Stasis (Book 1.2): Beta

by Osborne, E. W.

  “What am I looking at, exactly?”

  Hannah was hyper-focused on the screens. “There has to be something wrong with the imaging,” she replied, doubt creeping into her voice.

  “Maybe,” Cameron replied, shaking his head to the negative. He met Penelope’s eye behind Hannah’s back and continued. “But let’s say for a moment it isn’t. What would that mean?”

  The technician scoffed. “It’d mean… Christ. It’d mean that every part of her brain was firing at the same exact time. The damn thing is lighting up like a Christmas tree, but that’s impossible.”

  “You’ve never seen anything like this?” Penelope prodded.

  “No, especially in a partially sedated patient.” Hannah stared at the screens a few moments more before pushing away from the controls. “I’ll let it run through this last cycle and then I’m going in to check it out. There has to be a malfunction. You okay if I leave you here for a bit?”

  “Absolutely,” Cameron calmly replied. “Take your time.”

  The moment the technician had left, he practically pounced on Penelope. Pulling her by the arm, he pointed to a spot on the screen. “There. It’s there.”

  She tried to make sense of the mess of colors. “I don’t even know what I’m looking at,” she replied. It was true. She couldn’t pick out one part of the brain from another in this state.

  Fiddling with the controls, he scrolled down through the layers to the top of her brain stem. “Look at the root. Right there. It’s practically glowing.”

  “Okay…”

  Cameron grunted and landed heavily in the technician’s chair. “How can you not put this together? We’ve been looking for something that all these people have in common. Something that we now know can touch every corner of their brains. You can’t think of anything that would do that?”

  Penelope was exhausted, both physically and emotionally. “Rather than drop breadcrumbs, why don’t you just fucking…”

  “It’s the seed. It’s the goddamn seed. I suspected it from the beginning, but I finally have the proof.”

  It was a slap across the face. For the first time in weeks, the fog lifted and everything was perfectly clear. “Ah,” she squeaked out. Cameron didn’t seem to notice the air shift. She glared at the back of his head, feeling so incredibly dumb. It was almost impossible not to lash out and slap him.

  “Of course, we need to get one of the catatonics in here and perform the same scan, but I’m willing to bet the whole goddamn house that they’ll look nothing like this.”

  “Figures,” Penelope muttered as she walked to the door. When the light from the hall flowed into the darkened room, Cameron gave a shout. She paused half-way out, still wanting to smack him across the face.

  “You can’t go home now. We have to sift through this, figure out what it means.”

  Penelope didn’t trust herself to respond, so she let the closing door speak for her. She made it ten steps down the hall before he chased after.

  “What the hell are you doing?”

  “I’m not going to be a part of your agenda,” Penelope replied without stopping.

  “It’s not an agenda if there’s proof!” When it was clear she wasn’t going to stop, he jogged down the hall after her.

  When she turned the corner, she decided she couldn’t walk away without saying anything again. She turned and met him face on, so close came to a skidding halt to keep from running into her. “The more things change, the more they stay the same, huh?”

  He held up his hands defensively. “Pen, listen.”

  “Nope. Not anymore. I thought we were working together because you needed my expertise, because you respected me or, I don’t know,” she laughed. “Maybe because you needed a friend on your side. But you just needed an in.”

  “I’m telling you it wasn’t like that. I do respect and need you, more than ever,” he said, reaching for her.

  “That’s not saying a lot,” she snarled, pulling her hand back. “I haven’t seen or talked to James in nearly ten years, so whatever access to the company you thought you could get through me doesn’t exist. I’ll see you around.”

  With a lump of rage and regret choking her throat, Penelope entertained the thought that she might’ve been overreacting. She was tired, stressed, overworked. Maybe she was seeing things that weren’t there and taking it out on Cameron. I’ll take a few days off, reconnect with Joey, and reach out to Cam when I’ve cooled down, she thought as she bundled into the car.

  The streets were mostly empty, so it was a quick commute home. Rather than use the time to catch up on work, she sat inside and watched the world zip past.

  How long will my family’s business haunt me? No matter what I do or how much I achieve on my own, I’ll always have that following me.

  When she was a few minutes away from home, a message from Cameron came through.

  For what it’s worth, you’re an amazing doctor. Let me know what you find out when you talk to James. I have some questions of my own.

  Penelope unleashed a deafening scream at his presumption. She’d almost convinced herself this was all her fault. He knew she couldn’t resist reaching out to her brother in light of what they’d found tonight. With every fiber of her being, she hated that he knew that about her.

  Rochester, NY

  May 29th

  The next countdown party lacked the spontaneous fun of the first one. If anything, it felt to Neil like they were there more to watch him than the actual countdown. The only person who seemed genuinely interested in the site changing was Wills. Maggie was using it as an excuse to invite Ian over again and Rachel… well, Neil didn’t really understand why she was there. But of his four friends, she was the one who seemed most concerned about him.

  “How long has this been going on? Like, how long have you been watching?” she asked, her long hair swinging as she cocked her head to the side.

