Suffrage (World Key Chronicles Book 1)

by Julian St Aubyn Green

  “This arm is a prosthetic. See just here?” Gillette pointed to a thin, almost invisible scar running around the shoulder joint. “This is where the prosthesis joins her shoulder. Prosthetics have come a long way in the last ten years, but we have nothing even remotely like this. This is cybernetics. Not prosthetics. Like in Subject Two, it appears connected directly to her nervous system.”

  Hardaker switched off the recording. “You don’t need the rest Dr. Ellis, and this is strictly need-to-know. So, accelerated healing, advanced technology, cybernetics. If they aren’t aliens dressed in human masks, or clones, what are they?”

  “But what’s the motivation? Why travel lightyears to infiltrate a speck of dust on the other side of the galaxy? And this report says one of them spoke in accented English. And the instrument in the lab spoke in English. How did they learn the language? Why speak it at all? In just the brief time I’ve had in the lab I’m seeing major inconsistencies. I think aliens is a stretch,” Stanford replied. He rubbed his chin again, mind aflame with possibilities. “Wait. They’re here aren’t they? If this happened a handful of hours ago, you haven’t had time to move them. They’re here. In this facility, not the base hospital.”

  The colonel simply raised an eyebrow and the stogie circled and bounced again.

  Stanford took his silence as assent and ran a hand through his hair. “They are your best chance at answers. You know that. What are these visitors saying?”

  There was a pregnant pause as the colonel eyed him. He pursed his lips and pulled the stogie out with a sigh. “I’m taking a chance on you Dr. Ellis. I’m taking that chance because of your security clearance and that Dr. Wright has vouched for you. I’ve got the White House on the phone every ten minutes demanding answers and nothing to tell them. The … visitors aren’t speaking. They haven’t all woken up yet. Those that have seem to have amnesia. Could be a ploy.” The colonel leaned back, replacing the stogie, blue eyes narrowing.

  “You know, if they are human, except for the technology …” Stanford swallowed. I can’t believe I’m about to say this. “Time travel seems more plausible than aliens.”

  “Yeah. One of the White House analysts thought that. Take a look at Subject Four,” Hardaker said.

  Subject Four was a Caucasian male in his mid-twenties. His long, greasy hair was a dirty blond, like the unkempt goatee hugging his chin.

  “Okay, what about him?” Stanford asked.

  “We turned up a hit on facial recognition. One Daniel Adder. Some big-shot Australian musician. Currently on tour in London,” emphasized the Colonel, allowing the implications to sink in. “Sounds like a clone to me. Thinking is, with the two of them the same age and general appearance, it’s aliens trying to blend in.”

  Stanford frowned, unconvinced. “Hmm. But—”

  The colonel interrupted before Stanford could finish. “Dr. Ellis. I’m sure you can appreciate that I’m a busy man. You should be as well.” Stanford heard the unmistakable tone of dismissal. “Let me know what you find out.”

  Stanford nodded and got to his feet. Before he could reach for the dossier and photos, Hardaker briskly retrieved it. Stanford left, closing the door behind him, idly wondering which room the visitors were held in.

  If these are aliens, why clone someone famous? And not just famous, but an international rock star? That doesn’t make any sense.

  It … felt. That was the only way to describe the indistinct sense of identity that drifted from the fog of unconsciousness. Slowly at first, it became aware of limbs and body, spreading until recognition struck. A person. It—no, he. He was a man. That much he knew. He could hear the omnipresent hum of fluorescent lighting and the soft beeps of machinery. Squeaks of shoes on linoleum floors broke up sterile machine noises in the background. The sound of someone chewing quietly lent an organic feel to the otherwise cold, industrial sense of the place. His nose twitched at a familiar aroma. Turkey. Onion and tomato. Sandwiches?

  He flexed the fingers of one hand, then the other, feeling slight resistance from something light that covered him. Sheet. Timidly, he lifted his eyelids and peered about the room: white walls, fluorescent lights, a white sheet and blue blanket, odd-looking bed. Hospital.

