by H C Edwards
“It’s better to feel your way through,” she had told him that first night. “A light will only make you panic.”
She had been right. The first few feet he had insisted on the paltry light but once he took her advice and clicked off the flashlight he felt the oppressiveness of the Wall go away. The cold still made his teeth chatter but he was able to make it through without falling apart.
It helped that Claire kept talking to him all the way through; there was something she wanted to show him. She told him that the rad levels were within reason and recovery, that the darkness on the other side was almost complete and would take time to adjust to, which is why she brought the flashlight. She even described the Edge as much as possible and warned him about the updraft if he went too close, which he was certain he wasn’t likely to ever do.
That first time seemed interminably long. When they emerged on the other side it was all he could do to crawl away from the Wall. He had been shaking so hard he could almost feel his brain rattling inside his skull.
“You’ll be okay in a couple of minutes,” she had assured him. “It was the same with me the first time…and the second and third.”
Though it was so dark he couldn’t see it, he knew that Claire gave the last admission with a smirk. It made him chuckle and forget for a moment how unnerving the trip through had been.
When she brought him to the edge he had felt exhilaration, not just for the taboo of their course of action but because he had seen something that almost no one in Akropolis had ever seen or was given the chance to. Being outside of the Wall was reserved for maybe a handful of people and for very specific reasons, usually entailing the collection of samples for scientific experiments, and always with a AA-Grade Hazmat suit for non-synthetics.
The first launch was almost as terrifying as it had been wondrous. The cylindrical object made him speechless, robbed him of all thoughts. He watched, spellbound, as the great object rose into the sky and disappeared into the cloud coverage, the glow from its fiery end persisting long after the object itself had disappeared.
There had been no time for talk after as they were treading the edge of curfew, he more concerned than she, but they spent the next few meetings pondering over the origins and purpose of the object. Quentin wanted to peruse the Akropolis library even though Claire had assured him it was useless. After a full afternoon of scanning any text available on flying machines they had come up with nothing but air transports and aeroplanes, flying machines of the twenty-first century.
Unsatisfied, Quentin had narrowed their search on a whim to objects able to break the atmosphere of Earth only to be met with a prompt that stated “search parameters not authorized”, whatever that meant. Even printed texts yielded no information. He found this perplexing to say the least.
This fodder provided for many an afternoon of theorizing but while they agreed the object was headed for the atmosphere of Earth and perhaps beyond, its purposed eluded even their imaginations, a true mystery with no obtainable answer.
Altogether, Quentin had witnessed the event a total of six times, none of which offered up additional clues, though they did not diminish his wonder in the least.
And then after that last launch they witnessed…she was gone. Just like that. She had given him warning; perhaps the foreshadowing was the worst of it, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong. It was instinctual, this feeling, and while such a thing could be attributed to a fair amount of depression, the trepidation that went along with it only strengthened his conviction that wherever Claire was…she needed help.
Quentin had finished his recollections almost a full minute before and yet his father had not moved from his arms-crossed posture, his grim expression the only outward sign that he had assimilated all that he’d heard.
“That’s all of it, I guess,” Quentin added lamely, when the silence became uncomfortable.
It was either that or squirm in his seat, and if he did that he was certain his father would know that he was hiding something.
Were the launches in the desert somehow connected to Claire’s disappearance? He didn’t know, couldn’t make the pieces fit, especially since he didn’t know what the damn pieces were to begin with, but he could only handle one mystery at a time. What he and Claire witnessed those times in the desert was a mystery between them. It was theirs, and Quentin just couldn’t bring himself to share it with anyone, not even his father…at least, not yet.
“Is that all of it?” Griffin asked.
Quentin nodded then realized that his non-verbal affirmation might trigger further affirmation from his father.
“Yes, that’s all of it more or less,” he replied out loud.
“Do you know who this girl is?”
Quentin felt slightly self-conscious.
“Her name is Claire.”
His father frowned.
“I mean who is she? What’s her last name? Who is her family?”
Quentin shook his head.
“I don’t know.”
“You never thought to ask?”
Hanging his head in embarrassment, Quentin mumbled a ‘no’.
Griffin sighed heavily.
“Of course not. Why would you?”
When Quentin looked up at his father he saw him shaking his head in exasperation but also with a bit of amusement.
“You’re not the first guy to lose his head over a girl, and you won’t be the last. I guess I can’t really give you too much grief over it. Your mother had the same effect on me.”
“The ASF,” Quentin said, still troubled that they had been tracking him and what it might portend. “They know I went beyond the Wall. What are they going to do to me?”
His father uncrossed his arms and held up a hand, his expression serious once again.
“Listen to me very carefully,” he said. “The Wall’s electromagnetic field has a way of interfering with most of the technology we have. It’s why the Grove is there. It’s a buffer zone of sorts. Get too close to the Wall and things malfunction or just stop working altogether. That’s why you never see QUBITS working the Grove.”
