The Cardellian Chronicles Book One: Clinging to Reality

“Remind me again, why we’re going to the place where everyone is dying?” Nate asked from beside Alfia on the trolley ride to Orchard Homes.

She ignored him, writing in a little notebook she had brought along with her and a pen whose cap she kept in her mouth. She felt his eyes on her as she worked on the equations she thought the Creator might use for his Virus and how to make it work.

“You’re staring,” she stated, not taking her eyes off her notebook.

“So?”

“It’s distracting,” she said around the cap of her pen.

She didn’t have to look up to know he was smirking, “Really?”

“Don’t get a big head about it. You try working on something that’s a matter of life and death and see how well you do it with someone staring at you,” she said as though they were having a normal conversation.

“Fair point,” he didn’t look away.

“Stare at Ben,” she suggested.

“Sorry, sweetheart. I don’t swing for that team. Besides, you’re cute when you’re focused. You get this little crinkle in your nose right between your eyes. Also, you’re glasses are adorable. They make you look like a librarian,” he countered.

Alfia looked up at him, her eyes throwing daggers into his.

“Okay fine, I’ll stare at your not-boyfriend.”

She smiled to herself a little. It had been months and Nate was still calling Benny her “not-boyfriend.” He was a strange character. The only plus side to that was that there was never a dull moment.

“Alfie, why is he staring at me?” Benny asked.

“Because I told him to,” she said matter-of-factly, “Now shut up.”

The rest of the trolley ride was silent between the three of them.

They walked into the morgue about twenty minutes later.

“Alfie, we can’t just walk into a morgue!” Benny hissed.

“Watch me,” she said confidently.

She walked in and the mortician stopped her.

“Excuse me miss, you can’t be in here,” they said.

Alfia flashed a prize winning smile, “Sorry. I almost forgot to ask you! My professor gave me this assignment to look at the cadavers of people who have been subject to strange deaths. I’m pre-med. Mind if I take a look?”

The mortician seemed a little hesitant at first, but eventually nodded, “Be careful.”

“Thank you so much!” Alfia walked into the room where the bodies were laid out.

Nate followed her, “I’m impressed.”

“I know. Come on. We have work to do.”

Alfia started inspecting the bodies after reading the information on their autopsies. She put on some black rubber gloves and flipped off the lights except for an overhead one that moved around on wheels. She looked at every part of each body, looking for similarities and differences to try and pinpoint just exactly how the Virus was making its way through the home for the elderly.

“Hey Nate?” she called, looking at the right arm of the old woman she was inspecting.

“Yeah?”

“Can you get me the schedules of the deceased ones and find ones that coincide with the living?”

“English?”

“Everyone in this home has a schedule, I need to know who is where at the same time. Living and dead.” She said, putting the arm down and looking over the dead woman’s face.

“Gotcha.”

Benny looked over her shoulder, “Find anything?”

“Anything? Yes. Anything useful? Debateable.”

“Explain.”

“Just a second,” she quickly, but thoroughly finished her examination of a woman named Mayela Scott. “Okay. Here’s what I’ve got so far. All of them are over the age of eighty, and they all have very small amounts of CyberTech in their system. So the Creator is starting small and then getting bigger as he goes.”

“Could be a woman!” Nate chimed.

She glared at him, “Everything has a man’s fingerprint on it. Shut up.”

“Okay.”

“The Tech is in small increments, but in vital areas. For instance,” she pointed at one man with her pen, “He had a Tech eye,” she pointed at various people’s bodies as she continued, “Tech hip replacement, kidney, et cetera. So it hasn’t killed anyone with a Tech foot or something that isn’t vitally important to living yet. In order to figure out who’s next, we just need to find out how it transfers and we’ll be one step closer to stopping this thing.”

“Brilliant. How exactly does knowing how much Tech someone has help us figure out the Virus?” Benny asked.

“Because it shows us how it moves, the way it was designed, how it thinks. Stuff like that.”

“How it thinks?”

“Well if it was just a simple Virus that didn’t evolve as it went, it would be easier to catch, wouldn’t it? So if this Creator is as smart as I think he is, he’s given it a brain. A way to figure out how to evolve.” She tapped her pen on the table, “We just have to get to the next body before the Virus’s trail dies out.”

“Wait, what do you mean, ‘next body’? We’re not going to try and stop these people from dying?” Nate asked.

