A Chronetic Memory (The Chronography Records Book 1) (3 page)

He decided she would have to pay more.

“The funds have been transferred, Hunter. I trust the group’s discretion will continue.”

The group. He would have to get the increase approved. He chafed at the delay, but knew he had no real choice.

“As always, Ms. Lowe.” He waved his hand again and the image vanished. A few more gestures opened a banking icon and confirmed the transfer: 400 million global credits. The corner of his mouth turned up slightly, just short of a smirk. The money was coming in, from hundreds of highly-placed sources, and a good portion of it was his.

Soon he would be one of the richest people in the world.

BATELLI’S DELI, West Seattle, WA. 1205, Monday, June 5, 2215.

Kat had already ordered for both of them when Dani got to the sandwich shop. “You have your choice between beef with provolone or turkey and Swiss,” she offered. “They’ll be here in a few minutes.”

The restaurant had an old-fashioned feel to it. The owners had decorated the deli to match a two-hundred-year-old photograph. Walking through its doors was like walking back in time. Dani watched as waiters took orders by hand and brought meals to the table. “I’ll take the turkey,” she decided, “although the beef sounds good too. How much do I owe you?”

“Don’t worry about it. You can buy next time.”

They settled into the antique chairs that made no adjustments to their body temperature or shape. The unyielding plastic felt strange on her back, but surprisingly comfortable.

“So the game was bad?” Dani prompted her friend, wanting to talk about something that didn’t involve settings and scans. Most of the interns ate in the cafeteria at lunchtime to gossip and gripe, but she depended on these forays into the outside world for her sanity.

“Oh, you wouldn’t believe it. None of these kids has ever telecompeted before this year. Including Jored, of course. It’s worth watching, though, if only because it’s so funny.”

“Well, he’s only seven. It’s mostly about sportsmanship and having fun at that age, isn’t it?”

“Exactly. And he does that part really well.”

At that moment, their waiter arrived with the sandwiches and a complimentary apple turnover. It looked delicious. Excellent way to inspire loyalty in new customers, Dani had to admit. As if the whole two-hundred-year-old atmosphere thing wasn’t enough. “Where are his teammates from?”

Kat shrugged. “They don’t really like to tell you that. Underage players and privacy, you know.”

“You’d know all about privacy,” Dani teased. Kat’s whole reason for protesting was to keep private lives private.

“Well, yeah.” Kat grinned. “But the kids talk, and Jored has a vague idea anyway. There are a few from China, two or three from the Balkans—their families have known each other a long time, it turns out—and only a handful from the western hemisphere.”

“Impressive! Truly international, and at that age! I don’t think any of my telegames, when I was a kid, involved anyone from out of the country. Well, I mean, they would have, if we ever got to championship levels, but we were never that good.” Dani shook her head. “Kids these days don’t realize how much the world has changed.” Then she added, almost as an afterthought, “How do they communicate?”

“Sometimes in English, sometimes in Croatian, but mostly in Chinese.” Kat laughed at her friend’s expression. “Kids pick up languages so fast.”

“But he likes it, right?”

“Oh, he loves it. Almost as much as he loves playing chess with you.”

Day brightener, right there. “I love spending time with him. It surprises me how much I look forward to it. When we play chess, it’s not really about chess. It’s mostly about talking. He’s so smart. And he likes to hear about the parts of my job that I still enjoy. Reminds me of what attracted me to this field when I was his age.”

“He asked me this morning when you were coming over again. Want to have dinner with us tomorrow night?”

Dani didn’t hesitate. “What else have I got going? Six-ish?”

“That’ll work.”

They ate companionably for a few minutes, saying nothing. Kat was comfortable like that. But Dani felt like talking after her silent morning in an observation box. “How was your day?” she asked her friend.

“Great! The fair-weather visitors have starting showing up, so we get to educate them about how dangerous your work is.” She winked.

When the two had first met, they had kept their conversations to neutral topics. They both instinctively realized that a new friendship had to find common ground before venturing into potential discord or conflict. But now they were sure of their bond, and there were no rules to their topics.

