There was an abandoned nurses’ station there, and Charlotte skated around it to find two short hallways leading off to patients’ rooms. And there, at the end of one of them, was a surgical center with reinforced windows. She saw the shapes of two men standing there in their scrubs, and they were looking at clipboards over an undressed, unconscious body.
The doors into the surgery center gave way with a loud clatter, and the two doctors looked up at her heaving frame and her fiery eyes and were too shocked to say anything at first. Her eyes darted to the man on the operating table, and there was no doubt it was Orion. A great bandage was wrapped around his head, and on a small table used to collect medical instruments and blades, there was a small bloody object, like a nickel but thicker and uneven.
The air went out of her.
It was too late after all.
“Miss, you can’t be in here,” said the one doctor. But the other surgeon’s mouth had fallen open in recognition.
Charlotte lunged for the largest scalpel on the small table, and then she thrust it at the men.
“Did you operate on this man? Did you pull this out of him?” she motioned to the nickel-like object.
“Ma’am, please stop this,” the first doctor said, with his hands in the air.
The other stumbled backwards, his eyes on the knife tip.
“Yes, we did. It was a foreign object that could have endangered his life. He’s perfectly fine now. The implant did not require much penetration to reach.”
Charlotte looked down at Orion’ sandy hair, his tan complexion. He looked so peaceful there, and she could see now that his chest was rising and falling. His wrists were handcuffed to the table.
“Take off those cuffs now,” she demanded.
“Ma’am, this man is a security risk. If we do that, we’ll need to have you arrested.”
“I will shove this in your eye if those handcuffs are not off in ten seconds.”
The surgeons stumbled over themselves until one of them produced a key and unlocked the patient’s handcuffs. Then Charlotte had the men lift Orion onto a gurney. The doctors were stealing glances over their shoulders as if a nurse or security escort might soon come to their aid, but the floor was almost fully abandoned.
Then she pushed Orion out awkwardly through the double doors by herself, never letting her eyes leave the two doctors or loosening her grip on the scalpel.
Charlotte guided the gurney through the hallway, past the nurses’ station, and out of the medical center. Most employees had made it to the stairwells at that time, and as she approached the elevators again, one conveniently opened to greet her. She rolled Orion in, and the doors closed quietly behind her.
Then came the first floor.
Then the lobby.
Then outside. It was all a blur, and she could feel the start of hot tears forming in her eyes.
Evacuated employees were milling about in the courtyard in front of the building, looking at their cellphones. A few were beginning to take notice of the disheveled red-headed woman pushing an unconscious, half-dressed man on a gurney.
Charlotte scanned the street curb until she saw the shape of a grey van roll up at the end of the block. She hurried Orion over, and when the back doors swung open, she was greeted by Gabriel and Alexi. Darnell was there too, leaning back in a passenger seat and moaning from what seemed like half a dozen knife cuts all over his body. It was a ghastly sight, but when Darnell’s eyes met with hers, he weakly flashed her a thumbs up.
Gabriel helped lift Orion into the back of the van, leaving the gurney behind. When the Frenchman saw the white bandages wrapped around the back of Orion’s head, his face aged fifteen years and his eyes were full of despair. Charlotte opened her hand and revealed to him the blood-speckled implant.
“I think that’s her,” someone exclaimed from behind them.
“No way,” said another.
“It can’t be.”
Charlotte turned. A small group of onlookers had begun coalescing. She followed Orion inside the van and quickly slammed the doors shut behind her. Alexi took the car out of park.
“Security! Police!” someone yelled.
But before security or police or any kind of uniformed person with the courage to do anything could arrive, the grey van disappeared into the midday Manhattan traffic.
Now and the Far After
“It was dangerous to take him out of there, you know?”
“It was dangerous to leave him.”
“Was he hooked up to monitors and so forth? Hopefully he doesn’t need anything.”
“You said you have a doctor across the border?”
“She’s waiting for us there, yes.”
Orion could hear the rumble of an engine, feel the bumps and jostling of a vehicle in motion and the road underneath him. His head was sore. He recognized the feeling of anesthetic on the cusp of losing its hold on his pain. And when he opened his eyes, everything seemed too bright at first, and the lines of all the shapes around him were fuzzy.
Charlotte was there. He smelled her body before anything else. A hundred lifetimes could pass, and he would remember the flowery smell of her skin. Then she was leaning over him, and a few wild, auburn curls fell from her face and brushed his cheeks.
