Away Saga

by Norman Oro

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  Ide worked the rest of the day into the early evening hours researching the disappearances and summarizing his preliminary findings in a report to the League Governing Council. Though it had been a long day, the sun was still out when he got home. Seeking a respite from trying to avert what he feared was an impending crisis, he spent the sun’s waning hours sailing the Alster with Tawny.

  Shortly after arriving in his office the next day, he called forth his chart from the day before and compared his forecast with the latest numbers. His model was accurate to within five percent. Staring into the graph, he heard his phone buzz. It was Aiden. Chip Gannon wouldn’t join him in requesting a grostish. Though he thought Ide’s proposal was compelling, it was an election year and he couldn’t risk calling for one then failing. However, not all was lost. They spoke with Julia Byrn, the interior minister, and she agreed to activate location tracking for her entire department. That came out to fifty million people worldwide.

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  Ide was at his terminal just before sunrise the following day. To safeguard people’s privacy and account for system glitches, he’d requested that only location changes greater than one hundred miles be reported. Concerned at first that his criterion was too restrictive, he logged in to find that there’d actually been thirty such incidents detected. After porting the coordinates to search and rescue units, he summoned a three-dimensional map of Halcyon. All around the globe floated thirty little green shields marking initial transponder coordinates. An equal number of orange placeholders identified subsequent locations. One pair of shields were on opposite sides of the globe, separated by a distance of over eleven thousand miles.

  Baffled by what he was seeing, he called Aiden to get his perspective. Before heading the science department, he’d been one of Ohnz’s greatest physicists. After looking at Ide’s map and reviewing the data, however, he stood there just as perplexed himself. Replaying the night’s telemetry only made the chances of quickly finding a plausible explanation seem even more remote. There’d been no gradual movement to speak of. The transponders seemed to have instantly changed location.

  Like many people around his age, Ide knew there was a possible answer. Centuries ago, the department, along with universities and private industry, had investigated teleportation. The project was called Ecres and its research team was arguably the finest ever assembled. Ide had followed their efforts religiously as a boy. However, after over a century of effort, the team’s consensus was that it wasn’t possible, and their work unceremoniously ended. What else could explain the telemetry, though?

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  For centuries, the science department and the interior ministry had made public sensor telemetry, which clearly showed alien craft visiting the Cley solar system. The visits, however, were always fleeting and harmless. If they were preparing to invade Halcyon, why return the citizens unharmed? Aside from some disorientation and occasional dehydration, no one had been hurt.

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  The next evening, Ide felt a humming in his chest. It was the Kahl, a vestigial organ just next to the Cley heart, which scientists ages ago learned gently vibrated when exposed to sound at exactly 45.6 KHz. In ancient times, it was used to warn people of emergencies and notify them of town meetings. In the modern era, it was used exclusively to summon all of Halcyon to a grostish, a worldwide virtual gathering to decide a particular issue. Everyone weighed the matter before them via a connection device, usually a phone or a numerical resource terminal, then voted. If over fifty percent of those considering a measure approved it, it passed. Though it was too soon to tell exactly how many would actually consider Ide’s proposal, it had already met the council’s one million person minimum. After seeing that he had only six days to prepare, Ide confided to his team that the thought of presenting to so many people gave him pause; however, Aiden, having presided over many a grostish in his long career, assured him that he’d do fine.

  As the days passed, the number of cases continued growing precipitously, and soon victims reported hearing disembodied voices during the incidents and after. A few days later, objects started disappearing, as well. By the end of the week, a new word was cropping up all over Halcyon. People began referring to the cases as displacements. Despite the mounting sense of alarm, the media did what it could to accentuate the incidents’ lighter side. Quite a few news reports were about startled couples waking up to find themselves in bed with an equally startled displaced stranger, often a neighbor and at least in one instance, a well-known lingerie model. One segment dealt with the age-old rivalry between Canton Estresha and Ohnz. It had been rekindled when the Estreshans awoke to find the statue of their beloved patriarch, Zahnkt Pehtr, displaced and standing thousands of miles away in Ohnz’s central square. Ide joined the ebullient crowd gathered around it himself once he heard the news. A rival’s public monuments had, since ancient times, been considered the most coveted of trophies. Of course, the Estreshans weren’t so pleased and after a hastily arranged air-lift, the statue was standing once again in their central plaza the following day. Angry recriminations of Ohnzer mischief went unvoiced, though, as telemetry from the security detectors placed around the statue was released. For those like Ide who grew up following Project Ecres, the clip was unlike anything they expected. Without any fanfare, light or sound, the towering statue of Estresha’s greatest hero simply vanished before their eyes.

  Despite the media’s efforts, it was hard to deny there was a darker side to what was happening. Paranoia over who or what was driving the displacements continued to intensify, breathing new life into old prejudices long thought conquered. With reports of theft and missing persons sky-rocketing and local police overwhelmed, a mob had formed to take matters into its own hands in the city-state of Foling. They eventually targeted the Maro, a minority group stigmatized ages ago as thieves and ne’er do wells. For almost two days, no one with bronze-colored eyes, a rare trait common among the Maro people, felt comfortable walking certain quarters of the city. The League dispatched a federal militia and called for town me
etings, which quickly defused tensions. Although no one had been hurt and the deeply ingrained Cley social pillars of fairness, good humor and tolerance had held, the potential for violence was escalating.

