Chapter 14
?rim
?rim waited for Cassie for nearly a standard hour and was about to pack up his things and make the trip back to his domicile when she came sprinting into the schoolhouse with a pichari feather in her hair.
A fizzing excitement ran through his electrical core, despite the lateness, and it wasn’t just because he would have a chance to better examine the inner mechanisms of her voicelock.
“Is everything okay?” Before he could stop himself, he reached to pluck the feather from her soft hair.
?rim held it up in front of her, and he could see Cassie’s skin had grown darker again, the same shade he’d seen her turn the other evening when she’d noticed him and S’samph staring.
He suspected it was the ‘embarrassment’ reaction he’d heard described on healer Eleri’s face by some of the younglings.
“I am so sorry, let me try again!” She accepted the feather from him, and their hands touched for a long moment. ?rim was stunned by her soft warmth against the cool crystalline exterior of his skin.
“It’s okay, I’m glad to see you. I don’t have any particular plans for this afternoon, so it’s no trouble if we study later.
Were you visiting the pichari?” ?rim finally broke the contact.
Cassie nodded and made the sign he’d come to recognize as ‘bird’.
It was also the second half of her name sign.
“Should we start our lesson?”
Cassie made the sign he’d come to learn meant ‘I’m ready’.
They sat together at the worktable with her datapad in front of them while she wrote out a few short phrases.
M-I-N-E-M-I-Z-C-A-S-S-I-E. Y-U-R-N-E-M-I-Z-O-O-R-I-M.
Her spelling still left much to be desired, but she was improving in speed and efficiency when it came to writing the individual letters.
He intended to move on to full word symbols during their next lesson.
He was so pleased with her progress he almost forgot she had agreed to a deeper analysis of her voicelock.
When the end of the lesson came, she reminded him by tapping on the device with a question in her eyes.
“Are you sure you’re ready to do this?” ?rim asked. He could feel his own anxiety start to pulse from one node to the next as he rubbed reflexively at his wrists. Cassie made her ‘I’m ready’ sign, so he took that as his cue to boot up his device.
“Let me know immediately if anything feels strange. There are often safeguards on these types of things. The device will likely warn us if we’re breaching something unauthorized.”
Cassie nodded, and ?rim loaded the necessary hardware to ping her voicelock.
He brought up the interface on his datapad and then leveled her with a serious expression.
“Ok, let’s start then.” He said this to himself more than to her.
It was hard enough to hide his giddiness at the whole thing.
Obviously, this was still an early step.
Ideally, he’d want to get better imaging done so he could holomodel her device down to the minutiae of the wiring and the biological integration.
“I’m so grateful!” Cassie placed a hand on his arm, and he startled himself by covering her fingers in his own much larger ones instead of pulling away.
He wasn’t sure what it was about her that made physical contact so desirable. He’d never wanted physical contact with another being in his life. “If we can get more information, this will be the first real step toward disabling the voicelock.”
She smiled at him, and it was one of the first genuine smiles he’d ever seen her give.
It sent a zing of joy through his chest node, and he resolved to do this properly.
After everything she’d been through, Cassie deserved his fullest efforts.
“Let’s start. I suspect nothing will trigger from a superficial exploration of the codex.
” He input his commands into the console and then pressed the trigger that would make a first attempt at linking with her voicelock.
At first, nothing happened. The console remained dark, but then it suddenly lit up with an influx of data.
Permissions. Vocabulary Bank. Security Protocols.
There it was. The engineering behind her silence.
This was what he’d been missing all the time he’d been away from Teos.
The thrill of a new discovery. The thrill of connecting the biological with the technological.
“I think I’m in.” He clapped his palm nodes together, unable to contain his excitement.
His eyes flickered beneath his eyestones to the data output.
He couldn’t believe his luck. This was what he’d been waiting for.
His lightning in a bottle. They were going to beg him to come back to Teos.
He was going to be one of their most well-respected and well-funded researchers.
For a long moment, he was so entranced by the possibilities he’d almost forgotten about the person.
Not the person. Cassie. He’d almost forgotten about Cassie.
