AER (The Elements Series Book 3)

by Tracy Korn

  Cal nods. "Neural Enhancement Tuner."

  "Where did it come from? How did you get this?"

  "The Vishan have always had it. It's one of the artifacts left to us by the ancestors who went to the stars. Or, that's what the artifact records say at least."

  "It is called a Neural Enhancement Tuner…a very, very old one, but it may still do the trick," Jack answers, examining the slim, silver tool in his hand that looks like a compacted divining rod. "This is a receiving unit, but I may be able to reverse its polarity for transmission. We may be able to send a message to Calyx…to the others, with this."

  "Vox and Jazz were able to connect with that when we were in the Vishan tunnels. It knocked Jazz out cold before we got the DNA treatments," I say, scanning Jack and Cal for answers to questions I don't even know I have yet.

  "We've also used this as a beacon. I took it with me when I made my way to the Motherland after we pulled Dell from the Rush. My people were able to keep track of me as long as I had this…it works with the rocks on our Lookout Pier," Cal adds.

  "So it's already been modified…but how did you…I mean, you say you've just always had this?" Jack asks, raising both his eyebrows at Cal in disbelief.

  "It goes back to the beginning of our people—the story is written on our Origin Wall," Cal answers.

  "Fascinating…"

  "You said this is a receiver unit?" Azeris asks.

  "Yes. But if it's been modified, it could potentially project and receive neural wavelengths, which travel parallel to magnetic waves. When people have neural channels installed, they're able to receive newsfeeds, participate in virtuo-cines, all that." Jack shakes his head. "This NET is designed to work with those channels…but if your people have been down here as long as this thing has been around, how could you have ever had a neural channel installed? And you must have, or I don't see how it's possible that the NET could work for you," he explains, studying Cal.

  "I've never had anything installed," Cal answers, his nearly white eyebrows drawing together, wrinkling the diamond and arrow scars on his forehead. He takes a step back from Jack. "So this comes from your people at the facility we just left too?" he asks, but the tight look on his face suggests he already knows the answer.

  "Truly fascinating," is all Jack says in reply, not even looking up from the NET for a few more seconds until he seems to remember himself. "And yes…this was designed as a precursor to port-call technology. I haven't seen one in years, though. They're obsolete."

  Cal nods, pressing his lips into a line.

  "Not to us right now," I say to Jack before Cal can respond to his oblivious, blunt answer. "Does this mean you can contact Jazz? Can we find out if they made it to Admin City?" I add in a rush. Has everyone except me forgotten what we're supposed to be doing here?

  "Theoretically. I just need to see if I can open a channel. But we can't do that now. There isn't enough coverage out here."

  "This is exactly where Vox opened a channel to Jazz. She'd just lost her sleeve to one of those funnel trap spider things and managed just fine," I say.

  "I mean it's too dangerous, exactly because of those funnel spiders. They're actually called antlions—at least, that's what we've categorized them as in the Phase Two database. They are not genetically modified implants, though, like the tunnel sharks; those creatures have naturally evolved here," Jack says, then holds the NET out in front of him before pulling it into his chest. He turns to me again. "You said Vox used the NET to contact Jazz? But she couldn't have known what she was doing, or how she was doing it," he says, confused. Cal nods in agreement.

  "We never showed her how it worked. Her natural instinct as a Vishan descendent and by accident are the only ways she could have gotten the NET to transmit anything."

  "Jazz didn't have any counterpart tool, though. When we use this, she won't need one wherever she is either, right?" I ask.

  "It will depend on if who sends the message has the same kind of neural framework," Jack answers.

  "Then it will have to be me—we're both Reader Empaths. No one else here is a Reader, unless…" I trail off, looking at Jack because I'm not sure what his classification from Gaia is beyond being an Omnicoder like Jax.

  "No, I'm not a Reader," Jack answers, seeming to read my mind despite not technically being able to. "I am a Receiver, but it is a latency."

  Receiver latency. Just like Arco Hart, I think, realizing I must have pushed the question about Jack's classification into his head.

