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Gestalt Prime

Page 26

by Ignacio Salome

“Yeah,” she said. “I could do power grid maintenance. I mean you do it, how hard can it be?”

  “Hey!” he said, smiling. “And you can have Aurora figure it out if it’s too hard for you.”

  She gasped and hit his shoulder playfully.

  “Yes, I can’t wait,” Aurora said as her actor was rendered sitting in the chair on the other side of the table.

  “She’s back, you better put on the auglens,” Alexia said then took another spoonful of soy meal.

  “Got it,” Joel said, grabbing the diagnostic tool to put it on. “Welcome back,” he nodded at her.

  “We have about twenty minutes. Wrap it up, we need to keep moving,” Aurora said.

  “I’m done,” Alexia said then stood up and picked up the empty meal packet.

  “Yeah me too,” Joel said. Alexia grabbed his and dumped them in a trash can by the sink. “Let’s see how things look out there,” he added then walked to the door and peeked out the window. “There’s a few people out there. I think we should get going, we don’t want anyone to find us here.”

  “I agree, get moving,” Aurora said.

  Alexia nodded and Joel grabbed her hand to lead her out. “It’s a nice gesture but it might look suspicious,” she said motioning at his hand.

  “Oh yeah, sorry,” he excused himself, smiling.

  The two of them walked out of the aeroponic farm onto the sidewalk outside. It was that early morning moment when the cold of the night before still lingered but it was clear enough to walk around safely. Sunlight passed gently through the energy barrier and Alexia thought it was a shame most people in the Citadel were going to spend their entire lives under it without ever seeing the true colors of the world outside under unfiltered sunshine.

  “It’s going to be a long walk,” Joel observed.

  “Yeah, we better hurry,” Alexia said. “Now you take off your glasses, they stand out worse than mine.”

  “Oh yeah,” he said and removed the auglens to place them in a similar pocket as the one Alexia had found as he took a few steps onto the street then looked both ways.

  Alexia stood there, the cold of the morning and the view of the greenhouses pulling her back to reality. She looked at him, the engineer that had come out of nowhere, at first hostile towards her and now making promises he couldn’t fulfill. When he appeared content it was safe out there, he turned and signaled for her to join him and so she did, playing along with his fantasy that everything was going to be alright.

  Joel

  WHEN HE TURNED to wave Alexia to join him, Joel noticed she had been standing there, a certain silent fear showing in her face but she immediately changed it to a reassured smile and walked to him. The two of them continued down the street, leaving behind the greenhouse with the central bastion in the distance guiding them with its amazing display of power, shooting up an energy column into the sky to form the barrier. A barrier that was powered by whatever exotic energy existed at the center of the galaxy. But the fact of the matter was the only reason he was walking down a surface street and had gotten a chance to ever see those sights in his life had been thanks to the collapsed citadel. No even that, but it had also been thanks to that disaster that he had gotten to meet Alexia in person.

  Only a day had passed since they met and now he couldn’t help but feel embarrassed for dismissing her as just another arrogant surfacer, after all she had gone through in her childhood at the hands of her own stepfather. An ordeal she still had to live with and may need to carry for the rest of her life. He looked at her and she faced him with a quiet smile which he returned, hoping he could fulfill his promise.

  “What?” Alexia asked him with that smile that urged him to hold her in his arms. But it probably wasn’t a good idea and so he decided against it.

  “No, nothing,” he replied. “I mean why are you so quiet. Are you girls talking about me or something?”

  “Oh,” she replied and looked away, embarrassed. “No, why would we?”

  “Okay,” he said, knowing it was obvious they were. As they continued, here and there they saw farmers on the streets going about their days. At least for the time being, they were safe from being out there, hiding in plain sight.

  Looking to change the subject, he said “by the way, before I came back to meet you, I stumbled upon some pretty interesting information that had been locked away in a reactor control terminal.”

  “Really?” she asked, more relaxed, perhaps relieved he didn’t inquire further. “What was it?”

  “Well, apparently a group called the Hermes Initiative knew about the sync incident at least ten years before it happened.”

  “I see,” she commented then said “could you put on your auglens? Aurora would like to speak about it.”

  “Sure,” he replied then pulled the diagnostics device out of his pocket. “Just keep an eye out for people coming too close to us.”

  “I don’t know if I’m going to be much help with that,” she said, pointing at her face to remind him she was not wearing her glasses.

  “Right. Well I’ll keep an eye out then.”

  When the device powered on from sleep mode, Aurora appeared next to Alexia and she even looked like she was walking along with them. Amazed, Joel moved his head up and down and sideways but the pixelated, low resolution image of the alternate personality construct stayed properly aligned and smoothly animated to blend with the background.

  With her voice distorted from the low-quality output of the auglens, Aurora said “I had a friend who believed careless experiments carried out during the celestial alignment were the reason for the magnetic field imbalance that stripped the planet of its atmosphere. The information you found validates this.”

  “It’s strange why our history books say otherwise, though,” Joel commented. “Back in school I was taught the sync incident happened with almost no warning and building the citadel infrastructure was this sort of heroic race against time to save humanity from the end of the world.”

