“This… this is better. Okay, so his body produces a hallucinogen. Which means…” she spun her hand in a circle as she tried to figure it out. “Which means you think he’s crazy. He’s hallucinating. Seeing all these things. Because of what? Because he’s just like this? But then, why are you helping him?”
Rachana glared past her to Michael. The gaunt figure withheld a response. The director leaned onto a terminal for support.
“Be quiet and I will explain. No more interruptions!”
She clicked and the hologram blinked out. A globe replaced it. Faint blue lines framed the oceans as they cast familiar latitudes and longitudes in the open space. Dim green light rimmed the landmasses. The globe refreshed and the landmasses shifted to show elevations. Pale brown mountains rose from green fields. Grasslands faded to beige deserts at various global locations. The ice caps appeared.
Click.
The globe spun to focus on the Pacific Ocean with the Americas, Japan, and most of eastern Oceania in view.
Click.
A string of orange inverted V’s appeared around the ocean’s perimeter.
“The Ring of Fire,” Rachana said. “An active chain of volcanic locations formed at the borders of several tectonic plates. The volcanic chain that runs the spine of South America is formed from the activities of the Nazca and South American plates.”
Eliza mouthed a response but stopped. Rachana waited until she closed her mouth to click again. Purple dots appeared near Lima, in Mexico, in a dotted line running from what Eliza guessed was Galveston up through the Appalachians and Alleghenies to Canada and far north into somewhere she thought must be Canada. That was the crown of the world, right?
A solitary dot appeared somewhere near the Alaskan border to Canada. Another dotted line drifted west across the Bering Sea, where it stopped before it reached Russia, Japan, or anywhere at all.
Rachana clicked a final time and what looked like coordinates appeared in purple over Lima, in Mexico, at the Canadian location near the Arctic Ocean, and near the terminal line at the western edge of the Bering Sea. A single dot pulsed at the Alaskan border.
“What do…?” She paused to wait for a retort that never came. “What do these coordinates mean?”
“They’re not coordinates,” Rachana said.
Michael stepped to the globe. The brilliant electric lines of the hologram cascaded over his haunting form and for a moment, Eliza saw something more angelic than demonic. He couldn’t help how he was made any more than Charlie or anyone else could. He was just a person.
“They are not physical coordinates, no,” he said. “They are more appropriately thought of as coordinates in time, or as place markers for a story. Correlative coordinates, perhaps. This globe represents our best efforts to recreate Charlie’s story. It is the atlas of his life.”
He prodded the purple (19 : 20; 95%) over Peru.
“This figure represents his current location and naturally, the lifespan of the Grupo de Pachakuti. We are confident to the 95th percentile that he has been here since the early 1900s until present day.”
“Or so he believes,” Rachana said.
Michael selected the coordinates over Mexico. A straight dotted line appeared between the points.
“This is a story you do not yet know. We have documented another story of time spent near or in the Nahuatl capital city Tenochtitlan.”
Tim slipped a mug of steaming cocoa into Eliza’s frozen hands. She let the liquid heat warm her while she waited for Michael’s next response. It had finally happened, she noticed. The world had finally accelerated enough to overwhelm her. She prodded the nagging voice in her mind for a reaction. It offered nothing. The imp was quiet.
She smiled and nodded at Michael as she sipped the cocoa. Its richness flooded her mouth, erasing any memory of the paltry coffee. Cocoa was the drink for this morning. She drained the mug and handed it to Tim. He was already refilling his but stopped to fill hers.
Michael turned to Rachana. She nodded as she scribbled a note. He continued.
“We trail him in reverse north along the Gulf of Mexico. The dotted line indicates a general and assumed path. We seek full details to confirm or refute. As an illustration, we believe he chose a path through the mountains of the eastern United States because of a strong aversion to the ocean.”
“But based on what’s coming next, or I guess what came before, you generally know he had to travel south from Canada through the Appalachians and the southeast United States. That’s smart.”
