by Scott Rhine
Trina nodded, softening slightly. “You have her number. Can you do it?”
“She’s my student. It’s my job to help her,” Zeiss stated. “Anything more?”
“We need you to infiltrate her Sunday Dinner Club,” she added.
“You make them sound like terrorists.”
“Worse—idealists,” she asserted. “Don’t push or ask. Just be open to invitation.”
“I already have more than the normal load and my research.”
Trina passed him his computer pad. “I’ve just raised your clearance level. That should help with your research. But don’t use this in front of anyone.”
“Sure.” When Zeiss saw the rating, he couldn’t speak. Fortune Aerospace—board clearance.
“You’re my assistant,” Daniel explained. “You need it to do your job.”
“Why?”
“I’m Daniel Fortune.”
“The world’s foremost Out of Body talent, one of the original multiples?”
“Former talent. I can’t leave this island without blinding pain.”
Zeiss blinked. “Wow. This is big.”
“Mr. Calm. We were worried you might be a psychopath with the way you keep your head in a crisis.”
“In every situation, I plan disaster scenarios and try to have at least one alternative available for any contingency. Survivors say that in any event, any positive action however small is better than freezing or continuing unchanged. Forgive me if I don’t have a plan for this.”
“Don’t worry; you would’ve put the pieces together in another few weeks. I had to know if I could trust you first,” said the billionaire. “And I knew about your father. Your leaving him off the application was one of the main reasons I picked you. I know a thing or two about horrible fathers.”
“Thank you, sir,” said Zeiss. “Now what?”
“Now the hard work starts,” Daniel sighed. “Someone on this island is transmitting confidential information.”
“That should be impossible.”
“Yes. Jez designed the protocols herself. Someone here’s also sabotaging the astronaut program. In your copious free time, we’d like you to figure out who.”
Chapter 8 – Hell Week
When Red woke Monday morning, Risa was already gone to class. She tried to shower, but the water was stone cold. “It takes a while to get hot again. We heat with passive solar on the roof,” explained a girl from room five.
Grumbling, the young pilot put on her blue flight suit again so it would match her hair color. She locked the door, put the thumb-sized camera on her dresser, and hit record. “Testing, testing.”
When she played it back on the TV screen, her voice was distorted and her face static-filled. “Oops.” She turned off the media blocker in her goggles. “Logging session one: Red Benson. I’m about to attend my first class. I’m so nervous. I haven’t seen Uncle Daniel in ten years. We’ve both been through a lot since. They wouldn’t let me visit him at the hospital because I was too young. I don’t know how damaged he was. I know the shuttle incident made him worse. Geez. I hope he doesn’t blame me. If I hadn’t wanted the elephant ears . . .” She swallowed hard, holding back the tears. “End scene.”
The camera shut off.
She turned it back on again at the checkout of the BX. Red had a pile of texts behind her as a backdrop. The cashier was gone. “I just got all my books. Alien Tech alone has three. Anti-terrorism has a reading list, plus a DVD collection. I’m having them delivered to my room. Professor Sorenson should be a piece of cake. I doubt there’s anything he can teach me about talents I don’t already know. Horvath . . . I get the feeling she’s going to make my life hell. Well I give as good as I get. End Scene.”
The next shot was Red jogging into the Alien Tech amphitheater one minute after the starting bell. The other fifty-nine freshmen and one sophomore were seated already. There was no Daniel, only Zeiss. The TA wore a button-down shirt of blue Oxford cloth. “Any questions?”
A student in front asked, “Why does Professor Sorenson say the first few minutes on the artifact will be world-changing?”
“With each of the twenty-seven alien pages that led us to the Sirius artifact, we learn enough to keep our scientists busy for decades. For each combination of pages, we discover more than the sum of the two. Even with all the pages combined, we wouldn’t know enough to build this spacecraft for a thousand years. Just walking in the front door of the craft will give us access to alien techniques and technologies Earth hasn’t even considered.”
