Hexad: The Chamber (19 page)

Dale held out a hand to Amanda who took it, almost in shock, and then Dale reached out a hand and caught the Hexad that appeared in the air a split-second later.

"It's not just you that can play God Cray. We're coming for you buddy, so you better get ready."

"I'll be ready Dale, you can count on it."

With a farewell smile, Dale pressed down the dome by pushing it at his chest and even managed a "Whooooooooooooooooooosh," before Cray was left alone with nothing but a vision of the plastic gun sliding across the polished floor as he kicked it away in disgust at himself for being fooled so easily.

A Vast Improvement

Present Day

"I think I'm finally getting the hang of this," smirked Dale, fiddling with his Hexad, disappearing for a split second then reappearing beside Amanda with a very real gun held carefully pointed at the floor. "Do you know how to work these things?"

"Dale, can you please warn me if you're going to jump? We need to stick together," admonished Amanda.

"Sorry, but it wasn't like I could tell you what I was going to do in front of Cray."

"That's okay, and wow, that was pretty clever."

"Yeah, gotta say I'm surprised myself; I got it all spot on. Well, obviously, I didn't even notice, did you? And Cray didn't."

"I didn't notice, no. How did you do it?"

"Simple, I just promised myself that I'd do what I just went and did then, which was jump back and take Cray's gun while he wasn't looking, and he did go a little mad by the way and nearly had me, so I jumped away and then just jumped right back to the very second I took it, just a fraction after so I didn't land on myself, and replaced it with a fake one I got from our time. Kind of amazing, right?"

"Amazing? It's totally incredible. You saved us." Amanda smiled, then looked warily at the gun. I think you should keep that pointed well away from us, and I think it works just by flipping off the... Haha, who am I kidding? I have no idea."

Dale stared at the gun, like he had after taking it to try to match it with a replica, seeing the same Heckler brand and various numbers as well as P99 at the base of the grip, if that was what it was called. Past that he had no idea how to work it apart from that you pulled the trigger and there was usually some kind of safety feature with a gun so you didn't shoot yourself. After giving it the once-over he decided that the best thing was to not use it if at all possible — he wasn't even sure if it had bullets and had no way of re-loading anyway. Dale stuffed it into his satchel nervously, praying the trigger couldn't accidentally be pulled.

"I think we need to find out how to use this thing, otherwise one of us could end up getting shot," said Dale, feeling really uncomfortable knowing it was so close.

"I think so too." Amanda shifted to his left side, just so the gun wasn't anywhere near her.

"Thanks for the vote of confidence," said Dale, not blaming her one bit.

"Let's just go somewhere quiet and have a look Online so we can at least use the thing." Dale took off his weapon, Amanda did the same, and Dale scuffed a shallow depression underneath the nearest tree and covered them up with leaves. He set his Hexad and they jumped.

~~~

"Perfect landing, I really am getting good at this."

"Took a while," said Amanda, smiling.

"I'm like fine wine, I—"

"Cost too much and usually disappoint."

"Hey, no fair."

"Just joking, you did amazing. Where are we?"

"Present day, stood in the disabled parking space outside the local cafe offering free WiFi."

"Let's go check out YouTube then."

Ten minutes later they had a rudimentary understanding of how to fire the gun, so once outside Dale jumped them back into the woods and rather nervously made the gun safe — he was lucky he hadn't shot himself, or both of them, as the gun really was as ready to kill as he feared it had been.

"Okay, done. Let's stick to the blades, guns make me very nervous."

"Me too, but it let us get away so that's something."

"Yeah, but if Cray had it in for us before then now he's going to be seriously annoyed."

"Dale, we will beat him, I know we will. I wish he'd told us though, how it all worked."

"I have an idea about that, and it might even work."

"Well, good, be a bit pointless if it didn't." Amanda smiled and gave Dale a hug, holding on like she never wanted to let go.

"Hey, what's that for?"

"Because I love you, and because you are so brave."

"Brave? Me? Not really. Well, not at all, I was terrified. I've never even had a fight in my life. You're the brave one, incredibly so. Now, let's get our blades and get on with saving the world." Dale kicked away the leaves and bent down, handing Amanda her short sword and then dusting off the parang before strapping it back on.

"Now, about my idea..."

~~~

Various Futures

They spent days watching, learning, and the more they uncovered the scarier the whole enterprise became. Dale had come up with the idea of jumping high up above The Chamber, on one of the gantries that hung down from the ceiling, there to perform maintenance on the huge ducts that ran for miles back and forth across what felt like a world in its own right.

They took their time choosing suitable equipment, consisting of high-powered digital binoculars and the like, along with assorted basics like water and food, and ensured that their stash of Hexads were there at hand in a moment's notice.

Once set, they jumped through countless futures, moving far forward in time, and back to the early evolution of The Chamber during its construction.

Many of its secrets were revealed; many sad deaths were witnessed.

What became apparent was that the strange appearance of Amandas within The Chamber came as just as much of a surprise to Cray as it did to the women themselves. With incredibly powerful audio equipment they listened in on numerous conversations going on below over the course of many years, some where it was obvious Cray had not lived normally in the intervening years, others where he seemed to have aged appropriately in the time that would have elapsed if he'd experienced all that went on in-between.

The Amandas had simply begun to appear — Cray didn't have to go out and get them himself. There were a few instances where this was the case: they witnessed Amandas kicking and screaming before they were jumped away from the ground and taken inside by Cray, but it seemed that merely constructing the machine with its purpose so ingrained into its very fabric was enough for what Cray wanted to simply happen.

