“Where did you get those? I didn’t even know they were in the bag.”
“They were in one of Trail’s closets,” he said as the mover’s engine purred to a start. “We can’t avoid every obscura, so the visor will help to hide our faces.”
“Good idea.”
I took the other hat and traced the gray, raised letters on the front panel. It was the name of the place where Trail had worked, Energy-Plant 29.
“Poor Trail,” I said.
“He should be okay. Since he’s part of that secret group, he should be protected. They’ll help him.”
“I hope so.”
With the E-Paper unfolded across my lap, I directed Michael. His driving skills were far superior to mine when it came to roads with regulators. Letting a car equipped with ADS, an “assisted driving system,” practically operate itself was something that was hard for me to get used to, though I’d get my turn behind the wheel once we hit the Outback.
Without a blocker, Michael’s main concern was keeping the car at its proper hoverment. For personal movers, that meant approximately five feet from the ground. For me, that meant shuddering every time a hoverbus passed over us, its shark-like shadow closing upon our model Three. I’d hear the unbalanced whip of a helicopter propeller in my mind. My shoulders would lock and I’d close my eyes until the ill memory passed.
“Don’t worry,” said Michael when he saw me grab the edge of my seat. “It’s not like a bus is going to drop from a sudden loss in hoverment. Something like that has never happened.”
“Yeah, that’s easy for you to say. You’ve never been killed in a helicopter crash.”
The Model Three was sleeker than the Models One and Two, its bullet-shaped body making nothing more than a whisper as it broke the air. We passed several traffic SECs patrolling the intersections busy with foot traffic, and at one point a security mover hummed in the next lane, lightly bobbing as it came to a stop beside us at a traffic light. He didn’t turn his head in our direction, and it wasn’t until after the light turned green and he drove ahead of us that I realized I had been holding my breath the whole time.
“Are you sure this is the way we are supposed to go?” asked Michael.
At the end of the street where it forked left and right sat a portable security substation manned with officers and bots, a yellow traffic bar floating across the stopped stream of traffic.
“Yeah, I’m sure. Magnum couldn’t predict they’d set up a checkpoint on this particular street. We better take a detour. Take the next right. It’s the only way to avoid it.”
Michael directed the mover through the next turn as I studied the map, figuring out the best way to circumvent the checkpoint and get back on track.
Twenty minutes later we were back on route, and as he yawned and shifted in his seat, I knew that the drive was wearing on him. Commutes of more than fifteen minutes were practically unheard of in this time, considering most people lived in housing provided by their employers and their jobs were within walking distance.
“Hungry?” I dug into one of the bags and pulled out a bag of mixed nuts.
“No, not really, but I do need a good stretch.”
A small shopping center came into view on the left, and Michael pulled into the lot, parking as far away as he could from the obscura hanging atop a central pole. He stretched, then pulled me against him and kissed the top of my head. His warm body felt so good against mine. Taking a deep breath, I pressed my cheek against his neck, inhaled the scent of soap on his skin, and noticed that his hair, which was an inch longer than he usually wore it, had begun to curl at its ends.
“It’s going to be weird,” I said. “Just showing up at Chu-Lung’s, flashing him our bands, and then telling him we’re going to be staying there for who knows how long.”
“Yeah, I’m nervous about it, too, but while we’re there I’m going to try to get as much information out of him as I can when it comes to Victoria and our twins.”
“If he even knows about them. Magnum didn’t, and they’re in the same club.” I lifted my shoulders. “And if he does know about them, he won’t tell us anything unless he’s been ordered to.”
“I know, but I’m still going to try.” His hand curled into a fist.
I woke up as our mover bobbed to a stop and lowered to the ground. “Where are we?” I asked Michael. The moon had replaced the sun hours ago, and for some reason the blink of stars above me seemed familiar. They’d been there for thousands of years, they were same stars I saw hanging across the desert sky in 2025, but something about them was different now and I wasn’t sure why.
“We’re at a mover port. It might be a while before the next one, so I thought we should fuel up now.”
“Good idea,” I said, opening the door.
Michael paid the “old fashioned” way, waving the pre-loaded card Magnum gave us in front of the fuel dispenser, which also meant our purchase couldn’t be traced back to us.
As the fossil fuel pellets dispensed into the fuel block like a stack of coins and electricity pulsed into the mover’s battery, I scanned the landscape and listened for the calls of dingoes.
“My turn to drive, and your turn to sleep,” I announced, slipping into the driver’s seat. “In less than an hour, we should be on the two-lane road Magnum told us about.”
“You mean warned us about.”
“I’m not worried about it. I prefer driving manually, and if you don’t mind, I’m going to keep our hoverment under five feet, but not low enough to whip up dust.” I winked. “I might even ‘ground it’ for a while. I miss the feel of the road beneath the wheels.”
“I wouldn’t. Those wheels are only designed for landing and parking. They aren’t designed for heavy use,” Michael warned.
“I’m kidding,” I said as I knocked my shoulder into his.
