Indentured Page 5

  “What’s going on?” he asked, still refusing to let his guard down, “Are they still listening?”

  “I’m still learning as I go, but I think they only listen in on people in the Indentured section. I’m not 100% sure though, so that’s why I want no names. At least not in the halls,” she replied, “I need you to follow me. I have to show you some important stuff.”

  He remained planted firmly in the passageway; unable to imagine why she thought he’d be willing to follow her anywhere. Surely she had to know that Declan had only a few faces to put to his new enemies and she was one of them.

  “I’m not so sure I should come with you,” he replied, “Why would I follow you?”

  When she turned abruptly, he caught a hint of anger or frustration imbedded in her features. She tried to cover it with a partial smile, but it was a little too forced.

  “Because you got me into this mess a long time ago and I need some help figuring it all out,” she whispered, “I’ll explain in a bit, but for now, please… follow me.”

  If he was confused before, he was baffled beyond belief now. She started purposefully down the corridor while he remained planted by the storage room. Something in the back of his mind warned that he had a good chance of getting killed if he got busted standing there in the hallway. That same intuition whispered that she could quite possibly have him killed if he refused to go along with her right now. But that same intuition hinted that he might get a chance to overtake her and force some information from her.

  By the time he decided to follow her, she already had a twenty-meter head start and was about to head up a flight of stairs. He rushed to the woman who now seemed indifferent to him; being led up two flights of stairs and down a bewildering maze of passageways.

  She finally stopped at a silver door and quickly punched a code into the small keypad imbedded onto the door itself. The door emitted an audible click before she opened it and gestured Declan into the room.

  He warily slipped past her, keeping his guard up the whole time. He skimmed his antiseptic surroundings, coming to the conclusion that this was probably some sort of a medical facility. The lighting suddenly increased, permitting him a better view of the room.

  “No one can interrupt us now and I’m positive this room is secure,” she said, shuffling past him toward the cabinets on the far wall, “I’ve got something to show you.”

  She opened one of the cabinets to reveal a system of clear drawers, each tiny drawer probably no larger than a typical baseball card. Before him were probably more than a hundred drawers.

  “What’s this?” he asked.

  Rather than reply, she turned toward another cabinet with a keypad similar to the one she bypassed to enter this room. She punched in a code and opened the door, revealing another drawer system of anywhere from 60 to 80 drawers.

  “The drawers I just unlocked contain the scans of citizens or crew members of the ship,” she said, pulling one of the drawers out and placing it on the counter, “And those drawers beside you contain scans of Indentures – yourself, your friends, and some that haven’t even been used yet.”

  He looked down at the drawer she pulled out and immediately noted the name “Rowe” on the front.

  “Yeah, that’s me. Ensign Brianna Rowe. If I were to die, they could take this little chip,” she said, lifting what appeared to be a small black and gold postage stamp from the drawer, “and imprint the information into the undeveloped brain of a clone created from my own DNA. Basically, Ensign Rowe gets to live forever.”

  “I’m completely confused,” he said, shaking his head, “What does any of this have to do with me?”

  “Oh, it has everything to do with you,” she said with a laugh that made Declan all the more uncomfortable, “You see, this little chip isn’t Ensign Rowe. Ensign Rowe is dead – killed at the hands of a couple of Indentures several years ago.”

  He looked down at the chip she held between her fingers, then to her again.

  “Whose identity then is in that chip?” he asked.

  “That’s the question you were supposed to ask all along!” she laughed, reaching out and patting his arm playfully, “This chip contains the identity of Tami Guzman… or Taz as my friends know me.”

  “Taz? Who… wait… the nurse lady from the hospital?” he asked, immediately getting a nod and a grin from her, “You’re the one who was there for my MRI?”

  “If you think that’s freaky, I’m also the girl downstairs that you know as Sierra. Though she’s the confused version, same as you. Once you introduce yourself to her by your real name, you’ll see what I mean,” she said, dropping the chip back into the drawer.

  “You’re one of them now? You’re the one behind all this?” he spat, clenching his fists in anger.

  “NO!” she shouted quickly, raising her hand to cut him off, “Not at all! I’m a victim the same as you, but somehow, at some point in the past, you and I switched some things around and did some damage to the whole mission of these people.”

  This brought him back a step. He tried to process all this, going back to everything he had seen and heard.

  “You and I escaped somehow – long ago. But our escape must have been ingeniously perfect because no one ever figured out that we switched the chips and by doing so, we put a spy on the other side of the wall.”

  “I don’t quite understand. When and why did we exist as Indentures before? Do they keep making carbon copies of us?” he asked, “Do we keep living this hell over and over again?”

  “I only know for sure that we went through this all about eight or nine years ago. Since my memory only begins at my MRI, same as yours, I don’t know the details of what happened then. I do know this, however,” she said, kneeling next to the cabinet and tugging a folder out from under the cabinet, “I wasn’t left without something to go on.”

