Drift pattern, p.7
Drift Pattern, page 7
Shar nods, her eyes fixed on her. “That’s what the chancellor said. You’ll be returned just a little over week after the talk you gave.”
The floating robot moves to the corner, and she asks, “What were you saying about Enos Macer to me a minute ago?”
Shar answers, “I don’t know what you mean.” Her brilliant green eyes flick up and to the left.
“Shar, I need you to level with me, woman to woman.”
“Yes, Luci—I mean, Dr. Gaudiano?”
“I need to understand what’s really going on here. What are you holding back?”
Shar nods. “A revolutionary named Cyphor Gicul is destroying the interval juncture openings, but we don’t know why or how.”
“I still don’t get why that is such a big deal,” Luci says. “Humans have existed for several millennia without skipping through time as you say.”
“We don’t leap skip to simply visit the past for recreation or as tourists. It’s about the survival of the human race.”
Luci reads the intense expression on Shar’s face. It’s obvious the young woman is conflicted as to what to say and what not to reveal. Luci feels bad for her until she remembers that it’s she who is the victim here. She wonders if this is the beginnings of Stockholm syndrome that she’s developing. She determines that she must keep focus; she must stay on target if she’s going to make it through this. “Okay, so everyone keeps mentioning ‘survival of the human race.’ How is that? What do you all mean?”
Shar takes in a deep breath and then exhales, choosing her words delicately. “It really should be Chancellor Macer to go over all of this with you.”
“It’s alright,” Luci encourages her, feeling something’s on the verge of bursting open in the conversation. “I need to know. Give me the big picture of what we’re up against.”
Shar sighs and glances over to the bot before turning back to Luci. “A long time ago, there was a bitter war between the nations that existed back then. I don’t remember their names, but they’re gone now. The conflict grew out of control, and then several nuclear exchanges took place.” Her face lights up. “China . . . it was one of the names . . . and something else.” Her expression turns grave again. “Though the missile launches began with the major nations, in the end, every country that had access to a weapon used it. The record of it states that at that point, the fighting didn’t last for very long, but the burning period after it lasted for many years, what’s called Hi no Kawa.”
“What?”
“Hi no Kawa, but there’s many names for it—Nat i brande, The Night of Ten Million Fires, Enjō Pembakaran—but it’s all the same. It’s the day the world burned.”
It’s as if all of the oxygen in the room disappeared, and there’s a sickly stillness. Luci slides a wayward strand of hair from her eyes. “How long ago did this Hi no Kawa happen?”
Shar pauses to calculate. “It was about thirty-five years into your future—no, wait, thirty years.” Shar’s voice is cold and flat as her eyes fix on the corner of the bed. “When Hi no Kawa was over, only one eight hundredth of the world’s population remained. In a few decades, the planet went from over ten billion people to an estimate of less than thirteen million scattered souls, and then many of those died off later.”
Luci’s mouth moves. “Nine billion nine hundred eighty-seven million lives.”
Shar allows the statement to linger as if doing so will give the number a chance to evaporate. She speaks so softly that her voice is a reverent whisper. “An unforeseen consequence of the fallout was the damage to the topsoil and below in the oceans. Even most of the insects died. The nutrients required for plant growth had been extinguished by radiation and other poisons. Nothing can grow from the ground anymore. Within a decade after Hi no Kawa, all the animals were all consumed as food. This was because there was no feed or grain left.” She finally looks up to Luci. “This is the world that I was born into. Until I was twenty-two, I’d never seen a living mammal other than a human—they simply don’t exist in this time. The first leap skip that I ever did was the first time that I saw a feline and then a horse that wasn’t holographic.”
“You don’t have any animals here?”
“No, all of them died or were consumed by the survivors to stay alive, since no crops could be harvested.”
Another wave of despair hits Luci. She had forgotten about Marcus H., her slobbering bulldog with the gimpy paw. Her neighbor is pet sitting Luci’s rescue mutt for the two-week period she’s supposed to be at the beach house. At least she was to do that over a century and a half ago. She wonders if she’ll ever see Marcus H. again.
“So, you see, Dr. Gaudiano, we leap skip for food, going into the past to stay alive, to survive.”
Shar studies Luci’s expression, allowing this to sink in before continuing. “What was left of humanity came together out of necessity. They pooled their resources to expand leap skip understanding. The basic premise had been at work for a half century through drift pattern mathematics.” She gestures to Luci. “Your drift pattern. The chancellor’s father, Waleen Macer, led the team that eventually figured out how to successfully leap skip a human. The journeys were just for a few days at first, but once they had a fundamental understanding of leap skip technology, it eventually led to being able to go back years, then decades, then centuries. They built Relicus City with materials they scavenged from the past. Waleen Macer was and forever will be a hero.”
“You say they skip back into the past. Do they ever go into the future?” Luci asks.
A confused expression fills Shar’s petite face. “There’s no food in the future. Teams farm it in the past and send it through to this interval.”
“But aren’t you the least bit curious of what the future holds for your people? Don’t you want to skip forward?”
Shar’s posture stiffens even more. “Forward is prohibited—article two of the edict.” As if to block a response, Shar adds, “The longchairs are constructed with a FTT failsafe that restricts Future Temporal Trespass.”
