“Kate’s leaving,” he shrugged.
This was not what Kate had discussed with her, but she knew her reaction would be important.
“Like I give a festering rat’s…” she let her shoulders sag and sighed, “Suppose I better go ‘liaise’ with her, find out what’s up. Where is she?”
Roy pointed back down the stairs, “Roped off with the others on the Obs Deck.”
The Observation Deck had been divided in two by a cordon, flanked by Civil Protection Officers with holstered handguns. On the far side of the rope she could see anxious-looking faces; strangers thrown together by President Barnes’ pronouncement. It took her only a few seconds to spot Kate, who was making conversation with a few of the others. She approached the cordon and was blocked by one of the newly appointed officers. With one hand raised towards her, his other hand strayed towards the holster at his waist.
“You need to step back, Miss,” he announced, “Best to keep your distance from ‘em.”
Until a few days ago, many of these people had treated each other as friends; now a simple piece of rope had reclassified them as criminals. Cassidy backed away and saw Alfred talking with Trevor. She had an idea and walked towards them. As she arrived they were still in conversation, Alfred signalled that he’d seen her, so she patiently waited to speak.
“I reset the warning protocols,” Trevor was saying in monotone, “When the electrical charge drops, the tone will sound, just like you wanted…”
He handed a touchscreen tablet to Alfred who took it without comment.
Trevor shook his head and departed.
“Everything OK?” Cassidy stepped closer.
“It’s an emotional day for all of us,” he replied, looking at the control tablet, “I take it you’ve heard?”
“Roy told me, just now,” Cassidy glanced over at Kate, “Do you want me to see if I can persuade her to stay?”
Alfred stopped his study of the tablet and looked at her.
“I’d prefer her to stay,” he admitted, “but I promised that anyone can leave if they wish, I have to grant her the same choice.”
Cassidy thought she knew exactly why Barnes wanted Kate to stay. Being the daughter of the self-sacrificing Field inventor carried an awful lot of sympathy from the Node’s population. If she left, that sympathy left with her.
“Let me try for you,” Cassidy briefly touched his forearm, “it couldn’t hurt.”
“I appreciate it,” Alfred sighed, “but she’s already made her choice.”
He left without a word, leaving her without a plan.
More packing cases trundled by and Cassidy realised the departure must now surely be imminent. She heard a wheeled case stop behind her and she turned to see Tyler.
“Shit, am I glad to see you! Kate’s leaving and we need to get a message to her. You’ve got a packing case, are you dropping that off outside?” she gestured in the direction of the airlock.
“Yeah,” he looked away from her.
“Alright, when you get the case out there, hang around for a bit, then come back in, but on the other side of the rope… when you’re… what?” she suddenly saw the look on his face, “What, Ty?”
“I’m leaving too, Cassy,” his face crumpled.
She saw that on top of the case were a few of his belongings.
“No!” she felt the tears prick inside her eyes, “No, no!”
She felt an explosive fire building from the pit of her stomach.
“It was my choice,” Tyler gave her a weak smile.
Her throat became tight and she could only mouth the word ‘why?’
“I don’t fit in here, Cassy,” he shrugged, “You’ve got your Council thing to do the whole time… which is great… I’m really happy that so many people look up to my little sister. But I don’t learn stuff as fast as the others who’ve got a proper place here…”
“You do have a proper place!” she found her voice, “Our Mum and Dad paid for it fair and square, we’ve got just as much right to be here as these other people! Mum and Dad wanted us to be free, Ty! I’m begging you, don’t throw it all away!”
“I will be free,” Tyler seemed puzzled that she didn’t understand, “Cassy, you know I’m not the best thinker, but… look out there… blue skies, the water’s gone. The Siva thing didn’t kill us. Out there I won’t be a burden to -”
“Don’t…” she began, but choked on her own tears, “You were never a burden. Just stay, Ty, please! I can’t do all of… this… without you.”
He pulled her into a hug.
“Before we got here, I never saw nothin’. Everything was always just… there. Now I got a chance to see a brand-new world. I don’t wanna stay inside anymore, I wanna see it all, Cassy!”
Their hug now caught the attention of a baton-carrying officer who moved towards them.
“Get back into line,” he placed a hand on Tyler’s arm.
Cassidy’s full anger erupted in an instant.
“Get your fucking hands off!” she roared, grabbing the officer’s hand.
A second later she found herself on the floor looking up at the officer who was standing over her, his baton raised again. She saw Marshall suddenly dash between them.
“Stand the hell down you bloody moron!” he shouted, “How can you not know who that is?!”
Cassidy struggled to her feet and could hear the man explaining that he was only following orders, but her attention was devoted to locating Tyler. In the few short seconds that she’d been on the floor, he’d been carried along with the others heading towards the airlock.
Just audible above the now tumultuous shouts, she heard his voice.
“Love you, Cassy!”
His voice allowed her to pinpoint him in the stream of people; he was smiling at her. She quickly drew breath to shout the same back, but he’d already disappeared from view.
•
Exile had certain advantages, Kate thought. Out here she’d be free of Barnes’ personal crusade to instill a permanent state of fear. It would also ensure that her father’s theories on the Boundary were not abused.
