Child of the Fall Read online

  Kim had spent the subsequent months doing her level best to forget any of it ever happened. She was enjoying adjusting to normalcy and was practiced at the art of ignoring contradictions. It made their attempts to figure out what exactly happened to her more than irritating. She had no desire to find out anything about it, and yet…there was a brief flash of curiosity, of what if, and that’s what scared her.

  Which was infuriating.

  She set her fork down. “I am not an idea, Mike. I am not a specimen. I thought I was the woman you loved.” She turned to Tonya, who blanched. “I thought I was your friend. And yet you choose to bring this up—” Kim got a grip, so the next part came out in a whisper. “You choose to bring this up in public?”

  “Kim,” Mike said, “you can’t keep turning away from this. It’s—”

  “It’s my life, and it happens to me, and if I don’t ever want to even speak about it again, then that is what will happen.” She must’ve lost the whisper; the restaurant had gone quiet. Great. Kim accessed its quickRealm and paid the tab. Standing up without hurling the table sideways was an effort, but she managed it. “I’m not doing this here. I’m not doing this ever.”

  She was pretty sure they called her name as she crashed through the front door, but she didn’t care. The nerve. They’d set this all up knowing exactly how she felt about it. She didn’t want anything to do with whatever that was. It was from her old life, the part she had to forget to stay sane.

  “Kim!” Tonya called out behind her.

  And they did it to her in public. It had to be the cold making her eyes blur. She would not let them get under her skin about this.

  “Kim!” Tonya had gotten closer.

  They were her friends. She loved them. But they refused to understand that under no circumstances could she ever consider what they were asking.

  Tonya rushed ahead of her and held up her hands. “Kim! Stop!”

  Kim balled up her fists even though it was a useless gesture. She couldn’t touch Tonya. She didn’t want to. She only wanted to get out of here and forget any of this happened.

  “Please,” Tonya said as she panted. “We knew this would be touchy, but we didn’t know you’d react this way. I’m sorry.”

  A soft scarf caressed her cheek, hanging up on her tears.

  “I’m sorry too,” Mike said from behind her, “but we needed to talk to you about this. Kim, we may have figured out how to make it stop.”

  Chapter 2

  Mike

  “I told you an ambush was the wrong strategy,” Helen said. It was—for him—their nightly call. She was still in China, so it was a morning call for her. “I didn’t think you’d be able to stop her in the parking lot. You should have gone with my suggestion. Let me break it to her.”

  “Kim can hang up on you,” Mike said, “and she would’ve. I’ve only seen her that angry a couple of times.”

  “A couple of times? Do you make a hobby of pissing her off?”

  They were reviewing this afternoon’s events via his daily phone video, a suggestion from Kim to help him and his sister analyze their interactions with humans. Comparing notes was a valuable way to navigate the hormone-driven maze of realspace.

  Helen hadn’t meant what she’d said as an insult. She was a cop in a former life, and being blunt came with the territory. So he swallowed the protest he wanted to throw at her now. It would only get him a lecture anyway. “No, I don’t make a hobby of it. I just don’t understand why she’s so touchy about this.”

  He and Kim had discovered something fundamental when he kissed her in that mysterious not-quite-realm and in realspace at the same time. That intimacy had let him envelope her in his threads and take her to more than one place at once. More than one realspace place at once. It had to do with her transformation, and his. He could manifest in that place—Mike had started calling it the transit dimension because of the way Kim used it—in a form that Kim could touch without pain. It wasn’t a real body, because Mike couldn’t feel anything at all. He didn’t know what it was, or what it turned into when he relaxed and it vanished, allowing him to surround and help her.

  Mike had been working with Tonya on what really happened ever since they got home from China. Like him, she’d had no formal training in math or physics. Unlike him, she couldn’t read six textbooks at once. It made her ability to sometimes beat him to an equation’s solution intimidating.

  “I know when it’s right somehow,” she’d said. “If I’d had the time and the money, I would’ve gone for an academic degree. But a sister has to eat.”

  The limb-regrowth patients she helped treat as a nurse would never guess the lady in scrubs was almost certainly on a fast track to a Nobel prize. They were that far out on the leading edge of multidimensional consciousness, along with whatever it was that Kim had experienced, which didn’t even have a name.

  Helen brought him back to the present. “But Kim eventually said yes to the experiment. I did not expect that. So what’s your plan?”

  “It has to be a realm interaction, some sort of resonance. We think it may be structures in her brain that extend into extra dimensions.” It was how he and Helen controlled their hosts. There was nothing in the math that said it would only work in one direction, or just for them. “She uses a small part of it with her quantum hacks, but then amplifies it to get a full transformation.”

  If amplification caused it, then dampening it should stop it. The realm device he and Tonya had built should prevent resonances from ever reaching a tenth of what they predicted was required for her to transform. The device could go further than reduction. “I think when I mentioned we could stop it, she came around.” He unpaused the recording.

  Kim had locked him in that gaze she had, the one that made him want to run away and stand very still at the same time.

  “You’re sure you can stop it?” she asked.

