by Jacob Gowans
“Your mom is proud of you. I hope you know that.”
Albert nodded silently and stood to leave. As he reached the door, Byron called out to him.
“I love you, Al.”
“I love you, too, Dad.”
2. Glasses
December 19, 2085
MIRTH RANG THROUGH THE CAFETERIA at Brickert’s joke. Sitting next to him, Jeffie giggled hardest, clutching her sides as if they hurt from all the laughing. Her golden blonde hair, tied into a ponytail, bounced on her back. The light in her bright green eyes lit up as her smile grew, stretching her face until the corners of her nose flared out.
I love it when her eyes do that.
In celebration of Al’s graduation from Psion Beta, food and decorations filled the cafeteria. Finally, after living six years at headquarters, he’d be moving on and joining an Alpha Squadron. Marie solemnly watched the party from a distance as Alphas spoke enthusiastically about Al’s future. Kobe and Kaden stacked their plates obscenely high with cake, pie, and pastries. They walked delicately, trying to balance the towers of food threatening to topple. Miguel and Martin chanted at them, cheering them on.
Across the room, platters of chicken, ham, roast beef, and turkey let off pillars of steam each time someone cut off a small slice of meat. Cooked vegetables, boiling gravies, and sparkling salads were nearby, waiting to adorn the entrées. Another table bore circular arrangements of fruits surrounding fountains of fondue.
Just give me a handful of that food. One plate. That’s all.
Kawai, Natalia, Brickert, and Jeffie chatted on about their sims and instructions, comparing who was further and giving each other tips. Brickert made another funny comment, and everyone laughed again. His eyes shone with delight, basking in the attention—especially the looks Kawai discreetly shot him when no one else could see.
Brickert’s sisters were right. It’s easy to tell when someone likes your friend, so much easier than telling if someone likes you.
As the laughter died down, Brickert, still smiling at himself, got up from the table with his empty bowl and crossed the room to the ice cream dispenser. As he reached for the handle, a small red ball formed on the lip of the nozzle and glistened in the light. The drop grew unnoticed until it was too heavy to cling to the plastic and splashed on the spill guard below.
That’s not right! Brickert shouldn’t get ice cream from there!
Sammy desperately tried to cross the cafeteria and stop his friend, but his legs were now made of mud and he could barely move. He yelled and screamed but, despite his protests, Brickert’s hand reached up and pulled down on the handle. Instead of ice cream, thick red blood gushed into his bowl spilling up the sides and over the edge. At first, Brickert didn’t notice. He was too busy looking back at his friends and laughing with them. But when he turned back and saw the blood covering his arm, dripping down onto his shoes, and pooling around his feet, he screamed. It was high pitched, toe-curling—a wail that echoed around the room.
Like the Aegis I blasted into that hot field . . .
Then everything in the room sped up to a hyper-fast pace. Every head jerked around to see what would cause someone to scream out like that. The lights in the room went dark. Sammy continued to run across the cafeteria, but he hadn’t sped up like the rest of the world. Panicked voices yelled out in the dark, but were silenced by animal-like shrieks that filled the cafeteria. Red eyes shone in the blackness, approaching from impossible directions: the ceiling, the floor, the walls. They grew brighter and more menacing as they drew closer.
Red eyes! I have to warn them!
“THIRTEENS!” Sammy shouted as he jerked awake.
Gasping for air, he sat up shakily. Drops of sweat matted the edges of his shaggy, curly brown hair and trickled down his face. “It was a nightmare. Get over it! Only a nightmare.” He put his hand on his chest and clutched the skin over his heart. “Just calm down . . .” Gradually, his breathing slowed.
“It was so real,” he told himself.
That described most of his dreams lately. He lay back down and stared up at the ceiling of the bunker. Then he closed his eyes.
In his head he could still hear perfectly the voice of the women over the intercom at Psion Beta headquarters saying, “Good morning, Psions. Good morning, Psions.” He muttered the same words several times using a falsetto voice in a well-practiced imitation.
