The Fourth Sage (The Circularity Saga)

by Stefan Bolz

  "You okay up there?"

  Aries is completely startled. So much so that she has to catch her breath. Then she grabs the doorknob and opens it. There is nobody there.

  "Aries?" Ty's voice seems louder than usual.

  "Yes. I'm here. My door just opened."

  "Come again?"

  "The door to the shaft opened while I was down in the first unit."

  There's a pause. Aries becomes aware of how quiet it is up here.

  "That's strange. I don't see how this can happen without someone standing there. It closes automatically once you step away from it. Let me know if it happens again."

  "Okay," Aries replies. She walks away from the door. It closes, once more sealing itself into the frame.

  "It just closed," she says into the walkie-talkie.

  "Okay," Ty's voice answers.

  She climbs back down through the trapdoor and continues with her task. She finishes four of the eight shafts without incident. In the second unit of the fifth shaft, she finds the irregularity. She sees it right away when she turns on the oscilloscope on the DIAG. The waves on the screen are completely different from those of all the other units. Not only does the shape of the sinus curve look different from anything she has ever seen before, but the part of the sinus curve going downward into the negative actually goes slightly backwards. If Aries is not mistaken, that's completely impossible.

  "Ty, you there?" she says.

  "Yes. You got something?" Ty's voice echoes through the small, cube-like space.

  "Looks like it. I think I found the glitch. Second unit in shaft number five. The image looks very strange. I don't think I've ever seen anything like it."

  "Can you take a picture?"

  "Sure. I'll take a screenshot."

  "That's my girl. Why don't you come down? We can go up there together tomorrow and fix it."

  "Sounds good. I'll be down in a minute."

  Aries pushes a button on the DIAG to capture what's on the screen in the internal flash drive. Then she takes off the wires, puts everything back into the shoulder bag and climbs out of the trapdoor. She arrives at the door and punches in the code. Nothing happens. She punches the code in again. Nothing. She pulls the doorknob then pushes, tries to move the door. No results. She taps the camera above the doorframe with her finger a few times. Then she walks back several feet, turns and comes back toward the camera, looking up. Nothing happens.

  "What's going on?" she asks the silence. "Ty, now my door won't open... Ty? You there? Ty, can you hear me?"

  No sound comes from the walkie-talkie.

  "Ty—"

  Without warning, the lights in the shaft go out. She stands in pitch black until she remembers the headlamp and turns it on. The bright beacon illuminates the shaft about fifteen feet into it. Behind it is blackness. She turns and looks into the camera again.

  "Come on! Open the door!" she says, half out of frustration. The other half is the slowly building uneasiness that begins to creep up on her. This can't be coincidence. As she looks into the camera, her neck hair stands up. She turns her head quickly to see if there is anyone behind her. But the shaft is empty. All she sees is the flickering light beam of her headlamp. She looks back toward the camera. She begins to breathe more heavily, feels fear rise up inside her. The feeling of panic is all too familiar to her but it normally only occurs when she is somewhere high up. Small dark spaces don't bother her. This one is different. She registers that she feels trapped.

  More out of instinct than anything else, she turns her headlamp off and slides to the floor, her back resting against the door. She closes her eyes. If this is some kind of a game, she can certainly play it. Ty knows where she is. Worst-case scenario would be for him to have to come up here and manually open the door. Aries tries to relax. She sits still for a few minutes, calming her breath. Out of the blackness, an image appears inside her eyelids. It's Kiire's room. There is no sign of him or the hawk. The walls and ceiling show the top of a mountain. The vistas reach far into the distance. A nest is perched on the rock and an eagle is about to land in it. It has something in its beak that it distributes among three young birds. And now it dawns on Aries. Kiire is running a Bird of Prey program.

  Born-of-Night, she thinks. "Are you there?" she whispers, while holding the image of the hawk in her mind. Nothing. After a few moments she shakes her head, feeling silly for expecting some kind of an answer.

  The hawk's scream cuts into the silence of her mind. She hears it as if it sits right next to her, but on the inside, not outside of her. Aries holds the silence for a minute or so. Born-of-Night, she thinks. After a few moments she hears the cry again.

