Chapter Seventy-four
Souls in Transit- Part Three
The Travelers
He opened his eyes and they burned as if he was getting all the sunlight on his retina. But it wasn't sunlight. It was just artificially lit space.
It looked like some kind of office with libraries or cluttered study. It looked like everything had been in order until a few moments ago as there were things lying on the floor and some smoke and a book was spewing out what looked like dying flames.
Jack Pierson coughed and groaned.
His ears were ringing and his whole body ached. Slowly he stood up and tried to look around as his eyes adjusted. He was seeing double and in fact his eyes were stinging even more, but the brightness was almost gone.
What happened? He wondered as he got up from the floor and tried to locate the place. Then, he remembered.
Janus.
The time travel.
The accelerator.
He put a hand to his head. It hurt terribly. And he felt as if some of the hair he had worked so hard to grow was scorching. Irony, for even though he had been covered in bandages from treatments all the time he had tried to keep his hair in order, but hair was the least of his problems at the moment.
Had they succeeded? Had it been possible?
He touched his body. He was completely naked and his skin still gave off a mist as if he had just come out of a Turkish bath with a temperature above what any person should be able to withstand. In fact, his whole body felt hot.
It smelled like burning, and worse not only papers, more like burning flesh. His own flesh.
He looked at his hands and for the first time he noticed how part of his skin was burned. But what surprised him was to see how the skin and flesh had begun to regenerating and the burn was disappearing. It was true after all. The first reconstruction was the one that took the longest. He only hoped that the skin culture treatment that had been done on his face would not reveal his true identity.
He tried to remember the last thing he had seen.
For some reason he couldn't remember when he had fallen asleep. He remembered that he had spoken to the Director moments before, but nothing else after that. His memories were a little fuzzy, but he knew what he had to do. That had been pounded into his brain over so many years, thanks to Janus' therapy and memorization sessions.
Still it felt strange. He thought he was forgetting something important. He didn't know why, but he had never questioned Janus on anything. It wasn't trust, it was something else but he couldn't put it into words.
He looked around one more time, his eyes were slowly getting used to the place. It was in some kind of finely furnished library. Although at that moment some papers were fluttering and smoke was coming out of other loose sheets.
Everything was in a jumble.
This doesn't look like Japan, he thought.
According to Janus his destination was Japan. The home of the Yanagida family, which was the custodian of Satou Nobuyama's diaries and that strange stone that had caused all the commotion to begin with. But that room had a western style. Maybe Janus had made a mistake? No, it couldn't be possible.
He looked down at the floor from where he had stood up and then saw how the carpet and part of the floor had a black stain in a radial shape. It reminded him of how solid surfaces look after a small explosion. Was that due to time travel?
What a pity he had not been awake to see what had happened and how his body had gotten there. He had wondered if he had heard and felt the same sensations he had felt when he had traveled to the future.
Anyway, he would have time to think about his doubts. But at that moment he had a mission. A mission that would last for decades, but it was the reason for his existence.
Even if the world wouldn't know it, he, a pathetic chemist and a rocket and occult nut, now had a mission on his shoulders that he had never dreamed of.
The doors of the studio were open and shouts and voices could be heard speaking hurriedly from the other side. They were voices in Japanese.
He had better get things in order.
He walked out and the first thing he encountered were the confused faces of a couple and other men in suits looking like they were not very friendly.
He couldn't blame them. A stranger had just emerged naked from a studio that moments before had been empty and completely tidy.
Jack Pierson, still staggering and dizzy, walked over to an armchair and grabbed a cushion to cover his genitals.
He had better start explaining to Ishida Yanagida who he was.
On the isle of the studio, the nucleus fragment was glowing and its surface was rotating. Jack didn't see it at the time, though. It wouldn't be until a few moments later that he would re-enter the room as he was chased by Ishida Yanagida's guards and pick it up.
Although that was already past history.
Louis Armstrong's “What a Wonderful World” was playing in the background and it was the year 1959 of the Ancient Era.
***
May 1, 1977. 2AM. Ancient Era.
Somewhere in the Mojave Desert.
Carl Scott slammed on the brakes of the Company Peugeot and exited the vehicle in a hurry.
Just 20 minutes ago he had received the call from Jack that the unthinkable was happening.
The one they were waiting for seemed to have come early.
Based on Satou Nobuyama's notes, there would be a tokion emission in 1977 but, according to the odds, it was likely to occur later in the summer. Not in May, and certainly not in the middle of the night.
