Will’s face flushed crimson. The sudden display of anger snapped Adan out of his memories.
They’ll be okay, he told himself. Most of the Welkin survived. And Gavin said they were going to some place safe.
“Why couldn’t he make the connection?” Will slammed his fists on top of one of the barrels.
“He said they were using some other channel, that he couldn’t connect to their minds. He had to use something called an oscillathe instead,” Adan said, surprised he remembered the unfamiliar name.
“Hmm, he swore he’d never use that.” Will huffed derisively. “At least that’s one lie of his I don’t regret.” He motioned towards the canvas sacks, “Sit down, compa. Let’s save some time and you can just share the memory with me directly. I want to know everything.”
Right. A mental exchange. Adan was more than willing to allow his mind to drift back into that serene mental landscape he had recently discovered, a place where pain and death were mere concepts and ideas. They sat down across from each other. Adan opened his mind once again to his friend. As they met, he turned his thoughts back to Gavin’s visit. Everything came pouring out in a torrent of memory.
“So Gavin is going back to Oasis,” Will said as the memories finished.
It had not taken long, but Adan felt drained by the mental exchange. Perhaps it was just that he was still recovering from the blow to his head, but he thought it more likely was something to do with the memories themselves. He was still struggling to make sense of them.
“Do you think he’ll be able to stop them?” Adan asked.
Will stared intently at the extractor. “I don’t know. He is a Developer. But something tells me that whatever he does, it won’t get rid of the real problem: the Developers themselves. If they’re allowed to stay in control of Oasis, they’ll come after the Welkin again. We’re the only ones who can stop them.”
Adan rubbed the back of his neck, massaging out the stiffness. “Right,” he said, but inside he still wasn’t sure.
“At least he brought us back the shifter,” Will said. “I need to stay up for a little longer and make some more almamenth and supplies for the journey. You go on to bed. You’ll need your strength for tomorrow.”
“You’re sure?”
Will nodded and headed over to one of the salvage barrels and started pulling out scraps.
Adan went back to the shelter. He stretched out on the empty canvas sacks which served as his bed. He tried to sleep, but his mind was too consumed by what had happened with Gavin. Something in him felt like he had to unravel the mystery behind the strange visit.
By the time Will turned in much later, Adan was still wide awake, thinking. Will placed the shifter and the box housing the extractor on some shelves by the door. Adan didn’t say anything, He didn’t want to burden Will with questions he probably couldn’t answer anyway. Instead, he waited until he could tell Will was sound asleep. Then he arose as quietly as he could and felt in the dark for the small box that contained the extractor.
In the absolute darkness of the shelter, he reached inside and felt the smooth hard metal of the device. Gently, he slipped it around his neck and lay back down. He knew the data inside had originally belonged to Gavin. If there was anything more in there about this enigmatic man, he wanted to find it out.
And so, there in the middle of the night, he let his mind be carried away by the memories he found in the extractor, visions from Gavin’s past. Not all of Gavin’s memories were in the device; and even if they were, there would not have been time to explore them all. But he allowed his mind to drift through Gavin’s thoughts and linger on the ones that caught his attention.
Mostly, he was searching to find out why Gavin had left Oasis. He wanted to know if he had really tried to stop the remapping like he’d said, and if so, what had led him to make that decision. It didn’t seem possible that one of the scientists could have broken rank. They seemed too uniform, too similar to imagine one of them defecting.
As images and impressions whisked by, he settled in at length on a series of memories that seemed to be what he was looking for. Though there was no true space inside the mental world, these felt clustered together in some way. As his mind soaked them in, the memories solidified and became more real, as if they were happening to Adan himself instead of Gavin. He felt what Gavin felt and saw what Gavin saw. In a short time, he understood this man in a far greater way than he had ever understood any other person. Stepping inside Gavin’s world, Adan pulled away from his own thoughts, living inside the complicated and conflicted mind of the Developer who left Oasis, left everything, to come out to live amongst the people of the Vast.
A group of scientists in silver lab coats sat around a long metal table. Most of them looked remarkably similar because all but two of them were based off the same generational map. Everyone stared off, glassy-eyed, their minds caught up in a mental conversation.
“Cut it off, we’ve seen enough,” came the mental command of Darius, the Developer in charge of the meeting, and one of the two who looked slightly different. Darius had white hair and keen eyes. His face was noticeably shrunken and wan. Eleven other Developers, including Gavin, sat in a circular row of chairs in the Command Center.
As Gavin let the trace fade, he could sense doubt and disbelief in the minds of the rest of the Developers.
“How can this possibly be a malfunction?” he put the question before the others. “I’ve retraced the algorithms hundreds of times and they always give the same result.”
Darius paused uncharacteristically. Though the others probably missed it, Gavin could tell he was anxious not to make him look bad in front of the others.
“It’s not your calculations which are off, Gavin. It must be the algorithm itself.”
“You yourself stated in your abstract that it utilizes sub-rational paradigms and the non-standard event model,” Val shared his thoughts. He was a scientist who specialized in viand transfer, but who knew a little of time-mapping theory. “But those approaches have been completely discounted. They must be the source of these…anomalies.”
