CHAPTER 18
“Do you believe in God, Ronika?” John asked, clinging to her waist from the back of his scooter. They were on their way back to her apartment to pack some clothes and equipment before leaving for Longboard Key. John had told Ronika of his mother’s offer for her to stay with them until the ordeal was over, and the news had made her overwhelmingly pleased.
Ronika was piloting the scooter again for their ride home. John didn’t want to mention it, but lately he’d been feeling less resolute against the watch. Jumps had been taxing before, but the last two in particular had taken a real and visceral toll on him.
“God?” Ronika called back to John over the rushing wind. “Thinking about taking up an ancient Egyptian belief system?”
John laughed. “No, no, I was just curious. We’ve never talked about it before.”
Ronika thought for a few moments before answering. “Einstein once said to imagine a child walking into a big library filled with books written in different languages. The kid can’t read or understand anything she sees there, but she knows that somebody wrote them. She also doesn’t understand how the books got there, but knows that somebody brought them, and that somebody ordered them on the shelves.
“Einstein said that’s how humans are with the concept of God. Yes, the library is there--you’re standing in it--but no matter how long you sit there looking at it, you’ll never have the brainpower to understand anything other than the fact that’s it’s been organized by someone, even if we don’t get exactly how. The lack of chaos proves the existence of something greater than ourselves, but doesn’t bring us any closer to understanding what it actually is. I guess that’s how I look at it, too.”
“I would have also taken a simple yes or no,” John said. They both laughed.
“Even science nerds don’t like yes or no questions,” she replied.
“Why are people always quoting Einstein anyway?” Kala asked.
“Something about E=mc2, I think,” Ronika said.
“Which, incidentally, is wrong,” Kala grumbled.
Ronika pulled the scooter up to her apartment. As she dismounted, John slipped from its back, knocking the scooter to the ground on top of him. Ronika ran to him and offered her hand to help him up. Once safely back on his feet, she carefully lifted the scooter back onto its wheels.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
“Yeah, sorry,” John replied. “Just lost my footing for a second. I’m fine.”
John brushed the dirt from his jeans and walked toward Ronika’s door. She unlocked it for him and watched him move straight past the entrance to her couch where he flopped his body lifelessly upon its cushions.
“Tired?” she asked.
John leaned his head back and closed his eyes. “Just worn out.”
“I’ll just be a second, okay?” she said. “Let me grab some things and unhook my equipment. I can hook it up to your machine once we get to your place, right?”
John muttered something into the pillow beneath his head as Ronika disappeared back into her room.
“John,” Kala said.
“I know what you’re going to say,” John replied, his eyes drooped closed. “I know, I know.”
“I understand your frustration at what’s happening, but this is like a shot at the doctor. You can sit there and squirm as much as you like, but you can’t leave the office until you deal with the prick.”
“And you’re that prick, huh?”
“Actually no, my lab is the prick. I know you don’t want to hear it, but it’s the only way to save us both.”
“I thought we agreed not to talk about this anymore.”
“Your body is degrading, damn it!” Kala yelled. “The next jump may kill you.”
“Yeah? And why do you care? Are you trying to protect me or your own escape plan?”
“Both! Listen to me, even if you survive, you’re in no condition to run from the Advocates. Think about how hard it was back at full strength! Now you’re banged up, bruised and broken, passing out three times a day uncontrollably.”
“I can manage.”
“Do you not think it odd that they never showed up for you in the desert? Something is happening, John. It’s getting dangerous ... and it was dangerous before.”
“Maybe they gave up.”
“Highly unlikely,” Kala said. “Not giving up is commandment one for them. This game is over. It’s time to end this. You need to leave denial!”
“We just left de Nile,” John said airily.
“Great, now you’re getting punchy,” Kala grumbled. “Listen to me while you have the wits about you to understand. This is the time for decisions, John, right here, right now. It is beyond unwise to risk a final jump. There’s too much at stake for you to senselessly try to enjoy a final twelve hours of freedom. Do you want to see your mother and Ronika again? Waiting a few years is better than never being with them again.”
John lifted his head and lightly slapped at his cheeks with his hands. He shook his head side to side and opened his eyes. “I’m feeling better,” he said.
“If you aren’t lying, it’s temporary,” Kala replied.
