Zosma Read online

  He scratched his neck, unsure what to do next.

  “In Zosma’s culture they touch forearms to form bonds in trust and friendship,” Dr. Giro said.

  Zosma pursed her lips as Jared edged toward her.

  “Yeah, uh nice to meet you,” he said, tapping his forearm to hers.

  “You are supposed to say, ‘I accept the truth of you as you are, here and now’,” she scolded.

  “Sure, that too.” Having staggered back and no longer in earshot, he nudged the doctor and mumbled, “What’s she doing here?”

  “Dr. Giro is giving me an opportunity to use my power to help humanity,” she answered. “In return, I can stay on Earth and make this my new home.”

  “Right,” he said, stretching the single syllable word by the tail.

  To him, Zosma being accepted by humanity was about as likely as her making it back to the Andromeda Galaxy. Emerging awareness came as a single conscious stream, penetrating the cloud in his mind. One unrestricted thought lead to another, then another. A threat to Dr. Giro’s influence.

  The longing in her voice sparked confusion about her true motivation, and like cancer, suspicion spread in him, making him confused about his own true motivation. Jared stroked his face. He’d been tricked, and a placebo attack had left his mind mist-free.

  “Zosma prepare for exit, I meet you on bridge to finalize strategy.”

  “As you wish.” She placed a hand over her stomach, dipped her head, and returned to the air.

  “I admit, C20 would not be this far if not for your dedication,” Dr. Giro said to him. “Do not make it worthless. Come.”

  Exercising tenuous independence, he followed Rabia, listening to each word explaining C20’s mission for inconsistencies. Whether through meticulous rehearsal or blatant honesty, nothing rang alarms. He moseyed away only to be dwarfed by the energy-canceling wall and the U-generator prototype itself.

  “Ahh, she’s gotta power this puppy!” He knocked hard on the protective barrier. “And she ain’t got a clue, does she?”

  “It promises to save billions.”

  C20, conceived to help humanity, an abstract painting with a complex background and blurry foreground, none of which fit together comfortably.

  “There is always catch,” the doctor said. “Prepare for worst, hope for best. I have gift for you, special plasma weapon.”

  “Aww, you shouldn’t have.” Jared’s brow relaxed. He shrugged off his qualms and asked, “When do I get to see my godson?”

  “That’s spirit,” Dr. Giro said, looping a hefty arm around his shoulder. They walked back toward the giant steel doors they’d entered through. “Will be glorious reunion.”

  Florence Belladonna

  Belladonna Mansion, New SoHo, New York

  Florence sensed the sorrow for her death and relief for her survival dissolving into contempt for her deceit. Allister had refused her assistance getting up the mansion’s stairs, and by the time they reached the foyer, his tears had dried, replaced by cold, bloodshot eyes and a hardened jaw. Their heartfelt reunion froze to ice in the climate of reality.

  “I live in a dumpster compared to this.” Allister glared at the oil painting collection lining the hallway of Belladonna family members from the past ten centuries. Italian or African descent or both; dukes, duchesses, lords, counts, queens, knights, and an emperor legitimized her often challenged pedigree. “Hmph, no wonder you’re so rich,” he noted.

  “Let’s see,” she began, “in a month’s time you’ve pissed off the U.S. government, infiltrated a top-secret facility, and leveled an entire city. Am I leaving anything out?”

  “Think you nailed it. By the way General Delemar says thanks for saving him,” he spat and threw his hands out, “except he thought you were dead, like I did!”

  “Don’t take it personal. He knew the Andromeda Project inside and out. It had to be done.” Florence dismissed his tantrum and guided their voyage deeper into the house. They entered the sun-lit sitting room, though neither were keen to sit.

  “It had to be done, I had no choice,” Allister mocked. “You need a new script.”

  She kept a flat tone, combating his frustration with apathy, and delivered her next line, “I assume you obtained some useful information.”

  Chasing her down on an off-balance gait, then wrenching her upper arm, he screamed, “Why’d you save him after what he did!”

