by Rysa Walker
He looks at me and huffs out an annoyed breath. “But he’ll recognize you. Damn, I didn’t think about that.”
I start to ask why Saul would recognize me, but then I realize that’s a stupid question. The same reason the woman at Norumbega recognized me. The same reason half a dozen other people have recognized me. My face is plastered all over their religion.
“Did you have trouble getting in?” I ask.
“Not really. They’re more AR than usual because of last night’s breach, but the blue chip meant they waved me in without much scroot.”
“Great.” I smile, even though there are a few words in the mix I’d like to google or whatever they call it these days.
Tate leads me down a corridor similar to the one we were in last night. There’s another door at the end with a large red X, but we turn left before we reach it, onto a curved walkway surrounding a large atrium with trees, ponds, and seating areas scattered about. It’s very lush and tropical, but as I look closer, I think it’s the same sort of artificial environment as the recreation area. There are three or four dozen people in small clusters. A few seem to be playing a game, and others are watching something I can’t see. There’s a loud cheer, and the sole woman near the back reaches up to give the guy beside her a high-five.
“Stop gawking.” He takes hold of my elbow, steering me away. “We need to get to Campbell’s quarters quickly and avoid drawing attention.”
He waves his hand in front of something that looks like the Juvapods. The logo on the door is similar, except it reads Transpod Ultra.
The door swoops shut once we’re inside, and the Alisa voice greets us. “Tate Poulsen. On special request from account Cyrus01. Again.” Her voice is snide, almost angry. “I guess you expect me to take you to his wing?”
“Yes,” Tate replies in a weary voice. “And I don’t want any commentary from you about it this time.”
“Noted,” Alisa says. “But you’re disgusting, and I have every right to comment.”
“You know her?” I ask Tate.
Before Tate can answer, Alisa says, “Hello again, Prudence K. Rand. Will you be joining your family in Redwing Hall?”
Now it’s Tate’s turn to shoot me an incredulous look, and I hold up a hand to tell him to save it until we’re out of earshot of this Alisa thing . . . person . . . whatever. Although I’m starting to wonder now whether we’re ever out of her earshot. Is she present throughout the club, or only in these pod devices?
“No, Alisa. I’ll be joining Mr. Poulsen.”
“I’m sorry, Prudence.” She doesn’t sound sorry at all. “That would be a violation of OC policy. Unescorted females may not be transported to the quarters of male members outside their family. Once I deliver Tate Poulsen to level ten, I’ll take you to the dining hall, the main clubroom, the Rand family rooms, or back to the recreation area.”
“She remains with me,” Tate says. “At the request of Morgen Campbell.”
A short pause. “My log shows no such request.”
“It will, in about two minutes,” Tate says in a low tone, but Alisa keeps talking over him.
“But even so, it would still violate OC policy. Prudence K. Rand is an affiliate member, and as a guest on her family’s account, she shouldn’t even be sharing a Transpod with a companion, let alone accomp—”
“Silence!” Tate’s command is very close to a roar. Alisa stops talking, but she gives us a very audible how-dare-you sniff, and I can almost feel her listening, so I keep quiet.
Tate leans down and says, “Request that your record for today’s session be kept private.”
“Okay.” I repeat the request in a louder voice.
“Request noted.”
Hmph. Noted. I glance over at Tate and can see he doesn’t find that any more reassuring than I do.
A few seconds later, the pod door slides upward, and we both step out onto a translucent platform. I make the mistake of glancing down and instantly regret it. Each floor below us is visible beneath my feet, and for once, I’m glad Tate’s hand is on my arm.
“Close!” The pod door slides down after Tate speaks, and the entire unit drops back into the tube, which seals behind it.
“Can she still hear us?” I ask.
“No. Only in the pods.”
“You’re sure?”
“Of course I’m sure. People live here, Pru.” He looks a little disgusted, as though I’ve asked why someone would use a toilet instead of just peeing in the hallways.
