Sicora Online_The Sorting Read online

  Sicora Online

  The Sorting: A GameLit Adventure

  S.W. Clarke

  Copyright © 2018 by S.W. Clarke

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Illustrator: Minh Bui

  Cover Design: CoverMint Design

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  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  About the Author

  One

  Veda had a midweek meeting with Mother. An anomaly.

  She reread the message, her fingertips sliding over the braille: “06:00. Parlor.” Tomorrow morning. Veda lowered her fingers from the screen. She was at 98% efficiency, hadn’t been called for a midweek in five years of service. Others had been: Prairie, many times through the years, and never because she had been a good dupe.

  Always because her sister had been bad.

  Veda shut her eyes in the sleeping pod. In her dream, she had been on her way home from her job, the moon a great and luminous bulb above. That was what she’d been told it looked like: a massive orb, silver-limned and cratered. Veda had dreamed in such vivid color that when she awoke, she almost expected to see.

  She considered not showing at Malai’s corner shop. She wondered if it would do her any good now that the anomalous meeting had already been scheduled. But it had taken her six months to build to this, and if she canceled now she might never get the courage. She would go. She had twenty extra minutes to get ready.

  Veda had to stick to the appearance of routine. After three minutes the pod door unsealed, and she slid out with the colors from the dream still in her head. She couldn’t see them, of course, but they had texture, weight: black was embossed, lifted from the screen of her mind, the hard edges of a computer. Yellow floated under her palm like cat’s fur, tickling the skin. Her favorite was green. It grew in her cupped hands, sprouted before her supple and verdant. This was the one she saw as she followed the chime from the pod room to the bathroom. No water, no sound—empty. She relished being the first one in.

  She shed her nightgown, balled and tossed it; the throw scored the basket with a soft sweep. It had been nineteen days since she’d missed. At the stall she lifted her foot, set it under the sensor. The water came cold, and she held her foot there until it warmed. Soaping her hair, she thought of red—the color that evaded her. Years ago, Prairie had tried to teach her red by setting Veda’s hand above the tray warmer. There was the familiar heat, the danger. Without speaking, Prairie pressed Veda’s fingers right to the metal, holding them there past the second of incomprehension into the realm of pain. Veda screamed, jerked bodily away so that even Prairie’s strength couldn’t hold her. “It burns,” she cried, her scalded fingers wrapped in her other hand.

  “That’s red,” Prairie said. “It’s bright, willful, dangerous—it burns.” Her apology was hidden in her explanation.

  Veda was among the 1% of her model born with the red curls, the green eyes. The other 99% had brown hair, brown eyes. It sometimes happened that way—a weird quirk of the spermatozoa and egg combining in the lab—and it didn’t make her any less capable, so the 1% was allowed to remain. She was glad, though, to have eyes, even if they didn’t work: Veda had heard that the earliest iterations of her model were designed eyeless. Even though optical abilities were unnecessary for her model, it turned out humans were naturally averse to eyeless creatures. Some had been attacked, even killed. So she had all the trappings of regular people.

  Her name was Veda Powell; she was eighteen, a service administrator. She lived in the 43rd block of Columbia City, the section nearest the reclaimed coast, and she had green eyes, grew a mass of red curls. But she still couldn’t picture red.

  In the clothes room, Veda lifted her uniform—the furthest left, her name in braille on the sleeve hem—from the hanger. She pulled it on, zipped it to her neck. White: invisible, vaporous like fog. She lifted the mass of her hair, wrapped it into a bun. Two showers had activated in the bathroom, which put her five minutes ahead of the others, ahead of her fake sister.

  Veda only had one sister. Her name had been Prairie Powell.

  She emerged to a rare clear day, the sun warm on her skin. If she weren’t in a rush, she might have been tempted to slip off the mask during her walk, to cast her face up into the summer heat. In fact, she was of the first generation of dupes whose lungs were engineered to filter the dust from the air; the masks were only for humans’ sake, for consistency. The Reclaimed States had come far, but only last week an entertainment dupe had removed her mask in the 42nd block and had her nose broken by a fist. A human fist.

  Ninety-five steps to the corner. If she thought too hard about the placement of her feet she would stop short. That was why she relied on sounds, sensations. Here was Willow the shih tzu and the start of the fenceline. He followed her—saving his mistress, Mrs. J, from her dupelike clutches—along to the end of the fence. “Shut up, Will. Shut up,” murmured an uninterested Mrs. J, and that, too, was helpful for navigating: the drawl of her voice echoing out the door, falling away as Veda passed on.

  Here was old Marcus’ shadow, his cup bouncing rocks that never accumulated into coins—he was a terrible beggar, too proud—and his call to Veda: “Ought to call you Stretch, Miss Red.”