John took a deep breath. “Okay,” he said. “You’re right.”
“That was never in question,” Kala stated. “The question is whether or not you’ll finally take my advice.”
“What if you’re lying to me?”
“Lying about what?”
“About me dying,” John replied. “What if on the last jump, the watch would just teleport without me attached to it, or something? Someone before me had to have gotten it off somehow, and they didn’t have your special little tool.”
“True,” Kala said, “but assuming the person before you was who I think it was, then that person is highly intelligent and probably figured out an alternate solution. No offence.”
“That still doesn’t address whether or not you’re lying.”
“This is true,” Kala admitted. “All I can say is that I’ve lied about nothing thus far, and other than an admittedly strong motive, you have no reason to think that I’m telling you anything but the truth. I’m not a ‘bad guy,’ John; I’m just one more casualty of this awful situation. All I want is my freedom. You don’t even have a concept of what thirty years is yet at your age. I think I’ve been fair with you thus far.”
“You have,” John admitted. He dropped his head to the cushion behind him. He dreaded what he knew he was about to say. He’d been dreading it since pulling out the watch’s knob for the first time. “Alright. I’ll do it.”
“Good. Finally,” Kala said. “Do you remember the numbers to position the hands or do you need me to give you them again?”
“I’ll need them again, but not yet. I want to explain my choice and what’s going to happen to my mom and Ronika at the same time. We’re heading over to my mom’s place now. I’ll tell them, then I’ll get the numbers from you, and then I’ll set the watch before the next jump. Alright?”
“Fair,” Kala said quietly. “I hope you can see that this is a wise decision that you’ve made.”
Ronika came back into the room a moment later and slid onto the couch next to John.
“I’m ready,” she said.
“So am I,” John replied.
John and Ronika pulled up to his short, blue house by the sea half an hour later. Because Ronika had to drive, John had been recruited to wear her large pink backpack, stuffed to its seams with clothing and gadgetry. The backpack was taller than John was, rising above his head at least fifteen inches. Its extra height made the straps strain against his shoulders as the wind pushed against it. He’d told Ronika that he felt like a poor version of the Beverly Hillbillies. She hadn’t understood the reference.
John dismounted the scooter and groaned as he lifted the bag from his back to hand to Ronika.
She took the pack from him and easily whipped it around onto her back. “Wimp,” she joked past a quick smile.
They made their way quietly across the dew-dampened lawn to the front of his house, surprised to find its door half open.
John looked back at the driveway and saw his mother’s small sedan still parked there. “That’s weird,” he said quietly to himself. “But I guess she’s still here.”
“Mom?” he said loudly, dropping a foot into the house. There was no answer. “Hello?” he called again.
Ronika slid past him and was the first to notice the living room. She stood still in the doorway as she scanned the scene, her motionless body blocking the entryway.
“What is it?” John asked. He looked to Ronika and followed her eyes to the room in front of them. He ran past her.
Signs of struggle were obvious. The small wooden coffee table in the center of the room had been knocked onto its side and the TV Guide magazines that had been stacked on top of it were now strewn across the floor, looking as though they’d been stepped upon. The large couch behind the table was standing firmly in place, but a large, damp, brown stain, probably tea, was splattered across its left cushion next to where John’s mother usually sat. The television across the room was unbroken, but turned to the side and moved to the edge of its stand as if someone had hastily slammed into it. Three small blots of blood were settling into the carpet beneath it.
“Mom?” John yelled, growing more panicked than before. Ronika’s eyes welled with tears as she looked around the room, hearing the fear in John’s cry.
“They took her!” he yelled, turning back to Ronika, his chest huffing in and out. “Those a*sholes must have taken her. Why would they do that? How did they find her? She has nothing to do with this!”
“Kala!” he yelled at the watch. “Where is she? Where is this company you were telling us about? We have to go after her. They can’t have gotten far.” He began to pace back and forth, taking only one step each way before turning again. He repeated the motion over and over, fuming anger and fear from his body with each heavy step. The sudden, jerky movements made him dizzy and the quick, sharp breaths churning in and out of his lungs made it worse.
“I don’t know, John,” Kala said in quiet shock. “I don’t know why they would take her anywhere, let alone where they would take her. I could understand them questioning her about you, maybe--if they could even find this place--but kidnapping her? I just wouldn’t know what the point was.”
