by J. J. Green
Chapter Three
On the quarantine station in its low Earth orbit, Dr. Sparks was bored. He’d pondered the question at length, but he hadn’t been able to understand exactly why Polestar insisted it had to be him who performed assessments on the Paths. It was true that he’d been the physician aboard the Galathea when it crash-landed on K.67092d, but he hadn’t even seen the things before they’d been taken to quarantine.
But Polestar in its infinite wisdom had somehow connected the Paths with the only scientist on board who was well versed in the complexities of the human body, and it had ordered him to conduct tests on this new species. He could have refused, but then he would have been out of a job and without a good reference to show a new employer.
He regarded the Paths on the other side of the transparent barrier and yawned. The shapeless, fungi-like upturned bags were among the least interesting aliens he’d come across. They just sat there, not doing anything, apparently existing on nothing but ordinary air, as they didn’t eat any of the variety of foods offered to them, and they didn’t drink or absorb water or any other liquid.
All they seemed to do was emote. Anyone within a few meters of the creatures inevitably felt whatever the Paths themselves felt at the time. Or that was how it seemed. That was supposed to be one of the things he was investigating.
It occurred to him that maybe his boredom wasn’t his, but theirs. He took several steps backward to test his suspicion. From previous tests he’d gathered that the vicinity within which the Paths had an effect on humans seemed to be limited. He left the room and went a short distance down the corridor. He was still bored.
“Sparks,” said a lab tech, Rogers, approaching him, “how are you doing? Found out anything about your mushrooms yet?”
“No,” intoned the doctor. “I don’t suppose you have some free time? I need another human subject to test their emoting.”
“Me, sit in a room with those things? You must be joking. My emotions are my own, and not to be tampered with.”
“The feeling wears off almost as soon as you leave the immediate area,” said Sparks. “It’s completely harmless as far as I can tell.”
“And it’s that as far as I can tell that makes me repeat my response. No. Sorry.” Rogers moved away. “Good luck.”
He was right to be cautious, of course, Dr. Sparks mused. No one knew the long-term effects of exposure to the Paths. He hoped that wasn’t something that Polestar would like him to find out. Their instructions had been annoyingly vague. He didn’t think the company itself had any idea what it wanted to know, or what to do with the creatures.
Returning them to K.67092d was out of the question. Not only was the planet occupied by hostile aliens, but the Paths didn’t appear to be natives of the place. No one knew where they’d come from. Sparks had scoured the Transgalactic Council databases on life forms existing and extinct, but he’d found nothing that remotely resembled them. None of the Council’s experts had even been able to help with educated guesses.
Sparks wondered when Polestar would finally give up their investigations and put the strange aliens in a zoo.
He returned to his observation room. The Paths hadn’t moved, but he hadn’t expected them to. He sat down and brought up his latest unfinished report to Polestar on his screen. It was very short and thin on meaningful detail. He didn’t think Polestar would be satisfied with it. If only he could get someone to agree to be a test subject, maybe he would find out something new. He wondered if the strength of the emotions conferred differed according to a variable within the subject.
Sparks rested his elbows on the frame around the window to the Path’s room. He steepled his fingers and gazed intently at the aliens. There had to be something else he could say. Something.
He blinked. For a brief fraction of a second, the Paths had seemed to change in some way, but the moment had been so short, he wasn’t sure what the change had been or if his eyes had been deceiving him. He folded his arms and leaned on the window frame again. Maybe this was it. Something new that he could put in a report. He determined to not take his eyes off the aliens until the change happened again.
Sparks didn’t have to wait long. After a couple of minutes, the Paths very briefly faded before returning to full visibility. He was right. They were doing something. He set a timer.
Two minutes and twenty-four seconds later, the creatures faded again. Sparks made a note and returned to his observation. Exactly two minutes and twenty-four seconds later, the same thing happened.
The fading seemed to be regular behavior. A fourth bout of fading supported Sparks’ hypothesis. His head tilted to one side as he watched. The phenomenon was so subtle, he doubted that he would have noticed it if he hadn’t been staring directly at the creatures for a sustained period of time. It occurred to him that the Paths could have been doing the same thing ever since they’d collected them on K.67092d, but no one had noticed.
He turned his attention to his screen and brought up a vid from the camera that had been filming the room that held the aliens. It took him longer than twenty minutes to detect the first fading, but once he’d seen it, the ones that followed at regular intervals were easy to spot.
Sparks smiled to himself as he brought up his report to Polestar. This new behavior he’d observed should fill it out nicely. He began to speak into his mic and his words appeared on the screen. He recorded what he’d seen directly and the corroborating evidence from the vid. He would include a copy of it with a note regarding the timing of the behavior.
