Ginger conjured a cool, dark river.  The bottoms of her feet actually tingled as they slipped over the smooth rocks in the virtual riverbed.  As she lowered her body into the wetness, frightened river fish darted around her legs.  She heard birds hidden in the boughs of the great trees surrounding her insular sanctuary. She thought that she could hear their anxious voices, the furtive fluttering of fragile wings.  Everything echoed, even her breath.

The air became heavier and heavier.  She sang and she sang and she sang. Her breath caught in her throat when she heard hushed whispers.  When Ginger opened her eyes there were eight of them; the virtual guardians who functioned as the core-controls of Tsui City.  Her voice had been the lure to draw them into this fabricated space.  Caught in her web, they surrounded her.  Infiltration had been easy enough.  Staying alive and getting the job done was going to require a lot more finesse.  She began to weave a story, a story of orphans and a dead mother who had loved them—a mother named Dusk.

She swallowed hard, terrified as they closed ranks around her.  Not until that moment did it truly catch up to her, the inherent fear of being caught as well.  Their glassy irises reflected her wordless panic.  She tried to lurch away but couldn’t move.  Her limbs simply wouldn’t cooperate.  Frigid hands grasped her shoulders, as vivid images of horrible deaths bubbled to the surface, feeding her fear.  A scream began to build inside her throat.

“Get me out!” Her mouth finally managed to form the words but she was vaguely aware that she’d made barely any sound. 

The smallest of them, a dark girl bent forward.  She knelt before Ginger in the water.  She tilted her head forward to touch her lips to Ginger’s, who thrashed and struggled violently against the arms that imprisoned hers. Trembling fingers fumbled with the controller strapped to Ginger’s wrist. She was still screaming as reality came hurtling back.  She was safe.  She was safe, yet she couldn’t let go of the terror.

Duke and Cheng were frantic.  Elinor was pissed.

“Shut her up!” Elinor hissed.

Duke’s massive hand briefly clamped down over Ginger’s mouth, cutting off her air as she drew in a deep breath to let loose again.  The atmosphere was tense enough as it was.  She knew her screaming just made things worse but she couldn’t help it.  They frightened her to that degree, those shadow personae.  That fear fed on something ugly inside her.

She couldn’t stop thinking… they’re my kin but I would kill them all if I could.  I would.  I would.  I would.

“Ginger!”

Cheng’s anxious entreaty had her snapping back into the here and now.  Her teeth chattered as they raised her body up out of the ancient baptismal pool.  She was still numb from the cold and shock.  It burned like hell where they’d just pulled several wires out of her skin.  She was vaguely aware of someone briskly toweling her down with a rough cloth.  Elinor snapped something at Cheng, who snarled right back at but gathered up her gear and hurried toward the exit.

Ginger blinked against the dizzying blur of light and shadow.  Duke was helping her into her clothes.  She experienced a moment of acute embarrassment when his fingers accidentally brushed across her bare breast.  He was all business though and turned away, seemingly oblivious to her plight.  Her fingers fumbled as she fastened her shirt buttons.  Mortification melted into vague misery.  She tugged her boots on and struggled to dislodge this inexplicable ache in her chest.  They weren’t the only ones under the Influence, she reminded herself sternly.

Overhead, the sun’s rays speared down through stained glass.  The harsh brilliance of daylight was amplified by the lens at the center of the great dome that protected the mad city from what it believed to be a rampaging wilderness beyond. Bird droppings stained the walls and the beams that braced the high ceiling.  She could hear the eerie cooing of doves and the distant flapping of many wings.  Too sickeningly familiar, it made the curdled feeling in her stomach worsen.  She stopped just short of the door and listened to the murmur of her companions’ voices outside for a few seconds.  Cautious, she was just being cautious.

Ginger found Elinor strangely fascinating.  Her hair was a star-burst of short braids, ocher on fire.  She was clearly the leader of Tsui City’s avatars.  She was maternal and magnetic, a bit of a fanatic.  She was hostile even without speaking but the antagonism suited Ginger’s purposes.  She wasn’t stupid enough to attempt to subvert the personalities of the avatars after all, just manipulate them.

