Parting Shot

Denden, 3rd May 2163

Zaharah awoke with a start, sitting up and banging her head on something hard and metal. She groaned and tried to turn over, but there was little room to turn around in whatever box she was locked in. Or... the creeper. The creeper was on top of her. Her panic redoubled, and she banged against the metal with her fists.

"Help! Jade help!" she called.

A hiss reached her ears and light streamed in from her left, and the metal moved away on its own. She tried to scramble into a sitting position, but her limbs felt like wet noodles.

"Easy, easy, Zaharah. You're fine."

She looked up, not at Jade, but at Dr Will, and drew her brows in tight. "When did you get here? And the creeper. It—"

"Zaharah breathe." He put a hand on her shoulder. "It was just a memory. There is no creeper here. I promise you."

Zaharah stared at him for a long moment, then looked at Skorpi, who was perched on his shoulder, the past him at the screens, machines and panels behind him. And it all came rushing back like the flow of a tide.

Her mind raced and reeled with everything that had happened over the last few days. The Director was taking them to the EUC that afternoon. The videos, the messages, the hacking. The lies. Cammi was right. All this time, they were right and the people she trusted, the people she called friends, had been lying to her. Her stomach turned on its side and bile pooled in her mouth.

Two years... They'd been lying to her for two years. She shook and tears stung her eyes.

"I know you're a little... overwhelmed right now," Will said. "But I need to ask you a few post-procedure questions. Just to be safe." He pressed a cup of coffee into her hands.

Zaharah nodded and swiped at the tears with her sleeve. The warmth from the cup seeped into her hands and chased the numbness from her fingers. Control the things you can... her mom had said that. She thought she was in control, but she'd been a puppet on a string this entire time.

"All right." Dr Will pulled up a stool and sat facing her, tablet in hand. "What is your name?"

"Zaharah Dev..." She bit the inside of her cheek and squeezed her eyes shut. Her mind was scrambled, and she felt as though she was trying to draw information from two places at once. Or two different timelines at once. "Zaharah Cyan. My name is Zaharah Cyan." She looked up at Will. "Am... I related to Dr Cyan?"

"We'll get to that in a moment. Do you know where you are, and why you're here?"

She nodded. "I'm at the clinic in Denden and... you just gave me my memories back." She took a swig of coffee to alleviate the dryness in her mouth and throat. Dr Cyan had given her the truth too. Exposed the Director. Aleesha Saunders, the giant stepping over all of them. All those kind words and gestures, all the offerings of new arms and hopes for a fancy education in a prestigious art academy. It was all a lie.

"Good." Dr Will's gaze flicked up to her briefly. "What's the last thing you remember from the night of the accident?"

"I..." Zaharah swallowed, images of the creeper flashing through her mind. She looked down at herself to make sure she was intact. No way... That creeper had to be at least twenty feet up when it fell on top of her. She should be broken, scarred up, and then some. "Jade and I were in the shipyard on the north end of Denden. I was running to the garage, and the creeper fell on top of me."

He nodded, tapping away at the tablet's screen. "Are you at all dizzy, light-headed, any numbness or pain in your hands or feet?"

She shook her head.

"Okay. I will field your questions now." He set the tablet aside and moved Skorpi from his shoulder to her lap.

"Am I related to Dr Cyan?" It was rare nowadays, and especially in the 700, for people to share a last name and not be related. Especially a new one like Cyan.

"Yes. She is your aunt by marriage."

"By marriage...?" Zaharah repeated dumbly. She rubbed her temple as though she could massage the memory from her brain. "I remember an uncle but I'm not getting a name or a face."

Will exhaled a sigh."I figured that may be the case. Memory remapping is usually something that we do over the course of a few days. But we don't have that long. Your memories will return to you in time, just be patient."

"Why were they taken away from me in the first place?" Her voice was louder than she intended; it resonated through the suite and rebounded off the walls and floor.

He winced. "So we could continue to experiment on you without your consent. So we could paint ourselves as heroes instead of villain. Because we were under the Director's orders. I know this looks bad, but understand Cyan was just trying to protect you."

"Then where the fuck was she? Did she fuck with my head too?"

"She wasn't here. The night of your accident, Kass was halfway across the globe on vacation. She wasn't due back in Denden for another week. That left me, the nurses and the Director to see to your care." He clasped his hands in front of him. "Trust me, Kass did her best to protect you. You don't know the unspeakable things the Director wanted to put you through. That she will put you through if you board that plane with her this afternoon."

Zaharah took a breath to calm herself and fisted her hands to stop herself from lashing out at Dr Will. "Okay. Can you explain to me exactly what happened that night?"

