Angela and Ramses stared at the sky after Mateo left, even though they
obviously wouldn’t have been able to see him floating around up there. They
themselves floated in the water for around ninety minutes until Ramses’
device beeped. The satellite module was up there, and starting to scan every
brain in the world. It will take a little bit of time, but he programmed it
with a threshold. Each scan will look for the most generalized data first.
They’re not hunting for someone of an exact age. They’re looking for someone
with an ungodly number of years of experience. The scanner doesn’t have to
look very deep into someone’s mind to see whether they’ve been around for a
lifetime, or several lifetimes. To be safe, he placed this threshold at a
hundred years. Yes, it will find people who are 110 years old, but that’s
okay, there still shouldn’t be too many to sift through, and once they have
their dataset pared down, they will be able to run more detailed scans to
tease out the specific person that they’re looking for. They don’t know how
old Meredarchos is, and they don’t know how old Erlendr is at this moment,
but it’s well past a century, and in all likelihood, the scanner will come
back with an error when it comes across a single brain with two
consciousnesses.
The two of them hit their emergency teleporters, and returned to the lab to
watch the data come in. They would focus their efforts on North America,
since the entity has only been spotted here, but that’s not how the scanner
works. They’re not in control of whatever satellite the module managed to
latch itself onto. It’s going to make a pass at a rate according to its
speed of orbit, and will scan as many minds as possible before it passes out
of range. Then it will make another pass and try again. It will do its best
to filter and ignore duplicates, but the tradeoff in the cursory glance is
that it won’t always know whether it scanned a given individual yet. Still,
napkin math suggests that the process will only take a day. It takes half a
day. It’s morning.
“There, that’s him,” Ramses announces, waking Angela up.
“Are you sure?” Angela asks.
“It has to be. This is the second time the scanner has seen him. It’s
returned an error, because it can’t rectify the unusual brain chemistry,
just as I had hoped and predicted.”
Angela picks up her phone, and dials. “I’m calling Kivi.” Arcadia is the one
who picks up. Apparently, the tactical team is not too far from where
Meredarchos and Erlendr are hiding out in San Diego, but they’re all pretty
far from where Marie is being made comfortable at a hospital in Chicago. She
hangs up. “I believe Mateo.”
“What do you mean?” Ramses is still looking over the data, making sure that
there aren’t any other outliers, who might actually be who they’re looking
for.
“He said that the Vertegens gave me immortality water, and that they gave
each one to me in order. Do you know the order?”
Ramses sighs, and peels himself from the screen. “Yes.”
Angela waits for him to elaborate. “Go ahead.”
He sighs again. “You need Catalyst from the early waters of Earth, Longevity
from Atlantis, Time from the island of Lorania on Dardius—which is in
another galaxy, by the way, so I’m not sure how the Vertegens would have
pulled that off.”
“Keep going,” Angela urges.
“Assuming you drank those three, the next one you would need is Body from
the Atacama Desert, Existence from the Bermuda Triangle, Invulnerability
from the North Pole, Energy from the Dead Sea, Youth from the Fountain of
Youth in Florida, Death and Health from the Pools of Pamukkale, and...”
“Go on, don’t stop now.”
“And for any of these to become permanent, you would have to drink Activator
from the last liquid water on Earth before it’s destroyed. Earliest estimate
of that is a bolide impact on par with the Theia collision, which created
the moon, which could happen anywhere between now and never, followed by
solar expansion in over seven billion years.”
“So you’re saying there’s a chance.”
“Angela, you can’t save Marie by sticking yourself in the Insulator of Life.
You would have to put, not just your mind, but also your body in there, and
we don’t know how Meredarchos did it. We don’t even know if what you do can
affect Marie at all!”
Angela goes over the lockers, where an extra set of tactical gear is just
hanging there in case of emergency. “Fortunately, we find the Insulator, we
find Meredarchos, so I’ll just ask him.”
