It felt strange being back in the compound without him. So much had changed since the two of them had left a few short days ago. In some ways, though, Adan felt closer to Will now than he had when he was alive. Will had always been somewhat of a mystery when they were together, even before he had taken the remin fluid and recovered the plans to overtake Oasis. But watching Will die had changed the way Adan saw him. Will’s vision of the mysterious messenger of Numinae the Welkin called an ‘eidos’, just before he died, had affected Adan in a way he found hard to explain. Though he hadn’t seen the otherworldly being himself, the change that had come over Will in those last few moments had been undeniable. Restoration was the closest word Adan could find that seemed to fit. There was a kindness in his eyes when he died, a humility and a peace that Adan had never seen before.
But there was something else about Will’s death that kept coming back, something Will had said: “It wasn’t my idea…” He had been referring to the virus that was supposed to destroy Oasis and kill Adan as well. But, if it wasn’t Will’s idea then whose was it? No one else knew about the virus besides Gavin, Will, and Adan, as far as he knew.
“Impossible!” Gavin exclaimed, pulling his head out of one of the barrels and interrupting Adan’s thoughts. He had already thrown about half the scraps from inside onto the ground and was presently holding in his hand a chunk of raw metal covered in grime.
“What do you mean?” Adan asked. Like most of the scrap in the Vast, the piece had no doubt been part of some machine at one point, but in its present state there was no telling what purpose it had once served.
“I don’t believe it,” Gavin muttered, “It looks like…celerium.”
The word didn’t register with Adan. “Celerium?”
Gavin rubbed away some of the grime with a rag, revealing a dark metal cylinder with blue flecks running through it.
“There was some information about this material in the Developer archives. It’s an energy amplification agent. But it was just a theory. It doesn’t occur naturally and all attempts to synthesize it have failed. Or so I thought.”
“What’s it doing in Will’s barrel?”
Adan stared at the dark piece of scrap. It looked fairly useless despite Gavin’s wide-eyed look.
“I don’t know. That’s another thing they never told us about—all these machines out in the desert. Who knows how long they’ve been buried out here or even what they were for. If there’s celerium out there, there could be anything.”
“So can we use it?”
“I don’t want to get your hopes up,” Gavin answered, “but if it does what I think it will, I may be able to resolve the energy efficiency issues with the chronotrace. The energy amplification coil was always its weakness. That’s why it had to draw in so much extra power to compensate. But if I could improve the amplification process, the device could run on a tiny fraction of what it used before.”
Adan accidentally dropped the glob of char he had on his trowel into the sand. “Then what are you waiting for?”
Gavin worked nonstop on the new energy amplification coil, barely sleeping over the next two days. The hardest part had been finding a way to mold the celerium so it would fit inside the chronotrace. The cutter’s bright, triangular energy blade had no effect on it, which puzzled Gavin to no end. It should have been able to cut through anything.
In the end, he was forced to create a set of calibration controls for the cutter and use an additional power source in order to adjust the frequency of the beam. The cutter normally had two variations in the beam it projected: yellow for cutting inorganic material and red for cutting organic, living things. The beam that Gavin finally got to work was blue in color, something the cutter had been incapable of producing before the modification. This new cross stream blade could cut through both living and non-living material and even energy fields, but it drained the power considerably. Even then, the celerium resisted the blade so that Gavin had to work it back and forth for a long time to shape it how he wanted.
Once he finished, he was finally able to fashion the celerium into the form he wanted, a kind of ribbed wafer, which he inserted into the expanded energy chamber inside the lower section of the chronotrace. The new chamber also had space for more bismine chips to boost the device’s power.
In the meantime, Adan continued the grueling task of patching up the char walls. His arms grew sore and heavy from lifting so much of the gray, goopy rock to fill in the gaps. On the second day, though, he was able to rest for the better part of the morning when a storm swept through and forced them back inside the shelter.
Adan tried to follow what Gavin was doing, but even when Gavin shared information through his bioseine, there were too many unknowns for Adan to fully grasp what was going on. Gavin himself barely seemed to understand everything fully. He was going mostly on hope and hunches.
“How do you manage to do all those calculations and iterations of your algorithm so quickly?” Adan asked as they finished off their cups of atol.
“That’s another benefit of being a memorant. We do not just process other people’s thoughts quickly, but any type of information.”
Adan was still unsure about whether or not he wanted to develop his own latent memorant abilities, but this certainly sounded useful.
“How close are you to being able to test the modifications?” Adan asked.
Gavin set down his empty cup. “Tomorrow.” His eyes glinted with expectation.
“I can’t wait,” Adan replied, catching his friend’s enthusiasm.
Unfortunately, the weather did not accommodate Gavin and Adan’s eagerness. A storm raged over the compound all the next day. Gavin worked on what refinements he could, but the shelter was cramped and even though the storms were outside, the bioseine interference it caused affected the shelter as well, cutting off Gavin’s ability to connect with his device.
After a while, Gavin gave up and they decided to wait until the storm blew over.