  He still didn’t know she was blind. At least he knew her name. And though he wasn’t precisely unkind, Veda never opened her mouth. She had learned a configuration of her face that produced the least response, positive or negative—just nothing at all. She imagined it as a soft-lipped pleasantness, a sweet and radiating confidence she didn’t feel. Her sister had been the master of affectation, of pretending to be someone until she became that person, and the residue of Prairie’s influence was still on Veda.

  The dip waited for her just before the corner. Here two blocks of the sidewalk angled inward like a pair of uneven teeth, which created three opportunities for tripping. And she had stumbled on every one of them, once hitting all three on the same walk. It was when the sound of Marcus’s cup had diminished by half, his rocks now like pebbles, that she double-stepped, lifted one foot in a high arc and met the dip in just the right spot. The other foot followed.

  She came to the corner, stood at the crux of Liberty and 43rd where the sun was boldest on her face, and she slipped her mask down anyway. Veda closed her eyes, and for ten seconds, she imagined yellow. Yellow was soft warmth, Prairie had said. Yellow was light.

  The transport’s combustion engine passed her on 41st. Fake Prairie—Veda had secretly dubbed her “Dairy”—and the thirteen others, each of them delivered to their jobs. A perverse thing: if Veda had sight, she would probably take the transport as well. She was the only service model among them—the only sightless, too—and she knew they thought she was strange fo
r walking. By this point, Dairy might even hate her. No, that couldn’t be. They thought she was strange, sure, but clones weren’t engineered for hate. Passiveness, docility, dedication. The extremes of hate, love, joy, mourning—those were for humans. Of course, that made it difficult for Veda to define her feelings over the past year.

  When Dairy arrived, Veda knew she was a replacement. Dairy was a security model, just like Prairie, and she had the same basic makeup: the low voice, the silken hair, the buttery smell, the way of scooping Veda’s hand into the crook of her elbow if they walked anywhere together. But she wasn’t the same person who had left for the west coast, the one who was selected for the first trial of Sicora Online.

  Veda had known it on that initial hug. Where Prairie had a reflexive habit of bumping Veda with her shoulder, Dairy only wrapped her arms around the other girl, stood in a long and meaningful hug. Where Prairie broke rules in subtle ways—removing her mask as soon as they were out of sight of the apartment and Mother—Dairy only complained about the rules, broke none of them. She was more docile even than Veda, and after a time Veda began to test the other clone, to prod the edges of this stranger’s act.

  They went for nightly walks, as before Prairie left. “What was California like?” Veda asked. She knew Pyro Games forced a strict NDA on the testers that prevented Dairy from telling her about the game itself, but she could talk about what surrounded the game. And of course, her sister had been a rule-breaker, so the NDA shouldn’t have mattered to her anyway. “Hot,” Dairy said. “I was glad to be done with it.”

  “With the game?”

  “California, the game, everything.”

  No, Veda thought. Prairie had wanted it more than anything, to prove what clones were capable of. “What happened in there?”

  “Inside Sicora? You know I can’t say, V.” Veda hated when Dairy called her that. The nickname was Prairie’s privilege, and someone had formatted it onto this stranger who knew nothing about Veda that mattered.

  After a time, Veda got more specific. “Remember that night we didn’t turn right at the corner?” she asked during one of their walks. “We just kept walking straight,” Dairy said, charmed by the memory. “And then you started to run,” Veda said, trailing off to allow her to fill in the rest. But Dairy had only walked alongside her, finally offering: “I ran a lot then, didn’t I?”

  Veda went silent. She had lied, of course: Prairie didn’t run anywhere that night. She’d been too drunk to run—more rules broken, an underaged dupe drinking—and they’d turned back after she yakked on the sidewalk eight blocks from the apartment.

  Finally, Veda confirmed it. One morning, a month after Dairy arrived, she turned to her in the bathroom while they washed their faces and began searching out the place on Dairy’s neck where the fingernail scar should have been. “What are you doing?” Dairy asked, jerking away. “Sorry,” Veda had said, bending over to splash water on her cheeks. But it was confirmed: she found only a perfect canvas of skin. At some point Prairie had been swapped out, and she would not come back. Such was a dupe’s life: they lived and died quietly. And they were easily replaced.

  So Veda had begun her own rebellion. It began small: waking before the chime, removing her mask outdoors. But now, after six months of anomalous behavior and not a single reprimand, she’d gotten bolder. She stepped into the shop at 40th with a belling, and behind the counter, Malai offered a cough—the typical greeting. Veda wasn’t sure of her exact age on account of the smoking, but she might have been fifty. Old enough to remember the world before the war, when clones weren’t dupes, weren’t slaves. Malai herself was a clone, an early-model service admin who had managed her own rebellion: she was off the grid, more or less, just a blind woman running a convenience store—with the real operations in back. “Wasn’t sure you’d be back,” she said.

  “I was always coming back,” Veda said, though she wasn’t sure herself until she came through the door.

  “Well, let’s get to it,” Malai said, and Veda heard her sweep through the curtain.

