The Thirteenth Proxy, Chapter 2

CHAPTER 2, "The Caves of Limbo"

Slowly the darkness of the void lifted and morphed into a white haze; an endless fog suspended on a vast lake. Sounds formed from seemingly nowhere but Avery couldn't make them out. They sounded like whispers. After a while, the whispers became louder, words took shape and she felt the weight of gravity press down on her chest like the impact of a meteor.

A voice asked questions from within the dense fog that she didn't understand. It sounded like a man -- a young man -- but she couldn't be sure. The voice was distorted and cut out like static on a television.

"Hand me th..." Another voice continued, different from the last; a woman, her voice was authoritative, distinctively American. There was a softness to it that Avery found soothing but she didn't know why.

"We're losing her..." said the young man grimly. This single sentence cut through the static with crystal clarity, her chest tightened and it was hard to breathe.

It was then she noticed the pain. A white hot pain seared her core. A hand emerged from the water and gripped Avery's leg, pulling her beneath the fog. She was falling down, down, down. The pain so intense it felt like being burned alive. Her thoughts were hijacked by the unbearable affliction. She tried to will it away but the pain blazed onward like a rolling flame. She was a swimmer surfacing from a deep dive into the oceans of death. Avery burst through the layers of the void into the conscious world. Suddenly, she was aware of everything.

Machines beep and hum and pulse all around her. The sound filled her ears like a chaotic orchestra. Avery sensed the presence of people nearby, but she couldn't tell how many. They were shuffling around her but what they were doing she couldn't tell for sure. Her eyes fluttered open but her vision blurred and distorted like looking through a soap bubble. A bright white light shined in her face. She felt the heat of it on her skin. She tried to raise her left arm to block it out but she couldn't; her arm was restrained... She was tied down. Avery wrenched her arm in an attempt to pull free but it was futile.

"She's waking up! Hold her down!" yelled the woman, her voice full of panic.

Avery tried to focus on the large figure that leaned over her, but her eyes were still blurry. She felt a heavy weight press down on her chest while a hand held her arm still. Instinctively, she swung her other arm at the figure in self defense, but nothing happened. There's no feeling in her right arm. She felt a small prick in the crook of her elbow, like a bee sting. Almost immediately, the familiar warmth of chemical suggestion flooded her senses. She relented as she began to feel dizzy. The fog slowly crept back in from the periphery of her vision and the pain loosened its fiery grip as she sunk back into nothingness. But before she fell unconscious, Avery overheard the two strangers discussing what should be done with her other arm.

"What should we do with this arm?" asked the man.

"Hand it to me," the woman replied. "We're running out of time."

Avery felt sick at the thought of her body being chopped up for parts, but there was nothing she could do. She was helpless to stop them. Everything went black.

Avery was ten years old again. She was with her mother and together they walked hand-in-hand down the hallway of their old house in London, her mother's polished black heels clicked in stride. Her mother always had a keen fashion sense of which she desperately tried to pass on to her daughter, but Avery would have none of it. She wasn't much interested in dresses and color coordination- to her, clothes were just clothes. Who cared if they matched? She didn't. She thought it made people look fake, like they were trying too hard, like they were just imitations of themselves. She imagined rows of woman identically dressed as her mother walking down hallways at her work like robots. Worker bees. Drones. Idiots.

When they reached the kitchen Avery could see that the dining room table was already set, her breakfast anxiously waited for her to consume it in the form of a large brown pancake with whip cream hair, chocolate chip eyes and a syrupy smile. In the middle of the table was her mother's cherished ornate tea kettle with an oriental scenery of cherry blossoms painted across its surface and a pair of matching teacups.

As they sat down together, Avery ate her smiley face pancakes and her mother sipped tea as the TV blared cartoon noise from the far wall. It captivated Avery's attention while her mother flipped through the morning news on a tablet. They'd reached that point in a mother-daughter relationship where conversation during meal time was no longer desired. Talk only ended in tears for one or both of them, and sometimes words they couldn't take back. Silence was agreed upon diplomatically. Each of them had energy they needed to save for the day ahead, her with school and her mother's job, so, silence became the norm.

Avery had conceded to that fact that unless hospitalization was involved, she would be going to school today and there would be no throwing of fits, screaming of words, or slamming of doors. She may have to abide by her mother's rules, but she didn't have to like it. She stared at the television with a blank expression, poking at her special pancakes in contempt.

"Tea, darling?"

