Attribution

by Christine Horner

  There it was, a drone. The thing’s eerily glowing “eyes” were round, first protruding then retracting only to protrude again. The eyes glowed amber, morphing to green, then blue depending on the technology it called forth. The tailless monster’s desert camouflage told him all he needed to know. Distended accusatory eyes rotated for 360-degree access before targeting the cowboy. Triangular-shaped, no wider than a boomerang, the drone unflinchingly kept pace with man and tamed beast.

  Unsure what to think, it wasn’t until the drone produced two spheres that popped out of its belly like freed testicles that the cowboy felt his empty stomach drop down into his own throbbing singular testicle.

  A burst of white light that turned blue landed into the encroaching ground fissure causing a small explosion. At first, the man thought the drone was trying to close the widening gap when he realized with horror that the drone meant to aid the crevice in reaching its maximum potential. Smoke rose from the ground like cautery as the fissure quickly cut a path across the valley floor.

  Defiant, the cowboy bent down to decrease wind resistance. Every little bit helped. At that moment, he decided from then on, wherever he went he’d ride naked. To hell and back with what anybody thought. He hooped and hollered like a warrior heading into battle, kicking at Libby’s ribs urging her to go faster.

  CHAPTER 3

  Americas Sector N3-24E :: Old Faithful Inn, Wyoming

  A frozen image of the craggy cowboy’s rage filled Truby’s media screen. Both middle fingers were held rebelliously high over his shockingly pale naked body except for a red-hot sunburn that extended from where his shirt collar would have hit, up his neck and into his scalp. This one bothered Truby, and not because even though he was thin, his skin hung off him like a Shar Pei. She’d become inured to the litany of work orders that crossed her desk, but she’d been caught off guard by this crazy character.

  He spurred something in her. Maybe the red-faced codger reminded Truby of her former self, the one she made a point of forgetting. They could have been accidental friends if fate had brought them together under other circumstances even though they came from different generations and different worlds.

  Truby twirled a delicate wedding band on her pinky finger as she leaned back in her wobbly desk chair to stare at the video frame. She and the cowboy were both tall and well-proportioned, though he preferred clothing optional to her gender-neutral apparel. He had the same full head of untamed hair she did, Truby’s still a copper brown untouched by time.

  A journalist in a previous life, Truby had a trained eye for detail. It’s also why they made her do what they were waiting on right now. Her forearm’s subdermal BioIDentificator dispensed an indigo blue number three from beneath her skin which rose to the surface like a tattoo that rapidly faded away to alert Truby she was three minutes over her deadline.

  This is what happens when you make a deal with the devil. First came random projects that had never been explained. At the time, Truby didn’t think much of it as they seemed innocuous in and of themselves. Maybe she hadn’t been thinking at all.

  She slammed her palm on an antique shaker-style desk. A little league baseball and a relic of a high-definition video camera along with replacement parts and batteries bounced in reply. It felt as if even her thoughts were subject to scrutiny.

  Truby looked around at the juxtaposition called her life. It was a room at the now defunct Old Faithful Inn where the national monument once offered visitors the illusion that some things could still be counted on.

  Drawn heavily-lined drapery kept out sunlight, and roving eyes—organic and otherwise. Though it was likely wishful thinking. The suite was tastefully appointed with early 20th-century furnishings; a queen-size bed, the second bed removed for workspace; a decorative quaint wash basin next to a full bath, and a sitting and work area with a small refrigerator. Despite their age, the furniture along with the hum of the mini-fridge was soothing and comfortable as minimalistic styling went. Wide-planked pine wood floors, walls, and ceiling aided in keeping errant light from bouncing into her work while lending a natural woodsy fragrance, solitude’s companion that never grew stale.

  Truby’s modern office chair, not built to last, was the only impediment to ideal working conditions. The work itself, too, she grumbled. As tasteful as her digs of three years were, the work required of her was not.