  She dropped the folder next to Declan and flipped the cover open. The first paper was a small scribbled note on a torn blue sheet of paper. Declan leaned in and read it.

  “Just play along or you’ll be killed. You’re not Tami – you’re Chief Warrant Officer Brianna Rowe on a spaceship in the future. It sounds like a joke, but if you don’t play along, you’ll die. Look under the green cabinet in MedLab 2. Until then, claim that you feel some gaps in your memory.”

  “Imagine waking up to that. My first memory after the MRI back in the 21st century was waking up in a glass chamber, completely naked, in a body I didn’t recognize, with a little stuffed animal that apparently I demanded to have with me upon awakening. It was just me and a little walrus with ‘tear me open ASAP’ handwritten on his fat belly,” she said, tossing the little paper to the side, “You think you had it bad? I was lost, confused, and trusting the handwritten instructions of someone I had never met.”

  “Dear Lord,” he muttered, understanding the true magnitude of their whole situation for the first time, “And you played along?”

  “I read a lot of sci-fi in my time,” she said by way of explanation, “Unless something bad happened, I had no choice but to play along and hope for the best. This folder here was the same exact folder under that green cabinet all those years ago. What you see is all that I had to go on.”

  Declan lifted the top few pages from the folder, a small map suddenly slipping from his pile and fluttering to the floor. She knelt to pick it up and placed it on the folder.

  “This was just a map of the ship with scribbled notations from you. You wanted me to be able to pretend I knew where I was at all times, but even you didn’t know where half the passageways lead. You didn’t even know where my berthing was for that matter,” she said, “Rowe’s berthing, I mean.”

  “I can’t believe you were able to fool the crew of the ship. Honestly, I don’t think I would have believed any of this stuff if I woke up as you did,” he muttered, examining the papers before him, “Wait, I don’t get this. It says we were woken up when we got to the Beta Hydri System – two weeks before getting to the planet. You
just told us the same thing yesterday.”

  She nodded, offering no explanation, “Just read it.”

  You are a crewmember of this ship in charge of a group of slaves – or Indentures as we’re often referred to. You, Tami, are (and were) one of these slaves actually, so please don’t mess this thing up. We went through a lot to get you implanted into the body of an officer…

  The letter continued to explain how she should act and that she should claim that some scanning flaw must have been responsible for her gaps in memory. As he read further, it just went on to explain an identical experience for the Indentures, discovering themselves to be in the 24th century and preparing to be trained for colonization of a planet.

  We found a way to escape into the command portion of the ship through Storage B. Knowing there was no way we could take over this ship or achieve freedom in any sense at all, we chose to spend our nights sneaking around in these uncharted regions of the ship hoping to learn what we could.

  I won’t bore you with all the details since time is of the essence, but as time progressed, we learned that we, the Indentures, were the only ones going to Hydrus. The plan had originally been for everyone, the command crew and the Indentures, to establish this initial ground base for the upcoming colony ships, but something significant had happened aboard the ship. Whatever this unknown thing was, it made the crew want to drop us off and head out. That’s where you come in. If you think this is all part of a scam, ask the Indenture named Sierra any questions that only you would know the answers. You were and are Sierra.

  Declan continued to read, shaking his head.

  “How did Rowe die? I mean, I guess she had to die in order to be reconstructed with your information inside,” he said.

  “Supposedly an electrocution accident involving some bare wires in the exercise lab,” she said, “But I think it would be safe to assume it wasn’t an accident. It happened a few days before dropping off the Indentured.”

  He leafed through more papers, some giving her what little history they could gather on Rowe. Her murder was definitely premeditated by two people who were uncommonly patient.

  “This is all so unbelievable. I almost want to pat myself on the back,” he said, setting the folder down, “Did you ever find out why they… why we were dropped off on that planet and where we’re going now?”

  She nodded, taking the folder off the counter and sliding it back into its original hiding place.

  “All the command personnel seem intent on keeping the crew in the dark, so I’ve got no information from them. I’m an officer, but not in the line of command officers. I did however gather some interesting tidbits from the engineering guys. Personally, I believe what they told me explains it all,” she said, motioning for him to follow her out of the room, “All the USSC ships have the capability of travelling at speeds of up to 95% the speed of light. That’s a tolerable speed for our local group of stars especially since those travelling at such speeds experience a slower passage of time. But-”

  “Wait, mankind can somehow change the flow of time now?” he sputtered as they entered the passageway and headed down the long, silent corridor.

  “Seriously, Declan? We’re talking about ancient 1905 Einstein relativity,” she said, giving him a mocking grin, “He theorized, and it’s been proven many times in our own time, that both gravity and speed affect the flow of time for the subject involved. The faster you go, the slower time goes. If you reach the speed of light, time stops, which is why we can never travel at that speed.”

