The Echo Chambers, 45

He sighed. “Our roles here are not as grand as all that. We, each of us—” his gesture included Clare and Sam, “—help facilitate the transfers. We’re technicians.”

“Transfers?”

“The arrivals. For the vill—for people like Ji.”

Her eyes narrowed. “What didn’t you say just now?”

“Villein,” Ji said before Dan could speak. “It’s what I am.”

“It’s your word for anthropologist?”

“You could say that. We don’t really have anything that translates exactly.”

Clare took a step toward her. “Lyssa, he isn’t—”

“I’m not talking to you.” Her words were clipped, her mouth tight, as she turned hot eyes on her friend.

She flushed. “I just—”

“No. No, you don’t get to talk. Not now.” Her anger burned too bright to be swayed by Clare’s wide, hurt eyes or the way they began to gleam with unshed tears. Clare’s throat worked and then she turned and walked out on unsteady legs without another word.

Sam cursed quietly. “Was that really necessary?” he asked her as he followed his wife.

She turned to Dan, silently daring him to challenge her temper. Instead, he offered a small, sad smile and stood. Without a word, he left.

Lyssa pressed a hand to her eyes and realized she was shaking. A long breath, then another, and she felt calm enough again to raise her head. Ji watched her, one hand on the table and the other on his knee, patient and relaxed. “If this is some sort of sick joke—”

“You saw the technology. Watched my colleague’s heart beating from one room over. Tell me, have you ever heard of technology like that?”

“How did you know what I saw?”

“You think our technology lacks security?”

“Surveillance?”

He nodded.

“So you didn’t find me by accident.” She blew out a heavy breath and tapped her fingers on the tabletop. “I’ll admit I haven’t seen anything like that, but that doesn’t mean that someone  somewhere hasn’t designed it.”

“Well, naturally.”

“I meant here.”

He shrugged a shoulder. “I didn’t.”

“Right.” She leaned back in her chair and mimicked his pose, trying for the same easy posture. “So let’s just say it’s true and not some twisted, expensive, horribly complicated prank—”

“Yes, lets,” he said, not quite able to keep the amusement from his voice despite the straight face.

“—Then how does it work exactly? Is it a ‘Beam me up, Scotty’ situation or like a ‘quantum leap’ or what?”

His brow creased. “Those are popular culture references, correct? I have more difficulty accessing those.”

“Accessing? Nevermind,” she said when he opened his mouth to explain. “Later. Right now I want to know how you go about jumping around different dimensions. What’s the magic spell that makes you go poof, Houdini?”

“Threose mesh. It’s a special material that can be tuned to the frequencies of the various dimensions and transfer whatever it surrounds between the planes.”

“Right,” she said, drawing out the word. “So it’s cloth.”

“Put simply, yes.”

“Magic cloth.”

“Not magic.” He leaned forward, his expression earnest now. “It’s the result of generations of scientific study and technological advancement. Our greatest achievement. Threose mesh is constructed of something similar to what you’d call a bio-nano-chip, suspended in living tissue that—”

“Wait. Living tissue?” She asked, her nose wrinkling.

“Yes, it’s—” At her growing look of disgust, Ji stood. “Come. I’ll show you.”

“I don’t think I—”

He left the room without letting her finish, betting that her curiosity would overcome her distaste. He didn’t know where the others had gone, and he didn’t see them as he passed through the hall and entered the empty Echo Chamber that Lyssa had explored first. Turning on the lights, he watched with satisfaction as she trailed behind him.

The Echo Chambers, 44

Ji turned and walked from the room, pleased and oddly humbled when Lyssa didn’t hesitate to follow.

“You said he’s sick. What’s wrong with him?”

“Not sick. His body has had a shock, a symptom of which can be severe nausea among others. He’ll need a few days to recover, but he’ll wake up feeling well.”

“What kind of shock?”

He wasn’t certain what compelled him to reveal the truth to Lyssa, or what he could of it. While she wouldn’t be the first dresi to be told of the myriad worlds, she was the only one he’d chosen. Was it because of her relationship to Clare, knowing it’d be a relief to the young, naive technician to be able to speak freely to her friend? He decided it was, even though, when Lyssa looked at him in that silent, penetrating way she had sometimes, he felt her clear through to his bones. Some villeins operated solely by reason, but Ji had long ago learned to follow his instinct when pulled hard enough, so however he’d come to the decision, it’d been made, and he saw no reason to postpone it any longer. “Perhaps we should join the others in the kitchen. I can explain over a cup of tea.”

