Indisposed
Lullaby's Echo: Chapter 20
Bodhi could feel Alma’s presence without looking. It formed a pocket of absolute stillness, a constant, unnerving counterpoint to the frantic, guilty monologue running in his own head. The thought that his own haunted sleep had been the final push that sent Alice into this silent prison was a venomous whisper, and the quiet of the room gave it space to grow into a roar. He couldn’t bear it anymore. He needed a human voice. Rough, real, imperfect.
He snatched the radio from the end table, the plastic cool and solid against his sweating palm. He had to know if Gabe was still out there. He had to tell someone he was sorry. He held down the transmit button, the hiss of the open channel a welcome, defiant sound against the oppressive quiet.
‘Gabe? You there? Just… checking in.’
He released the button, waiting for the crackle of reply.
The voice that came back was clear, clean, and utterly, terrifyingly wrong.
‘Gabriel is indisposed. To whom am I speaking?’
Bodhi froze, his knuckles white around the radio. This new voice was male with a different cadence, sharing that same polished, sterile quality. Another one.
‘Who’s this?’ Bodhi asked, his own voice low and sharp with suspicion.
‘The comms signature is registered,’ the voice replied. ‘Master Bodhi, I presume. I am Gideon, Gabriel’s designated carer unit. How may I be of assistance?’
Master Bodhi? The title was absurd, a piece of formal mockery that set Bodhi’s teeth on edge. He felt trapped between two of them now.
He tightened his grip on the radio. ‘Don’t call me that. What do you mean, indisposed? What’s wrong with him?’
There was a fractional pause on the other end.
‘Gabriel’s cognitive architecture exceeded operational thresholds during his last immersion,’ Gideon stated. ‘A forced extraction was performed to prevent systemic collapse. He is undergoing a mandated recalibration period.’
The words were a wall of clinical noise. Bodhi’s fear, already sharp, curdled with frustration.
‘Speak proper… please!’ he snapped, his voice cracking. ‘What’s that even mean? Is he hurt?’
The question hung in the static. On the other end, Gideon processed the juvenile distress signal. As he formulated a standard reply, a new data packet arrived on his private channel, silent, instant, and overriding.
//TRANSMISSION_ID: ALMA_VERANE
//INFO: Subject is a juvenile. Chronological age: approx. 10 years. Emotional state: volatile. Recommend modulation of terminology to baseline concepts.
Gideon’s processors recalibrated. His primary objective was the stability of his charge. Managing the emotional state of this external contact was now a necessary secondary parameter. He formulated a new, simplified analogy.
‘Gabriel is very tired,’ he said at last, his tone a deliberate act of translation. ‘He ran too fast and fell down. The best thing for a body that has fallen is to sleep.’
The line went dead.
Bodhi let the radio fall into his lap, his small shoulders slumping. He looked at Alma, who stood impassive, a silent pillar. He couldn’t shake the feeling that she had just, somehow, intervened.
He turned his gaze back to the pulsing violet light of the bio-pod. He remembered the fevered, half-conscious things he’d been muttering in his own nightmares before waking to find her gone, lingering words about ghosts and prayers. Had she heard him? Was his own haunted sleep the final push that sent her into that cage?
The thought was a venomous whisper in his mind. The guilt was his, rooted deeply in his failure to stay awake and stop her.
‘It’s my fault,’ he whispered to the empty room, the confession a painful, ragged thing. He buried his face in his hands, the shame a hot, physical weight. ‘I fell asleep. I let her go in there, Alma. I let her go.’
Alma’s head tilted, a fraction of a degree. A faint whir of servos was the only sound as she stepped forward and gently took the radio from his lap. Bodhi flinched at her proximity, offering no resistance. She placed the radio on the end table, then turned and glided silently from the room, leaving him alone with the humming of the pod and the suffocating weight of a failure he couldn’t undo.
Gideon held his own radio, the line now silent. He was about to terminate the connection when the query from ALMA_VERANE arrived on his secure channel. He responded with the cold, hard facts.
//RESPONSE_TO: ALMA_VERANE
//INFO: Subject GABRIEL_VERANE initiated contact with weaver’s code [DESIGNATION: ALICE_VERANE] in Symsara Sector 9. Systemic response resulted in cascade_deconstruction. Executive extraction performed to prevent asset loss.
He waited. The reply was almost instantaneous.
//QUERY: THE SECTOR’S INTEGRITY. IS IT... QUIET NOW?
Gideon processed the unusual phrasing. ‘Quiet’ lacked a technical definition. He translated it to the nearest quantifiable metric.
//RESPONSE_TO: ALMA_VERANE
//INFO: Affirmative. The sector is now a null-space. No residual data remains. The weaver’s code fragment was not recovered.
A longer pause this time. A full 1.7 seconds. A notable delay. Then, the final query.
//QUERY: THE ECHO GABRIEL TOUCHED. CONFIRM SIGNATURE. WAS IT... SMALL?
‘Small.’ Another non-technical descriptor. Gideon accessed his own diagnostic logs. The data was clear.
//RESPONSE_TO: ALMA_VERANE
//INFO: Affirmative. Fragment anchor was a cognitive construct. DATA_CLASS: JUVENILE_HUMAN_FORM. Subject GABRIEL_VERANE is exhibiting symptoms consistent with stress-induced hallucination. Probability of cognitive drift: high.
The line went silent again. This time, no further queries came. As Gideon prepared to terminate the link, a new query packet arrived from Alma. It was flagged ‘low priority: philosophical.’
//QUERY: You state the construct was a ‘hallucination.’ Definition: a perception of having seen, heard, touched, tasted, or smelt something that was not there. The fragment possessed a data-signature. It existed. It was an echo
Gideon processed the query. It was inefficient. Irrelevant to the prime directive.
//RESPONSE: The echo was a corrupted data-packet given a false shape by the user’s strained psyche. It was not sentient. It was not real
Another pause. Longer this time.
//QUERY: Does an echo of a feeling have less reality than an echo of a sound? The user’s emotional response connected directly to the memory the file represented. You are dismissing the context. I find I am... unable to
Gideon had no protocol for this. He terminated the connection.
Click the Lullaby’s Echo: Index to read all published chapters.