“To get to me, to find me. To make me come to them,” John said sharply.
“If they knew you were coming, then why wouldn’t they just wait for you here? Why try something so theatrical and risky?” Kala replied.
“I don’t know!” John yelled. “Stop being so damn logical!”
“John,” Ronika said softly and slowly, “I don’t think they took her anywhere.”
“Of course they--” It was then that he saw one part of one side of a foot resting by a chair in his mother’s bedroom down the hall. The rest was hidden from his view behind the corner of the doorway.
John stopped pacing and closed his mouth. He leaned slowly to his side toward the hallway, revealing a wider view of the foot he’d seen and the leg to which it was attached. He saw the glint of what seemed to be a thin metal wire around the leg’s ankle, binding it to the chair leg. Everything in his narrow view was painted in blood, and nothing was moving. The foot, he knew, belonged to his mother.
John closed his eyes and brought his hand up to his mouth. Ronika and Kala remained ghostly quiet as John slowly inhaled. He released the first breath quickly, making room for another.
At first, the air he breathed quivered him, as if a cold snap had rushed suddenly through the front door behind them. He could hear nothing but the rhythmic sound of air entering and exiting his body; it was the noise of raking leaves. With each breath he took, John’s breathing shook him less and less until finally not shaking him at all. With the quaking ended, he opened his eyes and dropped his hand back down near his waist and walked slowly toward the bedroom.
Ronika watched the scene from behind John’s couch, adhered in place, frightened to move. As John advanced toward his mother down the hallway, time slowed. The room melted and changed, morphing and reforming into scenes from her memory.
She was suddenly sitting alone on a small metal chair in a hospital waiting room. She was in her apartment’s galley kitchen, halving her favorite recipe to cook for one. She was lying in bed, watching the digital clock on her nightstand for hours as the seconds and minutes changed.
She never saw her father’s death, only those moments after when she’d first noticed the solitude it had brought her. She witnessed only those moments that had haunted her, and haunted her still, reminding her of the gaping hole that tore across her days.
John reached his mother’s bedroom and closed the door behind him. The sound of the door against its frame shattered Ronika’s visions and brought the space back to John’s living room.
Ronika washed over the back of the couch like putty and ended prone across its cushions, her head in her arms and crying. She cried for her own loss, but mostly for John’s, and those moments of remembrance that were sure to follow him every single day after this one.
She wept for ten minutes more until John came back to the room, wet-faced and quiet. She did her best to wipe the fluid from her eyes, sit straight, and be strong for her friend. The charade was transparent, even to Ronika, but she knew that someone had to try.
“She ... ” Ronika began.
“She’s gone,” John replied solemnly.
“How ... ” Ronika mustered, “How bad was--”
“She’s in one piece,” John answered. “But it did look like, well, her fingers were--”
“Someone was asking her some questions,” Kala worded for him. “And, it appears that she wasn’t interested in answering them.”
Ronika bit down on her arm, understanding his implication. She looked at John’s dead expression, then spied a tissue, carefully folded, in his right hand.
She dropped her forearm from her bite, leaving small indentations in the skin behind it. “What is that?” she asked, gesturing at the tissue.
“I don’t know,” John said. “She was holding it.”
“She left you a note,” Ronika said optimistically. “What does it say? Wait, sorry; you don’t have to read it now, or at all, or to me. You know. It’s yours.”
“It’s okay,” John said. “I’d like to know. It’s just the last thing she’ll say to me, and I didn’t want to be looking at what happened to her when I read it.”
John opened the tissue and bit down on his lip. Ronika watched his breathing weigh heavier as his eyes panned across the note, shaking and convulsing again. His eyes must have run across the words five, ten, a hundred times. A small stream of blood ran down from his mouth from where his tooth pressed against his lip.
“It’s not from her,” he finally said. “It’s from them.”
Ronika sprung from her seat and slunk up behind John. Slowly embracing him from behind, she looked over his shoulder at the note. It had been written with his mother’s eyeliner.
SEE YOU SOON.
John crumpled the tissue and threw it to the ground. He lightly removed Ronika’s hands from around him and left the house by its front door. She waited a few minutes in the living room before following him out.
