Moonliner: No Stone Unturned (26 page)

              “Now we just have to wait fifty-five years,” Beau tells Kendra laughing.

              “Or he could be replying right now,” Kendra responds.

Part 5
: August 2, 2069 

Vancouver BC

There’s a turning point in every summer, or a point when you realize you’ve crossed the summer’s summit and are now headed down the other side.  It affects the mind much like a mid-life crisis, only on a smaller scale, forcing us to view time from a new angle.

Cedric sits just barely beyond the peak of 2069, on a bench below a bell tower in the center of the campus quad.  It‘s August now and the school is once again showing signs of life.  Throw in the fact that it‘s a sunny Friday and you can see why; students are laughing, bicycling, tossing frisbees, reading, and doing things students do.

Cedric’s face is planted in his hands though, and he’s completely oblivious to his surroundings. There are laser generated images orbiting around his head but he seems to have lost interest them.  The bell tower chimes ten o‘clock.  He looks up for a second, then back down.

Across campus, Dr. Ridpath sits in a room with a panel of three professors, also hearing the distant chimes of the clock tower.  They all check the time and look at each other.  The room is silent.  The three panel members look at Dr. Ridpath, who shrugs and looks again at the clock, then down.

Meanwhile, a little girl stands on the sidewalk beside Cedric.  His floating images have caught her eye.  With an eye for eccentricities she stands mesmerized, watching each image rotate by.  Disobeying everything she’d been taught, but with a mature sense of sizing people up, the girl speaks to Cedric.

              “That looks hard,” she says.

Surprised, Cedric looks up and notices the girl for the first time.  He smiles.

              “It isn’t really,” he tells her.  “It’s just a lot of simple things bunched together, which makes it look hard.”

              “Is it for school?” the girl asks.

              “Yes,” Cedric answers.  “I have to show this stuff to my teachers.  But you know something?”

              “What?” the girl asks.

              “I’m late,” Cedric says.  “In fact, when that clock tower just rang, I was supposed to start my meeting with them.”

              “Uh-oh, she says,” eyes widening, “are you gonna get in trouble?”

              “Maybe,” he answers with a smile.

              “Aren’t you worried about it?” she asks.

              “I am, but I’m not ready to meet them,” Cedric answers.  “I guess I’m worried about other things more,” he adds.  “Besides, they really seem to like my project.  They might even send me to the moon to finish it.”

              “Wow, I’ve never been to the moon,” the girl comments with a big smile and eyes wide open, gesturing cutely with her arms as she speaks.

              “Neither have I,” Cedric tells her.

The girl runs off without saying anything, like kids do, into her frivolous day, taking in every turn, every face, and every crack in the sidewalk.  What impact her run in with Cedric will have on her impressionable young mind, if any, will never be known. 

For Cedric, nonetheless, it’s refreshing to have had her come along, and to have someone show a raw interest in his work, regardless of age.  He gets up, tucks his communication devices away and slowly walks away from the campus.

              “He’s had personal issues this summer,” Dr. Ridpath tells the panel as they stare at him.  One of them shakes his head in dismay.

Moonliner
5:02

There’s a DOT-5 News poster on the Skytrain car, introducing the new weekend anchor, Neda Novell.  It sits right next to a Moonliner ad.  The train pulls away from University and rapidly zips downtown.  It glides swiftly beneath the Granville Bridge and into English Bay station, where it comes to a stop as a sexy woman’s voice announces the station.  Cedric gets off.

There’s a massive clock in the shape of a pendulum hanging from under the bridge, almost all the way to the platform.  It reads 10:26 a.m.  Cedric takes the escalator down to the street level.  A little late morning fog remains over the bay.  You can smell the ocean air in the breeze.  It’s cooler but beginning to warm up again.  It feels good to be there, and to be alive, a feeling he hasn’t felt in a little while.

He walks along the waterline, letting the mindless stroll clear his busy brain.  People are already gathering, dotting the beaches.  At this latitude, summer’s window doesn’t stay open as long.  Beach-goers are well aware of this and grab as much sun as they can, while they can.  Then faintly, Cedric again hears a steel drum way off in the distance.  He smiles, again finding it is so soothing.  Slowly, he walks in the direction of the sound, almost as if he were under hypnotic suggestion.

He sits again in the distance, listening to the music and staring into the endless blue sky with his sunglasses on.  His incoming call indicator blinks, but he doesn’t respond.  Seconds later, his incoming message indicator blinks, then flashes a new message from Lennox.  Cedric listens to the message.

              “I’ll be back late Saturday night.  Let’s grab a game of golf on Sunday,” Lennox is heard saying.  “Anything under the stone?” he asks at the tail of his message.

