Started with Errors (Relative Industries Series Book 2)

by Joanna Beaumont

  He’d get bored waiting for her. He’d get attention elsewhere. The thought of him with another woman made her feel desperate.

  Their first flight, a passenger drone, shuttled them from Area 5 to Brize Norton. Travelling beyond Area 5 was safest by air. Auto trucks delivering food into the New Cities were frequently RF jammed, which forced them to slow down, and then they were easy pickings for the raiders. When the food trucks were hijacked it didn’t matter how many credits you had. Food rationing began. The New Cities could sustain themselves for a few days but after that, it was usually canned and dried food and that’s when the sense stimulator, the SS5000, came in useful.

  The aerial view over the New Cities gave Lana feelings of hope and dread. She wanted to help change things for the better, but what if she couldn’t?

  She remembered the news broadcast from outside and imagined what life must be like for the children. What did they hope for? It must be hell for them. Life before the war was difficult enough for families. Parents with a job worked every hour in fear of losing it, but those without had to accept the state-guaranteed salary which for some was an admission of uselessness. What use was free time without money to travel, without money for hobbies? Decent wages brought dignity to lives—and choices. And while fearing for their jobs, climate change had prompted the New Cities development program. The pending doom overwhelmed most, so when the scale of the infertility crisis was finally revealed, three sides of the doom triangle were in place. The conditions were perfect for a raging fiery inferno.

  After the war the new government blamed the old government for the lies and inaction. But by then, an intolerance had been nurtured and allowed to thrive. Security was demanded, and in the New City compounds guards with machine guns provided security from the people outside and guards with machine guns provided security for the people inside. And mostly, it worked.

  By 2060, just eighteen months after the war started, those who agreed to the terms and condition of transfer were evacuated into the New Cities.

  Lana never knew their way of life was so fragile.

  Air pressure blocked her ears, and she’d had little sleep through the night.

  They should be arriving at Ascension Island soon. It had been a while since the captain announced they were flying over the equator and they should look out for the RI space-elevator rig.

  Ten minutes to landing.

  As the old plane began its descent, she could make out the vehicles on the line they’d followed since passing the space-elevator rig. The line was a bridge to and from the equator.

  She gazed at the still blue of the ocean, but it offered her no calm. She had the security clearance, but the thought that her fake identity could be discovered caused waves of anxiety to oscillate through her body. They would eventually pass like they had done before, and she would continue with her lie like she had done before. But holding Callum at a distance wouldn’t be easy.

  From his seat across the aisle he nudged her and pointed towards her window. “There it is.”

  His voice sounded muffled to her pressure clogged ear.

  She turned to her window, and the aeroplane tilted towards Ascension Island, giving her a good view of RI’s magnificent sprawl.

  And there it was, the island just south of the equator occupied by Relative Industries.

  A smaller central ring building formed from smooth metallic sheets and windows glistened in the morning sun. A larger ring building connected at the north point, and a domed building connected at the south. And the bridge they’d followed from the equator finally terminated.

  “Can you believe ten thousand people work inside Zone 12?” Callum asked.

  “Which is Zone 12?”

  “The biggest!”

  The plane descended rapidly, and she grabbed the chair’s arms. They landed after two bounces, and the whoosh from the brakes overwhelmed the noise from the dying engines.

  The plane slowed to a stop, and the engines cut out. The metallic pop from hundreds of releasing seatbelts rang out through the cabin, and Lana unbuckled her own.

  Now she didn’t want the journey to end.

  She retrieved her bag from the overhead locker and trundled down the aisle with it.

  The plane doors opened, and the heat from the outside rushed to greet her.

  At the top of the steps the hot dampness hit her face, and she caught her breath before stepping down.

  The runway’s concrete surface rippled with heat. The air was salted. The sky was blue. She might forget who she really was here, but then the angst reminded her again. It rushed through her gut as loudly as the waves crashing on the nearby shore.

  Chapter Eight

  Daylight flooded the huge vaulted reception area inside the Zone 0 building and offered little respite from the burdening heat outside.

  A line had formed at the reception desk, and Lana and Callum queued with the other new arrivals alongside a rope barrier.

  On their right, a long table had a range of refreshments. Callum left the line to get orange juice. He held a glass up and nodded at her. She shook her head at his offer. Orange juice was a luxury in the New Cities. She wouldn’t normally say no, but she felt too nauseated from the flight to drink anything.

  One of the three women behind the counter beckoned Lana forward.

  “Any screens or storage devices?” she asked, efficiently and unsmiling.

  Lana slipped her folded flexi-screen from the pocket inside her bag, placed it on the counter and tapped it. “This screen has my research on it. I need it inside.”

  The woman slid the screen towards her and handed Lana a round token with a number etched in gold.

  “The screen stays here. Bring the token back when you leave. Did you get the implant at home?”

  “No.”

  She pointed to a camera, high-up on the wall behind her. “Look at the camera, please.”

  Lana looked up at the camera. She didn’t feel like smiling for a photo. The woman took her notes from the last six months away, but she was too worried about bringing attention to herself to protest too much.

