Drift pattern, p.21
Drift Pattern, page 21
~ Four ~
March 24, 2191: Relicus City
relikus siti
[6.217012/127.792969/4.603.388.824/968:49:31]
mxK 24, 2191
A warm shaft of sunlight shining on her closed eyelids nudge her from slumber. She rubs sleep crust from her eyes and is in mid-yawn when she realizes she’s not alone.
“Dr. Gaudiano . . . Luci?” Ish says softly.
She jolts to an upright sitting position. “What happened? Did your ride not come?” An unpleasant taste in her mouth causes her to swallow a few times. A mild burst of adrenaline from the surprise of seeing him stare at her pushes back any remaining grogginess.
“No,” Ish says. “Actually, I overslept a few minutes this morning. I’m sorry that I’m late.” He advances to the curved sofa across from hers to take a seat. “Wait, did you stay down here all night?”
“All night?” Luci repeats, recognizing for the first time the brilliant beams of sunlight pouring in through the dome glass as the indicator of a new day. “No, of course not,” she lies to cover her embarrassment. “I came down here a few minutes ago, but you weren’t here . . . and I took a nap is all.” Luci massages the crick in her neck as she stands to her feet. “I’ll be right back.”
She makes her way upstairs to the bathroom. It only takes a few minutes to change, use the toilet, quickly straighten her matted hair, and brush her teeth. As she splashes water on her face, Luci sees a small, ragged post-it-note-size scrap of something leaning against the edge of the mirror. Remembering the rarity of paper here, she delicately picks up the curious item. Had it been here yesterday? Had she missed it with all the commotion of her pull basin “accident” and the excitement of learning the fundamentals of DPM? She unfolds it to reveal a jagged, handwritten scrawl of unfamiliar letter characters:
Y or bEiN lId tU
Luci flips it around and back again. She’s certain that it wasn’t here yesterday—she would’ve seen it. She dismisses the notion this is a joke from Ish like the “Jardon-blue-urine” thing. He would have prompted her just now to learn if she’d seen it; plus, the characters are printed with more skill than his awful chicken-scratch penmanship. No, her gut tells her that this is something different.
A dull ache begins to throb in her head, calling back to the Jardon migraine from the day before. She steadies the shaking hand holding the note to examine it more closely. The paper stock they’ve been using from Macer is of a different grade. The strip in her palm was torn from a linen paper, a fine bond like the stock used for letterhead back home, not the coarse, butcher-block-like paper plastered on the curved walls of the den.
She recognizes the use of UNIFON characters from the inscription at the base of Macer’s statue from two days ago. “You,” she says running her finger under the first character. “Or biin,” she continues, less certain, hoping that context will inform her. “What is ‘L’ plus or minus ‘D’?” She closes her eyes, allowing her mind to recall the formula “L = (1/2) d v2 s CL.” It flashes across the blackboard of her mind, the lift formula that determines aircraft lift capabilities. She opens her eyes to study the paper again and says aloud, “You or bi in, the tangent of the glide angle related to the ratio of the drag, D, of an aircraft vessel to the lift? Is it about the drobine?”
She grits her teeth and crumples the note in her fist. “Argh! Come on, Luci G. Why can’t I get this?” She resists taking the note downstairs to Ish. He’d be able to relay the message instantly to her, but could he be trusted not to prance off to Macer with the news of it? What is his stake in all of this? Other than the obvious “saving the world” and all, where are his allegiances? Something inside tells her that he may be more than Macer’s lackey and won’t betray her confidences, but what if he’s not? She wonders if that was the point. What if the handsome man downstairs was deployed here because Macer had identified some blind spot in her? What if the future version of herself had somehow revealed a weakness about her to the chancellor? How can she test Ish to verify which side he truly serves?
