The Chronotrace Sequence- The Complete Box Set

by D J Edwardson

  Without warning the memory grew dim and began to fade. Someone was closing his mind for him and there was nothing he could do about it. He thought he heard a door opening or closing, but it was a far away echo in the back of his mind. He felt himself falling forward as his surroundings evaporated into nothing.

  Dark gray shapes hovered over him, but he wasn’t seeing them with his own eyes, it was through someone else’s. That someone else was inside his thoughts, carrying his mind down into an empty box where he would be locked away and forgotten.

  Hazy things leaned down and took hold of him, jerking his slumped form and placing him roughly on a metal cart. It hummed forward while pairs of glazed eyes floated above him. Somehow he could not help but feel that this had all happened before.

  And yet, as everything else vanished, a spark lit itself in the darkness and the memory of the prayer rose up inside him again. It was so powerful, so overwhelming that it took hold of his thoughts and would not let go. He watched as he lowered his hands and folded them gently in his lap. A peaceful smile washed over his face. Slowly, he raised his head and opened his eyes. They were a brilliant, shocking shade of azure.

  Thirty-Seven

  The Embedded Memory

  Adan found himself staring at the dull sheen of a metal ceiling. From the sterile, odorless air he knew at once that he was back in the Institute.

  “Welcome back,” Will’s thoughts penetrated his mind from somewhere in the esolace. Though he was glad to be awake again and able to sense the presence of his friend, something bothered him, something more than just being back at the Institute, but it took a moment to realize what it was.

  “That was you in the memory, wasn’t it?” Adan asked, recalling the last few images which flickered through his mind before he went unconscious.

  “Things can get confusing when you’re forced into unconsciousness through the esolace,” Will replied.

  “But it seemed so real. So that wasn’t you praying?”

  “I did mix in a few images from my own memory to give it more authenticity, but right now, that’s not important. We’ve got to get you to the Annex.”

  “Wait, wait—” Adan protested, but Will’s mind had already slipped away.

  Adan’s body went numb and began to move on its own. “Will, what’s going on?” Was this part of the plan? Everything seemed fuzzy. His mind was spinning. He was living his escape from the Institute all over again. Involuntarily he sat upright and his legs swung over the edge of the pallet in one slow, awkward motion. His feet slid downwards and he lurched towards the door. There was a brief pause and then it whisked open and he was thrust through.

  “The prayer…” Adan’s thoughts echoed inside him, unable to escape the confines of his mind. “There was something about a prayer…” He tried to recover the thought, but it eluded him. He reached out to Will for help, but Will wasn’t there.

  All Adan could do was watch as his body carried him along the empty hallway with its gray metal walls. His feet thumped against the metal floor, making a thunderous racket.

  “Won’t they hear us?” Adan asked, but the question went unanswered.

  Time plodded on until he arrived in front of a door at the end of a passage. He had forgotten how awful the feeling of disconnectedness was when being controlled like this. It was far worse than using the bioseine to suppress his pain.

  The door slid open and two assessors appeared on the other side. They should have collided with him as they stepped through, but they twisted their bodies to avoid him.

  Adan’s body jerked forward. Their footsteps retreated down the hall behind him. He moved down several more halls and through more doors. The journey became less and less jerky as he went along, though his progress remained painstakingly slow.

  Finally he came to a door that was different from the rest. It was set in a thick frame and took even more time to open than the others. Just beyond it was another door which looked exactly the same.

  Will’s mental presence sprung back into Adan’s mind.

  “We’re getting into the high security area now,” Will informed him.

  His mind seemed fatigued, harried, under terrible strain, but it closed back up again before Adan could tell anything more. The door slid open after another long pause and he swung around to face the door he had just passed through.

  He stayed in that position for some time. When the doors opened back up to a new hallway he realized he had been in an elevator again. Down this hallway was another door. While he waited for it to open, Will’s mind popped back.

  “After I get you through this door, we’ll be in the hallway leading to the Annex.” Will had barely conveyed the thought before he sealed himself back again. The stress he was under seemed to spill over into Adan’s thoughts. He could hardly endure the wait this time until the door opened.

  The metal hallway beyond was dark gray in color. Up to this point, all the walls had been featureless and blank, but etched designs adorned the passage halfway down on either side. As Adan got closer to them, two identical, circular emblems emerged, etched in lines of pale, blue light. The design was a series of swirling arrows which met in the center. Where the arrows converged sat two glowing words: ‘The Annex’.

  So subtly that he didn’t even notice it at first, the lines began to move, shifting and coalescing. First they formed a circle, then they squished into an oval, and finally scurried and squiggled into the outline of a human face. It was the same face on both walls. The two shapes extruded from the wall, intertwining themselves into a single, disembodied head in the middle of the hallway. The face was only a wireframe mesh, but something about it looked familiar. The bare frame took on color, fleshing itself out and filling itself in until it became a perfect replica of Gavin’s face: long hair and troubled eyes set within the chiseled face of a scientist.

  Before Adan could come to grips with what he was witnessing, more strange things occurred. The numbness in his body faded completely, but instead of returning to normal, he seemed to leave his body altogether and the hallway along with it.