“Well, since we’ve got some time on our hands,” Gavin said, “perhaps you’d like to learn a few things about being a memorant?”
Adan paused, caught off guard by the suggestion.
“Um…” he said, hedging. Was he ready for this?
“You know, if we ever do find your memories, being a memorant will help you absorb them much faster.”
This was something Adan had not considered. What was he really afraid of anyway? Perhaps it was just a leftover reaction from the time Gavin had used his abilities to read Adan’s thoughts without him knowing. He wasn’t sure he wanted that kind of power. Still, he supposed there was a way to control it or turn it off somehow when he didn’t need it.
“Okay, just go over the basics,” he said.
Gavin studied Adan’s face, looking him directly in the eye. “One of the first things you must do is quiet your own thoughts and notice everything you can about the person whose mind you are attempting to read.”
That seemed easy enough. Adan stared back at him, trying to see if he could tell from Gavin’s expression anything about what he was thinking. He looked serious, but Adan thought anyone would have been able to tell that.
“And the way you must begin to do that is by closing your eyes,” Gavin instructed.
Adan let out a short laugh. “Close my eyes? But didn’t you say I was supposed to—”
“Just try it,” Gavin said. “Close your eyes and try to remember what my face looks like. Study it from your memory.”
Adan rolled his eyes, but did as he was told. He tried to picture Gavin’s face. At first all he could see was a static image of what it looked like, but then dozens of expressions began to flash through Adan’s mind. He was surprised to find that Gavin’s relatively plain face was capable of such a variety of emotion. He was equally surprised that he could recall his expressions so clearly, but he didn’t see how this would help him guess what Gavin was thinking at that particular moment.
“You may open your eyes again,” Gavin said. “Now t
ell me what I’m thinking.”
Adan opened his eyes to the same serious expression Gavin had been wearing before.
“You’re pleased with my effort?” he ventured.
Gavin shook his head. “Don’t just guess.”
“Wait, wasn’t that my intuition?” Adan said, confused.
“Yes, but you can’t always trust your intuition.”
“But I thought—oh, never mind.” Adan shrugged and Gavin made him repeat the process again: closing his eyes, watching the parade of expressions rush by, and then opening his eyes again to try and divine what Gavin was thinking.
After the fifteenth time, Adan said, “You’re just looking at your own reflection in my eyes. You’re not thinking about anything, are you?”
Gavin cracked a smile. “Well done,” he said. “That’s the first thing you have to learn about reading people’s thoughts—how they can mask them. You have to know what the false readings look like before you can ever figure out what the real ones are.”
“I can’t believe you were just tricking me this whole time,” Adan said, chagrinned. Gavin was generally so forthright, but when it came to his memorant side, he could be extremely enigmatic. “So are you going to stop masking your thoughts now and let me really try to read them this time?”
“I don’t know,” Gavin replied, still smiling. “You tell me.”
“You’re not going to make this easy, are you?”
“You see, you’re reading my thoughts already.” He laughed.
Adan shook his head, both amused and frustrated by Gavin’s evasiveness.
“Maybe I’m just not cut out for this,” Adan said.
“Just because you have the ability doesn’t mean you don’t have to put in the work to learn how to use it. Any skill worth doing well is worth banging your head against until you break through.”
Adan nodded. He knew Gavin was right, but he was still a little leery of this memorant business. Part of him wondered if he should just stay the way he was. He wondered if knowing the sorts of things Gavin seemed to know might not be more of a burden than a benefit.
“You are right to worry,” Gavin told him, picking up on what he was thinking. “Sometimes knowing what others think is painful. And it’s tempting to use it for selfish reasons. I have certainly done that many times in the past. But if Numinae granted you this ability, you can be certain that it must be for some purpose.”
Adan regarded him thoughtfully. “I suppose you’re right. I guess I shouldn’t let myself get frustrated. So what else do I have to learn?”
Gavin gave him a sympathetic nod. And with that he resumed expounding on the subtle and difficult art of being a memorant.
Three
Mining and Crafting
The initial tests of the chronotrace went better than expected. Will had left behind ten bismine crystals in a box in the shelter and Gavin inserted these into the new energy array to work with the celerium. That was enough to make a trace which ran back almost a full day, with plenty of power left when Gavin brought the test to a halt.
“Why did you stop?” Adan asked.
“Because I don’t want to burn out the crystals. Bismine recharges over time, but if you drain it too far down the crystals become useless.”
“Do they really recharge on their own? Where does the energy come from?” Adan watched Gavin slide the array out from under the shiny black chronotrace and open it to examine the chips. The yellow crystals were arranged in two half circles spread out around the celerium wafer.
“The energy comes from a mixture of the light that filters through the clouds and the locus energy field which surrounds all matter,” Gavin explained.
Though Adan had never heard the term ‘locus field’ before, Gavin didn’t have to explain it to him. The information was already in his bioseine. The field was akin to the zoetic energy which permeated the universe. However, whereas zoetic energy held living things together, the locus field did so with inorganic matter. But the fields could interact with each other and locus energy could be harnessed to disrupt both living and non-living matter. The cutter used locus energy in this way.
