Everything seemed frozen in time. The clip in the metal carabiner opened and shut slowly, and every breath felt thick, leaving little room in her lungs. On the last latch of the lengthening climb, she finally reached him. His gold-sheened helmet shielded his face from view, but his suit was definitely compromised. With the normal nudge of everyday people asking for a wake-up call, the company tugged for a sign of life as they reached his position.
“Alex?” she tried.
No response.
“Joelle, hold onto the panel,” RJ’s eyes ripped to the protruding object. “It’s heavy and is leaching the oxygen from his suit.” Her hands felt around the edge of his cinched tether, as Rolphe detangled another kink in the line. “On three . . .” Her voice echoed against her helmet space.
“One . . . “A scattered patter of rocks peppered her shiny mesh sleeve.
“Two . . . “ The tether started to unravel.
“Three.” Too like a corpse, Alex jerked toward Joelle, and his tether was free.
Stringing him and his panel along felt like they had caught a fish in a forsaken lake. As they reached the door of the hold, the tiny rocks picked up like a small rain that clipped RJ’s helmet just enough to startle her. Nothing new, but she shook her head like a foreigner to this expanse, where two suns wrapped cloaks of ringed white around the planets, which were in oddly spaced rows far from reach. Rolphe swam through the door just before RJ’s hand hit the close button. RJ knew, only too well, that they had only seconds to work.
RJ was short for Rylie Juniper. But, growing up, she didn’t feel much like a Rylie. A decided premed, she got into the field because of all the reasons humankind gets into medicine. But, through the clinical years, she realized she hated the bureaucracy and the death, and transferred to physics and biology. Finishing her PhD in Biophysics, she had registered with the aeronautical program and had been accepted into NASA’s space force, where she planned on experimenting with new ways to do medicine particularly the part where anti-gravity regions are useful laboratories for non-scaffolded 3D-printing. But she was here, a 33-year-old looking at the face of the world she had known for 4 years. RJ Vember couldn’t help but be transported back to the memory of a lost patient she had seen just before switching fields. He had been medevacked from France, and she remembered his eyes opening and shutting like a computer screen turning on and off. His eyes were white, just white.
“Alex, wake up!” Joelle had launched her helmet somewhere beyond the bay and was shaking him.
“Hey, hey,” RJ pushed her hand against Joelle’s shoulder, “What we need is a kit right now. Get me compression, okay?”
Joelle snapped back to no-emotion mode like they were trained to do, gathering supplies, while Rolphe assessed the patient. “No response,” Rolphe clicked off a flashlight he had been using to probe Alex’s eyes.
“We need to dislodge. Bandage ready?” RJ ripped her gloves off. Her hands were shaking. Why were her hands shaking?
“Ready,” Rolphe gripped the panel.
As soon as they ripped it from his body, Alex’s eyes splintered open, and a stream of globular blood drizzled upward before Joelle could get her compression kit on his side. RJ froze. Alex’s eyes didn’t look like Alex’s eyes. The hold was filling with more jello bubbles of upward-raining blood.
“RJ!” Rolphe was yelling, but she couldn’t move. “R. J.”
A horrible gasp of breath banged off the metal caverns like a pinball gone wild.
RJ sat up, blinking off the haze. Was that real? Where was she? She felt above her before her vision came to the hard sponge of spacecraft material loomed overhead, and she let out a gust of air. She reached a hand habitually beside her. The blurry figures of blankets and familiar panels came into view. She was home, or at least, what she knew as home for the past year. Space Station 13. The crew was bundled in egg-shaped bunks; nothing weird was happening, as far as she could see. Everyone was asleep . . . except for Alex. His chiseled face was highlighted by a screen that gave off a sort of burnt-yellow glow.
“Alex?” RJ whispered.
He turned toward her. His eyes looked like his eyes. She breathed in for the first time. Her heartbeat sizzled back to a steadier beat.
“You okay?” She asked him.
“Have you seen the log lately?” He asked back.
“No what’s ?”
He motioned for her to follow him, getting up slowly. She tussled with the tinny fibers of her bedding. Finally sinking onto the floor, she dodged Joelle’s water bottle and books below. Alex blinked and started in the opposite direction down the tubed hallway.
RJ couldn’t forget his eyes. They had been perfectly white, marble almost, internally glowing, white.
RJ found the corridor uncharacteristically tingly cold as she wrapped her arms around herself. The little lights that carved a seeable pathway lit upon their entry into the tunnel, away from the stowaway bedrooms. Alex put his hand on one of the ladders that shot up into the tubular station that would have seemed like a gerbil mansion, if it weren’t for the technical wires and equipment running in tidy tangles around them. He put the screen in his back pocket, and it was just tall enough to show the blinking words “Error - Error - MISCALCULATION - Error - Error - FATAL”
He was pretty shy, according to the world around him, except for the splash of color his socks gave off when he went upstairs or sat down. The feather in his well-worn hat reminded him that he had a better chance at relating to different species than to people. He gripped his wood cane a little tighter between his thumb and forefinger.
“Mr Lockhart,” the lady in blue had returned. She waited for him to look in her direction.
“Thank you for your patience. The Huttons have decided to investigate your zoo for funding in
addition to their conservation efforts. Congratulations. It seems you have a few patrons in New Zealand.”
Mr Lockhart, one of the few individuals to have bought his own zoo, felt a shock of relief prickle through his body. He smoothed the feather of the hat that rested on his knee, before donning it atop his slightly balding head. “Thank you, Miss. I believe our efforts are worth it for every person in Auckland.” He smiled his disarming smile, his blue eyes matching the hue of her blouse.
As he stood and shook hands, his kangaroo-patterned socks retreated back under his trousers, and he tapped his way back to the zoo.
Zion’s Wildlife Sanctuary.
Named for his late son, the letters still sparkled like the first day he hung them 20 years ago. He stopped underneath those letters as if watching a vision. “Papa, why’d you name it after me?”
Zion was atop his shoulders then, trying to squint through the sunny glare that the letters gave off.
“Well . . . you know how your momma told me before she . . . well, she knew Zion was a name for heaven, and that’s what this place will be for all the animals we’ll rescue together.” He sat Zion down, looking into his deep mother-look-alike eyes.
Zion smiled and said, “Okay, we have to get a tiger or something big like that just so we can make her proud up there.”
“Kia Ora, E!”
Mr Lockhart snapped back to his place under the lettering.
“Oh . . . hey, Liam. What’s your business today?” E answered him.
Liam took in the scene, “You looked like you were out in the wop-wops, E. Good news today? Bad news? If so, I don’t wanna hear.”
E flipped his hat from his head and wiped a tingle of forming sweat from under his feathery hair. “Good as gold, actually.” E smiled. “Another year at least.”
Liam wagged his curly head. “Zion would’ve loved what this place has become. How’re the kakapos today?”
“Far as I’ve seen, they’re starting on the path to baby ones.” He placed his hat back atop his head.
“Hey, I have a prospect for you; a kid from the states. Says he wants to be a zoologist when he gets wise . . . like you, maybe. I’ll send him by later with Jayda so he can do some service work. Won’t take no for an answer he’s working for nothing!”