"Sure, mum."

Her mother clicked her tongue. "Excuse me?"

"I mean- yes, please." Avery refused to look away from the TV for the sake of petty conversation. She felt her mother's gaze like laser beams. She tried her best to ignore it.

"That's better." Her mother poured the tea into Avery's cup and scooted it across the table in her direction. "Milk or sugar?"

"Just sugar, please. Two lumps." Avery's attention was drawn to the cup, tearing her away from the indulgence of mindless children's programming. The cup seemed important, for its shape or design, she didn't know. It was a question without an answer, an anomaly without origin, a sixth sense.

Her mother acquiesced and plopped two sugar cubes into Avery's cup with a tiny, elegant looking tong then stirred it with an equally elegant looking spoon. Once she'd finished stirring, her mother gave the rim of the cup two sharp taps with the spoon- clang-clang! like a bell signalling her distaste for Avery's overconsumption of sugar. She always tried to convince Avery of a healthier choice; to eat less junk food or eat more vegetables, drink more water and wash her hands more often, much to her daughter's lament.

Avery's hands were filled with warmth as they wrapped around the cup on a cold, rainy London morning. It was that obligatory morning mist, luring small children outside to ruin their day with the false promise of safety in sunlight. Truly, the sun was cruel to be shining in the rain. It was like nature giving you the finger, like "haha, you thought it was nice out!"

She took in a deep breath, savoring the scent of Earl Grey while her mother went back to staring at her tablet and listening through her earbuds. Avery stared into her cup, mesmerized by the steam that rose up from the hot liquid. This fragile little teacup laid out before her, it was something important- something menacing. While the nostalgic aroma was comforting, the imagery of the cup frightened her. It confused her.

Avery's heart raced, thu-thump, thu-thump, -thu-thump... A clear image of the teacup shattering pierced her mind like a vision. The tea splattered all over the table, but it wasn't tea anymore; it was thick, oozing blood. The blood gushed from the broken teacup like a severed artery, splurt, splurt, splurt! It stained the surface of the table, blood ran off the edge and spilled onto the floor. She heard the sound it made when the congealed blood dripped onto the wooden floor as if someone had wrung out a towel. A wet, slapping sound.

"No, no, no, no, no. This isn't real. This can't be!" Avery covered her eyes with her hands and shook her head in an attempt to jog loose the horrifying images. "This isn't happening!" Then she heard her mother call her name. "Mom?" Avery replied. But her mother was gone. She sat at the bloody table, scared and alone. Her mother's voice trailed off, fading far off in the distance. The image of her old house dropped away and once again Avery stood alone on a vast lake covered in fog.

"Avery..." Her mother's voice called out. "Aaaavery..." The pronunciation of her name was elongated; gradually, it got louder and louder.

"Mom? Mom! I'm here," Avery cried out desperately, pleading with the fog to open up and reveal her mother. But she is alone.

"Aaaavery..." Her mother's voice twisted. It was deeper, abnormally so. Distorted. Familiar yet foreign. It was as a demon had possessed her mother. It frightened little Avery so much that she started to cry.

"W-where are you? Why can't I see you?" Avery's voice quivered. "Don't leave me here alone!" She wept.

"Avery! Wake up!" a woman shouted while shaking Avery vigorously.

The sting of a slap across her face jolted Avery awake and she opened her eyes. A pale faced woman stared back at her with fluorescent green eyes. Short, spiky red hair encircled the woman's head like a halo. She was wearing an immaculate white lab coat that reached down past her knees. It had large shiny buttons down its entire length.

"Oh thank God!" The strange woman threw her arms around Avery and hugged her tight. "I thought I'd lost you," her voice was deep and mature, but she looked like she was eighteen, maybe early twenties at the most.

She was short and her arms wiry, which caused the cuffs of her lab coat to hang over her palms. A thin black line traced its way across the diameter of her face, separating it into two halves between the bridge of her nose. Similarly, two other lines intersect the space between her eyelids and cheeks on either side of her face; she was just like Avery. She was pale, like Avery. Sleek, like Avery. And her eyes glowed with an unnatural color just like Avery.

Avery pushed the woman away. "Holy shit! You... you're a Proxy?!" Avery was stunned. This woman was obviously not flesh and blood. She'd been heavily augmented with cybernetic prosthetics.

"Of course I am. Avery, what's wrong with you?" the woman replied. She looked puzzled.

