John Gone (30 page)

“She ... ” Ronika began.

“She’s gone,” John replied solemnly.

“How ... ” Ronika mustered, “How bad
was--”

“She’s in one piece,” John answered. “But it
did look like, well, her fingers were--”

“Someone was asking her some questions,” Kala
worded for him. “And, it appears that she wasn’t interested in
answering them.”

Ronika bit down on her arm, understanding his
implication. She looked at John’s dead expression, then spied a
tissue, carefully folded, in his right hand.

She dropped her forearm from her bite,
leaving small indentations in the skin behind it. “What is that?”
she asked, gesturing at the tissue.

“I don’t know,” John said. “She was holding
it.”

“She left you a note,” Ronika said
optimistically. “What does it say? Wait, sorry; you don’t have to
read it now, or at all, or to me. You know. It’s yours.”

“It’s okay,” John said. “I’d like to know.
It’s just the last thing she’ll say to me, and I didn’t want to be
looking at what happened to her when I read it.”

John opened the tissue and bit down on his
lip. Ronika watched his breathing weigh heavier as his eyes panned
across the note, shaking and convulsing again. His eyes must have
run across the words five, ten, a hundred times. A small stream of
blood ran down from his mouth from where his tooth pressed against
his lip.

“It’s not from her,” he finally said. “It’s
from them.”

Ronika sprung from her seat and slunk up
behind John. Slowly embracing him from behind, she looked over his
shoulder at the note. It had been written with his mother’s
eyeliner.

SEE YOU SOON.

John crumpled the tissue and threw it to the
ground. He lightly removed Ronika’s hands from around him and left
the house by its front door. She waited a few minutes in the living
room before following him out.

She found John sitting against the wall of
his small, bricked front porch, arms crossed around his knees and
staring out ahead of him to the darkness of the road past the lawn.
She sat across from him in the same fashion, keeping silent.

She wanted to help him, to find some magical
combination of words that would ease his pain. She wished she knew
anything about making this easier for him. She didn’t know what
people were supposed to say and do now, as there’d been no one to
have said or done anything for her when her own parent died.

Except for John
, she remembered. He
was the only one.
What did he say? I don’t even remember. That’s
horrible.

John finally spoke. “It’s not the time for
grief. I can’t shut down now.”

Ronika sat quietly, worried that responding
might lead his next decision.
He needs to decide what to do now
by himself.

“I want to bury her, but it’s just not
realistic. The neighbors will snoop soon, I’m sure. Then the police
will come and take care of the body. Ronika, you can take the
house. There’s only one thing for me to do now.”

John stood, but only for a moment before his
knees wobbled heavily, and he collapsed to the ground, breathing
shallowly and suddenly unconscious.

“John!” Ronika exclaimed. She moved over to
him quickly and lifted his head from the welcome mat where it had
fallen. She placed it in her lap and ran her fingers through his
hair.

“No!” Kala yelled, “Not now! You! Ronika, you
have to put in the numbers while he’s out!”

“This isn’t the time for your scheming!” she
yelled back. “He just lost his mother! He’s unconscious!”

“That’s the ‘thing,’ though. The numbers are
the thing,” Kala tried to explain. “The one thing he said he had to
do now. That was it!”

“Forget it,” Ronika said. “I can’t believe
you’d ask me to just screw him over. Especially now!”

“Ronika, listen to me. Why do you think he
said you could have the house? Does that make sense? And what else
could he have been talking about when he said there was one thing
to do?”

“If that’s what he wanted then he would have
told me,” she said.

“But he just decided! Inside, right before he
found his parent! He told me!” Kala protested.

Ronika’s voice was cold and grim. “How
convenient.”

“You have to believe me,” Kala said,
panicking. “Look at him! He can’t even control his consciousness
anymore! He’s going to die. Even if you don’t believe me, you’re
capable of coming to the same conclusion of inevitability. Put in
the numbers, you must!”

