Voices In My Head

It's been a long time since I've written a short story on here, so I decided I'd post the current chapter of the novel I'm working on.

It probably won't make a whole lot of sense since there's no context here, but let's see how it goes.

-----Chapter 45--------
As soon as Erica and Rob had forced Janice into the vehicle, Rob made the mistake of trying to catch her by surprise and jam his fingers in her mouth to shut her off. Janice bit him hard enough to communicate that further attempts to render her immobile would render him one less digit. Erica had interceded then, muttering something about “the rules” while restraining Rob from pulling his weapon on the robot. The two had studiously avoided interactions with her since then.

After an hour or two Janice started calculating potential destinations based on what she could detect of the craft’s speed and trajectory. Gathering parameters for her calculations was admittedly more difficult due to the mostly windowless nature of the vehicle but she used what she could see out of the front windshield and what she could detect of various gravitational fields to do her best.

Several minutes of consideration and calculation yielded the answer that they must be heading to Mars; welcome news to the robot. Hopefully she could find Jaycee, and hopefully Jaycee could provide a safe haven and maybe, just maybe, help Janice sort herself out a bit, too. Referencing the memory store holding the list of items that she needed help sorting out of course activated the robot's still-volatile emotional core, once again triggering the uncomfortable diffusion of chemicals that caused her chest to burn and her eyes to water.

Erica's comms device beeped, and Janice turned her head to listen in on her captor's conversation, noticing at the same time that Rob was doing the same thing.

"Yeah, we got it. Not much of a fight, nobody wanted to see it die." Erica's mulish eyes wandered lazily around the cabin, unfocused. Her nostrils flared out slightly as she listened to the other voice, completing her somewhat indolent appearance. She made a fist with her right hand and stuck out her thumb, index finger, and middle finger in succession as though counting off points while the other person talked.

"No, I don't think there's anyone else to worry about. The handler looked pretty dead when we left them, and we both know how likely it is that the school's going to give chase." The indolence melted off of Erica's face in favor of smug glee that almost echoed sophistication. Ordinarily Janice would have watched the transition with complete fascination; however, this time she barely noticed. Deep within the recesses of her skull, she overclocked her extrapolation processors, running simulations and calculating statistics to try and decide - could Alicia really have died?

She'd not considered the possibility, and realized with what must have been regret how much it would have assisted her calculations if she'd taken care to study her friend during those last few moments on the campus. Even worse, the flood of hormones carrying the physiological implications of her friend's death slowed her processors almost to a crawl. More than once she manually restarted calculation threads as they blocked on message ports whose buffers were full of emotions. Ugh. How did humans ever manage to adjust to living inside such a sluggish reality?

Finally, the answer emerged: based on the trajectory and speed with which Alicia was knocked to the ground as well as Janice's rough calculations of the girl's resistance based on her physical dimensions, Alicia was alive. Not only that, she was relatively unharmed.

"Yeah, we're almost there. See you in an hour or two." Erica finished her conversation, snapping off the comms device and nodding at Rob. Rob leaned forward in his seat and tapped the shrouded figure in the driver's seat on the shoulder.

"You remember how to get to the warehouse? We don't have any time to dick around at the spaceport while you figure it out." The driver maintained the silence he'd established at the very beginning of the trip and answered with a single, deep, self-assured nod. As though he didn't already seem enough like a grim reaper, he lifted his right hand from the steering wheel and stretched a long, bony finger towards the nav display on the hovercar's dashboard. He entered an address with quick staccato taps and the display winked into a satellite view of a rectangular structure similar to the one housing Jaycee's church.

Within minutes, the craft docked neatly in one of the public spaces at the main spaceport. Unlike before, many of the spots were filled - apparently the planed had managed to expand its tourism industry over the past several months. Janice passed her eyes over the tall domed welcome center, and began to plot her escape.