by Tim Kaiver
"Dad?" Emmit looked around for a camera. Mom, where are you? Sprinkles, go save her.
"You're safe there. I'll be back shortly."
"What are you talking about? Dad? Unlock the door." The fear of being imprisoned again drove a chill into his chest. "I can't," he said, shaking his head. Mom!
14
What if that wasn't even him? Emmit thought. What if this place is just messing with my head? I haven't seen Dad, just whatever that thing was, he thought, and watched the panel, which had remained shut since the pole went back inside and his father, or whatever, had locked him in.
Hunger turned his mind toward his backpack. He unzipped the front compartment and dug past a machete, a compass, sealed packets with flat discs inside.... Underneath those, he found a pouch with a cut-off edge that he tore open to a citrus-orange scent. The warm juice was full of tiny seeds, but went down smoothly enough to quench his thirst and give him a nice boost of energy. Deeper inside the front compartment, he found another vacuum-sealed packet—this one was a thin brick that he bit off to the taste of oatmeal and honey.
As he sat and chewed, he thought of Adi and wondered if his friend was okay, fallen in a hole, off on his own neuronet trip, being eaten by a large snake.... Emmit couldn't do a thing for him. Adi'd followed him here, had trusted him, and now he was as alone as Emmit had been when his father had left.
He paused on that thought. Okay, just to entertain his claim, if he really is Dad and things happened the way he said.... He hadn't wanted to be separated from me and Mom—so he says. He gave us up so they wouldn't dig deeper into his secrets. They were always more important than us, and now he wants me to thank him for the opportunity to mold under fire?
I didn't bring Adi here to force him to survive on his own.
Emmit thought back to the excitement of hopping onto his wolverine, of how his obedience to memory had created reality and linked him to a future dangling hope on the end of its line. He'd invited Adi—not because of a memory of the pair of them riding off together, but because he wanted his friend to enjoy the moment... whether for Adi's sake or his own, he wasn't sure.
Emmit adjusted his position on the floor, his tailbone aching from the pressure, and stretched his back against the wall. Father of the year didn't even give me a chair.
Emmit stood, took another bite of his oat bar, and paced.
Adi sometimes spoke of how he had his father's curly brown hair, how they had the same laugh, and how he hoped to someday escape Setuk, join an Esune fleet and show his dad how he could carry on the lineage as a hopper.
Adi's story was that he'd been captured by mistaken identity, called a stowaway because he'd ventured off to a part of the ship where he shouldn't have been, and believed that his father would find him some day and make it all right. He served the empire, after all. The Osuna took care of hoppers. They owed their wide-spanning existence to those who opened Mericure Bubbles and took them from one point of the galaxy to another.
Adi wanted to be just like his father. He wanted to travel the stars, hop back to his family, and make the kind of living that kept them safe, even if it hadn't worked for him. "That wasn't his fault," Adi would say. "I shouldn't have taken that card and gone behind locked doors. I knew it was wrong, but I was curious."
Curiosity.... That was the same reason he'd jumped on the wolverine. Every step since he'd found that beacon and its coded message had been born from curiosity. Then the Cipher had blown his mind and pulled him as though from a string ever since. He hadn't thought about how it would affect his best friend, or his mother—what if I had fallen off Sprinkles and cracked my skull open on the valley floor? What would Mom have done?
The oat bar had one more bite left. He fitted it in his mouth, bit into the honey-sweet chewy texture, and tossed the wrapper. I left Mom back there too. Curiosity, and those strange memories, had pushed him to enter that moss-covered hidden entrance.
For a moment, Emmit considered how he might be like his father. Obviously, he had reasons for his research. He was fighting for a better life for Emmit and his mother, even if it was in a strange fashion, letting them go to prison so he could continue his research.
"Why am I in here?" Emmit said to any possible microphones or surveillance hidden in his room—his cell. "What is the trial?"
The floor panel parted and the periscope pole rose to his eye level. Its marble-sized head whirred as it rotated before locking on Emmit's position. The light that exploded from its center was sudden and blinding.
His world shifted under the light's current and landed him in a hallway like the one he and Cullen's crew had been taken to after his scare in the cafeteria. The clean tile floors shone under the ceiling lights.
A hand rested on his shoulder. He spun one way, then the next, until he found his dad standing beside him, a look of love and regret on his face. "Sorry, the program wasn't ready and I couldn't let you leave. You're safe, for now."
Emmit felt far from safe. "What program?"
His dad lifted his hand to the closed door. "We have some things I'd like to test between your abilities and the neuronet that require distance."
Emmit was nervous about what lay on the far side of the door, yet he couldn't deny wanting it to open. "When am I going to have a say about if I want to be a part of your experiments? You want me to forgive you, but not before I call you out.... You talk about fighting a war against the Osuna, but is what you've done to me and mom much different?"
His dad worked a thumb over his eyebrow, rubbing the muscle. "I'm nothing like the—"
"You imprisoned us and messed with our minds without permission, all for the benefit of your plan. How is that not like what the Osuna do?"
