The Alaska Escape Read online

  THE ALASKA ESCAPE

  K.B. Spangler

  Kindle Edition

  Copyright 2020 K.B. Spangler.

  The Alaska Escape is a work of fiction. Names, characters, and events are the creations of the author. Settings are either fictional or have been adapted from locations in and around Washington, D.C. for purposes of storytelling. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. All characters, places, and events are set in the world of A Girl and Her Fed, found online at agirlandherfed.com

  This file was sold online via ebook distribution networks using Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing. If you have received a copy of this file via any source other than the original point of distribution, please visit agirlandherfed.com or kbspangler.com to learn more.

  Beware the bears.

  CONTENTS

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Books

  TRANSCRIPT 3 OF 8 FROM THE PERSONAL FILES OF JOSHUA GLASSMAN, FORMER

  DEPUTY DIRECTOR (2006-2016) AND DIRECTOR (2016-2021) OF THE OFFICE OF ADAPTIVE AND COMPLEMENTARY TECHNOLOGIES (OACET).

  RELEASE OF THIS TRANSCRIPT HAS BEEN CONDUCTED UNDER THE U.S. FREEDOM OF INFORMATION ACT. THIS TRANSCRIPT CONTAINS NO DETAILS RELATED TO ONGOING OR CURRENT THREATS TO THE NATIONAL SECURITY OF THE UNITED STATES OR ITS ALLIES.

  AS THIS TRANSCRIPT IS A PERSONAL RECORD, ALL INFORMATION PRESENTED IN THIS DOCUMENT REFLECTS AGENT GLASSMAN’S OPINIONS, PERCEPTIONS, AND MEMORIES OF PAST EVENTS, AND SHOULD NOT BE CONSIDERED PART OF THE OFFICIAL OACET RECORD.

  RELEASED JANUARY 18, 2056

  CHAPTER ONE

  Hey, Mare.

  Another day, another video for the Office of Adaptive and Complementary Technologies archives. This is the story about how I married my third wife.

  This is also the one with the bear.

  I love this new kink of yours, Mare! The highs and the lows of my love life, described in detail for the federal government. Heh, right. A story like this is going into our formal archives? Sure, Mare, sure. But, as always, I’m happy to indulge you in any way you desire.

  Because you already know this story, Mare.

  Let’s start a little before the beginning, back when you and I first met. You were a different person then. Bright, bold, ready to punch the world in its nose if it got in your way. You’re ten years older now, and God knows we’ve been through enough to change into entirely different people.

  I don’t miss who you used to be, but I remember her. Sometimes I can still see her, when you’re angry and that inner fire snaps out and scorches whoever’s stupid enough to stand in your way. She was still in the driver’s seat the first time we met, a small stick of dynamite with long red hair and enormous green eyes. You’ve always loved those ankle-length skirts, but that day you were wearing a pair of tiny gym shorts and an oversized t-shirt. Too cute, Mare, too cute. We were doing sprints, a couple thousand of us trying to prove we were worthy of those five hundred spots in OACET. You mowed down everybody who got in your way, including me. After that, you came straight up to me and told me you needed help putting sunscreen on your shoulders. And your neck. And your legs…

  We hit it off. And after we showered and went out for dinner? We really hit it off! I try to stay friendly with everyone I’ve slept with, and sometimes it takes effort. But with you, it’s always been easy. I’ve always been able to be myself with you, even back when we were both different people.

  Those lost five years, the ones that changed us forever? During that time, we kept finding each other, you and I. Somehow we’d end up in the same park at the same time, or eating at the same cheap sandwich place. And for a little while, we weren’t lonely. We never took it any further, because we had both been shattered. Deep down, in the part of our souls that hadn’t gone through a psychological blender, we knew there was no way we could put our own minds back together, let alone help each other.

  After those five years were over… Well, it’s a cliché, but the first time I began to feel like a human being again was when I looked into your eyes and saw you looking back at me. It was only after we had finally slept with each other again that I realized something was wrong! Why had it been so long since we woke up in each other’s arms? Why hadn’t we snuck off to the supply closet at least once or twice a week like we used to?

  Once we finally realized what had been done to us, how badly we had been damaged… It was only then that we tried to help each other. It took a while. We needed to relearn who we were, and part of that was accepting that we’d never be the same again. We had been brainwashed by the government into believing we were little more than machines, and some of the original pieces of our personality were simply gone forever. But we weren’t alone anymore. You were always there for me; I hope I was there for you. I tried to be, I know that.

  As for why we didn’t get more serious? At first, we were too damaged for serious, and after we had rebuilt ourselves, it didn’t seem necessary. Does it make sense that we were already too close to get much closer? That’s what our relationship has always felt like to me. What we had already worked for us: we drifted in and out of each other’s lives when we needed a lover, a companion, a best friend.

  (A baby grand piano moved… No, Mare, I’m not complaining, I just swore I’d never allow you to forget that particular favor. Yes, it was a great Craigslist score but you don’t even play the piano!)

