NOVEL NEXT Volume 1 Epilogue
She wakes up and begins the gradual indignity of getting out of bed. The thing about getting older isn't so much the aches. They're manageable—it's fine. She knew those sorts of pangs would come, with age. She prepared for them.
It's more the absence of the why that galls her. She does not like mysteries. Why is her neck so stiff? Where did that come from? Was it from some way she moved? Or just how she slept? Her posture?
Maybe it's just the headache her life has become, physicalizing itself. Stress response.
Nothing to worry about for too much longer. Things are being rearranged. She'll be dealt with, she imagines.
With the humiliations of age properly pondered, she's up, and Lordling is underfoot as he loves to be, grumbling about food.
He catches a claw on her pants as she pulls them on. "One thing at a time, hellion," she says, chidingly.
She really ought to put some thought into where he'll go. Check around with the neighbors, perhaps. Tell them—what? She's taking a little vacation. It might be fun to blow the top off everything. An interesting way to go, perhaps. But she'd end up a tabloid curiosity, and she'd probably get the neighbors liquidated. So perhaps not.
Was it cats that eat your face when you die, or was it dogs? She steeps her breakfast tea and tries to remember.
"Will you eat my face when they bump me off, Lordling?" she asks.
"Murmnaunm," he says, which is the sort of vocalization he makes when he's disappointed in her. Join the club.
She's ninety seconds into her teabag vigil when her phone goes off. Not her normal phone. The phone she keeps in her blazer. The one she assumed would never go off again.
Her ridiculous, irrational stomach ties itself off into a neat little bow.
"Today it is, then," she says to Lordling, and stands.
She digs the phone from her pocket and hits the green button.
"How did you get this number?"
"We were pinged." The voice on the other side. Not a familiar one, but they never are. "Just now. The T-5. Fifteen seconds within range."
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"Fifteen—"
Helen sprints to her living room and opens her laptop. God dammit, where's her glasses. God dammit, where's the charger thing.
"Fifteen seconds," she says. "What was it doing?"
"What were they doing. B-31 and B-32. You'll see the signal path. Either the device has a malfunction or our guests are faster-than-light."
"I'd call that a coin toss. We still barely understand what the hell we're tinkering with." She finds the cord under a stack of Vogues and plugs her computer in. "He's still with her, then."
"Possibly," the phone says. "Or his remains, or they extracted the chip."
"Now why would they do that?" She hits the power button.
"Counter-intel."
"Counter-intel." She scoffs and shakes her head. "Really. We're infants to them. If those chips are still inside the subjects, it's because they can't be assed to care about our primitive technology, and can't imagine we'd reverse-engineer anything from T-1."
"He might be dead. And dissected."
"Why would they go through the trouble of sparing him, taking him, and then killing him?"
"Why did we go through the trouble of sparing him, taking him, and then leaving him alive?" The voice's flat grind speaks to a computer-generated source. Perhaps Helen's reading the emphasis. "Considering you couldn't keep him from slipping the net."
"You, he says." She smirks. "No. If it was me, I'd be gone. Let's not pretend. I'd been wondering why I wasn't, in fact. Everyone else is. Everyone our little unaccounted variable didn't massacre. I've kept tabs."
No reply.
"It was a mistake to pull the plug," she says. "We should have let him carry her off. More uptime, less blood, same result."
"He was about to expose us."
"We selected for that. Low institutional trust, no connections, no expertise. He was googling how to whistleblow at a library, for God's sake. You saw the eval."
"You saw the phone."
"Your people went knuckle-dragger. Hooting at a lit torch, right at the moment we could have broken through."
"We're not relitigating Archer West."
"No," she says. "No, I understand. You've stumbled into an opportunity. Something that dwarfs whatever we might have expected from our little xenopsychology trial. And whatever cat's-paws we've had to cut off." She casts a look at Lordling, who greets her metaphor with feline indifference. She plucks her teabag from its mug. "And you still need me."
"Are you logged in yet?"
Helen watches the wheel spin. "I would be, if you'd budgeted for a computer from the 21st century. What's waiting for me? Did we pull anything in from those fifteen seconds?"
"Fragments. Audio is doing what they can."
"And you want my take?"
"File's on the desktop."
Helen sees it. Her hand shakes as she double-clicks.
Muffled voices. Nonsense words. But close enough, she thinks, to the voices on the recordings. The language B-31 spoke to B-32.
She furrows her brow and replays the file. "That is Thirty-Two," she says. "Pull the voice from the Archer West tapes and compare it, but I swear to God it's Thirty-Two. Thirty-Two speaking their language. And Thirty-One talking back."
She settles back onto the couch. Her heart is galloping. She pulls her horn rimmed glasses off and fiddles with the arms, folding and unfolding them.
"Grant Hyde is alive," she says. "He's alive and he's speaking Taiikari."