Chapter 28 #2
“But,” I press, “working here on The Parallax, you must understand some things. It seems…” I pause, decide where I want to nudge this conversation next.
“It seems unbelievable that one man could harvest enough data to predict future events for a single planet, let alone the entire galaxy. How does Doc Min even go about accessing that kind of information?”
Nina’s cheeriness fades ever so slightly. “Ran is an innovator.”
“Are there surveillance systems involved?”
“No.”
“Are you purchasing the data from a third party?”
“No.”
“So how—?”
“Ran has his own methods to gather the information needed to make his simulation work smoothly.”
“Enough methods to collect all the information, though? I understand everything in our galaxy is connected. Every event affects every next event. That’s the concept of Determinism, right?
But to predict the future, Doc Min would need to harvest that data, and to do that, he’d have to install the entire galaxy with observation technology—which, by the way, is illegal under galactic law—and somehow optimize the sequence of events to produce meaningful predictions. ”
Nina’s hair is pulled up today, exposing the curves of her face, the slope of her neck. She doesn’t look put off by my questions, exactly, but there’s something in her eyes now. A caginess that wasn’t there before. “You’ve been studying.”
“If I’m going to join your movement,” I lie, “I’d like to understand it.”
“Oh, Keller.” She sighs. “Do you think you’re the first to wonder about Ran’s methods? I myself didn’t believe his predictions when I first joined the movement. But speaking too deeply about the simulation can have negative impacts on the technology itself.”
I’ve heard this argument before. It still sounds like bullshit. “But—”
“If you have questions,” Nina interrupts, “let’s save them for Ran, shall we?”
Which is about as far as I should have expected to get with my mother. Still, I rub my neck, feeling a little like I’ve been horse-collared.
“Speaking of,” Nina continues in brighter tones, “I was just talking to Ran about you this morning. I was telling him about that pet ferret you had as a child. What was his name? Fuzzy?”
“Floppy.”
“Floppy.” She gives a bell-tinkle laugh. “He was a cute little bugger. Such an escape artist. I remember the last time you lost him. You were so upset.”
It’s like I’ve looked into a mirror and there’s no reflection. What are we even talking about right now? “Yeah.”
“I went and bought you another ferret. I tried to pretend Floppy never run away, but you knew the difference instantly. Of course you did. You were always so smart.”
I’m struggling with this turn in conversation. Like, I can hear what Nina is saying, but I’m not absorbing it. It’s weird. How she’s talking about my childhood so openly. Reminiscing, like there’s no sore spot here, no elephant in the room. “I never told you I knew he was a different ferret.”
“You gave him a new name. It was obvious. Gosh, you always loved animals. Remember when I took you to the zoo?”
My heart thumps. Is she serious right now? Like, the day she abandoned me? “What?”
“We had the whole day planned, just the two of us. Remember that?”
There’s a part of me—a jagged, nagging suspicion in the back of my head—that thinks Nina is doing this on purpose.
Like she knows I was treading into dangerous territory with my simulation questions and is using this jarring change in conversation to derail me.
Which reminds me that despite Nina’s joyful demeanor, she’s the kind of woman who would willingly abandon her son in the name of her cult.
It reminds me I don’t know my mother at all.
I wish I wasn’t doing this alone. It’d be easier if Vera was here, or Jester, or (yes, all right, I’ll say what I mean) Lament.
He’d be my anchor, something to ground me.
I’ve got nothing to ground me now. Just this vacant room and my mother’s too-happy eyes and her memories that are so insensitive they’re borderline criminal.
“Yeah,” I say, and this time, I let the one-word answer stand.
She looks down. “Oh, but you haven’t touched your coffee. Shall we fetch you something else?”
My fingers are itching like they do when I want to grab my ray gun. I stand abruptly. “Is there a restroom?”
Nina blinks. “Now? Ran should be here any—”
“It was a long flight.”
“Of course.” She recovers herself quickly, but I don’t miss the way she’s eyeing me, like maybe she’s finally noticed the strain in my voice.
