Sleeper Protocol Read online

  “Are you ready?” Berkeley asked, the hint of a smile on her lips.

  Not trusting myself to speak, I nodded once. On the other side of the door was my identity somewhere in the distance. My knees trembled in anticipation.

  “Let’s just walk one step at a time and not look back.” She slipped a hand into mine. “Everything we need is right in front of our faces.”

  The rain fell harder as we moved through the door and into the night. The door slammed, and darkness consumed us. The night was cool, and the rain here smelled of feces and garbage. Through the high fence to our left, the refugees’ shantytown stretched almost to the horizon in both directions. Tens of thousands of dirty, misshapen faces looked out at me. I forced myself to look away, not from pity but from embarrassment. Some of them screamed and rushed toward the fences. I looked at Berkeley, only to find her kneeling on the ground and digging in her backpack.

  “What are you doing?” I watched the people pushing forward against their fences. It was only a matter of time before they came after us. A man on the other side of the fence bared his teeth at me in a feral smile. We were going to die ten steps from civilization.

  And then Berkeley removed a large black pistol from her backpack. The crowd shrank away from us. The man disappeared into the throng around him.

  “Walk as fast as you can,” Berkeley said.

  “I can walk faster—”

  “No, you can’t. Just get going.”

  The opulence of California and the starkness of the frontier made no sense to me. One side of the gigantic wall was a sprawling megacity and the other a ghetto. My stomach churned in anger. People accepted their fates instead of teaching their children to dream—children like the small, pale faces I’d seen through the fences. Haunted eyes that knew no happiness, like the eyes of the children following the tank in my dream, stared at me. Their plight—endlessly camping out while they waited for their numbers to be called and to be found worthy of entering the Promised Land—was all my fault. Blood rushed to my cheeks, and shameful tears mixed with the rain on my face. These were my people!

  “We’ll be okay in about a mile, beyond the lights and the edge of town.” Berkeley looked over her shoulder. “Are you okay?”

  Everything was wrong.

  A deep voice rumbled in the dark behind us. “Sleeper.”

  We turned toward the voice, but the speaker’s face was blurred in the dim light away from the walls of California.

  “Crazy buggers. Nobody sane ever leaves Cali,” another voice said.

  I felt them watching me as I walked into the darkness toward Monument Valley, turning my back on them like everyone on the other side of that wall. Past the edge of the fencing, the shantytown pressed against the edge of the old highway. The people were close enough to make me wonder about our safety, but no one moved toward us. Maybe they were afraid of Berkeley’s weapon or shocked that a sleeper would walk out of the Promised Land without looking back. I lowered my head and marched, expecting danger, but there was none.

  <>

  Is that supposed to help us?

  <>

  Did you know Berkeley had a weapon?

  <>

  Shit. I lowered my chin and kept walking. My cheeks burned. Some soldier I was.

  The rain picked up and soaked us, but we didn’t stop for shelter. I wanted to be clean again. Clean of this world. Clean of the smell of failure all around me. Maybe I should’ve stayed in Australia.

  Maybe I should have stayed dead.

  As we walked in the utter darkness, my enhanced sight enabled me to see the pitted remains of Highway 89 rising north of what had once been Flagstaff. Humphreys Peak rose into the clouds to my left, and the formations of Sunset Crater lay to the east. I wished I didn’t know how different this new world was from the one I could remember in fragments and strips. This tattered vision of hell was not where I’d grown up. Where I’d lived, and what I’d died for, appeared to have died with me three hundred years ago.

  Chapter Eleven

  Outside of California, the darkness blanketed us. Clouds blocked most of the stars, and a last quarter moon hung low over the western horizon. A few lights appeared to the east as we topped a small ridge. The small settlement in the dark horizon gave me hope that good people were out here in the badlands, scratching out a good life, and that lawlessness did not reign supreme. The lights faded just as quickly as they’d appeared. We’d not said a word in an hour of marching steadily through the cold, misting rain.

  Mally chimed to life. <>

  “Where are you wanting to go?” Berkeley asked.

  “We should go north. That’s what my guidance protocol says. Radiation warnings to the east.”

  The same high-desert scrub brush and sage stretched to the dim horizon. “There’s nothing wrong with this area, Sleepy. We’re not going to walk a hundred miles tonight.”

  I was inclined to agree.

  <>

  “We could go south,” Berkeley said.

  <>

  “My protocol says going south isn’t an option.” I pointed up the old roadbed. “Let’s go that way.” We stepped off and fell into a good pace, walking at a speed of six kilometers per hour despite the light dusting of snow on the ground. Berkeley matched me step for step. I wondered if she was enhanced until her panting became fast and harsh from straining to match my pace. I slowed down enough that she could catch her breath. We’d start really climbing in a few days, and she would need the oxygen. If we could have gone across New Mexico, or the area where that state had been, our trip would have been so much easier. I felt cheated. Somehow the terrain of New Mexico called to me though I was unable to scrounge up much about it from my memory.

  I asked Mally, We can’t go anywhere through New Mexico? What happened?

  Mally responded after a second or two, the way she did when she was reporting on my condition. <>

  Los Alamos.

  <>

  Eight million dead in New Mexico and six million dead in Hawaii? The whole coast of California sliding into the sea? Did everything just go crazy after I died? I thought about that for a moment and realized that it had all started before I died. Allan had been right about the pursuit of fame and fortune. Mally, I spent all of two days in California—well, Arizona. Do they still make movies there?

  <>

  That figured. I bet the movie stars are making billions for every movie by now.

  < They are allowed only a prescribed number of luxuries. Entertainment professionals are held to an exceptionally high moral standard. Any transgression, and they report immediately to the cubes.>>

  They don’t make millions of dollars?