We turn right, and as we walk along the curved corridor, I keep my eyes trained on the walls and on the single strip of carpet that runs along the middle of the floor. Each time they stray toward those clear edges and I see the floors beneath my feet, I feel a little dizzy. Heights don’t usually bother me much, but you can see the level below us, and the level below that, each one a little less clearly than the layer above. It reminds me of this M. C. Escher poster that Dad’s girlfriend, Sara, has in her apartment.
“Why did the Alisa recognize you in the first place?”
“I sneezed. It activated the pod, and the DNA linked me to the Rand account. What does Alisa stand for?”
“No clue. Everyone in the club calls it the Alisa, so maybe it’s an acronym, but I think it’s just a name. Alisa was the name of Campbell’s daughter. I only met her once, but from what he’s told me, that’s her voice you’re hearing. Her personality, too, to some extent.”
“How—” I stop myself before I can launch into the barrage of questions his statement just raised.
You’re supposed to be Pru, remember? Maybe downloading someone’s consciousness into a computer system is the norm in 2308, whether it’s in this timeline or some other.
But there’s also another issue . . .
“Wait.”
Tate stops and turns back to look at me.
“How can that be? If Campbell doesn’t exist, then his daughter never existed, so how does she end up as . . .” I nearly say the twenty-fourth-century version of Siri, but he wouldn’t get it and Pru probably wouldn’t either. “How does Alisa’s voice end up in the system if she never existed?”
“Campbell wondered that, too. At first he thought it was really her. That she was here somewhere, protected by a key. Said he rode up and down the lift talking to her, asking questions. But he’s convinced it’s an AI of some sort, with her voice and speech mannerisms grafted on top.”
“But again, if she never existed . . .”
“Saul knew Alisa. I think he knew her really well. He was a major horndog between the time he broke up with Esther and moved in with Katherine. After, too, when he could get away with it. Campbell figures he took a recording of her voice back with him. Having his people put Alisa’s voice in the system when they built this club is just another of Saul’s little gotchas, another way to remind Campbell he won. Didn’t you hear her in the Transpod? The account that provides Campbell’s room and board is in the dog’s name. Almost every time we were at the club, Saul would pat old Cyrus on the head as he left and snark about him being smarter than his master. Now Campbell is symbolically dependent on his pet. It doesn’t seem to bother him, but it’s another echo of Saul saying he won.”
“Not only won, but erased someone Campbell loved in the process.”
“Eh . . . I guess. They didn’t like each other, but she was still his kid, so . . .”
I can’t help but think of Connor’s kids, two more people who were erased by Saul, even though they weren’t purposefully targeted. We’re now so far from the timeline where they existed that I don’t think Connor holds out much hope for getting them back. After several years, Connor seems to be at the point where it doesn’t eat at him constantly, aside from fueling his determination to stop Saul, but it’s still a source of pain. And could he have reached even that level of healing if every time he turned on his computer he was confronted with the virtual ghost of Andi or Chris?
“Come on,” Tate says, tugging my arm. “We need to get movin
g. I just hope Campbell’s coherent enough for us to get any info he has and get out. You being tagged as a Rand is . . . a complication. They’re supposed to believe you’re a companion brought in at Campbell’s request. Instead, the minute one of the Rands steps into a pod, they’ll get the whole story from the Alisa.”
We cross an intersecting corridor and enter a wide hallway. There’s a door at the far end and another one about halfway down. The walls are a cool white, but every few yards, they’re separated by a bright blue strip of light. The effect is similar to the tubes along the walls in Katherine’s library, so I’m pretty sure it’s from a CHRONOS key.
I pull Tate to a stop just to the left of one of the lights. “There’s a key nearby. The lights are blu—”
My heart stops. Pru sees the key as green. I fake a cough to give myself a second to think how to rephrase. “The lights are blurry, but they’re the same shade of green.”
“These?” Tate looks at the light strips.
“Yes. We should check that smaller door. I can’t tell for certain, but it looks like there’s a pinpoint of light coming through, there at the bottom corner.”