"I can do that. The creepers were here as a part of Denden's beta testing programme, and that's the extent of my knowledge on that front. Dwight's team was responsible for keeping them in check. I'm not sure what went wrong, but that night, he came over here." Will shook his head. "I've never seen him so frazzled. He said they needed a Doctor to come with them urgently. So we rode out to the shipyard and found your sister trying to pull a one ton hunk of metal off you."

Zaharah smiled inwardly at that. "Was Jade hurt?"

"No. She was fine. You, on the other hand, were in bad shape. Multiple broken bones and lacerations, head trauma, and significant damage to your lower spine. It took us around half an hour to get the creeper off of you without causing further injury. Then we rushed you here to stabilise you while a team was flown in from the mainland."

She drank more of her coffee. It tasted like something now, bitter, as bitter as she felt.

"I won't bore you with the details but after the team assessed your condition, they came to the same conclusion I did. Even with extensive surgery, your chances of survival were next to nothing and... even if you did survive, you'd be bound to a wheelchair for the rest of your life."

That sounded about right, Zaharah decided. She imagined that creeper falling on top of her was akin to being struck by a speeding car.

"Experimental treatment was the Director's idea, and it was risky. Even riskier than surgery." He leaned back in his seat. "You should get dressed now. There's something I need to show you. I promise it will answer the rest of your questions."

"All right." She moved Skorpi to her shoulder and stood, the cold floor shocking her feet. As she drifted towards the bathroom, she glimpsed the clock. 8:24. She'd gotten to the lab before three am. Five hours she'd spent in the Entochamber, no wonder she'd woken up so disoriented.

Zaharah closed the bathroom door behind her and sunk to the floor. The smart skin suddenly felt as though it were suffocating her, and her hands shook so much she could grab hold of the zipper. So she threaded them in her hair and rocked back and forth. Experiment. They'd been experimenting on her. She was just a rat in a maze.

Skorpi patted her hand with a claw and beeped encouragingly.

"Why won't you say something? Did they experiment on you too?" She remembered him speaking so vividly. The posh accent, the cringey way he referred to her father. Her heart lurched in her chest. Get it together, she told herself. She needed more answers and wouldn't find them shaking on the bathroom floor.

Zaharah tried the zipper again and held fast before dragging it down. She peeled off the smart skin and donned her clothes. Her reflection in the mirror was as haggard as she felt, eyes dead, braids dishevelled and clothes twisted.

Back in the suite, the Entochamber had been shut down and Dr Will stood by a door near the MRI machine. A door she didn't remember seeing their before. If her memory served her right, and maybe it didn't right then, a monitor was hanging there.

"Right this way Zaharah." He led the way through the door and up the narrow stairwell beyond it. At its top was a digital panel, set into another door. Will punched in a code and went through a series of scans, left hand, his face and his retina.

The door slid aside and Zaharah looked past Dr Will into the room. Another lab, this one equipped with microscopes, incubators, a computer flanked by cabinets, and a wall of tools that made Zaharah wonder if this doubled as a torture chamber.

She walked over to the wall and touched one that looked a like a laser gun, while Will sat at the computer. "Is this the stuff you all experimented on me with?" She took down a box cutter.

No. Look here." Dr Will swung his chair around and opened a drawer in the cabinet. A cloud of fog rolled out and crept over the floor to chill her toes. He pulled a single glass vial from the smoke, and inside it was black liquid, maybe a teaspoon's worth. "Give me your hand."

When she did, he poured the liquid into her palm, and to her surprise, it remained in one cohesive mass. Cold, almost as cold as ice, but not a liquid like she thought. It rolled around her palm of its own volition, wound and weaved around her fingers.

"What the hell...?" Zaharah breathed, watching the black blob perch on the tip of her fingers.

"This is micro metal," Dr Will explained. "And this is the stuff we experimented on you with."

She tilted her head. "Is this one of those fancy synthetic metals they've been manufacturing in the states? Did you all make me bionic?"

"No, this is a living organism. The primary elements that make up its cellular structure are unlike anything found here on earth." He stood and leaned against the cabinet.

Zaharah looked up at him, then down at the black blob. "You're telling me... this is an alien?" He nodded. "Like, from space?" Another nod. "I'm holding an alien right now?"

"Not just holding it." Will pursed his lips and nodded to the chair. "Here sit down."

She obliged, even though she wanted to sling the micro metal from her hand and run from the room.

"After the team of doctors assessed you, I suggested taking your consciousness and putting it into an android. Which I thought was the best course of action given the circumstances. But the Director had other ideas." He paused, as though collecting his thoughts. "This micro metal has displayed some curious qualities. Incredible resistance, regeneration, it can even process data organically. But most importantly, it formed a symbiotic bond with another living creature."