I wonder if she’ll insist I wait for Doc Min to arrive before I go anywhere, but she only nods and points.
“Just out the doors to the left. You can’t miss it. ”
I don’t go to the bathroom. My feet take me swiftly away from the lounge, up a corridor and back into The Parallax’s main chamber.
I learned as much as I could questioning my mother, which wasn’t much.
Not that I expected her to be forthcoming about Doc Min’s simulation, but her deflections, her overbright attitude, the shifty change in conversation …
She’s hiding something.
I consider waiting for Ran Doc Min. That’s why I’m here, isn’t it? To question the man myself. Only now I’m realizing that plan comes with one pretty huge flaw: I don’t trust Doc Min any more than I trust my mother. She’s not giving me the answers I came for, so who’s to say he will?
If I want to unravel the mystery of the space mist, Bast, and FPS, I’ll have to do it on my own. And as I stare down the hallway, I realize I might have just stumbled upon that very opportunity.
I bolt through corridors, recalling the image of Jester’s heat map (thank the stars I have it memorized) and setting my watch countdown to fifteen minutes.
That’s the amount of time I estimate it would take a visitor to vanish to the restroom before their Determinist mother started to grow suspicious.
I have fifteen minutes to find the center of the ship, sneak into the simulation room, learn whatever I can, and return to Nina before anyone realizes I’m missing.
Which suddenly feels like a fucking impossibly short amount of time.
Rash, says the memory of Master Ira’s voice, still so familiar after all these years. Reckless.
I know, I think back. It’s not enough to stop me.
I turn off the main chamber, pass the moat (still no sharks), and dart up a different corridor, walking as fast as I can without drawing attention.
The hallway is square and straight, illuminated by white overhead lights.
There are a fair number of people around (guards, extraterrestrial species, buff-looking people in gray-and-yellow flight suits), which is actually a good thing—the crowd helps conceal my presence.
As it is, my heart ratchets every time someone glances in my direction, but the Determinists seem absorbed in their own thoughts, their own lives.
My civilian clothes blend seamlessly in with the throng, and my face, while recognizable (I’m starting to understand why Lament works so hard to stay out of the news) is just average enough to avoid notice. No one looks at me twice.
I come to a T-shaped dead end and hang a left, moving down yet another hallway (this one features a unit of marching guards wielding fire blasters—yay) and deeper into the belly of The Parallax.
The walls are a smooth, uniform gray. The floors are textured to prevent slipping.
By my estimation, I’m somewhere in the lower right quadrant of the craft heading toward its center.
I speedwalk under archways and through doors (square, circle, circle, hexagon), but I keep meeting dead ends, forcing me to backtrack and eating up precious time.
I’m starting to feel disoriented. I debate, madly, whether I could ask someone for directions to the simulation room. I barrel onward, keep my face down, trying not to meet anyone’s eye. I hit another dead end. Curse. Turn back.
Then I start to notice the pattern.
If I pass through a hexagon door and take a left, it will lead me to a circular door.
When I pass through that and take a right, it will lead me back to a hexagon.
No more dead ends. I follow this series, avoiding rectangular doors entirely.
It’s like a maze with a secret code, guiding me to the ship’s center.
There are fewer people now, just enough that I can’t hide in a crowd. I start checking around corners, waiting until the coast is clear before moving through a new door, doing everything in my power to stay out of sight. If I get caught this far from the lounge, I won’t have any excuses.
I try not to dwell on that.
The overhead lights have been growing steadily dimmer as I continue into the labyrinth.
Sometimes, they cut out altogether. I presume this has to do with saving energy on lesser-used sections of the spacecraft and is not some psychological hack to make invaders feel like the walls are closing in.
Which, they do feel like that. I round yet another corner and see a bot holding a drink tray, much like the one that delivered Nina and me coffee.
On impulse, I grab the tray out of the bot’s mechanical hands. It doesn’t seem to notice.
I reach a final hallway and peer around the corner.