Before E could answer, Liam had already taken off in the other direction. Every time Liam bumped into E at this very gate, something was afoot that took E for, let’s say, an unwarranted “adventure.” Taking a deep breath in, he trotted through the open gates into the jungle awaiting him.
The gate was always open because, on the off chance a wild wallaby wanted to stroll in, like last year in June, E wanted to make sure he was available for the visit.
Crunching his way down the leafy path, the variegated plants that sprouted red veins between blue-green leaves greeted him, gently patting his shoulder as he passed. The familiar call of creatures hung in the air as he got closer and closer to the main house.
In that opening, a perfect picture of old rippled glass windows that rainbowed in the sun looked back at him from a large brick building, three stories tall with a tin roof that made music during rain storms. It was home, where hundreds of birds had nested, hot chocolate was always made during the cold spells, and it was something that looked like a jungle Christmas card always strung with tiny white lights—even in July.
“Hallo, Joshua! What time’s the delivery today?” E jovially laid his cane on the corner of the stairs as he made his way, fingers jabbed in his tiny vest pockets, toward a crouching figure. Joshua, or what could be made out of Joshua, quickly pushed a stop-sign hand in the air.
Joshua’s rear was the only thing E could make out, besides the wildly wagging hand, so he stayed where he was.
A rustling sound shivered from the place where Joshua crouched on his knees, and before E could get out a whistle, Joshua lunged into the brush. A squeak, a crack, another squeak, and a “little devil” later, Joshua was walking amongst the bipeds again.
“This little guy thought he could fool me into a cat and mouse game, but we showed him, huh?”
Joshua’s tall figure seemed menacing to anyone at first glance, but when you got to know him, he was a gentle giant who knew a thing or two about taming an alligator or wooing a sparrow into his hand. “Kiwis . . . the little devils. You know, the tiny ones are the ones that are the trouble.” Joshua opened his palms, and E watched the look on the kiwi babe’s beak as it eyed Joshua from the side.
E thought it was odd that the bird looked like it was about to have a conversation about its dealings for the day. The kiwi peered straight into E’s eyes and tilted his fluffy head sideways. My mom . . . where is she? E had heard the words in his head just as clearly as he heard “Mr Lockhart?” A low, unexpected voice sliced his concentration. “Sir?”
It was unlike Alexei Stepanov to leave the flame on for so long. The sugar began crackling, almost magnesium-like in its purple-tinged sparks. Like a game of chemistry, he splashed a few drops of oil into the mix and watched the spinning bubbles dance.
“You remember being a kid, Dumas? Because you look exactly like one right now . . .” Chi Wah, the owner, stood shoulder to shoulder with Alexei, eyeing the frizz in the pan. “What’s the magic today?”
Alexei didn’t flinch as he continued watching the pan, “Glass bubbles, like the ones you put . . . precious things in when you want to display them . . . I want to make them colorful without dye like old glass gets when it catches . . .” he couldn’t think of the word. радуга (raduga) in Russian. An arch. “The arch in the sky.” He went with it.
“The arch? ah rainbow,” Chi placed a measured hand on the young chef’s shoulder. “Don’t burn yourself, huh. Come sit down.”
It had been like this since before the restaurant opened. Chi Wah had discovered Alexei in France a decade or so ago, working as a sous chef under a Michelin star. Alexei was more like his hometown back then, or at least, he looked like it tall, dirty blonde hair, the look of
someone hungry for more than food, for thought. He was quiet, but he still is. “Do you know why I call you Dumas?” Chi gestured to the glass of wine for the day’s sample selection.
Alexei sat down, his thoughts still in the pan he left, off the heat.
“You like the Musketeers?” The corner of Alexei’s lip lifted in a mock smile, as he twirled the wine in the glass around.
Chi was unfazed by the usual dry wit from his chef: “Alexandre was noteworthy because he was genuine, a true zeitgeist of his culture, but also a catalyst of transformation.”
Alexei paused. “Dumas” in Russian sounded like the assembly of the state, something to be leery of, at least to Alexei’s mind. But, on the other hand, it could also sound like the verb for thought or pensiveness in its classy Russian form. That was honest enough. A thought, while neither good nor bad, could be the kernel for either. He could try it on for a while.
“So I’m your counselor, essentially, or something like that?” For the first time, Dumas met Chi’s gaze, which was a smiling one.
“What do you think of the wine selection?” Chi pressed.
Dumas tilted the glass, tasting the smell for the first time dark cherries, tart ideas. Black as ink.
“A spicy merlot good with duck, glaze . . . apricot . . .” he tasted it. Prunes. The last note tingled in his nose. “I think it’ll pair fine. Is it Hungarian?”
“Something like that, yes,” Chi answered the first line of thought. “So, what do you want to be, Dumas?”
“Why do you insist on asking me that every morning, Chi? It’s not like I look at you and go, ‘Do you think you’ll get any closer to being a god if you tell me your deepest desires?’” Dumas leaned back in his chair, lifting its front feet in the air.
“Do you not believe that thoughts are powerful? The essence of magic? Something we can control . . . or better ”
“Manifest?” Dumas completed Chi’s sentence. “You always say the same thing. I’m beginning to think I’m in a vexing monastery with your monk kind you used to talk about.”
Chi shrugged. “We might all be.”
“You are . . .” poshly he thought “something,” he finished out loud. “Why do I put up with you?” A wide smile lit up Dumas’ face.
“Because you love me,” Chi laughed back. “I’m like your father. I just want to see you do more than what you think you’re capable of . . . see beyond what you can’t see.”
“Well, that’s why it’s invisible, isn’t it? The unknown isn’t scary, Chi. It’s . . . just the other. I’m a realist. I don’t live in the there. I live in the now. Now is worth something.”
“So, what do you want from the now, then? Satisfied?” Dumas tapped the toes of his shoes on the cobble of the kitchen. “I want you to stop bugging me and let me get back to figuring out my symphonies . . . or novels, okay?” His big arm slouched over his chair.
“Yes, fine; get back to your glass house, or whatever it is you’re making.” Chi smiled as Dumas raised his form from the table
Before he wandered back into the stove cavern from whence he had emerged, he tilted his head back and gave Chi a warm, familiar look. Dumas remembered his mother, holding his face before he left for chef school in France. “You remake the world, Alyosha. You have a gift,” she
had said to him. She always believed in him. Having paused for a second too long, Chi waved him away like a kid, “Go already, you pain.”
Dumas looked back at the stove. It was in flames. Half of the pan had crystallized into burnt pockets of black with white streams of heat foaming out of it. “Chiort!” Dumas blurted.
A second later, the sugar was perfectly calm, unburnt, sitting on the side of the stove in a glistening ice-like form, playing with the colors of the sunrise as it broke through the kitchen window.
“What the “ Dumas slid a really confused hand through his hair. He knew he had clicked the stove off because talking with Chi always took longer than expected with his riddles, but what was that?
The scent of thyme and coriander floated through the open window. He looked up. Chi was standing there, quizzical, “Something wrong? Why did you curse?”
“No reason. Just thought you know what, I’m going to go slowly commit suicide.” He pulled a wrapper and some tobacco from his back pocket. “Nothing to worry about, Chi; stop with the father gig already, will you? You’re making me jumpy.” He didn’t have to see his face to punctuate that statement; he knew what Chi would be thinking. Chi paid too much attention to the world.
