Stasis (Book 1.1): Beta

by E. W. Osborne

  As with all manual overrides, the vehicle wouldn’t resume the programmed journey until an incident report was filed. She only had a few minutes.

  The witness reports conflicted greatly until this point. Some claimed she had taken over the bus because of debris in the road. Others claimed she screamed out in a foreign language, veering this way and that in an effort to tip over the bus. One woman said the driver was perfectly calm during the whole ordeal while another claimed Caroline was agitated, that he’d feared for his life the moment he stepped foot on the bus. But every witness recounted the next few moments with an uncanny accuracy.

  Caroline stood and opened the small door to her driver’s seat. With abnormal strength for such a small frame, she tore the small partition apart and wedged it into the front doorway, blocking any quick exit. She leaned over the broken section to grab a heavy metal thermos from the footwell. A successive concussion of blows to the dash shattered the plastic. A few frozen passengers fled from the back exit but lingered outside on the highway.

  With a thick shard in her hand, Caroline calmly stalked down the narrow aisle. The well-fed man leapt away from her path, stumbling backward into a young woman as he retreated. The pair tumbled down the stairs and outside. They were the last to make it out before she attacked. Eight remained inside.

  Like a dog herding sheep, Caroline forced the remaining passengers up the spiral staircase to the top. This created a bottleneck as the upstairs group surged downward, unaware the danger was below. With a wide arc, Caroline slashed at the closest person, an older woman. She managed to deflect the first blow with her bag but caught the upswing across the face. Out of shock and horror, the gray-haired woman clutched her face and fainted. She slid down two stairs before her foot hooked on the railing, snagging and trapping her in an awkward position.

  Caroline used her ribcage as a step as she lunged for the next person in line. The plastic shard sank deep into a young boy’s calf. His scream drowned out the rest of the cries inside. The shout shifted the panicked group, their surge downward immediately retreating. Despite the wound, the boy jumped out of her grasp and made it back to the top level. The plastic shard was either pulled or knocked free in the scramble. Either way, it bounced down the stairs and back into Caroline’s hands.

  A growing crowd had gathered around the bus by the time she reached the upper deck. The remaining passengers pressed against the back as her gaze swung toward them. She switched the plastic weapon to the other hand and casually wiped the slippery blood across her stomach.

  A mother dangled her infant daughter from an upper emergency window she’d managed to open. A small group organized below, jostling and shouting up. “Let her go!” “I’ve got her!” The child wriggled and cried as her mother leaned as far over as she could to minimize the drop.

  Moments after the child was safely caught below, Caroline took two steps forward. The passengers pressed back as if repelled by her advance, shoving the unbalanced mother out. For the first time, the screams from outside the bus were louder than the ones inside.

  Instinctively, Caroline knew her time was limited.

  She was so intent on separating and cornering one of the people in front of her, she’d left her back vulnerable. A brave man from outside had crept up the stairs undetected and unprepared. Something tipped her off, a glance from one of the passengers or a sound she didn’t consciously register.

  Caroline spun, the full weight of his attack deflected. Knocked off balance but still on her feet, it took her only a second to react. A looping slash brought the plastic shard into the man’s neck. The vicious blow threw him to his knees. He slumped into a seat and slid to the floor in shock. With a mystified expression, he probed the foreign object lodged in his flesh until consciousness faded away.

  As if nothing had happened, Caroline stepped over his body and took a seat at the very front of the bus. She stared at the briskly moving southbound traffic through hooded eyes.

  When the surviving passengers crept behind her and down the stairs, she didn’t move. When the police arrived, shouting instructions with weapons aimed at her chest, she didn’t react. When they slammed her to the floor of the bus and restrained her, she didn’t resist.

  After a rare flash of violence, Caroline was completely catatonic.

