Integral - Julie Steimle (snow like ashes txt) 📗

“My sister is alive?” Tacy’s knees suddenly grew weak.

Her handler caught her just as she fell. Lifting her with a great deal more care than she had expected from one who would arrest her, he set her in a chair somehow he conjured up. Her eyes found it hard to focus on the faces around her while in her mind she hovered over the two military leaders discussing issues so much more pertinent to her distress.

“You call it pitiful? But what about their choice of pilots? We were lucky they put that little girl in the interface, otherwise it would be a loss.”

“A child in a man’s machine? That is even more pathetic.”

“Put your mouth on that and breathe in,” her handler said, lifting a small canister with a mouthpiece up to her lips.

“You are looking at her size and not her abilities, General. All the stats on Tacy Jensen are on file. She was top of her class—”

“For a first year cadet—”

“Better than a first year cadet.”

“I don’t have asthma!” Tacy snapped back as she batted the small air piece away from her face as her eyes focused back on the room around her. The woman with the superior look gave one of her eyebrow-lifted smirks and silently snorted to herself. “I want to see my sister!”

“A cadet is a cadet. We made those ships for trained military pilots. I still think we ought to cut her out of the system and reprogram the interface for another autopilot.”

“Tacy, the ship thieves are gone,” her handler said.

“You must be joking.”

“She’s my sister!” Tacy shouted back, trying to get onto her feet again. “I’m just as much guilty of stealing that ship as she and Larke were!”

“Do I sound like I’m joking?”

“True,” the woman with the electronic clipboard said, peering down at Tacy as she inputted information into the machine. “But you are now the pilot to that ship. Lucky for us, those thieves put a good one into the gel. Otherwise we would have had to scrap the whole thing. Millions of good money down the tubes….”

“Money?” Tacy jumped up from her seat again. Her handler could not hold her down this time. He backed off as if giving up. “Is that all you care about? We were running from the Gardo, and all you care about is money?”

“We defeated the Gardo years ago. That machinery is more valuable than you were,” the woman said.

“Have you really had a look at the pilot? If you had, it would be a joke for you to think that.”

“You know, if they hadn’t taken the ship, you wouldn’t have it now,” Steve said with a wink to Tacy.

But Tacy was in no flirtatious mood. With her eyes focused half in her ship and half in the room, she calculated together the meaning of both conversations. The voices of the men in her brain had also gotten louder. They had entered through the ship’s hatch and were climbing inside. It was the strangest sensation; the metal bending under their feet sent tingles of feeling into her nerves, almost as if she were being violated.


“I’ll show her to you myself. Look. She is the most integrated with her machine than any of the other pilots I have ever seen. She is the ship.”

Her body shuddered. Tacy pulled her arms into herself as if it would protect her from these men climbing inside the machine parts of her metal shell out back in the hangar. Around her, the world in the gray-carpeted room was filled with dreamlike sights of people approaching her. Several of them had glowing lines on their bodies like Steven. She closed her eyes, still seeing those glowing green lines that pulsed with the beating of her heart and the rippling of her thoughts. Opening her eyes, she looked down at her own arms.

“What happened to me?” Tacy’s legs felt unable to hold her again.

“Wait a minute? Where is she?”

“She escaped?”

“She must have hatched. She was long in the interface—longer than most. This is bad.”

Her arms had the same green pulsing lines as Steve did, only close up Tacy could see that they were not just marks on the surface of her skin, but actual currents of energy flowing within her skin, deep within even her muscles and bones—all the way to her nerves where she felt an outside sensation of feet thumping on metal racing to exit the ship, where in the back of her mind she saw two men in military uniforms calling out to the workers in orange jumpsuits in the docking bay for attention on a serious matter. On the surface all she saw were her pulsing green lines in her flesh right through her somehow translucent pant leg covered in residual goo.

Steve reached down, setting an arm over her shoulder as he whispered into her ear. “You are now an Integrate. One of us.”

“What is that?” Tacy looked up at him and then at the pulses that ran up her arms with the beating of her heart and the pulsing of her thoughts.

“A biological, neurological, cybernetic experiment,” the woman said in her cold voice, not even looking up as she continued to input information into her computer interface. “You are the autopilot.”

“Autopilot?”

“We would have preferred a trained military pilot,” the woman said with the same dryness. “But for a thief, you proved you could handle the ship.”

“Handle it?” Steve said with a laugh. “We couldn’t catch them at all until they made port.”

