The Life of a Dream
Part 1
There’s a flicker, a dark expanse. I’m spinning and spinning, then stillness. A face comes to me, a person. There in the void, floating with a perfect wash of platinum blonde hair. The darkness holds her, but she smiles wide and happy, looking down at me as she reaches out a hand. I go to take it, for her to pull me up and out of this place, this hole I’ve found myself in and…and…
The bedside alarm screams as I bolt upright, covered in sweat, panting.
“Lights,” I whisper to the room between breaths, and the ambient glow rises as I hit the alarm off.
My eyes adjust, and I’m still there. A fraction of a moment. Still reaching for that hand that looks to pull me up and out of that void. And the face, her face, a mirage…if I could only hold on…
“Name and designation,” the terminal at the side of my bedroom states, its voice gender neutral and computer-generated.
I pause.
“Name and designation.”
“Orion Calder, Seep Containment and Forecasting Team, second-in-command.” I shift my legs around and put my bare feet on the cold tiled floor.
“Please place your hand on the terminal for recalibration, Orion.”
I stand with a slight ache in my back from the thin mattress and walk over to the desk where the data-terminal sits.
The light rises. My eyes continue to adjust as the memory of the dream fades. The sensation that comes along with it ebbs away. The idea. What was that? Escape from this place? Something different from this world? One I always wanted. One I worked for so long and so hard to get to, but now…
“Please place your hand on the scanner for recalibration, Orion,” the voice comes again from the terminal, with an edge of pressure to it.
Another step on the cold floor, and I place my hand down on the terminal’s ID-reader. The nano-pins enter my fingertips, and a sensation runs through me. Not unpleasant. Not a physical pain. It’s the knowledge of what it’s doing that makes me quiver. The electrodes, small pinpricks that insert themselves into me and align with the Arkwright Industries tech laden throughout my body. Syncing to ensure I have all the latest protocols, algorithms and code updates that run the colossal AI systems at the core of the Hub. But it’s more than that. The tremor that creeps up my spine, over my scalp and renders any previous thought of the dream inert. Any idea of anything else other than my complete and unquestioned fidelity to Arkwright Industries and their grand ideals is utterly dead. The allegiance protocols are always hungry.
“Recalibration complete,” the terminal buzzes with a flash of green.
I breathe a long breath as the pins pull out of my fingertips, and I rub my hand as I try to hold on to the memory. That irrevocable thought. Escape from this place? The Hub. Where the early Arkwright engineers, in their infinite wisdom and terminal hubris, first turned on the Chrono-Wave reactor. The moment the cascading effect ripped temporal holes through the fabric of the universe. When the first Echo relics and temporally displaced people appeared across Horizon City. The day the world changed. This place. Where I worked so hard to get to…
“Shower, tepid,” I strip, stand in the small cubicle unit as the coldish water blasts my skin, and clean myself off. After another couple of moments, the water stops, replaced by warm air. I’m dry as I step out, find a fresh, off-white uniform with the Arkwright Industries logo embroidered across the right chest pocket, and change quickly.
“Report.”
“Chrono-Wave reactor containment nominal. Horizon City Echo relic and temporally displaced person phenomenon levels stable. All systems green,” the terminal states.
“Good, sync any further updates with my comms-bracelet,” I say as I shift the Arkwright Industries technology into place on my right forearm.
“Done.”
I take a quick look at my sharp features in the mirror. There, my hollow eyes that once contained such excitement for this place, for this honour. Now, what? More a…prison? Do I really think that? The dream…The allegiance protocol fires a small itch through me at the thought as I turn to the door.
Quick steps along the hallway. White, clean, sterile. The same as the rest of this place. I take a few turns, and the entrance to the canteen shifts open.
I leave the quiet of the corridor behind as I walk into the massive room that serves up our food around the clock.
“Morning there, champ,” Harlem’s voice comes from behind as I take a tray and place it down on the food line counter.
“Harlem,” I turn, nod, and smile. He’s a good friend, also part of the Seep Containment and Forecasting team, lower rank, and his enthusiasm can be on the insufferable side, but he gets his job done so I permit the chit-chat.
“Oh, not all that bad, is it?” he says, gesturing to the counter. “Look, it’s hash brown day.”
“Hm,” I take the spatula and load my tray with a few of the hash browns, some scrambled eggs and bacon. We walk a few feet, take a coffee from the stand and find a table.
“What is it today, my old friend?” he says, chewing on a hash brown. “Still with the dreams?”