  Hidden in her room was one of the most advanced biocomputers issued by the military. Walk into the room; it was invisible. One only saw what appeared to be a few personal items strewn across the surface of a desk. It was what was unseen that was so impressive. A flat, pliable work surface blended in seamlessly with its environment using the same biotechnology a chameleon uses to change its skin to mirror its surroundings. It’s when the touch screen is activated via the user’s unique electromagnetic signature that the magic happens.

  The work surface revealed itself, emitting a hologram beam above it that served as the media screen. The screen size is adjustable from tablet to wall size. Smart glasses allow you to control your computer with your eyes replacing the mouse and stylus pens, but Truby always broke or lost her costly pair, thus, avoided using them.

  Like quantum computers, biocomputers used molecules that worked in parallel rather than processing a single task at a time. The interface between the device and the virtual world it creates is the user herself. Nearly indestructible, the malleable keyboard can be added materially to almost any object and as a wearable making it virtually undetectable. Though simplistic quantum hologram computers and technology as wearables became available commercially several years ago, the scope and depth of their application have been kept classified.

  Stalling disobediently, Truby picked up the dirty white hand-stitched ball off the desk, tossing it from hand to hand. The sound of a ping like an elevator stop and a red circle appeared on her forearm. Truby swore before reluctantly reaching for an earbud within the objects on her desk, placing it in her ear.

  A genderless voice, “Good morning. It is 9:04 a.m. local time. You have one minute to upload your assignment, or your contract will be nullified”

  “Get out of my head!” Truby slammed the ball on the desk as several camcorder bits clattered to the bare hardwood floor.

  Her hand smoothly waved in a circular motion over the keyboard, a preferred tracking mouse ball of light rising. She rolled the virtual ball backward to let the drama unfold once more.

  A drone recording the event left the old man below to sweep back toward the splitting Earth fissure that seemed to be losing momentum too soon. Making Truby jolt in her seat a second time, a white-blue laser beam from an unknown source, most likely the same drone, shot into the flagging crevice creating an explosion within that blasted rock debris large and small out of its innards. Next, the earth below appeared to shake like a panhandler shaking a box of dirt for gold. A wide stream of brackish water issued from the fissure that raced the length of the landscape at a high rate of speed toward its target once more.

  The drone smoothly turned its lens to follow the churning earth emitting black dust and white foam from its depths.

  Truby could hardly watch as the cowboy turned to see what was coming for him, turning back as if it were inconsequential.

  Why would he do that?

  An unknown object moved in the corner of the screen. Truby zoomed in on the second target, another horse. She still couldn’t believe she was looking at living, breathing American Mustang. They were supposed to be extinct. She could barely watch destiny unfold. The wild mustang slowed by a wind-etched landscape gave the cowboy a chance to surge ahead. The unrelenting man took a rope off his saddle, struggling to twirl it overhead as his horse dodged the same ground conditions. Close enough to his prize, the cowboy let loose his cry of hope.

  Truby’s heart sank at the man’s jubilance on his face. The man pulled hard on the rope to slow his catch and firmly establish command. Both horses were clearly exhausted despite the terror still visible in bulging eyes
, sides heaving wide and narrow.

  That’s when it got them. The cowboy tried to hold on but a bucking horse much less two is too much for a tired old man chafed raw by time and circumstance. A final episiotomy of blue light and like the birth waters that gave him life, it was water that took it away. The Earth below the man and his horses dropped out beneath, but not before a two-fingered salute toward the sky Truby doubted she’d ever forget.

  She was furious. Truby worked haphazardly rather than carefully and methodically, scrolling the video in reverse again to a cowboy in socks and a cowboy hat, and his tired horse racing across the scraggly landscape. She froze the video before the mustang became visible, cutting the ending to paste in a new one. Her hands worked as fast as they would go.

  “I think this story is far from over, don’t you, cowboy?” Truby keyed in the final sequence like lightning that plastered a flashing UPLOADING sign across the holographic screen. “Come on, come on.”

  She eyed the time: 9:05 a.m. Truby picked up the baseball off the desk and threw it squarely at the wall, her aim high and true. A lone drape hook slipped off its aluminum rod allowing yellow sunlight to penetrate the haze of darkness. The messenger had delivered its mark in the wood plank next to a row of dents that traveled perfectly across the length of the wall like a wallpaper border.