  "Then I'll be the one to use the NET. How do you do it?" I ask, looking from Jack to Cal.

  "We'll need to wait until we're on more stable ground. It's not safe here," Azeris says, nodding to me.

  "The ground is stable enough to see if this will work for five minutes. Just tell me what to—" I start, but then Zoe starts shouting.

  "Hey! My foot!"

  "Zoe, don't move!" Jack says.

  "Crite…" Dell blows out a breath. "This whole entire place is a giant sandbox, and you manage to find a sinkhole. Stop thrashing or you're gonna open up a mouth under there that will swallow us all."

  "What!?" Zoe whisper-shouts.

  "Be still—they're right," Cal says. "It's like the fast floors back home. The ones behind the Bale field after the rain, remember?"

  "Quicksand? How can there be quicksand in a giant desert?" Zoe asks in a high, thin voice.

  "Underwater springs—they tend to run the perimeters of each biome because the ground is softer there. Transitions are vulnerable places," Jack sighs. I can feel his anxiety squeezing my chest as he tries to figure out how to free Zoe.

  "Take this!" Cal holds out the end of his walking stick to Zoe. "Nobody get close, or it will only spread the sinkhole under us."

  "He's right…it's like stepping on a bag of pudding with a hole in it; any surface pressure will just force the spread under us," Jack adds.

  "A whole biome full of sand…" Dell shakes his head.

  "Just stow it and get me out of here!" Zoe says through her teeth as Dez tries to offer her hand.

  "Get back!" I shout to her. She shoots me an icy glare, and the backlash of my own harsh, loud voice hits me. I push it out of my head—is she trying to get us all killed? "Didn't you just hear him? The whole ground could turn into that mush and swallow everyone—don't get so close," I try to explain, but she just turns away in a huff. I don't have time for this.

  Zoe grabs the end of the walking stick, but then starts sinking into the sand, which doesn't even look wet.

  "I'm stuck! It's pulling both my boots!"

  "Just be still!" Dell says, all the teasing out of his voice now.

  "Zoe, look at me," Azeris says. "You just watch me, wise? We're gonna get you out."

  Zoe nods to her dad, but then suddenly sinks all the way to her hips and yells out in pain.

  "What happened!? What was that?" Dez's voice is shrill.

  Cal starts to say something low and steady in his Vishan language to Zoe, but Dell cuts him off.

  "No! Just pull her out! Make some room and I'll help you!" he yells.

  "I'll only let go just in case. Keep back…" Cal says.

  "What's going on?" Dez starts crying, and Jack grabs the back of his neck as all the blood drains from his face when he answers her.

  "There's an antlion under there."

  CHAPTER 16

  Login

  Jazz

  "Wait, what?" Arco turns to Calyx. "You're going to put us in a virtuo-cine?"

  "Well, several, actually," she answers, then pulls her erratically streaked hair into a tiny ponytail and rolls the ring in her bottom lip with her top teeth.

  "Going into the Grid here means you'll be on the Platform layer—the one there at the bottom of the cylindrical color gradient," she says, spinning the ring between breaths. "Once your neural channels are connected, the story feeds will play. The difference here is when participants jack into a virtuo-cine topside, they interact with the flattened storyboard. All these layers y
ou see there aren't flattened yet; that's why we can still go in and patch the code on the Platform level. If we had a storyboarder credential, we could even change the baseline plot around. This is the raw layer, does that make sense?"

  Arco nods at Calyx, processing. Myra shakes her head and presses her fingers into her temples.

  "So if these virtuo-cines aren't finished, why do we even have to worry about the message being released? The cines aren't available to the public yet," Arco says.

  "Oh, they're released, some of them just yesterday," Calyx says. "The network updates and flattens the cines hundreds of thousands of times an hour with the latest changes too…the plots are adaptive, so whenever someone blows up an enemy ship, the narrative takes that possibility into account so someone can't leave the virtuo-cine and tell a friend exactly what he did to blow up that ship. Nothing can ever happen twice in the same way in a virtuo-cine."

  "So the whole thing runs on algorithms," Arco says to himself in confirmation.

