XX In A State XX

XX In A State XX

"I want to create wilderness out of empire." -Gary Snyder

XX

“Wake up,” commanded a low voice. Okeena obeyed; better to get up groggily than to be rousted by a Havanu. They might’ve looked human, but that didn’t mean that they were anything like a human. “You have received a new task to complete.”

Ah, only the Havanu’s could pull off such stale language…

“That right?” responded Okeena. “So uh…how much is it gonna pay?”

“Enough,” came the simple reply. Okeena smirked, shoving arms into a jacket and legs into tight pants that, she supposed, were made to look like jeans.

“Enough as in…?” she pressed. Havanu’s were legendary for withholding information. Still, it couldn’t hurt to ask.

“Enough to gamble with.”

“Aight, no questions asked then,” Okeena replied, checking herself off her window’s reflection. Havanu’s had never heard of mirrors; obviously, since they’d already mastered television, transportation and all that jazz. Clearly the mirror was just too unimportant at this stage. Still, Okeena was human. She liked to see if she looked all right.

“Report to Keanu after your meal,” continued the voice. When she’d started working with the HEA, Okeena had assumed the Havanu was outside of her room. He usually wasn’t, however. They always liked to wake her up through her wires. “He will give you what you need to know.”

A click resounded in her ear, confirming Okeena’s belief that the Havanu servant wasn’t outside her room. Okeena grimaced, wishing she could tell if that bump on her forehead from last night looked okay or not. “Great…” she muttered to herself. “They’ll tell me what I need to know, but not anything helpful.”

Boots went on last, and just moments after she’d woken up, Okeena was ready for work. She took one last glance at her window; her constant reminded that no, she wasn’t home, nor would she ever be “home” again. Instead, she was out here. Out in the vast expanse of what she liked to call outer space. Too bad that’d never catch on. The Havanus just called it Otra; the Other Place.

Out here in Otra though, there was no sun. Everything the Havanu’s controlled was artificial, and they kept it that way for a reason. They knew how artificial things worked; Sjerabians and Humans didn’t apparently. Okeena completely knew how artificial things stayed working, and so did a lot of Sjerabians, but that didn’t mean they were willing to volunteer what they knew. All the Havanus wanted was control, and the Sjerabians (and what was left of humanity) let it happen as long as they stayed alive and well.

Humans were last on the pecking order out here, following the Sjerabians and then the Havanus. Higher than the Havanus were creatures that Okeena couldn’t even comprehend. Apparently they were all around her, but since she was human and had limited vision, she never saw them. Thus, she only saw three out of the billions of members of the living-creature-food-chain. But, of course, since humans had been fading out in the past decade, it wasn’t like it mattered anyway.

Yes indeed, with the exception of her brother Kahn (whom she barely met up with), Okeena saw very few of her own race anymore. Most died for being stupid. Some couldn’t handle the trauma the Otra put into their hearts. Others, like her, played the waiting game.

It was only a matter of time before the Havanus or Sjerabians tired of her, and even she knew it. It wasn’t some big secret; the last of the living creature classes was vanishing drastically.

But enough about the depressingly inevitable future.

Okeena butted her door open with her hip and sauntered out into a hallway, heading in the direction of her bosses’ quarters. The corridors were always empty when she was woken up, and every step she made echoed loudly. Few noises could be made out here, yet Okeena still knew each and every one of them. She hummed to herself sometimes, because Havanu’s hadn’t invented music yet either.

It made watching their movies very boring. Therefore, Okeena chose to gamble instead. Entertainment and wasting time with lots of noise.

“Sup, boss?” Okeena drawled as she pushed her hip again into Keanu’s door. The gel-liked material dissolved, letting her into his quarters before closing back up again. Keanu, she knew, was smart, and being a Havanu, she also knew he liked to be the smartest creature in a room. Thus, she played dumb for him. It was almost a sympathetic act, but Okeena only did it because it had probably saved her job more than once. Everything she’d accomplished so far was “pure luck”.

