Selfless Series Box Set

by S Breaker

  Noah watched him. “Oh, what?”

  “I know exactly where we need to go to get it,” Berry said brightly. “It could be dicey, and government patrols might be a problem again, except it’s a source we can trust, and it’s right on our way.” Then he added, looking hesitant, “But…”

  “But?” Noah repeated cautiously. “What is it?”

  Berry’s reply was wry. “You’re not going to like it.”

  The Fringe

  “Stay close to me,” Noah said under his breath.

  Laney tried to keep behind Noah in the near-complete darkness of the tunnel system that they were going through.

  He had landed the Chubby on a hill at the edge of what must have been a city. They had hoofed it to the underground from there so they could move around without alerting any military patrols.

  She adjusted the satchel that she had brought along over her shoulder, as Laney had thought to bring along a water bottle this time around, knowing the likelihood of another marathon was high, although as usual, she didn’t know where they were going again.

  Noah trained his HUD toward the next corner and it must have indicated that the coast was clear because he motioned her forward, and Laney made another face.

  It was stairs. More stairs. Again.

  “Seriously?” she groaned as she began to slog up the concrete steps, decidedly way behind Noah. “Noah, where in the hell are we?” she wanted to know.

  “This used to be the subway,” was his uninformative reply. “I think we’re close enough now to go top-side.”

  “Close to what?” she asked helplessly, knowing he wasn’t going to offer any more information. “Hey,” she spoke up. “Why don’t I get one of those HUD things on my arm? Seems pretty useful.”

  He coughed. “This is also a prototype.”

  She raised her eyebrows. That meant there was only one. “Well, it might be helpful if Berry gave me a gadget too, maybe a weapon,” she muttered. “Like that poofy thing he used at the London train station—what was that?”

  “A portable inertial wave generator,” he replied.

  Laney frowned in total confusion. “Whatever,” she dismissed. Then she mused almost to herself, “Except, I suppose, it would also knock me out, unless I was able to trigger it remotely, like from a safe distance.” She concluded, “Well, either way, I think I should have also been given some kind of techy thing-a-ma-jig—”

  “Here,” Noah cut her off, putting something in her hand, presumably to shut her up.

  Laney blinked. “What’s that?”

  “A necklace.”

  “What?” Laney shot him a surprised look. “Wow,” she breathed in disbelief. “I can’t believe...” She gazed down at the ornate, intricate gear mechanism on the slightly tarnished gold clock necklace in the faint light of his HUD. “Oh, it’s a very pretty necklace,” she began. She was almost going to smile, but then she stopped short in suspicion and narrowed her eyes up at him. “And?” she prompted flatly.

  A corner of his mouth turned up in a smirk. “And…it’s a locator beacon.”

  Laney rolled her eyes since she should have known. “So it’s a lo-jack device. Thanks a lot.” She shook her head even as she put the necklace on, granting that it was probably a necessity for someone in her situation.

  “It’s inert.”

  “Huh?”

  “That means it doesn’t work until it’s been activated. So don’t accidentally set it off or you’ll light up like a Christmas tree on everyone’s radar.”

  Laney’s eyes lit up at the mention. “Oh, you guys still have Christmas here?”

  “Some do.”

  His reply made her stomach churn at the very sad, very likely possibility that maybe Noah didn’t have any family left to celebrate Christmases with. And she thought of how warm and cozy Christmases were at home—the ones she had easily taken for granted. But before she could begin to wallow in self-pity and despair that maybe she had already spent her last Christmas with her family, she saw the light at the end of the tunnel. Literally.

  Noah pushed open a heavy metal door that was the exit out of the tunnels and led the way outside.

  Laney glanced back and noticed that they had run up the steps of an old elevator well and that the old stone walls, which were overgrown with vines, matched the cobblestones of the sidewalk.

  She squinted in the afternoon sunlight, still catching her breath. “So, are you going to tell me where we’re going—?” She stopped abruptly as soon as she looked up, as in the distance, she could see quite clearly, even with the slightly overcast weather, a tall wrought-iron lattice radio tower.