Fiddling with the well-known paper under his fingers felt like fidgeting with the thin layers of a shallot. He was angry at himself. For some reason. The emotional outburst that had no point, maybe. That was not real. It was burnt. . . and then it was perfect. Was it real?
He clenched his jaw tight, pushing his way into the outside world where brick tiles gave way to tufts of grass sprouting dandelion heads. He sat on the steps, eyeing the flicker of color on the blue mountain ridge far away.
Dumas breathed.
He closed his eyes, wringing the paper roll along his fingers. He opened his gaze, but the world was far different than what had met him before he shut his eyelids.
She ran a diagnostic glance across the scrolling screen. Matrices and strings of numbers, letters, and Greek flooded the output line.
“Thio, what are we looking at?” She pushed down on her screen, which popped every scripted letter into the air as a hologram. She spun the projection and pushed it toward her lab tech, and the lines flew across the desks.
Thio slid his odd-lensed glasses onto the bridge of his nose and whipped his black hair away from his eyes. Pursing his lips, he put up two hands to stop the projection from spinning, and he repositioned it right-side up in front of him. Tilting his hands, the holographic hieroglyphs pressed themselves into his desk and lit up again like a familiar computer screen from the early 2000s.
“Umm . . . looks like the schematics crashed back before the neural transitions. See “ he pressed a thumb to the screen, “the ME output says, ‘irreconcilable anti-material present.
Check catalog 13-C for logistical data on mental networking . . . yada yada . . . with quantum tele-setup . . .”
“Same thing on patient B. No response. Something isn’t syncing up. They’ve been metastable “0” frozen for how long?”
“That one for 100 years at least—patient A. I mean, E here. Hey, J, where are we going with these ice statues? Seems like the cryogenic Q-sump has stopped the mutations, but I don’t see how that’s going to help.”
Jocelyn Grimm tilted her head. Her lab was a network of holographic webs, projecting the navigational systems she had scanned from the patients, some of whom were still showing signs of cognitive function, even beyond what would normally be called physical death.
“We have to solve this problem, Thio. It’s not going to solve itself. We have a way to harness intelligence, soul, maybe . . . infinity,” she whispered.
Dr Grimm had studied dark matter projections within neural networks since before her PhD, but only in AI setups. What had happened since then was her usage of breakthrough tech in establishing live neural pathways of humans into coded algorithms that could reconcile the images from what she called “live wires” of human minds. She could watch dreams, see deteriorations in real-time, capture the neural scope before and after a trauma, reconstruct the healthy mind before the occurrence and build it back to that “cocooned” time with minimal side effects. The one thing she could not figure out, though, was how these few patients held distinct differences from usual dead people. And, they were strangely similar, even connected to one another, though they had lived entirely distinct lives in the past.
“Thio, any sign of that data trail on the busted servers today?”
“You know as well as I do we’ve been tunneling those fried circuits for months; nothing has cropped up yet unless you count that fractal trail from yesterday.”
“I know . . .” she sounded far away. “See if you can link it with anything in the outgoing servers; you never know . . . sometimes things leave the strangest traces.” She was looking at the pod containing one of the patients. This patient was young and looked like she was simply sleeping. The patient’s colleague, of about the same age, rested in the pod next to hers. Oddly, their heads were facing each other.
“Jocelyn? Why were we given these patients again? We study live data to help people live, right? Why these guys?” Thio was cleaning his glasses.
Jocelyn missed what he was saying because she was watching a brain scan jump through fragmented visuals a saucepan with small fireworks going on inside, a far jump into outer space, the look of herbs resting on a sill. What a strange dream. What could it mean . . . when he’s gone? Is he really gone?
“Dead people . . . personally, dead people freak me out. No offense, guys,” Thio had turned his words elsewhere because Jocelyn frequently lost conversational skills when she became fixated.
“Thio, get the transducer, please. I have an idea, and it can’t wait.” Jocelyn held her hand out, still looking at the streaks of dreams in the brain waves.
Thio, who had been ready to go home since lunch, was used to the negotiation. “Okay, I’ll give you this, but I’m going for coffee because you still owe me for staying late last week . . . and the week “
“Yes, I know,” she said, a slight tinge of amusement tracing her smirked lip. Her fingers, devoid of the device which she had requested, twitched. It dropped into her hand.
“If we can switch these pathways, reroute them, uncover their origin careful post-causal analysis we can maybe determine how they are operating . . . because what we’re seeing here is more ethereal than a normal functioning of the quanta you remember your SQUID memory nano-cells and Qbit logic gates? What if we can start to operate on something more fundamental than memory?”
“I’m coffee. Right now. I’m bringing you back a ristretto. Hey, plug that in after I leave, please? Just be careful of the reverse current feedback loop if you go into the hardware piece on that back plate. It pulls a nasty bite, last time I finagled with it.” Thio bounced out of the room, his chucks squeaking the floor a bit as the door slid open to his gait.
Jocelyn screwed open the back plate, the plasma poles humming like perfect shock-blue light strings do. If I can rewire my brain, just like a computer, what can we do with something that has nascence . . . but might be uncommunicable . . . at least, how we define communication.
“Talk to me, Einstein.” She lifted some of the components out of the transducer. Einstein’s brain waves flushed in and out of lucid dreams. He was being chased by a sphinx into the ocean or something that looked like a sphinx. It was going to be a long night.
“Did you see your log?” Alex straightened up, his fingers folding. He usually did that when something serious was about to be discussed. He leaned forward. Another bad sign. RJ sat down without looking at the chair. She felt a little queasy after reaching the gravity chamber, which was odd.
“No, not since yesterday,” she replied.
Alex rubbed a hand across his mouth before squeezing the edge of his stubbled chin. He breathed in quickly and out long. “I have to tell you something. It’s not easy, and I don’t want to tell you, but I need to.” He paused. “Do you remember the mental aptitude tests we took before coming up here? They . . . put us under to check our brain-heart connection? We blacked out, then came to? Well . . . they put sensors . . . in our heads.”
RJ’s mouth slightly dropped. “You’ve . . . Alex. Seriously? You’ve gotta be “
“I’m not kidding.”
“Why are you telling me this now? That’s not okay. That’s a blatant disregard ”
“J.”
RJ stopped. Alex was the only person to call her J, let alone know her middle name. “The sensors keep track of our neural responses, keep records of atrophies, oxygen levels, brain adaptations. For our benefit.”
“Right, for our are you out of your mind?” Her voice was more upset than she had intended.
“Sorry, are you out of your mind?” She lowered her voice.
“I know you’re upset . . .”he hushed, “but it turns out that it caught something on one of our live feeds. Your . . . live feed.”Alex rustled into his back pocket, the pocket that had been home to the FATAL error screen just minutes before.
“Mine . . .” she said, a scratchy sound off of her throat.
“It’s not good, J. It’s really . . .”he tapped his fingers against the screen backing. “You should see it for yourself.” He handed it to her.
RJ’s eyes inhaled the screen’s contents. Her brain scan looked like a bunch of wired confetti, lighting up at all ends.
“It triggered tonight, while you were sleeping. And it’s been tripping alarms ever since.”
