by E. L. Aldryc
But what did Tammy want now, insisting Elodie came to her office right after kicking her out?
“You know I have an intimate relationship with the future,” Tammy said. “I caught a glimpse of the true timeline that will get us to the Universe of Infinite Wonder. It’s very fickle; I have to keep chasing it, and it takes a lot out of me.”
That was all great, but Elodie still didn’t know what she was doing there. It’s not like she could help.
“Looks like I joined the gifted at the perfect time. You’ll do the heavy lifting before I’m even trained.”
“Don’t worry, there will always be plenty to do for an A-class paragnost. What you need to focus on now is getting well,” Tammy said.
“And then?”
“Then, when I can see you’re comfortable enough to last a few days with no complications, I’ll try to train you to do something only you and I can. There’s your carrot,” Tammy replied.
“Should I even ask what the stick is?” Elodie wondered.
“All righty, little miss bitter, then I won’t teach you how to create full visions out of past events.”
“Maybe you should teach me how to see normal future events first?” she replied. Ouch. Even she thought she sounded unnecessarily rude.
Elodie didn’t want to get her hopes up by talking about the near-vision she’d had this morning. Especially since talking about it would probably get all deep in how her flatmate was a bad influence stopping her from reaching her full potential again. Or worse; break Soraya’s trust just as they started making progress.
“Tell you what,” Tammy said and forwarded her a schedule. “Here’s what we’re going to do. You will do some work in the Particle Lab. They’re super short because of the new tola development.”
“In the Particle Lab?”
It was the last place she wanted to go. So what, they recognised her as the biggest prospect in the history of the gifted, she vanished for months, and now she’d go right back to her old job? No. Definitely no.
“Familiarity, honey. That’s the next level. I need you to be able to walk and talk to people other than myself before I train you.” Tammy opened up a visible window to book their next meeting.
“No. Absolutely not. That will be so embarrassing! They know why I left. What will they say when I come back with literally nothing to show?”
It wouldn’t stand. Elodie needed to fight against it. Nope. Not the Particle Lab. That’s where all her friends were.
“Elodie.” Tammy closed the window and looked at her with a look Elodie never wanted to see. Angry gifted looked like they were contemplating the best future outcomes of hiding your body. “You will go to the Particle Lab. You’ll do any job they give you. And you’ll be nice about it. And next time we meet, you’ll tell me how much you like it, because you’ll realise that the things I tell you to do are never things that would cause you harm or discomfort. Because I know what I’m doing. In this moment, I know what’s best for you much better than you do. Is that understood?”
“Yes,” Elodie said quietly.
“Come see me tomorrow at three.”
Elodie got out of the office as quickly as she could. When she made it outside Rising Dawn, she started walking towards the Particle Lab. The central reservation of the Institute was much bigger than she remembered.
She texted Soraya to tell her that she needed backup. Elodie threw in a sentence about what happened and that she couldn’t just walk in. She was hoping that Soraya would get the message and the urgency in it. And would make her invisible.
She stopped outside for a moment, thinking whether she should just turn around and go back, tell Tammy it was a no, accept any punishment she threw at her, and go back to reading books about the real gifted.
[Come along, I’ll be your buffer.]
Phew.
Elodie entered the complex through the front entrance, and Norbi greeted her with an excited buzz. The malleable hall was full of off-white robes, and after a long time, Elodie was once again surrounded by people who weren’t gifted.
Soraya came in from the right and took her under her arm. She looked like she was in a hurry.
Suddenly, everyone stopped, and even more researchers came from the incoming corridors to fill the entry hall, which grew larger as more power was directed at it.
“All right, everyone,” Soraya said, and her voice was projected all the way to the back.
What in the world was she doing? Elodie was so shocked, she was certain she would pass out any minute. Surprises were the worst thing to do to a gifted trainee. Stop. Just stop.
“How much does Rising Dawn love us? A lot. They love us a lot. They love us so much that they’re willing to let your favourite Miss Marchand take a break from her super intense training and help your lazy asses. That’s what I call interdisciplinary collaboration. As you can see, she’s alive and ready to help. Be nice and don’t ask stupid questions. Welcome back!”
About two hundred people applauded enthusiastically, and then Soraya pulled Elodie with her to a corner. A passage opened up, and they were in a smaller lab.
Only Soraya would do something like that. Make an awkward situation so public that it wasn’t even possible to make it any weirder. Oddly, Elodie felt better now that it was out in the open.
“Before you bite my head off, Tammy cleared it, and I sent a memo out during the slowest walk over I’ve ever seen,” she said.
“No, it was fine, I just—”
“We miss you, you know the admin, it’s great to have you back. Temporarily,” Soraya interrupted. She gave Elodie another coffee.
She really shouldn’t.
“I’m ready.” Elodie took a sip. Heaven.
“Lab three needs an energy usage risk assessment,” Soraya said, and Seravina was approaching, waving at them both. It was just like the old days. The good part of the old days.