“Okay, I get it, I guess, but I don’t understand why, if you possess this remarkable ability to skip back in time, you don’t just send everyone backward in time hundreds or thousands of years before this Hi no Kawa thing takes place. I mean, why not colonize some forgotten past that wouldn’t even be noticed? Why go to the trouble of sending food and supplies from the past instead of just setting up back there?”
Shar freezes, and Luci studies her, wondering why she looks embarrassed. No, it’s not embarrassment. It’s the look of shame. But why?
Luci verbally prods her. “What am I missing here, Shar? Surely I’m not the first one to ever come up with this as a solution. Why not colonize the past before Hi no Kawa?”
Shar returns her eyes to the floor. This time, Luci bends to enter her line of sight. “Is it some kind of edict or code thing like the ‘no going into the future’ rule or something? Or is the thought of abandoning this time plateau considered irresponsible?” Luci reaches for the woman’s shoulder. “Shar, help me out here. Are there too many people to take back into the past? What is it?”
Shar mouths a word. It’s spoken so softly that Luci can’t hear it.
“What’d you say?” Luci asks.
“Sterilization.” Shar says slowly lifting her head to meet Luci’s gaze. “The reason that sitters can’t bring soil from the past, the reason we can’t plant seeds we gather from other intervals is because the trip through time sterilizes them.”
Luci shrugs. “So, what does that have to do with—”
Shar cuts her question short. “Everything that we carry through in the longchairs or skip barges becomes sterilized . . . everything.” She pauses and then adds with a quivering lip, “Including people.”
Luci doesn’t catch on at first, but then the horrifying pieces of the puzzle snap into place. She gasps and throws her hands over her open mouth. Though she doesn’t feel different, traveling through time to the future period of Relicus City made her barren.
~ Ten ~
Luci’s mind instantly rejects what she’s just been told. “You’re saying that anything you bring through time is sterilized?”
Shar’s head bobs a slow yes.
Luci tries to turn down the static in her mind. “So this happens after how many journeys?” A panic rises in her heart. “How many . . .” She searches for the term. “Shar, how many skips do I have until—”
“Only one,” Shar says in a whisper, though the impact of it feels like the answer is shouted through a megaphone. “It’s already done.”
“No, no, no . . . you’re lying,” Luci says, covering her mouth. “Tell me the truth.” A lump forms in her throat. “Why would you say that? Why would . . .” She pleads with her, “I agree to help with the drift pattern equations. You don’t have to do this to me. I’ll do what you all want. I’ll help.” Fighting to hold the panic in check, she asks, “Does it revert back when I’m returned to my own time period?”
Shar’s voice trembles. “I’m sorry, but it’s true. There’s no way to reverse the effects of the leap skip.”
Luci’s springs up from the bed, pacing. Her head is in a cloud of confusion. “No, this can’t be happening. This can’t be real.” Hot tears swell in her eyes, and her pulse beats in her ears. A solution forms in her mind, causing her to stop abruptly. “Wait, there’s another version of me from another time. Why couldn’t I get my eggs from future me and—”
Before Luci can finish, Shar shakes her head somberly. “Leap skips don’t work that way. Both versions of the subject would have to converge at a time-neutral point using two exclusively independent longchairs. I’m so sorry. I know being a stretch . . . having a child was important to you.”
Through gritted teeth, Luci says, “You don’t know anything.” Her words bubble up like acid. “How do you know anything about what I would want . . . what I would ever want?”
Shar looks wounded. “From before. It wasn’t a few days ago. That’s what I wanted to tell you.” Shar slides her hand from her cheek to the ruby rectangle on her ear. “Yes, sir?” She’s all business now. She looks at Luci, but it’s clear she’s speaking to someone else. “Yes, I’m on my way.”
At first, Luci thinks it’s a bluff, a ploy to get her off balance, but when Shar spins around and heads for the doorway, Luci demands, “Wait! What did I say to you the first time I was here? What happened to me?” Her frustration mounts. “Answer me! Please answer me.”
Shar stops in her tracks. With her back still to Luci, she says, “Luci . . . Doctor, I’m really sorry for before. I know this may not make any sense to you, but I want you to know that I’m sorry anyway.” Shar takes a step and stops again. “Just keep yourself alive and stay safe. We’ll be back when it’s time.”
~ Eleven ~
With Shar gone, Luci collapses face-down into the egg-shaped bed. The combined shock of everything prevents her from concentrating on self-soothing with her random math exercises. Only once in her life has she experienced such bottomless despair. She refuses the impulse to openly sob for two reasons: she’s self-conscious about the hovering machine in the corner and she’s never been one to wallow in self-pity. The accident that took her parents from her when she was twelve delivered her from any of those self-indulgent tendencies.
Still, she feels a deep sense of remorse, and a dark, empty hole envelops her. There’s something else—a pulsating, black rage growing in the pit of her stomach, anger that’s she’s been violated. Something has been stolen from her—her possible future. They might as well have gutted her and ripped a kidney from her insides.