  He was nothing like the Allister she remembered. Instincts kicked in. She took back the limb and executed an elbow jab to his bandaged side. He looked up at her, doubled over, breathing like the room was robbed of oxygen.

  “Don’t make me do this.” Florence’s hand spread out, a psionic energy orb whipping round it. More aggressive measures weren’t necessary.

  Allister’s chilling yelp didn’t end in retaliation. It ended with his cheeks soaked in tears. It ended with him crumpled on the floor, begging.

  “It hurts, everything hurts.”

  She kneeled. Crimson energy separated into each palm, and she held them next to his head. “What’s happened to you?”

  Florence entered Allister’s mind by boarding an imaginary rollercoaster traveling at light speed. A captivating, yet dizzying laser light show flew by in broad darkness, and she was ejected into the astral plane, destined to fall the inevitable distance to the subconscious surface she chose. Over years of training, deep-probing telepathy, though effective, hadn’t become less daunting.

  She hit the ground, sending a clear telepathic ripple through Allister’s psyche.

  His heart beat as if no blood would ever be enough. It thundered in her ears and in the air. Every fiber in her being linked to his. She felt vehement fear, anger, devastation, smothering life in the heat of emotion. “This can’t be the same place, the houses, his parents, the...” She bent to pick the withered brown grass. It whittled to dust between her translucent fingertips. Dead patches spanned for eternity beneath a blackened sky.

  Florence recalled a different world: Z-energy blue grass growing in abundance, houses holding his mother and father’s fond memories, and their astral images keeping hope alive. What had happened to the luminous sky? The stars, planets, and galaxies representing his magnificent intelligence and understanding? What had happened to his guide, Neight Caster?

  A silver glow pulsed where lifeless vegetation met the atmosphere. Two distorted shapes, aiming to be round, resembled binary stars positioned on the horizon’s opposite sides. Transporter gems, she guessed. They fought to penetrate the clouds and pushed through in spurts, bringing temporal energy’s light to the darkened setting. Thickening air restricted free motion, and she crawled toward a little boy’s silhouette. “It doesn’t make any sense,” she struggled to say.

  “You shouldn’t have come down here,” he said. The cross-legged child tended to and dwelled over three looming tombstones. Patrick Adams. Dolores Adams. Leesa Delemar.

  Mismatched explanations about Leesa’s disappearance and forming no true friendship while working together gave Florence liberty to throw any attachment to her in the river carrying away distractions. But she fished for sentiments and reeled them close. She witnessed dying without death, her colleague’s capable body deteriorating in Allister’s arms as Zosma reclaimed her stolen life.

  “Oh, my goodness.”

  “What’s the point of having these powers if I can’t save the people I love?” eight-year-old Allister asked.

  Any answer sounded insensitive, scripted or lacked perspective. She had only ever loved one person, and she suspected neither her love nor her power would save him from the inevitable.

  “You’re holding onto emotional pain,” she said. “And it’s holding the physical pain with you as well. You can’t punish yourself for what’s happened.” Gazing at Allister’s perceived failures etched in stone, Florence touched his shoulder to make him face her, to see the trauma’s mental scarring. He refused her request. Her bodily functions stopped. She felt suspended, stuck, bogged down by his rejectio
n. An excruciating, unbearable pain stabbed through to the crux of her soul. She jerked her hand back. “There’s nothing I can do,” she whispered. “You hold absolute power here. You must find a way to restore your psyche.”

  A loud vroom began Florence’s journey in reverse. She launched skyward, traveled backward through the same nausea-inducing ride, and woke up to Allister cradling his side and using the wall to stand. Guilt squatted on her chest like a tenant refusing to pay rent. “Have a seat,” she said, moving a plush patterned chair to him.

  He dropped into it and turned away from her. “How’s Dorian?”

  “Dorian’s safe, recovering.”

  “What about Bridget?”

  “She’s where you left her, in Florida. No one’s going after her.”

  “It’s my fault Detective Steele went after Dorian.” He sniffled. “I... wanted to make sure.”

