“Oh, god no,” Paige said, waving both hands at Rylee. “Jonathan is like a little brother to me.” She was grinning, as though the idea of her and Jonathan bordered on comical, and Rylee relaxed.
“Oh, good,” Rylee said. “I was starting to realize how this might look. I assumed he wasn’t involved with anyone. Just realized he hadn’t ever actually said so.”
Paige’s grin dipped, only for a moment, before she propped it back up. “So, you were hoping he was uninvolved?”
Rylee felt Paige studying her then, and looked away. “A girl would be lucky to have him,” she said.
“I’m sorry, I don’t mean to pry.”
“Yeah. I think that is the third time you’ve said that.” Rylee regretted the words almost immediately, and tried to busy her hands with putting her clothes back into her backpack before she stopped abruptly. “I apologize,” she said. “That was… rude.”
Paige shrugged. “You aren’t wrong. I can’t help it, I worry. Take this group you mentioned…” She bit her lip before she spoke. “Are you his sponsor?”
Rylee’s eyes narrowed questioningly for a moment before she snorted in amusement. It came out far more condescending than she’d intended. “What, like for an AA meeting?” she asked.
Paige raised an eyebrow, leaving Rylee with the feeling that she hadn’t thought the question funny.
“No, Jonathan doesn’t need a sponsor,” Rylee said. “If anything, he’d be m—” She cut herself off abruptly. Paige was going to keep prodding until Rylee said something she didn’t mean to—something else she didn’t mean to.
“Oh,” Paige said.
Angry, Rylee swallowed down a dose of her dignity. She would have kicked Jonathan’s ass if he had told someone that he was some kind of support system for her. Now she’d just given Paige that very impression.
She began picking up her belongings, shoving them back into her pack. “Do you mind if I use your laundry? I don’t want to be a nuisance, borrowing Jonathan’s clothes any longer than I have to.”
When she looked up, Paige was still standing in the doorway, looking like she was angling to ask another round of questions. Rylee didn’t give her the time. She lifted the bag up and walked toward the door.
Paige stepped aside when Rylee made it plain that she wasn’t planning on waiting for an answer. “Go right ahead. Washer and dryer are down in the garage, want me to sho—”
“No. I’ll find it.”
“Oh,” Paige said, trying to recover politely. “Okay. It was nice meeting you, though.”
“Yeah.”
When she reached the bottom of the stairs, Paige got in one last question: “Oh, Rylee,” she said. “Any idea how long you’ll be staying with us?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
WHEN HE FELT whole again his vision returned, but he had trouble standing. Heyer held onto Jonathan’s shoulder, seeming to know he’d be needing the support. When the world stopped spinning, he looked around and found they were on a rooftop in the inner city.
“So, what was that all about?” Jonathan asked.
“With your constant surveillance,” Heyer said, “I couldn’t just give you the address and have you drop by. I had to be sure The Cell had lost sight of you before the jump. Now, they will spend the next few hours thinking you slipped away, finding that the bugs in your clothing are gone, and trying to pin you down to your phone’s GPS coordinates. They won’t know where you’ve gone.”
“Where have I gone?” Jonathan asked.
“Only a few miles from where we were. I thought it best that the surveillance team not know that I’d had any immediate hand in your disappearance. It’s not much of a ruse, but it will delay them from putting it together.”
Jonathan nodded and looked around. As far as rooftops went, this one was pretty standard. “What’s so special about here?”
“This is my home. Technically, we are standing on top of Mr. Clean,” Heyer said. “He is camouflaged, appears to look like any other building in the area. The actual building on this property, the true brick and mortar, starts a few floors down.”
“Why did you bring me here?” Jonathan asked. “I mean, you’ve never thought this was necessary before.”
The alien removed his hand from Jonathan’s shoulder, and Jonathan found that he was now able to stand on his own. “I had planned to bring you here sooner. You need to know of this place, but events have not played out as I intended,” Heyer said.
“Dams the Gate?” Jonathan asked.
