“They’re going to know what we’re planning,” said DesUas, gesturing at the scribbles she’d made on the comfort room wall. A box of analogue styli in all different colours sat on a low caffeinated beverage table in the centre of the room. Alvedo snoozed in a comfortable chair in the corner, tucked under a fuzzy blanket- after staying up for eight straight hours, his now irate melatonin-equivalent overtook him and knocked him out cold. The rest of them watched in rapt attention as the Aredbyne charted out her plan.
Aurelie had never been to DesUas’ accomodation, and looking around as she walked in she was struck by how… lived-in it seemed. There were photos on the wall of DesUas with friends and kin, scenescapes including the SC complex as viewed externally, and two certificates confirming the Aredbyne’s higher education. The furniture was comfortable and matching, with accent pieces including intricate glassware dotted around, but there were also several shirts hung from the back of a chair, a pair of shoes tucked under the caffeinated beverage table, and various everyday items scattered around. When they’d walked in, DesUas had hastily kicked something out of sight into a closet.
It was a far cry from Aurelie’s spartan living space. The only thing they likely had in common was the empty kitchen, though Aurelie suspected that DesUas’ would be filled with flavoured waters.
“As soon as Cora, Alvedo and I disappear, they’ll be suspicious. If they choose to review the video footage of the past day, they’ll see that Cora, [Micky] and [Sam] spent a good chunk of the last 50 or so hours in our office, which will draw attention to them as well as to Aurelie. Aurelie, you’re already in trouble, so you’ll be under extra scrutiny- there’s a good chance they’ll put you under quarantine and then transfer you straight to the shuttle. Obviously we want to avoid that. Unfortunately, H13 isn’t leaving until four standard time units after we escape, so it’s not like we’ll just be running around unsupervised.”
“I guess I’ll need to go into hiding?” said Aurelie, reaching for her thermos of caffeinated beverage.
“Yes, ideally at a location with ample room, gas and temperature ratios suitable for humans, and which they won’t think or know to check. You won’t be able to go back to the Bureau, as it’ll be too high risk, even after H13 leaves. Instead, you’re going to steal a Space-Time Machine.” The Aredbyne paused as Aurelie choked on her drink. Micky grinned.
“You want me to pre-program the machine to send her straight to Hominus G, right?”
“Yes, so she can step in and go as soon as the new window starts, and then as the window ends she can head straight over to join us.”
“Back track, I’m going to be doing what?”
“No, I can only pre-program one destination at a time- it’s a safety thing I believe, and to stop people stream jumping. I can get her to Hominus G, but she’s in charge of the next step.”
“How am I even meant to transport it, the smallest ones I can fit in must be 150kg at lightest!”
“There’s also the problem of the code,” Micky continued, ignoring Aurelie’s indignant splutters. “I don’t have the authority to give code clearance, and that script is behind H13’s own firewall- no way I’m breaking through that without rousing suspicion.” DesUas nodded.
“I thought that might be the case. That’s why Alvedo, Cora and I are going to get ourselves on camera climbing into the Space-Time Machine, and then Aurelie is going to use [Bob]’s code.”
“What? Why his?” asked Cora as Micky cackled.
“Because they know Aurelie and Alvedo are friends and so they’ll probably deactivate Alvedo’s once Aurelie goes missing. I considered using yours since the two of you aren’t friends, but there was the risk of them disactivating yours simply because you’ve committed a crime. Plus, I took a look through that cellulose ledger you stole and [Bob]’s code is written in it.” Cora shifted uncomfortably.
“We’re friends,” she mumbled, half under her breath. The rest of the room chose to ignore that statement.
“Once we’re in the space time machine, [Micky] can release a bug jamming the security footage for… up to 40 minutes, right?” The Chitinous Farer nodded. “That’ll give Aurelie enough time to get from the office, where she’ll be pretending to work, grab the Space-Time Machine and get out.”
“Hey!” Finally, they turned to Aurelie. “How are you expecting me to move this thing? I’m 60kg before I pee in the morning, Humans aren’t that strong. Is there a teleportation system that I’m not aware of?” DesUas stretched her arms out and grinned in a ta-da motion.
“That’s the fun part. Cora’s going to turn off the gravity.”
---
It was t-minus 35 minutes to when their plan was due to start, and Aurelie was pretending to work. Between the two of them, Cora and Micky had managed to get through four firewalls, several million lines of code and six litres of caffeinated beverage to implement the necessary scripts. The office around her was empty, and she was distracting herself by watching a handsome Human man masquerade as a time travelling alien. She wondered why the Bureau’s Space-Time Machines couldn’t be larger on the inside.
