Cliffhanger Contest Winner 2-28-19

Cliffhanger Contest Winner

Failsafe

Jetta stared down at her hands. Blinkers like her knew well the feeling of being trapped in a body that felt too heavy, but this -- this thick, lumbering weight that made each small movement feel like the shifting of mountains -- was a new sensation, one that seemed to have come along with the other unwelcome agonies of grief.

She ran one thumb over her gloved palm, breaking bedrock each time the cloth snagged against the jagged gash in her sleek grey skin. It was a sharp, almost clinical divide, slicing through the midline of each of her fingerprints as a bitter reminder of where she’d been gripping when the ship savagely ripped itself away. She could still feel the whetted edge of the spoiler in her hands, still feel the red-hot flames of the thrusters snarling at her heels, still feel the sick jolt of anger and fear that had consumed her when the sheer speed of its takeoff wrenched her from the craft and sent her spiralling back down into the station below with the debris of the dock burning around her like dying stars. She remembered watching with her teammates as the very starcraft they’d been sent to stop fled into the cosmos, leaving them with nothing but two fast-fading trails of light and the sick, terrified realization that -- in spite of everything they’d done -- Aebelon had won.

And he’d taken Gabriel with him.

His body had been moved to the archives for reprocessing, but the image of his face was burned so sharply into her eyes that Jetta could almost pretend she was still back there in those ruins, clinging to his empty shell and begging for the lights in his eyes to turn on again. Just one more time, she’d sobbed, wrestling against the grip of the rescue squadron in the vain hope that if she could only make it back to him that she’d see that familiar neon-green glow winking back at her. Please, come home with us, just this one last time… She got that last chance later when they allowed the squadron a final few moments with his body before sending him below deck, but his eyes were still dark no matter how long they wept and waited and hoped.

The door to the meeting room opened with an abrupt wheeze from the hinges; light spilled in from the places that General Holbrook’s body didn’t block. Their faces lolled towards him and he lingered in the doorframe, glancing between their vacant gazes and reddened, tear-stained cheeks. Gabriel’s absence was almost palpable, the monochrome color scheme of the room feeling all the greyer without him; the space between the surviving team members was heavy and grim and the air like dust.

He pursed his lips and shut it gently behind him, walking to his usual spot at the front of the room. “I understand that the mission didn’t go as planned,” he said, almost hesitant to address the significance of their failure. The eyes that had snapped to him upon his entrance fell swiftly and solemnly away, only bitter silence offered a response.

The General cleared his throat and tried again. “You’ve all suffered a great loss today. My condolences are with you, but we need to know what happened in that station.”

“I’ll tell you what happened,” Jacobson bit out in muffled fragments of hot, angry speech. “We screwed up and Gabriel got killed. Now Aebelon is halfway to the Andromeda galaxy with our payload and the whole system is doomed.”

Holbrook’s face seemed to gain more lines with every word the younger ranger spoke. “I understand that you’ve gone through a lot, but histrionics aren’t going to help anything. If we want a chance at getting out in front of this, we have to know everything that went down at Dock 04 and exactly why those things went wrong.”

“Aebelon had a drone steal the data,” said Jetta, weakly. “It got away before we could stop it.”

“An unmanned drone managed to kill an armed ranger?”

“It wasn’t unmanned.” Adaline’s voice arose from the tension like a pinprick on an aching wound. She stepped forward, pushing off of the wall and slowly approaching the table, meeting the man’s eyes with firm conviction. “With all due respect, sir, the drone that attacked Gabriel was a combat unit that had been heavily modified with stolen Blinker parts. Drones aren’t programmed to move beyond their joints’ axis of motion, and given the way this one fought…” A shaky breath. “It was manually controlled, sir. Probably by someone nearby.”

The realization struck everyone in the room at once. General Holbrook’s eyes clouded with thought as dots connected in his head. After a short interval, he quickly blinked himself back into focus and looked at her again. “You’re saying that there’s a hostile operative active in this base right now?”

Ada glanced briefly to her teammates, as if checking for objections, and then nodded.

Images whistled through Jetta’s mind, her processors whirring in contemplation until the pieces snapped together. “That smuggler…” she murmured, her eyes deep-set with concern despite the fact that her mechanical face had hardly shifted.

Jacobsen caught on quickly, snapping his fingers for emphasis. “Yeah-! Our first mission, that cargo thief who kept stealing parts but we could never find the ship that was carrying them off-world. We never found the contraband because it had never left the station in the first place.”

The group sat in in the General captured the group's attention once again. “If this is true…” He trailed off. He didn’t need to continue the statement; they all understood. “Keep a close eye for anything amis.” The meeting ended as suddenly as it had began, the General turning and walking brusquely out of the room, a certain rigidity about him as he left the squadron alone once with their thoughts once more. His head hung a little and shoulders sagged. The heaviness seemed to grow even thicker and each ranger slowly made their way from the room to be alone. Ada and Jetta were the last two in the room; without a word, Ada began to walk out, but Jetta caught her arm.

