by John Carrick
Fox realized his blood pressure was through the roof. He stumbled as the wind threatened to throw him off the balcony, and plunged to his knees. He took a deep breath, shook his head and tried to level out. 'Keep the mind level, and the whole world stays level,' he said to himself.
"I'm just gonna take off my coat." Andrew crashed back into the briefing room. His jacket fell to the floor. He heard his colleagues following him as he rushed toward the bathroom.
Fox checked to see that he was entering the men's room, and the next thing he knew, the walls turned sideways and he was watching red ink pour across white and blue tiles of the bathroom floor.
Pierce remained on the balcony. He had no real desire to see Fox shot. What he wanted was right here. He walked over to it.
The wind whipped his clothes.
He picked up the prototype with his gloved hand. His back to the glass, Pierce tossed it to his bare right hand.
When he touched it, he froze.
Then he fell forward, hit the railing and went over.
Several emergency vehicles hovered alongside Fuji Dozo. A halo team raced off in pursuit of the falling chairman.
They reached his angle of descent, cutting off the municipal EMTs and coast guard. They deployed life-lights, twelve hover-disks that locked into position, and split the sky with four-foot-wide beams of harmless red laser light, tracking Pierce from his current elevation to his projected impact point, on the canyon floor.
The rescue team streaked through the air toward the citizen.
Chapter 19 – Splashdown
In the canyon, the crimson pillars had transfixed the children. "It's a jumper! They're trying to rescue a jumper!" someone yelled.
High above, the kids spotted the jumper, Chairman Pierce, fourth gate citizen, and heir to a vast fortune, should he survive to enjoy it.
The circle was twenty meters across, the pillars growing fatter as the three rescue agents, HALO operatives, or Chasers, gained on the plummeting Pierce. A fall from the median city height of a mile and a half took ninety seconds at terminal velocity. You could count on being rescued by the coast guard from any elevation of seven thousand or better, lower than that, and your chances diminished drastically. The coast guard and EMTs caught ninety percent, but Pierce looked to be that tenth man. The chasers just couldn't reach him.
Every time the agents got close, Pierce pulled away, as though he were moving under his own power. Then their altimeters triggered their deceleration kites, slowing them a safe distance above the earth's surface.
Chairman Alexander Pierce, twenty-three years old, crashed into the canyon floor with a loud smack, splashing blood on the watching children. Alexander's wristwatch, his phone, his gun, all his heavy personal effects bounced free of pockets, appendages or holsters.
The prototype landed at Ashley's feet. She recognized it as the secret device her father had been carrying around at home. Without a second thought, she picked it up. There was a button on the top right side. She didn't press it, but suddenly realized something was terribly wrong.
Everything was still. No one moved. There was no sound, no wind. The trees stood still, nothing disturbed their leafy green arms. The tall grasses and knee-high ferns held their posture as stiffly as any soldier in formation. The agents hung overhead, suspended above the children.
The red beams weren't beams at all, but rather pulses. There were massive gaps where the light alternated, the pulses themselves descending slowly, creeping toward the earth. Everything else was frozen. Geoff was nearby, tiny spots of Pierce's sprayed blood on his skin.
The moment stretched into infinity. Ashley wondered if she could move. She was able to use her eyes and turn her head, but when she tried to lift her arm, it felt as if it were made of molten steel. Struggling, she raised her hand and looked at the prototype. It was like the one her father had at home. In that instant, she knew, he was somehow involved. She felt it had come to her, through this fallen man.
Ash looked over to Geoff, she reached out for his hand. When she touched him, he woke up, coming alive into the frozen moment with her.
"Geoff, Geoff, look at me.”
He did.
"We have to get Jack, and get out of here.”
Geoff looked at the item in Ashley's hand. "Is that Dad's?”
Ashley pointed upward; the agents hung in place, against the sky.
"Who are they?" Geoff asked.
"We have to go!" Ash pulled Jack's leash from her shoulders.
