“Sounds good,” Kendra says nodding her head, not needing to see the map.
“We can check out first, leave our bags and car at the hotel, and walk over to rent the bikes. It’s not too far from here,” Beau says, putting the plan together.
“Should we put the bags in the car?” Kendra asks.
“We can leave them with the hotel concierge for a few hours,” Beau answers.
The waitress returns and takes their order. Both repeat their previous day’s selections. The sun beams through a window in the waffle house, warming the place. The days are getting longer and warmer.
After breakfast, Beau and Kendra return to their hotel room, where they spend their last rented hour of room time relaxing, taking in the view and the sunlight, and slowly packing their bags. Having only been in the city two nights, there isn’t much to pack. As planned, they check out just before noon, leaving their bags with the concierge. Keeping their jackets and the metal plate with them, they walk up to Georgia and over to Denman, where they rent a few bicycles.
They roll down Denman and onto the trail that leads into Stanley Park. The day remains cool but sunny and beautiful. They’re glad they waited. They enter the park and wind their bikes around its seawall, past Deadman’s Island and Brockton Point, stopping briefly at Legends of the Moon gift shop to get a drink and use the facilities. A couple of young Chinese students offer to take a picture of Beau and Kendra together in front of the Totem poles. They happily agree to it and thank them for doing it. They get back on their bikes and back on the trail. The trail seriously narrows at one point as it passes tightly between massive trees and the rocky shoreline. The north side of the park is cold; it doesn’t get any direct sunlight for much of the year. A couple passes them on a tandem bike.
“That’s what we should have rented,” Kendra tells Beau after they pass.
“They actually had those at the shop where we got these bikes,” he says; “I just didn’t tell you because I thought you’d want to rent one.”
“Why?” Kendra asks; “don’t you want to ride on one?”
“Not really,” Beau answers; “I think it’s one of those things that looks more fun than it actually is. I’m sure I’d be doing all the pedaling anyway.”
“Oh, come on! It might be fun,” Kendra says.
“We couldn’t look at each other like we are now,” Beau tells her. “Instead, you’d be looking at my sweaty back.”
“Good point,” Kendra replies.
They ride underneath Lions Gate Bridge and around to the western edge of the park, where the sun shines. It’s warmer and more scenic as the seawall passes between large rock walls and the water. They stop again at Siwash Rock, where the park meets its westernmost edge, one of most scenic points for a picture. It’s sunny. Beau takes a few pictures of Kendra alone, and one of them together setting the camera on his bicycle seat with a mini tripod and using a self-timer to get the shot.
“It’s so beautiful here,” Kendra tells Beau as they stand on the edge of the seawall looking out at five ocean-liners anchored way out on the bay. “I can see why he likes it here,” she adds.
“Who?” Beau asks.
“Time Bender,” she answers.
“Oh, I almost forgot about him,” Beau replies; “speaking of which, we’d better get back on the tail if we’re going to find the stone.”
They roll past Third Beach and around the final edge of the park, along English Bay, Second Beach, and over to Lost Lagoon. Their excitement rises as they near the Lagoon. The area is lush and green with huge, tropical-like plants and Sakura trees in bloom all along its edge. They sit on a bench at the lagoon’s edge.
“Why do you think he chose this place?” Kendra asks.
“It’s untouched, especially around the stone,” Beau answers; “but still conveniently close to the city. It was a wise choice.”
They lock their bikes to a post near the northern tip of the lagoon. They then find the trail leading into the trees, though again this poses a real task for Beau; it’s neither clearly marked nor well-trodden, at least not in the year 2014. They follow the path, just as Cedric’s message tells them to. They come to the large tree in the center of the path, described as a stump in the message; a site now sacred to them. They follow the path around the tree and Beau spots the stone.
“That’s it,” he tells Kendra pointing to it.
“Are you sure?” she asks. “It doesn’t look like the moon to me.”
“It was about to rain and I wasn’t paying as close attention then, but I’m pretty sure,” Beau answers as he takes pictures of the entire area with his phone, getting a lot of shots of the rock.
“I still don’t think we should have put our names on the plate,” Kendra says again. “What if someone else finds it?” she asks.
“They won’t,” Beau answers; “and we already know that they won’t. Remember?”
“This moment seems to be too real to be real,” she tells Beau, now nervous about leaving the plate beneath the stone.
Beau kneels in front of the stone, then looks around to see if anyone is watching him. Kendra makes fists with her hands to release tension. Beau takes the plate and the plastic box he bought to house it from his pocket. He slides the plate into the box and seals it up. He overturns the stone. Sure enough, the coin he left from the NeoTech tradeshow sits undisturbed on the ground beneath it. He photographs it. Then, as instructed, he removes the coin from its spot and digs a slightly deeper hole for the plate. Having not thought to bring a tool, he has to use a sharp rock to dig the hole. When the hole is finally deep enough, he places the plastic box with the plate into it, photographs it, and buries it with the displaced soil. Carefully, he places the coin exactly where and how it was found, takes another picture of it, then replaces the stone, also exactly where and how it was found. He takes one more picture for comparison and looks up at Kendra, who is watching intensely.
