Free Radical (18 page)

Then, on a whim he tried his right hand. He could feel a tingle in his right arm, as if he had a very localized case of the jitters, or had developed dozens of tiny, fluttering tics in his forearm. His HUD lit up.

He smiled. He had no idea what to do from here, but he knew it worked. This was the payoff.

He was a bit disappointed to find that the interface was in his right hand. D'Arcy hadn't bothered to ask if he was left handed. Idiot.

A simple geometric cube appeared. Its surface was a flat, featureless yellow. It was comically primitive, like some child's first program in grade school. It looked out of place next to the grace and complexity of the rest of his neural interface.

The cube seemed to represent the keypad. In his mind's eye, he moved closer to examine the artifact. As he did so, detail appeared. The cube actually seemed to be made up of smaller, more detailed pieces. By the time Deck was "beside" it, it was a collection of smaller interconnected cubes.

His hand began to fatigue as he held it up to the keypad.

The exploration continued. Each of the components was some sort of representation of data. He found one that represented the keypad interface and moved in closer to examine it. As he did, it broke into an intricate collection of geometric shapes. There were twelve in all, and they were designed such that they could be re-assembled into a cube, but had now arranged themselves into an interlocking pattern that formed a long, flat surface. Each represented a button. He touched one.

Suddenly the keypad beneath his hand beeped. He glanced down to see that he had typed a six without touching the actual buttons. After exploring this a little more and typing in a bunch of random codes, he backed out and examined one of the other components.

He found one that was an unlabeled collection of complex shapes. He moved in further and selected one of its pieces at random.

The entire system reminded him of a fractal pattern that became more complex as it was examined in further detail. Deck was zoomed in so far now that the original yellow cube that contained everything else now looked to be the size of a building, not that size had much meaning in the virtual world inside his head.

Exploring the keypad further, he found that parts of it were fashioned after their real-world counterparts (such as the circuit board) while others were completely abstract. This was the beauty of the implant. It was able to take the known data about the keypad and represent it to Deck in an interactive form. The program to handle this must have taken years to develop. He wondered if Shodan had helped.

His arm ached. He stepped closer to the pad and shifted his weight, trying to alleviate the burning in his muscles.

The shapes rushed by in a blur of glowing colors as he navigated up and down the hierarchy of geometric data. The colors were bright and basic, like some giant city fashioned out of simple children's toys. The interface became easier to use, and his movements become faster, more fluid. He flew through fields of geometric primitives, through translucent walls of color, through lattice patterns of wire-frame mesh, and across the surface of spheres with seamless fractal patterns etched into their faces. All of this was part of a simple numeric keypad.

There were parts relating to the hardware, security alarm, the door mechanism, the numeric display, and the lockdown mechanism

His upper arm and shoulder burned. He dropped his pipe and massaged them with his left hand.

There was one part that seemed to be a container of sorts. As he examined it, he could see its surface become slightly translucent. As it tumbled in the imaginary space in front of him, he could see digits through the shimmering walls: 45100.

He dropped his aching arm and typed in 4-5-1-0-0. There was a cheerful beep and the door slid open.

Deck emerged from D'Arcy's office into the main corridor, brandishing his metal tube.

The corridor, like D'Arcy's office, was utterly trashed. The cold air reeked of sewage, death, and burnt plastic. There was a thick smoky haze gathered near the ceiling, a remnant of some long spent fire. Lights were burned out or shattered, and broken equipment and smashed bots littered the floor. Human waste had gathered in puddles in the corners. Most of the public display screens that dotted the hallways had been destroyed, and the few that were operational displayed static or gibberish. The unmistakable pockmarks of bullet holes peppered the edges of walls and framed doorways. What were once wide pools of blood were now simply blackened outlines on the floor.

