Every time Winston sought to answer a question, three more popped up in its place. He was about to press Bernie on what an Omega Mesh was when Bernie continued.
Fair enough. But Winston was determined to have a very long chat with Bernie as soon as they were out of this place.
Hearing nothing except the pulse beating in his ears, Winston gingerly opened the door. He peered out to make sure no one was in sight and stepped into the hallway.
Winston didn’t have to be told twice. Thankful that his sneakers were living up to the promise of their name, he sped along in something between a tiptoe and a jog to the end of the hall. The last door on the right was unlocked, and he was careful to close it behind himself with care. He hadn’t gone three steps down the cement stairway before distant voices entered the hall. It was roughly three in the morning. Apparently, this facility really did stay active around the clock.
Winston descended two flights of stairs, which meant he was now lower than the warehouse he’d assumed was at the bottom of the Area X complex. The stairway dead-ended at a stout metal door with an electronic lock controlling two deadbolts, each as thick in diameter as Winston’s wrist.
In his augmented vision, Winston saw the lock’s basic electronic blueprint unfold. He shorted out the communication link going higher in the complex and snapped back the bolts to release the door. The event would likely register to whomever was monitoring as a malfunction rather than an entry.
Winston hauled back on the door, which moved silently on its massive hinges. As he stepped through, Winston found himself in another cavern scraped from the desert bedrock. The rough-hewn walls seemed strange given the reinforced door, but Winston supposed that interior decoration wasn’t a priority for this space. The chamber was at least the size of Shade’s house and twice as high. Most of the room lay shrouded in shadows, as the lamps mounted on the walls were dark. In the corner to his left, Winston spotted what appeared to be a surgical table accompanied by two tall stands of drawers and racks filled with stainless-steel tools and assorted medical supplies. Against the wall to his right stood a row of chairs, a folding table, and a bulky reel-to-reel tape recorder.
These details hardly made an impression, though, compared to the cage that hung suspended by a steel cable from a crane arm fifteen feet above the room’s floor. The cage was fashioned from thick bars, lined across the bottom with a fine mesh, and prevented from swaying by a smaller cable attached to each bottom corner and secured tautly to bolts driven into the room’s floor. The slender figure inside the cage stood watching Winston, partially obscured by the row of bright overhead lights behind him.
“Bernie?” whispered Winston.
The figure in the cage inclined his head forward, and his shoulders slumped slightly.
Winston couldn’t help but grin.
“Oof,” said Winston under his breath. “Again.”
He followed the cable from which the cage dangled. It led up and over a pulley, then fed down to a winch bolted to the floor against the far wall. A control panel stood next to the winch. Winston crossed the room and studied the panel. Two large buttons, one above the other, seemed obvious choices for up and down, but when Winston pressed the bottom one, nothing happened. A keypad waited next to the larger buttons, and Bernie confirmed Winston’s guess.
Winston studied the console just a bit longer, then he looked up at Bernie. “I don’t know the combination!”
Winston was confused, then Bernie’s meaning became clear. Of course. When was he going to stop thinking like…well, like back when he was normal?
He extended Little e toward the console and began to feel his way into the circuits. This was 1940s hardware. Just like the lock in the warehouse, getting past this device should be no harder than getting into his gym locker.
That led to the next obvious thought. If he could easily manipulate this console, then so could Bernie. For that matter, Bernie seemed to know everything about what happened within Area X, regardless of time or place. He ought to be able to spring himself out of here in a heartbeat. So why didn’t he?
Winston let Little e fall to his side.
“Bernie, I need to ask you a question,” said Winston.
Something changed in Bernie’s body language. He stood straighter, seemed to ease back a few inches, and lifted his chin, as if steeling himself for something to come.
Warning noted.
Winston shifted his focus with Little e and activated the chrono controls. He chided himself for not having done that anyway. He should be prepared to jump away at a second’s notice. Time was on his side, but only if he was ready to use it. Nudge by nudge, he began bumping backward in time, searching for a moment in which this chamber would be empty and unwatched by anyone other than Bernie.