As he scrolled down the report to the section on his conclusions, he paused as he wondered what to say. What did the behavior mean? Were the creatures capable of entirely disappearing? Transparent organisms weren’t unusual, on Earth or elsewhere in the galaxy, but the Paths didn’t seem to be turning see-through. Their entire body faded, as if they were very slightly and very momentarily not there. And it happened at a regular rate, almost like a heartbeat. Could it be possible that they weren’t fading, but they were going somewhere? Were they able to move, but without a conventional means of locomotion, and to places not in their immediate vicinity?
Sparks gasped as another idea popped into his head. Was it possible that the Paths could move in time? Did they fade as they moved briefly into the future or the past? The most famous xenobiologists had long speculated that beings with such capabilities might exist somewhere in the galaxy, given the wealth of variety in species already discovered. Some species could do things no human had ever dreamed of.
But he must not get ahead of himself. There would be plenty of time to test his hypotheses later. He grinned. He hadn’t felt this excited about practicing science since he’d been at medical school. His speculations made him feel young again.
He needed an independent verification of his observation. The fading was so difficult to spot that, even with the vid evidence, it was possible he was imagining it. He would ask a colleague to watch the Paths with him. Springing to his feet, Sparks suddenly checked himself. His elation felt odd. Was it real? Was he experiencing a genuine emotion, or was he being influenced by the Paths?
The shapeless aliens sat in their quarantine room innocently.
No, Sparks was sure their range didn’t extend to the observation booth. He’d tested them on several subjects. No. He was only happy because he’d found out something interesting and was finally relieved of his terrible boredom.
He went to find Rogers.
Chapter Four
It was the early hours of the morning when Sayen and the others made it to the outskirts of the city. They were still several miles’ walk from downtown, where they hoped to find the kind of people who could help them in their new, cred-free lifestyle. Makey clearly couldn’t go any farther that night, however. The kid was stumbling with tiredness, and Jas and Carl also looked pale and drawn.
They’d come across a stream as they descended the hills, and the water had seemed clean enough to drink. All four of them had been extremely thir
sty by then and willing to take the risk. Sayen’s stomach had ached with hunger for a few hours, but now she only felt a little weak for lack of food.
The suburban houses at the city’s edge offered little hope of rest or sustenance. Knocking on a random door was out of the question. Whoever answered wouldn’t waste much time in calling the police. Dusty and haggard from their walk, they looked like the kind of people who made suburbanites uneasy. Sayen was barefoot and wearing oversized clothes. She was also covered in scratches and bruises from her escape from the Shadows.
“We should stop and rest up as soon as we can,” she said. “We can walk the rest of the way in the morning.”
“Yeah, okay,” Jas replied. “If we come across a park or recreational ground, we can rest there.”
It wouldn’t be too hard to find such a place, Sayen knew. The residential districts of her home city were planned for convenience and for bringing up the precious children of parents who’d invested a large proportion of their income in them even before they were born.
Sure enough, halfway down the next street was a small park. Daily watering had kept the grass green during the summer heat, and shade trees provided protection from the blazing sun. Drifts of the previous year’s leaves had accumulating under the hedges that surrounded a playground, and the four of them made themselves as comfortable as was possible in the circumstances. Sayen was asleep within minutes.
Not long later, it seemed, the closing of a car door awakened her. Where she was sleeping, she had a view of the road, and her heart stopped when she saw what kind of car it was. Two uniformed police officers were walking toward them.
Carl was sleeping along from her under the same hedge. She edged toward him and pushed his shoulder with her foot. He shifted but didn’t wake until she pushed him again, harder. He mumbled as he woke up. The police officers heard and altered their direction, heading right for them.
Sayen was already forcing her way through the leaves and stems to the other side of the hedge, and Carl followed seconds later as he realized what was happening. Jas and Makey were on the far side of the playground. Sayen and Carl ran across to them, keeping below the height of the hedge, but the officers spotted their movement.
“Hey, wait up,” called one of them.
The cop’s voice woke Jas. Sayen saw her eyes snap open, and she crawled quickly over to Makey and shook him, holding a finger to her lips as he stirred.
Sayen had spotted an exit to the playground in the opposite direction from the police. She pointed toward it wordlessly.
“Hey,” called the officer again, more stridently.
Now they’d been seen, there was no point in trying to hide. All four sprinted toward the exit and through it before running down a road. Sayen suspected that the police were only trying to move them on, and it seemed she was right as no shots were fired and there were no more shouts.
Sayen kept her pace slow enough for the others to keep up. They raced the length of three streets before drawing to an exhausted stop.
When the others had caught their breath, she said, “I guess a neighbor saw us and made a call.”
Jas nodded. “They don’t want us down and outs in their area.”
“Exactly,” Sayen said.
They walked slowly on through the moonlit streets, assuming the same thing would happen wherever they stopped in that upmarket neighborhood. Solar-powered streetlights cast a soft orange glow. The others were beyond tired, but they had no choice but to march on. Gradually, the houses lining the streets became smaller, and they directly abutted the road with no security fences. The houses also became older and shabbier, and more cars and autocabs drove past.