  It was unmistakable.

  Her jaw dropped. “Holy cats, are we in Paris?”

  Friday, 20 March 2020 1:15 p.m.

  “Oh, I’ve always wanted to go to Paris,” Laney breathed, almost excitedly.

  “It’s not going to be the Paris you know, remember?” Noah reminded her.

  And true enough, she stopped short again, looking up. “What the hell is that?”

  Half of the city was lit up with some kind of green glowing light. It was as though a giant semi-transparent blanket was stretched over across at least the entire eighth arrondissement. It swallowed up the Arc de Triomphe entirely, ending through possibly one-quarter of the Eiffel Tower itself.

  “Is that a force field?” Laney guessed, still staring up at it while they walked.

  Noah replied, “It’s a monofilament electrified mesh which forms a near-invisible barrier.”

  She blinked. “So, it’s a force field,” she repeated pointedly after a moment.

  He rolled his eyes.

  “Is it keeping something in or keeping something out?” she asked, curious.

  “Both,” Noah replied. “Half the city is irradiated and dangerous. There are similar…force fields,” he enunciated flatly, to her amusement. “In Brussels, Amsterdam, Dublin—the fringes of the primary blast radius of the cascade bomb event. Somehow, the effect of the bomb is worse in these zones. We don’t know why yet. We have scientists studying the phenomenon right now,” he relayed.

  Laney’s eyes widened slightly. “Right now? In there?” She gestured toward the force field. Then she stopped. “Wait a minute,” she said, looking wary. “We’re not going in there, are we?”

  “If I say no, will you stop asking so many questions?”

  Laney gave him a suffering look.

  Noah let out a little sigh. “We’re going there.” He pointed ahead, where the street ended up to a large courtyard, and there were remarkably well-preserved pyramid-shaped glass structures, an area outside of the force field.

  She looked up and felt herself smile again.

  They were approaching The Louvre.

  “Wow…” She breathed in amazement. She presumed most of Paris was pretty old anyway so in fact, this Paris looked much similar to her own world’s version of Paris. Except for... Her eye caught the “ruins” of a little café that they walked past.

  This place feels familiar somehow…

  Laney couldn’t quite put a finger on it, but despite having never visited Paris ever in her life, she felt as though she had seen that café before, as though she had walked down that street, a lot.

  Must have seen it in a movie, she dismissed quickly as she walked faster to catch up with Noah.

  ***

  “It looks like a gaming arcade,” Laney mused, loud enough so that only Noah could hear, as the two of them came down the stairs into the museum’s main atrium, under the giant glass pyramid, where there were rows and rows of capsules with screens, and panels of buttons, dials, and levers. Not to mention easily more than a dozen people upon the capsule stations.

  “I thought you said everyone lived on the other side of the world,” she asked Noah.

  “They do,” he replied with a nod. “But ‘The Fringe’ zones are like markets where people trade all kinds of things. I’ve heard some people claim that around these parts, the cascade bomb affected cert
ain technology in a strange way,” he relayed under his breath, not pausing as he walked quickly past the ‘arcade’. “They say it’s basically your go-to place if you’re into obscure, unconventional devices. But they’re probably old, defective technology. I do know some of them also sell old prototypes from defunct experiments or previous versions of military gadgets scavenged from containers headed for disposal.”

  “Isn’t that—?” Laney started.

  “Illegal?” Noah supplied, unsurprised. “Incredibly. Walk faster.”

  She picked up her pace, following Noah into a hallway, further into the museum, and couldn’t help but breathe again in awe as she looked around.

  Most of the museum had collapsed or had been closed off, either due to the cascade bomb event or from generic aging and decay throughout the years. But while all the sections of the museum that were still accessible had all been repurposed as a market or other, its internal structure, all the crown moldings, the columns, and the marble floors were surprisingly still intact. And even though what was left of the remaining paintings on the ceilings were all damaged, torn and faded, unrecognizable, Laney could easily imagine what it must have been like when the greatest collection of artworks in the world were displayed here.