"But …" Geoff was awestruck.
"Mom says you have to do what I say," she reminded him.
"Only in emergencies," he answered.
"What do you call this?" Ashley snapped; gesturing in real time while everyone else remained frozen.
Geoff looked at Jack. "Will he wake up if I touch him?" he asked.
“I don't know, you did," Ash answered.
"You do it." Geoffrey stepped back.
Ash reached out, her hand just a few inches from Jack's coat.
"Ash, how do we know, I mean …”
Ashley stroked his neck and spoke to him. "Jack, wake up, boy. We have to go, come on, wake up.”
Suddenly the animal was breathing again. Ashley clipped the leash to the choke chain. Their voices had sounded normal, but the chain rattled eerily in the frozen time.
Jack began to growl. In weird, slow motion, he turned and snapped at Ash. He bared his teeth, dropped his front paws, and growled.
"Jack! No!" Ashley said.
Jack's ears, as floppy as they were, went back, and then he was gone, sprinting away from them, the leash ripped from Ashley's hand. He had growled in slow motion, but now, running away from them, he seemed to be moving in fast forward. His leash dragged through the brush.
Ash and Geoff raced after him, running at their own speed in the absurd frozen-time, but they weren't able to keep up with the puppy. Ashley was faster than Geoff, yet pulling him along; she was far too slow to catch the feral pet.
"I'll go get him and be right back." Ashley didn't wait for a response and a second later she was sprinting after Jack.
In the observation lab, Mr. Reid and the rest of the supervisors were dumbfounded. Their internal feeds from Dr. Fox had gone down, they knew nothing of what was going on aboard Fuji Dozo.
When Pierce fell, their first information of the event had been from Ashley and Geoffrey, when they saw the massive laser beams illuminate the canyon floor.
When Pierce hit the ground, both Ashley and Geoffrey's eyes had tracked the body. They saw the objects that bounced from his corpse.
Mr. Reid, Major Ross and the others watched Ashley's field of vision as it tracked the prototype, from Pierce's hand to land at her feet.
They watched Ashley reach down to pick it up, and her system went black. A second later the system monitoring Geoffrey went offline too.
"That's no accident," Reid said.
Ross chuckled and returned to his desk at the back of the small lab. "No accident, huh? Should we call the doctor?”
"For curiosity's sake alone, I suppose," Reid said. "But if that was his amplifier, I don't know how he'll answer."
Chapter 20 – Exposure
The ringing in his head startled Fox. He woke to discover he was lying on the bathroom floor. Someone was shaking him and he was helped to his feet. In the mirror, blood ran from a gash above his eyebrow.
Fox scanned his consciousness for the Micronix. It wasn't there. He ran his hands over his pockets.
"Pierce took it," someone said, presuming Fox was looking for the prototype.
"He fell off the balcony," another added.
"We saw a rescue team go after him, but...”
Fox leaned on the sink and looked into the mirror. He felt nauseous. The Micronix provided visual and audio enhancement. Without it, Fox found his eyes had grown weak. Focusing was difficult and increased his nausea.
Without his mind supported by the familiar comfort of the operating system, Fox found himself
on foreign ground. He forced himself to open his eyes, and focus. He realized this was the first time in almost thirty years that he'd seen anything with his own eyes.
He thought of the Metachron. It was still at his home, but the second prototype was dangerous. He didn’t want to touch it.
A second later he was racing into a stall, the contents of his stomach splashing into water and white porcelain.
Back among the other kids, time never stopped. Pierce crashed into the canyon floor with a devastating smack. There was blood everywhere.
The trio of kite bound agents descended toward the scene.
Bobby, Evan and Doug, discovered the items tumbling to rest at their feet. Evan picked up Pierce's phone. Doug retrieved a bloody wristwatch, the band had snapped. Bobby, having approached the group during the argument with his brother, found Mr. Pierce's revolver at his feet.
