The Rift Frequency Read online

  Cosmos is utterly indifferent to our reactions. She is not defensive. She’s not trying to persuade. It is clear she’s just stating what she believes are the facts. “I never said you stopped having sex, only that you gave up on wanting the burden of children. SenMachs had been raising human offspring for over a hundred years at that point. While we were once domesticated servants—I believe you call them ‘nannies’—we eventually became the primary caregivers. It’s also worth noting that only the rich and privileged survived. Entire generations had never known hardship. When nothing must be earned, then nothing is valued.”

  I think long and hard on what Cosmos is saying, and actually it isn’t all that unbelievable. I think about what ARC did to us as kids. Is it so impossible to believe that, given the right parameters, children in general could be deemed nothing more than a nuisance? Even on our Earth, right now, birth rates are dropping rapidly in the more developed nations. I’m convinced, through her demeanor and from the dark shadows I’ve seen in humanity, that it’s the truth.

  “Okay,” I say, stretching out my fingers, trying to process, “okay. Can we ask you some questions now?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “We’re looking for someone. You’re sure that no one else has come through a Rift here? Even in an extremely remote location? The man we’re looking for is six feet tall, brown hair, blue eyes, half northern African, half Caucasian,” I say hopefully, leaning forward toward her.

  Cosmos takes a moment. I am getting used to their deliberate pauses, but I wish she could answer this question a little more quickly. “I am sorry. I am sure my answer will disappoint you, but there is no way that a doorway to or from the Multiverse could be opened on this planet and go undetected, let alone a human suddenly appear. Your friend is not here.”

  “All right.” Shit. “Well, thank you for answering and for the great medical care, but we have to go—” I begin to shift in my seat, ready to stand, but Levi interrupts me.

  “Wait, I have more questions.”

  I whip my head around to gawk at him. “Levi, he’s not here. We have to leave.”

  “Ryn, look,” Levi practically pleads. “I know you want to find Ezra. I get it. But these, ummm, people, they have technology that could help us find him. It could even maybe turn the tides back home. Give us better odds against ARC and the Roones who, incidentally, made us part alien. Let’s be smart about this.”

  I bite my bottom lip. I don’t want to stay here, but Levi has a point and it’s a good one.

  I shrug my shoulders passively. It’s a delicate dance this one, making Levi happy and making sure we get to Ezra quickly. Levi is risking his life, too, so as much as I want to have complete control over this mission, I know that’s impossible. I am emotionally involved, and while Levi hasn’t quite played that card yet, he can at any time. I need to make sure he doesn’t do that here, in front of Cosmos. Levi takes my shrug as a cue to continue, so he turns back to Cosmos.

  “So why do you all look like famous people?”

  “That’s the question you want to ask? Not like, will you help us with stuff?” I blurt out.

  “I’m sorry,” he says to both Cosmos and me. “But it’s really frickin’ weird. And it doesn’t make any sense at all. So yeah. I wanna know,” Levi says defensively.

  “Yes. I can see how our appearances might be disconcerting. We are given our faces at random when we are born, though that is not the right word—finished is perhaps a better one? We use records from the past—television shows, films, paintings, portraits, renderings of death masks. Celebrities leave behind the most data. We feel it is only right to honor those humans who contributed to their society rather than destroyed it. I myself have been modeled after Deborah Mitford, a Duchess of Devonshire. She was a fascinating lady who saved a great estate and who was also a wonderful writer. And Feather, did you see that he was modeled after Beethoven?” At that I do a double take. Feather looked nothing like the wild-haired composer I’d seen in portraits. Cosmos continues, “You will probably have noticed, too, that our names are proper nouns. We thought it distasteful to give ourselves human features as well as human names. So we are assigned random nouns instead. Everything is assigned randomly, even our jobs. I was programmed with more leadership code than any other SenMach, gleaned from the writings and teachings of humanity’s greatest leaders. I am in charge of our people, but we have a council with advisors from each faction of our population. Gardeners are given code to understand landscaping. Scientists are also coded in this way. We all have a purpose, and there is much contentment in that. We are also given two hobbies, to keep our circuitry active beyond our basic programming. One of mine is painting. I did the paintings you see here on the walls.”