“No—no. Less of that, Harlem, please. I told you about that in confidence.” I stare him in the eye. “No, nothing to report.”
“Oh, now come on, there’s always something to report in this place,” he says between mouthfuls.
He’s right. The reactor never sleeps. The Seep is always awake. The Echo relics continue to appear, and the temporally displaced people feed through to our time without fail. So, our job to contain, measure, track and bring some sense of order to this grand mess has no rest. Arkwright Industries cannot permit such pleasures.
“Did you see that Cat-5 Echo yesterday? Intercept Teams came down hard. My cousin at the Daily Echo sent me some livestream footage. Serious business. He’s saying the gear-runners from Canal Nine are getting even more confident with their—”
“The Daily Echo? That rag?”
“It’s no rag.” He flinches, looking up from his food. “Decent news source, my friend. Set up for exactly this sort of thing. Keeping tabs on the Seep, Echo relics. Us.”
“Hm, well, maybe. The intel leaks are becoming more frequent…” I turn from my coffee and see her. Colonel Zed Alberton, part of the military black-ops unit ever present in the Hub. My eyes follow her as she moves across the room. The flick of her platinum blonde hair in the sterile light. The curve of her body under the jet-black uniform. The edge of her wide smile as a colleague comes to greet her at the food line.
“Hey,” Harlem puts his fork down. “Lost you there for a second, bud.”
I shake it off—the feeling, that thing, a small frisson. Her power. My thought. I clear my throat, look back down at the uneaten tray of food.
“Lost your appetite?” Harlem looks over his shoulder. “Or something else?” he turns back to me with a wry smile.
“I need to get going,” I stand. “See you at the Calibration Unit.”
“That’s right,” he says, nods, picks his fork back up. “I’ll be along shortly.”
I make my way over to the trash, arch my tray forward, letting the uneaten food slide into the receptacle, watching it disappear into the darkness and—
Someone bumps into my shoulder, breaking me from my trance.
“Oh—” she clears her throat. “You’ll have to excuse me.”
“Colonel Zed,” I drop the aluminium tray. It hits the tiled floor with a loud bang as my eyes shift across the room. No one pays attention. All buried in their morning gossip, hash browns and weak coffee.
“Here, let me,” she crouches, and I follow her down.
Our eyes meet for the first time. Only it’s not. There’s something else there. A hand reaching out to me…
“No, no, my fault entirely,” I say as my comms-bracelet pings an elevation in heart rate, flickering a pulse of red.
“Here,” she picks the tray up as I reach for it, and we both rise. Maintaining eye contact until we’re both standing. She ignores the bracelet as I pull my uniform sleeve down over it. “Please,” she motions the tray towards me, her platinum blonde hair down around her shoulders, her wide smile there in front of me. That thought. That memory.
I breathe, take the tray and place it on top of the bin. “Apologies, Colonel. Have a productive day,” I say as I turn away, wrestling the thump in my chest.
“Orion,” she places a hand on my arm, turning me back to her. “If you believe in the dream, remember this when the time comes.” Her hand moves down and into mine before she lets go, pats down her already perfect uniform, produces a formal smile, turns and walks away.
I look down at my hand, a holo-chip, round and glittering with infinite colours. My comms-bracelet pings another elevated heart rate notification, and I look back up for her, but she’s gone. Out of the canteen. Out of sight. But the holo-chip is there. I pocket it, take slow breaths until my bracelet quiets, and head towards the Seep Containment and Forecasting Unit server room.
Part 2
“Ah, Mr Calder,” my boss, lead scientist Koji Mishima, says as I step into the enormous space and the door swipes closed behind me.
“Sir—”
“How lovely you could make it,” he pulls his sleeve back, looks at his comms-bracelet, tapping it a few times.
“Apologies, sir,” I say, having had to take a minute on my way here to compose myself. The encounter with Colonel Zed. The memory of the dream. The holo-chip.
All swimming in my mind as the allegiance protocols try to stamp it out. “It won’t happen again.”
“See that it doesn’t,” he says, pulling his sleeve down. “Now please take your station. We have a busy day ahead of us.”
I nod, move around the massive circular room, towards my VR Seep containment and forecasting connection point.