The terrain changed drastically as we headed north into the Outback, our mover’s headlights angled just enough to illuminate the immediate area and the ground below. Dwellings became sparse—a dot of a house here and there set a quarter mile away from the road—and in the distance, the silhouette of a mountain range poked up against the horizon.
With Michael’s soft breathing my only company, I continued as driver, keeping the car two feet from the ground and increasing our hoverment only once when a dingo ran across the road, its eyes red in the glow of the mover’s headlights.
Keeping my eyes open was difficult. I cracked the window just enough for a wash of wind to whip against my face and sang songs from a 2025 rock band, tapping my thumbs against the steering wheel.
Overcome by the nostalgia, I silently mourned during the last stretch of the two-lane road for Victoria, my mother, and my grandfather.
“Were you singing earlier, or was I dreaming?” asked Michael, stretching his arms over his head.
“Um, dreaming,” I lied, totally embarrassed.
“But that’s not a dream,” he said and smeared a leftover tear away from cheek. “What’s wrong?”
“Only everything,” I answered. “I hate it here. I want to go home, to my real home.”
“Even though you have Victoria and me?” he said slowly. “If you could go back in time like none of this ever happened, would you do it?”
Would I? Me being here had nothing to do with the plague. If I never died to awaken 1,003 years later, half the population would still have perished, the women becoming infertile. As the last viable sample of DNA was harvested and cloned, the world would have fallen into anarchy and chaos, the expiration date for man’s fate one step closer to a reality no one wanted to face.
So, was the world better off with me here, even if it didn’t go my way and I suffered through the Van Winkle Project along with my offspring? In a world like this? A world of obscuras, suppression, and government cover-ups? Or would this civilization be better off extinct?
And what if I didn’t get my baby back? Would it have been worth ever having her at all, considering she’d probably end up growi
ng up at a GenH?
I didn’t know if I would or not. Too many factors were involved. Did he mean go back in time and live until I was ninety, or go back in time and die at seventeen, staying dead this time?
“My mind’s shot from the long drive. I can’t decide right now,” I said, shaking my head.
Chapter Ten
“Wow, that fuel plant is unlike anything I imagined it would be,” I said.
“Me, too,” said Michael. “When it opened five years ago, the residents in all three regions were required to take a virtual tour of the plant through Liaison, but a tour through Liaison is nothing like seeing it in real life.”
“Required?”
“Yup, and through Liaison, the presidents’ councils kept track of those who viewed it and those who didn’t. Those who didn’t received auditory reminders daily through their bands until they complied.”
Another example of government propaganda. I was sure the “so-called” tour included brain-washing kudos by the three presidents and stressed the conveniences and benefits the plant would bestow upon the good people of earth.
“I have to admit it is beautiful.” I squinted and pulled down the bill of my hat. As the road veered to the right, a curved building came into view, its dome plated with alternating silver and transparent tiles that sparkled like diamonds in the morning sun.
“That’s the main office. The plant is behind the chain-link fence.”
Beyond the last building, massive hover drills twenty stories high twisted and bobbed, emitting smoke and steam, and from their bases, thick oil oozed and painted the ground a glossy black.
Their impressive size wasn’t enough to counter the repulsive plumes of smoke that churned high into the heavens. Carpeting the blue sky gray, even the view of the majestic red mountains behind the fuel plant was obscured. Ironically, a civilization intent on forgetting their ancient past depended upon it now in the form of fossil fuel, a byproduct of life forms from the Jurassic period.
“It still amazes me,” I said.
“What?”
“That it’s been over 1,000 years, and still no one has come up with a cleaner, more efficient way to produce energy.”
“Like I’ve said before, we’re still in a technological recession. The only area that got any attention after the plague was the field of genetics and cloning. What good is perpetual motion if there’s no one alive to use it?”
“Good point.”
To our right sat the employee neighborhood, a string of gray houses all like one another and in varying degrees of dilapidation from wobbly porches, their beams cocked to one side, to sagging roofs that hung in their centers like the back of an old horse. A cracked sidewalk joined this neighborhood to the next, another grouping of homes in the same withered condition, enduring the same smoke, soot, smell, and blazing Australian sun. A half-inch crack of my window was more than enough to take in the awful stench produced from the oil-collection and processing procedures.
Within the last leg of chain-link fence, a large trash bin held what was left of the bots that suffered the fate of falling apart under the high labor demands associated with refining and converting the oil for mover use. Legs and arms stuck up from the container’s edge, the fingers and toes twisted and contorted like they had been trying to fight their way to freedom, and a few bald bot heads, their mouths ajar, lay like fallen coconuts below the heap of scrap. The scene gave me chills.
“Nope, they sure as hell didn’t include this in their mandatory tour,” Michael sneered. He shook his head and broke into a sarcastic laugh.
“What’s so funny, or maybe not so funny?” I asked.
“Just everything,” he said, shooting one hand into the air and then letting it drop back to the controls. “How naive and stupid I’ve been my whole life. How easily I believed that being banded and then monitored by Liaison was for my own good and for the good of the people. I was such an idiot,” he huffed.
