Saving the Reluctant

Raw Fiction: This is the rough first chapter of Book 2 in the Virtual Wars series, slated for release in 2023.

Saving the Reluctant

The sounds of proton rifles discharging caused seventeen-year-old Larken Marche’s shoulders to seize into a solid mass of useless muscle. She only exhaled when she saw the man in a green and gray military uniform collapse into arid land. A ticker scrolled across all four sides of a three-dimensional screen of her holovid projection: “Spain and Italy continue to exchange blows.”

Larken’s sniffling had been reduced to an annoying periodic whistling — but her nose still ached from illness. Her eyes drifted toward numbers hanging on the wall to her right. Still only early afternoon,  despite the dimness. She scanned the holovid channels, seeking hints of other outbreaks of violence, all the more common as nations ceased formalities and opted for armed conflict to secure their fair share of a shrinking global supply of resources from rhodium to peanut butter. 

Larken wanted none of it. 

She flipped through more channels, seeking a lofting match. All she could find was a men’s league final — the Boise Widowmakers, second in their league, against the Minneapolis Bolts, ranked twentieth but up and coming. Boise was up by five, so there wasn’t much of a game to watch. Larken flicked the station over and stumbled across more news. “France Threatens to Invade England” was the next ticker she saw. France hadn’t had a war with England for at least three centuries, according to her former history teacher’s ramblings in that life she’d had until only a year ago. Once upon a time, her back and legs had worked, and more than once, she scored the winning goals at lofting matches for her alma mater Brighton Academy. It seemed like another lifetime. 

The news anchor’s face appeared full of eyebrow-furrowed concern and grimacing sympathy before morphing into an apathetic grin when the story turned local. A now bright-eyed and smiling newscaster discussed how the amazing Seattle Aircrawlers were in the championship again. Larken turned the holovid off. Zephyr wasn’t her thing. With the Aircrawlers playing, she knew her brother Oliver would be watching — wherever he and his perennial girlfriend Molly had disappeared.

Larken twisted her neck to work out the kink from laying with her head propped at almost a ninety-degree angle for half an hour. She did a quick mental inventory and discovered no new pains beyond her neck and that her head cold had mostly subsided save her nose. The searing head and sinus pressure even replaced the usual dull throbbing that had plagued her for most of the previous year. Her back spasmed when she tried to stand, locking her into a supine position amid the cushions. The thick sweatpants she wore hung like elephant skin from her withered frame. She supported herself with her elbows, inhaled again, and blew out through her teeth, willing the pain away — which had all the effect she’d expected: none. It wouldn’t be a good pain day.

Her bearing held the next try as she forced her way to her feet. She scanned the room for the hundredth time since being relegated to it. Larken’s cane had disappeared since she’d begun her relaxing-on-the-couch journey. No cane yet, but she didn’t need it — not really. She could make it without the cane’s support if she had to. Her back and leg pain would be torture in the meantime, and she would pay for it later, but she could do it. Larken weighed the possibility of remembering where she’d lain her support against her need for a strong cup of yaupon tea and decided to go for the drink. Standing atop shaky legs, her bare feet sank into inch-thick carpet as she trudged toward the kitchen area, each step shooting a spike up through her hips.

“Play messages,” she said, breathless once she’d covered the distance to the kitchen counter. “MiniMaid 2201, make me some yaupon.”

One of the best investments she’d ever made was buying a MiniMaid about a year ago, even if she did forget that she owned it from time to time — well, all the time. Larken was almost to the food generator by now. Instead of standing by the thing and punching in the code for her caffeinated yaupon warm brew, she plopped down on a stool by the counter and watched as the little machine she hadn’t bothered to name whirred past and brought the device to life. She considered some different names. Candy? Eucana? Cher? No term or title seemed appropriate for her little pudgy round-shaped assistant.

“Larken, we have to talk. You need to call me. I’m worried about you.”

Larken jerked up and regretted it as her back protested. She’d already forgotten that she’d even asked for messages to be played, but that voice sounded like Jocelyn, her former grade-school classmate. But Jocelyn wasn’t supposed to know that Larken stayed at the H Hotel. Her brother and Molly had been sworn to secrecy, and Sam and Stephen didn’t even talk to the girl — who must still be sixteen by now, it being May and Jocelyn’s birthday being in July. Yet here her voice was, leaving messages. Unless it wasn’t her, after all.

“Replay the last message,” she said, clenching her teeth as she waited.