She found John sitting against the wall of his small, bricked front porch, arms crossed around his knees and staring out ahead of him to the darkness of the road past the lawn. She sat across from him in the same fashion, keeping silent.
She wanted to help him, to find some magical combination of words that would ease his pain. She wished she knew anything about making this easier for him. She didn’t know what people were supposed to say and do now, as there’d been no one to have said or done anything for her when her own parent died.
Except for John, she remembered. He was the only one. What did he say? I don’t even remember. That’s horrible.
John finally spoke. “It’s not the time for grief. I can’t shut down now.”
Ronika sat quietly, worried that responding might lead his next decision. He needs to decide what to do now by himself.
“I want to bury her, but it’s just not realistic. The neighbors will snoop soon, I’m sure. Then the police will come and take care of the body. Ronika, you can take the house. There’s only one thing for me to do now.”
John stood, but only for a moment before his knees wobbled heavily, and he collapsed to the ground, breathing shallowly and suddenly unconscious.
“John!” Ronika exclaimed. She moved over to him quickly and lifted his head from the welcome mat where it had fallen. She placed it in her lap and ran her fingers through his hair.
“No!” Kala yelled, “Not now! You! Ronika, you have to put in the numbers while he’s out!”
“This isn’t the time for your scheming!” she yelled back. “He just lost his mother! He’s unconscious!”
“That’s the ‘thing,’ though. The numbers are the thing,” Kala tried to explain. “The one thing he said he had to do now. That was it!”
“Forget it,” Ronika said. “I can’t believe you’d ask me to just screw him over. Especially now!”
“Ronika, listen to me. Why do you think he said you could have the house? Does that make sense? And what else could he have been talking about when he said there was one thing to do?”
“If that’s what he wanted then he would have told me,” she said.
“But he just decided! Inside, right before he found his parent! He told me!” Kala protested.
Ronika’s voice was cold and grim. “How convenient.”
“You have to believe me,” Kala said, panicking. “Look at him! He can’t even control his consciousness anymore! He’s going to die. Even if you don’t believe me, you’re capable of coming to the same conclusion of inevitability. Put in the numbers, you must!”
“No,” Ronika said quietly, looking down at John. “The only way I’m sure I’ll lose him is if I send him to you.”
“You don’t--” Kala started frantically. Ronika took John’s hand and depressed the knob on the watch’s side, dispatching the hologram immediately.
She stared down at John in the new quiet and began to cry again, raining her tears down onto his face like a storm.
She moved her hand to his cheek and smoothed the water from his face. “I don’t want to leave you here,” Ronika said to him. “But if I don’t set up, I can’t give you Mouse on the next jump. I’d set up here, but ... ” She looked back toward the house. “I just can’t be here, John. Not alone. I can’t. I’m sorry. I need to leave so I can be with you.”
Ronika stood and hooked her arms beneath John’s. She carefully pulled his body into the small foyer and leaned him against the wall there. Then she thought about the note he’d found in his dead mother’s hand. See you soon, it had read. What did that mean? she wondered. She realized that she couldn’t leave him alone here either.
“Fine. We’ll stay, but we’re going back outside,” she told John. She lifted him again and brought him back outside to the porch. After propping him up in a seated position, she walked back inside.
Ronika traveled to the kitchen and saw a box of teabags labeled Samurai Chai on the counter. There was a mug in the open cabinet above the sink. She reached up and took it, noticing an over-used Hang in There! below a picture of a dangling cat on its surface. She filled the mug with water, then poured it back out into the small instant boiler next to the refrigerator.
While the water reached boiling point, Ronika reached for the box of tea bags. It was almost empty. She moved the last bag of Samurai Chai from the box into the mug and waited for the boiler to finish. Thirty seconds later, she emptied the bubbling water over the bag. While it steeped, she searched through the drawers beneath the countertops. Soon, she found what she was looking for, a large serrated knife.
Four minutes later the tea was done, and she brought the mug and the knife back out to the front porch. She sat next to John, knife in one hand, mug in the other, and waited for 3:14.
April 1st, 1974:
Felix sat stunned in the black, wheeled office chair at his desk, unable to so much as consider sleeping. He hadn’t yet worked out every detail, but was extremely confident in at least one of his hypotheses: The company was sealing its laboratories shut and leaving their operators inside when they did it. It had made so much sense once Felix had figured it out that he’d become angry with himself for not noticing it prior. Why would a company so secretive that they built a facility far beneath the Earth’s surface trust a twenty-something with knowledge of their existence or the ability to recreate what discoveries they’d made while in the labs?
