Sienna made a sudden decision not to tell any of her captors about Jean-Baptiste Camus. She wasn’t entirely sure why, but that piece of information seemed safer unsaid. If anything, it made her knowledge appear all the more like guesswork.
“My… friends and I,” Sienna said, also concealing the existence of her brother, “We had somewhat hammered together that theory on our own. I don’t have the same addiction other Leechers do, even if they do turn into Mancers.”
“Fascinating! I hadn’t, er, anticipated that particular aspect of the conversion.”
“Uh-huh. And what am I ‘converting’ into?”
Dr. Harvey said nothing. He stepped back from the window and lowered himself down into a battered folding chair. His fingers jumped around his coat pocket, finally settling on his face where he removed his glasses. No longer trembling, he folded his hands in his lap.
“I… I’m the only biophysicist left alive who specialized in Galvanic Sciences, as far as I’m aware,” he said slowly. “Before my, er, services… became exclusive to those of Madam President, I was working on… a theory.”
His eyes strayed to T-Net tower map. “Nearly twenty percent of the T-Net is down. That’s not a great deal when you considered the vast amounts of data saturation, the way the zettahertz frequencies, um… permeate everything. I keep checking the calculations, over and over… but, they’re the same.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Those few random dead zones, where there is, um, zero signal strength from the T-Net towers. It’s not a coincidence there are no Feeders present in those areas. It’s just enough… just enough…”
“Enough for what?” Sienna asked, voice raised.
“To keep them, er… active? Animated, existing. Alive? And we stay alive with our Servants, correct? Of course, Madam President had me abolish this line of research…”
“Why are you telling me this?” she asked, enunciating every syllable.
His eyes finally came back to rest on her in the observation room, and he gave her a very tired, very sad smile through the window. Making his way to get up and leave, he turned off two of the hard-light holograms and typed away at a third keyboard. Siena banged on the glass.
“Dr. Harvey? What am I converting into? Dr. Harvey!”
He paused by the door. “Long ago, it was postulated that ‘energy can not be created or destroyed, only transferred.’ Humans found a way to transfer their own energy, but Leechers absorb it as well. Feeders have lost the ability to transfer, to… um, manipulate it, while Mancers are, er… adept at it.”
Dr. Harvey took one last look at Sienna. “Some… might make the assumption that since Feeders absorb, and Mancers manipulate, er, that others might be able to somehow radiate. Um, expel, even dissipate.”
DataLog Text-MemxJourn: Kepler-Madison, Margaret. / 12-07-24
/DataLog Text-SUPPLEMENTAL: Doyle, Sienna A.
“Release him. I can’t understand what the fool is saying.”
Rove relaxed his will and Dr. Harvey fell to the floor. There was a deep impression in the wall where his shoulder had impacted it. Blood came leaking from his mouth.
“Doctor, explain to me again why you have defied me and, in doing so, chosen to commit suicide?”
Dr. Harvey spat out a word along with a few teeth.
“What was that?” asked President Kepler-Madison.
Rove grimaced. “I believe he said ‘Sienna.’ The name of that crude whore we just brought back from Nashville.”
The Madam President leaned back in her chair and peered at Dr. Harvey’s broken form from over her desk. “Of all the ridiculous times for your withered heart to start beating again. Or was it another organ, doctor? That would still not explain why you would take Lopez offline, an act that would result in her death as well.”
Dr. Harvey pulled his face up from the carpet, spit out more blood and caught Margaret Kepler-Madison’s imperious glare with one of his own.
“Because… a supernova is just as devastating as a black hole.”
Her fist slamming down on her desk, Madam President shifted the velocity and kinetic energy onto Dr. Harvey’s head. Its potential capabilities increased tenfold through her Mancer abilities, the doctor’s head was obliterated in a pink mist. Rove managed to look mildly impressed.
“Get down to Harvey’s facilities with a team of techs and see if Lopez can be salvaged,” hissed the President of Raleigh.
“And the young woman?”
“Just kill her and let’s be done with this.”
DataLog Text-MemxJourn: Doyle, Sienna A. / 12-07-24
Her thoughts were a tornado of confusion and implications, rocked by occasional lightning strikes of clarity. What little she had told Dr. Harvey had only seem to strengthen an opinion he already held. Feeders absorbed, Mancers manipulated, and she… what? Was going to be able to shoot laser beams from her eyes? She doubted that.
Why would he tell her about the T-Net? Could the Feeder epidemic really be solved with the destruction of the T-Net towers? Mancers would still be formidable, but a hell of a lot less so without their Feeder armies.
“Doctor? Dr. Harvey?” Sienna yelled out for what felt like the fiftieth time.
She had to get out, escape somehow. Find a weapon, bolt from Raleigh, go anywhere else. She idly considered Camus, but banished those thoughts when memories of Gemmel crept back in. Sean. What about her brother?
She had to get out. She had eyed the bathroom both when she had used it and since then. The window was made out of one of those weird poly-carbonites that could withstand a plasma explosion. The door…
The door swung open at her touch.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” Sienna screamed to the empty room.
It must have been an accident. Or Harvey had unlocked it remotely before he left when he was turning off the holograms. Either way, Sienna was out the door and into the hallway.
Halfway down the hall, she realized she didn’t have a weapon or hadn’t leeched from anything back in the lab. Relatively defenseless, she tried to stay as stealthy as possible. A noise at the end of the corridor caught her attention. The windows lining one side were too high to easily access, so forward looked to be the only way out. Preparing herself for action, she nudged the door open a few inches with her toe.
Nothing, no previous experience in her life, could have prepared her for the sight of what was inside. An oval shaped room with a dark, four story high ceiling, there was even more recent pre-Feeder tech here than in the lab. Most of it was attached to a singular unit situated in the center, a medical prosthetics chamber. A piece out of historical texts, they were used to fashion bio-droid body parts and graft them on before the advent of Galvanic Sciences. Wired up inside the chamber, looking directly at her was a dismembered child.
“Oh hell, oh… “ Sienna babbled. “Oh shit, I… I don’t know what to… tell me how to help you.”
“That is why I like you, Sienna,” came a digital voice from one of the monitors. “You truly are a good person.”
A little girl. A little girl with her arms amputated at the shoulders, her skull opened and brain exposed to circuitry, portions of her hip bones gone along with everything below them. Even her lower torso had been splayed open to allow for a variety of cables and device to be inserted next to a number of still functioning organs. Her tiny dark eyes shone with a preternatural intelligence. And a cosmos of pain.
“Why? Why… who did this?”
Her mouth didn’t move, but the digital voice replied. “The Madam President, of course. She couldn’t allow another Mancer in her domain that wasn’t under her absolute sway.”