Translucent (22 page)

Karena had made it a long way in a very short period of time. Thi
s was something she was used to, ever since she’d been through the experiments and had been upgraded so that she could do remarkable things. Including killing someone from over a mile away without using any sort of projectile weapon.

She was on top of Translucent. She’d never actually seen it before, but
she had the intel to know what it would look like and what she would need to do.
It looked
essentially,
like a giant hourglass, filled with swirling, shimmering sand that was spiraling down but n
ever seemed to reach the bottom.
The glass-like material around it was see-through, but objects behind it were out-of-focus and blurry, hence the name
Translucent.
However, it really was
the machine that harnessed the energy of the vortex and allowed it to be manipulated to create dreams. She almost laughed as she thought of her own time under the control of this machine, where she’d thought the hourglass to be the most terrifying thing. And the Sandman.
The hourglass he’d been holding actually did look an awful lot like a small version of Translucent. In every simulated dream there was a small Translucent, hidden somewhere within it, that served as a basis for controlling the events of the dream.
It all seemed so silly to her now, since she’d gotten her memory back. Really it had been no big deal.

The guard
s
were coming for her. They would soon be in this room, surrounding her, and she’d be trapped inside the center of the complex. But of course that was all part of her plan. That was what she’d been planning to do the whole time, and nobody knew.

Just a moment later they were all there. They thought they were so powerful in their little suits, with all their weapons that they thought they were going to be able to use to take her out. They had no idea.
They surrounded Translucent and pointed all their projectiles
directly at her before securing the target permanently. Karena watched all of this, feeling quite amused. There was another of her powers, the ability to feel amused. Quite rem
arkable that the scientists had
been able to pull that off.

They called her name. “Come down now with your wires in the air.”

“And why should I do that?” she asked. “Why would I surrender myself to you so you can kill me?”

“Because you know the law. Your conscience should tell you that it is not right to go unpunished.”

“Sorry, but my survival instinct is overruling my conscience right now.”

“Then we will have to deactivate you now.”

“Fine. Go ahead.”

The commander pulled a small button out of a container in his uniform.
She presumed that
the projectiles
were all synced, so
that if the commander pressed the
button,
they
would fire at once. Any ordinary person would be obliterated.

“We will give you to the count of 10,” said the commander. “If you are not down here by that time you will be deactivated.”

Karena was perfectly relaxed as the commander began at 10, and then began to count down to 0. However, when he reached 6, he was suddenly interrupted by another voice calling her name. She recognized it as the Sandman’s.

He called her name again as he flung himself to the base of Translucent and stopped, in front of all the guards. “I need to talk to you!”

There was a pause. The Sandman couldn’t see Karena from where he was on the ground, but he assumed that it was standing in the center of the top
.
After a moment, however, it came to the edge. “Yes?’ it
asked.

“Please, just a moment of your time.”

“Go on. But make it quick. As I’m sure you can see, you have just interrupted my being ‘deactivated,’ as these humans call it.”

“Do you remember how I said I had helped you?” he said. “And it didn’t seem like I was really helping you, but instead tormenting you, because of what happened in the dream chamber?”

“Oh, honestly. Please don’t bring that up now. That entire episode in the dream chamber was ridiculous.”

“No, listen. Well, I was everyone in that dream, including your friend Shawn.”

Karena knew what the S
andman was going to say, and it
didn’t want to hear
it. “I want you to listen,” it
said. “I am not going to change what I’m about to do just because you were friendly to me inside that
dream,” she said. “You don’t understand the full scope of what’s going on here. I am (insert name here) yes, but I am also someone else. Did you ever wonder what would make me want to assassinate the Figure? Well, it was because I was strongly, how shall
I put it, influenced by another
. And that someone was the one who experimented on me, the same one
who gave me the powers that I
now have. And the same one that is going to make me do what I am about to do. (Insert name here) is about to be deactivated, yes, but not by all you guards. I’m going to deactivate myself. And I’m going with a bang.”

Suddenly, another human burst into the room, and the Sandman whirled around to see who it was. It was none other than the head of the entire facility, leaving his lofty office to come and see what all the commotion in the Translucent chamber was about. And he had come at a good time.

“Who was the one who experimented on you?” he asked, stopping himself near the base of Translucent surrounded by guards.

“I am not at liberty to discuss that.”

The head turned his attention to the Sandman. “This is a matter of universal security. This phericke has
assassinated the Figure and now you know that for sure. And yet before you were attempting to help this phericke and even to let it escape from its punishment.”

The Sandman could feel something like worry beginning to grow inside of him. “Wh
at evidence do you have of that?
”

“Enough. Did you honestly think that these schemes of yours would go unnoticed? I know your kind, though they do not appear often. You are the kind that can feel, and that kind cannot be permitted in this facility.
The Figure was one who brought justice and freedom to all in the universe, and you aided the phericke who killed him, which is just as bad as killing him yourself.
”

The commander interrupted the argument. “I am afraid that this discussion will have to be delayed, under your permission, head. This phericke is still up here, and it must be deactivated immediately.”

