The Bar Code Prophecy

by Suzanne Weyn

  “Not yet!” Katie insisted. “Not yet.”

  “All right.” Kayla turned to Grace. “We’re going to tell you about the prophecy. I promise. But there are equally important things you need to know first.”

  “Like what?” Grace asked. At this point she felt so far over her head that more complex questions seemed beside the point.

  “Global-1 has found out you’re adopted. They’re after your biological father and that’s why they’re looking for you.”

  Grace felt as though she were in a dream as she listened to Kayla speak. A bad dream. “Adopted? What are you talking about?”

  “You didn’t know?” Kayla asked.

  “I don’t believe you,” Grace murmured. She could feel Eric getting closer behind her, backing her with his presence, the rope now invisible between them. He put his hand gently but firmly on her arm, and she was grateful for the support. She hadn’t seen this coming and she felt almost faint from the impact.

  “I know this is messing with your head,” Kayla said to Grace. “You must be feeling the way I did when I discovered I was one of six clones and that I share genes with an actual bird.”

  Grace acknowledged the comparison with a nod, but she didn’t really feel this was the same. And just because Kayla had been through something similar didn’t mean this wasn’t weird. No, not weird. Earth-shattering.

  “So you’re saying that my family isn’t my family?” Grace asked in an unsteady voice.

  “Of course they’re your family,” Allyson spoke kindly. “But you don’t share their genetics. That’s all.”

  “Lots of people are adopted,” Eric added softly.

  “Yes, but they grow up knowing it. They don’t learn it abruptly from strangers at seventeen,” Grace objected, fighting the tears that were welling up. And then a sudden memory hit her, changing everything. “Wait a minute! Why are you lying to me?”

  “We’re not,” Kayla insisted. “You were adopted by your parents at birth.”

  “My parents have a DVD of my birth. I’ve seen it!”

  “I can’t explain that, Grace,” Kayla admitted.

  “All we know is what Decode headquarters has told us,” Mfumbe added.

  “I’m sorry to have dumped that on you so clumsily,” Kayla apologized. Mfumbe returned to the group and stood beside Kayla, resting his hand on her shoulder. “It didn’t occur to me that you might not know about your adoption,” she added. “I’m sorry.”

  Grace didn’t believe it. They had to be mistaken. “So, basically, you want me to take it on faith that I’m adopted, just because Decode headquarters — wherever and whoever that is — tells you so? Can you understand that I might need a little more proof than that?”

  “We have our sources and spies and computer hackers just like Global-1 does. We have to, in order to fight them,” Jack said. “The moment you got the bar code tattoo, your DNA flooded into the Global-1 data banks. Apparently they were just waiting for it. You’re the child of someone very important to them. They’ve been watching you and so have we, because we’re hacked into their newsfeed and we can follow whatever they’re following.”

  “I get it. Global-1 is evil because of all their surveillance. And then, wait, you go and do the same exact thing?” Grace was angry now, and it felt liberating. “So you sent someone to stalk me. Great. Whoever it was did a great job. I had no idea.”

  “It was me, Grace,” Eric said.

  His words hit her, battered her. For a moment, she didn’t have enough air in her lungs to speak.

  “You?” she stammered dryly when her voice returned. She’d never felt so foolish. “Wow,” she said with a note of sarcasm. “And all this time I thought we were friends.” And had hoped they were more than friends.

  “We are friends,” Eric insisted, but Grace felt too betrayed to believe him.

  “Whatever you say,” Grace muttered dismissively, turning her back on him. “Does anyone know who my biological parents are? Just out of curiosity.”

  “The file says you were born at GlobalHelix,” Katie revealed.

  Grace’s eyes darted to Kayla. “Am I a clone, too?”

  “Probably not,” Kayla replied. “My file revealed my clone status.”

  “There was no information like that in your file,” Mfumbe said.

  “Then why do they have a file on me?” Grace needed to know.

