Selfless Series Box Set

by S Breaker

  Rui winked at her. “You got it!”

  “Oh, whatever,” Laney dismissed, curling her lips. “You guys are all world-renowned accomplished scientists and I’m just the dumbest girl here who almost failed her Chemistry mid-term.”

  A loud, deep foghorn blast reverberated throughout the departure lobby and they all looked up to attention. The airship was signaling its imminent departure and calling for passengers.

  Rui shrugged. “That’s us.”

  Kevin moved to help Rui carry some of her bags.

  “It’s a shame you guys can’t stay for the holidays,” Maia said. “Laney said you’ve only just arrived too.”

  Simon shook his head. “We’ve left some time-sensitive experiments back in our lab.”

  “I can’t even imagine,” Laney commented in wonder. “The commute back and forth must be a killer, huh?” she prompted Simon but he seemed intent on not meeting her gaze.

  Rui replied instead, “We’re used to it. And we’re very rarely required to come back to The Community anyway.” She looked around the group. “Anyone here will tell you, their lab is basically their home.”

  Laney noted the nods from everyone. “I see.”

  “I mean my sister and her husband are marine biologists. They spend most of their time in their underwater lab in the middle of the Pacific Ocean,” Rui relayed.

  “Hey, we’d better go before that flight leaves without us,” Simon urged Rui, and Laney noticed him toss another cautious glance toward the balcony.

  Rui nodded. “Right. Good luck, Laney. Seriously,” she bid with a meaningful look as she pulled on her suitcase. “See you guys later.”

  “Bye Rui! Bye Simon!” Laney waved.

  Simon merely nodded shortly in acknowledgment before he turned to leave.

  Then Laney felt Kevin’s hand on her shoulder.

  “I’ll see you around, Laney,” he said, smiling at her.

  Laney flushed slightly as she met his gaze. “Yeah.” She watched as the three of them crossed the lobby headed toward the departure gate, leading up to the ramp going onto the airship.

  “Did you notice that?” Laney prompted Maia after a moment.

  “What? Kevin’s come hither look?”

  Laney rolled her eyes again. “No,” she said. “Simon. It was like he couldn’t wait to get away from here. Or me.”

  Maia waved it away.

  “You know, it wasn’t just him. Even your lab assistant Tak and that Nivan guy from the horticulture lab at the University garden. They were both trying to avoid me this afternoon,” she remembered, narrowing her eyes, before giving Maia a questioning look. “Did you say something to them? Are people afraid of me?” But then she reconsidered. “Hang on. It can’t be that. I know Rui’s not afraid of me. What is it then?”

  “Um…” Maia trailed off, her gaze distracting above her shoulder.

  Laney turned to look to see Noah only a few yards away.

  His expression was serious as always and his voice carried no hint of humor as he relayed to the two of them, “The sub’s in the harbor.”

  Laney’s eyes lit up and she looked toward the balcony. “Berry.”

  Sub

  “Watch your head,” Noah spoke to no one in particular as he stood by the airlock opening as a cue for Maia and Laney to descend the stairs into the belly of the submarine

  Laney prepared to duck while holding on to the handrail, but as she moved, she noticed quite a few people gathered up on the viewing deck at the terminal building, all watching them with interest.

  It must have been an impressive sight, she figured, even if all they could see was the stylized metal platform upon which the airlock opening was fixed, bobbing slightly above the choppy water. It gave no indication of the sheer size of the giant sub that was a mere dark shadow right beneath the surface.

  Noah noticed her gaze wander and followed it. “It’s not often that they see a submarine dock here in the city,” he explained as he moved to follow behind her.

  But instead of responding, Laney walked faster.

  She could count on one hand the number of conversations the two of them had had in the last twenty-four hours, which was easily explained since Laney had been doing her absolute best to avoid him.

  The tiny nagging suspicion in the back of her mind about Noah had grown in the last day and it was almost enough to choke her.

  Obviously, she was grateful to him for saving her life. Again. But she couldn’t ignore the facts.