The massive Hub servers stand in the middle. Thick as tree trunks, glittering towers of technology. Millions of lights and diodes flicker in the otherwise low light. Its sub-bass thrum pushes itself through my chest, reminding me of its power. The raw computational force contained within. That which we sync with, aligning alongside the powerful AIs to help maintain the Seep containment fields. Restraining its temporal qualities, as best we can. All the while predicting and pinpointing any chrono-spikes and Echoes we can so we can feed them to the Intercept Teams, who ensure the capture and containment of all vital relics (and people).
Quick steps as I move around the room, running my hand on the chrome handrail. I spot Harlem across the way, taking notes on his field report tablet as he stands over an already jacked-in containment tech. He shoots me a quick wink, that wry smile again, and my jaw tightens as I come to my terminal.
I sit. Face forward in the motorcycle-like position, lean into it and place my head face down on the calibration rings. My hands come to the haptic keyboards at my sides, and the world flashes white.
I’m in. The blank field shifts, fuzzes for a split second before firing out in front of me at the speed of light. Endless rows of numbers and algorithms, towering monuments to the power of the AIs that we align with. The computational supremacy that surrounds us. The temporal wakes that the failed Chrono-Wave reactor continues to rip into our world.
“Team,” Mishima says via his remote uplink, the vision of him from the server room’s feed-cams opening in my peripheral vision. “Over the last seven days we have seen seven Cat-3 relics, one Cat-5, and over a dozen temporally displaced people enter our timeline. All Seep locations predicted with ninety-three percent efficiency. We maintained ninety-eight percent effectiveness of the containment rings and held back a Cat-7 chrono-spike that could have wiped out Horizon City’s power grids for 24 hours or more. Good work. You continue to excel. This week—”
He rolls on, his tubby figure strutting around the room, stepping behind the team sitting in their VR units, the same as me. My vision continues to attune. Endless rows of numbers, algorithmic patterns and ticker reports flash past. They formalise in their coded way into looming blocks of glowing green raw data.
Something fizzes in my peripheral vision. A microscopic blip. An element that should not be. “Remember this when the time comes…” my mind repeats the words from Colonel Zed. I shift my right hand from the haptic keypad, reach down into my pocket and rub my fingers against it, the holo-chip.
“Orion Calder—” Mishima pauses his walk, turns to me in the feed-screen still floating in my peripheral. “May we have your full attention, please?”
“Sir—” I pull my hand back quickly, place it on the keyboard. “I am in the pipe. Containment algorithms and forecasting protocols locked.”
“Good,” he says, placing his hands down on the chrome railing, looking over the room, scanning the data flowing via his subdermal implants, checking all operators are ready. “Then let us begin.”
“Pass through alignment and containment readiness at one hundred percent.” I subvocalise to the other techs entering the VR world. “Bring up forecasting algorithms and patch in the latest data streams from Chrono-Wave reactor suppression rings. On my mark—MARK.”
I fire through the stream of data whipping past in the VR world as my colleagues stream by me. They shoot forward and away on their VR light-cycles before coming to abrupt halts at the vast blocks of information to gather the latest data. Ensuring alignment. Patching in any of the latest framework updates before they sign it off, glitter in green and fire away to the next tower.
My eyes twitch upwards. Something is not right.
“Wait—”
A screeching white noise rips through the server room. Red lightning shoots across the blackened sky of the data-driven world I am within. My light-cycle fires up, max speed, as I hammer through the blocks of data, each beginning to throb in deep crimson.
>>WARNING//WARNING<<
>>CONTAINMENT BREACH DELTA<<
>>CATEGORY-10 CHRONO-SPIKE IMMINENT<<
>>T-MINUS 90 SECONDS<<
“No,” I subvocalise. “That can’t be. We would have picked it up. Everyone, on me. NOW.”
“Affirmative,” a succession of voices follows as the light-cycles from the team come around me and we fire between the towers of data, all pulsing red.
“Orion!” Mishima shouts. “I’m jacking-in.”
The vid-stream of him in my peripheral flickers out as I turn my head and see his light-cycle come alongside mine.
“Core terminal,” he subvocalises. “Expand algorithms to all containment frequencies. Batch-uplink across all groups. ZERO-THREE-TWO-C inversion protocol.”
“Affirmative,” I race ahead fast, impossible turns around the blocks of data, right angles at max speed and zero lag.
The core opens out in front of me, wide and colossal. An immense tower of data, throbbing with deep red hues.
>>CATEGORY-10 CHRONO-SPIKE IMMINENT<<
>>T-MINUS 60 SECONDS<<
I hammer forward as two digital grappling hook cables fire out of my light-cycle and embed themselves in the base of the data structure. It vibrates, that sub-bass thrum shakes through me as more red lightning fires across the sky, and I come to a halt in front of it.