Deck stood for a moment, afraid to proceed. There was simply no explanation for this level of chaos and destruction. He could see the uneven outlines of what could only be human corpses in the darkened corners. Fear of death and fear of the unknown compelled him to stay, to turn back, to return to the recovery room and wait for help. Eventually the taskmaster of hunger drove him onward, and he headed carefully down the corridor. His plan was to reach an elevator and head for the crew level, where the cafeteria was.

Most of the bodies in the hallways had been horribly mutilated. A few were in piles, and weren't surrounded by blood, which suggested they had died elsewhere and had then been brought here for whatever reason. There didn't seem to be anything threatening at the moment, but his body had gone into full-scale flight or fight mode. His heart pounded away in his chest. The pipe in his hands became slick with sweat. He licked his lips. His pace quickened, partly due to fear, but partly as a way to cope with all the energy now flowing through his veins. He was weak, confused, terrified, hungry, and alone, but in some primal corner of his mind he still knew what to do next: Get some food, and kill anything that stops you.

The corridor curved to the left, taking him counter-clockwise around the level. Eventually Deck came upon a corpse lying in the fetal position in front of the elevator. It hadn't been mutilated like the others, but it was still horribly disfigured. Most of its teeth were gone from the gaping dry mouth. Its closed eyes were sunk deep into the skull, and it was emaciated, suggesting that it had gone without food long before death. Its fingernails were long, impossibly thick, and colored a jaundice yellow. Just a few scattered strands of white hair remained on the balding, bruised scalp. The skin was a lifeless slate gray and somewhat translucent, spotted with tumorous lumps. He could clearly make out the patterns of blue veins below the surface. It had probably been male, but that was impossible to say for certain without further investigation. The tattered jumpsuit was a filthy, bloodstained orange, stained from the waist down in excrement.

Deck realized he was going to have to step over this abomination to get to the elevator. He thought of dragging it off to one side, but decided he didn't want to touch it. Besides, what could he really do for this person? It wasn't like he could just bury them. The dignity of a proper death was a luxury beyond them at this point.

Deck carefully stepped over the putrid mess. He wiped a damp palm on the leg of his pants and hit the elevator button. The door instantly popped open to reveal the yawning throat of the elevator shaft. Air rushed out of the shaft as the separate areas attempted to equalize atmospheric pressure.

Deck heard movement behind him and turned to see the body at his feet stir. Its bent, deformed head lifted. The eyes opened and focused on Deck. An instant later the thing was scrambling to its feet, clawing at his face.

He smacked its grabbing claws aside and jabbed at it with the end of his pole. Too late he realized he'd forgotten to lock it in the open position and it simply telescoped closed as he pressed it into the sunken chest of his opponent. The mistake threw him off balance and brought him stumbling forward. The ex-person reached out and gouged at his face with its hardened nails, cutting into his skin. Its breath smelled like rotting meat, and its ragged breathing sounded like its lungs were full of swamp water.

Deck recovered in an instant. He elbowed his foe to push it back, then followed up by smashing his free hand into its throat. As the creature stumbled back, he swung his pipe in a perfect arc, snapping his wrist at the apex of the blow. There was a pop as the metal connected with its jaw, shattering it. The thing fell backwards and hit the wall.

Deck extended the pole again, twisting the separate sections to lock them in position.

The creature recovered without pausing and advanced on Deck without flinching. It had no fear of him, and didn't seem to be affected by the damage he had inflicted. Given the staggering number of things already wrong with its body, a destroyed jawbone was probably the least of its problems. Deck easily blocked its primitive grabs at his face and throat and countered with a strike to one knee with the heavier end of the pole. He followed up with a jab to the throat that pushed it backwards.

Showing absolutely no understanding of self-preservation, it came at him again. Deck deflected its animal-like attack and spun around, bringing the end of the pole to bear on the side of its neck. There was a pop, and it flopped forward onto the cold, hard, no-skid surface of the floor.