Of course they don’t let the scientists free, he thought.
His head swam with the indicators he’d missed: the gross amount of food and water stores, the special sun-lights and oxygen processing; even Calendar was a breed of tortoise known to live upward of a hundred years. The worst of it was that Felix sat with the knowledge that he’d delivered himself willingly to the cell meant to entomb him.
And for what? Money? A six followed by a string of hypothetical zeros on a piece of paper? Who knew that so many nothings would actually add up to nothing?
An hour after realizing the truth, Felix let himself calm. He sat crouched on his knees with his back against the wall, oblivious to when he’d left the chair and crossed the room.
Having exhausted panic, Felix calmly decided to force his frantic emotions into practicality, trading his guilty self-loathing for proactive reasoning. He looked to his side and saw the painting of the man at the airport. There was no one waiting for him on the surface, but that didn’t mean he wanted to spend the rest of his life in a concrete prison. The time for looking to past mistakes was done; he needed a plan to get out of here.
The watch had been an obvious first thought for escape, though after mere moments of consideration, Felix judged the option unrealistic. With the amount of information he knew about the company, and even more so now that he’d seen the doors, he was sure that they’d come after him if he tried to leave.
A company that goes to the trouble of kidnapping and imprisoning its scientists would certainly have contingencies for escapees. After all, they were dealing with those whom they believed to be the smartest people on the planet--smarter, even, than they. Furthermore, all of the device’s real-time location data streamed from a tiny emitter buried deep within its circuitry. If he were to use the watch to get away, the company would immediately know to where he’d traveled. Even if he dropped the watch upon arrival, anyone hunting him would have a solid idea of where to start looking for him while Felix would have no money, direction, nor knowledge of the area.
No, they have to think they’ve won. There are no cameras in this lab; if they think they’ve got me, they’ll never know to hunt me.
The safest possibility, he concluded, would be to leave the laboratory after they’d sealed it.
It wasn’t long before Felix had calculated the only escape option viable. He would need to clandestinely create a second watch alongside the first and use it once his own door disappeared. The main difficulty, of course, would be requisitioning the necessary components from Karen without arousing suspicion.
Felix stood from the floor and rushed to his workstation, throwing open the drawers of his inventory, looking for anything already in his possession that could be used to clone the Diaspora. His best chance at going unnoticed would be to ask the company for as few components as possible and ask for none that couldn’t be explained by claiming constituent testing or repairs.
The first thing he found was the full watch casing that had been given to him for comparative spatial logistics. He’d originally used it for judging size and spacing when choosing new components. It was perfect. Felix looked down to his wrist, removed the leather watchband from his own watch, and laid it next to the spare casing on the table. He had the vessel.
Felix continued to search through his inventory, finding only a few assorted pieces that could be used, or that could be made to be used. In the final red drawer of storage, he found a small plastic bag filled with circled wires sitting on top of an assortment of bolts and cords. He lifted the small, translucent bag out of the drawer by its top and sighed.
The wires in his hand were the first he’d ordered from the company eight months ago. Each was approximately as thick as human hair, and Felix had initially spec’d them as such when first commissioning their creation. They were the only component that had been specifically manufactured for his project and had also been the cause of the only chiding Felix had received since his work had begun. When he’d told Karen that the wires he’d asked them to produce weren’t going to work, she’d done little to hide the annoyance the company felt at having taken over thirty days to specially manufacture useless product.
Per his original idea, Felix had first installed and activated the hair-thick wires before requesting the new ones, but initial testing had showed that increasing the number of wires and reducing their thickness by half would reduce the energy required by its user by forty percent.
Without using new wires, as he’d tried to explain to Karen, the device could potentially cause bodily harm or death if overused. She had grumbled, but eventually relented and told the company to produce a new, thinner set. The Diaspora currently in Karen’s possession held the new wires, while the old ones had been left for Felix’s overage inventory.
I’d only be using it for one jump, Felix told himself. The risk should be minimal.
