The Search for Sam

“Is it true?” she asked.

“Is what true?” I asked, a bit spitefully. I wanted to make her spell it out.

“That you’ve betrayed the Mogadorian cause.”

I guess my father figured we were past sugarcoating things and had told her everything.

“Yes,” I said.

Without another word, she left.

Moments later, as I held the still-warm bread in my hand, I realized that final home-cooked meal would be the last kind and motherly thing she would ever do for me.

I threw it in the trash.

Now Zakos is prepping me for the procedure. He’s filled a syringe with some kind of anesthetic, explaining that this time he will render me unconscious before the procedure begins, which should give him greater precision over the neurological mapping. Soon I will be put under, then I will join One in her memories, and then I will be dead.

Zakos opens One’s pod, to make a couple of adjustments before the procedure begins. I think of One and all the Greeters in their pods.

“Does it hurt?” I ask.

“Excuse me?” He’s absorbed in his preparations.

“What you did to all the Greeters, keeping them alive, raking their brains for intel all those years.”

“Oh, I never really thought about it,” he says. “Yes, I would guess it’s quite excruciating.”

Just then I hear her voice. “You’re not really going to let him get away with that, are you?” I turn to see One, flickering beside my chair. I had wondered if I would get to see her again before going under, if she hadn’t already flickered out of existence.

I don’t really have a choice, I say. I’m trapped here.

She leans against the counter. “You always have a choice. You had a choice to screw up today on the job, to bait your father into sentencing you to death, to do it in Zakos’s earshot so you’d end up here....”

I was afraid you were already gone. I couldn’t think of anything else. I ran out of hope, figured I was going to lose you anyway, and we could at least—

“See each other one last time?” she says, finishing my thought. She gives me a flirty, cockeyed grin.

“That’s sweet,” she says. “But that wasn’t the real reason you went haywire today.”

She’s right. That isn’t how all this started. In the moment, I just couldn’t bring myself to rat out those humans to my people. That was the first time the work I was doing as a surveyor was clearly going to help the Mogs and hurt others, and I couldn’t do it. Over the past week I’ve had to take some crazy, on-the-fly risks, but that was the first time I acted completely without a plan, without any clear sense of what the consequences would be.

One, I say. I don’t even really understand why I did what I did.

She doesn’t answer me immediately, but instead turns back to the tiled wall, crossing her arms. I can see an idea brewing in her head. After a moment, she turns back to me and fixes me with a cryptic stare.

“Don’t worry, Adam,” she says. “You will. Seeing as you’re going out anyway,” she says, leaning close to my ear. “Don’t you want to go out swinging?”

I look at her, confused.

“A giant leap for Mogadorian technology,” she whispers, casting a glance over at the tiles where the Greeters’ bodies are kept. “Is that what you really want your legacy to be?”

It’s time.

I’m in the chair, connected to Zakos’s console by a bunch of wires and cables. The machine that will plug me back into One’s consciousness is already humming. “The parameters are in place,” Zakos says. “It will just take a moment after we administer the anesthetic to begin working.” He gestures to a syringe on a tray of tools next to me. The syringe hasn’t escaped my attention either, though.

He approaches, towering above me in my reclined seat. As he holds my left hand against the arm of the chair and begins to pull the strap over my wrist, I know I only have a second to act.

I jerk my hand loose from Zakos’s grip and leap up, grabbing the syringe and stabbing it into Zakos’s throat before he can make another move. He punches me desperately, making contact with my face, but it’s too late: I’ve already depressed the plunger.

He staggers back in a woozy daze, the drugs already making their way into his system, and falls to the floor.

I rip the strap off my left hand and stand up.

“Why …” he says, puzzled at what I’ve done. “What could you possibly hope to accomplish …”

Then he’s out.