As she listened to the exact words, Larken tried to tease out what the concern might be that hid in Jocelyn’s voice. Her mind sped through the events of the previous year. She’d discovered she was a genetically-altered clone called a model — something only a handful knew. Her heron-headed cane — the only support she would accept — had been necessary in light of the beatings she’d taken that year. The cane was a gift from Jocelyn before Larken went into semi-permanent hiding — just in case the extremist organization, the Human Pride Movement, or HPM, decided to retaliate for blowing up their headquarters. She hadn’t, but they didn’t know that any more than they knew she was a model. In true Jocelyn fashion, the heron’s head indicated the goddess of the dead, Theron, from the Hesperia Basin emerging mythologies of Mars.

When the message finished, Larken convinced herself it was Jocelyn, even if the caller didn’t leave her name. Like most other relationships in her life, Larken's tie to Jocelyn had withered due to non-care. The saved message felt like a betrayal because of their shared past and unshared present. Larken bit her trembling lip, and the taste of dehydrated mud caked her tongue. She hadn’t cleaned her teeth the night before, and now, just as her neck protested still about her choice of sleeping arrangement, her tongue protested her tea-time selection the day before, which consisted mainly of the whiskey she’d liberated from Torrent’s room, coupled with champagne macaroons. She smiled at the thought of her benefactor waking to discover that his prize had been prized away.

“Call Jocelyn Reed.”

“No.”

Her hotel room had something of an attitude.

“Call her.”

“Last time, you said you didn’t want to speak to her again. She cried, you cried, and it was very uncomfortable for everyone. Including me.”

“I know that,” Larken said, although she should have admitted that she’d forgotten that they hadn’t exactly parted on speaking terms the last time she’d talked to Jocelyn. Larken shook her head, unsure how she could ever forget the screaming match that ensued. Her memory had been spotty since the attacks. “I need to talk to her.”

“You said if you ever try to talk to her again, don’t let you.”

It sounded like something she would do.

“She called me. She could be trying to apologize.”

Instead of connecting her to Jocelyn, House played the next message on the list. This one portrayed the voice of a stuttering boy who Larken had never heard before but guessed by the repeated throat-clearing to be Bodhi, as much her “half-brother” as Torrent was her “father.”

“I hate these things. I got your number from Dad. Listen. Stay away from the protests. I wanted to let you know that something strange is happening. People are disappearing, and they say HPM are responsible. I don’t know….”

“Disconnect.”

Warnings and concern, and nobody ever just calls to say hello. After an excruciating balancing act involving scalding hot tea in a mug and rickety legs carrying her across the thick carpet, Larken reclined into the sofa and sipped on her yaupon. House offered to play multiple board games or holo games, but she wasn’t in the mood, and now she wanted to go to a protest. Fucking Bodhi.

She brought up the cup and took a swig. As the bitter taste dripped down her throat, it spread warmth throughout her body. She could feel fake energy spread from her stomach to her mind. Ideas fired into one another in her brain until one latched on.

“House, next protest. When is it?”

“I assume you mean model rights protest since that’s what you always look for.”

“Of course.”

Snarky bastard.

“There’s one next Saturday, downtown Seattle. Industrial district.”

SoDo. Larken's memories harkened to nights running in terror through the woods nearby, trying to stay one step ahead of a crazed android and her oversized killer former-Zephyr mech. Larken’s jaw still clicked sometimes where the woman had connected one of the blows that had landed Larken in the hospital the first time.

“Any others?”

“Not for a few weeks. There’s one next month in May. Unless you want to take a trip to Bellingham. Up there, they have them every other weekend.”

Even by volantrae, Bellingham was a two-hour ride, worse on public transit, which Larken would have to take since she couldn’t legally drive due to medical conditions and is prone to the occasional seizure. She worked her way back to her feet from the kitchen counter stool. Maybe she could make it down to the University of Washington. There was always a mini-protest going on down there that she could join. Perhaps she could even do some recruiting.

Hopping the number sixty bus down to the metro would get Larken to the university in two stops. The alternative one-thirteen would take about four minutes less but wouldn’t arrive for another hour. Larken shuffled forward again and saw something from the corner of her eye. She swiveled her head toward the couch. Wedged between the cushion and the back peeked out two beady eyes of the heron-headed goddess. Pulling it out of its hiding place, she leaned her weight onto it. One-thirteen it was. She guessed she probably needed a shower from the odor that she’d only gotten whiffs of here and there due to olfactory fatigue.

