Drift pattern, p.26
Drift Pattern, page 26
She grabs him by the wrist. “Come over to the pull basin. I want to know of every skip point juncture in that range.”
Ish follows, but he doesn’t sit when they reach the sofa. “That’s going to be around five to six dozen or so at the very least.” He continues his objection, “Minister Cavazos granted me technical access to review leap skips and sitter archives, but even with these special permissions for the project, there is likely to be hundreds of activity files with . . . I don’t know how many individual sitter personnel.”
She presents the basin’s wand and takes the sipper straw from his top pocket to hand it to him. “So, what if you only search the industrialized areas that would use fine linen paper? You can eliminate any odd junctures like the ones that appear in areas that are inhospitable like the middle of oceans or high in the mountains. Just stick with cities.”
He frowns but fastens the straw to the apparatus. “Even if I cross-reference to get the name of every longchair sitter, it doesn’t mean that we’ll be able to find who is doing this.”
“Why not?” she asks.
For the first time ever, there’s an annoyance in his voice. “Because I doubt that Gicul and L’inversione report their leap skips and sitter activities to the technicians at the Spike command center.”
“True,” she says pensively as she studies him, “but consider this: If we do decide to turn the notes over, wouldn’t it be better to have already come up with the names of a few suspects? Who knows? You may even get promoted up to work for the security minister after I’m gone.”
He scoffs, “That’s unlikely.”
“Why do you say that?”
“I’m not the right shade.”
Luci’s surprised by the inference. “Racism? Is that even a thing here?”
“It is for Security Minister Cavazos,” Ish answers.
Luci remembers the darkness of Bru’s South Asian skin and mumbles the term “dob-dash” to herself. “I’ll begin work right now on transposing the STMO corridors and chronal points. You can do the variable origins after looking up the possible skip point junctures of where the paper could have come from.”
“We’re not security detectives, Luci,” he protests.
She dismisses his reluctance. “I’m faster at doing rote calculations anyway.” She gestures for him sit and partake of the bubbling Jardon before them. “It’s the least you can do since you won’t spend the night here to catch whoever this is.”
He sighs. “I’d stay, but I . . . I’m working on something,” he says, breaking eye contact.
“Working on what?”
He sits. “It’s not DPM related, just a thing I’m doing. I’m working on a thing for somebody, something for a . . . friend.”
“Okay, fine. But what is it?”
Ish shakes his head as he dips the wand into the liquid of the large round ceramic receptacle. “I can’t really talk about it, not yet. Just trust me. I’ll do your research.”
Though she’s convinced him to search out the Strathmore paper mystery, the accomplishment is hollow when put against the fact that he is deliberately withholding something from her. She crosses her arms and looks at him coolly. “Fine. Okay, I’ll go ahead and get started then.”
He’s already typing on his unseen keyboard in the air as she turns to go to the galley. Luci constructs a makeshift clipboard out of a food plate wrapped in a swath of butcher-block paper and begins to work.
A few minutes later, she’s interrupted by Ish mumbling something. Luci lowers her homemade pad and speaks across the room. “What did you say?”
The question breaks his concentration. “Huh? Oh, what? I was just speaking to myself.”
She crosses the area to him. “About what?”
He lowers his sip tube. “Well, like I said, the paper could have come from many different junctures as the company was in existence for 175 years—until Hi No Kawa, of course.”
“So, what is it?” Luci probes. “What did you discover then?”
“Well, unrelated to all of that, I came across the skip point junctures during your lifetime before and after DPM.”
“Yeah, and?” Luci asks, trying not to prod him too hard.
“There’s one when you were three and a half months old in Macau on the south coast of China that has a duration of fourteen and a half hours. There’s another when you’re nineteen, but that’s only open for forty-eight seconds in the Pacific Ocean. We know of the corridor that you went through to get here, the interval in a place called Baltimore in the northern hemisphere of America. That one stays open for two hours, twenty-three minutes, and thirty-three seconds. And then there’s the anomaly of the twin that the chancellor mentioned. That one occurs in East Timor in Southeast Asia that has a duration of seventeen minutes, thirty-eight seconds.”