Quick fingers on the haptic keypads at my sides in the real world as the other techs come in, each firing off their own virtual data cables into the core’s central base.
Green slivers of data radiate from the bottom of the tower as we go to work. Calculation. Code. Algorithm. Alignment. Speed and finesse. But it’s not enough. The red is winning.
There’s a blip in my peripheral, a fuzz of white, and letters come streaming across it.
If you believe in the dream, use this when the time comes.
“Wait,” I whisper to myself. “No…”
I let go of the keypad on my right and bring my hand down into my pocket.
My sweat-slick fingers find the holo-chip.
>>CATEGORY-10 CHRONO-SPIKE IMMINENT<<
>>T-MINUS 30 SECONDS<<
Tactile feedback from the chip as my fingers search it and my mind splits. Half in the VR world of the containment server, firing out core code with my left hand, aligned with the other techs, the AIs at work, the green base of the tower struggling against the heavy red readouts that push down on the inversion and containment code. The other half, in the dream, in the vision as I hold on to the holo-chip, pulling at the thought. The vision. Colonel Zed.
“NOW!” Mishima roars out loud as the techs come together, working in parallel to hold back the containment failure, a gigantic Cat-10 chrono-spike with enough EMP charge to take Horizon City back to the dark ages.
I press the holo-chip between my fingers, and a flash of white shoots across my vision. A bizarre cerebral static that cascades out and forms around the base of the data tower like a net. It flickers, tightens its grip, pulsing white then green, and the flash of colour continues. Up and up, absorbing the red that retreats into the darkened sky.
“Outstanding!” Mishima cries out as the tower before us beats green.
>>CATEGORY-10 CHRONO-SPIKE WITHHELD<<
>>CHRONO-SPIKE OCCLUSION PROTOCOLS STEADY<<
>>ALL SYSTEMS NOMINAL<<
The tower pulses green. The red lightning from the black sky retreats. The other containment techs look at each other with amazement.
“Jacking-out,” I subvocalise to the team as the scene before me flickers and fades. I pull my head back from the VR headrest rings, sit up straight, bring my hand out of my pocket and turn my eyes over the room.
“What the hell was that?” I whisper to myself, looking at the central server tower in the middle, glittering with a million lights and diodes like nothing ever happened.
“Orion!” Harlem shouts over to me, already in a light jog, coming around the circular walkway.
I eye him, watching the tower, slipping the holo-chip back into my pocket.
“Goddamn,” he says, tapping his field note tablet against his thigh with a quick breath. “How the hell did you do that?”
“I—” I pause, look at him, covered in sweat as my focus shifts and I see Mishima jacking-out behind him, turning this way. “It just came to me.”
He eyes me with excitement before pulling it back. “I’m going to need a full code alignment download for the containment AI occlusion construct.”
“Yes—” I say, tracking Mishima behind him, making his way over to us. “We’ll get to that. Look, keep Mishima off my back for a minute, okay? I need a moment to myself—bathroom break.”
“Sure thing, champ,” he says, turning to face Mishima and his slow, tubby walk. “I got you. Containment reports, right? Lots to compile after what just happened,” he winks.
I step off the VR terminal chair, and I turn and make my way out.
I hold the chip in my pocket in the grip of my shaking hand.
“Orion!” I hear Mishima shout from behind, but I keep walking, Harlem’s voice interrupting him with some technobabble about reports.
I find the nearest exit and step through to the white light of the corridor, the chip in my hand, my comms-bracelet lit up red with the thump of my racing heart, the allegiance protocols eating away at my mind.
Part 3
A moment of silence. The sterile white passage is empty as my eyes adjust, and I make my way towards the bathroom. I breathe. Slow my pulse. Bring my comms-bracelet up and look it over. Insane readouts of elevated everything flicker, but they calm a fraction as I catch my breath.
Slow steps. The air-conditioned ambient temperature evaporates the sweat from my forehead. I take a few corners, the chip still gripped hard in my pocket, and I hear the voice.
“Orion,” she says as I stop dead. “It’s okay.”
“What the hell have you done?” I turn to her, Colonel Zed.
“Can’t explain here, I need you to come with me,” she gestures with her arm as I stand still.
“This is not normal, Colonel,” I say, bringing the chip out of my pocket. “What the hell is this thing?”