“The Wall,” Quentin said. “Would it shut them down?”
“No,” his father replied, “but there have been cases where they have acted…strange, or out of sorts with prolonged proximity to it. Better safe than sorry, if you get my drift.”
Quentin nodded.
His father continued.
“As for the ASF, they do have some suspicion, but I assured them of the fact that I just relayed to you, that your uplink must have malfunctioned.”
“What does that mean for me?”
“It means that for now they’re fine with tattling on you, trusting that I will see to your discipline.”
Quentin let out a deep pent up breath. He ran a shaking hand through his hair then stopped when he had a sudden realization.
“How did you know that I went beyond the Wall?”
“I didn’t. I was just guessing.”
“I don’t understand,” Quentin pressed. “You said yourself that the Wall had a way of messing with our tech. Why wouldn’t you just assume that the Wall had interfered with my uplink chip?”
His father just stared at him in silence.
“Dad?” Quentin asked.
“That was my initial guess, I won’t lie, and when the ASF brought this to me,” he said, gesturing to the screen pad, “that’s exactly what I told them…but sitting here waiting for you it occurred to me that you might have found a way beyond the Wall.”
“But why would you think that?”
“I saw where you were when your uplink chip stopped tracking. I know that spot…because it’s where we first discovered the opening ourselves years ago, before you were even born.”
“What?” Quentin asked, flabbergasted by the revelation.
Griffin shrugged.
“At that time there had been a lot of seismic activity, particularly near that section on the edge of the platea
u. The last tremor recorded was also the strongest. It put that crack in the Wall.”
Quentin thought about what this portended, not just in his previously infallible belief that Akropolis was an impenetrable haven against the dangers of the outside world, but also that if such a thing as a tremor could have cracked the Wall once, it could do so again.
“You said we discovered the opening,” Quentin said, latching onto that part of his father’s explanation to avoid thinking about the possibility of the Wall tumbling down.
Griffin nodded.
“Only a few of us know of it, and I’m certain none of us have given it thought for decades. We studied it and came to the conclusion that it posed no significant danger to the Wall’s structural integrity, and so we shot some resin in and let it be. Of course, that was so long ago that another tremor, even a small one, could just as easily have fractured the resin. The radiation leak would be too little to show up on major scanners. I guess it was only a matter of time before someone else found the opening.”
His father chuckled to himself.
“I knew when I hung those vines that they wouldn’t hold up on close inspection.”
Quentin rubbed his scalp with a hand, letting all the information sink in. His father reached over and placed a hand on Quentin’s forearm.
“We have all secrets, Son. It’s the way of the world.”
“How many more secrets do you have, Dad?”
Griffin frowned, his eyes growing heavy and sad.
“Too many to count, Son…but one day you’ll know them all. And when that happens I hope you don’t judge me too harshly.”
“I won’t,” Quentin replied, but even then he wondered if he was telling the truth. “I just…”
He paused and shook his head.
“What is it?” his father pressed.
“I just…I don’t know what to do now.”
“I do,” Griffin said with a small smile.
Quentin looked up quizzically at his father.
“We have a girl to find.”
The Camel’s Back
She didn’t remember everything that day. They had made certain of that before her revival. A quick foray into the cloud to administer a short wipe and voila; it was as if it never happened.
What she did recall was the beginnings of that day, the excitement she felt. She’d always harbored a fascination with the Old World, as did Tom, him more so than her. He was obsessed with all things from that time, from the vinyl albums he coveted to the near ancient magazines that depicted cities and lives that were so foreign to their mindset that they seemed almost like fantasy.
Always in these magazines were the flashy automobiles, slick shiny beasts of steel and glass and leather, two and a half tons of Old World technology and completely extinct. Well, almost. Apparently the Akropolis museum had recovered an automobile in the wreckage of an outer Wall excursion.
It happened sometimes. There would be a good rain out in the desert, enough to dampen the rad level down so that the external sensors can pick up on other things, old bits of technology or mineral deposits. A team of QUBITS would then be sent on air transports to retrieve or mine whatever was found. One of those times they had come back with the car, nearly rust free and still in one piece. It was taken to the Akropolis museum where it was restored and put on display.
The day it was made available to the public to see, she and Tom were first in line, having waited for hours outside of the museum door. They spent the afternoon pouring over every inch of that automobile from the boundary of the ropes, and when it was time to leave they did so reluctantly and with furtive glances behind them, as if it would disappear the moment it was out of sight.
The car was a 1971 Dodge Charger, and for the next two months Tom scrounged every bit of knowledge he could glean from texts, magazines, and books found in the Akropolis library. He even programmed a simulator to teach him how to drive. It took an extra month to make the specs and 3D print and assemble a steering wheel, pedals, and a gearshift, which he attached to a car seat he also printed, but once done it was as close as he could get to the real thing.