He winked at Tacy. “Caught you sleeping.”

Tacy felt her face flush, her cheeks feeling hot.
Her handler suddenly came back, though Tacy had not even known he was gone. He draped a coat over her shoulders. “You need to clean up and then dress in the uniform they give you.”

He pointed to an open door across the hall where a young woman was standing.

“Go with him,” the woman with the clipboard said not even looking up.

Tacy felt her chest heave, her anger still not gone. “Where is my sister?”

“I told you. Prison.” The woman then walked away, now talking to another technician who looked just as disgusted with working with Integs as she was.

Steven helped guide Tacy to the far door, whispering calmly as they walked with her handler going behind like an anima herder. “Don’t worry. Because they didn’t damage the ship they only got life. You’ll like it here besides. Us Integrates really are treated well. Good food. Good housing. We just freak the norms out because we can speak to our ships. No controls, you know?”

“Norms?” Tacy went with him, though all she really wanted to do was run.

“Normal boring folk. They’ve got norm pilots too. They’re cool, but they envy us,” he said.

Tacy somehow felt that was a lie.

“Come on, Tacy,” the man in the orange jumpsuit said, leading her like one would a dance partner, resting his hand on the small of her back. “Once you are clean and dressed, you can be briefed. They’ll pair you with a captain as soon as we have your health stats in.”

“But what about Marka?” Tacy looked back wondering which prison they took her and Larke too. If it was military prison that would be the end of it. No one broke out of military prison.

The man sighed low. “I’m sorry, but they stole that ship.”

“I stole that ship,” Tacy murmured.
He nudged her through the door and into the hall where already nurses were waiting for her.

*

Tacy sat stiffly on the chair. It was cold, plastic—hard against her tender skin even through the soft uniform made specifically to cushion the tender skin of Integ bodies.

Her arms throbbed, the pulsing of the green lines singing a strange electrical song that no one else in the room but she could hear, and she could feel in the back of her head the echoes of her ship as its parts were treated by men in orange jumpsuits. One man out there stroked her machine controls. He accidentally bumped a button. Mentally, she nudged it back into place, setting things to right again. The ship was at rest. Unfortunately, she was not. Their conversations ran in the back of her thoughts like strange echoes of a sometime else.

“…Do you understand? Because you are not military you lack the proper training. Therefore, you will undergo training with Captain Stoneman starting tomorrow.”

A sergeant dressed in a crisp green suit had been lecturing at her for the past three hours. He repeated himself a lot, but then he seemed to think he needed to. His disgust at talking to an Integ was the same as the others. On his lip was a snarl. In his eye was a dark glint that said he’d rather shoot her for touching military property than brief her on her new life. His neck held stiff as he glared down on her, his chest thrust out.

Tacy looked away, her mind’s eye taking her back into the ship where she could see the internal scanners shift to survey the finishing touches to the ship’s renovation.

“You are part of the machinery, understand?” the sergeant said again.

He had said that about five times. Tacy had not misunderstood what he meant by it either. The implication that she was military property too was all too clear in her ears. But those ears also heard the echoes of what people said in her ship’s cabin. Her sister and Larke were being called ‘pirates’ rather than just ‘thieves’. It had a romantic ring to it.

“Are you even listening?” The sergeant shouted at her, his face now in hers.

Pulling back, Tacy nodded her head. “I heard you. No need to shout so loud.”

He clenched his teeth with a glare. “You Integs, if it were up to me, I’d have scrapped the whole project.”

It was another thing Tacy heard over the course of the lecture. Gel interface technology had come and gone with the Gardo Wars. It had not worked fast enough for the military generals, and it proved too risky for the test pilots. Out of the seventy-five ships commissioned in the project only fifteen survived. The fail rate was phenomenal, or as the stiff cold woman who came from the surveillance hall with her computerized clipboard said, it was not cost effective.

Her handler, a man who said to call her Jim, nudged Tacy to urge her to stand. “Come on.”

Tacy did as told. She was a military captive regardless of now being an integral part of priceless machinery. Larke’s apologies echoed in her head like scraps of a distant dream, sorry for what he had done to her. Absently as her handler walked her back down the hall towards the hanger to meet Captain Stoneman, Tacy wondered how Larke was enjoying prison food. At least they were alive, as he had said.

And what of poor Marka? She hadn’t wanted this at all? Tacy looked at her hands again, watching the green lines pulse full of energy, feeling more like live wires yet easily grasped like strings on a marionette. The skin around it was still young, young