Time Crossers 01: The Final Six Days

by Agster, Joe

  Friend sits in silence, in careful observation of his surroundings. The train inside is unequivocally clean, much more so than the one in Las Vegas. The seats are well cushioned in soft steel and cream colored vinyl. The passengers as usual stare at their devices, or at the dozens of various holographic messages projected from every overhead display. He continues to ponder if those two agents or guards are just coincidentally heading in their same direction. He watches out the window from his right hand window seat, observing the train roll through over the water with a view of the mountains from the opposite window.

  Cassie is busy tapping away at her device, blending in with the others that take to their electronics for companionship. But she has a purpose, as Fisher is sending her information that he has uncovered over the past several hours. As Friend looks on at her screen, they learn the details together.

  Her name is Lisa Zhou. The former mistress of Len Wang is now an associate director at the Hong Kong Space Museum. In her past life she was a singer and dancer, but since his disappearance over a decade ago she changed direction in her life, channeling her love of astronomy into a distinguished career. Fisher’s sources tell him that she may be the best link to finding Wang.

  Finally united with a sense of purpose, Friend feels compelled to warn Cassie of the possible danger he has noticed. Just as he had put it out of his mind, the two strange agents enter their car, gesturing and incessantly making eye contact from the seats on other end. It is clear to him they are being targeted.

  He peeks from the corner of his eye, then whispers to her, “I think we’re being followed. We should take a winding path through the city, on foot.”

  “How can we be followed so soon?” She asks.

  Friend comprehends the danger and doesn’t want to keep her oblivious from it. “Those two men over there, with black suits and blue dragon tattoos on their hands. They’ve been following us since we left the customs office.”

  “Is that all? There’s hundreds of us that just left the airport all heading in to the city.” She shrugs off his observation as being a little paranoid. She is brimming with confidence and excitement at being in the city of her heritage.

  Friend is not convinced of it being a coincidence. He decides to level with her about the true danger. “Cassie, there is something you should know. There is someone out there, very dangerous. He has powers like me.”

  “Does he relive the same six days as you?” she questions back.

  “Yes. And he looks exactly like me. I don’t know what he calls himself, so I just refer to him as the ‘other’. I can usually feel his presence, but I don’t feel anything, making this even more mysterious.”

  “Will I be able to tell you two apart?” she concernedly asks.

  He laughs, hoping to throw her off the unsettling fear he has of his Other. “Oh yes, he styles himself different. His eyes are dark and sinister. He is powerful and ruthless, and there is an evilness to the tone of his voice. We need to be diligent. If something doesn’t feel right let me know.”

  They watch as the train crosses the water and reunites with land, going underground as it nears its first stop on the peninsula.

  “Let’s stop at Kowloon Station and take in some sights, before we head to the space museum.” she suggests, to his agreement.

  Friend checks his watch as it reads 13:06; it had already calibrated itself to the current time, called Hong Kong Time, eight hours behind Las Vegas. They emerge from the train station and are greeting by an endless collection of tall buildings, all clumped on small streets. He is initially dumbfounded by the complexity, lamenting that this two dimensional cityscape will take much longer to peregrinate than the one dimensional Strip road.

  They spend the next hour zigzagging through the streets, soaking in the awe at the tall buildings, and its shops, hotels, offices, and living quarters. They slip around through tiny stair passageways, through back alleys and tiny service roads. For Friend it represents a treasure trove of teleporting spots. They walk through parks, visit churches, and browse through a couple shops. He is fairly confident that if he was being followed, by now he had lost them.

  They eventually come to a vast pier overlooking the vast body of water known as Victoria Harbour. The ground of the pier is covered in jagged gray and white concrete tiles, stretching into the distance bordering the waterfront. At the railing an irregular cool breeze blows through as they take sight in all of the tall structures from across the water, whereas a dizzying array of craft, from tiny fishing boats to large shipping vessels zigzag along, some even floating above the water. It’s at this captivating picturesque spot that draws out the fondest of memories from Cassie.

