Chapter Forty-Nine

“Rosa, Evata, an emergency meeting has been called for five this evening,” Enceo messaged to them on their direct home communication link.

Rosa turned to his girl, “Honey, we’ll be back home in a couple of hours. We have an emergency meeting with the team to discuss the challenges we are up against with the ark. Love you, dear.”

The taste of snow came against their lips as they left for the Halikkon compound.

For years, Viktoriya had flashed out and back, trying to understand her visions.

After almost every meeting, she would return to her room, lay on her bed, and drift off in a semiconscious state of flash-out. The very thing that the good doctor was trying to help her overcome.

If she could get herself stable, clear of any thoughts, she would start the same process again, seeking to understand the depth of the formulas that had revealed themselves as of late, now stuck like a splinter in her mind.

She lay quietly, breathing slowly, trying to clear her thoughts.

The silence had been an issue for her in the past, but she befriended it this time instead of fleeing away to some comforting sound to center her once again.

She was almost in a complete state of comfort and rest when the echoes of her flash-outs and formulas came barreling back in, holding her hostage to their calling. Her thoughts took on an electric, digital pulse of sorts—seemingly more orchestrated and calculated this time.

Then, suddenly, she sat up. Her eyes jolted back to life, and her faint heartbeat resuscitated. She was panting. But a smile curled up on her face.

“You are up!” CLEFF said from where he sat.

She leaped out of bed, grabbing her papers and backpack.

She began feverishly drawing patterns and diagrams on the papers. She located an old cardboard stand-up for her science fair projects, drawing and making several color charts and space maps on it as a display.

“CLEFF, scan these for holo.”

She then crammed everything into her backpack and shouted, “Let’s go!”

“Where?”

“Chaos. We’re going into Chaos!”

She reached for the door pad, opening it, saying, “CLEFF, come with me. We are going to Mom and Dad’s office. I have to talk to them. We have to get them to listen! I cannot sit on the sidelines watching everyone fail over and over anymore!”

“Hun, look. I, I can’t believe it, it’s Vik and CLEFF. They have the car and are headed here to Halikkon. What… What could she be thinking? Is she okay? This is getting way out of hand.”

“I wonder if she needs something?”

Her mom placed a call to them; it went straight to voicemail.

“Noxxor, park the car. We’re getting out here,” Viktoriya said as she ran up the front steps of Halikkon with CLEFF on her heels.

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“Welcome to Halikkon, Viktoriya,” Ti said, announcing their entrance.

“Hi!” she said, stopping in front of Ti, wondering if he was about to ask why they were here.

“Bye!”

Viktoriya raced through the hallway, her eyes searching every inch of the place for her parents.

“Mom! Dad!” she called to them. All the worst plausible scenarios began invading her thoughts. For years, it was them against her. They looked at her with pity, like she was broken, and they could not help her. They probably drowned themselves further into the fruitless project, maybe even trying to evade time with her.

“Was any of it true? Was all of it true?” Viktoriya thought out loud to herself.

Somehow, she would get them to make time to listen to her, and she would prove her experiences to them. She was not crazy. And although she could not explain exactly how she had come to this idea or why the information came to her in quantum formulas and visual representations of space, she must try to tell them now.

The tile floor beneath her feet was warm. The team’s gaze from those in the entryway, on the other hand, wasn’t so cozy. But she had never really cared what they thought of her, anyway. She was not about to start now.

Her parents looked worse than ever. Darkened circles appeared underneath their eyes from a considerable lack of sleep. Viktoriya felt her heart tighten at the sight of them, but what she had to say would bring joy to their faces.

She knew it.

If they could only believe in her.

She moved toward them, even though they made quick strides that suggested they were in for some rather serious business.

“Mom. Dad,” Viktoriya called out.

The two halted.

“Listen to me!” Viktoriya said desperately. Something constricted her. Only a few found their way out as she tried to force the syllables into coherent sentences.

Her parents stood still, gazing at their daughter, their one and only Viktoriya.

“If we travel along the Spectrum web paths that exist as the corridors throughout the universe, we will get to HH190 in a realistic time. It is magnetic. Like these,” she said, showing them two of her magnets in her outstretched palm. “Only we would need a hyper, super-charged quantum magnet,” she explained as she took one step forward.

She was desperate.

Desperate to be believed.

Desperate to be validated.

Desperate not to be marginalized.

She was desperate for her parents to have faith in her, but she could already see it in their eyes. She realized from the tears that fought their way out of their eyes her ideas had already been discarded.

“I am not crazy, Mom. Dad. You have to listen to me. All those people outside, dying, they can all be saved—all of them. We’ll make more arks, and if we all work together, we can make them, everyone working together… enough for everyone, which can pull us throughout the universe using the quantum web. Like a magnetic super rail.”

Her mom could no longer hold back her tears. She couldn’t conceal what she felt. The entire world was falling apart, and so was her own personal world. She turned her gaze to her daughter. There was her whole universe in one small being, breaking apart, and she had failed both.

Her mom became pale and visibly shook, even if ever so slightly.

“Viktoriya, I trust you want to help, but I don’t think you are actually helping, hun,” she said quietly, then turned back to her husband.

“CLEFF, please take Viktoriya to my office and wait. We’ll be there in an hour.”

Viktoriya turned pale.

Her throat and mouth went instantly, completely dry.

Her heart pounded loudly in her ears, and the back of her neck burned.

In defeat, she dropped her backpack onto the hard, unforgiving, immovable hallway tile floor, which she could have sworn was mocking her, the same way that it had when she fell from the brutality of the school bullies. Normally, when she dropped something onto the floor, it was just an ordinary sound. But today, it was a devastating, thundering—ever resounding thud of hopelessness.

The rest of the walk Eva made to the meeting location was quiet. Her mom could not help but wonder what she was going through. Why was she so obsessed? They had always known she was different, but this was going too far.

Rosa turned to Eva, “Listen, Eva. Magnets won’t work. Even if it somehow did, it would be much less effective than the technology we have created. You know it.”

“You think? Or perhaps we are too quick to dismiss her. I’m not sure anymore. We’re coming up short on every front, and it’s almost as if—I… I can’t think straight. I need some air.”

“We’ve run the simulation a thousand times now. It will all succeed. It just takes time.”

“I wish it were that easy to believe. Oh shit. We are late,” she said, finally pushing the door open and entering the conference room.

He exhaled as he followed. It was one thing for Viktoriya to come up with these outrageous thoughts. It was something else entirely for her to make his wife begin to doubt herself.