  “There’s a file on everybody,” Jack said. “The thing that made your file important was that it was deeply encrypted. Only the most top secret of all the Global-1 files get that.”

  “So you have no idea why?” Grace pressed.

  What else are you not telling me?

  “But we do know that someone has abducted your family — and on the same day you got the bar code tattoo,” Katie said with level calm.

  Grace realized that the news of being adopted had almost no impact on her, compared to this. Her family was the only family she’d ever known. It wasn’t a perfect family. But who had that? No one she knew.

  Why wouldn’t they have told her she was adopted? It was puzzling. But if that was a question, there were other things that weren’t at all questionable. Her family loved her — even pesky Kim and James — she was certain of that much. And at the moment it was what mattered. She loved her family, they loved her — and something had happened to them.

  But the cars. The cars were gone. If they’d been abducted, then why were the cars gone?

  “Do you know who’s responsible for whatever’s happened to them?” Grace asked.

  “It’s probably Global-1,” Mfumbe said. “Either they’ve abducted them or you’re family is on the run from them.”

  So it was still a possibility that they were on the run.

  Ultimately, it seemed that Grace’s instincts were as informed as Decode’s operation.

  “I should go back and tell the police all this,” Grace suggested, more to gauge their reaction than anything else.

  “Global-1 owns the police,” Kayla reminded her. “If Global-1 is behind this, the police will never solve your case. And I wouldn’t go into any foster home they assign for you, either.”

  A threat. It was almost too easy — everything that they said Global-1 would do became something that would happen to her if she didn’t cooperate with Decode.

  As if he realized this, Eric cautioned, “Kayla. We’re not going to let that happen to Grace.”

  Grace couldn’t stop herself. “As far as I’m concerned,” she told Eric, “you have nothing at all to do with what happens to me. Get it?” Before he could answer, she turned back to Kayla and asked, “Why, what would they do to me?” She figured she might as well have as full a picture as possible.

  “You might be the only one of your family they didn’t get,” Katie reminded her. “At any rate, they know you’re not with the rest of your family. They are probably looking for you, too.”

  “Ironic, isn’t it, that you were right there in the GlobalHelix building and they didn’t find you?” Jack commented.

  “I went home early. The only one I told was Terri, my replacement,” Grace recalled.

  “Did anyone else see you there?” Katie asked.

  “Lots of people work there,” Grace replied.

  “Who did you talk to?” Kayla asked.

  “The tattoo nurse, and Terri,” Grace recalled.

  “And Dr. Harriman,” Mfumbe said.

  “Yes — I already told you about him.” Grace turned to Kayla, who hadn’t been there for her first debriefing. “He’s a very strange man. For some reason he was upset that I’d gotten the bar code tattoo.”

  Grace could tell from the stunned expressions of everyone around her that she’d said something significant. But what was it?

  “You spoke to Jonathan Harriman, the inventor of the bar code tattoo?” Allyson reiterated. “Actually spoke to him? Does he know you?”

  “He always remembers my name,” Grace said. “But it’s not like we’ve ever had a real conversation. N
ot until today.”

  “Can you get in to talk to him tonight?” Kayla asked.

  “I have clearance,” Grace confirmed, unsure of where this was going. “Although they might have cancelled it.”

  “I wonder if he’s still there,” Allyson said. “It’s already six.”

  “I could call Terri,” Grace suggested. “The front desk is manned until eight and then it goes to voice mail. I trust her to tell me what’s going on.”

  “Here,” Jack said, pulling a phone out of his pocket. “This one’s secure.”

  She punched in the number for the GlobalHelix front desk and waited as the phone rang one, two, three, four, five times. “That’s odd,” Grace told the others. “We never let the phone ring more than three times.”

  Grace tried the call again, and this time let it sound seven times, still with no success. “Strange,” she remarked, giving up.

  “Someone should get out there and see what’s going on,” Katie suggested.

  But Grace wasn’t through. There were still things she wanted to know.

  “What about the prophecy?” Grace asked. “Can you tell me about that now?”