“Since when have temporal holes ripping through the fabric of time, displacing objects and people into our world ever been normal?”
I stay quiet.
“Listen, there’s more at stake here than you realise,” she steps towards me, the platinum blonde hair a beautiful wash around her shoulders, the flicker in her eye, tension there, but something else with it. Need. “You can trust me. Remember the dream.”
“The dream.” I step forward, lowering the chip, the connections formalising in my mind. “How?”
“Not here.”
“Tell me, or I’m not moving.” I try to meet her stare. “A friend has Mishima distracted, but he’ll be out here soon, and he’ll be asking questions. Are you ready to talk to him about what just happened? What I did?”
“Arkwright allegiance protocol hack,” she pauses, looking into my eyes. “I’ve been monitoring you, Orion. Closely.”
“What—how?”
“No, not here, come on,” she grabs my hand, takes the chip, throws it on the floor and brings a hard boot down on it. “NOW.”
I nod, my comms-bracelet pinging again at my elevated heart rate. She nods back, turns and leads me. More quick steps through corridors. A few personnel off shift or moving between data centres provide a glance and a smile. One tries to stop me, bringing up the chrono-spike containment from moments ago, full of praise. Zed hushes them, says I’m needed for an important debriefing and moves them along.
A couple more turns, and we come to the security wing of the Hub. I’ve only ever been here once. A valuable Echo relic location hack. Messy business. I was called to confirm the leaked code used. I hoped I’d never have to come back this way.
“In here,” she presses her hand against a scanning panel next to a thick-looking security door. It flashes green and slides across.
I step into the room, following her. Dark red light surrounds us. A bank of server screens on one side flickers white, two VR terminal seats on the other, empty.
“You want out?” she takes a step over to a terminal, leaning against it.
“Colonel—”
“I’ve seen it in your dreams, Orion. I’ve listened in on your thoughts.”
“They told me that was secure when I joined up. Cryptographic encryption? Impossible to hack?”
“Those ‘hungry’ allegiance protocol updates? I found a way in.”
“You—you got into my head? You watched me long for something outside of this place? You planted ideas in my dreams?” I shake my head and look at her. “Who the hell are you?”
“I’m your liberator, Orion,” she takes a long breath. “I’ve needed someone like you for a long time. With your skill set, with your…change of heart.”
“How—”
“Listen, I wasn’t sure if you were ready, but the time has come, and I had no other choice. I needed to act.”
“What do you mean—someone like me, my skills?” I find a table at the side of the room and sit against it, catching my breath as I watch the readouts on my comms-bracelet flicker red.
“High-level clearance. Trusted. Skilled and, most important of all, that doubt. Someone who’s seen through the veil. Or someone who has been trying to at least.” She looks up at me, raises an eyebrow. “I’ve watched others like you. Similar level clearance. Talented. They gave me nothing. The allegiance protocols, they work. Too fucking well. But with you, I could see it eating away at you. What you always wanted, here, in the Hub? To be at the cutting edge of temporal sciences, work your way through the ranks, and now second-in-command at the Seep Containment and Forecasting Unit. Advanced temporal research, all the rest. But it’s not right, is it? Something’s not right? With this place. With what you do.”
“What are you doing?” I say, clasping my hands together to stop the shaking, the allegiance protocols with their infinite lines of code running through me, hammering at my thoughts. “What the fuck is going on here?”
“No, let me ask you this: what do you think happens here? In the Hub, why we’re all here, what we’re doing.”
“Seep containment. Echo relic and temporally displaced person forecasting.”
“Straight from the book.”
I strain against it. The response fired off before I even had time to think.
“Allegiance protocols will do that to you,” she says.
I quiver, struggle against it, the code running through the implanted Arkwright Industries tech loaded throughout my body and brain.
“Seep containment, Echo relics. It’s only half the story, Orion. Not even half. Arkwright Industries has been studying the Seep from day one. You know this. I know this. What I know, but you do not, is that the government, the military and Arkwright Industries, while playing off the world with Echo relics, temporally displaced people and all their wonders, have been researching deep underneath this place. There is a secondary Chrono-Wave reactor, and they’ve built it to weaponise the Seep phenomenon. They have been researching, and they are almost ready.”
“What—” I brace against it, the pain shooting through me now, at her words, my thoughts. The protocols. Their code. Always hungry.