Alvedo and DesUas had left a few hours before to get their items together. For now, they were only bringing what necessities they needed until Aurelie arrived, as they didn’t want to rouse suspicion by carrying overlarge bags. The rest of their items were being stored in a storage room in the lower gravity top kilometre of the SC. The lock for the storage room had been non-functional for years, but the items t stored- emergency survival items for if anything ever happened to the electricity supply of the SC- were never used, so nobody had noticed to change it.
“How do you know about this place?” asked Cora as DesUas described it. The Aredbyne ducked her head, and Aurelie and Alvedo sniggered.
“She’s woken up in a food coma there more than once, no idea how she got there,” Aurelie explained. “She may have been the one to break the lock.”
Aurelie’s stuff was not being moved up there because it turned out that all the items Aurelie wanted to bring could fit into one unremarkably sized bag. At her co-worker’s expressions, she’d reddened.
“It’s changing after this,” she told them, more a promise to herself than anything else.
As the absurd plot of the fake Time Lord and his friends played out, Aurelie wondered whereabouts the others would be at this point. They’d planned to return from the storage unit with at least half an hour to spare, so likely somewhere in the building, but they’d also agreed it would be too risky for Aurelie to join them. Instead she was stuck here waiting.
At T-minus ten minutes, her watch beeped. She got up to grab a caffeinated beverage from the machine. Micky ‘happened’ to be there, and he nodded when he saw her.
The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.
“How’s it, Aurelie?”
“Yeah, can’t complain; how about you?”
“Smooth sailing on my end.”
Everything was in place, and the plan was good to go. Rather than return to her office, she made her way down one hallway, then another, into the Human’s toilet cubicle. Placing her drink on the side, she took a deep breath; nerves got the better of her, and she chugged it all in one go.
She felt as though she was living the dichotomy paradox, each moment requiring infinite other moments to progress. She checked her timepiece repeatedly, the hands barely seeming to move at all. Breathe in; breathe out; was she really breathing at all?
Her anxiety mounted.
Every moment she thought she heard a voice, calling for her, footsteps coming to break down the door and drag her out, yells of her friends being caught. She hunched in on herself, and tuned her ears for the slightest noise.
When the siren came she fell off the closed toilet she was perched on.
That must have been Cora.
She remained in the restroom, counting seconds, as the siren continued to wail and the voices of her colleagues passed by. 78, 79, 80, …
“What in the bloody hell is going on?”
“-in all my time, never heard of-“
123, 124, 125, …
“-this had better not eat into my meal hour-“
“-do you think they’d notice if we went for cocktails while they sort this out?”
178, 179, 180!
The voices outside had subsided. Pushing herself up, Aurelie had to hold in a shriek as she shot nearly two metres in the air. Now that she wasn’t counting seconds, her attention turned to the pull of gravity weakening, moment on moment. She slowly drifted down to the ground and then yanked open the door of the Human restroom, quickly glancing to make sure there was no one in the hallway. Grabbing her pack, it took only a moment of rummaging to find the desired item.
Alvedo was a genius.
She pulled out the battery powered hair-and-fur dryer (perfect for all your soft keratin needs) and switched it on as she pulled herself through the doorway, twisting the dial up to ‘Long dense velli’ and taking aim. If it wasn’t fully zero-G at this point, then it was close enough to make locomotion all but impossible.
Conventional locomotion, at least.
The hair-and-fur dryer roared to life, and Aurelie laughed in delight as she whizzed down the hall, propelled by the powerful flow of hot air. Right angled corners were tricky, and she frequently bumped into walls, but soon she was exactly where she needed to be- the room with the space time machines. There was a sticky note attached to one, with a rudimentary 😊 drawn on it. Even with the basic drawing, Aurelie recognised Alvedo’s scrawl. That was her ride, pre-programmed and ready to go.
Pulling the thin cord out her bag (her poor palms aching at the sight of it), she quickly looped it around the various necessary hooks, jerry rigging a sort of harness that would attach it to her back. Rotating it so that the smallest side with the least air resistance was in the direction of her desired direction of travel, she took off again. Through corridor after corridor, towards the air vent that would take her to her desired location.
It was so close to going perfectly.
Aurelie rounded the corridor and would have skidded to a halt if she had access to any surfaces with which to generate friction. Instead, both she and the Space-Time Machine collided with none other than her least favourite co-worker, who appeared to be stuck in the middle of the corridor, tumbling in various directions with nothing to anchor himself.
“Aurelie Jane! What in the- what is going on here?!”
“Hey Bob. Yeah, you’re going to have to pretend you didn’t see this.” He sputtered, enraged, gesturing wildly between her, the Space-Time Machine and himself- the latter likely to indicate the lack of gravity.