  She is communicating with me, Aries thinks. "Are you talking to me?" she says.

  She hears the cry once more. And then she feels it. A presence within her. Very light, like a fine brush on her soul. The touch, as fragile as it seems, lets Aries see the entire hawk at once. She sees her intelligence, her curiosity, her unbound energy and strength, her health, even her hunger. At the same time she realizes that the hawk sees her as well. For an instant, Aries contemplates hiding from her, withdrawing and showing her only aspects that she wants her to see. But then she decides that she doesn't want to do that. So she opens herself up and shows her everything as well: her joys, her fears, her loneliness, and her wish for company—her past and her wish to be free. That most of all she offers her. She tells her of her dream to see the stars one night and to stand under them out in the open.

  For a fleeting moment, Aries catches the trace of a memory from the hawk. A moonlit night with the land far below and the stars in the darkened sky above. And then Aries makes the connection. She has dreamed this. For the last few weeks she has dreamed of flying. Now she knows why. She must have communicated with the hawk, then. But how is this even possible? Part of her is not convinced that this isn't a figment of her imagination, created by her strong wish for companionship. And with the doubt, the hawk's presence fades until it is gone. What's left is the darkness around her and the slight sting of loss of something that seemed to have given her comfort for a moment.

  Once gone, Aries questions that it was real to begin with. Then, as sudden as they darkened, the lights in the shaft come back on and the door opens. Aries almost falls backward as the door opens outward. She gets up and moves away from the shaft. When she's ten feet away, the door closes. She enters the elevator. Going downward is usually worse than up, but this time her fear is less than before. Not by much, but enough not to feel sick to her stomach. And when she leaves the lift on the 205th floor, she cannot deny the faint yet somehow lasting impression her encounter with Born-of-Night has left her with.

  * * *

  "This is very odd," Ty says, when Aries shows him the screenshot. "But not only is this odd, it's basically impossible."

  "Why is that?" Aries asks, looking over his shoulder. The DIAG sits on the large desk of the command center amid the stacks of blueprints, with Ty hunched over it.

  "You see this curve here?" Ty traces the sinus curve on the oscilloscope's image.

  "Yes."

  "The oscilloscope basically measures electric current over time, usually in milliseconds. The closer the peaks of the curves are together, the higher the frequency of the current. Because it takes time for the current to flow, the sinus wave always goes forward. Always."

  "This one doesn't," Aries says.

  "Nope. It does not. Which makes me think that this must have been an error in the screen image rather than in the unit itself."

  "Why can't it be an odd fluctuation in the electric current?"

  Ty looks at her as if considering how much to tell her. "It can't be an odd fluctuation in the electric current because, if this is correct, the current would flow backward. In time."

  "What?" Aries sees on Ty's face a reflection of her own puzzlement.

  "If current flows from point A to point B in a certain period of time, it flows through point A and then, let's say, one millisecon
d later, crosses point B, then, again, one millisecond later, point C, and so on. You with me so far?"

  "Yes. Kind of."

  "In order for this image to appear on the oscilloscope, the current would have had to—for a very short period of time, roughly one hundredth of a millisecond—flow backward in time. As the oscilloscope measures the amount..."

  "...of current in a given time going from point A to point B. I got it."

  "Good."

  "So, the image must be wrong because current can't flow backward in time."

  "That is correct."

  "Is there anything that could theoretically cause this?"

  "Theoretically, yes."

  "What is it?"

  "The only thing that could theoretically cause this fluctuation in the electric current would be a wormhole."

  "A wormhole?"

  "Yes. And I said theoretically for there is no proof, only a theoretical concept of a possible theory."

  Both look at the image for a while.

  "What's next?" Aries asks.

  "You tell me."

  "I guess we'll go up there again, with another DIAG, and see if this one is broken." Aries says.

  "That is exactly what we're going to do. I'll run some self-diagnostics on it in the meantime." Ty looks at his wristwatch. "Your shift is almost over, kiddo. Why don't you get out a little earlier today? For excellent work well done. You'll still have plenty of overtime to use."