  But more than that, somehow she also felt as though she had spent many an early morning wandering around the museum—getting lost in the beauty, getting lost in the past, taking it all in, exploring the science in art…

  Science is an art.

  But she quickly dismissed the ridiculous thought.

  Laney followed Noah past a maze of hallways until they reached a large section with skylights again, and grand staircases on either end. This chamber had several curtained booths and cubicles lined up against the walls.

  She noticed a young guy wearing a stylized bowler hat walk out of one and she dropped her gaze so she wouldn’t meet his.

  Noah had said Laney needed to be absolutely incognito. They couldn’t risk someone spotting the famous Laney Carter out and about, especially with the trackers probably hiding in plain sight.

  She and Noah walked into one of the larger cubicles. All the cubicle contained were two cheap metal chairs, a black expensive-looking helmet on each seat.

  She looked at him puzzled. “I thought we were here to meet with someone.”

  “He lives inside the mesh—the uh force field,” Noah answered, walking up to one of the chairs. “Since there’s no way we’ll be cleared to go inside, this is how we’ll contact him.”

  “Oh, alright.” Laney nodded, taking a seat. “How does it work?”

  He began to explain, “This is a VRX helmet—sorry, it’s a virtual—”

  But Laney interjected, “No way, it’s a virtual reality helmet? Cool!”

  Noah shot her a strange look. “Alright, you know what it is. It’ll let us see a holographic projection of Macon from his lab, and then it’ll scan your brain to project your image to him on the other side.”

  “Whoa, scan my brain? We don’t have that,” she remarked, gawking at the helmet in her hands.

  “It’s fine,” Noah assured. “Holographic brain scan technology is super straightforward. It’s totally read-only, totally harmless. I built a helmet like this myself when I was seven.” He met Laney’s strange gaze. “Out of a step-by-step kit,” he added pointedly as if to illustrate how absurd it was to doubt its safety.

  She narrowed her eyes. “This world is weird.”

  He groaned, exasperated. “Just give me the thing.”

  Macon

  Laney sighed and obliged.

  “So who is this Macon person?” she wanted to know.

  Noah huffed slightly as he configured her helmet. “Dr. Julian Macon. He used to be one of our scientists back at GNR. I’ve had to arrest him a few times in the past, for constantly disregarding his safety protocols and putting his staff at risk,” he said, looking annoyed already. “He’s…a bit eccentric, you know, kind of out of touch with reality. He hasn’t left this place in years. He probably won’t have heard that you—our Laney—had been captured by the government.”

  He paused, tilting his head slightly to look at her. “So actually…”

  Laney gave him an expectant look. “What?”

  “Things might actually go better for us if he didn’t know that you’re another Laney from another world.”

  “What?” she asked in mocking disbelief.

  He looked at her seriously as he gave her back the helmet. “I need you to pretend to be Laney and get the stuff we need. Just make some adjustments to the speech we practiced earlier.”

  “No, no.” She shook her head, understanding he was not at all kidding. “We agreed I would ask him because we know he hates your guts, but that’s crazy! He’s totally going to know it’s not the same Laney. I mean, he might notice even the slightest differences in how we look. Maybe she has some kind of a mole or a birthmark that I don’t have. We don’t look exactly the same, do we? Surely, you could tell the difference, right?”

  He didn’t look at her when he replied, “No. You look exactly the same.”

  Laney made a face. “Oh man, I’m never going to pull this off.”

  “Yes, you will,” he compelled, turning to meet her gaze somberly. “Because you have to. This is our only shot, Laney. We have no backup. There is no cavalry. Nobody else is coming to help us. We are her last chance. Do you understand?” he prompted.

  She blinked, looking into his eyes, feeling the gravity of his words, and nodded after a moment.

