“Save me all your cooing over her, please. She stole my scrollpad.”
“I’m serious, Tuna.”
“Come on, there are passwords and codes, but they’d be of no use to her. How could they be? I didn’t write down where to enter them.”
Adam dropped his head and slowly massaged his temples. “She somehow knew how to find your diary.” He peered back up at Tuna.
“Whatever. We’re good. She’s not up on computer systems anyway. It’s not her thing.” Tuna saw that Adam had nothing more to offer. “And who cares if she finds what we found? Doctor Quarna will discover her too, eventually.” Tuna exhaled, trying to release tension. “Then she’ll get what she deserves like we did.”
Tuna took Adam’s indifferent nod as a sign it was time to go. He quickly walked past rows of lockers and went out the door too upset to notice anyone or anything. Between two rows of lockers Zeke stepped out from the shadows, visibly shaken by what he had just heard.
* * *
LEXI THREW A SMALL red disc into the air. She watched Ada and two other small girls give chase hoping they would be the one to catch it. The disc flew beyond their reach and just as it was to hit the ground, Gen reached down and snatched it out of the air.
The three small girls ran to her gleefully. Gen handed Ada the disc.
“Nice catch,” Lexi yelled running to them.
“Girls, can I borrow Lexi for a little while?” Gen smiled to Ada and the other girls. They quickly agreed and ran off to get more exercise chasing after the disc.
Lexi walked up to Gen, suddenly curious. “You need me?”
“I need someone I can trust,” Gen said scanning the area to make sure they were alone. “How are you with secret missions?”
Lexi checked the area herself, wondering who or what Gen could possibly be worried about. She laughed at the bizarre question. “A secret mission? Really? Is this a game?”
“It’s not a game.” Gen stated matter-of-factly.
“I don’t know,” Lexi began before stopping to consider the offer. She glanced back to watch the girls chasing the disc and then stared down at her feet. “This is truly unexpected,” she finally said, then looked back up to meet Gen’s eyes. “What kind of mission?”
* * *
THEY STOOD IN FRONT of the wall of lights uncertain of what they were about to attempt. Gen pulled her scrollpad from its holster and found the folder she needed.
“I don’t understand it all,” Gen confessed as she handed her scrollpad to Lexi. “Those are from Tuna’s notes. I thought you would be able to make sense of them.”
His name gave Lexi a sudden jolt of regret. “Tuna’s notes? How do you have Tuna’s notes on your scrollpad?”
Gen pointed at the four gray computer screens on the wall. The single prompts flashed on each screen waiting for them to begin.
“It’s better if you don’t know everything.”
“Gen, I’m a high ranking officer on ES2, remember? Tuna’s ship? How can I betray his trust?” Lexi tried to hand Gen back her scrollpad.
Gen pushed the scrollpad back to Lexi and turned to consider the screens and the four flashing prompts. “They were here at these screens on ES3. They were listening to something. I walked in on them. I think about it a lot.” Gen fell deeper into the memory. “Actually, I am haunted by it. It was the old national anthem.”
“On ES3?” Lexi wondered aloud. “You’re saying Tuna was there?”
Gen nodded without turning around.
“And Adam too I’m guessing being ES3,” Lexi said. “Why did they have to go to Audio Relay to listen to an old song?”
“But, you see, it wasn’t the song.” Gen turned around visibly effected by the memory. “It was the static.”
“Like static static?
“Yeah,” Gen said, relaxing as the mystery began to captivate Lexi. “They were receiving the song, Lexi, they were not playing it.”
“It was coming from… out there?” Lexi said, eagerly giving voice to Gen’s spine-tingling implication.
“Yes, exactly,” Gen agreed. “And the looks on their faces. Fear. Exhilaration. Guilt.”
“Is this what started them acting differently?” Lexi’s curiosity was peaked. Gen knew she had her now.
“You noticed that too?”
“Gen, everyone noticed,” Lexi answered. She stepped past Gen to the gray screens. “They don’t spend any time together and Adam is like a Zeke clone.”
