Hexad: The Chamber (16 page)

"Same way we got in I guess. Jump."

"To where? We don't know where we are so we can't just jump to the ground around this damn thing."

"I couldn't, but you could. Come on Amanda, you're great at getting the jumps right, think you can do it?"

Amanda thought for a minute, gnawing at the corner of her lip, absentmindedly brushing her hair away from her eyes — it was a mess from the rotation when they'd opened the door. "Maybe, but we'll have to open the door again and somehow try to get some bearings, see where the floor is at least."

"That's the spirit. Look, maybe if you lie down then it won't be so disorientating? Think that would help?" Dale had no idea if it would but somehow it sounded right, like it might work.

Amanda stared at him dubiously, but obviously didn't have a better idea so just nodded. She got down on all fours, head facing the door and then said, "Do it."

Dale opened the door and immediately felt the strong wind, an effect of the spin, and Amanda began moaning as she pushed forward little by little before lying prone. Dale looked out again, trying to make sense of something, anything, but all he felt was dizzy. It was like being on the worst fairground ride ever. He'd never been able to ride anything that went fast, even swings left him green and feeling extremely sick — this was like his idea of a really bad day out magnified a thousand-fold.

He tried to just focus on looking at what was down for him, and things began to slowly fall into a little bit of order. They were clearly in some huge space, and there were a series of long girders, criss-crossed by struts maybe, that were running away from the dome, but he found it really hard to make out much at all, and was sure of even less.

"Close it," croaked Amanda from the floor, her words almost lost to the void and the wind. She crawled back gingerly and moved to the side; Dale battled against the pressure difference but eventually slammed the door shut.

Time to Leave

Time Unknown

Amanda crawled back further away from the door, letting out faint moaning sounds, like the disorientation was a physical pain.

"Are you okay? Did you see anything?" asked Dale.

"Give me a moment, that's made me really dizzy. I feel sick." Amanda sat up slowly, then stood.

"Whoa, careful!" Dale grabbed her just before she fell over. Her face was ashen and she looked like she was going to throw up any second.

"Ugh, my head's still spinning." Amanda slumped to the floor, sitting with her legs out straight, head bent, hair tumbling in all directions. "I'll be fine, it just takes a little getting used to."

Dale didn't want to hurry Amanda but at the same time he knew that just hanging around like this wasn't a good idea — they had to be ready to jump at a moment's notice. Who knew what kind of alarm bells they'd set off opening the door? If they hadn't been watched the whole time they were inside The Chamber anyway.

Glancing around nervously, Dale searched for hidden cameras now that the thought was in his mind.

"Okay, I'm fine now."

"Good. What did you see?"

