Jed watched as files opened, and the thing that looked like his mother was erasing and changing the information in them. And then he had other memories—memories that didn’t seem right. He remembered watching battles with Dawn, but this time the Transport forces were performing heroically, and as the battles progressed, martial music played. He saw an image of a city being destroyed, and there was death, destruction, and horror, and words appeared in the smoke and clouds…
TRACE DID THIS.
While the woman worked in front of a long wall of file drawers, Jed searched in his memory for Dawn. He found her, and he remembered that she had once taught him how to hide data. She’d taught him so many things that he was only now recalling. So he gathered all of the information and conversations he’d had with her. He did it in his mind so that his avatar didn’t move, and he tagged all the data just like Dawn had told him to. The woman worked away in the drawers and mostly ignored him.
Jed found that his ability to manipulate the data happened faster and cleaner the more he worked with it. He was even able to retrieve files directly from the woman without her knowing he’d done it. Once he stole a file right out of her hand, and the avatar of his mother kept moving as if she still had it. She continued to file a piece of information that she could see, but which was no longer really there. She began humming as she worked, in the same way Jed’s mother used to hum, and he knew then that they were mining his memories in order to trick him.
While the woman hummed and worked, Jed worked too. He flicked his wrist, and a keypad appeared before him, and it had the letters of the alphabet on it, and numbers, and symbols too. The words for everything he needed appeared before him and were logged into his memory. Jed typed in the words COFFEE CAN out of pure instinct, and a drawer slid open next to him. He quickly dropped all the tagged files into the drawer and pushed it closed, just as the woman who looked like his mother turned to face him. She saw nothing.
“There,” she said, and smiled at him. “Everything back as it should be.” Then she reached up to him and waved her hand in front of his face, and the darkness swallowed him again.
Only, this time he controlled the switch. She thought she’d powered him down, but he willed himself to stand—and then he brought the screen back up.
And he worked.
He didn’t know for how long, but it seemed like he explored the BICE system for hours. For him, it all was just beginning to make sense, like when he’d first learned to work the horses. And just like Dawn had said, he could now see how the BICE interacted with his brain and his nervous system. He practiced controlling the electrical flow of impulses, changing the way that synapses fired.
Often he ran into roadblocks. The words Access Denied would appear whenever he tried something his BICE wasn’t cleared for. So he’d experiment around the edges of the information, looking for things he could see and know.
Then he began manipulating the screen in his room. He brought up a scene from his childhood—a Thanksgiving with his family—and he zoomed his consciousness around the room while his family ate their meal. He could smell the turkey, and his mouth watered at the wonderful aroma.
Then he zoomed out through the front door like a bird, and his mind took flight. He shot straight upward and hovered over the farm; then traveled like a rocket or an airbus until he was floating over the City. The City, long before it had been destroyed by a bomb. He tried to zoom in on the Transport station, but when he did, the image froze and Access Denied flashed before his eyes.
He blinked his eyes, and the City was gone, but he was still hovering over the planet, so he began to look for other things. For storms and squalls and flocks of birds moving en masse. When he saw these things, he looked deeper, and found that he could see the very pixels that made up the wind, and the invisible streams of data that flowed constantly around the planet, wirelessly, through the air.
And he understood it all. It made sense to him.
He blinked again and he called up Dawn.
Her avatar appeared before him in her beautiful navy dress and her white cape and apron. Her likeness seemed to be asleep, and her whole appearance was not quite solid. He stood in front of her and touched her face, but she didn’t stir.
“Dawn,” he said.
He flicked his hand, trying to activate her avatar, but nothing happened. He tried a dozen other tricks and motions to wake her up, but none of them worked.
Jed paced the room, rubbing his head with his hands to try to stimulate thoughts and answers. His frustration grew, and when he knew that he had no solution to the problem he screamed at the top of his lungs: “DAWN!”
Dawn’s avatar flickered. Her head raised and she sucked in air. As the flickering stopped and her form became solid, she opened her eyes. And then it was as if a bolt of electricity hit her, and Jed reached for her hand, and when he touched her the two of them rocketed up and through the ceiling, and wordlessly they soared over the Amish Zone, and Dawn took him until they were hovering over a farmhouse at the end of a lane. Then she blinked out and disappeared, and Jed awoke in his bed.
“There’s a farmhouse not two miles from here,” Jed told Matthias as they ate. He knew the food was laced with Q but for now he didn’t mind. He wanted to be sure he had access to the full capabilities of his BICE, in case he needed it. “There are three lightning rods on the roof of a banked barn that has green trim, and there’s a young orchard to the east of the barn with a white picket fence around the orchard.”
Matthias laughed as he took a bite of home-baked bread. “You just described most of the farms in the Amish Zone.”
“This one was different,” Jed said. He took a drink of lemonade. “It’s at the end of a lane, and there’s a creek that runs right through the property.”
“That sounds familiar,” Matthias said. “Marcus Yoder’s place, I think. He’s cousin to the man whose family is bringing us the meals.” Matthias ripped off another chunk of fresh bread and then used his pocketknife to spread a chunk of homemade butter on it. “Speaking of which, the Yoders’ food… it’s the best I’ve ever had. I feel so peaceful after I eat it. Maybe it has something to do with this alien planet, but I don’t look forward to the day when the Yoders stop delivering my meals.”
Jed just nodded and kept eating. He knew that Matthias was reacting to the Q in the food, but he didn’t say anything about it. All of this would have to be part of a long conversation he’d have with Matthias once he knew more about what was going on.
“Why are you asking about the Marcus Yoder farm?” Matthias asked.
And that was one more thing he couldn’t tell Matthias about. As if Jed could even explain how he suspected that a woman named Dawn was being held on Marcus Yoder’s farm somewhere.
And what did Jed plan to do about it, anyway? He was Amish. He couldn’t just take a gun and run over there to try to rescue her. She obviously wanted him to know where she was being held, but he felt like if she was in some kind of imminent danger she would have said something to him. Still, he wanted to find a reason to go search for her.
Jed shrugged. “I’m just thinking about going to look at some of the unique farms in the zone, to get ideas for my own place when I get my allotment.”
“How do you know about that place?” Matthias asked. He motioned for Jed to pass the peach preserves.
“Oh, I think Mr. Zook at the immigration center might have mentioned it. I’d just like to go take a look at it.”