Broken Pixels (The Chronicles of Mara Lantern, Book 4) by D.W. Moneypenny Page A

the middle of a rock-lined cavern. Floodlights mounted high above filled the space with simulated daylight. After the side of the compartment slid out of the way, the van’s engine turned over, and the vehicle rolled forward, following a white dashed line on the ground that curved to the left. Soon Mara could see two rows of other vehicles, half of which were white vans identical to theirs. This was a parking lot. Their van slid into a spot at the end of a row and again turned off its engine.
    “I suppose that means we have arrived,” Ping said. “Why don’t we step outside and see if we can get our bearings?” He reached for the handle of the side door and slid it open.
    Through the wide opening, they saw two men in light blue smocks and white slacks jogging toward the van. Behind them, an older woman in a lab coat—her gray hair pulled into a bun that peeked over the top of her head—eyed a clipboard while she walked at a more leisurely pace. The two men headed directly to the rear doors of the van, opened it and slid out the gurney holding Cam’s body. Mara and Sam clambered past Ping, out the side door of the van, and ran alongside the van to the rear.
    As the men turned to roll away the gurney, Mara said, “Excuse me, but what exactly will you do with him?”
    The men looked past Mara to the woman who had just walked up. She said to them, waving in the direction from which they’d come, “That’s okay. You guys go ahead, and I’ll consult with the relatives.”
    “Actually we’re not relatives,” Sam said. “We’re just friends of Cam’s.”
    The woman turned to him, and her eyes narrowed. Taking a step toward Sam, she leaned forward and stared into his eyes intensely—like she was conducting an exam. Reaching up to grasp his chin with her thumb and index finger, she turned his head slightly to the left and gasped. “You’re biological! How can that be?”
    She turned to Mara, gave her a quick once-over and said, “You too!”
    Ping stepped from the van and approached the opened rear doors. The woman shifted her gaze to him and said, “And you! How have the three of you survived this long without transitioning?”
    Ping gave her a blank stare, collected himself after a moment and said, “I’m sorry, are you inquiring as to why we don’t have artificial bodies?”
    “That would be a good place to start,” she said.
    “Well, that may take a little time and effort to explain, miss—”
    “Dr. Canfield, Celeste Canfield,” she said. She held up a hand. “I’ll tell you what. I need to get started with your friend,”—she looked at her clipboard—“Cameron Lee, and I can’t simply let you leave in this condition. I’d be called up before the ethics board for neglect.”
    She pointed toward the orderlies, pushing Cam’s gurney into two large industrial doors leading into a rock face two hundred feet from the parking lot, and said, “Hurry along. With all the other craziness going on, I can’t get bogged down on any single peculiarity.”
    Ping fell in step next to her, while Mara and Sam followed behind. “So, Dr. Canfield, how did you recognize us as biological so readily? No one else has given us a second look, even a nurse at a hospital earlier today.”
    “I work intimately with both biological and synthetic physiologies on a regular basis. After a few years, you develop an eye for it—the subtle differences in skin texture and muscle tone, shading and coloring. Although I have to admit that this is the first time I’ve been put to the test—it’s not like I run into animate biological adults every day.”
    “So you are a medical doctor?” Ping asked.
    She gave him an odd look. “Of course. Who else would be running a repository? You wouldn’t ask a plumber to plug you into a synthetic body and then take care of your biological one, would you?” She held open one of the doors and waved them in ahead of her. “Though the three of you haven’t ever addressed that