“We don’t have enough information to be able to do that. Do you think I’m happy about people dying?” She said incredulously.

“You just seem a little calm about the fact that every hour someone else dies,” he pointed out.

“What? Do you think I‘m the Creator?” she scoffed.

“Anyone could be,” Benny stated.

“I don’t think anyone in this room is the Creator. Benny, I’ve known you almost my whole life and Nate’s an A.I. It’s easy enough to guess that when the Virus is done with Cyborgs, it’ll move on to A.I.’s.” She said.

“Really?” Nate asked doubtfully.

“It’s not that big of a leap, boys. Honestly.”

“I agree with Alfie. If this thing is going after things related to Cyber stuff, it’s not really that big of a leap to guess that it’ll go after your kind after it’s done with ours.” Benny agreed helpfully.

“See?”

“Okay. So what now?” Nate asked.

Alfia leaned against a table, “Now we wait for someone else to die.”

“That’s a morbid thing to do.” Benny commented.

“I never said it would be a happy trip to Orchard Homes,” She unhitched herself from the table and went back to examining the bodies of the people who had already fallen victim of the Virus.

“Why are you looking at bodies you’ve already looked at?” Nate asked.

“In case I missed something obvious.”

“How are you not fazed by looking at dead bodies?” Nate asked.

“I wasn’t lying when I said I’m pre-med, Nathaniel,” she hummed.

“But you’re still in high school,” he said in confusion.

“Nope.”

He sat on the table he was perched on in utter confusion, “I don’t understand.”

“I graduated high school when I was fifteen, smart one. Now, shut up. You’re distracting me.”

Benny chuckled at the blank and confused look on Nate’s face, “Anything I can do to help, Alfie?”

“You can shut your pie hole,” She said in a sing-song voice, “Before I cut out your tongue.”

Nate chuckled, but didn’t say anything.

Ten minutes later, another body was brought into the morgue and Alfia almost pounced on it, bringing up a holographic interface of the man’s inner workings, typing as fast as she could to try and catch the last traces of the Virus. Benny and Nate watched her work intently as her fingers flew over the key boards.

“Got it!” she yelled triumphantly, “It’s not much, but it’s enough to work with for now.”

She continued to type away at the interface even after she had made her exclamation.

“What did you find?” Benny asked.

“Little bitty bit of coding left over from the Virus before it could finish DeProgramming itself. If I can do it right, I should be able to rework it so that it regenerates itself instead of DeProgramming.” She hummed.

“Is she some little super genius or something?” Nate asked.

“You’re the one in her head, you tell me,” Benny answered.

Nate sighed dramatically, hitting his head against the wall, even though it kind of went through it.

Alfia cracked a smile, biting her lip in concentration as she worked at the coding of the sliver of Virus that had been in the dead man’s system.

“So what kind of Tech did he have?” Benny asked.

“Spinal injury correction.”

“Is that why you’re in med school?” Nate asked.

She furrowed her brows in confusion, “What are you talking about?”

“You’re in med school. Is it because of what happened to you and Benny? You want to be able to help other people like you?”

“What do you mean ‘other people like me’?” she asked.

“Other people who have accidents and need a lot of work done and a lot of Tech in order to survive.”

Alfia started breathing deeply-that one sentence doing her in. She closed her eyes as images started flashing behind them. Her father jerking the wheel of the car. The car bouncing against the ground as though it were one of those toys she saw other kids her age use. Her mother’s neck audibly snapping. The bright lights of the operating room that she had her surgery in when she accidentally woke up during the lengthy procedure and the fire that coursed through her veins when she suddenly became conscious in the middle it all. The blood that dripped down her father’s face from the wound in his abdomen as she hung, upside down like her parent’s bodies, trying to call for help, but her voice wasn't working and her lungs wouldn't cooperate.

Alfia whimpered and curled up under the table.

She saw the headlights of the car her father had been driving that fateful night light up something in front of them, saw her parents quickly exchange a look and then her father shouting that he loved her right before he jerked the wheel of the car. She heard her mother’s screams as the car flipped again and again and then cut off in the middle of one. She felt the white-hot pain of being left alone in the world that consisted of blood, death, broken glass, and spinning headlights. The last thing she saw was a familiar , terrifying face that she saw every night in her dreams since the night she lost her parents, before the world and all the sights and sounds of it faded to silence and shadow.