by E. L. Aldryc
Elodie remembered what Tammy’d once said. Soraya was a minuscule player in the great scheme. It was listening to threats from a cricket. Elodie became aware of the overwhelming power they now had. The gifted ran the Institute. They knew all the futures. They could shape it in any way they wanted it. And take it straight to the Universe of Infinite Wonder.
“Can you guarantee constant monitoring? I send the hub a plan and you tell me which tests to take, how much time to spend on them, what not to do? All resources in?” Soraya asked.
A positive surprise. Soraya was actively asking for the gifted to get involved.
“Of course. And when we’ve launched, I’ll make sure your contribution translates into something more tangible. How does ‘Head of Research Operations’ sound?”
Oh no, this was dangerous territory. An official position was on the top of Soraya’s wish list for years. Seravina came up with every excuse in the book. Youth, external pressure, bad timing. Tammy, however, was better than that. She’d learned in two hours that the only way to keep the boat floating was to give Soraya what she wanted. This was the kind of person Elodie wanted to learn from.
“Two weeks is tough,” Soraya said, thinking.
“But if you say yes, we have a 72.2% chance of a successful launch. How do you like those odds?” Tammy stood up and offered her a hand.
“I like them a little bit,” Soraya replied and cautiously shook it.
Flock to Your Poison
Monday, 24 June 2363
It was a great day to launch tola. Soraya was losing her mind in the Particle Lab, anxiously going through every single detail once again, complaining to Elodie about the components the gifted didn’t want to test before launch because they’d cleared them prognostically. Elodie had to tell her to let go and relax every few minutes. And she was in a position to. She was involved. Observing only, but she was learning a lot. She saw the hub in action. All the prognosts lending each other power through a bond sustained by telepaths. They weren’t just dipping into the current. They were building cruise ships in it. And Elodie was taking notes, walking around with Tammy, back on the smoky marble floor, only this time, she was actually getting better. Each day, she felt a little braver. She could check the weather, the food, sometimes even likely things people were going to tell her.
Apart from one. After some guesswork, Elodie found the word that kept popping up.
“Jiddispjaċini” was Maltese for “sorry”, and there was only one Maltese person around who could shed light on the angry memory.
It wasn’t a conversation for the launch day. Imagine. She was tempted to try the timeline to see the outcome for the entertainment value.
Elodie wasn’t nervous. The gifted didn’t have a reason to be.
Everything looked stellar, and the Universe of Infinite Wonder glimmered with added intensity on the event horizon.
The rules of launch day were clear. No comms, no news. Elodie muted it all and went to work. Launch day madness. She nearly landed on a couple of white-robed operatives who carelessly ran across the launch pad.
As she exited the feï, without a warning, the current crept up and sank her.
Root reality. Root reality. Launch day.
Images rushed through her as she tried to pull herself back as fast as possible. If Tammy found out, she’d push the start of her training even farther. She couldn’t believe these were still happening. Peak annoyance.
She was out for a few seconds. Surprisingly, she hadn't fallen. Soraya was holding her by the arm, and it was almost like she was pushing her to walk.
“Can you not slow down?” Elodie said. Launch day madness was not her style.
“Get it together. We need to go,” Soraya said coldly and pressed on.
Something was wrong. Familiar faces started entering the admin building. Heads of departments. No one made eye contact. They were rushing.
“Keep walking,” Soraya said, all tunnel vision and no explanation.
“I’m serious,” Elodie pushed out on the steps. “We’re not going anywhere until you tell me.”
“Tola launch is two hours in,” Soraya said. “The area we launched in has just seen two thousand people fall into a coma. Your boss is waiting for us.”
She left Elodie behind and ran up the stairs.
No way. How could the gifted miss this? Elodie hurried up to follow her into a packed meeting room in a daze. They just couldn’t catch a break.
An all-star cast of the Institute, looking worn out from the hours they’d clocked in, mustered up a bunch of various chairs. The table needed to widen, and as everyone’s idea of how that should work varied massively, it ended up shaped like the first pancake on a pan.
Two chairs were left empty. The alchemists chose a poor day to be late again. Finally, the door disappeared, and Dr Birkelund marched towards his seat with his one remaining apprentice.
“Are everyone’s comms off?” Tammy said, and there was a murmur about while everyone rechecked.
“Good, don’t look at anything.”
She never sat down. When she moved faster than her usual glide through the sphere of Earthy perfection, Tammy’s long hair flowed restlessly.
“We’ve had a malfunction,” she said. “A serious one.”
Judging by how freaked out half the table looked, half the table knew.
“The tola update we released today has put over a thousand people into a coma before we got the first report and disabled it. We’re working with the police in North Madilune, where the incident happened. That’s the good part. Because if we launched it anywhere else in the world, we would have started a war. Do you understand? A war.”
Her voice was slow and calm, but Elodie felt sick to the stomach. How had they not seen it? Rising Dawn was so accurate in prognostics that they could even tell you the exact words someone used to insult the Institute in an article months ahead. She glanced over to Tammy, who maintained composure, and Soraya, who nodded at the factual accuracy.
