“It’s their preamble to first contact. Once they know your weaknesses, they are able to create an effective ruse. It’s how they trick you into donating freely.”
“So, the coalescence was real?”
“Yes, it’s a neural virus.”
“I’m pretty sure I picked it up on a version of Earth with a super-charged atmosphere. Kleezebee sent me there to search for you. Too bad they don’t make a brain condom. I could have used it to practice safe—”
“Do you know what the odds were of finding me in an alternate dimension?”
“Less than none. I know. I’ve heard the same speech from the professor a million times. But I had to do something. That’s all we had at the time. But now we can—”
Drew held up his hand. “Don’t tell me anymore. I don’t want to take the chance that the information bleeds its way across my firewall and finds its way into Loti’s central core. The longer we stay in here, we run the risk that the Baaku will discover this communications port.”
“I assume you have a plan. How do we get you out?”
“You’ll need to create a storage device to hold my essence.”
“Then what?”
“Do you have any BioTex remaining?”
Lucas nodded. “Plenty.”
“Have the professor assemble a body for me, then download me into it.”
“I thought that’s where you were going with this. I assume you’ll want to leave the wheelchair behind?”
“Great minds think alike, brother.”
“How big a device? Do you have specs?”
“Several hundred tera-quads ought to do it. But you’ll need to use the neuro-transducer from Kleezebee’s replica detector in order to establish the data pipe. Then create a pair of unidirectional, balanced data buffers that operate at two hundred twelve nanohertz.”
“I assume you’ll want them synchronized and multi-threaded.”
“Yes, but remember to augment the code with atomic variables so we don’t experience register walkover during the transfer process. I’d hate to lose even a single engram.”
“Got it.”
“I’ll open this same communication port precisely twenty-four hours from now, so you can initiate the download. Can you be ready by then?”
“Kleezebee and I will need to get off the ship. The equipment we need is back at his place.”
“Wasn’t the cabin obliterated?”
“It was, but—”
“Wait, don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.”
“Bleed over, got it. Can you get us off this ship?”
“Yes. I can deposit you anywhere on the surface. I have access to all their systems. They’re a bit lackadaisical with their security protocols.”
“The professor’s property will do. But if they’re tracking me, won’t the Baaku know where we went? We’ll need some time.”
“I plan to keep them busy with a few ghost images on their long-range scanners. They’ll think the Krellians are approaching with weapons hot.”
“That should work. How do we get back aboard, once the storage drive is ready?”
“I’ll let the Baaku take care of that. I just have to make sure the timing is right, then feed their sensors the correct info.”
“That’s a lot of moving parts.”
“Yes, but doable,” Drew said, before a smile grew across his lips. “By the way, I love the new face.”
Lucas ran his hand over his cheek. “Thanks. It’s nice to be smooth and normal again.”
“I’ll bet. But it’s time to send you back.”
Lucas didn’t want to go. His heart ached. “See ya soon, brother.”
Moments later, Lucas woke up in his own body and mind. He pulled his hand from the wall. “Man, what a rush.”
“Did you see my son? Is he okay?”
“Yes, he’s fine. A bit standoffish, even for him, but that’s probably because his entire existence is purely digital. He wants us to create a storage drive large enough to download his essence in exactly twenty-four hours.”
“Where’s his body?”
“You don’t want to know, Professor. Let’s just say that this is our Drew and we need to get him back. We’ll need a BioTex body to use as a vessel for his consciousness.”
“I assume you two formulated an escape plan.”
“Sort of.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“Drew said he had it covered. He’s jacked into their systems.”
“So we just wait?”
“Yes. Just let him do his thing. He said he can deposit us anywhere on the surface we like,” Lucas said, dreaming about kissing his girl’s sweet lips again. “Do you think Rico and Carrie Anne are okay?”
“More than likely. The Baaku weren’t interested in them. Let’s just hope they remained onsite. We’re going to need their help getting to Fuji. The trap door to the basement is probably buried under a pile of rubble.”
Just then, the deck plate of the ship opened as a swirl of light particles filled the room. Seconds later, Lucas found himself standing next to Kleezebee on the surface, only a hundred yards from the professor’s cabin. Lucas could see Rico and Carrie Anne working slowly to remove boards and other rubble from the massive debris pile covering the basement door.
FORTY
Kleezebee stepped to the left and Lucas to the right, as they positioned themselves on the same side of the wreckage covering the door to the basement. Rico and Carrie Anne stood on the other side.
“Be careful,” Lucas told her.
“I’m a lot stronger than I look,” she said. “I’m no Barbie.”
You can say that again, Lucas thought.
“On three,” Rico said, as the team bent down to grab the side of a twenty-foot-long joist beam.
“Are we going on one or zero?” Lucas asked the major.
“On zero. Everyone ready?”
Lucas nodded, as did everyone else.
Rico called out the number zero, then the group lifted the laminated beam off the pile, carrying it a few feet away and tossing it to the ground.