  ***

  Dr. Penelope Mercier wandered the halls of the hospital. She’d seen her last patient, caught up on paperwork, and even got around to reorganizing her desk before reluctantly putting on her coat and leaving for the night. She locked the door, slung her purse over one shoulder, and took a deep breath. Instead of jogging down the three flights of stairs to the left of her office, she’d turned right through the ward. Then a left, then another. With a plodding step, she walked further away from the parked car that’d take her home to her husband and baby.

  While this aimless walking wasn’t a regular occurrence, it wasn’t exactly rare either. In the five years she’d worked at San Francisco General Hospital, she’d covered every square inch of the campus. She told herself it was a form of meditation, not avoidance.

  The bracelet on her wrist vibrated, the device detecting she was still in the building. She stopped dead in her tracks.

  Psych. Emerg.

  Adrenaline thrumming, Penelope jogged into the psychiatric emergency department ready for anything. Even so, the scene she found rocked her back a few steps. It’d been a long time since she’d been called down for an emergency consult. The frequent fliers and other emergency cases had already choked the department, filling all but two of the forty beds. Dozens of police spilled into the wide space, corralling and interviewing bloodied patients.

  “I’m glad you’re here,” a voice said from behind. Penelope instantly recognized Cameron Richards’ voice and turned. He had more gray at the temples than when they first met but still looked fifteen years younger than his middle-age. Five years they’d been working under the same roof yet she’d only seen him from a distance or on the opposite side of a board room table.

  “I bet you are, Dr. Richards,” she replied wryly. “Where do you need me?”

  “Always the humble one,” he replied without much humor.

  Penelope wasn’t in the mood to trip down memory lane. She put on her game face, nodding to the controlled chaos around them. “What’s happened then?”

  Cameron guided her with a hand to the elbow, his voice dropping as they walked. “A bus driver manually took control in the middle of a highway and attempted to crash with a load of passengers inside. After that didn’t work, she used whatever she could to attack the closest passengers.”

  She pressed her lips together. The blood on everyone’s shocked faces seemed more gruesome knowing it’d been spilled by anger, not accident. “Right, so you need a psych eval on the…”

  “Yes and…” Cameron trailed off, rubbing the back of his neck uncomfortably. Penelope had seen him in dozens of stressful situations, some far more dire than this. This one subtle gesture was enough to put her on edge.

  “What is it?”

  Cameron held her with his hard, crystal blue eyes. “She didn’t stop until she knew she’d killed someone. Afterward, she apparently sat down and allowed police to arrest her. She… I’ve…” He cleared his throat and straightened. “The patient is almost catatonic.”

  Penelope followed his gaze, his eyes flicking to a curtained off area separate from the rest of the ward. Three police officers stood outside, tense and nervous.

  “Almost?”

  “You have to see it for yourself.”

  Like rubbing down goosebumps, Penelope tried to shake her apprehension as they walked to the end of the hall. You haven’t been in the ED for a while, that’s all, she tried to tell herself. But she couldn’t deny there was an air in the place, a sense that had her instincts begging to run.

  Cameron nodded to the armed police officers and pulled back the curtain.

  A middle-aged woman sat upright on the hospital bed, legs ramrod straight
in front of her. Blood matted her thin hair down in sections, a light trickle dried down the center of her face. She didn’t react in any way as the two doctors entered, her eyes glassy and unfocused. She looked almost serene.

  Penelope noticed he deliberately didn’t look at the patient, in fact, he made every excuse he could not to. With chart in hand, he rattled through what they knew.

  “Aside from a few bruises, the patient appears to be uninjured. We ran a full screen and it came back clean. The patient is unresponsive to human interaction and remains in this upright position. The patient…”

  “What’s her name?” Penelope asked softly as she circled the bed.

  The question caught Cameron off guard. “Uh, Ely, Caroline,” he read from the front of the chart. “Single, no dependents. Lives in a singles unit block across the bay in Oakland.”

