Chapter 6 Hazel #3
‘I count when I try once again to fix the Arch that you broke; when I receive my daily update from the chronodes; when I force you to work so that the Keepers’ efforts will not be lost. All you have to do is sleep, and you are incompetent even at that.
You only have to talk to the Backward Traveller, while I am left to fix this mess that you made.
If we are counting, Hazel Brandt, be sure to count yourself as a negative factor. ’
She balls her fists, holding back tears, trying not to think about the accident, or Lilith and Huxley’s bodies, or the fact that if she’d just wired the catopthura properly—‘I’m trying my best.’
‘So am I,’ CHARL1E replies. ‘The Keepers are gone because of you. Humans more imaginative and intelligent than you could ever hope to be, and they have been erased because you failed to build a basic catopthura correctly. Hazel Brandt, you are the perfect example of a twenty-first-century human being: destructive, suspicious, and dangerously arrogant. If justice existed, you would never be allowed home for the chaos you have wrought here. What could you possibly add to your time period even half so stunning as what you have wiped from this one?’
‘Why don’t you just go back and change it, then? Erase me instead of your precious Keepers?’
CHARL1E’s voice leans into its lowest bass tones, blasting at volumes she didn’t know he had and making the floor shiver. ‘Because I can’t!’
Hazel feels winded.
Shiny and Teaspoon zoom forward, grabbing her dungarees again. Locking eyes with Shiny, it finally occurs to Hazel that they might not just be trying to take her outside for their own ends. ‘Fine,’ she tells CHARL1E. ‘You want rid of me, fine.’
She turns on her heel, Shiny and Teaspoon leading her to the airlock, unable to speak, but understanding all.
‘Hazel Brandt, where are you going?’
She doesn’t respond, but starts jogging as she hits the corridor. Shiny and Teaspoon whir as they speed up with her, until all three are sprinting. Skidding to a halt in front of the airlock, Teaspoon grabs a biosuit as Hazel slaps the button that releases the internal door—but nothing happens.
The corridor lights flicker. ‘Hazel Brandt, your attempts to leave with the Tinys are wasted. There is nowhere for you to go.’
Shiny tears the airlock button apart and fiddles with the wires, shorting the circuit.
The door slides open, then sticks and judders, as Shiny and CHARL1E engage in an invisible electronic battle.
Teaspoon dashes into the airlock, biosuit bundled in its arms. Hazel steels her nerves and darts after the robot.
The door scrapes her chest, almost closing on her, but she squeezes through in a gasp of relief.
On the other side of the closed door, Hazel hears Shiny zoom off to another exit.
‘Hazel Brandt, I strongly advise that you do not follow the Tinys. Do not go outside. You must not go outside.’
Dropping the biosuit at Hazel’s feet, Teaspoon fiddles with the wiring behind the control panel, and there’s a hiss as air is released from a valve. A timer in the external door starts counting down: three minutes.
‘Teaspoon, what are you doing? I haven’t got my suit on yet!’
Teaspoon shrugs.
‘It’s not complicated, it’s air! I need it to stay alive!’
The Tiny shrugs again—and is it possible it’s more emphatic this time? No. She’s imagining it. The Tinys are robots, not ‘AI’ like CHARL1E. Then again, the Tinys are directly disobeying him, which gives them more agency than she’d anticipated.
There’s no time to dwell on it. The timer ticks away as she pulls on the yellow rubber suit, patched with seals from old air beds and a pond liner.
Her not-quite-healed body strains as she dons the air tanks and taps the oxygen meter.
They’re not full. She’ll have around twenty minutes once she’s outside.
‘I hope you know where we’re going.’
Teaspoon only shrugs.
‘That’s really getting old.’
The Tiny helps her put on the heavy glass headpiece and twist it into a locked position.
‘Hazel Brandt, desist!’ CHARL1E’s voice is a peal of different tones, shrill sopranos and fuming tenors, breaking their synchronicity like footsteps cracking ice. ‘You must not go outside!’
‘Screw you, CHARL1E.’ The Tinys will look after her. They will.
The timer concludes and the external door opens. Hot air gusts over the suit, like plunging rubber-gloved hands into a fresh bowl of washing up. Hazel leaps outside.
Her fishbowl headpiece distorts the world beyond the Habitation Dome, funnelling her focus to what’s in front of her: the Arch Dome’s scorched concrete, and the explosion’s crater.
Count yourself as a negative factor. Above, sepia clouds scud over each other but never expose the sky.
Grey waves crash on a rubble shoreline some distance away, beyond a forest of mirrors sticking out of the ground.