“Now we just have to wait fifty-five years,” Beau tells Kendra laughing.
“Or he could be replying right now,” Kendra responds.
Part 5: August 2, 2069
Vancouver BC
There’s a turning point in every summer, or a point when you realize you’ve crossed the summer’s summit and are now headed down the other side. It affects the mind much like a mid-life crisis, only on a smaller scale, forcing us to view time from a new angle.
Cedric sits just barely beyond the peak of 2069, on a bench below a bell tower in the center of the campus quad. It‘s August now and the school is once again showing signs of life. Throw in the fact that it‘s a sunny Friday and you can see why; students are laughing, bicycling, tossing frisbees, reading, and doing things students do.
Cedric’s face is planted in his hands though, and he’s completely oblivious to his surroundings. There are laser generated images orbiting around his head but he seems to have lost interest them. The bell tower chimes ten o‘clock. He looks up for a second, then back down.
Across campus, Dr. Ridpath sits in a room with a panel of three professors, also hearing the distant chimes of the clock tower. They all check the time and look at each other. The room is silent. The three panel members look at Dr. Ridpath, who shrugs and looks again at the clock, then down.
Meanwhile, a little girl stands on the sidewalk beside Cedric. His floating images have caught her eye. With an eye for eccentricities she stands mesmerized, watching each image rotate by. Disobeying everything she’d been taught, but with a mature sense of sizing people up, the girl speaks to Cedric.
“That looks hard,” she says.
Surprised, Cedric looks up and notices the girl for the first time. He smiles.
“It isn’t really,” he tells her. “It’s just a lot of simple things bunched together, which makes it look hard.”
“Is it for school?” the girl asks.
“Yes,” Cedric answers. “I have to show this stuff to my teachers. But you know something?”
“What?” the girl asks
.
“I’m late,” Cedric says. “In fact, when that clock tower just rang, I was supposed to start my meeting with them.”
“Uh-oh, she says,” eyes widening, “are you gonna get in trouble?”
“Maybe,” he answers with a smile.
“Aren’t you worried about it?” she asks.
“I am, but I’m not ready to meet them,” Cedric answers. “I guess I’m worried about other things more,” he adds. “Besides, they really seem to like my project. They might even send me to the moon to finish it.”
“Wow, I’ve never been to the moon,” the girl comments with a big smile and eyes wide open, gesturing cutely with her arms as she speaks.
“Neither have I,” Cedric tells her.
The girl runs off without saying anything, like kids do, into her frivolous day, taking in every turn, every face, and every crack in the sidewalk. What impact her run in with Cedric will have on her impressionable young mind, if any, will never be known.
For Cedric, nonetheless, it’s refreshing to have had her come along, and to have someone show a raw interest in his work, regardless of age. He gets up, tucks his communication devices away and slowly walks away from the campus.
“He’s had personal issues this summer,” Dr. Ridpath tells the panel as they stare at him. One of them shakes his head in dismay.
Moonliner 5:02
There’s a DOT-5 News poster on the Skytrain car, introducing the new weekend anchor, Neda Novell. It sits right next to a Moonliner ad. The train pulls away from University and rapidly zips downtown. It glides swiftly beneath the Granville Bridge and into English Bay station, where it comes to a stop as a sexy woman’s voice announces the station. Cedric gets off.
There’s a massive clock in the shape of a pendulum hanging from under the bridge, almost all the way to the platform. It reads 10:26 a.m. Cedric takes the escalator down to the street level. A little late morning fog remains over the bay. You can smell the ocean air in the breeze. It’s cooler but beginning to warm up again. It feels good to be there, and to be alive, a feeling he hasn’t felt in a little while.
He walks along the waterline, letting the mindless stroll clear his busy brain. People are already gathering, dotting the beaches. At this latitude, summer’s window doesn’t stay open as long. Beach-goers are well aware of this and grab as much sun as they can, while they can. Then faintly, Cedric again hears a steel drum way off in the distance. He smiles, again finding it is so soothing. Slowly, he walks in the direction of the sound, almost as if he were under hypnotic suggestion.
He sits again in the distance, listening to the music and staring into the endless blue sky with his sunglasses on. His incoming call indicator blinks, but he doesn’t respond. Seconds later, his incoming message indicator blinks, then flashes a new message from Lennox. Cedric listens to the message.
“I’ll be back late Saturday night. Let’s grab a game of golf on Sunday,” Lennox is heard saying. “Anything under the stone?” he asks at the tail of his message.
The grin on Cedric’s face fades, knowing he hasn’t been back to the stone.
“Hey, it’s you again,” the drummer yells to Cedric from across the lawn, now between sets and just sitting on a blanket with what appears to be her boyfriend. They have a small radio on the blanket beside them, playing some smooth jazz. “Come over here and talk to us,” she yells, motioning him in their direction.
Cedric gets up and walks over to them. He sits on a concrete barrier beneath a large Magnolia tree, next to their blanket.