  When she leaves Electrical and makes her way down the ladder toward the dining room, she formulates a plan in her head: go visit Kiire tonight. Find the marked air vent from inside the ducts and read up on hawks. And if not for the nagging feeling that this wasn't the end of it, that there must be another reason for the fluctuations and the strange behavior of the door, together with the almost twenty-minute-long blackout in shaft number five, she would be content.

  011 010 000 1010 0101 0001 010111 0101 0 0 10 10 10010100010 01010 010 101001001 010 010 010110 01 00001010100000110011010010011010 1001 100001 1 010 10000 1111010 010100 000111 001 01011 0101 0101 egan, aries, d. id#: 4746-poc-201-0017485 0001000 0101 01001 esm [evidence for social misconduct] retrieved111 1001 0111 00 11 1 0001101 01 evidence object: napkin// partial 1 010100001 1010111 tag 8. contents 100% readable1 100001 10011 content reads: Like the wind o'er forgotten plains [] When the storm clouds whisper names [] Like the girl that came from light [] Like the bird 'twas Born-of-Night [] 1:38 [] 1101011 100 1001 11001100 source: unknown 0011 1001 00101010 000111 001001 further action pending evaluation 1 1 11 0001 10001 1000 11000110 1011010 100011 00 1110100 001001 010101 010111 011000 010 0001101 01011101010 place subject on short list for red surveillance 0101001 01001 0101 010 010 010 010 000010101110 010 0001010 01010000101 111001 001101 010000 101110010100 001 001 001 0101110 0 000 10 011 010 0111 010 010 100010 101 01 1011

  Chapter 5 — Complications

  "Intricacy holds nothing but the promise

  of an intricate solution."

  [Mechanical Engineering Handbook,

  3rd Edition/s.2/p.17 (no longer available]

  Aries opens the air vent to Kiire's room at 1:41 a.m., after having slept for only an hour before her watch woke her. All night, her thoughts circled around her day on the 282nd floor; she couldn't turn them off. And when she finally fell asleep, she dreamed of running down the dark shaft that extended before her into infinity. There was something behind her, following her, and keeping her speed. She was unable to outrun it and suddenly she had to slow down, as if her legs wouldn't obey her command to run anymore. Whatever followed her came closer and closer until she felt it behind her—a cold presence, half-machine and half-human—and her scream was that of a hawk, and a terrible foreboding grabbed her heart as she awoke clutching her chest and calling out, "Mimosh."

  "I think someone has been waiting for you." Kiire's voice comes from the other end of his room as Aries climbs out of the air duct. He sits on his futon, pad on his lap, hood over his head. The hawk sits on top of a makeshift coatrack next to the futon. "We have become acquainted and I think she likes me, but I know that who she really likes is you. I read up on hawks and how to feed them and train them and stuff. And—"

  The hawk launches and swoops down toward Aries who, completely out of reflex, stretches out her arm to the side. The bird lands on her forearm, not without digging her small yet already powerful talons into the skin beneath Aries's sweater.

  "Wow. Okay. I think we can check off parts one-through-five of the training." Kiire gets up. "That usually doesn't happen unless you have a huge piece of raw meat in your hand, or you have worked with the hawk for a good amount of time."

  Born-of-Night lets out a loud scream.

  "Yeah. That happens too, a lot! Especially when I'm about to fall asleep. First couple of times I jumped up and screamed like a baby. Until I realized that she was just hungry. Here..." Kiire hands Aries a piece of ham. Aries takes it and holds it in her open palm.

  "Ehm, I wouldn't hold it—"

  The hawk digs her beak into the ham, piercing the skin on Aries hand.

  "Ahh, gentle," Aries whispers, while trying to swallow her pain.

  "—like that. Okay. Too late. Next time hang it from your finger so she can pick it from below. Or you could use these." Kiire pulls out a pair of worn leather gloves from the pocket of his hoodie. "They work really well."

  Aries takes the gloves and walks over to the futon. She sits down, Born-of-Night still on her forearm. With one finger she touches the hawk's head, moves gently around to her chest, feeling the soft feathers and stroking her.

