The First Poet Laureate of Mars by T E Olivant

Author:T E Olivant [Olivant, T E]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Shuna Publishing
Published: 2019-07-30T06:00:00+00:00

Chapter 24

Tolly’s first bad decision was to turn off the cocktail of augmented hormones that was keeping him happy. He picked up the datastick and stared at it. He needed to find a console or whatever they used in this century so he could access it.

As soon as he left his room he felt exposed. Were the Augments watching him? Last thing he could remember – a hundred years ago even though it felt like yesterday – was the new elections to the Council. They had asked him to attend, even though he had little interest in events in the Council chambers in Alcedine. He might have still refused, but there had been some worrying trends in his recent communications with other Augments. They were becoming even more secretive and more paranoid. The more the Augments isolated themselves from the h-men the more they seemed to lose their way. Or at least that was what he had believed.

Had he been wrong? If the Augments of today were telling the truth then sometime in the last hundred years he had become a danger not just to his people but to humanity. And although part of him wondered if they were lying, there was enough residual memory left to know that he had done something terrible. Something that he had wanted desperately to forget.

The datastick bit into his palm. Would it give him answers? What if the answers weren’t anything he could stand hearing? The Augment Copper hadn’t been exaggerating the risks of the brain wipe. He had seen it happen before, a long time ago when the technology had been new. Augments lost their minds trying to recover memories that had been erased. Those that challenged the process never lasted long enough to regret it. And yet knowing all this he couldn’t let it go.

He found a seedy little bar that was crammed in between two massive metal girders. He shuffled in past two men who were dealing in whatever substance was this century’s form of illegal high. He enlarged his augmented pupil so that he could see in the near-darkness and walked to the bar.

“I need to borrow a console. Something not connected to the web.”

The woman behind the bar, a skinny girl who had miners’ tattoos that curled around her eye and wound down her neck, said nothing but held out her hand. Payment.

Tolly reached into his pocket and took out the strips of metal he kept for just such an emergency. He handed one over and she nodded, satisfied. She disappeared into the back and returned a second later with a battered metal slab.

“Will it take this?” He held up the datastick. The girl looked at him as though he was a child, then pointed to the slot on the side of the console.

“Thanks.” Tolly took his hardware over to a quiet corner. He had to move quickly. He had no doubt that word of an Augment in a bar like this would spread fast.

It only took a few seconds to work out how to turn on the console and insert the datastick.

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