Carl Scott looked up at the desert night sky for a second and there were faint ghostly glows of green like swamp gas.
The only green that could be found in that place. The desert auroras were active that night. Maybe it was true that the sun had something to do with it after all.
He was not distracted for more than a second and began to run.
Those facilities were part of the experiment. It was an old facility and in fact dated back to World War II. The Department of Defense had given it to the RIA for research and to put the pieces that Carl and Jack had collected over the years. It was also where it would all end up, since it doubled as a laboratory.
With Gehirn's help they had built the missing part of the machine in the past months, as they had not been able to count on the help of that strange fey called Shin, since he had been missing since 1974.
But Gehirn's help had proven to be more than beneficial to both parties. He had sent technicians to build, based on Nobuyama's notes and illustrations, a device similar to the one in the notes. Gehirn had provided a couple of strange artifacts that performed similar functions to the sought-after table that Shin had hidden and hoped that it would be sufficient. Which would not be clear until the one they had been waiting for so many years arrived.
According to Jack the machine was necessary for the newcomer, because it was not like his case. Jack was something called homunculus temporis and because of that he had been able to withstand time travel without much damage other than some scrapes and burns that healed in a matter of days in 1959.
But the one sent from the future was human. A device had to be built to connect the past with the future.
The function of the machine was to act as a kind of decompression chamber for the time traveler to arrive safely.
But he didn't expect it to happen so quickly.
Jack looked into the distance. A hundred yards away someone was approaching at a run. It was Jack, wearing some horrible pajamas, that almost made him look as if he were an escaped prisoner from some floating Company jail.
For the past few months Jack had been residing with the scientists at the facility, although he had been more focused on occult studies than on the subject of the machine. Jack was obsessed with the pieces they had been collecting. And no wonder. Who had made them, why, and why were they scattered?
Even the analysis showed that they came from different eras. How was that possible? The others were not so much interested in that as in the use they could make of it. The royal family, on the other hand, wanted to keep everything related to it as secret as possible, so as not to attract the attention of the Parliament. Only a few academics had been called to investigate the enigma of the origin, but for the moment those questions remained an enigma. It would be a mystery for another time.
“Come on! Hurry up!” Jack stopped in his tracks and motioned Carl to hurry.
Carl Scott ran the remaining meters and the two friends began to head towards where the time machine was located, which was one of the farthest hangars of the complex, which at the same time functioned as the main laboratory.
“Is everything ready?! It's too soon, isn't it?” Scott asked.
“Yes, I know. But don't ask me. The scientists say a date mismatch was possible. That's why we've been on alert since March.”
“Shit!” mumbled Scott grumpily.
“You're ready, aren't you? You remember everything?”
“Yes, yes. Don't worry. Now just wai-!”
Carl Scott didn't get to finish the sentence. An explosion occurred and they were both thrown back by the detonation, and the shockwave that occurred less than eighty meters from where they stood.
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
The night in the desert was illuminated by a glow that blinded everyone for a few moments. The soldiers who were on guard at the farthest posts were also surprised and ran towards the place.
Jack, spitting sand and dust, got up from the ground and looked up in astonishment. Carl at his side also did the same.
“What the fuck happened?” shouted Carl, unable to take his eyes off the flames rising into the sky, as if they were greeting the lights of the auroras.
The following moments were of chaos and unbridled movement in the place. The fifteen soldiers who were on site were doing firefighting work to extinguish the flames in the laboratory hangar.
None of the twenty scientists working at the site had survived. At the time of the explosion, everyone was in the main laboratory and adjoining rooms, making sure everything was running smoothly. But there was an error in the cooling systems they had.
They had been off since early in the morning and when they noticed that the core was starting to show activity they had activated them, while moving the core to the decompression chamber for the traveler.
What occurred was an overload of the systems as they were turned on so early and due to the activity of the core the cooling systems had not been sufficient. The core had been activated inside the machine which acted only as a receiver. No one had been able to see it, but those particles called tokions had transported an enormous amount of gluon plasma from another time in the future. No one could have known that a mismatch had occurred in the future at the moment the traveler was arriving in the past.
According to emergency protocols, everyone donned anti-radiation protective gear, as this was one of the areas that had always been of concern to those working at the site. According to Nobuyama the radiation would disappear when the wormhole collapsed and would be absorbed. That was so, but no one had taken into account the event in the future.
