Man from Atlantis

by Patrick Duffy

  Mark allowed the memories to fade as he passed through the gate and drove towards the parking structure ahead. Beyond the buildings in the distance, he could see the sandy beach and the blue of the ocean.

  Only eight cars in the world had the microchip that opened the #2 white gate. Jason, Mark knew, was very proud of the fact that these seven other people, the best brains in the business, had never found the chip or even knew when he had installed it in their vehicles. The high point in his James Bond-like daring was when Professor Nagashima drove directly from the dealer in his new car and was shocked when every gate opened and Jason met him with a smile at the Beachlab door.

  Mark pulled into the covered garage area and into his space. He knew Elizabeth had not arrived because the space next to his was still vacant.

  “I’ll get it for you, Mark. I was just leaving anyway.” Jason was coming out of the lab before Mark could close his door. The young man dropped the large shoulder bag he was carrying, took the power cord from its hook, and plugged it into the Tesla. Jason always moved with the spring-like action of a dancer. He more or less jumped from a starting position and seemed to have a flourish of some sort to accentuate most things he did. His dark hair was cut short around the sides but rather long at the top, which added to the physical punctuation. He dressed in the fashion Mark had seen on the music channels of his TV and always had a pocket or bag that produced whatever was needed at any given moment.

  After rechecking that the power plug was firmly in place, Jason reached into the backpack and pulled out a cap with a large capital D on the front. Spinning it from the bill on the end of his finger, he pulled it onto his head and started for his own car.

  “You’re cooking, Mark. Catch you tomorrow.”

  “Jason,” Mark leaned on the roof of his Tesla, “Elizabeth would like you to run the results from yesterday’s work for us before you go, but if you do not have the time, I can do it myself.”

  Jason beeped the alarm on the green VW Bug a second time and immediately started back toward the lab door. Putting the keys into a pocket on the front of his bag, he flipped his cap back into the top opening.

  “Hey, no problem. It’s probably a good thing ‘cause Jessie’s being a real twit lately. Besides, it’ll save me from driving all the way to San Diego to loan my sister my camera for some music video she’s doing, which isn’t working right anyway!” Jason had already put his palm on the scanner before Mark could get to it.

  “Why do you give all the equipment female names, Jason?”

  “I dunno; maybe so when they work right I can pretend it’s because they like me! They really like me!” Jason looked at Mark and laughed and gave the little wink he always gave when he thought he’d been clever. Mark placed his hand quickly on the scanner as Jason removed his and followed him into the ready room where the door silently opened. With the click of the closing lock on the outer door, Jason pushed one of several small buttons on the side of his wristwatch and stared intently at the silver face.

  “Here,” he said, never taking his eyes off the watch, “I’ll show you what I mean.”

  “The room darkened a little and the reddish grid lines ran over the two while Mark cocked his head a little and smiled.

  “See what I mean.” Jason kept staring at his wrist. He tipped it up in an awkward lift, hand over his shoulder for Mark to see. “Check it out. It’s been over ten seconds and she hasn’t completed the scan, and I mean, Dude! Like it’s us!”

  Mark stood in the whirling red grid staring at the large silver watch with, what he considered, far too many hands and dials.

  “Jason, thank you, but I can tell when there is a fluctuation in the system.”

  When Mark stopped talking, the grid halted, the lights brightened, and the slight pop signaled that the airtight door to the lab was about to open. The hiss of the airlock was covered by Mark’s voice.

  “This wait was four point two seconds shorter than the delay last Tuesday,” Mark said. And with that he turned and walked into the lab leaving Jason standing there looking back and forth between him and his super-watch.

  Lab #1 was referred to as the Beachlab by the few members of the team who were authorized to pass through the last gate and enter the security room. Over the years, the distinction was made between them and where they worked and the other hundred plus employees of AORI. The Beachlabs were three buildings behind the security wall that did most of the initial experimentation concerning Mark. The two beyond where Mark now stood, housed the aquatic studies facilities and the sub-dermal studies facilities. The aquatic studies building housed all the tanks and their necessary equipment. Hundreds of smaller aquariums contained thousands of species of aquatic life being studied, while several larger tanks could accommodate fish and mammals up to the size of full-grown orcas. Two of these larger tanks were connected to the ocean by long underground channels that ran under the sandy beach and opened under the water some two hundred yard away. They were part of the surf line.

  The other site, Beachlab #3 was basically a state-of-the-art medical facility. Ongoing studies of Mark’s physical and mental abilities were done there. Hallways, overhead bridges, and underground passages connected the entire three building complex. Everything in the institute, including the large main buildings outside this secured area, was connected by thousands of miles of optic fiber electronics to the building where he now stood. Beachlab #1

  From where he was, Mark could see almost all of this main nerve center. Before him were eighteen computer desk cubicles. They were enclosed with desk-high walls and slightly higher file cabinets. Situated in an almost haphazard fashion in the center of the room, they constituted home base for the six men and women who worked for Elizabeth. Although each person had their personal area, depending on the projects they were involved in, a scientist would move from one station to the next, keeping ongoing studies up and active and available to comrades. The consoles belonging to the three original members of the team that were no longer here, however, were more or less retired. The work they had accomplished was still in the system, but the work areas were seldom occupied.

