Boundary (Field Book 3)

by Simon Winstanley

  At great personal expense, both financially and emotionally, he had arranged for his wife and their son to begin new lives without him as Vanessa and Danny Smith. He’d reasoned that anyone searching for one Smith in a million would have a hard time.

  He logged on to his computer by clicking on the cubist-looking ‘Pi’ symbol next to his name. The screen’s background wallpaper was a photo of Stonehenge; a tasteful silhouette shot against a misty dawn sky. Framed by the surrounding clutter of computer icons, the screen’s wallpaper featured two tall upright stones supporting a third horizontal one.

  It reminded him of when he and Vanessa had posed for a photo in front of the stone age monument. The two of them had stood opposite each other and, raising their arms above their heads, had joined hands to mimic the trilithon behind them. Though the resulting photo didn’t show it, she had been pregnant with Danny at the time; effectively it was the earliest photo containing his family.

  Of course he no longer had the physical photo, when Vanessa and Danny had assumed their new identities, he’d destroyed all evidence of their relationship. The image now existed in only two places, his memory and a heavily-encrypted ‘Trilithon’ folder buried within his smartphone. The encryption meant that viewing the image was not a simple matter, so he tended to rely on his recall of the event, where the colours, sounds and the smell of her perfume were more vibrant.

  Over the years, he’d occasionally watched their lives from afar but he’d never interfered. However, in 2001 it came to his attention that Danny had suffered a broken arm. Taking advantage of a recent development at an Archive research facility, he’d arranged for a miniature tracking device to be covertly implanted within Danny’s healing bone.

  During the intervening years, the tracking chip had allowed him to keep a passive eye on his son’s location. The implied threat he’d received a few minutes ago meant that the time for being passive was over.

  He synchronised the smartphone with his desktop computer and, after entering the long decryption key, accessed the ‘Trilithon’ folder. Once inside he began the process of updating the automated protocols that would find and retrieve his son.

  OBSCURA

  DAY03 : 05NOV2023

  Danny Smith sat on the floor of Cassidy and Tyler’s quarters, surrounded by the contents of the ‘Trilithon’ folder that had accompanied him here. The last few hours had been a blur of impossible information. He’d been brought to the Node inside a box designed to keep him alive, but in all other respects the box had resembled a coffin.

  It was as though he’d died during his sprint across the top floor of The Gene Pool, only to rise again here in some form of incomprehensible hell. Though when he thought back to his previous life, he knew it was just a different kind of hell.

  He knew it was post-traumatic stress that repeatedly forced Sophie’s tragic death into his mind. Time and again he’d experienced the moment when an armed man had pulled the trigger. Countless times he’d seen Sophie’s face disappear in a flash of pink that was as bright as her hair. Every time, he’d been forced to recall her inert, lifeless fall into the night.

  He made a conscious effort to reimagine her; alive and well with his other friends, gathered around a makeshift fire, drinking Jake’s hoarded cheap coffee. But even as Danny was recalling this, his memory unhelpfully volunteered the information that they’d all died too.

  Everyone had died, yet he’d been saved. Saved inside an impossible technological bubble, bound for the deep future. Facing an uncertain future was one thing, he thought, but it appeared that even his past was uncertain. From the pile of papers surrounding him, he picked up the photo of the two people in front of Stonehenge.

  He recognised the woman as a much younger version of his mother, but he didn’t know the man she was holding hands with. If the folder’s information was to be believed, the man in the photo was his father.

  Danny’s mother had always maintained that his father had died while Danny was very young. Yet the information before him provided evidence that his father, someone called Dylan Napier, had been killed only a few days before the Node’s departure.

  Apparently, Dylan had died at the hands of two men. Their photos had also been included in the file that had accompanied Danny, along with several paragraphs of dense type.

  He put the photos aside. He knew he’d been avoiding the most troubling aspect of the folder’s information; something that related specifically to him alone. He picked up a sheet of paper entitled ‘Cortical Enhancement Program & Metathene Trigger’.

