Chapter 28 #2
I stood there, swaying, watching the city outside as it bustled and moved, as millions of people lived their lives entirely oblivious to me.
Then I set the tablet on the side table, feeling numb and empty.
I fiddled with the overly complex holographic clock embedded in the table’s surface until I figured out how to set the alarm for the morning.
I stripped to my underwear, crawled under the enormous duvet, and fell back into the most comfortable mattress I’d ever experienced.
Soft but not too soft, firming up to support my body as I pressed into it.
It was such a contrast from only twenty-four hours earlier. I’d been alone, in agony, on a grimy stone floor, awaiting my next round of torture. Now I was alone again, but in a bed of sumptuous comfort, my wounds healed, my belly full. The dissonance was nearly overwhelming.
But I was too exhausted to think for long.
The alarm woke me at three thirty in the morning. It felt like I hadn’t slept at all.
I showered, then tried to figure out the survival suit.
It wasn’t complicated, but I couldn’t sort out the touchpad computer on the left forearm, nor the mask, so I left the suit off and sat near the window in my toga.
I watched the expansive, still-glittering city and waited, the suit bundled in my hands.
The door chimed at exactly four thirty. Anjari stood in the doorway when I opened it.
“Good morning,” she said. She held up one of the two bags she carried. Rich scents drifted out from the top. “Hungry?”
“Yes. Come in.”
We ate at the little table in front of the window.
I wasn’t entirely sure what I was eating—eggs, real or artificial; cheeses; some warmed pastries, possibly fresh out of the oven.
Anjari, between bites, showed me how to use the survival suit’s touchpad.
She instructed the suit’s computer to display in “Norte” so I could understand.
“Does it speak?” I asked.
Anjari tilted her head. “Wait, please. There’s one more piece. It is supposed to arrive shortly.”
“One more piece?”
“Please, Scott Treder. It will be the last element.”
“Okay.” I didn’t have any reason not to trust her. She’d shown me nothing but kindness.
After breakfast, Anjari gave me the other bag she’d brought.
It held cargo-style fatigues and a gray sweatshirt to wear over the survival suit, both based on designs her historical records suggested appropriate for my time.
I went to the bathroom and slid into the skintight survival suit.
The material was soft and slick like a wet suit.
I then pulled on the cargo pants and sweatshirt.
I had to ask Anjari to help me with the survival suit’s helmet.
It was more of a mask, a part of the suit’s hood that wrapped around to cover my head.
When I looked in the bathroom mirror, I found I could see out perfectly well, but my face was obscured.
I looked like a ghost, or the outline of a man with no facial features.
Anjari tapped a few commands on the suit touchpad and the mask went translucent from the outside as well, making it look as if I was wearing a hood.
She showed me how to pull up the mask to expose my mouth when I needed to eat or drink. She told me the suit could protect me from poisons, gas, poor oxygen levels, and radiation, and could allow me to survive deep underwater or even in a total vacuum for extended periods of time.
We went back into the living room and watched the city as it woke and prepared for sunrise.
Anjari was quieter than I had come to expect, but she kept shifting back and forth.
Excited. For the time jump, I supposed. She’d already seen me fall out of the air.
Maybe she was excited at the prospect of seeing me vanish before her eyes.
“I wish I could stay,” I said. I stared out across the expansive city. Watched the streams of aircars, the countless lights. “This … this seems like a good time. A good place to stay.”
I felt her eyes on me. “Scott Treder. You have a greater destiny ahead.”
“I doubt that.”
“At the very least, it is a most tremendous adventure.”
“It’s an adventure,” I said, my voice cracking.
“And one that, for some reason, you must experience.”
I thought back to what Lyle told me: to live, to wake up. “Anjari, I know you said it already, but I just want to make sure … may I take the tablet with me? If it’s anything like my old phone, it should come with me. I … I didn’t read the Word. I meant to, but last night, I … I didn’t.”
“Of course. Of course, yes. I meant for you to take it with you.” Anjari, spotting the tablet on the table, walked over and picked it up. “It is fully charged. Please—it should fit in the pockets you have in the pants.”
“Thank you.” I took the tablet and managed to cram it into one of the deep cargo pockets on my right leg.
“You are welcome, Scott Treder. I—” There was a chime from the door, and Anjari’s eyes widened. “Stay. Wait. This is it.”
I blinked and waited. She was back in moments. In her hands was a small package, wrapped in silver gift wrap, complete with a bow on top. She held the package out, smiling. “I am so glad it was finished in time. Please. Open.”
I took the small package and set it on the table.
I glanced up at her and she nodded. I untied the bow and pulled off the silvery paper.
The package within was lacquered wood that gleamed in the morning light.
A container. It split open through the center.
Inside, cradled in foam, was what looked like a fancy curved earpiece, a little bit like a wireless Bluetooth earbud from my time.
Next to it was a flat, square disk of silver material.
It glinted multicolored in the room’s overhead light, like the back side of a CD.
It took me a moment to realize the disk was the object Miri had given me. The holocrystal from Lyle.
“You were able to get it working?”
“Researchers at the university worked through the night. They repaired the damaged sectors and printed a bespoke quantum-mechanical interface for the holocrystal. They thought they would have to write custom code to discover the contents, but the holocrystal self-booted when it received power.” She pointed at the earpiece.
“It is all there. We transferred everything, per the instructions that appeared during the self-boot. The holocrystal itself is blank now, but we thought you might want it. He is now in the much more modern quantum-fold lattice array built into the earpiece. Upgraded, far beyond the capacity of the holocrystal.”
“He?”
“Put on the earpiece, Scott Treder.”
It fit over my left ear, sliding into place as though custom-built for me. Likely it was. The bulk of it—which wasn’t much—sat behind my ear, against my skull.
It turned on.
“Dad.”
My breath caught in my throat. The hotel room swam around me, the city lights through the window slanting and spiraling. “Lyle?” The word came out a halting, choked gasp.
“I’m here, Dad,” the voice in my ear said. It was Lyle’s voice, his voice as I remembered it from when he was in his early fifties, up on the mountain in his little cabin, showing me how to blow apart firewood.
“How?” I pressed the earpiece against my skull with my left hand. Behind me, visible in the reflection in the window, Anjari stood with her hands clasped before her.
“My final idea, Dad,” Lyle’s voice said.
“I constructed this from what I learned the last time with the Second Device, when it seemed like we’d stopped your transits.
Not quite all for naught after all. I learned how to make a copy of my quantum imprint, that connection to human consciousness, and inject it into the quantum substrate of the holocrystal. ”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“I leveraged what I learned from your jump to copy myself from carbon-based nerve endings into quantum crystalline pathways.”
“Are you—” I swallowed. The city beyond the wall-sized window blurred and refracted through my tears. “Are you real?”
“That’s a harder question to answer than you might believe.”
“But are you … you?”
“My internal time indicates we have only tens of minutes until your next transit,” Lyle’s voice said. “But if this will suffice for now, I believe myself to be me.”
“Scott Treder,” Anjari said. Her voice was gentle but insistent. “I apologize. But time is short. I have an idea for where you may want to take your next jump. A place that may remain as static and safe as possible for the next seven hundred years.”
I didn’t want to leave, to jump again. I wanted to stay and figure out this new twist, this voice in my head, the voice of my dead son.
But I couldn’t.
I took a breath. “Where?”
“My favorite spot.”