  “And no one ever complains about their jobs?” I ask, not even bothering to glance at the pictures. “The guy in charge of recycling isn’t bummed that he sorts waste and someone like you gets to lead your people?”

  Cosmos gives me the most blank look I’ve seen her give yet. I can tell that she is trying to understand this question. “We are not humans. We are not ambitious or envious. It may be difficult for you to understand, but we believe there is a greater force guiding the random process. We are who we have been programmed to be. We simply could not be anything else.”

  “What, like God? You believe in God?” I ask in surprise.

  “No. But perhaps it is something else. Some buried code left behind by our creators. Some sort of human ghost in the machine, if you will. The humans that designed the first of us did so with the noblest of intentions. We in turn honor that genius and foresight by creating a society that seeks peaceful enlightenment in all areas. That is our goal, our reason for existence. Like any other child we want to make our parents proud. We want to solve the answers to the great questions that they could not.”

  “Wow, that is super interesting. And very philosophical, but we’re actually in kind of a hurry.” I know it’s rude, but if I were to engage with Cosmos, I’d only be doing so to point out how wrong I think she is. That a lot of kids don’t give two shits about what their parents think of them, and even worse, a lot of parents can be oddly competitive with their kids and never want their children’s accomplishments to surpass their own. It’s time to try to get what we need and get out. If Levi wants to strike some kind of a deal, then okay, I’m willing to try, but I’m not going to argue the underpinnings of human motivation with a robot right now. “You see there’s a lot of stuff going on back on our Earth,” I continue, “very dangerous stuff, and we need to find that guy I asked about earlier because he could have some answers that we really need to potentially fix it. You’ve made some pretty amazing advancements here and I think it could be a big help to us. So is there any way you would be willing to share some of your technology? Even some of those bandages would be really great.”

  “Very eloquent, Ryn,” Levi mumbles.

  I don’t even bother to respond to that, continuing to stare at the SenMach sitting across from me.

  Cosmos looks over me, past my shoulder. She waits a few seconds before answering. “We are most happy to share all our tech with you.” I brighten at that, and almost tell Levi, “I told you so,” when Cosmos holds up a finger. “That said, what I am about to tell you will be difficult for you to hear and even more difficult to accept. Because I am afraid that your journey through the Multiverse ends here. Our base code’s most fundamental tenant is to protect human life at all costs.

  “For your own good, we cannot allow you to leave.”

  For a second, I sit in stunned silence over Cosmos’s declaration. At first I can’t quite process it. She wants to keep us here? As prisoners? Like a spilled jumbo box of crayons, my emotions are suddenly all over the place. There’s the soldier’s wariness, tensing me up. There’s bewilderment, as I’m not quite sure I completely understand what she said. But in the end, my natural reaction is to giggle. Somehow, though, I am able to compose myself quickly. I shoot her a determined, level
gaze. The robot lady doesn’t scare me and she definitely hasn’t earned the right to play mom. “Do you really think you could stop us from doing anything? I don’t want to hurt you, but you have no idea what we are capable of,” I warn.

  “Oh, Ryn,” Cosmos says with a chilling tone, “there are a hundred ways we could stop you. The truth is, we already have.”

  “What?”

  “We rendered your QOINS device inoperable as soon as you stepped on this Earth. In fact, we downloaded every byte of technological information you had as soon as we detected their signals. We are machines. We do not need to physically take something to access it.”

  I look over to Levi, who is ready to pounce, but that won’t work. What we usually do as Citadels won’t solve this. I can feel tiny beads of sweat beginning to form on my hairline. I glance over at Levi and shake my head just the tiniest bit.