Next up was a ten-foot section of the shingled roof. Lucas was surprised that the roof section was under the main support beam. He would have expected it to be the other way around. The Baaku energy blast must have blown and twisted everything in the air before it fell, he decided.
The roof section was a twice as heavy as the beam, but they managed to lift it up, then flip it end-over-end until it was far enough away to expose a corner of the area rug covering the trap door.
As they continued working together to clear the area, Lucas brought Carrie Anne up to date. He explained how he and Kleezebee had been stranded on the colony, and then filled her in about Drew and his disappearance a year and a half earlier.
An hour later, the debris pile had been cleared from the trap door.
“Looks like it’s still intact,” the professor said, pulling the area rug away to reveal the trap door.
“You think he’s alive?” Lucas asked.
“He better be.”
“Wouldn’t he have suffocated by now?” the girl asked.
“There’s an escape tunnel that leads into the forest. It would provide an additional volume of reserve air,” the professor said. “Of course, he could have used it to escape into the forest, if he felt threatened. But, knowing our friend, he’s probably still down there, working away to ensure our mission is a complete success.”
Lucas bent down to grab the trap door’s metal handle. He pulled the door open, getting a whiff of candle smoke from below. He looked inside, “I can see flickering light. Must be prayer time.”
“Rico, check it out,” Kleezebee said.
Rico moved to the top of the ladder, then descended. “All clear,” he reported a minute later.
Lucas traversed the ladder next, then waited at the bottom for Carrie Anne and the professor. He helped them off the ladder.
Kleezebee looked at Rico. “I need you up t
op. Let me know if you see any sign of the Baaku.”
“Drew said he had it covered,” Lucas said sharply.
“But we don’t know for how long. We need him on the surface.”
Rico climbed the ladder.
Fuji sat hunched over in the corner, sitting on his knees with his legs folded underneath. A circle of blazing candles sent alternating patches of light and shadow dancing across his petite nose, as he scribbled something on one of the twelve notepads sprawled out before him. His hand moved the pencil across the paperwork at lightning speed, almost as fast as a computer-controlled router carving up a sheet of plywood.
“What are you doing on the floor?” Lucas asked him.
The monk didn’t respond or look up, he just made more scribbles.
Lucas looked behind him. The work table was lying under a pile of ceiling rock; squished down flat in the middle. He could see bits and pieces of the twisted lab equipment interspersed with the rubble. “I hope you guys don’t expect me to clean that up.”
“What about the Incursion Chamber?” the professor asked.
Lucas walked to the door leading to the next room. He checked the condition of the incursion equipment and chamber, then ran back. “Looks like the only cave-in was here.”
Kleezebee nodded.
Carrie Anne grabbed his hand as they stood next to Fuji, looking down at the man’s paperwork. Lucas studied the non-linear, exotic equations flowing across the center notepad, then he focused his attention on the set of intercepting lines, check marks, and notations covering the pad next to it. He tried, but his mind couldn’t decipher the man’s revolutionary math, let alone the meaning of the drawings.
“What’s he doing?” Carrie Anne asked Lucas.
“Running a few numbers,” he said, pointing to the buried lab table. “It’s a manual process now that some of his equipment was destroyed.”
“What’s it for?”
“All kinds of science stuff. It’s pretty complicated.”
She punched him in the bicep.
“I’m just saying,” Lucas said, rubbing his arm.
Kleezebee knelt down next to Fuji. “What do you have for me?”
“Quantum inflections have formed.”
“How deep?”
“Two hundred and twelve iterations.”
“Which intersect?”
“Alpha vector, downstream channel. Displacement is off by point seven. Attempting to compensate.”
Lucas couldn’t hide his ignorance any longer. “Someone care to explain? I don’t speak Fuji.”
Carrie Anne sneered at Lucas.
“He’s charting the cascading deformation of time as it ripples across the fabric of space,” the professor answered. “We’ve changed its flow pattern. He needs to determine the level of the dispersion in order to adjust our plans.”
“Of course,” Lucas said, grinning at his girl.
“What is all this?” she asked.
“Fuji is a master at connecting with the Akashic Field,” Lucas answered.
She shrugged.
“It’s a central repository where all knowledge in the universe is said to exist. Well, theoretically, at least.”
“It’s not theoretical,” Kleezebee said.
“The jury is still out on that one, Professor.”
“Where is this field?”
“It’s everywhere and nowhere,” Lucas answered.
She punched him again—in the same spot as before. “I’m not stupid, you know. That doesn’t make any sense.”
“But it’s true.”
She held up her fist, but didn’t unleash another punch. “All right, explain it to me.”
“Think of space as an endless bed sheet flapping in the cosmic breeze. All along its surface are these transcendent pockets of knowledge.”
“Like pillows?”
“Yeah, really smart pillows, with endless amounts of information stored inside.”
“Okay, I get that.”