Still supported on her crutches, she couldn’t easily reciprocate Scott’s hug, but managed to place one hand on his arm and pat it.
“It’s alright,” she said, “this is my choice. These people need a friendly face… I can be there for them.”
“They’ll have a good leader, then,” Scott squeezed her.
A brief warning tone reached them through the Node’s external speakers.
“One minute left. You should go now,” she smiled, “You’ll remember what I said, won’t you?”
Scott simply nodded, then hesitantly turned away, his feet scuffing over the cold, rough ground. She knew she could rely on him to deliver her messages. It bothered her that she couldn’t tell people in person but, by maintaining her distance, it was less likely that they’d be associated with her actions.
Kate looked around at the group of exiles.
Most, including Danny, had been forced to leave, but there were a few who had chosen to be here. She desperately wanted to know what had possessed Tyler to leave, but it would have to wait until the Node had left.
“I’m glad you’re with us,” she called over to him.
“I belong with you guys,” he replied.
“Good luck,” Scott stepped inside the airlock and the door hissed closed. In the relative quiet outside the Node, Kate reminded everyone of the Field’s effects.
“OK, remember to face the centre of the Node and stand upright. As the Field stabilises you’ll experience a little dizziness, but it won’t be as bad as the one during the first departure and it’ll quickly pass.”
From her left, Danny gave a small cough.
“So I guess this is it?” he forced a thin smile onto his face.
“Best foot forward?” Kate offered.
She watched him taking in the view of the world beyond the Field. The clouds continued their blurred, river-like flow across the
sky.
“You know, my Mum used to say ‘Always forwards, Danny. Never back.’ I guess that’s good adv-”
The Biomag around Kate’s neck emitted a high-pitched whining tone. Danny whipped around and she could tell he was about to race to her aid.
“Stop!” she yelled at him, effectively bringing him and several others to a halt, “I’m compromised! Everybody keep your distance! If you’re around me when the Field changes, it could kill us all! Stay back!”
She looked in through the observation window.
On the balcony level of the Observation Deck, Alfred Barnes stared down at her. Only when he was sure that she’d seen him, did he turn his back on her.
The message was very clear.
He wanted her to know that he’d done this to her.
Regardless of her attempts to conceal the positive effects of her changes, it seemed that Alfred had taken note of something more basic: the metathene had caused a reaction, rather than none at all. Those with the right receptors were susceptible to rapid change.
It seemed that, like her, Alfred had concluded that she represented the start of a new evolutionary chain. Over a long enough timescale, genetic mutations and variations would occur.
It was a fact that she herself had hoped to capitalise on, outside the Node.
It was also a fact that Alfred probably feared; when the Node emerged from its flight through thousands of years, he may find himself belonging to a fundamentally weaker species.
To maintain his political standing, he’d been forced to let her leave the Node, but clearly he had no intentions of permitting her survival. Any possible evolutionary chain that she embodied was about to be terminated.
The Node’s external siren gave its final warning tone.
Her mother had once adopted a frail persona in order to momentarily deceive an ego-morph, a technique that Kate had been using for weeks to persuade everyone that she was no threat. There seemed little point maintaining the facade now.
She let her crutches fall to the floor, stood upright and raised her voice so that everyone could hear.
“I’m not going to survive this! Barnes has sabotaged my Biomag somehow.”
Taking care to remain still, she turned her head slightly in Danny’s direction. By no means was this the ideal time to relay the information, but her time was almost up. These would be her last words and would be remembered by those around her.
“Danny’s father was General Napier. Barnes killed him too.”
Voices of confusion erupted but she knew that she dare not look around. She heard the low, abrasive sound of people’s unsettled feet turning in place on the rough ground.
“Barnes wants you all to fail,” she called out, “but use his own words against him… We grow stronger!”
Almost at the very spot where her father had first thrust it upon her, the Biomag around her neck emitted a final stuttering whine and then fell silent.
Her father’s extraordinary efforts had earned her a reprieve of just one month. But that time had been enough. The dormant abilities given to her by her parents and the ignorant actions of a manipulative man, had given her the necessary vision to achieve what must come next.
She grasped her Biomag, now little more than jewellery, and closed her eyes once last time.
The sounds furthest away from her began to grow indistinct. The Node’s final warning tone was the first to fade, followed by the voices of those around her, until she was left with only the sound of her own slow breathing.
Before her was the surface of her mental ocean; a maelstrom of overlapping and coexisting thoughts. She knew that most of these turbulent thoughts no longer mattered and watched as the largest waves collapsed, leaving no wake. All that remained behind were the thoughts and memories that she needed now.
Chaotic swirling patterns of choice ebbed and flowed around her; all inextricably linked with her father’s instruction to protect the Boundary. She tried to focus beyond her surface thoughts but encountered resistance. She gripped the Biomag harder, as if she might gain strength from it, but she found the opposite to be true. The surface was becoming more unsettled than before.
It now began to dawn on her.
