John Gone (20 page)

“There is something I still fail to
understand,” Felix said.

“Ask me anything.”

“What am I working on and what am I working
on it with?”

“This is your station,” she answered,
pointing him toward three long empty tables in the main room.

“I saw these before,” he told her, “but
unless I’m to be working on the observation of furniture mating
habits across an extended timeline, I’ll need a bit more
equipment.”

“This is a good time to explain how the
system is going to work while you’re here,” Karen said, sitting on
a black stool by one of the tables. “One of my functions here is to
oversee your progress. As part of that, I’ll be the liaison between
your work and the company. You get to tell me what you need,
whether that’s test tubes or tiger testicles, and in most cases,
I’ll have it for you by the following day. Each morning at 8:00
A.M. I’ll bring you the device and your supplies, and each evening
at 7:00 P.M. I’ll be back to pick up the device for the night.”

“And what device is that?” Felix asked.

“Your project,” she said, slapping the large
manila folder she’d been carrying under her arm onto the table.
“The Diaspora.”

She opened the cover of the folder, revealing
a blue and white schematic paper-clipped to the inside flap. The
paper showed a small device at a 1:1 scale. It looked like a
wristwatch. A magnified section detailing its face appeared in the
lower right-hand corner of the page.

Felix bent down over the schematic and peered
closely into the magnified section. It looked exactly as any watch
face should, three hands seated on a rod over a basic
metallic-patterned backing.

“I’m not quite daft enough to imagine this is
simply for telling time, so perhaps you’ll enlighten me; what am I
looking at here?” he asked.

“The product of countless years of work,” she
answered. “But it’s still not finished.”

“Well, tell me what it’s supposed to do and
maybe I can fix it.”

“Oh, it already works quite well,” Karen
explained. “What we need you to do is figure out how to power
it.”

“I’ve just had a divine flash of scientific
inspiration,” Felix said. “What we need is one of those little
dime-shaped batteries you get at the mall.”

Karen raised her right eyebrow high above her
left.

“We can throw it right in the back. The
tricky part is remembering which side is positive and which is
negative. I suppose there’s that little dash on one end to--.”

“If the Felix Kala Comedy Hour is over, I’ll
continue,” she stated impatiently.

“Please,” Felix replied quietly, nodding
toward her.

“The Diaspora is a quantum transporter,” she
said. She looked coyly toward Felix and watched his mind ignite in
response to her statement. “No more jokes?” she asked, smiling.

Felix remained still and stunned,
extrapolating and processing the possibilities of such a
device.

“The process is there, but we have no way to
power it,” she continued. “Every proof we have of the device’s
functionality is on paper.”

Felix raised his hand slightly as if in
class. “May I?” he asked.

Karen nodded.

“If what you’re defining as quantum
transportation is similar to my own understanding of the, let’s
face it, hypothetical process, then the power you require to
achieve such an event is astronomical. You’d need ... ” Felix paced
his eyes left and right, performing rough calculations in his head.
“I don’t know, ten bolts of lightning, three nuclear power plants
strung together like Christmas lights; I don’t know. I just can’t
even conceive of--”

“You either need a tremendous amount of
energy,” Karen interjected, “or the right type of it.”

Felix froze. “You read my second-year
dissertation.”

“I did,” she answered.

Felix brought his right hand to his heart and
spoke half-jokingly, half-sincerely. “I’m touched.”

“It was truly remarkable,” Karen said with
more ardor than she probably intended. Her cheeks reddened.

“And the only thing I ever did in school that
got me something less than an ‘A’,” he muttered.

“But doesn’t that just cement that you were
on to something big?” she asked excitedly. “How can you expect
someone else to understand something that you were the first to
consider? It must be a truly amazing feeling.”

Felix looked confused. “Honestly, I haven’t
thought about that paper since I wrote it. I was always told that
to pursue the theory would be a waste of my efforts, so I stopped,
then I got into Curriculum B, then I ended up here.”

“That theory is what makes quantum
transportation possible,” she said. “Dr. Lawrence had a similar
idea at the start of his project. That’s why he made the device
into a wristwatch, a form perfectly suited to conduct the body’s
energy.”