“Listen to me, Orion,” she pushes herself upright, takes a step over to me. “I slipped you the holo-chip because I needed to lay the groundwork for what comes next. I faked the chrono-spike, and when you initiated the chip while jacked-in to contain it, you released a new line of code that I needed to get into the security AIs. You’ve given me a window. Us a window. That window is now closing, and fast.”
“I-I can’t,” I struggle, the words she speaks going against everything I know and understand and am coded to report, to turn in and expose. “Help.” I fall to one knee.
“Fight it,” she steps over, bringing her hand under my jaw, raising my head. “I need to know you’ll fight it. Fight them. Fight with me to bring this place down.”
“NO—” I fall forward onto all fours.
“Yes, Orion, they are weaponising the Seep. They have been researching for years. Project Rubicon is almost complete. I have been part of it, but like you, I’ve seen something else. I’ve understood their power and reach and fought against their protocols and the allegiance coding you need to submit to to work inside these walls. I have fought against it all, and I am here now with you to stop them, to expose them to the world.”
I pull my head up. Pain pulses through me. Sweat beads and drips. She stands in front of me, her hair awash, floating, floating. Darkness behind her, but she smiles wide and happy, looking down at me as she reaches out a hand. “Believe in the dream.”
My jaw juts. Legs shake. I reach out a hand, and she grabs it.
“I need you to say it, Orion. I need you to say it out loud. I have the anti-allegiance protocol code that can help you. I’ve got it running through myself right now. I need you to tell me, to say you trust me, to say you’ll help me do this.”
“I’ll do it,” I push out the words. “I’ll do it.”
“The dream, Orion.”
“I believe. I believe in the dream.”
Part 4
How do you have access to it? How long have we got until this whole thing comes online?”
“Horizon City’s history runs deep, Orion. Built on the bygone world of the industrial revolution, where the Arkwright family made their first fortune. The old tunnels, mills and warehouses were the reason they originally constructed the Chrono-Wave reactor down here after the new city rose atop. Built to last, this old world. Millions of tons of heavy brickwork and iron. Perfect for the central location they needed for it to power the city, but deep enough that if something went wrong, they could bury it all in a flash.”
“It did go wrong.”
“Yes,” she pauses, and comes to my side. “But not in the way expected. There wasn’t a meltdown. It gave us something else.”
“I know.” I lower my head, pinching the bridge of my nose as I hold back the nausea. “And now they’re turning it into a weapon.”
“I have access to it because that is my job. Was my job. No one comes down here, this low, to the secondary reactor below the original. They sealed off code and containment remotely, but this other reactor still needed to be built in proximity to the original so it could feed off its temporal leak. The Seep. I can’t explain everything right now, but I promise you I will.” Her jaw clenches. “How are you holding up?”
“Yeah, I’m managing,” I look up at her. “The allegiance protocol bypass is doing the trick, but it’s difficult. The sickness…”
She pulls back the sleeve of her uniform, taps a few times on her comms-bracelet, and the tension in my gut releases a fraction. “You need to hold on, okay? We won’t have long. You’ve got all the details synced now?”
“Yes,” I pull up my sleeve and look at the bracelet, a different colour from before. The red gone, now only an aura of purple in the low light of the tunnel. The colour there to show my allegiance protocols are now under her control.
“Once we get to the secondary reactor, there will be two terminals. We sync up and jack-in. There’ll be cybersecurity measures, elements I couldn’t nullify when you hit the holo-chip before, but I’ll go to work on them. I need you to do what you do at the containment unit, but remember, like I told you on our way here, I need you to go against your instincts.”
“Against my instincts.” I look at her. “All of this is against my instincts.”
“No, that’s not what I mean. This—what you’re feeling now—it’s the protocols. You’ve been here so long you don’t know the difference anymore, but I know you. There’s something, someone in you that never wanted this. You wanted the Seep and all it brings to be used for good. Not for this.”
“I wanted the world to understand it. To help people.”
“Everything you’ve done in the years you’ve been down in the Hub, working away to stop the Seep exposure? Ensuring you contain the chrono-spikes? I need you to rig it the other way. That’s what I mean. Your instinct is to keep the Seep contained. With what we’re about to do, you open it up, right? You’ve got the details. Expose the new Seep they have created down here to weaponise with the second reactor. This isn’t a contained temporal pocket like the original. Bringing things through from the past. They’ve built it to work another way—”
“It’s—it’s like a temporal black hole, it doesn’t pull things, people from the past, it pulls them away from the present, away from our time,” I say, looking at the code flashing across my comms-bracelet, watching it stream in my peripheral vision. “How have they done all this?”