  “After we talk to Jonathan Harriman,” Katie replied. “He might have information for us about the prophecy, information about your family. If anyone knows, it’s him.”

  “Hey, Eric,” Jack said, turning toward the covered vehicle behind him and gripping the edge of the tarp covering it. “This might be a great chance to take the new swing-lo for a test run.”

  “This is it … my baby … the swing-lo,” Jack said as Eric and Grace climbed into the craft. “Of course, Allyson has made a lot of improvements since I showed her the first prototype a while ago. What a piece of junk that was, compared to this one.”

  “And this one is still not the end product, we hope,” Allyson added, joining them. “All these dials and switches have to go. I mean, it’s so old-fashioned.”

  “Hey, I was working with scrap metal out in the desert,” Jack defended his design. “I was using car parts. Give me a break.”

  Allyson smiled and pushed him playfully. “Just saying, we can get something a little slicker going here.”

  “We’re going to have to hit our mysterious business backer for more money before that can happen,” Jack replied.

  Grace kept her gaze on them and wouldn’t look at Eric, who sat beside her in the swing-lo’s driver’s seat. Her emotions about him were wavering between disappointment, anger, and feelings of betrayal; she’d been so sure he was paying attention to her solely because he returned her feelings. The idea that she was only his assignment — that otherwise he wouldn’t even have noticed her — was humiliating.

  When she looked at him, she felt embarrassed and furious. She couldn’t bear to meet his eyes. But she’d been told to ride in the swing-lo with him and meet the others at GlobalHelix. She didn’t feel she was in a position to say no. If this is what it would take to get her family and her life back, she couldn’t say no.

  Grace also held mixed emotions about traveling in the shiny metallic disc in front of her. It had no more than a twelve-foot diameter. At its center was a seat well where two people could sit side by side. In front was a very high-tech computer control panel.

  “It works on magnetic repulsion, and it’s going to be the next big thing,” Jack told Grace. “Eric here is my test pilot.”

  Jack gave her a quick history of the swing-lo. Although magnetic repulsion had been around for a while — high speed trains in Japan ran on it, as did the Bullit-Buses and Bullit-Trains in America and Europe — he had done something no one else had yet managed to do. He had amplified the force so that his swing-lo could actually fly.

  “This idea of personal flying vehicles isn’t new,” Allyson added. “Guys like the physicist Nikola Tesla were working on it back in the early nineteen hundreds. He even had funding from John Jacob Astor and everything. They predicted it was how people would commute, but they never made it work. Now, over a hundred years later, we think we’ve got it.”

  “It’s just a tiny bit unreliable,” Jack admitted with a quick grimace. “But we’re almost there.”

  “In what way unreliable?” Grace asked nervously.

  “You’ll be safe,” Allyson assured her. “We’re just playing around with the altitude.”

  “Put this on and make sure you’re belted in,” Eric said when they sat side by side in the vehicle. He handed her the same helmet she’d worn on the motorcycle.

  Kayla, Mfumbe, and Katie headed back to their own motorcycles, but Allyson and Jack remained, watching as Eric switched on a series of buttons and toggles. “This is prototype five,” Eric told Grace, speaking in a friendly tone, as though nothing was strained between them. “You should have seen the first one; it looked like a hunk of junk because Jack had only scrap metal to work with. Now with the funding, he can buy some decent lightweight materials.”

  “I should be out looking for my family, not fooling around with some spaceship,” Grace fretted. She knew there was supposed to be an element of fun in all this. But what right did she have to be on an adventure like this when they were missing?

  “We are searching for them,” Eric said. “We’re going to see what Jonathan Harriman can tell us. He said he would contact you, right? Well, there’s no way for him to do that now. So we have to do it for him. You’ll get around a lot faster with us than on your own. And if you relied on the Global-1 cops … believe me, you’d get nowhere.”