  Neil forced himself to pull away from the giant numbers ticking down on his smart wall. “Uh, I don’t know. A couple weeks now?”

  Rachel lifted her hands and rested them under each knee. “What are you hoping for?”

  Even though it was an innocent question, her sweet concern was like a burr in his clothes. “I don’t know. Anything, I suppose.” He glanced at Wills who was as intent on the site as he. Why isn’t he getting the third-degree?

  Maggie laughed as she came back into his room, having collected more snacks from hers next door. “He’s hoping the counter final ticks down to the moment he gets to lose his virginity.”

  She’d been insufferable since the first party and only got worse when Ian was around. To his credit, Ian didn’t seem to encourage her increasingly caustic sense of humor.

  Neil ignored her, hoping his fourth time suggesting they leave might be the one that worked. “You all don’t need to stay for this, you know. I have a lot of reading to do and…”

  “It’s only a few more minutes,” Ian grinned. “Even I can last that long.”

  Maggie’s face turned red as she fought to contain herself.

  Just like the last time, the conversation hushed. All eyes were glued to the wall as the numbers rapidly ticked down to zero. Despite being disappointed each time before, Neil couldn’t stop the excitement bubbling up in his chest. What if something did happen this time? What if the site went beta rather than alpha? What would change? What clues would he get then?

  He watched Wills from the corner of his eye. Poised on the edge of the bed with a tablet in his hand, his eyes were focused on the series of numbers and letters at the very bottom. They’d managed to go back through six refreshes of this site before hitting the beginning. Each one had given them a sequence of numbers, but they hadn’t been able to make any sense of it. But as far as they could tell, it wasn’t an old site.

  It was comforting to know there was at least someone as obsessed with the site as him.

  The milliseconds fluttered by, the seconds counted down. As they neared ten seconds away, a h
alf-hearted countdown began in whispered tones. The numbers hit zero.

  Nothing happened.

  The counter sat at zero for longer this time, or maybe it just felt like it. Neil released a breath he didn’t realize he’d been holding. While squinting at the wall, Wills typed down the code at the bottom of the screen. Everyone else was distracted by the anti-climax. When he got it, he nodded to Neil, a half smile on his face.

  “Well, I guess that’s it,” Neil chirped.

  Maggie gave him a side-eye. “You’re not gonna slit your wrists or anything over this, right?”

  “That’s horrible!” Rachel gasped. “Like he’d ever…”

  Ian clapped his hands on his thighs as he stood. “I really thought something would happen this time, buddy,” he grinned down.

  It took everything Neil had in him to keep from snarling back a sarcastic comment. “Yeah, me too.”

  “Drinks?” Ian asked, looking around.

  “Hell yeah!” Maggie agreed, already giving Rachel a look that said, How about you have something else to do right now?

  Rachel choose to ignore it and begged off again. “I was thinking we could go over our lab notes. You missed the last two. I brought them with me if you wanna,” she said to Neil hopefully.

  “While you guys figure that out, we’ll be out having actual fun,” Maggie called back with a wave of her hand. She looped her arm through Ian’s and pulled him through the door.

  Wills and Neil’s eyes met. It was the briefest of glances, but Rachel seemed to read something in it. For whatever reason, she flushed bright red.

  “Oh, okay. I get it.”

  Neil felt horrible for some reason, like he’d hurt her. He scrambled to make up for it. “How about tomorrow? I definitely need to study and…”

  “No, no,” she said as she practically fled from the room. “See you later.”

  Neil stared at the space she’d left. “That was weird, right? That wasn’t just me?”

  Despite his normally stoic and dry attitude, Wills giggled like a madman. He held up a finger as he caught his breath. “Sorry, just one…”

  “What the hell is up with people today?” Neil muttered, settling back at his desk.

  “I’m pretty sure Rachel thinks you’re gay now,” he smirked.

  “What? Really? Just because you are, doesn’t mean anything. You have a boyfriend and… why would she care? Oh shit,” he groaned, wiping his face. “Okay, one problem at a time. At least this one I have a chance of solving.”

  Wills smiled but grew serious. “Okay, so including today, here’s everything we have.” He flicked a document up on the wall.

  61 49 61 74 68 68 65 6d 64 74 6c 70 68 61 6e 65 41

  “Great. What the hell does it mean?”

  “That’s the question of the year, isn’t it?”

  “Maybe it doesn’t mean anything. Maggie’s right. I’m wasting my time and focusing on this instead of…”

  “I don’t know what it means, but it’s not random. There are patterns, we just don’t know what they are. Look. There and there,” he said highlighting all the 6’s.

  “Have we tried adding them up?”

  “How do you add letters?” Wills replied with barely-masked disdain.

  Neil didn’t react to his snark. “I can almost see it, you know? Like the answer is right there and if I stare at it long enough, it’ll pop out.”

  “Are we going to talk about the other thing?”

  “What other thing?”

  Wills stared at Neil as if he were open-mouth drooling. He returned to the website and highlighted a space below STASIS.

  Plainly hidden against the white-gray background was text of the same color. It was such an obvious trick he kicked himself for not noticing it.

