Branch Off

by Dario Solera

  “I’m going with you, and that’s it.”

  Gagnier smiled as he loaded shiny brass rounds into a magazine. He set it aside with the others. “I’ll get the drone. I’ll be back in a couple of minutes.”

  “OK.”

  “Léa—”

  “What? You don’t want me around?”

  “No. It’s not that.”

  “Then what is it?”

  “It’s just that he’s a soldier, and I’m not from this world.”

  “But I am from this world, and I have seen too much to stop now.” She paused for a moment. “Moreover—” she began, without finishing the sentence.

  “Yes?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You still love me,” Sarah said with a tone that was both an affirmation and a question.

  “I…” Léa sighed and rubbed her eyes. “You left me. One day I woke up and you were dead!”

  The selfishness of suicide had never been clearer. Indeed, the egoism of her own life was apparent now. Will had died because she had dragged him into that mess. Doubly selfish, she had done that because she wanted to find her biological parents, for the vain reason of giving a sense to her life. She looked down. “You left me too,” she retaliated.

  “I’m not that Léa.”

  “And I’m not that Sarah!”

  “I know,” Léa said after a while with a very low voice. She got close and kissed her.

  At first, Sarah resisted her touch. It was not the right moment, and everything seemed so wrong. This wasn’t Léa. Was she betraying her?

  Léa’s warm lips pressed softly on hers, and she needed it, so she gave up and returned her kiss, placing an arm around her back and pulling her closer.

  “Here’s the drone,” Gagnier announced, walking into the tent. “Oh, sorry.”

  Both looked at him with embarrassed smiles.

  “So,” Sarah said, clearing her throat. “Show us.”

  “Sure.” He slammed a metal case on the table, opened its latches, and pulled the lid up. “Latest model with night-vision HD camera. These things cost the same as a car.” He powered up the control unit housed on one side of the case, and a small LCD screen showed status messages. On the other side was the main drone body with its six arms, while the propellers were strapped on the inside of the lid. “They can fly even without GPS signal using gyroscopes.”

  “Ever used one?” Léa asked.

  “No, but I can pilot helicopters. I’ll be damned if I cannot fly this toy.” He tapped on the touch-screen controls until he found the interface he needed to program the way points. “How do you want it to fly?”

  “Well…” She thought for a moment. “I guess a large, slow circle over the anomaly is fine. Maybe a hundred meters out.”

  “All right,” he said as he tapped on the control unit.

  “Make sure to film both the anomaly and the environment.”

  “OK.” It took him a while, but in the end he said, “Done! It will fly around the anomaly. It will stop at these spots here”—he pointed at the screen, which showed an octagon with highlighted corners—“and rotate the camera to have a three hundred sixty degrees view.”

  “Perfect.”

  Gagnier turned the control unit off and closed the lid. “Are you ready?” he asked.

  Sarah and Léa exchanged a look and then said, “Yes,” at the same time.

  He placed five magazines in the pockets of his camo jacket and slung the submachine gun on his shoulder. “Let’s go.”

  Thirty-five

  The driver pressed his foot into the accelerator to remain close to the car in front. Both vehicles had sirens screaming through the night, even though there still wasn’t anyone around.

  Sarah’s heart raced.

  As soon as the tallest buildings were behind them, in the northern suburbs of Geneva, the anomaly came into view, slightly to the left. In the darkness of the night, it was now a beautiful, mesmerizing sphere that glowed of bluish light. Even from that distance, it was clear that its surface was like water, shimmering and moving.

  They passed an antiaircraft unit on the back of a large truck, and a few hundred meters later, another was being installed with five men at work.

  From the front passenger seat, Gagnier glanced back at Sarah. “Why blue?” he asked over the noise of the engine.

  “Blue is just an electromagnetic radiation at a certain wavelength. It might not be intentional. The anomaly might also radiate at other frequencies; that’s what the case I placed in the trunk is for.”

  He nodded and turned to watch the road ahead of the car.

  “What are the other soldiers doing?” Léa asked.

  “I don’t know. The colonel didn’t tell me, but I guess they’re taking position around the anomaly.”

  That blue thing loomed at the horizon, and all Léa could think of was that something was wrong, and it wasn’t the anomaly. She felt dragged on by the events as if by an unstoppable tidal wave.

  “You OK?” Sarah asked.

  Léa nodded, biting her lower lip.

  “I know that face,” Sarah said, cocking her head slightly. “You scared? I am.”

  “That’s not the problem. Everything’s so strange.” She wasn’t able to form the right words.

  “Yeah. It’s something humanity has never seen before.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “We’ll take measurements.”

  “No, I mean after this.”

  “Oh.” Sarah remained silent for a moment as the simplicity of the question sank into her. “I don’t know. I haven’t thought about it.” She didn’t belong there, that much she knew, but she didn’t want to say it aloud. Not to Léa. “I’m not sure there will be an after this.”

  “Do you think we are in danger?” Léa asked with a flat tone.

  “No, no. I just think that the anomaly might remain here forever.”

  Léa’s face hinted at a smile.