“No,” Ronika said quietly, looking down at
John. “The only way I’m sure I’ll lose him is if I send him to
you.”

“You don’t--” Kala started frantically.
Ronika took John’s hand and depressed the knob on the watch’s side,
dispatching the hologram immediately.

She stared down at John in the new quiet and
began to cry again, raining her tears down onto his face like a
storm.

She moved her hand to his cheek and smoothed
the water from his face. “I don’t want to leave you here,” Ronika
said to him. “But if I don’t set up, I can’t give you Mouse on the
next jump. I’d set up here, but ... ” She looked back toward the
house. “I just can’t be here, John. Not alone. I can’t. I’m sorry.
I need to leave so I can be with you.”

Ronika stood and hooked her arms beneath
John’s. She carefully pulled his body into the small foyer and
leaned him against the wall there. Then she thought about the note
he’d found in his dead mother’s hand.
See you soon
, it had
read.
What did that mean?
she wondered. She realized that
she couldn’t leave him alone here either.

“Fine. We’ll stay, but we’re going back
outside,” she told John. She lifted him again and brought him back
outside to the porch. After propping him up in a seated position,
she walked back inside.

Ronika traveled to the kitchen and saw a box
of teabags labeled Samurai Chai on the counter. There was a mug in
the open cabinet above the sink. She reached up and took it,
noticing an over-used
Hang in There!
below a picture of a
dangling cat on its surface. She filled the mug with water, then
poured it back out into the small instant boiler next to the
refrigerator.

While the water reached boiling point, Ronika
reached for the box of tea bags. It was almost empty. She moved the
last bag of Samurai Chai from the box into the mug and waited for
the boiler to finish. Thirty seconds later, she emptied the
bubbling water over the bag. While it steeped, she searched through
the drawers beneath the countertops. Soon, she found what she was
looking for, a large serrated knife.

Four minutes later the tea was done, and she
brought the mug and the knife back out to the front porch. She sat
next to John, knife in one hand, mug in the other, and waited for
3:14.

Felix sat stunned in the black, wheeled
office chair at his desk, unable to so much as consider sleeping.
He hadn’t yet worked out every detail, but was extremely confident
in at least one of his hypotheses: The company was sealing its
laboratories shut and leaving their operators inside when they did
it. It had made so much sense once Felix had figured it out that
he’d become angry with himself for not noticing it prior. Why would
a company so secretive that they built a facility far beneath the
Earth’s surface trust a twenty-something with knowledge of their
existence or the ability to recreate what discoveries they’d made
while in the labs?

Of course they don’t let the scientists
free
, he thought.

His head swam with the indicators he’d
missed: the gross amount of food and water stores, the special
sun-lights and oxygen processing; even Calendar was a breed of
tortoise known to live upward of a hundred years. The worst of it
was that Felix sat with the knowledge that he’d delivered himself
willingly to the cell meant to entomb him.

And for what? Money? A six followed by a
string of hypothetical zeros on a piece of paper? Who knew that so
many nothings would actually add up to nothing?

An hour after realizing the truth, Felix let
himself calm. He sat crouched on his knees with his back against
the wall, oblivious to when he’d left the chair and crossed the
room.

Having exhausted panic, Felix calmly decided
to force his frantic emotions into practicality, trading his guilty
self-loathing for proactive reasoning. He looked to his side and
saw the painting of the man at the airport. There was no one
waiting for him on the surface, but that didn’t mean he wanted to
spend the rest of his life in a concrete prison. The time for
looking to past mistakes was done; he needed a plan to get out of
here.

The watch had been an obvious first thought
for escape, though after mere moments of consideration, Felix
judged the option unrealistic. With the amount of information he
knew about the company, and even more so now that he’d seen the
doors, he was sure that they’d come after him if he tried to
leave.

