Drift pattern, p.17
Drift Pattern, page 17
Macer regards her with a deadeye stare.
“You did that intentionally, right?” She studies his face, attempting to determine if his reaction is an aftereffect of the seizure on the other floor. Finally, a smile forms under his big beak of a nose, but she can tell it’s not authentic. He must know this because Macer laughs and snaps his fingers in faux amusement.
“Ah, you got me, my dear Luci.” He moves over to her, his face disappearing from view as he steps through the opaque hologram image. She’s startled as he emerges and grabs her hands in his. “No one ever noticed that I did that until now.”
Luci resists the urge to yank her hands free. “Well, probably the only reason that I did was because you alerted me to the hand-rendering thing upstairs.”
The dark eyebrows rise as he squints to look into her eyes. “No, I think you are clever enough that you would have caught it without my help. You are very clever, Doctor, and we are very fortunate to have you with us . . . very fortunate, indeed.”
She shakes off a shiver creeping up her neck. In an effort to appeal to his vanity and return to a sense of normalcy, Luci asks, “Where’s the real one? The statue, I mean. May I see it in person?”
Her ploy succeeds, and Macer releases his grip to turn and admire his handiwork. “Ah, I wish you could. We had the unveiling of the real thing four days ago. The actual sculpture is at the foot of the Spike.” He faces her. “Remember the tall building with the longchairs?”
She lets out a nervous laugh. “Of course. Other than your guest house across the way, it’s the only other place that I’ve been to in Relicus City.”
He frowns for a microsecond, but then the smile is back. “Yes, of course you do. Anyway, the statue is at the base of that building in the common area for all to see, so you’ll understand that we can’t take you to see it in person, as much as I’d like to.” The smile melts. “Security reasons and all, you know. We must keep you safe. No more excursions until your work is done.”
Shar’s final words to her before leaving the guesthouse echo through her mind to be safe. Luci bites her lip as she looks at the hovering device projecting the hologram. She’s grateful that the tension from before continues to dissipate. “Chancellor . . . er, Enos, I need to ask you something.” It’s still obvious that he’s holding things back from her, though the reason isn’t clear. Her mind races to find a way to convince him to let her in on what he’s fighting to conceal.
“Of course. What is it, my dear?” he says in a gush that makes the hairs on the nape of her neck bristle again.
She hesitates, picturing Shar handing the recording disc to him the night before and gets a different idea. “The room above this one, the one on the middle level . . . that’s your office, right?”
“My home office, yes,” Macer replies, shutting down the image of the hologram statue. “I have another in the Spike building, and you saw the one at the Grange.”
“But the one here, that’s the one the recording was made in, right?”
“Which recording? What are you talking about?” he asks, retracting the device into its compact form.
“The video where I talk about the doll that I almost won for my mother in the third grade.”
He massages the wrinkles on his forehead. “Ah, yes, that. What about it?”
“When was that recording made by future me?” Luci asks.
Suspicious eyes run over her face as he tilts his head slightly. Finally, Macer pinches the end of his bulbous nose and sniffs. “Well, right now, in fact.”
She bites the inside of her cheek to mask that she knows he’s lying. She expected it, remembering Shar’s slip that the recording was made a lot longer than a few days ago, longer than Macer implied in the warehouse.
“Follow me,” he says.
The two move up the staircase, Luci trailing behind and contemplating the potential outcomes of what she’s about to try.
~ Eighteen ~
The curved wall of windows encircles the room like dark mirrors blocking the dim starlight outside. Not that it matters. Like the guesthouse, only the den area on the top level is above the waterline of the ocean outside. Fluorescent light shines up from the plastic grid floor as in most of the city’s interiors. In contrast to the art room on the level below, everything is orderly and in place.
Positioned far back from the twisting stairwell opening sits a large metal desk with two guest chairs. In the table’s center is a large bowl of liquid with softly hissing bubbles. The ceramic container is a quarter of the size of the one in the den in the guesthouse but larger than the individual ones at the longchair station. As the two of them approach the desk, Luci points at the stand on the desk holding a straw-like apparatus and asks, “What is that? I saw those around in the station and one at your guest quarters.”
Macer takes his seat behind the desk. “It’s called a pull basin. Late into the twenty-first century, before Hi No Kawa, inventors and scientists developed I.I.R.”
“What’s I.I.R?” Luci asks.
“It stands for Ingestible Information Relay; the common slang is ‘sipping.’” Macer clicks the Viatorio. “Pardon me while I summon the domestic attendant to record us.” Macer reaches in the desk drawer and produces something that looks like a set of black rubber brass knuckles similar to the item that Benold Jesper used. As he slides his fingers into the openings, he says, “These are WIBs, short for Wearable Input Bands.” He points at the bubbling liquid. “And this is a substance called Jardon. Think of it as liquid information.” Detaching the straw and tube from the holder stand, he explains, “A sipper. The user operator drinks a small amount of the Jardon through a sip tube like this.”
Reading the confused look on Luci’s face, he waves the thin tube around in the air like the baton of an absent-minded conductor. “In your time interval, most people take in information through their eyes. A few learn through auditory means, but most learn through the visual ports of the eyes.”