He crouches down to look at the door and then back up at me. His expression is . . . envious? “See? That’s what I mean. The lights look pale yellow to me, just like half the lights you see in this building. Or most other buildings. Whoever set my parameters—”
Tate stands suddenly and grabs my chin, turning the right side of my face toward him. His fingers trace the scar along my jawline. “What’s this?”
I applied a pretty thick coat of makeup, but given that it’s been at least eight hours, and that part of the time was spent sweating like a pig in the stupid Juvapod, I’m guessing it’s rubbed away.
“It’s nothing really. An accident a while back.”
The look on his face tells me he’s not buying it. I tense up, ready to run or fight, certain my cover is blown. Unfortunately, I doubt that either fight or flight will be successful against this guy.
“That son of a bitch!” His fist connects with the light strip, which apparently isn’t made of the squishy stuff, because it doesn’t bend around his knuckles. It doesn’t crack, either, and Tate gives his hand an annoyed shake as he pulls it back. “I told you that if he hurt you again, you should kill him, Pru. I should never have listened to Campbell. If you’d stayed here, Saul couldn’t have touched you. He’d have been stuck there in the Dark Ages, stranded.”
I have a hard time imagining 2024 as the Dark Ages, but he’s genuinely angry, and again I see the resemblance to Simon—slight, but definitely there. Tate reaches out and crushes me to his chest, holding me a bit too tight for comfort.
“Let’s just go,” he says finally. “We’ll find out what we can from Campbell and grab whatever is inside that room on our way out. I want to get this done and then get the hell out.”
When we reach the end of the hallway, Tate presses his hand to the wall, and the larger door slides upward. No one is on the other side, but I hear a few feeble barks from somewhere within the apartment.
“Campbell?” Tate says as we step inside. It’s a large room, with a single window that wraps around three sides. There are no curtains—no roof, for that matter—and I get the sense that what I’m seeing above me is the real sky and not the facsimile in the recreation area below.
The view from the windows is depressing, overlooking the ruined buildings we ran past last night. Off in the distance, I see a few familiar landmarks. The Washington Monument is still there, and closer in, the White House. Contrary to Kiernan’s statement about DC in the previous timeline, most of the area around us appears to be dry land, although there are more pockets of water than I remember seeing when Trey and I took in the view from the rooftop of the hotel.
I’m still not sure precisely where this club is located, but the landmarks help orient me a bit. I think we’re somewhere between Metro Center and McPherson Square. Of course, those stops—the entire Metro—didn’t exist in Katherine’s future. I don’t know if they exist here or not, but it confirms my earlier suspicions that the building is near to where CHRONOS headquarters would have been, based both on Katherine’s memory and the information in Delia and Abel’s Future-Wiki.
As for the apartment itself, it brings to mind the room I viewed in the key when I saw Campbell and the winged girl. The dark paneling on the inner wall to my left and the heavy antique (or at least antique-looking) furniture and carpet seem strangely out of place next to the panoramic, if not particularly pleasant, view on my right.
One segment of the paneling slides up, and the fat Doberman trundles toward us. I tense up instantly when he sniffs me and even more when he gives me a halfhearted snarl. The few teeth he reveals, however, are so worn down I don’t think they could do much damage even if he had the energy to bite. He moves on to sniffing Tate.
“Get on, you ugly beast.” The words are harsh, but Tate’s tone isn’t malicious. The dog’s stub of a tail wags a feeble greeting before he waddles over to a padded mat on the floor and flops down.
Still no sign of Campbell. Tate calls out to him again. No response.
He curses and says a bit louder, “Campbell! Get out here. We need to talk, and we don’t have much time.”
A long, drawn-out noise somewhere between a snore and a groan comes from the other room. Something about it pisses Tate off, because he curses again and storms across to the doorway and out of sight.
“You want to fix this?” His voice is so loud, even from the other room, that it startles me. “We’ve got another chance, if you get off your sloppy ass and help. Or are you gonna lie here basted and let Saul gox you again?”