“He totally is a Zeke clone, but, no, that happened a little later.”
Lexi set the scrollpad on the console. Her hands began moving from screen to screen, typing in the lengthy passwords. Four unique shapes on each of the four screens.
Gen moved closer watching Lexi slid the shapes off one screen and threw them onto the next. In a flurry of seemingly random moves she was suddenly done. The screens went black.
“The numbers you have in those notes,” Lexi began, “the first two sets were passwords, but the last one looks like a frequency.”
Orange code began to spill down onto the black screens.
Lexi continued to punch through sequences until a high-pitched beep stopped her hands. She punched a few more keys and the orange code disappeared on three screens. The forth screen was black except for a single green frequency number on it.
“352.91,” Lexi said, “That’s us.” She pressed the up arrow. “We want 468.99. That’s what Tuna had in his notes here.”
Gen could barely control her anticipation. The riddle of Adam and Tuna had eaten away at her for months. Every time Adam passed by her without so much as a knowing sneer or sarcastic comment, the desire burned hot within her to find what they had found or heard or learned that completely altered their perspective and flipped their personalities.
The first whispering note made her tremble. A song played from beyond the end of the world. The melody poured into her like a warm, sweet liquid and instantly imbibed her with an unnamed longing, a stray nostalgia from a lost time.
Lexi pulled her hand back from the screen carefully like it might explode. She was overwhelmed by the song and the static. “This is incredible. I hear the static. Someone out there is doing this.”
The two girls shared a moment silently listening to the song and looking into each other’s eyes. A raspy voice began to sing a poetic and lonely lyric. Lexi licked her lips nervously and shook her head.
“Gen, listen, I’ll show you how to shut it off,” Lexi said uneasily. “I’m not sure I want to be here when the music ends.”
Gen studied Lexi wondering how she could just walk away. “I think I have it, Lexi. I’ll turn it to the old frequency and then shut down.”
Lexi stepped away from the screens toward the door, struggling to leave Gen alone within the immensity of that moment. “You were right, I think. It’s better if I don’t know everything.” She reached out to Gen but quickly pulled back her hand and walked out through the sliding door.
Alone with the raspy voice from the past and his strange, irregular melody, Gen moved closer to the screen and closed her eyes. She thought of the millions, no, the billions of people whose souls could have been touched by songs like this before the end came.
She was one now with the billions who woke up in a normal world on that last day before first word of the virus reached them.
The door slid open again. Gen opened her eyes from her trance. She exhaled happily but did not turn around. “You had to know, didn’t you?”
A long moment passed. They listened together to the music.
“I already know too much,” he said.
Gen was startled by a voice so deep she could feel it her stomach.
-15-Zeke stepped forward to stand beside her. Gen’s heart pounded. She fought to appear calm. He would turn her in, she thought, or lecture her or at very least stop her from listening.
“I can explain,” she promised, breaking the silence.
“No, you can’t,” he corrected her. “So don’t even try.�
�
They did not look at each other. They stared at the green frequency number. The longer he remained silent, the more uncomfortable Gen became. She snuck peeks at him, but he remained rigid, staring vacantly at the screen. Although his disappointment was obvious, his detached reaction to it was not.
The song faded slowly away. Only the soft crackle of static remained.
“Yeah,” Zeke said, oddly unimpressed. “This isn’t ours.”
The static filled up the dark spaces of the AUDIO RELAY SYSTEMS chamber leaving the two destined mates suspended in an icy state of isolation, forever apart. Gen felt like she was floating out into open space, doomed and unattached from everyone she cared about. Why even reach back to the ever receding ship? It would only make their final glimpse of her more tragic, more hopeless.
They were both suddenly startled and stepped away from the screens. They heard breathing. Very distinctly there among the static, was the sound of someone taking breaths, someone outside the dome.
Whatever they were before that moment, they were now made the same. Two thrilled kids staring straight into the unknown. Fear and anticipation raced explosively through their veins.