  “And this is real stuff?” he snickered, “Not something from your sci-fi books?”

  “Come on, it’s old news even for me. If this ship travels at 95% light speed, using Einstein’s proven formulas, you experience about a 69% warp of time. Basically, for every 10 years of Earth time that passes while we are in transit, only a little over 3 years pass for the crew of the ship,” she said, “And no, this isn’t science fiction. And yes, you are taking me off topic. I was trying to bring you up to speed on my investigation,

  “Anyway, as I was saying, I learned that we had a prototype engine aboard this ship called a ‘Jump Drive’, which would basically permit this ship to perform a nearly instantaneous transit between the stars – essentially travelling much faster than the speed of light. And it worked perfectly as far as anyone could tell, but it also damaged itself beyond repair in the process. As far as I can guess, we made a one-way trip to Beta Hydri aboard a ship that was supposed to return to Earth afterward using the same Jump Drive. I believe this unexpected problem is somehow related to the crew refusing to join the Indentures on the new planet.”

  He followed her down another passageway, then up a short set of stairs leading to what he assumed was a computer lab of some sort. Nothing in the room resembled any of the computers of the 21st century, but it didn’t require a stretch of imagination to see some sorts of processing technology in the various workspaces.

  “How long have you been living inside Ensign Rowe?” he asked.

  “Nearly eight years now,” she said, turning to him, “Eight years of obeying the secret commands of two non-existent people; spying on the crew and officers; and all the time waiting for you to be recreated so I could get some help!”

  He raised his eyebrows, confused by the sudden anger behind her words. She had already turned away from him, flipping unseen switches to bring some of the equipment to life.

  “Are you mad at me for something?” he asked, examining a dark circular screen pierced by several bright green pinpoints, “Let’s remember that I’m not the same man who escaped and did all this crazy Star Trek espionage eight years ago.”

  She turned to the terminal and tapped some keys, raising a three-dimensional holographic display of a bunch of triangles, dots, and dotted lines on the tabletop before them.

  “Listen Declan, I need to tell you something,” she muttered, staring blankly at the three dimensional display, “I believe you and I may have… well… let’s just say that everything I’ve turned up appears to point to the fact that we seemed to like each other a lot – Tami and Declan, I mean. And truthfully, I guess I could see something like that being possible based my memory of you at the hospital that night. It’s just-”

  “Wait, was there some sort of soap opera love triangle going on?” he asked, half-jokingly.

  “No!” she turned to him, slapping his forearm, “Just stop interrupting and let me get it all out right now because this isn’t easy for me. What I’m saying is this: I spent a lot of time reading and re-reading those notes and instructions from you and me. And in some ways, I felt a bit of jealousy toward that girl – Sierra or Tami or whatever you’d call her. I also felt that I should wait for you.”

  She turned away from Declan as he started to pace near one of the other lit up computer displays.

  “I know it sounds completely stupid, but these were the thought processes of a medical assistant who found herself abandoned in the 24th century. Anyway, that loneliness I felt progressively became unbearable and I wasn’t able to wait for you. I found someone I cared about and we clicked in a way that… well, he was the first one I truly loved. When I say ‘I,’ I’m referring to this version of Tami Guzman – me. Basically, I’m married now, Declan,” she said, finally turning to him.

  He stopped his pacing when he neared the holographic display. Then he turned to her unsure of how to respond to what he assumed was a confession of unfaithfulness in her eyes.

  “So, you feel that you betrayed me or something like that?” he asked, shaking his head, “I’m not that Declan who wrote those instructions to you and so far, I haven’t really even spoken to that Indentured version of you downstairs.”

  “I know,” she replied, “And I know you probably think I’m crazy, but I guess I was just hoping you’d tell me it’s okay. You know – that it’s okay I’m married.”

  “Of course,” he replied with a shrug, “Yeah, sure. I don’t mind.”

  She laughed, dropping
her face into her hands, “See you think I’ve lost my mind, and I guess we all have in some sense. It’s so hard trying to figure out the ethics, morality, and principles for having multiple versions of ourselves.”

  “Believe it or not, I can see how you’d feel awkward about all that so don’t worry about it. I’ve seen so much insanity in the last 24 hours that this doesn’t even come close to the top ten,” he said with a chuckle.

  “Good,” she raked her fingers through her hair, then nodded, “Good, so then I imagine you’d also understand that people share things with their spouses… such as the fact that a certain spouse may be on an undercover mission to save the Indentures from slavery.”

  “Are you kidding?” he sputtered, “Please tell me you’re joking. He could ruin everything!”

  “No, you don’t know him and actually I needed his help on some things, so stop looking at me like I’m a bad guy again,” she said, “He’s not even a member of the crew, so he’d have nothing to gain by reporting infractions.”