Sycorax's Daughters

by Kinitra Brooks, PhD

  The images stopped, and Javari turned his attention to Naomi. “It explains our strong connection and the reason we feel the way we do.” He took a deep breath. “The first time my eyes lay on you at the restaurant parking lot.—” He couldn’t find the words.

  Naomi remained quiet as her mind tried to process everything. But she didn’t have time; she became even more astonished when Javari repeated, “I told you that Jonathan says he loves Alexa.”

  He looked uncertain before speaking again.” And—and I believe,” he pointed to Jonathan, “we believe, you both are our soul mates.” He then fell quiet again.

  Naomi stood there.

  Of course, Alexa broke the silence. Soul mates. Love at first sight. Well, that explains why we both were lit up like Christmas trees.

  “Wha-what did she say?” Javari slowly asked.

  “She said,” Naomi added definition to Alexa’s statement, “it explained the Twin Flames episode between her and Jonathan.”

  Jonathan nodded agreeably.

  “Yes,” Javari said, very pleased that they understood. “Exactly.” They all stood there, trying to figure out the next words to say, when Naomi suddenly blurted out, “I killed my fiancé last night.” Her spirit partner raised her eyebrows and laughed.

  What? Now, that sounded more like me than you.

  Javari said, “I see,” and Jonathan looked concerned.

  It was awkward. Everything now was awkward, but it was a more welcome feeling than the flaming desire Naomi kept trying to keep under control.

  Javari finally said, “I saw in The Grasp archives that you encountered a Splitter and killed him. I didn’t know he was your fiancé.” He then added, “I’m sorry for your loss.”

  He was an ass, anyway, Alexa said, and Naomi watched Jonathan laugh. Alexa didn’t communicate with others of her kind much,

  let alone speak in a way that they could hear her. She mostly spoke in the language shared only between bonded human and spirit partner. But she thought enough of Jonathan to let him understand her, and, last night, to stand so close to her. It gave Naomi pause.

  Naomi smiled at Javari’s curious expression. “Alexa didn’t like him very much, anyway,” she explained.

  “I can understand why,” Javari said. “He tried to kill her. And he tried to destroy you.”

  Finally, Alexa said, throwing up her hands, a man who gets it! Naomi said openly, “She said she likes you.”

  Javari lowered his head a little and blushed. Then, he said, “Well—perhaps, we should take things slowly.”

  No, not slow! Alexa disagreed. No!

  “I’d like that,” Naomi agreed.

  Jonathan’s mouth moved, but Javari didn’t translate. Naomi could already see from Jonathan’s frown that he agreed with Alexa. He wanted union now!

  But that was the difference between those who were possessed and those who were spiritually aware and bonded with their unseen partners. The possessed often become overwhelmed by any combination of the deadly sins: lust, gluttony, greed, laziness, anger, envy or pride. Those who clearly understood their true selves and did not allow fear to lead them to these capital vices gained the power of love and the power of mind from their spirit partners. It was what The Grasp called a holy bond.

  “I could pick you up around seven,” Javari suggested.

  Ugh! Alexa exaggeratedly slumped over, making Javari laugh.

  Jonathan simply walked through the wall and disappeared.

  Still smiling, Javari said, “We can discuss my indoctrination into The Grasp over dinner.”

  Naomi’s thoughts returned to the argument she had had with Alexa while driving back from the cabin the previous night, and what she had said they must do: We need to find the one perfect for us. And today Alexa was seeing qualities in this man that appealed to both of them: intelligent, an established entrepreneur, acceptance of her and Alexa and sharing the same belief system; and more importantly, there was an attraction, a true connection, which was beyond faith. He, most definitely—

  “—Sounds perfect,” Naomi said, and returned his smile.