Heyer’s eyes darkened at the mention of the Ferox’s name, but he nodded. “Yes, but unfortunately, our problems have multiplied in my absence,” Heyer said. “There are things I need to show you, things you need to understand. It is a conversation we cannot risk having while you are being observed.”
At that, Heyer turned toward a roof access door. It opened as they approached, and shut behind them after Jonathan followed him down the stairwell.
“The Cell’s primary goal in watching you is the hope to take me prisoner, Jonathan. Their reasons are not entirely unwarranted. They have seen countless disappearances connected with my presence, and they are out to protect mankind from what they assume to be abductions. However, their secondary goal is getting their hands on technology in my possession. They are hell-bent on accomplishing this, for fear that another nation might beat them to it.” The alien raised a hand to their surroundings. “They suspect a ship like this exists, but they have no means of locating it. For all they know, Mr. Clean could be on the moon.”
Jonathan listened, but when Heyer brought it up, he found himself thinking it would make more sense for the vessel to be off-planet. Having Mr. Clean on the surface only left him vulnerable to eventually being found. “So, why don’t you keep him on the moon?” Jonathan asked, as he descended the stairs. “Seems safer.”
Heyer turned his head back and smirked. “Should anything happen to me, there would be no one left to resist the Ferox. That is why you need to know of this place. If I am ever compromised, you’ll need to come here immediately, a feat you would find difficult to manage if I left it on the moon.”
Jonathan nodded, though he was more than a little disturbed at the notion of Heyer being ‘compromised’. There had been a time he wished he’d never met the alien, but knowing what he did now, the thought of Heyer not being around to deal with Malkier was disturbing. Mankind would be lost without him.
“Are you particularly worried about that possibility?” Jonathan asked, his voice failing to hide his concern.
Heyer tilted his head back to Jonathan. “Well, one can never be too careful.”
When they reached the bottom of the first stairwell, another seemingly normal door opened into a hallway. The Pioneer Square district of Seattle was mostly known for its shopping and nightlife, but had a number of buildings built over a hundred years earlier. They had been slowly modernized, the upper floors turned into flats and apartments while the street levels remained mostly commercial. Mr. Clean seemed to be parked on top of one of those buildings and was mimicking its interior.
The hallways appeared old in construction, and had elaborate and elegant lighting placed in the ceiling above them, despite also having unsightly plumbing running along the inside of the corridors. So far, the only oddity that would have alarmed anyone who entered was the doors opening and closing on their own. Still, even that had a sense of mock-normalcy; the hinges squeaked like an old door would, despite being controlled by forces Jonathan couldn’t see. Frankly, the place reminded him more of a haunted house than anything he’d seen on Star Trek.
Finally, another door opened in the hallway and Jonathan found himself looking into a furnished room. “This is where you … what?” He paused. “Sleep, eat, live?”
Heyer nodded, waiting beside the open door for Jonathan to step inside.
First impressions left Jonathan wondering if, having lived through so much of mankind’s history, Heyer had an overly-developed sentimentality for the p
ast. The alien could decorate however he wished, yet he’d chosen an eclectic assortment of antiques mixed with modern luxuries. Does help explain his attachment to that ridiculous fedora though, Jonathan thought.
The first thing that drew his attention was a vault-like steel door recessed into one of the back walls, but before his curiosity had a chance to absorb the atmosphere of the place, a flat screen TV mounted on the wall tilted in his direction and he saw Mr. Clean smiling back at him.
“Hello, Jonathan,” the cartoon said. “Nice to see you under more ideal circumstances.”
Jonathan grinned back at him. “The feeling is mutual.”
“Mr. Clean,” Heyer said. “If you would, we’ll require a scaled model of the Feroxian gateways, schematics on the bonded pair, and a simplified model of dimensional space.”
Jonathan hadn’t understood much of what Heyer had just requested, but he lost track of his questions as the room began to alter around him. A framed painting and a mirror, each hung on separate walls, morphed before his eyes. They behaved as though they were liquid, and reshaped to form additional monitors like the one Mr. Clean was using. However, each displayed what appeared to be three-dimensional blueprints.
