakes up. "I know... how to prepare the single cell protein gloop? Can I please have some combat training now?"