Pins (9)

 

Applecross, Scotland
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Sophie tugged the bathroom pull-cord. Nothing. She tugged it again. The bulb must have gone. 

She could hear Alisdair muttering to himself in the kitchen. He always got that way after a few glasses. Probably turning over compact dimensions in his head. She ventured into the dark bathroom and stood blankly for a second. She could not remember why she had gone to this room. She lifted the toilet seat up automatically, and then turned to the mirror. She pressed closer. It was hard to see in the darkness.

Her face hovered disconcertingly in the circular glass. Her pupils were snowy drops against the white sclera. She rubbed her forehead and closed her eyes. Was this a symptom? It was hard to keep track. It seemed an odd one. Her white eyes moistened and she tried to push the sadness back, before it spilled over. Time for sleep. Sleep when it got too much. Alisdair could take the sofa. He seemed pissed enough. 

She backed out into the corridor and felt along the wall for the light switches. She clicked one. Nothing. Shadows bled around her. Perhaps she'd tripped a circuit. She turned and tried to move back towards the kitchen, but realised that she couldn't remember the direction. It was weird and confusing. 

She pressed against the wall and tried to find a pocket of calm. Too much work. Sick, and too much work. Shorter pulses. Attoseconds. Metric signatures. Too much of it. She felt her way along the wall and tripped. She stood and pulled herself towards Alisdair's voice. Movement was an odd sensation, like walking through mud. 

She had thought she was moving towards the kitchen, but found herself stepping into the living room. It was shrouded in darkness. Rain was spitting at the windows, and a soft-focus fuzz of stars swam behind it. 

Alisdair was sitting on a chair to her left, by the fireplace. His hands were on his lap and he was still. Three men wearing suits and bird masks were sitting on the sofa. They looked up at her as she stumbled in. There was a crackle and a flare in the dark as Alisdair lit a cigarette.

'You're not well,' he said. 'You should rest more.'

'I've not slept yet,' Sophie said. Something glinted in the window and she moved towards it. The beaks of the three bird masks followed her as one. 

'There's something in the sky,' she said, and her voice came to her as if thrown across centuries. She had no idea how long she had been in this room. Several hours could have passed. Several years.

Alisdair blew our smoke. She could not see his face properly.

'You've not been well,' he said, and there was a static edge to his voice. 'You should sleep.'

Sophie looked at the bird-masked men. They watched her indifferently through small eye-hole slits. She eased over to the sofa opposite them and fell onto it. Alisdair nodded. She wedged a cushion under her head and rolled onto her back. A tinny screeching echoed in her ears. She looked up at the ceiling and saw that it was ribbed with white roots.

I'll have to do something about that, she thought. Sleep pulled her down.

*

Her eyes felt scratchy as they slid open. She tried to raise herself on her elbows, but her body was stripped of energy. Somebody had draped a duvet over her. 

She twisted her head on the cushion. Alisdair was sitting by the window. The three bird-masked men were watching her. Their backs were very straight. She wondered if they'd been sitting like that the whole time she'd been asleep. She laid back and watched the ceiling. The roots. Some kind of mould. It had an organic, creeper-like quality to it. White roots sprouted and coiled from dingy recesses. 

A tiny flame flickered skittishly in her brain. It felt like something was deeply, horribly wrong, but the sensation was numbed, as if shrouded in layers of bubble wrap. Still, she pushed herself to rise, flinging off the duvet. She managed no more than two steps before her legs seemed to turn to mush, and she collapsed back onto the sofa. Her head was pounding, and black fluid ran from her nostrils. A wizened hand separated from the layers of black, and sandpaper fingertips pressed against her eyelids.

'You're not been well,' Alisdair said. 'You must sleep.'

She laid back on the sofa, grateful for the advice. She wedged the cushion and looked round. Alisdair was sitting beside the fireplace again. There was something strange happening in the sky outside the window, but it seemed so far away.

'Marvellous,' Alisdair said. He had a champagne flute in his hand. Drinking again. He drank too much.

One of the bird-masked men cleared his throat.

'The van is waiting outside, Miss Stewart,' he said. 'We can't tell you how excited we are.'

'Marvellous,' Alisdair said. 'You've all worked ever so hard.'

The bird-masked men stood up, and their bodies jerked with animated gestures. They seemed to be talking, but it was happening too fast, and no sound escaped their lips. Sophie looked past them to the window. She wanted to see what was happening in the sky. It looked beautiful.

 

Bakersfield, US 
2037

The convoy passed through the night, hitting the outskirts of Bakersfield. Tree lines tore by. Rural sweeps: lonely houses; signs for yard sales; piles of car parts; spilled oil; a dead dog. 

Sophie gazed out at the depressing view streaking past. Alisdair took her hand and squeezed it. She caught a vision of the hospital walls and the sterile corridors again, and for a moment it all felt utterly ridiculous. It was like she was visiting some magic shaman or healer. The diagnosis had come at precisely the wrong time, if there could ever be a good time. She didn't want to be ill. She didn't want to be visiting hospitals, and camps in Bakersfield. She wanted to be working, fine-tuning, preparing for the departure.

She wanted to tell Alisdair, but he got so weighty and sincere when he spoke about it all. Audits and safety and change. The end of everything. They are working in tandem. 

She saw the grainy laptop image in her mind's eye, the floating monolith, and felt the familiar shudder running through her. 

Six 4x4's flanked their car, boxing them into the inside lane. They dovetailed erratically, a weave of flashing lights and yellow stripes. Clouds rolled in low. Rain speckled the windscreens. Sophie saw a dark strip splitting the motorway ahead. A barricade. The 4x4's slowed, and their own car followed them.