“Any luck with your problem,” the drummer asks Cedric, remembering his aura.
“Not really, no,” he answers.
“I’m Opal and this is Piper,” she says.
“I’m Cedric,” extending his hand. They do a quick slide and fist hand-gesture popular with the youth. A low flying Skybus floats over their heads, then over the shimmering water. They all look up, amazed at the detail they can make out as it glides so low above the horizon.
“By the way,” Cedric says, “the drumming sounds awesome. It’s nice to listen to you play.”
“Thanks,” Opal says in return.
“So Cedric, how do you spend your time?” Piper asks in a warm tone.
“Well, I’m kind of into lasers, and optic communications,” Cedric answers. “How about you?” he goes on to ask Piper.
“Camping mostly;” Piper answers, “the great outdoors.”
A lull in the conversation shifts into a relaxing moment as a tenor sax solo with a nice, clear contrabass background fade into brushes on a soft crash cymbal, then silence.
“That was Mic 55 with She’s Sagittarius and you’re listening to smooth jazz on the hydrogen line,” a DJ softly says.
News then comes over the radio.
“A lunar-based radio telescope has picked up a signal from beyond our solar system. The signal originated 42.3 light hours from Earth, leading NASA officials to believe that it came from Voyager One; the first probe to leave the solar system, launched in 1977. Voyager One left our solar system in 2012 and continues to hurtle away from us at a rate of 520 million kilometers per year.”
Opal, Piper, & Cedric all listen closely to the news report.
“The signal, though far too faint to be clear, seems to have come from Voyager’s Plasma Wave Subsystem, which stopped functioning over 25 years ago when Voyager’s atomic engines finally shut down. Engineers at NASA are pleasantly baffled by the transmission, and add that even though the signal itself cannot be understood, it pinpoints the precise location of Voyager as it continues to race through inter-stellar space. They add that the signal may have originated elsewhere, then bounced back to Earth via Voyager, but all largely consider such a scenario to be extremely less likely given the precision required to aim the transmission.”
The radio then goes into a commercial.
“Have you done your back to school shopping? What is it that you need to get the school year off to a great start? Clothes? School supplies?”
“Hey, you’re into laser-com,” Piper says to Cedric. “What do you think of that signal? Where do you think it originated?”
“I don’t know,” Cedric answers. “What if it’s extraterrestrial?” Cedric asks. “Would you believe it?”
“I might, but my first thought is to doubt it,” Piper answers.
“Really?” Cedric responds.
“I’d believe it,” Opal jumps in to say; “I think it was more than likely alien.”
“What do you think they were trying to say in the signal?” Cedric asks.
“I don’t know. Maybe they were warning us of something,” she answers.
“Of an impending invasion,” Piper says with a smirk.
“Or giving us cures to cancers and terminal illnesses,” Opal adds.
“Maybe it was the last distress call from a dying planet?” Cedric adds to keep the conversation interesting; “we just couldn’t understand it.”
“Oh those poor people, or whatever they are,” Opal says.
“Or what if it didn’t come from another planet, but from another time, like the future,” Cedric asks to get their thoughts on the matter.
“Wild concept,” Piper replies. “How would you know for sure the message was from the future?”
“Good question,” Cedric says lifting his eyebrows.
Piper points out an older man also sitting near them on a concrete barrier, wearing a fedora. His back is mostly to them and he appears to be listening to their conversation.
Cedric is disillusioned by the guy, who seems to have shown up out of nowhere. Who is he? The guy, however, just gets up and walks away.
After a lengthy conversation with Piper and Opal, Cedric finally decides to excuse himself and get back home.
Moonliner 5:03
Night gradually falls as Cedric works his way home. Two weeks’ time has absorbed a lot of the initial shock of the crash, but the loss still sits as heavily in his chest as the day Nikki’s shuttle went dow
n. It keeps him away from home, often reluctant to return to its emptiness; its echoes.
Deciding to walk off a lot of his excess energy as opposed to drinking it off, tonight Cedric walks along the bay and through the park before climbing onto the skyway; an elevated greenbelt that connects the entire valley. He takes almost two hours getting home.
It’s a sticky night and people aren’t sleeping well, expressed best by the repeated cries of a neighbor’s baby. A dog howls in the distance, causing Cedric to drift back to the afternoon of his experiment, when he first succeeded in sending the message back in time, back to himself. He reflects deeply on that afternoon, the sequence of events, and his transmissions.
The quantum reality is that time is not as standardized as we’ve been led to believe. It’s relative to space, and therefore subject to a proximity factor. Space we know is capable of warping, and thus so it time.
Cedric sits on his balcony gazing over his neighborhood, too tired from his day to be focused on anything. He lets himself sink into a mindless stupor, and allows his vision to blur to clear his thoughts. A bedroom light from one of the several high-rise apartment buildings in the neighborhood catches his eye. It’s blinking on and off. Some blinks are long and others are short, almost as if the blinking were orchestrated. Cedric puts his sunglasses on to give Phaedra a look.
“Can you see the blinking window?” he asks her.
Moonliner: No Stone Unturned Page 17