"It was hard to really focus, we're moving pretty fast you know? But I could see the ground. It's quite a way away but at least the room this mad thing is in makes some sense. Come on, let's jump." Amanda pulled out a Hexad and set the dials. She grabbed Dale and with a nod to each other, and no sound from Dale, Amanda put her hand on the Hexad's flashing dome. Dale placed his over hers; together they pressed down.

~~~

Dale hadn't even thought such cavernous rooms were possible, but then, he'd never been so rich that money and numbers became little more than abstract concepts. Cray had obviously spent a handsome sum on The Chamber, but even that probably paled in comparison to what had been used to build the facility that housed it. It was like a mad scientist's idea of heaven.

They had jumped onto the floor, a real floor, where things made sense — there were walls, a ceiling, and gravity felt normal. The space, what Dale could only think of as a cave really, was so large however that it was hard to come to terms with — such proportions were as alien as The Chamber itself.

He had guessed roughly correctly about its size: at least a mile and a half long, half a mile in diameter, and it took up but a small portion of the space as a whole — it must have been miles long, well over a mile high. Seeing The Chamber from the outside made you appreciate just what a miracle of engineering it was. The scale was staggering, a man-made object that was bigger than anything ever built in the history of humanity, in his history anyway.

They stared at it open-mouthed, both trying to understand it better, to let it give up its secrets. They were standing about a third of the way down its length on a bare rock floor that was perfectly smooth, polished so it shone in the strange blue light that emanated from the dome of The Chamber. Dale could make out the shape, the simple cylinder, blunt at one end, curved at the other, just like a Hexad, but there the similarity ended. There were numerous ducts, groups of cables thicker than a human torso, and what he assumed were passageways for maintenance, like the one they had walked through, running its entire length, making the thing as a whole far less elegant from the outside than it was inside.

What was most fascinating was the way the unnatural environment actually functioned. On the inside Dale couldn't have imagined how it actually rotated to create the artificial gravity, and had seriously wondered whether they were out in space, hurtling toward unknown stars, the gravity created by some kind of thruster system, not that he knew the first thing about how such an effect could be created or even if it was possible, but he'd never imagined the whole thing was set up inside one large room of its own. Room seemed such a petty word, more like gigantic mind-bending futuristic uber-cavern.

Jutting out from the far end of the cavern were giant poles, impossibly thick, jet black and shining like they were covered in oil. They ran directly to either end of The Chamber, connected with numerous clamps each as large as a soccer pitch. The clamps themselves were connected by a series of concentric rings, originating at the thick poles but then running in series down at least a third of The Chamber at either end. The poles were spinning flawlessly, turning The Chamber, the clamps branching off to provide further structural support. It was hard to see exactly what was going on as the whole thing was simply too vast to understand, and Dale wondered how far the poles ran through the bedrock to be able to provide such immense support, he didn't even dwell on what was actually fueling them, it would be something gigantic and immensely powerful that was for sure.

It was overwhelming and dizzying in both complexity and the sheer audacity of such an endeavor. Thinking about it was like trying to unravel the secrets of time travel itself — a dead-end that simply left Dale scratching at his head in puzzlement and wonder that such an epic project had ever been dreamed of, let alone undertaken.

And why?

Above all else that one question remained unanswered: why had this been done? What purpose did it serve? Or was it the simple manifestation of madness, power and greed of one man? Did Cray really build such a thing?

Why? Why? Why?

"Can you get us back here if we need to return?" Dale turned to Amanda but she was lost in the madness all around her. He put an arm to her shoulder. "Amanda?"

She turned and took a few seconds to focus back to a sight as normal as Dale's face. "Huh?"

"I said can you jump us back here if we need to return?"

"Yes, not that I'd want to. Why?"

"Because I think we should go. This place is insane, and creepy as hell. And I get the feeling we are very much unwanted here. I'm amazed that nobody has come and..." Dale saw movement out of the corner of his eye and turned to see a figure in the distance walking slowly toward them. "Time to go." Dale nodded in the direction of the figure; Amanda turned to look.

"Right, where to?"

"Home?"

"Home," agreed Amanda, fiddling with the Hexad still in her hand. Dale stared at the flashing five before Amanda grabbed his arm.

~~~

1 Day Future

Dale blinked at the change to the light, then found himself staring at the familiar sight of the apple tree in his garden, masses of flowers in full bloom in the borders, the fragrance seeming almost too normal after the alien environment they'd spent the last day in. A robin landed on a branch, eager to see what the new arrivals were up to, seemingly unperturbed by the sudden appearance of two rather disheveled looking humans in his garden.

A squirrel ran for the cover of the conifer hedge, startled out of its plans to steal the seed that was taunting it from a feeder hanging from the tree, now dangerously low as it hadn't been filled for some time.

"I think I'll feed the birds. Oh and it's tomorrow. Um, I mean we jumped to one day into the future — for you. Ugh, I keep forgetting I'm ten years older than you now," said Amanda, before she went to gather up the feeders and wandered over to the shed where the bird seed was stored in plastic bins to stop the mice overrunning the shed and making it a permanent home.

"Um, okay."
Guess she wants to feel normal. Why a day in the future?
And is it one day in the future if we've spent longer than that in other timelines? We have, haven't we? Ugh!
Dale just stood there, feeling the sun on his face, a gentle breeze stirring his hair, the familiar sound of neighbors mowing their lawns in the distance welcoming him back to suburbia, to normality.
So it's just another Sunday?