Six men stood before the barricade. They wore blue boiler suits, and they were tooled up with automatics and sawn-off shotguns. Sophie leaned her head against the window and watched as the passenger door of the foremost 4x4 cracked open. A man in a suit stepped out and approached the barricade. Dark fields framed the small strip of world.

The men spoke. They flashed badges. The barricade men gestured. One of them pulled out a phone. His fingertips traced the screen. The 4x4 man watched, nodded, and returned to his car.

The convoy rumbled back into motion. The lead 4x4 peeled right and ploughed into a wide dirt track separating the fields. The remaining 4x4's followed. Alisdair wheezed as the car shook and gravel snapped. A line of trees fringed the track, and branches rattled the windscreen. Tyres hissed. The lead 4x4 stopped. The door cracked and the suited man stepped out. 

Sophie felt the car grind to a halt. She looked out. Diamond-hole fencing was erected around the field to their right, and striped yellow tape criss-crossed the area. There was a large geodome marquee in the centre of the field. 

'Oh well,' Alisdair said. 'What's the Scottish equivalent of stiff upper lip?'

Sophie unclipped her seatbelt and watched the people in biohazard suits and gas masks moving over the field.

'Help ma boab?' Alisdair said.

The suited man opened Alisdair's door and greeted him enthusiastically. Sophie stood shivering in the rain. They were taken to a tent where they were outfitted in beige hazmat suits and gas masks. Sophie looked at Alisdair through the lenses. 

'Everything's been audited, huh?'

'To within our working knowledge,' he said, pointing at her.

He shouldered a satchel bag and clicked a torch on. They crossed the field to the geodome. Generators thrummed. A man in a biohazard suit nodded to them as they ducked through the entrance. The membrane cover fluttered in the wind, and moonlight leaked through the portholes. Sophie stepped nervously and coughed inside the mask. There were a number of distinct piles of earth on the grassy floor of the geodome, and little coloured electronic markers placed beside them. 

Alisdair shrugged the bag off and lifted his tablet out. 

'Pinned around 1850, apparently,' he said. 

'Strange to think,' Sophie said. She couldn't take her eyes off the piles of earth. Alisdair looked up at her.

He was silent for a second, holding his tablet.

'Yes,' he said. 'I suppose it is.'

Sophie crossed the geodome and stood beside him as he tapped the screen. His fingers moved through a carousel of files. He selected one. He keyed in a password and clicked. He keyed in another password. A spiderish outline of a hand fuzzed onto the screen. He placed his palm on it. The screen glowed, and a document loaded.

- CLASSIFIED -

- EXEMPT FROM DECLASSIFICATION per E.O. 11552, S (E) (2) 

TURNER / CIA / 28 JAN 2008 -

- HD 85512B MONOLITH / 'PINS' / 'PINNING' / SPECIAL REVIEW -

Sophie watched as he scrolled. The document was heavily redacted. Black boxes obscured walls of text. Alisdair's sigh was muffled within the mask. He rummaged in his bag, withdrew a small tin box, and removed a micro card from it.

He slid the micro card into the tablet slot and held it until it locked into place. His fingers traced glyphs across the screen. The black boxes disintegrated. The redacted text clarified. He scrolled. He absorbed. He laid the tablet on the grass.

Sophie crossed her arms over her chest as he cut a confused path around the interior of the geodome, mapping out measurements and angles. He calculated. He went back to the tablet. He entered the data. He processed it, crunched numbers, and re-calculated.

The moon strobed above the marquee. Alisdair reached into one of the clumps of earth and jerked his arm. He came up holding a small pin with a tiny spherical tip. He walked over to Sophie and held it out for her to see. She stared down at the miniscule black cylinder. 

'I'm feeling a little too anxious right now to provide an appropriately amazed response,' she said.

Alisdair clamped his hand shut.

'I understand. Like I said, we can only remove two. We haven't had too much experience of different shapes. There are simulations being run. It's maybe wise not to get bogged down with them at this juncture. Getting all excited about possibilities. We shall stick with the original shape today. A few seconds should be all you need.'

Sophie felt her stomach tighten. Alisdair kept one eye on his tablet. He paced out and plunged the pin into the grass. He moved and double-checked the data.

'The important thing,' he wheezed, 'is to be absolutely precise.'

'Or what?' Sophie said. Her breath came ragged within the mask.

'Or... nothing,' Alisdair mumbled. 'I suppose it just doesn't work. I also suppose we don't know the different forms it may take. It's a process. But certainly it simply appears to be inactive, unless the shape is structured correctly.'

He stooped. He lifted a pin and re-punctured the earth with it. Sophie was aware of a static crackle around them. There was a sudden, heavy whump sound, and she flinched. A fuzzy black thread trailed from the pin. Alisdair stood and walked around the geodome. The pins were connected by the thread.

He rubbed his neck. Everything turned monochrome for a split second, and Sophie felt a sudden dizziness. She sank down to her knees and watched the trembling black threads. Alisdair observed her for a moment, and then tugged a pin out of the earth.

The black threads disappeared. Sophie exhaled. She looked down at her gloved hands. Rain pittered on the ceiling. 

'Was that... it?' she said. 'I don't... I don't feel any different.'

Alisdair was scrolling through the tablet again.

'That was auditing,' he said. 'You have to go inside the shape, Sophie.'

 

 

https://www.abctales.com/story/stephen-thom/pins-10