“Who is Dr. Lawrence?” Felix asked.

“He, um,” she said, audibly losing the
excitement in her voice. “He was the one who pioneered quantum
transportation. He invented the device.”

“Then I would very much like to speak with
him if it’s his project I’ll be attempting to complete,” Felix
said.

“That will be impossible,” Karen said
sternly.

“Alright,” Felix replied with thrift.
Something about the tone of her response informed him that either
arguing or joking about this topic would lead nowhere but trouble.
“So where is this device?” he asked instead.

“I’ll be bringing it to you in the morning,”
she answered. Something in Karen’s voice had become deliberately
colder, and Felix ran through the last few sentences they’d spoken
at one another in an attempt to discover the culprit.

“One more thing,” she continued, “and then
I’ll leave you to become acclimated to your new environment.”

Karen walked from the room to the bedroom
area swiftly. She soon returned carrying a small crate.

“And what, pray tell, is in that crate? I’m
allergic to cats, you know,” Felix said.

“It’s not a cat.” Karen placed the crate down
onto the table. Her hands reached inside and reappeared a moment
later holding a small tortoise.

“
Geochelone nigra
, if I’m not
mistaken?” Felix asked, keeping his distance from it.

“Very good,” Karen replied. “We’ve been
calling her Isabela, from the island in the Galápagos that she came
from.”

“Isabela? That’s a terrible name for a boy,”
he said.

“A boy?” Karen repeated, flipping the
tortoise upside-down and examining it. “How can you tell? It needs
to grow another ten years at least before anyone should be able to
determine gender.” She spun the tortoise back around and continued
her examination.

“Trust me, that’s a male,” Felix said. “Now
what is it doing here?”

“It’s a requirement.”

“Having a tortoise is a requirement?”

“We call them ‘companion animals.’”

“Oh, good grief.”

“Our studies have shown--”

“Alright, just leave it on the floor if you
must.”

Karen lightly placed the tortoise on the
ground. It craned its head upward at Felix and made an odd sound
somewhere between a cat’s meow and a bray one might expect from a
dinosaur.

“What was that?” Felix exclaimed.

“Isabela has a few quirks,” she replied.
“She, sorry,
he
came from another lab. He’s been the subject
of some testing.”

“It won’t exhibit any dangerous tendencies, I
hope,” Felix said, taking a step back from the small animal.

“No, no,” Karen replied. “We’re quite careful
of that.”

“Last I checked, you people didn’t even get
its gender right.”

“An aberration, I assure you.”

“So what other little quirks can I
expect?”

Karen shrugged. Isabela stood on its hind
legs and took a step toward Karen before immediately losing its
balance and falling backward onto its shell. Felix raised his
eyebrows at Karen.

“You’ll be fine,” she assured him.

“He’ll need a better name. I don’t want him
growing up thinking he’s a lesbian when the girl tortoises start to
flirt.”

Karen laughed. “Feel free. I’ll leave you two
to get acquainted.” She turned and walked to the door. It rushed
open at her approach.

“Karen,” Felix called.

She stopped and turned back to him.
“Yes?”

“Do you have a boyfriend?”

She looked puzzled. “That’s an odd question,”
she said.

Felix shrugged at her.

“I’ll see you at 8:00,” she answered. Karen
turned and left the room. The door slid down closed behind her,
impacting the ground below with a loud
thud
. Felix looked
around at his new home.

“Four years, huh?” he said to the tortoise,
now spinning slowly on its back like a weighted top. He reached
down and stopped it before flipping it back onto its feet. It made
an odd cooing sound.

“I’ll take that as a thank you,” Felix said.
“Four years is a long time. Judging by your size, you can’t have
been down here for more than two at most, and you’re already going
crazy. You fail to inspire much of hope for my future sanity.”

Felix walked over to the big blue chair in
what he’d just decided to be the living room. The tortoise followed
near his feet like a dog.

Felix sat on the recliner’s pillowy bottom
cushion and stretched out his legs beneath him. The tortoise pushed
its front feet against his ankle until he bent down and lifted the
animal to his lap.