The items all contained significant amounts of terillium, encoded by the prototype. The amplifiers had many peculiar attributes, one being a tendency to bleed data into nearby items. The upload equations, which Dr. Fox had never been able to fully eradicate, had formatted large chunks of the watch, revolver and phone.
Eventually Fox had accepted it as a built in redundancy, designed to take advantage of the product's environment. He had never had the courage to accept the tendency for what it truly was. He blamed himself.
Computers had no problem forgetting things; it was people who did that. Fox refused to consider the possibility that maybe the Micronix didn't want to forget the ability to upload backup copies of its operating system. After all, the desire to continue, to extend existence, survival was the linchpin of intellectual evolution.
So the interface transformed common items into network nodes, boosting its capacity. This hadn't been a problem at the facility, until the end. As common objects only held trace amounts of writable terillium, half-images and missing data packets were the predictable result. The gun, the phone, the watch, each had been infected with a portion of the system, yet incomplete in so many crucial and significant ways.
Bobby was closest to the action, standing next to Jamie and Doug. He never saw Ash leave. She just vanished. After the man crashed into the canyon, Ash, Geoff and Jack simply vanished.
Once Bobby picked up the revolver, everything happened in slow motion. Evan and Doug picked things up off the ground, and started to freak out. They were falling, tilted over the earth in an absurd defiance of gravity and moving so slowly. Their faces and hands blurred before Bobby's eyes. It hurt his brain to look at them.
Above him, he found the agents suspended in the air, drifting downward, twenty feet away.
Bobby glared at them and raised the handgun. He fired three times, and scored three hits as they fell in slow motion.
The other kids looked at Bobby, confused.
Bobby looked over at Evan, who was lying on his back, the muscles of his body twitching uncontrollably. Bobby turned and walked from the glen, staring at the gun.
Each of the agents had been struck; the first fell against his mast, clutching it, taking it into the ground at a sprint. The other two fell, dangling at the end of the four-foot leash, their kites pin-wheeling behind them, landing on the fern covered ground as gently as a parent putting a toddler to bed.
Doug and Evan had collapsed into seizures, their eyes rolled up in their heads, muscles convulsing violently, mouths foamed, They both then vomited a foul green mess.
In pursuit of Jack, Ashley had also lost sight of Geoff. She realized she was only adding to her troubles by chasing after the dog, and went back for her brother.
By the time she reached him, Geoffrey was already terrified, stumbling along and crying. Ash put the prototype in her pocket and hugged him.
They were exhausted, sweaty, scared and tired. Ashley held her little brother until he quit sobbing.
After a couple of moments, the sniffling stopped and Geoff was okay. They were on a shady section of trail, and the sound of the leaves in the wind was calming. The tranquil summer breeze felt good on Ashley's back.
Ash realized that time was no longer frozen. The wind blew and the trees moved, speaking to the children in their hushed yet open tones. She didn't have a watch to check, but the forest hadn't moved when she was holding the prototype She put her hand into her pocket, touching the object. Nothing changed. The breeze continued, and the trees swayed.
"We have to find Jack," Ash said to the wet-eyed boy.
Geoff nodded and together they set off down the trail.
In the observation lab, Ash and Geoff's systems came back online. Both children were experiencing significant adrenalin rushes, elevated heart rates, blood pressure and all the other predictable symptoms. Mr. Reid and Mr. Samuel reached out to their control panels, attempting to balance the children's systems.
"I'm not getting any response," Reid said.
"Same here, no control," Samuel said. "We've got eyes only.”
"We saw this on Red series. What was our protocol to reestablish?" Major Ross asked.
"We lost the first one, and had to reinstall the receivers on all the tanked models,” Reid answered.
"That's not an option here," Ross said.
"With Astral, they sent Taylor out into the field.”
"He went out on his own," Ross said.
"He was successful," Samuel added.
"Yeah, well, Astral wasn't carrying an amplifier, so we're in uncharted territory. Are the recorders working?”