  Her arms folded on the railing, looking ahead as the wind brushes her midnight dark hair, she asks him, “Did I ever tell you why my parents divorced?”

  Friend of course remembers everything she’s ever told him, piecing together all those bits and pieces, enough to write her life story, but senses there is more for him to learn. He replies, “You had said your mother’s competitive drive drove your father to feel inadequate. He wanted a family, not an endless career competition with her.”

  “That’s partially true,” she replies. She takes a moment to contemplate how much he really knows about here, and figures it must be a lot. She then speaks in a poetic manner, uttering “But there are secrets we dare not speak, that we deny knowing. He never felt inadequate. He left her because he was sick of competing with her. He loved her so much that he would rather have her ‘win.’”

  Friend now understands the source of this rift with her mother. He always knew that Cassie suppressed her intellectual talent just so her mother wouldn’t ‘win’, as she puts it. But he never knew until now why she loathed her mother so much, it was because of the torment she put her father through. But he made that choice. He conceded the competitive fight, he threw in the towel.

  She continues, “If he were here he would be a huge help to us.”

  Friend wants to console her but the urgency of the matter forced his to shelf it for another time. “He already has been a huge help, providing you a glimpse of the future and bringing us together.” He rubs her arm then strokes her back, peeking with interest at the top of her dragon tattoo underneath her black shirt, before he continues. “Now let’s go find this Lisa Zhou and see what she knows.”

  She finds his ability to transition from sentimental to logical strikingly sexy. He is right, she tells herself, switching back to left brain mode. They both need to stay diligent as the Other could appear at any moment.

  The Space Center is a giant silver structure, with thousands of voxel cubes erected upward yet fading with height, if it was made with building blocks and giving homage to the low resolution gaming of days long ago. It sits perfectly in the center of a square complete with fountains, lush greenery, and tiled walking space circumscribing the grounds. The entrance to this grand structure sits along the side of a busy street. They close in on the doors and visitors trickle in an out.

  The inside is spacious as one would deduce. The circular walls are lined with various exhibits such as our solar system, exoplanets, the sun, and other galaxies, all on display complete with holographic visuals. After they pay the nominal entrance fee they are free to explore, to study the endlessly high interior and its multiple levels.

  “What if she’s not here?” she asks.

  “We’ll track her down somehow. No matter what, I can just teleport back here at any time.”

  They slowly pace toward the rear as they study the presentations, eventually leading to where the exhibits terminate and a hallway leads downstairs underground to the administrative offices. As they near the stairwell, Friend’s eye is caught on one last exhibit: The Icedragon asteroid. They both read the description, reacting with a mix of shock and irony.

  “Icedragon (2009 WZ104) is an S-type stony asteroid, ideally chosen for its vast quantities of platinum and rare earth minerals. It was later discovered that a vast reservoir
of water lies underneath at its core, nearly tripling its worth overnight. It was named Icedragon for this reason, and for its unusual mix of stone and carbonaceous composition. Its total net worth is currently estimated to be over two trillion dollars. A mission is underway to ensure Icedragon never crashes into Earth…”

  Friend lets out a burst of laughter. “Nothing could be more true, I suppose.”

  Cassie finds much humor in the irony as well. She also marvels at the English, Cantonese, and Mandarin translations, picking apart connotative discrepancies among the descriptions in the various languages.

  She adds, “The Cantonese literal translation implies they have already completed that mission.”

  As they stand, ready to turn toward the offices, a tall attractive Chinese woman walks by, older but slender and by her posture she is very much in shape. She is dressed in professional business attire, a black skirt and blue blouse, with a matching black suit jacket. She wears a badge of some sort, stretched from a lanyard, implying that she is employed by the museum.

  They follow her near the front, where she engages the front desk area where they admit visitors. As she turns to head back, they approach her. Cassie moves to her front side to scan her badge, confirming it is her.

  “Ms. Lisa Zhou?” She asks.

  “Yes, how can I help?” The woman replies.

