Kaleidocide

by Dave Swavely

  “Get all the rounds off the surface first, the ones that Min blocked,” I said, thinking about this more. “The ones that were unblocked entered the ground, and won’t come in contact with the dew, because the dew’s only on the surface. We’ll have to dig them out later, sometime before it rains, but they’re not a danger right now.”

  “Did you hear that, Stephenson and San?” Terrey said, not sure whether my audio was still on all channels. They said that they did, so obviously it was.

  Ni, who was the triplet in the aero, started to count down the minutes as time progressed, which became nerve-racking as the projected deadline approached. Her sister even seemed rattled when there were three minutes left before the possibility of combustion, and she asked Terrey if he wanted her to stay on the ground or get back in the aero. It occurred to me that even a superhuman like her could be fearful of fire, especially when her own sister had just been fried by it. Terrey thought a moment and told her to get back in the aero, which implied rather strongly that he was more worried about losing her than losing our house. But I guess it made sense—he wasn’t being paid to protect our house.

  After swooping lower so that her sister could jump into the door of her aero, Ni announced that there was one minute left until the danger point. But Stephenson kept hopping around, eagerly scanning for more bullets and stuffing them in his pants pocket when he found them. Korcz was flying the aero that would pick him up, but fairly high in the air, probably because he and Tyra had recently experienced the fearsome power of the kind of flames that might ignite here at any moment.

  Ni announced that we had now passed the point where dew might form and combustion could begin. In fact, she added that a lot of dew may have already formed, but none of it had contacted a bullet yet. So Terrey said that Stephenson might want to think about getting some altitude.

  “I think I got all the ones on the surface here, where Min was.” He started walking past the graves and toward the hill behind them. “Let’s see if any of the ones that went past are close to the surface. You know they could be, depending on the angle. Better safe than sorry.”

  Right after he said this, we could see him stop in his tracks and listen as behind him there was a loud hiss, then another, and then another, all at the gravesite. We hadn’t realized that a few of the sniper’s bullets had hit the gravestones themselves, one lodging halfway in a marker and the others falling to the ground. Whether they all got wet at once, or whether one did and then ignited the others, a conflagration immediately engulfed the gravesite and started spreading outward.

  I couldn’t believe that such a tiny object could start something like this, or that such an uncommon chemical reaction could spread and sustain as it did, but I watched it with my own eyes (through Jon’s, of course). This is what it was engineered to do, I thought, and it’s doing it. The torrent of fire was so violent that Stephenson took off running in panic, rather than wait for the aero to come down and get him, and the flames followed so hard on his heels that he couldn’t even put enough distance between him and them, or stop running long enough to get picked up.

  30

  THE CHOSEN ONE

  I’m so glad I did all that biking back in New York, Stephenson thought as he raced for his life from the fire spreading behind him. He could have such a casual thought because he was utterly confident that the flames wouldn’t overtake him, since this was déjà vu all over again. Early that morning he had watched a recorded dream on his new rig in which he was running from fire and made it safely. The precog rating was high, according to his Dreamscape software, and here he was living it out. Nothing had ever seemed more real to him than this.

  “You have to jump so we can grab you!” Korcz was yelling in his earpiece, over the din of the fire behind him. “Or stop so we can pick you up!” He saw the aero hovering just behind and above his right shoulder, and believed that his Russian friend was willing to try to get him. But Stephenson wasn’t interested in a rescue attempt right now. His lack of panic allowed him to think logically about his predicament, and he could see that his current course was best. Jumping for an open door or window as he ran might land him back on the ground with an injury, in which case he would be overtaken by the flames and die. Besides, Korcz was flying the car, so the one who would be “grabbing” him would be the Black Italian woman, who was not very athletic, to say the least. Stopping or even slowing down to be picked up would be very risky at the rate the fire was spreading, and could endanger Korcz and Tyra as well.

  No, he decided to keep running until there was enough space between him and the flames, or until he reached somewhere safe, like where he was headed.

  “I can make it to the house!” he yelled back.

  “The house will have dew on it too, danyet?” Korcz offered, but Stephenson was thinking that it would have a safety system like the hill base had. It had to, because in his dream he had ended up safe from the fire. He was about to yell a question about this over the comm, hoping someone would know the answer, but he was now huffing and puffing too hard from the exertion, and when he stumbled slightly, his earpiece fell out. Now he really felt he had no choice but to continue the run for the house—he couldn’t even communicate with Korcz to coordinate a rescue.

  So he shut out all other considerations and focused on making it to the veranda of the house, which was about a football field’s length ahead of him.

  When he was about halfway there, breathing much heavier now, some flames from behind shot around him on the right and curved into his path. They seemed to be picking up momentum as they spread. He swerved to the left for about ten strides, and then had to turn back to the right when the charge of the fire brigade gained on him because of the angle he had to take. When he did head to the right again, he expected to be engulfed by the flames, but fortunately they had moved to the right themselves, and he found a narrow alley through which he reached the veranda.