“Indeed. The strongest correlation outside our personal knowledge of his life here in Peru lies near the Arctic Circle.”
He selected those coordinates and the dotted line continued its unsteady amble north from the vicinity of New York into Canada. The line split into dimmer eastern and western routes at the southern shores of the Hudson Bay.
Eliza thought the map wonderfully designed. The lines had dimmed because the researchers were uncertain which path he took, but certain he eventually chose some southern path. The eastern path bee-lined straight north across the Hudson Strait to an inverted V that waited on a large island she vaguely recognized. The western path wandered but found its way north of the same symbol and then back south and east until the lines converged on the coordinate (08 : 13; 85%).
“Eight, thirteen, eighty-five. So that’s what, 800 to 1300 Christian Era, eighty-five percent confidence? That’s…” Eliza sat her empty mug on a console. “And that’s a mountain. And it kind of makes sense because of…”
She turned to Tim. He had to see it too or she would lose her mind.
Michael clicked. The hologram zoomed from global to local. Greenland waited a hundred miles to the east. There was the southern inlet, a shallow valley not far from the shore, and the same inverted V just a few miles north of what had to be the settlement, the Grimarsson’s hall.
“Where… where is this?” Eliza asked the room.
Michael clicked again and the globe rendered into an aerial image of a wolf’s fang the size of a mountain protruding from a river flanked by a chain of more rugged mountains. The sprawling panoramic photo looked like all the Nordic fjords she had ever seen in documentaries. It was effortless to imagine glaciers gouging the surface of the earth itself during some forgotten Ice Age.
“Auyuittuq,” Michael said. “The Land That Never Melts. It is a national park in Nunavat, a Canadian territory. What you see is essentially a fjord. It is home to many spectacular geologic protrusions, including…”
“Mount Thor.”
Tim stumbled forward. His hands were shaking as he moved. Eliza grabbed his arm to steady him. The boy vibrated. How much cocoa had he drank? A second thought startled her. Had it been only cocoa?
She realized they knew almost nothing about the Grupo except Behema’s good word, and he was a man she barely knew except through the mentor and friend who abandoned her without notice. Now they were privy to the Grupo’s deepest secrets. How had it taken Rachana’s hostility to see this risk?
“It’s the tallest vertical drop in the world,” he continued, “because of how it like curves back on itself. It’s like ten or fifteen degrees past vertical. The cliff hangs out farther than the base. You can fall straight down like a mile.”
“How do you know that?” Rachana shot.
Eliza scowled. She was the only one allowed to poke fun at Tim. The boy knew a lot. He seemed to miss the biting tone.
“I’ve been there. My dad took me and my brother when I graduated high school. I’ve stood on top of that peak. Eliza, I… I didn’t know what to say this morning because it’s… it’s…”
He was staring at his feet as his endless capacity for blushing showed itself again.
“It’s crazy, Tim. I know. But tell me. Please.”
“I didn’t know what to say this morning because I thought I recognized it while he was telling the story. And it seemed so real. It was too real. Like it was me remembering it instead of him telling it. That first part in the story wh
en Jernbjorn climbs the mountain to look at the Northern Lights. Like, that’s the mountain.”
Eliza moved to the image.
“Can you zoom out? I want to see the globe again. But just to that level where it’s focused on this area.”
Michael clicked. The aerial photo faded and the wireframe returned. He clicked again. The coordinates and paths vanished so that she only saw the represented world.
“So this… this is the mountain. That’s the river valley where those dudes hunted him. Here’s the village. Or camp, I guess. It sounded pretty scant. Here’s the inlet where they sailed in and out.”
She traced a line with her finger down the inlet, pausing at the final cliffs where the fjord ended and the ocean began.
“Here’s where he sat to watch them abandon him. That’s why the trails split, isn’t it? This is basically an island. You don’t know if he swam south or made his way around by land. And they sailed over here to Greenland and off to… do you know anything about the people?”