“Now imagine trillions of these same endless bed sheets stacked on top of each other, all flapping in different directions and at different speeds. That’s the flow of time as it moves through the vastness of space. The sheets at the bottom are farthest away and compressed by all the layers of time on top of it. If Fuji concentrates hard enough, he thinks he can navigate along those sheets and look inside the smart pillows to pull out information about science, events, people, you name it. He tried to teach me, but I suck at meditation.”
“However, the flow of time is constantly moving. Therefore, the extracted information can be spotty and incomplete,” Kleezebee said, as Fuji continued his frantic writing pace. “He needs to extrapolate from there.”
“It’s like trying to use a telescope to spot a moving bird,” she said.
“Exactly.”
She looked at Lucas. “See, I’m not a blonde.”
Lucas smiled.
“Though in this case, it would be like attempting to spot a ballistic missile moving both toward you and away from you at the same time. It makes the number of events and their order unpredictable,” the professor added. “Oftentimes we only catch glimpses.”
She nodded as if it were starting to make sense to her.
“It’s his religion,” Lucas said, watching Fuji work his pencil even faster than before.
“It has taken him three decades to master and we are just now starting to understand how best to use this ability,” Kleezebee said.
“That’s why he lives down here in the basement,” Lucas said. “Sometimes, he spends days meditating, before extracting new data and using it for his calculations.”
“What’s he trying to figure out now?”
Lucas didn’t answer. He looked at Kleezebee.
“How best to—”
Lucas cleared his throat, trying to stop the professor. It worked.
“How best to what?” she asked.
Kleezebee slapped Lucas on the back. “Maybe you should handle this?”
Lucas pulled her hand, guiding her into the next room where the set of video screens were standing in an open circle around the operations console. Next to them was the wire mesh Incursion Chamber. He took a few moments to decide how much of the truth he was going to tell her, and which parts to leave out. He walked to Fuji’s operations console and snatched the Smart Skin Suit that had been lying across its chair.
“Originally, we had planned for me to step into the chamber wearing this suit to access the past. It would have taken me back to Earth, to the moment just before my brother stepped into the portal and disappeared. Fuji believes that I could have used this technology to see where he went. That way, we could have tracked his location in the multi-verse and rescued him.”
“Looks dangerous.”
“It’s perfectly safe. This is the same equipment we used to rescue you.”
“Not much to it.”
“That’s what a lot of people think, but bigger isn’t always better.”
She walked in front of him, cupping his balls with her hand. “Seems plenty big to me.”
Lucas felt a tingle surge across his body. “There’s tremendous power in the very small. It’s all about the math and enough power. With sufficient amounts of both, a genius like Fuji can accomplish great things. He believes the cosmos is a living, breathing mathematical equation that doubles as the operating system for a massive computer system that monitors and runs everything. We’re all just fragments of history—part of the equation—as time and space are compressed into data stream and stored in the Akashic Field.”
She stopped walking, and turned. “But now that you know where your brother is, you don’t need to use this again, right?”
“No. Not anymore. Our focus, now, is how best to get him back without the Baaku knowing about the second copy hiding inside their systems.”
She wandered inside the circle of equipment, running her fingers around the metal edges of the first view screen. “Can I ask you something?”
&
nbsp; “Sure, anything.”
“Why you? Why not someone else?”
He searched his brain for the right words.
She didn’t wait for an answer. “I think it’s because Drew trusts you the most. You were planning on talking to him in the past.”
“How could you know that?”
“I can see it on your face. That means you were going to talk him out of stepping into the portal. That way you wouldn’t need to rescue him. Right?”
Damn this girl is sharp, he thought. He nodded. “The way I see it, why waist the time to track him down when I could stop all of this right then and there.”
“Did Dr. Kleezebee know this?”
“No. It was my idea.”
“So, if Drew didn’t disappear in the past, then what would have happened after that? To us?”
Lucas could see the look of worry creeping onto her face. “Nothing. We’d be one happy family.”
“You’re hiding something. Just like Piston used to do,” she said, folding her arms across her chest. “You need to tell me. Now.”
He wanted to lie, but couldn’t. “The time line would have changed.”
Her face burned a deep red color. “I thought so.”
“But that was our plan. Not anymore. It’s a non-issue.”
“That’s why you didn’t answer me earlier.”
“What do you mean?”
“When I asked you if you were coming back.”
“I did answer you.”
“No, you never actually said the words, Yes, I’m coming back.”
Lucas didn’t respond. He felt his blood pressure spike and so did his respiration.
“God, how could I have been so stupid,” she said, “You already knew you weren’t coming back! Didn’t you?”
“I should have told you. I’m sorry.”
“You’re damn right you should have,” she said, throwing her arms up and storming toward the doorway that led to the main room.
“Wait!” Lucas said, running after her. He grabbed her arm, spinning her around.
Incursion (The Narrows of Time Series Book 2) Page 30