“You won’t be able to get to San Diego in time,” Ramses warns. “The
government team is already right there.”
“That’s why you’re gonna give me an injection of temporal energy. I know
that you collected rocks from the Atacama, which you squeezed water out of.
Don’t I need that one anyway?”
Ramses isn’t happy about testing his new formula on a living organism, but
he doesn’t have much choice. Yes, he took rocks from the desert. Each one
has oxygen and hydrogen trapped inside, and a process called electrolysis
allows a scientist such as himself to extract both. The results can then
theoretically be recombined to produce water, which he did. It is a
painstaking process, and he needed a lot of rocks to make even one vial of
the stuff, but it tested positive for temporal energy. It’s Body water,
through and through. He unlocks one of his cabinets, and then lifts the
bottom up to reveal a small refrigerated safe. He unlocks that with a
42-digit code, and retrieves the syringe. “Have a seat, I’ll get the rubbing
alcohol.”
Once the injection is in, Angela finishes putting on her gear. She offers to
take Ramses with her, but he decides that someone needs to stay at home
base, which makes sense. So Angela teleports alone, all the way to the tack
team’s location in Chula Vista, particularly to Kivi’s position. Best guess
is Meredarchos and Erlendr are aware that the team is hot on their trail,
and are trying to make a break for it across the border to Mexico. It’s hard
enough for normal authorities to cross for official business, but when it
comes to covert operatives, you can forget about it. It’s now or never.
“You shouldn’t be here,” Kivi whispers.
“I’m better trained than you are,” Angela either informs, or reminds, her.
She can’t remember how much she’s talked about her experiences in the
afterlife simulation.
A voice comes in on the radio, “spotter, report.”
“No visual yet,” Kivi reports back. “We have an addition who will be
assisting with capture.”
“Understood.”
“She’s just letting me join the mission without question?” Angela asks.
“She’s been told that we have unusual skills and knowledge, and access to
rare or unique resources. She’s been advised to expect people like you
showing up when the situation calls for it, and assumes that you’ve all been
properly vetted. It’s a pretty great group,” Kivi says, putting the
binoculars back in front of her eyes. “I know that you’re worried about your
sister, but please try not to ruin it.”
“I’m not here to get the Insulator back to my sister. I’m here to get in,
and prevent her from ever getting sick.”
“I don’t understand how any of that works, but—” She interrupts herself to
speak into the radio. “Visual on the target. I repeat, I have a visual on
the target.” A man has just rounded the corner in the vacant park. He’s
struggling to walk, but not because of any disability. He’s acting like half
of him doesn’t really want to go in that direction. Maybe that’s exactly
what’s happening. If Meredarchos and Erlendr are evenly matched, psychically
speaking, it may still be difficult for them to agree on a course of action.
That’s good for them.
“Light ‘em up,” the leader orders.
“No, you can’t kill him,” Angela argues, getting to her feet. “I need him to
tell me how to use the Insulator.
“Stop,” Kivi demands at a loud whisper. “She means to target him with a
laser designator.”
It’s too late. Angela stops herself from heading towards the man, but her
cover’s been blown. He looks up, and spots her. He takes a gut out of the
back of his pants and tries to aim it at her, but something stops her. That
doesn’t really make much sense. At worst, both Meredarchos an Erlendr want
her dead, and at best, they don’t care. Either way, nothing should be
holding them back.
“Go, go, go!” the leader orders. “Blitz formation!”
Seven other people come out of the woodwork, and begin to run towards their
target, holding their own guns. He tries to aim at any one of them too, but
he can’t hold his weapon at anything but the ground. He yells, frustrated
with his own inadequacy. The team overwhelms him, so he tries to invade
their minds, but he’s shocked to find that they’re all impervious to his
psychic powers, thanks to a little mental masonry on Arcadia Preston’s part.
Two operatives place him in cuffs while a third searches his bag.