  “Oh, one other thing,” Noah added, offhand. “Technically—technically, Macon is your ex-boyfriend.”

  “My what?”

  But Noah had already put his helmet on.

  Laney groaned in exasperation. Then she wrinkled her nose before cautiously putting the helmet on herself.

  It wasn’t so much “The Matrix” as Laney had expected. As soon as she’d put on the helmet, she was almost instantly in a different place altogether.

  It was a small, dimly lit room with several rows of tables with beakers, jars, and other equipment. The walls of the room were all whiteboards and had complex-looking scientific formulas written all over them.

  When she turned her head, she saw an image of Noah standing beside her, much as he looked back in the real world.

  She looked down at her own hands. Her resolution was splintering off and on and she looked see-through half the time but she still felt like herself.

  She reached up to pull the helmet up off her head slightly and was relieved to see the brightly lit cubicle at The Louvre once again. She smiled to herself, mumbling, “Fascinating…” Alrighty then, she breathed, relaxing, and shifted the helmet back down, blinking a few times to adjust her eyes to the light.

  “It’s a full-motion sensor device,” Noah explained quietly. “The helmet reads your brain activity and directs your hologram to walk, talk, and move.”

  “Wow,” Laney breathed, walking toward a table, and reached her hand out gingerly to attempt to pick up an empty beaker. She grinned and whispered, “Look, Noah, I can touch things.”

  Noah cleared his throat pointedly. Obviously, acting like this was the first time her holographic hand picked up a holographic beaker was not how to convince anyone that she was the legitimate Dr. Laney Carter.

  Laney gave him a sheepish look and backed up again.

  “You need to be confident. You’re a Nobel Laureate scientist with breakthrough findings on multiverses and string theory. Just…be the ball and remember your lines. I can handle the rest of the science talk.”

  “Roger that.”

  “Dr. Macon,” Noah called out loudly then.

  The man that came out to meet them was definitely not what Laney had expected any ex-boyfriends of hers to look like. Possibly because Macon had wiry graying hair, almost ‘Dr. Emmett Brown’-esque, and he was wearing another funny sort of goggles which covered the top half of his face, the bottom half was covered with a beard.

  He
looked at the two of them, before smiling. “Laney, ma chérie, is that you?”

  Then when he took off his goggles and haphazardly ran his hand through his hair to tidy it a bit, Laney met his gaze and she blinked, surprised at how his bright gray-blue eyes instantly made his face significantly more pleasant-looking.

  Ah, there is Laney’s ex-boyfriend, she thought with an almost impressed smile.

  “What a pleasant surprise,” Macon said with a nod, speaking with a thick French accent. “And you, Mr. Soldier, good to see you again.” He gave Laney a brief look. “I see you are still running around with this guy?”

  She shot Noah a quick glance before tentatively smiling back at Macon. “Uh, apparently.” She shrugged, then decided to get straight to business. “Listen, Dr. Macon—”

  “Ah.” He put up his hand to stop her. “Dr. Macon was my father. Well, non. My father was a, what you call, a psychiatrist, so really—a loose interpretation of the word ‘doctor’, yes?” He glanced over at Noah as he laughed. Then he looked at her again. “My baby, have you forgotten what you used to call me?”

  Laney tilted her head slightly. But before Noah could cut in, she answered, “Jay-jay.”

  Macon’s eyes lit up as he smiled. “Ah, you remember.”

  She blinked. She had no idea where that had come from or how in the world she could have known that. “Lucky guess?” she mumbled over her shoulder so only Noah could hear.

  “So, what do I owe this visit for?” Macon prompted, raising his eyebrows, as he donned his thick-rimmed glasses.

  Laney cleared her throat. “We’re actually working on perfecting the transceiver for the ring array. Berry—my assistant, he thinks we’re having problems because of the purity of the copper ink supply back at my lab. So I thought, we ought to try getting some copper from an outside source for testing to see if that’s the source of the issue. We’d only need about half a gram, maybe a little more, if you can spare any.”