On the coffee table, the unremarkable contents that had been there when he walked in receded down into the surface to be replaced with a holographic image of what looked like an oddly-shaped sundial. The shape rotated like a carousel over the table, allowing Jonathan to see it from various angles as it turned.
On each side of that table there was a leather-upholstered chair, each facing one another, and now, in the empty space above the sundial hologram, a sequence of blue rectangular cubes took shape. They hovered above the chairs, a little below the ceiling, glowing with an iridescent blue light that reminded Jonathan of the strange coloring he sometimes caught in Heyer’s pupils when he stood in the dark.
As everything around him changed, it dawned on Jonathan that nothing inside of Mr. Clean was real—or, at least, nothing seemed permanently fixed. Trying to test this, he reached out and tentatively placed his hand on one of the chairs. He was unsure if he should have been surprised when the chair felt precisely as his eyes told him it should—like solid leather.
“So, is this chair really here?” Jonathan asked, “Or, are only parts of the room an illusion?”
“All of the structures here are generated by Mr. Clean,” Heyer replied. “They are dependent on the shape that he is taking at any time. Much like the exterior of the building, the internal pieces of the architecture and furniture are only semi-permanent. It is a highly adaptable technology, but Mr. Clean’s current configuration is mostly designed for camouflage. This is needed so that a person might be brought here without becoming suspicious that they have actually boarded an extraterrestrial vessel.” After a moment of thought, Heyer added, “And I find the decor relaxing.”
“What does it….” Jonathan paused, becoming aware that his choice of words might seem rude. “Sorry, I meant what do you actually look like, Mr. Clean, when you aren’t taking a shape?”
“Far less interesting than you may imagine. When my constructs are disabled, you only see a default setting. The physical structures recede back into the whole,” Mr. Clean said. “To a human, I might look like a giant cube of over-sized solar panels.”
Jonathan turned his attention back to the Mr. Clean on the monitor. “So, how much of this building is actually you?”
“The top three stories. However, the two stories beneath you are currently dormant additional mass. The shapes I can manifest are only limited by my total volume. Imagine me like a lump of Play-Doh. You can flatten the lump into a large surface area, but you lose volume, or the enclosed three-dimensional spaces where you now stand. If I were to take the shape of some large, solid mass—say, fill this room with myself—I would no longer have enough of myself left over to camouflage the roof, so I would have to shrink the building’s exterior by a story. Of course, people in the surrounding buildings would notice that the building had shrunk.”
Jonathan nodded. He found it odd how quickly his wonder receded these days. He was standing inside of an artificially intelligent being, who was taking the shape of a human living room to accommodate them. He should have been fascinated, but how long could a person live knowing an individual like Heyer was on Earth and still be surprised by the things that came with him?
“I like to think of myself like a far more advanced version of the villain in Terminator II,” said Mr. Clean. “I am the ship, and I can take the shape of anything of equal mass, the major difference being that I can form complex machines within and around myself.”
Jonathan smiled, remembering what Heyer had told him about the computer’s personality. That, and it sounded comically close to the type of thing Hayden or Collin might have said if they were here.
“If you are worried that the chair will disappear out from under you,” Heyer said, “Mr. Clean grew bored with that joke centuries ago.”
“Yes,” Mr. Clean said. “Though it has been awhile.”
“So,” Jonathan said. “What stops you from turning into a giant metal robot and rampaging through the city?”
The bald cartoon raised a bushy white eyebrow. “Desire,” Mr. Clean said. “What purpose would that serve? I can imagine far more efficient means to—”
Heyer cleared his throat. When Jonathan turned to him, the alien’s face showed he clearly thought it was time for more important matters than the bells and whistles of his odd companion. A silence followed.
Jonathan was reminded that he wouldn’t be here if there wasn’t an emergency, and he let out a long breath in acknowledgment of this. “Before you tell me the world is ending, I’d hoped you could help me understand something.”