His dad took a moment. He lifted his hand to point, then pulled it back to his chin. "I see what you're saying. The difference... is, the Osuna continued to build their empire long after they could have stopped. Their reach is driven by...." He smiled. "Revenge. I get it. My point is here somewhere. I never would have let you leave my side if I didn't think it was the only way you could survive. They were the force that triggered my action. The force behind theirs has only been pride and greed. They want what our people on Vijil have: the key to unlocking the power of the First—the Cipher."
The Cipher is in me and Mom, he wanted to say, but couldn't. It was a secret he couldn't reveal. "We want to go to Vijil. Can you let me out so we can find you and leave?"
"You have quite the challenge before you, between you and finding me. What we have on the other side of this door is necessary for your ability to survive. It will require your full concentration. You asked for full disclosure. This is dangerous. Your mother would stab me if she knew what I was about to do."
Emmit didn't know how to respond to that.
"But as I said, our timeline is too accelerated for me to offer a gentler next step in your ability's growth. The way you handled the wolverine right away, and breezed through the grill modification to the p-drive. I think your evolution went better than we could have expected."
The Cipher helped me with the p-drive, he thought. "What do you mean, my evolution?" He wanted to ask what an ultra was, but didn't know how to broach that he knew the term without spilling the secret of the Cipher.
His dad smiled as though Emmit had uncovered the mystery that meant everything. "Partly from the chip that has trained your brain to grow in ways far superior to anyone else your age. Ocia helped in that development, in my absence. And has done quite well."
Ocia had acted surprised when he found Emmit and his mom were chipped, and had been a friend in both treating them and keeping it a secret from the warden and his guards. He'd helped Emmit's mom with her nightmares and activated programs that gave Emmit an education unavailable to the other prisoners his age. If this was from him, why wasn't he asking Emmit about the Cipher texts he saw, or the restricted access? It felt like his role in this was only partial, that he had no idea what Emmit had experienced.
"The other part o
f your evolution is a gift of the Ancients that I discovered on Saemera. What you've seen since you uncovered my beacon is only the beginning of realizing that blessing."
That's closer, Emmit thought. "How much of a blessing is it, if Mom would stab you for giving it to us?"
His dad accepted the question with a moment of thought that made Emmit feel respected. He cleared his throat. "I have felt a calling to this for longer than you've been alive. I tried with others first, but could not deny the dreams that said to include you and your mother. Dreams that showed you escaping Setuk through it. Dreams of us doing great things."
"Are you sure you can trust me and Mom after telling us of your part in our imprisonment."
His dad's eyes narrowed and his jaw clenched. "I did not want you to be captured. Don't you remember our time together? The set of wooden toys I made for you, how we'd set them up like a farm on the rug in the den? Our walks along the cliff, bird-watching? We... I loved you so much. And I think you loved me too. That hasn't changed—only grown since we were separated by the Osuna.
"It could be that the gradual treatments… Ocia's cover required patience between visits to Setuk, otherwise he'd have been questioned, and the chance that two net-chipped in their prison were discovered... we could not risk that. By the time we realized that the rate at which those who were being given treatments here was backfiring, and that your progress—you and your mother's—was well beyond what we could replicate within our remaining time frame…. We're talking days, maybe less, before we need to act. As I said, this isn't what I planned, but I'm bound to make it work because I love you and your mother."
Emmit took the new information in, but resisted the desire to buckle and accept the father he'd wanted for so long.
"If I fail," his dad continued, "because you and your mother decide not to trust me—not to forgive me—then I don't care about anything else. None of this matters if I can't have your love in return."
Emmit couldn't stop the tear from burning through, even in this neuronet version of reality. He couldn't stop his body from breaking down, and when his father's strength held him on his feet, wrapping him against his chest, Emmit couldn't ignore his deep need for this to be true—truth he could accept.
His dad's sobs shook the base that held him tight. "I missed you so much, Son. I can't even… tell you how much." He pressed his cheek down on the top of Emmit's head, gave him another strong hug, then pushed him out and kissed his forehead. A tear dripped off his dad's face and landed on Emmit's nose.
Emmit looked up to see his father more shattered in this moment than he was, which helped wipe away some of the doubts and self-consciousness that whispered for him to not exhibit such weakened honesty. This moved him to speak from his heart, while he had the courage. "If I forgive you and you break my trust..."
"I won't."
"If you do." Emmit steeled himself against the need to break down in tears again. "I don't know how I'd ever recover." He thought of the men and women locked up in Setuk, how they did vile things at every turn because inside there was nothing left but anger. "I don't want to think of what I'd become if I let you hurt me or Mom again."
"I promise. You both have my everything. You are my everything. I would take all the hurt on myself before I let either of you suffer again because of me."
Emmit wrapped his arms around his father's waist and squeezed him close. This was the truth he needed to believe in, be surrounded by, stand upon. "I forgive you, Dad."
"Thank you, Son." His dad rubbed his short hair and patted the back of his head above the implant. "I'm here for you."
Emmit wrestled with that truth for a moment, then confessed, "I know."
His dad stood back and smiled as he cuffed a tear from his cheek. "Are you ready to see what's inside?"
He nodded. It was time to act, and this meeting with his father was what he'd needed.