  When the time came for Ide’s grostish, he saw that over two billion Cley had agreed to weigh his proposal. He chose to deliver his presentation from the science department’s primary conference room. With its heavily weathered granite walls and stained glass windows, it looked every bit the seat of royal power that it once was. Conducting the meeting in his native Ohnzdeytch, the grostish went as smoothly as he’d hoped with his proposal for emergency location tracking approved the next day. Over the following month, the whereabouts of almost every person on Halcyon would be made public. In a world where individual rights and privacy were so heavily protected, such a measure passing just a few weeks earlier would’ve been unthinkable. Events, though, had made it necessary. Along with expediting rescue efforts and possibly explaining the displacements, the telemetry would also blunt accusations of theft and abduction, which were fueling the waves of paranoia threatening Halcyon’s city-states and cantons.

  In addition to Ide’s measure, the interior ministry soon raised the planetary alert level to high readiness. For the first time in over a half dozen millennia of peace, Halcyon prepared itself for war. To fend off a possible outworlder invasion, League fighter craft and battle zeppelins patrolled the air continuously, its land-based flux cannons were all charged then pointed skyward, and its two hundred million person global militia was summoned then deployed to combat fortifications all around the planet.

  As the number of incidents continued its steep ascent and the sense of crisis deepened, the somewhat unexpected happened: Nothing. Despite the havoc which the increasingly widespread displacements wrought, violence didn’t escalate and there was no invasion. People simply went about their lives as best they could; and after weathering a harrowing few days that saw over three hundred million people go missing each night, the number of incidents started to finally decline. Within a couple of weeks, missing persons reports were approaching pre-crisis levels. It was then when reports of a very different nature started filtering in. People were claiming they could displace themselves at will.

  Clips began surfacing in Ide’s numerical resource account of Cley in Ohnz’s Serenity Park displacing themselves from one end of Lake Freedom to the other, a distance of just over seven miles. He soon received a call from Officer Stern, his counterpart at the interior ministry, requesting Ide’s help in investigating the claims. Within an hour, they were at the door of Yoost Van der Weg, a young man who’d made one of the clips. When they asked for a demonstration, he broke out into a wide grin then led them out across the street to the park.

  Once they got there, Ide pulled out his phone and opened its physics application, which obediently began displaying Yoost’s vital signs, as well as energy readings within the vicinity.

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  In an instant, he was gone and standing by the lake’s shore where Ide had pointed to just moments earlier. Despite the lack of any visible or audible energetic events, his phone had definitely picked up something.

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  Yoost then vanished. A moment later, he blinked back into sight.

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  Once he returned to the office, Ide logged his phone into the department’s wideband network and began looking at the readings from the park at his terminal. Each of Yoost’s displacements generated an unmistakable spike of energy. In fact, even before and afterwards, that same energy was there, albeit at a considerably attenuated level. Exactly what kind of energy it was, though, he couldn’t say. Running its parameters through the science repository, he confirmed it was unlike anything the department had encountered in the millennia since its founding. Out of curiosity, he scanned himself and found he generated it, as well, though at an order of magnitude below the field surrounding Yoost.

  After speaking with Aiden Hower, he got access to the interior ministry’s planetary sensor grid. He uploaded the field’s parameters into it then ported the resulting telemetry to his holographic projection of Halcyon. Within seconds, Ide saw billions of points giving off the same level of energy he did with the greatest concentrations in the cities. Apparently every Cley generated the field. Zooming into Ohnz, he noticed that some points shone much brighter than others, and that their energy levels exactly matched Yoost Van der Weg’s. He eventually identified one hundred forty-four Cley like Yoost spread all over the globe. Within a few weeks, they totaled over nine hundred million.

  By then, Ide’s three-dimensional map of Halcyon had become noticeably brighter and pulsed with Cley displacing themselves at will. Visiting those citizens invariably turned up people of all ages from all walks of life who were just like Yoost. They were cheerful, at ease and more than eager to demonstrate their newfound gift. Ide couldn’t shake the feeling that the world was changing before his very eyes. Within the span of just over a month, his anxiety over his people’s very survival had been replaced by a sense of wonder about their future.

  The next day, he and his wife discovered they could both displace themselves, as well. They tried it after watching some news clips and their first successful attempt was made together, just across their bedroom. It was unlike anything Ide had ever felt. Every worry he’d ever had, every concern, every sorrow was forgotten in those first moments. Never truly having outgrown their more adventurous years, by the end of the day, they found themselves rematerializing with their hands clasped together, thousands of feet above Ohnz. They spent a few heartbeats there peering down through the clouds to catch a glimpse of the city lights brightening the Halcyon night. After they displaced themselves back into their bedroom, they’d never felt so free.

  During each displacement, Ide heard disembodied voices like the ones he’d investigated. When he quieted his mind and focused, he could hear Aiden Hower, their neighbors, and his parents. In a literal sense, though, they weren’t really voices. Instead of words and sound, Ide felt meanings, fully formed. If anything, their voices at least partially came from him as his mind gave co
nscious expression to the sensations it had just received. Of course, one voice rang clearer than the rest: his wife, Tawny’s. They spent the final day of the weekend trying to see if they could go through it without talking. It wasn’t quite a substitute for speech, but it was very good. For certain things, in fact, like conveying sensory impressions, it was superior. Almost unerringly they spent the day together, seeing a film, going for a stroll along the lake and having dinner at their favorite restaurant, all without uttering a word to one another.

  A few days after Ide’s emergency measure had ended, involuntary displacements ceased. Looking at the holograph floating in his office, he saw all of Halcyon’s cities now suffused with light. The wave of euphoria sweeping all over his world as people came into full possession of their new abilities soon had a name. They called it the Awakening.