  This was Truby’s wall of shame. Carved even more deeply into her heart, she bent over not only to repossess the ball that rolled back to her feet but from the heaviness of memories that had never heard of time.

  CHAPTER 4

  2023 :: Oslo, Norway — “Hemmy?” A dull seesaw wail of approaching sirens brought Thomas a little further out of the deep haze that gripped him like a vise. His head resounded with every beat of his heart. Along with the constant noise of the sirens, a loud, high-pitched ringing served to fill in the gaps the warm liquid missed in his bleeding ears.

  Fresh waves of fear washed over Thomas with each name he called, “Claire! Dev!”

  Light and shadow dappled his vision. Thomas’s racing pulse informed him he hadn’t been out long. Burning eyes wouldn’t focus to show him where he was, but hard concrete not so softly whispered he’d been thrown across the outdoor patio of the Oslo café where he and his young family had been having ice cream before hiring a car to take them to the airport.

  Thomas tried to move blinking his eyes furiously to make sense of the twisted outdoor seating and blitz of bodies that seemed to block his every move. Dark shapes were approaching. He had to find his family and get out before it was too late.

  Something moved nearby. An inscrutable shape lifted itself waving like a kite searching for wind, muffled sounds taking flight. A small voice pleaded delicately.

  “Hemmy!”

  A swarm of locusts descended. Thomas could barely make out that they were Int’l Terrorism Special Forces. That’s when the shouting began in a cornucopia of languages. Slowly he began to pick out words as he crawled toward something that moved. Every inch felt like a little death. Thomas uttered words of his own, but he wasn’t sure what they were.

  “Her borte! Gurney! American?”

  “Do not touch the bodies until we secure the perimeter! That’s an order!”

  “Daddy— Daddy's coming!”

  “Omkretsen er sikker!”

  Thomas inched closer, glass embedding itself into his thigh making him cry out. He’d walk on fire to find them, if only he could walk. A body, still warm, lay between him and shadowy movement. Man, or woman? He pushed at it. It wouldn’t budge like the mountain it had become. Thomas tried to go around, but more glass shards and metal shrapnel made crawling over a body more appealing.

  A forearm and elbow gingerly reached out to begin the crossing. Why couldn’t he go to his knees?

  He vomited as he lifted his torso over sturdy lifeless legs. As Thomas’s second forearm stretched out, his eyesight cleared enough momentarily that he noticed the ring on the right hand of his mountain. He knew that hand! She had insisted on wearing her wedding band on the same hand as her Australian mother.

  “Claire? Oh, my God, Claire!” Thomas willed every ounce of remaining strength into his upper body, lifting it higher though everything within screamed at him. He commanded his head to turn toward the face.

  “Please, God, no.” Thomas wiped at his watery eyes with his torn jacket sleeve then turned his defiant gaze upward.

  The clothing was so badly shredded, he would never have been able to identify it, much less remember what she had been wearing that day. A face covered in blood, but he knew the earrings. Thomas had given Claire two exquisite opal studs yesterday, one an apology for all the secrets between them, the other to mark a new start to their lives.

  “This isn’t like you,” she’d said with a worried twist of her mouth. “I should think these earrings to mean things were far more precarious than you let on, and not just between us.”

  Thomas opened his mouth to speak before closing it. He wouldn’t tell another lie. This time, he let his eyes convey what was in his heart. But would she accept them—and him?

  Claire was about to issue a condition when she decided to meet him halfway. “If it’s over now...”

  That’s when Thomas had pulled her into his arms and kissed her tenderly on her favorite spot behind her ear. She had melted into his arms.

  Thomas reached for her blood-slicked hand, collapsing over her body, lost in grief. Soul-wrenching anguish threatened to steal the remaining life out of him.

  Two soldiers in different colored uniforms but similar insignia quickly approached carrying a gurney, scraping someone off the pavement.

  “Daddy?”