  “Great. Hello, Caroline. My name is Dr. Mercier, it’s good to meet you.” Penelope noted no response from the patient, but felt better using the woman’s name. A person with a name was easier to handle than a breathing corpse. “Sorry to interrupt,” she said to Cameron without looking. “Please continue.”

  He rattled through the standard tests and exams they’d performed on the bus driver in the emergency room before transferring her to the emergency psych unit. Cameron’s experience was in psychiatric, but with his extensive experience as a combat medic, was better utilized there.

  “So Ms. Ely is unresponsive,” Penelope mumbled again, running through her mental catalog of tests and diagnoses.

  “Well, not exactly.” Cameron walked to the opposite side of the bed and placed a hand on the patient’s shoulder. “If I were to push her back, she would resist.” He demonstrated by pushing with moderate strength. Although he was stronger, the patient strained to remain upright, even going so far as to lifting her legs as leverage. “But if I were to ask… Ms. Ely, could you please lay back for me?” The woman didn’t follow the order directly, but did allow herself to be lowered to a prone position.

  Penelope leaned over the woman directly into her line of sight, yet noticed no change. She plucked a mini-flashlight from her pocket and tested the dilation of the pupils and found none. Her gaze snapped up to Cameron who anticipated her question.

  “We’re waiting for a space to clear up and we’ll give her a full body scan.”

  Unresponsive pupils usually indicated an issue with the brain. Until those results came in, she didn’t feel confident saying the patient’s behavior was due to a psychotic episode. She nodded outside and only spoke when they were out of earshot of the police.

  “Okay, then. I’ll wait for those results to come back and in the meantime, help with the witnesses.”

  The earnest look hadn’t disappeared from Cameron’s face. “That’s good and all, but just, wait a minute. I want to show you something.” He watched the seconds tick by on his wristband, his other hand holding her arm. Just as she was about to speak, he nodded back to the catatonic patient. “Go check on her now.”

  Penelope’s brow wrinkled but she followed his command. She pulled the curtain apart with one hand to peer inside and found Caroline Ely sitting straight up again, as if she’d never been moved. Although Penelope stood directly in front of her, there was no recognition or response on her face. Even her blinking seemed deliberate and thoughtful, as if she had to remember to perform the function every few seconds. Cameron’s voice at her back caused her to jump.

  “It’s strange, right? I’m not the only one thinking that?”

  Heart thumping in her chest, Penelope nodded. “It’s unique.”

  With a strong grip, Cameron pulled her from the curtain and away from anyone else. He leaned in close, his voice low and shaky. “That’s just it. It’s not unique. There are three more just like her waiting in the ED for beds over here. Same symptoms, same violent outbursts, same semi-responsive state.”

  For the first time, Penelope thought about Joey and Anna at home. “Terrorism?”

  Cameron shook his head and stared down the ward. He’d spent a great deal of time in combat positions, seen terrorism up close. “If it is, it’s nothing we’ve seen before. Every person is vastly different in age, race, socio-economic position. I don’t know what this is.”

  Penelope’s chest tightened again. If any other doctor had responded in the same way, she would’ve chalked it up to dramatics. But she knew Cameron. He wasn’t the sort who panicked even in times where he probably should’ve. If this had him rattled, she had a reason to worry.

  “Okay, let me give home a call and let Joey know I’ll be late,” she said.

  The skin around Cameron’s eyes tightened as the doors swung open at the end of the ward. A swarm of nurses escorted the bed toward them. The patient, a young man sitting straight up, swayed gently from side to side with the movement. As the bed swung around and back into a bay opposite Ms. Ely, the boy’s gaze swept across the pair of doctors.

  Penelope suppressed a shiver, wondering at her own response. “I’ll call home and meet you there.”

  Rochester, NY

  May 4th

  Neil never liked the word paranoid. Or weird. Or out-of-date. Mostly because those words were usually hurled at him as insults. Over the years, he found the people who used them tended to miss the point completely. He wasn’t paranoid but cautious. Weird to them was unique to him and as for out-of-date? There were a lot of thing in modern society he was glad he didn’t participate in.