  Words drifted up from somewhere, but he didn’t know where. One bleary glance told him other people were in the room. His eyes refused to focus properly at first. Some reclined in the strange hospital beds. Patients. Two others wore white uniforms and stood about the room. Doctor, nurse.

  The light hurt his eyes, so he closed them. Amid the backdrop of general pain throughout his body, he slowly discovered that aside from the bodily ache that stretched from marrow to skin and from head to toe, nothing seemed broken.

  “Doctor, Subject Four just moved,” intoned a pleasant female alto, resonating with a nervous timbre.

  He opened his eyes again, with less pain this time. He saw the doctor approach, stethoscope in hand. The doctor was an older man, with gray in his hair and a look of gentle experience mingled with excited curiosity. The nurse, wearing a severe bun and white uniform, took another patient’s pulse while occasionally casting a furtive look in his direction.

  He spoke the first thing that came to mind. “Where am I?” More questions came pouring out as clarity started to return to his addled consciousness. His tongue felt like a dried-out footy sock shoved into his mouth as he attempted to speak further. “How did I get here? And more importantly why do I feel like I was run over by a road train? I hurt everywhere.” He was shocked at how dry and powerless his voice sounded. I don’t usually sound like this, do I?

  He tried to clear his throat, but instead a painful rasping escaped his lips. The doctor, sympathy etched across his features, reached over to the bedside table and poured him some water, then raised the bed to a seated position. With no less care, the doctor handed the man the glass.

  “We were hoping you’d tell us,” the doctor encouraged with a reassuring smile. “Don’t worry, you haven’t broken anything.”

  The water felt glorious sliding down his throat, but something caught the man’s attention.

  That smile. The doctor looked innocuous enough. It was the eyes. The smile never reached those brown irises hiding behind a pair of spectacles. Now he was looking more closely, the doctor appeared tense. The doctor swallowed repeatedly. He also brushed the hair back over his ears more than once, even though his close-cropped hair needed no attention. And the medical man’s posture was as rigid as his death grip on the stethoscope in his hands.

  “Don’t tell me I actually was run over and forgot it?” he remarked sarcastically before taking another gulp of water, eyeing his caregivers. He felt dehydrated and his stomach gurgled appreciatively.

  “No. That’s … not how you came to be here.” The doctor replied. He shot a concerned glance towards the nurse before looking back at him. “My name is Doctor Stephen Gillette. This is Nurse Janet Simpson. What’s your name?”

  He opened his mouth to answer the question and then closed it. Feeling like the village idiot, he answered haltingly. “Well this is kind of embarrassing Doc, but, I don’t know. How come I don’t know my own name? What kind of accident was I in?”

  Doctor Gillette gave him a look of concern that appeared a bit more genuine this time. “Seems like you might have some amnesia there.” He took out a pen and notepad and slid them across an over-bed table.

  “Try signing your name, and take a look at the other patients. You all arrived together, so you might remember them.”

  He took the pen in his left hand. It just felt more natural and he signed across the paper with a flourish. “Err, my name is ‘Snake’, apparently. That’s a bloody weird name.”

  It occurred to him that while he and the doctor spoke the same language, there were some differences in enunciation. “Doc. Why do you sound so weird to me?”

  Dr. Gillette collected the paper and pen, frowning at the signature before putting them back in his pocket. “I’m American. You sound British
or Australian. I don’t quite have an ear for accents,” he replied. “Mind if I call you Snake? Take a look at the others. Do you recognize them? Can you tell me their names?”

  “Oh, you’re a Merry. I—don’t know why I said that.” Snake shrugged and glanced around the room.

  With his bed raised, he could see the other people in hospital gowns clearly. An extremely handsome Asian man with astonishing, dark violet eyes smiled and waved cheerfully at him. An enormous dark-skinned woman just nodded in his direction, barely pausing in her consumption of a sandwich. The light amethyst glint from the black woman’s strange eyes was somewhat intimidating.

  Two people with purple eyes? What are the odds? Those eyes caused a nervous shiver up his spine, like the feeling of stepping close to a brown snake.

