Daughter of Zeus ✔

3

"One minute to destin. A. Tion." The voice of the car interface faded with the dying engine.

Ada lay unconscious in the front seat. She was unaware her car had stopped on a busy roadway. Cars waited behind hers. Horns blared, people cursed and yelled, but Ada slept on.

Even as cars pulled around hers to go on their way, a concerned citizen called a Statie.

The car arrived soon after, featuring the yellow logo of two intersecting handguns, contrasting sharply against the black paint. The Statie, wearing a blue uniform and Kevlar vest, waved all the other cars to continue maneuvering around the stopped vehicle.

She tapped on the driver-side window of Ada's car.

"Citizen."

She brought out her iris scanner, but put it back in her pocket when she saw the driver's eyes were completely shut.

Suddenly, Ada cracked one lid open, then the other. Recent events were a blank in her mind, but they came tumbling back with the next impatient tap on her window.

"Citizen."

Her mother was in trouble, and her car was dead. Out of habit, Ada mumbled for the car to turn on. It remained powerless, and she cursed her stupidity.

Through all of this, she ignored the Statie outside of the car.

"Please remove yourself from the vehicle." The woman's hand rested on her weapon holster.

Ada considered her options, bleary as she was. Once a Statie had their hand on their weapon, there wasn't much reasoning with them.

Do I have time to deal with this shithead?

In the next second, she thought, No, no I don't.

So, she worked some voodoo.

After opening the car door, Ada sent a small zap (or what she assumed was a small zap) at the Statie's legs. With her drained energies, Ada accidentally hit the Statie's head. The woman's face contorted and relaxed simultaneously. Her arms and legs swung about like she had planned a dance but couldn't bring herself to remember the steps.

The Statie was still dancing as Ada ran to her mother's house down the street.

Wonder why she twitched like that.

She stopped once to rest, hands on her knees. A second time she stopped to retch in the street. Not even a block away, a homeless man was doing the very same thing. A car honked as she heaved up her food in chunks. She gave them the finger from her bent over position.

Home was an empty space. The first sign her mother had gone was the locked door. When Ada tried the unyielding doorknob, her heart retracted. She had left her house keys in the car. Her idea to break in the house subsided after she remembered the hide-a-key under the mat.

"Mom!" Ada's voice was a roar in the still house. "Mom!"

She moved from room to room. Upstairs, she found two pieces of luggage in her room. In Gemina's room, there were two open bags, half-full. Clothes were scattered about the bed.

The State wouldn't repossess, huh? a sneering voice told Ada.

She settled slowly onto her mother's bed. Her head was inflamed, and her chest was numb. The desire to close her eyes was strong, but she knew if she lay down, she wouldn't be getting up.

"Call Mom," she managed in a hoarse whisper.

A panel on the bedroom wall lit up in response to her voice.

"Calling Mom."

Several rings later, Ada heard only static.

Older interfaces had trouble connecting on the updated Prominent networks. Static was common in place of a call.

"What is Mom's location?"

"Wall user 'Mom' is at home."

Her mother's pocket interface rested on the nightstand, set to silent. Ada picked it up and read the message blinking on the screen, (Where are you?), from Kressick. Forgetting an interface was like forgetting your right arm. Contacts, affiliations, personal files, and more were stored on the small box-like device. More advanced models were locked to recognize fingerprints and retinal scans, featuring slim designs and glass-alloy construction. Gemina's interface was not an advanced model.

Ada tapped on Kressick's name. He would know where her mother was, like he always did. Kressick answered via video chat, his face anxious and worried. For Ada, his expression was like looking into a mirror.

"Do you know what's happened to your mother?" A trembling hand pushed through his sweaty, pixilated hair.

"No, do you?"

"Yes. I'm here with her at Tranquility Hospital. She's in surgery."

Relief crashed through Ada, but the words "hospital" and "surgery" threw her off.

"What for?"

"The State authorized the doctors to remove her artificial heart and replace it with her original one."

Ada suspected the State to be capable of such maneuvers, but the situation was too fantastical to believe, and it was happening to her mother. The removal of her synth meant one thing: Gemina Corentin was an Undesirable.

People would whisper about her, stop seeing her, and soon Gemina would be moved to the barracks where no one was heard from again.

"Her old heart." Ada shook her head of the possible future, focusing on what was important. "That'll kill her."

"I said the same thing to the State rep that was here. He showed me the contract your mother signed, stating what they would do if failure of payment ever became an issue." Like it has now, was what he left unsaid.

"I still don't understand why she had to pay any money at all. The synth ads only talk about Amnesty."

Amnesty, the way to pray your troubles away. Instead of paying the State, citizens had the option to take out loans on synths, and commit to attending service at State-sanctioned facilities in lieu of monetary commitments.

"What they don't tell you about is the fine print, and it's riddled with fees that balloon year after year, with interest on top of that." Kressick's face twisted up into a bitter sneer.

He was a happy man, usually. This new look scared her.

"This---can't be legal." It was all Ada's brain would allow her to answer.

Her words were slurred, slowed down, as if they came from far away. It belonged to the Ada from months before, the one in a near-vegetative state. Her mother had driven her out of the fog, but Ada was slipping back to that place, her safe place. It was like floating. She wanted to float. Not dealing with anything too hard. She could feel herself losing hold of the ground, disappearing into the gray clouds.

On the other end of the chat, Kressick recognized her need for a tether. He cleared his throat.

"Ada, you need to be here."

Ada blinked the fog back, but not entirely. It was at the edge of her consciousness, ready to be recalled when needed.

"I'm coming," she said.

What she really meant was, I'm here.

For now.

~ * ~

A/N: If you like the story so far, make the lonely star happy by smashing it. Weird, but the star is into it, swear.