At the end of the corridor is a single door with a hand scan access pad and a scrolling sign overhead that reads SIMULATION IN PROGRESS: DO NOT ENTER.
A guard stands on either side of the door.
The one on the left looks like any regular guard, her uniform neat but her face bored.
My eyes slide to the one on the right, and I do a double take, because I recognize them from Avi’s lessons: That’s Jij, the poisons master.
I dip back out of sight, press my back against the flat wall. I’m sweating. My stomach hurts. I check my watch: already ten minutes down.
I briefly consider aborting this mission.
Back on Skyhub, we’d talked about what it might take for me to get my eyes on FPS.
Presumably, the simulation spits its predictions out onto some kind of monitor, which is located in the same room as FPS’s processors.
All the Sixers agreed that even if I was able to get my eyes on that screen myself, it wouldn’t do much good, since I don’t know how to read computer code.
Which is all to say that this little detour has probably been totally pointless.
I’m sure Lament will wring my neck when he finds out. And yet.
And yet.
I have this feeling in my gut, same as I do when I’m lining up the perfect shot, ray gun in hand, finger on the trigger. Things just click, and right now, something is clicking.
I need to see the simulation. I am meant to go through that door.
I hoist the stolen tray like I’m a waiter at a diner, emerge around the corner, and start forward at a fast clip.
At a glance, Jij could be mistaken for human, except for a few small oddities: the slitted nose, the wide-set eyes, the faint blue tint to their skin.
Jij and the other guard glance up, their hands going to their ray guns.
“Delivery,” I say.
“This room is closed to—”
I hurl the tray through the air. It catches the first guard in the stomach while I dodge a ray beam from Jij, pull out my gun, shoot the weapon from their hand.
It’s noisy, Mother of Stars, it’s noisy.
While the woman is trying to draw air back into her lungs, Jij produces a small black pouch of I-don’t-know-what-but-I-think-I-can-guess.
I close the distance between us, come in with a fist to the face. Jij is clearly not expecting a gunman to do anything so obviously physical, especially given I still have a gun in my hand. They reel back. Hit the wall. In the confusion, the contents of their pouch spill down their front.
Jij’s eyes bulge. The veins grow in their neck, swelling at an alarming rate. They give a short, surprised gurgle before slumping to the floor.
The other guard’s nose is streaming, her face red from where the tray hit her diaphragm. I pick up the fallen platter.
She says, “You sonuva—”
I smash the tray over her head, and she crumples down on top of Jij.
My thoughts are strangely clear in the midst of all this violence. Like it’s been choreographed, I grab Jij’s limp hand and slap it onto the hand scanner. The doors swoosh apart down the center.
I step into the simulation room.
In the movies, when there’s a big revelation, the producers always take time to build up to the moment.
They add in dramatic music and do a slow pan of the camera, closing in on the protagonist’s face, letting you see their emotion.
Meanwhile, the viewer is held in suspense, anticipating that great and final unveiling.
It’s not like that now. There’s no buildup, no gap between me and the revelation.
I know immediately this isn’t a supercomputer room—it’s a laboratory.
I see Trey Morton standing in its center, speaking to a young woman in a lab coat.
He turns at the sound of my entrance, his eyes widening, but not before I get a look at what’s around me.
Models of Mount Kilmon. Test tubes, gas masks, maps detailing rings of vapor.
And there, stacked along the wall, is what looks like a dozen gray heat collectors—the same devices used by the people of Venthros to harness energy from Mount Kilmon’s eruption and power our planet.
Only, these collectors have been altered.
Their interior grids are gone, replaced with capsules of smoky white mist. Connected to the capsules are wires leading to countdown timers, which read in big red letters: three hundred and twelve hours.
Thirteen days. The same amount of time until Mount Kilmon’s eruption.
My heart is in my throat. My ears roar as everything clicks into place.
There is no simulation. No advanced computer technology. Ran Doc Min didn’t predict the poisonous gas that will erupt out of Mount Kilmon and kill millions of people.
He planted it.
“Keller,” says a voice from behind me, “you’re off course, aren’t you?”