BOOK OF MIA: 2081

Chapter 4: The Plant

________________________________

LOCATION: UNKNOWN

When I come to, it's pitch black —

THE frost nips at my skin, despite the clothes I'm wearing, an old hand-me-down T-shirt Young Billie used to wear when she was my age with the words 'R.A.G.E'  — some band that was hot for a second there when Billie was thirteen  — barely legible on it; paired with aged denim pants. I'm hoping no one will remember what I was wearing the night I almost died. The camp was dark, I was in dark clothes, and when I got fished out of the river by Hill and her people, half my chest was missing and Nate and I were covered in mud and blood. Not much to see under those conditions.

Yet, despite the standby mode I'm in, my heart skitters nervously, and my night vision kick on. When it shouldn't. It's another glitch, I assume. Result of having to shut down most of my tech so I can appear non-threatening. Left for dead.

But it isn't just the pulse quickening it the night vision that has me whispering, "Grandad?" into the frost air. Ever since they loaded me into a body bag and ferried me here, wherever 'here' is, images of things I've never seen, are flickering in my mind. They remind me of the old TVs Nate and I saw in the video archives of a world long forgotten. Billie's world. Grandad's world. Dev's world.

Dev.

His face flickers behind my eyelids like a film projected onto a wall at his name. His wary smile as he suits up in Hill's guard's clothing, the old dirt and blood still speckled across it. 'I'll be okay, kid. I promise.'

'I'll be okay kid. Promise,' the word echoes in my ear again, but the voice is slightly different, gruffier. Older. As if he hasn't used it in years. Whoever he is. This man I keep seeing. Images of him flicker to the forefront, sometimes laughing — his crinkled eyes, dark and deep, sometimes his white teeth, set against pale pink lips; sometimes, huddled over cadavers and computers, his wide shoulders seemingly carrying the weight of the world; and sometimes being watched, as if he's a hampster in a cage and not the master.

'I'll be okay.'

It wipes Dev's face away, and 'the man' replaces it; a tall guy with a head full of hair; a long, slender nose; sharp, intelligent eyes — a bit like Billie's — and a voice I could imagine replacing Lil Pete's over the Daily Radio in the bunkers. Calm. Deep. Warm, like the sun, now that I've discovered it.

Who are you? I squint in the dark. Surely not Grandad. The cadence isn't the same. The tone isn't as scathing as I'm accustomed to. Yet, something about it, him, sounds familiar.

I should have asked Billie if this was normal when I had the chance. I try to shake him out of my mind, to focus on the air hissing through the cooling system in my ear; tune into the muffled voices somewhere at my feet, beyond the door of this mortuary freezer I'm in. I'm freezing. And that's not an understatement. Or at least I would be freezing — if I was exactly what they were expecting: a dead body retrieved from the woods near the camp, in near-perfect condition. They'd be curious to know how I or we, stayed so 'intact' all this time. They'll want to bring us in, not incinerate us — remove all traces of us, from this earth and their records. 'Expunged' was the word Billie used when she showed us the satellite image of stacks of smoke coming off incinerators are the camp.

No wonder no one in the bunkers knew what went on at the camp. No one did. Except Billie and her base. They'd discovered it a few years back while routinely keeping an eye on what was left of society, surfacing.

'Billy, or Grandad, and I knew there was a chance we'd be found out — what we were trying to do, take down the government. We knew there was a chance, that when the time came for the code to be turned on, our plants would be discovered. Possibly destroyed without due diligence as to what the new tech entailed...' Billie had hunched over the console in her office and massaged her temples when she'd tried to explain to Nate and I how we came about. 'We also knew if the day came that your codes would activate, because all codes activate when a child reaches fifteen-sixteen, that they'd try and purge you out. Turns out that's what the camp was about. Purging the weak as well as trying to weed out those with faulty coding. Kill. Expunge. Replace — memories. At the click of a button. And a whole life just blinks out like that. None the wiser.'

Even now, I get a shiver down my spine at that. Or maybe it's the damn cold.

"They were found near Area E fences?" A voice beyond the cold box reaches me.

My ears tingle, the sensation of them homing in on sounds to amplify still giving me slight vertigo every time. Thank god I'm already lying down.

"Yes, Sir. Down by the banks. The both of them."

I almost sigh with relief. So somewhere in this house of death, Neil is too, near freezing, just like me. Waiting, just like me, waiting for the right timing. I wasn't hundred percent when we both shut down that we'd stay together. What if we'd gotten separated once we were found? What if they decided only to take one of us and shoot the other? What if... what if Hill's men found us instead of the Camp, and thereby the Hive? Because we were really tempting fate by sneaking back on land in the dead of the night, with only Billie's voice guiding us back to the very riverbank from whence Hill had scooped us out, half dead.

"You sure it's those kids?" Familiarity prods my mind, like I've been here before. Exactly a month ago, with Hill, and part of me panics. What if it is Hill who's got us now, locked away in her freezers? What if this time, we really can't escape? What if this time, she truly does manage to take me apartment, organ by organ, bot by bot?

Granddad? You asleep?

I take a chance. I shouldn't talk to him. Not here. But he's all I have. Gone are the days of soaking up the sun on the rig. Gone are the days of ingesting 'the plan' so it's all I think about without thinking about: get in, access the Hive, get to the server core, and dismantle CodeTech with the God Codex. Rewrite history. With one touch. Mass system update.

Easy done.

The door opens, a small square of light blurring my vision past my toes. The idiots have rammed me in here head first. But this is my chance to spy the world beyond, the world I'm about to try and bring down... if I can get out of here alive. And the face I see freezes what little blood courses through my veins rights now.

I feel a tug on the tray and suddenly the brightness through my eyelids blinds me as he looms over my 'body'. I try not to breathe. I shut off everything. Pretend I am dead. But that's not the plan is it. That's not the plan at all. This is where it begins. My story.

"Hmm." A grunt comes out of his throat, so close to my face my sensors pick up his body heat. "And the boy?"

"This way."

Three steps away to my right, I hear the glide of metal on metal as another cabinet is thrown open and a tray pulled out.

I take the chance to crack open my eyelid and stare at the back of the large man's face, to take in the familiar scar spanning the length of his head, from his neck to his whorl.

No. It couldn't be. Not him.

I watch him draw closer to Nate, Nate who is still out, but his pulse thrums quietly in my ear. He's alive. Thank god.

To my horror, I'm not the only one who notices — thanks to my super sonic hearing.

"He lives." He places a hand on Nate's neck, feeling his pulse. "Bring the boy to me. And report to my desk at 18:00 hours about the girl."

"Yes, Sir. Right away." The morgue attendant pales several degrees as he eyes Nate. "I—I wasn't here when they were brought in..."

"The boy. Now." And the man leaves.

The attendant rushes around, to fetch a stretcher, yelling into his comms for a 'little help', and I watch unable to do anything as they move Nate, still sound asleep, out of the morgue to who knows where. And I know. I just know...

Our plan's falling apart already, because he and I? We were meant to do this together.

Old man? I really could do with a friendly voice right now. I reach into my subconscious, hoping for something. Help. Tell me it's going to be okay?

But nothing. Not even a beep.

Word count: 7582