“So, how long will it take before those chips fully recharge?” Adan asked.
“About two days.”
“Then how are we ever going to trace back to when the extractor was taken? The capsule opened seventeen days ago.”
“Since the trace has already started, when we do the next run we will pick up from where we left off.”
“But how? I thought the chronotrace always had to trace back in time from the present.”
“That’s the way it works right now, but I’m working on some adjustments that might change that. We’ll see if I can pull it off.”
Gavin’s thoughts turned back to his work, but Adan allowed his hopes to rise ever so slightly. For the first time since discovering the capsule, he felt there was an actual chance of finding Gavin’s memories.
Over the next few days, Adan continued to improve in his ability to read Gavin’s surface thoughts. With the walls patched back up, he shadowed Gavin as he worked on the chronotrace, studying him as often as he could and asking him from time to time what he was thinking. Adan was getting to where he could guess without even closing his eyes, but he was still wrong most of the time.
“Even I don’t always get it right,” Gavin assured him. “And you are picking it up far more quickly than I did.”
“I suppose that’s because I have a good teacher.”
Gavin laughed. “We’ll see if I’m as good an inventor as I am a memorant. The bismine chips will be fully recharged in less than a slice. Let’s grab something to eat while we wait.”
They whipped up a batch of atol and mosh and had a quick bite before heading out to the stasis capsule to test the chronotrace. The grainy drink and the bluish green paste made a wonderful combination, gritty and salty with a hint of sweetness.
The winds kept quiet all afternoon. Even the sickly green sky seemed to swirl less than usual. It looked like perfect conditions for the test.
After placing the chronotrace next to the capsule, Gavin went over the improvements he had been working on.
“I was able to further increase the power efficiency, as well as the range of effect, yesterday, to the point that I could test the new modification: downtime tracing.” Gavin’s eyes glowed with excitement. He often got that way when sharing about his invention. “You see, after the initial sample, all of the variables the chronotrace needs for its calculations have been recorded. I just had to implement an efficient way to store them. With that in place I was able to continue the trace all yesterday with five of the bismine chips while the others were recharging.”
“How far back did you get?”
“Almost five days,” Gavin effused. “And I think the array will have enough to get us back to the point when the extractor was taken.”
Tiny needles of anticipation pricked Adan’s skin as the chronotrace fired up. It let off its usual shower of light and then faded from view, replaced by the whirling desert winds and restless sands of a swiftly changing landscape. Inside the temporal bubble everything was a blur until it reached the time when the capsule was supposed to have opened. Then Gavin slowed everything down.
From his connection to the chronotrace, Adan could see the energy array was down to sixty-five percent. That would still give them plenty of time to finish the trace.
The desert winds swirled inside the temporal bubble. With time flowing in reverse, from beyond the edge of the trace Adan noticed a figure walking backwards into the scene out of the corner of his eye. But the figure only got half-way into the projection when everything winked out of existence. The chronotrace flashed and went dark and the energy levels took a sharp drop, dipping suddenly below thirty percent.
“What happened?” Adan asked.
Gavin growled in frustration. “It was the thought-mapping algorithm. I shouldn’t have tried to test it so soon. It caused a power spike and cr
ashed the system.”
“You’re trying to get the chronotrace to map a person’s thoughts as well? I didn’t know you were working on that.”
“I wanted to find out who this person was, not just follow the trace to see where they went. It would have saved us a lot of time if it had worked, but it looks like I was overly ambitious. I didn’t tell you about it because I didn’t want to get your hopes up. I knew there was only a slim chance of it working. I’ll need a lot more time and much better equipment to get that running, I’m afraid.”
“Don’t be so hard on yourself. At least you got far enough back to see the event. A few days ago that wasn’t even possible.”
Adan brought up the memory of the last scene from the chronotrace in his mind. Whoever was walking away from the capsule had dusty brown hair and wore the nondescript robe of a patient from the Institute, identical to the one Adan had worn. He was walking towards the compound. Unfortunately his face was still hidden beyond the edge of the temporal projection.
“We may not know who he is, but he was headed towards the compound. He had to be the one who took the extractor,” Adan commented.
“Probably, but even if that’s true, we won’t know where he took it until the chronotrace can backtrace the days after this event occurs.”
“Wait, isn’t the chronotrace limited to depicting the events at a given location? If he headed out into the Vast, wouldn’t we have to do a separate projection for each location he traveled to?”
“Not if the downtime processing works as expected. I configured it so it can follow an event sequence over space, as well as time, after it maps the initial conditions.”
“And the bismine array?” Adan asked. “It can’t recharge now. The chips are drained.”
Gavin picked up the chronotrace and pulled out the array. The color of the crystals was fading, more brown than yellow now.
“I guess we’ll have to find some more,” Gavin replied stoically.
“How?” Adan had no idea where Will had gotten the bismine, and he had never seen any of it out in the Vast.
The Chronotrace Sequence- The Complete Box Set Page 38