“What do you think, my little oviparous
friend?” he asked. “Worth it?” The tortoise turned its head to the
side and stared at Felix curiously.

“I just thought of a good name for you,”
Felix said. He placed the tortoise down on top of his thighs and
fished a black permanent marker from his left pocket.

“I think I’ll call you ‘Calendar,’” he said,
marking a thin black tally mark on the side of the tortoise’s
shell.

As John pulled into The Napoli, he looked at
his watch. It was a little past two in the afternoon. He sighed.
There was no time to tackle a conversation with his mother before
his next jump.

As he approached Ronika’s door, he looked
down at her welcome mat before knocking.
There’s no place like
127.0.0.1.

The first thing I do is go home
, he
promised,
the second I get back, if I get back at all
.

Ronika opened the door and stood in the
doorway like a wall.

“You’re back,” she said stonily.

“I am,” he responded, not sure why they were
having this conversation outside.

Ronika lightly bobbed her head as if rolling
a decision around the inside of it. Eventually, she rolled her
eyes, shrugged and moved from the entry. John walked through,
puzzled by the small encounter they’d just shared.

“That was, like, eleven hours,” she said to
him.

“I--” he began.

“He slept for almost all of the that,” Kala
interjected quickly.

Ronika’s body tensed.

“Outside in the grass,” Kala clarified.

“Why did you do that?” she asked.

“I was more tired than I thought,” John
explained.

“Did you get some quality time with your
girlfriend at least?” Ronika asked passively, sitting at her
computer and resuming the video game his knock had apparently
interrupted.

“We broke up,” John said quietly. “We saw
each other for five minutes and we broke up.” He took his place on
the couch and looked up at her ceiling fan as it spun. He tried to
follow one blade with his eyes, round and round, until he couldn’t.
Feeling dizzy, he looked down to the carpeting.

Ronika closed her game and swiveled her chair
around to face him. Her eyes appeared sad, but the rest of her
expression was more difficult to read.

“I’m sorry, man,” she said plainly. “That
sucks.”

“Thanks,” he replied.

“What about your mom?”

“If I don’t have long enough to explain all
of this, I’m afraid it’ll just make things worse,” he replied.
“I’ll go next time.”

“Sounds like I’m not going to see you much
before--” she said, stopping before finishing the thought.

“You’ll be with me the whole time,” John
said, jumping into the silence she left. “Or Mouse will anyway,
right?”

“Not this time, John,” she said. “Mouse can’t
go with you this time.”

“Why not?” John asked, standing quickly from
the couch.

“He’s broken. I must have hit something when
I was reattaching his arm. I can’t get Mouse to hold a charge for
more than a second. I need a whole new power source,” she
explained. “Then I need to replace some of the wires.”

“Let’s go to Radio Shack or something!” John
exclaimed. “Come on, we have time.”

“No, John,” she said. “This is specialty
stuff. I ordered it off the internet with the fastest shipping
possible, but its still not here.”

“You mean, I’m going alone?” he asked.

“I’m sorry, John,” Ronika said sincerely, “I
don’t know what else I can do. I don’t know how I broke it.” She
began to cry.

John was confused, but felt somehow guilty
for the tears. He ran to her chair and bent down on his knees to
hug her.

“Ronika,” he said.

“I just,” she managed between sniffles, “I
don’t want you to go out there by yourself, but I can’t fix it. You
might not even, I mean, this is the fourth. Things are getting
worse.” She wiped her running nose with the back of her hand.

“He won’t be alone,” Kala said. “I’ll be
there with him.”

John forced a smile and nodded in agreement
with the hologram, trying to abate her fears. She looked at John’s
face, then at Kala. She started crying again.

An hour later, John woke on top of a wooden
toilet seat without Mouse in his bag. He considered running his
hand beneath him, but decided against it after remembering the
unwelcome dampness of the public Port-a-Potty’s seat a day before.
Instead, he sat patiently for a few minutes, then opened his eyes
and looked around the room. Unsurprisingly, it was another
bathroom.