“Get up. It’s a big day.”
His bed was made of torn cushions, laminated maps, and polyester stuffing. He never bothered making it. He wouldn’t know where to start.
The morning routine was always the same. He’d become so dependent on routines and schedules after nine months in headquarters that he lived one now to keep himself grounded. First, he splashed water on his face. Then he coaxed crusty toothpaste onto his finger from an old, worn tube and rubbed his teeth until he heard squeaking. When he finished, he pulled on the same torn, smoky-gray jumpsuit he’d worn for the last four weeks and started his exercises.
Four weeks.
Four weeks without any human contact. Four weeks stranded in the secret compound of a resistance group underneath a factory in Rio de Janeiro. Four busy weeks.
No.
Four frantic weeks. Four nerve-frying weeks. Four panicked weeks.
The first week he’d spent just figuring out a way to leave the bunker underneath the factory. When he finally managed it, he explored the factory and security records only to learn that Al’s Rio mission had gone wrong because a Psion—not just a Psion, a member of Psion Command—Commander Wrobel—had betrayed them and organized an ambush. The image of a Psion and a Thirteen working together was like a nail in his brain. He dreamed about Wrobel or Thirteens or both almost every night. During the day, he bent his willpower on one thing: finding a way to get back home and warn Commander Byron about the traitor.
The task was daunting. How could he travel halfway across the world to Capitol Island? How would he move safely through CAG-controlled territory? Travel and communication between CAG and NWG territories was highly regulated and closely monitored. He couldn’t just take a jaunt from Rio de Janeiro to New York City to London and tell everyone he was traveling for pleasure. Nor could he simply pick up someone’s com and call Byron. The CAG operatives would be on him in minutes. Besides, everyone back home probably thought he was dead.
He had no money, no identity, no contacts; nowhere to start and nowhere to go.
During the second week in the bunker, people had come and dragged away bodies. He’d heard the muffled sounds as their feet crunched the rubble above and muttered a few words here and there. That day was one of the most terrifying of his life. He’d shut off the generator and crawled into a corner where he huddled for hours trying not to go mad.
Since then, he’d either heard or imagined hearing random sounds: small things like distant shouts, always in very short, staccato-like bursts. They sounded eerily similar to the Thirteens’ bizarre form of communication. Occasionally rubble tumbled down through the ceiling hole. Those times were always followed by long, sleepless nights.
He knew that eventually people would come back to the factory. It was just a matter of when. Many nights he lay on his makeshift bed, wishing he had somewhere to go and thinking about all the things that might go wrong when he tried to leave.
The only thing he had to wear was the torn, gray flight suit that every Psion wore. What if someone was watching the facility and recognized his clothes? He’d have to swipe something immediately after he left, even if it came from a dumpster. And another thing: his voice. He didn’t have a local accent. He wasn’t sure how similar English here was to his South African vernacular. What if he gave himself away as a foreigner the first time he spoke?
He’d spent days scouring the few rooms in the bunker for anything useful. There were many broken gadgets on the shelves and scattered across the compound floors. Possessing a limited knowledge of mechanics gleaned from his instructions at Beta headquarters, he set
out to fix whatever he could, hoping something might be worthwhile. After many frustrating hours of tweaking and tinkering with unnamable devices in various states of disrepair, he managed to put a couple things back into working order.
The first was a flashlight. He even found a battery for it, and it lasted roughly five seconds before dying out. Another discovered device was a small black pair of thick glasses that Sammy originally thought was old-fashioned, pocket-sized binoculars. The strangely tinted glass lenses were not broken, but the frame had been damaged in several places. He messed around with some honey from the food stores and balls of cotton for hours before getting the frame to hold together long enough to look through.
He was so disappointed that the stupid gadget wasn’t binoculars that he almost chucked the glasses across the room. One thing stopped him. In the corner of the room, on one of the maps he’d been sleeping under, were blue and red markings he hadn’t noticed.