Her brow crinkled when she turned to Ginger. “Cheng found an exotic plant’s seedling at the edge of this sector.  It’s contained.  Emmy’s got it on the truck.”

Ginger hesitated.  “I really need to run a thorough diagnostic from the core.  Remote access just isn’t doing the job.”

Elinor’s breath hitched.  For a second, her expression was mutinous.

“The guardians went into an emergency hibernation phase,” Ginger plowed on before she could complete that thought. 

“If we don’t do something, we might be looking at critical failures all over the city.”  She sighed.  “You’re not the only one who loves this city, Elinor.  Let me help.”

Elinor’s response was barely a grunt.  Ginger watched her stalk toward the truck.  She knew something was wrong but without access to the guardians, the avatars couldn’t even begin to put it all together.

The technology of their time had been chaotic at best.  Their makers had granted them intelligence, personalities and histrionic belief systems that had become dogma to the guardian and avatar personae alike.  As with the only five other remaining domed cities in the world, Tsui City had become dangerously paranoid and had kept its human citizens trapped within for over a century already.  Although said denizens went about their daily lives, barely bothered by their predicament, external concerns had deemed it necessary to free those “unfortunate” citizens from entrapment by machines-gone-amok.  That was where Ginger’s expertise came in handy.  A virtually impregnable fortress like that couldn’t be cracked open with a frontal attack.  You had to sneak in and deceive it, weigh it down with emotions—in this case, worry and grief; then finally, you crippled it.

Cheng and Ginger were riding behind the truck on anti-grav cycles, so they could fly overhead and navigate through what was bound to be a historical traffic snarl several miles in diameter.  Less than a block away from their goal and they couldn’t seem to go either backward of forward.  Duke and Elinor hopped out of the front of the truck as Cheng and Ginger settled their cycles to the earth.

“How is it?”

Ginger gave Elinor a brief shake of the head.

“Deadlocked.  It’ll be an hour before anything starts moving again.  We have to foot it the rest of the way from here.”

Ginger sat back on her cycle abruptly, mouth cottony and stomach rolling.  Her legs suddenly couldn’t bear her weight. The encounter with the guardians had left her with a weird sort of turbulence that squatted at the bottom of her belly.  She wasn’t going to feel better until she got down into the core, disabled it and got this farce over with.  She scowled.  The end of this ordeal was still a few hours away yet. Confronting the mind of a city was very much like diving down into a raging torrent or windsurfing her way through a tornado.  It robbed Ginger of her breath and thrilled her but she was never quite certain that she was going to survive the ride.

Elinor’s eyes scanned their surroundings.  People were starting to alight from their vehicles and spilling out onto the sidewalks and spaced between vehicles.  There was a collective air of bewilderment and annoyance.  It hadn’t yet occurred to anyone, the epic nature of a system failure of this extent.

“This is a real mess.”

Ginger watched her walk over to the other side of the truck.  Elinor stood beside Duke, their heads together.  Ginger’s vision blurred, too many nerves rolling around in her head for her to even worry about what they were discussing.  She blinked when Cheng suddenly hovered before her.

“Drink this,” Cheng urged. She thrust a bottle with a peeling and faded paper label into Ginger’s reluctant hands.

Ginger could tell from the smell alone, that the thick, brown liquid was brandy and it was old.  It went down like lava.  She wheezed, eyes tearing up as the liquor’s warmth fanned outward in her belly.  She wanted to take another gulp but she knew better than to be so greedy.  She corked the bottle and held it out to Cheng.

“Thanks.”

Cheng grabbed hold, squeezed Ginger’s hand.  The familiarity of that sensation was disconcerting.

“What was it like?  Merging with the guardian personae?”

Ginger shrugged.  “I could probably tell you but you’d never understand.  You’d have to experience it firsthand.”

Cheng was supposed to be the youngest of their mismatched gang.  Eighteen and skinny as wisp, Cheng’s head barely came up to her shoulders when they stood, side by side.  She had a peculiar fondness for strange hats, and at the moment was wearing a pink, bowl shaped creation, held in place by translucent chinstraps.  It was ridiculous yet suited her elfin features.  Ginger never could help laughing a little at that.  She was a little taken aback when Cheng suddenly gave her an uncharacteristically dazzling smile and stuck the bottle back in her backpack.