  Florence took refuge in the chair’s matching love seat. She rearranged her floor-length skirt to conceal its slit and the unwanted souvenir from the Andromeda Project. After a booby trap bomb went off during C20’s attack on their base, too much tissue damage left her few options short of amputation. Rabia’s motives for installing the alien-infused tech remained unclear. The psiborg leg responded to her thoughts and was twice as strong as its human counterpart. Sometimes it felt too light and she forgot that beneath pigment matching fibers; hard wires, metal alloys, and crystals commingled. If uneven steps didn’t remind her, the psionic energy it channeled would.

  Allister’s lip twisted to the side.

  Propping her elbow on the couch arm and her cheek on her fist, she massaged the area where numb upper thigh met the foreign enhancement. “It doesn’t hurt,” she said.

  “Why do you do that?” he asked.

  “I’m telepathic. It’s involuntary.”

  “It’s rude. I don’t blast you with blue energy and say, oh sorry, I have energy projection.” He let his head rest on the chair. “Are we doing this? Or are you babysitting me?”

  “Why do you think you’re here and not in a prison?”

  His shoulders relaxed. Allister’s tree of angst had deep, thick roots. “Save yourself, it’s what you’re best at,” he’d said to her as the Andromeda Project crumbled around them. The last words in her head, as she drowned in the Atlantic Ocean, and the first when she woke in the ICU in Milan.

  “I had to make a difficult decision, I wouldn’t have left you behind otherwise.” Florence uncrossed her legs and stood. “To your point, how do you expect to save others, when you can’t save yourself?” Slowing her stride, she turned her chin to her shoulder. “Look at you.”

  “Hmph, that’s your apology?” Allister inhaled and struggled to stand. “It’s fine. You did what you had to do.”

  “It’s evolution, the strong survive.”

  “And the rich, the cunning, the selfish,” he added.

  She eyed a purple streak in his hair. “When you’re ready, I’ll be in the computer room. I encourage you to leave your attitude here.”

  Allister Adams

  Belladonna Mansion, New SoHo, New York

  “This is my father, Giovanni,” Florence announced, arms wide, palms up. “What’s left of him at least. It’s an artificial intelligence program.”

  Skirt swishing left to right, right to left, drawn out steps carried her into the buzzing room. She turned in jewel-embellished heels. The older sister he never had, waiting for him, the much younger brother to catch up during a tiresome outdoor adventure’s end. He limped in, aided by the door frame’s narrow width. He watched her watch him, her expression aimed at sympathy but reading as impatience.

  The CPU’s motherboard was installed on the farthest side and floor-to-ceiling monitors were installed on the one nearest him. Public news and private transmissions sang a tragic song. One told the world’s truths. One showed how those same truths were spun into the tallest tales. Hard to recognize which was which.

  “How much did President DeVries pay you to find me?”

  “Technically, Detective Steele found you.” She flipped her hair. “Which means I don’t get paid.”

  His cynical grunt held an inkling of scorn and appreciation. He slumped against the entrance. “How’ll you keep the lights on?” The trust tightrope connecting them was stretched to a frayed center, contingent on the motives (if any) concealed under her navy silk getup.

  “New look?” she asked.

  The man bun on his head loosened, then liberated, he tousled his overgrown mane and pulled the stark minority growing at the hairline over his eye. Violet strands had multiplied to a violet clump. “I think it’s a side effect. Could be from using the Transporter gems? Color’s kinda random.” He let the follicles curl to their natural shape. “The gems are stressing me out. And I haven’t slept. And I’m not healing. I don’t know what the hell is up.” He pushed the hair back and hunched forward, defeated by his own admission.

  “I told you why. It’s your problem to fix,” Florence said. Nicolas Delemar’s Cynque dangled from her forefinger. “I take it you haven’t accessed it?”

  “When would I have?” Forget it, he thought, it wasn’t worth the sarcasm. “No. Password is Leesa.”

  “Giovanni, do me a favor and manifest the keyboard for me. I’ll also need you to open your software backend.”

  “I’d be happy to, Dr. Belladonna.”

