by S Breaker
Laney looked surprised but nodded shortly, placing P.T. in his hand.
She shook the snow off her jacket as she watched him quickly press a few buttons on P.T., and then click on his HUD, before rolling the robot across the floor. She assumed that P.T. was probably going to stay in the hut to make sure nobody suspected that this front door had been compromised. She gave the little robot a little wave. “I guess this is see ya later then,” she whispered.
When she looked up, Noah was already standing by the almost opaque little panel by the white door at the end of the room. He held the forged Ident card up in his hand, glanced back at her briefly, then shrugged wordlessly before scanning the card against the panel.
She held her breath, almost wanting to cross her fingers.
The two seconds already felt like forever, but the entire frame of the door lit up green, and she heard a soft shush as it unlocked.
She smiled widely and met his gaze again. It worked.
The door slid open and Laney peered inside in wonderment. It was an elevator.
She and Noah stepped in and he gestured to the touch screen inside the elevator as the door slid closed again.
“It’s all you now,” he said softly, a small smile on his face.
Laney swallowed again, meeting his intent gaze.
It was like a momentous event. They’d made it. They were finally here. This was it. It felt strange as it seemed so long ago that she and Noah had first met when in reality, only one day had passed. Laney felt as though they had gone through so much together already, but somehow, together, they had made it, alive, and relatively unscathed—after everything—in spite of everything. But it was almost time.
She tilted her head slightly. “Time to find Laney?”
Noah blinked, almost like he was thinking of something else altogether. But then he nodded. “Just put your hand on the panel,” he instructed.
She nodded in reply and took a deep breath before raising her hand to press it against the touch screen. “Here goes nothing.”
Almost as soon as she said it, the elevator jerked into movement, and she grabbed Noah’s arm to steady herself. She dropped it quickly when he met her gaze again, and she stepped back to lean against the wall, to wait for the elevator to come to a halt and for the doors to reopen.
Except it was taking a scary, unusually long time.
The elevator was moving swiftly downward to no end.
She looked up at the panel, but there was no indication of where they were going when the elevator would stop, or whether or not they were going anywhere at all. She felt a lump in her throat in worry. What if the elevator was a trap in itself? It was completely sealed, there would be absolutely no way out, and it could be bringing them anywhere. It could very well be bringing them straight to the door of whatever bad guys were trying to kill them.
Then without warning, the elevator stopped moving and Laney heard a soft ding as if to indicate that they had arrived at their destination.
She watched the still-closed door warily, her pulse beginning to race in anticipation and dread. She whispered, “What’s outside the door, Noah?”
He gave her a dark, tentative look and said three words that chilled Laney to the bone. “I don’t know.”
P.S.
“So when you said this place was your lab, did you actually mean ‘labyrinth’?” Laney mused in disbelief, looking around as she followed Noah through seemingly never-ending halls and doorways. “How does anyone even know where they’re supposed to go?”
Fortunately, when the elevator doors had finally opened, they found that it had brought them to a dark, completely isolated, though unidentified section inside the facility.
Noah himself had never been in it before either, but he raised his arm meaningfully at Laney in response to her question. His HUD knew the way.
In the dim light of the HUD, Laney could barely make out what the place looked like. They were in some type of maintenance section, with various sizes of large pipes running along the hallways.
She pursed her lips wearily. They had been walking along the same maintenance tunnels for a long while. “Are you sure we’re not going in circles? I feel like I’ve been seeing these same pipes forever,” she said, gesturing to them.
“Those are the old accelerator tubes,” Noah replied casually. “I told you it’s almost thirty kilometers across.”
Laney felt a tingle of recognition. “Particle accelerator?” she ventured a guess. She was no scientist but she certainly knew what particle accelerator was supposed to be in Switzerland. She felt another smile of wonder on her face. “Fascinating,” she mumbled again.
In the dark, she barely heard Noah’s scoff at her expression, but she just rolled her eyes. “Did you used to work on the particle accelerator?” she asked, curious.
“Itself? No,” Noah replied. “But a lot of that effort was redirected more toward our multiverses research and exploring quantum shears. That’s why most of this section has been largely abandoned. Also, because our team has better toys.” He grinned as he said it.
Laney watched his face, looking amused at how proud he looked, only to see it fall again.
“That was a long time ago,” he added roughly. Then he stopped short and gestured Laney to press her hand against the panel by the next door again, as she had had to do a few times along the way already.
The door frame lit up green again, as they all had done so far, and opened for them.
Laney was slightly relieved to see that they were no longer in the endless hallway of accelerator tubes.
The new room was round, small, and was lit up with only red spotlights. There were several doors around them. Noah consulted his HUD and pointed to the third door on the right.
She noticed that aside from the panel for her hand, it was also indicated that she needed to scan her eye upon what looked like a microscope attached to a wall. She was relieved to see that the door lit up green again. “So far, so good,” she said to herself.
None of the alarms had been triggered. The backdoor that Laney had built into the system was undoubtedly there, and she and the “real” Laney apparently shared exactly the same palm prints, retinal prints, and voiceprints.