Duke slapped his palm against the side of the truck.

“Emmy, are we mobile yet?”

There was a muffled grunt from inside. “Two minutes!  I need two minutes,” came her strained reply.  “Something’s not quite—”

Cheng suddenly had a scared look on her face.

“I’m sorry, Ginger.  Follow me!”

Her cycle shot upward.  Propelled by the urgency in her tone, Ginger kicked hers into gear, streaking upward after her.  A sort of electrical hum filled the air followed micro-seconds later by an earth shaking explosion.  She barely had time to register that the truck had just gone up in a ball of flames, spewing projectiles and some sort of green mist.

Cheng’s cycle flipped awkwardly, stalling out.  She screamed, plummeting earthward.  Ginger tore after her.  Her body hit the ground hard, right in the middle of that madness.  There was an animal kind of roar, a green cloud of spores bubbled forth out of the flames, darkening the air.  The extreme heat had triggered the seedling’s explosive growth.  Ginger set down and ran to Cheng, ears ringing with screams and alarms going off all over the city.  Cheng lay flat on her back, dazed.

“Cheng!”

Her eyes opened and immediately swung shut.  “Hurts.”

“Where?”

“Everywhere!”

Ginger’s shaking hands probed for the worst of the damage. Cheng screamed when she tried to raise her up.  The ground was buckling beneath them, the monstrous plant already taking root deep down and reshaping the broken landscape.  She clung desperately to the need to get Cheng the hell out of there because if she allowed herself to think for even one second about what had just gone wrong, she wouldn’t be able to keep her panic down.  Somehow, she managed to haul her companion over to her cycle.  She was in the air a few seconds later, one arm gripping Cheng’s limp body to her.  Later, she would remember being amazed at how steady her hands were, with what felt like the world crumbling around them.

She brought Cheng back to the derelict church on the outskirts of the city. The air was hazy with green ash even out there.  The ground still rumbled and quaked—the berserk plant working its way down into earth and bursting forth in random places in the distance.  Ginger sat on the steps of the church, Cheng’s head resting in her lap.  There, stamped on the back of Cheng’s neck, the “A.I.” logo for Alasiri Industries was still intact.  Ginger’s fingers brushed at the flesh there and Cheng started crying quietly.

“What the hell did you do that for, Cheng?”

“Schedule moved up.  Dusk’s orders.”  She coughed.  An oily blackness stained her mouth.  “Do you think they realized…”

Ginger didn’t—couldn’t answer that honestly.  Elinor, Duke and Emmy were long dead.

“Don’t think about that.”

Her grimy fingers brushed at the veiny green particles clouding over Cheng’s eyes.

“Look,” she pointed into the distance, where one far side of the dome had fallen away, letting the outside in.  “It’s the sunset.  Feels like forever since we last saw that, huh?”

“It’s beautiful,” Cheng murmured.  “But it’s breaking my heart.”

Ginger knew the feeling.

“Was I wrong?” Cheng whispered.  “Did I do something that was horribly, horribly wrong?”

Ginger swallowed hard.  “You were just doing your job.  The biological ordinance was Dusk’s idea, wasn’t it?  Don’t forget to give the Devil her due.”

“Ginger?”  Cheng closed her eyes against the strangely wondrous panorama spread out before them.  “I don’t want to do this anymore.”

“That makes two of us.”

“Ginger?”

“Hmmm?” Her hand idly stroked the delicate strands of Cheng’s hair.

“If Dusk is the devil, what am I?”

Ginger grimaced.  Her fingers dug into the soil.  It was warm and throbbed against her palm.  Her other hand curled around the back of Cheng’s neck.  An almost effortless twist in just the right spot produced a sickening pop.  She watched the sun go down and listened quietly as the breath went out of Cheng. In that awful moment, there was only one person on the planet that she loathed more than herself.

