An hour later, in the meager shade of a twisted, spiny cactus that grew defiantly near the mouth of the mountain base, Michael was engaged in a conversation that made his skull ache. Beside him, clinging to his arm with a childlike dependency that utterly belied her appearance, was the popsicle-turned-woman.
No, not a littledrag-along, he corrected himself with a sideways glance. A substantialone. The simple white dress shirt he'd lent her—the only thing readily available that wasn't military surplus or rags—was stretched taut in ways that spoke of a figure both formidable and elegant. 'Petite' was decidedly the wrong word.
"Miss… or ma'am," Michael began, trying to keep his voice gentle as he peered into her large, strikingly clear eyes, which held a depth and an unsettling innocence. "Do you remember who you are? Your name? Or why you were in the cryo-pod?"
The woman, her expression one of perpetual, wide-eyed bemusement, merely shook her head rapidly, her dark hair swishing. The motion held none of an adult's deliberation, only a simple, earnest negation.
Undeterred, Michael pressed on. "What about your job? Your work? Anything at all from before? Any memories that feel… close?"
Perhaps his questioning grew too intense, his focus too sharp. A flicker of fear crossed her face. She released his arm to press her palms against her temples, her fine features screwing up in an agony of concentration. But the effort yielded only a pained whimper. No spark of recognition, only distress.
Michael immediately backed off, a pang of guilt hitting him. In the hour since her awakening, it had become painfully clear that something in the delicate revival process—or perhaps decades of imperfect stasis—had gone awry. The revered "Old Leader," the figure an entire community had bled and died to protect, now possessed the cognitive faculties and behavioral patterns of a young girl. Attempts at complex recollection triggered visible, physical anguish. For now, all he could do was hope that time, or some miracle of neuroplasticity, would heal whatever was fractured. The idea of scavenging some pre-Collapse nootropic supplements, or even something as crude as vitamin tonics, flickered in his mind. The ghost of a jingle about 'brain elixirs' from his old life surfaced, making him shudder.
Forcing a smile that felt grotesquely out of place, he adopted the tone one might use with a frightened child. "It's okay, it's okay. Don't force it if it hurts. Just… be a good girl and wait here. I need to talk to those men over there, and then I'll take you home, alright?"
She looked up at him, the pain in her eyes melting into a trusting placidity. She nodded, a quick, bird-like motion. Then, as if the thought had just bubbled up from some undisturbed spring in her mind, she spoke. "Daddy," she said, the word still jarringly direct. "I remember a little. You used to call me Jasmine. When you picked me up high. Up to the sky."
Daddy, for the love of—I'm a single man!The mental rebuttal was a reflex by now, though hearing it from a woman who looked like thatstill sent an involuntary tremor through him. His eyes, betraying him, flicked again to the way his shirt strained across her chest. And 'picked me up high'? I'm practically a child myself here!The internal monologue was a desperate attempt to reclaim some sanity.
But regardless of his internal screaming, reality had to be accepted. They had, for now, a single, fragile data point. Her name. Or at least, a name. "Jasmine," he repeated aloud. It was a soft name, a gentle one. A pet name. It was utterly useless for his half-formed idea of cross-referencing it in the databases of the old world. A million girls could have been called Jasmine.
A hundred meters away, Zhang Tiezhu and the remaining survivors of Base 0005 waited in a state of collective anxiety. Jasmine, in her childlike state, had reacted to the sight of the burly, anxious soldiers with a fear so palpable it was like a physical force. To avoid terrifying their own 'leader,' they had been forced to maintain a respectful, and painful, distance.
As Michael approached, Zhang surged forward, his face a battlefield of hope and dread. "Well? Did she… remember anything? Who she is?"
Michael's answering smile was weary. "She says her name is Jasmine. That's it. Everything else… it's gone. Or locked away."
The sound that escaped Zhang Tiezhu wasn't a word. It was a long, slow exhalation of air, carrying with it the weight of generations of sacrifice. It was the sound of a foundation crumbling. He, Li Hao, and the other two veterans seemed to physically deflate, sinking down to sit on their haunches in the dust like farmers witnessing a field of blighted grain. The complex torment on their faces was a story in itself: devotion, confusion, a profound sense of loss for something they had never truly possessed.
Michael understood. The core of their purpose, the lodestar that had guided their fathers and grandfathers, had woken up as a stranger. He clapped a hand on Zhang's shoulder, the gesture awkward but meant to be firm. "Look at it this way. It's better than a corpse, right? She's alive. That's the victory. I'll… I'll see what I can do. Find things that might help a mind heal. Medicine, nutrients. Maybe she'll get better." The 'brain elixir' jingle echoed mockingly in his head again.
It was a thin thread of hope, but it was all he had to give. Zhang nodded, a slow, heavy movement, acceptance settling on him like a cloak.
The next duty was a somber one. They gathered at a quiet corner of the valley, where a small, orderly field of simple mounds marked the final resting place of Base 0005's guardians. Before them, eight new mounds of fresh earth had been raised. The crude markers bore only names in Chinese script, testaments to lives of hardship and stubborn loyalty. Here lay the last soldiers of a forgotten command.
With a confused but obedient Jasmine watching quietly from his side, Michael stood before the graves. He felt the weight of their silent history, the unbroken chain of duty that had ended here. He bowed three times, a gesture of respect that felt inadequate but necessary. Jasmine, mimicking him clumsily, did the same.
Then, with a finality that echoed in the slam of heavy blast doors, they sealed the entrance to Base 0005 for the last time. Its purpose, its secret, was now carried with them. The base, as an entity, ceased to be. They loaded the last of their salvageable belongings—precious tools, archived files, personal effects—into the already overburdened vehicles. The convoy, now a funeral procession and a relocation mission in one, began the slow crawl back towards Sweetwater Gulch.