  The Cynque clinked on a waist-high glass table’s surface. She bent, typing on the table’s embedded keyboard, taking breaks to recall memories and stroked the watch as if it held them. Her typing resumed, then stopped. She shook her head, highlighted and deleted what she’d written and clicked her nails. Grinning, she muttered, “Wrong interactor.” Her chin and gaze, parallel to a monitor, dared not falter as her fingers attempted the unknown feat at their fastest pace. For the third time, language spread the wall’s length.

  It was a legacy coding language called Viper. Allister leaned close. Although outdated compared to Cynque’s programming, its fundamental theories echoed in all encrypted software, providing compatibility between two incompatible systems.

  Astonished by Florence’s proficiency, he ogled at cyber security layers peeling away to let her enter the password, establish a private link, and initiate the download.

  The computer dinged and said in a smooth androgynous voice, “Download complete. Which folder should I access first Dr. Belladonna?”

  Letters, numbers, characters, and symbols on a dimensionless black setting, language rendered immaterial, dissolved, leaving a warm tan screen inhabited by files and folders totaling in the millions. She gave Allister a skeptical glance.

  “Delemar mentioned a program called, Hex... Fourth?”

  “Doesn’t ring a bell,” Florence replied. “Giovanni, open folder Hex Fourth.”

  “Accessing folder Hexforth.”

  Ah Hexforth, not Hex space numeral four. He scratched his head, the familiar syllables he’d reunited hoping to find clarity felt incomplete.

  Three blueprint sketches enveloped the room. He cupped his neck, inspecting the CAD file labeled “U-Generator Energy Distribution Prototypes.” From the notes he gathered two models weren’t feasible. The available input/output ratio tested insufficient for the joules needed to maintain continuous distribution.

  “Dr. Rabia Giro endeavors to construct, what?” he said, reading a short description beneath the last approved model. “Construct twenty U-generators?” He glanced at Florence and read on, “... for the purpose of harnessing Z-energy. U-generators will use formula listed in Exhibit E, to draw the energy from its source.” Allister’s head got closer to the flickering image, he swallowed. “Which has been hypothesized to reside in the Containment Center. Said energy will operate as clean energy and be distributed throughout said medium, for public and private use, subject to premiums as set forth by the... ” his voice pitched in shock as he finished, “controlling entity known as C20! What the hell is this?”

  In a word, vague, and Zosma’s n
ame wasn’t mentioned a single time.

  “This is pure madness,” she said.

  It went on to state that the U-Generators would be available for private sale to major cities and utility partners worldwide at C20’s discretion.

  Date commissioned: March 2052, a month ahead of the Andromeda Project’s downward spiral.

  “Look,” she said, pointing. Giovanni played the next round of evidence.

  In the video stream dated November 20, 2044, the camera focused on a bland boardroom of stuffed old geezers. One in particular, well past his sixties, tilted a mic and began, “Neight Caster, you tried to leave the planet without adhering to your promise. A promise to help us mitigate a catastrophe you predicted. Please explain to the board why we should trust your council and continue the search for these gems you spoke of. It would seem to us, they don’t want to be located, and you don’t want to help us locate them. Dr. Giro has presented a reasonable, if not better alternative to your original proposal.”

  Silly for Allister to see Neight Caster using his claws to anchor himself to a metal podium. An alien testifying in front of congress for God’s sake. “Senator Phillip DeVries, allow me to put it in terms you can comprehend. Should this world you cherish as your home become uninhabitable, the Transporter gems can open gateways to new worlds for you to explore. They hold the key to limitless manipulation and movement through time-space. I know it has taken over a decade to detect their power, but I assure you, they are far more valuable than the Z—”

  “Your honor,” another member of the senate scoffed, “this is the same thing we’ve heard year after year. Doesn’t he have any new material?”

  Senator DeVries gulped and spoke up, “Neight, understand that we’re facing trillions of dollars in losses and damages from these natural disasters. We’ve had to take loans and aid from our enemies. The American people don’t care about mystical space travel. They need water. They need food. They need heat and power.”