The Sphere: A Journey In Time (18 page)

We ate in silence for a little while. I was getting the impression Jim had shielded me from quite a few things going on at the lab. If they were cruel enough to kill people in their search for Noah, what would they have done to me? Given how Jim was acting before I left on my last mission, I had the feeling he was more worried about me than he let on. And then there were the images of Noah being tortured that I had seen in Eliza’s mind. I began to think I was lucky the lab was defunct upon my return.

Marina pulled me out of my contemplation. "You were on the boat for a few days I take it?"

"About 3 and a half."

"Why don't you go freshen up then and relax. We can get to more important matters over dinner."

I headed back to the boat to grab my bag and took it over to the hut I had stayed in just over a week ago. I looked longingly at the enormous bathtub for a moment before turning and heading back out. I ran into Carlo on my way to their hut. He smiled at me, just as Adam would have. "Carlo, I'd like to pay my respects to your father, if I may."

"Of course, miss. Follow me." He led me around behind their hut to the start of a path. He gestured along the path, which seemed to wind towards the center of the island. "This path will take you right up the side of the mountain to his grave. It shouldn't take more than half an hour to get there. The return trip will be much easier."

"Thank you." I left him behind and climbed the steep path up to the top of the mountain. There was a clearing on top that I had remembered from my first trip here. And there in the middle was a small grave marker. There were fresh flowers atop the marker. I walked over and sat in the grass next to it. "I'm sorry," I said to the ground next to me. The epitaph on the marker read,

"He loved his life until he lost it to defend ours."

A sudden fury rose in me. "Damnit Adam, you didn't have to die." For so many years I had just accepted the decisions of the omnipresent people in charge. I figured they knew what they were doing and that I wasn't to ask questions for my own good, but this was just plain vicious. There was no need for them to come so aggressively after Noah and kill the people in their path. It filled me with rage that he had been killed so senselessly, and I vowed I would find a way to make them pay. I would find Noah or whoever he instructed on how to get me back, and I would find a way to avenge Adam’s death.

I turned to head back down the mountain again when a flash of light caught my eye. I walked over to it and found a small metal robot, about the size of a rabbit laying in the grass. It hadn’t moved as I approached. I kicked it lightly with my foot and it rolled slightly, still not moving on its own. It was six sided and had six legs. On each side was the unmistakable circle of a lens. Below each lens was a mesh cavity that I could only assume was some sort of mic. “So you’re what was following me around last time,” I said to the metal creature.

My engineering instincts kicked in. I turned it around in my hands. The bottom was etched with a company logo, Lancing Electronics. The name was not familiar to me. I couldn’t see any access panels for batteries, and none of the surfaces looked to be energy transducers, so I couldn’t determine how it would get power, let alone transmit a signal back to the lab. I tried to pull one of the legs off, partly to try and open the thing and partly because of an irrational desire to make it suffer. I knew it wasn’t alive and was long past its usefulness, but it was likely that this reported Jim and Noah’s whereabouts back to the lab and brought them here in pursuit.

I hurled the robot into a group of trees towards the edge of the clearing. It hit the trunk of one of the larger trees and fell to the ground. A clinking sound made me think I had managed to damage it slightly, but that wasn’t enough. I glowered at it on the ground for a moment, fighting the urge to go over and do further damage. It was a pointless pursuit. My rage now had an edge of irritation to it as well as I turned back to the path and stalked back down the mountain.

Chapter 18

I took a long bath after I returned from Adam's grave. I tried to relax and let the rage pass, but it wouldn't. I feared it would only get worse the more I learned on my journey. I stayed in the bathtub until my skin started to prune and the rage submerged to a dull pain in the back of my mind. I had decided I would remember that moment on the top of the mountain, but I wouldn't let it overtake me. If the time came for revenge, I would remember, and I would exact it without remorse.

I went to Marina's again for dinner. Carlo joined us this time. Talk over dinner was again left to more trivial matters. Carlo cleared the table after dessert, and when he was gone I nodded after him. "What's going to happen to him when you're gone?"

"Carlo?" She laughed. "Oh you don't have to worry about him. He has so many girlfriends he'll never be lonely. I'm hoping he'll pick one of them to join him here before I pass on." She paused. "Though I've given up hope for a grandchild." She looked thoughtful for a moment. "He might not stay here though. I've told him, it was Adam and my decision to come here, not his. So maybe he'll go back to the mainland and this place will fall to ruin." She didn't seem as sad about this as I thought she would. "But it was always our dream, not his. And we saw it through very well, I think.

