Fragments - Dan Wells

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Partials only as bogeymen, the monsters that had destroyed the world, and even having met Samm—even knowing that she herself was some kind of a Partial—it was strange to see them referred to so positively. And yet so clinically, as if they were a new kind of Jeep from the quartermaster. The master sergeant mentioned that they seemed “insular,” that they kept to themselves and ignored the human soldiers, but that was hardly a negative—a bit ominous, in light of their eventual rebellion, but not immediately threatening or scary.

      “This is how it started,” she said out loud, setting it down and picking up another paper from the same box. It was another combat report, this time from a Sergeant Major Seamus Ogden. He talked about the Partials the same way, not as monsters but as tools. She read another document, then another, and the attitude was the same in each one—it wasn’t that they thought the Partials were harmless, it was that they barely thought of them at all. They were weapons, like bullets in a clip, to be spent and used and forgotten.

      Kira moved to another box, 302, pulling out a newspaper clipping from something called the Los Angeles Times: partial rights groups protest on capitol steps. Beneath it in the box was a similar clipping from the Seattle Times, and beneath that another from the Chicago Sun. The dates in this box were all from late in 2064, just a few months before the Partial War. Kira would have just turned five. Obviously the Partials would have been all over the news at the time, but she didn’t remember her father ever talking about them; now that she knew he’d been working for ParaGen, that made more sense. If he’d worked with them, or even helped create them, he would have had a different attitude from the rest of the world—probably a pretty unpopular attitude. At least I hope he had a different attitude, she thought. Why else would he raise one as his daughter? She vaguely remembered her nanny as well, and a housekeeper, but they never talked about Partials either. Had her father asked them not to?

      Had they even known what Kira really was?

      Kira turned to the earliest numbered boxes in the room, finding number 138 and pulling out the top piece of paper. It was another newspaper clipping, this time from the financial section of something called the Wall Street Journal, describing in vague terms the awarding of a massive military contract: In March of 2051 the US government contracted ParaGen, a budding biotechnology company, to produce an army of “biosynthetic soldiers.” The focus of the article was entirely on the cost of the project, the ramifications for stockholders, and the impact this would have on the rest of the biotech industry. There was no mention of civil rights, of diseases, of any of the massive issues that had come to define the world right before the Break. Only money. She searched through the rest of the box and found more of the same: a transcript from a news interview with ParaGen’s chief financial officer; an internal ParaGen memo about the company’s new windfall contract; a magazine called Forbes with the ParaGen logo on the cover and the crisp silhouette of an armed Partial soldier in the background. Kira flipped through the pages of the magazine, finding article after article about money, about technologies being used to make more money, about all the ways the Isolation War, despite being “a terrible tragedy,” would help heal the American economy. Money, money, money.

      Money had a place in East Meadow society, but that place was a small one. Almost everything they needed was free: If you wanted a can of food, a pair of pants, a book, a house, whatever it was, all it cost you was the effort to go out and find one. Money was used almost exclusively for fresh food, things like wheat from the farms and fish from the coastal villages—things you had to work for—and even then, most of those commodities were traded in kind, through a barter system in the marketplace. Nandita and Xochi had built a lucrative business trading herbs for fresh food, and Kira had always eaten well because of it. Money, such as it was, was usually just work credits: government vouchers for her time spent in the hospital, her reward for performing a vital service that didn’t actually produce a tradable commodity. It was enough to keep her in fresh fish and vegetables for lunch, but not much else. It was a minor, almost insignificant aspect of her life. The documents in box 138 described a world in which money was everything— not just the means of sustaining life but the purpose of living it. She tried to imagine being happy about the war with the Partials or the Voice, rejoicing because it would somehow bring her extra work credits, but the idea was so foreign she laughed out loud. If that was how the old world worked—if that was all they really cared about—maybe it was better that it had fallen apart. Maybe it was inevitable.

      “You’re real,” said Afa.

      Kira spun around, startled, hiding the magazine behind her guiltily. Would he be mad at her for looking at his records?

      “Did you say I’m . . .” She paused. “Real?”

      “I thought you were a dream,” said Afa, shuffling into the room. He stopped at one of the boxes and sifted through it idly, almost as if he were petting an animal. “I haven’t talked to anyone in so long—and then last night there was a person in my house, and I thought that I’d dreamed it, but you’re still here.” He nodded. “You’re real.”

      “I’m real,” she assured him, placing the magazine back into box 138. “I’ve been admiring your collection.”

      “It has everything—almost everything. It even has video, but not in this room. I have the whole story.”

      Kira stepped toward him, wondering how long he’d stay talkative this time. “The story of the Partial War,” she said, “and the Break.”

      “That’s just part of it,” said Afa, picking up two stapled sheaves of paper, examining his own pen marks in the upper corners, and then reordering them in the box. “This is the story of the end of the world, the rise and fall of human civilization, the creation of the Partials and the death of everything else.”

      “And you’ve read all of it?”

      Afa nodded again, his shoulders slack as he moved from box to box. “All of it. I’m the only human being on the planet.”

      “I guess that makes sense, then,” said Kira. She stopped by a box—number 341—and pulled out some kind of government report; a court order, by the look of it, with a round seal stamped in the corner. She wanted answers, but she didn’t want to pressure him again, to freak him out by saying or mentioning anything he didn’t want to remember. I’ll keep it generic for now. “How did you find it all?”

      “I used to work in the clouds,” he said, then immediately corrected himself: “In the cloud. I lived my whole life up there, I could go anywhere and find anything.” He nodded at a box of dusty clippings. “I was like a bird.”

      I saw your name at ParaGen, she wanted to say again. I know you have information about the Trust: about RM, the expiration date, what I am. She’d been looking for these answers for so long, and now they were right here, split into boxes and trapped in a failing brain. Is it just from the loneliness? Maybe his brain works fine, he just hasn’t spoken to someone in so long he’s forgotten how to interact with people. She wanted to sit him down and ask him a million questions, but she’d waited this long; she could wait a little longer. Win him over, don’t freak him out, get him on your side.

      She read a bit of the court order in her hand, something about the words “Partial Nation” being declared a sign of terrorist sympathy. Students couldn’t write or say them on school campuses, and anyone caught using them in graffiti was subject to prosecution as a threat to national security. She waved it lightly, grabbing his attention. “You’ve got a lot about the last days before the war,” she said. “You’ve really worked hard to put this together. Do you have anything . . .” She paused, almost too cautious to ask. She wanted to know about the Trust, which Samm had implied was part of the Partial leadership, but she worried that if she just blurted it out, like she had with ParaGen, he might shut down again. “Do you have anything about the Partials themselves? The way they’re organized?”

      “They’re an army,” said Afa. “They’re organized like an army.” He was on the floor now, looking at two of his boxes and the papers in them; every third or fourth one he frowned at and moved to the other box.

      “Yes,” said Kira, “but I mean, the leaders of the army—the generals.

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