“Yeah, it’s called reading,” Luci says. “It’s been around for thousands of years.”
He ignores the sarcasm. “We read glyphs too, like the UNIFON language that I told you about, but just imagine if you could learn about a subject simply by ingesting it in small doses over a brief time, to know something by absorbing it into you. Today, the technology of instantly knowing a topic allows learners to become a master of a static discipline almost instantly. This is going to save an enormous amount of time in you getting up to speed with DPM that the slightly older version of you wrote about in the twenty-first century.”
Macer shoots a glance at the floating concierge bot as it enters the area and then returns his gaze to her. “Luci, the days of classroom teaching have long been abolished; there simply is no need to spend countless hours of adolescence to early adulthood in formal instruction. In Relicus City, there are no students, only sippers.”
“Bullshit!” Luci exclaims, half-laughing in disbelief. “My lecture clocked in at seventy-two minutes last night. You’re saying that a teaspoon of juice from this magic bowl would’ve relayed everything instead of them listening to me speak?”
“It’s called a pull basin, and there’s nothing magical about it or the Jardon. And it’s been scientifically proven that the information is retained longer because it physically becomes a part of the person as if they experienced it first-hand.”
The idea is astonishing. “Show me,” she demands, reaching for the sip tube. “I want a demonstration.”
“Soon enough, but first we have to—”
“If this Jardon works the way you say it does, I want to see it. Pick any topic. It doesn’t matter to me.”
Macer pulls back before she can snatch the tube from him over the desk. “That’s not a good idea.” He gestures to the guest chair. “Have a seat.”
“Why can’t I sample it?” she asks reluctantly, plopping down in the seat.
“You’re not ready. Measures have to be taken to isolate sections of the hemispheres of the brain, and you have to have a Viatorio to be able to search and access files. Without establishing virtual partition compartments in your mind to receive and stow the information, it would be like turning a kachoti blender on high without a lid—very messy and very dangerous. One could die from it.”
Luci studies his eyes, but she can’t tell if he’s lying. “The neural pathways must be identified.” He points to the device on his ear. “I’ve scheduled to have you fitted with your Viatorio and cerebral modifications in the morning. It’ll take the better part of the day to get acclimated to using it, but you should be able to begin drift pattern work before sunfall tomorrow.”
“Whoa, are you talking brain surgery?”
He shakes his head. “There’s no cutting of tissue or skull. I assure you that the process is routine.”
She squirms in her chair, attempting to stifle the growing fear. “But there’s risk involved. Every procedure has some level of risk, no matter how small.”
“Actually, that’s not true. The method by which the arom-nanobots perform an installation is flawless, a 100% success rate. They’re just inserted in and—”
“Absolutely not.” Luci shoots up from her seat, pushing her palms down on the cool metal desk. “If something were to happen to my brain, it’d be bad for both of us.” She shakes her head defiantly. “You’d lose your shot at stopping this Cyphor Gicul guy, have no chance of shutting down his resistance, and I’d return home not able to do calculations—or worse, go back as a vegetable. No, it’s too risky.” She pulls back from the desk and crosses her arms. “Point me in the direction of your science libraries, or if you insist on protecting me, send the books up here and I’ll begin in the morning first thing.”
When Macer doesn’t respond, she wags an index finger. “But nothing goes in my brain.”
Macer exhales through his big nose in mild exasperation. “First of all, every text we have is transcribed in UNIFON, so that would take a very long time for you to decipher—time that we don’t have. But more importantly, we have no physical books. There is no library. Everything—and I mean everything—all collected knowledge is in the well drop. Back at the warehouse in Baltimore, you asked me if Relicus City had something like the ARPANET of your interval. This is it. The Jardon flows throughout the city from the well drop into these pull basins.” He adjusts the WIB on his left hand. “I’ve shown you what’s at stake here, and this back-and-forth between us on every single issue is tiresome.”
“There has to be another way,” she says in desperation. “Please, Enos.”
“There’s not, and as I said before—”
He clicks his Viatorio and is in another conversation. He holds his palm up to pause the discussion. He asks the caller, “Of course we’re back; otherwise, how would you be speaking to me right now?” Macer glances back at Luci, then up at the ceiling. “How can you not know how long it’s been gone, Pol?”
Though the response isn’t audible, Luci knows that someone is “speaking” directly into Macer’s brain through the Viatorio bud. She wonders how common a name Pol is here and whether or not this is the Security Minister, Pol Cavazos, that Bru had warned her of, the man that had argued with the chancellor in the hallway outside the guest home a few hours before.
“Yes, she’s here with me now,” Macer says, stealing another glance at Luci.
She shudders as Macer informs the unheard voice, “I’m arranging for that tomorrow.”
There’s more silence, but the pause allows Luci to remember the reason she wanted to come in the office in the first place. So distracted by talk of pull basins and altering her brain, she’d forgotten what she’d planned to do on the recording. Her body tenses at the prospect of altering her answers on the video they’re about to make. She wonders if she’ll be sucked at blinding speed through a portal back to a rainy Baltimore night or some other unexpected result.