"And now, the story. I only delayed so you wouldn't be able to leave this afternoon, you know. Carlo is a good son, but he's so dull." She smirked after him. "But enough delay, you're right." She poured another glass of wine for herself and pushed her half eaten dessert to the side. "As I said, Jim and Noah arrived a few days after the lab had been assaulted. The four of us would eat together almost every night, and they would update me and Adam with what they had worked out that day, what their new plan was. It changed nearly daily, you see. There were risks associated with what they wanted to do, and they felt that careful planning was worth the delay in getting back to the mainland. What do you know about how the sphere works?"

"Not much, admittedly. I push the button and it takes me to wherever they've programmed it to go."

"Have you ever met one of the programmers?" she asked.

"No. They keep us pretty well isolated. We're not encouraged to associate with people outside our, well, class for lack of a better description. Librarians stick with librarians, scouts with scouts, planters with planters and so forth."

"For programmers it was even worse. They weren't allowed outside of their living areas at all. They were segregated from everyone. Their only contact with the outside world was the messages they got to tell them about the next mission and who was going where. They had files on all the travelers. They had to know who they were sending, to keep a mental idea of that person in their mind while they were being sent back and forth in time. You see, during the operation of a sphere, part of what makes you able to travel back and forth is the fact that operator knows who you are, and is specifically sending you through time."

"You make it sound like the programmer is controlling the sphere itself."

"The programmer is."

"But I thought," my mind stuttered a bit. "A computer does it. A programmer programs the computer to specify the destination of the sphere."

"No, Addy. It's a person who controls it. One person, to be exact. He is able to see paths through time and send people back and forth along them. The sphere is largely just a tool for them to keep track of the path, where it ends, and when to bring you back. It’s a constant in time. Anything that touches the sphere when the button is pushed is forced into the mind of the programmer, and he can then send that along with the sphere to wherever he chooses. And by extension, anything that person touches as well, though my understanding is that it gets harder the more removed an object is from the sphere. Which is part of why you were never allowed more than a few important objects to complete your missions."

"What kind of person could do that?" I was in awe to find out that there were people who could see the course of time. It seemed an incredible power; I wasn’t surprised the lab would want to have that on hand, even less surprised that they’d keep it a secret.

"There were at least two people who could do it during the years the lab was open. The first one went mad. They expected the second would at some point as well. They saw the warning signs with the first one. People ending up not quite where they were supposed to. But they're also tied to the sphere. If the button is pushed, they have to act on it. Their default response is to bring someone to their timeline, so people were still coming back.

"So when things started going wrong with their first programmer, they started looking for another candidate. Jim was there when it happened. They didn't tell him much about what was going on, but missions were halted for a few weeks. Then all of a sudden they were up and running again, and this new person was suddenly living in the dome, unable to remember most of his life. Being the kind hearted person he was, Jim befriended him and tried to help him adjust to his new job as a gardener. Jim assumed it was one of the librarians who disobeyed an order or made a mistake on a mission and had been neutralized. The guy had nightmares about time unraveling around him.

"And then one day it started to come back to him. Like I mentioned, they can see paths in time. So he started seeing his own path. He was able to travel in his own mind to his past and feel his brain working out moving people around in time. He started to interfere with the current missions. He could feel the new programmer making paths for people and would push them just a little off course. He told Jim about it. Of course, someone overheard. The next day, the gardener was gone." She paused to let me take all of it in.

"Yes, I think that would make me a little mad too." She didn't have to explain what it meant that he was gone. "How do they find these people?"

"They have people watching for indicators. Hints that there are gifted children out there. Incredibly smart children, who dream about time travel as though it's really happening to them. They’re usually terrified by it and get sent to psychiatrists who find them to be fascinating and post their cases in journals. Jim started researching the list of children in the lab with those listed in these journals. Some were on record as being admitted to a hospital. Some merely disappeared."

"They kidnapped children?" The rage flared inside me. Had I known what was going on I never would have condoned it. I would never have participated in the time travel. It was smart of them to keep us in the dark. I was almost afraid to ask, “What did they do with them?”

“Jim was never sure. He never saw any children in the complex, so he had to assume they were being kept somewhere else. He didn’t believe they were killed.”

A vision filled my head; a dorm room full of empty beds and pictures of children with a faceless doctor. Eliza Phillips, barely a teenager, strapped into a hospital bed. I felt ill and wondered if Jim had known about that section of the lab. "How did he figure all this out?"

