Isabel panics. The crush of people falling onto her and Sister Mary restricts her ability to breathe, trapping her under their weight. When another person falls and their hand lands on Isabel’s face and slides down to her throat, all her control vanishes. Fear-charged adrenaline shoots through her veins and into her small ten-year-old muscles. Writhing and pushing against the weight, she lifts the bodies from her chest just enough to get necessary breathing room. In anguish and frustration, she sucks air into her lungs and then lets loose with another scream of screams.
Everything and everyone freezes in mid-motion as the scream descends into a long wailing siren call, drawn out and perpetual. From the sky above, a snowfall of glowing white light particles begins descending; filling the air and coating everyone and everything; piling higher and higher while bluish arcs of electric panic shoot out from Isabel in all directions, snapping and popping over everything they touch; crackling and zizzing in wild disarray.
Inside her scream she recedes, lost in the noise of it and tumbling through its chords until finally, exploding in frustration and anguish, she pushes back against all that is crushing her to the pavement.
In an instant, everyone and everything around her vanishes.
The crush is no more.
Relief from the terrible weight against her body is achieved. Prostrate on the ground, she opens her eyes to find that the street next to her is completely devoid of people and vehicles. Grey and black scorch marks radiate from her in all directions for the length of a city block. Sections of the walls of the building across the street are missing as if a giant hand bearing a giant spoon carved them away. Immediately around her, everything is quiet and empty. Only noise from beyond the scorched area intrudes into that temporary vacuum.
Then it dawns on her that Sister Mary is missing. When the consequences of that sink in, a wave of nausea hits her. She grits her eyes closed and doubles over as her stomach flops. Tears leak down her cheeks. Acid from her stomach works up into her throat.
Why did her guardian angel take Sister Mary? Why? Not Sister Mary! This was to be a new life. How could this happen? Her guardian angel made a mistake.
She opens fearful eyes and then pushes herself up from the ground.
Where did her guardian angel put Sister Mary? Please don’t let it be like it was for those boys in the car. Please, please, please! Sister Mary doesn’t deserve such a thing. Not her Sister Mary.
At the edges of the scorched street, people flow towards Isabel from the protests at the Plaza. She takes one horrified look at them, scrambles to her feet, turns the other direction and, acting on instinct alone, runs in the opposite direction; away from what will happen to them if her guardian angel decides to make them disappear. Her feet move as fast as her new high-top tennis shoes will allow.
Chapter 19
Day 2
Santiago, Chile
As soon as Zed steps into Sonnet’s room he is hit with the odor of ozone and animal musk. The room itself feels charged and thickly moist, like a seaside bungalow engulfed in fog and filled with static electricity. For Zed, it’s like being back in the bowels of the African Gi where he and Sonnet used to go avatar. It is familiar and energizing. Inside the room, Twizzle and Forbes are deep in avatar mode; both lie next to each other on a bed. Both are enclosed in a large transparent Gi-generated orb of tiny white lights. Both appear to be asleep.
“Your date give you problems when you kicked her out of the room?” Sonnet asks with mirth in her voice.
Staring at Twizzle and Forbes, Zed says distractedly, “It’s just so unusual, seeing them like this, having us all do this together.”
Then in offhand response to Sonnet, “I told her to let herself out. That I wasn’t coming back today. She was fine with it. Said to get back with her when I was available.”
Sonnet follows his gaze to Twizzle and Forbes. “Think you’ll survive?” she asks facetiously.
Zed smiles. “Heh, I’m always in for an avatar ride. It’s the stuff of good dreams; soaring out over everything, riding wind currents. It’s fun.”
“Once you’re in, the twin will connect you with everyone. She’s our point of direction. She’ll let us know where to go.”
“Where do you want me?”
Sonnet points to an overstuffed chair. “That should be comfortable for you. Sit and enjoy the ride.”
Zed crosses the room to the chair, gets comfortable in it, looks over to the twin and says, “Ready when you are.”
Moments later, as the air around him becomes filled with small white lights, he closes his eyes and settles deeper into the chair. Quickly the white lights coalesce into a transparent protective Gi-generated orb.
Sonnet lies down on the second bed and stares at the ceiling, waiting for the twin to join her. Once the twin is next to her, they become surrounded by a transparent large orb.
Rafa watches as all of the orbs slowly transition from transparent to solid white balls of light. When the transformation is complete, he walks to the orb surrounding Twizzle and slides his hand over its smooth surface. The feel is fizzy, electric, and slick. He raps his knuckles on it and gets no sound. It’s like knocking on solid concrete. This is the first time he has ever encountered the orbs firsthand. Twizzle’s description of it to him, while adequate, is no substitute for the real thing.
“Enjoy your ride, Twizzle,” he says under his breath. Outside the hotel window of their room, a flurry of movement catches Rafa’s attention. When he turns to the window, he sees that swarms of avian creatures fill the air. He walks to the picture window and almost waves, but catches himself, wondering if his presence registers with them.