  The door to the quarters opened suddenly and Danny found himself on his feet, alert and backing away. He relaxed slightly when he realised it was Cassidy and Tyler returning, still in conversation.

  “…only gonna get more difficult?” Tyler was asking.

  “Well, obviously,” Cassidy replied sarcastically.

  She spotted Danny’s stance and rolled her eyes.

  “Chill out, Danny-boy. Food.”

  Danny watched as they both retrieved several ration packs from their pockets. Evidently their night-time raid of supplies had been successful.

  “It’s early days. Getting these was easy, but we’ll have to sort something out soon. We can’t keep sneaking rations for you. Pretty soon, people are gonna notice that you’re not on the Node’s register and - what?”

  Danny realised he’d been staring at her hair. It was as bright and pink as Sophie’s had been. It still seemed an unlikely coincidence that they should both have the same vibrant colour.

  “I…” he began, “You just remind me of someone, that’s all.”

  She threw him a ration pack and laughed.

  “With this hair? Un-bloody-likely! I’m one of a kind. Now eat something, will you? Can’t have you getting all weak. I don’t want to cart you off to the infirmary again.”

  “Er, excuse me?” interrupted Tyler with a grin, “I think I was the one doing the carting.”

  The three of them sat down among the papers and rations, talking about the last few hours and discussing the contents of Danny’s folder. Soon the conversation returned to the page that Danny had found the most awkward to deal with. Tyler pointed to the page in front of Danny.

  “So, you and your mum have, like, this weird DNA thing?”

  “I dunno,” Danny sighed, “I guess. Maybe not. Maybe I’m safe as long as I don’t take any of that…”

  “Metathene,” Cassidy completed, tilting her head to read the page.

  “Whatever the hell that is,” Danny shook his head, “You’ve never heard of it then?”

  The other two both shook their heads. Not for the first time, Danny thought that with each new piece of information the picture was becoming less and less clear.

  “He says he was trying to keep me safe,” said Danny, picking up the piece of paper, “He hid me and my mum. Sent us away, so that no-one would find out about the gene thing. So why bring me back here?”

  “Isn’t it obvious?” Tyler shrugged, “He must’ve loved you and your mum.”

  “Funny way of showing it,” Danny murmured.

  “People do all sorts of weird shit when they know their number’s up,” Cassidy cut in, “Looks like he planned for it though - that was a really fancy box we found you in. I think Ty’s right, he sent you to the one place on Earth you could survive. Right here.”

  “So, let me get this right,” Danny attempted again to instill order, “This General Napier, my dad, he ran this whole place? I mean, the base outside and this… this…”

  “Time machine?” Cassidy snorted a derisive laugh, “Yep, the whole thing.”

  Danny began leafing through the pages that lay around him.

  “But there’s no mention of the fact that he invented time travel, he must’ve been a genius… Hey! Maybe my dad also had genetically -” Danny stopped because the other two were frowning more than usual, “What?”

  “Your dad was in charge,” Cassidy’s frown persisted, “But he wasn’t the guy who
came up with the Field - shit, I keep forgetting that you know squat about anything round here. No, the guy that came up with this place was Douglas Walker. Now he was a genius. If anyone was ‘cortically enhanced’ I’d bet good money it was him - I mean, seriously, who just invents time travel?”

  “I heard that he invented it when he was a kid,” Tyler joined in.

  “Seriously?” said Cassidy, “Where’d you hear that?”

  “I heard Johnson talking about it one time in the mess hall.”

  Cassidy stared at Tyler with a look of incredulity.

  “Johnson? As in ‘Johnson who didn’t take his Biomag isotope early enough and got Field-fragged’ Johnson?” she wiggled her head about, imitating the moment of his catastrophic unanchoring.

  Danny was very much aware of the importance of wearing a Biomag, but it was useless without the anchoring isotope. The very fact that Danny was still alive demonstrated that his father had arranged for the isotope to be administered during his journey to the Node - it also explained the fever he’d run whilst inside the transport box.