“Why didn’t he try to contact us?”

Ada blinked and Jetta held on tighter while standing her processor spinning nearly out of control.

“Ada, why didn’t Gabriel contact us telling us where to find him? What was he doing between the time we lost his signal and the attack? He had to be doing something, Ada!”

Adaline’s mind spun and it finally clicked; they both looked at each other. Jetta spoke first.

“Downloading. Blinkers only lose their tracking signals when they’re-!” Her eyes went wide. “Oh no... He was trying to download the data from the ship!”

She moved to dash down the hall, but caught herself when she realized that Ada hadn’t moved, her face still twisted in confusion. Her human companion shook her head slightly, still not having gotten what she was implying. “W… Wait, that’s a good thing right? All we have to do to get that data back is retrieve it from his memory chip down in the…”

Ada’s face paled as the realization hit, both her’s and Jetta’s eyes trailing slowly down the long, looming corridor.

“...Processing station.”

Neither ranger needed to check if the other was following before bolting for the elevator.

They arrived in room 045-1 of the memory reclamation zone just minutes afterwards, tearing through the door with panic pulsing within them. Gabe’s lifeless body was sitting, upright, against a series of blinking cabinets, wires sprouting from the back of his head and several places along his arms. Ada’s stomach lurched when she saw the sorry state of their teammate -- discarded on the floor like a faulty piece of hardware -- but she forced down the uncanny sense of disgust that seethed in her chest and made her way to one of the screens at the end of the tangle of wires.

She clicked through several windows until she found the one that was monitoring the progress of his memory wipe. “Good, it hasn’t finished scanning his system for errors -- we still have time. If I start trying to access his memory now, we should have enough time to bypass the firewalls and grab the data before they erase his mind and destroy it.” She bit her lip. “Assuming it doesn’t take too long to download…”

Her teammate hadn’t heard her; she knocked a box of screws from a shelf as she snatched up an armful of tools from the drawers and set them down started connecting herself to the machine at the center of the room. Ada followed behind, scooping up the items and putting them away. Jetta tugged the last cable into place, grimacing slightly as it settled into the port on her arm with a click. Ada’s eyes flickered to the device and she gasped.

“Wait- Jetta. You can’t do that!”

Jetta reached out and squeezed Ada’s hand. "I promise I'll be fine. We both know that I have to do this." She handed her the controls before turning back to the device.

Adaline watched her slide into the buckled restraints of the machine's processing table – a cold, ancient surface that scuffed her metal skin as she moved – and bit her lip with an anxiety that she wasn't even attempting to hide. "I know, It’s just..." She pursed her lips as the machine rocked to life; her teammate paused briefly in discomfort before continuing to secure herself to the spider-like chassis. "Nobody's ever attempted a transfer into a body with an unwiped memory, and-"

"Ada,” said Jetta slowly, encouragingly. Even from where she was lying on the table, the damage covering her metallic frame all the more visible in the limited light of chamber, her eyes still held that same, special courage that had been there since the first day of initiation. "Even if I wasn't the last Blinker on the team, I'd still do this for all of you in an instant. Gabe died for information, Ada -- I'm not gonna let that be for nothing." She gave a cheeky smile. "We shook on it. I've got this."

The star-ranger grinned, tears gleaming in her eyes as she matched her teammate's gaze. She wished it were just as easy to match her conviction. "I know." She initiated the transfer. A metallic voice began it’s drone.

TRANSFER PROCEDURE READY IN 3... 2…

Jetta woke up in a room full of screens. When the shock had faded, it occurred to her that she had not woken with a body. She could not move, nor feel, nor even properly think. Really, she was present in this space based only on her own conviction, the dim awareness of her existence pulling her consciousness together like the strings that tug galaxies into focus. Panic surged somewhere within her existence and she quickly shifted focus, concentrating instead on the place she had suddenly found herself in.

Peals of static rolled from the walls as confusion reached for her in waves of thundering light. As she watched them snow into the darkness of the space, a single beam of color blinked to life in the center of the array of screens. Perhaps unconsciously, she pulled closer, two lines of text becoming visible amongst the haze of blue:

FAILSAFE PROTOCOL READY ACTIVATE Y/N?

Fingers she didn't have brushed gently against the glossy surface, tracing the spaces between each letter until they landed on the final query. Gabriel had no handwriting, prohibited by protocol to write in anything but perfect facsimiles of BM-approved typeface, but as the simple string of words blinked slow and strong against the silence, they were unmistakably his. She'd picked yes before she even moved to press it.

The static died, leaving her in darkness for only a second before the room lit up with lights once again. A face peered back at her from the puzzle of glittering screens.