  He dove across the cement tiles and practically fell against the door in exhaustion, but it was locked. So he turned around to face the oncoming fire, leaning back against the paned glass out of both fear and fatigue. The flames rushed up to the edge of the veranda, like a stampede of raging demons coming to claim his soul. At that moment his confidence waned for the first time, but also at that moment the closest flames suddenly stopped and dissipated. The wall of fire had receded ten to twenty feet back from the veranda and couldn’t come any farther. Instead it spread sideways, and Stephenson could see it moving around the house both ways, still very energetic and destructive of the flora on the hill. But it could cause no damage to the structure.

  Adrenaline shot through his body, and he pushed himself away from the door and out to the edge of the veranda, where he could gloat over the defeated fire. He threw his arms up and let out a series of whoops like he had just won the Super Bowl. Then he punched the air, kicked his feet up, and spun around a few times saying “Yes! Yes!” over and over again. He barely noticed Korcz landing the aero next to him on the veranda, and then approaching him when he got out of the car.

  “Are you having a seizure or something?” the big man asked.

  Stephenson threw his arms around Korcz and gave him a big hug, though his arms barely reached around his partner and his head was only as high as his stomach.

  “Okey, okey,” Korcz said, removing the little man’s arms from him, and then grimaced. “Ughh. You are sweating.”

  Suddenly the odd couple both looked at each other, both realizing the same terrible thing at the same time.

  “Oh no,” Stephenson said, his celebration abruptly ending. He looked down at the protruding bulge in the right pocket of his increasingly wet pants, where he had put the bullets that became deadly when touched by water! He started to reach into the pocket with his hand to take them out, but then realized his hand was sweaty, too. So he did the only thing he could do—fumbled his belt open as fast as he could, dropped his pants, and pulled them off. Then he bounded back toward the edge of the verand
a and threw the pants out onto the scorched swath of ground where the flames had been repelled by the EM pulse.

  His adrenaline newly renewed, Stephenson threw his arms up and whooped again several times, then turned around to see Korcz, who had backed away from him toward the aero for fear of an explosion. Tyra looked out of its open window and studied his purple boxers, which were hanging halfway down. But this didn’t bother him either. All he could think of was that his theories about Dreamscape were once again confirmed, now more than ever—he felt like the Christopher Columbus or Copernicus of the human mind.

  “What did I tell you, Valeri? I dreamt it, it was rated, it happened! Again! Do you believe me now?”

  “I believe you are lucky to be alive,” the Russian said. “And that you should get into the car. After we lost comm with you, Mr. Ares told us that the house was protected like the base. But the more the fire spreads, the hotter it gets. The house might not be able to stand.”

  Stephenson took his friend’s advice, but after they got in the car and lifted off, he couldn’t help but return to the topic of his life-defining revelations.

  “Who would have ever thought this would happen to me? I can tell the future, Valeri, I can. Not some psychic mumbo jumbo, this is the real thing. This is gonna change the world, once people start finding out more about it. It taps into the questions humanity has always had. And you’ve absolutely got to do it, Valeri. Wouldn’t you rather be on the new frontier like me, instead of just like everybody else?”

  “I’d rather have my pants on,” Korcz said seriously, but Stephenson laughed anyway. Until he glanced at the backseat and Tyra, who was not laughing, because the more truth there was in his claims, the more likely she was going to die soon.

  Speaking of death, someone else was apparently facing the prospect of it, because the voice of Michael Ares came on in the car, saying that one of the aeros had spotted his neighbors on a nearby hill, fleeing from the fire. Since Stephenson had been so eager to face the dangers of the fire, he said, and because the people in his car were more expendable than those in the other three, they should fly over and try to help them. He gave Korcz the coordinates, and as they sped in the direction of the other BASS house on the next hill over, Ares told them more about the situation. It was a mother (Liria Rabin) and her two eight-year-old twin daughters, Hilly and Jessa. They liked to ride their horses almost every evening at sunset, with one of the girls riding with Liria and the other learning to ride herself. They must have gotten cut off from their house by the fire, and now they were almost surrounded by it.

  As Korcz flew past the Rabins’ house on its left, Stephenson could tell that its safety systems had stopped the flames like the Ares’s house had, but also like the other situation, the flames had spread around it and cut off access to it, like the BASS leader had said. And on the far side of the house he could now see the two horses, with the woman and both girls on one of them—she must have brought the second child over in order to protect her. She clutched one of the twins in front of her, and the other was holding on to her torso from behind. The riderless horse was panicking at the fire, stomping in circles, but the woman must have been really good, even with only one arm to use, because the one she was riding was much calmer. They were in just as much danger, however, because the fire was closing in on them. There seemed to be a way out to the east, where they could have run away from the fire, but Stephenson guessed that they didn’t know it was there because of all the smoke. By the time the aero arrived near them, however, there would be no way out. They were indeed going to die, unless he and Korcz could do something.

  “Can we use the thing that shoots out and grabs people?” Stephenson said to Korcz and the disembodied Ares. “That was used to rescue us in New York?”

  “No,” Ares’s voice replied. “The aeros from the base aren’t equipped with RATS—they’re more basic models than the ones we use to show off in other cities. You’ll have to land and pick them up.”