‘Hazel Brandt—’ She flicks her comms off using the biosuit’s wrist pad and CHARL1E falls silent, though he might still be monitoring her.
She scrambles over a fractured Tesla coil, heading towards the mirrors to examine them, but Teaspoon grabs her and taps her oxygen monitor. Nineteen minutes. ‘Right you are. After you.’ She doesn’t even know if Teaspoon can hear her through the headpiece, but it takes the lead regardless.
The edge of the blasted dome is a three-foot drop, which Hazel has to lift Teaspoon over—not easy when it weighs almost as much as the air tanks.
Finally on the ground, it zooms off without a nod of thanks, leading her down a narrow dirt track between wind turbines, and a dome even larger than CHARL1E’s Workshop, which must once have connected to the destroyed Arch Dome.
‘What is this place?’ she asks Teaspoon. Another shrug. ‘Stands to reason. Nothing’s simple around here.’
Unlike the other domes, which are made from scrap, this one is composed of regular iron sheets bolted together, patterned by years of acid rain and rust. She checks her oxygen meter. Thirteen minutes.
Waddling in the biosuit, she circles the new dome with Teaspoon.
They pass a grimy window and, unable to help herself, Hazel rubs her fist over the inch-thick glass to make a peephole.
Between the glare on the window and the light refracting through her headpiece, she can’t make out much inside.
There are tables of old electronic bits and pieces: fat 1980s computer monitors like she had as a kid, next to the slicker kind of flatscreens she created DataTrill on.
Hazel deflates. It’s just another workshop. Except—
She stumbles away from the window with a gasp.
There’s a body in there, lying under a stained sheet.
It’s definitely human; the sheet can’t hide the curves of limbs or the gentle crests of the chin, forehead, and nose.
It can’t be Lilith or Huxley—they’re buried, CHARL1E told her that much.
This is someone else. A dead body, with the sheet pulled over its head like in a morgue.
Hazel’s blood sings as the memory of pulling back stiff hospital sheets in an ice-cold room takes over.
‘Apologies, Miss Brandt, but could you confirm, are these your parents?’
Hazel hesitated, trying to see past the purple-edged, clot-black wounds on their faces. What Hex code would those half-formed bruises on their necks be? The bluish white of the frost on their lashes? What a screwed-up thing to think. She rubbed her eyes, steadying herself.
‘It’s OK, take your time. Just breathe,’ said the nurse with the clipboard, but she checked her fob watch.
Hazel inhaled the damp old scent of the morgue, like wet autumn leaves trampled into the pavement.
Not as bad as she’d expected—the smell of decay must have frozen before it could bloom.
She looked at the corpses, trying to find her own features in the two faces.
There were her mouth and cheekbones on Mum, her too-large eyes and shock of red hair on Dad.
‘Yes. It’s them.’
The nurse thanked her and made a note on her clipboard.
In the silence, Hazel realised that the autumn-leaf scent was coming from her parents.
No more Chanel for Mum or Penhaligon’s for Dad.
Not that they could care about it anymore.
They didn’t have olfactory nerves, couldn’t process, couldn’t judge—couldn’t even love Hazel anymore. Could they?
The compost smell stuck in Hazel’s gullet, and she forgot how to breathe.
Inhale and exhale collapsed into a vacuum of panic and her breathing came in short quick gasps.
The nurse snapped into action, bundling Hazel in a cocoon of platitudes and guiding her from the room.
It was no use. Hazel’s parents had been reprogrammed in her mind, the rigor mortis spreading from their bodies into her memory, freezing them in place.
Her primary response to them had flipped in seconds: She would never again think of ‘my parents.’ Only ‘my dead parents.’
Even here, in the amnesiac future, Hazel’s first memory is not of their life, but their death. Tears tickle her cheeks but she can’t wipe them away through her helmet and they itch as they evaporate.
Her oxygen gauge bleeps. Ten minutes. Sentimental idiot, she’s wasting time. She forces herself to double-check what she saw. The body in the steel dome is still there, contours clear under the sheet. Her meter slips to nine minutes.
She turns back to Teaspoon, who’s beckoning frantically up ahead.
Odd. She doesn’t remember teaching it to beckon.
It points across the rubble island towards a great tree, a giant sequoia towering above the buildings.
The only other living thing on Station C.
Hazel’s heart swells with wonder, then sinks just as fast.
‘It’s a tree, what help will that be? I need to get inside, Teaspoon; I need oxygen.’
The Tiny shakes its head and beckons harder, tail whipping.
‘There’s nothing for me that way. Come on, you’re meant to be helping me.’