Avery glanced down at her right side and gaspped in horror. "My arm! What the hell did you do to me?" Avery spit out her words with an icy malice. "Where's my damn arm?!"

Avery took in the scene for the first time. She was on a blue-steel table, thick leather straps hung loose and unbuckled where the arms would go. It had the distinct look of a surgical table. The surface bent up at the waist, allowing her to remain in a sitting position. A large, circular lamp bent curiously over the table illuminating her face. The room was long and rectangular with white sterile walls and a tiled floors. Gears, screws, and copper wire laid strewn about haphazardly on the floor, mingling with long smears of blood that trailed its way to the center where a small circular drain consumed the biowaste. A small metal tray hung in the air attached to the other side of the table. Within the tray were long, complex looking tools, some had blunt ends, others sharp and saw-like. Other tools blinked and glowed at the tips with a red light.

Several large machines as tall as the ceiling lined the wall opposite of Avery like clockwork ziggurats. There were half a dozen of them. Each had a flat, square screen that displayed different information, several of them included pictures of what appeared to be Avery's individual body parts. An arm here. A leg there. Even a picture of her brain. The other monitors displayed Avery's heart rate, blood pressure, and brainwave pattern. Small electrodes attached to her skin wirelessly transmitted the necessary data to the medical devices.

Avery recognized this technology right away. The only thing that didn't look brand new was the IV pole next to her bed, which used an old gravity fed system to intravenously administer a clear liquid from a plastic bag. It looked completely out of place next to the host of machines that surrounded it. But there was no denying it, the rest of it was Union tech. She'd seen it before when she'd been examined by the technicians on staff. Regular maintenance was a small price to pay considering the benefits of total body cyberization. With the most cutting edge technologies at her disposal, she never had to worry about death again. Even her consciousness could be uploaded to the net in case of total body failure. And when a new body could be obtained or cloned, she would just download herself into the shell like slipping on a pair of new shoes.

But now she was alone. Hunted by the Union, cut off from the net. And to top it all off, Avery's body was a complete wreck. Her right arm laid limp on a table, separated from her body and various wires hung out of it. Her arm socket was a giant, gaping hole filled with metal gears and wires that protruded from it. Her right leg was also missing from the knee down. Twisted, mangled metal was all that remained of the rest of her thigh. A patch of gauze stained with blood was held in place by medical tape around her ribs. A square bandage was taped over the bullet wound in her shoulder.

The strange woman stared at Avery looking quite perplexed by the rejection of her concern. The woman's eyes gazed into Avery's without hesitation and for a moment, it looked like she might cry. The woman sighed as if considering her next words carefully.

"Avery, do you remember who I am?" asked the strange woman with fiery red hair and glowing green eyes.

"No," Avery paused for a moment before continuing, "...should I?"

"My name is Grace. We've been..." she hesitated. Her eyes dipped down away from Avery before reconnecting. She continued, "...friends for a very long time. You're safe here, with me."

"What happened to me?" Avery interrupted, still uncertain whether or not to trust this person. She didn't remember having a friend named 'Grace.' But she couldn't deny the fact that her memory was suspiciously blank.

"You were being chased by some men. They shot you. Twice. And then you... fell into a river. You were so high up that the fall hurt you pretty bad. I wasn't sure I'd be able to fix the damage," Grace explained while her voice wavered. She politely folded her hands together. "I did the best I could with what I had but it was touch and go for a while. I'm just glad you're alright."

Grace tried to put her hand on Avery's shoulder, but Avery deflected it with her remaining arm. Avery studied Grace's face with scrutiny and skepticism. She watched her would-be-savior's eyes for any sign of malice, deceit, or betrayal.

Is she lying? Avery's imagination painted her thoughts in shades of grey. Deception, death, and doom. Do I really know this girl? Can she be trusted? The last thing she remembered was being chased by two Repo Men. But why? Why were they chasing me? The memory of bullets piercing her arm and shoulder still stung in her mind. Perhaps this woman was telling the truth, or maybe she wasn't. Regardless, this woman seemed to genuinely want to help and Avery was in no condition to refuse.

"Avery, what is the last thing you remember?" Grace's arms folded defensively across her chest, but her voice was still soothing as ever.

Avery eyed her mangled leg. She rubbed her thigh as a wave of phantom pain throbbed from the knee down, even though there was nothing there anymore. It was just a memory. A false alarm. A sick joke played by nature that served no purpose.