“Of course,” the head replied.
“Please proceed.”

Karena was up on top the entire time, hardly having moved an inch. “Please spare me all of this talk and just incinerate me already, or kill me in whatever pathetic way you plan to try to kill me. I don’t have all day.”

The Sandman turned his attention back to Karena. Unlike the others, he knew that no ordinary projectile would harm it.
“Please, you don’t have to do this!”
he cried.

“You don’t understand.” She turned away.

The Sandman racked his mind. There had to be something, something that he could say to make her believe him and not do whatever it was she was about to do.
He had been dedicated to helping this phericke for so long, and now it felt as if it wasn’t too late to help it after all.
And then he had it. Increasing the amplitude of his ripples, he called to her. But her didn’t say her phericke name, which was of course her real name, but rather the name he had known her to be for all those months in the dream chamber. “Karena!”

She stopped. It was obvious that she’d been about to do something drastic, but all of a sudden she stopped right in the middle of it, freezing completely still. Then, she slowly moved her body ba
ck to focus on
him. “My name is not Karena,” she said. “Karena is from another time and another place. I know how it works. You go back in time and take information about a single person’s life,
it doesn’t matter from what aeon or era.
And then you take that person’s life and emulate it through a dream. Karena is the person that you took the information from. I am not Karena. I never was Karena. I will never be Karena.”

“But think back to what you were like when you thought you were Karena.”

“I had had my memory wiped. I was foolish. I did not know anything about the real world back then.”

“And yet you were still a person. You still had feelings, and when I betrayed you
,
you felt legitimately felt betrayed. That must mean something.”

There was a silence. The guards all still had the
ir projectiles locked on Karena, awaiting the signal of the commander. The head stood in silence, watching it all as if it were a show, though of course there was no such thing in his millennia.
The Sandman sat still, waiting. And Karena did not reply for the moment.

“I
t
means nothing,” she said finally.
She made it clear from her tone that this conversation was over.

The Sandman
glumly backed away from Translucent
. There
wouldn’t be any
stopping this now. Karena was going to deactivate herself, and not only would that be bad for her, it would be bad for everyone in the proximity of the area. But he could not go now.
It was too late, and anyway, h
e had to see this.

“(Insert name here), you have one last chance. Will you surrender?” The chief guard, however, knew it was essentially pointless to ask this. She was not going to surrender.

“No,” she
replied.

The guard nodded at the Sandman and turned back to the button that would activate all the projectiles. And this time, without a countdown, he activated it.

They screamed forward, moving almost faster than the human eye could see. All of th
em were locked onto one target along, Karena, sitting still without showing any sign of concern.
They were going to collide with her in the middle and she was going to go up in an explosion that would hopefully stay contained in the area where she was. It wouldn’t destroy Translucent, because it was made of too strong a material to be destroyed by any of these weapons. But it would kill Karena for sure.

I
n the blink of an eye, they were all upon her, and the Sandman
shut off his optical transmitters,
waiting for the explosion. But no explosion came. There wasn’t even the faintest sound, and when he opened his eyes he saw that Karena was standing on top of Translucent perfectly fine, and that there were no projectiles in sight.

The guard was befuddled. Confusion was not something that came easily to humans, because they quickly discovered the logical explanation for everything. But for some things, it seemed that there was no logical explanation. One of these things was the phericke becoming sentient. Another such thing was the projectiles vanishing into thin air, leaving Karena perfectly all right.

“How did you do that?” the commander
asked.
Fear was also something that did not come easily to humans, but the commander was beginning to feel the first pangs of it within him now, as the Sandman could see from the patterns of his ripples. He could feel it, too.

Karena did not reply. It was clear that she was concentrating on something, because she was standing, motionless, on top of Translucent. Some of her cords were rising slowly, but most of them stayed down, press
ed flat against the bulk of wires that was her body.

“She’s doing something,” the Sandman said. “If I were you, I would recommend getting all your troops out of here immediately. There isn’t time to waste.”

“No. I’m not going anywhere. If you want to go, then save yourself right now.”

“I can’t go. This is my doing, and I will see it through to how it ends.”

The head spoke up for the first time after Karena had destroyed the projectiles. “This is absurd,” he said. “I’m not going to stand here waiting for this phericke to do whatever it is she’s going to do. I’m leaving here whether the rest of you are staying or not.” And with that, he turned around and
flung
himself down the corridor as fa
st as his flesh could carry him, before disappearing around a corner and heading off towards the exit.
Hardly anyone noticed his departure, or else they didn’t care. Everyone was focused on Karena, who was still raising her cords up, more and more of them by the second.

Suddenly, the Sandman noticed something strange on the side of Translucent. It looked as though it was shimmering, but not in the way the sand beyond it was shimmering. It seemed as if it was unstable somehow, the slightest little bit. And it was shaking, hardly visibly, but, with a closer look, it was clear that it was definitely shaking. Not the whole of Translucent, just the individual areas of glass all around it. The glass was not divided into segments, but not it seemed as though it was, and all these segments were rattling against each other, more violently by the second.