Kamikaze by Jayel

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Kamikaze, Part 6
by Jayel

By the time Alonzo and Morgan had managed to unpack enough medical supplies to make Magus comfortable, I had staunched the flow of excess blood in her brain and stabilized her condition. Once Bess helped me lift her onto a cot and hook her up to the necessary life support, it was a fairly simple matter to bring her around.

"Julia . . . oh, my god," she said softly, turning her face into the pillow. "Please, turn down that light."

"Okay," I promised, reaching to comply.

"Thanks," she murmured when I had turned the lamp down to the softest yellow glow it could emit without going out entirely. "What was that, anyway?"

"What was what?" I asked her gently, exchanging a glance with Alonzo.

"All that . . . You guys didn't see it?" She looked back and forth between us. "How could you not have seen it?"

"Honey, we didn't see anything," Alonzo said. "All we saw was you, sleeping on the job."

She managed a weak smile. "Yeah, well, you really missed it," she said, closing her eyes.

"What, Magus?" Bess pressed, looking at me with wide eyes. "What did we miss?"

Magus' eyes suddenly snapped open. "Tara," she said. "Where is she?"

"She's gone," Alonzo said, squeezing her hand. "She was gone when we found you."

"You've got to find her," she insisted, grabbing his sleeve. "Julia, make somebody go find her right now--"

"Her husband and John have already gone,"I assured her. "Magus, please, you've got to tell us what happened. I think you'll be fine, but I need to know what did this to you."

"Tara did this to me," she said. "Or at least, I think it was Tara." She closed her eyes again as if remembering hurt her head. "You and I were talking, and I went to look for her, remember?"

"Yes," I said gently. "I remember. Was she in the shelter?"

"Yes," she answered. "The shelter . . . it was full--full of light." She looked up at me in helpless frustration, obviously struggling to put her thoughts into words. "Walking into that room was like walking into a rainbow or a star or a . . . a matrix," she said. "It was like a computer matrix, only more complex, infinitely more complex, a genuinely infinite array of colors and so bright. I saw things, people--so many places all at once. And she was there. Tara was there; it was coming out of her, or rather--it was inside her." She closed her eyes in concentration. "It was like being inside her head," she said firmly. "Like I was seeing her thoughts. I saw her see me, and she called out to me, but there was no sound, only a feeling, like I was calling out to myself to wake up. Only she was saying 'go to sleep.'" She opened her eyes again. "The next thing I remember is waking up here, just then," she finished.

Morgan stuck his head into the shelter. "They're back," he said, glancing around at all of us. "Julia, you might want to bring your glove." Then he was gone again.

"What are you talking about?" I called after him. "Morgan, wait, I can't leave--"

"It's okay," Bess said, putting a hand on my arm. "I'll stay with Magus. You go see what they've done to John."

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Bess was wrong; no one had done anything to John. Or rather, John had apparently given as good as he got. Both he and Val were wearing the evidence of what looked like a pretty entertaining brawl. Val's left eye was an alarming shade of black, and Danziger's nose was still bleeding in spite of all the blood already staining the huge wad of rag he was holding under it.

But while these injuries were certainly more superficially colorful, they were far less alarming to my highly-trained medical eye than the pallor of Tara's skin or the purple shadows around her eyes. Her lips were swollen and cracked, not as if from any blow but as if she were in the last stages of some cruelly debilitating fever. Val was carrying her in his arms, and her head lolled drunkenly on his shoulder. Her eyes were open, but she didn't seem to know where she was.

"Val, what's wrong with her?" I asked him gently, handing Danziger a somewhat cleaner rag to staunch his wounds.

"He doesn't know," John interrupted. "Believe me, we've been over that already."

"How's Magus?" Val said, lowering his burden to the cot Alonzo had set up.

"I'm not sure," I said bluntly. "She's conscious, finally."

"Then she'll be okay," he said, sounding certain. He still hadn't looked at any of us. Instead his full attention was on his wife, whom he had arranged on the cot like a broken doll. "Come on, honey," he said softly. "You can come back--Magus is going to be fine. You didn't hurt her--"

"Like hell she didn't!" Alonzo said sharply. "She almost killed her! If Julia hadn't found her when she did--"

"I'm sorry!" The voice that came from the crumpled form on the cot sounded more like a magpie than a woman. "'Zo, I'm so sorry. I didn't mean it . . ." She covered her face with her hands and sobbed.