  Beyond the workstations, lining the outer walls, were the offices of Elizabeth and Mark—hers on the left and his to the right, with the massive mainframe in the middle. These rooms were glassed in floor to ceiling.

  There was only one person in the room when Mark entered, a young woman intently working at a station about midway into the room. Walking past shelves of flash drives, old discs, and manuals of reference materials, he approached the back of the woman’s chair.

  “Good afternoon, Staci.”

  The attractive young lady lifted her head from where she had been intently staring at the row of monitors lining the counter and pushed the wire-rimmed glasses back to the bridge of her nose. The many screens filled with all sorts of equations and data charts reflected various angles of her, and Mark could see the cloth elastic that held back her streaked blonde hair, the two earrings in each ear, and her profile from both sides.

  “Oh, hi, Mr. Harris. I didn’t hear you come in.”

  “Why?” Mark stopped at her chair and waited for her to respond.

  His response to what was obviously a rhetorical statement caused her to think a second before continuing on. “Well, I guess it’s because we…the…we… who aren’t like you, haven’t developed our brain’s ability to devote equal, one hundred percent dedication to all of our senses…simultaneously…yet. Whether or not they are center of peripheral.”

  Mark only continued to look into her eyes. When a slight blush of color started to appear in her cheeks, Staci continued with a little smile. “To tell you the truth, I think for the time being I like it better to be able to tune out when I want to.”

  She sat there smiling at Mark, clearly pleased that she had been able to explain herself without being condescending. Then a rapid beeping from one of her monitors got h
er attention.

  “Oops! Excuse me, Mr. Harris.” And with a quick swivel of her chair, she grabbed her laptop and started to make notes.

  He walked past her. As he did, once again, he kindly reminded her, “Staci, I wish you would feel comfortable enough here to call me Mark.”

  “Huh? Uh huh. Yes, sir.”

  Her words trailed off into a mutter and, with a smile, he went into the lab followed now by Jason who tossed off a, “hey, Stace,” to the girl as he glanced off and on at his watch and counted to himself.

  The glass door slid open as Mark approached, and the two of them stepped into Jessie’s control center. About forty feet of the back wall was actually a floor to ceiling map of the world. The glass surface of the map was really just a protective covering over the six ultra-high definition screens that projected the scene being fed from Jessie. This one-dimensional world was, just like the real one, in constant motion. By commanding Jessie the screen could show ocean currents, weather patterns, and the positions of vessels on land or sea. With another command, the screens would fill with pinpoint locations of every satellite now in orbit. In front of the map was the command console. Looking a lot like a captain’s bridge from a large ship, it formed a gentle arc and accommodated four large captain’s chairs. In front of each chair was a keypad, phone, and bank of monitors. Considering its enormous capability, the command center for Jessie was quite uncluttered.

  The room hummed with the sound of the cooling system and whirring and gentle clicking of the computer running all aspects of AORI. Mark stopped at the small console in front of the glass wall and door that divided Jessie from the rest of lab #1, just as Jason plopped into one of the captain chairs at the console station. Mark watched Jason talk, arrange papers, move his briefcase out of the way with his foot, and activate a program on Jessie. At the same time, he continued to look at his watch and push different buttons on it.

  “Hey! Stace! Come on over here.” He had touched the intercom button to the right of his keypad. “We’re gonna punch up your yesterday stuff on the wet string thing. And we gotta book ‘cause Dr. Merrill just came through number two.”

  This last remark brought Mark’s attention to the top center of the screen on the big wall. That section was no longer showing northeast Asia and part of the polar ice cap but had divided into eight sections that rolled to eight others every four seconds and then on to another eight before repeating. Twenty-four security cameras that watched continuously the entire lab complex, and with more commands would display the over two hundred cameras of the institute. Mark saw Elizabeth’s Mercedes as it passed through the gate. The next screen caught the car as it passed into the parking area and into her space next to his Tesla. The screen stayed on her instead of rolling to the next rotation as they were all programmed to be action sensitive. His head tipped a little to the side while he watched her pause as she passed his car and touched the driver’s door handle. She left that screen, and he tracked her to the screening station at the entrance.

  “Here, Mark. I’ll show you what I mean about little Miss Jessie.”

  Mark turned back to Jason as his fingers flew across the keyboard inputting codes and symbols and finally coming to a rest as the main monitor started a readout of names.

  “Here, before Dr. Merrill gets in, check this out.” Jason pointed to the screen for Mark to follow. “This is me. Here’s Dr. Merrill and Stace and you.” His finger touched an area of the screen and Mark saw the entire right hand of the monitor fill with graphs and lines as Jason activated the touch screen. “You already know most of this stuff, but here look at this! It’s like she gets the hiccups or palsy or something. And if she’s tripping up on this easy stuff, I don’t know what else… Here it is.”

