CPU12F Is Missing

by *NeuronPlectrum

When I came to, all I felt was a violent rocking motion with pressure on my stomach and around my legs. It was a strange sensation, as were most to me outside my datapod. My vision, which had always been crowded with abstract visual representations of information, was now just a big gray blur that faded upwards into a white haze. There were lines on occasion, passing upwards and sometimes side-to-side, but always very fast. My hearing was muffled, but whereas the imagery I was trying to make sense of wasn't being made clearer by squinting, the sound of footsteps became crystal clear and every step had a sharp, heavy click to it, the kind that gravity boots make on metal. I tried blinking to help fight the blur and make better sense of what was happening, but my eyelids were heavy and each time my eyes closed, I'd find myself tensing up to fight nodding off. I was very weak, but I tried moving my arms so I could bring my hands in front of my face, giving myself something to focus on. They'd been dangling limply in front of me, which told me I was lying supine, hence the pressure on my stomach. It was hard to resist the violent rocking, but I brought my arms against whatever I was lying on, my hands searching for something to hold. The best I could manage was limply palming the broadest surface I could find, just a little to my right, relying on the black tactile dots worked into the palms and along the fingers of my gloves to give me a little friction.

It was definitely not the familiar ribbed foam of my datapod. I could push off of this, lift myself up, and look around. Things were beginning to clear up enough that when I looked to my right, just above where I put my hands down, I finally pieced together what was going on.

I felt a little silly not realizing that the white haze at the top of my field of vision was just the hood of my plug suit. Obviously, I don't have it down when I'm in my data pod; there it's bunched up at the back of my neck for support, but the few times when I'm taken out of the pod for things like maintenance or physicals, it covers up the hub jacks drilled into my skull. It keeps dust out, but it also helps keep me from feeling too self conscious about having a dozen fiber optic terminals covering my scalp instead of a normal head of hair. Mine fell out when I was about seven, supposedly a side effect of the vitamin drip we're put on when we're inside our pods. I think it's just something they put in so they don't have to fuss with our hair when we get plugged into the network.

Just because I'm not connected to the military's mainframe doesn't mean I don't recognize standard issue space armor when I see it. Black armor plating over a gray multi-aramid bodysuit and an iridescent yellow visor made good combat gear, but wasn't the most comfortable thing to be slung over the shoulder of like a rucksack. I hate being treated like luggage, but, given the circumstances, I didn't feel like complaining.

He just kept running without saying a word, even though he probably realized I'd come to and was looking around. It seemed like forever before he finally stopped in front of a large door just around a blind corner. I'd thought of getting his attention by asking where we were, but I got my answer when I looked back over my shoulder at the sign above the door. It was in the enemy's language, but I knew it read "Museum of Ignorance" which told me we were on one of their transports instead of one of their warships. These museums are basically trophy cases of war spoils from the early attacks. We learned about them years ago from a transmission an enemy general made from onboard one of the transports as a kind of boast. It was the first time anyone saw who we were fighting. They look just like us, the only difference being bright yellow skin and purple eyes. They say they're descended from people who were taken from earth millenia ago and taken across the galaxy, growing and adapting to other worlds' environments, hence the genetic variations. Their contempt for us is rooted in the relative progress we've made in the time they were away, whereas they've had to scavenge and salvage from races long gone. Their exposure to aliens has given them an idea of racial purity, untouched by advanced eugenics, the sort that led to achievements like the super soldier who was now trying to find a way off their ship.

He spun round, trying to see if there was another way, maybe a maintenance hatch or access panel. Unfortunately, transports aren't so much designed as cobbled together, long corridors running along the sides of the hull, connecting city block-sized containers repurposed as living quarters and recreational facilities. Lucky for him, when he did his little twirl, I spotted the control panel in front of the door. It was a pentadecimal tiling interface, but since I wasn't sure the soldier would know what that meant if I told him, I just rather inelegantly rapped my knuckles against the side of his helmet and pointed down when he turned to me. He knelt and eased me off his shoulder onto the floor in front of the console. I was still a bit wobbly, so I braced my right arm against the wall tapped away at the keypad with my free hand, letting the data-driven part of my brain take over. The interface was very fast and responsive, clearly their own take on a catalytic DNA computer. Despite their opposition to genetic enhancement, the enemy uses bio-components in their technology, just like we do. Just like I am.