“Fatal.”One word, she said aloud, that didn’t seem to apply to her. Fatal. She was 33, alive, an astronaut, able to hold her breath for 3 minutes without feeling the burn in her lungs. Fatal.
“Tell me. Give me clearance,” she bit her lip.
Alex washed his hand over the back of his head.
“Alex, you know I know how to read these better than anyone on this thing.”
“Are you sure you want to see it? It gives readings for . . .”
“For I’m not a child,“ she felt angry for some reason.
“Time of death, cause.” Alex was clenching his jaw so tight his right temple vein started popping out.
RJ blinked. She had to know every problem had a solution.
“Give me clearance, please, Captain,” she met his gaze.
“Juniper, I cannot let you live your last moments like “
“Sir, with all due respect, if it has to be anyone, it’s going to be me. I want to know what I’m dealing with. I’ve never . . . “What the hell is wrong with me? “I’ve never seen any scan like this before.” Odd, considering she had longed for neuro work before she left medicine and had perused nearly every study out there on neurological terrain, due to her last patient’s condition.
Alex’s pursed lips and poker face gaze flinched as he pressed his palm onto the glowing screen, which chimed:
“Access granted. Captain. Password.”
“Junebug,” Alex recited, watching for her reaction to the line of thought his password might give. RJ just looked at the ceiling, trying to brace her next moves and calm her swelling emotions. Funny how there was a ceiling to this tin can they moved around unlimited spacetime in.
“Granted.” The screen chimed: “Clearance. Level. 9, 0, 4, 3, 2. Level. A, 47. Accepted.” RJ lowered her eyes to the plasma screen, the matrices of statistics flooding in.
Time of death 2 days, 13 hours, 14 minutes, 17 seconds. Cause of death neurological suture. Unknown origin. Too much gray matter stimulation. Not of hemorrhage origin. Speculative external causation. Internal backlogs, see residual charts. Recent studies related to the patient’s analysis not available.
Course of action cryo-q: cryokinetic quantum sleep induction, metastable “0” stasis. . . .
Her eyes rummaged through another tab, where all the live information on her brain was compiled. It looked like parts of her synapses were traveling through brain spaces that didn’t even exist.
Alex laid his hand on RJ’s shoulder and let it slide down to her wrist. “J, I can’t “ RJ looked up, her brain in work mode, so that her eyes had no opportunity for memories of death and fear and loyalty, but that all shook when she met his gaze. His voice took on tone for the first time: “I can’t lose you.”
“So, you know quantum entanglement, right?” Thio’s glasses gently slipped a little further down the bridge of his nose. Jocelyn’s eyebrows twitched as if to ask for the punchline of his joke.
“Right, so that’s how they’ve been seeing two places several places at one instantaneous point,” he continued.
Jocelyn kept drawing the small wire needle through a hovering hologram of a brain scan. The pixels jostled around her intrusion but bustled back together like microscopic iron pieces drawn to a magnet. “Thio, if you’re going to decide to stay there, please take a seat. You’re doing the thing you do.” Jocelyn, without looking at him, felt his posture slouch.
“Fine, I’m seated. Go ahead; I can tell you’re getting somewhere . . . Care to share?” He grinned, tipping his coffee in her direction.
“I’ve fine-tuned the anti-T3 algorithm to cross-reference processes remotely coupled to its usuals. Nothing yet. Trying to find the perfect eigenvalue rhythm because it’s not a functional or a multi-variable continuum. It seems like a biorhythm of some . . . or maybe, like a wave that oscillates back and forth into time, out of time. That just sounds stupid,” she felt her fingers tremor a little from tiredness. She put the needle down. The brain scan dizzily danced in the glisten of its own lights that spurted to and fro from one synapse to another.
“What I can’t get is—” she stopped.
Thio prodded: “Yeah, that time travel thing got me too. You know, the reverse mobius strip eigenvalue problem? That was kind of clev ”
“No you know as well as I do that that’s not how time travel works. The eigenvalues are both positive and negative inverses of each other. You’d be spliced. Honestly, Thio, sometimes . . .” she gave him a side glance.
“Oh, come on, don’t give me that look. Sometimes what? Just say it.”
“Sometimes I wish I hadn’t programmed your thought-scape to American folklore, is all.”
“Oh but how fun would I be then, huh? Jarvis has nothing on me. I’m basically human.”
“You run on coffee well enough, I’ll give you that.” She softly laughed.
“And I’m funny and wear shoes . . . but I can still calculate the problem if you give it to me, J. So, give it to me, will you? This is my fifth cup, and you know how my synaptic motor SQUIDs get when I’ve been on Italian coffee all day.”
She gave him a small smile. Thio, short for Titanium Humanoid Intelligence Off-shoot, was the fastest Quantum Computer alive. He was mildly short on creativity, except for the learners plugged in by watching American entertainment outlets. But, he had the programmed voice of her son, who she hadn’t seen for several years due to the war efforts going on far beyond her pristine lab walls. She liked Thio the way he was; he wasn’t perfect, but he was a reminder of life, outside of vocational cages, and a masterpiece of design. He was her friend or something like that.
“Mind if I take a look, J?” His eyebrows knit up in that way they did when he was concerned. “Your hormone levels are looking pretty well toward sleep, if you don’t mind me saying.”
“Go ahead, Thio. Thank you.” She stepped back from her perch and watched his eyelids close, his fingers plugging into the screen from which the hologram was projected.
Dumas came to, and his head felt sickly sweaty, like a gloss of something sticky had puttied next to his eye. He had been in the middle of the strangest scene. The earth was shifted away from his feet, and there was no air everything was off-shore, out in space, so bright. And, slow, everything was slow small rocks had scattered from him with minimal motion. He had been wearing a suit. Had he had a body? The thick feeling of a heartbeat oozed back into his sore head as he wrenched himself upright into a sitting position. He pushed his temple, and the sticky tack came red to his fingers. His head felt like it was about to rupture. Everything was cloudy. He winced a blink. The street lights that were fading away seemed to shimmer and leave their posts, like long lines of iridescent flames that morphed into real shapes, walking along the pavement. Then, it all went dark. Again. He blinked, trying to make sense of the stone or anything that could be real beneath his hands. His hands. They were engulfed, gloved, and peppered with tiny spinning rocks. He tried to twist his neck around to see beyond the deep glare that was arresting his view. Everything was slow, taxing, like fighting a dream you desperately wished to be torn from. Raw. He was being pulled along like this wasn’t his body. There was no ground. The air felt tight, like breathing cold shards that kicked back mist upon being exhaled. Something cold and hard was beating against his chest. Was that his heartbeat? “Stay. With. Me.” The voice was far away, unfamiliar, nowhere. His body felt solid, like melted metal beginning to thaw into a set mold. Was he losing his mind? A piercing feeling held him in a stitch, and he could no longer breathe. His mind wrestled against the jarring cage of a body that gave no recognition to his struggling thoughts. And, all at once, his hands, just gloved, floating listlessly through nothing, were splayed out on the ground, with the pavement gloriously solid underneath. The tiny gravel pieces were making their cratered impressions on his grip, as he lifted his fingers to make sure he could still move things attached to his mind.
“Chef,” the voice came through the window. “I’m going to start on the foie “ The beat of the voice knifed itself into silence.