“No more questions, Orion. I need you here and now. You expose the secondary reactor, its Seep, and it’ll eat itself. That thing will suck itself inward to an unknown time in an unknown place. Gone. It might not stop them forever, but it’ll bring what they’ve done here to a halt, and if we make it out, enough time to expose everything they’ve done to the world.”
“If?” I say.
“If.” She smiles that wide smile. “You wanted to help the world, Orion. You wanted the Seep to be used for good? This is how you start that process.”
The incline elevator judders, steam pistons shoot out clear white mist, and the broad platform comes to a halt, revealing a vast tunnel ahead of us. Arched brickwork with more of those halogen lamps overhead every few metres. It drips with old water. The smell of rust and iron creeps into me. Heavy air laden with ancient dust cut into shafts surrounds.
“Come on,” Zed moves around the railing and starts a quick jog down the tunnel.
I follow as the sound of the incline elevator firing up again comes from behind. I take a quick look as it rises past the tunnel’s opening and out of view.
“How are we supposed to get back out of here?”
“Coolant tunnels surround the secondary reactor the same as the primary. Lead back out to the canals. Bringing it down will trigger a full flush. Once they’re exposed, we escape through them.”
I nod, come beside her as we reach a massive brick wall, an arched stone doorway with an immense, rusted iron door set into it.
Zed steps up, pulls out a cable from her comms-bracelet, inserts it into a panel held in the door, then turns to me. “You ready?”
“I’m ready.”
“On me.”
I stand beside her as she goes to work on her bracelet, her platinum blonde hair bobbing as she lowers her head. Her fingers move, the seconds tick around, and the door hisses. It pulls itself back an inch before separating down the middle and sliding across with a rough sound of heavy gears and iron on brick.
“Project Rubicon: the secondary Chrono-Wave reactor Seep Temporal Release and Weaponisation Programme Facility—centre stage,” she says as I step forward and into the enormous chamber.
The immense incline elevator’s platform shakes, pistons fire, steam pushes out of heavy mechanisms, and we begin our descent.
“How?” I ask as I lean against the rusted iron rail and watch the flickering halogen lamps set into the arched brickwork walls of the old tunnel pass us by. A shiver runs through me, but the pain has subsided since she uploaded the new protocols into my internal systems.
“How what?” Zed says.
“All this? How was it built, and in secret?
Arched brick, heavy iron columns held together with rivets the size of my head. Built to last, the same as all old industrial-era infrastructure of Horizon City that’s stood the test of time for so many centuries.
“How could we not know?” I say as I step forward and towards it in front of me.
The new reactor, a gigantic sphere. Black obsidian in look and texture, without a trace of imperfection or defect. It sits in an iron cradle, and as I step closer, I see it’s spinning.
There’s no sound from the movement—without friction and as smooth and free-flowing as skates on ice—but the heavy resonance of the inner workings pulses through my body. The weight of what it is, what they’ve done, what it can do beats in my chest.
“Come on,” Zed says, low voice, looking at her bracelet as she moves around the vast ball. “Physical security is low. We didn’t think anyone would be down here, but once we jack-in, the cyber countermeasures will be ready to go. Keep your mind sharp.”
I nod, follow her, and quickly jog to the two VR terminal seats set into the cradle base. She goes up to one, places a leg over it, sits forward and looks down at the headset rings before turning back to me.
“Follow me in. I’ll do what I can. Orion, without this, they’ll make what they’ve got here a weapon against us all. Remember that.”
“I’ll remember.”
“Good.”
I sit at the VR terminal next to hers, breathe, the purple glow of my comms-bracelet throbbing on my right forearm. I turn my head as we both look at each other, nod, and bring our heads forward and down into the headset rings.
The world goes white.
Then black.
The vast VR expanse fires out in front of me, but there are no towering monoliths of data here. There are no blocks of Seep containment information. No Echo relic or temporally displaced person intel structures to wheel in and out of on the light-cycle. Just an endless black desert and grey sky with a vast white orb on the distant horizon.
“That’s it,” Zed subvocalises to me at my side. “That’s the secondary reactor Seep data centre. That’s the destination. We get there; you use what I’ve synced with your bracelet. Work your magic, Orion. I’ll be holding back the countermeasures. And remember…”
“Yes?”
“Believe in the dream,” she fires off, a streak of awesome red from behind her light-cycle following.