  Noah hadn’t done much else except to lie to her since the first time they’d met. He had been in league with the government organization whom eight months ago had tried to wipe out the entire multiverse, who had also attempted to kill her.

  And she’d just found out that Noah was part of The Alliance as well.

  That Donovan is such a master of deception…

  Laney couldn’t figure exactly whose side he was actually on.

  Or maybe it was all simpler than she thought.

  Noah had made it no great secret right from the beginning what his mission—his only mission—was. In fact, the last time they were both in the submarine was before they went on the mission to save Eleanor, only to, unfortunately, end up still losing her anyway.

  Laney couldn’t even imagine how distraught he must have been—must still be. To have lost his great love, the infamous Nobel prize laureate Dr. Eleanor Carter, and yet have an exact replica of her walking about in Laney.

  And perhaps he was just waiting for the right time. He kept saving her life so he could trade her off at the next most profitable opportunity. The greatest bargaining chip ever.

  Either way, whatever was going on with Noah, Laney knew none of it was about her. Not really. She was just an obstacle that needed to be got out of the way. And the sooner that they sent her home, so much the better.

  Laney squinted as her eyesight adjusted to the dimmer lamps that lit the inside of the submarine.

  A guy with spiky wheat blonde hair, glasses, and a holey maroon sweater was standing near the bottom of the winding staircase. “Hi guys!” he greeted up to them.

  “Berry! You made it!” Laney exclaimed.

  Berry met her gaze. “So?” He spread his arms out to gesture to their surroundings. “What do you think?”

  Laney looked around as fragments of memories came back to her.

  The rounded front of the large metal capsule had a railing that ran along the grated floor to ceiling windows that looked so thick they had a magnifying effect. Wavy sparkles of light shone in different patterns across the walls and the floors. There were large machines with analog readouts and dials, different colored bulbs blinking from multiple panels, monitoring, and navigational equipment. A handful of strange little creatures were moving around on the floor, their metal bodies bare, gears and spokes poking out of places, running on little treads or wheels.

  “It looks—” the same, she was about to say.

  She stopped short at the last step of the stairs as her gaze fell upon an elevated flat platform table in the center of the main compartment. It had a large peanut-shaped holographic lattice floating above, with different-sized dots glowing over certain points across it.

  One of the numerous white-coated lab assistants bustling about the table waved his hand and the hologram enlarged. He touched a point seemingly in mid-air, which made the entire image whoosh away, to be replaced by about a dozen little screens that to Laney looked like CCTV feeds.

  “Wow,” Laney breathed as she walked past Berry to approach the table.

  Maia was already there. She whistled as she appraised the holographic image. “Pretty impressive, Dr. Vermillion.”

  “This is absolutely fascinating,” Laney remarked, turning back to Berry as he came up to her.

  “I know, right? We’ve been working on it for—”

  Laney peered closely at him and poked his cheek with her finger. “Boop!”

  “What the heck are you doing?” He shot her a strange look.
>
  She grinned. “Just checking that you’re not an AI robot,” she said, even though she knew full well that Berry’s AI robot clone invention had been put away in storage back in Maia’s lab at the University after its power source was damaged during Laney’s rescue from The Alliance.

  “Oh, haha.”

  “It’s really good to see you.”

  “Likewise.”

  “Speaking of damaged robots,” Maia spoke up as she walked up to Berry to hand him a box of what looked like broken metal scraps.

  Laney frowned. “I’m so sorry about P.T.,” she began. “I still really feel bad about what happened.”

  Berry gave her an earnest look. “Look, the little guy helped save your life. That was completely above and beyond what I had designed it to do. So at least you can’t say he didn’t go out swinging.”

  Maia patted her back. “Don’t worry, Laney. I’m sure Berry can fix it. Berry can fix anything, right?”

  He winked at her. “Hey, if I can recover approximately sixty-four percent so far of the Quantum Jump Project’s data after it was destroyed last year, I think fixing a little robot will be as easy as Pi.” He winked, grinning at her then bent down to hand the box to another little robot that in turn wheeled away across the floor and out a compartment door.