 

A low buzz hummed in her ears, underneath all the words. Maybe she hadn’t heard right. “A parallel universe.”

“Yes.” Ji didn’t shift in his seat across the small dinette table. He sat relaxed, one arm resting along the tabletop. His dark eyes stayed level and calm.

Lyssa’s gaze darted to Clare, who still hovered near an old fridge, twisting her fingers together until her knuckles bleached. Her face had gone white when she’d seen Lyssa follow Ji into what used to be a break room and now served as a makeshift kitchen. Her color hadn’t returned, save for two twin spots high on her cheeks. She tried for a smile when she met Lyssa’s gaze, but the effect bordered on sickly. It was enough to tell Lyssa that her friend, at least, believed. And because looking at Clare made those feelings of betrayal, anger, and loss rise again, she looked away.

“You do know how crazy this sounds.” She told Ji.

“No, I’m afraid not. We were all raised with the knowledge of the dimensions. Of the four of us, only Clare is born of this world.”

“What?” The claim jolted through her, and she swung her gaze to the man leaning against the counter. “Sam?”

He, too, looked startled by Ji’s words, then sheepish, his dark eyes apologetic as he shrugged broad shoulders. “A’sa na koorus. He speaks the truth.”

She turned to Dan next, sitting to her right where he’d sat silently through the whole exchange. “I’m sorry, hon. It’s true. Though you shouldn’t know about it.” He tossed Ji an accusatory look.

The buzzing in her ears pitched higher, drowning out all other sound, and she looked back at Ji. He was the eye of the storm, a calm center in the midst of upheaval, and she stared at him until the buzzing faded again. He gave her time, silencing Clare with a lifted hand when she began to speak.

“So you—all of you—” she refused to exempt Clare “—are from this—this other planet?”

“Dimension,” Ji said again. “Same planet, different… realities.” His brow creased as he frowned slightly, the only indication of his frustration as he waded through the words. “Your lexicon doesn’t accommodate an adequate explanation yet. Our worlds are layered, one over the other. We exist in the same space, only on different…frequencies.”

“Like a radio,” Lyssa said.

“Yes!” Pleased by the analogy, he leaned forward and smiled. “The sounds are there. You just need to know how to tune into the stations.”

“And this is a station.”

“Both literally and figuratively.”

She crossed her arms over her stomach. “I don’t believe you.”

Ji only nodded. “Few do at first.”

“Why?”

“It seems a difficult concept for some—”

“No, I mean why are you here? What purpose would any of this have?”

“Ah.” An easy enough question to answer with a partial truth. “To study.”

Lyssa thought about that. Same world, he’d said, but different realities. All the variations of the world, all the different possibilities of humankind manifested, and yes—she could understand that. “So you travel and study how each world is different. Like an inter-dimensional anthropologist.”

This time he smiled fully, the corners of his eyes creasing as it flashed and faded, and he blinked at her a second, as if surprised by his own reaction. “You have a way of phrasing things perfectly.”

She stared at him, her gaze caught in his. “Thank you.” She couldn’t speak for a moment, and then something twisted in her chest, and she cleared her throat as she shifted her eyes to Dan. “Is that what you’ve been doing here? Studying?”

The Echo Chambers, 43

When he paused again, Lyssa waited, sensing he battled some inner protest as he stared at his colleague without seeming to see him. “What can I say that will convince you to leave?” he asked. “Forget you ever saw this place?”

“Do you work for the government?” she asked instead. “The FBI? CIA? Something like that?”

He looked at her this time, his head cocked with the distant look she’d come to realize was him searching for words, the absent glaze of his eyes like someone trying to remember where he’d put his car keys or whether he’d left the oven on at home. Within seconds, his expression cleared and a small smile lifted the corners of his mouth. “No. Nothing like that.”

“Some other agency then.”

He shook his head. “I work for a higher power than your government.”

“Crap. You’re in a cult.”

That brief distant expression again, his gaze turning inward and out in a moment’s hesitation. Then another smile, this one suspiciously charmed. “No. Not quite.”

“What does that mean?”

“Religion, science, technology—they’re more alike than anyone realizes. Each can be taken to an extreme that you may designate as cult-like. Our pantheon of gods, where one cannibalize the others, claim false the truths that speak through them.”

She studied him. “You sound like someone in a cult.”

Again that barely-there smile. “My apologies. I’ve had much time to think about it.”

Lyssa considered this a moment, still aware of the unconscious man resting between them. “And which do you serve?”

“All.” He paused. “And none.”