The grin on Cedric’s face fades, knowing he hasn’t been back to the stone.

              “Hey, it’s you again,” the drummer yells to Cedric from across the lawn, now between sets and just sitting on a blanket with what appears to be her boyfriend.  They have a small radio on the blanket beside them, playing some smooth jazz.  “Come over here and talk to us,” she yells, motioning him in their direction.

Cedric gets up and walks over to them.  He sits on a concrete barrier beneath a large Magnolia tree, next to their blanket. 

              “Any luck with your problem,” the drummer asks Cedric, remembering his aura.

              “Not really, no,” he answers.

              “I’m Opal and this is Piper,” she says.

              “I’m Cedric,” extending his hand.  They do a quick slide and fist hand-gesture popular with the youth.  A low flying Skybus floats over their heads, then over the shimmering water.  They all look up, amazed at the detail they can make out as it glides so low above the horizon.

              “By the way,” Cedric says, “the drumming sounds awesome.  It’s nice to listen to you play.”

              “Thanks,” Opal says in return.

              “So Cedric, how do you spend your time?” Piper asks in a warm tone.

              “Well, I’m kind of into lasers, and optic communications,” Cedric answers.  “How about you?” he goes on to ask Piper.

              “Camping mostly;” Piper answers, “the great outdoors.”

A lull in the conversation shifts into a relaxing moment as a tenor sax solo with a nice, clear contrabass background fade into brushes on a soft crash cymbal, then silence.

             
“That was Mic 55 with She’s Sagittarius and you’re listening to smooth jazz on the
hydrogen line
,” a DJ softly says. 

News then comes over the radio.

“A lunar-based radio telescope has picked up a signal from beyond our solar system.  The signal originated 42.3 light hours from Earth, leading NASA officials to believe that it came from
Voyager One
; the first probe to leave the solar system, launched in 1977. 
Voyager One
left our solar system in 2012 and continues to hurtle away from us at a rate of 520 million kilometers per year.”

Opal, Piper, & Cedric all listen closely to the news report.

“The signal, though far too faint to be clear, seems to have come from Voyager’s Plasma Wave Subsystem, which stopped functioning over 25 years ago when Voyager’s atomic engines finally shut down.  Engineers at NASA are pleasantly baffled by the transmission, and add that even though the signal itself cannot be understood, it pinpoints the precise location of Voyager as it continues to race through inter-stellar space.  They add that the signal may have originated elsewhere, then bounced back to Earth via Voyager, but all largely consider such a scenario to be extremely less likely given the precision required to aim the transmission.”   

The radio then goes into a commercial.

“Have you done your back to school shopping?  What is it that you need to get the school year off to a great start?  Clothes?  School supplies?” 

“Hey, you’re into laser-com,” Piper says to Cedric.  “What do you think of that signal?  Where do you think it originated?”

              “I don’t know,” Cedric answers.  “What if it’s extraterrestrial?” Cedric asks.  “Would you believe it?”

              “I might, but my first thought is to doubt it,” Piper answers. 

              “Really?” Cedric responds. 

              “I’d believe it,” Opal jumps in to say; “I think it was more than likely alien.”

              “What do you think they were trying to say in the signal?” Cedric asks.

              “I don’t know.  Maybe they were warning us of something,” she answers.

              “Of an impending invasion,” Piper says with a smirk.

              “Or giving us cures to cancers and terminal illnesses,” Opal adds.

              “Maybe it was the last distress call from a dying planet?” Cedric adds to keep the conversation interesting; “we just couldn’t understand it.”

              “Oh those poor people, or whatever they are,” Opal says.

              “Or what if it didn’t come from another planet, but from another time, like the future,” Cedric asks to get their thoughts on the matter.

              “Wild concept,” Piper replies.  “How would you know for sure the message was from the future?”

              “Good question,” Cedric says lifting his eyebrows. 

Piper points out an older man also sitting near them on a concrete barrier, wearing a fedora.  His back is mostly to them and he appears to be listening to their conversation. 

Cedric is disillusioned by the guy, who seems to have shown up out of nowhere.  Who is he?  The guy, however, just gets up and walks away.

After a lengthy conversation with Piper and Opal, Cedric finally decides to excuse himself and get back home.

Moonliner
5:03

Night gradually falls as Cedric works his way home.  Two weeks’ time has absorbed a lot of the initial shock of the crash, but the loss still sits as heavily in his chest as the day Nikki’s shuttle went down.  It keeps him away from home, often reluctant to return to its emptiness; its echoes.

Deciding to walk off a lot of his excess energy as opposed to drinking it off, tonight Cedric walks along the bay and through the park before climbing onto the skyway; an elevated greenbelt that connects the entire valley.  He takes almost two hours getting home.