The swarm swirls aloft randomly, like birds with no purpose. Then it groups into five separate flocks, flies in a circle, and then launches off into the city and countryside beyond.
“I hope you find what you’re looking for,” he says, admiring the beauty of their flight.
A knock at the door interrupts him. He crosses to it, positions his large frame to block the view into the suite, and cracks the door. It’s room service with his coffee and snacks on a tray. He pulls a “Do not disturb” sign from his back pocket, hangs it on the door handle, takes the tray in one hand, tips the employee with the other, and closes the door. He is now ready for his vigil.
He turns and faces the inside of the room and studies the three glowing orbs.
“Mama, what have we gotten ourselves into now?” he asks no one in particular.
Chapter 20
Day 2
Santiago, Chile
Zed’s entry into avatar mode is seamless and near instantaneous. One minute he is Zed-in-a-chair with eyes closed, the next he is looking through hundreds of eyes soaring above the ground outside the hotel tower as feathered avatars that are indistinguishable from the real birds they have been fashioned after. His control over them is just as smooth and rapid.
No longer Zed-in-a-chair, he is each avatar individually as well as all of them. This is multi-tasking he has had years of experience with. It is as familiar to him as opening and closing both his hands at the same time. Just as a musician controls each hand separately to play guitar, so he controls each avatar.
While he feels out his avatars, Twizzle and Forbes reach out to him in the language of avatar and he speaks back, acknowledging their mental presence.
When Sonnet joins in, her presence is reassuring as only a sibling’s companionship can be. They have done this together countless times in the past, and know each other’s thoughts and nuances almost as well as they know their own mind. Together they circle and swoop; riding the air currents and getting a feel for their new avatars. These avatars are indigenous to Chile, and that makes them special. In the past, avatars Gi whipped up for them were either indigenous to the Congo, or uniquely alien.
The twin directs them to test their avatar vision and Zed discovers that he is able to filter what he sees, much like a camera is able to see alternately infrared or thermal signature. He ca
n filter wavelengths and energy signals, cycling through them with lightning speed. The twin directs them to a band of vision that will possibly pick up a never-before-seen alien signature. But they are to take a shotgun approach and click through all spectrums of energy and bandwidth as they search.
The twin feeds images into their minds of the specific areas they are to explore, and then signals them to begin. The avatars group into five flocks, each flock controlled by each family member, and then fly away from the tower towards their specific regions.
As Zed’s flock puts distance between the tower and it, the number of eyes he is looking through begins to increase. He realizes that the twin is increasing the number of avatars he controls. Soon he is looking through thousands of eyes, and the power of the operation under the twin’s direction amazes him. Never before has he been able to control so many with such ease. The twin’s abilities that enable him are impressive. This is a new experience that is made even more enjoyable by the immensity of the information he is able to process. This is avatar mode on steroids, he decides.
His mind reaches out to Sonnet, who is experiencing the same.
“You didn’t tell me it was going to be so extreme,” he thinks to her.
“The twin is a bundle of surprises. As both African Gis fused into one, she is so very strong,” she thinks back.
“We are made for this, aren’t we?”
“Made and trained.”
“Born for the wilds.”
Zed turns his attention to his specific area of search that takes him east of the city, into the snow-covered mountains and hills beyond the metropolitan grid of streets and buildings of urban Santiago. The twin inflects that there is something to find there, a remnant of the screamer, something the twin feels but has no concrete evidence of. She lets him know that what he seeks may be faint and barely visible, but will stand out in stark contrast to everything around it once he focuses on it and filters out everything else.
For him, the search in the wilderness is a task of pure joy. Enjoyment of the majesty of the mountains and the beauty of the terrain is like manna from heaven. This is his domain, something he relishes and revels in as opposed to the manmade structures of the city. He is a wine connoisseur in a wine tasting room. Everywhere he looks he finds something of interest: Fauna and flora and insects, crevices, rock outcrops, valleys, and peaks. The snow cover shields much of the mountain terrain as he climbs higher in elevation, but using his unique vision, he is able to filter for what lies below the snow as well.
His search avatars fan out and move farther and farther from Santiago, tracing roads and buildings until he closes in on the popular skiing areas of La Parva and El Colorado that overlook the city of Santiago with their west-facing slopes. Here things change for him.
He notices traces of energy within the bandwidth the twin said he might find evidence of alien signature. Tuning into them exclusively, he is able to see that they start from the city and emanate out into this particular mountain area. They are ephemeral, like wispy clouds from a long-gone jet; windswept and slowly vanishing. Pulling his avatars from other areas and concentrating on only the signatures, he sends avatar eyes off towards the source while directing the majority of his avatars to follow the alien traces to the mountainside.
When he comes to where the alien signature dies into the mountainside, his avatars alight on the snow-covered ground and begin walking amidst what appears to be a small burial ground. A bare arm protrudes from the snow and is covered in alien traces. About ten feet away from the arm, the head and shirt-covered shoulder of a young boy protrude from the snow. It too is covered in alien signature. An alien signature-coated jean-covered knee protrudes a short distance from both of them.