"I was on a mission, I think." Avery's expression was blank as she stared past Grace deep in thought. "There was a man. He was... old. Something about him was important." Avery's face twitched as she racked her brain. "Something important. Something he didn't want other people to see. I think he was part of the Union. I remember his face. He had a bushy beard and a receding salt and pepper hairline." As she described the man Avery's face morphed in disgust.

"Wait a minute, was he pale- like nosferatu pale?" Grace asked, pausing for a moment, fishing for something in her pockets. "Did he look like this?" she held up a small rectangular device and on its screen displayed a picture that resembled Avery's description.

"Yeah, that's him! How did you-" Avery began to ask a question but was caught her off guard by a throbbing pain in her forehead.

"This 'man'- this piece of shit is the Prime Minister of the Union," Grace said through grit teeth, her hatred apparent. "But he's no man. He's a monster. He's ruled as supreme despot for two centuries! Two!"

"Who is h-" Avery was cut short. The pain had become intense. She grabbed her forehead and winced.

"Avery?" Grace looked concerned. "Are you okay?"

"Yeah, I'm fine. It's just a headache..." But she wasn't fine. The pain was agonizing.

"You sure? You don't look so good..."

"Actually, I don't feel so good..." Avery's eyes fluttered up into her skull and her body convulsed on the table. She seized violently as a visible arc of electricity crawled its way down the side of Avery's face, leaping from one conductive surface to the next.

"Avery? Avery!" Grace pulled out a thin black cable from the nape of her neck. She swept aside Avery's long hair to reveal a small port embedded in the back of her neck. Grace plugged it in and her eyes went white. At best, it was dubious to dive into someone's cyberbrain while they were having a seizure; there could be a neural bleed, causing Grace to seize too. And at worst, if Avery died, there was a strong probability her own consciousness would be lost as well. But she didn't care about the danger. She initiated the dive with reckless abandon.

Grace's face twitched as she navigated the complex roadmap that made up Avery's cyberbrain. She had to search a network of over one hundred trillion neural pathways while penetrating the endless barrage of attack barriers that barred her way. These attack barriers served as digital white cells that defended key areas of the brain from unwanted access or tampering, and could back-hack the intruder with deadly efficiency. Unlike the common defense barrier, attack barriers required a high class of technical skill to set up and they were even more difficult to bypass; if you failed, you died. Your brain would be fried before you even knew you'd screwed up.

Avery's cyberbrain was beautiful. In cyberspace, Grace took the form of an avatar -- a simple icon with a blue background and "NPC" written in the center -- which flew through the connections at the speed of light. This wasn't her first dive into Avery's cyberbrain, but the awe of it never wore out. She always found diving to be a fascinating experience. Everyone's cyberbrain looked slightly different, like a hive of neon wires. Chaos by design. But Avery's pathways bent and curved and connected in astonishing geometric patterns that compounded on each other to make tiers- wide and flat like floating continents of flashing neurons. As Grace dove deeper the shapes grew and morphed into fractals that spiraled down into the depths of Avery's consciousness. She'd missed this, the closeness, the intimacy of it. She'd missed Avery. But there was no time to revel in the past, Avery was in trouble and every nanosecond counted. She steeled her heart and forged ahead.

Soon enough, she isolated the problem. A virus had been triggered by the facial recognition of the Union's Prime Minister. It was a kill switch that was currently in the process of causing an aneurysm in the cerebellum which was putting pressure on Avery's brain stem. This was serious. Grace quickly launched her doppelganger programs which immediately attacked the virus with a series of bolts that resembled green lightning. While the virus was busy dealing with her mimicks, Grace activated a batch file that opened a waterfall of cascading windows around her icon. Hundreds of lines of code poured down the windows like rain as a progress bar opened up in front of her.

20% 25% 30% 35%

Grace felt her nerves tense up as she watched the progress bar climb. Her doppelgangers were losing, badly. Each time one of her doppels were destroyed they exploded into digital dust, showering the air with pixels. She only had four left. Time was running out.

50% 54% 58% 62%

Another doppel was destroyed. Then another. The progress bar had slowed down to a crawl as it neared the end. As her last doppel was destroyed, the virus turned its attention to her. The virus' avatar resembled a huge sphere of spinning gears with the word 'LOCKED' floating in front of it. Grace's attempts to bypass the security was failing. If she didn't do something quick, they'd both be dead. The virus began to glow and an electric hum resonated in the air as it powered up its attack.