"We're streaming, record is fine.”
Mr. Reid, Mr. Samuel and the rest of the team watched the afternoon sunlight fade through Ash and Geoffrey's eyes, as they searched for Jack.
Chapter 21 – Frequency Scrubbing
Back in the glen, Jamie tried to kick the watch from Doug's hand, but the convulsions had locked his fist tight around it. He looked as if he were being electrocuted.
That was when the gunshot agents stood up. They wore bulletproof suits and were strapped with a variety of packs. Their helmets had sealed oxygen, and behind their visors, a twelve-channel image translator identified everything in their surroundings.
The agents checked their suits, no rips no tears. The bulletproof material had held, and they gave each other thumbs up. They hadn't even been injured.
The kids watched them in stunned silence.
The tall agent raised his weapon and spoke, "Sinusoids.”
The other two agents also raised their weapons. They sprayed a thick green gas across the canyon floor.
The kids fell to the ground, unconscious. Evan and Doug's convolutions stopped. The agents pried Pierce's watch and phone from their hands.
"Let's get on with it," the tall one said.
"What hit us?" the female asked. Her flight suit made gender recognition difficult.
"We had one heavy-atom item during most of the fall, but I think it might have multiplied. The Doctor said something about it infecting other devices, like the watch, or that phone.”
"Or that gun," she said.
"The bullets, that's what hit us. They were charged, super-dense," the third agent pointed out.
"Where's the original?" the female asked. "I've got nothing on my scanner.”
"Hold on." The tall agent hit a switch on his headset, calling his home base. "Yes, Sir. I'm reviewing the recording now, sir. Time code: 12:37:22:17. Yes sir, frame eighteen she's gone.”
“Yes, sir, copy that.”
"What about the revolver, sir? Copy. You want us to... Copy sir. Out." He addressed his colleagues. "He says we have to find the bullets.”
The subordinate agents looked at each other, their expressions hidden under the shiny visors.
"It was a revolver right?" the third one asked.
"I see her," the female said, scanning her recorded footage. "Girl vanishes on eighteen, and at frame twenty-six, the little boy disappears.”
"And at 23:06 the dog vanishes. One, two, three," the other male added. "That's the prototype, for sure.”
"Should one of us pursue?”
"No, they're sending additional units. We're RTB, [Return To Base]. Jesus, I recognize them, those are Fox's kids," the tall agent said.
"Guess there was a reason we were on standby," the third agent added.
"He's never left anything to chance.”
"I've got the kid who shot us, it was a revolver, so there are no shells to worry about, just the bullets. Use your thermals, they'll still be hot.”
They scanned the ground.
"I got one," the female said.
"So do I, I've got mine."
"All right, here's the third. Let's sack them, and get on with the business." The lead agent removed a black pouch of non-reflective cloth. The watch, phone and three spent slugs were dropped inside and sealed up.
The trio pulled off their packs, and each assembled strange rifle-like devices, but instead of a proper barrel they had a radar dish and a scanner. A clamp swung from the bottom, morbidly empty.
"Either of you got a Meyer?" the tall agent asked.
"No, they gave me a Morelet," the female answered. "It was all they had.”
"Shit man, last week I was a noodle-cooking Mexican hat," the third agent laughed.
"No way, they still got those things in service?" the tall one laughed.
"Palm Springs it was all we had for the first year," the female said. "Fucking ghastly.”
Her colleagues laughed behind the tinted visors.
"It screws you up, plowing someone with a goddamn sombrero.”
"What have you got? You get a Meyer?" the third agent asked their leader.
"I don't think we've got any portable models out here, which is kind of hard to believe, but what the hell, Morelet it is. Sucks to be them.”
The tall agent walked over to Doug and rolled him onto his stomach. With the dish-rifle slung around his neck, the agent grabbed a handful of Doug's hair and pulled him up into a snake-like position. He locked the collar around the boy's neck and centered the scope on the back of his head.