  She wished she’d taken the juice now. She imagined spewing orange on her while gulping down the burning rancid acid leaching from her stomach.

  The woman interrupted Lana. She was still looking at the camera with a pained, ready to spew, expression.

  “Thank you. Follow the others. Retrieve your pass from the table,” the woman said.

  Lana joined another queue, slowly moving towards a table positioned at the entrance to a meeting room.

  She leaned against the white-washed wall and dropped her bag, now devoid of screen, to the floor. She turned and watched Callum being processed. How could he look so good after travelling for almost eighteen hours? He’d rolled up his shirt sleeves. He looked cool, unlike her, and his buzz cut was perfect for this climate.

  He joked with a woman behind the desk, and she was acting coy.

  At thirty, Callum was five years older than Lana. He was a pre-thirty-five. They should be enemies.

  He could be with a pre-thirty-five woman if he wanted to be and have his own children. But those children would be post-thirty-five. And having children knowing they could never conceive, knowing they were the last of their kind, not everyone wanted to burden their children that way.

  The woman behind the desk threw her head back like a neighing nag and laughed loudly with Callum. She handed him some paperwork, and before he signed it he glanced at Lana and smiled.

  Lana guessed he’d not had to give up his screen like she’d had to. He could be very persuasive and could win people over in the most fraught situations. She considered what he might have said to her.

  He approached Lana with a carefree smile, swinging his bag.

  Lana looked at the woman behind the desk, disapprovingly. The woman briefly met her eyes—so much for the sisterhood. Fortunately, Callum had a back-up of her research on his screen.

  “Winning friends and influencing people?
I think she’d be interested in end-of-the-species sex.” She glanced at the floor. She shouldn’t have said that. She was supposed to not care.

  “Maybe she would. But I’m not, not with her anyway.”

  He gave her a lingering look, and Lana felt heat rush to her face. She deserved that. She smiled.

  “At least they didn’t give us the implant,” Lana said.

  “I had it at home.”

  “You had the implant?” Lana asked.

  “Didn’t everybody?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “How did you get into work?”

  “I used my pass.”

  Lana nodded in the direction of the woman behind the desk. “Did she ask if you’d had it?”

  “No,” Callum said, turning to look at the woman. The woman smiled at him. “I think I distracted her.”

  Lana felt a twinge of jealousy. She was surprised he’d had the implant. Maybe she didn’t know him that well, especially if his head could be turned that quickly by another woman. She focussed straight ahead, relieved she hadn’t told him about her past. That could have been a disaster.

  “You put a copy of your research on my screen, right?” he asked.

  She nodded. He wouldn’t get away with flirting that easily.

  “You okay?”

  She shrugged.

  At the table inside the entrance to the meeting room they searched for their access passes. A white card clipped to the underside of Lana’s pass had Bus 2 written on it.

  While walking inside the meeting room Lana fixed the pass to her shirt.

  A woman with long dark hair, dressed in a pink trouser suit, stood next to the podium. She watched them find seats and sit down. The man standing next to her wore black trousers and a white shirt. He glanced up before fixing his eyes back on the screen in his hand.

  Lana recognised him as Alex Hamilton. She would know those eyebrows anywhere. What kind of relationship had he had with her sister? Lana got the feeling Paige liked him, a lot.

  “Hello and welcome to Relative Industries. I’m Meda Shore, the CTO here. You are here today for one reason—to make the world a better place.”

  The room applauded.

  Someone shouted, ‘Yeah!’ and fist punched the air.

  Lana leaned towards Callum. “No pressure then.”

  Callum raised his eyebrows and smiled.

  “Let me introduce our founder, Alex Hamilton.” She stretched her arm out towards Alex.

  Unmoved, Alex continued watching the screen in his hand.

  “Alex Hamilton,” Meda said again, that time louder.

  “Oh, okay,” Alex said.

  “Way to motivate,” Callum whispered. “I hope I never come across like that.”

  “You don’t.”

  A still with the Relative Industries logo appeared behind him, and Alex started speaking.

  “The collective will to survive has pushed technological advancement to an unprecedented level. In 2053, when the global threat to our species was first identified the government decided to use my company’s recent discoveries in science to their own advantage. Now in RI, nine-years-later, with significant help and investment from our Five-Eyes friends—”

  A ‘Yeah!’ sounded from the audience again.

  “Many of whom are here in this room today. We have developed the ability to knit the fabric of spacetime itself and have created zones of relative time here on the surface of Earth.”

  A film started on the screen behind him. “At the quantum level there is no nothingness. What we speak of when we think of nothing is the lowest energy state of nothing. And the lowest energy state of nothing is something. It is the stem cell for all matter.”

  Lana felt her eyelids drooping, either her fatigue catching up with her or sheer boredom. She startled awake.

  “With no need to rely on mass, be it positive or negative to distort spacetime. We can create any geometry we choose. If we could orbit a black hole, we would experience a slowing of time just like someone inside one of our deceleration pods would. They would witness everything outside the pod in either fast forward or a blur depending on how slow—”

  A man in the audience stood. “Alex! Alex!”