“Charlie?”
“I’m here.”
Their hands met, and their fingers slowly interlocked as he worked to move his sluggish body.
There were others there too. They were vaguely familiar. There was a Frenchman from San Francisco he recognized as Gabriel. He was stroking the stubble on his chin and studying a coin-sized object.
The object.
Orion saw it and sighed.
“You saved me, Charlie?”
“We tried to, but we were too late to save all of you.”
Gabriel cleared his throat.
“I suppose this means we’re all stuck here now. This chip cannot be implanted again. There’s no future Orion or Michael or any kind of heroic champion who is going to save us all from this horrendous future we’re hurtling into?”
“This is our lives now,” agreed Charlotte, more grimly than she intended.
Orion tried to lift his head. He saw a short, athletic woman in a pixie haircut in the driver’s seat. Another man who was not quite familiar to him sat dozing with fresh bandages on his naked torso. They were driving on a country road lined with sycamore trees that were clinging to the last red and yellow leaves of the year.
“No one was ever going to save everybody,” Orion mumbled uneasily. “The idea that I could save the world by myself, even with a time-looping miracle, that was science fiction.”
“But you said you would have tried forever?” Charlotte asked, surprised. “That you wouldn’t give up until the world got better.”
“I heard what you all did,” answered Orion. “I heard about how you all broke Cat out of the Citadel. That you plundered Sharebox’s deepest secrets. Maybe this is the life we’re supposed to be living. Maybe things will change now.”
“Diana,” Gabriel called to the air. “Did you release all the evidence about Devon Zimmer being behind the Nutrino meltdown?”
“Yes, it’s been sent to all major media outlets,” came the irascibly calm, matter-of-fact response from a speaker in the dashboard.
“Well,” Gabriel mused, crossing his legs. “Everyone is waking up to a reality with no Patriot Palace. And Sharebox itself is experiencing major crashes everywhere. People are going to need to get out of their habits. They’ll have to put down their headsets. They might even talk with someone in real life about the news, get some fresh air. And they’ll all hear about it. They’ll hear about how the greatest scandal of our time was manufactured by their own side, how the vengeance for that scandal was blown up by blowhard pundits and politicians, and the world is a worse place for it all. Maybe they’ll ge
t angry about it. Maybe some of them. Maybe things will start to change.”
“That’s probably too much to ask,” said the bandaged man, rousing from his sleep. “You’re just getting sentimental on us now, Gabriel.”
Orion reached with his free hand to trace the edges of Charlotte’s perfectly freckled face. His fingers started at her chin, then grazed her cheekbones and ended on her elegant, sharp nose.
“At least we’re all here fighting,” Orion smiled. And Charlotte had nearly forgotten how perfect and joyous that smile was, and it lit a fiery warmth through her veins. “Thank you for coming for me, my friends,” he said. “I hope you’re not disappointed.”
Charlotte ran her fingers through his hair, and the kindling hope in her limbs seemed to be telling her that, indeed, maybe everything would be alright.
“We’ll be fine,” she said. “This is a good time to be alive.”
Expose the truth! Beat the role-playing puzzle at
theechochambergame.com to unlock a final
scene from the story.
Acknowledgments
All people are brought into this world as tiny lumps with no talent. I’ve run into plenty of successful people who speak loudly about being self-made and gifted, and I can’t help but think they’re psychopaths.
That’s my way of saying that I’m grateful to a lot of people.
To Steve Schwartz for taking me on. To Heather and the good folks at Permuted Press who have poured so much attention and care into my debut.
To the soldiers I served with in the Army, thanks for a lifetime of good writing fodder.
To Silicon Valley and the megalomania that inspired me here, thank you.
To a political climate that seems to worsen each month and makes the dystopian vision presented in these pages feel increasingly less inventive…please go away.
To René and Mark, for making sure I always had good books to read. To Joe, for a well-rounded life. To Jude, Sawyer, and Ruby, for keeping me busy and forcing me to become ruthlessly time efficient. To Sharon, Bob, and Susie, for making me feel like I could do this. And to Rachel, who reads devotedly and gives wonderful feedback without bruising my delicate ego too much.
About the Author
Rhett Evans works at a Silicon Valley company that helps people find things. Before that, he was a U.S. Army officer and wrote briefly for the Orlando Sentinel. He resides in northern California on a small farm with his wife and three kids. His opinions are his own.
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