Celeste put her latte down and unzipped her suitcase. “Try him again.” She stuffed her Economist magazine into her carry-on.
“I just did, he’s not answering.” Jess dialed her father’s number anyway. They’d arrived at the airport the previous evening, staying at the Hilton next door. One ring, then two, then to voice mail. She clicked off and dropped the phone into her purse.
Ben was supposed to meet them at the Hilton last night, but he called to say he would arrive in the morning. Then he sent a text and email saying he’d meet them in the International Terminal food court. Now he wasn’t answering his calls or messages.
“Maybe he’s at the gate,” Celeste suggested, standing to knock the crumbs of her croissant breakfast off her blouse and jeans.
A man pushing a baby stroller eyed Jess and Celeste. He wanted their seats. Celeste smiled at the man. “Yes, we’re leaving.” She turned to her daughter. “Let’s go.”
Jess relented, grabbed her carry-on, and followed. A week ago, she’d left most of her things at a friend’s house in Rome, saying she’d call when she knew where she was headed. After nearly a year in Italy, all she was carrying was one small carry-on.
“Grazie, grazie,” said the man with the stroller, angling in behind them to get the seats.
Celeste pointed down a hallway to their right, past the Gucci store, to the C concourse. “This way.”
Jess’s phone buzzed in her purse. She fished it out right away. Not her father: a message from Giovanni: “If you stay in Italy for any reason, feel free to come back.” Even in her deepening frustration, she managed a small grin.
“I’m sure Ben’s on his way,” Celeste said as they walked down the concourse, passing gate C1. “Your father and I may have—”
Jess’s phone rang. She checked the screen. “It’s him.” She pushed the answer button. “Dad, where are you?”
Ben Rollins cringed. He knew his daughter wasn’t going to like this. “I’m on the next flight, right behind you. I’m sorry, honey. Fixing the data is taking longer than we thought.”
He put one hand over the receiver. “How much time, Roger? What do you think, another hour?”
Sitting in the growing nest of papers on Ben’s hotel bed, his student nodded. “Maybe two, tops. You can be out of here by noon.”
Ben took his hand off the receiver. “Sweetheart, I’m leaving in an hour, two maximum.”
“That’s what you said last night,” Jess complained.
“I know. I promise. I’ll be right behind you.” He pulled up a list of flights on his laptop screen. “There’s a direct flight on United at 3 p.m. I’m booking it now.”
No response.
“Jessica, honey, please, promise me you're getting on that plane.”
“Okay,” came the quiet reply.
“Good. Listen, if I want to finish this, I need to go. Love you, and give your mother a kiss for me.”
Another pause. “Love you, too.”
Ben took a deep breath and hung up.
“By the way, your boxes arrived.” Roger pointed to the corner of the room. “Just got here.”
Ben looked at them. Mrs. Brown might be an old horse, but she was reliable. “Roger, we need to get this done—”
The door to his room opened. He hadn’t given anyone else a key. “We don’t need any room service—”
But it wasn’t a maid. One of the sunglass-wearing security goons from the top floor had a commanding look on his face, as if he was a general and not somebody’s junkyard dog. “Dr. Benjamin Rollins, I need you to come with me.”
“What?” Ben slapped his laptop closed. “I’m not going anywhere, I need to finish—”
“This is not a request,” the big man said in a flat voice, his accent vaguely French. Another man appeared behind him.
Jess stared at the phone in her hand. She hadn’t put up much of a fight, but there was no winning an argument with her father. Not when he set his mind to something. And not when the circumstances were dictating what he had to do.
“What did he say?” Celeste asked.
They’d arrived at C23, and the waiting area was jammed. An American Airlines Boeing 777 sat hunched on the tarmac in front of the gate.
“He’s not coming.”
“At all?” Celeste frowned.
“On the next flight,” Jess corrected herself. “He said he’d be on the United flight at 3 p.m.” She put her phone back in her purse and looked up at the ceiling. Black signs with orange letters indicated directions, “Transiti - Transfers,” said one, and next to it, “Uscita - Way Out - Roma.” She stared at the sign. Roma. Rome. Way out.
A three-chime tone played over the public address system. “American Airlines flight 1465 now pre-boarding,” announced the flight steward at the check-in desk. “Families and anyone needing assistance can now—”
“That gives us a little more girl time, no?” Celeste said with a smile. “We can watch a romantic movie, have a few glasses of wine. It’ll be fun.”
“Yeah, sure.”
Jess closed her eyes. She opened them to see a young family pressing through the crowd, the mother and father loaded down with bags; the father held his little girl’s hand, the mother held her tiny son in one arm. The two children batted at each other, the girl smacking the little boy with an inflatable dolphin. The boy erupted into tears.
The family stopped at the check-in, then started down the gangway. Again the image of two children playing in a field of snow flitted through her mind. She gritted her teeth against an emotional flurry building inside her. She fought it back and took two steps behind her to grab a seat that had become vacant.
“Baby, what’s wrong?” Celeste stood beside her and caught her glancing at the family. Her mother’s face softened. “I think a lot about Connor, too, but what happened with your brother, it wasn’t—”
The three-chime tone played again. “Now boarding all rows,” said the airline steward over the public address.