Showering was an ordeal in the non-ADA-compliant room — one of the reasons she didn’t firmly stick to a shower schedule. There was no supporting handle or floor mat to secure her feet. Wobbling as she ran the soap over her body with one hand while trying to maintain balance with the other, she regretted the pride that had landed her in a “normal” room. Pride and the fact that Sam, her conspicuously absent roommate, had wanted to be on a higher floor had created her current shower dilemma. Larken's left foot slipped two inches, nearly spilling her to the floor. She bit down on her lip hard enough to draw blood but kept her balance through the agony of strained thigh muscles against dislocated vertebrae.

It took her the entire hour to shower, fix her hair back into a ponytail, and don some clothing that looked close enough to what the college girls were wearing: a sensible t-shirt under a checkered dress along with her favorite black boots that gave her at least an extra inch in height, putting her on the same level as most of the people she came across. She would have been taller than most women if the pain didn’t force her to hunch over at the shoulders. As it was, she counted herself fortunate to be able to look others in the eye.

~

The bus smelled like old latex and fake grape for reasons that Larken didn’t want to imagine. The wall of odor slammed into her as the bus driver opened the door. Larken carefully pushed her cane onto the first step, and then her body followed slowly as she negotiated the elevation difference. When she got to the top of the stairs, the bus driver stared needles of judgment at her.

“Miss, would you like to sit?” A boy just about Larken's same age —  though he probably couldn’t tell given how much her injuries had aged her — stood to allow room for Larken to sit. Larken passed the driver a judgmental scowl in return before accepting the seat. As she passed the boy who’d offered her the seat, she got a distinct aroma of acrid oil and must. The smell lingered in her nostrils and floated into her chest, lifting her heart and belly while she lowered herself to the slight warmth the boy had left behind. She glanced up at him to give him a thankful and maybe borderline flirtatious smile, but he’d already moved his attention to staring out the window as the volantrae bus lifted from the road and into the sky. She clamped her lips together and took her seat, having been relegated to the scenery by her cane.

People were always friendly to her, but in the way that someone had to be pleasant. The boy held no genuine concern for her. He probably felt a little better about himself for helping the cripple this morning and may brag to his friends about how good a person he was.

Larken tried to ignore him and practiced her recruitment speech in thin whispers.

“You can feel it in the air. Things are changing, and not all for the better. We need to be prepared.”

A magical woman who only exists in my mind told me so, so I’m building an army of people to sit around and do nothing, she thought. The ridiculousness of the idea made her laugh out loud, causing the boy who’d given up his seat for her to look down at her with one eyebrow raised just enough to betray his judgment.

“Prepared for what, dear?”

A shaky voice from beside shook her out of her gaze. She turned to face a withered-looking woman with a yellow hat and excessive make-up — not her target audience. So she didn’t feel like she had any reason not to tell her something that she probably wouldn’t believe anyway.

“I’m not sure,” she said. “I know something is happening, and we must be prepared. I don’t know how or from where whatever it is will happen.”

Larken hadn’t meant to let the frustration into her voice. Something about the woman brought out the angst she’d kept inside and wove it into her response.

“I remember when Akston came to power,” the older woman said, her voice getting even weaker, which Larken thought was her attempt at a whisper. Larken leaned closer to the woman as the woman continued to speak about the totalitarian regime that had nearly toppled the world governments before Larken was born. “There were those of us who saw what they were doing, you know? Hundreds of thousands of us. And my parents and I protested too. For months we protested every day. Every single day.”

The woman got a far-off look in her eye, and for a second, Larken thought she might lapse into protest chants. Instead, she only continued with her barely-audible monologue after a deep sigh.

“And every month, we tried to get more people. But as Akston gained power, we lost more people than we got. At first, we wondered what was wrong with everyone, so they couldn’t see what Akston was doing. Then — I remember, it was 2100, and I was twelve — suddenly Akston rose in every nation on the planet, and there was no longer any point in protesting.”

“Not very encouraging,” Larken said.

“It wasn’t meant to be.”

“Oh.”

“The point is that my parents and I — we continued protesting. They beat us, hosed us, and even sent the military to shoot at us.”

The older woman let out a giggle that, to Larken, seemed inconsistent with being shot at by the military, but she offered a thin smile anyway in response. The woman seemed to see her discomfort.

“You must have a  sense of humor about these things, dearie. Otherwise, the weight of it all will destroy you. Where was I?” the woman asked, seemingly not having detected the same.