The last reminder of her father was nestled in her physical hand. The Biomag itself was now useless, but her emotional attachment was anchoring her here. Nothing of this world could be taken to the next. Once more, she would have to let him go. She pictured his ‘LOKT’ hidden message one last time:
‘Create a better world than us.’
“I will,” she let go of the Biomag and exhaled her last breath, giving up all connection with the corporeal.
In an instant, the waves became peacefully calm; rising and falling to an unseen rhythm. In this calm, she began to see the multiplicity of depths beyond the mere surface of perception.
Gently, she pushed through its surface and moved her mind into the waves beyond. She felt her atoms align with the collapsing Field, then her mental ocean became one with the undulating and infinite temporal variation of the Boundary.
21 HOURS
9th April 2107
While the other crew members continued their extended hibernation, Anna listened to the accounts of Fai, Mike and Cathy. She couldn’t yet process the Jupiter events, it was all too sudden. From her perspective, it had been only a few minutes since Miles had helped her into the hibernation unit. In the blink of an eye, he had gone.
Cathy had revived Mike and Lana early but, apparently prompted by Miles’ last words of ‘Assist Anna’, Fai had insisted that Anna be revived too. What Anna saw as an act of empathy, Fai described as a simple rebalancing of an equation. It seemed to Anna that the world had changed yet again while she’d slept.
Another of the changes was that Dr. Chen was absent; a fact that Lana Yakovna was also having difficulty with.
“But, Fai,” Lana was asking, “this conflicts with your programming, no?”
“Lana, I have conducted nine Pittman-Wild interviews with Dr. Chen during his hibernation. On eight of those occasions he demonstrated that his presence here would be suboptimal to the evaluation process.”
Anna didn’t particularly relish the idea of Dr. Chen being anywhere near her, at any time, but she felt she had to ask the question.
“Where is he?”
“In hibernation,” Fai replied.
Anna opened her mouth to ask how conversations were possible during hibernation, but Cathy held up a tablet screen.
“Really sorry, Anna, no time. Fai says there’s a maximum of twenty-one hours before the hibernation units will need to stop. Everyone else will wake up. We need to show this to you and Lana now.”
Cathy fixed the tablet to the module wall and connected it to the network cabling.
“This footage was taken during Mike’s EVA to disable the manual overrides outside I.A.3 and 4. Focus on Jupiter, in particular the Great Red Spot.”
Anna watched as Jupiter sailed through the frame, its bands of reddish hues encircling the planet and the red spot swirling within a band below its equator.
“The intensity of the red spot keeps changing,” Cathy pointed to the detail on the screen.
“I am not an expert,” Anna scrutinised the footage, “but even I know that Jupiter’s spot changes over time. What’s the significance?”
“The red spot is a storm that’s lasted for centuries,” Mike explained, “The spot’s colour changes from red to white and all the shades in-between, but it takes many decades.”
Anna felt compelled to point out the obvious.
“The Field’s temporal gradient is simply accelerating our point of view. It just seems to be changing rapidly.”
Mike and Cathy were shaking their heads.
“I’m afraid not,” said Cathy, “Our temporal gradient still doesn’t account for the spot’s rate of change.”
“In real time,” Mike now joined in, tapping at Jupiter on the screen, “this storm fluctuated over the course of just weeks, not
decades.”
Lana drew a breath and pulled herself over to the screen.
“So this is a super-storm, yes?” she shrugged.
Anna saw Mike and Cathy exchange glances, clearly there was something else going on here.
“OK, Lana, picture a chaotic storm,” said Cathy, “Lightning flashes, black skies, the works.”
“Da,” Lana agreed, closing her eyes.
“The skies clear and then another storm rolls in,” Cathy paused, “except it’s exactly the same storm that happens again.”
Lana opened her eyes, “What?”
Anna had also been visualising Cathy’s description and realised that she was being presented to. It was a technique that she herself had sometimes used to explain complex subjects in a simpler way.
“Why not just tell us what you’ve found?” she asked them.
“OK, Fai’s confirmed it,” said Mike, “but she thought it would be better coming from us. We were both there when it happened but we didn’t truly see it because of the… you know, situation.”
“Fai,” Anna addressed the air, “is this true?”
“Yes, Dr. Bergstrom,” her voice came from a nearby panel, “I have verified the fluctuations and concur.”
“OK, Fai,” said Cathy, “Run the sequence.”
The footage of Mike staring out at Jupiter stopped and the image zoomed in to focus on Jupiter alone. The video restarted but Fai stabilised the image to ensure that the red spot was always in the centre of frame during the clip.
“We’re now looking at the storm spot alone,” Mike confirmed, “Fai, can you add the overlay?”
The occurrence and duration of the red spot was accompanied by a graph, running along the bottom of the screen. Sometimes the red spot would only appear briefly, causing a flat-topped spike on the graph, at other times the red spot would last longer causing a stepped plateau to appear. Although the order of the spikes and horizontal lines seemed random, each spike was identical to the others, and each line had exactly the same duration.
Anna watched as the red spot suddenly lost resolution and became blurred.
“That’s when Jupiter went out of camera range,” Mike explained.
The screen now displayed only the graph filled with spikes and flat lines.
Boundary (Field Book 3) Page 33