“Do you see a small glass greenish-blue object in there?” Angela asks.
“This right here?” He takes the Insulator of Life out.
“Yes.” Angela takes it from him and shakes it in front of Meredarchos’ face.
“How do you get in this thing physically? It’s only supposed to be able to
store consciousness, so how do you do it? Tell me!”
“I have no idea.” He kind of looks like he’s telling the truth, but that’s
not good enough.
“Tell me!” she repeats.
“I honestly don’t. I didn’t even know that wasn’t how it was supposed to
work,” Meredarchos claims. “She’s the one who put me in it in the first
place.” He jerks his head towards Arcadia.
Everyone looks at her. “I don’t know what he’s talking about,” she tells
them.
Kivi nods understandingly. “You haven’t done that yet. It’s in your future.”
“I must figure it out eventually,” Arcadia realizes. “The problem is that
could mean this very moment, or a hundred years from now.”
“Marie doesn’t have that kind of time,” Angela complains.
“Then let’s give her more time.” It’s Leona. No one noticed her appear, and
they don’t know where she’s been, or what she’s been up to, this entire
time. “I suspected as much as Mateo did regarding the water, and I’ve been
working on a backup plan.”
“What might that be?” Kivi asks.
Leona doesn’t bother answering her. She brings Angela into a hug, and
teleports them both away. They land in the underground lab where Leona
worked before the government provided them with their own facility at The
Lofts. Angela looks up in awe at the huge spaceship towering above them.
“Welcome home,” a woman says, approaching them.
“Whoa. What are we doing here?” Angela asks.
“Angela Walton, this is Magnus Petra Burgundy. Petra, Angela.”
Angela shakes Petra’s hand. “It’s nice to meet you.” She faces Leona. “What
am I doing here, LeeLee?”
“This is how we save Marie. What you need is time. Time to...procure the
necessary ingredients for her recovery.” She eyes Petra, who clearly doesn’t
know everything about what’s going on here, though she didn’t bat an eye
when they appeared out of nowhere, so she doesn’t know nothing.
“The Insulator was a bust,” Angela laments.
“I know. That was probably never going to work. That’s why I’m giving you
this.” She gestures towards the ship. “This project has not been officially
abandoned, but when the government started focusing on homeland grid
integration of fusion power, space exploration ended up on the backburner.”
“How does that help me? We already have Time water from Dardius,” she says
through gritted teeth. It doesn’t matter much. Petra can hear, but isn’t
familiar.
“You’re not going anywhere, per se,” Leona begins. “You’re going on a loop
to and back from the Oort Cloud. For us, months will pass, but for you,
around six hours. This is regular special relativity at work, no time powers
necessary, just profound speed.”
“Is this going to work?” Angela questions.
“We can’t let the earlier water that you drank break down in your system.
This is the only way.”
“Am I going alone?”
“I’m going with,” Petra says, “as will a crew of experts. You’re in good
hands.”
Angela is nervous, but she trusts Leona’s judgment. “I guess I’ll see you on
the other side then. It’s ready to go, right?”
“We’ve been in a holding pattern,” Petra explains, “but the countdown
started as soon as you showed up. Follow me.”
All three of them take the elevator to the entry level of the ship while the
silo blast doors are closing. “Shouldn’t you stay out here?” Angela asks
Leona.
“I need to pick up my husband. I can’t teleport all the way into orbit, so
I’m going to hitch a ride, and then bug out before you break orbit.”
Hmm...he’s alive?
They continue walking through the corridors until reaching the seating area.
Carlin and Moray are playing a card game with two other crew members. Angela
exchanges a look with Leona, but they don’t talk about it. This may be the
safest place for them. After the countdown reaches zero, they launch into
space, much to the surprise of everyone in the world. Shuttles don’t launch
from Kansas City.
Several hours later, Marie wakes up in her hospital bed feeling much better.
No comments :
Post a Comment