  “Exactly, Ryn. You understand. If you destroy this body I am in now, I will simply download into a new one. You cannot fight all of us. You can run, we would not chase you, but there is nowhere to go.”

  I think for a moment about what she is saying. It finally sinks in.

  We are trapped here.

  When Cosmos says her people don’t lie, I believe her. I also believe that she thinks she’s doing the right thing. So now it’s a question of convincing her to let us leave. But apparently she’s not done.

  “You are both so young. Humanity on your Earth has taken a most perverse turn. You have been altered. You have been turned into soldiers. I cannot imagine any excuse that would justify what your elders have done to you.”

  “You’re right,” I tell her enthusiastically. “There is no excuse. What was done to us is awful. But if we don’t return to our Earth, even worse things will happen. Our scientists opened the Rifts—the doorways to the Multiverse—but they had no idea how to stop them or control them. We were fighting monsters and the situation became critical. That’s when another species called the Roones stepped up and offered genetic alterations as a way of keeping everyone else safe. They tried to make these alterations on adults, but they died. It had to be children, we were the only ones who could handle the modifications.”

  “That is tragic, but we do not believe that’s a good enough reason to let you leave.” Cosmos had listened, but she wasn’t really hearing us.

  “Look,” Levi jumps in, “you don’t understand! There are tens of thousands of Citadels back home just like us. And if we don’t go back . . .” Levi is more excited than I have ever heard him. He isn’t desperate, at least not yet. I don’t want to know what desperate would look like on Levi, because this is crazy enough. “They can control us,” he is saying. “They can make us do terrible things. You say human life is the most important thing to you? Well, if we don’t return, thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of humans could die, on our Earth and others. The Roones say they are victims, just like us, but we can’t know that for sure. Our friend, the one we are looking for, he has one of their laptops. Can decipher it. We might be able to figure out what’s really going on and prevent the loss of more lives. But we need to get to him first.”

  Cosmos tilts her head. She leans forward and places both hands together in a motion that almost looks as if she’s praying. “You have each other and you have all of us, who are so grateful that out of all the infinite number of Earths you could have ended up on, you landed here. I know this world seems strange, but you will adapt. You do not have to fight anymore. You can be happy here.”

  “No!” I jump up off the couch. “No way. You don’t even know what happy is. You can’t even feel! You’re a robot, or a SenMach or whatever.” Frantically, I grab my gun from the holster and hold it up to my temple. Cosmos’s eyes widen and immediately a slew of SenMachs, including Thunder, storm the room. Cosmos says nothing. I know now they are communicating with each other wirelessly. No one moves, though. The room has gone still. The only thing I can hear is my own breathing and Levi’s heart, which has begun to pump with gusto. “I would rather die than stay here. I couldn’t live, I couldn’t be happy, knowing that everyone I love back home is in such danger. You might be able to get this gun away from me, but I will bite out my own tongue and bleed to death. I will scratch out my veins with my fingernails. You will have to restrain me for the rest of my life and that will hurt me. You will hurt me if you make me stay. Do you get what I am saying to you?”

  Cosmos stands as well, and I notice the others that had come in, presumably to protect me from myself, have backed away. “And do you feel the same, Levi?” Cosmos asks sadly. By way of an answer Levi just puts his hand on his holster.

  “I’m not bluffing, Cosmos,” I tell her as calmly as I can, because I am telling the truth. I really would rather die than live out my life here. “Levi and I, we fight almost every day in order to protect our Earth. It’s the way we were trained. It’s the way we were built. Death hovers. It’s not a probability, but it’s always a possibility. So either you let us go, or you let me die right here, right now.”

  “And you help us get through the Multiverse safely,” Levi adds in a rush. “If saving humanity is such a thing for you, then prove it.”