“Don’t be stupid, Pol. Put everyone on alert for what? If somebody’s in an interval that Gicul decides to destroy, it’s not like you can do anything to prevent it, not until we understand how he’s doing it, and that’s what we’re working on over here.” He massages his veiny forehead. “All that you’ll do by spreading news like this is inciting a panic, and that won’t do anything for us, not yet.” He shakes his head. “Double or even triple your cybo counts around key areas if you like, but don’t officially announce anything. I’ll speak to you about it in person in the morning.”
Macer doesn’t attempt to mask his frustration after he disconnects. “I’m sorry.” He pauses to find his smile. “Where were we?”
“What just happened, Chancellor?” she probes cautiously. “Did another interval go dark?”
The fake smile fades, and Macer sighs. “The skip node of Poland 1952 apparently was destroyed a couple of days ago. We had five sitters in the interval.” He shakes his head in disgust. “They’ll be stuck there now for the rest of their lives, and they’ll have to survive all alone so as to avoid contaminating the residents of the interval.”
She bites her lip and responds in a soft voice. “Sorry. What were they doing there if all the food is at the Grange?”
“They were setting a trap for Gicul, but it failed. We’re running out of time before he targets all the intervals.” His voice is somber. “He’s a madman. I just hope we can beat him when it comes down to it.” The intensity of his eyes on her could ignite a fire. “You’ve got to figure this out. You’ve got to beat Gicul.”
She debates whether now is the best time to go through with her impromptu experiment. It may not work anyway. As is always the case, her curious nature gets the better of her and forces her to press on. “We were about to make the hologram recording that you showed me in the warehouse last night.”
“Ah yes,” he says. “We do it under one condition: you go through with the procedure to install your Viatorio. No more resistance, no hesitation.”
The notion of him not making the recording is preposterous to her. She reasons that if no recording is ever made, Shar has nothing to give him to view . . . that is, unless something else is going on here. “You drive a hard bargain,” she says. “Where I come from, you’d be quite the businessman.”
The statement seems to perplex him. Even so, he offers a witty response and, of course, his signature politician’s smile. “I am a businessman. I’m in the business of the human race.” He leans forward. “So, we have an agreement?”
“I’ll do it,” she lies, convinced that if what she is about to do works the way she thinks it will, none of this will matter anyway. She’ll be back in Baltimore headed to Atlantic City and won’t even know anything about the Hi no Kawa. If Macer really did set up the lecture to grab her, she’ll be somewhere else, but someplace safe—anywhere but here. “Yeah, I’ll do the Viatorio thing tomorrow,” she says confidently.
“Great, then let’s begin,” Macer says.
Luci notes that his shoulders relax slightly.
He commands the floating robot behind Luci, “Concierge, record meeting—activate.”
She turns her head as the device hovers into position. After several banal questions from Macer, he leans slightly back in his chair and makes a comment about the importance of people being clear. It’s the line that Luci’s been waiting for. She begins the story of how when she was in the third grade and Lakeview elementary had their “Fun Day.” As she relays the story, her stomach knots up. It constricts in the way it would riding on a rollercoaster that’s ascending that initial agonizing climb before the first steep drop. She tells of the doll she’s going to win for her mother, but this time she switches the number she wrote on the slip of paper from ninety-nine to sixty-six. She holds her breath after she delivers the alteration to the story and grips the arms of the chair.
Her heart is racing, and she’s afraid to open her eyes prematurely.
After a few tense seconds, a question comes. “Doctor, are you feeling alright? Are you having another panic attack?”
Her stomach continues to somersault. Wave after wave of confusion envelops her as she opens her eyes. Nothing’s changed. She whispers to herself in a daze, “What am I still doing here?”
“I don’t understand. Are you feeling okay?” Macer’s bushy eyebrows climb, his expression confused.
She mumbles, “You’re still here. I changed it. It should have changed the recording and therefore altered what I did in the warehouse, nullifying . . .”
He squints giving a suspicious look. “Whatever are you going on about?”
She gazes blankly at the metal desk, attempting to work out why her revision to the “script” hasn’t changed anything. What had he called it in the warehouse? Macer used a term, something like identity convergence—yes, that was it. What had she done wrong? She closes her eyes again on the off chance that the result isn’t instantaneous. She struggles to recall Macer’s comments about how the longchair U-curve would overlay a previous version of a timeline.
She opens her eyes again to Macer’s perplexed expression that’s growing into a scowl. Either she has no clue as to how this time travel stuff works or the recording was never her in the first place—it was the Luci from before, the dead Luci. “Ninety-nine to sixty-six,” she stammers, still processing. “It didn’t change anything.”
“Are you okay?” he asks. “What do you mean?”
She twists in the seat for a look at the hovering robot and then slowly turns back to Macer.
He’s interrupted by another alert to his Viatorio. “What now, Pol?”
Luci isn’t willing to wait this time. She blurts out a question, “What happened to the other Luci? Who killed her?”
Macer shoos her away with his hand while continuing the other conversation. “Absolutely not. I expressly forbid it.”