Which one of them would take the blame?
“You’ll all want to ask Rising Dawn what’s going on, but unfortunately, that won’t be possible. We are in blackout.”
This was the word that made Tammy show the only sign of fear. Not war. Not a thousand comatose. Blackout.
“Those of you who read operation reports already know that we enter prognostic blackouts occasionally, and that they’re nothing to be afraid of. The gifted are temporarily ejected from the futures. Normally it only lasts a few hours. I don’t know if the tola malfunction and the blackout are correlated. It might just be our luck.”
The gifted had no oversight? No access to the futures? Not even Tammy?
She looked around the room. The leadership of the Sight Institute put on a thinking, brave face. Important questions. What would Seravina have done?
One hand went up.
“Have we identified the tola error?” Dr—what was his name—Hollbrook asked. He was the only one present from MediMundus.
“No,” Tammy said. “We’ve gone through all the parts of the programming that can be troubleshot by the AI. The rest is built on anthropotomatic protocols. Those need to be looked at by a human engineer. They link directly to the sublime. The AI can’t read them. This sort of thing would normally be solved by a skilled paragnost, but… you know.”
It was the same protocols Soraya was worried about earlier. Tammy handed the podium over with as much neutrality as the situation permitted.
“How long did you say it’s gonna take?” Tammy asked.
Soraya brought up a sheet of data.
“If we hire four hundred engineers today, it will take them a maximum of six months to look through all two million components. If we’re correct, then one of them will tell us what went wrong.”
No gloating. Elodie half wanted Soraya to casually insult everyone in the room and come up with a solution. It wasn't her day either.
“Are you sure the AI-controlled parts are perfect?” Tammy asked
. This would become a point of contention. The mood sharpened.
“I’ve peer checked it with all our sister institutes. They confirmed our results,” she replied.
Peace.
“Of course, I could hire another four hundred engineers and have them work for two years to double check all the AI components.”
It was a swift jab. All that needed to happen to lose any semblance of order was for someone to strike back.
“No, that’s fine. I trust you.” Tammy emphasized. She addressed the table. “Stop despairing, everyone. Seravina would have done one thing if this happened on her watch: she’d fix it. And to do that, she’d use the only approach that works in times of desperation.”
It had to be the “right now” approach. It had to be.
“I’ve split you and all your teams into groups of four. In an hour, I want all the ideas. I want them instantly implementable. I want all of them to be solutions. And if the blackout finishes before then, I’ll get it all fixed and buy you all a beer.”
Seravina was in love with the “right now” approach. And spoiled, because she knew that if she put people in a sealed room and told them they had an hour to figure out a problem, they often did better than a month of research. Especially when she threatened to withhold lunch. When Elodie first joined, she was put in loads of them—sometimes they were to solve a simple problem and sometimes a centuries-old one. It was how they were trained. The research teams at the Sight Institute were conditioned to always look at everything with fresh eyes. That’s what Seravina'd always said. Fresh eyes!
Elodie fully expected not to be included, but here it was—a note that said she needed to go to Seravina’s former office with Soraya. That was great. But there was another name. Frederich Hawken.
And it all became clear. They wanted to put the juniors in a room so they wouldn’t disturb them. She was infuriated.
Ten minutes later, the Institute had already been divided into emergency brainstorming teams.
Their trio was at the bottom of the list.
Elodie had done so much to be taken seriously by the gifted, and now at the first sign of trouble they chucked her in with the rest of the liabilities?
They might have suspected that Soraya didn’t want to help them to make them look bad. And no one had ever looked at Frederich and thought he was a great person to have on the team. She was stuck with the poster boy for anti-social behaviour while seniors got to talk shop and make all the decisions. Elodie hadn’t respected Seravina enough for her progressive leadership.
Seravina’s office looked the same. Nothing had changed, apart from a looming absence. A final proof of the fact that Tammy didn’t want them to “contribute”. Both she and Soraya had made memories in this place. It was haunting.
“Are you talking today?” Soraya asked Frederich as he looked through the window behind Seravina’s former chair. It projected sunlight, 9 a.m. summer time. All day, every day. Even while the gifted were in blackout and their tola was putting people in a coma.
“Yep,” Frederich replied.
Elodie felt sick again. The office was highly saturated with data—and something else. She wanted to sit down.
“Careful.” Soraya spotted her discomfort and got her a chair.
What if this was what happened to the gifted when they entered a blackout?
What if it literally made them sick?
“You really messed this one up,” Frederich said to Soraya.
“Me?” she said, sitting on the end of the desk. “Ask Elodie. I was begging for another check in the anthropotomatic components. Her people messed up.”
“Do you think,” Elodie tried to ask, staring at the sun. She was nauseated. “Do you think the blackout can kill me?”
Seravina’s office was a dizzying sight, with a cathedral-like ceiling and enormous bookshelves that loomed over them.
“No,” Soraya replied. “But I don’t know much about them. So maybe.”
That was a first.