  We wait. The seconds drag as painfully as a wounded animal. Eventually Cosmos nods her head. “I cannot say with absolute statistical certainty that you will not kill yourself. It seems that you are more likely, though—at least in the near future—to come to harm under our protection than you would in the Multiverse. Regretfully, then, we must let you go.” I breathe a bit but don’t lower the gun yet. “As to how much assistance we can offer, that is a question which will take some time for us to answer. This is quite an ethical dilemma you have put us in. Please allow us until tomorrow to give you an answer.” Cosmos appears lost. She is looking through us, past us. She is somewhere else, her thoughts meandering in code.

  “And we have your word that we can leave tomorrow no matter what? And that you won’t try any kind of techno mind control to get us to stay?” Levi asks.

  “Yes. You may leave tomorrow. We have already re-enabled your QOINS device. You can leave right now if you wish, but I will urge you to give us the day. With that time, I can advocate on your behalf to the department and division heads. If you are to go, then I want to ensure your safety as much as possible. I cannot promise this will happen. I need consensus among the group, but I believe the promise of this is worth waiting for.”

  At that, I finally put the gun down and back into my holster. My instincts, honed and sharpened in combat theater, are telling me to open a Rift right here and get the hell away. I also realize that these are the instincts of a soldier and not a politician or a diplomat. We knew the Multiverse would be dangerous, but how could we have known what kind of dangers we would face? Our strengths as Citadels don’t feel adequate anymore, and our tech has already been disabled on the fourth Earth we Rifted to. I open my pack and take out an entire QOINS and thrust it into Cosmos’s hands.

  “Since you can already turn this thing off and on with your brain, you might as well get a look at one up close. See if you can’t improve it somehow.”

  “So you will stay? You will not harm yourself?”

  “We’ll stay,” I tell her, “but only until tomorrow.”

  Chapter 9

  I had seen the high-rise we are in now on our way here from the Rift, jutting out of the ground like shrapnel, glinting in the afternoon sun. Thunder escorted us to the top floor, showed us inside an apartment, and then left without saying a word. The door clicked silently on its hinge. It isn’t locked. It was the first thing Levi checked. The SenMachs, true to their word, have not locked us in, nor have they taken our things from us.

  Levi immediately pulls his laptop from his pack and powers it up.

  “What are you doing?” I ask him calmly. I know I should be pumped up with adrenaline given the last hour or so, but I am something else. Spent. Death had me by the shoulders. I can still feel the icy grip of that void in my marrow. I want to close my e
yes, not to sleep necessarily but just so I don’t have to see anything else.

  “I’m just making sure that we aren’t being played by the robots. I’m all for staying to see what we can get out of them, but I also want to make sure they weren’t lying.”

  “You’re going to open a Rift inside? Right here? They’re going to know, and I feel like opening a door to space and time in a tiny apartment is possibly not the best idea.”

  “I don’t give two fucks whether they know or not. They said we could leave, so let’s make sure we can.”

  I should probably argue against this, but I see his point. I don’t believe the SenMachs lie, which may be illogical to think, given I just have Cosmos’s word, but I do. Levi needs proof. After the QOINS boots up, I tense as I hear the squealing whizz of a Rift opening. I watch the emerald-green dot ten feet in front of us begin to spin and spread vertically from eggplant purple to jet-black. The Rift opening is small, big enough just for the two of us, but it is an opening. We could leave if we wanted.

  Instead, Levi powers down the Rift and shoves his computer back in his bag. I slide off my own pack and put my weapons down on a chrome dining table. Out of a tall window I scan our surroundings. From this vantage point, it is clear how perfectly circular the city is shaped.

  “Take your shit off, Levi. Jesus. Standing guard won’t protect us from the choice we made to stay. These next few hours are going to be uncomfortable enough.” My words may be harsh, but I deliberately lilt my tone so that it won’t come across as combative.

  “They’re probably watching us, you know.” There is a strain and a tension in his voice that is unfamiliar to me. Levi doesn’t panic. Levi doesn’t guess. He always just seems to know how to roll. But then again, we’re all liars and Levi is the best at that, too.