“Chef? What the heck happened to you?” Caiya, the sous chef, swung through the door, still ajar. Her face froze. She drowned her next sentence, no doubt an accusatory one, due to his
behavior becoming more like a drunken man than a boss. But, she refrained. Something was wrong. She folded one of his arms over her shoulder and rustled him off the ground. Being quite a bit shorter than him, she struggled to keep him upright along the stairs, but she succeeded in sitting him down on the stool beside the stove, where the herbs overgrew their sill. You could smell the basil blooming. “Chef?”
“How many . . .” Dumas licked his lip, and it tasted like salty sand. “How many times do I have to tell you to call me Alexei?” He smiled his sweet smile, and Caiya got visibly upset and snapped out of her generosity for the day.
“I’m going to murder you if you don’t get this figured out. Do you know how long I’ve worked to be good enough for this position? And, what are you doing? In LaLa land over there, acting like it’s all fine,” she went on, grabbing things to clean, and venting like an older sibling ticked at their little brother for getting them into trouble. She wrenched a wet cloth across his temple, to which he winced.
Alexei looked down at his hands. They seemed to pulse with colors that were not the usual human hues, the blues and purples lifting out of the veins. He blinked so viciously that he started seeing black spots. No change. It was like his blood was carrying color out of and across his skin.
“Caiya . . .” Alexei watched the color shift out of his hands, and like sand in a time-keeper, it sifted into the form of a young boy.
“. . . and make the soufflé, he says . . . put it on the register where everyone can see, so we can have our fourth star, and all the people will know . . .”
“Caiya, I keep seeing things. I can’t . . . explain.” Alexei’s vision held fast to the boy, who seemed so familiar, rummaging around the corridors of his mind and his kitchen in swatches of echoed movements, like a Duchamp painting come to life.
“And, what will Chi think? He’s been . . . well, he’s the closest thing to a father you’ve known in . . .”
“Caiya,” he managed, slightly louder. The boy looked up at him, his blue eyes achingly familiar, almost like reaching into a past-looking mirror. She snapped her black-bunned head to him, but it was too late. He had slid off the stool and hit his head on the tile.
Little beeps, every few seconds, lingered loud. They started getting more frequent with their heavy notes. Fuzzy sounds around the space clung like cotton cloth to each new noise. He imagined the cold he felt to belong to a waiting room, a white space, not unpleasant but foreign. He remembered leaving his hometown, in a place like this. Cold. A little unearthly.
“Mister Stepanov . . . Alexei? Can you hear me?” The voice was some distant, bouncy echo.
“Alexei?” It tried again.
“Y yes. I’m. I’m Alexei.” He breathed, but his lungs felt smaller somehow. There were stuck-things, hard things, in his nostrils, stale but flavored like something fakely sweet.
“Very good, Mister Stepanov. How are you . . . how are you feeling?”
Alexei stared at the ceiling. The little specks started fading to black things, but not like a night sky.
“Alexei, can you try to speak again for us? That would be very helpful. We just need to run a few tests to figure out what type of incident we’re Alexei? Alex?“ the voice stopped talking, or maybe it was something else because Alexei couldn’t hear her anymore.
He was somehow calm, far away, unable to open his eyes. Trying to feel with his fingers, a sensation of cold, the type that no longer prickles, forming shocks of identification as to his placement. He couldn’t move. He couldn’t see. He breathed the air of something cloaked against his face. “We have to get them out of there. . . .” What’s happening? “There’s too much similarity between Alex’s scan and this. . . . She is our last hope to land this thing where it needs to go, and with Jayson gone. . . .” The murmurs grew faint, and so did Alexei’s heartbeat on the monitors that hummed millions of minutes away.
“Alex?” RJ’s hand shook as she touched his arm. She felt denial. She wasn’t going to die. Was she?
“I mean it, J. I can’t lose you. I can’t Nothing makes any sense to me . . . I’m so sorry. I should be more like what they’ve trained us to be than this, but I can’t. Not with you. This means something.” He gestured to the space between them, and she saw the ringed tattoo on his finger.
“You’re human. What’s wrong with that?” She smiled, saying this familiar phrase, but a tear softened her cheek as it fled her eye.
It had been an inside joke, on their second week of training. He had come second to her for the first time in one of the drills. And, she had told him that it was good to know that he was human, which he had argued internally against. He was always top in his class. But, she had soothed his sore attitude by making it a soft joke between them.
“Juniper, I want to solve this problem if we can. But . . .” He put up a finger. “Because I can’t face it if you won’t be here. I . . .”
“You’re not helping make this any easier, Alex.” She looked down and felt around the little ring on her finger. Pure titanium, able to withstand anything, but so small. Alex had asked her the question two months before they left. She continued, “You know how this mission goes. It was a one-way shot to get here, where we are now; there’s no going back to Origin. We don’t have what we need on this ship. We have capacities, but not future dreams stored here where we can plant them and survive. We need a planet, and in case I’m missing something, we don’t have one, yet.”
“We have time. We have time,” he said.
“It’s an eternal process that doesn’t tire when we do. Time. You are so . . . flipping annoying when you act like a Captain. ‘We have time.’” She mocked him, but she became quiet, almost stalling, almost serious.
“I don’t believe that, J. I once stayed up for a full week and didn’t give in to time. Time is not our master here.”
“Well . . . when have I ever let a chart tell me what to do?” RJ half-smiled.
“I won’t stop until I find a loophole,” Alex replied.
“Alex, you have to face the facts,” she tilted the screen in his direction.
“The facts are, we have cryo-qs on this ship; we have resources for years to keep you in hypersleep. We can resist this if you let us.”
“I see you’ve read the log without me, traitor.” Her teeth felt hard and tight. The mix of emotions that had been slain by years of discipline and need was surfacing like a soldered circuit board coming to life for the first time. Her eyes danced with the sheen of tears. Alex pressed his hand against her cheek, stroking hair away from her ear. “I have loved you . . . always . . . and now. So . . . what will it be, J? The easy way, or the hard way?”
“Captain. Right. If you know anything ”
“The hard way then,” they both echoed, but his voice was softer than hers.
He pushed the tablet gingerly out of her hands and into his pocket again and dipped onto his knee. Taking her face in his hands, he pressed a plush kiss into her lips. The dam holding all her emotions was about to breach. He traced his hands along her form, to hold her.
“I’ll make some coffee,” he held her close, and as his cheek brushed hers, it was damp.
“Alex?”
He turned back.
How is this going to work? “How do you have “
“Remember how I wouldn’t let you touch my bag when we were doing inventory? I wanted to surprise you,” he looked a little chagrined.
“Alex?”
“Yes, baby,” he said into the air.
“I love you. I just need to say it,” she smiled a full smile out of fear. He walked back to her, reading that smile. And, he pressed his forehead into hers. “I love you more . . . because I always win, so . . .”
The small feel of laughter sauntered from her nose in an audible exhale.
“It’s not unsolvable. Nothing ever is,” he said.
“Let’s get started, then. Tell me about my probe."
“Sir, my name is Henry McDonald. They say you’re the best in the business, and I couldn’t be more excited to be here, sir. I am so grateful for the opportunity.” The young man’s hand was hovering toward E for more time than he had seemed to be talking.