She acknowledges a bitter possibility—does her hesitation to share this with him stem from her pride? Does she resent that he’d be able to read the UNIFON writing without effort while she stands here struggling to make sense of it? She doesn’t like seeing this side of herself. For so long, her abilities set her apart from others. She allowed her talent in mathematics to define who she was. It allowed her to succeed in the world. It served as her “ace in the hole” more than once. In time, everyone accepted that she was the brightest bulb in the room, but now Ish encroached on the safety of that unconscious barrier.
Has this sliver of darkness always been present in her heart? Had this attitude constrained the life she could have enjoyed with Michael, her ex-fiancé, relegating it to nothing more than an undemonstrative stalemate? Her head is pounding now. Until this moment, Luci has never realized how alone she’s felt all these years. She has been by herself emotionally since the accident on the bridge.
She watches the video reflection of herself. A disturbing question forms in her head as to whether the video mirror records its subjects or is monitored in some way. Did it record her discovery and the audio of her trying to phonetically work out the message just now?
She moves out of viewing range of the mirror and sits on the closed lid of the toilet. Uncurling the note, she’s fairly positive that the last word is “to.”
She quietly repeats the words to herself as the headache subsides. “You or bi in L plus D to.” A familiar rush of endorphins releases into her brain. This is the natural drug that she lives for—she’s solved something. Though she sounds it out again as if she’s doing an exaggerated impersonation of a southern belle, the first part of the line makes sense to Luci’s ears: “You are being L plus D to.”
The discovery and euphoric release push the twinge of loneliness into the background. “You are being blanked to,” she says softly. “It’s not a plus sign,” she mumbles. “Lied to.” Another wave of satisfaction flows over her. “You’re being lied to,” she whispers. Turning the note over to the back, she says in normal volume, “Well, duh. Not much of a revelation there.”
Though the guesthouse is technically Macer’s, Luci still feels the anger welling up in her at the violation that someone snuck in while she was unaware. Despite this and a half dozen other unproductive feelings, she’s able to remain clinical—she must remain objective and approach it logically. She flips the note back over.
Y or bEiN lId tU
Taking a calming breath, she reasons that whomever left it knows a way around the city’s security and can get past the cybo standing guard outside the front door. That’s a big deal and very scary. She wonders if it could be infiltrators from New Australia. Working from the assumption that it wasn’t left yesterday when she was at the Grange, whomever it is walked right past her on the sofa to place it in here. She swallows, ruling out that they’re obviously not from L’inversione or they would’ve killed her in her sleep. Also to be considered is whether or not the intruder knew of her episode of drinking the Jardon. Did they contact her on paper because they knew the fried-out areas of her brain would prevent the usage of a Viatorio for her, or were they being cautious and avoiding any digital message that could be traced back to them?
She exhales and massages her temples to ease the pain. One thing is certain: if they have answers that she can’t get from her keepers, she must keep Macer and Royse out of the loop until more is known. The unresolved question from a few minutes ago resurfaces. What about Ish? Does she trust her heart and bring him in or play it safe by siding with logic until she can prove him out? It’s more of a conundrum than who left the message and why.
She emerges from the bathroom, creeping softly with the slip of paper cupped in her hand. She squats to peer down through the stair railing at Ish, who is sitting innocently. Luci studies him sipping from the pull basin before returning to the bedroom. It’s no surprise to find that there’s no would-be-culprit in hiding. She imagines the intruder or intruders to be long gone by now, waiting to make their next move.
She makes her way downstairs to where Ish is sitting. He smiles. “Ready to get started?”
“You ever feel like you’re being lied to?” she asks, studying him for a poker tell.
His expression is a quizzical smile as he stands. “About what?”
Moving in closer to study his eyes, she says, “I’m just asking do you ever feel like . . .” Luci quotes the note verbatim, “You-are-being-lied-to.” Her fingers flex around the paper in her pocket, waiting for any twitch of betrayal on his face.
Either he’s a master of deception or he’s oblivious to this new development. He chuckles and says, “I feel like I’m missing something here.”
Her body relaxes as she takes her seat to begin. “I’m sorry, there’s just a lot going on in my head right now.”
He waives it off. “I know we’ve covered a lot of material, but for what it’s worth, I’d never lie to you, Luci.”