The universes, and the immense pressure such a machine put on reality, meant that the Amandas simply appeared inside to allow the messed-up reality Cray had created to continue. It was obvious really: the universes that were created had no choice, this was how things worked, how Hexads worked, and here was the source of the universal confusion, a self-feeding prophecy caught in a paradox of its own making, fed by time itself, keeping the whole system functioning as everything else slowly faded to non-existence.

They witnessed that too: the slow fading away of people that once milled about constantly below. Gradually the space emptied, the initial buzz of construction replaced by regular faces there to maintain the impossibly complex machine and take away the most prized possession of all: Hexads.

They watched as technicians put the final pieces together all around the domed end, saw what was behind it, what was going on within. They watched the immensely complicated machinery installed before the dome was put into place, watched as vast and convoluted systems were connected via delicate robotic arms, working in miniature against the behemoth.

And they watched as groups of men worked in shifts, carefully packing finished Hexads on the ground far below. They were linked up to the production facility that worked unseen behind the blue glow of the gigantic dome, sending finished products down to the ground via a series of incomprehensible systems of gravitational forces as they were extruded like mechanical bowel movements down onto conveyor belts where each was treated with as much care as a mother taking her newborn into her arms for the first time.

Time and time again they witnessed the various stages of the great machine, Dale never able to shake the image of the mechanical milking machine seen in his younger and much more innocent days.

The more they observed, the more they learned, but it had to end, it simply had too. Both of them were completely exhausted, Dale became aware how much it had taken out of him when he turned to Amanda on the gantry beside him, just about to pass a comment about what he'd seen, and realized that she looked absolutely terrible.

Her hair had lost its luster: it was hanging limp, plastered to her head like a bad wig. Her face was drawn and the skin was dry, lips cracked. But it was her eyes that told Dale they had to stop their vigil — it was doing too much damage to them both.

Amanda's eyes were haunted, like she'd watched the death of her family over and over, which Dale supposed was not even coming close to what she was really going through. She was experiencing the death of herself repeatedly, watching her incarcerations in the machine from countless points in time, seeing her prison constructed, seeing a few women put inside before procedures changed and they were jumped inside, and witnessing body after body taken away — for some reason they were never left buried within The Chamber.

Dale found the removal of the bodies fascinating — it was the only time it seemed that Cray himself got involved with actually entering the construct. Oddly, they were never jumped out, he brought them out and was lowered to the ground via a vast platform, the unfortunate Amanda always shrouded in simple white linen, but Dale and Amanda witnessed enough of the bodies uncovered as they were moved to know that they hadn't all died peacefully. It must have been terrible to acknowledge that whatever happened to the women was caused by versions of herself, to know that you were multiplied endlessly in different universes and each one could diverge to have characteristics very different to your own. It wouldn't make it easy to stomach when you knew, deep down, that at some point they had been you.

The terrible stress showed in Amanda's eyes. They were dark and sunken, all light gone. All Dale could think of was that her usually sparkling eyes looked like they had borne witness to the end of countless worlds, which he supposed was exactly what they had been witnessing.

Amanda was staring intently at the scenes below, eyes locked on the solitary figure magnified through binoculars: Cray, now the lone gatekeeper to the destruction of humanity. They'd witnessed everything slowly eroding, sometimes seeing people fade out of existence before their very eyes, their colleagues showing the fear, waiting for their own turn to come. People stopped coming, either vanishing or trying to escape the inevitable by jumping away through time, running from something that would catch up with them whether they liked it or not.

Then it was just Cray, but mostly the space was empty. They jumped back and forth, trying to see what happened, and The Chamber endured, it always endured, although all around was emptiness.

Dale wondered how long it would go on for, how long the machine would keep functioning, and whether or not there were still Amandas inside, bodies piling up, living and dying year after year, decade after decade, none of them knowing any longer what was happening to them or why, just tales passed down from one woman to the next, everything warping the bubble they lived in, telling tales of madness from other worlds.

Would it go on indefinitely? Surely there had to be an end to it? With Hexads causing the closing down of universes to time travel, and people vanishing, then how did society continue to provide Amandas to fuel the system? And what was going on inside with nobody to run it?

But then the next jump would reveal another Cray, looking slightly different, younger or older, confused or reveling in power, workmanlike, a king or a pauper, but enduring. Dale thought he understood, realizing that Cray acted as his own recruit, aging so far then convincing other versions of himself to continue the madness, taking himself from endless timelines to the future to continue the task he had appointed himself, waiting for things to change, for society to be reborn far into the future, a line with him as the founding father, and who knew how many unfortunate Amandas.

In the end there was only one conclusion: the man had lost his mind and was waiting for something that was not worth the price paid, but he refused to go back on his decision, his creation, and was simply consumed by madness and was waiting it out, ensuring the future he had seen far ahead would come to pass, using himself as sentries to guard the powerful machine.

Dale watched Amanda absorbed in the scene below, and knew he had to get her away — she was close to being broken. This was enough; there were no answers to this any longer, nothing to be learned, to be gained by such a vigil.

"Honey, we have to go now," said Dale gently, putting a hand carefully on her shoulder, feeling the bones even though for them it had been only a few days of watching. Her body was eating itself, running fast and furious, trying to give Amanda the energy she willed herself to use so she could keep watching the terrible scenes they had witnessed over and over again. "Amanda, we have to go."

She turned to him, staring vacantly into his eyes, a zombie that wasn't with him any longer, obsessed with the terrible actions of a man just as consumed as she was.

"We can't, we have to see."

"We've seen enough love, we need to leave now, before we aren't able to stop it."

"Look Dale, look what's happening."

Dale turned to look below, lifting the binoculars as he'd now done hundreds and hundreds of times, staring down from above to watch the tiny figures brought large by the power of technology.