E watched Henry, like a golden retriever with a tail that wouldn’t stop wagging. Another one, wet behind the ears. Eager. At least he was smiling and not cocky like the last rascal he was shipped.
Joshua hustled over to the young pup and grabbed his eager hand in his free one. “Here you go, Hank. Take the little one, huh? Your help is much welcomed, isn’t it, E?”
E breathed out softly. “Yes, it is.” E did his part. “Welcome, Henry. Our youngest kiwi needs a strong hand. Joshua will help you get acquainted with our sanctuary.”
Henry’s head bobbed, his eyes huge as he watched the little kiwi now in his arms.
“Sir, Joshua? Sir?” Henry trailed behind him, his satchel tied to him and bulging. Joshua smiled. “Son, why don’t you come with me, and we’ll get you settled, get your . . . bag? Your bag hitched to the right spot.”
E snatched his cane from its original perch, making his way across the leaf-laden pathway that felt more like the floors of his home than inside floorboards felt to most people. He longed for something more than what today had given him, which might be odd, considering he had received such good news that continued his family’s dreams this side of Auckland. He just felt like his part of that home was missing.
“Darling, it’s beautiful. I love this idea.” Clara’s green eyes were so bright then, but he knew she felt so sick. He held her hands in his; they were so small. The drawings of the sanctuary were scattered across her bed. She smiled at him and said: “I wish for lions, tigers, and bears . . . and all of them to be home. Our home.”
It’s like her memory flooded this place, and her footsteps were still about to round the corner to him.
He pushed his fingers to his lips, tapping his cane against the wooden fence to swing it easily open. On his path, he found wallabies waddling in the meadow and his baby giraffe lazily leaning against the tree trunk they had just chopped down last week. She looked like she had intended to start a tea party, sitting quite properly there. His home felt more like sky and less like earth these days. There was so much more up there that he wanted instead of what was next to his feet.
“Mr Lockhart?” Henry’s voice punctured E’s reveries.
“Yes?” E wasn’t particularly pleased to be interrupted on his daily rhythms, but he would allow it for now.
“May I come with you on your stroll? I’d like to see how you do things . . . and . . . I will try my best to just observe . . . sir.” Henry’s smile folded in on itself, a quiet but genuine punctuation. The kiwi in Henry’s arms had cuddled itself into a doze.
E couldn’t help but give a little laugh. “Very good, then. Let’s see what she has to offer us today.” He pointed to the path ahead with his cane.
Henry nodded, and they continued through the brush.
“Why do you want to help with our Sanctuary, Henry?” E paced along, nice and slow.
Henry’s eyes lit at the sound of his name, like sympathetic magic. “Well, sir, I would like to write a book on endangered species, specifically to help people understand them better . . . and it seems like the best way to get into the business of helping things is to better understand them. At least, that’s what I think anyway.”
E pursed his lips together. “Not a bad start. So . . .” E pulled his hand across some variegated leaves. “This is our well-kept secret. Say ‘kia ora’ to Ziza.”
Henry stood as still as a field mouse that was eyeing an owl.
The lioness coolly sauntered over, and E threw his cane and his arms across the fence line.
“I’m sorry . . . Key-ah . . . what?” Henry looked down to ensure the small kiwi in his arm was far away from lion eyes, cupping a tender hand over its fluffy face.
“Kia ora means a sort of I see you, or a warm welcome to my space; you’re welcome here . . . Yes, girl. How was your morning?” E rubbed Ziza’s ears as she brushed her face across the linked fence then up to his arms. A long tongue caught a swatch of his face up to his hat, which flopped off in a hurry.
“She’s one of our non-locals. We have her to give her a fighting chance; she needs a safe place to rehabilitate before her return to Africa. She’ll be in close contact with humans, though. She’s not to be released back into the wild. She’s too well-acquainted with bi-peds, and that’s not the best for her kind right now.”
Henry, still shielding the kiwi, stepped slowly forward toward E, who rolled up his sleeves as Ziza went her own way. A quick flip, and his cane was in the crook of his arm, swinging as he walked down the lane. Henry smiled, full of wide-eyed awe.
“Sir, do you always handle animals that way?”
“What way you mean?” E asked.
“Like . . . I don’t know.”
“They’re like humans, in a way they respond to disappointments, to hellos, to kindness. I have watched animals be more humane than many . . . watched humans be more animals than humans. So . . . I treat them with due respect, and they repay in like kind.”
Henry kept pace, taking in the sights. “Sir, what’s this little guy’s name?”
“That’s Jojo. He’s . . . well, he’ll keep you on your toes. You should watch him with both eyes.”
“Kia ora, Jojo,” Henry looked back up at E, who was eyeing him.
“You ready for some of our birds? We need to return Jojo to his family and figure out where his escape hatch resides.”
Before E could turn, he caught a glimpse of something very odd that streaked through the canopies of the trees.
“Woah, Henry. Woah,” E put a hand to Henry’s chest, stopping his forward gait. Sensing the gravity of the moment, Henry froze, cupping the kiwi closer to his chest. The watery glow of sunlight filtered across the ground with rustles of leaves falling as the figure rummaged through the tree tops.
“Sir, what is it?” Henry was more startled than scared, as he tried to figure out what E was seeing. Henry was either missing it, or blind.
“Shhh . . . slowly go back the way you came. Get Joshua. Go, go,” E whispered. Henry slowed away, and E saw it for the first time a lion-like form leapt from the canopy and landed in front of him. Eerily glowing, it ruffled its wings high above its lion-hawk face, feathers layering into hair.
E froze. How could this be real?
Before he knew it, he was on the ground of his own accord; he slipped on a root as he walked toward her. The creature calmly looked him over, pawing the ground with its claws, its dewy breath sifting through his hair.
“Einstein!” Joshua’s form diffused the vision of the creature, but Einstein had already succumbed to the blackout.
“Thio . . . you remember the logs before this war?”
“You mean, The War? Those logs,” Thio more stated than asked, but it was his job to be sure.
“Yes.”
“Can I recover anymore from the servers, you mean?”
“That’s exactly what I mean,” she rested her chin on her hand, swirling her coffee around. Thio sat back, toggling with a hologram pixel he had picked out of the brain scan. “Several corrupted files . . .” his eyes seemed to shiver as he kept speaking, “Several seem to be torn from the hardware, leaving ghost trails in the machine.”
“What did you say?” Jocelyn asked.
“Ghost “
“Yes, ghosts in the machine. Can you reconstruct them? Take their fractal structures—they are fractals . . . ?”
“Kind of. More like sequences built out of necessity, some twisted from self-coupled patterns, but . . .” Thio stopped.
“Probe them for me, and let me know if they lead anywhere. Do a Rubiks de-tanglement algorithm on them. Unfold them, image mirror them. There’s a reason they’ve been . . . destroyed.”
“And you wonder why I like Marvel so much, talking about Rubik over there. J . . . You sound like you’re looking for a key in a hopeless haystack. Why do you keep trying to find out their secrets?” Thio inquired.
“Because, that’s why we’re doing this, isn’t it? The reason my son . . . I believe what I’m doing is for a reason, Thio. I need a reason that is worth some sacrifice. Otherwise, what is the point?”
Thio blinked. She was always candid with him.