Zaharah didn't interrupt, despite the cold lump of dread forming in her stomach. The pieces were falling together in her head, forming a road she did not want to go down.

"This micro metal was put into an enclosure with an old crow who had lost its leg. And over the course of a few weeks, a team of scientists observed and documented interactions between the two. And one day when the team came in, the micro metal was gone, and the crow had somehow, miraculously, regenerated its leg."

"The micro metal healed the bird?" Zaharah asked.

"They formed a symbiotic bond somehow. The micro metal was found in blood samples, tissue samples.It showed up on MRIs and x-rays."

"So, you all... replicated that process. On me."

"Well... yes and no. We didn't have weeks to work with you, more like hours. And so the Director had the idea to take a copy of your consciousness, program it into the micro metal, and then introduce it into your system."

"And you did that." Her words were soft and may have gone unheard were it not for the quiet room. Will nodded. "And it worked." Another nod.

"Better than we thought it would. Within a few hours, your lacerations were healed with no scarring, spine was being repaired and the swelling in your brain had been reduced by half. It was scientific history being made, right before our eyes."

Zaharah only heard what he said subconsciously; her attention remained on the micro metal dancing around her hand. "These things are inside me."

He straightened and moved to the computer. "They not just inside you. They've become an integral part of your cellular make up, so much so that if we were to destroy the micro metal inside you, you'd die."

This was too much. Her feet itched with the urge to run, hide, pretend none of this ever happened. "Is that why I don't sleep as much anymore? Why I had to stop eating meat?"

"Indeed. The micro metal feeds primarily on plant matter, which leads me to believe they came from a place similar to earth. They don't really sleep per se, but go into a sort of hibernation for a few hours per day. You'd probably sleep for less were it not for the inhibitors."

She finally looked up at him. "What inhibitors?"

Dr Will looked away and rubbed the back of his neck. "We've been giving you injections and...mild electric shocks during your longer sessions in the entochamber. They inhibit some of the micro metal's qualities because... during the initial process, they tried to regenerate your arm.

"And what was Dr Cyan's role in all this? You said she was on vacation. What happened when she got back? Why didn't she report this? Isn't this illegal?" Her voice rose an octave with each question.

"She and Aleesha fought, of course. As you can imagine, it was nasty. But no, the research regarding the micro metal isn't illegal. It's actually government funded. What is illegal is experimenting on you without your express consent and taking your memories so you wouldn't know any better. I'm not sure if going to Parliament with this is going to help you. They probably won't care. Aleesha used you to give them what they wanted and more."

"Then what the fuck am I supposed to do?!" She yelled, her voice reverberating off the walls and floor. "Just live with this shit?! Where the fuck is your humanity?" Her voice cracked and throat suddenly felt raw.

Dr Will stayed silent for a long time before he exhaled a sigh. "I don't know what to tell you Zaharah. Sorry, seems too patronising at this point." He plucked the blob of micro metal from her palm and deposited it back into the canister. "I'd be lying if I said I wasn't intrigued when the Director presented the possibility of using the micro metal. I'd be lying if I said I didn't want to continue exploring its many applications."

Zaharah pressed her lips together to stop them from trembling.

"As an android, I was programmed with an innate curiosity, a desire to learn more. I was also programmed to follow the orders of my superiors. And I suppose I was using that as an excuse. I was telling myself I had no choice. But I do. And I choose defiance." Dr Will opened up the bottom cabinet and pulled out a bag. Then he pulled the micro metal samples from the drawer above and lined them up inside.

"What are you doing? What are all of these?" She stood over him as he zipped the bag up.

"There has to be someone on The 700 who can help you, otherwise, Kass wouldn't have suggested you go there. This batch of micro metal was harvested from your blood samples. They're yours." And he held the bag out to her. "I also included the hard drives with research from this lab and the one on the mainland. This is as much as I can do for you I'm afraid. You're on your own from here."

Zaharah reached for the bag, but her hand stopped short and she looked up at Dr Will. "What's going to happen to you? I'm sure the Director won't—"

"Don't worry about it." And he grinned. "I guess you could consider this my parting shot."

Parting shot, Zaharah repeated in her head. Her heart sank. On one hand, she was angry about what was done to her. On the other, Dr Will had been a constant part of her life since the accident. She was angry, but she couldn't hate him for following orders. Especially when she knew what happened to wayward androids, when she knew what would happen to him.

"Okay." And she took the bag.

He nodded to the door. "Get out of here, kid."