  At least she was listening to him. “As sure as we can be at this stage.”

  The cold autumn wind blew strands of hair into her face as she looked at him and Tonya. “I need more than that.”

  Tonya said, “We have to start somewhere.”

  He thought Kim would say not with me, you don’t. She seemed on the edge of doing that, but then stopped.

  “Who else has checked your work?” she asked.

  Kim always knew how to find the weakest spot in his arguments. “It’s complicated,” he said. That got him an eye roll, but he ignored it. “We posted the parts that connected to existing research up on Acta Mathematica’s StackExchange, and they all checked out.”

  It was an understatement. Tonya’s middle proof had been up-voted faster than anything he’d ever seen. It was what had given them the courage to come to Kim in the first place.

  Tonya continued, “We can’t be too explicit without exposing Mike. And you. But we’re on the right track, and we need you to take the next step.”

  Hard Kim, the one who had stormed out of the restaurant, the one who earned the name Angel Rage, came back and turned to him.

  “You’re recording this for Helen, aren’t you?” she asked. “Stop. Now.”

  And that’s where the recording ended.

  “You’re right,” Helen said. She knew to be scared of that face, too. “I’m glad you were the one to do that.”

  “She wasn’t done.”

  “It got worse?”

  “Not exactly.”

  He told Helen the rest of the story the old-fashioned way.

  ***

  In the parking lot, Kim turned to Tonya. “Are you recording?”

  Tonya shook her head. “I don’t have a sister to tell everything to. Feels too much like spying anyway.”

  “No,” Kim said as she calmed a bit. “I want him to do that. He needs to learn we’re not just a bundle of hormones, and so does Helen. I don’t mind being a study subject. But I’m not doing this for an audience. Not when it comes to that.”

  That being her transformed state. Kim hated talking
about it, but it couldn’t be ignored. They were onto a mystery here, and it was killing him that she didn’t want to participate. It wasn’t only about how her looks changed or how she could channel zero-point energy—although those were very cool—but also how it had affected him. There was some sort of commonality there, a connection he needed to explore.

  Kim walked them back to the car and then turned around. “Tonya, do you have a cig…oh right, I forgot you quit.”

  Mike realized she almost asked for a cigarette, that’s how rattled she was. Stuffing her hands in her pockets didn’t hide the shakes.

  This was a mistake on so many levels.

  Tonya replied, “It’s times like these that make me miss it.” She settled in beside Kim. “I’m sorry. I—we—didn’t know it bothered you this much.”

  Kim chuckled for a moment, so he relaxed a little. This might work out.

  “That’s the thing,” she said. “I’m freaking out because for a second, I wanted to know about it too, before you told me you could stop it.” She looked at him. “I’ve never done that before.” She smiled a little. “You’re a damned bad influence on me, you know that?”

  This was the Kim he liked being around. He could be rational with this one.

  Mike shrugged. “We think it’s key to understanding what happened. You felt it, right?”

  It took her a long time to answer him. “You know I did.”

  “You never mentioned—”

  The flash came back in her eyes. “You’re supposed to be convincing me, Sellars. Focus.”

  He’d wobbled off track, another thing Kim was good at spotting. “Right,” he said. “We’ve run tons of simulations. I’ve built environments perfect down to the atomic level. But I’m missing something.” He looked at Tonya. “We’re missing something.”

  She nodded. “The models aren’t lining up. We know how to damp the field you create.” Kim cocked an eyebrow, which made Tonya stutter for a second. “O-okay, we think we know how. But nothing else makes sense. We can’t make accurate predictions without more data, and truth be told,” she traced her hands around Kim, close but not touching, “you’re all we have.”

  She stiffened at Tonya’s poor choice of words. People who said Kim was all they had brought back dark memories from her past.

  “No,” Mike said, “we don’t mean it that way. Now that Ozzie’s gone, we don’t have a proper test subject.”

  It wasn’t just Ozzie himself who had vanished. He’d had some sort of dead man’s switch on his notes stores that activated at the moment of his death. Well, his second death. They hadn’t figured that out either. The transit dimension they’d fought him in had also vanished. It may have been a victim of the same self-destruct as Ozzie’s files, or it may have been a casualty of the blowback that hit them when a dam in India blew up in their faces. It might still be out there, waiting for someone who knew how to open the door.

  In the parking lot, he waited as calmly as he could. Pushing her would only result in another explosion.

  Kim stared at the ground silently for a moment, then threw a wry smile at him. “I’m a test subject now? Did you license a GLaDOS voice for the AI controller?”

  Referencing old video games was a good sign.

  “No,” he replied, “but we thought Edmund might volunteer.”

  That made her laugh out loud. Her unduplicate butler-slash-researcher was about as far from an evil robotic mastermind as you could get.

  “Okay,” Kim said. “You’ve sold me. And I’m sorry for causing a scene. When do we start?”

  ***

  Helen smiled when he was done.

  “What?” he asked.

  “That was well played, from start to finish. I’ll make a politician out of you yet.”

