John Gone (31 page)

Felix loved working with seeds. His first
major breakthrough as a scientist had been made through DNA tests
performed on the same type of tulip seed he now held before him.
Ever since, he’d never undertaken a project without making sure to
have some on hand, just in case. They were more than a good luck
charm to him; often, they were actually practical. He’d asked for
the seeds from Karen on the second day of his stay in the facility.
He was hoping she didn’t remember.

It was almost 8:00 A.M. the following morning
and Felix still hadn’t allowed himself to sleep. Instead, he’d
occupied his time with a small project, something to keep him awake
and busy while his mind cycled through the endless possibilities
and contingencies of his escape plan.

Felix had thought again and again about
trying to tell Karen his plans at many times throughout the
night.

Just enjoy the time that you have with
her
, he imagined a fictitious friend would advise him. He’d
never found any comfort in the ephemeral and saw nothing beautiful
about never seeing Karen again after two years. But as much as he
didn’t want to leave her, he knew that it was much too risky to
tell her the truth.

It could cost me everything
, he’d
reminded himself throughout the night.
Her as well.

Felix had finally come to the conclusion
around 4:00 that morning that if Karen was to be involved in any
way with coming events, she’d have to be the one to approach him,
not the other way around. It would be the only way that he could be
sure of both her resolve and the ultimate safety of his escape.

Felix snuck a finger beneath his protective
eyewear and pulled a hardened piece of sleep from the corner of his
eye. The substance had been creeping into his tear ducts all night,
tugging on his eyelids and reminding him of how tired he was.

Tomorrow night I can sleep
, he told
the small green fleck on the tip of his finger.
And I don’t need
the discharge of some vestigial second eyelid to interfere with my
vision before then.

Felix flicked the mote across the room and
returned to his project. In front of him stood a metal cylinder,
nine inches in height. Two sides of it were open, revealing a
spacious view through its inside. Two mirrors had been placed at
the top and bottom of the machine, and between them was a thin
plastic tube containing a shiny, powdered metal. A few circuit
boards hid beneath the bottom mirror, serving as a point of
connection for the two cords running into the cylinder: one a
typical power cord, the other a blue and white multi-pin male
input.

The door across the room whirred open. Karen
approached him from the entrance, her eyes refusing to make contact
with Felix’s.

“Good morning,” she said as she reached his
workstation. “Here is the device.” Karen placed the metal box
containing the watch onto the tabletop.

“What is this?” she asked coldly, noticing
the small machine Felix had built since last she’d been there.

“Karen, I--” Felix began.

“I don’t want to talk about last night, Dr.
Kala,” she interrupted, looking toward the ceiling. “I would
appreciate it if you would refrain.”

“I wasn’t going to,” Felix replied honestly.
“I was going to ask you to sit so that I could answer that
question.” He gestured to the small black stool on the other side
of the table where Karen normally sat during his exhibitions.

“Oh,” she said. “Good.” She sat at the table
and examined the small device with her eyes. “I’ll ask again, what
is this?”

“I’ll show you,” he answered quietly, a thin
smile on his lips. He opened the metal box that Karen had brought
with her and removed the watch from its inside.

“Watch,” Felix said. “No pun intended.”
Karen’s expected giggle was decidedly absent.

With the quick turn of four tiny screws,
Felix opened the back of the Diaspora, and carefully removed a
coiled blue and white cable from amidst the circuitry. He connected
it easily to the cable coming from the cylinder he’d built the
night before. Nothing happened.

“Well?” Karen asked.

“It will probably take a few minutes to warm
up. And this might help.” Felix found the end of the cylinder’s
power cord and plugged it into the plated socket in the floor. The
cylinder emitted a slight buzz while a faint blue light appeared
between its mirrors. Karen raised her eyebrows at Felix,
unimpressed.

“Patience,” he assured her.

“While we’re waiting for that to do whatever
it is that you think it’s going to do, why don’t we go over your
requisitions,” she said, pulling a large, thick folder from under
her arm and dropping it to the surface between them. She looked up
from her paperwork and made eye contact with Felix for the first
time since the night before. The buzzing from the cylinder became
louder.

“Well? What do you need me to bring you
tomorrow?” she asked, uncapping the pen she’d pulled from her
pocket.

Felix sighed, annoyed with her composure.
He’d known that this morning wasn’t going to go smoothly, but
hadn’t expected sheer frozen denial.

He pulled his list of the components he
needed from the notebook located in the shallow table drawer beside
him and listed each one to her. Karen nodded and wrote them down on
the form in her folder, failing to notice the one suspicious
component that he’d slipped into the middle of his list.

“Is that everything?” she asked.

“Look,” Felix replied, shifting her attention
to the buzzing cylinder. The dim light from before had become
intensely bright, filling the machine completely as if it were
water in a jar. The buzzing halted abruptly and the machine began
to run eerily silent.

“That’s what we were waiting for,” he said.
Karen looked into the small core of bright light. It was beautiful,
and there was something within it, shadows behind it that seemed to
dance against the glow. She looked through the light to Felix and,
for a moment, saw him much older than he was now, speaking to
someone, but muted past the machine.

“Don’t,” Felix said, breaking her trance. “In
my experience, it’s easy for people to be drawn toward quantum
fields, but what you see through them is often inaccurate. They can
give the impression of foretelling the future, but there are no
secret truths or answers there. You can sometimes see things on the
other side as older or younger, infantile or dead. None of it is
relevant, but the brain dictates a person’s reality, and the brain
trusts the eye.”

“I know,” she said defensively, averting her
eyes from the field. “At first, I just wasn’t sure what I was
looking at.”