“Yeah, yeah, so?” The mention of this skip point juncture excites her, and she rubs the folded ticket and documentation that she’s carried in her pocket for days. “Go on. Macer mentioned there was one in Luxembourg two years before my lecture. He claims that he went there to fund the meeting.”
Ish nods. “Yeah, that checks out. The interval is only open for ten hours, six minutes, and fifty-one seconds. I didn’t mention it because he was the only sitter, and we know the notes aren’t coming from him.”
“So, what is remarkable about all of this that made you perk up?”
Ish clicks his Viatorio. “You know how you were brought here the first time when you are forty-five years of age?”
“Yes, I was told that I develop DPM four years before I was brought here. The first deployment of a physical DPM object isn’t—or rather wasn’t—until 2063.”
“Right,” Ish says. “To conceal your presence here, the chancellor would never have you listed on the sitter manifest. So, while I can’t prove it, the closest one would be an opening that happens in a place called 2045 New Mexico, again in the northern region of what was America.”
“You mean North America.”
“Huh?” Ish responds. “Oh yeah, North America. Anyway, the skip point juncture remains open for six hours, thirteen minutes, and fifty-one seconds.”
“Okay,” Luci says, running her fingers through her hair. “I don’t get it. Why is that a big deal?”
“Two sitters—a man and a woman—definitely came back to Relicus City though the New Mexico skip point juncture in tandem as the record shows.” Ish wiggles the WIBs on his fingers, manipulating some unseen data hovering in the space between them. “What’s interesting, as best as I can tell here, is that the man and woman didn’t skip from Relicus City to 2045 New Mexico. They only returned through it.”
He pinches his chin. “They both went from Relicus to 2044 Thuringia, Germany, a duration opening of seventeen hours, thirty-two minutes, and eight seconds.”
Luci still struggles to draw a conclusion from all of this. “I want to clarify what you’re saying here. Is it kind of like how I came to Relicus City through the portal thing in Boston, but I’ll return through the skip point juncture in East Timor?”
“Yes, except the two sitters came over to the skip point juncture in Thuringia, Germany 5,952 hours and 12 minutes, 42 seconds before the first moment that they could bring you back—the 45-year-old you—through the New Mexico interval to Relicus City.”
“So, 5,952 hours, 12 minutes?” She does the math. “That’s two hundred and forty-eight days. They were there for nearly eight and half months? Is that common for sitters to remain in an interval for that long other than those serving at the Grange?”
“No, it’s not,” Ish answers. “And that’s what caught my attention.”
Luci lets this sink in. “That’s plenty of time to obtain Strathmore paper. Who were they and what were they doing?”
“I assume they were there to bring you—the older you—back to Relicus City. The woman is someone called Shar Ryson.”
“I know her. Shar came with Macer and Royse to get me from Baltimore. I think she told me that she was involved the first time too. Was Royse the other one with her?”
Ish extends his hands before his chest and activates the WIBs. He types for a few seconds before looking up at her. “No, it wasn’t Royse Timmons. It was someone by the name of Noah Beaumont who did the leap skips with her.”
March 28, 2191: Relicus City
~ Nine ~
relikus siti
[6.217012/127.792969/4.603.388.828/9452:24:19]
mxK 28, 2191
After a long day of recalculating and transposing the work that they’ve labored over for the past three days, Luci retires to her bed. She dreams of developing formalisms with Ish and constructing thresholds for integer homology in random d-complexes.
In the wee hours of the morning, her imaginings transform into things more abstract and surreal in nature, and she dreams of a family car ride on a deserted two-lane highway off a coastline somewhere. Who’s driving is unclear, since her vantage point is from the backseat. She gazes out the side window at the surf hungrily lapping the shore far below the cliff’s edge. The overstuffed vinyl seat is a comfy perch for her. She gently sways with the motion of the vehicle as it maneuvers along the serpentine asphalt and ascends the mountain. Luci presses her face against the window’s cool glass as the car engine purrs a mechanized hum of contentment.