When Makey staggered and fell, they had no choice but to stop. They had wandered into an area of apartment blocks and small convenience stores. Sayen and Jas helped the kid into a large block’s recessed entrance, and he lay down under the security panel. Jas sat with her knees drawn up and her head resting on her folded arms, and Carl curled in an uncomfortable-looking ball on the hard pavement. Sayen sat in a corner with her back against the apartment block door and leaned her head against the wall.
It seemed only moments later when she found herself falling backward. She managed to jerk awake just in time to prevent herself from hitting the back of her head hard on the floor. It was dawn, and the door she’d been leaning against had opened. A pair of legs in pants and heels were stepping over her, their owner cursing good-for-nothing panhandlers. The woman who had opened the door let go of it, so that it would have hit Sayen if she hadn’t put out her hand to catch it.
She held onto the door as the woman left, not giving them a backward glance. Jas and Carl were blinking awake. Makey snored gently, his mouth hanging open.
“Hey, look,” Sayen said, nodding toward the building’s interior.
“We can get inside?” asked Carl. “What good’s that gonna do us? Are you saying we should break into an apartment?”
“I thought about it,” Sayen replied. “We could find an empty one by buzzing them all and seeing which ones don’t answer, but I don’t know how to get past the door security. There might be other stuff inside the building, though.”
“Yeah, that’s right,” said Jas. “It might have a gym.”
Carl looked at her like she was mad.
“Showers,” she explained. “Clean water.”
They woke Makey up and went inside the building. The elevator was operated by retinal scan or voice recognition, but the fire door to the basement opened with a push, and they went down two flights of stairs. They found a gym. The equipment was sparse and old and so were the showers, but the water was hot and it was free. They had no soap or towels, but right then that didn’t matter to Sayen. They all went into shower stalls.
Sayen stripped off her clothes and turned on the shower, sighing with pleasure as the warm water cascaded over her body. Her enhanced skin was already almost healed. The scratches she’d sustained in the jungle were now only slight grazes, and her bruises were light yellow. Bending over, she lifted her feet one by one and checked the undersides. They were holding up well considering the many miles she’d walked without shoes. If it hadn’t been for the enhancements her parents had paid for, she could never have survived the last couple of days.
Her conscience twinged as she remembered her anger over the tracer they’d put inside her. She still thought it was wrong, but she didn’t doubt their love for her.
“Sayen,” came Jas’ voice from beyond the shower curtain, “are you nearly done? We have to go. Someone’s bound to turn up in a minute, and we can’t risk another run in with the police.”
“Okay,” she replied as she reluctantly turned off the water. Leaning forward, she ran her hands across her head, trying to wipe away as much water as she could. She reached up to the basket that held her clothes. Wrinkling her nose, she put on the dirty underwear and clothes, tugging them over her wet skin.
They went up onto the first floor and outside. Air and her body’s warmth quickly dried Sayen off as they went deeper into the city. The place was waking up, and they began to attract attention from passersby. The area they were in was still too affluent for them to pass unnoticed, but this was Sayen’s home city, and she knew where they had to go. When they reached the oldest, dirtiest, most dangerous area, they wouldn’t get any more stares. In their unkempt, hungry, desperate state, they would fit right in.
Chapter Five
With no possibility of using their embedded credchips, Sayen and the others had to make a hard choice. They’d finally reached the area where the people the vidnews called 'underworlders’ lived, and they stopped to discuss their next move.
Sayen knew she was less streetwise than the others, so she was content to go along with what they decided. It was clear that they would either have to steal to survive—running the risk of arrest with nothing but an implausible story to tell in their defense—or sell the only assets they had: the contents of the bag Jas had carried all the way from
the shuttle.
The decision didn’t take long to make. They decided to keep Jas’ two weapons and Carl’s that he’d brought from Australia. They would sell everything else. The invisibility spray could have been very useful to them, but it was also very illegal in the way that personal weapons were not, and their risk of chance encounters with the police was high now that they were homeless. The spray, the explosives, and the rest of the bag’s contents would have to be sold, but with the proceeds they could buy food and maybe somewhere to sleep while they figured out what to do about the Shadows.
They decided they would try to find a buyer as quickly as possible.
Considering that it was around midday, the street they’d stopped on was quiet. Few cars seemed to drive through the underworld zone, and the ones they saw were customized, self-driving models that didn’t seem to be going anywhere in particular, but only cruised up and down the streets.
It was fortunate that the street wasn’t busy with traffic, as children roamed it. Even toddlers who could barely walk had been allowed out by their parents, and they tottered around, sometimes in the care of slightly older siblings, and sometimes ignored by all. Older youths also loitered a short distance away from Sayen and the others. They were unashamedly staring at them.
The adolescents seemed to be the kind of people who might know buyers for Jas’ equipment. She walked over and approached one of the group, who seemed to be the ringleader. A sycophantic female follower clung to his elbow. She bore a tattoo on her right cheek of a symbol that Sayen didn’t recognize. The young man bore the same tattoo on his neck.