He placed the oversized wires down next to the empty watch face, band, and other components he’d scavenged. Using the thin black marker from his coat pocket, Felix began to compile a list of everything else he would need to make the Diaspora’s twin. The list ended long, and after its completion, Felix assigned dates and a note to each item for when and how he’d ask Karen to bring them to his lab.
For a moment, he stopped writing and considered the idea of simply telling Karen that he’d figured it out. Perhaps he could make twin devices and they could escape together.
Too risky for her, he thought. Who knows how she’ll react? She needs to make her own decision about leaving this place. But maybe I can do something else in the mean time.
Felix opened the red drawers of his excess inventory and began to remove a new set of items: a thin, metal optical cavity, assorted colors of circuitry wires, a breadboard, two thick metal disks, two large circular mirrors, a small jar of gallium arsenide, a handful of small steel clamps, a power cable, a soldering iron and sponge, and finally another small plastic bag filled with tulip seeds. He lifted the bag in front of his desk lamp, allowing light to shine between the contents. He smiled.
Felix loved working with seeds. His first major breakthrough as a scientist had been made through DNA tests performed on the same type of tulip seed he now held before him. Ever since, he’d never undertaken a project without making sure to have some on hand, just in case. They were more than a good luck charm to him; often, they were actually practical. He’d asked for the seeds from Karen on the second day of his stay in the facility. He was hoping she didn’t remember.
April 2nd, 1974
It was almost 8:00 A.M. the following morning and Felix still hadn’t allowed himself to sleep. Instead, he’d occupied his time with a small project, something to keep him awake and busy while his mind cycled through the endless possibilities and contingencies of his escape plan.
Felix had thought again and again about trying to tell Karen his plans at many times throughout the night.
Just enjoy the time that you have with her, he imagined a fictitious friend would advise him. He’d never found any comfort in the ephemeral and saw nothing beautiful about never seeing Karen again after two years. But as much as he didn’t want to leave her, he knew that it was much too risky to tell her the truth.
It could cost me everything, he’d reminded himself throughout the night. Her as well.
Felix had finally come to the conclusion around 4:00 that morning that if Karen was to be involved in any way with coming events, she’d have to be the one to approach him, not the other way around. It would be the only way that he could be sure of both her resolve and the ultimate safety of his escape.
Felix snuck a finger beneath his protective eyewear and pulled a hardened piece of sleep from the corner of his eye. The substance had been creeping into his tear ducts all night, tugging on his eyelids and reminding him of how tired he was.
Tomorrow night I can sleep, he told the small green fleck on the tip of his finger. And I don’t need the discharge of some vestigial second eyelid to interfere with my vision before then.
Felix flicked the mote across the room and returned to his project. In front of him stood a metal cylinder, nine inches in height. Two sides of it were open, revealing a spacious view through its inside. Two mirrors had been placed at the top and bottom of the machine, and between them was a thin plastic tube containing a shiny, powdered metal. A few circuit boards hid beneath the bottom mirror, serving as a point of connection for the two cords running into the cylinder: one a typical power cord, the other a blue and white multi-pin male input.
The door across the room whirred open. Karen approached him from the entrance, her eyes refusing to make contact with Felix’s.
“Good morning,” she said as she reached his workstation. “Here is the device.” Karen placed the metal box containing the watch onto the tabletop.
“What is this?” she asked coldly, noticing the small machine Felix had built since last she’d been there.
“Karen, I--” Felix began.
“I don’t want to talk about last night, Dr. Kala,” she interrupted, looking toward the ceiling. “I would appreciate it if you would refrain.”
“I wasn’t going to,” Felix replied honestly. “I was going to ask you to sit so that I could answer that question.” He gestured to the small black stool on the other side of the table where Karen normally sat during his exhibitions.
“Oh,” she said. “Good.” She sat at the table and examined the small device with her eyes. “I’ll ask again, what is this?”
“I’ll show you,” he answered quietly, a thin smile on his lips. He opened the metal box that Karen had brought with her and removed the watch from its inside.
“Watch,” Felix said. “No pun intended.” Karen’s expected giggle was decidedly absent.
With the quick turn of four tiny screws, Felix opened the back of the Diaspora, and carefully removed a coiled blue and white cable from amidst the circuitry. He connected it easily to the cable coming from the cylinder he’d built the night before. Nothing happened.
“Well?” Karen asked.
