Forgotten

First Published 2012

Copyright © 2012 by Kailin Gow

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First Edition

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Henceforth space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality. – Hermann Minkowski

ONE

I
’m drifting, floating in a way I know can’t be real. Floating above a woman I know as well as anyone on the planet, for the simple reason that she’s me. Celestra Caine. She has the same flowing dark hair falling past her shoulders, the same flawless skin and fine boned features, the same athletic frame. She’s…
I’m
wearing a dark suit that’s cut perfectly for me. There’s a man beside me, wearing an almost identical suit. That’s the most I can make out of him. My eyes seem to slide from his features every time I look at them. Along with the floating, that tells me that this is just a dream. That it isn’t real. Yet somehow, I know that it is, or will be, or has been. I’m not sure which.

            I’m not floating any longer. I’m looking out through her eyes. My eyes. It’s so bright that I reach for a pair of shades automatically, the filtered lenses of them giving the world a darker cast. The field has changed a lot from the way it would have been back when it was in use. The whole climate is different now. The subsoil samples taken so far at the dig have proved that. Open trenches mark where the archaeological work has been taking place, mounds of soil beside them. With the way the open fields are now, it’s hard to believe that this was once a desert.

            I hop down into the nearest trench to get a closer look. It’s a deep trench, and I have to climb down almost ten feet before I reach the bottom. There are flashes of metal there. It’s still bright, despite the long years underground.

            “Data drives?” the man with me asks, sounding a little surprised. “I know we’ve recovered some readable ones before.”

            “Possibly,” I say. “The metals they used in these facilities protected them in a way most archaeological deposits from that time weren’t protected. Even with that though, there’s still a chance that they could have all degraded.”

            “Well, I guess a few thousand years in the ground will do that,” the man replies. I can hear the tension in his voice though. We need this. “What else have you got down there, anyway?”

            Taking a sonic brush from my pocket, I start to peel away the layers of dirt, very carefully, the ultra-sonic sound waves scraping it away more gently than a normal digging tool ever could. As he just said, these things have been in the ground for thousands of years.

            “A lot of it looks like fairly standard lab equipment,” I say, “though the typology seems a little off. Some of these things are more advanced than I’d expect given the period.” It’s hard to keep a note of excitement out of my voice. We both know what that is likely to mean.

            “Keep going,” my companion says, though he makes no move to join me in the trench. Probably he doesn’t want to get his suit dirty, though I know for a fact he’s gotten more on it than dirt before now. A lot more.

            I keep rooting through the finds, hoping for something clear. Something definite. I sift through the soil, looking for things below the current layer of the trench. It’s bad archaeology, when we haven’t recorded everything at that level, but some things are more important. The fate of the world, for one.

 What I find is a scrap of metal, a plate obviously designed to be bolted onto something else, but loose now. I pull it from the dirt and set about cleaning it carefully. If this place is what we think it might be, then the metals in it won’t have corroded the way iron or even steel would have after all this time. It has just two words written on it, raised slightly from the surface so that as I run my hand over them, I can feel them.

Location Six.

“Do we know anything about a ‘Location Six’?” I call up to the top of the trench. The man there nods, though I still can’t seem to make out his features. The dream, or my memory, won’t let me have that.

“It used to be a base belonging to the Underground. It’s mentioned in some of the old records.” He’s trying not to sound too excited about it, but I can tell that he is from the slightly too rapid way he says that. Location Six is obviously a big deal. “I never thought that we’d actually find it.”

“And now we have,” I say. “You’re going to have to bring in a team to collect the important parts from here.”

He nods and takes an in-ear phone from a pocket, putting it in place and relaying details of the location. I notice that he doesn’t tell the crew on the other end exactly what we have found. It’s a very big deal, then.

For now though, I’m too busy climbing out of the trench to worry about that. Near the top, he reaches out for me, helping me from the trench with strong hands on mine. Immediately, and perhaps inevitably, he pulls me closer, one arm going around my waist. Even though he hasn’t been in the trench, he has been standing around at the dig, and right then he smells earthy and solid.

I pull away anyway. “There isn’t time.”

“Make time.”

I shake my head. “We aren’t kids anymore, and this is too important to mess up by wasting time.”

“Would it be a waste?”

“When there’s so much at stake, yes.” I look back down at the trench, away from him. “There’s so little time left. All that down there might be the past, but it’s also the key to the future. If we get things wrong, even a little, everything around you will vanish like it never existed.”

“And you can’t allow that.”

I shake my head. “I can’t. I won’t. There are some things that it is worth taking risks to protect. It all means too much. Too much for us now. Too much for the future. Too much for
everything
.”

I can hear the strength of the passion in my own voice, and in that moment I know how important what we are doing is, but I can’t quite remember why. I can’t quite focus. I’m drifting too much. Drifting, and listening to the voice I can hear on the edge of my thoughts, calling my name.

“Celes. Celes, come on. Wake up.”

TWO

“
C
eles, wake up.”

            My eyes blink their way open and I find myself looking up at Jack Simple’s face. There are definitely worse things to look at in the world when waking up. His dark hair is short and normally stylishly arranged, though now it’s a mess. There’s a light dusting of stubble over his features, which is strange, because normally they’re clean shaven for an elegantly suave look. I have to admit it suits him though. It even goes with the combat gear he’s wearing, left over from our rescue mission into the Others’ base.

            The look in those icy blue eyes of his is one of worry as I start to sit up on the low bed I’m currently lying on.

            “How are you feeling, Celes? Are you okay?” His delicately British accent normally doesn’t give much away, but right now I can hear the concern there. Like he’s afraid I shouldn’t be standing up.

            “I’m fine, I think.” I stand up carefully. My legs are a little shaky, but I’m quickly on my feet. I’m still dressed the way I was the last I remember, in camouflage combat gear that matches Jack’s. More of those memories come back to me.

            “Lionel drugged us.”

            Jack nods. “He must have found out what happened.”

            What happened was that I killed a member of the Underground in self defense, the organization for which Jack works, and in which Lionel is one of the most senior figures. Not to mention very dangerous for someone who looks like he could be somebody’s grandfather, with his silver hair and twinkling eyes. It turns out that he doesn’t like people who don’t match his idea of human very much, or at least doesn’t trust them.

That means people like me, since I can do so many things that normal humans can’t do. Things like burning one of his agents with a power that seems to almost have a mind of its own. It means people like Jack too, though Lionel has only just found that out. Maybe that’s why we’re here. Wherever here is.

More likely it has something to do with the part where I was trying to get as far away from him and his faction of the Underground as possible. As far as I can tell, they aren’t much better than the Others, the group that wants to kill all those like me. One of Lionel’s people found me sneaking out, and I ended up burning him up. But only after he tried to kill me. It seems my ability to burn mostly comes up when I’m scared or trying to defend myself or someone I cared about…like an adrenaline rush.

            I look around the room Jack and I are in. It’s very white. White as in the white of a padded cell, barely ten feet on a side. There’s a single bed, also white, which I was asleep in, but other than that the room is unfurnished. The walls, and even the door, are covered in squares of a white material that gleams like plastic, but which feels more like cloth when I reach out to touch it.

            “What’s happening, Jack?” I ask. “Do you know where we are?”