  “She’s mine!” Thomas yelled. “Hemmy!” Thomas broke free of Claire using one hand to prop himself up enough to use his right hand to force a foot flat on the ground. “Stop!”

  Two more soldiers with assault rifles appeared, pointing them at Thomas. “Sir, stand down,” said the woman.

  “They’re taking my daughter! She’s just twelve!” Thomas tried to stand, but she pushed him down.

  The second soldier used her weapon to slip open Thomas’s charred jacket before moving in to pat him down.

  “Sir, it looks like you’re the only other witness. Your daughter’s in good hands. We’ll need your statement first.”

  Thomas grabbed the stunned terrorism special forces agent’s pant leg, catching her off guard. He climbed her like a flagpole, pulling himself to his quivering knees. “I don’t know anything!”

  Another agent angrily grabbed Thomas’s arm to twist it behind his back, causing the already suffering man to cry out in pain.

  “Hemmy! Hemmy!”

  Truby’s heart racing as it had then, she willed it to stop working. But that would mean getting off easy. Screaming Hemmy’s name every day for the last thirteen years. She had that coming.

  CHAPTER 5

  Pulling an abandoned undergarment thru a sleeve, Truby stood over the glowing computer work surface. A hologram asked if she was ready to log off. It was only 10:10 a.m., but she’d been up since before dawn completing another assignment she had initially refused, as if she could. They chose her when there were a million talented and willing naïve ladder-climbers that would step all over each other for a bit role in a project that would put their careers on the fast track.

  A screensaver of a smiling ginger-haired eight-year-old girl missing an incisor beamed back at her. Holding her breath, Truby hovered her finger near the screen. The six seconds of video the image offered could deliver her as much pain as it did pleasure. What would it give her today?

  She’d taken enough chances this morning, and the hardest part was yet to come. Truby was about to pull her finger back when she felt a slight tingling sensation at the tip. The untouched video played.

  The scrappy girl ran backward revealing a red and white baseball uniform, her oversized mitt up high for a catch.

  “Teamwork makes the dream work! Come on, Daddy, play with me!”

  There
was more wisdom contained within the old baseball slogan than most people would ever realize. Still, a happy smile lifted the scowl that had dominated Truby’s cheeks all morning despite her determination that today was going to be a good day. Over time, she had learned to find the good in at least one thing each day to keep from entirely losing faith in humanity—and herself. She shut the computer down.

  Out of the corner of her eye, the woman barely caught a dark shadow that soared past covered windows. She quickly grabbed a non-military issued computer tablet, her vintage video camera and an electrical battery charging cord. Unlike new construction, the Old Faithful Inn still ran on good old-fashioned electricity.

  Outside her room, the charger cord caught in the wooden frame, she unlatched the three heavy-duty door locks she had just bolted to set it free. A colorful mythical dragon delivery drone the size of a large squirrel, made Truby start when it ding-donged beside her. She took the small package it carried. The drone hovering at eye level just stared at her with glowing green eyes.

  “Go on, git!” Stolen words dredged from somewhere deep within her subconscious.

  She inched closer to the drone wondering if, or more likely who was looking back. She was half-tempted to smack it down and deliciously stomp it into a hundred little pieces. Something a capricious ten-year-old boy would do, she realized, but she still liked the idea. Instead, she decided on something else a budding 20th century delinquent would do. She made faces, switching to fish lips, then a monkey face before displaying a fistful of knuckles. Seeming to find her repugnant, the drone reared back before zooming past her and skyward toward lands she had yet to explore.

  “Next time, I’ll do it!” she yelled after the thing.

  Truby rushed down the walkway seeking the mystery object that had zoomed by her window. The crown-jewel of hotels at Yellowstone, the Old Faithful Inn was a tall, gabled log structure built in 1903-1904. Constructed of local lodgepole pine logs and rhyolite stone, it was still the largest log structure in the world. A steel-frame hidden in the logs had kept the Inn from destruction during the 1959 Hebgen Lake earthquake and the human-induced earthquake of 2019. Truby’s room was in the Old House.