“You have off-system confirmation?”
“Yes, Com, we’ll do a physical scan, but he’s not here,” Jax answered.
“All right. We have the facility locked down. He can’t be far,” Com replied.
“From the last live feed, we’ve got two slices lead time. He could be anywhere,” Jax reported.
“Two slices? That has to be an error. Wait—we’re back-synching it now.”
“Look, Com, you sort it out,” Jax replied, frustrated. “We don’t have time. He’s not in his room. We’ll start spreading out using these trajectories. Support can pick up the slack.”
A diagram winked into Adan’s mind. He knew instinctively that the men could see the same image in their thoughts. Four thick, glowing green lines were imposed over a representation of the top floor of the Institute.
“Jax, what’s going on here?” asked Tol, the fourth man in the group.
“Are you as fresh from the vault as Cal?” Jax responded. “Look, we’ve been compromised. I don’t know how it happened any more than you do, but it sure looks like we have a dead node here. But whatever is going on, the protocol is clear. We find the non-viable and get him back under Admin control.”
Jax turned his thoughts back to the nebulous voice of Com. “Do I have authority to proceed with the physical scan and go off system?”
Adan could feel the tension amongst the four men in the ensuing silence. They were growing increasingly unsettled by the lack of response from Com.
“Com? Com? Are you there?” Jax was quickly losing his composure. “Great, there’s something they’re not telling us. I hate it when they do this.”
“What do you mean?” Cal asked.
“Look, Rip and I have seen a lot. Some of the things that go on in the Institute are ‘overwrite to buffer’ if you know what I mean. We don’t get to know because we don’t need to know. Com does what it needs to do and the assessors clean up the mess.”
“Jax, this isn’t the time,” Rip cautioned. Along with this primary thought, however, Rip subtly pushed another message towards Jax, one which he wasn’t sharing with the others. It seemed to say, ‘you better keep quiet’. After noticing this new message, Adan realized that these undercurrents of thought had been there all along, he just hadn’t noticed them.
Jax responded with his own sub-thoughts, “Com is as dark as we are right now, they won’t—”
“Are you going deviant, Jax?” Rip’s concern was mingled with the hint of a threat. The intensity of his transmitted thoughts seemed to rise in volume and tone. How this could be when there was no actual sound Adan could not explain.
“You know as well as I do that nothing goes unnoticed; they see it all in the flat-lines,” Rip added.
“Listen, as far as I can tell, for all their talk about protocol, the Admins in Com don’t really care what we think, just as long as we get the job done.”
Despite the bluster of Jax’s thoughts, he appeared to sense the validity of Rip’s warnings. His next thought was calmer, more composed.
“You’re probably right,” Jax agreed. “This is probably just another kill dash nine. We just have to find the non-viable. I shouldn't let myself get so worked up over this kind of thing.”
Jax opened up his mind to the rest of the group.“Our orders haven’t changed. For all we know, Com is blank right now, but the Admins should have things up and running soon. So we’ll just follow protocol and proceed with the physical scan as if we had authorization. Now get on your route and we’ll see you back at the Annex if nothing turns up.”
The green floor plan with the lighted paths appeared once again. Jax and the others, represented by red dots, were moving from Adan’s room back out into the hallway.
“Oh, no, a physical scan…a physical scan. I’ve got to do this the hard way.” A new thought flitted through Adan’s mind. It wasn’t from any of the men or Com. Adan had no idea who it came from.
His body lurched back into motion. He was moving fast now. Not quite a run, but close. As he hurtled down the passage, parts of the mental conversation played back through his mind. Non-viable. That word stuck out. Because he could understand their thoughts, he knew the word referred to him. He also knew exactly what it meant. It meant that his fears were true. His life was nothing to these scientists. He was defective somehow, useless. Something to be discarded with the trash. If they even had trash in a place as sterile as this.
But then why go through all the treatments? The interviews? The talk about the esolace and integrating him back into society? Why all this if they just meant to kill him? Because he understood what the kill dash nine part meant, too.
As he reached the end of the hall his body thudded to a halt. The sound of the assessors moving towards him from behind drifted down the hallway. They were still far away, but it sounded like they were picking up speed.
Adan found himself staring at a new set of doors. The map flashed back into his vision. He saw dozens of red dots on it this time, all converging towards his location. His view of the door began to shake in all directions.
“I sure hope this works,” came the anonymous thoughts again into his mind.
Adan’s body crashed to the floor. Though he knew that his head must have slammed onto the metal plating, he felt nothing. The scene bounced once as he hit, and all went still. He was left staring at the seam between the door and the floor. More and more red dots sped towards his position on the map. They would be here soon. He noticed a pool of dark red liquid oozing its way out from underneath his head.
“That must be my blood,” he thought, and then, with his eyes still open, everything went dark.
Five
Beyond the Institute
Adan stirred where he lay, but the slight effort set off a drumming inside his head. Vague impressions from his last few moments in the hallway floated through his mind. He remembered falling down and hitting his head, but not what had made him fall or why he was even in the hallway in the first place.