  Honestly, Mare, if anybody else had asked me to help me track down their lunatic Grizzly Adams-type grandfather in the Alaskan wilderness, I would have told them to take a flying leap into a diesel woodchipper. Me? In the woods? No. Not in a billion years, not to avoid the zombie apocalypse, not to hide from the heat death of the sun. Absolutely not.

  But I never could say no to you, Mare.

  How do I tell this story? Do I pretend to talk directly to you, so we relive the tale of you and me and our adventures in the Alaskan wilderness? That makes sense. After all, you’re the only one who’ll ever watch this video. It’ll disappear into the official OACET records, like everything else we’ve done to document our first steps as a baby hivemind in this strange new world.

  Wait. No. If I do that, it won’t match the other records in this series. Better to have some fun with it, turn you into someone I met and watched and wondered about, all through my own eyes.

  After all, you do love a good fantasy, Mare.

  This’ll be fun!

  Back to the story. When did this happen… Let’s see… It was about a year after we went public, right?

  Yeah, that’s right. The world had gotten over the initial shock of cyborgs, but it was still processing the consequences. So what if there were human beings with tiny quantum computers embedded in their brains? They could deal with that. Human beings had had miniature computers stuck into various orifices and organs since the Reagan administration. It wasn’t that we were cyborgs, but what we could do as cyborgs. The world wasn’t happy to learn that America’s federal government had made cyborgs who could take control of any networked device.

  If you look at it from their point of view, we are pretty creepy creatures. I know that if I wasn’t an Agent, I’d wonder about the sense of having them. Why make government employees who can take over comp
uter systems if you don’t intend to use them? Well, it’s because Agents are the next generation of nuclear bombs, and nobody intends to use those, either.

  Doesn’t mean you want one hanging around your cocktail party, though.

  As OACET’s public relations specialist, I got to go to those cocktail parties. Every single one of them. It was my job to charm the pants off of anybody who happened to think that maybe all of these walking, talking, thinking nuclear bombs should be disabled, dissected, and the individual pieces locked away in a deep mountain vault somewhere, just in case.

  I loved it.

  Everybody isn’t one single thing. People are complicated knots of emotions, experiences, preconceived ideas, and stress. When I came across a person who thought that Agents needed a bullet to the head to protect civilization itself? I got to pick apart that knot and learn why this particular person was against us, usually while drinking a very nice blend of white wines. Then, once I understood them, I took this tangle of…of unraveled person, and wove their preconceptions back together in a way that wouldn’t be a danger to OACET.

  Politicians were easy. Most of them don’t know what they believe until their constituents tell them. As I was also doing press conferences, talk shows, town halls, and the rest, public opinion tended to run in our favor. Sure, there’d always be the holdouts—change is different and change is bad!—but the general public was charmed by our story. Young patriotic Americans, just starting their lives in public service, who had been lied to by their own government and brainwashed into compliance? And then, when all hope was lost, they came to their senses and threw themselves on the mercy of public opinion! It was a great story with a serious hook: if Agents existed, then who was to say that other countries didn’t have their own version of OACET? Better keep us around, just in case.

  Journalists? Well, everybody’s got their own ideas to sell, and a journalist’s job is to communicate those ideas to others. But ideas can be flexible, especially if you understand where they come from and where they’re intended to go. It was easy for me to tweak their prewritten talking points with a new piece of information, or even just a kind word. It’s hard to be a professional asshole to someone you consider a friend.

  The ones I had the hardest time persuading were in the military. Not all of the military, to be sure. Not even most! The majority of military personnel had decided that, like nuclear weapons, it was better to have us and not need us than need us and not have us. However, there were some who saw us as unpredictable and unstable, and weapons like that have no place in a well-run arsenal. Nothing I could say or do would change that deeply held belief. Only time would do that for me.

  Well, time, and not destroying civilization as we know it on a whim.

  On the night that Mare swept me away to Alaska, I was chatting with just such a hardliner at a military function. He was a three-star general, if I remember correctly, and I was trapped in the most predictable conversation.

  “You see, Glassman—” (Always with my last name, those military boys. “Call me Josh,” I’d tell them over and over, but no. Names are a distancing technique: first names draw people in, last names push them away.) “—I’m a student of history, and—” (They are always a student of history.) “—we’ve got to be careful.”

  This was usually the part where I assured him I did know, and I agreed that we needed to be more careful. In the grand scheme of things, don’t we all need to be more careful? And please, call me Josh. Except that was when Mare came barging in, moving so fast that her long hair snapped behind her as she cut her way across the room. She was wearing a pale yellow silk dress I knew from countless formal events, with tiny pink flowers embroidered into every inch and clung to her like a sleek second skin. She called that dress Old Faithful: it was the one she grabbed out of her closet when she had to show up somewhere fancy and didn’t have time to plan ahead.

  Truth be told, Mare were a little overdressed. That dress works when it’s in the company of tuxedoes, and this was a casual jacket party. Still, Old Faithful did its job. Every head in the room turned to look at her, and those standing in her way leapt aside so she could pass.