A company that goes to the trouble of
kidnapping and imprisoning its scientists would certainly have
contingencies for escapees. After all, they were dealing with those
whom they believed to be the smartest people on the
planet--smarter, even, than they. Furthermore, all of the device’s
real-time location data streamed from a tiny emitter buried deep
within its circuitry. If he
were
to use the watch to get
away, the company would immediately know to where he’d traveled.
Even if he dropped the watch upon arrival, anyone hunting him would
have a solid idea of where to start looking for him while Felix
would have no money, direction, nor knowledge of the area.

No, they have to think they’ve won. There are
no cameras in this lab; if they think they’ve got me, they’ll never
know to hunt me.

The safest possibility
, he concluded,
would be to leave the laboratory after they’d sealed it.

It wasn’t long before Felix had calculated
the only escape option viable. He would need to clandestinely
create a second watch alongside the first and use it once his own
door disappeared. The main difficulty, of course, would be
requisitioning the necessary components from Karen without arousing
suspicion.

Felix stood from the floor and rushed to his
workstation, throwing open the drawers of his inventory, looking
for anything already in his possession that could be used to clone
the Diaspora. His best chance at going unnoticed would be to ask
the company for as few components as possible and ask for none that
couldn’t be explained by claiming constituent testing or
repairs.

The first thing he found was the full watch
casing that had been given to him for comparative spatial
logistics. He’d originally used it for judging size and spacing
when choosing new components. It was perfect. Felix looked down to
his wrist, removed the leather watchband from his own watch, and
laid it next to the spare casing on the table. He had the
vessel.

Felix continued to search through his
inventory, finding only a few assorted pieces that could be used,
or that could be made to be used. In the final red drawer of
storage, he found a small plastic bag filled with circled wires
sitting on top of an assortment of bolts and cords. He lifted the
small, translucent bag out of the drawer by its top and sighed.

The wires in his hand were the first he’d
ordered from the company eight months ago. Each was approximately
as thick as human hair, and Felix had initially spec’d them as such
when first commissioning their creation. They were the only
component that had been specifically manufactured for his project
and had also been the cause of the only chiding Felix had received
since his work had begun. When he’d told Karen that the wires he’d
asked them to produce weren’t going to work, she’d done little to
hide the annoyance the company felt at having taken over thirty
days to specially manufacture useless product.

Per his original idea, Felix had first
installed and activated the hair-thick wires before requesting the
new ones, but initial testing had showed that increasing the number
of wires and reducing their thickness by half would reduce the
energy required by its user by forty percent.

Without using new wires, as he’d tried to
explain to Karen, the device could potentially cause bodily harm or
death if overused. She had grumbled, but eventually relented and
told the company to produce a new, thinner set. The Diaspora
currently in Karen’s possession held the new wires, while the old
ones had been left for Felix’s overage inventory.

I’d only be using it for one jump
,
Felix told himself.
The risk should be minimal.

He placed the oversized wires down next to
the empty watch face, band, and other components he’d scavenged.
Using the thin black marker from his coat pocket, Felix began to
compile a list of everything else he would need to make the
Diaspora’s twin. The list ended long, and after its completion,
Felix assigned dates and a note to each item for when and how he’d
ask Karen to bring them to his lab.

For a moment, he stopped writing and
considered the idea of simply telling Karen that he’d figured it
out. Perhaps he could make twin devices and they could escape
together.

Too risky for her,
he thought.
Who
knows how she’ll react? She needs to make her own decision about
leaving this place. But maybe I can do something else in the mean
time.

Felix opened the red drawers of his excess
inventory and began to remove a new set of items: a thin, metal
optical cavity, assorted colors of circuitry wires, a breadboard,
two thick metal disks, two large circular mirrors, a small jar of
gallium arsenide, a handful of small steel clamps, a power cable, a
soldering iron and sponge, and finally another small plastic bag
filled with tulip seeds. He lifted the bag in front of his desk
lamp, allowing light to shine between the contents. He smiled.