“He’s not coming.” Jess breathed deeply and regained control of herself. “You know how Dad is. When he gets a thing stuck in his head.”
“He’ll come,” Celeste insisted, then looked away, reconsidering. “But maybe you’re right.” She gazed at Jess. “Why don’t we go and get him, then? You just talked to him. He’s at the hotel, right? It’s not as though this is a same-as-always situation.”
Jess shrugged weakly.
“An hour in a taxi and we’ll be back in Rome. Then we can all catch the 3 p.m. Is that what you want? You decide.”
Jess said nothing.
“I’ll cancel our reservation. We have no checked luggage. I can just cancel. We’ll go meet your father.”
Jess pushed hair back from her eyes. “You don’t need to do that.”
“I’d like to see Ben, too,” Celeste said. Without another word she strode off toward the check-in desk. A minute later, she returned. “Done. Call your father, tell him we’re coming.”
The crowd of people around them were faced the gate, waiting to board, but a few of them had turned around in the direction of the concourse. Noise there suddenly hushed, then people started talking loudly, a wave of noise rising up from the lower gates. More people in front of Jess turned around. About to dial her father, she craned her neck to see what was going on.
The television monitors lining the center of the concourse seemed to be drawing people toward them. Jess and Celeste walked around a few people to have a look for themselves. In bold letters on the screen: “Massive Object on Collision Course for Earth.” A BBC news anchor filled half of the screen above the headline. The people crowded around Jess shushed each other to be quiet.
“We are joined now by the head of the Swiss Astronomical Society,” the anchor said. “Dr. Menzinger, what can you tell us?”
In the other half of the split screen, a diminutive man, balding with wire frame glasses, chewed on his lip. “Exactly what I’ve already s
aid. A massive object, many times the size of our sun, is heading directly into the solar system. The government has been hiding it.”
“The government?” asked the news anchor. “Which government?”
“Any of them,” Dr. Menzinger replied, still mashing his lip. “All of them.”
“This is an incredible claim. Can you back it up?”
Dr. Menzinger laughed. “Go and look yourself. Any amateur can point their telescope into the skies tonight and look at the position of Uranus or Neptune. Are they where they’re supposed to be? The gravity of this object—they’re calling it Nomad—is already pulling the planets away.”
A third box opened on the screen with a blond-haired, tanned man in his mid-thirties. The news anchor introduced him: “This is Professor Hallaway with the Siding Spring Observatory in Australia.”
People around Jess had their phones out. They tapped on their screens. Dozens of conversations erupted, breaking the near silence that had descended on the concourse moments before.
“G’day,” said the blond man on the TV screen, nodding.
The news anchor nodded in greeting. “Professor Hallaway, can you confirm what Dr. Menzinger is saying?”
The blond Professor Hallaway took a deep breath before responding: “I can’t confirm what he’s saying, but we are seeing a disturbance in the orbit of Uranus. Something is happening.”
“You see!” Dr. Menzinger shouted on-screen. His video box was grainy, and faded out and then back in. “You don’t need to trust me, go and look for yourselves.”
The anchor turned his attention back to Dr. Menzinger. “So what are you saying?”
“I’m saying that the planet Earth has, at most, months before utter destruction.”
Around Jess, many people seemed stunned into silence, while others started to yell into their phones.
“Phone Ben.”
“What?” Jess pulled her eyes from Dr. Menzinger ranting about black holes and Roche limits tearing the planet to shreds.
“Your father, call him.”
Jess’s phone was in her hand, her father’s number on it. She’d been distracted in the middle of calling him. She pushed the call button and held it to her ear. Busy signal. She tried again. Busy signal. She looked around at the people around her, most of them on their phones. Those who weren’t crowded the airline desks instead.
“The cell networks are jammed,” she whispered, a note of anxiety affecting her voice.
“Oh, God. Now what?”
“In ten minutes,” Jess warned, “every tourist in Europe will be looking for a flight home.”
“I’m not really concerned about the Italian tourism industry right now,” Celeste said.
“You don’t get it.” Jess clutched her mother’s elbow, and turned her mouth close to her ear. “There’s no way we’re getting on the 3 p.m. flight. We might not be getting on any flight.”
***
From the author, Matthew Mather
If you want to continue the story, click here, or search for Nomad on Amazon and start reading at Chapter 13. NOTE that Nomad is in Kindle Unlimited, so is free to continue reading if you are part of this program.
Blue Skies – An Atopia Short Story
1
“NO! NO! YOUR other left!” I barked, gesturing toward the pack of cigarettes I wanted. My heart was still pounding after the screaming fight I’d had with Alex in the street outside. He’d wanted us to move in together –– or rather, he’d wanted to move in with me, but I needed my space. We’d just broken up, and this time for the last time.
It wasn’t helping that I hadn’t slept properly in weeks.
The pharmacist behind the counter stared at me and began speaking in something foreign. Even with languages going extinct faster than frogs, I’d read that the city still had nearly a thousand spoken throughout its many boroughs. What a mess.
He shrugged as if to say, “Now what?”