  Foundling

  by Tenea D. Johnson

  By noon, Petal had plucked fourteen people from the earthquake debris. Even if the other techs in HRO’s small mobile unit nodded appreciatively, she could hardly believe the slow pace of the rescue teleportations. In the last year alone, she’d evacced an entire Sri Lankan apartment building’s residents within 25 minutes of a tsunami alarm and rescued a California fire fighter squad from a forest fire seconds before it flamed into an inferno. Other teleport techs worked to match Petal’s speed and accuracy; she worked to beat it. But not all trips through the black were about speed.

  The fourteen had tired her. She shifted to release the dreadlocks pinned between her back and the chair, and stretched her hip from where she sat. Per protocol, she had to clear the chipped before she could extract any unchipped people. The race always sapped her energy. Regardless, she sat alert at her terminal rig, staring at the quintet of monitors, gaze darting between the chip signal map up top and the vectimeter readouts below. Her hands sat loose on the controls, splayed wide, with her pointer finger poised over the Enact button, timing the millisecond the extract arcs would align.

  Earthquake rescues were a special challenge, a complicated game of knowing which person to move and when—move the wrong one and other pockets of space might collapse and kill anyone now vulnerable in the configuration of air and pressure that destroyed buildings became. An Indonesian high rise was Boolean calculus that only a Petal Scott could reliably solve. The other techs worked to extract survivors in open fields or atop intact buildings. Their numbers lagged hers. Some had clocked out from fatigue after a single extraction; a few gathered discreetly behind her, watching from a distance. Petal paid them no mind.

  As the arcs intersected on a trajectory that would hold, she struck the Enact button. In an instant the man she’d spent the last 32 minutes working on disappeared from the rank and dusty hole he’d lain in overnight, and materialized at a medevac unit a few miles away. Adi Taher, father of two, vitals still strong, would most likely survive. Petal closed her eyes and stretched her wrists. At 39, they needed more stretching these days. She took two deep gulps from the water bottle on the floor and consulted the map for the next one.

  Not a single light blinked on the chip signal map. Had she finally cleared all of the chipped from the queue? Being a high rise in one of Jakarta’s wealthiest districts, most of the inhabitants could afford to be chipped. The quake had struck in the middle of a weekday, so, hopefully only a small portion of the residents were home at the time. She’d waited on Taher’s extraction to give the others a better chance of survival. His position had been tricky, liable to set off little landslides below him. So far the gambit had worked, but now came the true challenge.

  Petal looked again at the building’s schematics on the bottom left monitor—both the blueprint of what it had been as one piece and the rendering overlay of it in pieces. She pinpointed each sizable void to perform a remote manual bio scan.

  Though most of the residents had been chipped, just as likely those people had housekeepers and maintenance workers that could never afford the expense.

  HRO existed for them. Though Humanitarian Rescue Organization’s mandate stated that they would rescue any and all people they could in a natural disaster, their real mission, as far as Petal was concerned, was to save those no one else thought worth the trouble—the ones who could never pay for expensive trips through the black. For them, she’d decided to work with a non- governmental organization instead of the lucrative commercial market.

  She wouldn’t have had it any other way—even today.

  Near the top of the rubble, Petal found a number of cooling bodies, a small legion of cats, and below that three sizable rodents huddled together in the ruins of a restaurant that had once dominated the 15th floor. Sweat beaded on Petal’s forehead. She wiped it and dried her hands on her pants
. Slowly she scanned the rest of the building, cubic meter by cubic meter, consulting the locale grid she’d imposed on the overlay. At one of the last grid locations she got a larger, faint reading: no doubt, human. This person lay in the middle of the building, at the bottom, on the cusp of being crushed and being free. The location couldn’t be much worse. It denoted a bleak, new level of complexity. Petal had to know the extractee’s particulars to have any chance at a successful teleport. She grabbed her headset, toggled the talk function, and dialed up the mobile hospital’s HRO rep.

  “Intake,” a female voice said, her accent relaxing the word. “Have you finished cross-referencing the records of residence and accounted-for list?” Petal asked.