“It will probably take a few minutes to warm up. And this might help.” Felix found the end of the cylinder’s power cord and plugged it into the plated socket in the floor. The cylinder emitted a slight buzz while a faint blue light appeared between its mirrors. Karen raised her eyebrows at Felix, unimpressed.
“Patience,” he assured her.
“While we’re waiting for that to do whatever it is that you think it’s going to do, why don’t we go over your requisitions,” she said, pulling a large, thick folder from under her arm and dropping it to the surface between them. She looked up from her paperwork and made eye contact with Felix for the first time since the night before. The buzzing from the cylinder became louder.
“Well? What do you need me to bring you tomorrow?” she asked, uncapping the pen she’d pulled from her pocket.
Felix sighed, annoyed with her composure. He’d known that this morning wasn’t going to go smoothly, but hadn’t expected sheer frozen denial.
He pulled his list of the components he needed from the notebook located in the shallow table drawer beside him and listed each one to her. Karen nodded and wrote them down on the form in her folder, failing to notice the one suspicious component that he’d slipped into the middle of his list.
“Is that everything?” she asked.
“Look,” Felix replied, shifting her attention to the buzzing cylinder. The dim light from before had become intensely bright, filling the machine completely as if it were water in a jar. The buzzing halted abruptly and the machine began to run eerily silent.
“That’s what we were waiting for,” he said. Karen looked into the small core of bright light. It was beautiful, and there was something within it, shadows behind it that seemed to dance against the glow. She looked through the light to Felix and, for a moment, saw him much older than he was now, speaking to someone, but muted past the machine.
“Don’t,” Felix said, breaking her trance. “In my experience, it’s easy for people to be drawn toward quantum fields, but what you see through them is often inaccurate. They can give the impression of foretelling the future, but there are no secret truths or answers there. You can sometimes see things on the other side as older or younger, infantile or dead. None of it is relevant, but the brain dictates a person’s reality, and the brain trusts the eye.”
“I know,” she said defensively, averting her eyes from the field. “At first, I just wasn’t sure what I was looking at.”
“Then you probably also know,” Felix continued, “that the effect occurs because everything and everyone exists in different states simultaneously. And that, of course, is the theory behind this watch.” He raised the Diaspora into his hands, careful not to disconnect the cable. “The device doesn’t actually make you teleport; it simply changes your state. Do you want to use it to travel to China? Well, you’re already in China. You’re simultaneously at every location you could be. All this device does,” he said, placing it carefully back down onto the table, “is force you between those states. And because an entity can’t perceivably co-exist in two states, the user appears to disappear from where they started.”
“Yes, you’ve said the same in your reports,” Karen replied. “But I still don’t understand what this thing is that you’ve built. A quantum field generator? Why?”
“While looking through the field can cause odd visual apparitions, physically touching or entering it can cause an actual change in state. If you can understand that you exist everywhere at once, then you can also understand that you exist every when at once as well. At this exact moment you are an infant, a teen, and an aging senior, all at the same time. We only perceive the young, beautiful version of you because that’s where our perceived realities intersect with each other. That’s the constraint and function of time.”
Felix looked past the light to Karen and saw her as she’d been at sixteen: short and pimpled. He chuckled quietly to himself and continued.
“Quantum fields such as these have no interaction with linear time, so entering them will cause each state to exist simultaneously, even in our reality. But because we can only perceive one state at a time, as I stated before, we can actually take something and give it the appearance of aging or regressing. When we remove it from the field, that illusion becomes what we then perceive as reality. Are you still with me?”
“I believe so,” she said quietly. “But isn’t this dangerous? Can’t we cause some form of paradox that risks the entire fabric of space and time?”
“Rubbish,” Felix said. “Hollywood stuff. It’s the same as time travel. You can’t actually create a paradox even if you were to affect something. Everything we do, even outside of an open quantum field, is causing major implications everywhere in the universe. Think of your life as an infinitely complex spider web. Each strand in that web represents a different path. One strand might have you elected President; the one beside it has you wearing red shoes on a Tuesday.
“Your life, as you know it, is a dewdrop sliding down the web. Time is gravity, pulling it across the strands. Which strands will it travel across as it falls? Everything from which country wins a world war to how much butter you put on your toast yesterday effects the drop’s direction.