  “It makes sense if you think about it,” Alexia commented. “I mean look at that,” she said pointing at the central bastion. “Seems to me it would take more than five years to design and build it.”

  “Correct,” Aurora added. “The Citadel is a fairly complex structure. Just powering the barrier is an impressive feat of engineering.”

  “Oh yeah, about that,” Joel said. “Are you ready for the real shocker? That thing down there powering the barrier is not even a reactor.”

  “We know,” Aurora said dismissively.

  “Oh yeah, then what is it?” Joel countered. In the auglens display, Aurora appeared to look away, perhaps embarrassed and he made a mental note of the range of emotions she was capable of displaying.

  “I guess we don’t know,” Alexia replied.

  “Well, isn’t that interesting,” Joel said with a smile. “The genius Controller sisters trumped by this lowly engineer.”

  “Spit it out already,” Alexia insisted, annoyed.

  “Okay fine. That giant chrome sphere that defies the laws of physics is a portal. A wormhole.”

  “A wormhole?” Alexia asked, puzzled.

  “It’s a sort of shortcut that interconnects otherwise distant points in space-time,” Aurora explained. “But as far as I know from astrophysics papers in my onboard Library their existence was only theorized and one was never actually observed.”

  “Huh,” Alexia muttered. “A portal that leads where?” she added.

  “Apparently, the center of the galaxy. All that energy the barrier uses is not being produced but it’s rather simply leaking through.”

  “It would make more sense than it being a zero-point energy reactor,” Aurora said. “The galactic center is a zone of intense gamma radiation activity. Theoretically, it could be a steady, limitless energy source for millions of years. I’d like to know how it’s captured once it’s in our side of the wormhole though.”

  “Yeah don’t ask me,” Joel said. “I didn’t get a chance to examine
the fine print.”

  “This information conforms to what Sophia once told me,” Aurora continued. “Perhaps this Hermes Initiative team somehow opened the wormhole on the day of the celestial alignment with the intention of using it as a power source. In doing so, a gravitational anomaly was produced which destabilized the Earth’s magnetic field and ultimately caused the atmosphere to dissipate.”

  “I wouldn’t know,” he said. “By the way, is Sophia this friend you mentioned? Where is she now?”

  “In a better place,” Aurora said.

  “That didn’t answer my question,” he insisted.

  “It’s a long story,” Alexia explained. “Even I still don’t fully get it but we’ll have plenty of time to talk about it once this whole mess about me being an accessory to genocide is resolved.”

  The two of them continued the long walk across the surface. It had been a while since they had seen other farmers and Joel wondered if there was a certain time when no one was allowed on the streets.

  “I don’t think that was part of their plan though,” Joel continued.

  “What plan?” Alexia asked.

  “The Hermes Initiative’s. One of the documents showed a projected destination for the wormhole which they thought would be on the other side of the galaxy. They miscalculated it, I think.”

  “That would suggest they predicted the celestial alignment would create the conditions for a stable wormhole to open,” Aurora said. “That’s all they knew before the event occurred. The magnetic imbalance may have been an unexpected side effect.”

  “Kind of convenient that the resulting energy leak would help build the Citadel infrastructure,” Alexia observed.

  “Not a coincidence,” Aurora said. “Human ingenuity at its best. After all, humans adapt easily and so their creations do to.”

  “Ethan used to say that a lot back when I was training under him,” Alexia said. Aurora didn’t seem to react.

  “Wait a minute, their creations?” Joel asked. “So Controllers don’t consider themselves human?”

  “No, we’re something else,” Aurora replied.

  “Huh,” Joel muttered and didn’t press the matter when it was clear Aurora did not want to discuss it.

  As they continued their walk well into the scheduled time for the bulk of surface laborers to emerge from the alleys, more people started crowding the streets. Joel understood that as his cue to take off the auglens. The sisters had been quiet for a few minutes anyway so he figured they now needed to have one of their silent little talks in Alexia’s head. At least she had relaxed a little perhaps knowing that the farmers would help them move stealthily.

  “Do you need a break?” Joel asked.

  Alexia seemed to need a second to snap out of it then looked at him and said “no, I want to get there as soon as possible.”

  Joel nodded and they continued. Eventually, in the distance, he saw the base of the central bastion. It was a structure he knew well from pictures, videos and schematics but it’s not something he even considered he would ever see in person. At that moment, he was looking at it from a block away and it blew his mind just how massive it was. Its base was surrounded by a barbed wire fence. The structure appeared to have been built on top of a cylinder-shaped building whose windows and internal furnishing had been removed, leaving behind only its reinforced steel skeleton on top of which a mess of pipes, cabling and railing had been built. Alexia had to stop and look up in amazement. Its inner workings caused a subtle vibration that extended to the far ends of the surface perimeter and even down below to some of the top sublevels.

  “Let’s go this way,” Joel said to Alexia, pointing to a street on the right. “Other people seem to avoid getting too close and we don’t want to raise suspicions.” Alexia nodded and followed him.