Despite the precautions, the Geiger counters did not detect any harmful radiation, although the temperature in the place was still high enough. Much of the structure had melted and twisted in seconds when exposed to the plasma, before it disappeared as residual energy and then dispersed with the explosion.
Trying to find survivors, they reached the decompression chamber which was in a semi-destroyed state and with other parts almost unrecognizable. The machine with all its parts had been destroyed and the pieces were scattered or melted all over the place.
What they found inside the decompression chamber would haunt the dreams of those soldiers for years to come.
The core was almost intact even though everything else around it had not survived the temperatures.
And someone else.
The traveler was there. The one for whom they had been waiting and for whom they had been preparing everything had arrived. But it had gone horribly wrong.
The newcomer was writhing in pain and his body seemed to vibrate at different intensities.
Carl Scott, still terrified, called the ambulance helicopters to take them to the nearest hospital.
In a matter of minutes two helicopters picked them up and both were on their way to the nearest army hospital.
It had gone wrong. Terribly wrong. Or at least that was their point of view.
But the traveler from the future had arrived. That was the important thing and now they only hoped he survived.
The simulation for them was beginning.
Carl and Jack would have liked Hisui and Quincy to be there to help them, but that was impossible for the happy couple. They were not even in the United States Kingdom.
At that very moment, in a clinic in Japan, Hisui was giving birth to a baby girl with eyes as green as two emeralds and Quincy could not have been happier to become a father. They could not interrupt each other's happiness at that moment.
That little girl would be named Rei with the kanji that read as “little bell”. A half fey and half human.
A new life that was born in that chaos.
And who unknowingly would carry in the future the burden of saving the world.
Fates intertwined in a skein that time had been responsible for confusing the pieces through spatial and temporal dimensions.
As if hiding the pieces was the most important thing for survival.
***
Jim Stuart woke up. It was night and subtle glows could be seen in the sky starry indicating the presence of auroras.
Who am I?
Awaken? Why did he feel like he was in the middle of a nightmare? He wasn't sure how but he was looking snow fall.
Snowflakes? In a clear night?
No, that was too thick to be snowflakes. It was just snow. Snow being stirred up and flying through the air.
Sounds like ice cracking and several tons of earth and snow being moved could be heard. And Stuart felt vibrations in all directions.
What had happened?
Why couldn't he move, yet he could see and hear? He was on his back then. But if he was in the snow why didn't he feel cold?
He was wondering, when he saw a black shadow cross over him. Several hundred tons of snow moved and so did he. He was spinning out of control. He couldn't see his body but he had just realized something else. He was very light.
Stuart remembered. The synthetic body. The chamber. That living plasma and the black sphere.
Time travel.
Where am I? What's wrong with my body?
He couldn't move, but he could hear new sounds. His body was moving with tons of snow and dirt being thrown in all directions.
He became dizzy as he saw the world spinning in all directions and noticed the sky.
It was night and he could see mountains. Where am I?
He had just realized. He wasn't breathing. Nor did he have any sense of taste.
The spinning stopped and he stopped on the edge of a snowdrift high enough to see the situation.
He tried to move but his body did not respond. Then in his vision appeared those imperfections that indicated some malfunction of electronic parts. Electronics. He had the Neurowire. Was it still in the synthetic body?
[System cannot connect to the network.]
He tried several times but nothing. Then he did something else and waited in fear.
[Initiating body scan.]
The system scan took only a few seconds but it confused him.
A sphere only about two inches in diameter that must have once been shiny and polished was now scratched and part of it showed signs that it had almost melted.
There was no body.
Stuart recognized the sphere and it terrified him.
The main brain of a synthetic anthropoid body. Nothing of the body had survived, only that sphere which was the main core, where even the Neurowire and the individual's consciousness were housed.
Inside that sphere there was a quantum computing system in a liquid state, which was the one that received the data from the original body to copy the physical and neurocognitive structure, before entering the synthetic body. The reason it could see was because that sphere had an optical and auditory receptor, since the humanoid synthetic body copied the location of the auditory and visual structure.
They were not the main organs and in fact could be the reason why vision and sounds were strange, almost drowned out. They were support systems used to test the brains, prior to installation in a synthetic body. Even so, given what had happened, it was already a miracle that he had those two senses. Stuart dug through the few options in the synthetic body's menu and found the functions of that nucleus and took them to the maximum.