Teaspoon stamps a wheel. She definitely didn’t teach it that.
She checks her meter, considering the safety of following or not following the Tiny.
But it’s a Tiny. It’s not going to hurt her.
They seem only able to do good—within the context of what they think is good for her.
Whatever Teaspoon’s planned, it won’t be harmful, even if she doesn’t like it. ‘Fine.’
They trundle across broken tarmac spattered with shards of brick and paving slab.
Hazel jogs to keep up, sweating into the biosuit and painfully aware of her limited air.
‘This tree had better be special.’ Speeding up, Teaspoon grabs Hazel’s hand, and she fights not to recoil from the sharp fingers tugging her along.
Up close, the tree is raised on a small hillock, only a few metres from the shoreline. At the hillock’s edge are large burrows, from which a few Tinys emerge, their tails twisting in the wind. The Tinys gather and watch as Teaspoon drags Hazel up the incline to the trunk.
‘Teaspoon, I’m not sure…’ But she trails off.
Wire offcuts, shoelaces, and old bike bungees have been tied around the colossal trunk.
Someone has—or somethings have—hung votives from the ropes: framed snapshots of Lilith and Huxley, alongside sun-bleached photos of other Keepers huddled around the Arch when it was whole, a mirror the height of a house.
Other votives seem less meaningful, until Hazel realises they must be the Keepers’ artifacts: a hand mirror; a red ribbon; two gold rings. A breeze sets the objects tinkling.
‘It’s like a shrine.’ Hazel looks at Teaspoon, who’s still holding her hand but gazing at the tree, seemingly entranced. Seemingly moved? No, don’t be stupid.
It trundles forward, placing its free hand, fingers splayed, against the bark.
It looks up expectantly at Hazel, who copies.
Even through her suit, she can tell there’s something wrong with the bark.
Images of trees from the past flash through her mind, but this is smoother and sleeker.
Because it isn’t wood. It’s plastic. She snatches her hand back, gazing at Teaspoon, remembering it entwining tails with Robin, the beckoning, the foot-stamping, and now this.
A jigsaw starts clicking together, and even though it’s not complete yet, Hazel finally has an idea of just how many pieces she’s missing.
Her meter bleeps a five-minute warning. She’d better be trusting the right robots.
She crouches down, holding Teaspoon’s hand in both her own. ‘Alright, I’m listening. What do you want?’
Teaspoon pulls her down the hillock so fast it makes her pant and stagger—or is that her oxygen running out? It whisks them into one of the large burrows in the tree’s roots. Teaspoon lets go of her hand and retracts its arms and legs until it can fit. A few feet in, it turns, and looks at Hazel.
Her head’s spinning and it’s getting hard to focus. Bleeps indicate she’s reached the one-minute mark. She takes three shallow breaths just to get out the words: ‘Follow—you?’
Teaspoon nods.
She frowns at the burrow. It does not look like it contains a breathable atmosphere. She fills her lungs on the third try. ‘Ox-y-gen.’
This time, Teaspoon points down the burrow.
Hazel’s vision swims. She’s going to have to trust it. She falls to her hands and knees, crawling and fumbling down the increasingly dark tunnel. Teaspoon opens a series of sliding glass doors, which slip shut behind them. Around the Tiny’s bulky silhouette, warm light appears ahead.
The burrow gives on to a wide, roughly circular room, probably three times as long as Hazel is tall. Her vision mists, and Teaspoon fiddles with the helmet. She shakes her head—‘At-mos-phere’—but it persists, and the helmet comes off with a whoosh.
She curls up on the floor, eyes screwed shut, expecting toxic air to attack her lungs. Her heart beats—one, two, three times. She’s still here, still breathing. Breathing more easily, in fact. Her head clears. The glass doors must have been an airlock system. She opens her eyes and looks up.
The ceiling’s so high it’s lost in darkness. Oil lamps on a low table send flickering shadows across the packed-earth floor and up the honeycombed walls. Wires hang from some of the hexagonal cells, while glinting Tiny lenses peep from others.
Finding her voice again, Hazel puts a hand on Teaspoon’s shoulder. ‘Teaspoon, where are we?’
It shrugs, lenses on one side, wipers angled up in the middle, like it’s enjoying itself.
She stands, as Tinys flood in from the burrows and the ground-level hexagonal cells, surrounding her.
Shiny and Robin slink from the crowd, joining tails briefly with Teaspoon in greeting.
Robin’s hand has been removed entirely, the parts placed in a clear plastic bag hanging from one of its antennae.
Hazel looks away guiltily, gazing up again, into the dark.
‘We’re inside the tree. Aren’t we?’