“You mentioned having to synchronize with something,” said Winston. “What did that mean?”
At this, Bernie retreated out of sight. Winston saw the cables securing the cage to the floor vibrate with the thin figure’s steps as he paced. Strange. Had Winston actually struck a nerve, or was Bernie putting on some sort of act to persuade Winston to make choices in certain ways?
thought Bernie, and Winston sensed hesitation and self-rebuke in the alien’s tone.
Winston found a time just over two hours in the past in which Bernie was alone in this room, but Winston was careful to explore and discovered that the alien would have company within minutes on each side of that moment. He discarded the timeslot and kept nudging backward.
Beside Winston, something clicked in the winch console. The light within the green button illuminated, and with a deep rumble that vibrated the stone floor under Winston’s feet, the steel cable began to play out. Inch by inch, the cage descended. The support wires went slack and began to pile like writhing snakes on the floor. Looking up, Winston saw a slender hand grip one of the cage bars. Bernie’s head reappeared and watched Winston as the cage descended.
“Try me,” said Winston.
Winston heard a resigned sigh and thought to himself how curious it was that some communication traits must be universal.
said Bernie.
“What’s the Omega Mesh?” finished Winston.
Rather than answer immediately, Bernie waited as the bottom of the cage drew level with Winston’s head and continued to descend. Winston’s impulse to press him for an answer was shoved aside as, inch by inch, the alien came into full view.
Dressed in a blue jumpsuit that hung loosely on his frame, Bernie had a decidedly humanoid head, humanoid body form, and thin lips over an apparently normal mouth. His skin looked like the gray of galvanized nails, and, while he was thin, he was not the practically skeletal form portrayed in most images, from Close Encounters of the Third Kind to supposedly top-secret photos leaked onto the Internet from Russian and Area 51 scientists. If anything, Bernie had the lean, muscular build of a tall runner or perhaps a basketball player. His partially bald head seemed a bit too large for his frame, but not like a balloon on a stick. He only had three long, wide toes on each foot. The white hair that flowed from the back of his head was thick and beautiful. He was much closer to human than Winston would have ever guessed.
Distracted by studying the alien, Winston was completely unprepared for when the cage struck the stone floor. Despite the slow pace of its descent, the reinforced cage’s weight made the impact deafening in the confined space. Winston felt the collision through his shoes and in his bones. He cringed and recoiled backward, instinctively pushing his hands and Little e to his ears. For a moment, he lost focus on the chronoviewer’s target layer and struggled to get it back.
As the collision’s boom faded, though, Winston lowered his hands and slowly stepped toward the cage.
Bernie continued.
Winston knew computing. He could build a dual-processor server with his eyes closed and do a passable job of configuring one within at least three operating systems. He understood all of Bernie’s words, but the alien might as well have been talking in a different language.
When he stood within arm’s reach of the cage, Winston found himself immediately drawn to Bernie’s eyes, which were perhaps half again larger than human eyes. The irises did not radiate outward from a central pupil. There was no pupil. Rather, the irises were formed of repeating blue, green, and magenta patterns that regressed from large to small as they spiraled in from the iris’s outer edge toward the eye’s center, which glowed with a faint background of gold. Bernie’s strangely thick corneas flexed and reshaped in subtle movements as Winston watched, which must mean that the corneas were focusing light onto the iris’ photoreceptors. Suddenly, an interior set of semi-opaque eye lids blinked over the corneas while the main lids remained open.
Winston found himself both fascinated and repulsed, wondering what Bernie might be able to see that humans could not.
Winston replied as he looked away.
Winston examined the cage’s lock. As far as he could tell, its door merely used a mechanical lock that required a key. That was bad news. Without electronics, Winston was back to welding.
Winston heard Shade’s voice in his imagination supply the obvious answer: Time machine — duh!
Winston cursed inwardly as he gave up on searching for a quick method of extracting Bernie.