His dad opened the door to a room with a bank of viewscreens and four chairs set before action stations below them. The viewscreens showed people Emmit guessed were part of the village he'd seen during his first meeting with his father. A woman tossed a knit ball to her toddler. She gave a wide smile and dramatic reaction when the boy caught it. In another, a man worked on sewing a net, a dock and pond in the background.
His dad led him inside and motioned for him to sit in one of the middle chairs. The viewscreen directly in front of him had a child poking a stick under a rock. He wedged it out of the soft earth, exposing bugs with winding bodies and countless legs, and beetles with pincers.
Emmit looked up at his dad, who adjusted his chair to sit next to him. "Okay."
His dad pointed at the screen with the lake and the fisherman. "Take a good look at this setting."
Emmit did. Dragonflies hovered and lifted off the calm surface of the deep blue water. The planks making up the walkway of the dock were warped and splitting in places. A round hat rested at an angle on the pole at the land side, closest to the fisherman. His open tackle box had spools of wound and unwound wire, three sizes of pliers, and a yellow fishing rod with a silver reel sitting on the dirt beside it.
"Now, I want you to transfer that image," his dad said, pointing to the bug hunter, "into his mind."
*Task to use telepathy to direct Samu to his father – Activated.*
Telepathy? Emmit thought, then remembered the skill, Pathing that he'd learned in the cafeteria. Is Dad connected to the Cipher? Emmit was confused. The abilities and clarity of their past conversations seemed distant, as though from a program he'd watched months ago. He couldn't possibly do that. The thoughts he'd heard in the last day felt more like a fluke than a repeatable pattern.
"Picture the world around Gerry as a place Samu wants to visit. That's his father and he wants to see him. He just doesn't know where he is."
That helped a little. Emmit slipped into Samu's shoes, pretending how it would feel to be within reach of his father, how he'd react if he found out where he was and could go visit. While looking at the bugs crawling out of the hollow in the mud beneath the rock, he ran over pictures in his mind of the dragonfly, the tackle box, and the boy's father chewing on a loose thread as his eyes focused on the net he worked over.
The boy stuck his stick in the mud in front of an escaping beetle. It wiggled around on the uneven ground, forcing Samu to unearth and replant his stick head in front of it.
"It's not working," Emmit said out loud. Go to your father, he thought, trying to use his Pathing skill.
Samu's beetle diverted its path from his stick. He lifted it and stabbed it down, spearing the beetle in the dirt as white guts split out from its shell.
Go see your father at the lake!
Samu lifted his stick with pieces of the beetle and mud on its end and angled it closer to his face to examine more in-depth.
Stop looking at the bug and go see your father!
Samu flicked the tip of his stick, sending beetle bits and mud into the air. He adjusted his grip on the stick and swatted it down at the remaining bugs in view.
*Task to use telepathy to direct Samu to his father – Failed.*
Failed to establish telepathic link.
Thanks a lot, Emmit thought as he sat back in a huff. "I can't do this. I sent every detail I could—even thinking-told him to go see his stupid dad at the lake." He pointed at the viewscreen. "He didn't even flinch."
His dad wore a smile Emmit wanted to pinch right off his face. "This is your first try. Keep at it." He leaned over and pointed at a green box with an image of a radio inside on a viewscreen in front of Emmit. "When the boy gets to the lake, press that button."
"What if I can't?" Is he going to leave me in here until I do?
"You will. I'll be back before too long to check in, but for now I think you just need practice."
"What about Adi? He was in the tunnel with me. Is he okay?"
"He is. We opened a room for him too. But I don't want you to worry about him right now. Keep your focus on Samu getting to his fa
ther. When you're done, I'll let you go see Adi, and the two of you can continue your journey to Fel Or'an."
"Why couldn't we just do that from the start?"
His dad took a moment. "Everything is working out just fine. Focus on this task for now, and as your reward, more information will be given."
Emmit gave a slight nod.
His dad winked, stood, and patted Emmit's shoulder on his way out.
Emmit glanced at the boy lifting another big rock from the path. The bugs, exposed to light, wiggled and clawed in futile attempts to escape.
He thought of the Cipher's message that—he'd failed the telepathy connection. Maybe this was something he could do to gain experience points.
Okay, I'm not giving up.
But his heart wasn't in it. Adi was in danger or, at least, lost and afraid. His wolverine was out there somewhere, and so was his mom. To get to them, it seemed he had to accomplish this quest, but if he could do something good for them first, maybe it could help free his mind from some of the stress so he could focus on Samu.
Maybe I need to try with someone I know first.
Emmit closed his eyes and pictured the room where the neuronet activation pole stood with its hypnotic beam directed at him. He tried imagining how his body felt standing in that room rather than sitting in this chair. He tried to smell the thick, moldy air. Then he did smell it. His legs felt the weight of his body. Eyes still closed, he reached out and closed his hand over the head of the activation pole.
And woke to the room.
15
Emmit, can you hear me? Ehli asked as she studied the snake hissing at her from the broken transmitter. Where are you, Son?
"I can show you where your son is." Willo 'pathed.
If you know where he is, then take me there.
"You look distracted. What's going on?" Cullen asked.