…
"Daddy, why does the car go so fast when you push that pedal?"
"Daddy, what is a 'little bread van'? Is it something to eat? Talking about it makes my tummy feel empty…"
The journey back was soundtracked by Jasmine's endless, guileless questions. Every bush, every rock formation, the very concept of an internal combustion engine—all were subjects of intense, bewildered curiosity. Michael, who had taken the wheel of the lead Wuling for the return trip, initially tried to answer with patient, simple explanations.
This lasted approximately twenty minutes. The relentless, recursive nature of her questioning—each answer spawning three more "whys"—began to feel like a psychic drill against his temples. His sleep deficit and the stress of the past days shortened his fuse to a nub.
Desperate for a moment's peace, his eyes fell on the glove compartment. A truly terrible idea took root.
"Jasmine, sweetie," he said, injecting a syrupy note of patience into his voice that he did not feel. "Daddy really needs to concentrate on driving now, so the car doesn't bump. Look, there's a very interesting book in there. Why don't you have a look at it?"
The "very interesting book" was, in fact, the vehicle's original, decades-old owner's manual for the Wuling van. It was a thick, densely-typed tome of paralyzingly dull technical specifications, wiring diagrams, and maintenance schedules, utterly devoid of narrative or pictures beyond crude, functional line drawings. It was the literary equivalent of sandpaper. Michael's hope was that the sheer, impenetrable boredom of it would act as a sedative.
The effect was instantaneous, and not at all what he expected.
Jasmine pulled the hefty manual onto her lap with a serious expression. She fell silent. Not a bored, distracted silence, but the deep, focused quiet of intense absorption. The transformation was remarkable. The childlike nervous energy vanished, replaced by a poised, intellectual intensity. A faint, almost imperceptible frown of concentration appeared between her brows. She began to turn the pages. Not with the idle flipping of someone looking at pictures, but with a deliberate, steady rhythm. Each page received about fifteen seconds of her attention before she moved to the next.
Just looking at the diagrams, Michael thought with relief, settling into the blessed quiet. Perfect.
The quiet held for nearly an hour, the only sounds the grumble of the engine and the whisper of tires on cracked asphalt. Then, without warning, the Wuling's engine gave a violent, shuddering cough. It sputtered, jerked as if in its death throes, and died completely, rolling to a silent halt on the desolate road.
Michael stared at the unresponsive steering wheel, dread pooling in his gut. "That's not right," he muttered. "I had them fill the tank to bursting before we left…"
Being stranded an hour's hard march from the safety of Sweetwater Gulch, with vehicles packed to the roof with the last worldly possessions of a dozen people, was a scenario ripe with disaster. "A broken home is still worth ten thousand gold," the old saying went. Abandoning a vehicle meant abandoning someone's history.
Before he could even unbuckle his seatbelt to begin the frustrating, ignorant search under the hood, a calm, matter-of-fact voice spoke from the passenger seat.
"It is a minor malfunction," Jasmine stated, not looking up from the manual now splayed open on a specific page. "The symptoms—violent shaking upon deceleration followed by engine failure—suggest carbon deposit accumulation on the spark plug electrodes, or potentially within the combustion chamber itself. This creates a hot spot, causing pre-ignition and unstable idle, leading to stalling."
Michael froze, halfway out of his seat, and slowly turned to stare at her.
She continued, her finger tracing a line of dense text. "The recommended corrective action is to clear the deposits by inducing a high-temperature burn-off. You should attempt to restart the engine and maintain a high RPM—approximately three thousand revolutions per minute—for a period of three to five minutes. The increased thermal load should vaporize the carbonized layers."
Her delivery was flat, academic, devoid of the childish lilt that had characterized her speech just minutes before. It was the voice of a technician reading a report.
Michael's brain struggled to process the disconnect. "You… you can't remember your own name," he said slowly, "but you can diagnose a carburetor issue from a manual you just read?"
Jasmine finally looked up, blinking as if the question were absurd. She held up the weighty owner's manual. "It is written here. I read it, so I know it." She said it as one might state that the sky was blue.
Dumbfounded, Michael slid back into the driver's seat. With a silent prayer to any god that might listen to a wastelander with a broken-down van, he turned the key. The engine cranked, protested, then roared reluctantly to life. Following her instructions, he pressed the accelerator, holding the RPMs at a steady, high whine. The engine groaned, coughed out a small puff of black smoke, and then, miraculously, the shuddering smoothed out. The idle steadied.
He let it run for a full five minutes, the noise echoing in the silent landscape. When he gently eased off the gas, the engine purred, smooth as it had been an hour before.
He looked at Jasmine, who had returned to studying the manual with serene focus, as if she'd just commented on the weather. The implications crashed over him in a wave. The phenomenal, almost photographic recall. The ability to instantly comprehend and apply complex mechanical information. The cognitive architecture of a savant, housed in the mind of a child and the body of a stunningly beautiful amnesiac.
Her identity, once shrouded in the mystery of a revered elder or a brilliant general, now snapped into a new, startling focus. Not a leader of men. A scientist. An engineer. A mind of potentially staggering capability. The very key to the vault of pre-Collapse knowledge they had just been forced to abandon.
And that mind, that priceless, irreplaceable key, was currently locked in a box labeled "Jasmine," who thought he was her daddy and got distracted by hunger pangs at the mention of bread.
A bitter, hysterical laugh bubbled in his chest. The sheer, cosmic absurdity of it was breathtaking. It wasn't just a tragedy. It was a masterpiece of cruel, ironic waste. What a fucking joke, he thought, putting the van into gear and pulling back onto the road. The future of his little settlement, perhaps of everything, was sitting beside him, quoting a repair manual in a flawless, vacant tone. And he had no idea how to turn the key.