  Eric pushed another button and the swing-lo elevated abruptly to about five feet off the ground. Jack and Allyson came alongside. “We’ve made some big innovations, Eric. You can put the roof bubble up now and she goes a lot higher. There’s a gauge to the right that will tell your elevation above sea level. If you get the chance, see how high she’ll go.”

  “How high is too high?” Eric asked as he strapped on his helmet.

  “We don’t know,” Allyson admitted. “But the craft will start to shake when you’re too high.”

  “Oh, swell,” Eric quipped sarcastically.

  “Just bring it back down and the shimmying will stop,” Jack assured him. “But don’t keep it shaking too long.”

  “Why? What will happen?” Eric asked.

  “Just don’t do it and everything will be fine,” Jack insisted.

  With a nod to Jack and Allyson, Eric pushed the throttle forward and the swing-lo whirred forward, traveling toward the wide garage door from which they had entered. Grace gripped her seat anxiously. She found it strange to be traveling so close to the ground, and yet not be touching the earth.

  The garage door had been opened, and now the craft entered. Immediately the doors shut and the elevator car began traveling upward. When it bumped to a stop, the door on the opposite side opened. Eric turned on headlights that illuminated the area around them. Instead of using the narrow alley the motorcycle had come down on the trip in, Eric steered to the left and came out into a gated children’s playground.

  “Going up,” Eric warned as the swing-lo lifted above the fence and sailed over it. “Jack’s big invention is a mechanism that amplifies the magnetic repulsion coming from the earth many times over,” he explained. “It’s a totally clean fuel, and the thing can really fly.”

  Grace nodded as she peered over the side. As long as they were talking about the machine, she could bear the sound of his voice. But that was about it. They were flying at about ten feet in the air, still needing to stay to the roadways rather than flying above buildings. “We’re heading down again,” Eric reported. “If I stay close to the road, people just think this a funky new car, some kind of experimental hybrid. They don’t even notice that the thing isn’t actually on the ground, especially now that it’s dark.”

  They traveled toward GlobalHelix without talking any further. At one point Grace spied Mfumbe, Kayla, and Katie riding ahead of them. Eric flew up and buzzed them from above before speeding past.

  After twenty minutes, they turned t
he corner toward GlobalHelix. Grace looked at Eric directly for the first time since learning the truth about their relationship.

  “What?” he asked.

  “I didn’t say anything,” she pointed out.

  “That scowl on your face did, though,” Eric countered. “What’s wrong? Is my driving making you sick?”

  “No,” Grace replied. “You lied to me. Why didn’t you tell me what was going on?”

  “I wanted to, Grace, but I couldn’t. I wouldn’t have been doing my job if I had. You can understand that, can’t you?”

  “Yes. You were just doing your job. How could I not understand that?” Grace replied. “Still … I thought we were friends.”

  “We are friends,” Eric insisted as he slowed the swing-lo in front of the Global-1 headquarters. “I’m going over this gate so I can park the swing-lo inside, then your code will get us in the front door.”

  “If it works,” Grace said.

  “Yeah. If it works.”

  Once more the swing-lo rose and easily sailed over the wall before descending on the lawn outside the headquarters. Low amber lights glowed from the lobby. There was no sign of activity inside. They left the craft stashed behind some forsythia bushes and headed for the front entrance.

  Grace ran her new bar code tattoo across the front door scanner.

  ACCESS DENIED.

  “Maybe it’s too soon. I’ll try the eye scan.”

  ACCESS DENIED.

  “You’ve been wiped clean. They’re not admitting you anymore. Can you think of another way in?”

  “There’s a door on the roof that isn’t scanner protected, but it’s usually locked.”

  Eric’s eyes darted to the swing-lo and back to Grace. “Want to try it?”

  “Can it go that high?”

  “We’ll find out.”

  Grace gazed up at the huge spiral sculpture on the roof. Looking up was vastly preferable to looking down. She had never been frightened of heights, but as the aircraft rose, it began to shimmy, first just slightly. But the higher they went, the more violent the shaking became.