“Then you probably also know,” Felix
continued, “that the effect occurs because everything and everyone
exists in different states simultaneously. And that, of course, is
the theory behind this watch.” He raised the Diaspora into his
hands, careful not to disconnect the cable. “The device doesn’t
actually make you teleport; it simply changes your state. Do you
want to use it to travel to China? Well, you’re already in China.
You’re simultaneously at every location you could be. All this
device does,” he said, placing it carefully back down onto the
table, “is force you between those states. And because an entity
can’t perceivably co-exist in two states, the user appears to
disappear from where they started.”

“Yes, you’ve said the same in your reports,”
Karen replied. “But I still don’t understand what this thing is
that you’ve built. A quantum field generator? Why?”

“While looking through the field can cause
odd visual apparitions, physically touching or entering it can
cause an actual change in state. If you can understand that you
exist everywhere at once, then you can also understand that you
exist every
when
at once as well. At this exact moment you
are an infant, a teen, and an aging senior, all at the same time.
We only perceive the young, beautiful version of you because that’s
where our perceived realities intersect with each other. That’s the
constraint and function of time.”

Felix looked past the light to Karen and saw
her as she’d been at sixteen: short and pimpled. He chuckled
quietly to himself and continued.

“Quantum fields such as these have no
interaction with linear time, so entering them will cause each
state to exist simultaneously, even in our reality. But because we
can only perceive one state at a time, as I stated before, we can
actually take something and give it the appearance of aging or
regressing. When we remove it from the field, that illusion becomes
what we then perceive as reality. Are you still with me?”

“I believe so,” she said quietly. “But isn’t
this dangerous? Can’t we cause some form of paradox that risks the
entire fabric of space and time?”

“Rubbish,” Felix said. “Hollywood stuff. It’s
the same as time travel. You can’t actually create a paradox even
if you were to affect something. Everything we do, even outside of
an open quantum field, is causing major implications everywhere in
the universe. Think of your life as an infinitely complex spider
web. Each strand in that web represents a different path. One
strand might have you elected President; the one beside it has you
wearing red shoes on a Tuesday.

“Your life, as you know it, is a dewdrop
sliding down the web. Time is gravity, pulling it across the
strands. Which strands will it travel across as it falls?
Everything from which country wins a world war to how much butter
you put on your toast yesterday effects the drop’s direction.

“Now, imagine the same web for everyone and
everything in the universe. And to make things more complicated
still, imagine them all intersecting with each other at different
points. There’s exactly one point where every other web intersects
with your own, and that’s the reality that you’re able to perceive
at any given time. If consequences follow our use of this small
quantum field in front of us, then the change would be as
unperceivable to us as the consequences caused by someone sneezing
in the U.S.S.R. Are we changing things by opening this field and
playing with it? Of course. Are there world ending repercussions?
No.

“Now, the reason for all of this.” Felix took
the small bag of tulip seeds from his pocket. He carefully spilled
a few onto the table and lifted one from the group with a long pair
of steel pincers.

Slowly, he moved the seed from the table into
the blue light of the cylinder. Karen watched as he released it and
saw the seed remain supported within the light, floating buoyant
within it, bobbing and warbling against its energy. Felix removed
the pincers, and Karen looked in amazement at the tips of the tool,
now rusted and bent. As Felix set the pincers down, its powdery
tips crumbled from the handle.

“The seed, not the tool,” Felix said quietly.
Karen quickly returned her attention to the glowing cylinder. The
seed’s movement had intensified since she’d looked away.

She moved her face closer to the light as the
seed coat shook and split open at its center. What appeared to be a
small white tentacle emerged from the newly created opening in its
shell. The tentacle, now more obviously a root, twisted and turned,
soon joined by other smaller roots both beside it and on its sides.
Then: bright green, shooting out tall from a white base, curving
around itself like soft, curled paper. The thin spiral leaves grew
taller and taller, unfurling and expanding outward to the height of
the machine.

Felix sat back in his chair and watched the
scene unfold with an equal intensity as Karen, but focused his
attention on the beautiful woman sitting across from him and her
reaction to the flower instead of the machine. He’d already seen
his own parlor trick many times in the past, and watching her face
light up, as his own had many years ago, was much more rewarding.
Then, he saw her smile.

I knew you were hiding that somewhere
,
he thought, victorious.

The leaves and stalk had finished growing and
a small yellow bulb was now showing from the top of the leaves, as
a child peering above the edge of its blanket. The petals expanded
outward in a burst before settling into a rounded cup shape.

Felix detached the power cord with his foot
and placed his hand beside the machine. As the blue light faded
from the cylinder, a newly formed tulip dropped lightly into his
open hand. He spun it once quickly between his fingers and offered
it to Karen, still in shock from the accelerated growth. She looked
apprehensively at the tulip before her and moved her eyes above it
to Felix. He nodded reassuringly.

Carefully, she took the flower by its stem
and lifted its petals to her face. She breathed in heavily through
her nose.

“It smells real,” she said under her
breath.

“It
is
real,” he said, pleased with
himself.

She lightly placed the flower across her open
folder on the table in front of her.

“Why did you do this?” she asked, looking
down at the tulip.

“You said you missed the plants,” he
answered.

“It’s not for the device? You built this
whole machine just for this flower?”

“Yes.”

Karen sat across from him, motionless,
staring down to the beautiful yellow petals in front of her. She
closed her eyes. Felix watched intently as her brow began to furrow
and her lips began to pucker. He‘d seen this face before. It was
the face she’d made before crying on his couch last night. She was
going to cry again, and this time he would comfort her. This time
he would hold her and speak to her, he’d tell her that everything
would work out in the end, and that she didn’t have to be scared of
the feelings they shared. This time, he was ready.