“But the review committee approved the project,” Gavin protested. “You knew the direction I was taking my research in.”
“I assumed you would simply dismiss them and move on to more proven methods,” Leif commented. He was a data aggregation expert who should have understood what the chronotrace was capable of. “If we had known you were taking this line of investigation seriously, I’m sure we would have canceled the project long ago.”
“I think Gavin should keep working on the chronotrace,” said Malthus, the Developer sitting next to Darius. He was the other Developer not based on the primary generational map. His dark hair and beard made him stand out even more than Darius. Though not a researcher himself, as the head of security, his opinions carried a great deal of weight in the Collective, even in scientific matters. His spoken voice shifted the others out of their mental link. Malthus often chose to break out of esolace communication, preferring ordinary conversation. It was inefficient, and an inconvenience, but no one objected. With Malthus’ vast amounts of military experience and tactical expertise, he was far too valuable to bother over this little quirk.
“So you think this depiction from the storm is authentic?” Cyrith asked. He sat on the other side of Darius. As head of the Institute, he held a place just as prominent as Malthus in the Collective. In fact, he and Malthus were responsible for the creation of the somatarch forces vital to the city’s protection. Gavin had actually used some of Cyrith’s methods for zoetic modeling to predict the actions of intelligent agents in the chronotrace.
“No, I don’t, actually,” Malthus said. “But I still think the project has potential. Gavin just needs more time to work out these mistakes.”
“It wasn’t a mistake,” Gavin insisted. “If you’d just allow me to walk you through the algorithm, I could show you—”
“That won’t be necessary,” Darius said in clinical tones.
“We’ve spent too much time going over this already. We have our own research to attend to and maintenance plans to go over for the upcoming flat-line.”
Gavin gave a defeated nod. Why don’t they see the importance of this work? This invention could change everything for the Collective…if we survive.
The Developers rose from their chairs and filed out, but Darius motioned Gavin aside.
“I’m sorry I could not support your findings,” Darius lamented. “You know it is nothing personal.”
“You taught me everything I know—do you really think I would make this sort of thing up if the research didn’t bear it out?” Gavin searched Darius’s mind for hidden motives, but his thoughts were too focused and narrow. Darius usually kept a tight rein on them, even with those whom he worked with most closely.
But Darius’ concern for his protégé did come through. “You are a memorant first and foremost, Gavin. That is what we need you to focus on. If the chronotrace interests you, I won’t oppose you continuing the work, but I agree with the others that these sub-rational parameters are not the right approach.”
Gavin thought about pressing his case, but he knew Darius well enough to know it would be no use.
“Fine. I’ll just keep testing it.”
Darius gave him a slight nod and walked through the doorway. Gavin did not follow, but turned and gazed at the chronotrace sitting in the center of the room. He knew what he had seen in the trace wasn’t a mistake. He had to convince the other Developers somehow that what he had seen there was real. If he didn’t, Oasis could be lost.
Gavin knew he was risking everything by pursuing the chronotrace research. If he continued to incorporate the sub-rational in his work, continued to press the case for the reality of the supernatural, it would only be a matter of time before they equalized him. The Developers had no place in the Collective for such things. He had taken a great risk in even showing his evidence to them at all. But he was so convinced they would be persuaded that he had decided to take the chance. The evidence was undeniable. How could they not see it?
There had to be something he was missing, something that would make them see the truth. And he had to find it before it was too late. For the hundredth time Gavin opened up his mind and entered into the scene the chronotrace had recorded a few days before.
Twenty-Four
The Miasma Channel
Gavin stood calmly in the midst of the seething storm. Sheets of sand blasted the outskirts of Oasis one after the other. Several atmos generators were gone, ripped from the ground by savage winds. Though the effects of the whirlwind were everywhere visible around him, he felt none of its power. It was a mere re-creation of the chronotrace.
Time flowed in reverse as he replayed the trace to see what he might have missed. A mangled atmos generator whipped past his head and landed back into its housing in the ground. Dust swirled past like curtains of coarse, dark fabric, but Gavin could see right through them via the enhanced sight afforded by the device.
Eventually, the dark shape appeared at the edge of the storm. This is what he was looking for.
It floated in midair, unaffected by the winds around it. It was human in shape, but twice the size of an ordinary human. Its skin glistened like mercury. Strips of some sort of radiant fabric clothed its body, but they neither swayed nor rippled in the shear winds. The figure passed through the waves of stinging, slicing debris without a scratch.
It was the most beautiful—and terrible—being Gavin had ever witnessed. He had played back the trace many times and, though it was only a projection, he never got past the sense of dread when he saw it. Blazing shafts of light streamed from its eyes, raw energy smoldering inside them. Gavin had the feeling he was seeing some forbidden mystery, something he was not meant to see and could not comprehend.
The trace came to an abrupt stop. The device had overloaded at that point and failed to map any further events from the storm.