  “Yes, I’ll forward it now. Your access number?” “2478,” Petal said.

  “Sent,” the operator replied. “Thanks,” Petal said, disconnecting.

  An icon blinked on the center screen. She ran the parameter search and waited a few seconds for the soft ding of completion in her ear.

  Petal exhaled and motioned the ID reveal command. She’d learned not to look at the extractee’s particulars before absolutely necessary; she’d watched a colleague in Rio reduced to tears when a sibling showed up on the screen. The tech couldn’t have been more grateful when Petal evacced his sister, but Petal had been just as grateful for the lesson. She had no surviving family, only a long-ago-lost locket of their faces before the fire. She had a heart, though. Sometimes what you didn’t know could help someone else.

  Petal heard the other techs react and took her time looking at the screen: a baby, a toddler really, no more than four years old. Due to the extractee’s age, a photo hadn’t been added yet. The screen showed only a DOB with a blank space after the dash—unaccounted-for life, a maid’s child, or perhaps a maid-in- training herself. The record didn’t include any weight or height measurements from this year, no body scan, just the record of residence.

  Petal called in a drone to help her. She wanted eyes on the child. She’d need to see the pocket that held the girl and her position in it, but mostly Petal didn’t want her to be alone in the dark any longer. Petal glanced at the top monitors as the drone left the hangar.

  While she calibrated the vectimeter to her estimates of a South East Asian 3 ½ year old’s median weight and height, the drone reached altitude and quickly covered the distance to downtown Jakarta.

  Petal watched its progress as the piles of rubble grew larger and the drone cruised down to the one that held the girl. The monitor darkened as the drone reached the closest opening and extended

  its pinpoint camera into the space. A finger wouldn’t have fit into it but the camera did. A faint outline of concrete and twisted steel glowed into existence on the screen. It slowly brightened and the girl’s face appeared on the top center monitor.

  A shallow gash bled down her cheek, but other than that she looked intact. Her legs and arms were free, her head at a natural- enough angle, but Petal couldn’t see any space for her to wiggle, much less take a deep breath. Her lips had turned a strange hue, signaling the need to get her out now. Petal flicked the microphone away from her mouth and activated brown noise inside her headset. Leaning forward, the world shrunk down to five monitors and the controls in her hands.

  On the top right monitor, the girl’s infrared face glowed, below it the vectimeter adjusted and dead center scrolled the NAV screen’s crowded array of numbers, colors, and all the custom apps and algorithms that Petal had loaded for easy execution.

  She’d have to go fully manual. For this, she’d rather trust her own algorithms. Mass manufacturers hadn’t yet figured out how to code functional finesse. Her algorithms bested them when it came to complex teleport metrics and executions. Though the algorithms only awaited an execution command, first Petal had to see the right combination of variables, the sweet spot in all the data flooding into her system. She tweaked and waited. As each second crept by, each breath she felt sure the rubble would shift and crush any hope of completing this rescue. With her left hand she carefully guided the extract arc into a better position. Petal glanced up at the vectimeter; she needed to adjust no more than 1 degree 3 and— there, the curve of a pocket in time. Petal’s finger hovered above the Enact button, its code scrawling quickly by. NAV almost lined up. It would in 87 milliseconds, 47 milliseconds, the arc careened, snapped back before Petal could react, 17 . . . .

  The girl disappeared from the screen.

  Petal blinked, jerked her head up to check the drone connection. In that millisecond, tons of concrete and steel shifted, filling the void. The screen turned black as the camera went offline. Petal gasped. She scanned for bio signals—nothing. Not a cooling temp, or phantom trace. The toddler had simply ceased to be there, but Petal hadn’t evacced her. She couldn’t identify the feeling filling up her chest, just as she couldn’t make sense of where in all the worlds and wormholes the girl had gone.