  The anomaly disappeared behind a block of buildings as the jeep went around a corner. Suddenly the structures gave way to open fields, with the sphere towering right in front of the car.

  “Can you imagine,” Sarah continued, “what it would mean if these two worlds remained connected forever?”

  Léa watched her, expecting her to continue.

  “We would need policies to avoid people going on the other side, at least for a while. Most would go insane if they met their copy. But then, after a couple generations, the population would be different. They might share the same ancestry, but they would not be the same persons.”

  “We would be able to meet again someone we’ve lost.”

  “Yeah,” she said with a thin breath.

  “Ten minutes,” the driver said.

  They proceeded in silence for the last few kilometers, with the cars speeding in the night and dodging occasional obstacles. They switched the sirens off. There was no point in keeping them screaming and they resounded inside the cabin.

  The car left the tarmac and began running on the muddy road through the fields. It rocked left and right and water splashed below the wheels.

  “Damn,” Gagnier said. “They’re moving again.”

  Sarah and Léa leaned forward to get a better view from the windshield.

  One by one, leaving the swarm in seemingly random places, with a swift motion the alien vessels flew downward, illuminated by the blue glow coming from the sphere.

  “Where are they going?”

  A dozen or so objects at a time drew a spiral from their position in the pack and pointed toward the anomaly, disappearing into it.

  “To the other side!”

  “Go faster!” Sarah yelled.

  The driver accelerated and the jeep lurched forward.

  “The upper swarm is descending. And look there!” Gagnier said. “Another one is forming higher in the sky!”

  Other cars appeared outside as the vehicle reached the base camp that Rubais had ordered. Headlights were left on to illumina
te the area, and soldiers were in the process of setting up halogen lamps.

  Sarah jumped out of the car and ran to the trunk. Opening it, she pulled out a small plastic case. Running toward the anomaly, she opened the case and extracted the electromagnetic field detector she had stolen from the labs. She left the case to fall into the mud and reached a clear area, some fifteen meters away from everyone else and the vehicles. Léa and Gagnier followed her, their faces lit in blue.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “I’m taking measurements of EM radiation.” She fumbled in the dark with the device’s buttons.

  “Why?”

  “Prepare the drone!”

  “OK,” he said as he scurried off back to the car.

  “Sarah, what’s happening?”

  “Where do you think they’re going?”

  “To your world,” she answered with an unsure tone.

  Sarah giggled. “No, they’re not.”

  “Where, then?”

  “Somewhere else. Yes! It’s working.”

  They watched the little LCD screen on the device, unable to read anything in the dim light.

  “Ask Gagnier for a flashlight.”

  Léa jogged away and returned a moment later. “Here.”

  “Thanks! Point it here on the screen.” She paused. “Sorry. I’m treating you like a—”

  “It’s fine.”

  Sarah knew it was not but ignored the problem for now. “Right, yes. It makes sense.”

  “What?”

  “Obviously there’s radiation in the visible spectrum, but also at other frequencies, even infrared. Can you feel the slight heat it’s producing?”

  “Yeah!” she said, nodding, her face surprised. “What does that mean?”

  “It has changed. It didn’t emit anything before. It was like a rock.”

  “Have the aliens changed it?”

  “Yes, it’s likely. I don’t know how. Maybe their flying up there like that…” She looked up at the swarms above. The device beeped to signal it had completed the scan.

  Every few seconds another alien object dove into the sphere, silent and quick.

  Gagnier arrived with the large metal case containing the drone. He set it down on the ground, finding a dry spot, and then opened it. “I’ll need a minute.”

  “I believe we’ve got all night,” Sarah said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “It looks like they are all going into the anomaly, and they’re quite a lot.”

  He extracted the drone’s main body from the styrofoam case, attached the bulky battery, and then mounted the propellers on the six arms. The LCD screen lit as he turned the power switch on. “Ready for flight.”

  “Fantastic. Set it free,” Sarah said with a grin.

  After pressing a green button on the control panel, Gagnier stood with the drone in his hands. He raised it as high as he could as the little electric motors spun up, sending a gust of air around and messing up Sarah’s and Léa’s hair.

  Tentatively, he let go of the belly of the drone, letting it float freely. After a couple of seconds, the small aircraft zipped upward and flew toward the anomaly.

  “We’ll have the video feed until it goes through,” Gagnier said as he watched the images relayed from the drone to the control unit. The screen showed a green-washed, wide-angle image of the fields and the anomaly, which looked like a flat, white surface.

  They crouched and stared at the little LCD, craning their necks to get the most out of it. The tiny aircraft flew at a steady speed toward the anomaly, which seemed bigger on the screen every second.

  “It’s going through,” Sarah said.

  The screen sent a grey image for a moment, and then a message appeared, saying the video link was lost.

  “How much time until it gets back?” Léa asked.

  “Less than ten minutes.”

  “If it gets back,” Sarah pointed out. “For all we know, there might be a supernova on the other side.” She stood up and looked around her. Above, an incessant flow of alien objects was piercing through the sphere and disappearing into the other dimension. The third swarm of aircrafts appeared complete now, with the first, lower one roughly halved in size. For some reason no one at the base camp seemed concerned about all those alien ships. Perhaps it was because there was no way to shoot them down.