“Why can’t we land today?” inquired another.
“That’s another class. The short answer is that the nations who refuse to join the collation have missiles aimed at the artifact. If they can’t have the knowledge, no one can.”
“Then why are we here?”
“To be ready when an agreement is reached. But even if that doesn’t happen, you’re the leaders of tomorrow. The curriculum and competition sharpen each student to be the best in his or her arena.”
On her goggles, Red entered a caption for the lecture. “My first sermon in the crystal cathedral.”
When the questions were over, Zeiss announced, “As promised, today’s class should be easy. Take out your tablets, and connect to the class website, quiz one. There will be ten short-answer questions; nothing too strenuous. You’ll have fifteen minutes. Afterward, we’ll discuss the answers that people missed in open forum.”
Red was still taking her new school tablet out of its case when he announced, “Begin.”
Her tablet had a large note stuck to the front, “Charge for twelve hours before first use.”
She immediately raised her hand, causing Zeiss to walk up and lean over. “Yes?” he whispered. When she showed him the note, he sighed, “Here, use mine.”
As she typed the answers at breakneck speed, Red failed to notice that they were appearing on the large, overhead screen. Number four, one of the easiest questions, gave her fits. Some feature of the pad kept blacking out her answer. On the last question, they only provided a quarter inch for the answer, but she attached an answer file that took her the remainder of the quiz to expound upon. A few early-finishers were chuckling. After he called out the one-minute warning, she hit submit and handed the pad back.
He punched a button and graded all the submissions in a few seconds. “Not bad. Low score was 70 percent. The average was 94. Excellent.”
The TA walked through a few obvious answers. One boy claimed, “I had that.”
Zeiss brought it up on his pad and said, “Ah . . . Spelling. I’ll give it to you this time, but you should know the word aerospace for the final. Next, how can you tell a planetary orbits’ expert? The correct answers were increased hormonal activity and fixation with curved geometry.” He brought up the wrong answers to check for spelling.
“Horny,” he announced. “Not specific enough. That definition would encompass ninety percent of our student body.” No one could see the name of the student, but everyone saw the red X.
When he read the other wrong response, everyone laughed again. “Talk to him for five minutes and see if he tries to teach me something.”
Zeiss winced. “I’m afraid that anything they tried to teach you with that combination . . .”
Sojiro shot up a hand. “Sir, I read ahead; the primary source material, The Twenty-Seven Pages, references increased teaching ability.” He was looking at Red as he spoke. The Japanese artist knew from the overhead that the answer had been hers. Zeiss did not.
“Half credit seems fair,” the TA ruled, sending a note to the student. When the note came up on his own pad, he missed a step. “Next question. About half of you who missed a problem tripped up on this one. What is the most common failure mode for a deep quantum talent? We accept coma or navel staring. Okay, one of you misspelled it naval. I’ll fix the program to give you credit for that one. But drooling and funny farm are unacceptable.
“Here’s an easy one. Who invented the sta
r drive? We have one with an answer missing.”
“Your pad was defective, sir. It wouldn’t let me type the answer,” Red claimed.
Zeiss successfully tapped out, “Cassavettis and Reuter.”
“No, sir. Reuter was long dead, although the math was his. Cassavettis invented the Icarus field. PJ Smith turned it into a propulsion system,” Red insisted.
“Who’s he?” asked Zeiss.
“The lead scientist for Fortune Aerospace,” said a voice from the stage. The curtain rippled and the Professor of record wheeled out. “The pad won’t allow company classified information to be transmitted on the web. But she should have listed Dr. Reuter. Half credit.” He locked eyes with the girl in the blue flight suit. “Next.”
Red didn’t dare extend her empathy in a crowded room like this.
“Number ten. What do you do when a person with the override page, a Rex, exhibits unstable or hostile behavior? There were a lot of variations, and one person wrote War and Peace.”