  Two others looked sound asleep: a dark-haired female teenager and a blond woman he guessed was in her mid-thirties. He took a long look at each of them, hoping for some bells to go off, but nothing happened.

  “Sorry Doc, I got zilch. Hmm. Budgie smugglers, mozzies, Vegemite, strewth, crikey, stone the crows, I’ve got a kangaroo loose in the top paddock. It’s a colorful language, isn’t it?” He grinned and couldn’t help noticing Nurse Janet give a secretive sort of smile. Her reaction cheered him slightly.

  “Pilot …” murmured the unconscious blond woman in the bed next to him while Nurse Janet checked her pulse.

  “Wait, what did she say? Pilot?” Snake rolled the word around more, testing its syllables. “Pi-lot ….” It sounded familiar to him. The muttered word triggered a feeble memory.

  There was a room, crowded with people. The other patients were there and more unrecognizable people besides, including an older Asian male and a young man with olive skin and dark hair. They were all seated around a glowing hologram that displayed a complicated three-dimensional map. In the middle of the projection was planet Earth.

  Other glowing Earths spiraled outwards like a fractal mathematical design, beautiful and precisely complex. Between the glowing spheres were small frames of light, dense with text and what looked like a musical score. Spinning delicately, the text and musical notes changed.

  The whole scene gave Snake chills. So familiar and so real, yet he couldn’t place where he could have gotten such a memory. He remembered a question in the background of the meeting: “Can you do it, Pilot?”

  The memory ended and his eyes refocused to meet Gillette’s. “Oh, hey I, I got something back just then. She, the blond woman, she’s called me Pilot before. That’s funny. I don’t feel like a pilot; I feel like a musician. Maybe that’s why my name is Snake. Nah, I can’t actually be a pilot—I don’t know anything about lightships.”

  Two hours and two pots of coffee later, Stanford and the other half-dozen laboratory staff continued to puzzle over the items. The five bags were filled with surprisingly ordinary things like clothes and climbing equipment. However, they decided to focus on a few items packed amongst the more mundane objects that piqued their interest.

  There was a medical kit in one bag, identifiable by its plethora of bandages and gauze. The unidentifiable elements of that bag included some glowing purple ampules that appeared ready for injection, and some kind of diagnostic device. A pair of bulky, yet feminine bracelets completed the medical bag inventory.

  After taking one of the ampules for analysis, they’d gone through the other bags carefully. Aside from another bag containing a device that looked like a small camera drone with a display unit, there was little to interest them from a materials viewpoint.

  By far, the two most intriguing items were the weapon and the instrument. Stanford adjusted the position of the instrument again under the stereo microscope using the robot arms, twisting it slightly.

  “Unauthorized DNA detected, security protocols engaged. Access denied. Please return me to Pilot Adder. Thank you.”

  “Damn.” Stanford hissed in frustration. It just kept repeating the same statement again and again. At least the instrument hadn’t reacted with the same shocking jolt of electricity as the weapon. But they weren’t taking any chances, hence the robot arms.

  The researchers tried to find a plug or entry point through which to attach a computer to the instrument, but there weren’t any. Unlike a normal bass guitar, which the object most resembled, there was no amp jack, only a weird acoustic well that glowed a soft green color. It was an unlikely fusion of metal and wood and contained a maze of internal circuitry.

  Several of the staff wanted to cut open the casing and look for something to tap into. An ultrasound revealed a complicated internal structure, but the analysis merely reinforced their preliminary assessment.

  A small, glowing crystal sat nestled within the resonating chamber of the instrument. And like any instrument, the rest of the structure augmented that chamber.

  It’s in position now. Stanford focused on the softly glowing, translucent crystal. “Alright. Crystalline formation. I’m not a geologist, but this doesn’t look natural. Solid, with a secondary dendrite formation inside it. Its appearance is reminiscent of a snowflake,” Stanford summarized for the benefit of his colleagues who stood at their stations, monitoring the continuous output of multiple apparatus.