“Is this your doing? Are you the reason I’m stuck like this?”
“Well, it was mainly Alvedo and Cora, but I like to think of it as a team effort. Collaboration, if you will. Like those trust exercises, except we don’t trust anyone else.”
“You will put a stop to it at once!”
“No can do, Bob-O. I have a deadline to meet, so if you’d… just…move.” He blocked her each time she tried to push past her, and the anxiety returned in a rush. “Seriously, Bob, I need to- why can’t you- just get out the way-“
“Don’t call me Bob, that’s not my name.” One hand closed around her arm, while the other was grappling with her for control over the hair-and-fur dryer.
“I don’t care you waste of oxygen, move now or-“
“Or what?”
18 years spent mostly friendless in a Displacement Home, 18 months of basic training, and an acute awareness that she was running out of time- in so very many ways- hit Aurelie in the only way the sympathetic nervous system knows how: a giant dump of adrenaline and norepinephrine straight into her blood stream.
She drew back her arm, and punched him straight in the face.
His grip loosened and she quickly pried herself free. His eyelids fluttered, but besides that he seemed completely unresponsive: she’d knocked him out cold. Aurelie took comfort in the fact that it wasn’t too hard to knock out a Chitinous Farer, and that with a day or two’s bedrest he would be fine again. Pushing his limp, floating figure behind her, she continued on.
For the first time ever Aurelie was grateful for the compact size of the Space-Time Machines. Kicking open the air vent, she was able to wrestle it in with marginal cursing and bruises on only one shin. Once in, it floated behind her easily, occasionally knocking the sides with a dong. The air-vents had handles along one side, likely to help any maintenance individuals drag themselves along the slippery surface, and again Aurelie was grateful as it meant she could rapidly pull herself along.
She felt less grateful as she removed the other end of the air vent and stared at the 90m drop below her. The fastest way to get from the office to the section that led up to the open storage room was to cut across an open, ‘outside’ area and enter through a window in the opposite wall. It was about 200m to the other building. It was very high up.
Aurelie’s stomach churned. Her sympathetic nervous system decided it wasn’t yet saturated, and dumped another round of fight or flight hormones into her blood stream. Her time piece told her that she still had 18 minutes before the gravity and the security cameras came back on.
But what if Micky and Cora weren’t as good as they thought?
Or the people tasked with resolving the problem were better than expected?
(Were those questions equivalent but phrased differently?)
Shaking her head, Aurelie brought her attention back to the matter at hand. She curled up, hands flat against the outside wall, feet braced against the handle, and did what she’d been taught to do in basic: count down from five quickly, and then act on one.
Five she began, then had to stop.
Five she tried, and her muscles seized up. She blinked back tears. There was nothing optional about this- it was too late, she’d committed.
Five she tried, and then she looked down and froze. A glance at her timepiece showed the seconds leeching away.
Five four three two ONE!
She pushed with all her strength and shot out the vent, the Space-Time Machine trailing behind her. At this point everyone should be in the emergency shelters, but she didn’t want to risk turning on the hair-and-fur dryer just in case. Sailing through the air, she was gripped by an icy, calming fear.
If anything were to happen now, she would die. It was completely out of her control.
The 200m to the next wall seemed to take an agonisingly long time, but according to her timepiece it was a little over 17 seconds. It was easy to open the window from the outside, as it had no locks (the architects likely not suspecting anyone would ever try). She slid it up and slipped in, manoeuvring the Space-Time Machine behind her. From there, it was two doorways to the flight of stairs, and then she simply pointed the hair-and-fur drier directly downwards to shoot herself up through the middle. Reaching the correct floor, she went through one door, another, and a third, each one leading to an area that was progressively more dust coated. Finally, she came to door 3A618D. The lock was clearly broken, one side entirely coated in rust.
Made it, with four minutes to spare.
Opening the door, Aurelie had to laugh. There was a large, DesUas shaped imprint in the dust, along with various footprints. They were lucky there weren’t security cameras in this building, but she wished the event could have been caught on tape. She shut the door behind her, though there was no real need, and pushed herself to the centre of the room.
The time piece chimed: the 45 minutes were up.
Above her, she could hear the gears and machinations rumbling as the SC began rotating again. A few minutes later, the tug of gravity slowly pulled both her and the Space-Time Machine back to the ground. Aurelie slipped out of the harness and took a few experimental steps: if the springiness in her step wasn’t a clear indicator enough that the gravity was weaker in this room then the fact that she immediately lost her balance sealed the deal.
Aurelie stretched and yawned and pulled out her screen, wireless and Bluetooth disabled. Now, it was time to wait.