This exchange had long reached ridiculous. “I told you, I don’t want riddles.”

“Ah, but our conversation is still philosophical, is it not?” He inhaled slowly, expanding his lungs, a cleansing breath that had Lyssa thinking—oddly—of a martial artist preparing for a match. Ji turned to her fully, his gaze steady on hers. “I serve a soul named Sheng, and to do so, I must serve all three. So all, but none.”

“You serve a soul.”

“Yes.”

Unease shivered down her spine. “A…human soul?” Even as she asked, she couldn’t believe it even had to be a question.

“An ancestral soul,” Ji said, his gaze faraway again. “Perhaps a god. Or, yes, maybe a human soul. An ordinary, everyday human. Wouldn’t that be something?” The faint tug of a smile around the lips again at his own rhetorical question, and then his gaze focused, sharpened instantly on the man in the bed who’d suddenly sighed in his sleep. “We should leave.”

Lyssa looked at him, too. “Can he hear us?”

“No.”

Didn’t they always tell people in the movies that the coma patient could hear them? “You sound confident.”

“Because I know. Come. Let us leave him to rest.”

The Echo Chambers, 42

The breathing did not alter as Lyssa waited, uncertain and scared. In the waiting, her eyes adjusted to the dark, and she saw a human form in the bed that stood as its twin had in the other room. His breathing did not alter; he didn’t move at all, and, running on instinct, her body tense, she flipped the switch.

 A man lay in the hospital-style bed, bald, well-muscled, and eerily still save for the slow, even breaths of one in deep sleep. When he didn’t react to the light, Lyssa began to ease into the room, watching him closely. Something about him seemed… off. Artificial. She stood two feet from the foot of the bed before she realized that it was his sleep that seemed unnatural, the breaths too evenly spaced, the body too still. She’d never seen someone on life support, but she imagined they’d look something like this, only this man was connected to no machines. He lay on top of the sheets still tucked with hospital corners, and he wore a shirt and pants in loose, white linen, his feet bare, and the hairs on her neck rose as she remembered meeting Ji in an outfit like that one.

“You should not be here.”

She gasped and whirled around to find Ji in the doorway, watching her, his expression impassive.

“I—” No excuse came to her, no explanation both credible and innocent. Her heartbeat pounded in her temples, and she realized that her hand had gone to her throat. She dropped it and, at a loss, could only stare at him. Her body felt both light and heavy, and she shifted her weight to the balls of her feet, thoughts skittering as she acknowledge how little she knew of this man, this powerful, silent man who now stood between her and the only exit.

Ji stepped forward into the room but stopped when Lyssa stepped back, keeping the distance between them. “You should not be here,” he said again, “but I will not harm you.” Slowly, deliberately, he moved sideways into the room, clearing the way to the door while still keeping his distance.

Lyssa studied him as he stood silent now, letting her take his measure with not sign of impatience or agitation despite the admonition of his words. He frightened her, yes, but as her heart calmed she realized she didn’t feel threatened by him. Strange how the distinction had never occurred to her before.

Still, better to be cautious even as her curiosity waxed and her fear waned. She turned enough to keep Ji in sight even as she glanced at the man on the bed. “Is he okay?”

 

That that should be her first thought surprised him. She stood as tense as a doe catching the scent of a wolf, and yet she worried for another. “Yes. He’s in an induced sleep is all.”

“Is he hurt?”

“Yes. And no.” He moved closer to the bed, keeping his eyes on Cale even as he watched her watching him in his peripheral. “He would be suffering from acute nausea were he conscious. He’s asked to sleep through it.”

“Who is he?”

“A colleague.”

“And who are you?”

He faced her then, startled to find her gaze suddenly piercing. Their steady intensity unnerved him, felt fierce and familiar and unknown all at the same time. “Ji.”

“You’re more than that.”

“Only as you are more than Lyssa.”

“I don’t want riddles.”

“Then don’t ask philosophical questions.”

Lyssa narrowed her eyes, but her shoulders relaxed, a minute shift that had Ji offering her a small smile. “You’re not related to Clare or Dan, are you?” she asked.

He considered, fleetingly, of lying. But something about her tugged at the truth of him, and he felt almost relieved to be unburdened of it. “I should insist that I am, but no. I am not.”

“Why shouldn’t you be honest about that?”

Ji didn’t answer right away, his gaze drawn to the unconscious Cale. He drew in a slow breath, wishing he’d had more time in her world before his had intruded. “Because it is safer that way.”

He sensed rather than saw her focus sharpen to a honed edge. “For who?”

“For us all.”