  “Yeah well, if you ask me,” Cassidy jerked her head again to sweep her pink hair away from her eyes, “Johnson did us all a favour by removing himself from the gene pool.”

  Sophie’s tragic death on the exposed level of The Gene Pool flashed into his memory; as ever, her bright pink hair flaring outward in hideous slow motion as she was mercilessly killed in front of him.

  When he looked at Cassidy really carefully, as he did now, he could almost see Sophie alive and well again in vibrant colour. He knew it was only a trick played on him by his own wishful thinking, but Cassidy’s mentioning of the words ‘gene pool’ had given the moment a personal connection beyond the superficial.

  Coincidence no longer seemed to describe their situation.

  It had been Cassidy who was present when he’d crawled from the box in the basement levels of the Node. She had sought medical attention for him. She had also arrived at the infirmary just when he most needed help avoiding awkward questions. She had given him shelter and food. Now, even her choice of words echoed a connection with his past. The cloud of confusion surrounding his new life aboard the Node seemed to disperse, leaving behind only her words.

  “Walker’s daughter - now there’s a new fish in our gene pool. If her dad was a special-brainer, then she’s gotta be.”

  Tyler was nodding in agreement, evidently there was something they both knew.

  “Why?” Danny looked between the two of them.

  “OK, quick recap,” Cassidy leaned back, “Doug Walker gets stuck outside the Field but sends a message to his daughter using, like, a hundred pages of equations and shit. His daughter captures it on her DRB but can’t watch it at normal speed without the video suite. Beck gets everyone to find all the bits of the video equipment -”

  “Which is when you found me,” Danny nodded, “Go on.”

  “OK, so, eventually they get all the pages off the DRB and start putting together Walker’s message. But, and here’s the thing, it’s Walker’s daughter who works it all out!”

  Danny could see that she was waiting for his reaction, but he knew he’d missed something.

  “I don’t get it. If the message was sent to her, then why wouldn’t she figure it out?”

  “She was never part of the Field engineering team and, if what I’ve heard is true, she hadn’t seen her dad in over ten years. She only got here about four months before we left -”

  “Same day as the Mark 3 fire,” Tyler chipped in, shaking his head.

  “The what?” Danny quickly asked, eager not to lose the thread.

  “It was like a tiny version of the Node, experimental stuff,” Cassidy waved the interruption aside and continued, “The point is you don’t become a Field-tech expert in a few months, some of the guys aboard have been trying to master the theory for years. I saw her a few times in the mess hall and she was just… normal, yet she’s the one that figured out the Field fix.”

  Danny nodded, understanding the apparent incongruity.

  “Cassidy,” he began, still holding the page about cortical enhancement, “if there’s even a small chance that she’s one of these, then I have got to talk to her.”

  “Might be difficult.”

  “Why am I not surprised?” Danny quietly placed the page back on the floor.

  “No, it’s just that…” Cassidy began.

  “What?”

  “Well it’s the other odd thing,” Cassidy shared a glance with Tyler, “Right after solving the Field stuff, she had some sort of dramatic fit and got sent to Doc’ Smith in the infirmary. It might be a bit difficult getting in there. It’s not the sort of place you can casually stroll around, you know what I mean?”

  The room fell quiet for a moment and then Tyler spoke.

  “Unless you’re a patient already,” he pointed at the bandage wrapped around Danny’s head.

  Cassidy looked at Tyler with an expression bordering on awe.

  “Nice one, Ty,” she smiled, “We tell Doc’ Smith that you need a bed for the night, she’s met you once already, just make sure you rub your head a lot and I’m sure she’ll remember.”

  “We’re both ‘Smith’, I don’t think she’ll have forgotten that,” Danny added, feeling a small pinch of guilt at the proposed manipulation.

  “D’you know,” Cassidy turned to face Danny and pointed at the dressing around his head, “I never asked, how’d you get hurt?”

