John Gone (24 page)

She stood from the couch and shook her face
left and right, trying to wake herself enough to hold a semi-lucid
conversation. Leaving her mug on the table, her feet dragged as she
crossed her living room to the front door. Bleary-eyed, she opened
it and looked at what stood waiting for her on the other side.

She closed her red eyes tightly, as tightly
as she could, and opened them again at John. After making his shape
from the blur, she gasped. Choking back a torrent of nascent tears,
she stepped forward and embraced him. He hugged her back with equal
strength. They stood in the doorway in each other’s arms for a full
minute before John spoke.

“Hi, Mom,” he said, his face crushed into her
shoulder.

Reinvigorated and alert, she released her son
and looked him over. He was wearing the same clothes he’d been
wearing the night of his disappearance. She turned her head left to
Ronika, recognizing her immediately from their sole introduction
years ago. She noticed the small, black humanoid robot in the
girl’s left hand.

Her eyes travelled back to John again, this
time seeing the small tears in his clothing that surrounded dried
bloodstains and an assortment of bruises living across his body.
Then, she noticed the same strange-looking watch on his wrist that
he’d found on the beach behind their porch.

“Let me make some tea,” she said suddenly,
turning sharply back into the house.

It had been almost two years since Felix had
begun his work on the Diaspora. Progress had been gradual, but
steady. Karen never mentioned anything about the speed of his
progress, and so Felix had maintained his pace, working as quickly
and as well as he knew how in the relatively short time he was
allowed with the subject of his research, the large enigmatic
wristwatch intended to transport a man from one place to the
next.

Felix had tried to explain to Karen that he
wanted more time with it, that nights of potentially break-through
research were often wasted when he was interrupted mid-thought by
her consistently punctual 7:00 P.M. arrival.

Like the end of a high school pop-quiz, Felix
could almost hear Karen say “Pencils down!” when she visited him in
the evenings, abruptly halting his day’s progress to take the
device from his laboratory. The visits had been so unvarying each
day that, eventually, Felix’s internal clock had become wound to
her precision. Each morning at 8:00 and each evening at 7:00, he
could nearly sense her presence five minutes prior to her arrival,
saddling his mind with a constant, looming sensation of
premonition.

But despite the impediment she brought with
her, Felix had come to truly enjoy the few moments of time he could
spend with Karen each day. Originally, he’d considered this due to
the fact that she was his only real human contact. She’d been right
about the hub, after all; visiting it was simultaneously boring and
overwhelming. No one had time to stop and talk with him, and the
mere sight of hundreds of people was an intimidating change of
environment for one so often alone in his room.

He’d recently begun to feel a more genuine
attraction to Karen, a feeling that someone may have for another
regardless of whether she was the last person on Earth or one of
millions. She was beautiful and intelligent to be sure, but not
unlike other beautiful and intelligent women he‘d met at Harvard.
Perhaps it was the way she flattened her upper lip and widened her
nostrils when trying to contain a laugh, or perhaps it was the fact
that she could always admit when she was wrong--such an uncommon
trait among intelligent people. Perhaps it was the fact that she’d
been the first to remain in his life for more than a few passing
months, and perhaps, Felix feared, perhaps that was only because
she had to.

He’d never in his life been good at
understanding people, especially women, and Karen was no exception.
Felix had tried his best to flirt with her on occasion, though his
awkward efforts were usually met with an odd reaction and followed
by him lamenting the attempt to Calendar later, after she’d
left.

There were, of course, those few and
memorable times when she seemed as if she’d actually been warming
to him. There were even those times when Felix was sure that it had
been her doing the flirting: an oddly placed giggle at a bad joke,
lavishing praise at the most minor of breakthroughs, and once, just
once, a possible sexual innuendo veiled beneath a talk on Galápagos
tortoise mating behaviors. Yet, it always seemed that at the peak
of her warmth, an unpredictable chill wind would blow between them,
returning her to a cold and apathetic supervisor.