  "Right," Eco answers. "This version of Dustbowl has probably been updated at least a thousand times in the five minutes we've been explaining this to you."

  "So, you're somehow going to send us into the original layers of this virtuo-cine? The Platform master file or whatever?" Avis asks, then nearly floats toward to the huge cylinder of gradient colors in the center of the chair circle. He stops over the shoulder of one of the people in a white jumpsuit who is typing on her console. "So all these colors are different storylines already? How many right now?"

  The girl turns around and looks at Tark.

  "It's all right," he nods.

  "The different colors represent alternate scripts. These are for Transcendence. If participants don't trip the explosives in the beginning of this cine, there are currently…" she pauses, checking her screen, "…4,977 other scenarios in which they will still be trapped on the planet with combatants."

  "Whoa…" Avis says, his default reaction to everything. Ellis joins him behind the girl's other shoulder as the huge cylinder of colored layers starts spinning faster.

  "How many layers are actually there?" I ask, still trying to process the idea that each one of these thousands of color variations is an alternate script.

  "It's impossible to say—they multiply every second depending on the participants' choices," Calyx answers.

  "So how are we supposed to find these Glyphs and deliver the code patches if there are countless alternate scripts? The Glyphs could be in any one of them at any given time," Arco says, narrowing his eyes and shaking his head. "This is impossible."

  "No," Tark answers. "All the Glyphs will originate in the background layer—the Platform—that's why you're going in there. Only copies of the Glyphs will move to alternate script layers. That's actually what we're counting on. You patch them in their original form at the Platform level, and any alternate scripts that are created when people interact with them will already have the patch. Patch all the Glyphs, and The Seam's complete message about Gaia's genetic engineering funnel, the port-cloud, and the corporations involved, will get out to the public."

  "This is giving me a headache…" Myra says, squeezing her eyes closed.

  "I think I understand it," Avis says, turning abruptly to face us. He blows his blue-edged bangs out of his eyes and holds up his hands like he's about to catch a ball. "So, it's like, you meet a gunslinger in there, and you know there's no way you're going to be able to outdraw him, and you don't really want to die, so you have to be smarter, right? So you say, 'hey, gunslinger guy, what's that up there?' and you point over his head. BAM! You draw your gun and win! But then you finish the virtuo-cine and go back to tell your friends how you beat the boss bad guy…only now the gunslinger is wise to that trick you pulled, so your buddy is probably going to get one right between the eyes," Avis explains without taking a breath, then looks around the room for marveled approval at his performance. "That's a new colored layer then, right?" he asks Calyx.

  She pushes out her bottom lip and nods. "That's about it."

  Avis beams and folds his arms over his chest.

  "All right, then," Jax says, chuckling. Ellis shoves Avis, causing him to stumble forward. They both laugh, but Arco's expression hasn't changed.

  "So, why us? Why don't you send some of these jumpsuits into the Grid? They obviously have more experience with this kind of thing, no?" he protests.

  "Because the code was originally written for Liddick, and your Empath compatibilities are almost as strong according to your threshold scans," she adds, looking at me. "You must have grown new neural branches because of the telepathy…like mirror neurons."

  "How did you know about our telepathy, and when did you scan us?" I ask, hearing the edge in my voice.

  "We finally pulled your readings from your port-carnate transfer," Calyx answers. "It's fascinating, actually. Jazz, it's like your mind could map Liddick's mind—yours built new roads…the same roads he had so that you could understand him better. That's how Empaths work, and it's why your dad needed to code The Seam's message on Empathic neural thread. It's the only kind with the ability to replicate like that and eventually reach everyone."

  "So that means Vox must be able to adapt like this, too, right? She heard the marlin that night before we left for Gaia just like I did. And Arco…" I add, turning around to face him. He meets my eyes, and for one second I see him again—thoughtful and unselfish, brave and kind—but then his eyes cool. "Arco heard the message when we were in the Stingrays on that first exploratory mission," I add.

  "His records say he has an Empathic latency, so it makes sense that he would also be able to adapt," Lyden says, but the muscles under Arco's cheekbones just flex as he presses his lips together like he's trying to keep himself from saying anything.