“There’s someone,” Gen finally whispered, grabbing Zeke’s elbow. They looked intensely into each other’s eyes bonded by the enormity of the moment. Then they heard him, his hoarse voice, barely audible, exhausted.
“The end is near, my darling listeners,” the DJ weakly said, then cleared his throat. “When the music stops, the ballroom will be cleared.”
The DJ stopped talking, but they could still hear him breathing. They could feel him thinking. Gen grabbed Zeke’s elbow again glancing up to him like a child needing reassurance.
“I’ve been without cake now two weeks hence and so, alas, our fate should be of no surprise.” The DJ began to laugh at himself or his fate or the fact that no one was likely listening or all of these things. “What is a ballroom without cake and music after all, but a tomb?”
The words chilled Gen and she fell into Zeke’s side. He had no choice but to hold her up by putting his arm around her shoulder.
“But enough of my peckish old tum, today there is yet music. Let’s all rejoice with a little toe tapping good times.” A sudden, peppy beat filled up the speakers of AUDIO RELAY SYSTEMS. Zeke reached quickly to the screen to turn down the music to a comfortable level.
Gen realized she was leaning against Zeke and stood back from him quickly. She tried but could not look him in the eye. “I can feel your judgment. You might as well just say it.”
Zeke reached out again and ran his fingers through her hair with an odd expression on his face. “Now you do not pull away. Funny.” He let her hair drop and walked away to a darker space. “So this is why you took Tuna’s scrollpad. He was right to doubt you in the gardens.” He turned around to watch her reaction.
Gen put on a defiant face. “What are you talking about?”
“Isn’t it about time you start telling the truth? I know everything about Tuna, Gen.” He dropped his eyes, retreating from hers. “And I know everything about Adam.”
She sensed he was hurt in a way she did not understand. She had been waiting for a lecture about the safety of the project and the fate of all mankind. It never happened. Instead, the strongest boy in the dome was wounded in ways she could not fathom. “They’ve been acting strange,” she could only say. “I was curious.”
“They’ve been acting strange?” It was his turn to become defiant. “Really? They’ve changed for the better at least. How about you? None of the protocol seems to matter to you at all. You ignore the very rules meant to save us.” His face flooded with red. “And for what? Some unhealthy curiosity?”
She had never seen him angry and she had never seen anyone this angry anywhere outside of dramatic scenes in legacy films. She searched for just the right way to handle his overflowing emotion, but she had no idea where to begin.
“Okay, fine. I’m in. Let’s be curious.” Zeke did what Gen could not do. He redirected his anger. Before she knew what was happening he was working the screen and making it a split screen with two frequencies instead of one. “It might just be possible.”
“What might be possible?” Gen said, confused and exhilarated by his fast-moving fingers.
“To talk to him.” Zeke stopped suddenly. “The starving man.”
The gravity of what he was about to attempt once again synced his heartbeat to hers. They locked eyes not to question one another but to silently acknowledge their doomed solidarity. They would do this thing and it was far beyond anything that had been done already. Even more, Gen thought, than anything Tuna ever mentioned in his diary.
And so when she should have spoken up for the good of them all, she did nothing, said nothing.
Zeke turned back to the second frequency. “He may be operating a sub frequency that allows him to simultaneously transmit and receive on two separate channels. I’ll set it up to try any and all sub frequencies in this range and we could get lucky.” After a flurry of keystrokes he hit the last button hard and then stepped back from the screen.
Gen was overwhelmed by his exhilarated eyes. He motioned her with his hand. She tried not to jump to any obvious conclusion.
“We’re live,” he whispered.
She turned back and saw the second frequency number pulsing. It showed a range of numbers instead of a single number. She checked back to Zeke who nodded and waived his hand from his mouth outward enticing her to speak.
She nodded, stepped to the screen and cleared her throat. “Hello, are you alone in the ballroom?”
They waited, listening to the faint melody of peppy dance music. Zeke stepped forward to turn up the music. Nothing. No response. A glimmer of relief began to form on Gen’s face until the music stopped.