Historically, Felix had considered such
amorous considerations foolish. The only reason he’d never mastered
the wooing of women, he’d convinced himself, was because he’d never
wanted to. Women, dating, and even sex were, to some degree, major
time-wasters. The pursuit of women was nothing but a distraction
from the truly important things in life--things like chromosomes,
atomic orbitals, and bra-ket notations.

Once, during his second and final year of
high school, Felix had actually, to even his own surprise, been
with a member of the opposite sex. The unlikely reaction had
occurred primarily as a product of the female’s exuberant interest
and Felix’s own lazy curiosity. A quiz bowl competition had been
held an hour prior, and he’d, unsurprisingly, single-handedly
decimated the opposing team in a record-shattering time.

The female in question had been the leader of
the fallen faction, and had seemingly discovered herself entranced
by the young, tall, intellectually confident boy sending her and
her team home empty-handed.

The plump, golden-haired girl had followed
him after the match and located him sitting outside by the back
door while his ineffectual teammates claimed the small,
silver-painted, poorly-sculpted trophy bust of Einstein’s head as a
reward for his efforts. She’d made the proposal, provided the
contraception, and imposed the will necessary to cause the
coupling.

Felix had found the affair dull, feral, and
just slightly base. She’d handed him her phone number scrawled on
the back of a piece of torn notebook paper when they were finished,
and never heard from him.

Thus far, Felix had been finding his
experience with Karen much different than his previous, and
admittedly, limited experiences with the fairer sex. Instead of
hampering his work, he’d actually found his affections motivating
progress.

He woke each morning with the happy knowledge
that he would soon see her again, and that perhaps that morning
would be the morning in which he would finally discover the elusive
secret keeping him from being with her, the secret of her cool,
often cold composure. Each day, he could work with fervor on the
device, hoping to share some new moment of eureka with her that
evening.

Lately, though, he’d been short on new
discoveries. He was getting closer to powering the device, but had
reached a point in his research that required physical tinkering,
nothing as flashy or impressive as the colored cloud burst of a
chemical reaction or the spontaneous transport of a small piece of
organic tissue from one side of his desk to the other.

After two years of work, he’d finally
discovered a way to efficiently provide power to the quantum
transportation process. Instead of wastefully flooding the device
with the already limited supply of energy in a human body, he’d
realized that assigning each component of the process its own
conductor would increase the efficiency of power usage by over
three hundred percent. Doing so meant installing hundreds of
thinner than hair-thin wires throughout the center of the device.
It was a process that he’d been working on for months, and one yet
to be even half accomplished.

Each wire had to be affixed while beneath an
extraordinarily powerful electron microscope, using tools Felix
hadn’t been previously trained to use. Allowing other, more
skilled, physical engineers into the process was highly impossible,
or at least that’s what Karen had told him when he inquired. And
so, he was forced to both learn how to attach the wiring, then
master the difficult art in a relatively short amount of time.

Attaching wires was exactly what he was doing
just then in his lab, with a familiar feeling of Karen’s nearby
presence looming over the work. It was almost 7:00 P.M.
It must
be,
he thought.

Felix carefully moved his hand from
underneath the microscope and wiped a bead of sweat from his eyelid
beneath his glasses. He fluttered his eyelashes up and down
rapidly, trying to clear his vision from a moisture-induced
blurriness that had overcome it.

Just one more wire
, he thought.
Let
me get one more attached before--

The loud door slid vertically open and the
familiar clopping of Karen’s shoes paced into the room in front of
him.

“It’s time, Felix,” she said.

“Almost done.”

“It’s seven o’clock.”

“Stop me now, and you’ll cost me an hour of
work starting on this again in the morning.”

“Alright,” she said.

After a quiet moment of focus on the
intricate wire clenched between the jaws of his precision clamps,
he processed her answer. “What?” he suddenly asked.