Her twin’s mellow voice intruded. “It’s always the Cheng’s, isn’t it?” She commented idly.  “They never fail to amaze me.  They way they just suddenly go all…sideways.”

Ginger scowled.  “Shut up, Dusk.”

There was a throaty laugh.  “So, I’m the devil?  Doesn’t that make you the devil’s plaything?  Well, that does sound about right.”

Ginger retrieved the small knife that she kept in the strap of her boot and turned the sharp end on the back of Cheng’s neck where the company logo was stamped.

“Maybe you’d prefer something along the lines of the Dukes,” Dusk rambled on. “There were moments when I thought you were on the verge of trying to liberate him from those other two avatars.”

Ginger’s eyes rolled skyward.

“It was a part of the ruse, nothing more.  Kudos to you, by the way.  Starting with the guardians made manipulating the avatars child’s play.”

“Of course it worked.  I’m the mastermind, aren’t I?  Things always work out as long as you do exactly as I say.”  

There was a thoughtful pause.  “Good to know that you can keep your head and still do the heavy lifting in a situation like that.”

Twilight had fallen.  Patches of star-studded sky peeked down through the shattered dome. She couldn’t help baiting Dusk just a bit.

“How did you like my new cover-story?  On the fly, so it was a bit sketchy.  Figured it might appeal to a massive ego such as yours.”

“Yeah,” Dusk drawled.  “Couldn’t help noticing how dead I was, though.”

For the first time, Ginger’s lips nearly split into a genuine smile.

“Well, I can dream, can’t I?” She stood abruptly, twirling the data-chip that she’d removed from Cheng between her thumb and forefinger.  She dropped it and ground it to useless bits under her heel.

“I don’t care how many more you build to replace her.  I’m not working with this model anymore.”

Dusk scoffed at that.

“From your lips to Mother’s ears.  I don’t make the rules.  I just make sure that you follow them.”

Ginger’s mouth twisted sideways. Who was she kidding? “Well, aren’t you just a regular cog in the old wheel?  Casualties?”

Dusk skipped a beat. “Due to the traffic deadlock—good thinking by the way, today’s fatalities were minimal.  At this rate, the grievance fee deducted from our overhead will be negligible.

“What about the survivors?”

“Not our department.  Search and Rescue ops should have already been on standby.”

Ginger contemplated the devastating results of the day’s work. So much for a corporate cover-up job. Why had Dusk gone behind her back and used Cheng to kill all of those people? It seemed there was quite a bit more to this assignment, than A.I. obfuscating the evidence of past mistakes in order to protect their standing in the shaky global markets.

“What kind of spin is Alasiri Industries putting on this?”

“None.  This is purely a public service.”

The final pieces of this messy puzzle were falling into place now. This new, bitter taste in Ginger’s mouth had nothing to do with immersion-fatigue.

“Yeah,” she muttered dryly. “I’m sure the sudden outpouring of public interest has nothing to do with the upcoming elections.”

“Voters need something to be passionate about, don’t they?  This is a government-funded operation to free ’helpless citizens’ from paranoid technology that has kept them prisoners of these domes for decades.  It’s merely a coincidence that all of those evacuees will be transported to shelters in certain ballot-starved municipalities.”

“So, the nasty biotech was just for effect?”

“Well, we are being paid to do what it takes to sell the story. The terrorism angle was my suggestion to Councilman Larrs.  He seemed to rather like it.  I bet he’s already rehearsing his big speech.”

There was a pause, and then Dusk quipped: “Many will look back on this day and say, it was their fear that killed them.”

Ginger glared up at the shadowy aircraft hovering silently overhead, waited for it to settle to the ground in front of the old church.  The door slid open.  The woman waiting inside was her mirror image—save for the prim business outfit, the fashionable dreadlocks and pretentious, antique spectacles.

Ginger slid in beside Dusk with a disgusted scowl. “You know, one of these days I really am going to destroy you.”

Dusk cracked a brittle grin and shrugged off Ginger’s threat. She removed her spectacles and gazed out across the twilit remnants of Tsui City.

“You’ve just got to love them though,” she mused.  “Humans and their short memories.”

THE END

© TONYA R. MOORE