  A minute later, Veda sat in the padded chair while Malai inserted the connecting port into both their heads. She was down to ten minutes, but it was enough for the evaluation. “Hmm,” Malai said, and Veda sensed the other woman’s consciousness probing her brain, evaluating the connections. “You’re right: your eyeballs aren’t hooked up, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be.”

  Veda’s breath hitched. “You can fix them?”

  Malai let another chorus of coughing. “Never tried it with a newer model like yours. It would be a first-time venture. And I don’t have anything but ibuprofen in the front, so it’s going to hurt something powerful. You up for that, girl?”

  Veda’s fingers went tight on the armrests. “What are the chances?”

  “40% chance.”

  “Of failure?”

  “Of success. Either way, you wouldn’t be any worse off than before.”

  And Veda, who had for six months been building herself to this, couldn’t find her courage. She needed this if she was going to help her sister. Instead, she sat in the chair, a statue, until Malai’s coughing flinched her to awareness. “Well?”

  Well. Well, and well, and well. Her whole life would pass with indecision, and still she didn’t speak.

  “I’m taking that for a no,” Malai said.

  And the woman was right.

  Veda was nearly late. She stopped at 39th and Liberty, waited for the tick-a-tick-a-tick sound to cross. When she stepped out, her bracelet vibrated: she had two minutes. She took the last block at double speed. At the corner, her foot connected with the hydrant, and she managed to swing herself around it instead of plunging. At the entrance, she set her bracelet to the sensor. It clicked, and the door whirred open.

  Sybil was already at her post, fingers tapping. Veda swiped her bracelet at her station, which emitted an approving chime. “Hey, Syb.”

  The other clone continued tapping. She couldn’t hear Veda anyway.

  Veda stepped up to her post, attached the interface to the port at the back of her head. The login text appeared in her mind: “Welcome, Administrator. Username and password?”

  She thought them: Veda Powell; Mayday43. And the system accepted.

  For five hours Veda worked, her fingers hovering, delivering sharp strokes. She dealt largely with the AI that controlled simple systems: food preparation and delivery. She sought out anomalies, the processes that stuck, that gummed up, and she removed that gum. Mostly, though, it was a job of endurance. The service administrator model was designed for patience, dedication, a high tolerance for repetition. Why they’d life-paired her with a security model—designed for instinct, action, courage—she’d never understood.

  But that was what happened. And as intended, Veda had been attached to Prairie from the time she could form memory. Nights the older girl slipped into her pod, braided Veda’s hair and told stories of her day. At first it was small arms training, acrobatics, self-defense, blunt weapons, suppression. At thirteen she’d graduated to her security job, and then the stories were of whose face she’d bloodied, the drunk asshole who’d wandered into the compound and had to be coerced out. And Veda, who had no such stories, lived them so well with her sister that, at some point, she slipped past vicarious enjoyment. It was Veda who swept the frail arm around, pressed the hunting knife from the clutching hand. It was Veda who delivered three blanks into an intruder’s back, avoiding the vitals.

  Unlike Veda’s model, who ensured all the switches were flipped, security dupes were trained for critical judgement. Because for as much as AI had advanced, they couldn’t begin to duplicate human—or even dupe—coercion. They couldn’t be programmed beyond a 55% chance of proper critical judgment. A dupe was trained to assess, to act, to assimilate the variables to create an ideal, bloodless result—or the least bloody one. And Prairie Powell surpassed every standard they trained her to meet. She hit 100% efficiency.

  That was why Pyro Games had picked
her. She was the only dupe participating in their “trial,” which was really the first marketing push for the game. Before Prairie had left, she’d had the gumption to think she could do it all: survive, demonstrate the human capacity of a dupe, shine a light on the treatment of clones. All she had to do was survive ten levels in the ever-shifting world of Sicora. Ten days in the capsule.

  The system pinged. Veda had missed 88251, which had registered an order for two hamburgers in place of fries and an ice cream cone. 88251 loved hamburgers with a conviction she’d never seen; every day she had to dive in, fiddle with the same line of programming. Beside her, Sybil sighed, removed her headset.

  “I know,” Veda said.

  “It’s not my territory, Veda.”

  “I’m fixing it now.”

  “When they come for you, I’m not going to cover your delinquent ass.”

  “I know, Syb.” And she knew the other girl meant it.

  “Anyway, lunch?” Sybil asked. It was always she who asked, and they always ate the same meal.

  Their Big Stax sat in the center of Columbia City, a hub for workers. They ordered at the kiosks at the front of the store, Veda speaking loud into the machine to avoid being lost in the current of voices around her. The kiosks were Veda’s babies, and any pride she took in her work occurred during this meal, when she could listen to the machines operate with slick ease, taking orders and delivering them so efficiently that she sometimes heard pleasant surprise from customers. Little did they know the entire joint was run by two eighteen-year-old dupes.