Then, without warning, she experiences a sense of weightlessness. The piercing shriek of her mother calling out her name shoots through Luci like lightning. Luci also screams from the backseat, but her tormented yell can’t be heard over the anguish of her mother’s wail.
The impact comes with an impossible darkness. The only sound is Luci’s racing heartbeat. This is the drumbeat of becoming an orphan, a cadence that she is all too familiar with.
She’s drowning again, sinking ever downward into darkness and the abyss.
Luci springs up to a sitting position in bed. She’s covered in sweat, hyperventilating in the dark; it feels like a jackhammer is tap-dancing on her skull. After self-soothing with math equations which contain some variant of Luci’s 2012 number, she rises from the bed in her shirt and panties. She heads downstairs for a cup of water to shake off the nightmare and get some relief from the Jardon migraine.
The sensor mechanisms must be malfunctioning, because she gropes her way to the stair rail without any of the low lighting coming on as it usually does. A soft rain taps on the outer glass dome far above her head as if to explain why the skylight doesn’t offer any moonlight from above.
Luci yawns as she begins her descent, gripping the cool metal railing in the dark. Her free hand rubs the sleep from her eyes. She hesitates to squint in the blackness. At first, she thinks the glow is from the concierge bot, but the movement of the narrow beam below is too erratic. Someone’s in here with a flashlight, and it’s not Ish.
Though every nerve in Luci’s body comes alive, she remains completely still. Her sense of flight or fight kicks in, demanding that she escape to the bedroom, but the logical part of her brain insists that there’s no way out of that dead end, and the only option is downward. She swallows the knot in her throat and suppresses the urge to call out to the intruder. Her curiosity demands that she investigate. Extending her bare foot to the next step, she tries to ignore her body’s quaking. The soft scraping of her foot on the step should be relatively noiseless, but to her ears, it sounds like it’s been amplified a thousand times. She freezes in place again.
The beam of light moves along, bouncing on the floor with each step the intruder takes toward the exit of the guesthouse. The notion that he’s getting away forces Luci into desperate action, and now she takes the stairs two at a time.
Before she knows it, she reaches the bottom and stumbles forward. The flashlight beam shifts from the floor to the palm reader near the door. A soft pink glows around the silhouette of the intruder’s hand against the pad of the reader.
The door slides open with a swoosh due to the change in air pressure. The light from the corridor pours in, displaying the cybo on duty on the other side. The intruder is short and dressed in a dark, non-reflective hooded jumpsuit of some sort. The figure steps through the door and turns to face into the area.
Luci scrambles toward the opening. Before she can get a good look at the intruder’s face, the figure reaches into the hood, no doubt activating their Viatorio.
The door zips shut the same instant the lights in the lower level reactivate. Even though the illumination is set to a low level, the sudden change forces Luci to wince as her eyes adjust.
Luci rushes the door. “Come back!” she shouts, pounding it with her fists. “It’s okay, come back here!” She leans her ear to the cold metal while attempting to slow her breathing to listen for any movement outside. “Come back, you bastard!” she yells, pressing her face against the door. She realizes the futility of doing this—the door is at least eight to nine inches of metal.
She’s too late. It’s over.
Luci is completely helpless with no Viatorio to alert anyone to what just happened. She imagines Ish a few miles away asleep in his bed. It will be hours before he arrives and she’s able to relay any of this to him. Even if Macer is home in the structure adjacent to this one, there’s no way for her to signal to him or Royse to come over. In all her life, she’s only felt this trapped once before.