He crouched, catching his breath. His ears were filled with the rushing sound of his own breath. His lungs burned. He spat on the floor. There was a strange taste in his mouth. He stood with his hands on his knees, his head drooping low as he fought to recover. He saw blood dripping from his cheek onto the floor. Deck touched the side of his face to find he'd received at least two deep gashes for his tactical blunder. As he wiped away the blood he found a foamy, white substance seeping from the wound.

He remained crouching, catching his breath and listening for further danger.

He looked down into the open, unblinking eyes of his opponent. He had no idea what had happened to this person. Radiation might cause the hair and tooth loss, but that wouldn't explain its insanity or the tumors. There was no single thing that could account for everything that was wrong with it.

Once he had recovered from the battle, he tried again with the elevator to find that it pulled the same trick again. The doors popped open to reveal the deadly drop as soon as he hit the call button. That wasn't going to get him anywhere.

He decided to return to D'Arcy's office and look for some dermal patches. As he made his way back through the corridors, he carefully regarded each corpse, checking to see if it might be alive. Some were just dead people, but many had been marred and mutated into whatever it was that he'd just encountered. Most of the bodies had been torn apart to the point where it was clear they could be of no threat to him, alive or not.

In D'Arcy's office, he searched through the medical supplies. Clearly whoever had trashed the place had made a point of collecting the dermal patches, since most of them were gone. Deck managed to recover a few patches that had been inadvertently placed into a box of detox, and thus overlooked by whatever scavenger had cleaned the place out.

Suddenly a message appeared on his HUD:

He stared in disbelief at the message. The implant was buried in his skull, and doubtless wasn't talking about some airborne threat. It had detected some nasty stuff in his bloodstream. How had he been infected?

Realization struck and he bolted to the nearby industrial-size, stainless steel sink. He began pouring water over the wound on his face. While radiation and disease would never cause the deformations he witnessed on the mutant by the elevator, a biological weapon probably could. The fat, yellow fingernails that had broken his skin could have been host to any number of poisons. Following another logical leap, it could have been carrying whatever biological agent that had caused the person's mutation in the first place.

He suspected that is meant that he was as good as dead, and that all of his efforts from here on out were a great flaming waste of time.

Rebecca Lansing tapped on the console screen as she spoke, "We've got a directional on the signal. It has to be coming from Citadel. This isn't a prank. This guy is for real."

"I just don't get it. You've been paging the station for days. Why didn't he answer sooner?," Buchanan asked.

Rebecca gestured towards the console, "You heard him. He was in a coma."

"A healing coma."

"Right."

"That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard," he muttered.

Buchanan was one of the higher-ups at TriOptimum. Rebecca couldn't remember exactly what his title was, but he seemed to have been given the job of managing the Citadel crisis because nobody else wanted it or knew what to do about it. He was tall, fiftyish, with deep, unhappy creases in his face. The dye job he'd had performed on his hair was wearing off, and the gray was starting to peak through black strands that framed his face. He either owned an entire wardrobe of dark suits, or ran out each evening to have the same suit cleaned and pressed so he could wear it again the next day. After five days of nearly living in the control room, he had finally given in to debauchery and loosened his necktie by three-quarters of an inch.

She shrugged, "I don't know if he's telling the truth or not about the coma, but we have no idea what is going on up there. This guy is the only one talking to us. Even if he's lying to us... or nuts... or whatever - it doesn't matter. We'll talk to him and humor him and see what we can learn."

"After over a week of paging the station we finally get a response, and it's a ten second conversation with a nut-case You're sure he's not some prankster, and he really is on the station? I mean," he paused for a moment to bring his scowl to full power, "
really
 sure?"

His humorless, severe manner had an imposing effect on the TriOptimum employees around, but Rebecca was a consultant so that sort of thing didn't work on her. "The directionals say this guy is somewhere on this line," she pointed to a wire-frame image of the Earth, with a bright blue line projecting from the surface of the planet and intersecting the the large orbiting 'C' icon. "So either he is on the station or he is floating in deep space between there and our Mojave towers."