  And she was headed straight at me.

  “Excuse me,” I told the general, as I went to intercept the tiny red-haired arrow zooming through the crowd.

  He didn’t listen: that particular breed of military man never does. Instead, he followed along behind me, still trying to continue our conversation. “It’s a security issue, Glassman—”

  I ignored him.

  The second Mare reached me, she seized me by the wrist. “Pappy is missing.”

  It was only then I realized her cybernetic implant wasn’t active. Her eyes were green iron, her voice a hammer on steel, but I knew Mare, knew her intimately on so many levels, knew how that perpetual worry line in the middle of her forehead only disappeared completely when she was on the verge of panic. When she touched me, our skin contact meant her emotions should have crashed into me like a runaway train. Instead, it was Mare and me, talking like ordinary humans.

  That was terrifying.

  “Your grandfather?” I asked. “How do you know he’s gone missing?”

  You shook your head hard enough to set your hair flying. “Skipped a check-in. He never misses a check-in, so my Dad went out to the cabin and there was blood, and—”

  “It’s okay,” I said. It wasn’t okay, but that was what she needed to hear. Since she wasn’t in the link, so she convince herself she believed the lie. “What do you need?”

  “I’m going home,” she said. Her voice began to shake. “I haven’t been home since…since…”

  Now I understood why she had deactivated her implant.

  I reached out, and Mare collapsed into my arms. Just for a moment. Then, she pushed away from me as she tugged her self-control around herself. “I’ve got a flight out in an hour.”

  “Did you book me a seat?” I asked.

  She nodded. “Packed our bags, too. There’s a taxi waiting out front.”

  “You’re leaving?” The general who had attached himself to me like a rabid dog seemed confused.

  I have never once spoken for Mare. That’s a good way to lose my lips, and not in a fun way. Instead, I took a step back, and gestured for her to take over.

  Mare glared at me as she reached out one slender hand, and left it in the air until the general needed to take it or look like a supreme asshole in front of his coworkers. “Mary Murphy,” she said. “OACET administration.”

  “Another cyborg,” he said, as he tried to draw his hand away.

  She stepped in, fast as a serpent, twisting so she grasped his hand with both of her own. “A cyborg who has just discovered her grandfather has gone missing,” she said, moving in close. Mare was shorter than the general by at least nine inches, and he outweighed her by a hundred and fifty pounds, easily. Even so, he was starting to get that wide-eyed look that some men get when they realize they’ve stepped into a trap. “The very same grandfather who helped his son raise me when my mother died. He’s disappeared! And there’s enough blood to make the local police think that there was a murder.”

  I noticed that clever phrasing. The general didn’t: Mare was too busy making him squirm under the weight of his faux pas. He tried to retreat, apologizing for his callous behavior, wishing her good luck on finding her grandfather… Except Mare refused to let him back out. She kept tugging him down towards her, a tiny Irish gravity well hell-bent on turning him inside out.

  The general gave me an expression that begged for rescue.

  I gave him one of pure puzzled innocence.

  “Do you understand?” Mare whispered to him. “Someone I love has vanished. I’m terrified! I don’t know what happened to him! You do understand, don’t you?”

  The general began nodding, somewhat frantically. I, on the other hand, was thinking about the very clever phrasing Mare kept using.

  “This seems like an emergency,” I said to him. “Can Agen
t Murphy borrow me?”

  The general was trying to extricate himself even as Mare said: “I’m very sorry for the inconvenience. I feel terrible for breaking up your meeting. Do you have time in your calendar next week? I can put something official in Josh’s schedule.”

  Oh, what a lovely trap! A formal meeting with a person like this particular general would indicate that they were open to doing business with OACET. The general realized this and tried to pull away, muttering pleasantries about how next week wouldn’t work, such short notice—

  “The week after, then? Monday afternoon? Good, I’ll call your people,” Mare said, still holding onto his hand. It was only after he finally blurted assent that she allowed him to escape.

  “Wicked, Mare,” I told her.

  “I don’t have the spoons for nice right now,” she muttered, as she guided us towards the doors. “Wicked will have to do.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  The flight into Anchorage was long and fairly dull. I had managed to talk us into a business class upgrade, so after we changed into our street clothes, we were able to spread out and get some rest. Not that we did much sleeping. Mare was too nervous, and she vibrated in her seat from unspent anxiety. She filled me in on what had happened. Her father had called her in a panic: Pappy was gone, his cabin was a wreck, there was blood—there was too much blood!—and the police were involved.

  Now that we were in the privacy of our own airborne bedroom, I could ask the necessary questions: “Who’s blood was it?”

  “Not Pappy’s,” she replied. “I’ll know more once the lab results come in.”

  “Can I see what the cabin looked like?” I had been in the FBI before joining OACET and old habits die hard. Hadn’t been there very long before I got tapped to become a cyborg, but I had gone through extensive training and had a little field experience.

  Besides, murders happened around me. I knew what to look for.