  Gavin’s body rippled downwards from his head until he looked the same as he did when Adan met him in the compound. The two of them stood together in a shimmery and undefined somewhere. This had to be some trick of the mind. Gavin had found out he was in the Annex and was manipulating his thoughts somehow. Had he rejoined the Developers?

  “Hello, Adan,” Gavin said gently. The words sounded like normal speech, but Adan knew they could not be real.

  “Where am I?” Adan asked, “And what are you doing here?”

  “Your suspicions are correct. I’m not really here. What you are seeing is an embedded memory.”

  “I don’t understand.” Adan’s words gave off a shadowy echo each time he spoke. It was as if he were not so much having a conversation as reliving it, like he was experiencing something from the past, but for the first time. His awareness of the present was still there, but it was dim and translucent. His present self was a mere observer of the scene which played out before him.

  “Do you remember towards the end of our conversation when I asked if I could see the extractor?” Gavin folded his arms thoughtfully. His movements and expressions were so life-like.

  “Yes. And then you hit me over the head and knocked me out.” Anger stirred inside Adan at the memory, but it didn’t take hold of him the way real anger might have. The emotion was too hollow, too vague. It was like the swirling green clouds in the sky, ominous and dangerous-looking, but too far away to do any harm.

  “Yes, I’m sorry I had to do that. It was the only way I could gain access to your subconscious to implant this memory.” A shadow of regret passed over Gavin’s face.

  “So you knocked me out just to give me a message? Couldn’t you have just told me what you needed to say?”

  “You would not have believed me if I had. And you would have told Will about it and…I'm not sure what he would have done.”

  “Well, whatever it
is you have to say, I don’t want to hear it. This isn’t right. You can’t just force your way inside someone’s mind like this. Now let me go.” Adan looked desperately for a way out, but all around him was nothing but shimmering emptiness.

  “I’ll let you go once I’ve said what I have to say,” Gavin said somberly. “Understand that I’m not trying to tell you what to do, only to give you the truth. Once you know that, I believe you will make the right decision.”

  “Why should I trust you? Just let me out of here,” Adan demanded.

  “If you’ll just listen, this will be over soon enough.”

  “But—” Adan started to protest but then stopped. Gavin was the one in control of this place. He could probably force the information on him if he wanted to. Or take control of him completely. But he wasn’t doing that. He was just trying to tell him something. Maybe Adan should just listen and get this over with as quickly as possible.

  “I’m going to use the symbols at the entrance to the Annex as a trigger for this memory,” Gavin explained. “If Will is doing what I think he’s doing, you’ll have to pass through that corridor.”

  Some part of Adan understood what ‘the Annex’ meant, but it felt like something from a dream, clouded in confusion like everything else in this place.

  “If I’m wrong and he never takes you there, then this memory will never become real for you and all I will have done is given you an unnecessary lump on the back of your head,” Gavin continued. “But if you do see this, then it will mean that my intuitions were unfortunately correct. You see, the extractor Will has is a copy of my own, something I brought with me when I left Oasis. It contained a great deal of knowledge, including my research on the chronotrace. But it also contained information about Oasis and I’m sure Will made his copy of it with that end in mind. Looking back on it, it never occurred to me that this might be where he was getting his information. But we’re all blind, just to different things.”

  “So what if he knows about Oasis? And what does that have to do with me anyway?” Adan asked.

  “There was something else in that device—a terrible thing that no one should have ever discovered. That is what frightens me.”

  Gavin paused, staring at Adan with the glassy-eyed look of a scientist, looking through him but not at him.

  “I couldn’t let the Werin suffer, you see, not when I had the chance to do something to prevent it. At least that was how I rationalized it to myself. In order to protect them, I came up with what seemed like the only possible solution at the time.”

  The image of Gavin flickered, as if the memory had been paused and then restarted. A look of grim resolve overtook Gavin’s face as he continued.

  “It was wrong, Adan. I want you to know that. There was no excuse for what I did.” Adan looked into his eyes and the sadness displayed there was so overwhelming it felt more real than Adan’s own emotions. “I set about crafting what’s known as a feedback virus, a sort of disease that could replicate itself through the esolace.”

  “A virus? What do you mean?” Like the word, ‘Annex’, this word had a strange mixture of newness and familiarity to it at the same time.

  “It subverted the reparative updates that are a part of the viand stream. That was the secret to it. It went out like a cure, but it was really a disease. The virus had one purpose and one purpose only: to kill whoever received it.”

  A terrible pain wracked Adan’s being. It was both physical and mental. Somehow it was part of the fabric of this memory-scape. And it wasn’t coming from Adan. It was coming from Gavin.

  “But, it couldn’t—it wouldn’t kill everyone, would it?” Adan stammered.