“No, you weren’t. You just didn’t understand what it meant to be free. You—”
“Yes, I was. Do you remember last year when we removed our bands for the first time?” he continued. “I was scared. I felt alone. Vulnerable. Ill-equipped. But now—” He smiled and his eyes left the road to glance at me. “Now I understand that my fate belongs to me. It’s what I do with it, and should not be determined by those who monitor my life. I was a fool to believe otherwise.”
“Everyone was fooled, not just you. Heck, everyone is still being fooled.”
“Not Magnum. Not Trail or anyone else in their secret society. I should have figured it out a long time ago like they did.”
“You’re being too hard on yourself,” I said as Michael blinked hard. “Your circumstances were different. You grew up at GenH1. You were raised by—”
“Yeah, and that should have been the first sign. I should have realized that the governments have no right to foster ultimate control over the people. I should have seen through their so-called leadership and understood that greed and deception are the only things that power the presidents’ motives. That their goal is to keep us weak and gullible.”
“And you know that now. That’s all that matters.” I patted the top of his thigh with my hand.
“I was so stupid.” He shook his head, and his eyes became misty. “I actually felt special knowing that I had been cloned and groomed specifically for my role to awaken our ancestors. Can you believe that?”
“Yeah, I do. You had an important job. I mean, I wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t been cloned when you were and assigned your position at GenH1.”
I slipped my arm between his neck and the driver’s seat and drew the side of my body against his. My right hand shot to the center of his chest, and I nuzzled my head under his chin and kissed his neck.
If I were a clone and had been raised in this century, would I have been as trusting and obedient as Michael had been, or would I have found Magnum’s secret society and joined it? I didn’t know, though my gut told me it would have been the latter.
And Michael had withheld information from me in the past, promising to never do it again, but I still held that grudge despite knowing that he grew up in a world so different than mine. If I had been born in this century and in his shoes, I wasn’t sure if I might have done the same. “It’s okay. You can’t beat yourself up over this, wishing and wondering how things could have been different. You understand now, and that’s all that matters. You’re not the same person you were when—”
The mover jerked, the soft, almost inaudible hum of its engine popping.
“What the hell?” I shouted and braced my arms and legs against the mover’s interior. “What’s happening?”
“I have no idea,” he said as he tapped the control panel. “We have plenty of fuel, and according to these readings, all fluids are at acceptable levels.”
The mover bobbled, losing altitude, and I stifled a scream as several buttons on the console flashed red.
“You said these things never just drop from the sky.” We were only five feet from the ground—now probably only four—but still. My stomach dropped with the mover’s next dip and my heart felt like it had floated into my throat.
“They don’t. I don’t know what’s happening. Without an L-Band, I can’t communicate with the Model Three’s computer.” With a sputter, the mover lost another foot. “I better ground her.”
“Damn! We’ll never make it to Chu-Lung’s without a vehicle, let alone find Victoria and the twins.”
Michael lowered the mover. The whine of its engine dwindled and stopped. The Three lurched forward and downward and settled to the ground with a thud, the red earth below erupting into a cloud of fine dust.
“It’s got to be over a hundred degrees out here,” I said when I cracked the door and fanned the dust away from my face with my hands.
When I got outside, Michael was already standing next to the flyer in deep thought, his lips tight and his hands on his hips.
“What are we
going to do?” I moaned. “The fuel plant is just down the road. People are going to be driving by. For all we know, our faces have been broadcasted over Liaison, and the public has been alerted to contact the authorities if they see us.” I pulled the brim of my cap down and gave Michael’s a tug until his eyebrows disappeared underneath it.
“Let me try starting it again and see what happens.” He slid into the driver’s seat and pushed a button on the dash. The engine weakly puttered and then petered into a series of snorts until it died a few seconds later. “Movers never do this. They always start,” he said through the opened window.
“Pop the hood,” I said and ran my sweaty palms against my thighs.
“You mean open the engine compartment?” asked Michael.
“Yeah.”
He leaned toward the dash and a minute later what I referred to as the hood opened at its center like a pair of double doors, and then folded away. “So this is what they look like inside,” he said as he joined me at the nose of the mover.
“What the hell? Where’s the radiator, the carburetor, the battery?” I asked, stunned.
Was I a mechanic? No, but I could change tires and oil, replace fuel filters, oil filters, fan belts and spark plugs, check and add oil or coolant, scrape acid corrosion from battery terminals, and use jumper cables. My mother’s Jeep had been more than unreliable. We had better luck finding a dinosaur bone than we did making it across the Arizona desert and to a dig without getting stuck on the side of road a couple of times.
“I don’t recognize anything in here. We’re screwed,” I said and threw my hands into the air. Without Magnum’s know-how, stealing a mover wasn’t an option. Michael and I would never be able to figure out how to bypass another mover’s automatic controls and set it to manual so we could operate it while unbanded.
Michael shot a glance down the road. “There’s a mover coming.”
The mover slowed and lowered its hoverment as it approached. The driver, probably a worker at the plant, gave us a long stare and actually turned his head to get a last look after he flew past us.
Ascendancy Page 13