  Stephenson felt an adrenaline surge through his body again, but this time it was fear. He hadn’t dreamt about this, and realized there was no reason he couldn’t die right now, even though he had survived earlier.

  “If you could see,” he said as a kind of knee-jerk reaction, “you would see that there’s no way we could land and make it out. We’d all buy it.”

  “I’m actually watching you from Terrey’s aero,” Ares said, “which is higher and north of you. From this angle it looks like there’s some room to the east of her.”

  “Well, from this angle down here, it looks pretty tight.”

  Korcz now had the aero almost on top of the woman, though she hadn’t noticed yet because she was waving smoke out of her eyes and trying to move the horse away from the closest flames. Stephenson found a button for the PA system on the windshield HUD, and activated it.

  “Ma’am, we’re here to help you,” he said, and saw that the PA was working because she craned her neck upward at his voice. “Follow my voice—we’ll try to land to your east, and pick you up.” He kept saying “This way” as Korcz maneuvered that way to find a spot to set down, and she made some progress in that direction, but the visibility was too low for her to be sure where to go, and she was clinging to the girls as her horse staggered its path.

  Korcz set the aero down on the ground with a thud, facing Liria’s direction, but they couldn’t even see her now because of the smoke. They watched for her to emerge, and suddenly saw a horse run out of the smoke in their direction, but it was the riderless horse. It bolted to the right of the car, but then the wall of flame rushed into the area it had just entered and Stephenson could hear it squealing in pain. He didn’t know that horses could scream that loud, but when he saw the flames approaching on his right, he knew that he would be screaming himself if they didn’t change positions.

  “We have to move!” Korcz shouted, obviously thinking the same thing, and lifted the car back off the ground again.

  “Okay, just stay there, ma’am,” Stephenson said into the PA. “We’re coming back to you.”

  When they reached the woman, and were hovering just above her, they had literally seconds before the fire would engulf her and the girls. By some miracle, they were in the crook of a V-shaped opening between the flames. But the opening was closing fast, so all Korcz could do was bring the right side of the aero down near the top of the horse, and Stephenson stretched himself out of the window to grasp the first daughter, who was standing on her mother’s lap and was pushed up by her so Stephenson could reach her. He did, and managed to haul her into the car. As she scrambled to the backseat, Stephenson extended himself back out of the window, but the fire had now reached the horse’s legs and Liria was struggling to control it and maneuver the other daughter around to her front.

  “Move closer!” Stephenson yelled to Korcz.

  “I’m trying!” Korcz yelled back. But the horse was moving too much in the flames.

  Suddenly both the aero and the horse lurched toward each other at just the right time, and Stephenson yelled, “Now!” The mother instinctively gave up on trying to shift her daughter with just one arm, let go of the reins, and jerked her own body sideways to push the girl upward and into Stephenson’s grasp. She fell off the horse and into the fire, of course, but Stephenson did manage to hold on to her daughter with his small but strong arms. He hauled her inside and pushed her into the backseat, where Tyra was already comforting her sister. Korcz hovered over the spot, and even dipped lower toward the ground, as if he could do something else. But there was nothing else to do except listen to the screams of the horse, which were hideous but thankfully loud enough to cover any other screams that might have been heard.

  Stephenson closed the window as fast as he could and looked at Korcz. Silently they agreed that nothing else could be done, and so Korcz lifted the aero higher away from the scene until they couldn’t hear anything from down there. For the next half hour or so, they hung in the sky as they waited for word that they could re
turn to the hill base and the Ares house, when the blackened brush on the hill around them had fully burnt out. They also watched the outside edges of the fire spread to other properties on the hills nearby, and even used the zoom function on the windshield camera to watch some of the houses burn before the local fire services could stop them with the pre-burnt borders they created.

  Worst of all, they were tortured by the cries of “Mommy!” and the questions about her from the twin girls in the backseat. Thankfully Tyra was there to lend a woman’s touch—she did seem to be more cut out to be a female than a male. Stephenson felt really bad for the girls and their mother, but he also had to admit that he felt an exhilaration that he had made it through this latest adventure, and that he would live to explore his dreams further. He felt invincible, like he had been chosen to pioneer a path that would actually change the world.

  When they finally were cleared to return to the base, the protection team gathered again in the aero bay, to debrief yet another close call. Despite all the damage that had been caused by this latest assassination attempt, Michael Ares and the double were still both alive, as was Lynn Ares, who had asked the big cyborg bodyguard to take her back to the house above. For this reason, Stephenson unfortunately misjudged the mood, and sidled up next to Terrey as the team was gathering, telling him excitedly about how his dream of the fire came true and how his Dreamscape rig could revolutionize the personal protection business. As he was talking to Terrey, he half-perceived the double comforting the twins next to the parked aero not far away, with the little girls hugging him in a way that showed they couldn’t tell the difference between him and the real Michael Ares. He also half-noticed that Jon stood up and looked in his direction at some point, saying, “No, I’ve never hit anyone” and then looking at his fist and adding, “The knuckles at the base, right.”