  On their way down the street, they joined a group of farmers walking in that same direction. Joel noted all six of them walked in silence and wondered if he should start casual conversation with them if only to learn what the word was on Alexia’s escape. But their body language indicated it wouldn’t go well. After all, they were walking to their worksites inside the greenhouses where chemical clouds used to grow vegetables also caused them to become ill. These people were walking to their appointed daily, slow deaths. Casual chatter was probably not in their morning routine. They also didn’t seem very interested in the two of them, which was reassurance they were blending in just fine.

  As they went down the next corner bend, Joel looked behind them and saw two Citpol officers walking their way. Alarmed, he looked away from them and continued the walk. A block later, he looked back again and they were still behind them. They had followed them around the corner bend. He sped up his pace slightly and Alexia followed in silence.

  After they were a short distance ahead of the farmers, he quietly said “stay calm and don’t look back but there’s two Citpol behind us and I think they’re following us.”

  Alexia nodded and the two of them continued to move away from the group of farmers.

  “Can Aurora see them?” he asked.

  Alexia took a few seconds then faced him and said “no, she says there are no sensors or cameras in this area.”

  Joel nodded then carefully looked back again. The two Citpol were closing in and behind them, another two followed. Then without much though he turned to Alexia, grabbed her hand and said “run!”

  The couple went around a corner then another and found themselves at a street block with abandoned buildings. Joel figured they could lose their trackers there and guided Alexia to the space between structures. There was an incline on the street they were in which for him was probably why that block had not been leveled to make room for greenhouses yet. Alexia tried to keep up but it looked like she was having trouble breathing so he slowed down and looked at both ends of the alley. When he didn’t see anyone, he continued down the side of the building and tried to open a door which was locked and did not have a chip reader. Then he tried another then finally the third one was unlocked. They stepped in and he closed it behind them. It was cold inside the building, empty and smelled of abandonment. It was one of the many ancient structures still standing on the surface, remnants of the city that once existed there. Alexia leaned against the wall then slid down to sit while slowly she regained her breath. Being bound to a building with easy access to elevators was apparently not very good for one’s conditioning, Joel thought then he sat down by her side.

  “Are you okay?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she managed to answer in between breaths. After a couple minutes, she appeared rested then said “Aurora tells me we’re close to the distribution center.”

  “How close?”

  “About three blocks. We just have to keep going south.”

  Joel nodded and stood up then slowly opened the door to peek out. Both sides of the alley were empty. He then closed it again and said “that’s weird.”

  “What is it?” Alexia said as she stood up and hit the sides of her patchwork pants to shake off the ancient dust from the floor.

  “They’re gone, we lost them.”

  “Isn’t that a good thing?”

  “No, it’s just… it was too easy.”

  “Sometimes you just get lucky,” she said with a faint smile.

  “Alright,” Joel said then opened the door and stepped out of the ruin with Alexia following closely behind. “Looks like it’s safe. As weird as that is,” he added. The couple continued their walk up the alley then eventually they reached its end and across the street, the rows of greenhouses resumed out away as far as the eye could see. When Joel looked both ways for Citpol, he noticed Alexia was looking at a fixed point towards the west. He followed that direction and in the distance, he saw the upper floors of the Control Administration building.

  “Don’t worry,” Joel said holding her hand. “After today, you’ll never have to go back to that place.”

  “I know,” she said still looking at it. “But that was my home fo
r so many years. Believe it or not I feel like I miss it… despite everything that happened there.”

  “Alright, we got to go,” he said when he didn’t find the words to follow up on that. Alexia had been just a little girl when she was taken to that place. Who knows what had happened in its closed doors under the guise of necessary science not only to her but the rest of the children used by the Controller Program. Alexia nodded and they continued south in silence. As they walked, Joel recalled his childhood in sublevel three. The place was no different from other junctions but he still remembered it fondly. Perhaps it was a similar nostalgia that made Alexia miss that hellish tower.

  Eventually, they arrived at distribution center 6. It was an old concrete building about two stories tall. The structure appeared to have been used for the same purpose even during pre-Sync times judging from the series of large square openings on the sides where cargo vehicles had once parked to load and unload their contents. Workers wearing the same patchwork clothing as theirs were busy carrying bundles of knapsacks into it. Some by foot, others pushing carts full of them. There were no engine powered vehicles doing the hard work as far as Joel could tell. They stood at a corner across the street while he looked at all directions, searching for Citpol but he found none.

  “You know,” Alexia said, calling for his attention. “Life is so hard out here. I’m glad I didn’t have to grow up to be just another laborer. Does that make me a bad person?”

  “No,” Joel said. “I agree. It was because I saw how hard my parents worked that I did what I could to make it to an engineering team.”

  “Yeah but your case is different,” she said, looking at him. “You worked for that, me I was randomly picked and the rest just happened. I never thought I deserved the comfortable life I lived in the Control Administration building.”

  “After everything you went through, maybe you did deserve it,” Joel said. “Sounds like the least they could do after using you brain as an organic computer.”

  “I guess,” she said absentmindedly then crossed the street towards the distribution center and Joel followed as he wondered if that had been the right thing to say.

 

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