So it was with no trace of defensiveness that Dani replied, “Do you know how many yottabytes of information you’d have to sift through to find one damaging piece of information? And it’s all so boring.” She yawned, then laughed. “I didn’t plan that yawn, really.”

Kat smiled. “Jored never hears about that part of it, does he? He thinks your work is the most interesting thing in the world. It’s my job that he gets bored with. To him, it’s just standing outside and waving a sign.”

“You’re doing what you believe in. That’s what counts.” Dani reassured her friend. “Honestly, I’d squirm just like anyone else if someone decided to look at my life with a chronograph.”

“There, see? That’s what I mean. People never think it’s about them. It’s about all of us, as much as it’s about any of us.”

Dani looked at her fondly. “You have such a big heart, Katella. You’re always looking out for people, always making people’s lives a little easier or a little better. Does Marak know how lucky he is?”

“Well, yeah. That’s how we met, you know. He was doing something the hard way, and I made it easy.”

“What did you do?”

“He was standing outside a fence, clearly wanting to be inside, testing the bars for potential footholds, trying to figure out if he could climb it to get one of his famous insider reports. I watched for a while and then I couldn’t help it; I laughed.”

“Did you know who he was?”

“Not until he introduced himself, but then I knew. He had already made a name for himself, and his stuff was really good. He’d gotten it into his head that he wanted to interview my uncle for some story he was working on. Hadn’t been able to reach him through the usual channels, so he decided to go see him in person. But when he found the locked gate, he hadn’t a clue what to do. I guess he’d just figured the gate would be open and he could walk right in.” She snickered.

Dani could just see that. Honest, earnest Marak, who didn’t have a deceptive bone in his body, faced with a locked gate. “Did he ever get inside?”

“That was the ironic part.” The glint in Kat’s eye was unmistakable. She so loved a good joke. “My uncle wasn’t even there that day. He was down the road, waiting at the marina for me to meet him so we could spend the afternoon on his boat.”

“What did you do?”

“I brought Marak along, of course. And I introduced him as the man I was going to marry someday, which was not what he expected at all. But he warmed to the idea pretty quickly.” She activated her eyescreen to view the time. “Hey. Don’t you have to be back at work in a few minutes?”

“Yes!” Dani gathered her bag, tucking the uneaten dessert into it for later. “I’d better run. See you tomorrow morning?”

Kat nodded. “Don’t forget about dinner!”

RIACH LABORATORIES, Alki Beach, Seattle, WA. 1310, Monday, June 5, 2215.

Ba
ck in the lab, Dani was in a considerably lighter mood. She glanced at her eyescreen to check her schedule again, just in case there were any changes.

AFTERNOON SCHEDULE—Lab D, station 3

1. Ob:097113 22060917:114417-114941/N36W-15. Rec:VAO Inv/Hist-Comm

No changes. Good. A real investigative recording awaited her. She caught herself humming again as she went to the shelves to retrieve Object 097113, which turned out to be a small iron padlock. She looked it over, trying to imagine its history. “What have you seen?” she asked it conversationally. “What have you heard and smelled, that might make them want to get sounds and scents from you?”

It hadn’t escaped her notice that the time frame she was about to bracket was within her own lifetime. Even if this hadn’t been a commissioned investigation, that aspect alone would be interesting. She smiled to think of Kat’s reaction if she knew. Anything more recent than a hundred years ago would make Kat start preaching privacy invasions. She placed the padlock within the imaging chamber, activating the seldom-used audio and olfactory recorders, and sealed the door.

The requested time frame was for a little more than five minutes. She waited for the sensory integration, set the viewing elevation, beginning time, and duration, then flipped the switch to begin.

Immediately, she realized her mistake. The view surrounded her on all sides as well as overhead. This was supposed to be a narrow angle, not a full-circle image! She reached to turn off the switch and start again when she caught something around S30E that startled her. A hand reached for the lock and jiggled it, evidently testing it to see if it was locked. Viewing and hearing it as she was, from the lock’s point of view, everything around her jiggled side to side, and the fingers obliterated pretty much everything else. Normally, she’d only be able to see the fingers, with the view angle that had been requested. But because of her mistake, she could see the whole hand. Apparently, the lock had held. As the hand retreated, she got ready to change the settings, when she saw the face behind the hand, and realized it was a face she recognized. That hand belonged to someone she knew very well: Marak Wallace.