"Most of it he pieced together based on things he had heard and seen in his time there. No one was explicit in explaining how things worked, he was only given a general idea. But also he had the conversations with the first programmer, the one who had gone mad. He gave Jim a great deal of information through his rambled memories. Jim didn't understand that it was all real until after the programmer had disappeared."

Jim must not have known that they were being kept there. I couldn’t believe that he would have condoned such a thing. Maybe he didn’t have a choice. Sadly, I couldn’t ask him. I had ventured too far into the future, and he was gone. "So why did I come back when I did?"

"Like I said, they spent a few months here, puzzling it all out. Jim had kept extensive journals and uploaded them here. He had managed to work out a secure link to a database outside the lab and would post his notes and thoughts about his experiences there, where they couldn’t monitor them. He and Noah poured over all of it, then set about trying to fill in some of the gaps. In the end though, they decided they needed to try and find one of these children. They found a little girl in Philadelphia who showed signs of insomnia. Because of her time travel dreams she was terrified that she was affecting the course of history. So they went to Philadelphia to track her down and try to get her to understand her power." She laughed, "They pretended to be experts on insomnia and convinced the parents they could help. They were given an hour to do what they could and then told to leave. That night was the first time the child slept soundly in several months. The parents contacted them again the next day and Jim and Noah convinced them their child needed more work or the nightmares and insomnia would return.

"So the parents let them stay. They spent several days at the little girl's house, helping her understand what was going on and trying to get her to focus her power. They ran into some trouble though. One day when they went back to her house there were people from the lab there. They stayed hidden until the laboratory men had left, then went back to the house. The parents had thankfully been distrustful of the men who arrived at their door and said nothing, even when they had been shown a picture of Noah and recognized him. At that point, Noah had to explain a bit more of what was going on to the parents. He didn't tell them the truth, but explained that their daughter had a gift and that dangerous people might come back for her one day soon. They convinced the parents to let her go away with them for a few days. They took her to a place where Jim had lived as a boy, a farm that had been abandoned, and spent the next few days helping her focus more clearly on each of their timelines.

"Finally, one day she was able to see Noah in the past and she followed his path back to the present time. She was able to follow him on a few of his missions; she could easily see the paths through time and his presence while he traveled. His last two journeys though, she said were complicated. The first one was the one where the two of you both traveled on your sphere. She said the existence of the second presence made it hard for the path to complete, which is why you only made it halfway. And then the second trip, Noah had the wrong sphere."

"What do you mean, the wrong sphere?" I tried to remember leaving from the jail cell.

"You both dropped your spheres when you arrived in...where was it, Georgetown?"

"Yes. We both collapsed, it's hard to keep a grip on anything when you arrive."

She laughed, "I believe it. Well you both dropped your spheres, and picked up the wrong ones. As I said, the sphere carries an association with whoever touches it, but the programmer also has a person in mind already. When Noah pushed the button on your sphere he suddenly showed up in a path he wasn't supposed to be in. The programmer managed to get him back anyway, but in the amount of time it took him to sort Noah out and then switch over to you, too much time had passed. The paths are not reversible once you’re on them. He brought you back as quickly as he could, but it was already well past the time you should have returned. The girl felt that. She felt that Noah was on the wrong path and she could sense the change when it happened. Of course, she had no idea who you are, but given you're the only other person with a sphere she worked it out."

"So, if I find this girl. She may be able to send me back?"

"If that is what you want to do. She needs to meet you and talk to you about what you want. She's been able to sense your sphere, she's known all along and been waiting for you to get to this point. She even had a path in mind for you, if you just happened to push the button randomly."

I stood up without realizing it. "Tell me where she is."

Marina smiled and took my hand softly. "Sit down, Addy. Calm yourself."

She was right. I wasn't about to head out tonight. "You're right. I'm sorry, Marina. I just didn't think I would get to this point. I'll wait till tomorrow morning to leave, I just want to know what's in store for me and how to find her."

"She went back to Philadelphia, supposedly cured. Noah wrote a bogus journal article with some medical mumbo jumbo about how she had been cured of her ailment, and she understood that if people ever came looking for her again, she should deny any dreams she might have had. But you need not trouble yourself in leaving, Addy. Carlo will bring her here."

"That's not necessary. I can sail back on my own just fine, I just need the address."

"You're better off working out things here where it's safer. Carlo can get her for you."

I did the mental calculation, three days back to the mainland, probably another day up to Philadelphia then another four days back. I could hardly stand to wait that long. "Marina really, I'm perfectly capable-"