“Shot at by military.”

“Ah, yes. That’s how I lost my parents, you know. Protest in downtown Portland. They disappeared. One moment, they were there; another moment, they’d been shoved into an unmarked van and never returned.”

“I get it. It was harder in your day.”

“You don’t get it, though, do you? It wasn’t harder. And it wasn’t different. It was the same. No matter what enemy arises, people never change. Some are fighters, and some aren’t willing to risk anything, even at the expense of everything they claim to believe in. We didn’t realize until twenty years later that you can’t make people care. What we really should have been doing was finding those people who care already.”

Larken felt her stomach lift again as the bus began its descent. She looked at the woman’s smile and tried to imagine the woman younger, standing with a microphone or holo-projector and screaming in the face of a wall of police. The bus crept to a slow stop, and people began to disembark.

“I don’t understand, though. Akston was destroyed by Congressional intervention. What does that have to do with your protesting? It was an assassination that killed their leader and an investigation by United States Congress.”

“Who do you think we are, dearie? Let me out, please?”

Larken then realized that the departure had slacked, and the boy who’d given up his seat blocked the aisle for her to make her way out. She gave him a nod and felt a twinge of guilt for reprimanding him so severely in her mind as she pulled her weight up onto her cane and pushed her way forward. The woman followed just behind. When they’d breached the bus exit, Larken turned to ask one more question. The woman stood ready as though she’d expected it.

“But people don’t care. How can you get people to care?”

“We never did figure that out. Even when Congress went after the Akston Society leaders, half of Americans didn’t seem to care. Only ten years after Akston’s dissolution, when the evidence in Akston’s books was finally exposed to public scrutiny, did people start to understand the extent that they’d leached resources from the governments and tried to turn themselves into emperors? To this day, some people still haven’t learned.”

The older woman took a slow breath as Larken followed her gaze toward the university buildings, vast and spread out over a hidden valley in the foothills of Mt. Rainier.

“They have to care, though. They will die if they don’t.”

“Some might, but not all. And if you do prevent whatever you think you see, especially if you prevent it, some will always say that things would have been better if you’d never gotten involved. You can’t save people who don’t want to be saved.”

That seemed to be what the older woman had started to say on the bus but had taken a very long time to get to. The older woman began a slow shuffle toward the campus.

“Mind if I walk with you?” Larken asked.

“Professor Halbrook?”

The woman seemed less old now that Larken had spent some time talking with her, though she had to be over a hundred. Professor Halbrook turned faster than Larken would have expected to greet a young man.

“Dale, you’re late for my class.”

Dale seemed confused for a moment as he tried to craft a response. Professor Halbrook smiled at him.

“I’m joking, of course. I’m late too. Have you met… I’m sorry, dear; I didn’t get your name?”

“Larken Marche,” Larken said, though the name seemed foreign suddenly.

“Larken. This is Dale. He’s a senior this year in my Dissecting Objectivism class. It’s a very intriguing course. Someone like you would benefit from it if you could fit it into your program. Are you pursuing your doctorate at the University of Washington?”

Larken wanted to say yes. She wanted to say that she had a normal life and that she could pretend for a while that she was a college student with everyday concerns and shake the burden of world troubles. Of course, she was too young, but that didn’t matter.

She realized then why Professor Halbrook had spent the time talking to her: to the woman; she was a confused college student faced with the truth of the world for the first time and having trouble dealing with her relative weakness to affect change. A complete miss from Larken’s actual situation, but Larken felt that the woman tried, which was kindness.

“Not yet,” Larken said, giving herself some wiggle room. It would have been her senior year coming to a close at Brighton Academy if she hadn’t been a model. Now? She wouldn’t even be considered for admission. So she lied. “I’m checking the campus today to see if it’ll suit me.”

“Mention me on your application,” Professor Halbrook said. “I carry some weight here, and you seem like an intelligent young woman. Remember that whatever troubles you will pass, dearie.”

“Professor, I’ve been meaning to ask. Do you have time?” the young man, Dale, interrupted. Professor Halbrook smiled at him, seemingly unperturbed by his rudeness.

“About?”

“What licensed the assassination? I don’t understand at the end of….”

The two drifted off together, and Larken let them. She looked up at the university buildings with longing in her heart, wondering faintly what would happen if she told Oliver that she’d decided to get a college degree instead of preparing for a war she didn’t understand. After thirty seconds of introspection, she straightened her back, placed her cane tip, and followed the sounds of the protest.