Part 2 Ch 1: Bring Up the Living
The Futureness Part 2
I have always been here, lies the Moon,
and the Sun shines on a broadcast delay.
Methyl writes in her journal, using a pen and notebook a bot found for her as she moved outside to her tent. She pitched it just outside the perimeter Xavier set around The Francesca, to wait.
It’s quiet and has been for five days. Headquarters hasn’t gotten any messages or video from the ship, and no one’s ready to decide whether to touch it. So, Methyl writes aphoristic, poetic notes to herself, she keeps away from sparking equipment and stays burrowed in her tent, watching the news on Richard’s phone and pressing Send on messages to Francesca every half hour, at the least, asking if she’s there. Are you there? Is Richard alive? What are you? Are you leaving us?
She believes in the ship; she knows it has meaning. Everyone knows, because The Francesca hovers silently and without displacement of air or heat thirty feet off the ground behind the walls of Xavier’s headquarters. Alien, it rose from the pit on a column of light and has been floating fifty meters to the side of the hole for days now, unmoving, unchanging.
And so, she is thinking of relativity and grappling with the complete darkness encasing the future, when she decides she just needs out of her tent.
It’s a little past three in the morning when she unzips the front flap of the tent, wriggles out and up, and sees that the ship is gone. There is nothing but the fact of the matter, which is that Methyl is seeing through the space where the ghostly white, moth-like ship hung in the air, big as a house but delicately turned, built a little like rock candy, but also in some parts resembling fan coral—but whatever, it is no longer there.
“Hey,” Methyl says weakly. “Hey? It’s…?”
Ten meters from her tent one of the film crews rolls cameras. Most of the job is done remotely, but three techs doze nearby in reclining chairs they trucked in for the potentially long wait.
Methyl steps between them without waking any.
“When did it go,” she shouts. “Where did it go? Wake the hell up!”
She burst into fierce hand clapping.
“What’s the issue, again,” the nearest man to her says.
“The ship! When did it leave? What’s going on?”
“The Francesca? Right there behind you.”
Methyl spins around. No ship.
“No,” she says. “No.”
“No,” says one of the other techs as he wakes. “No, no, no, no…where the hell is it?”
“What?” says the first tech. “There. Rub the Jack Daniel’s out your eyes.”
“It’s right there, Mike,” the third tech says. “Leo’s right, you’re still drunk.”
“This isn’t my birthday,” Leo says. “No pranks. Everyone, go to bed.”
Methyl turns to the tech and growls, “Turn your monitors back on.”
They’d been off so the men could sleep. Leo levels a stare at Methyl.
“You’re that tent girl.”
“Xavier Gregor’s friend,” says Mike.
“Fuck it,” Leo says. Without getting out of his chair, he leans to the monitor bank and flips the ons. The four monitors overseeing The Francesca show empty space.
“What the living…” he says. He looks away from the monitors at the space itself. “It’s right there. Why isn’t it on cameras?”
“Because it’s in your head,” Methyl says.
“It’s not gone,” says the third tech, but Methyl ignores him. She points at the monitors. “Rewind it,” she says.
“Get the hell out of here,” Leo shouts. He tosses an empty water bottle at Methyl’s legs.
She dodges it.
“The fuck?”
“Dude,” says Mike. “Do you remember that bot she turned into a fucking rock, or what?”
“Rewind it, or find out,” Methyl says.
“Bitch sabotaged our rig while you were sleeping it off,” Leo says, pressing the master rewind on all cameras. “Just when did the ship take off, honey?”
“I…I don’t know, just go slower.”
“Jesus Christ, why are you putting on this act?”
At 1:09 in the morning, all four cameras watched the ship ascend on a plume of steam that evaporated within seconds.
“One-hundredth of a second,” Mike says.
“Then that’s what it took to leave,” Methyl tells him. She’s immediately filled with rage and cannot contain it. “While you fat assholes slept in your loungers.”
“And you played Girl Scouts,” Leo says. “And then it came back. Landed right back there, obviously. Now let’s just fast forward again.”
Methyl screams in frustration. Within two seconds a security bot assigned to her is by her side.
“Bring me to Xavier,” she tells it, although she knows where he is.
In the hangar, Gabbyella shines under workstation lights set in a ring around her form.
She’s mid-crouch, with her left arm bent up to protect her face and her right arm gripping a handrail set up around a separate workspace. Quartz covers her frozen body four point two centimeters thick all around and seems to puddle onto the floor around her boots. Her eyes, never alive, show less light than ever, far less than the glare bouncing off the facets of crystal encasing her.
Xavier sits cross-legged at her base, paying no attention to the electrodes and wires and sensors scattered around her. At Methyl’s footsteps and a chime from the bot, Xavier stands and, without turning around, says, “Nothing from her. Nothing.”
Methyl somehow isn’t afraid of another outburst following the film crew’s rage; Xavier’s shoulders sloop, everything about him seems gripped harder by gravity.
“Xavier—Mr. Gregor…” Methyl says. She’s out of breath, and out of words already.
Xavier turns to Methyl. Three nights of missed sleep have drained his aura of nearly all signs of life.
“She was working on the vaccine, too—manufacturing, distribution—until you froze her.”
“I know. You’re trying,” Methyl says. A blatant stalling tactic. She winces inside.
“What’s the problem,” he asks.
“Are there no alarms? Is there no one watching?”
“Sophia, slow it down and tell me, alarms for what?”
“Rich and Francesca took off two hours ago.”
“They…” Xavier says, stepping away from Gabbyella and to the hangar door that leads to the hole and The Francesca site, but he’s still connected to Gabby by links clipped to his clothes and a scanning tablet in his pocket. All rip and yank randomly. The tablet clatters to the deck, but Xavier ignores it and continues for the door, shouting profanities that echo in the huge hangar.
