The Chronotrace Sequence- The Complete Box Set

by D J Edwardson

  The last thing inside the container was Gavin’s cloak. Adan decided to put it on so he could more easily carry the chronotrace and his zoelith. It fit well enough, though its pockets were considerably looser than those he was used to with his garrick.

  Leaving the locker on the floor, he stepped out into the prison hallway. He made one last check of the Annex layout for the quickest route to the secret exit. Then, slipping the inhibitor band onto his wrist, the world of the esolace drained away. The hallways plunged into shadow, lit now only by the dimmest of auxiliary lighting running along the ceiling, just like in Com. A cold draft wafted down the hall.

  He was himself once again, no esolace, no limitless knowledge, no privileged access; just Adan and nothing more. But that was enough.

  Forty-Three

  Tempus Fugit

  Adan made his way towards Gavin’s secret exit, flinching at the sound of booted feet as he passed several corridors. The closer he got to the exit, the louder the echoes grew. By the time he reached it, he could hear a patrol of four or five men running hard down the corridor just around the corner.

  He expected to see the semi-transparent wall, but the walls there looked like any others in the Annex, made of dark gray and very solid non-transparent metal.

  Was Gavin lying? No, he couldn’t be. There had to be something he was missing, some hidden switch or pressure plate. He pressed his hand against the wall and—it passed right through.

  It was a projection!

  Adan leapt through just as the patrol rounded the corner. The wall was just as solid-looking from the other side. They must not have seen him pass through because they marched by without even slowing. Soon the echoes of their boots were lost in the sprawling passages of the complex.

  Adan wished Gavin had explained to him the trick of the wall, but then again, there wasn’t exactly much time to go over every little detail of his plan.

  The ramp on the other side was lit by the dim auxiliary lighting running along the floor. White stone walls enclosed the sloped passage, but the floor was metal. His passing left padded echoes for his pursuers to follow, but unlike his race through the Annex, he heard no booted patrols closing in on him in reply. Hopefully they thought he was still in the main complex.

  The angular ascent brought him past five doors which led presumably back into the Annex proper. He tensed when he passed each one, preparing for a team to burst through and lay hold of him, but the doors remained closed. With the inhibitor on, he was truly a ghost in this city. Perhaps it had never occurred to the Devs that someone would go completely blank when they had the ability to access the esolace using back door channels.

  Despite the work Gavin had done to restore Adan’s stamina, he was winded and dragging by the time he reached the final door. He took a moment to catch his breath before pulling the lever beside it. As the door swung open he squinted at the fresh light of day bursting in upon him.

  He stumbled outside, directly onto one of the streets of Axis Prime, the central district. The street was not nearly as wide as the ones in the outer parts of Oasis, but like them they were also deserted because of the flatline. All the buildings here were low, one-storied structures which had the majority of their levels underground. They were made from the same white acretian stone and had permanent, visible doors marking their points of entry.

  Adan dashed through the vacant streets, a surge of energy coursing through him. He felt free for the first time in his life. No scientists, no assessors, no Will. He was on his own.

  But how long would it last? There were still assessors patrolling the city. And the Developers would eventually figure out that he was no longer in the Annex.

  He passed out of Axis Prime and into the Service Ring which made up the majority of the city. Rushing down the broad, shiny path lined with rows of silvery buildings, he scanned each intersection, searching for the place from Gavin’s memory, but every street he passed was a blur. They all looked the same.

  Three-quarters of the way through the district, the surroundings looked somewhat familiar, but it wasn’t an exact match. He took the intersecting street and headed south. Two blocks later recognition jolted him to a stop. From the size of the buildings and the view towards the city center he knew he’d found the correct location.

  He twisted off the inhibitor, making himself visible to the Developers once again, and wiped the sweat from his brow.

  This was it. He had to work fast.

  The nebulous lights of Oasis replaced the harsh light of the Vast as his mind submerged itself back into the esolace.

  He checked Com to see if any assessors had been dispatched to his position, but no patrols were coming out of Axis Prime. A few assessors patrolled the Ancillary Rim nearby, but they were still doing scans. For now, they did not seem to be aware of his location, but he’d only been on-system for a few moments.

  He placed the chronotrace on the ground. Linking to it with his mind, he explored the capabilities of the mysterious device. He quickly found that, as complicated as the technology behind it was, it was remarkably simple to operate. The first thing he had to do was connect it to a sufficient power source. It could not scan using only its internal power core.

  The energy mesh which powered the city was accessible from anywhere. A device could draw as much power as required as long as it was authorized to do so. Normally, the inordinate amounts of power needed to run a scan would have required Developer approval. But since Adan was operating outside the normal channels he could pull down as much as he wanted. And, until the Devs figured out how to shut down the back door Will had given him into the system, they would be powerless to stop him.

  The chronotrace blazed to life at Adan’s command. The crystal disc on top and the silver ring began to glow. The disc started spinning. It lit up in a mesmerizing blur, whiter than a lumin. Soon the metal rings were glimmering, sending out golden planes of light which expanded across the pavement. The further the light went, the more rapidly it grew, until it engulfed Adan in its radiance. He had to cover his eyes until the intensity died down.