Indeed, he could see and hear and had an audio system on one side. He could talk.
Where am I?
He tried to locate himself and focused the optical receiver as best he could.
What he saw confused him even more. Snow-capped mountains, jagged rocks and in the distance the ocean. But that was not what surprised him the most. It was what was happening on the snow that was the reason he had been blown up.
The dog. Was that the little dog?
If it wasn't for the shape of the face Stuart wouldn't have recognized it. That dog had grown to such a size that it must have been over six meters tall and its shape was somewhat different. It looked much more like a large predator. Its mirrored fur reflected the stars in the night sky and the snow.
But the dog wasn't the only thing that was there.
If it had been in his real body Stuart probably would have felt his hair stand on end. He had seen them many times in videos, simulations and in museums. But that seemed too real.
A fractus. The dog was at that moment fighting a fractus.
Was it a fractus? Yes, it had to be. At least for its metallic or crystalline structure, but Stuart had never seen a fractus like that.
Its shape was quite hairy, not to mention its size, which must have been at least ten meters high and fifteen meters long.
It was composed of three main structures of metallic appearance, aligned horizontally, and whose body moved in and out continuously changing shape. It had no organic shape on its surface, which seemed to take on geometric patterns with extrusions. But its movement did appear to be organic. From the two structures on the sides appeared and disappeared limbs that allowed its movement, while from the structure in the middle appeared other appendages that it used to attack.
The organic movement was like a tesseract, something many fractus shared, but its form was unique.
Stuart didn't remember seeing it anywhere in the catalogs. It looked more like three giant bacteria but with a much more solid structure holding them together.
The dog and that fractus were locked in a fierce fight.
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The fight was the reason Stuart had been lifted into the air along with the snow and dirt.
It was a surreal sight. But more surreal was the thought that that small dog could stand up to that gigantic monster.
The fractus attacked with its central part, making those spear-like appendages come out and crash into the snow. While the dog evaded the attacks and tried to attack the other two structures with its teeth. The sound that accompanied the fight was a mixture of screeching metal and crashing glass. Stuart could see as if some kind of electricity was produced in the dog's skin every time he collided with his enemy.
On several occasions the fractus was successful in its attacks and seemed to have pierced the dog. But to Stuart's surprise he saw glass flying everywhere and instantly the broken and flying parts were reattached to the dog.
He had heard about something similar when the others rescued Agent Zi from the mirror box. That crystal skin must have had some regenerative ability. Something that had possibly changed the animal's biology thanks to the time it had been inside. They still didn't know enough about the mirror boxes or how they had been created in the past. Who knew what the real purpose had been. It was possible that it was much closer to magic, since even with all the science they had not been able to explain it.
In that at least the dog was lucky. If any of those spears thrown by the fractus had pierced someone else, it would most likely have impaled him like a brochette or simply disintegrated into elemental particles.
The middle structure was spinning vertically in a maddened sense, while it launched new attacks that the dog evaded with more typical alacrity of a wolf or a hunting dog than that nice puppy they had found.
The fight dragged on for what seemed to Stuart to be several minutes but might as well have been seconds. The fractus despite its size was incredibly quick to respond to attacks. Luckily for Stuart, the beasts had moved several dozen meters away from him and he was able to watch in amazement that completely unreal battle. What had happened to the tunnels and the accelerator?
Stuart looked up at the sky and thought. He had an idea.
It was a good idea that the nuclei of the synthetics copied the memories of the bodies to perfection.
He looked through his files and found that application for the skies. Even without the Neurowire he could know where he was if he entered the sky data and let the program run the star movement reading program. He had recognized the stars and he knew he was still in the northern hemisphere, but location was another matter. He let the program run for a few seconds.
The result made him shudder inside that sphere. According to the position of the stars at that hour he was in the Kuril Islands. But that was not the only thing that made him shiver. It was the date and, more importantly, the year.
January 1st. 2098.
It made sense.
There was no fractus in 125, except for simulations.
Time travel.
Stuart didn't want to accept it.
Had he been sent back in time? Wasn't it possible that it was all an illusion of his mind and that he was still in that chamber? Dying slowly, perhaps. Could it be possible that he was dying and that his mind had created that fantasy? It felt real, too real. Almost like the Another Earth simulation. But it couldn't be possible. The Neurowire would have to be connected.
In a stupor he looked at the fight.
Almost being able to predict the outcome.