"Dear you, If you're hearing this, chances are that I am dead. If you knew me, this shouldn't... exactly come as much of a surprise. Anyways, I'm leaving this message in deep storage because the body you're wearing right now used to be mine. Since I'm obviously not, uh, using it too much anymore, I guess that means it's yours now. Take good care of it and all that, yeah? I'd rather not have carted this thing around the galaxy all those years for nothing. Though in complete fairness, I guess it wasn’t being used for anything too important anyway, so… I dunno. Do what you want. I’m dead.

Gosh, this hurts. Stay on track, Gabe.

New body, not yours, take care of it. That's where the easy stuff ends. Now listen up, because this is where things get... complicated."

Ending by Tirzah Hopkins

Jetta’s mind was distracted, but she didn’t know by what. She wanted to listen to what Gabe was saying, but there was something in the back of her conscious, telling her she had to wake up, something was wrong in the room with her body and Ada.

But this was more important. Gabe had said things were supposed to be complicated, and she was missing it. She buried the paranoid part of her and focused as much as she could on what Gabe was saying.

“It was Ada.”

What was Ada? Jetta’s mind screamed.

“I hear you, Jetta. And I think you know what I’m talking about. It was Ada.”

Wait, Gabe. You can hear me?

“I think I did just say that, and yes, I can hear you. My circuits were fried so I wasn’t able to function, like, at all, but I’m still here. Me. Gabe the reckless annoying stupid head. Isn’t that what you used to call me?”

Umm...

“No need to finish that sentence- thought- thing. Man, this is weird. But we don’t have much time. You need to get me onto a hard drive or something to preserve my memory and self. I can already feel it, the wipe. You don’t have as long as you thought you did, time’s funky in here.”

Okay, but I didn’t really think this through. How do I get out?

“Never mind, I’ll just download myself into you.”

Wait, what?

“No time to argue. We gotta go.”

But-

There was a flash and a strange sensation, and then Jetta was sitting up with a gasp. She looked over to see Ada standing over her with a knife.

“Ada, what...” she began.

Then Gabe’s voice flashed through her head. “Told you. It was Ada.”

“Not now, Gabe,” Jetta muttered.

Ada laughed. It was a terrifying, crazy laugh, not at all like the one she usually used. “Going crazy, are you, Jetta? I guess that’s to be expected, since you tried to go through a total memory transfer when Gabe’s memory circuits are damaged.”

“They-” Again, she was interrupted by Gabe.

“I did that. They aren’t actually damaged, just made to look like it.”

“So it was you,” Jetta said. “You piloted that ‘drone’, you killed Gabe, you betrayed us!”

“Well, I had to do something,” Ada said in a bored voice. “If I hadn’t, Aebelon would have killed me. Well, he would have tortured me first, and that wouldn’t have been very comfortable. He said he was afraid I was turning.” She spat the word like an insult. “Me! Turn to you!”

“She’s stalling,” Gabe said. “I don’t know why, but she’s stalling. We have to go.” Jetta rolled off the table, smashing into a tray of scrapped Blinker limbs. They scattered everywhere. Jetta got up and jumped through the viewing windows, leaving a screaming Ada behind.

“Rogue Blinker!” Ada screamed. “Rogue Blinker!” Alarms started blaring. Jetta stopped and looked around, wondering where they could go.

“What now, Gabe?” Jetta muttered.

“Find the rest of the team.”

“But what if they’re bad?”

“They’re not. Trust me.” Gabe said.

Jetta hesitated, and then sprinted down the hallway. She nearly collided with Jacobson. “Jetta, are you okay? They say there’s a rogue Blinker-”

“They think it’s me,” Jetta said. “Jacobson, listen. Gabe is alive, he transferred himself into my head. Ada’s the one that killed him, Ada works for Aebelon!”

“Slow down. Ada works for Aebelon?”

“That’s what I said!”

“And she said you’re a rogue Blinker? Maybe you need to get your positronic network checked.”

“Jacobson, she tried to kill me! Where’s everyone else?”

“They’re-”

“You!” came the unholy shrieked. Jetta whirled around.

“Ada?” Jacobson said.

“See, I told you,” Jetta hissed. She felt her arm going uncontrollably to her boot. Gabe knew she kept a knife there. “Um, Gabe? What are you doing?”

“This is for the greater good.”Gabe said.

“You hacked me!”

“I did.” He said. Her hand drew out the knife. She raised it behind her head.

“No, Gabe, stop, this isn’t the way.”

“She killed me. She’ll kill others.”

“But-”

“I’m sorry, Jetta.” The knife left her arm, whistled through the air, and made contact with Ada’s throat. She dropped. Dead.

“You’ve just made us criminals, Gabe.” Jetta whispered, staring at her hand.

“There was no evidence to condemn her.”

“I know. But it was worth it.”

Guards surrounded them. “Blinker 5273572, you are under arrest for the assault and murder of a human ranger. Your punishment: Instantaneous scrapping."

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