When she got used to it, Elodie was relieved to be in a place where everyone was too busy to talk. Her Rising Dawn duties were kept to a minimum, with only one depressing appointment per day at the HQ to monitor her progress and advise her on day-to-day problems. Progress: zero. Problems: see previous segment.
It was almost scary to see how welcome she was. Everyone in the Particle Lab was simply too busy to muster anything but joy at the sight of someone who knew what drawer things were in.
As a gifted trainee, she was only assigned to basic projects that weren't dangerous for an open mind like hers to react with less explored technology. And it was glorious. She was so overwhelmingly busy that she completely forgot her giftedness for the first few hours. She got into the flow of tasks assigned to her, and it even dulled down her paragnostic vision—she looked at items and did not see deeply into them, their stories, their origins, or the people they touched. They were just things and projects. It was like a holiday.
It took a whole day before she noticed the first little twinkle in the corner of her eye, inviting her to look at a piece of rock that was used in a perceived hardness test. And when she looked at it, it was suddenly carved out of a quarry in Romania. Close to Cluj. And Elodie saw herself being pulled again to the hole of knowing all, and she forcefully pulled herself out. And she kept on working. No one noticed.
At lunch, she took her seat next to Soraya, who was glowing. So many crazy things already happened between breakfast and lunch, and Soraya was complaining about Frederich, who refused to commit to a date for the alchemical matter specs.
“Ever since he's been put on Catalyst duty, he's gotten cocky. I got nothing out of him during our meeting. I don't have time for that. People send me to check in and get commitments. If he's going to act like this, I’ll have to take him down a peg.”
Elodie almost believed that nothing had ever changed. And then of course, her daily seizure swept her out of herself and into the infinity of futures.
She clawed her way back out of a whirlwind of numbers and segments of words that were repeated to her in sequence over and ove
r again. It was even more fragmented than usually, and she assumed it was a direct consequence of the volume of information she was handling again, without being fully intellectually ready for it. But she found herself awake again on the floor, Soraya supporting her head. Her hands were bloody, and there was a healing beam directed above her eye level.
"How did she even do that?" Soraya asked someone else, and with a sigh, someone put Elodie on a stretcher.
Elodie closed her eyes, and when she opened them again, she was upright, listening to the end of the same sentence.
"... take him down a peg." Elodie looked around and quickly gathered her thoughts enough to realize that not even a second had passed. She felt herself getting pulled back into the current, but she reached towards Soraya, relying on her reflexes. She was looking at some kind of holographic message, but she spotted it and immediately grabbed Elodie by the wrist, stopping her from falling back on her head. Elodie was still pulled into the current, but her body neither fell nor bled. When she came back to her basic senses, Soraya was looking at her disapprovingly.
"I thought this wasn't supposed to happen anymore, seeing that they let you into the wilderness."
“Now we know even your knowledge has limits," Elodie snapped.
"All right, calm down." Soraya closed all her windows and focused on tending to Elodie. She brought her a glass of water, pulled her up and fixed her hair behind her ear.
Elodie drank the water.
"Should I call someone?" Soraya asked.
"They know already. They’re gifted, remember?" she replied.
"So, what do you need? I mean, to make it better?"
"Just be quiet for a sec. That would help." Elodie checked her messages and realised the tasks had started piling up again.
Someone came up to them, and as they came closer, the indefinite figure turned into Dr Lian from the AI initiative. He was a tall man with an awful posture who seemed to be racing with time itself to get ahead, another one of those awkward people who spent more quality time with the AI than socialising. Two Nobels so far. Both so complex that even the person giving the award had trouble pronouncing some words in the paper titles that led to them.
"Sorry to disturb, erm, there's a black alert in sector M," he said. Soraya dropped everything and nodded to Elodie, who watched them disappear at a speed that was just a degree away from running.
At the edge of the entrance, Dr Lian stopped her and opened a type of passage that Elodie had never seen before. Space was pliable in the Institute, and those with high level access codes (and Soraya, because she always got special treatment), could create passages between most parts of the Institute. They exchanged a few words, and it almost looked like he was taking instructions from her. He followed her into the passage, which closed a moment after it swallowed them both.
Elodie thought of how odd it was, seeing Soraya once again being counted as an essential part of the Institute. There was a pang of jealousy, sure.
She finished her lunch alone and completed her tasks for the day. Outside, Augustina bumped into her, and Elodie shared how she lived the same few seconds twice. Augustina was of the opinion that this was a sign of growing prognostic ability. First, she was to feel comfortable looking a few seconds ahead, and then more. There was even a chance that she was finally stepping into a normal healing route. There were always these chances, of course. Elodie was expecting to hear the end of the healing story, not another beginning. She needed to figure something, something to get out of this funk.
Next morning, Soraya was there again with the coffee and pleasant conversation. A routine had started. Elodie went to work with Soraya, who was again snatched by Seravina, surprised that she had the audacity to take a break.
This was why she had wanted to join Rising Dawn in the first place.