  Instinctively he reached up and rubbed at his bandaged forehead. At present, only Dr. Smith knew of the circle and dot symbol that the bandage concealed. He’d told Cassidy and Tyler about the hours leading up to his abduction above The Gene Pool and the event itself, but he’d always avoided talking about the bandage.

  In his old community, the Exordi Nova symbol that had been burned into his forehead would have inspired fear and hatred; here, aboard the Node, he didn’t want to risk alienating the only two people he knew. But now, after seeing all they’d done for him, he knew that his future relationship with them could not be based on a lie, or an omission. He would tell them the truth.

  Both Cassidy and Tyler had lived lives that were isolated from what Danny called the real world. They listened, enthralled by his account of the struggles and hardships experienced by most people since the announcement of Siva’s approach. They sat in uncomfortable, squirming silence as he detailed the cruel branding ceremony that had left him permanently marked with the symbol of the Exordi Nova. Only when he’d finished did he peel off the bandage so they could see the wound that would now forever follow him.

  Cassidy’s response told him that, in relaying the full truth, he’d made the right choice; she simply shuffled to sit at his side and placed her arm around him.

  “I had no idea,” she said, resting her head against his shoulder, “We’re gonna make this right. Right, Ty?”

  Tyler simply looked at the floor and nodded.

  Danny looked at the contents of the folder, still spread out over the floor. The information it contained somehow seemed more manageable; his new life aboard the Node was still an uncertainty, but it now contained hope.

  With a deep breath, Cassidy got to her feet. Danny could see that her expression was now more determined, an outlook that did not change during their short walk to the morning briefing on the Observation Deck.

  Cassidy had shown him the Observation Deck once before, in an attempt to explain what the Node was. The sight through the massive curved window had almost made him sick, so he was glad that the window was currently opaque.

  The three of them made their way through the crowded space. Tyler quietly escorted Danny while Cassidy, a few strides behind them, purposefully drew people’s attention with confident banter.

  A sense of order and quiet started to move through the crowd and Danny saw that people were beginning to look up at the balcony above the Observation Deck. He could see a man standing at a lectern and, from Cassidy’s description, he realised
it must be Colonel Beck.

  Immediately to the left of Colonel Beck, Danny could see another man. With the photo still fresh in his mind, Danny recognised him immediately and felt his heart rate soar. His sudden high blood pressure caused the Exordi Nova’s brand-mark to burn again under his bandage.

  The man next to Colonel Beck was Alfred Barnes.

  One of the men who had killed his father.

  •

  Standing on the balcony that overlooked the Observation Deck, Alfred Barnes waited patiently for his turn to use the microphone. He’d found it a surprisingly simple matter to convince Colonel Beck of the necessity to address everyone aboard the Node. Alfred had even given him the highlights of the subject matter, so that he would feel in control.

  Alfred watched him reiterating Biomag safety protocols and delivering the duty rosters to everyone gathered below. Being only a few feet away, Alfred could see that Beck was a man made weary by the burden of his sudden command; a burden that should have been carried by General Napier.

  In his discomfort at the thought of Napier, Alfred looked away to the observation window. It was still opaqued from the night before and would remain that way until the briefing concluded.

  Alfred had to admire Beck’s choice in this matter; by obscuring the distractions of the outside world during the briefing, it focussed people on the present.

  For all intents and purposes, while Beck was speaking, the outside world did not exist.

  Alfred calmly opened his folder of papers and scribbled one word, ‘Obscura’. He was just closing the folder when Colonel Beck stood aside from the lectern and invited him to use the microphone.

  “Please, Dr. Barnes.”

  “Thank you, Colonel,” Alfred took his place.

  As he looked out over the assembly gathered below him on the Observation Deck, he recalled a theory he’d once discussed during a Think Tank long ago. In the absence of confirmation to the contrary, and with sufficient authority, you can define social reality.

  He could use his former status within Archive to leverage authority if he so wished; there was no-one to verify the claim he was about to make.