"There she is," Val said, obviously relieved. He knelt down beside the cot and gathered her into his arms. "There's my girl."

"Julia, look at her hands," Danziger said softly. "Make him show you her palms."

"I want to show her," Tara said, allowing Val to hold her upright. She held her fists out to me, then slowly opened them.

"Good lord," Morgan breathed. "What is that?"

In the center of each palm was a rough circle of bluish-gold light, shimmering like the surface of a tiny but endlessly deep well of glowing liquid. "I know," she said, looking around at all of our shocked faces. "It's awful."

"It isn't awful," Val insisted, burying his face in the side of her neck.

"No, it isn't," I agreed, moving closer to her with my glove extended. "Just very strange . . . " I passed the glove down the length of her body, but its readings were perfectly normal for an adult woman under somewhat more than normal stress. Even when I held the glove directly over her palm, it refused to register so much as a hiccup of unusual energy. "Tara, what is this?" I asked her.

"I'm not sure," she admitted, closing her fists again. "It's me--what Magus saw, what hurt her, it was me, turning myself inside out, going into myself, putting the light on the outside instead of the inside--"

"Wait a minute," Morgan demanded. "Are you some kind of computer? Are you EVE?"

"No!" she cried, looking wildly around at us. "Val, please make them believe me. I'm a person, just like you, or Uly, or any of you." She squeezed her fists even more tightly shut, and when she opened them, the light was gone. "He made it come out of us," she said. "He cut away the barriers so that what was on the inside could come out, so he could see it."

"Who, Tara?" I asked, forcing myself to take one of her hands with my bare one. "Who did this?"

"My father," she explained slowly, looking down at our clasped hands. "Citizen Reilly."

My very bones turned cold. I knew Reilly wasn't just a "personality matrix." No computer projection could have manipulated me so well, could have seen inside me the way Reilly had. Seen inside me . . . but that was just what Tara was talking about, wasn't it?

"That's impossible," Alonzo said, coming up behind me and putting his hands on my shoulders. I resisted the urge to slump against him, but I was inutterably grateful to feel him so close. "There is no Citizen Reilly. He's just part of a computer--"

"*Now* he's just part of a computer," Val said, looking up to meet Alonzo's eyes.

"There were ten of us," Tara said slowly, as if reciting a difficult poem for an audience of children. "Citizen Reilly called us his children. He opened our brains and touched . . . then when he was finished, we could reach out. Our minds could reach out of this--" She knocked on her forehead, a gesture that would have been comically childish if the idea behind it weren't so frightening. "We could bring the energy of our minds out of organic matter and into a free-standing matrix. We could touch each other's minds--we were connected." She let go of my hand and pressed her fists against her temples as if trying to hold the light inside her skull. "Only the others couldn't stop," she said, tears spilling down her cheeks. "They couldn't draw it back in again, once it was out. And they couldn't stop burning--the light just burned them up." She turned her face away from us and buried it against her husband's chest.

"When that happened, Reilly's experiment was declared a failure, and Tara was taken away from him," Val explained, stroking her hair. "That's when she was given to her adoptive parents, people who were on the Council who could be trusted to keep her 'talent' a secret."

"They told me I could never let anyone see me do it, that I could hurt them," she explained. "But they let me use it to make VR--all I have to do is think really hard about a place, and I can recreate it perfectly and transfer everything about it to a real computer matrix. I was always really careful not to hurt anyone, but I had accidents--like with Magus, people just walked into me. That's how Val found out --I almost killed him, too." This thought seemed to frighten her even more than the others, and she clung to him tightly.

Yale had been listening to all of this in silence. As a kind of computer-assisted intelligence himself, he more than any of us was in a position to understand what Tara was describing, but so far he hadn't commented. But now he came forward and laid a reassuring hand on Tara's shoulder. "You told Uly that your father came back for you," he said gently.