“So I heard from a little birdie that you got a job for me?” she inquired, watching Keanu’s strange face patiently.

Keanu glanced up at her from his important-looking desk, deep grey skin wrinkling on his forehead. The biggest physical difference between a Human and a Havanu was that one head only grey skin, and the other had multiple shades of brown.

“Yes,” Keanu replied monotonously, “I do have a task for you at the moment.” He leaned forward on his desk, steepling his hands together—the other not-so-noticeable trait of a Havanu would be their quadruple-jointed fingers. “Are you aware of the population of Humans in Varja?”

Okeena bit back a smile of recognition; of course she knew. She loved getting to see their acts and shows when she had no more pay for gambling. Humans had always been best at entertainment as far as she was concerned. Their circuses in Varja were known all over the Otra for their acts.

“Yeah, those kids are all over the place when I go there,” was her careful reply, however. Keanu didn’t need to know if Humans actually organized or not. If he was so smart, he would’ve caught on by now that Okeena wasn’t as dumb as she acted. “What’s up with them?”

Keanu cleared his throat—a nasty sound in Okeena’s ears—and held up a folder in her direction. “This…troupe of Humans has been harboring a rather clever A.I. In that folder you shall find everything about this A.I., including its stats and physical features. Since it’s not living, you will be given heavier duty weapons; we won’t have to worry about disposal.”

Okeena bit her lip, hoping her face didn’t betray her worry. Wait a minute…she had to go into a circus and find an A.I.? That was going to be—

“I know,” Keanu continued, “you’re probably thinking this will be extremely hard, and you’re right. A.I.’s are skilled at blending in if they become too clever, and that is why this one has been around for some time. Luckily, by monitoring you and your coworkers’ trips to Varja we’ve managed to pinpoint the A.I. to the Human population there. Are you up to this task?”

At heart, Okeena kind of wanted to slap Keanu across his ugly grey face and tell him what a loser he was for thinking that she of all creatures would search through her own race and not know whether one was alive or not. But instead she slapped a smile on and grabbed the folder.

“Of course I’m up to this,” she told Keanu without missing a beat. “Oh, how much am I gonna get paid for this?”

Keanu smirked, glancing down at his desk again and shaking his head. “Humans,” he muttered. “Always concerned about the profit…”

Well duh, Okeena thought to herself, glad that she hadn’t had the Thought Wire installed when the HEA had been offering the brain-implant for free.

“You shall be paid accordingly,” Keanu stated, once again refusing to tell her how much credit he would add to her payment card if she finished her job.

“Nice,” Okeena mumbled before brightening. “So what will I be taking down to Varja then?”

“A B-52,” replied Keanu, looking back up at her. “Are you ready to go now, or shall I wait to issue a notice for you to go down there?”

Okeena flashed him her pearly whites. “Love Shack, baby” she said, nodding her head but leaving him confused anyway. She backed out of Keanu’s quarters with folder in hand, opening it up and flipping through the first few pages of the A.I. report as she headed down the hall for the aviation base. They’d fix her up with a nice little B-52 in order to make the trip to Varja shorter than her usual day and a half trip.

So this A.I.…obviously Okeena would have an easy enough time tracking down the machine. It wasn’t like A.I.’s could copy Human actions completely. They always messed up. It was either in how they copied, or in how they moved. If an A.I. copied the same movement too many times it was easy to tell it was a machine. Also, when they moved it was fairly to tell if they were mechanized. Jerky movements and squeaking joints always gave them away.

It didn’t matter if A.I.’s disguised themselves up to the T in living creature paraphernalia; Okeena would out them to the world if it meant getting a big payment.

“Gonna get paid big for this one,” she said to herself, her smile widening as she hummed a little tune from when she was a little girl. “The Love Shack is a little old place…where we can…” She paused in her walk and frowned. “Damnit, I forgot the rest!”