Daniel stared at Red. “The only answer I will accept from my students has three letters: r-u-n. Anything else will get you and your rescuers dead. Delete the other answers.”
The sophomore repeating the class called out, “But the long one was hilarious. The four B’s: Beg them to see reason, Blind them, Break their arms, and . . .”
“If they still don’t listen, bury them,” asserted Red. “Once Rexes go rogue, you have to put them down; it’s the only safe way for everyone. That’s official UN policy.”
Several eyebrows went up at her attitude. The mils in the back row nudged each other.
The professor replied in a cold tone, “No. The first rule of this academy is preservation of life. While alliterative, that answer does not reflect the goals of this institution. No credit.”
So saying, Daniel spun his wheelchair back through the curtain and out of sight.
“Any other questions? Good. Read chapter thirteen for tomorrow and do the questions at the end.”
****
“You got an 80 percent,” said Sojiro to Red as they walked to Anti-terrorism together. “That’s great for a surprise quiz.”
“The professor sounded mad at me,” Red said, her feelings hurt.
“Nah. He’s a teddy bear. I’ve seen him explain the same idea five times to someone. This class isn’t a weed-out. He really wants everyone to succeed; this is information we have to know cold if we’re going to survive reading a page. You can’t look up the symptoms of neuralgic breakdown in the middle of an episode.”
She blew out a sigh. “Maybe it’s just me.”
“I hear you’re good at martial arts. This next class should be a snap.”
“I hated all those people watching me in Alien 101.”
“This one is small. They broke the class up into three groups because only so many people can fit in the dojo at once.”
“But I know Horvath’s going to bust my balls about not having a charged computer pad.”
Sojiro pointed at the BX. “They have rental pads. Grab one for the day.”
“Thanks. See you at the dojo!”
Five minutes after the bell, she came in, smiling smugly, with a fully charged computer. People were already seated, cross-legged on the mats. Today’s lesson, written on the board, was first aid for terrorist attacks.
The guard ‘Grunt-Monkey’ stopped her at the door, shouting, “Someone does not have respect for our time. How can this person show us respect?”
Half the class chorused back, “Sing us a song.”
Trina worked hard to suppress a smile.
Red blinked and jerked back. “I had to get a computer.”
“You had forty-seven-and-a-half hours of your time to do that. This is our time. The rule is the same for everyone. I was late once last semester. A song, if you will.”
In her panic, Red could only remember one song, from the animated mermaid movie. Sojiro clapped but everyone else booed her down. She almost cried, but wouldn’t give Trina the satisfaction.
“Sit,” said the instructor. “With the second infraction, you wear the bucket on your head. With the third, what happens, doorkeeper?”
“You get a new name tag, sir!” snapped Grunt-Monkey.
“Correct. Now, the rest of these freshmen have been donating their free time, three hours a week, to worthy causes. It’s a time-honored tradition to pay back the upper classmen who will be mentoring you and helping you through this maze of confusion. Since you are the only freshmen not to sign up by yesterday’s deadline, you get what’s left. You are the new cabana girl.”
“Pardon?”
“After Extreme Environments class, report to the pool area,” decreed Professor Horvath with a twinkle in her eye. “You will hand out dry towels, pick up soiled ones, and generally make yourself useful. You have until the end of the semester to complete your service hours—you’re nine behind.”
Face burning with shame, Red sat down in the back of the class and half-listened to the lecture on how to treat burns, chemical inhalation, and improvised explosive shrapnel. She had to concentrate on her breathing and didn’t use the rented computer once for notes.
Over lunch hour, she ran back to her room, cooked lunch, and read everything she could about where they were at in Extreme Environments. Herkemer was in her class and told her what to expect. “Show up early in your insulated swimwear. I checked, and the pool’s cold today.”
That meant she had to run back to the BX and buy a scuba wet-suit. The suit was bright red, and a little too big because they didn’t carry her size. Anything under 5’5” had to be special ordered. She did, however, manage to get a matching arm holster for her survival dagger.