Michael clicked. The world zoomed back out as the hologram grew until Eliza had become the molten core of the artificial earth. She threw her hands in the air.
“Hold on!”
“I am afraid we must finish the journey before you will understand. Allow me to continue.”
Michael extended his arm in an invitation to exit the hologram. Eliza grumbled as she stepped through the light. He prodded the pulsing dot at the Alaskan border to Canada. A straight dotted line sprawled across the vast nation from Auyuittuq to the pulsing border marker.
“This is a supposed correlation. It is more of an interpolation based on our extensive study than anything Charlie has indicated. It is similar to our assumption about his aversion to the ocean.”
“They’re guessing at a part of the story that Charlie hasn’t told them based on the parts he has, Tim.”
“Precisely. Our hypothesis involves a terrific physical and emotional trauma at this location. We know nothing more. Finally, the origin.”
He selected the terminal location in the Bering Sea that read (-13 : -07; 10%) and stepped away from the hologram.
“And now we’re into 1300 Before Christian Era. What, no story? Rachana? Nothing?”
“This is where our uncertainty reaches its zenith,” Michael said.
“We simply don’t know more,” Rachana added.
Eliza saw her face fall. Gone were the hellfire and brimstone, the set jaw, the ferocity. They were replaced by a simple withered woman whose exhaustion made Eliza tired. What had she been carrying and for how long?
“Okay. So let me try and piece this together. Because what’s in my head is insane. Just, let me talk it out and then you guys correct me.”
She didn’t wait for their response.
“You have this idea that our boy Charlie started his journey somewhere in the middle of the Bering Sea as early as 1300 BCE or as late as 700 BCE, wandered his way to Alaska where something really bad happened at some point in time, then strolled across all of Canada while he became Chewbacca and interacted with some Vikings, before wandering south through the entire United States and into Mexico City a couple centuries later, until he ended up here as a… man? I think he’s a man. Is that all right? Is that what you think happened?”
Michael mouthed a word but Rachana spoke first.
“That is what Charlie believes. We’ve tried to reconstruct his story here. The emphasis is on it being his story. My suspicion is that the story is a complex reaction to an early childhood trauma, coupled with the undeniable fact that he is essentially not homo sapiens. The gland network alone is enough to make him truly unique. It completely alters his mind and the minds of anyone exposed to it. Which, unfortunately…”
“Unfortunately what?”
Eliza stalked to her. The globe’s bright light draped her angry face.
“Unfortunately what, Rachana?”
ThisIsWhatYouKnewWasGoingOnMakeHerSayItYoureNotCrazyAtleastNotAboutThisMakeHer
“Unfortunately what?”
“Which unfortunately, has happened to both of you,” Rachana finished. “There was no stopping it and besides, the data was indispensable.”
“Data?” Tim asked.
“Data,” Eliza echoed. “On us. They weren’t just observing Charlie. They were recording us. Because they both knew this was a thing. Whatever we’re talking about. They used us as test subjects.”
Eliza’s hands were on Rachana’s lab coat. She felt a hard-edged terminal jar the wheezing woman’s slight frame. Michael haunted the edges of her reddening vision. He wasn’t moving but Tim was. He was between Eliza and Michael with an arm extended to each. She saw him lock his injured legs and brace to block Michael.
The woman stank of chlorine and ketosis. Her breath was rotten. Paper-soft hands gripped Eliza’s wrists. But she was smiling.
“You were right, Michael. Excellent hypothesis. Remove your hands, Doctor Reyes, or I will simply not continue and you will not understand what is happening to you.”
Eliza looked the lab coat was balled up in her shaking hands. Her fingernails dug through the fabric into her scarred palms. This was not her. She was not violent. This was something else. This was intoxication. She released the coat.
“You should have made me understand right away.”
“You would not be quiet. Besides, it’s often best if the subject does not know what’s happening until after the dosage passes through their system. The cocoa and coffee help, sometimes. People become confused, often reporting a sensation of imprisonment.”
