…When it all began, I ran into Essa back in the corridors of
ChronoDune™ Inc. as
I was walking along to my port, and Essa was just…running. Whatever it was that
has happened to her, back in the sector of Peryton, it was enough to get even
through her seasoned skin.
Make no mistake, I have views
about Essa – for someone from Peryton she is certainly subdued, but then again,
it is a practical view to take within ChronoDune™ - we tend to conflate our seasons together: one
moment it’s winter, the next – summer, then it’s autumn, and finally we’re back
to winter again. What has happened to spring, where have we misplaced it, I do
not know, and I am afraid to write to the upper management to ask. Actually, we
are all afraid – unlike our counterparts from Peryton, who actually dwell close
enough to the actual Olympus to learn what rumors are coming down and who
sometimes can actually ask the upper
management to learn as to what is going on down, or rather – up there for real.
Hm. Maybe I could ask Essa about spring? But first-
“What got you so worked up?” I asked even as I helped her
up: she was not running this fast, and she did not smack into me that hard, but
she still lost her footing and almost fell; certainly lost her tablet and
almost smacking her head against the wall… “Hunting wolves are on your trail or
something?”
“More like a swarm of smarmy vultures, ravens and magpies,
making all the noise,” Essa replied bitterly. “There are five major tears in
the narrative that we can determine, and a big metaphorical grizzly bear
sniffing around one of them already, and what do they do? They dismiss me!”
“Well, naturally,” I pointed out. “You’re a lab worker; you
do all the theory and everything else is done by other people – field agents,
mostly, but still. The end. You rang the alarm bell, your hands and conscience
are clean, what is missing?”
“I don’t know,” Essa said bitterly. “Maybe it’s the matter
that Shawn has given me an exercise bike for a birthday gift-“
“Wait,” I raised my hand. “Your birthday? It was yesterday
or tomorrow or today or in the recent chronological vicinity?”
“Yes!” She said excitedly. “It was! It was my birthday, and
I wanted us to go to Kims’ department to petition us for a baby – instead, he
got me an exercise bike!”
I thought this over. On one hand, I barely knew Shawn – I barely
know Essa, and I knew Shawn less than that, on the other hand, male solidarity
and all, and I barely knew Essa, so why should I get involved in their mess?
Essa – and Shawn - did not have a child yet. Bully. As a determined bachelor
this was one topic that I had no qualifications to discuss; plus, when I received
my appreciation award it was a treadmill
of some sort, and I certainly got my mileage out of it until time had run out
for it – literally – and I had the option to apply my superiors for higher-ranking
missions to receive enough of… everything that I needed to fix the damned
device and give it a new life. I am a chaotician. I do not do predictable and
straightforward, and I work at the Xaos sector of ChronoDune™ because it suits me –
and vice versa. My superiors can certainly foresee what choice I make and can
try to influence me… or not. Case in point – my defunct treadmill. It makes a
most formidable conversation piece ever.
…Oh wait, I do not do conversations, outings and innings,
and so on, and so forth. Long live the treadmill, put otherwise, and I continue
to do my missions as I always did – for the sake of chaos rather than money or
other manifestations of order…
“Right,” I told Essa. “An exercise bike? One that’s got a
limited amount of life, or existence, or something-?”
“Yes,” Essa nodded solemnly. “It just eats all those
credits-“
“You’re coming with me.”
Essa stared. She never looked particularly owlish – she did
have contact lenses rather than spectacles, for example – but right now she did
do her best to look like an owl right now.
“Why?” she finally managed.
“Well, how are you going to start maintaining your new
acquisition?” I raised an eyebrow. “I know a bloke who got a Peryton-level TV –
it was dead before the year was out and he needed to acquire a lot of things to
resurrect it – and it cost money, and it means working overtime, emphasis on working.”
“Which is what I do,”
Essa snapped.
“Yes, but field work costs more,” I did not back down. “Think
you will be able to keep it running on your current salary? And for long? Or
are you just going to throw it out once it dies?”
Essa stared at me for a good long while. “You’re from the
Xaos sector, aren’t you?” she muttered. “I cannot see the future… the time
lines are all tangled…”
“Is it one of the five tears that you’ve been talking
around?” I produced the address of my destination – the one that I have been
assigned to earlier today. I should have been getting there by now, but time
has a very fluid meaning in the corridors of ChronoDune™, even moreso than space does.
Essa took a good long look. “Maybe,” she drummed her
fingers. “Perhaps. Can we go there and see for ourselves what does it look
like?”
And so off we went.
/ / /
…Now, as far as my missions go, this one started at a fairly
mundane place – a garden enclosure of some rich- someone rich, (and did I
mention that I really do not like the rich?), complete with a pond. The pond
was huge, with reinforced walls and appropriately oversized lily pads floating
on top of the water, with large, pale pink flowers blooming alongside them.
Very lovely.
I pulled out my packet, one that was given to me for the
mission, and scattered its’ contents into the water. I beckoned to Essa, and
she followed suit. Where did she get her packet? I always have several spares,
whenever I get a partner. I would like to claim that I am an incredibly complex
and unpredictable character and what else have you, but the fact is that ChronoDune™ demands that everyone
and everything, (we have some odd types working here, I can promise you), has
it in extra – just in case a mission that is supposed to be solo becomes, well,
not a solo one. Have I mentioned that me working at ChronoDune™ is based largely on the
benefits of me being an agent of chaos, not on any other reason? No? Well, here
you have it, then – I work at ChronoDune™
because it permits me to be an agent of chaos, not for any other reason.
Remember that!
…Meanwhile, Essa just mutely followed my lead – first with the
packet, and then-?
Then we just sat down and concentrated. Yes, slipping into a
trance is not easy, even when you got your helmet on your head, but we managed.
The miracle! We managed, and followed the flakes as they sank into the water
and dissolved there – with our minds. And then we got contact.
A pair of eyes set in striped black and yellow armored skull
blinked, and a crocodile-like reptile began to rise to the surface even as its
body began to be subtly restructured, albeit temporarily. The second reptile in
the pond – bigger and heavier, clad in duller scutes of dull and light grey –
also blinked and followed its neighbour, flicking its tail almost lazily but
catching up to its’ smaller neighbor almost instantly, shifting and
transforming bodies irrelevant.
Slowly, we surfaced to the surface, amongst the giant lily
pads. “Now what?” Essa muttered to me via telepathy.
“Now we chaos-“ I didn’t finish, as one of the locals – a human,
thank Chaos – stumbled through the trees, visibly bleeding and collapsed,
fading fast.
“Casey!” Essa yelled out to me, even as we broke contact
with the nano-modified reptiles and raced to the victim. “He’s dying! Please
help-?” she trailed away, seeing the first aid kit in my hands. “Um-“
“You’re so lucky that Chaos is benevolently inclined towards
him,” I muttered as we dragged our saved person into our time-travelling
apparatus.
“Of course-“
“Plus, it’s one of us – there’s no orderly reason as to why
a person with a wound done by an Austro-Hungarian Hussar saber has ended up
here, in a completely different time and place.”
Essa just stared – this is no lab work, of course, but this
was also the deep end, true – and followed my lead.
TBC?
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