Red still managed to line up pool-side with her roommate a minute before class started. “This, I can do,” she bragged.
“This class is just about surviving, chica,” Risa whispered, pointing to an older man in the lifeguard chair. Instructor Rogers was sipping a mug of coffee with the Navy Seal logo on the side. “The instructor is a hardcore mil. Someone complained about eating termites on the field trip and he made them do it twice. Smile and nod, got it? By the way, your books arrived. They’re on your bed. We don’t have enough shelf space for all of them. I don’t know why you didn’t just order e-books like everyone else.”
“You have paper books!”
“For engineering diagrams and tables. I need to lay them out when I’m doing the problems. They don’t show up worth spit on those little screens, and I hate flipping back and forth.”
Merrick, the crew-cut she’d met on the shooting range swaggered by, and sniffed, “I smell cherry.” He pointed to the bright red suit and snorted.
Risa hissed, “Water off your back. He’s a rescue diver who helps out.”
The mil grinned at Red. “Cherry, are you a fag hag or are you ready for a real man?”
“If I have to choose, then the first one,” said the new girl.
“The cherry says she wants to complete her impact training and get it out of the way,” Merrick said loudly. “How about it, sir? We still have the gear set up.”
Mr. Rogers nodded. “Better to get it out of the way now. We’ve got two others who haven’t passed yet. You know who you are. Suit up.”
“It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood,” joked one student.
Red and two others spent the next twenty minutes getting fitted with bio-monitors, strapping into the cockpit simulator, and loading the large fuselage into position. She video-logged the whole experience. Toby, the young man beside her, was terrified. “This is my third time. The first time, they put the dye in the water that turns violet when it comes in contact with urine. I thought something went wrong with the crash and I was bleeding to death.”
The tech performing their safety check said, “The second time, he opened the cargo hatch by mistake and dumped a hundred kilos of simulated spare parts on himself and another gentleman. The other candidate refused to test with him again. Uh . . . miss, I don’
t know if this dagger is legal.”
“The manual says I can carry anything that the astronauts can take, and this is UN regulation equipment for survival training,” explained Red. After she cited the regulation number, the tech shrugged and green-lighted the group. He put his own breathing apparatus into place as the speaker began to play the tape of a typical NASA landing.
They had to push the buttons on the control panel matching the voice-over instructions. Three minutes into the simulation, Red heard a thump. There wasn’t time to brace. Air pressure popped her ears, and cold water exploded into the fuselage. When the cockpit rolled over, she grabbed the seatbelt latch with her last coherent thought.
****
The emergency oxygen mask dropped lazily down from the overhead, dancing in front of her face by the dim red emergency light. It had only been seconds ago. She pulled the latch and floated free of the chair. She reached over and popped Toby’s belt next. The girl in the third seat was releasing bubbles when Red freed her.
Together, the three of them navigated the maze. Toby had practiced it often enough that he knew the route. They had to swim under a bent plane wing to escape. When they reached the surface to the cheering of their peers, Red gulped the air. She hadn’t practiced this part. Risa helped pull her gasping roommate out of the pool.
While she stared, exhausted, at the sky, someone threw a yellow football flag at her face. “Penalty. No helping the other candidates in this exercise.”
The man on the lifeguard chair said, “The other two pass. Cherry has to do it again. We can reschedule.”
“What’s wrong . . . with . . . today?” she asked.
The instructor shrugged. “Not a thing. You heard her: lock and load gentlemen. Switch out the divers and go again.”
This time, she was ready for the impact, the shock of the temperature drop, and the enfolding weight of the water. She reached the door in what she was sure was record time. As she swam though, someone in the dark grabbed her ass and pinched hard. Bubbles burst out as she tried to voice her indignation. Merrick leaned out into the daylight. Running low on air, she contented herself with an ‘accidental’ kick at the perpetrator.