Except for another Jardon headache flare-up a few hours later, the rest of the morning and afternoon continue without incident. Ish delves back into his tutelage of his solitary pupil, and each new layer presented is like opening a new door of a vast mansion to her. Luci eagerly rushes into each concept as if it were a new chamber in a glorious castle of knowledge. It’s no surprise that she leapfrogs over many of the ideas to the point of finishing Ish’s sentences.
The thrill she experiences of these new re-evaluations is there, but the undercurrent of who left the note and its purpose taints some of her excitement. Her brain does double duty as she takes in the DPM information while scrambling to run over every scenario involving the cryptic message.
As a brilliant orange-gold sun sets on the shimmering ocean outside the guesthouse dome, there’s an unexpected noise from the front door. Both Ish and Luci tense up and spin around to face whoever is entering their math sanctum.
Luci recognizes the man strutting through the doorway like a fat king—Pol Cavazos. He struts around the place as if deciding if whether or not the area is worthy of his presence. The last time she saw the security minister, his boss, the chancellor, was chewing him out in the hallway beyond the door. Now with Macer gone, there’s nothing to hold Cavazos in check from lasciviously looking Luci over.
Luci is used to quiet, pervy glances from some men. It not right, but it’s just the way it is. Some men expect women to dismiss their awkward gazes as a prerequisite of being a twenty-first-century woman, like a kind of toll that they expect from women for the involuntary shapeliness of their bodies. Most of the gawking usually only lasts for a few seconds, and then they meekly look away as if nothing happened, as if it is beyond their ability to control. Maybe a secret peek would be stolen later, but it’d be more surreptitious than straight-on ogling. This had been the way of it for as long as she could remember, going back to the days of her training bra in the sixth grade.
Then there are the others; the predators, the ones that ogle unashamedly; men she’s encountered over the years that leer at women unrepentantly, without reservation. This type of loathsome creature never looks away, acting as if they can pluck her from the vine and greedily devour her until they have their fill, because women are theirs for the taking, like property. Cavazos is this second type of being—she knows his kind well.
Luci crosses her arms, pressing them against her chest as he unashamedly eyeballs her on approach. He frowns and then struggles to bend for one of the large sheets of sketch paper on the floor. Cavazos crumples the edge of the page in his plump fist, bringing it to eye level.
Luci seethes with anger at his hubris. “Do you even know what any of that means?” Her hands ball up into knotted fists wedged tightly in her armpits. “Do you understand any of it?”
He scrunches his nose up at the handwritten figures before allowing the sheet to fall to the floor like a dry dead leaf from a tree. With an unblinking glare, he says, “I don’t have to know what it means, but numbers on the page better mean that we’re getting closer to stopping Gicul.” He sucks a bit of air through his teeth. “I understand that, and that’s all that I need to understand. The question is . . . do you understand?”
Two cybos shamble through the doorway with equally awkward gaits and take their positions on the left and right side.
The sight of their reanimated forms makes Luci squeamish even before their smell wafts to her nostrils. She shoots a glance to Ish, who’s also grimacing. “Do they have to be in here?” she demands.
He smirks wickedly. “You are a valuable commodity, Miss Gaudiano. They’re here for your protection.” He saunters over to her. “My name is Pol Cavazos—”
“I know who you are. What are you here for?” she asks curtly.
Cavazos snorts and steps forward to run his index finger along her arm. Repulsed, Luci reflexively snaps her arms to her side. She retreats from him, accidentally stepping on one of the blank sheets of paper, tearing its edge.
“Careful now,” Cavazos says, pleased about how off-balance he’s made her.
Ish bows, looking at the floor in silence like a statue. Luci wonders if his allegiances will prevent him from stepping in if this man goes too far. Would the cybos protect her against Cavazos if she were to call out? Could she run past them out of the guest home and make it to the elevator in the corridor beyond? She’s not at the right angle to give him an old-fashioned Chicago-style knee to the groin if he grabs her.