  She looked at the anomaly. Its capturing glow hid unknown secrets, and the idea that it might not be linked to her world anymore sent an icy thrill in her chest. She hadn’t thought about it before, but the possibility that she was stuck there was very real. In a few minutes, she would know.

  Léa stood beside her while Gagnier still fumbled with the drone’s control unit, trying to catch its signal. The sphere’s blue enhanced that of her eyes. “What if you can’t return home?” Léa said.

  Sarah shrugged slightly. “I asked to come here. I’ll face the consequences.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “I know.” She sighed and looked up. She would have liked to tell Léa that they could be together again, but it was wrong. So many things had changed—she had died, even. “I know,” she repeated. “It’s a mess.”

  “Yeah.” It was a desperate try, but the idea of losing Sarah once more was unbearable; it stole Léa’s breath and caused her guts to clench. For Sarah, it could not be the same. She still had another Léa in her world.

  A distant whining sound became louder. “We’ve got video!” Gagnier exclaimed.

  Sarah and Léa crouched back down near him.

  “That’s us,” Gagnier said, pointing at the screen. The drone was coming back to them, its electric motors whizzing noisily. It flew over their heads and stopped some twenty meters above ground, then it descended slowly until it was close enough for him to grab it. “It’s downloading already,” he said. In a couple of minutes, the entire video recording was available on the control unit. Gagnier hit the play command, and the LCD screen started displaying the beginning of the drone’s mission. “We can skip this,” he said. “Here.”

  For several seconds the video was just greenish static, but then a clear image appeared. The camera had captured the fields on the other side of the anomaly. They looked like normal, agricultural fields, partly covered in snow.

  As the autonomous aircraft reached its first way point, the camera rotated, first toward the anomaly, which blocked the majority of the view, and then back outward.

  “There’s nothing,” Sarah said.

  “At least it’s not a supernova,” Gagnier joked.

  “I doubt it would have returned in that case.”

  The image moved again, and the drone reached the second way point. Once more, the camera showed nothing interesting, except for a few of the alien objects flying out of the anomaly and disappearing into the darkness.

  Once the tiny aircraft gained its fourth spot around the sphere, Gagnier said, “That’s roughly south-southwest. We should see the airport.”

  Blank picture.

  “Maybe it’s too dark,” Léa noted.

  “No. We should see the lights on the landing strip, they’re quite bright,” Sarah said. “There just is no airport.”

  Gagnier frowned in the low light. “You’re telling us that it’s not the same place?”

  “Maybe.”

  At the fifth stop, when the drone had moved south, something came glistening in the noisy image.

  “There,” he said. “Lights.”

  “Geneva,” Léa observed.

  “It might be.”

  Those lights were feeble and scattered.

  The drone proceeded on to the next stops, providing more of the same sparse light dots on the screen, roughly south of their observation post, and then the machine began its journey back into the anomaly.

  Sarah stood and paced up and down in the night, looking at the ground. Léa and Gagnier didn’t say anything for a while. Suddenly Sarah turned and walked over to them. “Send it back. Send it toward those lig
hts.”

  “It’s a long shot. It might not make it back.”

  “I know.”

  He studied her for a moment and then set off to configure a new flight plan on the control panel, and a few minutes later the drone flew away.

  Standing in the cool air, lit by headlights and accompanied by the misty puffs erupting from their mouths, no one dared talk.

  “It should be halfway,” Gagnier said, checking the instrumentation. “It’s probably circling above Geneva and coming back. Assuming it’s Geneva.”

  Yellowish glares lit up a small grove several hundred meters farther to the south, and a strong hissing sound came from there.

  A set of missiles rose from the ground and raced into the sky in the general direction of the swarm of alien objects. Before anyone could register what was happening, the missiles hit one of the aircraft in the formation around the sphere.

  The object left the group just as more fire ran toward it.

  At first it seemed as though it was falling, but then it took a different course and moved toward the trees. The missiles hit it several more times until it came crashing down in a ball of flames.

  “What the fuck are they doing?” Sarah yelled at Gagnier.

  He looked back at her and raised his arms. His face sported a frown. “I don’t know.”

  “They’re moving!” someone shouted.

  In the sky more dark shapes detached from the regular formation and headed for the antiaircraft battery behind the trees. In just a moment, they reached it and began dropping a rain of tiny spherical objects.

  Plumes of fire and smoke erupted from the distance, and in less than a minute, the aliens had neutralized the threat and rejoined the flock.

  The chatter among the soldiers grew louder as the events became clear.

  “It’s the first time we downed one,” Gagnier said over the noise.

  Several jeeps were being prepared.

  “We have to go and have a look,” he added.

  Sarah would never miss such an opportunity. “OK,” she said after a quick glance at Léa. The expression on her face was scared. “The drone?”

  “It should be here in a moment.” He crouched and checked the control unit. “Two minutes.”