Gavin knew the sudden appearance of this being could have been the product of a malfunction in the chronotrace, despite the soundness of his calculations. But he had not asked the Developers to believe in the authenticity of its appearance based solely on this trace alone. He had also shown them the memory he’d extracted from Illiud, the one depicting the exact same being he'd witnessed in the chronotrace.
In his memories, Illiud had called it an eidos. At first Gavin believed Illiud’s vision of it must have been a hallucination. But its appearance in the chronotrace changed everything.
Illiud believed the eidos was a messenger sent from Numinae, the supernatural being whom the Welkin believed to be the creator of the universe. As outlandish as that conclusion was, over time Gavin had surrendered to it as the only one which fit the facts. Nothing strictly natural could have walked through a storm like that unscathed. Not even the wind had affected it.
When Gavin had shown Illiud’s memory to Darius, he cut off the replay before the creature ever spoke, but Gavin doubted it would have made any difference. It had been too much to ask the Developers to trust the memories of a Welkin. To the Devs the Welkin were nothing more than blank andros, a word used to refer to people without a bioseine and who lacked the generational map the Collective was based upon.
But Gavin had come to realize they were not sub-human. He had studied their thoughts and memories too long to believe that lie any longer. And he knew that Illiud’s eidos was real. The fact that two independent sources had corroborated the same phenomena should have been enough to convince the Developers, but it wasn’t.
What more did they want short of a direct manifestation of the creature itself? Even then he wondered whether or not they would accept the truth.
How he wished they had. Because there was more at stake than just the validity of his research. The words the eidos had spoken to Illiud terrified Gavin. The message was some sort of prophecy—a word of judgement from Numinae.
“The blood of the dead who have been trampled underfoot cries out for justice,” the eidos declared in a soundless voice which penetrated directly into Illiud’s thoughts. “The skies shall fall upon that city of iniquity and destruction shall walk its streets. But if the people of that place should repent from their wickedness, Numinae will stay his hand. For long is the arm of his justice, but just as great is his mercy.”
Gavin had no doubt the city referred to was Oasis. What other city was there? Oasis was all that was left.
The eidos’ final words had been even more cryptic.
“Speak of this prophecy to no one,” it commanded. “For through your death shall it be delivered. From beyond this world shall your voice be heard.”
At first the words had made no sense to Gavin. Why give a message that no one would ever hear? No one could speak once they were dead. But over time Gavin had come to believe that the message had been delivered—to him, through the memory of Illiud.
He had filed the prophecy into the logs for the Remapping committee to review, and even mentioned it privately to some of the other Developers, but they had shown little interest, brushing it off as the ravings of a blank andro.
Now Gavin had a choice to make. If he did nothing, equalization awaited him. All knowledge of the supernatural would be expunged from him, along with his acceptance of the Werin as human beings. The genocide would go on and he would once again see nothing wrong with it.
He had to find a way to stop the Remapping Initiative. But there was no way he could think of to do that but one. And he was loathe to go down that path. Such a course of action would be just as evil, if not more so, than the Remapping project itself. And yet, the next flat-line was fast approaching and he was slated for a deep memory scan when it came. He had to do something. He just didn’t know what.
After that, there was a curious gap in Gavin’s memory. Either what happened next had not been recorded or it had been erased. Whatever the case, the memories picked up the day after his meeting with the Developers.
Another storm had hit the city. It
was far worse than any before. Two memorants had been caught out in it and both were missing. One of them was Darius, the most experienced memorant amongst the Developers. Perhaps no other person was more vital to the Collective. His equalization algorithms allowed the Developers to stamp out deviations from the generational map and made the Collective the utopia that it was. He had to be found.
“We’ll organize into teams. Each Developer will lead a group of four assessors to scour Virid Ridge where the storm hit,” Malthus instructed during an emergency meeting inside their Command center. All ten of the remaining Developers were present.
“Are you sure Gavin and Xander should go?” Cyrith asked, sharing his doubts with the Developers. “We have no idea when these storms will hit again and we can’t risk losing any more memorants.”
“I’ll send my best assessors to accompany them,” Malthus replied. “They’ll get them out fast if another one hits.”
Gavin sensed that Cyrith wasn’t pleased with the response, but he did not contest the decision.
The Developers were assigned different sectors of the ridge via a shared mental map and hurriedly left the room. Gavin went to investigate the area where the storm was thought to have done the least damage.
The cone-shaped zoelith he held in his hand told him there were no living things within its hundred-span range besides himself and the four gray robed assessors who’d been assigned to assist him. The rocky outcroppings on the ridge meant he couldn’t see them physically, but he could tell from the device they were spread out to either side of him a hundred or so spans apart, scanning the ridge with zoeliths of their own.
As Gavin approached the entrance to one of the maintenance shafts, his device picked up a faint zoetic pulse. He quickened his pace and, being the closest to it, arrived at the source of the pulse alone.
A human body lay face down, covered in sand and rubble. Rushing over, Gavin pushed away the debris and rolled him over. A mixture of blood and dirt covered his face, but Gavin could still recognize his mentor Darius. He had a gruesome gash on the side of his head and his breathing was shallow.
The Chronotrace Sequence- The Complete Box Set Page 17