His avatars, still hovering in the air, adjust their vision to see below the snow and make a shocking find. The area is littered with human forms buried at different depths beneath the snow. When his avatars on the ground claw the snow from around the protruding bodies, he sees they have become fused with the snow. The mixture is gelatinous and gooey where the fusion occurs. Judging by the size and shape of the bodies, he estimates that they are all young boys.
“Why?” is his first thought. “Why kill young people?”
His avatars that followed the alien signature to their source discover a building top covered in alien signature as if from an explosion. Building tops around the main source are dappled in signature. Importantly, the signature is unlike anything previously encountered by his family. Does this mean the alien is new and more dangerous? The unquantifiable aspects make the encounter unsettling.
He shares his findings with the twin as he makes them, and she offers no answers but to his surprise, modifies his avatars, that are on the ground near the bodies, to become diggers.
“Another twin phenomenon, adjusting avatars on the fly,” he notes to himself. This was never possible with the African Gi he had been raised on. With that Gi, once his avatars were formed, they remained in their initial shapes. Only in death could they be reborn. But that rebirth merely brought them back to their original shape.
Once he acclimates to the new digger avatars, he has them claw and scrape the snow away from the buried forms. Their work reveals eight buried bodies whose poses remind him of excavated victims from the volcanic explosion at ancient Pompeii; all in various twisted postures frozen in time and mid-action. One of his avatars inspects a body that appears to be banging on a circular object. Its mouth is open as if frozen mid-yell. The circular object appears to be a garbage can lid and the other object in his hand could be a stick from a tree. He wonders if the boy was waging battle like a gladiator with shield and sword.
He is lost in contemplation of the bodies when suddenly a scream hits him. The force of it instantly floods his mind with its panic and distress for what seems like a full minute. Like a dentist’s drill on an angry nerve, the scream reaches every part of his avatar bodies. They flounder and vibrate as if in an epileptic fit. Those hovering over the area drop to the ground and writhe about senselessly.
And then suddenly it’s gone, but the effects linger and the experience is unnerving.
“What the hell?!”
There was no way to sense its origin as it seemed to come from everywhere. Immediately, he is aware that the twin, Sonnet, Twizzle, and Forbes have all experienced the scream as well.
“Where?” he asks. And did any of them actually witness it?
Sonnet feels she was the closest to it but says that none of her avatars saw the source.
The twin directs her to isolate her vision to match Zed’s so she can see the alien signature. When she complies, her avatars discover massive amounts of alien traces slicing through the city. Immediately she has them swarm to its source, where she finds an explosion of alien signature covering a vacated portion of a street and the surrounding buildings. At its peripheries, protesters are pouring into the vacant area. From there, she follows the alien trace to its destination and discovers a stadium filled with alien signature.
She drops down and sees human bodies and vehicles strewn about the playing field that drips with signature. Getting closer, she discovers human bodies and vehicles half buried in the ground, human bodies still and dead and twisted, human bodies moving, but apparently injured, and humans alive and walking unsteadily in confusion. Protest banners litter the area. Pieces of broken building walls are scattered about the grass.
Her avatars alight amid the wreckage and she inspects it just as Zed did. Judging by the circumstances, she guesses everyone and everything was transported from the empty street to the stadium.
But by whom? And why?
The presence of the protesting students in conflict is not lost on her. If the screamer is responsible for the shift of people and vehicles from the street to the stadium, was the screamer trying to protect the people? Or was the screamer threatened by the people and because of that sent them away? And what is the screamer? Alien?
The avatars that remain at the sourc
e of origin fan out looking for alien signature outside the explosion area, but find nothing. Either the alien screamer exists no more or, more likely, the alien is able to conceal its personal signature as it moves, which means that only in a moment of threat does it reveal itself. If that’s the case, how and why was the screamer threatened by the people?
Sonnet adjusts the vision of her avatars that float above the scene at the stadium, to see below the turf to look for alien signature underground. She discovers very little. It would appear that the people and vehicles are mostly unburied. It’s as if they were dropped from the sky. This would account for why some of the dead humans and vehicles look as if they had fallen from a great height.
The twin directs Sonnet to have her avatars scan for anyone or anything fleeing the scene of the origin, but the continued student clashes with the police and the resulting mayhem render her efforts useless. There are just too many people and too much confusion. She tries but concludes the efforts are hopeless.
Chapter 21
Day 2
Santiago, Chile
Isabel, running at full speed, rounds the corner of a building and is confronted with a street bustling with activity. Slowing to a trot, she manages to weave her way through the mass of legs and torsos until she accidentally careens into a tall man carrying a bag of just-purchased goods. Bouncing off of him, she loses her footing and lands on her buttocks in front of him at the same time that his bag of goods drops to the ground at her feet. Momentarily stunned by the collision, she looks up into his face that is red with embarrassment.
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