  Laney gave him an amused look. “So is that what all this is?” she asked, tilting her head in the direction of the holographic lattice.

  “Isn’t it beautiful?” Berry looked proud. “Big Boss Eleanor and I only used to have a smaller, handwritten version. This is a bit more comprehensive.” He waved his hands in the air in a declaration. “I’m calling it ‘The Map’—” He paused. “Or ‘The Verse’.” He paused again. “Or ‘The Brane.’” He paused yet again to shake his head briskly. “Still working on the name,” he amended.

  “A brain? It looks like a peanut.” Laney tilted her head to look again.

  “No,” he corrected. “A brane, like dimensional membranes.”

  “You’ve mapped all the dimensions in the multiverse?” Maia looked impressed.

  “Of course not.” Berry made a skeptical face. “We don’t have nearly that much data storage. This was just the sample population of what was part of the Quantum Jump Project last year.”

  “These look like surveillance,” Laney said, pointing at the little holographic screens on ‘The Map.’

  “Oh, the feed is not live. We can’t do that. Not yet anyway. These are just clips of what we’d collected during some of the investigations last year.”

  “Still, this is all pretty cool, Berry.” Maia patted his back. “I think another Nobel prize will be in order, and this time you won’t have just been Dr. Eleanor Carter’s assistant.”

  Noah was already at a console, manipulating the lattice. His eyes narrowed as he zoomed in and out of several dark patches that looked to appear randomly across the map.

  Berry noticed. “Uh, yeah, those are the bits that we haven’t fully reconstructed. I’m expecting at least twenty-five percent of the entire data set will be too corrupted to recover.”

  “Tell me the government is not asking you to restart the project. Tell me that’s not why you’ve done all this.” Noah’s manner was bone-dry.

  “No way!” Berry waved his hands. “They should know better than that by now. Besides, I don’t think our world can afford another globally-catastrophic event. No.” He shook his head. “This is just for analysis. I mean, we’ve got tons of data already, enough for my team to study for five years.” He shoved his hands in his pockets. “As far as the government is concerned, the breakthrough’s already been completed. Anything more is a risk they’re not willing to take.” He looked over at Laney. “GNR has been assigned to take point on this,” he noted of their main lab, Global Nuclear Research. “And I have a mandate to use any resources to facilitate restoring Laney to her original world.”

  “And I’m sure they can’t wait to get rid of me,” Laney piped up, recalling that she hadn’t exactly left a very good impression with the President and Prime minister.

  “Aw.” Maia gave her a sympathetic look. “Give them a chance. Maybe they’ll warm up to you eventually.”

  “Not planning on staying here for that long, Maia,” Laney reminded her. Then she thumped on Berry’s back. “Okay so, what now? We go find that ‘supernova’ you were talking about?” She gestured air quotes for the word in mocking.

  “Supernova?” Maia repeated, looking surprised. “You didn’t tell me about that.”

  “Oh.” Laney blinked. “Remember that universal translator thing I was doing—”

  “Right, you could speak to anyone in any foreign language it seemed, even obsolete ones.”

  “Yeah, we found out that that was just a side effect of my…condition,” Laney phrased carefully. “The thing is, your illustrious Dr. Carter had given me something.” Her gaze slid over to Noah’s cautiously, but for a change, he didn’t seem incensed to defend Eleanor’s good name.

  He just met her gaze without a word.

  Laney looked away, a slight furrow in her eyebrows. She couldn’t quite pin it down, but lately, she sensed that something had changed with Noah. Only it was even more disconcerting than normal.

  Berry went on when she paused. “Call it interdimensional insulation,” he enunciated. “An especially formulated dose of exotic particles. Basically, it made Laney a tracking point of origin. She served as a reference point. Like on a map, you can’t give directions unless you have somewhere to start. It was brilliant because it’s what made discovering all the other quantum worlds possible.”

  “Brilliant,” Laney echoed with a wry tone.