  “Yes, everyone,” Gavin said, struggling to force the words out. “Why I didn’t erase it immediately after I left Oasis, I don’t know. I think at first, a part of me still feared the Developers might one day find me again and I’d have to use it after all. I did eventually expunge it from the extractor, but it was not until after Will was banished and by then, he must have already made his copy. I checked his device just now before implanting this memory and the virus wasn’t there. But he could have passed it off into remin fluid to keep it safe. I hope that’s not what he did. I hope it’s lost forever and that you’ll never have to experience this memory at all. But if he didn’t…Oh, Adan, if he didn’t…”

  Adan was stunned. It had to be that nothing in this memory was real. This had to be some sort of manipulation of his mind. Gavin was a Developer after all. Adan had no idea what he was capable of. The only thing Adan could do was resist long enough until all of this went away.

  “Do you see what a wretch I am, Adan? Trying to help the Welkin, all the while knowing inside what I was capable of? Why didn’t I erase it sooner? It’s because I’m a coward, that’s why, and my faith is weak.”

  Adan’s mind pushed back violently against what he was being told. Gavin was dragging him down into a dark hole where he did not wish to go. Adan wanted him to stop, but he kept on talking.

  “Perhaps it was my cowardice, though, that kept me from using it in the first place. You see, I could never solve the fatal flaw inherent in the virus.”

  “So the virus has a flaw.” Adan latched onto the thought as his last hope of avoiding being swept over the edge.

  “Yes. The only way to disseminate it is to be connected to the esolace. But once it’s delivered, it will affect everyone on the esolace—even the carrier. Whoever delivers the virus will die from it himself.”

  Gavin’s words were becoming more substantial, more real, each time he spoke. It was as if things were sliding away from the shimmery and indistinct plane back down onto the hard solid ground where his present self existed. But there was still a vacillation, as if the two realities were pulling on each other, each one vying for control of his mind.

  “Why are you telling me this? So what if Will found out about it? You didn’t use it and Will wouldn’t use it either, even if he did know about it, and you have no proof that he does. Will wouldn’t kill himself.”

  “You’re right, Adan. He wouldn’t. I don’t think he intends to be the one to deliver the virus,” Gavin looked on Adan with eyes of pity.

  Adan felt himself whither beneath Gavin’s gaze, as if something were drying up inside him.

  “No, no that’s not possible. You created the virus. It’s your fault and you’re trying to blame it on Will. Don’t try to tell me that he—no! He wouldn’t do that!”

  “Adan, listen carefully. I know you don’t want to hear what I’m about to say, but you must know the truth. Ever since I learned of your visit to the Welkin, I knew you must have come from Oasis. But I couldn’t figure out why Will would have risked his life to bring you back.”

  “Because he—it’s because—” Adan couldn’t finish the sentence, realizing that he either didn’t know the answer or didn’t want to say it.

  “Once I saw the extractor, it all became clear. Will wants to stop the Developers. But that isn’t enough. He wants to take control of Oasis and use its technology. The virus is the only way he can do both. Not all the Waymen in the Vast would be enough to capture the city if he doesn’t kill everyone in the Collective first. But if he delivered the virus himself, there would be no one left to take control—”

  “No, no—you’re wrong,” Adan said.

  “So he needed someone to deliver it for him. And that person is you. He sent you here to your death, Adan.”

  “No, no, no…” Adan repeated over and over. To the person living the memory, there was no possible way that what Gavin was saying was true. But on the other side of time, the Adan of this moment could not escape the reality of what he had been told. Gavin knew too much for him to have guessed everything. It made too much sense. But Adan didn’t want things to make sense anymore. He kept looking for a flaw in the story, some fatal discrepancy, something that would change it all and make everything go back to the way it had been before, but there was nothing.

  “When this memory ends, he
will regain control over you. He will bring you into the Annex and then you will be discovered. Once that happens, you will only have a moment before the assessors close in on you. He will be counting on you to use the virus before they capture you, but whatever happens Adan, you must not do it. You cannot sacrifice yourself and all these people. You must not use it,” Gavin pleaded.

  Everything was unraveling for Adan. If what Gavin said was true, everything he had learned from Will, everything they had shared had all been based on a lie. The person he thought he could trust the most, the person who had rescued him from the Institute and saved his life, had simply been using him all this time.

  “I’ve given you a great deal to think about, Adan,” Gavin said. “Now it’s up to you to decide whether you want to believe me or not. But remember what I told you: you would not even be having this memory if what I said wasn’t true.”

  A mental cloud settled over Adan’s mind. Gavin’s voice grew faint. The numbness crept back in and for once, Adan was grateful. He didn’t want to feel anything at that moment.

  “There is one last thing you should know,” Gavin’s voice echoed through Adan’s thoughts as his form began to dissipate. “Once you enter the Annex and they discover your presence, you will be trapped. But Will must have given you access to the Dev channels or you couldn’t use the virus. You will have to use that access to take control of the assessors. Use the esolace against them. That’s your only hope of getting out.”

  Gavin’s indistinct form shrank to nothing as he spoke these last words. The shimmering space around Adan swirled and then solidified until the world around him eased back into existence.

  He found himself staring at the glowing emblems on the Annex walls. He was trapped inside his own body again. Everything was exactly as it had been before the strange vision had come upon him. But for Adan, everything had changed.