“Now, imagine the same web for everyone and everything in the universe. And to make things more complicated still, imagine them all intersecting with each other at different points. There’s exactly one point where every other web intersects with your own, and that’s the reality that you’re able to perceive at any given time. If consequences follow our use of this small quantum field in front of us, then the change would be as unperceivable to us as the consequences caused by someone sneezing in the U.S.S.R. Are we changing things by opening this field and playing with it? Of course. Are there world ending repercussions? No.
“Now, the reason for all of this.” Felix took the small bag of tulip seeds from his pocket. He carefully spilled a few onto the table and lifted one from the group with a long pair of steel pincers.
Slowly, he moved the seed from the table into the blue light of the cylinder. Karen watched as he released it and saw the seed remain supported within the light, floating buoyant within it, bobbing and warbling against its energy. Felix removed the pincers, and Karen looked in amazement at the tips of the tool, now rusted and bent. As Felix set the pincers down, its powdery tips crumbled from the handle.
“The seed, not the tool,” Felix said quietly. Karen quickly returned her attention to the glowing cylinder. The seed’s movement had intensified since she’d looked away.
She moved her face closer to the light as the seed coat shook and split open at its center. What appeared to be a small white tentacle emerged from the newly created opening in its shell. The tentacle, now more obviously a root, twisted and turned, soon joined by other smaller roots both beside it and on its sides. Then: bright green, shooting out tall from a white base, curving around itself like soft, curled paper. The thin spiral leaves grew taller and taller, unfurling and expanding outward to the height of the machine.
Felix sat back in his chair and watched the scene unfold with an equal intensity as Karen, but focused his attention on the beautiful woman sitting across from him and her reaction to the flower instead of the machine. He’d already seen his own parlor trick many times in the past, and watching her face light up, as his own had many years ago, was much more rewarding. Then, he saw her smile.
I knew you were hiding that somewhere, he thought, victorious.
The leaves and stalk had finished growing and a small yellow bulb was now showing from the top of the leaves, as a child peering above the edge of its blanket. The petals expanded outward in a burst before settling into a rounded cup shape.
Felix detached the power cord with his foot and placed his hand beside the machine. As the blue light faded from the cylinder, a newly formed tulip dropped lightly into his open hand. He spun it once quickly between his fingers and offered it to Karen, still in shock from the accelerated growth. She looked apprehensively at the tulip before her and moved her eyes above it to Felix. He nodded reassuringly.
Carefully, she took the flower by its stem and lifted its petals to her face. She breathed in heavily through her nose.
“It smells real,” she said under her breath.
“It is real,” he said, pleased with himself.
She lightly placed the flower across her open folder on the table in front of her.
“Why did you do this?” she asked, looking down at the tulip.
“You said you missed the plants,” he answered.
“It’s not for the device? You built this whole machine just for this flower?”
“Yes.”
Karen sat across from him, motionless, staring down to the beautiful yellow petals in front of her. She closed her eyes. Felix watched intently as her brow began to furrow and her lips began to pucker. He‘d seen this face before. It was the face she’d made before crying on his couch last night. She was going to cry again, and this time he would comfort her. This time he would hold her and speak to her, he’d tell her that everything would work out in the end, and that she didn’t have to be scared of the feelings they shared. This time, he was ready.
Karen slammed her folder closed, crushing and flattening the tulip between its pages. The noise jarred Felix to attention.
“Listen to me, Felix,” she said, her eyes dry and fixed upon him. “I cannot do this. You have to stop. We can’t be friends, and we can’t be more. There are things at work that you cannot understand. This is the last time you’ll see me. I’m transferring labs. Good luck with the device.” She stood and slipped the folder underneath her arm.
“Wait,” Felix exclaimed, slamming his legs into the table as he raced to stand. “What do you mean, another lab? Are you leaving the facility?”
“No,” she answered, walking to the exit and refusing to look back as she spoke. “I’m just working with a different scientist and project. It’s better this way. If you see me in the hub, don’t say hello.”
“Karen,” Felix called to her against his better judgment.
She paused briefly, standing still, looking forward, allowing him a final sentence.
“Maybe someday,” he said, “when we both get out of here, we’ll meet on the surface and things can be different.”
“I doubt it,” she said quietly. And then, she was gone.