The Echo Chambers, 41

Possibilities reduced to 2,863.

Ji ignored Mesa, scrolling through the list of names on the screen in front of him. Considering he’d culled this list from an original of several million collected by Sam from hospital records, blood banks, government agencies, private companies, and other miscellaneous sources, less than three thousand should be respectable, but it was still too many.

A hand dropped on his shoulder. “How’s it going?” Sam asked.

Slang. Possible meanings: what is your emotional status; how—

Silence, Mesa. Ji straightened and turned as Sam sat next to him and glanced at the screen. “Tediously. But you’ve cut my time here substantially with the amount of data you’ve been able to provide. I’m impressed.”

He grinned, the expression one of unrepentant pride. “I’m damn good at my job.”

“You are.” Ji relaxed back into the chair, studying Sam as the other man leaned against one of the desks. “In fact, I have to wonder how you ended up here.”

Sam shrugged one big shoulder. “This isn’t the worst place I could end up. Not by a longshot.”

“No. But it’s not one that, shall we say, attracts the most ambitious of technicians.”

Though he didn’t move, a hint of warning appeared in the slight tightening around Sam’s eyes. “You don’t have to be ambitious to be good at your job.”

Ji had a feeling that further subtlety would only piss Sam off.

Slang efficacy at eighty-nine—

Shut up, Mesa.

“I’m here to observe,” Ji said, meeting Sam’s eyes with a direct and steady gaze. “To pay attention to details, collect information, even be an impartial judge when the situation calls for it. And what I see is isolation, outdated technology, one technician who hasn’t handled a transfer in decades, and one who wouldn’t pass her first examination back on Prism. Then there’s you.” Without turning, he reached out to touch a button on the screen to bring up Sam’s dossier. He saw the other man glance at it as he laid his arm back on the armrest. “Top five percent of your training year, high marks on every review for the first three years, chosen to transfer to Omega-85—the general populace has started petitioning the council to open it up as a resort, by the way—and yet, here you are.”

“Here I am.”

“Some might say this assignment was a punishment.”

“Most would.” He grinned again, sudden and mischievous. “I wouldn’t, especially not after meeting Clare. Who, by the way, cannot be blamed for her lack of training.”

“I don’t blame anyone except the people on Prism who lost Dan and his wife in the first place.”

Sam nodded. “Then we’re in agreement with that.” He pushed up from the table, leaning over to delete his dossier from the screen. “I started to question the process, and I didn’t accept bullshit for an answer. The folks in charge didn’t care too much for that, so they sent me here, a conveniently lost world that needed to be found again.”

“Just isolated enough for a revolutionary, but strategic enough to put your skills to use.”

“You got it.” He waited a moment. “So are we good?”

“We’re good.”

“You know, if you cross-reference for genome mutation tendencies on the X chromosome, you should get a more manageable list.”

Ji frowned, turning to the screen. “What?”

“Doesn’t your Sheng’s appearance tend to vary more than most other Remnants? In one world, he’s blonde and fair-skinned, in the next he’s black-haired and dark. He’s more subject to the previous generation’s genetics than others, right?”

“That’s correct.”

“Then try factoring in the Slyndus Effect on the X, say with a reactionary range of seventy percent and above.”

Ji frowned. “The Slyndus Effect hasn’t been approved for genetic identification.”

“Not for confirmation of identification,” Sam said. “Isn’t that what they have you for?”

Ji made a noncommittal sound, staring thoughtfully at the list of names.

“I’ll leave you to it, then,” Sam said, sounding satisfied as Ji began to tap commands on the screen.

“One more question,” he said, looking up.

Sam lifted an eyebrow in question.

“When I first received this assignment, Director Kai said Clare was an excellent specialist. How would he know that?”

Sam chuckled. “I may have…exaggerated a bit in my reports back.” With that, he turned and left.

Ji faced the computer again and, within moments, a new list of names appeared on the screen.

Possibilities reduced to eleven.

“Huh. Well, son of a bitch.”

Slang efficacy to nine—

“Quiet, Mesa.”

The Slyndus Effect has not been adequately detected to account for genetic anomalies along the axial strain of—

Ji tapped into his backdoor and silenced Mesa mid-sentence. He focused back on the computer screen and up the photos and scrolled through them, studying each in turn for any similarities to previous Sheng’s. A few looked more promising than others, but the second to last one had his stomach dropping. “Son of a bitch,” he said again.

Before he could call up any more information, movement from the corner of his eye caught his attention, and he turned to the large screen dedicated to the security of Cale’s room.