  Cassie responds, “My partner and I are looking for a man named Len Wang. We understand you had a relationship with him some time ago.”

  The woman says something in Cantonese, eluding to a sense she doesn’t know anything as she tries to walk away. But Cassie responds in her language, her speech increasingly harsh as if to demand an answer. 「请，我们需要你的帮助。」

  As Friend stands close, witnessing the exchange, he notices something out of the corner of his left eye: a woman dressed in all black, short and slender, cautiously approaching in their direction. As she draws close he spots the blue dragon tattoo, similar to the men from the airport and train. Before he can react, the woman pulls out a gun, black with an extended long barrel, and begins firing bullets at Ms. Zhao.

  Screams echo from every angle of the building, the shrieking sounds bouncing from the concrete floors and around the domed ceiling to no end.

  “Take care of her for a minute!” he commands to Cassie, giving chase to the woman.

  He rushes to the outside, and watches as the woman escapes on the back of a red motorcycle, quickly accelerating out of view. The only thing he could do is get a glance of the numbers on the back plate.

  Realizing the woman could die at any moment, he grabs Cassie and instructs her to grab Ms. Zhou, and taking advantage of the temporary state of panic within the area, they disappear into thin air, returning to the mansion.

  Friend lays her on the floor near the kitchen, grabbing a pillow and hoping the carpeting provides enough comfort. As she lay lifeless clinging to life, he focuses his mind and puts his hands on her chest, drawing the bullets out and healing her flesh. Within a minute she regains consciousness, free from the pain and able to sit up again.

  Cassie brings a glass of water to the weary woman, as she barely stands again on her own power. “You need to help us Ms. Zhou.”

  “Why was that woman trying to kill me?” Ms. Zhou responds.

  “She was trying to see how I’d react to you being shot.” Friend mentions, turning to Cassie. He feels the influence of his double somehow in all of this. “He’s on to me somehow. He must have a network of allies, possibly powerful ones.”

  “Ms. Zhou, you need to tell us everything you know about Len Wang, why he is hiding and how to find him.” Friend sympathetically demands as Cassie helps her to the couch.

  She takes a sip of the water for refreshment. “We were a couple many years ago, through the period when he left Space Onyx. He was forced out by the shady company that bought them. He was glad to be free, but I knew he held many secrets. When the other executives were turning up dead, we grew apart. He believed the only way he could protect me and the ones that he loved was to exile himself.”

  She reflects for a moment as she resumes, with a crackle in her voice, “I knew they kept him alive for a reason. They needed him for something. But the sheltered, isolated life was too much for him to bear, so one day he took his own life. I received a letter from him sometime later, telling me goodbye.”

  “Who exactly is ‘they’? The Chinese government?” Cassie wonders.

  “Outwardly the Chinese government may strike Americans as this harsh dictatorship, but the fact is they operate in a very predictable, tempered manner,” Ms. Zhou explains. “No, this evil group is masquerading as the Huludao Holdings Corporation. They are much worse. Len wouldn’t have feared for his life from the Chinese government.”

  Friend writes all of this information on the clearboard, using what little room left to construct a node diagram of the connections among the Chinese government, Huludao, Wang. Ms. Zhou looks at amazement, the detail of the information before her. She studies it diligently, learning the truth, one scribbled note at a time. Until now, she inherently knew the asteroid might crash, even if she vehemently denied it to herself. But she can’t help but connect the dots.

  “You guys think Huludao is responsible for the asteroid heading toward Earth?” she asks.

  Friend, a bit concerned that she has been exposed to all this information, attempts to deflect her. “It’s possible. We are just trying to uncover the truth, but perhaps we are too late.”

  With decades of animosity built up toward Huludao, she is relieved that she can finally strike back by providing essential information to her saviors who are so intent on uncovering the truth. She opens up, “You can find many of their executives on Hong Kong Island, in and around the central district. They frequent the clubs and massage parlors there.”

  Friend continues to jot notes, when Ms. Zhou adds, “I would like to be returned to the museum.”