  “But horrible,” Berry amended with an instant frown. “Of course. Very, very horrible.”

  Maia chuckled.

  “Yes. Anyway,” Laney dismissed. “If I don’t get all this stuff out of me, well, let’s just say that’s where the story ends. I’m not going home. I’m not staying here. I’m not going to…be.” She made a face. “And apparently, according to Berry, only a supernova blast can effectively reset me.”

  “In theory.”

  Laney turned an exasperated look over at Berry. “Thanks for that.”

  “Um, I don’t mean to ask the stupid question but wouldn’t exposure to a supernova oh say, kill you?” Maia’s expression was comical.

  “Not the way we’re going to do it,” Berry quipped confidently.

  Noah was busy with the map again. He waved his hand and the peanut lattice dissolved away to be replaced by a holographic diagram of the solar system. He went on to gesture some more and the view panned out three times, then he touched a point in the holographic image and one of the billion stars in the galaxy map blinked and magnified. “Betelgeuse.”

  An inordinate amount of lists, statistics, and graphs scrolled rapidly down on the screen. But after a moment, Noah frowned and he consulted the glowing holographic update display (HUD) that activated on his left forearm. “I’m not reading any indications with this star. It looks stable. Are you sure this is the one you meant?”

  “Oh.” Berry looked hesitant. “See, well, actually, I didn’t tell you the other part.”

  Laney tilted her head. “Why am I not surprised?” she drawled.

  “When I said I’d detected an impending supernova in the galaxy,” Berry began. “I never said I’d found it in this dimension.”

  Maia looked taken aback.

  But Noah’s eyes cleared in understanding.

  Laney scoffed. “So this alleged supernova of yours is actually from yet another parallel univ—?” She threw up her hands, almost nonchalantly. “You know what? Sure. Whatever. At this point, I don’t know if anything can still shock me anymore.”

  Berry pursed his lips. “Really? Try this.”

  “What is that?” Laney peered at the small round device in Berry’s hand.

  “This.” Berry gave her a meaningful, even ceremonious, look. “Is a Zeta device.”

  Traversal

&
nbsp; “An actual Zeta device.”

  Laney gasped. “Hell’s bells, Berry, you did it!”

  Berry looked over at Noah. “This was the main reason I wanted to recover all the project’s records. Sorry I didn’t tell you, man, but it was necessary.”

  Noah dismissed it curtly. “It doesn’t matter now.”

  Berry creased his forehead at him, looking slightly puzzled, but he went on. “And fortunately, when Eleanor made a ‘bleed through’ the other day and took over Laney’s personality, part of the transdimensional formula we cooked up to fix Laney’s memory loss was incidentally also the last piece of the puzzle we needed to complete the Zeta device.”

  “That’s brilliant!” Laney shook Berry’s shoulder in excitement.

  “Congrats, Berry,” Maia said. “I’m sure Captain Blood would be so proud.”

  Berry smirked knowingly. “I think not.”

  Laney chuckled in high spirits. For once good news! “Well, I approve, and I am part-Eleanor so…”

  Berry grinned. “I’ve improved on certain aspects. It has a built-in interface so it can be configured independently of the quantum jump platform.” He waved and the image of the map lattice behind him dissolved into the schematics of the Zeta device. “It has a compensator that renders the energy exchange negligible as long as it’s under a certain threshold, similar to the anchor devices we’d used in the past to enable traveling to other dimensions.”

  “Cool.” Laney murmured, looking over at Maia who was gazing up to study the specs on the screen herself.

  Berry made another gesture and a hologram of a boomerang outline blinked in mid-air. “I’ve even programmed a ‘boomerang’ protocol on it, so you can keep track of your jumps and retrace your steps back to your original anchor point.” He gave a slight shake of his head. “Of course, it’s still not as fully-featured as Eleanor’s original design, but I imagine it should do the trick.” He held out the Zeta device as he finished.

  Laney and Noah moved to take it at the same time. “How do I activate it?” they asked in unison.

  Noah shot Laney a surprised look.