  Dr. Christine Brown and Dr. Bob Wright watched their screens as Stanford expounded on his observations of the crystal for the audio recorder.

  Christine sported a bandage on her hand and a gauze strip on her forehead, from where the weapon had electrocuted her earlier. When Stanford suggested that she take time off to rest, she’d threatened to castrate him with a rusty gear wheel and told him there was no way she was letting this opportunity pass her by.

  True to her word, there she stood, doggedly compiling data and readings.

  Stanford adjusted the magnification of his lens, concentrating on the strange structure within the crystal. This crystal was the power source for the whole device. After blowing the fuses on four multimeters of increasing capacity trying to determine the electrical potential, he had begrudgingly set aside that curiosity. For now.

  He blinked slowly, and again when his thoughts still refused to order themselves. His excitement combined with sleep deprivation into a volatile cocktail, and the coffee only made it worse. His mind ran through a multitude of potential applications rather than obediently deciphering what was right in front of him. That energy source! We could be on the verge of a breakthrough for humanity here.

  “Storage or generation? I know crystals can contain salts; you think it’s galvanic?” Bob enquired, breaking through Stanford’s swirling thoughts.

  “I’d say generation, given the off-the-scale power reading, but it doesn’t make sense. The power we recorded isn’t going anywhere. It could be both. No Geiger reaction, no observable chemical reaction, so it can’t be nuclear or galvanic. Green and translucent might suggest bio-generation, but at this magnification, I’d see any organisms,” Stanford offered, ticking off possibilities on his fingers and sighing.

  Stanford leaned forward and traced the hexagonal outline of the crystalline structure with a capped pen on one monitor, then looked quickly back and forth to several others.

  He spoke slowly and carefully as the new idea emerged like the sun over a distant horizon, spreading fresh light over his weary thoughts. “You know, it reminds me of a piezoelectric crystal. They’re used to generate ultrasonic sound waves, and this looks like a guitar. We also use piezos to generate electricity.”

  “Dr. Ellis, you might be onto something. If it is, our piezoelectric crystals are the equivalent of the Bagdad battery by comparison,” Christine interjected with a brightness in her tone that he’d not heard in hours. “The structure inside. Does that look like a fractal repetition to anyone else?”

  “It could be a Julia Set or some other form of repeating structure,” Bob replied. “Any way to test if it’s a piezo?”

  “Well, any piezoelectric material produces electricity from mechanical compression. I’m shooting blind here. This maintains a charge, which
a piezo shouldn’t.” Stanford took a sip of coffee, or the sewage this place called coffee. “It must be that secondary formation. If it is a piezo—hmm, mechanical stress would produce a response,” Stanford stated.

  “Okay,” Christine said. “This power unit moved five people and all this equipment who knows how far. If we thump it with a hammer, we could release a lot more energy than we want. Like a monkey with a bone club prodding a nuclear pile,” she concluded wryly.

  Stanford grinned in agreement. “Well, I don’t feel like playing the monkey. Let’s forgo the mechanical stress test until we can devise appropriate precautionary measures.”

  “Why embed the power source in an instrument to begin with?” Bob pondered. “If it is a piezo crystal, is it to produce, or possibly, absorb specific sound frequencies? We could focus different sounds at it, see if that elicits a response?”

  “Interesting idea. Alright, we’ll start with sound waves. See what happens.”

  Doctor Brown waved over one of the lab assistants and sent them off for equipment before turning back to the two men.

  “Something else occurred to me,” Stanford admitted, rising from his chair and stretching.

  “What’s on your mind?” Bob asked.

  “How much do you know about Dr. Juan Maldacena’s theory on many interacting worlds?” Stanford queried.

  Bob nodded, almost as if he’d expected the question. “Stan, quantum mechanics isn’t my field. As a physicist, you’d have greater familiarity with the subject matter than me. I think I know where you’re going though. You’re thinking alternate reality instead of a wormhole, right? That Subject Four isn’t a clone?” The big man paused with a thoughtful expression before continuing. “Maybe. But we are way past the edge of unproven theory here. I wouldn’t even know where we’d begin to test it.”