The rumbling impatience of the line behind me almost overcame my need for a nicotine fix. Almost, but not quite.
“Wait a minute!” I held up one hand and rummaged around in my purse for my mobile with the other. Squeamish of surgical implants, I still used an old-fashioned earbud. Acutely aware of the eyes on me, I clumsily popped it into my ear.
“Camel Lights!” I repeated, jabbing my finger at the display case.
Whatever language he was speaking was instantly translated. “Like I said, lady, those aren’t Camels. The package looks the same, but you’ll have to go across the street to find those.” He pointed hopefully out the door.
I sighed. “Whatever, that’s fine, whatever those are.”
Reaching into the display, he handed them over, and I grabbed them and began pushing my way back through the crowd to the entrance, opening the pack as I went. Getting cigarettes was a regulated activity that required a pharmacist to personally verify my nano-cleaning certification. I banged open the door to the street as I stormed out, startling some incoming customers.
Smoking was a bad habit I’d picked up from my mother. We hadn’t spoken in years, but then she’d barely ever shown any interest in me when we had. She’d driven my father away to some kind of Luddite commune back in Montana with the rest of his family. I hadn’t been able to reach him in almost as long as I hadn't spoken to my mother, and it wasn’t something I was going to forgive her for anytime soon.
I stopped just outside the door of the pharmacy to light up, closing my eyes as I took a deep drag.
Midtown blazed away before me in an orgy of advertising. Almost every square inch of space, from lamppost to sidewalk, was full of commercials heralding a new Broadway show or multiverse world. A holographic head danced above me, sparkling and wobbling as the smoke from my cigarette drifted up into it. “Come to Titan, experience the methane rain.”
Taking another long drag, I glanced up at the grinning head. “Experience the methane rain?” Not exactly sexy. They should have been saying something like, “Take her to new heights— make love in the hydrocarbon desert.” I laughed grimly to myself—make love, now there was something alien, never mind Titan.
Without warning, a robotic surrogate I’d noticed lining up behind me in the shop came from nowhere and barreled into me, pinning me hard against the wall. It fumbled at me. Blood drained from my face in shock, but the short pause of confusion and fear was replaced by a bolt of pure fury, and I lashed back, yelling and flailing.
“Get off me!”
It bounced back much more easily than I’d anticipated. We stood staring at each other for a moment, my green and angry eyes meeting its dead, gunmetal-grey orbs. With what I could only interpret as a furtive glance, it shrugged an oddly robotic shrug before turning to disappear into the stream of pedestrian traffic. I lurched forward to give chase but gave up almost instantly.
I was shaking.
Breathing raggedly, I wiped spittle from the side of my mouth. Looking down, I noticed that he had stolen my cigarette pack and the tremble in my hands matched the wobble of the hologram touting Titan above me. In my right hand, the cigarette continued to burn away, unconcerned with my threatened violation. I took a drag to calm my nerves.
Nobody walking by seemed to have noticed anything, or at least, nobody had wanted to notice anything. I guess it was just after the cigarettes, although why a robot would want cigarettes was beyond me.
This goddamn city.
I had half a mind to call Alex, but remembered the fight we just had, and I was already late for my presentation. Still shaking, I dropped my smoke and ground it out underfoot before venturing out from under the awning to merge into the sea of pedestrians flowing down West Fifty-Seventh Street.
Surging with the crowd, I watched for a current that could carry me towards the curb. Up ahead, someone swore out loud and then stopped. His arrested momentum forced a wave of people to flow outwards and around him.
This was my chance.
Sailing up
beside him, I ducked smoothly in behind and was caught perfectly in the opposite flow going in the direction I needed. Then I ran straight smack into a ridiculous-looking woman in sparkling red body paint and peacock feathers.
“Out of my way!” I growled. Shoving her aside, I rotated towards the edge of the street and elbowed my way to the curb, where I stretched out my arm to join with the forest of other outstretched limbs.
“Ten! Ten!” I yelled at the top of my lungs, offering ten times the going rate. I was tired and frightened and wanted to get out of there.
A cab slipped fluidly from traffic to pull up beside me, my generosity earning me dirty looks from the people around me trying to get their own ride. In return, I offered them my finger as the tiny gull wing door of the cab opened.
I stepped inside and sat down. The relief was immediate. Cool, recycled air swept around me as the door clicked shut behind me. I took a moment to collect myself, closing my eyes, exhaling softly, trying to relieve the pressure.
“Where to, lady?” chimed a metallic voice. It was a self-driving electric, one of those Hondasoft ones with the motors in the wheels—barely more than a plastic tub on roller skates, if you asked me, but a cab nonetheless.
I took a deep breath. “Ah...” What the hell was my office address? I sat bolt upright in a panic. What was wrong with me? I’d worked there for over ten years.
“Lady, where to?”
“One second,” I shakily snapped at the cab.
“Kenny, what’s our office address?” I posed the question to my tech assistant through the mobile bud still stuck in my ear.
“555 Fifth Avenue,” a perplexed Kenny responded almost instantly, which I relayed to the cabbie.
Matthew Mather's Compendium Page 23