She looked up at him and nodded. "Yes," she admitted. "After I had enrolled at the University. I thought he was dead--that's what my parents had told me. Certainly the Council was denying his continued existence--if it hadn't been for me and my parents, they probably wouldn't have admitted he had ever existed at all."

"So he wanted you back," I said.

"Not me so much as what I could do," Tara said. "He said he had more children--orphans from a colonial insurrection. He said he had determined what had gone wrong before, that he knew how to make a computer that would help these children connect to one another, to make a superorganism. He said these children were sick, that the stations were making them sick, and connecting them this way was the only way to save them."

"Syndrome," I murmured more to myself than to her.

"Yes," she agreed. "At least, I guess so. Reilly said there was a new place, a new planet, where this superorganism could rebuild our society the way it was supposed to be, before we destroyed the Earth. The superorganism would save the Syndrome children, because instead of having a single flawed immune system, each child would be part of an entire immune network created in an entirely organic environment. My parents agreed with him--they said they would be the ones going to this new place, to make it ready for these children. All the time they had been pretending to me that Reilly was dead, they had been helping him build this computer."

"I'm going to hate myself for asking this," Morgan said slowly. "But what exactly were your adoptive parents' names?"

Tara smiled at him, but it was more a grimace than a smile. "You got it," she said, mock-flippant. "Elizabeth and Bennett Anson were my parents. They convinced me that my socalled talent would provide the catalyst to jump-start this superorganism's computer brain, that it would be a copy of my own personal matrix." She laughed bitterly. "My mother actually told me I was lucky; that I would be the mother of a whole new world."

"But you knew how wrong that would be," Alonzo said.

"Good lord, 'Zo, of course I did," she said impatiently. "I knew I wasn't going to help him; I just wasn't sure how to stop him." She looked down at her hands, lying open on her lap and looking perfectly normal. "Then I figured it out," she said, her voice suddenly cold and precise. "I suggested to Papa--to Reilly, that we form a three-way connection: me, him, and the computer. The computer was a standard life-support system with an open matrix address. I would download my matrix there, as if it were a really big VR program, and Reilly's own brain-grid would act as a controller, channeling it into the appropriate chambers. I would give it life, and he would give it 'discipline.' Needless to say, he loved the idea."

"Yes, I imagine he would," I said.

"Then when the time came to download what was me, I--I'm not sure how to explain it--I pushed out and away," she said. "I pushed Reilly into the computer."

"Excuse me?" Morgan demanded.

"When my matrix had made contact with that address, instead of taking hold, it created a vacuum," she explained slowly. "That space had to be filled, so it swallowed Reilly. That's the only way I know to put it. The computer swallowed Reilly's brian."

No one said anything for a long moment--this was, after all, quite an idea to take in. But Morgan, of course, soon broke the silence. "What about Reilly's body?" he asked. "Or is that just too gross to talk about?"

"It killed him, of course," Tara said, turning her gaze on him stonily. "Where my brothers and sisters had been burned from the inside out, he was consumed from the outside in. He just collapsed in on himself."

Everyone was quiet again while this pretty picture sank into our collective imagination. "Not an easy thing to explain to station security," Danziger said at last.

Tara looked up at him with genuine affection. "No," she admitted with a smile. "Not at all, nor to my parents. So I ran, as far and as fast as I could. I was hysterical--when Val found me, I was in a bar, drunk out of my mind and trying to explain what had happened to anybody who would listen."

"Luckily, the other guys all just wanted to get into her pants," Val said with a grin.

"He sobered me up, and when I was still telling the same crazy story three days later, he agreed to help me get away," she continued after planting a soft kiss on his jaw. "And after the first twenty years or so, it was easy to pretend it never happened. And it just got easier and easier."

"I think we can all understand that," Danziger said. "The only problem is, it did happen, and apparently it's still happening. Whatever you may have done to Reilly, you didn't stop him."

"No," she agreed, her face sobering at once. "I just made him stronger." She reached out and took my hand again. "But we can destroy him, I know it. I know him, Julia, I know how his network works. There has to be a way to destroy the source without hurting you guys. If I can make the connection, there has to be a way I can break it."

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