After work Tom would arrive home, give Mia a kiss on the lips, and then hop on the simulator for an hour and get lost in the dream of the Old World, cruising pixilated mountain or desert roads with one of his vinyl records playing in the background. He would describe to her how he could almost feel the 275 horsepower engine rumbling through his hands and feet, hear the rush of wind as it flowed over the smooth hood and across the sleek door panels of the steel beast.
One day he propped her in front of the screen and spent the rest of the evening teaching her how to drive the simulator. After an hour of practice, she began to understand his obsession with the automobile and begrudged him less the past few months in which he had spent an excessive amount of time in creating the facsimile.
For the rest of that week they took turns on the simulator, she becoming almost adept as Tom after only a couple of days. The automobile even began to haunt her dreams with fantasies of winding country roads and fields of golden hay with red barns flitting by; images no doubt garnered from the magazines that Tom collected.
Then came the day that they received the positive test results. The news was a shock, especially since they’d only been married for eighteen months. Most couplings took years to produce results. The fact that they did so and quickly was a testament to the miracle she believed was at hand. All thoughts of automobiles and the Old World dissipated when the results arrived, and for the next few months they spent their time focused on preliminary tests, pregnancy and child rearing classes, the accumulation of the necessary products needed to make their home ready for a son or daughter.
Those were the happiest days of Mia’s short life. In retrospect they were like the blink of an eye, gone so quickly they might as well have been one long dream.
When the day came that Tom arrived home with the keys she was perusing a list of baby names…boy names, since she had just received the confirmation the previous week, and though she hadn’t shared the name with her husband, her mind was already set on Ambrose.
Tom was beside himself when he rushed into the house, not even bothering to close the front door behind him. She was startled and looked up from her seat with wide eyes. He planted a quick peck on her cheek and then as if he couldn’t contain himself, grinning like a young schoolboy, he jangled two jagged pieces of metal on a ring in front of her face.
“It’s all ours tomorrow. For the whole afternoon!” he said excitedly.
Mia’s brow furrowed even as she smiled. She had seen him this animated only once before and that was when they were given the positive test results.
“What’s ours? What are those?” she asked, nodding to the two pieces of metal.
“Keys!” Tom replied, laughing. “To the automobile! I sent a request months ago with the data from our simulator. They approved it just today.”
Mia’s skepticism was apparent.
“Really?” she said. “They are going to just let us take that antiquity out of the museum and drive around Akropolis with it?”
Tom straightened up, planted his hands on his hips, and laughed again. The image of him standing there like that made her think of Paul Bunyan, a tall tale she had read in the Akropolis library about a lumberjack and his Ox companion. That and his infectious mirth was enough to get her laughing out loud as well.
“They are bringing it by transport tomorrow,” he said when his laughter tapered off. “They have to print and replace some parts since it’s impossible to find gasoline anymore but they assured me it’d be ready.”
He twirled the ring with the keys around his finger like a magician preparing for a trick.
“So what do you say, pretty lady? Want to go for a ride?”
The weather had a mid-morning rain scheduled. Every third day of the week there was a controlled rainfall, mostly for the Grove and the Akropolis Gardens, but also because studies had showed that rain was
soothing for humans and synthetics alike.
The streets were still wet when the transport delivered the automobile. Mia had packed them a picnic lunch of fruit delivered fresh from the Gardens and some protein bars and wore her best dress. Tom had decided on a retro facsimile of a jean jacket he had printed a while back and a pair of boots. Together they looked like a picture straight out of an old magazine.
The engine roared to life. Whatever they replaced it did not diminish the sound they had read about. The rumbling of the engine could be felt as a vibration through their entire bodies as they sat in the seats.
Tom had hollered with approval when he revved the engine, the first time he had ever made such a sound. Mia’s response was a half-scream half-laugh.
When they took off, Tom was gentle, heading down the pre-planned path that had been approved, a route of the streets along the Outer Rim close to the wall. The roads were relatively straight with only gentle curvatures and at times Tom would ‘open it up’ a bit, a term that apparently meant going faster.
With the windows rolled down, Mia could close her eyes and feel the wind on her face, smell the plants and flora and trees wet with the dew leftover from the rain. It never smelled more alive to her. Everything felt more alive. Her body tingled with the reverberation of the automobile’s engine and her heart never quite settled down. She continuously rubbed her burgeoning belly and wondered what Ambrose-
-his name will be Ambrose-
-thought of the vibrations he surely felt through her body.
When they had come full circle and the end of their route, she felt a twinge of disappointment. Parked in front of their house and waiting for the transport to pick up the automobile, Mia reached over and grasped Tom’s hand, which seemed reluctant to release the steering wheel even with the engine turned off.
“The transport is late,” she stated matter-of-factly.
He nodded.
“Maybe we could take one more trip around before they get here.”
Tom grinned and leaned over to plant a passionate kiss on her lips.