There’s an answer, but I can’t make it out. Tate fires something back at him. While most curse words seem to have survived the centuries intact, the insults he’s injecting between them have apparently evolved.
Tate sticks his head around the corner of the door. “Need a little help.”
I enter reluctantly, unsure what might meet my eyes. A platform-type bed like I saw at the old couple’s place takes up the center of the room. There’s a white door similar to a Juvapod set into one wall.
Everything seems very dim after the brightness of the adjoining room. Campbell’s sprawled belly up across the bed. His robe gapes open to reveal what looks like a pair of Speedos. He keeps grabbing at a clear tube that runs from an outlet in the wall into his upper arm.
“Wait a minute,” Tate says, slapping his hand away. “I’ll give you a jolt before you disconnect. Pru, could you get a cloth from the lav?”
I look around, confused.
“Over there?” he says, nodding toward the door, his voice clearly indicating that I should know where the lav is.
I wave my hand in front of a sensor near the door, and it glides open. It’s actually fairly similar to bathrooms I’m used to, except there’s another podlike inner door. A stack of cloths is on a shelf near the back. I grab one and dampen it at the sink. It doesn’t feel much like a towel, but hopefully it will do.
Whatever the “jolt” was that Tate gave Campbell seems be working. I hand him the damp cloth and go back into the main room. The two of them follow a few minutes later. Campbell is still in his robe, but he’s pulled on a pair of shorts under it. His legs look too thin for his body, almost like popsicle sticks, and he apparently hasn’t bothered ordering the hair restoration service from the Juvapod menu because his hairline has receded so far that it’s not even visible from the front. What hair he does have hangs in dark, greasy strands around his ears. He’s holding a glass of something green—almost the same shade as my anticavity rinse. His other hand is angled over his brow, shielding his eyes from the sun. He plops onto one of the sofas near Cyrus, who is curled up on his mat, snoring.
“Dim light thirty percent.”
The ceiling dims, but the windows seem pretty much the same to me. Apparently to Campbell, too. He scowls out at the sunlit day, giving it what Charlayne calls the “stink ey
e.”
After about thirty seconds, he turns that same look on me. “Come to view your handiwork so you can report back to Papa, you backstabbin’ little bitch?” Campbell’s voice is slurred and tired, an odd contrast to the venom in his words. He sips the green stuff and waits for me to respond.
“No. I’ve come to try and fix—”
“Oh, yeah. Fix it. Isn’t that what she told us when we helped her get the keys, Poulsen? ‘I can fix it, I can get CHRONOS back up and running, I can get your club back, I can make everything better again.’ All lies . . . well, I guess the club is back, but it sure as hell’s not mine. Even this room’s not mine. Belongs to the dog.”
There’s a laugh at the end, short and bitter.
“Shoulda never helped you get back,” he says, looking out at the remnants of DC. “Then you’da been the one stuck outta your time. You’da been the fish on dry land, the anom’ly, instead of me. Or better yet, Tate shoulda left you in that wreckage.”
“Shut up, Morgen. We weren’t doing her any favors when we helped her go back. You knew it. I knew it.” Tate turns and gives me a sad smile before looking back at Campbell. “I apologized for that when she came back. Once we knew Saul was as much a part as Katherine—”
“No.”
They both look at me like I’ve grown another head. Maybe this is a mistake, but I’m tired of Katherine’s name being dragged through the mud. Every time Tate talks about her, I keep imagining her face on some twenty-fourth-century holographic wanted poster. And I think I’m better off if both of them understand that Saul was the one responsible for destroying CHRONOS. For destroying the entire world they knew.
“It was Saul, not Katherine. Saul set her up. The evidence was planted. She only recently found out what he was up to and—”
Tate looks a little stunned. “You’re certain? The investigation was pretty thorough.”
Campbell laughs. “Thorough and conclusive. There was a confession.” He leans his head back against the chair and peers out at me through lids that are barely open, but I still get the sense that he’s watching me closely. “Katherine’s prints and DNA on the case that held the device. On the tape around Angelo’s head.”