Heyer tilted his head at one of the chairs, stepping toward the other himself. “What is on your mind?”
“Paradox. These confrontations with the Ferox… I need to understand how I am retaining memories of events that happen in erased time lines.”
Heyer and Mr. Clean exchanged a look, the former drawing in a deep breath and nodding. “Take a seat Jonathan,” he said. “We must know what has occurred, but if you are to understand it yourself, your question is as good as any place to start.”
Jonathan nodded. “Uh… I guess I’m gonna sit on you now, Mr. Clean,” he said, then pursed his lips. “I guess that is better than standing on you, though.”
When Hayden got home, he found Rylee alone in the garage. She was sitting on the washer while the machine ran, a faraway look on her face as she listened to its white noise.
“How’d your mission of mercy go?” Hayden asked.
She forced a smile, but didn’t take her eyes off the floor.
“You look bummed,” he said. “You bored? We could watch a movie.”
She grunted noncommittally, then she sighed. “I wish Jonathan would get home. We didn’t really get to talk last night. You and Collin have been really kind, trying to keep me entertained.”
Hayden shrugged. “It’s not as though you’re putting us out. Might be entertaining us more than the other way around.”
He had made the statement casually, but Rylee’s expression was a difficult read. She smiled at him and sighed.
“You sure nothing’s wrong?” Hayden asked again.
Rylee shrugged. “I’m probably over-thinking it,” she said. “I met Paige a few minutes ago. I tried to be nice, but I got this feeling….”
“Oh,” Hayden grimaced. “Yeah, you probably weren’t imagining things.”
She looked at him, eyebrows raising in interest. “I didn’t want to be rude, but I felt like she didn’t want me around.”
Hayden nodded. “Yeah. You’ll need to forgive her. She was pretty irritated with Jonathan this morning. Trust me, though, she’s actually pretty cool when she isn’t convinced she’s our mother.”
Rylee snorted, but then her curiosity returned. “Why was she upset with Jonathan?”
Hayden lea
ned against the dryer beside her. “I’m not sure I should talk about it. I think they are overdue for a conversation, and Jonathan has been really distant the last few months. They used to study together a lot, before Jonathan dropped out of college…” He closed his eyes and grimaced. “Crap, see, I probably shouldn’t have mentioned that. Not my place to share. Forget I said it.”
A moment passed and Rylee nudged him with an elbow. “Said what?”
Hayden frowned for a moment until he caught that she was telling him she wouldn’t mention the slip.
“I wouldn’t judge him, you know,” Rylee said. “It’s easy to see someone do something that seems lazy or stupid and make assumptions. Takes a pretty self-righteous dickhead not to realize a person has reasons that they might not be able to share.”
Hayden smiled, more because Rylee’s accent made the term “dickhead” sound funny, than because of any wisdom in her words. “You might say that to Jonathan. I think the college thing weighs on him. I know his mother took it poorly.”
“He doesn’t need me to tell him that.”
Hayden shrugged. “I pray for him a lot.”
Rylee lifted an eyebrow, seeming to reexamine the big man. “You’re a good friend, Hayden.”
She stood, then, stretching out her legs and standing against the washer. Despite the somber tone of their conversation thus far, Hayden found it hard to ignore her as she slipped down beside him, his eyes taking her in before he could direct them elsewhere. He looked away in a slightly awkward innocence, as though something on the ceiling was suddenly interesting.
If Rylee had noticed him gawking, she didn’t let on. “I don’t want to be on her bad side,” she said. “Any thoughts on how to win her over?”
“No, not really. Honestly though, had it been any other day, you two would have got along fine… I mean—probably.” When he felt her studying him, he grimaced. “Ah, man, see, this is why people shouldn’t tell me things.”
“Hayden,” she said, “I sure do wish I knew what you meant by ‘any other day’.”
The Never Paradox (Chronicles Of Jonathan Tibbs Book 2) Page 21