"Hack-Slash, Aegis protocol. Enable!" Grace shouted as the virus shot a huge beam of energy towards her. It bounced off the surface of the shield that had been erected around her just in time. She sighed in relief. She'd survived the blast, but her shield had sustained severe damage and was beginning to crack. It would not survive another blow.

68% 70% 71% 72%

"Shit. Sorry, Avery. I tried," Grace admitted in defeat. She executed a kill command and closed the myriad of windows. The progress bar halted then disappeared. The virus had already finished charging its next attack and shot another beam towards her. The intensity of the beam grew with each failed attack, this time shattering her shield with ease and grazing the edge of her avatar. She winced in pain. "Warning! Warning! Severe damage taken! Abort dive immediately!" the synthesized voice of her cyber-assistant chirped in her ear. She ignored it.

She was running out of time, Avery was still seizing in the real world and she needed to act fast. Time dilation only afforded her a brief gap between real time and perceived time. Either she found a way to disable the virus in the next few seconds or they both died. No pressure. Then it dawned on her; the solution was simple yet elegant.

"Shift-command." A window opened up in front of her icon.

"Affirmative," the cyber-assistant acknowledged. "Ready to accept commands."

"Safety protocols, disable. Dump cached data, bypass all memory buffers, then enable remote storage. Overclock all processors by twenty-percent maximum," Grace commanded.

"Warning! Disabling safety protocols may result in permanent damage. It is not recommended that you change these settings from their factor defau-"

"Just shut up and execute my commands!"

"Affirmative. Running script. Done," it replied. If she hadn't known better, she'd swore she heard a hint of insolence in its tone.

As the command executed, Grace felt the gradual build of an intense headache- her cyberbrain was overheating under the increased load. It was all or nothing now.

"Hack-Slash, activate protocol Sun Wukong. Password, Monkey King," she said with a snide confidence. The artificial lighting of the cyberscape flickered as if she'd just uttered some kind of forbidden magic. In the real world, she was grinning like a shark.

The virus was about to launch another volley when bricks began to materialize around it. Each brick stacked on top of the other to form a three-dimensional wall around the virus, effectively quarantining it within its own prison. Bolts of energy could be heard ricocheting off the walls from inside as the virus rallied against its confines in vain. "Fuck yeah! Eat it you bastard!" Grace cheered victoriously.

Grace rejoined reality in time to see that Avery's convulsions had ceased but she remained unconscious, her eyes wide open in a dead stare. Grace unplugged the cable connecting them and grabbed Avery by the shoulders. She shook her vigorously.

"Snap out of it, Avery! Avery!" Grace shouted. She shook her harder. "Damn it, Avery! Wake up!" Grace slapped her across the face.

Avery blinked a few times before she regained consciousness. She swayed, mumbling to herself in a fugue state. "Ugh..." she groaned. The smell of burnt plastic filled the air. "What happened?" Avery asked sleepily. She cupped her forehead with her palm. Somehow, the pain felt even worse now. "My head hurts."

"Damn, Avery," Grace looked at her horrified. "What have they done to you?"

"Y-you're bleeding," Avery pointed.

Grace touched her ear then saw a smear of blood on her fingertips. She wiped it on her jeans. "Don't worry about it. I'm fine." She smiled convincingly.

"W-what... was that?" Avery grumbled. She tried to sit up but her head was pounding. All she could do was sit still and hope it went away quickly.

"You've been infected with a virus," Grace sighed. "I'd say the Union partitioned your memory with triggers that set off the virus when certain conditions are met," Grace theorized with a look of concern on her face.

"Like seeing his face," Avery said forlorn.

"Exactly. I barely managed to quarantine the damn thing before it fried your cyberbrain. Good news is we've bought you some time. The bad news is that until we remove the virus, your memory is locked up with it."

"Great," Avery scoffed. "Not only am I a walking, talking scrap heap, but the Union wants cook my head like a poached egg." She let out a long, defeated sigh. "This day just gets better and better."

"At least you've got me?" Grace said as if it was a question rather than a statement. She smiled sheepishly. She cautiously placed a comforting hand on Avery's shoulder; however, this time Avery didn't recoil. She accepted the gesture.

Their eyes met, and for the first time Avery felt like she could trust someone. Her body relaxed, her shoulders drooped and a meager smile crept across her face. "Thanks Grace," Avery said sincerely. "I don't know what I would have done without you."

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Deadman