  The initial scan took far too long for Adan’s liking. While he waited for it to complete, he checked the security channels. Still no assessors had been sent to his location. Checking the logs, it seemed like they were still hunting for him in the Annex.

  As the lights from the scan dimmed, he initiated the trace with a thought. The scenery around him began to shift. The most obvious change was that everything beyond his immediate surroundings disappeared. He found himself inside a chronological bubble in which everything looked artificial, and yet real enough so that he could not quite pinpoint what was missing. The scene just felt out of place somehow.

  Time began to work itself backwards inside the trace. The first thing Adan saw was himself picking up the chronotrace and walking backwards out of the bubble. That was the last thing that had happened in this place, played out in reverse. After that, all was still. He needed to increase the flow in order to get to the events surrounding Gavin’s abduction as quickly as possible.

  After increasing the speed, nothing much changed. Eventually, several dark gray blurs streaked by. They must have been assessors, out scanning the buildings in this area.

  Not long after that, the chronotrace issued a warning that the energy levels would need to be increased in order to sustain the accelerated rendering speed. It would be safer to use less energy, but he only had so much time before the Devs sent someone after him. He doubled the energy levels to keep pace with the trace.

  The invention hummed on. Though the artificial light of Oasis inside the scene never wavered, Adan knew from the mental updates he was getting that early morning had come and gone. The trace had passed into the previous day.

  Soon, a large number of people flashed through the intersection. The scene around him blurred with color as countless figures zipped by. Adan checked the time stamp in the Dev logs. This was when the flat-line had been initiated. From that point on, he saw more r
egular traffic through the intersection. Most of the blurs were white or gray, but blues, silvers, and browns smeared themselves across the trace as well. They were coming out of the buildings, but of course since time was working in reverse, the opposite was actually true.

  Once again the chronotrace showed signs of power issues. The energy levels needed to be increased. Adan augmented it by another factor of two. Doing so initiated warnings from the esolace itself that the strain on the energy mesh was becoming dangerously high.

  As the energy levels soared, the high amounts of power began to take their toll on the chronotrace. It simply wasn’t designed to sustain such high levels of power consumption for an extended period of time. It was in danger of burning out if he kept it at the current rate. But it had to hold out until he got to Gavin’s capture.

  Judging from the memory Gavin gave him, the trace was getting close. Because of that, Adan thought it would be okay to slow down the flow of time in order to ease the strain on the device.

  With the slower speed, the chronotrace stabilized somewhat, but warnings about the energy mesh persisted. The esolace informed him that critical systems in Oasis would soon be threatened if he did not reduce the power levels.

  Adan could not believe the Developers still hadn’t sent anyone out to stop him. It almost began to worry him as much as if he knew they were already on their way. Was there something he was missing?

  Inside the bubble, time continued rushing by. Soon, the device requested yet another spike in power to compensate for some of the failure of its internal components.

  The energy mesh plunged to perilously low levels. The less critical systems began shutting down in an effort to avoid a total crash of the system. There was now a real question as to whether or not there would even be enough power left for the chronotrace to finish.

  But there was no way around it; he had to get back further in time. He opened up the energy mesh wider. As the chronotrace struggled under the increased power levels, he pulled back the flow of time even further. By doing so, he hoped to avoid burning out the device completely. But with each decrease to the rendering rate, the event got further and further away and the energy mesh still looked like it would shut down at any moment.

  From the reduced time flow, he could now pick out occasional faces flashing into view as strangers wandered past. All the faces were the same, glassy-eyed, brown haired people with nothing to distinguish them except the color of their clothing.

  A loud boom thundered across the scene from outside the trace. Instantly, Adan lost his connection to the esolace, which could only mean one thing: the energy mesh had failed. There was no more power left.

  Though the esolace was gone, Adan was close enough to the chronotrace to still be connected to it through his bioseine. Amazingly, the device was still functioning. It was operating on the last reserves of power it had pulled down from the energy mesh before it crashed. But with no new power coming in, it was only a matter of time before it burned through that and powered off.

  The scene around him continued rushing by. It sputtered and flickered a few times, but the trace held on tenaciously. And then at last the event he’d been waiting for was upon him. He pulled the flow of time all the way back to normal as it approached. A shimmer ran through the scene and a brilliant light exploded into his eyes.

  Powerful beams of light shot forth from a hovering platform, flooding the edge of the temporal bubble. With time working in reverse, Gavin’s body was already on the transport. He lay motionless on the floor of the metal lev as it glided backwards to a stop. Half a dozen figures dressed in white occupied the platform. They had that unsettling vacancy in their eyes which marked them as somatarchs.

  Two of them moved backwards off the platform hauling Gavin’s body. When they reached the center of the intersection they placed it on the ground. They left his prostrate form and reversed course back to the transport. It was odd watching the events unfold this way, but Adan’s mind was beginning to adjust to the inverse flow of time.