He walked across the room, pressing the gadget against his face, and looked again at the maps.
“I’m sure they weren’t there . . .” He looked at the map without the glasses. No markings. Again with the glasses. Markings.
Some letters and numbers had been scrawled across the page, but most of the markings were thin arrows radiating outward and inward to and from little blue houses drawn like a box with a triangle on top. At first glance, Sammy thought of missile strikes.
“What is this all about?” he asked himself, then immediately answered. “Some kind of special ink that only these lenses pick up.”
He looked a few more times with and without the lenses at different maps.
“Yeah . . . Must be.”
He’d thought the maps were peculiar from the start. They’d been hidden in a room full of bird cages (and a few dead birds), and he had dragged them out to help make his bed. After discovering the markings, he’d gone over all of them again with the special glasses. Once he sorted out the marked and unmarked ones, he examined just the marked maps.
Some were of North America, South America, or both. Others were of only one territory. They all had one thing in common: CAG territory. After staring at the writing and symbols for two days, he’d gone to sleep with maps on the brain. That night he dreamed about catching a chicken and eating it. In the dream, he’d done all the work himself; feeding, killing, plucking, dressing, and roasting. Just when the time came to eat, the chicken jumped off the platter and flew away. When Sammy woke up, he could see the answer.
“Carrier pigeons. The dead birds were carrier pigeons.”
He jumped out of bed, found the glasses, and went over the maps again.
“The blue houses represent the other resistance compounds.”
He traced his fingers all over the maps. “These lines were pigeon routes. All of them centering around . . . this one.” Sammy jabbed his finger into the map of Mid-American Territory. There, in blue ink, was a mysterious inscription that appeared to have been scrawled out in haste: Sedgwick C. Plainpal. And it was right over the city of Wichita.
“That has to be the main compound of the resistance. But what does ‘plainpal’ mean? And who is Sedgwick C?” He searched through his memory. Thanks to his Anomaly Eleven, his brain was like a powerful computer in many ways, but nothing he could think of matched such an odd description. “But if these people were fighting the CAG . . . maybe they’d help me.”
The new revelations from the maps had been enough to light a fire in Sammy. He spent more time poring over the maps, interpreting data, plotting possible destinations, and the safest routes to travel.
This new hope helped push away his fears of the unknown. His information was likely very outdated, but still useful. Most of the blue routes and stations radiated outward from that area. If there were any resistance left, wouldn’t it be there?
With no better alternatives, he resolved to make for Wichita. As for Sedgwick C. and “plainpal,” he hoped to find out the meaning of that either when he got there, or sometime along the way. To prepare for his departure he made himself a serviceable traveling bag out of a cushion cover and some wire, then stocked it with food, water, and some maps.
When he’d given the Psions a month to come back and look for him, he knew it was time. Staying any longer might cost him his sanity. He’d debated for days whether he should leave a message in case Alphas came looking for him. In the end, he decided against it. The CAG was more likely to come snooping around. If Alphas hadn’t come by now, they weren’t coming.
The horrible dream with Brickert and the bloody ice cream stayed with him all morning as he got everything ready to go. His preparations took about an hour. Then he set about making the chamber look as if it had never been touched. Any evidence of his stay was removed; he wiped down every surface he could think of. When he finished that, he slung his pack over his shoulder with a satisfied sigh. He paused with his thumb on the generator kill switch, watching the machine chug away. The exhaust pipe made a faint rattling sound where it passed through the wall, though he’d grown so used to it, he rarely notice the noise.
“Lucky me this place was here,” he told himself. Brickert would have agreed, but Al would have said it was something more than luck.
So many emotions gripped him, but he swallowed hard and pushed the button. He went to wipe it with his sleeve, but decided to leave it.
Who knows, he said to himself. Without another glance, he traced the familiar path to the hidden door, and left the bunker.