Without warning, thoughts of her ex-boyfriend, Michael, move to the forefront of her mind. After three and a half years, she broke it off with the unofficial fiancé thirteen days ago. There wasn’t a fight so much as a weird and eerily calm disagreement over children.
How bitterly ironic to her now is that it all was about having children.
She felt ready.
He did not.
The conversation had the cold, peculiar semblance of a business transaction. The equation between them simply didn’t match up, leaving them no rational reason to continue. That it was handled so clinically surprised her and stung a little. They even shook hands instead of a final embrace or kiss.
She made the conscious decision to not harbor any resentment toward him. It wasn’t that he broke a promise or anything; he was always clear on the topic. She was the one who changed.
The concept of a family has always been in the back of her mind, but at age thirty-three, the idea has sharpened closer into focus. She wasn’t obsessing, but she feared she was on the threshold of doing so.
For years, Luci has known the consequence of a pregnancy to her work and repressed the urge to contemplate such trivial things. Being female in the academic world had always been an uphill climb. Her gender meant that she was often required to be better and work harder than her male colleagues, and sometimes even that wasn’t enough. Any sign of femininity was quietly considered a badge of weakness by many, a twisted admission of inferiority. Though it was never said aloud to her, the cultural undertow of it always worked against her, trying to pull her down backward under the sea. She suspected that her gender in the mathematics community was discreetly observed as the equivalent of a cripple competing in the high jump, and nothing screams, “I have a uterus!” louder than being knocked up.
Despite all of this, the seed of the idea took root in her heart at some point. For what it was worth, she’s more than demonstrated her skill and more than earned her place at the boys’ table, but a baby . . . that would be too much for them.
There was no rational reason for her to forfeit the life she knew for motherhood. Where did such an illogical desire come from? She considered that her subconscious may be working against her, attempting to restore and repair the family that she has been deprived of because of the accident.
Up until now, the prep work for the lecture has served as a distraction from the Michael breakup situation, but now that that is over, she wonders how she’ll be. Life is never as clean as math, but even so, that the possibility of motherhood has been snatched away while she slept is difficult to process. All of that is gone to her now, an option that is no longer viable—with Michael or anyone else.
A knot forms in her throat, and Luci sniffles and sits up in the bed. The concierge bot hovers at attention in the corner. An unexpected guilt sweeps over her, guilt for not attempting to run sooner when they were in the main warehouse. She probably would have been recaptured, but what if she was able to get away? This is the worst of all of it, the realization that she allowed Enos Macer to extinguish future possibilities for her and barely offered a whimper as it went down until it was too late. Luci’s rational mind catches up with this train of thought, reminding her that there was no way for her to know time travel rendered her eggs infertile.
She’s not guilty—Enos Macer is!
She rises from the mattress, ignoring her stomach twisting like the handles of a vice. If the robot in the room with her is recording everything, it could be transmitting live back to Macer now.
“Are you listening, Macer?” she asks, advancing on it. “Who do you think you are? You don’t decide for me!” She recognizes the futility of confronting her captor in this way, but an unquenchable anger short-circuits any possibility of rational thought. “I hope you can hear me through this thing, because I want you to know something. Unless you restore me to the way I was before, I refuse to do anything for you! Not a single equation until you prove that you’ll send a doctor back with me to harvest my undamaged eggs from before.” She’s unaccustomed to such an avalanche of emotion overtaking her. It’s frightening not to have control, but she can’t stop.
She lunges at the cylindrical casing of the robot. It’s cold to the touch as she grabs it. “If you’d been smart, you’d allowed me to stay in my time and work on the drift pattern for you there, but you didn’t, and you drug me across time, killing my chance to ever have a . . .” She hesitates, picturing the faces of her dead mother and father, and finally utters the word, “family.”
The concierge releases a low-voltage charge through its outer shell. It doesn’t hurt her, but it’s enough to shock Luci into releasing her grip. The machine exploits this and zips through the doorway before she realizes what happened.
“Come back here, you son of a bitch!” Luci scrambles to follow, still shouting, “You can’t make me do anything for you! You have no leverage! There’s nothing left to take from me, nothing left to barter with. I don’t care if all of your people starve.” It’s a lie; she does care, but the momentum of her pain-induced rage gets the best of her. As she exits the brightly lit cube of a room, the light fades. “Everyone knows that you can’t subtract from zero. It’s fundamental math. And you have zero left to take from me! You should’ve—”
She stops mid-rant as the realization that she’s in a future environment hits hard.
Outside the doorway, an awestruck Luci surveys the area. She’s on a catwalk overlooking an open-design loft below. Shafts of sunbeams pierce the oval windows at the top of the domed area like rods of light. A quarter of the way down from the peak glass walls, an enormous aquarium encompasses the entire circle down to the bottom. These tiles are illuminated in the same manner as the floor in the bedroom. She makes her way to the end of the balcony to a spiral staircase as if in a trance, pausing as she passes a bathroom on the same level as the bedroom. She returns her focus the area below. Slightly off center of the expansive glass bubble is a kitchenette pod with low walls made from highly reflective material like plastic. Beside it, a white table sprouts up from the light floor like a flat mushroom and is surrounded by a trio of chairs.