“I’ve been watching Mr Lockhart his dreams. His fears, his wishes. His life. I I have no life. I have this.” She raised her arms, all of her gadgets, discoveries, lab gear. Novelty.
“You aren’t happy?” Thio tilted his head.
“Thio, I’m just—tired. I’m tired.” She pressed her fingers on either side of her nose bridge. One of her screens glowed purple, a holographic block hovering upward from the screen.
“That’ll be the search results I just requested. You’ll want to see it,” Thio sat his coffee cup down and rested a passing hand on Jocelyn’s shoulder. She, half-asleep, pulled the little pixel box to her, tapping the corner with one of her fingers. It unfolded, drifting records and phrases unfurling freshly before her eyes.
“DM Rejection — Record Status: indications of a lack of compilation data, recent networks suggesting new reconciliation subjects. Once woven into the genetic code, wreaks havoc on DNA sequencing, especially neural networks. Robust results in the neurological sector, registering de-sequencing, side-effects including neurological mutation; effects possible across generational lines. Gray matter seems to “disappear” from subject, de-linking memory and causing internal disruptions, consistent with but not limited to dysphoria, dream-like states, comatose stints, and death . . . . .”
“Thio. Thio, did you ”
“They caught it before mass hysteria broke out,” he picked up her line of thought: “Shut the Dark Sector down. Hushed it more like. It was an off-shoot of a medical partner; they believed the technology would help solve neurological disease. But, it ended up becoming the weapon that began The War. The disease they created got out. That’s why we’re seeing these—they were the last cryo-qs that survived. But, it’s odd. They’re all from different times, these two even before The War. But, all this data considers them linked.”
“Thio, you know as well as I do that DM doesn’t play with time the same way normal things do. It’s almost as if it’s outside, reverse engineering things. You know what the proposition of breaking T symmetry can do. It’s a nasty game. I imagined ”
“What do you need?” Thio’s eyes were shinier than many humans’ he was made with humanlike eyes, with genetic modifications that could sift through people like data, but kindly, if there was such a thing.
“I need . . . time.” She smiled.
“You’ve just figured it out.”
Jocelyn nodded and sat her coffee cup on top of her stool. “We’re going to need a bigger circuit breaker to pull this off. Think you can get some power units?”
Thio smiled. “I’ll see what I can do.”
“Okay, so you’re saying there’s a freaking gap between my br-ain. My brain and my mind. My mental, my consciousness?” RJ said.
“June, it’s like you have a signal network in your brain that’s linked with something else we can’t even see. And, whatever it is, it’s like it’s attacking your gray matter. A hyper deterioration.”
She looked at the ceiling. “Okay.” She nodded.
“Okay?”
“Okay, we need a way, right?” RJ combed her hands through her hair. “What about neurogenesis? Aerobic—can we have this conversation on the gravity-treads? I need to protect what I have by temporarily switching my metabolism to ketones too. I’ll need do you have anything high-fat in that magic backpack of yours?”
“Yes,” Alex replied.
“Get me whatever it is, stick it in my coffee, and hook me up to the walkies, and then we can compare notes.”
Alex was taciturn, which didn’t suit him. “You also need sleep, you know.”
“Yeah, not likely, Alex.”
“I mean it. You need sleep. Sleep deprivation is the highway to killing brain cells.” He pulled her toward him. “I need you to sleep. I will keep working on this. I promise I will put everything I have into this; you know I will.”
“How do you even think I can sleep right now?”
He smiled. “I mean, I have some ideas.”
RJ’s head rested softly on his chest, his arm wrapped warmly around her. It was tingling, but he couldn’t justify unwrapping it from her. He typed notes to each of the crew members’ personal logs to give them proper clearance-level information on the situation, along with their instructions for the time being. His eyes scaled any shred of evidence for a cure that could keep RJ from certain death.
“Are these things ever wrong?” She had asked him earlier, about the probes. Unlikely.
The suns were rising, and it had been 2 hours she had asked for 2 hours. He kissed her forehead.
The soft feeling of his heartbeat hung in her ear, which was hot from laying there so long, and there was an ache in her neck as she ran her hand across his chest. The sickening reality of her situation crashed like Tetris pieces adjusting quickly through her consciousness.
“I have an idea. It’s a small one. But, it’s an idea,” he said.
The gang sat in a circle, shocked, overcome by a useless numbness. Alex’s proposition was hanging in the air.
“I don’t like this,” Rolphe said, pacing.
“Of course not; none of us do. RJ, you’re . . . our family.” Joelle bit the inside of her cheek so hard she felt it draw blood.
“We have to try. At least before our last option. Rolphe, I wouldn’t trust anyone else,” RJ said.
“I wish Jayson were here; we’d be able to get his stem cells. He took all of them before he ”
“Not all of them,” Alex held up a unit cell.
Jayson was RJ’s twin. He was called back to Origin because of biological issues that were caught just before they set out.
“I think Jayson has the same thing I have, Rolphe. If we can’t fix it up here, he’ll have the same fate.” RJ could feel it inside her; they were connected, somehow. Some things were just outside the rules of physics.
“Just put me under for long enough to reach it, insert what you can, and we’ll see how it takes. I’ll be okay.” RJ put a hand on Rolphe’s shoulder. Rolphe’s arms were crossed in front of him, but his stern stare let way to a pensive, distressed look.
“Rolphe, talk to me for a second,” Alex took him to the side.
“How can you ask me to try this, Alex?” Rolphe whispered.
“Because it’s our only option, besides freezing her to death. I’m not sure that will even stop it.” Rolphe stepped back and breathed hard. “Give me the d%&n thing; let me see her brain scans again.”
“I need to be awake, so make sure you numb me really well,” she clapped a hand on Rolphe’s shoulder.
“RJ, if anything happens to you, I will never “
“Rolphe, you can’t do worse than 1 day and 21 hours left, you know?” RJ pursed her lips.
Rolphe’s face was serious; he had trained in emergency surgery in The War and had two cases under his belt of Neurosurgery. He was about to face his worst fear now, though operating on someone he knew and cared for.
Joelle pushed all of the clean-room supplies around to make way for the IVs and wires they were hooking together.
“You know, if I had to choose anyone from our unit, it would have been all of you guys . . .” RJ walked her eyes around to sift each face in her sight.
Each solemnly nodded in turn to meet RJ’s slow gaze.
“Alex,” Rolphe squeezed his jaw together, saying everything he could in a look that put a point on sobriety.
“You can do this,” Alex responded.
“I know I can,” he quietly confided.
Alex took RJ’s hands in his, watching her green eyes reflect the bright lights overhead. “I see you,” he said, gently.
Her concentration snapped to him, knowingly. She breathed.
“You might want to take a look at the guy I just pulled up from The War logs. Dr. Lebedev . . . Look like anyone we know?”
An image, almost identical to one of the patients frozen in “0” stasis, crystalized into view, hopping off her screen. A younger form of Alexei Stepanov.
“Is that ?”
“Descended from Alexei,” Thio nodded. “You remember the young boy you kept seeing in his dreams? Apparently, he had a son somewhere in his life, before he contracted whatever it is we’re studying.”