“I said alright,” she repeated, sitting in
the blue chair across the room. “Don’t get used to it, though,” she
warned. “This is a special occasion. It’s Castler’s birthday and
all the other Badges are celebrating in the terrarium. No one’s
paying attention tonight. We can get away with a few extra
minutes.”

Felix carefully drew a wire taut against the
inner-rim of the watch’s face and fixed it there temporarily while
he switched tools.

“Terrarium?” he asked.

“Yes,” she replied. “It’s the only place down
here with actual plants. It doesn’t seem like something you’d miss,
but after awhile, you miss the strangest things. I heard there used
to be tons of plants down here, you know, for the oxygen.”

“Don’t you go to the surface? I met you
there. Remember?”

“Only for new scientists, which is rare. And
even then, it’s a desert, man. You saw it.”

Karen pulled the small wooden handle on the
side of her chair, causing its footstool extension to spring out
from beneath her feet. She stretched her legs on top of it and
closed her eyes. “No plants down here anymore, though. Now they
have some
machine
processing our air for us so they don’t
have to ‘expose us to the unnecessary risks of superfluous
biological contact,’” she said in an exaggerated, mannish voice.
She laughed at herself.

“Have you been drinking?” Felix asked,
remaining focused on his work.

“Huh?” Karen replied. “Why would you say
that?”

“You seem different than usual,” Felix said.
“Bad jokes, impressions, leniency. All could point to minor
inebriation. And did you call me ‘man’ a second ago?”

“Well, they’re drinking at the party, which I
know since I went into the wine store where there was only one
bottle left.”

“And now there are no bottles left?” Felix
asked.

“Stupid party,” Karen said.

“Why weren’t you invited?”

“Someone had to tend to the rounds. I guess
I’m the
only
one capable.”

Felix finished attaching the last wire and
began slowly reassembling the watch’s casing.

“Normally, I wouldn’t care,” she continued.
“It’s just so boring down here sometimes, you know?”

“Yes, I’ve noticed,” Felix replied.

She laughed. “It’s like, the one time they
actually do something ... whatever. Anyway, sorry for whining.
What’s new with you?”

“Um, same old, same old,” he replied dryly.
Felix finished closing the watch’s casing and carefully placed it
into the metal container that he always returned it to before
handing it over to Karen for the night. He lifted the box from the
table and brought it to the couch across from her.

Calendar, who’d grown considerably in two
years, was lying between them on the floor, asleep. Felix sat on
the couch and rested his feet on top of the tortoise’s heavily
tally-marked shell.

Karen opened her eyes as Felix approached.
She stood from the chair, walked over to Calendar, and lightly
began petted his resting head.

“He’s getting big,” she said.

“Yes. I worry about him.”

“Why?”

“His species don’t reach peak size until
approximately forty years of age. He’s halfway grown already, but
can’t be more than four. Whatever it is that you people were doing
to him--”

Karen stood and walked to the couch angrily.
“Hey!
I
didn’t do anything to him or to anybody else, okay?
I just work here. Everything that happens here isn’t on my personal
shoulders.”

“Oh, I apologize for the phrasing,” Felix
said. “I didn’t mean to imply ... ”

Karen’s eyes saddened at his non-combative
response. “No, I’m sorry,” she said, sitting next to him on the
couch. Felix handed her the metal box with the watch inside and she
spun it round in her hands as she spoke.

“Sometimes this place can make you kind of
crazy,” she said. “Who’d have thought being trapped in a box with
312 other people could make you feel so ... alone.”

“You’re not actually alone though,” Felix
said, carefully. “I’m here for you.”

“I like you, Felix,” she said. “I like you a
lot. But you’re not here for me.”

“Well,” he replied, now murmuring at a lower
volume, “I could be.”

“No, Felix, you couldn’t,” she said, leaning
against him. She put her head on the back cushion of the couch
instead of his shoulder. “You don’t understand this place.”

“Is there someone else?” he asked meekly.