We're used to cut back on hardware costs. Always easier to make a baby than a machine, and there's no shortage of orphans at a time like this. I never knew my parents. I may have volunteered, but it didn't really feel like I had a choice: either become a network conduit, have full access to almost any information you could want, or stay at the orphanage until either someone took you home with them or you got too old to be called a kid anymore and got drafted into the very service that made you an orphan in the first place.

The door slid open and before I could turn to the soldier, he'd wrapped his arm around my waist, hoisted me up under his arm, and ran inside. Although I was happy to be facing forward for a change, it still felt like a downgrade from rucksack to package.

We passed by billboards of half-naked women advertising sodas, sections of masonry from churches and mosques, and a projection table cycling through life-size holograms of various diplomats, mostly from the colonies. He stopped at this table, which was in the center of the museum, put me down again, and started looking around. I leaned against the table and tried my best to make the dizziness go away. I took some deep breaths, and tried some mental exercises, like the ones we do before getting physicals. I try to run through random data and see how vividly I can recall it. There's no real process set in stone, but with mine we'd always start with empirical data, facts, and work up toward something more personal.

If I close my eyes and concentrate, I can call up the schematics to the first hydrogen bomb ever made, I can name every known variety of rose on earth and the six main colonies, and I can list off the ingredients in the toothpaste used on the first shuttle mission, but I have no idea what either of my parents look like.

I got a surprisingly gentle tap on my shoulder from the soldier. I opened my eyes and pushed off the table. I wasn't dizzy or wobbly anymore, but I knew I couldn't keep up with the soldier if my life depended on it, which it technically did now. Luckily, he was aware of this, and picked me up again, only this time cradling me in his arms. He didn't run, either, but walked at a brisk pace around the table, which told me he found a way out of here and wasn't panicked about being cornered. They say soldiers don't panic, but I've also heard that they'll pull a gun on you if you so much as point your finger at them. Call that training, I call it being skittish.

On the other side of the projection table was a row of vehicles, mostly older terrestrial models, the kind made on military contracts then sold off privately. He made a beeline toward a boxy, red one with a bull on its hood badge, and I thought he'd lost his mind. It was probably a museum piece on earth before it became a museum piece here. There was no reason to believe this would still work after all this time, and I was ready to call him out on it until I saw the moebius decal by the badge. He opened the driver's side door and leaned over to set me in the passenger seat. I glanced at the instrument panel above the steering wheel and saw that the car had indeed been refitted to run on something replenishable. It started with a roar, probably an embellishment in the design to make it sound authentic, and the soldier drove off the display platform, plowing through the vehicle next to us, reducing its front half to scrap without slowing us down. I didn't recognize it, but I think the "H2" on its door meant it ran on hydrogen cells. I'd wondered where the soldier expected to get us in something like this, so I looked over the dashboard and saw a ramp at the end of the row that went downward. It was a service ramp for maintenance vehicles that led into a service tunnel that ran the length of the ship's underbelly. It was also probably how the display vehicles were brought on board in the first place. The tunnel most likely ended with a ramp leading up to a sensor array or observation deck at the ship's bow, which would be the best place for an extraction point.

We were basically back to running, but at least it was a smoother ride, no violent rocking and jerking, picking up and dropping. The seats were covered in a thick, white fur. Even through my gloves, it felt very soft, almost like being back in my datapod. It wasn't as confining as my pod, though. There was a huge space between the two front seats, almost enough for another person. I'd have to extend my arm and lean to my left just to tap him on the shoulder. I peered around my seat and saw that the back had two more plush seats like the ones up front, and with the same awkward distance between them. I tried to imagine the kind of family that would need that kind of space on a vacation.

The closest thing I've had to family were the ladytechs. They were more like big sisters to me than code monkeys or even nurses, which they were originally certified as. They were the ones who gave me the purple and gold shawl that I wear over my plug suit. They told the higher-ups that it was a form of color-coding to better tell us apart and that it saved on energy costs by giving us an added layer of insulation, but I knew that was just something they said to not get in trouble. They were like that, never forgetting that they were working with people. I remember the little messages they'd write on the backs of their clipboards so they could look busy while trying to make me smile. My favorite one was from Sarah, who had written "CPU12F," crossed it out, and wrote "Sophia" above it. They were the only people who ever called me by my real name. They were with me when the lab was attacked. They did their best, but...

"Echo Alpha, what's your twenty? Over."

"Command, this is Echo Alpha. The package is secure. I've commandeered an old vehicle and heading toward the extraction point. ETA less than five minutes. Over."

I hate being called a package.