“How are you doing, Cassie?”
“They call me Cheerful Cassie for a reason!”
Buoyed by her affirmative response, ?rim nodded as he decided to push a little further and see if he could access one of the data folders.
This would require more finesse. Biological systems like this tended to trigger safeguards if someone entered the wrong space.
Vocabulary bank seemed like the safest place to start.
Maybe he would even be able to modify her lexicon and give Cassie wider access to speech as a temporary measure.
He tapped the folder and waited for the data to load.
It was much more expansive than he had been expecting.
Hundreds of packets of data for different protocols?
Had Cassie been given a different vocabulary databank daily?
He was filtering through the mass of information when he finally remembered to check back with Cassie.
She was always quiet, but there was something eerie in this silence.
He heard her move and finally glanced up from his perusal.
Her hands clawed at her throat as the device blared red. ?rim felt like all the weight had disappeared from his body as he watched her crumple like a sheet of glass struck wrong.
“Cassie? Cassie, what happened?”
She didn’t respond. ?rim dropped the datapad.
Her body went rigid as the voicelock discharged a self-protective spark of electricity, and ?rim knew.
He knew what it was to get struck in the lightning fields.
He knew what it was like to feel the overwhelming charge rush through every atom of your body.
Except Cassie wasn’t crystalline. She was carbon and fragile and not opening her eyes.
He caught her before she fell off the worktable. Her narrow body crashed into his. ?rim held her, suspended in motion.
Clinic. He had to go to the clinic.
Sokt. He knew there would be a safeguard shutdown protocol. He just didn’t realize it was liable to destroy the host. Whatever secrets Cassie kept, whatever she’d seen, someone was willing to kill her if they got out. But he had been the one to pull the trigger. ?rim needed her alive, so he ran.
Teosians weren’t designed for quick motion, their bodies sturdy and heavy, but he moved faster than he ever had without the use of a levibike. The clinic was only a few paces from the schoolhouse, but running there was an eternity, especially since he wasn’t sure if Cassie was still breathing.
He crashed through the clinic doors with her in his arms and found Eleri and Aglao leaning over the training interface. “Cassie. Please. Something’s wrong with her.”
Eleri stood first, a dark expression crossing her face. “What did you do to her?”
“It was… it was the voicelock,” ?rim said, but it was obvious what he really meant. He’d been tampering with the voicelock, and Cassie had been… he didn’t know. He didn’t know if he was ready to consider the worst possibility. He didn’t know if he was ready for the Quorum to be right about him.
“How dare you.” Eleri’s tone was frigid.
“Healer Eleri. Let us assess the situation without letting our emotions interfere. We need to examine Cassie.” Senior Healer Aglao pressed a button on the interface, and a floating stretcher appeared from the floor in front of ?rim.
With some reluctance, he placed Cassie on it and let it whisk her into the infirmary.
“Aglao, I know it’s unprofessional, but Cassie is my patient, and she’s also human. Someone needs to advocate for her!” She snapped on a pair of gloves and made her way over to Cassie’s bedside, where she hooked her up to a set of diagnostic programs.
His whole body was shaking as he followed them to the examination space. “I understand how bad this looks, but you have to believe me, I wasn’t trying to hurt her.”
“Do you understand? You must know what the Aviary is by now. She’s spent her entire life being forced to obey other people.
She’s never had a choice. She doesn’t understand what it means to have a choice.
” Her tone seared through him as she inserted needles into Cassie’s body, threading a tube down her throat, connecting a bag to force air into her lungs.
“I wasn’t trying to hurt her! I would never hurt anyone!” ?rim clenched the node at his wrist so hard he worried it might shatter.
“Cassie isn’t an experiment! Don’t lie. She was interesting to you.
You say you weren’t trying to hurt her, but look at what you did to her!
” Something on the readout made Eleri pause and gasp.
Even though he had no idea what he was looking at, ?rim leaned closer, trying to see. “Aglao… tell me I’m wrong. Please.”
Aglao moved closer to examine the interface. “If you are commenting on the extensive damage to her breathing and speaking infrastructures, then your assessment is accurate.”