  Thirty hectic minutes later she had no explanation—not one for herself or the site director whose office she now stood in, exhausted and frustrated. She felt on the verge of tears, but kept her face expressionless; she’d spent years perfecting the wall between her and the world of nerves and overwhelming circumstances. Petal could barely focus on his words and hadn’t heard the name of the man who he introduced her to. It seemed a strange time for introductions, for conversations, for anything but finding the little girl. The director repeated himself.

  “Ms. Scott, this is Brian Dunphries, from headquarters,” the director said, moving hair out of his eyes as he spoke.

  Petal didn’t question why headquarters had sent a monitor for her, but a part of her filed away the information, the same part that filed all the work slights and microaggressions she chose not to deal with in the moment.

  She knew she should respond to the introduction, but the usual words rang hollow—it was not good to meet him. Petal settled on “hello” and waited for the director to continue.

  “I’d planned on introducing you this morning, but didn’t want to interrupt your progress on the Crissal Building.”

  Crissal building. This at least she could connect to. Her eyes shifted to the director and the tall blond man at his side.

  “What the hell happened?” the director asked.

  “Lost souls are a reality of our business,” the HQ rep interjected.

  “Supposedly not for Ms. Scott here,” the director replied. “We were told she’d never had an incident.”

  “I haven’t—hadn’t,” Petal said. Other techs accepted lost souls as an inevitable facet of their work; no one even looked for them after the loss. The possibility of losing someone simply because of the complexity of the task didn’t square. She created her own algorithms, went manual and trained three times longer than certification required to negate the inevitability of lost souls. Yet now here she stood, living a moment she’d worked to avoid.

  “I have no excuse,” she said. She wouldn’t start inventing them now.

  “You’ll be put on leave while we investigate,” the director responded.

  “Completely routine, Ms. Scott,” the rep said.

  “Of course,” she replied, turning to leave. As the door closed behind her she heard the director’s final words.

  “When I met her I told them no way she matched her numbers. Not her fault really. She’s overcome a lot of inherent limitations, but I can’t say that I’m surprised.”

  That night, alone in the small home she rented, the girl’s face waited behind Petal’s closed eye lids. So, Petal’d left the bed behind. Instead, she paced and pored over the episode, worrying the floorboards in the narrow corridor between her terminal rig and monitor array. She could hear the steady hum of her generator, and not much else beyond her own thoughts.

  Petal had never fancied herself arrogant, but she simply couldn’t believe she’d lost the girl. She had no problem accepting her mistakes when she made them, but her head as well as heart rejected that conclusion. Her finger hadn’t jumped. She�
��d had 17 milliseconds left and in that thin sliver of time something had happened.

  A headache collected at her temples and Petal stopped pacing. She grabbed an apple from the countertop and dropped down at her rig.

  She backed up everything, live-fed it to the server stateside that held her entire teleport history. Her father had been a boxing fan, and gave her one piece of advice: leave nothing up to the judges.

  They could conduct their own investigation, but so would she. Devouring the apple in five big bites, she logged onto her archives and pulled up the day’s work. Scrolling past the other extractees, she quickly found her place and pored over the time log, reviewing each reading and corresponding action on her part.

  It didn’t take long to find the hole in the whole. The anomaly started at 19 milliseconds-until-engage and ended at 17 til. In those 2 milliseconds, the arc had deviated—stretched into a parabola that did not correspond to her algorithms or HRO’s apps, and moved in a way not under her control. The girl had disappeared into that gap.

  Petal could find no further record of her existence. As an unchipped no teleport tech could. Had she spliced with the rubble around her, fallen into an alternate wormhole, evaporated with the cataclysmic intensity of Luther’s Arc? Petal did not know. The tears that had threatened all day fell freely now, soaking her shirt, the skin beneath and further still.

  #

  HRO called her back stateside within the week. Despite recent events her record of reliability and success remained unmatched. They could use her in Seattle where floods were regular and the occasional tsunami surfaced. HQ wrote the incident off as her