“I need a drink,” Frederich said. The worst idea ever.
The sun shone in the same, never-changing loop. They were stuck here while they could be helping elsewhere. Elodie had worked so hard to make it, and now, at the first chance she could help, she was overlooked.
“Help yourself. The new people moving in don’t drink.” Soraya pointed at Seravina’s drink cabinet. “It would be a shame to go to waste.”
“What went wrong?” Elodie asked. Was she the only one who cared about the actual emergency?
“A year ago, I joined the Sight Institute,” Frederich said and examined the bottles.
“Is this new, you’re funny now?” Elodie retorted.
“A year later, the gifted took over and decided to clean house,” Soraya continued. “Look at their arrogance. One thing goes wrong and they exclude some of their biggest talent, just because they think this is a ‘senior management’ problem.”
She was right. Soraya would have been the best person to consult about tola. Since Dr Birkelund rarely spoke about anything but himself, Frederich would have been the best person to consult about alchemical solutions.
Maybe they were here for a reason. Could they crack the crisis together?
She looked up at the sky that peered in through the ceiling, and suddenly, she felt it. It was there. She could feel the current invite her in for answers.
But how was this possible? It felt normal. There was the pull. There was the force. There were futures that corresponded to it, and she could just about sense them.
And wait—didn’t she just fall in when she landed? It didn’t feel any different than usually.
“Guys,” she said, “I think I know what to do. I’m not in blackout. I can try to find out what went wrong. I can do this.”
“Absolutely not,” Soraya replied, but that was expected.
“How?” Frederich asked from behind the liquor cabinet.
“I think it’s because I’m not fully stable yet. I don’t have an established relationship with the futures, like Tammy does. Maybe that makes me less susceptible.”
Done. Done. She had a solution.
“So then let’s just get someone else in the same situation to try and look at what’s going on and you can get credit for thinking of it,” Soraya said. Downer.
“There won’t be anyone powerful enough outside. Or familiar enough with our work to understand the details. Don’t you see?”
“So we get a hundred of them,” Soraya replied. “It’s better than putting you in danger.”
“Wait, let’s think about this,” Frederich said, and Soraya shot him a look that shut him up.
“We’re not doing it,” Soraya said. “If the gifted wanted to use Elodie, they would have done it. And in the absence of Seravina, I’m saying no.”
Frederich let out a dismissive grunt.
“What do you want?” Soraya said. “You got something useful or will you just sit there and wait for someone to pick a fight with you?”
“If you’re doing this,” Frederich said to Elodie in a much more sober manner than anything she’d ever hear him say, “then maybe I can help.”
Soraya got up in between them. “Both of you, stop,” she said.
“I discovered something a few months ago. It’s a stimulant for the gifted,” Frederich said.
“You’ve never tested it! You don’t even know what else it does!” Soraya objected.
How did she even know that?
“Let him talk,” Elodie said. She wasn’t trained to search for complex paragnostic data. Maybe this could help. Maybe this was the time for taking risks.
“Look. Everything I’m saying right now is illegal,” he said.
He was right about that. Wasn’t one of alchemy’s only known rules about exclusively dealing with inorganic matter? Like, never touching living things?
“If you promise not to tell anyone, you can test it. Seravina told me to work on it. They were run through medically accurate simulations. Not my word
s. It’s a gifted performance enhancer.”
The gifted hated everything stronger than chamomile tea. If Seravina really did discover something like it, she wouldn't have told Rising Dawn that she had it. At least not until circumstances called for desperate measures. Like now.
“I perfected it,” Frederich said proudly.
“No, you didn’t,” Soraya intervened. “And you’re taking notes from a woman who got herself killed while messing with a tola prototype.”
Ouch.
“Medical simulations normally do a pretty good job at predicting side effects,” Elodie said.
“Not when they’re asked to predict your relationship with the sublime. Remember? The final frontier? That one place we can’t understand yet?”
Elodie had already decided. Now it was a case of getting rid of the obvious obstacle.
“I’ll just make it while you decide,” Frederich said and pulled a small black box from his pocket. Completely unapologetic.
“If you do this, forget about my help next time you get in trouble with your mentor,” Soraya threatened.
“You hate him more than I do,” he replied, and for a brief moment, Elodie could see the secret array of apps that the alchemists used. It looked almost alien, with symbols that she couldn’t recognise, spinning and morphing into others, all in gold and aubergine. Then they disappeared.
“Just let me do my thing,” Elodie told Soraya. “I know what I’m doing. I accept the risks. I’m going to save the Institute, and then you can go back to being the cool kid.”
“It’s not about that. You’re taking this too easy. The rest of the gifted are in blackout. You’re trying to go into uncharted territory,” Soraya objected.
“Whenever you’re ready,” Elodie said to Frederich, immersed in his mobile kit.
Elodie could see that Soraya was looking at them both, contemplating if she could overpower them.
“This is your initiation into the club,” Frederich said and held up a silver ball. “Now you can do all the dangerous stuff we do.”
Elodie got up and walked to the radiating window to accept the dose.