He touched the side of his head, expecting to feel blood, but it was dry.
Above him, the ceiling was gone, replaced by an enormous, churning expanse. The impenetrable mass ran in shades from deep green to near black. It swirled in strangely hypnotic patterns.
It was clear that not only was he no longer in the hallway, he was no longer in the Institute. He had, on occasion, tried to imagine what being outside that place would be like, but he had never imagined this.
A rapping sound shook the stillness. He sat bolt upright, convinced someone must be coming. The shock from the noise and the sudden movement only made the pounding in his head grow worse. The sound repeated itself several times. He tried to block out the thumping inside his head and focus on where this external noise was coming from.
Rough gray walls made of lumpy rock enclosed the sand covered ground around him, which was also gray. The walls looked like large daubs of coarse material had been poured out and left to harden over time. A flimsy door in one of them quivered threateningly, as if someone was trying to get in.
The corrugated strips of metal which made up the door were held together by leaden seams. The door shivered against inrushing currents of air, bashing itself against its frame whenever the wind picked up in intensity.
“Where am I?” he thought.
As if in answer to his unspoken question, a voice drifted across the compound.
“Welcome to the Vast.”
Adan’s head spun in the direction of the voice, but the area was shrouded in shadows, an eclectic assortment of barrels and containers melded together in one single, dark puzzle.
As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, some of the shapes grew more distinct. Adan thought he could make out the appearance of a person leaning against a stack of large bags.
“Hello? Who’s there?” Adan ventured, still wondering if his eyes were telling him the truth in the dim half-light.
A man stepped out of the tangled black shapes, his face swathed in deep shado
ws. The only feature that stood out were the eyes. They leapt out like sparks in the midst of dark hollows. Even in the dimness, Adan could see they were a shocking shade of azure.
Adan scrambled to get to his feet before the stranger could reach him, but he only managed to slip and fall back into the dust. Pain lanced through his body.
The stranger reached down to grab Adan by the arm. Then he pulled him to his feet with surprising gentleness.
“My name is Will,” the man said.
Now that he was closer, Adan could make out the details of his face. It was the mysterious stranger from his room.
“It’s you. You were there in the Institute.”
“Yes,” Will said. “That was me.” He spoke decisively, as though he had prepared what he meant to say in advance.
“But this isn’t the Institute, is it? Where am I?”
Will motioned to a nearby barrel. “Have a seat.”
Adan sat down cautiously on top of one of the barrels. It didn’t look like an ideal place to sit, but the pain drumming in his head was making him a little dizzy.
“You’re in the Vast.” Will leaned against one of the other barrels.
“The Vast? What’s that?”
“Everything inside these walls and beyond—this whole desert—it’s all the Vast.”
“And what about the Institute? How far away are we from there?”
“Far enough to be safe. Far enough so you don’t have to worry about any more experiments.”
“You know about what they did to me?”
“Yes, most of it.”
Adan stared at him, still trying to piece things together. “How? Do I know you from somewhere?”
“No, you don’t know me,” Will said, “At least I don't think so. I don’t know any more about my past than you do about yours. I’m a remap, like you. That’s what the scientists in Oasis call us anyway.”
“Oasis? Is that another place?”
“It’s the city where the Institute is.”
Oasis, the Vast—Adan wasn’t clear what any of it meant. He was as confused as he had been in the Institute.
The winds outside shrieked painfully loud. A gust shot over the wall, carrying with it swirling specks of dust and forcing Adan to cover his mouth.
“I realize this must all be a shock to you,” Will continued, unaffected by the intrusive winds. “But I had to get you out before they initialized you.”
“I don’t understand,” Adan said, raising his voice. The door banged harder and harder, echoing twice as loud inside his throbbing head. “Initialize?”
“They were about to initialize your bioseine. I had to take you as soon as you got out of the Research division. Once they initialize you, it’s over. They have you and there’s no way to get you back.”
“And how do you know all of this?” Adan didn’t care about the drumming pain. Will was the first person he’d met who was willing to give him any answers. Still, he eyed him cautiously. He might have his own motives like the scientists. Or he could be working for them somehow, though that seemed unlikely.
The whistling outside the walls rose again. The metal door flailed away harder than ever. Will stared at it for a moment, finally acknowledging the distraction. A look of concern flitted across his face.
“I know what they did to you because they did the same thing to me.” Will’s eyes blazed bright as he said the words. There was a depth of emotion to them that Adan had never seen in another person. “But someone helped me get out—one of the scientists. He’s the one who told me most of what I know. The rest of it I learned from this.”
Will stood up and took a step closer, raising his chin and fingering a silvery torc he wore around his neck. The band looked like it was made from a single, seamless piece of metal. A small sphere bulged out from the middle of it at the base of his neck.
“It’s called an extractor. The assessors use them to store and access private information not available on the esolace. The Devs also use them to monitor and control the assessors.”
“I saw one of those before, on the men in the hallway, the ones in the gray robes,” Adan said, the memory seeping back as he spoke. “It was the strangest thing. I heard their thoughts somehow…I felt myself moving, but I wasn’t in control.”