  1.0.0

  “This isn’t good, is it?” he asked Wills, feeling like it was the understatement of the century.

  “I guarantee if we look back, we’ll see alpha version numbers,” he replied.

  Neil’s cheeks puffed as he sharply blew air out. “Which means we’re into a beta version of whatever the fuck this is.”

  Wills left for the night, leaving Neil with more questions than answers. How Wills was able to just switch on and off was beyond him. He hadn’t admitted it to anyone, but Neil was starting to work on it in his dreamscapes. I’m wasting all this time sleeping, he justified. Besides, if I do this at night, then I’ll have time to study in the day.

  Just as he was about to turn off the lights for the night, Maggie pounded on the wall.

  “Are you awake?”

  Neil stared at the ceiling and cycled through a dozen curses he wanted to hurl back. “Yeah,” he settled on.

  Maggie’s door slammed open quickly followed by his. Neil pulled the blanket under his armpits as she launched herself on the bed. “You gotta see this,” she said, thrusting her tablet onto his lap.

  “You know I hate it when you make me watch videos,” he groaned. “It’s never as funny or cute as you make it out to be.”

  With a devilish grin, she shook her head. “This isn’t either of those, I promise you.”

  Questioning the reasons he remained her friend, Neil swiped the video to the start and pressed play. The shaky image looked to be coming from the inside of a big mall. As the camera panned left and right, he could see the person was standing on a moving spiral escalator. There was a general commotion but nothing specific. More like a buzz of danger that travels through pack animals, each twitching at the slightest hint.

  From above, a voice screamed. “What are you doing?”

  As the person with the camera neared the top of the escalator, they moved to the railing and panned upward. The shopping mall was huge. The curved escalators ringed a vast open air section at least ten stories tall. People dotted each railing, leaning out, looking for the source of the screaming.

  “What is this?” Neil asked Maggie, unsure he wanted to continue watching. He tried to hand the tablet back but she thrust it in his grasp even further.

  “It just happened, like a couple minutes ago.”

  Another shout tore through the crowd like a crack of thunder, this time echoed by fresh screams from a larger crowd. Neil felt himself taking shallow breaths, wanting to look away but unable to tear his eyes off the increasingly frantic scene. The camera was getting jostled around now as the person tried to stand in one place. People were running.

  “Here it comes,” Maggie warned, making him tense even further.

  The camera steadied for a second, zooming in slighting and pulling out of focus.

  “Look out!”

  Leaving a trail of screams, a blur flew from the top of the frame to the bottom. Complete bedlam erupted in the mall. The camera thrust over the railing, struggled to focus, and finally delivered a clear shot of a horribly contorted body on the floor. The image zoomed in as the man convulsed, broken limbs twitching. A puddle of crimson spread quickly, some of it tracked by good Samaritans stepping close to help only to realize there was nothing they could do. Even from this vantage, it was obvious this guy was a goner.

  Neil grimaced as he pushed the tablet back. “That’s horrible, Mags. Why are you showing me this?”

  “That’s only half of it. Let me show you what happened to the guy before he fell. You aren’t gonna believe this…”

  San Francisco, CA

  May 29th

  Ariene shifted the heavy bags from one hand to the next, the plastic handles cutting into her fingers.

  “You could help me with some of this, you know,” she laughed as Ebony jumped the last step of the escalator. Ariene made sure to keep her shoelaces well away from the spiked teeth as she carefully stepped off.

  “If you can’t carry it all, maybe you should stop buying stuff,” Ebony said as she took the smallest bag from her friend’s hand.

  “It’s not like I’m going backpacking. I don’t have to lug this shit everywhere.”

  Ebony strode beside her, one step for every two of Ariene
’s. “Who knows what they do over there?”

  She rolled her eyes playfully. “It’s England, not some third-world country.”

  “Exactly my point. Why are you buying up everything like they don’t have shoes and books and toothbrushes over there?” She giggled and added, “Well, maybe get the toothbrush here.”

  Ariene replied with a fake laugh. In the months leading up to her exchange, she’d heard every joke at least twice. Bad teeth, bad food, bad weather. Her friends and family couldn’t understand why she chose to go to London over anywhere else in the world.

  “Okay, what else do you need? Lemme see your list,” her friend demanded with an out-thrust hand.

  Ariene set the bags down and flexed her aching fingers. “I think we have pretty much everything on here.” As Ebony scanned the list, she looked around the busy mall. They’d started at the top and worked their way down over ten floors of shopping. She stretched her arms up over her head as she gazed upwards, the spiral escalators making her a little disoriented.

  “There’s one thing you don’t have on here but I’d like to get you,” Ebony said as she folded the list.

  “You don’t have to get me anything! I’m apparently more than capable of going into debt by myself,” she deflected.

  There was a shout in the distance, above or down the hall, they couldn’t tell. Even though it was a weekday, the mall was filled with loud kids. They ignored it.

  “I want to get you a passport cover. It’s silly, I know, but it’s kinda like I’m looking out for you.” Ebony rubbed her close-cropped hair. “Is that lame? That sounds lame. Forget I said…”