She snatched her hand back from the screen. This wasn’t supposed to happen. Time searches were tedious, boring, and completely devoid of anything personal. How many times had she told Kat that?

Guiltily, she changed the settings to reflect her assignment. As she finished the five-minute recording, barely aware of the events she was seeing, she tried to console herself. It was an honest mistake. No harm done, right? It just felt really strange. She realized that, up to this moment, she hadn’t actually believed these images were of people who had lived and breathed, not really. They had felt more like characters in works of fiction.

But now? Her whole perception had changed.

All afternoon, while she completed and dismissed items on her checklist, she wrestled with the possible implications. All Kat’s cautions and worst-case scenarios from the last few months suddenly held new meaning. Nearly every relevant conversation they had had came back to beg for reconsideration. Every time another one popped up, she shoved it under a mental rug and deliberately made herself concentrate on the task at hand.

But somehow, she knew those thoughts wouldn’t put up with being ignored for long.

DANI’S APARTMENT, First Hill, Seattle, WA. 1750, Monday, June 5, 2215.

The rest of the day had gone by in a blur. Dani vaguely remembered checking out of the institute and awaiting her usual tube car to take her under the water and up to her apartment on Seattle’s First Hill. She felt relief that she wouldn’t have to face Kat tonight, and then decided that avoiding her friend was ridiculous. Kat was the essence of open acceptance when they were on opposite sides of her most passionate issues; why would she have any trouble with these new misgivings? She fixed herself dinner and had the apple turnover for dessert.

Enough of this. A good night’s sleep would settle her down. Tomorrow she would be fine.

It felt like she had barely closed her eyes when she had the first dream. She was in the school cafeteria, grade seven. She knew the year because the tables were set to blue for most of that year. Her best friend Kirtana had finished lunch and was checking out something on her worktablet. Dani leaned over the table to look and suddenly she was wearing a dress that was too short. A boy from the next table came over and tapped her on the shoulder to tell her he could see her underwear. Embarrassed, she straightened up. That’s when she saw them: forks with blinking eyeballs, spoons with ears. Watching and listening.

She woke herself up somehow and sat up in bed. Her heart was racing. It took a few minutes for the fog to clear so she could convince herself that it was a bad dream. She got up and splashed some water in her face. Maybe if she read for a while. Something soothing. She activated her eyescreen reader and blinked to page through until she found Sarama.

we remember
the past for
its gifts of
what we can
no longer touch
taste hear smell
or see
but when we
burrow deep
in remembering
we find
we can still
feel

She sighed. Sarama could pack all the reasons she chose her career into just a few words. He helped her focus. She read another.

soft shells
crunch beneath
my feet and
grains wash
away with water
that comes
and goes
in and out
but the grains
are rice
and the shells are
only pasta and
the beach is
a beach
no more

Her heart rate had slowed to something close to normal. Her eyelids drooped. She nodded in the chair, and the chair’s sensors detected that her breathing had slowed. It tipped her gently back into slumber.

She was back at the university sitting numbly in the dorm lobby while Jhon Rhys told her he never wanted to see her again. He was dark, beautiful, and everything she wanted until he opened his mouth to berate her. His kindness extended only to finding her alone, in the early hours of the morning when he knew she would be finishing out the night shift. He held back nothing; he was comfortable with brutal honesty. He was a rising star in international finance, she was a lowly academic, studying a field of science that should be banned. He was destined to stride through the world as golden pathways were laid beneath his feet, she should resign herself to stumbling along a gravel road that would soon be a dead end. She was an embarrassment to him. She was too tired to believe he was wrong. In her dream, he left, and that was when she noticed that all the student mailboxes were open, revealing hundreds of audio-video cams, busily filming her humiliation from all angles.