His voice trailed off, drowned out by the mounting winds.
“The Developers are the ones who brought you to Oasis,” Will said, lifting his voice over the wind. “They were trying to turn you into one of them—make you part of their society. The Collective—that’s what they call it, but it’s a meaningless name. Everyone, even the scientists, does whatever the Developers want.”
“What happened to me in the hallway? How did I lose control of myself like that?”
The sounds of the mounting gale would have smothered Will’s answer even if he had given one. Instead, he stood up and pulled Adan by the arm towards the barrels. The promise of getting the answers Adan wanted dissolved into the scattered bits of sand now coming on the wind. There was a new hostility in the air. It was different than the dull, oppressive threat of the Institute. This one was much more immediate, much more tangible.
Will moved quickly. He darted towards the shadowy area at the back of the compound and disappeared inside. A moment later, a light blinked on from inside the darkness. His silhouette stood in the doorway of a low, enclosed shelter with a roof.
He rushed back to Adan in a blur, dragging a faded plastic tarp in one hand and carrying a bundle of small metal rods in the other.
“What should I do?” Adan asked. The wind whipped over the walls, stirring up funnels of dust inside the compound.
Will didn’t seem to hear him. He was too busy casting the tarp over the barrels and securing it. He fastened one side to hooks in the walls. The bottom he pierced with the rods, sinking them into the sandy floor and pulling the covering taut.
Then he came back, putting his arm around Adan’s shoulder and yelling into his ear, “Come on! Inside!”
His limbs strengthened by fear, Adan followed Will towards the shelter. Will shoved him inside and shut the door behind them. The light inside revealed crates and stacks of junk packed tight, but at the moment Adan was more interested in the wind. He peeked through a crack around the edge of the doorway at the tarp rippling over the barrels.
“Storm’s coming. It’s better if you keep your face away from the door.” Will’s voice was still just barely below a yell, even inside.
Storm. Adan wasn’t sure exactly what that meant, but he supposed he was about to find out. So far, he didn’t like the word at all.
Adan did as he was told, trying not to think about the increasing volume of the wind outside. Will handed him a rag.
“Here, put this over your face. The door won’t keep all the sand out. This will help.”
Adan gladly did as Will suggested. He could still feel tiny particles brushing against his clothes and hair, but the cloth kept his mouth, eyes, and ears relatively protected.
As the wind buffeted the walls outside, the intensity of the racket made Adan wonder if the little shelter would be able to withstand everything being hurled against it. The door strained and pulled as if it might fly off at any moment.
They didn’t speak during the storm. Even if they had, the raucous wind would have made it difficult. How long it lasted, Adan couldn’t say, but it seemed forever before the noises outside began to die down. From that point on, it faded rather quickly.
Will got up, stretching his legs.
“The worst is over. It should be safe to go out now,” he said, kicking open the door and venturing through. “We should probably get you something to eat,” he added over his shoulder.
“Eat? What do you mean?” Adan replied, puzzled. He didn't have the slightest idea what Will was talking about.
Six
The Shifter
Will chuckled—a low, graceful rumble that shook Adan as much as anything else he had experienced so far. That this man was capable
of laughter removed all doubts that he had any connection to the scientists.
“Forgot how to eat, eh?” Will said. “I know. It sounded strange to me the first time I heard about it, too. In the Institute they have something called the viand stream to keep you healthy. They send out the nutrients you need through the air. It works in conjunction with the esolace. But out here you’re going to need food. We’ll start you out with some atol. You should be able to handle that.”
“I do feel pretty weak.” Adan said. “And my head is sore. Will eating help with that?”
“It might. Just watch and I’ll show you.” Will made his way over to the covered barrels.
The light had grown stronger with the passing of the storm. The tarp covering the barrels was still in one piece, but the walls had crumbled away in several spots and chunks of rubble lay strewn about.
Will removed the rods holding down the tarp and pulled it back. He yanked the lid off one of the barrels and pulled two plastic cylinders out of it. He twisted off their tops and steam gushed from the openings.
“Atol. Made it this morning. You probably can’t handle solid food yet, but this is as good as anything you’ll get out in the Vast.” He handed a container to Adan. The surface was pleasantly warm. Will raised his to his lips, tilting it so that whatever was inside flowed into his mouth.
So this was eating? As Will lowered the cup, he wiped a beige film from the edges of his mouth.
“Go on, take a swig, compa” he said. “Tilt it back like I did.”
Adan gripped the container with both hands and looked down into it. A coarse liquid, light hazel in color, sloshed around inside.
“What’s this called again? And what’s it for?”
“It’s called atol,” Will said, licking his lips, “and it’s for drinking—to give you energy.”
“I thought you said it was called eating?”
“Eating, drinking, it’s all the same—whatever it takes to put some flesh on your bones,” Will said with another chuckle. There it was again, that easy laugh. Somehow it set Adan’s mind at ease.
The Chronotrace Sequence- The Complete Box Set Page 4