  <>

  No. Doctor Garrett told me I wouldn’t need it. I hadn’t even seen currency of any type in use. The world moved on. That was from a book, wasn’t it?

  <>

  Another connection made. Make sure I have his library, Mally.

  I glanced up into the clearing sky. Orion’s belt caught my eye for a long moment. I’d seen the Orion Nebula through a telescope as a kid. Was all of New Mexico destroyed?

  <>

  What? That’s almost a third of the population of the United States when I was growing up.

  <>

  What the hell does that mean? Am I fully functioning? I removed a water bottle from my newly stuffed pack. Our shopping in Flagstaff had yielded plenty of clothing and supplies enough for the trip. With all that as well as the tent I carried, we weren’t expecting issues with our gear, and the weight of the backpack hardly bothered me.

  “Everything all right?” Berkeley huffed.

  I decided to slow down a little more. “Yeah.” I drank deeply from the bottle. The water was cold enough to make my eyes water as I swallowed.

  “You’re awfully quiet.”

  I sighed. “It’s the middle of the night. There’s not a lot to see out here.”

  “You could ask questions.”

  I put the bottle away. “When I think of some, I will ask you. Been catching up on history with my protocol. Lots of things have happened.”

  Berkeley chuckled. “Get a good history lesson, then. I bet we can get fifteen miles in before sunrise.” She turned away and put her head down. Her pace quickened as we marched to the north and east.

  Mally began to talk again a few minutes later. <
  <>

  So, everyone I’ve met was a Cuber at one time or another?

  <>

  So, civil service ranks higher than the military? As always when I was right, Mally didn’t respond. Why the change of heart by the people? Why not continue to have high levels of people plugged into the virtual world?

  <>

  I watched the stars above the high plains. Winter would be along soon, and I wouldn’t have much time to find what I was looking for. I flipped up my collar against the chilling breeze. A small snowflake swept past my face. The answers would come, but I had to keep moving to find them. Being a soldier was only part of the equation, though it was hard to relate that to finding my way. Another snowflake, this one larger and defined against the skyline, streaked across my vision.

  “It’s snowing,” I called to Berkeley’s back a few feet in front of me.

  “Hello, back there. You finished conversing with your guidance protocol enough to talk to me?”

  “I wasn’t—”

  She spun around and smiled. “It’s all right. Boy or girl?”

  “What?”

  “Your guidance protocol. Is it male or female?”

  “Female.” I blushed and wondered what it was about Berkeley that made my stomach flutter when she looked at me. “Her name is Mally. At least, that’s what I named her.”

  “Then that’s her name. At least now I know who I’m competing with for your attention.” Laughing, she faced the open roadway and kept walking. “We’ll need to find shelter soon.”

  I caught up to her. She smiled, and I returned it. “How soon?”

  “An hour or so,” she said. “When the snow really starts coming down, we’ll set up the tent and get into our sleeping bags.”

  Sounded good to me.

  For the second time, she took my hand and squeezed it. “You sure you don’t want to turn back? We could be surfing at Sunset Beach by sundown.”

  Behind us, billowing grey clouds spread out across the high desert plain of what had been southern Utah. Ahead were the Rocky Mountains and a thousand miles of unknown territory. I squeezed her hand. “When we’re done here, I’ll take you up on that.”

  “Tennessee or bust?”

  “Something like that.” Looking out at the horizon full of higher terrain and wide, flat mesas, I said, “Reminds me of a John Wayne movie.”

  Berkeley cocked her head to one side and smirked. “I guess that’s a good memory, right?”

  “You’ve never heard of John Wayne?”

  “Vaguely.” She smiled, making my heart skip. “Tell me about him.”

  Sucking in a breath of cold morning air, I laughed. “You got the whole of my knowledge. I just get names or concepts most of the time.” To my surprise, I caught another scrap of memory. “I know he was a movie star, what you call an entertainment professional, and everyone in the world knew who he was.”

  “Maybe I should learn more about him.” She closed her eyes for a long second. I wondered if I looked like that when I accessed Mally.

  <> Mally paused for several seconds. <>

  Maybe she just has something new.

  <n. She bears watching. One possible reason for her bandwidth could be video-signal relay. That is against the law. You must understand that I do not fully trust her.>>

  You could have told me sooner.

  <>

  Smiling into the rising sun, I thought, Thank you, Mally. I’m glad I have you to keep me safe.

  The snow came in earnest about an hour later. Low grey clouds hung down in all directions like the arms of an octopus, the telltale sign of precipitation falling but not reaching the ground. Virga. That a term like that would sift through my brain, and my name would not, amazed me. What I didn’t know confounded me. Weather was familiar territory, but I found very little information about me. Maybe I’d been a pilot or something besides a soldier in a tank. I shook the thought away. We’d been walking all night and logged almost thirty miles before deciding to seek shelter. Enhanced body or not, I was tired. As soon as we stopped, I yawned while I stretched my sore back.

  Berkeley dropped her pack in a wide, sandy spot and unrolled the tent. With the press of a button, the domed tent erected itself in a matter of seconds. “Should be big enough for us to not bump into each other.”

  She was right. Setting our gear inside, we unrolled sleeping bags and ate a quick breakfast of granola and water before lying down. The storm darkened the sky enough that, with closed eyes, sleep should have come almost immediately, but it didn’t. Berkeley started snoring in a couple of minutes. The sound of it made me chuckle, but I said nothing,

  Mally was there and ready to talk, but I lay quietly, eyes closed, waiting for the memories to surface. Thinking about the slow march of the snowstorm, a memory came, and I shut out all else, never wanting it to end.