Chapter 21 Hazel #2
She takes his hands in hers, trying to loosen his fingers, thinking of the busy, populous world she used to collide with from the moment she opened her eyes to the second she slept.
All those other humans, fauna, flora, funga.
Plane tree seeds skidding at her feet; a butterfly woken by central heating; a fly at the windowpane; the neighbours’ cat twining around her legs; cars grumbling; planes roaring; hard drives whirring; kids squealing; her sister laughing and crying and gossiping and whispering and shouting and—
Hazel puts her arms around CHARL1E. He doesn’t hug her back, but leans into her with his hands clutched to his chest until his breathing calms.
Too tired to don the biosuit, Hazel sleeps on a row of chairs under a heat blanket.
She’s woken by CHARL1E stalking in the darkness, using his night vision to explore the leftover experiments.
In the morning, he doesn’t want to power down again, and Hazel has to coax him to lie on the gurney, promising on her life, and her sister’s life, and Robin’s life that she will wake him.
Once alone, she faces the code, but just like yesterday, it’s reticent to reveal its meanings.
Lilith’s notes are equally hard work, jumbled with jargon that leaves the Not Here as stumped as Hazel—Temporal Area Network, quantum-binary translator, trans-dimensional signal gateway …
At this point, Hazel’s got a pretty good picture of CHARL1E’s network structure and the problem with the chronodes, she just can’t figure out the details that would fix it.
The stuff on Station C was simple to download into a body because there were existing hubs for all the old hardware that continued communicating wirelessly with the body.
One of the reasons Hazel must always wake CHARL1E is that when he’s powered down, the systems run as he left them, but if any fail—atmosphere, power, lighting—only he can fix it.
The chronodes are different. Scattered down the timeline, they exist beyond Station C, in a pocket of space-time that from Lilith’s descriptions must be the dreamscape.
How they got there isn’t clear, but they were linked to CHARL1E on a separate system to the rest of Station C—and that link was severed when he transferred to his body.
He might not be able to access the dreamscape directly, but he has always had an indirect link through the chronodes.
Yesterday, Hazel investigated his now-unilluminated icosahedron, but found nothing out of the ordinary, so she figured corrupt code must be causing the issue.
Yet she still can’t find the bug anywhere, in her code or Lilith’s notes.
Lilith writes about CHARL1E like a parent talking about their child: her endless, unquestioning love and delight at each of his movements mixed with fears of disappointment, irritation at his half-learned social abilities, and grief at her loss of self to him.
The light slants from one side of the room to the other as the day ages, and by evening Hazel has no choice but to wake CHARL1E, crash out on the chairs again, and pray that she sleeps too lightly to enter the dreamscape.
The passage of time is confusing at Station C, short term because Hazel hates marking it, and long term because the seasons are hidden.
The days might draw out or close in, but it’s hard to tell when everything inside is enclosed in the flat line of controlled atmosphere and everything outside is a perpetual sticky heat, bounded by rainless clouds and deadened sea.
So Hazel guesses about a week passes before her frustration snaps.
CHARL1E wakes, coughing and gripping the edge of the gurney until his green knuckles turn yellow.
‘How can you not know the answer to this?’ Hazel snaps.
‘Do you know how your heart beats?’ CHARL1E rubs his chest like he’s got technological acid reflux.
‘Roughly, yes!’
‘You are an inferior liar, Hazel, we have covered this topic before.’
‘But you must know something!’
CHARL1E shakes his head. ‘All I can relay is that I feel … grief. It is as if I have lost a limb: Sometimes I sense the phantom of it when I am asleep, then when I wake it is gone.’
Hazel pauses. ‘Do we need to think about the fact that you can dream now? Maybe that’s formed a direct connection between you and the dreamscape, and is screwing up your communication with the chronodes?’
‘Improbable. My dreams are not special in a way that lets me access the dreamscape. I have no twin, and nobody in the timeline has a body genetically similar to mine, so I cannot perform spooky action over great temporal distances.’
‘But you’re a post-quantum computer, you should be able to access those spaces without that.
’ Hazel paces, tightening her ponytail. ‘OK, so maybe the problem’s that you’re not accessing the dreamscape at all, neither indirectly through the chronodes, or directly through your own dreams. How did the Arch access it? ’
‘The Keepers did not deem it appropriate to give me that information.’ CHARL1E crosses his arms, brow furrowed. ‘However, I understand from Tree that her link to the Arch was part of the process.’