Berry had been right. She was the perfect human spare key for the lock. It was definitely strange to think that another person was exactly the same as her, atom for atom, Laney thought. But at least, it meant that they might actually have a really good chance to save the “real” Laney.
The next room looked more like a normal room. It was a control room, with several standing workstations, arranged geometrically in neat ninety-degree angles across the floor. Some machines looked similar to the ones on the mobile submersible lab, with panels, toggles, and dials.
“Great,” Noah said, approaching a workstation to hook up his HUD. “One of these should tell us where Laney is being held,” he said. “With any luck, it might also tell us how many people are in the facility right now, and which areas we should be avoiding.”
Laney nodded, looking over his shoulder as he worked.
“This is where we are,” Noah muttered almost to himself, as he scanned the internal sensor maps of the lab facility, and all Laney could see was a darkened blob of map on his HUD screen. But when he moved his hand, Laney’s eyes widened as the screen lit up with hundreds of moving red dots. Noah cursed under his breath.
“What does it mean?” she asked. “What is it?”
“That.” He pointed to the screen with the many, many dots. “Is where we need to go.”
“Shit.”
“No shit.”
“Yeah.”
Noah shook his head quickly as if to refocus. “Let me just,” he began. “Everyone should be working on the quantum jump platform, so hopefully they’re all too distracted to bother with guarding Laney. They must assume she’s in a highly-secured enclosure—there it is.” He stopped short at another dot on the screen.
Laney narrowed her eyes. There you are, Laney.
&n
bsp; He clicked a few more buttons. “Maybe I can override my old login and open up an indirect route for us that avoids running into all of the other security and personnel on the ground—”
Just then, the entire screen of the HUD blinked red—as if in alarm, with Noah’s next statement confirming it. “Shit, I triggered the fail-safe!”
Laney swallowed hard. “What does that mean?”
“It’s an isolated alarm for this section of the lab. It shouldn’t set off any other alarms, but—”
There was a loud creak and all of a sudden, the walls began to move into the center of the room.
Laney’s eyes nearly popped out of her head. “Holy shit. Is this room going to squish us into pancakes?” she asked, giving Noah a panicked look. “Do something!”
“What the hell do you think I’ve been trying to do on this console for the past thirty seconds?” he called out, forcibly pulling a control board off the panel on the table with a flourish so he could take it along as he moved to the center of the room, furthest away from the walls.
Laney looked around, breathing heavily in panic.
The walls were coming in even closer, smashing through the work terminals, pushing the equipment along, pulling at cables, smashing through light bulbs, and making sparks fly.
“Noah—hurry,” she urged, backing up against him.
His eyebrows were furrowed in deep concentration and his jaw was set as his fingers flew across the keypad in almost imperceptibly fast movements. “Come here.” He motioned for her to come around in front of him.
“Oh my god. Oh my god. Oh my god,” Laney muttered as she did so, gasping in short breaths, as all she could do was watch the room shrink all around her.
By this point, Noah’s arms were propped over her shoulders as he worked the console. She was trying to brace her hands against the wall with clearly puny force.
Laney felt the cold wall against her back. Broken equipment was pushing in from each side. The space had become so narrow that she could no longer extend her arms. She could feel Noah’s chest heaving as she began to get pressed against him.
“Ohh…” She groaned loudly. “P.S.—this is like the worst freaking way to die!” she exclaimed in terror. She squeezed her eyes shut, expecting the worst.
The creaking of the walls stopped short, and Noah heaved a haggard sigh of relief, cursing sharply.
She opened one eye, looking up hesitantly to meet his gaze. “What?”
He met her gaze. “I think that did it.”
She opened her other eye and looked around.
The walls had stopped moving. Everything had gone still. In the darkness, the two of them were squeezed into a space barely two feet across.
“It should take a few moments to reboot the system,” he relayed, making a face as he moved his arm to get the control board out of the way.
She couldn’t contain a nervous chuckle of relief. “Oh my god,” she remarked. “Who designed this stupid fail-safe system? It’s like a throwback to some old console game or a Star Wars movie or something.”
“A bunch of adolescent geeks, who else do you think?” Noah replied, one corner of his mouth turning up. Then he tilted his head, looking curious. “What’s Star Wars?”
She shook her head, trying to take a deep breath, which was difficult to do without pressing herself even closer against Noah. She looked up at him briefly. “Sorry.”
She couldn’t read the expression in Noah’s eyes but right then she felt his heart hammering in his chest, as he was breathing heavily himself.
He gazed down at her. “Sorry…”
She met his gaze, swallowing hard.
He shifted his hand to brush her hair back from her cheek, studying her face. “Sorry,” he whispered again.
His eyes were so blue, and the blue standby lights on the machines made his eyes seem even bluer. It was impossible to look away. She tried to summon the logic that should prevent what might happen next. But it was incredible how natural it felt to have Noah’s arms around her. How inevitable it seemed for him to tilt his head down, his lips seeking hers.
She felt an effortless surrender, her eyelids fluttering closed—just as a loud humming started as the recessed emergency lights in the ceiling flickered on, and subsequently, the walls began to recede, with sparks of broken things flying about again.