“I know! Shut up!” Winston couldn’t help but yell in frustration.
Winston scanned backward, but every time in which he paused had people in the room. He swore again, and this time he grasped a cage bar and tried to shake it in rage. The metal was just as unyielding as his situation.
“I need your help!” he cried. “I don’t know what to do!”
Bernie nodded once, and the corners of his small mouth turned down in compassion.
Bernie’s fingers settled over Winston’s hand. His gray skin was smooth and cool, but the skin was remarkably similar to Winston’s own, as was the construction. He might as well have been pulled from a Star Trek set, where the heads changed shape but everything else remained conveniently human. Five fingers, the same knuckle configurations. Even the nails, while colored a uniform off-white, looked remarkably like those of a human.
Part of Winston’s mind flashed on a series of questions about how this might be. Unfortunately, no sooner had he started to ponder the possibility of Homo sapiens having been seeded on Earth than the chamber’s door opened to reveal two soldiers. At first, they were oblivious to Winston’s presence. Each looked at the other. One of them waved a hand dramatically and said, “…when she told me to get stuffed!”
Both men started to laugh. As soon as their heads swiveled back into the room, they would spot Winston and the lowered cage.
Bernie began.
No sooner had his fingers withdrawn from Winston’s hand than Winston felt a sudden burst of pressure in the back of his brain, and the world exploded into a field of electric white.
17
Push for a Plan
As the sparks fell away, Winston confirmed that he was in the same room. The winch control console for Bernie’s cage looked unchanged. Thankfully, the guards had vanished, and the cage now stood at its original position well above Winston’s head. A quick check of the time controls in his peripheral vision confirmed that Winston had jumped back about five and a half hours. The problem was that he had meant to go back only three and a half hours. Once again, Bernie must have given him a little nudge beyond his own control.
He wobbled on his feet, feeling slightly dizzy and a bit nauseous. The sensation passed quickly, though, and he stood straight and steady as he studied the room for any immediate threats. So far, nothing seemed to have changed except the cage’s position.
Winston felt tinnitus flare in his left ear. An instant later, Bernie’s voice appeared in his mind.
Winston opened his mouth to reply, then he realized the truth of his situation. The Bernie above him didn’t know about Winston’s arrival. The Omega Mesh would be updating him any second now, but Winston had a few seconds during which he could stop to think through his own plans free from Bernie’s interference.
Bernie wanted Winston to avoid his parents, but everything in Winston wanted the exact opposite. If he had really been through this situation many times before, could it be that he had always had this impulse and that Bernie was right. Di
d involving his parents always doom his mission? Or did Winston normally listen to Bernie, which yielded the dismal results?
There was no way to know. And there was no way he was going to ask.
Winston remembered the time in sixth grade that he had gotten into trouble for cheating on his math test. He had watched his teacher, Mrs. Roberts, log in to her classroom computer so many times that picking up her password had been no problem. With that in hand, even a kindergartner could log in to her account and figure out how to browse through her files.
Low lag time, indeed. Someday, he was going to have to learn how aliens got around network latency.
“Says who?” he asked quietly. “You? The Omega Mesh? I thought you weren’t going to keep getting in my head.”
Winston’s mind felt like a beehive. He couldn’t concentrate, couldn’t make the pieces of what was happening line up in any kind of sensible order. The existence of this Omega Mesh threw everything into a new light, but he had no idea what to make of it.
The chrono pieces still spun within Little e at his side. Not knowing what else to do yet, Winston started searching backward in time for another jump point.
A click sounded within the winch control console. Above Winston, Bernie’s cage gave a sudden lurch. Its ground cables bent inward, and its floor started to descend.
Winston didn’t want to listen. He wanted to talk with his parents, his mom most of all. She could guide him. But she, or at least the version of her that knew him, was dead.
No. Not all of her.
Winston closed his eyes and did what she had raised him to do in times of uncertainty. He listened for his little voice.
Winston Chase and the Omega Mesh Page 12