The song had not finished. It stopped amid a bouncy series of beats. They listened to the static. It seemed to be listening back. Zeke scanned the room full of speakers, waiting.
She could feel her heart beating in her throat. A warm waive of fear overtook her, burning up her skin. The starving man had heard her. He was there within the static inside the room surrounding her.
“What phantom are you?” His voice had changed. He was more vulnerable, sadder, like a lost boy or a simpleton.
Contact. They had made contact with the outside world. Zeke laughed silently through a nervous grin.
“I am like you,” Gen began, uncertainly, “a traveler.”
The static became the sound of his thinking. “But I have long ago gone to madness. You are not like me, but rather you are me, a voice, no doubt, echoing in my feeble mind.”
“From your mind or from your speakers?” Gen replied. Zeke gave her thumbs up for her quick response.
“Good point, phantom. I can see the line on the transceiver pulsing when you speak.” The DJ coughed and cleared his throat. “And none of the voices in my head are that of such a young girl.”
“Are you on a ship? Are you alone?”
“Oh yes. I call my ship Borrowed Time and I am never alone when I have my music with me.”
“Have you no food to eat?”
“Neither rat nor bean sprout remain on the SS Borrowed Time.” He answered in an odd, sing-song accent of his own invention. “Do pray tell that you sail on the SS Cornucopia and your ship’s hold is overfull of sugared hams and baked haddock with creamy crab sauce.”
Zeke and Gen turned to each other hoping the other understood what he just said. Zeke lifted his hands to indicate he had no clue. “Yes. I am on a small boat,” Gen said, searching for words.
“So it was you I saw passing just before the dawn. I thought I was still dreaming. I have seen your boat now for a second time. What wee lass do you call your wee boat?”
“I call my boat simply Eden and we too are not long for this world.”
“Ah, it’s ‘we’ you say?”
Gen scrunched her face apologetically toward Zeke, realizing her mistake. She struggled to an
swer. Zeke pointed to the screen imploring her to speak. She shook her head and faced the screen. “Yes, me and my cat. Zeke is his name. We have a small boat and few supplies left.” Zeke tilted his head at her, disapproving.
“You’ve a cat you’ve not eaten?” The DJ said through a chuckle. “Then I call you a dreamer, my young nymph.”
Zeke and Gen were smiling, amused by the starving man’s strange words, when suddenly the door to AUDIO RELAY SYSTEMS slid open.
-16-Adam stood in the door frame. Zeke and Gen turned slowly to face him. He stepped into the chamber and the door closed. He spotted the familiar frequency number on the screen above Gen’s shoulder and the similar, but less familiar configuration next to it on the split screen.
“Turn it off,” Adam commanded. The sound of his voice made both Zeke and Gen turn expectantly back to the screen.
“A cat you say? My, what a deep voice for such a small creature,” the DJ’s voice came hoarsely through speakers all around the room.
Adam staggered forward scanning the dark areas in the ceiling where the speakers were hidden. He too felt the static listening. He was frightened how far his friends had taken this game.
Adam’s eyes eventually found Gen. His intense glare unnerved her.
“Isn’t it always the silences,” The DJ whispered, “that make the music?”
Adam marched between Zeke and Gen and quickly punched out of the feed. The static ended.
“Don’t act so noble, Adam,” Zeke said, stepping aggressively into Adam’s path. “We were just walking in your shoes.”
Gen reached out to separate them, but changed her mind and pulled back her hand. Adam met Zeke’s hostile stare. “No. Tuna and I never dared speak to him.”
“Come on guys, I think we’re all done with this,” Gen interjected, trying to find common ground. “Let’s calm down.”
Zeke backed off. Adam walked to the door.
“Adam,” Gen pleaded. “We can all just forget this and move on like it never happened.”
He turned around to face her. “We can move on, sure, and we can try to forget, but you just let him know we’re out here with him.”
The Eden Project: Humanity's Last Chance Page 8