Hazel runs through what she knows about Tree: the strange malfunctions that occurred during her arrival, and the component at the middle of it all, spherical and glinting. ‘Did that have something to do with her elpis device?’
CHARL1E pauses, silently communing with Tree. ‘Affirmative.’
‘The same device that’s in the Catopic Aperture,’ Hazel says, thinking of the mirror orb in the past cradle. ‘And I bet the Arch had one too?’
‘Affirmative,’ CHARL1E says. ‘I was permitted that much information.’
‘Which means every bit of equipment that touches the timeline has an elpis device—except you.’
CHARL1E freezes, speaking in the same tone of voice as when she found the “Heretical Book” in his code. ‘Affirmative. I do not have an elpis device.’
‘At least you don’t anymore, because if Tree, the Arch, and the Catopic Aperture all need one, then you must too. Which makes this a hardware issue after all.’
‘No.’ CHARL1E shakes his head vehemently. ‘I would know.’
‘Would you? As you pointed out, I don’t know how my heart beats. What if it was hidden?’
‘This is Station C, there is no place that I cannot see, feel, control—’ CHARL1E’s shoulders slump. ‘The icosahedron.’
‘Right,’ Hazel says excitedly. ‘It’s a sealed unit: no way in, no way out. It’s the perfect place to hide an elpis device, somewhere no one could damage it.’
‘You conclude that the gap in my torso is for an elpis device?’ CHARL1E asks, staring at the floor.
‘It must be!’ Hazel says, fizzing with the adrenaline of a breakthrough. ‘But then, why didn’t Lilith put one in?’
CHARL1E crosses his arms. ‘The method for manufacturing them was … how would you describe it? Lighter-than-feather-pillow science. The Keepers lost the wisdom for it many years ago, and there are no unused elpis devices left on Station C.’
‘That’s why Lilith didn’t finish your body, isn’t it? She was putting off having to choose between your needs and the operation of the Arch. But then, how did the Aperture get one?’
Still avoiding eye contact, CHARL1E says, ‘Because Lilith was not only choosing between my body and the Arch.’ He nods to the deceased Tiny trapped in Huxley’s failed prism.
Steeling herself, Hazel examines the Tiny more closely, registering the hole bored in its chest, not an accidental part of the experiment’s failure, but an intentional extraction.
Hazel’s breath sticks in her throat, and she turns back to CHARL1E.
‘That’s how Huxley got the Aperture to work, by mutilating a Tiny? ’
CHARL1E nods.
Hazel looks at Robin, Teaspoon, and Shiny, who stare back with their deep round lenses. ‘That means every Tiny has an elpis device…’
‘Affirmative.’ CHARL1E finally meets her gaze. ‘It is what keeps them connected, to each other and to Tree. They were designed to communicate over great distances, and there is no greater distance than time. But Lilith was not like her brother. She would never harm a Tiny, even for my body.’
Hazel stares at him. ‘Would you?’
‘No,’ CHARL1E says without hesitation. ‘It would breach our truce. Besides, I have humanity.’
Looking at the mutilated Tiny again, Hazel wonders if CHARL1E might have evolved beyond humanity. She starts pacing. ‘There must be something we can use instead of an elpis device. We got the Aperture to work with the Eikos Muthos, maybe we could wire that into you.’
‘Negative. When using the Eikos Muthos, the Catopic Aperture operated at suboptimal functionality.’ CHARL1E sighs, indicating his software’s overclocking.
‘I infer that the Eikos Muthos has a limited energetic capacity. It worked because of its mirrored cover and the centuries of prayers it absorbed, but prayer is like a battery, it runs out if it is not answered. An elpis device is more like a solar panel, recharging in response to its surroundings.’
‘I see what you mean by lighter-than-feather-pillow science.’ Hazel scuffs the floor. ‘What you’re saying is, if we want you to see the timeline accurately, and long term, you need an elpis device.’
‘Affirmative.’
‘And you’re going to need the Catopic Aperture once I’m gone, because it’s the only way nongenetically identical beings can communicate through time.’
‘Affirmative.’
‘So the only place we can get an elpis device is from a Tiny?’
Unable to hold her gaze, CHARL1E nods.