She wonders if it’s a tactic. Could Cavazos’s sexualization of her be an attempt to diminish her control in this interaction? Her heart skips a beat when her fingers brush against the note in her pocket. She’d forgotten to hide it away from a few hours ago. Luci knows that she can’t “number soothe” herself in front of him, because he’ll know something’s up. She swallows hard and does her best to look disinterested in contrast to the fear that she’s really experiencing.
“It appears that you left any of those twenty-first century manners back in the interval we brought you from,” Cavazos says snidely. “Well, before your rude interruption, I was introducing myself. I’m the city’s minister of security, and you’re under my protection. You’ll be safe in here—”
Luci takes a step closer to Ish as her fingers tighten around the hidden note. She goes on the offensive. “We’re safe unless somebody figures out a way to fool or hack your cybos over there.”
Cavazos scoffs, “Impossible. There is only one way to neutralize a cybo, and that would be with this.” He produces a thin, black onyx rectangle as long as his index finger and playfully wags it in front of her face. He lifts his bulbous shoulders in a shrug as he tucks the device back into his vest pocket. “It’s the only one of its kind, so I don’t think we’ll have to worry about that anytime soon.”
Ish jerks his gaze from the floor. “Minister Cavazos.” His voice begins slightly shaky. “I know your time is valuable, especially with the threats to the city by New Australia and the radicals in L’inversione. What can we do for you today?”
Luci looks at him, wondering if he is intentionally creating a safe space to deflect the minister’s advances. Either way, it works—for the moment.
Cavazos cocks his head as if attempting to size Ish up. “Well, you two can solve this DPM issue before it’s too late. I would think that’s obvious.” Cavazos cracks the knuckles of his fat, stubby fingers. “The other reason for the visit was that I wanted to see her up close and get a sense of who we’re dealing with.” He glares at Luci. “While she possesses some desirable qualities, sometimes a bad personality can negate them.”
Rejecting the obvious attempt to shame her by his scolding, she asks, “Does Macer know you’re here?” Her extended index finger is shaking as she points at him. Turning to Ish, she commands, “Contact the chancellor on your Viatorio and tell him that—”
“You’ll do nothing of the sort!” Cavazos shouts. In a more refined tone, he says, “Miss Gaudiano, I come and go as I please, and furthermore, while you are here in Relicus City, you are under my care and protection.”
“I’m your prisoner is more like it,” Luci spouts.
“Call it what you will, but I am in control,” he says, self-satisfied. “And by the way, the work you’re doing here, Mr. Moyta, is extremely confidential, so don’t go spreading what we’re doing here in splash forums to try and get yourself some combi.”
Ish replies in a formal tone, “Of course, sir. I’d never do anything like that.”
“What’s combi?” Luci asks.
“Coitus,” Ish answers as if back in instruction mode for her.
“Combining sexual organs together,” Cavazos adds with a satisfied smirk. “I’m sure that not too much has changed from the twenty-first century until now in that regard. Perhaps when you’re done with this drift pattern thing, I could—”
“You disgust me,” Luci blurts out, feeling her heartrate increasing.
The statement rolls off him. “Suit yourself, but you may be surprised.” Turning his focus back to Ish, he says, “So no splash forums, and nothing said to family members.”
“I have no living relatives, sir. I consider it an honor to be selected for this and will do my utmost to reach our goals.”
Cavazos waves his hand dismissively. “Relax. You’ve already got the job through the chancellor, Mr. Moyta, and your points account will be rewarded handsomely.” He plops down on the couch with a grunt. “Chancellor Macer requested that I update him regularly as to your progress, so you’ll be seeing a lot of me over the coming days . . . hopefully not weeks.”
While Luci’s grateful to move on from the subject of sex, she’s ready for this creep to leave. “We need a list of all skip point junctures.”
Cavazos looks to Ish for confirmation.
Ish nods. “Yes, sir, and we’d like to have that as soon as possible along with the ones that have been destroyed and the order sequence that each of the junctures were destroyed.”