  "Well! That's why we're the ones who have to go in," Vox says, clapping her hands once in front of her. "How do we get in there?"

  Calyx fights a smile. "We can keep track of you, and we're able to track the Glyphs as well, but your natural abilities will probably root them out before we will. Just like you heard the marlin message—the code the Glyphs are carrying has been activated, and is already trying to reach anyone with Empathic tendencies."

  "What about if we never heard any of the messages? What if we never saw anything strange happening because of that code?" Myra asks.

  "Because your Empath trait is secondary, it's just taken you longer to hone in. You all saw the images of Jazz's father in place of the code on the Grid yesterday, so you're definitely wired for this by now," Calyx explains.

  "And that leaves us out," Ellis says, angling his head at Avis. "We don't even have a secondary Empath trait."

  "And me too," Jax adds as his heavy, dark eyebrows draw together. "I came back as an Omnicoder."

  "I'm an Empath Receiver," Myra says. "That's what they said at Gaia. Fraya is an Empath Projector and a Coder…a Hybrid. Hybrids count too, right?"

  "Any Empath variation, yes," Tark says, pushing his big hands into his dark green jumpsuit pockets. "Who else has Empath classification?"

  "Lyden," I add.

  "Then you six are the ones going into the Grid. We'll put the rest of you to work out here, don't worry," Tark adds.

  "Wait, so we can't do anything in there? I'm an Omnicoder. I can help do something," Jax says, his arm tightening around Fraya.

  "You would help the most on the outside if we need to modify the patches that we're going to embed on the biochips. If the Empaths need to ingest updates, it's critical we get those right," Tark explains.

  "So, I don't know if anyone has noticed how terribly well behaved I've been over here just minding my own business without comment, but can we stop jawing now and just go in already?" Vox says just before a long, obnoxious sigh. She looks at Mr. Tark like he's holding up the cafeteria line.

  "Not yet, Ms. Dyer," he answers, trying to keep his hard face, but his gold eyes twinkle just like they did when Vox and I came out of his barbarian virtuo-cine back at Gaia. "
The dive suits you're wearing have been damaged to the point that they're likely inoperable by now," he adds, gesturing to Vox's completely shredded sleeve. "We have channel tester suits you'll need to wear—these will allow us to keep track of your vitals when you're in the Grid," he says, waving us to follow him.

  Tark leads us to a small room just on the other side of the huge cylinder of colored layers and its surrounding reclining chairs. We pass the people at the consoles wrapping around behind the chairs, and everyone looks at us like we're heading for death row or something.

  Don't worry about them, Lyden says in my mind.

  Stop doing that. Does jumping into people's thoughts out of nowhere run in your family or what?

  Lyden tries to stifle laughter as we enter the little room with white jumpsuits hanging along the walls.

  "Goes by height—they'll adjust to fit you. Mr. Hart, you'll likely find something suitable here," Tark says, pointing to the beginning of the suits on our left. "Ladies, to your right," he adds. "Leave what's left of your black Gaia dive suits in a pile in the middle here; we'll have them recycled."

  Vox and I exchange glances, then she shrugs. I pull the release cord at my shoulder, and the back panel of my dive suit falls open. I haven't taken this off since we were training with our fire back in the Vishan tunnels after our treatments. I almost feel naked without it on, the blue fabric of my Gaia school jumpsuit seeming so thin in comparison.

  "Whoo!!" Myra almost giggles as she puts her arms into her new, white jumpsuit, which then fastens up the back all by itself with a quick whoosh sound. Mine does the same, and even though I just saw it happen with Myra, I didn't expect it.

  "Mr. Hart, let's get that treated before you suit up. Like your dive suits, these will take care of hygiene, but not flesh wounds," Tark says, examining the long, ragged gash on the outside of Arco's shoulder.

  "It's just a cut," Arco says.

  "A cut that you know is there, and that you know is not yet treated. If you know, the Glyphs may also know. Never let them see you bleed, son," Tark says in a quieter voice. "Not in there."