  “It is much too dangerous,” Friend interjects. “They are looking for you.”

  “If the asteroid is indeed crashing, then what difference does that make now? Believe me, I will never tell them anything.”

  Reluctantly Friend obliges, dropped her off at the corner spot, next to the Icedragon exhibit display, before immediately returning to the mansion.

  Cassie stands in a strong posture, hands to her hips, looking on at Friend with a sense of satisfaction, ready to jump into the next step. “Do you believe her? Whatever we think about this Huludao corporation, China is involved somehow.”

  “What about those thugs? That woman who shot Ms. Zhou had the same blue dragon tattoo on her hand as those guys who followed us on the train.”

  “Triads,” Cassie responds with a look of grief, but Friend has a perplexed look. “Triads are criminal gangs, mostly based in Hong Kong. This particular group appears to be well financed and well disciplined. No doubt they are taking orders from a major backer.”

  “That backer being Huludao?” Friend asks rhetorically, staring at his notes. “We need to find out more from Fisher.”

  Friend looks at his watch as it reads 23:58 Las Vegas time, which subtracting eight hours, or more precisely, adding sixteen hours, means it’s currently 15:58 the following day in Hong Kong. If they want to go looking in the nightlife district for Huludao executives there’ll have to wait a few hours. It’s perfect timing for them to get some sleep.

  Day 2 – December 27, 21:54 HKT

  Hong Kong Island, Central District

  Fisher took some prodding to come along. Up all night with a female companion, he didn’t take it too well when Friend interrupted his sleep with the woman. Fisher bragged to Friend that he always meets her for a tryst when he is in town, and was glad to embrace her yet again after being stuck in Langley for the past few weeks.

  But here he is now, dressed in a black suit, his shaven head not need much tending to but otherwise his image blends perfectly with the party going crowd. Cassie looks sexy as well. She lit up knowin
g she would be partaking in the nightlife festivities in Hong Kong. Just seeing her now, wearing that same red dress she wore at the Vyxx, is having a tantalizing effect on Friend.

  The city at night has more of a buzz than Las Vegas, primarily due to the fact that the buildings are so tall and close together, bringing pedestrians in closer proximity to each other. The buildings all have their own holographic signs, and similar to Las Vegas are hologram images playing messages above the narrow streets. The streets are incredibly clean, the ground composed of a mesh of light reddish concrete mixed with tiles in some spots. This along with the perfectly manicured landscaping creates an aura of a higher standard, ensuring the public adheres to maintaining its cleanliness.

  After a lengthy walk they arrive at the entrance to a small restaurant called the Parisian. It features a large round entryway painted blue and red like the flag of France. As Fisher had explained, the restaurant serves as a front for an underground Mahjong game, a game of chance where players compete using white tiles. Hong Kong officially banned Mahjong gaming establishments many years ago, so patrons risk arrest or more when participating in the game of chance.

  “I have a contact here; her name is Rosa. She’s been here for a long time in deep cover, so let me do the talking,” Fisher tells the group, then turning to Cassie. “Cassie, if they start speaking Chinese try to pick up on what they’re saying.”

  They enter the restaurant foyer and are greeted by the hostess. The inside of the restaurant is dark, with chestnut colored walls and decorated in paintings of the Eiffel Tower. The restaurant seems to be quite popular, as every table is occupied. Fisher mumbles something indiscriminant and they are told to wait. Moments later a large gentleman dressed in a black suit and blue collared shirt escorts them through the restaurant and down a dimly lit hallway. At the end of the hallway is a door, opening to a stairwell, descending into the basement.

  As they finalize their descent they enter a brick lined short hallway to a thick steel door. The large man opens the door and they are introduced to large smoke filled room with about a dozen tables, all filled with players and engaged in their game of Mahjong. They sit four to a table, rapidly moving tiles around in a furor, perhaps hoping the speed will assist them in besting their opponent. Other would-be players stand around a bar area, sipping their cocktails and perhaps waiting their turn for a chance to play.