Noah was holding on to her, frozen still. His gaze which was locked on her lips, moved up to meet her eyes before he clenched his jaw and calmly let her go without another word.
Laney took a deep breath to settle her frazzled nerves.
Noah straightened up then checked his arm HUD again. He didn’t look in the slightest bit willing to talk about what had almost happened—again. She knew he was right, but her pulse was still racing—again!
Dammit, Laney, she grumbled in annoyance, as this was all her fault. When I finally meet you, we are totally going to have words.
The Other Laney
A few more hallways, several more security doors, ducking behind about a dozen heavily-armed guards, and a couple more touch screen panels brought Laney and Noah to a large brightly lit room.
It was off-white and practically empty, except for the completely glassed-in cube enclosure in the middle, which was lit overhead by a single bright light bulb. And inside the cube, a girl was sitting on a cot, a half-played chess board beside an open notebook in front of her on a little plastic table.
Walking up closer to the cube, Laney’s stomach churned as they passed another table. It was heaped with syringes, empty little glass bottles, empty bags of I.V., and defibrillator paddles. She felt a shiver up her spine again as she totally did not want to know what all those things were for.
The “real” Laney’s jaw dropped when she saw the two of them approaching. “What are you doing here?” she asked, standing up.
Noah gave her a pointed look. “Just what in the goddamn hell do you think we’re doing here?” he snapped, already headed for the hidden panel around the side so he could release the locks on the cell.
The “real” Laney shot Noah a semi-panicked look. “You brought her here? Noah, what have you done? You shouldn’t be here.” She hissed at him. “Seriously, this is the last place you two should be right now. Don’t you know what time it is?” Her eyes were wide with meaning.
“Obviously, we planned to be earlier than this,” Noah said wryly. “It didn’t work out.”
Laney was standing in front of the glass window of the cell, staring in awe. “This is so freaking surreal,” she murmured as she stood before the “real” Laney. It was absolutely like looking into a mirror. They were even wearing the exact same clothes, except the “real” Laney’s suspenders had flopped down around her hips and Laney was still wearing her jacket. “We look exactly the same,” she breathed.
“Yes, yes.” The “real” Laney rolled her eyes. “It’s fascinating. Can we please get back to the more pressing issue here? You two have to get out of here. Right now. Right now,” she urged.
The locks on the cell released with a click and the glass panel door slid open. Noah looked up. “Yes, let’s all get the hell out of here.”
Laney met the “real” Laney’s gaze as she stepped out of the cell. “It’s nice to finally meet you,” she started, then stopped short, changing her expression altogether. “I mean, terrible,” she amended. “It’s terrible to be finally meeting you. I’m not even supposed to be meeting you at all! Do you have any idea the hell you’ve put me through in the last like twenty-four hours?” she demanded, her hands on her hips.
“Laney—,” Noah began, exasperated.
“What?”
“What?”
Noah blinked, looking from one Laney to the other in abject confusion. “Oh, crap.”
Laney looked at him blankly.
The “real” Laney looked at each of them in turn. “Okay, this could get very confusing, very fast,” she began evenly. “Why don’t you both call me Eleanor?” she suggested. “I’ve alwa
ys liked that name.”
Laney was already making a face. “Seriously? Jeez, you’re welcome to it.”
Noah rolled his eyes. “Glad that’s settled,” he said, beckoning Eleanor over. “Now, let’s get out of here before they manage to hack through P.T.’s jamming signal at The Front Door.”
“Aww, P.T. is here? I love that little guy.” Eleanor smiled as they exited the large room. She looked over at Laney to relay, her voice only above a whisper, “He and I used to do this bit—he follows me around everywhere, he’s a hilarious little bot. I don’t know why, but I seem to relate more easily to robots than humans.”
Laney watched Eleanor in puzzlement. Given the situation, Laney thought Eleanor was being unusually, strangely calm, whereas Laney had been on edge non-stop for practically the last twenty-four hours. “Um, okay, now how do we get out of here?” she wanted to know. “Surely you guys must have some kind of teleportation device here, right? Get us back home in two shakes?”
Eleanor and Noah both gave her strange looks.
“There are no teleportation devices here, Laney,” Eleanor told her as though in ridicule. “Also, it’s called ‘quantum entanglement’ but that’s seriously lame and super dangerous. I mean, just determining the one-to-one mapping for the start and end states for each of the stuff is practically impossible.”
Noah chuckled in agreement.
Laney rolled her eyes. “Oh. Oh! You don’t have teleportation here…but somehow ‘quantum shear’ anchors and ‘brain scan’ technology is what—child’s play?” she remarked, doing air quotes with her fingers emphatically. “I don’t understand this place.” She threw up her hands, exasperated.
They reached an elevator, got inside, and Noah gestured to the touch screen panel. Laney and Eleanor moved to activate it at the same time.
“Oh.” Laney stopped short, drawing back, and motioned for Eleanor to do the honor. The real Laney was back, she thought, somewhat with finality, feeling like extra baggage.
Eleanor put her hand on the panel and paused to enter a code, presumably for which way to go. “Which exit are you planning to take?” she asked Noah.