He emerged in the noon-day sun from the trapdoor in the middle of the lawn of a large chemical engineering plant. Before anyone could notice something out of the ordinary, he hopped out and erased all traces of the door by smoothing out the grass. He intended to walk to the air rail hub in downtown Rio de Janeiro. According to the maps, the landmark closest to the hub was Estádio de Maracanã. Once he found that, he would easily find the air rail station.
Heading westward, Sammy hoped daylight traveling would be safer because he could appear less conspicuous in crowds. With a seven or eight kilometer walk to make, he tried to keep a good pace. He stayed on the lookout for clothes: shirts, shoes, a pair of pants—anything to get out of the clothes that told a Thirteen or Aegis what he was.
For the first hour or more, he passed mostly industrial buildings, shops, and truck yards. On multiple occasions, trucks flew by him on the road, paying him little mind. He spotted several dumpsters, but nothing inside he could use. When the landscape changed into homes, Sammy grew nervous again. When he was unable to take it anymore, he scampered down a bank, landed in a creek running alongside the road, and smeared mud over the holes and blood stains in his jumpsuit.
About halfway to his destination he found a tattered rag of a shirt strung out over a bush. It had two long tears down the back, several frayed edges, and yellow food stains, but smelled fit to wear. It covered the top half of his jumpsuit, which let him breathe easier.
It was a hot day and stiff breezes whipped regularly through the street. On the back of these winds, he caught a whiff of something that stunk like the bottom of a garbage can. He turned into an area where the sidewalks were busy with pedestrians and mangy, stray dogs. It took considerable restraint on his part to not rush over and speak to someone. He hadn’t had human contact in a month. Most of the kids played football in the streets, dispersing only when a car rumbled through the game. Then they’d converge back into the road as though nothing had happened. Dogs chased and nipped at each other. Flies or fleas swarmed most of them. One dog took quite a liking to Sammy, sniffing and barking happily at the food in his pack. Sammy ignored it for two blocks, and the dog left him alone.
Rows of townhomes lined each side of the street with dusty windows and crumbling eves, each missing several bricks from the siding. They had all been turned into shops or churches. A police car roared down the cobblestone street with sirens blaring. Kids scattered like roaches and heads popped out of windows to investigate. Sammy hadn’t seen or heard a siren since he’d run f
rom the Shocks back in Johannesburg almost a year ago. Instinctively, he ducked into a small shop selling heat-blown glass. He peeked out the window, ignoring the sales clerk’s attempts to coerce him into buying a glass flower. It took about five full minutes before he felt safe to continue traveling.
Not long after leaving the shop, he came to it:
Estádio de Maracanã. The largest football stadium in the world.
Sammy had heard about it, of course. Anyone who knew football had heard of Maracanã. Still, the sight of it mesmerized him. It stood like a bright white temple calling out to its people. This stadium held over a quarter of a million spectators. Four towering statues of stone honored the Great Ones: O Fen��meno, Copa, Pélé, and O Rei. The grounds around the stadium bustled with activity.
The air rail hub was a block away. The surrounding streets were busy, too. According to flyers pasted on every flat surface he could see, two local football clubs were inside battling for a regional title. From inside the stadium’s bowels, a soft buzz of noise echoed out of the semi-open dome. As he passed by the magnificent structure, the buzzing grew louder until it turned into a dim roar of cheers, horns, whistles, and shouts. It built in crescendo until one tumultuous eruption of sound like thunder filled Sammy’s ears, startling him. Half of the stadium bellowed out its approval while the other half whistled in anger.
As he drew closer to the hub, he heard a voice over the intercom announcing the arrivals and departures. He passed a large pink sign with a suspicious looking man in a black hat and coat. Underneath the image, in bold letters, he read: KEEP THE PEACE! CALL IT IN! After over three hours of walking, he finally reached the hub. The main building was a long, low oddly-designed structure with strange angles to the roof and windows. Next to it stood a large parking garage of similar architecture. Buses and taxis lined the roads coming and going. Sammy passed them all, picking up his pace in anticipation.