  Adolescence was difficult, but really, who ever looks back on their teenage years and thinks, That was easy! Let’s do it again! Even at a young age, Neil knew he was lucky to have supportive parents and a core group of friends. He didn’t grow up rich or poor, popular or rejected. His only quirk was a fascination with old technology over new. All in all, Neil considered himself an average guy with an unremarkable life. That’s why it took so long for him to understand what he found was significant. Important things never happened to him.

  When he was bored, Neil liked to perform his own version of digital exploration. The internet was cluttered with millions of discarded and abandoned sites, still hosted yet… shelved. He’d frequently create a string of words and search for the matching domain. If he managed to find something, most of the time it hadn’t been updated in forever. When he really didn’t feel like studying, he’d look backwards in time, pulling up screenshots of what the site looked like before he’d even been born. With wars to fight, people to feed, and other real life issues to take care, cyberspace had turned into a bit of a junkyard. But treasure can hide in trash.

  Rejecting the majority of modern technology, Neil was considered a bit of a Luddite compared to his friends and others his own age. He loved to lurk in the past, back in a time when technology felt wild and imaginative, not done simply because it could be. So one night, when he should’ve been studying, Neil was doing just that… tripping through time.

  He was so bored he could no longer entirely rely on his own imagination, he began to pluck words from around his room, his notes, other phrases online.

  RecursionExcursion.com.

  ILikeMints.com

  He rifled through his notes and picked two words at random. Stasis homonym. Project homonym. Stasis project. Project stasis.

  Finally, a real site appeared. The minimalist layout was in stark contrast to modern sites, so it made sense Neil was immediately drawn to it. A simple gray background, a single word, and a countdown. Days, hours, minutes, seconds.

  He turned off his music with a quick command and watched the counter tick down. Nothing else on the page opened. Nothing popped up or started playing. The word on the screen didn’t take him anywhere when he tapped on it. As far as he could tell, this was still a live site, not abandoned.

  Neil tilted his tablet this way and that, thinking maybe he could see a hidden watermark tucked away in the grayness, but came up empty. Frustrated but not ready to close it, he kept the page open and continued avoiding his work. He told himself the design was what k
ept pulling him back to the page. The clean lines, strange font, and mysterious ticker. Deep down he felt a deeper pull, but ignored it. For several minutes, he watched the number run down, closer and closer to… what?

  When he tried to copy and send the link to a few friends, it wouldn’t send.

  “That’s weird,” he muttered, deciding it wasn’t important enough to type out the entire address by hand. Most of them would just make fun of him for it anyway. Neil and his internet archeology. Instead, he pounded his fist three times on the wall above his desk. A faint voice replied.

  “What?”

  “You awake?”

  A loud groan followed by the familiar squeak of her door brought his friend Maggie into the room. Her light disheveled hair disappeared into the neck of her sweatshirt, hastily pulled on as she stumbled over. With another grunt, she padded her way across his cluttered floor and curled up on his bed.

  “Your sheets smell,” she mumbled from under the blanket.

  “I’m not surprised. I don’t think I’ve washed them since last semester,” he replied.

  “Ew,” she said, making no attempt to move. Clearly not disgusted enough.

  He chuckled at the lump on his bed and leaned back, chair squeaking. “While I appreciate you rushing over here when I call, aren’t you at all curious why I knocked?”

  Two hands appeared, pulling the top of the blanket down to reveal her red-ringed eyes. “I was hoping you were going to put me out of my misery.”

  A twinge of guilt deflated him slightly. He hadn’t even thought about letting her sleep. “What time did you get in? What time is it now, for that matter?” he frowned, checking the time.

  “I don’t even know, to both counts. Organic Chem is gonna kill me, though. Of that, I’m positive.” She yawned and propped herself up to a semi-sitting position. “What did you want to show me?”