  "Judging by her size, she must be about three months old," Kiire says, sitting beside Aries. “She has reached about two-thirds of her size by now. She eats quite a lot. And therefore she... ehm... she..."

  A smile crosses her face.

  "Let's just say she's very... messy," Kiire says. "I've never cleaned my room so much as I have in the last twenty-four hours. I'll be happy to do it, don't get me wrong, it's just that..."

  Aries moves her arm so that the hawk is in front of her face.

  "How did you find your way in here, hmm? How did you end up so deep inside the building, so close to the core?" The hawk looks at Aries as if trying to understand what she is saying. "And where did you come from?" For an instant, Aries has the fleeting image of the night sky and the desert far below. "She understands me."

  "What do you mean?"

  "I mean she understands what I'm saying."

  "How do you know?"

  "Because she just told me that she was flying here."

  "She said she was flying?"

  "No. She didn't say she was flying. She showed it to me. I saw it in my mind's eye, like an image. I think she's communicating with me somehow."

  "That is so interesting. And totally awesome at the same time!"

  Aries looks at Kiire. His curly hair sticks out from under the hood of his sweater. "Thank you," she says.

  "For what?"

  "For being a friend in a place that doesn't allow it."

  Kiire looks back at Aries. Their eyes meet. Long enough for both to acknowledge the truth of what Aries said; long enough for both to see in each other the same wish—to not be here, to somehow, hope against hope, change their lives.

  "And thank you for your note."

  "Which note?"

  "Like the wind o'er forgotten plains," Aries exclaims dramatically.

  "When the storm clouds whisper names," Kiire replies as dramatically. "Like the girl that came from light..."

  "Like the bird 'twas born of night," Aries replies. "A very fine piece of poetry, I must say." She bows her head.

  "I must say so myself, I'm afraid. Very fine indeed," Kiire answers.

  "There must be more," Aries says.

  "More of what?"

  "More poetry."

  "Ah... alas, a lover of the spoken word, the written word, the riddle, rhythm, and the rhyme."

  Aries looks down. "Very much so," she whispers. "Very much so." A
nd for no apparent reason she starts to cry. Not a lot, and she wipes away the tears as soon as they come. "Sorry," she says. "I feel so silly."

  "Don't be," Kiire replies. "Please. Not in here."

  "It's just so hard sometimes. And I don't know what to do about it."

  "I don't know, either, but we'll find a way."

  "I hope so." For some reason, Kiire's matter-of-fact reply is comforting to her.

  "We will. I know it," he replies.

  Aries wipes her tears while realizing that she can sense the hawk's presence, similar to yesterday when she was in the dark shaft. As if Born-of-Night is somehow privy to her emotional state and reacts accordingly.

  "I have to find you a place to live," Aries says. "This is too small for you."

  "Any ideas?" Kiire asks. "'Cause I don't."

  "Yes, as a matter of fact I do have an idea. The other day I found a very odd and very long vertical shaft that connects the core with the duct system. I marked it. I have to find the vent from within the ducts. I could take her there and let her through the vent and into the core. She would have plenty of space."

  "What about food?" Kiire replies.

  "I'm sure our friends at Rodent Control would appreciate a little help," Aries says.

  Kiire smiles. "You think she'll be okay there?"

  "I don't know. I hope so. I don't see any other place for her to be."

  "It's settled then," Kiire says.

  "I need to go."

  "Now?"

  Aries looks at her watch. "It's 1:59. I have forty minutes. I think I know where to look. It'll take me about fifteen minutes to get there and I'll have plenty of time to get back before the loop expires."

  "Okay. But be careful."

  "I will."

  Kiire stretches out his arm and Born-of-Night jumps over to it.

  "Aw, why does it have to hurt so much?" he exclaims.

  "See you tomorrow night?" Aries says.

  "Yes. See you tomorrow night."

  Aries crouches in front of the vent. As she looks back toward Kiire and the hawk, she sees, for just an instant, an image of herself from the hawk's perspective, kneeling in front of the open vent. The colors are brighter and the image is sharp. Then it's gone and Aries climbs into the duct.