“So, this guy was a scientist on the medical application side, before The War,” Jocelyn thought aloud. “He was working on weaponizing, or ? Ah, says he was the progenitor of the study of Neuro-regeneration using dark matter particle acceleration to study intermediaries as bridges . . . mimics of real matter. Curious . . .”
“My ‘instincts’ tell me he was working on this when it got out of control; maybe that’s why he’s quantumly linked to his ancestral genes it’s like some sort of DNA strand that got pulled out of our timeline and re-sequenced across the ages,” Thio posited.
“So that’s why he made it here Alexei. He’s the past repercussion of his DNA’s future tampering.”
“Time doesn’t like to be linear with DM, does it?” Thio quipped.
“So, if he was connected to Ground 0 . . . what makes these others so inherently engaged with his dark sector ‘mutation’? Everything I’m seeing is that there’s some sort of connection between the ‘material’ or ‘substance’ that one would consider the soul or mind of a being and the ownership of the material body.”
“How do you mean?” Thio bit into an apple, quite loudly.
“I mean, a phantom limb sort of an extension or projection of the self that exists apart from the matter that it usually owns . . . but an inability to overcome that barrier. Or, some sort of strange pairing between the dark matter that resists parting a parasitic thing or something that has given us a key to something far more interesting . . .”
Thio kept pulling up files like a librarian of antiquities looking at photocopied records.
“Ah, here are his compatriots, or a few of them. Looks like quite a few are ‘scratched’ from the books. There’s “ Thio stopped.
“Yes?”
“Dr Grimm . . .”
Thio rarely said her name aloud like that. She peered at him. “What?”
“No, it’s “
She saw the reflection in the hologram. Her son. Her son had been a part of that experiment. She hadn’t seen him in 15 years. Of course, she hadn’t seen him in 15 years. He was always interested in medical physics. They had told her he had been missing in action, trying to save lives.
“It’s not his fault, J.”
“I know,” she knew she couldn’t touch him, but she still reached toward the pixels of his image. His tussled hair she was always trying to tame; his borderline mischievous smile that disguised a heart of gold. Everything seemed to shift into place and get wrecked all at the same moment.
“I have to stop this, Thio. We do. I can’t “ God, why did I believe them? Everything was telling me something was wrong in all of this. “So . . .” she wiped wet from her eyes. “I guess I’m next, if our hypothesis is correct?” She straightened up.
Thio watched her, waiting. “I don’t wish to confirm our hypothesis, J. It’s not sound. I can’t be certain.” His face turned almost human, worried.
“Give me something else, Thio. What else?” Jocelyn stared straight in front of her, which happened to be right into the frozen-shut eyes of RJ.
“Scanning family trees now. Give me a few moments; it will take time. Why don’t you take a walk?” Thio suggested.
“You know, I liked you better when you were circuit boards, whirring motors and cryogenic units that cooled your brain,” she smiled. “I’m joking. I’m—“ She rerouted: “Thio? Did they ever find RJ’s brother?”
“Not that my servers tell me.”
“So we don’t know if he succumbed or not?”
“No.”
Jocelyn watched RJ’s eyes rolling around inside her head. REM sleep cycles always looked so strange.
“I did find Einstein’s link, though he had a brother, whose family line traces back to Ground 0 patient logs. Looks like one of his descendants volunteered for treatments for dementia. Lowlevel stuff but enough to start a chain reaction of this.” Thio thrust his arms into the air. He felt something odd. “I feel upset. I’m going on a walk.”
Jocelyn held a concerned brow in his direction. She didn’t know how long it was until her time would be up, but nothing in her world seemed to feel the same anymore.
Alex held her as she came to.
“I’m sorry what happened?” She tried to straighten up, but she couldn’t move.
“It’s okay. It’s okay. Everything went fine. You passed out, but nothing a good hook up wouldn’t fix,” Alex’s hand was warm behind her head.
“Rolphe did a good job for once, huh?” Her eyes were still closed, but she was smiling.
Rolphe rubbed his hand on her shoulder. “Just rest, okay?”
Joelle was sitting on the floor, monitoring all of the vitals. She was relieved, smiling up at Alex.
A warm flowing feeling wakened her senses, so she opened her eyes. She was attached to Alex, sharing his bloodline. He met her forehead. “Can you do me a favor? Can you actually rest?
You’ve earned it—we have more time now.”
She heard his words just as she succumbed to a dream.
“Thio, what am I seeing?”
Everything was fuzzy.
“Here, let me you’re seeing a mirror charge; the image is switch-flipped . . . makes it easier to solve the system’s energy flux. Let me guide the lens.”
“Rylie? Can you hear me?” A woman’s voice echoed.
RJ tried to stir; nothing on her body registered her internal cues.
“It’s okay; try again. I think she can hear me her eyes stopped REM. Rylie . . . Juniper?”
“She seems to be lost in the space between times,” Thio rested a hand on the resonant energy gauge. “Are you sure we should be connecting to her like this? Maybe we should try a different way.”
“It’s like probing a soul . . .” Jocelyn was gently coaxing the neuropathway patterns that rippled like pixelated waves around the transducer.
“How do you what actually is a soul?” Thio asked.
“It’s . . . it’s like energy,” Jocelyn reacted.
“I . . . don’t think so . . . Every scan I’ve made of these isn’t like energy. It’s something . . . more fundamental.”
“More fundamental,” Jocelyn reiterated.
“Yes.”
She squeezed her eyes closed. More fundamental. “Like fundamental eternal?”
“Yeah, like God.”
“Like God,” she mocked.
“You don’t think there’s something more out there?”
“I have to go through the science, Thio. It’s strictly science,” she looked at him funny.
“What is your science telling you?” Thio sat down next to her. “Remember what you always say truth is truth, no matter what you put against it,” he said.
She laid the transducer on its rest point for a moment. “It’s telling me . . . it can’t reach what I’m after, Thio. There’s something . . . else.” She laid her hands on the cryo-q unit, where RJ resided, like she was trying to hold a piece of her. She felt like she knew these people somehow.
She couldn’t stop her thoughts: “Why is it that soul is seamlessly attached to owning something physical, but also out of time? Like when we dream, it happens in a moment, but the trail of simulated events feels like time.”
Thio watched as she went on.
“Soul has a physical component, but that’s just like the truncated part of some infinity counter term that lasts beyond renormalizing it into our sphere of what is happening now our stuff. Something is still here, within them, even though we would call them physically dead.”
“Because soul is fundamental. Life is . . . transient,” Thio answered her first question.
“Say again?”
“Soul is fundamental it’s not energy. Life, it takes energy. Entropic. Soul is what we once thought dark matter was untouchable, time-less, unchoreographed by us.”
“So, soul exists in a state beyond probing. You’re telling me I can’t touch something that I know exists?” Jocelyn knew the answer to her own question.
“Yes. Some things are like that.”
Jocelyn continued the answer: “Many things, arguably. Love. Soul. Time. Dark matter.”
“Well, not so much DM anymore, is it?” Thio responded.
“I don’t like it when you get snarky.”
“Apologies. I’m just trying to help. Maybe you need different tools for the job than all this fancy equipment, J . . . like we needed an intermediary to probe dark matter.” Thio’s head tilted. She exhaled sharply through her nose, like an exclamation on a thought.
“Perhaps you need a soul . . . to probe a soul.” To be continued