The sensation was horrible: a chemical revolution that seemed to burst the blood vessels of his body, a physical explosion that detached his muscles from his skeleton, making them go through energy currents and then reassembling them, ensuring that each detached ligament remembered the pain caused by the sparks received.
The shock lasted only a few seconds but was enough for Adam to promise never to forget it. And he was so grateful it was over that he took having appeared in midair, three feet above the ground, and then collapsing face down on the warm, damp asphalt, as a blessing.
With the blow, Adam bit his lip; he was bleeding a little and his jaw hurt. His head was spinning, his eyes were full of multicolored flashes, and his muscles were numb.
And his heart… Damn it, it had never drummed like this! It did it so hard that he came to think that at any moment it would give up continuing to work and stop.
“What... have you... done?” he asked fearfully, and clutching his chest, trying to hold his heart back from running away, he rose to his feet but staggered back to his knees on the ground.
“Don’t worry. You won’t die,” he heard Malin tell him. She didn’t sound agitated, she sounded just fine.
After a while, indeed, his heartbeat returned to normal.
The ambient noises were gone. Had the traffic slowed down considerably in front of Dana’s? Or was the intense ringing that pierced his ears covering them? He waited a moment for the dizziness to pass and tried again to stand up.
Malin helped him to stand up and held him until he could balance himself. Unlike him, she didn’t act very affected, or she hid it well. “It’ll be over soon,” she said. “You get used to it after the second time.”
The ringing in Adam’s eardrums disappeared after a poof, as if he had had them covered with water for a long time, and suddenly that water had drained away. But something liquid slipped into his ears. He touched it. It was blood.
“Don’t worry, it’s normal. See?” Malin said, and she showed that there were traces of blood in her ears, too.
Adam was still too disoriented to care about that, though. At least he felt better. He took a deep breath and smelled pee; some drunkard had made that place his urinal. Humidity didn’t help either, it was suffocating.
He realized that it had gotten dark too soon. Only a silver glow licked at the floor beneath his feet, a glow like the glare of the moon, only stronger. A streetlight?
Even with his vision unfocused, he noticed the alley’s brick wall had changed. It was no longer brick; it was concrete. He shook his head—his neck creaked and ached—dislodged the blurry veil that clouded his eyes and found that the alley had become another alley, a wider one. The left wall had become a net fence, and behind it was a circuit of thick metal pipes outlined by that soft light as shadows ate up the rest.
They were next to a refinery or an industrial plant; the bluish glow came from distant lamps. It was night, and the moon shone from some hidden place behind one of the many buildings that surrounded them.
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Adam coughed a little as he choked on his own saliva. When he felt better, he brushed off his shirt. Guided by the noise of a lone vehicle, he walked to a narrow street, a little less shadowy than the alley. A cargo truck passed in front of him. Adam followed it with his eyes, then looked around: warehouses and sheds everywhere. They were in a kind of factory neighborhood, maybe near the harbor.
Across the street, a man dressed in a gray jumpsuit lowered the gate from one warehouse.
It had gotten dark in the blink of an eye, almost literally, and there were no signs of Dana’s, the parking lot, or anything he recognized.
“It can’t be… Can it?”
In the distance, about twenty or thirty blocks from them, he could see some sophisticated buildings, very different from the gloomy warehouses that were around them, and rising here and there among them, some thin towers that rose like chimneys for miles until getting lost in the darkness of the heights, far above the sparkles of the city, only visible by the flickering obstruction lights. What pilot in his right mind would fly a plane among those things? Below, above the skyscrapers and passing between those strange towers, groups of little white lights, too small to be airplanes, flew over the skies like swarms of fireflies.
Adam had never been there before but knew the place through photos and videos; he had it fresh in his memory thanks to the brief research attempt he made a few days ago. That city was Markabia. Of course, it would be night there; they were on the other side of the ocean, in a very different time zone from his.
“We-we’ve been transported!” Adam stammered.
“Moving through a quantum passageway with this.” Malin touched her bracelets. “We’re in the Markabia shipyards.”
“It can’t be. No—”
Malin hesitated for a second as if thinking what to do to convince him; then she turned to the man in a jumpsuit who, having closed the gate, was walking down the opposite sidewalk with a leisurely and very familiar gait, as if he were sliding across the floor. It wasn’t a man; it was a Cyclops.
“Hey!” Malin called him.
The android stopped short and turned on its heels in that inhuman way that characterized them. That single red eye focused on them, and Adam couldn’t help but jump. The experience with Broga was still an open wound.
“Android,” Malin said. “I need to know what city this is.”
“This city is Markabia, the capital of the imperial territory,” replied the Cyclops with his synthesized voice. “We are in sector 650 of the shipyards. If you are lost and need help or transportation to the metropolitan center, I can inform the nearest military post of your location and request a vehicle so that—”
“No need!” she interrupted him with a courtesy greeting. “Thank you!”
The android turned and resumed its path with its particular walk.
“How is that…?” Adam looked at the bracelets on his wrists and couldn’t fathom what he was wearing or what they had just done. He took his hands to his head, then patted his face as if he wanted to check he wasn’t dreaming and let out a startled laugh. He thought about the Binary Atavistic Project, the implants, the antigravity thrusters, and now this. “How is it possible the rest of the world doesn’t know that something like this is possible?” he questioned.
“Perhaps because we’re not interested in them knowing so,” she replied. “When it comes to culture and discoveries, let’s say you guys from Proxima are a bit more…”
“—Bombastic about it?” Adam suggested.
Malin nodded.
“You people love it when everyone knows how much and how well you do it,” she pointed out, “while we play quiet despite being more advanced than the rest. Don’t forget the first A60-R8 Cyclops were made here, and I daresay so were the utility robots.”
Adam said ‘no’ with his finger. “Utility robots were ours,” he corrected her. “Homam Enterprises put them into operation in the year 2095, in Proxima. Anyway, here we are talking about transportation in space and time! Hell, about creating fire out of nothing! What more advanced than that can you be?!”
Malin motioned for him to lower his voice. “Want to lower it a bit?”
“Sorry.”