When Methyl catches up with him, she finds Xavier leaning heavily against the door of the entrance, surveying the site and the hole beyond. A dozen bots scuttle about the scene, erranding. Methyl looks for the film crew but can’t see them from where she’s standing—by a man she must now ask a difficult question.
“Do you see the ship or do you not?” she says.
“I do not,” Xavier whispers.
“Some people do,” Methyl says. “No one saw it leave. I noticed it was gone twenty minutes ago.”
“My tablet,” Xavier says.
“You, well…you dropped it back there,” Methyl says. “Let’s get you into your office.”
Methyl signs for a bot and when it arrives at their side, she tells it to take Xavier there.
“It hacked everything,” Xavier says.
“People, too,” Methyl says. “But it let a film crew record it. A 1:09 am liftoff for who, for wherever...”
Methyl’s eyes fill with tears so quickly she’s alarmed before she’s aware she’s being hit by grief. Now that she is alone, Xavier having rushed off with the bot, she sits in the hangar doorway, looks out over the empty site where The Francesca once hovered, and weeps.
Two minutes pass until the sound of men fighting reaches her. Methyl looks up. Through her tears, she watches as three men square off against two Xavier Enterprises employees in their red work suits. She hears shouting, can scarcely make out their voices or their faces in the harsh shadows of the klieg lights over the site.
“It’s fucking gone,” one man shouts repeatedly.
A Xavier guy looks like he’s trying to calm the three down—not the camera crew, Methyl can see as they step around each other like boxers before a match and fall under a floodlight.
Methyl hears one of the workers say the words “medical bay.” Suddenly, it’s happening. Without a beginning to it, the five men are grappling, punching and shoving. The scrum staggers several meters closer to Methyl until she wonders whether it will envelop her. She signs for another bot.
“Get me out of here. Take me to the dig site,” she says.
No one is around there now, with the action having moved after The Francesca came up from the hole and then drifted away from the pit. Sensing the fight’s danger, the bot leads Methyl on a wide curving walk of seven minutes, which Methyl spends on the lookout for more trouble, until they come to the five-meter-tall fence around the hole.
“Let me in,” Methyl tells the bot.
A door set in the fence makes the sound of metal sliding across metal, then Methyl pushes her way into the site.
Decommissioned bots idle at low power around the perimeter of the pit. Some of the klieg lights that had been set up around the hole have been moved since The Francesca hovered away from it, but a minimum of surveillance is being kept on the dig, the hole that reaches to the edge of the Earth’s mantle. Despite the sustained interest, Methyl isn’t harassed by any security bots as she walks to the pit’s perimeter.
No guardrails ring the hole. Methyl walks to the edge and looks in. Faint light issues from the depths, likely from bots trapped on their way up or down by the work stoppage, Methyl thinks. She sits on the ledge, her legs dangle over the lip of the hole. Nothing between her feet and the beginning of Hell and the River Styx Francesca drank from.
“Did you go back into the pit,” Methyl asks the emptiness. “Are you down there now, hiding from us? Or are you in the sky? Why didn’t you say something to us? Why didn’t you give us something to hold onto?”
Although it’s summer, here the night is cool. Methyl wraps her arms around her body and hums to herself. She feels self-pity well up from her core. She hums louder to drown the emotion. In a moment, she’s caught a tune, one she came up with herself just after the afternoon everyone blew up at the Golden Apple. All her friends, vanishing into puffs of fine blood mist.
Methyl begins to sing softly.
“Do not consume—
It’s a desiccant.
Keep away from children—
But to get out of Hell,
Eat silica gel!”
But to get out of Hell…. In an instant Methyl knows that they haven’t gone back down. They’ve gone up, somewhere up.
She reaches into a vest pocket and pulls out her lighter. Black, full of butane, she tosses it into the pit where it can spin in a forever dance of falling until it combusts and winks out in the darkness.
The other two kids at the wall, Methyl thinks. Disappearing too, but not coming back to themselves, like Methyl, only supposedly much worse off. Institutionalization for both Eric and Angela immediately followed the wall. Methyl hasn’t heard anything about them in five months. She stopped hoping they would come back to the Golden Apple long ago, but never gave up on Richard. And there he was, appearing with Xavier that day, and standing at the wall and not exploding but bleeding. What, really, have Eric and Angela become? Like herself? Like Richard?
She’s up and out of the dig site before the bot that brought her there can spin to catch up with her. She hears men shouting in the distance ahead, at the ship’s site, and crouches behind a bot to watch. Silhouettes of shouting men, some shoving and attacking each other in the equipment and bot-strewn area near The Francesca’s empty space. But not empty to many of the men, and some women. Methyl hears their voices now, too, arguing over whether the ship as large as a house is there or has left them all behind.
Finding cover as she goes, Methyl slowly makes her way to her tent. As she passes the television crew’s setup, she swipes a black hoodie draped over the chair Leo had been using. She’s back, zipped up inside her tent before anyone notices her.
She hasn’t had a moment to wonder why she can do it, and she doesn’t take one now. She sits cross-legged on the floor of the tent with the stolen hoodie on her lap and snaps her fingers over it. White light crackles from her fingertips. When her eyes re-adjust to the darkness, she sees a small patch of quartz crystals have appeared on the sleeve of the black sweatshirt.
Her tears and her heartache for her missing friends feel far away now that she knows two things: she can fire-proof some clothes, then it’s time to go home to Dayton and find Eric and Angela, casualties who could be, Methyl suspects, keys to finding The Francesca.