Dale left Amanda to her chores and wandered towards the house, feeling completely bizarre digging the keys out of his bag and unlocking the entrance to the kitchen that led out onto the side garden where they normally sat and drank coffee. Such a simple thing felt weird, like he didn't do 'normal' anymore.

"Coffee?"

"Yes please," shouted Amanda, as she finished hanging the feeders on the tree.

Dale could see the squirrel sat on the fence behind the hedge, and smiled as the robin landed and began to sift through the seed, discarding what it didn't want onto the lawn, greedily eating the sunflower seeds it prized most. Dale smiled and wandered into the kitchen.

"Shit, I forgot." Dale was staring at a festering lump of meat on the kitchen table, dark pus and thick slime oozing onto the tiles. There were tiny tracks of viscera all around the lumps that had dribbled off the table, probably from a mouse that had feasted on the stinking bounty, decomposing rapidly in the warm summer heat.

Welcome home Dale, welcome back to the madness.

Welcome Home

1 Day Future

Dale did what any sensible time traveler would do: he ignored the stinking mound, sidestepped the goop on the tiles, opened the fridge, got the milk out, took the cap off and sniffed cautiously. "Not too funky."

Once the coffee was made he took it outside where the air was slightly less foul.

Amanda was sat staring into the distance, lost in her thoughts.

"Don't go into the kitchen, it's a mess. Messier than yesterday." She stared at him, eyebrows raised in question. "You don't want to know, trust me."

"Okay," said Amanda wearily.

"Did that all really just happen? How the hell are we supposed to sort this mess out?" Dale didn't know where to start, what to think, what to do next. Life was too surreal to make any kind of sense any longer.

"We stick to the plan," said Amanda, jaw set firmly. "We stop all this, stop everything that has happened just because I used a Hexad and jumped back to find you Dale. I can't believe it, I can't believe that everything had been put right by another me and another you and then I ruined it all by just wanting to come home. It's not fair, it's just not fair." Amanda was in tears — flowing freely like they had been building and building until she had the time to vent the sadness of every Amanda that had ever been, every version of her that had lived then died at the hand of another her, or wiped from existence when she terminated countless parallel universes when she stopped the production of Hexads from ever happening.

Now it was all back — one jump to find the man she loved and she'd opened up all of it again, setting in motion a chain of events that had created countless alternate universes where madness reigned and Amandas willingly gave up their bodies to insanity just so they could survive.

The floodgates were open: Amanda looked like she could cry tears for centuries.

"I know honey, I know. We will, we'll stick to the plan and we'll sort this mess out. Then it will be just you and me again, peaceful, hanging out in the garden, trying to stop that damn squirrel nicking all the bird seed. Look, there it is again the cheeky bugger, the feeder's half empty already."

Amanda wiped her tears and turned to watch the squirrel hanging upside down from the branch the feeder was suspended on, tipping it sideways so seed spilled onto the lawn.

"You can't beat a squirrel, they're like Tom Cruise from Mission Impossible. Doodle-ooh, doodle-ooh, da da." Amanda hummed the theme tune as they smiled and watched the squirrel in action.

Dale sipped his coffee: maybe the milk had been off after all. He wondered if he was even in his own timeline, and if another version of him and Amanda had just this minute left and gone to the pub, not wanting to deal with the pulp in the kitchen, or maybe they were in their right world, and everything was just normal, for now. He very much doubted it but you had to have hope. What else was left? Dale thought for a minute, then remembered it was Sunday, so maybe this was their home, their time.

"Is this home Amanda? Our home, our world?"

"Dale, I don't know. I simply don't know anymore. I'm sorry."

"Hush, it's okay, it's not your fault. You can't be blamed for wanting to find this gorgeous hunk of a man. Nobody could blame you for that." Dale smiled, then flexed a bicep.