I floor it, max speed. The black desert moves underneath me. Zero friction, all motion. Zed’s ahead of me as I spot the first one, a cybersecurity countermeasure tower breaking out of the ground, reaching up into the sky, hundreds of stories tall.
She dodges around the base and releases two digital grappling hooks from her light-cycle. They fire out and loop around the base of the tower. There’s a flash of green across the grey VR sky as the cables release themselves from her bike. They swing around the tower’s base with increasing speed, whipping and tightening before they reach a terminal velocity and slice through the base of the tower. It arches, topples over and smashes on the black desert ground into a billion shards of digitally rendered glass.
“Just the start, get going!” she roars as she fires off ahead, the horizon filling with more and more towers of cybersecurity protocols looming and ready to stop our intrusion.
I dodge and weave my way through, the colossal white orb that represents the secondary reactor’s Seep data-core growing on the horizon.
The towers rise and fall, shattering into shards of code and algorithmic data as Zed fights her way through them.
I reach the base of the white orb, pulsating with infinite lines of black code that run from its base and up around its curved body and out of sight.
This is it.
Calculation. Code. Algorithm. Alignment. Speed and finesse.
I fire off my digital grappling hooks from my light-cycle into the base of the orb. They pierce deep. The security held back from Zed and her own fight.
I go to work. My hands on the haptic keyboards at the side of my head in the real world hammer out the code that pulses through the cables in the VR environment and into the orb.
“Believe in the dream.”
I close my eyes, and it comes. The alignment. The idea. The freedom. Unlinked from the allegiance protocols, my entire mind open and alive.
>>WARNING//WARNING<<
>>SECONDARY SEEP CONTAINMENT PARAMETERS BREACHED<<
>>CORE CODE CORRUPTED<<
>>CONTAINMENT FAILURE IN 60 SECONDS<<
This is it.
Zed’s light-cycle comes firing in next to mine. “Got it?” She pants, looks at me with her wide smile and nods.
“I think—”
There’s a surge. Forked red lightning fires out across the sky. She disappears.
My eyes dart. The world is crumbling. The towers of data protocols and algorithms lay shattered, turned to mounds of vast digital rubble all around.
The orb resonates in front of me, and the world explodes white.
The wind whips my head back from the VR terminal.
“NO!” I scream as the real-world flashes back into my vision.
The reactor’s chamber is a wash of heavy dust and winds that lift me off the VR terminal as I turn my head and see Zed holding on to hers by a single hand on the haptic keypad.
“IT’S THE REACTOR!” she screams over the vortex within the brick and iron chamber. “It’s collapsing, pulling it all in with it! They’ll collapse this place any second, neutralise it—Orion!”
The world is brick and dust. Heat and energy. The wind whips and pulls and everything disappears into the reactor behind me as I’m lifted off my seat and I grab the keyboard handles at the side.
“Orion—” she screams again over the deafening sounds of the wind and collapsing chamber. “I’m sorry, I’m sor—” her grip fails as I turn my head and follow her, sucked into the secondary reactor’s Seep, the vast obsidian ball swallowing her in the blink of an eye.
There’s a flicker, a dark expanse. I’m spinning and spinning, then stillness. A face comes to me, a person. There in the void, floating with a perfect wash of platinum blonde hair. The darkness holds her, but she smiles wide and happy, looking down at me as she reaches out a hand and I see her whisper it. “Believe in the dream.”
“ZED!” I scream, my grip slipping, the wind too powerful, the vortices too strong, the terminal pull of the secondary reactor’s temporal dilation around me pulling and pulling.
Quick thoughts, my mind firing up.
My comms-bracelet signals red on my arm as I pull myself back into the VR terminal, pull my arms around the base and tap the bracelet’s readout blind. But I know what I need to do. I know what comes next.
“Orion, where the hell are you? Where’ve you been?! This place—the Hub—it’s gone fucking crazy?!” Harlem answers the call, his face appearing in my peripheral vision via the vid-feed link.
“Harlem!” I scream against the wind. “I’m going to upload everything I’ve got to your comms-bracelet. Everything I’ve done. There’ll be a lot of questions, but you need to get it all over to your cousin at the Daily Echo! You hear me?! EVERYTHING!”
“Orion!”
The upload pings complete as the vid-feed disappears and my arms lose their grip. The vortices pull me up as I hear the terminal shock of the containment explosions firing around the chamber.
I let go.
The air whips me into the reactor’s core.
And I believe in the dream.
They will not weaponise this technology today.
The world will know what they did.
And all goes black.