For the second time this morning, she begins to self-soothe with math, but this time, she stops short of reaching her special number of 2012. “The note,” she says aloud, rushing to the dining area. Just as the day before, there’s a folded sheet of paper waiting for her. Luci snatches it up and takes a cleansing breath on her way to the sink.
don’t trust mxsc
wEv got A plan tU brAk U frE
A confusing mix of exhilaration and trepidation floods her heart as she fills her cup from the faucet. Sipping the cool water on the way to the couch around the pull basin, she contemplates how close she and Ish are to achieving a DPM solution. The note is right that Macer shouldn’t be trusted; even so, she has a ticket from him to go to East Timor tucked under her mattress—a ticket home, a ticket back to her gimpy dog Marcus H., back to her cosmetics, back to steaming cups of coffee and real food, a ticket back to her life away from this madness. Everything will be as it was before, except she will return barren. Despite this, what can this note-leaver guy offer that can compare with any of that?
There’s an odd, unrecognizable feeling as she acknowledges that either way, she doesn’t have much more time with Ish. Though they’ve only worked together for a few days, it’s difficult to imagine never seeing him again. The notion feels like a heavy stone in her stomach. Out of everyone she’s collaborated with over the years, he’s the only one who can keep up with her talent and skill. There was that, but then there was something else, something so much more. She shakes her head to prevent being overtaken by sentimentality. This works for the most part, but she’s left picturing her partner’s unassuming grin.
She sighs. Ish was right all along. She should’ve turned over the first two notes, but the notion of involving Pol Cavazos irks her. She could live without him prancing and sniffing around. She contemplates telling Royse and determines that a better alternative, but how can she contact him without a Viatorio?
She bites her lip, knowing that she and Ish will reach a DPM conclusion within the next few days and all of this “living in the future” will finally be over for her.
“Papa always said that the future isn’t what it used to be.” She yawns, the nostalgia of saying his words aloud to herself is comforting. “Little did he know how right he was . . . little did he know. The future is not what—”
Excited, she drops the cup to the floor and barely notices the puddle it makes. “Sweet God in Heaven, Cyphor was never hiding from us in the past—he’s in the future! He’s got to be there!” Her head darts from left to right, taking in the tapestry of numbers and calculations plastered on the curved glass walls. In her haste to grab something to write with, she bumps the concierge bot floating over to clean up the spilled water. “Move!” she shouts, though it’s no good without a connected Viatorio.
She tears off a sheet from the paper roll and snatches up her pencil. She can’t write fast enough.
Many hours pass, and the storm outside picks up in its intensity. Luci hardly notices the dome enclosing her being pelted by sheets of rain.
“Uh, Luci?” Ish calls to her.
She looks up from her writing. “Oh, hey. You startled me.”
He approaches, carrying an armful of equipment. “Where are your pants?”
For the first time since waking up from her nightmare and the encounter with the intruder, she is aware of her physical appearance. She never got dressed. Luci frantically pulls the roll of paper to conceal her bottom half. She shifts to adjust it to cover the long scar running down her leg. With her other hand, she attempts to arrange her matted hair, but to no avail. “Sorry,” she begins, “I kind of lost track of time.”
Ish lowers parts of unrecognizable equipment components gently to the couch. “How long have you been working?”
She sighs and answers in a matter-of-fact tone. “Um, since about 3:00.”
He looks around the room cluttered with new sheets of figures strewn about. “It looks like a whirlwind in here. A late-night epiphany? Did you figure out the mystery of porous number compounds?”
“No,” she begins. “Well, no to the limber number thing, but yes to the late-night epiphany question . . . well, sort of.”
Luci quickly relays the pre-dawn events to him: spotting the intruder, the latest message, and the concept that Gicul may be operating from a skip point juncture in a future beyond Relicus City instead of one located in the past.
Patiently and silently, Ish listens to it all. When she’s done, he says, “I’m sorry, I should’ve stayed like you wanted. We’ve got to alert someone about these break-ins. We can’t go on like this.”
Luci begins to stand until she remembers her bottom half is wrapped in butcher-block paper. “Yeah, we’ll do that later, alright? You’re missing the bigger picture here—Cyphor Gicul is hiding in the future. I’m certain of it. Can you sip the Jardon to get a list of skip point junctures in the future?”