  He noticed after the two somatarchs remounted the lev that one of the other figures on it was different. The sixth one was dressed in the silvery lab coat of a scientist. As he turned, Adan recognized the face of Darius. He seemed to stare right at Adan with his frighteningly cunning eyes, but it was just a coincidence, a mere happenstance of the trace.

  The lev reversed back out of the scene, hissing off into nothingness. A few moments later Gavin seemed to fall upwards onto his feet and then the image vanished. The chronotrace had finally spent the last of its energy, or had overloaded and given out. Whatever the case, the device was now dead.

  In place of the chronological bubble, the dark streets of Oasis returned, lit only by a sickly green light from the clouds above. Back in the present, the esolace was down and Oasis was without power and the street was no longer empty. A pair of lights rushed at him from the city center. As they drew nearer, a hissing sound filled the street. Something told Adan he should flee from it, but it was closing so fast, he knew it would do no good.

  The lights grew closer and brighter. He shielded his eyes with his hands, trying to get a glimpse of what it was, but he had a terrible intuition. The hissing behind the lights was like an echo from the chronotrace sequence which had just played out.

  The source of the lights did not slow down. For a moment, Adan thought it would slam right into him. He dashed left to avoid the impact, but it swerved and came alongside him. Someone reached out and snatched him up and swung him onto a floating platform without it ever coming to a complete stop.

  Terror gripped Adan by the throat. He’d been caught. Looking into the face of the figure that scooped him up, he saw that it was a somatarch, as were the other figures on the lev. It was as if the chronotrace was playing the same events out again, only this time with him in Gavin’s place.

  But Will had defeated the somatarchs back in the Basin. Adan still had hope. He reached with his mind out to the creature holding him, but it was blank, they all were, just like the ones who had captured him in the compound. And just like then, he lost all hope of escape. An awful dread crept across his skin.

  The lev swerved back around and headed for the center of Oasis. Adan grabbed hold of the railing on the edge to keep from swaying.

  Suddenly, the platform came unexpectedly to a full stop. One of the somatarchs hopped out and scooped something up off the ground. It jumped back in a moment later, depositing the chronotrace into a compartment under the bench which ran down the middle of the platform.

  As the lev hissed back into motion, a figure moved towards him from the front. Adan didn’t know how he’d missed him before. It was Darius. This really was the chronotrace playing itself out all over again.

  “Hello, Adan,” Darius said in a quiet voice. Adan had to strain to hear it over the hissing lev. “It’s time to take you back to the Institute.” The edges of his mouth quivered as if he were trying to smile. “You know, we’ve been looking for you for some time. You left us before you were ready. You hadn’t even been initialized. But I’m glad to see that you survived and made it back to us.” The cheerless tone of his voice belied the words he spoke.

  “What are you going to do to me?” Adan asked.

  “I know that you’re afraid of us, but you shouldn’t be,” Darius said. “I didn’t want to kill you back in the Annex, you know, but you were forcing my hand. I’m actually glad you figured out a way to escape. Oasis needs memorants if it hopes to survive.”

  “What?” He couldn’t be saying what he seemed to be saying. Adan gripped the bench tighter, as if the lev had just swerved or was about to, but it continued on as smooth as ever.

  “Without memorants, it would be impossible to safely expunge the deviations,” Darius said dryly. He sounded tired, but his eyes remained as alert as ever.

  “Are you saying I’m a memorant? That’s impossible,” Adan shot back. This had to be some sort of trick. What game was he playing? Adan couldn’t be a memorant. Gavin
would have told him if he was.

  “We’re so far behind. With the casualties we suffered back when the last storms hit we’ve had to make the flat lines longer and longer to ensure we can get all the equalizing done. Memorants are invaluable, you see. You’ll be of great help to us once we perfect the remapping process,” his voice droned on as if Adan wasn’t even there.

  “But I don’t want to help you. Even if I was a memorant—you can’t force me—” Adan cut himself off, realizing the futility of what he was about to say. Of course they could force him. They could make him do whatever they wanted.

  “I know you’re the one who erased Gavin’s memory,” Adan went on. All he could hope for was to somehow push Darius into revealing something—anything that might help him find a way out of this situation. “I know about you. I know about the…”

  “Miasma channel? That’s what you were going to say, wasn’t it? But then you thought that you’d better not. If I knew about it, I might find out how to use it against you or the rest of Oasis.” Darius peeled back a cheerless smile, as if it had been hidden beneath a layer of skin. “You’ve learned much since you left, but you have been learning all the wrong things, I’m afraid. All the wrong things.” He spoke these words more softly than ever, as if speaking to himself.

  Adan tugged agains the railing, as if he could rip it out somehow and sweep it across the lev, sending the rest of the passengers flying. After all he’d been through he was about to lose everything again. He thought about flinging himself from the platform, but they would just stop and pick him up again.

  Two somatarchs grabbed him by the shoulders and shoved him onto the bench. Darius pulled out the zoelith he’d been wearing at his waist. He ran his fingers along the shiny metal disc for a moment, lost in thought. Then he handed it wordlessly to the somatarch standing in front of Adan.