  Mark watched Jason’s finger move across the readouts until it stopped and followed one line in the middle of the screen. “Your basic heartbeat, oxy content, respiration, yadda, yadda. This is it. This one is the biotrack for the carbon dating. Most of the time it’s like a rock. Steady as a preacher. For everybody except sometimes for you, that is.”

  Mark could see the line as it inched slowly to the right under the dateline at the top of the screen. Very steady and straight until, at uneven intervals, it rose in a small hump before straightening out once again.

  “Crazy, huh? I mean it’s really tiny. Maybe only a split second or two and not for every reading, but she is definitely giving you a stretch now and then. I’ll recalibrate it again next week or maybe just take her out to dinner.” Mark didn’t see Jason’s little smile and wink because his own head tilted and he started to think inside it.

  Mark’s ears heard the pop and opening door through the computer noise and the glass wall. He turned to see Elizabeth enter from the ready room and gather up Staci as she crossed the floor and stepped through the opening door.

  “Sorry I’m late, everyone.” She stopped at the small desk, dropped the armload of papers and her presentation on top, and started to remove her pale green suit jacket.

  “Which country did you turn down today, Dr. Merrill?” Staci smiled as she asked and handed Elizabeth her white lab coat, with the hand not carrying a stack of folders.

  “No country. Just cocktails.”

  As she was buttoning the coat, Jason’s attention was suddenly focused on the monitor. After touching another part of the screen, he quietly asked, “Dr. Merrill, are you…?” But Mark didn’t need to watch the readout to understand. He interrupted and touched Jason lightly on the shoulder, stepped up, and held one side of the white coat for her to slip her arms into.

  “Elizabeth, what happened?”

  Jason stopped tracking her elevated heart rate, salinity read, retinal read, and all other signs after he realized Mark had picked up on most of them without the aid of Jessie’s new experimental Pentium XII chip.

  “After the board meeting, Gasten wanted a word alone with me. He told me that he received a call when Dr. Raggit hadn’t shown up today to speak at the museum’s art and science luncheon. After calling his house and his mobile, he notified the police in Arrowhead. They went over and, as far they could tell, he hadn’t been home for at least a week.”

  As he watched her stand in silence, Elizabeth absent-mindedly drew the small charm that hung from the fine gold chain inside the neck of her blouse. Turning it slowly in her fingers, she stared at it as small creases deepened on her forehead. Mark felt there was more and softly began to lead her into expressing her thoughts.

  “That is not so different from his behavior when he was here…before he retired, Elizabeth. He was always packing off to some other experiment in an instant.”

  “Yes, Mark, but he was a fanatic about staying in communication. And the other thing is that he had been looking forward to giving his speech for months. It was on Tagore, one of his favorite poets.”

  Everyone at AORI knew that Dr. Raggit would call or Email or log into Jessie several times a day whether he was at the lab, at home or even on vacation. He carried that habit with him into retirement, and at no time could Mark remember him being completely out of touch.

  Staci put her five-stack of CDs into the remote tower of the computer while she said, “Maybe he has just finally learned what it means to be retired, Dr. Merrill.”

  “Yes, Staci, I’m sure that’s it. Anyway, Gasten said he would follow up with the people in Arrowhead and get back to me. Now,” she gave a little clap of her hands and turned to the console, “where were we yesterday?”

  Even with her show of concentrating on Staci’s new work, Mark knew the situation with Thomas Raggit was still occupying Elizabeth, but he would think inside that later. For now, he joined the others. For the next several hours they reviewed Staci’s cross-referencing of her test results and Jason, having decided against going to his sister’s altogether, worked on Jessie’s calibrations and fiddled with his camera.

  The rest of the day went on as usual,
and the lab was completely deserted except for the four of them.

  It had been two hours since Dr. Nagashima had left when Mark came to the surface of the glass tank. He swam to the edge and draped his arms over the metal rim. “You put number four up three percent and the rate in number six fell off quickly. Either by shading or possibly by removal.”

  Seeing Elizabeth sitting in the console chair and smiling pleased him. She seemed to have forgotten her earlier angst over Dr. Raggit. She looked peaceful, tapping the end of a pencil she was holding against her lower lip. He always felt a great responsibility for her state of mind and would do whatever he could to make her happier.

  “Amazing, absolutely amazing!” Staci’s voice came from behind the rolling screens at the other end of the lab.

  The tank that Mark stepped out of was part of a labyrinth of water tanks of various sizes all connected with clear plastic tubing. In addition to the water and tubes, there were freestanding plants and dry terrariums; some with and some without inhabitants. The entire village was wired into a web of literally thousands of interconnections, signal boosters, and relays, with the entire system ending in various remote ports of Jessie. All of this was being watched over very intently by Jason who responded with, “One hundred percent, Stace!”