Elodie was in the same position as before, with the added bonus of these daily seizures, and the general inability to use her gifts for any practical purpose. Talking to Augustina made her realise that she needed to start taking risks if she wanted to get anywhere.
Soraya did risky stuff all the time, and nothing bad ever happened to her. Elodie was still so afraid, but she recognised that there was an opportunity. At home, she could practice far enough from Rising Dawn’s pressure. She wasn’t supposed to, but hey. No one had any better ideas.
She started alone at night during the pre-scripted meditation practice. Checking something unambitious, something like the food or weather for the following day. And while she sometimes succeeded in pulling herself out just as she was about to be swallowed by the current, without result, she more often ended up unconscious on the floor. Soraya would pick her up late at night when she came home, and Elodie woke up in bed every morning.
And there was the smell of coffee, the techno, and both varied very little. Soraya, who varied even less, reading articles and sharing gossip about who was sleeping with whom after-hours.
Elodie was avoiding Tammy, but she had a way of finding her when she was feeling down. And every time, the only question on Elodie's mind was “how long”?
“As long as it takes you to adapt,” Tammy would say. These were supposed to be supportive words.
And Elodie was horrified by them. She didn’t know how to get better. Things didn’t just fix themselves because she wanted them to. She needed to find a way to become the gifted prodigy they wanted her to be.
A will was born out of it.
Elodie started seizing less. She put lipstick on in the morning. She did her hair. She hoped that maybe, with time, these things would snap back into place inside her if she faked it. Her eyes weren't absent or glinty.
She didn’t seem desperate or sad on the outside.
So the mirror was the only one she needed to fool. Whenever she faced her reflection, she forced herself to think, look, this is the new, super powerful A-class paragnost. Look at that. She’s great. And everyone wants to be like her.
Sometimes she got a bit brave with it. And she said it out loud.
“And yes, actually, I am the one who delivered the Universe of Infinite Wonder.”
Things were looking better. For a moment, it looked like nothing could go wrong.
So Long and Thanks for All the Glam
There were no days off when a new product launch was close to a breakthrough. The only pressure release was the spontaneous parties that flourished in the wake of rough days and made the days after them exponentially harder. Elodie went to a few of these. She didn’t drink, and she didn’t like them sober.
Something had changed, and she liked it. She practised for herself, and quietly. So quietly that she didn’t even tell Tammy.
She was done listening to advice about how to get “well”. She just had to. Period.
Soraya was great at handling stress, and Elodie was hoping to learn from the best about how to do it. She was about to become the Institute’s biggest asset; she’d have to learn to suck it up.
There was an odd one though—as Elodie painfully forced herself to try to observe separate futures, she hit a wall whenever Soraya was involved in the question.
Reading into people close to you was supposed to be easier than strangers. It didn't add up. It sucked that she couldn’t just ask Tammy about it. She wanted to get fully over this adjusting stage before she asked for more.
Now it was Wednesday morning, and things seemed as uneventful as ever. Soraya took a call during their morning coffee in which she told someone blatantly not to pursue a project, because they needed to wait for the confirmations of an addendum to the new AI law. She said she'd talk to Seravina if there were issues.
“You should be careful with this stuff,” Elodie said. “There’s one boss at the Institute.”
“My life is drenched in secrecy and carefulness,” Soraya replied without elaborating. Elodie felt an itch somewhere in her other senses, but it was early, and she didn’t want to get her hopes up.
"I thought you weren't supposed to give instructions on how
to do their research," Elodie noted.
Soraya waved her hand dismissively.
"I know exactly what would happen if I didn't tell them. Chaos. Two weeks of delay. And they would wait for whoever was heading that research, and they would take it up to Seravina, and she'd say the same thing."
She gave Elodie her jacket.
"And if you're bent on preaching me about overstepping my limits, maybe you can tell me why I’m picking you up from the floor every night. I thought they told you to take it easy and just stabilize."
"It's my responsibility to progress and get past this phase. No one’s pulled me up on it yet, so I must be doing something right."
"They should have a plan that doesn't involve just leaving you until you figure it out," Soraya replied as they stepped out onto the terrace where her feï awaited.
“You’re forgetting that all of the gifted, Soraya, all of them complete their training in a month or two. I can’t even work on anything but theory. I’ve literally run out of books to read. I can do what I want. The gifted leave me alone. If I were Tammy, I’d give up on me too. Wouldn’t you?”
Soraya got in the feï first, thinking about the rhetorical provocation as if it was a true quest for advice.
"I'm not sure I should give you suggestions. You do you," she said after a while. At least Elodie could still count on her honesty.
"But if you were in my situation?" Elodie asked as the door dematerialised. For what it was worth, Soraya gave good advice and never asked for any.
"I don't know. I feel like you're kind of in between. You're doing what they want you to do, but then you do this private rebellion. If it was me, I'd do one or the other. Either follow the charted part of the Rising Dawn or reject it completely, find out what works for you. This inbetweening. I couldn't."