“Explain.” Eliza jabbed a finger at Rachana’s forehead, turned the finger back to stare at it, and then decided it needed to be aimed at the director. “Now.”
Michael handed the hologram’s controller to Rachana, who rolled a thumb around the middle and then clicked. The hologram of Charlie’s body replaced the globe. The purple gland network was highlighted again. Eliza noticed a large gland on his neck near the bruised place Tim had noticed the night before. Thin lines coursed like toxic rivers into Charlie’s brain.
“The gland network produces a powerful hallucinogenic entheogen. If you’re familiar with N-N-Dimethyltryptamine or ayahuasca then you understand the essence.”
“How… how powerful?”
“An overwhelming dosage of DMT is 60 milligrams or so. This is enough to separate even the most… ardent indulger of hallucinogens into a perceived alternate reality so real that they forget our world exists. The equivalent dosage from his gland network is three magnitudes more powerful with a similar half-life.”
“Three. Jesus, that’s a thousand times stronger. I don’t… I don’t have any experience with stuff like that. Drugs. Hallucinogens. I mean, I know about their role in religious rituals. Ayahuasca is a big time spiritual event for South American tribes. But what does a thousand times stronger mean? What’s the context? I need a baseline for that.”
“The closest description we’ve recovered from test subjects is of absolute alternate reality,” Michael said. “The test subjects believe the hallucination entirely, often to the extent that their neural pathways reform to memorialize their hallucinatory experience as reality. The hallucination is typically rooted in Charlie’s own experience and rarely derived from the patient’s experiences. They will later deny all evidence that what they experienced was not real, even when shown video testimonies we have them record before their trials.”
“You do this to other people! You test this on people!” Eliza’s fingernails found their familiar sheaths in her palms as she yelled.
“Those who consent,” Rachana said. “Members of the Grupo who fully understand the risks and benefits.”
“Benefits? Christ. What benefits?”
Eliza realized she was struggling to breathe. Her words choked her. She tried to calm down. What had she done? What had she done to Tim?
“What does this have to do with us?” Tim asked.
“Ah, yes,” Rachana said. “Here, do you see how th
e purple lines run from the glands into patches beneath his jaw and in his hands? His body distributes a significantly diluted version to these locations. The serum is diffused through his skin when the network is active. He can incidentally intoxicate people if he touches them while the network is active.”
“But I didn’t touch him.”
HellYesYouDidHeHelpedYouDownTheMountainYesYouDid
“Yeah I did. On the mountain. Was he hallucinating then? But Tim didn’t touch him.”
“But that’s the thing around his jaw, right?” Tim asked. “Those patches aren’t for contact.”
“Indeed not.” Rachana smiled and nodded to Eliza. “Astute observation. Those patches are more similar to a musk gland’s expressive capabilities. He can aerosolize the serum. You breathed it while he told the story.”
“Does he know he’s doing this?” Eliza asked.
“Likely not,” Michael said. “He seems to have no autonomy over the glands. In fact, it causes him significant anguish. You must consider his existence, Eliza. You were exposed to a few milligrams of aerosolized serum over the course of an evening and you are exhausted, dehydrated, and your brain nearly empty of endorphins.”
“That’s why I’m so irritable.”
NoShitSherlockDontLookAtTheLittleWitchWoman
Rachana brushed the wrinkles from her lab coat.
“Among other reasons. I imagine you’re an unpleasant woman to begin with.”
“That’s a pot-kettle situation, ya know? But that doesn’t matter. Because if I was buying this story while he was telling it and that was a micro-dose, and his body is mainlining this crap into his brain, then he’s basically living in a super real hallucination.”
Rachana clicked and the globe reappeared. She waited for Eliza to continue.
“Subtle. Then his story is a giant hallucination. And you’re reconstructing it to figure out… to figure out… you want to know why! You want to know what the trauma was so that you can help him.”
“Indeed,” Michael said as he stared at Rachana.
Eliza traced the path again, from Peru up north through all of the Americas and then west to the edge of Asia.
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