  “Questions at the end please.”

  “Are you saying Relative Industries could create a black hole?”

  “It is possible, but that’s not going to happen.”

  There was a collective inhale from the audience.

  “Look, there’s a risk you might get run over stepping outside your door in the morning. Or how about the use of nuclear power? We’ve been willing to take that risk for decades. We mitigate the risk, and desperate times call for desperate measures.”

  Nobody could argue with the level of desperation.

  “If we’re going extinct, we should go extinct trying not to, right?”

  Wide-eyed neighbours turned to neighbours, deciding now was the time to ponder the potential undesirable side effects associated with manipulating spacetime.

  The nervous chatter showed no sign of abating.

  Hearing those brutal words from Alex, someone important, someone with influence, made the prospect of extinction feel closer than it ever had felt before. Tears welled in Lana’s eyes. She bit her lip and held her hand out to Callum.

  He took her hand. “What a tosser! Don’t worry. Do you still want to go in Zone 12?”

  She plunged her nails into her palm and blew out her breath. If RI created a black hole that would be the end of them, of Earth, of everything. She stopped the tears falling and gave Callum a sad shallow nod.

  The conversation rumbled on.

  Meda’s lips had pursed into a tight line, and she scowled at Alex. The hostility between them was on show for everyone to see.

  Alex pointed at another member of the audience.

  “Can we use the technology to travel back in time?”

  “This is a question I am asked frequently. The answer is no. Everyone in our zones, be it time acceleration or time deceleration, are travelling into their future. Reversing entropy is not possible.”

  “Alex, with all due respect the existence of the multiverse is well established in the scientific community. If copies of our own universe exist in different time-rate zones, i.e. with different rates of entropy, then there is every chance I exist at age 10, age 80 and every age in between in separate universes right now. And so if I exist at every point in time then if I visited Paris when I was 10 and Florida when I was 80. I am here and in Florida and in Paris at the same time by virtue of the fact I exist at all points in time at the same time. Quantum entanglement is a practical demonstration of the principle of non-locality—”

  Alex interrupted her. “Which is the case for all superpositions. So let me put it to you. What value would there be in seeing a past you have already lived? And would you want to know your future when it cannot be changed?”

  “We should at least try to send a message to our future selves and take advantage of the vacuum correlations to see if we can change the future for them. Give them a message inside a quantum time capsule!”

  “Do you think anyone would listen to a message from the future? Wouldn’t that person be labelled a crackpot?”

  The room fell silent. They waited for the woman to respond. Lana wasn’t sure if she would want to know the future if it couldn’t be changed. Any person with such wild claims would certainly be labelled a charlatan.

  “I can assure you no one inside Relative Industries knows what the future holds,” Alex said.

  He looked innocent but sounded insincere. How did he manage to do that? He was a strange man indeed. Paige must have seen a different side to him.

  “Everyone working on climate change will work under Meda. There are lots of interesting projects in here. We have an anti-ageing one Meda is particularly fond of. Meda is actually over a hundred years old.”

  Meda turned to the audience, shook her head and feigned a smile, obviously annoyed with Alex’s tau
nt. Lana thought he had to be joking. Meda couldn’t be a hundred years old. She looked mid-forties at the most.

  “And I’ll be looking after everything else. I’m sure you’ll see me around. Please make your way outside. The buses will take you inside Zone 12,” Alex said.

  “I hope we don’t,” Callum said.

  Lana took deep breaths. Now she had to worry about being found out and a black hole.

  She loosened her tight grip on Callum’s hand, and he balled and un-balled his fist.

  Chapter Nine

  Lana boarded the bus that would take them inside Zone 12.

  A woman in a black jumpsuit was sitting in the front seat. A screen rested on her lap, and a pile of envelopes were stacked precariously underneath it.

  Lana waited to be acknowledged while the woman scrolled up and down the list of names on the screen. Then she spoke to the top of her head.

  “I’m Lana Underwood. Am I on the right bus?”

  The woman looked up at Lana, and her screen almost slipped from her lap. She grabbed hold of it just in time.

  Lana gasped when she recognised the woman. Beth Jackson worked at RI.

  For a few moments they were both frozen and speechless. Now would have been a good time for that black hole.

  Beth looked the same as she always had. Brown wavy hair just past her shoulders, clear skin with freckles and blue-grey eyes. However many years she’d worked inside RI, she hadn’t aged.

  Lana rounded her eyes, willing Beth to keep quiet, to behave normally, to lie for her.

  “I’m Beth Jackson. Let me check to see if you’re on the right bus.”

  Beth’s face had drained of colour like she’d seen an apparition. She nudged the pile of envelopes resting on her lap. They slid off and scattered about her feet. Lana dropped to her knees and helped Beth scoop them up.

  Crouched on the floor with their faces only inches apart, their eyes met, and Beth gave Lana a single, shallow complicit nod.

  Lana rose, and Beth sat up.