  “Not if I can help it.” Helen was better with people. Mike only wanted to figure out how things worked. People were often a distraction from that. “Anyway, we penciled in tomorrow as our first experiment run. What’s new on your side of the planet?”

  She got a thoughtful look on her face, then said, “What do you know about the Yellowstone Project?”

  Usually she talked about goings-on in China, not about anything happening in the US. “I haven’t followed it that closely, mostly what makes the headlines.” It was a gigantic geothermal power plant, the largest public works project in history. They’d dug a pit a hundred feet across and fifteen miles deep using nanomachines and the latest ferrographene concrete to keep it all from collapsing.

  It was a strange thing to bring up. “Why the interest?”

  “I’ve got…researchers…who think they’ve spotted some unusual anomalies. I’m busy and on the wrong side of the Pacific to look into it in any detail, so I was wondering if you could check them out?”

  “I won’t be able to dedicate much to it until we’re done with our experiments, but sure. I’ll take a look.”

  “Excellent. Now, have you given any more thought to when you’re going to propose?” Helen never let a call pass without bringing this up.

  “I’m a little closer.”

  She shook her head. Helen was all about family, and even though she was technically younger, she had taken the role of elder sister without asking. “Keeping a ring in a box doesn’t get you closer. It’s going to fall out of that jacket pocket one day, I just know it.”

  “That’s what the zipper is for.” He absolutely intended to ask Kim to marry him. He needed the right moment, that was all. “Maybe after the experiments.”

  Chapter 3

  June

  The power plant’s amphitheater was standing room only. The enthusiasm of the crowd lent the air an electric feeling that made June tingle. She always made time for Anna’s speeches. They were so inspiring, and it gave her an excuse to go up to the surface. Otherwise months would go by before she saw the sun. With the Yellowstone Project so close to completion, this may be one of the last chances June got to hear Anna address a crowd this size.

  “I’m very glad to meet you all today,” Anna said, her powerful voice echoing through the PA speakers. “You’ve kept our dream alive. We’re less than a year away from full production, and you’re the ones who made it possible. We can continue the fight against their precious free enterprise.”

  Anna Treacher, June’s hero, her boss, was at least three cricket pitches away from June. She stood on a dais addressing thousands of hopeful people, the dramatic Rocky Mountains serving as a pristine backdrop. There was no mistaking Anna’s red hair, even at this distance. Being at least half a meter taller than everyone else meant June didn’t have to worry about seeing over the crowd. The inevitable stares upward from people standing close to her didn’t bother her as much as they usually did. She was part of the staff; she belonged here. She still cheered like a tourist fresh off the bus when Anna talked about her vision for the future. They would succeed.

  “The Yellowstone Project is the only way to break the oil barons, coal miners, and natural gas mavens forever. Those monsters have spent two centuries destroying this beautiful planet for obscene profits, obliterating species after species.”

  After some belt-tightening, they would witness the end of an era, and the beginning of a much better one. Especially as they approached launch day. Mr. Watchtell’s failures wouldn’t derail this great leap forward. June was certain of that.

  “With your help, we will break that cycle and bring this plant online. We will destroy the stranglehold of the so-called energy companies, and we will, single-handedly, power an entire nation!”

  June’s throat was getting sore from all the cheering. To be a part of this was more than she could’ve ever wished for in her wildest dreams. Like Anna, she had started out from modest beginnings, only in South Africa. Yet here they were, on the cusp of a revolution that would save the world. And June was right here!

  The loss of federal funding would not be the end of it all. That’s why Anna was making her pitch. Private donors, if they found the right ones, could close the
budget gap. It was up to June to make the gap as small as possible.

  The geothermal power plant started out as the largest public works project in history. Anna had poured enough concrete to build ten Hoover Dams, run enough wire to tie Mars and Earth together twice, and dug a hole twice as deep as anything ever known. The name itself was a nod to natural beauty; the actual Yellowstone National Park was hundreds of kilometers to the northeast.

  June was in charge of the AI infrastructure. That used to mean AI programming and bot design, but lately it was more about cutting corners and finding ways to save money.

  Anna waited for the cheering to subside with a smile that glowed even at this distance. “The main plant is still a dangerous construction site. We’ll tour the prototype today. It will give you a good demonstration of what we’ll be capable of once the main plant is operational.”

  The crowd went one way, June went the other. She had work to do. When the previous administration fell victim to what everyone now called WatchtellGate, the one that replaced it had set shuttering the Yellowstone Project as one of its primary goals. It was deeply unfair. Matthew Watchtell had been instrumental in getting things off the ground, but he hadn’t been a part of the federal government for five years. Yet the plant was still seen as part of his plan, another cog in the vast conspiracies he masterminded.

  Regular people didn’t believe any of it, but the Congress and the presidency, now filled with men only interested in bankrupting the government and unleashing chaos, was another matter. They couldn’t confiscate the plant—an innovative private-public structure prevented that—but they could cut off the funding. And so they did. Taxes that were going to a project that was literally saving the world were now squandered on yet another round of useless tax cuts, which were, as always, only going to help the wealthiest of all.