There were questions, at least he thought they were questions. Every sentence, every word was in Edenian, a language that sounded to him like an energetic fiddle playing. He had questions too, “Where am I? Does anyone speak Castelian? Where’s my family?”
“Lineaum te placeum,” responded the skinny, tall one. His blue hair was cropped short, military-chic. Like the others, he wore a short-sleeved khaki shirt that showed off his bronzed, muscular forearms. “Lineaum,” he drew an imaginary line on the desk.
“Line?” Mike guessed.
“Che, che,” The man nodded and pointed at him, “Te placeum.” He walked his fingers across the imaginary line.
“I walk across the line?”
“Venaca, venaca,” the man waved him over to a door. He followed him out into the dry heat under a fried egg sky, the golden sun framed by an aura of white. Wherever they were in Eden was desolate, the cinder-block building the only structure save for a chain link perimeter fence. A droid rolled up to them, a camera mounted where a human would have a head.
Mike backed up as the camera focused on him. “Venaca,” the man waved him towards a drone. As Mike took a step forward, there was a whirring sound behind him. He casually looked over his shoulder. The droid was behind him, taser at the ready. He looked to his right. The fence wasn’t that high; he could easily scale it and make his escape. Humans, even cursed ones, were good at one thing droids weren’t: short bursts of speed.
He started running, banking sharply to the right as he heard the guard’s footsteps. “Bastete!” the guard yelled, but it was too late. Mike hit the fence with a rattle. For a moment he was climbing, fingers smarting as he linked them through the chinks in the fence, boots slipping as tried to gain purchase. Then there was a pulse, a sound he didn’t hear, and again he was electrified.
Someone must have pulled him off the fence. Maybe it was the slender Edenian, maybe it was the droid; but whoever it was had at least put a blanket over him after placing him on the drone’s hard floor. Mike sat up and groaned. He hurt all over, which wasn’t a surprise. He wasn’t bleeding, which was. He was certain he had been shot in the back, but the only thing he could feel with his painful hands was a large bruise. There were no chunks of flesh, no gaping hole; and as a matter of fact, his feet hurt worse.
He stayed seated, peeking above the console at the landscape below him. He tapped a button on the console. “Securare puer,” flashed on the screen. He tried different keys, finally getting a different word, followed by a blinking cursor.
“Pass-eh-ver-boom,” Mike scratched his horns, “Password?” Stumped he keyed in the same word.
“Falsa,” lit up the screen.
“123456789,” he tried again.
“Falsa.”
Frustrated, Mike banged out a random string of letters.
“Falsa,” the screen blinked.
He rested his red fingers on the keys, “Calm down and think.”
“Falsa.”
“I barely touch you, and you ‘falsa’ me. I’m having a really bad day today, not that you would understand,” Mike paused. Maybe he had this backwards, maybe he needed to try to understand the machine. He didn’t know a lot about drones, just that they ran off a computer mainframe thing-a-majiggy. Supposedly those things liked zeros and ones.
“Here goes nothing,” Mike pushed the one. He pushed it again. He added some zeros and pushed enter.
“Falsa.”
Maybe that was wrong. Maybe it was just numbers in general. “Would you like a song? I left my fiddle with the wagon, but music can be represented with numbers as well.” Mike rested his hand on the ten-key and imagined the score of What If? Painstakingly he typed a string of numbers, pushing enter at the end of each measure to mark time. The more he typed, the easier it became, and he tapped his foot as the music played in his head.
He got so used to the screen flashing “Falsa,” that he almost didn’t notice it had stopped. Puzzled, he pushed some other keys, then rested his ear on the side of the console. The drone was silent, and there was no sense of vibration, no blinking lights.
“Uh-oh.”
That’s when he noticed the droid was losing altitude. Mike scrambled to his aching feet, throwing himself at one of the console seats. Never before in his life had he had such difficulty sitting down. The seat bucked him off like a wild horse, then dodged his next attempt by ducking left. Grabbing the base of it, he climbed up the side of it, then strapped himself in.
The drone fell straight down, in an amusement-park plummet. His stomach screaming, he was almost relieved to see the ground approaching. The drone hit on the edge of its frame and bounced, flipping as it hit. He screwed his eyes shut as glass shattered and metal bent. A wind, heavy with sand, roared around him. Then, everything was still.
It was so dark, that for a moment Mike thought his eyes were closed. He pushed the button on his seatbelt before the obvious hit him; he was hanging upside down, the floor now the ceiling. Grasping the belt as he somersaulted out of his seat, he landed feet first. A smoky light trickled in through a hole in the cabin, and he crawled through it onto the sand. All around were broken and twisted pieces of metal, and he found himself thinking there were too many to have been from this crash. Overcome by his injuries, he lay down in the sand next to a propeller blade.
It may have been hours or minutes until he heard voices, either way, he couldn’t move. Four men in khaki, guns slung over their shoulders leaned over him. Two of the men lifted him, while the others checked out the crash site. The hum of their language blurred into the thrum of their drone’s propellers. They sat him up, unscrewing a canteen of water. With no attempt to communicate what they were about to do, they seized him and poured water down his throat.
“Lucky me,” Mike sputtered.
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